What shocked me was not the answer but the question. It seems the UK government doesn't care about investigation or evidence and simply takes the stance that "the science is decided". If anyone questioned this they would no doubt just employ some "scientists" to manipulate the data and backup their per-conceived assumptions.
When Tony Blair came to power a decade ago he listed his three priorities as "Education, Education, Education". Since that time New Labour have lowered standards in education to the point where school leavers are now totally unemployable and near illiterate. The UK education system renders most children unemployable and 20% of youths between the age of 16 and 24 are currently out of work. I was interested in becoming a teacher at one point but after visting a secondary school and seeing what was being taught I was completely put off the idea. GCSE students were learning what I would expect to be taught in a primary school and the textbooks were filled more with New Labour propaganda than anything of value. With no skills it's little wonder none of them can get a job upon leaving education.
So, what does any of this have to do with President Obama? Like New Labour Obama is obsessed with "Equality for all" and where there is not equality he will create false equality. Instead of accepting that all men are not created equal and that students have widely differing levels of academic ability he will force a false equality. The only way you can force equality in education is to lower standards to the level of the least gifted student, and at that point everyone will attain the same incredibly low standard of education thus total equality.
Tony Blair did exactly what Obama is doing now, making s speeches about the importance of science with his usual sound bites like the future is “lit by the brilliant light of science”. Now there is absolutely no science being taught UK schools, at least nothing anyone here would call science. Science can be very complicated and if some students don't understand it then we won't have "Equality for all" so it has to be discarded from the curriculum. In order to achive his "Equality for all" Obama will have to do exactly what New Labour has done and I therefore expect that Obama will do for the US education system what Tony Blair and Gorden Brown have done for the UK.
While everyone likes to criticise the Chinese government they have undoubtedly got their education system bang on right, separating students into different schools by ability and pushing the most gifted students to achieve in education. With a solid foundation of knowledge these highly educated individuals will go on to make the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the future, and China will reap the economic benefits associated with these breakthroughs. Meanwhile in the west our children won't even be able to write their names and western civilisation will collapse into poverty.
"Equality for all" doesn't work and any attempts to force it, particularly in education, will destroy a nation.
I simply can't wait to get my hands on such a technical marvel. Compact, functional and incredibly stylish - it makes me wish I was born in the future.
To be fair, the device did show similarities to a modern smart phone in terms of functionality, so while the producers were a bit off the mark with the design their vision of a future mobile phone was fairly accurate.
"We pay for the power setup, the roads, the police force-- they pay none of these costs"
Firstly, "they" pay 40% corporation tax - the second highest in the world. What more do you want? Do you really want to see the total collapse of the US economy as corporations buckle under an even heavier tax burden?
Secondly, who are "they"? A corporation is composed of three groups of people - employees, shareholders and customers. In reality "they" is in fact you, me and everyone else here and it's us who pays the costs of higher taxes on corporations.
If you tax a corporation the money has to either come from raising prices, cutting the workforce or taking a hit and suffering a reduction in share value. In all of these situations it's the public who pays the cost, either through higher prices of goods and services, losing their job or a suffering a reduction in the value of the shares in their retirement account.
When corporations get taxed it comes out of your pocket and it's you that suffers. Quite why you'd want to see them taxed more I don't know.
It's hardly surprising since the pay at MI5 is abysmal. I requested an information pack during my last year of university but lost interest when I found MI5 was about the worst paying graduate recruiter and especially bad for central London. Given the pay I would imagine that anyone with competence would take a job in the private sector leaving them to scrape up the dregs.
Still, it was worth requesting the information pack for the entertainment alone because in every one of the pictures all the people were turned away from the camera. It looked thoroughly ridiculous and I couldn't help think that they would have been better not using pictures at all.
Why would Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, kill himself and convince 39 followers to commit suicide if the whole thing about the space ship following the comet was a lie? It seems certain people can't cope with reality so fantasise that they're here for some greater purpose and will go to extreme lengths to complete that delusion.
Western civilisation is crumbling because we're obsessed with punishing people for being "offensive" rather than for real crimes. Here in the UK you can kill somebody and get away with 2 years in a luxury prison. Beat somebody to a pulp and you'll get a slap on the wrist. If you have your house burgled or your car vandalised the police won't even be interested in taking a crime report and will certainly never catch the criminals. However if you offend a homosexual or member ethnic minority the police will be all over you in an instant and you'll be facing seven years in prison for the terrible crime of saying something offensive. Likewise if you modify an image to contain a minor and is deemed "patently offensive" you'll have your life ruined because of your evil photoshoppery. It seems our governments don't care in the least about crimes that do real harm and are only interested in going after "criminals" who have said some nasty words or produced a nasty picture
I'm terrified to go out on the streets at night because gangs have no fear of the toothless police and can act with impunity. The other thing I'm terrified of is accidentally offending the wrong person since something as simple as eating black Jelly Babies in the presence of a black man can cost you your job. The country is in massive debt, the economy is collapsing, the education system has been rendered worthless making it impossible for us to compete with countries like China, crime and vandalism are taking over the streets while the worthless police do absolutely nothing and society in general is collapsing. Despite all this the government's only concern seems to be stopping thought crime and offensive words.
Id was at its best when Jon Romero worked there since Carmack would focus on the graphics and Romero would focus on the gameplay. Since the break-up of this partnership Id's games have gone drastically down hill while Romero found he couldn't make a game without Carmack. Romero appeared to have trouble with the technical side of Daikatana with lengthy delays and terrible visuals when it finally was released. Daikatana received a poor reception but the gameplay was clearly there with some innovative ideas and great feel to the movement control. It was the technical execution that was lacking, likely a result of not having somebody like Carmack.
Carmack's engines always look amazing but the engine is now Id's only selling point and their games are just dire. Id desperately needs to recruit someone with a proven record of making fun games so they can bring their gamplay up to the level of their engines. I vote for Romero, and bring American McGee back while you're at it. That would really return Id back to its past glory.
Why is this 5, Informative? I got the impression he was trying to be funny but it seems the members of the Church of Global Warming are so anti-carbon they've taken this comment seriously. It's getting as bad as when Greenpeace tried to have chlorine banned.
Environmentalism is the new religion and we're going to end up with a crusade of lunatics travelling through the universe trying to eradicate select elements because they've deemed them to be evil.
I live in the UK and despite cleaning my teeth obsessively one developed a cavity that has been growing for years and the tooth is now rotting to hell. Unfortunately like a lost of people I can't get on the books of an NHS dentist so I'm glad we're spending 7.5% of our GDP on a load of beurocrats and absolutely no health care. I'm sure all the thousands of people dieing from desises caused by filthy NHS wards are equally glad it's costing just 7.5% of the GDP.
Before claiming how grat the NHS is why don't you try living here. What you'll find is the NHS is broken beyond repair and is no matter how much money gets thrown into it things don't improve.
This problem is occurring everywhere from computer software to motor cars, with companies adding innovation where it's not needed and in so doing breaking things unnecessarily.
My last two company cars have been Vauxhalls; a company that is obsessed with adding innovation that makes the car a nightmare to drive. The old Vectra replaced the mechanical indicators with electrical ones that made it impossible to turn the indicators off. The Insignia, which has replaced the Vectra, has reverted back to mechanical indicators but now they've replaced the mechanical hand break with an electrical handbrake. To disengage the handbrake you have to press the accelerator making a hazard out of precise manoeuvres such as pulling out of a tight roadside parking space. Other aspects of the car are crap such as the automatic lights and automatic climate control which make me feel like I'm not in control of the car. Why can't they just leave things as they are instead of "innovating" and destroy things that work perfectly well.
Thins are even worse with software and we're seeing a push to replace the entirely functional mouse and keyboard with touch screens that are slow, cumbersome and don't work half the time. User interfaces are even worse and Microsoft are intent on innovating their way to destruction with the likes of the IE7 and Windows 7 interface while KDE seems to be in competition with them to produce the worst interface possible.
The by replacing a few words in the article summary you can get a perfect description of the current state of user interfaces:
"There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into user interfaces are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another system. On the other hand there are operating systems and applications that feel the need to completely revamp an interface that worked perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face."
The word "innovative" has now become synonymous with "junk". The Wii was "innovative" in that the control mechanism doesn't work at all so, while it's sold fantastically, nobody actually plays on it. Touch screen computers are "innovative" in that they make doing simple like viewing your photographs tasks a mammoth task where you're having to make ridiculous gestures to resize them or scroll through them. We're also seeing "innovative" portable media players controlled with facial recognition which I'm sure will work great!!!
The world has gone mad and it seems and companies seem to be in a race to make things as unusable as possible by replacing concepts that work with ones that don't.
The only way you get spam is if a) you give your email address to businesses or b) if you use a service like hotmail where spammers send emails to random addresses and record the ones that don't get returned.
Businesses and spammers can't magically conjure your email address out of thin air so the cause must be one of the above. You've either signed up for a service and not unchcked "allow us to share your details with select partners" or you're using a popular email service that spammers target. Given that you're getting emails from major companies it sounds more likely it's the first possibility.
I registered a domain and use that for my email address and I'm careful to read what I'm signing up for so I get absolutely no spam at all. My opinion of spam is the same as my opinion of viruses - if you ever get any it's your own fault.
While the public seem obsessed with the thickness of their television (apparently they watch their televisions from the side) they have a completely different view of speakers. When it comes to speakers they equate size with quality and the bigger the speakers are the better the public believe them to be. For this reason alone I can't see these speakers catching.
The other thing the public like is heavy bass and don't care if the mid range is completely drowned out as long as long as there is over exaggerated bass. In this respect flat panel speakers also don't perform well.
Electrostatic speakers have been delivering exceptionally detailed and neutral sound in a convenient form factor for decades but have been completely ignored by the public since they don't meet their criteria of being big and with a heavy bias towards the low frequencies. I don't see why these new speakers will do any better at penetrating the mainstream.
No the whole premise of April Fools' Day is to waste my time. Why the hell am I spending today reading stories that aren't true?! The whole thing is completely moronic and anyone who engages in the practice should be shot. It's the very definition of "not clever and not funny".
My first thoughts were also "Is speed really the issue here?" but for different reasons. I used Open Office for eight months before having to give up due to a massive number of small niggles that when combined make it very unpleasant to use. I think a lot of issues need to be addresses in Open Office before speed but sadly none of the problems ever seem to be addressed and they instead seem to focus on adding new features. In the end I had to give up and switch to Kingsoft Office 2009.
Whoever is designing the interfaces at Microsoft seems to be living in a fantasy world where functionality is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is "wow".
Things have been going rapidly down hill since around 2005 when they reversed the order tabs appeared in Visual Studio. The new arrangement meant that tabs appeared on the left and pushed all the other tabs along so the position of your files was constantly changing making it hard to keep track of where they are. Microsoft could simply provide the option to revert to the sensible behaviour used by every other application where new tabs appear on the right but despite the public outcry they refuse to do this. So much for their claims of "Work your way".
Next came Internet Explorer 7 where they ditched the traditional tool bar and spread the buttons to the four corners of the earth so nobody can ever find the button they one. I don't think there's a single person who likes this arrangement but once again Microsoft refuse to include any customisation to the intereface so you can "Work your way" just as long as "your way" is the way Microsoft tells you to work.
Then there was Windows Vista which adopted the attitude of "why do in 5 clicks what you can do in 20". Everything now takes more clicks to do so productivity is reduced. For example in XP you could change your resolution, theme, wall paper, screen saver and power saving options all from the Display Properties dialog but in Vista they were spread to multiple different places, making it harder to get things done. The functionality and consistency of interface provided by menus was abandoned and now every window has a different interface with stupid pictures and lots of "wow". The new start menu is worthless and abandons the tree structure to replace it with a list of applications you have to scroll through slowly, further reducing the productivity of Vista users.
Then there was Office 2007 which also ditched the consistent menu style interface and switched to ribbons. It makes it impossible to find the options you're looking for and someone who had the misfortune of getting Office 2007 with a PC once said to me "I've just spent 20 minutes looking for one options in the ribbons".
Windows 7 takes Vista and makes things even worse. The combined quick launch bar & task bar makes it hard to see if an application is running or not and impossible to see how many instances of the application are running. The fantastic Windows Classic theme has been removed completely and now you're forced to use wasteful themese where all windows have thick borders and fat title bars. Consistency has been further abandoned and things like the theme selection dialog box has been replaced by something entirely customised which users have to learn to use. Ribbons have been added to other applications like Paint and the whole thing seems to have been designed to be has hard to use as possible.
Other application interfaces have been destroyed, for example Windows Media Player with it's 1 pixel thick jog bar, lack of menus and ridiculous button arrangement.
The one thing Microsoft used to do right was user interfaces but they've now abandoned everything that makes a good interface. Things such as consistency, clarity and efficency have gone and instead all we have is "wow". I used to use all Microsoft applications but by destroying their interfaces across the board I've been abandoning them one at a time. After trying the Windows 7 beta I've been forced to switch to Linux.
I must admit I'm having a hard time with Linux and there's a lot to learn for a 30 year old who has been raised on Microsoft products. However, it's definitely worth the effort since Linux really does let me "Work your way" while Microsoft just makes that claim and in reality you have to work the way Microsoft tell you.
I always wondered what would bring an end to the Microsoft monopoly and it turns out it's Microsoft themselves. They seem intent on making their own products such a nightmare to use that people are forced to go elsewhere and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
When you move a heavy load do you get bogged down in "a poverty of self-perception" because it was the wheel that made it possible to move that load and not your own ability? Do you become "empty and self-loathing" when you hammer in a nail because it was the hammer that made this action possible? Do you become "a hollow, rotten chasm" after driving to work because it was the motor car enabled you to make your commute? Most of your achievements are already performed with external enhancements in the way of tools and other devices and this simply extends this principle to internal enhancements. I don't have any emotional problems with regards to using tools to enhance my performance and I would have equally few problems making use of cognitive enhancement tools if they helped me achieve more.
Instead of deciding for everyone the simple solution would be to allow each individual to decide whether they want to use these enhancements. That way insecure and emotionally unstable people who are concerned about the enhancements making them "empty and self-loathing" can avoid them while more stable people can enjoy the benefits such enhancements have to offer.
I'm sick of reading how any and all work related to human enhancement raises moral and ethical questions. Moralists are the reason medical science is stuck in the stone age since the stop all human experimentation and if you can't experiment you can't progress. This work could vastly enhance peoples' lives in ways such as curing mental conditions like depression to increasing intelligence and dexterity. However, progress will no doubt be stopped while morons who know nothing about the subject debate the moral and ethical issues. There's no way that "rewiring the brain" will be permitted in a Luddite society like ours where we still need to debate what human rights should be given to a clump of cells.
"The Web site provides access to several Microsoft online training programs, including how to use the Internet"
- This is fantatic idea. Now anyone who can't use the internet can just go on the internet and...oh wait.
The 3 day charts you linked contain too small a sample to prove anything and you need to look at a longer term chart such as this six year chart to see the true picture. When the NASDAQ was up 100% in 2007 Micrsoft was unchanged and while the NASDAQ is currently even on its 2003 value Microsoft is off nearly 40%. Microsoft is failing and investors know it.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want to use base10 the first thing they should do is respecify a byte to be 10bits.
I somehow think their enthusiasm for base10 would diminish when it would case a a 25% drop in stated capacity.
This was from a book of ridiculous exam answers in UK exams:
http://i45.tinypic.com/eqp46d.jpg
What shocked me was not the answer but the question. It seems the UK government doesn't care about investigation or evidence and simply takes the stance that "the science is decided". If anyone questioned this they would no doubt just employ some "scientists" to manipulate the data and backup their per-conceived assumptions.
When Tony Blair came to power a decade ago he listed his three priorities as "Education, Education, Education". Since that time New Labour have lowered standards in education to the point where school leavers are now totally unemployable and near illiterate. The UK education system renders most children unemployable and 20% of youths between the age of 16 and 24 are currently out of work. I was interested in becoming a teacher at one point but after visting a secondary school and seeing what was being taught I was completely put off the idea. GCSE students were learning what I would expect to be taught in a primary school and the textbooks were filled more with New Labour propaganda than anything of value. With no skills it's little wonder none of them can get a job upon leaving education.
So, what does any of this have to do with President Obama? Like New Labour Obama is obsessed with "Equality for all" and where there is not equality he will create false equality. Instead of accepting that all men are not created equal and that students have widely differing levels of academic ability he will force a false equality. The only way you can force equality in education is to lower standards to the level of the least gifted student, and at that point everyone will attain the same incredibly low standard of education thus total equality.
Tony Blair did exactly what Obama is doing now, making s speeches about the importance of science with his usual sound bites like the future is “lit by the brilliant light of science”. Now there is absolutely no science being taught UK schools, at least nothing anyone here would call science. Science can be very complicated and if some students don't understand it then we won't have "Equality for all" so it has to be discarded from the curriculum. In order to achive his "Equality for all" Obama will have to do exactly what New Labour has done and I therefore expect that Obama will do for the US education system what Tony Blair and Gorden Brown have done for the UK.
While everyone likes to criticise the Chinese government they have undoubtedly got their education system bang on right, separating students into different schools by ability and pushing the most gifted students to achieve in education. With a solid foundation of knowledge these highly educated individuals will go on to make the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the future, and China will reap the economic benefits associated with these breakthroughs. Meanwhile in the west our children won't even be able to write their names and western civilisation will collapse into poverty.
"Equality for all" doesn't work and any attempts to force it, particularly in education, will destroy a nation.
The 1987 anime Daimajuu Gekitou Hagane No Oni clearly shows us what cellphones will be like in the future:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cfd1f4.jpg
I simply can't wait to get my hands on such a technical marvel. Compact, functional and incredibly stylish - it makes me wish I was born in the future.
To be fair, the device did show similarities to a modern smart phone in terms of functionality, so while the producers were a bit off the mark with the design their vision of a future mobile phone was fairly accurate.
"We pay for the power setup, the roads, the police force-- they pay none of these costs"
Firstly, "they" pay 40% corporation tax - the second highest in the world. What more do you want? Do you really want to see the total collapse of the US economy as corporations buckle under an even heavier tax burden?
Secondly, who are "they"? A corporation is composed of three groups of people - employees, shareholders and customers. In reality "they" is in fact you, me and everyone else here and it's us who pays the costs of higher taxes on corporations.
If you tax a corporation the money has to either come from raising prices, cutting the workforce or taking a hit and suffering a reduction in share value. In all of these situations it's the public who pays the cost, either through higher prices of goods and services, losing their job or a suffering a reduction in the value of the shares in their retirement account.
When corporations get taxed it comes out of your pocket and it's you that suffers. Quite why you'd want to see them taxed more I don't know.
It's hardly surprising since the pay at MI5 is abysmal. I requested an information pack during my last year of university but lost interest when I found MI5 was about the worst paying graduate recruiter and especially bad for central London. Given the pay I would imagine that anyone with competence would take a job in the private sector leaving them to scrape up the dregs.
Still, it was worth requesting the information pack for the entertainment alone because in every one of the pictures all the people were turned away from the camera. It looked thoroughly ridiculous and I couldn't help think that they would have been better not using pictures at all.
Why would Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, kill himself and convince 39 followers to commit suicide if the whole thing about the space ship following the comet was a lie? It seems certain people can't cope with reality so fantasise that they're here for some greater purpose and will go to extreme lengths to complete that delusion.
Western civilisation is crumbling because we're obsessed with punishing people for being "offensive" rather than for real crimes. Here in the UK you can kill somebody and get away with 2 years in a luxury prison. Beat somebody to a pulp and you'll get a slap on the wrist. If you have your house burgled or your car vandalised the police won't even be interested in taking a crime report and will certainly never catch the criminals. However if you offend a homosexual or member ethnic minority the police will be all over you in an instant and you'll be facing seven years in prison for the terrible crime of saying something offensive. Likewise if you modify an image to contain a minor and is deemed "patently offensive" you'll have your life ruined because of your evil photoshoppery. It seems our governments don't care in the least about crimes that do real harm and are only interested in going after "criminals" who have said some nasty words or produced a nasty picture
I'm terrified to go out on the streets at night because gangs have no fear of the toothless police and can act with impunity. The other thing I'm terrified of is accidentally offending the wrong person since something as simple as eating black Jelly Babies in the presence of a black man can cost you your job. The country is in massive debt, the economy is collapsing, the education system has been rendered worthless making it impossible for us to compete with countries like China, crime and vandalism are taking over the streets while the worthless police do absolutely nothing and society in general is collapsing. Despite all this the government's only concern seems to be stopping thought crime and offensive words.
How do I get off this merry-go-round?
Id was at its best when Jon Romero worked there since Carmack would focus on the graphics and Romero would focus on the gameplay. Since the break-up of this partnership Id's games have gone drastically down hill while Romero found he couldn't make a game without Carmack. Romero appeared to have trouble with the technical side of Daikatana with lengthy delays and terrible visuals when it finally was released. Daikatana received a poor reception but the gameplay was clearly there with some innovative ideas and great feel to the movement control. It was the technical execution that was lacking, likely a result of not having somebody like Carmack.
Carmack's engines always look amazing but the engine is now Id's only selling point and their games are just dire. Id desperately needs to recruit someone with a proven record of making fun games so they can bring their gamplay up to the level of their engines. I vote for Romero, and bring American McGee back while you're at it. That would really return Id back to its past glory.
Why is this 5, Informative? I got the impression he was trying to be funny but it seems the members of the Church of Global Warming are so anti-carbon they've taken this comment seriously. It's getting as bad as when Greenpeace tried to have chlorine banned.
Environmentalism is the new religion and we're going to end up with a crusade of lunatics travelling through the universe trying to eradicate select elements because they've deemed them to be evil.
I live in the UK and despite cleaning my teeth obsessively one developed a cavity that has been growing for years and the tooth is now rotting to hell. Unfortunately like a lost of people I can't get on the books of an NHS dentist so I'm glad we're spending 7.5% of our GDP on a load of beurocrats and absolutely no health care. I'm sure all the thousands of people dieing from desises caused by filthy NHS wards are equally glad it's costing just 7.5% of the GDP.
Before claiming how grat the NHS is why don't you try living here. What you'll find is the NHS is broken beyond repair and is no matter how much money gets thrown into it things don't improve.
This problem is occurring everywhere from computer software to motor cars, with companies adding innovation where it's not needed and in so doing breaking things unnecessarily.
My last two company cars have been Vauxhalls; a company that is obsessed with adding innovation that makes the car a nightmare to drive. The old Vectra replaced the mechanical indicators with electrical ones that made it impossible to turn the indicators off. The Insignia, which has replaced the Vectra, has reverted back to mechanical indicators but now they've replaced the mechanical hand break with an electrical handbrake. To disengage the handbrake you have to press the accelerator making a hazard out of precise manoeuvres such as pulling out of a tight roadside parking space. Other aspects of the car are crap such as the automatic lights and automatic climate control which make me feel like I'm not in control of the car. Why can't they just leave things as they are instead of "innovating" and destroy things that work perfectly well.
Thins are even worse with software and we're seeing a push to replace the entirely functional mouse and keyboard with touch screens that are slow, cumbersome and don't work half the time. User interfaces are even worse and Microsoft are intent on innovating their way to destruction with the likes of the IE7 and Windows 7 interface while KDE seems to be in competition with them to produce the worst interface possible.
The by replacing a few words in the article summary you can get a perfect description of the current state of user interfaces:
"There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into user interfaces are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another system. On the other hand there are operating systems and applications that feel the need to completely revamp an interface that worked perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face."
The word "innovative" has now become synonymous with "junk". The Wii was "innovative" in that the control mechanism doesn't work at all so, while it's sold fantastically, nobody actually plays on it. Touch screen computers are "innovative" in that they make doing simple like viewing your photographs tasks a mammoth task where you're having to make ridiculous gestures to resize them or scroll through them. We're also seeing "innovative" portable media players controlled with facial recognition which I'm sure will work great!!!
The world has gone mad and it seems and companies seem to be in a race to make things as unusable as possible by replacing concepts that work with ones that don't.
Screw "innovation", what I want is "improvement".
The only way you get spam is if a) you give your email address to businesses or b) if you use a service like hotmail where spammers send emails to random addresses and record the ones that don't get returned.
Businesses and spammers can't magically conjure your email address out of thin air so the cause must be one of the above. You've either signed up for a service and not unchcked "allow us to share your details with select partners" or you're using a popular email service that spammers target. Given that you're getting emails from major companies it sounds more likely it's the first possibility.
I registered a domain and use that for my email address and I'm careful to read what I'm signing up for so I get absolutely no spam at all. My opinion of spam is the same as my opinion of viruses - if you ever get any it's your own fault.
While the public seem obsessed with the thickness of their television (apparently they watch their televisions from the side) they have a completely different view of speakers. When it comes to speakers they equate size with quality and the bigger the speakers are the better the public believe them to be. For this reason alone I can't see these speakers catching.
The other thing the public like is heavy bass and don't care if the mid range is completely drowned out as long as long as there is over exaggerated bass. In this respect flat panel speakers also don't perform well.
Electrostatic speakers have been delivering exceptionally detailed and neutral sound in a convenient form factor for decades but have been completely ignored by the public since they don't meet their criteria of being big and with a heavy bias towards the low frequencies. I don't see why these new speakers will do any better at penetrating the mainstream.
No the whole premise of April Fools' Day is to waste my time. Why the hell am I spending today reading stories that aren't true?! The whole thing is completely moronic and anyone who engages in the practice should be shot. It's the very definition of "not clever and not funny".
My first thoughts were also "Is speed really the issue here?" but for different reasons. I used Open Office for eight months before having to give up due to a massive number of small niggles that when combined make it very unpleasant to use. I think a lot of issues need to be addresses in Open Office before speed but sadly none of the problems ever seem to be addressed and they instead seem to focus on adding new features. In the end I had to give up and switch to Kingsoft Office 2009.
Whoever is designing the interfaces at Microsoft seems to be living in a fantasy world where functionality is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is "wow".
Things have been going rapidly down hill since around 2005 when they reversed the order tabs appeared in Visual Studio. The new arrangement meant that tabs appeared on the left and pushed all the other tabs along so the position of your files was constantly changing making it hard to keep track of where they are. Microsoft could simply provide the option to revert to the sensible behaviour used by every other application where new tabs appear on the right but despite the public outcry they refuse to do this. So much for their claims of "Work your way".
Next came Internet Explorer 7 where they ditched the traditional tool bar and spread the buttons to the four corners of the earth so nobody can ever find the button they one. I don't think there's a single person who likes this arrangement but once again Microsoft refuse to include any customisation to the intereface so you can "Work your way" just as long as "your way" is the way Microsoft tells you to work.
Then there was Windows Vista which adopted the attitude of "why do in 5 clicks what you can do in 20". Everything now takes more clicks to do so productivity is reduced. For example in XP you could change your resolution, theme, wall paper, screen saver and power saving options all from the Display Properties dialog but in Vista they were spread to multiple different places, making it harder to get things done. The functionality and consistency of interface provided by menus was abandoned and now every window has a different interface with stupid pictures and lots of "wow". The new start menu is worthless and abandons the tree structure to replace it with a list of applications you have to scroll through slowly, further reducing the productivity of Vista users.
Then there was Office 2007 which also ditched the consistent menu style interface and switched to ribbons. It makes it impossible to find the options you're looking for and someone who had the misfortune of getting Office 2007 with a PC once said to me "I've just spent 20 minutes looking for one options in the ribbons".
Windows 7 takes Vista and makes things even worse. The combined quick launch bar & task bar makes it hard to see if an application is running or not and impossible to see how many instances of the application are running. The fantastic Windows Classic theme has been removed completely and now you're forced to use wasteful themese where all windows have thick borders and fat title bars. Consistency has been further abandoned and things like the theme selection dialog box has been replaced by something entirely customised which users have to learn to use. Ribbons have been added to other applications like Paint and the whole thing seems to have been designed to be has hard to use as possible.
Other application interfaces have been destroyed, for example Windows Media Player with it's 1 pixel thick jog bar, lack of menus and ridiculous button arrangement.
The one thing Microsoft used to do right was user interfaces but they've now abandoned everything that makes a good interface. Things such as consistency, clarity and efficency have gone and instead all we have is "wow". I used to use all Microsoft applications but by destroying their interfaces across the board I've been abandoning them one at a time. After trying the Windows 7 beta I've been forced to switch to Linux.
I must admit I'm having a hard time with Linux and there's a lot to learn for a 30 year old who has been raised on Microsoft products. However, it's definitely worth the effort since Linux really does let me "Work your way" while Microsoft just makes that claim and in reality you have to work the way Microsoft tell you.
I always wondered what would bring an end to the Microsoft monopoly and it turns out it's Microsoft themselves. They seem intent on making their own products such a nightmare to use that people are forced to go elsewhere and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
When you move a heavy load do you get bogged down in "a poverty of self-perception" because it was the wheel that made it possible to move that load and not your own ability? Do you become "empty and self-loathing" when you hammer in a nail because it was the hammer that made this action possible? Do you become "a hollow, rotten chasm" after driving to work because it was the motor car enabled you to make your commute? Most of your achievements are already performed with external enhancements in the way of tools and other devices and this simply extends this principle to internal enhancements. I don't have any emotional problems with regards to using tools to enhance my performance and I would have equally few problems making use of cognitive enhancement tools if they helped me achieve more. Instead of deciding for everyone the simple solution would be to allow each individual to decide whether they want to use these enhancements. That way insecure and emotionally unstable people who are concerned about the enhancements making them "empty and self-loathing" can avoid them while more stable people can enjoy the benefits such enhancements have to offer.
I'm sick of reading how any and all work related to human enhancement raises moral and ethical questions. Moralists are the reason medical science is stuck in the stone age since the stop all human experimentation and if you can't experiment you can't progress. This work could vastly enhance peoples' lives in ways such as curing mental conditions like depression to increasing intelligence and dexterity. However, progress will no doubt be stopped while morons who know nothing about the subject debate the moral and ethical issues. There's no way that "rewiring the brain" will be permitted in a Luddite society like ours where we still need to debate what human rights should be given to a clump of cells.
"The Web site provides access to several Microsoft online training programs, including how to use the Internet" - This is fantatic idea. Now anyone who can't use the internet can just go on the internet and...oh wait.
The 3 day charts you linked contain too small a sample to prove anything and you need to look at a longer term chart such as this six year chart to see the true picture. When the NASDAQ was up 100% in 2007 Micrsoft was unchanged and while the NASDAQ is currently even on its 2003 value Microsoft is off nearly 40%. Microsoft is failing and investors know it.