For accuracy and truth on Central Africa, look to people like... Wayne Madsen
As a sometime reader of the lefty blogs, I can recall dozens of times where people would reference stories by Wayne Madsen about nefarious conspiracies on which the evidence was just about to publicly emerge, and on which he had unrivaled sources, he claimed. The thing is, with every single one of these his reporting turned out to be bunk. He's a good writer, in the sense that his stories are self-consistent and often also fit well with better-sourced reports elsewhere, but he always steps beyond the known into stuff that in retrospect he just makes up. It's the sort of fiction that people on the left are prone to believe, since it fits generally with the more paranoid edge of our worldview. But the man's an embarrassment.
So, yeah, underlying the claims about all of these "censored" stories (all of which are out there - nothing was new to me among them - but sure they deserve more coverage and analysis than they get) are people credulous enough to believe Wayne Madsen. Sad!
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists?
The vast majority of signed artists make nothing from sales of recordings. It all gets eaten up by "fees" the recording companies charge them for the privilege of being recorded. The only exceptions to this are the "artists" with platinum records - who (1) still end up cheated out of much of what's due to them - note the number of lawsuits brought by name artists against their recording companies because of this, and (2) generally have so many millions due to their superstardom that royalties "lost" due to copyright infringement amount to nothing they'd ever notice missing from their accounts. The artists - all the artists - make all or at least most of their money from concerts and merchandise (e.g. t-shirts). And the more their work is heard, the greater the concert attendance and merchandise sales. So the companies are in this case protecting their artists from being heard. Yeah, that does the artists' bottom lines a huge favor!
The pertinent Supreme Court ruling held that under current law states may not enforce sales tax charges on out-of-state merchants. However the Court in that ruling explicitly stated that Congress is free to enact different law.
Many states - roughly half of them - have unified their sales tax rules to make it easier for Congress to do just that without creating so much of a mess about calculating how much tax is due on what in which jurisdiction.
Now if you're Congress, do you let states raise this tax finally, or do you raise federal taxes to pay for the currently unfunded mandates that the feds have imposed on the states? Which would you get less blame for?
But seriously... when cosmology's solved we'll have a spade that can be used directly to uproot all the religions that make cosmological claims - particularly the genesis-myth-based ones. No smart child will any more join these religions, let alone fight wars for them, or strap bombs to their bodies to enter their paradises.
A robotic program with a bit of randomness in it wouldn't fit our basic experience: which is that of weighing prospects both immediately before us and beyond our sensory horizon, and from that conscious consideration both forming determinations to take one path or another, and also sometimes foregoing all the paths considered and setting off to explore a new direction. The point is twofold: we're doing this consciously (not to rule out unconscious components), and it's much of what our consciousness is usually concerned with (the "default mode"). If someone does something unconsciously, it's not done of free will.
Randomness in a program does nothing to introduce consciousness; thus the program with randomness added has no more free will than it did before the randomness was added. Randomness has nothing whatsoever to do with free will.
We've been joking about world domination and the evil empire for years here. But despite the kidding around, despite our biases, we've never been motivated to go all-out. We can ruin Microsoft. In the terrain of the Internet we hold much of the high ground - the servers, as well as not a few firewall-routers and other essential equipment. Microsoft for years has had no qualms about breaking competitors' functionality. We can cripple Microsoft's functionality in a wide variety of real-time environments - and stay a hair's breath within the law just as they've (almost) done.
Building stuff that can replace Microsoft's products is one thing - honest competition really. But we've never stooped to Microsoft's own favored methods of dishonest competition. Is Redmond really stupid enough to motivate us to take that step?
On the Greenland ice sheet, the IPCC report is being mischaracterized by Spiegel's reporter. There are also a handful of quotes from scientists about the imperfections and difficulties in climate models, which imply that those researchers share the reporter's skepticism about whether what the models say should be taken at all seriously. But do they? Or are they just being honest scientists describing their awareness of the limitations of their tools, who yet take seriously the likely threat that the best of those tools describe? At best, they are quoted out of context.
As for fewer deaths from the cold, surely we should remember the tens of thousands of deaths from the European heat wave a few summers ago. Then consider the NASAreport just published estimating that by 2080 East Coast American cities which currently have summer temperatures in the the 80s with occasional spikes into the 90s will instead have typical temperatures in the 90s with occasional spikes into the 100s. What effect will that have on health? Have you tried breathing New York City ozone on a 95 degree day? What will that be like when it's 105 instead? How will it burn your lungs?
Can a lawyer out there speak to the likelihood that the judge will sanction the lawyers who brought this to court? If the judge does sanction them, how severely will that damage their careers? I've had a lawyer profess fear of sanction even when I had a solid case against a business partner who'd misappropriated my software. With no case, isn't that threat much worse?
If we can create a situation where bug disclosures are maximized, the products with the most serious security problems will die, and likely take their companies with them. So if you're a company that reasonably believes your products have few if any such bugs, your smartest bet is to encourage all companies to offer rewards to hackers - if you're right about the quality of your products, it will take your competition down and leave you standing.
As a customer, then, who should you buy from? The companies with the confidence in their products to offer hacker rewards, or the ones with so little confidence that they don't? Yes, some of the first will be wrong about their products; but virtually all of the latter will be correct.
Do you have an online checking or savings account? Both INGdirect.com and HSBCdirect.com persistently send out plain-text e-mails to confirm just about every transaction - with no option to turn these off. I've written various people at both banks explaining why this is a really, really bad idea. They are uncomprehending. The confirmation e-mails don't give full account details, but give plenty of information for someone who manages to intercept them (or crack someone's Hotmail account) to use social engineering to find out the rest.
Mind you, these are two otherwise fine enough banks that I do business with them. But if I didn't control my mail server - and know and trust the admins running my ISP's routers - I'd be taking on a level of risk that borders on idiotic.
Let's not forget that a year ago these same wizards were telling everyone that AMD stock was the most splendid in the universe. Their perspectives are essentially meaningless. They make their money basically from the volume of trading, so every bit of advice aims at churning the market.
The real question for AMD is what their geniuses are up to, and whether management will convert that, over the time between now and "out of cash." Intel doesn't look stupid today, but it didn't look stupid a couple of years back either. What genius does is make the competition look stupid in retrospect. If AMD is working on something that will do that again, the last people to know will be the Wall Street Hooligans - because if it were that open Intel would be warned too.
Ubuntu comes built for two platforms, i386 and AMD 64.
If Ubuntu sticks with that, and manages to become the breakthrough "Linux for Everybody," AMD ends up the benefactor - a distro compiled for i386 costs majorly in speed, in ways that show up in normal desktop use.
Consider that Michael Dell is personally testing Ubuntu, and that Dell itself has hit a rough patch of late, and is looking for new ways to differentiate itself. Canonical is also working closely with Sun to make Ubuntu the superior Linux platform for Java. So if (very big if) Ubuntu breaks out backed by a large Dell marketing campaign in the desktop space plus Sun's support in the commodity server space, not to mention its continuing excellent word-of-mouth, and if Ubuntu remains best-tuned to AMD, that's all to AMD's future advantage.
"We are looking at the possibility of treating those patients that fail to respond to conventional therapy for hypertension with drugs... increase blood flow within the brain."
So would gingko biloba lower blood pressure? It's well-known to increase blood flow to the brain. There's doubt that this does anything, as has been claimed, to improve memory. But due to the extensive marketing based on that claim it's widely available, cheap, comes in standardized doses.... Since blood-pressure gauges are also widely available and cheap, it would be fairly simple for even an undergrad to set up a good double-blind study and, if the results pan out, write up a nice little popular book that all the supplement shops would carry, and you nearly have a career.
You might want to go to Salzburg this summer to attend the Quantum Mind conference. You'll find a number of top physicists, a few philosophers, some famous mathematicians, and at least one anaesthesiologist (hey, you don't know what you've got till it's gone).
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As TFA points out, it's not just the content providers who can benefit. Businesses want to be sure that their internal and client communications are secure. This would allow sending, for example, PDFs of sensitive documents that couldn't be easily copied by a rogue employee and sent off to a competitor. If you think corporate spies aren't a fact of life, you're either wrong or not in a successful enough enterprise to be worth spying on. Now, your rogue employee still might actually photograph their screen, if they're authorized to at least view the document. But that's not nearly as convenient as doing a screen capture, and can't be automated to run in the background.
If you're a major corporation with any trade secrets at all (which is to say, any major corporation), your obvious best choice is to buy systems with this technology. As home users we may have an ethical right to total root access to our personal systems; but when we go to work, if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs. And you'd probably rather that the IRS were using security measures along these lines, too. This is good tech in a business or government context.
We just need laws regarding hardware ownership clarified so that it becomes illegal to implement restrictions on equipment which the equipment owner - whether person or corporation - can't disable at will. That wouldn't interfere with corporate- and government-owned systems being properly locked down, while preserving the property rights of individuals.
There's one tax software company doing their programming entirely in America, TaxAct (2nd Story Software. I haven't used their Web version, but their Windows version runs nearly flawlessly under Wine on Linux (there are minor problems with checkbox and drop-down list display on screen while filling out forms, but those show up correctly in the print preview and output). I've used TaxCut and TurboTax in past years; TaxAct doesn't have silly videos included, but it's efficient and effective.
I share the caution about Indian programmers. I just dropped checking and savings accounts with Ameriprise (formerly Amex Bank), because in the several years since they shipped the programming off to India they still haven't gotten their site to work reliably in its basic operations. Even before security is considered, the incompetence is amazing. Now I'm seeing a downgrading in the usability of CitiBank's Website, where there's also been extensive recent offshoring - they can't be bothered to test for obvious JavaScript bugs that block Mozilla, for example, even though previously they'd officially and effectively supported Mozilla/Netscape for years. (Hell, I do work for financial firms in NYC that don't even allow their own people to browse with IE.)
Here we are in the present. There's the future. We can't see the future directly. However we have expectations regarding it many of which are statistically dependable. We can know when the sun will rise (clouds permitting). And if we apply some math we can know when Venus will rise. More complex astronomy requires more advanced aids, not just math but various forms of observatories (e.g. Stonehenge) and calculating devices - instruments and formulas.
As far as things like "The sun will rise" and "Spring will follow winter" we do pretty well by common sense - without instruments or formulas. The basic assumption is "Tomorrow will be like today; next year will be like this year." Common sense has always had a firm anchor in our sensibility, and so from "The sun will rise" we get a sureness that "The sun circles the Earth." We fairly easily accept instruments and formulas to tell us about distant constellations, since claims about them have little friction with the common sense domain. But when it gets "closer to Earth" there are always questions about which authority to accept.
The question here is, is the best authority on GW our common sense, which always says "Tomorrow will be like today," or is the best authority our instruments and formulas, which strongly indicate we're facing a very different tomorrow? Compare attitudes if instruments and formulas were to predict a major comet strike, yet the comet was not yet apparent to the naked eyeball. Would you say, "I'm confident tomorrow will be like today, because those are just models"? Or would you say, "Holy shit, how can I maximize the chances that I and my family can survive this thing, just in case our instruments and formulas are right?"
Attaturk seems to have been one cool dude. What other nation of Muslims has in its Constitution that Islam must be kept out of the government? They owe that constitution to the man.
On the one hand we have home users behind Linksys firewall/routers. On the other hand we have business users who have better primary firewall hardware (at the cheaper end at least a Linux iptables box) but who have some of the stuff from Linksys and its competitors sitting behind that running wireless in their offices. So is this exploit going to be something that only threatens the former, or is it something that you could embed in a Webpage such that your office user, in pulling it across the Linksys-type wireless access point, compromises the WAP - maybe adding some custom routing rules? The latter would be pretty damn scarey.
Inevitably any discussion of stability will include anecdotes from people who've had a rock solid experience, and others from people who've had frequent problems. What's we need is statistics from a larger population. The disease exists, but what are the odds that a particular user is going to catch it if they visit Vistaland? If a corporation migrates 10,000 desktops to Vista, what percent will then be unstable systems? What percent was before the migration?
On the one hand, it should be so vanishingly small that reports like the article under discussion here just don't happen. Because if it's something like even 3% of systems going unstable after migration, that firm with 10,000 desktops now has 300 people - some of them in core functions - who've just had their productivity hobbled (presuming they had stable systems before). And those 300 people will require how many hours from how many support staff to get beyond their problems (or will they just silently accept it, perhaps as something that must be their own fault?). But if 97% of the systems are stable, in discussions like here there will be plenty of posters testifying to their rock solid experience. Those testimonies are almost pointless - certainly any operating system has some portion of hardware, peripherals and applications on which it will be about flawless. But whether that's the experience of 60% or 99.9% of users makes worlds of difference.
A standard hypothesis is that as soon as you have conditions in a chemical soup that can support selection for self-replicating chemical chains, you have the beginning of life. That is: As soon as evolution is a supported possibility, just then is when life takes hold.
Now, this is not proven, yet. But for decades there have been experiments with very suggestive results on this - setting up initial (and lifeless) environments in chemical conditions approximating early Earth, and seeing what just could be the start of the formation of such chemical chains. This was standard in main-stream press science reporting well back into the '60s. There's still much current research in it, and a whole lot of theory.
Why not? Sure it's another factor in motherboard design, but as long as the USB peripheral and the controller can negotiate the power demands...
Because the power demands aren't just on the motherboard, but on the power supply. The motherboard typically doesn't know the capacity of the power supply. Even allowing that it did, an over-large power supply is less efficient than one sized right for the most typical use of the system (assuming they are otherwise power supplies of equal quality).
No, it's a bill from a Liberal that the author is afraid the Conservatives may find their own twisted reasons to fancy. If the Conservatives don't fall to that, it's clear the author would be more than pleased with them for it.
The meta-point is that Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, Labor or Tory, the question of which party will claim the mantel of true liberty is wide open in the Anglo world. In the US, a large portion (by no means all) of the Republican Party has embraced government intrusion, and the Democrats may be showing themselves just smart enough to pick up the Independent/Libertarian vote by embracing the cause of a return to Constitutional rights. Meanwhile in Britain, it's the Liberals who've gone all fascist, and the Tories who just may be waking up to the opportunity this gives them to play the liberty card and regain pertinence and power.
Canada? Oh Canada! Fascinating question whether the historically left or right will become the liberty-aligned there. My frank urging is, as it's more important than anything else, vote for whoever, locally, is the true friend of liberty. Because without liberty, the difference between left and right is only the difference between Stalin and Hitler - meaningless finally.
When I was a kid in the early 60s my dad got a console stereo. It was pretty amazing: radio, record changer, amplifier and speakers all in one device, encased in a solid-wood cabinet, and with true hi-fidelity (better than your iPods, kids). The separate components of the hi-fi systems of the years before had been merged into one convenient device! What a technological advance!
And then, what? By the early 70s most of the console stereos were in the junk yards. Every audiophile wanted - gasp - a system built of separate components.
History may repeat: The all-in-one device will be perfected, and enjoy a brief domination of the market based in part on its cool factor. Then everyone will revert to the natural preference for individual flexibility and control, which favors separate but combinable devices. There's no reason your music player, for instance, won't be able to connect to whatever local network access is available at the moment - including your cell phone in the other pocket - without any necessity to combine them it the same case.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
Even the most obscure domain names get used for forged from addresses on spam. And, guess what, there's nothing the domain owner can do about that (well, SPF records may help a little - but I can tell you not much). So those abuse reports do nobody, nowhere, any good at all.
As for takedown notices, it's easy to see, if I can't see who the domain owner is, who the service provider is. So if you haven't been good enough to give me your own contact info, and I can show obvious copyright violation, I can most likely get your whole site pulled down. That should be motivation enough for those allowing possibly copyrighted stuff on their domains to give valid contact info - as I do. Why make a hard rule about it?
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As a sometime reader of the lefty blogs, I can recall dozens of times where people would reference stories by Wayne Madsen about nefarious conspiracies on which the evidence was just about to publicly emerge, and on which he had unrivaled sources, he claimed. The thing is, with every single one of these his reporting turned out to be bunk. He's a good writer, in the sense that his stories are self-consistent and often also fit well with better-sourced reports elsewhere, but he always steps beyond the known into stuff that in retrospect he just makes up. It's the sort of fiction that people on the left are prone to believe, since it fits generally with the more paranoid edge of our worldview. But the man's an embarrassment.
So, yeah, underlying the claims about all of these "censored" stories (all of which are out there - nothing was new to me among them - but sure they deserve more coverage and analysis than they get) are people credulous enough to believe Wayne Madsen. Sad!
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists?
The vast majority of signed artists make nothing from sales of recordings. It all gets eaten up by "fees" the recording companies charge them for the privilege of being recorded. The only exceptions to this are the "artists" with platinum records - who (1) still end up cheated out of much of what's due to them - note the number of lawsuits brought by name artists against their recording companies because of this, and (2) generally have so many millions due to their superstardom that royalties "lost" due to copyright infringement amount to nothing they'd ever notice missing from their accounts. The artists - all the artists - make all or at least most of their money from concerts and merchandise (e.g. t-shirts). And the more their work is heard, the greater the concert attendance and merchandise sales. So the companies are in this case protecting their artists from being heard. Yeah, that does the artists' bottom lines a huge favor!
The pertinent Supreme Court ruling held that under current law states may not enforce sales tax charges on out-of-state merchants. However the Court in that ruling explicitly stated that Congress is free to enact different law.
Many states - roughly half of them - have unified their sales tax rules to make it easier for Congress to do just that without creating so much of a mess about calculating how much tax is due on what in which jurisdiction.
Now if you're Congress, do you let states raise this tax finally, or do you raise federal taxes to pay for the currently unfunded mandates that the feds have imposed on the states? Which would you get less blame for?
But seriously ... when cosmology's solved we'll have a spade that can be used directly to uproot all the religions that make cosmological claims - particularly the genesis-myth-based ones. No smart child will any more join these religions, let alone fight wars for them, or strap bombs to their bodies to enter their paradises.
Come rouse me off my barstool when that happens.
A robotic program with a bit of randomness in it wouldn't fit our basic experience: which is that of weighing prospects both immediately before us and beyond our sensory horizon, and from that conscious consideration both forming determinations to take one path or another, and also sometimes foregoing all the paths considered and setting off to explore a new direction. The point is twofold: we're doing this consciously (not to rule out unconscious components), and it's much of what our consciousness is usually concerned with (the "default mode"). If someone does something unconsciously, it's not done of free will.
Randomness in a program does nothing to introduce consciousness; thus the program with randomness added has no more free will than it did before the randomness was added. Randomness has nothing whatsoever to do with free will.
We've been joking about world domination and the evil empire for years here. But despite the kidding around, despite our biases, we've never been motivated to go all-out. We can ruin Microsoft. In the terrain of the Internet we hold much of the high ground - the servers, as well as not a few firewall-routers and other essential equipment. Microsoft for years has had no qualms about breaking competitors' functionality. We can cripple Microsoft's functionality in a wide variety of real-time environments - and stay a hair's breath within the law just as they've (almost) done.
Building stuff that can replace Microsoft's products is one thing - honest competition really. But we've never stooped to Microsoft's own favored methods of dishonest competition. Is Redmond really stupid enough to motivate us to take that step?
On the Greenland ice sheet, the IPCC report is being mischaracterized by Spiegel's reporter. There are also a handful of quotes from scientists about the imperfections and difficulties in climate models, which imply that those researchers share the reporter's skepticism about whether what the models say should be taken at all seriously. But do they? Or are they just being honest scientists describing their awareness of the limitations of their tools, who yet take seriously the likely threat that the best of those tools describe? At best, they are quoted out of context.
As for fewer deaths from the cold, surely we should remember the tens of thousands of deaths from the European heat wave a few summers ago. Then consider the NASA report just published estimating that by 2080 East Coast American cities which currently have summer temperatures in the the 80s with occasional spikes into the 90s will instead have typical temperatures in the 90s with occasional spikes into the 100s. What effect will that have on health? Have you tried breathing New York City ozone on a 95 degree day? What will that be like when it's 105 instead? How will it burn your lungs?
Can a lawyer out there speak to the likelihood that the judge will sanction the lawyers who brought this to court? If the judge does sanction them, how severely will that damage their careers? I've had a lawyer profess fear of sanction even when I had a solid case against a business partner who'd misappropriated my software. With no case, isn't that threat much worse?
If we can create a situation where bug disclosures are maximized, the products with the most serious security problems will die, and likely take their companies with them. So if you're a company that reasonably believes your products have few if any such bugs, your smartest bet is to encourage all companies to offer rewards to hackers - if you're right about the quality of your products, it will take your competition down and leave you standing.
As a customer, then, who should you buy from? The companies with the confidence in their products to offer hacker rewards, or the ones with so little confidence that they don't? Yes, some of the first will be wrong about their products; but virtually all of the latter will be correct.
Do you have an online checking or savings account? Both INGdirect.com and HSBCdirect.com persistently send out plain-text e-mails to confirm just about every transaction - with no option to turn these off. I've written various people at both banks explaining why this is a really, really bad idea. They are uncomprehending. The confirmation e-mails don't give full account details, but give plenty of information for someone who manages to intercept them (or crack someone's Hotmail account) to use social engineering to find out the rest.
Mind you, these are two otherwise fine enough banks that I do business with them. But if I didn't control my mail server - and know and trust the admins running my ISP's routers - I'd be taking on a level of risk that borders on idiotic.
Let's not forget that a year ago these same wizards were telling everyone that AMD stock was the most splendid in the universe. Their perspectives are essentially meaningless. They make their money basically from the volume of trading, so every bit of advice aims at churning the market.
The real question for AMD is what their geniuses are up to, and whether management will convert that, over the time between now and "out of cash." Intel doesn't look stupid today, but it didn't look stupid a couple of years back either. What genius does is make the competition look stupid in retrospect. If AMD is working on something that will do that again, the last people to know will be the Wall Street Hooligans - because if it were that open Intel would be warned too.
Ubuntu comes built for two platforms, i386 and AMD 64.
If Ubuntu sticks with that, and manages to become the breakthrough "Linux for Everybody," AMD ends up the benefactor - a distro compiled for i386 costs majorly in speed, in ways that show up in normal desktop use.
Consider that Michael Dell is personally testing Ubuntu, and that Dell itself has hit a rough patch of late, and is looking for new ways to differentiate itself. Canonical is also working closely with Sun to make Ubuntu the superior Linux platform for Java. So if (very big if) Ubuntu breaks out backed by a large Dell marketing campaign in the desktop space plus Sun's support in the commodity server space, not to mention its continuing excellent word-of-mouth, and if Ubuntu remains best-tuned to AMD, that's all to AMD's future advantage.
So would gingko biloba lower blood pressure? It's well-known to increase blood flow to the brain. There's doubt that this does anything, as has been claimed, to improve memory. But due to the extensive marketing based on that claim it's widely available, cheap, comes in standardized doses.... Since blood-pressure gauges are also widely available and cheap, it would be fairly simple for even an undergrad to set up a good double-blind study and, if the results pan out, write up a nice little popular book that all the supplement shops would carry, and you nearly have a career.
You might want to go to Salzburg this summer to attend the Quantum Mind conference. You'll find a number of top physicists, a few philosophers, some famous mathematicians, and at least one anaesthesiologist (hey, you don't know what you've got till it's gone).
As TFA points out, it's not just the content providers who can benefit. Businesses want to be sure that their internal and client communications are secure. This would allow sending, for example, PDFs of sensitive documents that couldn't be easily copied by a rogue employee and sent off to a competitor. If you think corporate spies aren't a fact of life, you're either wrong or not in a successful enough enterprise to be worth spying on. Now, your rogue employee still might actually photograph their screen, if they're authorized to at least view the document. But that's not nearly as convenient as doing a screen capture, and can't be automated to run in the background.
If you're a major corporation with any trade secrets at all (which is to say, any major corporation), your obvious best choice is to buy systems with this technology. As home users we may have an ethical right to total root access to our personal systems; but when we go to work, if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs. And you'd probably rather that the IRS were using security measures along these lines, too. This is good tech in a business or government context.
We just need laws regarding hardware ownership clarified so that it becomes illegal to implement restrictions on equipment which the equipment owner - whether person or corporation - can't disable at will. That wouldn't interfere with corporate- and government-owned systems being properly locked down, while preserving the property rights of individuals.
There's one tax software company doing their programming entirely in America, TaxAct (2nd Story Software. I haven't used their Web version, but their Windows version runs nearly flawlessly under Wine on Linux (there are minor problems with checkbox and drop-down list display on screen while filling out forms, but those show up correctly in the print preview and output). I've used TaxCut and TurboTax in past years; TaxAct doesn't have silly videos included, but it's efficient and effective.
I share the caution about Indian programmers. I just dropped checking and savings accounts with Ameriprise (formerly Amex Bank), because in the several years since they shipped the programming off to India they still haven't gotten their site to work reliably in its basic operations. Even before security is considered, the incompetence is amazing. Now I'm seeing a downgrading in the usability of CitiBank's Website, where there's also been extensive recent offshoring - they can't be bothered to test for obvious JavaScript bugs that block Mozilla, for example, even though previously they'd officially and effectively supported Mozilla/Netscape for years. (Hell, I do work for financial firms in NYC that don't even allow their own people to browse with IE.)
Here we are in the present. There's the future. We can't see the future directly. However we have expectations regarding it many of which are statistically dependable. We can know when the sun will rise (clouds permitting). And if we apply some math we can know when Venus will rise. More complex astronomy requires more advanced aids, not just math but various forms of observatories (e.g. Stonehenge) and calculating devices - instruments and formulas.
As far as things like "The sun will rise" and "Spring will follow winter" we do pretty well by common sense - without instruments or formulas. The basic assumption is "Tomorrow will be like today; next year will be like this year." Common sense has always had a firm anchor in our sensibility, and so from "The sun will rise" we get a sureness that "The sun circles the Earth." We fairly easily accept instruments and formulas to tell us about distant constellations, since claims about them have little friction with the common sense domain. But when it gets "closer to Earth" there are always questions about which authority to accept.
The question here is, is the best authority on GW our common sense, which always says "Tomorrow will be like today," or is the best authority our instruments and formulas, which strongly indicate we're facing a very different tomorrow? Compare attitudes if instruments and formulas were to predict a major comet strike, yet the comet was not yet apparent to the naked eyeball. Would you say, "I'm confident tomorrow will be like today, because those are just models"? Or would you say, "Holy shit, how can I maximize the chances that I and my family can survive this thing, just in case our instruments and formulas are right?"
Attaturk seems to have been one cool dude. What other nation of Muslims has in its Constitution that Islam must be kept out of the government? They owe that constitution to the man.
On the one hand we have home users behind Linksys firewall/routers. On the other hand we have business users who have better primary firewall hardware (at the cheaper end at least a Linux iptables box) but who have some of the stuff from Linksys and its competitors sitting behind that running wireless in their offices. So is this exploit going to be something that only threatens the former, or is it something that you could embed in a Webpage such that your office user, in pulling it across the Linksys-type wireless access point, compromises the WAP - maybe adding some custom routing rules? The latter would be pretty damn scarey.
Inevitably any discussion of stability will include anecdotes from people who've had a rock solid experience, and others from people who've had frequent problems. What's we need is statistics from a larger population. The disease exists, but what are the odds that a particular user is going to catch it if they visit Vistaland? If a corporation migrates 10,000 desktops to Vista, what percent will then be unstable systems? What percent was before the migration?
On the one hand, it should be so vanishingly small that reports like the article under discussion here just don't happen. Because if it's something like even 3% of systems going unstable after migration, that firm with 10,000 desktops now has 300 people - some of them in core functions - who've just had their productivity hobbled (presuming they had stable systems before). And those 300 people will require how many hours from how many support staff to get beyond their problems (or will they just silently accept it, perhaps as something that must be their own fault?). But if 97% of the systems are stable, in discussions like here there will be plenty of posters testifying to their rock solid experience. Those testimonies are almost pointless - certainly any operating system has some portion of hardware, peripherals and applications on which it will be about flawless. But whether that's the experience of 60% or 99.9% of users makes worlds of difference.
A standard hypothesis is that as soon as you have conditions in a chemical soup that can support selection for self-replicating chemical chains, you have the beginning of life. That is: As soon as evolution is a supported possibility, just then is when life takes hold.
Now, this is not proven, yet. But for decades there have been experiments with very suggestive results on this - setting up initial (and lifeless) environments in chemical conditions approximating early Earth, and seeing what just could be the start of the formation of such chemical chains. This was standard in main-stream press science reporting well back into the '60s. There's still much current research in it, and a whole lot of theory.
Why not? Sure it's another factor in motherboard design, but as long as the USB peripheral and the controller can negotiate the power demands...
Because the power demands aren't just on the motherboard, but on the power supply. The motherboard typically doesn't know the capacity of the power supply. Even allowing that it did, an over-large power supply is less efficient than one sized right for the most typical use of the system (assuming they are otherwise power supplies of equal quality).
No, it's a bill from a Liberal that the author is afraid the Conservatives may find their own twisted reasons to fancy. If the Conservatives don't fall to that, it's clear the author would be more than pleased with them for it.
The meta-point is that Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, Labor or Tory, the question of which party will claim the mantel of true liberty is wide open in the Anglo world. In the US, a large portion (by no means all) of the Republican Party has embraced government intrusion, and the Democrats may be showing themselves just smart enough to pick up the Independent/Libertarian vote by embracing the cause of a return to Constitutional rights. Meanwhile in Britain, it's the Liberals who've gone all fascist, and the Tories who just may be waking up to the opportunity this gives them to play the liberty card and regain pertinence and power.
Canada? Oh Canada! Fascinating question whether the historically left or right will become the liberty-aligned there. My frank urging is, as it's more important than anything else, vote for whoever, locally, is the true friend of liberty. Because without liberty, the difference between left and right is only the difference between Stalin and Hitler - meaningless finally.
When I was a kid in the early 60s my dad got a console stereo. It was pretty amazing: radio, record changer, amplifier and speakers all in one device, encased in a solid-wood cabinet, and with true hi-fidelity (better than your iPods, kids). The separate components of the hi-fi systems of the years before had been merged into one convenient device! What a technological advance!
And then, what? By the early 70s most of the console stereos were in the junk yards. Every audiophile wanted - gasp - a system built of separate components.
History may repeat: The all-in-one device will be perfected, and enjoy a brief domination of the market based in part on its cool factor. Then everyone will revert to the natural preference for individual flexibility and control, which favors separate but combinable devices. There's no reason your music player, for instance, won't be able to connect to whatever local network access is available at the moment - including your cell phone in the other pocket - without any necessity to combine them it the same case.
Where do abuse reports get sent when someone starts sending spam using your domain name?
Even the most obscure domain names get used for forged from addresses on spam. And, guess what, there's nothing the domain owner can do about that (well, SPF records may help a little - but I can tell you not much). So those abuse reports do nobody, nowhere, any good at all.
As for takedown notices, it's easy to see, if I can't see who the domain owner is, who the service provider is. So if you haven't been good enough to give me your own contact info, and I can show obvious copyright violation, I can most likely get your whole site pulled down. That should be motivation enough for those allowing possibly copyrighted stuff on their domains to give valid contact info - as I do. Why make a hard rule about it?