as far as copy protection methods go it's actually very good.
no limit on number of computers you can install, no need for CD in drive. in fact, no need for CDs at all - if you were away from home and on a computer with a decent internet connection, you could log into your account and play it there.
It has some avantages. It also has a big disadvantage: you need a net connection so anytime you can't contact the authentication server you can't install the game. How long will those servers be operating?
Unless you are playing on-line, it is a one time activation.
No, it's not. It's an install time activation. If I have to reinstall for any reason, I'll need to reactivate. Are Valve going to be providing authentication 10 years from now?
This isn't MS being hypocrites, it is an employee breaking company policy and bringing in outside sofware.
If MS are going to be at the forefront of the pro-IP lobby, they better damn well have their own house in order. Apparently they don't. Hypocracy is exactly what it is - the same offense they would crucify others for, they have themselves committed.
Maybe the steep increase is due to all the new file formats they are indexing now.
The steep increase is probably due to an architecture change. Google has, for a long time, been indexing around 4 billion pages. That implies that they have been giving each page a 32 bit unique identifier, and had exhausted that id space. It would be a lot of work for them to seamlessly upgrade all their software to support a larger id, and it has taken them a long time to do so. Now that they have the large jump in pages is simply due to the fact that they can index much more of the web.
I'm tired of seeing this example used by "hydrogen is dangerous" folks...
What I find interesting is that most people seem to overlook the fact that most of the passengers and crew survived: "Of the 97 people on board, 13 passengers and 22 crew-members were killed. One member of the ground crew also died, bringing the death toll to 36". That compares very favourably to modern air disasters. Yet most people would only be able to name a few modern air disasters (e.g. flight TWA 800, Lockerby, Concorde, and 9/11). The only reason the Hindenburg is still seen as a big disaster is that it was the first disaster with extensive, graphic news coverage. It's become a sort of legend, despite the fact that the loss of life was relatively low.
The additive MTBE is a classic example of gasoline additive gone bad. It is designed to oxygenate gasoline and make it burn cleaner to improve air quality. Unfortunately its been classified as a carcinogen and its started showing up in ground water and drinking water across the country (drinking water for 15 million in one study I saw). In very small quantities it makes water undrinkable due to its nasty turpentine odor and taste and of course it may cause cancer.
It's worth keeping in mind that gasoline is carcinogenic as well. Just about every molecule with a benzene ring is, and there are plenty of them in gasoline.
Not necessarily, in this case. If it were a regular colony that happened to settle near a source of (for example) geothermal warmth, then you're not starting from a specially adapted niche subspecies. Queen bees typically survive and lay eggs for two to three years; some may live up to five years. (Those numbers are for honeybees--I am assuming that the figures for tropical bees aren't too different.) If the world was only suffering from the worst lack of sunlight and heat for a year or three, there might be very little change in the species. (A bit of pressure for slightly hardier variants, but not much else...)
The point is that reduction of the population to that degree would mean that the rebuilt population would all derive from a very small genetic pool. There would be a lot genetic variation from the original population lost. That should be detectable (though I'm not sure it would be at the physiological level, I admit). As you say if the period of climate change was short (relative to the bees lifecycle) and the repopulation fast then there may not be a lot of specialisation evident in the rebuilt population.
If you want people to reach a conclusion that you say the article wants us to reach, then it's clear that the onus is on the party who has done far less work gathering empirical data to support its own claims. That group is the "honeybees couldn't have survived" theorist group.
And that has been done. You, and most other people here, are reacting as though the article is the entire body of work on this theory. It's not, and until you've seen the rest of the work you're really in no position to criticize it, are you?
I believe there is an ethical problem with taking advantage of price matching. Just go buy it at the better price.
I tend to agree, but there are two situations where I'm happy to use a price matching guarantee:
I bought a digital camera using a price match offer because the cheaper store was out of stock (and as the model had just been replaced by a version with 20% more pixels they might not have been able to restock),
I have a good existing relationship with a business.
I won't say which was which but in my example I had visited CompUSA, Circuit City and Best Buy. None of them is going to force any of the others out of business.
Why are you so reluctant to name names? Afraid you'll end up on someone's blacklist?
Microsoft: 3,520, since March 21, 1985
Novell: 243, September 24, 1990
Microsoft has Novell beat by an order of magnitude and then some. To give you some perspective, Amazon.com are famous for their patents, and they only have 41.
Microsoft is the poster boy for patenting anything and everything, and trying to use their "licensing" schemes to control and monopolize the market.
I have only one thing to say about that:
AN/"international business machines": 37931 patents.
That situation is called an evolutionary bottleneck. When it occurs it is generally accompanied by considerable genetic change, due to a lack of genetic variation, significant inbredding, and a fairly homologous environment (which encourages specialisation). That has not happened in this case, therefore it is unlikely that they suffered a near-extinction reduction in population.
That is quite a leap, but as I said in my other reply to you, we don't know the methodology so criticism of that leap is rather premature. There simply isn't enough detail in that report to dismiss the research. You'll also note that many the posts do not point out that leap, but instead seem to assume that all bees are the same.
As an aside, more and more science articles on Slashdot seem to be dominated by posters dismissing research based on perceived problems in reports of the research, rather than the research itself. It's not all that helpful to do that, especially when there are already 50 posts stating the same thing (personally I'll be handing out a few redundant moderations next time I notice this trend and have mod points). It's almost like Slashdot is becoming more cynical and more scientifically conservative.
A few, yes. It only takes a few to repopulate the species.
Furthere, populations migrate over time. There's no reason to assume that the bees now in the tropics came from the tropics.
A few survive, multiply, and diverge into different ecological niches.
And they evolve as they do so. These species have allegedly not evolved much at all, which implies that they have not diverged into different ecological niches, and that the climate they now occupy is probably very similar to the climate they used to occupy.
To be fair, the authors of TFA didn't say that the species found in amber were identical to the modern tropical honey bees.
There is that. But the article is not the research. Without seeing the research we are not in a position to judge the methodology. Yet most of the highly moderated posts dismiss the research out of hand, noting that "I heard you can freeze bees and revive them", or "I once kept a hive, and my bees survive winter just fine". There is (when I checked, anyway) not once highly moderated post commenting on the implications if the research is correct. That's a pretty disappointing discussion, if you ask me.
Frankly, without reviving those bees from the amber there's no way of telling if they could survive the cold or no, and the researcher is talking through her hat.
There will be physiological differences. It would also be possible to look at the global distributions of the ancient and modern species. There are ways to establish some confidence in this methodology.
I'm not saying the research is correct. What I'm saying is that the vast majority of highly moderated posts seem to be discounting the research with pretty superficial arguments, and little authority.
So, one-quarter to one-third of the sales drop is due to internet piracy? I can see why companies might be worried about this.
Of course, but their response has been out of proportion to the true magnitude of the problem. We've seen no end of lawsuits, threats, lobbying, media stories, and advertising about the piracy problem, but what sort of response have we seen to "
shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself"? Not much that's visible. To the public, it looks very much like the recording industry is crying wolf over internet piracy in the same way the did over casettes, and the same way the TV industry did over videos.
A beehive can survive for an extended period of time of bad weather. They survive pretty rough canadian winters, for one. A bee can be frozen solid and thaw out and still be alive.
We're not talking about common North American species. We're talking about tropical species. Do you think a hive of tropical bess would survive a harsh Canadian winter?
A much more interesting question would be, "How did Cretotrigona prisca or their close ancestors survive the mass extinction event about 65 million years ago"?
Did you RTFA? That question is claimed to have the answer "they couldn't". Therefore the conclusion is that the event was not as commonly depicted. The onus is really on the proponents of the "nuclear winter" theory to explain why this data point doesn't invalidate their theory.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an old answer though. POP3 access certainly is available.
AN/"international business machines": 37931 patents.
That situation is called an evolutionary bottleneck. When it occurs it is generally accompanied by considerable genetic change, due to a lack of genetic variation, significant inbredding, and a fairly homologous environment (which encourages specialisation). That has not happened in this case, therefore it is unlikely that they suffered a near-extinction reduction in population.
As an aside, more and more science articles on Slashdot seem to be dominated by posters dismissing research based on perceived problems in reports of the research, rather than the research itself. It's not all that helpful to do that, especially when there are already 50 posts stating the same thing (personally I'll be handing out a few redundant moderations next time I notice this trend and have mod points). It's almost like Slashdot is becoming more cynical and more scientifically conservative.
I'm not saying the research is correct. What I'm saying is that the vast majority of highly moderated posts seem to be discounting the research with pretty superficial arguments, and little authority.
There is one big plus to establishing a colony off-world: if anything happens to Earth, the colony might still survive.