What in Trump's background makes you think that he's honest with his platform?
It's pretty obvious that if he gets elected, he's going to run the country the same way he's run all of his businesses: He makes a bunch of unrealistic promises, siphons money from the investors/customers into his own pockets, and then declares bankruptcy. I mean, seriously, do you think he's telling the truth when he says he's going to build an impenetrable wall along the whole southern US border? His plan is to pocket the estimated cost of the wall, and that'll be the last anybody ever hears of it.
You're right that Hillary Clinton lies about as much as the average politician, so we need to look at her history as well. Based on her past record: If she's elected, she'll probably try to move things a bit towards the left but mostly keep the status quo in place. Of course a lot of this depends on what kind of Congress she winds up with. But if Trump wins, he'll be guaranteed a Republican Congress that won't have the courage to provide any meaningful resistance to his schemes.
There's a lot to unpack here but I think I understand what you're saying.
The toxically rigid gender roles you're describing didn't get invented in the 1950's. They've existed with minor variations for centuries. The reason the 1950's look especially bad is because they were at the end of a long static period, just before the 1960's-70's when things started to get dramatically better. (Which isn't to say that there isn't still room for improvement, even today.)
Now, there were some phony social scientists claiming that these rigid gender roles were the natural order of things, just like there were phony medical researchers claiming that smoking was good for you. And they got a lot of publicity from monied interests who wanted to preserve the status quo. People who were actually doing real social science were able to figure out the problems that rigid gender roles were causing. They didn't get as much publicity as they deserved, but that's not because they were using bad methodology.
Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" is a good book on the subject. He talks more about racism than sexism, but it'll still give you a good picture of the kind of dynamic that was in play.
It's not worthless in the sense that you can't find a sucker to sell it to today. It's worthless in the sense that eventually the supply of suckers will run out, and you're running the risk of getting stuck with bitcoins that have no other value. (Of course the same thing can happen with national currencies...but if it does, it means that the nation that issued the currency has collapsed, and if you're a resident of that country then you've got bigger things to worry about. Even a solid gold-based currency might not be tradeable for food or medicine or weapons.)
It helps if you notice that it's like every other pump-and-dump scheme:
Con Artist 1: I'll buy a bitcoin from you for $1. Con Artist 2: OK, here it is. Actually, I think I'll buy it back from you for $2! Con Artist 1: OK, here it is. Will you sell it back to me for $4? Con Artist 2: Absolutely! Victim: Wow, the value of bitcoins has quadrupled in the past few minutes! They seem like a wise investment! Can I get in on the action? Con Artist 1: Sure! In fact, I'll sell you as many bitcoins as you want for only $3.50 each. That's below the market rate. Victim: What a bargain! I'll take a thousand! Con Artist 1: Done! Victim: So, who wants to buy bitcoins? The bidding starts at $8 each! Con Artists 1 & 2: My, my, look at the time! We must be going!
The press keeps trying to make this a story about the President, and it isn't.
Huh? I haven't seen the press link Bush to the firings directly.
Here's where things stand: At this point, nobody is willing to take credit for deciding who to fire. Gonzalez says that his subordinates made the decision and he just signed off on it, but the subordinates are saying that Gonzalez was more involved than that. It seems like somebody's lying, possibly to cover up an illegal act. That's why we're investigating.
There have been some tantalizing hints that Gonzalez was taking orders from Karl Rove. If that's true, then Rove was probably the prime mover. There's no reason to suspect Bush; this is the sort of boring nuts-and-bolts work that Bush doesn't want to be bothered with.
"Ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers" should be translated as: "Ripping DVDs to files with 'interoperable DRM', which can be played on a single system after connecting to the internet and getting an authorization code. The authorization code will cost $4.95 if you can somehow prove you're the original owner of the DVD. If you can't prove you're the original owner then we'll assume you borrowed it from somebody and the authorization code will cost $29.95." The MPAA is perfectly fine with all of that.
The question that needs to be asked is where will all those people work when Sony, EMI, BMG and others close their doors? We're not talking about "artists" but programmers, accountants and secretaries. The guy packing boxes in the shipping department. All of these people are going to be doing something else soon.
The root of the problem is that those companies have a business model that involves charging $12.99 for a dime's worth of music. That's not sustainable, and sooner or later they're going to have to move to a more realistic pricing structure. When that happens, yes, people will lose their jobs.
But the lost profits don't just flushed down a toilet somewhere. Every time a consumer pays 10 cents to download an album, she has an extra $12.89 to spend on something else...maybe the money gets spent at a restaurant, or saved up for a vacation. So those industries will grow, and they'll have to hire more programmers, accountants, and secretaries to handle the extra business.
Oh, so if I were to own a huge "monopoly" company that makes say motorcycles and I wanted my motorcycles to be easily used as a jet ski and even say some type of saw if you removed the back wheel and put on the "saw" attachment that should be banned for me to do but the little shop down the road should be allowed to market the same thing I am banned from marketing?
Not exactly. Assume for the sake of argument that every jet-ski owner also owns a motorcycle. You could have a monopoly on motorcycles and still sell jet-skis on the side. You could even sell a conversion kit to turn a motorcycle into a jet-ski.
What you can't do is include a "free" conversion kit with each motorcycle. (Actually you'd raise the base price to include the cost of the conversion kit.) Since every jet-ski owner also has a motorcycle, you'd be able to leverage your motorcycle monopoly into an effective monopoly on jet-skis. (Hardly anybody's going to buy a high-quality jet-ski from your competitors when they can get a good-enough jet-ski just by having a motorcycle.)
(The "little shop down the road" can't do that. If they don't have a monopoly on motorcycles, then they'll lose business when they raise prices to cover the cost of the conversion kit.)
Anyway, it's bad for consumers if companies are allowed to take their existing monopolies and leverage them into new monopolies. This is why anti-monopoly laws got passed to begin with..
Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever.
I can't see that working with most ads. If I'm surfing the web and happen to see an ad for something interesting, I don't stop everything I'm doing while I dig up my credit card and place an order. I don't even stop everything I'm doing and fill out a contact form. I bookmark the main page (losing all the redirect info in the process) and come back to it after I've finished whatever I was doing.
The survey thing would make click-fraud easier. Fewer people are going to fill out surveys, so fraudsters could earn more ad money from each one. (Assuming that the advertiser has a fixed budget.) You could get away with having fewer unique IP addresses, which is a big win, and a lot of the random demographic information could be automated across surveys.
Everybody is, because there's a 100% chance that it will become the overwhelming market leader whenever it finally does hit store shelves.
Unless it's a bloated bugfest like Windows ME and people refuse to upgrade.
I don't know what the odds of that are, but personally I'm not in a hurry to migrate. I was excited about XP because it fixed the worst of the Windows 98 stability problems. (By making it harder for a misbehaving process to bring the whole system down.) But I don't have any motivation to go from my fully-patched XP system to a new and relatively-untested Vista. There aren't any new features that would make it worth the risk. Maybe I'll think about it in 3-4 years, assuming that a lot of games start requiring DirectX 10.
If underground Martians intercepted broadcasts of BPI-licensed music, and have a thriving business of large-scale commercial distribution and relicensing of that same music - Purely on Mars, of course - Have they broken the law?
I'm not an interplanetary lawyer, but...
The underground Martians are violating immigration laws, but I think they can get around this by recording from an orbit that's at least 7 miles above the Earth's surface.
That's considered interplanetary space, so the applicable copyright law is the one that applies to the country where the spaceship is registered. If Martian law doesn't recognize US copyrights, then they're in the clear.
However, if the Martians want to enter into trade treaties with the US, then we'd probably try to pressure them into signing the Berne Convention. On the other hand, if they've got superior technology, then we'd really want them as trade partners, and conceivably they'd pressure us into adopting saner copyright laws.
Make the device look like a little anthropomorphic cricket that sits on the user's shoulder. Program it to whisper helpful hints:
"From the way they're starting to nod off, I suspect you may have talked for a little too long about your D&D character. Maybe you should stop."
If we're using that design, I'd like to have *two* anthropomorpic crickets. The cricket on my other shoulder could say things like, "This person looks bored, but that's because they don't understand the subtleties of D&D and they've lost the point of your story. You need to go back to the beginning and explain everything in more detail."
To modify its behavior, the legislature needs a way BEFOREHAND to tell that it's passing a bad law. Where would you draw the line?
The same place we draw it when the government isn't involved. Filing a lawsuit and losing is one thing, but filing a frivolous lawsuit is another. If the court rules that your case had no merit, then you can be required to pay the other side's court costs.
Likewise, there's a difference between a law of questionable constitutionality and a law that's clearly unconstitutional.
It's not like this is anything new. There was a big court case in Dover, PA a few months ago. The school board tried to force Creationism on the students, and some of the parents sued. The board was in obvious violation of well-established constitutional precedent, and they wound up having to pay the parents' legal bills.
I thought this was another story about macroing gold farmers in MMORPGs, but I guess it's about real life...
But the same argument applies. Why would anybody spend good money to own a farm, and then spend even more money buying a robot to run the farm for them? I know it's not forbidden by the Terms-of-Service but it still seems kind of shady to me.
If the Romans named one of their Gods after it (e.g. Pluto), then it's a planet. If it's named after a person (Hale-Bopp) then it's a comet. If the name is just some random string of letters (UB313) then it's an asteroid.
(Note: Under this system, the asteroids Juno, Pallas, Vesta, etc. would be reclassified as planets.)
Please state these ways. Every time I see a discussion on slashdot about evolution being falsifiable, it ends with really no falsification being good enough for the adherents to evolution.
That's because there's so much evidence in favor or evolution that it would take something incredible to cancel all of it out. It's like the "Round Earth Theory". What kind of evidence would convince you that the Earth was flat?
Anyway, here are some things that could falsify evolution: A pair of unicorns materializing inside a closed room. A lion giving birth to a griffin. Somebody finding tech notes that describe how a particular animal was designed and built. (But strictly speaking, even those wouldn't falsify evolution...we've seen evolution happening. It would just show that there's a "Special Creation" or "Intelligent Design" effect that works in parallel with evolution.)
Both of you guys show me an addordable way to store 100gigs of data and I am there.
What do you consider affordable? CompUSA is selling 80GB USB drives for $99 and 160GB drives for $129...or half of that if you're willing to get Brand X hardware and go through mail-in rebate hell.
Or you can get an internal drive for the same amount of money...yank the old drive, do a fresh O/S install on the new one, and then install the old drive as a secondary and access your files from there.
"Well, everyone knows who Linus is, and everyone knows the source of his bias."
WE WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE ON SLASHDOT. We were talking about non-techies, and if you're trying to make the point that non-techies know who Linus is, you're an imbecile.
This is just silly.
If non-techies read an article by Linus and don't know who he is, then they can skip down to the endnotes and find out. Hopefully he'll be described as "the author of the OSS Linux kernel" or something to that effect.
If he's described as a spokesman for an organization with a name like "Finns for Better Software", then shame on him for hiding his agenda and shame on the editors for letting him get away with it.
As far as I know, Linus hasn't done that. But Pendergast and Fox News have, so shame on them for their dishonesty, and shame on you for defending them.
The man is allowed to have bias. You wouldn't squeal about Linus supporting OSS because he's biased, and you SURE AS HELL wouldn't call his opinion "spin". So why do you do it to this guy?
Because everyone knows that Linus is active in the OSS movement, so we know what his biases are and we can take them into account when we read his opinions.
But this Pendergast character isn't honest. He represents himself as a spokesman for "Americans for Technology Leadership". That sounds like a pro-consumer organization with no particular bias towards OSS or closed source, so we might be inclined to take them seriously. But the sad truth is that it's a Microsoft front organization; it was created to be biased in favor of Microsoft, and we need to take that bias into account (if we're lucky enough to find out about it!)
Why can't Pendergast be honest, and call his organization something like "Microsoft Employees for Increased Profits" or simply "Microsoft Corporation Public Relations Department"?
Oh, right you're one of the new breed of individuals who ascribe to the "Do as I say, not as I do" camp. It's ok for your side to be biased, because you can always attack the bias of the other guy, just make sure you're the loudest.
You sound like you're upset. I wonder if you're an unbiased private citizen reacting to a perceived injustice, or if you're a Microsoft employee trying to launch a biased attack on your company's rivals.
I'd like to assume that you're unbiased, but I can't do that, can I? Jerks like Pendergast are ruining things for everyone else.
(Full disclosure: I use a lot of OSS applications and I benefit financially from having alternatives to closed source. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.)
Slashdotters like to complain when markets aren't competitive because firms are too cooperative like the music industry, and slashdotters like to complain when the competition isn't friendly enough for you.
There are some exceptions, but I think most Slashdotters like free markets, so they complain about things that destroy the free market by creating monopoly effects.
The music industry is a special kind of monopoly called a "cartel", where all the major players in a market work together at the expense of their suppliers and customers.
Meanwhile, like the article says, Microsoft is trying to leverage their operating system monopoly in order to destroy Google and obtain a monopoly on internet searching.
I think that's everything...oh, and remember that a monopoly doesn't necessarily control 100% of the market. They need to control the "mass market", but not the related "niche markets". (In the examples above, the independent record labels and Linux would be considered niche markets.)
This reminds me of another fan project, Heatherly and Julie's Fantasy Bedtime Hour. It's the film version of Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever", but it's a spoof rather than a straight remake.
It's been running for the past two years on public access cable in San Francisco, or you can download the episodes from their website.
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
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That said, our primaries this term have coughed up the two worst candidates I have ever had the displeasure of voting for. I'd gladly vote David Duke in over either of them, because even if I don't like it, at least I know what he's going to do.
It's not really that they're bad candidates. (Although obviously one is a lot worse than the other.) It's more that modern political campaigns are so overwhelmingly negative. Any candidate would look awful once the opposition spin machine had gotten through with him.
Don't think that David Duke would come out any better if he were subjected to the same treatment. The very first thing that would come out is that you don't know what he's going to do. His supporters sent him a lot of money in the expectation that he'd use it to promote hatred, but instead he gambled it away at the casinos. (He's in jail for fraud now. It hasn't gotten a lot of press coverage because he's not running for office and so nobody cares about him any more.)
That's not the Alexa toolbar; it's a Microsoft "feature". If you click on "Tools/Find Related Links" in Internet Explorer, it does a search via the Alexa website. (And brings up a sidebar which gives you the option of downloading the Alexa spyware.)
So in a sense it's harmless; it's just a built-in web search. But it's generally considered to be spyware because of Alexa's reputation.
It probably got installed when you did the Internet Explorer update. I think you get it out-of-the-box when you install XP.
Imagine you add a saturday night special to the helicopter and you send a million of these things sweeping into Iraq. Now the only problem is finding enough trained pilots.
Wait. Scratch that thought. I just had a vision of a million, unsupervised 14 year old boys in control of armed, remote control helicopters.
You could give the 14-year-olds unarmed reconnaisance helicopters and have them check out buildings and caves. If they find any potential targets, then we could give them a coupon for a free small soda.
If you happen to be talking with someone via radio who has never seen a clock, try to explain to him what "clockwise" works. Maybe you would turn to the rising and falling of the sun and moon as a reference point, but if this person has never been outside or lives in a different solar system? Where is the common reference point?
There's a way of communicating "clockwise", but it's pretty hard. It relies on the fact that "weak interactions" aren't left-right symmetrical. Some details are here
This is an important thing to communicate to aliens before we meet them in person. If they hold out their left appendages when we go to shake hands, then we'll know that they're made of anti-matter and that we shouldn't touch them.
Slashdot Mirror
What in Trump's background makes you think that he's honest with his platform?
It's pretty obvious that if he gets elected, he's going to run the country the same way he's run all of his businesses: He makes a bunch of unrealistic promises, siphons money from the investors/customers into his own pockets, and then declares bankruptcy. I mean, seriously, do you think he's telling the truth when he says he's going to build an impenetrable wall along the whole southern US border? His plan is to pocket the estimated cost of the wall, and that'll be the last anybody ever hears of it.
You're right that Hillary Clinton lies about as much as the average politician, so we need to look at her history as well. Based on her past record: If she's elected, she'll probably try to move things a bit towards the left but mostly keep the status quo in place. Of course a lot of this depends on what kind of Congress she winds up with. But if Trump wins, he'll be guaranteed a Republican Congress that won't have the courage to provide any meaningful resistance to his schemes.
There's a lot to unpack here but I think I understand what you're saying.
The toxically rigid gender roles you're describing didn't get invented in the 1950's. They've existed with minor variations for centuries. The reason the 1950's look especially bad is because they were at the end of a long static period, just before the 1960's-70's when things started to get dramatically better. (Which isn't to say that there isn't still room for improvement, even today.)
Now, there were some phony social scientists claiming that these rigid gender roles were the natural order of things, just like there were phony medical researchers claiming that smoking was good for you. And they got a lot of publicity from monied interests who wanted to preserve the status quo. People who were actually doing real social science were able to figure out the problems that rigid gender roles were causing. They didn't get as much publicity as they deserved, but that's not because they were using bad methodology.
Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" is a good book on the subject. He talks more about racism than sexism, but it'll still give you a good picture of the kind of dynamic that was in play.
It's not worthless in the sense that you can't find a sucker to sell it to today. It's worthless in the sense that eventually the supply of suckers will run out, and you're running the risk of getting stuck with bitcoins that have no other value. (Of course the same thing can happen with national currencies...but if it does, it means that the nation that issued the currency has collapsed, and if you're a resident of that country then you've got bigger things to worry about. Even a solid gold-based currency might not be tradeable for food or medicine or weapons.)
It helps if you notice that it's like every other pump-and-dump scheme:
Con Artist 1: I'll buy a bitcoin from you for $1.
Con Artist 2: OK, here it is. Actually, I think I'll buy it back from you for $2!
Con Artist 1: OK, here it is. Will you sell it back to me for $4?
Con Artist 2: Absolutely!
Victim: Wow, the value of bitcoins has quadrupled in the past few minutes! They seem like a wise investment! Can I get in on the action?
Con Artist 1: Sure! In fact, I'll sell you as many bitcoins as you want for only $3.50 each. That's below the market rate.
Victim: What a bargain! I'll take a thousand!
Con Artist 1: Done!
Victim: So, who wants to buy bitcoins? The bidding starts at $8 each!
Con Artists 1 & 2: My, my, look at the time! We must be going!
The press keeps trying to make this a story about the President, and it isn't.
Huh? I haven't seen the press link Bush to the firings directly.
Here's where things stand: At this point, nobody is willing to take credit for deciding who to fire. Gonzalez says that his subordinates made the decision and he just signed off on it, but the subordinates are saying that Gonzalez was more involved than that. It seems like somebody's lying, possibly to cover up an illegal act. That's why we're investigating.
There have been some tantalizing hints that Gonzalez was taking orders from Karl Rove. If that's true, then Rove was probably the prime mover. There's no reason to suspect Bush; this is the sort of boring nuts-and-bolts work that Bush doesn't want to be bothered with.
No, you're not thinking like an MPAA executive.
"Ripping DVDs for portable video players and home media servers" should be translated as: "Ripping DVDs to files with 'interoperable DRM', which can be played on a single system after connecting to the internet and getting an authorization code. The authorization code will cost $4.95 if you can somehow prove you're the original owner of the DVD. If you can't prove you're the original owner then we'll assume you borrowed it from somebody and the authorization code will cost $29.95." The MPAA is perfectly fine with all of that.
The question that needs to be asked is where will all those people work when Sony, EMI, BMG and others close their doors? We're not talking about "artists" but programmers, accountants and secretaries. The guy packing boxes in the shipping department. All of these people are going to be doing something else soon.
The root of the problem is that those companies have a business model that involves charging $12.99 for a dime's worth of music. That's not sustainable, and sooner or later they're going to have to move to a more realistic pricing structure. When that happens, yes, people will lose their jobs.
But the lost profits don't just flushed down a toilet somewhere. Every time a consumer pays 10 cents to download an album, she has an extra $12.89 to spend on something else...maybe the money gets spent at a restaurant, or saved up for a vacation. So those industries will grow, and they'll have to hire more programmers, accountants, and secretaries to handle the extra business.
Oh, so if I were to own a huge "monopoly" company that makes say motorcycles and I wanted my motorcycles to be easily used as a jet ski and even say some type of saw if you removed the back wheel and put on the "saw" attachment that should be banned for me to do but the little shop down the road should be allowed to market the same thing I am banned from marketing?
Not exactly. Assume for the sake of argument that every jet-ski owner also owns a motorcycle. You could have a monopoly on motorcycles and still sell jet-skis on the side. You could even sell a conversion kit to turn a motorcycle into a jet-ski.
What you can't do is include a "free" conversion kit with each motorcycle. (Actually you'd raise the base price to include the cost of the conversion kit.) Since every jet-ski owner also has a motorcycle, you'd be able to leverage your motorcycle monopoly into an effective monopoly on jet-skis. (Hardly anybody's going to buy a high-quality jet-ski from your competitors when they can get a good-enough jet-ski just by having a motorcycle.)
(The "little shop down the road" can't do that. If they don't have a monopoly on motorcycles, then they'll lose business when they raise prices to cover the cost of the conversion kit.)
Anyway, it's bad for consumers if companies are allowed to take their existing monopolies and leverage them into new monopolies. This is why anti-monopoly laws got passed to begin with..
Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever.
I can't see that working with most ads. If I'm surfing the web and happen to see an ad for something interesting, I don't stop everything I'm doing while I dig up my credit card and place an order. I don't even stop everything I'm doing and fill out a contact form. I bookmark the main page (losing all the redirect info in the process) and come back to it after I've finished whatever I was doing.
The survey thing would make click-fraud easier. Fewer people are going to fill out surveys, so fraudsters could earn more ad money from each one. (Assuming that the advertiser has a fixed budget.) You could get away with having fewer unique IP addresses, which is a big win, and a lot of the random demographic information could be automated across surveys.
Everybody is, because there's a 100% chance that it will become the overwhelming market leader whenever it finally does hit store shelves.
Unless it's a bloated bugfest like Windows ME and people refuse to upgrade.
I don't know what the odds of that are, but personally I'm not in a hurry to migrate. I was excited about XP because it fixed the worst of the Windows 98 stability problems. (By making it harder for a misbehaving process to bring the whole system down.) But I don't have any motivation to go from my fully-patched XP system to a new and relatively-untested Vista. There aren't any new features that would make it worth the risk. Maybe I'll think about it in 3-4 years, assuming that a lot of games start requiring DirectX 10.
If underground Martians intercepted broadcasts of BPI-licensed music, and have a thriving business of large-scale commercial distribution and relicensing of that same music - Purely on Mars, of course - Have they broken the law?
I'm not an interplanetary lawyer, but...
The underground Martians are violating immigration laws, but I think they can get around this by recording from an orbit that's at least 7 miles above the Earth's surface.
That's considered interplanetary space, so the applicable copyright law is the one that applies to the country where the spaceship is registered. If Martian law doesn't recognize US copyrights, then they're in the clear.
However, if the Martians want to enter into trade treaties with the US, then we'd probably try to pressure them into signing the Berne Convention. On the other hand, if they've got superior technology, then we'd really want them as trade partners, and conceivably they'd pressure us into adopting saner copyright laws.
Make the device look like a little anthropomorphic cricket that sits on the user's shoulder. Program it to whisper helpful hints:
"From the way they're starting to nod off, I suspect you may have talked for a little too long about your D&D character. Maybe you should stop."
If we're using that design, I'd like to have *two* anthropomorpic crickets. The cricket on my other shoulder could say things like, "This person looks bored, but that's because they don't understand the subtleties of D&D and they've lost the point of your story. You need to go back to the beginning and explain everything in more detail."
To modify its behavior, the legislature needs a way BEFOREHAND to tell that it's passing a bad law. Where would you draw the line?
The same place we draw it when the government isn't involved. Filing a lawsuit and losing is one thing, but filing a frivolous lawsuit is another. If the court rules that your case had no merit, then you can be required to pay the other side's court costs.
Likewise, there's a difference between a law of questionable constitutionality and a law that's clearly unconstitutional.
It's not like this is anything new. There was a big court case in Dover, PA a few months ago. The school board tried to force Creationism on the students, and some of the parents sued. The board was in obvious violation of well-established constitutional precedent, and they wound up having to pay the parents' legal bills.
(Source: http://www.yorkdispatch.com/local/ci_3535139)
I thought this was another story about macroing gold farmers in MMORPGs, but I guess it's about real life...
But the same argument applies. Why would anybody spend good money to own a farm, and then spend even more money buying a robot to run the farm for them? I know it's not forbidden by the Terms-of-Service but it still seems kind of shady to me.
I think we should just decide based on the name.
If the Romans named one of their Gods after it (e.g. Pluto), then it's a planet. If it's named after a person (Hale-Bopp) then it's a comet. If the name is just some random string of letters (UB313) then it's an asteroid.
(Note: Under this system, the asteroids Juno, Pallas, Vesta, etc. would be reclassified as planets.)
That's because there's so much evidence in favor or evolution that it would take something incredible to cancel all of it out. It's like the "Round Earth Theory". What kind of evidence would convince you that the Earth was flat?
Anyway, here are some things that could falsify evolution: A pair of unicorns materializing inside a closed room. A lion giving birth to a griffin. Somebody finding tech notes that describe how a particular animal was designed and built. (But strictly speaking, even those wouldn't falsify evolution...we've seen evolution happening. It would just show that there's a "Special Creation" or "Intelligent Design" effect that works in parallel with evolution.)
What do you consider affordable? CompUSA is selling 80GB USB drives for $99 and 160GB drives for $129...or half of that if you're willing to get Brand X hardware and go through mail-in rebate hell.
Or you can get an internal drive for the same amount of money...yank the old drive, do a fresh O/S install on the new one, and then install the old drive as a secondary and access your files from there.
WE WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE ON SLASHDOT. We were talking about non-techies, and if you're trying to make the point that non-techies know who Linus is, you're an imbecile.
This is just silly.
If non-techies read an article by Linus and don't know who he is, then they can skip down to the endnotes and find out. Hopefully he'll be described as "the author of the OSS Linux kernel" or something to that effect.
If he's described as a spokesman for an organization with a name like "Finns for Better Software", then shame on him for hiding his agenda and shame on the editors for letting him get away with it.
As far as I know, Linus hasn't done that. But Pendergast and Fox News have, so shame on them for their dishonesty, and shame on you for defending them.
Because everyone knows that Linus is active in the OSS movement, so we know what his biases are and we can take them into account when we read his opinions.
But this Pendergast character isn't honest. He represents himself as a spokesman for "Americans for Technology Leadership". That sounds like a pro-consumer organization with no particular bias towards OSS or closed source, so we might be inclined to take them seriously. But the sad truth is that it's a Microsoft front organization; it was created to be biased in favor of Microsoft, and we need to take that bias into account (if we're lucky enough to find out about it!)
Why can't Pendergast be honest, and call his organization something like "Microsoft Employees for Increased Profits" or simply "Microsoft Corporation Public Relations Department"?
Oh, right you're one of the new breed of individuals who ascribe to the "Do as I say, not as I do" camp. It's ok for your side to be biased, because you can always attack the bias of the other guy, just make sure you're the loudest.
You sound like you're upset. I wonder if you're an unbiased private citizen reacting to a perceived injustice, or if you're a Microsoft employee trying to launch a biased attack on your company's rivals.
I'd like to assume that you're unbiased, but I can't do that, can I? Jerks like Pendergast are ruining things for everyone else.
(Full disclosure: I use a lot of OSS applications and I benefit financially from having alternatives to closed source. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.)
There are some exceptions, but I think most Slashdotters like free markets, so they complain about things that destroy the free market by creating monopoly effects.
The music industry is a special kind of monopoly called a "cartel", where all the major players in a market work together at the expense of their suppliers and customers.
Meanwhile, like the article says, Microsoft is trying to leverage their operating system monopoly in order to destroy Google and obtain a monopoly on internet searching.
I think that's everything...oh, and remember that a monopoly doesn't necessarily control 100% of the market. They need to control the "mass market", but not the related "niche markets". (In the examples above, the independent record labels and Linux would be considered niche markets.)
This reminds me of another fan project, Heatherly and Julie's Fantasy Bedtime Hour. It's the film version of Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever", but it's a spoof rather than a straight remake.
It's been running for the past two years on public access cable in San Francisco, or you can download the episodes from their website.
It's not really that they're bad candidates. (Although obviously one is a lot worse than the other.) It's more that modern political campaigns are so overwhelmingly negative. Any candidate would look awful once the opposition spin machine had gotten through with him.
Don't think that David Duke would come out any better if he were subjected to the same treatment. The very first thing that would come out is that you don't know what he's going to do. His supporters sent him a lot of money in the expectation that he'd use it to promote hatred, but instead he gambled it away at the casinos. (He's in jail for fraud now. It hasn't gotten a lot of press coverage because he's not running for office and so nobody cares about him any more.)
So in a sense it's harmless; it's just a built-in web search. But it's generally considered to be spyware because of Alexa's reputation.
It probably got installed when you did the Internet Explorer update. I think you get it out-of-the-box when you install XP.
More information here: http://www.imilly.com/alexa.htm
I just did a quick web search and found a page about it here. The publisher claims that it was the first computer game novelization ever.
Imagine you add a saturday night special to the helicopter and you send a million of these things sweeping into Iraq. Now the only problem is finding enough trained pilots.
Wait. Scratch that thought. I just had a vision of a million, unsupervised 14 year old boys in control of armed, remote control helicopters.
You could give the 14-year-olds unarmed reconnaisance helicopters and have them check out buildings and caves. If they find any potential targets, then we could give them a coupon for a free small soda.
Click here for more information.
There's a way of communicating "clockwise", but it's pretty hard. It relies on the fact that "weak interactions" aren't left-right symmetrical. Some details are here
This is an important thing to communicate to aliens before we meet them in person. If they hold out their left appendages when we go to shake hands, then we'll know that they're made of anti-matter and that we shouldn't touch them.