When you ask Microsoft why they are so riddled with exploits the answer is often because they are so popular that hackers everywhere are trying to take a crack at them. It's a pretty decent defense.
Does the same logic hold true for all their lawsuits? Are they so popular that they are natural targets for lawsuits? Either yes, they are, and all the companies that sue them are on the same ethical level as virus writers, or no, and they really are a company that deserves to be sued over and over again.
Funny thing though: they keep getting sued and losing. That puts all the companies that sue them on the moral high ground. Why aren't they getting all the business instead of the shaft? Here we have Microsoft with a nice long queue of lawsuits always waiting for trial and they will lose many if not most of them. So why do people keep doing business with them? Why are they allowed to do business? I thought governments were supposed to protect people from this sort of thing.
This is why I like Open Source. It's a fully functional socialist movement (because it's opt-in) and it actually has the power to stop such bad behavior. Microsoft as a company has such incredible profit margins I can only compare them to Middle-Eastern oil interests and diamond cartels. Bully for them that they're the only public company in the lot, but the rate at which they get sued casts a pretty dark shadow on that. You can't very well produce hydrocarbon and carbon out of thin air, but you certainly can with software and that's just what F/OSS is doing.
Incidentally, if Kyoto didn't even exist, then wouldn't CO2 emissions will be up even more by 2050? Like - almost 100%?
I've seen talk about what Kyoto is capable of doing in lots of different places and they all say nearly the same thing. CO2 emissions with the treaty vs without the treaty by the year 2050 differ by 3%. The Protocol for the most part just displaces the problem to a developing country. It's supposed to help allieviate CO2 concentration problems, but does this by concentrating CO2 outside of the first world countries.
They're not walking out on the entire process. They're walking out on the Kyoto Protocol.
The Protocol restricts pollution to pre-1990 levels. 1990 is when Europe was still dealing with extremely dirty East German factories and England relied heavily on coal. Since then East Germany has gone out of business and England found a natural gas source. Pre-1990 levels gives Europe plenty of room for expansion.
China will be putting out just as much CO2 as the U.S. by 2013 and then by 2050 will have put out a greater cumulative total.
The Protocol aims for a 5% decrease in CO2 emissions by 2012. If everyone agrees to the Protocol, and we meet the 5% mark, CO2 emissions will be up 70% by 2050.
To stop climate change CO2 reductions need to be *down* 60% by 2050. First world countries would have to decrease output by 90% in that time given what China, India, Brazil, and etc. are allowed. Can we do it? Maybe. But the solution isn't going to coalesce out of thin air and an economy in decline for the 2012 deadline won't be meeting the 2050 one.
Of course India and China ratified it. It doesn't put any restrictions on them. The Kyoto accord only applies to developed countries, so enforcing it around the world drives industry into developing countries, such as China and India.
The Kyoto protocol is just bad. The U.S. ambassador who helped write the thing was Al Gore.
Of course affordable healthcare so people don't die in the street is also a value.
Good Christians have a family, church, and community to take care of each other.
But I agree, I'd rather not have to personally help with the infirm. Better to let the government handle it.
I'm not Christian, but every time I heard people talk about socialism by government rather than religion I feel like it's Brave New World and I'm Bernard Marx.
We don't know what that means. Maybe the north pole has more ice than it should. Maybe the eleven year sun cycle has heated up large enough sections of equatorial waters that warmer waters are flowing to the poles in greater volumes than ten years ago.
Maybe it *is* but it's not the CO2. Rather, it the increased wash of pollutants into the ocean raising the melting point. If you believe we can produce enough CO2 that plants wouldn't be able to multiply fast enough to consume then I'm sure you can believe we have dumped enough into the ocean to affect its melting point.
Maybe the poles are getting ready to switch again. You remember what happens when poles switch, right? The earth is always doing stuff we know everything about.
Price war: when out of 12 gas stations in Hartsville the two of them located on the corners of 6th St. and Carolina Ave. are 10 cents cheaper than anyone else in town, even Wal-Mart.
As long as the BP and the Texaco in my town are having price wars I won't be believing in this monopoly you speak of. Standard Oil was broken up a looong time ago.
Kudos for mentioning something so useful without starting a political war.
South Carolina has at least one biodiesel station already installed in Columbia, that I know of. There's also a lot of speculation about getting restaraunts together to provide waste greases for biodiesel production rather than just dumping the grease.
OK, I'll bite. There are three reasons the prices are so high even though the war was about oil:
As if. Everyone forgets that the two most populous countries in the world are buying into the air conditioning craze. India and China, who are unrestricted by the Kyoto Protocol, are starting into the market and they're expected to more double their demand for oil every year for the next ten.
And your point 2 doesn't check. How much oil was Iraq actually producing before the war? Remember, the U.N. wouldn't allow it to sell its oil, it could only trade it for food. Unfortunately, France had been siphoning off most of the lunch money, so why do you think the Iraqis were much included on the market? If the war results in a country that can be paid without the U.N. and its children siphoning off money then prices should go down.
3. Europe doesn't have oil reserves. They can't compete for prices. Their oil company is parked in Vienna making it's load of cash for Austrians and Saudis.
Add in the democratic slant to the environment and the difference between them is even greater and more significant.
The association between environmentalism and Democrats is more logical than anything else. Environmentalism was first fielded as an important topic by conservatives and since then they've been associated with everything that happens to it. Don't believe me? Look at who gets blamed for pollution. Look at who gets blamed for the massive lumberjacking subsidies. (Hint: It's not the party that introduced them.) The Republicans are seen to be ultimately in control of the environment. Sad fact though, environmentalism costs jobs. The United States nets more loss in one percentage point of environmental control than in a percentage increase of all the social welfare systems we have in place. It's a two edged sword then, how to become more environmentally *responsible* while at the same time being more socially responsible? The numbers don't add up.
Oil produces jobs on this side of the world. Oil fuels the businesses we require to stay at the top of the game. If we can get to a replacement for oil, it will be funded by oil. What are the chances that BP, Texaco, Chevron, or Shell are just going to cut and run when oil supplies run out? The middle east expects the apocalypse before its oil runs out. We expect that oil will run out first. *No one* is trying harder to find a replacement for our staple energy source than our energy providers. This is a capitalistic nation, we don't rest on our laurels, we constantly expand and innovate.
Yes there is plenty of money to be made from oil, but only a tiny fraction of that money is made by the oil handlers. You want oil profit margins to be lower? Head over to Austria and break up OPEC. Then invade Saudi Arabia, because face it, the Saudis have it and we don't and they're going to make a killing until we can replace it.
Also, China and India have discovered air conditioning *big time* and they're going to be competing with the U.S. for that same middle eastern oil. They get added bonuses though, Kyoto doesn't apply to them. They're also investing big in nuclear power while we're still trying to get over the fears we had because of it.
Fears, I might add, provided by your neighborhood friendly environmentalist.
Well... you are forgetting geosequestration for coal power plants... but I would call you naive to say that burying nuclear waste is safe.
As if storing CO2 is sooo much better than storing nuclear waste. Perhaps we could put it in balloons. The complaint isn't CO2 anyway, it's the pollutants. Prove global warming before you attack CO2 emissions.
do you *really* trust government or corporations to do it properly and not cut corners?
Yes. Yes I do. Or perhaps we should put you or another individual in charge? Maybe some nonprofit organization? Laughable.
Planes of a certain size aren't allowed to fly within a certain radius of nuclear power plants. That radius is determined by how long it would take to scramble an Air Force jet to shoot the offender down.
Only a very large jet could cause any damage to a site that would result in radiation leakage; the sites are already built to withstand everything the size of a 737 or smaller.
From TFA, emphasis added: Members of each political party and the canvassing board must witness the recount process Tuesday.
How is this fair? When I voted this morning some positions were competitions between a Republican or Democrat and a third party, so you'd think several different parties would get called for the recount.
Does Florida not allow more than two parties to watch recounts?
That Roland guy seems to have a pretty well put together site/blog for new technology. Is it so wrong to use the information from someone who has obviously spent a lot more time and effort bringing it into presentable form?
This is the follow-up report explaining how it was real-time poll monitoring that was completely responsible for the confusion after the last election. They (CNN and maybe the others) seem to have decided to be responsible (in the Jon Stewart sense) and won't be fighting so haphazardly for meaningless tidbits of data which will, on the whole, only confuse matters while at the same time disgusting viewers.
Besides, realtime monitoring will only skew the results of the election more towards an ugly tie. Once one side sees the other side winning all sorts of people who didn't care to vote originally will suddenly pop out of the woodwork. If the people didn't want to vote without having to be prodded they really shouldn't be voting. This is a representative democracy and I'd like to think that our government represents only the people who *really* care.
Also, those of you not in swing states and who are rooting for the losing side in your state should *really* consider your third parties. Otherwise, you're throwing your vote away. Make it count.
If I were an antivirus company writing viruses and someone came up to me asking to use a "test" virus I'd be very public about not approving of that sort of behaviour.
There shouldn't be a debate in the first place. What the Intelligent Design people do is start a debate in a school district over whether evolution or ID should be taught. This brings a large group of people out of the woodwork to watch the debate. Then throughout the debate the ID people argue, since arguing the science is useless to them and always goes back to "some supreme being", that since these two topics were both important enough to be debated then they should both be put in school textbooks.
The Popular Science had this in their last issue and Penn & Teller lambasted Cobb county Georgia for including ID. It's like putting up the six Commandments which don't mention God and claiming they were independantly derived from morals and ethics experts around the country.
We wrote a program that "predicted" the outcomes of every South Carolina state representative elections since 1906 by running through the district numbers in order, and then assigning the candidate (in alphabetical order based on their surname) a base 16 number. We only went back to 1906 because that was the largest string of binary data we could find that actually correlated to anything we had lying around. In the end we wrote the source so it calculated pi (tinypi) and shifted through it several thousand times till it got to the right stuff and start spitting it out. A friend presented it to his lab for extra credit to anyone who figured out how it guessed correctly.
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When you ask Microsoft why they are so riddled with exploits the answer is often because they are so popular that hackers everywhere are trying to take a crack at them. It's a pretty decent defense.
Does the same logic hold true for all their lawsuits? Are they so popular that they are natural targets for lawsuits? Either yes, they are, and all the companies that sue them are on the same ethical level as virus writers, or no, and they really are a company that deserves to be sued over and over again.
Funny thing though: they keep getting sued and losing. That puts all the companies that sue them on the moral high ground. Why aren't they getting all the business instead of the shaft? Here we have Microsoft with a nice long queue of lawsuits always waiting for trial and they will lose many if not most of them. So why do people keep doing business with them? Why are they allowed to do business? I thought governments were supposed to protect people from this sort of thing.
This is why I like Open Source. It's a fully functional socialist movement (because it's opt-in) and it actually has the power to stop such bad behavior. Microsoft as a company has such incredible profit margins I can only compare them to Middle-Eastern oil interests and diamond cartels. Bully for them that they're the only public company in the lot, but the rate at which they get sued casts a pretty dark shadow on that. You can't very well produce hydrocarbon and carbon out of thin air, but you certainly can with software and that's just what F/OSS is doing.
Incidentally, if Kyoto didn't even exist, then wouldn't CO2 emissions will be up even more by 2050? Like - almost 100%?
I've seen talk about what Kyoto is capable of doing in lots of different places and they all say nearly the same thing. CO2 emissions with the treaty vs without the treaty by the year 2050 differ by 3%. The Protocol for the most part just displaces the problem to a developing country. It's supposed to help allieviate CO2 concentration problems, but does this by concentrating CO2 outside of the first world countries.
They're not walking out on the entire process. They're walking out on the Kyoto Protocol.
The Protocol restricts pollution to pre-1990 levels. 1990 is when Europe was still dealing with extremely dirty East German factories and England relied heavily on coal. Since then East Germany has gone out of business and England found a natural gas source. Pre-1990 levels gives Europe plenty of room for expansion.
China will be putting out just as much CO2 as the U.S. by 2013 and then by 2050 will have put out a greater cumulative total.
The Protocol aims for a 5% decrease in CO2 emissions by 2012. If everyone agrees to the Protocol, and we meet the 5% mark, CO2 emissions will be up 70% by 2050.
To stop climate change CO2 reductions need to be *down* 60% by 2050. First world countries would have to decrease output by 90% in that time given what China, India, Brazil, and etc. are allowed. Can we do it? Maybe. But the solution isn't going to coalesce out of thin air and an economy in decline for the 2012 deadline won't be meeting the 2050 one.
Of course India and China ratified it. It doesn't put any restrictions on them. The Kyoto accord only applies to developed countries, so enforcing it around the world drives industry into developing countries, such as China and India.
The Kyoto protocol is just bad. The U.S. ambassador who helped write the thing was Al Gore.
Of course affordable healthcare so people don't die in the street is also a value.
Good Christians have a family, church, and community to take care of each other.
But I agree, I'd rather not have to personally help with the infirm. Better to let the government handle it.
I'm not Christian, but every time I heard people talk about socialism by government rather than religion I feel like it's Brave New World and I'm Bernard Marx.
We don't know what that means. Maybe the north pole has more ice than it should. Maybe the eleven year sun cycle has heated up large enough sections of equatorial waters that warmer waters are flowing to the poles in greater volumes than ten years ago.
Maybe it *is* but it's not the CO2. Rather, it the increased wash of pollutants into the ocean raising the melting point. If you believe we can produce enough CO2 that plants wouldn't be able to multiply fast enough to consume then I'm sure you can believe we have dumped enough into the ocean to affect its melting point.
Maybe the poles are getting ready to switch again. You remember what happens when poles switch, right? The earth is always doing stuff we know everything about.
At those prices it'd be about a dollar difference, but yes.
Look, Amaco/BP, Texaco, Chevron, Shell, etc. are all public companies. Buy stock if you think they're making such great gains.
Anime.
Anime.
Anime.
google: "torrent" 2,370,000
google: "torrent anime" 239,000
That's a healthy 10%.
Price war:
when out of 12 gas stations in Hartsville the two of them located on the corners of 6th St. and Carolina Ave. are 10 cents cheaper than anyone else in town, even Wal-Mart.
As long as the BP and the Texaco in my town are having price wars I won't be believing in this monopoly you speak of. Standard Oil was broken up a looong time ago.
When so many Americans drive commercial vehicles, it's no wonder.
Kudos for mentioning something so useful without starting a political war.
South Carolina has at least one biodiesel station already installed in Columbia, that I know of. There's also a lot of speculation about getting restaraunts together to provide waste greases for biodiesel production rather than just dumping the grease.
OK, I'll bite. There are three reasons the prices are so high even though the war was about oil:
As if. Everyone forgets that the two most populous countries in the world are buying into the air conditioning craze. India and China, who are unrestricted by the Kyoto Protocol, are starting into the market and they're expected to more double their demand for oil every year for the next ten.
And your point 2 doesn't check. How much oil was Iraq actually producing before the war? Remember, the U.N. wouldn't allow it to sell its oil, it could only trade it for food. Unfortunately, France had been siphoning off most of the lunch money, so why do you think the Iraqis were much included on the market? If the war results in a country that can be paid without the U.N. and its children siphoning off money then prices should go down.
3. Europe doesn't have oil reserves. They can't compete for prices. Their oil company is parked in Vienna making it's load of cash for Austrians and Saudis.
Add in the democratic slant to the environment and the difference between them is even greater and more significant.
The association between environmentalism and Democrats is more logical than anything else. Environmentalism was first fielded as an important topic by conservatives and since then they've been associated with everything that happens to it. Don't believe me? Look at who gets blamed for pollution. Look at who gets blamed for the massive lumberjacking subsidies. (Hint: It's not the party that introduced them.) The Republicans are seen to be ultimately in control of the environment. Sad fact though, environmentalism costs jobs. The United States nets more loss in one percentage point of environmental control than in a percentage increase of all the social welfare systems we have in place. It's a two edged sword then, how to become more environmentally *responsible* while at the same time being more socially responsible? The numbers don't add up.
Oil produces jobs on this side of the world. Oil fuels the businesses we require to stay at the top of the game. If we can get to a replacement for oil, it will be funded by oil. What are the chances that BP, Texaco, Chevron, or Shell are just going to cut and run when oil supplies run out? The middle east expects the apocalypse before its oil runs out. We expect that oil will run out first. *No one* is trying harder to find a replacement for our staple energy source than our energy providers. This is a capitalistic nation, we don't rest on our laurels, we constantly expand and innovate.
Yes there is plenty of money to be made from oil, but only a tiny fraction of that money is made by the oil handlers. You want oil profit margins to be lower? Head over to Austria and break up OPEC. Then invade Saudi Arabia, because face it, the Saudis have it and we don't and they're going to make a killing until we can replace it.
Also, China and India have discovered air conditioning *big time* and they're going to be competing with the U.S. for that same middle eastern oil. They get added bonuses though, Kyoto doesn't apply to them. They're also investing big in nuclear power while we're still trying to get over the fears we had because of it.
Fears, I might add, provided by your neighborhood friendly environmentalist.
Kerry *did* sell one of his homes to help finance his campaign. Something like that?
Well... you are forgetting geosequestration for coal power plants... but I would call you naive to say that burying nuclear waste is safe.
As if storing CO2 is sooo much better than storing nuclear waste. Perhaps we could put it in balloons. The complaint isn't CO2 anyway, it's the pollutants. Prove global warming before you attack CO2 emissions.
do you *really* trust government or corporations to do it properly and not cut corners?
Yes. Yes I do. Or perhaps we should put you or another individual in charge? Maybe some nonprofit organization? Laughable.
Post 9-11? I don't think so.
Planes of a certain size aren't allowed to fly within a certain radius of nuclear power plants. That radius is determined by how long it would take to scramble an Air Force jet to shoot the offender down.
Only a very large jet could cause any damage to a site that would result in radiation leakage; the sites are already built to withstand everything the size of a 737 or smaller.
From TFA, emphasis added:
Members of each political party and the canvassing board must witness the recount process Tuesday.
How is this fair? When I voted this morning some positions were competitions between a Republican or Democrat and a third party, so you'd think several different parties would get called for the recount.
Does Florida not allow more than two parties to watch recounts?
That Roland guy seems to have a pretty well put together site/blog for new technology. Is it so wrong to use the information from someone who has obviously spent a lot more time and effort bringing it into presentable form?
This is the follow-up report explaining how it was real-time poll monitoring that was completely responsible for the confusion after the last election. They (CNN and maybe the others) seem to have decided to be responsible (in the Jon Stewart sense) and won't be fighting so haphazardly for meaningless tidbits of data which will, on the whole, only confuse matters while at the same time disgusting viewers.
Besides, realtime monitoring will only skew the results of the election more towards an ugly tie. Once one side sees the other side winning all sorts of people who didn't care to vote originally will suddenly pop out of the woodwork. If the people didn't want to vote without having to be prodded they really shouldn't be voting. This is a representative democracy and I'd like to think that our government represents only the people who *really* care.
Also, those of you not in swing states and who are rooting for the losing side in your state should *really* consider your third parties. Otherwise, you're throwing your vote away. Make it count.
I've never missed a cover sheet on my TPS reports!
The site.
The backup site.
The backup backup site.
The backup*3 site.
The backup*4 site.
The backup*5site.
The backup*6 site.
The backup*7 site.
I wonder if Tanenbaum's curriculum covers much data recovery?
If I were an antivirus company writing viruses and someone came up to me asking to use a "test" virus I'd be very public about not approving of that sort of behaviour.
There shouldn't be a debate in the first place. What the Intelligent Design people do is start a debate in a school district over whether evolution or ID should be taught. This brings a large group of people out of the woodwork to watch the debate. Then throughout the debate the ID people argue, since arguing the science is useless to them and always goes back to "some supreme being", that since these two topics were both important enough to be debated then they should both be put in school textbooks.
The Popular Science had this in their last issue and Penn & Teller lambasted Cobb county Georgia for including ID. It's like putting up the six Commandments which don't mention God and claiming they were independantly derived from morals and ethics experts around the country.
We wrote a program that "predicted" the outcomes of every South Carolina state representative elections since 1906 by running through the district numbers in order, and then assigning the candidate (in alphabetical order based on their surname) a base 16 number. We only went back to 1906 because that was the largest string of binary data we could find that actually correlated to anything we had lying around. In the end we wrote the source so it calculated pi (tinypi) and shifted through it several thousand times till it got to the right stuff and start spitting it out. A friend presented it to his lab for extra credit to anyone who figured out how it guessed correctly.