But since this will not have a screen on it's own it will need a TV set to work and this 30$ for the celular bits will also add a connection it will probably do not need a wireless card like the 100$ laptop. So I would guess screen + wireless connection could get near the 30$ that was spent on the cellphone IP.:-P
Sure that as others have stated those compromises would mean that the computer will only work well where exists the infrastructure for it. It must have a power grid (no crank power), it must connect to a TV and it must have a cell grid to work networked.
Re:Only make a third if it has the same quality.
on
Toy Story 3 Scrapped
·
· Score: 1
Except for the fact that toy story 2 was an idea comming from Pixar, with their mentality and their way of producing. This toy story 3 was being pitched byu disney with their "me want's more money" way of thinking. Sometimes is better not to do something so it will not destroy the characters and the story.
Photoshop already works in two very diferent "widget sets", this is a clear indicator that it has the code that "do stuff" cleanly separated from the code that "presents and lets user manipulate". If this is true the ammount of work to port it over linux is only to addapt this second portion of the program.
Off course I can be wrong and adobe keeps two compleatly entangled version of the code and has two separed teams to create a holle PS for each plataform.
And you know what that is? Love... MS takes cares that each copy of the windows code has that special touch that makes the code seem likes it got freshly out of your mom's computer.
Windows, now with something special(TM). Available to you for only an unspecified amount of money.
The point is google in or out of china makes no diference. The police will not change to acomodate google's demand. Sometimes you have no choice but to accept your limitations. Let me tell you a bit of brasilian history, not too long ago Brasil was a military dictatorship. As such goverments often do, our goverment did censor the major news papers. The penalty for not agreeing was probably torture ("pau de arara").
What did they do? Where there was a censored article they would put recipes, there were recipes in the first page. People would know that this was the censor acting. This brings an unconfortable feel. This is compies with the censorship, but in a subtle way acts against it.
I don't know what google will do it, and it will probably do much less then this example. But I guess something is better then nothing, it is childish to say "if you don't do it my way, I won't do it in any way". And it may be even possible that the presence of google makes more for freespeach then the absence.
I actually agree with you, antz and bug's life are two very diferent movies, with one thing in common they both use ants and insects as characters. I like them both, but in defending the grand-parents, I could bet that antz only got out of the paper because dumb big money "we should do only what is certain" producers thougth that this was kind of going in the same direction others (pixar) are going to.
The people who give the "green light" to movies are business people, much like those suits you see in your company and I would bet that with very little exceptions they are dumb, very little creative and understand very little of what people really want to see. If we do get an ocasional very good blockbuster like the lord of the rings or the spiderman series and other is only because there are very good directors, screen players and other people that are very briliant and are willing to figth those guys.
I guess that most laws that deal with child abuse are meant for "grown-ups" that have sex with children. If you are 12 and you convince your 12 years old girl friend to have sex with you I would assume that all is a-ok. Well at least in a rational law system. But then again I am not sure what are the law in the united states, or in each of it's diferent states.
The problem seems to come that adults have a power position to most children. Not all, sure, but many 12 years old would look upon a 20 years old adult(?) with some admiration, and even more so if the adult can relate to the stuff they are going throgth. This advantage position is sometimes used by the real child molester to convince that the child should do what he saing is good. In this point of view an adult seducing a child to have sex is similar to a boss seducing a secretary, if the secretary denyies the boss sex would he retaliate? If this adult, that surely knows more then me, is saying that I can do it, and it is good, why shouldn't I do it?
Some childs can tell what they want or not? I believe so. But how can you tell them apart? If questioned, both chieldren would have similar acounts, that they indeed wanted to have sex with the adult. How to tell witch of the two were cooerced, and witch of the two actualy wanted?
The rest of your comment is pretty much a good acount of what I see happening in your country. Sure I have an outsider point of view, so in many ways I may be wrong, but what I see in the US is more and more a search for "evil" and less search for the "reasonable".
I myself don't like to classify stuff as "good" and "evil", this is good for creating movies, plot lines and AD&D characthers. But when it comes to politics and dealing with real life facts, I would probably tell thar you that are no absolute "good" or "evil". In the mind of every criminal he has a very good reason for doing what he did, and he believes he is right or at least he repents truely for what he did. In his point of view he is good, but either made some evil thing due to some circunstance or he did something right that happens to be a crime.
So in my guess the search for those absolute "evils" and absolute "goods" is when you create all those radical points of views like "Video games are training the young to kill" or "Oh look he downloads porn from the internet, he must be a pervert" or the problem you stated with all this over jealous over child sex.
Ps. I am against child pornography, child abuse and many other things. But I do believe that children should be allowed to have sex, masturbate and even be in contat with porn. In my opinion the parents should let things happen naturally and provide information and guidance when the time comes and the family computer sudenly begins to pop-up strange adds.
I don't know if I wrote clearly, but I did stated this fact on my comment along with the fact that many sensors do have a 16 bits depth.:-D I was only stating that even though the fact that a 8megapixel camera has a raw file with 8Megabytes seem obvious, in reality it is not obvious that those figures should be the same.:-D
A raw image should have more then 8Megs, since each pixel has at least 3 bytes, but since many cameras that provide raw uses 16 bits per channel this would acount for 6 bytes per pixel. On the other hand, if your raw has the information direct from the ccd that usually is a black and white sensor that has a colored mask in front of it this would make each pixel to have a single channel (usually in an array of 4x4 squares that hold red and green in the first row and green and blue in the second). So in this configuration the raw file would hold 16Mb more or less. If this file is compressed with a non-lossy (gzip, zip, bz) compression it can be expected at least a 2x compression rate, so it would re-shrink it to 8Mb.
So I guess that it is not that obvious that a 8Megapixel camera will have a 8Mbyte raw file, even if it seem obvious.
I use flashblock so all flash render as defaut as a play button, I only click them when I know it is what I want. It also allows you to white-list flash sites like homestarrunner.something for instance.:-D
rootkit is very well defined, it is a program that subverts the operational system so that it become in fact invisible. The files do not show in directory listings and the process is not reported as running even thougth it is actually there.
They are not evil or bad in way by definition, but is arguable that this behaviour is not good. This is similar to the "good virus" concept (a program that replicates it self and goes from computer to computer doing something good like cleaning up another virus).
The sony DRM did have a rootkit, and aparently the norton has a similar "feature" that hiddens the deleted files in a hidden folder, so they can be undeleted. If this hidden folder follows the rules of the operational system (much like dot files in unix) this is quite ok, because if needed it can be found. But if it is actually using a rootkit is much harder to locate the said folder.
I imagine that those particles are probably closer to the blackhole, but since they are rotating arround and loosing "altitude" more slowly then their actual speed it takes a long time to reach the blackhole.
This is much like a artificial satelite that looses altitude due to several factors and if their route is not correct they would slowly fall into earth. If I am not mistaken that was what happened with the skylab, wasn't?
aplauses, aplauses, I don't know for how long I waited to hear those words from an american. There is no such thing as one size fits all. American freedom is not that good for other countries, I for one don't wish it for mine, we here have much less "self censorship" then your media for instance. We do have moer freedom in the "patent" area as far as I know. But our politicians are corrupt and our people is forgetful, we tend to think that this problem is unsolvable, and this general thought make the problem unsolvable (self fulfiling profecy).
rss should be a good indicator that some of the sites you like have something new. You don't acutually need to read them in the RSS reader, witch I don't like also for the same reasons you listed. But a little helper, maybe a Firefox extension, that would check if any of your bookmarks (that do suport rss) have been updated since your last visit and may put a little icon besides it (a jumping'n dancing 'new' flag for old time sake, humm probably not).
RSS are nice, they allow sites to interate with each other, they allow a program to "read" sites for you and maybe finter stuff out before giving you alternatives, and tons of other things that are yet to come.
In Brazil, unfortunaly, there are lots of MSN users, and as far as I know it is very popular in France also. I believe that it got late in the IM business, but since it get bundled with windows it has conquered the places where the public didn[ t yet have a favorite IM.
Sure parents should have a heavy saying in what a child should consume, do or even play. But I don't think that you and me have the same definition of "child". Perhaps, as an enlightened grown up, that you are you should remember that nothing magical happens when you turn 18 or 21 or even 30. People don't turn responsible over night.
Children should be treated as intelligent persons that do not yet have all the information on all the things that they are exposed too. Sure children are inexperienced, and as such are not expected to make the correct choices, and their parent should help them to choose, guide them to what they think is right and correct, and those may be even different from parent to parent.
My point is, if you are a parent and simply forbid your kid to do every single thing you don't like with a heavy hand, I believe that there is a great probability that your kid will seek to tryout those same things behind your back. A child, no matter how young, should be treated as an equal, the parents have the control, sure, but they deserve explanations on why they are not allowed to do X and those should not be "because I said so".
It is my belief that parenting should be a relationship of friendship and trust above all.
What enters where? There are in fact several different kernel trees. Sure there's on that is canonical and has only the aproved stuff, but usually it is used only as base for derivative kernels. RH & fedora have a customized kernel, and I suspect that ubuntu also has it's own pathces.
In the end what gets into the kernel is decided by whoever is deistributing. And the user gets to choose witch of the kernels he want in his computer.
This post is not a rant, it contains my personal points of view of the electoral process in the USA. I do not know every detail and I may be mistaken, I am not afraid of being wrong and you people can and I would thank if you do point out my errors. All this is based on my knowledge obtained throght the midia and other sources (including slashdot and other blogs on the net).
"First, because it is still a democracy"
It is? Are you sure? Do you vote for your president? I mean directly, not for a commission to vote for you. Do you have a easy mean to anyone to run for president? Will the media give you a fair way of reaching your potential voters if you're not from the two main parties?
The last I heard, I may be wrong here, to be able to run for president in the US you have to be able to convince each of the states that you are indeed a candidate. This alone requires an incredible amount of resources and successfully eliminates many of the "third parties".
If it wasn't hard to be able to become a candidate, the electoral process is intrinsically complicated and made from the ground up to stimulate people not to vote. Also the media in the US don't pay much or even any attention to candidates that do not come from the "holly duo" parties.
Also in the end people don't even vote directly, each state has a number of representatives that vote for you. There were a few cases where the president were not chosen by a majority, including Bush if I am not mistaken.
A real democracy is where the people can stir the government, it is as real as an utopia. But there a lot of things that the US can do if they want to be the "democracy champion" and push "democracy" down of everyone throats. For instance Brazil, it has a single and simple way of voting that is unique and electronic (as of now it is not open source, but we have little reasons to doubt it). Everyone in the country has to vote, I do not agree with this aspect, but it does make voting accessible to the poorest and even to illiterate people. There are hundreds of parties, a few of them are more widely known, and in every election there at least three of them that have a chance of wining. There was even one instance where a first-timer won the election (it proved to be a mistake and he was a free rider and was impeached shortly after with a great popular movement).
Well I am sure someone will think this is a "troll", but I am assure that this is not anti-American. I am not my self anti-American or anti-nothing. I believe that every nation has a lot of bad and a lot of good, and there is no "good" or "evil" in terms of nations. many Americans are already complaining about all the bad that is happening there, I just wished they had more voice.
In other words how to ruin the net making unrelated articles appear at the top every single search.
It's good to know that at least google try to defeat this kind of scumm. Not because google is "good" or "not evil", but because google knows the value of the site is dependent on how good the results people get. If MSN Search starts to get more good results then google then google would start to loose ground.
For all i know, google is already struggling to get good results, and many times the resuls are quite poor and full of ghost "search engines" and buy now pages. But other times it still is very usefull.
Yes I was searching a commentary on culture to reply, since I have saw a few articles on how the americans and english smile differently. Culture afects many, many things including, apparently, how we express emotions. Sure there is a large "basic emotions" overlap that comes from instinct, we can even recognize them in other mammals, but to get a proper "reading" to a level of 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, that is cited in the article you must take into account culture, I believe.
Another way of testing this would use the program to test several different cultures people. If it holds aggainst the test, then I will be more inclined to believe that the mona lisa was 21% bored or whatever.
Simply cite the revision you used. By this I mean, "Article on frogs on wikipedia on the revision made in 06:31, 17 November 2005 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frog&old id=28572307". If any new information like links to goatse.cx are added the person who is reading you work will know that it was not from that version that you based your work.
Firefox is not a gnome, nor a KDE application. The firefox that came installed in my Ubuntu, and my fedora before that, did have kerning turned on.
As of now I am using the firefox 1.5 as downloaded from the mozilla site, that as you said do not have kerning on, I have no idea why. But to be fair this is a firefox problem, not a gnome/kde one, witch in fact both desktops have their own integrated browsers that do have kerning.
Well I don't know exactly what version of gnome and KDE you're mentioning but all modern desktops (gnome and KDE included) do kerning and much, much more. Gnome have full suport to unicode being capable of redering in both directions and with diferent languages in the same line. This unicode duport includes the possibility of using ligatures like '' (U+FB00 Latin small ligature FF) or '' (U+FB01 Latin small ligature FI), those are single gliphs that represent two letters.
To test if your brower/application is doing kerning just type VA and select the V only if the A "runs away" from the selection or if the selection box let's part of the V unselected you have kerning. Monospaced fonts, like the one in your terminal don't have kerning by definition for all letters in this type of font must have the same exact size.
Slashdot Mirror
But since this will not have a screen on it's own it will need a TV set to work and this 30$ for the celular bits will also add a connection it will probably do not need a wireless card like the 100$ laptop. So I would guess screen + wireless connection could get near the 30$ that was spent on the cellphone IP. :-P
Sure that as others have stated those compromises would mean that the computer will only work well where exists the infrastructure for it. It must have a power grid (no crank power), it must connect to a TV and it must have a cell grid to work networked.
Except for the fact that toy story 2 was an idea comming from Pixar, with their mentality and their way of producing. This toy story 3 was being pitched byu disney with their "me want's more money" way of thinking. Sometimes is better not to do something so it will not destroy the characters and the story.
Photoshop already works in two very diferent "widget sets", this is a clear indicator that it has the code that "do stuff" cleanly separated from the code that "presents and lets user manipulate". If this is true the ammount of work to port it over linux is only to addapt this second portion of the program.
Off course I can be wrong and adobe keeps two compleatly entangled version of the code and has two separed teams to create a holle PS for each plataform.
And you know what that is? Love... MS takes cares that each copy of the windows code has that special touch that makes the code seem likes it got freshly out of your mom's computer.
Windows, now with something special(TM).
Available to you for only an unspecified amount of money.
The point is google in or out of china makes no diference. The police will not change to acomodate google's demand. Sometimes you have no choice but to accept your limitations. Let me tell you a bit of brasilian history, not too long ago Brasil was a military dictatorship. As such goverments often do, our goverment did censor the major news papers. The penalty for not agreeing was probably torture ("pau de arara").
What did they do? Where there was a censored article they would put recipes, there were recipes in the first page. People would know that this was the censor acting. This brings an unconfortable feel. This is compies with the censorship, but in a subtle way acts against it.
I don't know what google will do it, and it will probably do much less then this example. But I guess something is better then nothing, it is childish to say "if you don't do it my way, I won't do it in any way". And it may be even possible that the presence of google makes more for freespeach then the absence.
And of course: "Up yours!" ;-)
Well, in this particular case dosen't "up" means what the word supose to mean?
I actually agree with you, antz and bug's life are two very diferent movies, with one thing in common they both use ants and insects as characters. I like them both, but in defending the grand-parents, I could bet that antz only got out of the paper because dumb big money "we should do only what is certain" producers thougth that this was kind of going in the same direction others (pixar) are going to.
The people who give the "green light" to movies are business people, much like those suits you see in your company and I would bet that with very little exceptions they are dumb, very little creative and understand very little of what people really want to see. If we do get an ocasional very good blockbuster like the lord of the rings or the spiderman series and other is only because there are very good directors, screen players and other people that are very briliant and are willing to figth those guys.
I guess that most laws that deal with child abuse are meant for "grown-ups" that have sex with children. If you are 12 and you convince your 12 years old girl friend to have sex with you I would assume that all is a-ok. Well at least in a rational law system. But then again I am not sure what are the law in the united states, or in each of it's diferent states.
The problem seems to come that adults have a power position to most children. Not all, sure, but many 12 years old would look upon a 20 years old adult(?) with some admiration, and even more so if the adult can relate to the stuff they are going throgth. This advantage position is sometimes used by the real child molester to convince that the child should do what he saing is good. In this point of view an adult seducing a child to have sex is similar to a boss seducing a secretary, if the secretary denyies the boss sex would he retaliate? If this adult, that surely knows more then me, is saying that I can do it, and it is good, why shouldn't I do it?
Some childs can tell what they want or not? I believe so. But how can you tell them apart? If questioned, both chieldren would have similar acounts, that they indeed wanted to have sex with the adult. How to tell witch of the two were cooerced, and witch of the two actualy wanted?
The rest of your comment is pretty much a good acount of what I see happening in your country. Sure I have an outsider point of view, so in many ways I may be wrong, but what I see in the US is more and more a search for "evil" and less search for the "reasonable".
I myself don't like to classify stuff as "good" and "evil", this is good for creating movies, plot lines and AD&D characthers. But when it comes to politics and dealing with real life facts, I would probably tell thar you that are no absolute "good" or "evil". In the mind of every criminal he has a very good reason for doing what he did, and he believes he is right or at least he repents truely for what he did. In his point of view he is good, but either made some evil thing due to some circunstance or he did something right that happens to be a crime.
So in my guess the search for those absolute "evils" and absolute "goods" is when you create all those radical points of views like "Video games are training the young to kill" or "Oh look he downloads porn from the internet, he must be a pervert" or the problem you stated with all this over jealous over child sex.
Ps. I am against child pornography, child abuse and many other things. But I do believe that children should be allowed to have sex, masturbate and even be in contat with porn. In my opinion the parents should let things happen naturally and provide information and guidance when the time comes and the family computer sudenly begins to pop-up strange adds.
I don't know if I wrote clearly, but I did stated this fact on my comment along with the fact that many sensors do have a 16 bits depth. :-D I was only stating that even though the fact that a 8megapixel camera has a raw file with 8Megabytes seem obvious, in reality it is not obvious that those figures should be the same. :-D
A raw image should have more then 8Megs, since each pixel has at least 3 bytes, but since many cameras that provide raw uses 16 bits per channel this would acount for 6 bytes per pixel. On the other hand, if your raw has the information direct from the ccd that usually is a black and white sensor that has a colored mask in front of it this would make each pixel to have a single channel (usually in an array of 4x4 squares that hold red and green in the first row and green and blue in the second).
So in this configuration the raw file would hold 16Mb more or less. If this file is compressed with a non-lossy (gzip, zip, bz) compression it can be expected at least a 2x compression rate, so it would re-shrink it to 8Mb.
So I guess that it is not that obvious that a 8Megapixel camera will have a 8Mbyte raw file, even if it seem obvious.
I use flashblock so all flash render as defaut as a play button, I only click them when I know it is what I want. It also allows you to white-list flash sites like homestarrunner.something for instance. :-D
I recomend you to try it out.
rootkit is very well defined, it is a program that subverts the operational system so that it become in fact invisible. The files do not show in directory listings and the process is not reported as running even thougth it is actually there.
They are not evil or bad in way by definition, but is arguable that this behaviour is not good. This is similar to the "good virus" concept (a program that replicates it self and goes from computer to computer doing something good like cleaning up another virus).
The sony DRM did have a rootkit, and aparently the norton has a similar "feature" that hiddens the deleted files in a hidden folder, so they can be undeleted. If this hidden folder follows the rules of the operational system (much like dot files in unix) this is quite ok, because if needed it can be found. But if it is actually using a rootkit is much harder to locate the said folder.
Well I would define this "last leg" as the last revolution arround the event horizont, but I did not define it so I can't be sure.
One thing would help is to know the actual diameter of the event horizont, in my distant memory this depends on the mass of the blackhole.
I imagine that those particles are probably closer to the blackhole, but since they are rotating arround and loosing "altitude" more slowly then their actual speed it takes a long time to reach the blackhole.
This is much like a artificial satelite that looses altitude due to several factors and if their route is not correct they would slowly fall into earth. If I am not mistaken that was what happened with the skylab, wasn't?
aplauses, aplauses, I don't know for how long I waited to hear those words from an american. There is no such thing as one size fits all. American freedom is not that good for other countries, I for one don't wish it for mine, we here have much less "self censorship" then your media for instance. We do have moer freedom in the "patent" area as far as I know. But our politicians are corrupt and our people is forgetful, we tend to think that this problem is unsolvable, and this general thought make the problem unsolvable (self fulfiling profecy).
rss should be a good indicator that some of the sites you like have something new. You don't acutually need to read them in the RSS reader, witch I don't like also for the same reasons you listed. But a little helper, maybe a Firefox extension, that would check if any of your bookmarks (that do suport rss) have been updated since your last visit and may put a little icon besides it (a jumping'n dancing 'new' flag for old time sake, humm probably not).
RSS are nice, they allow sites to interate with each other, they allow a program to "read" sites for you and maybe finter stuff out before giving you alternatives, and tons of other things that are yet to come.
Does RSS suport tags?
In Brazil, unfortunaly, there are lots of MSN users, and as far as I know it is very popular in France also. I believe that it got late in the IM business, but since it get bundled with windows it has conquered the places where the public didn[ t yet have a favorite IM.
Sure parents should have a heavy saying in what a child should consume, do or even play. But I don't think that you and me have the same definition of "child". Perhaps, as an enlightened grown up, that you are you should remember that nothing magical happens when you turn 18 or 21 or even 30. People don't turn responsible over night.
Children should be treated as intelligent persons that do not yet have all the information on all the things that they are exposed too. Sure children are inexperienced, and as such are not expected to make the correct choices, and their parent should help them to choose, guide them to what they think is right and correct, and those may be even different from parent to parent.
My point is, if you are a parent and simply forbid your kid to do every single thing you don't like with a heavy hand, I believe that there is a great probability that your kid will seek to tryout those same things behind your back. A child, no matter how young, should be treated as an equal, the parents have the control, sure, but they deserve explanations on why they are not allowed to do X and those should not be "because I said so".
It is my belief that parenting should be a relationship of friendship and trust above all.
What enters where? There are in fact several different kernel trees. Sure there's on that is canonical and has only the aproved stuff, but usually it is used only as base for derivative kernels. RH & fedora have a customized kernel, and I suspect that ubuntu also has it's own pathces.
In the end what gets into the kernel is decided by whoever is deistributing. And the user gets to choose witch of the kernels he want in his computer.
It is? Are you sure? Do you vote for your president? I mean directly, not for a commission to vote for you. Do you have a easy mean to anyone to run for president? Will the media give you a fair way of reaching your potential voters if you're not from the two main parties?
The last I heard, I may be wrong here, to be able to run for president in the US you have to be able to convince each of the states that you are indeed a candidate. This alone requires an incredible amount of resources and successfully eliminates many of the "third parties".
If it wasn't hard to be able to become a candidate, the electoral process is intrinsically complicated and made from the ground up to stimulate people not to vote. Also the media in the US don't pay much or even any attention to candidates that do not come from the "holly duo" parties.
Also in the end people don't even vote directly, each state has a number of representatives that vote for you. There were a few cases where the president were not chosen by a majority, including Bush if I am not mistaken.
A real democracy is where the people can stir the government, it is as real as an utopia. But there a lot of things that the US can do if they want to be the "democracy champion" and push "democracy" down of everyone throats. For instance Brazil, it has a single and simple way of voting that is unique and electronic (as of now it is not open source, but we have little reasons to doubt it). Everyone in the country has to vote, I do not agree with this aspect, but it does make voting accessible to the poorest and even to illiterate people. There are hundreds of parties, a few of them are more widely known, and in every election there at least three of them that have a chance of wining. There was even one instance where a first-timer won the election (it proved to be a mistake and he was a free rider and was impeached shortly after with a great popular movement).
Well I am sure someone will think this is a "troll", but I am assure that this is not anti-American. I am not my self anti-American or anti-nothing. I believe that every nation has a lot of bad and a lot of good, and there is no "good" or "evil" in terms of nations. many Americans are already complaining about all the bad that is happening there, I just wished they had more voice.
In other words how to ruin the net making unrelated articles appear at the top every single search.
It's good to know that at least google try to defeat this kind of scumm. Not because google is "good" or "not evil", but because google knows the value of the site is dependent on how good the results people get. If MSN Search starts to get more good results then google then google would start to loose ground.
For all i know, google is already struggling to get good results, and many times the resuls are quite poor and full of ghost "search engines" and buy now pages. But other times it still is very usefull.
Yes I was searching a commentary on culture to reply, since I have saw a few articles on how the americans and english smile differently. Culture afects many, many things including, apparently, how we express emotions. Sure there is a large "basic emotions" overlap that comes from instinct, we can even recognize them in other mammals, but to get a proper "reading" to a level of 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, that is cited in the article you must take into account culture, I believe.
Another way of testing this would use the program to test several different cultures people. If it holds aggainst the test, then I will be more inclined to believe that the mona lisa was 21% bored or whatever.
Simply cite the revision you used. By this I mean, "Article on frogs on wikipedia on the revision made in 06:31, 17 November 2005 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frog&old id=28572307". If any new information like links to goatse.cx are added the person who is reading you work will know that it was not from that version that you based your work.
Firefox is not a gnome, nor a KDE application. The firefox that came installed in my Ubuntu, and my fedora before that, did have kerning turned on.
As of now I am using the firefox 1.5 as downloaded from the mozilla site, that as you said do not have kerning on, I have no idea why. But to be fair this is a firefox problem, not a gnome/kde one, witch in fact both desktops have their own integrated browsers that do have kerning.
Well I don't know exactly what version of gnome and KDE you're mentioning but all modern desktops (gnome and KDE included) do kerning and much, much more. Gnome have full suport to unicode being capable of redering in both directions and with diferent languages in the same line. This unicode duport includes the possibility of using ligatures like '' (U+FB00 Latin small ligature FF) or '' (U+FB01 Latin small ligature FI), those are single gliphs that represent two letters.
To test if your brower/application is doing kerning just type VA and select the V only if the A "runs away" from the selection or if the selection box let's part of the V unselected you have kerning. Monospaced fonts, like the one in your terminal don't have kerning by definition for all letters in this type of font must have the same exact size.