Urination is a God-given right. Our ancestors did it all the time, all over the place, until some religiously motivated tight-assed sourpusses decided it would damage fragile minds to accidentally see a tip of flesh. This kind of irrational repression is what we like to ridicule the Muslims for.
When a German's gotta go, he gotsta go. There is a reasonable modesty mechanism in place, i.e. I will feel uncomfortable about it and seek out a dark corner, the back of a preferrably windowless, non-residential building, behind a tree or wherever. And I'll be more likely to do this at night than in broad daylight. If I'm out walking in a "public" forest where I'm likely to be seen by joggers, cyclists or families taking a walk, I'll walk 20 - 50 feet off the path and into the woods so no one will see me in profile unless they follow me in. On two or three occasions, I've been in the woods with a girlfriend when she had to go, and she asked me to look out for passersby and shield her from view if necessary while she pulled down her pants and squatted to do her thing.
As a net result, you'll sometimes see the back of a man standing by the side of the road or up against a tree, with his legs spread and pelvis pushed forward. If you look closely, you may even see a yellow stream. But why would you want to look closely? You accept that the guy apparently had a hard time holding it before finding a proper convenience, turn away and ignore him.
I rarely heed Nature's call in the open, maybe once or twice a year; but when I do, I don't worry my head about it. By contrast, I understand that doing this in the US may get me arrested on charges of sexual misconduct and branded for life as a sex offender, with incriminating bulletins sent to prospective neighbors and employers. I find public urination as distasteful as the next guy, but... sanity check, anyone?
As someone living in Germany who just got back from a business trip to the US, I'd like to make a clarification about customer service.
Especially in the big cities, customer service people are surly at best and sometimes downright hostile. I recall walking up to a salesperson for some help, and he quickly walked away just as I opened my mouth. I recall the story of my girlfriend, who bought a tail light cover from an auto shop. When she asked them to install it, they refused and told her she could do it herself. That said, when you actually manage to get service in Germany, it's usually competent.
On my trip Stateside, I was met with nothing but courteousness and friendly smiles. It took me a moment to get used to being called 'Sir' all the time. On the other hand, many of those I dealt with were mind-bogglingly incompetent. Many operated by a fixed set of written rules and were unable or unwilling to deal with any situation not dealt with on their crib sheet. Another anecdote: I mailed the webmaster of an outfit that mails me an informative blurb on a daily basis when I noticed that the 'Subject' line was (all of a sudden) being truncated if that subject was more than one word. Thought I'd give him a heads up so he could fix this embarrassing little bug. Days later, I got a response to the effect of, "we can't do anything about this. Our software always shortens the subject to one word when it's more than one word."
So between Germany and the US (and from my admittely limited sample space), one gets the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea; between knowledgeable but lazy and annoying service people, and smiling minimum-wage goofballs.
GWB and his administration are the most dangerous threat that the Constitution and the American Way of Life have faced in the past century, easily topping even McCarthy.
To quote one 'Madpride' from another board:
Somebody hurry up and give George Bush a blowjob so we can impeach his worthless ass!
I heard a news commentary last night that seemed reasonably well informed to me. They said that the frequency of tropical storms (i.e. the reason they're running out of names at the moment) varies in a natural cycle which is probably not noticeably affected by temperature. On the other hand, the severity of the storms is directly a function of their energy, which they get from warm tropical water, which is directly affected by temperature.
If this is true and if global temperatures are affected by CO2 emissions, then human activity is probably causing these storms to be (on the average) more severe.
While I feel sympathy for the poor bastards suffering in NOLA and elsewhere, I feel it's a good thing that Katrina is making Americans sit up and think about possible connections between environmental cause and meteorological effect. It's human nature to tend not to think much about things that don't affect one personally. I wonder how GWB's stance on emissions would be affected if a storm were to dismantle his ranch in Crawford?
syukton, you absolutely deserve the "+5 Informative" you got on your post. Most of what you said is correct, and you provide an abundance of information. However, I believe I served my parent poster better than you did, by not swamping him with information he may not know what to do with. I based the level of my response on his claim of not even knowing whether to wire in series or parallel. I'm happy to see he plans to go off and learn some EE basics now; that should help him put both my information and yours in perspective.
I know my Ohm's Law at least as well as the next guy, and it so happens that just a couple of weeks ago I helped someone calculate/select the appropriate voltage drop resistor he needed to run a single LED off a 24V supply. Knowing the current rating of the LED(s) involved makes such a question amenable to being treated as an exact science.
However, knowing nothing about the parent poster's LEDs, not knowing what he knows and not wanting to confuse him too much, I chose the pragmatic approach and suggested a setup that will let him experiment in a way that will at least light up his LEDs and give them a fighting chance to survive for a few minutes. If his LEDs become amazingly bright but expire after a short time, I trust he'll consider fine-tuning the circuit.
My principle was that, once you get past the diode's cutoff voltage, the internal resistance of a LED is at least vaguely linear. So the voltage drop across LEDs will go up as the current goes up, eventually limiting current just as surely as if you were to control the current instead of the voltage. You'll notice that, while not resorting to chemistry (or mention of the fact that blue light photons carry more energy than red), I mentioned that red LEDs usually take a little less voltage than blue.
So: I take exception to your contemptuous and thoughtless labelling of my entire post as incorrect. It was simplistic, to be sure, but based on excellent knowledge of the subject matter and solid pragmatic reasoning.
Something interesting and useful to know is that one LED takes about 1.5 volts to operate. Red ones take a little less, blue ones a bit more. If you want to hook LED's to a 12V source, you need to hook about 8 of them in series, that is, end-to-end in a daisy chain. Note that LEDs have polarity, i.e. they will only light up if the correct end of the LED is hooked up to plus. So you need to hook the short lead on one LED to the long one on the next, consistently. If your power supply is AC, this still needs to be observed, but then it doesn't matter which end of the chain goes to which pin of the power supply.
If you want to hook up even more LEDs, then you should hook up several such 8-LED chains in parallel to your power supply.
While I'm happy that these hard-working academics were successful, I can't help but note the downside to this development.
Forget military applications. What I foresee is that, for computer scientists who've lost their jobs to outsourcing, this will deprive them of one more alternative, namely a career as a taxi/truck/bus/etc driver.
The grandparent is mildly funny but not a bit insightful, probably because the poster is unaware of the physics behind static electricity.
First, the idea of using static electricity to power devices inside a human is pretty hard to implement because in order to be useful, a device would need to be connected to both of the mutually charged components, and that potential difference will have to be transformed into DC at the battery's voltage of around 1-9 V.
Whichever piece of clothing is on the person's skin will have the same potential as that person, whose body is highly conductive as far as static electricity is concerned. That takes care of one side, as our device is already very well connected to the human.
So how will one gain access to the charge on the other piece of clothing? Have the person wear a layer of tinfoil over the outer garment? Sounds less than practical in the summertime. Have him drag a metal chain over any carpets he walks over? Folks, we're trying to improve quality of life here, not worsen it.
Now, having a charge of a few microcoulombs with a potential difference of maybe 20,000 volts, how are we going to transform it to a usefully large current at battery voltage? Hint: Transformers need AC to work, not DC. The microelectronics used to chop up DC into AC hate high voltages.
There's a reason why there are no (or virtually no) applications that use lightning or static electricity as an energy source.
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
People would not be nearly so upset if "eminent domain" were being applied in the sense of the Constitution, as above. People are upset that "public" is being construed to be synonymous with "commercial".
There's not a damn thing wrong with the Constitution. There is lots wrong with how politicians are finding ways to weasel around it.
We're talking about the future of the Internet here, you're talking about the past of the US. Look around yourself and tell me what's left of your individual rights after subtracting out the DMCA, PATRIOT, Eminent Domain and other Constitution-defying laws!
As for "the only country"... where did you learn this, the National Enquirer?
Hmm, I don't know which Internet governance to worry about more:
The US, which shows signs of migrating toward a police state where media producers and religious zealots compete to think up ever more stringent limits on what Internet users may do, and that demonstrably has no qualms about invading its citizens' privacy on flimsy pretexts and imposing its values and standards on the rest of the world, by force if necessary; or
The UN, an ineffective body of sometimes well-meaning, sometimes lazy, often egotistical bureaucrats, known for glacial processing speed on the tiniest issues and concensus on nothing but the lack of concensus and growth of administration as an end rather than a means, a forum for squabbles about eternally conflicting interests, refereed by opposing power blocs.
Is there a third alternative? Maybe decentralized governance? Self-governance? A meritocracy? Unpaid volunteership? Management by 1000 chimpanzees randomly pushing buttons?
The Internet is important to me. I'll feel troubled so long as I don't see an approach that works well and efficiently, is relatively bias and value neutral and allows reasonable freedom and privacy to the average user.
I read the reports once in a while: The winners, or close-to-finishers, are huge SUVs filled with computers and special-purpose sensory equipment. What this tells me is that today's computer technology still has trouble, in many cubic feet of space, and with practically unlimited electrical power, to find realtime solutions for a problem that even severely IQ handicapped humans handle routinely while balancing a McMeal on their knees and keeping up a cell phone conversation. I would wager that, with a fair amount of training and suitable controls, even a dog could handle the task. So...
Did AI research implode for lack of funding, or is it really that hard? Will we need Cray-like computing power to handle the sensory input quickly enough to work a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal? Or has this problem simply never been tackled by sufficiently big money? And, given the obvious military implications and a $400 Billion military budget alone, why not?
All these questions are quite serious, and I'd be interested in hearing answers.
Sorry about Yet Another Response, but it just occurred to me that I object to another part of your post as well:
Each and every product out there, no matter how good they are in and of themselves, won't sell if no one knows they exist.
Perhaps I'm not a typical consumer, but my buying style works pretty well without marketing. I put together my own PCs once in a while, and for other people too. I never study ads for things like graphics cards, and rarely reviews. Occasionally I'll listen to word-of-mouth recommendations by friends. I've discovered that very often the product I found in a review or ad is not available from my local hardware junk shop. So I go in there and say something like,
"I'd like a reasonably cheap graphics card with 32M and minimal acceleration but with a DVI output. What have you got?"
I may refuse ATI cards because I have had some bad experience with the intrusive and overblown driver and utility installation. nVidia software seems to install more smoothly for me, and I usually manage to integrate their (closed source) drivers into Linux as well.
In summary: As far as I'm concerned, and regarding graphics cards and other hardware, advertisement is completely wasted. Yet I'm still forced to pay for it.
R&D makes a product better. Employees put the product together. Advertising doesn't create product, nor does it make it better - it just drives the price up.
Thus, my complaint about the unnecessary price bloat due to advertising cannot logically be extended to apply to R&D and other aspects of product creation.
...with JUnit 3, they have to go and improve it. I'll be eating my heart out for a while, because my company will surely not go to Java 5 before Java 6 is out, so these mentioned features will not be available to me. And when they are, I'll have to change my modus operandi.
Actually: Nice work, guys. I'll probably appreciate this once I get a chance to use it and wrap my head around it.
I've recently had my eyes opened, by this article, to the hidden costs of advertising.
My own executive summary: Advertising makes products more expensive, because corporations that advertise their products sure as hell don't pay for the ads out of their own pockets.
Meaning: Any money going into gaming (and advertising therein) is going to jack up the price of the advertised products. So if I buy those products, I have to pay a few elite whoring twitch wizards whether I want to or not.
My personal conclusion: I'm buying even fewer games than before. (Gives the finger to (a small subset of) Corporate scum)
Google has, in fact, already quietly renamed their service to GoogleMail in Germany, where some other shmuck laid claim to the G. Pre-existing GMail accounts in Germany, such as my own, were left unchanged, but for the past month or so, new accounts have magically become GoogleMail accounts.
I guess nobody thought to make a fuss on/. over it when it happened here. I was annoyed, but WTF?
I foresee that criminally insane bastard causing destruction such as the world has never seen. Expect casualty counts in the hundreds of millions. Expect a return to the Dark Ages. If your family survives at all, expect your children to lead short, tragic lives.
Religions that claim the end of the world is nigh are laughable, up until the point where men in high places are given the means to directly bring it about.
thrillseeker, you are of course entitled to your opinion, but I'd like to contribute one as well.
Science has always been linked to politics: Think back to the astronomers who aligned the Pyramids, to the alchemists working to make gold for the king... a little more recently, politics almost got Galileo (Copernicus?) burnt at the stake.
I believe Scientific American started fighting back at the same time as science came under heavy political attack in the United States.
Politics is influencing science heavily, and may I add, heavy-handedly. Some examples off the top of my head:
funding for the Batavia (?) accelerator, slashed in mid-construction;
funding for the repair of Hubble, jeopardized;
funding for stem cell research, limited to a handful of mostly-useless lines;
a push for the teaching of Creationism as "science" in Kansas schools;
funding, fercryingoutloud, of the Voyager project slashed or jeopardized. I'm talking about this probe that has been travelling outward for 20 years now and is just hitting the outer limits of the solar system. It only costs a few million each year to capture the signals, and we won't have another opportunity for at least another 20 years!
denial of visas to foreign students and scientists willing to study in the US;
the de-emphasis, both in corporations and at the government level, of pure research in favor of applied research, with a narrow sub-focus on technology with military applications.
The former schoolyard bullies who kicked nerds around in the schoolyard are now politicians, and they continue to kick science around. As someone who believes in the scientific method and the untold benefits it has brought mankind, I am distressed that science is given short shrift in what claims to be the most developed nation on the planet. I feel that science needs to fight back to maintain its standing, and the first logical measure is to make the public aware of what's happening. As a long-time subscriber to Scientific American, I am grateful to them for struffling to advocate science.
One thing I've done to contribute in a small way was to buy the book The Republican War on Science. Not so much to learn something new, but to support the author and to send a message to Amazon (and maybe beyond, who knows?) that people care about science. I've also bought a gift copy for an interested friend, and am thinking of buying more for others.
All of this functionality comes with the aspect-oriented facility of overlays. Extensions also have as much access to the file system as the user running Firefox.
But... but... isn't it just this extreme flexibility that represents the biggest Achilles heal (sic) of Outlook and IE? Isn't this what Mozilla proudly avoids?
I realize that there are some differences, such as the fact that the red carpet is only rolled out for extensions the user trusts, but... when you advertise Firefox to dummies, your trusting users will BE dummies!
How much more will we need to convince you? And what happens if it reaches the conclusion that the time spent researching should have been spent averting the catastrophe?
Burning the fossils of millions of years in just a couple of centuries is a very unbalancing thing to do, and Western civilization's dependence on Middle Eastern oil is not helping world peace either. Whatever stops both is probably a Good Thing, and may just save our collective butts.
Slashdot Mirror
Urination is a God-given right. Our ancestors did it all the time, all over the place, until some religiously motivated tight-assed sourpusses decided it would damage fragile minds to accidentally see a tip of flesh. This kind of irrational repression is what we like to ridicule the Muslims for.
When a German's gotta go, he gotsta go. There is a reasonable modesty mechanism in place, i.e. I will feel uncomfortable about it and seek out a dark corner, the back of a preferrably windowless, non-residential building, behind a tree or wherever. And I'll be more likely to do this at night than in broad daylight. If I'm out walking in a "public" forest where I'm likely to be seen by joggers, cyclists or families taking a walk, I'll walk 20 - 50 feet off the path and into the woods so no one will see me in profile unless they follow me in. On two or three occasions, I've been in the woods with a girlfriend when she had to go, and she asked me to look out for passersby and shield her from view if necessary while she pulled down her pants and squatted to do her thing.
As a net result, you'll sometimes see the back of a man standing by the side of the road or up against a tree, with his legs spread and pelvis pushed forward. If you look closely, you may even see a yellow stream. But why would you want to look closely? You accept that the guy apparently had a hard time holding it before finding a proper convenience, turn away and ignore him.
I rarely heed Nature's call in the open, maybe once or twice a year; but when I do, I don't worry my head about it. By contrast, I understand that doing this in the US may get me arrested on charges of sexual misconduct and branded for life as a sex offender, with incriminating bulletins sent to prospective neighbors and employers. I find public urination as distasteful as the next guy, but... sanity check, anyone?
As someone living in Germany who just got back from a business trip to the US, I'd like to make a clarification about customer service.
Especially in the big cities, customer service people are surly at best and sometimes downright hostile. I recall walking up to a salesperson for some help, and he quickly walked away just as I opened my mouth. I recall the story of my girlfriend, who bought a tail light cover from an auto shop. When she asked them to install it, they refused and told her she could do it herself. That said, when you actually manage to get service in Germany, it's usually competent.
On my trip Stateside, I was met with nothing but courteousness and friendly smiles. It took me a moment to get used to being called 'Sir' all the time. On the other hand, many of those I dealt with were mind-bogglingly incompetent. Many operated by a fixed set of written rules and were unable or unwilling to deal with any situation not dealt with on their crib sheet. Another anecdote: I mailed the webmaster of an outfit that mails me an informative blurb on a daily basis when I noticed that the 'Subject' line was (all of a sudden) being truncated if that subject was more than one word. Thought I'd give him a heads up so he could fix this embarrassing little bug. Days later, I got a response to the effect of, "we can't do anything about this. Our software always shortens the subject to one word when it's more than one word."
So between Germany and the US (and from my admittely limited sample space), one gets the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea; between knowledgeable but lazy and annoying service people, and smiling minimum-wage goofballs.
To quote one 'Madpride' from another board:
What time zone is that time in?
I heard a news commentary last night that seemed reasonably well informed to me. They said that the frequency of tropical storms (i.e. the reason they're running out of names at the moment) varies in a natural cycle which is probably not noticeably affected by temperature. On the other hand, the severity of the storms is directly a function of their energy, which they get from warm tropical water, which is directly affected by temperature.
If this is true and if global temperatures are affected by CO2 emissions, then human activity is probably causing these storms to be (on the average) more severe.
While I feel sympathy for the poor bastards suffering in NOLA and elsewhere, I feel it's a good thing that Katrina is making Americans sit up and think about possible connections between environmental cause and meteorological effect. It's human nature to tend not to think much about things that don't affect one personally. I wonder how GWB's stance on emissions would be affected if a storm were to dismantle his ranch in Crawford?
syukton, you absolutely deserve the "+5 Informative" you got on your post. Most of what you said is correct, and you provide an abundance of information. However, I believe I served my parent poster better than you did, by not swamping him with information he may not know what to do with. I based the level of my response on his claim of not even knowing whether to wire in series or parallel. I'm happy to see he plans to go off and learn some EE basics now; that should help him put both my information and yours in perspective.
I know my Ohm's Law at least as well as the next guy, and it so happens that just a couple of weeks ago I helped someone calculate/select the appropriate voltage drop resistor he needed to run a single LED off a 24V supply. Knowing the current rating of the LED(s) involved makes such a question amenable to being treated as an exact science.
However, knowing nothing about the parent poster's LEDs, not knowing what he knows and not wanting to confuse him too much, I chose the pragmatic approach and suggested a setup that will let him experiment in a way that will at least light up his LEDs and give them a fighting chance to survive for a few minutes. If his LEDs become amazingly bright but expire after a short time, I trust he'll consider fine-tuning the circuit.
My principle was that, once you get past the diode's cutoff voltage, the internal resistance of a LED is at least vaguely linear. So the voltage drop across LEDs will go up as the current goes up, eventually limiting current just as surely as if you were to control the current instead of the voltage. You'll notice that, while not resorting to chemistry (or mention of the fact that blue light photons carry more energy than red), I mentioned that red LEDs usually take a little less voltage than blue.
So: I take exception to your contemptuous and thoughtless labelling of my entire post as incorrect. It was simplistic, to be sure, but based on excellent knowledge of the subject matter and solid pragmatic reasoning.
Something interesting and useful to know is that one LED takes about 1.5 volts to operate. Red ones take a little less, blue ones a bit more. If you want to hook LED's to a 12V source, you need to hook about 8 of them in series, that is, end-to-end in a daisy chain. Note that LEDs have polarity, i.e. they will only light up if the correct end of the LED is hooked up to plus. So you need to hook the short lead on one LED to the long one on the next, consistently. If your power supply is AC, this still needs to be observed, but then it doesn't matter which end of the chain goes to which pin of the power supply.
If you want to hook up even more LEDs, then you should hook up several such 8-LED chains in parallel to your power supply.
While I'm happy that these hard-working academics were successful, I can't help but note the downside to this development.
Forget military applications. What I foresee is that, for computer scientists who've lost their jobs to outsourcing, this will deprive them of one more alternative, namely a career as a taxi/truck/bus/etc driver.
The grandparent is mildly funny but not a bit insightful, probably because the poster is unaware of the physics behind static electricity.
First, the idea of using static electricity to power devices inside a human is pretty hard to implement because in order to be useful, a device would need to be connected to both of the mutually charged components, and that potential difference will have to be transformed into DC at the battery's voltage of around 1-9 V.
Whichever piece of clothing is on the person's skin will have the same potential as that person, whose body is highly conductive as far as static electricity is concerned. That takes care of one side, as our device is already very well connected to the human.
So how will one gain access to the charge on the other piece of clothing? Have the person wear a layer of tinfoil over the outer garment? Sounds less than practical in the summertime. Have him drag a metal chain over any carpets he walks over? Folks, we're trying to improve quality of life here, not worsen it.
Now, having a charge of a few microcoulombs with a potential difference of maybe 20,000 volts, how are we going to transform it to a usefully large current at battery voltage? Hint: Transformers need AC to work, not DC. The microelectronics used to chop up DC into AC hate high voltages.
There's a reason why there are no (or virtually no) applications that use lightning or static electricity as an energy source.
I believe there's not a country on Earth where you would be punished for saying "GEORGE BUSH IS AN IDIOT!!!"
People would not be nearly so upset if "eminent domain" were being applied in the sense of the Constitution, as above. People are upset that "public" is being construed to be synonymous with "commercial".
There's not a damn thing wrong with the Constitution. There is lots wrong with how politicians are finding ways to weasel around it.
We're talking about the future of the Internet here, you're talking about the past of the US. Look around yourself and tell me what's left of your individual rights after subtracting out the DMCA, PATRIOT, Eminent Domain and other Constitution-defying laws!
As for "the only country"... where did you learn this, the National Enquirer?
Is there a third alternative? Maybe decentralized governance? Self-governance? A meritocracy? Unpaid volunteership? Management by 1000 chimpanzees randomly pushing buttons?
The Internet is important to me. I'll feel troubled so long as I don't see an approach that works well and efficiently, is relatively bias and value neutral and allows reasonable freedom and privacy to the average user.
I read the reports once in a while: The winners, or close-to-finishers, are huge SUVs filled with computers and special-purpose sensory equipment. What this tells me is that today's computer technology still has trouble, in many cubic feet of space, and with practically unlimited electrical power, to find realtime solutions for a problem that even severely IQ handicapped humans handle routinely while balancing a McMeal on their knees and keeping up a cell phone conversation. I would wager that, with a fair amount of training and suitable controls, even a dog could handle the task. So...
Did AI research implode for lack of funding, or is it really that hard? Will we need Cray-like computing power to handle the sensory input quickly enough to work a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal? Or has this problem simply never been tackled by sufficiently big money? And, given the obvious military implications and a $400 Billion military budget alone, why not?
All these questions are quite serious, and I'd be interested in hearing answers.
Perhaps I'm not a typical consumer, but my buying style works pretty well without marketing. I put together my own PCs once in a while, and for other people too. I never study ads for things like graphics cards, and rarely reviews. Occasionally I'll listen to word-of-mouth recommendations by friends. I've discovered that very often the product I found in a review or ad is not available from my local hardware junk shop. So I go in there and say something like,
I may refuse ATI cards because I have had some bad experience with the intrusive and overblown driver and utility installation. nVidia software seems to install more smoothly for me, and I usually manage to integrate their (closed source) drivers into Linux as well.
In summary: As far as I'm concerned, and regarding graphics cards and other hardware, advertisement is completely wasted. Yet I'm still forced to pay for it.
Your reply is silly, for the following reason:
R&D makes a product better. Employees put the product together. Advertising doesn't create product, nor does it make it better - it just drives the price up.
Thus, my complaint about the unnecessary price bloat due to advertising cannot logically be extended to apply to R&D and other aspects of product creation.
...with JUnit 3, they have to go and improve it. I'll be eating my heart out for a while, because my company will surely not go to Java 5 before Java 6 is out, so these mentioned features will not be available to me. And when they are, I'll have to change my modus operandi.
Actually: Nice work, guys. I'll probably appreciate this once I get a chance to use it and wrap my head around it.
I've recently had my eyes opened, by this article, to the hidden costs of advertising.
My own executive summary: Advertising makes products more expensive, because corporations that advertise their products sure as hell don't pay for the ads out of their own pockets.
Meaning: Any money going into gaming (and advertising therein) is going to jack up the price of the advertised products. So if I buy those products, I have to pay a few elite whoring twitch wizards whether I want to or not.
My personal conclusion: I'm buying even fewer games than before. (Gives the finger to (a small subset of) Corporate scum)
Google has, in fact, already quietly renamed their service to GoogleMail in Germany, where some other shmuck laid claim to the G. Pre-existing GMail accounts in Germany, such as my own, were left unchanged, but for the past month or so, new accounts have magically become GoogleMail accounts.
/. over it when it happened here. I was annoyed, but WTF?
I guess nobody thought to make a fuss on
I foresee that criminally insane bastard causing destruction such as the world has never seen. Expect casualty counts in the hundreds of millions. Expect a return to the Dark Ages. If your family survives at all, expect your children to lead short, tragic lives.
Religions that claim the end of the world is nigh are laughable, up until the point where men in high places are given the means to directly bring it about.
Science has always been linked to politics: Think back to the astronomers who aligned the Pyramids, to the alchemists working to make gold for the king... a little more recently, politics almost got Galileo (Copernicus?) burnt at the stake.
I believe Scientific American started fighting back at the same time as science came under heavy political attack in the United States. Politics is influencing science heavily, and may I add, heavy-handedly. Some examples off the top of my head:
- funding for the Batavia (?) accelerator, slashed in mid-construction;
- funding for the repair of Hubble, jeopardized;
- funding for stem cell research, limited to a handful of mostly-useless lines;
- a push for the teaching of Creationism as "science" in Kansas schools;
- funding, fercryingoutloud, of the Voyager project slashed or jeopardized. I'm talking about this probe that has been travelling outward for 20 years now and is just hitting the outer limits of the solar system. It only costs a few million each year to capture the signals, and we won't have another opportunity for at least another 20 years!
- denial of visas to foreign students and scientists willing to study in the US;
- the de-emphasis, both in corporations and at the government level, of pure research in favor of applied research, with a narrow sub-focus on technology with military applications.
The former schoolyard bullies who kicked nerds around in the schoolyard are now politicians, and they continue to kick science around. As someone who believes in the scientific method and the untold benefits it has brought mankind, I am distressed that science is given short shrift in what claims to be the most developed nation on the planet. I feel that science needs to fight back to maintain its standing, and the first logical measure is to make the public aware of what's happening. As a long-time subscriber to Scientific American, I am grateful to them for struffling to advocate science.One thing I've done to contribute in a small way was to buy the book The Republican War on Science. Not so much to learn something new, but to support the author and to send a message to Amazon (and maybe beyond, who knows?) that people care about science. I've also bought a gift copy for an interested friend, and am thinking of buying more for others.
I realize that there are some differences, such as the fact that the red carpet is only rolled out for extensions the user trusts, but... when you advertise Firefox to dummies, your trusting users will BE dummies!
We need more research?
How much more will we need to convince you? And what happens if it reaches the conclusion that the time spent researching should have been spent averting the catastrophe?
Burning the fossils of millions of years in just a couple of centuries is a very unbalancing thing to do, and Western civilization's dependence on Middle Eastern oil is not helping world peace either. Whatever stops both is probably a Good Thing, and may just save our collective butts.
Google is about making information available. Microsoft is about selling Windows. They're not in the same business.
Microsoft is unlikely to make a REALLY significant dent in, what so far has been rather foreign territory, breathless news blurbs notwithstanding.