Mac OS X has a dumb little icon that leaps and jumps and bounces and begs for attention any time an update is ready. It's impossible to ignore. When the update applies itself and wants a reboot, your only options are "shutdown" and "restart." There's no "cancel" option.
What are you talking about? I've been using Mac OS X since the Public Beta, and there's ALWAYS been an option to close out the Software Update window and ignore anything you don't want (like iPod software updates). It used to be called "Cancel" before 10.3, and it used to pop up an "Are you sure?" window before letting itself be closed. In 10.3, it's just a "Quit" button and it goes away without double-checking.
Do you somehow have your system set up to auto-install updates?
So you mean civilization will nearly be brought to the brink of extinction by an unknown plague only to have it mysteriously mutate completely and in unison to a rubber-eating form just in time for the total cop-out ending?
Well, no one said that they were going to make these weapons anytime soon, I hope. I think this is just more "won't it be cool when we can do this" planning.
Rates of crimes other than murder are significantly higher in much of Europe than in the US. In addition, crime rates in the US have been dropping dramatically while those in Europe have been increasing.
Prepared to refute you with data from the United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network's statistics page, I found that a lot of what you said to be true -- except maybe the "significantly much higher" bit. The USA has hovered at about 5-6K crimes per 100K people with a slight decreasing trend, while all EU member nations have seen between 10%-50% increase in crime from 1980 to 1997.
However, in terms of violent crime, the USA is still king. Our murder, rape, and robbery rates are from 4-10 times larger than in EU states, and our incarceration rates are 7 times that of European nations outside of the former Warsaw Pact states. Apparently, while crime is more prolific in Europe (in spite of our much harsher drug laws), they are overwhelmingly not serious crimes.
Now, Japan is another story entirely. Crime rates in Japan went from about 11 in 1000 to 15 in 1000 over the same period of time. Violent crimes are nearly nonexistant (though on the rise). Having been to Japan, I can say that you really could leave a wallet on the bar without much worry in most places in Tokyo (and Sendai too). This is becoming less and less true now as a younger, less traditional generation is supplanting the values of the old, but Japan is much, much safer than America.
Your reaction? "HOLY FLURKING SHNIT!" What ya gonna do about it? You'd instantly realize you're way the hell out of your league.
Yeah, after all, being completely out of your league has worked soooooo well to stop terrorism in Israel, hasn't it?
Don't you understand that the entire reason war is being waged with terrorism is because disaffected people know that they're out of their league? If the Arabs could rise up, launch an military strike to drive Israel out of their homeland that they'd have done it? Oh, wait -- they already tried that for 60+ years and failed. Suicide bombing didn't start until 1994 in Afula and are a sign of desperation from an impoverished and vastly outgunned population against a nation backed with technology from the world's greatest superpower.
Why did Al-Qai'da use our own civilian planes against us? Because they didn't have the ability to do anything else to us. Orbital weaponry is a deterrent against nations and armies and not against terrorists.
FoxNews is worse than the Pravda. Every now and then the Pravda throws in stories about aliens or little girls with X-ray vision to keep the readers from getting TOO gullible. FoxNews doesn't provide that kind of disclaimer on its own credibility, preferring to skirt the line while claiming to be "fair" and "balanced."
Instead we [...] set the stage for the rise of radical Islam which may very well prove to be the death of us all one day.
Thanks a lot Reagan.
Oh, that would've happened anyway outside of the context of the Cold War. Our support of Israel was at best tangetially related to the Cold War as we would've been interested in Middle East oil without the Soviet threat. That has been the festering wound in the side of Islamic fundamentalists the whole time. Very little of our Mideast policy has been dictated by Cold War politics -- neither the Six Day War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War I & II, nor our support of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
True, Al Qai'da might not be so powerful without the Cold War. We did train and arm the Afghani religious fighters to repel the Soviets -- soldiers who later would form the core of Al-Qai'da. However, their motives of a borderless worldwide sharia state would have always been opposed to our own goals of consumerist Western democracy as well as those of atheist Communists. (I highly recommend the book "Jihad vs. McWorld" for a good overview of the cultural divide separating the modern world.) Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise for decades and is the new "sleeping dragon" of world politics.
We can blame our acts in the Cold War for destroying Southeast Asia and South America, but the problem of Islam is one that both sides would have to face eventually, especially considering the oppression of Muslims in Chechnya and Soviet interference in Afghanistan.
It might be legal, but I don't see the point nor the ethics.
Ah, here's where I can help. You see, dropping (or active shooting) darts from orbit has several military uses. The primary one of which is "bunker-busting." Currently, this is carried out by heavily armored conventional weapons, but there are bunkers today which cannot be cracked by these weapons such as those possessed by Kim Jong Il, and (I believe) NORAD, the central US military command center. Such weapons would've also been useful for smashing into the caves to get the Taleban in Afghanistan.
Bush's administration has considered weasiling around, bending, or outright breaking treaties on nuclear weapons by using low-yield nuclear bombs (mini-nukes) to crack the deeper and more hardened bunkers. However, dropping weighted "darts" offers far more punch without any radioactive fallout, thus being far more diplomatically viable. Sure, any weapon is designed to kill people, but at least a space-based projectile is less likely to cause permanent health hazards to an area.
The US has already won the arms race, yet they still want to enlarge that gap. [...] Why do they need so much weapons if it isn't for world domination?
Of course. It's not the nicest policy in the world, but it's the most strategically sound one. Clashes of culture and morals or battles over limited resources (which may become more important in the future) are inevitable, and so is war if other people think that they can beat you. A country who is militarily undefeatable is one that is most likely to win any conflict diplomatically through intimidation. (The only other two options are concession or war.) Regardless of any of the professed morals of their citizens, the goal of any culture is domination of the world by its viewpoint. America is just acting on that interest a little more blatantly than most.
I'm not fond of it myself either, but that's the point and the ethics.
But do you really think HardOCP was intending to drive business away from Infinium?
Oh yes, very clearly. HardOCP was essentially pointing out that the company was as much of a Phantom as its namesake product. It had no offices to speak of at the time the article was written, only a mail box. That casts serious doubt on them having actually had a research lab and employees at the time, especially because they claimed to already have an office, when they didn't.
Additionally, they cast very serious doubt on the credibility of the chief executive of the company's competence by listing all the failed businesses he worked at, and pointing out that of all the ones that still exist, he had relatives there in high places (implicating nepotism) or they are hardly considered successful.
The article was a very compelling argument that he shouldn't be trusted with investor's money, and HardOCP even went so far as to warn that investors tossing money at Tim Roberts were "throwing the dice."
Malice is easy to prove. The falsity of their claims is not, and is the strongest part of HardOCP's case against Infinium. You can be as utterly malevolent as you want so long as you never lie.
Americans who knock more traditional British cuisine should keep their mouths shut because burgers and chicken fried chicken/steak are hardly an improvement.
Ignoring that burgers have their roots in German cooking and that breaded, fried foods have their roots in African/slave cooking, neither of these things are very good in fast food format, which is probably what you're used to eating. Homemade versions of those are pretty good, and will knock the socks off of traditional haggis, blood sausages, blood pudding, and the other Horrors of Meat that Americans usually associate with "British Cooking." Of course, the usual American image of British cooking is blissfully ignorant of a fine tradition of mouth-watering desserts and a wide variety of foods that we both share in common.
As for the bigotry/racism comment, calling those cuisines "not British" is a cultural difference, not a matter of xenophobia. Americans eat a huge variety of foreign foods, though Chinese, Italian, and Mexican are by far the dominant three. Our own so-called "American Cuisine" may be from so many different European (and other) immigrant backgrounds, but by and large what we consider American cooking is what was commonly spread outside of various ethnic subcommunities by the end of the 19th century at about the time that being an American really gelled as an identity.
Accordingly, even though Americans consume more salsa than any other condiment, we don't consider a lot of cooking that didn't make it into that window of time to be "American," even though American version of Chinese and Mexican food are radically different from the foods cooked in their homelands (ironically, as part of tailoring the food to less adventures generations in the past). As such, even though Indian, Middle Eastern, and American foods have become part of the British landscape, we sort of apply that same division between "traditional" and "foreign" to your own foods as well. It's not a racist slur filled with hate for Britain's newest demographics, it's just applying our own standards in describing another culture. That's all.
Of course all this ignores the fact that the poster who spawned this whole sub-thread by listing foods of foreign origin as examples of good British food was making an obvious joke.
(P.S. If you want a better example of uniquely American food, try barbeque. It has its origins in Native American cooking techniques, and it has many, many uniquely local variations across the American landscape.)
Actually, the HardOCP article is more of an attack on the credibility of the founder of the company. While it's nothing but a listing of hard facts, it paints a very bleak picture of Tim Robert's competence as an entrepreneur. Essentially, it charges that many of the companies he worked for were failures, and the only ones which are still operational (or could at least be contacted) had family members working in high places there. The only exception to this is a company that went IPO a couple of years after he left and then sunk to the point of being threatened with delisting. They basically come out and say that the man is a multi-time loser who has wasted millions of investor dollars and whose business doesn't even have a physical office -- just a bunch of press releases.
As a news organization, HardOCP has a lot going for them in a slander/libel case. The only thing I think which they might be liable on is the implication (not a direct statement) that Tim Roberts being at WorldCom was somehow related to the bankruptcy of WorldCom.
As for the trademark violations, IANAL, so I don't know how liable a news organization can be for using a company's name and logo in a report without their permission. I doubt that they're going to be in any serious trouble, so long as they go back and place "tm's" on everything, but trademark law has surprised me many times before.
So I guess this would explain the state of school systems and education in general.
"OK kids, for next week you need to write a 2 page report on the latest 'Britney' CD."
You do know that the RIAA also sells classical music, audiobooks, educational children's songs, discs that teach you how to learn to speak a foreign language, and all sorts of other material than the latest pop music, right?
Maybe if your education and purchasing habits were broader and deeper, you'd know these things and appreciate that there actually is a wealth of material that the RIAA could donate to schools.
(Of course, I'll bet you that it's still a slap on the wrist because the value of the discs for purposes of the settlement is probably the value they sell them for instead of make them for, but I digress.)
"Lucas' Neck Has Asserting Increasing Influence"
on
Skywalker Ranch Wines
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I've always been fond of "It's Walky's" interpretation of why Lucas movies has sucked more and more over time.
That's pretty amusing but did the editors actually read this story before posting it? "Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!"
Hey, by Hollywood's standards, that's full-on "crypto-hacking." That's only one step away from using your Flash-powered Mac laptop to reroute a Pepsi bottling plant's deliveries via a VR accousticly-coupled net uplink to send all the winning bottles to your house.
And if you think that drinking any cola is only slightly preferable to sucking the sweat from Steve Ballmer's jock strap, then you'be just wasted 21c on sink corrosive.
Then buy Sierra Mist, Mountain Dew, or Slice. Now if your problem is with carbonated beverages instead of colas, you're S.O.L.
What happens if... humanity exhales a huge collective sigh of relief?!?
According to some "back of the envelope" math that I found on Google, the breaths of human beings contribute 0.000036% of the worlds carbon dioxide supply per day (which balances out with the fact that all the carbon they exhale comes from eating plants or things that eat plants).
If you drop that down to a single collective simultenous breath, we all put out about 2.9 million liters of carbon dioxide or about the amount equal to the emissions from burning a little over 2 metric tonnes of coal which I believe is worth ~2 hours of running a megawatt capacity coal power plant.
There's a difference between insisting and insisting with lawyers.
Yeah, that difference is having a legal leg to stand on. At this point, Linux can legally call itself anything it wants, and he can't stop them from doing so thanks to his own license, because it would violate the "further restrictions" clause of section 6.
He could change the GPL, but isn't really tenable at this point considering that such a change would automatically render the new version incompatible with all the code licensed under the old versions by section 6 unless the code specifically said that it was licensed under a specific revision or any later revisions as under section 9.
In other words, Stallman insists on it as much as he can get away with. Lawyers would do nothing but make his cause look bad and drain him of money without gaining him a thing.
All the runaway effects happen over a short period of time and happen when equilibrium is upset. The readjustment back to conditions more like the present day takes from thousands to millions of years. Usually, however, this involves the death of many, many species that can't adapt and the quick rush to fill missing niches of the species which can.
Basically, surviving plant species and aerobic bacteria can slowly crank down the temperature by flourishing in the carbon and methane rich atmosphere. Essentially, living things are all that keep this planet from being an unlivable hellhole for human life.
Oh, it gets even better. Here's another nasty feedback loop.
Many people are unaware that fully one third of the world's biomass is taken up by methane-metabolizing microbes of the Arcaea family -- close ancestors to the lifeforms that dominated the Earth before the evolution of plant species forever changed us from a primarily methane atmosphere to one of oxygen, CO2, and nitrogen. Marine biologists have only become fully aware of their existence in the past few decades. Buy this month's Discover magazine for more info.
To sum up some of the info there, these Archaea produce methane from decomposing plankton that falls from above. These methane molecules gets trapped in a cage of water molecules and create an ice-like substance called methane hydrate, which forms underthe high pressure and low temperatures of the ocean depths. This frozen material is considered to be the largest store of organic carbon on the planet.
For decades, global warming researches have noticed that the geological record shows massive increases of methane in times of global warming. Slow warming of the waters at the depths of the ocean (which normally happens over thousands of years) leads to a melting of the methane and a worldwide release of methane -- an extremely potent greenhouse gas which will only make global warming worse. This happens every now and then in the geological record, and it coincides with some levels of global warming and usually with some level of mass extinction. In fact, the Earth's greatest mass extiction event may have been caused by a huge methane eruption that wiped out 95% of all sea life and 70% of all land life.
Read this account of the KDE team meeting with Stallman. Note how one of the first topics he discusses with them is whether they say "GNU/Linux" or just "Linux" and whether they say "Free Software" or "Open Source Software." That's pretty innocuous and fair to say, but also notice how he is willing to get on a guy's case for having a bookmarks folder in his web browser named "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux." That's extremely anal, even if done in jest -- a thing which Stallman is not known for.
He also refused to speak at the Sheffeild Linux Users Group unless they switched to using "GNU/Linux" back in 2000. (They gave in, and he spoke there.) That qualifies as insisting to me.
Though it's quite likely that the original poster was implying that XML is inherently arcane, "some arcane XML format" only explicitly states that it is probable that the new config file that uses XML will be arcane on its own merits.
Also, having to mentally parse out the valuable info -- "ZAxisMapping = 4.5" -- from the surrounding detritus -- " -- is tiring on the eyes and mind, and all that extra tag junk makes it hard to format all the information in such a way that makes it easy for the eyes to flow over it as you can fit less info that matters per line.
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Mac OS X has a dumb little icon that leaps and jumps and bounces and begs for attention any time an update is ready. It's impossible to ignore. When the update applies itself and wants a reboot, your only options are "shutdown" and "restart." There's no "cancel" option.
What are you talking about? I've been using Mac OS X since the Public Beta, and there's ALWAYS been an option to close out the Software Update window and ignore anything you don't want (like iPod software updates). It used to be called "Cancel" before 10.3, and it used to pop up an "Are you sure?" window before letting itself be closed. In 10.3, it's just a "Quit" button and it goes away without double-checking.
Do you somehow have your system set up to auto-install updates?
Seriously, how much dust is in OUR solar system, and does this predict the existence of planetary systems like ours?
So you mean civilization will nearly be brought to the brink of extinction by an unknown plague only to have it mysteriously mutate completely and in unison to a rubber-eating form just in time for the total cop-out ending?
Well, no one said that they were going to make these weapons anytime soon, I hope. I think this is just more "won't it be cool when we can do this" planning.
Because Sun Drop has more caffeine, costs less, and has that same refreshing lemon-battery acid flavor?
Rates of crimes other than murder are significantly higher in much of Europe than in the US. In addition, crime rates in the US have been dropping dramatically while those in Europe have been increasing.
Prepared to refute you with data from the United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network's statistics page, I found that a lot of what you said to be true -- except maybe the "significantly much higher" bit. The USA has hovered at about 5-6K crimes per 100K people with a slight decreasing trend, while all EU member nations have seen between 10%-50% increase in crime from 1980 to 1997.
However, in terms of violent crime, the USA is still king. Our murder, rape, and robbery rates are from 4-10 times larger than in EU states, and our incarceration rates are 7 times that of European nations outside of the former Warsaw Pact states. Apparently, while crime is more prolific in Europe (in spite of our much harsher drug laws), they are overwhelmingly not serious crimes.
Now, Japan is another story entirely. Crime rates in Japan went from about 11 in 1000 to 15 in 1000 over the same period of time. Violent crimes are nearly nonexistant (though on the rise). Having been to Japan, I can say that you really could leave a wallet on the bar without much worry in most places in Tokyo (and Sendai too). This is becoming less and less true now as a younger, less traditional generation is supplanting the values of the old, but Japan is much, much safer than America.
Your reaction? "HOLY FLURKING SHNIT!" What ya gonna do about it? You'd instantly realize you're way the hell out of your league.
Yeah, after all, being completely out of your league has worked soooooo well to stop terrorism in Israel, hasn't it?
Don't you understand that the entire reason war is being waged with terrorism is because disaffected people know that they're out of their league? If the Arabs could rise up, launch an military strike to drive Israel out of their homeland that they'd have done it? Oh, wait -- they already tried that for 60+ years and failed. Suicide bombing didn't start until 1994 in Afula and are a sign of desperation from an impoverished and vastly outgunned population against a nation backed with technology from the world's greatest superpower.
Why did Al-Qai'da use our own civilian planes against us? Because they didn't have the ability to do anything else to us. Orbital weaponry is a deterrent against nations and armies and not against terrorists.
Some people have no sense of irony.
FoxNews is worse than the Pravda. Every now and then the Pravda throws in stories about aliens or little girls with X-ray vision to keep the readers from getting TOO gullible. FoxNews doesn't provide that kind of disclaimer on its own credibility, preferring to skirt the line while claiming to be "fair" and "balanced."
Instead we [...] set the stage for the rise of radical Islam which may very well prove to be the death of us all one day.
Thanks a lot Reagan.
Oh, that would've happened anyway outside of the context of the Cold War. Our support of Israel was at best tangetially related to the Cold War as we would've been interested in Middle East oil without the Soviet threat. That has been the festering wound in the side of Islamic fundamentalists the whole time. Very little of our Mideast policy has been dictated by Cold War politics -- neither the Six Day War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War I & II, nor our support of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
True, Al Qai'da might not be so powerful without the Cold War. We did train and arm the Afghani religious fighters to repel the Soviets -- soldiers who later would form the core of Al-Qai'da. However, their motives of a borderless worldwide sharia state would have always been opposed to our own goals of consumerist Western democracy as well as those of atheist Communists. (I highly recommend the book "Jihad vs. McWorld" for a good overview of the cultural divide separating the modern world.) Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise for decades and is the new "sleeping dragon" of world politics.
We can blame our acts in the Cold War for destroying Southeast Asia and South America, but the problem of Islam is one that both sides would have to face eventually, especially considering the oppression of Muslims in Chechnya and Soviet interference in Afghanistan.
It might be legal, but I don't see the point nor the ethics.
Ah, here's where I can help. You see, dropping (or active shooting) darts from orbit has several military uses. The primary one of which is "bunker-busting." Currently, this is carried out by heavily armored conventional weapons, but there are bunkers today which cannot be cracked by these weapons such as those possessed by Kim Jong Il, and (I believe) NORAD, the central US military command center. Such weapons would've also been useful for smashing into the caves to get the Taleban in Afghanistan.
Bush's administration has considered weasiling around, bending, or outright breaking treaties on nuclear weapons by using low-yield nuclear bombs (mini-nukes) to crack the deeper and more hardened bunkers. However, dropping weighted "darts" offers far more punch without any radioactive fallout, thus being far more diplomatically viable. Sure, any weapon is designed to kill people, but at least a space-based projectile is less likely to cause permanent health hazards to an area.
The US has already won the arms race, yet they still want to enlarge that gap. [...] Why do they need so much weapons if it isn't for world domination?
Of course. It's not the nicest policy in the world, but it's the most strategically sound one. Clashes of culture and morals or battles over limited resources (which may become more important in the future) are inevitable, and so is war if other people think that they can beat you. A country who is militarily undefeatable is one that is most likely to win any conflict diplomatically through intimidation. (The only other two options are concession or war.) Regardless of any of the professed morals of their citizens, the goal of any culture is domination of the world by its viewpoint. America is just acting on that interest a little more blatantly than most.
I'm not fond of it myself either, but that's the point and the ethics.
But do you really think HardOCP was intending to drive business away from Infinium?
Oh yes, very clearly. HardOCP was essentially pointing out that the company was as much of a Phantom as its namesake product. It had no offices to speak of at the time the article was written, only a mail box. That casts serious doubt on them having actually had a research lab and employees at the time, especially because they claimed to already have an office, when they didn't.
Additionally, they cast very serious doubt on the credibility of the chief executive of the company's competence by listing all the failed businesses he worked at, and pointing out that of all the ones that still exist, he had relatives there in high places (implicating nepotism) or they are hardly considered successful.
The article was a very compelling argument that he shouldn't be trusted with investor's money, and HardOCP even went so far as to warn that investors tossing money at Tim Roberts were "throwing the dice."
Malice is easy to prove. The falsity of their claims is not, and is the strongest part of HardOCP's case against Infinium. You can be as utterly malevolent as you want so long as you never lie.
Americans who knock more traditional British cuisine should keep their mouths shut because burgers and chicken fried chicken/steak are hardly an improvement.
Ignoring that burgers have their roots in German cooking and that breaded, fried foods have their roots in African/slave cooking, neither of these things are very good in fast food format, which is probably what you're used to eating. Homemade versions of those are pretty good, and will knock the socks off of traditional haggis, blood sausages, blood pudding, and the other Horrors of Meat that Americans usually associate with "British Cooking." Of course, the usual American image of British cooking is blissfully ignorant of a fine tradition of mouth-watering desserts and a wide variety of foods that we both share in common.
As for the bigotry/racism comment, calling those cuisines "not British" is a cultural difference, not a matter of xenophobia. Americans eat a huge variety of foreign foods, though Chinese, Italian, and Mexican are by far the dominant three. Our own so-called "American Cuisine" may be from so many different European (and other) immigrant backgrounds, but by and large what we consider American cooking is what was commonly spread outside of various ethnic subcommunities by the end of the 19th century at about the time that being an American really gelled as an identity.
Accordingly, even though Americans consume more salsa than any other condiment, we don't consider a lot of cooking that didn't make it into that window of time to be "American," even though American version of Chinese and Mexican food are radically different from the foods cooked in their homelands (ironically, as part of tailoring the food to less adventures generations in the past). As such, even though Indian, Middle Eastern, and American foods have become part of the British landscape, we sort of apply that same division between "traditional" and "foreign" to your own foods as well. It's not a racist slur filled with hate for Britain's newest demographics, it's just applying our own standards in describing another culture. That's all.
Of course all this ignores the fact that the poster who spawned this whole sub-thread by listing foods of foreign origin as examples of good British food was making an obvious joke.
(P.S. If you want a better example of uniquely American food, try barbeque. It has its origins in Native American cooking techniques, and it has many, many uniquely local variations across the American landscape.)
Actually, the HardOCP article is more of an attack on the credibility of the founder of the company. While it's nothing but a listing of hard facts, it paints a very bleak picture of Tim Robert's competence as an entrepreneur. Essentially, it charges that many of the companies he worked for were failures, and the only ones which are still operational (or could at least be contacted) had family members working in high places there. The only exception to this is a company that went IPO a couple of years after he left and then sunk to the point of being threatened with delisting. They basically come out and say that the man is a multi-time loser who has wasted millions of investor dollars and whose business doesn't even have a physical office -- just a bunch of press releases.
As a news organization, HardOCP has a lot going for them in a slander/libel case. The only thing I think which they might be liable on is the implication (not a direct statement) that Tim Roberts being at WorldCom was somehow related to the bankruptcy of WorldCom.
As for the trademark violations, IANAL, so I don't know how liable a news organization can be for using a company's name and logo in a report without their permission. I doubt that they're going to be in any serious trouble, so long as they go back and place "tm's" on everything, but trademark law has surprised me many times before.
What, are they gonna sue Penny Arcade too?
Dude, Whoa
I Hate The Stupid Phantom
So I guess this would explain the state of school systems and education in general.
"OK kids, for next week you need to write a 2 page report on the latest 'Britney' CD."
You do know that the RIAA also sells classical music, audiobooks, educational children's songs, discs that teach you how to learn to speak a foreign language, and all sorts of other material than the latest pop music, right?
Maybe if your education and purchasing habits were broader and deeper, you'd know these things and appreciate that there actually is a wealth of material that the RIAA could donate to schools.
(Of course, I'll bet you that it's still a slap on the wrist because the value of the discs for purposes of the settlement is probably the value they sell them for instead of make them for, but I digress.)
Personally, I've always been fond of "It's Walky's" interpretation of why Lucas movies has sucked more and more over time.
That's pretty amusing but did the editors actually read this story before posting it? "Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!"
Hey, by Hollywood's standards, that's full-on "crypto-hacking." That's only one step away from using your Flash-powered Mac laptop to reroute a Pepsi bottling plant's deliveries via a VR accousticly-coupled net uplink to send all the winning bottles to your house.
Hack the planet!
And if you think that drinking any cola is only slightly preferable to sucking the sweat from Steve Ballmer's jock strap, then you'be just wasted 21c on sink corrosive.
Then buy Sierra Mist, Mountain Dew, or Slice.
Now if your problem is with carbonated beverages instead of colas, you're S.O.L.
What happens if ... humanity exhales a huge collective sigh of relief?!?
According to some "back of the envelope" math that I found on Google, the breaths of human beings contribute 0.000036% of the worlds carbon dioxide supply per day (which balances out with the fact that all the carbon they exhale comes from eating plants or things that eat plants).
If you drop that down to a single collective simultenous breath, we all put out about 2.9 million liters of carbon dioxide or about the amount equal to the emissions from burning a little over 2 metric tonnes of coal which I believe is worth ~2 hours of running a megawatt capacity coal power plant.
There's a difference between insisting and insisting with lawyers.
Yeah, that difference is having a legal leg to stand on. At this point, Linux can legally call itself anything it wants, and he can't stop them from doing so thanks to his own license, because it would violate the "further restrictions" clause of section 6.
He could change the GPL, but isn't really tenable at this point considering that such a change would automatically render the new version incompatible with all the code licensed under the old versions by section 6 unless the code specifically said that it was licensed under a specific revision or any later revisions as under section 9.
In other words, Stallman insists on it as much as he can get away with. Lawyers would do nothing but make his cause look bad and drain him of money without gaining him a thing.
All the runaway effects happen over a short period of time and happen when equilibrium is upset. The readjustment back to conditions more like the present day takes from thousands to millions of years. Usually, however, this involves the death of many, many species that can't adapt and the quick rush to fill missing niches of the species which can.
Basically, surviving plant species and aerobic bacteria can slowly crank down the temperature by flourishing in the carbon and methane rich atmosphere. Essentially, living things are all that keep this planet from being an unlivable hellhole for human life.
Oh, it gets even better. Here's another nasty feedback loop.
Many people are unaware that fully one third of the world's biomass is taken up by methane-metabolizing microbes of the Arcaea family -- close ancestors to the lifeforms that dominated the Earth before the evolution of plant species forever changed us from a primarily methane atmosphere to one of oxygen, CO2, and nitrogen. Marine biologists have only become fully aware of their existence in the past few decades. Buy this month's Discover magazine for more info.
To sum up some of the info there, these Archaea produce methane from decomposing plankton that falls from above. These methane molecules gets trapped in a cage of water molecules and create an ice-like substance called methane hydrate, which forms underthe high pressure and low temperatures of the ocean depths. This frozen material is considered to be the largest store of organic carbon on the planet.
For decades, global warming researches have noticed that the geological record shows massive increases of methane in times of global warming. Slow warming of the waters at the depths of the ocean (which normally happens over thousands of years) leads to a melting of the methane and a worldwide release of methane -- an extremely potent greenhouse gas which will only make global warming worse. This happens every now and then in the geological record, and it coincides with some levels of global warming and usually with some level of mass extinction. In fact, the Earth's greatest mass extiction event may have been caused by a huge methane eruption that wiped out 95% of all sea life and 70% of all land life.
There's a fine line between asking and insisting.
Read this account of the KDE team meeting with Stallman. Note how one of the first topics he discusses with them is whether they say "GNU/Linux" or just "Linux" and whether they say "Free Software" or "Open Source Software." That's pretty innocuous and fair to say, but also notice how he is willing to get on a guy's case for having a bookmarks folder in his web browser named "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux." That's extremely anal, even if done in jest -- a thing which Stallman is not known for.
He also refused to speak at the Sheffeild Linux Users Group unless they switched to using "GNU/Linux" back in 2000. (They gave in, and he spoke there.) That qualifies as insisting to me.
Though it's quite likely that the original poster was implying that XML is inherently arcane, "some arcane XML format" only explicitly states that it is probable that the new config file that uses XML will be arcane on its own merits.
Also, having to mentally parse out the valuable info -- "ZAxisMapping = 4.5" -- from the surrounding detritus -- " -- is tiring on the eyes and mind, and all that extra tag junk makes it hard to format all the information in such a way that makes it easy for the eyes to flow over it as you can fit less info that matters per line.