I'm thinking it would depend on the country. In the US, it would probably not be illegal in any sense. Privacy is completely upside down there. In Canada, it might be a different story. Companies are only allowed to collect private information with your explicit agreement, and only for the purposes for which permission was given.
Although, judging by your comment you probably also think bin Laden was a CIA agent since the 80s too.
Well, he and his group were well funded and equipped by the CIA in the 80s. So in that regard, he was a CIA "agent", just not in the undercover operative sense. That much is well documented and accepted.
Let's not forget that Oracle pays dividends. Depending on your jurisdiction, dividends are anywhere from tax-free up to a certain amount or are taxed at an extremely preferential rate. The reasoning is that the corp has already paid corporate income tax on the cash being doled out.
I'm not a muslim or an expert in the koran by any means, but isn't that text regarding Mohammed talking to his followers about how they should treat the incumbents when they re-enter Mecca? I believe that Place of Worship business is talking about the Kaaba. Mohammad was forced out of Mecca for a while and founded Medina, then returned after a bit to reclaim Mecca. Seems like pretty standard wartime politics to me for any people of any era.
Anyway, if you can take some text out of context and try to justify your condemnation of an entire people, I think you were already biased to begin with and looking for something with which to justify it. I wonder if you hold similar views about Jews and Christians over Deuteronomy 20 or Americans over Iraq.
Why can't religious people see this as a much, much greater feat of creation, resulting in God being infinitely more omnipotent?
Theologians have been deeply pondering this point for hundreds, if not thousands of years: Whether or not God made a linear story in which we have an unwilling part, predestination, or if we have free will. Both are hinted at in the Bible. In predestination, God is the author of sin, which is distasteful to some. But if free will is truly free, God doesn't know the outcome of decisions that haven't been made yet, and that limits God's omniscience.
One way to reconcile the apparent paradox is to say that, while we as humans can only perceive one branch, God has awareness of every possible branch from the beginning of time to the end. A being that could create a system like that and maintain an awareness of it would be massively omnipotent to the point of being impossible to completely comprehend with the human mind.
Polarization is recognizable when each side can only conceive a charicature of the other. "Religious people" don't conform to one way of thinking any more than "science people" do, nor are the two mutually exclusive.
I think they both have value, but for different reasons.
Facebook allows the expression of what Jungians might call the persona, which is the face we all present to the world. Whether we know it or not, we construct our personas as a mask to protect our real selves. We show the world what we want others to believe about us. Clever people who realize this can quite convincingly construct an almost completely artificial self. Think politicians, business executives, and high-functioning sociopaths.
What I think is more interesting about 4chan and/b/ in particular is that complete anonymity allows for expression of the shadow aspect. I think it's this idea that moot expresses when he describes/b/ as "the internet's dark heart." The thing I find fascinating is that many attributes that we hide from others, that we fear and dislike about ourselves, are common to the human experience.
We conceal things about ourselves in order to form communities and we do it according to what we believe are the standards of that community./b/ is important because it allows us to explore what we have in common without fear of punishment or ostracization.
Terms like that are generally considered unfair and unenforceable, and could render the entire contract null and void. You could sign a contract that gave a person the right under certain conditions to take your children but that wouldn't be enforceable either.
The first one never happened and the second is suing for reinstatement based on violation for his civil rights. He'll win, too.
But while while we're playing "bad argument by analogy" let me have a go and maybe give you a better one. Even a fictional restaurant that may refuse to serve TSA agents can't take a person's money and *then* throw him out without delivering the product that was fairly paid.
That kind of underhanded tactic deserves harsh punishment. EA needs to be called to the carpet for this one.
I think you're trolling. But in case you're not, a car analogy.
If you buy a car from someone and, after the transaction is finished, you turn and say to him, "by the way, I think you're the biggest asshole I've ever met," he doesn't then get to keep your money _and_ take his car back. Not even temporarily as unilaterally imposed penance for the buyer being rude in the sole opinion of the seller.
In fact, I'd be tempted to file a complaint with the credit card company and attempt a chargeback.
This sort of nonsense is exactly why I've cut way back on my games purchases and avoid EA like the plague. They are pure unadulterated evil and have, indeed, sold their corporate soul to the dark one.
This company's financials look dire. About five years ago they were trading near $5 but just last week their stock hit $.05 on news of a financial squabble with a key partner. None of the insiders have bought stock for almost a year.
Sadly, it looks like this company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. I wish it were something worth investing in.
Polygamy is not a merger. Mergers turn multiple entities into one single thing. Polygamy still retains the individual people. The appropriate analogy would be cannibalism, and even that is wrong since mergers are usually mutually beneficial.
One can sort of defend that analogy, actually. In marriage, two people are considered to become "one flesh" under the law. This is why one spouse can't be compelled to testify against the other, since it would be self-incrimination. In marriage, one's spouse's family becomes one's own under the law. One's brother-in-law is indeed one's brother under the law (as opposed to by blood relation). Spouses often refer to their parents-in-law as Mom and Dad. All property and debt becomes that of the union rather than the individual. Each spouse may separately exercise financial operations that confer obligations on both parties.
Or maybe the other way around. I've noticed that when performing an activity that requires your unconscious/autonomic part of your brain to take over, memory recall will actively interfere with your ability to carry out that activity. We usually think of it as confidence or the ability to overcome distraction but I think it really comes down to clearing your mind of conscious thought/memories and allowing your other brain to take over.
Think about what it felt like to learn to type. At first, you had to think about which finger to put where to get the letter you wanted. But at some point, you had to start taking little leaps of faith and stop thinking about it. The same goes for sight reading on the piano. You don't have time to stop and think about what the notes mean and where you have to move your fingers. You have to just/do/ it. And if you start getting plagued with conscious thoughts and memories while you're in a performance, it will cause a distraction and lead to a memory slip, totally derailing the performance. The same goes for carrying a cup of hot coffee up the stairs. If you concentrate on the task of which foot to put on which step and making sure the cup doesn't tilt, you're sure to trip or spill it.
So I don't think it should be any surprise that performing a tetris-like activity supresses memory. Or rather, it requires the suppression of memory to do it well (or at least try to do it well).
I took an ancient, generic 286 computer, and upgraded it through 386SX, 486 DX/2, Cx 6x86, and AMD Athlon motherboards before finally switching to ATX. It was a cheezy, god-only-knows-who-made it power supply that came from a 'not-quite-aluminum-foil' AT case.
I call shenanigans. As I recall, and from what I read on this old Anantech Athlon motherboard review, Athlon motherboards were never produced in an AT form factor, partially due to the fact that AT PSUs were not expected to be able to handle the draw from power hungry athlons.
I also recall #4 having been debunked. Letting the moving parts run 24/7 causes more wear overall than power-up/power-down cycling. You may notice failures more often during a reboot but there's no causal relationship there. In fact, periodic restarts are a good practice to test startup and shutdown routines. 300-day uptimes are wonderful and all but good luck figuring out which of the last 78 changes broke the startup script.
As a Christian, I can tell you my biggest fear and reason I would oppose laboratory cloning of human beings is not about soul or spirit or whatever supernatural issue you're trying to make it into. It's the idea that it is one more step toward production and destruction of human beings in a laboratory.
I would not want any child to have Monsanto as its one and only parent.
The very thought chills me to the bone and it should terrify you, too.
I always thought the Anomaly from the series finale of Star Trek TNG All Good Things... was brilliant. Something caused in the future, growing larger backwards through time to eventually (??) cause humanity to never have existed in the first place. Awesome.
I'm no physicist either but all of this leads one to believe there's something we're not quite getting.
Take for instance the Expanding Universe theory that's based on Hubble's Law. Hubble noted that the measured redshifts of galaxies corresponded very nicely with their apparent brightness. This was interpreted to mean that the more distant the galaxy, the faster it is moving away from us. The problem came in the 60s when quasars were discovered, their redshifts were found to be all over the place and didn't correspond with their brightness at all. Even worse, some quasars are observed to be connected to galaxes and have redshifts that are different by orders of magnitude compared to the nearby connected galaxy. Some physicists have speculated that if Hubble had found and measured quasar redshifts first, the Expanding Universe theory would never have been suggested. And the Big Bang is a conclusion based in part on the Expanding Universe model.
The second problem is there isn't enough stuff out there to cause the increase in acceleration that Expanding Universe needs so "dark matter" was suggested as the culprit. The problem is that dark matter is inherently unobservable. We can't see or measure it. It's simply a fudge factor. That's not the way science is supposed to work when observations don't line up with a theory.
Anyway, there are physicists out there who believe that a badly needed shakeup is coming that will require rethinking everything we thought about cosmology in the last 80 years. Sadly, it's risky for young physicists to practice original, critical thought and potentially embarass well-established, senior physicists who've built their careers around Expanding Universe. Such behaviour is not conducive to grants and tenure.
I highly recommend checking out "Universe - Cosmology Quest" where these points are articulated by people way smarter than me: Dr. Halton C. Arp, Astronomer; Dr. Andre Koch Assis, Plasma Physicist; Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge, Theoretical Astrophysicist; Dr. Margaret Burbidge, Theoretical Astrophysicist; John Dobson, Telescope Designer; Prof. Truls Hansen, Geophysicist; Fred Hoyle, Cosmologist (who first coined the term "Big Bang"); the list goes on.
My experience is that people who help in the name of religion are doing more of a look at me thing. They want to look good and want to go to heaven. It is a peer system like highschool. They want to be cool and in the 'in' crowd. So they go along.
Beyond that, a lot of their 'good' work is used just to push their agenda. Will that christian homeless shelter take in a homeless man who refuses to embrace god? The ones around here require you to console with a church leader and read the bible. Which is why I choose not to donate my money or time to them.
I just wanted to do something good.
That is my experience as well but it should be noted that (if they claim to be Christian) those people are violating the teachings of their own faith.
That's not to say that your average Christian is all that interested in Christian teachings. Mostly they're interested in socializing with other like-minded people in a similar social class, proselytizing their very basic faith, and being told how to be a good person.
I let the leadership know that I'm not interested in pithy platitudes or psychological manipulation that causes emotional meltdown experiences. I also let them know that I will tell them "[citation needed]" when they set off my BS detector.
I donate time and resources as I am able where I feel it can best be used, and not necessarily to the church body. Others disagree with me but it never occurred to me to care, or recognize the authority of any religious hierarchy of human beings come to think of it.
It's sad to see so few so-called Christian churches resembling anything that could be called Christian.
Yes, I am a church-going Christian. By the way, I believe in the scientific method and a round earth (oblate spheroid actually). We're not all loonie toon evangelicals.
We need to judge the intent of the accused person.
If a person acts in a deliberate way with reckless disregard as to intentionally cause emotional or physical distress, they need to be prepared to accept the consequences of those actions. Criminal negligence causing death.
You don't have to intend to kill the person. You just have to do something you knew (or ought to know) was wrong, or fail to do something you are obligated to do. Heck, you don't even have to know that someone might die from your actions. It's enough to have caused a death through your reckless and deliberate disregard.
No, Bell, Rogers, and Telus are all independent from each other. However, once upon a time there was an alliance (cartel) of phone companies in Canada called the Stentor Alliance. This consisted of:
Maritime Tel & Tel (Nova Scotia) Newfoundland Tel Island Tel (Prince Edward Island) New Brunswick Tel Quebec Tel Bell Canada (Ontario) Manitoba Tel Sask Tel Alberta Gov. Tel BC Tel Northwest Tel
Back in the early 1990s, BC Tel was spun off from the Alberta government and eventually became a private company. About 10 years ago Stentor was broken up and Bell and Telus went on an eating frenzy. Bell swallowed up MT&T, NBTel, NewTel, and IslandTel (it's more complicated than that but that's the sum and substance). Telus ended up swallowing BCTel and Quebec Telephone. So now we have Telus and Bell with a few remaining regional incumbent carriers (SaskTel, ManitobaTel, and NorthwestTel).
Rogers came into being as a phone carrier, as I recall, when it bought out the competing (as opposed to incumbent) CanTel AT&T cell carrier. Rogers already existed as a cable TV provider in Ontario at that time. This would've been late '90s, early 2000s. Rogers is currently the carrier with the largest number of cell customers. Although their reputation has been tarnished on the internet side through their throttling activities the last few years, they have a decent name in Ontario. However, as cell service goes, Rogers is synonymous with poor quality (but cheaper) service in the east.
Rogers (as far as I'm aware) is the only carrier that uses GSM cell technology. Bell and Telus both use CDMA although I was just reading the other day that they are planning to switch to a GSM-like technology. I believe there is some agreement in place between Bell and Telus to permit the other to offer service in each other's respective territories. At least that's the case in Bell/Aliant territory. Telus has no towers here but you can get Telus-branded services and phones.
if I recall correctly, the sale of Pixar was an all-stock deal, which made Steve Jobs the largest single shareholder in Disney.
Considering Disney's holdings include Miramax, Touchstone, and ABC (among others), it was right about then that I realized his domination over content and delivery was all but guaranteed. Digital music on iTunes is just the first step.
For the love of Christ, it's 400 AD.
Is it too much to ask the editors to check basic facts in the summary? This is Slashdot...we're not expected to RTFA but shouldn't the editors? It took about 5 seconds to copy/paste it into Wikipedia and find the entry on the Codex Sinaiticus and check the dates.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking it would depend on the country. In the US, it would probably not be illegal in any sense. Privacy is completely upside down there. In Canada, it might be a different story. Companies are only allowed to collect private information with your explicit agreement, and only for the purposes for which permission was given.
Well, he and his group were well funded and equipped by the CIA in the 80s. So in that regard, he was a CIA "agent", just not in the undercover operative sense. That much is well documented and accepted.
Let's not forget that Oracle pays dividends. Depending on your jurisdiction, dividends are anywhere from tax-free up to a certain amount or are taxed at an extremely preferential rate. The reasoning is that the corp has already paid corporate income tax on the cash being doled out.
I'm not a muslim or an expert in the koran by any means, but isn't that text regarding Mohammed talking to his followers about how they should treat the incumbents when they re-enter Mecca? I believe that Place of Worship business is talking about the Kaaba. Mohammad was forced out of Mecca for a while and founded Medina, then returned after a bit to reclaim Mecca. Seems like pretty standard wartime politics to me for any people of any era.
Anyway, if you can take some text out of context and try to justify your condemnation of an entire people, I think you were already biased to begin with and looking for something with which to justify it. I wonder if you hold similar views about Jews and Christians over Deuteronomy 20 or Americans over Iraq.
Theologians have been deeply pondering this point for hundreds, if not thousands of years: Whether or not God made a linear story in which we have an unwilling part, predestination, or if we have free will. Both are hinted at in the Bible. In predestination, God is the author of sin, which is distasteful to some. But if free will is truly free, God doesn't know the outcome of decisions that haven't been made yet, and that limits God's omniscience.
One way to reconcile the apparent paradox is to say that, while we as humans can only perceive one branch, God has awareness of every possible branch from the beginning of time to the end. A being that could create a system like that and maintain an awareness of it would be massively omnipotent to the point of being impossible to completely comprehend with the human mind.
Polarization is recognizable when each side can only conceive a charicature of the other. "Religious people" don't conform to one way of thinking any more than "science people" do, nor are the two mutually exclusive.
I think they both have value, but for different reasons.
Facebook allows the expression of what Jungians might call the persona, which is the face we all present to the world. Whether we know it or not, we construct our personas as a mask to protect our real selves. We show the world what we want others to believe about us. Clever people who realize this can quite convincingly construct an almost completely artificial self. Think politicians, business executives, and high-functioning sociopaths.
What I think is more interesting about 4chan and /b/ in particular is that complete anonymity allows for expression of the shadow aspect. I think it's this idea that moot expresses when he describes /b/ as "the internet's dark heart." The thing I find fascinating is that many attributes that we hide from others, that we fear and dislike about ourselves, are common to the human experience.
We conceal things about ourselves in order to form communities and we do it according to what we believe are the standards of that community. /b/ is important because it allows us to explore what we have in common without fear of punishment or ostracization.
Terms like that are generally considered unfair and unenforceable, and could render the entire contract null and void. You could sign a contract that gave a person the right under certain conditions to take your children but that wouldn't be enforceable either.
Contracts are not laws.
The first one never happened and the second is suing for reinstatement based on violation for his civil rights. He'll win, too.
But while while we're playing "bad argument by analogy" let me have a go and maybe give you a better one. Even a fictional restaurant that may refuse to serve TSA agents can't take a person's money and *then* throw him out without delivering the product that was fairly paid.
That kind of underhanded tactic deserves harsh punishment. EA needs to be called to the carpet for this one.
I think you're trolling. But in case you're not, a car analogy.
If you buy a car from someone and, after the transaction is finished, you turn and say to him, "by the way, I think you're the biggest asshole I've ever met," he doesn't then get to keep your money _and_ take his car back. Not even temporarily as unilaterally imposed penance for the buyer being rude in the sole opinion of the seller.
In fact, I'd be tempted to file a complaint with the credit card company and attempt a chargeback.
This sort of nonsense is exactly why I've cut way back on my games purchases and avoid EA like the plague. They are pure unadulterated evil and have, indeed, sold their corporate soul to the dark one.
This company's financials look dire. About five years ago they were trading near $5 but just last week their stock hit $.05 on news of a financial squabble with a key partner. None of the insiders have bought stock for almost a year.
Sadly, it looks like this company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. I wish it were something worth investing in.
Polygamy is not a merger. Mergers turn multiple entities into one single thing. Polygamy still retains the individual people. The appropriate analogy would be cannibalism, and even that is wrong since mergers are usually mutually beneficial.
One can sort of defend that analogy, actually. In marriage, two people are considered to become "one flesh" under the law. This is why one spouse can't be compelled to testify against the other, since it would be self-incrimination. In marriage, one's spouse's family becomes one's own under the law. One's brother-in-law is indeed one's brother under the law (as opposed to by blood relation). Spouses often refer to their parents-in-law as Mom and Dad. All property and debt becomes that of the union rather than the individual. Each spouse may separately exercise financial operations that confer obligations on both parties.
Or maybe the other way around. I've noticed that when performing an activity that requires your unconscious/autonomic part of your brain to take over, memory recall will actively interfere with your ability to carry out that activity. We usually think of it as confidence or the ability to overcome distraction but I think it really comes down to clearing your mind of conscious thought/memories and allowing your other brain to take over.
Think about what it felt like to learn to type. At first, you had to think about which finger to put where to get the letter you wanted. But at some point, you had to start taking little leaps of faith and stop thinking about it. The same goes for sight reading on the piano. You don't have time to stop and think about what the notes mean and where you have to move your fingers. You have to just /do/ it. And if you start getting plagued with conscious thoughts and memories while you're in a performance, it will cause a distraction and lead to a memory slip, totally derailing the performance. The same goes for carrying a cup of hot coffee up the stairs. If you concentrate on the task of which foot to put on which step and making sure the cup doesn't tilt, you're sure to trip or spill it.
So I don't think it should be any surprise that performing a tetris-like activity supresses memory. Or rather, it requires the suppression of memory to do it well (or at least try to do it well).
I took an ancient, generic 286 computer, and upgraded it through 386SX, 486 DX/2, Cx 6x86, and AMD Athlon motherboards before finally switching to ATX. It was a cheezy, god-only-knows-who-made it power supply that came from a 'not-quite-aluminum-foil' AT case.
I call shenanigans. As I recall, and from what I read on this old Anantech Athlon motherboard review, Athlon motherboards were never produced in an AT form factor, partially due to the fact that AT PSUs were not expected to be able to handle the draw from power hungry athlons.
I also recall #4 having been debunked. Letting the moving parts run 24/7 causes more wear overall than power-up/power-down cycling. You may notice failures more often during a reboot but there's no causal relationship there. In fact, periodic restarts are a good practice to test startup and shutdown routines. 300-day uptimes are wonderful and all but good luck figuring out which of the last 78 changes broke the startup script.
Shampoo, is that you?
As a Christian, I can tell you my biggest fear and reason I would oppose laboratory cloning of human beings is not about soul or spirit or whatever supernatural issue you're trying to make it into. It's the idea that it is one more step toward production and destruction of human beings in a laboratory.
I would not want any child to have Monsanto as its one and only parent.
The very thought chills me to the bone and it should terrify you, too.
I always thought the Anomaly from the series finale of Star Trek TNG All Good Things... was brilliant. Something caused in the future, growing larger backwards through time to eventually (??) cause humanity to never have existed in the first place. Awesome.
I'm no physicist either but all of this leads one to believe there's something we're not quite getting.
Take for instance the Expanding Universe theory that's based on Hubble's Law. Hubble noted that the measured redshifts of galaxies corresponded very nicely with their apparent brightness. This was interpreted to mean that the more distant the galaxy, the faster it is moving away from us. The problem came in the 60s when quasars were discovered, their redshifts were found to be all over the place and didn't correspond with their brightness at all. Even worse, some quasars are observed to be connected to galaxes and have redshifts that are different by orders of magnitude compared to the nearby connected galaxy. Some physicists have speculated that if Hubble had found and measured quasar redshifts first, the Expanding Universe theory would never have been suggested. And the Big Bang is a conclusion based in part on the Expanding Universe model.
The second problem is there isn't enough stuff out there to cause the increase in acceleration that Expanding Universe needs so "dark matter" was suggested as the culprit. The problem is that dark matter is inherently unobservable. We can't see or measure it. It's simply a fudge factor. That's not the way science is supposed to work when observations don't line up with a theory.
Anyway, there are physicists out there who believe that a badly needed shakeup is coming that will require rethinking everything we thought about cosmology in the last 80 years. Sadly, it's risky for young physicists to practice original, critical thought and potentially embarass well-established, senior physicists who've built their careers around Expanding Universe. Such behaviour is not conducive to grants and tenure.
I highly recommend checking out "Universe - Cosmology Quest" where these points are articulated by people way smarter than me: Dr. Halton C. Arp, Astronomer; Dr. Andre Koch Assis, Plasma Physicist; Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge, Theoretical Astrophysicist; Dr. Margaret Burbidge, Theoretical Astrophysicist; John Dobson, Telescope Designer; Prof. Truls Hansen, Geophysicist; Fred Hoyle, Cosmologist (who first coined the term "Big Bang"); the list goes on.
Part 1 is here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4717807574075729588&ei=J07aSLGQMovurAK9iLCcCw&q=%22cosmology+quest%22&vt=lf
My experience is that people who help in the name of religion are doing more of a look at me thing. They want to look good and want to go to heaven. It is a peer system like highschool. They want to be cool and in the 'in' crowd. So they go along.
Beyond that, a lot of their 'good' work is used just to push their agenda. Will that christian homeless shelter take in a homeless man who refuses to embrace god? The ones around here require you to console with a church leader and read the bible. Which is why I choose not to donate my money or time to them.
I just wanted to do something good.
That is my experience as well but it should be noted that (if they claim to be Christian) those people are violating the teachings of their own faith.
That's not to say that your average Christian is all that interested in Christian teachings. Mostly they're interested in socializing with other like-minded people in a similar social class, proselytizing their very basic faith, and being told how to be a good person.
I let the leadership know that I'm not interested in pithy platitudes or psychological manipulation that causes emotional meltdown experiences. I also let them know that I will tell them "[citation needed]" when they set off my BS detector.
I donate time and resources as I am able where I feel it can best be used, and not necessarily to the church body. Others disagree with me but it never occurred to me to care, or recognize the authority of any religious hierarchy of human beings come to think of it.
It's sad to see so few so-called Christian churches resembling anything that could be called Christian.
Yes, I am a church-going Christian. By the way, I believe in the scientific method and a round earth (oblate spheroid actually). We're not all loonie toon evangelicals.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Do we really need to invent new law?
We need to judge the intent of the accused person.
If a person acts in a deliberate way with reckless disregard as to intentionally cause emotional or physical distress, they need to be prepared to accept the consequences of those actions. Criminal negligence causing death.
You don't have to intend to kill the person. You just have to do something you knew (or ought to know) was wrong, or fail to do something you are obligated to do. Heck, you don't even have to know that someone might die from your actions. It's enough to have caused a death through your reckless and deliberate disregard.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer.
No, Bell, Rogers, and Telus are all independent from each other. However, once upon a time there was an alliance (cartel) of phone companies in Canada called the Stentor Alliance. This consisted of:
Maritime Tel & Tel (Nova Scotia)
Newfoundland Tel
Island Tel (Prince Edward Island)
New Brunswick Tel
Quebec Tel
Bell Canada (Ontario)
Manitoba Tel
Sask Tel
Alberta Gov. Tel
BC Tel
Northwest Tel
Back in the early 1990s, BC Tel was spun off from the Alberta government and eventually became a private company. About 10 years ago Stentor was broken up and Bell and Telus went on an eating frenzy. Bell swallowed up MT&T, NBTel, NewTel, and IslandTel (it's more complicated than that but that's the sum and substance). Telus ended up swallowing BCTel and Quebec Telephone. So now we have Telus and Bell with a few remaining regional incumbent carriers (SaskTel, ManitobaTel, and NorthwestTel).
Rogers came into being as a phone carrier, as I recall, when it bought out the competing (as opposed to incumbent) CanTel AT&T cell carrier. Rogers already existed as a cable TV provider in Ontario at that time. This would've been late '90s, early 2000s. Rogers is currently the carrier with the largest number of cell customers. Although their reputation has been tarnished on the internet side through their throttling activities the last few years, they have a decent name in Ontario. However, as cell service goes, Rogers is synonymous with poor quality (but cheaper) service in the east.
Rogers (as far as I'm aware) is the only carrier that uses GSM cell technology. Bell and Telus both use CDMA although I was just reading the other day that they are planning to switch to a GSM-like technology. I believe there is some agreement in place between Bell and Telus to permit the other to offer service in each other's respective territories. At least that's the case in Bell/Aliant territory. Telus has no towers here but you can get Telus-branded services and phones.
if I recall correctly, the sale of Pixar was an all-stock deal, which made Steve Jobs the largest single shareholder in Disney.
Considering Disney's holdings include Miramax, Touchstone, and ABC (among others), it was right about then that I realized his domination over content and delivery was all but guaranteed. Digital music on iTunes is just the first step.
For the love of Christ, it's 400 AD. Is it too much to ask the editors to check basic facts in the summary? This is Slashdot...we're not expected to RTFA but shouldn't the editors? It took about 5 seconds to copy/paste it into Wikipedia and find the entry on the Codex Sinaiticus and check the dates.
and do yourself a favor by reading up on Thomas Robert Malthus and the impending Malthusian Catastrophe
because as everybody knows, it's turtles all the way down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down