Kind of a side track but for myself and other Linux users will Blu-Ray ever be usable?
According to wikipedia among the many horrific things they've done DRM-wise is a change where the keys on players may be dynamically updated once a key has been broken and new media distributed from that point will use new, unbroken keys.
Now I'm not sure how easy it will be for the crackers to get these keys but if it's anything but routine than Linux users will now have to do some sort of research into a disk before they buy it to make sure they can play it. It's even possible that they could have multiple keys in circulation at once making it impossible for a Linux user to know at the time of purchase if the media is even playable!
If this new encrpytion scheme is successful I'm going to have to stick to buying DVDs, and when those stop being sold I guess I'll have to be a pirate.
Several conservative organizations have also spoken out on similar problems. And as a recent Forrester Research analysis concluded, if these regulations become law, "Legal costs will shoot through the roof -- draining the pockets of everyone involved." That may be great news for lawyers, but not for ordinary consumers who'll be forced to pick up the tab.
I realize that usually more regulation == more legal costs but with net neutrality all it means is that providers can't discriminate based on the origin of the packet. Shouldn't enforcement be easy since there shouldn't be a lot of grey areas?
But without net neutrality you now have the legal costs of all these contracts between the telcos and different websites, making sure those contracts are being properly enforced and that they don't cross the line into censoring sites (I assume those safegaurds exist) could lead to some massive legal costs.
Does anyone know where these extra legal costs with net neutrality are supposed to come from?
There's a critical difference between the two scenarios. With the bank it's the bank who has the capability to prevent the dishonest teller and it's the bank that loses the money if there is a dishonest teller, this gives the bank a very strong motivation to ensure that safegaurds are put in place.
With BestBuy however while it is BestBuy who needs to act to make sure the harddrives are destroyed it's the consumer who is harmed if the harddrive is pawned instead. The only percievable damage to BestBuy is bad PR from stories such as this and combined with the fact that pawned harddrives probably save BestBuy money (less labour intensive than destroying them) BestBuy doesn't have sufficient motivation to make sure this kind of dishonesty doesn't occur.
The collapseable sections are nice but I tend to ignore the sections anyway. Collapseable stories on the other hand would be particularly useful, particularly with the collapsed stories/. already has on the front page. One could de-collapse a story without having to load a new page or collapse an expanded story they're not interested in to reduce clutter.
As many other posters have said the ipw2200 drivers are open source and in the kernel, though running fedora I know I had to get the actual ipw firmware from livna since it isn't open source. Howver, this didn't appear to be a problem with a live ubuntu cd (I suspect they include them anyway).
The graphics card is a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900-, again as other posters have said it's open source and in the kernel (though I couldn't actually get it to work until FC5). The card is decent, good enough to play ppracer on low settings, though on higher settings it got choppy. Also running bzflag only 1/4 of the screen actually showed up. I haven't tested any games other than these two and have no idea of the cards stability/performance under windows.
For a graphics card my reccomendation is thus. If you want some real 3D Linux gaming, go with NVidia. If however your 3D gaming needs are slight/non-existant such as mine are, go with the Intel card. With the Intel card inclusion in the kernel means you don't need to reinstalling everytime you do a kernel upgrade, also I know myself (as well as others) have had stability issues with NVidia drivers in the past. I don't know how much development is going on with the Intel drivers but hopefully most of the bugs will be worked out in the next few months.
Sound worked fine.
As for ACPI it seems to be working well for the moment though I've had minor issues in the past, the only special buttons that work are sound, and I haven't tried the card reader or played with the Bluetooth much (sounds like it could work with fiddling). For the battery using wireless with the screen turned down I can go 2-2.5 hrs (haven't tried without wireless much).
At the end of the day my best suggestion is to get a live Ubuntu cd, head down to a computer store, and see if they let you boot it (the only store that didn't let me do so was BestBuy). That lets you actually see most of what works and what doesn't work, of course there is additional stuff you can get working with fiddling (or even by just running an update) but the more things that just work the better.
I remember hearing about a police department in New Hamshipre that would not take applicants with above a 105 IQ, citing the high rate of burnout due to boredom
I wonder how they came up with a dumb policy like that...
Don't jump to conclusions about this just because this is about France! This isn't really about free speech, it's about definitions of intellectual property. Under French law, fashion designs are considered to be protected intellectual property, but not under American law.
Personally, given the current intellectual property landscape, I don't think the French case is unreasonable - no less unreasonable than much of the intellectual property law the USA is trying to force the rest of the world to agree to.
Actually I would consider this to be an issue of free speech. If I wish to discuss fashion designs the only real effective dialog to do so would be in pictures of the fashion designs I'm discussing. To prevent me from being able to post those pictures is to significantly inhibit my ability to discuss them.
"As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power."
This certainly goes against creationism but afaik the only difference between evolution and intelligent design is that intelligent design claims statistics is insufficient and a divine guiding hand was required, wouldn't this missing link be required for either model as both need to go from water to land?
I don't know how big a problem it is but I can't see how framing debates in partisan terms can help. You mentioned that you are able to effectively make the separation and I do consider it good practice in a discussion to advertise your beliefs and any bias you may have, however when you describe yourself as belonging to a party that personally makes me feel that the debate is going to revolve around party lines.
Of course this is my interpretation which may be slanted due to me being Canadian, our legislative and executive branches have to a large extent been combined, the Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most MPs (members of our legislative branch), this means they don't get much of an individual mandate since the voter is usually voting for the party and the Prime Minister. Thus in votes MPs almost always vote the party line so a politicial being a Conservative or Liberal has a lot of weight in what their official views will be, thus I tend to put more weight on partisan labels than they may deserve.
I know this is a difficult concept for Slashdotters to grasp, but neither party has a monopoly on stupid ideas. Vent your anger at the people doing the harm, not at whichever party is the one you don't happen to affiliate with.
If you're a Democrat, write your senator and tell them that you don't approve of these actions. I, a Republican, have done exactly that several times lately. Maybe if we all do that enough, someone will finally get the idea. (emphasis added)
This is kind of a tangent but I think a major problem with the US political system is that is encourages people to identify with political parties. I'm from Canada, I don't consider myself "Liberal", "Conservative", "NDP", "Green", or any other political alignment, there are those who do but it seems do me that Americans are far more likely to align with a specific party than Canadians.
The reason I bring this up is although both parties have policies that you either agree or disagree with the moment you align yourself with one you automatically become a little more biased in favour of that party. When that happens the argument stops being about policy, or even ideology, but about party alignment, this lowers the level of the entire political discourse and is one of the reasons that I believe dumb laws like this pop up.
1) Rich people pay more money in taxes because they have more money to pay. You mention 5% of income earners paid 54.36% of the income taxes but this statistic is meaningless since we don't know what % of the wealth these top 5% have (ie 10% of $100 is twice as much as 10% of $50).
2) Rich people are able to leverage their money to a much greater degree than poorer people. At the lower end of the scale this means things like being able to afford university or maybe just affording a computer and internet connection. At the higher end of the scale this means devoting a significant portion of your wealth to investments instead of spending it on consumable goods (food, gas, rent). This is the real reason you need to charge the rich more taxes, without more taxes to even the playing field the rich will simply get richer and richer regardless of whether or not they're actually good at managing money. In other words if the economy entrusts with several hundred million dollars the government better tax the heck out of you to make sure that either you're really good with all that money and can benefit the economy with it or get it out of your hands and give it to someone who can better aid the economy with it.
I happen to own your lack of surprise, it's all right here in this deed. You now owe me $5.00 for each occurrence that doesn't surprise you, or the viewing of anything in your surroundings that appears to be perfectly normal.
Please believe me when I say I find this shocking!!
The red particles that landed in sector omega-3 were obviously not a virus know as MindGobblers designed to manipulate the portions of your puny brains involved with sensory reception effectivly allow us to transform you into a slave race.
I suggest you fellow humans all make bad jokes about human researcher and realize his findings are not true.
Look on the bright side at least you didn't have a topic go from +5 insightful to -1 insightful (damn over rated), like I have several times. I'm starting to wonder if I have made a few enemies modding me down when I get a high rated comment.
Hey guys are you asleep or something?!? He's at like +5!!
I thought we went over this last meeting, when you see a post by Turn-X Alphonse you mod it down! Now, considering there's eight of you on shift WITH mod points I should not be seeing a +5 here!
Bloody n00bs, don't even know how to run a simple conspiracy...
A lot of people are trying to poke holes in the study itself though it seems to have been fairly well implemented.
I did however notice two interesting bits that cause me to put a lot less importance on the results
With three people there's certainly likely to be a lot of variability and to get some conclusive results, I'd love to get a huge group of administrators across the spectrum in terms of experience. I'd also love to do it across multiple scenarios, beyond the ecommerce study.
And a little later
it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released
Simply fund a lot of small legitimate studies with a high variance, publish only the results that fit your case. In a way it's like one big badly done study where someone throws out all the data points that don't fit their hypothesis, for all we know he, or another researcher, might have done a dozen other studies which came out in favour of Linux and were subsequently ignored. The research itself is all completely legitimate but Microsoft creates a false overall conclusion through selective publication, perhaps companies who fund the studies should be held to the same eithical standard as those who do the research?
You don't need to sue someone so stifle progress as evidenced by the fact their Mono patents are currently stifling progress by the risk of lawsuits where Microsoft could easily remove that threat.
You can leave your respect for National Geographic alone; there's nothing wrong with the scale in that painting as long as you remember that most pterosaurs weren't huge. This croc's skull is about 2.5 feet long, with the jaws being a little over half that length, and there were plenty of pterosaurs with wingspans of a meter or less, especially during the Jurassic and earlier. It was only when the birds started diversifying in the Cretaceous, taking over all the small-flyer niches, that the remaining pterosaurs were forced to become giants.
I don't doubt that there were a large number of species of small flying dinosaurs but the public conception is that most flying dinosaurs were approximately man-sized and National Geographic knows this, I feel the picture was deliberatly taking advantage of this perception and coupled with the godzilla reference attemping to make us think this creature was far larger than it actually was.
Sure 4 m may not seem like a giant crocodile but I don't think anyone can deny that the creature in this "photo" is a giant for sure!!
Seriously, that flying dinosaur it's going after would have to be the size of a sparrow for the scales in that picture to work!
respect_for_national_geographic--;
Re:We need deadlier cigarettes
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
[...] we simply made war so deadly with nukes that people stopped having them because is was MAD...
Excuse me, stopped having wars?
Not sure if you were being sarcastic but that statement was qualified with the preceeding phrase "there hasn't been a full out war between major powers since WWII". Which to my knowledge is correct, the "we" in the quote you took was of course referring to the "major powers" and "war" was "war between major powers".
Seriously though, I'm a smoker and I absolutely love smoking. I can spend 10 minutes doing abosolutely nothing but enjoying a cigarette. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. I can find plenty of worse ways to go. Smoking really works for me and I don't mind trading off a few years of my life for it.
I understand and respect how and why non-smokers can be annoyed by smoke, that's fine and understandable, but don't force your tired arguments down our throats. Smoking is a personal choice, so leave it at that, please. I've met one too many non-smokers who's been trying to "save me", which really just annoys me and won't ever work.
You sound like a nice person so I'd rather you didn't die a few years earlier, but that's just me. Note that in addition to your harming own health you are damaging the health of others, both directly through second hand smoke and indirectly through reinforcing the social acceptability of smoking. I don't know if you have children but if you did would you truly want your children to start smoking... did I just play the "won't sombody think of the children" card? (don't feel obliged to take that point seriously;)
Either way if you really do like smoking and feel the cost is worth it than go ahead, but I'd ask you to be considerate of where you do smoke. Consider it like talking on your cellphone, alone in your house, sure, in a theatre, not so good. I can tell you I never really enjoy walking through a cloud of smoke (and smokers) hanging around the entrance to a building on campus. As well I've heard cigarette smoke can be extremely annoying to former smokers. Again, as with any decision look at all the different costs and benefits impartially and decide accordingly.
Re:We need deadlier cigarettes
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree! While we are at it, why not:
Of the four comparisons you made here three were invalid and the fourth actually proved his point - Make cars more unsafe so people die when they crash? That way we will have fewer crashes - Make materials more flameable? That way a fire will ensure everyone gets killed. THAT will teach people to be more carefule with matches and lighters. - Make cellphones give you an electroshock when you say something ungodly? Then everyone will be religious and believe in the same crap.
Cars, matches and lighters, and cellphones are all very useful items that in some cases have innately dangerous qualities, people should exert caution with them but we lose a lot of benefit if people stop using them entirely. Cigarrettes on the other hand have no real benefits thus nothing is lost if people stop using them. Yes, by golly! I think you are on to something... Why not just use all the nuclear weapons we have? Then we will not be having this discussion in the future!
We haven't used a nuclear weapon in a war since WWII, in fact because nuclear weapons are so insanely deadly there hasn't been a full out war between major powers since WWII, we simply made war so deadly with nukes that people stopped having them because is was MAD... Hey, isn't that exactly the point the grandparent was trying to make with about using extra deadly cigarettes?
I hate Microsoft and I'd certainly like to know if Gates's charity is doing anything underhanded other than the usual bit of targeting donations to give Microsoft PR boost where needed.
However before accempting your claims in the slightest I would really have to see some sources.
If you get paid to write it, then obviously it's not what I was referring to. If somebody wants to pay you and then give away what you do, that's their money to possibly waste. But the vast majority of OSS work doesn't get done that way. Just pointing out that it's working out well for you is meaningless.
Are you sure? True, there is a strong volunteer basis and I suspect the majority of code does have a volunteer basis but at least among the top projects that most people are familiar with I'm not sure the vast majority is unpaid labour. A lot of companies develop software for their own usage and prefer to work with OSS since they get a lot of help with what they're doing. Also consider all the companies who develop software which works on free systems, you can be sure they get a good return putting stuff they need in the free software they use. Finally consider the open source projects who are developed almost exclusively by paid developers like openoffice and eclipse.
The volunteer component of OSS is crutial and an integral part of the community but don't think for a moment that no one is getting paid to do it.
My guess is that linux 08 will function a lot like Linux 05. We'll see, but with the exception of some nice icons, Linux '05 works pretty much like Linux '02. Still running on a graphics system mostly written in the 80s and based on UNIX architecture designed in 70s and rewritten in the 80s. The reason Linux looks like such an impressive achievement is that most of it isn't Linux. Shit, I wasn't supposed to say that here...
Yeah, the basics of Linux 08 will work a lot like Linux 05 and 02 and unix from 30 years earlier, and that's a damn good thing, I don't want to relearn my OS every three years. The differences aren't going to change the way you use the computer, they're just going to make it that much easier to use. Gcc compiled apps will be that much faster, the UI that much more polished, the apps will have more features, the system will be snappier, heck open source java might even give you a fast, stable, and complete JVM right out of the box, can you say that for Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of a side track but for myself and other Linux users will Blu-Ray ever be usable?
_ rights_management
According to wikipedia among the many horrific things they've done DRM-wise is a change where the keys on players may be dynamically updated once a key has been broken and new media distributed from that point will use new, unbroken keys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Digital
Now I'm not sure how easy it will be for the crackers to get these keys but if it's anything but routine than Linux users will now have to do some sort of research into a disk before they buy it to make sure they can play it. It's even possible that they could have multiple keys in circulation at once making it impossible for a Linux user to know at the time of purchase if the media is even playable!
If this new encrpytion scheme is successful I'm going to have to stick to buying DVDs, and when those stop being sold I guess I'll have to be a pirate.
Several conservative organizations have also spoken out on similar problems. And as a recent Forrester Research analysis concluded, if these regulations become law, "Legal costs will shoot through the roof -- draining the pockets of everyone involved." That may be great news for lawyers, but not for ordinary consumers who'll be forced to pick up the tab.
I realize that usually more regulation == more legal costs but with net neutrality all it means is that providers can't discriminate based on the origin of the packet. Shouldn't enforcement be easy since there shouldn't be a lot of grey areas?
But without net neutrality you now have the legal costs of all these contracts between the telcos and different websites, making sure those contracts are being properly enforced and that they don't cross the line into censoring sites (I assume those safegaurds exist) could lead to some massive legal costs.
Does anyone know where these extra legal costs with net neutrality are supposed to come from?
There's a critical difference between the two scenarios. With the bank it's the bank who has the capability to prevent the dishonest teller and it's the bank that loses the money if there is a dishonest teller, this gives the bank a very strong motivation to ensure that safegaurds are put in place.
With BestBuy however while it is BestBuy who needs to act to make sure the harddrives are destroyed it's the consumer who is harmed if the harddrive is pawned instead. The only percievable damage to BestBuy is bad PR from stories such as this and combined with the fact that pawned harddrives probably save BestBuy money (less labour intensive than destroying them) BestBuy doesn't have sufficient motivation to make sure this kind of dishonesty doesn't occur.
The collapseable sections are nice but I tend to ignore the sections anyway. Collapseable stories on the other hand would be particularly useful, particularly with the collapsed stories /. already has on the front page. One could de-collapse a story without having to load a new page or collapse an expanded story they're not interested in to reduce clutter.
I got a HP dv1420 on which I am running Fedora Core 5.t ?cc=ca&docname=c00500901&lc=en/
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocumen
As many other posters have said the ipw2200 drivers are open source and in the kernel, though running fedora I know I had to get the actual ipw firmware from livna since it isn't open source. Howver, this didn't appear to be a problem with a live ubuntu cd (I suspect they include them anyway).
The graphics card is a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900-, again as other posters have said it's open source and in the kernel (though I couldn't actually get it to work until FC5). The card is decent, good enough to play ppracer on low settings, though on higher settings it got choppy. Also running bzflag only 1/4 of the screen actually showed up. I haven't tested any games other than these two and have no idea of the cards stability/performance under windows.
For a graphics card my reccomendation is thus. If you want some real 3D Linux gaming, go with NVidia. If however your 3D gaming needs are slight/non-existant such as mine are, go with the Intel card. With the Intel card inclusion in the kernel means you don't need to reinstalling everytime you do a kernel upgrade, also I know myself (as well as others) have had stability issues with NVidia drivers in the past. I don't know how much development is going on with the Intel drivers but hopefully most of the bugs will be worked out in the next few months.
Sound worked fine.
As for ACPI it seems to be working well for the moment though I've had minor issues in the past, the only special buttons that work are sound, and I haven't tried the card reader or played with the Bluetooth much (sounds like it could work with fiddling). For the battery using wireless with the screen turned down I can go 2-2.5 hrs (haven't tried without wireless much).
At the end of the day my best suggestion is to get a live Ubuntu cd, head down to a computer store, and see if they let you boot it (the only store that didn't let me do so was BestBuy). That lets you actually see most of what works and what doesn't work, of course there is additional stuff you can get working with fiddling (or even by just running an update) but the more things that just work the better.
I remember hearing about a police department in New Hamshipre that would not take applicants with above a 105 IQ, citing the high rate of burnout due to boredom
I wonder how they came up with a dumb policy like that...
Don't jump to conclusions about this just because this is about France! This isn't really about free speech, it's about definitions of intellectual property. Under French law, fashion designs are considered to be protected intellectual property, but not under American law.
Personally, given the current intellectual property landscape, I don't think the French case is unreasonable - no less unreasonable than much of the intellectual property law the USA is trying to force the rest of the world to agree to.
Actually I would consider this to be an issue of free speech. If I wish to discuss fashion designs the only real effective dialog to do so would be in pictures of the fashion designs I'm discussing. To prevent me from being able to post those pictures is to significantly inhibit my ability to discuss them.
"As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power."
This certainly goes against creationism but afaik the only difference between evolution and intelligent design is that intelligent design claims statistics is insufficient and a divine guiding hand was required, wouldn't this missing link be required for either model as both need to go from water to land?
I wonder if we could convince Lucas to change the subject to Han Solo and give completely control of the series to Joss Whedon...
I don't know how big a problem it is but I can't see how framing debates in partisan terms can help. You mentioned that you are able to effectively make the separation and I do consider it good practice in a discussion to advertise your beliefs and any bias you may have, however when you describe yourself as belonging to a party that personally makes me feel that the debate is going to revolve around party lines.
Of course this is my interpretation which may be slanted due to me being Canadian, our legislative and executive branches have to a large extent been combined, the Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most MPs (members of our legislative branch), this means they don't get much of an individual mandate since the voter is usually voting for the party and the Prime Minister. Thus in votes MPs almost always vote the party line so a politicial being a Conservative or Liberal has a lot of weight in what their official views will be, thus I tend to put more weight on partisan labels than they may deserve.
I know this is a difficult concept for Slashdotters to grasp, but neither party has a monopoly on stupid ideas. Vent your anger at the people doing the harm, not at whichever party is the one you don't happen to affiliate with.
If you're a Democrat, write your senator and tell them that you don't approve of these actions. I, a Republican, have done exactly that several times lately. Maybe if we all do that enough, someone will finally get the idea.
(emphasis added)
This is kind of a tangent but I think a major problem with the US political system is that is encourages people to identify with political parties. I'm from Canada, I don't consider myself "Liberal", "Conservative", "NDP", "Green", or any other political alignment, there are those who do but it seems do me that Americans are far more likely to align with a specific party than Canadians.
The reason I bring this up is although both parties have policies that you either agree or disagree with the moment you align yourself with one you automatically become a little more biased in favour of that party. When that happens the argument stops being about policy, or even ideology, but about party alignment, this lowers the level of the entire political discourse and is one of the reasons that I believe dumb laws like this pop up.
You overlook two things,
1) Rich people pay more money in taxes because they have more money to pay. You mention
5% of income earners paid 54.36% of the income taxes
but this statistic is meaningless since we don't know what % of the wealth these top 5% have (ie 10% of $100 is twice as much as 10% of $50).
2) Rich people are able to leverage their money to a much greater degree than poorer people. At the lower end of the scale this means things like being able to afford university or maybe just affording a computer and internet connection. At the higher end of the scale this means devoting a significant portion of your wealth to investments instead of spending it on consumable goods (food, gas, rent). This is the real reason you need to charge the rich more taxes, without more taxes to even the playing field the rich will simply get richer and richer regardless of whether or not they're actually good at managing money. In other words if the economy entrusts with several hundred million dollars the government better tax the heck out of you to make sure that either you're really good with all that money and can benefit the economy with it or get it out of your hands and give it to someone who can better aid the economy with it.
Your IP address has scored: -1. This is ranked #56112 of the 56122 IP's spotted so far.
As if I'm not insecure enough already!!
It's funny...I read the description of Robert Hooke and it brings to mind many modern geeks I've known. Do these sound familiar?
Actually I thought of gollum.
Not a perfect likeness but that's the impression I drew
Filthy little Newtones. They stole it from us!
I happen to own your lack of surprise, it's all right here in this deed. You now owe me $5.00 for each occurrence that doesn't surprise you, or the viewing of anything in your surroundings that appears to be perfectly normal.
Please believe me when I say I find this shocking!!
This human researcher is clearly incorrect.
The red particles that landed in sector omega-3 were obviously not a virus know as MindGobblers designed to manipulate the portions of your puny brains involved with sensory reception effectivly allow us to transform you into a slave race.
I suggest you fellow humans all make bad jokes about human researcher and realize his findings are not true.
Look on the bright side at least you didn't have a topic go from +5 insightful to -1 insightful (damn over rated), like I have several times. I'm starting to wonder if I have made a few enemies modding me down when I get a high rated comment.
Hey guys are you asleep or something?!? He's at like +5!!
I thought we went over this last meeting, when you see a post by Turn-X Alphonse you mod it down! Now, considering there's eight of you on shift WITH mod points I should not be seeing a +5 here!
Bloody n00bs, don't even know how to run a simple conspiracy...
A lot of people are trying to poke holes in the study itself though it seems to have been fairly well implemented.
I did however notice two interesting bits that cause me to put a lot less importance on the results
With three people there's certainly likely to be a lot of variability and to get some conclusive results, I'd love to get a huge group of administrators across the spectrum in terms of experience. I'd also love to do it across multiple scenarios, beyond the ecommerce study.
And a little later
it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released
Simply fund a lot of small legitimate studies with a high variance, publish only the results that fit your case. In a way it's like one big badly done study where someone throws out all the data points that don't fit their hypothesis, for all we know he, or another researcher, might have done a dozen other studies which came out in favour of Linux and were subsequently ignored. The research itself is all completely legitimate but Microsoft creates a false overall conclusion through selective publication, perhaps companies who fund the studies should be held to the same eithical standard as those who do the research?
Has MS sued anyone over Mono patents? No.
However look here and here.
You don't need to sue someone so stifle progress as evidenced by the fact their Mono patents are currently stifling progress by the risk of lawsuits where Microsoft could easily remove that threat.
You can leave your respect for National Geographic alone; there's nothing wrong with the scale in that painting as long as you remember that most pterosaurs weren't huge. This croc's skull is about 2.5 feet long, with the jaws being a little over half that length, and there were plenty of pterosaurs with wingspans of a meter or less, especially during the Jurassic and earlier. It was only when the birds started diversifying in the Cretaceous, taking over all the small-flyer niches, that the remaining pterosaurs were forced to become giants.
I don't doubt that there were a large number of species of small flying dinosaurs but the public conception is that most flying dinosaurs were approximately man-sized and National Geographic knows this, I feel the picture was deliberatly taking advantage of this perception and coupled with the godzilla reference attemping to make us think this creature was far larger than it actually was.
Sure 4 m may not seem like a giant crocodile but I don't think anyone can deny that the creature in this "photo" is a giant for sure!!
Seriously, that flying dinosaur it's going after would have to be the size of a sparrow for the scales in that picture to work!
respect_for_national_geographic--;
[...] we simply made war so deadly with nukes that people stopped having them because is was MAD...
Excuse me, stopped having wars?
Not sure if you were being sarcastic but that statement was qualified with the preceeding phrase "there hasn't been a full out war between major powers since WWII". Which to my knowledge is correct, the "we" in the quote you took was of course referring to the "major powers" and "war" was "war between major powers".
Seriously though, I'm a smoker and I absolutely love smoking. I can spend 10 minutes doing abosolutely nothing but enjoying a cigarette. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. I can find plenty of worse ways to go. Smoking really works for me and I don't mind trading off a few years of my life for it.
I understand and respect how and why non-smokers can be annoyed by smoke, that's fine and understandable, but don't force your tired arguments down our throats. Smoking is a personal choice, so leave it at that, please. I've met one too many non-smokers who's been trying to "save me", which really just annoys me and won't ever work.
You sound like a nice person so I'd rather you didn't die a few years earlier, but that's just me. Note that in addition to your harming own health you are damaging the health of others, both directly through second hand smoke and indirectly through reinforcing the social acceptability of smoking. I don't know if you have children but if you did would you truly want your children to start smoking... did I just play the "won't sombody think of the children" card? (don't feel obliged to take that point seriously;)
Either way if you really do like smoking and feel the cost is worth it than go ahead, but I'd ask you to be considerate of where you do smoke. Consider it like talking on your cellphone, alone in your house, sure, in a theatre, not so good. I can tell you I never really enjoy walking through a cloud of smoke (and smokers) hanging around the entrance to a building on campus. As well I've heard cigarette smoke can be extremely annoying to former smokers. Again, as with any decision look at all the different costs and benefits impartially and decide accordingly.
I agree! While we are at it, why not:
Of the four comparisons you made here three were invalid and the fourth actually proved his point
- Make cars more unsafe so people die when they crash? That way we will have fewer crashes
- Make materials more flameable? That way a fire will ensure everyone gets killed. THAT will teach people to be more carefule with matches and lighters.
- Make cellphones give you an electroshock when you say something ungodly? Then everyone will be religious and believe in the same crap.
Cars, matches and lighters, and cellphones are all very useful items that in some cases have innately dangerous qualities, people should exert caution with them but we lose a lot of benefit if people stop using them entirely. Cigarrettes on the other hand have no real benefits thus nothing is lost if people stop using them.
Yes, by golly! I think you are on to something... Why not just use all the nuclear weapons we have? Then we will not be having this discussion in the future!
We haven't used a nuclear weapon in a war since WWII, in fact because nuclear weapons are so insanely deadly there hasn't been a full out war between major powers since WWII, we simply made war so deadly with nukes that people stopped having them because is was MAD... Hey, isn't that exactly the point the grandparent was trying to make with about using extra deadly cigarettes?
I hate Microsoft and I'd certainly like to know if Gates's charity is doing anything underhanded other than the usual bit of targeting donations to give Microsoft PR boost where needed.
However before accempting your claims in the slightest I would really have to see some sources.
If you get paid to write it, then obviously it's not what I was referring to. If somebody wants to pay you and then give away what you do, that's their money to possibly waste. But the vast majority of OSS work doesn't get done that way. Just pointing out that it's working out well for you is meaningless.
Are you sure? True, there is a strong volunteer basis and I suspect the majority of code does have a volunteer basis but at least among the top projects that most people are familiar with I'm not sure the vast majority is unpaid labour. A lot of companies develop software for their own usage and prefer to work with OSS since they get a lot of help with what they're doing. Also consider all the companies who develop software which works on free systems, you can be sure they get a good return putting stuff they need in the free software they use. Finally consider the open source projects who are developed almost exclusively by paid developers like openoffice and eclipse.
The volunteer component of OSS is crutial and an integral part of the community but don't think for a moment that no one is getting paid to do it.
My guess is that linux 08 will function a lot like Linux 05. We'll see, but with the exception of some nice icons, Linux '05 works pretty much like Linux '02. Still running on a graphics system mostly written in the 80s and based on UNIX architecture designed in 70s and rewritten in the 80s. The reason Linux looks like such an impressive achievement is that most of it isn't Linux. Shit, I wasn't supposed to say that here...
Yeah, the basics of Linux 08 will work a lot like Linux 05 and 02 and unix from 30 years earlier, and that's a damn good thing, I don't want to relearn my OS every three years. The differences aren't going to change the way you use the computer, they're just going to make it that much easier to use. Gcc compiled apps will be that much faster, the UI that much more polished, the apps will have more features, the system will be snappier, heck open source java might even give you a fast, stable, and complete JVM right out of the box, can you say that for Windows?