The customers have about 20 different developers for spreadsheets, word processors, databases, browsers, etc. All my customers use Microsoft because the software is easy to use and is stable...
Doesn't this smell just a little bit like Saddam Hussein's election results? 100.00% vote for him, therefore he was the democratic choice.
Everyone uses MS because everyone uses MS. Even if one of the 19 competitors, by some fluke, were to write better software, they can't get any traction because no one wants to be incompatible with MS files. I personally am forced to use MS Word to deal with files from my clients who have no idea that any other format is conceivable. 15 years ago there was a healthy competitive market: Lotus, WordPerfect, WordStar, etc. All provided feature rich applications. All had to be interoperable. MS leveraged their knowledge and control of Windows to hobble the competitors and made bundling deals to make choosing alternatives punitively expensive.
Let's look at reality here. The State wants these fines to pad their own accounts
Bullshit. If governments want money from anyone or any company, they don't drag need to manufacture a court case, they just write a law to tax something they do. Much simpler, little bad publicity, and the tax collectors are very efficient in getting their money. I'm sure MS has cost the EU millions already in legal manhours in investigating and arguing this case.
voting for the State to be more and more powerful, which means that it can do more and more damage to your freedoms.
Bullshit again. This is about Microsoft taking away consumer's freedom to use competing software by locking their data up in proprietary protocols.
My prediction is that FUD will be spread to discredit this tool. Because there are people who want to slow the growth of American industry, who want to reduce economic inequality by slowing the fastest of the herd
You forgot to mention that the TERRORISTS win if we believe in global warming. And that most people who do believe in global warming also support gay marriage.
Your links (the top 10 Google hits) are consistent with a temperature rise over the last 150 years, but they are hardly dramatic:...
The post I was repying to was about the uncertainties due to measuring temperatures in cities. I pointed out that there are plenty of "natural" temperature records in remote places. How "dramatic" these temperature changes are is another discussion.
Fact is is without China and India limiting their emissions there's nothing any other country can do to reduce emissions.
True. But it's also a fact that if the developed world doesn't act first, no one will ever do anything. Kyoto was just the first step, and the US didn't even take that.
Example: it's been asserted many times that there's been a rise in temperatures that coincide with the industrial revolution. Now why is that? Could it be because that temperatures were being measured where people were, rather than where people were not? It's reasonably clear that human concentration in urban areas increase local temperatures. We weren't taking temperature readings in the 1800s because we were worried about the Earth. We wanted to know about the local weather.
Temperatures have been measured based on ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic. No urban areas there to blame. Google has relevant sources on the first page of hits.
The entries weren't "closed", they were "semi-protected". From the headline one might assume the entries had been withdrawn. That would be notable, but restricting editing to registered users isn't very dramatic, so some idiot decided to sex up the story.
Then excuse me for the trollish behavior of not knowing the conventions, customs, and history of an SF discussion newsgroup I'd never heard of before:)
Even if you're not a professional troll, I think you've demonstrated a natural talent.
I saw the implication of levels of rights being teired, and given to those who earn them
But in the book this was presented as a good idea. People have argued there was a critical subtext, but I'm not convinced. Heinlein started out as a socialist, but ended up a libertarian, and he always venerated the military..
I also read it in the context of a book club in which we did emphasize the negative aspects of the society.
The question is not what you, or I, think of this society, but what Heinlein thought. The movie presented the society as unambiguously evil, a Nazi parody. That certainly was not what Heinlein intended. And the movie IS the story as far as much of society is concerned.
I guess I just don't take Heinlein as seriously as others do
I don't worship him. But obviously in this topic you're going to find people who do. There have been huge flame wars on SF discussion newsgroups on this subject.
What about Podkayne of Mars, The Rolling Stones? Lots of sex (though not graphic).
Huh? What are you talking about? There's no sex in those books.
Okay, it's 30 years since I read those. But I'm pretty sure in Podkayne her "auntie" (not biologically, but an older woman who took that role) was sleeping around, she certainly had an active social life around the Venusian casinos; some attempts to seduce Podkayne; and of course the whole "frozen embryos" thing at the beginning was probably rather shocking at the time. In Rolling Stones I think it was strongly suggested that the grandmother had had a very active sex life. But of course, no actual sex scenes in any of these.
Detail? You aren't going to have actors acting in giant armor suits where you can't see their faces, so I'll grant the moviemakers scaling down the suits.
It changed the nature of the warfare completely. It wasn't just cosmetic. In the movie troops rush into battle in mobs, on foot, and get chewed up, literally by giant bugs. The military tactics in the movie are idiotic and make the commanders responsible for senseless slaughter; impying that it's a "Wag the Dog" war to keep the home world cowed and fearful. This idea is nowhere in the book. They should have filmed The Forever War if that's the stry they wanted to tell.
I read the same patriotism / fascism into both the book AND the movie.
What were the recruiting ads in the movie but unsubtle characterisation of the society as openly racist and fascist? In the book, the protagonist, Rico, is not an Aryan storm trooper but a Filipino. You have to look very deep in the book to find hints of criticism of the society portrayed. So deep it's a strong point of contention whether Heinlein had any doubts at all of the virtues of his society, a world guided by benevolent military veterans fighting back against after an unprovoked alien attack corresponding to Pearl Harbor.
I don't think my views on "Starship Troopers" are that troll-like.
The words seem carefully calculated to piss people off. Thus "trollish".
When I tried to read "Friday" I had to put it down because she read like a man, not a woman.
Unfortunately, there were many reasons to put down most of the books he wrote after about 1970 when his health started to decline. Judge him by his best, in the 1940s-60s.
yet the females that are Human are two-dimensional window dressing. Unfortunately it was a trend in all his books.
Well, he did try occasionally. How about Podkayne of Mars? Being a male myself I can't say how authentic the narrator, a teenage girl was here, but it seemed to ring true.
... promiscuous sex.... drug use (meaning drugs that aren't in the socially approved pharmacopia in the U.S.).... In any case, this material is jarringly different from anything included in Heinlein's 50's juveniles.
I'm not so sure about that. What about Podkayne of Mars, The Rolling Stones? Lots of sex (though not graphic). I can't recall drugs, but plenty of drinking (and in many novels Heinlein speaks of the virtues of tobacco, rather jarring these days). Also apparently some more racy passages in his "juveniles" were cut in editing. Recent editions have included these parts, though I haven't troubled to read them. And of course in the 60s and 70s, Heinlein got into psychedelia, and lots of icky sexual obsessions like incest. But I try to forget those.
The all time worst conversion to a film for me has to be Running Man. The original Bachman story was entertaining and dark. The film was hidious, it makes me cringe just to think of it. That is an example of a film that will never stand on its own merits, because it has none, unless its merit is a pile of dog turds.
You do know that "Bachman" was a pseudonym for Stephen King? Anyway, most of his novels are disposable (but I like his short fiction) and little deserving of veneration. Running Man the movie was a quite funny parody of reality TV, WWF wrestling and such. I liked it on its own terms.
My nomination for worst adaptation of a good SF novel: Poul Anderson's High Crusade, filmed by Roland Emmerich. The novel is a space opera, about mediaeval crusaders who hijack a spaceship and end up conquering the galaxy. Emmerich sadly attempted to make a broad comedy, but failed dismally. I was so excited to find the VCD of this, the only movie based on a novel by this great author, so disappointed at the crap that it was.
I read "Troopers" right before seeing the movie. I found that it was a rather close adaptation: true to much of the detail and the spirit of the book.
Troll. But a couple of points anyway:
Detail: The book is about "Mobile Infantry": armoured flying battle suits, beam weapons. The movie has Vietnam-era grunts with machine guns walking up to bugs and getting slaughtered like sheep.
Spirit: The book is very Iwo Jima, John Wayne, patriotism. The movie makes the protagonists evil fascists.
The security implications of plutonium breeding make it unsuitable as a solution.
Yeah, unlike oil which has never caused any security problems or conflict.
And if you imagine fission scaling up to be the primary energy source, even with breeder reactors you still run out of uranium within decades, perhaps a century.
As I said, I'm not a booster, but the source you cite is obviously pushing an anti-nuclear agenda. I think it would last a century at least. By then there are a lot of alternatives that should be ready. Solar satellite to microwave; fusion (eventually they have to get the damn things working). Tides and wind can be supplemental, though probably never a large percentage.
Nuclear power is contentious, difficult, and actually not in infinite supply. The world would consume all the nuclear power in a couple of decades; and there isn't any easy way to make its energy available for transportation.
I'm not at all a nuke booster, but this isn't true. If you use breeder reactors you can convert non-fissile U238 to Plutonium, which multiplies your available fuel (U235) by a factor of hundreds. And it's not hard to transport electricity, it's just how efficient it is. Aside from copper cables, there's the possibility of cracking water to make hydrogen. Further out, maybe superconducting cables. Also you can make portable reactors on barges and move them to where they're needed.
Lots of safety and political issues, but the pure science isn't a problem.
From TFA:"Tumbleweed on Tuesday introduced its Adaptive Image Filtering technology designed to block image spam by using an image-processing technique called wavelet transform,...."
Why bother analysing the images? Block all email with attached images. Whitelist your friends and usual correspondents in case some insist on using "stationery" or sending images.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been stored underground for 60 million years or more...
Doesn't this smell just a little bit like Saddam Hussein's election results? 100.00% vote for him, therefore he was the democratic choice.
Everyone uses MS because everyone uses MS. Even if one of the 19 competitors, by some fluke, were to write better software, they can't get any traction because no one wants to be incompatible with MS files. I personally am forced to use MS Word to deal with files from my clients who have no idea that any other format is conceivable. 15 years ago there was a healthy competitive market: Lotus, WordPerfect, WordStar, etc. All provided feature rich applications. All had to be interoperable. MS leveraged their knowledge and control of Windows to hobble the competitors and made bundling deals to make choosing alternatives punitively expensive.
Bullshit. If governments want money from anyone or any company, they don't drag need to manufacture a court case, they just write a law to tax something they do. Much simpler, little bad publicity, and the tax collectors are very efficient in getting their money. I'm sure MS has cost the EU millions already in legal manhours in investigating and arguing this case.
voting for the State to be more and more powerful, which means that it can do more and more damage to your freedoms.
Bullshit again. This is about Microsoft taking away consumer's freedom to use competing software by locking their data up in proprietary protocols.
You forgot to mention that the TERRORISTS win if we believe in global warming. And that most people who do believe in global warming also support gay marriage.
The post I was repying to was about the uncertainties due to measuring temperatures in cities. I pointed out that there are plenty of "natural" temperature records in remote places. How "dramatic" these temperature changes are is another discussion.
True. But it's also a fact that if the developed world doesn't act first, no one will ever do anything. Kyoto was just the first step, and the US didn't even take that.
Temperatures have been measured based on ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic. No urban areas there to blame. Google has relevant sources on the first page of hits.
The entries weren't "closed", they were "semi-protected". From the headline one might assume the entries had been withdrawn. That would be notable, but restricting editing to registered users isn't very dramatic, so some idiot decided to sex up the story.
Even if you're not a professional troll, I think you've demonstrated a natural talent.
But in the book this was presented as a good idea. People have argued there was a critical subtext, but I'm not convinced. Heinlein started out as a socialist, but ended up a libertarian, and he always venerated the military. .
I also read it in the context of a book club in which we did emphasize the negative aspects of the society.
The question is not what you, or I, think of this society, but what Heinlein thought. The movie presented the society as unambiguously evil, a Nazi parody. That certainly was not what Heinlein intended. And the movie IS the story as far as much of society is concerned.
I guess I just don't take Heinlein as seriously as others do
I don't worship him. But obviously in this topic you're going to find people who do. There have been huge flame wars on SF discussion newsgroups on this subject.
Huh? What are you talking about? There's no sex in those books.
Okay, it's 30 years since I read those. But I'm pretty sure in Podkayne her "auntie" (not biologically, but an older woman who took that role) was sleeping around, she certainly had an active social life around the Venusian casinos; some attempts to seduce Podkayne; and of course the whole "frozen embryos" thing at the beginning was probably rather shocking at the time. In Rolling Stones I think it was strongly suggested that the grandmother had had a very active sex life. But of course, no actual sex scenes in any of these.
It changed the nature of the warfare completely. It wasn't just cosmetic. In the movie troops rush into battle in mobs, on foot, and get chewed up, literally by giant bugs. The military tactics in the movie are idiotic and make the commanders responsible for senseless slaughter; impying that it's a "Wag the Dog" war to keep the home world cowed and fearful. This idea is nowhere in the book. They should have filmed The Forever War if that's the stry they wanted to tell.
I read the same patriotism / fascism into both the book AND the movie.
What were the recruiting ads in the movie but unsubtle characterisation of the society as openly racist and fascist? In the book, the protagonist, Rico, is not an Aryan storm trooper but a Filipino. You have to look very deep in the book to find hints of criticism of the society portrayed. So deep it's a strong point of contention whether Heinlein had any doubts at all of the virtues of his society, a world guided by benevolent military veterans fighting back against after an unprovoked alien attack corresponding to Pearl Harbor.
I don't think my views on "Starship Troopers" are that troll-like.
The words seem carefully calculated to piss people off. Thus "trollish".
Unfortunately, there were many reasons to put down most of the books he wrote after about 1970 when his health started to decline. Judge him by his best, in the 1940s-60s.
Well, he did try occasionally. How about Podkayne of Mars? Being a male myself I can't say how authentic the narrator, a teenage girl was here, but it seemed to ring true.
I'm not so sure about that. What about Podkayne of Mars, The Rolling Stones? Lots of sex (though not graphic). I can't recall drugs, but plenty of drinking (and in many novels Heinlein speaks of the virtues of tobacco, rather jarring these days). Also apparently some more racy passages in his "juveniles" were cut in editing. Recent editions have included these parts, though I haven't troubled to read them. And of course in the 60s and 70s, Heinlein got into psychedelia, and lots of icky sexual obsessions like incest. But I try to forget those.
You do know that "Bachman" was a pseudonym for Stephen King? Anyway, most of his novels are disposable (but I like his short fiction) and little deserving of veneration. Running Man the movie was a quite funny parody of reality TV, WWF wrestling and such. I liked it on its own terms.
My nomination for worst adaptation of a good SF novel: Poul Anderson's High Crusade, filmed by Roland Emmerich. The novel is a space opera, about mediaeval crusaders who hijack a spaceship and end up conquering the galaxy. Emmerich sadly attempted to make a broad comedy, but failed dismally. I was so excited to find the VCD of this, the only movie based on a novel by this great author, so disappointed at the crap that it was.
Troll. But a couple of points anyway:
Yeah, unlike oil which has never caused any security problems or conflict.
And if you imagine fission scaling up to be the primary energy source, even with breeder reactors you still run out of uranium within decades, perhaps a century.
As I said, I'm not a booster, but the source you cite is obviously pushing an anti-nuclear agenda. I think it would last a century at least. By then there are a lot of alternatives that should be ready. Solar satellite to microwave; fusion (eventually they have to get the damn things working). Tides and wind can be supplemental, though probably never a large percentage.
I didn't say it was "easy to store". And laptops are a trivial use of electricity, convenience, weight are much more important than cost.
I'm not at all a nuke booster, but this isn't true. If you use breeder reactors you can convert non-fissile U238 to Plutonium, which multiplies your available fuel (U235) by a factor of hundreds. And it's not hard to transport electricity, it's just how efficient it is. Aside from copper cables, there's the possibility of cracking water to make hydrogen. Further out, maybe superconducting cables. Also you can make portable reactors on barges and move them to where they're needed.
Lots of safety and political issues, but the pure science isn't a problem.
Very brave, if it is really your own address you've got the University of Waterloo admins to deal with your spam.
Zonk, it's so sad you're illiterate, but maybe you could USE SPELLCHECK. Please.
RTFA. If it works as advertised, it breaks down pollutants. It doesn't absorb them.
Why bother analysing the images? Block all email with attached images. Whitelist your friends and usual correspondents in case some insist on using "stationery" or sending images.
They've fixed the "bud", now. But still obviously couldn't work out the plural of "passer-by".