This may be the single best long term decision Microsoft has ever made.
It's a great decision, certainly, but I wouldn't go that far. The #1 decision in my opinion is still convincing IBM to sign a non-exclusive deal that would let MS sell MS-DOS to clone makers. That was basically the foundation for everything else that followed.
If I'm only drinking beer for the flavour, then I'm just as happy with non-alcoholic beer.
Except that non-alcoholic beer has an unfortunate tendency to taste like crap in a bottle. Show me a non-alcoholic brew that tastes as good as Guiness, or Sam Adams Cream Stout, and I'll be all over it.
Yep. I saw an interview with him a few years back. He basically said that he never does anything halfway, that when he decides to retire (more or less) he intended to work as hard giving away his fortune as he did making it. He may be playing the philanthropy game now instead of the business game, but you can bet that he still wants to be the 800lb gorilla on the field.
"The menu in iPod is identical to the list view in NeXTStep , predating anything Creative did."
So? NeXTSTep wasn't a portable music player.
True, but one requirement to receive a patent is that the invention must be non-obvious. Taking a menu structure that's in use on one system and using it on another one would fail that test - it's pretty damn obvious.
Geeks spend a lot of time interacting with people online, which is different from face to face communication in two very real ways. First, there are no facial expressions or body language online, and most people have learned to compensate for that with more descriptive "speech" that outlines both the concept and the speaker's feelings on the matter. Emoticons are pretty useful, actually. The effect of this is that geeks are often accustomed to being aware of the other party's feelings without having to read facial expressions or body language, so when they end up in a real conversation, they completely discard the visual inputs from the other party, and thus miss out on some very important cues as to what they are feeling.
Quite right, but the cause and effect can be the other way around too. Some folks (like me) just aren't very good at sending or receiving non-verbal cues. Cthulhu knows how many times I've been asked "what's wrong" when in fact I was in a perfectly good mood, or completely failed to pick up on someone else's mood. So I tend to gravitate to forms of communication where such cues are irrelevant, like phone and email.
Open source means you can read the source, much like an "open book exam" means you can read the book. The correct term for software that belongs to the community is Free Software.
That's like saying that the correct term for a potato is "carrot". "Open Source" is not an incorrect reference to "Free Software", it refers to a completely different philosophy.
Those [Mars rovers] have been chugging along for 18 months now, when their original lifetime was slated at 90 days. Many people consider NASA to be horribly mismanaged.
I don't credit NASA management for the success of the Mars missions. I think of the Mars rovers as something that the engineers managed to pull off in spite of the incompetency above them.
How about you do your own research to support your assertion, and quote the paragraph in that article that states that "Why yes, it's." would have been correct usage. As far as snarky retorts go, WTF is your problem? I gave a straight answer to a simple question. I didn't question anyone's intelligence, nor did I imply they were intellectually inferior - that was you, not me.
your sig says that "It's = it is" so how come you didn't write "Why yes, It's."?
I didn't write that because it would have been incorrect. That fact that "it's" is always a contraction of "it is" or "it has" (and never a possessive) does not imply that it's always appropriate to use the contraction over the full spelling.
It makes perfect sense. Stimulant + Depressant = Balance.
Been there, done that. It sounds logical, but what you get isn't balance, it's a roller coaster ride of drastic ups and downs, largely because one tends to drink the coffee during the day at work, then the alcohol after work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, mind you - if that's what turns your crank, more power to ya. I'm just saying it's not the nice even balance you might think.
That's step two. We need to turn up the heat gradually, so the frog doesn't notice it's being boiled. Step three is... well, we all know what step three is. Profit!:-)
I would almost say that elections should be tax payer funded requiring that each candidate would petition the people of his/her district and if they get enough signatures they are on the ballot and can receive a set amount of funds. Only problem here is any number of people could do this and then you run into a funding problem again.
We could simply divide the total available funding equally among the candidates. More candidates would obviously mean that each one would receive fewer funds, but the playing field would stay level. That would also have the effect of limiting the amount of advertising the public is subjected to. We might see five commercials for each of two candidates, or one commercial for each of ten candidates, but either way we'd still only have to see ten commercials total.
This is only possible due to a lack of informed voters.
I completely agree with that. But...
When less than 30% of the people bother to vote, who really runs the government?
I don't know if simply increasing the turnout would help. If 80% of the people voted, but continued to blindly vote along party lines without bothering to educate themselves about the candidates, I don't think the result would be significantly different. Conversely, if the turnout stayed at 30%, but those who voted were better informed, I think we'd see real change.
What I'd like to see is ballots that don't list any party affiliations, just names. You could still vote a "party ticket" if you wanted to, but you'd have to do at least enough research into your party to know their candidates' names.
Given that we seem bent on such things as placing the value of a dollar above the hunger of our neighbors, do we really deserve to be able to infest the rest of the universe?
I agree, we've made a mess here on Mother Earth, and probably don't really deserve to do the same elsewhere. But really, being deserving has nothing to do with it. We were either created or evolved (depending on your philosphy) to be two things: Curious and prolific. That combination virtually guarantees that sooner or later, we will go exploring.
The problem of overpopulation is caused by having too many people for the available space. Increasing the amount of available space isn't avoidance, it's a perfectly cromulent solution to that problem.
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Since they're from Boston, you'll get that great guitar sound too!
Pigs In Space!
It takes a lot of backbone to make a joke like that. I'm amazed someone had the spine to do it.
Okay, I will: I always found the Oddworld games to be visually stunning. (It was worth repeating.)
They're following an age-old formula.
How about you do your own research to support your assertion, and quote the paragraph in that article that states that "Why yes, it's." would have been correct usage. As far as snarky retorts go, WTF is your problem? I gave a straight answer to a simple question. I didn't question anyone's intelligence, nor did I imply they were intellectually inferior - that was you, not me.
Bad coverage on Fox? Really??? I'm amazed. Shocked, even.
We could simply divide the total available funding equally among the candidates. More candidates would obviously mean that each one would receive fewer funds, but the playing field would stay level. That would also have the effect of limiting the amount of advertising the public is subjected to. We might see five commercials for each of two candidates, or one commercial for each of ten candidates, but either way we'd still only have to see ten commercials total.
Easy: Lickable interface.
I don't know if simply increasing the turnout would help. If 80% of the people voted, but continued to blindly vote along party lines without bothering to educate themselves about the candidates, I don't think the result would be significantly different. Conversely, if the turnout stayed at 30%, but those who voted were better informed, I think we'd see real change.
What I'd like to see is ballots that don't list any party affiliations, just names. You could still vote a "party ticket" if you wanted to, but you'd have to do at least enough research into your party to know their candidates' names.
The problem of overpopulation is caused by having too many people for the available space. Increasing the amount of available space isn't avoidance, it's a perfectly cromulent solution to that problem.