The internet is flooded with shitposts like yours in every article about weight loss. Diet and exercise, in the real world, appear to cure obesity about 2% of the time. That's like... shamanism cure rates. So yes, we'll need a real solution, and no, shitposts like yours won't bring it to fruition any faster.
If there was a pill that cured a disease if you took at every day, but 98% of the people with the disease couldn't manage that would you say the pill didn't work?
There are no fat starving people, when people in general eat less, there was less obesity. Almost nobody gets fat without eating too much and exercising too little even many of the metabolic disorders trotted out as excuses won't make you obese by themselves.
Sure some people get lucky through genes and/or gut flora can eat more and not put on weight but it can't be that every thin person has this because the obesity problem is relatively recent and limited to certain countries. So there have to be plenty of people out there who are not obese but it isn't just luck.
There are other things that could help, regulating and/or taxing fat and sugar in food for example. Looking for a medical solution for a cultural problem seems like a problematic idea to me though.
The BBC tells us that Wikileaks taught us nothing new and was just a slight embarrassment to the US government.
When dealing with Snowden they say nothing about the actual leaked information outside of, "bulk collection of email and telephone metadata". The story is always, "Is he a spy for the Chinese, or Russia?", "What's his motive?" etc.
I just went to the BBC website and searched for Wikileaks (http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=Wikileaks)
Top 4 results:
Wikileaks: US 'routinely spied' on Brazil
US 'spied on French presidents' - Wikileaks
NSA spying: France summons US envoy after Wikileaks revelation
Wikileaks: Bin Laden's son 'asked for father's death certificate'
Nope, nothing there about actual leaked content.
Listen to radio 4. It feels like a creepy recreation of the empire circa 1954 right up until the world service kicks in whereupon a few of the opinions that were verboten during the day can now be expressed.
Radio 4? Really? The station with the rep of being for the middle aged (and older), middle class liberals? I mean cutting edge it isn't but what are these verboten opinions?
I only listen to the the comedy/science on it, News Quiz, Now Show, Infinite Monkey Cage. I'd love to know the propaganda in them.
You have to listen to the domestic output while comparing to foreign or independent sources to see the incredible, Orwellian nature of their deception.
Clearly I've been duped, open my eyes than what is the great deception? What lies are they feeding me? I don't pretend they are impartial, but Pravda?
As someone who suffered posture related back problems I found just getting fitter didn't help and the typical gym trainer won't be any help. You need to develop awareness of your posture, and reset what feels normal and natural to something that is actually a good posture. A good physio, osteopath or chiropractor can help and something like Pilates or Tai Chi is good for posture awareness.
Here's a clue: It's sci-fi and fantasy, in games no less. It's called suspension of disbelief.
I rather think that is the point. Suspension of disbelief require some internal consistency in fictional universe. So it is consistent when someone with superhuman powers like a Jedi performs a superhuman feat like wading through hundred's of. If isn't when a normal guy like Freeman does it. So you need additional suspension of disbelief to buy it, on top of buying the setting.
That's great if your audience is just a niche of hardcore playes, since they are the ones most rewarded by this.
Personally I play City of Heroes largely because PvP only happens in certain zones and doesn't effect leveling up. I'm a casual player, and I want to just play some coop or solo stuff now and then without having my fun ruined by someone else. Yeah, I'm a 'carebare', I don't play to get abused by some 14 year old, and it is a big chunk of the market too.
I have no problem with some MMOs doing unrestricted PvP, I'll just ignore them, but MMOs in general certainly don't need it.
Besides, in and of itself unrestircted PvP doesn't give you an evolving storyline or complex politics, you need a lot more than that. Storyline and politics don't even need PvP as such anyway.
Forced distribution of resources dictated by the government is communism,
Er no. Communism is a political philosphy, not an economic one like capitalism. They are in no way opposites.
Government control of resources is known as a Command Economy, or centrally planned. Its a part of the communist idea, but you can have a planned economy with any comuunisim at all (it is quite popular with some extreme right wing politicians as well).
capitalism lets the market dictate how they are distributed. By what definition is copyright capitalistic?
It isn't capitalistic, in the sense that neither are taxes or environmental regluation. It is wrong to assume that automatically somehow makes it communist.
I'm sure he means South America, I definitely remember seeing a documentary about it, covering the cave paintings, and genetic tests on the people on the island.
Was a while ago, so I don't remember the details, and I have no idea what the current thinking about the theory is, but I do remember it. I wish I could Google up a reference, but my quick searches just get me stuff on 'traditional' native Americans.
Wikipedia is just a very efficient way of collaborating on information, with few limits.
It certainly is efficient in terms of volume of information, but quality still remains a problem in obscure or controversial areas.
All of the sudden nobody is an expert, all of the sudden information can come from anywhere.
The availability of information doesn't suddenly remove expertise, or bestow it. What is more, information from 'anywhere' isn't much use, unless you trust the source you can't trust the information. Even most wikipedia supporters suggest that it is a first stop, then you go to the experts, which the article often points you at.
There are lots of areas where opinion is no substitute for knowledge. You can't vote on reality, its the very idea Colbert is mocking.
Nor are most experts deliberately hiding their knowledge, they usually want to publish. But get in depth into any subject and you need expertise to understand it. Reading about quantum mechanics on wikipedia doesn't make me an expert, and it doesn't make a physics professor who has studied it for years not an expert.
All of the sudden we don't have this magical authority anymore to tell us what is right and wrong, and for many people that is unimaginable.
Instead I think many people just shift to the Internet being the authority. They believe it because a website say it, rather than a book or a person on TV. People like authority and certainty, and I don't see some major shift in human nature occurring.
People don't have time (or inclination) to be experts in many things, so ultimately you have to trust someone else in those areas. I'd question the idea that some public consensus of non experts is more likely to be right than traditional 'authority' like people who study or work in the area.
Perhaps what wikipedia will do is teach people to trust a little less. As critics highlight its errors, and supporters point to errors in more traditional sources, maybe people will become a little bit more sceptical all around.
I firmly believe that the internet will do away with peer-reviewed academic journals, and all other sorts of authority.
Peer reviewed journals are useful when you are doing science exactly because the people reviewing them have expertise. Comments from Joe Random Internet user are no help here. Just look at scientific discussions on popular sites like Fark or Slashdot, full of (sometimes willful) ignorance. How is that remotely useful to someone publishing a paper, or doing research.
All you are achieving is making the signal to noise ratio much worse.
It may be a while off, and many people may call me crazy, but I see it. Instant communication using wiki like technologies will allow the efficient review and commenting of any academic work.
The review and commenting is only worthwhile if the people doing it actually know what they are talking about. Lots of them don't, not being experts. Not that experts always know, or non-experts never do, but you are more likely to get something useful from experts. The signal to noise ratio is so much better.
I envision a system that has been worked out over time, perhaps derived from wikipedia or even slashcode that allows people to weigh in on the merits and flaws of a work.
Groupthink is not a substitute for knowledge. You may get electronic peer reviewed journals, I'm sure it will happen, but the "peer" part is key to making it useful.
I think wikipedia is handy for non-controversial subjects, and some blogs are useful. But this techno-utopian stuff has been around as long as the internet (and before the web) that has always let people put anything out there, going back to usenet and bulletin boards. It is great that more information is more easily available to people however, information may be free, but knowledge and expertise often needs to be earned.
FPSes, after he left Id, and after Daikasucka, became slow, patience, boring-as-shit events by comparison. Sure, Counter-strike is/was awesome, but the blood-pumping feel of original FPSes, under Romero's Id, were an ancient, pure-breed of PC gaming long since dead and gone IMO.
Try the Serious Sam games if that sort of hectic playstyle is your thing in FPS games. I think they very much capture that feel.
My point is that criminals don't obey gun control laws
Then why aren't those anecdotes in the article about shootings? Most criminals in the UK don't have guns. The point isn't to stop every criminal having one, but to reduce the number significantly and it does seem to work in the UK.
so all such laws do is make the criminals reasonably certain that their law-abiding victims are unarmed. In this particular situation being armed wouldn't have helped the victim much, but perhaps the criminal would have been less brazen if he was uncertain of that?
You seem to have missed my point about UK (lack of) gun culture. The attitude to guns is very, very different to the US. The public were very much behind the handgun ban, partly because almost no members of the public owned them when they could. The deterrent factor is only going to work if 1) the criminal is rational and 2) there is a good chance the potential victim actually will have a gun. Without that it doesn't help.
Most violence in the UK is done my young men attacking other young men. Some of it is muggings, and some gangs, but a lot is drunk guys on a Friday or Saturday night (some places the police just turn up every weekend because they know there will be trouble). The thought that these guys could be carrying is pretty scary since they wouldn't be deterred by the possibility of someone else being armed since they a drunk and looking for trouble.
Alternatively the Brits could try novel approaches like long jail sentences for armed criminals.
Aboslutely. I would also like to see something like the three strikes system.
Also, note the linked-to article's point as to why British crime statistics are bogus.
It said why the author thought they were bogus, but I didn't see actual proof. While I don't completely believe the statistics provided by the government there are other sources, and I don't think the police are hiding bodies to fix the murder rate.
I'm not necessarily opposed to citizens being armed, but I really don't see it helping at all in the UK at the moment. Most of the people who would get guns would be young men who think they are cool, and most likely to do something stupid with them.
The only way I could see it working is with some sort of big public eduction campaign to get "normal" people not to be afraid of guns and regard them as a tool they should get trained with and carry, rather than some evil scary thing or cool fashion accessory. Politically though that would be suicide, relaxing gun controls and encouraging even responsible ownership would so unpopular.
I think "Web 2.0" will get used in a similar way, to describe an idea where the scope is too great to be explained in concrete terms
I haven't heard anything about web 2.0 too great to be explained in concrete terms. It just seems to be a mashing together of AJAX, XML, web services, greater user interaction, social networking and possibly the semantic web and some other things. Most of it actually seems to be here now, and not actually be used.
I think the people not "in the know" will mostly never know, hear, or care about the term. They will hear about Google maps, or MySpace or some other particular site that has buzz.
Crazily enough the article says they are third generation search, so really they should be Search 3.0, but that wouldn't sound as cool and as if it was connected to Web 2.0.
All the op said was the "2.0" tag was stupid, not the content. I happen to agree, what the hell does "search 2.0" mean? Or "web 2.0"? If you want to actually discuss a technology or approach then fine, but these terms are so vague they don't actually mean anything at all.
Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.
Eh? If the person being mugged had a gun, how would it have helped when someone had what he thought was a gun pressed to the back of his head?
Gun control laws seem to be working pretty well in the UK. It just isn't a gun owning culture, and even when you could own a handgun, almost nobody wanted one (even the police don't want them except for specially trained officers). If they were available, I just don't think we would get any of the benefits for law abiding citizens. If almost nobody owns them they don't offer much for deterrent or protection.
Yes some criminals have guns, but not many. Gun crime is low, and the murder rate is lower than the US although I believe that other violent crimes apart from rape are higher. It may be connected, that fights/assaults happen but they don't escalate to killings as often without the weapons, although I think that would be impossible to prove.
I don't think the same laws would work in the US, the culture is different and the guns are out there. If I lived in the US again I'd want a gun.
I have been suffering from RSI for about a year now and found some things that help.
Voice control software. I use ViaVoice myself. It is a real pain to train, but once done it is very good for emails, documents and the like. Probably too unwieldy for a total replacement, but it can reduce the typing load.
RSIGuard a handy program that forces you to take breaks based on how much you have used the mouse or keyboard. Simple idea, but it is so easy to forget to take breaks.
Aerobic Mouse or Quill Mouse. If gripping a pointing device is the problem this is great. Its like a vertical mouse and your hand sits in a tray on the side of it. You can move it around and keep the hand relaxed.
I've been using IE7 beta 3 for a while now, it is quite nice, but the only feature I've found useful that firefox lacks the the ability to save tables in web page as Excel sheets. The other features just seem to be catch up.
That doesn't proof Wikipedia failures, but humanity ones.
If a system that is supposed to be used by humans, it has to take into account human behaviour. It doesn't matter how well it would work if humans were better than they are, its like when people say "Communism is a great system, its just that people ruin it". No, its a crappy system because it doesn't work with real people. Likewise Wikipedia's failures to account for human behaviour can't be excused, because it is supposed to be used by people.
Claiming Wikipedia doesn't have problems because users can fix the bad data just doesn't cut it. We know plenty of people won't bother, others won't know it is wrong, and corrections risk getting undone. The question is what to do about it. Hopefully they will get around to doing the two version of pages talked about, current free for all, and fixed, fact checked, edited ones.
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial, or about modern politians or corporations because it is just too untrustworthy.
Re:Seems an obvious patent
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 1
I don't disagree, I was just pointing out that it wasn't just text-to-peach as some people were claiming.
Personally I think many patents are silly and obvious and lack any real innovation. I don't get to decide though, and this seems less obviously that stuff like one click ordering that got a patent, and I expect this does enough to get Apple the patent, unless the system gets an overhaul.
If the particles are so small we just didn't see them before
If you read the article you might realise they aren't talking about that at all, the particles in question are positrons and electrons.
They are talking about actually empty space having sufficient energy that sometimes it turns into matter, an electron and a positron, that usually then wipe each other out and become energy, but can have an effect on things.
However the energy doesn't fit with other observations and theories in physics. So our understanding about something here must be wrong.
Re:Seems an obvious patent
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I expect what they will patent is the system where the computer does the text-to-speech and then loads up the created files to the player along with the actual songs, then the menu system plays them as appropriate.
So a bit more than just a text-to-speech menu system.
Re:Rockbox
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 2, Informative
AAC is no more proprietary than MP3 and doesn't have DRM. Apple have a music format that is AAC + DRM.
I use Rockbox on my iRiver, and while I would never expect it to play something bought from iTunes for all sorts of reasons, no reason why it couldn't play AAC in addition to the MP3 and OGG.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is flooded with shitposts like yours in every article about weight loss. Diet and exercise, in the real world, appear to cure obesity about 2% of the time. That's like... shamanism cure rates. So yes, we'll need a real solution, and no, shitposts like yours won't bring it to fruition any faster.
If there was a pill that cured a disease if you took at every day, but 98% of the people with the disease couldn't manage that would you say the pill didn't work?
There are no fat starving people, when people in general eat less, there was less obesity. Almost nobody gets fat without eating too much and exercising too little even many of the metabolic disorders trotted out as excuses won't make you obese by themselves.
Sure some people get lucky through genes and/or gut flora can eat more and not put on weight but it can't be that every thin person has this because the obesity problem is relatively recent and limited to certain countries. So there have to be plenty of people out there who are not obese but it isn't just luck.
There are other things that could help, regulating and/or taxing fat and sugar in food for example. Looking for a medical solution for a cultural problem seems like a problematic idea to me though.
The BBC isn't part of the government, just publicly funded, in fact it fairly regularly annoys the government,
The BBC tells us that Wikileaks taught us nothing new and was just a slight embarrassment to the US government.
When dealing with Snowden they say nothing about the actual leaked information outside of, "bulk collection of email and telephone metadata". The story is always, "Is he a spy for the Chinese, or Russia?", "What's his motive?" etc.
I just went to the BBC website and searched for Wikileaks (http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=Wikileaks)
Top 4 results:
Nope, nothing there about actual leaked content.
Listen to radio 4. It feels like a creepy recreation of the empire circa 1954 right up until the world service kicks in whereupon a few of the opinions that were verboten during the day can now be expressed.
Radio 4? Really? The station with the rep of being for the middle aged (and older), middle class liberals? I mean cutting edge it isn't but what are these verboten opinions? I only listen to the the comedy/science on it, News Quiz, Now Show, Infinite Monkey Cage. I'd love to know the propaganda in them.
You have to listen to the domestic output while comparing to foreign or independent sources to see the incredible, Orwellian nature of their deception.
Clearly I've been duped, open my eyes than what is the great deception? What lies are they feeding me? I don't pretend they are impartial, but Pravda?
As someone who suffered posture related back problems I found just getting fitter didn't help and the typical gym trainer won't be any help. You need to develop awareness of your posture, and reset what feels normal and natural to something that is actually a good posture. A good physio, osteopath or chiropractor can help and something like Pilates or Tai Chi is good for posture awareness.
Here's a clue: It's sci-fi and fantasy, in games no less. It's called suspension of disbelief.
I rather think that is the point. Suspension of disbelief require some internal consistency in fictional universe. So it is consistent when someone with superhuman powers like a Jedi performs a superhuman feat like wading through hundred's of. If isn't when a normal guy like Freeman does it. So you need additional suspension of disbelief to buy it, on top of buying the setting.
What MMOs really need, IMHO, is unrestricted PvP.
That's great if your audience is just a niche of hardcore playes, since they are the ones most rewarded by this.
Personally I play City of Heroes largely because PvP only happens in certain zones and doesn't effect leveling up. I'm a casual player, and I want to just play some coop or solo stuff now and then without having my fun ruined by someone else. Yeah, I'm a 'carebare', I don't play to get abused by some 14 year old, and it is a big chunk of the market too.
I have no problem with some MMOs doing unrestricted PvP, I'll just ignore them, but MMOs in general certainly don't need it.
Besides, in and of itself unrestircted PvP doesn't give you an evolving storyline or complex politics, you need a lot more than that. Storyline and politics don't even need PvP as such anyway.
Forced distribution of resources dictated by the government is communism,
Er no. Communism is a political philosphy, not an economic one like capitalism. They are in no way opposites.
Government control of resources is known as a Command Economy, or centrally planned. Its a part of the communist idea, but you can have a planned economy with any comuunisim at all (it is quite popular with some extreme right wing politicians as well).
capitalism lets the market dictate how they are distributed. By what definition is copyright capitalistic?
It isn't capitalistic, in the sense that neither are taxes or environmental regluation. It is wrong to assume that automatically somehow makes it communist.
I'm sure he means South America, I definitely remember seeing a documentary about it, covering the cave paintings, and genetic tests on the people on the island.
Was a while ago, so I don't remember the details, and I have no idea what the current thinking about the theory is, but I do remember it. I wish I could Google up a reference, but my quick searches just get me stuff on 'traditional' native Americans.
Wikipedia is just a very efficient way of collaborating on information, with few limits.
It certainly is efficient in terms of volume of information, but quality still remains a problem in obscure or controversial areas.
All of the sudden nobody is an expert, all of the sudden information can come from anywhere.
The availability of information doesn't suddenly remove expertise, or bestow it. What is more, information from 'anywhere' isn't much use, unless you trust the source you can't trust the information. Even most wikipedia supporters suggest that it is a first stop, then you go to the experts, which the article often points you at.
There are lots of areas where opinion is no substitute for knowledge. You can't vote on reality, its the very idea Colbert is mocking.
Nor are most experts deliberately hiding their knowledge, they usually want to publish. But get in depth into any subject and you need expertise to understand it. Reading about quantum mechanics on wikipedia doesn't make me an expert, and it doesn't make a physics professor who has studied it for years not an expert.
All of the sudden we don't have this magical authority anymore to tell us what is right and wrong, and for many people that is unimaginable.
Instead I think many people just shift to the Internet being the authority. They believe it because a website say it, rather than a book or a person on TV. People like authority and certainty, and I don't see some major shift in human nature occurring.
People don't have time (or inclination) to be experts in many things, so ultimately you have to trust someone else in those areas. I'd question the idea that some public consensus of non experts is more likely to be right than traditional 'authority' like people who study or work in the area.
Perhaps what wikipedia will do is teach people to trust a little less. As critics highlight its errors, and supporters point to errors in more traditional sources, maybe people will become a little bit more sceptical all around.
I firmly believe that the internet will do away with peer-reviewed academic journals, and all other sorts of authority.
Peer reviewed journals are useful when you are doing science exactly because the people reviewing them have expertise. Comments from Joe Random Internet user are no help here. Just look at scientific discussions on popular sites like Fark or Slashdot, full of (sometimes willful) ignorance. How is that remotely useful to someone publishing a paper, or doing research.
All you are achieving is making the signal to noise ratio much worse.
It may be a while off, and many people may call me crazy, but I see it. Instant communication using wiki like technologies will allow the efficient review and commenting of any academic work.
The review and commenting is only worthwhile if the people doing it actually know what they are talking about. Lots of them don't, not being experts. Not that experts always know, or non-experts never do, but you are more likely to get something useful from experts. The signal to noise ratio is so much better.
I envision a system that has been worked out over time, perhaps derived from wikipedia or even slashcode that allows people to weigh in on the merits and flaws of a work.
Groupthink is not a substitute for knowledge. You may get electronic peer reviewed journals, I'm sure it will happen, but the "peer" part is key to making it useful.
I think wikipedia is handy for non-controversial subjects, and some blogs are useful. But this techno-utopian stuff has been around as long as the internet (and before the web) that has always let people put anything out there, going back to usenet and bulletin boards. It is great that more information is more easily available to people however, information may be free, but knowledge and expertise often needs to be earned.
FPSes, after he left Id, and after Daikasucka, became slow, patience, boring-as-shit events by comparison. Sure, Counter-strike is/was awesome, but the blood-pumping feel of original FPSes, under Romero's Id, were an ancient, pure-breed of PC gaming long since dead and gone IMO.
Try the Serious Sam games if that sort of hectic playstyle is your thing in FPS games. I think they very much capture that feel.
My point is that criminals don't obey gun control laws
Then why aren't those anecdotes in the article about shootings? Most criminals in the UK don't have guns. The point isn't to stop every criminal having one, but to reduce the number significantly and it does seem to work in the UK.
so all such laws do is make the criminals reasonably certain that their law-abiding victims are unarmed. In this particular situation being armed wouldn't have helped the victim much, but perhaps the criminal would have been less brazen if he was uncertain of that?
You seem to have missed my point about UK (lack of) gun culture. The attitude to guns is very, very different to the US. The public were very much behind the handgun ban, partly because almost no members of the public owned them when they could. The deterrent factor is only going to work if 1) the criminal is rational and 2) there is a good chance the potential victim actually will have a gun. Without that it doesn't help.
Most violence in the UK is done my young men attacking other young men. Some of it is muggings, and some gangs, but a lot is drunk guys on a Friday or Saturday night (some places the police just turn up every weekend because they know there will be trouble). The thought that these guys could be carrying is pretty scary since they wouldn't be deterred by the possibility of someone else being armed since they a drunk and looking for trouble.
Alternatively the Brits could try novel approaches like long jail sentences for armed criminals.
Aboslutely. I would also like to see something like the three strikes system.
Also, note the linked-to article's point as to why British crime statistics are bogus.
It said why the author thought they were bogus, but I didn't see actual proof. While I don't completely believe the statistics provided by the government there are other sources, and I don't think the police are hiding bodies to fix the murder rate.
I'm not necessarily opposed to citizens being armed, but I really don't see it helping at all in the UK at the moment. Most of the people who would get guns would be young men who think they are cool, and most likely to do something stupid with them.
The only way I could see it working is with some sort of big public eduction campaign to get "normal" people not to be afraid of guns and regard them as a tool they should get trained with and carry, rather than some evil scary thing or cool fashion accessory. Politically though that would be suicide, relaxing gun controls and encouraging even responsible ownership would so unpopular.
I think "Web 2.0" will get used in a similar way, to describe an idea where the scope is too great to be explained in concrete terms
I haven't heard anything about web 2.0 too great to be explained in concrete terms. It just seems to be a mashing together of AJAX, XML, web services, greater user interaction, social networking and possibly the semantic web and some other things. Most of it actually seems to be here now, and not actually be used.
I think the people not "in the know" will mostly never know, hear, or care about the term. They will hear about Google maps, or MySpace or some other particular site that has buzz.
Crazily enough the article says they are third generation search, so really they should be Search 3.0, but that wouldn't sound as cool and as if it was connected to Web 2.0.
All the op said was the "2.0" tag was stupid, not the content. I happen to agree, what the hell does "search 2.0" mean? Or "web 2.0"? If you want to actually discuss a technology or approach then fine, but these terms are so vague they don't actually mean anything at all.
Its just marketing and hype.
He probably didn't, according to the actual article it just felt like a gun. Or a toy gun. Or, you know, fingers.
Although this guy is apparently an expert, and can tell the type of gun he can't see being pressed against his head. Useful skill that.
Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.
Eh? If the person being mugged had a gun, how would it have helped when someone had what he thought was a gun pressed to the back of his head?
Gun control laws seem to be working pretty well in the UK. It just isn't a gun owning culture, and even when you could own a handgun, almost nobody wanted one (even the police don't want them except for specially trained officers). If they were available, I just don't think we would get any of the benefits for law abiding citizens. If almost nobody owns them they don't offer much for deterrent or protection.
Yes some criminals have guns, but not many. Gun crime is low, and the murder rate is lower than the US although I believe that other violent crimes apart from rape are higher. It may be connected, that fights/assaults happen but they don't escalate to killings as often without the weapons, although I think that would be impossible to prove.
I don't think the same laws would work in the US, the culture is different and the guns are out there. If I lived in the US again I'd want a gun.
I have been suffering from RSI for about a year now and found some things that help.
Voice control software. I use ViaVoice myself. It is a real pain to train, but once done it is very good for emails, documents and the like. Probably too unwieldy for a total replacement, but it can reduce the typing load.
RSIGuard a handy program that forces you to take breaks based on how much you have used the mouse or keyboard. Simple idea, but it is so easy to forget to take breaks.
Aerobic Mouse or Quill Mouse. If gripping a pointing device is the problem this is great. Its like a vertical mouse and your hand sits in a tray on the side of it. You can move it around and keep the hand relaxed.
I am sure plenty of slashdotters would be happy to flip your girlfriend's bit.
I've been using IE7 beta 3 for a while now, it is quite nice, but the only feature I've found useful that firefox lacks the the ability to save tables in web page as Excel sheets. The other features just seem to be catch up.
I have yet to use one which did not work with a new version of firefox yet
I have, although it seems pretty rare, last time on the change to 1.5 which changed some menus.
many times had to manually alter files so that a new release of firefox would work with them
Try the MR Tech Local Install extension, you can override the version compatibility on other extensions and dispense with the file changes.
That doesn't proof Wikipedia failures, but humanity ones.
If a system that is supposed to be used by humans, it has to take into account human behaviour. It doesn't matter how well it would work if humans were better than they are, its like when people say "Communism is a great system, its just that people ruin it". No, its a crappy system because it doesn't work with real people. Likewise Wikipedia's failures to account for human behaviour can't be excused, because it is supposed to be used by people.
Claiming Wikipedia doesn't have problems because users can fix the bad data just doesn't cut it. We know plenty of people won't bother, others won't know it is wrong, and corrections risk getting undone. The question is what to do about it. Hopefully they will get around to doing the two version of pages talked about, current free for all, and fixed, fact checked, edited ones.
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial, or about modern politians or corporations because it is just too untrustworthy.
I don't disagree, I was just pointing out that it wasn't just text-to-peach as some people were claiming.
Personally I think many patents are silly and obvious and lack any real innovation. I don't get to decide though, and this seems less obviously that stuff like one click ordering that got a patent, and I expect this does enough to get Apple the patent, unless the system gets an overhaul.
If the particles are so small we just didn't see them before
If you read the article you might realise they aren't talking about that at all, the particles in question are positrons and electrons.
They are talking about actually empty space having sufficient energy that sometimes it turns into matter, an electron and a positron, that usually then wipe each other out and become energy, but can have an effect on things.
However the energy doesn't fit with other observations and theories in physics. So our understanding about something here must be wrong.
I expect what they will patent is the system where the computer does the text-to-speech and then loads up the created files to the player along with the actual songs, then the menu system plays them as appropriate.
So a bit more than just a text-to-speech menu system.
AAC is no more proprietary than MP3 and doesn't have DRM. Apple have a music format that is AAC + DRM. I use Rockbox on my iRiver, and while I would never expect it to play something bought from iTunes for all sorts of reasons, no reason why it couldn't play AAC in addition to the MP3 and OGG.