30 years ago I was working in a physics lab at a major university. The man in charge of the support teams that were helping the scientists bought a set of tires on his gasoline company credit card. He paid the entire amount for the tires the next time he got a statement. But the tires had been put on an automatic payment plan stretched out over four months so the company only charged him for one tire that first month and gave him a positive balance for the other three tires. He didn't use the card for anything else and at the end of the four months he had an outstanding balance due to the interest that had accrued even though he had paid off the amount in full when he got the first statement.
Repeated phone calls to the company got him nowhere (which just goes to show we have no need to out-source
customer service since we are perfectly capable of providing terrible customer service domestically). Back in those days the billing systems were just getting computerized which was why this mistake was made and also why this man was having a hard time getting his problem solved.
Back in those days the companies actually sent all of their customers a
punched card
in each monthly statement and the customers were supposed to send this card back with their payment. Well, this man knew all about punched cards since he was in charge of several computers that still used them. So he simply punched in an end-of-file on a blank card and sent that back instead of the card the company sent him.
A couple of weeks later he got a phone call from the company asking him what he did and why he did it. He explained and they said they would correct the problem as long as he promised not to tell anyone else about the trick he had pulled.
... but finally after three or four tries, I had developed enough context so that I could read it all the way through and I found it to be magnificent.
Unlike The Silmarillion, I think The Illuminatus! Trilogy, was designed to expand the mind of the reader.
I first read it when I was in grad school and living in the most "alternative" house off campus. One person had a copy and all the guys in the house were reading it, one after the other.
I think the need and ability to have one's mind expanded tends to decrease as we get older. I think this is related to the general rules of thumb that say physicists and mathematicians tend to do their best work before they are 25 years old.
I recently bought yet another copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. It sits by my bedside unread. I really don't know if I'm going to be able to read it again or not. But I'm sure going to send some money to RAW to help him in his time of need. His books broadened my mind and changed my life.
i happen agree that had he been employeed previously with a steadier job, he might have the money saved to pay his rent, but most of the time i wish i had nothing to do with organized work too.
I don't think RAW was allergic to work as you seem to imply.
The man spent his time writing books that I happened to really enjoy. His writing has enriched my life. Our totally fucked up health care system severely punishes people who choose to contribute to society in creative ways such as RAW has done.
I'm extremely grateful that he didn't get a regular job and instead spent his time and energy challenging us with his writing. That's why I'm chipping in. Please feel free to call me any names you want. Any name you call me because I'm helping out RAW in his time of need, I will consider a badge of honor.
Re:If contamination were a problem, we would be de
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
·
· Score: 1
I think that overall, you have some good and valid points, but I also think you've overstated your case in a couple of places.
quigonn said:
... fighting too aggressively against any kind of etiologic agents only produces more resistant etiologic agents.
I think this conclusion very much depends upon what you are using to fight the etiologic agents. There is no question that we are facing a severe problem with antibiotic resistance but I don't think there is a threat of resistance to alcohol, Clorox, or simple soap and water.
The mouse in question uses a combination of Titanium Dioxide and Silver. I'm not an expert but this seems closer to alcohol and Clorox than it is to the type of antibiotics to which resistance can actually become a problem.
quigonn said:
[I]f the current contamination really were a problem, we would all be dead.
Again, I think you've overstated your case. Because we have an immune system, not all infections lead to death. But this does not imply that infections do not cause problems, nor does it imply that lack of hygiene is risk free even if the threat of death is small.
AFAIK, washing your hands frequently is still considered one of the simplest and most effective ways of protecting yourself against infection. Yet many people don't and they haven't all died out. If I applied your logic to this situation then I would conclude that there is no benefit to washing ones hands since they are still alive.
No one is saying "use this new mouse or die!". But the mouse could still be useful if it reduces the number of times per year a person gets sick.
The quote "Because that's where the money is" is usually attributed to Willie Sutton not John Dillinger. But at least
one source
says that Willie claims it was actually a reporter who came up with the witty response.
No, because hovering doesn't involve moving through a gravitational gradient.
What you say is true, hovering does not involve gravitational gradients, but it is also totally irrelevant. A gravitational gradient is a change in the gravitational acceleration from one point to another. Gravitational gradients cause tidal forces, which are not of interest in this discussion.
PatrickThomson then said:
Everyone hovers at 1G, it's just that we have to use bones and leg meat and so on to fill the space between our arse and the planet.
Now you are just being silly. The word hover means to be suspended in air without physical contact. We stand. Helicopters and hummingbirds hover.
Let me review some very basic physics for you. Newton's second law of motion is often taught as:
Force = Mass x Acceleration
When you stand on your legs, your legs are exerting a force equal to your mass times the acceleration of gravity in a direction pointing to the center of the Earth. If you are standing still, your legs, or the legs of a table, aren't doing any work (in the physics sense) because Work = Force x Distance and you and the table aren't moving vertically.
For rocket ships, helicopters, or microwave cavities to hover, they too must exert a vertical force equal to their mass times the acceleration of gravity.
Since they exert this force without physical contact, unlike you and your legs, they are free to use this force independent of distance. Your legs on the other hand, can only exert a force over a very limited range of distances.
If we take the rocket ship, slap some wheels on it, tip it sideways, and take it to the Bonneville Salt Flats, we can compete to break the land speed record.
Your legs can't do that. If we slap some wheels on you, tip you sideways, and give you something to push against then you can accelerate yourself at greater than one G but you can only do this through a distance of less than four feet (the range of your legs). This does mean though, that if we give you wheels and something to push against then you could win a drag race against almost any street car over a very, very short distance of just a few feet.
If we take a microwave cavity that is able to hover,
tip it sideways and slap some wheels on it then it will be able to accelerate at one G. It won't be limited in range like your legs are. This is almost three times the acceleration of the cars I mentioned in my initial post.
The reason I used this to question the inventor's relativity calculations is because the end result of the above long winded explanation should be known instantly to someone who has studied relativity since it follows directly from Einstein's Equivalence Principle.
... while the thrust of a motionless emdrive is high, the faster the engine moves, the more the thrust falls. Shawyer now reckons the emdrive will be better suited to powering vehicles that hover rather than accelerate rapidly.
Clearly either the reporter or the inventor does not know about relativity otherwise they would not claim that the thrust depends on the velocity of the engine (which would violate relativity).
But even if this is the reporter's goof, confusing acceleration and velocity, the inventor claims that the device would work better for hovering (presumably in Earth's gravity) instead of accelerating. This shows that the inventor does not understand relativity or basic physics. If his device could make a car hover then it could also accelerate the car at 1 G.
According to
the physics fact book, a 2001 Jaguar KX8 and a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse can each accelerate at 3.8 m/s^2 which is less than 1/2 G.
Since the inventor does not understand one of the simplest applications of relativity (gravity is the same as acceleration) I do not trust his calculations that claim some relativistic effect is giving him a force that will violate the conservation of momentum and energy.
It has always been this way. It has always looked this way. Life is like pinball. When we win we don't vanquish evil forever, instead, when we win all we get is a chance to play again.
And yet over the years there has been a steady series of significant changes in the direction of freedom.
Two hundred years ago, liberal democracy was an oddity, now it has
spread over the globe . More recently, we gained the 40-hour work week and young children no longer work in mines (in America and Western Europe at least).
The other thing that you might feel better knowing about is that despite this steady progress, the dominant pattern is a cycle. Things swing back and forth. In the 70's we stopped the bloody Vietnam war and we forced Nixon to resign in disgrace. Things had swung in the direction of freedom. Since then things have been swinging back in the opposite direction towards fascism (Godwin's rule be damned). You have incorrectly interpreted this current swing as a steady linear trend.
There are no guarantees in life but I predict we are close to the extreme and things are about to swing back in the direction of freedom. This too shall pass.
Patent law and copyright law are totally different. That is why RMS insists on not using the term "Intellectual property". Use of that term throws totally different things together and causes confusion.
Suggesting that RMS should deal with patent laws the same way he dealt with copyright laws is like suggesting he use a plunger to extinguish a kitchen fire since clogged drains and kitchen fires are both "household problems".
The GPL allows software authors to publish and distribute their software in a way that keeps it free and passes on the "four freedoms" to all recipients of that software. That software cannot suddenly become non-free due to copyright law (assuming, of course the original authors GPL'ed it). If the authors created the software themselves and didn't copy it from someone else then they are free and clear with regard to copyright law.
There are many problems with software patents (or benefits, perhaps, from the perspective of large corporations). It is not practical for FOSS developers to patent the software they develop. Back in the 1980's it cost $10,000 -- $15,000 to get just one patent. Worse, even if you developed a code base from scratch, and can prove it, that does not protect you from violating software patents. It is almost impossible to unwittingly violate copyright laws but it could well be that most patent violators are totally unaware they are doing anything wrong.
If you've been paying attention to patents in the news, you would realize that it is non-trivial and expensive, even for a large corporation, to defend against charges of patent infringement, even if the patents are eventually shown to be totally bogus.
It is true that many large corporations have extensive collections of patents and have agreements with each other to not sue each other over patents. A sort of patent mutually assured destruction strategy. Unfortunately, this is not a winning strategy for FOSS developers.
To sum up. Patent laws and copyright laws are totally different. They make software non-free in totally different ways therefore the best strategies for battling them are totally different.
Yes, let's trust the politician's opinion over the scientist's.
Here is what Rachel Carson actually said in her book:
It is more sensible in some cases to take a small amount of damage in preference to having none for a time but paying for it in the long run by losing the very means of fighting [is the advice given in Holland by Dr Briejer in his capacity as director of the Plant Protection Service]. Practical advice should be "Spray as little as you possibly can" rather than "Spray to the limit of your capacity."
In some areas DDT has lost much of its effectiveness, especially in areas such as India where outdoor transmission is the predominant form. According to one article by V.P. Sharma, "The declining effectiveness of DDT is a result of several factors which frequently operate in tandem. The first and the most important factor is vector resistance to DDT. All populations of the main vector, An. culicifacies have become resistant to DDT." In India, with its outdoor sleeping habits and frequent night duties, "the excito-repellent effect of DDT, often reported useful in other countries, actually promotes outdoor transmission."
According to a pesticide industry newsletter, DDT is obsolete for malarial prevention in India not only owing to concerns over its toxicity, but because it has largely lost its effectiveness.
So the politician you quoted was completely wrong on several different levels. In her book, Rachel Carson argues for limiting the use of DDT since excessive use can harm people and also make it less effective in fighting malaria.
It turns out that even the pesticide industry agrees with her.
It's not meant to be a believable lie. It is a clever political ploy developed by Karl Rove. The people currently in the White House are desperate to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives. If the Democrats gain control of the House while Bush is still president, he is going to be investigated out the wazoo and many people close to him will face jail time.
It is meant to be an unbelievable lie. It is meant to cause a reaction. Then Ken Mehlman can send out emails to the party faithful telling them how the evil, evil Democrats support child pornography. It was designed to get you riled up so they can use your reaction to inflame their base.
If you think this sounds far fetched, I encourage you to get on the GOP email list. The person who had my email address before me was on it and I haven't unsubscribed. The only thing the Democrats have going for them is almost every single issue and that may not be enough. Things are bound to get very, very ugly.
Here is a very simple solution for you if you want to give Gentoo a try again: don't update regularly. Just do important security updates (mostly browsers and media viewers and players).
Then in six months or so when you would normally do a fresh Ubuntu install, just do a fresh Gentoo install instead. If you keep a few spare partitions lying around and keep you $HOME on a separate partition, this is pretty darned easy. One of the best things about Gentoo (IMO) is that you can do the new install from within the old system -- no loss of productivity.
The QA problems in Gentoo have fluctuated. They were pretty bad a year or two ago and they've gotten much, much better since then. Some people on the Gentoo forums are complaining that things have become too easy.
The key to this strategy is your ability to resist updating.
If uncheck global warming destroys civilization as we know it then Philip Morris won't have to face any more of those pesky multi-billion dollar lawsuits. Not only that, the survivors will be so traumatized they will all feel the need to "light up" in order to relax and recover. It's a win-win.
now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it...
Since the author does not seem to understand the difference between a liveCD and a graphical installer, I for one, am not at all surprised he had problems installing Gentoo. It is not for the computer illiterate.
The last I heard the Gentoo Graphic Installer sucked bowling balls and ate existing partitions. To be fair, I found the newish Ubuntu Graphical Installer to totally suck also. It seemed to require more than 256 Meg otherwise it would slowly and painfully grind to a halt.
Putting a graphical installer in front of Gentoo is sort of like putting a two-speed Hydroglide automatic transmission behind a 409 engine.
DRM may not be an infection on the media files (although I've seen good arguments here saying it is) but it is certainly an infection in the minds of the people inflicting DRM on their customers and it is an infection in the minds of the customers that let this be done to them.
Let's look at some definitions of infection returned by
Google:
contagion: the communication of an attitude or emotional state among a number of people; "a contagion of mirth"; "the infection of his enthusiasm for poetry"
moral corruption or contamination; "ambitious men are led astray by an infection that is almost unavoidable"
An infection is the detrimental colonization of a host organism by a foreign species. An infection is, in effect, a war in which the infecting organism seeks to utilize the host's resources in order to multiply at the expense of the host. The infecting organism, or pathogen, interferes with the normal functioning and perhaps the survival of the host....
Personally, I think that last definition fits the case of DRM on media files perfectly.
It seemed to me that JRR covered the entire history of Middle Earth in Silmarillion,...
Well, yes Christopher put together the published Silmarillion into an coherent whole that did cover the entire history of Middle Earth. I think he made a good compromise in its length since he has been severally criticized both for making it too long and for making it too short. In the forward he says:
There is indeed a wealth of unpublished writings by my father concerning the Three Ages, narrative, linguistic, historical, and philosophical, and I hope that it will prove possible to publish some of this at a later date.
I can sympathize with finding these later works, or even the Silmarillion itself, inpenetratable or just not to one's taste but that is a far cry from being exploitative and a dilution.
As I said before, I feel very grateful towards Christopher Tolkien for making so much of his father's work available to the public. These books are not for everyone, perhaps they're not to your taste but that doesn't make them bad and exploitive.
IMO Christopher Tolkien is not being greedy. He could probably have just sat back out of the fray and lived comfortably off of royalties. Or he could have pursued his own career totally separate from his father's work and fame. I think he truly wants to get his father's works into the hands of the public and further, I think he is responding to a clammer from the fans of these works for more, more, more.
I've only read the Silmarilion,...
However sometime after that, the seemingly endless stream of variant versions of the same stories seems to have crossed over the line of honouring his legacy
to ruthlessly exploiting, and diluting, it.
I realize this is Slashdot and we have a glorious history here of commenting on articles without reading them but I must ask you how you can reach the conclusion that the volumes that followed the Silmarillion were exploitative and a dilution of the earlier works when you haven't even read them?
I've read most, but not all, of the volumes of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth and I've enjoyed them greatly. I felt no hint of exploitation or dilution. I'm very grateful to Christopher for taking the time and effort (and flack) to make all these parts of his father's work available to the rest of us.
If you are interested in exploring these other works, you might want to start with "Unfinished Tales" which provides a nice bridge between what happened in the Lord of the Rings and the larger world of the Silmarillion.
Yes, that poses a bit of a conundrum. I suggest that you read the story and decide for yourself.
I read it recently and my impression was that it was unmistakably an autobiographical allegory. The Wikipedia article I linked too handled it this way:
Tolkien himself might have disagreed with an allegorical interpretation. He wrote, in Letter 131 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, "I dislike Allegory." In specific reference to Niggle, he wrote in Letter 241, "It is not really or properly an 'allegory' so much as 'mythical'." On the other hand, in Letter 153 he said, "I tried to show allegorically how [subcreation] might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my 'purgatorial' story Leaf by Niggle."
I've been meaning to pick up the Simillarion as I've heard nothing but good things.
It took me about five tries before I was able to read this book. There were too many new names and I kept struggling to get some context. My mistake was trying to start from the beginning. It is one of those books that is much easier to read after you've already read it. I suggest you thumb through it and just start reading a section you find interesting.
Another way to ease your yourself in is to first read "Unfinished Tales" which contains details from both the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings. It is an excellent transition from the world of the Lord of the Rings to the much, much larger world of the Silmarillion.
It's a short story by J. R. R. Tolkien (the father not the son). The
wikipedia
says:
"Leaf by Niggle" is very much an allegory of Tolkien's own creative process, and, to an extent, of his own life.
If this is true the Tolkien (the father) would have very much wanted the world to read his unpublished stories especially if he had known they would have received the tremendous accolades they have gotten.
Christopher Tolkien has been providing Tolkien fans with many volumes of his father's unpublished works. I've found almost all of them to be fascinating and delightful, surpassing both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".
I've also found the stories about The Children of Hurin too brief, even the extended version in "Unfinished Tales" and the verse version in "The Lays of Beleriand". I'm looking forward to reading this new book and I think the son sharing these works with the rest of us has honored his father and made the world a better place.
We're working on that but there have been some problems, we are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
The KMechanical arm is able to access your RAM chips but all the credit cards in your KWallet have been maxed out so we've been unable to purchase new RAM chips for you.
Please help us help you by putting a valid credit card into your KWallet so we can proceed with the purchase.
Thank you for your time and consideration. We're glad you've chosen to fly KDE. Have a nice day.
Slashdot Mirror
Free ride indeed!
Repeated phone calls to the company got him nowhere (which just goes to show we have no need to out-source customer service since we are perfectly capable of providing terrible customer service domestically). Back in those days the billing systems were just getting computerized which was why this mistake was made and also why this man was having a hard time getting his problem solved.
Back in those days the companies actually sent all of their customers a punched card in each monthly statement and the customers were supposed to send this card back with their payment. Well, this man knew all about punched cards since he was in charge of several computers that still used them. So he simply punched in an end-of-file on a blank card and sent that back instead of the card the company sent him.
A couple of weeks later he got a phone call from the company asking him what he did and why he did it. He explained and they said they would correct the problem as long as he promised not to tell anyone else about the trick he had pulled.
Unlike The Silmarillion, I think The Illuminatus! Trilogy, was designed to expand the mind of the reader. I first read it when I was in grad school and living in the most "alternative" house off campus. One person had a copy and all the guys in the house were reading it, one after the other.
I think the need and ability to have one's mind expanded tends to decrease as we get older. I think this is related to the general rules of thumb that say physicists and mathematicians tend to do their best work before they are 25 years old.
I recently bought yet another copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. It sits by my bedside unread. I really don't know if I'm going to be able to read it again or not. But I'm sure going to send some money to RAW to help him in his time of need. His books broadened my mind and changed my life.
I'm extremely grateful that he didn't get a regular job and instead spent his time and energy challenging us with his writing. That's why I'm chipping in. Please feel free to call me any names you want. Any name you call me because I'm helping out RAW in his time of need, I will consider a badge of honor.
quigonn said: I think this conclusion very much depends upon what you are using to fight the etiologic agents. There is no question that we are facing a severe problem with antibiotic resistance but I don't think there is a threat of resistance to alcohol, Clorox, or simple soap and water.
The mouse in question uses a combination of Titanium Dioxide and Silver. I'm not an expert but this seems closer to alcohol and Clorox than it is to the type of antibiotics to which resistance can actually become a problem.
quigonn said: Again, I think you've overstated your case. Because we have an immune system, not all infections lead to death. But this does not imply that infections do not cause problems, nor does it imply that lack of hygiene is risk free even if the threat of death is small.
AFAIK, washing your hands frequently is still considered one of the simplest and most effective ways of protecting yourself against infection. Yet many people don't and they haven't all died out. If I applied your logic to this situation then I would conclude that there is no benefit to washing ones hands since they are still alive.
No one is saying "use this new mouse or die!". But the mouse could still be useful if it reduces the number of times per year a person gets sick.
The quote "Because that's where the money is" is usually attributed to Willie Sutton not John Dillinger. But at least one source says that Willie claims it was actually a reporter who came up with the witty response.
PatrickThomson then said: Now you are just being silly. The word hover means to be suspended in air without physical contact. We stand. Helicopters and hummingbirds hover.
Let me review some very basic physics for you. Newton's second law of motion is often taught as: When you stand on your legs, your legs are exerting a force equal to your mass times the acceleration of gravity in a direction pointing to the center of the Earth. If you are standing still, your legs, or the legs of a table, aren't doing any work (in the physics sense) because Work = Force x Distance and you and the table aren't moving vertically.
For rocket ships, helicopters, or microwave cavities to hover, they too must exert a vertical force equal to their mass times the acceleration of gravity. Since they exert this force without physical contact, unlike you and your legs, they are free to use this force independent of distance. Your legs on the other hand, can only exert a force over a very limited range of distances.
If we take the rocket ship, slap some wheels on it, tip it sideways, and take it to the Bonneville Salt Flats, we can compete to break the land speed record. Your legs can't do that. If we slap some wheels on you, tip you sideways, and give you something to push against then you can accelerate yourself at greater than one G but you can only do this through a distance of less than four feet (the range of your legs). This does mean though, that if we give you wheels and something to push against then you could win a drag race against almost any street car over a very, very short distance of just a few feet.
If we take a microwave cavity that is able to hover, tip it sideways and slap some wheels on it then it will be able to accelerate at one G. It won't be limited in range like your legs are. This is almost three times the acceleration of the cars I mentioned in my initial post.
The reason I used this to question the inventor's relativity calculations is because the end result of the above long winded explanation should be known instantly to someone who has studied relativity since it follows directly from Einstein's Equivalence Principle.
But even if this is the reporter's goof, confusing acceleration and velocity, the inventor claims that the device would work better for hovering (presumably in Earth's gravity) instead of accelerating. This shows that the inventor does not understand relativity or basic physics. If his device could make a car hover then it could also accelerate the car at 1 G.
According to the physics fact book, a 2001 Jaguar KX8 and a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse can each accelerate at 3.8 m/s^2 which is less than 1/2 G.
Since the inventor does not understand one of the simplest applications of relativity (gravity is the same as acceleration) I do not trust his calculations that claim some relativistic effect is giving him a force that will violate the conservation of momentum and energy.
It has always been this way. It has always looked this way. Life is like pinball. When we win we don't vanquish evil forever, instead, when we win all we get is a chance to play again. And yet over the years there has been a steady series of significant changes in the direction of freedom.
Two hundred years ago, liberal democracy was an oddity, now it has spread over the globe . More recently, we gained the 40-hour work week and young children no longer work in mines (in America and Western Europe at least).
The other thing that you might feel better knowing about is that despite this steady progress, the dominant pattern is a cycle. Things swing back and forth. In the 70's we stopped the bloody Vietnam war and we forced Nixon to resign in disgrace. Things had swung in the direction of freedom. Since then things have been swinging back in the opposite direction towards fascism (Godwin's rule be damned). You have incorrectly interpreted this current swing as a steady linear trend.
There are no guarantees in life but I predict we are close to the extreme and things are about to swing back in the direction of freedom. This too shall pass.
Are you volunteering to supply the $10,000 or so it takes for each patent? Great! Problem solved.
Patent law and copyright law are totally different. That is why RMS insists on not using the term "Intellectual property". Use of that term throws totally different things together and causes confusion.
Suggesting that RMS should deal with patent laws the same way he dealt with copyright laws is like suggesting he use a plunger to extinguish a kitchen fire since clogged drains and kitchen fires are both "household problems".
The GPL allows software authors to publish and distribute their software in a way that keeps it free and passes on the "four freedoms" to all recipients of that software. That software cannot suddenly become non-free due to copyright law (assuming, of course the original authors GPL'ed it). If the authors created the software themselves and didn't copy it from someone else then they are free and clear with regard to copyright law.
There are many problems with software patents (or benefits, perhaps, from the perspective of large corporations). It is not practical for FOSS developers to patent the software they develop. Back in the 1980's it cost $10,000 -- $15,000 to get just one patent. Worse, even if you developed a code base from scratch, and can prove it, that does not protect you from violating software patents. It is almost impossible to unwittingly violate copyright laws but it could well be that most patent violators are totally unaware they are doing anything wrong.
If you've been paying attention to patents in the news, you would realize that it is non-trivial and expensive, even for a large corporation, to defend against charges of patent infringement, even if the patents are eventually shown to be totally bogus.
It is true that many large corporations have extensive collections of patents and have agreements with each other to not sue each other over patents. A sort of patent mutually assured destruction strategy. Unfortunately, this is not a winning strategy for FOSS developers.
To sum up. Patent laws and copyright laws are totally different. They make software non-free in totally different ways therefore the best strategies for battling them are totally different.
Here is what Rachel Carson actually said in her book: Let's look at the Wikipedia article on DDT: So the politician you quoted was completely wrong on several different levels. In her book, Rachel Carson argues for limiting the use of DDT since excessive use can harm people and also make it less effective in fighting malaria.
It turns out that even the pesticide industry agrees with her.
It's not meant to be a believable lie. It is a clever political ploy developed by Karl Rove. The people currently in the White House are desperate to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives. If the Democrats gain control of the House while Bush is still president, he is going to be investigated out the wazoo and many people close to him will face jail time.
It is meant to be an unbelievable lie. It is meant to cause a reaction. Then Ken Mehlman can send out emails to the party faithful telling them how the evil, evil Democrats support child pornography. It was designed to get you riled up so they can use your reaction to inflame their base.
If you think this sounds far fetched, I encourage you to get on the GOP email list. The person who had my email address before me was on it and I haven't unsubscribed. The only thing the Democrats have going for them is almost every single issue and that may not be enough. Things are bound to get very, very ugly.
Here is a very simple solution for you if you want to give Gentoo a try again: don't update regularly. Just do important security updates (mostly browsers and media viewers and players).
Then in six months or so when you would normally do a fresh Ubuntu install, just do a fresh Gentoo install instead. If you keep a few spare partitions lying around and keep you $HOME on a separate partition, this is pretty darned easy. One of the best things about Gentoo (IMO) is that you can do the new install from within the old system -- no loss of productivity.
The QA problems in Gentoo have fluctuated. They were pretty bad a year or two ago and they've gotten much, much better since then. Some people on the Gentoo forums are complaining that things have become too easy.
The key to this strategy is your ability to resist updating.
Well, duh ...
If uncheck global warming destroys civilization as we know it then Philip Morris won't have to face any more of those pesky multi-billion dollar lawsuits. Not only that, the survivors will be so traumatized they will all feel the need to "light up" in order to relax and recover. It's a win-win.
The last I heard the Gentoo Graphic Installer sucked bowling balls and ate existing partitions. To be fair, I found the newish Ubuntu Graphical Installer to totally suck also. It seemed to require more than 256 Meg otherwise it would slowly and painfully grind to a halt.
Putting a graphical installer in front of Gentoo is sort of like putting a two-speed Hydroglide automatic transmission behind a 409 engine.
Let's look at some definitions of infection returned by Google: Personally, I think that last definition fits the case of DRM on media files perfectly.
As I said before, I feel very grateful towards Christopher Tolkien for making so much of his father's work available to the public. These books are not for everyone, perhaps they're not to your taste but that doesn't make them bad and exploitive.
IMO Christopher Tolkien is not being greedy. He could probably have just sat back out of the fray and lived comfortably off of royalties. Or he could have pursued his own career totally separate from his father's work and fame. I think he truly wants to get his father's works into the hands of the public and further, I think he is responding to a clammer from the fans of these works for more, more, more.
I've read most, but not all, of the volumes of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth and I've enjoyed them greatly. I felt no hint of exploitation or dilution. I'm very grateful to Christopher for taking the time and effort (and flack) to make all these parts of his father's work available to the rest of us.
If you are interested in exploring these other works, you might want to start with "Unfinished Tales" which provides a nice bridge between what happened in the Lord of the Rings and the larger world of the Silmarillion.
I read it recently and my impression was that it was unmistakably an autobiographical allegory. The Wikipedia article I linked too handled it this way:
Another way to ease your yourself in is to first read "Unfinished Tales" which contains details from both the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings. It is an excellent transition from the world of the Lord of the Rings to the much, much larger world of the Silmarillion.
Christopher Tolkien has been providing Tolkien fans with many volumes of his father's unpublished works. I've found almost all of them to be fascinating and delightful, surpassing both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".
I've also found the stories about The Children of Hurin too brief, even the extended version in "Unfinished Tales" and the verse version in "The Lays of Beleriand". I'm looking forward to reading this new book and I think the son sharing these works with the rest of us has honored his father and made the world a better place.
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