I think your problem might be a case of simple PEBKAC.
I have a Vista install since 2007 still running as fast as when I installed it, with no errors or problems.
I've got a Vista install that I've since upgraded on-the-spot to Windows 7 (despite the frequent warnings of various netizens that this is a bad idea), and it's still perfectly fine. It's even made it through the transition to a new build, something Windows XP and earlier wouldn't survive, and I didn't have to do a thing other than running the new motherboard's driver disc to install ethernet drivers.
Yes, but the judge there made it clear that the organization of the corporations is such that eBay Canada only handles Canada-targeted marketing, and that's it. They don't even own the website itself, though they might own the domain just to satisfy CIRA requirements.
That was really tertiary to the judgement anyways, and it doesn't read like it was even contested. The judgement was about whether the Minister of Finance could force eBay Canada to release information on Power Sellers (which they do have access to); eBay Canada argued that the information was foreign-based (it's on a server in San Jose which is owned by eBay Inc. or eBay AG), and thus not covered by the Act which would permit the Minister to do this. The judge said that, due to the nature of modern technology, it was irrelevant where the physical server was located.
eBay AG are the ones who run the website and who buyers and sellers are working with, they'd have to be targeted.
This is what XP Mode is for, isn't it? Move the document to a folder shared with the VM, open it in the HP software in the VM, and go. Note that XP mode can run seamlessly so that you just see XP windows interspersed with your Windows 7 windows; you can add a shortcut to your Windows 7 start menu to open up an application in XP Mode, so it feels like you've just got your HP app and drivers right in Windows 7.
Yes. Nearby theater: audio is too loud to listen to comfortably, and the levels were so off that speech was impossible to understand, with the mid-range almost totally cut out and bass dominating. It had a THX certification at one point; I complained on the THX complaint site, and a few months later the certification disappeared. Audio is still shit, though. It's even worse with their new mini-IMAX; I was plugging my ears through Transformers because they were hurting. And you know how things start sounding like they're "clipping" when they're too loud? Yeah, that was happening. In a movie theatre. Fuck that, I'm not going to pay to be physically assaulted.
Wikipedia suggests agnosticism was never an opposition to gnosticism (and it has sources, as such a hot article is apt to):
Agnostic (from Ancient Greek - (a-), meaning "without", and (gnsis), meaning "knowledge") was used by Thomas Henry Huxley in a speech at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869[9] to describe his philosophy which rejects all claims of spiritual or mystical knowledge. Early Christian church leaders used the Greek word gnosis (knowledge) to describe "spiritual knowledge." Agnosticism is not to be confused with religious views opposing the ancient religious movement of Gnosticism in particular; Huxley used the term in a broader, more abstract sense.[10] Huxley identified agnosticism not as a creed but rather as a method of skeptical, evidence-based inquiry.[11]
Of course, it's been extended since then to mean any number of things. Wikipedia sticks with the classic "no knowledge" and "knowledge is impossible" (strong agnosticism) definitions, but the other ones are used by other people. I was just cataloguing ones I've seen.
While I'm in agreement with pretty much your entire post, I'm struggling to understand how you can justify your comment regarding your older classmates.
I'm not generalizing to all older students since I can't. However, the first-year University students in my class had an easier time of the course than the older adult students. It wasn't hard to pick up on, and it was made even easier by many group assignments and occasional debates. They didn't grasp logic, they fumbled through the group assignments, they made strange arguments in the debates, they argued with the professor about every assignment and every test. This wasn't an enormous class, and when I say they, I mean they: all of the older students, despite being outnumbered by the young. I don't know what type of justification you're looking for other than that, I can't provide their grades or anything.
I chalked it up to (that is, I guessed that it was because of, based on what they were saying) their having a long life experience apparently devoid of critical thinking, with many irrational beliefs and decisions, and indeed an entire means of making decisions/beliefs apart from critical thinking. Like I said, you can't come to skeptical thinking overnight, and I'm going to guess it's harder when you've been living with and building your life upon non-skeptical thinking.
Agnostics are just atheists with no nerve to say what they are in fact believing.
I wrote a post a few days ago splitting agnosticism into three definitions. I think I was wrong, I can count at least six in use around the internet.
Atheist is "I don't believe".
Agnostic is "I don't know" OR ("strong" agnosticism) "knowing is impossible" OR "maybe I believe" OR "I don't want to say if I believe" OR "I don't care" OR "I don't believe because I don't have evidence, but will change my mind if I get it". The first two types aren't incompatible with atheism, and don't answer the same question; the third indicates either that you think there's evidence of theism, that you're leaning towards faith instead of rationality, or that you haven't taken the time to think about things; number four is silly; number fives may as well just call themselves apatheists; and six is just the very definition of "weak atheism". From what I can gather agnosticism maybe originally referred to the first two definitions, but since it's being used by people who don't want to identify as theists or atheists (maybe because they believe the whole "atheists are all dickish militant anti-theists" notion), it's nearly useless now.
Maybe you can't teach it to the fullest extent in school, but you can certainly help it along. The Critical Thinking course I took in University covered a few things that would be invaluable for any school-age child, and none of them at a level that couldn't have been done in high school:
Basics of logic and evidence Breaking apart a written argument into separate propositions and conclusions Applying logic and evidence to arguments to figure out their soundness and cogency Rational vs. irrational beliefs
This is big, and surprisingly, non-obvious stuff. The course was extremely easy for me since anyone with a CS or math background should have the logic stuff down pat, but some of my classmates (especially the older ones) seemed to struggle with what was a big paradigm shift for them. Many people don't even think to try to break arguments up and figure out if they actually make sense, they'd rather just go with whatever "feels" right.
Yes, you can't ensure that someone doesn't leave school credulous and unskeptical, but if you give them these skills early on it'll hopefully be easier for them to learn a skeptical attitude on their own with time.
Despite the low price, however, Kindle Fire hosts a variety of quality games that were ported with little effort, which is a rarity within the Android market. Chalk that up to Amazon’s developer friendly system... "From a developer’s point of view, it makes creating an experience much easier, as we don’t have to take into account every single piece of hardware that’s out there, which quickly dilutes how good a product can truly be."
What? Might as well have said
Targeting a single Android device is easier than targeting several.
Since the article doesn't specifically mention anything that makes the Fire more developer-friendly than any other device. The vague claim that it's easier to port to than other devices is dubious, but it's also worded so vaguely that it might mean "porting to the Fire alone vs. porting to every device in existence at once". Would it be any different if the developer was solely targeting the Nook Tablet, or the Transformer? Doesn't the iPad have an even bigger advantage in this respect since it has a relatively enormous userbase?
Multiply that vague claim several times, add in a general description of the device ("[a] tablet you can take anywhere that stores books, games, videos and other kinds of media"), some praise ("We can't wait for the Kindle Fire 2"), and you've got the article. I totally expected a disclaimer at the bottom about it being paid-for.
Black aren't just their "premium" drives, they're also their high-energy/high-noise drives. I tend to buy Blue and Green, which I've still found to be perfectly fine even if slightly lower performance. I'd shell out a few more bucks for premium versions of these drives if they were available.
But assuming you are not agnostic, then you believe there is no god. So you do not have an absence of faith, you have faith in an absence that (IMHO) cannot be proven either way.
Just because something cannot be proven, does not mean it is false. Trees falling in a forest with nobody around, etc., etc.
In philosophical circles, and where people haven't been raised listening to annoying people repeatedly shout that "atheists are all evil militants", the definitions of agnosticism and atheism aren't exclusive. They're:
atheism: I don't believe in the existence of gods agnosticism: I believe the existence or non-existence of gods to be fundamentally unknowable
You can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. There's no overlap, atheism and agnosticism are answers to completely different questions; atheism answers "do you believe in gods", agnosticism answers "do you believe that the existence or non-existence of gods is knowable". Notice that "atheist" doesn't mean "I know with certainty that God doesn't exist". That's a subset of atheism we often call "strong atheism", but it's just a subset. So you see, there's no "faith" here. Atheism just means "I have no belief in gods", nothing more, nothing less.
There is another definition of agnosticism and atheism, that is:
The problem with this is that we cannot, rationally, consider the existence of anything for which we have no evidence to be false with 100% certainty. Nothing. So you're agnostic towards gods; you're also agnostic towards unicorns, leprechauns, Reptilian Obama, invisible teapots, and so forth, because that's the only rational course. This is a silly way of looking at things, however. You can't live life as though unicorns might exist, just because you don't have any evidence against them. So instead we use the other question: do you have belief in gods? As in: do you consider "gods exist" to be true? Using the other definitions again: Atheist: no Agnostic A: no Agnostic B: Uncertain Agnostic C: yes Theist: yes
Okay, you've agnostic groups A and C can be merged in with our normal Atheist/Theist definitions, leaving us back where we were, but with a third category:
Do you have a belief in gods? Atheist: no Agnostic (type 2): uncertain Theist: yes
It happens, it can happen with any belief, but it's shaky ground. In this state, you are considering theism to be potentially plausible. If you're doing this without evidence, this is an irrational state, make no doubt.
Short: atheism means "no belief in gods", not "I believe there are no gods". Agnosticism either means "belief in gods is unknowable" or "existence of gods is unknown" or "I'm uncertain where I believe in gods". The first two aren't incompatible with theism or atheism. The third is a shaky middle ground where one is not atheist, not fully theist, but still seems to be swayed by theism for some reason, which may be as irrational a position as theism.
I said iPad specs shouldn't be required for an education tablet or made necessary when making a comparison between education tablets. That's all I said. You've read too much into my post.
The Fire was just an example of a tablet that doesn't have iPad specs. Replace it with whatever you like.
The screen size is one part of a tablet's hardware. I don't know whether a 7" screen would be sufficient or not, but do you need the iPad's CPU and GPU?
And I'm also not saying that iPad isn't the best choice. It might very well be, I would think mostly due to a combination of durability and education support from Apple.
It is hard to blame Samsung for the problems with the phone because they are just taking advantage of a free phone software environment. Rather than spending lots of money developing the phone software they just picked it up free.
But that's not so. A number of things you've got on your phone weren't just "picked up" from Android. That menu you see when you start the phone? That's not standard Android. The touch screen drivers that steer the keyboard you don't like? Device-specific. The Exchange app? Added by your carrier or by Samsung, it's not a Google app.
You can have the common complaint that Google doesn't lock their system down like Apple which is so horrible and etc., but then the question arises as to whether Android would have the traction it does today if it was locked down. Would every phone manufacturer want to just make an Android phone, with no spiffy customizations or anything to differentiate themselves other than hardware specs that no one cares about?
The iPad does not retail for (much) more than tablets of similar spec, and Apple has always offered educational discounts.
But you don't need tablets of iPad spec for educational use, so they do cost significantly more than is necessary. Something like the Fire might not be specced high enough for the latest 3D games, but it would be perfectly adequate for textbooks and supplementary material.
VGChartz' numbers are notoriously unreliable, unsourced, some say fabricated. We don't know how many copies of Skyrim have sold for the PC, and the game has sold 7 Million total by now, not 3.4. Likewise I'm pretty sure Activision hasn't said how many copies MW3 has sold for each individual platform.
Since we don't have a private message feature (someone will probably off-topic mod this if they can manage to browse this far through Slashdot's ever-more-broken commenting system)...
Celsius is problematic because the degrees are too large, thus not really a better system, and is actually separate from the metric system anyway, so I wouldn't count that fact.
Celsius is just an offset Kelvin scale (a 1 degree C temperature difference is the same as a 1 K difference); it's not that separate from metric / SI, and they're both used in some scientific fields (Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures says that this is acceptable, so it's Official).
And we've already had plenty of discussions about your other point on Slashdot: you use decimal numbers when you need more precision, and you get used to it, like any unit change.
I'm using a semi-common name in my email address, and let me tell you, it gets a little annoying at time.
I have people apparently signing me up with email lists and website accounts (which invariably lead to more email lists). I've gotten emails from Victoria Secret, Build-a-bear Workshops, even some douche who is running for governor of Ohio. None of these sites asked for my permission to add me to their lists, so I just mark them all as spam. After a few months, Gmail tends to catch on and starts pushing them to my spam folder.
Most companies give a "this isn't my account" option when someone signs up, including Microsoft with their Live IDs. If it's a legit company, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and click it. Sony doesn't do this for some reason. Someone has signed me up for a PSN account. I get PSN emails. I can't do jack all about them; I contacted Sony support, they told me they would inform the person who signed up for the account. Nothing has happened.
On the fun side, I got a password that would let me RSVP for the "webby" awards, and I've had people mistake me for the CEO of some company which could lead to shenanigans if I were a lesser person.
The worst part is your post has a hint of truth, but heaped on it is a mountain of crackpot bullshit. You're giving chiropractors everywhere a bad name, and on behalf of those of us who know how much good they CAN do I say: Please, go crawl under a rock somewhere and stay there. Its people like you that mean a lot of folks can't get their chiropractic physiotherapy covered when it could potentially be the only thing that will get them real relief.
That "subluxations" cause every disease under the sun and can be cured by chiropractic is taught in most or all chiropractic schools, and is to them a normal belief.
There have been studies comparing registered massage therapists to chiropractors for back injury recovery. There was no appreciable difference in effect. Only one of them considers themselves a "doctor" though.
Steve is also the person who tried to lead a crusade against Universal Plug n Play, calling it, I recall, "Universal Plug N' Prey". He has a very strange sense of "security", honestly. Spinrite was a good program, but Shields Up! was more alarmist and goofy than it had to be, and half of what I've heard him say since the old Tech TV days has just been silly.
It's just that nothing happened in it. I've watched all of the prequel movies exactly once (and that was enough), and this is what I remember (not necessarily in chronological order, since the plots were... weak):
Phantom Menace: - The senate quacked about something - The Naboo queen went through space, was attacked, thwarted the attackers with her super shiny ships - Strangely unemotional little kid is sold to some race driver or something - Said kid finds and repairs C3P0 (RETCON) - Kid meets JarJar, is nonplussed - Kid wins a race for some reason - Naboo attacked by the Trade Federation (more like the War Federation, am I right?) - Unemotional kid helps fight trade federation off by piloting a spaceship - Midichlorians - Obi-wan and his master (Qwi-gong or something) fight some Sith for some reason, then find the little kid - Something about a prophecy?
Attack of the Clones: - there's some clones of boba-fett's daddy; obi-wan goes to see them - Anakin is older, still has problems expressing emotion
Revenge of the Sith: - Palpatine dissolves the senate, activates the clone's secret programming and they quickly wipe the jedi out - Obi and Anakin kill some droids - Anakin starts to get evil for some reason, even though he has a pretty hot girlfriend now -- Still doesn't think of doing something about JarJar - Anakin and Obi fight - Anakin burned, puts on voice-changing suit, screams comically - Chewie comes up somehow - Queen dies for no good reason just to avoid having to explain where she went in the next movies
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed that many of the negative reviews for demo or "lite" versions of Android apps come down to (without any hyperbole whatsoever):
"I really really love this app, but I can't afford $2 for the full version"
I think your problem might be a case of simple PEBKAC.
I have a Vista install since 2007 still running as fast as when I installed it, with no errors or problems.
I've got a Vista install that I've since upgraded on-the-spot to Windows 7 (despite the frequent warnings of various netizens that this is a bad idea), and it's still perfectly fine. It's even made it through the transition to a new build, something Windows XP and earlier wouldn't survive, and I didn't have to do a thing other than running the new motherboard's driver disc to install ethernet drivers.
Yes, but the judge there made it clear that the organization of the corporations is such that eBay Canada only handles Canada-targeted marketing, and that's it. They don't even own the website itself, though they might own the domain just to satisfy CIRA requirements.
That was really tertiary to the judgement anyways, and it doesn't read like it was even contested. The judgement was about whether the Minister of Finance could force eBay Canada to release information on Power Sellers (which they do have access to); eBay Canada argued that the information was foreign-based (it's on a server in San Jose which is owned by eBay Inc. or eBay AG), and thus not covered by the Act which would permit the Minister to do this. The judge said that, due to the nature of modern technology, it was irrelevant where the physical server was located.
eBay AG are the ones who run the website and who buyers and sellers are working with, they'd have to be targeted.
This is what XP Mode is for, isn't it? Move the document to a folder shared with the VM, open it in the HP software in the VM, and go. Note that XP mode can run seamlessly so that you just see XP windows interspersed with your Windows 7 windows; you can add a shortcut to your Windows 7 start menu to open up an application in XP Mode, so it feels like you've just got your HP app and drivers right in Windows 7.
Yes. Nearby theater: audio is too loud to listen to comfortably, and the levels were so off that speech was impossible to understand, with the mid-range almost totally cut out and bass dominating. It had a THX certification at one point; I complained on the THX complaint site, and a few months later the certification disappeared. Audio is still shit, though. It's even worse with their new mini-IMAX; I was plugging my ears through Transformers because they were hurting. And you know how things start sounding like they're "clipping" when they're too loud? Yeah, that was happening. In a movie theatre. Fuck that, I'm not going to pay to be physically assaulted.
Wikipedia suggests agnosticism was never an opposition to gnosticism (and it has sources, as such a hot article is apt to):
Of course, it's been extended since then to mean any number of things. Wikipedia sticks with the classic "no knowledge" and "knowledge is impossible" (strong agnosticism) definitions, but the other ones are used by other people. I was just cataloguing ones I've seen.
While I'm in agreement with pretty much your entire post, I'm struggling to understand how you can justify your comment regarding your older classmates.
I'm not generalizing to all older students since I can't. However, the first-year University students in my class had an easier time of the course than the older adult students. It wasn't hard to pick up on, and it was made even easier by many group assignments and occasional debates. They didn't grasp logic, they fumbled through the group assignments, they made strange arguments in the debates, they argued with the professor about every assignment and every test. This wasn't an enormous class, and when I say they, I mean they: all of the older students, despite being outnumbered by the young. I don't know what type of justification you're looking for other than that, I can't provide their grades or anything.
I chalked it up to (that is, I guessed that it was because of, based on what they were saying) their having a long life experience apparently devoid of critical thinking, with many irrational beliefs and decisions, and indeed an entire means of making decisions/beliefs apart from critical thinking. Like I said, you can't come to skeptical thinking overnight, and I'm going to guess it's harder when you've been living with and building your life upon non-skeptical thinking.
Agnostics are just atheists with no nerve to say what they are in fact believing.
I wrote a post a few days ago splitting agnosticism into three definitions. I think I was wrong, I can count at least six in use around the internet.
Atheist is "I don't believe".
Agnostic is "I don't know" OR ("strong" agnosticism) "knowing is impossible" OR "maybe I believe" OR "I don't want to say if I believe" OR "I don't care" OR "I don't believe because I don't have evidence, but will change my mind if I get it". The first two types aren't incompatible with atheism, and don't answer the same question; the third indicates either that you think there's evidence of theism, that you're leaning towards faith instead of rationality, or that you haven't taken the time to think about things; number four is silly; number fives may as well just call themselves apatheists; and six is just the very definition of "weak atheism". From what I can gather agnosticism maybe originally referred to the first two definitions, but since it's being used by people who don't want to identify as theists or atheists (maybe because they believe the whole "atheists are all dickish militant anti-theists" notion), it's nearly useless now.
Maybe you can't teach it to the fullest extent in school, but you can certainly help it along. The Critical Thinking course I took in University covered a few things that would be invaluable for any school-age child, and none of them at a level that couldn't have been done in high school:
Basics of logic and evidence
Breaking apart a written argument into separate propositions and conclusions
Applying logic and evidence to arguments to figure out their soundness and cogency
Rational vs. irrational beliefs
This is big, and surprisingly, non-obvious stuff. The course was extremely easy for me since anyone with a CS or math background should have the logic stuff down pat, but some of my classmates (especially the older ones) seemed to struggle with what was a big paradigm shift for them. Many people don't even think to try to break arguments up and figure out if they actually make sense, they'd rather just go with whatever "feels" right.
Yes, you can't ensure that someone doesn't leave school credulous and unskeptical, but if you give them these skills early on it'll hopefully be easier for them to learn a skeptical attitude on their own with time.
It sounds like a big long press release.
Despite the low price, however, Kindle Fire hosts a variety of quality games that were ported with little effort, which is a rarity within the Android market. Chalk that up to Amazon’s developer friendly system ...
"From a developer’s point of view, it makes creating an experience much easier, as we don’t have to take into account every single piece of hardware that’s out there, which quickly dilutes how good a product can truly be."
What? Might as well have said
Targeting a single Android device is easier than targeting several.
Since the article doesn't specifically mention anything that makes the Fire more developer-friendly than any other device. The vague claim that it's easier to port to than other devices is dubious, but it's also worded so vaguely that it might mean "porting to the Fire alone vs. porting to every device in existence at once". Would it be any different if the developer was solely targeting the Nook Tablet, or the Transformer? Doesn't the iPad have an even bigger advantage in this respect since it has a relatively enormous userbase?
Multiply that vague claim several times, add in a general description of the device ("[a] tablet you can take anywhere that stores books, games, videos and other kinds of media"), some praise ("We can't wait for the Kindle Fire 2"), and you've got the article. I totally expected a disclaimer at the bottom about it being paid-for.
Black aren't just their "premium" drives, they're also their high-energy/high-noise drives. I tend to buy Blue and Green, which I've still found to be perfectly fine even if slightly lower performance. I'd shell out a few more bucks for premium versions of these drives if they were available.
But assuming you are not agnostic, then you believe there is no god. So you do not have an absence of faith, you have faith in an absence that (IMHO) cannot be proven either way.
Just because something cannot be proven, does not mean it is false. Trees falling in a forest with nobody around, etc., etc.
In philosophical circles, and where people haven't been raised listening to annoying people repeatedly shout that "atheists are all evil militants", the definitions of agnosticism and atheism aren't exclusive. They're:
atheism: I don't believe in the existence of gods
agnosticism: I believe the existence or non-existence of gods to be fundamentally unknowable
You can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. There's no overlap, atheism and agnosticism are answers to completely different questions; atheism answers "do you believe in gods", agnosticism answers "do you believe that the existence or non-existence of gods is knowable". Notice that "atheist" doesn't mean "I know with certainty that God doesn't exist". That's a subset of atheism we often call "strong atheism", but it's just a subset. So you see, there's no "faith" here. Atheism just means "I have no belief in gods", nothing more, nothing less.
There is another definition of agnosticism and atheism, that is:
Statement: God(s) exist.
Atheist (other): false (with certainty)
Agnostic (other): unknown
Theist (other): true (with certainty)
The problem with this is that we cannot, rationally, consider the existence of anything for which we have no evidence to be false with 100% certainty. Nothing. So you're agnostic towards gods; you're also agnostic towards unicorns, leprechauns, Reptilian Obama, invisible teapots, and so forth, because that's the only rational course. This is a silly way of looking at things, however. You can't live life as though unicorns might exist, just because you don't have any evidence against them. So instead we use the other question: do you have belief in gods? As in: do you consider "gods exist" to be true? Using the other definitions again:
Atheist: no
Agnostic A: no
Agnostic B: Uncertain
Agnostic C: yes
Theist: yes
Okay, you've agnostic groups A and C can be merged in with our normal Atheist/Theist definitions, leaving us back where we were, but with a third category:
Do you have a belief in gods?
Atheist: no
Agnostic (type 2): uncertain
Theist: yes
It happens, it can happen with any belief, but it's shaky ground. In this state, you are considering theism to be potentially plausible. If you're doing this without evidence, this is an irrational state, make no doubt.
Short: atheism means "no belief in gods", not "I believe there are no gods". Agnosticism either means "belief in gods is unknowable" or "existence of gods is unknown" or "I'm uncertain where I believe in gods". The first two aren't incompatible with theism or atheism. The third is a shaky middle ground where one is not atheist, not fully theist, but still seems to be swayed by theism for some reason, which may be as irrational a position as theism.
Android has Exchange support. Honeycomb added full device encryption, and ICS carries it over. It's right in the changelist.
I said iPad specs shouldn't be required for an education tablet or made necessary when making a comparison between education tablets. That's all I said. You've read too much into my post.
The Fire was just an example of a tablet that doesn't have iPad specs. Replace it with whatever you like.
The screen size is one part of a tablet's hardware. I don't know whether a 7" screen would be sufficient or not, but do you need the iPad's CPU and GPU?
And I'm also not saying that iPad isn't the best choice. It might very well be, I would think mostly due to a combination of durability and education support from Apple.
But that's not so. A number of things you've got on your phone weren't just "picked up" from Android. That menu you see when you start the phone? That's not standard Android. The touch screen drivers that steer the keyboard you don't like? Device-specific. The Exchange app? Added by your carrier or by Samsung, it's not a Google app.
You can have the common complaint that Google doesn't lock their system down like Apple which is so horrible and etc., but then the question arises as to whether Android would have the traction it does today if it was locked down. Would every phone manufacturer want to just make an Android phone, with no spiffy customizations or anything to differentiate themselves other than hardware specs that no one cares about?
But you don't need tablets of iPad spec for educational use, so they do cost significantly more than is necessary. Something like the Fire might not be specced high enough for the latest 3D games, but it would be perfectly adequate for textbooks and supplementary material.
VGChartz' numbers are notoriously unreliable, unsourced, some say fabricated. We don't know how many copies of Skyrim have sold for the PC, and the game has sold 7 Million total by now, not 3.4. Likewise I'm pretty sure Activision hasn't said how many copies MW3 has sold for each individual platform.
8000 Euro? I know you folks pay significantly more for electronics, but really? What type of TV is this and when did you buy it?
No, it doesn't. I can type with either very quickly without looking at what I'm doing. The brain is a wonderful thing.
Since we don't have a private message feature (someone will probably off-topic mod this if they can manage to browse this far through Slashdot's ever-more-broken commenting system)...
Canadian chiropractors asked about which non-back pain-related illnesses they thought they could treat with chiropractic. You can thank me another time.
Celsius is problematic because the degrees are too large, thus not really a better system, and is actually separate from the metric system anyway, so I wouldn't count that fact.
Celsius is just an offset Kelvin scale (a 1 degree C temperature difference is the same as a 1 K difference); it's not that separate from metric / SI, and they're both used in some scientific fields (Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures says that this is acceptable, so it's Official).
And we've already had plenty of discussions about your other point on Slashdot: you use decimal numbers when you need more precision, and you get used to it, like any unit change.
I'm using a semi-common name in my email address, and let me tell you, it gets a little annoying at time.
I have people apparently signing me up with email lists and website accounts (which invariably lead to more email lists). I've gotten emails from Victoria Secret, Build-a-bear Workshops, even some douche who is running for governor of Ohio. None of these sites asked for my permission to add me to their lists, so I just mark them all as spam. After a few months, Gmail tends to catch on and starts pushing them to my spam folder.
Most companies give a "this isn't my account" option when someone signs up, including Microsoft with their Live IDs. If it's a legit company, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and click it. Sony doesn't do this for some reason. Someone has signed me up for a PSN account. I get PSN emails. I can't do jack all about them; I contacted Sony support, they told me they would inform the person who signed up for the account. Nothing has happened.
On the fun side, I got a password that would let me RSVP for the "webby" awards, and I've had people mistake me for the CEO of some company which could lead to shenanigans if I were a lesser person.
The worst part is your post has a hint of truth, but heaped on it is a mountain of crackpot bullshit. You're giving chiropractors everywhere a bad name, and on behalf of those of us who know how much good they CAN do I say: Please, go crawl under a rock somewhere and stay there. Its people like you that mean a lot of folks can't get their chiropractic physiotherapy covered when it could potentially be the only thing that will get them real relief.
That "subluxations" cause every disease under the sun and can be cured by chiropractic is taught in most or all chiropractic schools, and is to them a normal belief.
There have been studies comparing registered massage therapists to chiropractors for back injury recovery. There was no appreciable difference in effect. Only one of them considers themselves a "doctor" though.
Steve is also the person who tried to lead a crusade against Universal Plug n Play, calling it, I recall, "Universal Plug N' Prey". He has a very strange sense of "security", honestly. Spinrite was a good program, but Shields Up! was more alarmist and goofy than it had to be, and half of what I've heard him say since the old Tech TV days has just been silly.
It's just that nothing happened in it. I've watched all of the prequel movies exactly once (and that was enough), and this is what I remember (not necessarily in chronological order, since the plots were... weak):
Phantom Menace:
- The senate quacked about something
- The Naboo queen went through space, was attacked, thwarted the attackers with her super shiny ships
- Strangely unemotional little kid is sold to some race driver or something
- Said kid finds and repairs C3P0 (RETCON)
- Kid meets JarJar, is nonplussed
- Kid wins a race for some reason
- Naboo attacked by the Trade Federation (more like the War Federation, am I right?)
- Unemotional kid helps fight trade federation off by piloting a spaceship
- Midichlorians
- Obi-wan and his master (Qwi-gong or something) fight some Sith for some reason, then find the little kid
- Something about a prophecy?
Attack of the Clones:
- there's some clones of boba-fett's daddy; obi-wan goes to see them
- Anakin is older, still has problems expressing emotion
Revenge of the Sith:
- Palpatine dissolves the senate, activates the clone's secret programming and they quickly wipe the jedi out
- Obi and Anakin kill some droids
- Anakin starts to get evil for some reason, even though he has a pretty hot girlfriend now
-- Still doesn't think of doing something about JarJar
- Anakin and Obi fight
- Anakin burned, puts on voice-changing suit, screams comically
- Chewie comes up somehow
- Queen dies for no good reason just to avoid having to explain where she went in the next movies