I'm not trolling or flaming at all here, I'm genuinely surprised.
about a pint to a quart of everclear a night
By my quick-and-dirty calculations:
1 qt = 946 ml
@ 95% ABV = around 900 ml of pure alcohol (898.7 ml)
12 oz (bottle of beer) = 355 ml
@ 5% ABV = around 18 ml of pure alcohol (17.744 ml)
1 qt everclear = 50 12-oz bottles of beer
1 pt everclear = 25 12-oz bottles of beer
I tend to feel rough after four or five beers. How is it you're drinking five to ten times that *a night* and still around to talk about it lucidly? I'd expect some serious delerium tremens in short order on that track...
Heh, that's more than half the battle right there. I'm happy I don't live closer to my cousins for this exact reason (they lack your wife's self-control)... and my wife decided she likes Macs better, so I'm off the hook there too. Whew!
She hates learning new things, especially on the computer.
More's the pity, then, what with software companies / projects changing things around from release to release. Good luck with the spousal tech support!;)
I presume she's had some sort of experience with the app that's soured her on it; I doubt she just woke up one day with the word "OpenOffice" in her head and decided she would hate it.:)
FWIW, I am quite put off by OOo too, largely because of moribund development, boneheaded design, and an opaque codebase, among other issues. Various bugs have been on the books for over 8 years, and linger still. When I first learned about OOo back in 2002 or so, I was very excited about it -- hey, who wouldn't like a feature-complete, essentially drop-in replacement for MS Office? But the more I used it, the more it became painfully apparent that OpenOffice is *not* feature-complete, and *not* a drop-in replacement for MS Office. Some missing features are even stupidly simple, like broken word/character counts for Asian text in Writer, or absolutely baffling date display and editing formats in Calc. Both are clearly bugs. Both would seem trivial to fix. Both have been on the books for more than half a decade. Both are targeted vaguely at "OOo Later" (i.e., the devs have no clear target for when a fix might be released)...
I've personally given up on ever being able to use OOo professionally (I'm a Japanese translator, so bogus Asian counts are bad, and I deal with dates in spreadsheets a lot, so bogus display/edit formats are bad). Reading your comment here, I'm curious what reasons your wife might have for disliking the software.
Sure, 30,000 mph is relative to the ground. The velocity of a piece of space junk relative to an astronaut could well be 60,000 mph if it's going the other way round. Even if both junk and astronaut are orbiting west-to-east, they could be on divergent ellipses. So collision speeds could go anywhere from 0 to 60,000 mph. Heck, I'm pretty sure that a collision at a velocity difference of "just" 1,000 mph would hurt.
Interesting link, albeit woefully flawed. The beginning, emphasis mine:
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world. [2]
55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM).
The LPTM lasted 100,000 years. [3]
Those subterranean seas of methane virtually reshaped the planet when they explosively blew from deep beneath the waters of what is today called the Gulf of Mexico.
Here's a pic of the world's land masses around 255 mya, and another of around 237 mya. Here's a pic from close to the 55 million years later mentioned in the article above, around 195 mya.
In none of these scenarios is the current Gulf of Mexico a body of water. This would seem to rule out any sort of clathrate-based "sea fart", at least from that specific region.
Moreover, the two events the article mentions aren't quite right. The first is the Permian-Triassic extinction, indeed around 251 mya, but the cause is still debated, with one of the leading explanations being a combination of factors that include one or more impact events.
The second event is dated in the article at 55 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, or around 196 mya. However, the Paleocene didn't even begin until around 65 mya. What the article author was probably thinking about was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, dated to around 55 mya. One of the theories for the cause of the PETM is indeed that methane clathrates may have destabilized, causing a runaway greenhouse effect, until the poles were warm enough for palm trees and sea turtles. However, the PETM isn't associated with any mass extinction -- the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction happened 65 mya when the geologic K-T boundary was laid down in the rock, and is again theorized to be due mainly to one or more impact events. Note in the pic here that the Gulf of Mexico is indeed a body of water by this time, but rather than being the source of any clathrate fart, it is instead noted as the location of the Chicxulub crater, theorized to be the kicker that killed the dinosaurs.
So basically, as disruptive as any sustained "sea fart" might be, the article you linked is full of bunkum and misinformation. And that's just in the intro.
Funny, that. But then I suppose one of the key flaws is that OPEC and US interests don't always align -- positioning the key backing of one's own currency in the hands of another possibly opposing group might not have been the smartest option.
I dislike plain partisanship, and trust Obama about as much as I could throw him. That said, it bears noting that the financial crisis, however well or poorly handled by the Obama administration, is the result of a long slow boil with its roots in policy decisions made under Clinton (the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for instance) and Bush Jr. Implicated in a lot of this was Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, key proponent of the Glass-Steagall repeal, and then Secretary of the Treasury under both Bush and Obama, during which time he presided over an unprecedented giveaway of some $700 billion of taxpayer money to prop up corporations that probably should have failed (and many of which he had personal connections to from his time at Goldman Sachs).
In short, I don't think the debt increase can be attributed solely to Obama. Nor can Obama fairly be called twice as bad -- the fact is that he's a national politician, which essentially guarantees that he's in bed with most of the same interests that were friendly with his predecessors.
You're going to put a soldering iron (or god forbid, a torch) in the hands of a child way before she's eight? Something (or someone) is going to end up getting burned. Speaking as the parent of a seven year old, I can't help but think this is a really bad idea.
Heck, I learned to solder around 3rd grade, in an after-school class no less, which would have made me what, 10 or so. And yes, someone did end up getting burned (me) -- in a couple different ways -- and I learned from it.:)
I'm reminded of a scene in the live-action Hogfather movie (available for streaming on Netflix, actually quite good indeed), where Death is filling in for the missing Hogfather (Discworld's Santa Claus) and makes an appearance at a department store. A little girl comes in with her mother, and when Death asks her what she wants for Hogswatch (Christmas), the mother interrupts with requests for frilly things until Death freezes her, at which point the girl asks for a castle and a sword (and a few other things I forget). Death *does* give her a real sword:
Susan: “You can’t give her that for Hogswatch! It’s a real sword!”
Death: “IT IS WHAT THE CHILD REQUESTED. THINK OF IT AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE.”
Susan: “She might hurt herself!”
Death: “THEN IT WILL BE A VALUABLE LESSON.”
I'm not advocating that we hand out claymores to children. But I do think that US society has gone a bit too far off the deep end when it comes to "safety" -- past a certain point, protection becomes actively harmful by keeping people from learning what is actually bad for them.
Reading a while back, it really sound like what happened under Nixon with the move away from the gold standard was not an abandonment of *any* backing for the dollar, but rather a change -- we went from a gold-backed dollar, to an oil-backed dollar.
Part of the sweetheart deal the US worked out with the Saudis (and other OPEC members) was that OPEC countries would *only* accept USD in payment for oil, effectively backing the US dollar by petroleum. This would appear to partially explain both the Iraq invasion and the US government's dislike of Hugo Chavez (he was making serious noises about accepting euros in payment for Venezuelan oil).
While it is true that these sea slugs have indeed been appropriating the protein machinery required for them to maintain (and possibly at some point produce) chloroplasts of their own by ransacking the genes of their food algae, we must also note that this is a process that has been going on for quite some time, certainly longer than any GMO efforts, and thus we can also infer that the slug (the gene receiver in this case) has found a way to effectively bug-test and shake out any overly adverse negative effects.
Meanwhile, with GMOs, we have creative scientists combing the breadth and width of the vast library of known genes, picking and choosing with little clue of the myriad possibilities for unintended long-term consequences. And, when the underlying motives are ultimately about earning profits for the very select population of shareholders and executives, it's a fair bet (and has been exhibited through history by many corporations) that the genetic manipulations put in place are being implemented orthogonally to the greater good -- and by "greater good" here I speak not metaphorically of some nebulous mythic concept, but quite literally of that outcome that produces the maximum benefit for the most beneficiaries, that particular bell curve shape that has the greatest integral.
So, on the one hand, we have a process occurring over an extended period and with properly implemented bug-testing, carried out to improve the success of the users of the change. On the other, we have a process occurring over a very short period and with minimal testing, carried out to improve the success of the implementers of the change.
Whether the processes in question affect foods, medicines, nuclear power, or even skin creams or furniture glue, for my part, I know I would prefer that product developers lean more towards the former of these two patterns.
It hasn't been implemented because 1) it's expensive and no one knows whether it would really work
I recall reading (I thought from a Slashdot posting) about a scientific group's trip to the southern Pacific, where they seeded the ocean with iron just as you describe. Sure enough, there was a big phytoplankton boom, successfully sequestering a goodly bit of carbon in their skeletons, and when they died, sure enough, they sank, taking that carbon to the bottom of the sea. (Some information here.) This would seem to suggest that it has indeed been implemented, albeit so far only on a limited and experimental basis.
However, they also found that the process has a limit -- successive attempts at seeding a bloom in the same area failed. The speculation was that this is because phytoplankton rely on more than Fe and CO2, and that the first bloom had exhausted the local supplies of the other required nutrients, among them, oxygen. This, among other factors, leads us to your 2) fear of unintended consequences, which could indeed bear more modeling and study.
I'm not up on oil-eating bacteria, so I'm unsure of the mechanics at work. If they're big and heavy enough (at least, after eating), they might well sink when dead, especially if they (or at least their waste products) contain the heavy metals mentioned by nido here in some bound form.
One of the ways I've read about that some folks hope to use to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to encourage phytoplankton blooms, which, when dead, sink, taking their carbonaceous skeletons to the bottom of the sea. Ideally, this oil-eating bacteria ploy would work similarly -- but yes, as you note, this deserves a more knowledgeable look before implementing.
That saying works so well to describe American politics in large part because the nose being cut off generally belongs to someone else.
Financial crisis: someone else's money -- check.
Gulf crisis: someone else's real estate / livelihood / etc. -- check.
Middle-east wars: someone else's money / country / population -- check.
This list could go on and on, but the basic idea is that, so long as the ones making the decisions aren't actually accountable and aren't themselves directly inconvenienced, they couldn't really give a rat's ass how messy or slipshod their proposed solution might be. So long as it keeps the gravy train running, it's all good, as far as they're concerned.
It bears pointing out that the cane toad was imported from outside the Australian ecosystem, whereupon it became a runaway success as an invasive species. Meanwhile, the bacteria mentioned here are already present as a natural part of the Gulf ecosystem, and they thus present zero risk of invasiveness.
Mind you, I'm not saying that guarantees there'll be no problems -- I certainly don't know enough to say one way or the other. But we can be reasonably sure that the oil-munching bacteria in the Gulf are safer than the cane toad, simply because they're already there.
To counter with an example from the real world just look at the malware infections of people installing screensavers for ubuntu.
I've never heard of this myself, but assuming it's true, I'm 1) baffled that anyone still uses screensavers, and 2) baffled about where these unfortunate people are going online to find screensavers to download for Ubuntu, since anything in the official repos has been vetted, and you have to go out of your way to bother with non-repo software.
Were these malware packages you mention downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories? If not, you're basically talking about people who take the effort to engage in known-risky behaviours by deliberately sidestepping the safeguards put in place to mitigate such risks. If the official Ubuntu repository screensaver packages contained malware, I'd feel upset that Canonical failed to audit the packages, and I'd feel sorry for the people affected. However, for folks who download Ubuntu packages from random sites on the web, I'm not sure I'd have much sympathy for them at that point.
Where was the magic open source pixie dust to stop them. Oh yeah it doesn't exist.
Unless these malware packages came from the official Ubuntu repositories, this has nothing to do with open-source vs. proprietary -- this has to do with users not understanding basic computer hygiene and deliberately engaging in risky activities, which is a different kettle of fish.
Any real liberal or conservative wouldn't associate themselves with their mainstream party substitutes. The people in both of those parties are only the husks of what use to make each of them great at some point in our history.
Anyone remember the old Folgers Crystals instant coffee commercials?
We are here in the US, where we've secretly replaced real representation with the mainstream party substitutes. Let's see if anyone can tell the difference!
That argument might hold water if illegal downloaders waited 14 years after a song, movie or game came out before downloading it (28 if the author was still alive) because they actually believed in the copyright act of 1790 and promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
That sounds like a spurious argument. If I already know up front that I'll never see XYZ copyrighted work in the public domain anyway, what earthly reason could I have for waiting 14~28 years?
Because only islam says that if a man rapes a women it is the womens fault. Then again such things as stoning a person to death are also encouraged.
I can't agree with you here. Islam is not alone in perpetrating this myth. For that matter, my historical reading makes it sound like this was a common defense trotted out by rapists here in the US until not so long ago.
Looking only at religion, user Creedo said it much better than I could just recently over in the story about the Utah governor. A choice quote:
"If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you." - Deut 22:23-24
Mind you, I'm not trying to say that Islam is somehow excused because the Old Testament says much the same things. However, I am trying to say that looking only at "holy" books will show you no end of horrid hypocrisy. Judge people not on their religions, but instead on how they behave.
Sadly, much of the world, Muslim or otherwise, isn't doing too well when it comes to fairness and justice.
Slashdot Mirror
I never claimed to be much of a drinker. :)
On a more sobering note, it's partly that my mom drank herself to death, and I'd rather not follow in her footsteps.
And as a side benefit, having a wuss tolerance is certainly cheaper!
Sláinte,
I'm not trolling or flaming at all here, I'm genuinely surprised.
By my quick-and-dirty calculations:
I tend to feel rough after four or five beers. How is it you're drinking five to ten times that *a night* and still around to talk about it lucidly? I'd expect some serious delerium tremens in short order on that track...
Curious,
Depends on what script they've been reading.
Cheers,
Cheers,
Heh, that's more than half the battle right there. I'm happy I don't live closer to my cousins for this exact reason (they lack your wife's self-control)... and my wife decided she likes Macs better, so I'm off the hook there too. Whew!
Cheers,
Thanks for the reply.
More's the pity, then, what with software companies / projects changing things around from release to release. Good luck with the spousal tech support! ;)
Cheers,
I'm quite curious, why?
I presume she's had some sort of experience with the app that's soured her on it; I doubt she just woke up one day with the word "OpenOffice" in her head and decided she would hate it. :)
FWIW, I am quite put off by OOo too, largely because of moribund development, boneheaded design, and an opaque codebase, among other issues. Various bugs have been on the books for over 8 years, and linger still. When I first learned about OOo back in 2002 or so, I was very excited about it -- hey, who wouldn't like a feature-complete, essentially drop-in replacement for MS Office? But the more I used it, the more it became painfully apparent that OpenOffice is *not* feature-complete, and *not* a drop-in replacement for MS Office. Some missing features are even stupidly simple, like broken word/character counts for Asian text in Writer, or absolutely baffling date display and editing formats in Calc. Both are clearly bugs. Both would seem trivial to fix. Both have been on the books for more than half a decade. Both are targeted vaguely at "OOo Later" (i.e., the devs have no clear target for when a fix might be released)...
I've personally given up on ever being able to use OOo professionally (I'm a Japanese translator, so bogus Asian counts are bad, and I deal with dates in spreadsheets a lot, so bogus display/edit formats are bad). Reading your comment here, I'm curious what reasons your wife might have for disliking the software.
Cheers,
Sure, 30,000 mph is relative to the ground. The velocity of a piece of space junk relative to an astronaut could well be 60,000 mph if it's going the other way round. Even if both junk and astronaut are orbiting west-to-east, they could be on divergent ellipses. So collision speeds could go anywhere from 0 to 60,000 mph. Heck, I'm pretty sure that a collision at a velocity difference of "just" 1,000 mph would hurt.
Cheers,
Debunking requested? Sure! :)
Interesting link, albeit woefully flawed. The beginning, emphasis mine:
Here's a pic of the world's land masses around 255 mya, and another of around 237 mya. Here's a pic from close to the 55 million years later mentioned in the article above, around 195 mya.
In none of these scenarios is the current Gulf of Mexico a body of water. This would seem to rule out any sort of clathrate-based "sea fart", at least from that specific region.
Moreover, the two events the article mentions aren't quite right. The first is the Permian-Triassic extinction, indeed around 251 mya, but the cause is still debated, with one of the leading explanations being a combination of factors that include one or more impact events.
The second event is dated in the article at 55 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, or around 196 mya. However, the Paleocene didn't even begin until around 65 mya. What the article author was probably thinking about was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, dated to around 55 mya. One of the theories for the cause of the PETM is indeed that methane clathrates may have destabilized, causing a runaway greenhouse effect, until the poles were warm enough for palm trees and sea turtles. However, the PETM isn't associated with any mass extinction -- the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction happened 65 mya when the geologic K-T boundary was laid down in the rock, and is again theorized to be due mainly to one or more impact events. Note in the pic here that the Gulf of Mexico is indeed a body of water by this time, but rather than being the source of any clathrate fart, it is instead noted as the location of the Chicxulub crater, theorized to be the kicker that killed the dinosaurs.
So basically, as disruptive as any sustained "sea fart" might be, the article you linked is full of bunkum and misinformation. And that's just in the intro.
Cheers,
Funny, that. But then I suppose one of the key flaws is that OPEC and US interests don't always align -- positioning the key backing of one's own currency in the hands of another possibly opposing group might not have been the smartest option.
Cheers,
I dislike plain partisanship, and trust Obama about as much as I could throw him. That said, it bears noting that the financial crisis, however well or poorly handled by the Obama administration, is the result of a long slow boil with its roots in policy decisions made under Clinton (the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for instance) and Bush Jr. Implicated in a lot of this was Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, key proponent of the Glass-Steagall repeal, and then Secretary of the Treasury under both Bush and Obama, during which time he presided over an unprecedented giveaway of some $700 billion of taxpayer money to prop up corporations that probably should have failed (and many of which he had personal connections to from his time at Goldman Sachs).
In short, I don't think the debt increase can be attributed solely to Obama. Nor can Obama fairly be called twice as bad -- the fact is that he's a national politician, which essentially guarantees that he's in bed with most of the same interests that were friendly with his predecessors.
Cheers,
Heck, I learned to solder around 3rd grade, in an after-school class no less, which would have made me what, 10 or so. And yes, someone did end up getting burned (me) -- in a couple different ways -- and I learned from it. :)
I'm reminded of a scene in the live-action Hogfather movie (available for streaming on Netflix, actually quite good indeed), where Death is filling in for the missing Hogfather (Discworld's Santa Claus) and makes an appearance at a department store. A little girl comes in with her mother, and when Death asks her what she wants for Hogswatch (Christmas), the mother interrupts with requests for frilly things until Death freezes her, at which point the girl asks for a castle and a sword (and a few other things I forget). Death *does* give her a real sword:
I'm not advocating that we hand out claymores to children. But I do think that US society has gone a bit too far off the deep end when it comes to "safety" -- past a certain point, protection becomes actively harmful by keeping people from learning what is actually bad for them.
Cheers,
Reading a while back, it really sound like what happened under Nixon with the move away from the gold standard was not an abandonment of *any* backing for the dollar, but rather a change -- we went from a gold-backed dollar, to an oil-backed dollar.
Part of the sweetheart deal the US worked out with the Saudis (and other OPEC members) was that OPEC countries would *only* accept USD in payment for oil, effectively backing the US dollar by petroleum. This would appear to partially explain both the Iraq invasion and the US government's dislike of Hugo Chavez (he was making serious noises about accepting euros in payment for Venezuelan oil).
Cheers,
While it is true that these sea slugs have indeed been appropriating the protein machinery required for them to maintain (and possibly at some point produce) chloroplasts of their own by ransacking the genes of their food algae, we must also note that this is a process that has been going on for quite some time, certainly longer than any GMO efforts, and thus we can also infer that the slug (the gene receiver in this case) has found a way to effectively bug-test and shake out any overly adverse negative effects.
Meanwhile, with GMOs, we have creative scientists combing the breadth and width of the vast library of known genes, picking and choosing with little clue of the myriad possibilities for unintended long-term consequences. And, when the underlying motives are ultimately about earning profits for the very select population of shareholders and executives, it's a fair bet (and has been exhibited through history by many corporations) that the genetic manipulations put in place are being implemented orthogonally to the greater good -- and by "greater good" here I speak not metaphorically of some nebulous mythic concept, but quite literally of that outcome that produces the maximum benefit for the most beneficiaries, that particular bell curve shape that has the greatest integral.
So, on the one hand, we have a process occurring over an extended period and with properly implemented bug-testing, carried out to improve the success of the users of the change. On the other, we have a process occurring over a very short period and with minimal testing, carried out to improve the success of the implementers of the change.
Whether the processes in question affect foods, medicines, nuclear power, or even skin creams or furniture glue, for my part, I know I would prefer that product developers lean more towards the former of these two patterns.
I recall reading (I thought from a Slashdot posting) about a scientific group's trip to the southern Pacific, where they seeded the ocean with iron just as you describe. Sure enough, there was a big phytoplankton boom, successfully sequestering a goodly bit of carbon in their skeletons, and when they died, sure enough, they sank, taking that carbon to the bottom of the sea. (Some information here.) This would seem to suggest that it has indeed been implemented, albeit so far only on a limited and experimental basis.
However, they also found that the process has a limit -- successive attempts at seeding a bloom in the same area failed. The speculation was that this is because phytoplankton rely on more than Fe and CO2, and that the first bloom had exhausted the local supplies of the other required nutrients, among them, oxygen. This, among other factors, leads us to your 2) fear of unintended consequences, which could indeed bear more modeling and study.
Cheers,
Much clearer, thank you.
I'm not up on oil-eating bacteria, so I'm unsure of the mechanics at work. If they're big and heavy enough (at least, after eating), they might well sink when dead, especially if they (or at least their waste products) contain the heavy metals mentioned by nido here in some bound form.
One of the ways I've read about that some folks hope to use to remove carbon from the atmosphere is to encourage phytoplankton blooms, which, when dead, sink, taking their carbonaceous skeletons to the bottom of the sea. Ideally, this oil-eating bacteria ploy would work similarly -- but yes, as you note, this deserves a more knowledgeable look before implementing.
Cheers,
That saying works so well to describe American politics in large part because the nose being cut off generally belongs to someone else.
This list could go on and on, but the basic idea is that, so long as the ones making the decisions aren't actually accountable and aren't themselves directly inconvenienced, they couldn't really give a rat's ass how messy or slipshod their proposed solution might be. So long as it keeps the gravy train running, it's all good, as far as they're concerned.
Cheers,
It appears that the unions are not oil-soluble. Perhaps if we add more detergent to the mix?
Cheers,
It bears pointing out that the cane toad was imported from outside the Australian ecosystem, whereupon it became a runaway success as an invasive species. Meanwhile, the bacteria mentioned here are already present as a natural part of the Gulf ecosystem, and they thus present zero risk of invasiveness.
Mind you, I'm not saying that guarantees there'll be no problems -- I certainly don't know enough to say one way or the other. But we can be reasonably sure that the oil-munching bacteria in the Gulf are safer than the cane toad, simply because they're already there.
Cheers,
That's a long first name there.
Okay...
Maybe that was his middle name?
In which case, his full name would be the impressively silly James Van Allen Allen Van Allen.
I kinda like it.
Cheers,
I've never heard of this myself, but assuming it's true, I'm 1) baffled that anyone still uses screensavers, and 2) baffled about where these unfortunate people are going online to find screensavers to download for Ubuntu, since anything in the official repos has been vetted, and you have to go out of your way to bother with non-repo software.
Were these malware packages you mention downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories? If not, you're basically talking about people who take the effort to engage in known-risky behaviours by deliberately sidestepping the safeguards put in place to mitigate such risks. If the official Ubuntu repository screensaver packages contained malware, I'd feel upset that Canonical failed to audit the packages, and I'd feel sorry for the people affected. However, for folks who download Ubuntu packages from random sites on the web, I'm not sure I'd have much sympathy for them at that point.
Unless these malware packages came from the official Ubuntu repositories, this has nothing to do with open-source vs. proprietary -- this has to do with users not understanding basic computer hygiene and deliberately engaging in risky activities, which is a different kettle of fish.
Cheers,
Anyone remember the old Folgers Crystals instant coffee commercials?
We are here in the US, where we've secretly replaced real representation with the mainstream party substitutes. Let's see if anyone can tell the difference!
Meh.
Cheers,
That sounds like a spurious argument. If I already know up front that I'll never see XYZ copyrighted work in the public domain anyway, what earthly reason could I have for waiting 14~28 years?
If (waiting == not waiting), don't wait.
Cheers,
I can't agree with you here. Islam is not alone in perpetrating this myth. For that matter, my historical reading makes it sound like this was a common defense trotted out by rapists here in the US until not so long ago.
Looking only at religion, user Creedo said it much better than I could just recently over in the story about the Utah governor. A choice quote:
Mind you, I'm not trying to say that Islam is somehow excused because the Old Testament says much the same things. However, I am trying to say that looking only at "holy" books will show you no end of horrid hypocrisy. Judge people not on their religions, but instead on how they behave.
Sadly, much of the world, Muslim or otherwise, isn't doing too well when it comes to fairness and justice.
Cheers,
Woosh woosh! :)
Cheers,