Thank you for the additional link, very interesting stuff, if a bit perplexing how to pull it off, or what the impact on ocean chemistry might be. Going back through the materials for my previous reply got me curious again, and I did some more digging, and went through to the calcium bicarbonate article on Wikipedia; this Cquestrate site is clearly working from the same idea, that calcium oxide in solution will actually become calcium bicarbonate instead of just calcium carbonate (limestone), ionically attracting an additional carbonate and thereby sucking up more carbon dioxide than is possible outside of solution.
So provided that solar furnaces or some similar solar approach is used to calcinate the limestone, the missing piece of the logistics puzzle is finding a carbon-neutral means of distributing the lime in the oceans. Perhaps as solar power technology improves, either fuel-cell or electric vehicles and equipment could be used for extraction and transportation.
There's an old aphorism that says something about making assumptions...
I actually clicked through your link, but my browser only pulled up the "Global Warming Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea" article thread (which I read through when it first showed up), but the browser view failed to jump to any specific comment. Perhaps your link wasn't correct?
If you intended simply to link through to the article, a number of people in that thread pointed out notable flaws with the suggestions of TFA. Solar would be the only possible way of heating lime kilns in a carbon-neutral manner, but any non-solar lime kiln would involve burning something, which increases CO2 emissions. Besides which, any lime production process at all will release CO2 anyway as it's driven out of the base material (generally limestone) during calcination. Reversing the calcination process, which is what would happen with the lime added to seawater, would generally only suck up as much CO2 as was originally driven out of the raw limestone to begin with. Which leaves us with a very labor- and energy-intensive process to create the lime and cart it out into the ocean, which in the best possible scenario would end with no loss or gain in CO2 levels. Kinda pointless, unfortunately...
I was thinking more of the impact of a loss of coastal integrity causing damage to the Islands. That's not exactly a short term thing.
No, I agree. Plus, the first paragraph of this section indicates that a number of other Caribbean islands might indeed be mostly sand.
On a side note, I've also heard / read that the lushness of the Amazon is supported to some extent by mineral nutrients blown over from the Sahara. A quick Google search seems to find a number of relevant links.
Um, Vieques at least (and the big island of Puerto Rico proper) has an awful lot of nice, solid bedrock forming the bulk of the landmass. I don't think sand transported from the Sahara has much of anything to do with Vieques geology.
Read up on how lime is produced. It's problematic -- one hint is how much heat is required to produce (and therefore fuel of some sort to produce the heat), let alone the energy requirements for digging up the raw materials and transporting to processing facilities, etc etc. It's definitely *not* carbon-neutral.
I must also chime in and say you're misinformed, at least for roaming within North America. I live on San Juan Island, WA, just across the Haro Strait from Victoria BC, and my cell phone often switches over to the BC Rogers cell across the water with no change in functionality -- and I have never called AT&T to "enable" any such roaming technology, it simply does it automatically. In fact, I have to be very cautious with my billing statements to make sure that AT&T isn't busy trying to slip a ton of extra charges in there for maintaining a cell tower here on the island that's so underpowered I wind up getting the one next door instead.
Sorry to reply twice, but the intro to Vajda's paper mentions the Zuni language, which leads me to recommend The Zuni Enigma, wherein Nancy Yaw Davis sets forth a very interesting argument that the precursors to the Zuni absorbed a sizable Japanese community some time in the 1300s-1400s, with the Japanese language of the time forming part of the current Zuni ecumenical language. Davis's work still leaves many questions, and she is not a linguist but rather an anthropologist, but her writings are still worth evaluating. I'm a Japanese translator by trade, and some day I would very much like to be able to seriously study Zuni myself to see what I can find.
Oo, very interesting, I'll definitely give that a look-see. I'm quite interested in such morphologic analysis, and hope some day to possibly conduct some of my own, so a paper such as this touted for its methodological rigor is a happy find. Thank you.
The only thing I've read recently about Basque in the ancient world has to do with the possible remnants of Basque words in place names around Europe, which might indicate a much broader dispersion of Basque speakers prior to the influx of the Indo-European tribes. The one example I recall was the word "aran", apparently cognate to a Basque word meaning "valley", that shows up in various places around Europe, usually with the now-local language word for "valley" stuck on the end, such as Arantal, Germany (literally, the "valley valley").
The old Irish oral tradition relates that there were other people in Ireland before the folks now calling themselves Irish showed up, and the tales describe how the original inhabitants fought so valiantly that the incoming Gaelic tribes named the place after them in tribute -- Eiran. What with how many dramatic valleys there are in Ireland, that made me wonder if perhaps this "Eiran" is the same Basque word for "valley" -- but that is pure conjecture, and simply a fun thought experiment.
FWIW, almost anything lumping Basque in together with other languages has never read to me as terribly convincing, seeming almost more like "we don't know where the heck Basque came from, so what if it's related to XXX?" but with no clear smoking-gun type of compelling evidence that it actually *is* related to anything. Who knows, hopefully some day someone will figure out where it fits in.
There is growing evidence that the Polynesian linguistic group arose from origins in what is now Taiwan. Mâori oral traditions (the "story" in their "history") describe arriving at Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud (New Zealand), right when a particular star became extremely bright. Given the constellation described in detail in the tale, Western eggheads have been able to identify it as the Crab Nebula, which went kablooie in 1054.
They came from the west.
This makes any detour through the Americas quite unlikely, at the least.:)
That's not to discount any Polynesian contact with South America -- if a people can travel from Indonesia through Samoa and find Rapa Nui ("the big hunt" -- i.e. Easter Island) and travel back again, they can probably hit something as big as the South American coastline.
There's also some fun circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that one of the Kham plateau dialects of Tibetan is possibly related to Navajo.
A woman I once worked with lives in the Southwest and was at a Tibetan conference chatting with a friend of hers about the Navajo, when she turned to the Tibetans sitting at her table and apologized for not explaining who the Navajo are. The Tibetans laughed and said they needed no explanation. They told her how, in WWII, when the US hired on the Navajo code talkers, the Japanese figured out who it was on the radio and searched around for anyone who might be able to interpret. There was apparently a serious effort underway by Tibetan speakers that was making some headway before the war ended.
The recent Elliot Pattison novel, Prayer of the Dragon, plays on this potential Tibetan-Navajo connection. He talks some about the (admittedly superficial) similarities -- sand paintings, sky burial. And the Navajo themselves have a creation story about climbing down from a hole in the sky in the far north, where nowadays speakers of the related Athabaskan languages reside.
Sure, it might all be accidental, but circumstantial evidence, in sufficient quantities, begins to be a bit compelling.:)
Is your "f" notation here the same thing as for cameras? I'm used to SLRs, where "f" denotes the f-stop, the size of the lens aperture versus the focal length, with smaller numbers meaning a wider aperture, resulting in a greatly reduced depth of field (i.e., you have to be a lot more careful about focusing correctly), but also more light coming through and therefore shorter exposure times. Is this what you mean by "fast"? And why is this important? Does it allow for imaging of darker objects?
It has apparently escaped your notice, but the US is very busy trying to propagate its particular legal interpretation of "intellectual property" throughout the rest of the world, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, among other avenues. The DMCA itself might be specific to the US, but similar laws have been passed or at least proposed across much of the rest of the globe.
The DMCA! Coming Soon to a Country Near You!!! TM (c) (r) (pat. pend.)...
The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."
The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.
Both approaches require taking two photographs, so I confess I don't see too much difference that way. Part of what I'm confused about, I guess, is why it's easier to reconstruct 3D-ness from flash+nonflash rather than from parallax. Per your point, yes, stereoscopy has no depth per se, but then neither does flash+nonflash, really, which appears to be suggested by this bit:
...one aspect that researchers are still working on is how to capture an image that incorporates more than one surface field, such as vines growing up a brick wall. As the technique extracts a height field, it is not possible to "represent the two separate distinct bits of geometry"...
Reading through it again, I think what's important about this approach has much more to do with lighting and surface textures than with 3D:
The two captured images essentially become a reflectance map (albedo) and a depth map (height field)...
..."That information is used to produce a realistic rendering of a surface's texture. By altering the direction of illumination on the virtual surface the system can generate realistic shadow effects."
Can anyone elucidate why this is so whizbang neato when we've had 3D photography ever since someone with a camera figured out about parallax? Why is this different from stereoscopy?
Hello folks, pray tell, why has the parent post been modded "Troll"? While further research has shown that I was wrong, and that electoral fraud constitutes neither treason nor sedition, it is still a grave crime against the very heart of the state. Ranking electoral fraud as egregious a crime as treason, with similar consequences, certainly seems fitting.
Most followers of political parties don't think, they rationalize. They will find any reasons they need to support what their party does. If the situation changes, the reasons will change too.
The fun part is when this kind of willy-nilly-anything-goes attitude shows up in ostensibly conservative business circles like banking. This attitude seems to crop up in a cycle every few decades. We saw it in the S&L scandals of the 80s, and we see it now twenty-odd years later with the mortgage and loan (M&L?) scandal of the 00s (the Naught-ies).
Rationalizing, rather than reasoning, is putting Descartes before the horse -- and has, in fact, been the death of many a thinker through the long course of history.
I may be mistaken, but I was under the strong impression that such high crimes and misdemeanors as out-and-out treason were punishable by death in front of a firing squad.
I'm generally not a bloodthirsty person, but somehow I think this might be warranted here. Similar measures in Vietnam sure seem to have done a lot to discourage corruption among government officials.
I've got FF 2.0.0.16 on up-to-date XP. I've never found the amount of memory usage to have any notable impact on my browsing experience. What I *have* noticed, though, is that browsing gets notably slower, and the CPU often gets pegged by FF, once FF's page fault count gets much above 2 million (as according to Process Explorer). The situation is gradually improving, as v.16 doesn't slow down as much as v.15 did.
Somehow I suspect this might not be legal, since the warranty is ostensibly to cover the hardware. Wasn't there a/. article some months back about exactly this kind of issue, and how voiding the warranty on computer hardware for changing the software wasn't legal?
I'm glad someone else caught this. Maybe this is the underlying problem -- Kenny-boy himself doesn't have a clue what words are correctly or incorrectly spelt, and therefore can't be bothered to expose his own incompetence by "correcting" his students' spelling.
Either that, or he's just a lazy jackass. I can't tell which.
... and then the execs need to be drawn and quartered.
Only partly joking. This is such a flaming case of massive malfeasance that impacts **SO** much more than your run-of-the-mill corruption and other shenanigans. As other posters have noted, this shadiness means certs like this are, in general, complete crap, and given the extent to which many very vital businesses conduct online operations on the basis of these certs, a simple slap on the hand -- or even forcing the CA out of business -- is far too limited a repercussion.
The condition of the Sahara is not the result of local factors, but instead depends on weather patterns that affect the rest of the plant as well, and as such, any attempt at "terraforming" it must look at the wider, global picture.
IIRC, one of the keys to why the Sahara is so dry is also the same reason that the far north of Europe is still comfortably warm -- i.e., the North Atlantic Drift, the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water heading north and consequently raising temperatures in northern Europe. The North Atlantic Drift is a current generated largely by thermohaline processes, i.e. as the warmer and thus more saline-rich waters from the Gulf cool off, they become denser and sink. This warm water leaving the tropical Atlantic means less energy and less evaporation off the west coast of Africa, and thus less rain on the Sahara.
There's some thought that meltwater (fresh water) flowing into the Arctic Ocean may interrupt this process by diluting the northern end of the Drift current and preventing the waters from sinking, with the shutdown of the Drift current possibly leading to more warmth staying in the tropical Atlantic, with Europe cooling off while changing weather patterns in the ocean off the west coast of Africa lead to more rain in the Sahara. There are a couple interesting articles on Wikipedia about this, notably Thermohaline circulation and Sahara Pump Theory.
Wait a minute, I thought Law 1 was "always wait for the second release of any IT product"? At least, that's the golden rule for Windows releases, and now seems to be what some people are talking about regarding KDE...
And some of us Merkans value our posteriors enough (and have sufficiently different ideas of what constitutes "entertainment") that we simply don't watch TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the additional link, very interesting stuff, if a bit perplexing how to pull it off, or what the impact on ocean chemistry might be. Going back through the materials for my previous reply got me curious again, and I did some more digging, and went through to the calcium bicarbonate article on Wikipedia; this Cquestrate site is clearly working from the same idea, that calcium oxide in solution will actually become calcium bicarbonate instead of just calcium carbonate (limestone), ionically attracting an additional carbonate and thereby sucking up more carbon dioxide than is possible outside of solution.
CaO(calcium oxide) + 2(H20) >> Ca(OH)2(calcium hydroxide) + H2O
Ca(OH)2 + H2O + 2(CO2) >> Ca(HCO3)2(calcium bicarbonate) + H2O
Oh yeah, *aqueous*. (slaps forehead)
So provided that solar furnaces or some similar solar approach is used to calcinate the limestone, the missing piece of the logistics puzzle is finding a carbon-neutral means of distributing the lime in the oceans. Perhaps as solar power technology improves, either fuel-cell or electric vehicles and equipment could be used for extraction and transportation.
Cheers,
There's an old aphorism that says something about making assumptions...
I actually clicked through your link, but my browser only pulled up the "Global Warming Stopped By Adding Lime To Sea" article thread (which I read through when it first showed up), but the browser view failed to jump to any specific comment. Perhaps your link wasn't correct?
If you intended simply to link through to the article, a number of people in that thread pointed out notable flaws with the suggestions of TFA. Solar would be the only possible way of heating lime kilns in a carbon-neutral manner, but any non-solar lime kiln would involve burning something, which increases CO2 emissions. Besides which, any lime production process at all will release CO2 anyway as it's driven out of the base material (generally limestone) during calcination. Reversing the calcination process, which is what would happen with the lime added to seawater, would generally only suck up as much CO2 as was originally driven out of the raw limestone to begin with. Which leaves us with a very labor- and energy-intensive process to create the lime and cart it out into the ocean, which in the best possible scenario would end with no loss or gain in CO2 levels. Kinda pointless, unfortunately...
Cheers,
No, I agree. Plus, the first paragraph of this section indicates that a number of other Caribbean islands might indeed be mostly sand.
On a side note, I've also heard / read that the lushness of the Amazon is supported to some extent by mineral nutrients blown over from the Sahara. A quick Google search seems to find a number of relevant links.
Cheers,
Um, Vieques at least (and the big island of Puerto Rico proper) has an awful lot of nice, solid bedrock forming the bulk of the landmass. I don't think sand transported from the Sahara has much of anything to do with Vieques geology.
Cheers,
Read up on how lime is produced. It's problematic -- one hint is how much heat is required to produce (and therefore fuel of some sort to produce the heat), let alone the energy requirements for digging up the raw materials and transporting to processing facilities, etc etc. It's definitely *not* carbon-neutral.
Cheers,
I must also chime in and say you're misinformed, at least for roaming within North America. I live on San Juan Island, WA, just across the Haro Strait from Victoria BC, and my cell phone often switches over to the BC Rogers cell across the water with no change in functionality -- and I have never called AT&T to "enable" any such roaming technology, it simply does it automatically. In fact, I have to be very cautious with my billing statements to make sure that AT&T isn't busy trying to slip a ton of extra charges in there for maintaining a cell tower here on the island that's so underpowered I wind up getting the one next door instead.
Cheers,
Sorry to reply twice, but the intro to Vajda's paper mentions the Zuni language, which leads me to recommend The Zuni Enigma, wherein Nancy Yaw Davis sets forth a very interesting argument that the precursors to the Zuni absorbed a sizable Japanese community some time in the 1300s-1400s, with the Japanese language of the time forming part of the current Zuni ecumenical language. Davis's work still leaves many questions, and she is not a linguist but rather an anthropologist, but her writings are still worth evaluating. I'm a Japanese translator by trade, and some day I would very much like to be able to seriously study Zuni myself to see what I can find.
Cheers,
Oo, very interesting, I'll definitely give that a look-see. I'm quite interested in such morphologic analysis, and hope some day to possibly conduct some of my own, so a paper such as this touted for its methodological rigor is a happy find. Thank you.
The only thing I've read recently about Basque in the ancient world has to do with the possible remnants of Basque words in place names around Europe, which might indicate a much broader dispersion of Basque speakers prior to the influx of the Indo-European tribes. The one example I recall was the word "aran", apparently cognate to a Basque word meaning "valley", that shows up in various places around Europe, usually with the now-local language word for "valley" stuck on the end, such as Arantal, Germany (literally, the "valley valley").
The old Irish oral tradition relates that there were other people in Ireland before the folks now calling themselves Irish showed up, and the tales describe how the original inhabitants fought so valiantly that the incoming Gaelic tribes named the place after them in tribute -- Eiran. What with how many dramatic valleys there are in Ireland, that made me wonder if perhaps this "Eiran" is the same Basque word for "valley" -- but that is pure conjecture, and simply a fun thought experiment.
FWIW, almost anything lumping Basque in together with other languages has never read to me as terribly convincing, seeming almost more like "we don't know where the heck Basque came from, so what if it's related to XXX?" but with no clear smoking-gun type of compelling evidence that it actually *is* related to anything. Who knows, hopefully some day someone will figure out where it fits in.
Cheers,
Chickens are one thing, humans are another. :)
There is growing evidence that the Polynesian linguistic group arose from origins in what is now Taiwan. Mâori oral traditions (the "story" in their "history") describe arriving at Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud (New Zealand), right when a particular star became extremely bright. Given the constellation described in detail in the tale, Western eggheads have been able to identify it as the Crab Nebula, which went kablooie in 1054.
They came from the west.
This makes any detour through the Americas quite unlikely, at the least. :)
That's not to discount any Polynesian contact with South America -- if a people can travel from Indonesia through Samoa and find Rapa Nui ("the big hunt" -- i.e. Easter Island) and travel back again, they can probably hit something as big as the South American coastline.
Cheers,
There's also some fun circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that one of the Kham plateau dialects of Tibetan is possibly related to Navajo.
A woman I once worked with lives in the Southwest and was at a Tibetan conference chatting with a friend of hers about the Navajo, when she turned to the Tibetans sitting at her table and apologized for not explaining who the Navajo are. The Tibetans laughed and said they needed no explanation. They told her how, in WWII, when the US hired on the Navajo code talkers, the Japanese figured out who it was on the radio and searched around for anyone who might be able to interpret. There was apparently a serious effort underway by Tibetan speakers that was making some headway before the war ended.
The recent Elliot Pattison novel, Prayer of the Dragon, plays on this potential Tibetan-Navajo connection. He talks some about the (admittedly superficial) similarities -- sand paintings, sky burial. And the Navajo themselves have a creation story about climbing down from a hole in the sky in the far north, where nowadays speakers of the related Athabaskan languages reside.
Sure, it might all be accidental, but circumstantial evidence, in sufficient quantities, begins to be a bit compelling. :)
Cheers,
Is your "f" notation here the same thing as for cameras? I'm used to SLRs, where "f" denotes the f-stop, the size of the lens aperture versus the focal length, with smaller numbers meaning a wider aperture, resulting in a greatly reduced depth of field (i.e., you have to be a lot more careful about focusing correctly), but also more light coming through and therefore shorter exposure times. Is this what you mean by "fast"? And why is this important? Does it allow for imaging of darker objects?
Curious,
It has apparently escaped your notice, but the US is very busy trying to propagate its particular legal interpretation of "intellectual property" throughout the rest of the world, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, among other avenues. The DMCA itself might be specific to the US, but similar laws have been passed or at least proposed across much of the rest of the globe.
The DMCA! Coming Soon to a Country Near You!!! TM (c) (r) (pat. pend.) ...
Cheers,
The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges ... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."
The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.
Cheers,
Both approaches require taking two photographs, so I confess I don't see too much difference that way. Part of what I'm confused about, I guess, is why it's easier to reconstruct 3D-ness from flash+nonflash rather than from parallax. Per your point, yes, stereoscopy has no depth per se, but then neither does flash+nonflash, really, which appears to be suggested by this bit:
Reading through it again, I think what's important about this approach has much more to do with lighting and surface textures than with 3D:
Cheers,
Can anyone elucidate why this is so whizbang neato when we've had 3D photography ever since someone with a camera figured out about parallax? Why is this different from stereoscopy?
Bemused,
Hello folks, pray tell, why has the parent post been modded "Troll"? While further research has shown that I was wrong, and that electoral fraud constitutes neither treason nor sedition, it is still a grave crime against the very heart of the state. Ranking electoral fraud as egregious a crime as treason, with similar consequences, certainly seems fitting.
Cheers,
The fun part is when this kind of willy-nilly-anything-goes attitude shows up in ostensibly conservative business circles like banking. This attitude seems to crop up in a cycle every few decades. We saw it in the S&L scandals of the 80s, and we see it now twenty-odd years later with the mortgage and loan (M&L?) scandal of the 00s (the Naught-ies).
Rationalizing, rather than reasoning, is putting Descartes before the horse -- and has, in fact, been the death of many a thinker through the long course of history.
Cheers,
I may be mistaken, but I was under the strong impression that such high crimes and misdemeanors as out-and-out treason were punishable by death in front of a firing squad.
I'm generally not a bloodthirsty person, but somehow I think this might be warranted here. Similar measures in Vietnam sure seem to have done a lot to discourage corruption among government officials.
Cheers,
I've got FF 2.0.0.16 on up-to-date XP. I've never found the amount of memory usage to have any notable impact on my browsing experience. What I *have* noticed, though, is that browsing gets notably slower, and the CPU often gets pegged by FF, once FF's page fault count gets much above 2 million (as according to Process Explorer). The situation is gradually improving, as v.16 doesn't slow down as much as v.15 did.
Cheers,
Somehow I suspect this might not be legal, since the warranty is ostensibly to cover the hardware. Wasn't there a /. article some months back about exactly this kind of issue, and how voiding the warranty on computer hardware for changing the software wasn't legal?
Cheers,
I'm glad someone else caught this. Maybe this is the underlying problem -- Kenny-boy himself doesn't have a clue what words are correctly or incorrectly spelt, and therefore can't be bothered to expose his own incompetence by "correcting" his students' spelling.
Either that, or he's just a lazy jackass. I can't tell which.
Cheers,
... and then the execs need to be drawn and quartered.
Only partly joking. This is such a flaming case of massive malfeasance that impacts **SO** much more than your run-of-the-mill corruption and other shenanigans. As other posters have noted, this shadiness means certs like this are, in general, complete crap, and given the extent to which many very vital businesses conduct online operations on the basis of these certs, a simple slap on the hand -- or even forcing the CA out of business -- is far too limited a repercussion.
Cheers,
The condition of the Sahara is not the result of local factors, but instead depends on weather patterns that affect the rest of the plant as well, and as such, any attempt at "terraforming" it must look at the wider, global picture.
IIRC, one of the keys to why the Sahara is so dry is also the same reason that the far north of Europe is still comfortably warm -- i.e., the North Atlantic Drift, the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water heading north and consequently raising temperatures in northern Europe. The North Atlantic Drift is a current generated largely by thermohaline processes, i.e. as the warmer and thus more saline-rich waters from the Gulf cool off, they become denser and sink. This warm water leaving the tropical Atlantic means less energy and less evaporation off the west coast of Africa, and thus less rain on the Sahara.
There's some thought that meltwater (fresh water) flowing into the Arctic Ocean may interrupt this process by diluting the northern end of the Drift current and preventing the waters from sinking, with the shutdown of the Drift current possibly leading to more warmth staying in the tropical Atlantic, with Europe cooling off while changing weather patterns in the ocean off the west coast of Africa lead to more rain in the Sahara. There are a couple interesting articles on Wikipedia about this, notably Thermohaline circulation and Sahara Pump Theory.
Cheers,
Wait a minute, I thought Law 1 was "always wait for the second release of any IT product"? At least, that's the golden rule for Windows releases, and now seems to be what some people are talking about regarding KDE...
Cheers,
And some of us Merkans value our posteriors enough (and have sufficiently different ideas of what constitutes "entertainment") that we simply don't watch TV.
Cheers,