One in particular had aliens coming to Earth and transforming human bodies into narcotics factories (and doing the person in, in the process).
That sounds somewhat like "I Come In Peace", starring Dolph Lundgren. It deals with an alien that sucks the endorphins out of heroin addicts' brains to produce an addictive "space drug". A silly movie, but worth a look if you have a couple of hours to waste.:-)
I should have noted that only the standalone academic versions of Director and Authorware display the splash screens and watermarks. Most of Macromedia's other apps and suites appear to be unencumbered.
Not sure I can say the same for games, but when an app is something you can make a living off of, 'piracy' does have a way of making it necessity.
At the college where I once taught, piracy of the types of apps that you've described (e.g. Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, etc.) was rampant. However, most of the IT and teaching staff recognized that this would go on and, generally, turned a blind eye to it.
We understood that many of the students could not afford to buy these apps, even with substantial educational discounts. Therefore, piracy was perhaps the only way to access these apps outside of class or lab times. Much of the piracy may have been instigated by the fact that the majority of our students were using a different OS than the one that we used in our labs (we used Macs exclusively).
Eventually, though, most of the students did end up buying legitimate copies of the apps once they had graduated and begun to earn a living in the graphics and video fields.
I honestly don't think these would be around if not for piracy. At least some companies understand the value of giving something a worthwhile long-term test drive.
One of the companies that didn't seem to understand the value of a "test drive" was Macromedia. This was exemplified by their practice of releasing two versions of an app; the commercial version and the academic version. For example, the academic version of Director had all of the features of the commercial version, but at a huge discount. Sounded great at first, but what none of the students who were sucked into buying the academic version realized (because they hadn't read the EULA in which Macromedia states that the academic version cannot be used for comemrcial purposes) was that their finished products would display non-removeable splash screens that declared "Created with the academic/non-commercial version of Director". The students then found that upgrading to the commercial version would cost $799 CDN. Considering that they'd already spent $649 CDN for the academic version, they ended up spending almost the same amount as if they'd just shelled out for the commercial version ($1499 CDN) in the first place.
Then, to add insult to injury, many of the students noted that prospective employers were not impressed when shown presentations created by the academic version due to the aforementioned academic/non-commercial usage splash.
So, I suppose that the point of the foregoing screed is that some companies occasionally burden their apps with cumbersome EULA provisions that sometimes prompts people to pirate them. This is not the right thing to do, of course, but I can see why it happens.
The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra was the standard card in the first-generation 1.6 SP and 1.8 DP. The 2.0 DP came standard with an ATI Radeon 9600. The 9800 Pro was a BTO option.
So, I'm guessing that you probably have a GeForce FX 5200, unless you had your machine built-to-order with a Radeon 9600 or 9800.
Actually the old Nike Zeus/Spartan antiballistic missle from the late 60s early 70s might have the range and speed. But it is unlikly that it chould it hit far enough away to make a big difference.
Probably not.
The Zeus EX/Spartan had an operating ceiling of only 560 km (350 mi) and maximum range of 740 km (460 mi). I've read that the ideal range to intercept an asteroid/comet, so that its trajectory is altered enough to guarantee a complete miss, is 300 million km (186 million mi). That's because such an object would be travelling very quickly (as much as 60,000+ km/h) and we'd need a lot of lead time (at least a week) to figure out the object's composition and course, and prepare a missile/payload that could alter its course (or destroy it).
In other words, I don't think that anti-missile technology from the 1950s (or even present-day technology, for that matter) is going to save us.
Apple's first foray into speech input was a technology demo in 1990 on the Mac IIsi, running System 6.0.7. It was extremely rudimentary. Things improved slightly in 1991 (in System 7.0), but the implemementation was still crude and a bit of work was needed to make it function properly (-- well, I never got it to function properly, anyway:-P ). In 1993, PlainTalk, a much improved technology, debuted as a standard component in System 7.1.0 on Quadra 660AVs and 840AVs. Thereafter, command-oriented speech-recognition was a standard part of the Mac OS.
Looking at their photos and biographies, they appear to be different people. If you compare Samantha Bee's bio and Samantha Bennett's bio, then the differences become more obvious...
Samantha Bennett was born in East Pennsylvania, lives in West Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh), and was educated at Yale University and Carnegie-Mellon University. Meanwhile, Samantha Bee was born in Toronto, Ontario, lives in Manhattan, and was educated at the University of Ottawa.
They do have the same sort of fun, cheeky, unforced sense of humour, though. The similarity of their styles is noticeable.
I agree with white not being the greatest color. I'm thinking about painting my iPod because, damn, the rest of the design is simply perfect. I'm just stunned out how horrible all these other HD players look.
Like you, I'm not a fan of the appearance of most HD players on the market (including the Virgin player). It seems to me that companies are trying to hard to create crazy designs in the hope that they'll catch people's attention. Frankly, I can do without the weird styling and settle for the pure functionality (and minimalist-looking whiteness) of the iPod.
By the way, if you want to change the look of your iPod, perhaps something like a PodSkinz would work. A friend has the "pink fur" skinz on her 3rd-gen iPod. At first, it was rather jarring, but it grows on you after a while.
DaVinci was a close contender, and they are ready to go.. I hope they still go even though the prize has been won, the more methods the better..
I think it's likely that da Vinci will still make an attempt. The idea of the Ansari X Prize was to stimulate low-cost privately-funded commercial space flight. So, although the Prize has already been won, there are still opportunities to make some money (e.g. space tourism, commercial cargo transportation, etc.) if someone can come up with an economical method of getting into space.
The da Vinci Project seems to be on the right track by attempting to get into space on a shoestring budget of $5 million CDN ($3.75 million US). Their whole effort was geared from the start to offer extremely inexpensive space transportation, and their long-range goal is to offer a per flight cost (for people and cargo) of less than $100,000 US by 2020.
Contrast that with American Mojave Aerospace Ventures/Scaled Composites which received more than $25 million US from Paul Allen. It's not really a surprise that they won the Prize because no other project was as well-funded. Still, that $25 million is chickenfeed in comparison to what it costs NASA to launch a single shuttle (more than $500 million US per flight, or about $70 million per astronaut!).
What it boils down to is that any company that can get into space for $25 million (or less) is way ahead of the game. It would be even more impressive if the da Vinci Project can do it for a measly $3.75 million US.
So, I hope they keep working at it and successfully make it into space. As you said, competition in this realm can only be a good thing for all of us.
FYI... Stephen Galton is the lawyer that filed a class-action suit against Yahoo! for refusing to divulge the personal information of users who posted negative remarks about him on a Yahoo! forum. See this Slashdot article for more info.
Although Galton deserves to be lambasted for being a shyster, I don't know if what he's done is in the same league as spamming. Instead of harassing Galton, what we should really be doing is finding out the identity of "Richard Cunningham" (a "Happy Days" reference?) via his domain registration info or some other means, and placing flaming bags of dog shit on his doorstep (among other things).
How many people will endure the hassle of warranty repair on a 3-5 year old hard drive, when they can pick up something significantly bigger and faster?
I don't know about other folks, but I've gladly "endure[d] the hassle of a warranty repair" on old defective drives, and have received much higher capacity drives in return for my troubles. For example, in the last four years, IBM has sent a 10 GB Travelstar in exchange for an old dead 6.4 GB unit, Maxtor sent a 60 GB DiamondMaxPlus9 in exchange for a dead 40 GB unit, and Seagate sent an 80 GB Barracuda 7200.7 in exchange for a squeaky 40 GB Barracuda III.
In each case, I phoned the tech support departments of the respective manufacturer to ask about RMA procedures. They asked me a few questions, approved the RMAs, then had new drives sent out (IBM sent theirs by Next-Day Air -- a very nice gesture). Upon receiving them, I repackaged the dead drives in the boxes that the new drives had arrived in, took them down to Purolator and sent them to their respective manufacturers at their expense.
Altogether, I spent about 20 minutes on each warranty incident, and received replacements that were, in my opinion, of higher value than the original items. So, I don't consider what I had to go through as a "hassle". In fact, if that's the sort of thing that I can expect if/when I need to RMA another drive in the future, then I'd gladly endure it without complaint.:-)
D.
p.s. Of course, my experiences are anecdotal, and I don't pretend to think that these companies regularly act so magnanimously towards all warranty claims. Perhaps I just happened to get lucky, though.
Actually, Mike Breeden (the "interviewer") did not ask if nVidia itself will be introducing retail Mac cards. He is asking for Mr. Desai's opinion on whether graphics card manufacturers have any interest in introducing nVidia retail cards to the Mac market.
In fact, Mr. Breeden foresaw that Mr. Desai would probably answer with the standard "We don't make cards. We make GPUs." answer, so he flatly asked the question, parenthetically. Read the actual quoted passage again:
* This is an old question, but do you think there will ever be a retail Mac NVIDIA card? (i.e. Is the Apple contract an exclusive on the ROM code, etc. - or is there just no interest in PC graphics card mfrs to do a Mac product?)
Just thought you'd like to know that I received three items from the CRA today: a 2002 tax reassessment; a refund direct-deposit confirmaton; and something about my 2003 RRSP contribution limit. All of them arrived separately in old "Canada Customs and Revenue Agency" envelopes.
I guess they're going to keep using them until they run out.
Unless they're using old envelope stock (which they don't), it was still Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (or CCRA - ADRC) as of March 8th.
The CCRA was split into two separate agencies on December 12, 2003 -- the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canada Revenue Agency. The CRA is at the old CCRA URL, but they have nothing to do with Customs anymore.
In the past, it was handy to only visit one office to conduct business that dealt with both taxation and customs, even if the office was ostensibly for revenue matters only. Since January, I've been forced to go to two separate places (the CRA occupies the same old CCRA offices, while anything to do with the customs has been moved down to the border stations). Kind of a pain in the ass, but I'm told that it will streamline operations for both agencies and eventually cut down on the bureacracy that citizens have to deal with. In that case, I guess I'm all for it.
Yes, these updates automatically appear in Software Update. In fact, Security Updates usually appear in Software Update before they appear on Apple's website. The following day, a standalone downloadable updater is made available.
D.
Re:Is Apple or Microsoft forcing HP to do this?
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 1
Is it possible to obtain or download bugfixes for free, or are you forced into swallowing an upgrade tax if all you need is the bugfixes?
Yes, you can download free standalone installers for bug fixes and security updates. For example, there's a list of security updates at the Apple Software Updates page for most OS X iterations extending back to 10.0.x.
As for feature updates: Minor OS X updates (e.g. 10.x.x releases) are usually free, and contain minor feature updates. Major updates (e.g. 10.x releases) are generally not free. But, as others have mentioned, these major updates feature extensive changes that are (supposedly) worth the money.
Have a look at this TidBITS headphone article which discusses the merits of several different brands and models of headphones for use with portable music players. Very informative and well-researched.
By the way, there's a section that deals specifically with the type of headphone that you described (i.e. behind-the-head). The Koss KSC-55 (mentioned in the article) gets a good review. It's one of two headphones in this style that actually sound decent. Also, it only costs $19.99 US.
D.
Re:I wonder what the results would have been...
on
G5 vs Opteron, Finally
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Better now?
Well, personally, I wouldn't be too interested in that sort of comparison. I doubt that I'd be the only one who felt that way, either. Barring truly representative synthetic benchmarks, I suspect that most people would be interested in real world benchmarks, such as those provided by testing with After Effects, Bryce, etc. in Windows or Mac OS.
Yes, it is frightening. And, I'm not just agreeing with you because of what could occur in the future if a variant strain of TB was accidentally (or even purposely) released into the general population, but because I've already personally experienced the suffering that it can cause. TB has hit my family particularly hard -- three of my aunts succumbed to it during internment in World War II.
So, when I hear about researchers fooling about with virulent diseases (diseases which should have been eradicated long ago!) for seemingly superficial or spurious reasons, then I always get an uneasy feeling. Especially when they say that these hyper-virulent strains should, as Dr. Stoker says in the article, "pose no danger to humans". I hope that those aren't the proverbial famous last words.
Yes, the Garmin GPS 12XL is a fantastic unit. I've used one since 1998 for work purposes and have absolutely no complaints. Like Alrescha, this is my second unit (the first one was stolen from my truck) and I had no qualms about getting another. The latest revision of the 12XL (circa 2001, I believe) added several new features such as track area calculations, a power-saving mode, higher-capacity battery, and others.
I must say that it is a definite improvement over my previous GPS receiver, a Magellan GPS Satellite Navigator supplied to me by my company in 1993, I believe. A very nice unit with the rotating quadrifilar antenna, among other things. At that time, not many portable receivers had those sorts of features, although it was not up to par with the improved technology of the Garmin GPS 12XL. Sadly, that one was lost when our helo's belly-pod cargo compartment opened in mid-flight and spewed our belongings into the wilderness below.
Anyway, well, I can't comment directly on the GPSMAP 76S directly, but I can definitely second the positive comments made by other Garmin owners about their respective GPS receivers. Garmins are top-notch. I'd buy one again, and so recommend them to others.
Do you have even a vague basis for your supposition that the US would, today, employ chemical weapons?
I don't think that Eisenstein meant that the U.S. would employ chemical weapons. Rather, I believe he's stating that the U.S. is more likely to be the target of a chemical weapon attack by a terrorist organization.
Slashdot Mirror
One in particular had aliens coming to Earth and transforming human bodies into narcotics factories (and doing the person in, in the process).
:-)
That sounds somewhat like "I Come In Peace", starring Dolph Lundgren. It deals with an alien that sucks the endorphins out of heroin addicts' brains to produce an addictive "space drug". A silly movie, but worth a look if you have a couple of hours to waste.
I should have noted that only the standalone academic versions of Director and Authorware display the splash screens and watermarks. Most of Macromedia's other apps and suites appear to be unencumbered.
Not sure I can say the same for games, but when an app is something you can make a living off of, 'piracy' does have a way of making it necessity.
At the college where I once taught, piracy of the types of apps that you've described (e.g. Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, etc.) was rampant. However, most of the IT and teaching staff recognized that this would go on and, generally, turned a blind eye to it.
We understood that many of the students could not afford to buy these apps, even with substantial educational discounts. Therefore, piracy was perhaps the only way to access these apps outside of class or lab times. Much of the piracy may have been instigated by the fact that the majority of our students were using a different OS than the one that we used in our labs (we used Macs exclusively).
Eventually, though, most of the students did end up buying legitimate copies of the apps once they had graduated and begun to earn a living in the graphics and video fields.
I honestly don't think these would be around if not for piracy. At least some companies understand the value of giving something a worthwhile long-term test drive.
One of the companies that didn't seem to understand the value of a "test drive" was Macromedia. This was exemplified by their practice of releasing two versions of an app; the commercial version and the academic version. For example, the academic version of Director had all of the features of the commercial version, but at a huge discount. Sounded great at first, but what none of the students who were sucked into buying the academic version realized (because they hadn't read the EULA in which Macromedia states that the academic version cannot be used for comemrcial purposes) was that their finished products would display non-removeable splash screens that declared "Created with the academic/non-commercial version of Director". The students then found that upgrading to the commercial version would cost $799 CDN. Considering that they'd already spent $649 CDN for the academic version, they ended up spending almost the same amount as if they'd just shelled out for the commercial version ($1499 CDN) in the first place.
Then, to add insult to injury, many of the students noted that prospective employers were not impressed when shown presentations created by the academic version due to the aforementioned academic/non-commercial usage splash.
So, I suppose that the point of the foregoing screed is that some companies occasionally burden their apps with cumbersome EULA provisions that sometimes prompts people to pirate them. This is not the right thing to do, of course, but I can see why it happens.
'CAN-SPAM' stands for "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing".
So, technically, 'CAN' is part of an SLA (seven-letter acronym).
D.
The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra was the standard card in the first-generation 1.6 SP and 1.8 DP. The 2.0 DP came standard with an ATI Radeon 9600. The 9800 Pro was a BTO option.
So, I'm guessing that you probably have a GeForce FX 5200, unless you had your machine built-to-order with a Radeon 9600 or 9800.
D.
Actually the old Nike Zeus/Spartan antiballistic missle from the late 60s early 70s might have the range and speed. But it is unlikly that it chould it hit far enough away to make a big difference.
Probably not.
The Zeus EX/Spartan had an operating ceiling of only 560 km (350 mi) and maximum range of 740 km (460 mi). I've read that the ideal range to intercept an asteroid/comet, so that its trajectory is altered enough to guarantee a complete miss, is 300 million km (186 million mi). That's because such an object would be travelling very quickly (as much as 60,000+ km/h) and we'd need a lot of lead time (at least a week) to figure out the object's composition and course, and prepare a missile/payload that could alter its course (or destroy it).
In other words, I don't think that anti-missile technology from the 1950s (or even present-day technology, for that matter) is going to save us.
D.
Just FYI...
:-P ). In 1993, PlainTalk, a much improved technology, debuted as a standard component in System 7.1.0 on Quadra 660AVs and 840AVs. Thereafter, command-oriented speech-recognition was a standard part of the Mac OS.
Apple's first foray into speech input was a technology demo in 1990 on the Mac IIsi, running System 6.0.7. It was extremely rudimentary. Things improved slightly in 1991 (in System 7.0), but the implemementation was still crude and a bit of work was needed to make it function properly (-- well, I never got it to function properly, anyway
D.
Looking at their photos and biographies, they appear to be different people. If you compare Samantha Bee's bio and Samantha Bennett's bio, then the differences become more obvious... Samantha Bennett was born in East Pennsylvania, lives in West Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh), and was educated at Yale University and Carnegie-Mellon University. Meanwhile, Samantha Bee was born in Toronto, Ontario, lives in Manhattan, and was educated at the University of Ottawa.
They do have the same sort of fun, cheeky, unforced sense of humour, though. The similarity of their styles is noticeable.
D.
I agree with white not being the greatest color. I'm thinking about painting my iPod because, damn, the rest of the design is simply perfect. I'm just stunned out how horrible all these other HD players look.
Like you, I'm not a fan of the appearance of most HD players on the market (including the Virgin player). It seems to me that companies are trying to hard to create crazy designs in the hope that they'll catch people's attention. Frankly, I can do without the weird styling and settle for the pure functionality (and minimalist-looking whiteness) of the iPod.
By the way, if you want to change the look of your iPod, perhaps something like a PodSkinz would work. A friend has the "pink fur" skinz on her 3rd-gen iPod. At first, it was rather jarring, but it grows on you after a while.
D.
DaVinci was a close contender, and they are ready to go.. I hope they still go even though the prize has been won, the more methods the better..
I think it's likely that da Vinci will still make an attempt. The idea of the Ansari X Prize was to stimulate low-cost privately-funded commercial space flight. So, although the Prize has already been won, there are still opportunities to make some money (e.g. space tourism, commercial cargo transportation, etc.) if someone can come up with an economical method of getting into space.
The da Vinci Project seems to be on the right track by attempting to get into space on a shoestring budget of $5 million CDN ($3.75 million US). Their whole effort was geared from the start to offer extremely inexpensive space transportation, and their long-range goal is to offer a per flight cost (for people and cargo) of less than $100,000 US by 2020.
Contrast that with American Mojave Aerospace Ventures/Scaled Composites which received more than $25 million US from Paul Allen. It's not really a surprise that they won the Prize because no other project was as well-funded. Still, that $25 million is chickenfeed in comparison to what it costs NASA to launch a single shuttle (more than $500 million US per flight, or about $70 million per astronaut!).
What it boils down to is that any company that can get into space for $25 million (or less) is way ahead of the game. It would be even more impressive if the da Vinci Project can do it for a measly $3.75 million US.
So, I hope they keep working at it and successfully make it into space. As you said, competition in this realm can only be a good thing for all of us.
D.
Yup, Apple offers X11 for Mac OS X. See this webpage. A link to the free download is in the right sidebar.
D.
FYI... Stephen Galton is the lawyer that filed a class-action suit against Yahoo! for refusing to divulge the personal information of users who posted negative remarks about him on a Yahoo! forum. See this Slashdot article for more info.
Although Galton deserves to be lambasted for being a shyster, I don't know if what he's done is in the same league as spamming. Instead of harassing Galton, what we should really be doing is finding out the identity of "Richard Cunningham" (a "Happy Days" reference?) via his domain registration info or some other means, and placing flaming bags of dog shit on his doorstep (among other things).
D.
How many people will endure the hassle of warranty repair on a 3-5 year old hard drive, when they can pick up something significantly bigger and faster?
:-)
I don't know about other folks, but I've gladly "endure[d] the hassle of a warranty repair" on old defective drives, and have received much higher capacity drives in return for my troubles. For example, in the last four years, IBM has sent a 10 GB Travelstar in exchange for an old dead 6.4 GB unit, Maxtor sent a 60 GB DiamondMaxPlus9 in exchange for a dead 40 GB unit, and Seagate sent an 80 GB Barracuda 7200.7 in exchange for a squeaky 40 GB Barracuda III.
In each case, I phoned the tech support departments of the respective manufacturer to ask about RMA procedures. They asked me a few questions, approved the RMAs, then had new drives sent out (IBM sent theirs by Next-Day Air -- a very nice gesture). Upon receiving them, I repackaged the dead drives in the boxes that the new drives had arrived in, took them down to Purolator and sent them to their respective manufacturers at their expense.
Altogether, I spent about 20 minutes on each warranty incident, and received replacements that were, in my opinion, of higher value than the original items. So, I don't consider what I had to go through as a "hassle". In fact, if that's the sort of thing that I can expect if/when I need to RMA another drive in the future, then I'd gladly endure it without complaint.
D.
p.s. Of course, my experiences are anecdotal, and I don't pretend to think that these companies regularly act so magnanimously towards all warranty claims. Perhaps I just happened to get lucky, though.
Actually, Mike Breeden (the "interviewer") did not ask if nVidia itself will be introducing retail Mac cards. He is asking for Mr. Desai's opinion on whether graphics card manufacturers have any interest in introducing nVidia retail cards to the Mac market.
In fact, Mr. Breeden foresaw that Mr. Desai would probably answer with the standard "We don't make cards. We make GPUs." answer, so he flatly asked the question, parenthetically. Read the actual quoted passage again:
D.
Actually, it might have been NetCaptor. They've had a tabbed browsing implementation since 1998.
D.
Actually, you'll get a better deal at Crazy Watto's Deals On Wheels (And Repulsors).
;-)
As long as you're not a Jedi, that is.
D.
Just thought you'd like to know that I received three items from the CRA today: a 2002 tax reassessment; a refund direct-deposit confirmaton; and something about my 2003 RRSP contribution limit. All of them arrived separately in old "Canada Customs and Revenue Agency" envelopes.
I guess they're going to keep using them until they run out.
D.
Unless they're using old envelope stock (which they don't), it was still Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (or CCRA - ADRC) as of March 8th.
The CCRA was split into two separate agencies on December 12, 2003 -- the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canada Revenue Agency. The CRA is at the old CCRA URL, but they have nothing to do with Customs anymore.
In the past, it was handy to only visit one office to conduct business that dealt with both taxation and customs, even if the office was ostensibly for revenue matters only. Since January, I've been forced to go to two separate places (the CRA occupies the same old CCRA offices, while anything to do with the customs has been moved down to the border stations). Kind of a pain in the ass, but I'm told that it will streamline operations for both agencies and eventually cut down on the bureacracy that citizens have to deal with. In that case, I guess I'm all for it.
D.
Yes, these updates automatically appear in Software Update. In fact, Security Updates usually appear in Software Update before they appear on Apple's website. The following day, a standalone downloadable updater is made available.
D.
Is it possible to obtain or download bugfixes for free, or are you forced into swallowing an upgrade tax if all you need is the bugfixes?
Yes, you can download free standalone installers for bug fixes and security updates. For example, there's a list of security updates at the Apple Software Updates page for most OS X iterations extending back to 10.0.x.
As for feature updates: Minor OS X updates (e.g. 10.x.x releases) are usually free, and contain minor feature updates. Major updates (e.g. 10.x releases) are generally not free. But, as others have mentioned, these major updates feature extensive changes that are (supposedly) worth the money.
D.
Have a look at this TidBITS headphone article which discusses the merits of several different brands and models of headphones for use with portable music players. Very informative and well-researched.
By the way, there's a section that deals specifically with the type of headphone that you described (i.e. behind-the-head). The Koss KSC-55 (mentioned in the article) gets a good review. It's one of two headphones in this style that actually sound decent. Also, it only costs $19.99 US.
D.
Better now?
Well, personally, I wouldn't be too interested in that sort of comparison. I doubt that I'd be the only one who felt that way, either. Barring truly representative synthetic benchmarks, I suspect that most people would be interested in real world benchmarks, such as those provided by testing with After Effects, Bryce, etc. in Windows or Mac OS.
D.
That is a pretty frightening bit 'o news there
Yes, it is frightening. And, I'm not just agreeing with you because of what could occur in the future if a variant strain of TB was accidentally (or even purposely) released into the general population, but because I've already personally experienced the suffering that it can cause. TB has hit my family particularly hard -- three of my aunts succumbed to it during internment in World War II.
So, when I hear about researchers fooling about with virulent diseases (diseases which should have been eradicated long ago!) for seemingly superficial or spurious reasons, then I always get an uneasy feeling. Especially when they say that these hyper-virulent strains should, as Dr. Stoker says in the article, "pose no danger to humans". I hope that those aren't the proverbial famous last words.
D.
At the risk of posting a "me too" comment...
Yes, the Garmin GPS 12XL is a fantastic unit. I've used one since 1998 for work purposes and have absolutely no complaints. Like Alrescha, this is my second unit (the first one was stolen from my truck) and I had no qualms about getting another. The latest revision of the 12XL (circa 2001, I believe) added several new features such as track area calculations, a power-saving mode, higher-capacity battery, and others.
I must say that it is a definite improvement over my previous GPS receiver, a Magellan GPS Satellite Navigator supplied to me by my company in 1993, I believe. A very nice unit with the rotating quadrifilar antenna, among other things. At that time, not many portable receivers had those sorts of features, although it was not up to par with the improved technology of the Garmin GPS 12XL. Sadly, that one was lost when our helo's belly-pod cargo compartment opened in mid-flight and spewed our belongings into the wilderness below.
Anyway, well, I can't comment directly on the GPSMAP 76S directly, but I can definitely second the positive comments made by other Garmin owners about their respective GPS receivers. Garmins are top-notch. I'd buy one again, and so recommend them to others.
D.
Do you have even a vague basis for your supposition that the US would, today, employ chemical weapons?
I don't think that Eisenstein meant that the U.S. would employ chemical weapons. Rather, I believe he's stating that the U.S. is more likely to be the target of a chemical weapon attack by a terrorist organization.
D.