Monsanto has a long, and fortunately well-documented, history of deliberately poisoning our world with first their herbicides, then genetically modified plants that withstand larger quantities of their own herbicides, and further infertilizing that crop, so that you have to buy new seeds every year.
Couple that to an army of lawyers to sue the environmentally consious people and innocent bystanders who had their natural crop infected with blown-over genetically modified seeds from Monsanto, and anyone can conclude that Monsanto is EVIL.
If I was granted 1 wish, I wish that Monsanto would stop operating and invest their accumulated profits into undoing the damage that they did worldwide.
I support the intranet for a 7000 person company, and put up a help page telling them to use OGV (for Firefox on Windows. Linux and Solaris) and WMV (for IE).
<video src="filename.ogv" autoplay="true" controls="true">
...code for IE7 users...
<video>
Firefox reads the video tag and ignores the inside of the video container, and IE7 ignores the video tag and reads the 10 lines of WMV code.
My site kayakfun.info (dutch-language site about whitewater kayaking, so no tech-bias) runs Webalizer stats so I only see the top 15 agents, amid lots of bots, but here is the summary from feb 2009 to jun 2009:
IE total went from 44% to 37% (-19%)
Moz 5 (Fx and Safari people explained above) went from 12% to 18% (+50%)
Opera 8.5 went from 0.9% to 2.5% (+170%)
IE6 dropped from 13 to 9%
IE7 dropped from 30 to 23%
IE8 went from 1 to 5%
So "collapsing" ? No, IE total is just slowly degrading for evolutionary reasons, most likely asymptotically approaching zero after a long time. I sincerely hope IE6 and 7 drop out of the top15 really soon, IE8 is not that bad.
We had this guy who got laid off, and left to finish work for the remaining 4 weeks, as editor of the company newsletter. He managed to let the first characters of every line in the first article say " sucks", so that if you placed a piece of paper over the rest of the sentence it would stand out clearly. Only after it returned from the printer he told us.
A few years later, when the boss that fired him had moved on and we had another boss, he reapplied for his job. When the new boss heard the story, he did not even want to see the CV. His comment "once a loose cannon, always a loose cannon".
In these networked times, you never ever burn your bridges.
Actually M$ has quite strict internal UI design rules - yet they are to accommodate disabled, not to improve overall usability.
The fact that in all MS programs you can never resize those popups with too-wide info, and then does not even include sideways scroll bar, is beyond my understanding. Surely most programmers at MS themselves must have noticed this, and then all of them decided to NOT fix it.
Using Linux at home, I know how it could and should be, and you blaiming their inability to fix unresizable windows on UI design rules is an eye opener.
Someone in the MS design department actually thought about it and made it illegal for MS programmers to resize popup windows so that we all feel how it is to be disabled????
That was just the trailer, they gave you $10 to rent the whole video so you can see how it ends (just in case you never saw porn and don't know how they all end).
If I wanted to be treated like a criminal, I'll become one.
The assumption that all foreigners are (potential) terrorists is a slap in the face of hospitality.
And it totally disregards the fact that there are quite some criminals among USA residents.
And then consider that the USA owns a prison where you can be held without any trial or human rights, and that the USA is vetoing all UN resolutions against Israel that would lead to peace in the middle east...
I said it before, americans are mostly nice people, but their government are still living in the cold war times. Luckily there are still a lot of other really nice countries that welcome my tourist euros.
The parent is soooo right. Israel gets a blank check to do whatever they like from the USA. The USA is vetoing all UN resolutions that would force Israel to do it's part in ending this tragedy.
Now it's time for us to step in like we did in South Africa. Boycott any product coming from Israel. And kick them out of the Eurovision song festival. It's not like Israel is part of Europe anyway. We are civilised.
My grandfather hid jews in the cellar of his Amsterdam shop in the second world war. How can people who have suffered so much turn 180 degrees and become the suppressors themselves? Put up concentration camps (Gaza) and security fences on land that does not belong to them?
The Hamas are no sweethearts, but given the circumstances, what do they have to loose? If Israel follows all UN resolutions, and the Gaza harbour and airport functions again, then the Palestinian middle and working class will kick out Hamas. Israeli hardliners love Hamas and Hamas loves them, because otherwise they would die.
Give land and work to the Palestinians, then they will become addicted to wealth like us, giving up the wish to become a martyr, because they have too much to loose.
Cost is not the biggest hurdle for wind power. Off-shore wind parks have difficulty getting permits, where a oilrig on the same location would get a permit the same week.
A future problem is the fluctuations between wind availability and power demand, limiting it's share in the mix to about 30%, but we are currently around 1%. And that was my point, let's first build wind parks because they are a mature technology that's simple to implement now. That will buy us time to make our oil last longer.
I also mentioned solar and tidal energy. A lot of solar has been confined to the rich 'west', while poor countries around the equator keep deforesting
for cooking fires and hot water. A solar boiler is (again) mature technology that should be implemented on a much larger scale, before we start looking into exotic and expensive energy production. Solar electricity in those countries also can be scaled up massively.
When all the easy solutions have dried up (including house insulation and more energy-efficient cars), we may well have solved the problem without needing nuclear/fusion. Maybe we will need it, but as long as no-one has built an fusion reactor with a positive yield don't sit on your hands on the easily introducable alternatives.
Oil will end, and the last few drops of it will be needed for the chemical/plastics industry rather than be burned in someone's Hummer.
with a proven track record of more than 5000 years. And it will be for another 5000 years, because it is sustainable and simple to 'harvest'.
Big industry keeps neglecting the low-hanging fruit like wind, tidal and solar energy because they are too autistic to notice they are not needed. Much in the same manner that Detroit kept making gas-guzzler SUVs and trucks.
If all the money that has been put in that nuclear black hole had been spent on clean sustainable energy, then the oil producing countries' main income source would be tourism by now.
Let the market decide which car company survives, and which energy source gets the best ROI, but do it on a level playing field.
Via is small, and having too many product lines means missing out on opportunities like the netbook market that is now quickly turning into a Intel Core2 and Atom environment. And that while lean and powerful enough were once solely Via territory...
Give us a Via motherboard sized ITX or preferably smaller, with a Via VX800 chipset, and the Via Nano CPU, and join the marketplace before the hype is over.
I was already annoyed about the ridiculous long queues coming into the USA for foreigners, but this is it: I will not visit the USA anymore, including using any flight that has a stopover in the USA.
I know that the chance is very low that they'll steal MY camera with holiday photos, GPS with waypoints and laptop with travel notes, but that's not a risk I want to take.
There are so many more countries that are willing to accept my euros and treat me as a guest. Even Cuban immigration personnel is friendlier (been there twice).
I'm sure this policy will do wonders for the american economy and american airlines.
My 80's guitar hero Ted Nugent will perform live in my hometown this sunday, so I looked him up on Youtube, but I found more movies of his political views than musical work. He should really stick to music.
Disclaimer: this was a joke. Don't commit a big crime to solve a small crime.
My 'smart-phone' has a 10.2" touchscreen, and will be flushmounted in the standard center console so that it looks like OEM.
Obvious advantage is the screen real estate for navigating and surfing. I can display real-time traffic websites such as http://www.traphic.nl/ without zoom/scroll problems. Try that on a smartphone and you'll be fiddling so much with the tiny screen that you'll end up in a ditch or someone's rear.
I'm looking for these kind of CPUs for my carputer/carPC, which will do just MP3 playback, GPS location, routeplanner, and internet over mobile connections.
Although any purchase you make will be bested within a month, these Atom and Nano CPUs are the new norm, killing all older low-power CPU sales.
In my car, power is important because I run from the battery, but it is still not as critical as in a true portable PC. So I'll wait a little longer and go for the Via Nano which should be much more powerful under (parallel) load, but get almost the same idle power consumption.
If you stay below your normal power consumption (fridge, deepfreezer, computer, TV and video on standby, several clocks) then just connect it via an inverter.
I have 4 m2 PV cells (in the Netherlands) and on sunny days have very low resulting power draw from the grid.
I also have 4 m2 solar water heating, and use absolutely zero gas from jun-sep and very little in the surrounding months.
Payback time for solar water heating is less than 7 years, and for solar PV it is 20+ years in the Netherlands. Raising oil prices makes it more interesting.
Not really energy-saving, but ecological too:
If you are in an area where it rains a lot, you can also divert some of your roofs to a water container (mine is 10 m3) and use that water for flushing the toilets, doing the laundry, and watering your garden. I have that since 1994 and it works great.
Actually they would appreciate it, because it decreases their time on the plane. LIFO is a luxury you could even market as one of the advantages. Cattle class must be at the gate 30 minutes before, and 1st class only 10 minutes. That gives them 20 minutes longer at their business meetings.
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It's the least we can do. You liberated us (I'm dutch) 65 years ago, let us now liberate you.
Couple that to an army of lawyers to sue the environmentally consious people and innocent bystanders who had their natural crop infected with blown-over genetically modified seeds from Monsanto, and anyone can conclude that Monsanto is EVIL.
If I was granted 1 wish, I wish that Monsanto would stop operating and invest their accumulated profits into undoing the damage that they did worldwide.
I support the intranet for a 7000 person company, and put up a help page telling them to use OGV (for Firefox on Windows. Linux and Solaris) and WMV (for IE).
<video src="filename.ogv" autoplay="true" controls="true">
...code for IE7 users...
<video>
Firefox reads the video tag and ignores the inside of the video container, and IE7 ignores the video tag and reads the 10 lines of WMV code.
Voila, no more flash.
And proud because the dutch girls are pretty enough to cause this effect, ;-)
Disclaimer: I'm dutch.
My site kayakfun.info (dutch-language site about whitewater kayaking, so no tech-bias) runs Webalizer stats so I only see the top 15 agents, amid lots of bots, but here is the summary from feb 2009 to jun 2009:
So "collapsing" ? No, IE total is just slowly degrading for evolutionary reasons, most likely asymptotically approaching zero after a long time. I sincerely hope IE6 and 7 drop out of the top15 really soon, IE8 is not that bad.
This is too close to April fools day to take it seriously.
A few years later, when the boss that fired him had moved on and we had another boss, he reapplied for his job. When the new boss heard the story, he did not even want to see the CV. His comment "once a loose cannon, always a loose cannon".
In these networked times, you never ever burn your bridges.
Actually M$ has quite strict internal UI design rules - yet they are to accommodate disabled, not to improve overall usability.
The fact that in all MS programs you can never resize those popups with too-wide info, and then does not even include sideways scroll bar, is beyond my understanding. Surely most programmers at MS themselves must have noticed this, and then all of them decided to NOT fix it.
Using Linux at home, I know how it could and should be, and you blaiming their inability to fix unresizable windows on UI design rules is an eye opener.
Someone in the MS design department actually thought about it and made it illegal for MS programmers to resize popup windows so that we all feel how it is to be disabled????
That was just the trailer, they gave you $10 to rent the whole video so you can see how it ends (just in case you never saw porn and don't know how they all end).
The assumption that all foreigners are (potential) terrorists is a slap in the face of hospitality.
And it totally disregards the fact that there are quite some criminals among USA residents.
And then consider that the USA owns a prison where you can be held without any trial or human rights, and that the USA is vetoing all UN resolutions against Israel that would lead to peace in the middle east...
I said it before, americans are mostly nice people, but their government are still living in the cold war times. Luckily there are still a lot of other really nice countries that welcome my tourist euros.
Now it's time for us to step in like we did in South Africa. Boycott any product coming from Israel. And kick them out of the Eurovision song festival. It's not like Israel is part of Europe anyway. We are civilised.
My grandfather hid jews in the cellar of his Amsterdam shop in the second world war. How can people who have suffered so much turn 180 degrees and become the suppressors themselves? Put up concentration camps (Gaza) and security fences on land that does not belong to them?
The Hamas are no sweethearts, but given the circumstances, what do they have to loose? If Israel follows all UN resolutions, and the Gaza harbour and airport functions again, then the Palestinian middle and working class will kick out Hamas. Israeli hardliners love Hamas and Hamas loves them, because otherwise they would die.
Give land and work to the Palestinians, then they will become addicted to wealth like us, giving up the wish to become a martyr, because they have too much to loose.
Or placing data centers in cold places and just go air-cooling. Or using a 4 W Atom processor in your computer to replace a 130 W CPU.
Wind power is intermittend, so should not be more than 35% of your energy mix, but that's a lot more than 'a drop in the bucket'.
Explanation: the dutch word for acorn is 'eikel' which also means the tip of a man's p*n*s, and is commonly used to refer to d*ckheads.
A future problem is the fluctuations between wind availability and power demand, limiting it's share in the mix to about 30%, but we are currently around 1%. And that was my point, let's first build wind parks because they are a mature technology that's simple to implement now. That will buy us time to make our oil last longer.
I also mentioned solar and tidal energy. A lot of solar has been confined to the rich 'west', while poor countries around the equator keep deforesting for cooking fires and hot water. A solar boiler is (again) mature technology that should be implemented on a much larger scale, before we start looking into exotic and expensive energy production. Solar electricity in those countries also can be scaled up massively.
When all the easy solutions have dried up (including house insulation and more energy-efficient cars), we may well have solved the problem without needing nuclear/fusion. Maybe we will need it, but as long as no-one has built an fusion reactor with a positive yield don't sit on your hands on the easily introducable alternatives.
Oil will end, and the last few drops of it will be needed for the chemical/plastics industry rather than be burned in someone's Hummer.
Big industry keeps neglecting the low-hanging fruit like wind, tidal and solar energy because they are too autistic to notice they are not needed. Much in the same manner that Detroit kept making gas-guzzler SUVs and trucks.
If all the money that has been put in that nuclear black hole had been spent on clean sustainable energy, then the oil producing countries' main income source would be tourism by now.
Let the market decide which car company survives, and which energy source gets the best ROI, but do it on a level playing field.
Doesn't surprise me a bit.
That was nothing compared to what I lost buying back my house and furniture after the divorce a few years later: 200.000 euro.
Reality doesn't give a shit about true love.
Give us a Via motherboard sized ITX or preferably smaller, with a Via VX800 chipset, and the Via Nano CPU, and join the marketplace before the hype is over.
I know that the chance is very low that they'll steal MY camera with holiday photos, GPS with waypoints and laptop with travel notes, but that's not a risk I want to take.
There are so many more countries that are willing to accept my euros and treat me as a guest. Even Cuban immigration personnel is friendlier (been there twice).
I'm sure this policy will do wonders for the american economy and american airlines.
(Please score as funny, instead of insightful)
My 80's guitar hero Ted Nugent will perform live in my hometown this sunday, so I looked him up on Youtube, but I found more movies of his political views than musical work. He should really stick to music.
Disclaimer: this was a joke. Don't commit a big crime to solve a small crime.
Obvious advantage is the screen real estate for navigating and surfing. I can display real-time traffic websites such as http://www.traphic.nl/ without zoom/scroll problems. Try that on a smartphone and you'll be fiddling so much with the tiny screen that you'll end up in a ditch or someone's rear.
Although any purchase you make will be bested within a month, these Atom and Nano CPUs are the new norm, killing all older low-power CPU sales.
In my car, power is important because I run from the battery, but it is still not as critical as in a true portable PC. So I'll wait a little longer and go for the Via Nano which should be much more powerful under (parallel) load, but get almost the same idle power consumption.
I have 4 m2 PV cells (in the Netherlands) and on sunny days have very low resulting power draw from the grid.
I also have 4 m2 solar water heating, and use absolutely zero gas from jun-sep and very little in the surrounding months.
Payback time for solar water heating is less than 7 years, and for solar PV it is 20+ years in the Netherlands. Raising oil prices makes it more interesting.
Not really energy-saving, but ecological too: If you are in an area where it rains a lot, you can also divert some of your roofs to a water container (mine is 10 m3) and use that water for flushing the toilets, doing the laundry, and watering your garden. I have that since 1994 and it works great.
Actually they would appreciate it, because it decreases their time on the plane. LIFO is a luxury you could even market as one of the advantages. Cattle class must be at the gate 30 minutes before, and 1st class only 10 minutes. That gives them 20 minutes longer at their business meetings.
The USA is the country for people who don't care about civil rights. All others stay in the civilized world.
USA tourism and business travel will go the way of the dollar: avoid it like the plague.