Okay, lets move the clutch, the brakes and the accelerator out of order, and to different locations. Cope with that.
User interfaces must have certain aspects similar or they are confusing. The very fact that you use stickshift puts you far ahead of most drivers who can barely (if they actually do) cope with automatic.
Okay, so we are really talking about the difference about may be fatal Methyl Alcohol (CH3OH) and may cause serious damage Sodium Borohydride (BNaH4). Hmm, kind of a silly thing. Neither of these chemicals ought to be in the common persons hands (the same people who bring you hot coffee lawsuits and ride around in the back of pickup trucks.)
People do enough damage to themselves and the world with the current harvest of dangerous consumer products. Gasoline included. Now, if you are trading a lesser evil for a greater evil, that is a step in the right direction sometimes. Sometimes it prevents a much lesser evil or a non-evil from being selected instead (like cure in medicine vs manage, which do you think is normally selected in the current business models?)
In the end, I do not see the need for a focus on distance per unit. I see the focus as being cost per unit (pollution, money) and cost per distance achieved (again, pollution money). If the cost is cheap enough to travel a certain distance on a fuel, then it is cheap enough to double or triple the size or the fuel storage system. Other issues may enter into play, such as consumer safety, but those would be addressed (as they always have been) by consumer protection actions (laws and standards).
I agree. One problem. How are you going to determine what the actual cause of something like cancer is. Or, do you simply state that if you ever smoked, your coverage for cancer is null and void?
There are so many other issues out there to be dealt with, obesity being one. Before you get a chance to crack that one though, you are going to have to get corporates to play with morals. The big sugar mills are just as bad as the tobacco companies at protecting their profits. As are the alcohol companies, or for that matter just about any company. As long as they can afford dubious science that they can *demonstrate* the safety of their product with, how are you ever going to nail this stuff down?
Like everything else in this country (world?) it is not about right and wrong, but profit.
The best way to do that is to either make a loud public fight (start locally, with little money needed), or to take your name off ther roster of membership. By keeping your name on the roster, you count as a vote in the direction that your (fill in the blank) organization takes. That is why it is so important to big groups olike the AARP to increase membership. Membership gives them clout. Unfortunately, their membership also allows the AARP to abuse the powers it has. Most organizations do that after some time. Most organizations start with a good reason in mind and then go bad. Few do not.
I have done this in the name of education and truth in church. I eventually took my name off the church's roster (as did several others) when it became plain the central control of the church (some commuinity "pillars") were going to get there way no matter what it cost them (buying stuff for the church).
Most "Christians" simply let people tell them what to believe (try telling a congregation they are wrong about something they grew up with in religion). It is the same problem with the church saying the Earth was flat, or that the Earth was the center of the Universe, or the church murdering over 5 million people in 1500 years. Yes, it did happen, in the name of eliminating Paganism, Witchcraft and landowners who stood in there way (power, control and money).
It happened whether you like it or not. There were those who did it and those who allowed it. Almost noone stood up to it. That is like what is happening today.
BTW, in the Bible, 'Elohim' is the plural form of eloah. It is made plural by adding im (masculine plural) to the root eloah (literally the god) Check out Cherubim (sme im masculine plural form). WHat this means in anywhere you see elohim in the bible (and why in so many places it was you do not see it), it should read Gods, hence in Genesis, it should read:
"In the beginning, the Gods created the heavens and the earth." Mark it Troll if you want, but ignorance does not make you right.
In case the very very short list above is not enough, try searching on information on street children being taken from Engalnd and froppe din Australia, or Child Abuse in the church, or the Inquisition, or the murder of many scientists labeled as heretic (Satanists - literally against the Church, not for the devil), or the Crusades. If your ignorance of reality continues unabated in the light of such factual and in many cases bragged about and/or admitted crimes, marking someone Troll comes down to you merely denying the reality of what has happened (like those who say Nazis never had concentration camps of death.)
It is people such as yourself (if I interpret your marking of Troll correctly) that I fear the most, for like others in history who have chosen to rewrite history to ignore what has happened, you are helping to promote the continued abuses, crimes against humanity that these institutions have continuously allowed.
In my experience, the biggest problem with getting qualified people are the HR people. So many times, I have seen HR pass over good candidates because a buzzword was missing or they did not like the paper the resumes was sent in on (or more diabolically, not always being employed.)
Back when I used to actually do job hunting (prior to working for myself), I never had any luck with the HR path. I lacked certain credentials. However, if I had lunch with the IT managers, I was normally offered jobs without asking. It is amazing how many positions were made available through the networking (linux meetings, network managers meetings, etc) and how few jobs were ever even considered with HR pukes.
Now, I am not saying that HR people are a waste of money. They serve some important functions but they are rarely competent in hiring for technical fields. If you want a job, you need to go to the local meetings where the employed people are. Find out what companies are in your area, what their work environments are, how the hiring process works internally (HR only, internal reference required/preferred, local management hiring,...)
Resumes are a lazy persons way to eliminate potential candidates. Sometimes that is good, but more often than not, you miss the truly good candidates, or do not get a candidate. Most resumes get tossed or passed over. Most resumes are taken with a big grain of salt. Resumes do not convey the personality of the person well (an important part of any hiring) and rarely convey the technical abilities of the individual. Many people who write resumes are forced to embellish (this side of lying) so they can be competitive with others who embellish as well. I have looked over/talked to just over a dozen people in the past few months for a web developers position in Indiana (no medical benefits, great flexibility), and most of the people who have applied have pushed there experience to the limit of honesty.
Just in asking around of people whom I know, I ran into two people who are looking for part time work that might be ideal for the position. They had never heard of it (were not looking), and I had never heard of them (can't look under every rock), but people whom I know knew them, and the personal networking is what made it work.
...No matter how you break it down, Bill Gates is good at marketing and business tactics. MS is all about the blinding sheen of their marketing and the ball and chain of their contracts (and software).
This does not even have to be a reality. It gets people talking about what MS is *going to do next*, and does so without invoking Linux or any other competitor. You see, to win the public, they do not have to be better, just better at marketing themselves and silencing the competition. The public does not hear whispers in the wind.
You can't be serious, a politician *exhagerate*?!? What is the world coming to. I thought most of them just made empty promises while they lined pockets of themselves and their "friends" and backers.
*Disclaimer* I am not a doctor, but these observations are based on my personal experience and the experiences of others I know and/or have read about. All changes in your treatment program should be made with the consulation of a medical professional. You may look for one that works with you the way you want.
Type II diabetes is a different disease (cause) in most cases. Insulin resistance from the body is normally what Type II is caused by. Solutions for that are exercise, diet, exercise and oh yeah, exercise. I am a Type II and have been for at least a decade. Unfortunately, most medical practitioners are unaware or unconcerned with diabetes.
Though YMMV, this is what has worked for me:
Exercise: 30 minutes cardio in the AM, weight 3 nights per week at night. Stretch every day with a yoga or some other gentle flexibility program. These all increase blood flow, decrease insulin resistance (weights especially) and have the added side effects of making you healthier than your non-diabetic friends who do not do them. Insulin resistance is more pronounced in the muscle cells. These are the cells you want to be least resistant, and exercise seems to fix that. Fat cells seem to be the least insulin resistant, so if you do not exercise, you will more than likely start gaining weight from the difference in which cells win in the glucose consumption contest.
Diet. Remove the white refined anything (flour, sugar, etc). On its own, this caused a drop of several hundred points to within the 70 to 130 range for me. Stay away from things that are sugar concentrated (fruit juice, cake, ice cream,...) And run from anything that is low fat. Normally it is also high sugar, starch or simple carb. These three things fly into your bloodstream (starch, then sugars then simple carbs), blowing your sugar levels much higher than normal. This in turn causes greater stress on the insulin producing cells and causes more resistance to insulin. Also, learn that good fats are some of the most important nutrients for a diabetic. Take a good vitamin, get lots of vitamin C (anti-oxidants in general are very important). If your doctor does not seem to focus on diet and exercise, find a new doctor who does. This demonstrates understanding (and maybe concern) for your condition.
Track your eating and blood sugars daily. Take your blood sugars at night, morning, and two hours after each meal. Your blood sugars should be normally (70 to 100) at each of these readings. If not, your control is not tight enough. Many doctors will say that 130 is okay, but you can read the current research for yourself. Remember how elevated blood sugars do their damage. They coat the red blood cells with sugars, making it hard or impossible for them to get to the smaller capillaries in the fingers, toes and other extremeties. They also cause toxic build ups in the blood stream and mess with your mind. Every little increment above the normal is a little step in that direction.
Never trust your doctor. They are not out to harm you. They really do intend to help you, but most of them are not specialists and rely on literature from pharmaceutical companies that is often not in the patient's best interests. You need to be more on top of the disease than what is recommended. That means you need to study, study , study! You are your best health care manager. Doctors are good for many things, but not for knowing yourself. In the entire time since I was diagnosed Type II, I have seen a dozen plus doctors, and only three were paying attention to current research, and only one could even be considered a diabetes specialist (though all but one claimed to be).
If you are having difficulty controlling your sugar levels, consider a low level baseline insulin like Lantus (talk with you doctor) instead of trying to squeeze more insulin out of the cells with drugs that actually cause more harm. You have this disease for the rest of your life, you need to minimize the damag
people are lazy Lazy people are not an issue, it is the people who do not have time we should be concerned with... Lazy people will not be a market to worry about, as changing wil require effort that they are too lazy to do untli a critical mass is reached in the market and they no longer feel lazy about a change. Time conscious professionals who demand productivity at a bottom cost are the market to target. They are the ones to make changes and take a chance on something different, especially if it can add to their bottom line. There are a lot of very competent computer users that have no idea that free/OSS software that is often superior to it's proprietary cousins is available. Quite true! We need to market harder as a community (word of mouth, try this installs, letting people know what we did our work on, writing documentation, writing books, getting publicity in circulars,...) We really need a form of OSM (Open Source Marketing) that goes beyond what we currently have. It is sitting out there, but not quite in hand yet. It has been done in small numbers (shared marketing, word of mouth,...) My experience is I can save large marketing dollars if I do these things, as do the businesses I share marketing with. As a first step for this, all people I work with except three now have firefox and thunderbird installed. They no longer use the MS counterparts.
In my experiences, lazy people are not the market for linux. There is another group of people far more important and much more likely to pay for something they could get for free. Those who simply do not have time for new things. Especially new things outside of their career field. Can you imagine taking up medicine, auto mechanics, construction and teaching on top of your current work? I do not mean as a hobby, but well enough to understand it and do it right. Very few people can handle half of a load like that, let alone the whole thing. Yet, we all want good medical treatment, a vehicle that runs well, a solid structure to live in (preferably our own) and for those with children, the best education they can have. There is a reason most of us pay for the services. We do not have time ourselves to do them.
The biggest reason linux is not mainstream is ease of use, ease of install and ease of work. Yeah, I know linux is not as hard to install as windows. The key there is they do not have to install windows, linux they do. Linux is not as easy to use as windows yet. Some aspects of it are. Most aspects (from general joe user perspective) are not. As far as getting work done, linux is not 100% with MS yet either. I can do most of what I need in linux, and do. Some I still need MS for. True, that is because of the way MS has created their applications and the lock in they build in, but that does not change the reality.
I have several clients that have moved (with my help) form linux to windows. None of them have regretted it. Not all of my clients can move to linux, some are stuck in MS land for now. Those that have moved have used the money saved to actually hire more people, or buy new production equipment. But, still, not all of my clients are ready for that.
In all that you do in the world or MS and consumerism, follow the money trail. THere are fringe markets that do things for other reasons, but the bulk of the market does things with dollars and sense in mind.
And they are not compromised? Spyware is often as bad or worse than most viruses. Most spyware sits in the background degrading your systems performance recording things that you do, from where you visit to what you type. Spyware is invaluable to crime. If you want to steal identities, accounts, etc., spyware is an invaluable tool.
I wonder who they use for a service provider, and what kind of connection they have. Almost 100% of the Windows machines I have seen hooked up (insightBB, comcast, onenet, SBC, and other smaller companies) on everything from cable to dsl to dial-up have been infected within hours at the most(the slower and more sporadic the connection, the longer the infections took.) It may be that they are being protected by their service provider or some dumb luck combination. I seriously doubt they have some special version of windows that does not have the compromises that all other versions have.
Spyware is becoming one with viruses. The difference is that most script kiddie "virus writers" want you to know they own your box (or defaced it/erased it), whereas most criminal intent wants you to know nothing at all. Their fruits of labor will not be realized if you take actions based on their intrusions. After all, if you change your card/account number or passwords, how can they use it?
Proper spyware (with criminal intent) would install itself collect some information and then delete itself, leaving no trace or suspicion behind. By doing this, they get information and leave no clues to tip off the victim. Once the cards are used, the account tapped, or whatever else they intend to do (identity theft for instance), they no longer need your system anyway, and the damage done is to late to prevent. Try telling companies that you are no the one that ruined your credit rating.
You are correct, but please see reply to post above yours.
Actually, the sun is toxic. The atmosphere filters most of the toxicity of the sun out. That is why a person without proper protection/shielding would fry so fast in space from the solar wind (see NASA et al for more info)
That is true. The cancers have always been there. The hole in the ozone layer is contributing directly to higher rates of skin cancer developing in people at younger ages in the southern hemisphere (South America, Southern Africa, Australia,...).
The way radiation works, adding more increases the chance of something going wrong, there is not a plateau of any more exposure does not increase the risk until you hit death.
Sorry if my wording was not as good as it can be. I am in the middle of four major projects, working almost 80 hours per week.
Yeah Robin - it is why we have such huge medical bills. The food is bad for us. Their is a definate lack of health in this country and all the other "developed" countries. Get out your medical journals and read all the varied articles on the health care system crisis (one major aspect), syndrome X, obesity, diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart attack, etc al.
That was actually a pretty good troll, or a comment in complete ignorance of reality.
I'm sure that the key people in industry have key people in the administration who are making sure these things can get through.
Hence, I say it should be considered a major victory. (I agree with you).
You make it sound like it's happening behind their backs / without their knowledge.
Please tell me how I do this. I am missing something in how I stated what I said, as I meant that it was a major victory for their marketing (lobbying). Maybe I just said it the wrong way.
The best medical care and excercise is only so useful when your diet is full of poison and bad food. Read the labels on food products for what most of us eat, and find out what is in your food at most restaurants. There are other vectors as well, air pollution, water pollution,...
All in all, he did live long time for someone who was born the decade he was born.
...This should be considered a major victory for their marketing. Now, we will need another commerical entity that can gather information from customers and correlate it to discover what kind of service level telecomms provide. Sounds like another source of funding for GW and co.;-)
Why is it so much of this happens under the Bush watch? It happens under all presidents, but so much more so under this watch.
Allow me to clarify. They may have dropped the package of Palladiun, but they have not dropped the spirit of control and DRM it represents.
They are still trying to lock the market in general into MS. Always have, probably always will. Customers will not buy into it. But, they are not trying to get customers to buy into it. They are trying to get industry to buy into it. They do not need to win the sheep. They need to win the sheep herders.
This document is one more tool they have to try to get it legislated/required by companies.
Around the world? Does Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, England and others count as the world or US? Linking solar exposure to skin cancer - reasearch is around the world duplicated in labs in controlled environments, not just the EPA - use Google to see what you missed. This research is not statistically derived. There is actually direct cause and effect with understood biochemical principles here.
The research linking steaks to heart attack/cancer on the other hand has much more to do with assumptions about how the body works made over fifty years ago. The cancer question for red meat has a lot to do with the way it is cooked and how the meat in question was raised (burned or over cooked causes carbon based (charcoal like) carcinogens to be introduced into the meats). Of course, this cooking problem is there with anything else (including apples, celery, carrots, etc) that is overcooked or cooked to hot or burned. At high heats, sugars and amino acids as well as other biologically active molecules can have their chemistry altered in undesireable ways. And, the research on meat is speculative based upon the idea that all fat is the same. The theory that meat products cause heart attack and stroke has to do with the belief that the fat in meat and certain properties of red meat (when cooked) cause problems inside the human body when consumed. Amongst them, elevated cholesterol, elevated blood lipids and weight gain. It has been proven now many times over that these are bunk (except burned food is bad for you). Over eating is not limited to meat, but normally associated with sugar and refined white flour consumption more than anything now. A lack of excercise contributes to weight gain more than anything. Not just not excercising, but not getting enough excercise. Cholesterol mysteriously drops in people who consume these high cholesterol foods and stay away from refined flours and sugars.
It may be in fact that the problem with fat has more to do with fats not found in beef, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - margarine for instance. The same conclusions that people touted to say meat is bad for you are being debunked with many new studies. It is very likely that most of (if not all) the ideas behind beef, eggs, milk and other natural foods being bad for you was nothing more than the USDA and a few others jumping on research results that were not only incomplete, but not truly related to the claims made from them. It is true that being fat causes health problems. It is also true that eating modern white refined flours and sugars causes elevated cholesterol (heart attack, stroke), lipids (heart attack, stroke), insulin (insulin resistance, diabetes) and blood sugars (diabetes and hyper/hypo blood sugar) far above and beyond what any meat has been able to do as of yet.
I am sorry. I thought everyone by now knew that the direct link between skin cancer and solar radiation was beyond theory (kind of like smoking.) I will admit, my wording was a bit short though. Spell checkers do not catch copy and paste errors. 8-)
For some light reading in terms most people can actually understand, try this site. For a more technical summary, try here.
...is the biggest competitor to MS is mostly a venue for piracy of MS's product. This is useful for preparation for another attack through legislative and judiciary means to squash competition. This reads like the opening statement in a trial by media.
I support MS locking all potential thieves of their software out of their software. What I really see this document paving the way for is Palladium and more DRM like controls on hardware (CD-Rom, bootstrap, DVD, HD, CPU, etc) to force the world to use MS.
I think this is a case of follow the money. What value is there in a report that says people buy linux systems to install pirated windows? The only value is in making it easier to get more locked down hardware, and a bigger MS tax imposed. I believe, based on other things that have been published and reported in the past 2 years, that with Paladium coming out in a few years that MS is wanting to lock down the hardware to prevent competing OSs from being able to use it (or anything that might have been useable on it).
Remember, MS is loosing market share to linux. The market is not growing as fast as it used to. MS is a company who's value is based on growth of sales base, not divedends. MS needs more ways of making money (which essentially includes not making less money).
...But, once again, man causing a more extreme situation than what would have existed before is still not a good thing. Ozone depletion has a deadly potential... just think Microwave Oven Earth. Though I would be surprised if there were not a natural cycle like all things in nature (magnetic poles, ice ages, volcanic activity...), we do not need to play baby God with it.
The Earth is fairly resillient, much more so than we humans are. The Earth will survive just about anything we do to it, but we are at risk. The argument that there are no (or minimal) dangers ignores the fact that skin cancer exists. It ignores the fact that there is a hole in the ozone. The Montreal Protocol has been a major step forward to eliminating/minimizing those chemicals that we know deplete the Ozone layer.
The other thing that may contribute to the Ozone layer growing back would be global warming, as the ozone depletion effect requires very cold temperatures to do the spectacular damage it has done to the pole. (see Univeristy of Cambridge.)
Slashdot Mirror
User interfaces must have certain aspects similar or they are confusing. The very fact that you use stickshift puts you far ahead of most drivers who can barely (if they actually do) cope with automatic.
InnerWeb
People do enough damage to themselves and the world with the current harvest of dangerous consumer products. Gasoline included. Now, if you are trading a lesser evil for a greater evil, that is a step in the right direction sometimes. Sometimes it prevents a much lesser evil or a non-evil from being selected instead (like cure in medicine vs manage, which do you think is normally selected in the current business models?)
In the end, I do not see the need for a focus on distance per unit. I see the focus as being cost per unit (pollution, money) and cost per distance achieved (again, pollution money). If the cost is cheap enough to travel a certain distance on a fuel, then it is cheap enough to double or triple the size or the fuel storage system. Other issues may enter into play, such as consumer safety, but those would be addressed (as they always have been) by consumer protection actions (laws and standards).
InnerWeb
There are so many other issues out there to be dealt with, obesity being one. Before you get a chance to crack that one though, you are going to have to get corporates to play with morals. The big sugar mills are just as bad as the tobacco companies at protecting their profits. As are the alcohol companies, or for that matter just about any company. As long as they can afford dubious science that they can *demonstrate* the safety of their product with, how are you ever going to nail this stuff down?
Like everything else in this country (world?) it is not about right and wrong, but profit.
InnerWeb
I have done this in the name of education and truth in church. I eventually took my name off the church's roster (as did several others) when it became plain the central control of the church (some commuinity "pillars") were going to get there way no matter what it cost them (buying stuff for the church).
InnerWeb
This is no Troll. This is informative+++++.
Most "Christians" simply let people tell them what to believe (try telling a congregation they are wrong about something they grew up with in religion). It is the same problem with the church saying the Earth was flat, or that the Earth was the center of the Universe, or the church murdering over 5 million people in 1500 years. Yes, it did happen, in the name of eliminating Paganism, Witchcraft and landowners who stood in there way (power, control and money).
It happened whether you like it or not. There were those who did it and those who allowed it. Almost noone stood up to it. That is like what is happening today.
BTW, in the Bible, 'Elohim' is the plural form of eloah. It is made plural by adding im (masculine plural) to the root eloah (literally the god) Check out Cherubim (sme im masculine plural form). WHat this means in anywhere you see elohim in the bible (and why in so many places it was you do not see it), it should read Gods, hence in Genesis, it should read:
"In the beginning, the Gods created the heavens and the earth." Mark it Troll if you want, but ignorance does not make you right.
In case the very very short list above is not enough, try searching on information on street children being taken from Engalnd and froppe din Australia, or Child Abuse in the church, or the Inquisition, or the murder of many scientists labeled as heretic (Satanists - literally against the Church, not for the devil), or the Crusades. If your ignorance of reality continues unabated in the light of such factual and in many cases bragged about and/or admitted crimes, marking someone Troll comes down to you merely denying the reality of what has happened (like those who say Nazis never had concentration camps of death.)
It is people such as yourself (if I interpret your marking of Troll correctly) that I fear the most, for like others in history who have chosen to rewrite history to ignore what has happened, you are helping to promote the continued abuses, crimes against humanity that these institutions have continuously allowed.
InnerWeb
Back when I used to actually do job hunting (prior to working for myself), I never had any luck with the HR path. I lacked certain credentials. However, if I had lunch with the IT managers, I was normally offered jobs without asking. It is amazing how many positions were made available through the networking (linux meetings, network managers meetings, etc) and how few jobs were ever even considered with HR pukes.
Now, I am not saying that HR people are a waste of money. They serve some important functions but they are rarely competent in hiring for technical fields. If you want a job, you need to go to the local meetings where the employed people are. Find out what companies are in your area, what their work environments are, how the hiring process works internally (HR only, internal reference required/preferred, local management hiring,...)
Resumes are a lazy persons way to eliminate potential candidates. Sometimes that is good, but more often than not, you miss the truly good candidates, or do not get a candidate. Most resumes get tossed or passed over. Most resumes are taken with a big grain of salt. Resumes do not convey the personality of the person well (an important part of any hiring) and rarely convey the technical abilities of the individual. Many people who write resumes are forced to embellish (this side of lying) so they can be competitive with others who embellish as well. I have looked over/talked to just over a dozen people in the past few months for a web developers position in Indiana (no medical benefits, great flexibility), and most of the people who have applied have pushed there experience to the limit of honesty.
Just in asking around of people whom I know, I ran into two people who are looking for part time work that might be ideal for the position. They had never heard of it (were not looking), and I had never heard of them (can't look under every rock), but people whom I know knew them, and the personal networking is what made it work.
InnerWeb
This does not even have to be a reality. It gets people talking about what MS is *going to do next*, and does so without invoking Linux or any other competitor. You see, to win the public, they do not have to be better, just better at marketing themselves and silencing the competition. The public does not hear whispers in the wind.
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
*Disclaimer* I am not a doctor, but these observations are based on my personal experience and the experiences of others I know and/or have read about. All changes in your treatment program should be made with the consulation of a medical professional. You may look for one that works with you the way you want.
Type II diabetes is a different disease (cause) in most cases. Insulin resistance from the body is normally what Type II is caused by. Solutions for that are exercise, diet, exercise and oh yeah, exercise. I am a Type II and have been for at least a decade. Unfortunately, most medical practitioners are unaware or unconcerned with diabetes.
Though YMMV, this is what has worked for me:
Lazy people are not an issue, it is the people who do not have time we should be concerned with... Lazy people will not be a market to worry about, as changing wil require effort that they are too lazy to do untli a critical mass is reached in the market and they no longer feel lazy about a change. Time conscious professionals who demand productivity at a bottom cost are the market to target. They are the ones to make changes and take a chance on something different, especially if it can add to their bottom line.
There are a lot of very competent computer users that have no idea that free/OSS software that is often superior to it's proprietary cousins is available.
Quite true! We need to market harder as a community (word of mouth, try this installs, letting people know what we did our work on, writing documentation, writing books, getting publicity in circulars,
In my experiences, lazy people are not the market for linux. There is another group of people far more important and much more likely to pay for something they could get for free. Those who simply do not have time for new things. Especially new things outside of their career field. Can you imagine taking up medicine, auto mechanics, construction and teaching on top of your current work? I do not mean as a hobby, but well enough to understand it and do it right. Very few people can handle half of a load like that, let alone the whole thing. Yet, we all want good medical treatment, a vehicle that runs well, a solid structure to live in (preferably our own) and for those with children, the best education they can have. There is a reason most of us pay for the services. We do not have time ourselves to do them.
The biggest reason linux is not mainstream is ease of use, ease of install and ease of work. Yeah, I know linux is not as hard to install as windows. The key there is they do not have to install windows, linux they do. Linux is not as easy to use as windows yet. Some aspects of it are. Most aspects (from general joe user perspective) are not. As far as getting work done, linux is not 100% with MS yet either. I can do most of what I need in linux, and do. Some I still need MS for. True, that is because of the way MS has created their applications and the lock in they build in, but that does not change the reality.
I have several clients that have moved (with my help) form linux to windows. None of them have regretted it. Not all of my clients can move to linux, some are stuck in MS land for now. Those that have moved have used the money saved to actually hire more people, or buy new production equipment. But, still, not all of my clients are ready for that.
In all that you do in the world or MS and consumerism, follow the money trail. THere are fringe markets that do things for other reasons, but the bulk of the market does things with dollars and sense in mind.
InnerWeb
InnerWeb
May have downloaded spyware...
And they are not compromised? Spyware is often as bad or worse than most viruses. Most spyware sits in the background degrading your systems performance recording things that you do, from where you visit to what you type. Spyware is invaluable to crime. If you want to steal identities, accounts, etc., spyware is an invaluable tool.
I wonder who they use for a service provider, and what kind of connection they have. Almost 100% of the Windows machines I have seen hooked up (insightBB, comcast, onenet, SBC, and other smaller companies) on everything from cable to dsl to dial-up have been infected within hours at the most(the slower and more sporadic the connection, the longer the infections took.) It may be that they are being protected by their service provider or some dumb luck combination. I seriously doubt they have some special version of windows that does not have the compromises that all other versions have.
Spyware is becoming one with viruses. The difference is that most script kiddie "virus writers" want you to know they own your box (or defaced it/erased it), whereas most criminal intent wants you to know nothing at all. Their fruits of labor will not be realized if you take actions based on their intrusions. After all, if you change your card/account number or passwords, how can they use it?
Proper spyware (with criminal intent) would install itself collect some information and then delete itself, leaving no trace or suspicion behind. By doing this, they get information and leave no clues to tip off the victim. Once the cards are used, the account tapped, or whatever else they intend to do (identity theft for instance), they no longer need your system anyway, and the damage done is to late to prevent. Try telling companies that you are no the one that ruined your credit rating.
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Actually, the sun is toxic. The atmosphere filters most of the toxicity of the sun out. That is why a person without proper protection/shielding would fry so fast in space from the solar wind (see NASA et al for more info)
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The way radiation works, adding more increases the chance of something going wrong, there is not a plateau of any more exposure does not increase the risk until you hit death.
Sorry if my wording was not as good as it can be. I am in the middle of four major projects, working almost 80 hours per week.
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That was actually a pretty good troll, or a comment in complete ignorance of reality.
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Hence, I say it should be considered a major victory. (I agree with you).
You make it sound like it's happening behind their backs / without their knowledge.
Please tell me how I do this. I am missing something in how I stated what I said, as I meant that it was a major victory for their marketing (lobbying). Maybe I just said it the wrong way.
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All in all, he did live long time for someone who was born the decade he was born.
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Why is it so much of this happens under the Bush watch? It happens under all presidents, but so much more so under this watch.
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They are still trying to lock the market in general into MS. Always have, probably always will. Customers will not buy into it. But, they are not trying to get customers to buy into it. They are trying to get industry to buy into it. They do not need to win the sheep. They need to win the sheep herders.
This document is one more tool they have to try to get it legislated/required by companies.
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The research linking steaks to heart attack/cancer on the other hand has much more to do with assumptions about how the body works made over fifty years ago. The cancer question for red meat has a lot to do with the way it is cooked and how the meat in question was raised (burned or over cooked causes carbon based (charcoal like) carcinogens to be introduced into the meats). Of course, this cooking problem is there with anything else (including apples, celery, carrots, etc) that is overcooked or cooked to hot or burned. At high heats, sugars and amino acids as well as other biologically active molecules can have their chemistry altered in undesireable ways. And, the research on meat is speculative based upon the idea that all fat is the same. The theory that meat products cause heart attack and stroke has to do with the belief that the fat in meat and certain properties of red meat (when cooked) cause problems inside the human body when consumed. Amongst them, elevated cholesterol, elevated blood lipids and weight gain. It has been proven now many times over that these are bunk (except burned food is bad for you). Over eating is not limited to meat, but normally associated with sugar and refined white flour consumption more than anything now. A lack of excercise contributes to weight gain more than anything. Not just not excercising, but not getting enough excercise. Cholesterol mysteriously drops in people who consume these high cholesterol foods and stay away from refined flours and sugars.
It may be in fact that the problem with fat has more to do with fats not found in beef, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - margarine for instance. The same conclusions that people touted to say meat is bad for you are being debunked with many new studies. It is very likely that most of (if not all) the ideas behind beef, eggs, milk and other natural foods being bad for you was nothing more than the USDA and a few others jumping on research results that were not only incomplete, but not truly related to the claims made from them. It is true that being fat causes health problems. It is also true that eating modern white refined flours and sugars causes elevated cholesterol (heart attack, stroke), lipids (heart attack, stroke), insulin (insulin resistance, diabetes) and blood sugars (diabetes and hyper/hypo blood sugar) far above and beyond what any meat has been able to do as of yet.
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For some light reading in terms most people can actually understand, try this site. For a more technical summary, try here.
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I think this is a case of follow the money. What value is there in a report that says people buy linux systems to install pirated windows? The only value is in making it easier to get more locked down hardware, and a bigger MS tax imposed. I believe, based on other things that have been published and reported in the past 2 years, that with Paladium coming out in a few years that MS is wanting to lock down the hardware to prevent competing OSs from being able to use it (or anything that might have been useable on it).
Remember, MS is loosing market share to linux. The market is not growing as fast as it used to. MS is a company who's value is based on growth of sales base, not divedends. MS needs more ways of making money (which essentially includes not making less money).
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The Earth is fairly resillient, much more so than we humans are. The Earth will survive just about anything we do to it, but we are at risk. The argument that there are no (or minimal) dangers ignores the fact that skin cancer exists. It ignores the fact that there is a hole in the ozone. The Montreal Protocol has been a major step forward to eliminating/minimizing those chemicals that we know deplete the Ozone layer.
The other thing that may contribute to the Ozone layer growing back would be global warming, as the ozone depletion effect requires very cold temperatures to do the spectacular damage it has done to the pole. (see Univeristy of Cambridge.)
Some interesting facts:
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