granted the guy is making an unstubstaniated claim, but his point is a good one, namely that Islamic terrorists have no reasonable justification for massacring women and children. I am sick of those of you that are obssessed with trying to find a way to blame the West for the actions of terrorists; is it so hard to admit that there is evil in the world that is not embodied in the executive branch of the United States government? All too many individuals seem determined to pass the blame off onto the US, after all 'we must have offended them'. Europe tried to appease Hitler, and it did nothing to prevent a second world war. Why do we continue to try and find ways to pacify terrorists, who in the meantime can just bide their time, waiting until nuclear weapons are finally added to their arsenal?
The sad thing is paypal is worse for the seller than the buyer... I remember selling a computer on ebay a while back... Paypal garnered 70 in fees for the transaction... That coupled with ebay's 4% final value fee (or whatever it is), is making ebay less and less of a viable medium to sell things...
that's what I've never understood about PC modders... They spend hundreds on lights, see thru cases, etc... My case came from a pentium mmx comp, as long as the PS works, and the case can protect the delicate internal components when I kick it, I'm quite satisfied. Geez, you could double your porn capacity for the extra cost of having a see thru window (and be honest, which is really more attractive? A hot girl, or the sexy platters in a HD?).
it's sad that after all the hype, MS seemingly ignored such a basic component as verifying that internal components remain within thermal limits. I should be able to leave my xbox 360 on overnight without having to worry about it overheating, and I shouldn't have to resort to water-cooling the 360 to ensure it operates properly. Props to those who got this to work, but a user who spends 300+ bucks on a console shouldn't have to make the choice of voiding their warranty (and spending extra to put a cooling sys together) in order to keeep their 360 operating within thermal specs, or risk overheating and failure in the future. MS never seems to quite get it, they made a _huge_ deal pre-release about the chassis being smaller and more attractive (especially those stupid swappable front covers), yet all the hardcore gamers I know would prefer a stable system with great performance to an attractive POS that overheats when you leave it running overnight.
When people hear of something like this, oftentimes they can feel threatened that someone is so much more intelligent then they are. Just because a person wishes to ask the relevance of solving a specific equation doesn't make them an idiot compared to the person who solved the problem. Take my numerical analysis class for example: one of my professors took an entire 50 min lecture discussing the error involved with Lagrange interpolation, his final result included an equation that required taking the nth derivative of what was being approximated. Valuable result? Not if you're interpolating data whose true behavior is unknown. If you knew the function you were approximating to begin with, why waste the enormous computational time to compute a lagrange interpolating polynomial? Point is, there are some mathematical results that while interesting, are not valuable in a real-world sense. I'm not saying this particular result is one of those cases, but questioning the practical significance of a particular find is a valid question. One of my now-retired professors put it this way "Engineers solve problems in order to resolve a physical phenomena, mathematicians and physicists solve problems because they are there". Do engineers have a debt to the mathematicians and physicists for what they have been able to accomplish? Sure, but do the mathematicians and physicists have engineers to thank as well? Well, everytime they drive their car, operate their AC, or turn on a computer, they should. Bottom line is there are two types of people: some can solve mathematical problems for the sake of solving them;some spend their lives applying them, I personally couldn't do the former. These mathematicians are like brick makers. The engineer comes along and looks at the bricks and says, "what can i do with these?". The engineer can do little without the mathematician, but the mathematician's work is not appreciated until someone does the equally difficult job of figuring out how to apply it to something useful.
400 mil is an awful lot of money to fix a browser... For a 1/10 of that price, you could fix the current IE... Plus, MS has to save face here... Buying opera is as much as saying "IE is worthless, buggy, crap... we had to buy opera because it was just too bad to be fixed"... Not exactly positive PR...
Seriously, it's not that good... I tried it a while back and went back to firefox... It doesn't even make sense to buy opera for $400 mil, the browser market isn't that fertile any longer, and I for one wouldn't pay for opera when an open source alternative, that works better mind you, is available. MS couldn't hardly ask people to purchase the browser, after giving away IE for so long... It'd be like throwning $400 mil down a black hole, since they could derive no direct monetary benefit. Sure it might help PR, but I don't see people leaving windows over IE in droves; they've still got the monopoly, and as long as they continue to patch IE holes as they develop most clueless EU's will continue to use MS products... The only thing they could hope to do is bring back people who left for linux or more secure alternatives, but how many of us are going to do that? Not that many...
a human is observing something, right? come on, you're still looking at images produced from a telescope, you're not just dreaming up a nebula exist 20 mil light years away...
science is, by definition, that which we can observe, and guess what, we only have our 5 senses to use. We can observe electrons, by noting macroscopic movements within bodies, we can devise theories for nuclear reactions, and can observe these by designing electronic devices that measure changes in electric field, etc... We don't just assume "electrons exist" because we came up with a cool idea, and thought it might stick. Scientists in the early 20th century devised experiments and (by accident) discovered the particle that bends to certain magnetic fields, which ultimately became known as the electron. You can argue radio carbondating says the world is 4 billion years old, yet an advocate of ID might argue that it a mature world was created, this is a valid theory, you can't disprove that these so-called evidences of evolution were not introduced by some higher being, you weren't there to see the evolution of the world. You may think the idea of a higher being is perposterous, but unless you are everywhere at once, you cannot logically make the argument that such a being doesn't exist, any more than you can argue that aliens don't exist in some other galaxy... Regardless on whether or not you think ID is a load of BS, my point is this: the question of the origins of the universe is not a scientific, but rather, philisophical question. Science should deal with _facts_ or well-established theories (at least in HS or below), evolution is a hypothesis, and unlike most _theories_ it has not been proven to be true, except for micro-evolution within species, something which even advocates of ID do not dispute... Evolution, the supposed "theory", refers to macro-evolution, and we have no proof of this "missing link" scientists have been searching for, for over 40 years... You know what my textbook said about it? Evolution either happened too quickly for there to be a fossil record, or so slowly that the changes are not evident from the fossils remaining... That's not evidence to me, and until you can show me proof of macro evolution, i.e. evolution accross species, I will keep an open mind about things... P.S. So the big bang occured, then where did the energy come from? It's easy to devise a theory that manufactures life from something, but how does something, say an electron, appear, out of nothing?
fine. ID isn't science... Neither is Darwinism, or any other _theory_ concerning the origin of the universe. Science is the study of what he can experience with our five senses, what we can _actively_ study. Origin of the universe is philosophy, not science. You weren't there to observe evolution, you weren't there to observe ID... Keep science classes to science... There's a wealth of topics you can discuss other than the question of origins. Quit inserting philosophy into science and this entire debate can be avoided...
you're quite correct... a Co-60 source isn't going to eat through the cicuitry... That's just stupid... It can produce enough heat to melt circuits (assuming it's a very high-fluence source), but the article must've been written by someone ignorant of health physics, since it's quite obvious Co-60 isn't an acid, eating through a container... Finally, these sort of tests were likely done for gamma spectroscopy, where you can use gammas to examine imperfections in materials(it is probably the most common radioactive isotope used in nuclear labs today).
I believe this is the crux of our disagreement... How do you define "religion"? One of the definitions of religion by Webster is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."... I would choose a bit broader definition and define religion as one's philosophy of life, one's reason for existence, in essence, "one's practices and principles based on the metaphysical realm"... An atheist in that sense is a believer in his/her specific "religion"... The essence of a religion is a "group of practices/system of beliefs" that guide an individual's daily life. An atheist then has developed his/her own "system of beliefs/practices" based on his/her view of the metaphysical... The atheist bases his/her own actions on their basic supposition that god does not exist, thus man can determine right or wrong, morality is subjective and can and should be established by society (Hume has a remarkable treatise on this). Then atheism have just another belief system, or religion, that is based on subjective morality. I will not argue concerning the absurdities of such a subjective system, Aristotle has done a much better job than I could ever do...
This entire article is a load of BS... I'd give an arm and a leg to have _one_ girl in my CS classes, and most guys in CS would do the same! Hell, I would give just about anything to meet _one_ female every semester in a class... And don't give me the "you should try going to parties" routine, I go to LAN parties every other week, why just last month I kicked this girl's ass so badly at quake, that after cussing at her for being an f*ing n00b, she began to cry... Afterwards I offered to give her lessons on strafing in the privacy of my home, and she still wouldn't go for it... Damn female... and they say I have problems with social interaction...
it is individuals such as yourself that give agnostics/atheists a bad name... the salvation army, just like the red cross, does a lot of good, and helps many people. I don't see any athiest organizations on the scale of the salvation army that exist, if so, please correct me. The salvation army doesn't walk up to you after a disaster and devise some "proselytise for aid" scheme, where you either convert or they walk away... They go out there, help people, and tell people why they are doing that(i.e. spreading the gospel or something of that nature), if the people they help are positively impressed by this, and drawn to go to church after this, is this dishonest? in what way does this put them in the wrong?
Most of the computational codes used in national labs were written in the 70s (which btw are used throughout private industry), because no one wanted to incur the expense of 'updating' them in C... There's a _huge_ demand in the scientifc programming sector for people who know fortran (adding functionality to existing legacy code, correcting coding errors, etc). As for dead-end knowledge, Fortran does many things better than C, at least with regards to scientific programming. Just because C is best for gui development doesn't make it the best choice for everything... I miss the days when I knew that I went outside of array bounds in Fortran, and got the "array bounds" error in the compiler. Unlike C, that allows you to accidentally go outside bounds, and instead of warning you, it simply overwrites the next variable in memory... Plus things like intrinsic support for matrix multiplication, intrinsic max/min functions, and a built-in ** operator for exponents, make it much easier to write computational simulations in Fortran, and with the advent of Fortran 95, and Fortran 2000 (or whatever the next standard is called), there is enough object oriented support to keep fortran a viable option over C, at least, as I said, with regards to scientific programming...
and what's sad, is people who pirates dvds will spend as much time in prison as a first time rapist... Now I'm not saying it's right to counterfeit dvds/ music, but it's not exactly equivalent to a violent crime either... The government's pretty messed up when the former gets nearly a penalty on the same scale as the latter... And moreover, what right does the RIAA or MPAA have the right to keep someone from creating software to share files accross the net with? It's about equivalent to suing manufacturers of cassette tapes or VHSes back in the 80s/early 90s, since they were the medium used for pirating copyrighted material... If they ultimately shut down Kazaa, they won't stop there... Bittorrent, emule, gnutella, etc, will be next... It's a dangerous precedent to set, even if it is in Australia, since left wing judges in the USA don't hesitate to pull in "international decisions" as their basis for judgement (take Justice Suitor as an example)...
it will still be a while before you see many hybrids out of warrenty
true, most head straight out of warranty and into the junk yard... give me a gas-guzzling, supercharged, rt/10 viper, and I will show you a satisfied customer... hmmm, just the thought of blowing those rice-rockets off the road in a 'vette or viper is SO tantalizing!
Just what I need, some dumb blonde trying to retain important data...what's the life expectancy of these drives anyways? 30 min? besides, how twisted can you get? A barbie (with a male adapter) plugging into devices... wtf, did she get the operation?!?
The litigant was responding to the profile of a girl who shared a remarkable resemblance to his idol, Kate Moss. He sent her over two dozen messages in a 3 week span, expressing his undying love and admiration, to which she finally replied and agreed to meet him. To the litigant's dismay, upon meeting the subject-in-question, he found that not only was she _not_ Kate Moss, nor even her twin. The subject couldn't even fit into the front seat of his Yugo, and needed two safety belts to secure herself in the rear. Scarred emotionally, and physically (she tried to sit in his lap), the litigant is suing match.com for mental anguish and his $25 monthly fee...
This is precisely the problem with rpm-based distros. Users usually resign themselves to getting the latest sw packages when Mandrake decides to release a new update, with (gasp) kde 3.4 and gcc 4.0, both of which have been out for six months or so... If I'm running a debian or source-based distro like gentoo, i can use apt-get 'package name' or emerge 'package name', dependencies will be resolved, and the package will be installed (bar rare package conflicts that are generally easy to resolve)... But aside from outdated software, the user of mandriva (or redhat, fedora, suse) has to figure out a) how to upgrade (or perhaps more accurately, how best to upgrade) and b) resolve the numerous package conflicts that occur when 'upgrading' their distro. Even a linuux newbie would be better off with a distro like Ubuntu, which is quite user friendly, and doesn't require the additional headache for the user of resolving package dependencies. If a newvbie did want to upgrade to the newest ver of openoffice, how likely do you think he would be to succeed if he's got to find a dozen other packages that must be installed first (and each of them requiring another 3 or 4 packages, themeselves)? When I encoutered this difficulty 5 years ago as a linux newbie, I just threw out my redhat-based distro in frustration, decided anyone who would go through the hell of individually resolving package dependencies every time one wanted to install software was nuts, and simply went back to windows.
my point is this: risk-free install is such an absurd idea that no one should expect it to be accomplished in any distro. I'd like my linux distro to cook breakfast for me in the morning, but it's not responsible for me to author an article and say "Linux would gain widespread use if only it could cook meals for the user", sure it's a nice idea, but is it feasible? There are a number of things linux could do better (simple stuff like streaming audio/video embedded in websites), mention those things in the article, don't merely formulate utopian improvements, which are _not_ feasible as long as MS chooses to utilize in-house fs's. Linux already does MANY things better than Windows, particularly in the remote management field, and I am not, nor never have, suggested that Linux should simply try to be a windows clone, only that our expectations of the OS should be kept in the realm of reality.
"Linux to be 100% RISK FREE. If you don't like it you need to be able to easily uninstall and your computer will be exactly the same as before you started." So linux should use a fat32 fs so it can be "uninstalled"? Try installing XP and "restoring" win98 or win2k. If you want to tryout linux use knoppix, it's stupid to expect _any_ OS to adopt a deprecated fs from another OS in order for a user to be able to "restore" his old OS. Don't put absurd requirements for Linux that the latest MS Windows can't accomplish..
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granted the guy is making an unstubstaniated claim, but his point is a good one, namely that Islamic terrorists have no reasonable justification for massacring women and children. I am sick of those of you that are obssessed with trying to find a way to blame the West for the actions of terrorists; is it so hard to admit that there is evil in the world that is not embodied in the executive branch of the United States government? All too many individuals seem determined to pass the blame off onto the US, after all 'we must have offended them'. Europe tried to appease Hitler, and it did nothing to prevent a second world war. Why do we continue to try and find ways to pacify terrorists, who in the meantime can just bide their time, waiting until nuclear weapons are finally added to their arsenal?
The sad thing is paypal is worse for the seller than the buyer... I remember selling a computer on ebay a while back... Paypal garnered 70 in fees for the transaction... That coupled with ebay's 4% final value fee (or whatever it is), is making ebay less and less of a viable medium to sell things...
I'll take the MacBook combo with fries and a diet coke, value sized, please.
that's what I've never understood about PC modders... They spend hundreds on lights, see thru cases, etc... My case came from a pentium mmx comp, as long as the PS works, and the case can protect the delicate internal components when I kick it, I'm quite satisfied. Geez, you could double your porn capacity for the extra cost of having a see thru window (and be honest, which is really more attractive? A hot girl, or the sexy platters in a HD?).
it's sad that after all the hype, MS seemingly ignored such a basic component as verifying that internal components remain within thermal limits. I should be able to leave my xbox 360 on overnight without having to worry about it overheating, and I shouldn't have to resort to water-cooling the 360 to ensure it operates properly. Props to those who got this to work, but a user who spends 300+ bucks on a console shouldn't have to make the choice of voiding their warranty (and spending extra to put a cooling sys together) in order to keeep their 360 operating within thermal specs, or risk overheating and failure in the future. MS never seems to quite get it, they made a _huge_ deal pre-release about the chassis being smaller and more attractive (especially those stupid swappable front covers), yet all the hardcore gamers I know would prefer a stable system with great performance to an attractive POS that overheats when you leave it running overnight.
When people hear of something like this, oftentimes they can feel threatened that someone is so much more intelligent then they are.
Just because a person wishes to ask the relevance of solving a specific equation doesn't make them an idiot compared to the person who solved the problem. Take my numerical analysis class for example: one of my professors took an entire 50 min lecture discussing the error involved with Lagrange interpolation, his final result included an equation that required taking the nth derivative of what was being approximated. Valuable result? Not if you're interpolating data whose true behavior is unknown. If you knew the function you were approximating to begin with, why waste the enormous computational time to compute a lagrange interpolating polynomial? Point is, there are some mathematical results that while interesting, are not valuable in a real-world sense. I'm not saying this particular result is one of those cases, but questioning the practical significance of a particular find is a valid question. One of my now-retired professors put it this way "Engineers solve problems in order to resolve a physical phenomena, mathematicians and physicists solve problems because they are there". Do engineers have a debt to the mathematicians and physicists for what they have been able to accomplish? Sure, but do the mathematicians and physicists have engineers to thank as well? Well, everytime they drive their car, operate their AC, or turn on a computer, they should. Bottom line is there are two types of people: some can solve mathematical problems for the sake of solving them;some spend their lives applying them, I personally couldn't do the former. These mathematicians are like brick makers. The engineer comes along and looks at the bricks and says, "what can i do with these?". The engineer can do little without the mathematician, but the mathematician's work is not appreciated until someone does the equally difficult job of figuring out how to apply it to something useful.
400 mil is an awful lot of money to fix a browser... For a 1/10 of that price, you could fix the current IE... Plus, MS has to save face here... Buying opera is as much as saying "IE is worthless, buggy, crap... we had to buy opera because it was just too bad to be fixed"... Not exactly positive PR...
Seriously, it's not that good... I tried it a while back and went back to firefox... It doesn't even make sense to buy opera for $400 mil, the browser market isn't that fertile any longer, and I for one wouldn't pay for opera when an open source alternative, that works better mind you, is available. MS couldn't hardly ask people to purchase the browser, after giving away IE for so long... It'd be like throwning $400 mil down a black hole, since they could derive no direct monetary benefit. Sure it might help PR, but I don't see people leaving windows over IE in droves; they've still got the monopoly, and as long as they continue to patch IE holes as they develop most clueless EU's will continue to use MS products... The only thing they could hope to do is bring back people who left for linux or more secure alternatives, but how many of us are going to do that? Not that many...
a human is observing something, right? come on, you're still looking at images produced from a telescope, you're not just dreaming up a nebula exist 20 mil light years away...
science is, by definition, that which we can observe, and guess what, we only have our 5 senses to use. We can observe electrons, by noting macroscopic movements within bodies, we can devise theories for nuclear reactions, and can observe these by designing electronic devices that measure changes in electric field, etc... We don't just assume "electrons exist" because we came up with a cool idea, and thought it might stick. Scientists in the early 20th century devised experiments and (by accident) discovered the particle that bends to certain magnetic fields, which ultimately became known as the electron. You can argue radio carbondating says the world is 4 billion years old, yet an advocate of ID might argue that it a mature world was created, this is a valid theory, you can't disprove that these so-called evidences of evolution were not introduced by some higher being, you weren't there to see the evolution of the world. You may think the idea of a higher being is perposterous, but unless you are everywhere at once, you cannot logically make the argument that such a being doesn't exist, any more than you can argue that aliens don't exist in some other galaxy... Regardless on whether or not you think ID is a load of BS, my point is this: the question of the origins of the universe is not a scientific, but rather, philisophical question. Science should deal with _facts_ or well-established theories (at least in HS or below), evolution is a hypothesis, and unlike most _theories_ it has not been proven to be true, except for micro-evolution within species, something which even advocates of ID do not dispute... Evolution, the supposed "theory", refers to macro-evolution, and we have no proof of this "missing link" scientists have been searching for, for over 40 years... You know what my textbook said about it? Evolution either happened too quickly for there to be a fossil record, or so slowly that the changes are not evident from the fossils remaining... That's not evidence to me, and until you can show me proof of macro evolution, i.e. evolution accross species, I will keep an open mind about things... P.S. So the big bang occured, then where did the energy come from? It's easy to devise a theory that manufactures life from something, but how does something, say an electron, appear, out of nothing?
fine. ID isn't science... Neither is Darwinism, or any other _theory_ concerning the origin of the universe. Science is the study of what he can experience with our five senses, what we can _actively_ study. Origin of the universe is philosophy, not science. You weren't there to observe evolution, you weren't there to observe ID... Keep science classes to science... There's a wealth of topics you can discuss other than the question of origins. Quit inserting philosophy into science and this entire debate can be avoided...
you're quite correct... a Co-60 source isn't going to eat through the cicuitry... That's just stupid... It can produce enough heat to melt circuits (assuming it's a very high-fluence source), but the article must've been written by someone ignorant of health physics, since it's quite obvious Co-60 isn't an acid, eating through a container... Finally, these sort of tests were likely done for gamma spectroscopy, where you can use gammas to examine imperfections in materials(it is probably the most common radioactive isotope used in nuclear labs today).
I believe this is the crux of our disagreement... How do you define "religion"? One of the definitions of religion by Webster is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."... I would choose a bit broader definition and define religion as one's philosophy of life, one's reason for existence, in essence, "one's practices and principles based on the metaphysical realm"... An atheist in that sense is a believer in his/her specific "religion"... The essence of a religion is a "group of practices/system of beliefs" that guide an individual's daily life. An atheist then has developed his/her own "system of beliefs/practices" based on his/her view of the metaphysical... The atheist bases his/her own actions on their basic supposition that god does not exist, thus man can determine right or wrong, morality is subjective and can and should be established by society (Hume has a remarkable treatise on this). Then atheism have just another belief system, or religion, that is based on subjective morality. I will not argue concerning the absurdities of such a subjective system, Aristotle has done a much better job than I could ever do...
This entire article is a load of BS... I'd give an arm and a leg to have _one_ girl in my CS classes, and most guys in CS would do the same! Hell, I would give just about anything to meet _one_ female every semester in a class... And don't give me the "you should try going to parties" routine, I go to LAN parties every other week, why just last month I kicked this girl's ass so badly at quake, that after cussing at her for being an f*ing n00b, she began to cry... Afterwards I offered to give her lessons on strafing in the privacy of my home, and she still wouldn't go for it... Damn female... and they say I have problems with social interaction...
it is individuals such as yourself that give agnostics/atheists a bad name... the salvation army, just like the red cross, does a lot of good, and helps many people. I don't see any athiest organizations on the scale of the salvation army that exist, if so, please correct me. The salvation army doesn't walk up to you after a disaster and devise some "proselytise for aid" scheme, where you either convert or they walk away... They go out there, help people, and tell people why they are doing that(i.e. spreading the gospel or something of that nature), if the people they help are positively impressed by this, and drawn to go to church after this, is this dishonest? in what way does this put them in the wrong?
national labs, nuclear power industry, but usually they want at least a masters...
Most of the computational codes used in national labs were written in the 70s (which btw are used throughout private industry), because no one wanted to incur the expense of 'updating' them in C... There's a _huge_ demand in the scientifc programming sector for people who know fortran (adding functionality to existing legacy code, correcting coding errors, etc). As for dead-end knowledge, Fortran does many things better than C, at least with regards to scientific programming. Just because C is best for gui development doesn't make it the best choice for everything... I miss the days when I knew that I went outside of array bounds in Fortran, and got the "array bounds" error in the compiler. Unlike C, that allows you to accidentally go outside bounds, and instead of warning you, it simply overwrites the next variable in memory... Plus things like intrinsic support for matrix multiplication, intrinsic max/min functions, and a built-in ** operator for exponents, make it much easier to write computational simulations in Fortran, and with the advent of Fortran 95, and Fortran 2000 (or whatever the next standard is called), there is enough object oriented support to keep fortran a viable option over C, at least, as I said, with regards to scientific programming...
and what's sad, is people who pirates dvds will spend as much time in prison as a first time rapist... Now I'm not saying it's right to counterfeit dvds/ music, but it's not exactly equivalent to a violent crime either... The government's pretty messed up when the former gets nearly a penalty on the same scale as the latter... And moreover, what right does the RIAA or MPAA have the right to keep someone from creating software to share files accross the net with? It's about equivalent to suing manufacturers of cassette tapes or VHSes back in the 80s/early 90s, since they were the medium used for pirating copyrighted material... If they ultimately shut down Kazaa, they won't stop there... Bittorrent, emule, gnutella, etc, will be next... It's a dangerous precedent to set, even if it is in Australia, since left wing judges in the USA don't hesitate to pull in "international decisions" as their basis for judgement (take Justice Suitor as an example)...
it will still be a while before you see many hybrids out of warrenty
true, most head straight out of warranty and into the junk yard... give me a gas-guzzling, supercharged, rt/10 viper, and I will show you a satisfied customer... hmmm, just the thought of blowing those rice-rockets off the road in a 'vette or viper is SO tantalizing!Just what I need, some dumb blonde trying to retain important data...what's the life expectancy of these drives anyways? 30 min? besides, how twisted can you get? A barbie (with a male adapter) plugging into devices... wtf, did she get the operation?!?
move to openVMS, no problems here with viruses, spyware, or any immediate concerns about widespread adoption.... of course the rest isn't so good...
The litigant was responding to the profile of a girl who shared a remarkable resemblance to his idol, Kate Moss. He sent her over two dozen messages in a 3 week span, expressing his undying love and admiration, to which she finally replied and agreed to meet him. To the litigant's dismay, upon meeting the subject-in-question, he found that not only was she _not_ Kate Moss, nor even her twin. The subject couldn't even fit into the front seat of his Yugo, and needed two safety belts to secure herself in the rear. Scarred emotionally, and physically (she tried to sit in his lap), the litigant is suing match.com for mental anguish and his $25 monthly fee...
This is precisely the problem with rpm-based distros. Users usually resign themselves to getting the latest sw packages when Mandrake decides to release a new update, with (gasp) kde 3.4 and gcc 4.0, both of which have been out for six months or so... If I'm running a debian or source-based distro like gentoo, i can use apt-get 'package name' or emerge 'package name', dependencies will be resolved, and the package will be installed (bar rare package conflicts that are generally easy to resolve)... But aside from outdated software, the user of mandriva (or redhat, fedora, suse) has to figure out a) how to upgrade (or perhaps more accurately, how best to upgrade) and b) resolve the numerous package conflicts that occur when 'upgrading' their distro. Even a linuux newbie would be better off with a distro like Ubuntu, which is quite user friendly, and doesn't require the additional headache for the user of resolving package dependencies. If a newvbie did want to upgrade to the newest ver of openoffice, how likely do you think he would be to succeed if he's got to find a dozen other packages that must be installed first (and each of them requiring another 3 or 4 packages, themeselves)? When I encoutered this difficulty 5 years ago as a linux newbie, I just threw out my redhat-based distro in frustration, decided anyone who would go through the hell of individually resolving package dependencies every time one wanted to install software was nuts, and simply went back to windows.
my point is this: risk-free install is such an absurd idea that no one should expect it to be accomplished in any distro. I'd like my linux distro to cook breakfast for me in the morning, but it's not responsible for me to author an article and say "Linux would gain widespread use if only it could cook meals for the user", sure it's a nice idea, but is it feasible? There are a number of things linux could do better (simple stuff like streaming audio/video embedded in websites), mention those things in the article, don't merely formulate utopian improvements, which are _not_ feasible as long as MS chooses to utilize in-house fs's. Linux already does MANY things better than Windows, particularly in the remote management field, and I am not, nor never have, suggested that Linux should simply try to be a windows clone, only that our expectations of the OS should be kept in the realm of reality.
"Linux to be 100% RISK FREE. If you don't like it you need to be able to easily uninstall and your computer will be exactly the same as before you started." So linux should use a fat32 fs so it can be "uninstalled"? Try installing XP and "restoring" win98 or win2k. If you want to tryout linux use knoppix, it's stupid to expect _any_ OS to adopt a deprecated fs from another OS in order for a user to be able to "restore" his old OS. Don't put absurd requirements for Linux that the latest MS Windows can't accomplish..