You'd have to demonstrate a use. There's a lot of companies who patented huge swathes of the human genome who are having those patents methodically overturned when it was discovered that 1)they didn't know what they were patenting and 2) they had no use for it then, anyway.
After reading the Grumpy Gamers sensible and well reasoned complaints, Nintendo have taken his comments on board, returning the Zelda franchise to a stylish and retro look. You can see a screen capture from their recently rereleased trailer here.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions in grandparent.
Diabetic fatties will have to wait on further research into the cellular nature of their disease. When I was at Uni (~3 years ago) they pinpointed the disease to interference in the specific process somewhere between Insulin Receptor recognising Insulin (which went fine) and actual cellular changes as a result of activation and dimerization of IR. It's almost certainly moved on since then, but there's been no "headline" discovery of exactly why some people start ignoring Insulin, or I'd probably have noticed it.
the research available is generally through scientific journals which charge a hefty fee for the ability to look through them. Even a service such as Medline which allows you to search through abstracts - not complete articles - isn't free to any member of the public.
The Institution I work at cannot afford much more than ~200 journal subscriptions, and it's a major UK research institute. Nature and its offshoots(like Nature Biochemistry, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Molecular Biology etc. etc. is horrendously expensive). The lack of available science to the layperson is a total scandal.
You could use local library facilities depending where you are based, for instance the British Library will be able to get almost anything on request. The Catch-22 is, you need some service like Medline to find papers you might be interested in, but without access, although you can request the papers themselves, you don't know what to look for. If you're at Uni, you should be able to get ATHENS access on behalf of your institution if you ask nicely. An ATHENS authorisation will allow you to use MEDLINE normally, which is just a search engine for scientific papers. Try searching for reviews in the last 5 years on a couple of keywords you might be interested in, if you get this far. They collate available information and explain enough that an intelligent layperson can follow without difficulty. I'll revisit this topic at work tomorrow and try and dig up specific papers for your query. All the techniques I mentioned in my previous post are fairly mundane and mature molecular biological techniques.
The suggested treatment in your url looks a lot like that for leukaemia, to be honest. The difference is the stem cells are supplied not by a bone marrow transplant, but through the stem cells previously isolated. It works, but its an EXTREMELY expensive and yes, medically dangerous, treatment again making extensive use of immune suppressive drugs (in leukaemia - they wouldn't be necessary in the postulated stem cell treatment).
What you say could be true, but it doesn't naturally follow. Even with the best technology available, induced islet cells are not identical to body grown islet cells, they're just close enough to make no difference therapeutically. An auto-immune response accidentally targets your cells by recognising cell surface markers which it shouldn't. There isn't the research doen to substantiate your assertion as far as I know, but it is a sensible conclusion. You could get around it, I think, by selection of cultured differentiated stem cells which do not express the cell surface marker that causes the difficulty, either by direct intervention via drug selection, or directed selection ie. cell sorting/ culturing of low expressed CD markers.
Either way, a immune suppression regime (to prevent the auto immune response) would be substantially lighter than that required to suppress total rejection of all aspects of the foreign cells in the transplant.
I should say, this is not my area of expertise, this is based on some paper reading, recall and conversations with other scientists.
Is the anti-rejection drug regime. It can cause problems down the line with side-effects and with the immune system somewhat compromised, a susceptibility to infection.
If stem cell research continues at the rate it does, even this will be solved when cord blood stored at the patients birth is encouraged to differentiate into Eyelet cells, injected back into the patient years later and begin producing insulin. No rejection problems with your own-tissue-derived cells.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions.
USians, consider writing to your senator to protest Bush policies on Stem cell research. I'm not having a pop at him - fair enough if it's a moral issue to some folks. Just register your opinion with them. It can't hurt.
Just below: Independent Games Festival, a Sundance like festival to highlight all the innovative non-commercial games that are ignored by the mainstream public. First I'd heard of it.
There's a fantastic game from the London Games Festival you absolutely must play, it's unbelievable. It's pretty difficult to describe without having played it, but I'll take a shot.
Ok, it's a text based multiplayer online game played by people around world, but mainly US based players. You register your details, choose a nick and start playing. The gamesmaster, Charles, posts the most outrageously biased and nonsensical daily talking points he possibly can multiple times every day. The aim of the game is to respond with the absolutely most extreme, fascistic and downright frightening rightwing opinion you can, judged against the contributions of other players. The winner is patted on the back by the other players, socially féted, and if you persevere, given an endorsement by Charles himself.
It's difficult to pick up to begin with, they have their own set of strange jargon that the most successful posters use, but you soon get the hang of it and it's loads of fun to be mean spirited, distasteful and horrid about the deaths of just about any victim of US soldiers or the Israel Army, the death of foreign kids, old people, Iraqis, and so on.
Anyway, to play the game just go to the website of the London Games Festival. The Register link is on the left hand side. Enjoy!
Here we have one vendor incorporating GPL'd code into their product without attributation. It's on the record. Now SCO are arguing the same thing happened with IBM / Novell / whoever it is this week. This sets the precedent that it does happen. This can only aid SCO, especially when they take this to a technically illiterate judge.
They can bring up CherryOS in court, and in front of the judge, say "CherryOS incorporates code from PearOS. Why are we bringing this up? It does not make sense.
If CherryOS incorporates PearOS code you must acquit."
Actually I disagree with the rosy assessment of TFA. In my opinion the increasing commercialisation and mainstreaming of games is doing harm to the overall artistic and creative development. I see the whole process as analogous to the revolution in the film industry from its origins to mainstream Hollywood today, where about every 3rd film is a crappy big star - big explosion creative graveyard only successful because of the obscene amount of money spent pushing merchandising, made for TV trailers and mock docos, T shirts and other shit.
I'd hate to see the games genre lurching towards that creative oblivion.
We can see the blackened shoots of this future growing in the annual churn out of moneybox sports titles from big companies like EA. They plough these golden eggs into... creating more surebet moneybox sports titles, not risky creative development. They've started buying up small developers who have rights to creative games, cutting their resources and sending out titles that are "good enough" instead of "the best they can do" - just look at The Sims. I personally hate The Sims, but then I'm not a 14 year old girl, and I recognise it as something (that was) innovative and new at its time, something that, like the catflap, was obvious once someone else thought of it. This is despite my distaste at the innumerable expansions packs that became just a bit too contemptuous and greedy.
We're nearing the end of the consolidation phase of the games industry where a few big developers will come to dominate >75% of the market (fuck, they do already). And the big worry for me is, unlike the film industry where Independent developers can create and release their own work without requiring too much expense, games development of the sort of polished titles that came from nowhere and were a huge success is too expensive to be undertaken by anything other than medium sized risk takers, the same risk takers who after one major success will be gobbled up by the huge EA like conglomerates and creatively spayed, then spat out.
One of the first signs of the end of this golden age of gaming we're hardly aware we're living through, will be the creation of a games festival taking a Sundance festival like attitude to promoting the little guy. If there is hope, it lies in modding communities but these rely far too much on existing game engines which will probably in the future be licensed for increasingly large sums, if successful games based on a big-company-developed engine are developed.
Yeah, so I say, I hope to fuck the big monied folks DON'T realise the capitalisation potential of gaming, because all we'll get from it is a brainless litany of formulaic pigswill. If there's enough of it in the trough, the pigs'll never find the odd juicy carrot among all the shit.
Anyway, this might all be bullshit, I don't pretend to be an expert (unlike the guy in TFA) but it's where I see us going.
...are the ones going around cleaning up other peoples messes. Occassionally I find it entertaining to drop into Wikipedia: Vandalism in progress and just look at the constant erosion of Wikipedia articles by schoolkids, dedicated trolls, the misinformed, or just the dogmatic.
To be honest though, it really shakes my confidence in Wikipedia articles, I mean how much is actually missed by the policemen? You've got multiple vandalisms from a few well known addresses, it's not a rare problem. A user doing one or two vandalisms in a bunch of legitimate edits is going to, on the whole, escape censure.
I really only trust articles which have been locked from editing as they have been validated repeatedly and are immune to the random vandalism that a little looked at page must inevitably gain.
Absolutely, I was going to post this response myself until I saw you had preempted me. Just consider the difference in bodyweight involved, and scale up to the kind of microwaves you would have to send into a human to replicate the same.
It reminds me of that pretty poor study about the effects of GM potatoes on rats that caused a huge stir in the UK. To be fair, Motorola has to respond to this kind of study, what else are they going to do? I hate having to carry a mobile phone, and I'm no shill for Motorola but I'm not surprised they acted the way they did - anyone would.
As for animal testing, well, I've had some experience of the type of tactics the animal righters use to intimidate scientists in this country (UK). We're not a high profile target (thank God for Huntington Life Sciences), but still we get phone calls seeking information on staff, people outside our place of work overtly protesting, taking down number plates, or once or twice trying to follow people home and find out where they live. It's unpleasant.
Animal testing is so rarely used as the bureacracy involved and expense mean that these experiments would be done another way, if there was any way we could possibly get decent results. I've heard pseudoscientists on the radio promoting cell models over animal models and I just have to laugh at the ignorance shown by someone who says they would be any use at all.
Did you read the criticism that you are responding to? A hugely important part of that criticism is saying, in essence, that if you make racist assumptions, even justified by economic arguments, don't be surprised if people criticise you.
It's a pity that something racist can be defended by asserting the intentions weren't racist, or that the final conclusion, removed from its troubling context, is economically sound. I guess it's just easier to jump to someones defence than to think.
According to the wired article: Agents will also be able to use facial identification software to compare the person to the digitized photo, which is not feasible with current passports.
Which is interesting because, according to this the error rate for real time facial recognition:
the current error rate is 20% [...] this implies that out of 50,000 match scores there are 1,000 errors.
Enjoy the wait. Remind me how many of the 9/11 hijackers had invalid passports?
I had a rudimentary monitor prototype that did almost exactly what this product is claiming to do. It was a flat, pixellated display, not much more than 8", that operated completely without batteries. The picture was "tuned in" using the two control dials at either side of the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, it never gained widespread acceptance because the refresh rate was so low and pictures displayed tended to be very blocky. Still, the display would last for hours, unless shaken for some reason. I think it was based on magnetic field technology.
I became very good at tuning it in, but far too often my parents would make me put it down and go play outside.
Retinitis Pigmentosa only affects peripheral and night vision. Which makes the article summary somewhat suspect. Two seconds of google to check up on it, Taco. Another three seconds to actually "being able to reading" the thing to edit it properly. Is this so difficult?
A bit off-topic, but then the article was slashdotted anyway. I had hell with one of my power units, couldn't figure out why my computer components were failing so rapidly, until a post in Microsoft help and support forums sent me on the right track.
But I'm a bit ambivalent about choosing the word "torture" here, in a jocular or mock serious way. I don't think it's really appropriate to have the term become diluted down to mean anything else than the really worst things that humans can do to each other. Some words should be ringfenced and not put into common usage.
Maybe its just me, but isn't it kind of symptomatic to the overall reaction to atrocities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to misuse the word tortture. It's like it loses its impact. I doubt they editors would have posted something titled "Power Supply Holocaust!" for instance. I think "torture" should be treated like "holocaust", with kid gloves. Otherwise, the language we speak, and therefore think in becomes almost ammoral.
You make no sense at all your post is littered with so many errors it is difficult to count them up!! I am one of the people you are calling thieves and I run a small website which is involved in fansubbing Goriko No Porkio which is >herebr br
I wouldnt do this if the original cartoons were available in english because i speak english better than japanese despite being a japanese native. If they made them available i would buy them so they arent supplying a product so how am I stealing this my friend??!!!
and as for learning japanese, I already know japanese as does everyperson who fansubs, or they couldn't do it, so it is just irrelevant! back to the drawing board, and apologise.
I do also share music but I buy the albums when I have enough money, so noone loses anyway you are one of these accountants who are so straightlaced they can't see past to the spirit of the laws rather than the actual wording. your crazy interpretation would fail in a court of the law!!
I've been using it all morning and it seems to me it's just as good, if not better than googles search. For one thing, many of the pages I'm looking for are about microsoft, such as security bulletins, windows media player download site, direct x, and so on, so its habit of magnifying these results over others is a positive boon.
Also, I make it a policy to give as few organisations as possible any data they could mine for marketing purposes, and as a windows user, I know windows already has this information, so why should I further propagate to Google, a company that likes to pretend its transparent, but does things like refusing to rule out using gmail data to refine its ad business in the future, or linking the actual pages you visit, NOT just what you search for, in their profile of you.
Its an unpopular view, but in this case microsoft is just be[tter.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to demonstrate a use. There's a lot of companies who patented huge swathes of the human genome who are having those patents methodically overturned when it was discovered that 1)they didn't know what they were patenting and 2) they had no use for it then, anyway.
After reading the Grumpy Gamers sensible and well reasoned complaints, Nintendo have taken his comments on board, returning the Zelda franchise to a stylish and retro look. You can see a screen capture from their recently rereleased trailer here.
Let's wait for the game, eh?
You should consider the possibility that one of her drinks was spiked.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions in grandparent.
Diabetic fatties will have to wait on further research into the cellular nature of their disease. When I was at Uni (~3 years ago) they pinpointed the disease to interference in the specific process somewhere between Insulin Receptor recognising Insulin (which went fine) and actual cellular changes as a result of activation and dimerization of IR. It's almost certainly moved on since then, but there's been no "headline" discovery of exactly why some people start ignoring Insulin, or I'd probably have noticed it.
the research available is generally through scientific journals which charge a hefty fee for the ability to look through them. Even a service such as Medline which allows you to search through abstracts - not complete articles - isn't free to any member of the public.
The Institution I work at cannot afford much more than ~200 journal subscriptions, and it's a major UK research institute. Nature and its offshoots(like Nature Biochemistry, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Molecular Biology etc. etc. is horrendously expensive). The lack of available science to the layperson is a total scandal.
You could use local library facilities depending where you are based, for instance the British Library will be able to get almost anything on request. The Catch-22 is, you need some service like Medline to find papers you might be interested in, but without access, although you can request the papers themselves, you don't know what to look for. If you're at Uni, you should be able to get ATHENS access on behalf of your institution if you ask nicely. An ATHENS authorisation will allow you to use MEDLINE normally, which is just a search engine for scientific papers. Try searching for reviews in the last 5 years on a couple of keywords you might be interested in, if you get this far. They collate available information and explain enough that an intelligent layperson can follow without difficulty. I'll revisit this topic at work tomorrow and try and dig up specific papers for your query. All the techniques I mentioned in my previous post are fairly mundane and mature molecular biological techniques.
The suggested treatment in your url looks a lot like that for leukaemia, to be honest. The difference is the stem cells are supplied not by a bone marrow transplant, but through the stem cells previously isolated. It works, but its an EXTREMELY expensive and yes, medically dangerous, treatment again making extensive use of immune suppressive drugs (in leukaemia - they wouldn't be necessary in the postulated stem cell treatment).
What you say could be true, but it doesn't naturally follow. Even with the best technology available, induced islet cells are not identical to body grown islet cells, they're just close enough to make no difference therapeutically. An auto-immune response accidentally targets your cells by recognising cell surface markers which it shouldn't. There isn't the research doen to substantiate your assertion as far as I know, but it is a sensible conclusion. You could get around it, I think, by selection of cultured differentiated stem cells which do not express the cell surface marker that causes the difficulty, either by direct intervention via drug selection, or directed selection ie. cell sorting/ culturing of low expressed CD markers.
Either way, a immune suppression regime (to prevent the auto immune response) would be substantially lighter than that required to suppress total rejection of all aspects of the foreign cells in the transplant.
I should say, this is not my area of expertise, this is based on some paper reading, recall and conversations with other scientists.
Is the anti-rejection drug regime. It can cause problems down the line with side-effects and with the immune system somewhat compromised, a susceptibility to infection.
If stem cell research continues at the rate it does, even this will be solved when cord blood stored at the patients birth is encouraged to differentiate into Eyelet cells, injected back into the patient years later and begin producing insulin. No rejection problems with your own-tissue-derived cells.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions.
USians, consider writing to your senator to protest Bush policies on Stem cell research. I'm not having a pop at him - fair enough if it's a moral issue to some folks. Just register your opinion with them. It can't hurt.
It's kind of obvious if you look at the admin comments on the vandalism in progress page. But that's in the process of being fixed already.
Just below: Independent Games Festival, a Sundance like festival to highlight all the innovative non-commercial games that are ignored by the mainstream public. First I'd heard of it.
There's a fantastic game from the London Games Festival you absolutely must play, it's unbelievable. It's pretty difficult to describe without having played it, but I'll take a shot.
Ok, it's a text based multiplayer online game played by people around world, but mainly US based players. You register your details, choose a nick and start playing. The gamesmaster, Charles, posts the most outrageously biased and nonsensical daily talking points he possibly can multiple times every day. The aim of the game is to respond with the absolutely most extreme, fascistic and downright frightening rightwing opinion you can, judged against the contributions of other players. The winner is patted on the back by the other players, socially féted, and if you persevere, given an endorsement by Charles himself.
It's difficult to pick up to begin with, they have their own set of strange jargon that the most successful posters use, but you soon get the hang of it and it's loads of fun to be mean spirited, distasteful and horrid about the deaths of just about any victim of US soldiers or the Israel Army, the death of foreign kids, old people, Iraqis, and so on.
Anyway, to play the game just go to the website of the London Games Festival. The Register link is on the left hand side. Enjoy!
Here we have one vendor incorporating GPL'd code into their product without attributation. It's on the record. Now SCO are arguing the same thing happened with IBM / Novell / whoever it is this week. This sets the precedent that it does happen. This can only aid SCO, especially when they take this to a technically illiterate judge. They can bring up CherryOS in court, and in front of the judge, say "CherryOS incorporates code from PearOS. Why are we bringing this up? It does not make sense.
If CherryOS incorporates PearOS code you must acquit."
Actually I disagree with the rosy assessment of TFA. In my opinion the increasing commercialisation and mainstreaming of games is doing harm to the overall artistic and creative development. I see the whole process as analogous to the revolution in the film industry from its origins to mainstream Hollywood today, where about every 3rd film is a crappy big star - big explosion creative graveyard only successful because of the obscene amount of money spent pushing merchandising, made for TV trailers and mock docos, T shirts and other shit.
I'd hate to see the games genre lurching towards that creative oblivion.
We can see the blackened shoots of this future growing in the annual churn out of moneybox sports titles from big companies like EA. They plough these golden eggs into... creating more surebet moneybox sports titles, not risky creative development. They've started buying up small developers who have rights to creative games, cutting their resources and sending out titles that are "good enough" instead of "the best they can do" - just look at The Sims. I personally hate The Sims, but then I'm not a 14 year old girl, and I recognise it as something (that was) innovative and new at its time, something that, like the catflap, was obvious once someone else thought of it. This is despite my distaste at the innumerable expansions packs that became just a bit too contemptuous and greedy.
We're nearing the end of the consolidation phase of the games industry where a few big developers will come to dominate >75% of the market (fuck, they do already). And the big worry for me is, unlike the film industry where Independent developers can create and release their own work without requiring too much expense, games development of the sort of polished titles that came from nowhere and were a huge success is too expensive to be undertaken by anything other than medium sized risk takers, the same risk takers who after one major success will be gobbled up by the huge EA like conglomerates and creatively spayed, then spat out.
One of the first signs of the end of this golden age of gaming we're hardly aware we're living through, will be the creation of a games festival taking a Sundance festival like attitude to promoting the little guy. If there is hope, it lies in modding communities but these rely far too much on existing game engines which will probably in the future be licensed for increasingly large sums, if successful games based on a big-company-developed engine are developed.
Yeah, so I say, I hope to fuck the big monied folks DON'T realise the capitalisation potential of gaming, because all we'll get from it is a brainless litany of formulaic pigswill. If there's enough of it in the trough, the pigs'll never find the odd juicy carrot among all the shit.
Anyway, this might all be bullshit, I don't pretend to be an expert (unlike the guy in TFA) but it's where I see us going.
...are the ones going around cleaning up other peoples messes. Occassionally I find it entertaining to drop into Wikipedia: Vandalism in progress and just look at the constant erosion of Wikipedia articles by schoolkids, dedicated trolls, the misinformed, or just the dogmatic.
To be honest though, it really shakes my confidence in Wikipedia articles, I mean how much is actually missed by the policemen? You've got multiple vandalisms from a few well known addresses, it's not a rare problem. A user doing one or two vandalisms in a bunch of legitimate edits is going to, on the whole, escape censure.
I really only trust articles which have been locked from editing as they have been validated repeatedly and are immune to the random vandalism that a little looked at page must inevitably gain.
Absolutely, I was going to post this response myself until I saw you had preempted me. Just consider the difference in bodyweight involved, and scale up to the kind of microwaves you would have to send into a human to replicate the same.
It reminds me of that pretty poor study about the effects of GM potatoes on rats that caused a huge stir in the UK. To be fair, Motorola has to respond to this kind of study, what else are they going to do? I hate having to carry a mobile phone, and I'm no shill for Motorola but I'm not surprised they acted the way they did - anyone would.
As for animal testing, well, I've had some experience of the type of tactics the animal righters use to intimidate scientists in this country (UK). We're not a high profile target (thank God for Huntington Life Sciences), but still we get phone calls seeking information on staff, people outside our place of work overtly protesting, taking down number plates, or once or twice trying to follow people home and find out where they live. It's unpleasant.
Animal testing is so rarely used as the bureacracy involved and expense mean that these experiments would be done another way, if there was any way we could possibly get decent results. I've heard pseudoscientists on the radio promoting cell models over animal models and I just have to laugh at the ignorance shown by someone who says they would be any use at all.
Did you read the criticism that you are responding to? A hugely important part of that criticism is saying, in essence, that if you make racist assumptions, even justified by economic arguments, don't be surprised if people criticise you.
It's a pity that something racist can be defended by asserting the intentions weren't racist, or that the final conclusion, removed from its troubling context, is economically sound. I guess it's just easier to jump to someones defence than to think.
My bad. 10,000 out of 50,000, rather. Thanks.
According to the wired article: Agents will also be able to use facial identification software to compare the person to the digitized photo, which is not feasible with current passports.
Which is interesting because, according to this the error rate for real time facial recognition: the current error rate is 20% [...] this implies that out of 50,000 match scores there are 1,000 errors.
Enjoy the wait. Remind me how many of the 9/11 hijackers had invalid passports?
I had a rudimentary monitor prototype that did almost exactly what this product is claiming to do. It was a flat, pixellated display, not much more than 8", that operated completely without batteries. The picture was "tuned in" using the two control dials at either side of the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, it never gained widespread acceptance because the refresh rate was so low and pictures displayed tended to be very blocky. Still, the display would last for hours, unless shaken for some reason. I think it was based on magnetic field technology.
I became very good at tuning it in, but far too often my parents would make me put it down and go play outside.
Republicans: Sure, Iraq's elections aren't perfect, but they're the first step on the road towards true democracy....
Republicans: Since the Kyoto treaty isn't perfect, but is a first step on the road towards a solution to global warming, we'll stay out...
Retinitis Pigmentosa only affects peripheral and night vision. Which makes the article summary somewhat suspect. Two seconds of google to check up on it, Taco. Another three seconds to actually "being able to reading" the thing to edit it properly. Is this so difficult?
A bit off-topic, but then the article was slashdotted anyway. I had hell with one of my power units, couldn't figure out why my computer components were failing so rapidly, until a post in Microsoft help and support forums sent me on the right track.
But I'm a bit ambivalent about choosing the word "torture" here, in a jocular or mock serious way. I don't think it's really appropriate to have the term become diluted down to mean anything else than the really worst things that humans can do to each other. Some words should be ringfenced and not put into common usage.
Maybe its just me, but isn't it kind of symptomatic to the overall reaction to atrocities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to misuse the word tortture. It's like it loses its impact. I doubt they editors would have posted something titled "Power Supply Holocaust!" for instance. I think "torture" should be treated like "holocaust", with kid gloves. Otherwise, the language we speak, and therefore think in becomes almost ammoral.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
You make no sense at all your post is littered with so many errors it is difficult to count them up!! I am one of the people you are calling thieves and I run a small website which is involved in fansubbing Goriko No Porkio which is >herebr br
I wouldnt do this if the original cartoons were available in english because i speak english better than japanese despite being a japanese native. If they made them available i would buy them so they arent supplying a product so how am I stealing this my friend??!!!and as for learning japanese, I already know japanese as does everyperson who fansubs, or they couldn't do it, so it is just irrelevant! back to the drawing board, and apologise.
I do also share music but I buy the albums when I have enough money, so noone loses anyway you are one of these accountants who are so straightlaced they can't see past to the spirit of the laws rather than the actual wording. your crazy interpretation would fail in a court of the law!!
I've been using it all morning and it seems to me it's just as good, if not better than googles search. For one thing, many of the pages I'm looking for are about microsoft, such as security bulletins, windows media player download site, direct x, and so on, so its habit of magnifying these results over others is a positive boon.
Also, I make it a policy to give as few organisations as possible any data they could mine for marketing purposes, and as a windows user, I know windows already has this information, so why should I further propagate to Google, a company that likes to pretend its transparent, but does things like refusing to rule out using gmail data to refine its ad business in the future, or linking the actual pages you visit, NOT just what you search for, in their profile of you.
Its an unpopular view, but in this case microsoft is just be[tter.
I read the wired article, and in all fairness the IE bashing was based on IE pre-SP2. A lot of it's been tightened up. A little balance, please.