I understand what you're saying, perhaps it's been misinterpreted, but the way it's phrased sounds quite alarmist
Its not her job to tell everyone "everything's going to be ok", thats what politicians are for. It all boils down to how likely/unlikely you think a worst-case scenario is, and FWIW, I don't think her words were unnecessarily alarmist. If nothing else, the behavior of the 1918 pandemic (beginning as a mild strain but mutating within 6 months to a much deadlier form) justifies her not downplaying the current one.
, as I say in the best case it sounds like she suggested the whole of humanity is under threat of catching it, but again even that's false because as I mentioned previously even the 1918 pandemic only affected 40% of the world's population I believe.
Jeez, now thats some serious nitpicking there.
If a lethal pandemic broke out and began killing humans by the tens of millions, that would definitely have a negative impact on *everybody*, not just the ones who got sick and/or died. It would be a bad day for everyone, so referring to "all of humanity" in regards to a global catastrophe makes perfect sense.
The poor countries who need this "cure" the most aren't interested in patents. If it actually worked they'd use it and ignore any patent claims, just as Africa used generics for AIDS drugs instead of paying the higher costs demanded by the drug companies.
No, I suspect the reason this is only listed on herbal sites as a remedy and not mentioned on any medical sites is that like much folklore, its often repeated... and still wrong.
If you're right then somebody really needs to update this page. If this page is correct, and *most* flu vaccines are still made with inactive-virus or attenuated-live-virus methods, then what I said, and what the AC said in response above us are still true. There may be a new "animal cell" culturing method on the way, that you're referring to, but it hasn't taken over completely yet.
So it's not possible to get a flu infection from a flu vaccine.
But it is possible to get "sick", which is the word the OP used I believe, I was thinking of the over-reacting immune system situation, but you're right in that my explanation made it sound like you got the actual 'real' virus itself. You don't, but your body gets *enough* of the virus that your immune system *thinks* its really there and reacts accordingly. If the immune system over-reacts though, that can sometimes be almost as bad as getting the actual infection.
And the level of concern for a super volcano eruption should be?
I don't claim to know how to rank it, compared to other issues, danger vs. likelyhood, etc, thats up to each individual.
My only point is that it is not the same thing as a normal volcanic event, which was implied in your post: "There's always a volcano about to erupt". Uhmmm, no there *isn't* always a super-caldera about to erupt, thats the point.
You saw the reference to St. Helens, and assumed it was about a usual volcanic event(s), and missed the part about the alleged caldera super-strucure under the mountain, which is an *entirely* different beast... and yes, *if* this is true, then it *is* "newsworthy", even if no actual eruption is expected soon. Just the discovery of another super-caldera system is important since there are so few known ones, and we know so little about them, but need to, considering their power.
look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then
Strange, I don't have those same memories. H5N1 is very deadly, but can't transmit human-to-human, and the people I heard talk of it said only if it learns to move directly between humans do we need to get scared. It was the *media* that ended up hyping things, not the WHO.
If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse
Actually, what the WHO is worried about is the H1N1 strain linking up the existing H5N1 strains in Southeast Asia, combining the H1N1's ease of human transmission, with the H5N1's deadliness. H1N1 is part avian after all, it has a history of mutating and combining with other strains. Is it *likely*? No one really knows.
I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more.
The WHO's doing that for you, so you don't have to. Don't blame them for doing their jobs, blame the media for always hyping everything beyond its actual importance/relevance.
Folks get a *different* strain of influenza every year.
H1N1 is no different.
Yes, it is. It is a different strain of H1N1 that we haven't seen before, a combination of parts of four other strains of influenza A.
The WHO and the media make a big deal about this
The WHO is making a big deal about it only because it is a new strain that hasn't been seen before, and its spreading rapidly, thus fewer people will have any built-in resistance to it. And this particular category of influenza A has a nasty history of mutating quickly.
The media make a big deal about it because its news, but inevitably they end up over-hyping it since they're trying to fill 24/7 with 'interesting' news, and there just isn't enough to do that.
(H1N1 being a pandemic is blasphemous)
No. You just don't know what the meaning of the word 'pandemic' actually is. Hint: the number of casualties to the disease has *nothing* to do with its pandemic status. Look it up, it doesn't mean what you think it does.
millions of people each year who die from easily treatable illnesses such as Malaria.
Please define what you mean by "easily treatable". Malaria has no silver bullet, and the only available treatments which work consistently are really just preventative measures and are relatively expensive. And since the parasites behind Malaria are evolving resistance to the usual antimalarial drugs, for the most part, once you get it, you're cooked.
Malaria is a highly *intractable* problem that occurs in the poorest parts of the world, which makes dealing with it nearly impossible. That's why its a chronic problem, its not something that would just go away if the whole world threw some money at it. Nobody knows *how* to get rid of it.
H1N1 is known to be highly unstable. It has a tendency to pick up genes from other viruses.
Is it possible these properties will make for a more "dangerous" vaccine than others?
No, they will instead make for a less effective vaccine, because the virus *might* end up mutating faster than we can produce viable vaccines for it. Or it might just fizzle out and disappear, H1N1 is inheriently undependable in this regard, you can't predict its behavior, which is the problem.
What happened to you can actually happen to anyone after taking any vaccine (though normally its rare). Vaccines are in effect a way to give your body a very *weak* version of the virus so it will recognize it as an enemy if the real virus shows up later. Human variability being what it is though, sometimes a very weak version of the virus manages to gain a foothold despite it being weaker, and sometimes it is still enough to trigger a strong, perhaps overly-strong, immune system response.
A miscategorized geological formation isn't newsworthy unless they're trying to imply something else.
Its the corrected categorization that is doing the new "implying" here. The implication that St. Helens may be just one vent from a much larger super-caldera structure is what is significant. Now, whether its true or not is something else, I'm a little skeptical because it doesn't sound to me like the caldera structure at Yellowstone, but whatever...
And no, a super-caldera eruption is not "just another volcano going off". Its a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Super-caldera eruptions are automatically global, catastrophic events simply due to the amount of energy released by them, usually 3+ orders of magnitude greater than a single volcanic event, and the worst of them can be globally life-threatening.
The last time Mt. St. Helen's blew its top in 1980, it ejected ~1.2 km3 of material (cubic kilometers). The last time the Yellowstone caldera blew its top around 600,000 years ago, it ejected ~1,000.0 km3 of material. And the really bad one from the link above (Toba Lake, Sumatra, around 75,000 years ago)? That one ejected ~2,800.0 km3 of material. See the difference?:)
Fortunately, the only good thing about them is that they're rare. Unfortunately, they're very big firecrackers when they go off. How big? If the Yellowstone caldera decides to clear its throat real good in our lifetime, then you being in Florida won't automatically make you safe... That's how big.:)
And it is a big part of what's going wrong with ODF.
The only thing "going wrong" with ODF is that MS is playing its usual games with anything they don't like, and at the top of their don't-like list is open standards they can't control.
I mean really, the claim that its ODF's fault might have had some credibility had MS not already released a plugin that provided perfectly valid, cross-application ODF support. They already knew how to do things the "right" way, but when they later updated Office, they deliberately chose not to.
News reporters seldom seem to actually fully understand reality or what they are reporting
The "Deep Flight Challenger" vehicle has not actually *made* a dive to the bottom of Challenger Deep yet. In fact, its never made *any* deep dive, due to its owner's untimely death before its final completion.
Why would you expect news reporters to mention it? Claiming something is not newsworthy, *doing* that something is.
No, but Windows is, and IE is Win-only, that was how IE itself nearly became one, by piggy-backing on the real monopoly.
Having a choice as to what search engine to use is more important than you think. People will use the default one
Google will work on any OS running almost any web browser, but where is the initial "default" for a search engine set? Oh, that's right, its in the *browser*.
(Seriusly, have you seen how many things set Google as your homepage/search now?
How about IE?:)
Moral of the story: Google gained its dominance by providing something a lot of people liked/wanted but without any other advantages, whereas IE got to where it did by leveraging the Windows monopoly.
Yes, a lot of people simply accept the "default", whatever it is, and this is *exactly* what MS counts on. Half the battle for any company wanting to establish a monopoly is to reach the point where most sheeple accept their product as the "default", if for no other reason than they don't know any better... and that brings us right to the idea of providing alternative browsers *with* Windows, so they will know (at least something) better.
Whether it works or not is another matter, but claiming IE==Google definitely doesn't work.
Treaties do have the power to modify the Constitution.
Just a little nitpick here (but I think an important one):
You're correct in that international treaties are allowed by the US Constitution to "be on par" with it (given the same weight/power), so in that sense the GP is wrong.
However international treaties don't have the power to "modify" the US Constitution, since by definition that would give international treaties *more* power than the US Constitution, never mind that the Constitution is very specific about how it can be (legally) modified (and international treaties are not one of the mentioned methods). So treaties being able to ultimately *supercede* the Constitution is an idea that the US Supreme Court has never accepted.
Its important here to understand what the authors of the Constitution were thinking about when they wrote that part you quoted. The only treaty the US was a signatory to prior to adopting the Constitution was the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionaly War, and that was what the Constitution's framers were referring to, and protecting, in the first part you quoted.
This is an interesting read on the subject, in particular the 'Legal background' and 'Aftermath' sections. Note what is said at the end of that article in the 'Aftermath' section: the bottom line, established by the 2 US Supreme Court cases mentioned there, is that international treaties can't trump the US Constitution.
The mistake I believe you're making is assuming everyone who posts on/. is part of the same "group".
It might have been true early in/.'s history, but not any more. Heck, we've not only got both Windows advocates and Linux advocates now, but the anti-MS folks have since been joined by the anti-FOSS folks too. Its kinda hard to see them all as being in the same "group".:)
War crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces do not justify war crimes committed by the US. It's a very bad road to travel.
True. Unfortunately, I get the impression from the arguments about this that people alive today simply don't realize/remember what the true nature of WWII was. It was the first, and last, example of "industrialized total war". The nature of industrialization, and the fact that all the belligerents had shifted their entire economies to 100% war production, meant that the city populations became "valid" targets, in the reasoning of the time, because they were manning the factories producing war material, and "100% war production" meant all factories were involved in the war effort in some way, so they were all valid targets.
By today's standards its a war crime, of course, but then again, today's standards didn't exist back then, and after 6-12 years of total war and industrial-scale mass slaughter, what is now considered unthinkable, was unfortunately seen merely as "routine" then. Nor did it help that other side had themselves already done these kinds of acts against us, earlier in the war.
The only useful lesson to learn from this, is that any war that is allowed to go on for too long, will end up dehumanizing all of its belligerants, allowing them to do things they otherwise never would have considered, and the Isreali-Palestinian conflict is a prime example of this (with both sides routinely found guilty of war crimes and atrocities).
With Russia entering the war against Japan, they were already going to surrender pretty soon and the US knew it.
Actually, not only did we NOT know this for a fact, but neither did the Japanese. Emperor Hirohito did not actually act until immediately after August 9, when the 2nd bomb was dropped *and* the USSR declared war. 5 days later there was a coup by some in Japan's Army against their own Emperor which was an unthinkable act in their society at the time. So surrender, regardless of conditions, was clearly not agreed upon by all in Japan's elite, with extremists in their Army even prepared to take violent action against their own "divine" emperor, rather than surrender.
That there were those among our leadership convinced that they would, just shows how little we understood the Japanese mindset, even after years of fighting them. The only thing we "knew" with any degree of certainty was that there were elements within Japan's elite ready to "talk about" surrender. Of course we knew in 1943 the exact same thing about Germany (opposition to Hitler, recognition that the war was lost, willingness to surrender), yet the war went on another 2 years...
The US military casualty estimates were originally nowhere near the 1 million level. The figures were being inflated in an attempt to justify the atomic bombings.
[citation needed]
This claim has been made before, but without proof of intent. An equally (or more) plausible reason is that the estimates kept going up as we got intel back from Japan about how they were preparing their *entire* population to "fight to the death". Nor was this without its own supporting evidence, try reading about what US troops encountered during the Okinawa campaign, which had a large component of native Japanese civilians. The suicidal fanaticism exhibited by the Japanese only escalated during '44-'45, rather than decrease, clearly not an indication of a people ready to surrender, and in fact it looked increasingly to the US, as evidence that perhaps an invasion of their homeland would in fact be horrifically bloody for both sides.
However, even if the casualty estimates were right, it still does not justify the bombings.
Unfortunately, in the cruel calculus of total war, it made perfect sense, since the more casualties your country takes as the fighting drags on, the less *value* you see in the lives of the enemy. Sadly,
FYI, the alpha/beta v10.0 of their flashplayer is 64bit now.
From the above link:
Update: Furthering Adobe's commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha refresh of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 2/24/09 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation.
Note: I'm not an Adobe fanboi or anything, so I'm not saying it works well, just pointing out that they appear to be really trying to close the 64bit gap.
FWIW, it does seem to work for most of the things I've used it for, some videos from YouTube, for example, with sound, but I've also noticed it failing to work a couple of times on other things, so YMMV. It all depends on what you try to play with it.
As much as people like to say that this is a price issue, it really isn't. Otherwise, why on earth would OSX be near the 10% range?
Don't most OSX users get it with their Apple computer? How many people buy OSX separate from their Apple machine?
Why on earth would iPhone, and iPod touch be even registering on the radar?
Same reason as OSX. The OS comes with the Apple hardware, and the user has no (legal) choice.
It is not cost.
I think you've missed the GP's point about price. Your price examples above are irrelevant because the user doesn't get a choice in OSes for Apple hardware. The GP is talking about PC-compatible netbooks where there *are* choices for the OS, since the hardware and the OS aren't from the same company.
What the GP is pointing out is that MS doesn't want to see cheap netbooks happen at all, because if end users saw the cost of the (expensive) OS *separate* from the (cheap) hardware, it would lead to trouble for MS. If netbooks keep getting cheaper, then MS is either going to have to accept much less per copy of Windows, or, by not doing that, open the door to competition in the netbook market.
On Windows everything just works
Fanboi much?
Linux is more problematic. First there is very little commercialware support.
If the OS market were a level playing field, support for desktop/netbook Linux would happen, but fighting a monopoly is both expensive and potentially dangerous for a commerical company, so it isn't happening much now (Canonical, with its Ubuntu Linux, being the only example - and they haven't turned a profit yet).
The end result is that Linux will remain a niche product.
Linux is in a niche (on the desktop especially) primarily because it exists in a monopolized market. If you put a leash on the monopoly, then companies would begin to see the possibility for profit by commercializing Linux (and adding the missing functionality you talked about) for the 'average' end user, and Linux/BSD usage would start growing.
alias sex "updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; strip; look; touch; finger; unzip
Ok, that is funny, if only because this is the closest thing to sex most/.'ers will get to, but, being a/.'er with nothing better to do, and this being the only kind of 'sex' I can reasonably look forward to, isn't a little incomplete? Shouldn't it be more like:
alias sex `updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; unzip; strip; look; touch; finger; join; fsck; make clean`
or something similar?
As I see it, from my understanding of our geek definition of 'sex' (and the fact that I'm a male!), you left out the most important part.:)
I'm also idly wondering if there's a website with all the various aliases for sex that geeks have come up with (or the one 'best' one), since the available Unix commands have been changing over the years.
Why? Something that doesn't degrade... isn't a problem.
... unless it ends up in the Pacific Ocean.:)
We're now beginning to see the long term consequences of plastic in that section of the Pacific north-west of Hawaii, that's now being referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". There is tons of small bits, and a lot of larger bits, of plastic still floating around out there, *decades* after it entered the Pacific from various sources.
Large bits do break down to smaller bits, but if it doesn't biodegrade, then it never really goes away.
Unfortunately, not all plastic finds its way to an out-of-sight-out-of-mind land-fill, which is the only good place for it, since the damn stuff just won't die.:)
I don't think a post that makes a unsubstantiated allegation without even a link deserves any + mods
Welcome to Slashdot!:)
And yes, I agree with you, but our system allows the same people who do post unsubstantiated claims, to also be the moderators, so as long as humans are involved, a "perfect" system just isn't possible... much like our political system.:D
IANAL either, but AFAICT the only reason it would be hard to prove in a court of law is because it would be hard to prove fullstop. A payee agreeing to wear a wiretap is proof, but someone on teh internets saying bad shit about ATI is probably just a troll or a unhappy customer.
Well, in this particular case, I'm referring to the allegation that this poster of false information about AMD was working for NVIDIA. Proving the information to be false would be easy, but proving the connection between the poster and NVIDIA, after the fact, would be the hard part, I believe, and without that connection, there would be no basis for legal action.
As for my difference between "knowing something and proving it", that was just a reference to the common situation where there would be enough evidence that would convince a layman of a connection (such as, perhaps, tux), but not enough for a conviction in a court of law, which has a higher, and more strict, standard for "evidence" and "guilt".
I don't know what evidence 'electrosoccertux' has on this either, I just listed several reasons why AMD wouldn't want to get involved in a legal fight right now. You'll need to ask him to back up his claim.
As for "preponderance of evidence", if it were relatively easy to win legal fights like this, we'd see companies sueing one another every time one company explicity mentions a competitor in an advertisement in a deceptive/misleading way, and this kind of advertising seems to me to be fairly common. Even if it is relatively easy to win, I suspect the cost of a legal fight keeps companies from going crazy over what other companies say about them, or when they do something like plant false rumors, etc.
However, IANAL, so feel free to ignore/flame me.:)
Listen here youngster, if I took my glasses off, I'd have to go back to 320x240 on my 21' monitor. It'd either be that, or sit close enough to the screen that I get a nice suntan.
Because knowing something and proving it in a court of law are two different things?
As a corporation, you don't *normally* go around sueing individuals just for saying bad things about you, and *proving* the NVIDIA link would be the really hard part, legally.
Besides, ATI, now also known as AMD, is too embroiled right now in a legal fight with the 800lb gorilla of the hardware world, known to all as Intel, to be going around picking other fights, especially in a bad economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand what you're saying, perhaps it's been misinterpreted, but the way it's phrased sounds quite alarmist
Its not her job to tell everyone "everything's going to be ok", thats what politicians are for. It all boils down to how likely/unlikely you think a worst-case scenario is, and FWIW, I don't think her words were unnecessarily alarmist. If nothing else, the behavior of the 1918 pandemic (beginning as a mild strain but mutating within 6 months to a much deadlier form) justifies her not downplaying the current one.
, as I say in the best case it sounds like she suggested the whole of humanity is under threat of catching it, but again even that's false because as I mentioned previously even the 1918 pandemic only affected 40% of the world's population I believe.
Jeez, now thats some serious nitpicking there.
If a lethal pandemic broke out and began killing humans by the tens of millions, that would definitely have a negative impact on *everybody*, not just the ones who got sick and/or died. It would be a bad day for everyone, so referring to "all of humanity" in regards to a global catastrophe makes perfect sense.
Whoops, can't patent that.
The poor countries who need this "cure" the most aren't interested in patents. If it actually worked they'd use it and ignore any patent claims, just as Africa used generics for AIDS drugs instead of paying the higher costs demanded by the drug companies.
No, I suspect the reason this is only listed on herbal sites as a remedy and not mentioned on any medical sites is that like much folklore, its often repeated... and still wrong.
Your kidding, right? If people actually put effort into treating diseases like malaria and AIDS
Wait, AIDS is easy to stop too? Are you nuts?
Flu vaccines _do_ _not_ use a weakened viruses.
If you're right then somebody really needs to update this page. If this page is correct, and *most* flu vaccines are still made with inactive-virus or attenuated-live-virus methods, then what I said, and what the AC said in response above us are still true. There may be a new "animal cell" culturing method on the way, that you're referring to, but it hasn't taken over completely yet.
So it's not possible to get a flu infection from a flu vaccine.
But it is possible to get "sick", which is the word the OP used I believe, I was thinking of the over-reacting immune system situation, but you're right in that my explanation made it sound like you got the actual 'real' virus itself. You don't, but your body gets *enough* of the virus that your immune system *thinks* its really there and reacts accordingly. If the immune system over-reacts though, that can sometimes be almost as bad as getting the actual infection.
And the level of concern for a super volcano eruption should be?
I don't claim to know how to rank it, compared to other issues, danger vs. likelyhood, etc, thats up to each individual.
My only point is that it is not the same thing as a normal volcanic event, which was implied in your post: "There's always a volcano about to erupt". Uhmmm, no there *isn't* always a super-caldera about to erupt, thats the point.
You saw the reference to St. Helens, and assumed it was about a usual volcanic event(s), and missed the part about the alleged caldera super-strucure under the mountain, which is an *entirely* different beast... and yes, *if* this is true, then it *is* "newsworthy", even if no actual eruption is expected soon. Just the discovery of another super-caldera system is important since there are so few known ones, and we know so little about them, but need to, considering their power.
look at all the fear mongering over bird flu and apocalyptic scenarios they told us to expect then
Strange, I don't have those same memories. H5N1 is very deadly, but can't transmit human-to-human, and the people I heard talk of it said only if it learns to move directly between humans do we need to get scared. It was the *media* that ended up hyping things, not the WHO.
If you want a real apocalyptic scenario then there's the idea that Swine flu both mutates to become worse
Actually, what the WHO is worried about is the H1N1 strain linking up the existing H5N1 strains in Southeast Asia, combining the H1N1's ease of human transmission, with the H5N1's deadliness. H1N1 is part avian after all, it has a history of mutating and combining with other strains. Is it *likely*? No one really knows.
I'll start worrying or even caring a bit more.
The WHO's doing that for you, so you don't have to. Don't blame them for doing their jobs, blame the media for always hyping everything beyond its actual importance/relevance.
People get the flu EVERY SINGLE YEAR,
Folks get a *different* strain of influenza every year.
H1N1 is no different.
Yes, it is. It is a different strain of H1N1 that we haven't seen before, a combination of parts of four other strains of influenza A.
The WHO and the media make a big deal about this
The WHO is making a big deal about it only because it is a new strain that hasn't been seen before, and its spreading rapidly, thus fewer people will have any built-in resistance to it. And this particular category of influenza A has a nasty history of mutating quickly.
The media make a big deal about it because its news, but inevitably they end up over-hyping it since they're trying to fill 24/7 with 'interesting' news, and there just isn't enough to do that.
(H1N1 being a pandemic is blasphemous)
No. You just don't know what the meaning of the word 'pandemic' actually is. Hint: the number of casualties to the disease has *nothing* to do with its pandemic status. Look it up, it doesn't mean what you think it does.
millions of people each year who die from easily treatable illnesses such as Malaria.
Please define what you mean by "easily treatable". Malaria has no silver bullet, and the only available treatments which work consistently are really just preventative measures and are relatively expensive. And since the parasites behind Malaria are evolving resistance to the usual antimalarial drugs, for the most part, once you get it, you're cooked.
Malaria is a highly *intractable* problem that occurs in the poorest parts of the world, which makes dealing with it nearly impossible. That's why its a chronic problem, its not something that would just go away if the whole world threw some money at it. Nobody knows *how* to get rid of it.
H1N1 is known to be highly unstable. It has a tendency to pick up genes from other viruses.
Is it possible these properties will make for a more "dangerous" vaccine than others?
No, they will instead make for a less effective vaccine, because the virus *might* end up mutating faster than we can produce viable vaccines for it. Or it might just fizzle out and disappear, H1N1 is inheriently undependable in this regard, you can't predict its behavior, which is the problem.
What happened to you can actually happen to anyone after taking any vaccine (though normally its rare). Vaccines are in effect a way to give your body a very *weak* version of the virus so it will recognize it as an enemy if the real virus shows up later. Human variability being what it is though, sometimes a very weak version of the virus manages to gain a foothold despite it being weaker, and sometimes it is still enough to trigger a strong, perhaps overly-strong, immune system response.
A miscategorized geological formation isn't newsworthy unless they're trying to imply something else.
Its the corrected categorization that is doing the new "implying" here. The implication that St. Helens may be just one vent from a much larger super-caldera structure is what is significant. Now, whether its true or not is something else, I'm a little skeptical because it doesn't sound to me like the caldera structure at Yellowstone, but whatever...
And no, a super-caldera eruption is not "just another volcano going off". Its a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Super-caldera eruptions are automatically global, catastrophic events simply due to the amount of energy released by them, usually 3+ orders of magnitude greater than a single volcanic event, and the worst of them can be globally life-threatening.
The last time Mt. St. Helen's blew its top in 1980, it ejected ~1.2 km3 of material (cubic kilometers). The last time the Yellowstone caldera blew its top around 600,000 years ago, it ejected ~1,000.0 km3 of material. And the really bad one from the link above (Toba Lake, Sumatra, around 75,000 years ago)? That one ejected ~2,800.0 km3 of material. See the difference? :)
Fortunately, the only good thing about them is that they're rare. Unfortunately, they're very big firecrackers when they go off. How big? If the Yellowstone caldera decides to clear its throat real good in our lifetime, then you being in Florida won't automatically make you safe... That's how big. :)
And it is a big part of what's going wrong with ODF.
The only thing "going wrong" with ODF is that MS is playing its usual games with anything they don't like, and at the top of their don't-like list is open standards they can't control.
I mean really, the claim that its ODF's fault might have had some credibility had MS not already released a plugin that provided perfectly valid, cross-application ODF support. They already knew how to do things the "right" way, but when they later updated Office, they deliberately chose not to.
News reporters seldom seem to actually fully understand reality or what they are reporting
The "Deep Flight Challenger" vehicle has not actually *made* a dive to the bottom of Challenger Deep yet. In fact, its never made *any* deep dive, due to its owner's untimely death before its final completion.
Why would you expect news reporters to mention it? Claiming something is not newsworthy, *doing* that something is.
Which is the computing standard for "new version of app X".
There isn't one, which is precisely why we're having these endless flamewars about the initial state of KDE 4.0 when it was released.
Microsoft IE is not a monopoly.
No, but Windows is, and IE is Win-only, that was how IE itself nearly became one, by piggy-backing on the real monopoly.
Having a choice as to what search engine to use is more important than you think. People will use the default one
Google will work on any OS running almost any web browser, but where is the initial "default" for a search engine set? Oh, that's right, its in the *browser*.
(Seriusly, have you seen how many things set Google as your homepage/search now?
How about IE? :)
Moral of the story: Google gained its dominance by providing something a lot of people liked/wanted but without any other advantages, whereas IE got to where it did by leveraging the Windows monopoly.
Yes, a lot of people simply accept the "default", whatever it is, and this is *exactly* what MS counts on. Half the battle for any company wanting to establish a monopoly is to reach the point where most sheeple accept their product as the "default", if for no other reason than they don't know any better... and that brings us right to the idea of providing alternative browsers *with* Windows, so they will know (at least something) better.
Whether it works or not is another matter, but claiming IE==Google definitely doesn't work.
Treaties do have the power to modify the Constitution.
Just a little nitpick here (but I think an important one):
You're correct in that international treaties are allowed by the US Constitution to "be on par" with it (given the same weight/power), so in that sense the GP is wrong.
However international treaties don't have the power to "modify" the US Constitution, since by definition that would give international treaties *more* power than the US Constitution, never mind that the Constitution is very specific about how it can be (legally) modified (and international treaties are not one of the mentioned methods). So treaties being able to ultimately *supercede* the Constitution is an idea that the US Supreme Court has never accepted.
Its important here to understand what the authors of the Constitution were thinking about when they wrote that part you quoted. The only treaty the US was a signatory to prior to adopting the Constitution was the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionaly War, and that was what the Constitution's framers were referring to, and protecting, in the first part you quoted.
This is an interesting read on the subject, in particular the 'Legal background' and 'Aftermath' sections. Note what is said at the end of that article in the 'Aftermath' section: the bottom line, established by the 2 US Supreme Court cases mentioned there, is that international treaties can't trump the US Constitution.
You've got to love Slashdot groupthink, ...
The mistake I believe you're making is assuming everyone who posts on /. is part of the same "group".
It might have been true early in /.'s history, but not any more. Heck, we've not only got both Windows advocates and Linux advocates now, but the anti-MS folks have since been joined by the anti-FOSS folks too. Its kinda hard to see them all as being in the same "group". :)
War crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces do not justify war crimes committed by the US. It's a very bad road to travel.
True. Unfortunately, I get the impression from the arguments about this that people alive today simply don't realize/remember what the true nature of WWII was. It was the first, and last, example of "industrialized total war". The nature of industrialization, and the fact that all the belligerents had shifted their entire economies to 100% war production, meant that the city populations became "valid" targets, in the reasoning of the time, because they were manning the factories producing war material, and "100% war production" meant all factories were involved in the war effort in some way, so they were all valid targets.
By today's standards its a war crime, of course, but then again, today's standards didn't exist back then, and after 6-12 years of total war and industrial-scale mass slaughter, what is now considered unthinkable, was unfortunately seen merely as "routine" then. Nor did it help that other side had themselves already done these kinds of acts against us, earlier in the war.
The only useful lesson to learn from this, is that any war that is allowed to go on for too long, will end up dehumanizing all of its belligerants, allowing them to do things they otherwise never would have considered, and the Isreali-Palestinian conflict is a prime example of this (with both sides routinely found guilty of war crimes and atrocities).
With Russia entering the war against Japan, they were already going to surrender pretty soon and the US knew it.
Actually, not only did we NOT know this for a fact, but neither did the Japanese. Emperor Hirohito did not actually act until immediately after August 9, when the 2nd bomb was dropped *and* the USSR declared war. 5 days later there was a coup by some in Japan's Army against their own Emperor which was an unthinkable act in their society at the time. So surrender, regardless of conditions, was clearly not agreed upon by all in Japan's elite, with extremists in their Army even prepared to take violent action against their own "divine" emperor, rather than surrender.
That there were those among our leadership convinced that they would, just shows how little we understood the Japanese mindset, even after years of fighting them. The only thing we "knew" with any degree of certainty was that there were elements within Japan's elite ready to "talk about" surrender. Of course we knew in 1943 the exact same thing about Germany (opposition to Hitler, recognition that the war was lost, willingness to surrender), yet the war went on another 2 years...
The US military casualty estimates were originally nowhere near the 1 million level. The figures were being inflated in an attempt to justify the atomic bombings.
[citation needed]
This claim has been made before, but without proof of intent. An equally (or more) plausible reason is that the estimates kept going up as we got intel back from Japan about how they were preparing their *entire* population to "fight to the death". Nor was this without its own supporting evidence, try reading about what US troops encountered during the Okinawa campaign, which had a large component of native Japanese civilians. The suicidal fanaticism exhibited by the Japanese only escalated during '44-'45, rather than decrease, clearly not an indication of a people ready to surrender, and in fact it looked increasingly to the US, as evidence that perhaps an invasion of their homeland would in fact be horrifically bloody for both sides.
However, even if the casualty estimates were right, it still does not justify the bombings.
Unfortunately, in the cruel calculus of total war, it made perfect sense, since the more casualties your country takes as the fighting drags on, the less *value* you see in the lives of the enemy. Sadly,
No 64 bit support.
FYI, the alpha/beta v10.0 of their flashplayer is 64bit now.
From the above link:
Update: Furthering Adobe's commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha refresh of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 2/24/09 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation.
Note: I'm not an Adobe fanboi or anything, so I'm not saying it works well, just pointing out that they appear to be really trying to close the 64bit gap.
FWIW, it does seem to work for most of the things I've used it for, some videos from YouTube, for example, with sound, but I've also noticed it failing to work a couple of times on other things, so YMMV. It all depends on what you try to play with it.
As much as people like to say that this is a price issue, it really isn't. Otherwise, why on earth would OSX be near the 10% range?
Don't most OSX users get it with their Apple computer? How many people buy OSX separate from their Apple machine?
Why on earth would iPhone, and iPod touch be even registering on the radar?
Same reason as OSX. The OS comes with the Apple hardware, and the user has no (legal) choice.
It is not cost.
I think you've missed the GP's point about price. Your price examples above are irrelevant because the user doesn't get a choice in OSes for Apple hardware. The GP is talking about PC-compatible netbooks where there *are* choices for the OS, since the hardware and the OS aren't from the same company.
What the GP is pointing out is that MS doesn't want to see cheap netbooks happen at all, because if end users saw the cost of the (expensive) OS *separate* from the (cheap) hardware, it would lead to trouble for MS. If netbooks keep getting cheaper, then MS is either going to have to accept much less per copy of Windows, or, by not doing that, open the door to competition in the netbook market.
On Windows everything just works
Fanboi much?
Linux is more problematic. First there is very little commercialware support.
If the OS market were a level playing field, support for desktop/netbook Linux would happen, but fighting a monopoly is both expensive and potentially dangerous for a commerical company, so it isn't happening much now (Canonical, with its Ubuntu Linux, being the only example - and they haven't turned a profit yet).
The end result is that Linux will remain a niche product.
Linux is in a niche (on the desktop especially) primarily because it exists in a monopolized market. If you put a leash on the monopoly, then companies would begin to see the possibility for profit by commercializing Linux (and adding the missing functionality you talked about) for the 'average' end user, and Linux/BSD usage would start growing.
WTH? I don't get why this was modded 'flamebait', and I'm not a Windows fanboi.
Come on guys, flamebait/troll != disagree.
alias sex "updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; strip; look; touch; finger; unzip
Ok, that is funny, if only because this is the closest thing to sex most /.'ers will get to, but, being a /.'er with nothing better to do, and this being the only kind of 'sex' I can reasonably look forward to, isn't a little incomplete? Shouldn't it be more like:
alias sex `updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; unzip; strip; look; touch; finger; join; fsck; make clean`
or something similar?
As I see it, from my understanding of our geek definition of 'sex' (and the fact that I'm a male!), you left out the most important part. :)
I'm also idly wondering if there's a website with all the various aliases for sex that geeks have come up with (or the one 'best' one), since the available Unix commands have been changing over the years.
Why? Something that doesn't degrade... isn't a problem.
... unless it ends up in the Pacific Ocean. :)
We're now beginning to see the long term consequences of plastic in that section of the Pacific north-west of Hawaii, that's now being referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". There is tons of small bits, and a lot of larger bits, of plastic still floating around out there, *decades* after it entered the Pacific from various sources.
Large bits do break down to smaller bits, but if it doesn't biodegrade, then it never really goes away .
Unfortunately, not all plastic finds its way to an out-of-sight-out-of-mind land-fill, which is the only good place for it, since the damn stuff just won't die. :)
I don't think a post that makes a unsubstantiated allegation without even a link deserves any + mods
Welcome to Slashdot! :)
And yes, I agree with you, but our system allows the same people who do post unsubstantiated claims, to also be the moderators, so as long as humans are involved, a "perfect" system just isn't possible ... much like our political system. :D
IANAL either, but AFAICT the only reason it would be hard to prove in a court of law is because it would be hard to prove fullstop. A payee agreeing to wear a wiretap is proof, but someone on teh internets saying bad shit about ATI is probably just a troll or a unhappy customer.
Well, in this particular case, I'm referring to the allegation that this poster of false information about AMD was working for NVIDIA. Proving the information to be false would be easy, but proving the connection between the poster and NVIDIA, after the fact, would be the hard part, I believe, and without that connection, there would be no basis for legal action.
As for my difference between "knowing something and proving it", that was just a reference to the common situation where there would be enough evidence that would convince a layman of a connection (such as, perhaps, tux), but not enough for a conviction in a court of law, which has a higher, and more strict, standard for "evidence" and "guilt".
I don't know what evidence 'electrosoccertux' has on this either, I just listed several reasons why AMD wouldn't want to get involved in a legal fight right now. You'll need to ask him to back up his claim.
As for "preponderance of evidence", if it were relatively easy to win legal fights like this, we'd see companies sueing one another every time one company explicity mentions a competitor in an advertisement in a deceptive/misleading way, and this kind of advertising seems to me to be fairly common. Even if it is relatively easy to win, I suspect the cost of a legal fight keeps companies from going crazy over what other companies say about them, or when they do something like plant false rumors, etc.
However, IANAL, so feel free to ignore/flame me. :)
It's cheaper to just take your glasses off, IMO.
Listen here youngster, if I took my glasses off, I'd have to go back to 320x240 on my 21' monitor. It'd either be that, or sit close enough to the screen that I get a nice suntan.
Please, won't anyone think of the geezers?
Really? If this is *known* why doesn't ATI sue?
Because knowing something and proving it in a court of law are two different things?
As a corporation, you don't *normally* go around sueing individuals just for saying bad things about you, and *proving* the NVIDIA link would be the really hard part, legally.
Besides, ATI, now also known as AMD, is too embroiled right now in a legal fight with the 800lb gorilla of the hardware world, known to all as Intel, to be going around picking other fights, especially in a bad economy.