What would you call coal? Or diamond? Or graphite? A fluid?
Carbon dating isn't used for coal because it's typically far older than the roughly 50,000 years carbon dating is usable for, and because for most of it the source of carbon may be far, far older, rather than containing C14 released into the biosphere, especially via the atmosphere, from radioactive decay. It's not not because there's "no carbon".
The mishandling of C14 claims used by creationists is its own amusing topic: please don't confuse the two.
Oh, my. There was a hysterically funny sketch on Carol Burnett, decades about an alcoholic wine expert who was lured into a final tasting match against another expert. His opponent's failing description included the type of wine, the year, the winery, and the name of the girl who stomped the grapes. But he got the name of the girl wrong.
The alcoholic's winning description was "Isss g-o-o-d".
Actually, hip fractures are quite common for old people. They often break when the person is standing up from a sitting position, which used to be mis-diagnosed as "fell when getting up". Some of the relevant data is described at http://www.pnas.org/content/102/41/14819.abstract. And from experience with some old relatives, as long as they're splinted and the leg supported in the most comfortable position for that person, it's quite surprising how calm they can be about it. So I suspect that "hearing the screaming" wasn't happening.
_Moving_ them and bouncing around the fractured joint, especially if you're not careful, strong, and knowledgeable can cause an amazing amount of pain and damage. I've watched an ambulance crew moving an old relative from their nursing home to a hospital for a broken hip, and it was clearly awkward, but the relative wasn't in constant pain nor were they shouting except when being moved. They also did have a new hip joint implanted very quickly, and had years more of reasonable life.
It's Xenix. Ancient Xenix. Kermit wasn't commercial software, it was (and is) freeware. (http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/) Finding a way to compile and transfer Kermit to such an ancient system would take some serious archeological research, and some luck, because I certainly wouldn't expect to find it in Xenix from the days when Microsoft published it.
Given that it's only 10 Megabytes, "cu" or "uucp" it over the serial port twice and compare the results. Then, when you're entirely confident, consider using your controller in a newer system to do a modern Linux or UNIX "dd" of the entire disk image. I'd be fascinated to know what filesystem that ancient OS used, and if there are drivers available in a modern Linux to actually read it directly. Perhaps someone here or on an old Xenix support group would know.
There's also an odd source of SCO expertise that may be helpful, since SCO took over Xenix: the forums over at www.groklaw.net.
He did wait. His bank reported it as valid, and only after that did he send along the $190,000 to his client. Then the first check was bounced, _after_ his bank reported it valid. That's the root of a whole set of fiscal scams going on right now, the fact that banks report checks as "valid" that can still be voided by a malicisious check user after that point.
The patent agreement with Microsoft was fascinating: it cost them Jeremy Allison, who I rather thought was the real reason Microsoft _wanted_ to trap SuSe in a web of patent issues. Even with the obvious failures of the deal to provide the open source publicity and support for cooperation with Microsoft's vague and undocumented patent claims, it was still well worth the money to Microsoft to leave Novell struggling and confusing the market with Netware, and driving Jeremy Allison away and slowing Samba development.
True, but you also have to prepare a budget for it. You can choose the contracts for careless or even malicious customers who would not accept a more sane or secure overall environment, including spammers and l33t d00dz who insist that "the Internet is free!!!" and "why can't I run my own NFS/SMB/HTTP/SMTP/FTP/IRC/Bittorrent server, I paid my $19.99/month!!!!" And slapping them down and turning them away lowers your potential customer base: a lot of ISP's worry a lot about "market penetration", and rely on being the locally dominant player. Following up properly on complaints against those abuse customsers also takes serious engineering and legal reources, none of which generates revenue.
Conversely, some ISP's do well with the superior service being security aware can provide. They don't get overwhelmed by surprise Bittorrent or FTP deluges against hosted servers, they channel outbound SMTP through servers that require authentication so the spambots can achieve nothing without passwords and they disconnect machines spewing Windows worms around their local network. and they keep their routers up-to-date with security patches to avoid getting re-routed. Some of us appreciate the resulting protection, and pay for it in our monthly bill rather than in expensive internal engineering cleaning up the messes.
Because it does make your network less safe. Having the script kiddies, the spammers, and the harvesters active on your subnet exposes you much more directly to their abuses, and to the likelihood that your logs will be cluttered with the attacks from their servers. It also gets _you_ added to email blacklists and routing table blackholes, because your customers may be tired of the abuse from your network and find it far simply to simply block you.
The expense of a more reliable and secure server is an issue. But there's nothing like the self-righteous DDOS attacks that have occurred against networks that serve abusers to clutter the traffic of even innocent clients: it imperils the service for legitimate, paying customers. Cases like "agis.net", who hosted the Cyberpromo spammers before a DDOS against them finally got them to take action, make a fascinating study in the risks of hosting abusers. Conversely, xinnet.com in China is happy to host spammers: with the size of their service and the limited choices available to consumers in China, they're effectively immune from prosecution or attack.
Sadly, this is too often true. I've been watching the non-disclosure craziness around corporate agreements as part of my work for years, as an engineer involved with the products and services and sometimes fixing the IT so those bureaucrats can communicate reliably. The amazing divide between the hammering of the "no insider trading" given to the hourly or non-management employees, and the truly amazing conversations about insider information shared illegally and fraudulently with management in such deals is.... Oh, dear lord, it's pretty amazing.
Keep a good eye on the person who always wants a new, non-standard laptop and the latest cell phone and refuses, absolutely, to allow updates to his laptop. Those seem to correlate well with the people who commit such behavior.
That's not clear: while he claimed to be a scientologist at several times, it's not obvious at this late date how far he progressed. And there was allegedly a big sweep of scientology files when Manson was caught, to remove any reference, so it's hard to track now.
I understand that you're being facetious. But a key difference is that the pope's word is not absolute law to his followers, and analysis and dissent is normal and public. (We could discuss the few occasions where the pope's word has been declared law: they're fascinating.) Another is that the beliefs on which communion, confession, etc. are based is available publicly, and the nature of the rituals is well published. I also agree that the pederasty permitted by Catholic leadership was abominable, but it doesn't seem to have been _policy_ to engage in it. It seems merely to have been hushed up, which is awful. As near as I can tell, it destroyed the chances of becoming Pope of Cardinal Law of Boston.
It's not the same as, for example, the clitoridectomy (graphically shown at http://islammonitor.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1460) engaged in by some more extreme believers of other religions, where a majority of local clerics still support it. So if you want to do comparisons of "religiously sanctioned" practices, well, we could go there.
The distinction between cult and religion can get slippery. There have _certainly_ been christian cults.
"Having money" is not the same as profitable. Anyone who bought property in the last 5 years and is now in debt with mortgage payments they can't make can tell you this. And money leached to the pckets of a few leaders does not make the overall enterprise profitable. Anyone who's selling laundry balls as a pyramid scheme can tell you that. (The scientology owned company, Trade-Net, discovered this. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_ball#Consumer_protection_and_Scientology_link)
And you've been misled, possibly by the propaganda scientology's propaganda arm was publishing about CAN. It's a practice L. Ron Hubbard called "dead agenting": making someone look so bad that no one would believe them, and it's what Mary Sue Hubbard and the leadership of the Guardian's Office went to jail for. (Among other acts, they faked bomb threats to discredit Paulette Cooper, the author of "The Scandal of Scientology".)
The fraud about CAN was persistent and nasty: they do the same thing now about psychologists, putting up leaflets and articles with their "Citizen's Commission of Human Rights" which is a scientology front, with vague claims about rapes and abuses without names, dates, or references. They attempt to scare people away from other resources that might question scientology or lead them in other directions with a long history of fraud. Hop over to www.xenu.net for some history of this: I couldn't possibly make it all up.
More to the point, CAN didn't do forcible deprogramming. They were convicted of conspiracy for referring Jason Scott's mother to a deprogrammer, Rick Ross, which both CAN and Rick Ross said they did not do. And it's even more fascinating: Jason Scott has changed attorneys from Kendrick Moxon, the high-level Scientologist and former Guardian's Office member, to Graham Berry, an attorney who's handled several large lawsuits against Scientology. (An announcement from the new law company is at http://www.lermanet.com/cos/can1.html) Mr. Scott believes that Kendrick Moxon didn't represent him properly in court, and that Moxon used the lawsuit instead as a weapon to attck CAN. (CAN went bankrupt: it is now owned and staffed by scientologists.)
I couldn't make this material up: it's just too convuluted for wards.
This was very profoundly not my experience when helping a corporate partner price and sell equipment. Prices for hardware are advertised _without_ VAT. Slipping in and out portions of VAT depending on the upstream vendor's behavior was insane. And oh, dear lord, if you had a sale, the VAT numbers got even more insane.
Given that sales tax varies based on type of purchase in some states, and is weird numbers like 6.5% in others, it can vary quite a lot. And oh, my dear lord, try dealing with "valua-added-tax" in Europe....
Yes, that's a flashback to a lot of projects since the invention of money. Oh, and you also need bio-compatible LED's tested on real animals and real humans. And you need to provide, and test, actually enhanced signals that the human eye can use, rather than Powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Project plans and startup budget plans. And oh, yes, a valid reason to justify stuffing the system into expensive contact lenses rather than ordinary, more robust and safer to wear goggles.
The target isn't that small. The fact that being virtualized breaks their security models is a big issue, and indicative of other big issues. (Using virtualization to break copy protection is one of my personal favorites.) And there are plenty of home and business users who have gotten Windows Vista machines foisted onto them who use and need to use Windows XP for software compatibility reasons, and who therefore run old games or critical applications in Windows XP under Virtual PC. I've done it myself for debugging purposes, when I've had spare licenses but not spare desktop systems.
Amway actually sells products. They're a bit odd, but for a lonely bachelor or housewife, having a sales person turn up at your door and let you know about deals on things you actually use like plates and dishes and paper towels can be helpful. And for a _modest_ percentage of households, it can be a few hours of work a week that feeds that fourth kid.
It's the high pressure "make your friends into salespeople, that makes you money" that makes them an addictive and much hated pyramid scheme. But they've managed to stay in business because they actually sell a useful set of products, and they don't engage in the wholesale fraud of the "laundry balls" or the "Mangosteen Juice" or "Scientology E-Meters".
Yes, they do. But not all leaders create that isolation of the most devout, the separation of them not only from their families but from their cultures. The Bible hints that Jesus didn't, that he "dined with sinners", much to the shock of his most devout followers. And Paul, as one of his apostles, certainly did not insist on absolute spiritual rigor for new followers. So I think Jesus was a very unusual such leader, a charismatic but more open one than is typical for a cult. I rather wish I'd met him, to hear what he had to say without centuries of "doctrine" overlaid on top of his ideas.
No, I'm afraid not. "God" doesn't count as the "leader": he's not around to actually make the rules and announce laws and accept members personally, except nominally through his "representatives". It's "God's chosen" who tends to be the cult leader. The pope, like the archbishop of Canterbury, doesn't have the kind of unquestioned and fanatical loyalty the leaders of cults tend to have.
The Catholics at least have their core document, the Bible, published. And there doesn't seem to be the levels of belief, with the mysteries only explained to initiates at each level. This is a historical change: when the Gutenberg press was invented, the Catholic Church was very unhappy at the prospect of bibles in the hands of non-priests. But they've opened up since then.
Nice try, and completely false. Quoting from Wikipedia, which seems to have good material on this:
> CAN was driven into bankruptcy when a court found CAN guilty of having conspired to violate the civil rights and religious liberties of Jason Scott, a Pentecostalist, who had been forcibly kidnapped and subjected to a failed "deprogramming" by Rick Ross, a CAN-referred deprogrammer.
The plaintiffs lawyer, Kendrick Moxon, was then sued by his client for failing to serve his client and instead using the case to harass Cult Awareness Network. Kendrick Moxon was a member of Scientology's "Guardian Office", the group led by Mary Sue Hubbard that had its leadership raided by the FBI and convicted not only of harassment, but of planting fake bomb threats to discredit the author Paulette Cooper and her book, "The Scandal of Scientology".
These are not nice people, at least at the senior levels of the cult.
Try asbestos insulation. The poisonous effects aren't obvious at first, but it eventually infests and clogs the flow of important things, like oxygen or the data you actually care about.
True. Why do you _think_ WinFS failed, and why do you _think_ Microsoft's super-patented OOXML technologies are unusable by anyone who actually understands markup languages?
Not legally. MP3 remains patented in the USA, and only licensees who pay the fees, or for whom the patent owners are willing to _accept_ fees, have been able to use it. This has actually been a serious problem for "free" operating systems, with whom the patent owners have either refused to cooperate or charged genuinely outrageous fees.
Fortunately, if you're not in the USA, there are plenty of downloadable players at locations like the "Penguin Liberation Front", which also has DVD decryption utilities, game emulators, and software with strange licenses that don't easily permit their use in Linux distributions.
There is an incredible performance penalty for most object oriented code written by beginners: they aren't taught to avoid the layers of abstraction that eat away at your performance, and they often hide incredible errors behind layers of abstraction that make debugging a nightmare.
Python seems a good compromise: as a scripted language, it's quite portable. It has good text processing, there's a large base of small examples to teach students with, and it doesn't suffer from that horrid mass of badly written, interdependendent, unstable and unnecessary utilities known as CPAN that clutters a lot of Perl programming.
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What would you call coal? Or diamond? Or graphite? A fluid?
Carbon dating isn't used for coal because it's typically far older than the roughly 50,000 years carbon dating is usable for, and because for most of it the source of carbon may be far, far older, rather than containing C14 released into the biosphere, especially via the atmosphere, from radioactive decay. It's not not because there's "no carbon".
The mishandling of C14 claims used by creationists is its own amusing topic: please don't confuse the two.
Oh, my. There was a hysterically funny sketch on Carol Burnett, decades about an alcoholic wine expert who was lured into a final tasting match against another expert. His opponent's failing description included the type of wine, the year, the winery, and the name of the girl who stomped the grapes. But he got the name of the girl wrong.
The alcoholic's winning description was "Isss g-o-o-d".
Actually, hip fractures are quite common for old people. They often break when the person is standing up from a sitting position, which used to be mis-diagnosed as "fell when getting up". Some of the relevant data is described at http://www.pnas.org/content/102/41/14819.abstract. And from experience with some old relatives, as long as they're splinted and the leg supported in the most comfortable position for that person, it's quite surprising how calm they can be about it. So I suspect that "hearing the screaming" wasn't happening.
_Moving_ them and bouncing around the fractured joint, especially if you're not careful, strong, and knowledgeable can cause an amazing amount of pain and damage. I've watched an ambulance crew moving an old relative from their nursing home to a hospital for a broken hip, and it was clearly awkward, but the relative wasn't in constant pain nor were they shouting except when being moved. They also did have a new hip joint implanted very quickly, and had years more of reasonable life.
It's Xenix. Ancient Xenix. Kermit wasn't commercial software, it was (and is) freeware. (http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/) Finding a way to compile and transfer Kermit to such an ancient system would take some serious archeological research, and some luck, because I certainly wouldn't expect to find it in Xenix from the days when Microsoft published it.
Given that it's only 10 Megabytes, "cu" or "uucp" it over the serial port twice and compare the results. Then, when you're entirely confident, consider using your controller in a newer system to do a modern Linux or UNIX "dd" of the entire disk image. I'd be fascinated to know what filesystem that ancient OS used, and if there are drivers available in a modern Linux to actually read it directly. Perhaps someone here or on an old Xenix support group would know.
There's also an odd source of SCO expertise that may be helpful, since SCO took over Xenix: the forums over at www.groklaw.net.
He did wait. His bank reported it as valid, and only after that did he send along the $190,000 to his client. Then the first check was bounced, _after_ his bank reported it valid. That's the root of a whole set of fiscal scams going on right now, the fact that banks report checks as "valid" that can still be voided by a malicisious check user after that point.
The patent agreement with Microsoft was fascinating: it cost them Jeremy Allison, who I rather thought was the real reason Microsoft _wanted_ to trap SuSe in a web of patent issues. Even with the obvious failures of the deal to provide the open source publicity and support for cooperation with Microsoft's vague and undocumented patent claims, it was still well worth the money to Microsoft to leave Novell struggling and confusing the market with Netware, and driving Jeremy Allison away and slowing Samba development.
True, but you also have to prepare a budget for it. You can choose the contracts for careless or even malicious customers who would not accept a more sane or secure overall environment, including spammers and l33t d00dz who insist that "the Internet is free!!!" and "why can't I run my own NFS/SMB/HTTP/SMTP/FTP/IRC/Bittorrent server, I paid my $19.99/month!!!!" And slapping them down and turning them away lowers your potential customer base: a lot of ISP's worry a lot about "market penetration", and rely on being the locally dominant player. Following up properly on complaints against those abuse customsers also takes serious engineering and legal reources, none of which generates revenue.
Conversely, some ISP's do well with the superior service being security aware can provide. They don't get overwhelmed by surprise Bittorrent or FTP deluges against hosted servers, they channel outbound SMTP through servers that require authentication so the spambots can achieve nothing without passwords and they disconnect machines spewing Windows worms around their local network. and they keep their routers up-to-date with security patches to avoid getting re-routed. Some of us appreciate the resulting protection, and pay for it in our monthly bill rather than in expensive internal engineering cleaning up the messes.
Because it does make your network less safe. Having the script kiddies, the spammers, and the harvesters active on your subnet exposes you much more directly to their abuses, and to the likelihood that your logs will be cluttered with the attacks from their servers. It also gets _you_ added to email blacklists and routing table blackholes, because your customers may be tired of the abuse from your network and find it far simply to simply block you.
The expense of a more reliable and secure server is an issue. But there's nothing like the self-righteous DDOS attacks that have occurred against networks that serve abusers to clutter the traffic of even innocent clients: it imperils the service for legitimate, paying customers. Cases like "agis.net", who hosted the Cyberpromo spammers before a DDOS against them finally got them to take action, make a fascinating study in the risks of hosting abusers. Conversely, xinnet.com in China is happy to host spammers: with the size of their service and the limited choices available to consumers in China, they're effectively immune from prosecution or attack.
Sadly, this is too often true. I've been watching the non-disclosure craziness around corporate agreements as part of my work for years, as an engineer involved with the products and services and sometimes fixing the IT so those bureaucrats can communicate reliably. The amazing divide between the hammering of the "no insider trading" given to the hourly or non-management employees, and the truly amazing conversations about insider information shared illegally and fraudulently with management in such deals is.... Oh, dear lord, it's pretty amazing.
Keep a good eye on the person who always wants a new, non-standard laptop and the latest cell phone and refuses, absolutely, to allow updates to his laptop. Those seem to correlate well with the people who commit such behavior.
That's not clear: while he claimed to be a scientologist at several times, it's not obvious at this late date how far he progressed. And there was allegedly a big sweep of scientology files when Manson was caught, to remove any reference, so it's hard to track now.
I understand that you're being facetious. But a key difference is that the pope's word is not absolute law to his followers, and analysis and dissent is normal and public. (We could discuss the few occasions where the pope's word has been declared law: they're fascinating.) Another is that the beliefs on which communion, confession, etc. are based is available publicly, and the nature of the rituals is well published. I also agree that the pederasty permitted by Catholic leadership was abominable, but it doesn't seem to have been _policy_ to engage in it. It seems merely to have been hushed up, which is awful. As near as I can tell, it destroyed the chances of becoming Pope of Cardinal Law of Boston.
It's not the same as, for example, the clitoridectomy (graphically shown at http://islammonitor.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1460) engaged in by some more extreme believers of other religions, where a majority of local clerics still support it. So if you want to do comparisons of "religiously sanctioned" practices, well, we could go there.
The distinction between cult and religion can get slippery. There have _certainly_ been christian cults.
"Having money" is not the same as profitable. Anyone who bought property in the last 5 years and is now in debt with mortgage payments they can't make can tell you this. And money leached to the pckets of a few leaders does not make the overall enterprise profitable. Anyone who's selling laundry balls as a pyramid scheme can tell you that. (The scientology owned company, Trade-Net, discovered this. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_ball#Consumer_protection_and_Scientology_link)
I couldn't make this stuff up. It's too amazing.
And you've been misled, possibly by the propaganda scientology's propaganda arm was publishing about CAN. It's a practice L. Ron Hubbard called "dead agenting": making someone look so bad that no one would believe them, and it's what Mary Sue Hubbard and the leadership of the Guardian's Office went to jail for. (Among other acts, they faked bomb threats to discredit Paulette Cooper, the author of "The Scandal of Scientology".)
The fraud about CAN was persistent and nasty: they do the same thing now about psychologists, putting up leaflets and articles with their "Citizen's Commission of Human Rights" which is a scientology front, with vague claims about rapes and abuses without names, dates, or references. They attempt to scare people away from other resources that might question scientology or lead them in other directions with a long history of fraud. Hop over to www.xenu.net for some history of this: I couldn't possibly make it all up.
More to the point, CAN didn't do forcible deprogramming. They were convicted of conspiracy for referring Jason Scott's mother to a deprogrammer, Rick Ross, which both CAN and Rick Ross said they did not do. And it's even more fascinating: Jason Scott has changed attorneys from Kendrick Moxon, the high-level Scientologist and former Guardian's Office member, to Graham Berry, an attorney who's handled several large lawsuits against Scientology. (An announcement from the new law company is at http://www.lermanet.com/cos/can1.html) Mr. Scott believes that Kendrick Moxon didn't represent him properly in court, and that Moxon used the lawsuit instead as a weapon to attck CAN. (CAN went bankrupt: it is now owned and staffed by scientologists.)
I couldn't make this material up: it's just too convuluted for wards.
This was very profoundly not my experience when helping a corporate partner price and sell equipment. Prices for hardware are advertised _without_ VAT. Slipping in and out portions of VAT depending on the upstream vendor's behavior was insane. And oh, dear lord, if you had a sale, the VAT numbers got even more insane.
Given that sales tax varies based on type of purchase in some states, and is weird numbers like 6.5% in others, it can vary quite a lot. And oh, my dear lord, try dealing with "valua-added-tax" in Europe....
> All we need is more money.
Yes, that's a flashback to a lot of projects since the invention of money. Oh, and you also need bio-compatible LED's tested on real animals and real humans. And you need to provide, and test, actually enhanced signals that the human eye can use, rather than Powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Project plans and startup budget plans. And oh, yes, a valid reason to justify stuffing the system into expensive contact lenses rather than ordinary, more robust and safer to wear goggles.
The target isn't that small. The fact that being virtualized breaks their security models is a big issue, and indicative of other big issues. (Using virtualization to break copy protection is one of my personal favorites.) And there are plenty of home and business users who have gotten Windows Vista machines foisted onto them who use and need to use Windows XP for software compatibility reasons, and who therefore run old games or critical applications in Windows XP under Virtual PC. I've done it myself for debugging purposes, when I've had spare licenses but not spare desktop systems.
Amway actually sells products. They're a bit odd, but for a lonely bachelor or housewife, having a sales person turn up at your door and let you know about deals on things you actually use like plates and dishes and paper towels can be helpful. And for a _modest_ percentage of households, it can be a few hours of work a week that feeds that fourth kid.
It's the high pressure "make your friends into salespeople, that makes you money" that makes them an addictive and much hated pyramid scheme. But they've managed to stay in business because they actually sell a useful set of products, and they don't engage in the wholesale fraud of the "laundry balls" or the "Mangosteen Juice" or "Scientology E-Meters".
Yes, they do. But not all leaders create that isolation of the most devout, the separation of them not only from their families but from their cultures. The Bible hints that Jesus didn't, that he "dined with sinners", much to the shock of his most devout followers. And Paul, as one of his apostles, certainly did not insist on absolute spiritual rigor for new followers. So I think Jesus was a very unusual such leader, a charismatic but more open one than is typical for a cult. I rather wish I'd met him, to hear what he had to say without centuries of "doctrine" overlaid on top of his ideas.
No, I'm afraid not. "God" doesn't count as the "leader": he's not around to actually make the rules and announce laws and accept members personally, except nominally through his "representatives". It's "God's chosen" who tends to be the cult leader. The pope, like the archbishop of Canterbury, doesn't have the kind of unquestioned and fanatical loyalty the leaders of cults tend to have.
The Catholics at least have their core document, the Bible, published. And there doesn't seem to be the levels of belief, with the mysteries only explained to initiates at each level. This is a historical change: when the Gutenberg press was invented, the Catholic Church was very unhappy at the prospect of bibles in the hands of non-priests. But they've opened up since then.
Nice try, and completely false. Quoting from Wikipedia, which seems to have good material on this:
> CAN was driven into bankruptcy when a court found CAN guilty of having conspired to violate the civil rights and religious liberties of Jason Scott, a Pentecostalist, who had been forcibly kidnapped and subjected to a failed "deprogramming" by Rick Ross, a CAN-referred deprogrammer.
The plaintiffs lawyer, Kendrick Moxon, was then sued by his client for failing to serve his client and instead using the case to harass Cult Awareness Network. Kendrick Moxon was a member of Scientology's "Guardian Office", the group led by Mary Sue Hubbard that had its leadership raided by the FBI and convicted not only of harassment, but of planting fake bomb threats to discredit the author Paulette Cooper and her book, "The Scandal of Scientology".
These are not nice people, at least at the senior levels of the cult.
Try asbestos insulation. The poisonous effects aren't obvious at first, but it eventually infests and clogs the flow of important things, like oxygen or the data you actually care about.
True. Why do you _think_ WinFS failed, and why do you _think_ Microsoft's super-patented OOXML technologies are unusable by anyone who actually understands markup languages?
Not legally. MP3 remains patented in the USA, and only licensees who pay the fees, or for whom the patent owners are willing to _accept_ fees, have been able to use it. This has actually been a serious problem for "free" operating systems, with whom the patent owners have either refused to cooperate or charged genuinely outrageous fees.
Fortunately, if you're not in the USA, there are plenty of downloadable players at locations like the "Penguin Liberation Front", which also has DVD decryption utilities, game emulators, and software with strange licenses that don't easily permit their use in Linux distributions.
There is an incredible performance penalty for most object oriented code written by beginners: they aren't taught to avoid the layers of abstraction that eat away at your performance, and they often hide incredible errors behind layers of abstraction that make debugging a nightmare.
Python seems a good compromise: as a scripted language, it's quite portable. It has good text processing, there's a large base of small examples to teach students with, and it doesn't suffer from that horrid mass of badly written, interdependendent, unstable and unnecessary utilities known as CPAN that clutters a lot of Perl programming.