The big reason for pushing out the business editions first was because MS sold a lot of Software Assurance licenses with the understanding that Vista upgrades would be included. The first licenses are going to begin expiring this month, so MS would have been in the position of having to extend those licenses to meet their promises. The enterprise sector would have looked on software assurance for the OS as being just a bill of goods that MS was trying to sell them if Vista hadn't shipped within the license date.
He's politically radioactive after shutting down the government in budget battles with Clinton.
Which I've never understood. Shutting down the government showed people some things-- the biggest was that much of the government is superfluous, and that having a good amount of the government not working didn't effect much. The press was all in a titter looking for the horrible effects of the government shutdown, and the most the were able to find was that a few people couldn't get passports and government workers weren't getting paid. That more than anything else is what got the politicians to hammer out a deal. It wasn't that the government had ground to a hault, it was that it had ground to a hault and it wasn't effecting much. They had to get it started up again before voters realized that much of the bureaucracy isn't needed. It must have scared the hell out of the politicians and the bureaucraticic drones.
And it is well known science that adaptation works on existing genes. Adaptation does not turn worms into people. Adaptation is just variation within the existing types. It is only a philosophical belief based on rejection of real science that allows the idea that adaption can lead from pond scum to humanity.
I'm thinking that my MS in Cellular and Molecular Biology has given me a pretty good handle on what real science is when it comes to this issue. Your objection is a purely religious one and not a scientific one. Adaptation, obviously, works on existing genes, because if they didn't exist, there could be no natural selection working upon them, could there be? But, it has been observed in both the wild and in the lab, that new genes can arise through mechanisms that are quite well understood. And once these new genes are present in an individual the can effect that individual's chances of producing offspring.
And just to be clear, this is not a debate that is scientific in any way-- creationists lost in that arena over a hundred years ago. This is totally a social and political question. There are almost no reputable scientists that doubt evolution. The anti-evolutionists are religiously motivated individuals that try to foist their religious beliefs upon the rest of society through political means.
And just so you know, I have no animosity for creationists (be they Christian or any other variety). Two of my best friends are born again Christians, one, whom was a lab mate of mine in grad school, is what people call a theistic evolutionist, which means he thinks God is responsible for it all, but that what science has illucidated thus far appears to be correct. The other's beliefs border upon young earth creationism, but feels that the issue isn't of much importance to him or his faith, so he doesn't much care one way or the other. The only way that their religious beliefs effect our friendship is that we don't usually get together on Sundays, other than that, it doesn't effect things much at all.
It's not a knock for or against evolution, just a thought that people too quickly label "evolution" that which is simply stronger traits surviving under different conditions.
Huh? You're making a distinction that doesn't exist. Evolution is the change of the frequencies of alleles within a population over time do to differential reproductive success of individuals. There are a lot of reasons for this differential reproductive success, but two biggies are being alive to reproduce (you didn't get eaten or starve to death) and that you are acceptable to a member of the opposite sex (If you're big and tough and can find lots of food, it doesn't matter, because if the girls don't like the way you look, you don't pass on your genes).
Basically this is what you are defining as adaptation, and then call it different than evolution, which you don't define. Usually the people that I see making this distinction are opponents of evolution that do so because they can't deny adaptation or "micro evolution" (to many examples available in real life), but still want to be able to argue against evolution on a larger scale.
Anyways, the point is, adaptation is evolution by the definition that biologists use. Defining it otherwise is what people do in order to protect their religious and philosophical beliefs.
If he had bothered to patent it, he could have been a billionaire by now.
To interject, a spreadsheet was a big piece of paper with a grid on it and a place to put formulas so that it was easier to organize your work. Business school students were taught to make and use these, and certain industries had preprinted ones, prior to the first "electronic spreadsheet" being invented. This guy took a pre-existing idea and made a program that did the calculations automatically. It's doubtful that a patent would have had much force.
No, it means that none of their mitochondrial DNA survives in modern humans. Like with the mitochondrial Eve study, people misinterpret these results. mtDNA passes down from mother to children, so specific matralineal lines can die out, yet still contribute genes to the population-- a male hybrid whose mother was Neanderthal and whose father was human (H sapiens sapeins) would pass on is genomic DNA to his offspring, but not his Neanderthal mtDNA, and a female hybrid who's mother was a human and whose father was Neanderthal wouldn't have any Neanderthal mtDNA to pass on. So easily, in half the cases of Homo sapiens sapiens and Home sapiens neadertalis hybrids (if there ever really was such a thing) Neanderthal mtDNA would not enter in the the population.
I'm very glad to live in a country with extremely strict firearms laws, in fact I don't think I know a single person who owns a gun.
I know several people with guns all of which have been legally acquired. None of these law-abiding gun owners have ever used them to commit a crime or shot at any people. It's the people that acquire them illegally that do that, so what you end up with is removing the guns from the hands of the responsible and law-abiding while really not effecting the illegal trade and use of firearms. Seems pretty pointless.
OK fine. But crappy technology is hardly a "shenanigan", is it? Phrasing it that way, one would think that someone was deliberately causing this, as opposed to crappy touchscreens being the cause. Therefore, the summary and TFA, in that paragon of journalism "The Register", is FUD.
And from TFA:
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
SO what we have here is a few incidents with misaligned screens, and a some of the cases, the screen registered the republican instead of the democrat, and of course the press picked up on those in order to feed the conspiracy theories. Actually, the story picked a single incident that that happened in.
So to recap TFA:
There are reports of errors with the voting machines. These appear to be relatively minor and the poll workers are trained to fix them. Some districts keep records of maintenance, some don't, and at least one seals the machines for later review. And in one case, the voter was selecting a Democrat, but it came up Republican, but after three tries they were able to vote for the candidate they wanted. Then they called the press.
Excuse me, but making a big deal about this is just FUD.
So, did anyone else read the headline and think that this was about a bar cracking down on a bunch of lawyers sitting around on their laptops on a free wifi connection and using up all their bandwidth? I suspect the story might be a bit more interesting if the did?
Some users freak out when the "screens" are different.
It's one of those things that get glossed over by most slashdotters, but a good portion of people that use computers for their jobs do not like them and absolutely hate it when anything is changed. Where a lot of us will dual or triple boot different OSes, and spend hours tweaking things to just like we want, only to reformat and start over with something else, these people have invested time to learn how to use a tool and don't want to have to learn how to do something new-- it's just time wasted that could be spend better elsewhere.
I once did an upgrade at a job where I was the entire IT department, and made everyone move to Outlook from what had been a mixed environment, with a good amount of people using Outlook express. One of the buyers was so upset by the switch from Outlook Express to Outlook, that she didn't talk to me for two months.
Eye candy, new features, etc., are only wanted by a subset of the user base, Jenny Officeworker, for the most part, would like things to stay the same, and doesn't want to retrain on something new. In the long run, they'll stick with what they know or the next closest thing if they have to change.
IANAL, but the right to search and seizure without warrant has been around under certain cases since the inception of the country, and is not unconstitutional. The Coast Guard and the Treasury Department (the CG used to be part of the Treasury dept, later Transportation, and now Homeland Security) are two agencies that, under certain circumstances, search and seize without warrant, probable cause, or any other justification required. There is a long precident for this, and legislation reguarding goes back to the first congress.
Seriously, I've been reading slashdot for a couple of years (but not TFAs of course), and I didn't even know that there was an enlightment category, let alone not even recognizing the icon when I saw it. Though it should have been used on the "Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3" story from a while back http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/ 1342243 , because they are apparently going to use E17 when/if it comes out.
I know that this may sound a little too "tinfoil hat", but the thing that scares me the most about this is the potential for backdoors, spyware, and other nefarious modifications in this grey market hardware. Where would you detect the spying? This is potentially A Bad Thing(tm).
Yes, I know that so far no-one has found anything like that, but the potential creeps me out. One of the reasons people buy Cisco gear is because they trust the company. Counterfeit goods weaken the brand value and in and of themselves generate FUD.
Actually, weren't there reports of US intelligence pulling just this kind of thing in the first gulf war? They'd sold Iraq some printers that were supposed to glitch Iraqi computers when at a set time or when given a certain signal. Though my recollection is that it didn't work-- likely because the command and control (not to mention the power grid) was already off line due to big bombs landing on top of them.
You can call some people sheep all of the time, and you can call all people sheep some of the time, but you can't call all people sheep all of the time (yes, even Republicans...).
Being an arrogant insulting ass is no way to convert people to your cause. Except maybe other arrogant insulting asses that need a cause to be arrogant and insulting about.
Slashdot Mirror
The big reason for pushing out the business editions first was because MS sold a lot of Software Assurance licenses with the understanding that Vista upgrades would be included. The first licenses are going to begin expiring this month, so MS would have been in the position of having to extend those licenses to meet their promises. The enterprise sector would have looked on software assurance for the OS as being just a bill of goods that MS was trying to sell them if Vista hadn't shipped within the license date.
RTFA
GOP? Gates is an athiest. The chance of an athiest being a GOP candidate is pretty damned small.
He's politically radioactive after shutting down the government in budget battles with Clinton.
Which I've never understood. Shutting down the government showed people some things-- the biggest was that much of the government is superfluous, and that having a good amount of the government not working didn't effect much. The press was all in a titter looking for the horrible effects of the government shutdown, and the most the were able to find was that a few people couldn't get passports and government workers weren't getting paid. That more than anything else is what got the politicians to hammer out a deal. It wasn't that the government had ground to a hault, it was that it had ground to a hault and it wasn't effecting much. They had to get it started up again before voters realized that much of the bureaucracy isn't needed. It must have scared the hell out of the politicians and the bureaucraticic drones.
Yeah, to heck with hide-and-seek playing robots, it's hide-the-salami playing 'bots that the slashdot crowd wants.
And it is well known science that adaptation works on existing genes. Adaptation does not turn worms into people. Adaptation is just variation within the existing types. It is only a philosophical belief based on rejection of real science that allows the idea that adaption can lead from pond scum to humanity.
I'm thinking that my MS in Cellular and Molecular Biology has given me a pretty good handle on what real science is when it comes to this issue. Your objection is a purely religious one and not a scientific one. Adaptation, obviously, works on existing genes, because if they didn't exist, there could be no natural selection working upon them, could there be? But, it has been observed in both the wild and in the lab, that new genes can arise through mechanisms that are quite well understood. And once these new genes are present in an individual the can effect that individual's chances of producing offspring.
And just to be clear, this is not a debate that is scientific in any way-- creationists lost in that arena over a hundred years ago. This is totally a social and political question. There are almost no reputable scientists that doubt evolution. The anti-evolutionists are religiously motivated individuals that try to foist their religious beliefs upon the rest of society through political means.
And just so you know, I have no animosity for creationists (be they Christian or any other variety). Two of my best friends are born again Christians, one, whom was a lab mate of mine in grad school, is what people call a theistic evolutionist, which means he thinks God is responsible for it all, but that what science has illucidated thus far appears to be correct. The other's beliefs border upon young earth creationism, but feels that the issue isn't of much importance to him or his faith, so he doesn't much care one way or the other. The only way that their religious beliefs effect our friendship is that we don't usually get together on Sundays, other than that, it doesn't effect things much at all.
It's not a knock for or against evolution, just a thought that people too quickly label "evolution" that which is simply stronger traits surviving under different conditions.
Huh? You're making a distinction that doesn't exist. Evolution is the change of the frequencies of alleles within a population over time do to differential reproductive success of individuals. There are a lot of reasons for this differential reproductive success, but two biggies are being alive to reproduce (you didn't get eaten or starve to death) and that you are acceptable to a member of the opposite sex (If you're big and tough and can find lots of food, it doesn't matter, because if the girls don't like the way you look, you don't pass on your genes).
Basically this is what you are defining as adaptation, and then call it different than evolution, which you don't define. Usually the people that I see making this distinction are opponents of evolution that do so because they can't deny adaptation or "micro evolution" (to many examples available in real life), but still want to be able to argue against evolution on a larger scale.
Anyways, the point is, adaptation is evolution by the definition that biologists use. Defining it otherwise is what people do in order to protect their religious and philosophical beliefs.
I think that the live cd install used in edgy has problems with VPC. In all likelyhood the text based alternate install CD would be fine.
If he had bothered to patent it, he could have been a billionaire by now.
To interject, a spreadsheet was a big piece of paper with a grid on it and a place to put formulas so that it was easier to organize your work. Business school students were taught to make and use these, and certain industries had preprinted ones, prior to the first "electronic spreadsheet" being invented. This guy took a pre-existing idea and made a program that did the calculations automatically. It's doubtful that a patent would have had much force.
No, it means that none of their mitochondrial DNA survives in modern humans. Like with the mitochondrial Eve study, people misinterpret these results. mtDNA passes down from mother to children, so specific matralineal lines can die out, yet still contribute genes to the population-- a male hybrid whose mother was Neanderthal and whose father was human (H sapiens sapeins) would pass on is genomic DNA to his offspring, but not his Neanderthal mtDNA, and a female hybrid who's mother was a human and whose father was Neanderthal wouldn't have any Neanderthal mtDNA to pass on. So easily, in half the cases of Homo sapiens sapiens and Home sapiens neadertalis hybrids (if there ever really was such a thing) Neanderthal mtDNA would not enter in the the population.
Unless those sub-humans were, like, really hot.
I'm very glad to live in a country with extremely strict firearms laws, in fact I don't think I know a single person who owns a gun.
I know several people with guns all of which have been legally acquired. None of these law-abiding gun owners have ever used them to commit a crime or shot at any people. It's the people that acquire them illegally that do that, so what you end up with is removing the guns from the hands of the responsible and law-abiding while really not effecting the illegal trade and use of firearms. Seems pretty pointless.
OK fine. But crappy technology is hardly a "shenanigan", is it? Phrasing it that way, one would think that someone was deliberately causing this, as opposed to crappy touchscreens being the cause. Therefore, the summary and TFA, in that paragon of journalism "The Register", is FUD.
How about you drop the spin? "All" of the cases are a total of three that are mentioned, and TFA is actually a rather poorly written FUD taken from a Miami Herald editorial: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/editoria l/15889697.htm
The editorial clearly says that these are glitches that result from touchscreens that got out of sync.
And from TFA: Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
SO what we have here is a few incidents with misaligned screens, and a some of the cases, the screen registered the republican instead of the democrat, and of course the press picked up on those in order to feed the conspiracy theories. Actually, the story picked a single incident that that happened in.
So to recap TFA:
There are reports of errors with the voting machines. These appear to be relatively minor and the poll workers are trained to fix them. Some districts keep records of maintenance, some don't, and at least one seals the machines for later review. And in one case, the voter was selecting a Democrat, but it came up Republican, but after three tries they were able to vote for the candidate they wanted. Then they called the press.
Excuse me, but making a big deal about this is just FUD.
I do not believe that MS has spent enough time testing every facet of the new OS.
You're right. They should take a page from the crack developing team at 3dRealms and only release it "when it's done."
That way they will only ship only quality products.
So, did anyone else read the headline and think that this was about a bar cracking down on a bunch of lawyers sitting around on their laptops on a free wifi connection and using up all their bandwidth? I suspect the story might be a bit more interesting if the did?
Some users freak out when the "screens" are different.
It's one of those things that get glossed over by most slashdotters, but a good portion of people that use computers for their jobs do not like them and absolutely hate it when anything is changed. Where a lot of us will dual or triple boot different OSes, and spend hours tweaking things to just like we want, only to reformat and start over with something else, these people have invested time to learn how to use a tool and don't want to have to learn how to do something new-- it's just time wasted that could be spend better elsewhere.
I once did an upgrade at a job where I was the entire IT department, and made everyone move to Outlook from what had been a mixed environment, with a good amount of people using Outlook express. One of the buyers was so upset by the switch from Outlook Express to Outlook, that she didn't talk to me for two months.
Eye candy, new features, etc., are only wanted by a subset of the user base, Jenny Officeworker, for the most part, would like things to stay the same, and doesn't want to retrain on something new. In the long run, they'll stick with what they know or the next closest thing if they have to change.
Enjoy a bit of reading:m endment04/03.html#5
/ amendment04/04.html#2
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution
By definition, whether you like it or not, a ruling by the Supreme Court is constitutional.
Security 1 Constitution 0
IANAL, but the right to search and seizure without warrant has been around under certain cases since the inception of the country, and is not unconstitutional. The Coast Guard and the Treasury Department (the CG used to be part of the Treasury dept, later Transportation, and now Homeland Security) are two agencies that, under certain circumstances, search and seize without warrant, probable cause, or any other justification required. There is a long precident for this, and legislation reguarding goes back to the first congress.
Seriously, I've been reading slashdot for a couple of years (but not TFAs of course), and I didn't even know that there was an enlightment category, let alone not even recognizing the icon when I saw it. Though it should have been used on the "Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3" story from a while back http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/ 1342243 , because they are apparently going to use E17 when/if it comes out.
I know that this may sound a little too "tinfoil hat", but the thing that scares me the most about this is the potential for backdoors, spyware, and other nefarious modifications in this grey market hardware. Where would you detect the spying? This is potentially A Bad Thing(tm). Yes, I know that so far no-one has found anything like that, but the potential creeps me out. One of the reasons people buy Cisco gear is because they trust the company. Counterfeit goods weaken the brand value and in and of themselves generate FUD.
Actually, weren't there reports of US intelligence pulling just this kind of thing in the first gulf war? They'd sold Iraq some printers that were supposed to glitch Iraqi computers when at a set time or when given a certain signal. Though my recollection is that it didn't work-- likely because the command and control (not to mention the power grid) was already off line due to big bombs landing on top of them.
So PHD was spying on the PHBs?
You can call some people sheep all of the time, and you can call all people sheep some of the time, but you can't call all people sheep all of the time (yes, even Republicans...).
Being an arrogant insulting ass is no way to convert people to your cause. Except maybe other arrogant insulting asses that need a cause to be arrogant and insulting about.
Bah. Microsoft did that a long time ago.