It's hard NOT to when you see "peaceful" protests and demonstrations of a "compassionate religion" filled with people carrying signs reading slogans like "Slay all who insult the prophet", "Islam will dominate the world", "Europe your 9/11 is coming soon", "Islam rules the world" (that last as a faux newspaper headline), and my personal favorite "No forgiveness for jewish and christian swine..." (I... that end b/c I couldn't read the rest the way the photo was taken).
These are the same religious people who defied Gandhi in trying to keep India together as one nation because they wanted their own "homeland from which to begin their jihad" to spread their views to the world - some would say that's asking for a nation of their own to try and conquer the world from.
I mean, give me a break. They clearly have gone over the deep end as a whole ever since their prophet said "spread the world by all means, by force if necesarry" only they seem to leave off that "if necesarry" and go straight to "let's kill all the unbelievers". It was meant most likely as an order to spread their word and to fight back if/when attacked (as was common in the earliest days of Islam's growth), not likely meant to start a never-ending hate-fueled war machine of fanaticism and ruthless disregard for human life.
So, THEY can take a flying leap if they don't like "propaganda". WE don't make cartoons for kindergartners showing how to, and glorifying a child for doing, make themselves into a suicide bomber and blowing people up in markets and schools.
Tongue in Cheek - Does this matter? Not much to me
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Element 118 Created
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· Score: 1
I wonder where Twinkies fall in this list of "base elements." Let's face it, any food rumored to outlast the plastic wrapper it comes in if left alone for years on end has to be some pretty serious stuff. Could that be #120 (since I see "Corn-Nuts" (see above) is apparently #119). Heck even the Ghostbusters used a Twinkie as a representation for the whole of Manhattan, how many other foods can do that?
Unfortunate as it is there is truth in the old addage "You can not legislate morality." It's pathetic and sick that people, as a whole, will find ways to do the things the vast majority (in some cases the 'majority in power' (often not the same as the majority, and rarely thinking along the lines of the majority they are supposed to represent)) finds simply unacceptable and immoral. However, if a person is going to do something like that, a law or ban or restriction of any sort is going to be useless. That would only serve to keep those who "might not" do it from deciding "oh why not, it's not illegal" and going off and doing it. It will not prevent those who want to do it despite what people in general say and press for (legal-wise) from going out and doing it anyway.
In the case of a domain name "ban" or "filter" on certain "offensive" words... Please, that's too easy to abuse and misuse. How many people whine that being called "black" is offensive or "African American" is offensive, or "hispanic" instead of (or in some cases being called) "Latin American" or "caucasian" instead of (or due to being called) "white"... it's retarded. If someone thinks they can get something or get a fleeting moment of fame by crying the "I'm oppressed and insulted by this" for something, they WILL come up with a reason for it. At this rate we'll be banning words like "Play" and "toy" and "special" and "school" and a slough of "offensive" words b/c of misuse or people's feigned insult at their use.
Want to truly ban something offensive, ban the excessive control on what is billed as being the greatest medium of free speech and free idea trade ever created. Let people police themselves and the vast majority will do so - let the ones that don't want to just do their thing and stop making it a mainstream media frenzy and glorifying their struggle and making a liberal issue into a serious threat to everyone (ie: quit making these groups that want to do this stuff the hero by glorifying their fight for their free speech - b/c that is a REAL issue and makes us all have to get involved, and that's just making a bad thing glorified in order to save a good... we can do without that if there weren't a threat on the good at all).
Anyone else think that streaming TV is just not ready yet? I'd say we need another couple of years at least...
Not really. Let's face it, digital cable is basically streamed to your home. It's just the manner in how it's handled. What hurts most streaming video (aside from the quality of image and all that discussion - irrelevant as Digital cable quality CAN be done easily) is that bandwidth for it is not dedicated. You hook up your digital cable to your DVR from the Cable company and that entire system and wire is for their one signal of all that digital video. Unlike with internet streaming media where you are using an internet connection that has a shared line... Cable modems have to contend with line noise from the TV data on the wire in addition to other regional carriers - it does not monopolize the line. DSL - it uses your phone lines. Guess what, think that "Ma Bell" rewired everything coast-to-coast to have the DSL system switch and route it's data around? Think again, your packets are switched and routed like all the phone data being sent all over the place. Again, no monopolization of the resource.
But Digital Cable TV gets a HUGE chunk of its resource pool dedicated to it. It IS what they make more money off from, it IS their selling point... Internet is a huge selling point for Telco's but their other services have long been their cash cow and until there's a reasonably overwhelming demand for them to change they won't. Let's face, why spend billions to give your cable modem users so much more speed and streaming ability so they can get from other sources digital-like cable when you can keep things as they are and let them enjoy faster-than-dialup speeds AND keep them unrealistically able to obtain quality streaming video outside of your digital cable package? There's no reason to change it, and every green dollar bill's worth of reasons NOT to.
I wonder if they keep the browser from advertising things like the software and OS used to surf the hosting servers and/or IP/MAC address of the packets... Does it do an anon. proxy thing? There are much more subtle footprints than cache and history - those are only the "desktop end" of the footprint and are by far the "least important" in terms of following the tracks of someone from the admin/investigative end.
Of course, it must be nice for parents to know that their kids can download this tiny app and stash it somewhere where Mom and Dad will never find it and surf all the porn they want when they're not home and there's next to no way (aside from keyloggers and/or "filter" software) to know where they went and what they did...
"if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people...."
Ok, so if 110 million of these were installed it'd free up enough energy to power hundreds of lightbulbs for 1.5 million people... meaning 110 million of these equals several hundred million regular lightbulbs... and one of these equals about a few hundred? That makes this little bad boys more than 7:1 ratio better... ???
"... One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."
And this has no quantitative value. Cars exhaust output impact can not be empirically measured due to conditions of the vehicle, how hard its driven, fuel quality, air quality, etc. These sorts of figures are "best guess" efforts to use the "scare tactics" of the global warming threat of impending doom to us all to force us to panic and think we NEED to adopt this new technology in order to try and save ourselves. Not likely that a lightbulb will do that much in the long run to save the world.
But then, maybe I am just being cynical... Perhaps I should go buy a few and not be "in the dark" and at least "play it safe" eh?
While this is technically old news - the "beta" has been available to play with for some time now. I remember looking at it to prove a point about "porn searches" to my friend - that US was NOT #1 on the categories WE could think of (only about 4 so I KNOW we missed some)... and being surprised that we were further down than 10th... Arab nations almost empirically held the top places...
But the point is, that this has been around now. But, it IS news that something Google has put out IS listed as 'complete' and not just "Beta" for once. That is a rare thing. It seems that all of Google stuff is "beta" forever.:o)
The minute we start to allow companies that provide access to the internet to filter the content and the providers of content that it will allow the users of said service (who often, thanks to sweetheart deals, brute force in the market, and exclusivity in geographical areas) with no alternative but to view only censored and "approved" material, or forgoe all interaction on the greatest medium of shared information in the world. That is not a choice, that is not what the ideals that the internet designers and creators had in mind when they created it. In fact, some of them are even against the idea of paid access, speaking in favor of a library-card-like system where the access is a free privilege.
While most people, myself included, are willing to concede on pay for access services, many, myself included loathe the idea of censorship of the information we could have access to (or not have access too as the case may be). I am extremely paranoid of government ideas to do this, even moreso when it is proposed to be run by businessmen and companies that have long since given up any shred of decency and public interest in favor of making the board and large-quantity share-holders pockets fat.
I do not want my right to access information freely curbed by the government or any profit-driven interest group.
And SCO breathes easier knowing that they can rip this poor man apart in questioning regardless of relevance. This just shows a terrible problem with the legal system that a lawyer can put in for, and win, permission to be able to ask anything, regardless of whether it has any impact on the actual charge(s) in question. That is a smear tactic pure and simple, it is a form of propaganda - and should have no place in a "court of law."
How do they calculate this as "more accurate"?
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An Older, Larger Universe
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· Score: 1, Insightful
They claim this is more accurate by using data that they say is even older than they originally thought...
Let's see.. "The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value." (from the article)... So there's a half million MORE years of time before that light even gets to us, and somehow that makes their data more accurate TODAY - it's 1/2 Million years OLDER data... that's more accurate...
Even IF it winds up being "proven" true (and scientists still argue about the speed of light as constant and whether graivational forces can effect light (which we KNOW you CAN "bend" a light beam with energy and graviational forces - been proven in the labs) - thus it's speed) it doesn't prove anything about the age of the galaxy or width of it. We don't know if anything's slowed that light down (we do know as intensity tapers off the light beam loses energy and thus "slows" down - again, raging debate in science over this; as it's proven and disproven back and forth more times than a yo-yo bouncing up and down to/from a kid's hand).
"The researchers reached their surprising conclusion after using a new method they invented to calculate intergalactic distances, one that they say is more precise and requires fewer steps than standard techniques."
So they didn't like the old way, it didn't say what they wanted it to - and it couldn't be used to help them... And the whole "Dark Energy" thing seems shaky at best.
"Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating, in other words.
Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos.
'It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is,' as Livio puts it, 'even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth.' "
Key words here... "Nobody has a clue what's up, so the 'smart minds' (my emphasis) invoked (aka: created) a thing dubbed dark energy..." So let's see... We think the galaxy is getting wider and wider faster and faster every day... We don't know why or how... So we'll just say that this force is causing it and to keep it sounding scientifically sound and reasonable give it a good name like "dark energy"...
And THIS is what these other guys made a new method of calculation to measure distance of stars from Earth so they could account for and measure? Why bother trying to measure something that scientists readily admit to just creating because they didn't understand what was going on?
Yea, but you can't argue that point without admitting that it has been ripe with flaws and incorrect logging of legitimate copies of Windows and Office (and whatever else uses this now) in the past as well. Such as the CNet (I believe it was a CNet reporter) who had his laptop lock up - first Office only into the "read only" mode b/c it was not authenticated and activated (it was, and had been before he left and had worked fine for a few weeks).. and then when he went to try and get the updates for it on the Microsoft site (something tech support instructed him to do) he found that his "Genuine Windows Product" failed to appear so "genuine" by the WGA thing on the site so he COULDN'T get the patches. Long story short, he was basically without a laptop and his office apps and his e-mail the entire trip - save for the generosity of one co-worker that had brought his own laptop loaded with Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and a score of other things the reporter needed/used that did the job as well as (and he admitted some were better in many ways, but honestly reported he felt they lacked in others, to M$ Office)... I think the laptop had Win2k or XP, I forget; there was little about that - mostly the LACK of help and support for a legitimate software being tagged suddenly as illegal and being more or less shafted by the support who's instructions were to try the update(s) site and to reinstall from master CD's - which were 2000+ miles away... Not cool.
And what would be the point of having a 1-atom wide object again? Let's face it, it's not practical or excessively useful to us (Ok, don't rant about "future potential" of this just yet... Really now? Do you think that this will REALLY make a significant difference in anything, other than the bragging rights of those that made this "breakthrough"...)
More imporant in my mind isn't the sharpness but the hardness. If it is sharp enough to slice through anything in existence but has the rigidity and frailty of, say, an egg-shell... it'd be useless anyway. ^_^
Again, I ask (with full pun intended), "What's the point?"
This article isn't anyway. This group has been paid by M$ to do "objective" research many times in the past and they never come out showing M$ on the losing side of those "objective tests."
One such propaganda device was M$ using the story of a company "Envirotactics" in New Jersey moving from Linux to M$'s server platform after the "Blaster Virus" brought their network down and cost them $5,000 to $10,000 daily during the outage, and the general headaches it caused. Ironically, that is impossible as the Blaster Virus/Worm is and was an IE/Explorer security hazard, something not even present on a Linux system without emulation - and certainly not "critical to the stability of the OS" as (Internet)Explorer is to Windows.
Funny enough, NetCraft shows their web server to be an HPUX (HP's Unix) software base, not Windows and IIS.
M$ Propaganda/Article Site:
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/case-studie s/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15438
NetCraft result:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.envirotactics.com%2F&position=limited&lookup=Wa it..
There's some serious erroneous logic in this article's summarization of the find and of it's importance...
First, they compare it to the "reptile-to-bird" fraud (and yes, it's been proven by NON-CREATIONIST scientists to have been known to be WRONG and NOT what it was said to have represented, yet was displayed and proclaimed as such anyhow - that's fraud, it's a lie... BUT that's not the point here...); This comparison claims to be on the same level of importance and uses that earlier finding as justification for the assumption of this one being relevant to what they are claiming it is. Basically "that one was a link, and since that's one, this has to be another." Well, not really. It COULD be something totally unique.
Second, the assumption that this thing lived and died, therefore had offspring of another type of animal is just plain silly. We breed dogs with all sorts of other types of dogs, sometimes wolves, coyotes, and even Jackals and Hyenas (all in the "canis" family) and we always get offspring that are DOGS! If we suddenly found a skeleton of a St. Bernard no one would think to claim it's a rabbit's ancestor in a transitional period of evolution. It's just not logical. A fossil/remains can tell you ONE THING and only one thing... that the creature to which those remains belonged to LIVED AND DIED. It can't tell you how many offspring it had (it's suspect whether most can tell you if they had ANY - forget that half (give or take) of most all species is of a non-childbearing gender)), whether those off spring survived or not, and certainly not what those off spring looked like - other than to assume that in the "millions of years" of human record of the animals of our world that the off spring would be just like the parents; as we've seen billions of times in humans alone (much less the thousands of variants of animals and all their offspring!)
Third, they simply claim that this previously undiscovered creature is something "in transition" from one being to another when this is the first one found. How do they know that it's not just a unique creature that died out (ie: gone extinct). We've seen entire animal groups wiped out by over-hunting or poaching (the Dodo bird comes to mind), if this happened many years ago and it was not recorded by someone for us to know today, how would we know?! We're always finding new information about animals that have been long since extinct... And we're finding new ones once in a while too...
Fourth, they seem to ignore the fact that we have aquatic animals today that have feet-like appendages, fin-like appendages, and live in the water more of their life than not. Most are reptilian, but there are mammals too. That is a problem... Reptiles are cold-blooded and egg-laying. Mammals are warm-blooded and bear live young... There's no way to prove that this was an "adaption" to moving from water to land - else, why do animals like ducks still lay eggs (or the platypus, et al) and some mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, etc) live entirely in the water (but not breathe in the water like fish and some reptiles) bear live young like mammals if this is indeed an evolutionary change... Frogs are reptilian but they live more of their life on land than in water (so it's believed currently, this has been a back-and-forth debate for years)... and look at gators or crocs- reptilian, breathe oxygen without gills, and still are cold-blooded and not mammalian breeding...
There's too much speculation along the lines of "this is what we expect to see therefore it's what we see, and what was/is" thinking in these types of articles.
The sad and simple truth is that you have to take it on faith that "this must have happened" to truly make the evolution theory work. That's fine, and that's ok... but it's not scientifically sound. You can not test it, it can not be duplicated to ensure the theories hold out true, and the scientific principles of the methodology of study can not be applied to the evolution. When you take this into account and say "well we're here
I wonder if they'll take up a fight against M$ for trying to patent "Virtual Desktops" - as they describe it, the ability to have more than one working desktop environment on a single machine. - Basically what we've been doing on Linux for years, what Windows still fails to be able to do properly (PowerToys plugins for XP lets you half-@55 it)... yet they are going to try to patent it as if they created it and mastered it and should have rights to who can and can't do it!?
"ID-10-T" errors there, ne?
It was time for people to listen to music first in the 60's when radio played more than a single cut from an LP.
MTV changed all that by playing JUST ONE SONG from the record companies and trying to push JUST ONE SONG at a time from an artist... since it's conception MTV has transformed from Music relayer (where we could hear new tunes) to corporate bedfellow to RIAA companies wanting to control what we all hear.
Are you guys anticipating that Longhorn will be that butt-ugly?
Have you SEEN it?! It IS that butt ugly! And what's with that tacky "can't be removed (but temporarily hidden)" bar on the side of the screen? I mean come on, I don't like framed web pages that take up that kind of space, just what I want to do is take away MORE useable space - this time on the desktop!
"It is a weak terrorist-like tactic. Even though they only get a tiny fraction of the population, they hope that this will scare everyone individually."
that is EXACTLY what that is. They hope that if enough people will see and fear the lawsuits that it will END P2P music sharing. What they fail to realize is that it was proven that during Napster's height the CD sales were at their highest of all time... since the lawsuits have started sales have slumped... they are starting to come back slowly now... BUT I think they misunderestimated how much people would take being treated like this....
like they have a choice - all the major manufacturers (well most) of them ALWAYS sell Windows... and many of them "only" windows. IBM made a big move by stepping to Linux instead. I hope it pays off for them. We need true competition for ingenuity and innovation to thrive.
you have to understand also that the PC games market is the biggest money-maker for PC's (excluding the gains M$ reports in XP sales - since they get a cut of EVERY PC sold by major distributors)... There's NO OTHER software venue that comes close to the gaming market's annual revenue...
Getting a strong Gaming platform based on Linux COULD bring the windows-trapped gamers that would switch for stability and security (ie: no "sobig" worms and such) but can't b/c there are too few games for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard NOT to when you see "peaceful" protests and demonstrations of a "compassionate religion" filled with people carrying signs reading slogans like "Slay all who insult the prophet", "Islam will dominate the world", "Europe your 9/11 is coming soon", "Islam rules the world" (that last as a faux newspaper headline), and my personal favorite "No forgiveness for jewish and christian swine..." (I ... that end b/c I couldn't read the rest the way the photo was taken).
These are the same religious people who defied Gandhi in trying to keep India together as one nation because they wanted their own "homeland from which to begin their jihad" to spread their views to the world - some would say that's asking for a nation of their own to try and conquer the world from.
I mean, give me a break. They clearly have gone over the deep end as a whole ever since their prophet said "spread the world by all means, by force if necesarry" only they seem to leave off that "if necesarry" and go straight to "let's kill all the unbelievers". It was meant most likely as an order to spread their word and to fight back if/when attacked (as was common in the earliest days of Islam's growth), not likely meant to start a never-ending hate-fueled war machine of fanaticism and ruthless disregard for human life.
So, THEY can take a flying leap if they don't like "propaganda". WE don't make cartoons for kindergartners showing how to, and glorifying a child for doing, make themselves into a suicide bomber and blowing people up in markets and schools.
I wonder where Twinkies fall in this list of "base elements." Let's face it, any food rumored to outlast the plastic wrapper it comes in if left alone for years on end has to be some pretty serious stuff. Could that be #120 (since I see "Corn-Nuts" (see above) is apparently #119). Heck even the Ghostbusters used a Twinkie as a representation for the whole of Manhattan, how many other foods can do that?
Unfortunate as it is there is truth in the old addage "You can not legislate morality." It's pathetic and sick that people, as a whole, will find ways to do the things the vast majority (in some cases the 'majority in power' (often not the same as the majority, and rarely thinking along the lines of the majority they are supposed to represent)) finds simply unacceptable and immoral. However, if a person is going to do something like that, a law or ban or restriction of any sort is going to be useless. That would only serve to keep those who "might not" do it from deciding "oh why not, it's not illegal" and going off and doing it. It will not prevent those who want to do it despite what people in general say and press for (legal-wise) from going out and doing it anyway. In the case of a domain name "ban" or "filter" on certain "offensive" words... Please, that's too easy to abuse and misuse. How many people whine that being called "black" is offensive or "African American" is offensive, or "hispanic" instead of (or in some cases being called) "Latin American" or "caucasian" instead of (or due to being called) "white"... it's retarded. If someone thinks they can get something or get a fleeting moment of fame by crying the "I'm oppressed and insulted by this" for something, they WILL come up with a reason for it. At this rate we'll be banning words like "Play" and "toy" and "special" and "school" and a slough of "offensive" words b/c of misuse or people's feigned insult at their use. Want to truly ban something offensive, ban the excessive control on what is billed as being the greatest medium of free speech and free idea trade ever created. Let people police themselves and the vast majority will do so - let the ones that don't want to just do their thing and stop making it a mainstream media frenzy and glorifying their struggle and making a liberal issue into a serious threat to everyone (ie: quit making these groups that want to do this stuff the hero by glorifying their fight for their free speech - b/c that is a REAL issue and makes us all have to get involved, and that's just making a bad thing glorified in order to save a good... we can do without that if there weren't a threat on the good at all).
Anyone else think that streaming TV is just not ready yet? I'd say we need another couple of years at least... Not really. Let's face it, digital cable is basically streamed to your home. It's just the manner in how it's handled. What hurts most streaming video (aside from the quality of image and all that discussion - irrelevant as Digital cable quality CAN be done easily) is that bandwidth for it is not dedicated. You hook up your digital cable to your DVR from the Cable company and that entire system and wire is for their one signal of all that digital video. Unlike with internet streaming media where you are using an internet connection that has a shared line... Cable modems have to contend with line noise from the TV data on the wire in addition to other regional carriers - it does not monopolize the line. DSL - it uses your phone lines. Guess what, think that "Ma Bell" rewired everything coast-to-coast to have the DSL system switch and route it's data around? Think again, your packets are switched and routed like all the phone data being sent all over the place. Again, no monopolization of the resource. But Digital Cable TV gets a HUGE chunk of its resource pool dedicated to it. It IS what they make more money off from, it IS their selling point... Internet is a huge selling point for Telco's but their other services have long been their cash cow and until there's a reasonably overwhelming demand for them to change they won't. Let's face, why spend billions to give your cable modem users so much more speed and streaming ability so they can get from other sources digital-like cable when you can keep things as they are and let them enjoy faster-than-dialup speeds AND keep them unrealistically able to obtain quality streaming video outside of your digital cable package? There's no reason to change it, and every green dollar bill's worth of reasons NOT to.
I wonder if they keep the browser from advertising things like the software and OS used to surf the hosting servers and/or IP/MAC address of the packets... Does it do an anon. proxy thing? There are much more subtle footprints than cache and history - those are only the "desktop end" of the footprint and are by far the "least important" in terms of following the tracks of someone from the admin/investigative end. Of course, it must be nice for parents to know that their kids can download this tiny app and stash it somewhere where Mom and Dad will never find it and surf all the porn they want when they're not home and there's next to no way (aside from keyloggers and/or "filter" software) to know where they went and what they did...
"if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. ..."
Ok, so if 110 million of these were installed it'd free up enough energy to power hundreds of lightbulbs for 1.5 million people... meaning 110 million of these equals several hundred million regular lightbulbs... and one of these equals about a few hundred? That makes this little bad boys more than 7:1 ratio better... ???
"... One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."
And this has no quantitative value. Cars exhaust output impact can not be empirically measured due to conditions of the vehicle, how hard its driven, fuel quality, air quality, etc. These sorts of figures are "best guess" efforts to use the "scare tactics" of the global warming threat of impending doom to us all to force us to panic and think we NEED to adopt this new technology in order to try and save ourselves. Not likely that a lightbulb will do that much in the long run to save the world.
But then, maybe I am just being cynical... Perhaps I should go buy a few and not be "in the dark" and at least "play it safe" eh?
While this is technically old news - the "beta" has been available to play with for some time now. I remember looking at it to prove a point about "porn searches" to my friend - that US was NOT #1 on the categories WE could think of (only about 4 so I KNOW we missed some)... and being surprised that we were further down than 10th... Arab nations almost empirically held the top places... But the point is, that this has been around now. But, it IS news that something Google has put out IS listed as 'complete' and not just "Beta" for once. That is a rare thing. It seems that all of Google stuff is "beta" forever. :o)
The minute we start to allow companies that provide access to the internet to filter the content and the providers of content that it will allow the users of said service (who often, thanks to sweetheart deals, brute force in the market, and exclusivity in geographical areas) with no alternative but to view only censored and "approved" material, or forgoe all interaction on the greatest medium of shared information in the world. That is not a choice, that is not what the ideals that the internet designers and creators had in mind when they created it. In fact, some of them are even against the idea of paid access, speaking in favor of a library-card-like system where the access is a free privilege. While most people, myself included, are willing to concede on pay for access services, many, myself included loathe the idea of censorship of the information we could have access to (or not have access too as the case may be). I am extremely paranoid of government ideas to do this, even moreso when it is proposed to be run by businessmen and companies that have long since given up any shred of decency and public interest in favor of making the board and large-quantity share-holders pockets fat. I do not want my right to access information freely curbed by the government or any profit-driven interest group.
And SCO breathes easier knowing that they can rip this poor man apart in questioning regardless of relevance. This just shows a terrible problem with the legal system that a lawyer can put in for, and win, permission to be able to ask anything, regardless of whether it has any impact on the actual charge(s) in question. That is a smear tactic pure and simple, it is a form of propaganda - and should have no place in a "court of law."
They claim this is more accurate by using data that they say is even older than they originally thought... Let's see.. "The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value." (from the article)... So there's a half million MORE years of time before that light even gets to us, and somehow that makes their data more accurate TODAY - it's 1/2 Million years OLDER data... that's more accurate... Even IF it winds up being "proven" true (and scientists still argue about the speed of light as constant and whether graivational forces can effect light (which we KNOW you CAN "bend" a light beam with energy and graviational forces - been proven in the labs) - thus it's speed) it doesn't prove anything about the age of the galaxy or width of it. We don't know if anything's slowed that light down (we do know as intensity tapers off the light beam loses energy and thus "slows" down - again, raging debate in science over this; as it's proven and disproven back and forth more times than a yo-yo bouncing up and down to/from a kid's hand). "The researchers reached their surprising conclusion after using a new method they invented to calculate intergalactic distances, one that they say is more precise and requires fewer steps than standard techniques." So they didn't like the old way, it didn't say what they wanted it to - and it couldn't be used to help them... And the whole "Dark Energy" thing seems shaky at best. "Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating, in other words. Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos. 'It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is,' as Livio puts it, 'even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth.' " Key words here... "Nobody has a clue what's up, so the 'smart minds' (my emphasis) invoked (aka: created) a thing dubbed dark energy..." So let's see... We think the galaxy is getting wider and wider faster and faster every day... We don't know why or how... So we'll just say that this force is causing it and to keep it sounding scientifically sound and reasonable give it a good name like "dark energy"... And THIS is what these other guys made a new method of calculation to measure distance of stars from Earth so they could account for and measure? Why bother trying to measure something that scientists readily admit to just creating because they didn't understand what was going on?
Yea, but you can't argue that point without admitting that it has been ripe with flaws and incorrect logging of legitimate copies of Windows and Office (and whatever else uses this now) in the past as well. Such as the CNet (I believe it was a CNet reporter) who had his laptop lock up - first Office only into the "read only" mode b/c it was not authenticated and activated (it was, and had been before he left and had worked fine for a few weeks).. and then when he went to try and get the updates for it on the Microsoft site (something tech support instructed him to do) he found that his "Genuine Windows Product" failed to appear so "genuine" by the WGA thing on the site so he COULDN'T get the patches. Long story short, he was basically without a laptop and his office apps and his e-mail the entire trip - save for the generosity of one co-worker that had brought his own laptop loaded with Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and a score of other things the reporter needed/used that did the job as well as (and he admitted some were better in many ways, but honestly reported he felt they lacked in others, to M$ Office)... I think the laptop had Win2k or XP, I forget; there was little about that - mostly the LACK of help and support for a legitimate software being tagged suddenly as illegal and being more or less shafted by the support who's instructions were to try the update(s) site and to reinstall from master CD's - which were 2000+ miles away... Not cool.
And what would be the point of having a 1-atom wide object again? Let's face it, it's not practical or excessively useful to us (Ok, don't rant about "future potential" of this just yet... Really now? Do you think that this will REALLY make a significant difference in anything, other than the bragging rights of those that made this "breakthrough"...) More imporant in my mind isn't the sharpness but the hardness. If it is sharp enough to slice through anything in existence but has the rigidity and frailty of, say, an egg-shell... it'd be useless anyway. ^_^ Again, I ask (with full pun intended), "What's the point?"
This article isn't anyway. This group has been paid by M$ to do "objective" research many times in the past and they never come out showing M$ on the losing side of those "objective tests." One such propaganda device was M$ using the story of a company "Envirotactics" in New Jersey moving from Linux to M$'s server platform after the "Blaster Virus" brought their network down and cost them $5,000 to $10,000 daily during the outage, and the general headaches it caused. Ironically, that is impossible as the Blaster Virus/Worm is and was an IE/Explorer security hazard, something not even present on a Linux system without emulation - and certainly not "critical to the stability of the OS" as (Internet)Explorer is to Windows. Funny enough, NetCraft shows their web server to be an HPUX (HP's Unix) software base, not Windows and IIS. M$ Propaganda/Article Site: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/case-studie s/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15438
NetCraft result:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.envirotactics.com%2F&position=limited&lookup=Wa it..
There's some serious erroneous logic in this article's summarization of the find and of it's importance...
First, they compare it to the "reptile-to-bird" fraud (and yes, it's been proven by NON-CREATIONIST scientists to have been known to be WRONG and NOT what it was said to have represented, yet was displayed and proclaimed as such anyhow - that's fraud, it's a lie... BUT that's not the point here...); This comparison claims to be on the same level of importance and uses that earlier finding as justification for the assumption of this one being relevant to what they are claiming it is. Basically "that one was a link, and since that's one, this has to be another." Well, not really. It COULD be something totally unique.
Second, the assumption that this thing lived and died, therefore had offspring of another type of animal is just plain silly. We breed dogs with all sorts of other types of dogs, sometimes wolves, coyotes, and even Jackals and Hyenas (all in the "canis" family) and we always get offspring that are DOGS! If we suddenly found a skeleton of a St. Bernard no one would think to claim it's a rabbit's ancestor in a transitional period of evolution. It's just not logical. A fossil/remains can tell you ONE THING and only one thing... that the creature to which those remains belonged to LIVED AND DIED. It can't tell you how many offspring it had (it's suspect whether most can tell you if they had ANY - forget that half (give or take) of most all species is of a non-childbearing gender)), whether those off spring survived or not, and certainly not what those off spring looked like - other than to assume that in the "millions of years" of human record of the animals of our world that the off spring would be just like the parents; as we've seen billions of times in humans alone (much less the thousands of variants of animals and all their offspring!)
Third, they simply claim that this previously undiscovered creature is something "in transition" from one being to another when this is the first one found. How do they know that it's not just a unique creature that died out (ie: gone extinct). We've seen entire animal groups wiped out by over-hunting or poaching (the Dodo bird comes to mind), if this happened many years ago and it was not recorded by someone for us to know today, how would we know?! We're always finding new information about animals that have been long since extinct... And we're finding new ones once in a while too...
Fourth, they seem to ignore the fact that we have aquatic animals today that have feet-like appendages, fin-like appendages, and live in the water more of their life than not. Most are reptilian, but there are mammals too. That is a problem... Reptiles are cold-blooded and egg-laying. Mammals are warm-blooded and bear live young... There's no way to prove that this was an "adaption" to moving from water to land - else, why do animals like ducks still lay eggs (or the platypus, et al) and some mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, etc) live entirely in the water (but not breathe in the water like fish and some reptiles) bear live young like mammals if this is indeed an evolutionary change... Frogs are reptilian but they live more of their life on land than in water (so it's believed currently, this has been a back-and-forth debate for years)... and look at gators or crocs- reptilian, breathe oxygen without gills, and still are cold-blooded and not mammalian breeding...
There's too much speculation along the lines of "this is what we expect to see therefore it's what we see, and what was/is" thinking in these types of articles.
The sad and simple truth is that you have to take it on faith that "this must have happened" to truly make the evolution theory work. That's fine, and that's ok... but it's not scientifically sound. You can not test it, it can not be duplicated to ensure the theories hold out true, and the scientific principles of the methodology of study can not be applied to the evolution. When you take this into account and say "well we're here
well if IBM could get them chips faster they could get the machines out faster, VT would get theirs X Servers, and you get your machine...
I wonder if they'll take up a fight against M$ for trying to patent "Virtual Desktops" - as they describe it, the ability to have more than one working desktop environment on a single machine. - Basically what we've been doing on Linux for years, what Windows still fails to be able to do properly (PowerToys plugins for XP lets you half-@55 it)... yet they are going to try to patent it as if they created it and mastered it and should have rights to who can and can't do it!? "ID-10-T" errors there, ne?
It was time for people to listen to music first in the 60's when radio played more than a single cut from an LP. MTV changed all that by playing JUST ONE SONG from the record companies and trying to push JUST ONE SONG at a time from an artist... since it's conception MTV has transformed from Music relayer (where we could hear new tunes) to corporate bedfellow to RIAA companies wanting to control what we all hear.
Mandrake's download versions are entirely GPL. There is "non-free" software included with the $70 DVD disc of MDK 10.
Are you guys anticipating that Longhorn will be that butt-ugly? Have you SEEN it?! It IS that butt ugly! And what's with that tacky "can't be removed (but temporarily hidden)" bar on the side of the screen? I mean come on, I don't like framed web pages that take up that kind of space, just what I want to do is take away MORE useable space - this time on the desktop!
Apple Store NYC SoHo http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/ There are TONS of PC sellers there too... just look around.
"It is a weak terrorist-like tactic. Even though they only get a tiny fraction of the population, they hope that this will scare everyone individually." that is EXACTLY what that is. They hope that if enough people will see and fear the lawsuits that it will END P2P music sharing. What they fail to realize is that it was proven that during Napster's height the CD sales were at their highest of all time... since the lawsuits have started sales have slumped... they are starting to come back slowly now... BUT I think they misunderestimated how much people would take being treated like this....
like they have a choice - all the major manufacturers (well most) of them ALWAYS sell Windows... and many of them "only" windows. IBM made a big move by stepping to Linux instead. I hope it pays off for them. We need true competition for ingenuity and innovation to thrive.
In bed with microsoft... oh yea, nothing screams security like M$... *LOL*
you have to understand also that the PC games market is the biggest money-maker for PC's (excluding the gains M$ reports in XP sales - since they get a cut of EVERY PC sold by major distributors)... There's NO OTHER software venue that comes close to the gaming market's annual revenue... Getting a strong Gaming platform based on Linux COULD bring the windows-trapped gamers that would switch for stability and security (ie: no "sobig" worms and such) but can't b/c there are too few games for Linux.
"I've been to some sites that pop up messages that say "Javascript error: Not a Win32 environment" :) "
Just another good reason to use anything other than M$. ^_^