Studies have been done on small sections of some DNA databases, comparing every profile with every other profile, and found this to simply be false. In Arizona 65 493 profiles were made available - 122 pairs matched at nine loci, 20 at ten, 1 at eleven and 1 more at twelve. In Illinois 220 000 were checked, and 903 pairs matched at nine or more loci, and in Maryland 30 000 were checked, providing 32 matching pairs.
Add to this the problem that eyelashes, skin fragments etc can be carried on the wind, or from a random frottage, and we have some important cases being 'solved' with what amounts to deeply circumstantial evidence. With any luck this fascination with DNA being used as the be all and end all, the assayer of truth, will end as soon as possible.
You say all this as if the police walk into a crime scene having absolutely no clue who the perpetrator could possibly be, taking some DNA samples, running it through the computer, then arresting the resultant match and passing it on to the courts. In reality the list of suspects is going to be considerably narrowed by old-fashioned police work: finding witnesses, finding out the victim's history, looking for motive, etc.
In other words, fat lot of good it's going to do you to claim, "But there's a 0.1% chance that DNA isn't mine!" when you've been spotted leaving the crime scene by a witness, were seen having an argument with the victim a couple days prior, he owed you money, etc. Not to mention that if you go to find those other, say, 30 DNA matches, you find out that 21 of them live hundreds of miles away, 3 of them are in nursing homes, 1 is a kid, 2 are already in prison and have been for years...
I plead bad sarcasm. It probably should've read something like, "The most perfect example of ruthlessly perfect exploitation of our so-called 'free market' in existence today." The Wall Street big boys are pikers compared to the corporate fascists that are the IOC.
VANOC trademarked the line, "With Glowing Hearts", which comes directly out of Canada's national anthem.
Today's Olympics are all about whoring themselves out to corporate sponsors, being absolute dicks to anyone who isn't one, and stiffing local taxpayers with the bills for years if not decades on end. If you're the type who worships at the altar of the free market, you've got to admire their ruthlessly perfect exploitation of it.
Terrorists will always find a way to get explosives on planes if they feel they need to.
I keep thinking that it's only a matter of time before they figure out they don't need to. Forget defeating the security lineup; just strap on some old-fashioned bombs, walk into said security lineup, and before being searched, blow themselves to hell and take a hundred or so innocents with them. Coordinate that at a few different airports around the world, and watch the entire airline industry collapse overnight.
Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument
(...)
The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this.
Wow. Just.. wow. You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it. I could try to respond to this by pointing out all the good the United States does in the world, and how I believe they're second to none in that department, but what would be the point? I'm apparently not one of your "everything thinking people," just some dumb Canadian who'd rather have the USA, flawed & imperfect as it is, at the top of the food chain than any other country out there.
There are various IR-to-Bluetooth adapters available that will allow you to control your PS3 with a universal remote. Personally, I use the Logitech adapter for their Harmony remote line, since I have a Harmony One that I really love. In theory that adapter could be used with any universal remote as long as you know the codes. The Harmony adapter has the added benefit of supporting a power off macro (previously only available on $100+ adapters).
I thought about this but rejected it; if I had to spend another, what, $40 on an adapter to use the PS3 with my universal, that's just more sunk cost over the standalone player that worked out of the box. Or worse, end up having to buy another universal. All I wanted was to watch Blu-rays; not overhaul my entire HT setup.
I never said the prequels were kids movies. I think Lucas fully expected the prequels to be well-received and intended them to be all-ages just as the originals were. It wasn't until after Phantom got such a, "WTF was that?" reception that Lucas came out with the, "Oh this was made for kids" line as a retroactive excuse, then tagged it onto the originals as well to stroke his ego.
The last hour of Sith was the only decently written part of the prequels and it still doesn't hold a candle to the originals.
Keep in mind that every star wars movie was a kids movie. Kids were the target audience.
No, they weren't. You don't have Han Solo shooting Greedo first in a kids movie. You don't have Darth Vader torturing Han Solo and cutting off Luke's hand in a kids movie, or Lando betraying Han. I don't even think you have the Rebels getting their asses kicked from one end of Empire to the other in a kids movie.
The original trilogy were all-ages movies. The kids could enjoy them, the adults could enjoy them, and they (until Return) didn't insult anybody's intelligence.
This "they were only ever kids movies" is pure Lucas bullshit intended to paper over just how bad the prequels really are.
Not true; I just upgraded from TB2 to TB3 and TB3 happily started downloading my entire GMail account in the background. It even tried to tell me about it in the "Migration Assistant" which has the most confusing wording possible for this option:
Synchronize IMAP Messages
Benefits
Lets you read your mail when you're not connected to the internet, and lets you find messages based on the words they contain, not just the subjects and names.
Alternative
Thunderbird will download all your mail onto this computer. Turn it off if you're low on disk space, or you have to pay for network traffic.
I read "download all your mail" as being equivalent to "read your mail when you're not connected". On top of that, you only see one button; it either appears beneath "Benefits" or "Alternative". So I had no idea whether the feature was on or off at install; I had to go into the preferences screen to find out for sure (by which time I'd already seen TB3 building an offline GMail folder and went hunting for how to stop it). Really bad UI.
You work...you want Roast Beast of some sort for supper. So you put said once-living-animal into your oven when you leave for work, and want to turn it on at X:xx so that you walk into your house to fully ready-to-eat dead animal flesh.
Or you could make life a lot easier on yourself and just buy a slow cooker. Turn it on in the morning when you leave for work, and the beef is ready to eat when you come home. You can even be late getting home and the beef won't be ruined.
See, I get it for Microsoft Office. Its alot user intuitive for users to find the save and print and formating buttons with the ribbon system they've got set up. Good for that.
Actually, save and print aren't on the ribbon. They're buried under that weird Office logo thing that doesn't look the least bit like a button. Still have no idea WTH MS were thinking with that.
We had a court-like thing called "The Human Rights Commission" that had a 100% success rate in convicting people of hate crimes. Basically, it was ignoring the equivalent of the 1st amendment and fining people any time you communicated in a way that offended anyone, anywhere.
They've just looked at themselves and said, "wait, what the fuck are we doing? We've been ignoring the constitution."
Not only that, but a former member of the CHRC (or CHRT - I forget which), one Richard Warman, the complainant in this case, has been responsible for something like half of all "hate speech" cases filed at the tribunal over the last several years. Anything this little snake finds on the internet that he decides is hateful, he files the complaint and looks to cash in. Ezra Levant has been doing a lot of legwork on exposing this corrupt little cesspool for what it is over the past couple of years, ever since he got hauled before them to defend his publishing of the Mohammed cartoons when he ran the Western Standard magazine.
Unfortunately, this ruling does not strike down the law. That's beyond the CHRT's power. The adjudicator's only remedy was to refuse to apply the law and dismiss the case. The law is still on the books and the ruling does not have the power of precedent unless appealed to a real court and upheld. So while this is a big step in the right direction, the fight's not over yet.
4. Programs like CfC and the stimulus package are the solution to this crisis, as time is bearing out.
I'm sorry, but you sound like a true-believer Keynesian. As such I believe you are seriously misguided about programs like CfC; let me try and demonstrate, as simply as possible, why this sort of program produces nothing but a short-term gain that I believe actually makes the economy weaker in the long run.
Let's take a community where there are 10,000 people projected to buy new cars over the next 4 years, or about 2,500 cars per year. So the car dealerships and factories should be supplying 2,500 cars/year to meet the demand. X number of people work in the factories, Y in the dealerships, everything's reasonably balanced out.
Now the government steps in. 2,500 cars/year isn't good enough. $4500 (of state-borrowed money) for everyone who buys a new car this year, says Big Nanny State! 8,000 people rush to take advantage of the "free" money. The car factories and dealerships scale up to meet this new demand. More people working at the factories and dealerships! More cars sold! Record profits! New cars in every yard! Tax revenues up on all the work and sales! What a success! In year 1.
Now year 2 comes along. There are only 2,000 people left in the community who need a new car. Only about 700 will actually buy a car this year. But the factories & dealerships are all built up to supply 8,000. Now what happens? Supply greatly exceeds demand. The factories and dealerships lay people off. Some close outright. Sales plummet; we're talking a 90% year-over-year decline here! People out of work. Tax revenues crater. But that money the government borrowed to finance the program still needs to be paid back -- with interest. Kind of hard to do that now...
I don't consider myself a hard-core Austrian, but it makes way more sense to me than any of this Keynesian nonsense.
As for the overall consumer debt load, there's actually a chart on the Market Ticker blog I linked that shows its total amount. It is over 2.5 trillion dollars. How much has been paid back? About 50 billion. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what's out there. Hence why I say, getting that number down to something sustainable is going to take a long time, and it does not help in the least that just as the consumer is finally starting to de-leverage, the government is levering up at warp speed and playing "kick the can" with all the big banks, just like Japan did through the 90s.
One really gets the feeling the whole thing is a powder keg, just waiting for the spark to be lit.
The truth is that this recession has been driven by two things. The primary factor is that people panicked. EVERYONE freaked out, THE SKY IS FALLING. The second factor is simply a side effect of the first one, banks backed off on giving credit, even to people who were low-risk.
No, this is not what's driving the recession. What's driving the recession is that the amount of debt in the economy, especially the American economy, has reached critical mass. You really need to start reading some blogs like
The Market Ticker, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis, and Zerohedge to get a true picture of what's going in the economy.
As for this particular "cash for clunkers" program, all it's doing is pulling forward demand for new vehicles. It will cause a short-term rise in demand now, but once the program expires or runs out of cash again, that demand will vanish and there will be nothing to replace it. Sales will have to return to their previous level or even go lower, as the people who buy new cars under this program certainly won't need to do so again for a few years.
At the macro level, all the debt in the system has produced a similar effect. All the demand, all the growth we've seen for years now, has been fuelled by debt. The debt just can't grow any more; everyone's maxxed out and now trying to pay it down. There's so much debt out there that clearing it out is going to be a long, painful process, and during that process we'll be lucky to stave off an outright market crash, let alone actually return to a growing economy.
Correction: Canadians haven't done it. Not fully. Most people you talk to know their height in feet & inches, their weight in pounds. You buy butter by the pound (even though it's labeled 454g), buy screws, bolts, & wrenches in imperial units, paint by the gallon, etc.
It comes from having a southern neighbour who hasn't switched and being highly economically dependent on them.
By rebranding Windows Vista as Windows 7 and getting some tech sites to view it in a positive light, the layperson who holds any nerds technology opinion as inherent truth will be more apt to try and view it in a positive light as well.
Until the first Mac guy/PC guy ads come out targeting Windows 7, that is. I've got nothing empirical to back it up, but my gut feeling is that those ads really pushed Vista over the edge from "ehh, this really isn't so great" to "yeah that's that shitty Windows the Mac ads rip on all the time, keep away from it!"
I just did an Ubuntu install myself (finally migrating away from Mandriva after being less than impressed with their new release) and I did have to endure a multi-hour fight getting sound to work correctly. The problem seems to be Ubuntu's slipshod treatment of anything KDE-related. I had to plug in a lot of packages before I "unlocked" enough of KDE's settings to see that KDE was trying to send audio directly to the card instead of through PulseAudio. Finally after changing that, everything worked.
I don't understand why Ubuntu won't make at least a token effort to get KDE & GNOME to play together. It would go a long way to finishing the distro up. It is the one big thing I miss from Mandriva so far.
Putting the onus on pedestrians. Law stipulates that pedestrians pretty much always get right of way.
Physics do not care what the law says. Your 70kg "ugly bag of mostly water" versus 1000kg+ of steel, glass, and plastic is a losing battle every time. When you are near moving motor vehicles, pay attention and don't do anything stupid.
Case in point: Amarok 2. I was just getting to like Amarok 1.4. The musicbrainz tie-in was golden to me; I've got so many mistagged files downloaded and copied from various sources, that looking up all the tag info myself was downright painful. Enter Amarok 1.4, one mouse click, and the suggested tags are right there. I usually do a quick wiki lookup to double-check before I save, but still much faster than having to look through an entire discography manually.
Enter Amarok 2, which I tried today for the first (and last) time. Musicbrainz is ripped out. Why? "We're planning something better," say the devs. Any progress on it? Nope. Toss in a totally new, butt-ugly UI, loss of smart playlists, loss of wikipedia plug-in, loss of ipod support (!!!), loss of postgre support (though that one I can at least understand even if I don't like it) and you get an app that went from being a near-killer desktop app to useless garbage.
I thought it was just the KDE developers who went insane with the "blow everything up in a massive rewrite" mindset, but it seems to be infecting their apps, too:(.
All DS9 had to do, was make Worf look like a TOS-era Klingon, and have the other characters in the show not even notice the difference. Just exchange a couple of odd looks, perhaps coupled with a small joke along the lines of, "Did he cut his hair?" Then when they return to DS9's present, Worf is back to his fully-made-up self, and again, nobody sees the difference.
Much of the episode was played for humor in the first place, I don't know why they didn't go there for the Klingon make-up.
Plywood on a garbage can? Thankfully on only a couple occasions, I haven't even had that luxury. While tied by a too-short serial cable to a controller or HMI, I've had to hold my laptop computer up with one hand, and use the other to diagnose the problem.
And the place I'm going to next month.. it makes fish feed. The smell is just vile, and it gets into everything.
I am not one to defend the profligate spending of the Bush administration. He missed a golden opportunity when the country rallied around him post-9/11 to get federal government spending under control. However to stop the graph at the end of the Bush administration without acknowledging what Obama's proposing is flat-out wrong.
Shutting off kdawson or other irritating (to put it gently) editors may help your front page, but does nothing for the RSS feed. I rarely visit the front page, myself; I open the RSS via a Firefox live bookmark, and if I see an interesting headline, I check the story out. It's only then that I might find out the story was posted by an editor I don't like, the headline was misleading, the summary is utter tripe, etc.
So the complaint is perfectly valid. I'd go so far as to say, "Just turn him off on your page," smacks of excuse-making.
Slashdot Mirror
Studies have been done on small sections of some DNA databases, comparing every profile with every other profile, and found this to simply be false. In Arizona 65 493 profiles were made available - 122 pairs matched at nine loci, 20 at ten, 1 at eleven and 1 more at twelve. In Illinois 220 000 were checked, and 903 pairs matched at nine or more loci, and in Maryland 30 000 were checked, providing 32 matching pairs.
Add to this the problem that eyelashes, skin fragments etc can be carried on the wind, or from a random frottage, and we have some important cases being 'solved' with what amounts to deeply circumstantial evidence. With any luck this fascination with DNA being used as the be all and end all, the assayer of truth, will end as soon as possible.
You say all this as if the police walk into a crime scene having absolutely no clue who the perpetrator could possibly be, taking some DNA samples, running it through the computer, then arresting the resultant match and passing it on to the courts. In reality the list of suspects is going to be considerably narrowed by old-fashioned police work: finding witnesses, finding out the victim's history, looking for motive, etc.
In other words, fat lot of good it's going to do you to claim, "But there's a 0.1% chance that DNA isn't mine!" when you've been spotted leaving the crime scene by a witness, were seen having an argument with the victim a couple days prior, he owed you money, etc. Not to mention that if you go to find those other, say, 30 DNA matches, you find out that 21 of them live hundreds of miles away, 3 of them are in nursing homes, 1 is a kid, 2 are already in prison and have been for years...
I plead bad sarcasm. It probably should've read something like, "The most perfect example of ruthlessly perfect exploitation of our so-called 'free market' in existence today." The Wall Street big boys are pikers compared to the corporate fascists that are the IOC.
VANOC trademarked the line, "With Glowing Hearts", which comes directly out of Canada's national anthem.
Today's Olympics are all about whoring themselves out to corporate sponsors, being absolute dicks to anyone who isn't one, and stiffing local taxpayers with the bills for years if not decades on end. If you're the type who worships at the altar of the free market, you've got to admire their ruthlessly perfect exploitation of it.
Terrorists will always find a way to get explosives on planes if they feel they need to.
I keep thinking that it's only a matter of time before they figure out they don't need to. Forget defeating the security lineup; just strap on some old-fashioned bombs, walk into said security lineup, and before being searched, blow themselves to hell and take a hundred or so innocents with them. Coordinate that at a few different airports around the world, and watch the entire airline industry collapse overnight.
Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument
(...)
The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this.
Wow. Just .. wow. You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it. I could try to respond to this by pointing out all the good the United States does in the world, and how I believe they're second to none in that department, but what would be the point? I'm apparently not one of your "everything thinking people," just some dumb Canadian who'd rather have the USA, flawed & imperfect as it is, at the top of the food chain than any other country out there.
There are various IR-to-Bluetooth adapters available that will allow you to control your PS3 with a universal remote. Personally, I use the Logitech adapter for their Harmony remote line, since I have a Harmony One that I really love. In theory that adapter could be used with any universal remote as long as you know the codes. The Harmony adapter has the added benefit of supporting a power off macro (previously only available on $100+ adapters).
I thought about this but rejected it; if I had to spend another, what, $40 on an adapter to use the PS3 with my universal, that's just more sunk cost over the standalone player that worked out of the box. Or worse, end up having to buy another universal. All I wanted was to watch Blu-rays; not overhaul my entire HT setup.
For me (I bought a Blu-ray player before Christmas) it was several reasons. The first two were my show-stoppers, the last two more incidental.
I never said the prequels were kids movies. I think Lucas fully expected the prequels to be well-received and intended them to be all-ages just as the originals were. It wasn't until after Phantom got such a, "WTF was that?" reception that Lucas came out with the, "Oh this was made for kids" line as a retroactive excuse, then tagged it onto the originals as well to stroke his ego.
The last hour of Sith was the only decently written part of the prequels and it still doesn't hold a candle to the originals.
Keep in mind that every star wars movie was a kids movie. Kids were the target audience.
No, they weren't. You don't have Han Solo shooting Greedo first in a kids movie. You don't have Darth Vader torturing Han Solo and cutting off Luke's hand in a kids movie, or Lando betraying Han. I don't even think you have the Rebels getting their asses kicked from one end of Empire to the other in a kids movie.
The original trilogy were all-ages movies. The kids could enjoy them, the adults could enjoy them, and they (until Return) didn't insult anybody's intelligence.
This "they were only ever kids movies" is pure Lucas bullshit intended to paper over just how bad the prequels really are.
Synchronize IMAP Messages
Benefits
Lets you read your mail when you're not connected to the internet, and lets you find messages based on the words they contain, not just the subjects and names.
Alternative
Thunderbird will download all your mail onto this computer. Turn it off if you're low on disk space, or you have to pay for network traffic.
I read "download all your mail" as being equivalent to "read your mail when you're not connected". On top of that, you only see one button; it either appears beneath "Benefits" or "Alternative". So I had no idea whether the feature was on or off at install; I had to go into the preferences screen to find out for sure (by which time I'd already seen TB3 building an offline GMail folder and went hunting for how to stop it). Really bad UI.
You work...you want Roast Beast of some sort for supper. So you put said once-living-animal into your oven when you leave for work, and want to turn it on at X:xx so that you walk into your house to fully ready-to-eat dead animal flesh.
Or you could make life a lot easier on yourself and just buy a slow cooker. Turn it on in the morning when you leave for work, and the beef is ready to eat when you come home. You can even be late getting home and the beef won't be ruined.
See, I get it for Microsoft Office. Its alot user intuitive for users to find the save and print and formating buttons with the ribbon system they've got set up. Good for that.
Actually, save and print aren't on the ribbon. They're buried under that weird Office logo thing that doesn't look the least bit like a button. Still have no idea WTH MS were thinking with that.
We had a court-like thing called "The Human Rights Commission" that had a 100% success rate in convicting people of hate crimes. Basically, it was ignoring the equivalent of the 1st amendment and fining people any time you communicated in a way that offended anyone, anywhere.
They've just looked at themselves and said, "wait, what the fuck are we doing? We've been ignoring the constitution."
Not only that, but a former member of the CHRC (or CHRT - I forget which), one Richard Warman, the complainant in this case, has been responsible for something like half of all "hate speech" cases filed at the tribunal over the last several years. Anything this little snake finds on the internet that he decides is hateful, he files the complaint and looks to cash in. Ezra Levant has been doing a lot of legwork on exposing this corrupt little cesspool for what it is over the past couple of years, ever since he got hauled before them to defend his publishing of the Mohammed cartoons when he ran the Western Standard magazine.
Unfortunately, this ruling does not strike down the law. That's beyond the CHRT's power. The adjudicator's only remedy was to refuse to apply the law and dismiss the case. The law is still on the books and the ruling does not have the power of precedent unless appealed to a real court and upheld. So while this is a big step in the right direction, the fight's not over yet.
4. Programs like CfC and the stimulus package are the solution to this crisis, as time is bearing out.
I'm sorry, but you sound like a true-believer Keynesian. As such I believe you are seriously misguided about programs like CfC; let me try and demonstrate, as simply as possible, why this sort of program produces nothing but a short-term gain that I believe actually makes the economy weaker in the long run.
Let's take a community where there are 10,000 people projected to buy new cars over the next 4 years, or about 2,500 cars per year. So the car dealerships and factories should be supplying 2,500 cars/year to meet the demand. X number of people work in the factories, Y in the dealerships, everything's reasonably balanced out.
Now the government steps in. 2,500 cars/year isn't good enough. $4500 (of state-borrowed money) for everyone who buys a new car this year, says Big Nanny State! 8,000 people rush to take advantage of the "free" money. The car factories and dealerships scale up to meet this new demand. More people working at the factories and dealerships! More cars sold! Record profits! New cars in every yard! Tax revenues up on all the work and sales! What a success! In year 1.
Now year 2 comes along. There are only 2,000 people left in the community who need a new car. Only about 700 will actually buy a car this year. But the factories & dealerships are all built up to supply 8,000. Now what happens? Supply greatly exceeds demand. The factories and dealerships lay people off. Some close outright. Sales plummet; we're talking a 90% year-over-year decline here! People out of work. Tax revenues crater. But that money the government borrowed to finance the program still needs to be paid back -- with interest. Kind of hard to do that now...
I don't consider myself a hard-core Austrian, but it makes way more sense to me than any of this Keynesian nonsense.
As for the overall consumer debt load, there's actually a chart on the Market Ticker blog I linked that shows its total amount. It is over 2.5 trillion dollars. How much has been paid back? About 50 billion. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what's out there. Hence why I say, getting that number down to something sustainable is going to take a long time, and it does not help in the least that just as the consumer is finally starting to de-leverage, the government is levering up at warp speed and playing "kick the can" with all the big banks, just like Japan did through the 90s.
One really gets the feeling the whole thing is a powder keg, just waiting for the spark to be lit.
The truth is that this recession has been driven by two things. The primary factor is that people panicked. EVERYONE freaked out, THE SKY IS FALLING. The second factor is simply a side effect of the first one, banks backed off on giving credit, even to people who were low-risk.
No, this is not what's driving the recession. What's driving the recession is that the amount of debt in the economy, especially the American economy, has reached critical mass. You really need to start reading some blogs like The Market Ticker, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis, and Zerohedge to get a true picture of what's going in the economy.
As for this particular "cash for clunkers" program, all it's doing is pulling forward demand for new vehicles. It will cause a short-term rise in demand now, but once the program expires or runs out of cash again, that demand will vanish and there will be nothing to replace it. Sales will have to return to their previous level or even go lower, as the people who buy new cars under this program certainly won't need to do so again for a few years.
At the macro level, all the debt in the system has produced a similar effect. All the demand, all the growth we've seen for years now, has been fuelled by debt. The debt just can't grow any more; everyone's maxxed out and now trying to pay it down. There's so much debt out there that clearing it out is going to be a long, painful process, and during that process we'll be lucky to stave off an outright market crash, let alone actually return to a growing economy.
From one of the other kids in the neighborhood, explaining to me why he swore. He used the example of dropping a hammer on his foot:
"So what am I going to say? (uses very proper-sounding tone of voice) Oh, look at this. I hurt my foot. Would someone please help me?
(switches back to normal voice) No! I'm gonna scream, Owww, goddammit, I dropped the fucking hammer on my fucking foot!
Then I feel better."
Correction: Canadians haven't done it. Not fully. Most people you talk to know their height in feet & inches, their weight in pounds. You buy butter by the pound (even though it's labeled 454g), buy screws, bolts, & wrenches in imperial units, paint by the gallon, etc.
It comes from having a southern neighbour who hasn't switched and being highly economically dependent on them.
By rebranding Windows Vista as Windows 7 and getting some tech sites to view it in a positive light, the layperson who holds any nerds technology opinion as inherent truth will be more apt to try and view it in a positive light as well.
Until the first Mac guy/PC guy ads come out targeting Windows 7, that is. I've got nothing empirical to back it up, but my gut feeling is that those ads really pushed Vista over the edge from "ehh, this really isn't so great" to "yeah that's that shitty Windows the Mac ads rip on all the time, keep away from it!"
I just did an Ubuntu install myself (finally migrating away from Mandriva after being less than impressed with their new release) and I did have to endure a multi-hour fight getting sound to work correctly. The problem seems to be Ubuntu's slipshod treatment of anything KDE-related. I had to plug in a lot of packages before I "unlocked" enough of KDE's settings to see that KDE was trying to send audio directly to the card instead of through PulseAudio. Finally after changing that, everything worked.
I don't understand why Ubuntu won't make at least a token effort to get KDE & GNOME to play together. It would go a long way to finishing the distro up. It is the one big thing I miss from Mandriva so far.
Putting the onus on pedestrians. Law stipulates that pedestrians pretty much always get right of way.
Physics do not care what the law says. Your 70kg "ugly bag of mostly water" versus 1000kg+ of steel, glass, and plastic is a losing battle every time. When you are near moving motor vehicles, pay attention and don't do anything stupid.
Case in point: Amarok 2. I was just getting to like Amarok 1.4. The musicbrainz tie-in was golden to me; I've got so many mistagged files downloaded and copied from various sources, that looking up all the tag info myself was downright painful. Enter Amarok 1.4, one mouse click, and the suggested tags are right there. I usually do a quick wiki lookup to double-check before I save, but still much faster than having to look through an entire discography manually.
Enter Amarok 2, which I tried today for the first (and last) time. Musicbrainz is ripped out. Why? "We're planning something better," say the devs. Any progress on it? Nope. Toss in a totally new, butt-ugly UI, loss of smart playlists, loss of wikipedia plug-in, loss of ipod support (!!!), loss of postgre support (though that one I can at least understand even if I don't like it) and you get an app that went from being a near-killer desktop app to useless garbage.
I thought it was just the KDE developers who went insane with the "blow everything up in a massive rewrite" mindset, but it seems to be infecting their apps, too :(.
All DS9 had to do, was make Worf look like a TOS-era Klingon, and have the other characters in the show not even notice the difference. Just exchange a couple of odd looks, perhaps coupled with a small joke along the lines of, "Did he cut his hair?" Then when they return to DS9's present, Worf is back to his fully-made-up self, and again, nobody sees the difference.
Much of the episode was played for humor in the first place, I don't know why they didn't go there for the Klingon make-up.
Plywood on a garbage can? Thankfully on only a couple occasions, I haven't even had that luxury. While tied by a too-short serial cable to a controller or HMI, I've had to hold my laptop computer up with one hand, and use the other to diagnose the problem.
And the place I'm going to next month.. it makes fish feed. The smell is just vile, and it gets into everything.
I am not one to defend the profligate spending of the Bush administration. He missed a golden opportunity when the country rallied around him post-9/11 to get federal government spending under control. However to stop the graph at the end of the Bush administration without acknowledging what Obama's proposing is flat-out wrong.
Shutting off kdawson or other irritating (to put it gently) editors may help your front page, but does nothing for the RSS feed. I rarely visit the front page, myself; I open the RSS via a Firefox live bookmark, and if I see an interesting headline, I check the story out. It's only then that I might find out the story was posted by an editor I don't like, the headline was misleading, the summary is utter tripe, etc.
So the complaint is perfectly valid. I'd go so far as to say, "Just turn him off on your page," smacks of excuse-making.