That was a cut and paste job from Phands' post on the IV SCOX board, but I happen to agree with it.
The board of directors had to approve Elop. It was suicide. "Microsoft cannibalizes its partners? Oh no, that won't happen to us!"
Delusional thinking by the board of directors at best.
I said before that one of Microsoft's strategies is to "cut off the oxygen" of competing companies. They have failed to be able to do that in this century, and what they've had a habit of doing instead is teamkilling their partners in the head. Witness the whole Surface tablet debacle - directly competing now with the OEMs. The trail of dead beside the road is evident.
>My relationship with phands and the Y! Microsoft board
I've known Paul long before he started trolling the idiots over there. I know him from SCOX, not MSFT. It's a hobby for him. I'm not going to judge him because everyone needs a hobby. But to characterize him as foul mouthed, no, he swears far less online than I do, so I'll say that's patently false. Paul's "trolling" of the MSFT board is usually on-topic and fact based. Because that's all it takes to stir the mouth breathers there - post something factual. And to call what Phands does trolling, compare and contrast that to the situation between wally, msftsucks, hawcreek, wottow, and the rest - it's mostly a political troll circle jerk with no end in sight with haw being the worst offender. I don't know how Paul can stand it, personally. I can't.
I poke my head in maybe once or twice a year on the idiot board now. I run away screaming because of the political stupidity. The derp, it burns.
There used to be a time when the MSFT board wasn't that way. Now it's just sad.
There is one other person who I know who used to frequent the idiot board, and that is Wrathful Pig. He avoids Y! MSFT as much as I do now. There are a few pro-softies that I miss from MSFT, but they no longer go there either.
As a side note, I just went looking for old posts of mine from when I used to frequent the MSFT board. You can only find two under my current Yahoo alias, and none under my old Boyle M. Owl name. Those have all vanished. Poof. Meh. This is why I have largely left Y! Finance for IV. It's been run by morons ever since the WHOLE NEW LOOK.
It's run by Andy Schlafly. Phyllis Schlafly's son.
They really believe this stuff. You have run into Poe's Law.
"Poe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between parodies of religious or other fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobe Fred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they argue he's a "deep cover liberal" trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes." --Rational Wiki.
Assuming that Bruce Willis is physically fit and weighs 85kg, we can annihilate him with an equivalent mass of antimatter.
170kg of mass converted directly to energy gets us 15.3 exajoules of energy (1.53x10^19), or appx 72 Tsar Bombas (each at 2.1x10^17)..
There are appx 116 members of the cast, credited and uncredited according to IMDB.
We could detonate the cast members with equivalent masses of antimatter in succession a la "Orion" to steer the asteroid if it is far enough out. This gives us 177x10^19 joules, evenly divided up into 116 separate bombs, assuming the rest of the cast weighs the same.
For larger asteroids, we could use the casts of Troll 2, Biodome, Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: ecks vs sever (even the title is bad), Battle Los Angeles, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, etc.
Yes, it's called bittorrent, because clearly the publishers are not interested in playing by the rules anyway. If it was up to them, brick and mortar libraries would disappear too.
Where did this idea ever come from? "Everybody knows" that Gates bought QDOS from Kildall and nobody ever claimed that QDOS was a "copy of CP/M," not even Kildall himself. What was in dispute was whether Kildall was literally out to lunch or flying, or whatever, brushing off the meeting and selling a license for what turned out to be a pittance. That's the legend anyway, but he's not here on this planet anymore to defend himself.
Let's take Office 2000...please. Let's assume that I am the Russian Government and I have cracked copies of, I don't know, older Photoshop, Office, you name it.
Now someone gives me an OS that runs all those programs but to which I have the source code
Sure. Wine runs all that old stuff on various other OSes - OSX, Linux, BSD. Faster than Windows does. Heck, it runs WoW faster than Windows does and it does so on already mature operating systems that you don't have to baby to keep from crashing. You don't need an entire OS, just the API.
But then let's look at the idea of running obsolete pirated software on a not-even-third-tier OS. Modern versions of Libre Office, for example, work better than 12 year old obsolete closed-source software, if only for the fact that they can open modern, *standardized* ISO and ECMA file formats. Or are you willing to go through life with Office 97 formats forever? Really? And what if these users want to communicate with the outside world? What happens in 10 years when you've got all these files in 25 year old formats that nobody knows how to read but yourselves because y'all have been using pirated copies of Microsoft Office 97?
Do you make a habit of sending files in AmiPro format? Because that's the equivalent of what you'd be doing in 10 years.
Down that road lies madness.
Your argument is pretty weak and self-contradictory.
"if this gets completed Russia can be sure that Windows programs can be run in secure environments"
Trying to make a bug-compatible Windows clone is secure? You wind up implementing the same design decisions that Microsoft did that makes Windows an unsecure pile. Don't forget that Windows is a *consumer oriented* operating system and the design compromises show it.
It's funny how a lot of people who seem to be American do not seem to get that for a large part of the world the USA is a threat as well as a promise
If you want an OS that is truly international and not dependent on any one country, you want Linux or *BSD or even Plan9 if you don't want to roll your own. It would be cool if the Russians picked up Plan 9 and ran with it. It's got some really good ideas. Besides that, It's easier to write an OS from scratch than to reverse-engineer Windows. It's not like Russia is lacking in the people with that skillset.
Finally, trying to untie yourself from Microsoft and the US by reverse engineering Windows is self-defeating, isn't it? You remain wedded to whatever design Microsoft comes up in the future and chase that forever.
Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University that grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, says he wants to make lab meat "indistinguishable" from the real stuff,
Why stop there? Why not use human muscular stem cells? Then it could be branded as Ambrosia Plus.
> Why is everyone so quick to accept the corpse of TCPA in new clothes?
Only softies and people who don't know any better do. Pointing at Apple and saying they lock their phones and tablets too ignores the fact that what they do is also wrong. It's like Timmy beating up Bobby on the playground, and when you beat up Bobby, you point at Timmy and say "well, he was doing it too!"
The rest of us want to punch people in the face for even suggesting TCPA 2.0
Look-and-feel lawsuits are less than a crapshoot. Apple lost theirs against Microsoft, for example.
This is a look-and-feel lawsuit, and when it comes to games, look-and-feel is even harder to enforce than the look-and-feel of a spreadsheet program, for example.
To repeat what Hatta posted up there:
Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.
You can't copyright game rules. They are functional, not creative. You can copyright the *presentation* of those rules, but not the rules themselves. You can't copyright isometric projection of a 3 walled house to show the interior. It's functional, not creative. You can't copyright a genre. You can't copyright an idea.
As much as I find Zynga offensive, unless EA can show that Zynga copied EA's actual artwork and/or code and not just created their own version of it, then EA should shut up and walk away quietly.
>You do realize that an activated charcoal filter (brita pitcher) is more than adequate for removing fluoride and that you're trying way too hard, yes?
Disregard, this is wrong. Bone char is much more effective.
Entire countries, such as Sweden have taken this approach, giving xylitol gum in school lunches, which provides a higher level of benefit.
This is just wrong. Sweden puts it in table salt, like we put iodide in table salt. It's actually more effective this way, and gets fluoride to people who have well water. Many countries do this. Germany, Spain, Switzerland, etc.
But silicoflourides are much cheaper than sodium fluoride
I'm ok with this logic here...
because it's a toxic waste product extracted from the smokestack scrubbers of fertilizer manufacturing plants.
Oh come on. I read a site claiming exactly that and they said it was just taken unrefined from the waste stream and put into the water supply. Yeah, really.
From waterloowatch.com
Hydrofluorosilicic acid is drawn from open air cooling lakes, as is. It is containerized in tankers, and shipped to your municipal drinking water supply. Hydrofluorosilicic acid remains contaminated with trace amounts of lead, arsenic, mercury and radioactive materials. It is delivered unrefined, and in none-pharmaceutical grade, to be used as water fluoridation 'product'.
What. That doesn't even make fucking sense.
We also have modern studies showing that silicofluorides transport heavy metals across calcium channels and epidemiological studies show that municipalities that use them have statistically higher levels of violent crimes
Yeah, we have the Boston study, but I'm skeptical that they adequately controlled for lead paint.
YMMV.
I use a distiller at work because the local town puts silicofluorides in their water.
You do realize that an activated charcoal filter (brita pitcher) is more than adequate for removing fluoride and that you're trying way too hard, yes?
bragging that you haven't had a cavitiy in 12 years.
I'm 47. I haven't had one, ever. I don't know what it's like to have one. Compare and contrast to my parents who had mouths full of metal by the time they hit 20 years old.
Longer answer: if you buy into the "fluoridation is harmful and doesn't actually do anything to prevent dental caries" you are going against 50 years of worldwide studies.
Slashdot Mirror
'..suicide by M$'? Maybe you mean homicide.
That was a cut and paste job from Phands' post on the IV SCOX board, but I happen to agree with it.
The board of directors had to approve Elop. It was suicide. "Microsoft cannibalizes its partners? Oh no, that won't happen to us!"
Delusional thinking by the board of directors at best.
I said before that one of Microsoft's strategies is to "cut off the oxygen" of competing companies. They have failed to be able to do that in this century, and what they've had a habit of doing instead is teamkilling their partners in the head. Witness the whole Surface tablet debacle - directly competing now with the OEMs. The trail of dead beside the road is evident.
>My relationship with phands and the Y! Microsoft board
I've known Paul long before he started trolling the idiots over there. I know him from SCOX, not MSFT. It's a hobby for him. I'm not going to judge him because everyone needs a hobby. But to characterize him as foul mouthed, no, he swears far less online than I do, so I'll say that's patently false. Paul's "trolling" of the MSFT board is usually on-topic and fact based. Because that's all it takes to stir the mouth breathers there - post something factual. And to call what Phands does trolling, compare and contrast that to the situation between wally, msftsucks, hawcreek, wottow, and the rest - it's mostly a political troll circle jerk with no end in sight with haw being the worst offender. I don't know how Paul can stand it, personally. I can't.
I poke my head in maybe once or twice a year on the idiot board now. I run away screaming because of the political stupidity. The derp, it burns.
There used to be a time when the MSFT board wasn't that way. Now it's just sad.
There is one other person who I know who used to frequent the idiot board, and that is Wrathful Pig. He avoids Y! MSFT as much as I do now. There are a few pro-softies that I miss from MSFT, but they no longer go there either.
As a side note, I just went looking for old posts of mine from when I used to frequent the MSFT board. You can only find two under my current Yahoo alias, and none under my old Boyle M. Owl name. Those have all vanished. Poof. Meh. This is why I have largely left Y! Finance for IV. It's been run by morons ever since the WHOLE NEW LOOK.
--
BMO
Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
--
BMO
It's not fake.
It's run by Andy Schlafly. Phyllis Schlafly's son.
They really believe this stuff. You have run into Poe's Law.
"Poe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between parodies of religious or other fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobe Fred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they argue he's a "deep cover liberal" trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes." --Rational Wiki.
--
BMO
Achewood:
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007
--
BMO
Assuming that Bruce Willis is physically fit and weighs 85kg, we can annihilate him with an equivalent mass of antimatter.
170kg of mass converted directly to energy gets us 15.3 exajoules of energy (1.53x10^19), or appx 72 Tsar Bombas (each at 2.1x10^17)..
There are appx 116 members of the cast, credited and uncredited according to IMDB.
We could detonate the cast members with equivalent masses of antimatter in succession a la "Orion" to steer the asteroid if it is far enough out. This gives us 177x10^19 joules, evenly divided up into 116 separate bombs, assuming the rest of the cast weighs the same.
For larger asteroids, we could use the casts of Troll 2, Biodome, Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: ecks vs sever (even the title is bad), Battle Los Angeles, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, etc.
We could then have JJ Abrams add lens flare.
--
BMO
>Is there any alternative sites out there?
Yes, it's called bittorrent, because clearly the publishers are not interested in playing by the rules anyway. If it was up to them, brick and mortar libraries would disappear too.
--
BMO
Chris Christie is persona-non-grata ever since he defended appointing Sohail Mohammed to the New Jersey Superior Court.
And then he told the Tea Potty that they're morons, and rightly so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y83z552NJaw
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BMO
They don't.
They believe in Conservapedia.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
Go. Read.
--
BMO
Where did this idea ever come from? "Everybody knows" that Gates bought QDOS from Kildall and nobody ever claimed that QDOS was a "copy of CP/M," not even Kildall himself. What was in dispute was whether Kildall was literally out to lunch or flying, or whatever, brushing off the meeting and selling a license for what turned out to be a pittance. That's the legend anyway, but he's not here on this planet anymore to defend himself.
FFS. Want to know where DOS came from? Just read Tim Patterson's blog. http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/
He discusses the design differences between the two and why he did what he did.
And if you're really curious and need to feed the inner nerd, go have a look at the CP/M source code.
http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html
--
BMO
Let's take Office 2000...please. Let's assume that I am the Russian Government and I have cracked copies of, I don't know, older Photoshop, Office, you name it.
Now someone gives me an OS that runs all those programs but to which I have the source code
Sure. Wine runs all that old stuff on various other OSes - OSX, Linux, BSD. Faster than Windows does. Heck, it runs WoW faster than Windows does and it does so on already mature operating systems that you don't have to baby to keep from crashing. You don't need an entire OS, just the API.
But then let's look at the idea of running obsolete pirated software on a not-even-third-tier OS. Modern versions of Libre Office, for example, work better than 12 year old obsolete closed-source software, if only for the fact that they can open modern, *standardized* ISO and ECMA file formats. Or are you willing to go through life with Office 97 formats forever? Really? And what if these users want to communicate with the outside world? What happens in 10 years when you've got all these files in 25 year old formats that nobody knows how to read but yourselves because y'all have been using pirated copies of Microsoft Office 97?
Do you make a habit of sending files in AmiPro format? Because that's the equivalent of what you'd be doing in 10 years.
Down that road lies madness.
Your argument is pretty weak and self-contradictory.
--
BMO
"if this gets completed Russia can be sure that Windows programs can be run in secure environments"
Trying to make a bug-compatible Windows clone is secure? You wind up implementing the same design decisions that Microsoft did that makes Windows an unsecure pile. Don't forget that Windows is a *consumer oriented* operating system and the design compromises show it.
It's funny how a lot of people who seem to be American do not seem to get that for a large part of the world the USA is a threat as well as a promise
If you want an OS that is truly international and not dependent on any one country, you want Linux or *BSD or even Plan9 if you don't want to roll your own. It would be cool if the Russians picked up Plan 9 and ran with it. It's got some really good ideas. Besides that, It's easier to write an OS from scratch than to reverse-engineer Windows. It's not like Russia is lacking in the people with that skillset.
Finally, trying to untie yourself from Microsoft and the US by reverse engineering Windows is self-defeating, isn't it? You remain wedded to whatever design Microsoft comes up in the future and chase that forever.
--
BMO
Why stop there? Why not use human muscular stem cells? Then it could be branded as Ambrosia Plus.
--
BMO
linux is selling out faster than you can say "we wish we were apple!"
Linux is not your SeKrIt KLuB.
Also, you must be one of those people that stops liking a band that becomes popular.
Hipster.
--
BMO
I thought I'd never actually use that word here, but there it is, Linux hipsterism.
>reads your flawed logic in reply to the AC
Your name fits you.
Plonk.
--
BMO
Being tolerant of intolerant people does not make you tolerant. It is you standing idly by as bad things are done to people.
--
BMO
Citation needed.
--
BMO
> Why is everyone so quick to accept the corpse of TCPA in new clothes?
Only softies and people who don't know any better do. Pointing at Apple and saying they lock their phones and tablets too ignores the fact that what they do is also wrong. It's like Timmy beating up Bobby on the playground, and when you beat up Bobby, you point at Timmy and say "well, he was doing it too!"
The rest of us want to punch people in the face for even suggesting TCPA 2.0
--
BMO
Look-and-feel lawsuits are less than a crapshoot. Apple lost theirs against Microsoft, for example.
This is a look-and-feel lawsuit, and when it comes to games, look-and-feel is even harder to enforce than the look-and-feel of a spreadsheet program, for example.
To repeat what Hatta posted up there:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
Just because something is visually similar doesn't mean that it's an infringing copy. SCO tried this "nonliteral copying" argument and failed.
--
BMO
You can't copyright game rules. They are functional, not creative. You can copyright the *presentation* of those rules, but not the rules themselves.
You can't copyright isometric projection of a 3 walled house to show the interior. It's functional, not creative.
You can't copyright a genre.
You can't copyright an idea.
As much as I find Zynga offensive, unless EA can show that Zynga copied EA's actual artwork and/or code and not just created their own version of it, then EA should shut up and walk away quietly.
--
BMO
Article doesn't even mention deliberate trolling of chat operators by the likes of /g/.
--
BMO
>You do realize that an activated charcoal filter (brita pitcher) is more than adequate for removing fluoride and that you're trying way too hard, yes?
Disregard, this is wrong. Bone char is much more effective.
www.de-fluoride.net/3rdproceedings/80-83.pdf
--
BMO
Entire countries, such as Sweden have taken this approach, giving xylitol gum in school lunches, which provides a higher level of benefit.
This is just wrong. Sweden puts it in table salt, like we put iodide in table salt. It's actually more effective this way, and gets fluoride to people who have well water. Many countries do this. Germany, Spain, Switzerland, etc.
But silicoflourides are much cheaper than sodium fluoride
I'm ok with this logic here...
because it's a toxic waste product extracted from the smokestack scrubbers of fertilizer manufacturing plants.
Oh come on. I read a site claiming exactly that and they said it was just taken unrefined from the waste stream and put into the water supply. Yeah, really.
From waterloowatch.com
What. That doesn't even make fucking sense.
We also have modern studies showing that silicofluorides transport heavy metals across calcium channels and epidemiological studies show that municipalities that use them have statistically higher levels of violent crimes
Yeah, we have the Boston study, but I'm skeptical that they adequately controlled for lead paint.
YMMV.
I use a distiller at work because the local town puts silicofluorides in their water.
You do realize that an activated charcoal filter (brita pitcher) is more than adequate for removing fluoride and that you're trying way too hard, yes?
bragging that you haven't had a cavitiy in 12 years.
I'm 47. I haven't had one, ever. I don't know what it's like to have one. Compare and contrast to my parents who had mouths full of metal by the time they hit 20 years old.
--
BMO
This. Holy shit that hurt to read.
This guy gets paid to write this article that's all over the place? Did he smoke a fattie while writing it or was he just drunk?
Yes, it's an actual issue. You're much better off reading Ray Beckerman's blog.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
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BMO
Keep using it then. If your teeth have turned brown, you're overdoing it. If your teeth are not brown, then don't worry about it.
It's just that without more description in your initial message, it was too easy to attribute an anti-fluoridation intent to your message.
What you might want to look into is getting your teeth sealed. Doing this drops incidence of caries by 60 percent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_sealant
--
BMO
No.
Longer answer: if you buy into the "fluoridation is harmful and doesn't actually do anything to prevent dental caries" you are going against 50 years of worldwide studies.
--
BMO