If I were a sex offender and this law got passed, I know exactly what I'd be tempted to do... sign-up for ~50 new screen names a day. Basically, (Number of sex offenders in the UK) X (Average number of new screen names per person) = A LOT of paperwork for the police. So much, in fact, I doubt they'd have the ability to do anything else. Which would lead to either this law getting changed/removed or an automated system. If it's the latter then there should be enough white noise & overlap (ilikekids in chatroom A & ilikekids in chatroom B) that it would render the list nearly useless.
The point is that you are giving so called scientists a financial motivation for making one conclusion over another. This is nothing like your OSS bounty comparison.
Are you implying that it's rare for a scientist to have a financial motivations affecting their research? Lots of scientists believe strongly in what they research, to the point of investing in stocks or starting companies. I wish I could find the article that explains this, but (according to a teacher of mine) scientific journals used to list potential biases, but after a while the lists grew too long to be practical and the information got moved to the journal's website. Also, a scientist's credibility is directly related to their financial well being. If they start getting called a crackpot then their grant prospects start dwindling, and being that grants are hard to obtain in the first place, that could quickly become a bad thing. Even more, the burden of proof is much higher for a claim that contradicts the consensus opinion, so that translates into more expensive studies.
Besides, financial motivations would just be an easily noticed bias. If a scientist receives money from Exxon, then you'd want to closely examine articles that downplay global warming for procedural or statistical errors (or suspect data). Likewise, if a scientist is often a global warming
doomsayer, then any articles they publish to that effect should also be put under close scrutiny. But what you can't do is outright dismiss anything ad hominem. In science it's the opinions and research that matters, not the scientist or their motivations (at least ideally).
If you have decent defenses, and don't want to go to war, then I would think that improving your defenses would lessen the likelihood of you attacking anyone. MAD worked because the US & Russia had comparable technology and focused on offensive power. Now that the cold war is over, the US isn't as worried as much about being wiped off the map, but protecting its citizens against suicidal weaker nations/groups. Terrorists rely on anonymity/mobility to survive. North Korea might be crazy enough to launch a nuclear weapon. With either of those enemies, the US doesn't face annihilation as with the Russians, it faces getting a city hit and letting a few million people die.
Now, since MAD doesn't apply the rules change. If you have no defense, then you have to use your offense to reduce your enemy's offensive power before they can use it, i.e. a preemptive strike. If you have sufficient defense then you can wait until they attack once before declaring war and destroying them.
Here's an example. Suppose North Korea starts fueling some long range missile on a launch pad (in a silo/whatever), and the US strongly suspects that it has a nuclear warhead and is aimed for San Francisco. Now without missile defense there are two options. A) Do nothing and hope that the intelligence is wrong. Or B) Destroy the missile before it launches, hence declaring war. If the missile defense is reliable then there are still two options. A) Prepare the defense system and wait to see what North Korea is doing. Or B) (Same as before). Gee, I wonder which scenario makes the US less likely to attack?
There are plenty of reasons people don't like flash (after all, FlashBlock is a very popular plugin). For games it's great. For videos it's passable (especially if you're targeting people smart enough to install flash, but too ignorant to install a codec). For most everything else, plain HTML+CSS+Javascript should be enough (and lots of people would probably argue about Javascript). After all, HTML is free to develop, 100% of your potential viewers can interpret it, and it's easy enough for a ten year old to learn. It also can dynamically resize (I do my browsing from 1400 x 1050 or 320 x 480), load extremely quickly, and it's actually fairly usable.
I, for instance, middle click and open tabs in new links. Flash navigation makes that impossible. Handicap people also tend to be SOL when it comes to flash (text readers for the blind for example). Flash also tends to be incompatible with copy/paste, browser extensions, certain browsers and OSes (PDAs, alternative OSes), alternative fonts (see handicap point), translators, web spiders, offline browsing, slow connections (some people have no choice but dial-up), bookmarking (sometimes Alt+D, always when right-clicking a link), and a myriad of other things.
Or sometimes a teacher will surprise people by disallowing calculators. I had that happen once in a Physics class (non-calculus based, required for Biology majors and not much else). The test hadn't started yet, people were still coming in, etc., and two people a couple rows below me were talking.
"You worried about the test?" "Yeah, I'm terrible at this class." "Yeah, me too, but what I do is put all my notes in my calculator so I don't have to study for the tests."
Now, at this point the teacher was walking around and just happened to be standing close to where I was sitting, so easily within earshot. A couple minutes later he goes to the front of the room and announces that calculators wouldn't be allowed for this test, and to not worry about getting a numeric answer, just to simplify things as much as possible.
A lot of people screwed up on that test. I always did my physics algebraically first, then used my calculator to compute the actual numeric answer at the very end, so I did fine (100%). The next highest was 93%, then 87% and after that 78% (class of ~60 people). Moral of the story: be able to do the math/physics without a calculator. Oh, and also don't be a dumbass that announces your method of cheating while the teacher is standing behind you.
Because Clinton knew he was lying and knowingly committed perjury? Bush relayed what intelligence agencies were telling him, and at the time it's fairly easy to see that he believed his statements to be accurate. Being wrong is one thing (and rather disturbing given the actions that followed), but knowingly lying under oath to the American people is another matter entirely.
Orders of magnitude are powers of 10. I figured that a base XP install is about 2 GB and if AOS4 is ~50 MB that's ~2 orders of magnitude (5 * 10^1 MB compared to 2 * 10^3 MB).
I've been playing around with nLite, but I doubt you could get XP to something under about 1 GB and still have it mostly functional. If you tweak it further then you can get it down to about 200 MB with a fair sacrifice in functionality. Even so, it looks like AOS4 is still only a fourth of that, and a BeOS base install (I mention it because that's what I'm familiar with) is only about 150 MB (and can be reduced to ~50 MB without much of a loss).
That said, you can reduce Windows 2000 to a fairly small size more easily, but it still doesn't boot considerably faster. So not everything is harddrive IO. Windows is probably slower partly because it's doing stuff with applications (preloading IE, Windows Defender, etc.). Just about everything you install will increase boot time.
Re:boot time
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'd guess bloat. I would assume that Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS. That said, though, I've heard of people cutting XP's boot time to 12 seconds. Still, I have no idea why "modern" OSes take so long to boot. Linux takes a couple minutes on my computer, and I hear Macs are similar to XP. Personally I run the BeOS which is similar to Amiga in boot time (I've heard of people booting in 5 seconds). And that's to a fully usable desktop (no login, ready to open Firefox), while checking for hardware changes (you could swap out your video card and there's no prompts or delay). So fundamentally I don't see any reason why other OSes can't boot in 10 seconds or less.
That some of us still use the word steal, instead of your newspeak
Do you even know what newspeak is? It's "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." The point of that is to reduce the number of ideas and concepts that a person can think. It's propaganda which forces every dissenting argument to be a strawman. In the English language there are currently two terms to describe two different crimes. Stealing is the act of removing a person's property without their consent. Copyright infringement is the illegal copying of intellectual property. Stealing is pretty much universally condemned. Copyright infringement is a far lesser crime that many people feel is hardly a crime at all. By calling "copyright infringement" "stealing" you are trying to remove the distinction between the two and get people to condemn copyright infringement by equating it to stealing, which they already condemn. It's propaganda, a fallacious argument, and an embodiment of Orwell's "newspeak". It's not newspeak if people are using two words to describe two different concepts, it is newspeak if someone insists upon removing a concept by removing the term used to describe it.
Sorry for the rant, but, like Orwell, people redefining words is one of my pet peeves. People misusing "literally" is bad enough, don't you dare misuse "newspeak" to mean the exact opposite of what it really means.
It doesn't even have to be future software. I highly doubt that any DRM even could be backwards compatible with every piece of hardware and software that people still use. Case in point, I use the BeOS and still own a RioVolt (early CD-based MP3 player). This question seems almost like "if you could push a button that would end all of the world's problems, but it would kill an innocent child, would you push it?".
Take a trip to a grocery store in a poor neighborhood, and you'll see cart fulls of ramen, boxed meals, and red fruit drink - all full of questionable chemicals, MSG, and high-fructose corn syrup. These people are fat because they can't afford nutritious food like fresh fruits & vegetables.
Last time I checked, exercise was free while TV costs money. Bananas cost something like fifty cents per pound, and (cheap) soda costs about the same as milk (when it isn't on sale), so I also doubt it's the food cost. I'm a college student, living in downtown Louisville, KY (not incredibly high crime, but much higher than surrounding areas). It's cheaper for me to buy (certain) fruits, rice, and such than to buy most TV dinners and far cheaper than to eat fast food on campus. I would agree that obesity and income level are probably negatively correlated, but I would disagree that it's a causation. Eating unhealthy food is a short-sighted decision. My guess is that people that often make short-sighted decisions tend to be unable to accumulate wealth, get an education, stay away from crime, or find/keep good jobs, and that is much of the reason why they are poor. Of course, that's a generalization, since I'm sure that doesn't describe only poor people, or all poor people.
BitComet (a Bittorrent client) uses "UDP NAT Bypassing" which I assume is this technique. Unfortunately, this feature has been broken/disabled for the last few versions though.
I figure that we could handle environmental changes far better than most species. First of all, we have considerable intelligence and tools that extend our "natural" adaptability. Second, how many other animals can thrive on 6 of the 7 continents (or all 7 if you let people use tools)? Third, we can eat a fairly varied diet, so our survival isn't dependent on any specific prey. Fourth, our population is enormous compared to the minimum number needed to sustain the species (i.e. not enter an extinction spiral/cascade). If 5 billion of us were to instantly just fall over dead, the human species still wouldn't be threatened with extinction. Of course, a significant climate change probably would kill a bunch of people, and make life kinda suck for the survivors, so it's in our best interest to prevent that from happening. Extinction is probably impossible for humans unless we do something really dumb, like ignite the atmosphere or create some super virus.
The difference seems to be entirely OS specific. MS-DOS probably takes virtually no time to boot. I've heard of people trimming their BeOS boot times to about 4 seconds from power-on (remember that BeOS isn't multiuser either, so there's no login prompt). And Windows XP can be trimmed down to something like 15 seconds on normal hardware IIRC.
Personally, my boot times are about 40 seconds for BeOS, 75 seconds for Windows XP, and about 200 seconds for Linux (the primary reason I hardly ever boot it). But that's in part due to my BIOS taking 10 - 30 seconds to do its thing (if it doesn't freeze), my boot manager taking 5 seconds before timing out, and BeOS hating my IDE chain (~80% CPU usage for 1.2 MB/sec).
While I agree with you in essence, I suppose I'll nitpick as well.
Main Entry: environment
Pronunciation: in-'vI-r&(n)-m&nt, -'vI(-&)r(n)-
Function: noun
1 : the circumstances, objects, or conditions by which one is surrounded
2 a : the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival b : the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community
3 : the position or characteristic position of a linguistic element in a sequence
4 : a computer interface from which various tasks can be performed
So if our effect on the climate has been downgraded then wouldn't our effect on the environment be downgraded as well? After all, the "environment" seems to include the climate. (Reducing one part while keeping the others constant should reduce the overall total.)
There are also free mail forwarders for subdomains. I use http://www.cjb.net/ personally. When I register for a site I use sitename@mysubdomain.cjb.net and have that forward to my Gmail.
Not after time is served. "Oops, we were wrong, you don't have to serve the remaining 5 years of your 25 year sentence." More reversible than the death sentence, but certainly not completely reversible.
While you're completely right that said statement is false, I doubt that you should worry too much about telling it to "impressionable children". First of all, it's an immensely popular idea (a very common theme in TV & movies), so trying to prevent children from being exposed to it is futile. Second, one cannot be completely certain of much of anything. If we only told children what we absolutely know to be true, then we wouldn't be teaching them much at all. Third, it's probably decent advice even though it's not entirely true. For the most situations, revenge is illegal, unethical, not beneficial to anyone, or just a bad idea . So, given that it's a child, they probably aren't experienced enough (or whatever) to determine what is a good cause for revenge and what isn't. So it's safer to tell them to tell them to never do it rather than to always do it. If they are equiped to accurately make that assessment, then they don't need and will probably see the faults in that strategy.
Strange, none of those examples were hypothetical sales (which the **AA is counting). If you physically steal an object the prior owner can't sell it anymore, nor do they have the benefit of using it. If you download a song, the **AA can *still* sell as many copies as they want to. Downloads also aren't equal to a hypothetical sale. With a service, like a haircut, there's an agreement of payment upon its completion. If I download a song from a random person non-affiliated with the **AA, there is no such agreement.
Words are a method of communication. Communication doesn't work unless all parties involved share a common set of definitions. Even scarier, most people also use words to think. Read 1984 if you don't get the implications of this. We don't call copyright infringement stealing because it's not the same thing. That's why there's a different word for it!
As for playing the language game, I do it because because it matters. If you broaden the definition of stealing to accomidate copyright infringement then it loses much of its meaning. You'd might as well call it child molesting. Oh no, people are "raping" the **AA's "children"! It might make your strawman a little bit stronger.
But, just for fun, lets broaden the definition of stealing to include anytime someone causes a hypothetical loss. So, if I invite someone to play a game or something, thus preventing them from shopping and spending money, then I've stolen from a store, right? Or how about the time I spend waiting in line? Hypothetically I could do something very profitable with that time, so am I entitled to sue the people in front of me for that money or have them arrested for theft? Personally, I'm completely against stealing. I think copyright infringement, however, is in serious need of reform. (Heaven forbid that I actually have a different opinion about the two; afterall, aren't they the same thing?)
Drastically reduce but not eliminate. IIRC mutations tend to occur once every 600,000 base pairs, so that would mean that replication is about 99.99983% accurate. After 100 divisions the genome of a cell would only be 99.983% accurate, so it'd have about 1 error every 500 base pairs. Given the size of most genes/proteins, that cell should have some serious problems or be cancerous. (I don't know the "maximum" number of divisions, it could be more or less, but you can see the problem.) Not to mention, mutation accumulation is just one part of aging. Now, if we could take our genome and add some parity base pairs and some redundancy checking proteins we might be able to address that problem. But that's far beyond our level of genetic engineering (AFAIK).
Can you really be addicted to something as diverse as the internet? I assume you could get addicted to porn, games, or what not, but the internet as a whole? What this sounds like is someone noticed that some people spend a lot of time on computers, figured that this abnormal behavior must be the result of an addiction and worked backwards from there. As for withdrawl, I'd say almost anyone would experience similar symptoms if you took away their primary method of socialization, research, and entertainment. For some people, this happens to be the internet. For others you'd have to remove TV, telephone, newspapers, and probably transportation.
"Lack" of freetime doesn't seem to keep people from watching TV. I suppose if don't watch much/any then you would probably have several hours a week to spend on MMORPGs. It's just a choice of how you entertain yourself during your freetime since most people don't work/do necessities for every waking hour of every day.
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If I were a sex offender and this law got passed, I know exactly what I'd be tempted to do... sign-up for ~50 new screen names a day. Basically, (Number of sex offenders in the UK) X (Average number of new screen names per person) = A LOT of paperwork for the police. So much, in fact, I doubt they'd have the ability to do anything else. Which would lead to either this law getting changed/removed or an automated system. If it's the latter then there should be enough white noise & overlap (ilikekids in chatroom A & ilikekids in chatroom B) that it would render the list nearly useless.
The point is that you are giving so called scientists a financial motivation for making one conclusion over another. This is nothing like your OSS bounty comparison.
Are you implying that it's rare for a scientist to have a financial motivations affecting their research? Lots of scientists believe strongly in what they research, to the point of investing in stocks or starting companies. I wish I could find the article that explains this, but (according to a teacher of mine) scientific journals used to list potential biases, but after a while the lists grew too long to be practical and the information got moved to the journal's website. Also, a scientist's credibility is directly related to their financial well being. If they start getting called a crackpot then their grant prospects start dwindling, and being that grants are hard to obtain in the first place, that could quickly become a bad thing. Even more, the burden of proof is much higher for a claim that contradicts the consensus opinion, so that translates into more expensive studies.
Besides, financial motivations would just be an easily noticed bias. If a scientist receives money from Exxon, then you'd want to closely examine articles that downplay global warming for procedural or statistical errors (or suspect data). Likewise, if a scientist is often a global warming doomsayer, then any articles they publish to that effect should also be put under close scrutiny. But what you can't do is outright dismiss anything ad hominem. In science it's the opinions and research that matters, not the scientist or their motivations (at least ideally).
If you have decent defenses, and don't want to go to war, then I would think that improving your defenses would lessen the likelihood of you attacking anyone. MAD worked because the US & Russia had comparable technology and focused on offensive power. Now that the cold war is over, the US isn't as worried as much about being wiped off the map, but protecting its citizens against suicidal weaker nations/groups. Terrorists rely on anonymity/mobility to survive. North Korea might be crazy enough to launch a nuclear weapon. With either of those enemies, the US doesn't face annihilation as with the Russians, it faces getting a city hit and letting a few million people die.
Now, since MAD doesn't apply the rules change. If you have no defense, then you have to use your offense to reduce your enemy's offensive power before they can use it, i.e. a preemptive strike. If you have sufficient defense then you can wait until they attack once before declaring war and destroying them.
Here's an example. Suppose North Korea starts fueling some long range missile on a launch pad (in a silo/whatever), and the US strongly suspects that it has a nuclear warhead and is aimed for San Francisco. Now without missile defense there are two options. A) Do nothing and hope that the intelligence is wrong. Or B) Destroy the missile before it launches, hence declaring war. If the missile defense is reliable then there are still two options. A) Prepare the defense system and wait to see what North Korea is doing. Or B) (Same as before). Gee, I wonder which scenario makes the US less likely to attack?
There are plenty of reasons people don't like flash (after all, FlashBlock is a very popular plugin). For games it's great. For videos it's passable (especially if you're targeting people smart enough to install flash, but too ignorant to install a codec). For most everything else, plain HTML+CSS+Javascript should be enough (and lots of people would probably argue about Javascript). After all, HTML is free to develop, 100% of your potential viewers can interpret it, and it's easy enough for a ten year old to learn. It also can dynamically resize (I do my browsing from 1400 x 1050 or 320 x 480), load extremely quickly, and it's actually fairly usable.
I, for instance, middle click and open tabs in new links. Flash navigation makes that impossible. Handicap people also tend to be SOL when it comes to flash (text readers for the blind for example). Flash also tends to be incompatible with copy/paste, browser extensions, certain browsers and OSes (PDAs, alternative OSes), alternative fonts (see handicap point), translators, web spiders, offline browsing, slow connections (some people have no choice but dial-up), bookmarking (sometimes Alt+D, always when right-clicking a link), and a myriad of other things.
Or sometimes a teacher will surprise people by disallowing calculators. I had that happen once in a Physics class (non-calculus based, required for Biology majors and not much else). The test hadn't started yet, people were still coming in, etc., and two people a couple rows below me were talking.
"You worried about the test?" "Yeah, I'm terrible at this class." "Yeah, me too, but what I do is put all my notes in my calculator so I don't have to study for the tests."
Now, at this point the teacher was walking around and just happened to be standing close to where I was sitting, so easily within earshot. A couple minutes later he goes to the front of the room and announces that calculators wouldn't be allowed for this test, and to not worry about getting a numeric answer, just to simplify things as much as possible.
A lot of people screwed up on that test. I always did my physics algebraically first, then used my calculator to compute the actual numeric answer at the very end, so I did fine (100%). The next highest was 93%, then 87% and after that 78% (class of ~60 people). Moral of the story: be able to do the math/physics without a calculator. Oh, and also don't be a dumbass that announces your method of cheating while the teacher is standing behind you.
Because Clinton knew he was lying and knowingly committed perjury? Bush relayed what intelligence agencies were telling him, and at the time it's fairly easy to see that he believed his statements to be accurate. Being wrong is one thing (and rather disturbing given the actions that followed), but knowingly lying under oath to the American people is another matter entirely.
Orders of magnitude are powers of 10. I figured that a base XP install is about 2 GB and if AOS4 is ~50 MB that's ~2 orders of magnitude (5 * 10^1 MB compared to 2 * 10^3 MB).
I've been playing around with nLite, but I doubt you could get XP to something under about 1 GB and still have it mostly functional. If you tweak it further then you can get it down to about 200 MB with a fair sacrifice in functionality. Even so, it looks like AOS4 is still only a fourth of that, and a BeOS base install (I mention it because that's what I'm familiar with) is only about 150 MB (and can be reduced to ~50 MB without much of a loss).
That said, you can reduce Windows 2000 to a fairly small size more easily, but it still doesn't boot considerably faster. So not everything is harddrive IO. Windows is probably slower partly because it's doing stuff with applications (preloading IE, Windows Defender, etc.). Just about everything you install will increase boot time.
I'd guess bloat. I would assume that Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS. That said, though, I've heard of people cutting XP's boot time to 12 seconds. Still, I have no idea why "modern" OSes take so long to boot. Linux takes a couple minutes on my computer, and I hear Macs are similar to XP. Personally I run the BeOS which is similar to Amiga in boot time (I've heard of people booting in 5 seconds). And that's to a fully usable desktop (no login, ready to open Firefox), while checking for hardware changes (you could swap out your video card and there's no prompts or delay). So fundamentally I don't see any reason why other OSes can't boot in 10 seconds or less.
That some of us still use the word steal, instead of your newspeak
Do you even know what newspeak is? It's "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." The point of that is to reduce the number of ideas and concepts that a person can think. It's propaganda which forces every dissenting argument to be a strawman. In the English language there are currently two terms to describe two different crimes. Stealing is the act of removing a person's property without their consent. Copyright infringement is the illegal copying of intellectual property. Stealing is pretty much universally condemned. Copyright infringement is a far lesser crime that many people feel is hardly a crime at all. By calling "copyright infringement" "stealing" you are trying to remove the distinction between the two and get people to condemn copyright infringement by equating it to stealing, which they already condemn. It's propaganda, a fallacious argument, and an embodiment of Orwell's "newspeak". It's not newspeak if people are using two words to describe two different concepts, it is newspeak if someone insists upon removing a concept by removing the term used to describe it.
Sorry for the rant, but, like Orwell, people redefining words is one of my pet peeves. People misusing "literally" is bad enough, don't you dare misuse "newspeak" to mean the exact opposite of what it really means.
It doesn't even have to be future software. I highly doubt that any DRM even could be backwards compatible with every piece of hardware and software that people still use. Case in point, I use the BeOS and still own a RioVolt (early CD-based MP3 player). This question seems almost like "if you could push a button that would end all of the world's problems, but it would kill an innocent child, would you push it?".
Take a trip to a grocery store in a poor neighborhood, and you'll see cart fulls of ramen, boxed meals, and red fruit drink - all full of questionable chemicals, MSG, and high-fructose corn syrup. These people are fat because they can't afford nutritious food like fresh fruits & vegetables.
Last time I checked, exercise was free while TV costs money. Bananas cost something like fifty cents per pound, and (cheap) soda costs about the same as milk (when it isn't on sale), so I also doubt it's the food cost. I'm a college student, living in downtown Louisville, KY (not incredibly high crime, but much higher than surrounding areas). It's cheaper for me to buy (certain) fruits, rice, and such than to buy most TV dinners and far cheaper than to eat fast food on campus. I would agree that obesity and income level are probably negatively correlated, but I would disagree that it's a causation. Eating unhealthy food is a short-sighted decision. My guess is that people that often make short-sighted decisions tend to be unable to accumulate wealth, get an education, stay away from crime, or find/keep good jobs, and that is much of the reason why they are poor. Of course, that's a generalization, since I'm sure that doesn't describe only poor people, or all poor people.
Or, if you're lazy...
1. Delete everything on the card.
2. Fill the card with images from certain sites every slashdotter knows about.
I highly doubt anyone will have the desire to recover anything after that.
BitComet (a Bittorrent client) uses "UDP NAT Bypassing" which I assume is this technique. Unfortunately, this feature has been broken/disabled for the last few versions though.
I figure that we could handle environmental changes far better than most species. First of all, we have considerable intelligence and tools that extend our "natural" adaptability. Second, how many other animals can thrive on 6 of the 7 continents (or all 7 if you let people use tools)? Third, we can eat a fairly varied diet, so our survival isn't dependent on any specific prey. Fourth, our population is enormous compared to the minimum number needed to sustain the species (i.e. not enter an extinction spiral/cascade). If 5 billion of us were to instantly just fall over dead, the human species still wouldn't be threatened with extinction. Of course, a significant climate change probably would kill a bunch of people, and make life kinda suck for the survivors, so it's in our best interest to prevent that from happening. Extinction is probably impossible for humans unless we do something really dumb, like ignite the atmosphere or create some super virus.
The difference seems to be entirely OS specific. MS-DOS probably takes virtually no time to boot. I've heard of people trimming their BeOS boot times to about 4 seconds from power-on (remember that BeOS isn't multiuser either, so there's no login prompt). And Windows XP can be trimmed down to something like 15 seconds on normal hardware IIRC.
Personally, my boot times are about 40 seconds for BeOS, 75 seconds for Windows XP, and about 200 seconds for Linux (the primary reason I hardly ever boot it). But that's in part due to my BIOS taking 10 - 30 seconds to do its thing (if it doesn't freeze), my boot manager taking 5 seconds before timing out, and BeOS hating my IDE chain (~80% CPU usage for 1.2 MB/sec).
While I agree with you in essence, I suppose I'll nitpick as well.
Main Entry: environment
Pronunciation: in-'vI-r&(n)-m&nt, -'vI(-&)r(n)-
Function: noun
1 : the circumstances, objects, or conditions by which one is surrounded
2 a : the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival b : the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that influence the life of an individual or community
3 : the position or characteristic position of a linguistic element in a sequence
4 : a computer interface from which various tasks can be performed
So if our effect on the climate has been downgraded then wouldn't our effect on the environment be downgraded as well? After all, the "environment" seems to include the climate. (Reducing one part while keeping the others constant should reduce the overall total.)
There are also free mail forwarders for subdomains. I use http://www.cjb.net/ personally. When I register for a site I use sitename@mysubdomain.cjb.net and have that forward to my Gmail.
Because, of course, a spammer's objective is to be feared...
WxPerl looks fairly native to me. I tried it out a few years ago, but haven't stuck with it since I switched to an OS that it doesn't support.
Not after time is served. "Oops, we were wrong, you don't have to serve the remaining 5 years of your 25 year sentence." More reversible than the death sentence, but certainly not completely reversible.
While you're completely right that said statement is false, I doubt that you should worry too much about telling it to "impressionable children". First of all, it's an immensely popular idea (a very common theme in TV & movies), so trying to prevent children from being exposed to it is futile. Second, one cannot be completely certain of much of anything. If we only told children what we absolutely know to be true, then we wouldn't be teaching them much at all. Third, it's probably decent advice even though it's not entirely true. For the most situations, revenge is illegal, unethical, not beneficial to anyone, or just a bad idea . So, given that it's a child, they probably aren't experienced enough (or whatever) to determine what is a good cause for revenge and what isn't. So it's safer to tell them to tell them to never do it rather than to always do it. If they are equiped to accurately make that assessment, then they don't need and will probably see the faults in that strategy.
Strange, none of those examples were hypothetical sales (which the **AA is counting). If you physically steal an object the prior owner can't sell it anymore, nor do they have the benefit of using it. If you download a song, the **AA can *still* sell as many copies as they want to. Downloads also aren't equal to a hypothetical sale. With a service, like a haircut, there's an agreement of payment upon its completion. If I download a song from a random person non-affiliated with the **AA, there is no such agreement.
Words are a method of communication. Communication doesn't work unless all parties involved share a common set of definitions. Even scarier, most people also use words to think. Read 1984 if you don't get the implications of this. We don't call copyright infringement stealing because it's not the same thing. That's why there's a different word for it!
As for playing the language game, I do it because because it matters. If you broaden the definition of stealing to accomidate copyright infringement then it loses much of its meaning. You'd might as well call it child molesting. Oh no, people are "raping" the **AA's "children"! It might make your strawman a little bit stronger.
But, just for fun, lets broaden the definition of stealing to include anytime someone causes a hypothetical loss. So, if I invite someone to play a game or something, thus preventing them from shopping and spending money, then I've stolen from a store, right? Or how about the time I spend waiting in line? Hypothetically I could do something very profitable with that time, so am I entitled to sue the people in front of me for that money or have them arrested for theft? Personally, I'm completely against stealing. I think copyright infringement, however, is in serious need of reform. (Heaven forbid that I actually have a different opinion about the two; afterall, aren't they the same thing?)
Drastically reduce but not eliminate. IIRC mutations tend to occur once every 600,000 base pairs, so that would mean that replication is about 99.99983% accurate. After 100 divisions the genome of a cell would only be 99.983% accurate, so it'd have about 1 error every 500 base pairs. Given the size of most genes/proteins, that cell should have some serious problems or be cancerous. (I don't know the "maximum" number of divisions, it could be more or less, but you can see the problem.) Not to mention, mutation accumulation is just one part of aging. Now, if we could take our genome and add some parity base pairs and some redundancy checking proteins we might be able to address that problem. But that's far beyond our level of genetic engineering (AFAIK).
Can you really be addicted to something as diverse as the internet? I assume you could get addicted to porn, games, or what not, but the internet as a whole? What this sounds like is someone noticed that some people spend a lot of time on computers, figured that this abnormal behavior must be the result of an addiction and worked backwards from there. As for withdrawl, I'd say almost anyone would experience similar symptoms if you took away their primary method of socialization, research, and entertainment. For some people, this happens to be the internet. For others you'd have to remove TV, telephone, newspapers, and probably transportation.
"Lack" of freetime doesn't seem to keep people from watching TV. I suppose if don't watch much/any then you would probably have several hours a week to spend on MMORPGs. It's just a choice of how you entertain yourself during your freetime since most people don't work/do necessities for every waking hour of every day.