If you have nothing to hide how about the next logical step. You shouldn't have any problem with no court order reading of mail, e-mail and regular, phone taps and cameras in your house tied to the local police department. I mean it's not like you have anything to hide? It's called privacy and it's it's in the constitution, for the moment anyway. Unreasonable search and seizure means you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I'm sick of everyone trying to give away my rights because some sleazy government official says you'll be safer if you give up just one more right. We gave up a lot for the so called Patriot Act and yet the government just got a failing grade on what has been done to avoid terrorism. Since little has been done to stop it we are at a far greater risk than before 9/11 since now we are viewed as the evil empire by much of the world including parts of Europe. Hey we didn't need those pesky rights anyway. Hey more criminals will be caught because we can trace their cars. Guess what, more innocent people will be questioned and accused because they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. What was your car doing parked outside a murder scene at 9pm? Across the street getting ice cream, likely story. Can't happen? I got pulled over for driving past the scene of a crime. The excuse was I was driving too fast but that wasn't possible since the street was a washboard and we all had to crawl down it or trash our suspensions. It was an excuse to search and detain a vehicle. If I had happened to be parked there when it happened and they traced it I would have likely gotten a night in jail with a bright light in my face. We are over regulated and under the microscope as it is. If you use a credit card they can already tell where you had breakfast and filled the car as well as where you did your Christmas shopping and how often you bought your wife flowers. The government doesn't own us we own the goovernment and it's damn well time we reminded them of that fact.
Some one from my home state. As part of that flaw it'd be an easy way for your neighbors to know you just got home. Also it could form a kind of lie detector if you happen to tell the wife you haven't been out all day yet the car hood is a different color. It's not been an issue so far since humans don't see infared but temperature sensitive paint would convert the heat into a visible form.
There actually is and it has nothing to do with math but physics. Obviously there is a limit when you start talking circuits that are made of single paths of atoms. Even before that there's a leakage that occurs leading to errors. There'd have to be a redundancy to overcome the occational lost electron so you get a deminishing return. There's talk of ways of avoiding the the issue but circuits a few atoms across are likely to be the limit. Anything beyond that will mean working on a sub atomic level and well beyond any known technology.
So what did the I-pod select then? "Under pressure"? Something from the Crash Test Dummies?
Actually the Ipod called a lawyer and sent information on weight of vehicle, tire tread pattern, likely model of car and likely yearly income of the driver as well as probable outcome of a lawsuit. The legal profession has declared it the greatest advancement in personal injury cases since the police band radio.
It's the same argument I always hear against alternative sources, there isn't a single one that will replace all our energy needs. News flash, there isn't a traditional source that can do that either. Most electricity comes from coal. The second biggest is oil, I believe the third is hydroelectric but I'm not sure. The plus about organic biodiesel is it can be made from most any organic waste including waste products that are causing disposal problems. Everything from yard clipping to cast off food from resturants can be used. What is needed is to turn our infastructure from creating more dumps to recycling, a total win win. Before you say there isn't enough of that either I'm saying that there are other sources for carbon. If all those sources are tapped there should be enough with reasonable conservation. Sorry SUV gas hogs have to go and fuel economy has to be around 50 miles to the gallon where is should be. I had a car in the 70s that got 38 mpg on a good day so it can be done. By using all the alternative sources currently availible in a complimentary fashion fossil fuels can be phased out and eventually replaced. Sticking our heads in the sand and hoping fusion will save us all isn't realistic. After decades of research there is still no proof that fusion can be made practical. No one knows if it'll take another fifty years, one hundred years or one thousand years. No one says we'll have large numbers of fusion plants operating in the next fifty years so it can't replace oil. Replacing oil with coal is like putting out the global warming fire with gasoline. Coal burns dirtier than oil. Air polution goes up and CO2 levels go up dramatically. It's easy to say why not stick with what works but we are running out and it didn't work all that well. Alternative sources aren't the best option they are the only option. Big business doesn't like alternative sources because they are harder to control. With solar cells they only get to charge you once every 25 to 30 years when they need to be replaced. WIth electricity through the lines they get to charge you every minute of every day. Very much the same with biodiesel. A hundred small companies can produce it since there are no oil fields to control. The mineral rights in this country are tied up for a reason, to control the flow of resources. Most people don't even know they don't own the mineral rights on their land, very few do. Big business can't control argroculture in the same way. THey largely do but we are talking about waste products not soy beans. Soy beans are an excellent source of oil but they are too valuable to use for that purpose. There are far cheaper and easier to grow crops. Seed oil is a better source. Poorer quality land can actually be used so not much of the food land needs to be converted. Another news flash we over produce on food. It's easy to say send it to needy countries but that doesn't happen. A large amount of it is bought by the government and goes to waste. The formula that works is covert part of the food land to oil production, use farm and urban waste and plant oil crops on poor unused land. Add to all of that switching to diesel hybrides and conservation and we are largely there and it'll help the farmers and save a fortune in lower polution. Secondary costs are never factored like health and environmental savings. The cost of oil spills alone is huge. Stoping the over use of fertilizer will help with water quality and ocean die offs and reduce demand. There are better sources but the oil companies have the farmers hooked on petroleum fertilzer like crack. Rock powder has proven to be a far superior fertilzer and is incredibly cheap. It's why northern land is fertile, glaciers deposit ground up rock when they melt. It also improves food nutrician which is dropping fast.
There are answers just most don't mean higher profits for the governments corporate backers.
"I for one welcome our Republican Overlords", oops, sorry, wrong thread. Wrong bloody forum. I thought I was logged into the New World order forum. Never mind.
It was strictly to prove a point. I lean personally towards Buddism which at it's core has no concept of god. The point really is that different things offend different people and religion and what's right religiously varies widely. In the US religion usually means Christian and anymore Right Wing Christian. Even Christianity bears little resembalance to it's roots. I personally do find a lot of religious material offensive. It can't be restricted in a free society and shouldn't be but one religion can't guide the moral compass for all.
If it was about censorship the rightwingers would be for it. It's about freedom actually so they are against it. The point is a.XXX domain could easily be blocked on computers so children couldn't cruise them. The porn industry wants this very badly because it can get rid of most of the arguments against them. The Christian right doesn't want them segregated into their own part of the web they want them out of business all together. You have to remember what concerns them isn't their children seeing it it's you seeing it. It's about control and censorship. If porn companies have their own domains the right wing looses it's biggest argument about banning them all together. The plus for you and your site would be if you want to post adult material without being harassed simply post it under a.XXX domain and you'd in theory be safe. Art is a tricker subject. That is subjective. Porn may be impossible to define but it's fairly obvious what upsets the Christian Right. Ideally all women's clothing should come up to the chin and down past the ankle the way God intended.
I say we put all religous content under a.god address. I'd like the option of blocking all such offensive material. As a parent I should be able to shield my children from such corrupting influences. I'm terrified that my young son will wind up in a chat room with a priest. They should be given their own web domains and leave the net to decent folk.
It isn't an issue of competence, it's an issue of morals and ethics. If I were SEC, I'd be looking into investigating Bell South right about now.
I totally agree and I'd go a step further, I wonder if it breaches parts of the Richo Act. It definately reeks of mob extortion. It's sad that most big businesses reactions to something new is how can we corrupt it to make a buck. Another one got quietly passed that crippled organic food standards so big business can make money off this lucritive market. I remember when it first got big the top suppliers asked exactly how much pesticide can they use and still call it organic. Well the government finally gave them an answer. They didn't totally cut the heart out but they have left the term organic basically meaningless. Little things like antibiotics and artificial feed can be used on calves so long as they are fed organic before they are butchered. Why it's crime is people are paying a premium for organic foods. The true organic farmers won't be able to compete head to head with the ones cheating. A similar thing will happen here in that people won't realize that the smaller suppliers are being squeezed out. It's yet another sign the wild west days of the internet are coming to a close and it'll wind up eventually another corrupt tool of big business. Enough of the good will remain so most people won't complain but in 20 years the net as it's known today won't exist. It's already more about advertising and sales than content. Spam blew past regular e-mail a while ago and that doesn't include all the advertising. I always say if you want to kill spam and flashing pop up ads never buy what they are selling. If everyone does that the ads will fail and they will disappear. It's the 1% dumb enough to buy from them that keeps the rest of us in misery.
I'm hesitant to switch my main machines over to XP because of security. My Win 2000 machines run realitively problem free, virus spyware wise. Not that they aren't at risk just nothing has affecting their performance. My notebook running XP is another matter. If I let it sit 15 minutes logged onto the net without doing something intensive like a download or constant surfing it gets zombie botted and it's brought to it's knees. Every single app locks up and a 100% of it's resources are ocuppied. I've tried a little of everything and all softwares claim there is no problem. Made me very nervous about XP. Also the longer I run that machine the more quirks it developes. Pretty normal for a Windows machine but with a notebook it's not as simple as a desk top. I tend to redo my desk tops every six months or so. I'd do them more often but we're talking dozens of apps and a hundred file folders, God knows how many files. Major hassle to reconfigure a machine. How many consumers are going to buy an operating system that is more secure over one that has more bells and whistles? Marketing is the reason they largely don't care about security. They feel it's better to put the effort into the latest interface features and more player functions. Geeks worry about security but the average person doesn't buy because of it.
Over all I've had good experiences but I just went through a nightmare with of all people Amazon.com. Between two separate orders there were multiple mistakes including order duplication with multiple billings. At first they gave me the form letter brush off but I persisted and after several days and countless e-mails I finally got it all resolved. I told them that I'm hesitant to buy off the web again period and don't expect any more orders from me. They seem surprised that I was so upset about all their screw ups. It was over $300 in books and DVDs so it wasn't a small order. The initial response always seems to be it was your fault. Well order duplication and failure to ship even after an order was reported to have shipped is hard to blame on the customer. I discovered a cute trick. If an item is on back order their supplier can claim it was processed so you can't cancel the order and you get stuck in limbo until they can fill it. Pretty sleazy. You can save a lot of money but there's some real risk involved even with major established compaines.
There's obviously a limit to disolved solids that liquid water can hold. I doubt anyone is claiming there are liquid lakes on Mars even in the summer. There are obvious features that are created by running water. Those features aren't billions of years old so there has been flowing liquid on Mars in fairly recent years, geologically speaking, that is gospel. Given the mounting evidence for large amounts of water below the surface and no evidence of vast lakes of liquid carbon dioxide, except at the poles, it's likely the features were made by water. I just find it amazing that such a thing shakes reality for some as much as it does. We aren't talking little green men we are talking about flowing highly saline water that lasts for very brief periods during the height of summer, some years. Very little of it may even make it to the surface. Those types of features can be made by saturated soil. As to whether water ice can survive in low pressure environments, I believe we call them comets.
Science deals in absolutes rather than real world situations. A cup of distilled water poured on the surface would last minutes if not seconds and if it was in the winter months would freeze before it hits the ground. That's physics 101. Now if we have highly saline water as it is thought to exist on Mars, imagine the dead sea or worse, add to that that it's perculating from below so it's slowly being replenished, subsurface heat, it can survive for a time on a seasonal basis. That was recently proven. I just find it amazing how close minded science is. I grew up thinking it was the open minded group but that is hardly the case. Dogma is only surrendered kicking and screaming. How are any discoveries made when the first reaction is to ignore evidence that doesn't support the current model, or as I like to call it dogma?
Scientific dogma says that until an astronaut has mud on his boots and samples prove to be water it must be something else. It's odd to me that conclusions are made about Jupiter's moons yet Mars water is looked at with such skepticism. No one questions water on Europa but Mars traditional has been viewed as dry so it's held to a much higher standard. Over a year ago I saw a lander photo that clearly showed a puddle of what seemed to be liquid water next to a track and yet there are still people at NASA that are fighting every sign of water and liquid water is viewed with the same skepticism that a little green man would be. Why is it so difficult to accept. A recent test proved liquid water could exist for a time on the surface under it's present condition. Far more energy seems to be expended in disproving water than proving it. I'm really not sure life on Mars will be accepted in my lifetime for the same reasons. There was evidence of it from the first Viking lander yet the the official word was no sign of life. The evidence wasn't strong or compelling but it was there. Being skeptical is a good thing but head in the sand dogma is hurting not helping the science.
The talk was of a high failure rate. What happens if there is tissue rejection or there isn't sufficent blood flow? We are talking significant tissue loss and potentially leaving the patient in far worse shape than they were before, likely dead. They may be trading scar tissue for something closer to that shot in Face Off showing exposed muscle. How long can you survive like that? How many people would have face lifts if the survival rate was 50/50? Is it right to do cosmetic sugery that has a high failure rate and the potential for such tragic results? Remember the doctors oath about do no harm? For a purely cosmetic proceedure the risk is still far too high and would seem to go against the fundimental tenants of being a physician.
All they seem to have to do anymore is claim something will make us safer and most americans will offer up their Bic lighters to help burn the Constitution. Just how much information about everything we do does the government really need? Several thousand people die in the 9/11 attack and they offer up the constitution on a platter. 20X that many die from the flu every year in this country and there's no out cry. It was tragic but isn't heading down the police state road and making tin foil hats mandatory a bit of an over reaction? This flu may be as bad as claimed but I still remember the swine flu scare in the 70s and SARS just happened. It's important to take these threats seriously but over reaction gives the bad guys in the government more power and threatens to make people suspect the next time around, cry wolf anyone? The threat is real but until it manifests the over reaction can do more harm than good. We've all but been promised it'll happen within the year yet the truth is no one knows if a human strain will show up next month, next year or ten years from now. Can we mantain DEFCON 2 for that long? The irony is over use of antivirals before it hits could leave it immune and kill far more people. Let's not start implanting tracking chips and sending people to leper colonies for a head cold just yet. Wait till there's at least one confirmed human to human transmition before we torch that abused document that protects us when we let it. Give up your privacy rights if you want but bloody well leave mine alone.
I hear the next version of Windows after Longhorn is being called Beta. I guess they figured why the hell not.
PS on a related note Service Packs will be referred to as product "Enhancements" on that version. I fondly call them little dutch boy pluging holes in the Dike.
Apparently it is April 1st. Man where have I been? I just chucked my 2005 calenders and returned what Christmas presents I had bought. I've heard of spacing before but phasing out for four months is pretty scary. Fast friendly service from Microsoft? It's either April 1st or Bill Gates is posting on Slashdot again.
Ah, we got a Republican in the woodpile. In the good ole days they called that trickle down economics or as we at the bottom liked to call it piss down economics. The rich don't benevolently sprinkle their money down like fairy dust they horde it. The average person can't aford to save the bulk of their income so if you want to improve the economy let the average person have more and stop giving all the advantages to the rich. The big tax give back was a joke because the average person saw little of it and most of that went to pay bills. The tax cuts were a scam because they came snaeking back in the form of stealth taxes. All those cuts in deductions you're starting to see are part of that. No we won't raise your taxes but we'll take away your deductions thus raising your taxes without officially raising them. Services are being cut and fees are going up in an effort to balance the books. There's no free lunch and if the rich want to feast the rest of us have to pay for it. Thinking that we are better off with the corporations getting the tax money than the people only makes sense if you are a major corporation. If you claim it creates jobs apparently you aren't paying attention. There's been a blood bath of job cuts for many years now. Most of it so they can send the jobs overseas. Yes the money creates jobs, in China.
As I rememeber it's vegitable oil that doesn't burn as cleanly in older diesels. Biodiesel is fine in any diesel engine. There's a lot of confusion over what the defination of biodiesel is. Technically biodiesel is a blend of tradtional diesel and vegitable oil that burns cleaner than diesel by itself and if you have a free or cheap source of vegitable oil, used generally, it can be cheaper. Most real fanatics run the car briefly on biodiesel when they start the car then once it's warm they switch over to pure vegitable oil. The reason being when the engine is cold pure vegitable oil doesn't burn cleanly and will build up deposits fast. Starting the car with biodiesel then switching avoids this problem and produces very little polution at the start up, none of coarse once you switch to vegitable oil. Older diesels don't burn pure vegitable oil thoroughly so the engine would need regular service. Newer cars don't have this problem and can run indefinately on vegitable oil. Vegitable oil has a higher lubrication factor so they engine will infact last longer running it.
The new process is for blending vegitable oil with diesel to make biodiesel. It's potentially huge becuase oil prices are going up and biodiesel is only slightly more expensive. It may soon actually be cheaper than diesel, this new process could help make that possible.
Biodiesel won't solve all the fuel problems but it's a step in the right direction.
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If you have nothing to hide how about the next logical step. You shouldn't have any problem with no court order reading of mail, e-mail and regular, phone taps and cameras in your house tied to the local police department. I mean it's not like you have anything to hide? It's called privacy and it's it's in the constitution, for the moment anyway. Unreasonable search and seizure means you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I'm sick of everyone trying to give away my rights because some sleazy government official says you'll be safer if you give up just one more right. We gave up a lot for the so called Patriot Act and yet the government just got a failing grade on what has been done to avoid terrorism. Since little has been done to stop it we are at a far greater risk than before 9/11 since now we are viewed as the evil empire by much of the world including parts of Europe. Hey we didn't need those pesky rights anyway. Hey more criminals will be caught because we can trace their cars. Guess what, more innocent people will be questioned and accused because they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. What was your car doing parked outside a murder scene at 9pm? Across the street getting ice cream, likely story. Can't happen? I got pulled over for driving past the scene of a crime. The excuse was I was driving too fast but that wasn't possible since the street was a washboard and we all had to crawl down it or trash our suspensions. It was an excuse to search and detain a vehicle. If I had happened to be parked there when it happened and they traced it I would have likely gotten a night in jail with a bright light in my face. We are over regulated and under the microscope as it is. If you use a credit card they can already tell where you had breakfast and filled the car as well as where you did your Christmas shopping and how often you bought your wife flowers. The government doesn't own us we own the goovernment and it's damn well time we reminded them of that fact.
Some one from my home state. As part of that flaw it'd be an easy way for your neighbors to know you just got home. Also it could form a kind of lie detector if you happen to tell the wife you haven't been out all day yet the car hood is a different color. It's not been an issue so far since humans don't see infared but temperature sensitive paint would convert the heat into a visible form.
There actually is and it has nothing to do with math but physics. Obviously there is a limit when you start talking circuits that are made of single paths of atoms. Even before that there's a leakage that occurs leading to errors. There'd have to be a redundancy to overcome the occational lost electron so you get a deminishing return. There's talk of ways of avoiding the the issue but circuits a few atoms across are likely to be the limit. Anything beyond that will mean working on a sub atomic level and well beyond any known technology.
Actually the Ipod called a lawyer and sent information on weight of vehicle, tire tread pattern, likely model of car and likely yearly income of the driver as well as probable outcome of a lawsuit. The legal profession has declared it the greatest advancement in personal injury cases since the police band radio.
It's the same argument I always hear against alternative sources, there isn't a single one that will replace all our energy needs. News flash, there isn't a traditional source that can do that either. Most electricity comes from coal. The second biggest is oil, I believe the third is hydroelectric but I'm not sure. The plus about organic biodiesel is it can be made from most any organic waste including waste products that are causing disposal problems. Everything from yard clipping to cast off food from resturants can be used. What is needed is to turn our infastructure from creating more dumps to recycling, a total win win. Before you say there isn't enough of that either I'm saying that there are other sources for carbon. If all those sources are tapped there should be enough with reasonable conservation. Sorry SUV gas hogs have to go and fuel economy has to be around 50 miles to the gallon where is should be. I had a car in the 70s that got 38 mpg on a good day so it can be done. By using all the alternative sources currently availible in a complimentary fashion fossil fuels can be phased out and eventually replaced. Sticking our heads in the sand and hoping fusion will save us all isn't realistic. After decades of research there is still no proof that fusion can be made practical. No one knows if it'll take another fifty years, one hundred years or one thousand years. No one says we'll have large numbers of fusion plants operating in the next fifty years so it can't replace oil. Replacing oil with coal is like putting out the global warming fire with gasoline. Coal burns dirtier than oil. Air polution goes up and CO2 levels go up dramatically. It's easy to say why not stick with what works but we are running out and it didn't work all that well. Alternative sources aren't the best option they are the only option. Big business doesn't like alternative sources because they are harder to control. With solar cells they only get to charge you once every 25 to 30 years when they need to be replaced. WIth electricity through the lines they get to charge you every minute of every day. Very much the same with biodiesel. A hundred small companies can produce it since there are no oil fields to control. The mineral rights in this country are tied up for a reason, to control the flow of resources. Most people don't even know they don't own the mineral rights on their land, very few do. Big business can't control argroculture in the same way. THey largely do but we are talking about waste products not soy beans. Soy beans are an excellent source of oil but they are too valuable to use for that purpose. There are far cheaper and easier to grow crops. Seed oil is a better source. Poorer quality land can actually be used so not much of the food land needs to be converted. Another news flash we over produce on food. It's easy to say send it to needy countries but that doesn't happen. A large amount of it is bought by the government and goes to waste. The formula that works is covert part of the food land to oil production, use farm and urban waste and plant oil crops on poor unused land. Add to all of that switching to diesel hybrides and conservation and we are largely there and it'll help the farmers and save a fortune in lower polution. Secondary costs are never factored like health and environmental savings. The cost of oil spills alone is huge. Stoping the over use of fertilizer will help with water quality and ocean die offs and reduce demand. There are better sources but the oil companies have the farmers hooked on petroleum fertilzer like crack. Rock powder has proven to be a far superior fertilzer and is incredibly cheap. It's why northern land is fertile, glaciers deposit ground up rock when they melt. It also improves food nutrician which is dropping fast. There are answers just most don't mean higher profits for the governments corporate backers.
"I for one welcome our Republican Overlords", oops, sorry, wrong thread. Wrong bloody forum. I thought I was logged into the New World order forum. Never mind.
No he isn't. Archaeopteryx lived six thousand years ago. I thought you knew that?
It was strictly to prove a point. I lean personally towards Buddism which at it's core has no concept of god. The point really is that different things offend different people and religion and what's right religiously varies widely. In the US religion usually means Christian and anymore Right Wing Christian. Even Christianity bears little resembalance to it's roots. I personally do find a lot of religious material offensive. It can't be restricted in a free society and shouldn't be but one religion can't guide the moral compass for all.
If it was about censorship the rightwingers would be for it. It's about freedom actually so they are against it. The point is a .XXX domain could easily be blocked on computers so children couldn't cruise them. The porn industry wants this very badly because it can get rid of most of the arguments against them. The Christian right doesn't want them segregated into their own part of the web they want them out of business all together. You have to remember what concerns them isn't their children seeing it it's you seeing it. It's about control and censorship. If porn companies have their own domains the right wing looses it's biggest argument about banning them all together. The plus for you and your site would be if you want to post adult material without being harassed simply post it under a .XXX domain and you'd in theory be safe. Art is a tricker subject. That is subjective. Porn may be impossible to define but it's fairly obvious what upsets the Christian Right. Ideally all women's clothing should come up to the chin and down past the ankle the way God intended.
I say we put all religous content under a .god address. I'd like the option of blocking all such offensive material. As a parent I should be able to shield my children from such corrupting influences. I'm terrified that my young son will wind up in a chat room with a priest. They should be given their own web domains and leave the net to decent folk.
I totally agree and I'd go a step further, I wonder if it breaches parts of the Richo Act. It definately reeks of mob extortion. It's sad that most big businesses reactions to something new is how can we corrupt it to make a buck. Another one got quietly passed that crippled organic food standards so big business can make money off this lucritive market. I remember when it first got big the top suppliers asked exactly how much pesticide can they use and still call it organic. Well the government finally gave them an answer. They didn't totally cut the heart out but they have left the term organic basically meaningless. Little things like antibiotics and artificial feed can be used on calves so long as they are fed organic before they are butchered. Why it's crime is people are paying a premium for organic foods. The true organic farmers won't be able to compete head to head with the ones cheating. A similar thing will happen here in that people won't realize that the smaller suppliers are being squeezed out. It's yet another sign the wild west days of the internet are coming to a close and it'll wind up eventually another corrupt tool of big business. Enough of the good will remain so most people won't complain but in 20 years the net as it's known today won't exist. It's already more about advertising and sales than content. Spam blew past regular e-mail a while ago and that doesn't include all the advertising. I always say if you want to kill spam and flashing pop up ads never buy what they are selling. If everyone does that the ads will fail and they will disappear. It's the 1% dumb enough to buy from them that keeps the rest of us in misery.
I'm hesitant to switch my main machines over to XP because of security. My Win 2000 machines run realitively problem free, virus spyware wise. Not that they aren't at risk just nothing has affecting their performance. My notebook running XP is another matter. If I let it sit 15 minutes logged onto the net without doing something intensive like a download or constant surfing it gets zombie botted and it's brought to it's knees. Every single app locks up and a 100% of it's resources are ocuppied. I've tried a little of everything and all softwares claim there is no problem. Made me very nervous about XP. Also the longer I run that machine the more quirks it developes. Pretty normal for a Windows machine but with a notebook it's not as simple as a desk top. I tend to redo my desk tops every six months or so. I'd do them more often but we're talking dozens of apps and a hundred file folders, God knows how many files. Major hassle to reconfigure a machine. How many consumers are going to buy an operating system that is more secure over one that has more bells and whistles? Marketing is the reason they largely don't care about security. They feel it's better to put the effort into the latest interface features and more player functions. Geeks worry about security but the average person doesn't buy because of it.
Over all I've had good experiences but I just went through a nightmare with of all people Amazon.com. Between two separate orders there were multiple mistakes including order duplication with multiple billings. At first they gave me the form letter brush off but I persisted and after several days and countless e-mails I finally got it all resolved. I told them that I'm hesitant to buy off the web again period and don't expect any more orders from me. They seem surprised that I was so upset about all their screw ups. It was over $300 in books and DVDs so it wasn't a small order. The initial response always seems to be it was your fault. Well order duplication and failure to ship even after an order was reported to have shipped is hard to blame on the customer. I discovered a cute trick. If an item is on back order their supplier can claim it was processed so you can't cancel the order and you get stuck in limbo until they can fill it. Pretty sleazy. You can save a lot of money but there's some real risk involved even with major established compaines.
There's obviously a limit to disolved solids that liquid water can hold. I doubt anyone is claiming there are liquid lakes on Mars even in the summer. There are obvious features that are created by running water. Those features aren't billions of years old so there has been flowing liquid on Mars in fairly recent years, geologically speaking, that is gospel. Given the mounting evidence for large amounts of water below the surface and no evidence of vast lakes of liquid carbon dioxide, except at the poles, it's likely the features were made by water. I just find it amazing that such a thing shakes reality for some as much as it does. We aren't talking little green men we are talking about flowing highly saline water that lasts for very brief periods during the height of summer, some years. Very little of it may even make it to the surface. Those types of features can be made by saturated soil. As to whether water ice can survive in low pressure environments, I believe we call them comets.
Science deals in absolutes rather than real world situations. A cup of distilled water poured on the surface would last minutes if not seconds and if it was in the winter months would freeze before it hits the ground. That's physics 101. Now if we have highly saline water as it is thought to exist on Mars, imagine the dead sea or worse, add to that that it's perculating from below so it's slowly being replenished, subsurface heat, it can survive for a time on a seasonal basis. That was recently proven. I just find it amazing how close minded science is. I grew up thinking it was the open minded group but that is hardly the case. Dogma is only surrendered kicking and screaming. How are any discoveries made when the first reaction is to ignore evidence that doesn't support the current model, or as I like to call it dogma?
Scientific dogma says that until an astronaut has mud on his boots and samples prove to be water it must be something else. It's odd to me that conclusions are made about Jupiter's moons yet Mars water is looked at with such skepticism. No one questions water on Europa but Mars traditional has been viewed as dry so it's held to a much higher standard. Over a year ago I saw a lander photo that clearly showed a puddle of what seemed to be liquid water next to a track and yet there are still people at NASA that are fighting every sign of water and liquid water is viewed with the same skepticism that a little green man would be. Why is it so difficult to accept. A recent test proved liquid water could exist for a time on the surface under it's present condition. Far more energy seems to be expended in disproving water than proving it. I'm really not sure life on Mars will be accepted in my lifetime for the same reasons. There was evidence of it from the first Viking lander yet the the official word was no sign of life. The evidence wasn't strong or compelling but it was there. Being skeptical is a good thing but head in the sand dogma is hurting not helping the science.
The talk was of a high failure rate. What happens if there is tissue rejection or there isn't sufficent blood flow? We are talking significant tissue loss and potentially leaving the patient in far worse shape than they were before, likely dead. They may be trading scar tissue for something closer to that shot in Face Off showing exposed muscle. How long can you survive like that? How many people would have face lifts if the survival rate was 50/50? Is it right to do cosmetic sugery that has a high failure rate and the potential for such tragic results? Remember the doctors oath about do no harm? For a purely cosmetic proceedure the risk is still far too high and would seem to go against the fundimental tenants of being a physician.
All they seem to have to do anymore is claim something will make us safer and most americans will offer up their Bic lighters to help burn the Constitution. Just how much information about everything we do does the government really need? Several thousand people die in the 9/11 attack and they offer up the constitution on a platter. 20X that many die from the flu every year in this country and there's no out cry. It was tragic but isn't heading down the police state road and making tin foil hats mandatory a bit of an over reaction? This flu may be as bad as claimed but I still remember the swine flu scare in the 70s and SARS just happened. It's important to take these threats seriously but over reaction gives the bad guys in the government more power and threatens to make people suspect the next time around, cry wolf anyone? The threat is real but until it manifests the over reaction can do more harm than good. We've all but been promised it'll happen within the year yet the truth is no one knows if a human strain will show up next month, next year or ten years from now. Can we mantain DEFCON 2 for that long? The irony is over use of antivirals before it hits could leave it immune and kill far more people. Let's not start implanting tracking chips and sending people to leper colonies for a head cold just yet. Wait till there's at least one confirmed human to human transmition before we torch that abused document that protects us when we let it. Give up your privacy rights if you want but bloody well leave mine alone.
You can tell the Slashdot community is involved now. They had to reclassify it as an adult sight.
If you're referring to porn sites you'll need a third arm as well.
PS on a related note Service Packs will be referred to as product "Enhancements" on that version. I fondly call them little dutch boy pluging holes in the Dike.
Apparently it is April 1st. Man where have I been? I just chucked my 2005 calenders and returned what Christmas presents I had bought. I've heard of spacing before but phasing out for four months is pretty scary. Fast friendly service from Microsoft? It's either April 1st or Bill Gates is posting on Slashdot again.
Ah, we got a Republican in the woodpile. In the good ole days they called that trickle down economics or as we at the bottom liked to call it piss down economics. The rich don't benevolently sprinkle their money down like fairy dust they horde it. The average person can't aford to save the bulk of their income so if you want to improve the economy let the average person have more and stop giving all the advantages to the rich. The big tax give back was a joke because the average person saw little of it and most of that went to pay bills. The tax cuts were a scam because they came snaeking back in the form of stealth taxes. All those cuts in deductions you're starting to see are part of that. No we won't raise your taxes but we'll take away your deductions thus raising your taxes without officially raising them. Services are being cut and fees are going up in an effort to balance the books. There's no free lunch and if the rich want to feast the rest of us have to pay for it. Thinking that we are better off with the corporations getting the tax money than the people only makes sense if you are a major corporation. If you claim it creates jobs apparently you aren't paying attention. There's been a blood bath of job cuts for many years now. Most of it so they can send the jobs overseas. Yes the money creates jobs, in China.
Damn, I didn't know the weather was that bad in Ontario!
As I rememeber it's vegitable oil that doesn't burn as cleanly in older diesels. Biodiesel is fine in any diesel engine. There's a lot of confusion over what the defination of biodiesel is. Technically biodiesel is a blend of tradtional diesel and vegitable oil that burns cleaner than diesel by itself and if you have a free or cheap source of vegitable oil, used generally, it can be cheaper. Most real fanatics run the car briefly on biodiesel when they start the car then once it's warm they switch over to pure vegitable oil. The reason being when the engine is cold pure vegitable oil doesn't burn cleanly and will build up deposits fast. Starting the car with biodiesel then switching avoids this problem and produces very little polution at the start up, none of coarse once you switch to vegitable oil. Older diesels don't burn pure vegitable oil thoroughly so the engine would need regular service. Newer cars don't have this problem and can run indefinately on vegitable oil. Vegitable oil has a higher lubrication factor so they engine will infact last longer running it. The new process is for blending vegitable oil with diesel to make biodiesel. It's potentially huge becuase oil prices are going up and biodiesel is only slightly more expensive. It may soon actually be cheaper than diesel, this new process could help make that possible. Biodiesel won't solve all the fuel problems but it's a step in the right direction.