I posted a whole bunch of shit on various internet sites over the years. Everything from illicit drug usage, to my odd political leanings - and totally doing it under my real name (or nickname that can easily be traced to my real name). I honestly felt I hit the point of no return and just started to embrace the fact I'm not anonymous, and I'm all over the fucking place.
Don't worry - when I'm involved in the hiring process (I'm not in a position where I hire, but I am in a position where I "make recommendations" to my boss and talk to applicants, which often boils down to almost the same thing), I ALWAYS do a Google search for the person and any obvious aliases such as their email address/domain/whatever... HOWEVER, I do NOT consider illicit drug use, unusual political leanings, or criminal convictions to be negatives in the process whatsoever. In my younger days, I did a LOT of drugs, was arrested twice and myself have political ideas that not everyone agrees with (hey, who DOES have ideas that everyone agrees with?). I still semi-regularly take illegal substances (LSD, but not to the extent or all the other substances that I did when I was younger) and have no problem saying so online. When I do the "dreaded Google search" when looking at applicants, ALL I care about is what I can find of a technical nature relating to the job. Actually, I'd be more likely to discriminate against someone having a large number of posts on a "Born Again Christian" discussion forum than someone who posts their personal drug experiences on Erowid (based on the fact that I would have trouble working with someone whose religious views not only strongly oppose me, but are also very open about it).
I'm sure there are employers out there who will reject an applicant over a drunken party picture, but you probably don't want to work there anyway if they're that uptight.
I wish people wouldn't do this... I see it a lot and it just makes you look like an idiot. To made a "Yoda-like" sentence, you do NOT just muddle the words up at random. Yoda has an idiosyncratic style to his speech, but it's not just random.
The quoted text, in Yoda's style of speech would be something like, "Your lack of faith, disturbing I find". Essentially, take the object (or object fragment) of the sentence first, then the adjective that the subject is being described as (if present) and finally the pronoun and verb.
He doesn't actually always follow this exact style though, but I assume it's more of a slip-up on the writers part. Sometimes he'll slip and make the sentence more like, "Disturbing I find your lack of faith", or "Your lack of faith, disturbing find I" (although this latter one more rarely and only with the third person as far as I've noticed - "Stupid, is he" (instead of the more standard "Stupid, he is" in Yoda's style)) Yoda's speech, it's also worth pointing out, is NOT grammatically incorrect - archaic, unusual and odd are all good words to describe it, however "incorrect" it is not.
And no, I'm not a Star Wars geek at all (I actually never really got in to it that much, although I have seen all 6 of the movies), but I AM a linguistics geek and find it really disturbing that anyone's quality of English could be so low as to not immediately recognise how Yoda's sentences are constructed (I was "comfortable" with it by about the third time he said anything the first time I ever watched it)
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
If the only velocity it has is from gravity pulling it down to the centre of the earth, how could it possibly have enough velocity to shoot out the other side and escape the gravity? That just doesn't make sense... I wasn't trying to imply it'll go straight down and stop in the dead centre immediately, but it'd basically work its way there as it fell past, and was pulled back, then again and again with less travel each time.
The whole idea is just mental exercise anyway since any microscopic black hole WILL just dissipate before this would happen anyway.
The source for this one is just bizarre though... big comment blocks with such insights as "the crab always wins; it makes the baby syntacticians cry.". But yep, I do like the geekier style of the one you pointed out.
Re:So is there a God?
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Nope. Easy answer. Next question?
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think you misunderstand the area of the concerns of the "crackpots". It's not the chance of a black hole forming that's a concern (actually I think it'd be damn cool and potentially interesting if they DO form black holes) - the concern is a mislaid fear of what a mini black hole would do. It's almost certainly going to dissipate EXTREMELY quickly after being formed. If the current standing theories about things like Hawking radiation are in fact wrong, and it does NOT dissipate, then it'll fall to the centre of the Earth and then pretty much just sit there doing nothing - it doesn't have enough mass to "suck" anything in to it. For all we know (or care) they could already be a TINY black hole at the centre of our planet - it won't affect us either way.
My biggest problem with the Volt is that it's damn ugly. Sort of reminiscent of muscle cars, which I despise.
All I ask for, from any company, is a plug-in hybrid Cabriolet or Roadster. I'll probably end up buying a Tesla Roadster for short trips and use a standard ICE (like my current Renault Megane cabriolet) for longer trips.
Some might be, but most are pretty clean these days. 21st century hippies are quite interesting actually - there seems to be a high percentage of computer geeks amongst them also. My brother is basically a hippy (qualified by the fact that he lived in a hand-painted bedford van for several years, smokes a fair bit of pot, has long hair and is very ecologically minded), and he's also an excellent graphic artist, reasonable coder, and excellent with home-brew electronics. He also definitely never smells bad.
Reading through that wikipedia link (babelfish not required - I can read German), I stand corrected. I just asked one of my German colleagues (I live and work in Germany, although I'm not from here) and he says that he's never really even thought about the seasons as actually having a defined start and end but it being more of a continuum (which actually surprised me as an answer, but makes a lot of sense since that's how things are in "reality"). So from a sample of one, it seems it may not be as strongly considered here as elsewhere. He did say that it seems more sensible for it to be mid-summer though, regardless of what official designation there is.
Where in Europe are you? As far as I was aware, every country in Europe consider the longest day (the Summer solstice) to be the middle of summer, not the start. Shinobi from Sweden (who also replied to you) seems to agree (although the other definition is a little "interesting" also!
Some people bring out the old, "dogs have masters, cats have slaves" thing, but I actually disagree. Honestly, I'd prefer having a cat in the house rather than a dog even if this were true, but in my opinion, BOTH can be a friend. The difference is that with a dog, it's more of the "social leader" friendship that you see with a group of teenagers where one is "in charge" of the others. With cats, it's more of a direct one-to-one relationship. Treat a cat right, and he/she will respect you, but you need to respect him/her equally.
I had a cat that was completely in love with me once and she was great. She'd bring me gifts of dead animals at 3 in the morning (dropping things on me to wake me up), which wasn't so pleasant, but I knew her intentions were good, so I'd take the animal and dispose it of without her seeing, then let her sleep at my feet, happily purring. She'd also meet me at the bus-stop when I came home from work, then walk the last km or so home with me. I really miss her.
You characterize and categorize people (90%, society, night people) in terms of what they can give you (social activity).
I've been meaning to write a really long thing about altruism and selflessness, but I haven't had time, and don't have time right now unfortunately. The basic idea is that TRUE selflessness is a mental disorder - EVERYONE is (and should be) out for themselves only - it's the only way society and people can really function. There's nothing wrong with being "nice", but the vast majority of people are only nice because they're getting something out of it. I might buy someone a gift, but I'm honest enough with myself to know that I'm doing it because I want their opinion of me to improve. Or, to put a religious spin on it, a Christian will do good deeds and be a nice person because he's getting in to heaven for doing so. If God commanded him to be a complete arsehole, to get in to heaven, and told him that being kind to everyone around him would send him to hell, do you think most Christians would continue to be nice? (yes, some still would, and that's the mental disorder I'm referring to)
You speak in military (24 hour) time unnecessarily.
No, he spoke in 24 hour time, not military time as another poster has already pointed out. 24 hour time is standard here in Europe, so perhaps the poster is European? (compare 24hr time: "Hey John, I'll see you at twenty o'clock", to military time: "Hey John, I'll see you at twenty hundred")
You admit your own faults, but rather than fix them, you prefer to revel in your own meekness.
I didn't see any faults being admitted... He didn't say that his traits were negative - he simply pointed out that he has these traits and that it's unfortunate it doesn't really sync with other peoples' traits.
I've never managed to teach a cat to tell time, but I DID teach a cat to feed itself using an old Amiga 500, a custom feeding device connected via parallel (didn't NEED to be parallel, just that's what I wrote the software side as) and an oversized pad that technically was a 2 button mouse with no movement. If the large button on the left of the pad were pressed, a small amount of dry catfood would fall in to a bowl. If the button on the right were pressed, a small amount of water would fall in to a different bowl. I'd also occasionally buy soft food (fresh rabbit meat) as a special gift, but in general, he lived on the dry food and whatever he'd catch outside (birds, rats, baby possums etc). Once he got used to it, he never bugged me for food again.
Note: If you live somewhere where your cat can't hunt, this won't work without some modifications since cats need their soft/moist food as well as the dry stuff and that of course needs to be refrigerated. It's also probably a no-go for your cat, since you said she's on a special diet.
The start of winter is the shortest day of the year, the start of summer the longest. Weather is only a secondary effect.
Actually, that's only in the US. In most of the rest of the world, the MIDDLE of Winter is the shortest day and the MIDDLE of summer is the longest day. Not that it matters - the seasons are just names for some various times of year anyway, so it doesn't make any difference when you start/finish them, or even whether you have them at all or not.
You're of course right that weather has nothing to do with it though.
It seems like, to me, a newspaper is allowing drug dealers to take out classified ads (legal) and those dealers drive cars safely (legal) to legal parking spaces where they are legally allowed to congregate to pursue an illegal transaction.
I agree that that's a lot what it's like, and I see no problem with that. Out of interest, have you ever tried placing an ad in your local newspaper to sell drugs? Most papers would be quite happy to let you (well, in every place I've lived - maybe the US is different). Of course, if you do so, you should probably expect calls from the cops, but in your example, I see nothing wrong with the placing of the ad, the driving of the vehicles, or the congregating in public places. All of those things are just as legal for a drug dealer to do as they are for anyone else.
It seems like (in my pessimistic worldview) that it's more likely that the whole plan will backfire and that the courts will rule that torrent distribution sites such as isohunt (I mean, their name implies the a search for ISOs, and I'll be that the large number of ISOs available on that site are illegal) exist solely to facilitate the illegal sharing of copyrighted files through legal methods.
I download a lot of stuff, both things I "am allowed to" and things I "am not allowed to". Thinking about it, I don't really download a great deal of ISOs, but the ones I do tend to be legal (Linux distros and so on). Now, if we're talking video and audio formats, THAT'S a different story. (although, it still shouldn't be enough "evidence" to cause a problem for them - I could start a company called "Door to Door Heroin", and as long as I don't actually engage in illegal activities like selling heroin, there's nothing illegal about it)
You're not even going to let them fax sigend copies
I'm not sure about Canada (or the US), but in many countries a fax can't be considered a legal document, as it's not the original signature, merely an electronically re-created representation of it. That's the whole idea behind "filling out forms in triplicate" rather than just filling it out once and making a couple of photocopies.
In most of the world, it's not illegal. Actually, I didn't even know it was illegal in the US until a few years ago when someone casually mentioned it. I was honestly quite shocked and brought up the exact point you made there - it's legal to "give it away", so why is it illegal to sell it? It just seems crazy to me really.
I don't have any interest in their services (I do pretty well without paying thankyouverymuch), but I do have a good friend that used to do it for a living and she's a great gal - nothing like the stereotypical "crack-whore" or whatever. Good way to make money while she was studying, and she said she actually really enjoyed the job a good 80% of the time, which is something many people can't say.
I look forward to trying out Chrome when it's available for a platform that I use, but I do think you're being a bit overly harsh on Firefox. I definitely don't experience the problems you're talking about on Firefox - for me, I generally have around 20 tabs open, am constantly opening new tabs, doing stuff, and closing them again, and while memory will slowly take a hit, I haven't noticed any performance issues. Also, even with the memory hits, I generally only have to restart Firefox once a month or so - certainly nowhere near "two or three times a day".
Re:"When did you start using google?"
on
Google Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Interesting question: Do you know anyone who doesn't? I personally don't (well, possibly I do, but just don't know that they don't, but I haven't personally witnessed anyone using something else for their web search in a LONG time).
Perhaps you should consider how to re-phrase your searches. If I wanted to know how make my own system to water cool my video card, rather than buying a pre-packaged solution I'd use Google and type something like building own water cooling video card. Searching for just watercooling videocard, I would EXPECT to see results for off the shelf solutions.
I find a lot of people are in the old "one or two words mentality" from the days of text based games that just took <VERB> <OBJECT> commands. Expand to a more natural or semi-natural query, and your results will be MUCH better.
Nobody "rebranded" anything, except perhaps the media. Back when the media were talking about "global warming", climatologists were studying the climate. Now that the media is using the (better) term "climate change" those climatologists are still studying the climate (and coming up with pretty much the same conclusions, just with ever increasing accuracy (as happens in most fields of scientific study)). There has been no re-branding in the science, only in how the media is reporting it to you. Regardless of what you call it, it's still the same thing. It just happens that "climate change" is a more accurate term than "global warming", although neither are completely incorrect.
so if we're warming the environment now, they must have been doing it then.
How on earth does that follow? Last week, it was raining and I got wet. Today I got wet too when a man poured a bucket of water over me. Should I assume he was responsible for me getting wet last week too?
The climate DOES change without human assitance - EVERYONE who studies climate change is well aware of this, and it's ridiculous to bring it up as a point against the idea of anthropogenic climate change. Just because it CAN happen naturally, and some natural effects may even be assisting the current warming (or not), the evidence points to all natural causes being NOT ENOUGH to explain the current trends. In ADDITION to this, we have strong experimental evidence that shows how certain things that we KNOW we're putting in to the atmosphere can enhance an existing natural greenhouse effect. So, it doesn't take much to make the logical conclusion that if: 1) There is warming that is not explained by natural causes; and 2) We're putting out gases that can cause additional warming; then there's a bloody good chance that #2 is causing #1. That's even WITHOUT the modelling that has been done to back it up.
Many possible reasons, but almost certainly NOT the sun's output... if the sun had that much "immediate and direct" effect on our temperatures, we'd likely not be alive to be discussing it on slashdot (the first "big spike" would throw us up over the boiling point of water)
Also, please, repeat after me: "Local weather and daily temperatures do NOT show ANYTHING useful in Climate Models!". Longer term trends (in weather and temperature - e.g. Climate) are what counts (and even then, you still need to take in to account much larger areas also - your small patch of the world might be 2 degrees colder over the next 10 years, but if the rest of the world is 4 degrees warmer, you're just an interesting data point).
Either that, or they simply continue redefining carbon dioxide-- which makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere-- as a pollutant, even though it is beneficial to green plants.
Non-sequitur alert. Just because something exists in small percentages, it doesn't mean it's not bad to increase that percentage.
Yes, green plants like CO2, but they can only handle so much anyway. If we were to increase the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere to 0.5%, there's no way green plants could handle it, and we'd all almost certainly die (note: we're nowhere near even approaching that kind of level and it's nearly impossible that we ever could get it that high even if we tried, but I just wanted to point out how ridiculous your argument looks)
Just because something can be good, it doesn't mean it's not ALSO capable of being bad. Your statement that carbon makes up less that 0.04% of our atmosphere is correct, but in NO WAY does that imply ANYTHING about whether it's a pollutant or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I posted a whole bunch of shit on various internet sites over the years. Everything from illicit drug usage, to my odd political leanings - and totally doing it under my real name (or nickname that can easily be traced to my real name). I honestly felt I hit the point of no return and just started to embrace the fact I'm not anonymous, and I'm all over the fucking place.
Don't worry - when I'm involved in the hiring process (I'm not in a position where I hire, but I am in a position where I "make recommendations" to my boss and talk to applicants, which often boils down to almost the same thing), I ALWAYS do a Google search for the person and any obvious aliases such as their email address/domain/whatever... HOWEVER, I do NOT consider illicit drug use, unusual political leanings, or criminal convictions to be negatives in the process whatsoever. In my younger days, I did a LOT of drugs, was arrested twice and myself have political ideas that not everyone agrees with (hey, who DOES have ideas that everyone agrees with?). I still semi-regularly take illegal substances (LSD, but not to the extent or all the other substances that I did when I was younger) and have no problem saying so online.
When I do the "dreaded Google search" when looking at applicants, ALL I care about is what I can find of a technical nature relating to the job. Actually, I'd be more likely to discriminate against someone having a large number of posts on a "Born Again Christian" discussion forum than someone who posts their personal drug experiences on Erowid (based on the fact that I would have trouble working with someone whose religious views not only strongly oppose me, but are also very open about it).
I'm sure there are employers out there who will reject an applicant over a drunken party picture, but you probably don't want to work there anyway if they're that uptight.
I wish people wouldn't do this... I see it a lot and it just makes you look like an idiot. To made a "Yoda-like" sentence, you do NOT just muddle the words up at random. Yoda has an idiosyncratic style to his speech, but it's not just random.
The quoted text, in Yoda's style of speech would be something like, "Your lack of faith, disturbing I find". Essentially, take the object (or object fragment) of the sentence first, then the adjective that the subject is being described as (if present) and finally the pronoun and verb.
He doesn't actually always follow this exact style though, but I assume it's more of a slip-up on the writers part. Sometimes he'll slip and make the sentence more like, "Disturbing I find your lack of faith", or "Your lack of faith, disturbing find I" (although this latter one more rarely and only with the third person as far as I've noticed - "Stupid, is he" (instead of the more standard "Stupid, he is" in Yoda's style))
Yoda's speech, it's also worth pointing out, is NOT grammatically incorrect - archaic, unusual and odd are all good words to describe it, however "incorrect" it is not.
And no, I'm not a Star Wars geek at all (I actually never really got in to it that much, although I have seen all 6 of the movies), but I AM a linguistics geek and find it really disturbing that anyone's quality of English could be so low as to not immediately recognise how Yoda's sentences are constructed (I was "comfortable" with it by about the third time he said anything the first time I ever watched it)
If the only velocity it has is from gravity pulling it down to the centre of the earth, how could it possibly have enough velocity to shoot out the other side and escape the gravity? That just doesn't make sense...
I wasn't trying to imply it'll go straight down and stop in the dead centre immediately, but it'd basically work its way there as it fell past, and was pulled back, then again and again with less travel each time.
The whole idea is just mental exercise anyway since any microscopic black hole WILL just dissipate before this would happen anyway.
The source for this one is just bizarre though... big comment blocks with such insights as "the crab always wins; it makes the baby syntacticians cry.". But yep, I do like the geekier style of the one you pointed out.
Nope. Easy answer. Next question?
I think you misunderstand the area of the concerns of the "crackpots". It's not the chance of a black hole forming that's a concern (actually I think it'd be damn cool and potentially interesting if they DO form black holes) - the concern is a mislaid fear of what a mini black hole would do. It's almost certainly going to dissipate EXTREMELY quickly after being formed. If the current standing theories about things like Hawking radiation are in fact wrong, and it does NOT dissipate, then it'll fall to the centre of the Earth and then pretty much just sit there doing nothing - it doesn't have enough mass to "suck" anything in to it. For all we know (or care) they could already be a TINY black hole at the centre of our planet - it won't affect us either way.
My biggest problem with the Volt is that it's damn ugly. Sort of reminiscent of muscle cars, which I despise.
All I ask for, from any company, is a plug-in hybrid Cabriolet or Roadster. I'll probably end up buying a Tesla Roadster for short trips and use a standard ICE (like my current Renault Megane cabriolet) for longer trips.
No, no, no... he was talking about your right to do something... not sure what, but it might be about your right to recycle hybrid batteries.
Some might be, but most are pretty clean these days. 21st century hippies are quite interesting actually - there seems to be a high percentage of computer geeks amongst them also. My brother is basically a hippy (qualified by the fact that he lived in a hand-painted bedford van for several years, smokes a fair bit of pot, has long hair and is very ecologically minded), and he's also an excellent graphic artist, reasonable coder, and excellent with home-brew electronics. He also definitely never smells bad.
Reading through that wikipedia link (babelfish not required - I can read German), I stand corrected. I just asked one of my German colleagues (I live and work in Germany, although I'm not from here) and he says that he's never really even thought about the seasons as actually having a defined start and end but it being more of a continuum (which actually surprised me as an answer, but makes a lot of sense since that's how things are in "reality"). So from a sample of one, it seems it may not be as strongly considered here as elsewhere. He did say that it seems more sensible for it to be mid-summer though, regardless of what official designation there is.
Where in Europe are you? As far as I was aware, every country in Europe consider the longest day (the Summer solstice) to be the middle of summer, not the start. Shinobi from Sweden (who also replied to you) seems to agree (although the other definition is a little "interesting" also!
You have a cat.
Nothing wrong with that - cats are wonderful!
Your cat controls you.
Some people bring out the old, "dogs have masters, cats have slaves" thing, but I actually disagree. Honestly, I'd prefer having a cat in the house rather than a dog even if this were true, but in my opinion, BOTH can be a friend. The difference is that with a dog, it's more of the "social leader" friendship that you see with a group of teenagers where one is "in charge" of the others. With cats, it's more of a direct one-to-one relationship. Treat a cat right, and he/she will respect you, but you need to respect him/her equally.
I had a cat that was completely in love with me once and she was great. She'd bring me gifts of dead animals at 3 in the morning (dropping things on me to wake me up), which wasn't so pleasant, but I knew her intentions were good, so I'd take the animal and dispose it of without her seeing, then let her sleep at my feet, happily purring. She'd also meet me at the bus-stop when I came home from work, then walk the last km or so home with me. I really miss her.
You characterize and categorize people (90%, society, night people) in terms of what they can give you (social activity).
I've been meaning to write a really long thing about altruism and selflessness, but I haven't had time, and don't have time right now unfortunately. The basic idea is that TRUE selflessness is a mental disorder - EVERYONE is (and should be) out for themselves only - it's the only way society and people can really function. There's nothing wrong with being "nice", but the vast majority of people are only nice because they're getting something out of it. I might buy someone a gift, but I'm honest enough with myself to know that I'm doing it because I want their opinion of me to improve. Or, to put a religious spin on it, a Christian will do good deeds and be a nice person because he's getting in to heaven for doing so. If God commanded him to be a complete arsehole, to get in to heaven, and told him that being kind to everyone around him would send him to hell, do you think most Christians would continue to be nice? (yes, some still would, and that's the mental disorder I'm referring to)
You speak in military (24 hour) time unnecessarily.
No, he spoke in 24 hour time, not military time as another poster has already pointed out. 24 hour time is standard here in Europe, so perhaps the poster is European? (compare 24hr time: "Hey John, I'll see you at twenty o'clock", to military time: "Hey John, I'll see you at twenty hundred")
You admit your own faults, but rather than fix them, you prefer to revel in your own meekness.
I didn't see any faults being admitted... He didn't say that his traits were negative - he simply pointed out that he has these traits and that it's unfortunate it doesn't really sync with other peoples' traits.
I've never managed to teach a cat to tell time, but I DID teach a cat to feed itself using an old Amiga 500, a custom feeding device connected via parallel (didn't NEED to be parallel, just that's what I wrote the software side as) and an oversized pad that technically was a 2 button mouse with no movement. If the large button on the left of the pad were pressed, a small amount of dry catfood would fall in to a bowl. If the button on the right were pressed, a small amount of water would fall in to a different bowl. I'd also occasionally buy soft food (fresh rabbit meat) as a special gift, but in general, he lived on the dry food and whatever he'd catch outside (birds, rats, baby possums etc). Once he got used to it, he never bugged me for food again.
Note: If you live somewhere where your cat can't hunt, this won't work without some modifications since cats need their soft/moist food as well as the dry stuff and that of course needs to be refrigerated.
It's also probably a no-go for your cat, since you said she's on a special diet.
The start of winter is the shortest day of the year, the start of summer the longest. Weather is only a secondary effect.
Actually, that's only in the US. In most of the rest of the world, the MIDDLE of Winter is the shortest day and the MIDDLE of summer is the longest day.
Not that it matters - the seasons are just names for some various times of year anyway, so it doesn't make any difference when you start/finish them, or even whether you have them at all or not.
You're of course right that weather has nothing to do with it though.
It seems like, to me, a newspaper is allowing drug dealers to take out classified ads (legal) and those dealers drive cars safely (legal) to legal parking spaces where they are legally allowed to congregate to pursue an illegal transaction.
I agree that that's a lot what it's like, and I see no problem with that.
Out of interest, have you ever tried placing an ad in your local newspaper to sell drugs? Most papers would be quite happy to let you (well, in every place I've lived - maybe the US is different). Of course, if you do so, you should probably expect calls from the cops, but in your example, I see nothing wrong with the placing of the ad, the driving of the vehicles, or the congregating in public places. All of those things are just as legal for a drug dealer to do as they are for anyone else.
It seems like (in my pessimistic worldview) that it's more likely that the whole plan will backfire and that the courts will rule that torrent distribution sites such as isohunt (I mean, their name implies the a search for ISOs, and I'll be that the large number of ISOs available on that site are illegal) exist solely to facilitate the illegal sharing of copyrighted files through legal methods.
I download a lot of stuff, both things I "am allowed to" and things I "am not allowed to". Thinking about it, I don't really download a great deal of ISOs, but the ones I do tend to be legal (Linux distros and so on). Now, if we're talking video and audio formats, THAT'S a different story.
(although, it still shouldn't be enough "evidence" to cause a problem for them - I could start a company called "Door to Door Heroin", and as long as I don't actually engage in illegal activities like selling heroin, there's nothing illegal about it)
You're not even going to let them fax sigend copies
I'm not sure about Canada (or the US), but in many countries a fax can't be considered a legal document, as it's not the original signature, merely an electronically re-created representation of it. That's the whole idea behind "filling out forms in triplicate" rather than just filling it out once and making a couple of photocopies.
In most of the world, it's not illegal. Actually, I didn't even know it was illegal in the US until a few years ago when someone casually mentioned it. I was honestly quite shocked and brought up the exact point you made there - it's legal to "give it away", so why is it illegal to sell it? It just seems crazy to me really.
I don't have any interest in their services (I do pretty well without paying thankyouverymuch), but I do have a good friend that used to do it for a living and she's a great gal - nothing like the stereotypical "crack-whore" or whatever. Good way to make money while she was studying, and she said she actually really enjoyed the job a good 80% of the time, which is something many people can't say.
and the preference in Firefox to save tabs on exit does not work for some reason in OS X.
Working here for me, so it's not a "general" problem on OS X.
I look forward to trying out Chrome when it's available for a platform that I use, but I do think you're being a bit overly harsh on Firefox. I definitely don't experience the problems you're talking about on Firefox - for me, I generally have around 20 tabs open, am constantly opening new tabs, doing stuff, and closing them again, and while memory will slowly take a hit, I haven't noticed any performance issues. Also, even with the memory hits, I generally only have to restart Firefox once a month or so - certainly nowhere near "two or three times a day".
Interesting question: Do you know anyone who doesn't? I personally don't (well, possibly I do, but just don't know that they don't, but I haven't personally witnessed anyone using something else for their web search in a LONG time).
Perhaps you should consider how to re-phrase your searches. If I wanted to know how make my own system to water cool my video card, rather than buying a pre-packaged solution I'd use Google and type something like building own water cooling video card. Searching for just watercooling videocard, I would EXPECT to see results for off the shelf solutions.
I find a lot of people are in the old "one or two words mentality" from the days of text based games that just took <VERB> <OBJECT> commands. Expand to a more natural or semi-natural query, and your results will be MUCH better.
Nobody "rebranded" anything, except perhaps the media. Back when the media were talking about "global warming", climatologists were studying the climate. Now that the media is using the (better) term "climate change" those climatologists are still studying the climate (and coming up with pretty much the same conclusions, just with ever increasing accuracy (as happens in most fields of scientific study)). There has been no re-branding in the science, only in how the media is reporting it to you. Regardless of what you call it, it's still the same thing. It just happens that "climate change" is a more accurate term than "global warming", although neither are completely incorrect.
how did humanity cause the Early Medieval Warm?
Humanity didn't cause it...
Things were much warmer then
Yes, they were...
so if we're warming the environment now, they must have been doing it then.
How on earth does that follow? Last week, it was raining and I got wet. Today I got wet too when a man poured a bucket of water over me. Should I assume he was responsible for me getting wet last week too?
The climate DOES change without human assitance - EVERYONE who studies climate change is well aware of this, and it's ridiculous to bring it up as a point against the idea of anthropogenic climate change. Just because it CAN happen naturally, and some natural effects may even be assisting the current warming (or not), the evidence points to all natural causes being NOT ENOUGH to explain the current trends. In ADDITION to this, we have strong experimental evidence that shows how certain things that we KNOW we're putting in to the atmosphere can enhance an existing natural greenhouse effect. So, it doesn't take much to make the logical conclusion that if:
1) There is warming that is not explained by natural causes; and
2) We're putting out gases that can cause additional warming; then
there's a bloody good chance that #2 is causing #1. That's even WITHOUT the modelling that has been done to back it up.
Many possible reasons, but almost certainly NOT the sun's output... if the sun had that much "immediate and direct" effect on our temperatures, we'd likely not be alive to be discussing it on slashdot (the first "big spike" would throw us up over the boiling point of water)
Also, please, repeat after me: "Local weather and daily temperatures do NOT show ANYTHING useful in Climate Models!". Longer term trends (in weather and temperature - e.g. Climate) are what counts (and even then, you still need to take in to account much larger areas also - your small patch of the world might be 2 degrees colder over the next 10 years, but if the rest of the world is 4 degrees warmer, you're just an interesting data point).
Either that, or they simply continue redefining carbon dioxide-- which makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere-- as a pollutant, even though it is beneficial to green plants.
Non-sequitur alert. Just because something exists in small percentages, it doesn't mean it's not bad to increase that percentage.
Yes, green plants like CO2, but they can only handle so much anyway. If we were to increase the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere to 0.5%, there's no way green plants could handle it, and we'd all almost certainly die (note: we're nowhere near even approaching that kind of level and it's nearly impossible that we ever could get it that high even if we tried, but I just wanted to point out how ridiculous your argument looks)
Just because something can be good, it doesn't mean it's not ALSO capable of being bad. Your statement that carbon makes up less that 0.04% of our atmosphere is correct, but in NO WAY does that imply ANYTHING about whether it's a pollutant or not.