Indeed. And it's getting exported abroad, in particular in Britain where various American-based Christian groups are pushing ridiculous cases into the courts where they know they'll inevitably get a pounding so they can claim "You see, there's a war on Christianity!"
The guy was clearly pretty fucking retarded. Michael Behe is one of the main "formulators" (whatever that may mean in pseudo-science") of Intelligent Design and he works at Baylor in molecular biology, although the rest of the faculty regard him as a joke, but the one thing Behe never does is risk his tenure by using the university or any peer reviewed publishing to forward his views. He saves that for the rubes that pay him lots of money, including those retards at Dover (where his humiliation was completed).
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm very glad your father survived and has regained much of his abilities. Was your father ever actually declared brain dead though? There's brain injury and then there's brain injury. Keep people alive just in case somehow a massively and catastrophically damaged brain might somehow make it back out the other side seems more like basing decisions based on someone else's anecdotal claims (like yours, for instance).
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We're talking about some imaginary technology that allows regrowth of brains from splattered bone, rock and whatever intruded masses with blood supply cut off to large portions for lengthy enough periods to kill a good deal of the tissue off. If we ever develop that degree of technology, I suspect growing new hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs, corneas and the like will have happened a long time before, and no longer will we have much need of organ donors.
Of course then we'll have people like you demanding "Let the headless motorbike rider who left most of his brain on the pavement of I5 live so his body can be reused, you have no right to let a perfectly good body die!!!"
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if the brain could be physically repaired, I doubt there will ever be medical technology capable of restoring a person. We're talking massive head trauma, which more than likely means the cognitive, emotional and memory centers of the brain are destroyed or nearly so. Imagining that at some point you could be stuck in a vat and have your brain regrown would likely mean that you would largely be a whole new person. Maybe in some far off future we'll be able to back up our brains and restore them in case of serious damage, but that's not going to happen any time soon.
No fucking kidding. At very best if I'm in such a state, my body will keep on going for a while (maybe years), but everything that makes me me; my personality and memories, is likely gone or sufficiently devastated as to be irrecoverable. The very least I can do at that point is give my organs so someone else can live.
I've been on the Internet since the early 1990s and whenever someone claims they have an IQ of 146, they're usually some nose-picking fucktard sitting in their mom's basement trying to beat down anyone who dares question their brilliance.
I think at the core of conspiracy theorism is the need for self-importance, to be a member of an elite group that knows the truth. I mean, who would David Icke be if not for the Illuminati?
So what if it's proprietary. Since the customer in question receives a considerably amount of correspondence from external sources, most of it in docx format, it's what they have to deal with. Period. Installing a program known to open such formats poorly as a stand on principle will end me up out of some good paying work.
The customer in question is in Canada and has government contracts, and the Canadian government has specifically excluded all data storage outside of Canada.
The problem is that blood-alcohol level isn't a good measure of actual inebriation. It's the wrong metric. I posit that a good old fashioned sobriety test probably is far far better and determining the degree of inebriation at which the operation of an automobile becomes dangerous. Of course, it is possible that that too would nail people who weren't drunk, but then again, I don't think there should be a separate criminal offense for driving drunk. If someone high, drunk or sober, cannot pass a sobriety test, they shouldn't be driving. At that point, you do the blood test to determine if there was criminal intent (ie. he had a high amount of alcohol in his system so obviously got into the car pissed) or has some nasty metabolic disorder, in which case it isn't a criminal charge, though at the very least the license should be suspended until the medical condition has been resolved.
MADD, an organization that has been for a few decades now basically been guilting politicians into a sort of temperance through the back door scheme, has a vested interested in promoting unreasonably low limits. Of course, if you object, you're clearly some vile drunk driver who can't wait to operate a vehicle completely smashed and kill CHILDREN!!!!
I think.08 limit is utter bullshit, and I drink maybe four or five alcoholic beverages a year (I really do not look booze at all). But what I am is a reasonable person, and a reasonable person cannot look at the BAC limits in place in most Western countries and see anything about them that has anything to do with solid scientific research. It's just a magical incantation ".08 is drunk,.08 is drunk" that is not based on evidence in the least. And remember, the guys charging you with driving drunk are the same guys who have invented other whoppers like "smoking crystal meth once makes you addicted forever!" and "once you start smoking marijuana you will inevitably and eventually do heroin and cocaine".
Unless you have diabetes or other metabolic disorders. It's not nearly as clear cut as the authorities try to put across. Frankly, the only test that really determines severe enough inebriation to effect driving is pretty much the old sobriety test.
"Legal considerations" as in major contract strictly prohibits using Google, and while.doc support is at a reasonable level,.docx support just plain sucks.
In other words your pushing it out on to the cloud, which is fine when the solution is available. It's not in our case due to legal considerations, and beyond that Google Apps has a long ways to go before it's reasonably decent at handling complex documents.
I suspect your requirements are very modest indeed.
No open source software that I've seen handles docx halfway as well as Word 2007 and Word 2010. "Good enough", as in "this wordprocessing software is good enough for almost all needs" is a given, but that's not really the question. You're talking about sixteen or seventeen years of Office dominance here, coupled with Exchange. Do you understand the manpower that would be required to convert a large company from Office-Exchange to something else (assuming that something else was in fact an improvement in any real sense).
I'll concede right now that I loath Exchange. I hate it. I hate everything about. I hate how brittle aspects of it are, the bizarre dependencies with other systems like IIS which means if.NET/ASP takes a nosedive, your clients suddenly find out they've lost a whole lot of functionality. Believe me, I've had many sleepless nights over Windows because it's seemingly easy configurations are filled with pitfalls. I love the *nix world where you can got "cp worldsmostimportant.conf worldsmostimportant.conf.bak" and muck around to my hearts content with the config, knowing I can pretty much wipe out any changes by inverting the command and restarting the daemon. At heart, I'm a *nix man and have been for over two decades. I fit *nix and open source solutions in wherever I can.
But at the end of the day, my boss and my coworkers are expecting to walk in, log on to their Windows workstation, start up Outlook, work on their budget in Excel and read the latest business requirements documentation in Word. I hand them Zimbra and LibreOffice, and it's going to be nasty. Eventually I might calm the waters, but then someone is inevitably going to get some Word 2010 document with wild formatting and it's going to open up in LibreOffice like the dog just puked on the screen, and then I'm going to get demands for solutions, and the only solution is going to be "I guess we should have Word on there."
In the long term, Microsoft's dominance even in the business world will begin to wane, no doubt about it. As more tablets and smartphones make their way in, and the requirements of more open document standards and protocols become clear, things will change. But until then, and as ugly as it sometimes is, in the big world, Exchange-Office are still way ahead.
Considering the huge amounts of money Microsoft has thrown at its Xbox division, one could basically say they've purchased that market position. It has not translated into vast profits for Microsoft, and the obvious conclusion then becomes that for the bulk of the time the Xbox has been on the market, Microsoft has been selling it at a loss.
Now maybe, in pure numbers that is a meaningful sort of statement, but if I were an investor, I'd be asking myself "Why hasn't it paid for itself yet?" I'd being asking the same question of Zune and Microsoft's various failed attempts at creating a dominant web portal. And it's looking like various iterations of the Windows mobile platform are leading in the same direction.
At the end of the day, Microsofts fortunes are still tied to Windows and Exchange-Office, and where the big money in those divisions is in the corporate world. I'll wager a careful look would show you that the "Home" editions of Windows and Office probably do not make Microsoft any great profits at all, considering their OEM stuff is sold at a pretty steep discount as compared to the retail versions.
And that's fine on the PC. But when it comes to tablets and smartphones, that edge is gone. Microsoft has gone this way before when it tried to take on iPods, and the general consumer response was to reach over Zune players to grab the iPod on the shelf. Though not a perfect analogy, it also resembles Microsoft's failure at making a successful web portal. The first thing most people did when they got a new PC was to change the home page from MSN to Yahoo, and then after Yahoo had faded away, it was Google. The same goes with consoles. The whole Xbox division has swallowed who knows how much money now? And it's only been very recently that the division has even turned a profit, though certainly not enough to pay the vast investment.
I think a lot of Microsoft's success with consumer-grade PCs has been because of their dominance in the business world. You go out to buy a home PC, you want the same sort of OS and tools that you find on your work computer. But that's only a thin veneer, not an absolute requirement, and now that you have a generation of technology users who have no particular loyalty to Microsoft or to PCs in general, it no longer means very much at all.
I think Microsoft as a major player in the consumer market is probably going to fade. I still think they're going to be a major player in the medium-sized business and corporate world for some time to come. But as far as consumer devices go, they're so behind Apple and Android now that I just don't really see how they'll catch up.
Yes, to say 230% efficient is really a false statement. There's no violation of thermodynamics, it's just that the LED has more energy sources than the electrons it's drawing down the wire.
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Indeed. And it's getting exported abroad, in particular in Britain where various American-based Christian groups are pushing ridiculous cases into the courts where they know they'll inevitably get a pounding so they can claim "You see, there's a war on Christianity!"
The guy was clearly pretty fucking retarded. Michael Behe is one of the main "formulators" (whatever that may mean in pseudo-science") of Intelligent Design and he works at Baylor in molecular biology, although the rest of the faculty regard him as a joke, but the one thing Behe never does is risk his tenure by using the university or any peer reviewed publishing to forward his views. He saves that for the rubes that pay him lots of money, including those retards at Dover (where his humiliation was completed).
I'm very glad your father survived and has regained much of his abilities. Was your father ever actually declared brain dead though? There's brain injury and then there's brain injury. Keep people alive just in case somehow a massively and catastrophically damaged brain might somehow make it back out the other side seems more like basing decisions based on someone else's anecdotal claims (like yours, for instance).
We're talking about some imaginary technology that allows regrowth of brains from splattered bone, rock and whatever intruded masses with blood supply cut off to large portions for lengthy enough periods to kill a good deal of the tissue off. If we ever develop that degree of technology, I suspect growing new hearts, livers, kidneys, lungs, corneas and the like will have happened a long time before, and no longer will we have much need of organ donors.
Of course then we'll have people like you demanding "Let the headless motorbike rider who left most of his brain on the pavement of I5 live so his body can be reused, you have no right to let a perfectly good body die!!!"
Hey Fred, we've got an eater!
Even if the brain could be physically repaired, I doubt there will ever be medical technology capable of restoring a person. We're talking massive head trauma, which more than likely means the cognitive, emotional and memory centers of the brain are destroyed or nearly so. Imagining that at some point you could be stuck in a vat and have your brain regrown would likely mean that you would largely be a whole new person. Maybe in some far off future we'll be able to back up our brains and restore them in case of serious damage, but that's not going to happen any time soon.
No fucking kidding. At very best if I'm in such a state, my body will keep on going for a while (maybe years), but everything that makes me me; my personality and memories, is likely gone or sufficiently devastated as to be irrecoverable. The very least I can do at that point is give my organs so someone else can live.
I've been on the Internet since the early 1990s and whenever someone claims they have an IQ of 146, they're usually some nose-picking fucktard sitting in their mom's basement trying to beat down anyone who dares question their brilliance.
I think at the core of conspiracy theorism is the need for self-importance, to be a member of an elite group that knows the truth. I mean, who would David Icke be if not for the Illuminati?
All your bases are us...
Mod +1 Profitable!
So what if it's proprietary. Since the customer in question receives a considerably amount of correspondence from external sources, most of it in docx format, it's what they have to deal with. Period. Installing a program known to open such formats poorly as a stand on principle will end me up out of some good paying work.
Even more kludgy and reliant on external components than Exchange, and my experience is that the Outlook plugin just doesn't cut the mustard.
The customer in question is in Canada and has government contracts, and the Canadian government has specifically excluded all data storage outside of Canada.
The problem is that blood-alcohol level isn't a good measure of actual inebriation. It's the wrong metric. I posit that a good old fashioned sobriety test probably is far far better and determining the degree of inebriation at which the operation of an automobile becomes dangerous. Of course, it is possible that that too would nail people who weren't drunk, but then again, I don't think there should be a separate criminal offense for driving drunk. If someone high, drunk or sober, cannot pass a sobriety test, they shouldn't be driving. At that point, you do the blood test to determine if there was criminal intent (ie. he had a high amount of alcohol in his system so obviously got into the car pissed) or has some nasty metabolic disorder, in which case it isn't a criminal charge, though at the very least the license should be suspended until the medical condition has been resolved.
MADD, an organization that has been for a few decades now basically been guilting politicians into a sort of temperance through the back door scheme, has a vested interested in promoting unreasonably low limits. Of course, if you object, you're clearly some vile drunk driver who can't wait to operate a vehicle completely smashed and kill CHILDREN!!!!
I think .08 limit is utter bullshit, and I drink maybe four or five alcoholic beverages a year (I really do not look booze at all). But what I am is a reasonable person, and a reasonable person cannot look at the BAC limits in place in most Western countries and see anything about them that has anything to do with solid scientific research. It's just a magical incantation ".08 is drunk, .08 is drunk" that is not based on evidence in the least. And remember, the guys charging you with driving drunk are the same guys who have invented other whoppers like "smoking crystal meth once makes you addicted forever!" and "once you start smoking marijuana you will inevitably and eventually do heroin and cocaine".
It's called job security.
Fucking hell, pal! That's way too complicated for me when I'm drunk.
Unless you have diabetes or other metabolic disorders. It's not nearly as clear cut as the authorities try to put across. Frankly, the only test that really determines severe enough inebriation to effect driving is pretty much the old sobriety test.
"Legal considerations" as in major contract strictly prohibits using Google, and while .doc support is at a reasonable level, .docx support just plain sucks.
In other words your pushing it out on to the cloud, which is fine when the solution is available. It's not in our case due to legal considerations, and beyond that Google Apps has a long ways to go before it's reasonably decent at handling complex documents.
I suspect your requirements are very modest indeed.
No open source software that I've seen handles docx halfway as well as Word 2007 and Word 2010. "Good enough", as in "this wordprocessing software is good enough for almost all needs" is a given, but that's not really the question. You're talking about sixteen or seventeen years of Office dominance here, coupled with Exchange. Do you understand the manpower that would be required to convert a large company from Office-Exchange to something else (assuming that something else was in fact an improvement in any real sense).
I'll concede right now that I loath Exchange. I hate it. I hate everything about. I hate how brittle aspects of it are, the bizarre dependencies with other systems like IIS which means if .NET/ASP takes a nosedive, your clients suddenly find out they've lost a whole lot of functionality. Believe me, I've had many sleepless nights over Windows because it's seemingly easy configurations are filled with pitfalls. I love the *nix world where you can got "cp worldsmostimportant.conf worldsmostimportant.conf.bak" and muck around to my hearts content with the config, knowing I can pretty much wipe out any changes by inverting the command and restarting the daemon. At heart, I'm a *nix man and have been for over two decades. I fit *nix and open source solutions in wherever I can.
But at the end of the day, my boss and my coworkers are expecting to walk in, log on to their Windows workstation, start up Outlook, work on their budget in Excel and read the latest business requirements documentation in Word. I hand them Zimbra and LibreOffice, and it's going to be nasty. Eventually I might calm the waters, but then someone is inevitably going to get some Word 2010 document with wild formatting and it's going to open up in LibreOffice like the dog just puked on the screen, and then I'm going to get demands for solutions, and the only solution is going to be "I guess we should have Word on there."
In the long term, Microsoft's dominance even in the business world will begin to wane, no doubt about it. As more tablets and smartphones make their way in, and the requirements of more open document standards and protocols become clear, things will change. But until then, and as ugly as it sometimes is, in the big world, Exchange-Office are still way ahead.
Considering the huge amounts of money Microsoft has thrown at its Xbox division, one could basically say they've purchased that market position. It has not translated into vast profits for Microsoft, and the obvious conclusion then becomes that for the bulk of the time the Xbox has been on the market, Microsoft has been selling it at a loss.
Now maybe, in pure numbers that is a meaningful sort of statement, but if I were an investor, I'd be asking myself "Why hasn't it paid for itself yet?" I'd being asking the same question of Zune and Microsoft's various failed attempts at creating a dominant web portal. And it's looking like various iterations of the Windows mobile platform are leading in the same direction.
At the end of the day, Microsofts fortunes are still tied to Windows and Exchange-Office, and where the big money in those divisions is in the corporate world. I'll wager a careful look would show you that the "Home" editions of Windows and Office probably do not make Microsoft any great profits at all, considering their OEM stuff is sold at a pretty steep discount as compared to the retail versions.
And that's fine on the PC. But when it comes to tablets and smartphones, that edge is gone. Microsoft has gone this way before when it tried to take on iPods, and the general consumer response was to reach over Zune players to grab the iPod on the shelf. Though not a perfect analogy, it also resembles Microsoft's failure at making a successful web portal. The first thing most people did when they got a new PC was to change the home page from MSN to Yahoo, and then after Yahoo had faded away, it was Google. The same goes with consoles. The whole Xbox division has swallowed who knows how much money now? And it's only been very recently that the division has even turned a profit, though certainly not enough to pay the vast investment.
I think a lot of Microsoft's success with consumer-grade PCs has been because of their dominance in the business world. You go out to buy a home PC, you want the same sort of OS and tools that you find on your work computer. But that's only a thin veneer, not an absolute requirement, and now that you have a generation of technology users who have no particular loyalty to Microsoft or to PCs in general, it no longer means very much at all.
I think Microsoft as a major player in the consumer market is probably going to fade. I still think they're going to be a major player in the medium-sized business and corporate world for some time to come. But as far as consumer devices go, they're so behind Apple and Android now that I just don't really see how they'll catch up.
Yes, to say 230% efficient is really a false statement. There's no violation of thermodynamics, it's just that the LED has more energy sources than the electrons it's drawing down the wire.