Don't put it past them. Soon enough, they'll go after anything with ears. Dogs can sort of sing. Cats sort of howl, sometimes musically. And songbirds! Holy crap, not only can they make loud musical performances in public, they can also hear songs on the radio, copy them, and add those songs to their performances!
They also steal the sounds of ringtones, TVs, car horns, sirens, other birds, and they play them back constantly. And they migrate, thus violating regional copyrights and territory licensing. Sometimes people feed them too which is aiding and abetting!
Face it, birds are the biggest thieves of music of all time.
Well, I'd trade my childhood for that. From the time I was 11 until I was 22, my family did not have a car. We were too poor. But we lived in the city and survived by taking the bus or train or catching a cab ride now and then.
I was only robbed at gunpoint twice on the train. My brother was only mugged once walking home from the train. I only spent probably whole days worth of my life standing at bus stops in the heat or rain or snow or sun waiting for the one bus per hour.
We walked to liquor stores -the only stores in the shithole area where we lived- and bought bread and lunchmeat and chips for a couple dollars because that's all the food they sold and that was all the money we had and that was the only store open in the area. I think our household income back then was $300 a month, for three people. That was all the child support my father would pay for his two kids. That paid for food and lights. We squatted in a house so no rent. No gas or hot water. When the power was cut off, we cooked out back in a pit fired with coal. Seriously.
Anyway, we could take the bus and go to a better grocery but try hauling home 100lbs of groceries on your back, walking a mile from the bus stop. Actually I did that too. I got very good with a backpack.
We didn't have Walmart or Bestbuy or Circuit City or any of those places. I didn't go to a Walmart for the first time until I was 28 and had a car. Walking in, I had no idea what the hell a Walmart was. Kmart I knew, because we had shopped there was I was about 8 years old and there was one we could reach on a bus. But Walmart was just a myth.
We didn't go to movies from 1985 (A View to a Kill) until 1999 (South Park) because there was no movie theater we could reach. My first airline ride was in 1980. I didn't fly again until 2006. I went to an amusement park (Busch gardens) in 1977. My next amusement park visit of any kind wasn't until 2002. Never been to Disney. Never saw the ocean until last summer. You will have to take my word for how big of a smile I was wearing when I walked down the sand and into that water for the first time in my life, pushing age 40.
I am not asking for sympathy or whatever. Don't need it. Don't want it. I'm finally decently well-off and able to fund whatever I want, including a trip to Disney if I wanted. But I still remember where I came from. I remember what it was like to be utterly stranded and alone. So, I would kindly point out that life in the suburbs with a car and all the suburbs have to offer is not THAT bad. You have freedom and options and things to do and places to go that some people can only dream about.
The bus is not a solution to your problems, trust me.
Somewhere out there now is a kid like I was who won't learn to drive until 21 because the family has no car. Think about that concept. You're 16. All your friends have drivers licenses. It's a given that you at least get a license if not a car of your own. Now imagine waiting until 21, not to drink. Just to learn to drive.
Do a rescan on June 12 when all of them go to full digital and begin DTV broadcasts on new frequencies and higher power levels. After June 12, you may find that you are able to receive more channels.
If not, try a better antenna. If that doesn't work, then get upset. But at least wait until June 12 to write it off.
FWIW, I used to live in Baltimore but WDCA-20 was what we watched, with rabbit ears and and old UHF loop antenna. It may have had snow and static but we liked it better than channel 45. Fun memories.
It's kinda sad that kids coming up now won't know about those experiences. First TVs came with blue screens to politely mask the static and hidden faint signals, and now, there won't really be any faint signals. No more catching the show on the distant TV station because your local one won't carry it. It's a shame.
Combat for Atari 2600 had a warp effect in the tank vs. tank games. Start the game, turn your tank around and begin driving at the screen edge. Keep moving toward it full force while also firing the gun. Eventually you will warp out and come back somewhere else on the screen, sometimes to good effect and sometimes you blow up when you come out.
It worked very well. It works in the emulators too.
But when I think of games I was never meant to play at all, I think of ThrillKill for Playstation. This was a tag-team fighting game so bloody and violent, it was pulled just as it was about to ship. There's plenty of stuff on the net about what happened to that game. But the bottom line is that dev copies were immediately leaked onto the net and anyone who wanted it could get it and play the game thanks to an insider.
Take the extra crap out of the trunk. Take the food wrappers out of the back seat.
When approaching a traffic signal that is yellow or red, lay the hell off the gas and coast toward it. Too many people floor it toward red lights, for what? You can't GO anywhere.
Drive with no more than half a tank of fuel. Extra fuel is extra weight. If you know you won't be able to get more fuel, ok, fine. But if you are in a typical area with plenty of places to refuel, then don't haul around more than you need. For me, a half a tank is about four days worth of driving so plenty of time to get more when it gets low.
Drive 5mph slower than you usually do. This means you're probably still over the speed limit but what the heck. Unless you are driving really long distances, slowing down by 5 or 10 won't actually take that much longer to get where you are going, but it will save gas and maybe avoid tickets if your town is like mine these days.
All you need to say are five magic words: Am I free to go?
If the answer is yes, then you go. Now. Leave.
If the answer is no, then they have charges they plan to file/etc and that changes the ballgame immediately. Miranda rights come into play if it's the cops, or false imprisonment or kidnapping charges if it's just a rent-a-cop or Loomis worker. If it's the cops, that also means the ticker starts on how long they can detain you without charging you with something. Generally this is only a few minutes up to half an hour in some cases. That's not to say they won't outright lie or invent charges.
But any time someone tries to detain you, just say AIFTG? and watch the wheels of justice spin.
Everyone is up in arms about protecting bank account numbers but YOU (all of you) hand over that same info every time you hold up the grocery store line while you pay for corn dogs with a check.
Every time you pay your mortgage or rent, power or gas bills, credit card bills, loan payments, even payments to the bill collectors.
If you pay by check, you have just handed your account info over to those people, and not only them, but their back office people, the clerks, and everyone else who might have access to the check.
And despite being paper, there's no paper trail over who might have seen your check, copied down the info they need, and made off with all they need to take all your money.
ATM and pin-based systems have their share of problems but the paper check system is even worse.
Would you give your scuzzy landlord access to your bank account? You do that every time you hand him your rent, even if your landlord is Mom and your apartment is Mom's Basement.
There is no way most humans could detect a half-degree Celsius difference.
Most humans can't detect the difference between, say, 68F and 67F. It takes two or three or even four degrees before most people even notice. So the F scale is useless for the most part in everyday life.
Celsius comes close to hitting what people CAN actually feel, but even one degree C is still smaller what a typical person can detect.
Half degress C are right back in the F range of things people can't even feel.
That's still the response from many police agencies in my area, where it is legal to concealed carry with the right permit. You can go to Walmart minding your own business just shopping along and still get hell when some other customer or a store clerk spots the concealed weapon.
Of course it gets called in as a "man with gun" (not "man minding his own business shopping") and out come the local police who invariably act like you're robbing the store and refuse to believe that anyone could need to protect themselves when there are police a phone call away.
The irony is that becoming a computer geek is kinda mundane.
But becoming a legitimate gun geek, ah that's got the rarity, the obscurity and even some element of danger that should make it SO much more interesting.
Forget being a computer geek playing FPS. As a gun geek, you can actually buy lots of guns, learn them inside and out, and go shoot them legally and boast about it, or be even cooler and not say a word.
I used to be afraid of guns. Then I found out a couple of my friends were into them and decided it couldn't be all bad. And of course a gun is a machine and machines are my thing and suddenly I realized here was an entire class of machines I knew nothing about. Here was a chance to learn about something entirely new. How could I not try it?
I don't claim to be a gun geek or a know it all, but I now know a lot more about firearms than I did and my only regret is being so fearful of something for so long.
Respect for something is fine. Automatic fear is not.
The new hallmark of British aviation, we have learnt our lessons from the Comet disaster.
We have totally eliminated the windows thus guaranteeing that this British airliner will NOT, in fact, fall apart in mid air from metal fatigue around the windows.
In fact, I daresay this Mach 5 is uncrashable!
Here now is Captain Smith with your in-flight chitter chatter.
Well, radio is not the best way to make that local call. No, what they should do is pick out some major airport and make a slow, careful approach and slow, careful landing. This assumes they have a flying saucer or something.
Why an airport? They are ports. We expect to receive travelers there. We even have plans for what to do when planes land without making radio contact so sure, a flying saucer would be a little different, that type of landing would be sort of planned for. Kinda.
So anyway, they land, they hop out say hi or whatever. Done.
Nobody buys DVD recorders? I've owned two, keyword owned. One LiteOn 5002 and one 5005. They turned out to be the single most unreliable pieces of electronics I've ever owned, with the actual DVD drive mechanism dying in less than a year on all three -and not from heavy use or anything. The 5005 burned less than 10 discs over a year span before it died.
And this from Liteon who should know something about how to make a drive that works. But nope. My brother got a 5002 for himself and it also died the same way. Just outside the warranty of course.
I don't have a third recorder because I just don't have time to babysit a real-time recording from Tivo to disc, and I really really don't have time to watch the discs afterward. Same reason I don't watch DVD movies. Ever. Between working 12 hours a day and sleeping when I can and other obligations, there's no room for DVDs or much TV so that reduced the need to get another DVD recorder to make DVDs I will never have time to watch.
It's not whether people understand GUIs or that there are others or like or dislike one or another. Most of them don't care about GUIs.
They just want their computer to DO what they want. Surf the web, look at pictures of the grandkids, play some games, maybe type a letter.
You don't need Vista to do those things. XP is good enough and people who don't know about GUIs still know how to use it. Vista changed a lot of things for the sake of change and even more so with the latest Office redo. Tell these end users what Vista or Office now does better all you want -but they won't care. They just want to surf the web, type their letters, get work done. The task is more important than how it gets done.
Many of those people are finding that things are suddenly harder to do or unfamiliar or different for reasons that don't directly benefit them.
MS is caught in a trap of their own making: XP and Office 2003 are "good enough" for most people doing most things. But being the same as the last version doesn't sell new boxes of software or make stockholders happy, so there have to be new versions with lots of different stuff crammed in to justify 200/400/600 bucks a copy.
But many end users don't think there was anything wrong with the old one. They just want to do their work. They aren't interested in upgrading for fun or to try something new.
Not so fast. You can sign up for three months at $7.77 a month, but you have a $30 setup fee which is actually more than then the cost of the hosting plan over those three months. You can skip the setup fee, but only if you agree to a year of service for a product you can't try in advance.
This is like a restaurant saying a three-pack of hamburgers is $23 plus a $30 service fee, or you can pay for 12 hamburgers for $7 each but if you don't like it, too bad cause you get 12 of them, Wimpy.
Why can't hosting companies offer A MONTHLY PRICE? NO BS. NO fees?
Why do customers have to either pay a stupid fee or agree to a year of a product that may or may not suit them? I've gone through more than my share of hosting companies over the years. Lots of promises, lots of SLA assurances and uptime guarantees, and lots of talk talk talk. And most of it was hot air. Promises don't mean jack when my site goes down more than presidential popularity ratings.
As it happens, my personal website hosting provider does month-by-month and no fees. It's not "perfect" hosting but it's cheap and if it really goes to hell, at least I am not stuck in a contract of any sort.
My commercial business is hosted with a different and rather expensive hosting company but in two years, I've not had to call them about anything. It just works. I don't mind paying the bill for that one -and it's ain't nowhere NEAR $7 a month. I can't afford to save money there only to have my site die on the one critical day of the year when we need it most, which is exactly what it did to me with my previous provider.
Maybe I missed something. Adobe says the affected versions are these:
Adobe Reader 8.1 and earlier versions Adobe Acrobat Standard, Professional and Elements 8.1 and earlier versions Adobe Acrobat 3D OK, so I am running a nice copy of Acrobat 6.0 Pro. That's an earlier version.
The registry key they want changed simply doesn't exist on my system. Either the fix doesn't apply to this old version, or it's different, or.... I dunno what to make of it.
Come on, that would be like Apple disclaiming responsibility if they pushed and OS X updater which expected to find Macs with wifi turned on, which then bricked all the Macs which had wifi turned off.
The radio would be in a state Apple didn't expect. So it's not their fault if they brick it?
Excuse me, my Mac is MY property. My phone is MY property. You can't come in to my home and break these devices without being held accountable and neither should Apple be allowed to come in remotely and effectively destroy my Mac or phone without being held accountable.
Sure, my Mac was made by Apple and runs their OS but that doesn't give them any right to do whatever the hell they want to it. And if they do something malicious, then welcome to lawsuit time.
It's only in fiction that the results of a satellite crash or bioweapon accident or radiation produces zombies or successful mutants who look really weird but still manage to carry a mean chainsaw.
Mutation tends to be more random than not, so you are likely to get organisms that cannot actually DO anything useful (assuming making zombies is useful) or lack any particular advantage over the original species. In fact they may be sterile or weakened.
Irradiated flesh doesn't turn into the Hulk or glow or become self-intelligent. No. It just dies.
As for this particular result of super germs, this is nothing that regular evolution could not have tried. Evolution tries many paths. Not all of them succeed. The ones that don't, die off. In this case, it sounds like the germ is more effective at killing its host animal. The ideal germ wouldn't do that. Rather it would exploit its host to spread itself to other hosts.
Suppose the germ developed a version of itself that was 100% lethal and then killed its own host before the host could spread it. Well the germ dies too, doesn't it? That evolutionary path might be more efficient but it also effectively erases itself. Nature tends to prune out such extremes.
This is one of the reasons tagging illegal aliens won't work.
1) They'll know they've been tagged and do n+1 things to get the tags out.
2) Back-alley "doctors" will happily set up shop and do removals or even cross-plants, for a price. A whole new illegal industry will be born.
If the point of doing implants is to track people, but you can't trust the tracking, then the whole idea falls apart and it's no better than doing nothing.
The fundamental flaw with gold is that it's only actually valuable because people desire it and it's relatively rare at the same time.
Flaw? Gold is not THAT rare. Major countries sit on huge stockpiles of gold and literal gold mines. If they so chose, they could release massive quantities of gold into the market which would instantly deflate the value of everybody's holdings and crash the economy of any country stuck on the gold standard.
Russia, for example, could dump some of their holdings. This would possibly halve the price of gold, instantly. What, then, would that do to the US economy if it was tied to gold? Chaos. Imagine waking up to find that your investment has lost half its value and you can't even sell it.
Even now, private investors see gold as the miracle investment but it still suffers from the same weakness. A Russia or China or someone else could instantly make that miracle investment into miracle whip.
You don't want to give other countries that kind of power to destroy your financial structure. You don't want to be tied to something you cannot control or worse is controlled by people who oppose you and won't hesitate to undermine what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't put it past them. Soon enough, they'll go after anything with ears. Dogs can sort of sing. Cats sort of howl, sometimes musically. And songbirds! Holy crap, not only can they make loud musical performances in public, they can also hear songs on the radio, copy them, and add those songs to their performances!
They also steal the sounds of ringtones, TVs, car horns, sirens, other birds, and they play them back constantly. And they migrate, thus violating regional copyrights and territory licensing. Sometimes people feed them too which is aiding and abetting!
Face it, birds are the biggest thieves of music of all time.
Well, I'd trade my childhood for that. From the time I was 11 until I was 22, my family did not have a car. We were too poor. But we lived in the city and survived by taking the bus or train or catching a cab ride now and then.
I was only robbed at gunpoint twice on the train. My brother was only mugged once walking home from the train. I only spent probably whole days worth of my life standing at bus stops in the heat or rain or snow or sun waiting for the one bus per hour.
We walked to liquor stores -the only stores in the shithole area where we lived- and bought bread and lunchmeat and chips for a couple dollars because that's all the food they sold and that was all the money we had and that was the only store open in the area. I think our household income back then was $300 a month, for three people. That was all the child support my father would pay for his two kids. That paid for food and lights. We squatted in a house so no rent. No gas or hot water. When the power was cut off, we cooked out back in a pit fired with coal. Seriously.
Anyway, we could take the bus and go to a better grocery but try hauling home 100lbs of groceries on your back, walking a mile from the bus stop. Actually I did that too. I got very good with a backpack.
We didn't have Walmart or Bestbuy or Circuit City or any of those places. I didn't go to a Walmart for the first time until I was 28 and had a car. Walking in, I had no idea what the hell a Walmart was. Kmart I knew, because we had shopped there was I was about 8 years old and there was one we could reach on a bus. But Walmart was just a myth.
We didn't go to movies from 1985 (A View to a Kill) until 1999 (South Park) because there was no movie theater we could reach. My first airline ride was in 1980. I didn't fly again until 2006. I went to an amusement park (Busch gardens) in 1977. My next amusement park visit of any kind wasn't until 2002. Never been to Disney. Never saw the ocean until last summer. You will have to take my word for how big of a smile I was wearing when I walked down the sand and into that water for the first time in my life, pushing age 40.
I am not asking for sympathy or whatever. Don't need it. Don't want it. I'm finally decently well-off and able to fund whatever I want, including a trip to Disney if I wanted. But I still remember where I came from. I remember what it was like to be utterly stranded and alone. So, I would kindly point out that life in the suburbs with a car and all the suburbs have to offer is not THAT bad. You have freedom and options and things to do and places to go that some people can only dream about.
The bus is not a solution to your problems, trust me.
Somewhere out there now is a kid like I was who won't learn to drive until 21 because the family has no car. Think about that concept. You're 16. All your friends have drivers licenses. It's a given that you at least get a license if not a car of your own. Now imagine waiting until 21, not to drink. Just to learn to drive.
Do a rescan on June 12 when all of them go to full digital and begin DTV broadcasts on new frequencies and higher power levels. After June 12, you may find that you are able to receive more channels.
If not, try a better antenna. If that doesn't work, then get upset. But at least wait until June 12 to write it off.
FWIW, I used to live in Baltimore but WDCA-20 was what we watched, with rabbit ears and and old UHF loop antenna. It may have had snow and static but we liked it better than channel 45. Fun memories.
It's kinda sad that kids coming up now won't know about those experiences. First TVs came with blue screens to politely mask the static and hidden faint signals, and now, there won't really be any faint signals. No more catching the show on the distant TV station because your local one won't carry it. It's a shame.
Combat for Atari 2600 had a warp effect in the tank vs. tank games. Start the game, turn your tank around and begin driving at the screen edge. Keep moving toward it full force while also firing the gun. Eventually you will warp out and come back somewhere else on the screen, sometimes to good effect and sometimes you blow up when you come out.
It worked very well. It works in the emulators too.
But when I think of games I was never meant to play at all, I think of ThrillKill for Playstation. This was a tag-team fighting game so bloody and violent, it was pulled just as it was about to ship. There's plenty of stuff on the net about what happened to that game. But the bottom line is that dev copies were immediately leaked onto the net and anyone who wanted it could get it and play the game thanks to an insider.
Awesome game.
There are other passive or near passive things.
Take the extra crap out of the trunk. Take the food wrappers out of the back seat.
When approaching a traffic signal that is yellow or red, lay the hell off the gas and coast toward it. Too many people floor it toward red lights, for what? You can't GO anywhere.
Drive with no more than half a tank of fuel. Extra fuel is extra weight. If you know you won't be able to get more fuel, ok, fine. But if you are in a typical area with plenty of places to refuel, then don't haul around more than you need. For me, a half a tank is about four days worth of driving so plenty of time to get more when it gets low.
Drive 5mph slower than you usually do. This means you're probably still over the speed limit but what the heck. Unless you are driving really long distances, slowing down by 5 or 10 won't actually take that much longer to get where you are going, but it will save gas and maybe avoid tickets if your town is like mine these days.
All you need to say are five magic words: Am I free to go?
If the answer is yes, then you go. Now. Leave.
If the answer is no, then they have charges they plan to file/etc and that changes the ballgame immediately. Miranda rights come into play if it's the cops, or false imprisonment or kidnapping charges if it's just a rent-a-cop or Loomis worker. If it's the cops, that also means the ticker starts on how long they can detain you without charging you with something. Generally this is only a few minutes up to half an hour in some cases. That's not to say they won't outright lie or invent charges.
But any time someone tries to detain you, just say AIFTG? and watch the wheels of justice spin.
What Hatta said.
Everyone is up in arms about protecting bank account numbers but YOU (all of you) hand over that same info every time you hold up the grocery store line while you pay for corn dogs with a check.
Every time you pay your mortgage or rent, power or gas bills, credit card bills, loan payments, even payments to the bill collectors.
If you pay by check, you have just handed your account info over to those people, and not only them, but their back office people, the clerks, and everyone else who might have access to the check.
And despite being paper, there's no paper trail over who might have seen your check, copied down the info they need, and made off with all they need to take all your money.
ATM and pin-based systems have their share of problems but the paper check system is even worse.
Would you give your scuzzy landlord access to your bank account? You do that every time you hand him your rent, even if your landlord is Mom and your apartment is Mom's Basement.
When I need the channel changed, I get my imaginary virtual cosplaying internet girlfriend to do it for me.
She ALWAYS pushes the right button and totally listens to me and never argues.
I am not lying dammit!
Personally I`m waiting for voice recognition to become practical. I think that's more the future of how we control our devices.
We get signal!
Main screen, turn on!
Yeah, it has been done before.
I call marketing on that one.
There is no way most humans could detect a half-degree Celsius difference.
Most humans can't detect the difference between, say, 68F and 67F. It takes two or three or even four degrees before most people even notice. So the F scale is useless for the most part in everyday life.
Celsius comes close to hitting what people CAN actually feel, but even one degree C is still smaller what a typical person can detect.
Half degress C are right back in the F range of things people can't even feel.
OMG he has a GUN! Panic! Panic!
That's still the response from many police agencies in my area, where it is legal to concealed carry with the right permit. You can go to Walmart minding your own business just shopping along and still get hell when some other customer or a store clerk spots the concealed weapon.
Of course it gets called in as a "man with gun" (not "man minding his own business shopping") and out come the local police who invariably act like you're robbing the store and refuse to believe that anyone could need to protect themselves when there are police a phone call away.
Ah well, I just canceled a weeklong trip to San Francisco because I could not come up with enough things to DO there to justify the cost.
All I knew about CA gun laws was that your state won't honor my carry permit and that depressed me.
The irony is that becoming a computer geek is kinda mundane.
But becoming a legitimate gun geek, ah that's got the rarity, the obscurity and even some element of danger that should make it SO much more interesting.
Forget being a computer geek playing FPS. As a gun geek, you can actually buy lots of guns, learn them inside and out, and go shoot them legally and boast about it, or be even cooler and not say a word.
I used to be afraid of guns. Then I found out a couple of my friends were into them and decided it couldn't be all bad. And of course a gun is a machine and machines are my thing and suddenly I realized here was an entire class of machines I knew nothing about. Here was a chance to learn about something entirely new. How could I not try it?
I don't claim to be a gun geek or a know it all, but I now know a lot more about firearms than I did and my only regret is being so fearful of something for so long.
Respect for something is fine. Automatic fear is not.
The new hallmark of British aviation, we have learnt our lessons from the Comet disaster.
We have totally eliminated the windows thus guaranteeing that this British airliner will NOT, in fact, fall apart in mid air from metal fatigue around the windows.
In fact, I daresay this Mach 5 is uncrashable!
Here now is Captain Smith with your in-flight chitter chatter.
Well, radio is not the best way to make that local call. No, what they should do is pick out some major airport and make a slow, careful approach and slow, careful landing. This assumes they have a flying saucer or something.
Why an airport? They are ports. We expect to receive travelers there. We even have plans for what to do when planes land without making radio contact so sure, a flying saucer would be a little different, that type of landing would be sort of planned for. Kinda.
So anyway, they land, they hop out say hi or whatever. Done.
Nobody buys DVD recorders? I've owned two, keyword owned. One LiteOn 5002 and one 5005. They turned out to be the single most unreliable pieces of electronics I've ever owned, with the actual DVD drive mechanism dying in less than a year on all three -and not from heavy use or anything. The 5005 burned less than 10 discs over a year span before it died.
And this from Liteon who should know something about how to make a drive that works. But nope. My brother got a 5002 for himself and it also died the same way. Just outside the warranty of course.
I don't have a third recorder because I just don't have time to babysit a real-time recording from Tivo to disc, and I really really don't have time to watch the discs afterward. Same reason I don't watch DVD movies. Ever. Between working 12 hours a day and sleeping when I can and other obligations, there's no room for DVDs or much TV so that reduced the need to get another DVD recorder to make DVDs I will never have time to watch.
Agreed. I use XP under Parallels so Bootcamp is a non-issue.
But SMB in Leopard was a disaster for me and sent me running back to Tiger, where stuff just, you know, worked.
I'll stay in Tiger until the Leopard public beta finishes.
It's not whether people understand GUIs or that there are others or like or dislike one or another. Most of them don't care about GUIs.
They just want their computer to DO what they want. Surf the web, look at pictures of the grandkids, play some games, maybe type a letter.
You don't need Vista to do those things. XP is good enough and people who don't know about GUIs still know how to use it. Vista changed a lot of things for the sake of change and even more so with the latest Office redo. Tell these end users what Vista or Office now does better all you want -but they won't care. They just want to surf the web, type their letters, get work done. The task is more important than how it gets done.
Many of those people are finding that things are suddenly harder to do or unfamiliar or different for reasons that don't directly benefit them.
MS is caught in a trap of their own making: XP and Office 2003 are "good enough" for most people doing most things. But being the same as the last version doesn't sell new boxes of software or make stockholders happy, so there have to be new versions with lots of different stuff crammed in to justify 200/400/600 bucks a copy.
But many end users don't think there was anything wrong with the old one. They just want to do their work. They aren't interested in upgrading for fun or to try something new.
Not so fast. You can sign up for three months at $7.77 a month, but you have a $30 setup fee which is actually more than then the cost of the hosting plan over those three months. You can skip the setup fee, but only if you agree to a year of service for a product you can't try in advance.
This is like a restaurant saying a three-pack of hamburgers is $23 plus a $30 service fee, or you can pay for 12 hamburgers for $7 each but if you don't like it, too bad cause you get 12 of them, Wimpy.
Why can't hosting companies offer A MONTHLY PRICE? NO BS. NO fees?
Why do customers have to either pay a stupid fee or agree to a year of a product that may or may not suit them? I've gone through more than my share of hosting companies over the years. Lots of promises, lots of SLA assurances and uptime guarantees, and lots of talk talk talk. And most of it was hot air. Promises don't mean jack when my site goes down more than presidential popularity ratings.
As it happens, my personal website hosting provider does month-by-month and no fees. It's not "perfect" hosting but it's cheap and if it really goes to hell, at least I am not stuck in a contract of any sort.
My commercial business is hosted with a different and rather expensive hosting company but in two years, I've not had to call them about anything. It just works. I don't mind paying the bill for that one -and it's ain't nowhere NEAR $7 a month. I can't afford to save money there only to have my site die on the one critical day of the year when we need it most, which is exactly what it did to me with my previous provider.
Adobe Acrobat Standard, Professional and Elements 8.1 and earlier versions
Adobe Acrobat 3D OK, so I am running a nice copy of Acrobat 6.0 Pro. That's an earlier version.
The registry key they want changed simply doesn't exist on my system. Either the fix doesn't apply to this old version, or it's different, or
Come on, that would be like Apple disclaiming responsibility if they pushed and OS X updater which expected to find Macs with wifi turned on, which then bricked all the Macs which had wifi turned off.
The radio would be in a state Apple didn't expect. So it's not their fault if they brick it?
Excuse me, my Mac is MY property. My phone is MY property. You can't come in to my home and break these devices without being held accountable and neither should Apple be allowed to come in remotely and effectively destroy my Mac or phone without being held accountable.
Sure, my Mac was made by Apple and runs their OS but that doesn't give them any right to do whatever the hell they want to it. And if they do something malicious, then welcome to lawsuit time.
It's only in fiction that the results of a satellite crash or bioweapon accident or radiation produces zombies or successful mutants who look really weird but still manage to carry a mean chainsaw.
Mutation tends to be more random than not, so you are likely to get organisms that cannot actually DO anything useful (assuming making zombies is useful) or lack any particular advantage over the original species. In fact they may be sterile or weakened.
Irradiated flesh doesn't turn into the Hulk or glow or become self-intelligent. No. It just dies.
As for this particular result of super germs, this is nothing that regular evolution could not have tried. Evolution tries many paths. Not all of them succeed. The ones that don't, die off. In this case, it sounds like the germ is more effective at killing its host animal. The ideal germ wouldn't do that. Rather it would exploit its host to spread itself to other hosts.
Suppose the germ developed a version of itself that was 100% lethal and then killed its own host before the host could spread it. Well the germ dies too, doesn't it? That evolutionary path might be more efficient but it also effectively erases itself. Nature tends to prune out such extremes.
... So some cop watching the console suddenly sees the trackers heading out to sea, until it disappears when the cell signal fades out. hahaha
Might even be a spit-take in the police station.
This is one of the reasons tagging illegal aliens won't work.
1) They'll know they've been tagged and do n+1 things to get the tags out.
2) Back-alley "doctors" will happily set up shop and do removals or even cross-plants, for a price. A whole new illegal industry will be born.
If the point of doing implants is to track people, but you can't trust the tracking, then the whole idea falls apart and it's no better than doing nothing.
The fundamental flaw with gold is that it's only actually valuable because people desire it and it's relatively rare at the same time.
Flaw? Gold is not THAT rare. Major countries sit on huge stockpiles of gold and literal gold mines. If they so chose, they could release massive quantities of gold into the market which would instantly deflate the value of everybody's holdings and crash the economy of any country stuck on the gold standard.
Russia, for example, could dump some of their holdings. This would possibly halve the price of gold, instantly. What, then, would that do to the US economy if it was tied to gold? Chaos. Imagine waking up to find that your investment has lost half its value and you can't even sell it.
Even now, private investors see gold as the miracle investment but it still suffers from the same weakness. A Russia or China or someone else could instantly make that miracle investment into miracle whip.
You don't want to give other countries that kind of power to destroy your financial structure. You don't want to be tied to something you cannot control or worse is controlled by people who oppose you and won't hesitate to undermine what you want.