The real reason for this is obvious: Katrina never happened. It was a ploy to discredit the administration, and Google proved it. Now if Google want to do some real good, they should roll back all images of New Jersey to show the actual Gulf of Trenton, in all its natural glory. We'd all sleep easier.
Besides the warm-blooded = expanded environment advantage, it seems to me there is another, possibly more important advantage to being warm-blooded. Gestation can occur within a mobile incubator (mother), rather than forcing the mother to either remain more or less sedentary (and therefore both easier prey and at a disadvantage for food gathering), or bury/hide eggs where other species may root them out. Besides this, heat regulation in a warm=blooded body is likely superior to a pile of fermenting vegetables, near a volcano, or whatever. I would think the advantages would continue to rise as gestation periods got longer (up to a point), besides it allowing for more development before birth.
Then again, maybe that's just what the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Bless His Noodly Appendages) wants me to think.
unfortunately, there are still things GIMP cannot do (or do as well) as PS. Undoubtedly, GIMP will be a better tool in some cases than PS, but I think the opposite is true at least as often. No CMYK mode is a big drawback of GIMP, for instance. That alone makes it pretty much useless for professional print work.
GIMP is a fantastic program, and I consider it one of the best examples of desktop OSS, but it still needs some work. It isn't the equal of PS quite yet, but it's fairly close.
Okay, since XP sold 17M in the first two months, I'll assume (maybe not accurately) that the Jan sales were roughly 8M.
FROM TFA:
Silver estimates PC makers sold between 12 million and 15 million PCs with Windows XP Home Edition over the holidays -- a significant chunk of the 20 million total, depending on how many included Vista coupons.
While Microsoft wouldn't say how many Vista upgrades were ordered in that time frame, Dell Inc. spokesman Bob Kaufman said about two-thirds of its holiday PC shoppers registered for the upgrade.
Assuming that estimate is remotely accurate, take the most optimistic number (we don't know what the sales before the holiday season were, but to be especially fair, I'll assume 0): 12M Jan sales of Vista.
So, since the market was roughly half the size in 2001, this translates, in equal market size, to Vista selling only three-quarters as well in Jan as XP did six years ago (less actually, since there are many more PCs in homes available to upgrade (2x,3x,4x... as many???)).
Gangs and drug-related violence won't go away. Why give up your spot on the corner when you can undercut the gas station down the street by 25%? Why give up your turf just because Uncle Sam said your merchandise isn't illegal anymore?
The local dealer (or syndicate) is pretty much toast without a source. Both national, and some international legalization would need to take place (not for pot, obviously). If a legal international market existed, the current local distributors (criminal) would have no way to get it cheaper than the gas station (other than by outright theft). I'm sure it would be quite hard to remove the entrenched international manufacturers, but I think it could be done with time. What is being done now certainly isn't working very well.
The current non-political producers would become legitimate, and that would almost certainly result in a "mellowing" of their business practices. The political movements, whether FARC in Columbia, or the Taliban in Afghanistan, would have a much harder time getting money out of drugs. Legitimate companies could compete for (pay and protect) labourers successfully. Businesses (like Tescos or Walmart or whatever) would certainly buy from the legal sources, so most or all of the market would be legal. Cost of production would be similar, but you'd have a further side-effect of weakening local support for groups like FARC or the Taliban, and cutting into their war-budget significantly.
I bet quite a few countries would resist legalization, but I bet plenty would be into it without the current US anti-drug pressures and international agreements.
Personally, I can't see very many drawbacks to legalization of any drug, and can see a lot of positives. Sure, a handful more people might f*ck up their own lives, but I don't think that's either likely, or worse than the current state of affairs. Cutting into the revenue of gangs and guerrilla movements alone are worth that (possible) extra social cost.
Nobody goes to their boss with a proposal or idea that begins with "I read on slashdot..."
That kind of depends.... You're probably on safe ground if your boss is wearing a shirt that says: "I'm CowboyNeal's Lovechild", has a poster of Chuck Norris, or repeatedly says: "I'm your boss, you insensitive clod..."
For other bosses, I suppose "I read in the blogosphere..." will have to do.
My Former Attorney: You're honour, the defendant hired me in case X, and refuses to pay the $30,000 owed to me.
Me: You're honour, the plaintiff just violated my right to attorney-client confidentiality by disclosing this amount. I demand the case be thrown out and the plaintiff disbarred.
Even your analogy misses the point. You can't fumble the throw. This is/. Most people can't fumble a throw, but we can. To paraphrase Sartre: "Sports is other people."
If I remember correctly, Monsanto modified soybeans and corn to be "RoundUp Ready" as they called it. Basically they GE'd the plants so that they would not be affected by Monsanto's RoundUp pesticide, allowing farmers to spray their whole field with the pesticide and leave their crops untouched. So I would venture to say that in order to make these plants resistant, there is probably something being produced by them that is not entirely natural.
A lot of corn produced is already BT corn. Typically yields are quite a bit higher (10-25% in my area). In a way, it functions in exactly the opposite way: instead of making the plant resistant to herbicide, to allow for safe spraying, it makes the plant produce its own insecticides, to alleviate the need for spraying. Still, it's introducing something that's not "natural", but it is beneficial. I don't think unnatural necessarily means it's bad. There are benefits of less insecticide usage (generally the insecticides we use are WAY more dangerous than herbicides), and there's a higher yield per acre. (I don't know about standard kernel corn, I'm just talking about the corn that goes into making oil, whiskey, feed, etc.)
Besides RoundUp resistant corn, we have RoundUp ready canola, soybeans, and who knows what else by now. In central Canada, we also typically spray our wheat crops a week or two before harvest with RoundUp, as well as our dry edible beans (BTW I don't think the US allows for the RoundUp sprayed beans to be imported yet, but occasionally ND and Minn. (probably Mich. as well) allow their farmers to use it. Considering that some dry edible beans are virtually unprocessed, and there doesn't seem to be any indication of harmful effects, it seems doubtful that you'd find harmful effects from RoundUp sprayed products which are more finely processed. (Everything I'm saying is stale by at least 6 or 7 years, BTW, since I haven't had anything to do with my family's farm since then.)
Still, I wouldn't put it past Dow-Elanco or Monsanto or any of them to hide research. It just seems like pesticide and GMO fears are a little out of whack. For what it's worth (antecdote) I've been drenched with RoundUp, Treflan, 2-4D, Amitrol and various other pesticides in my life. Maybe I'll suffer horribly for it in the future, but so far, I have no noticeable health problems. ----Wait a sec---what's this lump doing here?---
Nonsense! I have booked a lovely journey to the Ottoman Empire this spring, which I'm greatly looking forward to. I'm especially interested in seeing the glorious gem that is Baghdad. I hear it is quite lovely in the spring. Next year I think a trip to Siam will be in order, though the wife is set on Prussia. I'm not sure what sort of fly-by-night gazetteer YOU use!
It seems to me that the best route would be to install a very user-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Linspire on all the linux-ready boxes. This would be the best in terms of selling to Joe Sixpack, and likely small businesses. Include DVDs of Fedora, Suse, Debian, Kubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware etc. for anyone else. What would that cost them, to include 8 or 10 DVDs/CDs? Not much, thirty cents, maybe. Hell, even if they just included Fedora, Debian, and Suse DVDs, with Ubuntu already installed, that would take care of the majority of customer distro choices. As long as they have chosen hardware which is supported under Redhat, Suse, and Debian, they'd have pretty much all bases covered.
Personally, I think it would be a bad move to allow a customer to have distros like Gentoo pre-installed. It won't do Linux any good to have Joe Sixpack buy a system, select a distro randomly, and then conclude that Linux sucks because he can't make a power-user distro work.
Apparently you're thinking I'm saying things i didn't say. Kudos to you for not ACing it, BTW.
You made some assumptions there which I'm not even going to bother to actually specifically address, but I will enumerate:
You are assuming:
allofmp3 are Russian mob.
I "throw money" at Russian mobsters.
I "steal" music
I feel I am moral for "stealing" music
I am going on and on about "sketchy legal loopholes"
I am an experienced e-lawyer (sarcastically)
I know that the artist is not getting financial any benefit whatsoever
You think I might bother arguing that the RIAA just has to contact...
We both know that allofmp3 are/were skirting the law
I benefited from allofmp3
I am an asshat
The/. zeitgeist is close-minded
I have a problem with "big business" taking advantage of the GPL
Something about Apple and blogs
I feel big business exploits musicians
And I benefit from that
Truly lame... If you can't take a post which said, essentially, that iTunes is not as convenient as allofmp3 --and that I think it could offer the same level of service-- and turn it into your own projectionist ramble, then good luck with that. FWIW, other than being an asshat, there're only two other assumptions you made which have an element of truth in them, as far as I can see.
If you don't think allofmp3 offer[s/ed] a great service, that's your problem. I have no problem paying for music at a reasonable rate --hell, I have thousands albums on vinyl, countless tapes, and tons of CDs. I've paid for them all. But I know what music is worth to me. I'm virtually NEVER going to pay even $10 for an album anymore if I only want one or two or three tunes off of it. Since some time in 2002, the only places I've been getting new music have been free publicity offerings by bands/labels or allofmp3. Cut that off, and I'll just stop consuming. I can perform well enough to get my musical kicks, and I have a decent library of existing music. $1 a song is a ridiculously overinflated price, for digital delivery, by at least an order of magnitude. Am I ripping someone off @ $1 an album? Nope. Not remotely. If it's good, then I'm a fan (and a collector), if it isn't, then I'll delete it myself, and spread my opinion that it's garbage. I've spent more money on music in my life than food, so your silly assertions are garbage to me.
As Jello Biafra sang:
"tin-earred,
graph-paper brained
accountants
Instead of music fans
Call all the shots at giant record companies now
The lowest common denominator rules
"Forget honesty
Forget creativity
The dumbest buy the mostest
That's the name of the game
"But sales are slipping
And no one will say why
Could be they put out one too many lousy records"
I read the summary, then went to read the article, but could only get this far:
Microsoft is striking a surprising balance.
The summary referred to "even-handed". but the article uses the words "striking...a balance" implying a reasonable, fair, and equitable relationship. I do not think this word means what he thinks it means. It still looks like business as usual from MS (ooXML or Ballmer's comments on the Novell deal, for example).
Nah, we wouldn't have 90% unemployment. Instead, we'd have about 80% of the population working in agriculture again. Personally, I'm not sure what I'd prefer: Blackberry ghouls/American Idol/Dental adhesives/Carpet bombing, or missing all the good things that coexist with the Blackberry ghouls/...
Either way, enabling luxury purchases by state tax-reimbursement has little or nothing to do with capitalism (though Keynes may disagree???). If there is a market for people to buy new TVs, let the market sort it out, don't incentivize a private market (TV manufacturing co.s) with the public's (state's) money. That is in direct opposition to capitalism. It's a little different when it's not a luxury good, but as a luxury good, there's no reason for the state to support it whatsoever. I don't see how any counter-argument to this would be anything other than the broken-window fallacy.
iTunes is extremely convenient. If I want just a song off of an album, I'll pick it up from Apple. But I also burn all the songs to a CD and then rip them back at high quality into mp3's.
Not half as convenient as allofmp3 was... If I wanted a song off an album, I'd pick it up from allofmp3. I never had to rip to CD and back, and I could chose my bit rate. Now that was convenient. I really don't see how Apple couldn't do the same thing. There's no way they have legal protection against enabling-copyright-infringement (or whatever) by requiring one to burn to cd and back. That's just a pointless inconvenience.
To call Zork "probably the most important" is just your individual bias. I'm disappointed that Doom was chosen instead of Castle Wolfenstein. I'm disappointed that the Atari "Combat" game wasn't on the list. I'm disappointd that the Intellivision D&D game wasn't on the list (the 3-D one). I'm disappointed that King's Quest I wasn't on the list.....Maybe they shouldn't be. But claiming Zork is more important than Tetris or SimCity or Mario is just a preference claim. They were all equally important, for different reasons. (I never played the soccer one, though, so I don't know about it.)
That being said... Really, Pac-Man should be on that list. Nothing has popularized computer gaming like Pac-Man.
We all take shortcuts in our jobs and to reach our goals, and when you're on the street, with a bust so close you can feel it - and the only thing stopping you is what you percieve as "beurocratic red tape", it's easy to slip up.
Nope, we don't all do that. I don't, and I've met many other people who don't, either. We trust cops with power unavailable to the rest of us, and we should hold them to at least as high of a standard as those who behave with integrity. If they betray that trust, no excuses suffice, they've made a mistake which should (universally) end their career, and (possibly) result in draconian criminal punishment.
Sure. a lot of them are trying to catch bad guys, or whatever, but plenty of them are not, and in either case, abusing that power is a greater threat to our personal liberty than Willie Horton or Usama Bin Ladin could ever be. It's easy to look at it as just another job, but it isn't. It's the front line where freedom's are fought for.
I might have a skewed view on this, I suppose, since I've been on the wrong side of police malfeasance a few times.
He Just doesn't have the right charisma to do it. In in the end Chrisma is what makes you predident or not.
jesus.... If that's true, someone wake me up. I've been sleeping since Reagan... Really, since Eisenhower, I'd only call JFK and Reagan charismatic, the rest of them seem to have the personalities of some strange Dr. Seuss contraptions.
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason for this is obvious: Katrina never happened. It was a ploy to discredit the administration, and Google proved it. Now if Google want to do some real good, they should roll back all images of New Jersey to show the actual Gulf of Trenton, in all its natural glory. We'd all sleep easier.
This article is about the IDE being used for PHP, so fans of Pascal syntax have nothing to get excited about.
As far as can tell, fans of Pascal syntax have nothing to get excited about, anyways... [Ducks]
Besides the warm-blooded = expanded environment advantage, it seems to me there is another, possibly more important advantage to being warm-blooded. Gestation can occur within a mobile incubator (mother), rather than forcing the mother to either remain more or less sedentary (and therefore both easier prey and at a disadvantage for food gathering), or bury/hide eggs where other species may root them out. Besides this, heat regulation in a warm=blooded body is likely superior to a pile of fermenting vegetables, near a volcano, or whatever. I would think the advantages would continue to rise as gestation periods got longer (up to a point), besides it allowing for more development before birth.
Then again, maybe that's just what the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Bless His Noodly Appendages) wants me to think.
unfortunately, there are still things GIMP cannot do (or do as well) as PS. Undoubtedly, GIMP will be a better tool in some cases than PS, but I think the opposite is true at least as often. No CMYK mode is a big drawback of GIMP, for instance. That alone makes it pretty much useless for professional print work.
GIMP is a fantastic program, and I consider it one of the best examples of desktop OSS, but it still needs some work. It isn't the equal of PS quite yet, but it's fairly close.
This really seems like a fine example of Chocolate Rations are Up... (more to the point: see chocorat.)
Okay, since XP sold 17M in the first two months, I'll assume (maybe not accurately) that the Jan sales were roughly 8M.
FROM TFA:
Silver estimates PC makers sold between 12 million and 15 million PCs with Windows XP Home Edition over the holidays -- a significant chunk of the 20 million total, depending on how many included Vista coupons.
While Microsoft wouldn't say how many Vista upgrades were ordered in that time frame, Dell Inc. spokesman Bob Kaufman said about two-thirds of its holiday PC shoppers registered for the upgrade.
Assuming that estimate is remotely accurate, take the most optimistic number (we don't know what the sales before the holiday season were, but to be especially fair, I'll assume 0): 12M Jan sales of Vista.
So, since the market was roughly half the size in 2001, this translates, in equal market size, to Vista selling only three-quarters as well in Jan as XP did six years ago (less actually, since there are many more PCs in homes available to upgrade (2x,3x,4x... as many???)).
There was a Victoria Secret bra that I remember hearing about that had diamonds all over it and it cost a million dollars
/. could get past the security feature on the million dollar bra. :|
The difference is that no-one on
Only 15% human!
Move along, there's mutton to see here.
...the hippies caught onto them and inflicted a generation of kids called things like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild on the world...
My name's Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, you insensitive clod....
Gangs and drug-related violence won't go away. Why give up your spot on the corner when you can undercut the gas station down the street by 25%? Why give up your turf just because Uncle Sam said your merchandise isn't illegal anymore?
The local dealer (or syndicate) is pretty much toast without a source. Both national, and some international legalization would need to take place (not for pot, obviously). If a legal international market existed, the current local distributors (criminal) would have no way to get it cheaper than the gas station (other than by outright theft). I'm sure it would be quite hard to remove the entrenched international manufacturers, but I think it could be done with time. What is being done now certainly isn't working very well.
The current non-political producers would become legitimate, and that would almost certainly result in a "mellowing" of their business practices. The political movements, whether FARC in Columbia, or the Taliban in Afghanistan, would have a much harder time getting money out of drugs. Legitimate companies could compete for (pay and protect) labourers successfully. Businesses (like Tescos or Walmart or whatever) would certainly buy from the legal sources, so most or all of the market would be legal. Cost of production would be similar, but you'd have a further side-effect of weakening local support for groups like FARC or the Taliban, and cutting into their war-budget significantly.
I bet quite a few countries would resist legalization, but I bet plenty would be into it without the current US anti-drug pressures and international agreements.
Personally, I can't see very many drawbacks to legalization of any drug, and can see a lot of positives. Sure, a handful more people might f*ck up their own lives, but I don't think that's either likely, or worse than the current state of affairs. Cutting into the revenue of gangs and guerrilla movements alone are worth that (possible) extra social cost.
Nobody goes to their boss with a proposal or idea that begins with "I read on slashdot..."
That kind of depends.... You're probably on safe ground if your boss is wearing a shirt that says: "I'm CowboyNeal's Lovechild", has a poster of Chuck Norris, or repeatedly says: "I'm your boss, you insensitive clod..."
For other bosses, I suppose "I read in the blogosphere..." will have to do.
Actually, stationary bikes are being installed in countless call-centres, even as we speak. Now that's maximizing employee value!
I guess since dogs are used to licking *ssholes, they are a natural choice for the movie and record industries to befriend. [Did I go to far?]
I can see it now:
My Former Attorney: You're honour, the defendant hired me in case X, and refuses to pay the $30,000 owed to me.
Me: You're honour, the plaintiff just violated my right to attorney-client confidentiality by disclosing this amount. I demand the case be thrown out and the plaintiff disbarred.
Besides RoundUp resistant corn, we have RoundUp ready canola, soybeans, and who knows what else by now. In central Canada, we also typically spray our wheat crops a week or two before harvest with RoundUp, as well as our dry edible beans (BTW I don't think the US allows for the RoundUp sprayed beans to be imported yet, but occasionally ND and Minn. (probably Mich. as well) allow their farmers to use it. Considering that some dry edible beans are virtually unprocessed, and there doesn't seem to be any indication of harmful effects, it seems doubtful that you'd find harmful effects from RoundUp sprayed products which are more finely processed. (Everything I'm saying is stale by at least 6 or 7 years, BTW, since I haven't had anything to do with my family's farm since then.)
Still, I wouldn't put it past Dow-Elanco or Monsanto or any of them to hide research. It just seems like pesticide and GMO fears are a little out of whack. For what it's worth (antecdote) I've been drenched with RoundUp, Treflan, 2-4D, Amitrol and various other pesticides in my life. Maybe I'll suffer horribly for it in the future, but so far, I have no noticeable health problems. ----Wait a sec---what's this lump doing here?---
Nonsense! I have booked a lovely journey to the Ottoman Empire this spring, which I'm greatly looking forward to. I'm especially interested in seeing the glorious gem that is Baghdad. I hear it is quite lovely in the spring. Next year I think a trip to Siam will be in order, though the wife is set on Prussia. I'm not sure what sort of fly-by-night gazetteer YOU use!
It seems to me that the best route would be to install a very user-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Linspire on all the linux-ready boxes. This would be the best in terms of selling to Joe Sixpack, and likely small businesses. Include DVDs of Fedora, Suse, Debian, Kubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware etc. for anyone else. What would that cost them, to include 8 or 10 DVDs/CDs? Not much, thirty cents, maybe. Hell, even if they just included Fedora, Debian, and Suse DVDs, with Ubuntu already installed, that would take care of the majority of customer distro choices. As long as they have chosen hardware which is supported under Redhat, Suse, and Debian, they'd have pretty much all bases covered.
Personally, I think it would be a bad move to allow a customer to have distros like Gentoo pre-installed. It won't do Linux any good to have Joe Sixpack buy a system, select a distro randomly, and then conclude that Linux sucks because he can't make a power-user distro work.
You made some assumptions there which I'm not even going to bother to actually specifically address, but I will enumerate:
You are assuming:
- allofmp3 are Russian mob.
- I "throw money" at Russian mobsters.
- I "steal" music
- I feel I am moral for "stealing" music
- I am going on and on about "sketchy legal loopholes"
- I am an experienced e-lawyer (sarcastically)
- I know that the artist is not getting financial any benefit whatsoever
- You think I might bother arguing that the RIAA just has to contact...
- We both know that allofmp3 are/were skirting the law
- I benefited from allofmp3
- I am an asshat
- The
/. zeitgeist is close-minded
- I have a problem with "big business" taking advantage of the GPL
- Something about Apple and blogs
- I feel big business exploits musicians
- And I benefit from that
Truly lame... If you can't take a post which said, essentially, that iTunes is not as convenient as allofmp3 --and that I think it could offer the same level of service-- and turn it into your own projectionist ramble, then good luck with that. FWIW, other than being an asshat, there're only two other assumptions you made which have an element of truth in them, as far as I can see.If you don't think allofmp3 offer[s/ed] a great service, that's your problem. I have no problem paying for music at a reasonable rate --hell, I have thousands albums on vinyl, countless tapes, and tons of CDs. I've paid for them all. But I know what music is worth to me. I'm virtually NEVER going to pay even $10 for an album anymore if I only want one or two or three tunes off of it. Since some time in 2002, the only places I've been getting new music have been free publicity offerings by bands/labels or allofmp3. Cut that off, and I'll just stop consuming. I can perform well enough to get my musical kicks, and I have a decent library of existing music. $1 a song is a ridiculously overinflated price, for digital delivery, by at least an order of magnitude. Am I ripping someone off @ $1 an album? Nope. Not remotely. If it's good, then I'm a fan (and a collector), if it isn't, then I'll delete it myself, and spread my opinion that it's garbage. I've spent more money on music in my life than food, so your silly assertions are garbage to me.
As Jello Biafra sang:
"tin-earred,
graph-paper brained
accountants
Instead of music fans
Call all the shots at giant record companies now
The lowest common denominator rules
"Forget honesty
Forget creativity
The dumbest buy the mostest
That's the name of the game
"But sales are slipping
And no one will say why
Could be they put out one too many lousy records"
Cheers [&Sorry for the long post].
Nah, we wouldn't have 90% unemployment. Instead, we'd have about 80% of the population working in agriculture again. Personally, I'm not sure what I'd prefer: Blackberry ghouls/American Idol/Dental adhesives/Carpet bombing, or missing all the good things that coexist with the Blackberry ghouls/...
Either way, enabling luxury purchases by state tax-reimbursement has little or nothing to do with capitalism (though Keynes may disagree???). If there is a market for people to buy new TVs, let the market sort it out, don't incentivize a private market (TV manufacturing co.s) with the public's (state's) money. That is in direct opposition to capitalism. It's a little different when it's not a luxury good, but as a luxury good, there's no reason for the state to support it whatsoever. I don't see how any counter-argument to this would be anything other than the broken-window fallacy.
To call Zork "probably the most important" is just your individual bias. I'm disappointed that Doom was chosen instead of Castle Wolfenstein. I'm disappointed that the Atari "Combat" game wasn't on the list. I'm disappointd that the Intellivision D&D game wasn't on the list (the 3-D one). I'm disappointed that King's Quest I wasn't on the list. ....Maybe they shouldn't be. But claiming Zork is more important than Tetris or SimCity or Mario is just a preference claim. They were all equally important, for different reasons. (I never played the soccer one, though, so I don't know about it.)
That being said... Really, Pac-Man should be on that list. Nothing has popularized computer gaming like Pac-Man.
Sure. a lot of them are trying to catch bad guys, or whatever, but plenty of them are not, and in either case, abusing that power is a greater threat to our personal liberty than Willie Horton or Usama Bin Ladin could ever be. It's easy to look at it as just another job, but it isn't. It's the front line where freedom's are fought for.
I might have a skewed view on this, I suppose, since I've been on the wrong side of police malfeasance a few times.
I like the "Teaching remedial math to call-centre employees" service that Verizon recently offered. I think it's got a great future.[/snark]