is coming. Never mind ID did not predict any specific design intent about appendix other than, "we are designed, so there must be some use for all the useless organs". But that won't stop them from predicting immediate demise of Darwinian evolution.
They can't use this to push ID since it's a straw man argument. Evolution never suggested or required that appendix doesn't have a role in our body, or never had one.
You can hear poor religious folk and poor scientists use it in their arguments, but in such a polarized issue, you'll find stupid people and poor arguments on both sides, negative proof is another form of logical fallacy that can't be used to prove an opposing theory.
In other words, "someone said appendix is useless because of evolution, this mean ID is correct" is nonsense.
Your attitude is why we no longer have the vibrant flurry of innovation that we last saw in the late eighties and early nineties. Everyone's on Windows, save for a small, growing, minority on Mac OS X, and a few of us use the alternatives and get laughed at for doing so.
Wow, so his attitude made Microsoft the biggest software company in the world. You put too much weight on his attitude.
Amiga is laughed at, since the guy shows nothing, says nothing, and still has the chutzpah to claim his OS is better than "OSX". Better how? Say something, god damn it!
If he's not ready to speak, he should just wind down the press releases and go back to work until he's ready. What he's doing now is in fact, laughing matter.
I don't want the technical details if he can't share. I want him to give us use cases. Why would we go buy their computers and OS when I can run OSX, Windows or Linux?
Who's the target, business users, video producers, prosumers, gamers, developers, mythical moms and dads, and how will Amiga make a difference to those people compared to OSX, Windows, Linux.
I must definitely not be the target, since "Better than OSX" means precisely nil to me. OSX runs my desktop software, Windows runs it as well. Hell, Linux runs some of it. I don't just install an OS and marvel at how good it is, I run apps on it.
Amiga doesn't run anything right now, but they have a checkerboard sphere. They better have made this the best checkerboard sphere in the world ever.
Apple bricking the phone is not illegal, nor should it be. When Apple sold the phone, they were crystal clear that its only supported use was with AT&T and Apple-approved apps.
To be fair they only became crystal clear about the bricking long after people have started patching their phones and several patch providers have been selling "mods" for weeks.
While I agree Apple will probably win a case that tries to prove Apple should support custom mods, still, many people would be discouraged from patching in the first place if they knew in advance.
As a proof to this is the frantic search for "unpatching" mods after Steve announced what will happen after the update.
Also let's not forget the PR effect of this lawsuit. Win or not, this, the 16-bit iMac screens, the deffective nano screens, the freezing Macs, the overheating MacBooks, and so on and so on: those pile together and may turn the tide against Apple.
Apple exists solely because of their solid cult-like fanbase. Should this fanbase turn against them, they're goners.
Japan was basically levelled in the Second World War, and thus enjoyed the benefits of rebuilding infrastructure following logical planning for the future from the ground up, unlike the US/EU that are saddled with centuries-old cities.
But you're fooling yourself if you believe this is the only reason. Most countries in their position would simply be left behind other ones which didn't suffer such damages during WWII.
Matter of fact is, Japanese people operate better in society, their motivation goes far beyond the money they can get. Which is truly the next step of society evolution, since money, while certainly a huge enabler on its own, shows its flaws as a single motivation for progress, at the scale modern businesses operates at.
Firstly, Japan is claiming that it is not being done to realise immediate profit. I think that is quite forward thinking, and not the sort of behaviour that I imagine we will ever see in the US.
You'll see it in US. In a global market, if Japan's strategy follows long term success, and US follows short term profits, not far from now (it's already happening btw, US economy is plunging down), Japanese telecoms will outgrow their own market, and their forward thinking would have earned them the cash to invest abroad.
How would you feel if Japanese companies build the US Internet infrastructure of tomorrow:)?
'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit a [..] for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
I have the feeling many managers would get a heart attack reading this. But don't we read every day stuff like "companies exist to make money!", "it only matters if it makes more money!".
God damn it, sometimes I wish I was proud to be a Japanese:P but I'm simply not Japanese.
Next time if you sense you need 2-3 years to come up with something sensible to support your rants, just keep quiet until the 2-3 years pass and only then post.
My problem is the only reason why shitty tools and OSes exist is because we're training ourselves TO EXPECT failure.
What failure? Ever bothered to claim your statements specifically? I have no failures on XP, what on Earth are you talking about.
Tell me one single serious problem, I, Windows XP and Photoshop user, suffer from the fact I use Windows to run Photoshop.
Then tell me how Linux helps this problem. Keep in mind: I'm a Photoshop user, seeing the kernel code means jack to me. You better come up with something real. And the price of XP is not much higher than the price of any other commercial grade Linux distro with corporate support.
Right... because absolutely no time is spent getting Windows to work. That's why people are migrating BACK TO XP from Vista in sufficient numbers as to have MSFT extend the life of XP.
Right, Windows "Just Works"... gotcha.
You have some serious issues. Most businesses don't upgrade to Vista for the same reason they don't switch to Linux.
In your mind it's The World versus Windows + Microsoft, and Vista is still Windows.
However in people who don't have time to waste on fighting windmills, it's Solutions that Work versus Solutions that don't Work
XP works just fine with Photoshop, so does OSX. Vista and Linux, don't.
To those people Vista and Linux is the same thing: poor solution to their demands. I know, I know... the blasphemy of putting them together. You'll need to live with it.
You can't talk about end-to-end data integrity when this is just a filesystem. It's only one tiny place where the data you store in said file system can wreck its integrity. Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
Also stop talking to ZFS. Very secret internal sources told me ZFS was supposed to be a bigger event in Leopard but Steve killed it because Sun scooped him. It has happened before folks!
Don't scoop the Steve. You scoop the Steve and business is over.
That the OS doesn't matter. What matters is your goal.
On the desktop, people hack Windows machines since that's what most desktop Machines are. On the server side, people hack more Linux machines since that's what most servers are.
Hacked Linux machines are hacked with a specific purpose in mind, and so are Windows machines. In fact, in both cases, the attack vector is usually an application running on said OS. Be it PHP script, server daemon, your browser or even music player on Windows.
Just like the article on Randi and weird audiophile products, it was said "music fans listen to music, audiophiles listen to stereos". Well, same applies:
"computer users run software applications, OS zealots run operating systems"
And now we see it even applies to hackers, which hack not according to the OS but their desired goal.
yeah I know it's cliche to post about running another OS, but honestly, what's the motivation to run windows anymore?
If you can't figure it out after this being the topic of discussion every single day on Slashdot, at least accept people have different needs from each other and stop asking the same question like a broken record.
Why don't you enlighten us then, and explain how cell phones and iPods can be used to better educate our kids? What's that? You can't? Didn't think so.
I don't have iPod, I've a tiny cheap Chinese mp3 player with 256 MB of Flash memory on it.
I can load more than a day worth of interesting lectures on it, I can also load the CNN News Update mp3 straight from their RSS. And I actually do, it's great I can go anywhere, with my hands free and enjoy listening to something interesting and educational at the same time.
I pick my own topics, I'd probably not find anything a high-school student learns particularly interesting, even if I was at that age.
Using 3rd party tools you can convert the free lectures on the internet to mp3 or other format compatible with your device. I particularly like to listen to SALT - Seminars about Long Term Thinking. It covers wide range of topics, from technology, ecology, society, business and so on.
I'm the kinda guy who also thinks high-school education is boring the hell out of people, and frequently force feeding them facts they forget in a month or two. It could be so natural, and provoke kids to seek information themselves, if you connect with their world and provide them relevant information they may be interested in.
But if all you see when you look at iPod is "goddamn kids and their rap music", then there's no way you can connect to those kids and help them improve actively, you'll just be the old angry man trying to stubbornly keep Earth still.
Well done IBM, the currently less evil of 'em all.
If Bill Gates could see what you wrote, he'll stay there staring at his giant screen with his jaw dropped for the longest time ever, then fall on the floor dead.
He outlined the problem with the *kids*, NOT the problem with schools. Perhaps if the kids didn't have access to all those toys they'd have an attention span beyond that of a chronically depressed lemming and actually be able to learn something while in class.
My, my. I've read more scary comments to this article than I ever imagined I could on an internet forum, let alone Slashdot itself.
Did someone replace the young geeky visionaries that fight for modern approach to modern problems with 70 year old bags overnight?
I'm reading stuff as "Yessir, in my time we also used black boards, and we liked it! Goddamn iPods spoiling our little brats. They deserve slap for using them newfangled gadgets versus not reading some good book like in the ol' times!"
Wow... *snivers*... Blaming the kids and refusing to even entertain the possibility of modernization in the education system (beside I guess forcing Linux and C++ courses on everyone, you'd all love that, right).
If geeks are on this level of thought, it's sad times we've come to in our development. Here's to hope poor countries at least pick up on a more modern trend with the OLPC.
Apparently, it was filed eight months before they implemented more stringent reviews of their patent applications so as to avoid filing for obvious patents, especially business method patents.
Wow... so they did that? Now I know, IBM is a corporation as any, working for profit, and they probably had reasons better than altruism to drop a patent that could cause them issues in court in the future.
But I almost shed a tear reading this, a company giving up on a patent on their own since they consider it obvious. Next thing you know, we'll be allowed to do things with a single click.
What if someone wrote a virus that downloaded a random number of songs? Then if songs were found on my PC, and the virus was on my PC, would that create reasonable doubt?
Right, I've seen plenty of viruses download random songs, this makes perfect sense. Now back to why Chewbacca lives on Endor...
Am I the only one who find the DX9 version of the pictures more appealing? With the exception of the Bioshock fog examples (which had sharp boundaries in DX9) they just look more "natural" to me.
Some did, some didn't.
You gotta understand that DX10 can do absolutely everything DX9 can, so if the DX10 image looks less natural, it's more of a human flaw than technological: it's a new area and people are only starting to discover what works best, both devs and designers.
Also I imagine that fine-tuned the DX9 version more since the majority of people out there have DX9 cards. DX10 are barely out there, they probably don't even have a good selection of DX10 cards yet to test everything thoroughly.
The only thing that worries me is that DX10 shows up slower on the benchmarks. DX10 was promised to have better performance than DX9, but don't forget all of the reviewed game use different code paths for DX10, thus load more effects and use higher precision buffers/processes in the DX10 versions. So while DX10 may be faster, it's not a fair comparison when DX10 is loaded with twice the texture sizes and effects of the DX9 version.
We'll need a more objective test written to use the same elements in DX9 and 10 and compare that.
One way or the other DX10 is the future. Even if the first few generation suck, the new features show lots of promise that will come to fruit in the coming years. DX10 has no choice but to become great. If you don't want to burn, just don't buy DX10 card YET, it's the worst moment to do so.
Wait at least until there's a DX 10.1 card out there with good price and review (DX 10.1 will come with Vista SP1). I don't expect this to be before Q3-4 2008 (which is great since Microsoft would have fixed lots of things in Vista by then, and 3rd parties would have better drivers and hardware for Vista).
The company that gave us the ultimately secure Windows OS and the uncrackable Passport?
As you know, Windows' security issues are ones of legacy. The more they fix it, the more they wreck existing apps.
Apart from this, I have to be honest with you: I'd rather have Microsoft work on this health information system, than some unknown little entity that just is in to grab the money and run.
Microsoft is here to stay, and while they may not end up with the most perfect solution possible, they don't need the money desperately, and can't hide if a major security breach occurs (and it's their fault).
be embarrassing if the hole was just the result of variations in various decades long solar cycles, after all we haven't been observing it for very long. we may have gone environmentally apeshit for no reason with regards to FHCs.
You're asking us to gamble, and bet Earth. The prize: deodorant and a fridge.
Then asking "wouldn't it be embarrassing if we gave up the gamble and potentially lost the deodorant and fridge for nothing".
Losing Earth would be more embarrassing, I'd rather not play that game.
Throw people a damn bone, the industry has done a lot to address this issue.
If whatever people do the effects are reported as negative, those people might as well give up and make those reports for natural disaster a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"New! Featuring four beams, nearly twice the rotation speed and improved timing processing, the Quadri-Beam is an ultra cool disc treatment. This patented process reduces the noise floor allowing far more information to be retrieved from the disc. It also works great on DVDs, giving you a picture that is brighter, sharper, crisper and cleaner. For those of you who have never experienced the sonic benefits of the Bedini Clarifier, it significantly reduces high frequency glare and increases retrieval of information, enhancing dynamic range. Detail and resolution are improved dramatically."
I won't comment. This is Slashdot, so I guess you have some entry level knowledge to know why this is the most ridiculous thing you've read in months.
Slashdot Mirror
is coming. Never mind ID did not predict any specific design intent about appendix other than, "we are designed, so there must be some use for all the useless organs". But that won't stop them from predicting immediate demise of Darwinian evolution.
They can't use this to push ID since it's a straw man argument. Evolution never suggested or required that appendix doesn't have a role in our body, or never had one.
You can hear poor religious folk and poor scientists use it in their arguments, but in such a polarized issue, you'll find stupid people and poor arguments on both sides, negative proof is another form of logical fallacy that can't be used to prove an opposing theory.
In other words, "someone said appendix is useless because of evolution, this mean ID is correct" is nonsense.
Your attitude is why we no longer have the vibrant flurry of innovation that we last saw in the late eighties and early nineties. Everyone's on Windows, save for a small, growing, minority on Mac OS X, and a few of us use the alternatives and get laughed at for doing so.
Wow, so his attitude made Microsoft the biggest software company in the world. You put too much weight on his attitude.
Amiga is laughed at, since the guy shows nothing, says nothing, and still has the chutzpah to claim his OS is better than "OSX". Better how? Say something, god damn it!
If he's not ready to speak, he should just wind down the press releases and go back to work until he's ready. What he's doing now is in fact, laughing matter.
I don't want the technical details if he can't share. I want him to give us use cases. Why would we go buy their computers and OS when I can run OSX, Windows or Linux?
Who's the target, business users, video producers, prosumers, gamers, developers, mythical moms and dads, and how will Amiga make a difference to those people compared to OSX, Windows, Linux.
I must definitely not be the target, since "Better than OSX" means precisely nil to me. OSX runs my desktop software, Windows runs it as well. Hell, Linux runs some of it. I don't just install an OS and marvel at how good it is, I run apps on it.
Amiga doesn't run anything right now, but they have a checkerboard sphere. They better have made this the best checkerboard sphere in the world ever.
Apple bricking the phone is not illegal, nor should it be. When Apple sold the phone, they were crystal clear that its only supported use was with AT&T and Apple-approved apps.
To be fair they only became crystal clear about the bricking long after people have started patching their phones and several patch providers have been selling "mods" for weeks.
While I agree Apple will probably win a case that tries to prove Apple should support custom mods, still, many people would be discouraged from patching in the first place if they knew in advance.
As a proof to this is the frantic search for "unpatching" mods after Steve announced what will happen after the update.
Also let's not forget the PR effect of this lawsuit. Win or not, this, the 16-bit iMac screens, the deffective nano screens, the freezing Macs, the overheating MacBooks, and so on and so on: those pile together and may turn the tide against Apple.
Apple exists solely because of their solid cult-like fanbase. Should this fanbase turn against them, they're goners.
Why should the vendor be held reliable if YOU break his software?
Indeed, why?
Let's find out!
*flips out a cell phone and dials his lawyer*
Japan was basically levelled in the Second World War, and thus enjoyed the benefits of rebuilding infrastructure following logical planning for the future from the ground up, unlike the US/EU that are saddled with centuries-old cities.
But you're fooling yourself if you believe this is the only reason. Most countries in their position would simply be left behind other ones which didn't suffer such damages during WWII.
Matter of fact is, Japanese people operate better in society, their motivation goes far beyond the money they can get. Which is truly the next step of society evolution, since money, while certainly a huge enabler on its own, shows its flaws as a single motivation for progress, at the scale modern businesses operates at.
Firstly, Japan is claiming that it is not being done to realise immediate profit. I think that is quite forward thinking, and not the sort of behaviour that I imagine we will ever see in the US.
:)?
You'll see it in US. In a global market, if Japan's strategy follows long term success, and US follows short term profits, not far from now (it's already happening btw, US economy is plunging down), Japanese telecoms will outgrow their own market, and their forward thinking would have earned them the cash to invest abroad.
How would you feel if Japanese companies build the US Internet infrastructure of tomorrow
'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit a [..] for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
:P but I'm simply not Japanese.
I have the feeling many managers would get a heart attack reading this. But don't we read every day stuff like "companies exist to make money!", "it only matters if it makes more money!".
God damn it, sometimes I wish I was proud to be a Japanese
These guys can think in more than one dimension.
All right, I'll talk to you in 2-3 years.
Next time if you sense you need 2-3 years to come up with something sensible to support your rants, just keep quiet until the 2-3 years pass and only then post.
My problem is the only reason why shitty tools and OSes exist is because we're training ourselves TO EXPECT failure.
What failure? Ever bothered to claim your statements specifically? I have no failures on XP, what on Earth are you talking about.
Tell me one single serious problem, I, Windows XP and Photoshop user, suffer from the fact I use Windows to run Photoshop.
Then tell me how Linux helps this problem. Keep in mind: I'm a Photoshop user, seeing the kernel code means jack to me. You better come up with something real. And the price of XP is not much higher than the price of any other commercial grade Linux distro with corporate support.
So, I'm waiting.
Tell me more, argument about it please. Thanks.
There you go
Right... because absolutely no time is spent getting Windows to work. That's why people are migrating BACK TO XP from Vista in sufficient numbers as to have MSFT extend the life of XP.
... gotcha.
Right, Windows "Just Works"
You have some serious issues. Most businesses don't upgrade to Vista for the same reason they don't switch to Linux.
In your mind it's The World versus Windows + Microsoft, and Vista is still Windows.
However in people who don't have time to waste on fighting windmills, it's Solutions that Work versus Solutions that don't Work
XP works just fine with Photoshop, so does OSX. Vista and Linux, don't.
To those people Vista and Linux is the same thing: poor solution to their demands. I know, I know... the blasphemy of putting them together. You'll need to live with it.
end-to-end data integrity
You can't talk about end-to-end data integrity when this is just a filesystem. It's only one tiny place where the data you store in said file system can wreck its integrity. Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
Also stop talking to ZFS. Very secret internal sources told me ZFS was supposed to be a bigger event in Leopard but Steve killed it because Sun scooped him. It has happened before folks!
Don't scoop the Steve. You scoop the Steve and business is over.
That the OS doesn't matter. What matters is your goal.
On the desktop, people hack Windows machines since that's what most desktop Machines are. On the server side, people hack more Linux machines since that's what most servers are.
Hacked Linux machines are hacked with a specific purpose in mind, and so are Windows machines. In fact, in both cases, the attack vector is usually an application running on said OS. Be it PHP script, server daemon, your browser or even music player on Windows.
Just like the article on Randi and weird audiophile products, it was said "music fans listen to music, audiophiles listen to stereos". Well, same applies:
"computer users run software applications, OS zealots run operating systems"
And now we see it even applies to hackers, which hack not according to the OS but their desired goal.
yeah I know it's cliche to post about running another OS, but honestly, what's the motivation to run windows anymore?
If you can't figure it out after this being the topic of discussion every single day on Slashdot, at least accept people have different needs from each other and stop asking the same question like a broken record.
Why don't you enlighten us then, and explain how cell phones and iPods can be used to better educate our kids? What's that? You can't? Didn't think so.
I don't have iPod, I've a tiny cheap Chinese mp3 player with 256 MB of Flash memory on it.
I can load more than a day worth of interesting lectures on it, I can also load the CNN News Update mp3 straight from their RSS. And I actually do, it's great I can go anywhere, with my hands free and enjoy listening to something interesting and educational at the same time.
I pick my own topics, I'd probably not find anything a high-school student learns particularly interesting, even if I was at that age.
Using 3rd party tools you can convert the free lectures on the internet to mp3 or other format compatible with your device. I particularly like to listen to SALT - Seminars about Long Term Thinking. It covers wide range of topics, from technology, ecology, society, business and so on.
I'm the kinda guy who also thinks high-school education is boring the hell out of people, and frequently force feeding them facts they forget in a month or two. It could be so natural, and provoke kids to seek information themselves, if you connect with their world and provide them relevant information they may be interested in.
But if all you see when you look at iPod is "goddamn kids and their rap music", then there's no way you can connect to those kids and help them improve actively, you'll just be the old angry man trying to stubbornly keep Earth still.
Well done IBM, the currently less evil of 'em all.
If Bill Gates could see what you wrote, he'll stay there staring at his giant screen with his jaw dropped for the longest time ever, then fall on the floor dead.
He outlined the problem with the *kids*, NOT the problem with schools. Perhaps if the kids didn't have access to all those toys they'd have an attention span beyond that of a chronically depressed lemming and actually be able to learn something while in class.
My, my. I've read more scary comments to this article than I ever imagined I could on an internet forum, let alone Slashdot itself.
Did someone replace the young geeky visionaries that fight for modern approach to modern problems with 70 year old bags overnight?
I'm reading stuff as "Yessir, in my time we also used black boards, and we liked it! Goddamn iPods spoiling our little brats. They deserve slap for using them newfangled gadgets versus not reading some good book like in the ol' times!"
Wow... *snivers*... Blaming the kids and refusing to even entertain the possibility of modernization in the education system (beside I guess forcing Linux and C++ courses on everyone, you'd all love that, right).
If geeks are on this level of thought, it's sad times we've come to in our development. Here's to hope poor countries at least pick up on a more modern trend with the OLPC.
Apparently, it was filed eight months before they implemented more stringent reviews of their patent applications so as to avoid filing for obvious patents, especially business method patents.
Wow... so they did that? Now I know, IBM is a corporation as any, working for profit, and they probably had reasons better than altruism to drop a patent that could cause them issues in court in the future.
But I almost shed a tear reading this, a company giving up on a patent on their own since they consider it obvious. Next thing you know, we'll be allowed to do things with a single click.
What if someone wrote a virus that downloaded a random number of songs? Then if songs were found on my PC, and the virus was on my PC, would that create reasonable doubt?
Right, I've seen plenty of viruses download random songs, this makes perfect sense. Now back to why Chewbacca lives on Endor...
Am I the only one who find the DX9 version of the pictures more appealing? With the exception of the Bioshock fog examples (which had sharp boundaries in DX9) they just look more "natural" to me.
Some did, some didn't.
You gotta understand that DX10 can do absolutely everything DX9 can, so if the DX10 image looks less natural, it's more of a human flaw than technological: it's a new area and people are only starting to discover what works best, both devs and designers.
Also I imagine that fine-tuned the DX9 version more since the majority of people out there have DX9 cards. DX10 are barely out there, they probably don't even have a good selection of DX10 cards yet to test everything thoroughly.
The only thing that worries me is that DX10 shows up slower on the benchmarks. DX10 was promised to have better performance than DX9, but don't forget all of the reviewed game use different code paths for DX10, thus load more effects and use higher precision buffers/processes in the DX10 versions. So while DX10 may be faster, it's not a fair comparison when DX10 is loaded with twice the texture sizes and effects of the DX9 version.
We'll need a more objective test written to use the same elements in DX9 and 10 and compare that.
One way or the other DX10 is the future. Even if the first few generation suck, the new features show lots of promise that will come to fruit in the coming years. DX10 has no choice but to become great. If you don't want to burn, just don't buy DX10 card YET, it's the worst moment to do so.
Wait at least until there's a DX 10.1 card out there with good price and review (DX 10.1 will come with Vista SP1). I don't expect this to be before Q3-4 2008 (which is great since Microsoft would have fixed lots of things in Vista by then, and 3rd parties would have better drivers and hardware for Vista).
The company that gave us the ultimately secure Windows OS and the uncrackable Passport?
As you know, Windows' security issues are ones of legacy. The more they fix it, the more they wreck existing apps.
Apart from this, I have to be honest with you: I'd rather have Microsoft work on this health information system, than some unknown little entity that just is in to grab the money and run.
Microsoft is here to stay, and while they may not end up with the most perfect solution possible, they don't need the money desperately, and can't hide if a major security breach occurs (and it's their fault).
be embarrassing if the hole was just the result of variations in various decades long solar cycles, after all we haven't been observing it for very long. we may have gone environmentally apeshit for no reason with regards to FHCs.
You're asking us to gamble, and bet Earth. The prize: deodorant and a fridge.
Then asking "wouldn't it be embarrassing if we gave up the gamble and potentially lost the deodorant and fridge for nothing".
Losing Earth would be more embarrassing, I'd rather not play that game.
Throw people a damn bone, the industry has done a lot to address this issue.
If whatever people do the effects are reported as negative, those people might as well give up and make those reports for natural disaster a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Eco zealots will be happy I assume.
Oh. My. God. One of the items in there is some sort of box for processing your disks:
"New! Featuring four beams, nearly twice the rotation speed and improved timing processing, the Quadri-Beam is an ultra cool disc treatment. This patented process reduces the noise floor allowing far more information to be retrieved from the disc. It also works great on DVDs, giving you a picture that is brighter, sharper, crisper and cleaner. For those of you who have never experienced the sonic benefits of the Bedini Clarifier, it significantly reduces high frequency glare and increases retrieval of information, enhancing dynamic range. Detail and resolution are improved dramatically."
I won't comment. This is Slashdot, so I guess you have some entry level knowledge to know why this is the most ridiculous thing you've read in months.