Admittedly, I didn't RTFA, but if the summary above is at all accurate, and part of the argument is that GPL software being "sold" for free prevents new competition, then isn't the entire argument obviously flawed? Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Blizzard, Adobe, etc. all make a killing on non-GPL software; is someone really going to try and tell me that GPL licensed software has made it too hard for them to compete?
Besides, Linux "vendors" are really in the support business. Nobody is stopping anybody from opening up their own support business for any distro they want. It can't even be argued that the 'vendors" have some sort of unfair advantage because of exclusive access t5o the source code... because they are required to distribute it, for free, to anyone who wants it. Even direct competitors! The only barrier to entry for me from slapping a decal on my car and declaring myself a traveling Linux support tech for hire is that, well, I'd be a thoroughly useless Linux support tech. And blaming that on IBM just won't fly no matter how good my lawyer is.
Sadly, the ISPs have a lot of lobbying power (read: money), and they make a huge profit hosting websites because we can't host them ourselves. If everyone had a static IP, it would essentially destroy the web hosting industry as we know it. You'd better believe that GoDaddy has a problem with end users getting static IPs at all, never mind that being the only option.
So, you're either with the self-perpetuating ISP/registrar monopoly system, or you're with the terrorists.
This is because, in times past, the wonky phrasing of "I stole Dave his guitar" would have been used. The possessive apostrophe is, in fact, a contractive one, as it contracts " hi" out of "[noun] his/her/its". I say wonky only because, to our Modern English tastes; there are many other languages in which such grammar is both proper and considered to be elegant.
It should also be noted that the "'s" can be used with more than just proper nouns; "the dog's bone smells bad" is an equally correct use of the "'s".
I don't see what "potentially" has to do with anything. Or is there actually some question that Microsoft's plans are, in fact, anticompetitive?
I thought this had been pretty well established, what, with the antitrust conviction, that whole Netscape vs. IE thing, backing that unfounded SCO lawsuit in a blatant attempt to undermine Linux, refusing to play nice with file formats in their office suite, writing and maintaining for many years boot loader sthat indiscriminately trashed all others and made multi-OS systems a hassle to put together (credit where credit is due, I've heard some good things about the new one for Vista), making up video and audio codecs that others' software can't read and making them the default formats on the default multimedia software on the vast majority of the world's computers, forcing the internet to comply with their shoddy web browser code and forcing two full generations (and counting) of web designers to do everything twice if they want it to work with browsers other than IE, etc., etc., etc.
That said, their attempts to compete with Google on search have been best described as... cute. It's so adorable watching one of the world's largest corporations practically throw a temper tantrum (with chairs) over their apparent inability to beat a bunch of hippies who make all of their money from what amounts to little more than selling text-only newspaper style ads at writing a search engine people like to use. Heck, they've even done away with the blinged out Yahoo style search page and done the minimalist style Google page for Windows Live, and it still isn't popular.
Indeed. It often strikes me that many of our colleagues in geekdom have a tendncy to get quite wrapped up in what employees of certain companies (Microsoft, Symantec, SCO, etc.) are or aren't doing, and the relative ethicality of those actions and inactions. So wrapped up, in fact, that they seemingly forget that those employee's are people too, real ones, with bills, and lives, and stomachs, and that given the choice between doing something we dislike and eviction, most people are going to suck it up and put food on their tables.
When you're ready to give full employment with equal pay and benefits to what they make now, then go ahead and tell us that they should all quit working for Microsoft because you don't like their business practices... until then, you're just blowing smoke.
Too bad the parent felt he had to post AC. Good thing I'm so damned apathetic.
Feet and inches?? What, are you stuck in the days of Henry I? We live in the modern world now. All calculations are done in meters and centimeters. Get with the times.
Can you really blame them though? Seriously, think about it.
How cool would it be if, when you were too lazy or apathetic to do your own job, it became somebody else's responsibility? How much cooloer would it be if you still got paid for doing your job? What if any time it doesn't work just right, you can sue the poor shlub who's supposed to do your job for you, and recuperate any losses, real or otherwise, plus damages, just because you didn't want to do your own job, and the other guy didn't do it right?
Who wouldn't take that deal if they could?
But since the use of allude was an edit, as elude was used in TFA, and the parent was correct in its assesment of the contextual usage of allude (ie. that it doesn't make any sense), it seemed unnecesary for me to point out. Unless I am mistaken, the original argument was that TFA had "miseplled" allude, and that it didn't make sense anyway, my response was that said argument was irrelevant, because the premise that allude had ever been intended was clearly false, because elude is a real word.
While technically you are still correct that elude is not properly used in TFA, it was obvious in context what the author intended, and the error was small enough that it can be easily ignored as an instance of artistic license. After all, the purpose of language is not to dogmatically follow the letter of definitions, but to effectively and elegantly communicate an idea, information, or both. Besides, in the conext of acronyms, the meanings and the acronyms themselves are often interchangeable such that one familiar with either is virtually guaranteed to be familiar with both, though notable exceptions to this do exist (nobody ever says "peripheral component interconnect" or "the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency").
And no, as an English major, I am never doomed to fail when outsnarking others. Not even you.
Seriously, what are you people doing that Firefox is eating so much system resources?
I'm running several optional extensions all the time, and regardless of how long I use Firefox or what I browse, I never see the problems some of you are reporting, not even close. Maybe it's because I mainly use Win2k, and the 'memory leak" issue is mainly a Linux thing, but somehow I doubt that memory management in Windows is better for any specific application at any time than the Linux equivalent.
And yes, I periodically do things like leave 5-10 tabs open in each of 1-5 instances of Firefox with each tab displaying svereal high resoultion photos, reams of text, and wacky formatting and CSS effects. I still don't see any problems with bloat. Ever.
I'm not saying that others' problems don't exist, I'm sure they do. I'm just saying that it doesn't sound anything at all like my own experiences with Firefox. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn't be using it at all. I'm only running 384 MB of RAM on a 5-6 year old computer... For soemthing to take up 2 GB of memory is not just unacceptable, but completely impossible. Thankfully, Firefox only uses between 30-100 MB for me. Guess I'm just lucky or something.
As for Opera... I'm not a fan. The Opera UI and I don't work well together, and I'm not of the opinion that my webbrowser should have much of a learning curve. Maybe if I ran into more rendering problems I'd work through it, but I don't, and the ones I do see are always because some idiot decided to make a web app that only runs in IE, and Opera doesn't exactly fix that (though the IE Tab extension does). There's nothing really wrong with it, and I tend to refer people to it as well as Firefox if they use IE, but not ever likely to use it myself.
The question is how to do it. Being old, I remember when credit card companies had "learner's" college accounts with limits like $200-$400. Maybe the companies have become so insanely greedy sending out applications for $10K-$20K limits for people's dogs that they just don't want to be bothered with miniscule accounts that train young people to be responsible? But they should.
It's not that they can't be bothered to do it, because the time and resources it would take them to make such a thing happen is virtually nothing if you consider the budgets most of the credit companies work with. It isn't even that they wouldn't be able to profit on such small amounts of money, because the fact of the matter is that the credit business is one of making very small amounts of money many, many times such that it adds up to a very large amount of money. In the long term, there is no amount so small that it's "not worth it" for the credit companies to deal with.
The real reason that they don't want to do that anymore is that the creditors don't want people learning to be responsible. They want people to grow up to be irresponsible spenders, and to owe them massive amounts of money for their whole lives. It is not in their best interests to educate you. Consumer ignorance and irresponsibility are what keep the credit companies not just in business, but some of the wealthiest and most influential private institutions in existence.
They don't really even care if you declare bankruptcy, forclose, or have it all reposessed, because they still get their money, one way or another. Even if your debts are cancelled at death, they are making the gamble that you will have already more then paid off your debt, regardless of the final balance. They don't care about getting back the money they lend, they care about getting the interest on the money you never pay back; whether you pay for it yourself, or they auction off everything you think you own is completely beside the point.
Offering such a service, while socially responsible, morally commendable, and financially feasible, is actually unprofitable for the creditors in the long term. It cuts into their bottom line when ordinary people understand how money works, managing and budgeting debt against income, long-term invetsments, and how to be generally responsible with their spending. They want you to go and max out all your high limit credit cards. They want you to owe them money you'll never pay back. They want you to believe that making the minimum payment is affordable and easy. They want you to refinance your home once every 5 years, especially if you want to use the money to purchase more debt on decreasng value property (cars, appliances, and expensive toys). They want you to do all the things that anyone who knows anything about how interest and debt really work wouldn't do in a million years. That's what they do to keep food on the table and fuel in the Leer jet.
The purpose of science is to make useful, accurate predictions.
No, it isn't. While I agree with you in sentiment, this is yet another one of those bad science memes that gets bounced around. The ability to make useful predictions should never be thought of as a factor in determining scientific validity for several reasons; the most important reason is that "useful" is a completely subjective term. Others range from the defintions inability to exclude non-naturalistic explanations, to the de-emphasization of actually understanding the relevent phenomena (rather than just being able to predict the result).
Nitpicky, I know, but that particular view of science is a pet peeve of mine.
My local theater charges $5.25 if you have a student ID, it's in Hadley, MA, about 1-2 miles from the University of Massachusetts' main campus. If I drive to the next city north (Greenfield), they charge $6.50 for an adult, no student ID necesary. However, if I drive south, to the much larger city of Springfield, it's about $10-$12 for low quality theaters in a high-crime rate area. When I lived in Buffalo, NY, movie tickets seemed to hover in the $7 area.
So, yes, movie prices just really suck in Orange County, CA. But hey, look on the bright side, they suck in Springfield just as much.
I'm not saying that telepathy exists, or that I feel that this is a good use of tax money, but some of the "science" being posted here is not only worse, but downright unscientific. Note to everyone, before you bash "pseudo-science", make sure you aren't perpetuating poor scientific practice yourself.
First off, I'd like to address the "all scientific evidence indicates telepathy does not exist" argument. What evidence? There isn't any. The same evidence that is so easily discreditied as for ESP is equally discredited as against it... the fact that false positives have tainted virtually every experiment on the subject simply means that they mean nothing because they were flawed experiments. If I put a rock on a table, and observe that it does not fall, I have not disproven gravity, I've just performed a flawed experiment (insofar as (dis)proving is concerned) and as such it is invalid.
Second, the whole crank/junk/whackjob science thing is patently unscientific. The fact of the matter is that nearly all of our scientific fundamentals have been considered "mainstream" for less than 300 years. Prior to that, virtually all of them were considered "junk science", and research into many of them was likely to result in extremely harsh punishment, up to and including death. Some sciences, such as evolution, are still labeled as "junk science" by a large sector of the population (even larger if you factor in the Third World). To put it simply, this argument is just bad, it's wrong, it is the single greatest obstacle that science has faced since the dawn of humanity; don't use it.
Third, the lack of observable medium means less than nothing. Believe it or not, we still have no idea how gravity works, why it happens, or why it is universally applicable to all matter at all times and states (or to energy under the same, if that's how you prefer to look at it... personally, I like to think of energy as a form of matter rather than vice versa, but I don't see as it makes a difference which is on the right side and which is on the left when there's an '=' in the middle). Under the logic some have applied to ESP, that means gravity does not exist. Obvious fallacy.
Fourth and final, the assumption that an experiment must yield affirmative data to be meaningful is just absurd. If, at the end of this, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is no affirmative evidence for ESP, then that conclusion has been drawn, and legitimately doing so may put the idea to rest. Similarly, if an ID research team comes to the conclusion that they are unable to find any evidence specifically supporting their theory and acting as counter evidence to the ToE, then it may also put that idea to rest. That said, unless the research is done, speculation about the value of the results is moot.
Using antiscientific arguments to state that potentially unscientific research shouldn't be done is even worse than letting it just happen.
Wow, how'd you get it that bloated? I've only got 384 mb of physical memory, and right at this very moment I still have 191 of those mb free. And that's running Firefox with Gaim, Semagic, and Steam running in the background... on Win2k.
Ah, what's that you say, I also have virtual ram? Yes, that's true. But checking task manager, I see that firefox.exe is using a mere 47 mb of memory. Still not even close to the 130 mb the parent complained about.
My question is, what on Earth have you done to Firefox that it's eating that much memory... that's insane. I really haven't done anything to tone down Firefox's memory usage, because I haven't had any problems with it; especially not compared to, say, Photoshop (which my girlfriend has the bad habit of leaving open with a dozen or so extremely hi-res photos loaded... then she gets mad at me for closing it after a day and a half of her not even looking, INFURIATING). I just can't even fathom how many shiny widgets you must be running to use that kind of system resources.
That said, Facebook profiles are not just available to students, they are also available to alumni (I think faculty might be able to get them too, it's been a while since I made my Facebook account... which I did a year after leaving the college I got it through for another, I might add). Further, if somebody goes to your college, you don't need to be on their friends list to view their profile, photos, or other information; presumably this works for alumni as well.
All you need, even if there is not a way for general faculty to get an acount at the school, is an alumni faculty staffmember who is willing to troll around Facebook, and they have a dossier on virtually everyone that has an account, and they've done so without violating any contracts, TOS, or what have you. Heck, even a student who wants to play stool pigeon can do this.
Bottom line, if you don't want to get caught drinking, doing drugs, and being a slut, THEN DON'T POST THAT YOU DO THESE THINGS ON FACEBOOK. Seriously, that's just stupid. If you want to write about things you've done without anyone being able to read them, then keep a diary... don't just put it on the internet and make the completely asinine assumption that the only people who might see it are your close friends. Or have we all forgotten that the whole point of the internet is to make information available to everyone?
Actually, they just want to be able to read what their kids are saying on AIM... to the "digitally illiterate" the phrase "omg we shud lik go 2 teh mol n bi stuf wit r rents $ thet ew rnt alowd waer wen wer hom" is complete gibberish. What they fail to realize is that the problem isn't their ability to read, it's their children's inability to not write like they were born feet first.
Microsoft has, so far, been completely unwilling to make themselves compatible with formats such as OpenDocument for the explicit purpose of keeping their own proprietary format the "standard" and stifling their competition.
But now that they see a semi-open format that's popular, viable, and really does suit a lot of common purposes much better than anything else available, they suddenly want in on the action. Sounds like a double standard if ever I've heard one.
I'm not entirely thrilled with any restriction on open formats and interoperability; but with a situation like this, where a company like Microsoft is clearly trying to profit from it on the one hand while killing it with the other, I'm completely in favor of letting them get a taste of their own medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly, I didn't RTFA, but if the summary above is at all accurate, and part of the argument is that GPL software being "sold" for free prevents new competition, then isn't the entire argument obviously flawed? Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Blizzard, Adobe, etc. all make a killing on non-GPL software; is someone really going to try and tell me that GPL licensed software has made it too hard for them to compete?
Besides, Linux "vendors" are really in the support business. Nobody is stopping anybody from opening up their own support business for any distro they want. It can't even be argued that the 'vendors" have some sort of unfair advantage because of exclusive access t5o the source code... because they are required to distribute it, for free, to anyone who wants it. Even direct competitors! The only barrier to entry for me from slapping a decal on my car and declaring myself a traveling Linux support tech for hire is that, well, I'd be a thoroughly useless Linux support tech. And blaming that on IBM just won't fly no matter how good my lawyer is.
If you can make in excess of $100 in 3-4 hours, then good for you. For those of us who don't make $25/hr or more, then this is great news.
I trump your appeal to "logic" with basic arithmetic.
Sadly, the ISPs have a lot of lobbying power (read: money), and they make a huge profit hosting websites because we can't host them ourselves. If everyone had a static IP, it would essentially destroy the web hosting industry as we know it. You'd better believe that GoDaddy has a problem with end users getting static IPs at all, never mind that being the only option.
So, you're either with the self-perpetuating ISP/registrar monopoly system, or you're with the terrorists.
Well, except for the part about being all that funny.
And the part about the developer (or the WWE) getting sued for such a character.
With the exception of those two points, your post has great merit.
Oh, wait...
This is because, in times past, the wonky phrasing of "I stole Dave his guitar" would have been used. The possessive apostrophe is, in fact, a contractive one, as it contracts " hi" out of "[noun] his/her/its". I say wonky only because, to our Modern English tastes; there are many other languages in which such grammar is both proper and considered to be elegant.
It should also be noted that the "'s" can be used with more than just proper nouns; "the dog's bone smells bad" is an equally correct use of the "'s".
"Microsoft's potentially anticompetitive plans."
I don't see what "potentially" has to do with anything. Or is there actually some question that Microsoft's plans are, in fact, anticompetitive?
I thought this had been pretty well established, what, with the antitrust conviction, that whole Netscape vs. IE thing, backing that unfounded SCO lawsuit in a blatant attempt to undermine Linux, refusing to play nice with file formats in their office suite, writing and maintaining for many years boot loader sthat indiscriminately trashed all others and made multi-OS systems a hassle to put together (credit where credit is due, I've heard some good things about the new one for Vista), making up video and audio codecs that others' software can't read and making them the default formats on the default multimedia software on the vast majority of the world's computers, forcing the internet to comply with their shoddy web browser code and forcing two full generations (and counting) of web designers to do everything twice if they want it to work with browsers other than IE, etc., etc., etc.
That said, their attempts to compete with Google on search have been best described as... cute. It's so adorable watching one of the world's largest corporations practically throw a temper tantrum (with chairs) over their apparent inability to beat a bunch of hippies who make all of their money from what amounts to little more than selling text-only newspaper style ads at writing a search engine people like to use. Heck, they've even done away with the blinged out Yahoo style search page and done the minimalist style Google page for Windows Live, and it still isn't popular.
Indeed. It often strikes me that many of our colleagues in geekdom have a tendncy to get quite wrapped up in what employees of certain companies (Microsoft, Symantec, SCO, etc.) are or aren't doing, and the relative ethicality of those actions and inactions. So wrapped up, in fact, that they seemingly forget that those employee's are people too, real ones, with bills, and lives, and stomachs, and that given the choice between doing something we dislike and eviction, most people are going to suck it up and put food on their tables. When you're ready to give full employment with equal pay and benefits to what they make now, then go ahead and tell us that they should all quit working for Microsoft because you don't like their business practices... until then, you're just blowing smoke. Too bad the parent felt he had to post AC. Good thing I'm so damned apathetic.
I for one welcome our new DRM crack distributing overlords...
Feet and inches?? What, are you stuck in the days of Henry I? We live in the modern world now. All calculations are done in meters and centimeters. Get with the times.
Can you really blame them though? Seriously, think about it. How cool would it be if, when you were too lazy or apathetic to do your own job, it became somebody else's responsibility? How much cooloer would it be if you still got paid for doing your job? What if any time it doesn't work just right, you can sue the poor shlub who's supposed to do your job for you, and recuperate any losses, real or otherwise, plus damages, just because you didn't want to do your own job, and the other guy didn't do it right? Who wouldn't take that deal if they could?
But since the use of allude was an edit, as elude was used in TFA, and the parent was correct in its assesment of the contextual usage of allude (ie. that it doesn't make any sense), it seemed unnecesary for me to point out. Unless I am mistaken, the original argument was that TFA had "miseplled" allude, and that it didn't make sense anyway, my response was that said argument was irrelevant, because the premise that allude had ever been intended was clearly false, because elude is a real word.
While technically you are still correct that elude is not properly used in TFA, it was obvious in context what the author intended, and the error was small enough that it can be easily ignored as an instance of artistic license. After all, the purpose of language is not to dogmatically follow the letter of definitions, but to effectively and elegantly communicate an idea, information, or both. Besides, in the conext of acronyms, the meanings and the acronyms themselves are often interchangeable such that one familiar with either is virtually guaranteed to be familiar with both, though notable exceptions to this do exist (nobody ever says "peripheral component interconnect" or "the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency").
And no, as an English major, I am never doomed to fail when outsnarking others. Not even you.
Seriously, what are you people doing that Firefox is eating so much system resources?
I'm running several optional extensions all the time, and regardless of how long I use Firefox or what I browse, I never see the problems some of you are reporting, not even close. Maybe it's because I mainly use Win2k, and the 'memory leak" issue is mainly a Linux thing, but somehow I doubt that memory management in Windows is better for any specific application at any time than the Linux equivalent.
And yes, I periodically do things like leave 5-10 tabs open in each of 1-5 instances of Firefox with each tab displaying svereal high resoultion photos, reams of text, and wacky formatting and CSS effects. I still don't see any problems with bloat. Ever.
I'm not saying that others' problems don't exist, I'm sure they do. I'm just saying that it doesn't sound anything at all like my own experiences with Firefox. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn't be using it at all. I'm only running 384 MB of RAM on a 5-6 year old computer... For soemthing to take up 2 GB of memory is not just unacceptable, but completely impossible. Thankfully, Firefox only uses between 30-100 MB for me. Guess I'm just lucky or something.
As for Opera... I'm not a fan. The Opera UI and I don't work well together, and I'm not of the opinion that my webbrowser should have much of a learning curve. Maybe if I ran into more rendering problems I'd work through it, but I don't, and the ones I do see are always because some idiot decided to make a web app that only runs in IE, and Opera doesn't exactly fix that (though the IE Tab extension does). There's nothing really wrong with it, and I tend to refer people to it as well as Firefox if they use IE, but not ever likely to use it myself.
It's not that they can't be bothered to do it, because the time and resources it would take them to make such a thing happen is virtually nothing if you consider the budgets most of the credit companies work with. It isn't even that they wouldn't be able to profit on such small amounts of money, because the fact of the matter is that the credit business is one of making very small amounts of money many, many times such that it adds up to a very large amount of money. In the long term, there is no amount so small that it's "not worth it" for the credit companies to deal with. The real reason that they don't want to do that anymore is that the creditors don't want people learning to be responsible. They want people to grow up to be irresponsible spenders, and to owe them massive amounts of money for their whole lives. It is not in their best interests to educate you. Consumer ignorance and irresponsibility are what keep the credit companies not just in business, but some of the wealthiest and most influential private institutions in existence.
They don't really even care if you declare bankruptcy, forclose, or have it all reposessed, because they still get their money, one way or another. Even if your debts are cancelled at death, they are making the gamble that you will have already more then paid off your debt, regardless of the final balance. They don't care about getting back the money they lend, they care about getting the interest on the money you never pay back; whether you pay for it yourself, or they auction off everything you think you own is completely beside the point.
Offering such a service, while socially responsible, morally commendable, and financially feasible, is actually unprofitable for the creditors in the long term. It cuts into their bottom line when ordinary people understand how money works, managing and budgeting debt against income, long-term invetsments, and how to be generally responsible with their spending. They want you to go and max out all your high limit credit cards. They want you to owe them money you'll never pay back. They want you to believe that making the minimum payment is affordable and easy. They want you to refinance your home once every 5 years, especially if you want to use the money to purchase more debt on decreasng value property (cars, appliances, and expensive toys). They want you to do all the things that anyone who knows anything about how interest and debt really work wouldn't do in a million years. That's what they do to keep food on the table and fuel in the Leer jet.
Unfortunately for your attempt at snarkiness, elude is, in fact, not only a real word, but appropriately used in that sentence.
Nitpicky, I know, but that particular view of science is a pet peeve of mine.
My local theater charges $5.25 if you have a student ID, it's in Hadley, MA, about 1-2 miles from the University of Massachusetts' main campus. If I drive to the next city north (Greenfield), they charge $6.50 for an adult, no student ID necesary. However, if I drive south, to the much larger city of Springfield, it's about $10-$12 for low quality theaters in a high-crime rate area. When I lived in Buffalo, NY, movie tickets seemed to hover in the $7 area.
So, yes, movie prices just really suck in Orange County, CA. But hey, look on the bright side, they suck in Springfield just as much.
I'm not saying that telepathy exists, or that I feel that this is a good use of tax money, but some of the "science" being posted here is not only worse, but downright unscientific. Note to everyone, before you bash "pseudo-science", make sure you aren't perpetuating poor scientific practice yourself.
First off, I'd like to address the "all scientific evidence indicates telepathy does not exist" argument. What evidence? There isn't any. The same evidence that is so easily discreditied as for ESP is equally discredited as against it... the fact that false positives have tainted virtually every experiment on the subject simply means that they mean nothing because they were flawed experiments. If I put a rock on a table, and observe that it does not fall, I have not disproven gravity, I've just performed a flawed experiment (insofar as (dis)proving is concerned) and as such it is invalid.
Second, the whole crank/junk/whackjob science thing is patently unscientific. The fact of the matter is that nearly all of our scientific fundamentals have been considered "mainstream" for less than 300 years. Prior to that, virtually all of them were considered "junk science", and research into many of them was likely to result in extremely harsh punishment, up to and including death. Some sciences, such as evolution, are still labeled as "junk science" by a large sector of the population (even larger if you factor in the Third World). To put it simply, this argument is just bad, it's wrong, it is the single greatest obstacle that science has faced since the dawn of humanity; don't use it.
Third, the lack of observable medium means less than nothing. Believe it or not, we still have no idea how gravity works, why it happens, or why it is universally applicable to all matter at all times and states (or to energy under the same, if that's how you prefer to look at it... personally, I like to think of energy as a form of matter rather than vice versa, but I don't see as it makes a difference which is on the right side and which is on the left when there's an '=' in the middle). Under the logic some have applied to ESP, that means gravity does not exist. Obvious fallacy.
Fourth and final, the assumption that an experiment must yield affirmative data to be meaningful is just absurd. If, at the end of this, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is no affirmative evidence for ESP, then that conclusion has been drawn, and legitimately doing so may put the idea to rest. Similarly, if an ID research team comes to the conclusion that they are unable to find any evidence specifically supporting their theory and acting as counter evidence to the ToE, then it may also put that idea to rest. That said, unless the research is done, speculation about the value of the results is moot.
Using antiscientific arguments to state that potentially unscientific research shouldn't be done is even worse than letting it just happen.
Wow, how'd you get it that bloated? I've only got 384 mb of physical memory, and right at this very moment I still have 191 of those mb free. And that's running Firefox with Gaim, Semagic, and Steam running in the background... on Win2k. Ah, what's that you say, I also have virtual ram? Yes, that's true. But checking task manager, I see that firefox.exe is using a mere 47 mb of memory. Still not even close to the 130 mb the parent complained about. My question is, what on Earth have you done to Firefox that it's eating that much memory... that's insane. I really haven't done anything to tone down Firefox's memory usage, because I haven't had any problems with it; especially not compared to, say, Photoshop (which my girlfriend has the bad habit of leaving open with a dozen or so extremely hi-res photos loaded... then she gets mad at me for closing it after a day and a half of her not even looking, INFURIATING). I just can't even fathom how many shiny widgets you must be running to use that kind of system resources.
That said, Facebook profiles are not just available to students, they are also available to alumni (I think faculty might be able to get them too, it's been a while since I made my Facebook account... which I did a year after leaving the college I got it through for another, I might add). Further, if somebody goes to your college, you don't need to be on their friends list to view their profile, photos, or other information; presumably this works for alumni as well.
All you need, even if there is not a way for general faculty to get an acount at the school, is an alumni faculty staffmember who is willing to troll around Facebook, and they have a dossier on virtually everyone that has an account, and they've done so without violating any contracts, TOS, or what have you. Heck, even a student who wants to play stool pigeon can do this.
Bottom line, if you don't want to get caught drinking, doing drugs, and being a slut, THEN DON'T POST THAT YOU DO THESE THINGS ON FACEBOOK. Seriously, that's just stupid. If you want to write about things you've done without anyone being able to read them, then keep a diary... don't just put it on the internet and make the completely asinine assumption that the only people who might see it are your close friends. Or have we all forgotten that the whole point of the internet is to make information available to everyone?
Actually, they just want to be able to read what their kids are saying on AIM... to the "digitally illiterate" the phrase "omg we shud lik go 2 teh mol n bi stuf wit r rents $ thet ew rnt alowd waer wen wer hom" is complete gibberish. What they fail to realize is that the problem isn't their ability to read, it's their children's inability to not write like they were born feet first.
Microsoft has, so far, been completely unwilling to make themselves compatible with formats such as OpenDocument for the explicit purpose of keeping their own proprietary format the "standard" and stifling their competition. But now that they see a semi-open format that's popular, viable, and really does suit a lot of common purposes much better than anything else available, they suddenly want in on the action. Sounds like a double standard if ever I've heard one. I'm not entirely thrilled with any restriction on open formats and interoperability; but with a situation like this, where a company like Microsoft is clearly trying to profit from it on the one hand while killing it with the other, I'm completely in favor of letting them get a taste of their own medicine.