In your list, don't forget the final chapter for a "successful" CEO, which is to run for political office. I think she will have a hard time running against Barbara Boxer, but I think she'd make the perfect senator in the mold of such esteemed senators as Joe Lieberman, Jim Inhofe, Ted Stevens or Sam Brownback who have been responsible for building and maintaining our great society. I'm sure she'll run the government like a business which worked so well for our last president Bush when responding to natural disasters and the like. (Yes, I am being sarcastic).
Show me something that MS doesn't consider a threat. I mean really, MS' goal has always been dominance of the market for their products, never accepting something less unless forced. A corporation (or person for that matter) in that position must always see everything as a threat. As evidence I offer that they continually push their OS monopoly to help their other products sometimes doing so in an illegal manner so as to shut out competitors rather than compete on the merit of their own products. Sometimes it works, like using the xbox to run directX (which anyone would do in their place, it only makes sense) or for web browsing, other times it doesn't, like for the Zune where their OS monopoly couldn't help them very much.
..and it already has legions of people already exclaiming that this is the best device yet, despite the fact that nobody has seen as much as a drawing yet.
Actually, I haven't read anyone who actually liked apple products say anything of the sort. All I've read in this thread so far are people who are complaining about imagined features they have pulled out of their asses, as you've pointed out, nobody has seen anything yet.
If Apple's past design decisions are any guide, the only thing I feel confident saying is that Apple has likely spent a tremendous amount of time and money designing the interface and it will likely be fairly intuitive and easy to use, but it's far from certain. It could just be an ipod touch, but bigger. This will certainly have some interesting applications, especially if they use a display that can be read in direct sunlight. I believe it likely that for applications they will follow their (mind-blowingly) successful app store but who knows. This is Apple we're talking about, they aren't the leader in innovation in the PC market for nothing and it's hard to imagine Jobs getting excited over an overblown ipod touch, but he has tried to sell us polished turds before so who knows.
This is very silly, as minor magnetic perturbations would make the mountains flail about wildly, just as trying to hold a magnet up in the air with another magnet is very difficult.
You mean difficult like this? Or how about this? Looks pretty easy to me. Minor magnetic perturbations would not make the mountains flail about wildly because they have a high MASS. It would take a great big magnetic fluctuation to do move a large mass. I wager that the only thing that could do that would be a magnetic pole flipping, but since the human race hasn't seen one of these in our recorded history we have no idea how they take place so I think we can forgive that one.
I notice that you don't mention that BOTH of the examples you give of the "evilness" of democrats served with distinction in the armed forces! John Kerry served in Vietnam and John Murtha was a drill instructor for the marines at Quantico and him in particular was one of the biggest supporters of the armed forces before the large-scale, unnecessary war in Iraq pushed forward by a pair of draft dodgers (Bush and Cheney). You'd think the best people to give critical assessments of what the military does are ones who have served. But no, the Republican slander machine needs to denigrate anyone who has a D by their name, regardless of the validity of their claims.
Doesn't rar have a capacity to have some redundancy though? I seem to recall that downloading multi-part rar files from usenet a while ago that included some extra files that could be used to rebuild the originals in the case of file corruption (which happened fairly often with usenet).
Know why those labels are there in the first place? That's right. Because some consumer somewhere probably sued the company because he didn't know mattresses were heavy or that you shouldn't eat your keyboard or something stupid like that...:)
You couldn't be further from the truth and the fact you automatically assume that those labels are unnecessary and the result of a frivolous lawsuit is a sign of just how gullible our society has become. Those labels are there so that the person selling the mattress can't claim it's stuffed with handpicked goose feathers and made with a silk cloth exterior and charge the buyer three times as much when it is actually made from reused synthetic products. It's called truth in advertising. Those types of consumer protection things were used a lot back in the days before regulatory capture when the government occasionally acted in the best interests of the consumer instead of the corporation.
To back this up, there have been substantial job cuts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory twice in its history. The first time was when Reagan cut the staff by about 50%, and Bush, Jr. cut about 10% in 2005. Considering that NREL is one of the centers of expertise of photovoltaics in the world, and often hold the record for efficiency for photovoltaics it does look pretty suspicious.
Well, considering that I had no idea what that guy said until I read it here, I'd say MS is putting more fuel on the fire by saying that. Would it have ended up on slashdot even if MS hadn't issued the denial? Maybe, but by denying it, it ensured it ended up on slashdot. In any case, this guy has the title, "partner group manager" which sounds like not only is he a manager but, suspiciously, in marketing too. It is funny though that MS periodically has these guys go off the reservation and start spouting not tactful, but perhaps true comments.
But anyway, considering that Apple has put a huge amount of effort into streamlining their OS and making it more responsive to the user, just in general I think that's a good thing to emulate in your OS. For example, I can remember waiting on 10.0 and 10.1 for what seemed like eternities for the spinning beach ball to quit but that's gotten a lot better with recent releases. (Don't get me started on if you were trying to log onto an ftp server that wasn't responding.)
As a point of clarification, the issue is NOT when we will run out of oil. There's enough oil left in the subsurface to last a long time. The issue is how fast we can get it out of the ground. When an economical oil deposit is first discovered, there is a substantial amount of pressure on the oil (think spindletop) and it comes up to the surface of it's own accord. As the oil from the deposit is produced, the pressure drops and the oil ceases eventually coming up by itself all together. After that, you can still get it out of the ground, but you have to pump it and you never get back to the same flow rate.
World population is continually increasing, China and India are rapidly industrializing so demand for oil is going up and up, but the flow rate isn't. This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators. It's all supply and demand, but in this case the supply is limited. No amount oil shale or tar sands or deepwater deposits will do us much good because we can't achieve the same flow rate with these deposits as the traditional ones.
As far as I can tell, this game is only planned to be released on Windows, Xbox 360, and the PS3. My question is, isn't the PS3 running linux? Doesn't it use OpenGL? I don't know much about consoles, and some quick googling didn't turn up the answer but maybe somebody could enlighten me, does the PS3 even run DirectX? If not, Bioware must be going through a lot of trouble to port it to the PS3, and I know there's a lot more PS3 owners than linux gamers, but if they have to rewrite it in openGL then it seems like a lot of the work necessary for a linux port would already be done.
This was a pretty stupid move on Intel's part, they didn't even need to act in this way because they seem to have really pegged the market precisely in going after the performance/efficiency angle with that last few years worth of chips. I should know, I was an AMD fan throughout the late 90s and early 00s but for my newest PC I went with an Intel Core Duo2 because they really are that great in terms of speed versus power consumption. Not to mention that during AMD's disaster with their Barcelona quad core chips, there really wasn't any choice for awhile for quad core chips except for Intel. Most of the dates in TFA are from 2003-2006, I suppose those were really sort of dark years for Intel in that it seemed like AMD was gaining ground and their chips were cheaper for the same performance, but now Intel's latest are really quite good.
There was a reduction of the national debt during the 90s-era Republican Congress (1997, 98 and 99 to be specific).
And who controlled congress during the Bush spending spree before the Democrats took over congress? Who controlled congress during the reductions in deficit in the 50s-80s? It's right here. The Democrats controlled both branches of congress right up until Reagan took the presidency and the Republicans took the senate. You can't have it both ways: you can't blame the president when it was Bush in the white house and then blame the Republicans in congress when it was Clinton who was president.
But, since you trotted out the same argument you always hear, here is the data that shows that on average, the deficit is reduced under democratic control of congress as well as under democratic presidents. The correlation just isn't as strong. The bottom line is that, statistically, Democratic party governments do a better job at reducing the deficit!
What, have you been selectively blocking the last three years? Or did you fail to notice that In the 2006 elections:
The election resulted in a sweeping victory for the Democratic Party which captured the House of Representatives, the Senate, and a majority of governorships and state legislatures from the Republican Party.
12 years of the "permanent Republican majority" was enough for people to finally vote the bums out, that election showed about the same dissatisfaction with incumbents as in 1994. Why is it that conservatives are the only ones in this country who can have a revolution? We certainly didn't see any less corruption, government waste, and general largess under conservatives as progressives. In fact, the last republican president to preside over a reduction in the gross national debt as percent of GDP was Gerald Ford.
What is all so totally worth it? I haven't seen any advantages of zfs over hfsplus. You say:
Most things are a hell of a lot easier, especially volume management with pools VS traditional volume managers.
Great, so my IT administrator has his life made easier but my, the user's, life is made harder? Thanks, but no thanks. I want ease of use, I have seen nothing in zfs that delivers that. For what it's worth, I tried the zfs commands you suggested but there aren't any of those available in my path, and my cluster was built and configured by Sun itself. Fuck that shit... I'll take hfsplus with all it's possible btree corruptions over zfs any day.
A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for.
And what will you do if you end up with a mix of ad-supported premium content for which you have to pay? Look at cable television now, you pay a monthly fee for the privilege of watching ad-supported television, if you want fewer ads, you have to pay more for those stations which are not included in the basic cable. News Corp. will go after the same model if they can.
I know you're only joking, but I'm actually using zfs on a sun cluster right now... whatever technical merits it might possess are lost on me because when I type in "df -h" and it doesn't report anything meaningful -- it always shows 2 GB free however much of my 1 TB disk quota I happen to be using. To get meaningful disk usage, you have to type in "df -h.". While it's certainly trivial to do that, I find that having to directly specify the directory in order to get meaningful disk usage data is just weird.
My experience with zfs has been tepid at best, it's not terrible. I won't miss not having it though.
I found the perspective from an NVIDIA coder on linux gaming to be fascinating:
Anyway, without a compelling Linux gamer customer base, it is hard to imagine many commercial game developers supporting Linux ports of their games. Like John alluded to in his comment, more Linux users paying for existing Linux titles like Quake Live will make the statistics more favorable for future Linux ports.
...
- Linux's recent success in netbook and handheld markets may lead to more Linux games developed for those platforms. Perhaps some of those will be interesting for Linux desktop use.
- Wine and TransGaming provide a way to run Direct3D games within Linux. Work is ongoing to continue to improve this path. Recently, several new OpenGL extensions were defined to make OpenGL semantics more closely match Direct3D semantics (thanks to TransGaming, Mark Kilgard from NVIDIA, and others at Codeweavers, Blizzard, Destineer, and Asypr). These extensions make it easier for applications like Cedega from TransGaming to map Direct3D on top of OpenGL, or for applications to interchange Direct3D/OpenGL graphics abstraction layers.
This confirms that companies ARE paying attention to if linux users go out and buy linux games. On the other hand, the fact that bioware didn't release drag age: origins on linux after releasing nwn on it might be a depressing tell-tale that linux users aren't buying enough to make it worthwhile for them (but then, they seem to be screwing the pooch with DA in terms of everything that made NWN cool, like community content, etc.).
While I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy more convenient typing in of passwords on openoffice documents and typing in Tamil fonts, I'm a little more concerned about the proposed ribbon interface from a while back. In the one screenshot in TFA that showed the toolbar, it looked like the usual icon driven interface. Can anyone confirm that a non-ribbon UI will still be available?
Ideal has nothing to do with it. We're not living in an ideal world. We're living in the status quo. Hurricane Katrina did about $90 billion of damage. You can sit there on your armchair and poo poo why anyone would build a city in such a hurricane ridden place, but the fact is that there were people living there and that it would cost a hell of a lot more than that to move them than it did to help them afterwards.
For changes in the ocean ecosystem, the same issue is here. About half the world's population lives within 60 km of the coast. That means if sea level rises there will be a lot of people who need to move, rich and poor alike. For Ocean acidification, you've also got tremendous numbers of people who are relying on that ecosystem for their lifestyle. For rich people, it's an inconvenience, for the poor, things are much more serious. For Ocean acidification, you've also got tremendous numbers of people who are relying on that ecosystem for their lifestyle. So unless you want to replace our Mexican immigrants with Jamaicans, I'd stop and consider first how reliant we are on the status quo.
It's a pretty weird idea to have guest account anyway unless it's a terminal computer for public access or unless you were using the computer for some other purpose than it's intent that you'd like to hide (e.g., using a work computer for personal stuff). What I noticed in TFA was that:
Apparently, Snow Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.6) has a habit of wiping out "home directories" when a user logs in to a Guest account following an upgrade from Apple's previous operating system: just Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5).
Is this right that it only occurs when someone upgraded from 10.5? I have never trusted upgrading an OS, no matter what platform. So when I put 10.6 on my laptop, I made a disc image of the drive on a back-up disc, then wiped it, and installed 10.6 fresh. I do that because I tend systems tend to get filled with a lot of library files, preferences, etc. that they don't necessarily need or want on a new install (it's worse with a registry). If this is true, yet another reason never to upgrade an OS, always install fresh.
P.S. Don't take this post as being an apologist for Apple, I think they still make a damn fine OS but in recent years they've been getting sloppy and more interested in "teh shiny" than stability and paying attention to their core computer users.
Incidentally, Bioware gave its last (free) update to nwn five years after it was released. More than that, they had some kind of snafu with some extra modules that were supposed to be pay modules but ended up being canned and they gave them away for free.
For NWN they went out of their way to make linux and OS X versions, they released a server and client tools that allowed you to set up you own server, and there was tons of community made content. Because of all that stuff, I was still playing NWN more than 4 years after its release because the constant updating improved the graphics quality of the models (and other things like more realistic sky-boxes, better costumes, creatures, etc.)
From what I can tell, Dragon Age feels like they are trying to reproduce NWN, but without all the stuff that made NWN a great game. I won't be buying it.
Yes precisely. Here we are with massive companies like Exxon that have market caps in the at over 300 billion dollars (1/3 larger than MS, nearly twice apple) with an annual profit of $40 billion that not only have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and to demonstrate that "There is no anthropogenic climate change(TM)" but have been outed as willing to fund that conclusion. The entire budget spent on climage change research in the U.S. is ~$2 billion a year but is spent on research where there is no foregone conclusion. Yet, despite this HUGE disparity in the amount of money that could potentially fund a given conclusion, some significant portion of people STILL believe that data after data and analysis after analysis are the result of some liberal conspiracy to punish the capitalists and put us back into the middle ages and that there's a massive media cover-up of the real data. Its no wonder people denigrate these people as "deniers".
I agree completely, it's really cool regardless of the outcome. Some of this type of historical data has already been used: Records of bird migration in particular are useful because the date is known precisely and the record doesn't rely on a measurement, i.e., all you have to do is answer the questions does the bird in question migrate earlier or later than previously, and how much so? Some examples are the snow goose (pay link, sorry) from the Hudson Bay Company and other records. Here's a full article that shows that birds are migrating to and from the UK an average of 8 days earlier than 30 years ago.
And would you ever admit that you're wrong if the logbooks do support it? We already see from the tone of your statement that you've already decided that there is no climate change.
You can't keep calling it skepticism when faced with a continual stream of evidence, that's called denial.
Slashdot Mirror
In your list, don't forget the final chapter for a "successful" CEO, which is to run for political office. I think she will have a hard time running against Barbara Boxer, but I think she'd make the perfect senator in the mold of such esteemed senators as Joe Lieberman, Jim Inhofe, Ted Stevens or Sam Brownback who have been responsible for building and maintaining our great society. I'm sure she'll run the government like a business which worked so well for our last president Bush when responding to natural disasters and the like. (Yes, I am being sarcastic).
Show me something that MS doesn't consider a threat. I mean really, MS' goal has always been dominance of the market for their products, never accepting something less unless forced. A corporation (or person for that matter) in that position must always see everything as a threat. As evidence I offer that they continually push their OS monopoly to help their other products sometimes doing so in an illegal manner so as to shut out competitors rather than compete on the merit of their own products. Sometimes it works, like using the xbox to run directX (which anyone would do in their place, it only makes sense) or for web browsing, other times it doesn't, like for the Zune where their OS monopoly couldn't help them very much.
Actually, I haven't read anyone who actually liked apple products say anything of the sort. All I've read in this thread so far are people who are complaining about imagined features they have pulled out of their asses, as you've pointed out, nobody has seen anything yet.
If Apple's past design decisions are any guide, the only thing I feel confident saying is that Apple has likely spent a tremendous amount of time and money designing the interface and it will likely be fairly intuitive and easy to use, but it's far from certain. It could just be an ipod touch, but bigger. This will certainly have some interesting applications, especially if they use a display that can be read in direct sunlight. I believe it likely that for applications they will follow their (mind-blowingly) successful app store but who knows. This is Apple we're talking about, they aren't the leader in innovation in the PC market for nothing and it's hard to imagine Jobs getting excited over an overblown ipod touch, but he has tried to sell us polished turds before so who knows.
You mean difficult like this? Or how about this? Looks pretty easy to me. Minor magnetic perturbations would not make the mountains flail about wildly because they have a high MASS. It would take a great big magnetic fluctuation to do move a large mass. I wager that the only thing that could do that would be a magnetic pole flipping, but since the human race hasn't seen one of these in our recorded history we have no idea how they take place so I think we can forgive that one.
I notice that you don't mention that BOTH of the examples you give of the "evilness" of democrats served with distinction in the armed forces! John Kerry served in Vietnam and John Murtha was a drill instructor for the marines at Quantico and him in particular was one of the biggest supporters of the armed forces before the large-scale, unnecessary war in Iraq pushed forward by a pair of draft dodgers (Bush and Cheney). You'd think the best people to give critical assessments of what the military does are ones who have served. But no, the Republican slander machine needs to denigrate anyone who has a D by their name, regardless of the validity of their claims.
Doesn't rar have a capacity to have some redundancy though? I seem to recall that downloading multi-part rar files from usenet a while ago that included some extra files that could be used to rebuild the originals in the case of file corruption (which happened fairly often with usenet).
You couldn't be further from the truth and the fact you automatically assume that those labels are unnecessary and the result of a frivolous lawsuit is a sign of just how gullible our society has become. Those labels are there so that the person selling the mattress can't claim it's stuffed with handpicked goose feathers and made with a silk cloth exterior and charge the buyer three times as much when it is actually made from reused synthetic products. It's called truth in advertising. Those types of consumer protection things were used a lot back in the days before regulatory capture when the government occasionally acted in the best interests of the consumer instead of the corporation.
To back this up, there have been substantial job cuts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory twice in its history. The first time was when Reagan cut the staff by about 50%, and Bush, Jr. cut about 10% in 2005. Considering that NREL is one of the centers of expertise of photovoltaics in the world, and often hold the record for efficiency for photovoltaics it does look pretty suspicious.
Well, considering that I had no idea what that guy said until I read it here, I'd say MS is putting more fuel on the fire by saying that. Would it have ended up on slashdot even if MS hadn't issued the denial? Maybe, but by denying it, it ensured it ended up on slashdot. In any case, this guy has the title, "partner group manager" which sounds like not only is he a manager but, suspiciously, in marketing too. It is funny though that MS periodically has these guys go off the reservation and start spouting not tactful, but perhaps true comments.
But anyway, considering that Apple has put a huge amount of effort into streamlining their OS and making it more responsive to the user, just in general I think that's a good thing to emulate in your OS. For example, I can remember waiting on 10.0 and 10.1 for what seemed like eternities for the spinning beach ball to quit but that's gotten a lot better with recent releases. (Don't get me started on if you were trying to log onto an ftp server that wasn't responding.)
As a point of clarification, the issue is NOT when we will run out of oil. There's enough oil left in the subsurface to last a long time. The issue is how fast we can get it out of the ground. When an economical oil deposit is first discovered, there is a substantial amount of pressure on the oil (think spindletop) and it comes up to the surface of it's own accord. As the oil from the deposit is produced, the pressure drops and the oil ceases eventually coming up by itself all together. After that, you can still get it out of the ground, but you have to pump it and you never get back to the same flow rate.
World population is continually increasing, China and India are rapidly industrializing so demand for oil is going up and up, but the flow rate isn't. This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators. It's all supply and demand, but in this case the supply is limited. No amount oil shale or tar sands or deepwater deposits will do us much good because we can't achieve the same flow rate with these deposits as the traditional ones.
As far as I can tell, this game is only planned to be released on Windows, Xbox 360, and the PS3. My question is, isn't the PS3 running linux? Doesn't it use OpenGL? I don't know much about consoles, and some quick googling didn't turn up the answer but maybe somebody could enlighten me, does the PS3 even run DirectX? If not, Bioware must be going through a lot of trouble to port it to the PS3, and I know there's a lot more PS3 owners than linux gamers, but if they have to rewrite it in openGL then it seems like a lot of the work necessary for a linux port would already be done.
This was a pretty stupid move on Intel's part, they didn't even need to act in this way because they seem to have really pegged the market precisely in going after the performance/efficiency angle with that last few years worth of chips. I should know, I was an AMD fan throughout the late 90s and early 00s but for my newest PC I went with an Intel Core Duo2 because they really are that great in terms of speed versus power consumption. Not to mention that during AMD's disaster with their Barcelona quad core chips, there really wasn't any choice for awhile for quad core chips except for Intel. Most of the dates in TFA are from 2003-2006, I suppose those were really sort of dark years for Intel in that it seemed like AMD was gaining ground and their chips were cheaper for the same performance, but now Intel's latest are really quite good.
And who controlled congress during the Bush spending spree before the Democrats took over congress? Who controlled congress during the reductions in deficit in the 50s-80s? It's right here. The Democrats controlled both branches of congress right up until Reagan took the presidency and the Republicans took the senate. You can't have it both ways: you can't blame the president when it was Bush in the white house and then blame the Republicans in congress when it was Clinton who was president.
But, since you trotted out the same argument you always hear, here is the data that shows that on average, the deficit is reduced under democratic control of congress as well as under democratic presidents. The correlation just isn't as strong. The bottom line is that, statistically, Democratic party governments do a better job at reducing the deficit!
12 years of the "permanent Republican majority" was enough for people to finally vote the bums out, that election showed about the same dissatisfaction with incumbents as in 1994. Why is it that conservatives are the only ones in this country who can have a revolution? We certainly didn't see any less corruption, government waste, and general largess under conservatives as progressives. In fact, the last republican president to preside over a reduction in the gross national debt as percent of GDP was Gerald Ford.
What is all so totally worth it? I haven't seen any advantages of zfs over hfsplus. You say:
Great, so my IT administrator has his life made easier but my, the user's, life is made harder? Thanks, but no thanks. I want ease of use, I have seen nothing in zfs that delivers that. For what it's worth, I tried the zfs commands you suggested but there aren't any of those available in my path, and my cluster was built and configured by Sun itself. Fuck that shit... I'll take hfsplus with all it's possible btree corruptions over zfs any day.
And what will you do if you end up with a mix of ad-supported premium content for which you have to pay? Look at cable television now, you pay a monthly fee for the privilege of watching ad-supported television, if you want fewer ads, you have to pay more for those stations which are not included in the basic cable. News Corp. will go after the same model if they can.
I know you're only joking, but I'm actually using zfs on a sun cluster right now... whatever technical merits it might possess are lost on me because when I type in "df -h" and it doesn't report anything meaningful -- it always shows 2 GB free however much of my 1 TB disk quota I happen to be using. To get meaningful disk usage, you have to type in "df -h .". While it's certainly trivial to do that, I find that having to directly specify the directory in order to get meaningful disk usage data is just weird.
My experience with zfs has been tepid at best, it's not terrible. I won't miss not having it though.
This confirms that companies ARE paying attention to if linux users go out and buy linux games. On the other hand, the fact that bioware didn't release drag age: origins on linux after releasing nwn on it might be a depressing tell-tale that linux users aren't buying enough to make it worthwhile for them (but then, they seem to be screwing the pooch with DA in terms of everything that made NWN cool, like community content, etc.).
While I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy more convenient typing in of passwords on openoffice documents and typing in Tamil fonts, I'm a little more concerned about the proposed ribbon interface from a while back. In the one screenshot in TFA that showed the toolbar, it looked like the usual icon driven interface. Can anyone confirm that a non-ribbon UI will still be available?
Ideal has nothing to do with it. We're not living in an ideal world. We're living in the status quo. Hurricane Katrina did about $90 billion of damage. You can sit there on your armchair and poo poo why anyone would build a city in such a hurricane ridden place, but the fact is that there were people living there and that it would cost a hell of a lot more than that to move them than it did to help them afterwards.
For changes in the ocean ecosystem, the same issue is here. About half the world's population lives within 60 km of the coast. That means if sea level rises there will be a lot of people who need to move, rich and poor alike. For Ocean acidification, you've also got tremendous numbers of people who are relying on that ecosystem for their lifestyle. For rich people, it's an inconvenience, for the poor, things are much more serious. For Ocean acidification, you've also got tremendous numbers of people who are relying on that ecosystem for their lifestyle. So unless you want to replace our Mexican immigrants with Jamaicans, I'd stop and consider first how reliant we are on the status quo.
Is this right that it only occurs when someone upgraded from 10.5? I have never trusted upgrading an OS, no matter what platform. So when I put 10.6 on my laptop, I made a disc image of the drive on a back-up disc, then wiped it, and installed 10.6 fresh. I do that because I tend systems tend to get filled with a lot of library files, preferences, etc. that they don't necessarily need or want on a new install (it's worse with a registry). If this is true, yet another reason never to upgrade an OS, always install fresh.
P.S. Don't take this post as being an apologist for Apple, I think they still make a damn fine OS but in recent years they've been getting sloppy and more interested in "teh shiny" than stability and paying attention to their core computer users.
Incidentally, Bioware gave its last (free) update to nwn five years after it was released. More than that, they had some kind of snafu with some extra modules that were supposed to be pay modules but ended up being canned and they gave them away for free.
For NWN they went out of their way to make linux and OS X versions, they released a server and client tools that allowed you to set up you own server, and there was tons of community made content. Because of all that stuff, I was still playing NWN more than 4 years after its release because the constant updating improved the graphics quality of the models (and other things like more realistic sky-boxes, better costumes, creatures, etc.)
From what I can tell, Dragon Age feels like they are trying to reproduce NWN, but without all the stuff that made NWN a great game. I won't be buying it.
Yes precisely. Here we are with massive companies like Exxon that have market caps in the at over 300 billion dollars (1/3 larger than MS, nearly twice apple) with an annual profit of $40 billion that not only have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and to demonstrate that "There is no anthropogenic climate change(TM)" but have been outed as willing to fund that conclusion. The entire budget spent on climage change research in the U.S. is ~$2 billion a year but is spent on research where there is no foregone conclusion. Yet, despite this HUGE disparity in the amount of money that could potentially fund a given conclusion, some significant portion of people STILL believe that data after data and analysis after analysis are the result of some liberal conspiracy to punish the capitalists and put us back into the middle ages and that there's a massive media cover-up of the real data. Its no wonder people denigrate these people as "deniers".
I agree completely, it's really cool regardless of the outcome. Some of this type of historical data has already been used: Records of bird migration in particular are useful because the date is known precisely and the record doesn't rely on a measurement, i.e., all you have to do is answer the questions does the bird in question migrate earlier or later than previously, and how much so? Some examples are the snow goose (pay link, sorry) from the Hudson Bay Company and other records. Here's a full article that shows that birds are migrating to and from the UK an average of 8 days earlier than 30 years ago.
Also, some evidence of hurricane patterns is from Spanish records of ships in the Caribbean from 1500 to 1600.
And would you ever admit that you're wrong if the logbooks do support it? We already see from the tone of your statement that you've already decided that there is no climate change.
You can't keep calling it skepticism when faced with a continual stream of evidence, that's called denial.