On some level, that crapware makes the conversion to Linux all the more appealing because if a company would have to say spend 1 million dollars to convert the crapware, they can then afford to do it because they are not spending money on the OS and other software.

Long live the crapware!!!

Most of the paying customers out there are told what to buy by the IT department, that now a days likly has more than a few closet FOSS people.

BP in one of its early environmental impact statements filed with the U.S. government gave something like 600,000 barrels a day as a worse case before the well was drilled.

So, relax everyone. It is only able to dump 600,000 barrels of oil a day according to BP.

I have seen beaver dams in the over 1/2 mile in length range in southern Canada / Northern MN ( the tops are often used as parts of hiking trails ). All I see are sat and airplane photos. Has anyone hiked out to take on the ground photos of the dam and measure it? Links please, if you got some?

I have been flamed more than a few times around here for suggesting Computer Science has not got a clue what they are doing when it comes to AI. Philosophy has been at this problem and more for the better part of the last 400+ years (more like a 1,000 years) in a serious way. The stock b.s., I get from the science fiction fan boys is that somehow natural language is a problem that can just be brute forced as if you were trying to figure out the password you forgot to your email account. Good luck with that.

By the way, language "recognition" by a computer is likly the easy part of the problem for AI researchers to crack. It is still not going to yield any real AI, just better cars and toasters.

I recently went through my email stats to see what IP's where sending email that was being rejected the most. I found only about 10 ip's in countries I have never had a reason to deal with composed about 70-80% of the waisted rejected email (thousands of emails each). I then either banned the country or the ip address. Not so much a solution, as saving some resources.

I seen a lecture where Stephen Hawking told everyone not to worry about falling to black holes because you will come out the other side. Nice guy and all, but I am not so sure about how sound his advice is on certain things.

The Chilean government and most airlines avoided flying around a volcano in Southern Chile a couple years ago. They did not however restrict small planes. In the course of about 4 months, 3 small planes crashed including a military flight. They were all prop planes with more than one engine. No one every officially linked the crashes to the volcano, but it was definitely outside the statistical norm for crashes in the area (like one every 2-3 years normally).

I worked as a teacher in China a couple years ago and was only paid $350 US a month, plus housing, and still managed to save money. So, that is not exactly slave labor wages by Chinese economy standards at $0.50 x 15 hours a day = $7.5 a day. That is something like $180 US a month. The working hours suck by western standards, but that is fairly normal working hours in China.

Also I don't buy that photo. When I was teaching at the University, I would go in to a room and there would be like 50 students all sleeping between classes. It is not unusual for Chinese workers to catch a catnap on breaks, because they work long hours.

I taught research writing at a Chinese Agricultural University for a year. I am not even sure where to start about the plagiarism.

Kids would bring in things so obviously stolen that the authors name was still in the text.

Chinese react to public shame and to threats well. I likly would not have been allowed to use most of the tactics in the States or Europe. I did finally get them to write real papers after almost a year (even if they were mostly bad), and reference their sources. I just told them, "this is how we steel others ideas in the West."

I also learned a thing or two about how Chinese view theft of ideas. For several thousand years, copying famous work was a sign of respect. After all, it is all "owned" by the Emperor or the States anyway. In a sense it is all public property, and copy rights means you have a right to copy.

Now, that is fine in the old days, but not in a modern China. At the University I was at, they were doing things like genetic engineering knew super strains of rice. There was no rigid testing going on. Students were all but being encouraged to take it home to their families to plant in the rural areas. Other foreign researchers told me how labs and experiments were contaminated in all sorts of different ways; yet, everyone was being pushed to publish. Publishing was the end, and not the means to science for many of them.

After what I seen, I am certain sooner or later we are all going to pay the price for China's great experiment with Science.

At least it would tell you everything else is fine, and using proper process of elimination work your way back to 'dam must be the processor'. That is assuming you ignore the error messages related to the processor in Linux.

They studied 20,000 people that joined the military. That would indicate they already could care less about their life or were already shown to be inclined to accept training or participate in activities that would make them disregard their own life. How about a control group among say something like university professors? At least compare that to 20,000 university students of the same age. There is a certain sweet spot for stupidity among those age groups (the superman factor).

Yea, sorry but this one falls outside the realm of science and religion. That is why we have Philosophy to referee these things.

Yea, I think you stumbled upon the reason MS is easier to learn. You can do less with it. Linux is a swiss army knife and then some.

It is like everyone around here is too young to remember the last what 3-6 failures MS made at "new" search engine or too old and their memory does not work anymore.

There is no reason to waist time and effort on bing as webmaster, until bing (or whatever they want to relabel it) starts moving traffic I don't care about bing as a search engine.