"it is necessary to satisfy mens rea"

The discussion is about child porn not gay porn.

There's a reason BIDU hit $630 yesterday having only been $100 a year ago and it's not because Bing will be taking Google's place.

I can't see Google withdrawing because they'd be handing what will be the world's biggest market over to a competitor. The free speech situation would also become worse with BIDU as the main search engine since they'll be far more inclined to do exactly what the government tells them.

It makes no sense financially or socially so Google would have to be completely stupid to pull out.

"Think it's illegal? Call the cops with details."

You: "Officer, I was interested in these so called 'dark nets' so looking around I happened to find a website with child porn on it. Clicking about the site I found there were literally hundreds of images so I thought I best report it to the police."

Police: "Please stay by your computer and we'll be around to arrest you shortly. Enjoy your 25 years in prison."

I think you need to review the "Don't talk to the police" video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

If you see a house being burgled, ignore it and continue on. If you see somebody being raped keep walking. If you see a child in trouble, absolutely never go near them. The last one is particularly important since children are the greatest risk to your freedom in the current political climate and should never be approached under any circumstances.

"It's impossible to say how computing would have changed"

We can get some ideas how things would be different by looking at the browser market. In particular we can compare the IE6 period, when Gates' monopoly was at its peak, to how it is now that Mozilla, Google, Opera and Apple has revived competition:

IE6 Period
-Zero innovation
-Focus on lock-in
-Standards ignored
-Insecure

After Competition was Revived
-A wealth of innovative features introduced
-Fair competition based on the quality of the product rather than lock-in
-Improvements in speed, security and stability
-Browsers generally following standards making things easier for developers

We could then look at how the OS and Office market is now and, based on the browser market, make some guesses at what the world would have been like without Gates:

OS and Office Suite Market with Gates
-Zero innovation
-Focus on lock in
-Standards ignored
-Insecure

OS and Office Suite Market without Gates
Executive summary: a shit load better

There's no denying that Gates is a great business man; he has ruthlessly strangled completion, locked in users and abused his OS monopoly to expand into other markets. This strategy has made Microsoft biggest and most successful company in the IT industry with obscene profits and massive influence, so it's hard not to be impressed by his business skills. However, everything he has contributed to IT has been negative and if he never existed we would likely have vastly superior software than we have under the Microsoft monopoly. Personally I would rank Gates as the single man who has done most damage to the software and IT industry.

Am I stupid or is the sign in the article telling people to always park in front of the entrance?

It essentially says to never never never never park there and isn't a quadruple negative a positive? Furthermore if you never never do something then you always do it so it seems he permanently wants somebody blocking his door.

If you don't want to see adverts don't visit any websites that have adverts on them. If you're repeatedly visiting websites that you know to have adverts then you're looking at the adverts voluntarily so it is no way an invasion or an intrusion.

Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?

Philip Campbell was one of the "scientists" selected to join the "independent" review panel for the UEA leaks. He later had to step down when it was revealed that he had already made up his mind before any review:

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/aposclimategateapos+review+member+resigns/3536642

I'm sure he was replaced by somebody equally independent and impartial and that we can expect the same level of impartiality from the UN's review of the IPCC. This is nothing but a waste of taxpayer's money.

72.54% of Windows users continue to use XP, so it is abundantly clear that the the market prefers XP to 7/Vista. If Microsoft had any competitors they would be forced to continue selling XP in order to avoid losing market share, however their monopoly means they do not have to worry about this since there literally aren't any competitors*. They are therefore abusing their monopoly by forcing 7/Vista onto a market that does not want it. What the judge says is true and Microsoft really aren't benefiting from this since they get a sale whether it's XP or 7, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a clear case of severe monopoly abuse. I certainly feel abused because I want to buy a laptop with Windows XP but all the options in my price range come with Windows 7 Home Premium. How can the judge conclude this isn't monopoly abuse? Somebody get the EU!

*Mac OS is not a direct competitor to Windows since I can't legitimately install Mac OS on my PC. Alternatives like Linux aren't quite ready for the mainstream desktop user yet.

It amuses me to see Sky suing somebody else for "fraudulent misrepresentation by their sales team" when nobody is more guilty of this than Sky themselves. When Sky launched their £10 a month Sky+ digital video recorder they did so under the slogan "never miss a thing" but far from never missing a thing I found that most of the programmes you set it to record would simply disappear from the recording schedule prior to the broadcast of the programme. Even if you set set the recording times manually instead of selecting the programme from the EPG it would still fail to record as much as 75% of the programmes I set. It wasn't just me who experienced these problems and the exact same issues could be recreated on a friend's Sky+ unit, while many other people reported problems in online forums.

Not only was much Sky+ subscription a waste it also rendered my Sky subscription worthless since I never got to see most the programmes I was paying to see and worse still I was stuck on a 12 month Sky+ contract. The final slap in the face was that they kept running these "never miss a thing" adverts which left me utterly furious. I desperately wanted to crucify them for their shitty software and blatant "fraudulent misrepresentation by their sales team". Sadly, lacking the legal resources to do so, I had to settle for taking them to the small claims court where they were forced to refund my complete Sky and Sky+ subscriptions as well as the cost of my £300 Sky+ unit and installation. Given that many other people were experiencing these problems when Sky+ launched I really don't know how they got away with their clear fraudulent misrepresentation and to see them suing somebody else for misrepresentation has fills me with rage (where's my damn stress toy!!!!).

On the up side, Sky+ did prompt me to cancel my Sky subscription and BBC extortion fee and join the smug "I don't want television" brigade. I actually find life much better without television so it worked out to my benefit in the end.

None of Sara Ford's blog posts generate any comments and yet this post had a sizable number of comments. Clearly the people who commented are not regular readers of Sara Ford's blog but are people who have been searching for a way to get VS to revert back to the VS2003 "new tabs on the right" behavior that's used by every other application with tabs (IE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Excel, Kingsoft Office etc). The fact that Microsoft, a company who most definitely don't care in the least about user opinions, has been forced to provide an option in VS2010 to revert back to the VS2003 behavior is evidence enough of the size of the backlash.

As for you not noticing the change; I simply can't imagine what sort of cognitive state you'd have to be in not to notice such a fundamental change to the way the UI worked. Everyone in my office noticed the change independently this leads me to wonder whether you're actually conscious when you use VS?

Well it doesn't matter that nobody commented because they don't actually listen to feedback anyway. Take the example of when they changed the file tab order in VS2005 so that new tabs were added on the right. This change caused all your open file tabs to be pushed along making it impossible to keep track of the location of your file tabs and resulting in users wasting considerable amounts of time looking for files. The person responsible for this was Sara Ford and as you can see from the comments on her blog the response was overwhelmingly negative:

http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2004/05/14/132065.aspx

Despite all these negative comments both her and Microsoft failed to take any action and no changes were made in the VS2005 service pack or in VS2008. Microsoft simply do not care what users think and and while the may put up the pretence of taking user feedback they always just do whatever they think is best. Sara Ford is a classic example of this and despite all the negative comments on her blog she was totally unable to accept that the change was for the worse. What's most absurd about this situation is that Sara Ford has written a book called "Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity". Given the she herself is responsible for considerably reducing the productivity of Visual Studio users through her absurd interface design I suspect the only use for this book would be as toilet paper.

Sara Ford is the personification of everything that is wrong with Microsoft today. When Windows 2000 came out I thought it was extremely good, offering the stability of NT and the software compatibility of 98 while running very fast on the hardware of the day. Since that time Sara Ford Syndrome has set in at Microsoft and the company has been over run with "soft skills" people who have these brilliant ideas to improve usability and in the process have rendered Microsoft's software completely unusable. The user interface changes Windows Vista/7 and Office 2007 have made using the software provably slower, are provably less consistent and are extremely wasteful of desktop space. I'd rather face torture than use Windows 7 or Office 2007 and many others feel the same way but despite the wave of negativity above these new user interface concepts Microsoft continue to push on regardless of their customers' opinions.

This time however it looks like it's going to cost them since they've split their operating system market into two camps with the vast majority in the XP camp. They're suffering revenue declines since people don't want their newer software, they're losing market share to Apple and they were forced to practically give Windows 7 away with their pre-order discount program to try and generate some positive hype. While 14 year olds may be rushing to Windows 7 with it's cool transparent Windows frames the corporate market is staying well away and have clearly indicated they have no interest in the new software Microsoft is trying to force on the market through their monopoly. By refusing to sell the software customers want and trying to force them to use software they don't it looks like Microsoft's latest monopoly abuse may be what finally brings their monopoly to an end.

For a high speed game like Quake even 60fps is totally unplayable and there's a massive difference between 90fps and 120fps. I consider 120fps the minimum for Quake and for that reason I continue to use a CRT. If you put my CRT at 120Hz+120fps next to a 60Hz+60fps LCD the difference is night and day and the LCD looks extremely choppy. You don't even have to do a side by side comparison and if you're used to playing at 120fps on a daily basis then you'll instantly see the difference when you see the game running at 60fps.

People who think you can't tell above 60fps have obviously never done any sort of valid comparisons because the difference is extremely pronounced. Research done by Sony found that "240Hz is the perception limit for the degradation of motion image quality for the human eye in following natural images" (Journal of the Society for Information Display Vol 15.1). I suspect there would be a noticeable difference between 240fps and 120fps but I've never had the opportunity to compare.

These comments are all in the context of playing Quake which is a very fast moving game so there is a large difference between each frame. If you play a much slower game then the difference between each frame will be significantly less, in which case 30fps might look absolutely fine. However, just because some games look fine at 30fps doesn't justify the whole "the human eye can't perceive above 30fps" idiocy.

Don't forget his Evolution Parters investment vehicle (of which he is the Managing Director) which has assets of $1.9billion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevation_Partners

If he really is so concerned about the plight of Africa why is he investing so much effort trying to increase his already substantial wealth? Why is he not using this money to help the people of Africa who he claims to care so much about? His hypocrisy is astounding and he seems to know no shame. He is a master of appearing righteous while doing absolutely nothing of any good. Quite simply he is pure evil.

If they want to use base10 the first thing they should do is respecify a byte to be 10bits.

I somehow think their enthusiasm for base10 would diminish when it would case a a 25% drop in stated capacity.