Pardon me, I might be one of those godless heathens but I suffered through quite a few years of Christian teachings - what exactly has the Bible promised us apart from forgiveness from our sins and heavenly bliss in the afterlife? The old testament was as I remember it mostly punishments. Punishment for eating the apple, building Babel's tower, Sodom and Gomorrah and of course the flood to wipe out everything. We're all sinners from the original sin and if we don't repent it's hell.

The new testament was pretty much all allegories on how we should live, there were a few "one-off" miracles while Jesus lived but all those who saw him raise the dead, turn water to wine or walk on water has been dead for 2000 years. So there's good and evil in the world, but that's pretty indistinguishable from good and bad people with free will without God or Satan pulling anyone's strings.

So I'm curious, what is it you feel God has promised? And what do see that makes you feel he's delivered? Because I can't find a lick of difference, the devout believers get injured, sick and die like the rest of us and terrible sins go by without being struck down from the heavens. It's of course possible that all of this gets tallied up and justice is served in the afterlife, but here and now in this life I can't find any sign of God. Maybe I should ask this in the opposite direction, if you were to envision a world without God what exactly would be different?

<Morbo>Touch screens do not work that way! Good night!</Morbo>

Look, I understand what you're trying to say. If they're trying to hide their atrocities we should expose them, if they're using them as propaganda and to terrorize we should suppress them. But as a guideline that would be very confusing and hard to live by since it assumes you know the details of every conflict and who wants what, assuming they're all in agreement which they're probably not. Not to mention the answer is probably (d) all of the above, some are inspired to fight against the atrocities, some are frightened by them and some are cheering them on.

Every year we send busloads of teens to visit Nazi concentration camps, not because we have some morbid fascination with death camps and genocide but because at some point you have to learn how cruel human beings can be to each other. But that is quickly fading out of living memory, it's 70 years since the war ended so those who really remember the war is in their 80s and 90s by now. Very soon it'll be "museum" knowledge that you read about in a book and look at an exhibit and it's going to be filed away as ancient history. But it's not, because there's still shit like that going on but we're not sure if we want to see it or not.

I'll admit that watching cruelty will make you die a little inside. You will want to punch something or maybe cry a bit, but at the end of the day I want the truth about the world not the PG-rated version. Which is of course not to say you should lose perspective, with 7 billion people it'll seem like anything you focus on happens a lot even if it deals with 0.01% of the population or less. And I'm here in the safety of my living room looking at a screen, I'm not the one in a war zone getting shot at. I'm not the one hoping nobody will bomb the market I go to. I'm not the soldier who needs to pull the trigger risking that innocents die if I do or die if I don't. I still got it easy.

Not really. I believe there is a clean hands doctrine that says if your inaction has amplified the harm then you might not get relief for that. For example if you live in the downstairs apartment and notice water is leaking from the upstairs apartment but don't do anything to stop it or limit the damage because you'd rather get the insurance money you can get cut short. It's a lot trickier with an IP issue, is it a lump transfer or an ongoing violation but I think it has most the characteristics of the former where you take a half-finished product and hand it to someone else to finish. In that case there's no harm in delaying apart from the statute of limitations.

Let's say I'm in an accident with you, but it seems at first to not be a big deal and I don't sue for damages. However it turns out it won't heal properly and I lose a lot of money and decide to sue anyway. Am I too late? No, those costs aren't caused by the delay, they'd come no matter what and it won't count against me. Of course I'm not in the US, there you find the nearest ambulance chaser and sue for $millions, unless it was a hobo that hurt you.

And yet it's an obvious case for cheap political rhetoric, "What do you mean that's never going to happen? You're sitting there making plans for it right now!" I don't think you should underestimate the explosive power of contingency plans. For example in a supply chain you might have a contingency plan in case your business partners, vendor or distribution network turn shit but nobody's going to like that you have a plan to stab them in the back. And there's always those who willingly or unintentionally confuse planning in case of failure with planning for failure.

TL;DR: Some things you should just keep your mouth shut about, even if makes sense.

Windows 3.0 was part of my first venture into the PC platform. I got my first computer, an Atari 800, in 1984. I stayed with the Atari 8-bit platform until 1991, when I was able to purchase my fist PC: an 80386SX-16, running DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0, despite it's repeated UAE errors and other frustrations, was absolutely AWESOME. I was a junior in high school, and using a mouse and icons felt so cutting-edge and... just fun. I still used DOS WordPerfect 5.1 for serious document creation, but Write was a lot of fun to work with, because of the pre-TTF fonts and pseudo WYSIWYG display.

> I purchased a Logitech ScanMan plus, B+W half-page scanner, and I was the envy of my classmates. This scanner worked great in Windows, if you didn't move the scanner too fast and overload the buffer. There was also a more competent DOS scanner utility, but the Windows one was just more fun.

I really enjoyed using Win3.0, and then Win3.1 with its TTF fonts. But, by then, I had moved to college and really depended on the stability of the OS. In 1994 I was using MS Word 6.0 and the stability of the whole system was simply atrocious. If I didn't habitually save my document every few minutes, I risked losing work due to lock-ups and crashes, which happened repeatedly and often. This was total CRAP! There had to be something better! I couldn't work like this -- how could anyone?

In 1995/1996 some of my fellow engineering student friends were talking about a new way -- "Lie-nuks". This new operating system that was a lot like the SunOS systems we were using in the lab. It was more stable and, even though there weren't as many applicationss available, it promised a more reliable way of getting work done. I tried Yggdrasil "plug and play" Linux in 1995, but it wasn't until 1996 that I was able to get Red Hat 4.1 (kernel 2.0.27) up and running that I completely fell in LOVE.

Since then, I've used Windows only as a necessary evil -- either for gaming or video editing (something Linux still lags in). But, for absolutely EVERY other task, I've used and enjoyed Linux (with Windowmaker, Gnome, Enlightenment, KDE; WordPerfect 8.0, WingZ, StarOffice 5.0, Liberoffice, and on and on, etc.) since 1996.

I have fond memories of Windows, sure. But, the best times I had with computing (even as I was a PC/Windows tech support guy for Packard Bell computers in the 1990's (and with the advent of Windows 95 and 98)), Linux has been the most fun, most stable, more secure, least worrisome and most productive OS in PC land for me. So, while I do certainly share in the Windows nostalgia, Micro$oft can totally SUCK IT! I lost more work and time and patience with your crappy, bloated, insecure and unstable OSes throughout the years than I care to chronicle and, while you may now be making strides to right the wrongs of the past, I will always view you with contempt and blame you for holding the home PC platform back from the more excellent potential it could have had if you had not been the dominant player. FUCK YOU.

Well, we sure didn't get into it to write boring business applications except a few in the dotcom years who quickly moved on when it went bust. As I remember it though, there were many who just wanted to play games and only a few who wanted work with code and I don't think pushing them to play more would have brought them over. Of course you needed the opportunity, but there are a lot of games that are mod-friendly if you're so inclined. I'd sure encourage and test if tweaking a game peeks their interest, but if it doesn't I wouldn't try with more game time.

How about "USAelection2016"? While Slashdot has always been somewhat US-centric (or, really, North America-centric), the level of unapologetic chauvinism here has gotten worse over the years. This site has a significant non-US user base and readership, and a lot of articles posted regarding international situations (UK government spying, EU IP laws, etc.). US posters and editors ought to maintain at least an iota of respect for the rest of the world, or risk alienating a good chunk of Slashdot's audience.

If it were in existence ~1400 years ago, perhaps we would have nipped Islam in the bud.

If it were in existence ~2000 years ago, perhaps we would have nipped Christianity in the bud.

And I wonder how many readers agreed with my first line, then threw a shit-fit when they got to my second line.

-

I bought my wife a Motorola Tundra. She doesn't want a smart phone, but she does want something that will get reception in the boonies and survive the rigors of horse back riding (or falling off said horse). I have seen that phone light up while at the bottom of a 3' deep creek, and she called me on it after taking a dive off a horse and was in need of an ambulance. So it passes my tests ;)

-Rick

Missing codecs: AAC, H.264, MP3
Missing plug-in: flash

So either patents or not their code, if you got a good solution for that I'm sure Google would like to hear it.

I don't think you have to come up with that many conspiracy theories, Mozilla's "problem" is that they won. They broke Microsoft's monopoly, made HTML/CSS properly standardized and together with KHTML/WebKit/Blink some 80% use an open source renderer though many use it in a closed source binary. Microsoft would be laughed at if they tried any new proprietary extensions and for the rest the implementation details are all in the open.

Their problem can be summed up in two words: "Now what?" and it turns out they didn't really have any other goal in common than slaying the dragon and now the dragon's dead. Some UX designers get to make an art project. Some cowboy coders thinks more releases is better. Some will do anything to get away from the reliance on their biggest competitor. Some security nuts get to go overboard. Some want to go after Android/Chrome OS with Firefox OS, but this time they're not competing against proprietary and neglected shovelware and barking up a tree Ubuntu has made essentially no progress on.

Let's face it, Mozilla mainly won because Microsoft was trying to keep the web from competing with local applications so they could sell Windows licenses, they got to the head of the pack and grinded it to a halt. They didn't want to compete, they wanted to put a spanner in the works for as long as possible. It annoyed many and gave Firefox enormous amounts of goodwill even when it didn't work properly, out of spite for Microsoft people kept using it and pushing for sites to support it. They don't have a clue on how to compete with someone that puts up a fight, which is their second biggest problem.

by "link" I assume you are using a colloquialism for directions to a specific resource. One might think of it as a "Universal Resource Locator".

For instance, there is a "link" to http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... but that does not identify the specific resources you are looking for. To do so, we would need to provide a more specific PAIR of links, for example:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... Page 131, Figure 1.4, TAR predictions 2001-2030

and

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... Page 131, Figure 1.4, Observed Temperature Anomalies

Now, you can argue the quality of the data, the accuracy of the models, and the legitimacy of the authors all you like. But these are TWO fully defined links to the exact information you are looking for.

If you would like to offer up your home address, I will personally pay for a special needs assistant to come to your residence, open a web browser for you, scroll to page 131, show you figure 1.4, and read aloud to you the text and description.

The burden of proof my friend, now lays on your shoulders.

-Rick

Isn't that argument a bit like "I plan to live forever, so far so good"? After all, if it did wipe out all life well then we'd be dead so obviously it hasn't happened yet. Some large extinction event seem to happen once every 50-100 million years, what does a once in a billion year event look like? Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt is about a million times bigger (10^20 kg vs 10^14 kg) than the dino killer. That one isn't going anywhere, but there's clearly quite a few potential total extinction candidates if they came to intersect with Earth's orbit.

Excessive hyperbole is silly, yes...

Global warming is a sloooooooooooooooooow process and even if you burned every bit of coal and oil you wouldn't make Canada into Sahara, it's hardly an extinction level event. A modern day pandemic could presumably kill millions, but it's hardly an existential threat to the human race. Same goes for total thermonuclear war, there's be a lot of direct deaths and many more indirects deads from nuclear winter and starvation but not enough to wipe us out.

Tsar Bomba (most powerful nuke): 50 MT
Chicxulub asteroid (dino killer): 100,000,000 MT

We're not even remotely in the same league. The odds are small that it happens tomorrow but in terms of "worst case" asteroids have everything us humans can come up with beat by far.