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Submission + - Einstein letter calling Bible "pretty childish" to be auctioned on eBay (theatlantic.com)

cheesecake23 writes: In an admirably concise piece in The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen summarizes Einstein's subtle views on religion and profound respect for the inexplicable, along with the news that a letter handwritten by the legendary scientist that describes the Bible as a 'collection of honorable, but still primitive legends' and 'pretty childish' will be auctioned off on eBay over the next two weeks. Bidding will begin at $3 million.

Comment Re:AMD has forbidden testers to write about cpuper (Score 1) 223

I think you're seeing conspiracy theories where none exist. The place I copied the text from had som text in Swedish there within "[]" since it at least was in the NDA at the time to not mention the date. So I just replaced that with "something" not to confuse people and I thought it important to get the news out there about AMDs shady practices.

Let me tell you something about why they do this. Most people will just see the first "reviews" (as they think). They will skip over all "this is just a preview, AMD has only allowed of game testing" and so on and at most read the conclusion or look at the graphs and be fooled, yes fooled, into thinking "wow! that's a really good processor".

Oktober 2 is far far into the future in that regard. It's like the newspapers publishing something and that "correcting" it a few days later, 99% of the people who's heard about it will beleive what they first heard.

That's we it's a shady and underhanded tactic and you AMD fanbois will cry and bitch to no end about it if Intel/Nvidia ever do the same.

Nvidia: "You can release Battlefield 3 tests@1080p, no other tests until next week"
You: "OH, MY GAWD!!! what cheeeeets!!!!1"
Me: "This is just the kind of shady tacticts AMD pulled."
Nvidia Fanbois: "Nvidia are angels. You're post is silly, everybody can just read about it next week."

Comment AMD has forbidden testers to write about cpuperfor (Score 5, Interesting) 223

AMD has apparently forbidden testers to write about cpuperformance.

In their NDA-contract it's specified

"In previewing x86 applications, without providing hard numbers until October [something], we are hoping that you will be able to convey what is most important to the end-user which is what the experience of using the system is like. As one of the foremost evaluators of technology, you are in a unique position to draw educated comparisons and conclusions based on real-world experience with the platform,"

and

"The topics which you must be held for the October [sometime], 2012 embargo lift are
        - Overclocking
        - Pricing
        - Non game benchmarks"

So the reviews coming out are only from sources that has decided to go along with those "guidelines". In other words, not complete, I would say extremly biased.

Comment Re:A great step forward (Score 1) 190

Sorry, you're just wrong. Look at the statistics again. This is true for all countries and all cultures for the last hundred years.

"Culture" can have a .1 or .2 margin of effect on this. If chjld mortality decreases, 10-20 years after that

First infant mortality drops, then the number of children per women.

www.gapminder.org. Show me a case where this isn't true.

The only way to stop world population increasing exponentially is to give health care, medicin and prosperity to all the world, not the other way around.

Comment Re:A great step forward (Score 1) 190

Yes they are (family planning). Maybe you shouldn't think most people are as dumb as you are?

The "if we cure [disease] then more people are going to survive more people will be exist" is false and have proven to be false again and again in reality. It's only true for real stone-age condtions. The number of people living in those conditions today are 100.000 in total and not statistically significant.

The reality today are are that the more people we save and the more people that get access to medicin, helth care and so on the LESS people will be born and this will REDUCE total population, not the other way around.

In the same way, wars also increase population.

For more on this search for examples of Hans Rosling speeches.

Patents

Zynga and Blizzard Sued Over Game Patent 179

eldavojohn writes "Thinking about developing a game involving a 'database driven online distributed tournament system?' Well, you had better talk to Walker Digital or risk a lawsuit, because Walker Digital claims to have patented that 'invention' back in 2002. The patent in question has resulted in some legal matters for the makers of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: World at War, Blur, Wolfenstein, DJ Hero 2, Golden Eye 007, World of Warcraft and its expansions, Mafia Wars, and many others.' Walker Digital (parent company of Priceline.com) said it's not sure how much damages are going to be, and requested that through discovery in the court. If you think Walker Digital is not a patent troll, check out their lawsuit from two months ago against Facebook for using privacy controls Walker Digital claims to have patented. It would seem that any online competitive game that uses a database to select and reward contestants in a tournament could potentially fall under this patent — of course, those with the deepest coffers will be cherrypicked first."
Iphone

Real Reason Why the White iPhone 4 Is Delayed 182

tekgoblin writes "There have been numerous reasons why the White iPhone 4 may be delayed with one reason being the color mismatch between the home button and the body. Well this time there is another reason. A source has told CultofMac that the reason for the delay is a light leakage issue caused by the case being clear. Light from the case leaks into pictures taken by the back and front camera on the white iPhone 4, causing distorted pictures. This problem is non-existent on the black iPhone 4, because of its already black case, so Apple has been looking for a solution to this problem, thus the delay of the White iPhone 4 till spring of next year."

Comment Re:Steve and his FUD (Score 1) 514

The lie: 0.55% of users with cases that Apple _registers_ av "antenna problems". They might have had tousands of calls which they simply don't count or labels as, I don't know, user errors ;)

"User held the phone in the wrong hand! -> user error, not "antenna problem" since Jobs said "there is no antenna problem"

Tadaa, nice statistics!

Science

Empathy Is For the Birds 201

grrlscientist writes "Common Ravens have been shown to express empathy towards a 'friend' or relative when they are distressed after an aggressive conflict — just like humans and chimpanzees do. But birds are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes, so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?"
Microsoft

Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral 151

Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

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