I daresay that the Nvidia execs are unaware of that bit of car legislation, all driving company cars and having them serviced at registered brand outlets.

I don't buy that, very old people have survived the past occurrences of swine flue, that's why they are old and living.

No they haven't. They've survived different versions of flu. It changes, the sneaky little bastard.

Unless you were talking about shoving pigs up chimneys...

"Seriously, its just us tech guys now, the RIAA isn't in the room, we can be honest."

*click* Yes. That assertion is correct. It is in fact, 'just us tech guys'. Ha. Ha. Ha. Now, would you kindly repeat that incriminating statement? For, uh. Technical purposes. *click*

Actually, I'm one of those strange people who still mostly buy music. Call it a lingering desire to support musicians, I guess.

Please define exactly how many people you have personally seen die due to allergic reactions to the flu shot. The flu kills 30,000 to 40,000 people annually. Doing some quick research I am having a problem locating exactly how many people die from an allergic reaction to the vaccine each year, but the worst case is "several". So, doing some quick math, your statistics are off by around a factor of 8,000.

I am not sure if your post was a joke. If so, it is not funny.

Get your flu shot people. At the very least, do your research with credible organizations and make an educated decision, not one based on someone saying that you "don't_need it_".

Really? I don't see how it is difficult to understand at all. Someone decided they want to try and force users to go all NVIDIA. I don't agree with it, but I can see how some suit would think it is a great idea.

Mmmh, I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, my collection is also 99.999% legit, save for the odd copy of something bloody hard to find that I got from a friend.

My personal experience on the iZune thing, however, is that a lot of them are bought by young people, who, almost per definition, often don't have the money to buy a lot of the argumentably too expensive on-media music. That drove them to learn how to get the music they want for cheap, and because the industry has been too stupid to swiftly hop on to the digital bandwagon, 'for cheap' became 'downloaded from the internet for free'.

A very convenient habit, and one very hard to break even now that the music industry have started to realise that there is something to this whole intarweb thing after all.

Yes, us older types with a good income and a lot of appreciation for the bands we choose to listen to will buy the stuff, often on physical media.
However, add to the above circumstances the fact that music has become not so much of an art as another mass-produed consumer item to be rammed down the shee-err, valued customers' collective throat, and what incentive is there to pay good money for something that you'll never listen to again in three weeks, when the newest fad buys airtime ?

Again, the above is based on personal experience, but I have a feeling that the share of illegal copies on the world's music players, while spectacularly less than what the MAFIAA wants us to believe, is still a lot more than you seem to think.

They each have their place, but on low end hardware you would never choose vista over XP, so the only way to switch to Vista is buying new hardware also.
I think most people who like Vista over XP either don't run IO intensive applications over a network or never had XP and Vista on the same hardware. I wouldn't mind Vista on a desktop where it's not too pricey to get the additional specifications required by Vista. And their is little doubt at the high end hardware front Vista can be better.
I don't see why I want my dept to pay extra in power consumption, specifications, and OS price so that IT and Sony will have more control over our computers. (warning car analogy) then again I am one of the few that still drives a manual transmission because I don't want a little convenience at the cost of additional maintenance, lower economy, reduced reliability, and higher upfront price.

At least in the USA, unfair and deceptive commercial practices are forbidden by the FTC Act, and deception by omission is still deception.

Quoting from the FTC: "Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment."

The practice of publishing only the positive reviews, without disclosing that fact, appears to be an ommision likely to mislead a consumer, and would therefore be an illegal practice. You didn't say whether the merchant is based in the US, so this may not apply, if they are ouside of US jurisdiction.

Majority of Jewish population in Israel is secular. And if you are born to Jewish parents, you can immigrate, regardless of your beliefs (e.g. only a few percent of more than 1 million russian immigrants are non-atheist). However because of a political system called democracy, religious parties have ~20% representation in the parliament. It's not possible to form a coalition without them, so they are given too much power in a lot of matters, and marriage is one them. The workaround is simple - register your marriage abroad and the state recognizes it, even if it's a gay marriage. A lot of Jewish couples, too, prefer to go this route rather than dealing with rabbis.

Craig Ferguson (of the Late Late Show) had the best joke about it: Vampires with 6 pack abs! Do they come out at night to go to (in vampire mock-scary voice) Goooold's Gym! Then Craig does an impression of Sesame Street's The Count while miming a bench press: "One! One Repetition! Two! Two repetitions!"

He hates these so called Vampires because they should really be pasty white and frail.

ohman maybe offtopic but all for Craig

While you need a decent studio to create a decent music quality, writers can create good-looking PDFs on their computer.

If there is going to be an iTunes book store, publishers and bookstores will take the hit. An author could charge a bit more, and the audience would pay way less. It would be more convenient to buy the book (one can read the first chapter before buying, not something you do in a bookstore. Nor do you have to go there).

Bert

From that article:

It also mentions that data from every country other than Canada fails to support the claim.

My first thought after hearing this "unpublished claim" was that there's heavy selection bias here. People who get flu shots are primarily people who have higher exposure to infectious diseases, such as hospital workers and teachers. If it's true for influenza (spurring them to get a shot) it would be true for H1N1 as well.

Without hearing anything to the contrary (and esp. PaddyM's link showing other researchers see selection bias in the Canada study) the "news" here is really:

People more likely to catch the flu are more likely to catch the flu.

Stunning, isn't it?

Or this could work out in your favor (and the environments no more dead books!). What if we completely cut out the publishers? Set up your own author's webpage with your works on them. All author's pages catalogued on servers, could even be a decentralized server to cut out more middle men. Have your works freely downloadable or for a nominal fee (say the amount you get paid per book by your current publisher). Have a micro-payment system so that individuals can easily pay you small amounts, whether for the book or as a donation. Perhaps even be totally open about your expenses and have a running total of donations vs amount needed to survive/publish the next book in your series.
I think this might be a better system than the current one because there's a bunch of crap out there and once you buy the book you can't do anything about it. Here, you would be supported by people who genuinely appreciate your books and not simply by how many fools your publisher can convince to buy your book.
If the system was wide-spread, there could even be deals made with instant book printers, and people would still be paying less than they are currently.

Yes, never said they weren't. But, so are you impaired from your cellphone/texting, only you're too full of yourself too believe it.

I don't need lessons in German driving from you...I drove on the Autobahns for six years. Yes, I wish we would train our drivers the same way, and yes our lack of any real drivers training is shameful. By the way, if you're going to use statistics, you need to not compare apples to oranges...deaths by percentage of population is a poor comparison...try something like...Germany:6 fatalities/billion miles, U.S.:8 fatalities/billion miles.

I guess 40,000+ isn't a slaughter?

Actually, I do. I vote, and write to my congress critters. Maybe you need to back away from your pipe long enough to stop assuming that you know what other peoples feelings are, and stop judging them. As for what those feelings are, well I'll tell you, since you were so kind. I personally don't give a shit what anyone else does to themselves as long as it doesn't interfere with another persons right to do the same.

I'm sure you're not old enough to remember when people drove around w/o seat belts, and the days before M.A.D.D. I am, and times have changed, and now you see cops pulling folks over for not wearing them. You occasionally see sobriety checkpoints. And, now you're seeing enough of the population that's pissed off enough about the morons weaving down the road that you're very likely to observe police action. So, good luck with your go-fuck-yourself-I'm-gonna-do-whatever-I-want attitude.

Well, you were the "dumbass" that made the claim that you weren't impaired while texting. I was offering an opportunity for you to stand up and prove it, but here's your admission of...well, not really...rookie.

Really, is it all that ironic that the IOC would consider our immigration and the recent crime statistics as reasons to not come here over RIO ? For me at least, I can see their point on a few issues :

1) The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate when measured against citizen head count to incarcerated or otherwise restricted status citizenry (Parole/Probation) of ANY country in the world.

2) A convicted U.S. felon can still travel internationally to other countries, yet the U.S. refuses to consider allowing another country's citizens to arrive here for what constitutes a misdemeanor or less, regardless of time passed

3) Getting back into the country as a citzen or "worse" GC or other status holder is worse than painful if singled out for secondary. I am non-white and get profiled every time I come back, despite having served and having no "reasons" to be flagged other than my last name which is clearly non-american originated.

4) While requiring a VISA or fingerprinting itself is not counter-intuitive to travel, the manner and inconsistency is. Having said that, for being touted as "the land of the free" and "a shining beacon of democracy" is ironic itself when our policies at the border (or even non-border with the TSA and Border Agents) clearly indicate that we are profiling even inside our borders. How do you explain roving road blocks for "immigration" checks just because you happen to be on a road within 100 miles of a border....

5) To host in Chicago, we'd be doing the same things we did in Atlanta. We'd be buying the homeless once again a 1-way ticket to nowhere (or anywhere but "here"), we'd be tearing down projects and displacing people/families to make way for the Olympic Village, and you can be damn sure that the average "Chicagoan" (sp?) would not be able to even get into the venues, much less afford the cost of the tickets being hosted in their own city. This happened in Atlanta where I live in 1996....

6) We just had the summit in Pittsburgh that was shameful in the way it's citizenry were treated as well as most of the peaceful demonstrators. Beatings, the use of a sound cannon and extensive use of tear gas, etc had me thinking initially this was some other country where liberty and democracy/freedom of speech was supressed.... Turns out I was right, but had the wrong country in mind, which was depressing and downright scary

The list could go on with examples, but it would be unfair to clutter the Slashdot database with further examples that are easily googled.
I do love my country and the people in it for the most part, but I'd be lying if I said I believed 95% of the hype that our Tourism Board spews out to attract visitors. I think the loss of tourism and downturn in visitors since we enacted the failed Patriot Act speaks volumes, the rest of the tidbits I shared just add further fuel to the reasons why those who would like to see us (the U.S.) just stay the hell away.
Suffice it to say in my opinion that on the one hand we have U.S. which has clearly become a very dim shadow of itself and the other hand we're trying to portray ourselves, or at least that's my impression as a U.S. Citizen.....