As he stated at the beginning of the demo, the plugin was still in development and there appeared to be a multitude of sliders and settings to set in order to get any particular photo to come out 'just right'. I'm assuming he had limited stage time and felt that saving all those settings to be loaded on an as needed basis would save time.

Otherwise, would you have been more content to sit there and watch him fiddle with sliders and settings for 5-10 minutes per photo in order to achieve the results he produced with saved settings? In fact, he explicitly stated that he was loading some presets.

Additionally, if you look at the file size column when he loads the pre-defined parameters, they are single-didgit file sizes, Most likely 1 KB each.

Imagine someone who's never been exposed to company A or their products, but runs across company B products, which are a derivative work of company A's products.

Now imagine that this person enjoyed company B's products so much that they had to have everything that relates to it, so they go out and but all related works produced by company A. Now remember, this person may have otherwise never been exposed to company A's products if it weren't for their exposure to derivative works produced by company B.

Don't tell me this would be a rare occurrence, for this has happend to me many times with respect to music, video, and written works. I have, through consumption of products that infringe on copyright, spent money to acquire the works that inspired them to begin with.

I refuse to ever vote strategically. It will lead to the downfall of a nation if everyone were to think like this. I've always voted for the party/candidate that best represents my interests, which generally happens to to be the NDP. Yes, I am splitting the leftist vote, but at least I can say I haven't sold out my values for the sake of having a lesser of two evils in government.

If everyone were to vote with the mindset of "oh, I don't want them in power, so I'll vote for the most popular opponent", we'll quickly end up with a two-party system not unlike that of the United States. Think of this another way, imagine how many more seats the NDP would have had in the last election if people did not vote strategically! There were very many close calls between the NDP and Conservatives/Liberals in many ridings.

No, I am sorry, I will not cast my vote based on who I don't want in power. I would much rather place a positive vote towards those who I would like to see running this country instead.

I can't help but reply to this.

I upgraded my home server from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. After the update completed and I rebooted, the system happily announced that I was now running Xubuntu and then refused to boot until I remove the "biosize=16" option for my XFS drives in fstab.

Once the system did boot up, it wouldn't start X, but instead preferred to sit at a swiftly flickering console that could cause seizures.

I think I'll switch back to Gentoo now. =D

Actually, isn't the satellite simply intercepting the energy that would have made it to the Earth anyhow?

If this system has about a 50% efficiency, then isn't this satellite actually blocking the other 50% of said energy from actually ever reaching the earth?