panicsafe

Link to the website Pretty nice movie, actually a bachelor thesis on google's mysterious master plan to take over the world. Interesting to have a look at their arguments. I did not know what google is all involved with but back when I first heard about gmail I knew I'd never gonna use it. I am very fond with privacy and I'd never agree to TOS that allow google to read the contents of my e-mails, even if they contain 100% personal stuff. Tip: if you don't want google to know anything there is to know about you, at least delete your cookies after surfing the web!

We have a Wii at my work, the "Office Wii". Today my two bosses, a colleague and me played the Wii Sport Tennis. As our office is equipped with a beamer we occupied all the space there is to do our strokes. I tell you that was real fun.Why do I tell you this? Well, reading this thread it came to my mind that the Wii has something neither the PS3 nor the XBox have: a real social aspect. It is unlikely to have a PS3 or XBox in your office and you competing in a video game against your boss, is it? Nintendo's Wii, imho, is a revolution of gaming. Something the PS2 started with its karaoke and quiz show games, but the ultimate perfection of social gaming is the Wii, because online gaming was yesterday!

The Chinese are showing that they are a superpower. I am quite surprised at how the USA were shocked about the Chinese demonstration up in space. Hey America, wake up, China will be the most potent superpower on this planet in very few decades. Better get used to it now Anyway, of course it is dangerous that one nation can actually dominate space and the satellites. On the other hand, lately the USA have been sending out many direct threats (like against Iran and NK) as well as many indirect threats (towards China). If China was ever to attack Taiwan the USA promised military help for Taiwan. Now the USA might possibly not because they'd risk their communication backbones.So maybe the Chinese are not just testing themselves, I believe behind their nice and peaceful words that intend to ensnare the West, there is also a strategic and competitive component to any action they take.

I understand what you are saying SportsLegend. Maybe this big paying deal is an attempt to boost the popularity of soccer/football in the United States. Actually you have some good players and your national team is not even that bad. I fear this attempt is futile, just like Robbie Williams trying to conquer the USA with his songs.In my opinion Beckham is going to move to L.A. because his glamour addicted wife and ex-Spice Girl Victoria Beckham wants to become part of the noble Berverly Hills 'high society'. She is tired of living in the dull U.K and in Madrid she cannot stay either. and now needs a challenge - and a new shopping mile Back to sports. I really love Basketball and the NBA, but I don't understand why anybody watches Baseball. It is so interruptive, boring and ... boring to watch. But hey, if you like it that is okay. I don't expect any Americans to like soccer either Having hosted the last soccer world championship (not me, the country I live in) I however need to tell you that it is a pretty damn popular sports around the globe and it was fun celebrating such an international sports event.

Slow down! There are very good explanations to what you found out. Though I admit there are (better) arguments that really let you doubt in a true moon landing, there is also evidence and explanations that make up to it.The weakest argument is your gravity example. The moon has just 1/6th of our gravity. However you can even break a an ankle or leg if you jump too high and land hard or jump of a steep slope. I hope the Chinese will soon make their plan real and fly to the moon. They already considered visiting the US landing sites. Hopefully they find out the truth, because I am honestly interested!

Thank you very much, a very great site you found there. Does anybody know if there is an open source alternative for Adobe Illustrator, just like Gimp for Photoshop?

I have tried Joomla and Wordpress and both have their own intendend use, Joomla being a full feature CMS and Wordpress for smaller and easy solutions. If I were to start a serious and big community I'd use the Community Server by teligent. It is free (depending on the version) and open source, yet it needs a Windows based webserver (IIS) to run as it is written for the .NET Framework.

There is a similar offer on this website: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/. It has no apparent limit to the file size of the image you upload and it is generated within seconds. If you want to enhance the hyperlinks on your website leading to other pages by adding the target's favicon right next to your link, have a look at this nice tutorial: Hyperlink Cues with Favicons

The latest Core 2 Duo Processors are the first Intel processors which would convince me in not buying an AMD for a long time. Before Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo I bought an AMD X2 and now I am quite jealous that Intel's processores are much faster for equal or less money. Anybody has the feeling no matter what computer you buy a month later you regret it?

My first computer was a Commodore 64. We were really proud of it being the only ones around owning one. We could not afford the floppy disk drive right from the start so in the beginning, for me as a kid, the computer was quite dull. With the floppy drive I soon realized that computers are fun - something that excites me until this very day. After the C64 my parents were unwilling to pay for the next generation, the AMIGA 500. Therefore the next computer for me a bit later was an IBM compatible 286 and my first game for it was Police Quest 1

The language indeed seems to be the key to being human. It is so much sophisticated we can use it not just to use it to identify anything in our world, but also to talk about ourselves. This 'meta'-level and the abstraction is what really makes us human I believe. Many of what we do can be found with animals, but our potential for abstraction, philosophy and a most complex, fast developing language makes us differ.

I agree, Opera is a good choice. Most of the time I use either Opera or Firefox.

What you can always do to avoid computer viruses is not use Windows and instead install Linux or MacOS. You automatically rule out 80-90% of the existing viruses out there.

I don't think that people are smarter because they are vegetarians, but people who chose to be vegetarian are smart enough to abstract and understand that meat is not neccessary. As meat gets cheaper and cheaper and vegetables do not it is a tiny luxery to completly abstain from meat. In addition if you want some variation as a vegetarian you need more time for shopping groceries and preparing food. What I am trying to say is that vegetarian might be better educated, because they are usually upper middle class to upper class in terms of society standings. I doubt there is a true correllation between being vegetarian and the IQ which depends on genetic preconditions and the early years of childhood (in which most kids are not vegetarian considering that becoming a vegetarian is a teen/adult's own choice). In the end, having a look at the development of mankind it also becomes obvious that our brains developed because we had quite a high dosis of calories by eating lots of meat. Stone Age man could not have survived relying on plants and herbs, and surviving is also a sign of intelligence

Interesting to read about your views. I am European and though I respect your attitude towards George W. Bush I have no comprehension for it, as hard has I try. What bugs me most is that sane and intelligent people trust a president who provingly led a nation into a war based on lies and deceit. But I am always curious to read opinions from Americans - maybe I will learn to understand... though I doubt it! In the end we are all victims of the society we grew up in.

I cannot remember my last bluescreen. I think in the beginning days of WinXP. If you don't have exotic hardware with instable drivers it is rather unlikely to see them at all. Vista will generate bluescreens because it is missing stable drivers for some hardware.

I think GMail is not an option to use for private communication because Google's terms and conditions seem to have a backdoor that allows them to collect quite a lot of information - and I am not sure what they do with it. I (mis)use google to send large password encrypted rar-files. But I will never give them any personal information nor use Gmail to write to people I know about subjects of my real life.Just my 50 cents...

As for the RAM needed to smoothly run Windows Vista I can tell from experience that 1 GB is sufficient. Vista offers an option to use plugged in USB sticks to expand your RAM by using the USB stick' memory, even without rebooting the system. You just plug in the stick and Vista asks you to use it as RAM.Although USB bandwith and memory access is slower than that of a true RAM chip, it is still much faster than Windows' virtual ram on the harddisk. For security reasons the RAM directed to the USB memory device is encrypted. So even if somebody pulls the stick out of your laptop to sneak on your RAM-data it will remain relatively safe.I love the idea to dynamically expand my RAM using an USB stick. However I have doubts if this can ever be a substitution to a real RAM chip because USB memory devices have a limited number of read and write operations before they die.

I have ADSL2+ for half a year now as it became cheaper. It is truly dependend on the line quality, meaning the distance to the next switch and the attenuation of the copper wire. My ISP offers a maximum of 16 Mbit/s downstream and 700 kpbs upstream. I have full upstream but downstream usually fluctuates somwhere between 12 and 14 Mbit/s. Right now I don't think there is a reason to change my ISP or the access technology. At least in Germany there seems to be no other solution that gives you that much speed for the buck.

Exactly, emulators will always be behind. They don't intend to be up to date. They are being used to revive games you cannot play anymore (because it is a retro game) or for some it is the best substitute for a real console because they lack the money to buy one. Many users of emulators are PC gamers, they'd never buy a console nor console games. For free (and sometimes ilegally) they can however play medium aged console games in addition to their pc games. So in the end it is the pc gamers laughing at console gamers. At least, I haven't seen a console seriously running pc games lately... Out of a technical point of view emulators often run games even better than the original mashine. Take the N64 emulator: On your tv screen you could run the game at the natural NTSC or PAL resolution, which is something around 700x500 pixels. The emulator on the pc allows to run the same games at a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels with Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering activated. That is pretty neat, don't you think? For one thing I always buy the console and don't emulate: The "collector" in me. For me it is great to have all these small consoles and collect all the game-modules and cds. Somehow it satisfies more than having a game folder on a harddrive...

The last song I remember not just to sound good but also carrying a message was System of a Down's song B.Y.O.B. (lyrics). A very cool band making great music and often expressing some of my political convictions.

Not quite, emulators are perfectly legal because they are programmed using reverse engineering. It is the roms that are illegal because creating and publishing roms cannot be done by reverse engineering but only through a pirate copy infringing the licensor's rights. I remember when the first N64 emulators were released Nintendo forced down many sites offering N64 roms. I think by now they don't care for N64, SNES and NES roms offered in the net. You can find a bazillion of them even on non-anonymous sites. Some sort of a legal grey zone, as long as nobody is offended you can download and use them. Of course it is always better to own the games. Actually I am glad the new Wii offers retro games on its virtual console and I already paid a fortune to download many of the old classics Does anybody emulate the C64, Amiga or older PCs? Many of the good old games can be found on abandonware sites and still make a lot of fun to play. For older PC games I recommend DosBox as it runs Dos games with sound and at reasonable speed (meaning not too fast). Fot links you can PM me, though I believe it is perfectly legal to download from these sites. Of course you can always google

They don't neccessarily need price tags on their software to compete with MS. The concepts of free and libre software does not stop the licensor from making money with it. While MS still gets its revenues from selling products (software) there are companies like IBM or SAP which by now make quite some revenues by selling services like consulting. Have a look at MySQL AB, the company sells an open source database system which anybody can download and use for free, even for commercial applications. Yet they make money by selling training for their products, support services and consulting. Not that any of these services make enough money to beat MS yet, but companies like google will profit from the growing demand to use software online, exactly when it is needed and paid only for the amount of usage. Again, I believe online software products which you use right in the Internet, without the need to purchase in a box, will be the future. Next example is Google Earth and Google Maps. You download a small client or use it directly online, the valuable data always remaining with Google. Great software having almost no competitor. For this kind of software we will never be charged for. But imagine a Google Office, online, the basic version for free, the commercial version paid by use or by subscription. I predict the end of MS domination in this market very soon after. Is it just me not willing to pay 300+ /$ for a MS Office of which I only need half the programmes if I could instead use a Google Office that would charge me a small usage fee for what I exactly used instead?

I don't intend to be offensive, but a problem could be that you don't know how it is done. Truly, running a public blogger-type service needs quite some knowledge and skills, beside some resources. In addition you need a good database design, performant code, security measures, - as already pointed out - bandwidth and a few potent servers. That is a full time job and could hardly be done by a single person. That all depends on how big you want to run the service. Do you want to run it for your friends, a closed community (a gaming clan) or the open public? What are your skills and who will help? To start with you could install and customize a community portal software that allows members to have their own blog hosted. Have a look at the Community Server by telligent. Keep us informed on your plans, maybe you find someone to help you here.

It will for sure not make Iraq a safer place. I agree that there are people who in some way or the other deserve death for their doings, yet an execution is rather useless, in my eyes it is a crime. A state driven murder, no more no less. I have no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, he was an insane and brutal dictator, but I don't want him dead either. I have empathy for him, at least I understand that going to death awake and aware is a psychological torture out of my imagination. I'd agree that is own actions led him there, but I still oppose the Iraqi's urge to hang this man as it will not undo the killing and it will not make Iraq a better place.