Opera and the Better Mouse Trap

Use Opera 10.1 beta with Unite for one week. One week, and you will understand this post.

Fans unite over products that are obscure for two reasons:
1) I will call the "Stuff White People Like" cause (SWPL is a viral Internet site that has become pop culture). In this case, people talk about their use of obscure products so that they can seem edgy and non-mainstream. The product doesn't even have to be better than the mainstream in this case.
2) A company that is fighting an established market, producing innovative products and the users of these products want to spread the word to help ensure that the innovative company they use does not fall.

So to all three people who may read my blog, I ask that you download Opera 10 web browser and try it for one week. Afterwards, go back and use your current browser and see if you aren't irritated by it. I am stuck on a PC all day at work, and I have downloaded onto my computer the 4 most known browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Opera). I'll be experimenting with some newer ones shortly, but aside from that, 99.9% of my web use is done on Opera 10 (the 0.01% is when some website hasn't coded for anything but Internet Exploder).

Here is what you will find after your week-long trial when switching back to the other three...

Opera Unite!: This feature is incredible. Absolutely novel, and useful. I think that this is the next step in cloud computing. Music, photos, documents, ANYTHING on your computer you can make accessible via the BUILT IN web server from Opera. Thinking about the Go To Meeting program? Why? you can access any of your computers and their files for FREE. If you allow others to have your password, so can they. You can listen to your friend's music, while they read over a document that you have for editing. And the list of applications, chat, stickies, etc. that will surface are going to be amazing.

GESTURES!: Dear sweet baby Jesus, this feature hasn't been stolen yet (like speed dial and tabs were!) and I can't tell why. The mouse does everything without having to hit the back/forward keys, or alt+T to open a new tab, or searching though tabs at the top (though if you do that a lot, you can expand the tabs to show THE ENTIRE WEBPAGE). Right click on the mouse serves as a function when you hold it down, and any swipe with the mouse will perform a different function. If I ever have to open another browser, this is very frustrating!

Mail: If you are on a work server using Outlook, Opera will manage your mail much better than outlook does, and the sending and receiving of mail is much more fluid on your browser. GMail is a dick and doesn't let Opera interface with it. I hate that because GMail is a superior mail client. Assholes.

Notes, widgets, etc: The sidebar on Opera 10 is awesome. You can highlight text and send it to notes for later use, or type them yourself throughout the day without opening Word. Widgets are great for Pandora or other little cool applications. Your downloads are much more easily managed, and contacts are always on hand.

Search: If you haven't made Bing your primary search engine, I suggest you try it. Microsoft hit this one out of the park! And the address bar in Opera 10 is much more intuitive. If you have a website on your speed dial page, you don't have to type anything but the name. If you want to search, just type that into the address bar. You can do this with any search engine set as primary.

Speed: I know speed tests always come up as Opera 10 being slower... Bull. Period.

Skins: Don't like your buttons (size, shape, etc)? CHANGE THEM. And save any skins you like. I use the Crystal Onyx skin and it is sweet.

Anyway... Any time Opera innovates, someone copies. It is like Microsoft and Apple. But this time Apple is the bandit, as are the others. Opera is always on the leading edge

Take the challenge, use Opera 10 for a week on your crappy PC or your Mac.

Duggar family math

The Duggar family, a member of the "full quiver" sect of insanity have decided to have as many children as god will allow them to have. Let's look at the math first, then the flaw in this thinking, shall we?

If each Duggar child, now 19 I think it is, lives by this philosophy, having an average of 10 children each (we'll just assume that Mrs. Duggar is an exceptional breeder, and her children will never measure up, otherwise the numbers get even more ridiculous... plus 10s are easy to work with).

The current population of the US is about 350,000,000, or 3.5x10^8 (from now on, we'll use scientific notation, because anyone reading my blog should have at least graduated from middle school).

If each of the kids produces 10 children, the Dugs will have 180 grandchildren (easy so far). If each of those grandkids have 10, now we are getting better, 1.9x10^3 grandchildren. Now we are at an interesting crux beyond this point. After 3 generations of children, we are now looking at the toll that THOSE great great grandkids will take on the population, just by getting MARRIED, stay with me.

If the children continue to copulate at this rate because "god wills it", we now see that after 7 generations, in 210 years (less than the time the US has been a nation), 1.9x10^7 people will be direct descendants of the Dugs. Coincidentally, that means in the course of marriage, the SAME number of people will be tied up in a relationship with these breeders, thus tying up 3.8x10^7, or 38 million US citizens (which will probably be somewhere around 1/20 of the US population by then, assuming we don't get a good war). Add to that the ruling out of all of the nieces, nephews and cousins of the aforementioned brood. The family would literally constitute the largest standing army on earth.

SO LET'S TALK ABOUT WHAT GOD REALLY WANTS...

Statistically, without modern medicine, this woman would have died from complications during childbirth quite some time ago. Additionally, a great many of them would have died as adolescents, or been born blind, retarded or deaf. Due to modern medicine, those people have been allowed to have a brood the size of a large boyscout troop. If we were to really leave the size of their clutch up to god, would we not ensure survival with modern medicine... YOU CAN'T HAVE ONE AND NOT THE OTHER GOD DAMNIT! You can't reasonably claim that you have left the number of children up to god and then put their health in the hands of the "good" things he has given you, like eye drops and ear tubes, while leaving out the change of bad things, like Downs Syndrom, Tay Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Phenylketonurea, Hemophelia, Muscular Distrophy, or that weird "claw hand" that some people get. Prophylactics fall under the SAME category as the medicine that has keep this breeder and her brood alive since the 1980s.

Nature has done quite well... sorry, "god" has done quite well making sure that exponential breeding like this doesn't let humans, or anything, take over the world. Predation, birth defects, lack of resources (time, attention, food, memory for all of their names and/or appointments, and sanity constraints), and yes, DEATH FROM CHILDBIRTH... they all limit the number of children one can have. These people are hypocrites and unsound thinkers.

Now as a last point... I can't wait to see what all kind of F&$#ed up these kids are going to be. I hope, honestly, that they all make it... but statistically, there is a high probability that one of them will be gay (thus, over 6 generations removing a MILLION people from the gene pool, so F#%@ YOU MODERN MEDICINE, GOD WINS!), and at least 1 or 2 of them will be hippies, a much worse fate than even death.

I have an idea... let this woman continue breeding, let's say 3 more children. And then let's have her give birth with no medicine and see how she fares, and then they can update their website with a NEW book deal, on how it turns out god doesn't give a shit about them after all.