It probably depends on where you live, but I think that you are allowed to work on anything on your side of the main valve. The other side of that valve belongs to the local water company, who may or may not also be your local government. If I am remembering my time at the property management company right, breaking something on the house side of the valve floods your house until you shut it off. But breaking something on the company side of the valve causes a lot more flooding and can affect your whole neighborhood until the water company gets out there and shuts off the line. Which moves it a lot closer to the 'public safety' side of the line.
Well moviepig, I'd hope you're not being elitist since you have a spelling error in your post.;)
Anyway, when you read 'genre-less' (whatever that means) stuff, what do you look for? Are you a characterization guy, er, pig? Can great prose cover all the sins in your world? Do you like Deep Thoughts on Big Ideas? You can always hit rec.arts.sf.written on Usenet or Google groups and say "I like AB&C for their XY&Z qualities, who else writes like that?" They'll be able to give specific and probably endless authors and books to try.
I don't know what you like, but here's my free (and no doubt worth every penny) ideas: Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman.
Ellison writes almost exclusively shorter stuff, but find "Deathbird", "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "Just Adrift Off the Isles of Langerhans" in one of his many collections and see if you like them. Be warned though - he has some opinions that will piss you off either by themselves or by his presentation of them, especially in his non-fiction. How can I say this when I know basically nothing about you? Read some of his stuff and you'll know...
Gaiman on the other hand, writes some creepy, creepy stuff, but seems like he'd be a great neighbor - only too hapy to loan you his tools or cook out with you. _American Gods_ always gets trotted out as his masterpiece, but I liked _Neverwhere_, _Stardust_ and especially _Good Omens_ (with Terry Pratchett) more. He's also written childrens books (_The Day I Traded My Dad For Two Goldfish_ and _The Wolves in the Walls_) and, of course, The Sandman comics. And he got namechecked by Tori Amos in "Tear in Your Hand".
And of course Vernor Vinge's _Fire Upon The Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_ are always worthy of pointing out to someone.;)
Editing isn't just taking x hours of film and reducing it by 90%, any more than sculpture is just taking a big rock and reducing it by 90%. When to use a slower pace of cuts or a faster one, when to wchoose a better 'emotional' result over a better 'technical' one, tying the rhythmn of shots to the score, which montage of shots, etc.
"If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit." - Stanley Kubrick (Some of his movies sure could have used some more of it though...)
There are so few good sf movies realeased in a given year that splitting the award into 'Original' and 'Adapted' like the Oscars, would result in frequent years where some piece of crap won, or no award was given.
Also, some people have noticed some differences between the books and the movies...
The sticky wicket is the lack of a photo on the birth certificate (not that it would do any good if one were included), thus the ease with which one person's ID can be used by another.
I just had to smile when I saw this.
"It's says here you weigh 8 lbs, 7 ounces and are 19 inches long. From the picture you are mostly bald and have a head that is not only pointed, but assymmetrically so. Okay, here's your beer."
However, this doesn't get around the problem of 'clean' id's for incorrect info. Here in the great state of Illinois, our previous governor is under Federal indictment for allowing people get commercial driver's licenses for contributing to his campaign funds while he was Secretary of State. (Check out http://www.pjstar.com/services/news/indictment/dat es.html for a timeline.) Just becuase an ID is issued by a legitmate authority doesn't mean it's a valid ID.
Those who wish for a strictly popular vote do so because they know they (generally liberally-minded folks) can get elected by promising to hand out more doles...
Um, no. Actually a big part of the reason people want to get rid of the electoral college is because of the gut feeling, reinforced in every other US election that I can think of, is that the person with the most votes should win, coupled with the fact that all those ads say is ' for President', not 'Electoral college rep who promises to vote for , honest.' It's a perception problem as much as anything else, and you can be sure that if GWB had a majority in the popular, but had lost the electoral, the people bitching about the electoral college would be The Elephant Ass-Licking Society, not The Jackass-Licking Society.
...can get elected by promising to hand out more doles (or claim their opponent will take away or severely cut their hand-out) to those already dependent upon the gov't for handouts (welfare, social security, etc.) - most of those dependents live in highly populated areas.
Actually, according to the Economic Research Service and USDA (http://www.jcpr.org/conferences/oldconferences/ru ral.html), "most poor and welfare-recipient families live outside of central cities, and substantial minorities live outside of metropolitan areas altogether," and lots of other data at the Joint Center for Poverty Research (www.jcpr.org) show that welfare reform hits rural households harder than urban ones. It seems to be mainly due to fewer jobs available in areas with lower poulation densities. Therefore, reducing 'doles' hits the rural poor harder than the urban poor, which doesn't seem to fit your hypothesis.
Also, you seem to imply that Liberals are the reason for huge government spending. They do spend money, but so do the Conservatives - hence the budget deficits under Bush are frequently compared to the ones under Reagan. Or do you consider these Presidents liberals?
We should also go back to allowing the State Legislatures elect members of the Senate instead of the people directly.
And this would stop the impact of polls how? Sure, the senators would conduct the poll by calling their party boss in the state rather than calling in Gallup, but so what? Since elections are popularity contests, polls in some form or another will be there.
Yeah, everyone talks so much about how she's too skinny, too nasty, too stupid. But I bet nearly anything it was the most downloaded video in internet history.
Well, McDonalds sells more burgers than anyone else, but not too many people think they make the best burgers...
Bringing in boatloads of cash for whom? You are aware that Microsoft doesn't pay income tax aren't you?
Politicians aren't generally concerned about who is paying too little taxes. They are always concerned about whose business is suffering and who may lose their jobs. So when a company the size of MS says they are being hurt, pols listen. Especially when MS starts talking about all their vendors being hurt and every company that sells MS, or every MCSE losing work, politicians start paying lots of attention. Therefore, when big companies are happy and not complaining (rightly or not), politicians are happy.
Would you say that being sued by Liberace for saying that he was gay was a slamdunk win for you?
On the criminal side, would you think that if you were trying an abusive ex-husband for the murder of his wife and a waiter with DNA evidence and a crappy alibi that you would have a slam dunk?
Or you can have your future mother-in-law give you her grandmother's engagement ring to give to your wife. Better design than the newer ones, plus the whole family heirloom thing.
Of course, I get along great with my mother-in-law. There are people out there that would consider a few grand a bargain to not feel like they owe their m-i-l anything. YMMV.
When discussing organisms at the genus level and up, you usually find that looks of seemingly unrelated characteristics are found together. Iirc from my zoology classes a decade-plus ago, mouthparts are pretty variable in insects, so it's not that unlikely that going an insect could be identified as a flyer from just the mouth parts.
Of course, since all fossils are fakes, this discussion is probably moot:)
It shouldn't be so surprising that people get more concerned about things that affect what they hold most dear. If you don't have children, nieces, nephews, young siblings, young cousins, kids in the neighborhood that you care about I suppose your credit card concerns are reasonable. However, one would hope that people who are parents would be more concerned about the physical safety of their children than about their credit rating. Particularly in the case of foster parents, who's biggest fear is often that the biological parents will somehow get the foster children back through one way or another, and for single parents, since a major cause of child abductions are from the other spouse. Oddly enough, this security fuck-up affects those parents more than the average family. So I think that the frothing mouths are completely appropriate.
I used to work for a real estate company in Central Illinois and I Feel Your Pain. The brokers/agents all used weird proprietary apps for different things that wouldn't work together (Win9x era, so they all used different.dlls, with the same names) and would freak out at the idea that they couldn't use their expensive new toys. The local board had the MLS setup so it was accessible only through an expensive front-end to telnet (basically), not a web browser. Then we merged with another company and eventually changed which national company we were franchises of, which led to a whole new set of expensive crap being shoved down our throats.
Then there was working with the agents themselves. I can deal with people who are scared of computers, unless it comes to randomly downloading stuff and opening every e-mail attachment, but the ones who made Annette Benning's character in _American Beauty_ seem rational...
In both cases the facts are the same: Some files were left unprotected and someone read them who was not supposed to have access.
Don't foget that in both cases that somone saw the importance of the data, especially if the data remained secret. Just that in one case the data may have affected the legitmacy of elections, while the other may have affected politics. Oddly enough, the people who were concerned about the legitmacy of the election then made that information public, those reducing its value, while the people who were concerned about the politics of elections kept the data valuable by keeping it secret, and using it for their own benefit.
This is the difference between the two cases - the political snoops 'leaked' the data amongst themselves until they got caught. As I said in a different post, they could have read one of these memos 'inadvertently', and informed the Dems by letting CNN know that the Dems are too stupid to be trusted with the security of the country since they are too stupid to password protect their own stuff. The Reps inspire some jokes, the Dems get red-faced, but really have very little too complain about since if something happens only once it is believably accidental. Likewise, if the Diebold snoops had tried to extort money from Diebold they would be acting like the the Reps did in this instance - keep it secret, keep it profitable. That's the difference.
The problem is that the information wasn't released to the people, unless you that subset of people who work for the Republican Party and some like-minded reporters who were willing to use it for tactical political advantages secretly. Noody posted the memos on the web and sent the link to/. Nobody emailed them to ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. That's not really public. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, they were taken to the largest newspapers in the country and splashed all over them. That's public.
I said that people who are performing an action for the reasons of civil disobedience are willing to do so openly and are willing to suffere the consequences, such as investigation, arrest, trial, monetary expenses and imprisonment for doing those actions. If the snoopers had released the memos to the public and said "See, the Dems are too stupid to use password protection to protect their memos where they say they don't like Latinos who don't toe the party line", that would be closer to the Diebold case. If the Diebold folks had kept the security vulnerabilities to themselves and tried to extort money from Diebold, or attacked the systems Diebold made, that woul be closer to this case. I may not have been clear in my initial post, but that is the difference I was getting at. I am holdly the cases to the same standard. If the Dems had done the same I would be more bothered because I am a liberal and tend to hold people and groups that I support to a higher standard of conduct.
Good point. Of course, there is a difference between leaking info for the greater public good - script kiddies could hijack the next election - versus copying info for tactical political gains. The difference is one between civil disobedience and Washington-business-as-usual. In one, you break a law and are willing to face the consequences becuase it was the right thing to do, in the other, you break the law and figure that you probably won't get cuaght and even if you do your bosses will look out for you, and maybe you'll a better job for doing so. Which is Diebold closer to and which is this closer too?
Itym, "I'd have been looking for the first US/UK unit to surrender to after my panzer broke down/ran out of gas so the Red Army didn't use me for target practice." The Nazis were classic bullies who were too stupid to worry about logistics and got too fat and slow from shooting civilians and stealing art. Even the old school Prussian-wannabes who tried to kill Hitler were expecting to sue for peace and keep all the land they had stolen.
When it comes to access to pols corps get more respect than small businesses who get more respect than the average individual. Hence they get better response such as government bailouts, which I'm pretty sure you business wouldn't have qualified for due to insufficient lobbying power. Your business probably could have qualified for a federal grant, but a single mother of 2 working 37 hours a week (a common cut-off so companies don't have to give benefits) for 8 bucks an hour (37*8*52=$15,392) couldn't qualify for handouts. This is not to say that the small businessperson isn't often between a rock and a hard place, but let's face it if we all called our senator at the same time - BillG gets right through, you can get through to high-level flunky and I get to leave a message for a low-level flunky to get back to me sometime.
Rollins told me that students had been using campus computers in unacceptable ways, and he hoped to make an example of Carl.
So effectively, other kids were causing problems or goofing but didn't get caught, so Carl got bitchslapped for someone else's sins. That's reasonable to me.
Also, from reading the article it sounds like the district has lots of problems with students using school equipment and supplies for non-approved purposes. I am shocked, shocked, to find that young adolescents are sometimes less than 100% dedicated to their schoolwork. I wonder if they would suspend someone for three days if they wrote "Hey" on the blackboard in big letters or read library books for fun when they were supposed to be doing research in the library?
Papers get peer-reviewed before publication (or submittal for that matter) to find flaws in them, suggest fixes for those flaws and in general serve as a check for problems large and small in the work. It doesn't always work that way in practice of course, but that's the idea. Think of it as a private beta test. Papers get peer-reviewed after publication by people who read the journal they were published in. These people will suggest/try additional experiments designed to test the hypothesis and will publicly criticize anything they don't like with widely varying degrees of politeness - "I'm underwhelmed" to "This is obviously faked data".
Also, a theory in the scientific sense is a strongly tested hypothesis that fits the data better than other models do. A lot of what people refer to as theories would, in a strictly scientific context, be considered hypotheses. Or guesses.
The Voynich Manuscript is filled with unrecognizable writing that no one has been able to decipher. To prove the manuscript contains a message it must be successfully deciphered. If they can't decipher it, the question becomes is it undecipherable because the encryption is that good, or is there no message to decipher. People who think that there is a real message have frequently claimed that the manuscript is too long and too complicated to have been hoaxed with the technology available in the 1500's. This research shows that the technology did exist in the 1500's to create a fake manuscript. Also the first appearance of the manuscript is when it was sold for a large sum of money, which provides a rather strong motive for a fraud. So, the Voynich Manuscript is now a document that has withstood decades of cracking, whose first documented appearance was when it was sold for the equivalent of a few kilos of gold, but could have been faked with technology available at the time. This does not prove that it was a fake (a highly difficult proposition), but it makes it much more likely that it is a fake. Of course, all it takes to prove the doubters wrong is to decipher it. And hope the resulting text isn't the equivalent of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', over and over.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably depends on where you live, but I think that you are allowed to work on anything on your side of the main valve. The other side of that valve belongs to the local water company, who may or may not also be your local government. If I am remembering my time at the property management company right, breaking something on the house side of the valve floods your house until you shut it off. But breaking something on the company side of the valve causes a lot more flooding and can affect your whole neighborhood until the water company gets out there and shuts off the line. Which moves it a lot closer to the 'public safety' side of the line.
I think you meant to say "Make sure to include your address and phone number, so he can get back at you. And stop playing tricks on the newbies...
Well moviepig, I'd hope you're not being elitist since you have a spelling error in your post. ;)
;)
Anyway, when you read 'genre-less' (whatever that means) stuff, what do you look for? Are you a characterization guy, er, pig? Can great prose cover all the sins in your world? Do you like Deep Thoughts on Big Ideas? You can always hit rec.arts.sf.written on Usenet or Google groups and say "I like AB&C for their XY&Z qualities, who else writes like that?" They'll be able to give specific and probably endless authors and books to try.
I don't know what you like, but here's my free (and no doubt worth every penny) ideas: Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman.
Ellison writes almost exclusively shorter stuff, but find "Deathbird", "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "Just Adrift Off the Isles of Langerhans" in one of his many collections and see if you like them. Be warned though - he has some opinions that will piss you off either by themselves or by his presentation of them, especially in his non-fiction. How can I say this when I know basically nothing about you? Read some of his stuff and you'll know...
Gaiman on the other hand, writes some creepy, creepy stuff, but seems like he'd be a great neighbor - only too hapy to loan you his tools or cook out with you. _American Gods_ always gets trotted out as his masterpiece, but I liked _Neverwhere_, _Stardust_ and especially _Good Omens_ (with Terry Pratchett) more. He's also written childrens books (_The Day I Traded My Dad For Two Goldfish_ and _The Wolves in the Walls_) and, of course, The Sandman comics. And he got namechecked by Tori Amos in "Tear in Your Hand".
And of course Vernor Vinge's _Fire Upon The Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_ are always worthy of pointing out to someone.
Editing isn't just taking x hours of film and reducing it by 90%, any more than sculpture is just taking a big rock and reducing it by 90%. When to use a slower pace of cuts or a faster one, when to wchoose a better 'emotional' result over a better 'technical' one, tying the rhythmn of shots to the score, which montage of shots, etc.
"If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit." - Stanley Kubrick (Some of his movies sure could have used some more of it though...)
There are so few good sf movies realeased in a given year that splitting the award into 'Original' and 'Adapted' like the Oscars, would result in frequent years where some piece of crap won, or no award was given.
Also, some people have noticed some differences between the books and the movies...
The sticky wicket is the lack of a photo on the birth certificate (not that it would do any good if one were included), thus the ease with which one person's ID can be used by another.
I just had to smile when I saw this.
"It's says here you weigh 8 lbs, 7 ounces and are 19 inches long. From the picture you are mostly bald and have a head that is not only pointed, but assymmetrically so. Okay, here's your beer."
However, this doesn't get around the problem of 'clean' id's for incorrect info. Here in the great state of Illinois, our previous governor is under Federal indictment for allowing people get commercial driver's licenses for contributing to his campaign funds while he was Secretary of State. (Check out http://www.pjstar.com/services/news/indictment/dat es.html for a timeline.) Just becuase an ID is issued by a legitmate authority doesn't mean it's a valid ID.
Those who wish for a strictly popular vote do so because they know they (generally liberally-minded folks) can get elected by promising to hand out more doles...
...can get elected by promising to hand out more doles (or claim their opponent will take away or severely cut their hand-out) to those already dependent upon the gov't for handouts (welfare, social security, etc.) - most of those dependents live in highly populated areas.
u ral.html), "most poor and welfare-recipient families live outside of central cities, and substantial minorities live outside of metropolitan areas altogether," and lots of other data at the Joint Center for Poverty Research (www.jcpr.org) show that welfare reform hits rural households harder than urban ones. It seems to be mainly due to fewer jobs available in areas with lower poulation densities. Therefore, reducing 'doles' hits the rural poor harder than the urban poor, which doesn't seem to fit your hypothesis.
Um, no. Actually a big part of the reason people want to get rid of the electoral college is because of the gut feeling, reinforced in every other US election that I can think of, is that the person with the most votes should win, coupled with the fact that all those ads say is ' for President', not 'Electoral college rep who promises to vote for , honest.' It's a perception problem as much as anything else, and you can be sure that if GWB had a majority in the popular, but had lost the electoral, the people bitching about the electoral college would be The Elephant Ass-Licking Society, not The Jackass-Licking Society.
Actually, according to the Economic Research Service and USDA (http://www.jcpr.org/conferences/oldconferences/r
Also, you seem to imply that Liberals are the reason for huge government spending. They do spend money, but so do the Conservatives - hence the budget deficits under Bush are frequently compared to the ones under Reagan. Or do you consider these Presidents liberals?
We should also go back to allowing the State Legislatures elect members of the Senate instead of the people directly.
And this would stop the impact of polls how? Sure, the senators would conduct the poll by calling their party boss in the state rather than calling in Gallup, but so what? Since elections are popularity contests, polls in some form or another will be there.
Yeah, everyone talks so much about how she's too skinny, too nasty, too stupid. But I bet nearly anything it was the most downloaded video in internet history.
Well, McDonalds sells more burgers than anyone else, but not too many people think they make the best burgers...
Bringing in boatloads of cash for whom? You are aware that Microsoft doesn't pay income tax aren't you?
Politicians aren't generally concerned about who is paying too little taxes. They are always concerned about whose business is suffering and who may lose their jobs. So when a company the size of MS says they are being hurt, pols listen. Especially when MS starts talking about all their vendors being hurt and every company that sells MS, or every MCSE losing work, politicians start paying lots of attention. Therefore, when big companies are happy and not complaining (rightly or not), politicians are happy.
Is there really such a thing as a slam-dunk case?
Would you say that being sued by Liberace for saying that he was gay was a slamdunk win for you?
On the criminal side, would you think that if you were trying an abusive ex-husband for the murder of his wife and a waiter with DNA evidence and a crappy alibi that you would have a slam dunk?
Guess what, Liberace won his suit and OJ walked.
Or you can have your future mother-in-law give you her grandmother's engagement ring to give to your wife. Better design than the newer ones, plus the whole family heirloom thing.
Of course, I get along great with my mother-in-law. There are people out there that would consider a few grand a bargain to not feel like they owe their m-i-l anything. YMMV.
When discussing organisms at the genus level and up, you usually find that looks of seemingly unrelated characteristics are found together. Iirc from my zoology classes a decade-plus ago, mouthparts are pretty variable in insects, so it's not that unlikely that going an insect could be identified as a flyer from just the mouth parts.
Of course, since all fossils are fakes, this discussion is probably moot:)
It shouldn't be so surprising that people get more concerned about things that affect what they hold most dear. If you don't have children, nieces, nephews, young siblings, young cousins, kids in the neighborhood that you care about I suppose your credit card concerns are reasonable. However, one would hope that people who are parents would be more concerned about the physical safety of their children than about their credit rating. Particularly in the case of foster parents, who's biggest fear is often that the biological parents will somehow get the foster children back through one way or another, and for single parents, since a major cause of child abductions are from the other spouse. Oddly enough, this security fuck-up affects those parents more than the average family. So I think that the frothing mouths are completely appropriate.
I used to work for a real estate company in Central Illinois and I Feel Your Pain. The brokers/agents all used weird proprietary apps for different things that wouldn't work together (Win9x era, so they all used different .dlls, with the same names) and would freak out at the idea that they couldn't use their expensive new toys. The local board had the MLS setup so it was accessible only through an expensive front-end to telnet (basically), not a web browser. Then we merged with another company and eventually changed which national company we were franchises of, which led to a whole new set of expensive crap being shoved down our throats.
Then there was working with the agents themselves. I can deal with people who are scared of computers, unless it comes to randomly downloading stuff and opening every e-mail attachment, but the ones who made Annette Benning's character in _American Beauty_ seem rational...
In both cases the facts are the same: Some files were left unprotected and someone read them who was not supposed to have access.
Don't foget that in both cases that somone saw the importance of the data, especially if the data remained secret. Just that in one case the data may have affected the legitmacy of elections, while the other may have affected politics. Oddly enough, the people who were concerned about the legitmacy of the election then made that information public, those reducing its value, while the people who were concerned about the politics of elections kept the data valuable by keeping it secret, and using it for their own benefit.
This is the difference between the two cases - the political snoops 'leaked' the data amongst themselves until they got caught. As I said in a different post, they could have read one of these memos 'inadvertently', and informed the Dems by letting CNN know that the Dems are too stupid to be trusted with the security of the country since they are too stupid to password protect their own stuff. The Reps inspire some jokes, the Dems get red-faced, but really have very little too complain about since if something happens only once it is believably accidental. Likewise, if the Diebold snoops had tried to extort money from Diebold they would be acting like the the Reps did in this instance - keep it secret, keep it profitable. That's the difference.
The problem is that the information wasn't released to the people, unless you that subset of people who work for the Republican Party and some like-minded reporters who were willing to use it for tactical political advantages secretly. Noody posted the memos on the web and sent the link to /. Nobody emailed them to ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. That's not really public. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, they were taken to the largest newspapers in the country and splashed all over them. That's public.
I am holdly the cases to the same standard.
If only I held my spelling to the same standard. Obviously, that should say "holding". Why do I only catch the errors after I've posted?
I said that people who are performing an action for the reasons of civil disobedience are willing to do so openly and are willing to suffere the consequences, such as investigation, arrest, trial, monetary expenses and imprisonment for doing those actions. If the snoopers had released the memos to the public and said "See, the Dems are too stupid to use password protection to protect their memos where they say they don't like Latinos who don't toe the party line", that would be closer to the Diebold case. If the Diebold folks had kept the security vulnerabilities to themselves and tried to extort money from Diebold, or attacked the systems Diebold made, that woul be closer to this case. I may not have been clear in my initial post, but that is the difference I was getting at. I am holdly the cases to the same standard. If the Dems had done the same I would be more bothered because I am a liberal and tend to hold people and groups that I support to a higher standard of conduct.
Good point. Of course, there is a difference between leaking info for the greater public good - script kiddies could hijack the next election - versus copying info for tactical political gains. The difference is one between civil disobedience and Washington-business-as-usual. In one, you break a law and are willing to face the consequences becuase it was the right thing to do, in the other, you break the law and figure that you probably won't get cuaght and even if you do your bosses will look out for you, and maybe you'll a better job for doing so. Which is Diebold closer to and which is this closer too?
Itym, "I'd have been looking for the first US/UK unit to surrender to after my panzer broke down/ran out of gas so the Red Army didn't use me for target practice." The Nazis were classic bullies who were too stupid to worry about logistics and got too fat and slow from shooting civilians and stealing art. Even the old school Prussian-wannabes who tried to kill Hitler were expecting to sue for peace and keep all the land they had stolen.
When it comes to access to pols corps get more respect than small businesses who get more respect than the average individual. Hence they get better response such as government bailouts, which I'm pretty sure you business wouldn't have qualified for due to insufficient lobbying power. Your business probably could have qualified for a federal grant, but a single mother of 2 working 37 hours a week (a common cut-off so companies don't have to give benefits) for 8 bucks an hour (37*8*52=$15,392) couldn't qualify for handouts. This is not to say that the small businessperson isn't often between a rock and a hard place, but let's face it if we all called our senator at the same time - BillG gets right through, you can get through to high-level flunky and I get to leave a message for a low-level flunky to get back to me sometime.
Rollins told me that students had been using campus computers in unacceptable ways, and he hoped to make an example of Carl.
So effectively, other kids were causing problems or goofing but didn't get caught, so Carl got bitchslapped for someone else's sins. That's reasonable to me.
Also, from reading the article it sounds like the district has lots of problems with students using school equipment and supplies for non-approved purposes. I am shocked, shocked, to find that young adolescents are sometimes less than 100% dedicated to their schoolwork. I wonder if they would suspend someone for three days if they wrote "Hey" on the blackboard in big letters or read library books for fun when they were supposed to be doing research in the library?
Papers get peer-reviewed before publication (or submittal for that matter) to find flaws in them, suggest fixes for those flaws and in general serve as a check for problems large and small in the work. It doesn't always work that way in practice of course, but that's the idea. Think of it as a private beta test. Papers get peer-reviewed after publication by people who read the journal they were published in. These people will suggest/try additional experiments designed to test the hypothesis and will publicly criticize anything they don't like with widely varying degrees of politeness - "I'm underwhelmed" to "This is obviously faked data".
Also, a theory in the scientific sense is a strongly tested hypothesis that fits the data better than other models do. A lot of what people refer to as theories would, in a strictly scientific context, be considered hypotheses. Or guesses.
The Voynich Manuscript is filled with unrecognizable writing that no one has been able to decipher. To prove the manuscript contains a message it must be successfully deciphered. If they can't decipher it, the question becomes is it undecipherable because the encryption is that good, or is there no message to decipher. People who think that there is a real message have frequently claimed that the manuscript is too long and too complicated to have been hoaxed with the technology available in the 1500's. This research shows that the technology did exist in the 1500's to create a fake manuscript. Also the first appearance of the manuscript is when it was sold for a large sum of money, which provides a rather strong motive for a fraud. So, the Voynich Manuscript is now a document that has withstood decades of cracking, whose first documented appearance was when it was sold for the equivalent of a few kilos of gold, but could have been faked with technology available at the time. This does not prove that it was a fake (a highly difficult proposition), but it makes it much more likely that it is a fake. Of course, all it takes to prove the doubters wrong is to decipher it. And hope the resulting text isn't the equivalent of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', over and over.