Do a search on google for Kiosk mode linux. There are a couple of projects out there. The idea with a kiosk is that it is a public machine dedicated to web surfing only, which would include using web based e-mail. It should be locked down really tightly, because people love to play with public machines.
I would suggest using icewm as a window manager. It runs fast on slower machines and the configuration files are easy to read and understand even before your read the fine manuals. I would also suggest mozilla as your web browser. You can really restrict it by changing lines in the.js and.rdf files.
Ah, but there is a sort of balance here. The members of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President, someone elected by the people. Therefore (in theory, and this is all in theory because in practice the Mouse always wins as does whoever has the most money) the Supreme Court is a reflection of the will of the people, because the people's representative appointed the members. And the representatives of the people in the form of Congress voted to permit the President's choice to be a member of the Supreme Court. As aside, that is the main reason I think the representatives have a duty to vote a nominee up or down based on purely political reasons. A senator or representative is a stand in for the people of his or her district; if the people the senator represents are mainly republican, that is good enough to vote against a nomination made by a democrat. That political approval is part of the system of checks and balances. In theory a president can't appoint someone from the far right or the far left, because the nominee must be politically palatable to a majority of the people who approve the nomination.
But I digress. If the Supreme Court oversteps its bounds by making law, then there are two main checks to that overstep. First, congress can pass a law that fits within the court's holdings but that still accomplishes the same end. Remember, sometimes it isn't the end that the Supreme Court objects to, it is the means. And we should all understand why the ends don't justify the means. The second main check to an overreaching court is an amendment to the constitution. If the Supreme Court says that there is no consitutional right to share music, then get an amendment passed to make sharing music a constitutional right.
So there are checks and balances, they just aren't the main ones that people learn in civics class.
I didn't think the smiley at the end was necessary. Guess it was. Either that or I didn't catch the implied smiley in your message.;)
Yeah, personally I'd like you to vote democratic. Overall, their party represents my view more than the republicans and I want the dems to be in office.
Is it OK if I hope Democrats don't win a majority this year?
No, no it isn't ok.
The funny thing is, that given both parties' theoretical underpinnings, an argument can be made that both parties should favor consumer rights over corporate rights.
In a very broad sense, Republicans see themselves as a hands off, less government is better party. That means they should oppose laws restricting the rights of individuals because those laws would increase government power at the expense of individual rights. Obviously some of the positions in their party plank are at odds with this line of reasoning.
On the other side of the spectrum, Democrats see more government as a way to help people and that people's rights flow from the government. They should be in favor of laws that enumerate consumer rights. And they should oppose laws that put corporations ahead of people. Obviously some of the positions in their party plank are at odds with this line of reasoning.
I find it helpful when I write to my representatives in congress, with paper and pen not keyboard and pixels, to show not only why a particular bill is bad or good, but how that bill fits into the bill fits into the party's platform and philosophy, depending on what party a particular representative belongs to. So they can see 1) this isn't just a form letter and 2) how my wishes fit into their philosophy of government.
Redhat 8 v Mandrake 9 1 dufus's opinion
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I played with Mandrake 9 last week and I downloaded and installed RedHat 8 on Monday of this week. So I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the differences in the distributions.
I've used Mandrake more, so I'm more familiar with its menu structures and way of doing things, but I hope my comments are objective. Or at least that my subjective opinions are biased for other reasons than my experience with Mandrake.
Both the installations were pretty easy. The only slight edge I would give to Mandrake is that if you are adding or removing packages it will tell you immediately what other packages will be added or removed. With Redhat, you select your packages, then it tells you all at once what dependencies are required. My preference would be a combination of these two approaches so that I don't have to say ok constantly, like on Mandrake, but I can easily make a choice about whether I really do want to get rid of efax if kde-utils depends on it. For example.
Another point against the Mandrake install is that I don't have the option to put in a grub password if I choose grub as my boot loader. And I couldn't find it in the preferences after install either.
For the desktop user, neither one of these is really an issue.
After install, I found Mandrake to be quicker and more responsive. I don't know if that is because Mandrake is using i586 compiled rpms and Redhat was 386. My test computer at work is a pII 300 with 196 megs of ram.
At first I thought it was a kde vs gnome problem, but Redhat felt slower even with kde.
As far as the look and feel, Mandrake had a reasonably consistent look to it for both gnome and kde. Yes, the themes were different, but that isn't a big deal. The menu structure, desktop icons and wallpaper were the same for both gnome and kde. While I like the idea of a common theme for both gnome and kde and think that RedHat could have executed it better. They did a good job, but I'm still up in the air on whether it was necessary.
The Mandrake menu structure is more complicated than RedHats in that it has more choices and more submenus. The upside is that the labels are more specific, including a really basic "what can I do now" menu item for beginners.
Mandrake also has a winner in the Mandrake Preferences application. Very well done. RedHat's configuration tools are just as impressive, and I prefer their theme and icons, but they aren't as convenient.
The only big problem I had with RedHat was that Apache did start. A quick check of the logs showed that it couldn't resolve the domain name (dhcp_ipaddress as assigned by the dhcp server) but once I added it to/etc/hosts, it worked just fine. Mandrake's install of apache didn't have this problem.
It's really a toss up as to which one I like. So I'll have to try suse next.
Check in to a procedure called intacs. It's for nearsighted people only. What they do is slip a transparent ring into your cornea to deform it into the right shape. It is supposed to be easily removable (not 100% reversable, since few surgeries are that) and it won't blind you in a worse case scenario.
3) Was watching the Fifth Element in under 5 minutes from the time I started downloading. Fast forwarded through the FBI junk even.
The only way it could have been easier was with a single download that was executable and just by double clicking it would install everything. That wouldn't be too hard to add though.
Too bad Gould didn't live just a few more months to see this. I haven't read the article, but the idea would certainly seem to support Punctured Equilibrium. I would hope that he at least had access to some of the data before publishing.
Could you give a longer example of RPN? I can't see the difference between:
6 enter 12 +
and
6 + 12 enter
In both cases I press 5 keys, "6", "+", "1", "2", and "enter" it is only the order that changes. And I can't think of an example of how it would work to save keypresses.
But does being Intelligent mean that something is alive?
Sentience does not necessarily require intelligence, although it certainly implies it. Sentience is the ability to feel and experience while sapience is "wisdom" or "intelligence" whatever those things are. The machines in TNG were both sentient and sapient. The Federation cares about both sentience and sapience. I believe there's another episode where they mention that their terraforming projects won't touch a world if it has so much as a bacterium on it.
A similar debate is just now starting about our exploration of Mars. If it had life on it, what is the possibility that that life still exists somewhere. And if it exists, what should we do to make sure that we don't accidentally exterminate the 1 possible instance of extra-terrestrial life we have ever encountered.
Pick two different law firms guaranteed to be around in 5 years, which shouldn't be too hard. Have them each keep a copy of all pertinent papers in a 2 separate firesafes in 2 separate buildings, preferably in two separate states of low import. For example, North Dakota and Alaska. Then just pay the lawyers to hire a pr firm in 5 years and pimp the product.
Your question implies two things: 1) a very short time span. "A few years," you say. 2) Civilization as we know it today will still be around in those 2 years. In other words, you don't seem to be worried about making sure the survivors of a nuclear war will be able to make use of your discovery. You just seem to want to make sure that someone will be around in you disappear off the face of the earth.
Ah, I have it. You've discovered a cheap, non-polluting, renewable substitute for oil. It can both power vehicles with no emissions and produce biodegradable plastics. No wonder you're scared. You're lucky you aren't under arrest for being a terrorist.
Yes, people are starving. But more food is produced every year than is eaten. The US pays farmers not to grow crops, it pays them for their over production and then puts the crops in a warehouse, never to be seen again until it spoils and must be destroyed.
So obviously we have the means *right now* to end all hunger on the planet. We simply don't care (because most of the people who are starving are black and in countries with no political importance), can't (because those countries are openly hostile to us and either won't accept our help or steal what help we do send), or won't (does anyone know the last time we sent aid to Cuba? I know Castro offered to provide medical care to the people of Appalachia, which has some of the poorest people in the country.).
Remember when the Russia sub sank? We offered to help and they wouldn't take it because of pride. A similar situation occured a few years before that where we needed help but we wouldn't take the Russians up on their offer because, well, duh, they're the Ruskies.
That having been said, I don't think a human mission to mars is the way to go. I've always been in favor of colonizing permanent space stations, then the moon, then from there to Mars.
Better to send a robotic mission to Mars when searching for life, to eliminate any chance of possible contamination, no matter how small that chance is.
There are two main problems with this study as you sort of pointed out was that it was completely biased and conducted in a way to get the required results. SOP of course.
1) How many people who don't have a background in science would realize the oxygen di-hydride is the same as H20? So the study purposefully used a non-common name in an effort to make the compound seem more "neutral" which was a good thing.
2) Only the negatives were described without a listing of the benifits. Of course if you don't tell people of the useful features of something and only tell them the negatives they will favor a ban. Duh.
There was also a really good episode of Yes, Minister (or maybe Yes, Prime Minister) that dealt with the same thing. They were going to build a plant that produced as a waste product metadioxin. The used the fact that the name was like dioxin to keep the plant from being built. I forget the entire plot, but as usual with this series, it was very good.
In theory yes, provided that you aren't talking about oem versions of windows, which I believe are required to stay with the machine they came on. But always make sure to read the license.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought so. Either that or the hippie growing pot was self-referential and the dude was simply not in his right mind when he answered.
I figure the second page is all a chatbot, considering that the answers have little to do with actually answering the questions. Of course he is an academic, so the natural tendancy is to ramble on and on without answering the question.
I didn't want to get into the jargon file and what is the "correct" usage of hack/hacker when I made the original comment. I was trying to point of the double standard. Slashdot can use "Hack" in a headline but if cnn or foxnews said that a hacker was arrested for stealing credit card numbers, people would be all over them for misuse.
ESR's authority to "deprecate" the meaning of the word for his or anyone else's little ego reasons.
The correct term is amelioration - the changing of the definition of a word to a better connotation. Happens all the time in the world. ESR doesn't have the authority, but users of the language do. The opposite is pejoration. Examples of amelioration are praise (originally a synonym for appraise), knight (originally a servant), and earl(originally just a man). More examples of amelioration and pejoration are left as an exercise for the student.
How many times have people here wailed at the non-tech press for using the word "hack" to describe what most would technically term a "crack"? Well if you ever actually read the article, you'd see that Princeton didn't hack or crack. They used the ssn and birthdate supplied to them by their own applicants to access Yale's pages. In other words, they had the users' login and passwords and used them. Not a hack, not a crack. Thoroughly evil of course, but "merely" a lie.
You might want to look at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/el/teachingzone/cae/coursework/reports/apostrophe.html where they specifically use "CDs" as an example of a plural that "NEVER EVER" needs an apostrophe. The confusion arises because plurals of letters and numbers do take apostrophes as in "Missippi has two p's." "Use an apostrophe and s to form the plural of letters, numbers, and signs, and for words referred to as words." (Punctuation Rules)
CD is either an abbreviation of cd-rom that doesn't use periods period or it is an acronym for Compact Disc. In either case, cd has become a word in its own right in the same way that scuba has. The confusion arises because we pronounce the word as if it were just the letters and letters do take the apostrophe.
Let's say I hear a song by A on the radio and go to Best Buy and buy the cd. I open it up and it sucks, so I return it for store credit. You can still do that, right? I was able to listen to the album and find out it is crap, then get my money (or the equivalent) back. Did this hurt the musician? It didn't help them, because they didn't get my money, but I certainly don't think that is stealing.
Or let's say I had a friend and listened to the album at his house. He says, "You got to hear how bad this is." So I do, and agree I wouldn't buy it. That didn't harm the artist.
How about buying the cd used? How about checking it out from the library? (How many people here knew most libraries have cd's to check out?)
It is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line?
I draw it by buying albums that I actually listen to and deleting the crap I download but don't like.
start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what
How did the Greatful Dead do it? They made money from concert tickets, t-shirt sales (Hey, that's the sweetest pie! quoth Krusty.) and probably a little from album sales. But they never really cared about concert bootlegs. Don't know how they felt about trading actual albums.
I'm not a deadhead by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe someone can explain.
you can expect to see politicians caring only about california, and the northeast
Yeah, like they pay a lot of attention to Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Oklahoma, the Dakotas now. And I remember how voters in California and New York were devastated because everyone ignored them in the last election.
Since the electoral college votes are based on number of representatives + number of senators, everyone starts of with a minimum of 3 electoral votes. More populated states get more representatives in the House, so they get more electoral votes. And oddly enough, presidential candidates spend more time campaigning in states with more electoral votes. In other words, where the population centers are. That won't really change.
The other thing that drives campaigns is the primary/caucus season. Lot's of little states, like Iowa, have early primaries and get heavy, disproportionate campaigning. I wouldn't advocate getting rid of the primaries, in fact if you implement the "second choice" method of voting, you will see more candidates, and that is the idea.
The other issue is fairness. A state with a low population has a guaranteed electoral count of 3, no matter how low the population sinks. So that means that each voter there has a disproportionately high influence on the outcome of an election. 1,000,000 people may cast 3 votes, but 100,000,000 may only cast 20. You don't see candidates flocking to North Dakota because the votes are worth proportionately more there. Candidates go to the swing states and leave "safe" states alone right now.
I don't really see where there would be a big shift in campaign strategy after the primaries if you did away with the electoral college. I've heard plenty of people say it, but know one ever proves it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a search on google for Kiosk mode linux. There are a couple of projects out there. The idea with a kiosk is that it is a public machine dedicated to web surfing only, which would include using web based e-mail. It should be locked down really tightly, because people love to play with public machines.
.js and .rdf files.
I would suggest using icewm as a window manager. It runs fast on slower machines and the configuration files are easy to read and understand even before your read the fine manuals. I would also suggest mozilla as your web browser. You can really restrict it by changing lines in the
Ah, but there is a sort of balance here. The members of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President, someone elected by the people. Therefore (in theory, and this is all in theory because in practice the Mouse always wins as does whoever has the most money) the Supreme Court is a reflection of the will of the people, because the people's representative appointed the members. And the representatives of the people in the form of Congress voted to permit the President's choice to be a member of the Supreme Court. As aside, that is the main reason I think the representatives have a duty to vote a nominee up or down based on purely political reasons. A senator or representative is a stand in for the people of his or her district; if the people the senator represents are mainly republican, that is good enough to vote against a nomination made by a democrat. That political approval is part of the system of checks and balances. In theory a president can't appoint someone from the far right or the far left, because the nominee must be politically palatable to a majority of the people who approve the nomination.
But I digress. If the Supreme Court oversteps its bounds by making law, then there are two main checks to that overstep. First, congress can pass a law that fits within the court's holdings but that still accomplishes the same end. Remember, sometimes it isn't the end that the Supreme Court objects to, it is the means. And we should all understand why the ends don't justify the means. The second main check to an overreaching court is an amendment to the constitution. If the Supreme Court says that there is no consitutional right to share music, then get an amendment passed to make sharing music a constitutional right.
So there are checks and balances, they just aren't the main ones that people learn in civics class.
I didn't think the smiley at the end was necessary. Guess it was. Either that or I didn't catch the implied smiley in your message. ;)
Yeah, personally I'd like you to vote democratic. Overall, their party represents my view more than the republicans and I want the dems to be in office.
Is it OK if I hope Democrats don't win a majority this year?
No, no it isn't ok.
The funny thing is, that given both parties' theoretical underpinnings, an argument can be made that both parties should favor consumer rights over corporate rights.
In a very broad sense, Republicans see themselves as a hands off, less government is better party. That means they should oppose laws restricting the rights of individuals because those laws would increase government power at the expense of individual rights. Obviously some of the positions in their party plank are at odds with this line of reasoning.
On the other side of the spectrum, Democrats see more government as a way to help people and that people's rights flow from the government. They should be in favor of laws that enumerate consumer rights. And they should oppose laws that put corporations ahead of people. Obviously some of the positions in their party plank are at odds with this line of reasoning.
I find it helpful when I write to my representatives in congress, with paper and pen not keyboard and pixels, to show not only why a particular bill is bad or good, but how that bill fits into the bill fits into the party's platform and philosophy, depending on what party a particular representative belongs to. So they can see 1) this isn't just a form letter and 2) how my wishes fit into their philosophy of government.
I played with Mandrake 9 last week and I downloaded and installed RedHat 8 on Monday of this week. So I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the differences in the distributions.
/etc/hosts, it worked just fine. Mandrake's install of apache didn't have this problem.
I've used Mandrake more, so I'm more familiar with its menu structures and way of doing things, but I hope my comments are objective. Or at least that my subjective opinions are biased for other reasons than my experience with Mandrake.
Both the installations were pretty easy. The only slight edge I would give to Mandrake is that if you are adding or removing packages it will tell you immediately what other packages will be added or removed. With Redhat, you select your packages, then it tells you all at once what dependencies are required. My preference would be a combination of these two approaches so that I don't have to say ok constantly, like on Mandrake, but I can easily make a choice about whether I really do want to get rid of efax if kde-utils depends on it. For example.
Another point against the Mandrake install is that I don't have the option to put in a grub password if I choose grub as my boot loader. And I couldn't find it in the preferences after install either.
For the desktop user, neither one of these is really an issue.
After install, I found Mandrake to be quicker and more responsive. I don't know if that is because Mandrake is using i586 compiled rpms and Redhat was 386. My test computer at work is a pII 300 with 196 megs of ram.
At first I thought it was a kde vs gnome problem, but Redhat felt slower even with kde.
As far as the look and feel, Mandrake had a reasonably consistent look to it for both gnome and kde. Yes, the themes were different, but that isn't a big deal. The menu structure, desktop icons and wallpaper were the same for both gnome and kde. While I like the idea of a common theme for both gnome and kde and think that RedHat could have executed it better. They did a good job, but I'm still up in the air on whether it was necessary.
The Mandrake menu structure is more complicated than RedHats in that it has more choices and more submenus. The upside is that the labels are more specific, including a really basic "what can I do now" menu item for beginners.
Mandrake also has a winner in the Mandrake Preferences application. Very well done. RedHat's configuration tools are just as impressive, and I prefer their theme and icons, but they aren't as convenient.
The only big problem I had with RedHat was that Apache did start. A quick check of the logs showed that it couldn't resolve the domain name (dhcp_ipaddress as assigned by the dhcp server) but once I added it to
It's really a toss up as to which one I like. So I'll have to try suse next.
Check in to a procedure called intacs. It's for nearsighted people only. What they do is slip a transparent ring into your cornea to deform it into the right shape. It is supposed to be easily removable (not 100% reversable, since few surgeries are that) and it won't blind you in a worse case scenario.
They are more expensive though.
Ogle.
1) Downloaded the rpms.
2) Did rpm -ivh *.rpm.
3) Was watching the Fifth Element in under 5 minutes from the time I started downloading. Fast forwarded through the FBI junk even.
The only way it could have been easier was with a single download that was executable and just by double clicking it would install everything. That wouldn't be too hard to add though.
Too bad Gould didn't live just a few more months to see this. I haven't read the article, but the idea would certainly seem to support Punctured Equilibrium. I would hope that he at least had access to some of the data before publishing.
It's up to 3 downloadable iso's now.
Could you give a longer example of RPN? I can't see the difference between:
6
enter
12
+
and
6
+
12
enter
In both cases I press 5 keys, "6", "+", "1", "2", and "enter" it is only the order that changes. And I can't think of an example of how it would work to save keypresses.
The menu links work fine for me in Mozilla 1.1 in win xp prof., but Moz messes up the location of the menu on subpages.
Beautiful, a thousand thank yous. This has been the most annoying "feature" of Moz/Netscape I've run across.
/. had done that, so I wondered why it wasn't working.
Two caveats though:
1) Slashdot inserted a space in the line. Took me a few restarts before I noticed that
2) This still opens a second Mozilla window which needs to be closed.
So thanks to you for the info, and a good job to the Mozilla developers for putting this in.
But does being Intelligent mean that something is alive?
Sentience does not necessarily require intelligence, although it certainly implies it. Sentience is the ability to feel and experience while sapience is "wisdom" or "intelligence" whatever those things are. The machines in TNG were both sentient and sapient. The Federation cares about both sentience and sapience. I believe there's another episode where they mention that their terraforming projects won't touch a world if it has so much as a bacterium on it.
A similar debate is just now starting about our exploration of Mars. If it had life on it, what is the possibility that that life still exists somewhere. And if it exists, what should we do to make sure that we don't accidentally exterminate the 1 possible instance of extra-terrestrial life we have ever encountered.
Pick two different law firms guaranteed to be around in 5 years, which shouldn't be too hard. Have them each keep a copy of all pertinent papers in a 2 separate firesafes in 2 separate buildings, preferably in two separate states of low import. For example, North Dakota and Alaska. Then just pay the lawyers to hire a pr firm in 5 years and pimp the product.
Your question implies two things: 1) a very short time span. "A few years," you say. 2) Civilization as we know it today will still be around in those 2 years. In other words, you don't seem to be worried about making sure the survivors of a nuclear war will be able to make use of your discovery. You just seem to want to make sure that someone will be around in you disappear off the face of the earth.
Ah, I have it. You've discovered a cheap, non-polluting, renewable substitute for oil. It can both power vehicles with no emissions and produce biodegradable plastics. No wonder you're scared. You're lucky you aren't under arrest for being a terrorist.
Yes, people are starving. But more food is produced every year than is eaten. The US pays farmers not to grow crops, it pays them for their over production and then puts the crops in a warehouse, never to be seen again until it spoils and must be destroyed.
So obviously we have the means *right now* to end all hunger on the planet. We simply don't care (because most of the people who are starving are black and in countries with no political importance), can't (because those countries are openly hostile to us and either won't accept our help or steal what help we do send), or won't (does anyone know the last time we sent aid to Cuba? I know Castro offered to provide medical care to the people of Appalachia, which has some of the poorest people in the country.).
Remember when the Russia sub sank? We offered to help and they wouldn't take it because of pride. A similar situation occured a few years before that where we needed help but we wouldn't take the Russians up on their offer because, well, duh, they're the Ruskies.
That having been said, I don't think a human mission to mars is the way to go. I've always been in favor of colonizing permanent space stations, then the moon, then from there to Mars.
Better to send a robotic mission to Mars when searching for life, to eliminate any chance of possible contamination, no matter how small that chance is.
There are two main problems with this study as you sort of pointed out was that it was completely biased and conducted in a way to get the required results. SOP of course.
1) How many people who don't have a background in science would realize the oxygen di-hydride is the same as H20? So the study purposefully used a non-common name in an effort to make the compound seem more "neutral" which was a good thing.
2) Only the negatives were described without a listing of the benifits. Of course if you don't tell people of the useful features of something and only tell them the negatives they will favor a ban. Duh.
There was also a really good episode of Yes, Minister (or maybe Yes, Prime Minister) that dealt with the same thing. They were going to build a plant that produced as a waste product metadioxin. The used the fact that the name was like dioxin to keep the plant from being built. I forget the entire plot, but as usual with this series, it was very good.
In theory yes, provided that you aren't talking about oem versions of windows, which I believe are required to stay with the machine they came on. But always make sure to read the license.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought so. Either that or the hippie growing pot was self-referential and the dude was simply not in his right mind when he answered.
I figure the second page is all a chatbot, considering that the answers have little to do with actually answering the questions. Of course he is an academic, so the natural tendancy is to ramble on and on without answering the question.
I didn't want to get into the jargon file and what is the "correct" usage of hack/hacker when I made the original comment. I was trying to point of the double standard. Slashdot can use "Hack" in a headline but if cnn or foxnews said that a hacker was arrested for stealing credit card numbers, people would be all over them for misuse.
ESR's authority to "deprecate" the meaning of the word for his or anyone else's little ego reasons.
The correct term is amelioration - the changing of the definition of a word to a better connotation. Happens all the time in the world. ESR doesn't have the authority, but users of the language do. The opposite is pejoration. Examples of amelioration are praise (originally a synonym for appraise), knight (originally a servant), and earl(originally just a man). More examples of amelioration and pejoration are left as an exercise for the student.
How many times have people here wailed at the non-tech press for using the word "hack" to describe what most would technically term a "crack"? Well if you ever actually read the article, you'd see that Princeton didn't hack or crack. They used the ssn and birthdate supplied to them by their own applicants to access Yale's pages. In other words, they had the users' login and passwords and used them. Not a hack, not a crack. Thoroughly evil of course, but "merely" a lie.
You might want to look at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/el/teachingzone /cae/coursework/reports/apostrophe.html where they specifically use "CDs" as an example of a plural that "NEVER EVER" needs an apostrophe. The confusion arises because plurals of letters and numbers do take apostrophes as in "Missippi has two p's." "Use an apostrophe and s to form the plural of letters, numbers, and signs, and for words referred to as words." (Punctuation Rules)
CD is either an abbreviation of cd-rom that doesn't use periods period or it is an acronym for Compact Disc. In either case, cd has become a word in its own right in the same way that scuba has. The confusion arises because we pronounce the word as if it were just the letters and letters do take the apostrophe.
What about returned cd's?
Let's say I hear a song by A on the radio and go to Best Buy and buy the cd. I open it up and it sucks, so I return it for store credit. You can still do that, right? I was able to listen to the album and find out it is crap, then get my money (or the equivalent) back. Did this hurt the musician? It didn't help them, because they didn't get my money, but I certainly don't think that is stealing.
Or let's say I had a friend and listened to the album at his house. He says, "You got to hear how bad this is." So I do, and agree I wouldn't buy it. That didn't harm the artist.
How about buying the cd used? How about checking it out from the library? (How many people here knew most libraries have cd's to check out?)
It is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line?
I draw it by buying albums that I actually listen to and deleting the crap I download but don't like.
start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what
How did the Greatful Dead do it? They made money from concert tickets, t-shirt sales (Hey, that's the sweetest pie! quoth Krusty.) and probably a little from album sales. But they never really cared about concert bootlegs. Don't know how they felt about trading actual albums.
I'm not a deadhead by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe someone can explain.
you can expect to see politicians caring only about california, and the northeast
Yeah, like they pay a lot of attention to Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Oklahoma, the Dakotas now. And I remember how voters in California and New York were devastated because everyone ignored them in the last election.
Since the electoral college votes are based on number of representatives + number of senators, everyone starts of with a minimum of 3 electoral votes. More populated states get more representatives in the House, so they get more electoral votes. And oddly enough, presidential candidates spend more time campaigning in states with more electoral votes. In other words, where the population centers are. That won't really change.
The other thing that drives campaigns is the primary/caucus season. Lot's of little states, like Iowa, have early primaries and get heavy, disproportionate campaigning. I wouldn't advocate getting rid of the primaries, in fact if you implement the "second choice" method of voting, you will see more candidates, and that is the idea.
The other issue is fairness. A state with a low population has a guaranteed electoral count of 3, no matter how low the population sinks. So that means that each voter there has a disproportionately high influence on the outcome of an election. 1,000,000 people may cast 3 votes, but 100,000,000 may only cast 20. You don't see candidates flocking to North Dakota because the votes are worth proportionately more there. Candidates go to the swing states and leave "safe" states alone right now.
I don't really see where there would be a big shift in campaign strategy after the primaries if you did away with the electoral college. I've heard plenty of people say it, but know one ever proves it.