I remember Blockbuster was going to be providing burn-on-demand VHS tapes Real Soon Now, about 10 years ago... I see this having almost exactly the same chance of becoming a reality.
First to "dynamically balancing itself"?
I thought Segway http://www.segway.com/ [segway.com] was the first.
The Segway, having wheels, is not generally considered to be "bipedal". Though in the video the "bully bot" looks to be a Segway with arms and a camera head.
The bipedal bot really needs to have arms to flail about for balance. Now that would be funny. It can bring you a beer, but don't open it right away...
No, it's not. It's infinite on overshoot but no bigger on undershoot. With large monitors, undershoot is common.
And on a dual-monitor system, the menu bar only exists on the primary monitor. Which means you need to move the mouse huge distances from a window on the secondary monitor up to the menu bar. Not only that, but my primary monitor is shorter than my secondary (900 pixels vs. 1024). I have the screens arranged so that the bottom rows are at the same level. This gives the secondary monitor a 124-pixel dead zone at the top where I cannot move the mouse back to the primary. If I'm dealing with a window at the top of the secondary monitor I have to move the mouse down, over, and back up to get to the menu bar.
Nope, I'm not buying that the Mac's menu paradigm is superior to Windows. Maybe it was back in the day when 640x480 screens were all the rage, but now it's just plain antiquated. It doesn't scale to modern hardware.
The truth is PCs running Windows are more problematic than Macs.
The truth is, they're roughly equivalent. My shiny new MacBook Pro has crashed as many times in the two months that I've had it as any Windows machine has in a two-month period. Some things are easier on the Mac, but some other things are easier on Windows. On both platforms I've had things "just work", and on both I've had things "just fail for inscrutable reasons".
I have a vague preference for the Mac, but it's just that -- a vague personal preference. It mostly comes from the Unix underpinnings of OSX, which means that an old Unix hack like me can get in under the hood and actually fix some of the things that go wonky. I have found nothing that clearly sets either platform above the other, at least for the things I need a computer for.
Besides that, games (at least the games published by Microsoft, which is no small chunk of the market) are likely to have other artificial "requirements" for Vista, whether or not those requirements are technically legit. Just like their games "require" XP now (but will run fine on Win2k if you can get around the installer's OS check).
I don't know what the requirements are for slapping a "Designed For Windows" logo on the box, but MS may well stop handing them out to any publisher that doesn't restrict the games to Vista.
All in all, my next gaming machine (I tend to get one every two or three generations of Moore's Law) will probably come loaded with Vista. Not that I especially want it, I just don't think I'll be able to install games without it.
I own approximately $300 worth of content I purchased for my Rocket eBook which is locked down to the particular serial number of my physical device. Nuvomedia and Gemstar are long gone, the servers are shut down, there's no customer service available, the battery life on my device is now down to a couple of hours... and when the device fails I'll be the proud possessor of expensive content which is completely inaccessible to me.
This is why I really love the ebook philosophy at Baen. Baen is a fairly large publisher of science fiction books. Real, paper books, sold in real bookstores. For the past eight years, every book they've published in paperback has also been for sale in electronic format on their web site. The ebook prices are comparable to the paperback editions, or somewhat less if you buy a bundle of all the new titles for a given month. The thing that makes Baen special is that they really dislike DRM of any kind. All their books are available as plain ol' HTML. No encryption, no special reader needed. I buy a lot of their books, and convert the HTML to something my Palm Pilot can handle. If the Palm ever dies, I can reconvert the HTML to whatever other format I need. If somehow all knowledge of HTML is lost to the world, I can still open the files in a text editor and read around the markup.
Baen also makes a huge portion of their back catalog available for free. Some of their hardback books have come with CDs chock full of free, complete novels. People are encouraged to copy and share the freebies with their friends. The Baen editors and authors say that the more free ebooks they give away, the more paper books get sold.
I do almost all of my fiction reading electronically. Probably 75% of what I read comes from Baen, because they have the titles, price, and philosophy that all hit my sweet spot. The other 25% are books that I own paper copies of, but that I've downloaded bootlegs off of alt.binaries.* because the ebook editions are either completely unavailable, locked to a format I can't use, or priced higher than the hardback paper editions. I don't mind paying for what I read, but ain't no way I'm going to pay a premium for an edition that will evaporate if some fragile piece of electronics dies.
IMHO either an installer flag or a registry key would be the way to handle this. Most people savvy enough to use these work-arounds aren't going to be calling tech support anyway; they have better trouble-shooting skills than the drones reading the scripts. Of course, that's assuming that the OS check isn't purely for the sake of giving people a reason to fork over bucks to upgrade to the new OS...
Microsoft would be forced to fix IE by a deluge of customer complaints.
Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, stop, you're killing me!
No, really. Let's imagine that you're one of the unwashed masses who use IE because they don't know any better, or (god forbid!) an MS fanboy who uses it because they truly believe MS can do no wrong. You start coming across sites which don't work, though other similar sites do. Do you (a) complain to Microsoft to fix its browser, or (b) complain to the site to fix its page?
Now imagine that you're on the receiving end of those complaints. If you're Microsoft, do you rush off to fix the problem in a product that generates no direct revenue, or do you touch your fingertips together and say "Excellent..." in your best Monty Burns voice while reflecting on the true meaning of "embrace and extend"? If you're running the web site in question, do you hold fast to standards and watch your customer base drain away to competitors, or do you cave in and support the tools they're using?
Microsoft has no incentive to be fully W3C compliant, since IE is, in fact, the de facto standard. And even the most well-intentioned of web developers can't withstand a large, non-technical customer base complaining that their site is "broken" because it doesn't render in IE.
"Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust," Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said in an e-mail.
Well, yes, but according to the scientists at the press conference all disturbances of the martian soil so far have shown up as darker than the undisturbed soil, not lighter as these images show. Also, the shapes of the light spots are more consistent with those a relatively thick muddy liquid would make than with what you'd see in a landslide. They did allow that yes, these images could be showing some previously unseen dry phenomenon, but that the shapes and color are both indicative of liquid.
While we're talking about accessible currency, pull some American coins out of your pocket and tell me how much each is worth. Now pretend you're trying to do it with only a passing knowledge of English. It's tough. The coins we have in circulation don't have digits indicating their worth. The quarter? It just says "Quarter Dollar". You need to know that the word "quarter" means "1/4". The penny and nickel? Not quite so bad, reading "One Cent" and "Five Cents", though "1 Cent" and "5 Cents" would be a lot better. But the worst is the dime. What's printed on it? "One Dime". Great! WTF is a "dime"!? It says "one" -- Must be $0.01, right? After all, it's the smallest coin, it should have the smallest value...
Travel someplace where you don't speak the native language, and you'll be glad for actual Arabic numerals on the money!
the closing down of this peripherally-related site distributing unofficial patches for pine.
Yup. This is hardly a disaster for the Pine community. I've been using Pine for at least 15 years now, and this is the first I've heard of this site. Looking it over, I don't see anything that I would personally find useful. There are about three dozen patches there, total. Not a single security fix among them. There are a few fixes for crash bugs which I've never encountered, and a bunch of patches adding or tweaking functionality. I'm sure some people will miss this site, but the vast majority of Pine users won't even notice.
(e.g., the revision control system could reject check-ins without unit tests)
This won't work. If people aren't willing to do the job, you can't force them through automation. Ever see a shop where they just adopted the practice of "all checkins must be accompanied by a change log"? 90% of the change log entries end up being "Fixed a bug." If the developers aren't willing to write unit tests, the need-a-test-to-checkin requirement is going to generate a lot of unit tests which unconditionally print "hello, world" and return success.
Peer review is probably the best way to enforce this kind of practice. Require that someone else reviews and signs off on the change. It doesn't have to be the project lead or anything like that. Just have another developer look it over to make sure nothing is missing, and is willing to sign his name to that fact. Very few people will take responsibility for someone else's blatant omission, so I doubt you'll end up with a lot of collusion to cheat the system. ("I'll sign your incomplete commit if you sign mine.")
And, of course, if you can get the peer to look at the actual substance of the change beyond just the format, you're way ahead of the game.
Now, I have to go write a unit test for a 2-line fix I made yesterday. (Really. Even though it annoys me to spend hours writing a test for something that took me 60 seconds to write.)
I really hope they're not considering releasing it under the GPL. That'll make it pretty much unusable for most embedded applications. If I link against some GPL'd code, I'm obligated to release mine under the GPL as well. Speaking as an embedded guy myself, I've worked at very few companies which would even consider releasing their own source code.
There's more to open source than the GPL, though. "Open source" could just mean that you give the source code to your paying customers, not to anyone else, and licensed such that they're not free to redistribute the source. I can't really imagine using embedded code which is completely closed, anyway. Most embedded systems are reasonably unique; it's impossible to deliver a pre-compiled binary. Usually the only way to use third-party embedded code is to get the source, modify it for your hardware, compile, and link. Actually, the GPL isn't too bad for this model -- you're only obligated to give the source to anyone you give the binary to. No others. The downside is that you can't prevent your customers from redistributing that source code. In fact, they'd have to redistribute it to their customers. But, as I said before, most embedded shops won't touch the GPL with a 10-foot pole.
That said, a dual license could work. Release the code under the GPL (or similar license) and let people download it for free. Then sell the commercial license. This gives you the best of both worlds. People can use your code if they make their own code available, or they can use it in a proprietary application if they cough up some money for the commercial license. This expands your userbase into the small hobbyist and garage shops and gets people familiar with your stuff. Later, if they end up working for a larger GPL-phobic company, they'll be more likely to purchase your commercial license because they're already familiar with your product. Trolltech uses this sort of licensing scheme for their products.
a last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise'
This is as opposed to what? A last-minute but that the entire Vista team expected?
And what does "most" mean here, anyway? Is that to say that there were some members of the team who weren't surprised by it? "Nah, I'm not surprised there's a crash bug in there. I was, like, totally stoned the day I coded that module."
Somehow, I really, really doubt that that's what the passage is referring to. It specifically says "arms control agreements". No, this passage says, "We reserve the right to put weapons in space."
The part I find most disturbing is the paragraph that reads (emphasis mine):
The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, "peaceful purposes" allow U.S. defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests.
WTF?! "Why yes, we want space open to everyone for peaceful purposes. But we get to decide what's peaceful. We can have weapons in orbit for national defense, because we're peaceful and would never like, invade any other country or whatever. You other losers are all threats to our national interests, so no weapons for you!"
This policy is a steaming pile of nationalistic jingoism. It does not say, "We're going to use nuclear power and propulsion when it's the right thing, regardless of political uproar unfounded by science." It does say, "We're going to do any damn thing we like to protect our national interests, treaties be damned." Go US of A!
(As an aside, why is the damned PDF saved entirely as graphics? There's no way to copy'n'paste from it, no way to send it to an accessible output device. All the other PDFs on the OSTP site are essentially text, even the ones which need some graphics for a seal or signature. I don't put this down to any conspiracy, just to plain old incompetence.)
Am I the only conservative on Slashdot that actually wants to WIN against the terrorists?
No, but you may be the only one here naive enough to think it's possible.
We can't win against the terrorists. Why? Because "terrorists" aren't a specific body of people. No matter how many you catch and lock up, more always show up. Terrorism isn't a nation which can surrender to you, and the fighting will be over. Terrorists can be anyone, from al-Qaeda to the IRA to Palestinians to Timothy McVeigh to the Unibomber. No matter what you do, there will always be someone willing to blow up a building to make a political statement.
Should we roll over? No, of course not. But it's not worthwhile to trash the Geneva Convention and the Constitution to wipe out terrorists, because it simply can't be done. Even in a complete police state there will be someone who can get his hands on some fertilizer and fuel, or some anthrax spores, or even a bloody 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke and some Mentos and cause mayhem. Hell, they don't even have to do anything, just make the suggestion that they could. The mayhem ensues as we fall all over ourselves to remove our shoes in the airports, throw out our toothpaste, and submit to searches whenever we go into a sports stadium. That's not winning. We'll "win" when we can get back to our lives without compromising the principles on which this country and international law are based.
I feel sick every time I hear someone say, "Well, things are different now after 9/11." The only reason they're different is because we let them be. And that's not the fault of any terrorist, that's the fault of ourselves and our duly elected leaders.
Seriously. Informal Poll: Does *ANYONE* here like Burger King?
It seems to me the easiest way to sell more burgers would be to make burgers that didnt taste like crap. But I'm not a marketing exec... so what do I really know?
Of the nationwide burger joints, I'd definitely go to Burger King before McDonalds. Probably before Wendy's, too, but Wendy's frosties score major points for them. I prefer Jack In The Box or Hardee's/Carl's Jr., but there aren't any in this area. I'd probably go to White Castle before any of the others, though. Not because I especially like the food, just because of the strange addictive qualities it has. White Castle is the Slurm of the fast food chains.
I have no idea who actually thought that creepy oversized plastic head with the insane grin was a good idea, though! Jeez, it looks like the Joker tried to design a Mardi Gras costume or something. My working hypothesis is that the CEO of Burger King was blind, drunk, or in a coma. Or all three.
Slashdot Mirror
And now I guess he finally will find out if God is REAL.
I remember Blockbuster was going to be providing burn-on-demand VHS tapes Real Soon Now, about 10 years ago... I see this having almost exactly the same chance of becoming a reality.
The Segway, having wheels, is not generally considered to be "bipedal". Though in the video the "bully bot" looks to be a Segway with arms and a camera head.
The bipedal bot really needs to have arms to flail about for balance. Now that would be funny. It can bring you a beer, but don't open it right away...
Oooh, I'd almost pay to download the torrent of that!
And on a dual-monitor system, the menu bar only exists on the primary monitor. Which means you need to move the mouse huge distances from a window on the secondary monitor up to the menu bar. Not only that, but my primary monitor is shorter than my secondary (900 pixels vs. 1024). I have the screens arranged so that the bottom rows are at the same level. This gives the secondary monitor a 124-pixel dead zone at the top where I cannot move the mouse back to the primary. If I'm dealing with a window at the top of the secondary monitor I have to move the mouse down, over, and back up to get to the menu bar.
Nope, I'm not buying that the Mac's menu paradigm is superior to Windows. Maybe it was back in the day when 640x480 screens were all the rage, but now it's just plain antiquated. It doesn't scale to modern hardware.
Well, of course they left the toilet seat up! Why bother drowning the kittens if you don't get to watch them spiraling to their dooms?
Yeah, but "Google Complies With The Law" doesn't make as good a headline...
The truth is, they're roughly equivalent. My shiny new MacBook Pro has crashed as many times in the two months that I've had it as any Windows machine has in a two-month period. Some things are easier on the Mac, but some other things are easier on Windows. On both platforms I've had things "just work", and on both I've had things "just fail for inscrutable reasons".
I have a vague preference for the Mac, but it's just that -- a vague personal preference. It mostly comes from the Unix underpinnings of OSX, which means that an old Unix hack like me can get in under the hood and actually fix some of the things that go wonky. I have found nothing that clearly sets either platform above the other, at least for the things I need a computer for.
Heresy, I know.
Besides that, games (at least the games published by Microsoft, which is no small chunk of the market) are likely to have other artificial "requirements" for Vista, whether or not those requirements are technically legit. Just like their games "require" XP now (but will run fine on Win2k if you can get around the installer's OS check).
I don't know what the requirements are for slapping a "Designed For Windows" logo on the box, but MS may well stop handing them out to any publisher that doesn't restrict the games to Vista.
All in all, my next gaming machine (I tend to get one every two or three generations of Moore's Law) will probably come loaded with Vista. Not that I especially want it, I just don't think I'll be able to install games without it.
This is why I really love the ebook philosophy at Baen. Baen is a fairly large publisher of science fiction books. Real, paper books, sold in real bookstores. For the past eight years, every book they've published in paperback has also been for sale in electronic format on their web site. The ebook prices are comparable to the paperback editions, or somewhat less if you buy a bundle of all the new titles for a given month. The thing that makes Baen special is that they really dislike DRM of any kind. All their books are available as plain ol' HTML. No encryption, no special reader needed. I buy a lot of their books, and convert the HTML to something my Palm Pilot can handle. If the Palm ever dies, I can reconvert the HTML to whatever other format I need. If somehow all knowledge of HTML is lost to the world, I can still open the files in a text editor and read around the markup.
Baen also makes a huge portion of their back catalog available for free. Some of their hardback books have come with CDs chock full of free, complete novels. People are encouraged to copy and share the freebies with their friends. The Baen editors and authors say that the more free ebooks they give away, the more paper books get sold.
I do almost all of my fiction reading electronically. Probably 75% of what I read comes from Baen, because they have the titles, price, and philosophy that all hit my sweet spot. The other 25% are books that I own paper copies of, but that I've downloaded bootlegs off of alt.binaries.* because the ebook editions are either completely unavailable, locked to a format I can't use, or priced higher than the hardback paper editions. I don't mind paying for what I read, but ain't no way I'm going to pay a premium for an edition that will evaporate if some fragile piece of electronics dies.
IMHO either an installer flag or a registry key would be the way to handle this. Most people savvy enough to use these work-arounds aren't going to be calling tech support anyway; they have better trouble-shooting skills than the drones reading the scripts. Of course, that's assuming that the OS check isn't purely for the sake of giving people a reason to fork over bucks to upgrade to the new OS...
Would you like some Freedom Fries with that?
Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, stop, you're killing me!
No, really. Let's imagine that you're one of the unwashed masses who use IE because they don't know any better, or (god forbid!) an MS fanboy who uses it because they truly believe MS can do no wrong. You start coming across sites which don't work, though other similar sites do. Do you (a) complain to Microsoft to fix its browser, or (b) complain to the site to fix its page?
Now imagine that you're on the receiving end of those complaints. If you're Microsoft, do you rush off to fix the problem in a product that generates no direct revenue, or do you touch your fingertips together and say "Excellent..." in your best Monty Burns voice while reflecting on the true meaning of "embrace and extend"? If you're running the web site in question, do you hold fast to standards and watch your customer base drain away to competitors, or do you cave in and support the tools they're using?
Microsoft has no incentive to be fully W3C compliant, since IE is, in fact, the de facto standard. And even the most well-intentioned of web developers can't withstand a large, non-technical customer base complaining that their site is "broken" because it doesn't render in IE.
Well, yes, but according to the scientists at the press conference all disturbances of the martian soil so far have shown up as darker than the undisturbed soil, not lighter as these images show. Also, the shapes of the light spots are more consistent with those a relatively thick muddy liquid would make than with what you'd see in a landslide. They did allow that yes, these images could be showing some previously unseen dry phenomenon, but that the shapes and color are both indicative of liquid.
While we're talking about accessible currency, pull some American coins out of your pocket and tell me how much each is worth. Now pretend you're trying to do it with only a passing knowledge of English. It's tough. The coins we have in circulation don't have digits indicating their worth. The quarter? It just says "Quarter Dollar". You need to know that the word "quarter" means "1/4". The penny and nickel? Not quite so bad, reading "One Cent" and "Five Cents", though "1 Cent" and "5 Cents" would be a lot better. But the worst is the dime. What's printed on it? "One Dime". Great! WTF is a "dime"!? It says "one" -- Must be $0.01, right? After all, it's the smallest coin, it should have the smallest value...
Travel someplace where you don't speak the native language, and you'll be glad for actual Arabic numerals on the money!
Yup. This is hardly a disaster for the Pine community. I've been using Pine for at least 15 years now, and this is the first I've heard of this site. Looking it over, I don't see anything that I would personally find useful. There are about three dozen patches there, total. Not a single security fix among them. There are a few fixes for crash bugs which I've never encountered, and a bunch of patches adding or tweaking functionality. I'm sure some people will miss this site, but the vast majority of Pine users won't even notice.
This won't work. If people aren't willing to do the job, you can't force them through automation. Ever see a shop where they just adopted the practice of "all checkins must be accompanied by a change log"? 90% of the change log entries end up being "Fixed a bug." If the developers aren't willing to write unit tests, the need-a-test-to-checkin requirement is going to generate a lot of unit tests which unconditionally print "hello, world" and return success.
Peer review is probably the best way to enforce this kind of practice. Require that someone else reviews and signs off on the change. It doesn't have to be the project lead or anything like that. Just have another developer look it over to make sure nothing is missing, and is willing to sign his name to that fact. Very few people will take responsibility for someone else's blatant omission, so I doubt you'll end up with a lot of collusion to cheat the system. ("I'll sign your incomplete commit if you sign mine.")
And, of course, if you can get the peer to look at the actual substance of the change beyond just the format, you're way ahead of the game.
Now, I have to go write a unit test for a 2-line fix I made yesterday. (Really. Even though it annoys me to spend hours writing a test for something that took me 60 seconds to write.)
I really hope they're not considering releasing it under the GPL. That'll make it pretty much unusable for most embedded applications. If I link against some GPL'd code, I'm obligated to release mine under the GPL as well. Speaking as an embedded guy myself, I've worked at very few companies which would even consider releasing their own source code.
There's more to open source than the GPL, though. "Open source" could just mean that you give the source code to your paying customers, not to anyone else, and licensed such that they're not free to redistribute the source. I can't really imagine using embedded code which is completely closed, anyway. Most embedded systems are reasonably unique; it's impossible to deliver a pre-compiled binary. Usually the only way to use third-party embedded code is to get the source, modify it for your hardware, compile, and link. Actually, the GPL isn't too bad for this model -- you're only obligated to give the source to anyone you give the binary to. No others. The downside is that you can't prevent your customers from redistributing that source code. In fact, they'd have to redistribute it to their customers. But, as I said before, most embedded shops won't touch the GPL with a 10-foot pole.
That said, a dual license could work. Release the code under the GPL (or similar license) and let people download it for free. Then sell the commercial license. This gives you the best of both worlds. People can use your code if they make their own code available, or they can use it in a proprietary application if they cough up some money for the commercial license. This expands your userbase into the small hobbyist and garage shops and gets people familiar with your stuff. Later, if they end up working for a larger GPL-phobic company, they'll be more likely to purchase your commercial license because they're already familiar with your product. Trolltech uses this sort of licensing scheme for their products.
Nah, MacOS. Don't you remember Star Trek IV: Save The Whales?
"A keyboard. How... quaint."
Well, that certainly suggests one solution to the problem...
This is as opposed to what? A last-minute but that the entire Vista team expected?
And what does "most" mean here, anyway? Is that to say that there were some members of the team who weren't surprised by it? "Nah, I'm not surprised there's a crash bug in there. I was, like, totally stoned the day I coded that module."
Somehow, I really, really doubt that that's what the passage is referring to. It specifically says "arms control agreements". No, this passage says, "We reserve the right to put weapons in space."
The part I find most disturbing is the paragraph that reads (emphasis mine):
WTF?! "Why yes, we want space open to everyone for peaceful purposes. But we get to decide what's peaceful. We can have weapons in orbit for national defense, because we're peaceful and would never like, invade any other country or whatever. You other losers are all threats to our national interests, so no weapons for you!"
This policy is a steaming pile of nationalistic jingoism. It does not say, "We're going to use nuclear power and propulsion when it's the right thing, regardless of political uproar unfounded by science." It does say, "We're going to do any damn thing we like to protect our national interests, treaties be damned." Go US of A!
(As an aside, why is the damned PDF saved entirely as graphics? There's no way to copy'n'paste from it, no way to send it to an accessible output device. All the other PDFs on the OSTP site are essentially text, even the ones which need some graphics for a seal or signature. I don't put this down to any conspiracy, just to plain old incompetence.)
No, but you may be the only one here naive enough to think it's possible.
We can't win against the terrorists. Why? Because "terrorists" aren't a specific body of people. No matter how many you catch and lock up, more always show up. Terrorism isn't a nation which can surrender to you, and the fighting will be over. Terrorists can be anyone, from al-Qaeda to the IRA to Palestinians to Timothy McVeigh to the Unibomber. No matter what you do, there will always be someone willing to blow up a building to make a political statement.
Should we roll over? No, of course not. But it's not worthwhile to trash the Geneva Convention and the Constitution to wipe out terrorists, because it simply can't be done. Even in a complete police state there will be someone who can get his hands on some fertilizer and fuel, or some anthrax spores, or even a bloody 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke and some Mentos and cause mayhem. Hell, they don't even have to do anything, just make the suggestion that they could. The mayhem ensues as we fall all over ourselves to remove our shoes in the airports, throw out our toothpaste, and submit to searches whenever we go into a sports stadium. That's not winning. We'll "win" when we can get back to our lives without compromising the principles on which this country and international law are based.
I feel sick every time I hear someone say, "Well, things are different now after 9/11." The only reason they're different is because we let them be. And that's not the fault of any terrorist, that's the fault of ourselves and our duly elected leaders.
They're just duty-cycling.
Of the nationwide burger joints, I'd definitely go to Burger King before McDonalds. Probably before Wendy's, too, but Wendy's frosties score major points for them. I prefer Jack In The Box or Hardee's/Carl's Jr., but there aren't any in this area. I'd probably go to White Castle before any of the others, though. Not because I especially like the food, just because of the strange addictive qualities it has. White Castle is the Slurm of the fast food chains.
I have no idea who actually thought that creepy oversized plastic head with the insane grin was a good idea, though! Jeez, it looks like the Joker tried to design a Mardi Gras costume or something. My working hypothesis is that the CEO of Burger King was blind, drunk, or in a coma. Or all three.