Not all at once, no. But then, I rarely read more than one or two books at a time so why would they need to?
Some of us leave home for more than a few hours at a time (on occassion, people have been known to travel to other parts of the planet -- which can take more than a day or two!).
I can only listen to one song at a time, yet I carry 6,000 of them in my pocket.
I'd be surprised if there were as many as 200 font families that actually have that wide a range available.
Well, of a single named family, maybe not. But keep in mind Adobe has literally about 500-600 (maybe more) Helvetica fonts alone that they sell. They aren't all a single family or design, so they wouldn't go together, but it can get crazy sorting outthe Adobe Helvetica from the Linotype Helvetica from the AGFA Helvetica from the Helvetica Neue from the...
There are about 75 fonts in the Minion family, and those actually go together, but that's definitely one of the larger families. I think most non-novelty faces have about 6-18 fonts, which add up quickly.
I suspect what happened is basically the place had an Adobe Font Folio CD somebody downloaded -- I think that's about 9,000-11,000 fonts depending on which version you have.
Correct, except for size. Professional publishers use PostScript typefaces, as they scale to any size. Loading different sized screen fonts (to see things rendered somewher correctly on screen for proofing) hasn't been an issue since the early '90s and Adobe Type Manager.
Well, not really. Most high-end faces do have multiple "sizes", because just scaling a face won't work correctly for all possible sizes. A type family will have specific fonts optimized for small type or large type, or book settings. A Display face will have much more delicate fine details, since it will be printed large and they will show up. If you just shrank down that design to 6pts, all the fine details would literally disappear and the words might well be impossible to read. So a small face (often called a caption face, since they are frequently used for photo captions) will be much heavier overall than the Display face, so much so that if you blew up a caption face to 60pts, it would be some of the ugliest type you'd ever seen! But it's extremely legible at small sizes, and has the "feel" of the type family, though the weights are completely different.
Adobe initially tried to solve this problem with Multiple Master faces in the 90s -- the weight of particular strokes were marked to expand or contract as the size changed, but it was quite frankly a huge pain in the ass to manage and the results were never as good as what a professional type designer would get optimizing a face for a particular size.
Just to clarify, because you're mixing up the authority of the coach, university, and scholarship giver:
If the coach has $10,000 of his own money he wants to give as a scholarship to any girl who will take off her clothes, that is of course perfectly legal. (though he'd likely get fired because of bad publicity)
If the University wants to start a Stripping team and awards scholarships for it, that would be legal (though probably a bad idea due to the inevitable lawsuits and bad publicity no matter how well-run the program was).
If a university gives a scholarship to a player for playing a sport, and the coach declares on his own that he'll stop her eligibility unless she takes off her clothes, that's sexual harrassment. You see the difference? You keep suggesting that somehow the coach gets to dictate the terms of a scholarship or eligibility, and that's just not the case, coaches are coaches, the scholarship committees do the contracts and finances (though often the coach is on the committee, it's unlikely they'll get away with adding a stripping provision to the contracts).
A state university with this kind of policy is setting themselves up for the mother of all First Amendment lawsuits.
Not true. US courts have repeatedly ruled that, as participation in extracurricular activities is not a required part of the educational mission, it can be subject to restrictions that would otherwise be unconstitutional. That's why drug tests for Algebra II are not allowed, but drug tests for Basketball are.
The major advantage they have at the university level is that athletic scholarships are tied to eligibility (and sometimes even performance), so getting kicked off the team also takes away the money you're using to pay for school.
Note that I don't support this move (though I can understand picking the low-hanging fruit), but it's certainly within their authority.
I don't see anything like what I was talking about. Your offsite backup is a live RAID5 array that costs $150/month (which, I'll grant you is a MUCH less expensive option than the ones in the article, and I'll certainly direct some customers towards a service like yours).
I'm talking about something more along the lines of selling a high capacity tape archive for 200-300% of the media cost, and then the tape goes into your vault until the customer requests a restore (which would be paid for, of course). Basically, people would pay a few hundred dollars at once for someone with a hugely expensive tape system to backup their stuff, and maybe another maintenance fee per month for tape storage and the smaller incremental backups that would be on a disk system until reaching tape capacity.
The biggest problem (aside from upstream bandwidth, which isn't something they can necessarily do anything about) is obviously price. I know lots and lots of people who've looked at this kind of storage for backup, but invariably just go to using hard drives with USB enclosures because they are thousands of dollars less than it would cost to use even the cheapest of these services for more than a few dozen gigabytes of data.
Looking through the features, I think I see why they all cost so much -- they all offer "live" storage, where you can send links to friends and view files over the internet at any time. That's certainly a great feature, but do people REALLY need every file they've ever backed up to be available at a moment's notice? Of course not.
All these services are selling file system space, but nobody seems to be selling actual BACKUP services. Where is the service that lets me upload my 500 GB of data, and then they back it up onto a 400GB Ultrium tape for $100? Who cares if it takes 24-48 hours for my tape to get loaded and cached for restoring? I can't download 500GB overnight anyways, and I've obviously had a catastrophic failure of some sort on my end if I need to restore that data, it will take me at least a day just to get new hardware in place and set up to receive. A 24 hour wait is NOTHING in such a situation, and presumably your day-to-day critical stuff is either replicated locally or can be stored in a more expensive live online file system.
Ever since QIC/Travan capacities were left wanting over a decade ago, there hasn't been a single affordable backup solution available to the home/small office community. Any decent tape system these days costs upwards of $10k (and easily $250k) and requires more than trivial expertise to set up and run properly. It's a perfect opportunity for a qualified online operator to distribute the huge capital investment over lots of small customers who quite literally have no affordable alternative.
I think it just comes down to the disaster you grew up with. You know what to expect, you know how to prepare for a typical hurricane/quake/flood/tornado, you know what to do during the disaster, and you know how pick things up afterward. Every once in a while something hits on the level of Katrina or the 1906 San Francisco quake, but for the most part, the locals in any region are comfortable with their area's disasters -- and often freaked out totally by the disasters that hit other areas.
Absolutely correct. I spent several years teaching wilderness survival for travelers going to remote areas overseas, and one of the single most important things was to educate them about the REAL risks of where they were traveling. People are very, very bad at risk evaulation because we perceive new risks as being MUCH greater than familiar risks. A large part of that is because we dramatically overinflate the danger of things we cannot control, while dramatically underrating situations we feel in control of. And familiarity can give a fantastic illusion of control.
The classic example is of course people who worry about being killed in a terrorist attack (something they feel helpless in preventing) and demand that we spend trillions of dollars to defend against the possibility, while we cheerily drive public roads every day despite knowing the chances of being killed in a car accident is astronomically higher. But we all think of ourselves as being good drivers, so we think WE won't get into an accident because we have influence over the situation -- which is of course ridiculous, since we have no control over the drunk idiot in the other car who plows into us, no matter how defensively we drive.
The net result is that of course someone who grows up with a given natural disaster (in my case, hurricanes), considers them merely an inconvenience. I know how to prepare, I have supplies, and have a realistic expecation of how the storm will progress, what kind of damage it will do, and how to deal with the aftermath while things return to normal. So I feel like I have some control over the situation. But I've only ever been through one earthquake, a very minor one and it scared the heck out of me because I did not instinctually know what to do in those moments. To me, it's a ridiculous risk because it can happen spontaneously without warning, but I know to someone who grew up in an earthquake-prone area, it would feel very manageable.
Of course we would both be proven very wrong if we ever had the "big one" happen to us, because the rare but terrific disasters are completely beyond our experience.
The first thing a business student learns is that nothing is about how much money you have, its about how much you think you have (since we can take out loans, use credit cards, etc). Everybody can think of somebody who has no money but has a big screen TV, or the opposite - somebody with lots of money and a small house, etc.
Using this logic, its not the rich folks with macs, its the people who are willing to spend a little more. The luxury crowd, if you will. (and yes, it does make a difference)
No, self-perception or people living beyond means has nothing to do with what I said. It may have a lot to do with marketing, but nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Mac buyers have higher household incomes than the average computer buyer. It's simply a statement of fact, not of perception or cachet.
I'm sure people do drop money on $5,000 macs (and $5,000 alienware systems) who can't afford to, but at the end of the day both Apple and Alienware also sell many of their systems to people who, as a demographic fact, make more money than the average Dell home computer buyer.
Actual biology -- you know, where you run tests to determine things instead of just guess -- shows that the male genitalia, on average, are much more free of infectuous microorganisms than the hands.
While factually correct, your comment is pointless. We're not discussing whether or not people's hands are dirty (they are, nobody disagrees), we're talking about whether or not genitals are.
Transient pathogens are the reason we wash our hands, and there are pathogens that live happily on our genitals but not for long on our hands. The point is to wash off those pathogens quickly, rather than waiting 3-6 hours for them to become harmless and in the meantime spreading them around every time we touch something else.
I mean, we all know there is fecal matter on most surfaces we contact, but we still wash our hands after taking a dump because it is more dangerous to have large quantities of fresh, warm and moist fecal matter than the comparatively less active contamination on normal surfaces.
Whether the period goes inside or outside the quote has more to do with geography than grammar. British English doesn't have the bad habit of putting extra punctuation inside quotation marks that American English does.
Why is it assumed that the penis is dirty in the first place? Do you wash your hands after touching your leg?
Genitalia are warm and humid and perfect places for flora to grow dramatically faster and in greater quantities than on any other part of the body. This is basic biology.
It's also worth noting you can be carrying any one of dozens of STDs and be asymptomatic. Last time I checked, Gonorrhea of the leg is not a common malady.
And no, you shouldn't grab the door handle to leave the bathroom, use a paper towel if it isn't a push door.
Don't know the answer, but it would be interesting if there are a higher percentage of Mac users who smoke versus PC users? Macs tend to attract "cooler", artistic types who may tend to be more likely to smoke.
Highly doubtful -- the primary demographic difference between Mac users and PC users is household income. Smoking is inversely associated with wealth for adults (though interestingly, adolescents are equally likely to smoke whether rich or poor).
Ironically it seems that many companies have a strong mechanism to control small costs at the rank and file level for things like printer cartridges, but there is less control and oversight at the higher levels
This is exactly correct. I've been in a variety of positions in the public and private sector, and they all operate the exact same way -- peeny wise and pound foolish. It was always easier to spend $5,000 than it was to spend $50, which obviously led to overspending on critical things because we couldn't wait 3 weeks for the cheap version to be approved.
Yes, large parts of Greenland, Canada, etc have ice on land in the high arctic that could melt and raise sea levels, I was just explaining to the poster why ice "at the North Pole" should not raise sea levels.
I don't know how so many replies failed to explicitly mention the North Pole has no land (unlike the South Pole), which is why the ice at the North shouldn't affect sea levels since it's just floating there.
Everything you say is 100% true, and 100% irrelevant. Yes, if they became a wonderful democracy tomorrow, we'd be great friends with Iran.
But that's all spoken as if the Iranians have no interests of their own other than to please us, which is most certainly not the case. They don't want to change, they just want to discourage us from attacking them. As they have clearly seen, the best way to do that is have nuclear weapons. It's not a good idea for us, or the safety of the world, or the stability of the middle east, but it's a completely sensible solution FOR THEM, to what they perceive as their greatest potential problem.
They have the added advantage of being incredibly rich in a globally critical natural resource and allied with nations who aren't concerned about international opinion, so threats of economic embargos are basically a joke to them. We can either offer fantastic bribes to them (which we're unwilling to do) or threaten them with invasion before they get nuclear capabilities (which is an empty threat as long as they can finish in the next few years).
If, from a non-American point of view, you find a large number of similarities between America and Iran, it is probably because your view of America is as uninformed as your view of Iran.
I didn't say I find a large number of similarities between America and Iran, I said most of the poster's claimed issues with Iran (support of terrorism, expressed desire to overthrow democratically elected governments, willingness to use military force) could be equally applied to the USA, and in fact we've been much more successful with those tactics on a global scale than Iran could dream of.
Most of the significant differences you point to simply support my already stated view that the USA is a much more stable society and government. I don't disagree with anything you said, you simply seem to have misread my comment and the post it was replying to.
It takes years to develop a nuclear weapon; the U.S. has shown that it can attack and defeat an Iran-sized military in months.
That's why I specifically said we wouldn't have the necessary stick for several years. Our most realistic threat (that we would invade) is clearly a bluff at the moment. They know, as everyone else on Earth does, that we've got our military working at 100% already and simply don't have the hundreds of thousands of troops and necessary equipment available to move at the moment.
Yes, in a few years when (hopefully) Iraq and Afghanistan are stable and we have finished building our permenant bases in Iraq, we'll be in a fantastic position to invade -- better than we would have been before the Iraq war (in terms of logistics and training). And that's precisely why Iran would be crazy NOT to be doing everything they could to demonstrate nuclear capability before then. The only thing we can realistically do is air strikes at the moment, which they are reportedly prepared for.
Indeed, I regret the years during which I ignored the CSM because of the name and my assumption that it would be akin to the Watchtower. Having read it daily for almost a decade now, it is basically the paper I turn to when I want to understand a complex issue.
Most papers cover every issue as he-said/she-said, and think that providing quotes from every idiot with an agenda is objective reporting. The CSM actually does the hard work of researching complementary articles that fill in multiple aspects of the same story, some from the human side, some from the historical side, and others from the dollars and cents side. They don't get bogged down in finding the bloodiest tragedy and hyping it in 60-point type, yet they do make sure readers are aware of the small tragedies happening in the corners of the world most of the American press ignores. It's an amazing mixture of eyes-open brutal realism, but without the defeatist, paranoid, sky-is-falling feel you get from most of the American press.
In the amount of time it took you type all of your responses, you could have gone to the CSM web site and seen whether or not they fit your preconception (er, misconception). They run a single column every day in the Op/Ed section that deals in some way with spiritual matters, and that's it. Almost every newspaper in the US runs at the very least a Bible Quote somewhere on the Op/Ed pages, and the majority of daily papers in this country do carry a religious section, even if only in the Sunday edition, so the column in the CSM isn't terribly out of place (and quite frankly, it's usually fairly nonreligious, but nonetheless it's relegated to the Op/Ed pages where biased commentary belongs).
As an athiest, I can assure you the presence of that one column doesn't somehow "taint" the rest of the newspaper. Quite frankly, the CSM is one of the best, if not THE best, newspapers currently published in the United States, in terms of objectivity, comprehensive coverage of vital issues, and reporting of straightforward facts. You will never see a front page story about Angelina Jolie's baby, or any other nonsense that most American "newspapers" cover, but you will find in-depth reporting from corners of the globe everyone else is ignoring. You'll find original coverage that doesn't rely on republishing the same tired wire reports everyone else is cribbing from, and you'll see rather penetrating journalism that should make every other newspaper's Washington bureau filled with syncophants (of both parties) hang their heads in shame.
If you approached the situation from a non-American point of view, most of the issues you raise with Iran could be applied to the US equally, and with more historical evidence rather than mere conjecture.
The most significant real issue is stability, but we've already had the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had more nuclear weapons than Iran could build in two centuries. So the horse is several leagues from that particular barn, though I agree it's in the world's best interests to keep as few nuclear horses from running around as possible.
But at the end of the day, Iran would be crazy NOT to develop nuclear weapons, assuming they look after their own best interests. An American policy that doesn't recognize this and try to overcome it is doomed to failure -- we need a HUGE carrot or a gigantic stick to stop them, and we don't seem willing to do the former or capable (for several more years) of the latter.
Ahh, that's quite elegant actually. Most proposals we've had here involve stores actually repricing individual items to 5 cent increments, of course always rounding up. That said, there just still isn't any mass upset at the inconvenience of carrying pennies, and the increase in use of debit and credit cards will probably prevent it from ever being significant in most people's daily lives. I know that the US tends to use cards a lot more than other places, so perhaps that was a factor in the australian decision?
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Not all at once, no. But then, I rarely read more than one or two books at a time so why would they need to?
Some of us leave home for more than a few hours at a time (on occassion, people have been known to travel to other parts of the planet -- which can take more than a day or two!).
I can only listen to one song at a time, yet I carry 6,000 of them in my pocket.
I'd be surprised if there were as many as 200 font families that actually have that wide a range available.
Well, of a single named family, maybe not. But keep in mind Adobe has literally about 500-600 (maybe more) Helvetica fonts alone that they sell. They aren't all a single family or design, so they wouldn't go together, but it can get crazy sorting outthe Adobe Helvetica from the Linotype Helvetica from the AGFA Helvetica from the Helvetica Neue from the...
There are about 75 fonts in the Minion family, and those actually go together, but that's definitely one of the larger families. I think most non-novelty faces have about 6-18 fonts, which add up quickly.
I suspect what happened is basically the place had an Adobe Font Folio CD somebody downloaded -- I think that's about 9,000-11,000 fonts depending on which version you have.
Correct, except for size. Professional publishers use PostScript typefaces, as they scale to any size. Loading different sized screen fonts (to see things rendered somewher correctly on screen for proofing) hasn't been an issue since the early '90s and Adobe Type Manager.
Well, not really. Most high-end faces do have multiple "sizes", because just scaling a face won't work correctly for all possible sizes. A type family will have specific fonts optimized for small type or large type, or book settings. A Display face will have much more delicate fine details, since it will be printed large and they will show up. If you just shrank down that design to 6pts, all the fine details would literally disappear and the words might well be impossible to read. So a small face (often called a caption face, since they are frequently used for photo captions) will be much heavier overall than the Display face, so much so that if you blew up a caption face to 60pts, it would be some of the ugliest type you'd ever seen! But it's extremely legible at small sizes, and has the "feel" of the type family, though the weights are completely different.
Adobe initially tried to solve this problem with Multiple Master faces in the 90s -- the weight of particular strokes were marked to expand or contract as the size changed, but it was quite frankly a huge pain in the ass to manage and the results were never as good as what a professional type designer would get optimizing a face for a particular size.
Actually, you can if you have the full version of Adobe. Just not the letters that aren't in use.
Full version of Adobe what? I can't think of any application Adobe sells that will let you pull the embedded fonts from a PDF to be used elsewhere.
Just to clarify, because you're mixing up the authority of the coach, university, and scholarship giver:
If the coach has $10,000 of his own money he wants to give as a scholarship to any girl who will take off her clothes, that is of course perfectly legal. (though he'd likely get fired because of bad publicity)
If the University wants to start a Stripping team and awards scholarships for it, that would be legal (though probably a bad idea due to the inevitable lawsuits and bad publicity no matter how well-run the program was).
If a university gives a scholarship to a player for playing a sport, and the coach declares on his own that he'll stop her eligibility unless she takes off her clothes, that's sexual harrassment. You see the difference? You keep suggesting that somehow the coach gets to dictate the terms of a scholarship or eligibility, and that's just not the case, coaches are coaches, the scholarship committees do the contracts and finances (though often the coach is on the committee, it's unlikely they'll get away with adding a stripping provision to the contracts).
A state university with this kind of policy is setting themselves up for the mother of all First Amendment lawsuits.
Not true. US courts have repeatedly ruled that, as participation in extracurricular activities is not a required part of the educational mission, it can be subject to restrictions that would otherwise be unconstitutional. That's why drug tests for Algebra II are not allowed, but drug tests for Basketball are.
The major advantage they have at the university level is that athletic scholarships are tied to eligibility (and sometimes even performance), so getting kicked off the team also takes away the money you're using to pay for school.
Note that I don't support this move (though I can understand picking the low-hanging fruit), but it's certainly within their authority.
I sell exactly what you're looking for =)
I don't see anything like what I was talking about. Your offsite backup is a live RAID5 array that costs $150/month (which, I'll grant you is a MUCH less expensive option than the ones in the article, and I'll certainly direct some customers towards a service like yours).
I'm talking about something more along the lines of selling a high capacity tape archive for 200-300% of the media cost, and then the tape goes into your vault until the customer requests a restore (which would be paid for, of course). Basically, people would pay a few hundred dollars at once for someone with a hugely expensive tape system to backup their stuff, and maybe another maintenance fee per month for tape storage and the smaller incremental backups that would be on a disk system until reaching tape capacity.
The biggest problem (aside from upstream bandwidth, which isn't something they can necessarily do anything about) is obviously price. I know lots and lots of people who've looked at this kind of storage for backup, but invariably just go to using hard drives with USB enclosures because they are thousands of dollars less than it would cost to use even the cheapest of these services for more than a few dozen gigabytes of data.
Looking through the features, I think I see why they all cost so much -- they all offer "live" storage, where you can send links to friends and view files over the internet at any time. That's certainly a great feature, but do people REALLY need every file they've ever backed up to be available at a moment's notice? Of course not.
All these services are selling file system space, but nobody seems to be selling actual BACKUP services. Where is the service that lets me upload my 500 GB of data, and then they back it up onto a 400GB Ultrium tape for $100? Who cares if it takes 24-48 hours for my tape to get loaded and cached for restoring? I can't download 500GB overnight anyways, and I've obviously had a catastrophic failure of some sort on my end if I need to restore that data, it will take me at least a day just to get new hardware in place and set up to receive. A 24 hour wait is NOTHING in such a situation, and presumably your day-to-day critical stuff is either replicated locally or can be stored in a more expensive live online file system.
Ever since QIC/Travan capacities were left wanting over a decade ago, there hasn't been a single affordable backup solution available to the home/small office community. Any decent tape system these days costs upwards of $10k (and easily $250k) and requires more than trivial expertise to set up and run properly. It's a perfect opportunity for a qualified online operator to distribute the huge capital investment over lots of small customers who quite literally have no affordable alternative.
I think it just comes down to the disaster you grew up with. You know what to expect, you know how to prepare for a typical hurricane/quake/flood/tornado, you know what to do during the disaster, and you know how pick things up afterward. Every once in a while something hits on the level of Katrina or the 1906 San Francisco quake, but for the most part, the locals in any region are comfortable with their area's disasters -- and often freaked out totally by the disasters that hit other areas.
Absolutely correct. I spent several years teaching wilderness survival for travelers going to remote areas overseas, and one of the single most important things was to educate them about the REAL risks of where they were traveling. People are very, very bad at risk evaulation because we perceive new risks as being MUCH greater than familiar risks. A large part of that is because we dramatically overinflate the danger of things we cannot control, while dramatically underrating situations we feel in control of. And familiarity can give a fantastic illusion of control.
The classic example is of course people who worry about being killed in a terrorist attack (something they feel helpless in preventing) and demand that we spend trillions of dollars to defend against the possibility, while we cheerily drive public roads every day despite knowing the chances of being killed in a car accident is astronomically higher. But we all think of ourselves as being good drivers, so we think WE won't get into an accident because we have influence over the situation -- which is of course ridiculous, since we have no control over the drunk idiot in the other car who plows into us, no matter how defensively we drive.
The net result is that of course someone who grows up with a given natural disaster (in my case, hurricanes), considers them merely an inconvenience. I know how to prepare, I have supplies, and have a realistic expecation of how the storm will progress, what kind of damage it will do, and how to deal with the aftermath while things return to normal. So I feel like I have some control over the situation. But I've only ever been through one earthquake, a very minor one and it scared the heck out of me because I did not instinctually know what to do in those moments. To me, it's a ridiculous risk because it can happen spontaneously without warning, but I know to someone who grew up in an earthquake-prone area, it would feel very manageable.
Of course we would both be proven very wrong if we ever had the "big one" happen to us, because the rare but terrific disasters are completely beyond our experience.
The first thing a business student learns is that nothing is about how much money you have, its about how much you think you have (since we can take out loans, use credit cards, etc). Everybody can think of somebody who has no money but has a big screen TV, or the opposite - somebody with lots of money and a small house, etc.
Using this logic, its not the rich folks with macs, its the people who are willing to spend a little more. The luxury crowd, if you will. (and yes, it does make a difference)
No, self-perception or people living beyond means has nothing to do with what I said. It may have a lot to do with marketing, but nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Mac buyers have higher household incomes than the average computer buyer. It's simply a statement of fact, not of perception or cachet.
I'm sure people do drop money on $5,000 macs (and $5,000 alienware systems) who can't afford to, but at the end of the day both Apple and Alienware also sell many of their systems to people who, as a demographic fact, make more money than the average Dell home computer buyer.
Actual biology -- you know, where you run tests to determine things instead of just guess -- shows that the male genitalia, on average, are much more free of infectuous microorganisms than the hands.
While factually correct, your comment is pointless. We're not discussing whether or not people's hands are dirty (they are, nobody disagrees), we're talking about whether or not genitals are.
Transient pathogens are the reason we wash our hands, and there are pathogens that live happily on our genitals but not for long on our hands. The point is to wash off those pathogens quickly, rather than waiting 3-6 hours for them to become harmless and in the meantime spreading them around every time we touch something else.
I mean, we all know there is fecal matter on most surfaces we contact, but we still wash our hands after taking a dump because it is more dangerous to have large quantities of fresh, warm and moist fecal matter than the comparatively less active contamination on normal surfaces.
Whether the period goes inside or outside the quote has more to do with geography than grammar. British English doesn't have the bad habit of putting extra punctuation inside quotation marks that American English does.
Why is it assumed that the penis is dirty in the first place? Do you wash your hands after touching your leg?
Genitalia are warm and humid and perfect places for flora to grow dramatically faster and in greater quantities than on any other part of the body. This is basic biology.
It's also worth noting you can be carrying any one of dozens of STDs and be asymptomatic. Last time I checked, Gonorrhea of the leg is not a common malady.
And no, you shouldn't grab the door handle to leave the bathroom, use a paper towel if it isn't a push door.
Don't know the answer, but it would be interesting if there are a higher percentage of Mac users who smoke versus PC users? Macs tend to attract "cooler", artistic types who may tend to be more likely to smoke.
Highly doubtful -- the primary demographic difference between Mac users and PC users is household income. Smoking is inversely associated with wealth for adults (though interestingly, adolescents are equally likely to smoke whether rich or poor).
Ironically it seems that many companies have a strong mechanism to control small costs at the rank and file level for things like printer cartridges, but there is less control and oversight at the higher levels
This is exactly correct. I've been in a variety of positions in the public and private sector, and they all operate the exact same way -- peeny wise and pound foolish. It was always easier to spend $5,000 than it was to spend $50, which obviously led to overspending on critical things because we couldn't wait 3 weeks for the cheap version to be approved.
Though on the bright side, porn site customers finally have a way to get screwed over the internet!
Yes, large parts of Greenland, Canada, etc have ice on land in the high arctic that could melt and raise sea levels, I was just explaining to the poster why ice "at the North Pole" should not raise sea levels.
I don't know how so many replies failed to explicitly mention the North Pole has no land (unlike the South Pole), which is why the ice at the North shouldn't affect sea levels since it's just floating there.
Everything you say is 100% true, and 100% irrelevant. Yes, if they became a wonderful democracy tomorrow, we'd be great friends with Iran.
But that's all spoken as if the Iranians have no interests of their own other than to please us, which is most certainly not the case. They don't want to change, they just want to discourage us from attacking them. As they have clearly seen, the best way to do that is have nuclear weapons. It's not a good idea for us, or the safety of the world, or the stability of the middle east, but it's a completely sensible solution FOR THEM, to what they perceive as their greatest potential problem.
They have the added advantage of being incredibly rich in a globally critical natural resource and allied with nations who aren't concerned about international opinion, so threats of economic embargos are basically a joke to them. We can either offer fantastic bribes to them (which we're unwilling to do) or threaten them with invasion before they get nuclear capabilities (which is an empty threat as long as they can finish in the next few years).
If, from a non-American point of view, you find a large number of similarities between America and Iran, it is probably because your view of America is as uninformed as your view of Iran.
I didn't say I find a large number of similarities between America and Iran, I said most of the poster's claimed issues with Iran (support of terrorism, expressed desire to overthrow democratically elected governments, willingness to use military force) could be equally applied to the USA, and in fact we've been much more successful with those tactics on a global scale than Iran could dream of.
Most of the significant differences you point to simply support my already stated view that the USA is a much more stable society and government. I don't disagree with anything you said, you simply seem to have misread my comment and the post it was replying to.
It takes years to develop a nuclear weapon; the U.S. has shown that it can attack and defeat an Iran-sized military in months.
That's why I specifically said we wouldn't have the necessary stick for several years. Our most realistic threat (that we would invade) is clearly a bluff at the moment. They know, as everyone else on Earth does, that we've got our military working at 100% already and simply don't have the hundreds of thousands of troops and necessary equipment available to move at the moment.
Yes, in a few years when (hopefully) Iraq and Afghanistan are stable and we have finished building our permenant bases in Iraq, we'll be in a fantastic position to invade -- better than we would have been before the Iraq war (in terms of logistics and training). And that's precisely why Iran would be crazy NOT to be doing everything they could to demonstrate nuclear capability before then. The only thing we can realistically do is air strikes at the moment, which they are reportedly prepared for.
Indeed, I regret the years during which I ignored the CSM because of the name and my assumption that it would be akin to the Watchtower. Having read it daily for almost a decade now, it is basically the paper I turn to when I want to understand a complex issue.
Most papers cover every issue as he-said/she-said, and think that providing quotes from every idiot with an agenda is objective reporting. The CSM actually does the hard work of researching complementary articles that fill in multiple aspects of the same story, some from the human side, some from the historical side, and others from the dollars and cents side. They don't get bogged down in finding the bloodiest tragedy and hyping it in 60-point type, yet they do make sure readers are aware of the small tragedies happening in the corners of the world most of the American press ignores. It's an amazing mixture of eyes-open brutal realism, but without the defeatist, paranoid, sky-is-falling feel you get from most of the American press.
In the amount of time it took you type all of your responses, you could have gone to the CSM web site and seen whether or not they fit your preconception (er, misconception). They run a single column every day in the Op/Ed section that deals in some way with spiritual matters, and that's it. Almost every newspaper in the US runs at the very least a Bible Quote somewhere on the Op/Ed pages, and the majority of daily papers in this country do carry a religious section, even if only in the Sunday edition, so the column in the CSM isn't terribly out of place (and quite frankly, it's usually fairly nonreligious, but nonetheless it's relegated to the Op/Ed pages where biased commentary belongs).
As an athiest, I can assure you the presence of that one column doesn't somehow "taint" the rest of the newspaper. Quite frankly, the CSM is one of the best, if not THE best, newspapers currently published in the United States, in terms of objectivity, comprehensive coverage of vital issues, and reporting of straightforward facts. You will never see a front page story about Angelina Jolie's baby, or any other nonsense that most American "newspapers" cover, but you will find in-depth reporting from corners of the globe everyone else is ignoring. You'll find original coverage that doesn't rely on republishing the same tired wire reports everyone else is cribbing from, and you'll see rather penetrating journalism that should make every other newspaper's Washington bureau filled with syncophants (of both parties) hang their heads in shame.
If you approached the situation from a non-American point of view, most of the issues you raise with Iran could be applied to the US equally, and with more historical evidence rather than mere conjecture.
The most significant real issue is stability, but we've already had the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had more nuclear weapons than Iran could build in two centuries. So the horse is several leagues from that particular barn, though I agree it's in the world's best interests to keep as few nuclear horses from running around as possible.
But at the end of the day, Iran would be crazy NOT to develop nuclear weapons, assuming they look after their own best interests. An American policy that doesn't recognize this and try to overcome it is doomed to failure -- we need a HUGE carrot or a gigantic stick to stop them, and we don't seem willing to do the former or capable (for several more years) of the latter.
Ahh, that's quite elegant actually. Most proposals we've had here involve stores actually repricing individual items to 5 cent increments, of course always rounding up. That said, there just still isn't any mass upset at the inconvenience of carrying pennies, and the increase in use of debit and credit cards will probably prevent it from ever being significant in most people's daily lives. I know that the US tends to use cards a lot more than other places, so perhaps that was a factor in the australian decision?