That's a great theory... Unfortunately it relies on a very narrow definition of "memory leak". In the real world, running out of memory 'cause you screwed up is a real problem (and the basis for a set of development products) in Java, and it's not the fault of the GC algorithm. You leak memory in a GC-based language by having things that can be accessed, but shouldn't be (and because they shouldn't be, you usually don't know about it until your big development effort starts crashing with out of memory errors).
Try Googling for:
"memory leak" java
Or as an example of the problem and one approach to fixing it see this article on IBM developerWorks.
As someone who works on long-lived projects with a mid-sized team (a dozen or so developers), I prefer a GC-based language. The biggest pro is the great reduction in memory leaks, closely followed by the productivity increase by not having to think about allocation/deallocation (very much). The biggest con is that far too many "young whippersnappers" seem to think memory allocation/deallocation is therefore "free" in a GC-based language and will take absolutely no care at all about when they allocate (e.g. will allocate a largish object inside a very tight loop instead of allocating it outside and reusing it...). And the 2nd biggest con is that a lot of developers can't believe you can have memory leaks in a GC-based language, won't look for them until you rub their nose in them, and don't really know how to find them when they look.
In my non-legal interpretation, it appears to claim web server modules that dispatch to outside processes (ie, mod_jk talking to a J2EE app server, locally or remotely). How that distinguishes from CGI, particularly as disguised via mod-rewrite (or straight HTML via an NTFS-mounted directory) is not exactly clear.
I have no idea either way, but I've certainly seen a lot of total BS eagerly repeated as truth.
On the other hand, the site gets most of its business from the "committed Christian" community and initially focused its marketing there, so the rumor has a smidge of plausibility to it.
I'd suggest adding some more basic points:
4. Design for change, but don't go overboard. If new requirements or a sub-system design failure comes along, be ready to go to plan B without starting over.
5. Design for performance auditing. When the system gets big, the question "why is X so slow?" WILL come up. It shouldn't be a 2 man-week project by senior staff to answer that question. After data integrity, performance is likely your biggest headache, especially if you add near-realtime functionality...
There are pretty sharp limits on non-compete clauses.
In general, a contract (or a contract clause) will not be upheld for a number of different reasons. Some of the leading ones are: illegality, public policy, incapicity of one of the parties, duress, undue influence, fraud or misrepresentation, vagueness, lack of exchange. Here's a quick summary.
"non-compete" clauses conflict with public policy when they make someone effectively unemployable in their chosen field; courts have generally found blanket "non-compete" clauses to be unenforcable. However, they have often upheld very limited clauses, such as ones with both a time-limit and a geographic restriction; for example, a salesman might be barred from selling a competing product in his former sales area for 1 year.
Recently, some employers have tried to argue that "trade secret" protection should allow broader "non-competes" to be acceptable, but in general, that argument hasn't flown very well.
Getting fired for turning up with green hair would surely be a garanteed win in a lawsuit against your former employer.
In the U.S., I suppose there might be a jurisdiction where you can only be fired for work-related issues, AND a judge who woudn't agree that green hair necessarily would cause workplace disruption... There might be, but I don't it...
In my jurisdiction (state of Texas), employment is at will, meaning that you might be fired for any reason, or no reason, excepting those certain reasons explicitly barred by law, such as race, religion, sex, disability, and country of origin. Green hair, or body mods, just aren't on the list.
I left my primary card unsigned for about 14 months, until a clerk said she couldn't accept an unsigned card. I borrowed a pen from her, signed it, and she accepted it.
I suspect that this technology will be dead-on-arrival in test markets; the only way a consumer would be such a thing is if there was no choice. For that to happen would require legislation, which seems unlikely to me.
However, I think there's a market for bio-metric access control to DVD-RW media, especially if well done. "Well done" would include good key management, so that an access control list of authorized users and/or machines and/or time limits could be set up, and dynamically revised.
Imagine you're with Mega-Big Legal Co., and you're working with the New York and San Francisco offices of your client on the Big Case/Merger/Whatever. They're sending you huge sets of digital documents, and it would be really realy bad if the wrong people (like the opposing law firm in the building across the street) got access. Sure, everything could be encrypted, but then a disgruntled/greedy staffer/intern/paralegal could burn an image and grab the key that the administrative assistant writes down, and sells it...
The market is limited; encryption and secure databases will cover a lot of needs much better, but for things that have to cross organizational boundaries (or for the truly paranoid), it might be a Good Thing(TM).
And of course, the U.S. didn't respect international copyright for something like 100 years, until somewhere around the beginning of the 1900's. For example, everything Charles Dickens wrote was legally pirated in the U.S.
Ben Franklin was also a notable "pirate", way back when...
The rational back then was that it benefited the U.S. economy (which it did). <sarcasm>Of course, now it's just absolutely horrible when "Intellectual Property" rights aren't respected... </sarcasm>
keep in mind that China's currency is currently undervalued by an estimated 40%
That's very interesting because:
a) they've artificially pegged the yuan-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate at 8.2765
b) the U.S dollar has been dropping substantially in value in comparison to many other major currencies, over the last 4 years. In May 2001, it took about 1.14 Euros to buy 1 US dollar; now it takes about.78 Euros...
The dollar's been rising lately though. At the beginning of the year, it only took.76 Euros to buy a dollar.
Assuming China's currency really is undervalued, because they're tied to the dollar at a fixed rate, then the US dollar is overvalued (or another currency tied to the dollar is). I'd guess that if China lets their currency float, then in theory the dollar (or the dollar and that other currency) will fall even more, which will make our exports cheaper to the rest of the world and make our imports (including spot market oil) more expensive.
Your argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere think it is bad then it IS bad.
Nice straw man. I'm not asserting anything about good/bad, and it so happens I'm not arguing my personal values either. I'm making a claim about what I think is the objective reality of the opinion people (Americans) have of the LDS church; that a lot of people find (or found) those current and former practices of the LDS church extreme or offensive, in contradiction to the post to which I responded. Because it's a claim about objective reality, it's subject to verification (if someone wants to do the work). I've backed my assertion with external references to some evidence that supports my claim. If you've got evidence that polygamy is "acceptable" in the U.S., let's see it. ("acceptable" means "tolerated by at least a big plurality of the Americans.) Evidence might persuade me that I'm wrong about what I think a lot of Americans think about polygamy.
...just because Frist is pandering...
That's exactly my point! Senator Frist is trying to link gay marriage to polygamy (and other things with high negatives in U.S. culture) because polygamy has much higher negatives among the general populace than does gay marriage. QED.
The observation of Senator Frist's action is not based on what you or I think about either polygamy or gay marriage or their relationship or lack thereof, it's an observation of what a leading politician thinks will work to sway opinion to his side on the issue.
It seems that what I'm trying to communicate just isn't "coming in". I'm *not* trying to change anyone's personal opinion of any LDS doctrine or former doctrine, pro or con, nor am I trying to characterize those practices. I'm trying to express my sense of what the general sentiment of my fellow Americans is towards certain practices or former practices that Americans generally found to be extreme or offensive.
To give you some practice, here are some other similarly structured statements that I think are also true.
In 1860, a great many Southerners supported slavery, or politicians who did so.
Now, most people in the U.S. thinks slavery is reprehensible
We're talking about modern American culture here, not 2 millenia old history. 1 Corinthians 7:2 is often taken as a prohibition on polygamy, though thats open to interpretation. Certainly, St. Paul transformed Christion practice to make it acceptable to Western (Greco-Roman) culture, which is what we've more or less inherited. Also, if you've followed the political flamefest about gay marriage, you might have noticed that one of the arguments that the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate has made against legalizing gay marriage is that doing so puts us on the "slippery slope" to legalizing "worse" things such as
polygamy and incest. I cite this solely as an example of how polygamy is viewed in the U.S. currently; the gay marriage debate (as a debate) has no place on Slashdot.
And while no one gets too riled up about foreign practices in foreign countries, when the polygamists move next door, people get upset
Finally, you're argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere else or long ago thought it was good, then most Americans now don't think it's bad, which seems to me to be faulty logic. By that rational, a doctor who suggests that patients should be regularly bled to rebalance the humors would be practicing what is called "good medicine", just because it was "good medicine" 200 years ago. (BTW, whether or not something really is good medicine ought to be a scientific question, IMHO, not subject to opinions or social consensus or religio-political debate or corporate lobbying or ad campaigns, but that doesn't seem to be the current state of things, if it ever was...)
Please note that I'm not arguing here for or against any of the aforementioned practices. I've definetly got pro or con opinions on all of 'em, but Slashdot just isn't the place. I'm just challenging the bare assertion that nothing the LDS does (or did) is considered extreme or offensive by others. This really isn't a Slashdot issue either, but if inaccurate information isn't challenged just because it's off-topic, the casual reader will get the idea that the claim is accurate and undisputed.
A more neutral reference on "blood atonement" can be found in the Wikipedia article.
xmission (not xmormon) definitely has an not-very-fond-of-the-LDS bias, it was just a handy reference to illustrate the controversy, coming up early on Google for "blood atonement".
Wanna learn about the LDS faith. Frankly, I have excellent reference material on most religions, but 99% of it is in dead tree format, so it's not very useful for a Slashdot post.
The LDS church may have different beliefs that mainstream Protestant and Evangelical Christianity, but none of them are extreme or offensive.
Well, I'd call that a pretty subjective and ill-informed judgement. Trying to keep away from the flamebait and encourage civil discourse, I'm aware of a lot of people who consider the LDS practice of post-mortem "baptism" at least odd, and some people were mightily offended when it was found that they were applying it to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Of course, if we want to visit the historical files, then the LDS's history of polygamy and "blood atonement" (murdering the sinner, commonly for adultery, but sometimes just for leaving the church or challenging the leadership or being in the wrong place at the wrong time) would make a lovely flamefest. The modern LDS formally repudiated "blood atonement" in 1978, but major splinter sects still advocate it.
But yes, it's pretty far afield for slashdot, and most individual Mormons are "good folk".
Her opinion doesn't matter much, no more so than many others. Groklaw (which she runs) matters a lot because it provides a fantastic resource for those wishing to understand the SCO v. IBM, SCO v. Chrysler, SCO v. AutoZone, SCO v. Novell, and RedHat v. SCO lawsuits. Primarily it does so by providing references and copies of unbiased original source material; court filings, relevant historical journalism and press releases, etc. etc.
Groklaw allows anyone who's willing to take the time (and it takes a lot of time), to understand just how (un-)likely it is that SCO will win some or all of its major lawsuits.
Because of the extensions since 1976, you have to go back to "published in 1922" to guarantee that the copyright on a published work has expired. If it was published between 1923 and 1950 and copyright was not renewed by filing with the copyright office and doesn't fall into some classes of exceptional exceptions, then the copyright has expired. The most significant class of exceptional exceptions are foreign works that are still copyright in their "home" countries but lost copyright (or never had it) in the U.S. for failure to comply with certain technicalities; as of 1996, these works automatically regained their copyright status, despite such things as failing to renew a registration, and being actively republished as public domain works. In other words, foreign publishers are more protected than American ones are.
Copyright terms on unpublished works are different; no matter how antique the original, they became copyrighted in 1978, until 2002; if published before 2002, they became copyrighted until 2047.
This thread is typical of the IT support mindset that says "if only we can restrict what the users are doing we will have a much easier ride". The problem is that assumes that a one size fits all PC configuration can really work for all users.
Ever since the roll-out of the desktop PC, there's been a chronic tension between the users and the support people in the business environment, even before the days of the "Internet". Both sets of people see the box as "theirs". Given the chance, many users will install all sorts of "stuff" on their machines: screen savers, wallpaper, P2P downloading apps, games, applications, etc., most of which has no business purpose. Then, when something goes wrong, they expect their support guys to fix it, an unnecessary business cost.
The converse problem (as the previous poster alludes to) is that not every user has "standard" needs.
A mature support organization needs to have multiple levels of authorization and IT hand-holding, from the "standard lockdown installation for the accounting department" to the "anything goes even on the servers and Domain Controllers" for the software QA lab (appropriately firewalled). The levels depend on the business. For example, in a hospital, practically every machine should be locked down pretty hard, while in a software company, the developers need to be pretty wide open, while the sales staff should be given pencil, paper, and abacuses.
The problem with a "level" approach comes with the assignment of levels; some users will always want "more", either so they can install non-business crap, or as an ego/status thing. Back when I did IT, my most annoying service call was a manager who wanted Photoshop installed and running on his Windows PC, "right fucking now". The service call pretty quickly devolved into a shouting match, after I told him that there was no way I could or would load it; not least of the problems was that it was a "warez" Macintosh download. After he was fired (for unrelated reasons (grabbing the wrong woman's butt)), I heard he was having a competition with another manager on total value of software they could get installed on their PC (the other guy was canned too, for circumventing purchasing rules - he wasn't bright enough to use "warez").
95% of users, given rules they think are reasonable (and *that* may require some good explanations), will try to stick to the rules and do the right thing. The other 5%, in a networked environment, are the ones who give the IT folk headaches and bring out the "net-NAZI" in the less flexible ones. I sympathize with both sides.
And said museums could also keep 90+ percent of their collections in the back rooms where most people will never see them...
Having been in a very very small part of said back rooms (invertebrate paleontology), I can assure you that 90% of the stuff there doesn't need displaying. After you've seen the best example of each of thousands of species of trilobytes, you don't really have much interest in seeing the second-best specimen.
tilobyte genera And frankly, unless you're a specialist, the fragments and partial specimens will make your eyes glaze over after the first 50 drawers. (And if you're a specialist, you can arrange access, or at least you could...)
However, I heartily agree that they could use a *hell* of a lot more display space and put a *lot* more on display. I think a big room full of trilobites and a good comparitive time-line might do more to explain more about bio-diversity and ecology and ecology and geological time scales and evolution than any textbook.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Googling for:
"memory leak" java
Or as an example of the problem and one approach to fixing it see this article on IBM developerWorks.
As someone who works on long-lived projects with a mid-sized team (a dozen or so developers), I prefer a GC-based language. The biggest pro is the great reduction in memory leaks, closely followed by the productivity increase by not having to think about allocation/deallocation (very much). The biggest con is that far too many "young whippersnappers" seem to think memory allocation/deallocation is therefore "free" in a GC-based language and will take absolutely no care at all about when they allocate (e.g. will allocate a largish object inside a very tight loop instead of allocating it outside and reusing it...). And the 2nd biggest con is that a lot of developers can't believe you can have memory leaks in a GC-based language, won't look for them until you rub their nose in them, and don't really know how to find them when they look.
In my non-legal interpretation, it appears to claim web server modules that dispatch to outside processes (ie, mod_jk talking to a J2EE app server, locally or remotely). How that distinguishes from CGI, particularly as disguised via mod-rewrite (or straight HTML via an NTFS-mounted directory) is not exactly clear.
I have no idea either way, but I've certainly seen a lot of total BS eagerly repeated as truth.
On the other hand, the site gets most of its business from the "committed Christian" community and initially focused its marketing there, so the rumor has a smidge of plausibility to it.
I'd suggest adding some more basic points:
4. Design for change, but don't go overboard. If new requirements or a sub-system design failure comes along, be ready to go to plan B without starting over.
5. Design for performance auditing. When the system gets big, the question "why is X so slow?" WILL come up. It shouldn't be a 2 man-week project by senior staff to answer that question. After data integrity, performance is likely your biggest headache, especially if you add near-realtime functionality...
Good choices, I'd add:
In general, a contract (or a contract clause) will not be upheld for a number of different reasons. Some of the leading ones are: illegality, public policy, incapicity of one of the parties, duress, undue influence, fraud or misrepresentation, vagueness, lack of exchange. Here's a quick summary.
"non-compete" clauses conflict with public policy when they make someone effectively unemployable in their chosen field; courts have generally found blanket "non-compete" clauses to be unenforcable. However, they have often upheld very limited clauses, such as ones with both a time-limit and a geographic restriction; for example, a salesman might be barred from selling a competing product in his former sales area for 1 year.
Recently, some employers have tried to argue that "trade secret" protection should allow broader "non-competes" to be acceptable, but in general, that argument hasn't flown very well.
In the U.S., I suppose there might be a jurisdiction where you can only be fired for work-related issues, AND a judge who woudn't agree that green hair necessarily would cause workplace disruption... There might be, but I don't it...
In my jurisdiction (state of Texas), employment is at will, meaning that you might be fired for any reason, or no reason, excepting those certain reasons explicitly barred by law, such as race, religion, sex, disability, and country of origin. Green hair, or body mods, just aren't on the list.
I left my primary card unsigned for about 14 months, until a clerk said she couldn't accept an unsigned card. I borrowed a pen from her, signed it, and she accepted it.
However, I think there's a market for bio-metric access control to DVD-RW media, especially if well done. "Well done" would include good key management, so that an access control list of authorized users and/or machines and/or time limits could be set up, and dynamically revised.
Imagine you're with Mega-Big Legal Co., and you're working with the New York and San Francisco offices of your client on the Big Case/Merger/Whatever. They're sending you huge sets of digital documents, and it would be really realy bad if the wrong people (like the opposing law firm in the building across the street) got access. Sure, everything could be encrypted, but then a disgruntled/greedy staffer/intern/paralegal could burn an image and grab the key that the administrative assistant writes down, and sells it...
The market is limited; encryption and secure databases will cover a lot of needs much better, but for things that have to cross organizational boundaries (or for the truly paranoid), it might be a Good Thing(TM).
And of course, the U.S. didn't respect international copyright for something like 100 years, until somewhere around the beginning of the 1900's. For example, everything Charles Dickens wrote was legally pirated in the U.S.
Ben Franklin was also a notable "pirate", way back when...
The rational back then was that it benefited the U.S. economy (which it did). <sarcasm>Of course, now it's just absolutely horrible when "Intellectual Property" rights aren't respected... </sarcasm>
That's very interesting because: a) they've artificially pegged the yuan-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate at 8.2765 .78 Euros...
b) the U.S dollar has been dropping substantially in value in comparison to many other major currencies, over the last 4 years. In May 2001, it took about 1.14 Euros to buy 1 US dollar; now it takes about
The dollar's been rising lately though. At the beginning of the year, it only took .76 Euros to buy a dollar.
Assuming China's currency really is undervalued, because they're tied to the dollar at a fixed rate, then the US dollar is overvalued (or another currency tied to the dollar is). I'd guess that if China lets their currency float, then in theory the dollar (or the dollar and that other currency) will fall even more, which will make our exports cheaper to the rest of the world and make our imports (including spot market oil) more expensive.
Nice straw man. I'm not asserting anything about good/bad, and it so happens I'm not arguing my personal values either. I'm making a claim about what I think is the objective reality of the opinion people (Americans) have of the LDS church; that a lot of people find (or found) those current and former practices of the LDS church extreme or offensive, in contradiction to the post to which I responded. Because it's a claim about objective reality, it's subject to verification (if someone wants to do the work). I've backed my assertion with external references to some evidence that supports my claim. If you've got evidence that polygamy is "acceptable" in the U.S., let's see it. ("acceptable" means "tolerated by at least a big plurality of the Americans.) Evidence might persuade me that I'm wrong about what I think a lot of Americans think about polygamy.
That's exactly my point! Senator Frist is trying to link gay marriage to polygamy (and other things with high negatives in U.S. culture) because polygamy has much higher negatives among the general populace than does gay marriage.
QED.
The observation of Senator Frist's action is not based on what you or I think about either polygamy or gay marriage or their relationship or lack thereof, it's an observation of what a leading politician thinks will work to sway opinion to his side on the issue.
It seems that what I'm trying to communicate just isn't "coming in". I'm *not* trying to change anyone's personal opinion of any LDS doctrine or former doctrine, pro or con, nor am I trying to characterize those practices. I'm trying to express my sense of what the general sentiment of my fellow Americans is towards certain practices or former practices that Americans generally found to be extreme or offensive.
To give you some practice, here are some other similarly structured statements that I think are also true.
And while no one gets too riled up about foreign practices in foreign countries, when the polygamists move next door, people get upset
Finally, you're argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere else or long ago thought it was good, then most Americans now don't think it's bad, which seems to me to be faulty logic. By that rational, a doctor who suggests that patients should be regularly bled to rebalance the humors would be practicing what is called "good medicine", just because it was "good medicine" 200 years ago. (BTW, whether or not something really is good medicine ought to be a scientific question, IMHO, not subject to opinions or social consensus or religio-political debate or corporate lobbying or ad campaigns, but that doesn't seem to be the current state of things, if it ever was...)
Please note that I'm not arguing here for or against any of the aforementioned practices. I've definetly got pro or con opinions on all of 'em, but Slashdot just isn't the place. I'm just challenging the bare assertion that nothing the LDS does (or did) is considered extreme or offensive by others. This really isn't a Slashdot issue either, but if inaccurate information isn't challenged just because it's off-topic, the casual reader will get the idea that the claim is accurate and undisputed.
xmission (not xmormon) definitely has an not-very-fond-of-the-LDS bias, it was just a handy reference to illustrate the controversy, coming up early on Google for "blood atonement".
Wanna learn about the LDS faith. Frankly, I have excellent reference material on most religions, but 99% of it is in dead tree format, so it's not very useful for a Slashdot post.
Well, I'd call that a pretty subjective and ill-informed judgement. Trying to keep away from the flamebait and encourage civil discourse, I'm aware of a lot of people who consider the LDS practice of post-mortem "baptism" at least odd, and some people were mightily offended when it was found that they were applying it to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Of course, if we want to visit the historical files, then the LDS's history of polygamy and "blood atonement" (murdering the sinner, commonly for adultery, but sometimes just for leaving the church or challenging the leadership or being in the wrong place at the wrong time) would make a lovely flamefest. The modern LDS formally repudiated "blood atonement" in 1978, but major splinter sects still advocate it.
But yes, it's pretty far afield for slashdot, and most individual Mormons are "good folk".
Groklaw allows anyone who's willing to take the time (and it takes a lot of time), to understand just how (un-)likely it is that SCO will win some or all of its major lawsuits.
This is why no one really cares who she is.
Jump Domain postal address, even in their corporate filings, is a MailBoxes, Etc. maildrop - 790 W. 40 HWY #197, BLUE SPRINGS MO 64015.
Copyright terms on unpublished works are different; no matter how antique the original, they became copyrighted in 1978, until 2002; if published before 2002, they became copyrighted until 2047.
Not to pick on them particularly, there seems to be a smaller percentage of DIMs (Drooling Incompentent Morons) with OCP or CCNA than with MCSE.
It least, that's the colloquial usage where I'm from.
Ever since the roll-out of the desktop PC, there's been a chronic tension between the users and the support people in the business environment, even before the days of the "Internet". Both sets of people see the box as "theirs". Given the chance, many users will install all sorts of "stuff" on their machines: screen savers, wallpaper, P2P downloading apps, games, applications, etc., most of which has no business purpose. Then, when something goes wrong, they expect their support guys to fix it, an unnecessary business cost.
The converse problem (as the previous poster alludes to) is that not every user has "standard" needs.
A mature support organization needs to have multiple levels of authorization and IT hand-holding, from the "standard lockdown installation for the accounting department" to the "anything goes even on the servers and Domain Controllers" for the software QA lab (appropriately firewalled). The levels depend on the business. For example, in a hospital, practically every machine should be locked down pretty hard, while in a software company, the developers need to be pretty wide open, while the sales staff should be given pencil, paper, and abacuses.
The problem with a "level" approach comes with the assignment of levels; some users will always want "more", either so they can install non-business crap, or as an ego/status thing. Back when I did IT, my most annoying service call was a manager who wanted Photoshop installed and running on his Windows PC, "right fucking now". The service call pretty quickly devolved into a shouting match, after I told him that there was no way I could or would load it; not least of the problems was that it was a "warez" Macintosh download. After he was fired (for unrelated reasons (grabbing the wrong woman's butt)), I heard he was having a competition with another manager on total value of software they could get installed on their PC (the other guy was canned too, for circumventing purchasing rules - he wasn't bright enough to use "warez").
95% of users, given rules they think are reasonable (and *that* may require some good explanations), will try to stick to the rules and do the right thing. The other 5%, in a networked environment, are the ones who give the IT folk headaches and bring out the "net-NAZI" in the less flexible ones. I sympathize with both sides.
Having been in a very very small part of said back rooms (invertebrate paleontology), I can assure you that 90% of the stuff there doesn't need displaying. After you've seen the best example of each of thousands of species of trilobytes, you don't really have much interest in seeing the second-best specimen. tilobyte genera And frankly, unless you're a specialist, the fragments and partial specimens will make your eyes glaze over after the first 50 drawers. (And if you're a specialist, you can arrange access, or at least you could...)
However, I heartily agree that they could use a *hell* of a lot more display space and put a *lot* more on display. I think a big room full of trilobites and a good comparitive time-line might do more to explain more about bio-diversity and ecology and ecology and geological time scales and evolution than any textbook.
Threaten to send them Michael Jackson too? That ought to strike terror and dread into their hearts.
SBC is actually Southwestern Bell. The south-eastern RBOC is BellSouth.