In the first scenario, there's a clear winner. The Republicrat can go about their party-line business and doesn't need to listen to the "other side" at all on any issue. They have a clear supported mandate from the voting public, which means they stand a good job of getting any referendums or popular votes go their way. Impeachment is nearly impossible since they have majority support from their eligible voting public. They can lose significant amounts of their support base while still getting re-elected, and there's no real reason to pander to the other side or compromise at all.
In the second scenario, even the winning candidate is going to know he/she doesn't have the full support of 50% of their eligible voting public, and that means they have to work their asses off to make the majority who did not vote for them happy enough that they don't lose the next election. Impeachment and defeat of popular vote initiatives are higher-risk items.
The only real difference between the two scenarios is that Independents decided to get off their asses and participate, even if the candidate they voted for was less than ideal for them. If you're thinking about sitting out anyway, you don't have a "throwaway vote" to worry about, just go vote your straight conscience or as close as you can find, and hope it at least sends a message that the two-party monopoly is unacceptable.
And, every now and then, you get an independent who is interested in working the center of the aisle.
Part of it is knowing when to stay put, but another part is just knowing how to handle your vehicle in the weather and having the proper emergency gear (mine includes a blanket, a bag of sand mixed with kitty litter, a good shovel, jumper cables, temporary chains, and a flashlight that either works off a crank, has good batteries, or can be kept in your 12V socket so it stays charged).
I gave up carrying flares years ago. The last thing I want in my car is something highly flammable out back near the fuel tank. Just seemed like a bad idea.:)
But the most important thing is just knowing your car. Slow down, take it really easy, don't be in a hurry, watch for other drivers, leave lots of room, and if someone is in a huge hurry or overtrusting their 4WD behemoth work your darndest to let them go have their accident with another driver if possible.
And fercripesake, find an abandoned parking lot somewhere and go out in the bad weather and do some donuts and skids, regardless of your vehicle of choice. Everyone should go through at least a few dozen uncontrolled skids in their car so they know what it feels like, and how to at least keep the impact-absorbing pointy end with the hood over it in the most effective position when things go truly pear-shaped at 50MPH. The crumple zones in your doors aren't worth shit, and nothing works at all when your car rolls over.
No, that would be wrong, of course. They'd never be able to accept a grant. It could never happen. Ever.
But only because, technically, it's called a bribe, not a grant. If you want to call it a grant, you have to put it in quotes, as in: "I wonder if they could get a larger "grant" from..."
I'm refuting your point that "consumers switched to". If you meant "a small minority of consumers", then I apologize for misunderstanding you, I read your post as "the majority of consumers". I only need to look at any parking lot to refute that. Sure, there are a few large RWD and a good number of SUVs and light trucks, but small front wheel drive cars outnumber the sum of the remainder.
There will always be a market for rear-wheel-drive vehicles, as there will always be people who want to drive them. There are also cars in that space that are available, and have been all along. The Crown Vic never went away, the Grand Marquis and Town Car have been around for a while, Caddy makes the Catera and it's been around for quite some time.
I think the real question is, since they've been around the whole time, why are they starting to sell more of them (if, in fact, they are)?
I think RWD cars enjoy pretty much the same niche market they have since the majority have moved to something more efficient and cheaper to buy and maintain. A good number of the people who used to like RWD went to SUV (because if you're goingg to get 25MPG you might as well be able to carry some cargo), but so did a number of people who used to drive light trucks.
I'm not dismissing your preference for your vehicle of choice, but at least around here your anecdotal evidence is in vast disagreement with my anecdotal evidence.:)
Frequent hand-washing is very effective at getting any cold germs you've been exposed to (including your own) off your hands, where you can then touch objects and spread those germs to others, or touch your eyes or nose or other soft tissue and become infected by them.
After you do your business, regardless of the sanitation involved with any nasties Mr. Willie might be carrying on his person, you're in a bathroom, and you have a sink and soap conveniently available. The more often you wash your hands, the less likely it is you'll get sick or spread any illness you might have to others.
Even with this prevention, you're still going to catch a cold now and again. No need to look for a magic cure, just do your best to keep from spreading it to others, and that includes washing your hands frequently. And console yourself with the fact that your sore throat and stuffy nose are all in a good cause. Your immune system is being exercised, which is good for you in the long run.
That doesn't mean you should go out and intentionally infect yourself with every cold virus you possibly can. Being constantly sick is as bad for the immune system as never being sick.
I'm not entirely in agreement with GP, but the portion you responded to does make sense.
In order to keep health care costs down, the best things to prevent are those that are going to drive up costs and/or cause the most deaths, and the best way to prevent it is the cheapest.
The common cold already has an easy and cheap preventative solution - you can easily be prevented from spreading - if the cold is making the rounds in your area, start washing your hands more often (with plain old soap if you can find a way to avoid the antibacterial stuff since it's not helping). If you feel sick, fercrissake stay the hell home, and if you can't then make an effort not to touch anything belonging to someone else, or something someone else will be touching soon, and warn people that you don't feel well so they can be extra cautious.
Once you have a cold, you'll probably be out of work for a day, no matter what you do. Maybe two if it's particularly nasty. You can go to your doctor and get a scrip for something that will make your body fight the cold off more effectively, but it will only cost money and not really cut down on the time it takes to beat the cold by all that much. It's also not going to prevent you from giving your cold to someone else, even if it does manage to mask your symptoms for the day.
I see this breakthrough as a wonderful one for, say, AIDS patients. The virus compromises their immune system, so we feed them a crapload of calories to support the drain their immune system is about to put on their system, and give them "Immune System Booster" which may be enough to knock out the virus.
For colds? No, the best way to handle the common cold is to try and prevent it yourself using the freely-available method of washing your hands and being cautious around seasonal changes, which change people's patterns and introduce them to new viruses.
The best way to handle it if you get one is to allow yourself to get sick, take care of yourself to prevent further infections like pneumonia, and try to keep from spreading it to others as much as you possibly can manage (particularly those with compromised immune systems). Nothing you can get from your doctor is really going to make it any better, or make it pass faster, or keep you from spreading it, and you're really just wasting health care dollars.
I dunno, I look out in the parking lot of my employer and I see a mixture of vehicles, but the majority of vehicles are what you label "crappy front wheel drive cars". I've been driving a "crappy front wheel drive car" for a number of years now, and it's eliminated the need for 4WD on my crappy front wheel drive cars, because rear-wheel drive blows hot steaming monkey chunks in any kind of snow or slippery conditions without special tires, but I can do quite nicely using stock 4-season radial tires on my crappy front wheel drive car.
Meanwhile, most of the vehicles I see stuck in snowbanks are large RWD sedans and powerful 4WD SUVs, even though the majority of cars on the road are crappy front wheel drive cars. Why is that, I wonder?
Look, I drove rear-wheel drive cars for a long time, and resisted the switch to front-wheel-drive for years. But as soon as I got into one, I understood why it made sense. I had to re-learn how to handle slippery conditions, but a couple of hours in an abandoned snowy parking lot sorted that issue out, and I was good to go. All of my rear-wheel-drive cars have been garbage in the snow, and/or have been 4WD or AWD capable. I haven't run into any circumstances where front-wheel-drive can't perform acceptably unless the snow is high enough that my car high-centers on it, and at that point all bets are off anyway and I need the ground clearance of my truck.
I want a practical and fun car. I own a pickup truck, but that's only because I need one for plowing and homestead maintenance tasks, and for cases when the snow is too deep for any car but I still have to get to work. My practical and fun car is a crappy front wheel drive car, for very practical and fun values of "crappy".
To each his own, but the majority of people I know have chosen "slow, cramped and wimpy go-carts", also known as "5-passenger, 4-cylinder, front-wheel-drive sedans capable of 35+ MPG" for their daily driving. These aren't just hippies, or at least the guys with the Limbaugh mugs on their desks might be offended if you called them that. Be my guest, but just understand that it might get violent.
It's all about the Benjamins. If I can get to work in my current 40MPG car that performs well in the snow, why would I choose a heavy, lumbering, horrible-in-the-snow beast that only gets 20MPG? I drive 16 miles each way to work, every day. That's 160 miles a week. I can do that on about 4 gallons of fuel in my current car, including my three carpoolers, or I can do it on 8 gallons of fuel a week. Hey, at almost $3 a gallon, that's nearly twelve bucks a week I'm saving in fuel using my crappy little front wheel drive car, not to mention the fact that my car was $20,000 and my tires are $75 a pop and my maintenance is very cheap, so I'm saving shitloads more money than just fuel. Sure, my engine (Diesel) only produces 90 HP. Who cares? There's plenty of power to merge on the highway, passing is no problem (drop a gear, spin up the hamsters, and go), and I only stop by the fuel station about once a month.
Putting the drive up front makes sense for daily driving. There are cars available with modern semi-efficient engines and rear-wheel-drive systems, the reason people have by and large converted to crappy front-drive is because it's cheaper to manufacture, more efficient, and for any sort of bad weather pretty much eliminates the need for expensive and complex AWD/4WD systems.
You only do this stuff for prototype, not production due to cost.
Umm, yeah, that's exactly what the article said they did. Built the prototype. Summary of the summary: "Prototype built using only prototyping machine." Other than the sanding and painting, of course.
Nothing is said in the article about the actual production car if and when it ever gets past the prototype stage.
I'm 100% certain they aren't going to be stupid enough to go to production using a prototyping machine. You're absolutely correct, though cost is not the only factor (speed would be one, and durability of materials would be another).
Since it's a prototype, I suspect it really doesn't matter all that much.
They used a prototyping machine (a 3D printer) to make... wait for it... the suspense is hard, I know... a prototype!
Once this hits production, using prototyping tools would be needlessly costly and inefficient, and the resulting prototype wouldn't be nearly as durable as the usual materials used today (fiberglass, high-impact ABS, etc)
There may be a bright and promising future in journalism for you. Assuming, of course, that you can make up facts that glibly on an ongoing basis and stomach working for Murdoch.
You know, it's funny. I've been using OpenOffice at home for quite a few years. I converted from Office 2000 during a reinstall some years back because OpenOffice was a lot smaller at the time.
When I ran it on Windows XP, it was a dog to start up. Nothing like the "5 minutes" cited, but 30-40 seconds is just a ridiculously slow startup time for a word processor on then-modern hardware. Once started, the applications seemed to run quickly enough, so I could just leave Writer or Calc open when I thought I might need to use them again soon (or use the "OpenOffice Quickstarter" or whatever the hell it was called that loads all the components into memory and keeps them there, but of course that made Windows restarts take longer and took up memory I had better uses for). Honestly, I accepted that as "the cost of free" and moved on, because my version of MS-Office was 4-5 years old at the time so OpenOffice gave me lots more features and it was free.
I converted to Linux Mint last year, and I'm still constantly amazed at how quickly OpenOffice starts up in Linux. I can usually see the splash screen, but not for long, and sometimes not at all.
This is not a "Linux versus Windows" fanboi argument. I use Windows (XP) and work, and I've tried Windows Seven, and both are capable of great speed with well-written software. Yet both make OpenOffice seem laggy and doggy and slow. When I try the same software in Linux, it's fast.
I'm wondering if there is something with the libraries they are using for their Windows port or poor compile choices or something that makes such an incredible difference. Maybe the people who write it don't really want it to work well in Windows? That might make a little sense for GiMP, since they have a third party (thanks, Jernej!) who does their not-officially-supported ports to Windows. But that wouldn't make sense for OpenOffice, since the whole point is to compete with MS-Office. Why would you want it to be slow?
My employer is great, they offer lots of nice benefits, they treat their employees well, but like most people I work in a cubicle where I can hear my neighbors as clearly as someone standing inside my cube, with greige cube walls, in an office area also with greige walls, off-white 4x8 ceiling tiles with ugly dark water sprinklers sticking out, fluorescent tube lighting, uninteresting seating without arms (chairs with arms are reserved for management or those who have been here long enough to get one), a "line of sight" policy where no personal items may be visible above the cube-wall top, and one small window very far away that's often covered with a blind.
So, no, we design OUR offices so we like them, but we design our employees' offices like we design our students' desks - cram as many asses in the given space as possible to cut down on rent.
Most students, especially those going into professional jobs, are looking at an environment where they'll have about the same privacy and room as they do in the real world, and they'll be expected to be creative and productive there, too. Might as well get them used to thinking outside the box while sitting inside one, because that's corporate life in America, even with the really good companies.
Since your reference to the terms "iPod", "iPhone", and "iPad" are the very first ones in the discussion thread, and none of them appears in either the original article or the summary, I'd have to allow you to answer that for yourself.
Did you, in fact, have to blabber those three terms to get attention?
Because no one else did.
Or are you confusing the term "touchpad" with an Apple product?
S1 was cheesy but I have to admit it's what got me engaged. Of course, I'm a Doctor Who fan (more the old series than the new), so cheesy to me means good sci-fi.
S2 the show actually started to get serious, and you could see the character development that had been done in S1 start to pay off. I still wasn't a big fan of having "Scarecrow" take over as the lead in S2, but he proved himself fairly well.
Frankly, in today's environment, I don't think B5 would have made it through Season 1. They would have released the first half of S1, people would have been turned off by the slow start and the heavy emphasis on character development and "foundation building", and it probably would never have had a Season 1.5.
First, no, I don't live in California. Other coast.:)
My daughter is only in second grade, so I can't speak for all of the grades. Yet. However, so far it appears that a lot of the materials are in the classroom. They go through "blocks" so (for example) French and Math become the primary focus for a while, then another pair or trio of subjects.
When they are going through a "block", the classroom reflects the amalgam of what they are going through, and a lot of the classroom materials are made by the kids themselves as part of their study rather than being handouts or premade materials.
Rather than "point to France on a map", it seems to be more of a "draw a map and highlight France" sort of exercise.
When we did a tour of the upper grades, I saw that a lot of the maps and charts that were needed were actually hand-drawn and/or hung temporarily on the walls of the classroom, to be replaced by other materials when the class focus changes.
GP's daughter's school system wouldn't cut it in California anyway, as it creates the need for one extra teacher for each class of kids. We can't pay for that, can we?
Honestly, it depends. I see the state-published prices per child for education here, and I see that the tuition I am paying to the school is significantly below that. But that's for a number of different reasons.
First, we're paying for it. So parents are more heavily involved because anything we can do ourselves is something we don't need to hire out and pay as part of tuition. Parents take the classroom laundry home every Friday and wash it over the weekend, saving the cost of the school maintaining a laundry facility and staff. Parents and students help the teacher keep the classroom clean. The maintenance staff is very small. All costs are kept as low as possible by engaging the parents to the greatest extent possible before hiring someone.
Second, we don't have a paid school board trying to represent the school to the source of their funding. Taxpayers don't fund us to the tune of a single dime, we pay our own way, and that makes us very cognizant of what we are paying for. We pay tuition and get donations, and have one paid administrator to make sure the school runs smoothly. She has a staff, and while a few are paid positions many are parent-volunteers.
Third, whenever a parent asks for some extra service "hey, we need an extra monitor in the classroom", it prompts a very simple discussion. "How do we, as a class, arrange it?" If the teacher needs extra help, quite often they ask for volunteers among the parents, and if the parents insist on a paid position we have to help find the funding for it, possibly including a tuition increase for that class.
Given that it's intentionally a small school (the 18 kids in my daughter's class represent the entirety of the second grade), the collaboration works pretty well. There are far fewer than 300 kids in the entire school grades K-12.
Obviously, such a system wouldn't scale terribly well into a larger school, but as a series of smaller schools that share "subject teachers" it might work.
The key is that you, as a parent, will value the education more if you are paying for it. And your child will value it more if the school puts the work into making it interesting and keeping them engaged.
I realize that the reality was a little more complex than the "urban legend" as you call it, but the fact remains that the final resolution of the Shadow War was moved to Season 4 and the two TNT spinoff movies to head off the possible cancellation of the series. That left JMS with more season to fill for Season 5 with a lot of exciting material already shunted into season 4 and the TNT movies, so the pace changed quite dramatically.
Well, to be fair, the same could be said for Babylon 5. It took a very long time before B5 really had its characters developed, and even longer once Sheridan took over the lead role in the second season. But the groundwork really paid off in the third and fourth seasons. Unfortunately, the viewership wasn't there by then, and the show was cut mid-4th-season and JMS's understandable desire to give his audience a finale resulted in him with a whole other year to fill when the show was suddenly picked up after Season 4 was filmed and being aired. The end result, while still quite good, isn't anything compared to what it could have been had the studio fully committed to JMS's 5-year story arc and stuck by that commitment.
Sadly, SyFy lacks the patience to develop a really good base story, and don't understand that sometimes it can take a year or two before a series gets "discovered", and that series sometimes will make more money from a cult following on DVD release than they ever do while being aired.
I dunno, Danny Graystone seems to be likeable enough, and driven into a corner over his obsession with keeping access to his daughter's avatar. He's a fundamentally good guy making really bad decisions. But the problem is that they haven't really expressed his character and motivations well. He's being acted out as cold and calculating, rather than just a guy who will do anything to talk to his dead daughter again.
They probably wanted to avoid the soap-opera-ish moment of a falling-down-drunk and angst-ridden Mr. Graystone sobbing over a picture of his daughter and doing something as mind-numbingly obvious as saying "I'd do anything to talk to you again, sweetheart", but they've tried to dance around that too much and made him an unsympathetic character.
Then you've got some other characters who are equally ambiguous, or seem to change roles to fit an uncertain storyline. The schoolmarm is powerful, we knew that, but when faced with the slightest adversity she waltzes in to the head of her Church and just takes the thing over without a fight. Her family accepts that she's abducted a young girl and assists in mistreating her without much sign of protest. There's an interesting substory there, but there's way too much Deus Ex Machina going on in that one. However, counterparting that with a weak-looking but sympathetic Ms. Graystone seems like a master stroke of a David v. Goliath subplot - but of course we won't see that one play out now that it's been shitcanned.
I'm OK with a sci-fi series that combines some soap-opera elements. Build me out some sympathetic characters, give 'em plenty of flaws, and have at it. It worked in BSG. But if you're going to do that, you have to accept that you are writing a tragedy and you have to really work on character development and expression, opening yourself to criticism of writing a soap opera.
If you want to write a pure "happy happy joy joy" series, stick to the Star Trek genre where there's little moral ambiguity and everything always eventually ends in happy fluffy bunnies, so you don't need complex characters. Cardboard cutouts in front of your storyline will usually work fine - just look at Shatner.
If you want to write a dark emotional series, accept that you are writing an emotional series and write the fucking thing, and accept that a subset of your potential audience will yell "soap opera". But Caprica and Sarah Connor and the like are already painted into a very dark corner - the eventual end of the story is a tragedy. Don't try and attract people who want a happy ending.
Slashdot Mirror
And, heck, in Maine we occasionally get an Independent governor. That scares the shit out of the major parties...
But the point is that a lot of people who could be voting for third-party candidates sit out because they feel it's a futile effort.
Which looks to a politician like they have a mandate:
Demublicans: 45%
Republicrats: 53%
Independent (Combined): 2%
or
Demublicans: 36%
Republicrats: 34%
Independent (Combined): 30%
In the first scenario, there's a clear winner. The Republicrat can go about their party-line business and doesn't need to listen to the "other side" at all on any issue. They have a clear supported mandate from the voting public, which means they stand a good job of getting any referendums or popular votes go their way. Impeachment is nearly impossible since they have majority support from their eligible voting public. They can lose significant amounts of their support base while still getting re-elected, and there's no real reason to pander to the other side or compromise at all.
In the second scenario, even the winning candidate is going to know he/she doesn't have the full support of 50% of their eligible voting public, and that means they have to work their asses off to make the majority who did not vote for them happy enough that they don't lose the next election. Impeachment and defeat of popular vote initiatives are higher-risk items.
The only real difference between the two scenarios is that Independents decided to get off their asses and participate, even if the candidate they voted for was less than ideal for them. If you're thinking about sitting out anyway, you don't have a "throwaway vote" to worry about, just go vote your straight conscience or as close as you can find, and hope it at least sends a message that the two-party monopoly is unacceptable.
And, every now and then, you get an independent who is interested in working the center of the aisle.
Part of it is knowing when to stay put, but another part is just knowing how to handle your vehicle in the weather and having the proper emergency gear (mine includes a blanket, a bag of sand mixed with kitty litter, a good shovel, jumper cables, temporary chains, and a flashlight that either works off a crank, has good batteries, or can be kept in your 12V socket so it stays charged).
I gave up carrying flares years ago. The last thing I want in my car is something highly flammable out back near the fuel tank. Just seemed like a bad idea. :)
But the most important thing is just knowing your car. Slow down, take it really easy, don't be in a hurry, watch for other drivers, leave lots of room, and if someone is in a huge hurry or overtrusting their 4WD behemoth work your darndest to let them go have their accident with another driver if possible.
And fercripesake, find an abandoned parking lot somewhere and go out in the bad weather and do some donuts and skids, regardless of your vehicle of choice. Everyone should go through at least a few dozen uncontrolled skids in their car so they know what it feels like, and how to at least keep the impact-absorbing pointy end with the hood over it in the most effective position when things go truly pear-shaped at 50MPH. The crumple zones in your doors aren't worth shit, and nothing works at all when your car rolls over.
"How profound, Wizard!"
I think I'm just gonna lay down in this little field of... POPPIES-POPPIES-POPPIES-POPPIES-poppies-poppies...
No, that would be wrong, of course. They'd never be able to accept a grant. It could never happen. Ever.
But only because, technically, it's called a bribe, not a grant. If you want to call it a grant, you have to put it in quotes, as in: "I wonder if they could get a larger "grant" from..."
I'm refuting your point that "consumers switched to". If you meant "a small minority of consumers", then I apologize for misunderstanding you, I read your post as "the majority of consumers". I only need to look at any parking lot to refute that. Sure, there are a few large RWD and a good number of SUVs and light trucks, but small front wheel drive cars outnumber the sum of the remainder.
There will always be a market for rear-wheel-drive vehicles, as there will always be people who want to drive them. There are also cars in that space that are available, and have been all along. The Crown Vic never went away, the Grand Marquis and Town Car have been around for a while, Caddy makes the Catera and it's been around for quite some time.
I think the real question is, since they've been around the whole time, why are they starting to sell more of them (if, in fact, they are)?
I think RWD cars enjoy pretty much the same niche market they have since the majority have moved to something more efficient and cheaper to buy and maintain. A good number of the people who used to like RWD went to SUV (because if you're goingg to get 25MPG you might as well be able to carry some cargo), but so did a number of people who used to drive light trucks.
I'm not dismissing your preference for your vehicle of choice, but at least around here your anecdotal evidence is in vast disagreement with my anecdotal evidence. :)
The two are not incompatible.
Frequent hand-washing is very effective at getting any cold germs you've been exposed to (including your own) off your hands, where you can then touch objects and spread those germs to others, or touch your eyes or nose or other soft tissue and become infected by them.
After you do your business, regardless of the sanitation involved with any nasties Mr. Willie might be carrying on his person, you're in a bathroom, and you have a sink and soap conveniently available. The more often you wash your hands, the less likely it is you'll get sick or spread any illness you might have to others.
Even with this prevention, you're still going to catch a cold now and again. No need to look for a magic cure, just do your best to keep from spreading it to others, and that includes washing your hands frequently. And console yourself with the fact that your sore throat and stuffy nose are all in a good cause. Your immune system is being exercised, which is good for you in the long run.
That doesn't mean you should go out and intentionally infect yourself with every cold virus you possibly can. Being constantly sick is as bad for the immune system as never being sick.
I'm not entirely in agreement with GP, but the portion you responded to does make sense.
In order to keep health care costs down, the best things to prevent are those that are going to drive up costs and/or cause the most deaths, and the best way to prevent it is the cheapest.
The common cold already has an easy and cheap preventative solution - you can easily be prevented from spreading - if the cold is making the rounds in your area, start washing your hands more often (with plain old soap if you can find a way to avoid the antibacterial stuff since it's not helping). If you feel sick, fercrissake stay the hell home, and if you can't then make an effort not to touch anything belonging to someone else, or something someone else will be touching soon, and warn people that you don't feel well so they can be extra cautious.
Once you have a cold, you'll probably be out of work for a day, no matter what you do. Maybe two if it's particularly nasty. You can go to your doctor and get a scrip for something that will make your body fight the cold off more effectively, but it will only cost money and not really cut down on the time it takes to beat the cold by all that much. It's also not going to prevent you from giving your cold to someone else, even if it does manage to mask your symptoms for the day.
I see this breakthrough as a wonderful one for, say, AIDS patients. The virus compromises their immune system, so we feed them a crapload of calories to support the drain their immune system is about to put on their system, and give them "Immune System Booster" which may be enough to knock out the virus.
For colds? No, the best way to handle the common cold is to try and prevent it yourself using the freely-available method of washing your hands and being cautious around seasonal changes, which change people's patterns and introduce them to new viruses.
The best way to handle it if you get one is to allow yourself to get sick, take care of yourself to prevent further infections like pneumonia, and try to keep from spreading it to others as much as you possibly can manage (particularly those with compromised immune systems). Nothing you can get from your doctor is really going to make it any better, or make it pass faster, or keep you from spreading it, and you're really just wasting health care dollars.
You have to admit, though, it did cure the cold.
I dunno, I look out in the parking lot of my employer and I see a mixture of vehicles, but the majority of vehicles are what you label "crappy front wheel drive cars". I've been driving a "crappy front wheel drive car" for a number of years now, and it's eliminated the need for 4WD on my crappy front wheel drive cars, because rear-wheel drive blows hot steaming monkey chunks in any kind of snow or slippery conditions without special tires, but I can do quite nicely using stock 4-season radial tires on my crappy front wheel drive car.
Meanwhile, most of the vehicles I see stuck in snowbanks are large RWD sedans and powerful 4WD SUVs, even though the majority of cars on the road are crappy front wheel drive cars. Why is that, I wonder?
Look, I drove rear-wheel drive cars for a long time, and resisted the switch to front-wheel-drive for years. But as soon as I got into one, I understood why it made sense. I had to re-learn how to handle slippery conditions, but a couple of hours in an abandoned snowy parking lot sorted that issue out, and I was good to go. All of my rear-wheel-drive cars have been garbage in the snow, and/or have been 4WD or AWD capable. I haven't run into any circumstances where front-wheel-drive can't perform acceptably unless the snow is high enough that my car high-centers on it, and at that point all bets are off anyway and I need the ground clearance of my truck.
I want a practical and fun car. I own a pickup truck, but that's only because I need one for plowing and homestead maintenance tasks, and for cases when the snow is too deep for any car but I still have to get to work. My practical and fun car is a crappy front wheel drive car, for very practical and fun values of "crappy".
To each his own, but the majority of people I know have chosen "slow, cramped and wimpy go-carts", also known as "5-passenger, 4-cylinder, front-wheel-drive sedans capable of 35+ MPG" for their daily driving. These aren't just hippies, or at least the guys with the Limbaugh mugs on their desks might be offended if you called them that. Be my guest, but just understand that it might get violent.
It's all about the Benjamins. If I can get to work in my current 40MPG car that performs well in the snow, why would I choose a heavy, lumbering, horrible-in-the-snow beast that only gets 20MPG? I drive 16 miles each way to work, every day. That's 160 miles a week. I can do that on about 4 gallons of fuel in my current car, including my three carpoolers, or I can do it on 8 gallons of fuel a week. Hey, at almost $3 a gallon, that's nearly twelve bucks a week I'm saving in fuel using my crappy little front wheel drive car, not to mention the fact that my car was $20,000 and my tires are $75 a pop and my maintenance is very cheap, so I'm saving shitloads more money than just fuel. Sure, my engine (Diesel) only produces 90 HP. Who cares? There's plenty of power to merge on the highway, passing is no problem (drop a gear, spin up the hamsters, and go), and I only stop by the fuel station about once a month.
Putting the drive up front makes sense for daily driving. There are cars available with modern semi-efficient engines and rear-wheel-drive systems, the reason people have by and large converted to crappy front-drive is because it's cheaper to manufacture, more efficient, and for any sort of bad weather pretty much eliminates the need for expensive and complex AWD/4WD systems.
You only do this stuff for prototype, not production due to cost.
Umm, yeah, that's exactly what the article said they did. Built the prototype. Summary of the summary: "Prototype built using only prototyping machine." Other than the sanding and painting, of course.
Nothing is said in the article about the actual production car if and when it ever gets past the prototype stage.
I'm 100% certain they aren't going to be stupid enough to go to production using a prototyping machine. You're absolutely correct, though cost is not the only factor (speed would be one, and durability of materials would be another).
Since it's a prototype, I suspect it really doesn't matter all that much.
They used a prototyping machine (a 3D printer) to make... wait for it... the suspense is hard, I know... a prototype!
Once this hits production, using prototyping tools would be needlessly costly and inefficient, and the resulting prototype wouldn't be nearly as durable as the usual materials used today (fiberglass, high-impact ABS, etc)
Bravo, sir!
There may be a bright and promising future in journalism for you. Assuming, of course, that you can make up facts that glibly on an ongoing basis and stomach working for Murdoch.
You know, it's funny. I've been using OpenOffice at home for quite a few years. I converted from Office 2000 during a reinstall some years back because OpenOffice was a lot smaller at the time.
When I ran it on Windows XP, it was a dog to start up. Nothing like the "5 minutes" cited, but 30-40 seconds is just a ridiculously slow startup time for a word processor on then-modern hardware. Once started, the applications seemed to run quickly enough, so I could just leave Writer or Calc open when I thought I might need to use them again soon (or use the "OpenOffice Quickstarter" or whatever the hell it was called that loads all the components into memory and keeps them there, but of course that made Windows restarts take longer and took up memory I had better uses for). Honestly, I accepted that as "the cost of free" and moved on, because my version of MS-Office was 4-5 years old at the time so OpenOffice gave me lots more features and it was free.
I converted to Linux Mint last year, and I'm still constantly amazed at how quickly OpenOffice starts up in Linux. I can usually see the splash screen, but not for long, and sometimes not at all.
This is not a "Linux versus Windows" fanboi argument. I use Windows (XP) and work, and I've tried Windows Seven, and both are capable of great speed with well-written software. Yet both make OpenOffice seem laggy and doggy and slow. When I try the same software in Linux, it's fast.
I'm wondering if there is something with the libraries they are using for their Windows port or poor compile choices or something that makes such an incredible difference. Maybe the people who write it don't really want it to work well in Windows? That might make a little sense for GiMP, since they have a third party (thanks, Jernej!) who does their not-officially-supported ports to Windows. But that wouldn't make sense for OpenOffice, since the whole point is to compete with MS-Office. Why would you want it to be slow?
To be fair, most people would probably have their alarms set for "weekday only", so the first time the symptom would appear would be Monday morning.
Basically, model it on the Internet. But without the packet loss, or routing loops. Or collisions.
Or a government kill switch.
We design offices so we like them.
Really?
My employer is great, they offer lots of nice benefits, they treat their employees well, but like most people I work in a cubicle where I can hear my neighbors as clearly as someone standing inside my cube, with greige cube walls, in an office area also with greige walls, off-white 4x8 ceiling tiles with ugly dark water sprinklers sticking out, fluorescent tube lighting, uninteresting seating without arms (chairs with arms are reserved for management or those who have been here long enough to get one), a "line of sight" policy where no personal items may be visible above the cube-wall top, and one small window very far away that's often covered with a blind.
So, no, we design OUR offices so we like them, but we design our employees' offices like we design our students' desks - cram as many asses in the given space as possible to cut down on rent.
Most students, especially those going into professional jobs, are looking at an environment where they'll have about the same privacy and room as they do in the real world, and they'll be expected to be creative and productive there, too. Might as well get them used to thinking outside the box while sitting inside one, because that's corporate life in America, even with the really good companies.
This is exactly what my school does. Woodworking shop makes and maintains most of the furniture.
Interesting. Thanks for the clarification.
Since your reference to the terms "iPod", "iPhone", and "iPad" are the very first ones in the discussion thread, and none of them appears in either the original article or the summary, I'd have to allow you to answer that for yourself.
Did you, in fact, have to blabber those three terms to get attention?
Because no one else did.
Or are you confusing the term "touchpad" with an Apple product?
S1 was cheesy but I have to admit it's what got me engaged. Of course, I'm a Doctor Who fan (more the old series than the new), so cheesy to me means good sci-fi.
S2 the show actually started to get serious, and you could see the character development that had been done in S1 start to pay off. I still wasn't a big fan of having "Scarecrow" take over as the lead in S2, but he proved himself fairly well.
Frankly, in today's environment, I don't think B5 would have made it through Season 1. They would have released the first half of S1, people would have been turned off by the slow start and the heavy emphasis on character development and "foundation building", and it probably would never have had a Season 1.5.
Hi, GP here.
First, no, I don't live in California. Other coast. :)
My daughter is only in second grade, so I can't speak for all of the grades. Yet. However, so far it appears that a lot of the materials are in the classroom. They go through "blocks" so (for example) French and Math become the primary focus for a while, then another pair or trio of subjects.
When they are going through a "block", the classroom reflects the amalgam of what they are going through, and a lot of the classroom materials are made by the kids themselves as part of their study rather than being handouts or premade materials.
Rather than "point to France on a map", it seems to be more of a "draw a map and highlight France" sort of exercise.
When we did a tour of the upper grades, I saw that a lot of the maps and charts that were needed were actually hand-drawn and/or hung temporarily on the walls of the classroom, to be replaced by other materials when the class focus changes.
GP's daughter's school system wouldn't cut it in California anyway, as it creates the need for one extra teacher for each class of kids. We can't pay for that, can we?
Honestly, it depends. I see the state-published prices per child for education here, and I see that the tuition I am paying to the school is significantly below that. But that's for a number of different reasons.
First, we're paying for it. So parents are more heavily involved because anything we can do ourselves is something we don't need to hire out and pay as part of tuition. Parents take the classroom laundry home every Friday and wash it over the weekend, saving the cost of the school maintaining a laundry facility and staff. Parents and students help the teacher keep the classroom clean. The maintenance staff is very small. All costs are kept as low as possible by engaging the parents to the greatest extent possible before hiring someone.
Second, we don't have a paid school board trying to represent the school to the source of their funding. Taxpayers don't fund us to the tune of a single dime, we pay our own way, and that makes us very cognizant of what we are paying for. We pay tuition and get donations, and have one paid administrator to make sure the school runs smoothly. She has a staff, and while a few are paid positions many are parent-volunteers.
Third, whenever a parent asks for some extra service "hey, we need an extra monitor in the classroom", it prompts a very simple discussion. "How do we, as a class, arrange it?" If the teacher needs extra help, quite often they ask for volunteers among the parents, and if the parents insist on a paid position we have to help find the funding for it, possibly including a tuition increase for that class.
Given that it's intentionally a small school (the 18 kids in my daughter's class represent the entirety of the second grade), the collaboration works pretty well. There are far fewer than 300 kids in the entire school grades K-12.
Obviously, such a system wouldn't scale terribly well into a larger school, but as a series of smaller schools that share "subject teachers" it might work.
The key is that you, as a parent, will value the education more if you are paying for it. And your child will value it more if the school puts the work into making it interesting and keeping them engaged.
I realize that the reality was a little more complex than the "urban legend" as you call it, but the fact remains that the final resolution of the Shadow War was moved to Season 4 and the two TNT spinoff movies to head off the possible cancellation of the series. That left JMS with more season to fill for Season 5 with a lot of exciting material already shunted into season 4 and the TNT movies, so the pace changed quite dramatically.
Well, to be fair, the same could be said for Babylon 5. It took a very long time before B5 really had its characters developed, and even longer once Sheridan took over the lead role in the second season. But the groundwork really paid off in the third and fourth seasons. Unfortunately, the viewership wasn't there by then, and the show was cut mid-4th-season and JMS's understandable desire to give his audience a finale resulted in him with a whole other year to fill when the show was suddenly picked up after Season 4 was filmed and being aired. The end result, while still quite good, isn't anything compared to what it could have been had the studio fully committed to JMS's 5-year story arc and stuck by that commitment.
Sadly, SyFy lacks the patience to develop a really good base story, and don't understand that sometimes it can take a year or two before a series gets "discovered", and that series sometimes will make more money from a cult following on DVD release than they ever do while being aired.
I dunno, Danny Graystone seems to be likeable enough, and driven into a corner over his obsession with keeping access to his daughter's avatar. He's a fundamentally good guy making really bad decisions. But the problem is that they haven't really expressed his character and motivations well. He's being acted out as cold and calculating, rather than just a guy who will do anything to talk to his dead daughter again.
They probably wanted to avoid the soap-opera-ish moment of a falling-down-drunk and angst-ridden Mr. Graystone sobbing over a picture of his daughter and doing something as mind-numbingly obvious as saying "I'd do anything to talk to you again, sweetheart", but they've tried to dance around that too much and made him an unsympathetic character.
Then you've got some other characters who are equally ambiguous, or seem to change roles to fit an uncertain storyline. The schoolmarm is powerful, we knew that, but when faced with the slightest adversity she waltzes in to the head of her Church and just takes the thing over without a fight. Her family accepts that she's abducted a young girl and assists in mistreating her without much sign of protest. There's an interesting substory there, but there's way too much Deus Ex Machina going on in that one. However, counterparting that with a weak-looking but sympathetic Ms. Graystone seems like a master stroke of a David v. Goliath subplot - but of course we won't see that one play out now that it's been shitcanned.
I'm OK with a sci-fi series that combines some soap-opera elements. Build me out some sympathetic characters, give 'em plenty of flaws, and have at it. It worked in BSG. But if you're going to do that, you have to accept that you are writing a tragedy and you have to really work on character development and expression, opening yourself to criticism of writing a soap opera.
If you want to write a pure "happy happy joy joy" series, stick to the Star Trek genre where there's little moral ambiguity and everything always eventually ends in happy fluffy bunnies, so you don't need complex characters. Cardboard cutouts in front of your storyline will usually work fine - just look at Shatner.
If you want to write a dark emotional series, accept that you are writing an emotional series and write the fucking thing, and accept that a subset of your potential audience will yell "soap opera". But Caprica and Sarah Connor and the like are already painted into a very dark corner - the eventual end of the story is a tragedy. Don't try and attract people who want a happy ending.