I believe the real irony of this story is that, by patronizing CleanFlicks, its customers are creating a greater market for the films that offend them!
If a large segment of the population "voted" with their pocketbooks by simply not renting films with violent/sexual content, then Hollywood would likely sense a market for more family-oriented films.
However, thanks to CleanFlicks, that segment can continue to happily fork over money for "sanitized" versions of violent films and Hollywood can continue to churn out enough to meet their demand.
and furthermore (found sounds)...
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 1
Cage more or less directly influenced groups like Einsturzende Neubauten, who were experimenting with "found" sounds in the late seventies and early eighties.
While Neubauten can rarely be accused of being quiet, they were composing collages of sound by doing things like crawling under a house with a tape recorder and taping the sounds created by someone else dropping various objects on the floors above.
Coincidentally, their last album was called "Silence is Sexy," a fairly subtle and enjoyable work.
As a contractor, I often work at a client site, and often those sites have what I consider to be some excessive filtering/blocking rules. For example, at my current client, all web-based email accounts are blocked-- and contractors are not, as a general rule, given email accounts on the client's corporate domain.
Now, awareness of the dangers of email attachments is commendable, but I should also note that this same client standardizes on MS Outlook as an email client, and as such has twice been taken out by Nimda-- in spite of the blocking of services like Yahoo mail and Hotmail.
So, by using a proxy like Safeweb, am I subverting the client's security policies? Perhaps. But by blocking my email access somewhat arbitrarily, are they hindering my effectiveness as an outide contractor? Absolutely.
Who's right? Depends on who you ask. But, I believe that all concerned parties sometimes have motivations that are at least a little bit more complex than surfing porn on company time.
Oops, you're right, of course. I missed that caveat.
Oh, well, looking down the responses, I see that at least I'm not the only one who missed it- last time I checked, Douglas Adams, Phil Dick, and others were still deceased, as well as Steinbeck and Papa Hemingway.:)
It seems that most of the writers mentioned so far are genre writers, so at the risk of being too obvious, I'd like to nominate John Steinbeck.
The transcendent East of Eden may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. A tragic and yet beautiful retelling of the Fall from Grace in a modern setting, the story manages to be simultaneously heart-rendering and uplifting by exploring the themes of destiny and freewill, righteousness versus callousness.
IMO, it competes with Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath for the title of Steinbeck's best work.
While he is perhaps more widely known among mystery readers, Dashiell Hammett's influence is felt outside that genre as well.
Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," although influenced by the westerns of John Ford, is, in fact, based on Hammett's bloody Continental Op novel, "Red Harvest."
Yojimbo, in turn, was remade/reinterpreted as the Sergio Leone western, "Fistful of Dollars."
And, of course, "Fistful of Dollars" was remade recently as the regrettable Bruce Willis film, "Last Man Standing."
Now, it's rather apparent that most people who watched "Last Man" probably don't know, or care, who Dash was and what else he'd written. He remains a writer's writer, though, and as others have said, most modern writers of detective fiction owe a great deal to the man, and many recognize that debt publicly.
I'd argue that in this particular case, they are listening to the majority of their constituents in that they (the people represented) want tougher measures as to prevent further terrorism acts in the future.
Ironic, isn't it, that in appeasing this majority, the Senate is undermining the very Constitution that is supposed to protect you and I from the Tocqueville's "Tyranny of the Majority?"
I think it may have been in the Federalist Papers that James Madison said, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
Researchers are not ignoring adult stem cell research; I'm afraid that your perception is misinformed, in this instance.
Researchers have repeatedly stated that while adult stem cell research shows promise, at this time it is no substitute for embryonic stem cell research. In fact, the progress made in adult stem cell research has relied upon research already done on embryonic stem cells.
Furthermore, researchers are on record as saying that we simply don't know yet if adult stem cells have the same abilities as embryonic stem cells.
Yale researcher Diane Krause testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in July:
"Work on embryonic stem cells is invaluable and work on adult derived stem cells is just beginning... To close off one avenue because of premature assumptions about the other is to play the odds with people's lives."
Adult stem cells may be, in your opinion, a "perfectly legitimate means of acquiring stem cells," but it remains to be seen whether they can effectively replace embryonic stem cell research. One thing is clear, however; researchers acknowledge the research that has been done on adult cells, and have cautioned that research must go forward on both types of cells.
Publishers can seek any number of different publication rights when they offer to do business with a writer. By far, the most commonly-sought publication rights by U.S. publishers are FNASR, or First North American Serial Rights. That means that the publisher has purchased the rights to publish a previously upublished written work in a periodical for the first time in the U.S. or Canada.
FNASR is basically an exclusive, one-time "use right". After the work is published, the rights revert to the author who may sell the work again if he or she so chooses (although he may not again offer FNASR on the piece).
With the advent of the digital age, several publishers will negotiate for electronic rights, which can mean archiving in a database or to a CDRom; writers should be careful to specify any "exclusivity" clauses or "first time Internet rights," etc. to avoid accidental loss of use rights. It's all part of the contract negotiation.
What publishers have been saying, however, is that they automatically have the rights to publish the work in every new medium as it is invented, without needing to compensate the author or negotiate for rights--as it continues to derive new income from those works.
I think a point that many folks are missing here is that the authors aren't pursuing fans who've knowingly or unknowingly violated copyrights-- the villain in this piece is the fat corporate cats like AOL Time Warner who cry for protection of IP while trying to deny the same rights to authors.
Since the so-called Tech Bubble burst last year, many software consultants and other techie types have taken advantage of the downtime to return to school for their MBAs.
Whether or not this is a good move depends largely on the individual's long-term career goals. Most companies will probably see prospective employees holding MBAs as desiring management positions-- which is good, unless (a) you don't want to be a manager, or (b) the company wants to hire a developer, not a developer who really wants to be a manager.
That said, I've been wondering what happens in a couple of years, when all of those MBA-seeking techies start graduating and re-entering the job market with their new certificates.
Remember, we are talking about introductory level CS courses here. Is the actual language that important, so long as it introduces the fundamental concepts of computer programming?
I took Java as an introductory language in 1994. At that time, the university was phasing out Pascal in favor of Java as the teaching language. Sure, we covered OO concepts like inheritance and polymorpism, but what did I really take away from the class?
Stuff that I used again and again in later CS courses-- stuff like iterative loops, conditional statements, etc.... how to actually do stuff with programs. How to solve problems. How to debug. Stuff that applied to every other programming language that I would later study.
Besides, although CS classes may introduce you to programming, the real learning begins when you stop studying and start writing real-world code. I learned more about programming in my first two or three months on the job than I did during the duration of a Fall class.
Bottom line, I just can't see the importance of which language you use to teach the fundamentals of programming-- that's why they're called fundamentals.
Alan Freed went down because he had integrity; he was honest. He would not sign an affidavit that said he had never accepted gifts or cash from the labels; in fact, he acknowledged that he had, and that anyone who signed said affidavit was a hypocrite, since that form of payola was widespread-- virtually all disc jockeys participated.
However, Dick Clark and most others did sign the affidavit, pretending ignorance and innocence, and were essentially off the hook.
Freed, on the other hand, was ruined.
To paraphrase "American Hot Wax:"
They might be able to stop the show, They might be able to stop Alan Freed, but They'll never be able to stop Rock and Roll.
I'm a consultant, so my work week varies, dependant upon the client and the project deadlines. In general, though, I work a 40-50 hour week.
I know other consultants who have been faced with huge workloads and tight deadlines. Sometimes this is the result of poor planning, other times it's strictly due to client demand. In either case, these consultants have put in 60 hour weeks when "necessary."
Fortunately, at this firm, projects like that seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Sounds like this book contains some of the nitty gritty that I've been missing in other volumes I've picked up. It's definitely on my buy-list now.
I'm a little disappointed in some of the flamebait posted in response to this review, though. I thought trolls like that hung around the Java advocacy newsgroups all day.
People who like to talk about the "failure" of Java apparently have very little exposure to the real world of Enterprise applications... EJBs, servlets, and JSPs are being deployed on many custom applications developed by and for Fortune 500 companies.
Some of the more popular middleware is also either Java-based, or, at the very least, is exposed to developers through a handy Java API.
In my experience, Java programming is one of the absolutely essential skills needed if one plans to develop these Internet and Intranet applications (and, no, I'm not talking about applets).
Kubrick can't pace a movie? Surely you jest. And, your comments about Kubrick fans strikes me as a little snobby-- they are just as bad as if I told you that if you don't appreciate Kubrick, it's just because you don't understand film.
Most of today's directors fall all over themselves to imitate the so-very-now look of music videos with flashy, quick edits and cool "hyper-realistic" digital effects popularized by someone else's summer blockbuster. Most of them also fail to create any tension whatsoever with this parlour tricks.
If it's pacing you want, watch Kubrick's "The Killing," a tightly-paced noir film with additional gritty dialogue courtesty of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, the Grifters).
I once worked a job where the company was losing money from week to week. The only reason bills were still being paid was because employees weren't being paid...
I was in a position similar to yours; without me, the business couldn't remain open. Weeks passed, every now and again someone would get a little money, but never the back wages due. I kept holding out, being broke, and hoping that, if I just held on a little longer, things would turn around.
Well, that went on for a couple of months before the business finally died altogether.
I didn't do anyone any favors by hanging on as long as I did. More money was lost, more debt was accumulated, more bad feelings were generated among all those involved. Hanging around for so long only made things more difficult and more costly, in more ways than one.
Maybe I should have asked myself three questions:
Can things be fixed?
What has to happen in order for them to be fixed?
How likely is it that those things happen?
Sometimes you just have to let it go and move on... sounds like this might be one of those times.
I would even suggest that an insecure box is the equivalent of an "attractive nuisance," like a swimming pool in a backyard that has an open gate.
If a bunch of kiddies trespass through the open gate and one of them drowns, the owner may be found liable in a civil suit. Why? a swimming pool is an "attractive nuisance" and a reasonable person would judge that some kiddies might be drawn to it. Therefore, it is up to the owner to take precautions to minimize the risk to others.
It's real... I downloaded the eBook reader and the text. You have to register to download the eBook with a name and email address, but there's not much validation, so I used an alias (Guy Montag) in the interests of privacy.
When you launch the eBook software for the first time, it says that you must allow it to do some certification to proceed, before you can read anything. I'm not sure what information is sent during the certification.
Once you open the book, click on/menu/permissions, and there the restrictions are, in all there infamy.
The banning actually occurred, not in Oklahoma, but in a neighboring state, Kansas; the Kansas State Board of Education removed all reference to evolution, the age of the Earth and the universe, from public school textbooks. The Oklahoma board tried to require a "disclaimer" at the beginning of every science textbook, warning that evolution was only a controversial theory, and that many scientists disagreed with it. Whatever.
Pretty blatant, but don't kid yourself that such things only happen in the so-called Bible Belt.
The same publishers who contract to provide science text books for huge states like Texas also provide the same books for the rest of the country, and rather than risk offending Texans and losing valuable contracts, they choose to water down "controversial" topics like evolution in Science textbooks and to whitewash historical facts in History textbooks. And, unfortunately, it's not cost effective to publish different editions for different states-- so everybody ends up losing, not just the kids in the Bible Belt.
That would appear to be the obvious solution, at first glance; unfortunately, like many obvious solutions, I don't think this one is really feasible, and I'll tell you why...
Besides blocking legitimate images, such as Hubble photographs (as another user noted), it will prevent users from visiting many, many sites with "dynamic" content. I've found several pages that contain absolutely no real text; nearly all the copy present was displayed in a GIF image.
Think of all the sites with javascript that change navigational GIF images to "ON" or "OFF" whenever you click or do a mouseover. Most of the sites that rely on flashy techniques-- and I hesitate to use the word "flashy," as now it's pretty much standard fare-- are designed by developers with no time or interest in providing friendly "ALT" tags for every image or menu.
Accessibility has become more of a luxury.
I had this same discussion with my sister, and illustrated by reviewing the source code of a site of her choosing: Lane Bryant
It appeared that, if she browsed it with a text-based browser, she could see the title bar... and that was it. Images are integral to the web now, like it or not.
I don't believe that a.sex TLD would be desirable or effective. It raises too many troubling questions, such as:
What bureaucrat(s) get to decide which companies are "porn" and which companies merely have "erotic" or "adult-themed" content? And if you find your site branded with the scarlet "S" and subsequently blocked, to whom may you appeal?
Will sites dealing with homosexual lifestyles, erotic fiction, transcripts of Supreme Court nominee hearings, or pro-life/pro-choice advocacy be labelled with ".sex" because of their "adult" content? Does an online gallery of the collected works of Robert Mapplethorpe or David Hamilton warrant the imposition of a.sex domain?
Defining pornography is pretty tricky. D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Allen Ginsburg, Henry Miller, and other notable 20th century writers all faced accusations of obscenity. I realize that you probably have a very clear idea of the kind of sites that should be given a.sex TLD, and I probably wouldn't disagree with any of your choices; but, unfortunately, I don't think we can depend on the same rational objectivity on the part of any board of de facto censors.
As another poster has observed, it will be all-too-convenient to enforce a blanket ban on anything with a.sex TLD, and certain lobbying groups will doubtless see to it that such a ban is enforced on campuses and in libraries, or required of local ISPs in small and not-so-small towns across the nation. After all, what elected official wants to be on record with such an "anti-family" position as supporting access to those dirty.sex domains?
Remember the rationale behind the NC-17 rating? The X rating wasn't intended to merely represent pornographic films. The Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, for example, was rated X. Eventually, however, X came to signify hardcore, and porn merchants used XXX as another marketing tool. The MPAA eventually adopted the NC-17 rating, ostensibly to allow serious filmmakers to release adult-themed films without being saddled with the same rating as Debbie Does Dallas.
Unfortunately, NC-17 is the financial kiss of death. Why? "Family" newspapers mostly won't run advertisements for NC-17 movies. Most major theatre chains won't show them. Major studies routinely require R-rated films to be delivered (such as the case with Kubrick's last film).
The same thing has happened with "Parental Advisory" labels on rock and rap albums, to a degree, but I won't go into that here; I'm afraid I might have rambled on too long, as it is.
In a nutshell, requiring a new.sex domain opens an entirely familiar can of worms. Whether it's labeled Censorware, Parental Advisory labels, or the Hayes Commission, it's still the same can we've been opening since the Comstock Act.
The first movie left a really bad taste in my mouth because of its utter contempt for the style of the series and its characters.
Can you really see Peter Graves as Jim Phelps wake up one day and say, "Hey, the Cold War's over and all I got was this lousy T-shirt... Maybe I'll just brutally murder the rest of my team to make a quick buck!" Not me.
Up until the betrayal of the IMF agents, the movie almost looked like a cool update, but instead espionage and intrigue were tossed aside for Yet Another Summer Action Vehicle.
I saw a clip on MTV the other day that kind of sums up this kind of contempt, or at least ignorance, of the source material. Kennedy was at the first MI premiere, and asked Martin Landau what he was doing there-- "What? There was a TV series? What, you were in it?"
He was understandably annoyed, and not-too-politely told her to do her homework next time; she made faces behind his back and said "Whatever;" she was there for Tom Cruise.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the real irony of this story is that, by patronizing CleanFlicks, its customers are creating a greater market for the films that offend them!
If a large segment of the population "voted" with their pocketbooks by simply not renting films with violent/sexual content, then Hollywood would likely sense a market for more family-oriented films.
However, thanks to CleanFlicks, that segment can continue to happily fork over money for "sanitized" versions of violent films and Hollywood can continue to churn out enough to meet their demand.
Cage more or less directly influenced groups like Einsturzende Neubauten, who were experimenting with "found" sounds in the late seventies and early eighties.
While Neubauten can rarely be accused of being quiet, they were composing collages of sound by doing things like crawling under a house with a tape recorder and taping the sounds created by someone else dropping various objects on the floors above.
Coincidentally, their last album was called "Silence is Sexy," a fairly subtle and enjoyable work.
It's not that black and white, I'm afraid.
As a contractor, I often work at a client site, and often those sites have what I consider to be some excessive filtering/blocking rules. For example, at my current client, all web-based email accounts are blocked-- and contractors are not, as a general rule, given email accounts on the client's corporate domain.
Now, awareness of the dangers of email attachments is commendable, but I should also note that this same client standardizes on MS Outlook as an email client, and as such has twice been taken out by Nimda-- in spite of the blocking of services like Yahoo mail and Hotmail.
So, by using a proxy like Safeweb, am I subverting the client's security policies? Perhaps. But by blocking my email access somewhat arbitrarily, are they hindering my effectiveness as an outide contractor? Absolutely.
Who's right? Depends on who you ask. But, I believe that all concerned parties sometimes have motivations that are at least a little bit more complex than surfing porn on company time.
Oops, you're right, of course. I missed that caveat.
:)
Oh, well, looking down the responses, I see that at least I'm not the only one who missed it- last time I checked, Douglas Adams, Phil Dick, and others were still deceased, as well as Steinbeck and Papa Hemingway.
It seems that most of the writers mentioned so far are genre writers, so at the risk of being too obvious, I'd like to nominate John Steinbeck.
The transcendent East of Eden may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. A tragic and yet beautiful retelling of the Fall from Grace in a modern setting, the story manages to be simultaneously heart-rendering and uplifting by exploring the themes of destiny and freewill, righteousness versus callousness.
IMO, it competes with Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath for the title of Steinbeck's best work.
While he is perhaps more widely known among mystery readers, Dashiell Hammett's influence is felt outside that genre as well.
Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," although influenced by the westerns of John Ford, is, in fact, based on Hammett's bloody Continental Op novel, "Red Harvest."
Yojimbo, in turn, was remade/reinterpreted as the Sergio Leone western, "Fistful of Dollars."
And, of course, "Fistful of Dollars" was remade recently as the regrettable Bruce Willis film, "Last Man Standing."
Now, it's rather apparent that most people who watched "Last Man" probably don't know, or care, who Dash was and what else he'd written. He remains a writer's writer, though, and as others have said, most modern writers of detective fiction owe a great deal to the man, and many recognize that debt publicly.
I'd argue that in this particular case, they are listening to the majority of their constituents in that they (the people represented) want tougher measures as to prevent further terrorism acts in the future.
Ironic, isn't it, that in appeasing this majority, the Senate is undermining the very Constitution that is supposed to protect you and I from the Tocqueville's "Tyranny of the Majority?"
I think it may have been in the Federalist Papers that James Madison said, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
From the story:
"The vulnerablity was first brought to Microsoft's notice about two months ago by Symantec."
Microsoft has known about this vulnerability and has taken two full months to warn users? Disturbing, if not surprising.
Researchers are not ignoring adult stem cell research; I'm afraid that your perception is misinformed, in this instance.
Researchers have repeatedly stated that while adult stem cell research shows promise, at this time it is no substitute for embryonic stem cell research. In fact, the progress made in adult stem cell research has relied upon research already done on embryonic stem cells.
Furthermore, researchers are on record as saying that we simply don't know yet if adult stem cells have the same abilities as embryonic stem cells.
Yale researcher Diane Krause testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in July:
"Work on embryonic stem cells is invaluable and work on adult derived stem cells is just beginning... To close off one avenue because of premature assumptions about the other is to play the odds with people's lives."
Adult stem cells may be, in your opinion, a "perfectly legitimate means of acquiring stem cells," but it remains to be seen whether they can effectively replace embryonic stem cell research. One thing is clear, however; researchers acknowledge the research that has been done on adult cells, and have cautioned that research must go forward on both types of cells.
I'm sorry, but delivery does matter in this case.
Publishers can seek any number of different publication rights when they offer to do business with a writer. By far, the most commonly-sought publication rights by U.S. publishers are FNASR, or First North American Serial Rights. That means that the publisher has purchased the rights to publish a previously upublished written work in a periodical for the first time in the U.S. or Canada.
FNASR is basically an exclusive, one-time "use right". After the work is published, the rights revert to the author who may sell the work again if he or she so chooses (although he may not again offer FNASR on the piece).
With the advent of the digital age, several publishers will negotiate for electronic rights, which can mean archiving in a database or to a CDRom; writers should be careful to specify any "exclusivity" clauses or "first time Internet rights," etc. to avoid accidental loss of use rights. It's all part of the contract negotiation.
What publishers have been saying, however, is that they automatically have the rights to publish the work in every new medium as it is invented, without needing to compensate the author or negotiate for rights--as it continues to derive new income from those works.
I think a point that many folks are missing here is that the authors aren't pursuing fans who've knowingly or unknowingly violated copyrights-- the villain in this piece is the fat corporate cats like AOL Time Warner who cry for protection of IP while trying to deny the same rights to authors.
Since the so-called Tech Bubble burst last year, many software consultants and other techie types have taken advantage of the downtime to return to school for their MBAs.
Whether or not this is a good move depends largely on the individual's long-term career goals. Most companies will probably see prospective employees holding MBAs as desiring management positions-- which is good, unless (a) you don't want to be a manager, or (b) the company wants to hire a developer, not a developer who really wants to be a manager.
That said, I've been wondering what happens in a couple of years, when all of those MBA-seeking techies start graduating and re-entering the job market with their new certificates.
Remember, we are talking about introductory level CS courses here. Is the actual language that important, so long as it introduces the fundamental concepts of computer programming?
I took Java as an introductory language in 1994. At that time, the university was phasing out Pascal in favor of Java as the teaching language. Sure, we covered OO concepts like inheritance and polymorpism, but what did I really take away from the class?
Stuff that I used again and again in later CS courses-- stuff like iterative loops, conditional statements, etc.... how to actually do stuff with programs. How to solve problems. How to debug. Stuff that applied to every other programming language that I would later study.
Besides, although CS classes may introduce you to programming, the real learning begins when you stop studying and start writing real-world code. I learned more about programming in my first two or three months on the job than I did during the duration of a Fall class.
Bottom line, I just can't see the importance of which language you use to teach the fundamentals of programming-- that's why they're called fundamentals.
Alan Freed went down because he had integrity; he was honest. He would not sign an affidavit that said he had never accepted gifts or cash from the labels; in fact, he acknowledged that he had, and that anyone who signed said affidavit was a hypocrite, since that form of payola was widespread-- virtually all disc jockeys participated.
However, Dick Clark and most others did sign the affidavit, pretending ignorance and innocence, and were essentially off the hook.
Freed, on the other hand, was ruined.
To paraphrase "American Hot Wax:"
Damned if they don't keep trying though...
I'm a consultant, so my work week varies, dependant upon the client and the project deadlines. In general, though, I work a 40-50 hour week.
I know other consultants who have been faced with huge workloads and tight deadlines. Sometimes this is the result of poor planning, other times it's strictly due to client demand. In either case, these consultants have put in 60 hour weeks when "necessary."
Fortunately, at this firm, projects like that seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Sounds like this book contains some of the nitty gritty that I've been missing in other volumes I've picked up. It's definitely on my buy-list now.
I'm a little disappointed in some of the flamebait posted in response to this review, though. I thought trolls like that hung around the Java advocacy newsgroups all day.
People who like to talk about the "failure" of Java apparently have very little exposure to the real world of Enterprise applications... EJBs, servlets, and JSPs are being deployed on many custom applications developed by and for Fortune 500 companies.
Some of the more popular middleware is also either Java-based, or, at the very least, is exposed to developers through a handy Java API.
In my experience, Java programming is one of the absolutely essential skills needed if one plans to develop these Internet and Intranet applications (and, no, I'm not talking about applets).
Kubrick can't pace a movie? Surely you jest. And, your comments about Kubrick fans strikes me as a little snobby-- they are just as bad as if I told you that if you don't appreciate Kubrick, it's just because you don't understand film. Most of today's directors fall all over themselves to imitate the so-very-now look of music videos with flashy, quick edits and cool "hyper-realistic" digital effects popularized by someone else's summer blockbuster. Most of them also fail to create any tension whatsoever with this parlour tricks. If it's pacing you want, watch Kubrick's "The Killing," a tightly-paced noir film with additional gritty dialogue courtesty of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, the Grifters).
I once worked a job where the company was losing money from week to week. The only reason bills were still being paid was because employees weren't being paid...
I was in a position similar to yours; without me, the business couldn't remain open. Weeks passed, every now and again someone would get a little money, but never the back wages due. I kept holding out, being broke, and hoping that, if I just held on a little longer, things would turn around.
Well, that went on for a couple of months before the business finally died altogether.
I didn't do anyone any favors by hanging on as long as I did. More money was lost, more debt was accumulated, more bad feelings were generated among all those involved. Hanging around for so long only made things more difficult and more costly, in more ways than one.
Maybe I should have asked myself three questions:
Sometimes you just have to let it go and move on... sounds like this might be one of those times.
Good luck with your choice.
I would even suggest that an insecure box is the equivalent of an "attractive nuisance," like a swimming pool in a backyard that has an open gate.
If a bunch of kiddies trespass through the open gate and one of them drowns, the owner may be found liable in a civil suit. Why? a swimming pool is an "attractive nuisance" and a reasonable person would judge that some kiddies might be drawn to it. Therefore, it is up to the owner to take precautions to minimize the risk to others.
It's real... I downloaded the eBook reader and the text. You have to register to download the eBook with a name and email address, but there's not much validation, so I used an alias (Guy Montag) in the interests of privacy. When you launch the eBook software for the first time, it says that you must allow it to do some certification to proceed, before you can read anything. I'm not sure what information is sent during the certification. Once you open the book, click on /menu/permissions, and there the restrictions are, in all there infamy.
The banning actually occurred, not in Oklahoma, but in a neighboring state, Kansas; the Kansas State Board of Education removed all reference to evolution, the age of the Earth and the universe, from public school textbooks. The Oklahoma board tried to require a "disclaimer" at the beginning of every science textbook, warning that evolution was only a controversial theory, and that many scientists disagreed with it. Whatever. Pretty blatant, but don't kid yourself that such things only happen in the so-called Bible Belt. The same publishers who contract to provide science text books for huge states like Texas also provide the same books for the rest of the country, and rather than risk offending Texans and losing valuable contracts, they choose to water down "controversial" topics like evolution in Science textbooks and to whitewash historical facts in History textbooks. And, unfortunately, it's not cost effective to publish different editions for different states-- so everybody ends up losing, not just the kids in the Bible Belt.
Besides blocking legitimate images, such as Hubble photographs (as another user noted), it will prevent users from visiting many, many sites with "dynamic" content. I've found several pages that contain absolutely no real text; nearly all the copy present was displayed in a GIF image.
Think of all the sites with javascript that change navigational GIF images to "ON" or "OFF" whenever you click or do a mouseover. Most of the sites that rely on flashy techniques-- and I hesitate to use the word "flashy," as now it's pretty much standard fare-- are designed by developers with no time or interest in providing friendly "ALT" tags for every image or menu.
Accessibility has become more of a luxury.
I had this same discussion with my sister, and illustrated by reviewing the source code of a site of her choosing: Lane Bryant
It appeared that, if she browsed it with a text-based browser, she could see the title bar... and that was it. Images are integral to the web now, like it or not.
What bureaucrat(s) get to decide which companies are "porn" and which companies merely have "erotic" or "adult-themed" content? And if you find your site branded with the scarlet "S" and subsequently blocked, to whom may you appeal?
Will sites dealing with homosexual lifestyles, erotic fiction, transcripts of Supreme Court nominee hearings, or pro-life/pro-choice advocacy be labelled with ".sex" because of their "adult" content? Does an online gallery of the collected works of Robert Mapplethorpe or David Hamilton warrant the imposition of a .sex domain?
Defining pornography is pretty tricky. D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Allen Ginsburg, Henry Miller, and other notable 20th century writers all faced accusations of obscenity. I realize that you probably have a very clear idea of the kind of sites that should be given a .sex TLD, and I probably wouldn't disagree with any of your choices; but, unfortunately, I don't think we can depend on the same rational objectivity on the part of any board of de facto censors.
As another poster has observed, it will be all-too-convenient to enforce a blanket ban on anything with a .sex TLD, and certain lobbying groups will doubtless see to it that such a ban is enforced on campuses and in libraries, or required of local ISPs in small and not-so-small towns across the nation. After all, what elected official wants to be on record with such an "anti-family" position as supporting access to those dirty .sex domains?
Remember the rationale behind the NC-17 rating? The X rating wasn't intended to merely represent pornographic films. The Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, for example, was rated X. Eventually, however, X came to signify hardcore, and porn merchants used XXX as another marketing tool. The MPAA eventually adopted the NC-17 rating, ostensibly to allow serious filmmakers to release adult-themed films without being saddled with the same rating as Debbie Does Dallas.
Unfortunately, NC-17 is the financial kiss of death. Why? "Family" newspapers mostly won't run advertisements for NC-17 movies. Most major theatre chains won't show them. Major studies routinely require R-rated films to be delivered (such as the case with Kubrick's last film).
The same thing has happened with "Parental Advisory" labels on rock and rap albums, to a degree, but I won't go into that here; I'm afraid I might have rambled on too long, as it is.
In a nutshell, requiring a new .sex domain opens an entirely familiar can of worms. Whether it's labeled Censorware, Parental Advisory labels, or the Hayes Commission, it's still the same can we've been opening since the Comstock Act.
Can you really see Peter Graves as Jim Phelps wake up one day and say, "Hey, the Cold War's over and all I got was this lousy T-shirt... Maybe I'll just brutally murder the rest of my team to make a quick buck!" Not me.
Up until the betrayal of the IMF agents, the movie almost looked like a cool update, but instead espionage and intrigue were tossed aside for Yet Another Summer Action Vehicle.
I saw a clip on MTV the other day that kind of sums up this kind of contempt, or at least ignorance, of the source material. Kennedy was at the first MI premiere, and asked Martin Landau what he was doing there-- "What? There was a TV series? What, you were in it?"
He was understandably annoyed, and not-too-politely told her to do her homework next time; she made faces behind his back and said "Whatever;" she was there for Tom Cruise.