Actually, the opposite is true. For the most part appointed judges, especially those appointed for life, tend to try very hard to interpret the law in a fair and consistent manner. Their political bent only influences the base assumptions and on which side they will err. The number of judges that will ignore the law and rule purely on their own prejudice are few and far between. Unfortunately we have a couple on the US Supreme Court, but we knew they would be when they were appointed.
This has caused problem for more than one president who had hoped to stack the court only to find that the appointed judge did in fact have ethics.
OTOH, the elected judges tend to be the ones that might rule more often on the basis of personal prejudices and personal gain. These judges, like all politicians, have war chests to fill.
A less cynical answer would be that result driven people, which I assume are many if not most of the people who actually have money to buy books like this, are interested in knowing which books will help them achieve results. Therefore, the reviews that get published are of those books that might be helpful.
/. is, after all, not a literary site where we analyze literature to within an inch of it's life. Of course, we have those that think by knowing how to spell and conjugate verbs make them literate, but that not necessarily the case.
and I am sure the bankers are laughing all the way to thier office.
For every dollar of lease or loan for Wintel machine, they keep a dime. Even when a refund from the MS occurs, they still get to keep thier dime.
Who cares if the bankers provide a service. Who cares if the bankers have evey right to try to make a profit just like everyone else. Who cares if nothing large gets bought or sold without such services.
No, lets just complain that they are making profits while doing nothing. That is the mature, educated, and informed thing to do.
Since inception, we have funded our operations primarily through loans from our major stockholder and through sales of common and preferred stock. During the nine months ended July 31, 2003, our operations produced positive cash flow. We believe that we will have sufficient financial resources to fund our current operations for at least the next twelve months, however, if our cash reserves, cash from operations and existing unused line of credit are insufficient to meet our needs, we may not be able to execute our business plan and our operations may be adversely impacted.
One one hand this sounds like boiler plate legal talk assuring investors that they will make it to court. OTOH, it sounds like they expect to recieve little new money from operations and they might have to max out thier credit lines to operate over the next year. So, if bussiness became very expensive, they might run out of money before the court case really gets started.
The apple keyboard has had a seperate island for these keys for a couple years. I am using one right now. It is a couple years old.
The interesting thing is the price. The last keyboard/optical mouse pair cost about this much. The fact that they were able to add bluetooth and keep the price the same, and competative, in impressive, though part of the reason may be less technologically advanced mouse.
Because Apple leads the way in product design. Knowing what Apple is doing helps the community know what to expect from other vender in the future.
As el reg stated, the once unique powerbook titanium is now copied widely. Fortunately Apple did not sit still. We now have a new design that will be copied.
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse? None else widely available. I know MS is supposed to have one, but a goggle search only points to vapor.
Apple has been and is the future of personal computing. They set the tone of coolness. Much like Versace or Prada, not everyone wants it or can afford it, but that does not mean that Gap, Target, and to a lesser extent wal-mart, won't copy it.
I think here again the pundits are rearranging facts to fit their reality.
The question isn't whether we will pay for content: We already are.
By and large most of us do not pay for content. How many of us buy magazines that are supported primarily by subscribers? They do exist, and their sales are marginal.
We tend to pay for the physical item or the name or other costs. Why else would we have no problem paying a dollar for a newspaper, but nothing to get it online.
In others, we may prefer to pay only for the content we want to access. This is not a novel situation; after all, many of us subscribe to some publications and purchase others off the newsstand when a particular issue has content that seems interesting, or when we feel we have time to read them.
True, we will buy a single issue of the magazine, but we do buy the entire issue. We do cut out the six pages of the article, put the magazine back on the shelf, and then ask the store to charge us only for those six pages. A single issue is not micropayments. A single issue is most often way of delivering a demographics to an advertiser If customers started cutting magazines up in stores and took only the ad free pages, I suspect the publishers would be quite unhappy
Similarly, most of us will subscribe to a finite range of Web content--just as most of us subscribe to only a few (if any) premium cable channels.
This is true. The WSJ and NYT presumable has customers for their online subscription services. However, these are not micropay. The/. service is not really micropayment either.
For cable you pay the same for the service no matter how much you use. The exception is pay per view, which is not micropayment. PPV is an additional service in addition for your subscription.
I believe that micropayments are not viable and is a response to a screwed up advertising model created when this web thing got going with ad supported pages. Instead of pushing internet ads as the traditional branding strategy with the added benefit of direct customer connections, the ads were promoted as a way to immediately sell product. The ads were also grossly overpriced and this lead to waste in infrastructure and management(/. pt cruiser? Thousand dollar chairs?). I believe that the web can provide a good value to advertisers, if we would just stop pretending it was a TV or magazine.
I don't know about this. I get many calls from advertising vacations and time shares. I am sure that these get some of thier income from people calling back.
First, i don't know what kind of lame SciFi collectors this guy hangs out with, but I have, and know people who have, plenty of paperbacks encased in plastics sleeves.
Second, there is vast difference between the death of SciFi and the decline of SciFi sales. The later is a distinct possibility, given that most people don't read real novels to begin with. The former is merely a matter of perception. It reminds me of the periodic statements by the educated ignorant that the end of science is nigh. Everything that can be discovered has been discovered. The reality is that though the technology is matured, the problems and possibilities still exists. We have moved from robots as, etymological, slaves to the questions of what makes a sentient being, or, as in the United Nation lingo, a person (see Can Animals and Machines be Persons, Leiber). We have the question of what does it mean to be human when we are no longer unique. Questions of culture, beyond the white human centric model pushed by the popular writers, are also up for grabs.
We must also acknowledge that the past is gone. As Andrei Condrescu stated on a recent editorial on NPR concerning the death of Teller and Riefenstahl, the 20th century is over. From a Science fiction point of view, we get the same from the death of Rodenberry and Heinlein, and the metaphorical deaths of Star Trek and Star Wars. The classic age of Science Fiction is gone. Complaining that the present is not like the past has to be one of the silliest thing for a SciFi fan to do.
And modern science fiction reflects this. The genre has not, like the romance novel, stagnating in a perpetual adolescents. It has grown, matured, and become complex. It is as unrecognizable as the friend that one has not seen since childhood. The very nature of that complexity limits the audience. No longer can it be completely understood by the child. No longer is a pulp medium to be passively consumed. It is literature.
Years ago Wells Fargo sent out an email survey that included a link to a site requested personal information linked to accounts. It was run through a third party that linked to the Wells Fargo site. There was no way to tell if a real relationship existed between Wells Fargo and the third party company.
Incredulous that they would do something so stupid, I checked to see if the email was for real. It was. I then asked them if they realized how stupid this email was from a security point of view. They replied that they took security very seriously.
I, as a common programmer with only minimal security experience, could see they were setting themselves up for trouble. Why was it so difficult for them to do the same?
and remember this when the government want to set up even more intrusive identification programs, but do not want to set up safeguards on how the identification data is used.
There was quite a bit of concern about SSN, and quite a bit of discussion about protected it from excessive use. The legislators promised that the SSN would not be excessively used, and no protection would be necessary.
The lied.
Currently any medical form, employment form, or rental form, can be used to steal an identity.
I run Camino. One reason it gets such a low rating is because it does not automagically run embedded content such as quicktime, flash and PDF files. This is the primary reason I prefer it to many other browsers. The 'crippling' really had no negative effect on my life. For Quicktime and PDF, the content get retrieved, stored and a friendly button appears that allows me to stop the download, view the file, or open it in an application. The benefits are clear. I do not have bandwidth wasted with things I do not want, and I do not viruses automagically running and destroying my computer.
As far as Flash is concerned I had take it off my computer. I just wasted too much time watching advertisements. If I had more control over what flash did on my machine, like I have with images, quicktime movies, and PDF, I would be more than happy reinstall and use the content. I think Flash is a good product. I just think it disrespects the computer user.
I believe that solutions exists that will not only render the patent meaningless but will also make the web a safer more pleasant place for the general users. I believe it can be smilier to giving the users to stop popups, which sometime lead to inappropriate content or sequences of windows that took over the computer.
Which is why MS is having such a problem with it. IE is a framework that, in part, allows content to pushed onto users whether they like it or not. It would be very hard to keep that functionality without technologies included in the patent. In other browsers, in which the user is respected with functionality that allows a more customized web experience, removal of the seamless technology will only be a nuisances.
Which is why we need to take all MS statements with a large grain of salt. They have quite a bit to lose if the push philosophy is destroyed. They are not the only ones. Will the advertising houses use flash it users have a choice of it's viewing, or will the just use Quicktime. Will MS web products lose importance if IE does have the ability to force content? I think not.
Which has been the windows defence. Windows is secure, it is only the fact that cheapskate companies do not use MS certified employess that cause the problem.
Which may be the same thing that is happening to OS systems. Companies with no budgets are setting up the webservers and not maintaining them.
So, are we accepted this defense? I think not. Most *nix systems are more secure out of the box than windows.
give me a break, we have been singing and writing about sex since always, not to mention drugs and killing people.
I mean look at canterbury tales. Look at McTeague. Look at Swan Lake. Look at Madame Butterfly. From not so long ago we have Blondie and 'Die Young and Stay Pretty.' One of my favorite Beavis and Buttheads was when they had the Cash video about killing his wife and her lover. The commentary, which ran along the lines of how violent the song is, was great.
The lyrics may be extreme to those who are older or more sensitive, but I find Lil' Kim singing about how she will fuck anyone regardless of ethnicity and taking control of her sexuality kind of liberating after the rock era where one was lead to believe that women existed purely for the pleasure of men.
And at least in the lyrics listed it describes the notion that lovers should try to pleasure each other, and not just treat each other as a machine. Again, I find this great replacement for the idea that lovin' the one you are with for no more reason than they exist and with no more passion than you would would give the morning newspaper.
It is perfectly normal for old people to be outraged with the contemporary culture. Hell, it is almost a prerequisite. However, the apparent popular claim that such lyrics are of any real concern is just silly. After all, we been gettin' our freak on and curling toes for as long as I can remember. At least those of us who can find someone to get our freak on with and care enough to curl toes. And anyway, everyone know it is heels over head.
You know, I here this a lot from many people. They have to work at their shit job to feed and clothe their. It many cases, it is not as dire as they say. They need to work so their child can ride in $40K car, live in a house that would in past fit three families, go to a school where they be protected from the evil minority lower class, and wear their designer clothes.
I know that some people have truly shit jobs and they really have no money. However, these people generally aren't the ones who make or implement or design to company policy.
I hate to wax idealistic, but i think that people should reflect on what they are really saying. I mean my parents managed to raise three kids and usually were able to stick to their ideals. We did not have much, but we did generally know we were loved and cared for, and we never had to hear how mommy or daddy steals money from people retirement funds in order to pay for the big screen TV.
Do you use your web site for business or just for play? Do you think you have sole control over you DNS entry, or do you grant register.com the right to direct it as they wish? Would you allow register.com to one day point you entry to a interstitial advertising page that would force visitors to you domain to watch a 30 second commercial?
I will make the same statement I made elsewhere. If you allow advertising without your permission for a day or two, I am sure there are many people who would happy to send you penis enlargement ad copy that you can place on your front door.
Hell, let me know if you own a business. If you don't care about the image of your company let me and several of my friends come over have a party during business hours.
The fact is that is that domain names are becoming property, and sometimes quite valuable property. I seriously doubt anyone here will tell me that another person has the right to use your property without your permission.
Oh, I know everyone will bring up file sharing and software copying and the like. But there is a difference. If I copy a piece of software or a song or whatever, I am only violating copyright. In general, I will still attribute the 50 cent mp3 to 50 cent, and not try to claim it as my own work. Likewise, I am not doing MS any harm beyond copyright violation unless I sell tier product as my own or repackage their product and sell the product in such a way that it hurts the reputation of the MS corporation.
Which is what is happening here. I register widgets.com. I produce business cards and other advertising materials for widgets.com, and note to my clients that the website will be up in a day or two. I then get a hosting service, set up my website, and propagate my decided DNS entry.
However, without my knowledge or permission, register.com has pointed my domain to their advertising copy. My potential clients are being inconvenienced. My potential clients blame me for the inconvenience. Register.com is making ad revenue off my property and to my detriment. Because of the nature of the propagation of DNS, it would take a couple days to move the entry from the squatter register.com site to my site. In that time I may well have lost every initial contact.
Damage has been arguably done. Register.com is very arguable to blame. Register.com is generating revenue to the detriment of their customers. I doubt any of us would tolerate someone putting advertising copy on our houses or at our places of business without our permission. If you do allow such advertising copy, let me know and I will arrange to have some 5 foot by 5 foot penis enlargement copy posted on your front door.
This lawsuit is silly only because it is so clear that register.com is wrong. They should have never done this. They should have apologized to their customers and stop the practice as soon as they received the lawsuit. They should have paid the initial legal fees and settlement, which would have likely been much less than they are paying now.
This is a case of firm believing that the customer is beholden to the company rather than the other way around. When are we going to return to the capitalistic ideal that we are here to serve our customers; that we are here to make better product than our competitors; that we are not here to figure out innovative ways to screw the people we expect to pay us for our services.
Bloom County was wildly popular. The switch was his decision, and we were all quite sad to see it go. If i remember correctly, Breathed was trying to do three things when he switched from Bloom County to Outland. First, he did not want the hassle of the daily strip. He told many the tale of his frantic late nights and last minute work on plane trips to deliver copy to his publisher. Second, he was protesting the fact that newspapers were shrinking comic strip to barely legible form. It was impossible to make out the text much less the artwork. Third, he wanted to concentrate more on the artwork: larger vistas, more detail.
In the middle of this, he also wanted to leave Bloom Country behind. He focus shifted from a white male adolescent to black female pre-adolescent. The animal shifted from a flightless motherless waterfowl and drugged garfield parody to a cynical mickey mouse parody and his pal. Unfortunately Breathed could not make the strip work, so he had to reintroduce opus and bill, which then became a product line of plush animals, greeting cards, and the like.
So the fact that the new strip concentrates on Opus and Bill is not surprising, though somewhat disappointing. Breathed drawing did become very good at the end, so I have high hopes for that. The only problem I see is that Bloom Country originated from a college paper, and the college crowd continued to be the core audience. I don't know how well his work will be received by the general audience or the current generation that grew up without exposure to his work. i hope that he will make the strip available to campus papers. Although most would not run it sunday, they could repeat it on Monday
Down here in the southern US, 12 is almost old enough to be executed. She is lucky that she, her family, and her family's family is evicted from the housting.
I believe there was recently a supreme court decision that in which the court supported the housing authorities eviction of a grandmother because her minor grandchildren were caught in possesion of a small amount of illigal drugs.
Clearly we believe that children can not only be held responsible for thier actions, but that they and they parents can be punished quite forcefully for those actions.
have you noticed the increase in the number of companies that are asking that you pay money in exchange for nothing. It used to just be insurance, casinos, and state lotteries. Everyone knew that these people were legalized con artists, and pretty much any other scam was illegal.
Now we have ebay selling 'buyer insurance' while denying that the service is actually insurance, or saying they will actually pay anything out. We have SCO asking for money without possible refund if the product never materializes. It is to the point that it would seem anachronistic to merely rough up a retailer in exchange for protection money. The law has created so many other creative way to shake down a mark.
Actually, in my experience the only time one gets a 'single vendor' policy is if one uses MS. Even in the old days, Apple products inter-operated with other machines unless those machines were specifically designed to work only with PCs. And if they were, one found that they were obsolete much faster than general machines.
With OS x the choice becomes even greater. The Mac has entered the *nix community and represents choice for the user. Web boxes do not have to be running IIS with the accompanying license and month patches, but can be Apache boxes with reliable support contracts. For the data entry person, a x86 Linux box running thin net to the application and data. More secure that a full fledged Windows box in which the person has rapid access to all the data. For the superuser who needs more box, a Mac or even Sun Blade. Oracle or MySql would handle the database needs. Standardize on MS Office and StarOffice. Administration is the pretty much the same on all machines. The kernel is customizable, and shell commands can be added or subtracted as need.
Hell, you can even put in some windows machines for the apps that require it.
No MS is the definition of single source. Everyone else knows how to play together.
I second that. All good fictions explores ideas and relationships. Heilein, at his best, did both. He talked a lot about how we relate to ourselves. The problem that many people have with science fiction is that it gets bogs down in the idea and forgets that everything, at least in the world we live in, depends on how humans implements the idea in real time. Asimov was often guilty of this. Likewise, hardcore sci fi fans get very annoyed when the human element becomes dominant.
Of course Robinson's writing often comes closer to fantasy than sci fi. Though he cites Heinlien as a major influence, he lacks the necessary flair of combining ideas and people.
That said there is probably as much good science fiction now as there ever has been. Kim Stanley Robinson is great. Gibson is still churning out very interesting books. Brin is still publishing credible work. The problem is the general state of the book store and publishing houses. Publishers are pushing books based on tv shows and movies like crazy. For example, as much as I like buffy, the 100 novelizations leave little room for any original fiction. In my days, tripe like that was given away for free in fanzines, while the bookstore was where you went for thoughtful reading.
I agree. Computers are used in many silly ways, but consider this.
Making a PPT presentation full of eye-candy and other silly stuff is considered a skill. The content is not relevant, it is the fact they have learned to use the package. They can now go to an employer and show they a skill. It is just like typing. The fact that sentences are content free is not as important as the fact that one can type them at 60 wpm.
Each assignment has an objective. if the objective is to use PPT, and they created something that shows some skill in PPT, then the objective has been met. Likewise, if they objective is research a current event on the net and do some higher order thinking, and they do that, then that objective has been met. One does not preclude the other.
When we are teaching students to write a paragraph using three new vocabulary word, we do not obsess on the fact that have misspelled some complicated non-vocabulary words they might have included for fun. There is a rubric, and it should reflect the objectives.
Perhaps there is nothing that will make them learn history better, but perhaps there is something that will motivate them to pursue history a they get older.
Slashdot Mirror
This has caused problem for more than one president who had hoped to stack the court only to find that the appointed judge did in fact have ethics.
OTOH, the elected judges tend to be the ones that might rule more often on the basis of personal prejudices and personal gain. These judges, like all politicians, have war chests to fill.
For every dollar of lease or loan for Wintel machine, they keep a dime. Even when a refund from the MS occurs, they still get to keep thier dime.
Who cares if the bankers provide a service. Who cares if the bankers have evey right to try to make a profit just like everyone else. Who cares if nothing large gets bought or sold without such services.
No, lets just complain that they are making profits while doing nothing. That is the mature, educated, and informed thing to do.
Or are you in fact a government agent paid to monitor the alleged seditious activities occurring on /. Or even worse, an agent of the RIAA.
If you are engaging in such activities under commission, then i can understand why ups are so distressful to you.
Since inception, we have funded our operations primarily through loans from our major stockholder and through sales of common and preferred stock. During the nine months ended July 31, 2003, our operations produced positive cash flow. We believe that we will have sufficient financial resources to fund our current operations for at least the next twelve months, however, if our cash reserves, cash from operations and existing unused line of credit are insufficient to meet our needs, we may not be able to execute our business plan and our operations may be adversely impacted.
One one hand this sounds like boiler plate legal talk assuring investors that they will make it to court. OTOH, it sounds like they expect to recieve little new money from operations and they might have to max out thier credit lines to operate over the next year. So, if bussiness became very expensive, they might run out of money before the court case really gets started.
The interesting thing is the price. The last keyboard/optical mouse pair cost about this much. The fact that they were able to add bluetooth and keep the price the same, and competative, in impressive, though part of the reason may be less technologically advanced mouse.
As el reg stated, the once unique powerbook titanium is now copied widely. Fortunately Apple did not sit still. We now have a new design that will be copied.
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse? None else widely available. I know MS is supposed to have one, but a goggle search only points to vapor.
Apple has been and is the future of personal computing. They set the tone of coolness. Much like Versace or Prada, not everyone wants it or can afford it, but that does not mean that Gap, Target, and to a lesser extent wal-mart, won't copy it.
The question isn't whether we will pay for content: We already are.
By and large most of us do not pay for content. How many of us buy magazines that are supported primarily by subscribers? They do exist, and their sales are marginal.
We tend to pay for the physical item or the name or other costs. Why else would we have no problem paying a dollar for a newspaper, but nothing to get it online.
In others, we may prefer to pay only for the content we want to access. This is not a novel situation; after all, many of us subscribe to some publications and purchase others off the newsstand when a particular issue has content that seems interesting, or when we feel we have time to read them.
True, we will buy a single issue of the magazine, but we do buy the entire issue. We do cut out the six pages of the article, put the magazine back on the shelf, and then ask the store to charge us only for those six pages. A single issue is not micropayments. A single issue is most often way of delivering a demographics to an advertiser If customers started cutting magazines up in stores and took only the ad free pages, I suspect the publishers would be quite unhappy
Similarly, most of us will subscribe to a finite range of Web content--just as most of us subscribe to only a few (if any) premium cable channels. /. service is not really micropayment either.
This is true. The WSJ and NYT presumable has customers for their online subscription services. However, these are not micropay. The
For cable you pay the same for the service no matter how much you use. The exception is pay per view, which is not micropayment. PPV is an additional service in addition for your subscription.
I believe that micropayments are not viable and is a response to a screwed up advertising model created when this web thing got going with ad supported pages. Instead of pushing internet ads as the traditional branding strategy with the added benefit of direct customer connections, the ads were promoted as a way to immediately sell product. The ads were also grossly overpriced and this lead to waste in infrastructure and management(/. pt cruiser? Thousand dollar chairs?). I believe that the web can provide a good value to advertisers, if we would just stop pretending it was a TV or magazine.
I don't know about this. I get many calls from advertising vacations and time shares. I am sure that these get some of thier income from people calling back.
Second, there is vast difference between the death of SciFi and the decline of SciFi sales. The later is a distinct possibility, given that most people don't read real novels to begin with. The former is merely a matter of perception. It reminds me of the periodic statements by the educated ignorant that the end of science is nigh. Everything that can be discovered has been discovered. The reality is that though the technology is matured, the problems and possibilities still exists. We have moved from robots as, etymological, slaves to the questions of what makes a sentient being, or, as in the United Nation lingo, a person (see Can Animals and Machines be Persons, Leiber). We have the question of what does it mean to be human when we are no longer unique. Questions of culture, beyond the white human centric model pushed by the popular writers, are also up for grabs.
We must also acknowledge that the past is gone. As Andrei Condrescu stated on a recent editorial on NPR concerning the death of Teller and Riefenstahl, the 20th century is over. From a Science fiction point of view, we get the same from the death of Rodenberry and Heinlein, and the metaphorical deaths of Star Trek and Star Wars. The classic age of Science Fiction is gone. Complaining that the present is not like the past has to be one of the silliest thing for a SciFi fan to do.
And modern science fiction reflects this. The genre has not, like the romance novel, stagnating in a perpetual adolescents. It has grown, matured, and become complex. It is as unrecognizable as the friend that one has not seen since childhood. The very nature of that complexity limits the audience. No longer can it be completely understood by the child. No longer is a pulp medium to be passively consumed. It is literature.
Incredulous that they would do something so stupid, I checked to see if the email was for real. It was. I then asked them if they realized how stupid this email was from a security point of view. They replied that they took security very seriously.
I, as a common programmer with only minimal security experience, could see they were setting themselves up for trouble. Why was it so difficult for them to do the same?
There was quite a bit of concern about SSN, and quite a bit of discussion about protected it from excessive use. The legislators promised that the SSN would not be excessively used, and no protection would be necessary.
The lied.
Currently any medical form, employment form, or rental form, can be used to steal an identity.
As far as Flash is concerned I had take it off my computer. I just wasted too much time watching advertisements. If I had more control over what flash did on my machine, like I have with images, quicktime movies, and PDF, I would be more than happy reinstall and use the content. I think Flash is a good product. I just think it disrespects the computer user.
I believe that solutions exists that will not only render the patent meaningless but will also make the web a safer more pleasant place for the general users. I believe it can be smilier to giving the users to stop popups, which sometime lead to inappropriate content or sequences of windows that took over the computer.
Which is why MS is having such a problem with it. IE is a framework that, in part, allows content to pushed onto users whether they like it or not. It would be very hard to keep that functionality without technologies included in the patent. In other browsers, in which the user is respected with functionality that allows a more customized web experience, removal of the seamless technology will only be a nuisances.
Which is why we need to take all MS statements with a large grain of salt. They have quite a bit to lose if the push philosophy is destroyed. They are not the only ones. Will the advertising houses use flash it users have a choice of it's viewing, or will the just use Quicktime. Will MS web products lose importance if IE does have the ability to force content? I think not.
Which may be the same thing that is happening to OS systems. Companies with no budgets are setting up the webservers and not maintaining them.
So, are we accepted this defense? I think not. Most *nix systems are more secure out of the box than windows.
I mean look at canterbury tales. Look at McTeague. Look at Swan Lake. Look at Madame Butterfly. From not so long ago we have Blondie and 'Die Young and Stay Pretty.' One of my favorite Beavis and Buttheads was when they had the Cash video about killing his wife and her lover. The commentary, which ran along the lines of how violent the song is, was great.
The lyrics may be extreme to those who are older or more sensitive, but I find Lil' Kim singing about how she will fuck anyone regardless of ethnicity and taking control of her sexuality kind of liberating after the rock era where one was lead to believe that women existed purely for the pleasure of men.
And at least in the lyrics listed it describes the notion that lovers should try to pleasure each other, and not just treat each other as a machine. Again, I find this great replacement for the idea that lovin' the one you are with for no more reason than they exist and with no more passion than you would would give the morning newspaper.
It is perfectly normal for old people to be outraged with the contemporary culture. Hell, it is almost a prerequisite. However, the apparent popular claim that such lyrics are of any real concern is just silly. After all, we been gettin' our freak on and curling toes for as long as I can remember. At least those of us who can find someone to get our freak on with and care enough to curl toes. And anyway, everyone know it is heels over head.
I know that some people have truly shit jobs and they really have no money. However, these people generally aren't the ones who make or implement or design to company policy.
I hate to wax idealistic, but i think that people should reflect on what they are really saying. I mean my parents managed to raise three kids and usually were able to stick to their ideals. We did not have much, but we did generally know we were loved and cared for, and we never had to hear how mommy or daddy steals money from people retirement funds in order to pay for the big screen TV.
unless you are on the truly poor suckers who have to maintian production winboxes.
I will make the same statement I made elsewhere. If you allow advertising without your permission for a day or two, I am sure there are many people who would happy to send you penis enlargement ad copy that you can place on your front door.
Hell, let me know if you own a business. If you don't care about the image of your company let me and several of my friends come over have a party during business hours.
Oh, I know everyone will bring up file sharing and software copying and the like. But there is a difference. If I copy a piece of software or a song or whatever, I am only violating copyright. In general, I will still attribute the 50 cent mp3 to 50 cent, and not try to claim it as my own work. Likewise, I am not doing MS any harm beyond copyright violation unless I sell tier product as my own or repackage their product and sell the product in such a way that it hurts the reputation of the MS corporation.
Which is what is happening here. I register widgets.com. I produce business cards and other advertising materials for widgets.com, and note to my clients that the website will be up in a day or two. I then get a hosting service, set up my website, and propagate my decided DNS entry.
However, without my knowledge or permission, register.com has pointed my domain to their advertising copy. My potential clients are being inconvenienced. My potential clients blame me for the inconvenience. Register.com is making ad revenue off my property and to my detriment. Because of the nature of the propagation of DNS, it would take a couple days to move the entry from the squatter register.com site to my site. In that time I may well have lost every initial contact.
Damage has been arguably done. Register.com is very arguable to blame. Register.com is generating revenue to the detriment of their customers. I doubt any of us would tolerate someone putting advertising copy on our houses or at our places of business without our permission. If you do allow such advertising copy, let me know and I will arrange to have some 5 foot by 5 foot penis enlargement copy posted on your front door.
This lawsuit is silly only because it is so clear that register.com is wrong. They should have never done this. They should have apologized to their customers and stop the practice as soon as they received the lawsuit. They should have paid the initial legal fees and settlement, which would have likely been much less than they are paying now.
This is a case of firm believing that the customer is beholden to the company rather than the other way around. When are we going to return to the capitalistic ideal that we are here to serve our customers; that we are here to make better product than our competitors; that we are not here to figure out innovative ways to screw the people we expect to pay us for our services.
In the middle of this, he also wanted to leave Bloom Country behind. He focus shifted from a white male adolescent to black female pre-adolescent. The animal shifted from a flightless motherless waterfowl and drugged garfield parody to a cynical mickey mouse parody and his pal. Unfortunately Breathed could not make the strip work, so he had to reintroduce opus and bill, which then became a product line of plush animals, greeting cards, and the like.
So the fact that the new strip concentrates on Opus and Bill is not surprising, though somewhat disappointing. Breathed drawing did become very good at the end, so I have high hopes for that. The only problem I see is that Bloom Country originated from a college paper, and the college crowd continued to be the core audience. I don't know how well his work will be received by the general audience or the current generation that grew up without exposure to his work. i hope that he will make the strip available to campus papers. Although most would not run it sunday, they could repeat it on Monday
Down here in the southern US, 12 is almost old enough to be executed. She is lucky that she, her family, and her family's family is evicted from the housting.
I believe there was recently a supreme court decision that in which the court supported the housing authorities eviction of a grandmother because her minor grandchildren were caught in possesion of a small amount of illigal drugs.
Clearly we believe that children can not only be held responsible for thier actions, but that they and they parents can be punished quite forcefully for those actions.
Now we have ebay selling 'buyer insurance' while denying that the service is actually insurance, or saying they will actually pay anything out. We have SCO asking for money without possible refund if the product never materializes. It is to the point that it would seem anachronistic to merely rough up a retailer in exchange for protection money. The law has created so many other creative way to shake down a mark.
With OS x the choice becomes even greater. The Mac has entered the *nix community and represents choice for the user. Web boxes do not have to be running IIS with the accompanying license and month patches, but can be Apache boxes with reliable support contracts. For the data entry person, a x86 Linux box running thin net to the application and data. More secure that a full fledged Windows box in which the person has rapid access to all the data. For the superuser who needs more box, a Mac or even Sun Blade. Oracle or MySql would handle the database needs. Standardize on MS Office and StarOffice. Administration is the pretty much the same on all machines. The kernel is customizable, and shell commands can be added or subtracted as need.
Hell, you can even put in some windows machines for the apps that require it.
No MS is the definition of single source. Everyone else knows how to play together.
Of course Robinson's writing often comes closer to fantasy than sci fi. Though he cites Heinlien as a major influence, he lacks the necessary flair of combining ideas and people.
That said there is probably as much good science fiction now as there ever has been. Kim Stanley Robinson is great. Gibson is still churning out very interesting books. Brin is still publishing credible work. The problem is the general state of the book store and publishing houses. Publishers are pushing books based on tv shows and movies like crazy. For example, as much as I like buffy, the 100 novelizations leave little room for any original fiction. In my days, tripe like that was given away for free in fanzines, while the bookstore was where you went for thoughtful reading.
Making a PPT presentation full of eye-candy and other silly stuff is considered a skill. The content is not relevant, it is the fact they have learned to use the package. They can now go to an employer and show they a skill. It is just like typing. The fact that sentences are content free is not as important as the fact that one can type them at 60 wpm.
Each assignment has an objective. if the objective is to use PPT, and they created something that shows some skill in PPT, then the objective has been met. Likewise, if they objective is research a current event on the net and do some higher order thinking, and they do that, then that objective has been met. One does not preclude the other.
When we are teaching students to write a paragraph using three new vocabulary word, we do not obsess on the fact that have misspelled some complicated non-vocabulary words they might have included for fun. There is a rubric, and it should reflect the objectives.
Perhaps there is nothing that will make them learn history better, but perhaps there is something that will motivate them to pursue history a they get older.