I'm quite proud of my home state for rebelling on this. Washington D.C. is lost to the American people as an instrument for sensible government. The state houses are the only avenue left to us if simply by virtue of being within a day's drive, and of our legislators as being mostly people with day jobs who aren't trapped in a beltway bubble.
I once turned the tide for a crucial state reform bill by grabbing four friends and handing out flyers for 3 hours in front of supermarkets in certain legislators' districts. Inside of two days their offices received calls from ~150 constituents demanding to know why they weren't going to require members of the state legislature to show up for work. They usually get 5 calls on any issue, so they were taken aback and promptly decided to support the bill.
You can't do that with Senators and members of the House of Representatives. They don't give a crap what you and I think, unless we can threaten/promise 1000's of $$$/votes.
Thinking of the children...I live in New York and I'd far prefer kids and teens spending their free time indoors playing a violent video game like GTA than hanging out outside spraying graffiti, destroying property, or any of the much worse things they get into when they are bored and have time on their hands.
Sure, there are some kids who'll go pick up a DIY radio kit, code, or play basketball in their free time. But judging from the kids on my block in Brooklyn there are plenty who are not adept enough or self-motivated enough to do those things, but quite capable of doing harm if not directed or distracted.
I would say that that's more likely a suburban phenomenon. In an urban setting you probably live in an apartment building or in a rowhouse and it's practically impossible to eventually meet your neighbors. Close proximity denotes some degree of familiarity.
In the suburbs, however, there is less chance to meet the people in the house next door. There might not even be a sidewalk connecting you. You're expected to get in your car at point A and go directly to mall at point B. There is not much opportunity to randomly interact with your neighbors.
than even Kuviasungnerk (the winter festival that involves getting up before dawn to do calisthenics by the lakeshore in the snow). U of Chicago invents these weird activities for students to have "fun" while obliterating student-created traditions like SleepOut (camping out on the main quad to register for classes) or the Lascivious Ball (students and professors dressing in lingerie and attending a gothic ball). Thus, no one attends them.
U of C students have variously dubbed the university as the place where "fun goes to die" or where "hell DOES freeze over." In the 90's a national ranking of party schools placed it dead last, below even West Point, the Naval Academy, and Brigham Young University. All of this is deserved, since aside from killing student traditions as soon as they rear their heads, they also have never thought to build a student center or to allow the EL stops that reach campus to operate so that Hyde Park residents might be able to escape the neighborhood once in a while.
In short, the Scavenger Hunt is not worth valorizing, nor the institution that holds it. Friends don't let friends have anything to do with the University of Chicago.
He's a man who actually uses his public office to fight for the average citizen. Like the parent poster said, he took on the biggest financial and insurance firms in NY AND kicked Microsoft's butt for monopolistic behavior--Anyone who is known as "the most feared man on Wall Street" is both really intelligent (you would have to be) and has big brass balls the size of Toledo.
Unlike the Bush administration or virtually anyone else holding public office in America that I can think of, he's exactly the kind of person you want and that every Slashdotter grouses every day of the week that they wish they could find to lead the country instead of schmuck X.
So he wants to pass this law. *Shrug* I'm an adult and I don't care. It might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. It's really not that important in the big scale of things. Getting health care for New Yorkers IS important. Cracking down on the very, very corrupt big business assholes who like to play masters of the universe with everyone else's lives IS important. Reforming the state's educational system so that its graduates might actually be able to read IS important. Passing environmental laws that kick-start an alternative energy future for the entire country and world IS important. And Eliot's doing these things. In my book, that makes him way on balance someone who is not an ass.
now living in Brooklyn, this makes me proud. I hope that other states follow Montana's lead and flip D.C. the bird on this one. C'mon, New Hampshire, you know you want to. "Live Free or Die" and all that.
It's interesting, isn't it, that a general rebellion against federal overreach seems to be brewing. In 2006 a number of states across the West passed medical marijuana laws only to have Bush claim they couldn't do that. Yes, a guy from the "state's rights" party claiming that states don't have the authority to regulate that which the Constitution clearly says they do.
Then you have the various states and municipalities across the country now passing pollution laws that are stricter than federal regulations because "someone has to do something about climate change."
Wonder if the un-funded mandate of No Child Left Behind has added any fuel to the fire...
In any case, I sincerely hope the states do get together and whack D.C. on the nose. The centralization of power in this country is out of control and anti-thetical to effective representative government.
should germany be banned from the EU for banning swastikas and nazi propaganda? that's essentially what this law in turkey is about--preventing more extremist elements from gaining sway. yes, it's not the strict interpretation of free speech we think of here in america, but america's not exactly a bastion of that sort of free speech nowadays anyway, what with 'free speech zones' and other offenses.
so in sum it seems less like people are really objecting less to the offense to the ideal of absolute free speech than they are using it as a cloak to practice bigotry against people of another ethnicity and religion.
the turks are a wonderful, kind, gentle people who are more modern and developed than many of the countries already in the EU. keeping them out is thinly veiled bigotry and what's more, folly.
I figured out it was more fun to learn how to play music myself. Longer warm up time, shorter playlist, and more limited portability (guitar doesn't really travel well in the subway). But the enjoyment is about fifty times higher for picking out 'House of the Rising Sun' than listening to recycled boy band song #19.
Eventually I hope to learn to read music and write my own. And that too will take a while. But I'd rather take the next four years to get to a tolerable level of ability and enjoy every bit of it than give one more dime to an industry and system that thinks it has a monopoly on culture and that it has the right the dictate to you and me what we enjoy.
Or at least the landmarks are. The Cyclone is spot-on. Mapping the virtual streets to NYC's actual layout would be even cooler. Let's hope. It would be awesome to scream down my street in Brooklyn in a ferrari.
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth out there about the poor quality of our political leadership and the lack of good candidates who will stand up and fix what's wrong. But a timid people will never produce strong, moral leaders. It's axiomatic. If we want things to change in this country, we're just going to have to do it ourselves. We have to be strong if we expect our country to be strong. Corrupt political leaders will never bring themselves to justice--we have to do it. The police will never arrest themselves for violating the law, so we as citizens must arrest them. That's the ultimate guarantor of democracy, folks, us.
Can't speak for folks in other parts of the country, but Montanans still remember what it means to be free. They will correct this and those who think they can simply overrule a democratic vote.
The Ottoman Empire had a pretty brutal reputation, but modern Turkey seems to have little in common with that legacy. So people in America and Europe should cut Turkey a break. It's a great country.
It should acknowledge what it did to the Armenians. It was a crime. But acknowledging it is not a sign of weakness but rather of strength of character and sincere atonement. It's the right thing to do.
Also, Turkey should drop the anti-Turkishness law, because it's beneath them. Turks are better than that. It just seems to reflect a fragile ego.
Will that ever be enough to appease Americans and Europeans? It's tough to say. Anti-muslim bigotry will probably always be an obstacle to widespread rapprochement.
Turks are the some of the kindest, gentlest people on earth. Their country is at least as advanced as the median European country and more advanced than many. Lumping them together with "dangerous, repressive muslim states" like Libya or Syria makes as little sense as that recent smear campaign against the United Arab Emirates. In fact, Turkey is about as muslim as France is Catholic. That is to say, not much. The EU's rejecting their bid for membership was a mistake.
It is true that their anti-Turkishness law is silly and their refusal to own up to the Armenian genocide is shameful. But Japan absolutely refuses to own up to its wartime attrocities, and most people in the West seem to have no problem interacting with them. Likewise, no one in the United States seems to recall its occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in which it killed 600,000 Filippinos. And when the United States requires loyalty oaths and engages in warantless wire-tapping of its citizens, practices torture, and scraps habeus corpus then it's hard to argue that it enjoys any moral superiority.
Should Turkey repeal its anti-Turkishness law and acknowledge the Armenian genocide? Absolutely. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because they're a PR albatross that obscure the many great things about their country. But let's keep a little perspective. All of us need to do a much better job of defending freedom and human rights. As the saying goes, 'first remove the beam from your own eye.'
CompUSA is the most irritating, useless waste of space. Surly, clueless employees, rebates that are never honored, over-priced crap, utter ignorance on basically every level. You're always going to run into good and bad employees everywhere, but when every time you go someplace it's always consistently bad you know it's not just you and it's not just chance, but systemic.
The location in Manhattan in 57th and Broadway is a perfect example. All the businesses and corporations in the world within 5 blocks' walk and yet the place is always empty. You ask an employee an incredibly simple question like, "where are your flash drives?" and the answer you get is a surly, "what's a flash drive?"
Contrast that with the Apple store in SoHo, which is crawling with people every second of the day they're open. After many years of dealing with CompUSA for PC parts I went to the Apple store to check into buying an iBook for my girlfriend running the spiffy new OSX OS (yes, a few years ago). I dubiously asked a salesperson, a random salesperson, how to open a terminal to work on the command line. He did so and wrote a quicky little PERL one-liner to demonstrate that, yes, the kernel really was *NIX.
It's all how you cast the situation. If you tell your next prospective employer that you have been consulting, then the short spells at jobs is instantly explained. If they ask questions that make you think they're looking for someone more long-term, then you can either decide to move on or say something like, "Consulting has been fun and I've learned a great deal about many businesses, but I'm looking to change my lifestyle and settle down." But only say the latter if you really mean it, since lying will kill your consulting possibilities long-term as word gets around.
The thing about I.T. is, with a few exceptions it's all project-based. All projects end and most of them finish inside 12 months. Plus, the industry itself is quite turbulent. So whereas a 5-month stint in, say, insurance or finance makes you look fickle or suspect, it's perfectly reasonable and expected in I.T.
But at the end of the day, the real answer as to whether the job-hunting is truly fickle or intentional comes down to how you want to live. If you want something stable, then you are being fickle by hopping jobs. If you'd rather 'do it for the adventure' by consulting, then you're being deliberate and reasonable. Yet, as a previous poster said, make sure that whatever you do you're not leaving anyone in the lurch. If you do short stints, leave after completing the project or a significant milestone, not in the middle.
This reminds me of the story about how Mao woke up one day in Beijing and decided he didn't like birds. So he commanded the comrades to go outside and beat pots and pans to scare all the birds into flying around and around until they died of exhaustion and dropped out of the sky. Bird problem solved. Then the insect population exploded because there were no longer any birds to eat them. Rather than recognize that the birds had performed an important role, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided that the reason there were so many insects was that there was too much grass around collecting moisture and providing the insects a place to breed. So they tore up all the grass. They suddenly found themselves experiencing tremendous dust storms, because there was no more grass to fix the topsoil. And the insects still didn't abate all that much. So rather than bring back the grass and the birds, they decided to soak down every possible surface in the capital with great quantities of DDT sprayed once a week from giant blue tanker trucks. Now today's Beijinger suffers from exceptionally poor air quality from all the dust and DDT (and various other things related to CCP policies) and even non-smokers cough up coffee-colored chunks. The happy end to the story, however, is that the CCP wrapped the whole thing in a cover story about how the air problems are really Russia's fault, since the the jetstream goes West to East. Problem explained, if not solved.
So rather than change the behaviours that are screwing up the climate, let's engineer a series of quixotic and costly solutions like painting everything white and wrap the whole thing up by blaming everything on the guys living upwind.
This is absolutely true. We switched all our lights to compact fluorescents and our electricity bill dropped 40%. I'm giving them to my family as stocking stuffers this year.
The last company I worked at decided it wanted to pay people in "GoJos," which stood for "Good Job." They were essentially big blue marbles they would dole out as a pat on the head whenever you kissed ass well enough. They even gave us Crown Royal bags to hold them all. After 200 GoJos you could redeemed them for prizes like stereos and plasma screen TVs.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and a great many of the other founding fathers were Masons. They were quite devout in their faith, but the practice they saw work in Masonic lodges they felt was a fine model for the United States, and that's what they did. That is, when you enter a Masonic lodge, you check your religion and politics at the door. You can be thrown out for talking about religion or politics in lodge.
I've seen it work myself. In my lodge in New York there are Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Druze, Lebanese, Syrians, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and even Protestants. There are any number of combinations in that mix that would have good historical reason to be at each other's throats. But they're not, and get along really quite well. Even right after 9/11, I was sure the next lodge meeting was going to be weird between the muslims and everyone else, but everyone was equally in shock about what happened and we realized we were just brothers who were all suffering.
It's a great thing, and a rare thing, and has been an island of sanity for me amidst all the insanity the last few years.
I entered my income in one of those world income calculators and it said I'm in the top.4% of the world. So how come I still can't afford to buy even an apartment in New York?!
I have a different question: if this solar cell was developed with funding from the Department of Energy, does that mean that the technology will be open and available to all to implement? Or is this another one of those schemes where the public pays Company X through the nose to develop a technology, and then pays through the nose to license its own technology back from Company X (Boeing, in this case)?
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I'm quite proud of my home state for rebelling on this. Washington D.C. is lost to the American people as an instrument for sensible government. The state houses are the only avenue left to us if simply by virtue of being within a day's drive, and of our legislators as being mostly people with day jobs who aren't trapped in a beltway bubble.
I once turned the tide for a crucial state reform bill by grabbing four friends and handing out flyers for 3 hours in front of supermarkets in certain legislators' districts. Inside of two days their offices received calls from ~150 constituents demanding to know why they weren't going to require members of the state legislature to show up for work. They usually get 5 calls on any issue, so they were taken aback and promptly decided to support the bill.
You can't do that with Senators and members of the House of Representatives. They don't give a crap what you and I think, unless we can threaten/promise 1000's of $$$/votes.
Thinking of the children...I live in New York and I'd far prefer kids and teens spending their free time indoors playing a violent video game like GTA than hanging out outside spraying graffiti, destroying property, or any of the much worse things they get into when they are bored and have time on their hands.
Sure, there are some kids who'll go pick up a DIY radio kit, code, or play basketball in their free time. But judging from the kids on my block in Brooklyn there are plenty who are not adept enough or self-motivated enough to do those things, but quite capable of doing harm if not directed or distracted.
I would say that that's more likely a suburban phenomenon. In an urban setting you probably live in an apartment building or in a rowhouse and it's practically impossible to eventually meet your neighbors. Close proximity denotes some degree of familiarity.
In the suburbs, however, there is less chance to meet the people in the house next door. There might not even be a sidewalk connecting you. You're expected to get in your car at point A and go directly to mall at point B. There is not much opportunity to randomly interact with your neighbors.
than even Kuviasungnerk (the winter festival that involves getting up before dawn to do calisthenics by the lakeshore in the snow). U of Chicago invents these weird activities for students to have "fun" while obliterating student-created traditions like SleepOut (camping out on the main quad to register for classes) or the Lascivious Ball (students and professors dressing in lingerie and attending a gothic ball). Thus, no one attends them.
U of C students have variously dubbed the university as the place where "fun goes to die" or where "hell DOES freeze over." In the 90's a national ranking of party schools placed it dead last, below even West Point, the Naval Academy, and Brigham Young University. All of this is deserved, since aside from killing student traditions as soon as they rear their heads, they also have never thought to build a student center or to allow the EL stops that reach campus to operate so that Hyde Park residents might be able to escape the neighborhood once in a while.
In short, the Scavenger Hunt is not worth valorizing, nor the institution that holds it. Friends don't let friends have anything to do with the University of Chicago.
He's a man who actually uses his public office to fight for the average citizen. Like the parent poster said, he took on the biggest financial and insurance firms in NY AND kicked Microsoft's butt for monopolistic behavior--Anyone who is known as "the most feared man on Wall Street" is both really intelligent (you would have to be) and has big brass balls the size of Toledo.
Unlike the Bush administration or virtually anyone else holding public office in America that I can think of, he's exactly the kind of person you want and that every Slashdotter grouses every day of the week that they wish they could find to lead the country instead of schmuck X.
So he wants to pass this law. *Shrug* I'm an adult and I don't care. It might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. It's really not that important in the big scale of things. Getting health care for New Yorkers IS important. Cracking down on the very, very corrupt big business assholes who like to play masters of the universe with everyone else's lives IS important. Reforming the state's educational system so that its graduates might actually be able to read IS important. Passing environmental laws that kick-start an alternative energy future for the entire country and world IS important. And Eliot's doing these things. In my book, that makes him way on balance someone who is not an ass.
now living in Brooklyn, this makes me proud. I hope that other states follow Montana's lead and flip D.C. the bird on this one. C'mon, New Hampshire, you know you want to. "Live Free or Die" and all that.
It's interesting, isn't it, that a general rebellion against federal overreach seems to be brewing. In 2006 a number of states across the West passed medical marijuana laws only to have Bush claim they couldn't do that. Yes, a guy from the "state's rights" party claiming that states don't have the authority to regulate that which the Constitution clearly says they do.
Then you have the various states and municipalities across the country now passing pollution laws that are stricter than federal regulations because "someone has to do something about climate change."
Wonder if the un-funded mandate of No Child Left Behind has added any fuel to the fire...
In any case, I sincerely hope the states do get together and whack D.C. on the nose. The centralization of power in this country is out of control and anti-thetical to effective representative government.
should germany be banned from the EU for banning swastikas and nazi propaganda? that's essentially what this law in turkey is about--preventing more extremist elements from gaining sway. yes, it's not the strict interpretation of free speech we think of here in america, but america's not exactly a bastion of that sort of free speech nowadays anyway, what with 'free speech zones' and other offenses.
so in sum it seems less like people are really objecting less to the offense to the ideal of absolute free speech than they are using it as a cloak to practice bigotry against people of another ethnicity and religion.
the turks are a wonderful, kind, gentle people who are more modern and developed than many of the countries already in the EU. keeping them out is thinly veiled bigotry and what's more, folly.
I figured out it was more fun to learn how to play music myself. Longer warm up time, shorter playlist, and more limited portability (guitar doesn't really travel well in the subway). But the enjoyment is about fifty times higher for picking out 'House of the Rising Sun' than listening to recycled boy band song #19.
Eventually I hope to learn to read music and write my own. And that too will take a while. But I'd rather take the next four years to get to a tolerable level of ability and enjoy every bit of it than give one more dime to an industry and system that thinks it has a monopoly on culture and that it has the right the dictate to you and me what we enjoy.
Or at least the landmarks are. The Cyclone is spot-on. Mapping the virtual streets to NYC's actual layout would be even cooler. Let's hope. It would be awesome to scream down my street in Brooklyn in a ferrari.
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth out there about the poor quality of our political leadership and the lack of good candidates who will stand up and fix what's wrong. But a timid people will never produce strong, moral leaders. It's axiomatic. If we want things to change in this country, we're just going to have to do it ourselves. We have to be strong if we expect our country to be strong. Corrupt political leaders will never bring themselves to justice--we have to do it. The police will never arrest themselves for violating the law, so we as citizens must arrest them. That's the ultimate guarantor of democracy, folks, us.
Can't speak for folks in other parts of the country, but Montanans still remember what it means to be free. They will correct this and those who think they can simply overrule a democratic vote.
This would be the time to declare independence. Seems Whitehall and Parliament DO need to be kicked in the teeth once every 200 years.
Your English is fine.
The Ottoman Empire had a pretty brutal reputation, but modern Turkey seems to have little in common with that legacy. So people in America and Europe should cut Turkey a break. It's a great country.
It should acknowledge what it did to the Armenians. It was a crime. But acknowledging it is not a sign of weakness but rather of strength of character and sincere atonement. It's the right thing to do.
Also, Turkey should drop the anti-Turkishness law, because it's beneath them. Turks are better than that. It just seems to reflect a fragile ego.
Will that ever be enough to appease Americans and Europeans? It's tough to say. Anti-muslim bigotry will probably always be an obstacle to widespread rapprochement.
Turks are the some of the kindest, gentlest people on earth. Their country is at least as advanced as the median European country and more advanced than many. Lumping them together with "dangerous, repressive muslim states" like Libya or Syria makes as little sense as that recent smear campaign against the United Arab Emirates. In fact, Turkey is about as muslim as France is Catholic. That is to say, not much. The EU's rejecting their bid for membership was a mistake.
It is true that their anti-Turkishness law is silly and their refusal to own up to the Armenian genocide is shameful. But Japan absolutely refuses to own up to its wartime attrocities, and most people in the West seem to have no problem interacting with them. Likewise, no one in the United States seems to recall its occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in which it killed 600,000 Filippinos. And when the United States requires loyalty oaths and engages in warantless wire-tapping of its citizens, practices torture, and scraps habeus corpus then it's hard to argue that it enjoys any moral superiority.
Should Turkey repeal its anti-Turkishness law and acknowledge the Armenian genocide? Absolutely. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because they're a PR albatross that obscure the many great things about their country. But let's keep a little perspective. All of us need to do a much better job of defending freedom and human rights. As the saying goes, 'first remove the beam from your own eye.'
Ever since I read Shadow of the Torturer I've wanted something that's fuligin.
CompUSA is the most irritating, useless waste of space. Surly, clueless employees, rebates that are never honored, over-priced crap, utter ignorance on basically every level. You're always going to run into good and bad employees everywhere, but when every time you go someplace it's always consistently bad you know it's not just you and it's not just chance, but systemic.
The location in Manhattan in 57th and Broadway is a perfect example. All the businesses and corporations in the world within 5 blocks' walk and yet the place is always empty. You ask an employee an incredibly simple question like, "where are your flash drives?" and the answer you get is a surly, "what's a flash drive?"
Contrast that with the Apple store in SoHo, which is crawling with people every second of the day they're open. After many years of dealing with CompUSA for PC parts I went to the Apple store to check into buying an iBook for my girlfriend running the spiffy new OSX OS (yes, a few years ago). I dubiously asked a salesperson, a random salesperson, how to open a terminal to work on the command line. He did so and wrote a quicky little PERL one-liner to demonstrate that, yes, the kernel really was *NIX.
I nearly wept.
It's all how you cast the situation. If you tell your next prospective employer that you have been consulting, then the short spells at jobs is instantly explained. If they ask questions that make you think they're looking for someone more long-term, then you can either decide to move on or say something like, "Consulting has been fun and I've learned a great deal about many businesses, but I'm looking to change my lifestyle and settle down." But only say the latter if you really mean it, since lying will kill your consulting possibilities long-term as word gets around.
The thing about I.T. is, with a few exceptions it's all project-based. All projects end and most of them finish inside 12 months. Plus, the industry itself is quite turbulent. So whereas a 5-month stint in, say, insurance or finance makes you look fickle or suspect, it's perfectly reasonable and expected in I.T.
But at the end of the day, the real answer as to whether the job-hunting is truly fickle or intentional comes down to how you want to live. If you want something stable, then you are being fickle by hopping jobs. If you'd rather 'do it for the adventure' by consulting, then you're being deliberate and reasonable. Yet, as a previous poster said, make sure that whatever you do you're not leaving anyone in the lurch. If you do short stints, leave after completing the project or a significant milestone, not in the middle.
:-) "gens," pas "jens," et "connaissez," pas "connaiez."
--nazi grammatique
This reminds me of the story about how Mao woke up one day in Beijing and decided he didn't like birds. So he commanded the comrades to go outside and beat pots and pans to scare all the birds into flying around and around until they died of exhaustion and dropped out of the sky. Bird problem solved. Then the insect population exploded because there were no longer any birds to eat them. Rather than recognize that the birds had performed an important role, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided that the reason there were so many insects was that there was too much grass around collecting moisture and providing the insects a place to breed. So they tore up all the grass. They suddenly found themselves experiencing tremendous dust storms, because there was no more grass to fix the topsoil. And the insects still didn't abate all that much. So rather than bring back the grass and the birds, they decided to soak down every possible surface in the capital with great quantities of DDT sprayed once a week from giant blue tanker trucks. Now today's Beijinger suffers from exceptionally poor air quality from all the dust and DDT (and various other things related to CCP policies) and even non-smokers cough up coffee-colored chunks. The happy end to the story, however, is that the CCP wrapped the whole thing in a cover story about how the air problems are really Russia's fault, since the the jetstream goes West to East. Problem explained, if not solved.
So rather than change the behaviours that are screwing up the climate, let's engineer a series of quixotic and costly solutions like painting everything white and wrap the whole thing up by blaming everything on the guys living upwind.
This is absolutely true. We switched all our lights to compact fluorescents and our electricity bill dropped 40%. I'm giving them to my family as stocking stuffers this year.
The last company I worked at decided it wanted to pay people in "GoJos," which stood for "Good Job." They were essentially big blue marbles they would dole out as a pat on the head whenever you kissed ass well enough. They even gave us Crown Royal bags to hold them all. After 200 GoJos you could redeemed them for prizes like stereos and plasma screen TVs.
This was in lieu of paychecks.
I was out of there by nightfall.
Whenever I hear the phrase, "Wisdom of Crowds," I think of lemmings.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and a great many of the other founding fathers were Masons. They were quite devout in their faith, but the practice they saw work in Masonic lodges they felt was a fine model for the United States, and that's what they did. That is, when you enter a Masonic lodge, you check your religion and politics at the door. You can be thrown out for talking about religion or politics in lodge.
I've seen it work myself. In my lodge in New York there are Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Druze, Lebanese, Syrians, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and even Protestants. There are any number of combinations in that mix that would have good historical reason to be at each other's throats. But they're not, and get along really quite well. Even right after 9/11, I was sure the next lodge meeting was going to be weird between the muslims and everyone else, but everyone was equally in shock about what happened and we realized we were just brothers who were all suffering.
It's a great thing, and a rare thing, and has been an island of sanity for me amidst all the insanity the last few years.
Once decoded, it will say, "We apologize for the inconvenience."
I entered my income in one of those world income calculators and it said I'm in the top .4% of the world. So how come I still can't afford to buy even an apartment in New York?!
I have a different question: if this solar cell was developed with funding from the Department of Energy, does that mean that the technology will be open and available to all to implement? Or is this another one of those schemes where the public pays Company X through the nose to develop a technology, and then pays through the nose to license its own technology back from Company X (Boeing, in this case)?