I wonder how soon it will be that we start seeing offers like this brought up in "Your Rights Online" because some company claims that since they "gave" you a piece of hardware for free that they still "own" it and that you can only use it in ways that they approve of, a la UCITA or EULAs.
Well I got over 650,000 points on Megamania! Emulated at full speed using Stella for 32-bit Windows on a 750 MHz Athlon system. See if you can beat that!
Now, if only I can find that screen shot, I'll put it online...
How do you sneak up behind him? Well, it takes a bit of a trek... but if you got through the whole game you'd find the way just before the end of the game.
I always thought that Pitfall II was way too repetitive, although it did have some cool concepts, like the balloon ride.
So then are you regularly protesting your local library and schools about them not providing copies of 'Giant Jugs' and 'Bomb Making for Dummies'?
This isn't a valid comparison. Libraries have to spend money in order to add to their collection, and have to deal with issues like storage and shelf-space. They make decisions to buy stuff that the public wants, mitigated by their budgetary and physical space storage limitations, and yes, at times obscenity as defined by "community values".
If I am able to find a library affiliated with my local public library that has porn or bomb-making instructions in its collection, and I try to do an inter-library loan to borrow those materials, my library should not bar the transaction from taking place, and in fact has an obligation to make sure that it happens. The traditional excuses that keep porn, etc. off of most library shelves do not apply to the internet; the reasons why porn isn't available at most libraries on the shelf is different from why it should/shouldn't be blocked online.
Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits.
Katz, kids definitely have not stopped bragging about their sexual exploits. And I'm not even talking about beating Leisure Suit Larry, either. The implication that video games somehow became the be-all, end-all of life for Gen-Y and geekier Gen-X-ers is simply erroneous.
When I was a kid, I:
Played video games
Had a paper route
Playes softball
Rode my bike
Ran track and cross country in school
Read a lot, especially science fiction and choose your own adventure books
Playe pencil-and-paper RPGs
Watched TV and movies
Played with legos
Ok, so sexual exploits weren't on the list, but the point still stands that there was more to life than the NES and Atari 2600.
Everyone who knows what they're talking about says that you can't block/filter "offensive" content (ie violence, sex, sedition). Why are ads so much easier to categorize and filter against?
I'm for blocking ads, if the user doesn't want to view them, he has a right to try to block them. I'm against censorship imposed upon a user by someone else, but not against someone voluntarily filtering "offensive" (to them) material. But what makes one so easy to identify and the others so tricky that most attempts (Surfwatch, Net Nanny, etc.) have such awful error rates?
I've also never really understood this "wasted bandwidth" issue. I remember about text-worshippers complaining about "those wasteful images on the WWW" when the first graphical browsers came out. Hogwash, bandwidth "waste" leads to buildout of networks with higher capacities and lower cost of bandwidth transport.
I believe you're making a category error. The "text-worshippers" were making a claim about images taking up too much bandwidth in an era of extremely slow connectivity. They were not saying that pictures were undsirable, or that they would never willingly look at a picture. It was just that they could not reconcile waiting 5-10 minutes for a 100k.gif or.jpg to download. Once faster bandwidth became widely available the text-worshippers all but disappeared.
The anti-advertising crowd considers ads that slow them down from achieving their end-purpose of using the internet as wasteful, because it forces them to waste time doing something that they don't want and never will want to do in order to achieve something that they do want to do. This sort of waste will always be waste no matter how fast a network connection you have, and no matter how cheap bandwidth is. Your own personal time is, if nothing else in the equation is, money. And you should feel indignant when it is intruded upon by advertisers who refuse to respect your desire to be left alone.
If the end-user is *paying* for bandwidth, one could argue that the folks responsible for sending the unwanted stuff are liable to pay for the download time taken up by their junk. Didn't AOL lose a class-action suit over this very issue?
I may not click on a banner ad but I do notice them.
Click-thru should not be the only measure of success for this form of advertising. It would be as though TV advertisers only considered television ads to be a success if someone watched the commercial, then dropped whatever they were doing, got in their car, went to the store, and bought the product that was advertised. Almost no one who watches TV behaves in this manner. Except possibly the demographic targeted by saturday morning cartoons.
In fact, who really goes out and buys stuff just based on advertising alone? Don't most people shop around, compare prices, do a little research?
Perhaps if banner ads were linked to websites that contained valuable information, instead of some bandwidth-sucking Flash presentation, and some vapid, obviously anti-informative ad copy designed to garner brainless enthusiasm for the product, rather than a rational analysis of the product's benefits and drawbacks, people would start clicking on them.
You're lucky that consumers by and large tolerate banner ads as they are. Popup windows and redirects will only serve to alienate people and cause them to stop visiting sites that advertise in that manner. Once word gets out that the well is poisoned, people stop going there to drink. It's that simple.
One thing's for certain, I will definitely boycott any product that is advertised by highjacking my browser window and paid-for bandwidth!! It is nothing less than the web equivalent of spamming.
Doesn't "peaked" imply that from here on it's downhill? I seriously doubt that will be the case. Shouldn't we really be debating about whether or not things are/are about to level off?
There are various, benefitial, reasons why a market-decided wage is appropriate. If I am fresh outa high school, unskilled, living with parents or roomates, I would gladly take a salary exponentially less than what would support a family of four so that I could learn skills and make a living for just myself while working my way up the organization.
Great, now the guy with the family of four and same set of skills is competing against your salary needs. This is already happening of course; people find themselves downsized in middle age, and end up getting none of their retirement benefits. It's another brilliant way for the corporation to save some money -- fire the expensive older workers and hire some hungry younger workers who will work hard for less pay.
See, no matter what happens, someone exploits someone else, someone gets screwed, someone starves. We need to stop sayin "that's life" about it.
What's needed is a rethinking of economics in which it's possible for everyone to win.
The first step for that would seem to be stabilizing world population, and then reducing it to levels that can enjoy a high standard of living without throwing the environment permanently out of whack.
Personally, I can't wait till they invent robots that can do all work better than any human, thereby putting everyone out of work and back on the same level. It'll be interesting to see: will they be our slaves, and we get to live in luxury? Or will we be their pets, and eventually made extinct? The average person living in society is already pretty domesticated...
Re:Knowledge of Why One is Where One Is
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 1
according to Robert Pirsig - to think Socratically and logically (to categorize things according to Aristotelian logic, if I remember correctly) because the Socratics won the day, philosophically, over the Sophists, and from that day forward, virtually the fiber and wiring of our brain was forever conditioned toward viewing the world Socratically rather than like a Sophist.
Sophist philosophy is alive and well, and always has been. Witness 99.999% of all political rhetoric.
Socrates killed nothing, save himself with poison hemlock at the decree of the Athenian council. His way of philosophy lives on too, but it's probably *still* a minority viewpoint even after all these centuries and millenia. Witness the near-ubiquity of people (stupidly or otherwise) making claims of having knowledge; Socrates claimed to know nothing.
Even when one thing is demonstrably superior to another thing that does not mean that the first thing "wins" or "kills off" the second. Quite frequently the two things co-exist, often for a very long time.
It is well known that you can simulate a turing machine with the game of life. We learned about this in Computer Science class several years ago.
Correction: It is well known that it was theoretically possible to simulate a Turing Machine in the Life universe. A Turing Machine had never been fully implemented before, but various Life patterns had been discovered or engineered which could carry out the functions of various components of a Turing Machine. But the entire thing had never been put together, it being a monstrously complex and unbelievably huge pattern.
Since a turing machine can be implemented in Life, this means Life is equivalent to a turing machine. Since Life is simpler than a TM, doesn't this actually mean Life should be used as the base model of computation, rather than a TM?
And since both of *those* are implemented in the laws of physics, then shouldn't physics be used as the base model of computation?
No.
Why? Because the model of computation that we already have has more power to explain computation. Just because you can build a computer out of Life patterns does not mean that those patterns are inherently computational. You could build a computer out of Legos if you wanted to, or photons, or anything else. You could argue that the "most simple" material used to construct your computer was the "most basic" and therefore "most true" model for a computer. But that would not give you any more insight into what a computer is.
What does give you this insight is not the knowledge of what the computer is made out of, but how the components function and work together to do the computing process. The "count-the-neighbors, add births, remove deaths" rules for life give none of this information.
That a Turing Machine can be implemented in Life is very interesting, but it must be understood that Turing Machines in Life universes are engineered objects, and that this engineering requires quite a bit of additional knowledge than the simple rules for the Life universe.
errr... think about what you said in term of the white blood cells... I'm just asking that we make these nano's the same as the white blood cells...with metal shields...try to attack that HIV!
Even white blood cells need to be able to communicate somehow, in order to know where to collect to fight off an infection and what types of cells register as "foreign, benign; ignore", "foreign, hostile, kill on sight", or "host, ignore". Not being a biologist I don't know how this information gets communicated, but I imagine it's through chemical signals relayed from cell to cell, or something like that. Anything that doesn't have the proper authentication to be in your body sets the nearby white blood cells' off, and they go into "rejection mode", and then somehow after not too long that area of the body has a concentrated population of WBCs fighting the inauthenticated foreign stuff.
If we build the equivalent of white blood cells with nanotech, it would be most useful to be able to communicate with them remotely, in order to shut them off if they start misbehaving, or to coordinate their activities more effectively. If we could do that with our current white blood cells, we'd be able to do things like fight cancer and HIV infections (which fool the WBCs into leaving them alone when they are in fact pathogenic) with greatly increased effectiveness.
Have a few millions of these programmed to eat virus...say the AIDS virus. No more diseases
Yeah, just trillions and trillions of nanomachines, all demanding protection money, and threatening to rearrange your mitochondria if you don't pay up:)
Seriously, you can't just unilaterally wipe out all organisms that wipe out disease. If you did that:
The cure would be an organism/nanomachine that is in all probability worse than the diseases it wiped out.
Life as we know it on this planet would end because life as we know it on this planet depends upon microecologies being exactly as they are.
What would be cool would be some sort of "police" nanomachines (rather than "hunter/killers").
These "police" nanomachines wouldn't indiscriminantly destroy everything that they came into contact with, but would identify potentially harmful concentrations of human/animal/whatever pathogens and take action to neutralize them if and only if there was a real need to do so.
In order to do this, the nanomachines would have to be in contact with some sort of super-AI capable of analyzing the extremely complex and chaotic situation within a given microecology and making "shoot or don't shoot" decisions, and conveying those instructions back to the nanomachines.
It's a pretty tall order... but feasible if we can lick the problem of establishing a wireless nano-network capable of handling the data load these machines would require.
The way I see, I can pay Corel $700 every couple of years for the next significant version upgrade, or I can pay $100 every year for continuous, incremental improvement.
Thanks, I'll choose the $100 route.
I'd take this deal too, but I demand the option to not pay for a renewal but still use whatever current version of the software that I had, indefinitely. Without that, I'm forced to buy upgrades forever, even if the current version meets all of my needs perfectly well.
That's lame.
Especially if their next upgrade is so bloated that I have to buy a new box to run it on -- I might as well keep the old version running on the old box if I have to do that --
-- or --
-- the new version is so bug-riddled upon initial release that I have to wait a good six months or so for them to patch everything and make it reasonably stable.
I prefer to stay a few months behind the curve and buy consumer-tested, patched software, often at less than the premium cost they charge you for just-released software, and remain productive with slightly outdated but perfectly serviceable versions of the same program. With this subscription service, will I still have the option to upgrade to a new version when I want to?
Bottom line: I want software to run as-is on my computer for the projected lifespan of the hardware components.
The container is advertising. Although sometimes the packaging is so nice people keep it, you are buying the music.
Some may look at the external packaging as advertising, but it is also art, just as the music itself is art. I don't see how any of the internal pictures, lyric sheets, etc. could be construed as advertising, since you can't even see them until after you've purchased and opened the packaging.
Conversely, the music itself is advertising, when it is played for free on the radio. A single played on the air serves as an advertisement for listeners to buy the single or the album it came from.
I point this out to show that whether something is art or advertising is dependent upon the context of the situation, and the two are not mutually exclusive qualities, just as a ball may be both round and red at the same time.
Please, we don't need.kids domains so that big corporations like Disney can further masquerade the thinly veiled commercial brainwashing, merchandising and exploitation foist upon kids today. These categorization TLDs are rightly rejected.
Since when has it been ICANN's responsibility to police this? As much as I don't like the blatant commercial exploitation of children, companies such as Disney have a right to a web presence. And it's not like witholding a.kids TLD prevents them from existing.
Face it, we already have.edu,.gov,.mil, all of which ostensibly sort content by either topic or by "author type" (for lack of a better word) or sponsorship. These sort of distinctions make more sense than the geographical TLD names (ie, the.?? country codes).
If we followed the nearest equivalents, atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, we would write E-mail like A-bomb. Or T-shirt, which isn't an abbreviation, and must be written with a capital, because they don't look like a lower-case 't'.
Actually, it's tee shirt. You only write T-shirt or Tshirt or whatever if you're lazy, abbreviating, or writing shorthand.
If you want to live under the delusion that English grammar has a consistent logical structure, you can go ahead and make arguments for e'mail, as some poster suggested. I kindof (oops, not a real word) like the way "e'mail" looks, but I know that it ain't (oops, not a real word) gonna (ditto [um, ditto again]) happen.
In reality though, natural languages don't have hard and fast rules, and they evolve according to how they are used by their speakers. Both email and e-mail have been in usage and ought to both be recognized as legitimate. I think e-mail "looks" better from a typographic standpoint, but I have a personal bias against typing hyphens when I don't absolutely have to, so I generally prefer to use email when I'm writing because it's faster and easier.
Some/. (is this the correct spelling for "slashdot"?) user has a quote attributed to Andrew Jackson that it's a "damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word". Or something like that. I like that quote.
It's your language; there's no click-wrap agreement saying that you have to agree to use it a certain way or that you can't modify it as you wish. Hack your language! Master your language; don't let your language master you.
There's a really good book by a gentleman named John McWhorter entitled The Word On The Street which anyone who cares a whit about language they speak ought to read.
P.S. Obviously, kindof, ain't, gonna, and ditto are real words, despite what any grammarian prescriptivist would like people to think.
make a game map of my old middle school. I even went so far as to try to dig up the blueprints for the building in the city records.
This wasn't because of any latent desire to blow up my school or go on a shooting spree there, it's just that the layout of the hallways and staircases and rooms and closets and such would have made for some great tactical possibilities. Really, I swear officer!
This was all before shooting up your real school became popular though...
...is a voting model by which one could choose to either vote affirmatively FOR someone, OR to vote negatively AGAINST someone. And the rules would state that the winning candidate must have a positive total (more for votes than against votes). Each voter would still get only one vote. And the winner would be the candidate with the highest number of positive votes AFTER subtracting the negative votes.
Slashdot Mirror
Here it is! ( http://guppy_28.tripod.com/jpegs/megamania612880.g if )
I wonder how soon it will be that we start seeing offers like this brought up in "Your Rights Online" because some company claims that since they "gave" you a piece of hardware for free that they still "own" it and that you can only use it in ways that they approve of, a la UCITA or EULAs.
Well I got over 650,000 points on Megamania! Emulated at full speed using Stella for 32-bit Windows on a 750 MHz Athlon system. See if you can beat that!
Now, if only I can find that screen shot, I'll put it online...
That's skill baby!
Very simple. Sneak up behind him.
How do you sneak up behind him? Well, it takes a bit of a trek... but if you got through the whole game you'd find the way just before the end of the game.
I always thought that Pitfall II was way too repetitive, although it did have some cool concepts, like the balloon ride.
This isn't a valid comparison. Libraries have to spend money in order to add to their collection, and have to deal with issues like storage and shelf-space. They make decisions to buy stuff that the public wants, mitigated by their budgetary and physical space storage limitations, and yes, at times obscenity as defined by "community values".
If I am able to find a library affiliated with my local public library that has porn or bomb-making instructions in its collection, and I try to do an inter-library loan to borrow those materials, my library should not bar the transaction from taking place, and in fact has an obligation to make sure that it happens. The traditional excuses that keep porn, etc. off of most library shelves do not apply to the internet; the reasons why porn isn't available at most libraries on the shelf is different from why it should/shouldn't be blocked online.
Katz, kids definitely have not stopped bragging about their sexual exploits. And I'm not even talking about beating Leisure Suit Larry, either. The implication that video games somehow became the be-all, end-all of life for Gen-Y and geekier Gen-X-ers is simply erroneous.
Ok, so sexual exploits weren't on the list, but the point still stands that there was more to life than the NES and Atari 2600.
Um... go back and read The Hobbitt again. It says Gandalf the Grey.
Thank you.
Here's something I don't get...
Everyone who knows what they're talking about says that you can't block/filter "offensive" content (ie violence, sex, sedition). Why are ads so much easier to categorize and filter against?
I'm for blocking ads, if the user doesn't want to view them, he has a right to try to block them. I'm against censorship imposed upon a user by someone else, but not against someone voluntarily filtering "offensive" (to them) material. But what makes one so easy to identify and the others so tricky that most attempts (Surfwatch, Net Nanny, etc.) have such awful error rates?
I believe you're making a category error. The "text-worshippers" were making a claim about images taking up too much bandwidth in an era of extremely slow connectivity. They were not saying that pictures were undsirable, or that they would never willingly look at a picture. It was just that they could not reconcile waiting 5-10 minutes for a 100k .gif or .jpg to download. Once faster bandwidth became widely available the text-worshippers all but disappeared.
The anti-advertising crowd considers ads that slow them down from achieving their end-purpose of using the internet as wasteful, because it forces them to waste time doing something that they don't want and never will want to do in order to achieve something that they do want to do. This sort of waste will always be waste no matter how fast a network connection you have, and no matter how cheap bandwidth is. Your own personal time is, if nothing else in the equation is, money. And you should feel indignant when it is intruded upon by advertisers who refuse to respect your desire to be left alone.
If the end-user is *paying* for bandwidth, one could argue that the folks responsible for sending the unwanted stuff are liable to pay for the download time taken up by their junk. Didn't AOL lose a class-action suit over this very issue?
Hey, advertisers, wake up!
I may not click on a banner ad but I do notice them.
Click-thru should not be the only measure of success for this form of advertising. It would be as though TV advertisers only considered television ads to be a success if someone watched the commercial, then dropped whatever they were doing, got in their car, went to the store, and bought the product that was advertised. Almost no one who watches TV behaves in this manner. Except possibly the demographic targeted by saturday morning cartoons.
In fact, who really goes out and buys stuff just based on advertising alone? Don't most people shop around, compare prices, do a little research?
Perhaps if banner ads were linked to websites that contained valuable information, instead of some bandwidth-sucking Flash presentation, and some vapid, obviously anti-informative ad copy designed to garner brainless enthusiasm for the product, rather than a rational analysis of the product's benefits and drawbacks, people would start clicking on them.
You're lucky that consumers by and large tolerate banner ads as they are. Popup windows and redirects will only serve to alienate people and cause them to stop visiting sites that advertise in that manner. Once word gets out that the well is poisoned, people stop going there to drink. It's that simple.
One thing's for certain, I will definitely boycott any product that is advertised by highjacking my browser window and paid-for bandwidth!! It is nothing less than the web equivalent of spamming.
Doesn't "peaked" imply that from here on it's downhill? I seriously doubt that will be the case. Shouldn't we really be debating about whether or not things are/are about to level off?
Great, now the guy with the family of four and same set of skills is competing against your salary needs. This is already happening of course; people find themselves downsized in middle age, and end up getting none of their retirement benefits. It's another brilliant way for the corporation to save some money -- fire the expensive older workers and hire some hungry younger workers who will work hard for less pay.
See, no matter what happens, someone exploits someone else, someone gets screwed, someone starves. We need to stop sayin "that's life" about it.
What's needed is a rethinking of economics in which it's possible for everyone to win.
The first step for that would seem to be stabilizing world population, and then reducing it to levels that can enjoy a high standard of living without throwing the environment permanently out of whack.
Personally, I can't wait till they invent robots that can do all work better than any human, thereby putting everyone out of work and back on the same level. It'll be interesting to see: will they be our slaves, and we get to live in luxury? Or will we be their pets, and eventually made extinct? The average person living in society is already pretty domesticated...
Sophist philosophy is alive and well, and always has been. Witness 99.999% of all political rhetoric.
Socrates killed nothing, save himself with poison hemlock at the decree of the Athenian council. His way of philosophy lives on too, but it's probably *still* a minority viewpoint even after all these centuries and millenia. Witness the near-ubiquity of people (stupidly or otherwise) making claims of having knowledge; Socrates claimed to know nothing.
Even when one thing is demonstrably superior to another thing that does not mean that the first thing "wins" or "kills off" the second. Quite frequently the two things co-exist, often for a very long time.
Waitaminute... I thought Arnold Schwartzeneggar's Clone was supposed to look like Danny DeVito? It was in a movie; It's been scientifically proven!!!
Does this mean that "The Wizard" (starring Fred Savage) is the defining movie of our generation? I hope not...
Correction: It is well known that it was theoretically possible to simulate a Turing Machine in the Life universe. A Turing Machine had never been fully implemented before, but various Life patterns had been discovered or engineered which could carry out the functions of various components of a Turing Machine. But the entire thing had never been put together, it being a monstrously complex and unbelievably huge pattern.
And since both of *those* are implemented in the laws of physics, then shouldn't physics be used as the base model of computation?
No.
Why? Because the model of computation that we already have has more power to explain computation. Just because you can build a computer out of Life patterns does not mean that those patterns are inherently computational. You could build a computer out of Legos if you wanted to, or photons, or anything else. You could argue that the "most simple" material used to construct your computer was the "most basic" and therefore "most true" model for a computer. But that would not give you any more insight into what a computer is.
What does give you this insight is not the knowledge of what the computer is made out of, but how the components function and work together to do the computing process. The "count-the-neighbors, add births, remove deaths" rules for life give none of this information.
That a Turing Machine can be implemented in Life is very interesting, but it must be understood that Turing Machines in Life universes are engineered objects, and that this engineering requires quite a bit of additional knowledge than the simple rules for the Life universe.
Even white blood cells need to be able to communicate somehow, in order to know where to collect to fight off an infection and what types of cells register as "foreign, benign; ignore", "foreign, hostile, kill on sight", or "host, ignore". Not being a biologist I don't know how this information gets communicated, but I imagine it's through chemical signals relayed from cell to cell, or something like that. Anything that doesn't have the proper authentication to be in your body sets the nearby white blood cells' off, and they go into "rejection mode", and then somehow after not too long that area of the body has a concentrated population of WBCs fighting the inauthenticated foreign stuff.
If we build the equivalent of white blood cells with nanotech, it would be most useful to be able to communicate with them remotely, in order to shut them off if they start misbehaving, or to coordinate their activities more effectively. If we could do that with our current white blood cells, we'd be able to do things like fight cancer and HIV infections (which fool the WBCs into leaving them alone when they are in fact pathogenic) with greatly increased effectiveness.
Yeah, just trillions and trillions of nanomachines, all demanding protection money, and threatening to rearrange your mitochondria if you don't pay up :)
Seriously, you can't just unilaterally wipe out all organisms that wipe out disease. If you did that:
What would be cool would be some sort of "police" nanomachines (rather than "hunter/killers").
These "police" nanomachines wouldn't indiscriminantly destroy everything that they came into contact with, but would identify potentially harmful concentrations of human/animal/whatever pathogens and take action to neutralize them if and only if there was a real need to do so.
In order to do this, the nanomachines would have to be in contact with some sort of super-AI capable of analyzing the extremely complex and chaotic situation within a given microecology and making "shoot or don't shoot" decisions, and conveying those instructions back to the nanomachines.
It's a pretty tall order... but feasible if we can lick the problem of establishing a wireless nano-network capable of handling the data load these machines would require.
Bad germs, bad germs, whatchoo gonna do?
I'd take this deal too, but I demand the option to not pay for a renewal but still use whatever current version of the software that I had, indefinitely. Without that, I'm forced to buy upgrades forever, even if the current version meets all of my needs perfectly well.
That's lame.
Especially if their next upgrade is so bloated that I have to buy a new box to run it on -- I might as well keep the old version running on the old box if I have to do that --
-- or --
-- the new version is so bug-riddled upon initial release that I have to wait a good six months or so for them to patch everything and make it reasonably stable.
I prefer to stay a few months behind the curve and buy consumer-tested, patched software, often at less than the premium cost they charge you for just-released software, and remain productive with slightly outdated but perfectly serviceable versions of the same program. With this subscription service, will I still have the option to upgrade to a new version when I want to?
Bottom line: I want software to run as-is on my computer for the projected lifespan of the hardware components.
Some may look at the external packaging as advertising, but it is also art, just as the music itself is art. I don't see how any of the internal pictures, lyric sheets, etc. could be construed as advertising, since you can't even see them until after you've purchased and opened the packaging.
Conversely, the music itself is advertising, when it is played for free on the radio. A single played on the air serves as an advertisement for listeners to buy the single or the album it came from.
I point this out to show that whether something is art or advertising is dependent upon the context of the situation, and the two are not mutually exclusive qualities, just as a ball may be both round and red at the same time.
Since when has it been ICANN's responsibility to police this? As much as I don't like the blatant commercial exploitation of children, companies such as Disney have a right to a web presence. And it's not like witholding a .kids TLD prevents them from existing.
Face it, we already have .edu, .gov, .mil, all of which ostensibly sort content by either topic or by "author type" (for lack of a better word) or sponsorship. These sort of distinctions make more sense than the geographical TLD names (ie, the .?? country codes).
Actually, it's tee shirt. You only write T-shirt or Tshirt or whatever if you're lazy, abbreviating, or writing shorthand.
If you want to live under the delusion that English grammar has a consistent logical structure, you can go ahead and make arguments for e'mail, as some poster suggested. I kindof (oops, not a real word) like the way "e'mail" looks, but I know that it ain't (oops, not a real word) gonna (ditto [um, ditto again]) happen.
In reality though, natural languages don't have hard and fast rules, and they evolve according to how they are used by their speakers. Both email and e-mail have been in usage and ought to both be recognized as legitimate. I think e-mail "looks" better from a typographic standpoint, but I have a personal bias against typing hyphens when I don't absolutely have to, so I generally prefer to use email when I'm writing because it's faster and easier.
Some /. (is this the correct spelling for "slashdot"?) user has a quote attributed to Andrew Jackson that it's a "damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word". Or something like that. I like that quote.
It's your language; there's no click-wrap agreement saying that you have to agree to use it a certain way or that you can't modify it as you wish. Hack your language! Master your language; don't let your language master you.
There's a really good book by a gentleman named John McWhorter entitled The Word On The Street which anyone who cares a whit about language they speak ought to read.
P.S. Obviously, kindof, ain't, gonna, and ditto are real words, despite what any grammarian prescriptivist would like people to think.
make a game map of my old middle school. I even went so far as to try to dig up the blueprints for the building in the city records.
This wasn't because of any latent desire to blow up my school or go on a shooting spree there, it's just that the layout of the hallways and staircases and rooms and closets and such would have made for some great tactical possibilities. Really, I swear officer!
This was all before shooting up your real school became popular though...
...is a voting model by which one could choose to either vote affirmatively FOR someone, OR to vote negatively AGAINST someone. And the rules would state that the winning candidate must have a positive total (more for votes than against votes). Each voter would still get only one vote. And the winner would be the candidate with the highest number of positive votes AFTER subtracting the negative votes.