I think Knuth would agree that no work is ever perfect, and be satisfied with 9/10.
I once had a grad school prof who would never give perfect marks on assignments (we had weekly assignments in addition to papers and other work), for the same reason. He would even takes 1/4 marks off (out of 10) for spelling and typographical errors.
I once received an assignment back, marked 9-3/4 / 10. I hurried through the paper to find the error. Apparently there was a ribbon defect in the ribbon I used to print the final draft and an "r" had the hook of the letter broken in the middle. The red note beside it was "-1/4: did not proof read".
You can do the roses thing, and get away with it, without appearing cheap or unoriginal. But, while original, alas it also won't be cheap.
Get more than a dozen variegated roses. TWO dozen is a nice, round, number. Expect to pay between $100 and $200. (On the upside, that usually includes a vase.) Send them to her place of work. This is important: she has to have a job. More on that later.
This will have the following effect:
1. All her female coworkers will note, "Hey, there's more than a dozen here!". They will exude thinly veiled jealousy: their SOs never splurged that much. She will feel smug in front of them. (whether she actually wants such things from you is another matter.)
2. The more astute will point out that they are variegated. These are not cheap $11.99/dozen roses.
3. She will realize that you actually had the guts to be so public about your affection. After all, she could utterly dismiss your infantile display. True, but you aren't actually there. It will pass, and if she does and dumps you over it, you have saved the cost of dinner, and future courtship. Note: $150 for the flowers would be cheap by comparison.
4. She will realize that you went to some hardship to spend that kind of money on her. After all, she works for a living too and knows it's hard to earn. Granted, she might dismiss it as wasteful (but, you would probably know that aspect of her personality by now), but hey, it's once a year, and ya gotta live at least a little, no?
O.K. You've made your "investment". Over the next weeks and months, see what the return is. The real measure of a woman is not whether she will "service you" (note: hookers are cheaper than roses, and reciprocal booty calls and NSA relationships don't require them -- they are business arrangements), but rather if she will endure hardship for you.
And, always, always, remember this: if you get dumped over your display, it was a cheap lesson in the long run,
Indeed. When I was in kindergarten, I remember this one girl who walked a mile to and from school, and no one thought this was odd. I walked about 1/4 to 1/2 mile one way, like most of my friends.
Adults in the neighborhood generally looked out for kids: both those needing help and those getting themselves into mischief. No kid ever got abducted by a stranger, or even by a divorced parent -- parents didn't divorce unless there was real marital fault.
The biggest difference was that mothers could afford to stay at home: there was no need for both parents to work to pay the taxes for subsidized daycare (and the regulatory overhead associated with it). Latchkey kids were few and far between and generally older -- high school age.
While no woman should be denied the opportunity to work for a fair wage, neither should both parents have to work to pay the taxes to subsidize those women who want to work but for whom it makes no economic sense because of the non-subsidized cost of daycare: equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
The result, with some 40 years of feminazi (as opposed to feminist) social meddling is the present situation of having to micro-manage kids because the traditional community of caring adults has been forced to work.
Why are other people's allergies my problem? Did I give them to them?
Teach school-age kids to be careful, and provide them with epi-pens. Problem solved.
Five year olds can walk a mile too and from school -- we did when I was young. (And we knew not to talk to strangers.) They can certainly be taught to not eat strange foods. Crap, when I was a kid, six and seven year old diabetic kids were giving themselves scheduled insulin injections.
Perhaps your kid wasn't meant to live: you know Nature can be damn cruel bitch sometimes.
We didn't have this crap 40 years ago when I went to elementary school, and kids weren't dropping like flies. No one ever heard of a food allergy.
30 MILLION people have to adjust their way of life so one may live (based on the 1/30,000,000 actually having an allergy severe enough to kill them).
There are many more allergies who's fatal response rates are much higher (fish oil, as one poster noted), and we don't accommodate them, so why should we accommodate you? Get in line with your kid's rare allergy.
Great that you know the risks to your kid and all, but really, it is your responsibility to keep them out of danger (consider home schooling or some special school for highly allergic kids), instead of making the rest of the world accommodate you. You knew all the crap that can happen when trying to make another human. You chose to do so anyway (like I did). Deal with the fallout.
The appropriate societal response here is not to make the many bend to the few, but to encourage insurance for the rare risks and establish places of safety where they can be avoided. How about a separate lunch room for the short interval they are actually eating? Damn, wouldn't that encourage them to hurry up so they could play.
If I am not the direct cause of your problem I should not be obliged to help you deal with it.
A three year old might not be wise enough to not share food with a playmate, but a five year old (entering kindergarten) can be taught this. Oh wait! That was way back when I was five years old and my classmates and I were trustworthy enough to walk a mile to and from school each day and help with household chores, like cooking dinner on a shudder hot stove.
As kids, we have distorted views of what words mean: racist terms make no sense to a child who has not been taught to discriminate on the basis of race. Therefore, children will extrapolate their own definitions: in my case, one who has some purported undesirable quality and also happens to have a particular racial characteristic.
Officer "Bubbles" fits my childhood definition of a mythical person that I never met. I'm sure his behavior will also induce some to extrapolate (incorrectly) that it is due to his race. I though the juxtaposition of a child's distorted understanding, and some adult's prejudices expressed with the same epithet interesting.
I wasn't going to use the "N-word". Really, I wasn't: it's just too offensive to too many people, blacks (certainly), whites (if they have a clue), and generally every one else with two brain cells to rub together. But, I think it fits here.
My first experience with the "N-word" was in elementary school. I'd hear the occasional person (usually an adult), refer to "stuipid niggers", "damn niggers", or some other type of "nigger". I came to learn that this meant a black person.
That struck me as odd. I had black classmates, of course, but none of them were stupid (well, some were smarter than others, but that was true of everyone else as well, and we were all in the same grade, so no one could really be stupid). As for damned, well I wasn't much of a churchgoer, so I couldn't tell. I reasoned that niggers were some kind of troublemakers or neer'do'wells that just happened to be black.
So, there were the kids we played with: black, white, Asian, whatever, and, somewhere, out there, were "niggers" -- causing trouble in the high schools, perhaps... except, I never met any when I got to high school. It was at this point that I came to understand just how nasty an epithet it was, to have a word that didn't describe an "undesirable" that happened to be of a particular race, but a condemnation solely on the basis of race alone. And, I swore to erase that word from my thinking.
Until this story.
It may have taken close to 50 years of my life, but damn, if someone out there deserves that epithet, Officer Bubbles is it., cause he sure seems stupid, arrogant, narcissistic, a disgrace to the uniform he wears, and conveniently black: the elusive nigger of my ignorant youth.
So? Then the problem is that the financial risk is not high enough to warrant the care necessary. That can be changed, if a "dead kid" cost $500,000,000 instead of $5,000,000 due to negligence.
What you should really be proposing is insurance against such suits that is contingent on inspection, standards, and compliance. There is no reason the state could not sell such insurance.
I had returned, with family, to Ontario, Canada, after my H1B ran out in 2003 (Got sponsored for a Green Card in 2004 by the Redmond Devil, but that's a whole 'nother shameful story about prostituting ethics for permanent residency).
Anyyyyywayyyyy, my then-wife got sick, and there was a three month wait for the silly socialized "care" there, so we had private health insurance (never got the Canadian health care back in any case, since we wanted as few ties as possible if we left again (and, we did)). So, off to the hospital she goes, for some outpatient IV antibiotics to be administered every 8 hours. We get a bill for some $1000. No biggie, right? Send the itemized bill to the insurer, right?
Wrong!
Because "all Canadians and residents" are "covered", patients don't get itemized bills, citing privacy issues between the provider and the payor (i.e. the government). Well, that flies in the face of several mercantile laws, so we pressed for one. Finally, the hospital relented, but charged us a "service fee": $150 for the first page of the invoice, and $10 a page for every page thereafter.
Fucking bastards.
I wondered if it was the Canuckistani paper or ink that was so expensive, or the labor cost of the unionized lard-ass that had to move three feet from desk to printer.
I don't need a damn computer to read a non-digital book
What the license covers is how you may use the content.
Is it fraudulent to say "own it on DVD" today, when, in fact, you are merely licensing it?
Depends.
If "everyone knows" that you don't "really" own it, then a "reasonable person" will define what the license is, even if it isn't explicit.
With the **AA browbeating anyone who doesn't do what they want, a "reasonable person" will conclude that the license is whatever the **AA says it is.
I agree that the doctrine of first sale should apply, and that claiming one can "own" the content is misleading. But, I also see how those arguments can carry some semblance of legitimacy: you don't "really" own it, that was just a metaphor, and so all the notions that would otherwise apply to owned copies of copyright works don't.
The scam here is that people are defrauded into thinking that they do, if it were to ever matter. But, proving that is not trivial.
No, I am not doing the stupid thing of "... on the internet". If we were talking about something rendered by a browser vs. a book, and I suggested they be treated differently, you'd be right.
But, electronic media requires interpretation and the manner in which that is done can be licensed.
It shouldn't matter, but "reasonable" people accept that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Knuth would agree that no work is ever perfect, and be satisfied with 9/10.
I once had a grad school prof who would never give perfect marks on assignments (we had weekly assignments in addition to papers and other work), for the same reason. He would even takes 1/4 marks off (out of 10) for spelling and typographical errors.
I once received an assignment back, marked 9-3/4 / 10. I hurried through the paper to find the error. Apparently there was a ribbon defect in the ribbon I used to print the final draft and an "r" had the hook of the letter broken in the middle. The red note beside it was "-1/4: did not proof read".
It is a great read as it describes a supposed libertarian dystopia.
Jennifer Government was a spoof on libertarianism, not fascism.
Except, the energy required to blast our garbage to the sun will probably create more garbage in its production than the garbage blasted away.
So, it'll cost $70 instead of $30. At least that's what I pay.
A bit of a bummer, yes, but far better than if the difference between consumer and business class was 10:10 instead of 2.3:1.
The reward system combined with a propensity toward addiction makes the behavior addictive.
You can do the roses thing, and get away with it, without appearing cheap or unoriginal. But, while original, alas it also won't be cheap.
Get more than a dozen variegated roses. TWO dozen is a nice, round, number. Expect to pay between $100 and $200. (On the upside, that usually includes a vase.) Send them to her place of work. This is important: she has to have a job. More on that later.
This will have the following effect:
1. All her female coworkers will note, "Hey, there's more than a dozen here!". They will exude thinly veiled jealousy: their SOs never splurged that much. She will feel smug in front of them. (whether she actually wants such things from you is another matter.)
2. The more astute will point out that they are variegated. These are not cheap $11.99/dozen roses.
3. She will realize that you actually had the guts to be so public about your affection. After all, she could utterly dismiss your infantile display. True, but you aren't actually there. It will pass, and if she does and dumps you over it, you have saved the cost of dinner, and future courtship. Note: $150 for the flowers would be cheap by comparison.
4. She will realize that you went to some hardship to spend that kind of money on her. After all, she works for a living too and knows it's hard to earn. Granted, she might dismiss it as wasteful (but, you would probably know that aspect of her personality by now), but hey, it's once a year, and ya gotta live at least a little, no?
O.K. You've made your "investment". Over the next weeks and months, see what the return is. The real measure of a woman is not whether she will "service you" (note: hookers are cheaper than roses, and reciprocal booty calls and NSA relationships don't require them -- they are business arrangements), but rather if she will endure hardship for you.
And, always, always, remember this: if you get dumped over your display, it was a cheap lesson in the long run,
If the nukes the "terrists" have planted on U.S. soil can't ping one another through the net... they go off.
Who was the fucktard who came up with this piece of brilliance?
Indeed. When I was in kindergarten, I remember this one girl who walked a mile to and from school, and no one thought this was odd. I walked about 1/4 to 1/2 mile one way, like most of my friends.
Adults in the neighborhood generally looked out for kids: both those needing help and those getting themselves into mischief. No kid ever got abducted by a stranger, or even by a divorced parent -- parents didn't divorce unless there was real marital fault.
The biggest difference was that mothers could afford to stay at home: there was no need for both parents to work to pay the taxes for subsidized daycare (and the regulatory overhead associated with it). Latchkey kids were few and far between and generally older -- high school age.
While no woman should be denied the opportunity to work for a fair wage, neither should both parents have to work to pay the taxes to subsidize those women who want to work but for whom it makes no economic sense because of the non-subsidized cost of daycare: equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
The result, with some 40 years of feminazi (as opposed to feminist) social meddling is the present situation of having to micro-manage kids because the traditional community of caring adults has been forced to work.
... to quote that hilarious line from Idiocracy.
My character?
Let's see. I was taught "do no harm", "treat others like you want to be treated", not "I am responsible for every one else".
You look after yours, I'll look after mine, and we can all purchase insurance for risks we can't bear.
Though, maybe we should try it your "the world owes me" way: "I was born ugly, so hot chicks should be forced to fuck me."
Nope. Even ugly old curmudgeonly me finds that just plain wrong.
So?
Why are other people's allergies my problem? Did I give them to them?
Teach school-age kids to be careful, and provide them with epi-pens. Problem solved.
Five year olds can walk a mile too and from school -- we did when I was young. (And we knew not to talk to strangers.) They can certainly be taught to not eat strange foods. Crap, when I was a kid, six and seven year old diabetic kids were giving themselves scheduled insulin injections.
fatal to 1/(3x10^7).
Perhaps your kid wasn't meant to live: you know Nature can be damn cruel bitch sometimes.
We didn't have this crap 40 years ago when I went to elementary school, and kids weren't dropping like flies. No one ever heard of a food allergy.
30 MILLION people have to adjust their way of life so one may live (based on the 1/30,000,000 actually having an allergy severe enough to kill them).
There are many more allergies who's fatal response rates are much higher (fish oil, as one poster noted), and we don't accommodate them, so why should we accommodate you? Get in line with your kid's rare allergy.
Great that you know the risks to your kid and all, but really, it is your responsibility to keep them out of danger (consider home schooling or some special school for highly allergic kids), instead of making the rest of the world accommodate you. You knew all the crap that can happen when trying to make another human. You chose to do so anyway (like I did). Deal with the fallout.
The appropriate societal response here is not to make the many bend to the few, but to encourage insurance for the rare risks and establish places of safety where they can be avoided. How about a separate lunch room for the short interval they are actually eating? Damn, wouldn't that encourage them to hurry up so they could play.
If I am not the direct cause of your problem I should not be obliged to help you deal with it.
A three year old might not be wise enough to not share food with a playmate, but a five year old (entering kindergarten) can be taught this. Oh wait! That was way back when I was five years old and my classmates and I were trustworthy enough to walk a mile to and from school each day and help with household chores, like cooking dinner on a shudder hot stove.
How is this nothing more than "service by publication", common when an individual can't be served the usual way?
Oh! I see. It is because it uses the shiny new interweb.
I think you missed my point entirely.
As kids, we have distorted views of what words mean: racist terms make no sense to a child who has not been taught to discriminate on the basis of race. Therefore, children will extrapolate their own definitions: in my case, one who has some purported undesirable quality and also happens to have a particular racial characteristic.
Officer "Bubbles" fits my childhood definition of a mythical person that I never met. I'm sure his behavior will also induce some to extrapolate (incorrectly) that it is due to his race. I though the juxtaposition of a child's distorted understanding, and some adult's prejudices expressed with the same epithet interesting.
I wasn't going to use the "N-word". Really, I wasn't: it's just too offensive to too many people, blacks (certainly), whites (if they have a clue), and generally every one else with two brain cells to rub together. But, I think it fits here.
My first experience with the "N-word" was in elementary school. I'd hear the occasional person (usually an adult), refer to "stuipid niggers", "damn niggers", or some other type of "nigger". I came to learn that this meant a black person.
That struck me as odd. I had black classmates, of course, but none of them were stupid (well, some were smarter than others, but that was true of everyone else as well, and we were all in the same grade, so no one could really be stupid). As for damned, well I wasn't much of a churchgoer, so I couldn't tell. I reasoned that niggers were some kind of troublemakers or neer'do'wells that just happened to be black.
So, there were the kids we played with: black, white, Asian, whatever, and, somewhere, out there, were "niggers" -- causing trouble in the high schools, perhaps... except, I never met any when I got to high school. It was at this point that I came to understand just how nasty an epithet it was, to have a word that didn't describe an "undesirable" that happened to be of a particular race, but a condemnation solely on the basis of race alone. And, I swore to erase that word from my thinking.
Until this story.
It may have taken close to 50 years of my life, but damn, if someone out there deserves that epithet, Officer Bubbles is it., cause he sure seems stupid, arrogant, narcissistic, a disgrace to the uniform he wears, and conveniently black: the elusive nigger of my ignorant youth.
... that no one deserved to be called a fucktardic pig.
I guess there's a first time for everything.
This Canuck proudly wraps himself in the First Amendment, now that he's a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.
Whatcha gonna do, Officer Bubbles, extradite my ass back across the border?
In Texas, one can use deadly force against an adult trespasser after dark, and against a child if the child is armed or vandalizing property.
Gawd, I miss living in Texas.
So? Then the problem is that the financial risk is not high enough to warrant the care necessary. That can be changed, if a "dead kid" cost $500,000,000 instead of $5,000,000 due to negligence.
What you should really be proposing is insurance against such suits that is contingent on inspection, standards, and compliance. There is no reason the state could not sell such insurance.
Er, fail. EPIC LOGIC FAIL.
What you are describing would be pure negligence, and there is plenty of case law regarding suits around negligence.
I had returned, with family, to Ontario, Canada, after my H1B ran out in 2003 (Got sponsored for a Green Card in 2004 by the Redmond Devil, but that's a whole 'nother shameful story about prostituting ethics for permanent residency).
Anyyyyywayyyyy, my then-wife got sick, and there was a three month wait for the silly socialized "care" there, so we had private health insurance (never got the Canadian health care back in any case, since we wanted as few ties as possible if we left again (and, we did)). So, off to the hospital she goes, for some outpatient IV antibiotics to be administered every 8 hours. We get a bill for some $1000. No biggie, right? Send the itemized bill to the insurer, right?
Wrong!
Because "all Canadians and residents" are "covered", patients don't get itemized bills, citing privacy issues between the provider and the payor (i.e. the government). Well, that flies in the face of several mercantile laws, so we pressed for one. Finally, the hospital relented, but charged us a "service fee": $150 for the first page of the invoice, and $10 a page for every page thereafter.
Fucking bastards.
I wondered if it was the Canuckistani paper or ink that was so expensive, or the labor cost of the unionized lard-ass that had to move three feet from desk to printer.
I don't need a damn computer to read a non-digital book
What the license covers is how you may use the content.
Is it fraudulent to say "own it on DVD" today, when, in fact, you are merely licensing it?
Depends.
If "everyone knows" that you don't "really" own it, then a "reasonable person" will define what the license is, even if it isn't explicit.
With the **AA browbeating anyone who doesn't do what they want, a "reasonable person" will conclude that the license is whatever the **AA says it is.
I agree that the doctrine of first sale should apply, and that claiming one can "own" the content is misleading. But, I also see how those arguments can carry some semblance of legitimacy: you don't "really" own it, that was just a metaphor, and so all the notions that would otherwise apply to owned copies of copyright works don't.
The scam here is that people are defrauded into thinking that they do, if it were to ever matter. But, proving that is not trivial.
No, I am not doing the stupid thing of "... on the internet". If we were talking about something rendered by a browser vs. a book, and I suggested they be treated differently, you'd be right.
But, electronic media requires interpretation and the manner in which that is done can be licensed.
It shouldn't matter, but "reasonable" people accept that it is.
Implied contracts are enforceable.
If I go into a store, take a $1 candy bar, put $1 on the counter, and leave, I can't be accused of stealing.
A reasonable person would see the bar advertised and the price paid, therefore the terms of the contract of purchase and sale were fulfilled.
That said, a non-trivial contract can't be implied. I'm playing at Devil's Advocate here.