As someone who has been out of college for nearly 20 years, has a job and pays taxes, I'm more righteously PISSED (and I spell the word) that Bush the Lesser has squandered the federal deficit, given his wealthy corporate cronies tax breaks, shot the economy in both wings, lied to the people and got our military into a long and expensive conflict with no winners. A good centrist government would not have done any of those things. A good liberal government, in addition to not doing that stupid crap, might even be fixing some of the deep problems in the US, like education, immigration, the economy, rotting infrastructure, and corporate cartels run amok.
The only surprise here is that it's been such a long time coming. An imperative now exists for *all* OSS officeware developers to get their data formats (e.g. XML) as transparent and portable as possible. Only a unified front of interoperable alternatives combined with sane evangelizing will give corporate IT departments a soft landing when they realize it's time to jump off this train.
Since most, if not virtually all spam is commercial in nature, it is not protected by the First Amendment. Kind of like the whiny telemarketers suing the FCC -- nobody has a "right" to try and sell me anything, thanks. And use of a recipient-pays delivery model removes them even more from the collective good graces of everyone trying to wade out from under the deluge. So screw the bogus legal pretext and lets get on with some gruesome public executions.
It really is "soft-pedals," and the context it is derived from is musical. On a piano, the leftmost pedal shifts the entire action over so that the hammers which would ordinarily strike all three strings of each unison only strike one. This yields a quieter sound, but also a more subdued tone due to the lack of tiny phase and pitch differences among the unison group.
In piano notation, the marking for use of the soft pedal is una corda, Italian for "one string" and the marking for return to normal state is tre corda (the translation of which is left as an exercise for the reader).
Thus ends your fight -- with a loss. Move along now.
A friend of mine has one of these. He was actually around Engelbart and the PARC folks in those days, and used to write code using the thing. The five keys plus the three buttons on the mouse give you (surprise) a nifty analog 8-bit encoding mechanism. According to him, good coders could really fly once they got up to speed on the system. I might cook up something like this out of an old synth, since I can move about an order of magnitude more efficiently on a piano than on a terminal;-)
OK, which DOJ employees are moderating this thread? Parent post is not a troll.
Fuck Ashcroft. Fuck Bush. These guys were not legitimately elected and they don't have the consent of the governed. Democracy was a nifty experiment, but now it's over.
I have pretty much quit going to theaters since they've all been turned into claustrophobia-inducing shoeboxes with cardboard walls. Not much of a Big Picture, Big Sound experience when you hear half the dialogue and all the effects from the movies playing on either side of you.
No, I dismiss the tree sitters. Your efforts here are wasted. Sorry.
The tree sitters are radical environmentalists, and the cause they are promoting is an end to unsustainable forestry. That aim is shared by a majority of environmentalists, so you can't wave off the whole movement by denigrating the actions of a vanguard.
And much of the "overwhelming science" is junk.
Care to show me peer-reviewed citations refuting the science that I am referring to, then? Or will you just continue down that well-trodden path of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU"? Many of the anecdotes you use (a lot, I might add), such as "trees regrow" and "they plant more," are also junk.
BTW, I'm also a burned out misanthrope, only 90 percent of the way there, and I do give a flying fuck. I also spell out the word. Chickenshit.
It appears that you suffer that same problem as so many who dismiss the convictions of environmentalists: You don't see the forest for the trees.
Planting more trees != replacing a forest. An old-growth forest is a complex web of life, with countless niches filled by a wide range of species. Competition for sites, sunlight, moisture, nutrients, forage, prey and any other requirements for survival assure that a mature, wild forest can be described as having attained biological equilibrium -- even though within the macro scale of things there are always micro- and mesoscale disturbances, shifts, gradients and edge phenomena.
When a logging company goes in and clearcuts a forest, the whole web of habitats comes crashing down. Ever driven through the Pacific Northwest? What look like nice, healthy swaths of trees all about the same height are about as biologically diverse as the average midwestern cornfield. Those are the replanted clearcuts, and they could take centuries to return to a state resembling the old growth that they replaced. A monoculture of Douglas-fir will only support a fraction of the species that a diverse stand of old growth holds.
Managing our forests for timber production has other costs. Remember the enormous wildfires last summer? The one in Arizona burned nearly half a million acres, and nearly all of it burned previously logged land. Old growth ponderosa forest has lots of grassy interstices between large, fire-resistant trees. This is a result of frequent, low-intensity fires which clear out woody undergrowth and small trees that act as ladder fuels. Once these forests were clearcut, the replacement stands grew in far too thick. Fire suppression efforts ensured that this condition persisted, and the end product after an exceptional drought was akin to a lake of gasoline. A wild, "unmanaged" ponderosa forest could not have burned the way that one did, and the costs of fighting such a blaze would have been orders of magnitude lower.
Replanting makes for great PR for the timber products industry. But it's still a biological disaster, just like the erosion which inevitably follows mechanized logging activity and silts up streams. Have you noticed that salmon runs in the PNW have declined precipitously? Hint: It's not just dams, development and hydro that's killing them off.
Yes, young and vigorous trees sock away CO2 at a higher rate than old, senescent ones. But a mature forest represents a much more sizable carbon sink...that's the CO2 that was converted when the trees were younger plus the sustained activity of the trees and their symbionts, in particular the mycorrhiziae. You don't just recoup this by replanting.
I see this current among many of the techno-literate, and (like this thread) it seems to be increasing. You sneer at those who are willing to sacrifice for their convictions, and dismiss not only their methods, but the overwhelming amount of science that supports their cause. It's a lot like the fat, lazy Americans who don't see a problem with commuting solo in their SUVs and keep arguing about whether fossil fuel use or volcanoes is the greater contributor to climate change. (Who cares? It's happening, it's irrefutable, and we need to pull some heads out and plan on how we will deal with it.)
So my recommendation to you would be to get a little deeper into this topic that you evidently feel so strongly about. Maybe read a science book.
Wanna spend 6 hours troubleshooting a Xyplex terminal server and then post something coherent? Knew ya could....
Re:What the hey? (Grammar flaming)
on
Turn-Key Linux Audio
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because Malda & Co. apparently have profiled Slashdot readers as lip-movers.
That's the only explanation I can come up with for allowing -- nay, encouraging -- a culture of editorial lassitude which prizes the ability of the subliterate to fling up articles and shits on the ability of the literate to read them without continually having to stop and reparse.
Every one of those stupid misplaced apostrophes throws an exception in your built-in interpreter. If there are so many programmers in this community, why is isn't there a call for tighter code in this realm?
For all the nifty tricks embodied in Slashcode, the coolest yet would be a "demoronizer" for apostrophes. But it won't happen until there's a change in culture...just look at how Joe Clark was treated recently after he went to the trouble of EDITING the questions he replied to: "Whatever." -- roblimo
I don't have too many excess cycles to burn untangling atrocities while reading what purports to be a news site. Clear, concise text goes a long way toward justifying more than a cursory glance at an article.
Note that many immoral subjects are freely available, including some very rank pr0n.
It will never work over the long term or on a macro scale. See also: The US Government, starring in Prohibition, the classic tale of hubris and jump-starting gangland career sensations. Or the currently playing hits, Drug Wars, Sealing our Southern Frontier and Git Them Terrists!, all with no no closing night in sight.
Yes, Virginia, the health of the Internet *does* depend on decentralized technologies such as multiple backbones, gegraphically distributed root name servers, and standards committees not answerable to any single political entity or product vendor.
It's no different from a business monopoly, (or cartel, or oligopoly) which tends to create artificially high prices, poor quality of goods and services, and in the case of computing and networks a fertile breeding ground for viruses, worms and other nasty exploits.
And the analogue these worlds share with real live ecosystems is uncanny: Plant an entire state in one strain of corn for a few seasons in a row and watch the fun.
Didn't we already learn this crap? Why do the FCC, FTC, SEC and other god-forsaken, nutless bend-over wastes of acronyms keep rubber-stamping all the mergers?
Eh? You've "lived it," yet cannot fathom why some might think a diet of dog food is less palatable than steaks and sushi?
But you obviously don't need context. I can expect little more: You tell us to get out of middle school already, but can't get your head around a language rule that's quite well documented. (Hint: It's the opposite of the way Cmdr Taco normally uses it.)
"Eating dogfood" DOES imply dealing with the implications of sloppy coding and the resultant product quality issues. That is precisely why MS, and many other organizations, employ the practice. If you live in a house with a leaky roof, you should have an added incentive to fix the damn thing.
BTW, maybe you should read more. For some illuminating anecdotes of the above-described phenomenon, crack a copy of "Show-Stopper!" It's a nice insider's peek into Dave Cutler's team and the development of NT, with many references to canine cuisine.
Oh, and the possessive form "its" DOES NOT take an apostrophe. I had that down well before middle school.
I observe Buy Nothing Day. Not only do I despise traffic, crowds and malls, but I like to send whatever tiny message to the retail world that I actively resist marketing.
That said, I still think that the DMCA, as well as illegitimate uses of it such as this one, reek worse than the proverbial warthog's bunghole.
After recently getting RS/6000 and AIX certification, I can vouch for a couple of things: One - AIX backups are a slightly different critter from most Unixes, but very useful; Two - IBM's documentation (the Redbooks) is quite good:
Read man backup, man mksysb, man savevg. Also see the AIX System Support Study Guide SG24-6199, chapter 9 (in the redbooks). And you can use plain old tar or cpio if you want.
Just checked, and no cows in front, behind, or to the sides of me (unless you count the females at the other terminals...). Plenty of square inches free here.
Cute. Are you stupid, or just illiterate? I said "used by ranchers," not "covered in cows." Are you going to tell me that the use of that much land for growing burgers is not part of the human footprint?
Which tree-hugger book that played a hand in brainwashing you did you steal this from?
What's a tree-hugger book? Any historical or scientific text which cites its references and doesn't support your evidently highly narrow ideology? FWIW, there are many studies of the southwestern borderlands' ecology and history, and their accounts are remarkably similar. But if they don't mesh with your particular orthodoxy, they get dismissed as enviro trash. Whatever.
Kudos to ya for eating lots of game, BTW. I'm totally in favor of munching on Bambi haunches, and since I gave up beef over a decade ago I've realized what most "civilized" folk are missing because they don't eat game.
I suppose that to the casual observer, a lot of the western US looks like barren desert. But nearly every square inch of it, with the exception of a few military installations and national parks/monuments, is used by ranchers. In fact, the primary reason that most of this land is degraded and less productive from a biological standpoint is precisely because of grazing pressure and the corollary activities (predator control, fire suppression, introduction of exotic plants, herbicide usage, clearcutting, etc.) practiced by livestock interests.
One case study:
The desert grasslands of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico supported herds of pronghorn, deer, elk and even the occasional bison prior to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s. Historical accounts tell of grass that reached the belly of a horse spreading across the valleys, and perennial streams that held beaver, otter and enough fish to support a bald eagle population.
Of course, this was a perfect setting for Manifest Destiny to play its hand. Wealthy cattle companies rapidly overstocked the ranges with millions of head of cattle, which devoured the forage available. Then severe drought in the 1890s and a series of devastating floods from 1900-1905 carried away topsoil from the denuded land, and the greatly increased sediment load in the watercourses cut deeper channels which altered the drainage and aquifer recharge of entire watersheds. The rivers became dry ditches, cactus and tough scrub took hold where the grass once thrived, and the regional economy crashed hard.
Similar scenes to the one described above played out across the West. In fact, most places in the world that support vegetation but are not suitable for farming (everything except tundra, boreal forest, and virgin rainforest) are grazed and have been altered considerably from their pre-agricultural baseline conditions. So the figure of 83 percent is in fact very plausible, and may in fact be conservative.
It wouldn't be too tough to start turning this tide -- if Americans would simply cut their beef consumption by one third, there would be an economic impetus for the most marginal and habitat-damaging operations to cut back or ceases altogether. India, OTOH...how the hell do you fix that?
No sane interpretation of the First Amendment says that I am obligated to pay for a computer, Internet connectivity and electricity for the express purpose of some dwad who wants to sell me penis pumps.
The logic that says I can limit the "free speech" of a Jehovah's Witness on my porch at 9 am applies here. Same goes for the "free speech" of a shady store advertising a sale price, but using the wrong picture and running out of the advertised item in order to sell pricier model.
Spam is not remotely comparable to protected speech. As long as it is commercial in nature and forces the cost burden onto the transit providers and the recipient, it merits no protection whatsoever and instead invites stringent regulation. Laws like this are a good first step.
The possesive form "its" NEVER TAKES AN APOSTROPHE. It just doesn't. I know, it's a strange rule, sort of an exception, but it's the convention that literate folk have agreed on.
Every time you throw one of those in, it's like a speed bump on a freeway. The whole purpose of punctuation and grammatical convention in writing is to allow the most seamless transition possible from your head to the page/screen and thereupon the the reader's head. Don't keep flinging the typographical equivalent of ossified dog turds at the lawn mower of my mind.
Wrongo. Not only is sodium a metal, but it is one of the most metallic of all the elements. Iron, on the other hand, is barely a metal in the chemical sense. And aluminum? We won't even go there.
Go study basic chemistry, and come back to us when you get a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has been out of college for nearly 20 years, has a job and pays taxes, I'm more righteously PISSED (and I spell the word) that Bush the Lesser has squandered the federal deficit, given his wealthy corporate cronies tax breaks, shot the economy in both wings, lied to the people and got our military into a long and expensive conflict with no winners. A good centrist government would not have done any of those things. A good liberal government, in addition to not doing that stupid crap, might even be fixing some of the deep problems in the US, like education, immigration, the economy, rotting infrastructure, and corporate cartels run amok.
The only surprise here is that it's been such a long time coming. An imperative now exists for *all* OSS officeware developers to get their data formats (e.g. XML) as transparent and portable as possible. Only a unified front of interoperable alternatives combined with sane evangelizing will give corporate IT departments a soft landing when they realize it's time to jump off this train.
Since most, if not virtually all spam is commercial in nature, it is not protected by the First Amendment. Kind of like the whiny telemarketers suing the FCC -- nobody has a "right" to try and sell me anything, thanks. And use of a recipient-pays delivery model removes them even more from the collective good graces of everyone trying to wade out from under the deluge. So screw the bogus legal pretext and lets get on with some gruesome public executions.
It really is "soft-pedals," and the context it is derived from is musical. On a piano, the leftmost pedal shifts the entire action over so that the hammers which would ordinarily strike all three strings of each unison only strike one. This yields a quieter sound, but also a more subdued tone due to the lack of tiny phase and pitch differences among the unison group.
In piano notation, the marking for use of the soft pedal is una corda, Italian for "one string" and the marking for return to normal state is tre corda (the translation of which is left as an exercise for the reader).
Thus ends your fight -- with a loss. Move along now.
A friend of mine has one of these. He was actually around Engelbart and the PARC folks in those days, and used to write code using the thing. The five keys plus the three buttons on the mouse give you (surprise) a nifty analog 8-bit encoding mechanism. According to him, good coders could really fly once they got up to speed on the system. I might cook up something like this out of an old synth, since I can move about an order of magnitude more efficiently on a piano than on a terminal ;-)
OK, which DOJ employees are moderating this thread? Parent post is not a troll.
Fuck Ashcroft. Fuck Bush. These guys were not legitimately elected and they don't have the consent of the governed. Democracy was a nifty experiment, but now it's over.
Who's the leader of the court
That's made for you and me?
M-I-C
K-E-Y
M-O-U-S-E!
Yippee!
I have pretty much quit going to theaters since they've all been turned into claustrophobia-inducing shoeboxes with cardboard walls. Not much of a Big Picture, Big Sound experience when you hear half the dialogue and all the effects from the movies playing on either side of you.
No, I dismiss the tree sitters. Your efforts here are wasted. Sorry.
The tree sitters are radical environmentalists, and the cause they are promoting is an end to unsustainable forestry. That aim is shared by a majority of environmentalists, so you can't wave off the whole movement by denigrating the actions of a vanguard.
And much of the "overwhelming science" is junk.
Care to show me peer-reviewed citations refuting the science that I am referring to, then? Or will you just continue down that well-trodden path of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU"? Many of the anecdotes you use (a lot, I might add), such as "trees regrow" and "they plant more," are also junk.
BTW, I'm also a burned out misanthrope, only 90 percent of the way there, and I do give a flying fuck. I also spell out the word. Chickenshit.
It appears that you suffer that same problem as so many who dismiss the convictions of environmentalists: You don't see the forest for the trees.
Planting more trees != replacing a forest. An old-growth forest is a complex web of life, with countless niches filled by a wide range of species. Competition for sites, sunlight, moisture, nutrients, forage, prey and any other requirements for survival assure that a mature, wild forest can be described as having attained biological equilibrium -- even though within the macro scale of things there are always micro- and mesoscale disturbances, shifts, gradients and edge phenomena.
When a logging company goes in and clearcuts a forest, the whole web of habitats comes crashing down. Ever driven through the Pacific Northwest? What look like nice, healthy swaths of trees all about the same height are about as biologically diverse as the average midwestern cornfield. Those are the replanted clearcuts, and they could take centuries to return to a state resembling the old growth that they replaced. A monoculture of Douglas-fir will only support a fraction of the species that a diverse stand of old growth holds.
Managing our forests for timber production has other costs. Remember the enormous wildfires last summer? The one in Arizona burned nearly half a million acres, and nearly all of it burned previously logged land. Old growth ponderosa forest has lots of grassy interstices between large, fire-resistant trees. This is a result of frequent, low-intensity fires which clear out woody undergrowth and small trees that act as ladder fuels. Once these forests were clearcut, the replacement stands grew in far too thick. Fire suppression efforts ensured that this condition persisted, and the end product after an exceptional drought was akin to a lake of gasoline. A wild, "unmanaged" ponderosa forest could not have burned the way that one did, and the costs of fighting such a blaze would have been orders of magnitude lower.
Replanting makes for great PR for the timber products industry. But it's still a biological disaster, just like the erosion which inevitably follows mechanized logging activity and silts up streams. Have you noticed that salmon runs in the PNW have declined precipitously? Hint: It's not just dams, development and hydro that's killing them off.
Yes, young and vigorous trees sock away CO2 at a higher rate than old, senescent ones. But a mature forest represents a much more sizable carbon sink...that's the CO2 that was converted when the trees were younger plus the sustained activity of the trees and their symbionts, in particular the mycorrhiziae. You don't just recoup this by replanting.
I see this current among many of the techno-literate, and (like this thread) it seems to be increasing. You sneer at those who are willing to sacrifice for their convictions, and dismiss not only their methods, but the overwhelming amount of science that supports their cause. It's a lot like the fat, lazy Americans who don't see a problem with commuting solo in their SUVs and keep arguing about whether fossil fuel use or volcanoes is the greater contributor to climate change. (Who cares? It's happening, it's irrefutable, and we need to pull some heads out and plan on how we will deal with it.)
So my recommendation to you would be to get a little deeper into this topic that you evidently feel so strongly about. Maybe read a science book.
heh.
Good thing I am aren't an editor.
Wanna spend 6 hours troubleshooting a Xyplex terminal server and then post something coherent? Knew ya could....
That's the only explanation I can come up with for allowing -- nay, encouraging -- a culture of editorial lassitude which prizes the ability of the subliterate to fling up articles and shits on the ability of the literate to read them without continually having to stop and reparse.
Every one of those stupid misplaced apostrophes throws an exception in your built-in interpreter. If there are so many programmers in this community, why is isn't there a call for tighter code in this realm?
For all the nifty tricks embodied in Slashcode, the coolest yet would be a "demoronizer" for apostrophes. But it won't happen until there's a change in culture...just look at how Joe Clark was treated recently after he went to the trouble of EDITING the questions he replied to: "Whatever." -- roblimo
I don't have too many excess cycles to burn untangling atrocities while reading what purports to be a news site. Clear, concise text goes a long way toward justifying more than a cursory glance at an article.
Note that many immoral subjects are freely available, including some very rank pr0n.
It will never work over the long term or on a macro scale. See also: The US Government, starring in Prohibition, the classic tale of hubris and jump-starting gangland career sensations. Or the currently playing hits, Drug Wars, Sealing our Southern Frontier and Git Them Terrists!, all with no no closing night in sight.
Yes, Virginia, the health of the Internet *does* depend on decentralized technologies such as multiple backbones, gegraphically distributed root name servers, and standards committees not answerable to any single political entity or product vendor.
It's no different from a business monopoly, (or cartel, or oligopoly) which tends to create artificially high prices, poor quality of goods and services, and in the case of computing and networks a fertile breeding ground for viruses, worms and other nasty exploits.
And the analogue these worlds share with real live ecosystems is uncanny: Plant an entire state in one strain of corn for a few seasons in a row and watch the fun.
Didn't we already learn this crap? Why do the FCC, FTC, SEC and other god-forsaken, nutless bend-over wastes of acronyms keep rubber-stamping all the mergers?
Eh? You've "lived it," yet cannot fathom why some might think a diet of dog food is less palatable than steaks and sushi?
But you obviously don't need context. I can expect little more: You tell us to get out of middle school already, but can't get your head around a language rule that's quite well documented. (Hint: It's the opposite of the way Cmdr Taco normally uses it.)
"Eating dogfood" DOES imply dealing with the implications of sloppy coding and the resultant product quality issues. That is precisely why MS, and many other organizations, employ the practice. If you live in a house with a leaky roof, you should have an added incentive to fix the damn thing.
BTW, maybe you should read more. For some illuminating anecdotes of the above-described phenomenon, crack a copy of "Show-Stopper!" It's a nice insider's peek into Dave Cutler's team and the development of NT, with many references to canine cuisine.
Oh, and the possessive form "its" DOES NOT take an apostrophe. I had that down well before middle school.
I observe Buy Nothing Day. Not only do I despise traffic, crowds and malls, but I like to send whatever tiny message to the retail world that I actively resist marketing.
That said, I still think that the DMCA, as well as illegitimate uses of it such as this one, reek worse than the proverbial warthog's bunghole.
After recently getting RS/6000 and AIX certification, I can vouch for a couple of things: One - AIX backups are a slightly different critter from most Unixes, but very useful; Two - IBM's documentation (the Redbooks) is quite good:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/
Read man backup, man mksysb, man savevg. Also see the AIX System Support Study Guide SG24-6199, chapter 9 (in the redbooks). And you can use plain old tar or cpio if you want.
Cute. Are you stupid, or just illiterate? I said "used by ranchers," not "covered in cows." Are you going to tell me that the use of that much land for growing burgers is not part of the human footprint?
Which tree-hugger book that played a hand in brainwashing you did you steal this from?
What's a tree-hugger book? Any historical or scientific text which cites its references and doesn't support your evidently highly narrow ideology? FWIW, there are many studies of the southwestern borderlands' ecology and history, and their accounts are remarkably similar. But if they don't mesh with your particular orthodoxy, they get dismissed as enviro trash. Whatever.
Kudos to ya for eating lots of game, BTW. I'm totally in favor of munching on Bambi haunches, and since I gave up beef over a decade ago I've realized what most "civilized" folk are missing because they don't eat game.
It's actually the Bureau of Livestock and Mining.
The USFS got all the loggable acreage....
I suppose that to the casual observer, a lot of the western US looks like barren desert. But nearly every square inch of it, with the exception of a few military installations and national parks/monuments, is used by ranchers. In fact, the primary reason that most of this land is degraded and less productive from a biological standpoint is precisely because of grazing pressure and the corollary activities (predator control, fire suppression, introduction of exotic plants, herbicide usage, clearcutting, etc.) practiced by livestock interests.
One case study:
The desert grasslands of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico supported herds of pronghorn, deer, elk and even the occasional bison prior to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s. Historical accounts tell of grass that reached the belly of a horse spreading across the valleys, and perennial streams that held beaver, otter and enough fish to support a bald eagle population.
Of course, this was a perfect setting for Manifest Destiny to play its hand. Wealthy cattle companies rapidly overstocked the ranges with millions of head of cattle, which devoured the forage available. Then severe drought in the 1890s and a series of devastating floods from 1900-1905 carried away topsoil from the denuded land, and the greatly increased sediment load in the watercourses cut deeper channels which altered the drainage and aquifer recharge of entire watersheds. The rivers became dry ditches, cactus and tough scrub took hold where the grass once thrived, and the regional economy crashed hard.
Similar scenes to the one described above played out across the West. In fact, most places in the world that support vegetation but are not suitable for farming (everything except tundra, boreal forest, and virgin rainforest) are grazed and have been altered considerably from their pre-agricultural baseline conditions. So the figure of 83 percent is in fact very plausible, and may in fact be conservative.
It wouldn't be too tough to start turning this tide -- if Americans would simply cut their beef consumption by one third, there would be an economic impetus for the most marginal and habitat-damaging operations to cut back or ceases altogether. India, OTOH...how the hell do you fix that?
No sane interpretation of the First Amendment says that I am obligated to pay for a computer, Internet connectivity and electricity for the express purpose of some dwad who wants to sell me penis pumps.
The logic that says I can limit the "free speech" of a Jehovah's Witness on my porch at 9 am applies here. Same goes for the "free speech" of a shady store advertising a sale price, but using the wrong picture and running out of the advertised item in order to sell pricier model.
Spam is not remotely comparable to protected speech. As long as it is commercial in nature and forces the cost burden onto the transit providers and the recipient, it merits no protection whatsoever and instead invites stringent regulation. Laws like this are a good first step.
%s/it\'s/its/g
The possesive form "its" NEVER TAKES AN APOSTROPHE. It just doesn't. I know, it's a strange rule, sort of an exception, but it's the convention that literate folk have agreed on.
Every time you throw one of those in, it's like a speed bump on a freeway. The whole purpose of punctuation and grammatical convention in writing is to allow the most seamless transition possible from your head to the page/screen and thereupon the the reader's head. Don't keep flinging the typographical equivalent of ossified dog turds at the lawn mower of my mind.
OK, mod this down and get it over with.
Wrongo. Not only is sodium a metal, but it is one of the most metallic of all the elements. Iron, on the other hand, is barely a metal in the chemical sense. And aluminum? We won't even go there.
Go study basic chemistry, and come back to us when you get a clue.
I am going on record in a public forum to say that you, ROBERT NOVAK, are a fuckwit, a nimrod, a clueless laggard and an insufferable dwad.
Got a problem with this, ROBERT NOVAK?
Sue my ass. You will, of course, have the burden of proving that the things I said are not true....
furrfu.