Good Lord, you're not suggesting that the American people could influence corporate behaviour through their spending habits, are you? What would Karl Marx say? What would the Green Party do? Where would Ralph Nader go?
Most of all, what would happen to my God-given right to have policemen force my will upon strangers hundreds of miles away?
No it's not. Try advertising liquor on Saturday mornings, phone sex in prime time, or the Nazi Party anytime.
A lot of companies pick and choose their advertisers for a lot of reasons, and not flacking for their competitors is a damned good one.
If, as has been mentioned above, VA Linux chooses to advertise for other competetive companies, I presume that it's based on the idea that a rising Linux tide lifts all boats, not because they find it morally compelling to accept any and all ads.
I don't think it was arrogant, just a reminder that working at right-angles reflects a limitation of Man's techniques, not a law of Nature. He didn't, for instance, suggest that God would use only forty-five degree angles, merely that He would use them, probably in conjunction with other angles, if He were designing a chip, perhaps as part of a guidance system for a more advanced version of the Holy Hand Grenade (the Holy Smart Bomb?)
The real question, of course, is how many pins God's chip would have, and how many angles (dancing or otherwise) there would be for each pin. This issue may occupy the staff of Jesuit Research Technologies for some time to come.
I have read that the very first commercial jingle (for gum, as I recall) was carefully timed to some 10 seconds -- long enough to be memorably irritating, but not quite long enough to get up and turn the radio dial.
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Not unless you meant that Einstein founded FIG's journal.
You have more respect for the American consumer than the legal system does. I used to work for a Major Chain of Retail Stores, which operated under a consent decree regarding B & S.
Not only would an outright refusal to sell the item be illegal, but merely speaking badly of it ("Sure, you can buy it, but it's a piece of crap. Let me show you a real computer") or even simply being unenthusiastic would have been over the legal line.
We were legally obligated to sell the item just as hard as, in fact harder than, anything else. Only if the customer asked about moving up could we do so -- the initiative had to come from the other side, because apparently everybody in the legal system knows that the typical American consumer is a complete idiot, with no defenses against fast-talking salesmen whatsoever, as helpless as a baby harp seal.
Of course, once the customer did express a doubt, or ask what made the other models different, then we could fix them with our Mesmer stares and have our way with them.:)
If the situation is as described, this isn't "bait and switch". B & S is advertising one thing (say a $100 PC), and then refusing to sell it, instead talking the customer into something else more profitable.
What is described here is, if accurate, either breach of contract or simple fraud. These customers weren't sold up the line, but rather down the river.
Actually (God, you can't catch a break, can you?), IIRC jet fuel is pretty much kerosene, which is pretty much deisel fuel. Turbines aren't terribly picky. Barring some additives, I've been told you could heat your house, drive your truck, bunker your ship, fuel your Atlas rocket, and fly your F-16 from just about the same tank.
Aviation gas, used in piston-engined aircraft, is another matter entirely.
Rekon some sick bastard will put an afterburner on one? ; )
Afterburners dump fuel into the exhaust to increase thrust, but since the turbine's torque is the motive power here, rather than the thrust, that wouldn't help much (except maybe for an impressive tail of flame).
Come to think of it, you might also melt the rear tire at speed. I sense a Darwin Award in the making...
Nature sets up a system among animals that ensures both species survival and ecological balance.
Apparently you and I live in different Natures. The one where I live, far from "ensuring species survival", has killed off some 99.9% of species over time.
Like ecological balance, survival is dynamic, and circumstances generally favour the best dancers. Sometimes territorial behaviour is highly appropriate, and sometimes it's not, which may be part of the reason that previously succesful and highly territorial lions are dying out in relatively open Africa while flexible coyotes are thriving here in the built-up United States. Most territorial behaviour is against members of one's own species, and indeed generally only other males of one's species, because it's primarily about reproduction rather than sustenance. It's not about maintaining a hunting ground, because lions (for instance), do not spend their days driving off cheetahs or jackals (clearly competitors for food), just other male lions. They don't care all that much whether their cubs get fed, just that nobody else mates with their females. It is, after all, a game of percentages -- if you kill everybody but your offspring, for instance, then you've won (your genes are the most common in the surviving population), even though your species has been severely damaged.
I do have to say, though, that if you find marking trees and making rude noises at other males the sum of masculinity, such that questioning its utility is "male-bashing", then you don't think much of us. Personally I find that I and most other men are capable of far more than waving our dicks to impress some other guy who walks into the neighborhood.
Wow -- in my almost 42 years of being male, I've been called a bunch of things, but I think I've just been accused of being some kind of lesbian. Cool stuff.
Still, it's good to know that my ilk and I are responsible for the sorry state of the world. I thought I pretty much had my hands full being responsible for the sorry state of my lawn, but I guess my authority is greater than I thought.
I'm not "male-bashing", I'm simply pointing out that not every aspect of male behaviour is necessarily a good thing. The territorial instinct is terrific to ensure the promulgation of one's genes, but that's not the same thing as getting food or shelter. In many cases (including, to my horror, farm cats) it includes things like killing the young of previous mates, behaviour that I think we'd agree should generally be discouraged in polite society.
If you'd like to address the instinct to protect one's children (an instinct I certainly felt from the moment I watched my daughter's birth), then I'll happily join you in praising men. I find that instinct one of our finest. Just don't confuse it with territoriality, which in of itself neither feeds nor protects anybody, but rather seeks self-aggrandizement, if need be at the expense of the community or even family. Howler monkeys are probably not our best models.
If the meaning you wished to convey was "not free", than could I suggest that you use the term "not free" rather than "disenfranchised"? At the very least we would have saved some time. I realize that it is popular to use the term in the sense you did, without regard to legal rights, just as it is to use "minority" to mean "underclass", regardless of numbers, but it confuses rather than clarifies. (Could I be more condescending? I'll stop now.)
The territorial instinct is often vested in the male, it's true, and it's frankly one of the more embarrassing aspects of my gender since it's not good for much of anything yet takes up so much time and energy. Male lions are very good at protecting their territory against other male lions, but not nearly as good at hunting as their females. Pimps are exteremely territorial, but all the work is done by the hookers. Gang members will defend their turf against other gangs, but still live with their mothers because all their efforts are completely unproductive. The very fact that females tend to be less territorial and more practical inclines me to invest in them rather than their mates.
disenfranchised adj : deprived of the rights of citizenship especially the right to vote [syn: disfranchised, voteless]
Your peasant may be exploited all to hell, but that's not the same thing as disenfranchised.
And I have to ask: why should the groom be required to show that he can support a family? My interest would be in showing that somebody can support the family, and my money's on the wife. The World Bank has been finding that, tradition notwithstanding, a hell of a lot of women are better businessmen than their husbands anyway, less inclined to piss away wealth on status and liquor (in fact, I'd bet the dowery tradition has a lot to do with fathers showing off how much they can give away.)
That's because the traditional spectrum has been maintained as a means of limiting the debate -- if you can keep people thinking only "left" and "right", then they'll never look "up" or "down", thus maintaining a two-party system.
Libertarian ideas, as an example, are almost unthinkable to many voters, simply because they can't place them on that line and that's too weird. Libertarians must be crypto-authoritarians, or closet communists, or something. (There must be other parties in the same boat -- anybody have other examples?)
As for your pic of Hitler at a Communist rally -- are you sure about that? Could it have been a diplomatic event during the Non-Agression Pact period? I'm no historian, but a Bolshevik Hitler would surprise me a great deal.
There you go. If you give the information away to a third party, then it's no longer a secret.
You're lost, so you ask me for directions. Later the cops ask me where you were going. I can stand on my own privacy -- that conversation was between you and me -- but you can't stop me from revealing it if I choose.
The router needs to know where your packets are going, so you tell the router. If the router's operator chooses to keep that information private, that's his privilege, but you've already lost that privacy when you used the router.
If this seems unreasonable to you, I'm sorry. I don't know any means of visiting a web site without anybody else knowing. It is a limitation of the technology, and short of running your own wire to their server it's likely to remain. I also don't know any means by which I can fly like a bird, and I thinks that's unfair too, but I live with it.
Can't speak for Canada, but here in the States the argument is that the numbers you dial have always been known to a third party, namely the phone company, and that therefore you can't expect that to be private.
Picture the classic Mayberry situation: you pick up the phone and ask Mabel to connect you to Floyd the barber. You expect her to hang up after putting you through, so your conversation with Floyd is private, but you can't assume that she will forget connecting you. In fact, she may even write down the numbers for billing purposes. At that point, they are her records, not yours, and while she might claim privacy, you've already given it up.
The moral is that you should go to the barber shop in person (and don't take a cab -- I believe the same reasoning holds.)
Close, yes. IIRC Monarch Services was a parent company of Monarch Printing and Avalon Hill. As I understood the story, Monarch (which specialized in low-volume weird print jobs) was printing game boards for a struggling little game company. As the struggle was about to overwhelm them, Monarch bought them, Eric Dott reasoning that they could be made profitable (which I believe they were, for many years).
Girl's Life was a later project, but I think the inspriration was in fact Boy's Life (probably minus the bad jokes page).
I wasn't speaking about the patent aspect. It's the, "my city isn't noisy enough with all the boom cars, crying babies, barking dogs, screaming kids, honking horns, and arguing drunks" part that I didn't like (well, some of the dogs are mine). Whether or not it's patented, it's a purely evil idea.
(This may be the only forum in the world in which someone might say, "Now that I've finished testing it on orphans and puppies, I've just patented my airborne plague capable of killing all animal and plant life on land and sea", and get the response, "You fiend! You should open source that plague!")
However, I suppose I should have put in a smiley or something. I didn't really think you were terribly serious, and I wasn't really serious in my response, either.
Please feel free to burn in hell or not, as you see fit.:)
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Most of all, what would happen to my God-given right to have policemen force my will upon strangers hundreds of miles away?
A lot of companies pick and choose their advertisers for a lot of reasons, and not flacking for their competitors is a damned good one.
If, as has been mentioned above, VA Linux chooses to advertise for other competetive companies, I presume that it's based on the idea that a rising Linux tide lifts all boats, not because they find it morally compelling to accept any and all ads.
The real question, of course, is how many pins God's chip would have, and how many angles (dancing or otherwise) there would be for each pin. This issue may occupy the staff of Jesuit Research Technologies for some time to come.
Yesterday -- my daughter's great, but my car's a '92 Escort.
I have read that the very first commercial jingle (for gum, as I recall) was carefully timed to some 10 seconds -- long enough to be memorably irritating, but not quite long enough to get up and turn the radio dial.
Picture a world in which dropping the mouse to type and lifting your hands from the keyboard to point are no longer issues.
I'm not going out to buy one either, but not because of handedness.
Hmmm...does look a little off, I agree, although the green is right. A work in progress, perhaps?
Yeah, that's where I go to get worms and electrical parts (and doesn't everybody laugh when I get mixed up and run current through a nightcrawler!)
Not only would an outright refusal to sell the item be illegal, but merely speaking badly of it ("Sure, you can buy it, but it's a piece of crap. Let me show you a real computer") or even simply being unenthusiastic would have been over the legal line.
We were legally obligated to sell the item just as hard as, in fact harder than, anything else. Only if the customer asked about moving up could we do so -- the initiative had to come from the other side, because apparently everybody in the legal system knows that the typical American consumer is a complete idiot, with no defenses against fast-talking salesmen whatsoever, as helpless as a baby harp seal.
Of course, once the customer did express a doubt, or ask what made the other models different, then we could fix them with our Mesmer stares and have our way with them. :)
What is described here is, if accurate, either breach of contract or simple fraud. These customers weren't sold up the line, but rather down the river.
Aviation gas, used in piston-engined aircraft, is another matter entirely.
Come to think of it, you might also melt the rear tire at speed. I sense a Darwin Award in the making...
Like ecological balance, survival is dynamic, and circumstances generally favour the best dancers. Sometimes territorial behaviour is highly appropriate, and sometimes it's not, which may be part of the reason that previously succesful and highly territorial lions are dying out in relatively open Africa while flexible coyotes are thriving here in the built-up United States. Most territorial behaviour is against members of one's own species, and indeed generally only other males of one's species, because it's primarily about reproduction rather than sustenance. It's not about maintaining a hunting ground, because lions (for instance), do not spend their days driving off cheetahs or jackals (clearly competitors for food), just other male lions. They don't care all that much whether their cubs get fed, just that nobody else mates with their females. It is, after all, a game of percentages -- if you kill everybody but your offspring, for instance, then you've won (your genes are the most common in the surviving population), even though your species has been severely damaged.
I do have to say, though, that if you find marking trees and making rude noises at other males the sum of masculinity, such that questioning its utility is "male-bashing", then you don't think much of us. Personally I find that I and most other men are capable of far more than waving our dicks to impress some other guy who walks into the neighborhood.
For my part, I only wave mine to impress girls.
Still, it's good to know that my ilk and I are responsible for the sorry state of the world. I thought I pretty much had my hands full being responsible for the sorry state of my lawn, but I guess my authority is greater than I thought.
I'm not "male-bashing", I'm simply pointing out that not every aspect of male behaviour is necessarily a good thing. The territorial instinct is terrific to ensure the promulgation of one's genes, but that's not the same thing as getting food or shelter. In many cases (including, to my horror, farm cats) it includes things like killing the young of previous mates, behaviour that I think we'd agree should generally be discouraged in polite society.
If you'd like to address the instinct to protect one's children (an instinct I certainly felt from the moment I watched my daughter's birth), then I'll happily join you in praising men. I find that instinct one of our finest. Just don't confuse it with territoriality, which in of itself neither feeds nor protects anybody, but rather seeks self-aggrandizement, if need be at the expense of the community or even family. Howler monkeys are probably not our best models.
The territorial instinct is often vested in the male, it's true, and it's frankly one of the more embarrassing aspects of my gender since it's not good for much of anything yet takes up so much time and energy. Male lions are very good at protecting their territory against other male lions, but not nearly as good at hunting as their females. Pimps are exteremely territorial, but all the work is done by the hookers. Gang members will defend their turf against other gangs, but still live with their mothers because all their efforts are completely unproductive. The very fact that females tend to be less territorial and more practical inclines me to invest in them rather than their mates.
And I have to ask: why should the groom be required to show that he can support a family? My interest would be in showing that somebody can support the family, and my money's on the wife. The World Bank has been finding that, tradition notwithstanding, a hell of a lot of women are better businessmen than their husbands anyway, less inclined to piss away wealth on status and liquor (in fact, I'd bet the dowery tradition has a lot to do with fathers showing off how much they can give away.)
Libertarian ideas, as an example, are almost unthinkable to many voters, simply because they can't place them on that line and that's too weird. Libertarians must be crypto-authoritarians, or closet communists, or something. (There must be other parties in the same boat -- anybody have other examples?)
As for your pic of Hitler at a Communist rally -- are you sure about that? Could it have been a diplomatic event during the Non-Agression Pact period? I'm no historian, but a Bolshevik Hitler would surprise me a great deal.
(Yeah, I know about the missing the ground thing, but that hasn't worked so far.)
You're lost, so you ask me for directions. Later the cops ask me where you were going. I can stand on my own privacy -- that conversation was between you and me -- but you can't stop me from revealing it if I choose.
The router needs to know where your packets are going, so you tell the router. If the router's operator chooses to keep that information private, that's his privilege, but you've already lost that privacy when you used the router.
If this seems unreasonable to you, I'm sorry. I don't know any means of visiting a web site without anybody else knowing. It is a limitation of the technology, and short of running your own wire to their server it's likely to remain. I also don't know any means by which I can fly like a bird, and I thinks that's unfair too, but I live with it.
Picture the classic Mayberry situation: you pick up the phone and ask Mabel to connect you to Floyd the barber. You expect her to hang up after putting you through, so your conversation with Floyd is private, but you can't assume that she will forget connecting you. In fact, she may even write down the numbers for billing purposes. At that point, they are her records, not yours, and while she might claim privacy, you've already given it up.
The moral is that you should go to the barber shop in person (and don't take a cab -- I believe the same reasoning holds.)
The weird thing about this case is that it was the victim who asked the crowd, "I bet you can't pick up this dime without touching the glass!"
Here's an interesting question: does he have the $5K?
Well, I suppose we're OK then. See you in the funny papers!
Girl's Life was a later project, but I think the inspriration was in fact Boy's Life (probably minus the bad jokes page).
(This may be the only forum in the world in which someone might say, "Now that I've finished testing it on orphans and puppies, I've just patented my airborne plague capable of killing all animal and plant life on land and sea", and get the response, "You fiend! You should open source that plague!")
However, I suppose I should have put in a smiley or something. I didn't really think you were terribly serious, and I wasn't really serious in my response, either.
Please feel free to burn in hell or not, as you see fit. :)