Generally this is true, and usually for normal manufactured products that meet the requirements of the spec, BUT there is a specific exemption in Gov't purchasing for software, and thank God for it. Because of numerous factors (usability, compatability with existing stuff, ease of integration) the lowest-cost software solution that meets the specs may completely screw up a workplace, so purchasers are given the authority to make a decision based on their own department or office, as appropriate. Some things are standardized (like MS Office), but many others are bought as needed.
I'm sure we can all imagine a workplace filled with the lowest-cost software, purchased over the past 5 years, all incompatible with one another because what they had in-hand couldn't be taken into consideration. A nightmare. It's the gov't realizing that software isn't like hammers.
Among the most high-profile efforts is research funded by the National Security Agency to develop a more secure version of the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft's Windows.
IANAProgrammer, but I think that if the good people working on the kernel would like to contribute in a huge, meaningful way to Linux AND to national security they could put their heads together and bang out an iron-clad version of Linux, contributing to the above project and developing a superior, open-source solution that could achieve three primary goals, all very desireable.
Promote Linux as the premier OS for security. It's already good - make it damn near perfect.
Provide our nation's defense infrastructure with an open-source secure OS. The DoD is a BIG customer - keep them happy.
Less importantly, shame the fuck out of MSFT. Prove these dicks wrong while they're still patching IE security holes twice a month.
If any of you follow the link provided and read the article, you'll find that the DoD is giving MS's advice exactly the (lack of) credence it's due. So before you piss yourself about supposed Bush Administration / MS collusion, just read it.
Huzzah, and thank God the good folks at the DoD are relying on solid data to make good decisions about the software used to protect the nation, and Damn MSFT for looking for growth opportunities in degrading national security by harrying them for needless proprietary expenditures & vague allusions to "legal problems".
Corporate competition is one thing, but I don't think I can say it any simpler than Keep the Fuck off our Gov't with your FUD. When it comes to the DoD, there's more at stake than your option portfolios.
I know it sounds like a dumb joke, but really -- why not a set of high-tech, NASA-designed windshield wipers for when stuff like this happens again to the optics on a satellite?
Other satellites are sure to run into interstellar crud in the future, so they could possibly have a lens-cleaning apparatus as well as a lens cover, like for Hubble.
I'm sure some engineer up there has already thought of this but I'd figure I'd toss it out there.
I happen to do basic science, in molecular biology, and your comment reflects a misunderstanding of what the term "basic science" means. It's not a simple wandering about peering into keyholes to see what's there and doing things for no reason simply to see what might happen or what you might find out. And in any case, putting a base on the moon would be more a feat of engineering than science, though I'm sure some scientific innovation would result.
It sounds all well & good to say we'll go where no man has gone before, to explore & see what happens, but when you consider doing it with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and numerous human lives, no matter the gov't or the people involved, it's a different story. Almost by ethical fiat you have to have an actual, solid, useful purpose. To shrug our shoulders in the face of such pertinent questions & say that, essentially, we figure it'd be interesting, is to cheapen the lives of the people you've sent to attempt this and to squander epic amounts of capital that could be put to better use.
1 & 2 are possible with a much cheaper low-earth orbit space station. A moon base doesn't make 3 possible, nor am I sure that the cost of going & getting asteroids (which largely exist in the asteroid belt, not hanging about the moon) would at all be worth it, nevermind the engineering feat of stearing an asteroid about safely to the moon or earth.
As for 4, going to the American West or Alaska was something a single family could provision themselves, hop in a covered wagon, and do in about 3-4 months. Once they got to their destination life was hard, but there were trees with which to build houses and fires on-site, fertile land to grow food, river water to drink, and oxygen to breathe. None of the above exists on the moon. It's a stirring analogy, but the two things aren't in my view comparable.
Now the oceans, there's a spot we might be able to work in. But screw the moon. I wish it were made of cheese - it'd be worth more.
It is customary not to speak ill of the dead, but...
But you're going to do it anyway because you like playing devil's advocate, right?
There's a time and place for everything, and those who are interested in evolutionary theory know where the chinks in Gould's armor are. But chosing today to pick his nits is like bashing Darwin for getting parts of natural selection all screwed up only to ignore the larger grandeur of his contributions.
With the exception of his most recent 2-3 books, I've read everything he's written, most of it while I was in high school. I didn't agree with all of it, but it was wonderful to explore these ideas, to look at the evidence for things, and try to construct theories that might explain them. Between Gould & Richard Dawkins I learned, before I knew if I wanted to be a scientist, what science was like and how it could answer powerful questions about biology, which I loved.
So I read this in the news this morning, and I go around the lab asking people -- "You know who Stephen Jay Gould is?" -- and to my surprise, none of the 6 or so people I asked, scientists all, knew. Sigh. I understand that many scientists are too preoccupied with their work to read about evolutionary theory, but still. It's a pity. So I figured I'd post it here, have a little nerd wake for those of us who still read the giants of biology, because one of the giants fell this morning.
Thanks to his writing I learned what I wanted to do with my life. About a decade of working in molecular biology later, I'm still not sure I agree 100% on some of his ideas, but they're clear, powerful, and worthy of deep study. So thanks, Dr. Gould.
Sometimes it's nice to get an idea of what's actually happening at average theaters and get away from the press-released sales figures.
I was AotC on Thursday night, & went & saw About a Boy on Sunday afternoon at a different theater. At both places, I asked the manager about AotC sales.
On Thursday, opening day, the manager for the popular 10-plex I went to said he had it on 2 screens and that it was selling OK, but not selling out at all, each showing at about 80% of capacity. In his words "good, but not earth-shattering". This, and only about 30 people were in line for the midnight opening show, with the theater ending up about 1/3 full.
At the 12-plex I was at on Sunday I was able to ask the manager what he thought of AotC's sales over the long opening weekend, and he said that it'd done well, but not great. He hadn't had an opening midnight show. It was continuing apace, but he said him and his division manager were generally not impressed with the sales.
So, at least where I asked, Lucas doesn't necessarily have the lustre he used to. In my own opinion, I think it's kind of ridiculous for Lucasfilm to compare AotC to Spider-man. I'd think that in a properly made Star Wars film there should be no comparison. No matter what you think of PM and AotC, the worst thing is that Star Wars is now just another stable pony in the movie race. Due mostly to PM, normal people really just aren't as excited or interested anymore about Star Wars.
As for as the film goes, I felt like I had to pay in two ways - first by shucking my bucks for the ticket, then sitting through an hour of laconic, truly horrendous dialogue and stilted acting before the lush CGI payoff. There used to be good dialogue - where's the "I know" from AotC? Who's quoting Count Dooku? Nobody, because all the lines were shit. And I never, ever want to watch Hayden Christensen masturbate again.
As always, the essential question is why. Prestige only gets you so far. Notice that after mankind proved it could be done in 1969 - 1974, we just plain stopped. Know why? We'd gotten all the scientific information we could reasonably have gotten, it was very dangerous, and very expensive. So now we have to ask why and look for deeper responses, an actual purpose to flying out into space. What possibly could be done on the moon that couldn't be done right here, or perhaps on our money pit noisemaker, the Int'l Space Station (ISS)? I strongly suspect the answer is nothing.
Speaking in a larger, world exploration of space sense, couldn't we get more scientific gain by sending out many, many more satellites equipped with finely engineered sensors? I know our human nature makes us feel that if there's not a biped there we haven't really experienced it, but putting a base on the moon, landing on mars, doing deep space exploration, etc - these are all things that become exponentially cheaper if we decide to send machines instead of people to do it.
Before we went to the moon it held an air of mystery for us. But when we got there we found it was just a big dusty gray rock, and so our fascination was with ourselves with succeeding in getting there, not with the destination itself. People who dream of moonbases fail to realize that it'll never happen. It's like going to a far-away island - anything you need you have to bring with you. Food, housing, any and all equipment to do anything - it's ridiculous and there's no reason for it. We'll also never practice interstellar travel, or likely even get beyond Mars & Venus as humans, mainly due to the gamma ray problem. And will it be worth it? For science, yes. But not for any practical purpose.
The awful fact is that M$ is one of the most appalling corporate gangsters in all of history.
HA!
If you knew anything, anything at all about JD Rockefeller or JP Morgan's operations and tactics at the turn of the last century in the oil and rail industries respectively, you would shit in your hat and praise God for Bill Gates.
Not to defend that schmuck, but we're talking about two entirely different leagues of malfeasance. You bitch about BSA audits? Try hired jackbooted thugs & private police fucking killing you for talking smack about the company or trying to organize a union. Gates doesn't even exist in the same league.
If you mentally filter out every sequence that Jar Jar is on the scene, and maybe the midochlorians, and trim that Pod Race scene down, there's a good movie in there.
I know where you're coming from Taco, but you're just wrong. It's not our job to "filter" jack squat. That's Lucas's job, one he's not doing.
FYI everyone, Rotten Tomatoes has it at "barely fresh", with 61% positive reviews. For the selected, more reputable reviews it's rotten at 47%. Doesn't bode well.
Like it matters. The jackass has us all by the nape of our childhoods. I'll be there tonight. Already got my tickets in my pocket. There'll be bits that make me happy, but they'll be like reflections on water, untouchable & disturbed if you try. Ah well. We should all just realize we can't go back again.
Wow, having read that brief by EPIC, finding out that Tivo collects info on what I watch, I'm getting a ReplayTV when I get a PVR.
Monitoring what people read/watch/listen to is the stuff of police states, and is no better if it's a company instead of the government, I don't care why they do it.
In a nationwide epiphany the likes of which haven't been seen since people realized due to the Enron collapse that (GASP) investment analysts might not have their best interests at heart, parents nationwide suddenly realized that television, video game consoles, and computers are not actually necessary to the raising of a child.
May Johnson, mother of Jonathan, age 8, and Michelle, age 11, was stunned when she realized over the weekend that a mid-day power outtage due to high winds in the Tuskaloosa area allowed her to have the longest conversation she's ever had with her children.
"When the TV popped off, at first Shelly & I just sat there kinda stunned, looking out the window at the trees being blown around. Then Jon came in from his room & said something about the wind must've blown down a line, & how it messed up a game he was playing. We talked about the weather a bit, & that led to Michelle talking about how windy it was at soccer practice & how it affected her shooting. We ended up in the dining room playing Trivial Pursuit, talking and laughing about the questions before they helped me make dinner. I was watching Shelly cut up the veggies when I realized we hadn't really talked to one another about anything for a couple of weeks, 'till then. Heck, it was about 7 before we realized the power had come back on about 2 hours before, but we were having too much fun to go back to whatever it was we were doing. When my husband got home that night we talked about it, and decided that we're cancelling our cable. For the $50 a month it costs we figure we could take the kids camping or something & get more fun for our money.
In the wake of similar comments, investment analysts for the tech industry were widely downgrading the stocks of such stalwarts as Sony, Disney, and AOL/TW.
"We don't quite know what people are doing with their time lately, but they sure as heck aren't watching TV or surfing the 'net" said Derek Cashmacher of Citicorp as he downgraded AOL/Time Warner from "BUY BUY BUY" to "buy".
There are bacteria in cheese, in yogurt, in sauerkraut, in your own mouth right now, in your own gut right now
Hear hear. And might I also add that without some of those bugs in your gut you'd suffer from a lack of certain nutrients. Coming from a bio-type, let me tell you sure, some germs cause disease, and it's a good idea to clean up any filth you have in the house to minimize them. But most germs are harmless and in your body some are beneficial. That, and trying to sterilize your house is a damned useless waste of time, and probably helps you develop your own Uber-bacteria.
I might also add that using anything other than a dilute bleach or lysol solution to get at bacteria is a waste of money. As for virii, forget it - damn near impossible to get rid of them completely if they don't fall apart eventually of their own accord.
Every damned movie critic and self-imposed cultural commentarian ala Katz stirs up the old "Power of Myth" soup every time an iteration of their favorite superhero / space opera comes up in a conversation, and it's tiring. Everyone's heard it already and worse, it has no proprietary relationship to the fantasy genre, thus betraying an essential misunderstanding of the meaning of the conclusions on cultures' storytelling habits as explained by Campbell and more in-depth studies by people like Claude Levi-Strauss.
The point, as anyone of the anthropological bent who's studied this can tell you, is that the prototypical mythic elements play into EVERY story. EVERY SINGLE movie / book / play / video game contains the same damned mythic elements. There is no limitation to myths, superhero comics, or the latest Meryl Streep vehicle according to structural anthropologists who study multicultural storytelling. Check out Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked for specific structural analyses of the arrangements of elements in ordinary stories from entirely separate cultures that have no relationship to one another, and yet are, basically, telling the SAME DAMN STORIES!
The similarity of elements in stories says something amazing about the common basis of human thought, but such mythic elements are NOT the property of Star Wars or Spider-Man. Real understanding of the importance of mythic themes comes when you get out of fantasy or space and see it in Three Little Pigs, Memento, last year's Pollock, Lawrence of Arabia and every other tale told on the screen or anywhere else.
I completely agree, and I think that one of the main reasons MS is willing to go to the wire against opening the code to their OS or APIs is that if that happens other companies and perhaps even open-source projects will find that MS has directly plagerized code, or done the plagerize + touch-ups thing.
I suspect they're scared to death at the thought of others seeing 1 - how badly produced & managed the code either is or has been before 2000/XP, 2 - parts that've been lifted illegally from other projects or companies, 3 - how whole parts of the OS could be interchangeable with other companies' products contrary to their claims, and 4 - how MS has hidden APIs that allow their own products to function with the OS better than their competitors. Of course I can't prove the above. It's just an extremely strong suspicion.
Here's what I tell my 14 year-old son about buying video games/movies/music:
You're a smart kid. You know me, and I know you. If you buy anything I disapprove of, I'm going to take it away and you'll never see it again. So if you want to keep anything you buy, it better be something I don't disapprove of. No bloody violence, no explicit sex, and no cuss words. Just ask yourself if I'd feel comfortable buying whatever it is for you, and if your answer is no, don't waste your money.
It's parental authority, and it's that simple. Stop being your kid's buddy and use it. It requires persistence and a continuing sense of care about what your kid does, but it's better than picking them up at the police station.
When you're talking about a 95 million dollar deal, Davis had better know what's going on
Perhaps in Arkansas, but not in CA. Hell, back in 1991 the state spent $25 million to build a science building at my school. $95mil is a pile of cash to you & be but looks like a hill of beans in a state budget running into the tens of billions.
But this is not to say that he isn't to blame. I agree, in the end all responsibility rests with him. My distinction is that he's appointed lousy cabinet officials who didn't oversee the transaction correctly, while the position of the GOP is that it shows Davis is corrupt. There is no evidence, yet, that this is the case. But you're right in that it's a screwup stemming from the people he appointed, and it should never have happened.
This, combined with the way he mis-managed the energy crisis
Happen to read the LA Times today (reg required)? It's a nicely laid-out story explaining all about how documents out of the Enron investigation show that they were gaming the market for profits to save their bankrupt asses. Read it and learn the truth before you talk about the energy crisis being Davis's fault. Hell, the Governor inherited a fucked-up a deregulation that, if you forget, was passed by our previous Repub Gov Pete Wilson with the bipartisan support of a complicit Assembly.
And lest you forget, while we were getting our power turned off each afternoon, it was Bush & the assholes he appointed at the FERC who refused repeated requests by our governor and senators to investigate companies' obvious fucking-around with our power & gas markets. And lo, what are we finding now that our subpoenas are being fulfilled? That these companies were indeed fucking with our energy markets for profits. It's no joke. People fucking DIED because they didn't have the money to run their A/Cs. The CEOs of these companies should rot in jail for that shit.
That's as much bullshit as saying that it's all Davis's fault. I'm a staunch Dem myself, but Davis needs to appoint people who are thoughtful, deliberative, willing to do their jobs correctly, and aren't subject to graft, like it looks like the Dep't of IT was. ALL responsibility lies, in the end, with the governor. I'm just saying that he didn't do any wrong himself. The people who did wrong were his appointees. He needs to appoint qualified people of high moral standards, not his politico buddies, or else the Dem party and the people in general will suffer.
If we're going to choose something to nail Davis on, it should be that he's happily snuggled in the pocket of the damned prison guard's union, taking their money and doing their bidding with disgusting aplomb. When compared to the anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-minority, anti-government Simon however, he's by far the better man. I've learned after 10 years of watching politics that attention to the facts and maintaining high moral standards in governing does much more good for our cause than party radical rah-rah boosterism, and I'm willing to deal with someone I don't totally agree with rather than hand the governorship to Nero.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally this is true, and usually for normal manufactured products that meet the requirements of the spec, BUT there is a specific exemption in Gov't purchasing for software, and thank God for it. Because of numerous factors (usability, compatability with existing stuff, ease of integration) the lowest-cost software solution that meets the specs may completely screw up a workplace, so purchasers are given the authority to make a decision based on their own department or office, as appropriate. Some things are standardized (like MS Office), but many others are bought as needed.
I'm sure we can all imagine a workplace filled with the lowest-cost software, purchased over the past 5 years, all incompatible with one another because what they had in-hand couldn't be taken into consideration. A nightmare. It's the gov't realizing that software isn't like hammers.
gives a whole new meaning to the term "General Protection Fault".
From the article:
Among the most high-profile efforts is research funded by the National Security Agency to develop a more secure version of the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft's Windows.
IANAProgrammer, but I think that if the good people working on the kernel would like to contribute in a huge, meaningful way to Linux AND to national security they could put their heads together and bang out an iron-clad version of Linux, contributing to the above project and developing a superior, open-source solution that could achieve three primary goals, all very desireable.
If any of you follow the link provided and read the article, you'll find that the DoD is giving MS's advice exactly the (lack of) credence it's due. So before you piss yourself about supposed Bush Administration / MS collusion, just read it.
Huzzah, and thank God the good folks at the DoD are relying on solid data to make good decisions about the software used to protect the nation, and Damn MSFT for looking for growth opportunities in degrading national security by harrying them for needless proprietary expenditures & vague allusions to "legal problems".
Corporate competition is one thing, but I don't think I can say it any simpler than Keep the Fuck off our Gov't with your FUD. When it comes to the DoD, there's more at stake than your option portfolios.
Is easy to win the Supremes over, just before they make a bad decision shout:
"Stop! In the name of Love
Before you break my heart"
Actually, no. That song's not in the public domain, and thus you'll have to be fined on the spot & beaten with Diana Ross's weave.
I know it sounds like a dumb joke, but really -- why not a set of high-tech, NASA-designed windshield wipers for when stuff like this happens again to the optics on a satellite?
Other satellites are sure to run into interstellar crud in the future, so they could possibly have a lens-cleaning apparatus as well as a lens cover, like for Hubble.
I'm sure some engineer up there has already thought of this but I'd figure I'd toss it out there.
I happen to do basic science, in molecular biology, and your comment reflects a misunderstanding of what the term "basic science" means. It's not a simple wandering about peering into keyholes to see what's there and doing things for no reason simply to see what might happen or what you might find out. And in any case, putting a base on the moon would be more a feat of engineering than science, though I'm sure some scientific innovation would result.
It sounds all well & good to say we'll go where no man has gone before, to explore & see what happens, but when you consider doing it with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and numerous human lives, no matter the gov't or the people involved, it's a different story. Almost by ethical fiat you have to have an actual, solid, useful purpose. To shrug our shoulders in the face of such pertinent questions & say that, essentially, we figure it'd be interesting, is to cheapen the lives of the people you've sent to attempt this and to squander epic amounts of capital that could be put to better use.
1 & 2 are possible with a much cheaper low-earth orbit space station. A moon base doesn't make 3 possible, nor am I sure that the cost of going & getting asteroids (which largely exist in the asteroid belt, not hanging about the moon) would at all be worth it, nevermind the engineering feat of stearing an asteroid about safely to the moon or earth.
As for 4, going to the American West or Alaska was something a single family could provision themselves, hop in a covered wagon, and do in about 3-4 months. Once they got to their destination life was hard, but there were trees with which to build houses and fires on-site, fertile land to grow food, river water to drink, and oxygen to breathe. None of the above exists on the moon. It's a stirring analogy, but the two things aren't in my view comparable.
Now the oceans, there's a spot we might be able to work in. But screw the moon. I wish it were made of cheese - it'd be worth more.
It is customary not to speak ill of the dead, but ...
But you're going to do it anyway because you like playing devil's advocate, right?
There's a time and place for everything, and those who are interested in evolutionary theory know where the chinks in Gould's armor are. But chosing today to pick his nits is like bashing Darwin for getting parts of natural selection all screwed up only to ignore the larger grandeur of his contributions.
So please, lay off.
With the exception of his most recent 2-3 books, I've read everything he's written, most of it while I was in high school. I didn't agree with all of it, but it was wonderful to explore these ideas, to look at the evidence for things, and try to construct theories that might explain them. Between Gould & Richard Dawkins I learned, before I knew if I wanted to be a scientist, what science was like and how it could answer powerful questions about biology, which I loved.
So I read this in the news this morning, and I go around the lab asking people -- "You know who Stephen Jay Gould is?" -- and to my surprise, none of the 6 or so people I asked, scientists all, knew. Sigh. I understand that many scientists are too preoccupied with their work to read about evolutionary theory, but still. It's a pity. So I figured I'd post it here, have a little nerd wake for those of us who still read the giants of biology, because one of the giants fell this morning.
Thanks to his writing I learned what I wanted to do with my life. About a decade of working in molecular biology later, I'm still not sure I agree 100% on some of his ideas, but they're clear, powerful, and worthy of deep study. So thanks, Dr. Gould.
Sometimes it's nice to get an idea of what's actually happening at average theaters and get away from the press-released sales figures.
I was AotC on Thursday night, & went & saw About a Boy on Sunday afternoon at a different theater. At both places, I asked the manager about AotC sales.
On Thursday, opening day, the manager for the popular 10-plex I went to said he had it on 2 screens and that it was selling OK, but not selling out at all, each showing at about 80% of capacity. In his words "good, but not earth-shattering". This, and only about 30 people were in line for the midnight opening show, with the theater ending up about 1/3 full.
At the 12-plex I was at on Sunday I was able to ask the manager what he thought of AotC's sales over the long opening weekend, and he said that it'd done well, but not great. He hadn't had an opening midnight show. It was continuing apace, but he said him and his division manager were generally not impressed with the sales.
So, at least where I asked, Lucas doesn't necessarily have the lustre he used to. In my own opinion, I think it's kind of ridiculous for Lucasfilm to compare AotC to Spider-man. I'd think that in a properly made Star Wars film there should be no comparison. No matter what you think of PM and AotC, the worst thing is that Star Wars is now just another stable pony in the movie race. Due mostly to PM, normal people really just aren't as excited or interested anymore about Star Wars.
As for as the film goes, I felt like I had to pay in two ways - first by shucking my bucks for the ticket, then sitting through an hour of laconic, truly horrendous dialogue and stilted acting before the lush CGI payoff. There used to be good dialogue - where's the "I know" from AotC? Who's quoting Count Dooku? Nobody, because all the lines were shit. And I never, ever want to watch Hayden Christensen masturbate again.
As always, the essential question is why. Prestige only gets you so far. Notice that after mankind proved it could be done in 1969 - 1974, we just plain stopped. Know why? We'd gotten all the scientific information we could reasonably have gotten, it was very dangerous, and very expensive. So now we have to ask why and look for deeper responses, an actual purpose to flying out into space. What possibly could be done on the moon that couldn't be done right here, or perhaps on our money pit noisemaker, the Int'l Space Station (ISS)? I strongly suspect the answer is nothing.
Speaking in a larger, world exploration of space sense, couldn't we get more scientific gain by sending out many, many more satellites equipped with finely engineered sensors? I know our human nature makes us feel that if there's not a biped there we haven't really experienced it, but putting a base on the moon, landing on mars, doing deep space exploration, etc - these are all things that become exponentially cheaper if we decide to send machines instead of people to do it.
Before we went to the moon it held an air of mystery for us. But when we got there we found it was just a big dusty gray rock, and so our fascination was with ourselves with succeeding in getting there, not with the destination itself. People who dream of moonbases fail to realize that it'll never happen. It's like going to a far-away island - anything you need you have to bring with you. Food, housing, any and all equipment to do anything - it's ridiculous and there's no reason for it. We'll also never practice interstellar travel, or likely even get beyond Mars & Venus as humans, mainly due to the gamma ray problem. And will it be worth it? For science, yes. But not for any practical purpose.
The awful fact is that M$ is one of the most appalling corporate gangsters in all of history.
HA!
If you knew anything, anything at all about JD Rockefeller or JP Morgan's operations and tactics at the turn of the last century in the oil and rail industries respectively, you would shit in your hat and praise God for Bill Gates.
Not to defend that schmuck, but we're talking about two entirely different leagues of malfeasance. You bitch about BSA audits? Try hired jackbooted thugs & private police fucking killing you for talking smack about the company or trying to organize a union. Gates doesn't even exist in the same league.
If you mentally filter out every sequence that Jar Jar is on the scene, and maybe the midochlorians, and trim that Pod Race scene down, there's a good movie in there.
I know where you're coming from Taco, but you're just wrong. It's not our job to "filter" jack squat. That's Lucas's job, one he's not doing.
FYI everyone, Rotten Tomatoes has it at "barely fresh", with 61% positive reviews. For the selected, more reputable reviews it's rotten at 47%. Doesn't bode well.
Like it matters. The jackass has us all by the nape of our childhoods. I'll be there tonight. Already got my tickets in my pocket. There'll be bits that make me happy, but they'll be like reflections on water, untouchable & disturbed if you try. Ah well. We should all just realize we can't go back again.
Wow, having read that brief by EPIC, finding out that Tivo collects info on what I watch, I'm getting a ReplayTV when I get a PVR.
Monitoring what people read/watch/listen to is the stuff of police states, and is no better if it's a company instead of the government, I don't care why they do it.
Tuesday, May 14 2002 - New York, NY
In a nationwide epiphany the likes of which haven't been seen since people realized due to the Enron collapse that (GASP) investment analysts might not have their best interests at heart, parents nationwide suddenly realized that television, video game consoles, and computers are not actually necessary to the raising of a child.
May Johnson, mother of Jonathan, age 8, and Michelle, age 11, was stunned when she realized over the weekend that a mid-day power outtage due to high winds in the Tuskaloosa area allowed her to have the longest conversation she's ever had with her children.
"When the TV popped off, at first Shelly & I just sat there kinda stunned, looking out the window at the trees being blown around. Then Jon came in from his room & said something about the wind must've blown down a line, & how it messed up a game he was playing. We talked about the weather a bit, & that led to Michelle talking about how windy it was at soccer practice & how it affected her shooting. We ended up in the dining room playing Trivial Pursuit, talking and laughing about the questions before they helped me make dinner. I was watching Shelly cut up the veggies when I realized we hadn't really talked to one another about anything for a couple of weeks, 'till then. Heck, it was about 7 before we realized the power had come back on about 2 hours before, but we were having too much fun to go back to whatever it was we were doing. When my husband got home that night we talked about it, and decided that we're cancelling our cable. For the $50 a month it costs we figure we could take the kids camping or something & get more fun for our money.
In the wake of similar comments, investment analysts for the tech industry were widely downgrading the stocks of such stalwarts as Sony, Disney, and AOL/TW.
"We don't quite know what people are doing with their time lately, but they sure as heck aren't watching TV or surfing the 'net" said Derek Cashmacher of Citicorp as he downgraded AOL/Time Warner from "BUY BUY BUY" to "buy".
There are bacteria in cheese, in yogurt, in sauerkraut, in your own mouth right now, in your own gut right now
Hear hear. And might I also add that without some of those bugs in your gut you'd suffer from a lack of certain nutrients. Coming from a bio-type, let me tell you sure, some germs cause disease, and it's a good idea to clean up any filth you have in the house to minimize them. But most germs are harmless and in your body some are beneficial. That, and trying to sterilize your house is a damned useless waste of time, and probably helps you develop your own Uber-bacteria.
I might also add that using anything other than a dilute bleach or lysol solution to get at bacteria is a waste of money. As for virii, forget it - damn near impossible to get rid of them completely if they don't fall apart eventually of their own accord.
Dear God! Our poor little babies being babysat by the computers are catching bacterial infections from our filthy, filthy electronics!
Support the Child Online Cleanliness Act (COCA) to mandate child-safe bacterial filters on all library computers!
Stop the scourge of scurvy being brought home by your children using the same computer as some scuzzy homeless person!
Lord knows I always keep a box of handy-wipes by the computer for, um, cleanliness' sake.
Every damned movie critic and self-imposed cultural commentarian ala Katz stirs up the old "Power of Myth" soup every time an iteration of their favorite superhero / space opera comes up in a conversation, and it's tiring. Everyone's heard it already and worse, it has no proprietary relationship to the fantasy genre, thus betraying an essential misunderstanding of the meaning of the conclusions on cultures' storytelling habits as explained by Campbell and more in-depth studies by people like Claude Levi-Strauss.
The point, as anyone of the anthropological bent who's studied this can tell you, is that the prototypical mythic elements play into EVERY story. EVERY SINGLE movie / book / play / video game contains the same damned mythic elements. There is no limitation to myths, superhero comics, or the latest Meryl Streep vehicle according to structural anthropologists who study multicultural storytelling. Check out Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked for specific structural analyses of the arrangements of elements in ordinary stories from entirely separate cultures that have no relationship to one another, and yet are, basically, telling the SAME DAMN STORIES!
The similarity of elements in stories says something amazing about the common basis of human thought, but such mythic elements are NOT the property of Star Wars or Spider-Man. Real understanding of the importance of mythic themes comes when you get out of fantasy or space and see it in Three Little Pigs, Memento, last year's Pollock, Lawrence of Arabia and every other tale told on the screen or anywhere else.
I completely agree, and I think that one of the main reasons MS is willing to go to the wire against opening the code to their OS or APIs is that if that happens other companies and perhaps even open-source projects will find that MS has directly plagerized code, or done the plagerize + touch-ups thing.
I suspect they're scared to death at the thought of others seeing 1 - how badly produced & managed the code either is or has been before 2000/XP, 2 - parts that've been lifted illegally from other projects or companies, 3 - how whole parts of the OS could be interchangeable with other companies' products contrary to their claims, and 4 - how MS has hidden APIs that allow their own products to function with the OS better than their competitors. Of course I can't prove the above. It's just an extremely strong suspicion.
That's about how much I'd pay for a Pro.
In fact, I'd rather pay $300 for a Pro than a .pro.
Theo is missing some elements for the table, in case you have any spare europium (in a proper container, of course) lying about.
You can get Europium Oxide from Sigma-Aldrich Chemicals. About $162 for 10g. It's an oxide of the element, but it's stable.
Here's what I tell my 14 year-old son about buying video games/movies/music:
You're a smart kid. You know me, and I know you. If you buy anything I disapprove of, I'm going to take it away and you'll never see it again. So if you want to keep anything you buy, it better be something I don't disapprove of. No bloody violence, no explicit sex, and no cuss words. Just ask yourself if I'd feel comfortable buying whatever it is for you, and if your answer is no, don't waste your money.
It's parental authority, and it's that simple. Stop being your kid's buddy and use it. It requires persistence and a continuing sense of care about what your kid does, but it's better than picking them up at the police station.
When you're talking about a 95 million dollar deal, Davis had better know what's going on
Perhaps in Arkansas, but not in CA. Hell, back in 1991 the state spent $25 million to build a science building at my school. $95mil is a pile of cash to you & be but looks like a hill of beans in a state budget running into the tens of billions.
But this is not to say that he isn't to blame. I agree, in the end all responsibility rests with him. My distinction is that he's appointed lousy cabinet officials who didn't oversee the transaction correctly, while the position of the GOP is that it shows Davis is corrupt. There is no evidence, yet, that this is the case. But you're right in that it's a screwup stemming from the people he appointed, and it should never have happened.
This, combined with the way he mis-managed the energy crisis
Happen to read the LA Times today (reg required)? It's a nicely laid-out story explaining all about how documents out of the Enron investigation show that they were gaming the market for profits to save their bankrupt asses. Read it and learn the truth before you talk about the energy crisis being Davis's fault. Hell, the Governor inherited a fucked-up a deregulation that, if you forget, was passed by our previous Repub Gov Pete Wilson with the bipartisan support of a complicit Assembly.
And lest you forget, while we were getting our power turned off each afternoon, it was Bush & the assholes he appointed at the FERC who refused repeated requests by our governor and senators to investigate companies' obvious fucking-around with our power & gas markets. And lo, what are we finding now that our subpoenas are being fulfilled? That these companies were indeed fucking with our energy markets for profits. It's no joke. People fucking DIED because they didn't have the money to run their A/Cs. The CEOs of these companies should rot in jail for that shit.
Yeah damnit! Dems do no wrong!
That's as much bullshit as saying that it's all Davis's fault. I'm a staunch Dem myself, but Davis needs to appoint people who are thoughtful, deliberative, willing to do their jobs correctly, and aren't subject to graft, like it looks like the Dep't of IT was. ALL responsibility lies, in the end, with the governor. I'm just saying that he didn't do any wrong himself. The people who did wrong were his appointees. He needs to appoint qualified people of high moral standards, not his politico buddies, or else the Dem party and the people in general will suffer.
If we're going to choose something to nail Davis on, it should be that he's happily snuggled in the pocket of the damned prison guard's union, taking their money and doing their bidding with disgusting aplomb. When compared to the anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-minority, anti-government Simon however, he's by far the better man. I've learned after 10 years of watching politics that attention to the facts and maintaining high moral standards in governing does much more good for our cause than party radical rah-rah boosterism, and I'm willing to deal with someone I don't totally agree with rather than hand the governorship to Nero.