Note: just because you are ignorant does not make other people "mind-bogglingly stupid".
Old growth fir and redwood is not used for paper-making, it's used for construction and furniture-making. Paper is made from pulpwood, which comes from fast-growing softwoods--which are farmed. Down in the Deep South, Georgia-Pacific and Weyrhauser own thousands of square miles of tree farms covered with slash pines and loblolly pines, and they buy additional pulpwood from local landowners who farm the same pines.
Paper is a renewable resource; far batter to use paper than non-renewable plastic.
I don't think "normal" human beings can concentrate on anything much more than four hours straight, so don't feel bad. That's why we have lunch breaks, snack breaks, surfing/., playing Freecell, alternate tasks to switch to, etc. during the workday. I think playing a MMORPG or Civilization is the only thing I've done for 8+ hours straight with nothing except bathroom breaks.
Yeah, it's called "caffeine withdrawal". Why anyone is surprised by it, when it has been documented that caffeine is addictive as heroin, I don't know...
The no-USB rule is because higher-ups got tired of constant security breaches because someone plugged a virus-infected USB into a military computer. (And/or carelessly used an infected USB drive to circumvent the low-to-high or high-to-low transfer rules.) The use of write-once media is for transfers from low-to-high, because there is no way you can accidentally write classified info onto the UNCLASSIFIED transfer media if it is a fixated write-once CD or DVD.
Makes perfect sense to me. What's your problem with it?
Also, the NMCI contract is a boondoggle for the benefit of the company that's running it. Navy would have been better off doing the whole thing in-house.
That is an awesome idea! You wouldn't happen to have a link to any especially high-res online copies of Brady's and other contemporary photos, would you? Otherwise, time to Google.
As someone who grows fresh kitchen herbs, I can add that fresh herbs are expensive because you have to sell them FRESH, not "chill-preserved for weeks in a refrigerator car". Sweet Basil, for example, has NO (zero, none, nada, zip) shelf life. It rots a day after picking it and putting it in the vegetable chiller in the refrigerator. You can freeze it or dry it, but you can't keep it fresh without keeping the whole plant alive.
No, AdBlock does not work that way unless you subscribe to the blacklist. If you don't opt for someone else's blacklist (I don't, because maybe they don't like stuff I'd like to see), you have to choose to block ads from each source. Of course, once you blook all *.swf and ads from the major adserver domains, that covers most of the annoying stuff. Also, I don't like strange scripts playing without my permission, so I block scripts with NoScript by default and whitelist later, which just happens to block most of the ads.
I'm tired of idiots who spout their party-line without bothering to fact check. According to many, many WoW posters in the big thread O' doom, posting to forums is necessary for decent technical support. In-game issues are frequently referred to the support FORUM (not call-in support) by GMs, and it is well known that issues are frequently resolved an order of magnitude faster via forum than via call-in tech support or website trouble ticket.
Second, why should women be second-class citizens who must avoid communicating with other players out of fear? It's pretty well known that in communities dominated by insecure young men, a women is best off going by a neutral or male pseudonym if she wants her ideas heard, and to avoid pointless abuse. This is not new, nor is it news. It's unfortunate, it sucks, but unfortunately that's the way it is until parents get back to the job of civilizing their testostorone-laden young fucktards who are easily frightened by sentient beings with breasts.
The only "parenting for other people" I see in this incident belongs to Blizzard, who seems to think that gamers shouldn't be allowed to choose the face they present to the world. Enough screaming and cancellations and they got the hint. (Yes, it wasn't just forum posts; people were cancelling subscriptions and game pre-orders en masse).
Correction: your estate would have to pay your outstanding debts, not your wife, kids or other relatives. Once your estate has been exhausted, they don't owe a damn thing, because it's not THEIR debt. If there's any leftovers of your estate after creditors are paid, your heirs get it.
I feel obliged to point this out because credit card companies are notorious for pressuring survivors to pay off the deceased's credit debt, even if it the survivor had no legal tie to debt (wasn't a co-signer). A friend of mine whose middle-aged mother died unexpectedly found herself in that situation; fortunately, she had friends who were able to advise her that she could tell the collectors trying to make her personally pay off her mother's debts to go take a flying leap, because she didn't legally owe anything and couldn't be made to pay.
Caveat: in the specific case of a spouse, community property laws probably complicate things. IANAL, nor do I play one on TV.
As you probably didn't read on other posts, Verizon should have waived the ETF **BECAUSE** she moved to an area with no Verizon service. She agreed to pay them for service, they don't provide service and still expect her to pay? Sorry, contract law doesn't work that way. I rather doubt your cell phone contract has a clause that says "You are not allowed to move out of our service area", and if it did, you could probably get it tossed out as unconscionable.
Wish I had some mod points. You're not insightful, just obnoxious.
As someone who has been on a jury, I have to disagree. Sometimes, it's the other way around--you can get the notion the prosecutor is being a dick and really look hard for reasonable doubt and other reasons the defendant might not be guilty. Prosecutors do sometimes railroad people to make their record of convictions look good, and local jurors may well know that.
In the meantime, use Spybot Seek-and-Destroy to remove the tracking cookies periodically. Spybot S&D also creates an "innoculated" hosts file for you that blacklists most of the ad trackers. Useful to have in conjunction with APB and NoScript. I never realize the crap I *DON'T* see until I browse news sites from work and get buried under annoying ads.
Because pulpwood for paper-making and hardwood for structural timbers and cabinetry are two different animals. Er, plants. Pulpwood is fast-growing, soft woods like slash pine or cottonwood, and can be easily farmed--and it is. The major paper companies own huge tracts of land in the Deep South that are pine farms. Paper is a renewable resource; it's the sustainable choice of "paper or plastic?"
Quality hardwoods take much longer to grow. Even water oak, which is a mediocre hardwood, takes 30 years to grow a decent tree. That's why were still cutting the original reserve of old-growth timber nature laid up for us.
When you look at the facts on the ground, many, if not most, Americans practice what can only be called socialist ideals: they care about the weak in society, they care about the environment, they want to share their wealth and so on.
Those were Christian ideals long before Socialism was thought of, and the United States was mostly colonized by Christian sects running from persecution. So, it's a long tradition here.
The native American nations are poverty-stricken, woefully under-educated, had their religions, languages and cultures oppressed for generations, and their citizens are generally treated as third-class citizens, but I suspect there are more of them now than there were in 1776.
Actually, I would be interested in that if I ever get up to Chicago. The Oriental Institute's museum is one of the ones I want to see someday--I've an avid amateur (and writer's) interest in Egyptology and Assyriology (as they called it in the 19th century--it's Ancient Near Eastern Studies now, right?)
I find it hard to believe that pre-dynastic Egyptian civilization is totally ignored, given Flinders Petrie's and others extensive excavations of the Naqada civilizations. There had to be something before Naqada I--they already had extensive trade networks and a settled, agricultural society. The problem in Egypt seems to me to be that evidence is probably buried under a mile of Nilotic sediment. Hmm, a quick Wiki look at Pre-Dynastic Egypt mentions a bunch of Neolithic cultures in the region, that were agricultural, settled and made beautiful stoneware. What's suppressed about older cultures? What are we defining as "civilization"?
Once again the guy I lease my farm ground to cannot bring himself to understand why I make him leave 10 yard untilled perimeters around all my fields. To him that is just leaving money in the fields.
Send him over to your local USDA Soil & Water Conservation District office. There's one in every U.S. county not paved over with city. They'll explain it to him.
I hadn't thought about it in terms of game management, though I can see where that is significant. It's also a very important, cheap way to improve soil conservation. You don't clear to the edge of your streams for the same reason--leave a belt of forest along the stream banks.
Here's the money part that your thick friend might get: good topsoil that washes off your land has to be replaced, and/or you have to use more of expensive agricultural chemicals like fertilizers to make up for the loss.
most small doctors, due to the cost, already use intermediary companies to handle billing and colelction eliminating them from direct responsibility
You know what that also does? The small intermediary company doesn't give a crap if the doctor's customers get pissed off by mismanaged billing and insurance paperwork handling; they just insist on the money being paid. The doctor's office, since it isn't directly responsible, blows off your insurance issues with "the billing company handles that". This can really screw you if, say, the insurance company isn't paying up on the excuse that the doctor didn't send them some obscure paperwork on request--it's not in the insurance company's interest to push the issue, because then they'd have to pay out money, the billing company doesn't give a crap, because the doctor is their customer, not you, and the doctor's office doesn't handle billing or insurance paperwork, so they don't have a clue what's going on.
I had a 2-3 year fight with my (former) doctor's billing office and my (former) health insurance company over such a snafu. Made me hate going to the doctor for any reason whatsoever, because it would start up the fight with the insurance company all over again. Got so I wouldn't go to the doctor for anything short of an emergency--no routine check-ups, no innoculations, no visits for colds, flu, sinus infections that hadn't progressed to the "clutching my head and screaming in pain" stage, no checks on my blood pressure, no nothing, just because of the massive stress-inducing hassle.
My insurance problems miracuously cleared up when I was switched (old doctor closed his practice after Katrina) to a doctor whose office did their own billing and thus gave a crap about clearing the payment issue up.
Yeah, that's why I won't even consider iAnything development. One cannot make rational business decisions when there are no clear rules, and the murky, unwritten rules change capriciously. Is Apple going to reimburse me for my time, money and effort invested in writing an app that is stillborn because they whimsically change the rules about what is acceptable? Somehow I doubt it. Whereas if I write an application for Linux, Windows, MacOS, or, back in the day, PalmOS, it's my risk that no one will be interested in it, but at least I don't have to worry about the hardware or OS maker deciding AFTER I have created my program that I can't distribute it.
I'm amazed that Apple has managed to hornswoggle everyone and the DOJ into going along with this Prior Restraint of Trade thing... Apple is a lot like a 3rd World banana republic that way--businesses avoid investing in areas where the rule of law is capricious or absent. If you never know from day to day whether your standard business practices are acceptable in a country, or perhaps tomorrow to be deemed criminal and you subject to forfeiture of your assets/imprisonment, you avoid doing business there. Apple strikes me as a corporate version of that with their app store--avoid doing business with them because tomorrow they may decide to capriciously destroy the value of your investment with them.
So far, I've been stunningly uninterested in even owning an iPod or iPad, due to the whole issue of not being able to load any app I want into it, or write my own apps for it without agreeing to Apple's one-sided terms. To date, I use a fairly low-end cellphone because all I need is a phone, and since I can't yet have a freely programmable e-Reader, I buy a dedicated one that's affordable and does exactly what I want--display e-Books in a format that I can easily convert most documents to. (ePub)....Now if someone out there had an eReader that was freely programmable and could optionally use a stylus and the PalmOS Graffiti script for input--a Sony PRS-sized Palm?--I'd be delighted.
Hmm.. Hancock and Tellinger actually advocate someone else's theories while admitting they aren't professional archaeologists. If you are familiar with the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and anthropology or folklore or even psychology, their theories discredit themselves.
It's one thing to suggest that pre-dynastic Egyptians might have been a bit more organized and ambitious than generally known, and that they should be credit with the foundations of more than a few ancient Egyptian monuments and temples; it's a whole 'nother ball of wax to claim that we were created by space aliens from the eleventh planet, or that all human civilizations are descended from a high, now-vanished progenitor civilization that conveniently left no physical traces of itself. I can credit the former--known pre-dynastic artifacts such as the pottery of the Naqada civilizations shows they were settled agricultural peoples with a significant material culture, no less developed than that of early Dynastic Egypt. The latter sounds far too much like modern mystical wish fulfillment fantasies--woven people who no longer want to admit to believing in God, but still hark back to that old notion of Eden, and a Golden Age when everything was much better and all our leaders were wise and benevolent.
I regard with suspicion any theory of civilization's origins that amounts to replacing "God" with "space aliens"/"ancient Atlantean solons", and "Eden" with "Lost Atlantis", etc. I also regard with suspicion any theory of civilization that implies "humans are too stupid to figure out agriculture/writing/building mud-brick buildings/etc on their own, so they must have been taught it by space aliens/high Atlanteans/etc."
Also, taking a mythology where the attitudes and offices of the various dieties are so clearly a reflection of the attitudes and offices of the people of the time and proclaiming this mythology is actually the account of enslaving space aliens creating humanity just rates a "WTF are you smoking, dude?" in my book.
Your state/school district sounds like they have sane policies, like the ones of schools I grew up with. The place I currently live does not.
We also did not have the luxury of keeping kids home for colds and minor stuff--state law requires a certain minimum number of school days attended to graduate, so if you miss that minimum, no matter what the excuse, your kid gets held back. Unfortunately, hurricane evacuation days aren't an excuse, either--the school has to take that time out of vacation breaks or extend the school year. Basically, you're allowed about 10 absences a year, and a lot of teachers counted attendance as part of the grade, as well. (Along with state law, this policy was aimed at stopping inner city parents from just not bringing their kids to school until after Labor Day, even though the school year starts in early-to-mid August. Can't say I blame the parents, though--the climate here is infernal in August, and many of the poorer schools didn't have working AC). The upshot is that if you keep your kid home every time they have a minor cold or cramps, they might not ever graduate. You save sick days for serious illnesses.
My kid was checked out for her headaches--they terrified me until they were diagnosed. Turns out she's one of those unfortunate people that suffers from migraines occasionally, as am I. I am also talking about policies that extended into middle school/junior high, not just for young elementary schoolers.
Black market, gray market, who cares? It's all the same. The laws of economics dictate that an underground economy ("the black market") will exist wherever and whenever the "official" economy cannot or will not supply the market in accordance with the Laws of Supply and Demand. If the demand is high and the price set is too low, someone WILL buy low and re-sell high, no matter what the original producer thinks of the matter.
One should teach one's children to think, and learn why an apparently stupid rule exists. It might not be stupid; it might be there because people got killed ignoring the apparently stupid safety rule. (E.g. there's a reason you don't wear metal jewelry when working around high-voltage electricity, and it's not because your boss thinks your earrings are unprofessional.)
If it truly is a stupid rule that is insufferable to follow, you can work to get it changed. Maybe. A lot of places, you won't have any voice to speak of. How many of us have any voice in our corporate employee policies?
There are other options that everyone should learn by the time they grow up, so that they aren't the helpless victims of authoritarian apparatchiks.
1. Ignore the rules, but don't get caught.
2. Work around the rules in a technically legal, but spirit-breaking fashion.
3. Undermine the authority or mechanism enforcing the rules, so the rules cannot be practically enforced.
4. Protest via legal strikes, "work to rule", etc. (Note that deliberate, over-zealous enforcement of a bad rule can be a form of "work to rule" protest by the low-level enforcers who have had the rule forced on them by higher authority).
Yes, I pick and choose which rules I want to follow. You see, I am a thinking human being, not a mindless drone. Human beings have the capability to choose what to do based on ethics and morals of their own. Just because something is a rule or a law does not make it right; it just means don't get caught breaking it.
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Note: just because you are ignorant does not make other people "mind-bogglingly stupid".
Old growth fir and redwood is not used for paper-making, it's used for construction and furniture-making. Paper is made from pulpwood, which comes from fast-growing softwoods--which are farmed. Down in the Deep South, Georgia-Pacific and Weyrhauser own thousands of square miles of tree farms covered with slash pines and loblolly pines, and they buy additional pulpwood from local landowners who farm the same pines.
Paper is a renewable resource; far batter to use paper than non-renewable plastic.
I don't think "normal" human beings can concentrate on anything much more than four hours straight, so don't feel bad. That's why we have lunch breaks, snack breaks, surfing /., playing Freecell, alternate tasks to switch to, etc. during the workday. I think playing a MMORPG or Civilization is the only thing I've done for 8+ hours straight with nothing except bathroom breaks.
Yeah, it's called "caffeine withdrawal". Why anyone is surprised by it, when it has been documented that caffeine is addictive as heroin, I don't know...
If you think the grunts don't know better than anyone else just how sharp or stupid their bosses are, I can't help you...
The no-USB rule is because higher-ups got tired of constant security breaches because someone plugged a virus-infected USB into a military computer. (And/or carelessly used an infected USB drive to circumvent the low-to-high or high-to-low transfer rules.) The use of write-once media is for transfers from low-to-high, because there is no way you can accidentally write classified info onto the UNCLASSIFIED transfer media if it is a fixated write-once CD or DVD.
Makes perfect sense to me. What's your problem with it?
Also, the NMCI contract is a boondoggle for the benefit of the company that's running it. Navy would have been better off doing the whole thing in-house.
That is an awesome idea! You wouldn't happen to have a link to any especially high-res online copies of Brady's and other contemporary photos, would you? Otherwise, time to Google.
As someone who grows fresh kitchen herbs, I can add that fresh herbs are expensive because you have to sell them FRESH, not "chill-preserved for weeks in a refrigerator car". Sweet Basil, for example, has NO (zero, none, nada, zip) shelf life. It rots a day after picking it and putting it in the vegetable chiller in the refrigerator. You can freeze it or dry it, but you can't keep it fresh without keeping the whole plant alive.
The SKS also does this, and its cheap semi-auto knock-offs that were sold in the U.S. for a while are a bit more modern than WWI.
No, AdBlock does not work that way unless you subscribe to the blacklist. If you don't opt for someone else's blacklist (I don't, because maybe they don't like stuff I'd like to see), you have to choose to block ads from each source. Of course, once you blook all *.swf and ads from the major adserver domains, that covers most of the annoying stuff. Also, I don't like strange scripts playing without my permission, so I block scripts with NoScript by default and whitelist later, which just happens to block most of the ads.
I'm tired of idiots who spout their party-line without bothering to fact check. According to many, many WoW posters in the big thread O' doom, posting to forums is necessary for decent technical support. In-game issues are frequently referred to the support FORUM (not call-in support) by GMs, and it is well known that issues are frequently resolved an order of magnitude faster via forum than via call-in tech support or website trouble ticket.
Second, why should women be second-class citizens who must avoid communicating with other players out of fear? It's pretty well known that in communities dominated by insecure young men, a women is best off going by a neutral or male pseudonym if she wants her ideas heard, and to avoid pointless abuse. This is not new, nor is it news. It's unfortunate, it sucks, but unfortunately that's the way it is until parents get back to the job of civilizing their testostorone-laden young fucktards who are easily frightened by sentient beings with breasts.
The only "parenting for other people" I see in this incident belongs to Blizzard, who seems to think that gamers shouldn't be allowed to choose the face they present to the world. Enough screaming and cancellations and they got the hint. (Yes, it wasn't just forum posts; people were cancelling subscriptions and game pre-orders en masse).
Correction: your estate would have to pay your outstanding debts, not your wife, kids or other relatives. Once your estate has been exhausted, they don't owe a damn thing, because it's not THEIR debt. If there's any leftovers of your estate after creditors are paid, your heirs get it.
I feel obliged to point this out because credit card companies are notorious for pressuring survivors to pay off the deceased's credit debt, even if it the survivor had no legal tie to debt (wasn't a co-signer). A friend of mine whose middle-aged mother died unexpectedly found herself in that situation; fortunately, she had friends who were able to advise her that she could tell the collectors trying to make her personally pay off her mother's debts to go take a flying leap, because she didn't legally owe anything and couldn't be made to pay.
Caveat: in the specific case of a spouse, community property laws probably complicate things. IANAL, nor do I play one on TV.
As you probably didn't read on other posts, Verizon should have waived the ETF **BECAUSE** she moved to an area with no Verizon service. She agreed to pay them for service, they don't provide service and still expect her to pay? Sorry, contract law doesn't work that way. I rather doubt your cell phone contract has a clause that says "You are not allowed to move out of our service area", and if it did, you could probably get it tossed out as unconscionable.
Wish I had some mod points. You're not insightful, just obnoxious.
As someone who has been on a jury, I have to disagree. Sometimes, it's the other way around--you can get the notion the prosecutor is being a dick and really look hard for reasonable doubt and other reasons the defendant might not be guilty. Prosecutors do sometimes railroad people to make their record of convictions look good, and local jurors may well know that.
In the meantime, use Spybot Seek-and-Destroy to remove the tracking cookies periodically. Spybot S&D also creates an "innoculated" hosts file for you that blacklists most of the ad trackers. Useful to have in conjunction with APB and NoScript. I never realize the crap I *DON'T* see until I browse news sites from work and get buried under annoying ads.
Because pulpwood for paper-making and hardwood for structural timbers and cabinetry are two different animals. Er, plants. Pulpwood is fast-growing, soft woods like slash pine or cottonwood, and can be easily farmed--and it is. The major paper companies own huge tracts of land in the Deep South that are pine farms. Paper is a renewable resource; it's the sustainable choice of "paper or plastic?"
Quality hardwoods take much longer to grow. Even water oak, which is a mediocre hardwood, takes 30 years to grow a decent tree. That's why were still cutting the original reserve of old-growth timber nature laid up for us.
When you look at the facts on the ground, many, if not most, Americans practice what can only be called socialist ideals: they care about the weak in society, they care about the environment, they want to share their wealth and so on.
Those were Christian ideals long before Socialism was thought of, and the United States was mostly colonized by Christian sects running from persecution. So, it's a long tradition here.
essentially no more Indians to wipe out.
The native American nations are poverty-stricken, woefully under-educated, had their religions, languages and cultures oppressed for generations, and their citizens are generally treated as third-class citizens, but I suspect there are more of them now than there were in 1776.
Actually, I would be interested in that if I ever get up to Chicago. The Oriental Institute's museum is one of the ones I want to see someday--I've an avid amateur (and writer's) interest in Egyptology and Assyriology (as they called it in the 19th century--it's Ancient Near Eastern Studies now, right?)
I find it hard to believe that pre-dynastic Egyptian civilization is totally ignored, given Flinders Petrie's and others extensive excavations of the Naqada civilizations. There had to be something before Naqada I--they already had extensive trade networks and a settled, agricultural society. The problem in Egypt seems to me to be that evidence is probably buried under a mile of Nilotic sediment. Hmm, a quick Wiki look at Pre-Dynastic Egypt mentions a bunch of Neolithic cultures in the region, that were agricultural, settled and made beautiful stoneware. What's suppressed about older cultures? What are we defining as "civilization"?
Once again the guy I lease my farm ground to cannot bring himself to understand why I make him leave 10 yard untilled perimeters around all my fields. To him that is just leaving money in the fields.
Send him over to your local USDA Soil & Water Conservation District office. There's one in every U.S. county not paved over with city. They'll explain it to him.
I hadn't thought about it in terms of game management, though I can see where that is significant. It's also a very important, cheap way to improve soil conservation. You don't clear to the edge of your streams for the same reason--leave a belt of forest along the stream banks.
Here's the money part that your thick friend might get: good topsoil that washes off your land has to be replaced, and/or you have to use more of expensive agricultural chemicals like fertilizers to make up for the loss.
most small doctors, due to the cost, already use intermediary companies to handle billing and colelction eliminating them from direct responsibility
You know what that also does? The small intermediary company doesn't give a crap if the doctor's customers get pissed off by mismanaged billing and insurance paperwork handling; they just insist on the money being paid. The doctor's office, since it isn't directly responsible, blows off your insurance issues with "the billing company handles that". This can really screw you if, say, the insurance company isn't paying up on the excuse that the doctor didn't send them some obscure paperwork on request--it's not in the insurance company's interest to push the issue, because then they'd have to pay out money, the billing company doesn't give a crap, because the doctor is their customer, not you, and the doctor's office doesn't handle billing or insurance paperwork, so they don't have a clue what's going on.
I had a 2-3 year fight with my (former) doctor's billing office and my (former) health insurance company over such a snafu. Made me hate going to the doctor for any reason whatsoever, because it would start up the fight with the insurance company all over again. Got so I wouldn't go to the doctor for anything short of an emergency--no routine check-ups, no innoculations, no visits for colds, flu, sinus infections that hadn't progressed to the "clutching my head and screaming in pain" stage, no checks on my blood pressure, no nothing, just because of the massive stress-inducing hassle.
My insurance problems miracuously cleared up when I was switched (old doctor closed his practice after Katrina) to a doctor whose office did their own billing and thus gave a crap about clearing the payment issue up.
Yeah, that's why I won't even consider iAnything development. One cannot make rational business decisions when there are no clear rules, and the murky, unwritten rules change capriciously. Is Apple going to reimburse me for my time, money and effort invested in writing an app that is stillborn because they whimsically change the rules about what is acceptable? Somehow I doubt it. Whereas if I write an application for Linux, Windows, MacOS, or, back in the day, PalmOS, it's my risk that no one will be interested in it, but at least I don't have to worry about the hardware or OS maker deciding AFTER I have created my program that I can't distribute it.
I'm amazed that Apple has managed to hornswoggle everyone and the DOJ into going along with this Prior Restraint of Trade thing... Apple is a lot like a 3rd World banana republic that way--businesses avoid investing in areas where the rule of law is capricious or absent. If you never know from day to day whether your standard business practices are acceptable in a country, or perhaps tomorrow to be deemed criminal and you subject to forfeiture of your assets/imprisonment, you avoid doing business there. Apple strikes me as a corporate version of that with their app store--avoid doing business with them because tomorrow they may decide to capriciously destroy the value of your investment with them.
So far, I've been stunningly uninterested in even owning an iPod or iPad, due to the whole issue of not being able to load any app I want into it, or write my own apps for it without agreeing to Apple's one-sided terms. To date, I use a fairly low-end cellphone because all I need is a phone, and since I can't yet have a freely programmable e-Reader, I buy a dedicated one that's affordable and does exactly what I want--display e-Books in a format that I can easily convert most documents to. (ePub). ...Now if someone out there had an eReader that was freely programmable and could optionally use a stylus and the PalmOS Graffiti script for input--a Sony PRS-sized Palm?--I'd be delighted.
Hmm.. Hancock and Tellinger actually advocate someone else's theories while admitting they aren't professional archaeologists. If you are familiar with the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and anthropology or folklore or even psychology, their theories discredit themselves.
It's one thing to suggest that pre-dynastic Egyptians might have been a bit more organized and ambitious than generally known, and that they should be credit with the foundations of more than a few ancient Egyptian monuments and temples; it's a whole 'nother ball of wax to claim that we were created by space aliens from the eleventh planet, or that all human civilizations are descended from a high, now-vanished progenitor civilization that conveniently left no physical traces of itself. I can credit the former--known pre-dynastic artifacts such as the pottery of the Naqada civilizations shows they were settled agricultural peoples with a significant material culture, no less developed than that of early Dynastic Egypt. The latter sounds far too much like modern mystical wish fulfillment fantasies--woven people who no longer want to admit to believing in God, but still hark back to that old notion of Eden, and a Golden Age when everything was much better and all our leaders were wise and benevolent.
I regard with suspicion any theory of civilization's origins that amounts to replacing "God" with "space aliens"/"ancient Atlantean solons", and "Eden" with "Lost Atlantis", etc. I also regard with suspicion any theory of civilization that implies "humans are too stupid to figure out agriculture/writing/building mud-brick buildings/etc on their own, so they must have been taught it by space aliens/high Atlanteans/etc."
Also, taking a mythology where the attitudes and offices of the various dieties are so clearly a reflection of the attitudes and offices of the people of the time and proclaiming this mythology is actually the account of enslaving space aliens creating humanity just rates a "WTF are you smoking, dude?" in my book.
Your state/school district sounds like they have sane policies, like the ones of schools I grew up with. The place I currently live does not.
We also did not have the luxury of keeping kids home for colds and minor stuff--state law requires a certain minimum number of school days attended to graduate, so if you miss that minimum, no matter what the excuse, your kid gets held back. Unfortunately, hurricane evacuation days aren't an excuse, either--the school has to take that time out of vacation breaks or extend the school year. Basically, you're allowed about 10 absences a year, and a lot of teachers counted attendance as part of the grade, as well. (Along with state law, this policy was aimed at stopping inner city parents from just not bringing their kids to school until after Labor Day, even though the school year starts in early-to-mid August. Can't say I blame the parents, though--the climate here is infernal in August, and many of the poorer schools didn't have working AC). The upshot is that if you keep your kid home every time they have a minor cold or cramps, they might not ever graduate. You save sick days for serious illnesses.
My kid was checked out for her headaches--they terrified me until they were diagnosed. Turns out she's one of those unfortunate people that suffers from migraines occasionally, as am I. I am also talking about policies that extended into middle school/junior high, not just for young elementary schoolers.
Black market, gray market, who cares? It's all the same. The laws of economics dictate that an underground economy ("the black market") will exist wherever and whenever the "official" economy cannot or will not supply the market in accordance with the Laws of Supply and Demand. If the demand is high and the price set is too low, someone WILL buy low and re-sell high, no matter what the original producer thinks of the matter.
One should teach one's children to think, and learn why an apparently stupid rule exists. It might not be stupid; it might be there because people got killed ignoring the apparently stupid safety rule. (E.g. there's a reason you don't wear metal jewelry when working around high-voltage electricity, and it's not because your boss thinks your earrings are unprofessional.)
If it truly is a stupid rule that is insufferable to follow, you can work to get it changed. Maybe. A lot of places, you won't have any voice to speak of. How many of us have any voice in our corporate employee policies?
There are other options that everyone should learn by the time they grow up, so that they aren't the helpless victims of authoritarian apparatchiks.
1. Ignore the rules, but don't get caught.
2. Work around the rules in a technically legal, but spirit-breaking fashion.
3. Undermine the authority or mechanism enforcing the rules, so the rules cannot be practically enforced.
4. Protest via legal strikes, "work to rule", etc. (Note that deliberate, over-zealous enforcement of a bad rule can be a form of "work to rule" protest by the low-level enforcers who have had the rule forced on them by higher authority).
Yes, I pick and choose which rules I want to follow. You see, I am a thinking human being, not a mindless drone. Human beings have the capability to choose what to do based on ethics and morals of their own. Just because something is a rule or a law does not make it right; it just means don't get caught breaking it.