Bullies are cowards, especially the ones that travel in packs. That's why they travel in packs. Bullies also latch on to fear and insecurity like sharks on fish blood. If they know they are getting to you, they will keep at it as long as you give them their "hit" of fear and misery.
Alas, it took growing up and overcoming childhood loneliness and insecurity to learn how to deal with them. The verbal/internet kind, just ignore--bullies get bored if they don't get a response and soon leave for more interesting targets--though if they go past the limits of legality or TOS/AUP, it's fun to quietly report them and watch them then whine about how people are mean to them and it was all "just a joke".
Schoolyard bullies, really, the response is to punch back and show no fear. It's not fun for the bullies when the "victim" isn't scared, won't run, won't cry, and the bully gets bruised.
Physical attacks get physical responses, verbal attacks are best just ignored. Words are just noise, even if they are hurtful; consider the source. The map is not the territory. In my childhood, the mantra was "Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." I prefer the one I got from the "Back to the Future" movies: "Why do I care what he thinks? He's an asshole!"
Physical scarring has the advantage of automatically healing, will he or nil he. Emotional scarring (from bullying) lasts exactly as long as you hold onto your grievances or buy into the bully's lies. Are you "emotionally scarred" if the monkeys at the zoo hoot at you? No, it's just noise. Ignore the hooting monkeys of the world, you'll be much happier.
I owned a Ford Explorer until I drove it into the ground (my vehicles tend to give out around the 250,000 mile mark). I won't buy one again; it's not a quality vehicle. The chassis is an up-scaled car chassis, as is the transmission, not a truck chassis or transmission--and they don't hold up to doing truck-like duty for 100,000+ miles. You wind up replacing the transmission every 100,000 miles or so.
I am not impressed by Ford vehicles in general. Fix Or Repair Daily.
BTW, Tie Fighter plays quite nicely under DOSbox, check it out.
X-wing is a bit flaky, and with both, sometimes the joystick loses calibration for no reason in the middle of a mission, but still playable and far better than under the WinXP "DOS penalty box". Hmm, I see in that forum there's a commenter with a patch for the joystick flakiness. I need to check that out.
Depends on the state. States where jury duty is a major burden--you're on call for an entire month and/or multiple trials (California, I'm looking at you) have all the people who can't afford to be stuck in that situation scramble to find any excuse to get out of jury duty. Thus, as you say, juries are composed of people too stupid to get out of jury duty or unemployed enough not to care.
OTOH, states with something like a "24 hours/1 trial" system, like, say Louisiana, don't have people scrambling to get out of jury duty that badly, and you get sensible jurors. I and my spouse have both served as jurors in jury trials in such a state, and the other jurors were pretty much sensible people trying to come to the right, just decision.
Without knowing something about how juries are picked in a given state, you can't reasonably generalise about the quality of jurors.
So yea, a workers society with common ownership of the means of production and freedom and all that stuff.
Such societies have existed, and worked... on a small scale. Kibbutzim, early Christian communes, Shaker communes, etc. Curiously, the ones that worked all had a religious basis--and embraced common values of charity and compassion. They also kicked out or didn't attract the 5-10% of parasitical dickwads (criminals, freeloaders, authoritarians, etc) that exist in any large, non-selective group of human beings.
Larger societies have to work in spite of the parasites. Any system that requires 100% of its members to be good, upstanding citizens will fail... and that's the fundamental problem with "pure" Communism.
I still thank my Catholic upbringing for saving me from being a disillusioned ex-fundamentalist ex-Christian.
Protestant and Reformed denominations tend to teach that "Christ was the paschal lamb, the sacrifice for our sins so that all will be redeemed"... and stop there.
I learned the example of Christ and his teachings, first, and that the central mystery of Christianity was that Christ died on the cross--and was resurrected. The Resurrection was God's big middle-finger-gesture Take That! to evil--a graphic demonstration that not only was Jesus who he said He was, not only was his message truly from God, but that Death and Evil cannot triumph. The absolute worst that evil men can do--breaking a man under torture, cursing him, degrading and humiliating him, making him an outcast from society, and finally killing him--God can and will undo.
Also they mentioned the Paschal Sacrifice aspect, but the biggie was the Resurrection, as it was for the early Christians. "Oh grave, where is thy victory? Oh death, where is thy sting?"
You do know that Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a Law of Nature? It's a useful thumbrule for deciding between competing theories and cutting out unnecessary cruft from a theory.
I reject the "God created an apparently old universe" on theological grounds: it implies that God deliberately created a deceptive, lying universe. God does not lie, He despises falsehood, and He considered his creation "Good". Therefore, the universe does not lie about itself, though it may be very confusing and require more knowledge and wisdom than we have to understand it. Corollary: Young Earth Creationists either make God a liar, or attribute to Satan the power of Creation ("The devil planted all the evidence that makes it look like the Earth evolved" theory).
Category 3 has also been the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church from the 20th century on, and that is the largest single denomination of Christianity, period. As I recall, the Catholic doctrine on evolution is pretty much: 'The Bible tells us God created the universe, Earth, life, mankind et al. It doesn't tell us HOW He did it. He could have used the Big Bang and evolution (or whatever improved theory science comes up with in the future). God's method of creation isn't an issue of faith and doctrine; that God did create the universe and humanity is.'
I grew up with that doctrine, and for the longest time was utterly clueless about why some people get so hysterical over evolution vs. (their brand of) religion. It was only when I jumped to a Protestant denomination that I started hearing the 'insider view' of Creationism--it's based on what I frankly consider the error of Bibliolatry. The reasoning is that 'All our knowledge of God and articles of faith come from the Bible, and if any part of the Bible is fictional/metaphor/corrupted over time, then NONE of it is to be trusted, and if the "literal Word of God" cannot be trusted, our beliefs have no foundation, there is no God, no resurrection, no nothing. Therefore, the Earth was created in 7 days exactly as stated in Genesis 1, and if you don't believe this, you don't believe the Bible, don't believe in God, and are a damnable atheist at heart'.
Flawed reasoning, but almost logical if you believe the only source of faith and knowledge about God is the text of the Bible.
Catholicism, on the other hand, considers the Bible the primary source of information about God and Jesus, but not the only source of faith. As St. Paul wrote, "Scripture is useful for teaching"--and for teaching, parts of it are parables, metaphors that ancient nomads could understand, didactic stories, administrative rules for healthy living at the time.... The mainstream branches of Protestantism are mostly the same way. The source of faith and knowledge of God is one's own relationship with God and the Holy Spirit--the direct touch of the divine on a human soul.
Christianity (Islam, Judaism, most other religions) is and should be about one's relationship to God (goddess/the divine), not one's relationship to a book.
The Rift Valley is an awesome piece of geography. Calling it a 'mountain range' is just too trivial. On the other hand, the same species of animal out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which suggests it's a submarine mountain range.
Although if you define mountain ranges as uplifted areas formed by plate collisions, neither the Mid-Atlantic Ridge nor the Rift Valley would be one, as they are wounds in the crust where plates are pulling apart, allowing lower crustal/upper mantle material to leak through...
You are quite correct. I worked at a company with heavily DRM'd firmware in a certain set of computer electronics. We did all the development and testing with the non-DRM'd version, because the final step of applying DRM was heavily restricted to a handful of management for security reasons, and it also disabled all the outside interfaces that let us do important things like run tests and monitor the results.
You just hoped the DRM didn't break things, since you couldn't test with it, except for very limited blackbox testing.
1) There is no currently known, widely-accepted scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death.
There, fixed that.
Any scholar of the history of science would laugh at that argument. The various sciences have messy histories of this or that theory gaining vogue, being dropped when disproven or found useless for prediction, and new theories emerging that may be the exact opposite of what was fervently defended before as Scientific Truth.
Only a non-scientist can honestly believe that if science doesn't explain it, it doesn't exist. Science has much too long a history of stumbling around in the dark with half-assed explanations for a scientist to think that.
Short example: the entire sciences of geology and geophysics prior to plate tectonic theory.
Yes, yes, I know RMS has been trying to discourage the use of the word 'piracy' for commercial copyright infringement because of the violent connotations, but, alas, that use of the word was not invented by the RIAA or the MPAA. It's been around since the 17th or 18th century for unauthorized copying; I believe the earliest known reference was to the unauthorized publishing and distribution of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe".
However much you and RMS dislike it, one of the legitimate other definitions of piracy is "large-scale commercial copyright infringement".
Qualifier: it does seem like the **AAs started the trend of applying it to non-commercial, personal sharing of published works.
XP, Scrum, etc. have some good ideas--however, as TFA mentions, they require *thought* to implement well. They are also not new, just re-packaged. Ed Yourdon was talking about interviewing users to find out how the system/process *really* works over 20 years ago. (His "Structured Analysis" is an excellent on-line book for learning how to design systems)
However, any method that relies on your team members being in the top 10%/experienced programmers is only going to be useful for a few, high-profile or specialized projects where you can actually hire or have available those top, experienced programmers. What the world really needs is an "Army method": something that gets useful, productive work out of any coder who isn't literally retarded. You won't get that with any method that leaves the design specs between the lead programmer's ears; the average person needs a road map and instructions. However, with sufficiently detailed, simple step-by-step instructions, a hick fresh out of high school can maintain a tank. The same thing is true of the "average" coder: with adequate design specs, any idiot who knows how to code can be productive.
The trick is coming up with those design specs, just like the brilliance of Army training is in designing the courses and instructions that enable any idiot to repair a tank.
I'd like to point out that there's a difference between classified data and copyrighted data. One can have open-source, free-as-in-speech software OR proprietary software that is classified--the copyright doesn't matter, YOU aren't getting to see it without the appropriate security level and Need-To-Know.
However, when the day comes when that military system is declassified, THEN the open source or proprietary nature of the source code may be of interest. Most things don't stay classified forever; AFAIK, most of our WWII secrets (except for some of the Manhattan Project details) are now unclassified, unrestricted public knowledge.
Well, yes, if you're talking about a situation where you'd need a criminal lawyer giving you advice--like if *you* are suspected of a crime.
However, in day-to-day life, most of us (hopefully) aren't suspects. Being civil and friendly and getting to know the cops who live or work near you can do a lot to benefit you, as anyone with a bit of sense knows. Being previously known to the police as "a friendly man or woman who lives in the neighborhood and does honest work for a living" means a heck of a lot. It means they will have a biased view of you as one of the honest citizens they are there to protect, rather than a biased view of you as a possible perp.
Now, if you actually are a criminal, or doing something that looks shady even if it isn't, or are just doing/being something unpopular, if legal... yeah, you might want to keep quiet.
No, it does not. "Breaking and entering" means just that: you broke in. Just walking in unauthorized is "entering", or perhaps trepass, without the "breaking" part. If you then steal something, it's "burglary". If you just fall asleep in a drunken slumber on your ex-'s couch, it's still trespass or entering.
IANAL, but had a family member sitting on a jury in a case like that...
In what country? Not in the U.S.A. The Supreme Court ruled a while back that un-original arrangements of data are not copyrightable; the case in question was a white pages phonebook. The layout (fonts, decorations, etc) or other *original* elements of a compilation of data can be copyrighted, but not the data itself.
The U.S. Supreme Court very specifically struck down the argument that "sweat of the brow"/cost of assembling data entitles one to copyright protection. In the U.S., originality is required for copyright.
Er, no. You don't need a license to listen to music you own. Copyright is about the right to COPY a work, not to use it. Anyone who claims you need a license to USE a created work is LYING.
I also played heavily on KobraMud back in the day (have one of their T-shirts, and it set my grad school back a year!), and I think I remember you... Can't remember my own characters' names, though.
I know it's a cute argument, but Heinlein was full of shit when he came up with it, and his philosophy is at considerable odds with that of those who wrote the Constitution and signed the Declaration of Independence.
Ditto. I've been a happy customer of Dreamhost's for about 7-8 years now. Stumbled on them when they were new, like their rates and the fact that they used Linux server farms and had customer service that could answer technical questions coherently without trying to march you through a script.
Caveat: I have one friend who was unhappy with them; she was sharing some music files privately with a largish handful of us ("Check out this folk singer, I think you'll like her!") and Dreamhost noticed the large MP3 downloads and cut her off until she cleaned the infringing files off her account. However, they did reinstate her afterwards with a warning not to do it again.
So yes, reputable ISPs will pull your site if they think you are willfully infringing copyrights--they don't want to get a reputation as a warez or downloader's haven.
Ditto. So, since the local garbage collection is CHARGING me for me to do extra labor to separate out my recycleables, I refuse to do so.
If you want me to do extra work, pay me what my labor is worth. If recycling was such a wonderful deal, I wouldn't have to pay EXTRA for the privilege.... of doing more work. Screw that. I can't refuse to pay the recycling tax on my garbage bill, but I can and do refuse to work for negative pay.
My issued recycle bin is somewhere in the house serving as a storage bin. Works nicely for that.
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Bullies are cowards, especially the ones that travel in packs. That's why they travel in packs. Bullies also latch on to fear and insecurity like sharks on fish blood. If they know they are getting to you, they will keep at it as long as you give them their "hit" of fear and misery.
Alas, it took growing up and overcoming childhood loneliness and insecurity to learn how to deal with them. The verbal/internet kind, just ignore--bullies get bored if they don't get a response and soon leave for more interesting targets--though if they go past the limits of legality or TOS/AUP, it's fun to quietly report them and watch them then whine about how people are mean to them and it was all "just a joke".
Schoolyard bullies, really, the response is to punch back and show no fear. It's not fun for the bullies when the "victim" isn't scared, won't run, won't cry, and the bully gets bruised.
Physical attacks get physical responses, verbal attacks are best just ignored. Words are just noise, even if they are hurtful; consider the source. The map is not the territory. In my childhood, the mantra was "Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." I prefer the one I got from the "Back to the Future" movies: "Why do I care what he thinks? He's an asshole!"
Physical scarring has the advantage of automatically healing, will he or nil he. Emotional scarring (from bullying) lasts exactly as long as you hold onto your grievances or buy into the bully's lies. Are you "emotionally scarred" if the monkeys at the zoo hoot at you? No, it's just noise. Ignore the hooting monkeys of the world, you'll be much happier.
Cool! Apple is using Social DRM on their music files.
I owned a Ford Explorer until I drove it into the ground (my vehicles tend to give out around the 250,000 mile mark). I won't buy one again; it's not a quality vehicle. The chassis is an up-scaled car chassis, as is the transmission, not a truck chassis or transmission--and they don't hold up to doing truck-like duty for 100,000+ miles. You wind up replacing the transmission every 100,000 miles or so.
I am not impressed by Ford vehicles in general. Fix Or Repair Daily.
YESSS! I so want X-wing with modern graphics.
BTW, Tie Fighter plays quite nicely under DOSbox, check it out.
X-wing is a bit flaky, and with both, sometimes the joystick loses calibration for no reason in the middle of a mission, but still playable and far better than under the WinXP "DOS penalty box". Hmm, I see in that forum there's a commenter with a patch for the joystick flakiness. I need to check that out.
Depends on the state. States where jury duty is a major burden--you're on call for an entire month and/or multiple trials (California, I'm looking at you) have all the people who can't afford to be stuck in that situation scramble to find any excuse to get out of jury duty. Thus, as you say, juries are composed of people too stupid to get out of jury duty or unemployed enough not to care.
OTOH, states with something like a "24 hours/1 trial" system, like, say Louisiana, don't have people scrambling to get out of jury duty that badly, and you get sensible jurors. I and my spouse have both served as jurors in jury trials in such a state, and the other jurors were pretty much sensible people trying to come to the right, just decision.
Without knowing something about how juries are picked in a given state, you can't reasonably generalise about the quality of jurors.
So yea, a workers society with common ownership of the means of production and freedom and all that stuff.
Such societies have existed, and worked... on a small scale. Kibbutzim, early Christian communes, Shaker communes, etc. Curiously, the ones that worked all had a religious basis--and embraced common values of charity and compassion. They also kicked out or didn't attract the 5-10% of parasitical dickwads (criminals, freeloaders, authoritarians, etc) that exist in any large, non-selective group of human beings.
Larger societies have to work in spite of the parasites. Any system that requires 100% of its members to be good, upstanding citizens will fail... and that's the fundamental problem with "pure" Communism.
I still thank my Catholic upbringing for saving me from being a disillusioned ex-fundamentalist ex-Christian.
Protestant and Reformed denominations tend to teach that "Christ was the paschal lamb, the sacrifice for our sins so that all will be redeemed"... and stop there.
I learned the example of Christ and his teachings, first, and that the central mystery of Christianity was that Christ died on the cross--and was resurrected. The Resurrection was God's big middle-finger-gesture Take That! to evil--a graphic demonstration that not only was Jesus who he said He was, not only was his message truly from God, but that Death and Evil cannot triumph. The absolute worst that evil men can do--breaking a man under torture, cursing him, degrading and humiliating him, making him an outcast from society, and finally killing him--God can and will undo.
Also they mentioned the Paschal Sacrifice aspect, but the biggie was the Resurrection, as it was for the early Christians. "Oh grave, where is thy victory? Oh death, where is thy sting?"
You do know that Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a Law of Nature? It's a useful thumbrule for deciding between competing theories and cutting out unnecessary cruft from a theory.
I reject the "God created an apparently old universe" on theological grounds: it implies that God deliberately created a deceptive, lying universe. God does not lie, He despises falsehood, and He considered his creation "Good". Therefore, the universe does not lie about itself, though it may be very confusing and require more knowledge and wisdom than we have to understand it. Corollary: Young Earth Creationists either make God a liar, or attribute to Satan the power of Creation ("The devil planted all the evidence that makes it look like the Earth evolved" theory).
Category 3 has also been the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church from the 20th century on, and that is the largest single denomination of Christianity, period. As I recall, the Catholic doctrine on evolution is pretty much: 'The Bible tells us God created the universe, Earth, life, mankind et al. It doesn't tell us HOW He did it. He could have used the Big Bang and evolution (or whatever improved theory science comes up with in the future). God's method of creation isn't an issue of faith and doctrine; that God did create the universe and humanity is.'
I grew up with that doctrine, and for the longest time was utterly clueless about why some people get so hysterical over evolution vs. (their brand of) religion. It was only when I jumped to a Protestant denomination that I started hearing the 'insider view' of Creationism--it's based on what I frankly consider the error of Bibliolatry. The reasoning is that 'All our knowledge of God and articles of faith come from the Bible, and if any part of the Bible is fictional/metaphor/corrupted over time, then NONE of it is to be trusted, and if the "literal Word of God" cannot be trusted, our beliefs have no foundation, there is no God, no resurrection, no nothing. Therefore, the Earth was created in 7 days exactly as stated in Genesis 1, and if you don't believe this, you don't believe the Bible, don't believe in God, and are a damnable atheist at heart'.
Flawed reasoning, but almost logical if you believe the only source of faith and knowledge about God is the text of the Bible.
Catholicism, on the other hand, considers the Bible the primary source of information about God and Jesus, but not the only source of faith. As St. Paul wrote, "Scripture is useful for teaching"--and for teaching, parts of it are parables, metaphors that ancient nomads could understand, didactic stories, administrative rules for healthy living at the time.... The mainstream branches of Protestantism are mostly the same way. The source of faith and knowledge of God is one's own relationship with God and the Holy Spirit--the direct touch of the divine on a human soul.
Christianity (Islam, Judaism, most other religions) is and should be about one's relationship to God (goddess/the divine), not one's relationship to a book.
The Rift Valley is an awesome piece of geography. Calling it a 'mountain range' is just too trivial. On the other hand, the same species of animal out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which suggests it's a submarine mountain range.
Although if you define mountain ranges as uplifted areas formed by plate collisions, neither the Mid-Atlantic Ridge nor the Rift Valley would be one, as they are wounds in the crust where plates are pulling apart, allowing lower crustal/upper mantle material to leak through...
You are quite correct. I worked at a company with heavily DRM'd firmware in a certain set of computer electronics. We did all the development and testing with the non-DRM'd version, because the final step of applying DRM was heavily restricted to a handful of management for security reasons, and it also disabled all the outside interfaces that let us do important things like run tests and monitor the results.
You just hoped the DRM didn't break things, since you couldn't test with it, except for very limited blackbox testing.
The code seems to be written directly in assembly, since it has no C/C++ style stack frame or register usage
gcc -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer .... ?
1) There is no currently known, widely-accepted scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death.
There, fixed that.
Any scholar of the history of science would laugh at that argument. The various sciences have messy histories of this or that theory gaining vogue, being dropped when disproven or found useless for prediction, and new theories emerging that may be the exact opposite of what was fervently defended before as Scientific Truth.
Only a non-scientist can honestly believe that if science doesn't explain it, it doesn't exist. Science has much too long a history of stumbling around in the dark with half-assed explanations for a scientist to think that.
Short example: the entire sciences of geology and geophysics prior to plate tectonic theory.
Yes, yes, I know RMS has been trying to discourage the use of the word 'piracy' for commercial copyright infringement because of the violent connotations, but, alas, that use of the word was not invented by the RIAA or the MPAA. It's been around since the 17th or 18th century for unauthorized copying; I believe the earliest known reference was to the unauthorized publishing and distribution of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe".
However much you and RMS dislike it, one of the legitimate other definitions of piracy is "large-scale commercial copyright infringement".
Qualifier: it does seem like the **AAs started the trend of applying it to non-commercial, personal sharing of published works.
XP, Scrum, etc. have some good ideas--however, as TFA mentions, they require *thought* to implement well. They are also not new, just re-packaged. Ed Yourdon was talking about interviewing users to find out how the system/process *really* works over 20 years ago. (His "Structured Analysis" is an excellent on-line book for learning how to design systems)
However, any method that relies on your team members being in the top 10%/experienced programmers is only going to be useful for a few, high-profile or specialized projects where you can actually hire or have available those top, experienced programmers. What the world really needs is an "Army method": something that gets useful, productive work out of any coder who isn't literally retarded. You won't get that with any method that leaves the design specs between the lead programmer's ears; the average person needs a road map and instructions. However, with sufficiently detailed, simple step-by-step instructions, a hick fresh out of high school can maintain a tank. The same thing is true of the "average" coder: with adequate design specs, any idiot who knows how to code can be productive.
The trick is coming up with those design specs, just like the brilliance of Army training is in designing the courses and instructions that enable any idiot to repair a tank.
I'd like to point out that there's a difference between classified data and copyrighted data. One can have open-source, free-as-in-speech software OR proprietary software that is classified--the copyright doesn't matter, YOU aren't getting to see it without the appropriate security level and Need-To-Know.
However, when the day comes when that military system is declassified, THEN the open source or proprietary nature of the source code may be of interest. Most things don't stay classified forever; AFAIK, most of our WWII secrets (except for some of the Manhattan Project details) are now unclassified, unrestricted public knowledge.
Well, yes, if you're talking about a situation where you'd need a criminal lawyer giving you advice--like if *you* are suspected of a crime.
However, in day-to-day life, most of us (hopefully) aren't suspects. Being civil and friendly and getting to know the cops who live or work near you can do a lot to benefit you, as anyone with a bit of sense knows. Being previously known to the police as "a friendly man or woman who lives in the neighborhood and does honest work for a living" means a heck of a lot. It means they will have a biased view of you as one of the honest citizens they are there to protect, rather than a biased view of you as a possible perp.
Now, if you actually are a criminal, or doing something that looks shady even if it isn't, or are just doing/being something unpopular, if legal... yeah, you might want to keep quiet.
No, it does not. "Breaking and entering" means just that: you broke in. Just walking in unauthorized is "entering", or perhaps trepass, without the "breaking" part. If you then steal something, it's "burglary". If you just fall asleep in a drunken slumber on your ex-'s couch, it's still trespass or entering.
IANAL, but had a family member sitting on a jury in a case like that...
In what country? Not in the U.S.A. The Supreme Court ruled a while back that un-original arrangements of data are not copyrightable; the case in question was a white pages phonebook. The layout (fonts, decorations, etc) or other *original* elements of a compilation of data can be copyrighted, but not the data itself.
The U.S. Supreme Court very specifically struck down the argument that "sweat of the brow"/cost of assembling data entitles one to copyright protection. In the U.S., originality is required for copyright.
Er, no. You don't need a license to listen to music you own. Copyright is about the right to COPY a work, not to use it. Anyone who claims you need a license to USE a created work is LYING.
I also played heavily on KobraMud back in the day (have one of their T-shirts, and it set my grad school back a year!), and I think I remember you... Can't remember my own characters' names, though.
I know it's a cute argument, but Heinlein was full of shit when he came up with it, and his philosophy is at considerable odds with that of those who wrote the Constitution and signed the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
Ditto. I've been a happy customer of Dreamhost's for about 7-8 years now. Stumbled on them when they were new, like their rates and the fact that they used Linux server farms and had customer service that could answer technical questions coherently without trying to march you through a script.
Caveat: I have one friend who was unhappy with them; she was sharing some music files privately with a largish handful of us ("Check out this folk singer, I think you'll like her!") and Dreamhost noticed the large MP3 downloads and cut her off until she cleaned the infringing files off her account. However, they did reinstate her afterwards with a warning not to do it again.
So yes, reputable ISPs will pull your site if they think you are willfully infringing copyrights--they don't want to get a reputation as a warez or downloader's haven.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Alas, I fear your references were too old for most of these kids to get it...
Ditto. So, since the local garbage collection is CHARGING me for me to do extra labor to separate out my recycleables, I refuse to do so.
If you want me to do extra work, pay me what my labor is worth. If recycling was such a wonderful deal, I wouldn't have to pay EXTRA for the privilege.... of doing more work. Screw that. I can't refuse to pay the recycling tax on my garbage bill, but I can and do refuse to work for negative pay.
My issued recycle bin is somewhere in the house serving as a storage bin. Works nicely for that.