The people who go into these professions have the right to try and do their job as best they can, that includes trying to do things that haven't been done before and that they haven't been trained to do.... That's their job. their right is to try and do it as best they can.
I don't mean to nitpick, but you seem to have the wrong word there... I think you meant to say responsibility.
The right of initiative is what I was referring to.
What the? Are you just making up new Rights now? How about the Right of Leaving Work Early 'Cuz It's Friday? The Right of Peeking Over the Fence At The Hot Chick Next Door?
Sorry, I'm a bit of a Strict Constructionist myself - if you want a "Right" under the Law then go write a law that gives it to you, instead of magically finding it in 200-year old documents and the opinions of political appointees.
Having said that, I agree wholeheartedly that this judge gave little consideration of the implications and intent in the case. I can only hope that our newly-elected Democratic Overlords take up the challenge of writing a law to address this aggregious invasion of privacy.
I bought the video iPod so I can watch videos... so screen size matters to me. If I didn't have the iPod already, I might have bought a Zune just for that very feature. The fact that it displays at the same resolution would be fine, given that everything I watch has already been compressed in some lossy format. Call me when the HD portables come out, maybe I'll change my mind...
And really, nobody likes running with a large iPod either - if you expect to be actively exercising while listening to music you buy a mini version, like the Nano, Shuffle, Sansa, Rio, etc.
I fall squarely in the other camp - I carry a PDA (in a hardcase no less) which fills a wallet pocket pretty full, and I like it just fine. I use it primarily for reading ebooks, and I find the screen to be just big enough. I can load it with a subset of my music if I so desire, but I usually just carry the iPod too if I'm going to be away from a computer (where I would just use iTunes instead.)
I want to be polite, and I want you to believe I am not advocating inhumane working conditions for anybody, but can you PLEASE provide a little data, rather than just your earnest opinions? Some of us are not so involved in the matter as yourself, and would appreciate access to the information that you have.
Nice try but the corporations doing the exploiting are based here, and thus here is where the problem is...
That makes perfect sense, putting pressure on the corporate HQ - but are you also willing to go to the site of the problem and protest against the folks committing the wrongful deeds?
...you know the responsibility for the consequences of your actions thing? Or is that responsibility thing only for the little people?
Yes, I understand the concept of responsibility - and no, I don't think it's only for the little people. I do believe that responsibility starts with the individual, the little guy as it were - or do you believe the expolitive managers in the sweatshop plants are somehow less responsible than the Nike bigwigs just because they are further down the management chain? I would think that line management in a sweatshop factory would be the real criminals in this situation. That's why I ask, are you willing to go protest against the individuals committing the initial wrong?
I hope you sleep well at night justifying labor conditions such as workers locked in factories for 12 hours shifts with few bathroom breaks.
I wasn't aware that asking you questions was doing that... are you stating that that is standard practice at all Nike plants? I'd really like to see a reference to that claim, please.
It's people like you that make the world an uglier more brutal place to live.
Now you are just being insulting.
Fortunately people in Central America are waking up to this and saying no more and I sincerely hope the U.S. is next. Bush's extreme fuckups hopefully make this more likely as people are starting to see the exploiter class is vacant of real ideas of how to actually run things.
People in Central America are deciding they want to go their own way - I say cool, good luck with that. I'm not a big Bush fan myself, but I'm not sure he exemplifies any such thing as an "exploiter class" so much as he demonstrates that the Peter Principle certainly applies to the Presidency.
Pure libertarianism sounds great on paper and then a hurricane Katrina hits and the response infrastructure is hollowed out.
What? I'm no Libertarian, though I know a few, but I just don't see what libertarianism has to do with Katrina response - you can't seriously mean that you think the Bush administration is Libertarian.
That is what your vaunted corporate capitalism has led us to and oh yes thousands of angry people who want to kill us such that the powers that be use it as an excuse for an increasing police state as exemplified by police head cams. Nice...
I happen to think that corporate capitalism needs a bit more oversight, though I'm not sure the Legislature would be any improvement. As for the rest of your screed, I will note that it's not the USA that's doing this... it's the British. To me it positively smacks of their continuing desire for a nanny-state... something I don't see all that many signs of over here.
In the end, I'm glad you posted - it's always nice to question one's own positions from time to time. I admire your fervor, and even sympathize with your cause to an extent, but I will address the issue my own way. I'm going to keep rewarding companies that do it the right way, rather than try to compel companies to stop doing things the wrong way. I'm going to keep holding individuals accountable for their actions. And I'm going to keep asking questions, 'cause that's the only way to ever learn anything - even if you don't get an answer.
You raise some interesting questions, though perhaps not the ones you seek...
How many billions of dollars has Nike made on the products made in Vietnam?
What is the actual saving they achieved by paying the prevailing wage in VIetnam, as opposed to what they would pay here in the US?
Were there any actual Vietnamese workers at the protest? Or were they back in Vietnam enjoying the fruits of their labor?
Why aren't you protesting outside the Vietnamese Embassy over their labor conditions?
Maybe we should be outraged about workers in another country being exploited... but maybe their problems need to be solved by their own government rather than ours. After all, I'm pretty sure Nike will bow to the demands of the Nation of Vietnam well before they do so to the desires of extra-national protesters.
If this situation is as intolerable as you believe, surely the "Chavez style Bolivaran revolution" you seem to desire should be happening in Vietnam rather than here, shouldn't it?
The majority of Mac users that I know are using Safari... 'cuz that's what comes up on their toolbar on a default installation of OS X. We added FireFox to our organizational-install image, so our customers get a choice... and we actually use both, since some in-house apps break when viewed with FireFox (I'm lookin' at you, stupid HR-created web apps!)
Since you said you don't have an iPod, you probably don't realize that you would be downloading the music via iTunes... so you would just play the music from your iTunes Library through your computer's speakers. I do that all the time while updating the 'Pod.
I've using a 3 year old PC, so it's running at USB 1.0 speeds (12Mbits/sec), while my wife has a dock running USB 2.0 (AKA Hi-Speed, or 480MBits/sec) or FireWire 1.0 (100-400MBits/sec). My wireless card gets 11-54MBits/sec when maxed out - and it would do nothing for recharging the battery in the iPod.
You want to impress us all, figure out how to broadcast power over WiFi...
Perhaps your fears have changed due to the normal aging process? I know I give things a second & third thought these days that I would have jumped into back-in-the-day.
I have many friends and acquaintences who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era, a few of them even cited for contempt of Congress.
FWIW, do any of those folks appear in the Mitrokhin Archives? Just curious - I'd still respect them for standing up for their (and our) rights, even if they really were fellow travelers. Actually standing up to the government in court is a pretty gutsy move, regardless of motivation.
Lastly, people on/. who wish you to fall under the wheels of a bus are not terrorists, they are asshats. And people in the current government who seem to want to restrict our rights are usually authoritarian and sometimes fascist and always scared of the bigger world, but they are NOT terrorists. The asshats will always be with us, but I hope to live long enough for the politicians to leave office & get out of my life (your post does not inspire confidence in that outcome, though.) Till then, perhaps we could leave the T-word for people who commit actual acts of terror, hmmmm?
I'd be a fool to argue the claims and explanations of your message, but I will take exception with your final comment...
Why would he be avoiding the lawsuit, which would obviously clear his and his company's name, if he was right?
What's so hard to believe about his explanation?
Rabinovitch... says that he and his wife moved for employment and family reasons(emphasis added).
Or did you mean to imply (from the laundry list of statements you discounted above) that you wouldn't believe him if he said "water is wet"?
I'm just curious... If I had actually moved to another country and taken a new job, I'm not sure I'd be all that interested in telling the world where to find me either.
...the rapists themselves, the owners of the subcontracted factories and Nike for slipshod human rights monitoring of the contractors they chose ALL ought to be held responsible for it happening. In the same way that Rumsfeld, the commander at Abu Gharib, and the individual soldiers who did the torturing ought to be held responsible...
You seem to be pretty quick off the mark with your opinions, hoss... let's consider a few of them.
Your first, restated: Criminals, AND the OWNERS of the company where they work, AND the ENTIRE COMPANY that contracted the work "ought to be held responsible". Seems a bit draconian, unless you can show some proof that they were all in it together. Or are you saying that merely because [person A] hires [person B] who subsequently commits a crime that [person A] is guilty too?
Your second, restated: The soldiers (criminals), AND the commander of the prison (NOT the soldier's commander, BTW, and one of the people who pushed the investigation), AND the civilan boss of the entire Defense Department "ought to be held responsible". Again, it seems a bit much to indict the supervisor who attempted to put things right, and the many level higher supervisor who had never been to the site - but if you've got proof they were involved in the crime they should have been charged. In fact, the military does espouse the "chain of authority" concept - and they did charge the immediate supervisors who did not stop the crimes, and did censure the supervisors of those supervisors for not catching them slacking off.
It's your third assumption that really scares me, though: That Corporate Law should be the same as Military Law. Are you planning to treat soldiers like corporations, or corporations like soldiers? Neither idea sounds very inviting.
We're seeing a problem on some OS X systems (G4 & G5) where the Eudora Application folder has to have special permissions or the standard users can't use Entrust to encrypt & decrypt their messages. It seems the application uses that folder as a 'scratch pad', so the user's account MUST be able to write there - no problem if the application was installed by that account, but no good if it was installed by an admin and they are not one.
Here's the info I got today:
The Eudora install process sets the permissions on the directory '/Applications/Eudora Application Folder/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS' to be 755 and owned by whoever does the install. My users do not run as the "owner/admin" of a machine and they are not the one doing installs. All this is OK until Entrust gets involved. Entrust uses this directory as a scratch area for doing its decryption. This fails with an Entrust error as seen here:
(image not sent to me)
To solve this problem you have to set this directory to modes 1777 - meaning rwx for everyone and having the sticky bit on (the 1) so that only an owner of a file may remove it. The commands used were:
As you said, every computer scientist knows to do the mundane tasks of computers...
I'm throwing the BS flag on this one - I do tech support at a Large Left-coast National Laboratory, home to many fine scientists in a wide variety of disciplines, including a large number of computer scientists. They all (each & every one) know more than I do regarding clustering, coding, circuit design, etc. What they don't know is the mundane tasks, because they only do them once if ever.
Let me ask - when did you last tweak your network settings? Replace your DNS server? Patch a web server? Install a new printer and/or driver? Upgrade your anti-virus server? Find a way to run a one-off application written 25 years ago on new hardware? Roll out 20 new systems in 5 days? Dig through vendor documentation of a commercial product to find out WHY it won't work the way the cusomer thinks it should, and find an acceptable replacement?
You were right about one thing, tech support is not CS. CS is a "deep" subject and tech support is "shallow" by comparison - but it's a damn sight "wider" than you think. You get to develop solutions to problems, while we support folks just have to find them... and we have a lot more problems to solve.
If your definition of geekiness is esoteric knowledge about system internals, I'll call your bet and raise you $50 - I build systems every day at work & at home, I keep current on trends & threats in hardware AND software, and I actively test new applications & OS's. What makes your CS degree (attained ~n years in the past) such a great signifier of geek prowess?
... true geeks really like computers. Yes, tech support people don't need to learn CS or how to write software. That's why tech support people simply aren't that nerdy.
How does the Earthlink commercial go - "nerds & geeks know about computers, but geeks get things done"? I am definitely a geek. You?
Let me start with a Arguement from Authority - You should listen to me, because I work at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) so I know all about this stuff... LOL.
But seriously, my opinion is this:
Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:
You ignore the issue of scale - the Labs' budgets are so big that most day-to-day purchasing isn't affected. It's the things like not replacing the million-dollar photo spectrometer every year, or not buying updated software (I still have to support a few WinNT/98/ME systems because the controller's software was written to run only on that platform, and we can't afford to buy a whole new electron microsocope.*)
The "Mad September Purchasing Rush" still happens, but most funds are allocated quarterly (or more often) so we've never had to wait 6 months - the wait time seems comparable to what I remember from the private sector (though they ARE longer than those at the dot-bomb I once worked for.)
And we DO miss out on training that we would like, but not because of direct budget uncertainty. The problem here is that everybody in our organization draws against the same pot of training money, and when it's gone, it's gone.
No, the biggest management problem is balancing "Security" and "Efficiency". If it's easy to do, it's probably not secure, and vice versa. And the security side wins most decisions (which is usually a GoodThing(tm), given the stuff people play with at the Labs.) Nobody MEANS to cause a problem, but they break one little rule... and it gets easier to do it that way, or it encourages somebody else to break one little rule too... and as you say, "things can get kind of out of hand."
(*And nobody seems to want to write such software for OSX/Linux/etc... why is that?)
Were you on a Dell, by any chance? They have a real issue with not seeing a USB keyboard unless it is in the first USB slot. I have seen this behavior on most Precison and Optiplex models for the last several years - the easy fix has been to just use that port for the keyboard as a matter of course.
Were you honestly surprised that the default (Microsoft) drivers did not include those for an Apple keyboard? That seems a teensy bit disingenuos of you.
I hate to go all spelling & grammer Nazi on you, but anybody citing their scientifically-gifted workplace to shore up their anecdotal "evidence" ought to be able to spell and/or use spelling & grammer checker software:
thermaldynamics - thermodynamics is a word, thermal dynamics is two words - and I imagine you meant the other.
teh - I know, the IRC-style spelling is popular here at/. but it seems a poor choice for a purported NASA rocket scientist...
relase - letter dropping, to match the name dropping?
I'm cool with a claim of authority, but then I claim you ought to take the time to write it right. Mmmkay?
I see scientists who have abdicated their neutrality and objectivity. They have become anti-religious and even anti-social, acting against the beliefs and desires of the society in which they live. Scientists have rushed headlong into the cloning of animals (even people) with little discussion of its practicality, desirability, or morality. And how about the recreation of the deadly "Spanish Influenza" by the NIH without so much as a by-your-leave or a 'hey, does anybody think this might be a bad idea?'
Science is the very best tool ever devised for answering the HOW of things, bar none, but it too has its limitations. Ask a scientist of any stripe WHY an event or action happened and they are as in the dark as the next man. Those questions are answered (if at all) by Religion or Philosophy - Why are we here? Why do bad things happen to good people? etc, etc, etc. The Scientific Method cannot, by definition, explain any case determined by belief...
Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his state of the university address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by intelligent design which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. 'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said."
True enough, but what we are getting as science is starting to look more like ideology rather than "informed exchange." The Theory of Evolution has flaws, gaps if you will, and those are being addressed among scientists ('Punctuated Equilibrium' vice steady-path-of-change, for example) - but all we see in the press is the dogmatic refusal to even discuss the opposing "theory" of intelligent design and the assumption that only idiots would disagree with Almighty Evolution. Attitudes like that drive people away from science, not towards it...
I believe in the ToE, myself - it seems the most reasonable solution to the problem. I am finding, however, that some of the cheerleaders for the Theory are as simpleminded in their belief as those they deride and despise.
That might be true if we had only one brain amongst us... which I sometimes feel is the case, like when I read another {FP!|troll|dupe}. Since we do have (# of brains > 1) we can study working (via EEG, CAT scan, MRI, etc) and non-working copies to our heart's content.
"Rig for impact" isn't just a catchy phrase ...
on
Archimedes Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
In point of fact, when you are planning to ram other ships one of the first things you do is lower the mast, booms, and rigging. If you don't, the sudden cessation of forward movement when you hit the other vessal will almost certainly cause them to collapse forward onto your own deck/sailors/soldiers. Some galleys included this as a feature - boarding ramps at the bow would be raised to fall forward at impact, allowing your guys to swarm over and take the other vessel.
You would also stow away as much of the sails and lines as possible for at least two reasons: to prevent your own people from stumbling over them, and to prevent anybody from damaging them. Either way, sails wouldn't be available as a target for any notional death ray.
refugee - (noun) a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
"... or natural disaster" clearly agrees with your definition. We both missed the thrust of the definition, though... "forced to leave their country". Nobody has been forced to leave the country, although Mexico is offering free airfare to its displaced illega^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens, according to today's paper.
Do you have access to the actual OED? If so, could you please post the citation, and that for 'displaced person' - I would like to see how they differ.
Regardless, I hold fast to the Wikipedia as the definitive source for/. purposes... its transparency and timeliness alone give it greater credence in my daily life. (There is just nothing geeky about the OED...)
BTW, if you don't tell us you're quoting the OED, how are we to take your appeal to authority seriously?
A refugee is a person seeking asylum in a foreign country in order to escape persecution. Some regional legal instruments further include those seeking to escape generalized violence in the definition of a refugee. Those who seek refugee status are sometimes known as asylum seekers and the practice of accepting such refugees is that of offering political asylum. The most common asylum claims to industrialized countries are based upon political and religious grounds.
They also note the usage you refer to above... but do not seem to agree.
This article is for the group of people as defined by international law. For the description of "refugee" as casually used for any person who has been forced to leave their home, see displaced person.
You might want to check your fondness for ad hominem attacks first. Regardless, I wish the hurricane & flood survivors the best of luck with the media scrutiny they are getting. I rode out Hurricane Iniki (back in '92), and helped my folks rebuild afterwards, and I still remember those frickin video-vultures lining up their shots of devastated houses and families just so they could get 15 more seconds on the national news. F'em all...
Maybe this "Refugee Radio - KAMP" would have been the best thing ever... but how many people in the 'Dome even have radios now? Anybody got a number?
Sadly, I can easily name three such sites, and they are all internal to my organization - the HR, AIS (accounting & finance), and Training departments host a variety of web applications, and several of them work correctly with just one browser. My favorite is the Training reports site that can be viewed with Netscape/Mozilla/etc, but can only be modified with IE, and only prints reports correctly when you save them as PDF files...
And yes, they are all separate sites - we are an organization of departments, with little or no coordination.
1. You ARE aware Queen of Wands is no longer being produced? The 'rerun with commentary' is somewhat amusing, but not something I would ever pay for... would you? As such, the license it is released under makes little difference.
2. Re: your sig - I think Bill is doing more than just dreaming...
Slashdot Mirror
I so want to change my logon to OxygenThief ....
Sorry, I'm a bit of a Strict Constructionist myself - if you want a "Right" under the Law then go write a law that gives it to you, instead of magically finding it in 200-year old documents and the opinions of political appointees.
Having said that, I agree wholeheartedly that this judge gave little consideration of the implications and intent in the case. I can only hope that our newly-elected Democratic Overlords take up the challenge of writing a law to address this aggregious invasion of privacy.
And really, nobody likes running with a large iPod either - if you expect to be actively exercising while listening to music you buy a mini version, like the Nano, Shuffle, Sansa, Rio, etc.
I fall squarely in the other camp - I carry a PDA (in a hardcase no less) which fills a wallet pocket pretty full, and I like it just fine. I use it primarily for reading ebooks, and I find the screen to be just big enough. I can load it with a subset of my music if I so desire, but I usually just carry the iPod too if I'm going to be away from a computer (where I would just use iTunes instead.)
In the end, I'm glad you posted - it's always nice to question one's own positions from time to time. I admire your fervor, and even sympathize with your cause to an extent, but I will address the issue my own way. I'm going to keep rewarding companies that do it the right way, rather than try to compel companies to stop doing things the wrong way. I'm going to keep holding individuals accountable for their actions. And I'm going to keep asking questions, 'cause that's the only way to ever learn anything - even if you don't get an answer.
Maybe we should be outraged about workers in another country being exploited ... but maybe their problems need to be solved by their own government rather than ours. After all, I'm pretty sure Nike will bow to the demands of the Nation of Vietnam well before they do so to the desires of extra-national protesters.
If this situation is as intolerable as you believe, surely the "Chavez style Bolivaran revolution" you seem to desire should be happening in Vietnam rather than here, shouldn't it?
As they say, the plural of anecdote != data.
I've using a 3 year old PC, so it's running at USB 1.0 speeds (12Mbits/sec), while my wife has a dock running USB 2.0 (AKA Hi-Speed, or 480MBits/sec) or FireWire 1.0 (100-400MBits/sec). My wireless card gets 11-54MBits/sec when maxed out - and it would do nothing for recharging the battery in the iPod.
You want to impress us all, figure out how to broadcast power over WiFi ...
Lastly, people on
Or did you mean to imply (from the laundry list of statements you discounted above) that you wouldn't believe him if he said "water is wet"?
I'm just curious ... If I had actually moved to another country and taken a new job, I'm not sure I'd be all that interested in telling the world where to find me either.
Regarding the suit, I hope justice is done.
Let me be the next person to say it - Thank You!
Your first, restated: Criminals, AND the OWNERS of the company where they work, AND the ENTIRE COMPANY that contracted the work "ought to be held responsible". Seems a bit draconian, unless you can show some proof that they were all in it together. Or are you saying that merely because [person A] hires [person B] who subsequently commits a crime that [person A] is guilty too?
Your second, restated: The soldiers (criminals), AND the commander of the prison (NOT the soldier's commander, BTW, and one of the people who pushed the investigation), AND the civilan boss of the entire Defense Department "ought to be held responsible". Again, it seems a bit much to indict the supervisor who attempted to put things right, and the many level higher supervisor who had never been to the site - but if you've got proof they were involved in the crime they should have been charged. In fact, the military does espouse the "chain of authority" concept - and they did charge the immediate supervisors who did not stop the crimes, and did censure the supervisors of those supervisors for not catching them slacking off.
It's your third assumption that really scares me, though: That Corporate Law should be the same as Military Law. Are you planning to treat soldiers like corporations, or corporations like soldiers? Neither idea sounds very inviting.
Here's the info I got today:
Let me ask - when did you last tweak your network settings? Replace your DNS server? Patch a web server? Install a new printer and/or driver? Upgrade your anti-virus server? Find a way to run a one-off application written 25 years ago on new hardware? Roll out 20 new systems in 5 days? Dig through vendor documentation of a commercial product to find out WHY it won't work the way the cusomer thinks it should, and find an acceptable replacement?
You were right about one thing, tech support is not CS. CS is a "deep" subject and tech support is "shallow" by comparison - but it's a damn sight "wider" than you think. You get to develop solutions to problems, while we support folks just have to find them ... and we have a lot more problems to solve.
If your definition of geekiness is esoteric knowledge about system internals, I'll call your bet and raise you $50 - I build systems every day at work & at home, I keep current on trends & threats in hardware AND software, and I actively test new applications & OS's. What makes your CS degree (attained ~n years in the past) such a great signifier of geek prowess?
How does the Earthlink commercial go - "nerds & geeks know about computers, but geeks get things done"? I am definitely a geek. You?But seriously, my opinion is this: Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:
No, the biggest management problem is balancing "Security" and "Efficiency". If it's easy to do, it's probably not secure, and vice versa. And the security side wins most decisions (which is usually a GoodThing(tm), given the stuff people play with at the Labs.) Nobody MEANS to cause a problem, but they break one little rule ... and it gets easier to do it that way, or it encourages somebody else to break one little rule too ... and as you say, "things can get kind of out of hand."
(*And nobody seems to want to write such software for OSX/Linux/etc ... why is that?)
Were you honestly surprised that the default (Microsoft) drivers did not include those for an Apple keyboard? That seems a teensy bit disingenuos of you.
- thermaldynamics - thermodynamics is a word, thermal dynamics is two words - and I imagine you meant the other.
- teh - I know, the IRC-style spelling is popular here at
/. but it seems a poor choice for a purported NASA rocket scientist ...
- relase - letter dropping, to match the name dropping?
I'm cool with a claim of authority, but then I claim you ought to take the time to write it right. Mmmkay?Science is the very best tool ever devised for answering the HOW of things, bar none, but it too has its limitations. Ask a scientist of any stripe WHY an event or action happened and they are as in the dark as the next man. Those questions are answered (if at all) by Religion or Philosophy - Why are we here? Why do bad things happen to good people? etc, etc, etc. The Scientific Method cannot, by definition, explain any case determined by belief ...
True enough, but what we are getting as science is starting to look more like ideology rather than "informed exchange." The Theory of Evolution has flaws, gaps if you will, and those are being addressed among scientists ('Punctuated Equilibrium' vice steady-path-of-change, for example) - but all we see in the press is the dogmatic refusal to even discuss the opposing "theory" of intelligent design and the assumption that only idiots would disagree with Almighty Evolution. Attitudes like that drive people away from science, not towards itI believe in the ToE, myself - it seems the most reasonable solution to the problem. I am finding, however, that some of the cheerleaders for the Theory are as simpleminded in their belief as those they deride and despise.
You would also stow away as much of the sails and lines as possible for at least two reasons: to prevent your own people from stumbling over them, and to prevent anybody from damaging them. Either way, sails wouldn't be available as a target for any notional death ray.
Do you have access to the actual OED? If so, could you please post the citation, and that for 'displaced person' - I would like to see how they differ.
Regardless, I hold fast to the Wikipedia as the definitive source for /. purposes ... its transparency and timeliness alone give it greater credence in my daily life. (There is just nothing geeky about the OED ...)
BTW, if you don't tell us you're quoting the OED, how are we to take your appeal to authority seriously?
Maybe this "Refugee Radio - KAMP" would have been the best thing ever ... but how many people in the 'Dome even have radios now? Anybody got a number?
Aloha.
And yes, they are all separate sites - we are an organization of departments, with little or no coordination.
2. Re: your sig - I think Bill is doing more than just dreaming ...