And how many of the winners of the Nobel literature prize over the past 20 years can you remember without consulting Google?
The last well known author who wrote in English for a popular audience was William Golding, the committee was going through something of a populist phase at the time since it was the year after Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Nobel prize for literature is not given for writing, it is given for politics. The one common factor in the awards is that the authors are seen as representatives of a particular political situation. That is a defensible position for the Nobel committee because the terms of the Nobel bequest states that is what the awards are for. They are not about the book that is the best read, the will states "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind", the literature prize being "shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."
I was at Oxford when the campaign was rolling to get him elected as professor of poetry. It was a blatant grab to get a well known name in 'high literature' associated with the university. The English dons calculated that Heaney was a possible candidate for the Nobel because of his writings on the Irish situation. The game was that they make him poetry prof which he accepts because it raises the probability he gets the nobel, Oxford then lobbies Sweden on his behalf and shares in the glory if successful.
I fail to see how such games have anything to do with how good a writer someone is.
P.S. This isn't intended to sound rude, patronising,or adversarial, but really, when you write about literature, you need to spell it correctly.
You think that Beowulf is spelt consistently?
I am dyslexic. I consider the value of standardized spelling to be highly overated, along with the high literature that the grammarians would have people believe is superior to the plebian fare.
The fact that you fix on such a superficial issue demonstrates my case perfectly. I have a degree in nuclear physics, I am more than familiar with the classical canon. You chose to judge me on my spelling? But remember, very little of the canon was written as 'high literature', Shakespere and Dante both wrote for the common man.
That aside, I really don't think you can make a case that Rowling writes better than Heaney.
By what measure?
Writing for children is not at all easy. Ian Fleming found writing chitty chitty bang bang harder than writing his Bond novels.
Heaney is the type of author we are 'meant' to appreciate. Just as we are 'meant' to appreciate classical opera rather than the Rolling Stones.
I don't care for Heaney's type of poetry, there are many better poets arround, Bob Dylan to take an establishment approved example, oh he writes to music? How do you think Beowulf was performed in 600AD? Where oral traditions still exist you will find the narration is usually accompanied by a drum at the least - and if a drum isn't available the narrator will frequently clap.
The point is that Heaney merely translated another work. He did not provide the plot, the characters or anything else that an author has to do when writing an original work.
I think Rowling writes better than Heaney copies Beowulf.
I am interested to see how his Beowulf will compare with Seamus Heaney's truly masterful work, published a couple of years ago.
Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.
The book of the year came down to a choice between Heaney's Beowulf and Harry Potter. The ossified farts of the Booker committee gave the Prize to Heaney saying 'Children's books come and go, Beowulf is forever'.
The idiocy of this remark amazed me. While I have no doubt that students will be having Gilgamesh and Beowulf rammed down their craw in a thousand years time I very much doubt the Heaney translation will be much remembered (except perhaps by a snarky comment in a preface to Potter!). On the other hand we can be pretty certain that Alice in Wonderland and probably even Lord of the Rings will still be arround. And if any book published that year is still in print in 100 years time I'll bet Harry potter is as well.
What it comes down to is the same set of sniffy attitudes that denigrated Tolkein's work. The other Oxford Dons were not pleased when an obscure professor of philology made the publishing sensation of the decade rather than any of the established names they had been betting on. They certainly did not like the idea that tales of elves etc. was more popular than their 'high litterature'.
Beowulf is famous for one reason alone, it is the earliest that survived. Now that in itself is no mean feat since a tale that survives as an oral tradition has to be worth telling. But when it comes down to it Homer, Gilgamesh and Beowulf are more important for the way in which they have affected our culture than in themselves. For that reason alone I would rate Tolkein's translation higher since at the end of the day Tolkein did something interesting with Beowulf. Heaney merely translated it.
Besides Heaney is exactly the type of high litterature type that the Oxford Dons think we should like instead of Tolkein, if only we understood what high art is.
Perhaps one could look at the voting patterns and party identification of members of the media (reporters, producers, industry executives)
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests. That typically means anti-union and most important anti regulations that restrict media monopolies.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc. When Lott, Barr, DeLay and co are complaining about the 'liberal media' they are in most cases complaining that their 'conservative social agenda' is rejected as biggotry by pretty much everyone with a college education under the age of 45.
Re:Most Politically Incorrect == Worst?
on
Top Ten Shameful Games
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
In this game, the player took control of a naked General George Custer, who had to navigate a battlefield to have sex with an Indian maiden who was tied to a post. Although Mystique claimed the sex was just a consensual bondage escapade and not rape, Native American groups as well as the National Organization for Women believed the game promoted sexual violence and staged national protests against it.
Any chance we will find out that it was written by friends of Trent Lott?
If Custer was alive he would have called out the writers to a duel and shot them stone dead. It is not therefore a matter of 'political correctness' or any newfangled strange fad, unless what you mean by 'political correctness' is behaving in a way that would be considered civilized by any organism higher in the evolutionary scale than plankton.
Your words have been noted.
Anyone who knows what is good for them will make sure they don't repeat such unpatriotic statements.
You republicans get more utterly despicable every day. Bush is many things but a competent plumber certainly ain't one of them. You folks can't even fix an election without leaving a trail a mile wide so don't pretend you can run a police state.
On the plus side, police could finally catch the asshats going 90+ in the 25MPH zones,
I drive 10 miles to work every day in a far from inconspicuous car at approx 80 mph. I notice however that despite the fact that the stretch is patrolled fairly heavilly the cops don't go after folk for speed they go after the assholes driving 15 ft off someone's rear bumper.
Main reason I have to slow down is when some git with a truck a ton heavier than me with shoddy brakes decides to tailgate. I always leave 200 yards to the car in front and I have brakes and a suspension setup that can stop the car dead from 90mph in that space. The git behind would be lucky to respond before he ran into the back of me.
The thing that really gets me is the folk who have to tailgate in the inside lane.
Both men shared some difficulties with the draft, certain unclean dabblings with the courts, and a peculiar lying about past drug use
Have you ever seen the Clinton 'I never inhaled tape"?
It is worth seeing in context. Clinton was in the MTV studio with a teen audience doing an open meeting type Q&A. One of the teens asked if Bill had ever been in a situation where he felt pressured to take drugs.
The point is that the media have been lying to us. They smeared Clinton and Gore, they supressed the truth about Bush. But for the ability of the Republican echo chamber to create character assasination stories to damage Democrats there is no way Bush could have run as he did on a 'character' ticket.
So rather than become liberal Rush Limbaughs -- what a concept! -- let's ask about the Iraq agenda, the economy, prescription drugs, Wall Street corruption, Enron and family, domestic spying, immigration law, peculiar tax breaks, budget deficits, and so on and so on
And how do you get the media to talk about those issues when they really want to talk about the cost of Kerry's hairdo? I would much rather hear about issues, but if we can't have issues I much prefer to hear about the racist sympathies of Lott, Barr, De Lay etc than whatever story the republican echo chamber wants to promote.
One of the curious features of the Us is that politicians are almost completely absent from political talk shows. In Europe you see politicians debating the issues - mostly elected politicians with the occasional pressure group. In the US you have a special class of journalists, the pundit who speaks for politicians.
This means that the likes of Novak or Safire can mouth off for the GOP, promoting their agenda without taking any responsibility for it. If the policies backfire the politicians who promoted them are not even on record backing them.
The US is the only country I know of where journalists assert that the people are unable to make judgements for themselves without the intermediation of journalists to analyze the news for them.
there is much evil that will go on in gulf war II- the vengeance (pg-13). but there is also much good. iraqi people in an islamic democracy like turkey. less wmd in the hands of madmen.
And how many Iraqui civilians are you prepared to kill to get to that point, 5,000? 50,000? 250,000?
The civilian casualties in vietnam were 1. million of which 325,000 were killed. Little reported in the US media is the fact that repression in Saudi Arabia is actually worse than Iraq. In addition to the state repression, murder of opponemts, torture etc women are treated only slightly better than under the Taliban.
The US, owner of the worlds largest arsenal of weapons of mass deestruction is claiming that it has to go to war to stop Iraq from making any weapons of mass destruction. In order to fight this war they plan to use land mines and cluster bombs - weapons the rest of the world believes should be banned.
Forgive me if I am unable to see the moral clarity in this siutuation that the administration and its appologists claim. From where I stand I see only a bunch of opportunistic hypocrites whose goals appear to be determined by electoral calculations rather the national good of either the US or Iraq.
You could make a RAID of these things the size of a couple of decks of cards. And I imagine that they kick out less heat.
More appositely perhaps, you will probably be able to buy a RAID configuration for these drives at consumer prices rather than the ridiculous prices such configurations go for as 'commercial' configurations.
The 1.8" drive would fit pretty well in a camcorder and be much easier to deal with than tapes.
Really? This is the first I've heard of this. Seriously. Can you point me to some info on this?
AWOLBush has the basic facts. Shrub's military record shows that he did not show up for duty between May 1972 and October 1973.
There is no statute of limitations for desertion in time of war. If this was Clinton, Ken Starr would have investigated. However because it is a republican he gets off.
That's prolly why they end up doing sales. They don't actually have to help you to get their commission. I may not want to help them, but a good customer in their eyes. I usually know exactly what I want and where to find it. Quick and easy for the salesdroid.
When my car started to show signs of age I drove off to the local SAAB dealer with check book in pocket. You might think that a 30 something guy driving a 5 year old SAAB 9000 sport model who came in to ask about the new model range would be a pretty hot sales prospect.
Are there any places where you can just go and point to a 42" plasma TV's box and say, "cart that one out to my car.?" You're always going to have to go into a store with commissioned sales staff, right?
Try Costco. They have a SAMPO 42" screen for $2999 and a Pioneer 50" screen for $5999. If you join the executive club you get 2% back a year later.
Of course you had better have an SUV or other big car to get it home in. The staff will help you get the box to your car but you have to get it out.
I think that when they start drilling in ANWAR it should be renamed the Ralph Nader Oil Field.
So any greens out there who still can't tell the difference between Bush and Gore> If you are really that stupid heres some clues:
Gore would not be starting a war with Iraq instead of chasing Bin Laden
Gore would not have alienated every US aly apart from the UK (who are only loyal because of WWII) and Israel who would not last two years without US handouts.
Gore would not have promoted a tax cut in which 95% of the population see only 5% of the benefits that the country can't afford.
Gore would not have abroggated the Kyoto treaty, the ABM treaty.
John Ashcroft would not be AG
Poindexter, convicted of lying to congress would not be in charge of 'Total Information Awareness'
This administration lies about everything -- every goddamned thing -- as a matter of permanent policy
The problem isn't just the administration, its the Republican echo chamber that chose the candidate, chose the policies and lied to the people to get him elected.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
That is why we have in the Whitehouse a Vietnam draft dogger who deserted his National guard post that daddy pulled strings to get, a man with a criminal conviction and a man who was investigated by the SEC for corruption who got off on a 'technicality' - if you call having daddy being Vice President at the time a technicality.
All of this was known during the campaign but the Republican echo chamber made sure that attention was instead focused on the 'real issues' of Gore's 'lies', like saying he went to Texas fires with the head of FEMA, not the deputy head, according to the Republican echo chamber this was an attempt to embelish his record, a vice president claiming to be on equal terms with an agency director! imagine!
Very little is being said about the fact that the SEC is currently investigating Cheney for corrupt accounting. One would thing that would be a big story, bigger than Lott's racist gaffe even. But no the big story the Republican echo chamber want to talk about is the alleged cost of Kerry's hairdo.
And so having made a mess of the economy and failled to catch Bin Laden the Administration is desperately trying to start a war in the hope that everyone (or at least sufficient numbers) can be fooled by the flag waving.
Question for the republican slashdot monitors - can you honestly claim that W, who deserted from the National guard would have served in the war he wants to start with Iraq?
Over where I come from we have words for people like W, they are Hypocrite, Liar and Coward.
Inflight patent examination? How is that meant to be an improvement?
So you get onto a plane, hand your patent claims to the flight attendant and they give you the result before you land? Kool, I mean that is going to cut down on the number of bogus patents getting filled, at least they will have been reviewed by a flight attendant, that can only be an improvement on the current USPTO scheme.
A conference where they actually confer and (As implied by going to eat together) discuss what they're talking about rather than just visiting booths. It's about time some of that hacker-ethic efficiency made its way to the computer conference world.
Well that is pretty much how conferences start. They begin as a technical session with 5 experts talking and 50 people in the audience, then the next year there are more people and the program gets longer. The year after that there is an exhibition which the year after becomes an exhibition floor. After that the whole thing goes downhill and turns into a trade show.
That is exactly how the RSA Conference and Interop began.
I am somewhat disappointed by the means of choosing the papers, basically the first people to propose a talk. As a result the spam conference will only be discussing filtering approaches based on identifying the spam. The alternative approaches based on authenticating the genuine signal simply won't get a hearing.
The problem with filtering approaches is that they only work as long as the attacker does not have access to the filter. If the attacker does have access to the filter they can repeatedly test and modify their spam until it gets through. That is why the filtering built into Outlook fails, the attackers have access to the filter and can use countermeasures.
Filtering techniques are a hacker solution, they only solve the problem for the small community of hackers that use them. Once they are used generally they fail.
Like Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra, you mean?
I don't know that Don or Edsger 'dominate' the field any more than say Lamark dominates biology. OK so we use quite a bit of stuff they did, but neither has made a major contribution to the field in the last 15 years or so...
I don't think anyone dominates the computer science field. The most visible spokespeople are mostly young to middle age, Linus, Tim Berners-Lee. Oh yes and quite a few of them are imigrants. So yes lets put Linus on the first boat home, then all the descendants of imigrants and before too long all that will be left will be a bunch of native americans and some empty casinos.
So before folk get too shirty about how H1B visa holders are taking their jobs think on this. Three years ago companies like mine simply could not find US citizens to hire with the skills we needed. The choice was to move the engineering operations overseas or bring workers to the US.
I am not that keen on outsourcing code development, and I have heard enough horror stories of outsourcing to ultra low wage countries to know it is not a panacea. But if I can't bring the workers I need to the US there are plenty of English speaking developed countries to choose from.
The Royal Corps of Engineers was active in the Napoleonic wars, and long before that (thats circa 1800 for those who don't know history). So the 'engine driver' theory is total rubbish.
The Engineers were responsible for the placement and use of seige engines etc. That profession goes right back to Roman times.
A person who drives a train is called a train driver. They are not an engineer unless they are a member of a chartered institution (unlikely unless they drive trains for fun).
Equally the guy who fixes your car is a mechanic, not an engineer.
Guns don't kill people. People WITH GUNS kill people.
Actually I have always believed in the bullet theory myself.
If you want to blame PEOPLE then start with the frikin gun nuts. Those psychos help murder more people each month than Bin Laden has killed in his life.
Sorry but Charleton Hesston and Wayne la Piere are lower than peadophile priest in my book (and that is low). Those scum know (ok in the case of chuck knew) what their words lead to. They are accomplices to mass murder as surely as Milosevich or Saddam.
Now, I'm not saying if they're right or wrong, but to their credit, there is more possibility of it being true in this case, then from say, small arms fire, since the weapon they're talking about fires 30mm depleted uranium shells, designed to kill fully armored tanks from the air.
Thanks to those communist liberals in Congress you can't get weapons that fire 30mm uranium shells any more. Stupid laws like that are a real bitch for those of us who use that type of gun for *sport*.
I mean forchrisakes how are you expected to hit a deer if its driving an armored vehicle?
Actually, if they used Tolkien's writings on the First or Second Ages of Middle-Earth as it's basis, a prequel trilogy wouldn't suck.
Or if they were to look at the nothern mythologies on which they were based. Tolkein madee no secret of the fact that he took ideas from those sources. One of the motivations for the books in the first place was to get people interested in them.
Tolkein was disgusted with 'that bloody ignoramous' Hitler for hijacking the Norther heritage for his own political ends, he correctly realised that Hitler would pollute many of the symbols he appropriated.
There is no reason that the Silmarilion etc could not be made into workable movies. After all The Bond movies have done perfectly well using short stories, not that they are based on Flemming's books any longer.
Sun isn't very popular on the client because there is no consistency in the client-side VM. Gee, do you think Microsoft had anything to do with that?
Java isn't very popular on the client because the idea is stupid. It is only marginally more useful than VRML.
I have yet to see a java applet that does something that would not have been done better in HTML or need not have been done at all. I mean just how interesting is it to have a dancing java bean on your web page???
And last time I checked Sun still does more than twice as much business as Apple.
Who ships more boxes? At the end of the day it is the number of boxes you ship not the price per box that matters. The price per box will inevitably fall over time.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many of the winners of the Nobel literature prize over the past 20 years can you remember without consulting Google?
The last well known author who wrote in English for a popular audience was William Golding, the committee was going through something of a populist phase at the time since it was the year after Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Nobel prize for literature is not given for writing, it is given for politics. The one common factor in the awards is that the authors are seen as representatives of a particular political situation. That is a defensible position for the Nobel committee because the terms of the Nobel bequest states that is what the awards are for. They are not about the book that is the best read, the will states "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind", the literature prize being "shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."
I was at Oxford when the campaign was rolling to get him elected as professor of poetry. It was a blatant grab to get a well known name in 'high literature' associated with the university. The English dons calculated that Heaney was a possible candidate for the Nobel because of his writings on the Irish situation. The game was that they make him poetry prof which he accepts because it raises the probability he gets the nobel, Oxford then lobbies Sweden on his behalf and shares in the glory if successful.
I fail to see how such games have anything to do with how good a writer someone is.
You think that Beowulf is spelt consistently?
I am dyslexic. I consider the value of standardized spelling to be highly overated, along with the high literature that the grammarians would have people believe is superior to the plebian fare.
The fact that you fix on such a superficial issue demonstrates my case perfectly. I have a degree in nuclear physics, I am more than familiar with the classical canon. You chose to judge me on my spelling? But remember, very little of the canon was written as 'high literature', Shakespere and Dante both wrote for the common man.
By what measure?
Writing for children is not at all easy. Ian Fleming found writing chitty chitty bang bang harder than writing his Bond novels.
Heaney is the type of author we are 'meant' to appreciate. Just as we are 'meant' to appreciate classical opera rather than the Rolling Stones.
I don't care for Heaney's type of poetry, there are many better poets arround, Bob Dylan to take an establishment approved example, oh he writes to music? How do you think Beowulf was performed in 600AD? Where oral traditions still exist you will find the narration is usually accompanied by a drum at the least - and if a drum isn't available the narrator will frequently clap.
The point is that Heaney merely translated another work. He did not provide the plot, the characters or anything else that an author has to do when writing an original work.
I think Rowling writes better than Heaney copies Beowulf.
Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.
The book of the year came down to a choice between Heaney's Beowulf and Harry Potter. The ossified farts of the Booker committee gave the Prize to Heaney saying 'Children's books come and go, Beowulf is forever'.
The idiocy of this remark amazed me. While I have no doubt that students will be having Gilgamesh and Beowulf rammed down their craw in a thousand years time I very much doubt the Heaney translation will be much remembered (except perhaps by a snarky comment in a preface to Potter!). On the other hand we can be pretty certain that Alice in Wonderland and probably even Lord of the Rings will still be arround. And if any book published that year is still in print in 100 years time I'll bet Harry potter is as well.
What it comes down to is the same set of sniffy attitudes that denigrated Tolkein's work. The other Oxford Dons were not pleased when an obscure professor of philology made the publishing sensation of the decade rather than any of the established names they had been betting on. They certainly did not like the idea that tales of elves etc. was more popular than their 'high litterature'.
Beowulf is famous for one reason alone, it is the earliest that survived. Now that in itself is no mean feat since a tale that survives as an oral tradition has to be worth telling. But when it comes down to it Homer, Gilgamesh and Beowulf are more important for the way in which they have affected our culture than in themselves. For that reason alone I would rate Tolkein's translation higher since at the end of the day Tolkein did something interesting with Beowulf. Heaney merely translated it.
Besides Heaney is exactly the type of high litterature type that the Oxford Dons think we should like instead of Tolkein, if only we understood what high art is.
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests. That typically means anti-union and most important anti regulations that restrict media monopolies.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc. When Lott, Barr, DeLay and co are complaining about the 'liberal media' they are in most cases complaining that their 'conservative social agenda' is rejected as biggotry by pretty much everyone with a college education under the age of 45.
Letsee, offend native Americans - check, offend women - check, offend Custer relatives check.
Any chance we will find out that it was written by friends of Trent Lott?
If Custer was alive he would have called out the writers to a duel and shot them stone dead. It is not therefore a matter of 'political correctness' or any newfangled strange fad, unless what you mean by 'political correctness' is behaving in a way that would be considered civilized by any organism higher in the evolutionary scale than plankton.
Anyone who knows what is good for them will make sure they don't repeat such unpatriotic statements.
You republicans get more utterly despicable every day. Bush is many things but a competent plumber certainly ain't one of them. You folks can't even fix an election without leaving a trail a mile wide so don't pretend you can run a police state.
I drive 10 miles to work every day in a far from inconspicuous car at approx 80 mph. I notice however that despite the fact that the stretch is patrolled fairly heavilly the cops don't go after folk for speed they go after the assholes driving 15 ft off someone's rear bumper.
Main reason I have to slow down is when some git with a truck a ton heavier than me with shoddy brakes decides to tailgate. I always leave 200 yards to the car in front and I have brakes and a suspension setup that can stop the car dead from 90mph in that space. The git behind would be lucky to respond before he ran into the back of me.
The thing that really gets me is the folk who have to tailgate in the inside lane.
More Republican lies, the SEC just upgraded the Halliburton probe
Why tell lies about things that are so easily checked? Cheney is still under investigation, he was CEO while the accounting irregularities occurred.
Have you ever seen the Clinton 'I never inhaled tape"?
It is worth seeing in context. Clinton was in the MTV studio with a teen audience doing an open meeting type Q&A. One of the teens asked if Bill had ever been in a situation where he felt pressured to take drugs.
The point is that the media have been lying to us. They smeared Clinton and Gore, they supressed the truth about Bush. But for the ability of the Republican echo chamber to create character assasination stories to damage Democrats there is no way Bush could have run as he did on a 'character' ticket.
So rather than become liberal Rush Limbaughs -- what a concept! -- let's ask about the Iraq agenda, the economy, prescription drugs, Wall Street corruption, Enron and family, domestic spying, immigration law, peculiar tax breaks, budget deficits, and so on and so on
And how do you get the media to talk about those issues when they really want to talk about the cost of Kerry's hairdo? I would much rather hear about issues, but if we can't have issues I much prefer to hear about the racist sympathies of Lott, Barr, De Lay etc than whatever story the republican echo chamber wants to promote.
One of the curious features of the Us is that politicians are almost completely absent from political talk shows. In Europe you see politicians debating the issues - mostly elected politicians with the occasional pressure group. In the US you have a special class of journalists, the pundit who speaks for politicians.
This means that the likes of Novak or Safire can mouth off for the GOP, promoting their agenda without taking any responsibility for it. If the policies backfire the politicians who promoted them are not even on record backing them.
The US is the only country I know of where journalists assert that the people are unable to make judgements for themselves without the intermediation of journalists to analyze the news for them.
And how many Iraqui civilians are you prepared to kill to get to that point, 5,000? 50,000? 250,000?
The civilian casualties in vietnam were 1. million of which 325,000 were killed. Little reported in the US media is the fact that repression in Saudi Arabia is actually worse than Iraq. In addition to the state repression, murder of opponemts, torture etc women are treated only slightly better than under the Taliban.
The US, owner of the worlds largest arsenal of weapons of mass deestruction is claiming that it has to go to war to stop Iraq from making any weapons of mass destruction. In order to fight this war they plan to use land mines and cluster bombs - weapons the rest of the world believes should be banned.
Forgive me if I am unable to see the moral clarity in this siutuation that the administration and its appologists claim. From where I stand I see only a bunch of opportunistic hypocrites whose goals appear to be determined by electoral calculations rather the national good of either the US or Iraq.
More appositely perhaps, you will probably be able to buy a RAID configuration for these drives at consumer prices rather than the ridiculous prices such configurations go for as 'commercial' configurations.
The 1.8" drive would fit pretty well in a camcorder and be much easier to deal with than tapes.
AWOLBush has the basic facts. Shrub's military record shows that he did not show up for duty between May 1972 and October 1973.
There is no statute of limitations for desertion in time of war. If this was Clinton, Ken Starr would have investigated. However because it is a republican he gets off.
See also Bush's Top 10 Lies, Exaggerations And 'Obsfucations' About His Military Service
When my car started to show signs of age I drove off to the local SAAB dealer with check book in pocket. You might think that a 30 something guy driving a 5 year old SAAB 9000 sport model who came in to ask about the new model range would be a pretty hot sales prospect.
The sales staff were completely uninterested.
Try Costco. They have a SAMPO 42" screen for $2999 and a Pioneer 50" screen for $5999. If you join the executive club you get 2% back a year later.
Of course you had better have an SUV or other big car to get it home in. The staff will help you get the box to your car but you have to get it out.
So any greens out there who still can't tell the difference between Bush and Gore> If you are really that stupid heres some clues:
The problem isn't just the administration, its the Republican echo chamber that chose the candidate, chose the policies and lied to the people to get him elected.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
That is why we have in the Whitehouse a Vietnam draft dogger who deserted his National guard post that daddy pulled strings to get, a man with a criminal conviction and a man who was investigated by the SEC for corruption who got off on a 'technicality' - if you call having daddy being Vice President at the time a technicality.
All of this was known during the campaign but the Republican echo chamber made sure that attention was instead focused on the 'real issues' of Gore's 'lies', like saying he went to Texas fires with the head of FEMA, not the deputy head, according to the Republican echo chamber this was an attempt to embelish his record, a vice president claiming to be on equal terms with an agency director! imagine!
Very little is being said about the fact that the SEC is currently investigating Cheney for corrupt accounting. One would thing that would be a big story, bigger than Lott's racist gaffe even. But no the big story the Republican echo chamber want to talk about is the alleged cost of Kerry's hairdo.
And so having made a mess of the economy and failled to catch Bin Laden the Administration is desperately trying to start a war in the hope that everyone (or at least sufficient numbers) can be fooled by the flag waving.
Question for the republican slashdot monitors - can you honestly claim that W, who deserted from the National guard would have served in the war he wants to start with Iraq?
Over where I come from we have words for people like W, they are Hypocrite, Liar and Coward.
So you get onto a plane, hand your patent claims to the flight attendant and they give you the result before you land? Kool, I mean that is going to cut down on the number of bogus patents getting filled, at least they will have been reviewed by a flight attendant, that can only be an improvement on the current USPTO scheme.
Oh patient examination
Well that is pretty much how conferences start. They begin as a technical session with 5 experts talking and 50 people in the audience, then the next year there are more people and the program gets longer. The year after that there is an exhibition which the year after becomes an exhibition floor. After that the whole thing goes downhill and turns into a trade show.
That is exactly how the RSA Conference and Interop began.
I am somewhat disappointed by the means of choosing the papers, basically the first people to propose a talk. As a result the spam conference will only be discussing filtering approaches based on identifying the spam. The alternative approaches based on authenticating the genuine signal simply won't get a hearing.
The problem with filtering approaches is that they only work as long as the attacker does not have access to the filter. If the attacker does have access to the filter they can repeatedly test and modify their spam until it gets through. That is why the filtering built into Outlook fails, the attackers have access to the filter and can use countermeasures.
Filtering techniques are a hacker solution, they only solve the problem for the small community of hackers that use them. Once they are used generally they fail.
I don't think anyone dominates the computer science field. The most visible spokespeople are mostly young to middle age, Linus, Tim Berners-Lee. Oh yes and quite a few of them are imigrants. So yes lets put Linus on the first boat home, then all the descendants of imigrants and before too long all that will be left will be a bunch of native americans and some empty casinos.
So before folk get too shirty about how H1B visa holders are taking their jobs think on this. Three years ago companies like mine simply could not find US citizens to hire with the skills we needed. The choice was to move the engineering operations overseas or bring workers to the US.
I am not that keen on outsourcing code development, and I have heard enough horror stories of outsourcing to ultra low wage countries to know it is not a panacea. But if I can't bring the workers I need to the US there are plenty of English speaking developed countries to choose from.
The Engineers were responsible for the placement and use of seige engines etc. That profession goes right back to Roman times.
That is why we have 'civil engineering' as a profession, it is civil as in non-military. The Institution of Civil Engineers is an independent engineering institution. It was established in 1818, and today represents almost 80,000 professionally qualified civil engineers worldwide.
A person who drives a train is called a train driver. They are not an engineer unless they are a member of a chartered institution (unlikely unless they drive trains for fun). Equally the guy who fixes your car is a mechanic, not an engineer.
Actually I have always believed in the bullet theory myself.
If you want to blame PEOPLE then start with the frikin gun nuts. Those psychos help murder more people each month than Bin Laden has killed in his life.
Sorry but Charleton Hesston and Wayne la Piere are lower than peadophile priest in my book (and that is low). Those scum know (ok in the case of chuck knew) what their words lead to. They are accomplices to mass murder as surely as Milosevich or Saddam.
Thanks to those communist liberals in Congress you can't get weapons that fire 30mm uranium shells any more. Stupid laws like that are a real bitch for those of us who use that type of gun for *sport*.
I mean forchrisakes how are you expected to hit a deer if its driving an armored vehicle?
Or if they were to look at the nothern mythologies on which they were based. Tolkein madee no secret of the fact that he took ideas from those sources. One of the motivations for the books in the first place was to get people interested in them.
Tolkein was disgusted with 'that bloody ignoramous' Hitler for hijacking the Norther heritage for his own political ends, he correctly realised that Hitler would pollute many of the symbols he appropriated.
There is no reason that the Silmarilion etc could not be made into workable movies. After all The Bond movies have done perfectly well using short stories, not that they are based on Flemming's books any longer.
Java isn't very popular on the client because the idea is stupid. It is only marginally more useful than VRML.
I have yet to see a java applet that does something that would not have been done better in HTML or need not have been done at all. I mean just how interesting is it to have a dancing java bean on your web page???
And last time I checked Sun still does more than twice as much business as Apple.
Who ships more boxes? At the end of the day it is the number of boxes you ship not the price per box that matters. The price per box will inevitably fall over time.