Things are looking up for Mac users. Soon we will have three office productivity suites running in Aqua.
Microsoft Office. Probably not coincidentally, it's being sold for 1/2 price when you buy a new Mac.
AppleWorks. Which is almost as free as in beer, since it comes bundled with your new Mac.
and now OpenOffice.org.
Lots of people would say that having three different suites is a bad thing, but I don't think so anymore:
XML file formats: Both MS Office and Open Office have documented XML-based file specifications. This will make it possible for open source conversion stylesheets. Sure, there will be translation glitches, but the open nature of the file specification will make all types of conversion of content possible.
Variety of Tools. Some people like vi. Some people like emacs. Some people like BBEdit. Same for Office Suites. My wife has AppleWorks and MS Office, but she likes AppleWorks better. Me, I don't care what WP program I use, but I get really fussy when I can't use Excel. Too much finger memory built up.
Evolution. Like the varied Mozilla projects, lots of choices and experimentation is good. The more open code out there, the more new breakthrough projects built on the back of giants.
Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.
That's exactly the reason you should teach them the concept. Because they will never pick it up from casual use of Microsoft Word. They'll end up learning the hard way.
If you are doing a structured document with headings (a term paper or report), the benefits of learning Microsoft's style sheets will pay off.
But I also think it's important to do it for a one-off memo or letter. Why teach them "tab tab tab tab tab tab Sincerely," when the default letter stylesheet has styles for signature blocks.
I don't expect them to use XML and CSS and XSLT (heaven forbid!), but they should be aware of the concept and understand how to apply it (when warrented) in Word.
Learning bad habits like inserting tabs to indent paragraphs and signature blocks is not good. Sure it was fine when you used MultiMate in 1990, but it's a whole new century baby...
Teaching them about styles will pay off. Of course, Microsoft Word has a pretty spoogy way of creating and formatting styles which makes many people give up.
Once they learn how to make and apply styles, teach them how to template.
These are the two most useful (and time saving) skills you can learn with MS Word, plus they have implications in programming.
Oh, and if they're using Microsoft Excel, make sure to teach them how to use functions EARLY. Don't ask me how many times I've caught people tallying a column of numbers with a calculator in order to type the answer at the bottom of a spreadsheet...
One other skill they should learn is how to use version control software. There's a version of RCS that works quite nicely with Microsoft Word. Speaking from experience, version control is a technology whose time has come in the office. Every serious Word Processor I've worked with keeps backups of documents at critical stages (mostly out of self-defense). I've seen people reduced to tears because they've made edits to a document and then told to 'go back to the way it was'.
Carbon dioxide has a lower freezing point than water, so it comes out of solution when your soda freezes. The increased volume of the ice and the increased pressure of the CO2 can overpressurize a can.
It also has something to the thinwalling of aluminum cans. Aluminum is the most costly component to the cost of a can of coke. Packaging engineers are constantly thinking of ways to stretch more cans out of a pound of aluminum, and sometimes they get a little too thin.
Gee, I guess my biology degree, and my stint with a can manufacturing company paid off today...
You're right mostly. Humidity does effect wood more. I don't think wooden doors stick in the desert.
A better example would be running hot water over stuck jar lid. The metal expands faster than the glass.
Kinda off-topic but not really: Water gets denser as it cools to 4 degrees C, then it expands as the temperature drops until ice forms at 0 degrees C. Ice is acutally less dense than water (which is why it floats).
If they're looking for freeware, then their playing less money to Microsoft. That means they have more money for their employees.
For instance, we sometimes need a diagramming tool. Not everyday, maybe once a week. Nothing fancy, just some org charts that need updating.
If I have a choice between spending over $200/fanny for Visio or using Dia for free... Well, I've just saved $1200 in just my office. Do the same thing with a couple other 'optional' programs and we're talking real money.
Why would I want to pay Ballmer and Bill when I'd rather pay that money to employees that can turn around and make me more money?
The first Mickey Mouse cartoons would have eventually lapsed into the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono law.
And if you want a 'real' superheroes in the PD: the 1940s Superman cartoon shorts (produced by Max and Dave Fleischer, the guys who make the old time popeye cartoons) are also (apparently) in the public domain.
The most disconcerting thing about the old Superman cartoons is that one of the villians had the same voice as Popeye! Gave me the willies.
One person's spam is another person's 'useful email'. For instance, I may want a particular type of email (eg: a pr0n mailing list, or a "George Foreman Grill" user group, or lots of Korean friends). It might be considered spam by the ISP's filters, but not by me.
That's why it's best to train _my_ filter against _my_ received mail.
And as more email gets received and I add the uncaught messages to the spam filter, my filter 'learns' what I consider spam.
At a minimum it's 0.524 AU. The maximum would be 2.524 AU (when the earth and mars are on opposite sides of the sun) which is 5 times greater than your estimate (for a whopping 21.5 minutes). Of course, good luck getting your radio signal through Sol. Perhaps we have to install some repeaters somewhere (which would make for further delays). Anybody have that Pathagorean theorem handy??
IM allows a human at both ends to communicate. For instance:
Fire Chief: I need a MSDS for "Methyl-ethyl-meatloaf", I have a partial CAS Number: It starts with 456.
NRC Dispatcher: Chief, is it a drum or a cylinder?
Fire Chief: It's a cylinder.
NRC Dispatcher: The MSDS is being sent now...
Granted, this can be done over the phone as well as a IM client, but HTTP requires the user to navigate to the record. In some cases, the user doesn't know where to find the information (too much information available, not enough expertise in chemicals or searching). The NRC, Chemtrek, or state agencies staff call centers with experts that can handle requests from responders. Responders regularly communicate with them to verify their data and obtain additional information.
The benefit of using IM would be to communicate with an off-site expert (like a phone) and let an off-site expert to push the requested data to the user (like a fax). But unlike a fax, the data can be further processed: transformed to a standard format familiar to the emergency responders, or used in a chemical release modeling program to calculate a threat zone.
Frankly, the ideal situation would be if you could send data along side a regular telephone call. That's one niche I haven't seen explored.
The government is probably sick of having to use AIM (or MSN, or Yahoo) like everyone else.
But seriously, the DOD is fond of using SGML to process documents, and there's even a govt. website pressing for the adoption of XML standards as a way to facilitate communication between agencies. This would be a good thing.
Jabber clients, as an XML transport mechanism, would definitely facilitate this... For instance, right now the US EPA provides a database program called CAMEO which provides emergency response data for over 6080 different hazardous chemicals. Imagine, not a beowulf cluster, but a US EPA On-scene coordinator who wants data on "Methyl-ethyl-meatloaf", a chemical not included in the program. "Beep beep beep", she sends a query (containing the CAS Number for the chemical) via the Jabber IM client. Then about ten seconds later, she receives a response data information sheet on the chemical from the National Response Center. Her specially-designed US EPA Jabber Client takes the data and (a) loads it into her CAMEO program and/or (b) processes it with XSLT and dumps it into her browser for printing.
I do chemical emergency planning for a living and I'm always seeking to improve the ability to deliver appropriate information on request. One method is "give 'em everything we have and let 'em find it". That leads to (a) a file cabinet full of files on each fire truck or (b) a cd wallet and a computer guru on each shift.
An other alternative is fax them what they need on request (ugh!). A Jabber IM solution would be a powerful way to deliver structured content to the responder on request.
If the site doesn't have a slew of links at the very top, you can press and hold the tab key while each link gets highlighted. It's similar to using tab and shift-tab to navigate forms. Then you can use the return key to 'click' on the link.
Of course, I usually surf while on my laptop, so my fingers are close to the trackpad and the keyboard all.
I get the reasoning behind pie menus, I just think they're too clumsy (for me) to take the world by storm. Once someone makes the better pie menu, I reserve the right to sing their praises...:-)
You want me to hit "Reload" with my eyes shut? Ok... Ctrl-R.
The only thing I regularly do with the context menu is Save Link As... and the Get rid of frames submenu. Everything else I use from that menu (generally only "Open Link in New Tab") I try to use another shortcut.
Gestures and radial submenus are interesting, and I'll give them a try, but they don't solve the problem any more elegantly than the existing solution (at least for me).
jEdit is a medium-sucky text editor that does XML pretty well. (When I say medium-sucky, I mean it's a Java app, with all the pluses and minuses). It's freely downloadable and open source. It's no XML Spy, but it's much better than BBEdit's XML support, and it's cheaper than either.
If you use an external DTD, it will validate against it on the fly and even provide context-sensitive tag completion. It makes using DocBook tolerable, so I'm pretty sure it would make a more stringent schema easier to use.
Anyhow, I feel for you. I'm currently working on a medium-complex project (where I'm automatically generating tables from queries on a database) that I wrote the pages in XHTML and the scripts in Python. It was the only option where I felt I had control over the presentation (But then again, I'm good with raw XML).
I might have to check out InDesign for future projects...
Is for InDesign to accept an XML document. I've never used it, but it looks like InDesign does have the capability you need... At least that's what this page says.
I'm guessing you could write XML in a text editor and dump it into InDesign. The problem you describe (turn off all the bells and whistles and just give me the outlining) seems made for a markup language solution. Trying to separate content from presentation with Word will make you crazy.
Since it appears that InDesign can create an XML template for you, you could then fill in the content with a good text editor (like jEdit, BBEdit, Vi, or Emacs).
Of course, XML is anoother ball of worms, but I'd rather use a text editor and XML rather than struggle with all the 'features' of Micros0ft Word.
David Ascher is a co-author of Learning Python. It is one of the better (and one of the first) Python books out there. He has also co-edited O'Reilly's Python Cookbook which evolved from the Active State website.
I recently read that a new version of Learning Python is in the works, and I have to say that it's time. Learning Python is one of my favorite (read: more useful) books and Python has come a long way since version 1.5.
The typical ISP would like the spam problem to go away just as much as the typical user. For instance, the load on the e-mail servers, pushing around thousands of unread and unwanted email is a drain on storage space, bandwidth and electrons.
Since an ISP uses more of all of these than you do, they would benefit from having a good way to kill spam.
The Public Library is as American as Apple Pie. Imagine kids riding their bikes down the street to the library, checking out books, bringing them home to be read on summer vacation. Ahhh Memories...
If Publishing world starts wanting to restict fair use of dead-tree books, then they will find themselves on the wrong side of a backlash.
Come on Jack and Hilary, bring it on... I dare you.
Most of the endocrine disruptors that people are complaining of are "estrogenic", in that they mimic estrogen in the human body. To be more correct, these chemicals fit (for better or worse) the endocrine receptor proteins in the cell.
Sometimes the chemicals cause the activate the receptor prematurely, sometimes they block the receptor on the target cells from activating properly. Since receptors for a hormone are also on the cells that create the hormone, this can cause regular hormone production to be distrupted.
Since estrogen is related in structure to many other reproductive hormones (including 'male' hormones), estrogenic hormones have been blamed for everything from miscarriages (pregnancy is strongly dependent on the levels of estorgen/progesterone) to male fertility (spermatogenesis is dependent on testosterone, a steroid similar in structure to estorgen), to male baldness.
It turns out that so many chemicals in the environment exhibit 'estrogenic properties' it's hard to study the effects of each, short of having a labrotory of "bubble rats".
But endocrinology is especially vexing because so many of them work in tandem. Hormone Foo alone causes X to happen, Hormone Bar causes Y alone to happen. Hormone Foo + Bar causes not only X and Y to happen, but it also causes Z to happen. Now imagine every other possible scenario of Foo Bar and Baz and their impacts on X, Y, Z and the rest of the alphabet.
Endocrinology is inter- and intracellural communication -- the 'networking' among cells -- and is "the next big thing" in biology. It is critical in the understanding of fertility, development, cancer -- you name it...
So she won't be making movies anymore. So what? She'll just work another job doing makeup, like Fashion Magazines, or the Makeup counter at Field's.
Plus, let's not kid ourselves. Hollywood is such a youth-oriented industry with so many young people willing to do any job for no cash. Fannie's probably been working the Makeup counter since 1966.
There's still work for the trades. The dude that builds sets? Construction still pays last time I checked.
A lot of the "Film" trades won't be effected, their tools will just change. Film editors used to use a Movieola to edit film. Now they can use iMovie. Most of their skill doesn't depend on the new tool, it's applying their knowledge that counts.
The trades which will be most impacted are those where the creative process will change. The guy who builds Latex Masks might have a bigger change in store. If he's a technician, he may have to work in a Halloween mask factory, if he's the creative (he designs the face), he'll adapt to the new technology.
Work may change, but creative types either adapt and learn new tools or stick with their 'old tools'. Some become Moby, others stick to Bluegrass.
At last, something I know something about...
on
Ethanol Not A Total Loss
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A few years ago I drove a car optimized for an 85% Ethanol blend. Sometimes I used plain old Gasoline, sometimes I used the 85% EtOH. As a fuel, I found it performed as well as gasoline, as least in city driving (where MPG tends to tank anyway). I did notice a decrease in MPG when I was driving on the highway, but then I just switched to unleaded.
Using EtOH does a couple things, each of them are laudable, IMHO:
Creates another market for Corn. By opening another market, we might reduce farm subsidies.
Reduces dependence on foreign oil and reduces the need to use reserves.
Reduces air pollution. Specifically it reduces ozone production. That's why EtOH is used as an oxygenator during the summer months.
Finally, growing lots of corn improves the carbon equation. Instead of pumping up 50 million year old carbon that has been sequestered all this time, using ethanol helps make it more of a zero sum game. Ideally, you're growing (removing) the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that you're burning as EtOH. At least that's the theory.
In short, EtOH isn't a magic bullet, but it's definitely part of the mix.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of people would say that having three different suites is a bad thing, but I don't think so anymore:
That's exactly the reason you should teach them the concept. Because they will never pick it up from casual use of Microsoft Word. They'll end up learning the hard way.
If you are doing a structured document with headings (a term paper or report), the benefits of learning Microsoft's style sheets will pay off.
But I also think it's important to do it for a one-off memo or letter. Why teach them "tab tab tab tab tab tab Sincerely," when the default letter stylesheet has styles for signature blocks.
I don't expect them to use XML and CSS and XSLT (heaven forbid!), but they should be aware of the concept and understand how to apply it (when warrented) in Word.
Teach them to separate content from presentation.
Learning bad habits like inserting tabs to indent paragraphs and signature blocks is not good. Sure it was fine when you used MultiMate in 1990, but it's a whole new century baby...
Teaching them about styles will pay off. Of course, Microsoft Word has a pretty spoogy way of creating and formatting styles which makes many people give up.
Once they learn how to make and apply styles, teach them how to template.
These are the two most useful (and time saving) skills you can learn with MS Word, plus they have implications in programming.
Oh, and if they're using Microsoft Excel, make sure to teach them how to use functions EARLY. Don't ask me how many times I've caught people tallying a column of numbers with a calculator in order to type the answer at the bottom of a spreadsheet...
One other skill they should learn is how to use version control software. There's a version of RCS that works quite nicely with Microsoft Word. Speaking from experience, version control is a technology whose time has come in the office. Every serious Word Processor I've worked with keeps backups of documents at critical stages (mostly out of self-defense). I've seen people reduced to tears because they've made edits to a document and then told to 'go back to the way it was'.
Carbon dioxide has a lower freezing point than water, so it comes out of solution when your soda freezes. The increased volume of the ice and the increased pressure of the CO2 can overpressurize a can.
It also has something to the thinwalling of aluminum cans. Aluminum is the most costly component to the cost of a can of coke. Packaging engineers are constantly thinking of ways to stretch more cans out of a pound of aluminum, and sometimes they get a little too thin.
Gee, I guess my biology degree, and my stint with a can manufacturing company paid off today...
You're right mostly. Humidity does effect wood more. I don't think wooden doors stick in the desert.
A better example would be running hot water over stuck jar lid. The metal expands faster than the glass.
Kinda off-topic but not really: Water gets denser as it cools to 4 degrees C, then it expands as the temperature drops until ice forms at 0 degrees C. Ice is acutally less dense than water (which is why it floats).
If they're looking for freeware, then their playing less money to Microsoft. That means they have more money for their employees.
For instance, we sometimes need a diagramming tool. Not everyday, maybe once a week. Nothing fancy, just some org charts that need updating.
If I have a choice between spending over $200/fanny for Visio or using Dia for free... Well, I've just saved $1200 in just my office. Do the same thing with a couple other 'optional' programs and we're talking real money.
Why would I want to pay Ballmer and Bill when I'd rather pay that money to employees that can turn around and make me more money?
In other cartoon public domain news:
The first Mickey Mouse cartoons would have eventually lapsed into the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono law.
And if you want a 'real' superheroes in the PD: the 1940s Superman cartoon shorts (produced by Max and Dave Fleischer, the guys who make the old time popeye cartoons) are also (apparently) in the public domain.
The most disconcerting thing about the old Superman cartoons is that one of the villians had the same voice as Popeye! Gave me the willies.
One person's spam is another person's 'useful email'. For instance, I may want a particular type of email (eg: a pr0n mailing list, or a "George Foreman Grill" user group, or lots of Korean friends). It might be considered spam by the ISP's filters, but not by me.
That's why it's best to train _my_ filter against _my_ received mail.
And as more email gets received and I add the uncaught messages to the spam filter, my filter 'learns' what I consider spam.
At a minimum it's 0.524 AU. The maximum would be 2.524 AU (when the earth and mars are on opposite sides of the sun) which is 5 times greater than your estimate (for a whopping 21.5 minutes). Of course, good luck getting your radio signal through Sol. Perhaps we have to install some repeaters somewhere (which would make for further delays). Anybody have that Pathagorean theorem handy??
Lots of people complain that Apple is too expensive. My question is: How much do you want to pay for an Apple?
Seriously, what would be the price that would make all the "Apple's too expensive" camp shut up and buy?
I'm not trying to be fussy, I'm seriously interested...
"[Sam and Max] wasn't a sequel to anything."
As a game, true enough. But technically, Sam and Max were a comic book first (and a very funny one).
My fave quote from the Comic Book: "I'm Buck Nekkid, Texas Ranger!"
IM allows a human at both ends to communicate. For instance:
Fire Chief: I need a MSDS for "Methyl-ethyl-meatloaf", I have a partial CAS Number: It starts with 456.
NRC Dispatcher: Chief, is it a drum or a cylinder?
Fire Chief: It's a cylinder.
NRC Dispatcher: The MSDS is being sent now...
Granted, this can be done over the phone as well as a IM client, but HTTP requires the user to navigate to the record. In some cases, the user doesn't know where to find the information (too much information available, not enough expertise in chemicals or searching). The NRC, Chemtrek, or state agencies staff call centers with experts that can handle requests from responders. Responders regularly communicate with them to verify their data and obtain additional information.
The benefit of using IM would be to communicate with an off-site expert (like a phone) and let an off-site expert to push the requested data to the user (like a fax). But unlike a fax, the data can be further processed: transformed to a standard format familiar to the emergency responders, or used in a chemical release modeling program to calculate a threat zone.
Frankly, the ideal situation would be if you could send data along side a regular telephone call. That's one niche I haven't seen explored.
The government is probably sick of having to use AIM (or MSN, or Yahoo) like everyone else.
But seriously, the DOD is fond of using SGML to process documents, and there's even a govt. website pressing for the adoption of XML standards as a way to facilitate communication between agencies. This would be a good thing.
Jabber clients, as an XML transport mechanism, would definitely facilitate this... For instance, right now the US EPA provides a database program called CAMEO which provides emergency response data for over 6080 different hazardous chemicals. Imagine, not a beowulf cluster, but a US EPA On-scene coordinator who wants data on "Methyl-ethyl-meatloaf", a chemical not included in the program. "Beep beep beep", she sends a query (containing the CAS Number for the chemical) via the Jabber IM client. Then about ten seconds later, she receives a response data information sheet on the chemical from the National Response Center. Her specially-designed US EPA Jabber Client takes the data and (a) loads it into her CAMEO program and/or (b) processes it with XSLT and dumps it into her browser for printing.
I do chemical emergency planning for a living and I'm always seeking to improve the ability to deliver appropriate information on request. One method is "give 'em everything we have and let 'em find it". That leads to (a) a file cabinet full of files on each fire truck or (b) a cd wallet and a computer guru on each shift.
An other alternative is fax them what they need on request (ugh!). A Jabber IM solution would be a powerful way to deliver structured content to the responder on request.
If the site doesn't have a slew of links at the very top, you can press and hold the tab key while each link gets highlighted. It's similar to using tab and shift-tab to navigate forms. Then you can use the return key to 'click' on the link.
:-)
Of course, I usually surf while on my laptop, so my fingers are close to the trackpad and the keyboard all.
I get the reasoning behind pie menus, I just think they're too clumsy (for me) to take the world by storm. Once someone makes the better pie menu, I reserve the right to sing their praises...
BTW, www.colorstudy.com/ianb is broken...
You want me to hit "Reload" with my eyes shut? Ok... Ctrl-R.
The only thing I regularly do with the context menu is Save Link As... and the Get rid of frames submenu. Everything else I use from that menu (generally only "Open Link in New Tab") I try to use another shortcut.
Gestures and radial submenus are interesting, and I'll give them a try, but they don't solve the problem any more elegantly than the existing solution (at least for me).
jEdit is a medium-sucky text editor that does XML pretty well. (When I say medium-sucky, I mean it's a Java app, with all the pluses and minuses). It's freely downloadable and open source. It's no XML Spy, but it's much better than BBEdit's XML support, and it's cheaper than either.
If you use an external DTD, it will validate against it on the fly and even provide context-sensitive tag completion. It makes using DocBook tolerable, so I'm pretty sure it would make a more stringent schema easier to use.
Anyhow, I feel for you. I'm currently working on a medium-complex project (where I'm automatically generating tables from queries on a database) that I wrote the pages in XHTML and the scripts in Python. It was the only option where I felt I had control over the presentation (But then again, I'm good with raw XML).
I might have to check out InDesign for future projects...
Is for InDesign to accept an XML document. I've never used it, but it looks like InDesign does have the capability you need... At least that's what this page says.
I'm guessing you could write XML in a text editor and dump it into InDesign. The problem you describe (turn off all the bells and whistles and just give me the outlining) seems made for a markup language solution. Trying to separate content from presentation with Word will make you crazy.
Since it appears that InDesign can create an XML template for you, you could then fill in the content with a good text editor (like jEdit, BBEdit, Vi, or Emacs).
Of course, XML is anoother ball of worms, but I'd rather use a text editor and XML rather than struggle with all the 'features' of Micros0ft Word.
David Ascher is a co-author of Learning Python. It is one of the better (and one of the first) Python books out there. He has also co-edited O'Reilly's Python Cookbook which evolved from the Active State website.
I recently read that a new version of Learning Python is in the works, and I have to say that it's time. Learning Python is one of my favorite (read: more useful) books and Python has come a long way since version 1.5.
The typical ISP would like the spam problem to go away just as much as the typical user. For instance, the load on the e-mail servers, pushing around thousands of unread and unwanted email is a drain on storage space, bandwidth and electrons.
Since an ISP uses more of all of these than you do, they would benefit from having a good way to kill spam.
The Public Library is as American as Apple Pie. Imagine kids riding their bikes down the street to the library, checking out books, bringing them home to be read on summer vacation. Ahhh Memories...
If Publishing world starts wanting to restict fair use of dead-tree books, then they will find themselves on the wrong side of a backlash.
Come on Jack and Hilary, bring it on... I dare you.
Most of the endocrine disruptors that people are complaining of are "estrogenic", in that they mimic estrogen in the human body. To be more correct, these chemicals fit (for better or worse) the endocrine receptor proteins in the cell.
Sometimes the chemicals cause the activate the receptor prematurely, sometimes they block the receptor on the target cells from activating properly. Since receptors for a hormone are also on the cells that create the hormone, this can cause regular hormone production to be distrupted.
Since estrogen is related in structure to many other reproductive hormones (including 'male' hormones), estrogenic hormones have been blamed for everything from miscarriages (pregnancy is strongly dependent on the levels of estorgen/progesterone) to male fertility (spermatogenesis is dependent on testosterone, a steroid similar in structure to estorgen), to male baldness.
It turns out that so many chemicals in the environment exhibit 'estrogenic properties' it's hard to study the effects of each, short of having a labrotory of "bubble rats".
But endocrinology is especially vexing because so many of them work in tandem. Hormone Foo alone causes X to happen, Hormone Bar causes Y alone to happen. Hormone Foo + Bar causes not only X and Y to happen, but it also causes Z to happen. Now imagine every other possible scenario of Foo Bar and Baz and their impacts on X, Y, Z and the rest of the alphabet.
Endocrinology is inter- and intracellural communication -- the 'networking' among cells -- and is "the next big thing" in biology. It is critical in the understanding of fertility, development, cancer -- you name it...
So she won't be making movies anymore. So what? She'll just work another job doing makeup, like Fashion Magazines, or the Makeup counter at Field's.
Plus, let's not kid ourselves. Hollywood is such a youth-oriented industry with so many young people willing to do any job for no cash. Fannie's probably been working the Makeup counter since 1966.
There's still work for the trades. The dude that builds sets? Construction still pays last time I checked.
A lot of the "Film" trades won't be effected, their tools will just change. Film editors used to use a Movieola to edit film. Now they can use iMovie. Most of their skill doesn't depend on the new tool, it's applying their knowledge that counts.
The trades which will be most impacted are those where the creative process will change. The guy who builds Latex Masks might have a bigger change in store. If he's a technician, he may have to work in a Halloween mask factory, if he's the creative (he designs the face), he'll adapt to the new technology.
Work may change, but creative types either adapt and learn new tools or stick with their 'old tools'. Some become Moby, others stick to Bluegrass.
Using EtOH does a couple things, each of them are laudable, IMHO:
- Creates another market for Corn. By opening another market, we might reduce farm subsidies.
- Reduces dependence on foreign oil and reduces the need to use reserves.
- Reduces air pollution. Specifically it reduces ozone production. That's why EtOH is used as an oxygenator during the summer months.
- Finally, growing lots of corn improves the carbon equation. Instead of pumping up 50 million year old carbon that has been sequestered all this time, using ethanol helps make it more of a zero sum game. Ideally, you're growing (removing) the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere that you're burning as EtOH. At least that's the theory.
In short, EtOH isn't a magic bullet, but it's definitely part of the mix."handicapped parking spaces are usually open and very close to my destination"
I just have to believe you are kidding since the rest of your post made such sense.
Well, there's always Mini-Me, except he doesn't talk.
But he does have a propensity for white suits...
Hmm.... Does anybody know if Herve is really dead? Anybody ever see him and Verne Troyer at the same time???