The most common reaction if someone started that line around here would be for the nearest person to smack him on the back of the head and say, "Oh, shut up!"
Another common reaction would be to just laugh. The Statue of Liberty is one of the most common images in American political cartoons. I see a cartoon version of Miss Liberty at least once a week. The Subway ad isn't at all out of line. My reaction to the ad is that it's right in the tradition of American political humor.
Yet now that I live a 4 hour drive south of the border (7 hours from my hometown) and tell people I'm from "Ottawa", they look at me with a blank stare.
OTOH, as a Seattleite now living near Boston, one funny thing that I constantly run across is that people remember that I'm Canadian.
The reason seems to be my accent. Historically, Seattle and Vancouver have had closer relations to each other than to the rest of their own countries, and some linguistics profs have told me that the natives of both have very similar speech. My wife also says that I talk like other people from the Northwest that she knows. To me it just sounds "normal", of course, but it's apparently a hybrid Canadian/American dialect. And sometimes people ask me if I'm Scottish, but that's rare.
For that matter, one of the curious things about moving "out east" is the lack of Asian news. Where I grew up, half the news was about Asia, because that's where the majority of Seattle's and Vancouver's trade was (and still is). I still tend to think of Tokyo, Taipei and Shanghai as "close" while London, Paris and Madrid are "far away". And it's probably why I find maps of Asia full of as many familiar names as maps of Europe. Of course, the spelling of a lot of place names has changed since I was a kid.
I wonder if the Microsoft maps have "Peking" or "Beijing"? That alone would put a lot of Chinese in an offended state.
Indeed; Italian and Spanish are close enough to Latin that learning Latin is fairly easy. It's harder for the French and Portuguese, but still easier than for us whose native language is Germanic (even if corrupted by a lot of Old French 900 years ago;-).
Back when there was the debate about legitimizing vernacular masses, I recall reading a number of comments that much of the pressure to change was coming from American priests, whose flocks mostly couldn't understand any of it. This was a problem in a lot of the world, of course. But the US is one of the larger areas where much of the population is monolingual. And, let's face it, schools (Sunday or otherwise) have generally done a poor job of teaching Latin.
But not everyone approved. Here in Massachusetts (the state with the largest percent who are Catholic), it's quite common to see church schedules list "Latin mass" for at least one of the Sunday services. There are also churches that regularly have masses in Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese and a few other languages.
I've noticed that most maps now show something like "Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas)" for that group of islands.
This isn't so much a case of political correctness as it is what mapmakers have often done when a place or area has several names. And it doesn't matter whether the names are political or historical. A good mapmaker would be expected to document multiple names, as this makes the map more useful. Of course, there's always the contrary pressure of limited space.
Thus, maps now routinely say things like "Myanmar (Burma)" and "Thailand (Siam)" In some National Geographic maps that I have on hand, in Europe I see names like "Finland (Suomi)", "Jylland (Jutland)", and "Ireland (Eire)". On another map I see "Xinjiang (Sinkiang)" and "Xizang (Tibet)".
I've also seen "Israel (Palestine)" on maps. It's probably hard to sell those maps in the Middle East. But to someone who is using maps for their main purpose, such multiple names can be quite useful.
Something I could see useful to people like the MS sales staff is a map that thoroughly documents all such multiple names, with footnotes explaining the origins of the names and any social or political reasons for choosing among alternative names. Has anyone done this? It seems like something that would work especially well as a web site, since hyperlinks would work better than printed text for such complex maps.
Ummm, if you dig into the archives and look around at news discussion in early 2002, you'll find that it was widely known that the Iraqis no longer had "WMDs", whatever those might have been. Yes, they had used deadly gas in the slaughter of the Kurds, but only the steadfast Republican core in the US still believed that they still had such weapons or the ability to produce them without discovery. The common question among those Americans who followed more than Fox News was "So how will George and Dick justify an invasion now?"
The answer soon became clear. Rather that "Iraq has WMDs", the story became "Iraq is building WMDs", or even more ominously, "Iraq has the capability of building WMDs." This couldn't be debunked, because we hadn't yet developed mind-reading technology. And this sure sounded like a justification for attacking anyone anywhere.
(We still don't seem to have mind-reading technology. And where are those flying cars that we were promised?)
Anyway, well before the Iraq war actually started, we were already hearing humorists talking about "the possibility that Iraqis are considering the prospect of looking into a project to investigate the future development of WMDs" and other such parodies of the Bush line.
Then there was our horror when we realized that 2/3 of the American population had actually fallen for the attempt to associate Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We've had to face the shame of realizing that the American population really is that gullible.
OTOH, by then a lot of us had learned to associate the phrase "linked to" with the headline that the Onion printed back in Octobeer 2001:
Kevin Bacon Linked to Al Qaeda
This has gotta be the best comment so far on this line of propaganda. I've come to react to the phrase "linked to" by automatically wondering what lie the speaker is trying to make me believe.
(And there was the followup information that George W and Osama both have a Bacon number 3. It seems that they've been in at least two movies together, and one movie is 3 links from Kevin.;-)
Here in the US, I've seen a number of examples of churches that were "turned into" mosques or synagogues.
In each case, it happened because the neighborhood had gone through changes that led to low attendance at the church. So the congregation was dissolved and the building was sold. It's not surprising that a church for sale would be bought by another religious organization, since in many cases the building only needs a few cosmetic changes to be suitable. Most often, the new owner is another Christian group, but not always.
I've also seen cases of a church being converted to a home, school or store. But this usually requires a lot more modification, so it's not as common.
I've seen one case of a synagogue that was converted to a church. I saw another case (on the West Coast) of a church converted to a Buddhist temple. I don't know of any mosque being converted to a church, though I wouldn't be surprised to read of one. It's probably less likely, because the US Muslim population has been increasing in recent decades.
Here in Massachusetts, a current news story is the closing of more than 50 Catholic churches (or actually dioceses). The general reason is declining membership (and a shortage of priests). This may or may not be related to the recent scandals. The properties will presumably be sold in most cases. It wouldn't be much of a surprise to read of one or two being turned into mosques. It will take a bit of reconstruction, of course, but that would be a lot cheaper than razing the church and putting up a new building.
[C]an you imagine the rucus it would cause in this country if they were chanting, say, a Latin mass?
So what country are you in? I'm in the US, where most of the citizens wouldn't recognize a Latin mass. The largest single religious group is Catholics, and most of them wouldn't even recognize the Latin words to the mass.
There's an old joke in the US, that if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.
(Part of the joke is that most religious Americans wouldn't understand that it's a joke.)
While I was at the U of Wisconsin (in Madison), I had a friend who spent a couple of years in New York. She thought it was funny that a lot of the people there remembered that she was from Iowa or Kansas.
Iowa is at least next to Wisconsin. Kansas is a rather long drive from the southwest corner of Wisconsin.
Of course, now that I'm living near Boston, I find it funny that a lot of people think I'm from some place in California. I usually tell people that I grew up near Seattle. I suppose it's good that they know that that's on the West Coast somewhere. I've found that it's hopeless to tell people that I'm from the state of Washington. That just gets a puzzled look, because they know that's a city, not a state.
Around computer geeks, it's easier. I just tell them that I'm glad I got out before Bill Gates came to power in my homeland.
n order for computers to start thinking like humans, we first have to be able to properly understand and model how humans think....
No, no, no, no, no. Intellectuals have the problem backwards. Historically makind goes out and does something, and only later do we understand HOW we did it.
This is probably an important observation.
To use the traditional example of the Wright Brothers, we might observe that they didn't make a mechanical bird. True, there are some similarities, but airplanes don't in fact fly like birds. And we only figured out the specifics of bird flight decades after we built flying machines. This gave us a way to experiment with aerodynamics and replace the previous semi-mystical misunderstandings with actual scientific understanding.
Still later, in the past two decades we finally figured out that, contrary to the old engineering joke, bumblebees can fly after all. We know how they do it, and it's nothing at all like how our machines fly. (Well, not yet, but maybe soon.;-)
Similarly, insisting on understanding the human mind is misdirection. We'll more likely first build some new intelligences, perhaps partly by accident. They won't be at all human. When we have a few of them, we can finally start to build true scientific understanding of how a mind might work. And maybe in a few more decades we will finally start to understand how human (and other species') minds work.
That is, we might, if we survive the effect of creating the first artificial intelligences. If past development is any guide, it'll most likely be done with military funding. Debugging the first military artificial intelligences could just have some, uh, "interesting" side effects.
If the process is NOT destructive, then you've merely COPIED the human mind, not "uploaded" it.
Ummm, in all cases that I am aware of, when someone uses the term "upload" or "download, they always mean "copy". These operations are never destructive of the original. I've never heard either term used with physical objects that are moved. Both "load" and "offload" are used with physical objects being moved, but not "upload" or "download".
Can you give an example where "download" is used for an operation that doesn't leave the original unchanged?
Now, now; don't be greedy with your karma. There's plenty for everyone.
Re:Old-fashioned librarians are great people
on
Librarians to the Rescue
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Also you should work with reference librarians whenever possible, and don't give me that crap (prior post) about "we just use the Internet."
Actually, the idea that the Internet competes with libraries, while enticing, turns out to not be true at all. Public libraries all over are getting tied into the Internet, and for the poorer parts of society, this is often the only access to most of the world's information.
Librarians have generally figured out that the Internet doesn't replace hard-copy books; they complement each other in useful ways. Having Internet access in the library gives the librarians the freedom to be a lot more selective about what books they have on their shelves. They are starting to figure out what sorts of things are best presented in book form and which are better online. And libraries are migrating to a system that stocks up on the former while making the latter available via computers.
They just have to figure out how to handle the pr0n and spam problems...
It's even worse than you think. Most parents repeatedly attempt to instill in their impressionable childrens' minds the idea that nice people share their toys with their friends. This is a clear enticement to copyright violation.
And it's even worse than that. Many of those parents knowingly hand over their children to "schools", which are institutions that also attempt to teach the children that they should share.
After years of this sort of indoctrination, it's not surprising that the result should be teenagers (and even adults) who think that it's ok to violate copyright by sharing ideas, documents and music with each other.
These organizations are merely trying to interrupt this process and teach the children that ideas and songs are like toys and other kinds of property: Every child should have his or her own, every one should be paid for, and they should never be shared. Sharing is an economic perversion that undermines the private property that is at the heart of our corporate economic system.
(Lessee; will I get a "Troll" or "Funny" rating here? Maybe I need a;-)
... the BSA" The Boyscouts of America?! What's wrong with the Boy Scouts?
Probably the same thing that was wrong a few years ago with the GSA (Girl Scouts of America) - They sit around campfires singing copyrighted songs without first getting written permission from the copyright owners and paying the license fees.
Bunch of anarchic, socialistic copyright-violating pirates with no respect for the law, all of them!
Actually, I've seen both Eraserhead and Plan Nine. I'd say that Eraserhead is distinctly worse. Plan Nine at least has a bit of a plot. I'd agree that the "acting" is about equally bad in both. Plan Nine has some action, so the bad acting might stand out a bit more. Eraserhead is mostly a lot of scenes with little if any action; it's harder to accuse actors of poor acting when they don't have to act at all.
My wife calls Plan Nine a movie that's "so bad it's good". It at least makes you laugh, and you leave with a stupid grin on your face. Eraserhead leaves you with nothing.
Or maybe both are just so subtle and deep that we both missed their significance. Yeah; that must be it.
[A] company actually offered "life time" @gmail.com email adresses in -96...
Big deal. I had a life-time email address more than a decade before that. It's still valid, and I'm not old and feeble yet (though I could be run down by a truck or bus tomorrow;-).
Lots of people can say the same. As with most of them, mine is through a university where I hung around for a few years. Many universities have figured out that a permanent email address is a valuable commodity, and it something that the commercial world doesn't seem to be very interested in providing. And it gives them a fast way to hit you up when they're looking for contributions.
My university email accout is also a login account, and I have several GB of space available there if I want to use it. So far my email is only about 55 MB, but I also have web space that's approaching a GB. Several other alumni are above a GB in usage, and the department's reaction is to add more disk space. It's also nice to have web space at a place that positively encourages innovative development, something that the commercial ISP world doesn't seem to like much. But the economics of the situation are that if you're a university department, anything that's original and innovative just makes you look good, and that's what gets you funding.
But then, I suppose it's fairly normal for the academic world to be years ahead of the commercial world.
"Yes your honor, my client has plans to launch an email service before Google."
Your lawyer might have a bit of a problem supporting that, considering that google registered gmail.com nine years ago. Maybe the media (including/.;-) only just noticed the project. But to a court, that merely shows your own lack of attention. It sure looks like google has spent nine years developing their product, and as soon as they make it public, others jump in and try to claim the name for themselves.
Of course, it's likely that google's attitude is that they aren't much concerned with trademark. The word "google" was an English-language dictionary entry long before there was a computer industry. They not only can't stop us from using it as a common verb; they clearly benefit from this. (And they've added another item in the dictionary entries.;-)
What matters most is that they own "google.com" and "gmail.com". If others try to claim "google" or "gmail" as trademarks, what does it matter when you've owned the domains all along?
Would you mind posing [sic] a link to a site that uses Gmail, please?
Jeez; it would have been less typing to enter it in your browser's Location box, and you'd have found that it leads to https://gmail.google.com/, implaying that it exists and has the obvious effect
Also, "whois gmail.com" gives the info:
Domain Name: GMAIL.COM
Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.
Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 31-mar-2004
Creation Date: 13-aug-1995
Expiration Date: 12-aug-2006... and so on.
So google has owned gmail.com for nearly a decade.
My wife and I always use that as the movie that we compare all others to. So far, we haven't found one that's worse. But that could be because we get tipped off about the others. I haven't seen any on that bottom-100 list for that reason.
It's also possible that nobody here ever saw that one. I've noticed that almost all the movies mentioned here date from the past 25 years or so. There are plenty of really bad movies from before 1960. And most of them are still available, if you look hard enough.
(So much for the idea that copyright is robbing us of our culture.;-)
And note that that 20% estimate is the oil that's cheapest to pull out of the ground. There's a large "proven reserve" that's in forms that, with current technology, uses nearly as much energy to extract as the oil contains. Of course, this is slowly changing, as more efficient extraction techniques are developed. But there's an ongoing problem that extracting the remaining oil (however much that may be) will take an increasing amount of energy. The deliverable energy in the remaining oil is a lot less than a 20%/80% ration would suggest to the naive reader.
When you measure the energy deliverable to the end user, we really don't have very good estimates of how much there is under the ground in "fossil" fuels. Most of the estimates you read come from sources with obvious political and/or marketing biases. And they never seem to give you the error bars. So don't take them too seriously.
Yeah; I had wondered why he didn't provide it in Word format. And he should have made sure that there was a lot of "deleted" text in the.doc file, so that we could expose it.
He missed a really good opportunity for true irony.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but not democratically elected by a majority.
;-)
Sure he was. He won the only vote that counted, 5-4.
(You didn't say which majority voted for or against him.
The most common reaction if someone started that line around here would be for the nearest person to smack him on the back of the head and say, "Oh, shut up!"
Another common reaction would be to just laugh. The Statue of Liberty is one of the most common images in American political cartoons. I see a cartoon version of Miss Liberty at least once a week. The Subway ad isn't at all out of line. My reaction to the ad is that it's right in the tradition of American political humor.
Yet now that I live a 4 hour drive south of the border (7 hours from my hometown) and tell people I'm from "Ottawa", they look at me with a blank stare.
OTOH, as a Seattleite now living near Boston, one funny thing that I constantly run across is that people remember that I'm Canadian.
The reason seems to be my accent. Historically, Seattle and Vancouver have had closer relations to each other than to the rest of their own countries, and some linguistics profs have told me that the natives of both have very similar speech. My wife also says that I talk like other people from the Northwest that she knows. To me it just sounds "normal", of course, but it's apparently a hybrid Canadian/American dialect. And sometimes people ask me if I'm Scottish, but that's rare.
For that matter, one of the curious things about moving "out east" is the lack of Asian news. Where I grew up, half the news was about Asia, because that's where the majority of Seattle's and Vancouver's trade was (and still is). I still tend to think of Tokyo, Taipei and Shanghai as "close" while London, Paris and Madrid are "far away". And it's probably why I find maps of Asia full of as many familiar names as maps of Europe. Of course, the spelling of a lot of place names has changed since I was a kid.
I wonder if the Microsoft maps have "Peking" or "Beijing"? That alone would put a lot of Chinese in an offended state.
Indeed; Italian and Spanish are close enough to Latin that learning Latin is fairly easy. It's harder for the French and Portuguese, but still easier than for us whose native language is Germanic (even if corrupted by a lot of Old French 900 years ago ;-).
Back when there was the debate about legitimizing vernacular masses, I recall reading a number of comments that much of the pressure to change was coming from American priests, whose flocks mostly couldn't understand any of it. This was a problem in a lot of the world, of course. But the US is one of the larger areas where much of the population is monolingual. And, let's face it, schools (Sunday or otherwise) have generally done a poor job of teaching Latin.
But not everyone approved. Here in Massachusetts (the state with the largest percent who are Catholic), it's quite common to see church schedules list "Latin mass" for at least one of the Sunday services. There are also churches that regularly have masses in Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese and a few other languages.
I've noticed that most maps now show something like "Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas)" for that group of islands.
This isn't so much a case of political correctness as it is what mapmakers have often done when a place or area has several names. And it doesn't matter whether the names are political or historical. A good mapmaker would be expected to document multiple names, as this makes the map more useful. Of course, there's always the contrary pressure of limited space.
Thus, maps now routinely say things like "Myanmar (Burma)" and "Thailand (Siam)" In some National Geographic maps that I have on hand, in Europe I see names like "Finland (Suomi)", "Jylland (Jutland)", and "Ireland (Eire)". On another map I see "Xinjiang (Sinkiang)" and "Xizang (Tibet)".
I've also seen "Israel (Palestine)" on maps. It's probably hard to sell those maps in the Middle East. But to someone who is using maps for their main purpose, such multiple names can be quite useful.
Something I could see useful to people like the MS sales staff is a map that thoroughly documents all such multiple names, with footnotes explaining the origins of the names and any social or political reasons for choosing among alternative names. Has anyone done this? It seems like something that would work especially well as a web site, since hyperlinks would work better than printed text for such complex maps.
Ummm, if you dig into the archives and look around at news discussion in early 2002, you'll find that it was widely known that the Iraqis no longer had "WMDs", whatever those might have been. Yes, they had used deadly gas in the slaughter of the Kurds, but only the steadfast Republican core in the US still believed that they still had such weapons or the ability to produce them without discovery. The common question among those Americans who followed more than Fox News was "So how will George and Dick justify an invasion now?"
;-)
The answer soon became clear. Rather that "Iraq has WMDs", the story became "Iraq is building WMDs", or even more ominously, "Iraq has the capability of building WMDs." This couldn't be debunked, because we hadn't yet developed mind-reading technology. And this sure sounded like a justification for attacking anyone anywhere.
(We still don't seem to have mind-reading technology. And where are those flying cars that we were promised?)
Anyway, well before the Iraq war actually started, we were already hearing humorists talking about "the possibility that Iraqis are considering the prospect of looking into a project to investigate the future development of WMDs" and other such parodies of the Bush line.
Then there was our horror when we realized that 2/3 of the American population had actually fallen for the attempt to associate Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We've had to face the shame of realizing that the American population really is that gullible.
OTOH, by then a lot of us had learned to associate the phrase "linked to" with the headline that the Onion printed back in Octobeer 2001:
Kevin Bacon Linked to Al Qaeda
This has gotta be the best comment so far on this line of propaganda. I've come to react to the phrase "linked to" by automatically wondering what lie the speaker is trying to make me believe.
(And there was the followup information that George W and Osama both have a Bacon number 3. It seems that they've been in at least two movies together, and one movie is 3 links from Kevin.
Here in the US, I've seen a number of examples of churches that were "turned into" mosques or synagogues.
In each case, it happened because the neighborhood had gone through changes that led to low attendance at the church. So the congregation was dissolved and the building was sold. It's not surprising that a church for sale would be bought by another religious organization, since in many cases the building only needs a few cosmetic changes to be suitable. Most often, the new owner is another Christian group, but not always.
I've also seen cases of a church being converted to a home, school or store. But this usually requires a lot more modification, so it's not as common.
I've seen one case of a synagogue that was converted to a church. I saw another case (on the West Coast) of a church converted to a Buddhist temple. I don't know of any mosque being converted to a church, though I wouldn't be surprised to read of one. It's probably less likely, because the US Muslim population has been increasing in recent decades.
Here in Massachusetts, a current news story is the closing of more than 50 Catholic churches (or actually dioceses). The general reason is declining membership (and a shortage of priests). This may or may not be related to the recent scandals. The properties will presumably be sold in most cases. It wouldn't be much of a surprise to read of one or two being turned into mosques. It will take a bit of reconstruction, of course, but that would be a lot cheaper than razing the church and putting up a new building.
Actually having WMD is not a prerequisite for U.S. invasion
How right you are. Note that Dubya's excuse for invading Iraq was that they could develop WMDs sometime in the future.
I do wonder if there are any people who would fail this test?
[C]an you imagine the rucus it would cause in this country if they were chanting, say, a Latin mass?
So what country are you in? I'm in the US, where most of the citizens wouldn't recognize a Latin mass. The largest single religious group is Catholics, and most of them wouldn't even recognize the Latin words to the mass.
There's an old joke in the US, that if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.
(Part of the joke is that most religious Americans wouldn't understand that it's a joke.)
While I was at the U of Wisconsin (in Madison), I had a friend who spent a couple of years in New York. She thought it was funny that a lot of the people there remembered that she was from Iowa or Kansas.
Iowa is at least next to Wisconsin. Kansas is a rather long drive from the southwest corner of Wisconsin.
Of course, now that I'm living near Boston, I find it funny that a lot of people think I'm from some place in California. I usually tell people that I grew up near Seattle. I suppose it's good that they know that that's on the West Coast somewhere. I've found that it's hopeless to tell people that I'm from the state of Washington. That just gets a puzzled look, because they know that's a city, not a state.
Around computer geeks, it's easier. I just tell them that I'm glad I got out before Bill Gates came to power in my homeland.
n order for computers to start thinking like humans, we first have to be able to properly understand and model how humans think. ...
;-)
No, no, no, no, no. Intellectuals have the problem backwards. Historically makind goes out and does something, and only later do we understand HOW we did it.
This is probably an important observation.
To use the traditional example of the Wright Brothers, we might observe that they didn't make a mechanical bird. True, there are some similarities, but airplanes don't in fact fly like birds. And we only figured out the specifics of bird flight decades after we built flying machines. This gave us a way to experiment with aerodynamics and replace the previous semi-mystical misunderstandings with actual scientific understanding.
Still later, in the past two decades we finally figured out that, contrary to the old engineering joke, bumblebees can fly after all. We know how they do it, and it's nothing at all like how our machines fly. (Well, not yet, but maybe soon.
Similarly, insisting on understanding the human mind is misdirection. We'll more likely first build some new intelligences, perhaps partly by accident. They won't be at all human. When we have a few of them, we can finally start to build true scientific understanding of how a mind might work. And maybe in a few more decades we will finally start to understand how human (and other species') minds work.
That is, we might, if we survive the effect of creating the first artificial intelligences. If past development is any guide, it'll most likely be done with military funding. Debugging the first military artificial intelligences could just have some, uh, "interesting" side effects.
If the process is NOT destructive, then you've merely COPIED the human mind, not "uploaded" it.
Ummm, in all cases that I am aware of, when someone uses the term "upload" or "download, they always mean "copy". These operations are never destructive of the original. I've never heard either term used with physical objects that are moved. Both "load" and "offload" are used with physical objects being moved, but not "upload" or "download".
Can you give an example where "download" is used for an operation that doesn't leave the original unchanged?
Now, now; don't be greedy with your karma. There's plenty for everyone.
Also you should work with reference librarians whenever possible, and don't give me that crap (prior post) about "we just use the Internet."
...
Actually, the idea that the Internet competes with libraries, while enticing, turns out to not be true at all. Public libraries all over are getting tied into the Internet, and for the poorer parts of society, this is often the only access to most of the world's information.
Librarians have generally figured out that the Internet doesn't replace hard-copy books; they complement each other in useful ways. Having Internet access in the library gives the librarians the freedom to be a lot more selective about what books they have on their shelves. They are starting to figure out what sorts of things are best presented in book form and which are better online. And libraries are migrating to a system that stocks up on the former while making the latter available via computers.
They just have to figure out how to handle the pr0n and spam problems
It's even worse than you think. Most parents repeatedly attempt to instill in their impressionable childrens' minds the idea that nice people share their toys with their friends. This is a clear enticement to copyright violation.
;-)
And it's even worse than that. Many of those parents knowingly hand over their children to "schools", which are institutions that also attempt to teach the children that they should share.
After years of this sort of indoctrination, it's not surprising that the result should be teenagers (and even adults) who think that it's ok to violate copyright by sharing ideas, documents and music with each other.
These organizations are merely trying to interrupt this process and teach the children that ideas and songs are like toys and other kinds of property: Every child should have his or her own, every one should be paid for, and they should never be shared. Sharing is an economic perversion that undermines the private property that is at the heart of our corporate economic system.
(Lessee; will I get a "Troll" or "Funny" rating here? Maybe I need a
... the BSA" The Boyscouts of America?! What's wrong with the Boy Scouts?
Probably the same thing that was wrong a few years ago with the GSA (Girl Scouts of America) - They sit around campfires singing copyrighted songs without first getting written permission from the copyright owners and paying the license fees.
Bunch of anarchic, socialistic copyright-violating pirates with no respect for the law, all of them!
Actually, I've seen both Eraserhead and Plan Nine. I'd say that Eraserhead is distinctly worse. Plan Nine at least has a bit of a plot. I'd agree that the "acting" is about equally bad in both. Plan Nine has some action, so the bad acting might stand out a bit more. Eraserhead is mostly a lot of scenes with little if any action; it's harder to accuse actors of poor acting when they don't have to act at all.
My wife calls Plan Nine a movie that's "so bad it's good". It at least makes you laugh, and you leave with a stupid grin on your face. Eraserhead leaves you with nothing.
Or maybe both are just so subtle and deep that we both missed their significance. Yeah; that must be it.
[A] company actually offered "life time" @gmail.com email adresses in -96 ...
;-).
Big deal. I had a life-time email address more than a decade before that. It's still valid, and I'm not old and feeble yet (though I could be run down by a truck or bus tomorrow
Lots of people can say the same. As with most of them, mine is through a university where I hung around for a few years. Many universities have figured out that a permanent email address is a valuable commodity, and it something that the commercial world doesn't seem to be very interested in providing. And it gives them a fast way to hit you up when they're looking for contributions.
My university email accout is also a login account, and I have several GB of space available there if I want to use it. So far my email is only about 55 MB, but I also have web space that's approaching a GB. Several other alumni are above a GB in usage, and the department's reaction is to add more disk space. It's also nice to have web space at a place that positively encourages innovative development, something that the commercial ISP world doesn't seem to like much. But the economics of the situation are that if you're a university department, anything that's original and innovative just makes you look good, and that's what gets you funding.
But then, I suppose it's fairly normal for the academic world to be years ahead of the commercial world.
"Yes your honor, my client has plans to launch an email service before Google."
/. ;-) only just noticed the project. But to a court, that merely shows your own lack of attention. It sure looks like google has spent nine years developing their product, and as soon as they make it public, others jump in and try to claim the name for themselves.
;-)
Your lawyer might have a bit of a problem supporting that, considering that google registered gmail.com nine years ago. Maybe the media (including
Of course, it's likely that google's attitude is that they aren't much concerned with trademark. The word "google" was an English-language dictionary entry long before there was a computer industry. They not only can't stop us from using it as a common verb; they clearly benefit from this. (And they've added another item in the dictionary entries.
What matters most is that they own "google.com" and "gmail.com". If others try to claim "google" or "gmail" as trademarks, what does it matter when you've owned the domains all along?
Would you mind posing [sic] a link to a site that uses Gmail, please?
... and so on.
Jeez; it would have been less typing to enter it in your browser's Location box, and you'd have found that it leads to https://gmail.google.com/, implaying that it exists and has the obvious effect
Also, "whois gmail.com" gives the info:
Domain Name: GMAIL.COM
Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.
Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 31-mar-2004
Creation Date: 13-aug-1995
Expiration Date: 12-aug-2006
So google has owned gmail.com for nearly a decade.
Right you are. They're 204.251.13.11 and 64.81.91.49 respectively.
Eraserhead.
;-)
My wife and I always use that as the movie that we compare all others to. So far, we haven't found one that's worse. But that could be because we get tipped off about the others. I haven't seen any on that bottom-100 list for that reason.
It's also possible that nobody here ever saw that one. I've noticed that almost all the movies mentioned here date from the past 25 years or so. There are plenty of really bad movies from before 1960. And most of them are still available, if you look hard enough.
(So much for the idea that copyright is robbing us of our culture.
And note that that 20% estimate is the oil that's cheapest to pull out of the ground. There's a large "proven reserve" that's in forms that, with current technology, uses nearly as much energy to extract as the oil contains. Of course, this is slowly changing, as more efficient extraction techniques are developed. But there's an ongoing problem that extracting the remaining oil (however much that may be) will take an increasing amount of energy. The deliverable energy in the remaining oil is a lot less than a 20%/80% ration would suggest to the naive reader.
When you measure the energy deliverable to the end user, we really don't have very good estimates of how much there is under the ground in "fossil" fuels. Most of the estimates you read come from sources with obvious political and/or marketing biases. And they never seem to give you the error bars. So don't take them too seriously.
Hey, my stupid remarks just got moderated both "Troll" and "Funny"! I've been trying for that for several years ....
Yeah; I had wondered why he didn't provide it in Word format. And he should have made sure that there was a lot of "deleted" text in the .doc file, so that we could expose it.
He missed a really good opportunity for true irony.
I was disappointed.