TFA spends a lot of time talking about how few women there are on the list, without digging any deeper than that. I find that verging on morally reprehensible.
Looking into it myself, I see he used the list here as his starting basis, with only a few changes. The problem I have with that list is that it includes oodles of people who I've never heard of. Since I've been a professional software developer for 20 years, and an ameteur for 10 years before that, I think in my case "people with names I recognize" is a good filter for famous. Also lots of people are named who became famous more for starting companies than for their own programming. For example, Bill Gates and Paul Allen did write a Basic interpreter once upon a time, but its running Microsoft they are famous for. Talking about way less women starting software companies should be an entirely different discussion.
I think I can make a much shorter and better list. YMMV of course:
Alfred Aho
Marc Andreessen (mosly famous for his company, but I know his name from the Mosaic days
John Backus
Tim Berners-Lee
Dan/Dani Buten (as mentioned previously, male when I first heard of him, transgendered later)
John Carmack
Vint Cerf
Alan Cox
Ward Christensen (I was a big BBSer back in the day)
Ward Cunningham
Edsger Dijkstra
James Gosling
C. A. R. Hoare
Grace Hopper
Miguel de Icaza
Brian Kernighan
Donald Knuth
Ada Lovelace
Bertrand Meyer
Jeff Minter
John Ousterhout
Eric Raymond
Dennis Ritchie
John Romero
Guido van Rossum
Richard Stallman (debateable, as FSF, not emacs, is probably why I know his name)
Bjarne Stroustrup
Andrew Tanenbaum
Ken Thompson
Linus Torvalds
Larry Wall
Roberta Williams (TFA Author only counts her as 1/2. WTF?)
Ken Williams
Niklaus Wirth
Phil Zimmerman
Just to avoid the argument thread, if there was a name on the list that I didn't include, its either because I didn't recognize the name without reading the description, or because I know them for their business activites (or in one case, for his *hardware* development), not their software development. With my pared-down list, that's now 3.5 out of 35, or %10 female. There would probably be more if I made up the list entirely myself, but its tough for one person to judge "fame" all by himself.
Still this is much closer to what has been the actual historical percentage of participation of women in the industry, (and remember, "fame" would be a lagging indicator). So I don't think they are really fareing that badly in the fame department. Its getting them into the industry we are really having trouble with.
The GP was talking about the "intent of the framers" (ick). You may have a point that the *effect* today is the same. But he was talking about intent. Their intent doesn't really have to be a mystery, as good first-hand records of it exist.
The thing is, once you realise that it was all about slavery, a whole lot of the Constitution suddenly starts making sense. Here's an example: Ever wonder why taxing exports was considered evil, but imports just fine? Economists can come up with reasons if you ask them, but the rich gentleman farmers who wrote it in the 1780's weren't expert Kensyian economists. What they were worried about was that the North would try to get around the other restrictions against outlawing slavery by levying ruinous export duties on the *products* of slavery. Cotton and tobacco exports were the lifeblood of the South.
If you think about it, the only restrictions on *imports* that could possibly hurt slavery would be some kind of restriction on imports of the slaves themselves. Guess what? Tucked in article 1 section 9 (first paragraph), where nobody ever notices it, is a prohibition on congress banning the imporation of slaves for the next 20 years, and limiting what the import duties on them can be. Think about that one. Slaves were the one "commodity" that the constitution specifically protects from import duties.
Try coloring the states red and blue according the percent of popular vote. Then every state is some hue of purple, with only DC being explicitly blue.
Change "state" for "voting district", and the map you are describing is here. I know it isn't quite the same thing, but you'll see a lot of large nearly solid blue areas.
I have heard that the smaller population states wanted greater influence, and did not want to be bullied by the comparatively gargantuan New York and Pennsylvania at the time.
That's probably what everyone has heard, because that's what tends to be written in the history books that make it past school boards.
However, there are actually good historical records of the deiliberations at the constitutional convention, and this is not true. The system we have, along with the Senatorial system and the now obsolete 3/5ths rule and a whole buch of other little rules and clauses nobody pays much attention to anymore, were all pushed by the slave states, and their allies in the north. Their worry was that in a straight democracy the more populous (and at the time more religous) North would simply vote slavery out of existance. The entire system of government we have was designed to prevent the North from ever being able to do that. Nearly any good or bad feature of the electoral college system is just a side-effect.
The Whigs were mostly run by wealthy Northeastern business types. Sort of like the Republicans of the early 1900s. They were also fairly pro-England, and favored a weaker executive (probably mostly because they didn't hold that post much) and a much weaker separation of Church and State. They were much less racist than the other party at the time, but that's really not saying a lot.
Wikipedia has a halfway decent page on them, although it focuses more on what they did than who they were.
I read a pretty good book on this. I think this is the updated version.
It turns out that presidential campaigns in the USA have always been as nasty as they are today. Some were nastier. I guess human nature hasn't changed a lot in 220 years.
A "feature" (probably unintended) of the design of the Electoral College system is that most elections look like more of a blowout than they were. In theory, if someone manages to consistently get 50.5% in every state, they could win every state and the public will be told the next morning about the victor's huge landslide victory.
That's why after the 2000 election the Reps floated around those red state/blue state US maps with such glee. It made a squeaker look like a huge victory. (For a better picture, see the University of Michagan , which use some cartiographical tricks to adjust for population). A better illustration are Regan's victories. Everyone knows Regan clobbered Carter and Mondale, right? Well, the true answer is not really, and sorta respectively. The electoral college turned his %50.7 victory in 1980 into a %86 state victory, and his %58.8 victory in 1984 into a %94 state victory.
It has been argued that this effect is actually good for the country, as it gives presidents more legitimacy from their elections.
Back when I was school in the 80's, we all used VT-220 serial terminals to connect to the mainframes, rather than each having individual workstations. We were mostly working on VMS boxen. However, one year the department got a brand-spanking new Unix box, and we were assigned one class that used it exclusively. One thing I discovered (the hard way) was that if you accidentally tried to display a binary file on a VT-220 it would lock it hard. So hard that someone ("someone" = a grumpy and hard to find sysadmin) had to go down to the server room and reset the terminal server to get it back.
One of my slower classmates was having trouble with his program, and asked me to come look at the weird message he was getting. It said something along the lines of "SEGMENTATION FAULT. Core dumped". I knew from previous experience this meant the crash state of his program would have gotten dumped to a binary file in his working directory named "core".
Normally I'd be nice, but we used to play pranks on each other in the lab, and this was too good to pass up. So I told him, "Oh! That means your program ran out of memory. You need more. You can fix that by typing "more core""
My personal favorite is RR Intl. Airport in D.C., which happens to be one of only 2 places in the country that *never* voted him any electors. Congress forced the name change on them, over their strenuous objections. Now there's a slap in the face for you.
On the E1000? I believe Intel has the specs online, although I couldn't find them with a quick website search. I have them handy here, but I've never written my driver to write to the NVRAM so I can't say I know entirely how its done. However, skimming through it, I don't see anything about any "hardware lock bit".
Think about this logically. If its possible to flash it on purpose entirely through software, then it would be possible to do so accidentally with malfunctioning software.
I've written an E1000 driver (for a realtime program on a different OS). The issue is that once you have the base address registers for the card mapped into system memory, they are there. There's no super-special secret mechanisim devoted to writing only to the flash RAM.
Oversimplifying things a great deal (so experts out there, please don't roast me over the nitty details), every PCI device in your system presents software drivers with up to 6 "Base Address Registers" (BARs). Most PCI devices really only use one or two of those. This is (mostly) the device-driver's only window into the PCI device.
At bootup the system places the physical address of the device's control registers and memory into its BARs. When the device driver starts up later, it grabs those physical addresses and maps them into virtual memory so that software can get at them.
Once this is done, *all* the device's control registers are avialble to software. If one of these registers can command the card to write data to flash (as one of the control registers on the E1000 does), then the proper (or improper) value written to that memory location by *anyone* will cause a flash write. Its that simple.
I got one too. I've never actually seen anyone spamming for gold though.
I'm not even sure why you would want to buy gold in WAR. The only thing I've ever found that I would have liked to do but couldn't do due to lack of player funds was redye (color) my entire outfit. Hardly a real hardship, as that stuff is just going to get replaced by better gear 20 minutes later anyway...
I was playing last night and got one of those messages. I wish I'd written it down now, but it was something along the lines of "Emperor Frobozz has banished Ruetard for activies against the empire". I was playing my empire ("good" human) priest at the time.
I figured it *probably* meant they had just booted a gold-farmer, but it was kinda hard to be sure from the message.
Its kind of cool to see that, but they did it rather annoyingly. They didn't put the message in the chat window, and didn't have it come up as big text on your play window either. They put it in a pop-up window that you had to dismiss by clicking on the "OK" button. If I'd been in the middle of a furball at the time that could have been deadly. I still *had* to stop what I was doing to read the darn thing and click it away.
They interview the people taking out mortgages, the people selling them, and the bankers repackaging the mortages into securities. Who's guilty? In short, everyone.
In slightly longer: The people who removed all the rules (aka: regulations) from the system.
"Foreign affairs" - All Palin knows is that she "can see Russia from her house."
...except she can't. This particular meme is really starting to tick me off.
Wasilla is rougly 700 miles (as the crow flies) from any part of Russia. I'd wadger that a very large percentage of US citizens live closer to an international border than Palin does.
The parts of Alaska that can actually *see* Russian territories are in the Aleutian islands (well, there are two little islands in the Bering straight too, but its the same situation there). The inhabitants on both sides are Innuit, and don't care much about the "border". I'd also wadger that Palin has *never* been there, and if she did she'd see nothing on the other side that didn't look (physically and culturally) just like her side.
To claim that you can gain any insight into international affairs by standing in one remote Innuit island and peering over at the next one might be good for a laugh the first time you say it. To repeat it like its some kind of insight is just insulting to your listeners' intelligence.
Of course if anyone calls her on it, that's a good thing too. Any amount of time spent talking about such silliness is time distracted from our tanking economy, the two wars, the worsening diplomatic situations around the world, the worsening climate, and all other such issues that their ticket loses on.
It would be quite amusing if, as part of this litigation which they started, a judge ends up having to come up with a finding on whether they are indeed being "Vexatious". If it is found that they are, that could hurt them badly in every future litigation.
There's not really anything new here, so I really don't understand the anger. Every wave of immigration this country had worked the same way. Its not tough at all to find Jewish people whose parents or grandparents moved here and only spoke Yiddish. In the midwest there are plenty of people whose immigrant ancestors never learned to speak anything but their native Sweedish or German. Learning languages once you are grown is very hard for most people.
What *always* happens is that their children are biliungual, and their grandchildren don't know anything but English. There are now millions of third generation hispanics in this country who don't know Spanish at all. We just happen to have a large number of the first generation still here (and still comming here) walking around and trying to get by.
Also what happens every time is that generation's Know-Nothings get all irate at them for not assimilating faster.
It appears to me the creators of the original constitution felt it was important for the citizens of each state to decide how to cast their electoral votes.
Well, no. They actually felt it was important for the citizens to not directly decide such things. The original idea was for the state governments to appoint electors (either though the governor or the legistature). Presumably these people would be wiser than the actual populace. Its true that the state legislatures and governors were in turn voted on, but most states didn't have universal sufferage either. You generally had to be a land-owner to vote. Of course women and slaves couldn't vote either (even though they counted for congressional representation).
It was also the original idea that these electors would all vote for their own regional candidates, and thus the electoral college would almost never be able to come up with a majority. Thus every election would be thrown into the (outgoing) House of Representatives. US representatives were supposed to have been directly voted on (unlike senators), but in the 18th century you had to be fairly rich and idle to be able to afford to spend several weeks a year blovating in DC. This would insure that slave states had vastly disproportinate influence on who got elected president. Either way, it was intended to be a decison made by "our betters".
The getting thrown to the House thing didn't work out as intended, but the slave states still made out OK. Of the first 7 presidents, 5 were from Virginia.
If you hadn't gathered yet, our Founding Fathers were actually rather elitist.
I simply cannot find a more definitive point at which 'life' begins than at conception. It has nothing to do with my religion, but it is the most logical point at which you can say "Before that point, it was definitely not a human" and after that point "If we do not interfere, it will become a human".
Why do we have to say any such thing? I really don't understand why it has to be a boolean decision between "unimportant mass of cells" and "US Citizen". Why not bow to reality and admit that gestation is a process? We already do the same thing with childhood. People don't get full rights until they are 21. You can't drive most places until 16. You can't consent to sex before 16-18 depending on the state. Before 6, people are legally not responsible for their own actions. There's nothing magic about any of these dates. They are just seemingly appropriate dates in the middle of a person's maturing process that we picked.
So why not pick another seemingly appropriate date during gestation, say the third trimester (the date the Supreme Court picked), and say "after this point you have a right to finish and be born if you can. Before this date, we aren't going to force another human being to risk their life and possibly pemanantly disfigure their bodies to carry you if they don't want to"?
The moral absolutist language that the anti-choice crowd likes is great for comming up with simple answers that you don't have to think about. The problem is that it leads to absurd situations. For instance, if its as simple as "abortion is murder", then logically miscarriage is involuntary manslaughter. Millions of women have miscarriages every year. My wife had one. My mom had several. Should they be in jail? Or is it in actuality not that simple?
Microsoft had always said that the Bill & Seinfield ads were not a campaign unto itself, but an icebreaker, or rather, "phase one". Indeed, it would not surprise me if Microsoft's announcement was all about the new ads, and didn't mention Bill & Seinfield at all.
This would actually make the whole thing make sense. The ads were clearly crappy for the purposes of selling Microsoft. However, they did do a good job of personalizing Bill. Perhaps that was the whole point. Perhaps the grand plan is to use Bill like Wendy's used to use founder Dave Thomas after he left the company.
They couldn't just jump right in doing that with Bill, because we would be going, "Hey, there's that billionaire a-hole on TV!". So they had to first run a primer campaign to soften his image and make him seem like a regular guy. That would totally explain the "move in with a regular family" commercial. Seinfeld would be handy for that, because he's got an image as a regular guy from his TV show. Plus his old fans would be excited to see him again.
You watched it, you talk about it. That is what ad makers want you to do. All the rest is extra.
I disagree. I have to somehow at least know what the ad is for. It should also make a positive association with that thing.
Frankly, until this Slashdot discussion, I wasn't even sure they were Microsoft ads. They could have been ads for Bill's charitable foundation. They could also have been ads for some new tour or show Seinfeld was doing. Heck, they could have been some new celebrity shoe campiagn.
"Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming".
I like that...for a James Bond book. Readers of those are just looking for a certian flavor of nice pulpy goodness. You can almost look at "Ian Fleming" as a brand name.
For a HHG book, no. Adam's books are very much extensions of his own personality. Trying to ape that and sell it as his just seems too much like a violaton of Douglas himself. Those of us who grew to like the guy don't want to see that.
I suppose I don't have a problem with this, as long as its crystal clear that this is Colfer's book, set in the HHG universe. If there is any implication whatsoever that this is a new Douglas Adams book, I have a big problem with it.
He's not pinin' for the fjords. He's dead. Let him go.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA spends a lot of time talking about how few women there are on the list, without digging any deeper than that. I find that verging on morally reprehensible.
Looking into it myself, I see he used the list here as his starting basis, with only a few changes. The problem I have with that list is that it includes oodles of people who I've never heard of. Since I've been a professional software developer for 20 years, and an ameteur for 10 years before that, I think in my case "people with names I recognize" is a good filter for famous. Also lots of people are named who became famous more for starting companies than for their own programming. For example, Bill Gates and Paul Allen did write a Basic interpreter once upon a time, but its running Microsoft they are famous for. Talking about way less women starting software companies should be an entirely different discussion.
I think I can make a much shorter and better list. YMMV of course:
Just to avoid the argument thread, if there was a name on the list that I didn't include, its either because I didn't recognize the name without reading the description, or because I know them for their business activites (or in one case, for his *hardware* development), not their software development.
With my pared-down list, that's now 3.5 out of 35, or %10 female. There would probably be more if I made up the list entirely myself, but its tough for one person to judge "fame" all by himself.
Still this is much closer to what has been the actual historical percentage of participation of women in the industry, (and remember, "fame" would be a lagging indicator). So I don't think they are really fareing that badly in the fame department. Its getting them into the industry we are really having trouble with.
The GP was talking about the "intent of the framers" (ick). You may have a point that the *effect* today is the same. But he was talking about intent. Their intent doesn't really have to be a mystery, as good first-hand records of it exist.
The thing is, once you realise that it was all about slavery, a whole lot of the Constitution suddenly starts making sense. Here's an example: Ever wonder why taxing exports was considered evil, but imports just fine? Economists can come up with reasons if you ask them, but the rich gentleman farmers who wrote it in the 1780's weren't expert Kensyian economists. What they were worried about was that the North would try to get around the other restrictions against outlawing slavery by levying ruinous export duties on the *products* of slavery. Cotton and tobacco exports were the lifeblood of the South.
If you think about it, the only restrictions on *imports* that could possibly hurt slavery would be some kind of restriction on imports of the slaves themselves. Guess what? Tucked in article 1 section 9 (first paragraph), where nobody ever notices it, is a prohibition on congress banning the imporation of slaves for the next 20 years, and limiting what the import duties on them can be. Think about that one. Slaves were the one "commodity" that the constitution specifically protects from import duties.
Change "state" for "voting district", and the map you are describing is here. I know it isn't quite the same thing, but you'll see a lot of large nearly solid blue areas.
That's probably what everyone has heard, because that's what tends to be written in the history books that make it past school boards.
However, there are actually good historical records of the deiliberations at the constitutional convention, and this is not true. The system we have, along with the Senatorial system and the now obsolete 3/5ths rule and a whole buch of other little rules and clauses nobody pays much attention to anymore, were all pushed by the slave states, and their allies in the north. Their worry was that in a straight democracy the more populous (and at the time more religous) North would simply vote slavery out of existance. The entire system of government we have was designed to prevent the North from ever being able to do that. Nearly any good or bad feature of the electoral college system is just a side-effect.
The Whigs were mostly run by wealthy Northeastern business types. Sort of like the Republicans of the early 1900s. They were also fairly pro-England, and favored a weaker executive (probably mostly because they didn't hold that post much) and a much weaker separation of Church and State. They were much less racist than the other party at the time, but that's really not saying a lot.
Wikipedia has a halfway decent page on them, although it focuses more on what they did than who they were.
I read a pretty good book on this. I think this is the updated version.
It turns out that presidential campaigns in the USA have always been as nasty as they are today. Some were nastier. I guess human nature hasn't changed a lot in 220 years.
A "feature" (probably unintended) of the design of the Electoral College system is that most elections look like more of a blowout than they were. In theory, if someone manages to consistently get 50.5% in every state, they could win every state and the public will be told the next morning about the victor's huge landslide victory.
That's why after the 2000 election the Reps floated around those red state/blue state US maps with such glee. It made a squeaker look like a huge victory. (For a better picture, see the University of Michagan , which use some cartiographical tricks to adjust for population).
A better illustration are Regan's victories. Everyone knows Regan clobbered Carter and Mondale, right? Well, the true answer is not really, and sorta respectively. The electoral college turned his %50.7 victory in 1980 into a %86 state victory, and his %58.8 victory in 1984 into a %94 state victory.
It has been argued that this effect is actually good for the country, as it gives presidents more legitimacy from their elections.
Back when I was school in the 80's, we all used VT-220 serial terminals to connect to the mainframes, rather than each having individual workstations. We were mostly working on VMS boxen. However, one year the department got a brand-spanking new Unix box, and we were assigned one class that used it exclusively. One thing I discovered (the hard way) was that if you accidentally tried to display a binary file on a VT-220 it would lock it hard. So hard that someone ("someone" = a grumpy and hard to find sysadmin) had to go down to the server room and reset the terminal server to get it back.
One of my slower classmates was having trouble with his program, and asked me to come look at the weird message he was getting. It said something along the lines of "SEGMENTATION FAULT. Core dumped". I knew from previous experience this meant the crash state of his program would have gotten dumped to a binary file in his working directory named "core".
Normally I'd be nice, but we used to play pranks on each other in the lab, and this was too good to pass up. So I told him, "Oh! That means your program ran out of memory. You need more. You can fix that by typing "more core""
My personal favorite is RR Intl. Airport in D.C., which happens to be one of only 2 places in the country that *never* voted him any electors. Congress forced the name change on them, over their strenuous objections. Now there's a slap in the face for you.
On the E1000? I believe Intel has the specs online, although I couldn't find them with a quick website search. I have them handy here, but I've never written my driver to write to the NVRAM so I can't say I know entirely how its done. However, skimming through it, I don't see anything about any "hardware lock bit".
Think about this logically. If its possible to flash it on purpose entirely through software, then it would be possible to do so accidentally with malfunctioning software.
I've written an E1000 driver (for a realtime program on a different OS). The issue is that once you have the base address registers for the card mapped into system memory, they are there. There's no super-special secret mechanisim devoted to writing only to the flash RAM.
Oversimplifying things a great deal (so experts out there, please don't roast me over the nitty details), every PCI device in your system presents software drivers with up to 6 "Base Address Registers" (BARs). Most PCI devices really only use one or two of those. This is (mostly) the device-driver's only window into the PCI device.
At bootup the system places the physical address of the device's control registers and memory into its BARs. When the device driver starts up later, it grabs those physical addresses and maps them into virtual memory so that software can get at them.
Once this is done, *all* the device's control registers are avialble to software. If one of these registers can command the card to write data to flash (as one of the control registers on the E1000 does), then the proper (or improper) value written to that memory location by *anyone* will cause a flash write. Its that simple.
I got one too. I've never actually seen anyone spamming for gold though.
I'm not even sure why you would want to buy gold in WAR. The only thing I've ever found that I would have liked to do but couldn't do due to lack of player funds was redye (color) my entire outfit. Hardly a real hardship, as that stuff is just going to get replaced by better gear 20 minutes later anyway...
I was playing last night and got one of those messages. I wish I'd written it down now, but it was something along the lines of "Emperor Frobozz has banished Ruetard for activies against the empire". I was playing my empire ("good" human) priest at the time.
I figured it *probably* meant they had just booted a gold-farmer, but it was kinda hard to be sure from the message.
Its kind of cool to see that, but they did it rather annoyingly. They didn't put the message in the chat window, and didn't have it come up as big text on your play window either. They put it in a pop-up window that you had to dismiss by clicking on the "OK" button. If I'd been in the middle of a furball at the time that could have been deadly. I still *had* to stop what I was doing to read the darn thing and click it away.
In slightly longer: The people who removed all the rules (aka: regulations) from the system.
You must be new here...
Wasilla is rougly 700 miles (as the crow flies) from any part of Russia. I'd wadger that a very large percentage of US citizens live closer to an international border than Palin does.
The parts of Alaska that can actually *see* Russian territories are in the Aleutian islands (well, there are two little islands in the Bering straight too, but its the same situation there). The inhabitants on both sides are Innuit, and don't care much about the "border". I'd also wadger that Palin has *never* been there, and if she did she'd see nothing on the other side that didn't look (physically and culturally) just like her side.
To claim that you can gain any insight into international affairs by standing in one remote Innuit island and peering over at the next one might be good for a laugh the first time you say it. To repeat it like its some kind of insight is just insulting to your listeners' intelligence.
Of course if anyone calls her on it, that's a good thing too. Any amount of time spent talking about such silliness is time distracted from our tanking economy, the two wars, the worsening diplomatic situations around the world, the worsening climate, and all other such issues that their ticket loses on.
Actually, that's considered a war crime in this country, and it can carry the death penalty. We've executed people for doing it before.
I'm not suggesting anything, but I believe that's the law. "25 to life" for someone convited of that seems a bit light.
It would be quite amusing if, as part of this litigation which they started, a judge ends up having to come up with a finding on whether they are indeed being "Vexatious". If it is found that they are, that could hurt them badly in every future litigation.
There's not really anything new here, so I really don't understand the anger. Every wave of immigration this country had worked the same way. Its not tough at all to find Jewish people whose parents or grandparents moved here and only spoke Yiddish. In the midwest there are plenty of people whose immigrant ancestors never learned to speak anything but their native Sweedish or German. Learning languages once you are grown is very hard for most people.
What *always* happens is that their children are biliungual, and their grandchildren don't know anything but English. There are now millions of third generation hispanics in this country who don't know Spanish at all. We just happen to have a large number of the first generation still here (and still comming here) walking around and trying to get by.
Also what happens every time is that generation's Know-Nothings get all irate at them for not assimilating faster.
Well, no. They actually felt it was important for the citizens to not directly decide such things. The original idea was for the state governments to appoint electors (either though the governor or the legistature). Presumably these people would be wiser than the actual populace. Its true that the state legislatures and governors were in turn voted on, but most states didn't have universal sufferage either. You generally had to be a land-owner to vote. Of course women and slaves couldn't vote either (even though they counted for congressional representation).
It was also the original idea that these electors would all vote for their own regional candidates, and thus the electoral college would almost never be able to come up with a majority. Thus every election would be thrown into the (outgoing) House of Representatives. US representatives were supposed to have been directly voted on (unlike senators), but in the 18th century you had to be fairly rich and idle to be able to afford to spend several weeks a year blovating in DC. This would insure that slave states had vastly disproportinate influence on who got elected president. Either way, it was intended to be a decison made by "our betters".
The getting thrown to the House thing didn't work out as intended, but the slave states still made out OK. Of the first 7 presidents, 5 were from Virginia.
If you hadn't gathered yet, our Founding Fathers were actually rather elitist.
Why do we have to say any such thing? I really don't understand why it has to be a boolean decision between "unimportant mass of cells" and "US Citizen". Why not bow to reality and admit that gestation is a process? We already do the same thing with childhood. People don't get full rights until they are 21. You can't drive most places until 16. You can't consent to sex before 16-18 depending on the state. Before 6, people are legally not responsible for their own actions. There's nothing magic about any of these dates. They are just seemingly appropriate dates in the middle of a person's maturing process that we picked.
So why not pick another seemingly appropriate date during gestation, say the third trimester (the date the Supreme Court picked), and say "after this point you have a right to finish and be born if you can. Before this date, we aren't going to force another human being to risk their life and possibly pemanantly disfigure their bodies to carry you if they don't want to"?
The moral absolutist language that the anti-choice crowd likes is great for comming up with simple answers that you don't have to think about. The problem is that it leads to absurd situations. For instance, if its as simple as "abortion is murder", then logically miscarriage is involuntary manslaughter. Millions of women have miscarriages every year. My wife had one. My mom had several. Should they be in jail? Or is it in actuality not that simple?
Microsoft had always said that the Bill & Seinfield ads were not a campaign unto itself, but an icebreaker, or rather, "phase one". Indeed, it would not surprise me if Microsoft's announcement was all about the new ads, and didn't mention Bill & Seinfield at all.
This would actually make the whole thing make sense. The ads were clearly crappy for the purposes of selling Microsoft. However, they did do a good job of personalizing Bill. Perhaps that was the whole point. Perhaps the grand plan is to use Bill like Wendy's used to use founder Dave Thomas after he left the company.
They couldn't just jump right in doing that with Bill, because we would be going, "Hey, there's that billionaire a-hole on TV!". So they had to first run a primer campaign to soften his image and make him seem like a regular guy. That would totally explain the "move in with a regular family" commercial. Seinfeld would be handy for that, because he's got an image as a regular guy from his TV show. Plus his old fans would be excited to see him again.
If that's what's going on, I'm impressed.
I disagree. I have to somehow at least know what the ad is for. It should also make a positive association with that thing.
Frankly, until this Slashdot discussion, I wasn't even sure they were Microsoft ads. They could have been ads for Bill's charitable foundation. They could also have been ads for some new tour or show Seinfeld was doing. Heck, they could have been some new celebrity shoe campiagn.
I like that...for a James Bond book. Readers of those are just looking for a certian flavor of nice pulpy goodness. You can almost look at "Ian Fleming" as a brand name.
For a HHG book, no. Adam's books are very much extensions of his own personality. Trying to ape that and sell it as his just seems too much like a violaton of Douglas himself. Those of us who grew to like the guy don't want to see that.
I suppose I don't have a problem with this, as long as its crystal clear that this is Colfer's book, set in the HHG universe. If there is any implication whatsoever that this is a new Douglas Adams book, I have a big problem with it.
He's not pinin' for the fjords. He's dead. Let him go.