It would be awesome, but the biggest problem is that they lack advertising. That is, "24" sold brilliantly on DVD, but only after a season of what you could think of as hour-long infomercials for it.
A season of Firefly would cost over $20 million to put together. To make that up would take a hell of a lot of marketing, which is even MORE money.
Now, for Firefly that marketing is already done. But if that show hadn't been on TV, and if it didn't have the already-well-known Joss Whedon behind it, nobody's going to gamble tens of millions of dollars on it.
But I'd love to see somebody try it for smaller, cheaper shows. Something without special effects could perhaps produce a half-season (13 episodes) for under $1 million. That might conceivably attract investors.
iPods and used CDs are different, so I think the original title is correct.
Not even the RIAA would dispute that you own the physical CD medium, and that it's your right to sell it. If you've made a backup copy first, then you're a bad boy and they'll sue you.
But it's harder to prove ownership of the music/video on the iPod. If you downloaded it from iTunes, you can't get it back off the iPod, so that's all legal. (More or less. I don't know what would happen if you opened an "iPod service station" downloading playlists to other people's iPods, but it sounds like a very inconvenient thing.)
In this article they're specifically citing cases of ripped music and downloaded video on the iPod, and that's almost certainly a violation of fair use. They're trying to get around it with the wink-wink "we're assuming you already own this music", but I doubt courts will let that excuse fly.
In the limit the cases do have a lot of similarities. You could, in theory, just pass that CD around, re-selling each CD at the same price after you've ripped it. But it's less convenient; you'd have to move around hundreds of CDs and the overhead costs become huge. Buy an iPod with many songs, and you can do a whole lot of copyright infringement all at once.
That's true. However, the article doesn't say whether the disc was DRMed or not. If it was, it is in fact a crime, one for which I'd love to see them prosecuted, just on ironic grounds.
But my guess is that the disc wasn't DRMed. I believe that by default, most burning software doesn't apply CSS. (I'm not an expert, but I think you have to pay Macrovision whenever you burn a CSSed disc.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that most if not all jurisdictions have laws preventing people from giving money to law enforcement officials.
I'd love to see law enforcement at all levels be more appropriately focused. It's all a question of resources: more officers/agents spent catching dipsticks like in this article is fewer agents catching terrorists, copyright infringers, and Martin Luther King Jr. But if private investment made the job more lucrative, maybe there would be more people willing to do it.
There are ethical issues associated with tipping law enforcement officials. Police, etc. are supposed to be unbiased, responding equally no matter who has been harmed. When rich people or corporations start paying for better service, genuine gratitude becomes bribery rather quickly.
You can offer them some coffee and cherry pie, but that's about it.
Since everybody else is saying "no", I'll say "yes". I think that Americans feel a lot safer.
At least, they feel a lot safer than they did on September 12, 2001. Americans were pretty spastic then, and that's why PATRIOT Act I was passed pretty quietly. They were scared. I was scared. It was pretty frickin' scary.
Today, they feel a lot safer. The follow-up attack that everybody expected never materialized. They're not glued to CNN. They're not kissing their wives perhaps a final good-bye on the way out the door going to work. (I did.) They've gotten more or less back to normal. They're still kinda scared, but since I grew up with Mutually Assured Destruction breathing down my neck, me and a lot of other Americans are kind of used to low-grade, continual fear.
That's the Devil's Advocate answer. Now, do they feel safe for the right reasons? Maybe; maybe not. Why haven't there been any more attacks? Because we invaded Afghanistan and knocked out the Taliban? Because of the invasive techniques the FBI and NSA are using? Because of ordinary law enforcement? Because one big attack was all Osama had in him? I don't know.
And, as another poster pointed out, none of that has anything to do with porn. Neither me nor any of my friends is afraid of porn, so I don't have a read on that. Do "ordinary Americans" feel that their kids are being protected from porn? Probably not, but not for Bush's lack of trying; the laws he's tried to pass have all been struck down.
Would they feel safer if they had been passed? I doubt it. This is a stupid law they're trying to justify, and they're going about it in an offensive way. I appreciate Google saying "no", and I hope the courts back them up.
Strictly speaking they haven't been proven wrong. Their concern was that it might have blown up on launch, scattering and possibly aerosolizing radioactive material. Rockets blow up all too often; just because this one didn't doesn't mean that they were completely wrong about the possible consequences if it did.
As far as I can tell they ARE wrong. The RTGs are designed to withstand the destruction of the launch vehicle without dispersing the radioactive material. But I haven't seen the tests that prove that, and unless you're on the team, neither have you. It's not supposed to fail, but then, neither was the rocket itself, and we know that rockets do sometimes fail.
So they will keep protesting until a rocket carrying an RTG does explode. And if the radioactive material is pulverized and enters the atmosphere, you'd better have one hell of an apology ready yourself.
Google and BellSouth need each other. Without BellSouth, fewer customers come to Google's site, so Google displays fewer ads, and gets less revenue. There are plenty of alternatives to Google. By comparison, there are fewer alternatives to BellSouth's service, and it's a major pain for a customer to switch ISPs just for access to Google. So BellSouth figured it had the power.
Google figures BellSouth is bluffing, and I'm with them on this.
This sort of dickering goes on all the time among the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 providers. Some carry each other's traffic on a peering agreement; others must pay. It's a major negotiation as to which is which. The bigger players peer with each other; the smaller players have to pay the bigger players.
At the the bottom level you pay (usually) a flat fee to access an ISP, who pays a higher tier, and so on. That happens on both sides, the web site provider side and the user side. You pay the next level up to deal with those agreements for you.
BellSouth must have decided that Google was big enough to count as a tier, and a tier below them at that.
BellSouth wants to open a huge can of worms, because the sheer number of potential ISP/backbone carrier/major web site agreements possible would be truly astonishingly large. The whole point of the Internet is that it's very level.
It's much better for BellSouth to take its licking, but you can see where they thought they could score some money.
When this deal first came out, local affiliates were all kinds of nervous. They expected that people would switch from commercial-ridden TV to legal downloads, losing ad revenue. The network wins because it gets paid, but the local affiliates lose because nobody's watching their ads.
So a rise in TV viewership came as a surprise to them. And since their logic seemed sound, it seemed so to me, too.
Not that I was crying for them. I'd much rather see local affiliates go away and have the bandwidth replaced by something more useful.
Moreover, I'm not certain that the trend will continue. I wonder if people are being driven to watch it on TV because of the very poor quality of the downloads; it's enough to get addicted to the series but also annoying to watch. So if/when Apple raises the resolution, will the viewers leave TV again? Or is there more to it?
Interesting. It doesn't say that experiments say otherwise; it just says that the experiments haven't been done.
So you have to make kind of a logical jump from there to saying that whoever is saying it doesn't have any proof, either. Which is almost certainly true, though it's a bit of a jump; conceivably it could be some sort of unpublished report. But as far as I know it's not based on anecdotal evidence, either; I've never heard of any small animals being bitten.
Presumably nobody's done the study because they have no reason to believe that it is true. If somebody observed a daddy longlegs biting something larger than it and killing it, there would be reason to do the research. But if it killed a mouse, it would almost certainly cause at least some reaction in humans.
That strikes me as an interesting glimpse into the difference between science and urban legend. The spiders could actually be poisonous, but from a scientific standpoint it wouldn't make the urban legend true regardless. That's because the legend appears to be based on no data, and without data it's not science even if it turns out to be factual.
Wow. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and I didn't know that. For some reason I don't have the builtin Quick Searches ("dict foo" takes me to the same as a google "I'm feeling lucky" on "dict foo", which isn't a particularly useful thing.) It may be that I deleted the folder as too much clutter!
Thanks for pointing that out. I can easily recreate the ones I need and I've already added a few nonstandard ones.
I am glad that there are organizations protecting consumers' rights. They form a critical balance to self-interested business who are only looking out for themselves, with considerable legal and political clout.
But pronouncements like this bore me silly. You've got companies shouting "We must protect our property!" and consumers screaming "We must protect our rights!" and so the final result is an unprincipled compromise between the two by lawmakers desperate only to stop the clamor in both ears simultaneously.
I'd be much more interested in an article which talked about principled compromises. There are all sorts of technological and legal solutions to ensure BOTH the consumers' rights to use purchased content in a variety of ways, AND the producer's rights to sell their property to all the consumers who wish to buy it at a rate the market will bear without having the simplest part of the creative process, duplicating the final result, pre-empted.
Apple, for example, has a system which allows considerable, but not complete, flexibility in the way you use the music you buy. Rather than just having the NCC declare "We want more!" I'd prefer to hear them propose a better solution, one which helps protect the producer's rights as well as their own. Until then I'm going to keep tuning out their arguments.
Actually, I was just having a bit of fun. The Italian root word with the English suffix struck me as funny; I'd only ever heard "capiche" used in the present interrogative to make it understood that the preceding sentence was not so much a statement of fact as a threat.
Well, you can have kiloseconds, if you want, which is on the same order of magnitude as an hour (well, a bit over a quarter of an hour).
As you note, we use metric fractions of a second (mill, nano, femto, etc) all the time. Why megaseconds (about 11.6 days) and gigaseconds (31.7 years never caught on), I can't say. Maybe it's because we're all so familiar with hours, minutes, and days, and unlike other metric/English conversions the conversion factors are at least integers, and well known integers at that (e.g. 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour, etc.)
I'll admit I find the European speed limits in "km/hr" somewhat disconcerting, since the latter is such a non-metric unit. Hey, let's all try to convince the EU to standardize on km/kilosec, aka meter/second.
Google units conversion, BTW, does know about megaseconds and gigaseconds.
Yes, they've got a bit more detail on it. That's pretty much how science works, with people adding bits of detail over time.
This is press-release science, where a minor achievement (though I'm sure it's not minor to the grad students who spent thousands of hours poring over high-speed footage and writing analysis software) gets turned into a big deal. In this case it got tacked onto the Intelligent Design brouhaha, which bumps it up a level on the hype meter.
Which is funny, because the "bees flying" thing isn't one of the classic darts that ID advocates throw at evolution, like the clotting cascade, the flagellum, or the eye. That's a more general "scientists aren't as smart as they think they are" myth, which persists even though it was debunked decades ago.
So it's nice to have a recent article to point to when I hear the myth again. Not this article, which is over-hyped, but I'd like to have a cite of the original journal article I could show people to say, "Yes, scientists DO know how bees fly, please go away."
You've had plenty of thoughtful replies (and some total dipsticks), but I'd like to add mine anyway.
As many have said, science and God do not have to be mutually exclusive, but people on each side are defending certain things that ARE mutually exclusive. Scientists object to the teaching of intelligent design because it's poor science. They cannot accept the teaching of it as science because it contradicts the basis on which science works. (Teaching it as a public policy or moral matter is different, but there are practical if not epistemological concerns about the fact that this could easily be construed by students and even teachers as a scientific endorsement of the ID theory.)
Some religious people object to the teaching of evolution because it contradicts fundamentally held beliefs, not just physical ones (like the idea that man is a separate creation from apes) but moral ones (that if the Bible is not literally true on the subject of creation, then its moral authority on all bases are questioned). The compromise you've reached (along with many others) is unacceptable to them.
On that point they are mutually exclusive. There are those whose moral codes are built on what they consider the strongest rock, the Bible, but which I consider to be an extremely flimsy base. Both sides are well funded and politically active. Since the moral code gives rise to a lot of public policy and law, we're going to keep having this unresolvable argument.
Actually, I take the same position on ads that you do: I flashblock annoying ones but static ads do not bother me, because I know they're how the site pays for itself. (I do have Firefox set to play animated GIFs only once, because they're just as distracting.)
This is a classic tactic, called "attaching a rider". It's also the legal equivalent of asking, "have you stopped beating your wife?"
John Kerry's famous "I voted for it before I voted against it" referred to something like this. What he meant was, "I voted for the weapons acquisition bill, but when it brought up again with a whole bunch of stupid riders attached to it I voted against it." Either way, it meant that his enemies could hit him for voting for it, or for voting against it, or for being flip-floppy. How's that for win-win-win?
He sure didn't help by compounding the insult by injuring himself with a silly phrasing, but it's a sign that politicians have very little faith in their constituents by being unwilling to put out the longer and more complicated version. And, given how effectively Kerry's statement was used against him, their lack of faith seems to be entirely justified.
Personally, I favor a parliamentary procedure called "splitting the motion", where a member can move to consider part of a bill separately from the rest. That way when a bill like this comes up a member can say, "I think we should consider the 'jail you for flaming' part of the budget bill separately from the actual frickin' budget," and let that part stand on its own if the motion passes.
But it would be impossible to convince Congress to change its rules to allow that, because the all-or-nothing nature of a bill is what lets people say, "I'll vote for your self-serving amendment if you'll vote for mine." All of those deals would fall apart of those two Congressmen couldn't force the rest of Congress to go along with them once they got a sufficiently large coalition to pass the amendment.
So basically, get used to it. Not a bill goes by without scores of these riders. Sometimes they're useful, like when John McCain threatened to attach a "no torture" rider to every bill until it passed. It's just the way Congress works, and enjoy your tour of the sausage factory.
Floppy drive voice synth
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
On my old Osborne 1 I had a dual floppy drive setup (and no hard disk.) The speaker wasn't capable of much more than a high-pitched beep that sears my soul to this day. The floppy drives were noisy buggers, especially when the disk arm moved, which you could control pretty directly by bypassing the BDOS and going to the BIOS. (Memory protection? What's that?)
The speed wasn't anywhere near high enough for music, but somebody had written a freeware program that could use them to create a kind of gravelly (and frankly unintelligible) voice synthesizer.
The choice of language is irrelevant to how good a programmer you are, but a lot of employers aren't going to understand how fundamentally similar the languages are, and hire whoever knows the language they need for their project.
If you're at DeVry you're planning to get a job, not an advanced degree. So my advice would be Java, based on my extremely limited survey of the jobs market. Then go home and buy a book on C#, spend a few weeks with it, and put both languages on your resume.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be awesome, but the biggest problem is that they lack advertising. That is, "24" sold brilliantly on DVD, but only after a season of what you could think of as hour-long infomercials for it.
A season of Firefly would cost over $20 million to put together. To make that up would take a hell of a lot of marketing, which is even MORE money.
Now, for Firefly that marketing is already done. But if that show hadn't been on TV, and if it didn't have the already-well-known Joss Whedon behind it, nobody's going to gamble tens of millions of dollars on it.
But I'd love to see somebody try it for smaller, cheaper shows. Something without special effects could perhaps produce a half-season (13 episodes) for under $1 million. That might conceivably attract investors.
iPods and used CDs are different, so I think the original title is correct.
Not even the RIAA would dispute that you own the physical CD medium, and that it's your right to sell it. If you've made a backup copy first, then you're a bad boy and they'll sue you.
But it's harder to prove ownership of the music/video on the iPod. If you downloaded it from iTunes, you can't get it back off the iPod, so that's all legal. (More or less. I don't know what would happen if you opened an "iPod service station" downloading playlists to other people's iPods, but it sounds like a very inconvenient thing.)
In this article they're specifically citing cases of ripped music and downloaded video on the iPod, and that's almost certainly a violation of fair use. They're trying to get around it with the wink-wink "we're assuming you already own this music", but I doubt courts will let that excuse fly.
In the limit the cases do have a lot of similarities. You could, in theory, just pass that CD around, re-selling each CD at the same price after you've ripped it. But it's less convenient; you'd have to move around hundreds of CDs and the overhead costs become huge. Buy an iPod with many songs, and you can do a whole lot of copyright infringement all at once.
That's true. However, the article doesn't say whether the disc was DRMed or not. If it was, it is in fact a crime, one for which I'd love to see them prosecuted, just on ironic grounds.
But my guess is that the disc wasn't DRMed. I believe that by default, most burning software doesn't apply CSS. (I'm not an expert, but I think you have to pay Macrovision whenever you burn a CSSed disc.)
If I like it, I'll mail the artist(s) a check for what I think I owe them.
Really?
I'm curious. Does the memo line say, "For stuff I downloaded illegally?"
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that most if not all jurisdictions have laws preventing people from giving money to law enforcement officials.
I'd love to see law enforcement at all levels be more appropriately focused. It's all a question of resources: more officers/agents spent catching dipsticks like in this article is fewer agents catching terrorists, copyright infringers, and Martin Luther King Jr. But if private investment made the job more lucrative, maybe there would be more people willing to do it.
There are ethical issues associated with tipping law enforcement officials. Police, etc. are supposed to be unbiased, responding equally no matter who has been harmed. When rich people or corporations start paying for better service, genuine gratitude becomes bribery rather quickly.
You can offer them some coffee and cherry pie, but that's about it.
Since everybody else is saying "no", I'll say "yes". I think that Americans feel a lot safer.
At least, they feel a lot safer than they did on September 12, 2001. Americans were pretty spastic then, and that's why PATRIOT Act I was passed pretty quietly. They were scared. I was scared. It was pretty frickin' scary.
Today, they feel a lot safer. The follow-up attack that everybody expected never materialized. They're not glued to CNN. They're not kissing their wives perhaps a final good-bye on the way out the door going to work. (I did.) They've gotten more or less back to normal. They're still kinda scared, but since I grew up with Mutually Assured Destruction breathing down my neck, me and a lot of other Americans are kind of used to low-grade, continual fear.
That's the Devil's Advocate answer. Now, do they feel safe for the right reasons? Maybe; maybe not. Why haven't there been any more attacks? Because we invaded Afghanistan and knocked out the Taliban? Because of the invasive techniques the FBI and NSA are using? Because of ordinary law enforcement? Because one big attack was all Osama had in him? I don't know.
And, as another poster pointed out, none of that has anything to do with porn. Neither me nor any of my friends is afraid of porn, so I don't have a read on that. Do "ordinary Americans" feel that their kids are being protected from porn? Probably not, but not for Bush's lack of trying; the laws he's tried to pass have all been struck down.
Would they feel safer if they had been passed? I doubt it. This is a stupid law they're trying to justify, and they're going about it in an offensive way. I appreciate Google saying "no", and I hope the courts back them up.
Strictly speaking they haven't been proven wrong. Their concern was that it might have blown up on launch, scattering and possibly aerosolizing radioactive material. Rockets blow up all too often; just because this one didn't doesn't mean that they were completely wrong about the possible consequences if it did.
As far as I can tell they ARE wrong. The RTGs are designed to withstand the destruction of the launch vehicle without dispersing the radioactive material. But I haven't seen the tests that prove that, and unless you're on the team, neither have you. It's not supposed to fail, but then, neither was the rocket itself, and we know that rockets do sometimes fail.
So they will keep protesting until a rocket carrying an RTG does explode. And if the radioactive material is pulverized and enters the atmosphere, you'd better have one hell of an apology ready yourself.
Google and BellSouth need each other. Without BellSouth, fewer customers come to Google's site, so Google displays fewer ads, and gets less revenue. There are plenty of alternatives to Google. By comparison, there are fewer alternatives to BellSouth's service, and it's a major pain for a customer to switch ISPs just for access to Google. So BellSouth figured it had the power.
Google figures BellSouth is bluffing, and I'm with them on this.
This sort of dickering goes on all the time among the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 providers. Some carry each other's traffic on a peering agreement; others must pay. It's a major negotiation as to which is which. The bigger players peer with each other; the smaller players have to pay the bigger players.
At the the bottom level you pay (usually) a flat fee to access an ISP, who pays a higher tier, and so on. That happens on both sides, the web site provider side and the user side. You pay the next level up to deal with those agreements for you.
BellSouth must have decided that Google was big enough to count as a tier, and a tier below them at that.
BellSouth wants to open a huge can of worms, because the sheer number of potential ISP/backbone carrier/major web site agreements possible would be truly astonishingly large. The whole point of the Internet is that it's very level.
It's much better for BellSouth to take its licking, but you can see where they thought they could score some money.
When this deal first came out, local affiliates were all kinds of nervous. They expected that people would switch from commercial-ridden TV to legal downloads, losing ad revenue. The network wins because it gets paid, but the local affiliates lose because nobody's watching their ads.
So a rise in TV viewership came as a surprise to them. And since their logic seemed sound, it seemed so to me, too.
Not that I was crying for them. I'd much rather see local affiliates go away and have the bandwidth replaced by something more useful.
Moreover, I'm not certain that the trend will continue. I wonder if people are being driven to watch it on TV because of the very poor quality of the downloads; it's enough to get addicted to the series but also annoying to watch. So if/when Apple raises the resolution, will the viewers leave TV again? Or is there more to it?
Interesting. It doesn't say that experiments say otherwise; it just says that the experiments haven't been done.
So you have to make kind of a logical jump from there to saying that whoever is saying it doesn't have any proof, either. Which is almost certainly true, though it's a bit of a jump; conceivably it could be some sort of unpublished report. But as far as I know it's not based on anecdotal evidence, either; I've never heard of any small animals being bitten.
Presumably nobody's done the study because they have no reason to believe that it is true. If somebody observed a daddy longlegs biting something larger than it and killing it, there would be reason to do the research. But if it killed a mouse, it would almost certainly cause at least some reaction in humans.
That strikes me as an interesting glimpse into the difference between science and urban legend. The spiders could actually be poisonous, but from a scientific standpoint it wouldn't make the urban legend true regardless. That's because the legend appears to be based on no data, and without data it's not science even if it turns out to be factual.
Huh.
Wow. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and I didn't know that. For some reason I don't have the builtin Quick Searches ("dict foo" takes me to the same as a google "I'm feeling lucky" on "dict foo", which isn't a particularly useful thing.) It may be that I deleted the folder as too much clutter!
Thanks for pointing that out. I can easily recreate the ones I need and I've already added a few nonstandard ones.
Huh. I get the Washington Post when I try that.
It would be nice to have something like that. I often google for "wikipedia foo" or "wiki foo" in the search bar.
I am glad that there are organizations protecting consumers' rights. They form a critical balance to self-interested business who are only looking out for themselves, with considerable legal and political clout.
But pronouncements like this bore me silly. You've got companies shouting "We must protect our property!" and consumers screaming "We must protect our rights!" and so the final result is an unprincipled compromise between the two by lawmakers desperate only to stop the clamor in both ears simultaneously.
I'd be much more interested in an article which talked about principled compromises. There are all sorts of technological and legal solutions to ensure BOTH the consumers' rights to use purchased content in a variety of ways, AND the producer's rights to sell their property to all the consumers who wish to buy it at a rate the market will bear without having the simplest part of the creative process, duplicating the final result, pre-empted.
Apple, for example, has a system which allows considerable, but not complete, flexibility in the way you use the music you buy. Rather than just having the NCC declare "We want more!" I'd prefer to hear them propose a better solution, one which helps protect the producer's rights as well as their own. Until then I'm going to keep tuning out their arguments.
Actually, I was just having a bit of fun. The Italian root word with the English suffix struck me as funny; I'd only ever heard "capiche" used in the present interrogative to make it understood that the preceding sentence was not so much a statement of fact as a threat.
I think we in the natural sciences have capished this quite a while ago.
But in their favor, their grasp of Italian is rather better.
Well, you can have kiloseconds, if you want, which is on the same order of magnitude as an hour (well, a bit over a quarter of an hour).
As you note, we use metric fractions of a second (mill, nano, femto, etc) all the time. Why megaseconds (about 11.6 days) and gigaseconds (31.7 years never caught on), I can't say. Maybe it's because we're all so familiar with hours, minutes, and days, and unlike other metric/English conversions the conversion factors are at least integers, and well known integers at that (e.g. 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour, etc.)
I'll admit I find the European speed limits in "km/hr" somewhat disconcerting, since the latter is such a non-metric unit. Hey, let's all try to convince the EU to standardize on km/kilosec, aka meter/second.
Google units conversion, BTW, does know about megaseconds and gigaseconds.
Yes, they've got a bit more detail on it. That's pretty much how science works, with people adding bits of detail over time.
This is press-release science, where a minor achievement (though I'm sure it's not minor to the grad students who spent thousands of hours poring over high-speed footage and writing analysis software) gets turned into a big deal. In this case it got tacked onto the Intelligent Design brouhaha, which bumps it up a level on the hype meter.
Which is funny, because the "bees flying" thing isn't one of the classic darts that ID advocates throw at evolution, like the clotting cascade, the flagellum, or the eye. That's a more general "scientists aren't as smart as they think they are" myth, which persists even though it was debunked decades ago.
So it's nice to have a recent article to point to when I hear the myth again. Not this article, which is over-hyped, but I'd like to have a cite of the original journal article I could show people to say, "Yes, scientists DO know how bees fly, please go away."
You've had plenty of thoughtful replies (and some total dipsticks), but I'd like to add mine anyway.
As many have said, science and God do not have to be mutually exclusive, but people on each side are defending certain things that ARE mutually exclusive. Scientists object to the teaching of intelligent design because it's poor science. They cannot accept the teaching of it as science because it contradicts the basis on which science works. (Teaching it as a public policy or moral matter is different, but there are practical if not epistemological concerns about the fact that this could easily be construed by students and even teachers as a scientific endorsement of the ID theory.)
Some religious people object to the teaching of evolution because it contradicts fundamentally held beliefs, not just physical ones (like the idea that man is a separate creation from apes) but moral ones (that if the Bible is not literally true on the subject of creation, then its moral authority on all bases are questioned). The compromise you've reached (along with many others) is unacceptable to them.
On that point they are mutually exclusive. There are those whose moral codes are built on what they consider the strongest rock, the Bible, but which I consider to be an extremely flimsy base. Both sides are well funded and politically active. Since the moral code gives rise to a lot of public policy and law, we're going to keep having this unresolvable argument.
Actually, I take the same position on ads that you do: I flashblock annoying ones but static ads do not bother me, because I know they're how the site pays for itself. (I do have Firefox set to play animated GIFs only once, because they're just as distracting.)
This is a classic tactic, called "attaching a rider". It's also the legal equivalent of asking, "have you stopped beating your wife?"
John Kerry's famous "I voted for it before I voted against it" referred to something like this. What he meant was, "I voted for the weapons acquisition bill, but when it brought up again with a whole bunch of stupid riders attached to it I voted against it." Either way, it meant that his enemies could hit him for voting for it, or for voting against it, or for being flip-floppy. How's that for win-win-win?
He sure didn't help by compounding the insult by injuring himself with a silly phrasing, but it's a sign that politicians have very little faith in their constituents by being unwilling to put out the longer and more complicated version. And, given how effectively Kerry's statement was used against him, their lack of faith seems to be entirely justified.
Personally, I favor a parliamentary procedure called "splitting the motion", where a member can move to consider part of a bill separately from the rest. That way when a bill like this comes up a member can say, "I think we should consider the 'jail you for flaming' part of the budget bill separately from the actual frickin' budget," and let that part stand on its own if the motion passes.
But it would be impossible to convince Congress to change its rules to allow that, because the all-or-nothing nature of a bill is what lets people say, "I'll vote for your self-serving amendment if you'll vote for mine." All of those deals would fall apart of those two Congressmen couldn't force the rest of Congress to go along with them once they got a sufficiently large coalition to pass the amendment.
So basically, get used to it. Not a bill goes by without scores of these riders. Sometimes they're useful, like when John McCain threatened to attach a "no torture" rider to every bill until it passed. It's just the way Congress works, and enjoy your tour of the sausage factory.
On my old Osborne 1 I had a dual floppy drive setup (and no hard disk.) The speaker wasn't capable of much more than a high-pitched beep that sears my soul to this day. The floppy drives were noisy buggers, especially when the disk arm moved, which you could control pretty directly by bypassing the BDOS and going to the BIOS. (Memory protection? What's that?)
The speed wasn't anywhere near high enough for music, but somebody had written a freeware program that could use them to create a kind of gravelly (and frankly unintelligible) voice synthesizer.
Thanks for the interesting, sensible post. I'm out of mod points, but thanks.
When I tell the ladies about my fat pipe, they want to come over to my place and stay up all night long.
Downloading movies.
The choice of language is irrelevant to how good a programmer you are, but a lot of employers aren't going to understand how fundamentally similar the languages are, and hire whoever knows the language they need for their project.
If you're at DeVry you're planning to get a job, not an advanced degree. So my advice would be Java, based on my extremely limited survey of the jobs market. Then go home and buy a book on C#, spend a few weeks with it, and put both languages on your resume.