Also, Gladstone Publishing still has back-stock remaining of its cardboard-bound reprints in album format. They are more expensive but many are all-Barks. Really, this material is not difficult to find in the U.S. if you've ever tried to look. Ask at your local comic book store.
Second, Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does not have a significant presence in the embedded device market.
Perhaps not, but if the hardware vendors start cranking out netbooks based on ARM chips, it would be nice if Debian (or its downstream distros, such as Ubuntu) would function well on that platform -- especially considering that Windows (other than Windows CE) currently doesn't. I don't know whether Drepper objects to patches that cater to embedded-as-in-ARM or just embedded-as-in-ROM, but either way it seems pretty shortsighted to claim that the standard C library doesn't need to support code intended for this-or-that target.
Sorry, bud, but you're wrong. There was a CP/M version of Turbo Pascal. 1MHz sounds slow, but the first Kaypro ran at 2.5MHz. The Timex Sinclair had a 1MHz Z-80, but anyone who was trying to program in Pascal on that thing would have been some kind of lunatic.
Oh and $array[] = $value;
Coding, you should learn it.
Or maybe the PHP designers should, cuz I know quite a few programming languages and that syntax does not look like "append a value to an array" to me. It looks more like some kind of borked pointer assignment, or a way or re-initializing an array to contain a single value.
I doubt the retailers cared. Consider these scenarios:
- Mom needs to go shopping, but she also needs to watch the kids. That means she has to drag the kids to the supermarket, but the kids always make a big fuss. Aha, but wait! The supermarket has a rack of comic books. Plop the kids in front of the comics, et voila! They sit there quietly for the next hour. Net effect: Mom goes shopping, and she takes her time about it.
- Kids get off school, but mom doesn't get home from work for another hour or two. So the kids head down to the 7-Eleven near their school, where they have a rack of comic books and a videogame machine. Kids sit there reading the comics without paying for them. Net effect: Kids spend all their leftover lunch money on candy and Slurpees, which are higher margin items than comics anyway.
I'm sure it was the magazine distributors who got tired of carrying comics. For the retailer, who didn't pay for anything he didn't sell, it was out of sight, out of mind. But imagine having to deal with distributing 50 different titles per month, each of which brought in a couple cents' profit per copy sold and didn't sell one-fiftieth as well as People magazine.
1. The prices went up. 2. The old distribution system collapsed.
In the old days, comics were cheap. They were printed poorly on cheap newsprint and they cost less than a dollar. (When I started reading comics, a new issue cost a quarter.) Unfortunately, there were a number of paper shortages in the 1980s and 90s that sent the price of the type of pulp newsprint that comics were printed on up through the roof. Simply put, with the price of paper going up and the improvements in printing technology over the years, eventually you could print high-quality comics on good white paper for about the same price as you could print them on newsprint -- which is to say, about ten times more than they cost in the late 70s.
Meanwhile, as the prices went up, the audience for comics was steadily shrinking. Movies, TV, and videogames were all competing with comics for kids' attention. Even though the quality of the printing was getting better, comics sales just couldn't match the highs of the late 60s and 70s. And this was a problem, because magazine publishing can be a fairly risky business, and that was how comics were being distributed at the time -- like magazines.
Magazines, typically, are considered "returnable." A retailer orders a magazine, tells the publisher how many copies he thinks he might sell, and the publisher sends that many copies. But if the copies don't sell, the retailer is allowed to send the unsold copies back to the publisher. But because the cost of shipping back whole copies effectively means the retailer is paying for unsold goods, however, they compromise. Instead of sending back whole magazines, the retailer can tear the covers off the magazines and just send the covers back. The inside pages are supposed to be destroyed.
That was how comics worked when you bought them in the supermarket or a 7-11. Any unsold copies had the covers ripped off and the insides pulped. But because the cover price of a comic book was less than a dollar anyway, any comics that were returned really hit the publisher hard. Publishers needed to be sure they'd sell a certain number of copies to break even, and for a lot of titles, those numbers just weren't there anymore.
The 1980s, however, saw the rise of comics fandom. College students and folks in their 30s were reading comics, which led to two new phenomena. One, comic book conventions appeared in virtually every major city. And two, the first comic book stores appeared.
Initially, the main purpose of comic book stores was to buy nice, pristine copies of new issues that hadn't been pawed by kids on the spinning racks, and also to buy back issues. But the comics publishers saw a new opportunity in comic book stores. They realized that they could print up their comics on good quality paper, at a slightly higher price than was customary in the 7-11s, and sell them directly to the comic book stores for sale to the fan audience. More importantly, the comics they distributed to comic book stores would be non-returnable. In other words, a comic book ordered by a comic book store was a hard sale, where a comic book ordered for sale on a magazine rack was essentially being sold on consignment.
Sales continued to dwindle, and eventually the magazine distributors who used to carry comic books didn't see any profit in it anymore. The magazine-rack comics market effectively disappeared. In its place were a number of distributors that handled nothing but comics and related memorabilia, and they sold exclusively to comic book stores and other retailers who were willing to handle their merchandise on non-returnable terms.
That's the situation that you're left with today. So if you're surprised that Borders seems to be the only place that still racks comics, don't be -- Borders is probably one of the only chains big enough to be able to cut a deal that makes it feasible for it to deal in non-returnable magazines (which is, in essence, what comics are).
The moral of the story is: If you want comics, go to a comic book store.
Unlike the submitter, I've heard of at least half of the authors on the list: Jaime Hernandez, Rick Geary, Matt Groening, Alison Bechdel, Mark Kupperberg, Derf, Jason Lutes, Paul Pope, Kaz, Seth, Chris Ware... anyone who has followed "indie" comics for any length of time will find these names all too familiar.
It makes me wonder: Are these really the "best" that American comics has to offer? The submitter hits on the fact that the bulk of the comics that reach U.S. readers are superhero stories from two or three big publishers. The list of authors represented in this book reads like a roster of the exceptions to the rule -- the people who have made names for themselves by getting their offbeat comics published, usually by one or two or three of the better-funded "indie" publishers (Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Last Gasp). What about the comics that simply aren't reaching an audience because they weren't created by a known "name"? Was any attempt made to hunt them down and represent them in this book? Or is this just the same old club, getting together and congratulating themselves yet again?
I've heard comics artists lament that every time someone writes an article in the newspaper about the "new comics," they choose a headline that's some variation on, "ZAP! POW! ZING! Comics aren't for kids anymore!" But when every single anthology of "outstanding new comics" contains work by the same two dozen people, aren't the artists in effect doing the same thing to themselves?
...and it had customers. Even if SCO's products and services were worthless, its customer base alone would still have been valuable enough for some other Unix vendor (say, HP) to buy it out.
I wasn't aware that Janet Napolitano was an Arizonan. Knowing that, I think they couldn't have picked a worse person for the job. Arizona is, in my opinion, probably the most xenophobic and racist state in the nation now. This is a state that doesn't celebrate Martin Luther King Day, fer chrissakes. If you ask a resident, their stated objection will be that it's a slippery slope -- first we'll have a holiday for Martin Luther King, and next we'll be having one for Cesar Chavez. I've heard this exact argument more than once from people who don't know each other. Never mind that the population of Arizona is already 30 percent hispanic; God forbid we should honor an American of Mexican descent with a holiday. Never mind that Cesar Chavez was dedicated to the rights of workers; God forbid we should choose to give workers a day off in his honor.
My mother retired to Arizona with her husband some years ago. She now regularly forwards joke emails from her friends about the Mexicans and the damn immigrants. This surprises me... because just like me, my mother is a first-generation immigrant. Why the jokes about Green Cards? We used to have Green Cards. Why the jokes about stealing our jobs? We both came here and got jobs, too. And besides, my mom hasn't worked in years. She collects Social Security now. Imagine that, an immigrant on Social Security. But I guess once you move to a racist, xenophobic place, it's hard to keep those ideas from sinking in.
Sorry, any Arizonans out there -- but Arizona and the attitudes that fester there are simply sickening. It's no surprise to me that Janet Napolitano doesn't get it.
1. Tax revenues correlate with economic growth, not tax rates. This is reality despite your desire to believe in it or not.
2. Lower tax rates spur economic growth. This is reality despite your desire to believe in it or not.
So the situation we've got now, pre-increase, is one of economic growth? And the companies that haven't been paying their taxes have been giving back to America with all the growing they've been doing? Something tells me you need to let your newsletter subscriptions lapse and start looking around you.
I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others.
That sounds more like legitimately expanding the market. Diluting the market is where you pump out a whole bunch of "bibles" and books on the same subject, all of them getting the concepts out to people in pretty much the same way.
As others have pointed out, the H and N designations refer to the specific variants of two specific proteins that are exposed on the virus's surface.
Actually, it was I who pointed that out.
The strain of virus in the news these days does not contain the gene believed to have made the 1918 so deadly.
I hadn't read that scientists knew which gene(s) were responsible. As far my understanding, any knowledge we have about that strain is very limited, since virtually all known patients are dead. It is true, however, that the 1918 strain was also a variant of H1N1.
They figure everyone will go buy a splitter at Radio Shack and get cable so they charge. I used to install HSD service for a cable co in the Bay Area. Maybe this has changed but that was the deal back then. We had to remove all filters or no HSD.
In fact, when I hinted to my installer that I was aware of this, he went out to his truck and got a splitter for me: "Enjoy your cable." I am in the Bay Area.
Even if your theory about the origin of this form of the virus is correct, you cannot get the flu from eating pork. These bans are simply sowing more ignorance.
The H1N1 strain of type A influenza is the strain associated with the global influenza pandemic of 1918. In that year, not 190,000 but tens of millions of people died.
Normally, the people who die from influenza are the very young or the very old. The shocking characteristic of the 1918 variety was that a great many of the people who succumbed to the disease were young and fit. They went from being healthy and happy to being dead in an alarmingly short period. Immunology had not advanced far enough at that time to for doctors to understand why this was happening, but today it is believed to have been the result of a phenomenon known as cytokine storm, which is a severe autoimmune reaction. In other words, the patients died because they were so fit and had healthy -- their immune systems, reacting to the sudden threat, went nuts and attacked their own bodies.
Modern medicine could reduce the body count of such a flu dramatically, but if such a strain appeared again it would still be catastrophic. Treating viruses is still very difficult. There is still no cure for the common cold -- and, under normal circumstances, most people who get the flu just sit it out. Providing medicine for every patient in a true pandemic would be very costly and it's likely that there simply wouldn't be enough for everybody. It is also difficult to treat an autoimmune reaction in a patient that is already known to be suffering from a serious infection -- suppress the immune system and the virus wins. So don't assume that it would be easy to keep a new pandemic under control just because it's almost a century later.
So the reason for all the hubbub is clear. Scientists want to be the Paul Reveres of a future pandemic: The British are coming, they're not already here. So to arms now -- not when they're in our homes. Governments can be very slow-moving when confronted with unforeseen things and they often need this kind of uproar from the medical community before prevention protocols can kick in.
Current reports indicate that this strain of H1N1 influenza contains genetic material from swine, avian, and human forms of the disease. That's probably why it can spread easily from humans to pigs; normally, a virus does not cross species unless there is frequent or prolonged close contact between the two, because making the leap depends on genetic mutation. In this case, the virus is already adapted to both hosts.
To further clarify, the name "H1N1" refers only to a particular configuration of two proteins on the surface of the virus (H is hemagglutinin and N is neuraminidase). The configuration of these proteins determines how the immune system will react to a given strain of influenza (i.e. which antibodies will be able to recognize and attack it), which is the most useful information to have when it comes to treating the disease, but there are other factors that determine a given strain's properties.
So the news here is not that H1N1 flu can jump from humans to pigs -- it can't, not necessarily -- the news is that this variety appears to be able to. And it's not that we didn't know this could be possible -- we've seen this kind of thing countless times, and in fact it's believed that all forms of influenza ultimately come from birds -- it's just that calling it "H1N1 flu" doesn't give us enough information to make those kinds of predictions about its virulence.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Gladstone Publishing still has back-stock remaining of its cardboard-bound reprints in album format. They are more expensive but many are all-Barks. Really, this material is not difficult to find in the U.S. if you've ever tried to look. Ask at your local comic book store.
What about the reprints from Gemstone Publishing? Are they not affordable enough for you?
Second, Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does not have a significant presence in the embedded device market.
Perhaps not, but if the hardware vendors start cranking out netbooks based on ARM chips, it would be nice if Debian (or its downstream distros, such as Ubuntu) would function well on that platform -- especially considering that Windows (other than Windows CE) currently doesn't. I don't know whether Drepper objects to patches that cater to embedded-as-in-ARM or just embedded-as-in-ROM, but either way it seems pretty shortsighted to claim that the standard C library doesn't need to support code intended for this-or-that target.
Sorry, bud, but you're wrong. There was a CP/M version of Turbo Pascal. 1MHz sounds slow, but the first Kaypro ran at 2.5MHz. The Timex Sinclair had a 1MHz Z-80, but anyone who was trying to program in Pascal on that thing would have been some kind of lunatic.
I remember, back in the day, when all malware was written in borland C/C++.
Bah! I wrote Leprosy and Leprosy-B using Turbo C and Turbo Assembler. Now get off my lawn!
All languages have their warts, but the total lack of design decisions in this one is just staggering.
Oh and $array[] = $value;
Coding, you should learn it.
Or maybe the PHP designers should, cuz I know quite a few programming languages and that syntax does not look like "append a value to an array" to me. It looks more like some kind of borked pointer assignment, or a way or re-initializing an array to contain a single value.
I doubt the retailers cared. Consider these scenarios:
- Mom needs to go shopping, but she also needs to watch the kids. That means she has to drag the kids to the supermarket, but the kids always make a big fuss. Aha, but wait! The supermarket has a rack of comic books. Plop the kids in front of the comics, et voila! They sit there quietly for the next hour. Net effect: Mom goes shopping, and she takes her time about it.
- Kids get off school, but mom doesn't get home from work for another hour or two. So the kids head down to the 7-Eleven near their school, where they have a rack of comic books and a videogame machine. Kids sit there reading the comics without paying for them. Net effect: Kids spend all their leftover lunch money on candy and Slurpees, which are higher margin items than comics anyway.
I'm sure it was the magazine distributors who got tired of carrying comics. For the retailer, who didn't pay for anything he didn't sell, it was out of sight, out of mind. But imagine having to deal with distributing 50 different titles per month, each of which brought in a couple cents' profit per copy sold and didn't sell one-fiftieth as well as People magazine.
Two things happened:
1. The prices went up.
2. The old distribution system collapsed.
In the old days, comics were cheap. They were printed poorly on cheap newsprint and they cost less than a dollar. (When I started reading comics, a new issue cost a quarter.) Unfortunately, there were a number of paper shortages in the 1980s and 90s that sent the price of the type of pulp newsprint that comics were printed on up through the roof. Simply put, with the price of paper going up and the improvements in printing technology over the years, eventually you could print high-quality comics on good white paper for about the same price as you could print them on newsprint -- which is to say, about ten times more than they cost in the late 70s.
Meanwhile, as the prices went up, the audience for comics was steadily shrinking. Movies, TV, and videogames were all competing with comics for kids' attention. Even though the quality of the printing was getting better, comics sales just couldn't match the highs of the late 60s and 70s. And this was a problem, because magazine publishing can be a fairly risky business, and that was how comics were being distributed at the time -- like magazines.
Magazines, typically, are considered "returnable." A retailer orders a magazine, tells the publisher how many copies he thinks he might sell, and the publisher sends that many copies. But if the copies don't sell, the retailer is allowed to send the unsold copies back to the publisher. But because the cost of shipping back whole copies effectively means the retailer is paying for unsold goods, however, they compromise. Instead of sending back whole magazines, the retailer can tear the covers off the magazines and just send the covers back. The inside pages are supposed to be destroyed.
That was how comics worked when you bought them in the supermarket or a 7-11. Any unsold copies had the covers ripped off and the insides pulped. But because the cover price of a comic book was less than a dollar anyway, any comics that were returned really hit the publisher hard. Publishers needed to be sure they'd sell a certain number of copies to break even, and for a lot of titles, those numbers just weren't there anymore.
The 1980s, however, saw the rise of comics fandom. College students and folks in their 30s were reading comics, which led to two new phenomena. One, comic book conventions appeared in virtually every major city. And two, the first comic book stores appeared.
Initially, the main purpose of comic book stores was to buy nice, pristine copies of new issues that hadn't been pawed by kids on the spinning racks, and also to buy back issues. But the comics publishers saw a new opportunity in comic book stores. They realized that they could print up their comics on good quality paper, at a slightly higher price than was customary in the 7-11s, and sell them directly to the comic book stores for sale to the fan audience. More importantly, the comics they distributed to comic book stores would be non-returnable. In other words, a comic book ordered by a comic book store was a hard sale, where a comic book ordered for sale on a magazine rack was essentially being sold on consignment.
Sales continued to dwindle, and eventually the magazine distributors who used to carry comic books didn't see any profit in it anymore. The magazine-rack comics market effectively disappeared. In its place were a number of distributors that handled nothing but comics and related memorabilia, and they sold exclusively to comic book stores and other retailers who were willing to handle their merchandise on non-returnable terms.
That's the situation that you're left with today. So if you're surprised that Borders seems to be the only place that still racks comics, don't be -- Borders is probably one of the only chains big enough to be able to cut a deal that makes it feasible for it to deal in non-returnable magazines (which is, in essence, what comics are).
The moral of the story is: If you want comics, go to a comic book store.
Unlike the submitter, I've heard of at least half of the authors on the list: Jaime Hernandez, Rick Geary, Matt Groening, Alison Bechdel, Mark Kupperberg, Derf, Jason Lutes, Paul Pope, Kaz, Seth, Chris Ware ... anyone who has followed "indie" comics for any length of time will find these names all too familiar.
It makes me wonder: Are these really the "best" that American comics has to offer? The submitter hits on the fact that the bulk of the comics that reach U.S. readers are superhero stories from two or three big publishers. The list of authors represented in this book reads like a roster of the exceptions to the rule -- the people who have made names for themselves by getting their offbeat comics published, usually by one or two or three of the better-funded "indie" publishers (Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Last Gasp). What about the comics that simply aren't reaching an audience because they weren't created by a known "name"? Was any attempt made to hunt them down and represent them in this book? Or is this just the same old club, getting together and congratulating themselves yet again?
I've heard comics artists lament that every time someone writes an article in the newspaper about the "new comics," they choose a headline that's some variation on, "ZAP! POW! ZING! Comics aren't for kids anymore!" But when every single anthology of "outstanding new comics" contains work by the same two dozen people, aren't the artists in effect doing the same thing to themselves?
...and it had customers. Even if SCO's products and services were worthless, its customer base alone would still have been valuable enough for some other Unix vendor (say, HP) to buy it out.
I wasn't aware that Janet Napolitano was an Arizonan. Knowing that, I think they couldn't have picked a worse person for the job. Arizona is, in my opinion, probably the most xenophobic and racist state in the nation now. This is a state that doesn't celebrate Martin Luther King Day, fer chrissakes. If you ask a resident, their stated objection will be that it's a slippery slope -- first we'll have a holiday for Martin Luther King, and next we'll be having one for Cesar Chavez. I've heard this exact argument more than once from people who don't know each other. Never mind that the population of Arizona is already 30 percent hispanic ; God forbid we should honor an American of Mexican descent with a holiday. Never mind that Cesar Chavez was dedicated to the rights of workers; God forbid we should choose to give workers a day off in his honor.
My mother retired to Arizona with her husband some years ago. She now regularly forwards joke emails from her friends about the Mexicans and the damn immigrants. This surprises me ... because just like me, my mother is a first-generation immigrant. Why the jokes about Green Cards? We used to have Green Cards. Why the jokes about stealing our jobs? We both came here and got jobs, too. And besides, my mom hasn't worked in years. She collects Social Security now. Imagine that, an immigrant on Social Security. But I guess once you move to a racist, xenophobic place, it's hard to keep those ideas from sinking in.
Sorry, any Arizonans out there -- but Arizona and the attitudes that fester there are simply sickening. It's no surprise to me that Janet Napolitano doesn't get it.
I'll assume you're right. That still doesn't count as "most," or even a fifth of them.
Ahhh, may the deity bless them, the chosen.
All but seven states have state income tax.
1. Tax revenues correlate with economic growth, not tax rates. This is reality despite your desire to believe in it or not. 2. Lower tax rates spur economic growth. This is reality despite your desire to believe in it or not.
So the situation we've got now, pre-increase, is one of economic growth? And the companies that haven't been paying their taxes have been giving back to America with all the growing they've been doing? Something tells me you need to let your newsletter subscriptions lapse and start looking around you.
By not pissing away money on other things.
That's right -- eternal war should be America's first priority! Show me a legitimate "other thing" and I'll show you a traitor to the homeland.
I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others.
That sounds more like legitimately expanding the market. Diluting the market is where you pump out a whole bunch of "bibles" and books on the same subject, all of them getting the concepts out to people in pretty much the same way.
As others have pointed out, the H and N designations refer to the specific variants of two specific proteins that are exposed on the virus's surface.
Actually, it was I who pointed that out.
The strain of virus in the news these days does not contain the gene believed to have made the 1918 so deadly.
I hadn't read that scientists knew which gene(s) were responsible. As far my understanding, any knowledge we have about that strain is very limited, since virtually all known patients are dead. It is true, however, that the 1918 strain was also a variant of H1N1.
They figure everyone will go buy a splitter at Radio Shack and get cable so they charge. I used to install HSD service for a cable co in the Bay Area. Maybe this has changed but that was the deal back then. We had to remove all filters or no HSD.
In fact, when I hinted to my installer that I was aware of this, he went out to his truck and got a splitter for me: "Enjoy your cable." I am in the Bay Area.
Even if your theory about the origin of this form of the virus is correct, you cannot get the flu from eating pork. These bans are simply sowing more ignorance.
The H1N1 strain of type A influenza is the strain associated with the global influenza pandemic of 1918. In that year, not 190,000 but tens of millions of people died.
Normally, the people who die from influenza are the very young or the very old. The shocking characteristic of the 1918 variety was that a great many of the people who succumbed to the disease were young and fit. They went from being healthy and happy to being dead in an alarmingly short period. Immunology had not advanced far enough at that time to for doctors to understand why this was happening, but today it is believed to have been the result of a phenomenon known as cytokine storm, which is a severe autoimmune reaction. In other words, the patients died because they were so fit and had healthy -- their immune systems, reacting to the sudden threat, went nuts and attacked their own bodies.
Modern medicine could reduce the body count of such a flu dramatically, but if such a strain appeared again it would still be catastrophic. Treating viruses is still very difficult. There is still no cure for the common cold -- and, under normal circumstances, most people who get the flu just sit it out. Providing medicine for every patient in a true pandemic would be very costly and it's likely that there simply wouldn't be enough for everybody. It is also difficult to treat an autoimmune reaction in a patient that is already known to be suffering from a serious infection -- suppress the immune system and the virus wins. So don't assume that it would be easy to keep a new pandemic under control just because it's almost a century later.
So the reason for all the hubbub is clear. Scientists want to be the Paul Reveres of a future pandemic: The British are coming, they're not already here. So to arms now -- not when they're in our homes. Governments can be very slow-moving when confronted with unforeseen things and they often need this kind of uproar from the medical community before prevention protocols can kick in.
Current reports indicate that this strain of H1N1 influenza contains genetic material from swine, avian, and human forms of the disease. That's probably why it can spread easily from humans to pigs; normally, a virus does not cross species unless there is frequent or prolonged close contact between the two, because making the leap depends on genetic mutation. In this case, the virus is already adapted to both hosts.
To further clarify, the name "H1N1" refers only to a particular configuration of two proteins on the surface of the virus (H is hemagglutinin and N is neuraminidase). The configuration of these proteins determines how the immune system will react to a given strain of influenza (i.e. which antibodies will be able to recognize and attack it), which is the most useful information to have when it comes to treating the disease, but there are other factors that determine a given strain's properties.
So the news here is not that H1N1 flu can jump from humans to pigs -- it can't, not necessarily -- the news is that this variety appears to be able to. And it's not that we didn't know this could be possible -- we've seen this kind of thing countless times, and in fact it's believed that all forms of influenza ultimately come from birds -- it's just that calling it "H1N1 flu" doesn't give us enough information to make those kinds of predictions about its virulence.
And in other news: A local twenty-something male has found that he's in perfect health and has no need for medical care. Story at 11.