I wouldn't have the balls to get into dealing. The risk to reward ratio just isn't there for pot and I don't believe in any of the harder stuff.
On the other hand, the risk seems pretty low. Most pot dealers don't stand on a streetcorner, and many don't even advertise. Business is all word of mouth, and most customers repeat once a month or more -- nice and predictable income. Maybe every once in a while a dealer will try to up-sell a customer some mushrooms, but that's about it. Overall, selling pot seems like a much less risky business proposition than opening a coffee shop.
TFA actually makes it pretty clear. The copyright on the earliest images of Popeye has expired. That means you are free to make derivative works of those images -- in other words, draw Popeye yourself -- and you won't have to pay royalties to the copyright owner of the original image (because there is none). However, from TFA:
The Popeye trademark, a separate entity to Segar's authorial copyright, is owned by King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation -- the US entertainment giant -- which is expected to protect its brand aggressively.
...and so on those grounds, you won't get away with it. The Popeye trademark is doubtless registered for everything from coffee cups to T-shirts to books and any other junk you can think of, so if you try to sell your perfectly-legal drawing of Popeye, you'll probably get sued into oblivion.
On the other hand, I'd be really interested to see if someone drew a comic strip featuring a character that looks exactly like Popeye, but whose name is Jeremy the Anthropology Professor. Jeremy is a highly intelligent tenured employee of a major Ivy League university. He is very even-tempered himself and decidedly anti-violence, and for that reason he is against the military (all four branches). He is gay and therefore has no interest in women, and furthermore he can't stand any form of vegetables. Would the author get away with it now?
Probably very true. Remember how much of the old Who episodes took place inside the TARDIS control center? A bunch of characters standing around a room with the walls painted white, pondering the "readings" from "the scanner." That stuff has been all but nixed in the new show. And where would the old show cut to after a nice, long scene inside the TARDIS? Probably to the bridge of a starship, where a man sitting in a chair would have an argument with a standing man about orders from "the Company." Or maybe to the drawing-room of an English mansion, where a sinister-looking man in period dress would have a conversation with another man, who would then leave via the door. Or maybe to a long shot of a quarry, where a man in a nylon jumpsuit holding some kind of gizmo would stagger for a while, before succumbing to an unseen foe. The new show is far, far less static than the original, in general -- and though it jarred me at first, in hindsight I have to say that's a very good thing.
In our own time, things are not so sensible (which I really don't understand since you're appealing to a predominately male geek audience, not the popular model type kids).
That may be true in the U.S., where it's airing on the Sci-Fi channel. In Britain, you're appealing to damn near everybody. The current Doctor Who series has some of the highest ratings of any drama on television, both in terms of sheer numbers and overall approval ratings. The age range of the audience is quite broad, and though it probably skews more toward males, women watch it also.
Really this choice has everything to do with Steven Moffatt, the new head writer of the show, and what he wants to do with the character. Russell T. Davies, the man responsible for launching the new Who, has said that he had absolutely nothing to do with the casting. Perhaps the larger story arcs Moffatt wants to tell call for a younger Doctor.
And furthermore, nobody I know in the database field will tell you that SQL Server is an inferior product. It's actually quite competitive with Oracle and DB2 and Microsoft is in a position to price aggressively.
Sure, you say, but when you buy SQL Server it ties you to Windows. Yeah -- but what if it was already decided that the database server was going to run Windows? If you're considering running Oracle on Windows, why wouldn't you consider SQL Server?
Netscape Navigator was supposedly $14.95, but IIRC the Beta's were free.
The way I remember it, Navigator cost some amount, but the license explicitly said you were allowed to try it out for free first, and furthermore that trial period could be of any length you wanted.
See, this is what I'm talking about. A bunch of the world's most respected geologists say "we see zero evidence that this is likely to happen in the next thousand years -- zero, zip none." And then you come along -- please cite your geological expertise -- and say, "Well that was four years ago. Let's see what they say now." Are you kidding? Wake me up when the USGS starts advising people to evacuate the Midwest, but until that happens, the chance of Yellowstone destroying the earth this year is exactly the same as it was five years ago.
Sorry this is off topic, but I've just been so frustrated with the new User page that I decided to whack out a Greasemonkey script that would fix it back to the old behavior. When you install this script, clicking your username in the upper lefthand corner should take you to the Comments tab (the way it used to), instead of the near-useless Firehose tab, thus saving you a click.
You can download the script here. Sorry, the script is pretty crude because I don't really know what I'm doing in Greasemonkey, but it's working for me right now. If it doesn't work for you, or you have other changes/comments, you can contact me via my site and let me know.
By the way, before you install random Greasemonkey scripts from random sites (like mine), you should probably click on the button to view the source first, to make sure it isn't doing anything nasty.
Ah! So are you saying that the MSRT runs the scan during the Windows Update process? Because my assumption was that the Update would just install the tool, but that it would run at some later, undetermined time. If it did run during the Update, then it probably happened while I was asleep.
Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption in the near future. In fact, the probability of any such event occurring at Yellowstone within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low.
...
Lava flows and small volcanic eruptions occur only rarely--none in the past 70,000 years. Massive caldera-forming eruptions, though the most potentially devastating of Yellowstone's hazards, are extremely rare--only three have occurred in the past several million years. U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah, and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future.
(emphasis mine)
As for that "several million years" figure for a devastating explosion of the kind TFA is describing, consider that the United States as a nation is still less than 250 years old. I'm not saying it can't happen, but the idea that "it hasn't happened in a long time so it must be ready to happen now" is just a popular Las Vegas delusion.
I thought he sounded familiar. As parent mentions, here's a link to the blog of Kevin Carmony, former President and CEO of Linspire, for similar-sounding story.
You might be surprised. The version of MSRT that comes from Windows Update runs in the background once a month and only alerts you when it notices a problem. I've never knowingly run it, but sure enough, if I check my Windows Update history I've installed the December edition.
On a side note, maybe this explains the persistent disk thrashing episodes I still get with Vista, maybe once a month or so...
Hmmm. Well, no offense to Mr. Pratchett -- he's written a lot of books and they've been very popular and I know a lot of people enjoy them, so I'm sure the honor is well deserved -- but I, for one, could never read more than one or two before moving on to something else. It seems to me there's a whole universe of letters out there waiting to be read, rather than just revisiting the same thing over and over again. But I guess it's no worse than TV.
Re:Never seen a knighthood I've been happier about
on
Terry Pratchett Knighted
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The man is one of the best authors ever to have graced the earth.
Ummmm... wow. I mean, I know his paperback genre fiction appeals to geeks and all -- I get a little tickle when I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, myself -- but seriously??
I call troll. IBM makes millions (billions?) selling Linux servers, just for starters.
IBM believes in a future monopoly and the money could bring.
IBM is a reseller of Red Hat and Novell, and if either company disappeared it would find another one and resell that. This, despite the fact that IBM owns AIX and z/OS.
The only things that IBM has made open source are complete crap, like SWT, Xerces, Axis and the likes.
Yeah, and nobody uses those?
Hell, Eclipse wasn't even half useful until years after it became open source.
Kinda like Linux. What's your point? Are you claiming IBM hasn't committed any resources to the Eclipse Project?
IBM has only open sourced things to kill competition, ever.
Oh yeah, because software development IDE vendors were sending IBM to the poorhouse before Eclipse. And open sourcing Cloudscape sure dropped the bottom out of the database market.
Fuck IBM and their hidden agendas. Fuck WebSphere, DB/2, ZSeries and all the rest of their crap.
WebSphere ships with the IBM HTTP Server, aka Apache. zSeries runs Linux. DB2 is no more open-source than Oracle or SQL Server -- for that I recommend PostgreSQL, which IBM supports through its investment in EnterpriseDB.
I can't really say anything bad about iSeries though, which bugs me, as it's really cool stuff.
It's just more efficient to see if everyone is available by throwing that request out there and seeing who takes it and who rejects it.
Not when everybody on the list has to accept the request before the meeting can take place.
You know what is efficient, though? Handling new business in regular weekly meetings, rather than scheduling endless new meetings to deal with trivial issues. In my experience, "meeting creep" is one of the worst productivity sinks in any workplace.
My workplace is a multibillion dollar company and they hate using MS products due to unnecessary fees
That doesn't mean your workplace hates Microsoft software. It just means your workplace hates paying for Microsoft software, which isn't the same thing.
Remember: Free "as in beer" is not really a leading reason why enterprises switch to Linux or other open source software. Most end up paying Red Hat, Novell, or some other company for support contracts.
I admit it. My old company migrated away from Lotus Notes and I rejoiced. But six months into using Outlook/Exchange, I surprised myself when I found that I missed it. True, Notes doesn't have the most modern UI in the world, but it's a solid piece of software.
If some groupware were to be introduced to people along with traditional email when they first learn an office package, you could actually have people creating calendar events and sharing them out the door, instead of constantly sending emails to eachother, ignoring the actual capabilities of the software suite they have.
To each his own. I always found it really rude that people would "share a calendar event" with me in Outlook, essentially scheduling me for meetings that I knew nothing about, sight unseen, based on nothing more than the fact that I hadn't filled in any other appointment on my computer calendar. It seems like the normal thing to do would be to shoot me a quick email and ask me if I was available, but the software encourages otherwise. They call it "groupware," but to me it just increases animosity within teams by eliminating the respect and natural give-and-take that comes with actual facetime.
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I mean for one thing, a lot of crime really doesn't pay well. Sometimes even less than a minimum wage job.
Steven D. Levitt addresses this in his book, Freakonomics. Chapter 3 is titled Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?
I wouldn't have the balls to get into dealing. The risk to reward ratio just isn't there for pot and I don't believe in any of the harder stuff.
On the other hand, the risk seems pretty low. Most pot dealers don't stand on a streetcorner, and many don't even advertise. Business is all word of mouth, and most customers repeat once a month or more -- nice and predictable income. Maybe every once in a while a dealer will try to up-sell a customer some mushrooms, but that's about it. Overall, selling pot seems like a much less risky business proposition than opening a coffee shop.
Actually, no. This is the current issue.
Or you could always go to ddj.com.
Steve's marketing genius and patient leadership are the real value he provides to Apple
Whoah, are we thinking of the same guy?
TFA actually makes it pretty clear. The copyright on the earliest images of Popeye has expired. That means you are free to make derivative works of those images -- in other words, draw Popeye yourself -- and you won't have to pay royalties to the copyright owner of the original image (because there is none). However, from TFA:
The Popeye trademark, a separate entity to Segar's authorial copyright, is owned by King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation -- the US entertainment giant -- which is expected to protect its brand aggressively.
...and so on those grounds, you won't get away with it. The Popeye trademark is doubtless registered for everything from coffee cups to T-shirts to books and any other junk you can think of, so if you try to sell your perfectly-legal drawing of Popeye, you'll probably get sued into oblivion.
On the other hand, I'd be really interested to see if someone drew a comic strip featuring a character that looks exactly like Popeye, but whose name is Jeremy the Anthropology Professor. Jeremy is a highly intelligent tenured employee of a major Ivy League university. He is very even-tempered himself and decidedly anti-violence, and for that reason he is against the military (all four branches). He is gay and therefore has no interest in women, and furthermore he can't stand any form of vegetables. Would the author get away with it now?
No, you RTFA, because yes, it is. It says so right in the third paragraph.
Probably very true. Remember how much of the old Who episodes took place inside the TARDIS control center? A bunch of characters standing around a room with the walls painted white, pondering the "readings" from "the scanner." That stuff has been all but nixed in the new show. And where would the old show cut to after a nice, long scene inside the TARDIS? Probably to the bridge of a starship, where a man sitting in a chair would have an argument with a standing man about orders from "the Company." Or maybe to the drawing-room of an English mansion, where a sinister-looking man in period dress would have a conversation with another man, who would then leave via the door. Or maybe to a long shot of a quarry, where a man in a nylon jumpsuit holding some kind of gizmo would stagger for a while, before succumbing to an unseen foe. The new show is far, far less static than the original, in general -- and though it jarred me at first, in hindsight I have to say that's a very good thing.
In our own time, things are not so sensible (which I really don't understand since you're appealing to a predominately male geek audience, not the popular model type kids).
That may be true in the U.S., where it's airing on the Sci-Fi channel. In Britain, you're appealing to damn near everybody. The current Doctor Who series has some of the highest ratings of any drama on television, both in terms of sheer numbers and overall approval ratings. The age range of the audience is quite broad, and though it probably skews more toward males, women watch it also.
Really this choice has everything to do with Steven Moffatt, the new head writer of the show, and what he wants to do with the character. Russell T. Davies, the man responsible for launching the new Who, has said that he had absolutely nothing to do with the casting. Perhaps the larger story arcs Moffatt wants to tell call for a younger Doctor.
And furthermore, nobody I know in the database field will tell you that SQL Server is an inferior product. It's actually quite competitive with Oracle and DB2 and Microsoft is in a position to price aggressively.
Sure, you say, but when you buy SQL Server it ties you to Windows. Yeah -- but what if it was already decided that the database server was going to run Windows? If you're considering running Oracle on Windows, why wouldn't you consider SQL Server?
Netscape Navigator was supposedly $14.95, but IIRC the Beta's were free.
The way I remember it, Navigator cost some amount, but the license explicitly said you were allowed to try it out for free first, and furthermore that trial period could be of any length you wanted.
See, this is what I'm talking about. A bunch of the world's most respected geologists say "we see zero evidence that this is likely to happen in the next thousand years -- zero, zip none." And then you come along -- please cite your geological expertise -- and say, "Well that was four years ago. Let's see what they say now." Are you kidding? Wake me up when the USGS starts advising people to evacuate the Midwest, but until that happens, the chance of Yellowstone destroying the earth this year is exactly the same as it was five years ago.
Sorry this is off topic, but I've just been so frustrated with the new User page that I decided to whack out a Greasemonkey script that would fix it back to the old behavior. When you install this script, clicking your username in the upper lefthand corner should take you to the Comments tab (the way it used to), instead of the near-useless Firehose tab, thus saving you a click.
You can download the script here. Sorry, the script is pretty crude because I don't really know what I'm doing in Greasemonkey, but it's working for me right now. If it doesn't work for you, or you have other changes/comments, you can contact me via my site and let me know.
By the way, before you install random Greasemonkey scripts from random sites (like mine), you should probably click on the button to view the source first, to make sure it isn't doing anything nasty.
Ah! So are you saying that the MSRT runs the scan during the Windows Update process? Because my assumption was that the Update would just install the tool, but that it would run at some later, undetermined time. If it did run during the Update, then it probably happened while I was asleep.
Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption in the near future. In fact, the probability of any such event occurring at Yellowstone within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low.
...
Lava flows and small volcanic eruptions occur only rarely--none in the past 70,000 years. Massive caldera-forming eruptions, though the most potentially devastating of Yellowstone's hazards, are extremely rare--only three have occurred in the past several million years. U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah, and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future.
(emphasis mine)
As for that "several million years" figure for a devastating explosion of the kind TFA is describing, consider that the United States as a nation is still less than 250 years old. I'm not saying it can't happen, but the idea that "it hasn't happened in a long time so it must be ready to happen now" is just a popular Las Vegas delusion.
Michael Robertson is a scumbag.
I thought he sounded familiar. As parent mentions, here's a link to the blog of Kevin Carmony, former President and CEO of Linspire, for similar-sounding story.
nobody I know actually uses MSRT
You might be surprised. The version of MSRT that comes from Windows Update runs in the background once a month and only alerts you when it notices a problem. I've never knowingly run it, but sure enough, if I check my Windows Update history I've installed the December edition.
On a side note, maybe this explains the persistent disk thrashing episodes I still get with Vista, maybe once a month or so...
You know, that singer guy? From the 70s?
Hmmm. Well, no offense to Mr. Pratchett -- he's written a lot of books and they've been very popular and I know a lot of people enjoy them, so I'm sure the honor is well deserved -- but I, for one, could never read more than one or two before moving on to something else. It seems to me there's a whole universe of letters out there waiting to be read, rather than just revisiting the same thing over and over again. But I guess it's no worse than TV.
The man is one of the best authors ever to have graced the earth.
Ummmm... wow. I mean, I know his paperback genre fiction appeals to geeks and all -- I get a little tickle when I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, myself -- but seriously??
Nobody who is even semi-rational is going to endorse child abuse
IBM is a reseller of Red Hat and Novell, and if either company disappeared it would find another one and resell that. This, despite the fact that IBM owns AIX and z/OS.
Yeah, and nobody uses those?
Kinda like Linux. What's your point? Are you claiming IBM hasn't committed any resources to the Eclipse Project?
Oh yeah, because software development IDE vendors were sending IBM to the poorhouse before Eclipse. And open sourcing Cloudscape sure dropped the bottom out of the database market.
WebSphere ships with the IBM HTTP Server, aka Apache. zSeries runs Linux. DB2 is no more open-source than Oracle or SQL Server -- for that I recommend PostgreSQL, which IBM supports through its investment in EnterpriseDB.
Hmmm. Can they run Linux? Think so.
Not when everybody on the list has to accept the request before the meeting can take place.
You know what is efficient, though? Handling new business in regular weekly meetings, rather than scheduling endless new meetings to deal with trivial issues. In my experience, "meeting creep" is one of the worst productivity sinks in any workplace.
My workplace is a multibillion dollar company and they hate using MS products due to unnecessary fees
That doesn't mean your workplace hates Microsoft software. It just means your workplace hates paying for Microsoft software, which isn't the same thing.
Remember: Free "as in beer" is not really a leading reason why enterprises switch to Linux or other open source software. Most end up paying Red Hat, Novell, or some other company for support contracts.
I admit it. My old company migrated away from Lotus Notes and I rejoiced. But six months into using Outlook/Exchange, I surprised myself when I found that I missed it. True, Notes doesn't have the most modern UI in the world, but it's a solid piece of software.
If some groupware were to be introduced to people along with traditional email when they first learn an office package, you could actually have people creating calendar events and sharing them out the door, instead of constantly sending emails to eachother, ignoring the actual capabilities of the software suite they have.
To each his own. I always found it really rude that people would "share a calendar event" with me in Outlook, essentially scheduling me for meetings that I knew nothing about, sight unseen, based on nothing more than the fact that I hadn't filled in any other appointment on my computer calendar. It seems like the normal thing to do would be to shoot me a quick email and ask me if I was available, but the software encourages otherwise. They call it "groupware," but to me it just increases animosity within teams by eliminating the respect and natural give-and-take that comes with actual facetime.