I wrote for a couple of computer industry trade rags back in the early 90s and the editorial policy was that we never gave bad reviews. If a product sucked, the review was never published. We gave feedback back to the manufacturer but nothing got printed.
The reasoning was simple. If the manufacturer really wanted a review printed, they would fix their product (and some of them REALLY wanted good reviews and actually did make improvements). And if the magazine wanted to continue to get advertising dollars, they didn't print bad reviews. It was the unspoken quid pro quo.
Ugh, appalling. I don't know which rags you worked for but you probably shouldn't name them.
Full disclosure: I work for InfoWorld and though I don't usually work directly on our product reviews, I can tell you that no such policy is in place here. And, in all fairness to our direct competitors (like eWeek, Information Week, etc.), I sincerely doubt that any of the big name trades operate this way, either. Maybe the fly-by-night/niche operators, but nobody with an editorial reputation to preserve would stoop to these kinds of shenanigans. Keeping advertisers happy is the job of sales, not editorial. If you worked for a publication where the salespeople and the editors were one and the same, then you were not working for a magazine, you were working for a catalog.
Wait, so if a Web developer wants to test on Safari, what does he do? Answer: Safari doesn't have any real market share, so most people don't bother. But if they really cared, they'd buy a Mac.
I don't really get why this is a big issue. You want to test on Windows? Get a Windows machine. It's no big deal. And Wine isn't going to give you a true test experience anyway.
One Windows machine in your QA lab? Or one virtual machine running Windows? That's too much to ask? Seriously?
I wrote a cheap insult about Iceweasel, but then decided to just shut up and not say anything, but apparently my text editor bugged up or something and didn't erase the insult.
Exactly to Dean's point. What should its name be? "Download utility for Firefox"? "Download utility for Iceweasel"? "Download utility for Opera"? "Download utility for Linux torrents"? How is the customer supposed to have a good user experience when confronted with that many choices?
Value is derived from making information MORE accessible, not less accessible in a prettier way.
Exactly. If all your documents and applications are sitting right there in front of you, why would you want to superimpose a navigation metaphor that forces you to "virtually" walk to the end of the block just to use one of them? Or, to use the hoary old "Libraries of Congress" metaphor for the piles and piles of digital information on modern computers... if you've got the equivalent of eight Libraries of Congress sitting on your hard drive, why on earth would you want to have to "virtually" walk the equivalent of eight entire Library of Congress complex buildings to find what you want, when right now you can just search for it from the comfort of your desk?
If we want to extend the metaphor to the concept of "cyberspace," now you're talking about creating an entire 3-D world or worlds for people to voyage between. Am I the only one who finds it totally amazing that, today, I can access information that's physically located on the other side of the globe practically as easily as I can access information stored on my own computer? What advantage do I gain from replacing that with a 3-D powered cyberspace, where I have to ride a virtual cyber ocean liner to get to that same information ?
The argument in favor of 3-D interfaces seems to be that it makes the "computer realm" more comprehensible to the feeble human brain. It seems to me, though, that if you put down your science fiction for a second and stop trying to think of it as a freakin' realm in the first place, this problem disappears.
Ultimately, these guys need to kick their union and get them to specify that promotional materials cannot be purchased by the consumer, and must be of lesser value (based on market value) than anything they come bundled with.
Ah, but here we're not talking about Hollywood people. These are comic book writers and artists. There is no union.
I have sympathy for some of Alan Moore's kvetching. Some. But the truth of much of it, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and the other properties Moore now says were "stole" from him, is that he signed a lopsided contract. I'm not even going to use the word "bad," because it sounds to me like DC Comics bought his works for what, at the time, was fair consideration. Now, hindsight being 20/20, he wants to rewrite those contracts and get a bigger piece of the pie than he originally signed up for. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much ground to stand on there.
Even this Watchmen button issue discussed here is probably something of a red herring, because in the 1980s it was routine that many comics artists got zero recurring payments of any kind. If an artist drew a panel of Spider-Man and that image later wound up being used on a lunch box, the artist got squat. I'm not even sure if that particular policy has changed at Marvel, to this day.
Alan Moore claims that the Watchmen is the sole brainchild of himself and Dave Gibbons, and indeed it is one of the most creative comic books to come out of the superhero genre. But the truth is that, in the mid-1980s, DC Comics bought a group of superhero character properties from a defunct company called Charlton Comics. Alan Moore wrote Watchmen as a re-visioning of those characters -- much in the same way that his earlier Miracleman character was a re-imagining of an earlier character, the British equivalent of Captain Marvel. DC later decided that it didn't want to wreck those characters with a plotline like Watchmen, that it would rather publish their adventures in a more mundane, mainstream way, so Moore changed the likenesses of the characters in Watchmen so that they were more or less original. It's not hard to guess which Watchmen character is supposed to be which Charlton Comics character, though. So while Watchmen is a creative book, to be sure, the fact that it exists at all is wholly dependent on the fact that the superhero comics publishers exist, that their characters exist, and that they gave Moore an opportunity to work with their characters. To claim Moore and Gibbons came up with it out of whole cloth is a little disingenuous.
Bottom line: Alan Moore wishes he had self-published all that old work, but he didn't. And if he had, it wouldn't have been as successful. It might not have even found an audience. That's what DC Comics gave him, in addition to money. To say he got a raw deal is stretching the truth considerably. He got a much better deal than the creators of Superman got, for example. Could he have gotten a still better deal? Maybe. Maybe his next one will be better. He would have to try, though, instead of just stomping his feet and waving his fist.
We have DRM on the iTunes episodes because we are told that this stops pirating, so people pay for the episode instead. The networks tell us this is a good thing, because it means more money to pay for more shows = more content for us. But now we are being told that the money doesn't go back to the creative talent, ie presumably it goes into the oversized pockets of company execs/shareholders. Come again?!?!
I know. It's terrible. Execs and shareholders get 75 percent, 25 percent goes to that set-painter guy, and the creatives get zip.
How much of this is over reacting to an imagined threat though? How many schools are actually sued over stuff like this?
I don't know. I definitely think there's a societal trend at work here, though.
When I was three, my parents put me into preschool. While there, during playtime, I sustained a disfiguring facial injury. There was lots of blood. Luckily, my father was a doctor, knew the chief of plastic surgery at the local children's hospital, and asked him to work on me personally. Fourteen stitches later, I had a wound that would virtually disappear over the course of time. And guess what? Nobody got sued. There was no lawsuit.
OK, so happy outcome. But now imagine you're the parent. Would you not be able to sue over something like that? Could you just sit back and go, "Well, kids will be kids"? I'm not sure I could... and I've had all sorts of injuries that must have terrified my parents. Injury to the eye, broken bones, massive bruises... but nobody ever got sued. Can you really sit there and tell me that you wouldn't try to sue, though, if your child was in the same situation today?
Whoah! I grew up in Castro Valley, California, and we called this game "Red Ass." Where are you from?
BTW, the craziest game of this I ever saw took place in an emptied swimming pool. And instead of going "up against the wall," you had to hang from the diving board.
Not only does VMware already give away VMware Server, but Microsoft Virtual Server is also already free. That's not the news.
This is a news story from an uninformed reporter who seems to be confusing software and standards. The announcement appears to be that Microsoft is "relinquishing all license claims on its Virtual Hard Disk Image Format." This, to me, sounds like less of an altruistic move than a competitive one -- because, of course, VMware's image format is already free.
Been there, done that. "Big Iron" was it name, and it was Oracle on SunOS 5.
Actually, Raw Iron was its name, and my understanding was that these were supposed to be hardware appliances, with the software pre-installed. I can think of all sorts of reasons why that would be less popular with the customers than a software appliance that you could install onto approved hardware configurations with one click.
Re:Oracle should stick to databases
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Oracle Linux?
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Basically I'm wondering why Oracle want to pinch consumers away from Fedora and Ubuntu instead of just working with them to help intergrate their databases more seamlessly into these distros?
Because people who are really serious about Oracle -- read: top-dollar customers -- actually do a significant amount of kernel patching and tuning to get it working to the levels they require. This requires a lot of effort from Oracle, in terms of writing code, testing, and certification. It doesn't really make sense for Oracle to invest in "seamless" integration with free distros. If you want seamless, you gotta pay for it.
Re:It won't really compete with RHEL
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It is possible that an acquisition of Novell could bring in enough fresh blood to turn this around... And it would bring in an already-respected Linux distribution.
Plus a whole lot of cruft that Oracle isn't even remotely interested in.
Remember, Novell != Suse. As I understand it, the lion's share of Novell's income comes from the NetWare installed base and (believe it or not) interest from its cash and investment holdings. The actual Linux part of its business is better seen as a platform for other products.
Novell does have a solid suite of identity management products, but then again, so does Oracle, following the purchase of such companies as Oblix and OctetString. It looks like Oracle is buying its way into that market in smaller, more manageable pieces, which suggests to me that somebody over there has already considered Novell's stack and has passed on it.
Re:Definitely has uses but..
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Furthermore, Oracle provides *full* support for the Linux OS itself when you have a properly licensed copy of Oracle.
This is correct and something that a lot of people don't realize about Oracle. Oracle spends a lot of time working on Linux, contributing code to Linux, and supporting customers on Linux. Yes, they do provide support for the OS and not just the database. They even have a program of certified configurations that they provide to customers for exactly the kind of "runs Oracle perfectly" systems the grandparent is talking about. I wrote about this for InfoWorld earlier this year -- it's pretty interesting.
Re:Oracle Linux works better as a threat than real
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If I were Larry, I would create a great deal of hype about doing my own Linux distro, to soften up the price of Red Hat in anticpiation of a takeover.
I agree, and this is exactly what I said in April, when this whole rumor started. But there's not much evidence that Larry is really interested in such a take-over. If you look at TFA, they're just dredging up this quote from the Financial Times from back then. There's nothing new from Oracle on this. If anything, Larry has refuted the idea of buying up either Red Hat or Novell, repeatedly. Just a few days after this rumor started, he reiterated to the Financial Times his belief that Red Hat is an unsuitable purchase because "they own nothing." Still, he likes to drop hints and innuendo about things like this from time to time because it creates buzz around his company and that's good for his own stock price. If the little voices are whispering rumors again now, I assume it's just because of the Oracle OpenWorld show that kicks off in San Francisco next week.
Heh. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area as I do, I found your comment about $400,000 "mansions" to be totally charming. (FYI in my neck of the woods 400 grand won't get you a one room condo.) And, yes, believe it or not some of those options you mention are open to me. Others are non sequiturs. You sound bitter. I hope things work out for you.
College only determines your *first* job mostly. But your *first* job determines most of the rest of your jobs.
Meh. I think you're being a little rigid in your thinking there, guy. I'm 33 and I have no college degree, and yet I've had several "real" jobs, some good, others bad. I've made OK money. The job that paid me the most, as it turned out, was one of the ones I liked the least, so I quit that job. Then I took almost a year off to think things through. When I took a full-time job again it was to change careers, doing something I'd never done before. I'm still in that line of work today. My current employers like, value, and respect me, and short of making me rich, what more can I ask for? I'm still looking for the "perfect" work setup, but I feel like I have lots of options and that, to me, is the definition of success. As far as I can see, there's nobody telling me that I "can't" do anything I want.
So while I'm sure your hard work in school is never going to hurt you, the way you describe it, it sounds like an awful tough burden to bear for something that maybe isn't quite as crucial as you make it out to be.
I live in the Bay Area and never heard a thing about it until he was arrested. I guess I don't watch a lot of local news, though; I get most of it from NPR.
Clearly you haven't studied how reiserfs (3 at least) works. It doesn't use block sizes, it puts the data as compact as possible and uses a tree to figure out exactly where it is. This is obviously important if the police is ever to have a chance at finding the body. He'll probably have an algorithm at home, such that if they find one piece, they can find the rest following that.:)
Either that, or they should just start digging under the tree.
On the whole, your explanation makes sense. I think we differ in our perceptions of Christianity a little bit, though.
Christians are expected to reach out to others, to help each other, to live lives that will, by example, show the world that belief in God is something special, something that makes you different.
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. It doesn't seem like Christianity itself is what makes Christians want to demonstrate the value of belief in God; it seems like that's just human nature. If you honestly believe something is the truth then it's going to be hard for you to accept that other people can't see it that way -- this seems logical to me. People who are big into politics do the same thing, all the time. There are some Christians who believe that proselytizing and "spreading the gospel" are requirements for entry into heaven, but there are many who don't. I don't think I'd call them "fake Christians." Is a Jew who likes bacon a "fake Jew"?
And as far as being expected to reach out to others and to help each other, it seems to me that these are societal values; they are what makes a collection of individuals into a society. Christians have no monopoly on this behavior.
Nearly all religions (and, without trying to write a book on the subject, I have to say that Christianity is the most severe in this regard) require more, for lack of a better word, "goodness" from its followers than any human being can deliver.
That's not true. I am not a Christian, but my understanding is that Christianity doesn't "require" any goodness of you at all. On the contrary, what it requires of you is that you recognize and acknowledge that you are incapable of living up to the standard of goodness set by Jesus, and that in your heart you should honestly want to apologize for your shortcomings. Plenty of Christians have been drug addicts, thieves, even murderers. People who don't understand religion say that makes them hypocrites, and because they are hypocrites, all religion is therefore bullshit. But all it really means is that those Christians were flawed, fallible people -- as Christian doctrine says all of us are.
There are some other strange aspects to all this, the wife may have been having an affair, but (at least in UK) often divorce lawyers encourage clients to do a 'kitchen-sink' approach to try and wrest custody of the children, so her affair and his domestic violence are both suspect until we get more info.
It's not really the same in California. California is a "no-fault" divorce state. The only legally admissible grounds for divorce are "irreconcilable differences" -- basically, you have arrived at a point where you feel neither time nor counseling will repair the marriage. It doesn't matter why, it doesn't matter what either party has or hasn't done. Neither party is recognized as being "more responsible" for the divorce. What the divorce is about is pretty much the resolution of a financial transaction, nothing more.
As far as custody of children goes, though, you could have something there... California courts favor joint custody except in cases on spousal abuse, which Ms. Reiser seems to be alleging. And ordinarily, Ms. Reiser's sexual history would probably have no bearing on her claim to custody of the children, unless perhaps there was some evidence that her behavior would put the children at risk, which Mr. Reiser seems to be alleging in his version of events (given in the CBS5 article).
Hydrogen sulphide, a toxic gas that smells of rotten eggs, occurs naturally in swamps, springs and volcanoes.
But in mice, it was found to slow down heart rate and breathing and decrease body temperature, while keeping a normal blood pressure.
You guys may not remember this, but the original Buck Rogers story from the comic strips was that Buck was exploring a cave when he was exposed to gases that put him to sleep. When he woke up and emerged from the cave he was in the 25th century.
I think that "laser" and "visible beam" pretty much contradict each other, unless you either look straight into the beam, or set your room on fire to fill it with smoke, neither of which can really be recommended.
Not so. The green lasers he mentions are often capable of casting beams that are visible without using smoke under low light conditions. Google "green laser pointers."
Meh, Lost is kinda crap but it's entertaining crap. They took an ensemble cast and let fly with all kinds of wild ideas about where they all came from and what they're supposed to be doing. When people start analyzing every frame of the episode and reading hidden meanings into it, I tune right out. Timeless classic, it ain't. It's fun popcorn TV. I'll be watching the new season.
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Ugh, appalling. I don't know which rags you worked for but you probably shouldn't name them.
Full disclosure: I work for InfoWorld and though I don't usually work directly on our product reviews, I can tell you that no such policy is in place here. And, in all fairness to our direct competitors (like eWeek, Information Week, etc.), I sincerely doubt that any of the big name trades operate this way, either. Maybe the fly-by-night/niche operators, but nobody with an editorial reputation to preserve would stoop to these kinds of shenanigans. Keeping advertisers happy is the job of sales, not editorial. If you worked for a publication where the salespeople and the editors were one and the same, then you were not working for a magazine, you were working for a catalog.
Wait, so if a Web developer wants to test on Safari, what does he do? Answer: Safari doesn't have any real market share, so most people don't bother. But if they really cared, they'd buy a Mac.
I don't really get why this is a big issue. You want to test on Windows? Get a Windows machine. It's no big deal. And Wine isn't going to give you a true test experience anyway.
One Windows machine in your QA lab? Or one virtual machine running Windows? That's too much to ask? Seriously?
I read this one as:
Q: What is the greatest weakness of Firefox?
A: Inconsistent branding.
Exactly to Dean's point. What should its name be? "Download utility for Firefox"? "Download utility for Iceweasel"? "Download utility for Opera"? "Download utility for Linux torrents"? How is the customer supposed to have a good user experience when confronted with that many choices?
Trust Microsoft.
Exactly. If all your documents and applications are sitting right there in front of you, why would you want to superimpose a navigation metaphor that forces you to "virtually" walk to the end of the block just to use one of them? Or, to use the hoary old "Libraries of Congress" metaphor for the piles and piles of digital information on modern computers ... if you've got the equivalent of eight Libraries of Congress sitting on your hard drive, why on earth would you want to have to "virtually" walk the equivalent of eight entire Library of Congress complex buildings to find what you want, when right now you can just search for it from the comfort of your desk?
If we want to extend the metaphor to the concept of "cyberspace," now you're talking about creating an entire 3-D world or worlds for people to voyage between. Am I the only one who finds it totally amazing that, today, I can access information that's physically located on the other side of the globe practically as easily as I can access information stored on my own computer? What advantage do I gain from replacing that with a 3-D powered cyberspace, where I have to ride a virtual cyber ocean liner to get to that same information ?
The argument in favor of 3-D interfaces seems to be that it makes the "computer realm" more comprehensible to the feeble human brain. It seems to me, though, that if you put down your science fiction for a second and stop trying to think of it as a freakin' realm in the first place, this problem disappears.
Ah, but here we're not talking about Hollywood people. These are comic book writers and artists. There is no union.
I have sympathy for some of Alan Moore's kvetching. Some. But the truth of much of it, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and the other properties Moore now says were "stole" from him, is that he signed a lopsided contract. I'm not even going to use the word "bad," because it sounds to me like DC Comics bought his works for what, at the time, was fair consideration. Now, hindsight being 20/20, he wants to rewrite those contracts and get a bigger piece of the pie than he originally signed up for. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much ground to stand on there.
Even this Watchmen button issue discussed here is probably something of a red herring, because in the 1980s it was routine that many comics artists got zero recurring payments of any kind. If an artist drew a panel of Spider-Man and that image later wound up being used on a lunch box, the artist got squat. I'm not even sure if that particular policy has changed at Marvel, to this day.
Alan Moore claims that the Watchmen is the sole brainchild of himself and Dave Gibbons, and indeed it is one of the most creative comic books to come out of the superhero genre. But the truth is that, in the mid-1980s, DC Comics bought a group of superhero character properties from a defunct company called Charlton Comics. Alan Moore wrote Watchmen as a re-visioning of those characters -- much in the same way that his earlier Miracleman character was a re-imagining of an earlier character, the British equivalent of Captain Marvel. DC later decided that it didn't want to wreck those characters with a plotline like Watchmen, that it would rather publish their adventures in a more mundane, mainstream way, so Moore changed the likenesses of the characters in Watchmen so that they were more or less original. It's not hard to guess which Watchmen character is supposed to be which Charlton Comics character, though. So while Watchmen is a creative book, to be sure, the fact that it exists at all is wholly dependent on the fact that the superhero comics publishers exist, that their characters exist, and that they gave Moore an opportunity to work with their characters. To claim Moore and Gibbons came up with it out of whole cloth is a little disingenuous.
Bottom line: Alan Moore wishes he had self-published all that old work, but he didn't. And if he had, it wouldn't have been as successful. It might not have even found an audience. That's what DC Comics gave him, in addition to money. To say he got a raw deal is stretching the truth considerably. He got a much better deal than the creators of Superman got, for example. Could he have gotten a still better deal? Maybe. Maybe his next one will be better. He would have to try, though, instead of just stomping his feet and waving his fist.
I know. It's terrible. Execs and shareholders get 75 percent, 25 percent goes to that set-painter guy, and the creatives get zip.
I don't know. I definitely think there's a societal trend at work here, though.
When I was three, my parents put me into preschool. While there, during playtime, I sustained a disfiguring facial injury. There was lots of blood. Luckily, my father was a doctor, knew the chief of plastic surgery at the local children's hospital, and asked him to work on me personally. Fourteen stitches later, I had a wound that would virtually disappear over the course of time. And guess what? Nobody got sued. There was no lawsuit.
OK, so happy outcome. But now imagine you're the parent. Would you not be able to sue over something like that? Could you just sit back and go, "Well, kids will be kids"? I'm not sure I could ... and I've had all sorts of injuries that must have terrified my parents. Injury to the eye, broken bones, massive bruises ... but nobody ever got sued. Can you really sit there and tell me that you wouldn't try to sue, though, if your child was in the same situation today?
Whoah! I grew up in Castro Valley, California, and we called this game "Red Ass." Where are you from?
BTW, the craziest game of this I ever saw took place in an emptied swimming pool. And instead of going "up against the wall," you had to hang from the diving board.
Not only does VMware already give away VMware Server, but Microsoft Virtual Server is also already free. That's not the news.
This is a news story from an uninformed reporter who seems to be confusing software and standards. The announcement appears to be that Microsoft is "relinquishing all license claims on its Virtual Hard Disk Image Format." This, to me, sounds like less of an altruistic move than a competitive one -- because, of course, VMware's image format is already free.
Actually, Raw Iron was its name, and my understanding was that these were supposed to be hardware appliances, with the software pre-installed. I can think of all sorts of reasons why that would be less popular with the customers than a software appliance that you could install onto approved hardware configurations with one click.
Because people who are really serious about Oracle -- read: top-dollar customers -- actually do a significant amount of kernel patching and tuning to get it working to the levels they require. This requires a lot of effort from Oracle, in terms of writing code, testing, and certification. It doesn't really make sense for Oracle to invest in "seamless" integration with free distros. If you want seamless, you gotta pay for it.
Plus a whole lot of cruft that Oracle isn't even remotely interested in.
Remember, Novell != Suse. As I understand it, the lion's share of Novell's income comes from the NetWare installed base and (believe it or not) interest from its cash and investment holdings. The actual Linux part of its business is better seen as a platform for other products.
Novell does have a solid suite of identity management products, but then again, so does Oracle, following the purchase of such companies as Oblix and OctetString. It looks like Oracle is buying its way into that market in smaller, more manageable pieces, which suggests to me that somebody over there has already considered Novell's stack and has passed on it.
This is correct and something that a lot of people don't realize about Oracle. Oracle spends a lot of time working on Linux, contributing code to Linux, and supporting customers on Linux. Yes, they do provide support for the OS and not just the database. They even have a program of certified configurations that they provide to customers for exactly the kind of "runs Oracle perfectly" systems the grandparent is talking about. I wrote about this for InfoWorld earlier this year -- it's pretty interesting.
I agree, and this is exactly what I said in April, when this whole rumor started. But there's not much evidence that Larry is really interested in such a take-over. If you look at TFA, they're just dredging up this quote from the Financial Times from back then. There's nothing new from Oracle on this. If anything, Larry has refuted the idea of buying up either Red Hat or Novell, repeatedly. Just a few days after this rumor started, he reiterated to the Financial Times his belief that Red Hat is an unsuitable purchase because "they own nothing." Still, he likes to drop hints and innuendo about things like this from time to time because it creates buzz around his company and that's good for his own stock price. If the little voices are whispering rumors again now, I assume it's just because of the Oracle OpenWorld show that kicks off in San Francisco next week.
Heh. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area as I do, I found your comment about $400,000 "mansions" to be totally charming. (FYI in my neck of the woods 400 grand won't get you a one room condo.) And, yes, believe it or not some of those options you mention are open to me. Others are non sequiturs. You sound bitter. I hope things work out for you.
Meh. I think you're being a little rigid in your thinking there, guy. I'm 33 and I have no college degree, and yet I've had several "real" jobs, some good, others bad. I've made OK money. The job that paid me the most, as it turned out, was one of the ones I liked the least, so I quit that job. Then I took almost a year off to think things through. When I took a full-time job again it was to change careers, doing something I'd never done before. I'm still in that line of work today. My current employers like, value, and respect me, and short of making me rich, what more can I ask for? I'm still looking for the "perfect" work setup, but I feel like I have lots of options and that, to me, is the definition of success. As far as I can see, there's nobody telling me that I "can't" do anything I want.
So while I'm sure your hard work in school is never going to hurt you, the way you describe it, it sounds like an awful tough burden to bear for something that maybe isn't quite as crucial as you make it out to be.
I live in the Bay Area and never heard a thing about it until he was arrested. I guess I don't watch a lot of local news, though; I get most of it from NPR.
Either that, or they should just start digging under the tree.
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. It doesn't seem like Christianity itself is what makes Christians want to demonstrate the value of belief in God; it seems like that's just human nature. If you honestly believe something is the truth then it's going to be hard for you to accept that other people can't see it that way -- this seems logical to me. People who are big into politics do the same thing, all the time. There are some Christians who believe that proselytizing and "spreading the gospel" are requirements for entry into heaven, but there are many who don't. I don't think I'd call them "fake Christians." Is a Jew who likes bacon a "fake Jew"?
And as far as being expected to reach out to others and to help each other, it seems to me that these are societal values; they are what makes a collection of individuals into a society. Christians have no monopoly on this behavior.
That's not true. I am not a Christian, but my understanding is that Christianity doesn't "require" any goodness of you at all. On the contrary, what it requires of you is that you recognize and acknowledge that you are incapable of living up to the standard of goodness set by Jesus, and that in your heart you should honestly want to apologize for your shortcomings. Plenty of Christians have been drug addicts, thieves, even murderers. People who don't understand religion say that makes them hypocrites, and because they are hypocrites, all religion is therefore bullshit. But all it really means is that those Christians were flawed, fallible people -- as Christian doctrine says all of us are.
It's not really the same in California. California is a "no-fault" divorce state. The only legally admissible grounds for divorce are "irreconcilable differences" -- basically, you have arrived at a point where you feel neither time nor counseling will repair the marriage. It doesn't matter why, it doesn't matter what either party has or hasn't done. Neither party is recognized as being "more responsible" for the divorce. What the divorce is about is pretty much the resolution of a financial transaction, nothing more.
As far as custody of children goes, though, you could have something there ... California courts favor joint custody except in cases on spousal abuse, which Ms. Reiser seems to be alleging. And ordinarily, Ms. Reiser's sexual history would probably have no bearing on her claim to custody of the children, unless perhaps there was some evidence that her behavior would put the children at risk, which Mr. Reiser seems to be alleging in his version of events (given in the CBS5 article).
Ha! I got a chuckle when I read this:
You guys may not remember this, but the original Buck Rogers story from the comic strips was that Buck was exploring a cave when he was exposed to gases that put him to sleep. When he woke up and emerged from the cave he was in the 25th century.
Not so. The green lasers he mentions are often capable of casting beams that are visible without using smoke under low light conditions. Google "green laser pointers."
Meh, Lost is kinda crap but it's entertaining crap. They took an ensemble cast and let fly with all kinds of wild ideas about where they all came from and what they're supposed to be doing. When people start analyzing every frame of the episode and reading hidden meanings into it, I tune right out. Timeless classic, it ain't. It's fun popcorn TV. I'll be watching the new season.