Re:And you can often use payroll deduction.
on
Geek Charities?
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· Score: 1
Many companies that support umbrella charities like the United Way will let you make payments via payroll deduction. I find I miss the money less if it never hits my pocket in the first place! And even a small amount from each of 24 or 26 paychecks can add up to a nice amount for the charities of your choice. As a bonus, your last paycheck has a nice record of all that giving for your taxes.
Re:Good choices. Also Habitat for Humanity
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 1
Those are good choices. Myself, I've joined the EFF, and will probably be giving something extra to Habitat For Humanity this year.
If you don't like what Rob is doing, take the code and start you own, right wing, news service. It you are right, and actually provide a better product, you'll eat Rob's lunch. On the other hand, maybe your news service will wither and die. Ain't competition wonderful?
If you stomp off in a huff anonymously, can anyone tell you left?
Why would a techie support Gore? I like this planet. Bush is beholden to big oil for his campaign chest, so he won't look at any energy source the oil companies can't somehow control.
Under Reagan and Bush the deficit soared. Under Clinton and Gore it is going down. This keeps the economy booming.
Taxes: Reagan ballooned the deficit with a big tax cut he couldn't pay for. Bush prosposes to do the same thing. Gore's plan is much more responsible; instead of giving Bill Gates and H. Ross Perot a big tax cut they don't need, he'll use the money to give more kids a chance at college and possibly a techie career. That's a big win in my book.
Gore is tied to the Religious right, which wants to outlaw abortion and, afterwards, birth control. I don't want to go back to the 1910's. Women and men should have to right to decide if they want to reproduce.
Lest this get too long, let me just say I was an adult during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and have no desire to go back to those times!
The trouble is most techies have no time for rich Frat Brats like Bush. We make out way based on our skills, not the fact that Daddy's buddies will always bail us out when we screw up.
How dare the evil government level income taxes to pay for national defense, the interstate highway system, polution control, and crime prevention? How do any of those things benefit you? Why can't we have an all-volunteer, UNPAID Army, Navy, and Air Force? That way you could have a free ride and wouldn't have to pay those odious income taxes!!
I was involved in the old Genie online service. My portion was the Science Fiction Round Tables, which become a real community where F&SF writers could talk to their peers and fans about their lives and work.
Genie died, but the community migrated to the web, at dm.net and sfrt.com. I suggest that an online community able to last over 10 years and outlast its orginal home is real!
The record companies have a lock on the old distribution system. Until recently, if you didn't sign with a major, it was impossible to get your product to a mass audience. And the contracts with the record companies were so wonderful that Prince called himself a slave, and George Michael spend years fighting his contract.
So the free market wasn't determining CD prices; the major labels were. Now that the internet is providing alternate methods to order cds or just download mp3s, we might actually see the price drop to a free-market level.
Evolution is not a plan; it is a case of nature generation a ton of mutations to see which ones survive. If several survive, they survive. As to the variation of land species, animals suited for one climate (alligators in Florida, for example) and not necessarily suited to live in places like Antartica or even Minnesota.
Verbalizing the problem can really help. It forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective (the listeners). Allegedly some old time coding shops had a dummy in a conference room. If you couldn't solve a problem you could go in there and explain it to the dummy. I've never done that, but several times I've gone to a colleague for advice, got about 1/3 way into explaining the problem, and said "Never mind, I just figured it out!"
NATURAL BORN KILLERS (and BADLANDS) are loosely based on the 1959 murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carrie Ann Fugate. So your argument that the culture has to be "right" for muder sprees to occur is wrong. Nuts like Starkweather and Richard Speck don't need external conditions to be right for them to go off.
The basic issue here isn't really intellectual property laws; it's the spectre of new technology destroying the monopoly on content distribution that the big media companies have spent the last decade creating. When musicians can sell mp3s from their own websites they have no need for Time Warner. And the whole DECSS fight is about forcing small companies to pay huge license fees to create DVDs.
Re:never read the series; try Small Gods
on
The Truth
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· Score: 1
Oops, RinceWIND, of course.
Re:never read the series; try Small Gods
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 1
It is one of the best books in the series, and is set in a new region of Discworld, so nothing depends on you having read the rest of the series.
After that I'd suggest Hoggfather, Mort, Guards, Guards, and the first Witches one. The earlier Rinceward books are fun, but IMHO P. hadn't quite hit his stride.
Under U. S. Law, at least, Nitendo could make a case that they are satirizing a public figure and win the suit via fair comment. HUSTLER won when Jerry Fallwell sued over a very nasty satire of him. And the Simpsons have satired Ahhnold as Werner Wolfcastle for years with no fear of law suits.
MZB's longest lasting contribution to SF & Fantasy will likely be all the women writers who got their start writing for the Darkover and Sword and Sorceress anthologies, and then went on to good careers of their own. Her example and sponsorship brought a lot of new writers and viewpoints into a field that needed them.
SF people were saying that the next Sword and Sorceress anthology was in press (#17, I think), and that Bradley was almost done buying stories for #18, so you might be getting your g/f two more.
The "all nines" convention was to deal with hardware limitations; some devices wouldn't signal end of file, or worse, would abort if you read past the last record. Using nines as EOF gave a safe, platform independent way to handle the problem.
But as others as pointed out, Sept. 9 is 090999 and should not cause a problem.
I have this dream in which the EU and the US GOV. mandate that all official docs submitted to them must be in XML. This would force MS to make Office read and write XML. But this will hurt their lock-in. A business office could mix Word, Wordperfect, and AbiWord, along with Macs and PPCs and as long as everyone spoke XML it wouldn't matter if people used different platforms. And MS Office 2000 users would not be forced to upgrade to MSO 2003 to read documents from that platform. This could cripple an important MS cash cow.
That is why MS is trying to get to a rental software situation. But the rental market depends on lock-in. A savvy company could simply mandate XML for all their documents and would be in position to either really negotiate price with a vendor, or simply switch to a free alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Many companies that support umbrella charities like the United Way will let you make payments via payroll deduction. I find I miss the money less if it never hits my pocket in the first place! And even a small amount from each of 24 or 26 paychecks can add up to a nice amount for the charities of your choice. As a bonus, your last paycheck has a nice record of all that giving for your taxes.
Those are good choices. Myself, I've joined the EFF, and will probably be giving something extra to Habitat For Humanity this year.
They cannot be recalled, only impeached for gross misconduct. They can of course choose to retire.
I'd be tempted to razor blade off the
"Don't" and leave "Blame me I didn't vote".
If you don't like what Rob is doing, take the code and start you own, right wing, news service. It you are right, and actually provide a better product, you'll eat Rob's lunch. On the other hand, maybe your news service will wither and die. Ain't competition wonderful?
If you stomp off in a huff anonymously, can anyone tell you left?
Why would a techie support Gore? I like this planet. Bush is beholden to big oil for his campaign chest, so he won't look at any energy source the oil companies can't somehow control.
Under Reagan and Bush the deficit soared. Under Clinton and Gore it is going down. This keeps the economy booming.
Taxes: Reagan ballooned the deficit with a big tax cut he couldn't pay for. Bush prosposes to do the same thing. Gore's plan is much more responsible; instead of giving Bill Gates and H. Ross Perot a big tax cut they don't need, he'll use the money to give more kids a chance at college and possibly a techie career. That's a big win in my book.
Gore is tied to the Religious right, which wants to outlaw abortion and, afterwards, birth control. I don't want to go back to the 1910's. Women and men should have to right to decide if they want to reproduce.
Lest this get too long, let me just say I was an adult during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and have no desire to go back to those times!
The trouble is most techies have no time for rich Frat Brats like Bush. We make out way based on our skills, not the fact that Daddy's buddies will always bail us out when we screw up.
How dare the evil government level income taxes to pay for national defense, the interstate highway system, polution control, and crime prevention? How do any of those things benefit you? Why can't we have an all-volunteer, UNPAID Army, Navy, and Air Force? That way you could have a free ride and wouldn't have to pay those odious income taxes!!
I was involved in the old Genie online service. My portion was the Science Fiction Round Tables, which become a real community where F&SF writers could talk to their peers and fans about their lives and work.
Genie died, but the community migrated to the web, at dm.net and sfrt.com. I suggest that an online community able to last over 10 years and outlast its orginal home is real!
The record companies have a lock on the old distribution system. Until recently, if you didn't sign with a major, it was impossible to get your product to a mass audience. And the contracts with the record companies were so wonderful that Prince called himself a slave, and George Michael spend years fighting his contract.
So the free market wasn't determining CD prices; the major labels were. Now that the internet is providing alternate methods to order cds or just download mp3s, we might actually see the price drop to a free-market level.
Evolution is not a plan; it is a case of nature generation a ton of mutations to see which ones survive. If several survive, they survive. As to the variation of land species, animals suited for one climate (alligators in Florida, for example) and not necessarily suited to live in places like Antartica or even Minnesota.
Monkeys, apes, and humans are all descended from
a common ancestor, not from each other.
See Isaiah 11:12, Revelations 7:1, and Revelations
20:8, all of which refer to the four corners of
the earth.
Verbalizing the problem can really help. It forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective (the listeners). Allegedly some old time coding shops had a dummy in a conference room. If you couldn't solve a problem you could go in there and explain it to the dummy. I've never done that, but several times I've gone to a colleague for advice, got about 1/3 way into explaining the problem, and said "Never mind, I just figured it out!"
NATURAL BORN KILLERS (and BADLANDS) are loosely based on the 1959 murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carrie Ann Fugate. So your argument that the culture has to be "right" for muder sprees to occur is wrong. Nuts like Starkweather and Richard Speck don't need external conditions to be right for them to go off.
The basic issue here isn't really intellectual property laws; it's the spectre of new technology destroying the monopoly on content distribution that the big media companies have spent the last decade creating. When musicians can sell mp3s from their own websites they have no need for Time Warner. And the whole DECSS fight is about forcing small companies to pay huge license fees to create DVDs.
Oops, RinceWIND, of course.
It is one of the best books in the series, and is set in a new region of Discworld, so nothing depends on you having read the rest of the series.
After that I'd suggest Hoggfather, Mort, Guards, Guards, and the first Witches one. The earlier Rinceward books are fun, but IMHO P. hadn't quite hit his stride.
A few clicks and I was done. A small thing to do, but something I could do immediately.
Under U. S. Law, at least, Nitendo could make a case that they are satirizing a public figure and win the suit via fair comment. HUSTLER won when Jerry Fallwell sued over a very nasty satire of him. And the Simpsons have satired Ahhnold as Werner Wolfcastle for years with no fear of law suits.
That's probably why he's called UN-Geller!
MZB's longest lasting contribution to SF & Fantasy
will likely be all the women writers who got their start writing for the Darkover and Sword and Sorceress anthologies, and then went on to good careers of their own. Her example and sponsorship brought a lot of new writers and viewpoints into a field that needed them.
SF people were saying that the next Sword and Sorceress anthology was in press (#17, I think), and that Bradley was almost done buying stories for #18, so you might be getting your g/f two more.
The "all nines" convention was to deal with hardware limitations; some devices wouldn't signal end of file, or worse, would abort if you read past the last record. Using nines as EOF gave a safe, platform independent way to handle the problem.
But as others as pointed out, Sept. 9 is 090999 and should not cause a problem.
Old COBOL programmer
I have this dream in which the EU and the US GOV. mandate that all official docs submitted to them must be in XML. This would force MS to make Office read and write XML. But this will hurt their lock-in. A business office could mix Word, Wordperfect, and AbiWord, along with Macs and PPCs and as long as everyone spoke XML it wouldn't matter if people used different platforms. And MS Office 2000 users would not be forced to upgrade to MSO 2003 to read documents from that platform. This could cripple an important MS cash cow.
That is why MS is trying to get to a rental software situation. But the rental market depends on lock-in. A savvy company could simply mandate XML for all their documents and would be in position to either really negotiate price with a vendor, or simply switch to a free alternative.