Plus, the North Thurston School District (Washington state) has to pay up to the ACLU $52,000 in attorney fees, too.
Yaaaay! Now I get to send my tax money to some blood-sucking lawyers instead of to the struggling school system!
Not all lawyers are evil, you know. A lawyer who goes to work for the ACLU is probably not in it for the money, and probably among the farthest from blood-sucking. Even if you disagree with the ACLU's politics, it's hard to knock the cause of civil liberties.
"I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism... at least it's an ethos." --Walter Sobchak
But I agree that it's a shame that a jackass move by school administration only ends up costing the taxpayer.
I'm sure this scheme will be cracked in short order... I doubt they'll take the time to develop a cryptographically secure system. Of course, the crack will be an illegal "circumvention device", but legality has never been much of a concern to Napster users (myself included, I must admit). Of course, a weak scheme could be just what Napster wants... then they'll at least be able to give some lip service to the music companies, while making copyright abuse just a bit less convenient for their users -- and, most importantly, shift the blame from themselves to the evil crackers. Maybe we'll soon the the gallery of Protection Layer removers on Dave Touretzky's page.
Depends on your pronunciation of pissed or pleased (both of which can sound like a single syllable word).
Wha? Under the assumption that "pleased" has at least one syllable (reasonable, I think), the line "MPAA not pleased" has too many. Unless you have a funny way of pronouncing "MPAA."
Given all of this, what is to stop God having created us the way he did, and then leaving a couple of "jokes" for us to fall for? I could just imagine him laughing... ha, you guys have got it sooooo wrong!
Then, clearly, such a god does not want us to worship it. Surely, it knew that we would discover all this evidence against its involvement in the universe, and that this would dissuade a great many people from believing in it. So why plant that evidence unless that was the desired outcome?
So, maybe the universe was created yesterday by a god who implanted memories in all of us. Or maybe I am just a brain in a jar being stimulated by electrical impulses. All I know for sure is that I exist (Je pense, donc je suis, thanks to Descartes). But what is the point of considering these possibilities when they are not in any way measurable and don't affect our experience in any way? If there is a god that is responsible for creation of the universe, it's not around any more, in any meaningful way. If it were currently influencing the universe, we could measure the effect, and the god's presence would be clear.
So the point... Sure, maybe a god caused the big bang. But who gives a damn? If it's true (which I don't believe it is), the god also provided quite a lot of evidence against its own existence and gave us the intelligence to find it. So it doesn't want us... screw it.
I find believeing that we are only here because of random chance impossible to believe, just look at the work around us - it's incredible, I can't believe it wasn't designed by God.
Ah, the argument from incredulity. Not very persuasive.
Ok, look what I started. I was just trying to be a little funny and here's this big grammar thread. Grammar and spelling have been awful in Slashdot articles lately, so I guess it's not completely irrelevant, but this will be my last word on the subject.
So if you consider "everybody" to be singular then it seems that at least Mirriam-Webster's agrees that "their" is appropriate usage.
I don't just consider "everybody" to be singular; it quite clearly is. Would you say "everybody are here?"
As for whether "their" can be used as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, it's true that dictionaries have recently (in the past few years) begun to accept it. English is indeed evolving. But it's ugly, especially in formal settings (which this is, of course, not). There's a discussion of the issue here: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=A00 42019, containing this advice: "Writers who are concerned about avoiding both grammatical and social problems are best advised to use coordinate forms such as his or her."
This is kind of off topic(but I think it is worth it 'cause I am losing my moderator rights for this post), but aren't degrees(C) nonlinear? Isn't kelvin the only [common] linear unit of temperature?
No -- if I recall correctly, the Kelvin scale actually has the same size degrees as celcius, just with a different zero (i.e., K = C + 273.15). And, of course, there is also a linear conversion from Farenheit to C (C = 5[F-32]/9). So yeah, they're all linear.
If you steal things, then you are a thief. At least recognize that and then resume your thievery. Don't say "I am not *really* a thief, I am more of a 'borrower' of items no longer in use since I only take older things".
I recognize that downloading ROMs is illegal, and in that sense, if I do it, I am a committing a crime. (Incidentally, it's been years since I downloaded a ROM, so this is more of a bit of advocacy than my own current experience.) But look at what you say -- "If you steal things". What thing have I stolen through the act of downloading? It's been said a million times before, but this is not the same as taking another's physical property. When you do that, they are deprived of something. When you download an old ROM, what is the copyright holder deprived of? The ROM? No. The money they could have made from the sale of the ROM? No -- they're not selling it!
So, yes, I recognize that it's a crime, but at the same time, I feel completely morally justified. There are plenty of immorral laws out there. If you sell me a beer on Sunday, then you're a criminal (in my state, at least). Does that mean it's morally wrong?
It's just as illegal to distribute an old rom that you don't own than it is for a new one. Did someone at Capcom call up the cps2shock guys and say "Hey listen, we are having a hard time deciding which of our older CPS2 titles should be released to the public for free, can you make the decision for us?" Yeah I thought not.
It's not that I have a problem with arcade emu because I don't. But I also don't lie to myself when I download a ROM I don't own by saying "Oh it's ok, this is an older game."
Sure, it is still illegal to distribute an older ROM. But this is entirely a different question than whether it is moral to do so. If I download a ROM for which the copyright owner has no further marketing plans, I don't think I'm lying to myself if I say that it's OK. It may be illegal, but the copyright holder is not injured in any way. In fact, the copyright holder is probably better off for having their game remain in the public consciousness, since it will create new fans of the game (in case they do decide later to rerelease it) and of the company. And if it is rerelased, then the moral thing to do would be to buy it or stop using it.
If they were truly hackers they'd be doing it at binary intersections. 1x1, 11x11 (3olat x 3olong), 111x111 (7olat x 7olong), etc.
Actually, these are numbers of the form 2^n-1 (which don't seem any more "binary" than other numbers), and there would only be 24 (or so) such points on the globe. So, not too exciting. Plus, all these points would be included in their project anyway.
MS Entourage (née Outlook Express) on the Mac also has the option to disallow network access for HTML mail. It's a great idea. In the worst case, you get an email with some broken images. It's not like I want people sending me web pages... if they want me to see their web page, they can send me a link. But it still allows the text markup. Win-win.
Eudora for the Mac (but not for PC) has an option to not download remote HTML graphics. All HTML will be displayed, and all images sent with the message are displayed, but no remote server is accessed.
First of all, I'd let someone do just about anything to me for $5B. That's quite an absurd amount of money.
The lawyers cite statistics showing that just 2.6 percent of Microsoft's approximately 22,000 employees, and just 1.6 percent of its 5,155 managers, are black. "The numbers illustrate that Microsoft is guilty of some of the most egregious discrimination in corporate America," Hoffler said.
I find this to be a bit hyperbolic. Anyone have an idea what the percentage is of black workers across the tech industry? These numbers don't indicate any malfeasance if they're in line with the rest of the industry. Maybe black people don't tend to go into this line of work, for any number of reasons. I'm not saying this is true, but it's hard to comment on MS's practices without knowing the broader picture.
Well, of course. Innovations like plumbing and sanitation take care of basic needs. Now that these needs are taken care of, all that is left is to improve our lives in more trivial ways.
Probably wouldn't work on the chronic cases, but it works every time for me & everyone I've seen use it: Block your ears with your thumbs, and your nose with your index fingers. Pick up a glass full of water with the rest of your fingers and drink it while keeping aforementioned orifices blocked. It looks completely absurd, but it works.
Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
Note he is charging $1/kb, and NOT $1/kB... bits versus bytes
Using that math, he would only be required to generate 1/1000th of that, or 800, visitors, which is well within the realm of possibility.
Are you using one of those new computers with 1000-bit bytes? A confusion between bits and bytes could only account for a factor of 8. So he'd need 100,000 visitors in any case, which is still quite high.
The Amiga had the first personal computer operating system to offer pre-emptive multitasking, allowing running programs to utilize the processor as efficiently as possible.
Of course, this isn't really true. Or at least it depends on what you mean by "efficient." Cooperative multitasking generally results in better overall performance (especially with well-behaved programs), at the cost of stability and responsiveness .
On topic, the self-winding watches are definitely still around, and not as rare as the author makes them out to be. My father has a Seiko Kinetic, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
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"I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism... at least it's an ethos."
--Walter Sobchak
But I agree that it's a shame that a jackass move by school administration only ends up costing the taxpayer.
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So, maybe the universe was created yesterday by a god who implanted memories in all of us. Or maybe I am just a brain in a jar being stimulated by electrical impulses. All I know for sure is that I exist (Je pense, donc je suis, thanks to Descartes). But what is the point of considering these possibilities when they are not in any way measurable and don't affect our experience in any way? If there is a god that is responsible for creation of the universe, it's not around any more, in any meaningful way. If it were currently influencing the universe, we could measure the effect, and the god's presence would be clear.
So the point... Sure, maybe a god caused the big bang. But who gives a damn? If it's true (which I don't believe it is), the god also provided quite a lot of evidence against its own existence and gave us the intelligence to find it. So it doesn't want us... screw it.
Ah, the argument from incredulity. Not very persuasive.--
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As for whether "their" can be used as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, it's true that dictionaries have recently (in the past few years) begun to accept it. English is indeed evolving. But it's ugly, especially in formal settings (which this is, of course, not). There's a discussion of the issue here: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=A00 42019, containing this advice: "Writers who are concerned about avoiding both grammatical and social problems are best advised to use coordinate forms such as his or her."
There's another discussion I found here: http://athena.english.vt.edu/~IDLE/Gym2/workout6/w 6.stretch2.3.html, which basically suggests that you just avoid the whole situation by pluralizing the subject or reconstructing the sentence entirely.
So we're all right, and everybody is happy. And I'm sure I made a grammatical error somwhere in that post that someone will point out.
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There's nothing like flaming a grammar flame for grammar.
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So, yes, I recognize that it's a crime, but at the same time, I feel completely morally justified. There are plenty of immorral laws out there. If you sell me a beer on Sunday, then you're a criminal (in my state, at least). Does that mean it's morally wrong?
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And any translation software you could fit in it would be pretty sorry, since it would have to fit in about 1k.
Yes, I know you're kidding.
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On topic, the self-winding watches are definitely still around, and not as rare as the author makes them out to be. My father has a Seiko Kinetic, for example.
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