I didn't realize that. Back in the day (oh, 15 years ago) I had sinus problems and figured out that I'd buy quite a bit of Sudafed over the coming months. The little blister packs were so damn expensive that I asked my sis about how she bought hers. She clued me in, so I talked to the pharmacist at Kroger and did an order for a 1000-count bottle. If I remember right, it cost about the same as 4 little boxes containing less than a hundred pills.
After a few years, I ran out and bought another one. When I tried to buy a third several years after that, I was told that it was no longer sold in bulk.
Now you tell me that it *is* still sold in bulk in some places? I'm going to have to go look again. Thanks for the headsup.
that you can't tell if the study was deliberately slanted to be alarming or if the numbers are just being interpreted that way by a headline-grubbing article author. So I want to commit slash-heresy.
Does anybody have a link to the actual study so I can read it?
Summer Glau (River from Firefly) has a nice body but her face does nothing for me. Also either she can only act one character...
I disagree. And I pine for the Firefly that could have been.
Check her out for her last 10 seconds on-screen in Serenity. For a season of episodes and 99% of the movie, she was a tortured, often dysfunctional character because of what was in her head. At the end of the movie, though, she had fulfilled her destiny (well, at least the short-term one) and all her demons were excised from her. She was now free to be the genius little girl we had seen in flashbacks, only all grown up. Just her expressions and the way she launched that ship let you know this was now someone reaching for the full flower of her existence.
And her brother was getting laid.
And tragedy had left another potential couple in the offing.
Hell, man, if there were another season of Firefly, *all* the characters would have been very different and I think Summer Glau would have done wonderful things with River. She gave us such a tantalizing glimpse.
We'll never know for sure, I guess. Phooey, phooey, phooey!
Using sticky notes to flow processes was a big deal to on one particular project I worked some years ago. The project team was given a conference room with a giant glass wall that divided it from the elevator lobby. Most people who used "the fishbowl" hated that wall; they'd close the drapes and get annoyed anytime anyone peeked in. And people did peek in; that's why it got the nickname.
I had a completely different attitude. I opened the drapes all the way and proceeded to cover that wall with sticky notes. As we held more and more meetings in there, team members got used to being watched and learned to ignore it. We developed our own code for note position and color that dictated what sort of action or task was defined on the note. Since the systems we were examining were huge and complex, we wound up with hundreds of sticky notes on the wall and, crazily enough, we could all grok it in toto.
Eventually, some of our bosses started hearing some water cooler talk about those people in the fishbowl. They started dropping by our floor and lingering in the elevator lobby. They saw our animated and intense discussions (they couldn't hear us) and took in the breathtaking complexity of our sticky note art, then left convinced that we were doing a lot of work. Now, mind you we *were* actually doing a lot of work but we could just as well have been planning where to go for lunch. The folks outside the glass had no real idea. But the impression became widespread that we were all a bunch of creative geniuses running our own skunk works.
After that project wrapped (and incidentally increased revenues by a few billion, yes, *billion* dollars), I think every one of us parlayed that air of mystery we had created into better positions.
What has radically changed in the last 6 months? That was the last time I checked and it was the same as it ever was, namely, too slow to use.
I understand proxies. I carefully read and followed all documentation I could lay my hands on. I set up a dedicated machine carefully and left it online and churning away for weeks.
I always get the same results. It's just too slow to use. Opening a page took hours if it ever happened at all. Most never happened. Getting a file never succeeded.
I want freenet to work, so I've repeated this test at least 4 times over the last several years. As of now, I've given up on freenet. It's unusable.
Unless you can tell me that something has changed, I say you're playing a cruel joke on people when you encourage them to try freenet.
I wasn't aware of a legal requirement for showing where you bought... well, just about anything short of firearms.
Huh? There's no legal requirement for showing where you bought your firearms, at least in my jurisdiction. I've bought them off guys at the range, at yard sales, estate sales, etc., and often without a paper trail. Even where there is a paper trail, as when I buy from a licensed dealer, there's no requirement that I keep any records. Assuming the existence of such a requirement makes no sense.
So, in what horrifically non-free jurisdiction do you live, anyway?
There's a problem with trying to abolish the BATFE. Some years ago, ATF abuses got so severe toward firearms license holders and other gun owners that Congressional hearing were held. Congress was leaning toward exactly the sort of breakup you describe. FBI quashed the whole idea by throwing a fit.
Special Agents in the BATFE are, you must understand, essentially the bottom of the barrel of federal law enforcement. Badge-heavy and generally less than competent, the guys who get a badge there are the ones who couldn't get a job with any other agency (except for a few *really* small agencies, like the Railroad Retirement Board). The FBI was mortified that they would be forced to take on board a large number of SAs who were such fuckups. FBI screamed; Congress deferred. Congress agreed not to poison FBI ranks with those clowns and instead gave the ATF some slaps on the wrist and a bit of a reorganization. And everybody went back to work.
Frankly, the only competent SA with BATF that I've ever had a chance to talk to (we used to have the occasional casual conversation over morning caffeine at the office building deli and it was easy to see that this guy was quietly, strongly competent and completely unlike his cowboy-wannabe fellow SAs) was killed in the raid at Waco. BATFE has plenty of sharp folks as, for example, examiners on the tech side but their in-the-field SAs are a remarkably "Reno 911"-esque bunch, just minus all the humorous stuff.
What agency do you work for? Whoever they are, they're over a year late instituting the White House directive that mandates whole disk encryption on any computer that leaves the office.
I just hope athletes don't start thinking about replacing their naturla legs to get 'a leg up'!
You're way late to the party. Athletes have dreamed of this kind of thing since forever. In 1986 I was in charge of an Olympic trials event and had a fascinating, horrifying talk with a very sincere pistol shooter who was seriously investigating the potential of amputating several fingers to enhance his performance. Pistol shooters, he explained to me, needed their middle finger to hold the pistol and their index finger to press the trigger. Everything else on their hand was just a collection of useless muscles that trembled, had to be controlled, and hurt performance. He wanted to slice off his thumb on a line from the side of his index finger to his wrist. He also wanted to slice off his ring finger and pinkie on a line from the webbing between his middle and ring finger to the outside of his wrist.
The guy was serious. He never did it but if he had thought he could do it without being sanctioned by the International Shooting Union, he would have started interviewing doctors. Sanctions and the difficulty of finding a doctor willing to do something so unethical were apparently the things that stopped him.
Since that time, I've heard similar (though not as sincere) speeches from a number of athletes.
When asthmatics started competing well in Biathalon, other competitors started coming down with asthma, and taking beta blockers to reduce attacks. And also slow the heart rate to improve shooting accuracy.
You're going way back. The last time I was involved in Olympic sports administration was the late 80s and by then shooters had already gone past crude beta blockers and on to more sophisticated and less detectable drugs. So when did the biathlon community catch on to this?
The rules would have to be changed to make the winner the most flexible being. ie. No medals for winning at a sport, but only combinations of sports.
Events, plural, actually. Try:
Decathalon - mens sport with 10 events: 100 m, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 m, 110 m hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin throw, 1500 m
Heptathalon - womens outdoor sport with 7 events: 100 m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200 m, long jump, javelin, 800 m
Heptathalon (again) - mens indoor version with 7 events: 60 m, long jump, shot put, high jump, 60 m hurdles, pole vault, 1000 m
Pentathalon - ancient mens sport with 5 events: long jump, discus, javelin, a sprint, wrestling
Modern Pentathalon - mens sport with 5 events: épée, pistol, 200 m freestyle swimming, horseback show jumping, cross-country run
So which of those is your pick for the right way to judge the ability of an enhanced athlete? (I love modern pentathalon.) Or would you come up with a new collection of events and give it a new name?
I've been down this road before. My sister was a dealer in collectible Barbie dolls. She wanted to do a calendar showing dolls in various settings. Mattel threw a fit. Ultimately, Mattel agreed that she could use pictures of things she owned (the dolls) but that she couldn't use the text "Mattel" or "Barbie" except in a small disclaimer. So the calendar got published as a "11.25-inch Fashion Doll" calendar. In the Barbie world, "11.25-inch Fashion Doll" is code for "Barbie."
I'd guess in the instant case the publication could happen if they eschewed the use of "Ford" or any model designation. Kinda defeats the purpose if you have to leave the word "Mustang" off a calendar of Mustangs, but there you go.
People have no idea that a thing, software, can be "free as in speech." I don't even go there.
But when I tell people the software is free as in "you don't have to pay any money, you can copy to as many computers as you want, you can pass it along," they tend to look at me sideways. They are deeply suspicious. They just don't believe it. Generally, they voice two objections. The first is "If it's free, it must be crap." The second is "What's the catch? It can't *really* be free."
At that point, it's easy to reel them in. I just appeal to their natural skepticism, make them think their view of the world is especially insightful, and feed their greed. Here's how: "No, actually, it's not crap; it's better than the stuff they charge money for. Ya see, the people who write this free software give it away to everyone so that people will use it. Every once in a while, the head of I.T. in some big company tries it, likes it, and installs it in the company. Then the company will need some customization or training or other support so they'll call the people that wrote it and give them money to help out. The software writers make big money providing support, the companies save a lot of money because free software plus paid support is still cheaper than paying the ungodly cost of MS Office for every employee, and as this sort of minor, unintended side effect, regular folks like us get to acquire and use really high quality software for no money at all. Ain't that cool?"
The light bulb clicks on over their head. Their eyes furtively dart from side to side. Suddenly, they act like they just found a Rembrandt accidentally thrown out in the trash. They join me in the conspiracy to rip off the man (or so they think) and gladly take the CD that I'm offering.
No, it's not 100% accurate and it does tastelessly appeal to the base instincts of the mark. It's even comparable to an end-user marketing strategy commonly used to push crack. But it gets people to use (most often) a free AV product or (occasionally) OpenOffice, AbiWord, Firefox, et. al. They can learn more deeply later; I just want them to start using the stuff in the here and now. I want them to get used to the notion of not paying for software. This approach has had the most success for me.
All those people who bought base-configured Asus Eee PCs have so little money invested that I would expect quite a number to upgrade when the larger-screen version comes out. So what will happen to those old machines? I love my Eee but I can't help thinking that by the end of the year, I'll have a different one and this one will be sitting somewhere with an ethernet cable connecting it to my network and 3 USB-connected hard drives hanging off the sides. Sure, performance through the USB connections means that network file access will be slow, but for archiving away media files or other simple home user tasks, it's enough for me.
I'm betting that by next fall, Ebay will have a bunch of base-level Eees for cheap. When that happens, people are going to find all sorts of ingenious ways to repurpose them. A home file server is just one.
"You take the punishment we are dishing out or we turn these photos over to the police. Which do you prefer?"
I hope it wasn't couched in those terms. I've been down this road in another context. At least in my state, it is illegal to coerce someone in that way. You can't tell someone "Do what I want or I'll turn you in to the police." If someone has done something illegal, you can report it or not report it at your option for most crimes. (There are some mandatory reporting exceptions.) But you can't blackmail someone with the threat of doing so.
I hope they said "We have decided to punish you for breaking the rules. We have decided not to turn these photos over to the police. Those two decisions have nothing to do with each other." That would be legal and reasonable.
Why should a concealed carry permit give you special privileges with queue jumping at the airport?
I've never been allowed to jump a queue. That's not what I said. What happens is much more subtle. The carry permit demonstrates that I've been through an extensive background check, more than a little training, and some testing. It demonstrates that I'm capable of dealing in a mature and law-abiding fashion with a complex system of rules. It says to the ticket agent "This guy is OK. He's proven himself." Once that message gets through to the person I'm dealing with, they treat me with more respect, listen to me, problems are more easily overcome, suspicions are allayed. Almost as if by magic, everything just seems to go smoother and, therefore, notably quicker.
Also what is to stop a terrorist getting one of these permits? In case you've forgotten the 9-11 hijackers were all training to be pilots so it isn't that unlikely terrorists could get a concealed carry permit.
It depends on the state. In my state, it would be quite unlikely. The criteria that must be met include citizenship and an extensive background check. Even if they could technically qualify for a permit because they are a citizen with no criminal record, no terrorist wants to put himself into the system in that way, to raise his profile by demanding of the police "Here are my fingerprints and all my personal information. Go investigate me." That's not gonna happen. Terrorists don't want to be noticed until they get around to doing their crimes.
No, permit carriers are the good guys. They're so above-board, they don't mind being investigated. That's not a terrorist. In fact, that's not someone I (if I'm working security or the ticket counter at the airport) need to hassle or worry about. That's someone who just gets an "OK, this guy is all right, have a nice day, next, please" at the airport. Logically so.
I don't think guns are the answer to aeroplane security at all.
I agree. I never said otherwise. However, I would not be at all nervous if I knew that some number of my fellow passengers were permit carriers and armed. Wouldn't bother me a bit.
I my home state of Texas, when I use a concealed carry permit as ID in the airport, I get a pass on lots of things. Most people down here understand that the permit means I've been investigated and have demonstrated some self-discipline in a controlled setting. The checks I get are less extensive. The ticket agents move me through faster with less scrutiny. All that is perfectly logical.
I did run into one ticket agent (with Continental, a heavily accented guy who just didn't seem to "get it") who refused to accept it. I was traveling with my mom and sister who both pleaded with me to just move on because we were running late. To my shame, I did. I should have taken the time to get the guy's supervisor and have my say; I feel sure the ticket agent would have gotten a useful education from the confrontation.
...the absolute highest quality code was the cream-of-the-crop proprietary, closed source code from places that make things like fly-by-wire systems
I wish I could find the link but I remember being very impressed by an article about a code shop that did the flight controls for the space shuttle. There was some amazing dedication to quality going on there.
Because the Consumer Electronics market is so wildly unfocused?
Yeah, that's certainly part of it. But there are other factors that lead to the show being diluted. Some people go who really have no reason to. The car audio guys, for example, would reach far more of their buyers if they stayed at SEMA shows. And lots of people show up for reasons I can't fathom. Maybe there's some tenuous connection between iPod cover sales and consumer electronics. I'll grant that. But I actually saw an exhibitor whose product was those toy birds that stand next to a glass of water and continually bend over to dip their bill in the water. They belonged at a toy show, not CES. But CES has gotten so big that lots of exhibitors are just there because they think everybody is there. If they were honest, they wouldn't be able to articulate a reason for going.
...if products aren't being "shown in more depth" I'd imagine that's the exhibitors fault and not CES's.
I disagree. With the crush of show-goers, it's tough to see anything in depth. There are just too many people waiting, pushing, crowding to the front to see what you've got. If any real business is going to get done, you need to have a booth large enough to set up a walled-off office. At minimum, you need enough space to have some tables, separate from your product, so that you can sit down away from the crush and talk business. Those basic 8-foot booths where someone puts two chairs along the back curtain with a small table between them are, imo, completely useless for actually having a conversation and making a sale. Many to most exhibitors don't/can't spend spend enough money to get enough space. Others go even further and do the whole hotel suite thing.
My question is why do companies do the Hotel Suite thing?
Three things I can think of, offhand. 1 - See above. 2 - High end audio dealers need a quiet space to demo their stuff and the general show floor is anything but quiet. 3 - Parties that make a good impression on your customers and partners. Among my old friends, the last time I was in a corporate suite was in the wee hours after the AVN awards. The party was great right up until the point where they made the announcement "If you're not talent or you're not here with talent, you gotta leave now. The orgy's about to start.", followed immediately by security goons assisting the fat and dateless behind-the-scenes guys, like me, rather quickly out the door.
Can they not afford a booth on the floor?
Some can and do the suite in addition to the booth. Some can't afford it. A useful booth requires not just more cash but also more people to run. With a hotel suite, you can close the door if things get too crazy or if you want to pay special attention to one buyer. Some even close the door at lunch (not too many, though).
Take this with a grain of salt; it's been years since I was in the porn industry and actually got paid to go to CES so my knowledge may be out of date. But the adult section of CES (that once was the main draw for lots of attendees and certainly was an entertaining break for 99% of them) got too big and flashy, questioned the need to be a part of CES, and broke away years ago. Their completely separate gathering has been quite a success, from what I hear.
I've never understood why CES was so unfocused. Back when I went every year, there was the car stuff section, the adult section, the high end audio section (usually at a completely different location), the crap audio section, the home theatre section, the incredibly weird and useless lo-buck gadget section, and on and on. Lots of those things had nothing in common with anyone else and could have existed as their own (often large) trade show. CES is just too big and unfocused. If anyone is a big enough retailer to carry all the stuff that shows at CES, then they're big enough that they don't need to go to CES; the vendors would gladly come to them. Better to break it up and have people going to smaller shows where the products they're actually interested in are shown in more depth.
I'm a desktop tech so networking isn't my thing. But I did glean just enough from my last IP fundamentals class to decide that IPv6 was a good thing though probably a ways away.
The instructor didn't spend much time on v6 but he did make a comment that I found intriguing. He remarked that once IPv6 was universal, nothing on the net would be able to hide, that all those "underground" happenings (I suppose he meant things like botnets and the way the Russian Business Network works) would be easily traceable.
True? If so, I'm conflicted. The notion of having a lawless frontier, even if just a virtual one, always struck me as a good thing on the whole. That's where the crazy stuff and the new thinking comes from. Yeah, there are bad things that come along with it, but the American experience with the opening of the West tends to shape my viewpoint that having lawless places for fringe elements to hide is ultimately a good thing.
So, will IPv6 flush out all the bad guys, giving them no place to hide?
...Guns...don't really have any real use other than killing stuff.
Winning Olympic medals doesn't count? Hunting doesn't count? Collecting them as art, records of mechanical achievement, and historical artifacts doesn't count?
...you don't use a handgun while hunting...
Tell that to the tens of thousands of handgun hunters in the U.S.
...you don't need a fully automatic machine gun either.
I don't need a car that goes over 70mph. I don't need more than 300 square feet in which to live. But I like having them and I don't hurt anyone with them. Legally-owned, full-auto weapons, in the U.S., are never used in crime. (OK, there have been, like, 3 instances in the last 50 years. Those are dismissible as statistical anomalies.) They are, however, a whole bunch of fun if you can afford to keep them fed. Google "Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot", look at a few pictures and vids, read about the event, and then tell me, honestly, doesn't that look like fun? So what's wrong with some loud, harmless fun?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize that. Back in the day (oh, 15 years ago) I had sinus problems and figured out that I'd buy quite a bit of Sudafed over the coming months. The little blister packs were so damn expensive that I asked my sis about how she bought hers. She clued me in, so I talked to the pharmacist at Kroger and did an order for a 1000-count bottle. If I remember right, it cost about the same as 4 little boxes containing less than a hundred pills.
After a few years, I ran out and bought another one. When I tried to buy a third several years after that, I was told that it was no longer sold in bulk.
Now you tell me that it *is* still sold in bulk in some places? I'm going to have to go look again. Thanks for the headsup.
that you can't tell if the study was deliberately slanted to be alarming or if the numbers are just being interpreted that way by a headline-grubbing article author. So I want to commit slash-heresy.
Does anybody have a link to the actual study so I can read it?
I disagree. And I pine for the Firefly that could have been.
Check her out for her last 10 seconds on-screen in Serenity. For a season of episodes and 99% of the movie, she was a tortured, often dysfunctional character because of what was in her head. At the end of the movie, though, she had fulfilled her destiny (well, at least the short-term one) and all her demons were excised from her. She was now free to be the genius little girl we had seen in flashbacks, only all grown up. Just her expressions and the way she launched that ship let you know this was now someone reaching for the full flower of her existence.
And her brother was getting laid.
And tragedy had left another potential couple in the offing.
Hell, man, if there were another season of Firefly, *all* the characters would have been very different and I think Summer Glau would have done wonderful things with River. She gave us such a tantalizing glimpse.
We'll never know for sure, I guess. Phooey, phooey, phooey!
Using sticky notes to flow processes was a big deal to on one particular project I worked some years ago. The project team was given a conference room with a giant glass wall that divided it from the elevator lobby. Most people who used "the fishbowl" hated that wall; they'd close the drapes and get annoyed anytime anyone peeked in. And people did peek in; that's why it got the nickname.
I had a completely different attitude. I opened the drapes all the way and proceeded to cover that wall with sticky notes. As we held more and more meetings in there, team members got used to being watched and learned to ignore it. We developed our own code for note position and color that dictated what sort of action or task was defined on the note. Since the systems we were examining were huge and complex, we wound up with hundreds of sticky notes on the wall and, crazily enough, we could all grok it in toto.
Eventually, some of our bosses started hearing some water cooler talk about those people in the fishbowl. They started dropping by our floor and lingering in the elevator lobby. They saw our animated and intense discussions (they couldn't hear us) and took in the breathtaking complexity of our sticky note art, then left convinced that we were doing a lot of work. Now, mind you we *were* actually doing a lot of work but we could just as well have been planning where to go for lunch. The folks outside the glass had no real idea. But the impression became widespread that we were all a bunch of creative geniuses running our own skunk works.
After that project wrapped (and incidentally increased revenues by a few billion, yes, *billion* dollars), I think every one of us parlayed that air of mystery we had created into better positions.
Sticky notes. I love 'em.
I hadn't heard of that. I guess I'm going to have to test it again.
Sigh.
What has radically changed in the last 6 months? That was the last time I checked and it was the same as it ever was, namely, too slow to use.
I understand proxies. I carefully read and followed all documentation I could lay my hands on. I set up a dedicated machine carefully and left it online and churning away for weeks.
I always get the same results. It's just too slow to use. Opening a page took hours if it ever happened at all. Most never happened. Getting a file never succeeded.
I want freenet to work, so I've repeated this test at least 4 times over the last several years. As of now, I've given up on freenet. It's unusable.
Unless you can tell me that something has changed, I say you're playing a cruel joke on people when you encourage them to try freenet.
Huh? There's no legal requirement for showing where you bought your firearms, at least in my jurisdiction. I've bought them off guys at the range, at yard sales, estate sales, etc., and often without a paper trail. Even where there is a paper trail, as when I buy from a licensed dealer, there's no requirement that I keep any records. Assuming the existence of such a requirement makes no sense.
So, in what horrifically non-free jurisdiction do you live, anyway?
There's a problem with trying to abolish the BATFE. Some years ago, ATF abuses got so severe toward firearms license holders and other gun owners that Congressional hearing were held. Congress was leaning toward exactly the sort of breakup you describe. FBI quashed the whole idea by throwing a fit.
Special Agents in the BATFE are, you must understand, essentially the bottom of the barrel of federal law enforcement. Badge-heavy and generally less than competent, the guys who get a badge there are the ones who couldn't get a job with any other agency (except for a few *really* small agencies, like the Railroad Retirement Board). The FBI was mortified that they would be forced to take on board a large number of SAs who were such fuckups. FBI screamed; Congress deferred. Congress agreed not to poison FBI ranks with those clowns and instead gave the ATF some slaps on the wrist and a bit of a reorganization. And everybody went back to work.
Frankly, the only competent SA with BATF that I've ever had a chance to talk to (we used to have the occasional casual conversation over morning caffeine at the office building deli and it was easy to see that this guy was quietly, strongly competent and completely unlike his cowboy-wannabe fellow SAs) was killed in the raid at Waco. BATFE has plenty of sharp folks as, for example, examiners on the tech side but their in-the-field SAs are a remarkably "Reno 911"-esque bunch, just minus all the humorous stuff.
What agency do you work for? Whoever they are, they're over a year late instituting the White House directive that mandates whole disk encryption on any computer that leaves the office.
Serously, what agency do you work for?
That's a helluva list. Thanks for the thought you put into it.
You're way late to the party. Athletes have dreamed of this kind of thing since forever. In 1986 I was in charge of an Olympic trials event and had a fascinating, horrifying talk with a very sincere pistol shooter who was seriously investigating the potential of amputating several fingers to enhance his performance. Pistol shooters, he explained to me, needed their middle finger to hold the pistol and their index finger to press the trigger. Everything else on their hand was just a collection of useless muscles that trembled, had to be controlled, and hurt performance. He wanted to slice off his thumb on a line from the side of his index finger to his wrist. He also wanted to slice off his ring finger and pinkie on a line from the webbing between his middle and ring finger to the outside of his wrist.
The guy was serious. He never did it but if he had thought he could do it without being sanctioned by the International Shooting Union, he would have started interviewing doctors. Sanctions and the difficulty of finding a doctor willing to do something so unethical were apparently the things that stopped him.
Since that time, I've heard similar (though not as sincere) speeches from a number of athletes.
You're going way back. The last time I was involved in Olympic sports administration was the late 80s and by then shooters had already gone past crude beta blockers and on to more sophisticated and less detectable drugs. So when did the biathlon community catch on to this?
Events, plural, actually. Try:
Decathalon - mens sport with 10 events: 100 m, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 m, 110 m hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin throw, 1500 m
Heptathalon - womens outdoor sport with 7 events: 100 m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200 m, long jump, javelin, 800 m
Heptathalon (again) - mens indoor version with 7 events: 60 m, long jump, shot put, high jump, 60 m hurdles, pole vault, 1000 m
Pentathalon - ancient mens sport with 5 events: long jump, discus, javelin, a sprint, wrestling
Modern Pentathalon - mens sport with 5 events: épée, pistol, 200 m freestyle swimming, horseback show jumping, cross-country run
So which of those is your pick for the right way to judge the ability of an enhanced athlete? (I love modern pentathalon.) Or would you come up with a new collection of events and give it a new name?
Interesting topic, this.
I've been down this road before. My sister was a dealer in collectible Barbie dolls. She wanted to do a calendar showing dolls in various settings. Mattel threw a fit. Ultimately, Mattel agreed that she could use pictures of things she owned (the dolls) but that she couldn't use the text "Mattel" or "Barbie" except in a small disclaimer. So the calendar got published as a "11.25-inch Fashion Doll" calendar. In the Barbie world, "11.25-inch Fashion Doll" is code for "Barbie."
I'd guess in the instant case the publication could happen if they eschewed the use of "Ford" or any model designation. Kinda defeats the purpose if you have to leave the word "Mustang" off a calendar of Mustangs, but there you go.
Not really. That's a matter of opinion.
This post says it far better than I can.
People have no idea that a thing, software, can be "free as in speech." I don't even go there.
But when I tell people the software is free as in "you don't have to pay any money, you can copy to as many computers as you want, you can pass it along," they tend to look at me sideways. They are deeply suspicious. They just don't believe it. Generally, they voice two objections. The first is "If it's free, it must be crap." The second is "What's the catch? It can't *really* be free."
At that point, it's easy to reel them in. I just appeal to their natural skepticism, make them think their view of the world is especially insightful, and feed their greed. Here's how: "No, actually, it's not crap; it's better than the stuff they charge money for. Ya see, the people who write this free software give it away to everyone so that people will use it. Every once in a while, the head of I.T. in some big company tries it, likes it, and installs it in the company. Then the company will need some customization or training or other support so they'll call the people that wrote it and give them money to help out. The software writers make big money providing support, the companies save a lot of money because free software plus paid support is still cheaper than paying the ungodly cost of MS Office for every employee, and as this sort of minor, unintended side effect, regular folks like us get to acquire and use really high quality software for no money at all. Ain't that cool?"
The light bulb clicks on over their head. Their eyes furtively dart from side to side. Suddenly, they act like they just found a Rembrandt accidentally thrown out in the trash. They join me in the conspiracy to rip off the man (or so they think) and gladly take the CD that I'm offering.
No, it's not 100% accurate and it does tastelessly appeal to the base instincts of the mark. It's even comparable to an end-user marketing strategy commonly used to push crack. But it gets people to use (most often) a free AV product or (occasionally) OpenOffice, AbiWord, Firefox, et. al. They can learn more deeply later; I just want them to start using the stuff in the here and now. I want them to get used to the notion of not paying for software. This approach has had the most success for me.
All those people who bought base-configured Asus Eee PCs have so little money invested that I would expect quite a number to upgrade when the larger-screen version comes out. So what will happen to those old machines? I love my Eee but I can't help thinking that by the end of the year, I'll have a different one and this one will be sitting somewhere with an ethernet cable connecting it to my network and 3 USB-connected hard drives hanging off the sides. Sure, performance through the USB connections means that network file access will be slow, but for archiving away media files or other simple home user tasks, it's enough for me.
I'm betting that by next fall, Ebay will have a bunch of base-level Eees for cheap. When that happens, people are going to find all sorts of ingenious ways to repurpose them. A home file server is just one.
I hope it wasn't couched in those terms. I've been down this road in another context. At least in my state, it is illegal to coerce someone in that way. You can't tell someone "Do what I want or I'll turn you in to the police." If someone has done something illegal, you can report it or not report it at your option for most crimes. (There are some mandatory reporting exceptions.) But you can't blackmail someone with the threat of doing so.
I hope they said "We have decided to punish you for breaking the rules. We have decided not to turn these photos over to the police. Those two decisions have nothing to do with each other." That would be legal and reasonable.
IANAL, etc., of course.
I've never been allowed to jump a queue. That's not what I said. What happens is much more subtle. The carry permit demonstrates that I've been through an extensive background check, more than a little training, and some testing. It demonstrates that I'm capable of dealing in a mature and law-abiding fashion with a complex system of rules. It says to the ticket agent "This guy is OK. He's proven himself." Once that message gets through to the person I'm dealing with, they treat me with more respect, listen to me, problems are more easily overcome, suspicions are allayed. Almost as if by magic, everything just seems to go smoother and, therefore, notably quicker.
It depends on the state. In my state, it would be quite unlikely. The criteria that must be met include citizenship and an extensive background check. Even if they could technically qualify for a permit because they are a citizen with no criminal record, no terrorist wants to put himself into the system in that way, to raise his profile by demanding of the police "Here are my fingerprints and all my personal information. Go investigate me." That's not gonna happen. Terrorists don't want to be noticed until they get around to doing their crimes.
No, permit carriers are the good guys. They're so above-board, they don't mind being investigated. That's not a terrorist. In fact, that's not someone I (if I'm working security or the ticket counter at the airport) need to hassle or worry about. That's someone who just gets an "OK, this guy is all right, have a nice day, next, please" at the airport. Logically so.
I agree. I never said otherwise. However, I would not be at all nervous if I knew that some number of my fellow passengers were permit carriers and armed. Wouldn't bother me a bit.
I my home state of Texas, when I use a concealed carry permit as ID in the airport, I get a pass on lots of things. Most people down here understand that the permit means I've been investigated and have demonstrated some self-discipline in a controlled setting. The checks I get are less extensive. The ticket agents move me through faster with less scrutiny. All that is perfectly logical.
I did run into one ticket agent (with Continental, a heavily accented guy who just didn't seem to "get it") who refused to accept it. I was traveling with my mom and sister who both pleaded with me to just move on because we were running late. To my shame, I did. I should have taken the time to get the guy's supervisor and have my say; I feel sure the ticket agent would have gotten a useful education from the confrontation.
I wish I could find the link but I remember being very impressed by an article about a code shop that did the flight controls for the space shuttle. There was some amazing dedication to quality going on there.
Yeah, that's certainly part of it. But there are other factors that lead to the show being diluted. Some people go who really have no reason to. The car audio guys, for example, would reach far more of their buyers if they stayed at SEMA shows. And lots of people show up for reasons I can't fathom. Maybe there's some tenuous connection between iPod cover sales and consumer electronics. I'll grant that. But I actually saw an exhibitor whose product was those toy birds that stand next to a glass of water and continually bend over to dip their bill in the water. They belonged at a toy show, not CES. But CES has gotten so big that lots of exhibitors are just there because they think everybody is there. If they were honest, they wouldn't be able to articulate a reason for going.
I disagree. With the crush of show-goers, it's tough to see anything in depth. There are just too many people waiting, pushing, crowding to the front to see what you've got. If any real business is going to get done, you need to have a booth large enough to set up a walled-off office. At minimum, you need enough space to have some tables, separate from your product, so that you can sit down away from the crush and talk business. Those basic 8-foot booths where someone puts two chairs along the back curtain with a small table between them are, imo, completely useless for actually having a conversation and making a sale. Many to most exhibitors don't/can't spend spend enough money to get enough space. Others go even further and do the whole hotel suite thing.
Three things I can think of, offhand. 1 - See above. 2 - High end audio dealers need a quiet space to demo their stuff and the general show floor is anything but quiet. 3 - Parties that make a good impression on your customers and partners. Among my old friends, the last time I was in a corporate suite was in the wee hours after the AVN awards. The party was great right up until the point where they made the announcement "If you're not talent or you're not here with talent, you gotta leave now. The orgy's about to start.", followed immediately by security goons assisting the fat and dateless behind-the-scenes guys, like me, rather quickly out the door.
Some can and do the suite in addition to the booth. Some can't afford it. A useful booth requires not just more cash but also more people to run. With a hotel suite, you can close the door if things get too crazy or if you want to pay special attention to one buyer. Some even close the door at lunch (not too many, though).
That's certainly part of it.
Take this with a grain of salt; it's been years since I was in the porn industry and actually got paid to go to CES so my knowledge may be out of date. But the adult section of CES (that once was the main draw for lots of attendees and certainly was an entertaining break for 99% of them) got too big and flashy, questioned the need to be a part of CES, and broke away years ago. Their completely separate gathering has been quite a success, from what I hear.
I've never understood why CES was so unfocused. Back when I went every year, there was the car stuff section, the adult section, the high end audio section (usually at a completely different location), the crap audio section, the home theatre section, the incredibly weird and useless lo-buck gadget section, and on and on. Lots of those things had nothing in common with anyone else and could have existed as their own (often large) trade show. CES is just too big and unfocused. If anyone is a big enough retailer to carry all the stuff that shows at CES, then they're big enough that they don't need to go to CES; the vendors would gladly come to them. Better to break it up and have people going to smaller shows where the products they're actually interested in are shown in more depth.
I'm a desktop tech so networking isn't my thing. But I did glean just enough from my last IP fundamentals class to decide that IPv6 was a good thing though probably a ways away.
The instructor didn't spend much time on v6 but he did make a comment that I found intriguing. He remarked that once IPv6 was universal, nothing on the net would be able to hide, that all those "underground" happenings (I suppose he meant things like botnets and the way the Russian Business Network works) would be easily traceable.
True? If so, I'm conflicted. The notion of having a lawless frontier, even if just a virtual one, always struck me as a good thing on the whole. That's where the crazy stuff and the new thinking comes from. Yeah, there are bad things that come along with it, but the American experience with the opening of the West tends to shape my viewpoint that having lawless places for fringe elements to hide is ultimately a good thing.
So, will IPv6 flush out all the bad guys, giving them no place to hide?
Winning Olympic medals doesn't count? Hunting doesn't count? Collecting them as art, records of mechanical achievement, and historical artifacts doesn't count?
Tell that to the tens of thousands of handgun hunters in the U.S.
I don't need a car that goes over 70mph. I don't need more than 300 square feet in which to live. But I like having them and I don't hurt anyone with them. Legally-owned, full-auto weapons, in the U.S., are never used in crime. (OK, there have been, like, 3 instances in the last 50 years. Those are dismissible as statistical anomalies.) They are, however, a whole bunch of fun if you can afford to keep them fed. Google "Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot", look at a few pictures and vids, read about the event, and then tell me, honestly, doesn't that look like fun? So what's wrong with some loud, harmless fun?