If I had a time machine, I would go back to the 1787 and browbeat the Philadelphia Convention delegates into including a "vote of no confidence" into the U.S. Constitution. It could be applied to either the executive or legislative branch (or both) and require an immediate new election rather than waiting for the current term to expire.
You can usually gauge the strength of someone's position in a debate by how quickly they bring out the strawmen to knock down. The first two items in their "rebuttal" ("New top-level domain will not solve the phishing problem once and for all, so it's not even worth considering." and "But.com works just fine!") are pretty transparent misrepresentations/exaggerations of the arguments made against their proposal.
The question of what a person chooses to read or not read is exactly the opposite of whether someone else has the power to enforce their own choice upon him.
There are two kinds of censorship:
1) The kind done by governmental bodies, which has the force of law, and is often constrained itself by "free speech" guarantees. That's de jure censorship.
2) The kind done by private entities, which can be legally circumvented, but which can go beyond what the government is allowed to do. That's de facto censorship.
Each of these is a Bad Thing. If the government is non-democratic, de jure censorship is inherently destructive to the betterment of society, and infringes on the rights of the individual, because there's no way to effectively challenge it. If the private entity is a monopoly or has insufficient competition*, or if it is highly influential (e.g. religious bodies), de facto censorship can be just as bad, for the same reason. So saying "that's not censorship; it's not the government" is missing the point, and offering rather cold comfort to anyone who has had their work suppressed or their reading/entertainment options limited by self-appointed censors.
*Whether that applies is this case is certainly subject to debate, and I don't have a strong opinion on that point; I'm talking about the general principle.
I'm sure your daughter is both smart and adorable, and will grow up to be a great {climatologist/homemaker/supermodel/general}. But I wouldn't assume that all of the behavior you describes reflects conscious analytical thinking. At least some of it can be explained by simple conditioning, and many of the more intelligent non-human mammals - e.g. my family's dog - exhibit similarly complex patterns.
A scientist is someone who tries to learn things that nobody else knows yet.
He tries things to see if they do what he thinks they'll do, and if they don't, he figures out why.
As for your job in particular, it sounds like you figure out how people can tell whether they're upside down, and whether you can trick them into thinking they are. Tell the kids you tried putting upside-down photos in front of people and that didn't fool them, so you're trying to figure out what would do it. See what they say about that. (Hint: every suggestion they give, no matter how ineffective you know it'll be... will be brilliant. Because as far as they know, no one's ever tried it, and they came up with it out of nothing but their own imagination.)
It's not clear what exactly this will do for the structure, since it's already owned by HP and it already very well restored to its original glory.
What is will do is to protect the garage from HP. Even if the current management considers an historic landmark, there's no guarantee that future administrations will. Suppose in 2073 the company gets purchased by some Albanian-based conglomerate for its perpetual patent portfolio, lays off the remaining 538 U.S. employees, and tries to sell the property to a high-rise low-income housing developer. Being on the National Register would make it harder for them to do that.
Maybe there are more appropriate ways to pay your respects that actually mean something..
It's symbolic. To many sentient beings, symbols mean something.
Re:4 Minutes in Space
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Scotty Scooped Up
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· Score: 4, Informative
The rocket was already going (for other reasons), so the trip was already paid for. Doing a special beyond-orbital shot just to send someone's ashes out there would be... well, it would equal the cost of building and launching an entire larger-than-usual rocket.
This reminds of a situation going on over at Deviant Art. (For those unfamiliar, it's a mutual admiration society where mostly-amateur artists post their drawings so that their peers can tell them how !r0x0r! they are.) An artist I'm acquainted with noticed this guy who traces (not very well) professional illustrators' work and claims it as his own, sometimes selling the pieces for a few dollars. So she posts several comments pointing out what he's doing, and Deviant Art's response is to kick her of the system, for supposedly harassing him. They're so skittish about libel that not even truthful and factual criticism is allowed.
Not that it actually justifies draconian legislation like this, but I don't think this would be happening if so many people weren't acting as if copyright had no merit whatsoever. It's no coincidence that this garbage never made its way into law before "file-sharing" became ubiquitous. Completely disregarding flawed-but-reasonable laws (e.g. pay someone for your music) evidently encourages fundamentally flawed, unreasonable ones.
I've almost exclusively used mobile phones since about 2000 (me@14),
So you've never really used landlines. That's kind of my point: you don't have the frame of reference and expectations that those of us who've used wired phones with full-sized handsets for 30+ years have.
I live in the Third World country where you can't sit through an hour of television without seeing a mobile phone service doing a skit about dropped calls, imaginary network techs, or asking "can you hear me now?" It's the U.S., of course.
"there appears to be little doubt at this point that the traditional landline will be joining rotary dials and party lines as a relic of the telecommunications industry"
Only when/if they fix the inherent problems that currently plague wireless telecom. If you care about being able to hear and be heard, and for your phone to Just Work when you want it to (rather than being dependent on how the ionosphere's behaving today and battery charge), there are still good reasons for holding onto a landline. Wire has benefits that - in many situations - outweigh the benefits of wireless.
Yes, I am over 30... thanks for asking. I'm a member of the "hear a pin drop" generation of telephony users, whose standards appear to be a bit higher than the kids', and who just might have a bit of perspective that the under-30 set has yet to achieve. Don't get me wrong: I have and use a cell phone. But I have and use a landline more often, because I've come to depend on the features it offers... and which wireless does not.
Maybe the teens of today will change their standards when their hearing starts to deteriorate. Maybe they'll just never know what they're missing... and not miss it. I don't know. But I do know that you'll have to pry my wired handset from my cold, dead fingers. And I don't plan for that to happen for another 40-50 years.
Have you actually done this, or is this just fantasizing? When I was hired, the job description was not Bastard Lab Operator From Hell, nor was I given a staff of 40FTE to cover all of our labs during all of the hours they're open, so I've had to go with configurations that are actually convenient for students to get their work done without hand-holding. Setting up policies that discourage students from backing up their files regularly is not any way I'd want to run college labs. With good anti-malware software in place and restricted user accounts, I get by pretty well. It's just that this U3 crapware is a disruptive nuisance.
USB sticks (and other portable HDs) are a PITA for labs or managed environments.
So are users, but it doesn't make any sense to ban those either. What kind of lab doesn't need removable media... other than maybe a web browser farm? Our students use our labs to create files, which they have to take with them when they leave. (Yes, they have some file server space, but that's not permanent storage and would simply delay the need for using removable media.) The use of flash drives, portable hard drives, etc. is the whole freakin' purpose of our computer labs.
The problem isn't just how to get rid of the crapware, but how to prevent it from begging to install itself in the first place. I want the ability to erase the ROM. In my experience, people don't buy these U3 drives for the software; they buy them oblivious about it: because it was the first drive that caught their eye in the store, or because some salescritter told them it was "the best".
I don't know whether to cheer that the U3 flash drives are going away, or to tremble in fear of what these new ones will do.
I manage college computer labs, and those damn U3 drives have been a recurring hassle. They try to auto-install software on every Windows machine they come into contact with, and require two drive letters (which doesn't work so well in an environment where several key letters are already in use). When used on a Mac, they mount an extra pseudo CD on the desktop, loaded with software that's obviously (but not to many students) utterly useless. If this is in any way an extension or "improvement" upon that, then my job is about to get even harder.
I guess the difference between "an idea" and "the creative expression of an idea" is lost on you. For example, every sci-fi fan out there has "an idea" for a great book or a cool movie. They're worthless. It's the people who actually make that book or movie that deserve some consideration for their efforts.
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If I had a time machine, I would go back to the 1787 and browbeat the Philadelphia Convention delegates into including a "vote of no confidence" into the U.S. Constitution. It could be applied to either the executive or legislative branch (or both) and require an immediate new election rather than waiting for the current term to expire.
This is madness.
No, this... is... SPARTA!!*
*a town near Grand Rapids, Michigan. RTFA.
You can usually gauge the strength of someone's position in a debate by how quickly they bring out the strawmen to knock down. The first two items in their "rebuttal" ("New top-level domain will not solve the phishing problem once and for all, so it's not even worth considering." and "But .com works just fine!") are pretty transparent misrepresentations/exaggerations of the arguments made against their proposal.
The question of what a person chooses to read or not read is exactly the opposite of whether someone else has the power to enforce their own choice upon him.
And instead it just soaked the debate in gasoline, ensuring it would erupt in flames from the outset.
There are two kinds of censorship:
1) The kind done by governmental bodies, which has the force of law, and is often constrained itself by "free speech" guarantees. That's de jure censorship.
2) The kind done by private entities, which can be legally circumvented, but which can go beyond what the government is allowed to do. That's de facto censorship.
Each of these is a Bad Thing. If the government is non-democratic, de jure censorship is inherently destructive to the betterment of society, and infringes on the rights of the individual, because there's no way to effectively challenge it. If the private entity is a monopoly or has insufficient competition*, or if it is highly influential (e.g. religious bodies), de facto censorship can be just as bad, for the same reason. So saying "that's not censorship; it's not the government" is missing the point, and offering rather cold comfort to anyone who has had their work suppressed or their reading/entertainment options limited by self-appointed censors.
*Whether that applies is this case is certainly subject to debate, and I don't have a strong opinion on that point; I'm talking about the general principle.
I'm sure your daughter is both smart and adorable, and will grow up to be a great {climatologist/homemaker/supermodel/general}. But I wouldn't assume that all of the behavior you describes reflects conscious analytical thinking. At least some of it can be explained by simple conditioning, and many of the more intelligent non-human mammals - e.g. my family's dog - exhibit similarly complex patterns.
The cost to Jimmy's family of doing this was only $495. A wee bit of him basically hitched a ride on an test mission that was happening anyways.
A scientist is someone who tries to learn things that nobody else knows yet. He tries things to see if they do what he thinks they'll do, and if they don't, he figures out why.
As for your job in particular, it sounds like you figure out how people can tell whether they're upside down, and whether you can trick them into thinking they are. Tell the kids you tried putting upside-down photos in front of people and that didn't fool them, so you're trying to figure out what would do it. See what they say about that. (Hint: every suggestion they give, no matter how ineffective you know it'll be... will be brilliant. Because as far as they know, no one's ever tried it, and they came up with it out of nothing but their own imagination.)
The rocket was already going (for other reasons), so the trip was already paid for. Doing a special beyond-orbital shot just to send someone's ashes out there would be... well, it would equal the cost of building and launching an entire larger-than-usual rocket.
This reminds of a situation going on over at Deviant Art. (For those unfamiliar, it's a mutual admiration society where mostly-amateur artists post their drawings so that their peers can tell them how !r0x0r! they are.) An artist I'm acquainted with noticed this guy who traces (not very well) professional illustrators' work and claims it as his own, sometimes selling the pieces for a few dollars. So she posts several comments pointing out what he's doing, and Deviant Art's response is to kick her of the system, for supposedly harassing him. They're so skittish about libel that not even truthful and factual criticism is allowed.
Not that it actually justifies draconian legislation like this, but I don't think this would be happening if so many people weren't acting as if copyright had no merit whatsoever. It's no coincidence that this garbage never made its way into law before "file-sharing" became ubiquitous. Completely disregarding flawed-but-reasonable laws (e.g. pay someone for your music) evidently encourages fundamentally flawed, unreasonable ones.
I live in the Third World country where you can't sit through an hour of television without seeing a mobile phone service doing a skit about dropped calls, imaginary network techs, or asking "can you hear me now?" It's the U.S., of course.
Yes, I am over 30... thanks for asking. I'm a member of the "hear a pin drop" generation of telephony users, whose standards appear to be a bit higher than the kids', and who just might have a bit of perspective that the under-30 set has yet to achieve. Don't get me wrong: I have and use a cell phone. But I have and use a landline more often, because I've come to depend on the features it offers... and which wireless does not.
Maybe the teens of today will change their standards when their hearing starts to deteriorate. Maybe they'll just never know what they're missing... and not miss it. I don't know. But I do know that you'll have to pry my wired handset from my cold, dead fingers. And I don't plan for that to happen for another 40-50 years.
Have you actually done this, or is this just fantasizing? When I was hired, the job description was not Bastard Lab Operator From Hell, nor was I given a staff of 40FTE to cover all of our labs during all of the hours they're open, so I've had to go with configurations that are actually convenient for students to get their work done without hand-holding. Setting up policies that discourage students from backing up their files regularly is not any way I'd want to run college labs. With good anti-malware software in place and restricted user accounts, I get by pretty well. It's just that this U3 crapware is a disruptive nuisance.
The problem isn't just how to get rid of the crapware, but how to prevent it from begging to install itself in the first place. I want the ability to erase the ROM. In my experience, people don't buy these U3 drives for the software; they buy them oblivious about it: because it was the first drive that caught their eye in the store, or because some salescritter told them it was "the best".
I don't know whether to cheer that the U3 flash drives are going away, or to tremble in fear of what these new ones will do.
I manage college computer labs, and those damn U3 drives have been a recurring hassle. They try to auto-install software on every Windows machine they come into contact with, and require two drive letters (which doesn't work so well in an environment where several key letters are already in use). When used on a Mac, they mount an extra pseudo CD on the desktop, loaded with software that's obviously (but not to many students) utterly useless. If this is in any way an extension or "improvement" upon that, then my job is about to get even harder.
"as far as the show that's been running so far,"
Which means they apparently have plans for another show.
Perhaps entitled "Galactica 2009", in which the fleet reaches Earth a generation later, and its crew defends it from the attacking Cylons?
A rising tide lifts all boats! That's why global warming will "make life on Earth better, not just for humans, but all species"!
I guess the difference between "an idea" and "the creative expression of an idea" is lost on you. For example, every sci-fi fan out there has "an idea" for a great book or a cool movie. They're worthless. It's the people who actually make that book or movie that deserve some consideration for their efforts.