Here's a snippet about Hasbro getting into pricing trouble in the U.S., here allegedly colluding with other toy manufacturers and Toys"R"Us. Again I can't quite figure out what happened from the story, but imagine Google sould clear that up.
The dark underbelly of the toy business.
Interesting that retailers sometimes complained about too much margin. Such is our love of a great deal.
A prominent allow-no-discount company here is Bose, the speaker mfr.
To be practical, you have to stock Monopoly. People will come in asking for it, and probably not come back if your stock is that lame. Never mind it's a lousy game, it's popular. So price control could have some sting.
In the States, requiring a single product be sold at list is lately not per se price fixing. There is a market power line crossed where monopoly concerns kick in, in Hasbro's case that might be because multiple products were involved. (I don't know squiddle about British law, and see the Hasbro investigation was under a new year 2000 law so maybe the British don't yet fully know what it means, either. Certainly it could be stricter, as our law once was.)
One story reports, "The maker of Monopoly is being accused of monopolising the board games market through price-fixing." I.e., monopolizing not just Monopoly (ha-ha), but the board game market, and possibly other toy products. They control a number of popular games including Monopoly, Pictionary, Twister, and who could forget, My Little Pony? (Never heard of it.) Pressuring retailers not to discount with or without an MSRP could also be price-fixing, as (I think) it's just another way to attempt to vertically integrate the market. There are many manufacturer-retailer relationship on everything from price to shelf space. I don't think they're necessarily in the interest of the consumer, but it's a fact of life.
YMMV. The news accounts of the Hasbro action are sketchy and contradictory -- how unusual for the general press.;-)
Yeah, some NYC friends saw Stone and "The Old Man" (as we knew the first DA) lunching in MHT. Seemed kind of funny somehow; such sight sare familiar in Hollywood, where we used to having everything come from.
Speaking of which, I visited Korea the last time I was in So. Cal. -- the Malibu ranch, now a park, where M*A*S*H is taped.
Law & Order causes parking headaches in NYC? As opposed to "normal" parking there?:)
Actually Marx is a good example -- I've heard it was his co-author Engels who did all the heavy lifting. Marx saw himself as an "idea man" and hung out at the library. Presumably, he did read The Communist Manifesto.:)
Re:Thank you for using the M-word!
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Taken?
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See, I knew I wasn't just a curmudgeonly crank. Or not the only one.:)
I was mystified by people like Ebert going over the top on Ryan. Normally the critics are more wary of pap.
Actually, the TOS acting reminded me of "styrofoam boulders" as well. Neither made the show better, though perhaps more endearing.
Of course the old show is cool, but I like it for what it was and not as great television (if those two words can go together). It did broach some good topics, though it was mostly adapting existing stories. I respect Roddenberry's decision to cobble a crew together from a Russian, a Japanese, a (gorgeous) African-American woman, and a guy who looked distinctly satanic. (The number of Jews is maybe a message, too.) There's a lot of great stuff to write and talk about.
I hope you didn't pull all those episode titles from memory! You left out one of my favorites, "The Naked Time."
Neil Diamond -- once I realized what the lyrics "turn on your heart light" really meant, it was all over.:)
Shatner -- yech -- his character did serve a purpose at least. The one time I liked him most was in ST IV, when he was briefly genuinely charming... and did not get the girl.
Now I'm going to go read some Dostoyevsky, in the Russian of course. (kidding! I use a translation)
The Mosquito Coast? Are you insane?!?:) I just didn't see the point, and lost interest despite liking Ford. (For once Ebert and I agree, and I think he/we got it right.)
Bladerunner -- the director's cut allows Ford's character to make more sense, and omits the voice-over for a very different effect.
Oh, I agree, Saving Private Ryan had nothing to do with a war (most of it). More seriously, they are in the same genre. Das Boot is better in the German (subtitled). Private Ryan was not a good movie whatever the genre; a couple of reasons among many being Tom Hanks as cerebral remote tough guy, and these guys slogging through all that to rescue... Matt Damon! I kept going, hey, there's Matt Damon -- what's he doing there? Di he swing by the set for a drink with Tom Hanks? Hi Matt! Where's Ben Affleck? I know many people liked this movie, and respect that, but I was unconvinced (you can tell) and thought I'd seen much better.
The first 20 minutes of Ryan were like a different movie, and probably one of the most remarkable pseudo-documentaries of the Normandy invasion. I heard over and over how impressed vets were with the portrayal of a really nasty day. It was the tradition then, and once again now, to screen the public from the graphic details, and a lot of these guys came home suffering terribly. Pvt. Ryan's intro did get me thinking about that, and was a remarkable bit of work. I don't know how much credit Spielberg can take.
Every film has its fans, even (gag) Armageddon (on TV tonight... I wandered down here instead).
If anyone is wondering what this has to do with my first post, I'm still trashing Spielberg.:)
I forgot to commend Who Framed Roger Rabbit though what I liked about the film had much more to do with the styling, dialog, and Bob Hoskins's amazing ability to act against thin air. Kathleen Turner's uncredited voicing of Jessica Rabbit was very nice. It felt like a movie where Spielberg was farther in the background, some 15 years ago.
The Netflix list selects out the most famous titles and was as much as I could handle.:) Also, I like to sanity-check my views against others. (If I'm insane, I at least need a heads-up.) Turth, I was in a hurry, and though that list did enough damage.
I haven't seen Schlindler's List and want to, though there you have a topic of such gravity your film will seem significant as well (I liked Life is Beautiful as a totally weird take on the Holocaust; Benigni just barely pulled it off). The Color Purple was (for me -- my wife loves it) slick and unconvincing; I could feel Spielberg reaching out from the screen to emotionally manipulate the audience. Jurassic Park was cute as a faux nature show, but otherwise had me bored and chanting for Goldblum to get eaten (now that would have been a directorial decision I would admire). Saving Private Ryan crashed after the first 20 minutes. And so on.
Greatest movies ever made? At the box office. Mostly unmemorable cotton candy. That even his flops make some money reflects his brand name and how difficult it is for unknowns to break in.
Please don't think I'm some art film guy. I like junk, but good junk. Spielberg's Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark are milestones, if not art. My tastes run to Witness or Bladerunner (both Ford's best) or The Big Sleep or Ordinary People (for MTM) or 12 Angry Men or The Outlaw Josey Wales (magnificent Clint) or Das Boot (way better war movie than Pvt. Ryan) or Witness for the Prosecution.... Well, an eclectic crowd. I mention these just as reference to where I'm coming from, not as recommendation.
I doubt I'm alone on this, and of course there's no one actor or director or screenwriter for everyone -- fortunately! I also not expecting to start a career as critic.
Actually -- I've evolved -- if anything I would buy the DS9 episodes. I like the series better, and with the relative popularity of TNG and VOY I've memorized them anyway.
I've seen TV episodes piling up on Netflix and will eventually try more. I rented one Farscape disk, which was cool without ads but also kind of unnerving because the shows still have these dramatic moments and fade-to-blacks obvious calculated for ad breaks... and then the show just presses on!
Maybe TV shows really need ads, to be enjoyed as the creators intended.:)
P.S. I haven't seen Nemesis (Star Trek X) but am confident it will not lose money when all is said and done, as it's generic popcorn fare. For chrissakes, Waterworld earned money! (Cost: $175M; Gross:$255M!) 2/3 of the gross was foreign, where evidently they do not have access to American reviews, or dubbing somehow improves the film which seemed dubbed anyway. Once you factor in merchandising and broadcast fees and DVD/VHS sales they must come out OK, if money is one's only object (true for the studio). And in my HUMBLE opinion, Waterworld STANK! Nemesis (cost?) has already taken in about $8M.
Not that anyone including SciFi or/. cares, but I refuse to watch this show after they murdered you-know-what. Opting for the Spielberg name was doubtlessly hoped to be a free ride, though I doubt Spielberg comes cheap. I'm still skeptical of SciFi's editorial decisions. (These are the guys who broadcast double helpings of John Edward, after all.)
Not that I think I'm missing much. IMHO Spielberg's stuff has been pretty bad for a while. Here is a DVD'd list of his film work -- how many titles have you seen, and how many have you liked? There are a number of notable turkeys. I know many people love him, but when I hear "Hollywood" as a put-down for something thought glib and slick and insincere, I immediately think "Spielberg."
So that's two strikes against the show. And, as we all know, even if we miss a show and later regret it, the reruns will hound us for years if the thing was halfway good, or even if not. I laugh now to think how I once meticulously archived Star Trek: TNG episodes (I confess that was a major reason I bought the VCR). I had no idea how popular the show would be!
Speaking of stuff that's gone -- I've bought a half-dozen major appliance these last few years and seen not a sign of a box. I'm fairly sure they didn't have them on the truck either. I do remember them when I was a kid. What happened? It's not fair!
Imagine the maze you could build with a few dozen of these.
Of course what I really want is to do a cornfield or strawbale maze. As you can see from the link, country people take these seriously. Alas, I live near the city, and can't see doing a good maze on our 1/8 acre, except maybe one for mice.
I actually hadn't seen *that* disproof before, though I vaguely remembered one existed. It came up a few years ago in a problem where an employer agreed to pay an executive's taxes, but that payment was itself taxable as compensation, and the company's payment of that additional tax was also taxable compensation, an so on. The argument didn't persuade the court.
The way I understood it on quick perusal is that Zeno's problem is solvable so that the annoying infinity term drops out. I'm trying to think of another example. I've given my son some annoying ones like, if 2X=3X what is X? Of course it's very simple if you look at it right (or you can solve it pretty easily by brute force).
Perhaps perfect security is as impossibly distant as infinity. I don't mean security in the raw cryptographic sense, but in terms of resistance to 3rd party trickery.
I haven't met Mssrs. Peano or Cantor, and hope not to. I can't wait until my son exceeds my level of math. He's six, so I figure I have a few years left, perhaps a little beyond trig.:)
No, no, just self-awareness, which is intellectually if not functionally different from closed-mindedness. I proceed on experience rather than presumption (the reason actually that I reject atheism). But I concede that people do change, and that someday you may reject your faith.... I'm being facetious, but that is a symmetrical possibility unless you have an "a priori commitment to accept faith.":)
While we're here, how do we pick which religion is best? There's a tough one. People usually pick the one to which they have the strongest familial, community, or cultural affinity.
What can they do -- send a pink slip to Elflord1999? (How many Elflords do you figure work for them anyway?)
But maybe they can find this guy and can him so they can prove how competent they are at security and efficient management... or maybe that's not their best strategy... but they're not obligated to me smart. Yeah, I probably would have AC'd it, and I'm a nobody.
Yeah, I so much wanted it to be over that this kind of public key encryption exploit didn't even register with me until recently. So you might have a bad key? We back off another step and add steps to authenticate they key... then someone will figure out how to defeat that... and so on.
The overall impression I'm getting of electronic "security" is a bit like Zeno's paradox -- you know, you keep getting closer to the target in ever-finer increments but never quite reach it. (The paradox we know has an underlying flawed premise. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced the encryption race is winnable.)
"Her." Sexist pig.:) Yeah, the version i read when i was a kid had her dying "painlessly" on re-entry. As each story comes out her death turns out to have been even earlier. Next we'll learn she died of a heart attack when she learned they were about to send her into SPACE in that little deathtrap. Not wanting to be executed, the scientists loaded the body in anyway, and hooked up the biometric sensors to thesmelves.
Interesting! I like the SAG prices the best. Re NYC, Law & Order is one the few convincingly on-location shows I've seen. So was Vanilla Sky, but that movie stank.:) (I'm not a New Yorker, so I'm sure I miss a lot of errors.)
A SAG/Star Trek story I think I read in Koenig's book -- the scene in ST IV where Chekov is asking passers-by "Excuse me, where are the nukelear wessels?" originally called for him to stop real strangers. I guess they hoped no one would say anything. But the woman with the digs who replies, "I think they're over in Alameda" did, and turned out to be an aspiring actress. Nimoy loved it, so they did some sort of complicated hustle to get her into SAG after the fact.
Leonard Nimoy: "Up walked this woman with long, dark hair, whom none of us had ever seen before. She paused to listen to Walter, then said helpfully, 'I think they're across the Bay, in Alameda.' Her reaction was so ingenuous and perfect that we included her in the shot, and wound up negotiating a contract with her, so that we could pay her for talking. It was a wonderful accident, from our perspective as well as hers."
There's also a tale at http://mario.lapam.mo.it/films/st4.htm about how a child actor botched a scene and robbed Takei of his one big scene.:( And other stories, including a real humpback who tried to audition.
Re:They NOT sell EVERYTHING on ebay
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Hmm, I would like to see attribution of a few of these, like "Japanese people, in general, can't drive very well."
But I looked quickly and found a secondary reference on the underwear issue. A-ha.
And, if I may volunteer an American reaction, yuck. Not that we Americans don't have our equivalents.
Re:The _____ lies somewhere in be/truth/tween.
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:) I'm not trying to be a PIA; it just comes naturally.:)
I've done a lot of editing, and so had plenty of time to wonder about the correct rules. Many of the ones we are taught are nonsense cooked up by someone with time on their hands, like "don't split infinitives" (a fabricated rule derived from the idea that English should have a Latin grammar?). The classic starting point is Strunk's "The Elements of Style." It's a nearly century-old $3 booklet, really worth buying (mine's around here some place). The modern edition has additional commentary by E.B. White, a Strunk disciple. Bartleby's has some usage manuals as well -- they generally have very old out-of-copyright editions of things -- cool site.
Neologisms are great (and so are slightly-forgotten old words like neologism); even verbifications; I just don't like the pompous ones that some business and political people cough up. For example, I'm on the losing side but I hate verbified "impact" to mean "affect." I like affect! It works! But it didn't sound snobby enough.
Read Watterson's Tenth Anniversary Book, where he writes a lot in the first person and gives the sense of someone who would hate business-speak (it "weirds" not improves language, hence the humor). And yes, that Watterson indexing site is wonderful, I wrote a note to the webmaster thanking him. I'm just waiting for the copyright nazis to catch up with him -- a different syndicate (doesn't *that* word sound threatening) forced him to drop Dilbert and another strip. The strip links are to the syndicate website, where you can buy copies for outlandish prices; he's tried to keep it legal-looking.
So... new words are good. I just like to dig my heels in a tiny bit to distinguish the novel from the fad. You also don't need a bunch of high-falutin' words to be a wonderful writer. Tech sure has contributed its share of bizarre words.
"I could care less" is the unwitting inversion of what most of us want to say. This is the problem with cliches -- we don't hear what we're saying any more. It drives grammarians berzerk. I think Safire would insist it be, "I could not care any less." Personally, I couldn't care less. (If you don't have a sense of humor about English grammar, you don't haven't tried to learn it.)
Well... Pease is not well-known because it's most likely not true. I just double-checked on Google, and yes you're right that resources are abundant but they're far from unananimous or even supportive. (Interestingly, virtually all the pro-Pease sites are in Australia or New Zealand, suggesting an alternative conspiracy -- or merely the affliction of regional pride. I'm not a fan of hypothesized conspiracies.)
Pease appears to have left the ground, but he conceded it was uncontrolled and ended in a crash. He did not later pursue the "first flight" trophy, and it was one hotly desired. The flight is described as "undocumented" with widely varying estimates as to distance and such. Undocumented history means unreliable history, and of further suspicion is that his aircraft did not prove itself in the long run, either.
A question that interests me more than who was first is whose airplane led to productive development in aviation. That would be the Wright Flyer, though Europeans soon pulled far ahead. An odd bit of deja-vu is that engineers are looking again at Wright-style wing-warping (Java applet) as a method of controlling modern fighter jets. Also intriguing is the habit we all -- not just Americans -- have in taking nationalistic pride in the accomplishments of people we not only have never met, but who are quite dead.
Now, if you really want some baloney, it is NASA somehow taking credit for the first flight by celebrating it. When was NASA, or even NACA formed anyway? 1915?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a snippet about Hasbro getting into pricing trouble in the U.S., here allegedly colluding with other toy manufacturers and Toys"R"Us. Again I can't quite figure out what happened from the story, but imagine Google sould clear that up.
The dark underbelly of the toy business.
Interesting that retailers sometimes complained about too much margin. Such is our love of a great deal.
A prominent allow-no-discount company here is Bose, the speaker mfr.
To be practical, you have to stock Monopoly. People will come in asking for it, and probably not come back if your stock is that lame. Never mind it's a lousy game, it's popular. So price control could have some sting.
;-)
In the States, requiring a single product be sold at list is lately not per se price fixing. There is a market power line crossed where monopoly concerns kick in, in Hasbro's case that might be because multiple products were involved. (I don't know squiddle about British law, and see the Hasbro investigation was under a new year 2000 law so maybe the British don't yet fully know what it means, either. Certainly it could be stricter, as our law once was.)
One story reports, "The maker of Monopoly is being accused of monopolising the board games market through price-fixing." I.e., monopolizing not just Monopoly (ha-ha), but the board game market, and possibly other toy products. They control a number of popular games including Monopoly, Pictionary, Twister, and who could forget, My Little Pony? (Never heard of it.) Pressuring retailers not to discount with or without an MSRP could also be price-fixing, as (I think) it's just another way to attempt to vertically integrate the market. There are many manufacturer-retailer relationship on everything from price to shelf space. I don't think they're necessarily in the interest of the consumer, but it's a fact of life.
YMMV. The news accounts of the Hasbro action are sketchy and contradictory -- how unusual for the general press.
Yeah, some NYC friends saw Stone and "The Old Man" (as we knew the first DA) lunching in MHT. Seemed kind of funny somehow; such sight sare familiar in Hollywood, where we used to having everything come from.
:)
Speaking of which, I visited Korea the last time I was in So. Cal. -- the Malibu ranch, now a park, where M*A*S*H is taped.
Law & Order causes parking headaches in NYC? As opposed to "normal" parking there?
Actually Marx is a good example -- I've heard it was his co-author Engels who did all the heavy lifting. Marx saw himself as an "idea man" and hung out at the library. Presumably, he did read The Communist Manifesto. :)
See, I knew I wasn't just a curmudgeonly crank. Or not the only one. :)
I was mystified by people like Ebert going over the top on Ryan. Normally the critics are more wary of pap.
Actually, the TOS acting reminded me of "styrofoam boulders" as well. Neither made the show better, though perhaps more endearing.
:)
... and did not get the girl.
Of course the old show is cool, but I like it for what it was and not as great television (if those two words can go together). It did broach some good topics, though it was mostly adapting existing stories. I respect Roddenberry's decision to cobble a crew together from a Russian, a Japanese, a (gorgeous) African-American woman, and a guy who looked distinctly satanic. (The number of Jews is maybe a message, too.) There's a lot of great stuff to write and talk about.
I hope you didn't pull all those episode titles from memory! You left out one of my favorites, "The Naked Time."
Neil Diamond -- once I realized what the lyrics "turn on your heart light" really meant, it was all over.
Shatner -- yech -- his character did serve a purpose at least. The one time I liked him most was in ST IV, when he was briefly genuinely charming
Now I'm going to go read some Dostoyevsky, in the Russian of course. (kidding! I use a translation)
The Mosquito Coast? Are you insane?!? :) I just didn't see the point, and lost interest despite liking Ford. (For once Ebert and I agree, and I think he/we got it right.)
... Matt Damon! I kept going, hey, there's Matt Damon -- what's he doing there? Di he swing by the set for a drink with Tom Hanks? Hi Matt! Where's Ben Affleck? I know many people liked this movie, and respect that, but I was unconvinced (you can tell) and thought I'd seen much better.
... I wandered down here instead).
:)
Bladerunner -- the director's cut allows Ford's character to make more sense, and omits the voice-over for a very different effect.
Oh, I agree, Saving Private Ryan had nothing to do with a war (most of it). More seriously, they are in the same genre. Das Boot is better in the German (subtitled). Private Ryan was not a good movie whatever the genre; a couple of reasons among many being Tom Hanks as cerebral remote tough guy, and these guys slogging through all that to rescue
The first 20 minutes of Ryan were like a different movie, and probably one of the most remarkable pseudo-documentaries of the Normandy invasion. I heard over and over how impressed vets were with the portrayal of a really nasty day. It was the tradition then, and once again now, to screen the public from the graphic details, and a lot of these guys came home suffering terribly. Pvt. Ryan's intro did get me thinking about that, and was a remarkable bit of work. I don't know how much credit Spielberg can take.
Every film has its fans, even (gag) Armageddon (on TV tonight
If anyone is wondering what this has to do with my first post, I'm still trashing Spielberg.
I forgot to commend Who Framed Roger Rabbit though what I liked about the film had much more to do with the styling, dialog, and Bob Hoskins's amazing ability to act against thin air. Kathleen Turner's uncredited voicing of Jessica Rabbit was very nice. It felt like a movie where Spielberg was farther in the background, some 15 years ago.
The Netflix list selects out the most famous titles and was as much as I could handle. :) Also, I like to sanity-check my views against others. (If I'm insane, I at least need a heads-up.) Turth, I was in a hurry, and though that list did enough damage.
I haven't seen Schlindler's List and want to, though there you have a topic of such gravity your film will seem significant as well (I liked Life is Beautiful as a totally weird take on the Holocaust; Benigni just barely pulled it off). The Color Purple was (for me -- my wife loves it) slick and unconvincing; I could feel Spielberg reaching out from the screen to emotionally manipulate the audience. Jurassic Park was cute as a faux nature show, but otherwise had me bored and chanting for Goldblum to get eaten (now that would have been a directorial decision I would admire). Saving Private Ryan crashed after the first 20 minutes. And so on.
Greatest movies ever made? At the box office. Mostly unmemorable cotton candy. That even his flops make some money reflects his brand name and how difficult it is for unknowns to break in.
Please don't think I'm some art film guy. I like junk, but good junk. Spielberg's Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark are milestones, if not art. My tastes run to Witness or Bladerunner (both Ford's best) or The Big Sleep or Ordinary People (for MTM) or 12 Angry Men or The Outlaw Josey Wales (magnificent Clint) or Das Boot (way better war movie than Pvt. Ryan) or Witness for the Prosecution.... Well, an eclectic crowd. I mention these just as reference to where I'm coming from, not as recommendation.
I doubt I'm alone on this, and of course there's no one actor or director or screenwriter for everyone -- fortunately! I also not expecting to start a career as critic.
Actually -- I've evolved -- if anything I would buy the DS9 episodes. I like the series better, and with the relative popularity of TNG and VOY I've memorized them anyway.
... and then the show just presses on!
:)
I've seen TV episodes piling up on Netflix and will eventually try more. I rented one Farscape disk, which was cool without ads but also kind of unnerving because the shows still have these dramatic moments and fade-to-blacks obvious calculated for ad breaks
Maybe TV shows really need ads, to be enjoyed as the creators intended.
P.S. I haven't seen Nemesis (Star Trek X) but am confident it will not lose money when all is said and done, as it's generic popcorn fare. For chrissakes, Waterworld earned money! (Cost: $175M; Gross:$255M!) 2/3 of the gross was foreign, where evidently they do not have access to American reviews, or dubbing somehow improves the film which seemed dubbed anyway. Once you factor in merchandising and broadcast fees and DVD/VHS sales they must come out OK, if money is one's only object (true for the studio). And in my HUMBLE opinion, Waterworld STANK! Nemesis (cost?) has already taken in about $8M.
BTW, LOL, FDIC, etc.
Not that anyone including SciFi or /. cares, but I refuse to watch this show after they murdered you-know-what. Opting for the Spielberg name was doubtlessly hoped to be a free ride, though I doubt Spielberg comes cheap. I'm still skeptical of SciFi's editorial decisions. (These are the guys who broadcast double helpings of John Edward, after all.)
Not that I think I'm missing much. IMHO Spielberg's stuff has been pretty bad for a while. Here is a DVD'd list of his film work -- how many titles have you seen, and how many have you liked? There are a number of notable turkeys. I know many people love him, but when I hear "Hollywood" as a put-down for something thought glib and slick and insincere, I immediately think "Spielberg."
So that's two strikes against the show. And, as we all know, even if we miss a show and later regret it, the reruns will hound us for years if the thing was halfway good, or even if not. I laugh now to think how I once meticulously archived Star Trek: TNG episodes (I confess that was a major reason I bought the VCR). I had no idea how popular the show would be!
Mainway toys. :) I linked to a transcript somewhere in this topic....
Two of the best actors they ever had, too.
Speaking of stuff that's gone -- I've bought a half-dozen major appliance these last few years and seen not a sign of a box. I'm fairly sure they didn't have them on the truck either. I do remember them when I was a kid. What happened? It's not fair!
Imagine the maze you could build with a few dozen of these.
Of course what I really want is to do a cornfield or strawbale maze. As you can see from the link, country people take these seriously. Alas, I live near the city, and can't see doing a good maze on our 1/8 acre, except maybe one for mice.
I actually hadn't seen *that* disproof before, though I vaguely remembered one existed. It came up a few years ago in a problem where an employer agreed to pay an executive's taxes, but that payment was itself taxable as compensation, and the company's payment of that additional tax was also taxable compensation, an so on. The argument didn't persuade the court.
:)
The way I understood it on quick perusal is that Zeno's problem is solvable so that the annoying infinity term drops out. I'm trying to think of another example. I've given my son some annoying ones like, if 2X=3X what is X? Of course it's very simple if you look at it right (or you can solve it pretty easily by brute force).
Perhaps perfect security is as impossibly distant as infinity. I don't mean security in the raw cryptographic sense, but in terms of resistance to 3rd party trickery.
I haven't met Mssrs. Peano or Cantor, and hope not to. I can't wait until my son exceeds my level of math. He's six, so I figure I have a few years left, perhaps a little beyond trig.
a priori commitment to reject faith
:)
No, no, just self-awareness, which is intellectually if not functionally different from closed-mindedness. I proceed on experience rather than presumption (the reason actually that I reject atheism). But I concede that people do change, and that someday you may reject your faith.... I'm being facetious, but that is a symmetrical possibility unless you have an "a priori commitment to accept faith."
While we're here, how do we pick which religion is best? There's a tough one. People usually pick the one to which they have the strongest familial, community, or cultural affinity.
Pervert. :)
What can they do -- send a pink slip to Elflord1999? (How many Elflords do you figure work for them anyway?)
... or maybe that's not their best strategy ... but they're not obligated to me smart. Yeah, I probably would have AC'd it, and I'm a nobody.
But maybe they can find this guy and can him so they can prove how competent they are at security and efficient management
Yeah, I so much wanted it to be over that this kind of public key encryption exploit didn't even register with me until recently. So you might have a bad key? We back off another step and add steps to authenticate they key ... then someone will figure out how to defeat that ... and so on.
The overall impression I'm getting of electronic "security" is a bit like Zeno's paradox -- you know, you keep getting closer to the target in ever-finer increments but never quite reach it. (The paradox we know has an underlying flawed premise. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced the encryption race is winnable.)
I've being trying to find a competent person at Adelphia so I can get my cable internet service working.
:)
Well, at least they're giving you good security.
they never even planned for him to return
:) Yeah, the version i read when i was a kid had her dying "painlessly" on re-entry. As each story comes out her death turns out to have been even earlier. Next we'll learn she died of a heart attack when she learned they were about to send her into SPACE in that little deathtrap. Not wanting to be executed, the scientists loaded the body in anyway, and hooked up the biometric sensors to thesmelves.
"Her." Sexist pig.
Apparently gref is not close enough to href for these anal computers:
secondary reference
A SAG/Star Trek story I think I read in Koenig's book -- the scene in ST IV where Chekov is asking passers-by "Excuse me, where are the nukelear wessels?" originally called for him to stop real strangers. I guess they hoped no one would say anything. But the woman with the digs who replies, "I think they're over in Alameda" did, and turned out to be an aspiring actress. Nimoy loved it, so they did some sort of complicated hustle to get her into SAG after the fact.
Nimoy:
There's also a tale at http://mario.lapam.mo.it/films/st4.htm about how a child actor botched a scene and robbed Takei of his one big scene.
Hmm, I would like to see attribution of a few of these, like "Japanese people, in general, can't drive very well."
But I looked quickly and found a secondary reference on the underwear issue. A-ha.
And, if I may volunteer an American reaction, yuck. Not that we Americans don't have our equivalents.
:) I'm not trying to be a PIA; it just comes naturally. :)
... new words are good. I just like to dig my heels in a tiny bit to distinguish the novel from the fad. You also don't need a bunch of high-falutin' words to be a wonderful writer. Tech sure has contributed its share of bizarre words.
I've done a lot of editing, and so had plenty of time to wonder about the correct rules. Many of the ones we are taught are nonsense cooked up by someone with time on their hands, like "don't split infinitives" (a fabricated rule derived from the idea that English should have a Latin grammar?). The classic starting point is Strunk's "The Elements of Style." It's a nearly century-old $3 booklet, really worth buying (mine's around here some place). The modern edition has additional commentary by E.B. White, a Strunk disciple. Bartleby's has some usage manuals as well -- they generally have very old out-of-copyright editions of things -- cool site.
Neologisms are great (and so are slightly-forgotten old words like neologism); even verbifications; I just don't like the pompous ones that some business and political people cough up. For example, I'm on the losing side but I hate verbified "impact" to mean "affect." I like affect! It works! But it didn't sound snobby enough.
Read Watterson's Tenth Anniversary Book, where he writes a lot in the first person and gives the sense of someone who would hate business-speak (it "weirds" not improves language, hence the humor). And yes, that Watterson indexing site is wonderful, I wrote a note to the webmaster thanking him. I'm just waiting for the copyright nazis to catch up with him -- a different syndicate (doesn't *that* word sound threatening) forced him to drop Dilbert and another strip. The strip links are to the syndicate website, where you can buy copies for outlandish prices; he's tried to keep it legal-looking.
So
"I could care less" is the unwitting inversion of what most of us want to say. This is the problem with cliches -- we don't hear what we're saying any more. It drives grammarians berzerk. I think Safire would insist it be, "I could not care any less." Personally, I couldn't care less. (If you don't have a sense of humor about English grammar, you don't haven't tried to learn it.)
Well ... Pease is not well-known because it's most likely not true. I just double-checked on Google, and yes you're right that resources are abundant but they're far from unananimous or even supportive. (Interestingly, virtually all the pro-Pease sites are in Australia or New Zealand, suggesting an alternative conspiracy -- or merely the affliction of regional pride. I'm not a fan of hypothesized conspiracies.)
Pease appears to have left the ground, but he conceded it was uncontrolled and ended in a crash. He did not later pursue the "first flight" trophy, and it was one hotly desired. The flight is described as "undocumented" with widely varying estimates as to distance and such. Undocumented history means unreliable history, and of further suspicion is that his aircraft did not prove itself in the long run, either.
A question that interests me more than who was first is whose airplane led to productive development in aviation. That would be the Wright Flyer, though Europeans soon pulled far ahead. An odd bit of deja-vu is that engineers are looking again at Wright-style wing-warping (Java applet) as a method of controlling modern fighter jets. Also intriguing is the habit we all -- not just Americans -- have in taking nationalistic pride in the accomplishments of people we not only have never met, but who are quite dead.
Now, if you really want some baloney, it is NASA somehow taking credit for the first flight by celebrating it. When was NASA, or even NACA formed anyway? 1915?