Also, most Fantasy makes sides Black and White and Science Fiction uses more Grays.
Unless by "Grays" you mean those funky aliens who show up to anal probe people, no. Science fiction is also rife with simplistic morality - see almost anything written before the late 60s (Evil Aliens versus Galactic Patrol), as well as 90% of what's published today. Fantasy has the same problem (Dark Lord Syndrome), but also has its wonderful exceptions - like A Wizard of Earthsea.
But I read Earthsea at the same time I read The Prydain Chronicles. I was more drawn to Taran's journey of maturity than Ged's.
Taran's is a straightforward tale of becomming a man. Ged's is a complex tale of becoming a wise man. So yeah, you might have been too young to realize the character development.:-)
I might re-read The Prydain Chronicles for fun and escape if I came across a copy; but even now as an adult, each time I re-read the Earthsea novels I feel a little wiser.
Tehanu just doesn't fit in Earthsea: but instead of designing a new world were the message could fit comfortably, Earthsea got twisted until the message could be wedged in somehow. In my opinion I think the book's terrible.
I was disappointed with it initially too, it's a jarring change in tone from the original trilogy. It went down better on a re-read, and with the last two books in place, it fits pretty well (even the deus ex machina at the end of Tehanu makes sense at the end of the The Other Wind).
But I don't have high hopes for this miniseries - they're doing A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which means a lot of restructuring to get a single plot line out of both books. (The ending of A Wizard of Earthsea still amazes me almost a quarter-century after I first read it.)
Why is this good? Why is the government stepping into private business matters and FORCING them to make things easier for their competition a good thing?
You want the the government out of private business? Fine. We can start with eliminating corporate charters, patents, copyrights, trademarks...let's see how the auto manufacturers like that.
No? Then if we're going to build a legal infrastructure that makes corporate behemoths like GM possible, we also need to build in governering factors.
Nobody's getting shut out of the DVD player business.
Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS issue? "Without licensed DVD players for Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs."
The difference lies in the fact that with codes to your car, it can be serviced independently.
With the codes to your DVD, you can make unlimited copies, and do anything and everything with them.
Not correct. I can make unlimited copies of DVDs without any access to codes - just as I can make copies of a text written in German without being able to read that language. Mass bootlegging of DVDs happens this way already.
CSS is all about controlling who gets to make DVD players. It does nothing to prevent copying.
Personally, I'm with Robert Heinlein: No service, no vote.
So long as we understand "service" properly:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.
A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. --
Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
Never confuse serving the state with serving your country.
If you were a criminal who carries assault rifles, are you going to support the man who is the strongest supporter of executions?
Right...people who get into gang shootouts all the time, abuse dangerous and addicitive drugs, and generally don't expect to live into their 30s, are clearly going to be worried about the possibility of being tried and executed by the state, and a presidential candidates stand about capital punishment.
Executions may not lead to lower numbers of crimes, but they irrefutably lead to lower numbers of criminals!!!
In a democracy, executions make murderers of us all.
Even on a practical level, the number of executions clearly has no significant effect on the number of criminals; and indeed by presenting a bad example, may turn more people to crime - how can you respect the laws of a state that doesn't respect life? When the state sets the example of killing people it thinks "deserve it", how can you not expect individual citizens to follow that example?
Who do you think is more, or less, likely to have assault rifles in the home...
Since an assualt rifle is a firearm that can be set for full automatic, very few people are in legal possession of them. This is not to be confused with the vague term "assault weapon", which means "ugly gun legislators don't like because it looks too scary".
BTW: I'd vote for Kerry over Bush (I'd vote for my dog over Bush) and I have an Ruger Mini 14. I know many armed liberals/leftists. Remember that it was Bush, Sr. who banned the import of "assault weapons", and Ronald Regan who signed California's Mulford Act.
People's stance on gun ownership and control really doesn't break very cleanly along left/right or Republican/Democrat lines. (Urban/rural is a much clearer divide.)
I don't think it is important, or even a good idea for me to have a paper copy of my vote. In fact, sending me out of the polling place with a copy of how I voted is a potential violation of the secret ballot.
Cryptographic methods allow you to have a verifiable voter reciept that can't be read to see how you voted.
And the abuses you mention can already happen - I can threaten you into obtaining an absentee ballot, and completing and mailing it in my presense.
You had to teach yourself to print at the age of 13? I could print in the first grade!
Back in the old days of the 1970s, they only taught cursive writing in school. Maybe we traced block capitals when they taught reading, but I could read and print capitals before I started school. But, no, I couldn't print in mixed case until I was a teenager. (And weren't we supposed to have flying cars by now?)
I also was never taught in school how many cups in a pint, etcetera, since we would all be using metric by the time I grew up.
...has degraded my once legible (and, if i say so myself, rather beautiful) signature into a horrible, scribbling mess.
I won't say mine was ever beautiful, but yes, it has degraded to a scribble. I'd gotten used to getting away with that, but when I tried to cash some traveller's checks in Japan, the guy made me resign because the first scribble didn't exactly match the second...
That's the main reason I use my Palm less and less these days.
The iPAQ has a nice keyboard (thumbboard) add-on. And the iPAQ can run Linux. (The "slim" keyboard is supported - I added the driver, my sole clain to Linux kernel hacker-dom.)
Do you not know what the letters are supposed to look like?
Like this? Like this? Like this?
There are many choices for letterforms.
I gave up on cursive when I was around 13, and taught myself how to print. Of course I knew how to draw the upper case letters, my mom taught me those before I started preschool, but I'm self-taught on lower case. I make an "a" like it's found in Courier, while most people when printing make an "a" like it's found in (quickly runs though font options in gnome-terminal) Gothic. It has confused a few people.
Then there's the issue of stroke order. If you study calligraphy you'll see that the order in which the strokes are made can make it easier or harder, in non-obvious ways, to make a nice letterform. (I tried doing calligraphy when I was a kid, to neaten up my writing (didn't work), and lately I've been trying to teach myself shodo, which of course if completely impossible; but stroke order with kanji and kana is vital.)
So class action suits don't work in reverse. A class can sue an entity, but not the other way around.
The "class" in a class action lawsuit is a well-defined and indentified group. IANAL, but if I understand correctly you have to belong to the group in question (e.g., "people who bought stock in XYZ Corp. between June and December 1997") and you have to specifically file to join in the lawsuit.
Isolating children from peers and reality is not a good way to impart social skills.
The peers of a "gifted" child are other gifted children. (Just as the peers of a mentally retarded/challenged/(insert PC term of the month here) child are other retarded children.)
Does that mean that kids should only interact with their peers? Of course not. But they are most likely to be comfortable, and best able to start to develop social skills, among people with whom they have things in common. Getting into "gifted and talented" classes changed my life - suddenly I had people to talk to.
Sounds like you should vote to raise taxes and hire some more police.
Hmm. There's an old cliche that "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." (And, "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.")
But when the one of the "let's cut taxes!" brand of conservative suddenly finds not enough cops to track down the guy who burgled his house (or worse yet, not enough firefighters to come extinguish his house-b-que, or EMTs to come jumpstart his dad's failing heart)...yeah, you just might see a tax (and service) cutter switch to a tax-and-spend liberal.
(Of course, they might just become one of the new "borrow and spend" conservatives that have become popular lately; "don't tax us, our kids will pay for it." Grand.)
The key values of the Green party are: grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics and economic justice, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability. None of which require returning to the Stone Age.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to keep an eye out for it. Thanks.
Unless by "Grays" you mean those funky aliens who show up to anal probe people, no. Science fiction is also rife with simplistic morality - see almost anything written before the late 60s (Evil Aliens versus Galactic Patrol), as well as 90% of what's published today. Fantasy has the same problem (Dark Lord Syndrome), but also has its wonderful exceptions - like A Wizard of Earthsea.
Taran's is a straightforward tale of becomming a man. Ged's is a complex tale of becoming a wise man. So yeah, you might have been too young to realize the character development. :-)
I might re-read The Prydain Chronicles for fun and escape if I came across a copy; but even now as an adult, each time I re-read the Earthsea novels I feel a little wiser.
I was disappointed with it initially too, it's a jarring change in tone from the original trilogy. It went down better on a re-read, and with the last two books in place, it fits pretty well (even the deus ex machina at the end of Tehanu makes sense at the end of the The Other Wind).
But I don't have high hopes for this miniseries - they're doing A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which means a lot of restructuring to get a single plot line out of both books. (The ending of A Wizard of Earthsea still amazes me almost a quarter-century after I first read it.)
You want the the government out of private business? Fine. We can start with eliminating corporate charters, patents, copyrights, trademarks...let's see how the auto manufacturers like that.
No? Then if we're going to build a legal infrastructure that makes corporate behemoths like GM possible, we also need to build in governering factors.
Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS issue? "Without licensed DVD players for Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs."
Not correct. I can make unlimited copies of DVDs without any access to codes - just as I can make copies of a text written in German without being able to read that language. Mass bootlegging of DVDs happens this way already.
CSS is all about controlling who gets to make DVD players. It does nothing to prevent copying.
The company I work for is run by my boss and his wife. It seems to work well for them, both personally and professionaly.
So long as we understand "service" properly:
Never confuse serving the state with serving your country.
I've found the Postgres documentation entirely adequate. What do you find lacking?
You don't need much "Postgres" knowledge - your SQL knowledge applies. MySQL requires more of a seperate body of knowledge.
Especially in PHP, with it's PEAR::DB database abstraction class.
Right...people who get into gang shootouts all the time, abuse dangerous and addicitive drugs, and generally don't expect to live into their 30s, are clearly going to be worried about the possibility of being tried and executed by the state, and a presidential candidates stand about capital punishment.
In a democracy, executions make murderers of us all.
Even on a practical level, the number of executions clearly has no significant effect on the number of criminals; and indeed by presenting a bad example, may turn more people to crime - how can you respect the laws of a state that doesn't respect life? When the state sets the example of killing people it thinks "deserve it", how can you not expect individual citizens to follow that example?
Since an assualt rifle is a firearm that can be set for full automatic, very few people are in legal possession of them. This is not to be confused with the vague term "assault weapon", which means "ugly gun legislators don't like because it looks too scary".
BTW: I'd vote for Kerry over Bush (I'd vote for my dog over Bush) and I have an Ruger Mini 14. I know many armed liberals/leftists. Remember that it was Bush, Sr. who banned the import of "assault weapons", and Ronald Regan who signed California's Mulford Act.
People's stance on gun ownership and control really doesn't break very cleanly along left/right or Republican/Democrat lines. (Urban/rural is a much clearer divide.)
Cryptographic methods allow you to have a verifiable voter reciept that can't be read to see how you voted.
And the abuses you mention can already happen - I can threaten you into obtaining an absentee ballot, and completing and mailing it in my presense.
Back in the old days of the 1970s, they only taught cursive writing in school. Maybe we traced block capitals when they taught reading, but I could read and print capitals before I started school. But, no, I couldn't print in mixed case until I was a teenager. (And weren't we supposed to have flying cars by now?)
I also was never taught in school how many cups in a pint, etcetera, since we would all be using metric by the time I grew up.
I won't say mine was ever beautiful, but yes, it has degraded to a scribble. I'd gotten used to getting away with that, but when I tried to cash some traveller's checks in Japan, the guy made me resign because the first scribble didn't exactly match the second...
Like this? Like this? Like this?
There are many choices for letterforms.
I gave up on cursive when I was around 13, and taught myself how to print. Of course I knew how to draw the upper case letters, my mom taught me those before I started preschool, but I'm self-taught on lower case. I make an "a" like it's found in Courier, while most people when printing make an "a" like it's found in (quickly runs though font options in gnome-terminal) Gothic. It has confused a few people.
Then there's the issue of stroke order. If you study calligraphy you'll see that the order in which the strokes are made can make it easier or harder, in non-obvious ways, to make a nice letterform. (I tried doing calligraphy when I was a kid, to neaten up my writing (didn't work), and lately I've been trying to teach myself shodo, which of course if completely impossible; but stroke order with kanji and kana is vital.)
Sadly, this is nothing new.
Every software developer needs to read Peter Neuman's book Computer-Related Risks , and keep up with the Risks digest (comp.risks).
Learning from other's mistakes is much less painful.
The "class" in a class action lawsuit is a well-defined and indentified group. IANAL, but if I understand correctly you have to belong to the group in question (e.g., "people who bought stock in XYZ Corp. between June and December 1997") and you have to specifically file to join in the lawsuit.
The peers of a "gifted" child are other gifted children. (Just as the peers of a mentally retarded/challenged/(insert PC term of the month here) child are other retarded children.)
Does that mean that kids should only interact with their peers? Of course not. But they are most likely to be comfortable, and best able to start to develop social skills, among people with whom they have things in common. Getting into "gifted and talented" classes changed my life - suddenly I had people to talk to.
Hmm. There's an old cliche that "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." (And, "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.")
But when the one of the "let's cut taxes!" brand of conservative suddenly finds not enough cops to track down the guy who burgled his house (or worse yet, not enough firefighters to come extinguish his house-b-que, or EMTs to come jumpstart his dad's failing heart)...yeah, you just might see a tax (and service) cutter switch to a tax-and-spend liberal.
(Of course, they might just become one of the new "borrow and spend" conservatives that have become popular lately; "don't tax us, our kids will pay for it." Grand.)
Follow the link. Ask yourself how the Republicans and the Democrats stack up against these values.
May I suggest you read up on Bruce Sterling's "Veridian Green" movement? May I suggest you consider the existence of Green technophiles? (Do you think the people who put up Green Party websites want to return to the neolithic?)
The key values of the Green party are: grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics and economic justice, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability. None of which require returning to the Stone Age.