Actually, he does know who has used the facilities before him. He also knows what they wrote, and when. Looking at the page of recent changes (for example, for the encyclopedia britannica entry) tells you what has changed in this article and linked articles and when it happened. You know exactly who pissed where.
This is true, but it's not helpful.
If a reader has to read the editing history of an article, and check the other articles edited by a contributor, and still can't be sure if he should trust the Wiki entry, then that is genuinely problematic. If it is a more effective use of a reader's time to just look for the information elsewhere, then the Wikipedia has failed.
A well-written but factually inaccurate entry will often survive several rounds of superficial editing, because it has a glossy veneer. If you're trying to get a basic grounding in an area you know nothing about--and this is really what encyclopedias are supposed to be good for--then you can see that someone has written something well, and has contributed many articles on a topic...but you don't know if any of it is reliable.
What. An. Ass. Luckily I have no journalistic reputation to maintain so I can say that. The fact is that the data is not lost, if someone mangles an entry in the Wikipedia it can be restored, and at some point I fully expect some of the articles to end up locked down and only editable by a select few or through a moderation process. The fact that Wikipedia isn't there yet is just a sign that there's more quasi-Darwinian process before it.
And market forces will solve all economic problems, too. You can't always invoke a principle of natural selection (the 'quasi-Darwinian process') and expect to get something good out at the end. Sure, you'll optimize for something, but it isn't necessarily for maximum accuracy. The optimization might be for readability or for agreement with groupthink rather than for factual correctness.
I believe that the author was being generous when he suggested that Wikipedia articles would asymptotically approach correctness. What will happen is each article will reach a point where it becomes roughly equally likely that a change will be inaccurate or inappropriate--and this point is likely to be further from the 'truth' when the editing is being done by laypeople than when it is being done by carefully-vetted subject matter experts.
Further, unless there is someone actively (and competently) deciding when an article is 'finished', you'll probably see the same problem with articles as one does with code: tiny additions, little commments, the odd adjustments--they will all add up to make a crufty unmaintainable mess. Someone will eventually heavily edit or even rewrite the article, and the reinvention of the wheel will continue.
The monkeys can measure Wikipedia's success by how often it's cited in academic papers and used in classrooms.
Wikipedia--like any encyclopedia--should almost never be cited in an academic paper. Certainly never in peer-reviewed work. Real academic work usually involves consulting primary sources and formally peer-reviewed publications.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of classroom citations will indicate that people are reading it, but that won't tell you if it is getting more accurate. I suppose it depends on what measure of 'success' you use. A lot of people read and cite The Drudge Report, but that doesn't assure its veracity or lack of bias.
The comparison to CBS is dubious. A television station will generate at most a few hours of news reporting per day, which will be watched by millions of people. A newspaper will generate a few score of pages at most--and errors regularly appear in print there. Wikipedia contributors generate hundreds of pages per day, at a rate that continues to grow. The major articles are regularly scrutinized by experts, but more obscure topics will probably be seldom seen or reviewed.
Incidentally, peer review in academia doesn't mean that lots of people have skimmed a document. Peer review means that a number of highly qualified subject matter experts have read a document with painstaking care, with the goal of detecting any flaws. Unless experts deliberately set out to review, revise, and monitor specific areas of Wikipedia in an organized manner then errors will stand. Review by 'peers' who don't know very much about a given topic are useless at best.
Really? Is the reader in some non-internet connected vacuum? If I came across an inconsistency like that I'd do some searches. Chances are I would find an article somewhere online that dealt with this.
This presumes that the user of the Wikipedia article reads it in depth, and checks every date and age listed for internal consistency.
It's also possible for the article to be inconsistent in ways that are undetectable without reference to further works. If the article starts off by saying that Hamilton was born in 1755, then mentions that he retired at the age of 65, one might conclude that he ceased working in 1820. If the age was actually calculated using the 1757 birthdate, there would be no way for the reader to know. On its face, the statements are quite plausible, and pass the 'sniff test'.
Sure, we accept that no source is really authoritative and 100% accurate in all cases, but we should expect an encyclopedia to warn us about things like uncertainties in major dates.
And by the way, has anyone noticed the excessive use of exploding barrels yet? It's like City 17 is a giant nitro plant and they can't seem to keep track of the product.
Barrels (and their sister containers, the crates) are an essential part of any FPS.
One of the canonical pieces of FPS review literature is the Crate Review System, which measures the time in game until the appearance of the first crate or barrel (StC: Start to Crate).
If your password is compromised, it's a no-brainer to change it. Your biometric data may be harder to compromise, but if it is, how do you change it? Surgery?
This comes back to the canonical "something you know, something you have, something you are" model. Good security should involve at least two and preferably three of the above:
Something you know: a PIN or password;
Something you have: a card, a key, an RFID tag, etc.; and
Something you are: a biometric--iris scan, facial recognition, fingerprint, a signature.
Even if one element of the verification system is relatively soft, the others will make it more difficult for troublemakers. You're protected from an individual failure. Even if someone develops a technique to fake your thumbprint (or uses one of the existing ones...) they still also need to get your password and your ID card.
Re:Disconnect and motivation
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture
I hate to break it to the terrorists, but they're waaaay too late.
A tremendous amount of energy is used in the production of that meat and grain (much more energy than you actually gain by eating it). Imagine all the tractors and processing plants. Think about the farm and factory employees, who commute to work by car.
Well, okay...but then you have to think about all the mining, smelting, alloying, forging, and so forth that go into the construction of the vacuum cleaner. All the irreplaceable fossil fuel used in making the rubber and plastic components. Heck, you have to account for the small fraction of the electrical infrastructure that delivers power to your vacuum.
A broom, on the other hand, can be made with a wooden handle and straw bristles, and the assembly steps in the production of food are largely solar powered. Heck, a homeowner can easily grow enough apples on a tree behind the house to sustain them during an hour of sweeping every week.
Food...ahem...for thought.
I dunno? How much juice does a Roomba draw? And it's doing it all the time....
Well, the author mentioned that the majority of people had the Segway mastered in about 15 seconds (which I have to admit is pretty amazing, if true).
The whole point of the story is that it's obviously not true. Basic skills, perhaps, but definitely not mastery. Fifteen seconds is enough time to understand the basic controls--and then fall off sometimes when you stop, or occasionally run over a Roomba.
It's like saying you can learn to drive in fifteen seconds, as long as you don't mind driving with two wheels on the sidewalk sometimes and occasionally running over a small child.
Now I'm waiting for someone to visit Radio Shack, buy one of those little motors and hook that up to the scroll. Play with resistors to get it to the right speed.
Forget playing with resistors. Include a small optical sensor and a timer. When you convert the video to still frames, insert a small white spot in one corner of the screen in one of every n frames. You can then set up a feedback loop that automatically measures and maintains a constant frame rate.
The article forgot to mention that there was indeed a plausible explanation for the 21 grams lost after each person died.
I'm going with the plausible explanation of
his instruments weren't very precise;
he saw a loss in weight in only four of the six patients--the others gained weight; and
he had a result in mind that he wanted to see.
Also, the air explanation doesn't...er...hold water. Other posters have noted that the mass of air that will fit even in fully inflated lungs is only about (off the top of my head, now) about two or three grams. Plus, as an AC astutely noted, Archimedes would have a problem with this explanation. The air in the lungs won't have any effect on the measured weight of the person, because it's displacing an equal mass of air around the body.
There's no indication he has ever studied science except as a journalist and layman, there is no indication he's made any formal or credible study of the history or philosophy of science. There's every indication that he would happily rip someone for citing, in the context of a scientific dispute, the opinion of an individual of his own credentials.
On the other hand, he cites specific examples of the problem that he criticizes. In each case, he doesn't rely solely on his own knowledge, but refers to genuine experts in each field. As a journalist, one task he should be good at is evaluating the credentials and credibility of his sources, and conveying that information in his writing.
I also don't think he has a problem with a reporter who presents both sides of an issue where there exists genuine scientific dispute. Mooney's complaint is with reporters who present individuals with weak credentials and conflicts of interest as credible alternatives in order to produce a "balanced" story.
Do we care about Chris Mooney's opinion on a purported link between breast cancer and abortion, or between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming? We do not, and we should be skeptical of it because he isn't qualified by training or experience to make judgements in those areas. Do we trust Chris Mooney when he reports the opinions of the National Cancer Institute or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? We do, because those organizations have studied those issues, and are credible. In other words, we don't trust Mr. Mooney to run his own clinical trials, but with formal training in journalism he ought to be able to assess the qualifications of his sources. Journalists who don't do so are being tremendously irresponsible, misleading, and plain lazy.
Actually, scientists don't generally say that kind of thing. Scientists say things like, "Up to one alcoholic drink per day is correlated with a significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Above two drinks per day, the cardiovascular benefits are offset by increasing risk of liver damage, except where...blah blah blah."
Journalists take peer-reviewed, detailed, often-heavily qualified points, and distill them into misleadingly absolute statements: "Wine is good for you."
Generally scientists hate this process, but the alternative is to have their work ignored entirely by the press--and then you have a public which has no exposure to science, period.
While it is kind of them to do so (i've had a number of managers do that), really why does that make any sense for them to sit and twiddle thumbs while you work on something? Furthermore sometimes they can just be in the way, or micromanaging - and nothing is more annoying that someone constantly checking over your shoulder in a crunch at 2am.
There's always something they can be doing. If they've decided that a particular piece of a project is important enough that the employees should be there until 2am, then there is probably real work that the manager can be doing.
If there's nothing that's directly applicable to the project at hand, then the manager can be the guy that runs for takeout food and makes coffee.
When the Apollo capsule was being built by North American, there was only space inside for (at most) two guys to work. Climbing in and out through the hatch was time consuming and awkward. Further, the capsule was a very complicated piece of equipment and most of the assembly had to take place from the inside. Consequently, North American had a policy--if the guys in the capsule asked for anything, the nearest person was to run and get it for them. Doesn't matter if it's a company VP doing a tour on the shop floor. The assembly of the capsule was essential to the Apollo program and the success of the company, and if the guys working on the critical tasks said "jump"--no matter where they were on the org chart--anybody listening would say "how high?" Similarly, if something is important enough and time-critical enough for a software company to keep its coders at work for ninety hour weeks, management needs to be available to provide support at all hours for any purpose. If managers are unwilling to do so, then perhaps the project isn't quite the priority they say it is.
To be fair, if the employees want the manager to leave, then he should respect that. Also, if they're fixing something that's their own damn fault, then the manager probably isn't obligated to hang around for it. Otherwise, no excuses!
My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right?
Part of the problem is that pulverizing the waste and putting it into the atmosphere is hard to do. Particularly when you want to distribute it evenly, so that you don't inadvertently create hotspots downwind. Heavy metal dust will have a tendency to settle rapidly--in a nuclear war, we'd call it fallout. You've probably noticed that the smokestacks of an operating coal-fired generating station very quickly become stained black. It's a very bad situation if that unsightly blackness is high-level nuclear waste instead of just soot.
The uranium content of coal in the United States is about one part per million. To dilute nuclear waste to a similar concentration for disposal, each gram would have to be mixed with a full ton of other matter...might be a bit impractical. And grinding it up to push it up the stack is likely to be both difficult and energy intensive.
If you're a millionaire in the States you can speed with impunity, just as long as you're not way over the limit and facing a dangerous driving charge. A hundred-dollar speeding ticket can be written off as a cost of driving.
If a fine is meant to discourage a certain behaviour--rather than to act solely as a cash cow, as it does in some communities--then it actually has to sting a little to get caught.
This a good example of why we probably don't need new laws. If they committed fraud then convict them of fraud, regardless of the mechanism. If they went phishing and stole money right out of accounts, then charge them accordingly.
On the other hand, there is a school of thought that the act of sending the spam--in and of itself, regardless of whether it is fraudulent or not--is also destructive to society. It makes email a less valuable tool for everyone.
Telemarketers have restrictions on who they can call and when, so that our telephones aren't rendered useless by a barrage of marketing. They can be fined heavily for not following the rules, even if their practices are entirely honest. In that case, new law was required to regulate telemarketing, because existing law didn't cover the new technology. The same goes for junk faxes. With those, my time and other resources are wasted at relatively low cost to the advertiser. New law was required, because old law didn't cover the abuse of the new technology.
Similarly, spam wasn't regulated within the old framework. New law was required to address it. (If one believes that spam is detrimental to society and should be addressed in law at all.)
Fines are unfair. They are nothing to the wealthy, and the poor simply won't -- can't -- pay.
You could scale the fines to be proportional to income. The idea is that the same offense should result in the same approximate level of pain. Norway does this; occasionally it results in a wealthy individual receiving a ten thousand dollar speeding ticket.
Community service might be an appropriate substitute. An hour is an hour to everyone.
Although I'm sure that Bush would love to have Ashcroft as a Justice of the Supreme Court, it's completely untenable.
Although Ashcroft served as Attorney General, he's never sat as a judge on any court. I'm pretty sure that a complete absence of bench experience would probably work against him even among a lot of Republicans. It would be pretty embarrassing to have a Justice who's never actually written a judgement before.
Ashcroft also has been having some health problems--he had his gall bladder removed earlier this year--so even if he was offered a position, I don't know that he'd take it. He might also retire or die during the next Presidency, which might lead to a less Republican-friendly appointment in the near future--or another unpleasant confirmation hearing, at best.
But I simply cannot understand the constant speculation that it might become the "most popular" or "bestselling" game in history.
Indeed. It's not even the most popular game distributed by Microsoft--not by a long shot.
The clear winner has to be Solitaire. A copy is sold with nearly every computer, and it's the only thing to do with a computer at work after you've finished reading Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that make these a circumvention device?
This is true, but it's not helpful.
If a reader has to read the editing history of an article, and check the other articles edited by a contributor, and still can't be sure if he should trust the Wiki entry, then that is genuinely problematic. If it is a more effective use of a reader's time to just look for the information elsewhere, then the Wikipedia has failed.
A well-written but factually inaccurate entry will often survive several rounds of superficial editing, because it has a glossy veneer. If you're trying to get a basic grounding in an area you know nothing about--and this is really what encyclopedias are supposed to be good for--then you can see that someone has written something well, and has contributed many articles on a topic...but you don't know if any of it is reliable.
What. An. Ass. Luckily I have no journalistic reputation to maintain so I can say that. The fact is that the data is not lost, if someone mangles an entry in the Wikipedia it can be restored, and at some point I fully expect some of the articles to end up locked down and only editable by a select few or through a moderation process. The fact that Wikipedia isn't there yet is just a sign that there's more quasi-Darwinian process before it.
And market forces will solve all economic problems, too. You can't always invoke a principle of natural selection (the 'quasi-Darwinian process') and expect to get something good out at the end. Sure, you'll optimize for something, but it isn't necessarily for maximum accuracy. The optimization might be for readability or for agreement with groupthink rather than for factual correctness.
I believe that the author was being generous when he suggested that Wikipedia articles would asymptotically approach correctness. What will happen is each article will reach a point where it becomes roughly equally likely that a change will be inaccurate or inappropriate--and this point is likely to be further from the 'truth' when the editing is being done by laypeople than when it is being done by carefully-vetted subject matter experts.
Further, unless there is someone actively (and competently) deciding when an article is 'finished', you'll probably see the same problem with articles as one does with code: tiny additions, little commments, the odd adjustments--they will all add up to make a crufty unmaintainable mess. Someone will eventually heavily edit or even rewrite the article, and the reinvention of the wheel will continue.
Wikipedia--like any encyclopedia--should almost never be cited in an academic paper. Certainly never in peer-reviewed work. Real academic work usually involves consulting primary sources and formally peer-reviewed publications.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of classroom citations will indicate that people are reading it, but that won't tell you if it is getting more accurate. I suppose it depends on what measure of 'success' you use. A lot of people read and cite The Drudge Report, but that doesn't assure its veracity or lack of bias.
The comparison to CBS is dubious. A television station will generate at most a few hours of news reporting per day, which will be watched by millions of people. A newspaper will generate a few score of pages at most--and errors regularly appear in print there. Wikipedia contributors generate hundreds of pages per day, at a rate that continues to grow. The major articles are regularly scrutinized by experts, but more obscure topics will probably be seldom seen or reviewed.
Incidentally, peer review in academia doesn't mean that lots of people have skimmed a document. Peer review means that a number of highly qualified subject matter experts have read a document with painstaking care, with the goal of detecting any flaws. Unless experts deliberately set out to review, revise, and monitor specific areas of Wikipedia in an organized manner then errors will stand. Review by 'peers' who don't know very much about a given topic are useless at best.
This presumes that the user of the Wikipedia article reads it in depth, and checks every date and age listed for internal consistency.
It's also possible for the article to be inconsistent in ways that are undetectable without reference to further works. If the article starts off by saying that Hamilton was born in 1755, then mentions that he retired at the age of 65, one might conclude that he ceased working in 1820. If the age was actually calculated using the 1757 birthdate, there would be no way for the reader to know. On its face, the statements are quite plausible, and pass the 'sniff test'.
Sure, we accept that no source is really authoritative and 100% accurate in all cases, but we should expect an encyclopedia to warn us about things like uncertainties in major dates.
Barrels (and their sister containers, the crates) are an essential part of any FPS.
One of the canonical pieces of FPS review literature is the Crate Review System, which measures the time in game until the appearance of the first crate or barrel (StC: Start to Crate).
This comes back to the canonical "something you know, something you have, something you are" model. Good security should involve at least two and preferably three of the above:
Something you know: a PIN or password;
Something you have: a card, a key, an RFID tag, etc.; and
Something you are: a biometric--iris scan, facial recognition, fingerprint, a signature.
Even if one element of the verification system is relatively soft, the others will make it more difficult for troublemakers. You're protected from an individual failure. Even if someone develops a technique to fake your thumbprint (or uses one of the existing ones...) they still also need to get your password and your ID card.
I hate to break it to the terrorists, but they're waaaay too late.
Well, okay...but then you have to think about all the mining, smelting, alloying, forging, and so forth that go into the construction of the vacuum cleaner. All the irreplaceable fossil fuel used in making the rubber and plastic components. Heck, you have to account for the small fraction of the electrical infrastructure that delivers power to your vacuum.
A broom, on the other hand, can be made with a wooden handle and straw bristles, and the assembly steps in the production of food are largely solar powered. Heck, a homeowner can easily grow enough apples on a tree behind the house to sustain them during an hour of sweeping every week.
Food...ahem...for thought.
I dunno? How much juice does a Roomba draw? And it's doing it all the time....
Kudos to the parent; that's the funniest mental image I've had in a long time.
The only question is whether it will be a Summer or Winter Olympic event. My personal preferences is for Winter, so we can do it on ice. :)
The whole point of the story is that it's obviously not true. Basic skills, perhaps, but definitely not mastery. Fifteen seconds is enough time to understand the basic controls--and then fall off sometimes when you stop, or occasionally run over a Roomba.
It's like saying you can learn to drive in fifteen seconds, as long as you don't mind driving with two wheels on the sidewalk sometimes and occasionally running over a small child.
Forget playing with resistors. Include a small optical sensor and a timer. When you convert the video to still frames, insert a small white spot in one corner of the screen in one of every n frames. You can then set up a feedback loop that automatically measures and maintains a constant frame rate.
Of course, doing that would be really stupid. :)
I'm going with the plausible explanation of
his instruments weren't very precise;
he saw a loss in weight in only four of the six patients--the others gained weight; and
he had a result in mind that he wanted to see.
Also, the air explanation doesn't...er...hold water. Other posters have noted that the mass of air that will fit even in fully inflated lungs is only about (off the top of my head, now) about two or three grams. Plus, as an AC astutely noted, Archimedes would have a problem with this explanation. The air in the lungs won't have any effect on the measured weight of the person, because it's displacing an equal mass of air around the body.
On the other hand, he cites specific examples of the problem that he criticizes. In each case, he doesn't rely solely on his own knowledge, but refers to genuine experts in each field. As a journalist, one task he should be good at is evaluating the credentials and credibility of his sources, and conveying that information in his writing.
I also don't think he has a problem with a reporter who presents both sides of an issue where there exists genuine scientific dispute. Mooney's complaint is with reporters who present individuals with weak credentials and conflicts of interest as credible alternatives in order to produce a "balanced" story.
Do we care about Chris Mooney's opinion on a purported link between breast cancer and abortion, or between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and global warming? We do not, and we should be skeptical of it because he isn't qualified by training or experience to make judgements in those areas. Do we trust Chris Mooney when he reports the opinions of the National Cancer Institute or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? We do, because those organizations have studied those issues, and are credible. In other words, we don't trust Mr. Mooney to run his own clinical trials, but with formal training in journalism he ought to be able to assess the qualifications of his sources. Journalists who don't do so are being tremendously irresponsible, misleading, and plain lazy.
Actually, scientists don't generally say that kind of thing. Scientists say things like, "Up to one alcoholic drink per day is correlated with a significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Above two drinks per day, the cardiovascular benefits are offset by increasing risk of liver damage, except where...blah blah blah."
Journalists take peer-reviewed, detailed, often-heavily qualified points, and distill them into misleadingly absolute statements: "Wine is good for you."
Generally scientists hate this process, but the alternative is to have their work ignored entirely by the press--and then you have a public which has no exposure to science, period.
There's always something they can be doing. If they've decided that a particular piece of a project is important enough that the employees should be there until 2am, then there is probably real work that the manager can be doing.
If there's nothing that's directly applicable to the project at hand, then the manager can be the guy that runs for takeout food and makes coffee.
When the Apollo capsule was being built by North American, there was only space inside for (at most) two guys to work. Climbing in and out through the hatch was time consuming and awkward. Further, the capsule was a very complicated piece of equipment and most of the assembly had to take place from the inside. Consequently, North American had a policy--if the guys in the capsule asked for anything, the nearest person was to run and get it for them. Doesn't matter if it's a company VP doing a tour on the shop floor. The assembly of the capsule was essential to the Apollo program and the success of the company, and if the guys working on the critical tasks said "jump"--no matter where they were on the org chart--anybody listening would say "how high?" Similarly, if something is important enough and time-critical enough for a software company to keep its coders at work for ninety hour weeks, management needs to be available to provide support at all hours for any purpose. If managers are unwilling to do so, then perhaps the project isn't quite the priority they say it is.
To be fair, if the employees want the manager to leave, then he should respect that. Also, if they're fixing something that's their own damn fault, then the manager probably isn't obligated to hang around for it. Otherwise, no excuses!
Your forgot the apostrophe in "visualization's". :)
Yep.
Part of the problem is that pulverizing the waste and putting it into the atmosphere is hard to do. Particularly when you want to distribute it evenly, so that you don't inadvertently create hotspots downwind. Heavy metal dust will have a tendency to settle rapidly--in a nuclear war, we'd call it fallout. You've probably noticed that the smokestacks of an operating coal-fired generating station very quickly become stained black. It's a very bad situation if that unsightly blackness is high-level nuclear waste instead of just soot.
The uranium content of coal in the United States is about one part per million. To dilute nuclear waste to a similar concentration for disposal, each gram would have to be mixed with a full ton of other matter...might be a bit impractical. And grinding it up to push it up the stack is likely to be both difficult and energy intensive.
Why?
If you're a millionaire in the States you can speed with impunity, just as long as you're not way over the limit and facing a dangerous driving charge. A hundred-dollar speeding ticket can be written off as a cost of driving.
If a fine is meant to discourage a certain behaviour--rather than to act solely as a cash cow, as it does in some communities--then it actually has to sting a little to get caught.
For engineers, that's equivalent to a very small value of zero.
On the other hand, there is a school of thought that the act of sending the spam--in and of itself, regardless of whether it is fraudulent or not--is also destructive to society. It makes email a less valuable tool for everyone.
Telemarketers have restrictions on who they can call and when, so that our telephones aren't rendered useless by a barrage of marketing. They can be fined heavily for not following the rules, even if their practices are entirely honest. In that case, new law was required to regulate telemarketing, because existing law didn't cover the new technology. The same goes for junk faxes. With those, my time and other resources are wasted at relatively low cost to the advertiser. New law was required, because old law didn't cover the abuse of the new technology.
Similarly, spam wasn't regulated within the old framework. New law was required to address it. (If one believes that spam is detrimental to society and should be addressed in law at all.)
You could scale the fines to be proportional to income. The idea is that the same offense should result in the same approximate level of pain. Norway does this; occasionally it results in a wealthy individual receiving a ten thousand dollar speeding ticket.
Community service might be an appropriate substitute. An hour is an hour to everyone.
Although I'm sure that Bush would love to have Ashcroft as a Justice of the Supreme Court, it's completely untenable.
Although Ashcroft served as Attorney General, he's never sat as a judge on any court. I'm pretty sure that a complete absence of bench experience would probably work against him even among a lot of Republicans. It would be pretty embarrassing to have a Justice who's never actually written a judgement before.
Ashcroft also has been having some health problems--he had his gall bladder removed earlier this year--so even if he was offered a position, I don't know that he'd take it. He might also retire or die during the next Presidency, which might lead to a less Republican-friendly appointment in the near future--or another unpleasant confirmation hearing, at best.
I tend to believe those are the most perceptive users, actually.
Indeed. It's not even the most popular game distributed by Microsoft--not by a long shot.
The clear winner has to be Solitaire. A copy is sold with nearly every computer, and it's the only thing to do with a computer at work after you've finished reading Slashdot.