> to further military goals, which basically involve killing people.
You've greatly misunderstood the military. Killing people is seldom if ever a military goal. Almost always the goal is to force people to accept certain terms. Killing people is often employed as a way of furthering that goal, but it is not itself the goal.
> I don't understand. What good is a high school diploma except as the piece > of paper that gets you into university?
There also are still some midrange jobs for which the employer strongly prefers you to have a high school diploma (or at least a GED -- but a diploma is preferable) but does not require a college degree. Granted, there are not as many of these as there used to be, and going on to either college or vocational postsecondary training is the primary use for your high school diploma.
> I mean, it's not even that great as a get-into-university aid.
No. As I pointed out across thread, a decent SAT score will, as a rule, do better for you.
> If it was Taco Bell, perhaps they weren't smearing 'stuff' at all. Perhaps > the stuff was actually exploding all over the bathroom!
Yeah, soap does that sometimes. In fairness, there were a couple of times that the stuff they smeared around was the kind of stuff you envisaged. But more often it was all the liquid soap out of the soap dispensers, with just enough water to make it a really big latherey mess. And occasionally it would be other things -- food, shaving cream, the contents of used feminine hygene products,... but the soap was by far the most common smearing stuff.
I thought they were withdrawn in 1969 -- and "withdrawn" here does not mean "stopped printing", because they stopped printing them in the forties. If they are still legal tender, what does "withdrawn" mean?
> "nothing over a $20 bill" I consider reasonable, etc.
Depends. At a place that takes thousands of dollars into the drawer every day, you expect to be able to spend a $100 bill (though the cashier may look at it for an extra few seconds or get out one of those pens).
However, at a place that doesn't handle so much money, you can't expect them to take the larger denominations. For example, I work at a public library, and whenever people try to pay their fines with a $100, we direct them to the bank. We don't have that kind of change if we pooled all the money in the building, including what's in the librarians' purses. This occasionally annoys people, because the $100 is all they've got on them, but we just don't keep that kind of cash around. We would take a $100, if someone were paying a large fine (say, over $80), but we don't have $90 in change to give out, sorry.
> It seems that US currency has gone through many different changes over > the years, and yet it's all still legal tender
Actually, not all of it. Bills over $100, though most Americans don't know this, are no longer worth anything except as collector's items. (In practice, this is not a big change for most people, since most folks never used or saw the large bills on a regular basis anyway. They were taken out of circulation because most of their practical uses were criminal in nature.)
However, the $2 and the fifty-cent-piece and dollar coin and so forth *are* still legal tender, and in fact are even still produced, just nobody uses them much.
> Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
Because politicians like to stay in office.
If it were just a few whiners who didn't like $1 coins, it would be different, but in fact the overwhelming majority of the US population prefers bills to coins.
> The Sacajawea actually seems to be having some success, IMO.
Yeah, I'm sure that's why I had no idea what you were talking about until you said...
> But I think the real reason that the Sacajawea is having more success > than previous dollar coins is that they're gold.
Gold? Oh, you mean those bronze $1 coins? I think I've seen three of them so far, spaced months apart. Some success. (If you meant that there are *actual* gold coins in the US now, I've never seen one.)
If I were going to reform U.S. currency, the first thing I'd do is stop printing $2, $10, and $50 bills and make more of the other denominations to compensate. (I wouldn't take away their status as legal tender or anything, just stop printing new ones and let them slip gradually into disuse.) There are only five ones in a five, four fives in a twenty, and five twenties in a hundred; when there are 4-5 of a given denomination in the next one, you don't need another denomination in between them. I'd stop the minting of fifty-cent pieces and possibly dimes for the same reason (although, dimes are a lot smaller and lighter than nickels, so they might be worth keeping), and make the $1 coins have a diameter more different from quarters, so they don't get mistaken for them so easily.
> I wish I could remember the figure for how much the government would > save if they would stop printing the dollar and just use the dollar coin.
Yeah, but for at least a decade they'd have to spend all that and more on propaganda campaigns to convince people to go along with it. People *hate* carrying around a lot of coins.
> Nobody is using the coins because nobody is really setup to take them
No, that's not the reason. (The other way around you have it right, though.) Nobody uses the $.50 and $1 coins because we have $1 bills, which are smaller and weigh less, and people prefer them. Haven't you noticed how many people don't like dealing with lots of coins? A small handful of coins is okay, but if you're carrying around six bucks, $1 bills are *way* easier to deal with than $1 coins.
It's not that people dislike the $1 coins per se; they just dislike carrying them *around*. They like to collect them and let them sit in drawers...
The *only* way to get people to circulate the $1 coins with real frequency is to stop printing $1 bills, and people won't like it. They won't like it at all. Believe me, you've never heard whining such as there would be.
$1 coins aren't a hassle because they're unusal. They're a hassle because *coins* are a hassle, compared to bills. If we had $.25 bills, people would use them.
> wouldn't it make more sense to replace low-denomination bills with coins?
There are good solid reasons why the $1 note is paper rather than coin. We actually have $1 coins, but they're only slightly more common in circulation than $2 bills. This is not because they don't mint enough of them -- they *do* mint them. But they don't circulate, because people treat them like collector's items. They sit in drawers. The average household probably has almost as many $1 coins as bills at any given time, but the bills are sitting in wallets and will be spent in a day or two; whereas, the $1 coins are stacked in cedar drawers next to the good silver, laying in the bottom of jewelry cabinets, and so forth. A lot of people try to collect a "silver dollar", as they are called, for every year since their birth (i.e., one minted in each of those years). I guess almost 10% of the population does that around here. (Other folks collect a penny for each year, but you can do that your whole life and it adds up to about a buck, so it doesn't take that much currency out of circulation -- and, there's no paper $0.01 note.)
So, *why* do the $1 coins not circulate? Because, we have $1 bills, that's why. The paper notes are significantly preferable to Americans, because they weigh less and take up less space. Most men will tolerate carrying around about eight coins in a pocket before telling someone to keep the change. Women will tolerate significantly more coinage, because they have coin purses, but they don't like dealing with them either -- they don't, as a rule, get the coins out to pay for things -- they grab the bills, which are easier to deal with, and the coins accumulate until they fill up the coin purse, at which point they get emptied into a jar or dish at home. (A lot of men empty their coins into a dish at the end of each day, too.)
When the jar or dish fills up, it goes to the bank to be counted by machine and turned into bills. There are people who pay with coins, but they are in the minority. Just about every retail establishment in the US gives out a *lot* more coins than they take in. When I worked at T. Bell, I typically broke open one extra roll of quarters per shift, plus usually an extra roll of dimes or nickels, and often an extra roll of pennies. (An "extra" roll, in this context, is one besides the full roll your drawer stared with.) This was in the evening, which is the slowest time for fast food, and Taco Bell operates with a lower overhead and significantly lower gross take than, say, McDonald's (although, their evenings aren't as much slower than their daytimes as is true at a burger joint).
> I had to work a lot of retail jobs through all my degrees, and they are not > a party to start with, without having to contend with behavior like that...
Recounting a drawer is not the kind of chore that makes a fast food job hard.
Granted, it's mean to cause somebody extra work on purpose, but tossing an extra dime in the drawer is minor compared with the people who deliberately smear stuff all over the mirrors and other fixtures in the bathroom (a semi-regular occurance when I worked at T. Bell), or the people who come in five minutes before close, sit near the door for forty minutes, and keep opening it for anyone who wants in until you want to throttle them, or the employees who hide from work by going in the back and finding things (e.g., trays hamburger buns) to poke holes in with a pencil (one hole per bun, right through the plastic bag and into the middle of the bun -- the manager was less than amused when we discovered that one in the morning).
Over a dime, they will generally only recount the drawer once. It is, after all, just a dime. Now, if the drawer is over by several dollars, they will do what you described, and the employee will go home with a sick feeling in the pit of his poor little stomach.
We have a minimum wage for hourly employees, but there's a loophole: salaried employees (those paid by the month or by the year irrespective of how many hours they work) are, as near as I can determine, completely exempt from it. I haven't actually read the law, but it seems that when a formerly hourly employee gets promoted to a salaried position, they always seem to suddenly go from working 35-39 hours a week (because after 40 you have to pay an hourly employee half again his regular hourly wage) to more like 60 hours/week once they're salaried. *Maybe* this is just employers taking advantage of workers who don't know the law well enough to know they can complain, but I suspect it's an actual loophole.
> Like a few other posters have pointed out; you can always go for a GED, > which is generally as good as any high school diploma.
No, it's not. It's more like a certificate of completion. It'll get you a job that doesn't require anything beyond high school only if there aren't any better applicants, and it'll get you into most major universities, including any state school of course, but it is *not* the same as having graduated high school in the first place.
What would be better than a GED, as far as college admissions are concerned -- especially smaller schools with higher standards than the state schools -- is a halfway decent SAT score, plus a diploma from your home country that is the closest available equivalent there to what a high school diploma is here.
But when all is said and done, the frist psot is right: talk to the admissions officers (and, frankly, also the financial aid department) at the colleges you are interested in attending. They will know what will get you enrolled and what won't, and what will get you considered for grants and scholarships and what won't, too.
> Since when is it difficult to pronounce Cthulhu?
Since it contains blends that are not normally used in English, most notably "cth". (This also occurs in Ictheus, the Greek word for fish, and a lot of English-speaking people have trouble saying that, too.) The combination "ulhu" (or, for that matter, any blend between two Us) is also abnormal in English.
Of course, "difficult to pronounce" is relative. Glulxe, for instance, is harder to say than Cthulhu, and "mrurlurlji" is something terrible -- but Ungoliant practically rolls off the tongue.
> can someone please explain to me what the sudden infatuation with Ubuntu is?
Yeah. It's like this, see: There are five major classes of distributions using the Linux kernel: Debian-based, rpm-based, tarball-based, source-based, and specialty distributions. Specialty distros, such as Coyote, are just aimed at a particular use, so they don't show up much on the desktop. The tarball-based distros and to some extent the rpm-based distros are what most people use, it seems, but they have some problems, especially in terms of dependency resolution. urpmi and similar tools help, but there are still some, err, issues. I've been using Mandrake as my primary desktop for some good while now, and I mostly like it, but there are issues. I experimented with Gentoo, but that was a little *too* bleeding-edge for me, and it works your hardware pretty hard if you update often.
One of the chief selling points for Debian-based distros has always been apt-get, which supposedly handles dependencies very nicely, but doesn't have the compilation overhead of Gentoo. However, installing Debian itself (the stable release, that is) is like stepping back in time to the late paleolithic. I tried Sid, but couldn't get it to install to an actual bootable state, much less get a desktop running. The stable realease I got bootable, but getting a desktop running promised a fair amount of old-school pain -- hand-tweaking mode lines in XF86Config and stuff. C'mon, RedHat conquered that in 6.0, during the late bronze age, when most of us still had ISA expansion slots and an ethernet card was considered an optional extra on many new PCs.
Please note, I'm not trying to say Debian is bad. A lot of people really like it, and I suspect I might too, if I could get it set up and working. It does have frustrations, though. One of the servers I have an account on has Debian Stable, and getting recent Perl modules installed off the CPAN is far more problematic than on newer systems, for instance. I suppose that's a minor quibble, but for somebody coming from Mandrake, which is a bit more on the cutting edge side of things (though not to the same extent as Gentoo), it's a little annoying to go through the entire OS install, with eight disks, and discover that after all that you don't even have GTK2 installed. Gah. Some of us find that frustrating in 2005. I think some parts of the installation routine (most notably dselect) are older than my graphics card, which is a Matrox Mystique that I got in January 1998. In 1998, using dselect felt like a reasonable option -- I mean, installing Windows95 was a real pain too, and I was accustomed to using DOS, which you usually installed by manually copying the files. (I think DOS 5 and 6 theoretically came with an INSTALL.EXE, but it was primitive enough that nobody used it. DOS 3 didn't come with one at all. But DOS is no longer a major contender for desktop systems in 2005, either.)
So this is where Ubuntu comes in: it's based on Debian, but it's modern. Other distros have come along before that were Debian-based but more modern and desktop-oriented. There was Lindo^H^Hspire, for instance, but Ubuntu is more open and closer to the Debian way of doing things, except for the fact that it's more modern than Debian stable. Yet, while it's not as stable (in the "hasn't changed since Grandpappy used it" sense), as Debian stable, it is nevertheless fairly stabilized in the sense of mostly working, not having so many bugs as to render it useless, and so on -- it's cutting edge, but it's not *bleeding*-edge like Gentoo can be at times. For some of us, that just feels like the right balance.
Right now, I'm still using Mandrake for my main system -- I don't like to migrate often or prematurely -- but I'm evaluating Ubuntu on the side, in VMWare, and may switch to it if it's good to me. It shows promise. It's got my attention. I'm interested.
I hope that explains why people are interested in Ubuntu. It's why *I* am interested in it, at any rate.
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> Why not give the program to the English department and use it for teaching?
That would be counterproductive. If the program actually works with even 70% reliability, I'll eat my hat. In other words, I guarantee it's worse than the average student. Natural language processing is AI-complete. Every six months somebody claims to have solved the problem, and it always turns out to be another Eliza ("Did you come to me because the fact that question that concerns you is the real reason?") or babelfish ("To celebrate the score and seven years, our suffered ancestors brought ahead on this continent a new nation, taken in freedom and devoted to the proposal which all gecreeerde people are equal") or, frequently, even worse.
"I have a computer program that understands English sentences" is roughly the same as "I have some really great real estate a quarter-mile north of downtown Chicago that will fetch a fortune on the market, but because I'm in a hurry I'll let you have it for half price."
> Beef, it's what's for dinner, because there's no such thing as a chicken knife.
That's because nobody *needs* a special knife to eat chicken; it's possible to cut chicken with a fork or, in a pinch (if the chicken is cooked right) even a spoon. Beef is much tougher, and so sharp and/or serrated knives (miniature saws, in effect) are pretty well required, otherwise some cuts wouldn't even be edible. If beef isn't tough enough for you, the next step up is wood.
Of course, you can always work around this problem by getting beef that's been pre-chewed. Hamburger, we call that.
> "Pop-ups that you want to occur" would include, say, the compose window > of the IMP webmail client, as seen on SpamCop.net.
Not as far as I'm concerned. *If* I used webmail (okay, okay, so I actually have several webmail accounts for one reason or another -- I just don't use them for normal email purposes, mainly testing and accessory use), I would want the compose window to open in the current tab, if I click the compose link/button/whatever with the left button, or in a new tab if I click it with the middle button -- the same as every other link. Under absolutely, positively NO circumstances EVER would I want it to open an unrequested extra window, and while there are extensions to redirect new windows to new tabs, I also don't want it opening in a new tab it I left-click; if I wanted it in a new tab, I would have middle-clicked. If I left click, I want it in the existing tab. Always. On the occasion that I want a separate browser window, I will start another browser instance in the usual way, via a panel launcher. Websites are NOT welcome to try to impose their bizarre idiosyncracies on me by attempting to take this decision out of my hands.
And if pop-ups are problematic for me, they are trebly so for less savvy users. I should know; as TCG at a public library, I'm the one that gets to go help patrons when their back buttons won't work and they have no clue why, and the staff have no clue why either. YOU try explaining that to someone who isn't really clear on the concept of what a window is. After that happens about three times, they figure they'll try that (closing the window to go back) themselves, and then when they try it on a normal, well-behaved page that doesn't open superfluous new windows, I get called again: "I tried to get back to where I was, and it kicked me completely out." Before browsers came along that made it possible to configure away this imbecillic "new window" behavior, I was about ready to throw the offending sites into a hosts file black hole, except I didn't fancy maintaining a hosts file that large.
The whole idea of a "wanted pop-up window" is dubious in the extreme. There are established mechanisms -- established for something like than ten years now, which in internet time is basically forever -- whereby the user can open a link in a new window whenever the user wants. (Granted, some users don't know about this, but those are the users who would never want a new window, because they don't understand the concept of multiple windows being open at once.) The whole definition of a pop-up window is one that opens when the user did *not* specifically ask the browser for a new window. Saying "wanted pop-up" is like saying "solicited spam", "legal crime", or "gentle violence". It's a contradiction in terms, a semantic game bad webmasters play to make excuses for doing something fundamentally naughty.
> The comments on that blog URL are pretty unanimous in that they say the patch > causes FF to block pretty much all pop-ups, even ones you want to occur.
I'm confused. I'm missing the antecedent for the pronoun "ones". The closest preceding noun that matches it in number is "pop-ups", but that obviously cannot be the referrent, because the pronoun is modified by the relative clause, "[that] you want to occur", which can't possibly refer to any pop-ups. What, exactly, is it that you are talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeouch, I can't believe this one slipped through! From the rollover text-as-graphic on Apple's own page:
Automator works like a tireless robot
inside your computer to helps you
streamline challenging or annoying
repetitive tasks without programming.
> to further military goals, which basically involve killing people.
You've greatly misunderstood the military. Killing people is seldom if ever a military goal. Almost always the goal is to force people to accept certain terms. Killing people is often employed as a way of furthering that goal, but it is not itself the goal.
> I don't understand. What good is a high school diploma except as the piece
> of paper that gets you into university?
There also are still some midrange jobs for which the employer strongly prefers you to have a high school diploma (or at least a GED -- but a diploma is preferable) but does not require a college degree. Granted, there are not as many of these as there used to be, and going on to either college or vocational postsecondary training is the primary use for your high school diploma.
> I mean, it's not even that great as a get-into-university aid.
No. As I pointed out across thread, a decent SAT score will, as a rule, do better for you.
> If it was Taco Bell, perhaps they weren't smearing 'stuff' at all. Perhaps
... but the soap was by far the most common smearing stuff.
> the stuff was actually exploding all over the bathroom!
Yeah, soap does that sometimes. In fairness, there were a couple of times that the stuff they smeared around was the kind of stuff you envisaged. But more often it was all the liquid soap out of the soap dispensers, with just enough water to make it a really big latherey mess. And occasionally it would be other things -- food, shaving cream, the contents of used feminine hygene products,
I thought they were withdrawn in 1969 -- and "withdrawn" here does not mean "stopped printing", because they stopped printing them in the forties. If they are still legal tender, what does "withdrawn" mean?
> "nothing over a $20 bill" I consider reasonable, etc.
Depends. At a place that takes thousands of dollars into the drawer every day, you expect to be able to spend a $100 bill (though the cashier may look at it for an extra few seconds or get out one of those pens).
However, at a place that doesn't handle so much money, you can't expect them to take the larger denominations. For example, I work at a public library, and whenever people try to pay their fines with a $100, we direct them to the bank. We don't have that kind of change if we pooled all the money in the building, including what's in the librarians' purses. This occasionally annoys people, because the $100 is all they've got on them, but we just don't keep that kind of cash around. We would take a $100, if someone were paying a large fine (say, over $80), but we don't have $90 in change to give out, sorry.
> It seems that US currency has gone through many different changes over
> the years, and yet it's all still legal tender
Actually, not all of it. Bills over $100, though most Americans don't know this, are no longer worth anything except as collector's items. (In practice, this is not a big change for most people, since most folks never used or saw the large bills on a regular basis anyway. They were taken out of circulation because most of their practical uses were criminal in nature.)
However, the $2 and the fifty-cent-piece and dollar coin and so forth *are* still legal tender, and in fact are even still produced, just nobody uses them much.
> Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
Because politicians like to stay in office.
If it were just a few whiners who didn't like $1 coins, it would be different, but in fact the overwhelming majority of the US population prefers bills to coins.
> The Sacajawea actually seems to be having some success, IMO.
Yeah, I'm sure that's why I had no idea what you were talking about until you said...
> But I think the real reason that the Sacajawea is having more success
> than previous dollar coins is that they're gold.
Gold? Oh, you mean those bronze $1 coins? I think I've seen three of them so far, spaced months apart. Some success. (If you meant that there are *actual* gold coins in the US now, I've never seen one.)
If I were going to reform U.S. currency, the first thing I'd do is stop printing $2, $10, and $50 bills and make more of the other denominations to compensate. (I wouldn't take away their status as legal tender or anything, just stop printing new ones and let them slip gradually into disuse.) There are only five ones in a five, four fives in a twenty, and five twenties in a hundred; when there are 4-5 of a given denomination in the next one, you don't need another denomination in between them. I'd stop the minting of fifty-cent pieces and possibly dimes for the same reason (although, dimes are a lot smaller and lighter than nickels, so they might be worth keeping), and make the $1 coins have a diameter more different from quarters, so they don't get mistaken for them so easily.
> I wish I could remember the figure for how much the government would
> save if they would stop printing the dollar and just use the dollar coin.
Yeah, but for at least a decade they'd have to spend all that and more on propaganda campaigns to convince people to go along with it. People *hate* carrying around a lot of coins.
> Nobody is using the coins because nobody is really setup to take them
No, that's not the reason. (The other way around you have it right, though.)
Nobody uses the $.50 and $1 coins because we have $1 bills, which are smaller
and weigh less, and people prefer them. Haven't you noticed how many people
don't like dealing with lots of coins? A small handful of coins is okay,
but if you're carrying around six bucks, $1 bills are *way* easier to deal
with than $1 coins.
It's not that people dislike the $1 coins per se; they just dislike carrying
them *around*. They like to collect them and let them sit in drawers...
The *only* way to get people to circulate the $1 coins with real frequency
is to stop printing $1 bills, and people won't like it. They won't like it
at all. Believe me, you've never heard whining such as there would be.
$1 coins aren't a hassle because they're unusal. They're a hassle because
*coins* are a hassle, compared to bills. If we had $.25 bills, people would
use them.
> wouldn't it make more sense to replace low-denomination bills with coins?
There are good solid reasons why the $1 note is paper rather than coin. We actually have $1 coins, but they're only slightly more common in circulation than $2 bills. This is not because they don't mint enough of them -- they *do* mint them. But they don't circulate, because people treat them like collector's items. They sit in drawers. The average household probably has almost as many $1 coins as bills at any given time, but the bills are sitting in wallets and will be spent in a day or two; whereas, the $1 coins are stacked in cedar drawers next to the good silver, laying in the bottom of jewelry cabinets, and so forth. A lot of people try to collect a "silver dollar", as they are called, for every year since their birth (i.e., one minted in each of those years). I guess almost 10% of the population does that around here. (Other folks collect a penny for each year, but you can do that your whole life and it adds up to about a buck, so it doesn't take that much currency out of circulation -- and, there's no paper $0.01 note.)
So, *why* do the $1 coins not circulate? Because, we have $1 bills, that's why. The paper notes are significantly preferable to Americans, because they weigh less and take up less space. Most men will tolerate carrying around about eight coins in a pocket before telling someone to keep the change. Women will tolerate significantly more coinage, because they have coin purses, but they don't like dealing with them either -- they don't, as a rule, get the coins out to pay for things -- they grab the bills, which are easier to deal with, and the coins accumulate until they fill up the coin purse, at which point they get emptied into a jar or dish at home. (A lot of men empty their coins into a dish at the end of each day, too.)
When the jar or dish fills up, it goes to the bank to be counted by machine and turned into bills. There are people who pay with coins, but they are in the minority. Just about every retail establishment in the US gives out a *lot* more coins than they take in. When I worked at T. Bell, I typically broke open one extra roll of quarters per shift, plus usually an extra roll of dimes or nickels, and often an extra roll of pennies. (An "extra" roll, in this context, is one besides the full roll your drawer stared with.) This was in the evening, which is the slowest time for fast food, and Taco Bell operates with a lower overhead and significantly lower gross take than, say, McDonald's (although, their evenings aren't as much slower than their daytimes as is true at a burger joint).
> I had to work a lot of retail jobs through all my degrees, and they are not
> a party to start with, without having to contend with behavior like that...
Recounting a drawer is not the kind of chore that makes a fast food job hard.
Granted, it's mean to cause somebody extra work on purpose, but tossing an extra dime in the drawer is minor compared with the people who deliberately smear stuff all over the mirrors and other fixtures in the bathroom (a semi-regular occurance when I worked at T. Bell), or the people who come in five minutes before close, sit near the door for forty minutes, and keep opening it for anyone who wants in until you want to throttle them, or the employees who hide from work by going in the back and finding things (e.g., trays hamburger buns) to poke holes in with a pencil (one hole per bun, right through the plastic bag and into the middle of the bun -- the manager was less than amused when we discovered that one in the morning).
Over a dime, they will generally only recount the drawer once. It is, after
all, just a dime. Now, if the drawer is over by several dollars, they will
do what you described, and the employee will go home with a sick feeling in
the pit of his poor little stomach.
> Does the US have a minumum wage?
We have a minimum wage for hourly employees, but there's a loophole: salaried
employees (those paid by the month or by the year irrespective of how many
hours they work) are, as near as I can determine, completely exempt from it.
I haven't actually read the law, but it seems that when a formerly hourly
employee gets promoted to a salaried position, they always seem to suddenly
go from working 35-39 hours a week (because after 40 you have to pay an hourly
employee half again his regular hourly wage) to more like 60 hours/week once
they're salaried. *Maybe* this is just employers taking advantage of workers
who don't know the law well enough to know they can complain, but I suspect
it's an actual loophole.
> Like a few other posters have pointed out; you can always go for a GED,
> which is generally as good as any high school diploma.
No, it's not. It's more like a certificate of completion. It'll get you a
job that doesn't require anything beyond high school only if there aren't
any better applicants, and it'll get you into most major universities,
including any state school of course, but it is *not* the same as having
graduated high school in the first place.
What would be better than a GED, as far as college admissions are concerned --
especially smaller schools with higher standards than the state schools -- is
a halfway decent SAT score, plus a diploma from your home country that is the
closest available equivalent there to what a high school diploma is here.
But when all is said and done, the frist psot is right: talk to the
admissions officers (and, frankly, also the financial aid department) at
the colleges you are interested in attending. They will know what will
get you enrolled and what won't, and what will get you considered for
grants and scholarships and what won't, too.
> Since when is it difficult to pronounce Cthulhu?
Since it contains blends that are not normally used in English, most notably
"cth". (This also occurs in Ictheus, the Greek word for fish, and a lot of
English-speaking people have trouble saying that, too.) The combination "ulhu"
(or, for that matter, any blend between two Us) is also abnormal in English.
Of course, "difficult to pronounce" is relative. Glulxe, for instance, is
harder to say than Cthulhu, and "mrurlurlji" is something terrible -- but
Ungoliant practically rolls off the tongue.
> It isn't easy to create a good, strong, sensible product or brand name.
Indeed, bad names are much easier to create. I can come up with half a dozen of those in notime flat...
* Dependency Linux
* PainMonger Linux
* Lysergic Linux
* Tweeny Lweenux
* Linux Software Distro (JRB-LSD)
* kgildnuvrox
> can someone please explain to me what the sudden infatuation with Ubuntu is?
Yeah. It's like this, see: There are five major classes of distributions using the Linux kernel: Debian-based, rpm-based, tarball-based, source-based, and specialty distributions. Specialty distros, such as Coyote, are just aimed at a particular use, so they don't show up much on the desktop. The tarball-based distros and to some extent the rpm-based distros are what most people use, it seems, but they have some problems, especially in terms of dependency resolution. urpmi and similar tools help, but there are still some, err, issues. I've been using Mandrake as my primary desktop for some good while now, and I mostly like it, but there are issues. I experimented with Gentoo, but that was a little *too* bleeding-edge for me, and it works your hardware pretty hard if you update often.
One of the chief selling points for Debian-based distros has always been apt-get, which supposedly handles dependencies very nicely, but doesn't have the compilation overhead of Gentoo. However, installing Debian itself (the stable release, that is) is like stepping back in time to the late paleolithic. I tried Sid, but couldn't get it to install to an actual bootable state, much less get a desktop running. The stable realease I got bootable, but getting a desktop running promised a fair amount of old-school pain -- hand-tweaking mode lines in XF86Config and stuff. C'mon, RedHat conquered that in 6.0, during the late bronze age, when most of us still had ISA expansion slots and an ethernet card was considered an optional extra on many new PCs.
Please note, I'm not trying to say Debian is bad. A lot of people really like it, and I suspect I might too, if I could get it set up and working. It does have frustrations, though. One of the servers I have an account on has Debian Stable, and getting recent Perl modules installed off the CPAN is far more problematic than on newer systems, for instance. I suppose that's a minor quibble, but for somebody coming from Mandrake, which is a bit more on the cutting edge side of things (though not to the same extent as Gentoo), it's a little annoying to go through the entire OS install, with eight disks, and discover that after all that you don't even have GTK2 installed. Gah. Some of us find that frustrating in 2005. I think some parts of the installation routine (most notably dselect) are older than my graphics card, which is a Matrox Mystique that I got in January 1998. In 1998, using dselect felt like a reasonable option -- I mean, installing Windows95 was a real pain too, and I was accustomed to using DOS, which you usually installed by manually copying the files. (I think DOS 5 and 6 theoretically came with an INSTALL.EXE, but it was primitive enough that nobody used it. DOS 3 didn't come with one at all. But DOS is no longer a major contender for desktop systems in 2005, either.)
So this is where Ubuntu comes in: it's based on Debian, but it's modern. Other distros have come along before that were Debian-based but more modern and desktop-oriented. There was Lindo^H^Hspire, for instance, but Ubuntu is more open and closer to the Debian way of doing things, except for the fact that it's more modern than Debian stable. Yet, while it's not as stable (in the "hasn't changed since Grandpappy used it" sense), as Debian stable, it is nevertheless fairly stabilized in the sense of mostly working, not having so many bugs as to render it useless, and so on -- it's cutting edge, but it's not *bleeding*-edge like Gentoo can be at times. For some of us, that just feels like the right balance.
Right now, I'm still using Mandrake for my main system -- I don't like to migrate often or prematurely -- but I'm evaluating Ubuntu on the side, in VMWare, and may switch to it if it's good to me. It shows promise. It's got my attention. I'm interested.
I hope that explains why people are interested in Ubuntu. It's why *I* am interested in it, at any rate.
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> Why not give the program to the English department and use it for teaching?
That would be counterproductive. If the program actually works with even 70% reliability, I'll eat my hat. In other words, I guarantee it's worse than the average student. Natural language processing is AI-complete. Every six months somebody claims to have solved the problem, and it always turns out to be another Eliza ("Did you come to me because the fact that question that concerns you is the real reason?") or babelfish ("To celebrate the score and seven years, our suffered ancestors brought ahead on this continent a new nation, taken in freedom and devoted to the proposal which all gecreeerde people are equal") or, frequently, even worse.
"I have a computer program that understands English sentences" is roughly the same as "I have some really great real estate a quarter-mile north of downtown Chicago that will fetch a fortune on the market, but because I'm in a hurry I'll let you have it for half price."
How about Ungoliant Linux? Not as hard to pronounce as Cthulhu, but at least twice as evil.
> Beef, it's what's for dinner, because there's no such thing as a chicken knife.
That's because nobody *needs* a special knife to eat chicken; it's possible to cut chicken with a fork or, in a pinch (if the chicken is cooked right) even a spoon. Beef is much tougher, and so sharp and/or serrated knives (miniature saws, in effect) are pretty well required, otherwise some cuts wouldn't even be edible. If beef isn't tough enough for you, the next step up is wood.
Of course, you can always work around this problem by getting beef that's been pre-chewed. Hamburger, we call that.
> "Pop-ups that you want to occur" would include, say, the compose window
> of the IMP webmail client, as seen on SpamCop.net.
Not as far as I'm concerned. *If* I used webmail (okay, okay, so I actually have several webmail accounts for one reason or another -- I just don't use them for normal email purposes, mainly testing and accessory use), I would want the compose window to open in the current tab, if I click the compose link/button/whatever with the left button, or in a new tab if I click it with the middle button -- the same as every other link. Under absolutely, positively NO circumstances EVER would I want it to open an unrequested extra window, and while there are extensions to redirect new windows to new tabs, I also don't want it opening in a new tab it I left-click; if I wanted it in a new tab, I would have middle-clicked. If I left click, I want it in the existing tab. Always. On the occasion that I want a separate browser window, I will start another browser instance in the usual way, via a panel launcher. Websites are NOT welcome to try to impose their bizarre idiosyncracies on me by attempting to take this decision out of my hands.
And if pop-ups are problematic for me, they are trebly so for less savvy users. I should know; as TCG at a public library, I'm the one that gets to go help patrons when their back buttons won't work and they have no clue why, and the staff have no clue why either. YOU try explaining that to someone who isn't really clear on the concept of what a window is. After that happens about three times, they figure they'll try that (closing the window to go back) themselves, and then when they try it on a normal, well-behaved page that doesn't open superfluous new windows, I get called again: "I tried to get back to where I was, and it kicked me completely out." Before browsers came along that made it possible to configure away this imbecillic "new window" behavior, I was about ready to throw the offending sites into a hosts file black hole, except I didn't fancy maintaining a hosts file that large.
The whole idea of a "wanted pop-up window" is dubious in the extreme. There are established mechanisms -- established for something like than ten years now, which in internet time is basically forever -- whereby the user can open a link in a new window whenever the user wants. (Granted, some users don't know about this, but those are the users who would never want a new window, because they don't understand the concept of multiple windows being open at once.) The whole definition of a pop-up window is one that opens when the user did *not* specifically ask the browser for a new window. Saying "wanted pop-up" is like saying "solicited spam", "legal crime", or "gentle violence". It's a contradiction in terms, a semantic game bad webmasters play to make excuses for doing something fundamentally naughty.
> The comments on that blog URL are pretty unanimous in that they say the patch
> causes FF to block pretty much all pop-ups, even ones you want to occur.
I'm confused. I'm missing the antecedent for the pronoun "ones". The closest
preceding noun that matches it in number is "pop-ups", but that obviously
cannot be the referrent, because the pronoun is modified by the relative
clause, "[that] you want to occur", which can't possibly refer to any pop-ups.
What, exactly, is it that you are talking about?