Rosie Ruiz, i believe. Took the subway and dashed to the finish line. I live here in Boston, and while i can't run the marathons, almost everybody here knows someone who does- a doctor, a friend, a teacher or college student. And thanks to rosie, we see the rosie chips. You put it on your shoelace or what have you, and they use those as well as cameras. The checkpoints are set up along the course of the marathon. The marathon site is here.
I talked to one of the runners last year about it and we were laughing over the story. we also have a lot of ham radio operators in the city who broadcast results as they're anounced; i'm wondering what's next with RFID. Will hardcore athletes just have permanent chips in their bodies? Or will they be embedded in the sneakers?
It's interesting how many common foodstuffs are being found to affect blood sugar, glucose tolerance, and diabetes in general. Cinnamon, which if you ask me, tastes pretty good in coffee. So for those not wanting a six-cup-a-day caffeine habit, a cup of coffee or decaf with 1/4 tsp cinnamon added might be a good way to start the day.
Ten years ago, i used to be hell on alarm clocks. I had to put it on the far side of the room, because if i didn't, i'd just shut it off and go back to bed. (it's in the family; my brother can cheerfully sleep through an hour and a half of alarm clock, until somebody else in the household would get annoyed enough to go shut it off and kick him till he woke up.) I kept the one alarm clock plan in place until the morning i woke up smashing the thing against the shelf, because i couldn't figure out how to shut it off and wasn't really awake yet. It didn't work any more after that.
Now, i have two alarm clocks- one at the head of the bed, and one across the room. The one at the head of my bed is my handheld, which has three alarms, each more annoying than the last. By the time the one across the room goes off, i'm ready to wake up... But in case i'm not, the handheld goes off fifteen minutes later, on the same set-of-three schedule. Eventually, it gets annoying enough to wake me completely.
On an interesting side note, when we moved into a house that my family lived in some years back, one window was broken. Outwards. Lying in the broken glass- this was a real 'fixer-upper' of a house- was a rusted alarm clock. We looked at it for a moment, realised what had happened, and just laughed. (Remembering how early i've had to wake up for some of the times i've moved, i can honestly say it's only luck that i've never done the same.)
Either is possible. I like to think that the balance of powers would prevent its use against ordinary citizens- but i thought that before camp X-ray, and now i'm starting to examine my beliefs about freedom and political powers.
Maybe the measure of a new, potential privacy invasion can be taken not by the extent to which it will snare the guilty, but the extent to which the innocent will have recourse when they get caught, too.
to clarify: What happened with Gitmo shouldn't have been possible, not because it was ineffective at catching the guilty, but because the innocent- if there are any- have no way to refute the charges, no way to get out of it once they're in it. Using library data to find terrorists doesn't work because there's no way to prove whether or not you were taking out a book for a politically acceptable reason or not- only to prove, if they find a WMD that you've been building in your living room, that you weren't just curious about how long you've got to live once someone drops the bomb on us.
So the question i have is... how easy would it be to refute the charges?
With speed traps, it's sometimes simple- insist at the hearing upon a test of the equipment used. If the radar gun's out of whack, you're off the hook. If you really were speeding, and you know that you were speeding but it was because your wife was having a baby, show them the hospital record.
How easy will this be once the human factor is taken out of the process? The human factor leads to errors and fallibility, but it also lends correctibility to the system- a way to point out where the exceptions belong. If you're automatically issued a speeding ticket for defective equipment, how hard will you have to fight to clear your name when it's used to show which cars were near a crime scene at a certain hour?...and why should we accept that fight as the standard?
If, on the other hand, public uproar causes this use to require a court order, you might avoid having to miss work for three days because you were in court for the murder you didn't commit (but that your car records, library books, and membership in the Ginsu-knife-of-the-month club say you were perfectly capable of.)
At what point does data become evidence, in other words?
I don't mean to confuse the issue- i'll admit it's 8 AM here and i'm still waiting for the coffee to kick in. I don't know that tinfoil hats are necessary, but i do think that the questions we need to ask are... who has access to the data, what bans and bars would we like in place to prevent its misuse, and what checks and balances exist/will exist to allow us to clear our names, or better still, remain outside suspicion, when we ARE in fact innocent?
joke "...I don't want to go to drivers' concentration camp without a hearing, y'know?"/joke
I take the T to work every weekday. But i'll tell you why we love our cars- The constant rate hikes; the fact that they implemented 'forward funding' at a time when it would fail to pay off the MBTA's massive debt load; the insistence upon the greenbush rail project; the fact that they're counting on the next rate hike to net more money than they lose in customers...
I agree that subway service is an amazing thing to have at all. But small steps- like the one you mentioned, connecting the two train stations- would make a huge difference, and yet the various supervisory bodies can't collectively agree to implement them.
I kind of like the big dig, but i temped for one of the construction companies doing it, and i was astounded at the errors that were permissible. Concrete cracks, failure to make the ventilation tunnels meet in the middle (necessitating a whole new round of planning and building) and so on. I like the idea of the big dig- but i'm not sure how much i like the way it was done.
I also don't like the fact that the parcels of land on top of it are being found over tooth and nail, because they didn't figure out what to do with them at the time. One parcel is being fought over by the boston museum project and the YWCA. Which will win? Who knows. But it isn't open to just anyone- you have to be a well-connected organisation to get onto that property, and the last thing we need is to watch the whole big dig story unwind above ground as the projects take another X years to build.
It's a great theory- we have a parking lot under the boston commons, for example. The idea is to move travel off the surface, and in the absence of hovercars, that means pushing it underground, leaving the surface free to be 'green space.' It remains to be seen how this will work in practice. I'm openminded, and hoping it will work out well. The Zakim bridge is one of the prettiest structures in boston, as well as being a technological marvel.
Most large US companies have some kind of blanket statement for 'computer and electronic media use' which covers phone conversations as well. Usually it's in with the 'i will not make personal phone calls to distant countries' clauses. In some cases it's a message that pops up every time you boot up your computer. And it's there for exactly those reasons: Your email and IM may be monitored, your web use may be monitored, and they may not tell you. IT's gotten some interesting challenges in recent years, but most of the time it serves to keep employees from suing because the company can point to it and say, "But we told you right up front."
Doesn't mean it's right, and the 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' has come up over and over. But companies still seem to think that it's the best way to do it, i guess.
i'm not giving his name or his mother's, but i've given the date and the area of the state we lived in. I'll mention it to my sensei, he can mention it to her that snopes is out there. Beyond that, it's up to her.
It was around 1996-97, lived in Massachusetts, i think attleboro area, don't remember which mall, but there was a child molester arrested there in a separate case a couple of years later. Want to say Emerald Square, but i'm not 100% sure. If you're serious about looking, that's what i've got offer until the next time i talk to my former sensei, who will definitely remember because he had a small child at the same time all this happened, so we all were talking about it after class.
There have actually been a number of mall abductions in various places, just very few in which the child was recovered. Nobody saw him get grabbed; it wasn't on camera. One moment he was right behind her, and the next she couldn't find him. She went to the register and it was their idea to call security, who immediately locked the doors and let everyone without a kid out. I don't remember whether she ended up in court or not, but there should be a police record, because it DID get that far.
Oke. Most of the services are opt-in. And there are good reasons, including kidnapping, theft, and accident, why you'd want your cell phone to broadcast its location.
If you don't, including for police and other emergency services, you've still got an opt-out: Take out the battery. This is not as permanent as leaving it at home, and gives you privacy. But be sure to be someplace you don't mind having listed as your last known location first.
Me, i'm pretty comfortable having my location known, and feel oke about this being part of the cellphone i'm shopping for lately. i've seen too many people go missing in Boston to really like the idea of being vanished from the map. I always swore that the child-leashes in malls were a bad idea, too, until a friend's kid got snatched. They closed the mall and found the guy- in less than five minutes he'd changed the kid's clothes and dyed his hair (which was still wet with the dye.) Now i'm not so sure i don't like the leashes, you know?
Well, i think part of that problem is that a peanut allergy can develop at any age, and it's an allergy that can kill. This isn't like banning cigarettes- it's like banning dynamite. Peanut allergies, especially for kids, can be a sudden deadly discovery, not a nuisance. And the amount required for a kid with a severe peanut allergy to die is nowhere near the pick-up-a-peanut-and-eat-it level. It's trace amounts, like you can get from sitting at a table with kids eating peanut butter sandwiches.
Since it's a common scenario, and it's severe, i'd be in favour of classrooms asking parents not to pack peanut snacks in kids' lunches. On the other hand, the odds of a kid being allergic to something like celery are so low that it makes more sense to have those parents take charge of their kids' health. There really is a sort of fuzzy boundary. If the inconvenience is severe and the allergy isn't, then tough luck. But if the allergy is severe and the inconvenience is negligible, then the allergen goes, instead.
Cancer is a slightly trickier measure. Since it would probably require repeated doses over a lifetime, it's likely that the tests will be developed, because you'll be the one having to safeguard your well-being by avoiding them. I'm getting to experience this firsthand with my own food-triggered-autoimmune experiences. Common foods are likely to stay- but segregation of foods will get better, and hopefully so will labelling of foods. In the meantime, i pack my own celery. *sigh* And i've stopped eating it with peanut butter at work.
I won't speak to the moral issue. What i do have to offer is the thought that the dollar value goes to zero, but the perceived value doesn't. THat's because there's a shift from tangible assets to intangible assets happening.
When the dollar amount goes to zero, you evaluate a choice by how it affects your perception of yourself, and how it affects the possibility of future tangible assets. In this case, yes, the dollar cost to the consumer is near zero. However... there is a perceived dollar benefit (not having to buy the music) plus a perceived moral benefit, because the RIAA has been acting like the bad guy. The RIAA has been trying to counter this by upping the dollar cost (suing) rather than upping the intangible benefits. If they dropped the dollar cost, this would up the perceived moral value of keeping the RIAA afloat. But because they've become accustomed to dollars-only economic measures, they aren't likely to get this soon.
The other major factor here is that customers aren't just ditching the dollar cost- they are choosing to offer it more directly to the producers (in the goods sense, the producers mean the musicians and the small labels bringing them to market.) People aren't just ditching music. They're trading and sharing- and many are contnuing to spend, just in ways that don't benefit the RIAA. So the perceived-intangible-value really is getting a field demonstration.
actually, mum used to make pancakes with faces in them on purpose. She'd make the nose and eyes and ears first, and then pour batter over them, and viola! teddy-bear faces. We didn't think twice about eating them, however, and with that prior experience, i can't imagine that if we found an image in a pacake- even an image of the virgin mary- we'd have any trouble passing the syrup. If it happened in something we weren't familiar with as a portrait medium- say, in the gravy boat, or made out of the holes in swiss cheese- i imagine we might have to think about it for a minute. (mum, are you SURE this gravy is oke to eat? Yes? *shrug* All right then. Pass the potatoes.)
If it were me- and it's not and i'm not making games, so this is an armchair argument at best- the next 'unkillable' thing would require some form of regenerative algorithm, where the reduction of hit points triggers an addition, or some other form of increase- and make the darn thing reset at a certain level!
i think it's pretty d*d funny that the one thing gameplayers could agree on for an in-game large-scale social goal was to thwack the monster meant to be part of the permanent landscape. Somewhere, an executive is going mad under their desk, whispering things about a revolution...
i wonder whether such things will be deliberately introduced into future games, as a quiet little way to increase teamwork?
Hm. Guidelines exist. 'Shock Chromite' has a kind of nice ring to it, but...
Names of minerals are a tricky subject, and there are a lot of fallacies- a mineral may have a chemical composition, a common use name, and belong to a general group of closely-related compounds. Because of this, the guidelines do exist. It's not unlike trying to name a species of organisms.A history of the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names (CNMMN) demonstrates that this is not a subject touched upon lightly in the scientific world. (this comment is going to have a lot of links, because i'm interested in rocks and minerals. The info may be interesting or, as with the IMA info, useful and particularly relevant, so please bear with me.)
It becomes an issue in the everyday world more than one might expect. For example, i have anAlexandrite ring, a family heirloom. It's gorgeous, it's stunning, and it's a rock rarely seen in the jeweller's.
What's the difference between this and any other cut and polished 'ballistic missile from god'? (thank you, Mr. Watterson, for that beautiful quote.) It's pretty. So people remember it, although most people get it confused with iolite.
Rocks for which there is no scientific use frequently end up as jewellery, or even bookends, and i guess that's where a lot of the names get dropped. Rhodochrosite becomes 'that pink stone there,' and Calcite becomes (and i do not jest) "Fiberoptic stone," or sometimes "TV stone," or i've even seen it just listed as 'refractive' or 'optical' quartz. (Yeah, i've gotten kicked out of the museum of science gift shop over this one, but they let me back in when i promised to shut up.)
Personally, i think that such uses should involve the chemical composition in the labelling, sonce then people would grow up knowing the difference between nephrite and jadeite, and things labelled 'serpentine' (yes, it also talks about chromium)(see also here)and 'amazonite' would then end up consistently identified. Red ruby would be "ruby- Al2O3" and people would learn to recognise it the way they did the contents of ordinary table salt.
I know that you voted for the 'anti-spam' measure recently enacted. However, as many watchdog groups predicted, it has completely failed to stem the flood of spam. In fact, it's gotten worse. Please see the attached piece of mail as a representative sample of what's getting through."
Repeat, with minor variations, with a sizable quantity of the spam that you recieve in your personal inbox. Heck, print some out and send them by post. Even if only a few come in from every hundredth person in their district... that'll get their attention. Label the emails different things... "My response to your vote," "Commentary on recent legislation," "upcoming election." It can't be argued that they don't have a business relationship with you if you're in the US, as they represent you in congress.
A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")
Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")
Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")
Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
That would set a dangerous precedent, particularly in cases where an entire culture's dead are buried in a few small areas. It does happen, especially in areas where the climate or geography changes drastically. At what point do we create a cutoff line for historic value? The Egyptian dead are already in museums, and the government of Egypt tries to stop the sale and trade of new discoveries. What if a company buys the land, and wants to sell all of the bodies, in whatever condition they are exhumed, to whoever wants one? And the bids are low enough for private individuals to walk away with them?
Sounds weird but not morally wrong, until the question comes up- what if the next year, you found out that you were adopted by the now-deceased person in plot 72... fifty years ago... and you'd LIKE to have that body tested to check for a genetic deformity that you're worried about that might still be discernable? Maybe even if you don't have the defect, you don't want your grandkids to have to face it without their parents having time to prepare.
So you go to the town where they lived and died- but their body has been sold, for cash, to an unknown bidder. Now someone has the remains of your relative, and if they'd kept track of where that relative had gone, you might have been able to check.
In the US, there are some cemetaries which move you to a crypt after a certain time, but most Americans still are given the expectation that once they pay for a plot in a cemetary, they are to remain there. This is why we don't pay for the graves of ALL our ancestors. Can you imagine the bill? Even if all the descendents paid a share... the cost still goes up with every generation.
So we can't just sell bodies off, and we can't just throw them away, and we can't just burn them without someone giving us permission. It's not a mess that i see a solution to yet. BUt in this matter, i think that the towns should find out which one really is him, and the mother should therefore be exhumed, and then great care put into reburying her pretty much as she was found. She had the expectation in life that she would be buried, if that was the local custom, so it's probably the most appropriate move to let her remain that way once she's been matched with her descendants.
That part isn't about the right to stay buried, but about the fact that legal precedent allows for exhumation with a court order. Since this is a dispute between townships that can be settled by a test, tests should be made, paid for by the ones insisting upon them (whether the matter gets settled in their favour or not.)
I could be wrong about all of this, of course... these are just my thoughts immediately on reading all of this.
No matter what, it wouldn't have been worth it. An insurance claim like that makes the premiums jump in far, far greater amounts than the loss itself warrants. And that's if it doesn't get cancelled outright at the next renewal period date. They may not see an insurance payment for years, particularly if it goes into litigation, as often happens.
The insurance also isn't going to cover the hit that the company is going to take as a result of the loss- If they had reputation insurance (yes, there is such a thing these days) it will come in handy now, but every new contact is going to bring up the question-'hey, aren't you the guys that lost your great big prototype copter?'
I'm not kidding. And while i feel bad about recommending that we increease the amount of blank-minded email forwarding out there...and don't really know that it's a good idea... Think about the junk that DOES get forwarded. The best reason i can think of to do this is that it would wake up some sleeping people. The best reason NOT to is that it requires trusting those sme sleeping idiots with actual information to pass on, and hoping that they don't get creative somewhere along the way. So what follows could well be the world's worst idea:
Take the memos. Put them in an email- as text, not as attachments, or a a link to one of the sites hosting them.
Tell the recipient what the issue is, and why it matters.
Tell the recipient to tell their friends and get informed about this. Tell them about the EFF. Use the name Diebold and mention that they make ATMs, but aren't keeping the voting machines up to a verifiable standard.
Tell them to talk to their friends about it.
Send memo.
Four weeks later, there will be millions of Americans wondering when Bill Gates will send them a check that they can donate to gove the little boy with cancer a new kidney to replace the one that got stolen.
And hundreds of thousands, at least, will be asking out loud about Diebold and voting machines. Information can spread as fast as misinformation, But it unfortunately would have to use the same channels. And is likely to lose a lot in translation- but before it changes beyong recognition, a lot of people could learn things that they really ought to know about.
In Yahoo i've found several entries, most of which seem to indicate that there are frequently problems with fuel pump pressure, and that it seems to be a common failure. What year is it?
Slashdot Mirror
I talked to one of the runners last year about it and we were laughing over the story. we also have a lot of ham radio operators in the city who broadcast results as they're anounced; i'm wondering what's next with RFID. Will hardcore athletes just have permanent chips in their bodies? Or will they be embedded in the sneakers?
It's interesting how many common foodstuffs are being found to affect blood sugar, glucose tolerance, and diabetes in general. Cinnamon, which if you ask me, tastes pretty good in coffee. So for those not wanting a six-cup-a-day caffeine habit, a cup of coffee or decaf with 1/4 tsp cinnamon added might be a good way to start the day.
Now, i have two alarm clocks- one at the head of the bed, and one across the room. The one at the head of my bed is my handheld, which has three alarms, each more annoying than the last. By the time the one across the room goes off, i'm ready to wake up... But in case i'm not, the handheld goes off fifteen minutes later, on the same set-of-three schedule. Eventually, it gets annoying enough to wake me completely.
On an interesting side note, when we moved into a house that my family lived in some years back, one window was broken. Outwards. Lying in the broken glass- this was a real 'fixer-upper' of a house- was a rusted alarm clock. We looked at it for a moment, realised what had happened, and just laughed. (Remembering how early i've had to wake up for some of the times i've moved, i can honestly say it's only luck that i've never done the same.)
Maybe the measure of a new, potential privacy invasion can be taken not by the extent to which it will snare the guilty, but the extent to which the innocent will have recourse when they get caught, too.
to clarify: What happened with Gitmo shouldn't have been possible, not because it was ineffective at catching the guilty, but because the innocent- if there are any- have no way to refute the charges, no way to get out of it once they're in it. Using library data to find terrorists doesn't work because there's no way to prove whether or not you were taking out a book for a politically acceptable reason or not- only to prove, if they find a WMD that you've been building in your living room, that you weren't just curious about how long you've got to live once someone drops the bomb on us.
So the question i have is... how easy would it be to refute the charges?
With speed traps, it's sometimes simple- insist at the hearing upon a test of the equipment used. If the radar gun's out of whack, you're off the hook. If you really were speeding, and you know that you were speeding but it was because your wife was having a baby, show them the hospital record.
How easy will this be once the human factor is taken out of the process? The human factor leads to errors and fallibility, but it also lends correctibility to the system- a way to point out where the exceptions belong. If you're automatically issued a speeding ticket for defective equipment, how hard will you have to fight to clear your name when it's used to show which cars were near a crime scene at a certain hour? ...and why should we accept that fight as the standard?
If, on the other hand, public uproar causes this use to require a court order, you might avoid having to miss work for three days because you were in court for the murder you didn't commit (but that your car records, library books, and membership in the Ginsu-knife-of-the-month club say you were perfectly capable of.)
At what point does data become evidence, in other words?
I don't mean to confuse the issue- i'll admit it's 8 AM here and i'm still waiting for the coffee to kick in. I don't know that tinfoil hats are necessary, but i do think that the questions we need to ask are... who has access to the data, what bans and bars would we like in place to prevent its misuse, and what checks and balances exist/will exist to allow us to clear our names, or better still, remain outside suspicion, when we ARE in fact innocent?
joke "...I don't want to go to drivers' concentration camp without a hearing, y'know?" /joke
I agree that subway service is an amazing thing to have at all. But small steps- like the one you mentioned, connecting the two train stations- would make a huge difference, and yet the various supervisory bodies can't collectively agree to implement them.
I kind of like the big dig, but i temped for one of the construction companies doing it, and i was astounded at the errors that were permissible. Concrete cracks, failure to make the ventilation tunnels meet in the middle (necessitating a whole new round of planning and building) and so on. I like the idea of the big dig- but i'm not sure how much i like the way it was done.
I also don't like the fact that the parcels of land on top of it are being found over tooth and nail, because they didn't figure out what to do with them at the time. One parcel is being fought over by the boston museum project and the YWCA. Which will win? Who knows. But it isn't open to just anyone- you have to be a well-connected organisation to get onto that property, and the last thing we need is to watch the whole big dig story unwind above ground as the projects take another X years to build.
It's a great theory- we have a parking lot under the boston commons, for example. The idea is to move travel off the surface, and in the absence of hovercars, that means pushing it underground, leaving the surface free to be 'green space.' It remains to be seen how this will work in practice. I'm openminded, and hoping it will work out well. The Zakim bridge is one of the prettiest structures in boston, as well as being a technological marvel.
did that.
Doesn't mean it's right, and the 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' has come up over and over. But companies still seem to think that it's the best way to do it, i guess.
sol
There have actually been a number of mall abductions in various places, just very few in which the child was recovered. Nobody saw him get grabbed; it wasn't on camera. One moment he was right behind her, and the next she couldn't find him. She went to the register and it was their idea to call security, who immediately locked the doors and let everyone without a kid out. I don't remember whether she ended up in court or not, but there should be a police record, because it DID get that far.
If you don't, including for police and other emergency services, you've still got an opt-out: Take out the battery. This is not as permanent as leaving it at home, and gives you privacy. But be sure to be someplace you don't mind having listed as your last known location first.
Me, i'm pretty comfortable having my location known, and feel oke about this being part of the cellphone i'm shopping for lately. i've seen too many people go missing in Boston to really like the idea of being vanished from the map. I always swore that the child-leashes in malls were a bad idea, too, until a friend's kid got snatched. They closed the mall and found the guy- in less than five minutes he'd changed the kid's clothes and dyed his hair (which was still wet with the dye.) Now i'm not so sure i don't like the leashes, you know?
sol
Since it's a common scenario, and it's severe, i'd be in favour of classrooms asking parents not to pack peanut snacks in kids' lunches. On the other hand, the odds of a kid being allergic to something like celery are so low that it makes more sense to have those parents take charge of their kids' health. There really is a sort of fuzzy boundary. If the inconvenience is severe and the allergy isn't, then tough luck. But if the allergy is severe and the inconvenience is negligible, then the allergen goes, instead.
Cancer is a slightly trickier measure. Since it would probably require repeated doses over a lifetime, it's likely that the tests will be developed, because you'll be the one having to safeguard your well-being by avoiding them. I'm getting to experience this firsthand with my own food-triggered-autoimmune experiences. Common foods are likely to stay- but segregation of foods will get better, and hopefully so will labelling of foods. In the meantime, i pack my own celery. *sigh* And i've stopped eating it with peanut butter at work.
sol
When the dollar amount goes to zero, you evaluate a choice by how it affects your perception of yourself, and how it affects the possibility of future tangible assets. In this case, yes, the dollar cost to the consumer is near zero. However... there is a perceived dollar benefit (not having to buy the music) plus a perceived moral benefit, because the RIAA has been acting like the bad guy. The RIAA has been trying to counter this by upping the dollar cost (suing) rather than upping the intangible benefits. If they dropped the dollar cost, this would up the perceived moral value of keeping the RIAA afloat. But because they've become accustomed to dollars-only economic measures, they aren't likely to get this soon.
The other major factor here is that customers aren't just ditching the dollar cost- they are choosing to offer it more directly to the producers (in the goods sense, the producers mean the musicians and the small labels bringing them to market.) People aren't just ditching music. They're trading and sharing- and many are contnuing to spend, just in ways that don't benefit the RIAA. So the perceived-intangible-value really is getting a field demonstration.
actually, mum used to make pancakes with faces in them on purpose. She'd make the nose and eyes and ears first, and then pour batter over them, and viola! teddy-bear faces. We didn't think twice about eating them, however, and with that prior experience, i can't imagine that if we found an image in a pacake- even an image of the virgin mary- we'd have any trouble passing the syrup. If it happened in something we weren't familiar with as a portrait medium- say, in the gravy boat, or made out of the holes in swiss cheese- i imagine we might have to think about it for a minute. (mum, are you SURE this gravy is oke to eat? Yes? *shrug* All right then. Pass the potatoes.)
i think it's pretty d*d funny that the one thing gameplayers could agree on for an in-game large-scale social goal was to thwack the monster meant to be part of the permanent landscape. Somewhere, an executive is going mad under their desk, whispering things about a revolution...
i wonder whether such things will be deliberately introduced into future games, as a quiet little way to increase teamwork?
Names of minerals are a tricky subject, and there are a lot of fallacies- a mineral may have a chemical composition, a common use name, and belong to a general group of closely-related compounds. Because of this, the guidelines do exist. It's not unlike trying to name a species of organisms.A history of the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names (CNMMN) demonstrates that this is not a subject touched upon lightly in the scientific world. (this comment is going to have a lot of links, because i'm interested in rocks and minerals. The info may be interesting or, as with the IMA info, useful and particularly relevant, so please bear with me.)
It becomes an issue in the everyday world more than one might expect. For example, i have anAlexandrite ring, a family heirloom. It's gorgeous, it's stunning, and it's a rock rarely seen in the jeweller's.
What's the difference between this and any other cut and polished 'ballistic missile from god'? (thank you, Mr. Watterson, for that beautiful quote.) It's pretty. So people remember it, although most people get it confused with iolite.
Amethyst is just another kind of quartz.
Rocks for which there is no scientific use frequently end up as jewellery, or even bookends, and i guess that's where a lot of the names get dropped. Rhodochrosite becomes 'that pink stone there,' and Calcite becomes (and i do not jest) "Fiberoptic stone," or sometimes "TV stone," or i've even seen it just listed as 'refractive' or 'optical' quartz. (Yeah, i've gotten kicked out of the museum of science gift shop over this one, but they let me back in when i promised to shut up.)
Personally, i think that such uses should involve the chemical composition in the labelling, sonce then people would grow up knowing the difference between nephrite and jadeite, and things labelled 'serpentine' (yes, it also talks about chromium)(see also here)and 'amazonite' would then end up consistently identified. Red ruby would be "ruby- Al2O3" and people would learn to recognise it the way they did the contents of ordinary table salt.
*sigh*
Yeah, i know nobody's going to label Paramelaconite (a tetragonal oxide of copper) for the common consumer... but isn't it a nice thought? For more on the naming of minerals, try and here, and also here, with the International Mineralogical Association.
I know that you voted for the 'anti-spam' measure recently enacted. However, as many watchdog groups predicted, it has completely failed to stem the flood of spam. In fact, it's gotten worse. Please see the attached piece of mail as a representative sample of what's getting through."
Repeat, with minor variations, with a sizable quantity of the spam that you recieve in your personal inbox. Heck, print some out and send them by post. Even if only a few come in from every hundredth person in their district... that'll get their attention. Label the emails different things... "My response to your vote," "Commentary on recent legislation," "upcoming election." It can't be argued that they don't have a business relationship with you if you're in the US, as they represent you in congress.
A pirate ("Arr, we'll return on yer investment, matey, just hand over the doubloons...")
A Parrot ("Squawk! Polly wants leverage, polly wants synergies leveraged, squawk!"
A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")
Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")
Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")
Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
Sounds weird but not morally wrong, until the question comes up- what if the next year, you found out that you were adopted by the now-deceased person in plot 72... fifty years ago... and you'd LIKE to have that body tested to check for a genetic deformity that you're worried about that might still be discernable? Maybe even if you don't have the defect, you don't want your grandkids to have to face it without their parents having time to prepare.
So you go to the town where they lived and died- but their body has been sold, for cash, to an unknown bidder. Now someone has the remains of your relative, and if they'd kept track of where that relative had gone, you might have been able to check.
In the US, there are some cemetaries which move you to a crypt after a certain time, but most Americans still are given the expectation that once they pay for a plot in a cemetary, they are to remain there. This is why we don't pay for the graves of ALL our ancestors. Can you imagine the bill? Even if all the descendents paid a share... the cost still goes up with every generation.
So we can't just sell bodies off, and we can't just throw them away, and we can't just burn them without someone giving us permission. It's not a mess that i see a solution to yet. BUt in this matter, i think that the towns should find out which one really is him, and the mother should therefore be exhumed, and then great care put into reburying her pretty much as she was found. She had the expectation in life that she would be buried, if that was the local custom, so it's probably the most appropriate move to let her remain that way once she's been matched with her descendants.
That part isn't about the right to stay buried, but about the fact that legal precedent allows for exhumation with a court order. Since this is a dispute between townships that can be settled by a test, tests should be made, paid for by the ones insisting upon them (whether the matter gets settled in their favour or not.)
I could be wrong about all of this, of course... these are just my thoughts immediately on reading all of this.
The insurance also isn't going to cover the hit that the company is going to take as a result of the loss- If they had reputation insurance (yes, there is such a thing these days) it will come in handy now, but every new contact is going to bring up the question-'hey, aren't you the guys that lost your great big prototype copter?'
I'm not kidding. And while i feel bad about recommending that we increease the amount of blank-minded email forwarding out there...and don't really know that it's a good idea... Think about the junk that DOES get forwarded. The best reason i can think of to do this is that it would wake up some sleeping people. The best reason NOT to is that it requires trusting those sme sleeping idiots with actual information to pass on, and hoping that they don't get creative somewhere along the way. So what follows could well be the world's worst idea:
Take the memos. Put them in an email- as text, not as attachments, or a a link to one of the sites hosting them.
Tell the recipient what the issue is, and why it matters.
Tell the recipient to tell their friends and get informed about this. Tell them about the EFF. Use the name Diebold and mention that they make ATMs, but aren't keeping the voting machines up to a verifiable standard.
Tell them to talk to their friends about it.
Send memo.
Four weeks later, there will be millions of Americans wondering when Bill Gates will send them a check that they can donate to gove the little boy with cancer a new kidney to replace the one that got stolen.
And hundreds of thousands, at least, will be asking out loud about Diebold and voting machines. Information can spread as fast as misinformation, But it unfortunately would have to use the same channels. And is likely to lose a lot in translation- but before it changes beyong recognition, a lot of people could learn things that they really ought to know about.
could be a he... heck, as the librarian of congress, i imagined Conan The Librarian!
At least, not until the word, "verb," got verbed...
sorry, i had to...
sol
sometimes referred to as frogging a switch, at least on one campus i know.
http://www.carsurvey.org/viewcomments_review_33852 .html
can't find the rest as i'm home, i'll try from work tomorrow.
In Yahoo i've found several entries, most of which seem to indicate that there are frequently problems with fuel pump pressure, and that it seems to be a common failure. What year is it?