Doubt that freaky noises would have done anything with that group of guys, we just wanted them to stumble out in the middle of the night to find a partially decapitated squirrel. I forgot to mention before, but the squirrel's head ended up in the RA's bed the next day, for him to find a disembodied squirrel's face staring at him.
You have to go pretty far to shock or gross out that hall--heard that this year they hung an entire deer carcas from the ceiling on another guys' hall.
When I was in college, several of my hallmates installed an alarm clock in a dead squirrel. Said squirrel was left on my hall by a guy's hall, so we kindly returned it with an alarm clock set to go off at 3:00AM. Didn't think it possible, but yes, a girl's hall grossed out a bunch of guys with our fusion of road kill and electronics.
Taco Bell used to be a lot cheaper than it is now, but despite being the cheapest fast food restaurant in the business, they didn't get in that many customers. It was determined that people weren't eating at Taco Bell because they percieved the low price to be indicitive of low quality. After Taco Bell raised its prices to be more in line with other fast food chains, they increased their market share, because customers percieved the higher price meaning better food.
As for Godiva chocolate, there are certain kinds of Godiva that I don't even like, and I don't think are really very good quality chocolate. I'm a fan of Wilbur Chocolate's plain dark chocolate.
Fortunately, I went to a school where we were expected to learn how to work without a GUI environment. The idea was that it's a lot easier to learn to go from a non-GUI environment to a GUI than the other way around.
Umm, I wasn't talking about the end of the Soviet Empire, I was talking about the fall of the Milosevic government in former Yugoslavia in 2000. Before you try to go and correct someone's history, make sure you know history yourself.
It's not the first time a columnist missed the reasons for change. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a book about globalization, where he attributed the peaceful revolution in Serbia to a desire to participate in the global marketplace and the feeling that Slobodan Milosevic was holding them back (he gives a ridiculous example about people wanting to be able to afford frequent visits to McDonalds, and apparently doesn't realize that the reason that they can't afford to eat there is because it's ridiculously overpriced). I have e-mail contacts in Belgrade, and those people participated in the demonstrations that led to the peaceful overthrow of the government. They didn't take to the streets because they wanted McDonalds, they took to the streets because they wanted freedom to walk down the street without being harassed by police cracking down on dissidents, because they wanted to speak freely, to be able to write e-mail without worrying about it being monitored, and the straw that broke the camel's back was when everyone knew Milosevic lost the election but he claimed he won and he wouldn't leave (before anyone makes a crack about Bush in 2000, the student in Belgrade that my sister writes to associated Gore with Slobo refusing to admit defeat and said "when that happened here, we had a revolution"). I don't know what kind of direct role the internet had in the revolution, but indirectly, it did play a role, if only because it opened up avenues to interact with the rest of the world and thus served as a way to counteract the extreme form of nationalism, us-against-everyone mentality that the government used as a means of control.
Any channel of communication that takes place away from the oversight of a police state can help topple tyranny. Several years ago, the government of the Phillipines was toppled largely through the use of cell phone text messaging informing people of when a demonstration would be held--the revolutionary equivalent of a flash mob.
It's not the internet itself, or any particular website that will help topple tyranny, but any tool that increases the flow and volume of information is going to hurt tyrants.
Dude, if you're going to complain about Bush's economic policy, at least know what he's doing. Yes, Bush has cut taxes, but he's also increased spending--it's a Keynesian/trickle down combo, and it's starting to work.
It's elementary macroeconomics. Cutting taxes will increase the amount of money in circulation that can get spent, and the more money available to spend, the more people will spend, and if people want to spend, then there have to be goods and services for people to buy, and the increased demand for goods and services will create more jobs. Or, if you don't want to cut taxes, you can have the government start spending more money, which will start the same cycle. The real question is which method (cutting taxes or gov't spending) will add more money into the economy, and since Bush is both cutting taxes and spending more, he's putting money into the economy both ways, and two ways are better than one.
Addendum: The other way to influence the money supply is to tinker with interest rates, which in turn influences the value of the dollar vs. other currencies, causing money to flow in or out of the economy depending on whether rates go up or down. As interest rates are already extremely low, there isn't much that can be done in the interest rate department (free advice--this is why I think interest rates are going to stay low for a while--raising them will put a wet blanket on an already shaky economy).
The lowest bidder (usually) got the contract, but then, whatever they could charge Uncle Sam with a straight face (unforeseen delays, cost overruns, etc) the US paid without comment.
The US doesn't necessarily pay without comment. I have an uncle who works as an accountant with the Defense Department auditing department contracts. He has personally saved US taxpayers many millions (could be a lot more, but his job is top secret so there isn't much he can say, and most of what I know I've heard from my aunt), and when you figure in all of the other auditors, there is a lot of attempted overcharging that gets caught--probably well into the billions.
The problem with this is that while the gravitational force was used to find Neptune and Pluto, the fact that Neptune and Pluto exert gravitational force wasn't used do define them as planets. Your reasoning is backwards from the original reasoning.
The original reasoning was:
1) This planet's orbit cannot be explained by the current gravitational forces.
2) That means there must be another planet which we haven't yet observed that is exerting force.
3) The planet should be at point p.
4) Look at point p, voila, there's the planet we knew had to be there.
Dang educational games. When I was a kid, we had a game called Space Hop, which was supposed to teach all about the Solar System, but which has caused me to think that Ceres was shaped like a rather large and irregular rock, because that's the way the game showed it. I never saw anything that showed differently in any of my textbooks, so I've gone through life thinking that Ceres couldn't be a planet because of it's shape. If I had known it was round, I'd have been arguing since I was in elementary school that it's a planet. Moral, educational games aren't always so educational.
Also look at how many women there are in "hardcore" tech positions - meaning network and system admins, programmers, etc. I've seen women start those positions, and I've seen them leave. How many programs and incentives have been instituted over the last twenty years to encourage more women to get into science and technology? When do they begin to work?
The programs you speak of just might begin to work about the time that most male geeks stop exhibiting the sexist attitudes that show up all the time on Slashdot, and which are so clearly exemplified by many of the posts in this discussion. If you had to spend all of your time trying to prove that you were competant, and trying to fend off feeble advances by girlfriendless geeks, my guess is that you'd get sick of it and decide to go somewhere else where you're appreciated and not treated differently because you have two X chromosomes.
Dude, why is it that people think that if you say that you were smarter than all the kids your age, that it means you were arrogant about it?
Plus, why the assumption that doing what interests you is trying to be an adult? I was interested in science so I read science, and there's nothing adult about it, just like there's nothing adult about riding bikes up and down the street with the other kids in my neighborhood because I liked riding bike. It's just that there was a large part of me that I wasn't ever able to communicate about with kids my age because they wouldn't have been able to understand what I was talking about.
You sir, haven't a clue, and have completely missed the point. When I was a kid, I didn't even know that I was particularly smart. The closest person that I had to compare myself to was my 4 years older brother, who was, quite literally the smartest kid in his school. Ever. All I knew was that I had totally different interests than the other kids, and consequently had very little in common to talk about. It wasn't until I was much older and had someone other than my super-genius older brother to compare myself to that I understood why I always felt so out of place.
Oh yeah, and I can hold conversations. Was even quite successful in sales. Doesn't change the fact that as a young kid, it's not exactly easy when you're basically speaking a different language than others your age.
Precisely. I've always hated group work because I felt like I was carrying/babysitting the rest of the group. The only tolerable group project I had in school was in my software engineering class were we had to work together to pull off the project and each of us brought in different skills that we needed to succeed.
I don't think that sheltering children in the early years is a bad thing. Once they've developed a mature enough stance to be taught how to stand up against bullies, bigots, etc. then they can be introduced to the full gamut of the social strucure. However, you have to remember that these people who display extra intellectual prowess above and beyond their peers are effectively skipping HUGE areas of development that the rest of us have gone through. Getting them involved in more challenging material early on and protecting them is crucial to keeping them involved in that material, in my mind.
Amen to that. It's extremely hard being the smart kid in a group of average kids. My older brother was the smartest kid at his school (and I mean this literally--he had the highest IQ score of any kid ever at that school). By first grade he was writing stories about violently destroying his classroom if he were teacher for a day, largely because he had a teacher who had no clue how to deal with smart kids. My parents started homeschooling when he was in 5th grade, and from that point on until he graduated, he spent most of his time in his room reading about astronomy (and then getting up in the middle of the night to take his telescope out), he taught himself ancient Greek (and learned it so well that he knew it better than his college professors) and Latin, and while he didn't have many friends while in school, when he went off to college he ended up with tons of friends and had all kinds of girls chasing him.
Speaking personally, it's so very hard to be a little kid and be working on an intellectual level that most adults you know aren't even on. The only person I knew who could even remotely understand me was the aforementioned older brother (I never was IQ tested, but my parents always suspected I was smarter than him). Adding to that was that I was a girl who was into things that girls are't "supposed" to be interested in or good at, and you start to get the picture of what it's like to go through childhood when you're so much smarter than everyone else. All I can say is that I'm very glad I was homeschooled, because while I've always had fairly decent social skills, it can get to be rather stressful spending all your time having to talk down to people who can't understand half of your vocabulary, and to have to make small talk about things that you think are absolutely inane. If I had had to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week doing that, I think I really would have turned into a nerd with no social skills because I would have ended up getting bored with talking down to people and ended up avoiding people altogether.
As a kid, I had a hard time with communicating with other kids my age just because I was so much smarter than they were. A second grader who reads highschool science textbooks for fun doesn't really have much in common with other second grade girls who's idea of a hard book is The Babysitter's Club series.
Plus, it can be rather isolating when even most adults haven't got a clue about the things you're interested in.
Sometimes I think that it would be easier to be average and to go along happily clueless of anything below the surface of things.
My brother had some trouble with a script kiddie who got mad because my brother didn't give him the respect he thought he deserved (my brother isn't a geek, but at least I've taught him well in the disdain for script kiddies department), so the kid started trying to mess with my brother's e-mail and instant messenger accounts. This particular kid wasn't knowledable enough do any real harm, but if he did know more, I don't doubt that he would try to pull stuff like the kiddies in the article, and that he'd do it for similar reasons.
Part of the reason that Tolkien didn't think that works like his were suited for dramatization was that he didn't think it possible to do it correctly--the examples that he gives for why fantasy doesn't work in theater were ones where the dramatization messed up the story because there was no way to portray it on stage without requiring one too many levels of suspension of disbelief.
So, the question is, if Tolkien was aware of the filmmaking technology that we have now, would he still object? Filmmakers can make things look so much more realistic now than he would have been able to imagine back then. In other words, it's not just "Men dressed up as talking animals."
I don't know how to answer that question, but I think it's an interesting one to consider. Personally, I think that in any genre, except for works specifically written for stage or screen, you can get a lot more out of reading than you can from watching a movie where the thinking and imagining has already been done for you.
Back in the mid 1980s, for a period of several weeks we were seeing an object that would appear shortly before sunset and disappear after a few minutes that we were unable to identify (we forgot to take into account that a reflector telescope turns things upside down or we would have known it was a balloon). For some reason, my mom decided to call NORAD to see if they knew what it was, and we got a call back from the head of NORAD (yes, it really was the head and not some flunkie) asking for details and then telling us that it was a weather balloon.
Where I take out the tinfoil hat is that I keep wondering why in the world the head of NORAD would return my mom's call if there wasn't anything else going on besides just a weather balloon. Like maybe they were testing something NASA related or something at MacDill AFB that the general public wasn't supposed to know about. Maybe I'm just a paranoid geek.
I have a friend who was driving home from college and was pulled over after dark by an unmarked car. She rolled her window a crack and asked to see the guy's badge, since it was pretty obvious she was a woman travelling alone and wanted to be safe. The guy refused to show it to her and kept trying to get her to roll down her window the rest of the way. When she continued to refuse unless he showed his badge, he took off. She shouldn't have pulled over, but at least she didn't open her window or who knows what would have happened.
Back when I was a teenager, I was protesting somewhere (where and for what issue is irrelevant), and I had the cops called on me by people on the other side of the issue, who claimed that I was violating a perimeter injunction that the people who called the cops knew full well I wasn't named on. There was absolutely no way that I was going to allow my name to be placed on a police report just for exercising my First Ammendment rights (not to mention the whole unlawful search and seizure thing), but I had to go around and around with them reminding them of the Constitution before they decided to leave me alone and go. They even threatened me that they could arrest me and then I'd have to tell them who I was, but I think they finally gave up when they saw that just because I was 14 didn't mean they could intimidated me. If they had arrested me, there would have already been a Supreme Court case by now because I would have sued.
While the extreme limits of strength are influenced by male/female, the "normal" range is determined far more by excercise.
This is why my sister could be the only girl in her highschool hockey league and still be able to dish it out as much as anybody (despite having to deal with guy's playing "check the girl"--when she dished it back at 'em, they stopped pretty quick).
I, on the other hand, prefer intellectual pursuits, and just because I can use Linux proves nothing about it's ease of use.
1. I wonder how legal these sort of contracts actually are. I can't honestly believe that a court would allow a company to owns its employees minds in their spare time. I have heard horror stories about employees being asked to turn over their own projects that have nothing to do with their works business just because their employer thinks they might be able to make a buck on their spare-time work. Has anyone actually challenged these in court?
I don't know whether it's directly applicable to the corporate world because the case was at a university, but some years back there was a case where someone employed as a researcher at the University of South Florida developed something completely unrelated to his job, and did so on his own time, but it ended up as a criminal theft case when he tried to patent what he did. USF said that they owned his invention because it was in the same general field (chemistry, I think), as what he was doing for them, even though it had nothing to do with the research he was hired to do.
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So you reckon that if they'd crossed the mafia, the horse's head would be taken as a gross-out prank?
Most assuredly. And then they would complain about people copying them and not giving them sufficent credit for their ideas.
Doubt that freaky noises would have done anything with that group of guys, we just wanted them to stumble out in the middle of the night to find a partially decapitated squirrel. I forgot to mention before, but the squirrel's head ended up in the RA's bed the next day, for him to find a disembodied squirrel's face staring at him.
You have to go pretty far to shock or gross out that hall--heard that this year they hung an entire deer carcas from the ceiling on another guys' hall.
When I was in college, several of my hallmates installed an alarm clock in a dead squirrel. Said squirrel was left on my hall by a guy's hall, so we kindly returned it with an alarm clock set to go off at 3:00AM. Didn't think it possible, but yes, a girl's hall grossed out a bunch of guys with our fusion of road kill and electronics.
My dad's done that to several pagers. Didn't cause any lasting harm to the device, but it's still got the eww factor.
Taco Bell used to be a lot cheaper than it is now, but despite being the cheapest fast food restaurant in the business, they didn't get in that many customers. It was determined that people weren't eating at Taco Bell because they percieved the low price to be indicitive of low quality. After Taco Bell raised its prices to be more in line with other fast food chains, they increased their market share, because customers percieved the higher price meaning better food.
As for Godiva chocolate, there are certain kinds of Godiva that I don't even like, and I don't think are really very good quality chocolate. I'm a fan of Wilbur Chocolate's plain dark chocolate.
Fortunately, I went to a school where we were expected to learn how to work without a GUI environment. The idea was that it's a lot easier to learn to go from a non-GUI environment to a GUI than the other way around.
Umm, I wasn't talking about the end of the Soviet Empire, I was talking about the fall of the Milosevic government in former Yugoslavia in 2000. Before you try to go and correct someone's history, make sure you know history yourself.
It's not the first time a columnist missed the reasons for change. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a book about globalization, where he attributed the peaceful revolution in Serbia to a desire to participate in the global marketplace and the feeling that Slobodan Milosevic was holding them back (he gives a ridiculous example about people wanting to be able to afford frequent visits to McDonalds, and apparently doesn't realize that the reason that they can't afford to eat there is because it's ridiculously overpriced). I have e-mail contacts in Belgrade, and those people participated in the demonstrations that led to the peaceful overthrow of the government. They didn't take to the streets because they wanted McDonalds, they took to the streets because they wanted freedom to walk down the street without being harassed by police cracking down on dissidents, because they wanted to speak freely, to be able to write e-mail without worrying about it being monitored, and the straw that broke the camel's back was when everyone knew Milosevic lost the election but he claimed he won and he wouldn't leave (before anyone makes a crack about Bush in 2000, the student in Belgrade that my sister writes to associated Gore with Slobo refusing to admit defeat and said "when that happened here, we had a revolution"). I don't know what kind of direct role the internet had in the revolution, but indirectly, it did play a role, if only because it opened up avenues to interact with the rest of the world and thus served as a way to counteract the extreme form of nationalism, us-against-everyone mentality that the government used as a means of control.
Any channel of communication that takes place away from the oversight of a police state can help topple tyranny. Several years ago, the government of the Phillipines was toppled largely through the use of cell phone text messaging informing people of when a demonstration would be held--the revolutionary equivalent of a flash mob.
It's not the internet itself, or any particular website that will help topple tyranny, but any tool that increases the flow and volume of information is going to hurt tyrants.
Dude, if you're going to complain about Bush's economic policy, at least know what he's doing. Yes, Bush has cut taxes, but he's also increased spending--it's a Keynesian/trickle down combo, and it's starting to work.
It's elementary macroeconomics. Cutting taxes will increase the amount of money in circulation that can get spent, and the more money available to spend, the more people will spend, and if people want to spend, then there have to be goods and services for people to buy, and the increased demand for goods and services will create more jobs. Or, if you don't want to cut taxes, you can have the government start spending more money, which will start the same cycle. The real question is which method (cutting taxes or gov't spending) will add more money into the economy, and since Bush is both cutting taxes and spending more, he's putting money into the economy both ways, and two ways are better than one.
Addendum: The other way to influence the money supply is to tinker with interest rates, which in turn influences the value of the dollar vs. other currencies, causing money to flow in or out of the economy depending on whether rates go up or down. As interest rates are already extremely low, there isn't much that can be done in the interest rate department (free advice--this is why I think interest rates are going to stay low for a while--raising them will put a wet blanket on an already shaky economy).
The lowest bidder (usually) got the contract, but then, whatever they could charge Uncle Sam with a straight face (unforeseen delays, cost overruns, etc) the US paid without comment.
The US doesn't necessarily pay without comment. I have an uncle who works as an accountant with the Defense Department auditing department contracts. He has personally saved US taxpayers many millions (could be a lot more, but his job is top secret so there isn't much he can say, and most of what I know I've heard from my aunt), and when you figure in all of the other auditors, there is a lot of attempted overcharging that gets caught--probably well into the billions.
The problem with this is that while the gravitational force was used to find Neptune and Pluto, the fact that Neptune and Pluto exert gravitational force wasn't used do define them as planets. Your reasoning is backwards from the original reasoning.
The original reasoning was:
1) This planet's orbit cannot be explained by the current gravitational forces.
2) That means there must be another planet which we haven't yet observed that is exerting force.
3) The planet should be at point p.
4) Look at point p, voila, there's the planet we knew had to be there.
Dang educational games. When I was a kid, we had a game called Space Hop, which was supposed to teach all about the Solar System, but which has caused me to think that Ceres was shaped like a rather large and irregular rock, because that's the way the game showed it. I never saw anything that showed differently in any of my textbooks, so I've gone through life thinking that Ceres couldn't be a planet because of it's shape. If I had known it was round, I'd have been arguing since I was in elementary school that it's a planet. Moral, educational games aren't always so educational.
Also look at how many women there are in "hardcore" tech positions - meaning network and system admins, programmers, etc. I've seen women start those positions, and I've seen them leave. How many programs and incentives have been instituted over the last twenty years to encourage more women to get into science and technology? When do they begin to work?
The programs you speak of just might begin to work about the time that most male geeks stop exhibiting the sexist attitudes that show up all the time on Slashdot, and which are so clearly exemplified by many of the posts in this discussion. If you had to spend all of your time trying to prove that you were competant, and trying to fend off feeble advances by girlfriendless geeks, my guess is that you'd get sick of it and decide to go somewhere else where you're appreciated and not treated differently because you have two X chromosomes.
Dude, why is it that people think that if you say that you were smarter than all the kids your age, that it means you were arrogant about it? Plus, why the assumption that doing what interests you is trying to be an adult? I was interested in science so I read science, and there's nothing adult about it, just like there's nothing adult about riding bikes up and down the street with the other kids in my neighborhood because I liked riding bike. It's just that there was a large part of me that I wasn't ever able to communicate about with kids my age because they wouldn't have been able to understand what I was talking about.
You sir, haven't a clue, and have completely missed the point. When I was a kid, I didn't even know that I was particularly smart. The closest person that I had to compare myself to was my 4 years older brother, who was, quite literally the smartest kid in his school. Ever. All I knew was that I had totally different interests than the other kids, and consequently had very little in common to talk about. It wasn't until I was much older and had someone other than my super-genius older brother to compare myself to that I understood why I always felt so out of place. Oh yeah, and I can hold conversations. Was even quite successful in sales. Doesn't change the fact that as a young kid, it's not exactly easy when you're basically speaking a different language than others your age.
Precisely. I've always hated group work because I felt like I was carrying/babysitting the rest of the group. The only tolerable group project I had in school was in my software engineering class were we had to work together to pull off the project and each of us brought in different skills that we needed to succeed.
I don't think that sheltering children in the early years is a bad thing. Once they've developed a mature enough stance to be taught how to stand up against bullies, bigots, etc. then they can be introduced to the full gamut of the social strucure. However, you have to remember that these people who display extra intellectual prowess above and beyond their peers are effectively skipping HUGE areas of development that the rest of us have gone through. Getting them involved in more challenging material early on and protecting them is crucial to keeping them involved in that material, in my mind.
Amen to that. It's extremely hard being the smart kid in a group of average kids. My older brother was the smartest kid at his school (and I mean this literally--he had the highest IQ score of any kid ever at that school). By first grade he was writing stories about violently destroying his classroom if he were teacher for a day, largely because he had a teacher who had no clue how to deal with smart kids. My parents started homeschooling when he was in 5th grade, and from that point on until he graduated, he spent most of his time in his room reading about astronomy (and then getting up in the middle of the night to take his telescope out), he taught himself ancient Greek (and learned it so well that he knew it better than his college professors) and Latin, and while he didn't have many friends while in school, when he went off to college he ended up with tons of friends and had all kinds of girls chasing him.
Speaking personally, it's so very hard to be a little kid and be working on an intellectual level that most adults you know aren't even on. The only person I knew who could even remotely understand me was the aforementioned older brother (I never was IQ tested, but my parents always suspected I was smarter than him). Adding to that was that I was a girl who was into things that girls are't "supposed" to be interested in or good at, and you start to get the picture of what it's like to go through childhood when you're so much smarter than everyone else. All I can say is that I'm very glad I was homeschooled, because while I've always had fairly decent social skills, it can get to be rather stressful spending all your time having to talk down to people who can't understand half of your vocabulary, and to have to make small talk about things that you think are absolutely inane. If I had had to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week doing that, I think I really would have turned into a nerd with no social skills because I would have ended up getting bored with talking down to people and ended up avoiding people altogether.
As a kid, I had a hard time with communicating with other kids my age just because I was so much smarter than they were. A second grader who reads highschool science textbooks for fun doesn't really have much in common with other second grade girls who's idea of a hard book is The Babysitter's Club series.
Plus, it can be rather isolating when even most adults haven't got a clue about the things you're interested in.
Sometimes I think that it would be easier to be average and to go along happily clueless of anything below the surface of things.
My brother had some trouble with a script kiddie who got mad because my brother didn't give him the respect he thought he deserved (my brother isn't a geek, but at least I've taught him well in the disdain for script kiddies department), so the kid started trying to mess with my brother's e-mail and instant messenger accounts. This particular kid wasn't knowledable enough do any real harm, but if he did know more, I don't doubt that he would try to pull stuff like the kiddies in the article, and that he'd do it for similar reasons.
Part of the reason that Tolkien didn't think that works like his were suited for dramatization was that he didn't think it possible to do it correctly--the examples that he gives for why fantasy doesn't work in theater were ones where the dramatization messed up the story because there was no way to portray it on stage without requiring one too many levels of suspension of disbelief.
So, the question is, if Tolkien was aware of the filmmaking technology that we have now, would he still object? Filmmakers can make things look so much more realistic now than he would have been able to imagine back then. In other words, it's not just "Men dressed up as talking animals."
I don't know how to answer that question, but I think it's an interesting one to consider. Personally, I think that in any genre, except for works specifically written for stage or screen, you can get a lot more out of reading than you can from watching a movie where the thinking and imagining has already been done for you.
Back in the mid 1980s, for a period of several weeks we were seeing an object that would appear shortly before sunset and disappear after a few minutes that we were unable to identify (we forgot to take into account that a reflector telescope turns things upside down or we would have known it was a balloon). For some reason, my mom decided to call NORAD to see if they knew what it was, and we got a call back from the head of NORAD (yes, it really was the head and not some flunkie) asking for details and then telling us that it was a weather balloon.
Where I take out the tinfoil hat is that I keep wondering why in the world the head of NORAD would return my mom's call if there wasn't anything else going on besides just a weather balloon. Like maybe they were testing something NASA related or something at MacDill AFB that the general public wasn't supposed to know about. Maybe I'm just a paranoid geek.
I have a friend who was driving home from college and was pulled over after dark by an unmarked car. She rolled her window a crack and asked to see the guy's badge, since it was pretty obvious she was a woman travelling alone and wanted to be safe. The guy refused to show it to her and kept trying to get her to roll down her window the rest of the way. When she continued to refuse unless he showed his badge, he took off. She shouldn't have pulled over, but at least she didn't open her window or who knows what would have happened.
Always, always, always be careful.
Back when I was a teenager, I was protesting somewhere (where and for what issue is irrelevant), and I had the cops called on me by people on the other side of the issue, who claimed that I was violating a perimeter injunction that the people who called the cops knew full well I wasn't named on. There was absolutely no way that I was going to allow my name to be placed on a police report just for exercising my First Ammendment rights (not to mention the whole unlawful search and seizure thing), but I had to go around and around with them reminding them of the Constitution before they decided to leave me alone and go. They even threatened me that they could arrest me and then I'd have to tell them who I was, but I think they finally gave up when they saw that just because I was 14 didn't mean they could intimidated me. If they had arrested me, there would have already been a Supreme Court case by now because I would have sued.
While the extreme limits of strength are influenced by male/female, the "normal" range is determined far more by excercise.
This is why my sister could be the only girl in her highschool hockey league and still be able to dish it out as much as anybody (despite having to deal with guy's playing "check the girl"--when she dished it back at 'em, they stopped pretty quick).
I, on the other hand, prefer intellectual pursuits, and just because I can use Linux proves nothing about it's ease of use.
1. I wonder how legal these sort of contracts actually are. I can't honestly believe that a court would allow a company to owns its employees minds in their spare time. I have heard horror stories about employees being asked to turn over their own projects that have nothing to do with their works business just because their employer thinks they might be able to make a buck on their spare-time work. Has anyone actually challenged these in court?
I don't know whether it's directly applicable to the corporate world because the case was at a university, but some years back there was a case where someone employed as a researcher at the University of South Florida developed something completely unrelated to his job, and did so on his own time, but it ended up as a criminal theft case when he tried to patent what he did. USF said that they owned his invention because it was in the same general field (chemistry, I think), as what he was doing for them, even though it had nothing to do with the research he was hired to do.