Um, not to be a smart aleck or anything, but are we sure this is Firefly? It looks like Disney's Imagineers took some of the props from Pirates of the Caribbean and scattered them around Tomorrowland.
I was getting overtime as a contract agency employee to various outfits around Seattle as late as last year. Thanks to raises I've pretty much priced myself out of the overtime bracket, though.
Consider though that tech management (I mean the ones at the top of the ladder) has made the tech workplace palatable to workers without unionization by providing good pay, good food, good benefits, fun toys and the like, thereby providing a disincentive to unionization. Why should we unionize, they might argue, when we have the things a union would fight for, and we don't have to have the union to go with it? Especially when if we did decide to unionize management would start saying that they couldn't afford all of the perqs they currently provide if they had to meet the nut of a union contract.
This attitude is starting to change, though, thanks to globalization, outsourcing, the new overtime laws, (lack of) job security and the like. Groups like Washtech are working to make high tech employees aware of the issues they face and the benefits of unionization.
Hmmm. Vested interest, large immigrant population, thuggery at election time . . . sounds to me a lot like the sorts of things that happened in cities like New York around the turn of the 20th century. I'm not discounting that there is the potential for abuse (especially since it's already happened), I'm just saying that anyone determined enough to abuse the system is going to find a way ro try to do so, no matter what form those elections take.
Does the UK not have absentee voting? A significant percentage of voters where I live mail in their votes for every election, myself included. In fact there is a box you can check on your voter registration form to say that you want to always receive absentee ballots.
So I get my ballot in the mail. I fill it in, put it in a security envelope, put the security envelope in a mailing envelope with my name and address on the back, I sign the mailing envelope to say yes, this is me casting the ballot, put a stamp on it, and mail it in. No muss, no fuss, no worrying about electronic touch screens or jammed levers, no trying to get to the polling place on one end or the other of my commute, I can research the issues and vote at my leisure, there's a record that I voted, there's a paper ballot available in case of a recount, and as far as I can tell there's no more chance for fraud and abuse than there is in an in-person election.
Frankly I don't see what the problem is with postal voting.
I submit to you that if her fantasy novels pay the rent, they aren't exactly wasting her time, especially if they give her the time and freedom to create the Vorkosigan series (one of my wife's favorites, by the way).
As an aside, we once met Bujold at a Worldcon. Very nice lady, as I recall.
The Hugos are voted on by the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention. So, if you don't like the nominees or winners, you can get in on changing the outcome by signing up for this year's Worldcon ("this year" in Worldcon terms being defined as "roughly from Labor Day to Labor Day"). Here is the link for more information.
Next year's Worldcon is being held in Glasgow. Joining costs £30 if you just want to vote, or £95 if you want to attend. Those prices are likely to go up as next year's Worldcon gets closer.
Keep in mind that the awards are geared toward science fiction rather than fantasy, and the awards for novel, novella, novelette and short story tend to bear that out. The Dramatic Presentation award is more of a mixed bag. Over the last few years LotR and episodes of Babylon-5 and Star Trek:TNG have shared the award with movies such as Contact, GalaxyGuest and, oddly enough, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Keep also in mind that real excellence in science fiction on the screen, large or small, is often hard to find.
Thank you. Thank you. I agree with you -- I don't want to see Linux become something that the government mandates. By "a service like electricity or plumbing" I mean something that's there, anybody can hook up to with a minimum of fuss and bother thanks to standard interfaces, and above all that's reasonably well documented and fixable in case something does go wrong.
(Yes, I realize there are holes in the analogy, but you can only take an analogy so far.)
This article stems from a flawed assumption, namely, that the Linux development team really cares whether businesses switch to Linux or not. Linux was written by people who wanted "software that doesn't suck," not people who thought "Hey, let's write a bunch of neat-o code and put it out there and maybe a bunch of businesses will be interested."
In fact the article has it 100% backwards. Rather than Linux switching licenses to appeal more to the business crowd (which of course ain't gonna happen), business should start thinking of software in terms of software as a service -- not a web service, but a service like electricity or plumbing. Once that happens and businesscritters start realizing that you can use Linux in your enterprise without scaring off your employees or having to release all your internal software into the public domain, the arguments over lower TCO will start to take hold.
TiVo is as much a service as it is a box. You can buy the box and dig up the data yourself, programming it to blindly tape channel 59 every Friday at 8, and then having to guess on the Now Playing list which manual recording is the one you want, or you can pay a few bucks a month to know that you're going to record Stargate SG-1 every time a new episode comes up.
Personally my time is valuable enough that I can pay someone $13 a month to help me find shows I will enjoy watching in the limited time I allocate to television watching, plus alert me to things I might enjoy watching that I wouldn't otherwise know about, plus automatically search for shows I want to see that aren't currently on the schedule (my current list includes watching for The Seven Samurai, the musical Damn Yankees! and anyone who decides to rerun Due South), plus the ability to skip through commercials . . . but of course you are the one who is competent to judge what your time is worth, and your mileage may vary.
As for DirecTiVo . . . I'd check into that before I buy, based from what I've read in this article. It might be perfect for you, or you might find that it takes 30 seconds to change channels and you get to pay extra for the TiVo data anyway. (I don't know, I don't have DirecTV and I'm happy with what I have.)
but I would still have to get another subscription to support it
Not if you time it right (maybe). TiVo has, at least once, offered to transfer your lifetime TiVo subscription from a Series 1 box to a Series 2 box if you buy one from them. They might do so again, although there is of course no guarantee.
But my experience is similar to yours. I bought the TiVo ($150), the lifetime subscription ($99 -- I bought it just before it went up) and a bigger hard drive ($100). That's just about what I paid for the TV I watch it on, and it serves my TV watching habits just fine. In fact my wife will probably hit me if I ever suggest that we go back to TV without TiVo.
As pointed out on Groklaw, the Nuremberg experiments have nothing to do with the Nuremberg trials (other than the name Nuremberg). It's at most a semi-clever attempt by Enderle to both change the subject and try to link Linux advocates with Nazis without coming out and saying the N-word.
Actually, synthesizing ideas from other people's ideas is the foundation for capitalism. Or as George Carlin puts it, the way capitalism works is "You nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, and some shmuck will buy it from you for a dollar."
Just copying other people's ideas won't usually get you all that far. What gets you far is the combination of two or more ideas to make something new.
So you take the library, hook it up to a test harness and put it through its paces, continuously, to see what will happen. You can read the source, so you know or can extrapolate what the expected inputs and parameters are, and then use your tester's mentality to do the best you can to break it, and when it breaks you start the process of fixing it in motion -- again, aided by the source code.
You seem to be forgetting one of the prime principles of software production -- the people who write the software should not be the same people who try to catch the bugs inside it. If software is sufficiently important to you -- especially in military applications where finding bugs could ultimately save lives -- you have someone test it to see that it does what it's supposed to do, and ONLY what it's supposed to do. That goes for both proprietary and open software. Having source available just makes the process easier when you do find bugs.
I can see the government establishing a software testing branch inside the National Institute of Standards and Technology to handle the government's software testing needs.
Since when are assassination threats considered part of My Rights Online?
Maybe we're moving toward the world of H. Beam Piper's Lone Star Planet, where gunning down legislators was declared a legitimate expression of one's right to political speech.
Where did you get the idea that this was a WB show? It's produced by Sony Pictures Television and is syndicated. In my market (Seattle) it runs on the local ABC channel between the 6:30 news and whatever sitcom starts at 8:00. Not really a bad channel, and in a slot that's considered prime time.
As with the Tour, everyone on Jeopardy is going for the same goal. (Jennings eventually lost -- after all, he's not still taping the show -- but he is contractually obligated to tell no one, including his own family, how many games or how much money he won.) However, as with the Tour, not everyone is at the same level.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of a forest fire.
I bet he didn't say " . . . caused by a nuclear test."
Um, not to be a smart aleck or anything, but are we sure this is Firefly? It looks like Disney's Imagineers took some of the props from Pirates of the Caribbean and scattered them around Tomorrowland.
I was getting overtime as a contract agency employee to various outfits around Seattle as late as last year. Thanks to raises I've pretty much priced myself out of the overtime bracket, though.
So I no longer work overtime.
Consider though that tech management (I mean the ones at the top of the ladder) has made the tech workplace palatable to workers without unionization by providing good pay, good food, good benefits, fun toys and the like, thereby providing a disincentive to unionization. Why should we unionize, they might argue, when we have the things a union would fight for, and we don't have to have the union to go with it? Especially when if we did decide to unionize management would start saying that they couldn't afford all of the perqs they currently provide if they had to meet the nut of a union contract.
This attitude is starting to change, though, thanks to globalization, outsourcing, the new overtime laws, (lack of) job security and the like. Groups like Washtech are working to make high tech employees aware of the issues they face and the benefits of unionization.
Hmmm. Vested interest, large immigrant population, thuggery at election time . . . sounds to me a lot like the sorts of things that happened in cities like New York around the turn of the 20th century. I'm not discounting that there is the potential for abuse (especially since it's already happened), I'm just saying that anyone determined enough to abuse the system is going to find a way ro try to do so, no matter what form those elections take.
Does the UK not have absentee voting? A significant percentage of voters where I live mail in their votes for every election, myself included. In fact there is a box you can check on your voter registration form to say that you want to always receive absentee ballots.
So I get my ballot in the mail. I fill it in, put it in a security envelope, put the security envelope in a mailing envelope with my name and address on the back, I sign the mailing envelope to say yes, this is me casting the ballot, put a stamp on it, and mail it in. No muss, no fuss, no worrying about electronic touch screens or jammed levers, no trying to get to the polling place on one end or the other of my commute, I can research the issues and vote at my leisure, there's a record that I voted, there's a paper ballot available in case of a recount, and as far as I can tell there's no more chance for fraud and abuse than there is in an in-person election.
Frankly I don't see what the problem is with postal voting.
I submit to you that if her fantasy novels pay the rent, they aren't exactly wasting her time, especially if they give her the time and freedom to create the Vorkosigan series (one of my wife's favorites, by the way).
As an aside, we once met Bujold at a Worldcon. Very nice lady, as I recall.
The Hugos are voted on by the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention. So, if you don't like the nominees or winners, you can get in on changing the outcome by signing up for this year's Worldcon ("this year" in Worldcon terms being defined as "roughly from Labor Day to Labor Day"). Here is the link for more information.
Next year's Worldcon is being held in Glasgow. Joining costs £30 if you just want to vote, or £95 if you want to attend. Those prices are likely to go up as next year's Worldcon gets closer.
Keep in mind that the awards are geared toward science fiction rather than fantasy, and the awards for novel, novella, novelette and short story tend to bear that out. The Dramatic Presentation award is more of a mixed bag. Over the last few years LotR and episodes of Babylon-5 and Star Trek:TNG have shared the award with movies such as Contact, GalaxyGuest and, oddly enough, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Keep also in mind that real excellence in science fiction on the screen, large or small, is often hard to find.
This isn't even a rumor. It's basically one guy saying he wishes Google would start a Jabber-based messaging service. How is this front page material?
Hi. You must be new here.
Thank you. Thank you. I agree with you -- I don't want to see Linux become something that the government mandates. By "a service like electricity or plumbing" I mean something that's there, anybody can hook up to with a minimum of fuss and bother thanks to standard interfaces, and above all that's reasonably well documented and fixable in case something does go wrong.
(Yes, I realize there are holes in the analogy, but you can only take an analogy so far.)
Hey, this what's your ICQ#?
57007188888
How about yours?
16085588888
Funny, you don't look Jewish.
This article stems from a flawed assumption, namely, that the Linux development team really cares whether businesses switch to Linux or not. Linux was written by people who wanted "software that doesn't suck," not people who thought "Hey, let's write a bunch of neat-o code and put it out there and maybe a bunch of businesses will be interested."
In fact the article has it 100% backwards. Rather than Linux switching licenses to appeal more to the business crowd (which of course ain't gonna happen), business should start thinking of software in terms of software as a service -- not a web service, but a service like electricity or plumbing. Once that happens and businesscritters start realizing that you can use Linux in your enterprise without scaring off your employees or having to release all your internal software into the public domain, the arguments over lower TCO will start to take hold.
TiVo is as much a service as it is a box. You can buy the box and dig up the data yourself, programming it to blindly tape channel 59 every Friday at 8, and then having to guess on the Now Playing list which manual recording is the one you want, or you can pay a few bucks a month to know that you're going to record Stargate SG-1 every time a new episode comes up.
Personally my time is valuable enough that I can pay someone $13 a month to help me find shows I will enjoy watching in the limited time I allocate to television watching, plus alert me to things I might enjoy watching that I wouldn't otherwise know about, plus automatically search for shows I want to see that aren't currently on the schedule (my current list includes watching for The Seven Samurai, the musical Damn Yankees! and anyone who decides to rerun Due South), plus the ability to skip through commercials . . . but of course you are the one who is competent to judge what your time is worth, and your mileage may vary.
As for DirecTiVo . . . I'd check into that before I buy, based from what I've read in this article. It might be perfect for you, or you might find that it takes 30 seconds to change channels and you get to pay extra for the TiVo data anyway. (I don't know, I don't have DirecTV and I'm happy with what I have.)
but I would still have to get another subscription to support it
Not if you time it right (maybe). TiVo has, at least once, offered to transfer your lifetime TiVo subscription from a Series 1 box to a Series 2 box if you buy one from them. They might do so again, although there is of course no guarantee.
But my experience is similar to yours. I bought the TiVo ($150), the lifetime subscription ($99 -- I bought it just before it went up) and a bigger hard drive ($100). That's just about what I paid for the TV I watch it on, and it serves my TV watching habits just fine. In fact my wife will probably hit me if I ever suggest that we go back to TV without TiVo.
As pointed out on Groklaw, the Nuremberg experiments have nothing to do with the Nuremberg trials (other than the name Nuremberg). It's at most a semi-clever attempt by Enderle to both change the subject and try to link Linux advocates with Nazis without coming out and saying the N-word.
yeah, but Laverne and Shirley was a spinoff of Happy Days.
Oh, wait . . .
I don't think any of those issues are specific to Linux, which is I'm sure part of the point.
Actually, synthesizing ideas from other people's ideas is the foundation for capitalism. Or as George Carlin puts it, the way capitalism works is "You nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, and some shmuck will buy it from you for a dollar."
Just copying other people's ideas won't usually get you all that far. What gets you far is the combination of two or more ideas to make something new.
So you take the library, hook it up to a test harness and put it through its paces, continuously, to see what will happen. You can read the source, so you know or can extrapolate what the expected inputs and parameters are, and then use your tester's mentality to do the best you can to break it, and when it breaks you start the process of fixing it in motion -- again, aided by the source code.
You seem to be forgetting one of the prime principles of software production -- the people who write the software should not be the same people who try to catch the bugs inside it. If software is sufficiently important to you -- especially in military applications where finding bugs could ultimately save lives -- you have someone test it to see that it does what it's supposed to do, and ONLY what it's supposed to do. That goes for both proprietary and open software. Having source available just makes the process easier when you do find bugs.
I can see the government establishing a software testing branch inside the National Institute of Standards and Technology to handle the government's software testing needs.
Good thing they weren't compiling OpenOffice on Gentoo, we'd still be waiting for the result.
Followed by the same thing, in French. Multicultural society, language laws and all that, you know.
You git, there aren't any tigers within a hundred miles of you and your stupid rock!
Since when are assassination threats considered part of My Rights Online?
Maybe we're moving toward the world of H. Beam Piper's Lone Star Planet, where gunning down legislators was declared a legitimate expression of one's right to political speech.
What I still can't understand is what is holding their stock price up?
One word: Upsidaisium.
Where did you get the idea that this was a WB show? It's produced by Sony Pictures Television and is syndicated. In my market (Seattle) it runs on the local ABC channel between the 6:30 news and whatever sitcom starts at 8:00. Not really a bad channel, and in a slot that's considered prime time.
As with the Tour, everyone on Jeopardy is going for the same goal. (Jennings eventually lost -- after all, he's not still taping the show -- but he is contractually obligated to tell no one, including his own family, how many games or how much money he won.) However, as with the Tour, not everyone is at the same level.