Spam has an unfortunate relationship - the spam recipient isn't the spammer's customer. The spammer's customer is the advertiser, either directly or indirectly. Blocking spam doesn't disrupt the connection between the spammer and his customer, and as long as the spammer can convince his customer that there's value in advertising via spam, the spam shall continue. To eliminate spam, it must become substantially less attractive than traditional advertising channels. I don't expect that to happen any time soon, as the cost of sending a gazillion emails pales in comparison to the cost of running a print campaign.
Maybe the correct method to work toward eliminating spam isn't to block it, but rather let it all through. I think folks would be truly disturbed if the ISPs could coordinate a day where everybody disabled spam filtering for 24 hours. You wanna motivate a congresscritter? Irritate everyone in his district, all at once (including him and his peers.)
I'll further reinforce your point with another Google Maps reference - draw a horizontal line from the green arrow indicating the Baikonur Cosmodrome toward the east. See that chunk of southern Russia over near Japan? That's (generally) where they're planning to put the new cosmodrome. It's about as far south as they can go in Russia without displacing the North Koreans. Unfortunately, they're not getting any better location than Baikonur. The Russians really need some territory further south... like Afghanistan, for example.
Oh, that's wonderful. At first glance, this appears to be another post from the illiterati, but the lack of speling erorrs indicates otherwise. Well done.
Consider life insurance, and rephrase - "No individual would be able to get life insurance with the possibility that he may slide under a bus tomorrow. People get hit by busses all the time, and no insurance company would offer a million dollar policy if it didn't know that the policy holder would outlive the term." Uh huh. And yet, it's pretty easy to get a life insurance policy, right?
This isn't about risk aversion (though most **AA and publishing companies are pretty damned risk averse,) but rather about maintaining the revenue stream. The distributors don't create anything, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you'll comprehend what the issue is. If the distributors can't control the distribution channel, they cease to exist. The Sonny Bono Indefinite Retroactive Copyright Extension Act was essentially a cash-grab from the media distribution cartels. Copyright is supposed to be an incentive for the creation of new works, not a method for maintenance of a brutally obsolete business model. Unfortunately, Copyright has been usurped by the distribution cartels as a method of strong-arming money from... everyone.
Copyright should apply to an individual. Period. Corporate assignment of a copyright should terminate on the creator's death. If the creator wants to provide for his children, he can buy stock in a mutual fund or purchase a life insurance policy like the rest of us working stiffs. I see no reason to coddle musicians, actors, authors or anyone else in the artistic trades. What makes them so damned special? Are the starving auto mechanics so much less deserving?
The obvious solution is to create a rating that is "teh horrible pr0n" so the rating board can point to is and say "see? NC-17 and AO isn't porn. We have a rating for that stuff right there." Nobody says the ESRB has to actually assign the PRoN rating to anything. It just needs to exist to artificially raise the upper limit to one-more than desirable. Spinal Tap would be so proud.
It's worse - IM is for people who have nothing better to do than be interrupted all the time. My former boss used to love IMing us, probably because the immediacy of the communication mechanism appealed to his ego. Unfortunately, anyone involved in getting work done was subject to a crapflood of interruptions. IM was great for him, but ultimately made everyone else unproductive. My IM client "crashed" long ago, and it crashed so hard it appears to have blown the executable bits right off the hard drive... been that way for about four years now. Anyone in the engineering or scientific workplace knows how valuable large, uninterrupted blocks of time are. A constant stream of inane interruptions (IM or head-in-the-cubicle types) destroys your ability to concentrate on your tasks.
The linked video is overloaded with "boxes on conveyors," but there's a gem in the middle. The warehouse distribution is handled by a vertical lift system, where material containers are handed-off to robots scurrying around on the roof. The bots grab a container, then move along an orthogonal mesh of rails. The bots don't appear to be constrained to any particular track, and it's quite impressive to watch them perform collision avoidance. Very cool.
Americans are simply concerned that the bicycle frame will collapse under them. If you want widespread adoption in the US, you'll have to do three things:
- Reinforce the frames
- Install cupholders (follow the lead of the automakers)
- Install a sausage dispenser
Towing in space has been done before. Grumman sent North American Rockwell an invoice for towing their crippled spacecraft home. The rate per mile seems pretty reasonable too.
All joking aside, this is going to be a bear to fix. The best scenario would be that the drive gear was munching an insulation blanket. The debris would be friendly to space suits, and should only be labor intensive to clean out. If the gears are grinding on each other, the debris will be sharp and hard. That would be "bad" and I'd expect NASA to seriously consider returning the entire assembly to earth for repair. Expensive, but much less likely to kill someone.
I'm of the opinion that the drive system on this beast is probably over-engineered. It should resemble a Ford F-150 differential - loose tolerances, and designed to run for many millions of rotations without much maintenance. There's absolutely no need for the solar array to have precision pointing capability. I really do hope that the problem isn't due to over-engineering, but I wouldn't place a bet.
I've been personally involved in several amateur satellite payloads. As a secondary payload, there was no "permit" we had to obtain. If there was one, it was obtained by the Launch Provider as part of their service. However, we did have to meet a metric assload of materials, interface and operations requirements as dictated by the Launch Provider. Most of the restrictions centered around making sure the payload didn't present an unnecessary hazard to the flight. And by "unnecessary," I mean that propulsion systems carry triple-redundant safety structures to guarantee that the payload won't light-off prior to deployment, the RF section has redundant elements to prevent it from operating prior to deployment, etc. (I'm certain that you'd need a permit and gobs of oversight from the NRC if you were trying to launch a nuclear wessel, but that's a totally different animal.)
And that's my space junk, thankyouverymuch. I'm quite proud of having found a way to get some of my stuff off the planet... I'd love to send something to the moon, even if I have to land at 11 km/s (aerobraking isn't an option.) However, getting from LEO (7.5 km/s) to escape velocity (11 km/s) has proven to be quite difficult, even for small spacecraft.
Folks are willing to argue that the job *is* the problem. I beg to differ. I'm afflicted with kids. Regardless of my employment situation, there is no way in hell I could just disappear into the woods for half a year. Raising these little monkeys is a huge undertaking (which nobody warned me about way back when.)
And beyond that, here in the States, the gub'ment is the source of the evil money cycle. If you have possessions, they're going to be taxed. You'll require some form of employment to cover those taxes. Wages from your employment get taxed too. Almost no one will employ you (legally) without you having an address... and "cardboard box under the I-75 overpass" won't cut it. So rent a room, which requires more money. The gub'ment is structured with a fundamental bias against those who try to play outside the system. And if you buck the system too hard, you can earn a six-month "get away from it all" stay at the gray-bar hotel.
Nope, the solution is to get even more money. If I win the lottery, I'll be able to afford to put everything on hold (by paying someone else to babysit the house, the job, etc.) Until that point, I'm a wage slave.
Much of your computer was manufactured in... China, Philippines, Malaysia? If you don't live in the Pacific Rim, that's likely on the opposite side of the planet. At first glance, it doesn't make any sense to put your manufacturing facilities so far from the customer... right?
Eaten any avocados recently? They probably came from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, or Mexico. If you were living in the mid-1800s, those items would never survive the transportation time. Today, it's a no-brainer.
If you change the transportation dynamic, the entire market will shift. Things that are un-possible today will be commonplace tomorrow. And I hate to use the P-word (because it's been so over-used to be cliche,) but using today's social paradigms to establish expectations for tomorrow's environment is totally inappropriate. The GP can't see "any possible benefit" because he's using today's cost model against a future environment. If I was transporting vegetables and fruit for a living, and using only horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships for transport, the costs of importing perishable items from far distances would be excessive. So there's no possible value in doing so, right?
To quote my father - "It's not impossible. You just haven't figured it out yet."
Learning morse takes a buttload of time. It's extremely abstract, and probably isn't going to be easily memorized by someone who's sedated. If she already knows morse, then I'd say it's more of an option.
Alternatively, teach her a handful of ASL signs. "Yes" is a fist you nod. "No" is two fingers pinched against the thumb. Finger spelling resembles the written characters in many cases, so it shouldn't be a big burden to learn. Don't be afraid to invent signs - that's perfectly valid, especially when the signer has mobility issues. We've done baby-sign with both of our kids, and it's worked out wonderfully. Some suggestions:
Pain - touch left and right index fingers together, then point to the pain
Help - raise your hand like you need to ask a question
Hungry - motion like you're putting food in your mouth
Thirsty - lift the imaginary cup to your mouth
Water - place the sign "W" to your lips
Toilet - wave the sign "T"
Sleep - place one or both hands against your cheek
Done - place a hand flat over your mouth (hard to do when on a respirator, so invent one that works)
More - touch all fingers in each hand, then tap the two finger bunches together
Nah, Bait and Switch is what the big-box stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, et al) try to do without getting caught. There's no threat there, nor is there the counter-offer when you complain.
This is a classic technique used by lawmakers. They introduce some horrible bill, then "back down" to their original goals. The objective is to appear to be negotiating with your opponent when you are not.
This is a classic manipulation tactic. Your opponent wishes to impose an unpleasant restriction upon you. First, he imposes one that's excessive and offensive. You get upset. He, being the nice guy he is, offers a less-unpleasant restriction in "response" to your reaction. You fall all over yourself to choke down the restriction he originally wanted because it's "better than what we had before."
I'm sure there's a formal name for this method, but it escapes me at the moment. I haven't had my coffee yet.
My wife still keeps a typewriter... "just in case." I'm not sure what she's preparing for, as the ribbon is certainly dried out, so typing is not the reason. Perhaps she could brandish it in a threatening manner should the need arise. The typewriter has been in a box for at least the last 10 years. I believe there's a box of carbon paper inserts to go with it. I gotta remember to shuttle that crap to the dump when she's not looking.
I wonder if anyone remembers those wonderful blue Mimeograph machines? I worked for a summer making copies on an ammonia-based Blu-Ray diazo copier machine. That smell will never leave me...
Minority Report? I immediately thought of the spiders in Runaway... what? Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons, Kirstey Alley... killer robots, bullets that fly around corners...
damn, y'all make me feel old.
Worse - you can't touch the Sphere of One-ness with anything.
Q: May I put my greasy paws on it? A: No. Fingerprints will alter the mass in a measureable way.
Q: White gloves? A: Abrasive.
Q: Use a special cradle that's machined to exactly the same radius profile such that you won't scratch or deform the Sphere of One-ness? A: Nope. That'll result in a molecular interference fit. You'll never get the two pieces apart.
So ultimately, they're building a very precise bauble that no one will ever be allowed to touch. I suspect that bouncing photons off the surface may displace an atom or two, so they'll keep it in a dark room... in a vacuum chamber... at the bottom of a flight of stairs, in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading "prendre garde du léopard."
Maybe all mathematicians are actually zombies. That'd explain their relentless need for "Braaaaannessssss..."
C'mon. I can't be the only one here who was thinking this... right?
As for the FSM reference, I think you just found a way to sneak religion into the schooling curriculum via the mathematics conduit. Well done. I look forward to the Kansas Board of Education mandating textbook updates. I wonder if there's a correlation between Cosmic Creation Brane Theory and species extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs discovered The One Grand Unified Brane Theorem, and were so enlightened that they all had seizures and died. Damn. That's halfway plausible. I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Man, I gotta cut down on the caffeine and get more sleep. I was really confused about why the fanfic folks were having their LinuxJournal forum accounts terminated.
1) Personal opinion - problems have inertia, and unless you apply a force to them, nothing changes. If the schoolyard bully keeps punching you and taking your lunch, you're going to be bruised and hungry until you do something about it. You enjoy suffering to improve someone else's quality of life, right?
2) Other personal opinion - These asshats have involved the courts, and consequently I get to pay for their shenanigans (and it's also the reason why I give a crap about the issue.) The courts need the slap these idiots down with prejudice so they, and the other asshats like them, don't get to try again. Once the courts are involved, there's a legal obligation of due process. The courts can't "just ignore them."
The reason we have DRM is so the media cartels can create an artificial shortage and control the price. If the songs, movies, TV shows are readily available, you'll get more of a free-market pricing response... which is exactly what the studios don't want.
The entertainment industry's business model is fundamentally flawed. Up until recently, they've had a strangle-hold on production and distribution. That creates and artificial shortage, and allows them to dictate terms like price and availability. It used to be very difficult and very risky to go around them, and the cassette-tape pirates of long, long ago were small potatoes. Fast forward to today, and the entertainment industry is in the latter phases of the "adapt or perish" paradigm. Their control of the distribution channel gets less and less effective with each passing day. People have gotten a taste of freedom, and they like it. I don't care what new name they assign DRM... I refuse to roll over and be a "good little comsumer." I haven't purchased an audio CD in over 10 years. I haven't been downloading either. The commodity stuff is formulaic crap. I do, however, support indie musicians like Jonathan Coulton. He's earned some of my money without resorting to DRM or lawsuits. Imagine that. I'm also a firm believer that without the internet, Jonathan's music would have never gotten to me.
And finally, the entertainment industry isn't the center of the universe (in spite of what they've told you.) You can do without the latest DVD of American Whatever. Honest. It's not required. The entertainment industry has dictated the value-proposition of their goods (see the "artifical scarcity" argument above.) They're terrified that you'll actually make up your own mind, and realize that whatever they're peddling isn't worth it. That's one of the chief complaints about the iTunes pricing schedule - Joe Consumer can add (barely,) and the audio CD with 10 tracks selling for $18.99 at Best Buy is a lot more expensive than purchasing 10 tracks from iTunes. Additionally, the labels lose the opportunity to pad an album out to two discs by inserting filler or remastered tracks that you didn't want in the first place. Those last two are just pure profit for the labels, and that's where they're taking the biggest hits. Heard them whining about the death of the album format recently? It's not because they fancy the art form.
Slashdot Mirror
Spam has an unfortunate relationship - the spam recipient isn't the spammer's customer. The spammer's customer is the advertiser, either directly or indirectly. Blocking spam doesn't disrupt the connection between the spammer and his customer, and as long as the spammer can convince his customer that there's value in advertising via spam, the spam shall continue. To eliminate spam, it must become substantially less attractive than traditional advertising channels. I don't expect that to happen any time soon, as the cost of sending a gazillion emails pales in comparison to the cost of running a print campaign.
Maybe the correct method to work toward eliminating spam isn't to block it, but rather let it all through. I think folks would be truly disturbed if the ISPs could coordinate a day where everybody disabled spam filtering for 24 hours. You wanna motivate a congresscritter? Irritate everyone in his district, all at once (including him and his peers.)
I'll further reinforce your point with another Google Maps reference - draw a horizontal line from the green arrow indicating the Baikonur Cosmodrome toward the east. See that chunk of southern Russia over near Japan? That's (generally) where they're planning to put the new cosmodrome. It's about as far south as they can go in Russia without displacing the North Koreans. Unfortunately, they're not getting any better location than Baikonur. The Russians really need some territory further south ... like Afghanistan, for example.
Oh, that's wonderful. At first glance, this appears to be another post from the illiterati, but the lack of speling erorrs indicates otherwise. Well done.
Consider life insurance, and rephrase - "No individual would be able to get life insurance with the possibility that he may slide under a bus tomorrow. People get hit by busses all the time, and no insurance company would offer a million dollar policy if it didn't know that the policy holder would outlive the term." Uh huh. And yet, it's pretty easy to get a life insurance policy, right?
... everyone.
This isn't about risk aversion (though most **AA and publishing companies are pretty damned risk averse,) but rather about maintaining the revenue stream. The distributors don't create anything, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you'll comprehend what the issue is. If the distributors can't control the distribution channel, they cease to exist. The Sonny Bono Indefinite Retroactive Copyright Extension Act was essentially a cash-grab from the media distribution cartels. Copyright is supposed to be an incentive for the creation of new works, not a method for maintenance of a brutally obsolete business model. Unfortunately, Copyright has been usurped by the distribution cartels as a method of strong-arming money from
Copyright should apply to an individual. Period. Corporate assignment of a copyright should terminate on the creator's death. If the creator wants to provide for his children, he can buy stock in a mutual fund or purchase a life insurance policy like the rest of us working stiffs. I see no reason to coddle musicians, actors, authors or anyone else in the artistic trades. What makes them so damned special? Are the starving auto mechanics so much less deserving?
The obvious solution is to create a rating that is "teh horrible pr0n" so the rating board can point to is and say "see? NC-17 and AO isn't porn. We have a rating for that stuff right there." Nobody says the ESRB has to actually assign the PRoN rating to anything. It just needs to exist to artificially raise the upper limit to one-more than desirable. Spinal Tap would be so proud.
It's worse - IM is for people who have nothing better to do than be interrupted all the time. My former boss used to love IMing us, probably because the immediacy of the communication mechanism appealed to his ego. Unfortunately, anyone involved in getting work done was subject to a crapflood of interruptions. IM was great for him, but ultimately made everyone else unproductive. My IM client "crashed" long ago, and it crashed so hard it appears to have blown the executable bits right off the hard drive ... been that way for about four years now. Anyone in the engineering or scientific workplace knows how valuable large, uninterrupted blocks of time are. A constant stream of inane interruptions (IM or head-in-the-cubicle types) destroys your ability to concentrate on your tasks.
The linked video is overloaded with "boxes on conveyors," but there's a gem in the middle. The warehouse distribution is handled by a vertical lift system, where material containers are handed-off to robots scurrying around on the roof. The bots grab a container, then move along an orthogonal mesh of rails. The bots don't appear to be constrained to any particular track, and it's quite impressive to watch them perform collision avoidance. Very cool.
Americans are simply concerned that the bicycle frame will collapse under them. If you want widespread adoption in the US, you'll have to do three things:
- Reinforce the frames
- Install cupholders (follow the lead of the automakers)
- Install a sausage dispenser
Towing in space has been done before. Grumman sent North American Rockwell an invoice for towing their crippled spacecraft home. The rate per mile seems pretty reasonable too.
All joking aside, this is going to be a bear to fix. The best scenario would be that the drive gear was munching an insulation blanket. The debris would be friendly to space suits, and should only be labor intensive to clean out. If the gears are grinding on each other, the debris will be sharp and hard. That would be "bad" and I'd expect NASA to seriously consider returning the entire assembly to earth for repair. Expensive, but much less likely to kill someone.
I'm of the opinion that the drive system on this beast is probably over-engineered. It should resemble a Ford F-150 differential - loose tolerances, and designed to run for many millions of rotations without much maintenance. There's absolutely no need for the solar array to have precision pointing capability. I really do hope that the problem isn't due to over-engineering, but I wouldn't place a bet.
I've been personally involved in several amateur satellite payloads. As a secondary payload, there was no "permit" we had to obtain. If there was one, it was obtained by the Launch Provider as part of their service. However, we did have to meet a metric assload of materials, interface and operations requirements as dictated by the Launch Provider. Most of the restrictions centered around making sure the payload didn't present an unnecessary hazard to the flight. And by "unnecessary," I mean that propulsion systems carry triple-redundant safety structures to guarantee that the payload won't light-off prior to deployment, the RF section has redundant elements to prevent it from operating prior to deployment, etc. (I'm certain that you'd need a permit and gobs of oversight from the NRC if you were trying to launch a nuclear wessel, but that's a totally different animal.)
... I'd love to send something to the moon, even if I have to land at 11 km/s (aerobraking isn't an option.) However, getting from LEO (7.5 km/s) to escape velocity (11 km/s) has proven to be quite difficult, even for small spacecraft.
And that's my space junk, thankyouverymuch. I'm quite proud of having found a way to get some of my stuff off the planet
Folks are willing to argue that the job *is* the problem. I beg to differ. I'm afflicted with kids. Regardless of my employment situation, there is no way in hell I could just disappear into the woods for half a year. Raising these little monkeys is a huge undertaking (which nobody warned me about way back when.)
... and "cardboard box under the I-75 overpass" won't cut it. So rent a room, which requires more money. The gub'ment is structured with a fundamental bias against those who try to play outside the system. And if you buck the system too hard, you can earn a six-month "get away from it all" stay at the gray-bar hotel.
And beyond that, here in the States, the gub'ment is the source of the evil money cycle. If you have possessions, they're going to be taxed. You'll require some form of employment to cover those taxes. Wages from your employment get taxed too. Almost no one will employ you (legally) without you having an address
Nope, the solution is to get even more money. If I win the lottery, I'll be able to afford to put everything on hold (by paying someone else to babysit the house, the job, etc.) Until that point, I'm a wage slave.
Much of your computer was manufactured in ... China, Philippines, Malaysia? If you don't live in the Pacific Rim, that's likely on the opposite side of the planet. At first glance, it doesn't make any sense to put your manufacturing facilities so far from the customer ... right?
Eaten any avocados recently? They probably came from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, or Mexico. If you were living in the mid-1800s, those items would never survive the transportation time. Today, it's a no-brainer.
If you change the transportation dynamic, the entire market will shift. Things that are un-possible today will be commonplace tomorrow. And I hate to use the P-word (because it's been so over-used to be cliche,) but using today's social paradigms to establish expectations for tomorrow's environment is totally inappropriate. The GP can't see "any possible benefit" because he's using today's cost model against a future environment. If I was transporting vegetables and fruit for a living, and using only horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships for transport, the costs of importing perishable items from far distances would be excessive. So there's no possible value in doing so, right?
To quote my father - "It's not impossible. You just haven't figured it out yet."
Learning morse takes a buttload of time. It's extremely abstract, and probably isn't going to be easily memorized by someone who's sedated. If she already knows morse, then I'd say it's more of an option.
Alternatively, teach her a handful of ASL signs. "Yes" is a fist you nod. "No" is two fingers pinched against the thumb. Finger spelling resembles the written characters in many cases, so it shouldn't be a big burden to learn. Don't be afraid to invent signs - that's perfectly valid, especially when the signer has mobility issues. We've done baby-sign with both of our kids, and it's worked out wonderfully. Some suggestions:
Pain - touch left and right index fingers together, then point to the pain
Help - raise your hand like you need to ask a question
Hungry - motion like you're putting food in your mouth
Thirsty - lift the imaginary cup to your mouth
Water - place the sign "W" to your lips
Toilet - wave the sign "T"
Sleep - place one or both hands against your cheek
Done - place a hand flat over your mouth (hard to do when on a respirator, so invent one that works)
More - touch all fingers in each hand, then tap the two finger bunches together
Nah, Bait and Switch is what the big-box stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, et al) try to do without getting caught. There's no threat there, nor is there the counter-offer when you complain.
This is a classic technique used by lawmakers. They introduce some horrible bill, then "back down" to their original goals. The objective is to appear to be negotiating with your opponent when you are not.
This is a classic manipulation tactic. Your opponent wishes to impose an unpleasant restriction upon you. First, he imposes one that's excessive and offensive. You get upset. He, being the nice guy he is, offers a less-unpleasant restriction in "response" to your reaction. You fall all over yourself to choke down the restriction he originally wanted because it's "better than what we had before."
I'm sure there's a formal name for this method, but it escapes me at the moment. I haven't had my coffee yet.
Squeak, squeak squeak!
[translation: "I'm crazy, and so am I!"]
My wife still keeps a typewriter ... "just in case." I'm not sure what she's preparing for, as the ribbon is certainly dried out, so typing is not the reason. Perhaps she could brandish it in a threatening manner should the need arise. The typewriter has been in a box for at least the last 10 years. I believe there's a box of carbon paper inserts to go with it. I gotta remember to shuttle that crap to the dump when she's not looking.
...
I wonder if anyone remembers those wonderful blue Mimeograph machines? I worked for a summer making copies on an ammonia-based Blu-Ray diazo copier machine. That smell will never leave me
Minority Report? I immediately thought of the spiders in Runaway
damn, y'all make me feel old.
Worse - you can't touch the Sphere of One-ness with anything.
... in a vacuum chamber ... at the bottom of a flight of stairs, in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading "prendre garde du léopard."
Q: May I put my greasy paws on it?
A: No. Fingerprints will alter the mass in a measureable way.
Q: White gloves?
A: Abrasive.
Q: Use a special cradle that's machined to exactly the same radius profile such that you won't scratch or deform the Sphere of One-ness?
A: Nope. That'll result in a molecular interference fit. You'll never get the two pieces apart.
So ultimately, they're building a very precise bauble that no one will ever be allowed to touch. I suspect that bouncing photons off the surface may displace an atom or two, so they'll keep it in a dark room
Maybe all mathematicians are actually zombies. That'd explain their relentless need for "Braaaaannessssss ..."
... right?
C'mon. I can't be the only one here who was thinking this
As for the FSM reference, I think you just found a way to sneak religion into the schooling curriculum via the mathematics conduit. Well done. I look forward to the Kansas Board of Education mandating textbook updates. I wonder if there's a correlation between Cosmic Creation Brane Theory and species extinction. Perhaps the dinosaurs discovered The One Grand Unified Brane Theorem, and were so enlightened that they all had seizures and died. Damn. That's halfway plausible. I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Man, I gotta cut down on the caffeine and get more sleep. I was really confused about why the fanfic folks were having their LinuxJournal forum accounts terminated.
Have Boomer walk the ring in a tight bikini, holding up the round cards.
Oh damn, I just did the accidental flashback to the Boomer from the original Battlestar series - Herb Jefferson Jr.
AAAHHHahahaha!!! My Mind's Eye!! You sir, owe me a new mental retina
I disagree from two different standpoints:
1) Personal opinion - problems have inertia, and unless you apply a force to them, nothing changes. If the schoolyard bully keeps punching you and taking your lunch, you're going to be bruised and hungry until you do something about it. You enjoy suffering to improve someone else's quality of life, right?
2) Other personal opinion - These asshats have involved the courts, and consequently I get to pay for their shenanigans (and it's also the reason why I give a crap about the issue.) The courts need the slap these idiots down with prejudice so they, and the other asshats like them, don't get to try again. Once the courts are involved, there's a legal obligation of due process. The courts can't "just ignore them."
The reason we have DRM is so the media cartels can create an artificial shortage and control the price. If the songs, movies, TV shows are readily available, you'll get more of a free-market pricing response ... which is exactly what the studios don't want.
... I refuse to roll over and be a "good little comsumer." I haven't purchased an audio CD in over 10 years. I haven't been downloading either. The commodity stuff is formulaic crap. I do, however, support indie musicians like Jonathan Coulton. He's earned some of my money without resorting to DRM or lawsuits. Imagine that. I'm also a firm believer that without the internet, Jonathan's music would have never gotten to me.
The entertainment industry's business model is fundamentally flawed. Up until recently, they've had a strangle-hold on production and distribution. That creates and artificial shortage, and allows them to dictate terms like price and availability. It used to be very difficult and very risky to go around them, and the cassette-tape pirates of long, long ago were small potatoes. Fast forward to today, and the entertainment industry is in the latter phases of the "adapt or perish" paradigm. Their control of the distribution channel gets less and less effective with each passing day. People have gotten a taste of freedom, and they like it. I don't care what new name they assign DRM
And finally, the entertainment industry isn't the center of the universe (in spite of what they've told you.) You can do without the latest DVD of American Whatever. Honest. It's not required. The entertainment industry has dictated the value-proposition of their goods (see the "artifical scarcity" argument above.) They're terrified that you'll actually make up your own mind, and realize that whatever they're peddling isn't worth it. That's one of the chief complaints about the iTunes pricing schedule - Joe Consumer can add (barely,) and the audio CD with 10 tracks selling for $18.99 at Best Buy is a lot more expensive than purchasing 10 tracks from iTunes. Additionally, the labels lose the opportunity to pad an album out to two discs by inserting filler or remastered tracks that you didn't want in the first place. Those last two are just pure profit for the labels, and that's where they're taking the biggest hits. Heard them whining about the death of the album format recently? It's not because they fancy the art form.