Comic Sans font fills a unique slot that no other widely available (read: free) font provides. It allows an informal alternative to the other too formal and stuffy fonts for purposes that don't want to be all officious.
I feel that it's biggest drawback is it's name. (If you don't think a name can hurt you, try to tell someone to use GIMP, or even worse, Qtpfsgui.) If Comic Sans had been called Informal Sans I believe that there would be much less angst over it.
You're always touchable when stupid judges and rich, powerful special interests are involved in a media show trial. One can only hope that the Swedish Supreme Court has a better understanding of their own laws.
Summary got it wrong - AGAIN! They haven't started deleting logs, they've been doing it that way since 1994. This story has been out for a couple days and somehow - in typical Internet fashion - one person got it wrong and everyone else has copied the wrong data. They never saved this data from the beginning because they didn't have to. It's only mentioned now that they're continuing to do what they've done all alone, not that the suddenly started doing something different.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Sure been tough lately being a Democratic member of Congress.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Tell me about it. Tea parties. Fox News.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I know a way you can get real popular.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Go on...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): People hate Congress and are afraid we're spending too much. I mean we're just rewarding our constituents after 8 long dry years but...
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah, I know.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): But there's someone even less popular than we are.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Lawyers?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Call that one a tie. Think even worse.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Uhhh...where's my teleprompter? Oh yeah, loaned it to Barrack. Wait, I got it!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Right, the cable television companies that we're supposed to be regulating to the benefit of the consumer.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Ha ha ha ha ha...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Well Time-Warner just decided to screw over their customers even worse than before, and they're starting it in our own great state of New York.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What are they doing?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Their costs are dropping and their profits are up.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Profits are up? Aren't we taxing them enough yet?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Probably not, but that's not the point.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): But raising taxes on other people and spending the money on pork is about all I know how to do - except to blame Bush for everything, that is.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): This is easy. I'm just a small member of the House and they're not listening to me, but you're the senior Senator from a powerful state. They can't ignore your voice.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What exactly are they doing.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They imposing caps that will raise the average user's bill by at least 66% while calling them pigs for using the Internet connections they actually paid for.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): God Forbid! We can't have that - unless they need the money for more campaign contributions [wink][wink][nudge][nudge].
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I think they need new private jets.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): So what do I need to do?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Tell them to cut it out, or else - and you'll be a hero to millions.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): That easy?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): That easy!
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): And if I don't, what's the downside?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They'll be protesting in the streets this weekend.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): We can't have any more of that. Except for NBC who is already in our pocket, I don't think we can shut down the rest of the news organizations a second time so soon. Not after the ratings Fox News got out of those tea parties!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Then we've got a deal? You'll remember who brought this to you?
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Of course, kid. The check's in the mail.
It's all about greed. The internet company operating outside the state (if they're in the state they're already paying taxes) isn't using any of the infrastructure that the taxes pay for. If anything, they should be paying taxes in the state where they do the business, but then you have customers in other states paying out-of-state sales taxes which don't benefit them and aren't fair either.
The current system has worked well for many years. What hasn't worked well over that time is politicians controlling their spending of other people's money in their attempts to buy their way into continued future paychecks. Now they're out trying to steal even more from you.
If we threw out these politicians trying to vote this in as just yet more Big Taxers and Spenders then this stupid and unfair idea might actually go away for a while.
And it goes without mentioning the problems any Internet company would face in computing the proper state, county, city, and even borough taxes properly and paying them to all the proper taxing authorities. This is MANY TIMES the burden any local business faces. Talk about an attempt to kill internet companies - you couldn't have come up with a better scheme.
And think of the companies (FedEx, UPS...) which depend of them for a large chunk of their business. Raise prices, kill off companies, are you really trying to make this recession worse!
Tried to go visit the stopthecap.com site through my Comcast account and guess what? Connection interrupted during negotiation.
Okay, F-them, I'll read it out of the Google cached page. That completely stalled out also. How long has it been since you've seen the Google cache stall out for minutes? Sniff, sniff, something stinks here.
Where to I find a service that gives me the IP address for a DNS lookup?
This sounds like the ultimate legal fishing expedition. Any competent judge should see through this immediately.
Hey, wait a minute! Isn't Boston College a very liberal college in the very liberal town of Boston in the exceptionally liberal state of Massachusetts? There should be demonstrations, sit-ins, riots over the invasion of this student's privacy. The professors should be leading the kids in this. So where is the ACLU?
Google has Safe Search available for images. As others have said, if all Amazon did was offer a Safe Search Yes/No option next to their search box then this would be a tempest in a teapot.
I'm willing to bet that if they did offer this, and tracked its usage, that they'd find out that virtually none of their customers would actually opt for it
We keep getting government nannys feeling we need V-chips for every aspect of our lives (are you listening Australia Internet government censors?). But when the choice arises, the Opt Out choice seems to win every time.
But what about the children? My children? The best V-chip is parental involvement in what your child is watching on the TV or their computer. You can't expect technology to substitute for effective parenting.
To hide a book (remove it from the card catalog, to use an obsolete reference) is to censor that book. Amazon, you're engaging in censorship and you can't call it anything else! As a bookseller you should be more anti-censorship than pro political correctness.
David Gerrold (SF author) once told me the story of reading a manuscript by a new author. After he finished it he looked at the author for a moment before asking him: "And how long have you been a COBOL programmer?"
Yes the person was a long-time COBOL programmer, and yes David G. obviously knew enough about COBOL to know it when he saw it.
I do know from personal experience that DG had a keen understanding of what computers and programming might accomplish when he asked what it would take to design a device to automate the process of writing and editing manuscripts. He described a completely functional Word Processing system years before I saw and used my first DEC WPS-78 system, back in the days when all we had were simple text editors for writing code.
I've learned the basic rule of IT -- you're not there to play with computers and have fun. You're there to make sure the business you support is able to do their work, preferably without calling you in every night to fix something.
I know personally too many people today who think they're I.T. people and call themselves I.T. people who haven't got a clue about this. Congratulations for the most succinct expression of this idea that I've seen in a long time. I intend to use it to either educate - or replace - some people very soon because I'm tired of cleaning up their messes.
Ah, my favorite programming language of all time. PL/I was just great to work in back when my other choices were Fortran IV (eventually 77), COBOL (did my stint on that), and assembler (I've worked with near a dozen of those).
These days for me it's most of all that most denigrated - and yet highly used - language of all: Visual Basic. I do it in all its forms (VB6, VBA under Access, VB.NET as in VS2005/2008, VBS). Here I am looking for work, and as willing to do legacy languages as current ones, and jobs still aren't easy to find in my area.
Because the director of IT or whatever his title is will want to be able to put on his resume that HE moved a company from a "Legacy" and "Outdated" system to a modern "web based solution" that enables "greater productivity" among the workforce saving "millions of dollars". Now, he can put that on his resume and go for the CTO, CIO, or whatever jobs.
I've seen it and it works.
Allow me to translate this:
The guy that you hire as your Director of I.T. is going to spend hundreds of thousands to millions of new dollars moving your off of your proven system to an entirely new platform that he understands better than anyone else -- and then take a hike to greener pastures leaving you needing to support the latest technology that only the newest, rawest, least experienced, graduates understand. And he's probably going to take the best of your I.T. staff with him in the process.
Yeah, that's the guy I want to hire for our critical infrastructure.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."
I'm sure that the Germans did this all su sponte because they want to make it up to Australia for being on the other side in WW II.
So the Obama Justice Department has its head up its collective RIA-A$$. And their justification for this is that the Bush Justice Department had their own heads up in the same warm dark spot so it must be right.
So how's all the Hope and Change working out for you?
Lousy headline here. They haven't tripled the efficiency of the already best solar cells out there, but just some over variant that wasn't so very efficient to start with.
If you want to fight Google and don't like your stuff on their site, just tell them. They'll just take it down. In fact you don't even have to tell this company notorious for not letting you ever reach a live person with a question or problem. ROBOTS.TXT.
Of course you lose completely since Google pwns the information highway.
So instead, for content your otherwise giving away for free on your own sites you now want to dictate the rules for Google. You Must Carry Our News and You Must Pay Us Any Fee We Demand For Doing So!
Is this still America? Or did all the Hope and Change suddenly put me in Europe -- or worse?
So Apple over-promises and under-delivers again. Why is this news?
What was the over-promise all you fanbois are asking as you reach for your Troll -1 mod hotkey? That there would be as many 69 cent songs as $1.29 songs when the record companies -- not Apple -- are setting the prices. Since when has the recording mafia actually reduced prices? Apple should have kept their mouths shut over this fiasco. 99 cents was easy for everyone to understand -- so they had to go complicate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Comic Sans font fills a unique slot that no other widely available (read: free) font provides. It allows an informal alternative to the other too formal and stuffy fonts for purposes that don't want to be all officious.
I feel that it's biggest drawback is it's name. (If you don't think a name can hurt you, try to tell someone to use GIMP, or even worse, Qtpfsgui.) If Comic Sans had been called Informal Sans I believe that there would be much less angst over it.
You're always touchable when stupid judges and rich, powerful special interests are involved in a media show trial. One can only hope that the Swedish Supreme Court has a better understanding of their own laws.
Summary got it wrong - AGAIN! They haven't started deleting logs, they've been doing it that way since 1994. This story has been out for a couple days and somehow - in typical Internet fashion - one person got it wrong and everyone else has copied the wrong data. They never saved this data from the beginning because they didn't have to. It's only mentioned now that they're continuing to do what they've done all alone, not that the suddenly started doing something different.
The blogger who reported this perhaps didn't realize that he had just outed himself as a warez user.
Obama likes to compare himself to the great Democratic presidents.
So do I.
In fact, I compare him most of all to the great LBJ, who only [blanked] when his lips were moving.
Maybe. But it's definitely stupid not to.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Pssst, Chuck.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Sure been tough lately being a Democratic member of Congress.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Tell me about it. Tea parties. Fox News.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I know a way you can get real popular.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Go on...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): People hate Congress and are afraid we're spending too much. I mean we're just rewarding our constituents after 8 long dry years but...
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah, I know.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): But there's someone even less popular than we are.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Lawyers?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Call that one a tie. Think even worse.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Uhhh...where's my teleprompter? Oh yeah, loaned it to Barrack. Wait, I got it!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Right, the cable television companies that we're supposed to be regulating to the benefit of the consumer.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Ha ha ha ha ha...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Well Time-Warner just decided to screw over their customers even worse than before, and they're starting it in our own great state of New York.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What are they doing?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Their costs are dropping and their profits are up.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Profits are up? Aren't we taxing them enough yet?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Probably not, but that's not the point.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): But raising taxes on other people and spending the money on pork is about all I know how to do - except to blame Bush for everything, that is.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): This is easy. I'm just a small member of the House and they're not listening to me, but you're the senior Senator from a powerful state. They can't ignore your voice.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What exactly are they doing.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They imposing caps that will raise the average user's bill by at least 66% while calling them pigs for using the Internet connections they actually paid for.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): God Forbid! We can't have that - unless they need the money for more campaign contributions [wink][wink][nudge][nudge].
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I think they need new private jets.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): So what do I need to do?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Tell them to cut it out, or else - and you'll be a hero to millions.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): That easy?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): That easy!
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): And if I don't, what's the downside?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They'll be protesting in the streets this weekend.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): We can't have any more of that. Except for NBC who is already in our pocket, I don't think we can shut down the rest of the news organizations a second time so soon. Not after the ratings Fox News got out of those tea parties!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Then we've got a deal? You'll remember who brought this to you?
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Of course, kid. The check's in the mail.
Clearly this hasn't been Amazon's best week. They've really put their foot into it twice already, and the week ain't even over yet.
It's all about greed. The internet company operating outside the state (if they're in the state they're already paying taxes) isn't using any of the infrastructure that the taxes pay for. If anything, they should be paying taxes in the state where they do the business, but then you have customers in other states paying out-of-state sales taxes which don't benefit them and aren't fair either.
The current system has worked well for many years. What hasn't worked well over that time is politicians controlling their spending of other people's money in their attempts to buy their way into continued future paychecks. Now they're out trying to steal even more from you.
If we threw out these politicians trying to vote this in as just yet more Big Taxers and Spenders then this stupid and unfair idea might actually go away for a while.
And it goes without mentioning the problems any Internet company would face in computing the proper state, county, city, and even borough taxes properly and paying them to all the proper taxing authorities. This is MANY TIMES the burden any local business faces. Talk about an attempt to kill internet companies - you couldn't have come up with a better scheme.
And think of the companies (FedEx, UPS...) which depend of them for a large chunk of their business. Raise prices, kill off companies, are you really trying to make this recession worse!
Tried to go visit the stopthecap.com site through my Comcast account and guess what? Connection interrupted during negotiation.
Okay, F-them, I'll read it out of the Google cached page. That completely stalled out also. How long has it been since you've seen the Google cache stall out for minutes? Sniff, sniff, something stinks here.
Where to I find a service that gives me the IP address for a DNS lookup?
Wouldn't it have just been better to have been right in the first place?
This sounds like the ultimate legal fishing expedition. Any competent judge should see through this immediately.
Hey, wait a minute! Isn't Boston College a very liberal college in the very liberal town of Boston in the exceptionally liberal state of Massachusetts? There should be demonstrations, sit-ins, riots over the invasion of this student's privacy. The professors should be leading the kids in this. So where is the ACLU?
Google has Safe Search available for images. As others have said, if all Amazon did was offer a Safe Search Yes/No option next to their search box then this would be a tempest in a teapot.
I'm willing to bet that if they did offer this, and tracked its usage, that they'd find out that virtually none of their customers would actually opt for it
We keep getting government nannys feeling we need V-chips for every aspect of our lives (are you listening Australia Internet government censors?). But when the choice arises, the Opt Out choice seems to win every time.
But what about the children? My children? The best V-chip is parental involvement in what your child is watching on the TV or their computer. You can't expect technology to substitute for effective parenting.
To hide a book (remove it from the card catalog, to use an obsolete reference) is to censor that book. Amazon, you're engaging in censorship and you can't call it anything else! As a bookseller you should be more anti-censorship than pro political correctness.
Justification for a pub: Google doesn't have one.
Justification for pulling the plug on the pub: Google doesn't have one.
David Gerrold (SF author) once told me the story of reading a manuscript by a new author. After he finished it he looked at the author for a moment before asking him: "And how long have you been a COBOL programmer?"
Yes the person was a long-time COBOL programmer, and yes David G. obviously knew enough about COBOL to know it when he saw it.
I do know from personal experience that DG had a keen understanding of what computers and programming might accomplish when he asked what it would take to design a device to automate the process of writing and editing manuscripts. He described a completely functional Word Processing system years before I saw and used my first DEC WPS-78 system, back in the days when all we had were simple text editors for writing code.
I know personally too many people today who think they're I.T. people and call themselves I.T. people who haven't got a clue about this. Congratulations for the most succinct expression of this idea that I've seen in a long time. I intend to use it to either educate - or replace - some people very soon because I'm tired of cleaning up their messes.
Ah, my favorite programming language of all time. PL/I was just great to work in back when my other choices were Fortran IV (eventually 77), COBOL (did my stint on that), and assembler (I've worked with near a dozen of those).
These days for me it's most of all that most denigrated - and yet highly used - language of all: Visual Basic. I do it in all its forms (VB6, VBA under Access, VB.NET as in VS2005/2008, VBS). Here I am looking for work, and as willing to do legacy languages as current ones, and jobs still aren't easy to find in my area.
Allow me to translate this:
The guy that you hire as your Director of I.T. is going to spend hundreds of thousands to millions of new dollars moving your off of your proven system to an entirely new platform that he understands better than anyone else -- and then take a hike to greener pastures leaving you needing to support the latest technology that only the newest, rawest, least experienced, graduates understand. And he's probably going to take the best of your I.T. staff with him in the process.
Yeah, that's the guy I want to hire for our critical infrastructure.
I'm sure that the Germans did this all su sponte because they want to make it up to Australia for being on the other side in WW II.
So the Obama Justice Department has its head up its collective RIA-A$$. And their justification for this is that the Bush Justice Department had their own heads up in the same warm dark spot so it must be right.
So how's all the Hope and Change working out for you?
Lousy headline here. They haven't tripled the efficiency of the already best solar cells out there, but just some over variant that wasn't so very efficient to start with.
Yeah, but does "unlimited" really mean unlimited?
Uh, February of which year?
Not that Congress can get anything right done by February of any year.
If you want to fight Google and don't like your stuff on their site, just tell them. They'll just take it down. In fact you don't even have to tell this company notorious for not letting you ever reach a live person with a question or problem. ROBOTS.TXT.
Of course you lose completely since Google pwns the information highway.
So instead, for content your otherwise giving away for free on your own sites you now want to dictate the rules for Google. You Must Carry Our News and You Must Pay Us Any Fee We Demand For Doing So!
Is this still America? Or did all the Hope and Change suddenly put me in Europe -- or worse?
So Apple over-promises and under-delivers again. Why is this news?
What was the over-promise all you fanbois are asking as you reach for your Troll -1 mod hotkey? That there would be as many 69 cent songs as $1.29 songs when the record companies -- not Apple -- are setting the prices. Since when has the recording mafia actually reduced prices? Apple should have kept their mouths shut over this fiasco. 99 cents was easy for everyone to understand -- so they had to go complicate it.