Derek Jakobi was great, so was John Hurt. I don't even remember Patrick Stewart being in it but, my god, looking at the photo it's true!
Of course, I haven't seen this series since it first appeared on Masterpiece Theater and that was a long, long time ago, long before Patrick Stewart became a household name here in the US.
I'm 47 and have been working professionally since my mid-teens, over thirty years in other words.
The fact that I was 16 didn't stop DEC from thanking my friends and I for what later because OS/8 Teco (text editor, and the "8" stands for PDP-8). Thanked us on the first page of the user manual, as a matter of fact, for the entire world to see.
Nor did it stop customers from buying other software my friends and I wrote.
Let's see... I was being paid for my work, my work was being bought and used world-wide within the PDP-8 community (which was a tiny one by today's standards, of course). And you're saying I wasn't a professional because I happened to be in High School at the time?
Bah.
Next thing you'll say is that I'm no longer working professionally because I manage an Open Source project.
As far as not being taken seriously due to age, it wasn't a serious problem back then. It was a smaller and less formal world of computers back in those days.
I vastly prefer my gigabyte Linux boxes that cost less than an 8192 12-bit word PDP-8 did in the late 60s, but I kinda miss the informality and "small-town" feeling of the industry that I entered over 30 years ago.
While StarOffice 6.0 Beta still has problems importing certain Word documents (and always will), it seems to export.doc format just fine. I send such documents to folks who only have Word all the time, with no problem.
As long as your publisher can read your documents, why will they care whether the.doc file was written by SO rather than MS Word? Why would you even bother telling them?
I think SO suffers to a large degree because so many found 5.2 so loathsome. SO (or OpenOffice) 6 is much, much nicer.
Crime and criminals have been with us from the beginning and will be with us until the end. Most people are honest, but there will always be a small minority that aren't. There's not much point in wringing one's hands over this fact and whining about "people not having some sense of ethics".
In this case the victims aren't the retailers, the potential victims are those who purchase the gift cards. Blaming the retailers for not taking adequate precautions against the theft of the funds in question isn't a case of "blaming the victim" (the person buying the gift card who has every right to assume that the vendor takes reasonable security precautions).
It makes perfect sense to blame vendors who don't take adequate precautions to protect their customers from theft. Remember that the customer can be ripped off even if they keep the card secured in Fort Knox, in other words the customer can't do a damned thing (short of not buying the product) to protect the card, only the vendor.
And also keep in mind that simple security measures are available that greatly increase the safety of the card, and the article points out a few retailers who implement such measures. Those who don't are fair game for criticism, IMO.
You remember incorrectly, which is why he admitted he was wrong afterwards.
Now... should he've been convicted of three felony counts? Probably not, but there's undoubtably more history here. Intel normally would handle such stuff internally, I'm sure. It seems pretty clear that there were already bad feelings. Hell, I know plenty of Intel folks, including hackers much more on the ball than Randal (part of his problem being ego), and they don't seem disturbed. This is not how Intel normally handles such things. Note that there's been no avalanche of follow-on persecutions of supposedly-innocent people.
So, it is safe to say that Randal pissed off some folks at Intel in a very, very major way before this incident, and that afterwards they decided to chew his nuts off.
Actually, the Oregon Supreme Court's ruling in the case that you're mentioning was eminently reasonable. The measure on the ballot *clearly* addressed separate issues, and the Oreogn Constitution is veyr clear on the issue.
We have one of the most liberal constitutional amendment amendment procedures in the country. All you need is 50% + 1 vote to change it.
If the right (or the left, though the right has been the side playing the game) wants to put multiple issues under a single ballot measure, all they need to do is to pass a Constitutional Amendment by a 50%+1 vote margin to rewrite our Constitution to allow it.
The reason why this is important is that they put up tax-cutting measures that then have unrelated stuff tacked on in a single ballot measure. They hope that the promise of lower taxes will attract enough votes to pass the ballot measure regardless of whatever else they stuff into it.
I personally think that those who write my state's Constitution were wise to specify that every initiative ballot measure must address one, and only one, issue. (it is incredibly easy to put a ballot measure up here, popular democracy at its best, the least we can ask is to be given one question at a time to vote on).
Hear hear. I've been in this position and I always have asked, too.
Not because I live in the state of Oregon but because it is the right thing to do (and my knowledge of right and wrong far predate the law in question).
I think the major problem with Randal was that Intel had no idea of what he was actually doing, found out, freaked out. Freaki
ng out was a reasonable response.
The fact that the freaking out resulted in a criminal charge and conviction is unfortunate. Washington County (where Intel's Oregon facilities are located) is far, far more conservative than Multnomah County (where Portland, OR is mostly located). In Multnomah County some sort of non-criminal solution would've been the result, most likely.
The Appeals Court and Supreme Court, though, don't rule on whether or not the conviction is "reasonable" but whether or not the conviction meets the test of law.
That's not unreasonable, that's how judicial review is meant to work. The law as written is unreasonable, but not unconstitutional and therefore no constitutional grounds for overturning the conviction exist. There's no doubt about the evidence, so there's no evidenciary grounds for overturning the conviction.
So...
1. Randal sinned in a relatively minor way, but sinned nonetheless.
2. Intel and a hard-assed Washington County prosecutor decided to go after him in a major way (makes you wonder about past interactions, doesn't it? I would think that a single well-placed manager could've derailed this train if she'd thought Randal deserved grace).
3. The law doesn't violate the Oregon or Federal Constitution (nor your state's, most likely). Therefore the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, whatever their private view of the overreaction resulting in his conviction, have no basis for overturning it. (of course, they may actually want him to burn at the stake, but we don't know that, the Oregon Supreme Court is actually fairly liberal).
Hmmm...we had a temporary, but fairly significant, rise in memory prices what, about two years ago? Whenever I was building my personal SMP webserver, anyway. I remember being annoyed that I could've saved a few dozen dollars if I'd bought the memory a few months earlier.
Well, in my PDP-8 days 4K 12-bit words (6 KB or, more realistically, 8K 6-bit characters) cost a bit over $4,000. That was in 1969 dollars. What's that, about $12K today?
But we treat them far more harshly before putting them on probation. Which, of course, is the basic problem with the consent decree. There's nothing painful to MS in the decree (big surprise, given that they wrote most of it).
You forgot to read the part of the CIA fact book that defines the geographical boundaries of the UK. The "United Kingdom" refers specifically to England and Scotland.
Think "United States" for a minute. Japan invaded the Phillipines, for instance, in 1941 but we don't speak of the United States as having been invaded. We speak of our colony the Phillipines as having been invaded (and occupied).
The Battle of Britain was not an invasion, which by definition involves ground forces.
Northern Ireland's not been invaded by a foreign power. It's a domestic dispute. The closest foreign power is Eire, and they've stayed out of it.
The other examples you give all involve foreign possessions of Great Britain.
And of course "territorial disputes" are not necessarily invasions by foreign powers in the first place. Most of those you mention involve nothing more than diplomatic snit-fits.
Russia is both a country and (partially) part of Europe and (partially) part of Asia. Europe is a strange continent because it's not physically separated from Asia (thus the term "Eurasia"). The bits of the ex-Soviet Union which form today's Russia's straddles both continents.
Your either misusing or misunderstanding Encarta or you've run afoul of yet another Microsoft bug...
Feral horses are a major problem in the arid American West, as well. Thanks to "Wild Horse Annie" we can't use lethal methods of control (we can't kill them, in plain English).
So we taxpayers pay to have them rounded up, the small percentage that are young enough and in good health to be attractive to potential owners are adopted out, while the majority are penned in huge yards in places like Texas. Fed and watered again, at taxpayer expense, because people so love horses that they can't bear to seem them killed even in areas where they're a unmitigated pest and negatively impact our public lands.
Of course even I'd choose a horse over a cow on the range, and admittedly some (not all) of BLM's control efforts are to maximize forage for cattle, not wildlife. The BLM's bent priorities are no excuse for being stupid about feral horses, though.
Cane toad have been introduced into Florida as well. They were introduced because they were thought to eat some sort of sugar cane pest. I forget that detail, which is a minor one after all when one considers the fact that the cane toad doesn't eat that pest anyway.
They eat anything else they can get their mouths around, though, and they reach a HUGE size.
Florida's freshwater ecosystem is probably one of the most screwed-up in the world. (mostly) Unintentional escapees from tropical fish farms and intentional bass and other game fish introductions have thoroughly disrupted things.
Then there's the havoc wreaked by carp in much of the West...
The list goes on. Most attempts to introduce alien species fail, some result in no great harm (chukar almost exclusively eat cheatgrass, which is itself a noxious introduced weed that's vastly changed sage steppe ecosystems in the arid west, for instance; pheasants are largely dependent on agricultural), some are beneficial (cinnabar moth used to control introduced tansy ragwort).
But those that go bad... go very bad. And our ability to predict the side-effects of introductions is very poor.
And Australia itself has a long list of endemic species in peril, really more so than Africa in terms of a percentage of endemics that are in trouble. Seems like the wrong place to try this experiment.
In my area, at least, burying boxes this way is a no-no and would surely draw the wrath of the electrical inspector. Your electrician will know if this is true in your area.
Making a map would seem to answer the obvious objection to burying boxes, but what guarantee is there that the next owner will get the map? Or that you'll not lose it? Or get hit by a truck without bothering to tell anyone where it is or what it is?
The idea is that another electrician should be able to come in and figure out the wiring including all splices without ripping out all your walls.
Along the "she's also a great person" train of thought, I've been involved with a large annual bookfair and arts festival here in Portland for about fifteen years (it grosses a couple hundred thousand bucks each year).
One of the nice things about Ms LeGuin is that she readily makes herself available for readings and booksignings for such events, regardless of whether or not she's got a new book out, is working on a tour with a publisher, etc. In other words she'll do her best to accomodate non-profits in order to help out.
She's very gracious, as well, humble almost to the point of self-deprecation. The first year she read for us I ended up assigned to introduce her, and after her reading she came up to me and thanked me for my somewhat adulatory introduction.
Big-time writers don't have to go out of their way to thank volunteers at fund-raising events they're supporting... it says a lot for the woman that she would do so, and it's not an isolated event.
She's such a gracious, kind and dignified person that even Harlan Ellison was polite and humble to her when I saw them together on stage to read and discuss SF back in the early 1970s...
And it makes a big difference. When we can advertise that "Ursula will be there, signing and reading!" we draw huge crowds of folks, a wonderful thing. Few authors in Oregon have her popularity (ironically, National Book Award winner Robert Michael Pyle is known to relatively few folks). Another Oregon writer who is exceptionally well-known - Barry Lopez - has refused our invitation every year, so don't imagine that her generousity is universal among well-known writers.
And... if you're ever in Portland, do check out Powell's city of books. It's pretty amazing. They have an entirely separate technical store that in itself carries most titles than most non-specialized bookstores. Geek heaven...
No, RedHat is *not* doing the same thing. They're not trying to transform a major lawsuit against them into a tax writeoff and marketing opportunity (the sale of support/upgrade licenses in five years).
RedHat's not the company being sued for using their monopoly on the desktop as a lever for overcharging their customers, nor is RedHat the company that's worried that they may be fined much more heavily if they don't settle.
Re:Improvements in man-made wings possible?
on
Wind Tunnel for Birds
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
An interesting finding made by these guys that I didn't see mentioned on the site is in regard to flight efficiency in migratory shorebirds.
As someone mentioned above, shorebirds have an amazing ability to pig down and generate a lot of muscle and fat in a very short period of time (a large fraction of their body weight in 24-48 hours).
So - are they more efficient when their tank's full or empty, i.e. heavy after "refueling" or light as after a long stint in the air (they're known to migrate hundreds of miles between stops).
The reference I saw a few days ago says the answer, measured in this wind tunnel, is that they're more efficient when their tank's full (so to speak).
The studying of the physiology of migratory shorebirds may be important for conservation, too. There are generally limited areas in which shorebirds concentrate to feed on migration. While some migrate inland, in many species virtually all individuals migrate along the coast. And, of course, in most parts of the world coastal areas are under heavy developmental pressure. People like the beach, too...
Examples of such concentration areas include Delaware Bay in the eastern United States and Bowerman Basin in the western US.
And human use of natural resources also has an impact (in particular the harvesting of horsehoe crabs on the east coast, they're the source of some important chemical but I forget what exactly - we don't eat them, obviously!)
More knowledge about the physiology of these species might help us predict the impacts of certain types of development or resource consumption.
We actually know more about albatrosses than birds which flap energetically - an albatross flies similarly to a fixed-wing aircraft when conditions are right. This is one reason they're able to fly such long distances with such little nourishment. Among other things the wings can more or less lock in place, meaning that most of the energy expended by the bird goes to controlling angle and pitch etc in order to steer (tail plays a role, too, of course).
Flapping flight, though, that's whole 'nother thing and not analogous to either fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters.
Ha! Airplanes have engines! If "that" (gliding) is what airplanes do, they'd be called "gliders" and they wouldn't have "engines" (nor would you take one coast-to-coast except on days with *exceptional* thermal activity - and you'd never take one across the Pacific).
Hint - the engines are those big things hanging down from the wing, usually one or two to a side. Another hint - don't stand in front of them when they're revved up to take-off power!
What you should be doing is to suggest that the countries in which these practices occur make them illegal. And then enforce the law.
And if the practice is occurring in your country which already has such laws on the books, you should press for enforcement.
No, this doesn't mean I support the proposed side agreement. Free speech is free speech, and I'm with the ACLU (who supports free speech protections for neo-nazis as well as less odiforous groups).
Still... your right to talk about, or not talk about, female circumcision isn't the problem. It's the fact that there are countries in the world that allow it, by law, that's the problem.
Just how many Europeans do you think support the practice? Nearly nada. How many European countries protect it as a religous right? Nada? I don't know... tell me.
My shorter answer is that you're raising a strawman, which is unfortunate because there are *serious* reasons to worry about this.
Speaking of Warner Brothers, they've got one of my photos on two of their pages at the official Harry Potter website. You can include it in e-postcards you send.
They did not ask my permission. They did not pay for the use of my copyrighted work (this particular photo has been sold for publication several times).
Needless to say we'll be talking (they've already made an offer to another photographer in the same situation).
In all fairness, it's the web design firm's that at fault, but I find the irony quite humorous.
This "lawyer" would have to have passed the bar and most likely licensed to practice in Federal Court (since these are federal detainees we're speaking of).
You don't just walk off the street and say "I'm a lawyer" and get granted the attorney-client privilege.
And... before this change went into effect, the AG's office only needed to get a federal judge to agree and they could already listen in.
They're fixing something that's not broken. At the risk of sounding paranoid, when an extremist like Ashcraft expands the powers of federal prosecutors to "fix" a problem that doesn't exist, I get suspicious.
Slashdot Mirror
Derek Jakobi was great, so was John Hurt. I don't even remember Patrick Stewart being in it but, my god, looking at the photo it's true!
Of course, I haven't seen this series since it first appeared on Masterpiece Theater and that was a long, long time ago, long before Patrick Stewart became a household name here in the US.
I'm 47 and have been working professionally since my mid-teens, over thirty years in other words.
... I was being paid for my work, my work was being bought and used world-wide within the PDP-8 community (which was a tiny one by today's standards, of course). And you're saying I wasn't a professional because I happened to be in High School at the time?
The fact that I was 16 didn't stop DEC from thanking my friends and I for what later because OS/8 Teco (text editor, and the "8" stands for PDP-8). Thanked us on the first page of the user manual, as a matter of fact, for the entire world to see.
Nor did it stop customers from buying other software my friends and I wrote.
Let's see
Bah.
Next thing you'll say is that I'm no longer working professionally because I manage an Open Source project.
As far as not being taken seriously due to age, it wasn't a serious problem back then. It was a smaller and less formal world of computers back in those days.
I vastly prefer my gigabyte Linux boxes that cost less than an 8192 12-bit word PDP-8 did in the late 60s, but I kinda miss the informality and "small-town" feeling of the industry that I entered over 30 years ago.
While StarOffice 6.0 Beta still has problems importing certain Word documents (and always will), it seems to export .doc format just fine. I send such documents to folks who only have Word all the time, with no problem.
.doc file was written by SO rather than MS Word? Why would you even bother telling them?
As long as your publisher can read your documents, why will they care whether the
I think SO suffers to a large degree because so many found 5.2 so loathsome. SO (or OpenOffice) 6 is much, much nicer.
Crime and criminals have been with us from the beginning and will be with us until the end. Most people are honest, but there will always be a small minority that aren't. There's not much point in wringing one's hands over this fact and whining about "people not having some sense of ethics".
In this case the victims aren't the retailers, the potential victims are those who purchase the gift cards. Blaming the retailers for not taking adequate precautions against the theft of the funds in question isn't a case of "blaming the victim" (the person buying the gift card who has every right to assume that the vendor takes reasonable security precautions).
It makes perfect sense to blame vendors who don't take adequate precautions to protect their customers from theft. Remember that the customer can be ripped off even if they keep the card secured in Fort Knox, in other words the customer can't do a damned thing (short of not buying the product) to protect the card, only the vendor.
And also keep in mind that simple security measures are available that greatly increase the safety of the card, and the article points out a few retailers who implement such measures. Those who don't are fair game for criticism, IMO.
You remember incorrectly, which is why he admitted he was wrong afterwards.
... should he've been convicted of three felony counts? Probably not, but there's undoubtably more history here. Intel normally would handle such stuff internally, I'm sure. It seems pretty clear that there were already bad feelings. Hell, I know plenty of Intel folks, including hackers much more on the ball than Randal (part of his problem being ego), and they don't seem disturbed. This is not how Intel normally handles such things. Note that there's been no avalanche of follow-on persecutions of supposedly-innocent people.
Now
So, it is safe to say that Randal pissed off some folks at Intel in a very, very major way before this incident, and that afterwards they decided to chew his nuts off.
And did so.
Actually, the Oregon Supreme Court's ruling in the case that you're mentioning was eminently reasonable. The measure on the ballot *clearly* addressed separate issues, and the Oreogn Constitution is veyr clear on the issue.
We have one of the most liberal constitutional amendment amendment procedures in the country. All you need is 50% + 1 vote to change it.
If the right (or the left, though the right has been the side playing the game) wants to put multiple issues under a single ballot measure, all they need to do is to pass a Constitutional Amendment by a 50%+1 vote margin to rewrite our Constitution to allow it.
The reason why this is important is that they put up tax-cutting measures that then have unrelated stuff tacked on in a single ballot measure. They hope that the promise of lower taxes will attract enough votes to pass the ballot measure regardless of whatever else they stuff into it.
I personally think that those who write my state's Constitution were wise to specify that every initiative ballot measure must address one, and only one, issue. (it is incredibly easy to put a ballot measure up here, popular democracy at its best, the least we can ask is to be given one question at a time to vote on).
Hear hear. I've been in this position and I always have asked, too.
...
Not because I live in the state of Oregon but because it is the right thing to do (and my knowledge of right and wrong far predate the law in question).
I think the major problem with Randal was that Intel had no idea of what he was actually doing, found out, freaked out. Freaki
ng out was a reasonable response.
The fact that the freaking out resulted in a criminal charge and conviction is unfortunate. Washington County (where Intel's Oregon facilities are located) is far, far more conservative than Multnomah County (where Portland, OR is mostly located). In Multnomah County some sort of non-criminal solution would've been the result, most likely.
The Appeals Court and Supreme Court, though, don't rule on whether or not the conviction is "reasonable" but whether or not the conviction meets the test of law.
That's not unreasonable, that's how judicial review is meant to work. The law as written is unreasonable, but not unconstitutional and therefore no constitutional grounds for overturning the conviction exist. There's no doubt about the evidence, so there's no evidenciary grounds for overturning the conviction.
So
1. Randal sinned in a relatively minor way, but sinned nonetheless.
2. Intel and a hard-assed Washington County prosecutor decided to go after him in a major way (makes you wonder about past interactions, doesn't it? I would think that a single well-placed manager could've derailed this train if she'd thought Randal deserved grace).
3. The law doesn't violate the Oregon or Federal Constitution (nor your state's, most likely). Therefore the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, whatever their private view of the overreaction resulting in his conviction, have no basis for overturning it. (of course, they may actually want him to burn at the stake, but we don't know that, the Oregon Supreme Court is actually fairly liberal).
Hmmm...we had a temporary, but fairly significant, rise in memory prices what, about two years ago? Whenever I was building my personal SMP webserver, anyway. I remember being annoyed that I could've saved a few dozen dollars if I'd bought the memory a few months earlier.
Well, in my PDP-8 days 4K 12-bit words (6 KB or, more realistically, 8K 6-bit characters) cost a bit over $4,000. That was in 1969 dollars. What's that, about $12K today?
But we treat them far more harshly before putting them on probation. Which, of course, is the basic problem with the consent decree. There's nothing painful to MS in the decree (big surprise, given that they wrote most of it).
You forgot to read the part of the CIA fact book that defines the geographical boundaries of the UK. The "United Kingdom" refers specifically to England and Scotland.
Think "United States" for a minute. Japan invaded the Phillipines, for instance, in 1941 but we don't speak of the United States as having been invaded. We speak of our colony the Phillipines as having been invaded (and occupied).
The Battle of Britain was not an invasion, which by definition involves ground forces.
Northern Ireland's not been invaded by a foreign power. It's a domestic dispute. The closest foreign power is Eire, and they've stayed out of it.
The other examples you give all involve foreign possessions of Great Britain.
And of course "territorial disputes" are not necessarily invasions by foreign powers in the first place. Most of those you mention involve nothing more than diplomatic snit-fits.
Russia is both a country and (partially) part of Europe and (partially) part of Asia. Europe is a strange continent because it's not physically separated from Asia (thus the term "Eurasia"). The bits of the ex-Soviet Union which form today's Russia's straddles both continents.
...
Your either misusing or misunderstanding Encarta or you've run afoul of yet another Microsoft bug
Feral horses are a major problem in the arid American West, as well. Thanks to "Wild Horse Annie" we can't use lethal methods of control (we can't kill them, in plain English).
So we taxpayers pay to have them rounded up, the small percentage that are young enough and in good health to be attractive to potential owners are adopted out, while the majority are penned in huge yards in places like Texas. Fed and watered again, at taxpayer expense, because people so love horses that they can't bear to seem them killed even in areas where they're a unmitigated pest and negatively impact our public lands.
Of course even I'd choose a horse over a cow on the range, and admittedly some (not all) of BLM's control efforts are to maximize forage for cattle, not wildlife. The BLM's bent priorities are no excuse for being stupid about feral horses, though.
Cane toad have been introduced into Florida as well. They were introduced because they were thought to eat some sort of sugar cane pest. I forget that detail, which is a minor one after all when one considers the fact that the cane toad doesn't eat that pest anyway.
...
... go very bad. And our ability to predict the side-effects of introductions is very poor.
They eat anything else they can get their mouths around, though, and they reach a HUGE size.
Florida's freshwater ecosystem is probably one of the most screwed-up in the world. (mostly) Unintentional escapees from tropical fish farms and intentional bass and other game fish introductions have thoroughly disrupted things.
Then there's the havoc wreaked by carp in much of the West
Scotch broom. Starlings. Purple loosestrife. Kudzu.
The list goes on. Most attempts to introduce alien species fail, some result in no great harm (chukar almost exclusively eat cheatgrass, which is itself a noxious introduced weed that's vastly changed sage steppe ecosystems in the arid west, for instance; pheasants are largely dependent on agricultural), some are beneficial (cinnabar moth used to control introduced tansy ragwort).
But those that go bad
And Australia itself has a long list of endemic species in peril, really more so than Africa in terms of a percentage of endemics that are in trouble. Seems like the wrong place to try this experiment.
In my area, at least, burying boxes this way is a no-no and would surely draw the wrath of the electrical inspector. Your electrician will know if this is true in your area.
Making a map would seem to answer the obvious objection to burying boxes, but what guarantee is there that the next owner will get the map? Or that you'll not lose it? Or get hit by a truck without bothering to tell anyone where it is or what it is?
The idea is that another electrician should be able to come in and figure out the wiring including all splices without ripping out all your walls.
Along the "she's also a great person" train of thought, I've been involved with a large annual bookfair and arts festival here in Portland for about fifteen years (it grosses a couple hundred thousand bucks each year).
... it says a lot for the woman that she would do so, and it's not an isolated event.
... if you're ever in Portland, do check out Powell's city of books. It's pretty amazing. They have an entirely separate technical store that in itself carries most titles than most non-specialized bookstores. Geek heaven ...
One of the nice things about Ms LeGuin is that she readily makes herself available for readings and booksignings for such events, regardless of whether or not she's got a new book out, is working on a tour with a publisher, etc. In other words she'll do her best to accomodate non-profits in order to help out.
She's very gracious, as well, humble almost to the point of self-deprecation. The first year she read for us I ended up assigned to introduce her, and after her reading she came up to me and thanked me for my somewhat adulatory introduction.
Big-time writers don't have to go out of their way to thank volunteers at fund-raising events they're supporting
She's such a gracious, kind and dignified person that even Harlan Ellison was polite and humble to her when I saw them together on stage to read and discuss SF back in the early 1970s...
And it makes a big difference. When we can advertise that "Ursula will be there, signing and reading!" we draw huge crowds of folks, a wonderful thing. Few authors in Oregon have her popularity (ironically, National Book Award winner Robert Michael Pyle is known to relatively few folks). Another Oregon writer who is exceptionally well-known - Barry Lopez - has refused our invitation every year, so don't imagine that her generousity is universal among well-known writers.
And
Hydrogen isn't a fossil fuel.
It's a friggin' marsupial, have you ever seen a cat with a pouch?
No, RedHat is *not* doing the same thing. They're not trying to transform a major lawsuit against them into a tax writeoff and marketing opportunity (the sale of support/upgrade licenses in five years).
RedHat's not the company being sued for using their monopoly on the desktop as a lever for overcharging their customers, nor is RedHat the company that's worried that they may be fined much more heavily if they don't settle.
As someone mentioned above, shorebirds have an amazing ability to pig down and generate a lot of muscle and fat in a very short period of time (a large fraction of their body weight in 24-48 hours).
So - are they more efficient when their tank's full or empty, i.e. heavy after "refueling" or light as after a long stint in the air (they're known to migrate hundreds of miles between stops).
The reference I saw a few days ago says the answer, measured in this wind tunnel, is that they're more efficient when their tank's full (so to speak).
The studying of the physiology of migratory shorebirds may be important for conservation, too. There are generally limited areas in which shorebirds concentrate to feed on migration. While some migrate inland, in many species virtually all individuals migrate along the coast. And, of course, in most parts of the world coastal areas are under heavy developmental pressure. People like the beach, too...
Examples of such concentration areas include Delaware Bay in the eastern United States and Bowerman Basin in the western US.
And human use of natural resources also has an impact (in particular the harvesting of horsehoe crabs on the east coast, they're the source of some important chemical but I forget what exactly - we don't eat them, obviously!)
More knowledge about the physiology of these species might help us predict the impacts of certain types of development or resource consumption.
We actually know more about albatrosses than birds which flap energetically - an albatross flies similarly to a fixed-wing aircraft when conditions are right. This is one reason they're able to fly such long distances with such little nourishment. Among other things the wings can more or less lock in place, meaning that most of the energy expended by the bird goes to controlling angle and pitch etc in order to steer (tail plays a role, too, of course).
Flapping flight, though, that's whole 'nother thing and not analogous to either fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters.
Ha! Airplanes have engines! If "that" (gliding) is what airplanes do, they'd be called "gliders" and they wouldn't have "engines" (nor would you take one coast-to-coast except on days with *exceptional* thermal activity - and you'd never take one across the Pacific).
Hint - the engines are those big things hanging down from the wing, usually one or two to a side. Another hint - don't stand in front of them when they're revved up to take-off power!
What you should be doing is to suggest that the countries in which these practices occur make them illegal. And then enforce the law.
... your right to talk about, or not talk about, female circumcision isn't the problem. It's the fact that there are countries in the world that allow it, by law, that's the problem.
... tell me.
And if the practice is occurring in your country which already has such laws on the books, you should press for enforcement.
No, this doesn't mean I support the proposed side agreement. Free speech is free speech, and I'm with the ACLU (who supports free speech protections for neo-nazis as well as less odiforous groups).
Still
Just how many Europeans do you think support the practice? Nearly nada. How many European countries protect it as a religous right? Nada? I don't know
My shorter answer is that you're raising a strawman, which is unfortunate because there are *serious* reasons to worry about this.
Speaking of Warner Brothers, they've got one of my photos on two of their pages at the official Harry Potter website. You can include it in e-postcards you send.
They did not ask my permission. They did not pay for the use of my copyrighted work (this particular photo has been sold for publication several times).
Needless to say we'll be talking (they've already made an offer to another photographer in the same situation).
In all fairness, it's the web design firm's that at fault, but I find the irony quite humorous.
This "lawyer" would have to have passed the bar and most likely licensed to practice in Federal Court (since these are federal detainees we're speaking of).
... before this change went into effect, the AG's office only needed to get a federal judge to agree and they could already listen in.
You don't just walk off the street and say "I'm a lawyer" and get granted the attorney-client privilege.
And
They're fixing something that's not broken. At the risk of sounding paranoid, when an extremist like Ashcraft expands the powers of federal prosecutors to "fix" a problem that doesn't exist, I get suspicious.