perhaps you should go reply to him.
about how rules need to be laid down.
I for one view an enforced request as a rule.
Student.Eject() was perhaps inaccurately named. The function halts operation of the main thread under AllStudents.Teach() and requests that either Student.Disruptive be set to FALSE or, if that is not convenient, then the member variable Student.Present be set to FALSE. I taught 200+ student classes this way. The key is to explain what behavior is expected beforehand.
If the professor cannot be bothered to impart the information in such a way as to make his students learn it as well as possible, then perhaps he should find another job. He is, after all, a teacher being paid to teach
Actually, he's paid to bring in research grants. He has underpaid, overworked idiot TA's who barely understand the material teach the classes.
Students in college are not children to be lead about, and if you held that attitude or if you continue to hold it, you do a disservice to the students who are ostensibly under you as much as you are doing a disservice to yourself in terms of hindering your own ability to have fulfilling pedagogical interactions with these students.
I think perhaps you misunderstood what I was getting at. Admittedly, I was not entirely clear. Undergrads frequently think they're children, and as such have an irritating tendency to behave like them unless compelled to behave otherwise. This mindset can be used to a small, innocuous advantage on day one, as they are prone to heed the advice of anyone who looks and acts like an authority figure-- e.g. a TA ten years their senior standing before them in a classroom. Once informed that they were expected to act like adults and be considerate of their fellow students, there was generally no problem. I certainly did not treat them like children. I made it clear I was in charge, but I also made it clear I was not there to be a babysitter, but rather to teach them subject X.
Your claimed approach is indeed "brutal" and it is indeed "simple". It is also wrong-headed. It is ALSO a surefire way to earn not much more than contempt and resistance amongst intelligent young men and women -- perhaps you didn't have the experience of teaching any?
I would say that my first semester was a disaster, but only because I followed the advice given to us in training, which was essentially a misleadingly vague encouragement to "treat them as equals". Well, they behaved like animals. My method after that was to first explain to them exactly the kind of behavior I'd expect from my adult equals, and then treat them as such. It's amazing how reasonable students can be if you simply tell them they are expected to be reasonable. Too many of my fellow TA's tried to "treat them as equals" by pretending the bad behavior wasn't there, then resorted to shouting when it became too disruptive to continue instruction. I think they suffered from simply not knowing how to be in charge and by extension make the lecture or discussion the focus of the class. They had never really been in charge of anything before though, so it wasn't surprising. I had the advantage of having been in the Army for six years, so I knew the difference between being a good leader (detailing what constitutes good behavior beforehand), and being a bad leader (barking angry orders when the situation reaches a previously unenumerated degree of disruption).
Lastly, to not avoid the heart of the matter: you come off as some sort of 'imerator' wanna-be when you describe your teaching style, and it smacks of inadequacy as much as inexperience with dealing with undergraduates.
"Imerator"? I presume you meant "Imperator". I think perhaps you read too much into my "brutally simple" comment. It was merely a attempt to emphasize how little it takes to turn a room full of kids into a room full of adults. 90% of the job is already done, as it's already your classroom. The last 10% is just telling them how you do things in your classroom. People, especially young people, are quite receptive to behavioral boundaries. I was never dictatorial. Even the disruptive students were specifically asked to leave for the benefit the other students, never commanded. Half the time they didn't actually leave, but rather simply changed their behavior. My classes were instructive. My classes were fun. My classes had lively discussions. The only thing they didn't have was jackass behavior.
Um... no, I was (as I would have hoped was clear) referring to this little doozy:
"Undergrads have no power other than what you cede to them. You have to realize that they're still essentially children and are used to "adults" taking charge. The very fact that you're standing there at a podium in front of them and control their grades gets you 90% of the way there. The other 10% is telling them you're taking charge. It's brutally simple."
Yeah... no
"No" to what? That undergrads aren't receptive to an appropriate teacher-student relationship based on the very fact that they are students and you are their teacher? That explaining on day one that you are their teacher and they are students and the classroom is for learning (be it lecture, on topic discussion, testing, or whatever) and not for eating, sleeping, private conversations about "keggers", or other disruptive behavior? That undergrads basically still think they're children and will try to invoke the authority of their parents? That telling them that they are expected to behave like adults and take responsibility for their own behavior? What are you disagreeing with?
I'm glad you wern't one of my TAs... you wouldn't have gotten very far with that attitude.
What, the attitude that students are there to learn and that students who disrupt the learning of others are unacceptable? Well, then I'm glad I wasn't your TA too.
problem 1:
* person in the front row with 3 inch thick glasses and a laptop raises his hand.
What, are you kidding? Exceptions can obviously be made for the disabled, as they are everywhere else. If the student is too vain to wear spectacles, or too cheap to buy new ones, or too proud to admit poverty and avail themselves of charity for new glasses-- well then, they get the same treatment as everyone else.
problem 2:
* lecture is 400 people in size and don't take profs polite request seriously.
I was a TA in grad school. Anyone who says there's no way to enforce discipline in large classes is, in my experience, simply unwilling to lay down the rules and stick to them. In my classes, disturbers were reminded that university education was entirely voluntary and requested to leave that day's lecture so that others might learn. I explained this policy on day 1 and, after a couple early examples were made, never had a single further problem. A no open laptops beyond the rear 3 rows rule would be even easier to enforce, as the conditions for violation are extremely clearly defined:
if (laptop==open && rowcount-row>3) Student.Eject();
Undergrads have no power other than what you cede to them. You have to realize that they're still essentially children and are used to "adults" taking charge. The very fact that you're standing there at a podium in front of them and control their grades gets you 90% of the way there. The other 10% is telling them you're taking charge. It's brutally simple.
I don't know what you're getting at with Social Security. SS is a working program that is working. It pays not only for itself, but funds a lot of our debt. If anything, SS needs to be fixed to accomodate profligate Baby Boomers by getting interest from the rest of the Federal debt it supports.
I'm pointing at Social Security specifically as one of several federal entitlements that are essentially the same category. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other such "non-discretionary/mandatory" spending account for more than three quarters of the federal budget. The fact that the SS tax happens to take in more than the SS program itself needs right now is moot since, as you say, the excess is more than eaten by debt financing. Saying SS should be earning interest is likewise a pointless handwave because the SS system would be able to do nothing with that interest but buy more treasury bonds. Despite the name, it's not a trust fund, it's a pyramid scheme. As the bottom of the pyramid shrinks with the aging of the baby boomers, that surplus is going to vanish like a donut down a well.
Now, if you want to talk about the returns on our $1T annual military/intelligence investments, I think we have a lot of pork we can eliminate from the $45T in committed debt.
Well, first, the defense budget is $524B, and second, it is considered discretionary spending-- it's not considered part of the $45T fiscal imbalance. Did you even read the PDF you originally linked? That $45T is almost entirely the result of SS expanding beyond its ability to pay for itself to the tune of $7T, and Medicare's FI expanding to a whopping $36.6T. Telling the Air Force they can't have any more B-2 bombers isn't going to keep people from getting old. Defense spending is an easy target because the immorality of blowing up foreigners is fairly universally understood, but the fact remains that defense spending isn't the problem, and cutting the defense budget doesn't fix the problem. The defense budget, even if totally diverted to "mandatory spending", would hardly make a dent. The fact of the matter is that under current legislation there simply isn't going to be enough money to pay for the these people's medical care and subsidize their retirement.
With any of those options, and such a small number of books, why not just organize the shelves. Seperate the shelves by category and then organize each shelf by author.
The only drawback to that is then each shelf can be no smaller vertically than the largest book in that section. Libraries don't have that problem with their adjustable shelves, but a lot of home bookshelves are sized such that the topmost shelves are only really large enough for paperbacks, with the spacing increasing as you move down. Throw that in with someone like my wife, who can't stand when I put one of my O'Reilly books on the same shelf as my trashy SF collection in stadard trade paperback size, and the best you can do is a "size first, then author (or maybe subject)" system.
My final suggestion is to put a barcode on each shelf. You could put one on the bookshelf too, but that's redundant. Scan the shelf, then scan all the books on the shelf.
Probably it'd be easier to simply use sequential numbers, treating each bookcase as a column, each shelf as a row, and hand entering them as a single integer, [R]RC. I've yet to see a home bookcase that has more than 10 shelves, so he could safely have the last digit be the shelf number, and the leading digits be the bookcase number. This has the advantage of making the Case-Shelf combined integer something the software could spit out which he could immediately use, probably simply by starting at the leftmost bookcase in the room and counting rightwards...
I write high-definition video editing software, and I'll be running Vista Ultimate. I would have expected you to have known this from here, here, or here.
I did know that. I was challenging the original poster's possible insinuation that there will be no Volume License Key activated version with all the DRM stuff.
The government has "promised to pay" $45TRILLION more than it can reasonably expect to receive, given what it has "promised to do". Those promises are laws.
Yeah, this is all what they call "uncontrollable spending". But that is in itself a lie. The law can be changed, and indeed it must be changed.
With our entire society based on those payments.
Entire? That's stretching things a bit. "A major portion of" maybe.
Sure, we can just rip off those SS cardholders - tell them they paid into the program their whole lives, and now we're stealing their money so they can die in poverty
Their money was "stolen" the day they paid it into the pyramid scheme in the first place. The con job started a long time ago when people were allowed to believe that SS was some sort of retirement plan, rather than a safety net for truly desperate folks like the elderly who'd lost their retirement savings in the great depression.
while Bush's cronies wallow in $BILLIONS of pork
"While"? You say that as if it's something other than Nero's fiddling. Pork is so inconsequential compared to the scam that is SS. Hardly even relevant.
We can break the law, too.
Huh? No laws need be broken, only empty promises. "We", as in "congress" can change the law.
Robbing old people and destroying America isn't just "fairly" dire. It's a nightmare we're just starting to sink into. Which will last the rest of our lives. Your tactic of minimizing it with a few flip words doesn't get you out of it.
I'm not minimizing it. I'm just essentially stating the obvious, without resorting to scary impossible fictions like "$45T committed debt". I'm saying "all those rotten teeth will have to come out". At some point people will be forced to face the cold hard truth that the government really is a pack of liars who've built a house of cards. It's not going to be pretty, and it's not going to be fun, but it's also not going to result in a $45T debt with all of us laboring in chinese owned factories paying 95% taxes just to keep Social Security afloat. SS will die. The old and infirm who, either through bad luck or lack of personal responsibility, depend on SS will be in a bind. I tend to be an optimist and believe people won't let their fellow man starve, but who knows? It's gotta happen. There's no soft landing available.
"Committed debt" is a prediction based on current policy, essentially all the money the government has promised to pay. It's not actual debt. True, it's a fairly dire situation that will obviously result in major upheaval, but there aren't $44.5 trillion worth of bonds out there-- there's just a few hundred million people with social security cards and unrealistic expectations.
If they install the business edition, they won't be able to play high-definition video in MS's proprietary DRM format.
Unlike with XP, the home version isn't just the business version with some newtorking functions taken out. It has some extra (DRM-crippled) multimedia stuff that businesses don't get.
Err...so what version do people in the high-definition video business buy?
That.... is the funniest thing I have read all day.
(You are joking, right?)
Yeah, it's kinda absurd, but seriously, that's how intelligence people have to think. Obviously the Quaker isn't going to end up at the top of the list when it comes to dedicating their finite amount of intercept capacity-- a jordanian on a student visa who doesn't attend classes will obviously come first-- but the more contact you have with folks farther up the list, the farther up the list you go. It's a fairly blind system because nobody wants to be the guy fingered for not watching some guy because "he claimed to be a Quaker", then having him turn out to be a nut with a sack of anthrax spores. They simply have no means available of making the distinction beyond their intelligence gathering apparatus. It's a very strange culture, the "intelligence community". I was an intelligence analyst both in the US Army and later as a civilian. I quit because I could no longer stomach the mindset. Basically, I kinda turned into a peacenik myself.
"No, "double jeopardy" is when one is subjected to a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal or conviction (which is generally unconstitutional)."
Umm no. You can appeal your conviction in the US system, but the prosecution can not appeal an aquittal. So you can have a "second prosecution" after conviction.
Umm yes. A successful appeal results in the first ruling (or some portion thereof) being overturned. The first trial is essentially declared invalid. The "second prosecution" is a retrial-- a "do-over", if you will. It's really quite simple: if there stands an officially recognized verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty, you cannot be tried again for that same crime.
I hope a large part of Luke's Youth is omitted as I cannot think of one young child actor I have liked.
Indeed. Not only that, but the true story arc of the Luke character can't really even begin until Ep4. Too much of the character's development in ANH starts with the premise of Luke as an inexperienced farmboy. To have him do anything beyond shooting womp rats with his T-16 or wasting time at Tashi Station with his friends would bugger the existing canon. Not that I'd put it past Lucas to do just that...
Actually, the fall of American civilisation will happen because of people who fail to realise that there's more to America than the USA.
Actually it will fall because of pointless bickering and pedantic nit picking over the literal meaning of the word "america", and the colloquial meaning. Literally, yes, the word means the whole of north and south america. despite that, it has come to be used to refer to the United States of America specifically, and based on the recognition that, but for the isthmus of panama, there are two major, distinct land masses, references to the continental mass are generally a compounding: "the americas", or "north and south america". Usage defines meaning. Arguing otherwise is futile, as even those compiling the OED were eventually forced to admit.
Parenthetically, double jeopardy only applies when a mistrial is declared at which point the prosecution may or may not try to try again.
No, "double jeopardy" is when one is subjected to a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal or conviction (which is generally unconstitutional). A mistrial ends the trial before an acquittal or conviction, so a retrial after a mistrial is not double jeopardy, it's just a retrial.
If the term is trademarked, wouldn't "superhero" be defined as a type of fictional character created in Marvel and DC comic books?
That's the sticky bit about trademarks though. If someone can show that you've let your trademark be used as a generic term and only decided to enforce it when a direct competitor decided to use it, then you will generally lose the trademark. Trademarks can't be selectively defended. If Johnson & Johnson were to allow medical supply catalogs, trade journals, and the like to refer to all adhesive bandages as "bandaids", but sent C&D letters to Curad, 3M, et al when they labelled their products as "bandaids", they'd probably lose in court
The thing to remember about trademarks is that they are unique to market segments. The use of the "superhero" trademark should be limited to fictional characters. Legally, it could be used as the name of a sandwich or the name of a vacuum cleaner since they are in different market segments.
True, but if it can be shown that Marvel and DC have chronically allowed "superhero" to be used in reference to costumed beings with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and only whipped out the trademark when rival comic book companies tried to use the term, that's a clear loser.
But lately, dude, these guys spy on Quakers. I am beyond being surprised by this sort of thing anymore.
True, but Quakers are hardly an example of "the common man" and his life of quiet desperation. Quakers actively oppose violence of any sort, from fistfights up to international warfare. While surely no Quaker would ever knowingly provide aid or support to "terrorists", they're certainly more likely to end up mixed up with some who might than (say) my elderly grandmother who only watches Matlock and knits all day. It's hardly surprising that a Quaker would end up being watched, if for no other reason than the fact that "the opposition" of the government runs the gamut from good old fashioned peaceniks all the way to rabid, "shed the infidel's blood" jihadis, and they generally end up mixing due to vaguely common interest.
When they claimed trademark on the term "superheroes" they sure as heck did say something about "concepts". Unlike "Superman", or "Batman", or "Spiderman", the term "superhero" doesn't refer to anything in particular, but rather a generic set of things. Trademark is not like a patent, where the holder can use it to stake out a market segment and keep competitors out. THe purpose of trademarks is entirely for consumer protection, to prevent confusion in the marketplace. The fact that the term "superhero" exists in the common vernacular as a generic concept that nobody (other than a handful of jackass lawyers and executives at DC & Marvel) associates with any particular company's or companies' products, combined with the fact that their defense of said trademark over the last 40 years has been practically nil, obviously raises huge questions as to the validity of the trademark.
Mxyzptlk.
Sorry, sorry, sorry... [runs away and hides]
No, that's OK. I was hoping for a correction. This is one of the problems with google. If you don't have any idea how to spell a commonly misspelled name that's just a series of nonsense characters, it's hard to know what to type into google to find the answer. Google suggested that spelling, so I knew it was at least close enough to pass the desired information, as a lot of other people misspelled it that way too. I knew it started with M and ended with K, and had Y, X, P, and L somewhere in it, but was lost after that.
When the NSA goes datamining, they divide the intercepted traffic into two piles: clear and encrypted. Both piles get processed. Except yours has a red flag next to it.
I'm curious why you think "mine" was even intercepted. Even if the NSA had the capacity, why would they bother? As self-important as the Echelon-believing privacy paranoids are, the truth is that most of us are completely and obviously far beneath the interest of the NSA. We're nothing. We're nobody. It's just like the classic paranoid delusion that the government is "reading your thoughts". The obvious counter to that is "why would the government care what you think?" They're not stupid. They're not going to waste limited intercept and decryption capacity to get at someone's diaper-fetish correspondence.
The Matrix is the exception, but the plot in the Matrix was irrelevant compared to the effect of those incredibly novel visuals. The sequels blew because the novelty wore off enough that we could see the plot creak.
Well, I wouldn't say the plot creaked too badly in the first movie. It was a pretty much stock retelling of story number 259-A from the Film Writer's Plot Catalog*, "Rise of a Messiah from Obscurity to Ascendent Triumph", with a shitload of novel eyecandy to make it interesting. The trouble they had in the sequels was partly, just as you say, the non-novelty of the effects; but additionally they ran into the "Superman problem"-- i.e. how do you create a compelling adversary for the unstoppable, super-being? Well, you either do something interesting, like create super-equals (Superman II), or you do something utterly idiotic, like throw in magic extra dimensional creatures (Myxlplik), cast Richard Pryor as a super-genius computer nerd who builds an unstoppable computer (Superman III), or you just throw special effects at the hero till he gets (or we get) too bored or tired to let the fight go on (Reloaded, and the other Matrix one).
* no such catalog exists, to my knowledge, but it sure seems like it should.
Slashdot Mirror
Student.Eject() was perhaps inaccurately named. The function halts operation of the main thread under AllStudents.Teach() and requests that either Student.Disruptive be set to FALSE or, if that is not convenient, then the member variable Student.Present be set to FALSE. I taught 200+ student classes this way. The key is to explain what behavior is expected beforehand.
Actually, he's paid to bring in research grants. He has underpaid, overworked idiot TA's who barely understand the material teach the classes.
signed, a former underpaid, overworked idiot TA
Fixed that for ya'. ;)
I think perhaps you misunderstood what I was getting at. Admittedly, I was not entirely clear. Undergrads frequently think they're children, and as such have an irritating tendency to behave like them unless compelled to behave otherwise. This mindset can be used to a small, innocuous advantage on day one, as they are prone to heed the advice of anyone who looks and acts like an authority figure-- e.g. a TA ten years their senior standing before them in a classroom. Once informed that they were expected to act like adults and be considerate of their fellow students, there was generally no problem. I certainly did not treat them like children. I made it clear I was in charge, but I also made it clear I was not there to be a babysitter, but rather to teach them subject X.
Your claimed approach is indeed "brutal" and it is indeed "simple". It is also wrong-headed. It is ALSO a surefire way to earn not much more than contempt and resistance amongst intelligent young men and women -- perhaps you didn't have the experience of teaching any?
I would say that my first semester was a disaster, but only because I followed the advice given to us in training, which was essentially a misleadingly vague encouragement to "treat them as equals". Well, they behaved like animals. My method after that was to first explain to them exactly the kind of behavior I'd expect from my adult equals, and then treat them as such. It's amazing how reasonable students can be if you simply tell them they are expected to be reasonable. Too many of my fellow TA's tried to "treat them as equals" by pretending the bad behavior wasn't there, then resorted to shouting when it became too disruptive to continue instruction. I think they suffered from simply not knowing how to be in charge and by extension make the lecture or discussion the focus of the class. They had never really been in charge of anything before though, so it wasn't surprising. I had the advantage of having been in the Army for six years, so I knew the difference between being a good leader (detailing what constitutes good behavior beforehand), and being a bad leader (barking angry orders when the situation reaches a previously unenumerated degree of disruption).
Lastly, to not avoid the heart of the matter: you come off as some sort of 'imerator' wanna-be when you describe your teaching style, and it smacks of inadequacy as much as inexperience with dealing with undergraduates.
"Imerator"? I presume you meant "Imperator". I think perhaps you read too much into my "brutally simple" comment. It was merely a attempt to emphasize how little it takes to turn a room full of kids into a room full of adults. 90% of the job is already done, as it's already your classroom. The last 10% is just telling them how you do things in your classroom. People, especially young people, are quite receptive to behavioral boundaries. I was never dictatorial. Even the disruptive students were specifically asked to leave for the benefit the other students, never commanded. Half the time they didn't actually leave, but rather simply changed their behavior. My classes were instructive. My classes were fun. My classes had lively discussions. The only thing they didn't have was jackass behavior.
"No" to what? That undergrads aren't receptive to an appropriate teacher-student relationship based on the very fact that they are students and you are their teacher? That explaining on day one that you are their teacher and they are students and the classroom is for learning (be it lecture, on topic discussion, testing, or whatever) and not for eating, sleeping, private conversations about "keggers", or other disruptive behavior? That undergrads basically still think they're children and will try to invoke the authority of their parents? That telling them that they are expected to behave like adults and take responsibility for their own behavior? What are you disagreeing with?
What, the attitude that students are there to learn and that students who disrupt the learning of others are unacceptable? Well, then I'm glad I wasn't your TA too.
What, are you kidding? Exceptions can obviously be made for the disabled, as they are everywhere else. If the student is too vain to wear spectacles, or too cheap to buy new ones, or too proud to admit poverty and avail themselves of charity for new glasses-- well then, they get the same treatment as everyone else.
problem 2: * lecture is 400 people in size and don't take profs polite request seriously.
I was a TA in grad school. Anyone who says there's no way to enforce discipline in large classes is, in my experience, simply unwilling to lay down the rules and stick to them. In my classes, disturbers were reminded that university education was entirely voluntary and requested to leave that day's lecture so that others might learn. I explained this policy on day 1 and, after a couple early examples were made, never had a single further problem. A no open laptops beyond the rear 3 rows rule would be even easier to enforce, as the conditions for violation are extremely clearly defined:
Undergrads have no power other than what you cede to them. You have to realize that they're still essentially children and are used to "adults" taking charge. The very fact that you're standing there at a podium in front of them and control their grades gets you 90% of the way there. The other 10% is telling them you're taking charge. It's brutally simple.
I'm pointing at Social Security specifically as one of several federal entitlements that are essentially the same category. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other such "non-discretionary/mandatory" spending account for more than three quarters of the federal budget. The fact that the SS tax happens to take in more than the SS program itself needs right now is moot since, as you say, the excess is more than eaten by debt financing. Saying SS should be earning interest is likewise a pointless handwave because the SS system would be able to do nothing with that interest but buy more treasury bonds. Despite the name, it's not a trust fund, it's a pyramid scheme. As the bottom of the pyramid shrinks with the aging of the baby boomers, that surplus is going to vanish like a donut down a well.
Now, if you want to talk about the returns on our $1T annual military/intelligence investments, I think we have a lot of pork we can eliminate from the $45T in committed debt.
Well, first, the defense budget is $524B, and second, it is considered discretionary spending-- it's not considered part of the $45T fiscal imbalance. Did you even read the PDF you originally linked? That $45T is almost entirely the result of SS expanding beyond its ability to pay for itself to the tune of $7T, and Medicare's FI expanding to a whopping $36.6T. Telling the Air Force they can't have any more B-2 bombers isn't going to keep people from getting old. Defense spending is an easy target because the immorality of blowing up foreigners is fairly universally understood, but the fact remains that defense spending isn't the problem, and cutting the defense budget doesn't fix the problem. The defense budget, even if totally diverted to "mandatory spending", would hardly make a dent. The fact of the matter is that under current legislation there simply isn't going to be enough money to pay for the these people's medical care and subsidize their retirement.
The only drawback to that is then each shelf can be no smaller vertically than the largest book in that section. Libraries don't have that problem with their adjustable shelves, but a lot of home bookshelves are sized such that the topmost shelves are only really large enough for paperbacks, with the spacing increasing as you move down. Throw that in with someone like my wife, who can't stand when I put one of my O'Reilly books on the same shelf as my trashy SF collection in stadard trade paperback size, and the best you can do is a "size first, then author (or maybe subject)" system.
Probably it'd be easier to simply use sequential numbers, treating each bookcase as a column, each shelf as a row, and hand entering them as a single integer, [R]RC. I've yet to see a home bookcase that has more than 10 shelves, so he could safely have the last digit be the shelf number, and the leading digits be the bookcase number. This has the advantage of making the Case-Shelf combined integer something the software could spit out which he could immediately use, probably simply by starting at the leftmost bookcase in the room and counting rightwards...
I did know that. I was challenging the original poster's possible insinuation that there will be no Volume License Key activated version with all the DRM stuff.
Yeah, this is all what they call "uncontrollable spending". But that is in itself a lie. The law can be changed, and indeed it must be changed.
With our entire society based on those payments.
Entire? That's stretching things a bit. "A major portion of" maybe.
Sure, we can just rip off those SS cardholders - tell them they paid into the program their whole lives, and now we're stealing their money so they can die in poverty
Their money was "stolen" the day they paid it into the pyramid scheme in the first place. The con job started a long time ago when people were allowed to believe that SS was some sort of retirement plan, rather than a safety net for truly desperate folks like the elderly who'd lost their retirement savings in the great depression.
while Bush's cronies wallow in $BILLIONS of pork
"While"? You say that as if it's something other than Nero's fiddling. Pork is so inconsequential compared to the scam that is SS. Hardly even relevant.
We can break the law, too.
Huh? No laws need be broken, only empty promises. "We", as in "congress" can change the law.
Robbing old people and destroying America isn't just "fairly" dire. It's a nightmare we're just starting to sink into. Which will last the rest of our lives. Your tactic of minimizing it with a few flip words doesn't get you out of it.
I'm not minimizing it. I'm just essentially stating the obvious, without resorting to scary impossible fictions like "$45T committed debt". I'm saying "all those rotten teeth will have to come out". At some point people will be forced to face the cold hard truth that the government really is a pack of liars who've built a house of cards. It's not going to be pretty, and it's not going to be fun, but it's also not going to result in a $45T debt with all of us laboring in chinese owned factories paying 95% taxes just to keep Social Security afloat. SS will die. The old and infirm who, either through bad luck or lack of personal responsibility, depend on SS will be in a bind. I tend to be an optimist and believe people won't let their fellow man starve, but who knows? It's gotta happen. There's no soft landing available.
"Committed debt" is a prediction based on current policy, essentially all the money the government has promised to pay. It's not actual debt. True, it's a fairly dire situation that will obviously result in major upheaval, but there aren't $44.5 trillion worth of bonds out there-- there's just a few hundred million people with social security cards and unrealistic expectations.
Err...so what version do people in the high-definition video business buy?
Yeah, it's kinda absurd, but seriously, that's how intelligence people have to think. Obviously the Quaker isn't going to end up at the top of the list when it comes to dedicating their finite amount of intercept capacity-- a jordanian on a student visa who doesn't attend classes will obviously come first-- but the more contact you have with folks farther up the list, the farther up the list you go. It's a fairly blind system because nobody wants to be the guy fingered for not watching some guy because "he claimed to be a Quaker", then having him turn out to be a nut with a sack of anthrax spores. They simply have no means available of making the distinction beyond their intelligence gathering apparatus. It's a very strange culture, the "intelligence community". I was an intelligence analyst both in the US Army and later as a civilian. I quit because I could no longer stomach the mindset. Basically, I kinda turned into a peacenik myself.
Umm no. You can appeal your conviction in the US system, but the prosecution can not appeal an aquittal. So you can have a "second prosecution" after conviction.
Umm yes. A successful appeal results in the first ruling (or some portion thereof) being overturned. The first trial is essentially declared invalid. The "second prosecution" is a retrial-- a "do-over", if you will. It's really quite simple: if there stands an officially recognized verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty, you cannot be tried again for that same crime.
Indeed. Not only that, but the true story arc of the Luke character can't really even begin until Ep4. Too much of the character's development in ANH starts with the premise of Luke as an inexperienced farmboy. To have him do anything beyond shooting womp rats with his T-16 or wasting time at Tashi Station with his friends would bugger the existing canon. Not that I'd put it past Lucas to do just that...
Actually it will fall because of pointless bickering and pedantic nit picking over the literal meaning of the word "america", and the colloquial meaning. Literally, yes, the word means the whole of north and south america. despite that, it has come to be used to refer to the United States of America specifically, and based on the recognition that, but for the isthmus of panama, there are two major, distinct land masses, references to the continental mass are generally a compounding: "the americas", or "north and south america". Usage defines meaning. Arguing otherwise is futile, as even those compiling the OED were eventually forced to admit.
No, "double jeopardy" is when one is subjected to a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal or conviction (which is generally unconstitutional). A mistrial ends the trial before an acquittal or conviction, so a retrial after a mistrial is not double jeopardy, it's just a retrial.
That's the sticky bit about trademarks though. If someone can show that you've let your trademark be used as a generic term and only decided to enforce it when a direct competitor decided to use it, then you will generally lose the trademark. Trademarks can't be selectively defended. If Johnson & Johnson were to allow medical supply catalogs, trade journals, and the like to refer to all adhesive bandages as "bandaids", but sent C&D letters to Curad, 3M, et al when they labelled their products as "bandaids", they'd probably lose in court
The thing to remember about trademarks is that they are unique to market segments. The use of the "superhero" trademark should be limited to fictional characters. Legally, it could be used as the name of a sandwich or the name of a vacuum cleaner since they are in different market segments.
True, but if it can be shown that Marvel and DC have chronically allowed "superhero" to be used in reference to costumed beings with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and only whipped out the trademark when rival comic book companies tried to use the term, that's a clear loser.
True, but Quakers are hardly an example of "the common man" and his life of quiet desperation. Quakers actively oppose violence of any sort, from fistfights up to international warfare. While surely no Quaker would ever knowingly provide aid or support to "terrorists", they're certainly more likely to end up mixed up with some who might than (say) my elderly grandmother who only watches Matlock and knits all day. It's hardly surprising that a Quaker would end up being watched, if for no other reason than the fact that "the opposition" of the government runs the gamut from good old fashioned peaceniks all the way to rabid, "shed the infidel's blood" jihadis, and they generally end up mixing due to vaguely common interest.
Nobody said anything about 'concepts'.
When they claimed trademark on the term "superheroes" they sure as heck did say something about "concepts". Unlike "Superman", or "Batman", or "Spiderman", the term "superhero" doesn't refer to anything in particular, but rather a generic set of things. Trademark is not like a patent, where the holder can use it to stake out a market segment and keep competitors out. THe purpose of trademarks is entirely for consumer protection, to prevent confusion in the marketplace. The fact that the term "superhero" exists in the common vernacular as a generic concept that nobody (other than a handful of jackass lawyers and executives at DC & Marvel) associates with any particular company's or companies' products, combined with the fact that their defense of said trademark over the last 40 years has been practically nil, obviously raises huge questions as to the validity of the trademark.
Mxyzptlk. Sorry, sorry, sorry ... [runs away and hides]
No, that's OK. I was hoping for a correction. This is one of the problems with google. If you don't have any idea how to spell a commonly misspelled name that's just a series of nonsense characters, it's hard to know what to type into google to find the answer. Google suggested that spelling, so I knew it was at least close enough to pass the desired information, as a lot of other people misspelled it that way too. I knew it started with M and ended with K, and had Y, X, P, and L somewhere in it, but was lost after that.
I'm curious why you think "mine" was even intercepted. Even if the NSA had the capacity, why would they bother? As self-important as the Echelon-believing privacy paranoids are, the truth is that most of us are completely and obviously far beneath the interest of the NSA. We're nothing. We're nobody. It's just like the classic paranoid delusion that the government is "reading your thoughts". The obvious counter to that is "why would the government care what you think?" They're not stupid. They're not going to waste limited intercept and decryption capacity to get at someone's diaper-fetish correspondence.
Well, I wouldn't say the plot creaked too badly in the first movie. It was a pretty much stock retelling of story number 259-A from the Film Writer's Plot Catalog*, "Rise of a Messiah from Obscurity to Ascendent Triumph", with a shitload of novel eyecandy to make it interesting. The trouble they had in the sequels was partly, just as you say, the non-novelty of the effects; but additionally they ran into the "Superman problem"-- i.e. how do you create a compelling adversary for the unstoppable, super-being? Well, you either do something interesting, like create super-equals (Superman II), or you do something utterly idiotic, like throw in magic extra dimensional creatures (Myxlplik), cast Richard Pryor as a super-genius computer nerd who builds an unstoppable computer (Superman III), or you just throw special effects at the hero till he gets (or we get) too bored or tired to let the fight go on (Reloaded, and the other Matrix one).
* no such catalog exists, to my knowledge, but it sure seems like it should.