I think we need to liberate more than just New Hampshire. The United States has become too damn big for any new party to gain power on a national level. When the Republican Party (the last one to pull it off) was created, the U.S. was a much smaller country, not just geographically but also 1/10 the population. Any party that might get a foothold in New England is never gonna fly in the South, and any small party that appeals to Californians won't do well in the Midwest. That's why I like the idea of splitting the United States into five smaller nations, along geopolitical lines. Sure, it's a pipe dream too, but America needs more than just a third party; it needs fourth and fifth parties. And to get those you need an electorate of a size where the support of a few tens of thousands of voters will actually give a party some clout. Democracy simply doesn't scale well to populations of a quarter billion and up.
A few months ago I got the chance to say goodbye to a job (and particularly a boss) I hated. The guy had treated me like a waste of his time since I started six months before, and was fond of lecturing his staff about "customer service" even though he had the most anti-customer attitude I've ever seen in a manager. He was hypocrisy incarnate.
But when I told him I'd received another job offer, I gave him a chance to talk me out of it. (He didn't even try.) I said I'd stick around for the full two weeks. I cleaned my office. I wrote up notes for my co-workers. I told the ones I liked that I'd miss them. And on my last day, I was the last person to leave the building, and conscientiously set the alarm on my way out. (Which may give you a sense of just how badly they missed the point with security.) If I ever need to use this guy as a reference, he won't have anything he can say against me (at least not without risking litigation).
Oh, and did I mention that I explained to the HR folks in my exit interview all the reasons I was so glad to be out of this guy's department, and that I was taking a pay cut and reduced benefits just to do so?
Even so, I felt good knowing that I hadn't caused any pain to the innocent ones I was leaving behind. And maybe my comments to HR won't do any good, but at least I went on the record.
At the very least, putting communication in written form forces people to learn to communicate clearly and concisely.
It may encourage that, but it clearly doesn't force it. There's still plenty of unclear, rambling net.poetry that people are presenting as if it were prose.
That would be why I said "almost". Of course there are differences. The PowerMac has more expansion potential. The iMac takes less room. The PowerMac has a place to stack a Zip drive on top. The iMac has a display that tilts better than the 17" Studio LCD.
But it has the same number of processors, of the same type, running at the same speed. It has the same size hard drive, and the same class of optical drive. It comes with the same amount of RAM. It has roughly the same size display (17" widescreen, vs. 17" traditional). Most of the major specs match up. And if you unbox one of these new iMacs and set it up next to my 9-month-old PowerMac, most of the things one can do, the other will do about as well. The point being that by the standards of late 2003, this is a rather powerful machine. (And affordable.) Which oughta be good enough for most people.
There's a saying in open-source coding that with enough eyes all bugs are visible. The same is true of open-source writing. I think Wikipedia's main problem in terms of authoritativeness is that not enough people are reviewing it yet. I'd actually go further than that and assert that not enough people are writing for it, either. I just started seriously digging into and contributing to Wikipedia in the last few months (so, yes, I've been part of the problem), and I'm amazed at the number of topics that are still missing or just substubs. Not only esoteric humanities subjects that you'd expect to be lagging a bit, but even geek stuff that 1 thousand basement-dwellers must know better than I do. When someone like me can walk in the front door and find no information at all - correct or not - about topics that are common knowledge, it's premature to argue about its authoritativeness.
I must have seen a different movie from the one you saw. Sure, it was over the top, but it did so without any levity or humor. I figured he had to be kidding, but that didn't show up on the screen. It was so-bad-it's-good material done with such intensity and gravity that you wouldn't dare laugh at it. (It was a bit like The Passion in that respect.) It was like someone trying to tell a joke ("A spaghetti western, a kung fu movie, a blaxploitation flick, and a duck walk into a bar...") but delivering it like a sermon. This wasn't parody, it even went beyond homage. It was more like adoration.
I'd like to nominate Kill Bill as the worst Recent Movie That Was Supposed To Be Good. Sure, Tarantino did an expert job of capturing the essense of the source material he was paying homage to, but when you distill bad movies, you end up with... a bad movie. At least the originals came by their weaknesses honestly and could be forgiven them, but Tarantino added a layer of pretentiousness to it that killed it for me.
"I Am Not A Lawyer But I Play One On The Internet"
I don't mind the "I anal" part (I'm both gay and a perfectionist), but I have to admit I'm uncomfortable with the implications of "bi pooti"... I don't swing that way. {smile}
The legal profession operates according to the structure of our adversarial judicial system, in which one side tries to get his client's way, the other side tries to get her client's way, and a (hopefully) neutral party decides who deserves to win. Yes, it's ugly, and it's a sad commentary on our society that we have to treat everything as a fight between adversaries. But it's the best we've come up with so far. Got any better ideas for a judicial system? If not, I'd have to say that your post is nothing more than name-calling, which is how 6-year-olds behave. Congratulations: you're more more mature than the legal profession. {wry grin}
Would help to point out that the full name of the agency is the United States Patent and Trademark Office? If you're only doing business locally, you go to the state goverment to register. But if you intend to use a mark nationally, you need to go to the feds.
A) Google is already using it in interstate commerce. The fact that they're not charging money for it, and they're calling it a "beta" does not mean it isn't commercial. In the context of a company going public, it's inherently commercial.
B) One can file an "intent to use" registration before actually going public with the name. That's specifically to allow businesses to secure a brand name with trademark protection before they announce it to the whole world.
Trademarks are not like domain registrations, with the first filer automatically getting it. Any new trademark registration is first published for opposition, to give others with competing claims to the mark an opportunity to challenge that registration. If Google had been first to file and someone else was already using it (as has been alleged), they'd get the same chance. That's part of this USPTO bureaucracy that people are moaning about... and it's a part that serves a useful purpose.
(IANALBIPOOTI.) Unless the other parties can demonstrate that they really did have an intent to use to "Gmail" as a trademark before they heard of Google's service and the lack of registration, the fact that Google had already begun to do so (albeit in beta form) gives them a pretty good case to assert. Since they'll also have the benefit of good legal counsel, I'm not too worried about their prospects... it may just take some time.
Bad analogy. A totaled Ferarri is worth a fortune for the spare parts alone.
So is an old Mac.
OK, maybe not "a fortune" (they were never worth that much when new), but a used Mac - even a broken one - can have surprising value on the second-hand market. "Obsolete" Mac hardware retains pretty good value, despite the fact that all the beige units prior to the original iMac have been effectively written off by Apple's OS division. Of course the fact that everything since the original iMac is still well supported by the OS helps keep the price of old G3 systems - and the parts to keep them running - fairly high.
Naw man, i can see that. West Side is a pair of star-crossed lovers and and obvious riff on R&J. King Arthur's just another savior who was betrayed and killed, and will come back again, like JC. And half of Khan's good lines from ST:TWOK were lifted from Melville. ("I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up." Sound familiar?)
This song is your song, this song is my song
From the fields of Texas, to the streets of Boston
From the right-wing nut jobs, to the liberal sissies
This song was made for you and me.
At least you had the willingness to consider what others were telling you, the intelligence to understand it, and the maturity to admit your mistake. You'll go a lot farther in life than the kid who just keeps laughing and saying "nuh-uh", and then stomps away in defiant ignorance when a critical mass of people have pointed out to him that he's in error.
Their attempts at identifying geographic differences aren't all that successful. For example, they've got a data point on one of their maps for "Detroit/Lansing/Grand Rapids"... as if this were one metropolitan area, rather than a 3-hour drive from one side of the state to the other, most of which will be through farmland. About the only thing Detroit and G.R. have in common economically is that we pay the same sales tax.
I don't know how in the name of Beelzebub they come up with these numbers, but they're so alien to the world I live in that they're meaningless. I don't know anyone in this area (the midwest) whose salary is even 2/3 of the "average" InfoWorld always reports for their job category. I remember they used to publish min/max values as well, and I knew qualified people who didn't even break the "minimum". If I (by my own honest reckoning, a simply "average" LAN/Network Manager) made the $53K they say "I" am making, then my spouse could just quit working, and I could look forward to a clean house and home-cooked dinner every night. (Except he can't cook.)
My guess is that the sheer quantity of data they get from LA/NYC/etc swamps the smaller samples they take from the flyover regions in the totals, so the results are really only relevant for those high-priced markets.
...and I'll finally be able to have consensual sex with that hot 486 I met at the local Radio Shack. Watch for the barrage of tech pr0n featuring 486's when they finally turn 18 in a few years.
I doubt you'd get very far with a "right to be in porn" case in the courts. Not when weighed in opposition to the "public morals" question. (Not my opinion, just my analysis.)
Most porn (at least magazines and videos sold in the US; non-US web sites are another matter) includes a statement on the cover that "all actors at least 18 years of age" specifically to cover their asses on this point. I've also seen additional disclaimers on stuff that had the word "boy" or "girl" in the title, or which featured teenagers with (for example) pigtails and lollipops.
I agree that "what it looks like" should be irrelevant. The only question should be whether actual minors are being taking unfair advantage of. Mr. & Mrs. Christian & Prudence America seem to disagree.
Threepio's problems stem mostly from his envy and resentment of Luke and Leia. Despite being his "father's" eldest surviving child, and even with Anakin's increasing mechanization (giving them more in common), Vader never paid any attention to him. It was all "You are part of the Rebel Alliance, Princess," and "Luke, you can destroy the Emperor." In Episode VII, he'll probably murder them both in their sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we need to liberate more than just New Hampshire. The United States has become too damn big for any new party to gain power on a national level. When the Republican Party (the last one to pull it off) was created, the U.S. was a much smaller country, not just geographically but also 1/10 the population. Any party that might get a foothold in New England is never gonna fly in the South, and any small party that appeals to Californians won't do well in the Midwest. That's why I like the idea of splitting the United States into five smaller nations, along geopolitical lines. Sure, it's a pipe dream too, but America needs more than just a third party; it needs fourth and fifth parties. And to get those you need an electorate of a size where the support of a few tens of thousands of voters will actually give a party some clout. Democracy simply doesn't scale well to populations of a quarter billion and up.
But when I told him I'd received another job offer, I gave him a chance to talk me out of it. (He didn't even try.) I said I'd stick around for the full two weeks. I cleaned my office. I wrote up notes for my co-workers. I told the ones I liked that I'd miss them. And on my last day, I was the last person to leave the building, and conscientiously set the alarm on my way out. (Which may give you a sense of just how badly they missed the point with security.) If I ever need to use this guy as a reference, he won't have anything he can say against me (at least not without risking litigation).
Oh, and did I mention that I explained to the HR folks in my exit interview all the reasons I was so glad to be out of this guy's department, and that I was taking a pay cut and reduced benefits just to do so?
Even so, I felt good knowing that I hadn't caused any pain to the innocent ones I was leaving behind. And maybe my comments to HR won't do any good, but at least I went on the record.
It may encourage that, but it clearly doesn't force it. There's still plenty of unclear, rambling net.poetry that people are presenting as if it were prose.
But it has the same number of processors, of the same type, running at the same speed. It has the same size hard drive, and the same class of optical drive. It comes with the same amount of RAM. It has roughly the same size display (17" widescreen, vs. 17" traditional). Most of the major specs match up. And if you unbox one of these new iMacs and set it up next to my 9-month-old PowerMac, most of the things one can do, the other will do about as well. The point being that by the standards of late 2003, this is a rather powerful machine. (And affordable.) Which oughta be good enough for most people.
The low-end iMac G5 is - almost spec for spec - last year's low-end PowerMac G5. I should know: I have one (and paid nearly $1000 more for it).
There's a saying in open-source coding that with enough eyes all bugs are visible. The same is true of open-source writing. I think Wikipedia's main problem in terms of authoritativeness is that not enough people are reviewing it yet. I'd actually go further than that and assert that not enough people are writing for it, either. I just started seriously digging into and contributing to Wikipedia in the last few months (so, yes, I've been part of the problem), and I'm amazed at the number of topics that are still missing or just substubs. Not only esoteric humanities subjects that you'd expect to be lagging a bit, but even geek stuff that 1 thousand basement-dwellers must know better than I do. When someone like me can walk in the front door and find no information at all - correct or not - about topics that are common knowledge, it's premature to argue about its authoritativeness.
I must have seen a different movie from the one you saw. Sure, it was over the top, but it did so without any levity or humor. I figured he had to be kidding, but that didn't show up on the screen. It was so-bad-it's-good material done with such intensity and gravity that you wouldn't dare laugh at it. (It was a bit like The Passion in that respect.) It was like someone trying to tell a joke ("A spaghetti western, a kung fu movie, a blaxploitation flick, and a duck walk into a bar...") but delivering it like a sermon. This wasn't parody, it even went beyond homage. It was more like adoration.
I'd like to nominate Kill Bill as the worst Recent Movie That Was Supposed To Be Good. Sure, Tarantino did an expert job of capturing the essense of the source material he was paying homage to, but when you distill bad movies, you end up with... a bad movie. At least the originals came by their weaknesses honestly and could be forgiven them, but Tarantino added a layer of pretentiousness to it that killed it for me.
I don't mind the "I anal" part (I'm both gay and a perfectionist), but I have to admit I'm uncomfortable with the implications of "bi pooti"... I don't swing that way. {smile}
The legal profession operates according to the structure of our adversarial judicial system, in which one side tries to get his client's way, the other side tries to get her client's way, and a (hopefully) neutral party decides who deserves to win. Yes, it's ugly, and it's a sad commentary on our society that we have to treat everything as a fight between adversaries. But it's the best we've come up with so far. Got any better ideas for a judicial system? If not, I'd have to say that your post is nothing more than name-calling, which is how 6-year-olds behave. Congratulations: you're more more mature than the legal profession. {wry grin}
Would help to point out that the full name of the agency is the United States Patent and Trademark Office? If you're only doing business locally, you go to the state goverment to register. But if you intend to use a mark nationally, you need to go to the feds.
B) One can file an "intent to use" registration before actually going public with the name. That's specifically to allow businesses to secure a brand name with trademark protection before they announce it to the whole world.
Trademarks are not like domain registrations, with the first filer automatically getting it. Any new trademark registration is first published for opposition, to give others with competing claims to the mark an opportunity to challenge that registration. If Google had been first to file and someone else was already using it (as has been alleged), they'd get the same chance. That's part of this USPTO bureaucracy that people are moaning about... and it's a part that serves a useful purpose.
(IANALBIPOOTI.) Unless the other parties can demonstrate that they really did have an intent to use to "Gmail" as a trademark before they heard of Google's service and the lack of registration, the fact that Google had already begun to do so (albeit in beta form) gives them a pretty good case to assert. Since they'll also have the benefit of good legal counsel, I'm not too worried about their prospects... it may just take some time.
This is from the infamous Saven Marek, the boy genius who insists that his middle school science textbook is right and everyone else is wrong and then stomps off and refuses to listen when they try to explain to him that the same side of the moon does not always face the sun. "Foe" him now, dudes; he's either an irredeemable idiot or a troll.
So is an old Mac.
OK, maybe not "a fortune" (they were never worth that much when new), but a used Mac - even a broken one - can have surprising value on the second-hand market. "Obsolete" Mac hardware retains pretty good value, despite the fact that all the beige units prior to the original iMac have been effectively written off by Apple's OS division. Of course the fact that everything since the original iMac is still well supported by the OS helps keep the price of old G3 systems - and the parts to keep them running - fairly high.
Naw man, i can see that. West Side is a pair of star-crossed lovers and and obvious riff on R&J. King Arthur's just another savior who was betrayed and killed, and will come back again, like JC. And half of Khan's good lines from ST:TWOK were lifted from Melville. ("I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up." Sound familiar?)
From the fields of Texas, to the streets of Boston
From the right-wing nut jobs, to the liberal sissies
This song was made for you and me.
"This Virtual Machine Kills Fascists" -Debian Woody Guthrie
At least you had the willingness to consider what others were telling you, the intelligence to understand it, and the maturity to admit your mistake. You'll go a lot farther in life than the kid who just keeps laughing and saying "nuh-uh", and then stomps away in defiant ignorance when a critical mass of people have pointed out to him that he's in error.
I'd never thought of that. I'll have to give it a try! This is why the Web is such a wonderful thing: you learn so many useful things!
Their attempts at identifying geographic differences aren't all that successful. For example, they've got a data point on one of their maps for "Detroit/Lansing/Grand Rapids"... as if this were one metropolitan area, rather than a 3-hour drive from one side of the state to the other, most of which will be through farmland. About the only thing Detroit and G.R. have in common economically is that we pay the same sales tax.
My guess is that the sheer quantity of data they get from LA/NYC/etc swamps the smaller samples they take from the flyover regions in the totals, so the results are really only relevant for those high-priced markets.
...and I'll finally be able to have consensual sex with that hot 486 I met at the local Radio Shack. Watch for the barrage of tech pr0n featuring 486's when they finally turn 18 in a few years.
Most porn (at least magazines and videos sold in the US; non-US web sites are another matter) includes a statement on the cover that "all actors at least 18 years of age" specifically to cover their asses on this point. I've also seen additional disclaimers on stuff that had the word "boy" or "girl" in the title, or which featured teenagers with (for example) pigtails and lollipops.
I agree that "what it looks like" should be irrelevant. The only question should be whether actual minors are being taking unfair advantage of. Mr. & Mrs. Christian & Prudence America seem to disagree.
Threepio's problems stem mostly from his envy and resentment of Luke and Leia. Despite being his "father's" eldest surviving child, and even with Anakin's increasing mechanization (giving them more in common), Vader never paid any attention to him. It was all "You are part of the Rebel Alliance, Princess," and "Luke, you can destroy the Emperor." In Episode VII, he'll probably murder them both in their sleep.