6) If you only care about the.1% of the time where anyone could be irrationally impassioned, then there are many more things besides guns about which you should be concerned. For example, "that guy with a can of gasoline might go burn down a school in the dead of night, we've got to tighten control of gasoline!"
It is with great trepidation that I post this (I almost AC'ed it for the first time in my/. career), because, hey, gun control discussion, but it's a worthwhile point (IMHO, of course) that, if you substitute "middle of the day" for "dead of night" in your statement, you will have just described the two worst incidents of school violence in American history -- both of which put Columbine to shame in terms of body count.
Actually, to be precise, one of them used the school's boiler room as the source of the fire; but the point remains that arson has, over the years, consistently proven itself more effective than gunfire for killing people in batch mode under most circumstances. The big advantage than guns have, to drag this back towards the topic a little more, is their superiority in interactive mode.
Funny, but true: The one overriding problem with his approach is that if you make security too onerous for the end-user, the end-user will simply disable it -- either by picking braindead passwords, or by never logging off, or by writing the passwords down and keeping them right next to the computer, or by going out of their way to simply not use the computer (which is secure, all right, unless they choose to use someone else's insecure computer instead; and anyway, "don't use the computer" may not be the lesson you want to teach your kids).
Rather than instilling "best practices" in his kids, he may be instilling the message that "best practices suck, and make using the computer a miserable pain in the ass chore."
This is perhaps not unrelated to the reason why so many career military types have long-haired slacker sons.:-)
I'm currently taking a brief WikiVacation, but before GAFIAted, I had noticed a (just on the wrong side of the-)borderline troll who had discovered a new algorithm for hurting Wiki: He would go into a long article and make about twenty different small edits in a row, all over the article. Some of the edits would be neutral. Some would be helpful (typos corrected, etc.). Some would be bad, but at least slightly defensible. And the rest would be bad edits, ranging in severity from NPOV trolling up to borderline vandalism.
The problem, of course, is that doing a complete revert would throw out several babies with the bilgewater. I found myself doing a complete revert as a starting point, and then laboriously checking each individual edit to see if it was worth re-creating. All told, I ended up spending significantly more time and effort fixing things up than he did screwing around with them (on the other hand, the final product did contain his few positive edits, making it better than the original). I suppose that I could have simply done the revert and then forgotten about it, but that sort of thing would have left me open to complaints from him about how I cruelly reverted typo fixes, and so forth.
Fortunately, it's the type of attack that can only work on large articles, but I've seen a lot of vandals use its baby cousin, the "pee on one part of the article and then make a minor change to a different part" edit pair, and slip it by people who only diff the most recent of their edits.
The only thing inside a CRT which is likely to be even the slightest bit dangerous would be the materials which make pretty colors on the inside of the front of the tube when the cathode rays hit them; some of those are rare earths and the like. Still, it's probably no worse than the stuff inside flourescent light tubes, and I wouldn't be licking the stuff.
Aside from that, as others have pointed out, the inside is a vacuum, and all of the angry electrons live at the back of the monitor, behind the CRT. I've poked around back there before without killing myself even once, because I am properly deferential towards angry electrons.
Hmmm. I have a couple of monitors which are fried; it might be worth it to either smash the front of the tube, or remove it entirely (or the one followed by the other, of course), and take head-on pictures of the insides...
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.
If the President of the ALA has such a low opinion of bloggers, perhaps his organization should stop giving so many major awards to them.
I think what he actually meant to say was something along the lines of:
"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable -- except for ALA literary award winners such as Orson Scott Card or Neil Gaiman or Sherwood Smith or David Brin or Jane Yolen or Dianne Duane or, oh, bugger, you know, all those other ALA award-winning authors who also blog, not that I want to imply that ALA award-winning librarians who blog, like Kathleen de la Peña McCook, are bad either, and oh, yeah, I definitely don't want to seem to be criticizing PLABlog, the brand new blog of the Public Library Association, especially not when we put out a nifty little press release crowing about it, just last month, because that would look pretty stupid, now, wouldn't it -- er, um, what was I saying, again?"
I miss those heady days of yore, when there was still room for more outrage in my life. When I could stil be surprised by new examples of indifference, incompetence, and outright evil.
These days, I am no longer surprised at no longer being surprised by the ghastly things this Administration routinely does.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from French (nearly all words ending in "-tion," for instance). In some cases, such as names for food, these new words formed a parallel structure, with the French words ("poultry," "venison," etc.) becoming the high-class alternatives to their English counterparts.
The one area where French words made almost no inroads, however, was in short, common words such as pronouns and articles and everyday verbs -- the backbones of the language, if you will.
There was one exception: "Sore," from the Germanic "sohr," was pushed aside by the French "vrai," in the form of "very." People forget that "very" doesn't only mean "extremely"; it can also mean "truly" (you can see this root in action in words such as "verify," "veracity," etc.). Consider "I am the very model of a modern Major General," for instance, or the scene in Shakespeare's Henry IV, where Henry at one point declares, to someone who doubts his identity, that he is "the very King."
Because of this, whenever I hear someone say that something is "very unique," I mentally translate it as "truly unique," which is forgivable, rather than "extremely unique," which is not.
I don't do this for their sake, really -- I do it for mine. My blood pressure's already high enough from hearing "more unique" and "most unique" bandied about; no need to annoy myself further.
In addition, crimes committed by law enforcement tend, understandably, to erode public confidence in law enforcement; and public confidence in the legal system is a vital part of the working of a civilized society.
For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long way around the galaxy. At least this would give us an idea how big the loss is. Nothing has come back yet -- not surprising, I guess, considering the great number of hops and the expense.
The guy who runs the PR firm that bought Williams for the Bush Administration said that his PR firm had done more business with the Clinton Administration than they have with Bush.
Did you see the card get palmed there? He said they did more business with the Clinton Administration; he didn't say that it was the same type of business. As far as anyone has been able to determine so far, at least, there wasn't any payola involved in the past.
Given that Joe Trippi first asked Jerome to come to work for Dean several months before Zephyr started working for Dean, it seems just barely possible to me that she might not have the most accurate impression of why, exactly, they were hired.
And if they really did hire Jerome so that he would write nice things about them, you'd think that they might have gotten a bit miffed when he stopped blogging entirely while he worked for them.
He's an Editor. He edits. I've had two article submissions accepted here; both of them have been edited before going out with my name still attached to them. That's just the way Slashdot has always operated.
Furthermore, "reveal" deserved scare quotes around it in that sentence -- given that not only was it something that was public knowledge, but that it was something that the Wall Street Journal had, themselves, mentioned before in articles about both Markos and Jerome.
If I wrote a lead sentence of "The Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday that George W. Bush is President of the United States," I would certainly expect an editor to either add scare quotes, change the verb "reveal" into something more appropriate, or do something else to, well, edit my sentence.
On an offtopic note: Is there a SF writer out there who is more right-wing than OSC?
Seriously, I'm trying to think of one.
Steve Stirling, perhaps. L. Neil Smith is pretty strongly right-libertarian at times. Joel Rosenberg is kind of right-wing, but not as much so as Stirling. Oh, and Jerry Pournelle is kind of out there a little, too.
On the other hand, Will Shetterly and China Mieville are practically pinko commies, and Ken MacLeod laughs at us puny 21st-century humans from the dizzying heights of his post-scarcity future, where his anarcho-crypto-socialist libertarianism is a perfectly sensible and coherent political philosophy to hold.
Say you have a paper on web services and you mention the ASP model. As time goes on, both Active Server Pages and Application Service provider may fall out of usage both technology and terminology-wise. So someone decides to remove mention of them from the entry. Now you have a paper on web technology that points to an article about poisonous snakes.
Of course, Desitorrents may well have entirely different reasons for being offline at the moment, given that they are located somewhere on the subcontinent; and TorrentReactor is up and running just fine at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, to be precise, one of them used the school's boiler room as the source of the fire; but the point remains that arson has, over the years, consistently proven itself more effective than gunfire for killing people in batch mode under most circumstances. The big advantage than guns have, to drag this back towards the topic a little more, is their superiority in interactive mode .
Well, I suppose that Beer Goggles would count as being a "New Lens" for the purposes of this discussion.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to mis-attribute this quote to Voltaire." -- Avram Grumer
Funny, but true: The one overriding problem with his approach is that if you make security too onerous for the end-user, the end-user will simply disable it -- either by picking braindead passwords, or by never logging off, or by writing the passwords down and keeping them right next to the computer, or by going out of their way to simply not use the computer (which is secure, all right, unless they choose to use someone else's insecure computer instead; and anyway, "don't use the computer" may not be the lesson you want to teach your kids).
:-)
Rather than instilling "best practices" in his kids, he may be instilling the message that "best practices suck, and make using the computer a miserable pain in the ass chore."
This is perhaps not unrelated to the reason why so many career military types have long-haired slacker sons.
I'm currently taking a brief WikiVacation, but before GAFIAted, I had noticed a (just on the wrong side of the-)borderline troll who had discovered a new algorithm for hurting Wiki: He would go into a long article and make about twenty different small edits in a row, all over the article. Some of the edits would be neutral. Some would be helpful (typos corrected, etc.). Some would be bad, but at least slightly defensible. And the rest would be bad edits, ranging in severity from NPOV trolling up to borderline vandalism.
The problem, of course, is that doing a complete revert would throw out several babies with the bilgewater. I found myself doing a complete revert as a starting point, and then laboriously checking each individual edit to see if it was worth re-creating. All told, I ended up spending significantly more time and effort fixing things up than he did screwing around with them (on the other hand, the final product did contain his few positive edits, making it better than the original). I suppose that I could have simply done the revert and then forgotten about it, but that sort of thing would have left me open to complaints from him about how I cruelly reverted typo fixes, and so forth.
Fortunately, it's the type of attack that can only work on large articles, but I've seen a lot of vandals use its baby cousin, the "pee on one part of the article and then make a minor change to a different part" edit pair, and slip it by people who only diff the most recent of their edits.
Now we know why this car keeps crashing into Mars.
The only thing inside a CRT which is likely to be even the slightest bit dangerous would be the materials which make pretty colors on the inside of the front of the tube when the cathode rays hit them; some of those are rare earths and the like. Still, it's probably no worse than the stuff inside flourescent light tubes, and I wouldn't be licking the stuff.
Aside from that, as others have pointed out, the inside is a vacuum, and all of the angry electrons live at the back of the monitor, behind the CRT. I've poked around back there before without killing myself even once, because I am properly deferential towards angry electrons.
Hmmm. I have a couple of monitors which are fried; it might be worth it to either smash the front of the tube, or remove it entirely (or the one followed by the other, of course), and take head-on pictures of the insides...
In other words, you are the only person in history whose monitor had a live-in Beta tester.
I noticed on LSpace that there's also a short of "Troll Bridge" being filmed by a bunch of Aussies.
They even got a quickie script rewrite from PTerry himself.
If the President of the ALA has such a low opinion of bloggers, perhaps his organization should stop giving so many major awards to them.
I think what he actually meant to say was something along the lines of:
I miss those heady days of yore, when there was still room for more outrage in my life. When I could stil be surprised by new examples of indifference, incompetence, and outright evil.
These days, I am no longer surprised at no longer being surprised by the ghastly things this Administration routinely does.
The one area where French words made almost no inroads, however, was in short, common words such as pronouns and articles and everyday verbs -- the backbones of the language, if you will.
There was one exception: "Sore," from the Germanic "sohr," was pushed aside by the French "vrai," in the form of "very." People forget that "very" doesn't only mean "extremely"; it can also mean "truly" (you can see this root in action in words such as "verify," "veracity," etc.). Consider "I am the very model of a modern Major General," for instance, or the scene in Shakespeare's Henry IV, where Henry at one point declares, to someone who doubts his identity, that he is "the very King."
Because of this, whenever I hear someone say that something is "very unique," I mentally translate it as "truly unique," which is forgivable, rather than "extremely unique," which is not.
I don't do this for their sake, really -- I do it for mine. My blood pressure's already high enough from hearing "more unique" and "most unique" bandied about; no need to annoy myself further.
Rumsfeld may not be able to shoot a gun, but his kung-fu is unstoppable.
In addition, crimes committed by law enforcement tend, understandably, to erode public confidence in law enforcement; and public confidence in the legal system is a vital part of the working of a civilized society.
> first po
> NO CARRIER
For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long way around the galaxy. At least this would give us an idea how big the loss is. Nothing has come back yet -- not surprising, I guess, considering the great number of hops and the expense.
Did you see the card get palmed there? He said they did more business with the Clinton Administration; he didn't say that it was the same type of business. As far as anyone has been able to determine so far, at least, there wasn't any payola involved in the past.
And if they really did hire Jerome so that he would write nice things about them, you'd think that they might have gotten a bit miffed when he stopped blogging entirely while he worked for them.
According to Netcraft, Macromedia Flash is dead.
He's an Editor. He edits. I've had two article submissions accepted here; both of them have been edited before going out with my name still attached to them. That's just the way Slashdot has always operated.
Furthermore, "reveal" deserved scare quotes around it in that sentence -- given that not only was it something that was public knowledge, but that it was something that the Wall Street Journal had, themselves, mentioned before in articles about both Markos and Jerome.
If I wrote a lead sentence of "The Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday that George W. Bush is President of the United States," I would certainly expect an editor to either add scare quotes, change the verb "reveal" into something more appropriate, or do something else to, well, edit my sentence.
On the other hand, Will Shetterly and China Mieville are practically pinko commies, and Ken MacLeod laughs at us puny 21st-century humans from the dizzying heights of his post-scarcity future, where his anarcho-crypto-socialist libertarianism is a perfectly sensible and coherent political philosophy to hold.
Of course, Desitorrents may well have entirely different reasons for being offline at the moment, given that they are located somewhere on the subcontinent; and TorrentReactor is up and running just fine at the moment.