They weren't 'posted' to the site directly, rather they were sent to a security related mailing list which the site happens to maintain an archive of. So in addition to being draconian, MySpace also manages to be bumbling as the list is archived by a number of sites.
If the limitation in firing these is generating the power to fire, it won't matter if you have 60 launchers or just 1, you still will only get ten shots off in a day. Unless you are including the cost of a whole need power plant for each launcher.
That said, the point of "How many cruise missles do we expect to actually fire in one day?" is a good one.
I second this command. Psychonauts brings me back decades whenever I fire it up.
But the real reason why Sierra no longer does Graphical Adventures is that no one buys them. There is a reason why Psychonauts can be gotten cheap off of Steam, and it's not because it's only worth that.
Normally I'd side with the cop simply out of/. priorities (YEAH! Stick it to them MAN! Information just wants to be FREE!)
But really, let's look at this from a semi-objective viewpoint.
He was provided resources and training by the state
He didn't write the program, he wrote the interface to allow Wisconsin to use a program created by Iowa.
Wisconsin received a free license to the program from Iowa, specifically if they promised not to modify it to use commercially.
Now, I realize he'd really like to be able to take this modification he made to the original program and sell it, but really do you honestly think he has a leg to stand on?
He's created a modification to a program using Wisconsin state resources, of which the license for the program itself specifically states that it can't be modified for commercial use.
The fact that he was able to get this into court is the saddest part of the story. And while it's sad that he's commiting career suicide here, it sounds more like Social Darwinism taking it's due than the mean ol'government running him over.
One of the demo videos shows reinforcement being placed down by another robot before the concrete is formed. However rather than long bars of rebar, it looks as if they used T's that screwed into each other upside down. For horizontal reinforcement, the T's had holes in their flanges which allowed a third robot to place down U or C bars.
It looks as if the 'forms' are laid by the robot as it pours the concrete.
Monday, 10 AM -- Chicago, Illinois -- Start-up software developer Cuisine International announced CUISINENET, the first internetworking program to seamlessly integrate word and food processing. Called breakthrough for small restaurants and snack bars, Cuisine Chairman Mark Meigs confidently predicted sales of thousands of copies with shipments soon to begin.
Monday, 4 PM -- New York -- Cuisine International shares closed sharply higher on announcement of new CUISINENET product.
Tuesday, 9 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates, III announced that Microsoft Food for Windows would soon enter beta testing. Gates described the product as the first of a projected family of products to include Food for Windows, designed for small commercial dining establishments; Personal Food for Windows, designed for home kitchens; Portable Food for Windows, designed for lunchboxes; and, of course, at the high end, Food for Windows NC (Nouvelle Cuisine) designed for large institutional dining rooms. Asked by a reporter about CUISINENET, Gates said that he had never heard of the product, but was not surprised by it, because the software business is highly competitive, and Microsoft has to compete on the merits with many strong competitors, as the FTC had recently concluded.
Tuesday, 3 PM -- Chicago, Illinois -- An angry Mark Meigs showed reporters a copy of the nondisclosure agreement signed by Bill Gates, under which Cuisine International had informed Microsoft a year earlier about plans for CUISINENET. Meigs said that in hindsight, he should never have signed the agreement, as the only thing he learned from Microsoft was that Gates was considering making changes to Windows.
Wednesday, 9 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would soon publish specifications for the Windows Open Kitchen Architecture (WOKA), a series of design specifications to permit manufacturers of toasters, ranges, and other kitchen appliances to integrate their products into the forthcoming Microsoft Food for Windows line. Asked about reports of a nondisclosure agreement with Cuisine International for a similar product, Gates said that the other product was really at most a niche product, and would probably have less functionality than the food-related features that Microsoft would be building into the new Unsaturated FAT File System which would be part of DOS 9.0. Gates said that he doubted there would be much interest in a dead-end solution that would not be able to keep up to date with advances in WOKA. Gates added that over 11,000 manufacturers of kitchen appliances were already having serious discussions with Microsoft about WOKA, and that he expected almost all important eaters of food to standardize on the WOKA environment.
Wednesday, 10 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that he would be giving the keynote speech at the American Bakers annual convention on "Nutrition at Your Fingertips." Gates played down speculation that he would use the Bakers convention to introduce Microsoft Food for Windows, saying only that alpha testing was proceeding ahead of schedule, and the product would be shipped when it was ready.
Wednesday, 11 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Corporation announced that its Chairman, William H. Gates, III, had made a donation of over $250 of personal funds to the Cordon Bleu to begin an endowment fund for the Bill Gates Professorship of Advanced Cookery. The famous French cooking school confirmed that it had agreed to be a beta site for the much discussed Food for Windows application sweet.
Thursday, 9 AM -- New York -- PCWeek Magazine reported in a copyrighted story that it had obtained a copy of correspondence from Microsoft to Cuisine International, demanding that the small developer of kitchen software cease using the Cuisine name, as it infringes on the trademark for Microsoft Food for Windows NC. Microsoft added that Chairman Mark Meigs would also have
This could kill Blockbuster. It might put a hamper on brick and mortar retail outlets that have branched into selling DVD's, but this could never kill NetFlix.
Have you tried downloading a full sized DVD and burning it? Come on, I don't have the time or patience required to do that via bittorrent (which maxes out my connection and prevents me from doing other things online if I want the DVD as fast as possible) and that still takes several hours. How fast would I get the DVD if I'm downloading it from one source? It'd take days if not weeks of downloading in the background. Plus, now I've got a hard drive full of 4/8 gig files which are essentially useless once they've been burnt.
The general populace might see this as an alternative to going to the store and buying a DVD and I can see people simply queuing up DVD's on a wishlist to download at their leisure, but this is no where near the sort of thing that compete with the NetFlix model of business.
If it's a DVD that you've burnt, exactly how do they think they are going to limit the number of times you've viewed it.
It's not as if your DVD player has a built-in shredder. And most DVD players I know of don't have any ability to write to DVD's, so it's not as if the DVD itself will keep track of the number of time.
Text is nice, till you have to localize it. Remember this isn't going to be used soley by English speaking people. Using icons has the advantage of being accessible to all without as much risk of the "Bite the Wax Tadpole" or Engrish pitfalls.
Then you really need to shop around for companies to work for that actually have competant HR departments.
Management typically is intelligent enough to know that an abusive supervisor is more of a liability than a boon, since it generally costs more to hire and train a new worker than it is to retain someone who already knows the job. Abusive supervisors tend to have far higher turnover than ones who actually know how to do their job, and typically produce poorer quality work.
It's always in a company's intrest to investigate complaints and determine if the problem is with the manager or with the employee (or, as in most cases, a combination of both) and take steps to resolve the issue.
Most HR departments of the companies I've worked for, realize this.
The majority of the companies that were in the video game industry at the time were completely devastated. The ones that didn't already have huge bank rolls or weren't backed by other revenue (Mattel) went under in the blink of an eye.
The US lost most of it's dominance of the industry to Japan, and for a time, until the NES came to America, retailers refused to sell consoles due to the bath they had to take in losses when the crash occurred.
Yes, there were OTHER industries out there that filled in the vacuum, but they were not VIDEO GAME companies. They were the home computer companies. And the people MAKING the software for those computers, for the most part, were completely new to the scene.
Yes, it wasn't immediately obvious to the consumer what was happening, mostly because retailers were attempting to dump what they considered completely worthless stock (video games) for rock bottom prices. In fact for most, if you remember anything of this period as a consumer it would be the fact that all the sudden the games jumped down in price to being $1 a piece in most places. For us it was utopia, but that was only because the actual businesses had written everything off as a LOSS already.
No, this wasn't as big as the crashes that preceded the Depressions, but it was big enough to almost completely blow away an entire industry in America and bring an number of large corporations to their knees.
If anything it's revisionist to try to paint this as something other than a crash.
(And honestly, while TODAY it might be argued that there is a fine line between computers and consoles, you really aren't going to get that arguement to fly with anyone who acutally used the two back then. Even today there are clear deliniations for most people in the use of their computer and their console.)
Anyone who thinks that the Microsoft/Novell deal was anything other than a coup for MS either doesn't get it or has far more inside knowledge than anyone else on this planet.
The irregulars also happen to have a willingness to die for their cause which makes using 'whatever works' seem like a less undesirable option. Since blowing up because your jury rigged bomb went off as you were laying it down still makes you a martyr.
The regulars however would probably like to be able to come home in something other than a pine box, so having equipment which could end up getting them killed might be considered a better option.
Yes, they should have the tools needed to do the job, but remember Agent Orange was also once considered the tool needed to do the job. Sometimes taking the time to test things out is a good thing.
Actualy your point concerning the 'half-life' (pun intended) of a movie is even more ammo as to why EA has made it's own bed.
Half-Life 1 came out how many years ago? How much support has Valve dumped into it? Into it's expansions, mods, and successors?
Now take almost any of EA's major franchises. Need for Speed, The Sims, C&C, etc.
After the intial sale, how much effort has put into maintaining and supporting any of the games in any of their franchises?
When Half-Life 2 was released, you could (and can still) buy an updated and patched version of Half-Life 1 with it. You could buy all the expansions, and they also all came up to date. Hell, you could even get a version of Half-Life 1 that had been updated to work in HL2's engine. And you can still find plenty of HL1 servers out there, using the tracking servers maintained and provided by Valve.
When C&C:The First Decade was released a while back, how many of the games in that pack had been updated to run in XP? How many of them even had servers to play multiplayer on any more? The answer is none. There was a huge shit storm in the C&C community that some of the programs included in the release were even a step backwards from what had already been on the market in terms of compatibility.
When The Sims 2 was released, how much support did EA continue to provide The Sims? Outside of repackaging several expansions in a way to ensure you still had to pay about the same amount of money to catch up (by staggering what they included to be an old expansion and an new expansion) , what have they done new for the game? The answer is nothing.
EA has a long history of just dumping a game then acting as if it never exsited. And Valve isn't an isolated company in regards to how much effort they put into supporting the community that forms around their games.
If EA actually provided support for their products beyond that short intial launch window, they might have been able to build a better loyalty base and hence not have to waste all their money on marketing to wooing their target audience everytime they release something new. They might not have to spend all their money on eye candy to fool people into thinking "this game will be different, this one won't be candy coated crap".
EA is the RIAA of Video Games. They think it's their God given right to print money and get pissed when someone expects them to actually work for it.
And lets all give Toby a great big hand for demonstrating exactly why we have taxes and why government funded research is so important!
After all, it's not as if Toby's own economic potential didn't completely rely on the fact that he works in a nation whose citizenery benefited from the advances in science that such 'inefficient' research produces! No of course not! No, Toby is one of those billions of $2 a day workers who happens to have access to the Internet. An inefficient, failure of an attempt by the US and NATO signatories to create a decentralized network of communication capable of withstanding nuclear war.
And after all! It's not as if Toby's own opinion on EO-1 isn't well researched and thought out, I'm sure that right now he can spout off all of the sundry mission objectives that EO-1 has, as well as how successful so far it has been at meeting them.
No ladies and gentlemen, Toby has successfully shown to the world how selflessness and a broad world view, focused not on the impact of others actions upon oneself but on the impact of one's own actions upon others, can completely trump the necessity for government taxes collected for the benefit of it's citizens and applied in the pursuit of making their life better.
After all, if it were up to him, we'd just donate it all to the $2 a day workers! I'm sure that would make their day. For a week....
I wouldn't really call it 'giving up'. That implies the purpose the project was created for is being abandoned instead of what really happened.
Google Answers was a project that didn't have the results that were being sought. I'm sure the people who ran the project are still seeking those results, just not through this project.
For the record, my parents are public teachers. My parents are Christian. The region they live and teach in is predominantly fundamental right wing Christian.
The school they work at daily has a group holding a prayer meeting in front of the school before classes start. The staff is barred from participating.
I put forward the idea that this isn't so much a difficulty as an unwillingness to accept one of the responsibilities of the job.
Lets just apply a modicum of common sense to our life instead of exhibiting the "OMG I spent my life eating at McDonalds and now I'm fat, SUE!" mindeset.
Don't join the military if you have qualms about killing. Don't work for a meat processing plant if you are a vegan. Don't be a stripper if you have problems with people seeing your body. Don't work for a tobacco company if you have issues with smoking. Don't work for a public institution which specifically bans religion from its inner workings if you have a problem keeping your faith to yourself.
If you want to teach children, be a teacher. If you want to teach children and evangelize, be a teacher in one of the many private religious schools out there. Don't, however, work at a public school and expect the same freedom to evangelize.
If you can't do this, then the problem is NOT society for expecting you to follow the rules, the problem is with you refusing to accept responsibility for your choices.
It's not as if this "Separation of Church vs. State" idea is all that new, you can't claim not to have heard of it. It was one of the founding principals of our nation, along with democracy and capitalism. It's not as if you weren't raised in an era where this principal was only given lip service. All my life I've seen news stories about folk out there running into this one, especially in schools.
If you are a public servant, there are expectations of you. If you can't fulfill those, don't become a public servant. If you do, don't cry when your failure to do the job right causes them to hand you your head on a platter.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't 'posted' to the site directly, rather they were sent to a security related mailing list which the site happens to maintain an archive of. So in addition to being draconian, MySpace also manages to be bumbling as the list is archived by a number of sites.
If the limitation in firing these is generating the power to fire, it won't matter if you have 60 launchers or just 1, you still will only get ten shots off in a day. Unless you are including the cost of a whole need power plant for each launcher.
That said, the point of "How many cruise missles do we expect to actually fire in one day?" is a good one.
I second this command. Psychonauts brings me back decades whenever I fire it up.
But the real reason why Sierra no longer does Graphical Adventures is that no one buys them. There is a reason why Psychonauts can be gotten cheap off of Steam, and it's not because it's only worth that.
But really, let's look at this from a semi-objective viewpoint.
Now, I realize he'd really like to be able to take this modification he made to the original program and sell it, but really do you honestly think he has a leg to stand on?
He's created a modification to a program using Wisconsin state resources, of which the license for the program itself specifically states that it can't be modified for commercial use. The fact that he was able to get this into court is the saddest part of the story. And while it's sad that he's commiting career suicide here, it sounds more like Social Darwinism taking it's due than the mean ol'government running him over.
One of the demo videos shows reinforcement being placed down by another robot before the concrete is formed. However rather than long bars of rebar, it looks as if they used T's that screwed into each other upside down. For horizontal reinforcement, the T's had holes in their flanges which allowed a third robot to place down U or C bars.
It looks as if the 'forms' are laid by the robot as it pours the concrete.
Microsoft Food for Windows
Monday, 10 AM -- Chicago, Illinois -- Start-up software developer Cuisine International announced CUISINENET, the first internetworking program to seamlessly integrate word and food processing. Called breakthrough for small restaurants and snack bars, Cuisine Chairman Mark Meigs confidently predicted sales of thousands of copies with shipments soon to begin.
Monday, 4 PM -- New York -- Cuisine International shares closed sharply higher on announcement of new CUISINENET product.
Tuesday, 9 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates, III announced that Microsoft Food for Windows would soon enter beta testing. Gates described the product as the first of a projected family of products to include Food for Windows, designed for small commercial dining establishments; Personal Food for Windows, designed for home kitchens; Portable Food for Windows, designed for lunchboxes; and, of course, at the high end, Food for Windows NC (Nouvelle Cuisine) designed for large institutional dining rooms. Asked by a reporter about CUISINENET, Gates said that he had never heard of the product, but was not surprised by it, because the software business is highly competitive, and Microsoft has to compete on the merits with many strong competitors, as the FTC had recently concluded.
Tuesday, 3 PM -- Chicago, Illinois -- An angry Mark Meigs showed reporters a copy of the nondisclosure agreement signed by Bill Gates, under which Cuisine International had informed Microsoft a year earlier about plans for CUISINENET. Meigs said that in hindsight, he should never have signed the agreement, as the only thing he learned from Microsoft was that Gates was considering making changes to Windows.
Wednesday, 9 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would soon publish specifications for the Windows Open Kitchen Architecture (WOKA), a series of design specifications to permit manufacturers of toasters, ranges, and other kitchen appliances to integrate their products into the forthcoming Microsoft Food for Windows line. Asked about reports of a nondisclosure agreement with Cuisine International for a similar product, Gates said that the other product was really at most a niche product, and would probably have less functionality than the food-related features that Microsoft would be building into the new Unsaturated FAT File System which would be part of DOS 9.0. Gates said that he doubted there would be much interest in a dead-end solution that would not be able to keep up to date with advances in WOKA. Gates added that over 11,000 manufacturers of kitchen appliances were already having serious discussions with Microsoft about WOKA, and that he expected almost all important eaters of food to standardize on the WOKA environment.
Wednesday, 10 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced that he would be giving the keynote speech at the American Bakers annual convention on "Nutrition at Your Fingertips." Gates played down speculation that he would use the Bakers convention to introduce Microsoft Food for Windows, saying only that alpha testing was proceeding ahead of schedule, and the product would be shipped when it was ready.
Wednesday, 11 AM -- Redmond, Washington -- Microsoft Corporation announced that its Chairman, William H. Gates, III, had made a donation of over $250 of personal funds to the Cordon Bleu to begin an endowment fund for the Bill Gates Professorship of Advanced Cookery. The famous French cooking school confirmed that it had agreed to be a beta site for the much discussed Food for Windows application sweet.
Thursday, 9 AM -- New York -- PCWeek Magazine reported in a copyrighted story that it had obtained a copy of correspondence from Microsoft to Cuisine International, demanding that the small developer of kitchen software cease using the Cuisine name, as it infringes on the trademark for Microsoft Food for Windows NC. Microsoft added that Chairman Mark Meigs would also have
Do you work for the RIAA?
Just curious....
They seem to think the same thing about sales...
Read the summary of this article posted by Cmdr Taco concerning the announcement of the iPod. Pay particular attention to the last line.
/ 1816257
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
This could kill Blockbuster. It might put a hamper on brick and mortar retail outlets that have branched into selling DVD's, but this could never kill NetFlix.
Have you tried downloading a full sized DVD and burning it? Come on, I don't have the time or patience required to do that via bittorrent (which maxes out my connection and prevents me from doing other things online if I want the DVD as fast as possible) and that still takes several hours. How fast would I get the DVD if I'm downloading it from one source? It'd take days if not weeks of downloading in the background. Plus, now I've got a hard drive full of 4/8 gig files which are essentially useless once they've been burnt.
The general populace might see this as an alternative to going to the store and buying a DVD and I can see people simply queuing up DVD's on a wishlist to download at their leisure, but this is no where near the sort of thing that compete with the NetFlix model of business.
If it's a DVD that you've burnt, exactly how do they think they are going to limit the number of times you've viewed it.
It's not as if your DVD player has a built-in shredder. And most DVD players I know of don't have any ability to write to DVD's, so it's not as if the DVD itself will keep track of the number of time.
So what gives?
I think the key point here is that it's impossible to throw the Shuttle into orbit for one clear and obvious reason. Superman is still missing.
Text is nice, till you have to localize it. Remember this isn't going to be used soley by English speaking people. Using icons has the advantage of being accessible to all without as much risk of the "Bite the Wax Tadpole" or Engrish pitfalls.
"They're the ones who hire the assholes in the first place.
A much better bet is a small company where the big cheese is the HR department. That way you only have one potential asshole to worry about."
Who couldn't be pegged as the source of most of their own problems and the author of their own pink slip.
That doesn't mean they don't exist, I just haven't bothered to look. I have a feeling neither have you.
Then you really need to shop around for companies to work for that actually have competant HR departments.
Management typically is intelligent enough to know that an abusive supervisor is more of a liability than a boon, since it generally costs more to hire and train a new worker than it is to retain someone who already knows the job. Abusive supervisors tend to have far higher turnover than ones who actually know how to do their job, and typically produce poorer quality work.
It's always in a company's intrest to investigate complaints and determine if the problem is with the manager or with the employee (or, as in most cases, a combination of both) and take steps to resolve the issue.
Most HR departments of the companies I've worked for, realize this.
Mine are all covered in rubber, hmmm....
It was a crash.
The majority of the companies that were in the video game industry at the time were completely devastated. The ones that didn't already have huge bank rolls or weren't backed by other revenue (Mattel) went under in the blink of an eye.
The US lost most of it's dominance of the industry to Japan, and for a time, until the NES came to America, retailers refused to sell consoles due to the bath they had to take in losses when the crash occurred.
Yes, there were OTHER industries out there that filled in the vacuum, but they were not VIDEO GAME companies. They were the home computer companies. And the people MAKING the software for those computers, for the most part, were completely new to the scene.
Yes, it wasn't immediately obvious to the consumer what was happening, mostly because retailers were attempting to dump what they considered completely worthless stock (video games) for rock bottom prices. In fact for most, if you remember anything of this period as a consumer it would be the fact that all the sudden the games jumped down in price to being $1 a piece in most places. For us it was utopia, but that was only because the actual businesses had written everything off as a LOSS already.
No, this wasn't as big as the crashes that preceded the Depressions, but it was big enough to almost completely blow away an entire industry in America and bring an number of large corporations to their knees.
If anything it's revisionist to try to paint this as something other than a crash.
(And honestly, while TODAY it might be argued that there is a fine line between computers and consoles, you really aren't going to get that arguement to fly with anyone who acutally used the two back then. Even today there are clear deliniations for most people in the use of their computer and their console.)
Heck to that if we are calling in the Sky Captian, I want Sportacus and the Iron Vulture!!
Anyone who thinks that the Microsoft/Novell deal was anything other than a coup for MS either doesn't get it or has far more inside knowledge than anyone else on this planet.
"If you are going to kill someone, you should be able to smile at them when you pull the trigger."
Ring any bells?
Novell Headquarters: "Hey! We just got a cool wood horsie from Microsoft! Lets put it in the Board room!"
The irregulars also happen to have a willingness to die for their cause which makes using 'whatever works' seem like a less undesirable option. Since blowing up because your jury rigged bomb went off as you were laying it down still makes you a martyr.
The regulars however would probably like to be able to come home in something other than a pine box, so having equipment which could end up getting them killed might be considered a better option.
Yes, they should have the tools needed to do the job, but remember Agent Orange was also once considered the tool needed to do the job. Sometimes taking the time to test things out is a good thing.
Actualy your point concerning the 'half-life' (pun intended) of a movie is even more ammo as to why EA has made it's own bed.
Half-Life 1 came out how many years ago? How much support has Valve dumped into it? Into it's expansions, mods, and successors?
Now take almost any of EA's major franchises. Need for Speed, The Sims, C&C, etc.
After the intial sale, how much effort has put into maintaining and supporting any of the games in any of their franchises?
When Half-Life 2 was released, you could (and can still) buy an updated and patched version of Half-Life 1 with it. You could buy all the expansions, and they also all came up to date. Hell, you could even get a version of Half-Life 1 that had been updated to work in HL2's engine. And you can still find plenty of HL1 servers out there, using the tracking servers maintained and provided by Valve.
When C&C:The First Decade was released a while back, how many of the games in that pack had been updated to run in XP? How many of them even had servers to play multiplayer on any more? The answer is none. There was a huge shit storm in the C&C community that some of the programs included in the release were even a step backwards from what had already been on the market in terms of compatibility.
When The Sims 2 was released, how much support did EA continue to provide The Sims? Outside of repackaging several expansions in a way to ensure you still had to pay about the same amount of money to catch up (by staggering what they included to be an old expansion and an new expansion) , what have they done new for the game? The answer is nothing.
EA has a long history of just dumping a game then acting as if it never exsited. And Valve isn't an isolated company in regards to how much effort they put into supporting the community that forms around their games.
If EA actually provided support for their products beyond that short intial launch window, they might have been able to build a better loyalty base and hence not have to waste all their money on marketing to wooing their target audience everytime they release something new. They might not have to spend all their money on eye candy to fool people into thinking "this game will be different, this one won't be candy coated crap".
EA is the RIAA of Video Games. They think it's their God given right to print money and get pissed when someone expects them to actually work for it.
And lets all give Toby a great big hand for demonstrating exactly why we have taxes and why government funded research is so important!
After all, it's not as if Toby's own economic potential didn't completely rely on the fact that he works in a nation whose citizenery benefited from the advances in science that such 'inefficient' research produces! No of course not! No, Toby is one of those billions of $2 a day workers who happens to have access to the Internet. An inefficient, failure of an attempt by the US and NATO signatories to create a decentralized network of communication capable of withstanding nuclear war.
And after all! It's not as if Toby's own opinion on EO-1 isn't well researched and thought out, I'm sure that right now he can spout off all of the sundry mission objectives that EO-1 has, as well as how successful so far it has been at meeting them.
No ladies and gentlemen, Toby has successfully shown to the world how selflessness and a broad world view, focused not on the impact of others actions upon oneself but on the impact of one's own actions upon others, can completely trump the necessity for government taxes collected for the benefit of it's citizens and applied in the pursuit of making their life better.
After all, if it were up to him, we'd just donate it all to the $2 a day workers! I'm sure that would make their day. For a week....
I wouldn't really call it 'giving up'. That implies the purpose the project was created for is being abandoned instead of what really happened.
Google Answers was a project that didn't have the results that were being sought. I'm sure the people who ran the project are still seeking those results, just not through this project.
For the record, my parents are public teachers. My parents are Christian. The region they live and teach in is predominantly fundamental right wing Christian.
The school they work at daily has a group holding a prayer meeting in front of the school before classes start. The staff is barred from participating.
I put forward the idea that this isn't so much a difficulty as an unwillingness to accept one of the responsibilities of the job.
Lets just apply a modicum of common sense to our life instead of exhibiting the "OMG I spent my life eating at McDonalds and now I'm fat, SUE!" mindeset.
Don't join the military if you have qualms about killing.
Don't work for a meat processing plant if you are a vegan.
Don't be a stripper if you have problems with people seeing your body.
Don't work for a tobacco company if you have issues with smoking.
Don't work for a public institution which specifically bans religion from its inner workings if you have a problem keeping your faith to yourself.
If you want to teach children, be a teacher. If you want to teach children and evangelize, be a teacher in one of the many private religious schools out there. Don't, however, work at a public school and expect the same freedom to evangelize.
If you can't do this, then the problem is NOT society for expecting you to follow the rules, the problem is with you refusing to accept responsibility for your choices.
It's not as if this "Separation of Church vs. State" idea is all that new, you can't claim not to have heard of it. It was one of the founding principals of our nation, along with democracy and capitalism. It's not as if you weren't raised in an era where this principal was only given lip service. All my life I've seen news stories about folk out there running into this one, especially in schools.
If you are a public servant, there are expectations of you. If you can't fulfill those, don't become a public servant. If you do, don't cry when your failure to do the job right causes them to hand you your head on a platter.
Do you hear a whistling sound? Sort of like something flying well over your head?
I wonder what that could be? ^_^