Consider the following as a barley funny rough draught.
My approach for whatever ales me when reading Slashot is to reduce the problem to pint-sized portions, then with stout determination engage in vigorous physical activity to ferment a solution, ideally, starting with a bending of the elbow. When possible, I leave it to the barmaid to determine whether the glass is half-empty or half-full.
I solved the sluggish ISP DNS problem with simply installing bind9
So instead of one problem, you now have two?;-)
Most of the complaints I read on Slashdot invariably seem to be related to a loss of control. Seems to me that if you object to how others do things, taking charge and doing it yourself when possible is the only logical solution. For the tecnically inclined, that typically amounts to a few extra bucks per month along with, as you pointed out, some minimal work.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity.
I'd suggest that in an environment of social change where all things are hyper-political, personal identity is at the core, but it's much more convoluted than that:
Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites--politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers--are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink...the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.
Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that "the people" can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.
A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.
Put crudely, the libertarian mob cries out "I know what I know and I don't need some scientist telling me anything different". If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear other groups (provocateurs, stake-holders, religeous fundamentalists, etc.) chanting along in harmony.
ep, it's full of fat, so is the cauliflower gratin I just had - lightly sauteed cauliflower baked in a mix of egg yolk, butter, creme double and roquefort, add salt, pepper, chili power, saffron and lime juice to taste. That's why I don't gorge myself on it. How about just exerting some self-control instead of lowering calorie intake by pseudo-food substitutes?
Self-control is necessary only if you don't cook. Which few do, attributing the time required as some sort of trade-off, presumably so they can do something more interesting like reading labels on factory food package, or worse, watching more TV.
Admittedly, there is a perversion in a market when everything (except fresh fruits and vegetables are affordable) for daily eating, and sugar is cheapest of all. But if you regularly cook, you can't help but get back in touch with what's healthy and nutritious, and just as important, tasty. Deserts are just one example. They take time to prepare and the better ones require an inordinate amount of expensive ingredients. That you don't want to make them every day translates it into "you don't want to make them every day" which translates into the very simple adage of "you don't eat them every day".
Convenience food? Bad for society, but I've never understood the appeal of such things (with or without nanotechnology). Snacking for me has always been nibbling on the food that's being prepared in the kitchen.
Your recipe sounds yummy, BTW. I find that if your ingredients are high quality, sauteing in olive oil (with a dash of butter) works fine for just about anything. Cauliflower, of course, does seem to want egg yolk. If you enjoy saffron, consider adding some to an ordinary risotto made with something like porcini mushrooms.
Admittedly, there's a certain appeal to a one-card-fits-all type of solution. As a resident of the U.S., I have
a CA state drivers license a Residency Card a paper SS card a paper birth certificate
and living in California, I'm pretty much required to tote around in my wallet
a paper auto registration (that doesn't fit anywhere even when folded) a glossy paper auto insurance card.
I'd add a Canadian passport to the list, but it's expired, and most people in the U.S. have never owned or seen a passport so they're not much good for anything, least of all buying liquor or getting into a bar. Then, of course, there's all those other cards...
Your points are generally valid, but let's skip the exaggerations. I'll quote from Wikipedia to make things easy:
Windows XP was first released on October 25, 2001, and over 400 million copies were in use in January 2006. It was succeeded by Windows Vista, which was released to volume license customers on November 8, 2006, and worldwide to the general public on January 30, 2007. Direct OEM and retail sales of Windows XP ceased on June 30, 2008.
So according to the above, Windows XP is, at most, 3 years past the time it was last sold retail. To use a car analogy, if you bought a new car off the showroom floor a few months after at the end of the model year, did you buy a used car?
But even that is overly-simplified. The real world is always more nuanced and complex that, particularly with respect to enterprise customers. For that, you can consult the microsoft site, or talk to your sales rep.
So no, XP is not a decade old. More importantly, XP (and IE6) is very much in use and relied on.
People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be.
You've made some good points, but I'd offer the following: I continue to subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and magazines for a number of reasons, none of which include convenience.
Whatever it is I intend on reading, I can either read page by page, cover to cover, or skim the entire thing and be able to tell you exactly what's in that issue. With a website, pages are cross-linked to each other in an unholy, incestuous and distracting mess the rules of which are based partly in a misplaced effort at offering convenience, partly to pimp features (typically slideshows or useless video clips), but mostly to generate advertising dollars.
To expand on the above, no one knows what's in today's "web edition" of the New York Times. It's hardly unusual in a print edition for the day's more important article to be buried on an inside page below the fold. You'll never find it on the web without extraordinary effort and patience. And then, of course, there's those serendipitous discoveries that happen only where there's pages to turn (the most relevant tech news is often found in the Business section, and who the hell reads that, right?). Either way, if you don't think it's important to know what's in "today's paper", you're not part of the discussion; you're just a uninformed (by choice) bystander in the crowd making noise.
Can you say typography? Websites are, compared to print, ugly to look at and ugly to read.
Computer monitors are wonderful for displaying things, but they're antithetical to reading. Don't kid yourself you're doing any serious reading if you can't get through at least half of this article, for example, before you start to fidget, try unsuccessfully and repeatedly to sit back, and give up in frustration.
My newspapers are delivered in the morning. My dog and I enjoy walking to the end of the driveway to pick them up, just as I enjoy reading them in a comfy chair with my morning coffee. My magazines are similarly read at my leisure, but in the evening, and in another equally comfortable chair. You can't replicate those experiences with computer equipment.
It's certainly possible that a Kindle-like device may revolutionise reading in general, and the newspaper/magazine industry specifically (publishers are certainly hoping it does). But until that happens, I'll continue to pay for print subscriptions.. and bemoan the downward spiral of things.
Running for an office in the US, at least when you want to run for one that surpasses the office of mayor, requires a metric ton of money to get off the ground. It's pretty hard to afford that, especially given the risk and the minuscle chance of succeeding.
Generally true, but there's more the situation that just a metric ton of money. From a randomly selected article:
Since 2002, the average cost of gaining a House seat has risen 49 percent and now exceeds $1.36 million. The average cost of attaining a Senate seat has risen 68 percent and now exceeds $3.03 million, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.
There's at least three points to recognise here.
First, for a small group of medium or large corporations, those numbers are a pittance. For a subsection of voting public as a whole, it's similarly a pittance. Corporate donors, however, can generally be relied on and are easier to organise, among other things.
Second, voters demand that metric tons of money to be spent. Why? Because they like it like that. Increasingly, voters don't read newspapers or inform themselves of issues, but instead prefer to get their "facts" from their TVs. That means for an elected official, television commercials (the most expensive form of advertising) are the only means to reach voters. Also note that the public seems to have no problem with the length of most campaigns.
Third, public airwaves aren't. The networks demand to be paid for airtime, and the general public seems fine with that, despite apparent societal and legal obligations to the contrary. By contrast, I believe Canada mandates that the networks provide free airtime to political candidates.
The astute reader will note that a large corporation or two could easily fund the election campaigns of any number of key officials across the country and in doing so, buy control of their agenda. The degree to which that already happens is anyone's guess.
I have about 25 tabs open in each of 2 Firefox windows. I also have numerous other windows on each of 7 virtual screens on each of 2 physical screens.
Out of curiousity, what is it that's open in those 25 tabs?
I've never encountered a reason to open more than a handful at a time. I can't even imagine opening that many multiplexed terminals in screen, irrespective of how many jobs I was running, or how many systems I was working on.
And I hope there are many interesting results, other than buncha nerdy half-assed bullshit software projects. There are a lot more out there in life in need and want. Build a better water pump. Build a better wiring harness. Things people in need can use.
For 15 years, Kevin Costner has been overseeing the construction of oil separation machines to prepare for the possibility of another disaster of the magnitude of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.
Disturbed by the effects of the Valdez spill in Alaska, Mr. Costner bought the nascent technology from the government in 1995 and put $24 million of his own money into developing it for the private sector.
Kevin saw the Exxon Valdez spill, and as a fisherman and an environmentalist, it just stuck in his craw, the fact that we didn't have separation technology, said John Houghtaling, Mr. Costner's lawyer and business partner as chief executive with Ocean Therapy Solutions, which developed the technology.
On Wednesday, BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said that the company had approved six of Ocean Therapy's 32 machines for testing. All boast centrifuge processing technology giant vacuum-like machines that suck oil from water, separate the oil, store it in a tanker and send the water, 99.9 percent purified, back into the gulf.
The technology was available for use 10 years ago, Mr. Houghtaling said. "These machines have been very robust, but nobody's been interested in them until now," he added.
He said that the largest four machines have the capability of separating 210,000 gallons of oil from water a day, 200 gallons a minute.
Sounds like the quintessential hacker.
And for god's sake, stop wasting your good brains cooking up another social network bullshit. You young people can do way way better than that.
Kostner's efforts are the product of fifteen years work and $24 spare cash. And on a somewhat related note, the special submarines that James Cameron wants to contribute, those were financed courtesy of the movie studios. The point here is that it's hard to avoid the fact that the alternative (working on some possibly useless social networking thing) looks a lot more attractive. And do-able.
The USA's movie and music scenes are the biggest in the world because most of the world wants to consume our media.
Depends on how you measure "scene".
Bollywood films, for example, sell more tickets. As for music, there's a fair number of international (read "foreign to the US") artists who routinely sell more records than any of our local pop stars.
Your efforts at giving current events a historical context is to be commended, but I'd offer the comment that most of the changes you describe do not have their roots in the 19th century (i.e., they're not unique to that era), and introducing a thesis with a discussion of the vagaries of mens fashion does little to advance your purpose.
In all, I'm reminded of how political pundits today use the 1970s (or the 1980s) as baseline for their conclusions, with the more historically inclined among them citing occasional references to people and events anchored in time to the country's founding. More informative and useful would be a discussion of the ideas of the Enlightenment (less "founding fathers" and more "Hume and Locke"). More informative still, and much more interesting (and entertaining), would be using ancient Rome.
To use a concrete example, it's easy to assert that the modern environmental movement in the US has its roots in the radicalism of the 1960s (or the oil spill in Santa Barbara). But doing so is so narrow as to miss what underlies those changes. A better approach would be to start with the writings of Thoreau and examine (as Ken Burns did in his documentary "National Parks: America's Best Idea"), the birth and evolution of the park system. From that, you'll gain a real understanding of everything from the tensions surrounding oil drilling in the Gulf to the line of people shopping at a Whole Foods outlet, while everyone else is distracted with making noise or trying to reignite the culture wars of the Reagan era.
He also promised to get rid of Bendy Buses, improve rail and cycle services at no cost to the taxpayer (lolwut?) and (most likely) something about a badger in every pot.
Not being English, I read the above and guessed that a "bendy bus" was some sort of English desert. I was disappointed to learn that it has nothing in common with spotted dick, trifle, brakewell tart, or even a roly-poly, but rather it's just a frigging bus. Or more specifically, an articulated bus.
So how do you say "I, for one, welcome our bovine overlords" in German?;-)
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
I mention that because I've read stories of other countries doing what you're doing in German and Austria. In the Netherlands, for example, I've read of manufacturers that operate in such a way that the waste and by-products of both farms and factory are integrated in a near-closed loop not only with respect to materials, but also energy production.
The conclusions from these case studies is that location is key. While that may be true, I'm left wondering why, if location is so important, shipping by rail isn't just as cost effective? Certainly it's good to have things close, but the city of Chicago was built around the processing of cattle that were shipped from other parts of the country directly to "factory" spurs, and the finished "product" distributed from. If shipping by rail is cheap enough for cows (and similarly cheap for coal, oil, corn, water, among any number of other products), why wouldn't it be cheap enough for cow (or any other kind of animal) waste?
I think you overestimate the state of religeous (or any other) tolerance in the US. The slack afforded by a new country such as the US has more to do with the physical space and economic opportunities afforded its citizens than any noble or philosophical underpinning.
As for Muslims in general, I don't think they are any less tolerant than devoted followers of any other religeon.
Suggest to a Jew (or an Israeli) that the state of Israel is an illegitimate construct that will soon exist only as an ignominous example in history books. Demand that Eastern Orthodox Serbs give away part of their country to Albanian Muslims. Tell a church-going, God-fearing resident of 1950s Missisipi that negroes will be allowed to vote, eat in any restaurant or send their children to schools of their choosing. Open a chain of abortion clinics in an area of the US where Evangelical Protestants are the majority. March in a neo-Nazi parade in Los Angeles.
Pick your offense. A drawing of Mohammed, a crucifix in urine, a burning flag, interracial or same-sex couples kissing in public. Every group has something it considers sacrilegious.
Re:Got my CD in the mail a few days ago
on
OpenBSD 4.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I use OpenBSD. My firewall's named linksys and the SSID is default, both for sheer entertainment value.
I guess you could describe that as "What's the sound of one-hand clapping?" or "An inside joke of the nth degree".;-) Entertainment aside, pf users and fans should note the pf syntax changes.
BP PLC successfully inserted a tube into the broken pipe leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday, a person close to the containment operation said, increasing the chances that the company will be able to siphon off much of the oil now gushing into the sea....
It's still unclear whether the new siphoning operation will work. Even in the best-case scenario, the tube won't capture all the leaking oil.
Microsoft's approach involves selling software and client retention. That's not even something I could call evil in the same terms that google seems to be claiming.
Indeed. Just because Microsoft's past behaviour was universally considered unethical (when it wasn't ruled illegal) does mean we should be using terms like evil.
You want free? You lose functionality. That seems perfectly reasonable.
Well, that's certainly a better-phrased bullet point than the one that reads "License agreements, upgrade treadmills and vendor lock-in offer a Genuine Advantage to our customers".
Slashdot Mirror
Got any more brewing
Consider the following as a barley funny rough draught.
My approach for whatever ales me when reading Slashot is to reduce the problem to pint-sized portions, then with stout determination engage in vigorous physical activity to ferment a solution, ideally, starting with a bending of the elbow. When possible, I leave it to the barmaid to determine whether the glass is half-empty or half-full.
Cheers.
I solved the sluggish ISP DNS problem with simply installing bind9
So instead of one problem, you now have two? ;-)
Most of the complaints I read on Slashdot invariably seem to be related to a loss of control. Seems to me that if you object to how others do things, taking charge and doing it yourself when possible is the only logical solution. For the tecnically inclined, that typically amounts to a few extra bucks per month along with, as you pointed out, some minimal work.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity.
I'd suggest that in an environment of social change where all things are hyper-political, personal identity is at the core, but it's much more convoluted than that:
Put crudely, the libertarian mob cries out "I know what I know and I don't need some scientist telling me anything different". If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear other groups (provocateurs, stake-holders, religeous fundamentalists, etc.) chanting along in harmony.
ep, it's full of fat, so is the cauliflower gratin I just had - lightly sauteed cauliflower baked in a mix of egg yolk, butter, creme double and roquefort, add salt, pepper, chili power, saffron and lime juice to taste. That's why I don't gorge myself on it. How about just exerting some self-control instead of lowering calorie intake by pseudo-food substitutes?
Self-control is necessary only if you don't cook. Which few do, attributing the time required as some sort of trade-off, presumably so they can do something more interesting like reading labels on factory food package, or worse, watching more TV.
Admittedly, there is a perversion in a market when everything (except fresh fruits and vegetables are affordable) for daily eating, and sugar is cheapest of all. But if you regularly cook, you can't help but get back in touch with what's healthy and nutritious, and just as important, tasty. Deserts are just one example. They take time to prepare and the better ones require an inordinate amount of expensive ingredients. That you don't want to make them every day translates it into "you don't want to make them every day" which translates into the very simple adage of "you don't eat them every day".
Convenience food? Bad for society, but I've never understood the appeal of such things (with or without nanotechnology). Snacking for me has always been nibbling on the food that's being prepared in the kitchen.
Your recipe sounds yummy, BTW. I find that if your ingredients are high quality, sauteing in olive oil (with a dash of butter) works fine for just about anything. Cauliflower, of course, does seem to want egg yolk. If you enjoy saffron, consider adding some to an ordinary risotto made with something like porcini mushrooms.
Admittedly, there's a certain appeal to a one-card-fits-all type of solution. As a resident of the U.S., I have
a CA state drivers license
a Residency Card
a paper SS card
a paper birth certificate
and living in California, I'm pretty much required to tote around in my wallet
a paper auto registration (that doesn't fit anywhere even when folded)
a glossy paper auto insurance card.
I'd add a Canadian passport to the list, but it's expired, and most people in the U.S. have never owned or seen a passport so they're not much good for anything, least of all buying liquor or getting into a bar. Then, of course, there's all those other cards ...
No wonder my ass hurts.
a decade-old, non-current OS
Your points are generally valid, but let's skip the exaggerations. I'll quote from Wikipedia to make things easy:
So according to the above, Windows XP is, at most, 3 years past the time it was last sold retail. To use a car analogy, if you bought a new car off the showroom floor a few months after at the end of the model year, did you buy a used car?
But even that is overly-simplified. The real world is always more nuanced and complex that, particularly with respect to enterprise customers. For that, you can consult the microsoft site, or talk to your sales rep.
So no, XP is not a decade old. More importantly, XP (and IE6) is very much in use and relied on.
People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be.
You've made some good points, but I'd offer the following: I continue to subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and magazines for a number of reasons, none of which include convenience.
It's certainly possible that a Kindle-like device may revolutionise reading in general, and the newspaper/magazine industry specifically (publishers are certainly hoping it does). But until that happens, I'll continue to pay for print subscriptions .. and bemoan the downward spiral of things.
Running for an office in the US, at least when you want to run for one that surpasses the office of mayor, requires a metric ton of money to get off the ground. It's pretty hard to afford that, especially given the risk and the minuscle chance of succeeding.
Generally true, but there's more the situation that just a metric ton of money. From a randomly selected article:
There's at least three points to recognise here.
First, for a small group of medium or large corporations, those numbers are a pittance. For a subsection of voting public as a whole, it's similarly a pittance. Corporate donors, however, can generally be relied on and are easier to organise, among other things.
Second, voters demand that metric tons of money to be spent. Why? Because they like it like that. Increasingly, voters don't read newspapers or inform themselves of issues, but instead prefer to get their "facts" from their TVs. That means for an elected official, television commercials (the most expensive form of advertising) are the only means to reach voters. Also note that the public seems to have no problem with the length of most campaigns.
Third, public airwaves aren't. The networks demand to be paid for airtime, and the general public seems fine with that, despite apparent societal and legal obligations to the contrary. By contrast, I believe Canada mandates that the networks provide free airtime to political candidates.
The astute reader will note that a large corporation or two could easily fund the election campaigns of any number of key officials across the country and in doing so, buy control of their agenda. The degree to which that already happens is anyone's guess.
I have about 25 tabs open in each of 2 Firefox windows. I also have numerous other windows on each of 7 virtual screens on each of 2 physical screens.
Out of curiousity, what is it that's open in those 25 tabs?
I've never encountered a reason to open more than a handful at a time. I can't even imagine opening that many multiplexed terminals in screen, irrespective of how many jobs I was running, or how many systems I was working on.
"I'm sorry, if you really want to read this post you have to use Flash."
Oops, sorry. I'll try again next year.
And I hope there are many interesting results, other than buncha nerdy half-assed bullshit software projects. There are a lot more out there in life in need and want. Build a better water pump. Build a better wiring harness. Things people in need can use.
Like this pump?
Here's an excerpt:
Sounds like the quintessential hacker.
And for god's sake, stop wasting your good brains cooking up another social network bullshit. You young people can do way way better than that.
Kostner's efforts are the product of fifteen years work and $24 spare cash. And on a somewhat related note, the special submarines that James Cameron wants to contribute, those were financed courtesy of the movie studios. The point here is that it's hard to avoid the fact that the alternative (working on some possibly useless social networking thing) looks a lot more attractive. And do-able.
The USA's movie and music scenes are the biggest in the world because most of the world wants to consume our media.
Depends on how you measure "scene".
Bollywood films, for example, sell more tickets. As for music, there's a fair number of international (read "foreign to the US") artists who routinely sell more records than any of our local pop stars.
Your efforts at giving current events a historical context is to be commended, but I'd offer the comment that most of the changes you describe do not have their roots in the 19th century (i.e., they're not unique to that era), and introducing a thesis with a discussion of the vagaries of mens fashion does little to advance your purpose.
In all, I'm reminded of how political pundits today use the 1970s (or the 1980s) as baseline for their conclusions, with the more historically inclined among them citing occasional references to people and events anchored in time to the country's founding. More informative and useful would be a discussion of the ideas of the Enlightenment (less "founding fathers" and more "Hume and Locke"). More informative still, and much more interesting (and entertaining), would be using ancient Rome.
To use a concrete example, it's easy to assert that the modern environmental movement in the US has its roots in the radicalism of the 1960s (or the oil spill in Santa Barbara). But doing so is so narrow as to miss what underlies those changes. A better approach would be to start with the writings of Thoreau and examine (as Ken Burns did in his documentary "National Parks: America's Best Idea"), the birth and evolution of the park system. From that, you'll gain a real understanding of everything from the tensions surrounding oil drilling in the Gulf to the line of people shopping at a Whole Foods outlet, while everyone else is distracted with making noise or trying to reignite the culture wars of the Reagan era.
Please use the correct terminology. Plants grow through the power of "Photosynthjesus."
For that terminology to be entirely correct, you'd have to pronounce the "j" as a[n] "h".
Maybe it's me, but 5,000 Dell computers all running XP suggests Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering.
He also promised to get rid of Bendy Buses, improve rail and cycle services at no cost to the taxpayer (lolwut?) and (most likely) something about a badger in every pot.
Not being English, I read the above and guessed that a "bendy bus" was some sort of English desert. I was disappointed to learn that it has nothing in common with spotted dick, trifle, brakewell tart, or even a roly-poly, but rather it's just a frigging bus. Or more specifically, an articulated bus.
The badger reference I'm still working on.
Wendell Berry said it very nicely:
Delightful reading. Thanks for that. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know who he was.
So how do you say "I, for one, welcome our bovine overlords" in German? ;-)
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
I mention that because I've read stories of other countries doing what you're doing in German and Austria. In the Netherlands, for example, I've read of manufacturers that operate in such a way that the waste and by-products of both farms and factory are integrated in a near-closed loop not only with respect to materials, but also energy production.
The conclusions from these case studies is that location is key. While that may be true, I'm left wondering why, if location is so important, shipping by rail isn't just as cost effective? Certainly it's good to have things close, but the city of Chicago was built around the processing of cattle that were shipped from other parts of the country directly to "factory" spurs, and the finished "product" distributed from. If shipping by rail is cheap enough for cows (and similarly cheap for coal, oil, corn, water, among any number of other products), why wouldn't it be cheap enough for cow (or any other kind of animal) waste?
I have a bridge I would like to offer you at a very competitive price.
I, too, have a bridge.
Note to the OP: my bridge is nicer, despite the price similarity.
I think you overestimate the state of religeous (or any other) tolerance in the US. The slack afforded by a new country such as the US has more to do with the physical space and economic opportunities afforded its citizens than any noble or philosophical underpinning.
As for Muslims in general, I don't think they are any less tolerant than devoted followers of any other religeon.
Suggest to a Jew (or an Israeli) that the state of Israel is an illegitimate construct that will soon exist only as an ignominous example in history books. Demand that Eastern Orthodox Serbs give away part of their country to Albanian Muslims. Tell a church-going, God-fearing resident of 1950s Missisipi that negroes will be allowed to vote, eat in any restaurant or send their children to schools of their choosing. Open a chain of abortion clinics in an area of the US where Evangelical Protestants are the majority. March in a neo-Nazi parade in Los Angeles.
Pick your offense. A drawing of Mohammed, a crucifix in urine, a burning flag, interracial or same-sex couples kissing in public. Every group has something it considers sacrilegious.
Yeah, I use OpenBSD. My firewall's named linksys and the SSID is default, both for sheer entertainment value.
I guess you could describe that as "What's the sound of one-hand clapping?" or "An inside joke of the nth degree". ;-) Entertainment aside, pf users and fans should note the pf syntax changes.
Now I'm interested in anyone's explanation on why would someone have to face a legal process that's not of his country.
As one example, you might want to consider the the principle that forms the basis of war crimes tribunals.
Then, of course, there's the Polanski case ...
Manifest Destiny ... look it up.
You almost had it. I think you're referring to American Exceptionalism.
As reported by the WSJ
Microsoft's approach involves selling software and client retention. That's not even something I could call evil in the same terms that google seems to be claiming.
Indeed. Just because Microsoft's past behaviour was universally considered unethical (when it wasn't ruled illegal) does mean we should be using terms like evil.
You want free? You lose functionality. That seems perfectly reasonable.
Well, that's certainly a better-phrased bullet point than the one that reads "License agreements, upgrade treadmills and vendor lock-in offer a Genuine Advantage to our customers".