I grew up with Lego, and I can't express the joy it gives me to walk down a toy isle and see a healthy thriving Lego line. As you said, you don't have to buy the themed Lego sets (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Space Police, etc). They are awesome, and if you're going to spend money on toys for a kid, Lego toys allow a child to explore his imagination better than static action figures. My preference is still for the Lego CITY set which are more inline with the Legos I had as a kid. These sets are very elaborate. You can get a Malibu beat house, an entire downtown street corner, a passenger plane, etc. And you can combine sets. You can have the perfect setup for your own SyFy channel weekend movie. You just need a city set, a shark, and some sort of space alien.
If I have any complaint about the themed sets is that when I was a kid, a Lego sets gave you a main advertised assembled form plus a couple of alternate forms. This is still true today in some Lego sets, but in the themed sets like Indiana Jones, you get pieces that were clearly designed with one function in mind. For example, the Indiana Jones Shanghai Chase set gives you the two car from that scene in "Temple of Doom". You can't really use the pieces to make anything else but those cars.
Not every author who would require longer protection is resting on their laurels though. Two of the big focal point of copyright protection, music and television, feature works which were created 20-30+ years earlier, but which are still commercially viable today. How do we protect the valid commercial interests of musicians like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, or The Who - artists with a legacy who still perform this music today? How do we protect the interests of the copyright holders to the soap opera General Hospital which first premiered in 1963 and which has accumulated over 11,885 episodes since?
I can understand not wanting to protect a work that is clearly abandoned, lost to time, something that is being left to rot in a back room somewhere because the copyright holder just doesn't care about it -- something that clearly is not a money maker. But when we're dealing with something like rock music, which is owned by the artist and is very much their pension after 30 years of labor, it seems wrong to say they have to give up that work.
I would like to see a public right to preserve copyright protected works as a fair use exemption. For example, YouTube is full of clips from forgotten video; usually inconsequential local interest stuff, commercials, or TV specials that will never see the light of day again. In software, we similarly have abandonware. I would like a formal right to copy and non-commercially distribute these works in order to ensure that they will always be available somewhere.
No. There's another reason why English in the lingua franca of the Internet. A major feature of the English language is its ability to incorporate foreign words and phrases in a useful way which colors, expands, and even conceptually improves the language. For example, this sentence is perfectly sensible English.
Hey amigo, konichiwa! That was some serious schadenfreude Bob showed earlier when Kate's car broke down, n'est-ce pas?
In this sentence, I used words from a total of five languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish. It doesn't matter that two were Romance languages. I could have used "chombatta" instead of "amigo" and gone completely neo-African cyberpunk. Hell, if I spoke Klingon, I could have added some of that in. The German word, "Schadenfreude" adds a new word to English which explains a concept that doesn't exist in the language already. Notice also, that I could use the Saxon genitive to expression possession instead of the less efficient "the car of Kate".
The result is that English can expand really fast. It's likely the most extensible and expansive language on earth. It is always easily expressible without reliance on numerous accent marks. Japanese requires more effort to express electronically. Japanese also isn't as extensible in written form as English is. Japanese is written using multiple forms: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji. The Japanese pull it off well, but these are hacks - especially romaji. The Chinese have the same problem.
English can grow to accommodate words from other cultures as they become trendy. If Brazil becomes an amazingly cool place culturally, and people outside Brazil start using Brazilian slang, English will better adapt to include Portuguese words than say German or Russian. If I were to bet on any language surviving another couple thousand years and still being structurally the same while still growing, I think it will be English. Sure, we probably not recognize it cause the first person singular pronoun will be "Wa" instead of "I", but a language like Chinese can only maintain its native structure by resisting multi-cultural extension.
True, and I suppose that in the case of the Arctic and Antarctic, breathable air isn't a great advantage when you need to be underground, out from the environment. I don't know to what extent it compares, but I would like to first see a thriving undersea settlement - the key to that being a civilian population including children. I think it would give us some additional insight into what it would take to have a settlement in space.
Do we actually need to be planetside though? The stupid article has half of us focused on wanting to see settlers get at least one shipment of food and porn, and the other half questioning whether we should spend the money at all while we still live in a world where rice takes up to a minute to cook.
If we're talking about loading up the family in a space winnebago anyway, why not a habitable space station with a civilian population floating above the planet? For one, it's much safer than creating a planetside settlement that will be shielded from Mars' environmental threats, particularly Martian dust, which is a bit like lunar dust. If a purpose of colonization is mining; then we will have robots for this.
Also, the consequences of unearthing an ancient Martian artifact will be reduced.
We do have a serious notion of what profitable products exist on Mars. This isn't the 1400s. We have the ability to determine what mineral resources exist on Mars for us to exploit. And commerce is old enough now that even a first year marketing student can dream up products of lesser importance like vials of Mars dust, Martian burial services, postcards, etc.
It's not really that dark when you think about the initial exploration and European settlement of the new world. While cartographers may have had humanitarian intentions for exploring the new world, their financial backers (i.e., the State, the Church) had specific goals: faster, unencumbered trade routes which would give nations a competitive trade advantage, mineral and other resources to exploit, and new Christian converts.
That said, there's nothing wrong with doing something just to say you did it though. I consider that something of a test of humanity; the idea being that if one man can get to the moon, then in effect all mankind can. But, this is an expensive endeavor requiring more than just a ship. Supply ships from the Old World did bring things, but those things were mostly creature comforts. The colonists could make everything they needed
I think what's most likely going to bring serious Martian colonization efforts will be commercial endeavors to bring back mineral resources.
Doesn't the lack of plentiful native species of edible plants and drinkable water mean that we can say it's impossible to live on Mars? Self adaption in the arctic was made much easier by the fact that there was breathable air and fish in the sea.
The link you provided was a pleasant surprise. It wasn't long before my love of so-called T&A flicks and other b-movies as a kid led to me to discover raunchy computer games and animation demos. C64 and Amiga always had the most variety, particularly because of their capabilities. The thought that we would spend 10-15 minutes downloading some silly 2-3 second loop is embarrassing.
It always seemed like on the PC there wasn't much adult content beyond the multi-platform Leisure Suit Larry series, Simusex, and a couple of early CD-ROM interactive fiction and AI based games like "My Virtual Girlfriend..." I used to see some of those advertised in the backpages of Computer Shopper. I always wondered what weird stuff the Japanese had. It was years before I learned about Japanese Ren Ai and Hentai games.
I read it within the context, and thus my response. The fact remains, within the last several hundred years, asteroids have entered the earth, broken up, and killed large numbers of animals and humans as well as destroyed whole areas of land. The events I cited were obviously the most severe cases. Most of the time, a meteor strike only injures or kills a couple of people in a single area. But it's not a great leap to say that if smaller asteroids have been a threat before then large asteroids could be a threat later. And wouldn't it be nice to have *some* protection other than an early warning system and a Hollywood movie type response?
What does it matter what we think anyway? "We're" not wasting resources. I assure you, any contribution you and I personally make to the effort is infinitesimal and would have gone to NASA regardless And that money would have ending up funding other activities your against or running the NASA bureaucracy.
I applaud that you care about self-annihilation, starvation, and overpopulation. Guess what, the government does not. The last politician to seriously give a damn was Reagan, and if you remember both Republicans and Democrats did all they could to prevent him from meeting with the Soviet Premier on any open terms.
So in the entire existence of not just homo sapiens, but the whole mammal kingdom, not one asteroid has ever hit.
Back in 1490, an asteroid supposedly broke apart over a Chinese city called Chiling-yang in Shanxi Province, resulting in a meteor shower that killed 10,000 people. In 1908, an asteroid about 50m across broke apart over Tunguska, Siberia, killing over a thousand reindeer and blowing down about 2,000 square kilometers of forest. In 1937, Asteroid Hermes got uncomfortably close. The problem with Hermes as I understand it is that it has a very chaotic orbit, and repeatedly visits us, sometimes getting really close to Venus as well.
There are numerous other documented meteor strikes that resulted in injuries and deaths. Obviously, asteroids are much bigger, but the point is still made: meteors and asteroids are not a fantastic threat.
The *States* have the death penalty, not the U.S. government.. It's also why U.S. law no longer includes a death penalty, but places like Texas do.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The US Government does have a federal death penalty as well as a whole host of laws which provide for it. Here's a *small* sample:
Furthermore, the federal death penalty can be enacted in any state or territory of the US even in states that do not have a death penalty.
Additionally, the US military also has a death penalty. According to Amnesty International:As of January 2008, nine men are on military death row. Six are African-American. They are held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.
And finally, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provides for the death penalty for detainees of Guatanamo Bay for certain crimes.
In terms of social darwinism, suicide can be either good or bad. If we lose a brilliant contributor to society, then it is clearly bad, but if we lose reclusive asocial wanker who was more likely to take from society than add to it, then suicide is a good thing.
Suicide shouldn't have more than a nominally detrimental effect on the economy, but I can see an exception in the suicide of some greatly revered business or political icon. I noticed that Apple stock took a hit on the hint that Steve Jobs was too ill to run the company any longer.
How can a suicide not be selfish just because it is in protest? A person who would rather kill himself in protest than live under a disagreeable system should be just as selfish by definition as a person who commits suicide rather than suffer painful terminal illness.
I agree with you to the extent that removing religion would not make suicide any less a terrible thing. Morality and the recognition that life has value predate modern religion. It's part of our programming to favor life. And suicide should never be regarded casually because it is always a sad thing when a life is taken.
I can relate with the family. I'm watching my mother die slowly from a very advanced paranoid schizophrenia. She's starving herself to death essentially and depriving herself of sleep because her mind is restless. So, I'm watching a woman, who in her prime was once a beautiful runway model who graced billboards throughout the '70s and early '80s and who loved history and art, wither away. Medically, there's nothing to be done.
It's hardest for the caregivers who have to deal with a loved one's terminal life, and it's made even more difficult by the guilt caregivers often feel over sometimes wishing that their love one would just die already rather than suffer and continue to steal away the life energy of those surrounding them.
If you do decide to end it all, I hope you would have the courtesy of doing so in a manner that doesn't harm your bystanders. Every now and again, I get news about some jackass who decided he wanted to kill himself, and then went out onto the highway to slam his car into another vehicle or walk out in front of traffic or a train. I remember once witnessing the moments after a suicide on an opposing Metra Rail track. We had to sit there for 40 minutes as people came to spray the area. The passengers on the other train had to have been sitting there even longer. All I could think was, that guy was a real dick.
I'm not normally judgmental about suicide. But one shouldn't traumatize people or potentially injure or even kill bystanders in the process. That's just selfish.
When I finally do the deed myself, I wish to be in my nice comfy chair with a favorite drink, a favorite song playing, and maybe my TV playing some video that means a lot to me. I don't have time for displays of machismo, and I'm not rude enough to leave a bloody mess for someone to clean up after.
Are you talking about some NZ employment law? That does sound nice. Had this happened in the US where the employment-at-will doctrine holds, the employer would have been perfectly in its rights to fire her, providing the reason didn't have to do with her being a member of a protected class.
Oh it's not a huge problem. Get Sun's VirtualBox and install Ubuntu on your intel Mac like I did. (My mini, to be exact.) It's snappy, and best of all Virtualbox is free.
Nice. Thanks for the tip. I was thinking more about Fedora, but unless I'm mistaken, there's been more reports of success getting the internal iSight camera working on Ubuntu.
Actually, I've done quite a bit of programming, including game programming. I'm no DirectX guru, but I've used it effectively, and so have many others. It doesn't suck. But sure, it's not perfect. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "amazing", but then there's not a single piece of software out there that I can't find fault with if I choose to look for it; I just choose not to. And personally, I'll take DirectShow over VFW any day. Why are people using OpenAL instead? For the same reason people choose alternatives to DirectX whether it be OpenGL or something more targeted like ClanLib, SDL, or hell, Allegro: there was a reason to. Years ago, I preferred Borland C++ over Watcom. Everyone else around me preferred Watcom. I chose Borland. Was Borland the better compiler? No, but it did the job and I was happy with it. Enough said. Microsoft's APIs are pretty messy, but you learn to deal with it. I'm exclusively Mac now. There's weird stuff happening over on this side of the pond too.
It's been a while, but on Windows, I was most recently using the free VC toolkit along with a slew of stuff I pieced together - yes, including some of the tools from.NET SDK -- a debugger I think. I was pretty happy. I had my own IDE, and I was able to build on the command line happily. Sure, MS wanted me to upgrade to the latest greatest Visual Studio, but I look at these tools like I look at my cameras. Rarely do I *need* an advertised killer feature in a new camera. My current bodies do their job well because I learned to master them. If I were interesting in doing new DirectX programming, I would simply download the latest platform SDK and DirectX SDK and use it with my current tool chain.
I don't know much about the problems in.NET. I never made a.NET application.
From what I've learned, Windows 7 is a greater improvement over Vista than Snow Leopard is over Leopard. Since Vista was a consumer failure and Leopard was a resounding success, it's understandable that there's greater hope for Win7.
I'm actually excited about Windows 7; this coming from a Leopard user. The nice thing about being a Leopard user is that, if I don't like Windows 7, I won't need to downgrade to a worse Windows OS, I can just hop back over to Mac OS X. Still not sure what my hopes are for running Linux on an Intel Mac.
It's been suggested that this was a "last straw" situation. The article doesn't state whether the woman was a problematic employee. ProCare, her employer had no comment other than she caused disharmony in the workplace. Walker's own attorneys acknowledges that she did cause disharmony, but not to an extent meriting termination. It seems really silly that she would get sacked outright for this one incident. It seems more likely that, for whatever reason, Walker just wasn't liked there, and ProCare fired her based on a more long-term opinion of her. Pretty weak though.
Mondays? Mondays?? Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man. Which reminds me, what's this about you and your TPS reports? Didn't you get the memo?
I totally agree. How can you get the full impact of what I've written you if your email client isn't capable of displaying 36 pt comic sans in lavender?
Kidding. As I remember, I was using PINE as my client when people around me started writing HTML format emails. I don't remember now having been able to read those messages; thus your luddite argument. But even after I was able to read HTML emails, I got sick of email forwards full of photos, animated gifs, and even embedded audio. And so I regarded HTML email as generally being obnoxious. And then came the warnings about executable code being embedded in HTML emails. However, looking back, I don't think I ever got a malicious email that didn't depend 100% social engineering to be effective.
That method might be inappropriate given his audience and work environment. I've been exposed to many different writing cultures. Your suggestion is a natural choice in business and especially marketing, and also to an extent in military writing, but not so much in legal writing where things are necessarily verbose.
Personally, I say the answer is more clipart. You can never have enough clipart.
You're not alone. I believe Microsoft has always done a remarkable job in games. DirectX alone has been an amazing accomplishment. And Microsoft's development tools have been very good too.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up with Lego, and I can't express the joy it gives me to walk down a toy isle and see a healthy thriving Lego line. As you said, you don't have to buy the themed Lego sets (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Space Police, etc). They are awesome, and if you're going to spend money on toys for a kid, Lego toys allow a child to explore his imagination better than static action figures. My preference is still for the Lego CITY set which are more inline with the Legos I had as a kid. These sets are very elaborate. You can get a Malibu beat house, an entire downtown street corner, a passenger plane, etc. And you can combine sets. You can have the perfect setup for your own SyFy channel weekend movie. You just need a city set, a shark, and some sort of space alien.
If I have any complaint about the themed sets is that when I was a kid, a Lego sets gave you a main advertised assembled form plus a couple of alternate forms. This is still true today in some Lego sets, but in the themed sets like Indiana Jones, you get pieces that were clearly designed with one function in mind. For example, the Indiana Jones Shanghai Chase set gives you the two car from that scene in "Temple of Doom". You can't really use the pieces to make anything else but those cars.
Not every author who would require longer protection is resting on their laurels though. Two of the big focal point of copyright protection, music and television, feature works which were created 20-30+ years earlier, but which are still commercially viable today. How do we protect the valid commercial interests of musicians like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, or The Who - artists with a legacy who still perform this music today? How do we protect the interests of the copyright holders to the soap opera General Hospital which first premiered in 1963 and which has accumulated over 11,885 episodes since?
I can understand not wanting to protect a work that is clearly abandoned, lost to time, something that is being left to rot in a back room somewhere because the copyright holder just doesn't care about it -- something that clearly is not a money maker. But when we're dealing with something like rock music, which is owned by the artist and is very much their pension after 30 years of labor, it seems wrong to say they have to give up that work.
I would like to see a public right to preserve copyright protected works as a fair use exemption. For example, YouTube is full of clips from forgotten video; usually inconsequential local interest stuff, commercials, or TV specials that will never see the light of day again. In software, we similarly have abandonware. I would like a formal right to copy and non-commercially distribute these works in order to ensure that they will always be available somewhere.
No. There's another reason why English in the lingua franca of the Internet. A major feature of the English language is its ability to incorporate foreign words and phrases in a useful way which colors, expands, and even conceptually improves the language. For example, this sentence is perfectly sensible English.
Hey amigo, konichiwa! That was some serious schadenfreude Bob showed earlier when Kate's car broke down, n'est-ce pas?
In this sentence, I used words from a total of five languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish. It doesn't matter that two were Romance languages. I could have used "chombatta" instead of "amigo" and gone completely neo-African cyberpunk. Hell, if I spoke Klingon, I could have added some of that in. The German word, "Schadenfreude" adds a new word to English which explains a concept that doesn't exist in the language already. Notice also, that I could use the Saxon genitive to expression possession instead of the less efficient "the car of Kate".
The result is that English can expand really fast. It's likely the most extensible and expansive language on earth. It is always easily expressible without reliance on numerous accent marks. Japanese requires more effort to express electronically. Japanese also isn't as extensible in written form as English is. Japanese is written using multiple forms: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji. The Japanese pull it off well, but these are hacks - especially romaji. The Chinese have the same problem.
English can grow to accommodate words from other cultures as they become trendy. If Brazil becomes an amazingly cool place culturally, and people outside Brazil start using Brazilian slang, English will better adapt to include Portuguese words than say German or Russian. If I were to bet on any language surviving another couple thousand years and still being structurally the same while still growing, I think it will be English. Sure, we probably not recognize it cause the first person singular pronoun will be "Wa" instead of "I", but a language like Chinese can only maintain its native structure by resisting multi-cultural extension.
True, and I suppose that in the case of the Arctic and Antarctic, breathable air isn't a great advantage when you need to be underground, out from the environment. I don't know to what extent it compares, but I would like to first see a thriving undersea settlement - the key to that being a civilian population including children. I think it would give us some additional insight into what it would take to have a settlement in space.
Do we actually need to be planetside though? The stupid article has half of us focused on wanting to see settlers get at least one shipment of food and porn, and the other half questioning whether we should spend the money at all while we still live in a world where rice takes up to a minute to cook.
If we're talking about loading up the family in a space winnebago anyway, why not a habitable space station with a civilian population floating above the planet? For one, it's much safer than creating a planetside settlement that will be shielded from Mars' environmental threats, particularly Martian dust, which is a bit like lunar dust. If a purpose of colonization is mining; then we will have robots for this.
Also, the consequences of unearthing an ancient Martian artifact will be reduced.
We do have a serious notion of what profitable products exist on Mars. This isn't the 1400s. We have the ability to determine what mineral resources exist on Mars for us to exploit. And commerce is old enough now that even a first year marketing student can dream up products of lesser importance like vials of Mars dust, Martian burial services, postcards, etc.
It's not really that dark when you think about the initial exploration and European settlement of the new world. While cartographers may have had humanitarian intentions for exploring the new world, their financial backers (i.e., the State, the Church) had specific goals: faster, unencumbered trade routes which would give nations a competitive trade advantage, mineral and other resources to exploit, and new Christian converts.
That said, there's nothing wrong with doing something just to say you did it though. I consider that something of a test of humanity; the idea being that if one man can get to the moon, then in effect all mankind can. But, this is an expensive endeavor requiring more than just a ship. Supply ships from the Old World did bring things, but those things were mostly creature comforts. The colonists could make everything they needed
I think what's most likely going to bring serious Martian colonization efforts will be commercial endeavors to bring back mineral resources.
Doesn't the lack of plentiful native species of edible plants and drinkable water mean that we can say it's impossible to live on Mars? Self adaption in the arctic was made much easier by the fact that there was breathable air and fish in the sea.
The link you provided was a pleasant surprise. It wasn't long before my love of so-called T&A flicks and other b-movies as a kid led to me to discover raunchy computer games and animation demos. C64 and Amiga always had the most variety, particularly because of their capabilities. The thought that we would spend 10-15 minutes downloading some silly 2-3 second loop is embarrassing.
It always seemed like on the PC there wasn't much adult content beyond the multi-platform Leisure Suit Larry series, Simusex, and a couple of early CD-ROM interactive fiction and AI based games like "My Virtual Girlfriend ..." I used to see some of those advertised in the backpages of Computer Shopper. I always wondered what weird stuff the Japanese had. It was years before I learned about Japanese Ren Ai and Hentai games.
I read it within the context, and thus my response. The fact remains, within the last several hundred years, asteroids have entered the earth, broken up, and killed large numbers of animals and humans as well as destroyed whole areas of land. The events I cited were obviously the most severe cases. Most of the time, a meteor strike only injures or kills a couple of people in a single area. But it's not a great leap to say that if smaller asteroids have been a threat before then large asteroids could be a threat later. And wouldn't it be nice to have *some* protection other than an early warning system and a Hollywood movie type response?
What does it matter what we think anyway? "We're" not wasting resources. I assure you, any contribution you and I personally make to the effort is infinitesimal and would have gone to NASA regardless And that money would have ending up funding other activities your against or running the NASA bureaucracy.
I applaud that you care about self-annihilation, starvation, and overpopulation. Guess what, the government does not. The last politician to seriously give a damn was Reagan, and if you remember both Republicans and Democrats did all they could to prevent him from meeting with the Soviet Premier on any open terms.
So in the entire existence of not just homo sapiens, but the whole mammal kingdom, not one asteroid has ever hit.
Back in 1490, an asteroid supposedly broke apart over a Chinese city called Chiling-yang in Shanxi Province, resulting in a meteor shower that killed 10,000 people. In 1908, an asteroid about 50m across broke apart over Tunguska, Siberia, killing over a thousand reindeer and blowing down about 2,000 square kilometers of forest. In 1937, Asteroid Hermes got uncomfortably close. The problem with Hermes as I understand it is that it has a very chaotic orbit, and repeatedly visits us, sometimes getting really close to Venus as well.
There are numerous other documented meteor strikes that resulted in injuries and deaths. Obviously, asteroids are much bigger, but the point is still made: meteors and asteroids are not a fantastic threat.
The *States* have the death penalty, not the U.S. government.. It's also why U.S. law no longer includes a death penalty, but places like Texas do.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The US Government does have a federal death penalty as well as a whole host of laws which provide for it. Here's a *small* sample:
8 U.S.C. 1342
18 U.S.C. 32-34
18 U.S.C. 36
18 U.S.C. 37
18 U.S.C. 241, 242, 245, 247
18 U.S.C. 794
18 U.S.C. 844
18 U.S.C. 924
18 U.S.C. 930
18 U.S.C. 1091
18 U.S.C. 1111
18 U.S.C. 1114 (murder of a federal judge)
18 U.S.C. 1201
18 U.S.C. 1203
18 U.S.C. 1503
You can find more here.
Furthermore, the federal death penalty can be enacted in any state or territory of the US even in states that do not have a death penalty.
Additionally, the US military also has a death penalty. According to Amnesty International: As of January 2008, nine men are on military death row. Six are African-American. They are held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.
And finally, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provides for the death penalty for detainees of Guatanamo Bay for certain crimes.
Careful now, you don't want to end up being outed on Fox News and CNN as a left wing politico who said those words at a nursing home banquet, do ya?
In terms of social darwinism, suicide can be either good or bad. If we lose a brilliant contributor to society, then it is clearly bad, but if we lose reclusive asocial wanker who was more likely to take from society than add to it, then suicide is a good thing.
Suicide shouldn't have more than a nominally detrimental effect on the economy, but I can see an exception in the suicide of some greatly revered business or political icon. I noticed that Apple stock took a hit on the hint that Steve Jobs was too ill to run the company any longer.
How can a suicide not be selfish just because it is in protest? A person who would rather kill himself in protest than live under a disagreeable system should be just as selfish by definition as a person who commits suicide rather than suffer painful terminal illness.
I agree with you to the extent that removing religion would not make suicide any less a terrible thing. Morality and the recognition that life has value predate modern religion. It's part of our programming to favor life. And suicide should never be regarded casually because it is always a sad thing when a life is taken.
I can relate with the family. I'm watching my mother die slowly from a very advanced paranoid schizophrenia. She's starving herself to death essentially and depriving herself of sleep because her mind is restless. So, I'm watching a woman, who in her prime was once a beautiful runway model who graced billboards throughout the '70s and early '80s and who loved history and art, wither away. Medically, there's nothing to be done.
It's hardest for the caregivers who have to deal with a loved one's terminal life, and it's made even more difficult by the guilt caregivers often feel over sometimes wishing that their love one would just die already rather than suffer and continue to steal away the life energy of those surrounding them.
If you do decide to end it all, I hope you would have the courtesy of doing so in a manner that doesn't harm your bystanders. Every now and again, I get news about some jackass who decided he wanted to kill himself, and then went out onto the highway to slam his car into another vehicle or walk out in front of traffic or a train. I remember once witnessing the moments after a suicide on an opposing Metra Rail track. We had to sit there for 40 minutes as people came to spray the area. The passengers on the other train had to have been sitting there even longer. All I could think was, that guy was a real dick.
I'm not normally judgmental about suicide. But one shouldn't traumatize people or potentially injure or even kill bystanders in the process. That's just selfish.
When I finally do the deed myself, I wish to be in my nice comfy chair with a favorite drink, a favorite song playing, and maybe my TV playing some video that means a lot to me. I don't have time for displays of machismo, and I'm not rude enough to leave a bloody mess for someone to clean up after.
Are you talking about some NZ employment law? That does sound nice. Had this happened in the US where the employment-at-will doctrine holds, the employer would have been perfectly in its rights to fire her, providing the reason didn't have to do with her being a member of a protected class.
Oh it's not a huge problem. Get Sun's VirtualBox and install Ubuntu on your intel Mac like I did. (My mini, to be exact.) It's snappy, and best of all Virtualbox is free.
Nice. Thanks for the tip. I was thinking more about Fedora, but unless I'm mistaken, there's been more reports of success getting the internal iSight camera working on Ubuntu.
Actually, I've done quite a bit of programming, including game programming. I'm no DirectX guru, but I've used it effectively, and so have many others. It doesn't suck. But sure, it's not perfect. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "amazing", but then there's not a single piece of software out there that I can't find fault with if I choose to look for it; I just choose not to. And personally, I'll take DirectShow over VFW any day. Why are people using OpenAL instead? For the same reason people choose alternatives to DirectX whether it be OpenGL or something more targeted like ClanLib, SDL, or hell, Allegro: there was a reason to. Years ago, I preferred Borland C++ over Watcom. Everyone else around me preferred Watcom. I chose Borland. Was Borland the better compiler? No, but it did the job and I was happy with it. Enough said. Microsoft's APIs are pretty messy, but you learn to deal with it. I'm exclusively Mac now. There's weird stuff happening over on this side of the pond too.
It's been a while, but on Windows, I was most recently using the free VC toolkit along with a slew of stuff I pieced together - yes, including some of the tools from .NET SDK -- a debugger I think. I was pretty happy. I had my own IDE, and I was able to build on the command line happily. Sure, MS wanted me to upgrade to the latest greatest Visual Studio, but I look at these tools like I look at my cameras. Rarely do I *need* an advertised killer feature in a new camera. My current bodies do their job well because I learned to master them. If I were interesting in doing new DirectX programming, I would simply download the latest platform SDK and DirectX SDK and use it with my current tool chain.
I don't know much about the problems in .NET. I never made a .NET application.
From what I've learned, Windows 7 is a greater improvement over Vista than Snow Leopard is over Leopard. Since Vista was a consumer failure and Leopard was a resounding success, it's understandable that there's greater hope for Win7.
I'm actually excited about Windows 7; this coming from a Leopard user. The nice thing about being a Leopard user is that, if I don't like Windows 7, I won't need to downgrade to a worse Windows OS, I can just hop back over to Mac OS X. Still not sure what my hopes are for running Linux on an Intel Mac.
It's been suggested that this was a "last straw" situation. The article doesn't state whether the woman was a problematic employee. ProCare, her employer had no comment other than she caused disharmony in the workplace. Walker's own attorneys acknowledges that she did cause disharmony, but not to an extent meriting termination. It seems really silly that she would get sacked outright for this one incident. It seems more likely that, for whatever reason, Walker just wasn't liked there, and ProCare fired her based on a more long-term opinion of her. Pretty weak though.
Mondays? Mondays?? Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man. Which reminds me, what's this about you and your TPS reports? Didn't you get the memo?
I totally agree. How can you get the full impact of what I've written you if your email client isn't capable of displaying 36 pt comic sans in lavender?
Kidding. As I remember, I was using PINE as my client when people around me started writing HTML format emails. I don't remember now having been able to read those messages; thus your luddite argument. But even after I was able to read HTML emails, I got sick of email forwards full of photos, animated gifs, and even embedded audio. And so I regarded HTML email as generally being obnoxious. And then came the warnings about executable code being embedded in HTML emails. However, looking back, I don't think I ever got a malicious email that didn't depend 100% social engineering to be effective.
That method might be inappropriate given his audience and work environment. I've been exposed to many different writing cultures. Your suggestion is a natural choice in business and especially marketing, and also to an extent in military writing, but not so much in legal writing where things are necessarily verbose.
Personally, I say the answer is more clipart. You can never have enough clipart.
You're not alone. I believe Microsoft has always done a remarkable job in games. DirectX alone has been an amazing accomplishment. And Microsoft's development tools have been very good too.