They never matched the quotes from their desktop app which prints the shipping labels.
Also, at the end of the month, they append a "fuel charge" that is completely unpredictable and not represented in the cost at the label printing time in any way, shape or form. You can't derive an estimate for it from the price of oil, from the price of fuel, from last month... no way to do it that I know of, and UPS agrees. Best thing you can do is take last month's charge and distribute it across your best estimate of what this month's shipping will be, then incorporate the cumulative delta into the next month, be it plus or minus.
Also, you should *always* have a general estimate process that can price and ship packages without the exact shipping costs from the shipper. If you don't do this, your entire business can grind to a halt. In order to facilitate this, you need detailed shipping analysis modules that can plug back into the shipping price code, with "fudge" inputs from management as called for. If customers object, a simple letter with an explanation that external services (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc) were down, requiring an estimate to be used instead of an actual cost, along with a refund if called for. This is simple, fair and will resolve nearly any issue.
Fixed price shipping solves a large amount of this; drive the fixed price from longer term analysis and the whole issue of external pricing moves out of the "can we ship this package, today" zone for your business, and into the shipper's lap (where it belongs, really.)
The only reason shipping should actually fail is if the shipper doesn't show up, or won't accept the package. Otherwise -- if you designed the system, wrote/managed the code -- it's your fault. Every computer in your system should have failover backup, every machine should be backed up across the network to *at least* two machines with the same hardware configuration, ready to take the load with no more than an IP change, and every machine should be on it's own stable, uninterruptible power supply. Spare routers, switches and external interfaces.
UPS creates a bottleneck by providing underpowered, unreliable, non-backed up systems that talk to UPS in order to create shipping labels; when those go down, you're in trouble. This is, in essence, a UPS problem -- not that anyone will be any happier about it.:o) What you can do (and what we do) is put those machines on their own uninteruptable power supplies, add lots of extra RAM to them (never underestimate what this will do for any version of Windows, much less UPS's junky label apps), and keep them clean and well ventilated. Bloody things in our shipping department run Windows 2000. No kidding. Ugh. UPS insists this is what they need.
With the USPS, when all else fails, put everything in a bag and drop it off at the post office with a smile. Hand 'em a check when they give you a total.
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to let the CPU designers push you into a programming paradigm you are not effective in? Personally, I can see a machine being quite useful with say, 16 or 32 cores just because these machines do more than one thing at a time. But I'd much rather see them speed the cores up than endlessly multiply the number of them. There is a *lot* of room left to do this. Three D architectures offer more connectivity than is currently being used, and both the number and type of one-cycle instructions within a CPU can be increased until the summary is "all of 'em", which I doubt they're going to ever get to, orthogonality can be increased until again, the answer is that all instructions are available to the same degree for all registers and addressing modes no matter what. Compilers like broad orthogonality (and so do assembly programmers, not that there are a lot of us left.)
If CPU designers run off towards the horizon making many-core designs, what if no significant number of people follow them there? Which... frankly... pretty much seems to be the case. I've an 8-core machine, and just about the only things that actually use those cores together are the easy ones: graphics and waveform encoding/decoding. Aperture sure enough uses all my cores in a well-balanced fashion and can build a JPEG in a snap; but that's a far cry from my web browser doing the same thing while trying to render a page.
I'm just saying that the direction the CPU folks have chosen lately doesn't have to be the direction we actually end up going, and there are points in favor of this as the best choice.
[Football is] a game of simulated warfare and athletic strategy.
ROFL:o) Hardly. Chess is simulated warfare from the viewpoint of the generals, where the soldiers don't matter and the strategy, tactics, and outcome of the battle is everything -- just like real life. Fighting is *actual* warfare, where the viewpoint of the soldier is the primary draw, at least to the degree that the rule-makers let it be. Football is... other. If the spandex outfits, butt grabbing, and superfluous piles-o-guys don't cue you in, that's simply a lack of perception on your part. It doesn't change anything. Football is as intentionally homoerotic as "professional wresting", for many of the same reasons, and no amount of rationalizing will change that. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't like it, or that it's bad; that's entirely something coming from other comments. I'm just saying that I'd like a channel where they focus on the cheerleaders, because that's what interests *me*, as opposed to the teams of nattily dressed fellows out there jumping all over each other. The game itself wasn't conceived in such a way as to appeal to me, and that's fine. Cheerleaders, however...:o)
No, that doesn't follow. Being enthusiastically hetero is not at all the same as being homophobic; I'm not interested in the sexuality of men or sex with men, it's simply boring -- doesn't result in any sexual reaction at all. Which is, in fact, probably the main reason why football bores me. The fact is, male on male sexuality is neither offensive or fearsome to me. The more men that prefer that path, the more women left for exclusively straight guys like me, so by all means, have at it. You can count on me to support your quest for rights and equality on every front. As here, for instance.
One of the first comments, according to the commentators: "More cheerleaders."
Not surprising. There are basically three classes of people who watch pro football.
First, there are pre-pubescent kids, who think it's just a game because that's what daddy told 'em (while mommy rolls her eyes.)
The second (and the majority, no doubt) consists of those adults who truly enjoy watching a bunch of well-built guys run around in really tight, shiny outfits, regularly spanking each other's butts in an "encouraging" manner and hugging each other, playing with balls, all the while hoping for a deep, squirming pile of these guys to develop (baseball is very similar, only there's a fair bit of spitting and the piles are generally limited to twosies);
The third consists of those who want to watch beautiful cheerleaders perform routines that emphasize their feminine, athletic and desirable traits, while wearing the skimpiest possible outfits. This group is generally under-represented because (a) with televised games, the cameras spend far too little time on the cheerleaders, and (b), when you're there in person, there are comparably few seats with a decent view of the cheerleaders, barring the use of a set of good stabilized binoculars, which tends to be tiring and expensive.
Personally, I'm in the last group; the day I watch part of a pro football game with any serious interest at all on the tube is the day they devote an HD channel entirely to the cheerleaders. 3D would definitely be an incentive, as would more daring uniforms. As for the boys in tight outfits... not really interesting, thanks. But for those of you who swing that way, by all means, please enjoy. You can't live your whole life in the closet, after all, nor should you have to.
I develop Windows-based image manipulation software in C, and I also use said software, so I am constantly moving image files in and out of the VFS, that is, between my Mac and the VM running XP. Right now I'm working on image stacking capabilities, of use to me directly in unguided, bare-camera astrophoto foolery, working them into the layer handling model in as transparent a manner as I can manage. So I shoot images (EOS 50D), import 'em into the Mac via USB, keep the photo library on the Mac (Apple's "Aperture"), etc. So for instance, should I want a series to stack, I clip them to the dimensions of the stellar object, shove em in a shared folder and then grab that in XP. I also export source code regularly into the Mac filesystem, where it exists separately from Windows and where it is automatically backed up for me.
Unless all your files and work only move in one direction (out of the VM and never into it), then you should run a virus scanner.
Images from my camera are not a threat to either OSX or XP. And the idea that something *running* on my Mac would attack my virtual XP installation... no, don't think so. Nor is my own software a threat. No games, in fact other than my own stuff and Microsoft's VC++ to develop it, I don't think I've run a windows app in a couple of years. See, at some point, you just have to look rationally at what you're doing, recognize there's no credible threat vector, and just relax.
On my desktop, I have 16 gigs of RAM, four high-res monitors, and 8 cores @ 3 GHz; that machine hardly even *notices* when XP is running. My laptop has 2 gigs of RAM, just one of which I hand to XP, and 2 cores @ 2.4 GHz. It somehow stumbles along [laughing.] I have to say, you have an amusing perception of "proper" hardware management. I thought these machines were here to do what I wanted them to do. Silly me!
If you tell me that Outlook in a winXP VM uses less memory than the same Outlook process in native winXP, I'm calling bull
I'm sorry, I thought I'd made it clear that I ran XP in a sandbox, off the net. All my communications, calendering, etc. run under OSX. With this in mind, why would I use Outlook? And why would any XP process use less memory in a virtual machine than in a hardware environment? Do you know what a virtual machine is?
Don't give me the BS about "I don't need a virusscan/malware checker" if you're running XP in a VM.
I'm running XP in a VM without network access, and yes indeed, I do not need, and do not use, a virus checker.
My main applications at work at Outlook (plus plugins), Visio and various internal websites that use ActiveX controls or require IE (Oracle Projects!).
I'm very sorry.
Btw... don't forget the lessons of OS/2. It could run windows 3.11 applications, but not nearly as fast or efficiently as a native OS/2 Warp app.
Doesn't apply to a virtual machine. This isn't OSX running Windows apps, this is Windows running windows apps.
Well, this Apple "fanboi" is, in my own small way, annoying to Microsoft's OS ambitions because I can run XP in a virtual machine that moves with me across my various desktops, laptop, etc, in a 100% consistent "hardware" environment so I can stay on the hardware upward speed curve as Apple brings out new machines, but I don't have to deal with XP not understanding later architectures, nor with it "playing in the street" outside a network sandbox.
I can keep XP safely off the net, even while OSX is fully connected; I can keep it safely backed up outside the world it knows about; and I can knock it back to a "newly installed, but fully enabled" condition by simply copying one file. I can maintain a full software development environment within this virtual XP machine, and if I need something from the net, I'll get it with the Apple and safely hand it over using a virtual filesystem.
No more Microsoft upgrades. Period. Microsoft has seen their last OS dollar from me. And I'm glad; I feel that it was an abusive relationship, both as a developer, and as a user.
I keep a couple virtual linux machines available on my desktop as well, Ubuntu and Redhat; don't have to go to such extremes, as they're about as safe on the net as OSX is. Someday, if they ever develop an actual open, standardized GUI API that is free for everyone to use, regardless of why they want to use it, I may develop for linux, too. In the meantime, I'm keeping my hand in. I like linux, and I particularly like Ubuntu.
That "lots of ads" thing? Nope, no ads. That's one benefit of paying for the service. The jocks do push things they think are of general interest, like football scores and who is playing who and where, so it isn't entirely noise-free, but it is close.
Another benefit of radio over the iPod is that you're connected to the real world; if something happens, you hear about it. There are situations where that might be important, and there are situations where it certainly is at least desirable.
Satellite radio is, on some channels, uncensored. That's something I treasure. Important for listening? No, not really. But it is very nice to hear people speaking and performing without the government muzzling them. Particularly in the case of rock, where profanity keeps a very large number of tunes from ever getting on standard radio (if they ever deviated from their playlists, as if that'll ever happen.)
There are very large areas of the country where there is no service you can use to receive radio. You can't use an iPhone within hundreds of miles of where I live (they locked it to AT&T, and AT&T isn't very interested in Montana); and road trips are eight, ten, even twelve hours, during which we are almost pitifully grateful to have XM/Sirius. There's no digital service you can use to connect to the Internet barring a satellite connection on the roof of your vehicle. Which, of course, is what the XM/Sirius widget is in the first place. It just connects to them instead of the Internet, that's all.
We do have one (yes, that's *1*) FM station we can hear, as long as we're within 30 miles of town or so. We get the farm report, some country, some top 40, "auctions" of local goods and services, and the one thing I am grateful for, the lost pets report. Someone found my cat once. One of the charity things I was involved with brought PBS radio here; I contributed a few grand, they put up a translator, and if you're within, oh, five miles of it in the right direction, you can listen to PBS via FM. Having put money into it, you'd think I'd listen, but I'm somewhat conservative on many issues and frankly, they drive me a little nuts.
At night, we can hear quite a bit of the broadcast AM band, but that's really deteriorated into far left and far right and wackos, with a sprinkling of country (which you may enjoy, but no one in my family does.)
Now, I certainly recognize that if they can't make a viable business out of satellite radio, it is going to go away, but when urban dwellers generalize as if the entire country has access to the amenities they do, well, I'm afraid that's not the entire picture. It'll be a real loss for us. We have satellite radios in all our vehicles in the family, at work, and in my home. The day they go dead will be a day of mourning around here.
For the purpose of training the muscle fiber to relax, passive extension is both more effective and considerably less damaging than any active stretch.
Expert dynamic stretching can be very safe; it is a progressive, low-risk sequence of actions performed by someone very familiar with their limits and the exercises themselves that does not put the practitioner at significant risk. All stretching should be preceded by a warm up. As I said before, passive stretching is safer for the non-expert. I also mentioned that training the antagonist to relax is important. I use passive stretching to train for these reasons, among others (such as lawyers...)
Light active stretching can help with optimizing the alignment of the muscle fibers, but it shouldn't be done pre-workout, and it can actually antagonize the relaxation of the muscle since as one approaches the extension limit of the muscle a protective reflex causes the muscle to tense up.
Yes. PNF, most commonly dealt with using hold-relax techniques in the passive stretching context. I actively teach this myself in order to assist in training the new practitioner to fully extend, and it is one of the reasons I focus on passive stretching with interspersed warm-ups rather than dynamics.
Nothing against you in particular but I have yet to meet any athletics instructor that actually studied kinesiology to any technical extent, especially in martial arts.
Well, now you have. Here's part of my martial arts library (behind the trailing leg...:-) and here's my main library.
The advice of nearly everyone else is derived from hearsay and anecdotal observation.
Well, not to diminish the usefulness of a technical education in any way, but in turn, you should be careful not to dismiss the observation of people in the field, who deal with real-world issues constantly. Yes, fads and myths get around, but I think you'll find that there is quite a large segment of instructors who manage to not swallow them because there is no confirming research. Personally, I can always wait until there is actual data out there before I subject my students to a new idea in this particular area.
There isn't really good evidence that stretching prior to activity reduces injury.
I'm going to just go ahead and disagree on that one based on four decades of experience across several martial arts, almost exactly half of which has been spent as an in-class instructor.
Furthermore, in a purely practical sense, I've got to think you'd be amazed at the difference in the body's reaction if I took the average person's leg and suddenly folded it up to their shoulder (a) with no prior stretching activity, or (b) with proper stretching beforehand. In the former case, there would probably be screaming, limping, and perhaps an attorney involved, and in the latter, no more than mild discomfort, if that.
As I said originally, if the activity involves large range of motion and not just bursts of short range power, one had best be stretching beforehand. You are of course free to disagree, but you'll still be wrong.:-)
Some of the other stuff you talk about with muscle fibers, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. A better analogy for muscle fibers is a pneumatic or hydraulic cylinder.
It wasn't an analogy; it was a (admittedly vague) physical description of what actually happens. I elaborate on it here and also provide a reference for you to peruse; you can learn more about it once you have grasped the general concept.
The muscles aren't stronger/weaker because of more/less overlap, it is the mechanical advantage or disadvantage of the particular joint angle and where the muscles attach around that joint. Some angles are "stronger" than others.
Yes, in fact, they are - it is the overlap of two proteins that generates power. When the muscle is extended, the overlap is increased, and the power generated by the reduced overlap of the proteins when the cell is part of the recruited set is reduced. Leverage at the joint is also involved, as I have already said. Go read the other post and follow the link to the reference. Pay attention to how actin and myosin are involved.
As a martial artist, I now only do dynamic stretches before practice or sparring.
Dynamic stretches keep you warm while you stretch; that's a good compromise, though care must be taken to work into the full range of motion in a progressive manner as the stretches take effect, so as to avoid injury from ballistic over-extension. However, short periods of passive stretching interspersed with warm-ups accomplishes the same thing and reduces the risk of injury, especially for less experienced practitioners. What you don't want to do is sit on your butt for half an hour stretching. Very little good comes of that.
I said that "working elements of the muscle fibers are laid against each other in pairs with an intervening layer between"; I was attempting to be general. The specifics: Muscle cells contain filaments of two protein types, actin and myosin, which slide past each other during contraction. After contraction, ATP (from the mitochondria) relaxes the filaments and they return to their normal positions. The overlapping region betwen the two proteins behaves as I described; the more overlap there is, the more power can be generated. When the muscle fiber (which is a considerably more macro structure than the cells that make it up) is extended, the overlap of the actin and myosin filaments in the many cells that make up the fiber is lesser, and lesser power can be generated.
Go read an anatomy book.
I know how the system works, and my description was accurate — just not very specific. As you will find out if youread up on muscle anatomy.:)
The 30 second stretches are for after your workout, during the "cooling off" period.
That may be adequate for running, but it won't do for regimens with extreme range of motion, such as martial arts. We stretch for half an hour prior to a workout punctuated with short one-minute warm-ups every five minutes or so, and it definitely reduces injuries (which, as the GP has it, is the intent... not for "strength"... in fact, I've never heard — anywhere — that the act of stretching increases strength for the immediately succeeding session of exercise. I've been teaching martial arts for over twenty years.)
I can also tell you that if your body isn't prepared to reach an extended position, and it has to go there, either because you forced it to or someone else did, you had better have stretched first and be warmed up.
As for this line in TFS: "The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds -- known as static stretching -- primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them", the science of this has been known for many years. What happens is that the working elements of the muscle fibers are laid against each other in pairs with an intervening layer between; the more overlap, the more power can be generated because the overlapping surface area of the layer between is where the work gets done. When fibers are stretched, there is less overlap, hence the muscle can generate less power, but the muscle is longer.
Think of your forearm extended, and look at your bicep... see how it is long? Lots of fiber layers have slid against each other and now have considerably less overlap. Now move your arm to the 90 degree position at the elbow, and look at your bicep; it's bunched up, even if it isn't tense: many fiber layers are now slid to an overlapping position.
The number of fibers involved is the factor that determines the total amount of strength in your motion; high recruitment of fibers results in a strong motion, low recruitment results in a weak motion. We train to develop the ability to generate high recruitment on demand. But no matter the recruitment, if you start from a highly non-overlapped position, eg a stretched one, you'll generate less power with the stretched muscle.
This is the basis for moves like arm locks; if the arm is extended, not only is the leverage at the joint reduced, making it more difficult to close the arm against the lock, but the muscle is extended by the lock so that fiber overlap is minimal, which reduces the amount of force that can be generated by the muscle — it is literally a "double-whammy", and accounts for why a fully executed lock is so hard to exit using direct force (correct exits involve rotation of the arm or the lock itself in order to effect closure of the joint, and a good lock prevents such rotation.)
For any motion, you typically will have two muscle groups involved; the agonist, which is the muscle doing the work, and an antagonist, which is the muscle that would be responsible to reverse the motion. In the case of bending at the elbow, to close the arm, the bicep is the agonist and the triceps is the antagonist. If you are trying to open your arm, that is, extend your forearm, then the roles are reversed: The triceps is the agonist and the bicep is the antagonist. One of the key elements of controlling the force your body can generate is learning to really relax the antagonist, and again, stretching helps by teaching you what a really relaxed and extended muscle feels like; it is difficult to minimize fiber recruitment if you don't know what it feels like and the muscle isn't accustomed to that condition.
Anyway, my recommendation is that athletes ignore this report entirely; stretching significantly increases your range of motion, particularly in your ankles, legs, groin, waist, wrists, fingers, back, neck and shoulders, and to the degree that your sport requires (or risks) large range o
Is murder not a non-verbal communication of "I want you dead"?
No. It is an action that goes well beyond communication. Communication is information transfer, which by its very nature has primary effect only on the sensory organs and subsequently the mind. Taking someone's life is not information transfer. Arguing that it is for the purpose of characterizing communication pushes the metaphor beyond the bounds of the reasonable.
1. What do you think of the Preamble?
I think it is an interesting (and moving) statement of intent, having no force in law. Much like the prefatory phrase of the 2nd amendment, and a number of other literary flourishes in the document. To have such force, content needs to be couched in the form of a directive or directives.
If Congress is explicitly limited to their enumerated powers, then what use is the First Amendment in the first place?
Yep, that was the argument. And it was a good one. If congress was going to behave, truly, the bill of rights was superfluous. But again, we come down to a bunch of really smart people who thought that some repetition would perhaps make up for human nature. It didn't, and congress is entirely out of hand, but that is what I think the intent was. I'm fully prepared to agree that it didn't work, though.
Don't you think that there's a fair chance that in the context of the times, this is not at/all/ what our founding fathers meant for the first amendment to protect? It seems to me it was written with the intent of making sure people could speak out against the state without being silenced. This wasn't written because at the time, it would have been understood.
I think that after careful consideration, they determined that blanket protection of all speech was the best way to achieve precisely that. At the same time, such a construction serves the cause of liberty, both personal and group, about which they were extremely passionate.
If you doubt this, what do you think the reaction would have been if someone publicly proclaimed themselves a Satan-worshipper in the 1800s? Or perhaps published written pornographic material and distributed it at local schoolhouses? Would the 'artist' who made a shit-covered statue of 'Virgin Mary' have had his rights protected at that time?
I think that the constitution has been poorly obeyed by the government and poorly understood by the rank and file citizens since the day it was conceived, much less ratified. The consequences of prodding the religious have always been potentially dire. Mythos does not go gladly into the night, nor do those under its influence suffer criticism well, regardless of the form.
Again, I agree with teh end result - there's NO benefit to censoring "obscenity". However, I do think that protecting it was much more likely an unplanned side effect of the first amendment than it was something that the founding fathers specifically felt should be protected.
Oh, I don't know. You should look into some of their peccadilloes; very entertaining. Benjamin Franklin in particular, but not just him, either.:) Franklin was not only a dirty old man, he was a funny dirty old man.
Assume you interpret the First Amendment strictly. Does "speech" incorporate only verbal communication of sounds recognized as language, or does it also mean non-verbal expression
In today's terminology, speech means communication. At the time, speech - written, verbal - comprised communication. They were all they had; it is only reasonable for them to write to protect what they had. They used a general term of art. I'm perfectly satisfied that if you could put them on a round-table today, explain what email is, and ask them, "Is speech in an email protected", or is "speech on radio or television protected" that they'd first say "yes, of course, ALL speech is protected", and second "You woke us up to ask THAT? Are you IDIOTS?"
And therein lies the problem with literalism
I am not engaged in "literalism." I am focused on a legitimate striving to (a) figure out what they meant in the first place, and (b) apply that to the current situation as they would have, based on a solid background of studying their underlying intent to grant liberty to the individual and to restrain the government as much as possible in any area where it might infringe on person, property, commerce and personal choice (not necessarily in that particular order.) This is what the discussions of the day were about; this is how the bill of rights came into being (other than doubt that the government would be sufficiently restrained by enumerated powers, which turned out to be quite prescient.)
Oh, and let's not forget that the Constitution is, in effect, a contract.
No, it's not a contract. It is law. It is the constituting authority for the US federal government, and the overriding authority for US state government. It does not bind the people; we are not signatory to it, we have not sworn an oath to it, and we (the currently living population) had nothing to do with either its authoring or its implementation. It no more binds us to anything than you would be bound if your best friend signed you up for a loan. Only you can commit to being engaged in a contract. Doesn't matter how enthusiastic the other party is, or for what reason(s.)
The constitution binds the government because it is, in fact, the government's constituting authority; officials, in particular the ruling 545 (435 house, 100 senate, nine judges, and the executive) are bound by oath to obey the constitution. We, the people, are not. We've signed nothing and sworn nothing. What we (not the government) generally accept as a social contract is that our ancestors having given this very limited authority to the federal and state governments in the form of an authorized document they were supposed to obey, we will abide by the government's exercise of power in these areas only. The government, having stepped out of those bounds some time ago, is on very thin ice indeed.
When terms are ambiguous (as I hope I've demonstrated by this point in my post)
No, you haven't demonstrated that at all. You tried to cast "speech" as ambiguous; but it isn't. Straightforward fail.
And the greatest strict constructionist, Scalia? Well, why don't you read his opinion this summer in Heller, the gun control case.
I've read Heller front to back. My position on Heller is that it is a ludicrous decision, based upon ideas not in the constitution: For instance, there's no constitutionally explicit "right to self defense", a key point in the majority argument. The operative clause of the amendment reads "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The people of Washington DC were prevented from keeping and bearing arms by the law in question; bloody thing is unconstitutional. That's all they needed to do. But in Hel
That's one o' them thingies that lets a truck go over a river without gettin' all wet.
I can definitely understand how some bridges could be perceived as similar to the ability of the constitution to keep your freedom of speech from becoming submerged.
It's not an elephant. It's a dead horse. The SCOTUS has been ignoring the constitution in favor of direct violations of it for many years.
The constitution is 100% clear on this matter: Congress shall make no law......abridging the freedom of speech. Anyone who is even nominally literate knows exactly what "abridge" means today; a few minutes research will turn up that it meant the same thing in 1788. The bottom line is simple — there is no constitutional authority available (to anyone at the federal level, including the judiciary) to abridge (curtail, shorten) the freedom to speak in any form or fashion* by law, directly or indirectly (as per legislative surrogates like the FCC.)
Further, as this is an element of the bill of rights, the states don't have this authority either as per the 14th amendment, and as cities, towns, counties etc. all must comply with the same things that states have to comply with, this authority devolves to the people, as per the 10th amendment.
The fact that this is not the analysis of the SCOTUS is a direct indicator of the justices violating their oaths.
Not that it's going to change. When Bush said the constitution is "just a piece of paper", he was speaking a truth no one wants to admit. The feds, because they want you to think you live in a constitutional republic, the people, because they want to think they have a reasonable government. But the fact is, the only remaining effective elements of the bill of rights are amendments three and seven. Sadly, this is not because they are well written or somehow better than the others; it is simply that the government has had no need to make exception to them.
(*) Yes, that means that libel and slander laws are unconstitutional, that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater should be perfectly OK (and by the way, it makes sense that it should be OK), and that the seven "dirty" words should be just as OK to say on the air as "kitten" and "politician." The founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the first amendment. They didn't mean "unless the government says otherwise", they were explicitly limiting federal power because they knew it would be abused. And they have turned out to be 100% correct. Unfortunately, the constitution isn't up to the task of stopping our political apparatus from doing whatever they want to. Welcome to the machine.
Honestly, the most creative times I've experienced have been driving, both with and without passengers, on trips in the two to five hour range. I live in NE Montana, and there are plenty of such trips that offer few distractions (other traffic, road signs or lights, other roads.)
Sometimes I talk to my passengers; sometimes to myself. I go over the subject matter this way and that, and I try to use metaphors to gently prod myself into seeing other angles (by pushing the metaphors until they either break, register completely, or actually show me something.)
My sweetheart, who is both brilliant and kind enough to let me talk technically at her for considerable lengths of time, assists by letting me go through this process:
I'll pick something that either simply seems to need work or is an actual problem, and I'll explain to her exactly how I see the issue at the moment, complete with explanations of why I don't do this, or why I did that. Sometimes - not always by any means, but a reasonable number of times - I run down into a splutter, asking myself... "Why? Why did I do that? Uh... " or "man, that sure could have been done better..."
Which is followed by pulling over and making a note for later.:-)
The thing is, she's not technical (in my field) so I have to explain everything, pretty much. Metaphors help a lot too. But because she's actually paying attention, there's no getting away with hand-waving. I find that many times, inspiration lurks in areas I've discarded as no longer worthy of much (if any) attention. This process forces the issue.
Time of day doesn't seem to matter in my case. Coffee, however, is definitely involved.
We do this for management of our businesses as well; we have a couple retail operations, a software store, a lingerie store (stockings, mostly), a martial arts studio and a portrait photo business, plus I do some consulting here and there. We do a lot of juggling, and it helps to rattle ideas around in an unstructured environment. With the cell phones off!!!
No. You can go on all you want about "needed to change" and "autofix" and etc, but the bottom line is that this code presently isn't broken, and I am not about to fix code that isn't broken. It makes no sense on any level; financially, time-wise, or strategically. I have better things to do than refactor my code for entirely arbitrary reasons. Perhaps I just place a different value on my time than you do; that's fine. You should, of course, feel free to do whatever you like.
If you move to 3.0, unless you have those changes already, it just won't work.
...which is why some heavy python users, myself included, aren't going to use 2.6 or 3.0. I have huge amounts of python in operation, and the very last thing I'm going to do is break any of it with an incompatible language that happens to slightly resemble python (no matter who wrote it, and no matter what they call it, it isn't python if it can't run mundane python code.)
Every once in a while we see one of these "brainstorms"; for example, Microsoft pulled VB from the office suite... only to put it back. Because the idea was stupid; there was a ton of production code / applications they flat out broke. Python's doing exactly the same thing, and it's not going to work out for the same reason(s.)
If you're going to modify a language, you *must* do it in a compatible manner, otherwise what you're doing is making a new language that will require an entirely new community. Names notwithstanding, and resemblance beyond incompatibilities notwithstanding.
Re:You are a sick man .. can I catch it, please ?
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Bad Signs For Blu-ray
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My setup is a consequence of an confluence of opportunities. I already had projection equipment, but it was shoehorned into a small home. We were looking for a new home with a lot of space, but nothing was really coming on the market. Then this church became available (25k for 5000 sq ft on two lots!), and we agreed that we would buy it and build an interior into it. So during this process, I was standing in the middle of this huge, empty space when I noticed that the wall behind the pulpit and above the chair-rail looked exactly 16:9 to my eye. Turns out it's within just a couple of percent. So we decided to use that space, as it was, as the screen area. The only thing I ended up changing specifically to accommodate this was the projector, so as to get one that would throw a 17 foot diagonal image at 1080p (I picked an Optoma HD80, works great.)
As far as benefits, they are myriad; the big screen is really fun and very revealing of detail, and there's a huge list of why watching at home is better than watching in a theater, once you have an HD display. Do you need a list of those?
We've been "moved in" for about two years, but it'll be at least 2010 before we're done building the interior. Right now we're doing stained glass for the windows (secular themes) and a deck; there are still interior walls to be sheeted, etc, but it's coming along. I'm not sure if you can generalize such a situation to your case, but that's how it happened here.:) Some of the pics of the build are in this flickr set.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, at the end of the month, they append a "fuel charge" that is completely unpredictable and not represented in the cost at the label printing time in any way, shape or form. You can't derive an estimate for it from the price of oil, from the price of fuel, from last month... no way to do it that I know of, and UPS agrees. Best thing you can do is take last month's charge and distribute it across your best estimate of what this month's shipping will be, then incorporate the cumulative delta into the next month, be it plus or minus.
Also, you should *always* have a general estimate process that can price and ship packages without the exact shipping costs from the shipper. If you don't do this, your entire business can grind to a halt. In order to facilitate this, you need detailed shipping analysis modules that can plug back into the shipping price code, with "fudge" inputs from management as called for. If customers object, a simple letter with an explanation that external services (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc) were down, requiring an estimate to be used instead of an actual cost, along with a refund if called for. This is simple, fair and will resolve nearly any issue.
Fixed price shipping solves a large amount of this; drive the fixed price from longer term analysis and the whole issue of external pricing moves out of the "can we ship this package, today" zone for your business, and into the shipper's lap (where it belongs, really.)
The only reason shipping should actually fail is if the shipper doesn't show up, or won't accept the package. Otherwise -- if you designed the system, wrote/managed the code -- it's your fault. Every computer in your system should have failover backup, every machine should be backed up across the network to *at least* two machines with the same hardware configuration, ready to take the load with no more than an IP change, and every machine should be on it's own stable, uninterruptible power supply. Spare routers, switches and external interfaces.
UPS creates a bottleneck by providing underpowered, unreliable, non-backed up systems that talk to UPS in order to create shipping labels; when those go down, you're in trouble. This is, in essence, a UPS problem -- not that anyone will be any happier about it. :o) What you can do (and what we do) is put those machines on their own uninteruptable power supplies, add lots of extra RAM to them (never underestimate what this will do for any version of Windows, much less UPS's junky label apps), and keep them clean and well ventilated. Bloody things in our shipping department run Windows 2000. No kidding. Ugh. UPS insists this is what they need.
With the USPS, when all else fails, put everything in a bag and drop it off at the post office with a smile. Hand 'em a check when they give you a total.
Another question you might ask yourself is, are you going to let the CPU designers push you into a programming paradigm you are not effective in? Personally, I can see a machine being quite useful with say, 16 or 32 cores just because these machines do more than one thing at a time. But I'd much rather see them speed the cores up than endlessly multiply the number of them. There is a *lot* of room left to do this. Three D architectures offer more connectivity than is currently being used, and both the number and type of one-cycle instructions within a CPU can be increased until the summary is "all of 'em", which I doubt they're going to ever get to, orthogonality can be increased until again, the answer is that all instructions are available to the same degree for all registers and addressing modes no matter what. Compilers like broad orthogonality (and so do assembly programmers, not that there are a lot of us left.)
If CPU designers run off towards the horizon making many-core designs, what if no significant number of people follow them there? Which... frankly... pretty much seems to be the case. I've an 8-core machine, and just about the only things that actually use those cores together are the easy ones: graphics and waveform encoding/decoding. Aperture sure enough uses all my cores in a well-balanced fashion and can build a JPEG in a snap; but that's a far cry from my web browser doing the same thing while trying to render a page.
I'm just saying that the direction the CPU folks have chosen lately doesn't have to be the direction we actually end up going, and there are points in favor of this as the best choice.
Just some thoughts.
ROFL :o) Hardly. Chess is simulated warfare from the viewpoint of the generals, where the soldiers don't matter and the strategy, tactics, and outcome of the battle is everything -- just like real life. Fighting is *actual* warfare, where the viewpoint of the soldier is the primary draw, at least to the degree that the rule-makers let it be. Football is... other. If the spandex outfits, butt grabbing, and superfluous piles-o-guys don't cue you in, that's simply a lack of perception on your part. It doesn't change anything. Football is as intentionally homoerotic as "professional wresting", for many of the same reasons, and no amount of rationalizing will change that. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't like it, or that it's bad; that's entirely something coming from other comments. I'm just saying that I'd like a channel where they focus on the cheerleaders, because that's what interests *me*, as opposed to the teams of nattily dressed fellows out there jumping all over each other. The game itself wasn't conceived in such a way as to appeal to me, and that's fine. Cheerleaders, however... :o)
I didn't say it was a bad thing. :o)
No, that doesn't follow. Being enthusiastically hetero is not at all the same as being homophobic; I'm not interested in the sexuality of men or sex with men, it's simply boring -- doesn't result in any sexual reaction at all. Which is, in fact, probably the main reason why football bores me. The fact is, male on male sexuality is neither offensive or fearsome to me. The more men that prefer that path, the more women left for exclusively straight guys like me, so by all means, have at it. You can count on me to support your quest for rights and equality on every front. As here, for instance.
Yep. The one with the cheerleaders in it. :o)
Not surprising. There are basically three classes of people who watch pro football.
First, there are pre-pubescent kids, who think it's just a game because that's what daddy told 'em (while mommy rolls her eyes.)
The second (and the majority, no doubt) consists of those adults who truly enjoy watching a bunch of well-built guys run around in really tight, shiny outfits, regularly spanking each other's butts in an "encouraging" manner and hugging each other, playing with balls, all the while hoping for a deep, squirming pile of these guys to develop (baseball is very similar, only there's a fair bit of spitting and the piles are generally limited to twosies);
The third consists of those who want to watch beautiful cheerleaders perform routines that emphasize their feminine, athletic and desirable traits, while wearing the skimpiest possible outfits. This group is generally under-represented because (a) with televised games, the cameras spend far too little time on the cheerleaders, and (b), when you're there in person, there are comparably few seats with a decent view of the cheerleaders, barring the use of a set of good stabilized binoculars, which tends to be tiring and expensive.
Personally, I'm in the last group; the day I watch part of a pro football game with any serious interest at all on the tube is the day they devote an HD channel entirely to the cheerleaders. 3D would definitely be an incentive, as would more daring uniforms. As for the boys in tight outfits... not really interesting, thanks. But for those of you who swing that way, by all means, please enjoy. You can't live your whole life in the closet, after all, nor should you have to.
I develop Windows-based image manipulation software in C, and I also use said software, so I am constantly moving image files in and out of the VFS, that is, between my Mac and the VM running XP. Right now I'm working on image stacking capabilities, of use to me directly in unguided, bare-camera astrophoto foolery, working them into the layer handling model in as transparent a manner as I can manage. So I shoot images (EOS 50D), import 'em into the Mac via USB, keep the photo library on the Mac (Apple's "Aperture"), etc. So for instance, should I want a series to stack, I clip them to the dimensions of the stellar object, shove em in a shared folder and then grab that in XP. I also export source code regularly into the Mac filesystem, where it exists separately from Windows and where it is automatically backed up for me.
Images from my camera are not a threat to either OSX or XP. And the idea that something *running* on my Mac would attack my virtual XP installation... no, don't think so. Nor is my own software a threat. No games, in fact other than my own stuff and Microsoft's VC++ to develop it, I don't think I've run a windows app in a couple of years. See, at some point, you just have to look rationally at what you're doing, recognize there's no credible threat vector, and just relax.
On my desktop, I have 16 gigs of RAM, four high-res monitors, and 8 cores @ 3 GHz; that machine hardly even *notices* when XP is running. My laptop has 2 gigs of RAM, just one of which I hand to XP, and 2 cores @ 2.4 GHz. It somehow stumbles along [laughing.] I have to say, you have an amusing perception of "proper" hardware management. I thought these machines were here to do what I wanted them to do. Silly me!
I'm sorry, I thought I'd made it clear that I ran XP in a sandbox, off the net. All my communications, calendering, etc. run under OSX. With this in mind, why would I use Outlook? And why would any XP process use less memory in a virtual machine than in a hardware environment? Do you know what a virtual machine is?
I'm running XP in a VM without network access, and yes indeed, I do not need, and do not use, a virus checker.
I'm very sorry.
Doesn't apply to a virtual machine. This isn't OSX running Windows apps, this is Windows running windows apps.
Well, this Apple "fanboi" is, in my own small way, annoying to Microsoft's OS ambitions because I can run XP in a virtual machine that moves with me across my various desktops, laptop, etc, in a 100% consistent "hardware" environment so I can stay on the hardware upward speed curve as Apple brings out new machines, but I don't have to deal with XP not understanding later architectures, nor with it "playing in the street" outside a network sandbox.
I can keep XP safely off the net, even while OSX is fully connected; I can keep it safely backed up outside the world it knows about; and I can knock it back to a "newly installed, but fully enabled" condition by simply copying one file. I can maintain a full software development environment within this virtual XP machine, and if I need something from the net, I'll get it with the Apple and safely hand it over using a virtual filesystem.
No more Microsoft upgrades. Period. Microsoft has seen their last OS dollar from me. And I'm glad; I feel that it was an abusive relationship, both as a developer, and as a user.
I keep a couple virtual linux machines available on my desktop as well, Ubuntu and Redhat; don't have to go to such extremes, as they're about as safe on the net as OSX is. Someday, if they ever develop an actual open, standardized GUI API that is free for everyone to use, regardless of why they want to use it, I may develop for linux, too. In the meantime, I'm keeping my hand in. I like linux, and I particularly like Ubuntu.
That "lots of ads" thing? Nope, no ads. That's one benefit of paying for the service. The jocks do push things they think are of general interest, like football scores and who is playing who and where, so it isn't entirely noise-free, but it is close.
Another benefit of radio over the iPod is that you're connected to the real world; if something happens, you hear about it. There are situations where that might be important, and there are situations where it certainly is at least desirable.
Satellite radio is, on some channels, uncensored. That's something I treasure. Important for listening? No, not really. But it is very nice to hear people speaking and performing without the government muzzling them. Particularly in the case of rock, where profanity keeps a very large number of tunes from ever getting on standard radio (if they ever deviated from their playlists, as if that'll ever happen.)
There are very large areas of the country where there is no service you can use to receive radio. You can't use an iPhone within hundreds of miles of where I live (they locked it to AT&T, and AT&T isn't very interested in Montana); and road trips are eight, ten, even twelve hours, during which we are almost pitifully grateful to have XM/Sirius. There's no digital service you can use to connect to the Internet barring a satellite connection on the roof of your vehicle. Which, of course, is what the XM/Sirius widget is in the first place. It just connects to them instead of the Internet, that's all.
We do have one (yes, that's *1*) FM station we can hear, as long as we're within 30 miles of town or so. We get the farm report, some country, some top 40, "auctions" of local goods and services, and the one thing I am grateful for, the lost pets report. Someone found my cat once. One of the charity things I was involved with brought PBS radio here; I contributed a few grand, they put up a translator, and if you're within, oh, five miles of it in the right direction, you can listen to PBS via FM. Having put money into it, you'd think I'd listen, but I'm somewhat conservative on many issues and frankly, they drive me a little nuts.
At night, we can hear quite a bit of the broadcast AM band, but that's really deteriorated into far left and far right and wackos, with a sprinkling of country (which you may enjoy, but no one in my family does.)
Now, I certainly recognize that if they can't make a viable business out of satellite radio, it is going to go away, but when urban dwellers generalize as if the entire country has access to the amenities they do, well, I'm afraid that's not the entire picture. It'll be a real loss for us. We have satellite radios in all our vehicles in the family, at work, and in my home. The day they go dead will be a day of mourning around here.
Expert dynamic stretching can be very safe; it is a progressive, low-risk sequence of actions performed by someone very familiar with their limits and the exercises themselves that does not put the practitioner at significant risk. All stretching should be preceded by a warm up. As I said before, passive stretching is safer for the non-expert. I also mentioned that training the antagonist to relax is important. I use passive stretching to train for these reasons, among others (such as lawyers...)
Yes. PNF, most commonly dealt with using hold-relax techniques in the passive stretching context. I actively teach this myself in order to assist in training the new practitioner to fully extend, and it is one of the reasons I focus on passive stretching with interspersed warm-ups rather than dynamics.
Well, now you have. Here's part of my martial arts library (behind the trailing leg... :-) and here's my main library.
Well, not to diminish the usefulness of a technical education in any way, but in turn, you should be careful not to dismiss the observation of people in the field, who deal with real-world issues constantly. Yes, fads and myths get around, but I think you'll find that there is quite a large segment of instructors who manage to not swallow them because there is no confirming research. Personally, I can always wait until there is actual data out there before I subject my students to a new idea in this particular area.
I'm going to just go ahead and disagree on that one based on four decades of experience across several martial arts, almost exactly half of which has been spent as an in-class instructor.
Furthermore, in a purely practical sense, I've got to think you'd be amazed at the difference in the body's reaction if I took the average person's leg and suddenly folded it up to their shoulder (a) with no prior stretching activity, or (b) with proper stretching beforehand. In the former case, there would probably be screaming, limping, and perhaps an attorney involved, and in the latter, no more than mild discomfort, if that.
As I said originally, if the activity involves large range of motion and not just bursts of short range power, one had best be stretching beforehand. You are of course free to disagree, but you'll still be wrong. :-)
It wasn't an analogy; it was a (admittedly vague) physical description of what actually happens. I elaborate on it here and also provide a reference for you to peruse; you can learn more about it once you have grasped the general concept.
Yes, in fact, they are - it is the overlap of two proteins that generates power. When the muscle is extended, the overlap is increased, and the power generated by the reduced overlap of the proteins when the cell is part of the recruited set is reduced. Leverage at the joint is also involved, as I have already said. Go read the other post and follow the link to the reference. Pay attention to how actin and myosin are involved.
Dynamic stretches keep you warm while you stretch; that's a good compromise, though care must be taken to work into the full range of motion in a progressive manner as the stretches take effect, so as to avoid injury from ballistic over-extension. However, short periods of passive stretching interspersed with warm-ups accomplishes the same thing and reduces the risk of injury, especially for less experienced practitioners. What you don't want to do is sit on your butt for half an hour stretching. Very little good comes of that.
I said that "working elements of the muscle fibers are laid against each other in pairs with an intervening layer between"; I was attempting to be general. The specifics: Muscle cells contain filaments of two protein types, actin and myosin, which slide past each other during contraction. After contraction, ATP (from the mitochondria) relaxes the filaments and they return to their normal positions. The overlapping region betwen the two proteins behaves as I described; the more overlap there is, the more power can be generated. When the muscle fiber (which is a considerably more macro structure than the cells that make it up) is extended, the overlap of the actin and myosin filaments in the many cells that make up the fiber is lesser, and lesser power can be generated.
I know how the system works, and my description was accurate — just not very specific. As you will find out if you read up on muscle anatomy. :)
That may be adequate for running, but it won't do for regimens with extreme range of motion, such as martial arts. We stretch for half an hour prior to a workout punctuated with short one-minute warm-ups every five minutes or so, and it definitely reduces injuries (which, as the GP has it, is the intent... not for "strength"... in fact, I've never heard — anywhere — that the act of stretching increases strength for the immediately succeeding session of exercise. I've been teaching martial arts for over twenty years.)
I can also tell you that if your body isn't prepared to reach an extended position, and it has to go there, either because you forced it to or someone else did, you had better have stretched first and be warmed up.
As for this line in TFS: "The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds -- known as static stretching -- primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them", the science of this has been known for many years. What happens is that the working elements of the muscle fibers are laid against each other in pairs with an intervening layer between; the more overlap, the more power can be generated because the overlapping surface area of the layer between is where the work gets done. When fibers are stretched, there is less overlap, hence the muscle can generate less power, but the muscle is longer.
Think of your forearm extended, and look at your bicep... see how it is long? Lots of fiber layers have slid against each other and now have considerably less overlap. Now move your arm to the 90 degree position at the elbow, and look at your bicep; it's bunched up, even if it isn't tense: many fiber layers are now slid to an overlapping position.
The number of fibers involved is the factor that determines the total amount of strength in your motion; high recruitment of fibers results in a strong motion, low recruitment results in a weak motion. We train to develop the ability to generate high recruitment on demand. But no matter the recruitment, if you start from a highly non-overlapped position, eg a stretched one, you'll generate less power with the stretched muscle.
This is the basis for moves like arm locks; if the arm is extended, not only is the leverage at the joint reduced, making it more difficult to close the arm against the lock, but the muscle is extended by the lock so that fiber overlap is minimal, which reduces the amount of force that can be generated by the muscle — it is literally a "double-whammy", and accounts for why a fully executed lock is so hard to exit using direct force (correct exits involve rotation of the arm or the lock itself in order to effect closure of the joint, and a good lock prevents such rotation.)
For any motion, you typically will have two muscle groups involved; the agonist, which is the muscle doing the work, and an antagonist, which is the muscle that would be responsible to reverse the motion. In the case of bending at the elbow, to close the arm, the bicep is the agonist and the triceps is the antagonist. If you are trying to open your arm, that is, extend your forearm, then the roles are reversed: The triceps is the agonist and the bicep is the antagonist. One of the key elements of controlling the force your body can generate is learning to really relax the antagonist, and again, stretching helps by teaching you what a really relaxed and extended muscle feels like; it is difficult to minimize fiber recruitment if you don't know what it feels like and the muscle isn't accustomed to that condition.
Anyway, my recommendation is that athletes ignore this report entirely; stretching significantly increases your range of motion, particularly in your ankles, legs, groin, waist, wrists, fingers, back, neck and shoulders, and to the degree that your sport requires (or risks) large range o
No. It is an action that goes well beyond communication. Communication is information transfer, which by its very nature has primary effect only on the sensory organs and subsequently the mind. Taking someone's life is not information transfer. Arguing that it is for the purpose of characterizing communication pushes the metaphor beyond the bounds of the reasonable.
I think it is an interesting (and moving) statement of intent, having no force in law. Much like the prefatory phrase of the 2nd amendment, and a number of other literary flourishes in the document. To have such force, content needs to be couched in the form of a directive or directives.
Yep, that was the argument. And it was a good one. If congress was going to behave, truly, the bill of rights was superfluous. But again, we come down to a bunch of really smart people who thought that some repetition would perhaps make up for human nature. It didn't, and congress is entirely out of hand, but that is what I think the intent was. I'm fully prepared to agree that it didn't work, though.
I think that after careful consideration, they determined that blanket protection of all speech was the best way to achieve precisely that. At the same time, such a construction serves the cause of liberty, both personal and group, about which they were extremely passionate.
I think that the constitution has been poorly obeyed by the government and poorly understood by the rank and file citizens since the day it was conceived, much less ratified. The consequences of prodding the religious have always been potentially dire. Mythos does not go gladly into the night, nor do those under its influence suffer criticism well, regardless of the form.
Oh, I don't know. You should look into some of their peccadilloes; very entertaining. Benjamin Franklin in particular, but not just him, either. :) Franklin was not only a dirty old man, he was a funny dirty old man.
In today's terminology, speech means communication. At the time, speech - written, verbal - comprised communication. They were all they had; it is only reasonable for them to write to protect what they had. They used a general term of art. I'm perfectly satisfied that if you could put them on a round-table today, explain what email is, and ask them, "Is speech in an email protected", or is "speech on radio or television protected" that they'd first say "yes, of course, ALL speech is protected", and second "You woke us up to ask THAT? Are you IDIOTS?"
I am not engaged in "literalism." I am focused on a legitimate striving to (a) figure out what they meant in the first place, and (b) apply that to the current situation as they would have, based on a solid background of studying their underlying intent to grant liberty to the individual and to restrain the government as much as possible in any area where it might infringe on person, property, commerce and personal choice (not necessarily in that particular order.) This is what the discussions of the day were about; this is how the bill of rights came into being (other than doubt that the government would be sufficiently restrained by enumerated powers, which turned out to be quite prescient.)
No, it's not a contract. It is law . It is the constituting authority for the US federal government, and the overriding authority for US state government. It does not bind the people; we are not signatory to it, we have not sworn an oath to it, and we (the currently living population) had nothing to do with either its authoring or its implementation. It no more binds us to anything than you would be bound if your best friend signed you up for a loan. Only you can commit to being engaged in a contract. Doesn't matter how enthusiastic the other party is, or for what reason(s.)
The constitution binds the government because it is, in fact, the government's constituting authority; officials, in particular the ruling 545 (435 house, 100 senate, nine judges, and the executive) are bound by oath to obey the constitution. We, the people, are not. We've signed nothing and sworn nothing. What we (not the government) generally accept as a social contract is that our ancestors having given this very limited authority to the federal and state governments in the form of an authorized document they were supposed to obey, we will abide by the government's exercise of power in these areas only. The government, having stepped out of those bounds some time ago, is on very thin ice indeed.
No, you haven't demonstrated that at all. You tried to cast "speech" as ambiguous; but it isn't. Straightforward fail.
I've read Heller front to back. My position on Heller is that it is a ludicrous decision, based upon ideas not in the constitution: For instance, there's no constitutionally explicit "right to self defense", a key point in the majority argument. The operative clause of the amendment reads "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The people of Washington DC were prevented from keeping and bearing arms by the law in question; bloody thing is unconstitutional. That's all they needed to do. But in Hel
I can definitely understand how some bridges could be perceived as similar to the ability of the constitution to keep your freedom of speech from becoming submerged.
It's not an elephant. It's a dead horse. The SCOTUS has been ignoring the constitution in favor of direct violations of it for many years.
The constitution is 100% clear on this matter: Congress shall make no law... ...abridging the freedom of speech. Anyone who is even nominally literate knows exactly what "abridge" means today; a few minutes research will turn up that it meant the same thing in 1788. The bottom line is simple — there is no constitutional authority available (to anyone at the federal level, including the judiciary) to abridge (curtail, shorten) the freedom to speak in any form or fashion* by law, directly or indirectly (as per legislative surrogates like the FCC.)
Further, as this is an element of the bill of rights, the states don't have this authority either as per the 14th amendment, and as cities, towns, counties etc. all must comply with the same things that states have to comply with, this authority devolves to the people, as per the 10th amendment.
The fact that this is not the analysis of the SCOTUS is a direct indicator of the justices violating their oaths.
Not that it's going to change. When Bush said the constitution is "just a piece of paper", he was speaking a truth no one wants to admit. The feds, because they want you to think you live in a constitutional republic, the people, because they want to think they have a reasonable government. But the fact is, the only remaining effective elements of the bill of rights are amendments three and seven. Sadly, this is not because they are well written or somehow better than the others; it is simply that the government has had no need to make exception to them.
(*) Yes, that means that libel and slander laws are unconstitutional, that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater should be perfectly OK (and by the way, it makes sense that it should be OK), and that the seven "dirty" words should be just as OK to say on the air as "kitten" and "politician." The founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the first amendment. They didn't mean "unless the government says otherwise", they were explicitly limiting federal power because they knew it would be abused. And they have turned out to be 100% correct. Unfortunately, the constitution isn't up to the task of stopping our political apparatus from doing whatever they want to. Welcome to the machine.
Honestly, the most creative times I've experienced have been driving, both with and without passengers, on trips in the two to five hour range. I live in NE Montana, and there are plenty of such trips that offer few distractions (other traffic, road signs or lights, other roads.)
Sometimes I talk to my passengers; sometimes to myself. I go over the subject matter this way and that, and I try to use metaphors to gently prod myself into seeing other angles (by pushing the metaphors until they either break, register completely, or actually show me something.)
My sweetheart, who is both brilliant and kind enough to let me talk technically at her for considerable lengths of time, assists by letting me go through this process:
I'll pick something that either simply seems to need work or is an actual problem, and I'll explain to her exactly how I see the issue at the moment, complete with explanations of why I don't do this, or why I did that. Sometimes - not always by any means, but a reasonable number of times - I run down into a splutter, asking myself... "Why? Why did I do that? Uh... " or "man, that sure could have been done better..."
Which is followed by pulling over and making a note for later. :-)
The thing is, she's not technical (in my field) so I have to explain everything, pretty much. Metaphors help a lot too. But because she's actually paying attention, there's no getting away with hand-waving. I find that many times, inspiration lurks in areas I've discarded as no longer worthy of much (if any) attention. This process forces the issue.
Time of day doesn't seem to matter in my case. Coffee, however, is definitely involved.
We do this for management of our businesses as well; we have a couple retail operations, a software store, a lingerie store (stockings, mostly), a martial arts studio and a portrait photo business, plus I do some consulting here and there. We do a lot of juggling, and it helps to rattle ideas around in an unstructured environment. With the cell phones off!!!
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No. You can go on all you want about "needed to change" and "autofix" and etc, but the bottom line is that this code presently isn't broken, and I am not about to fix code that isn't broken. It makes no sense on any level; financially, time-wise, or strategically. I have better things to do than refactor my code for entirely arbitrary reasons. Perhaps I just place a different value on my time than you do; that's fine. You should, of course, feel free to do whatever you like.
Every once in a while we see one of these "brainstorms"; for example, Microsoft pulled VB from the office suite... only to put it back. Because the idea was stupid; there was a ton of production code / applications they flat out broke. Python's doing exactly the same thing, and it's not going to work out for the same reason(s.)
If you're going to modify a language, you *must* do it in a compatible manner, otherwise what you're doing is making a new language that will require an entirely new community. Names notwithstanding, and resemblance beyond incompatibilities notwithstanding.
My setup is a consequence of an confluence of opportunities. I already had projection equipment, but it was shoehorned into a small home. We were looking for a new home with a lot of space, but nothing was really coming on the market. Then this church became available (25k for 5000 sq ft on two lots!), and we agreed that we would buy it and build an interior into it. So during this process, I was standing in the middle of this huge, empty space when I noticed that the wall behind the pulpit and above the chair-rail looked exactly 16:9 to my eye. Turns out it's within just a couple of percent. So we decided to use that space, as it was, as the screen area. The only thing I ended up changing specifically to accommodate this was the projector, so as to get one that would throw a 17 foot diagonal image at 1080p (I picked an Optoma HD80, works great.)
As far as benefits, they are myriad; the big screen is really fun and very revealing of detail, and there's a huge list of why watching at home is better than watching in a theater, once you have an HD display. Do you need a list of those?
We've been "moved in" for about two years, but it'll be at least 2010 before we're done building the interior. Right now we're doing stained glass for the windows (secular themes) and a deck; there are still interior walls to be sheeted, etc, but it's coming along. I'm not sure if you can generalize such a situation to your case, but that's how it happened here. :) Some of the pics of the build are in this flickr set.