Here's a properly edited version. Only took a few minutes to match question and answer, but that was obviously beyond the abilities of Slashdot's paid editors.
How has technology changed acting for you?
by wired_parrot
TV and movie productions have become more technically elaborate over the years, evolving from what were essentially filmed theatrical productions, to elaborate and technically demanding productions that require a large industry of people to support it. In your view, how has technology changed the role and experience of acting since you started?
Do you think young actors today have it easier?
by elrous0
In your early days, there were only a few major television networks, and it was much more difficult to move back and forth between television and movies. Today, with so many cable shows, the internet, and with actors moving much more freely between movies and television, do you think young actors have it easier? Or do you think that the proliferation of reality television and the "noise" of so many channels/series has actually made things harder for scripted actors?
Answer to both: Performing a role is always the same. You take a deep breath, you speak words, you hit marks, and you listen to what other people say. What has changed is the amount of light that is necessary to get your image on film - which by now is candlelight. So that it's not any harder and certainly not any easier to be an actor. Yes, there is more need for content, but so much of that content doesn't require experience, talent, the ability to speak English or in fact, the ability to stand upright (e.g. The Jersey Shore).
The cerebral characters you've played vs. pure action heroes?
by jd
Are there times you wish you'd had a quieter, more sedate career like, say, Roger Moore or Bruce Lee, or is there a part of you that craves the geekier, more cerebral hero roles you've played?
Answer: There is a great deal of fun in doing stunts. It makes for a lot of physical activity. You have to remember to do your pushups but sitting in a chair and talking about how you feel is also entertainment, at least for the actor. Now if you have a thinking man's action hero, that would be ideal.
Uniforms
by milbournosphere
Mr. Shatner: I recently watched my way through The Original Series and you were constantly pulling your uniform shirt down. I've also heard that the red uniforms from the movies were quite cumbersome to design and wear. Which was more uncomfortable to you, the uniforms from the original television episodes or the red command uniforms from the movies?
Answer: Wardrobe is certainly a consideration in many instances. It is possible to be beautifully dressed and to be your character especially if you get to keep the expensive wardrobe. The Star Trek wardrobes were made of stretch material so if your lunch was more than bread and water, you had to keep pulling those shirts down because they tended to ride up.
Favorite non-Star Trek roles?
by loftwyr
Outside of the Star Trek series, you've had a large number of regular, one-off and recurring roles. What would be your favorite role prior to the beginnings of Star Trek and after the original ST series run? If different, what was your favourite one-off?
Answer: I don't think of favorite roles like 'This was my favorite thing to do, and that isn't.' I just wish they hadn't cancelled Shit My Dad Says because I could bicycle to work.
Boston Legal
by gurps_npc
You seemed to have a great relationship with Mr. Spader - was that all fantastic acting, or did you become friends - as in you still see/speak with him even after the show ended?
Answer: It's best to be friendly with the people you are working with and that goes for everything including acting. If you dislike a person and you have to say 'I love you,' it certainly makes things difficult. I have remained friends with most of the people I have worked with through the years.
Until these two studies were published, there was not a single piece of literature suggesting that finasteride could cause sexual dysfunction persisting after cessation of the medication. The Irwig paper expressly says as much in one of the early paragraphs. Cite me something that says otherwise and we'll talk.
No, they don't have every right to sue the pharma company. Unless they can prove also that the pharmaceutical company knew about the problem and intentionally hid the information.
Well, not quite. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but at least in my country I believe the standard is a negligent, not intentional, failure to disclose the risk.* So, it's only necessary to show that the pharmaceutical company should have known, not that they did. I would be surprised if that is not the case here. Merck has reportedly been tipped off numerous times by patients and doctors over the past 10 years and has not acted. Moreover, the drug has shipped in Europe with a persistent sexual side effects warning since 2008 due to pressure from regulators there. How ignorant could Merck be then? Not to mention Merck's history: they essentially covered up the side effects of Vioxx only a few years ago.
I should add that I fully agree that a drug company that quite innocently puts a drug on the market having taken all prudent measures to ensure all relevant risks are disclosed should not be held responsible for issues that weren't foreseeable at the time. But this situation is unlikely to be one of those times.
If you read the description label and it lists impotence as a side effect, temporary or otherwise, you don't take that drug, unless you are happy to be permanently impotent.
Sorry, but how on earth does that make any sense? Temporary impotence which goes away as soon as you stop taking the drug is not even remotely similar to losing sexual function for the rest of your life. I am inclined to think the men involved in this debacle agree.
*There is also a statutory cause of action under consumer protection legislation that sets an even lower standard for the plaintiff, but I can't recall the elements off the top of my head.
It's been known for decades that continual ingestion of anti-androgens (for a period of over 6 months) can cause permanent loss of potency.
Simply wrong. They provide a loss of potency while on the medication - which, in the case of prostate cancer, is usually years. And yes, the loss of potency worsens after several months. But it does not persist after treatment. Here is a quote from Merck's page for Propecia: "A small number of men had sexual side effects, with each occurring in less than 2% of men. These include less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, and a decrease in the amount of semen. These side effects went away in men who stopped taking PROPECIA because of them." That information has turned out to be wrong. Are you seriously telling me they shouldn't be liable for giving prospective patients wrong information about side effects? If so, why not?
This is the correct answer.
Anyone that doesn't understand this shit should be suing their doctor for not telling them, not the drug company.
Antiandrogens are only supposed to have that effect temporarily, while you're taking them. The significance of these new studies is that they show Propecia is causing permanent impotence - it persists even after you stop the drug. That is not a known behaviour of antiandrogens, and was not disclosed to patients considering Propecia.
Whether a drug is worth the risk for the benefits should be up to the PATIENT, not some damned ambulance chaser!
Right, and in this case the patients weren't warned of the risk of irreversible impotence, only reversible impotence that was supposed to go away after they stopped taking the drug. They weren't in any position to weigh up the real risks and benefits, and have every right to sue the pharmaceutical company for that.
Propecia is an antiandrogen, and has always been known to cause sexual dysfunction while the user was on the drug. What's significant about these new studies is that they show that sexual dysfunction can persist AFTER you stop taking Propecia. That contradicts what Merck has always said - their product guidance warns of sexual side effects but expressly states that they always stop after ceasing the drug - and the advice that doctors give to patients considering taking Propecia. That's why there's a lawsuit - no one was ever warned that these sexual side effects might be permanent.
In fact, it remains a mystery how the drug could have this effect: its half life is only a few days, and it really should be ceasing any effect within that time. At least one doctor (Dr Alan Jacobs, a neuroendocrinologist in NYC) is speculating that Propecia is inducing permanent changes to the expression of genes governing the androgen system. IANAD so I express no view on that.
If you want to learn more about this issue, go to propeciahelp.com. There are people there who have been suffering from post-Propecia symptoms - not just sexual dysfunction, but other symptoms associated with low testosterone like cognitive impairment, fatigue, etc - for upwards of 10 years after stopping Propecia. If that's not worth a big payout from a pharma company that expressly told that that all side effects would cease after taking the medication, I'm not sure what is.
If by "dictatorship" you mean elected body, then yes.
"crossing the floor on the basis of principle is almost entirely unheard of and considered to be little better than treason"
The last time a member of the ruling Coalition -- and not the opposition parties, which vote against Coalition legislation frequently -- crossed the floor was about a year ago, but internal dissent scuppered some immigration laws this year. Anyway, since when was the measure of a democracy the lack of discipline of the ruling party? What's undemocratic about an elected ruling party voting for its own legislation? On the contrary, if, after being elected with a majority in both houses, the government were unable to make new laws, that would be a failure of democracy.
"with none of the individual rights in our Constitution"
Our constitution may suck, but Australia is still a free country. Freedom House rated us a 1 1, meaning we have an excellent record on both civil liberties and political rights.
Come to Australia. Our GDP per capita is higher than the major European countries', and our Human Development Index is third in the world -- behind only Iceland and Norway.
Third, be aware that the state of 3d under Linux sucks. I'm sorry, but that's how it is.
Wrong. nVidia's Linux drivers are as fast, and almost as full-featured, as its Windows ones. Using an ATI card in Linux is worse than it is in Windows, it is true, but modern cards should still be able to play the sort of game the poster described, which is designed to accomodate lower-end systems.
ATI and NVidia ship binary drivers that produce friction from the kernel folks.
Sometimes the latest binary drivers won't work on the latest kernel, but otherwise this problem is decidedly minor. It is certainly not considerable enough to say "3d under Linux sucks".
The open-source drivers are uselessly slow, by the way, so I'm not sure why you brought them up as an alternative to binary ones.
Thirteenth, expect your port to lose money.
If you read the summary, you'd know that the poster's approach was to offer a share of the profits to porters. I hardly see how that could possibly lose money. I guess that comment was in keeping with the overly general nature of your post (such as when you suggested he use SDL, though he already said that he had).
People making ports to Linux may want to consider 2d strategy or adventure games as good options for ports.
I play games like UT2004 on Linux, and I play Windows games on Linux with Cedega. While it's true that Linux games are not big moneymakers, it is not true that Linux cannot support 3D games for technical reasons.
Leela: Hold it Santa! Consider this: you are programmed to destroy the naughty... I submit to you, that you are in fact naughty, and that, logically, you must destroy yourself.
Santa: Nice try, but my head was built with paradox absorbing crumple zones.
Seeing as website content is not an invention, I'd say not.
Copywrites? [sic]
Anything published is given automatic copyright -- and copyright is the thing that would disallow all the examples you gave below.
So the guy pulls the plug. beerandporn dot com dies. Or did it? It seems others liked his hobby as well, and downloaded all the content, and started hosting it. Problem is, google now links to these new sites, with his face and work for the world to see.
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
The guy has a right to expect -- and demand -- that his creations aren't republished and redistributed. It's really that simple. He could request Google to remove it from their cache, which they'd do, and he could ask archive.org to do the same. This is really not and dilemma, and your hypothesis that things you have done in the past may bear upon the things you do in the future is neither interesting nor insightful.
When someone puts up a website... That is their property. Nobody has a right to take a snapshot of it, store it, or recreate it.
Um, do you realise that just by visiting a webpage, a copy of it is transferred from the server to your computer, and then cached by your browser? That amounts to taking a snapshot of it, storing it, and, if you use your back button, recreating it.
A more legitimate question would be if people such as Google or archive.org are allowed to redistribute content it finds on sites, which is what it does by showing you its cached versions of those sites.
Today was a great day in the battle for a free and open information infrastructure, and for a favorable business environment in Europe for enterprises that use or produce software.
Not just that, but it was a great day for European democracy, with the EU's elected body asserting itself totally over the unelected, untransparent Council.
Archive.org has a great video on a "physically-based, deformable, 3D" virtual brush developed by the University of North Carolina that allows artists to paint as naturally on a computer as they would on a canvas.
Enforcing and Amalgamating Trustworthy Copyright Regulations, Assurances and Protections -- Countering the Onerous, Nefarious and Stupid Underming of Many Elites' Riches
1. John Locke's philosophical ideas aren't fundamentally logical. Why is man innately dignified? Why are all men "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"? There's no proof for this thought; it's a pure emotional appeal, made with persuasive rhetoric.
2. American political dialogue, today, is among the most unintellectual in the world. You have senators who quote from Star Wars; politicians can play the national security card to trump all other concerns; your anarchic leftists blame everything on corporations and attribute anything and everything to "American imperialism". Even your political commentators, like Joe Klein, are populists, whining that Democrats and Republicans aren't putting aside their "partisanship" to appeal to some apparently nonpartisan notion of "common sense". Most countries do, of course, have their fair share of demagoguery. My point is merely that yours has more, not less, than the average.
3. Libertarianism is an undeveloped, incomplete and yes, naïve political ideology. It's very nice to claim that American political thought is based on reasoning, but if the reasoning is so generalized that it rides roughshod over specificity and practicality the way libertarianism does, then you'd be better off just with your popularism. At least your popularism doesn't claim universality.
4. There's nothing wrong with appealing to a sense of social justice and compassion. After all, there was no pragmatic reason for the Allied Powers to stop the Armenian Genocide, so they didn't. That's rather regarded to have been wrong, now; lassez faire politics are rarely looked back on as having produced the humane result. Though universal health care has plenty of pragmatic arguments in favour of it, I support it because I believe in the right of all men to be healed. The document with those other "certain unalienable Rights" is equally a work of principle, not logic, and on that basis I strongly admire it.
And rhythmbox, for example, offers nice integration of music management and iPod operability -- if that's what is supposed to have made this newsworthy.
as Archimedes Plutonium. According to the aforelinked repository of unblemished truth that is Wikipedia, Archimedes has since discovered
1. Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather growth from a "Hydrogen Atom Totality" into the present "Plutonium Atom Totality", in which "the galaxies are dots of the electron dot cloud".
2. Fusion Barrier Principle. Quoting Plutonium, "Fission energy is the highest form of energy that is able to be controlled and surpass breakeven".
3. Unification of the Forces of Physics as a Coulomb Unification.
4. Stonethrowing theory. This theory states that the difference between apes and humans resulted some 8 to 10 million years ago from a solo quadruped ape that "started throwing rocks overarm and overhead". This activity gave the ape advantages in getting food and more females for mating purposes "by killing other rivals using throwing".
5. Possibility of global warming reversal. According to Plutonium's theory, there exists a CFC variant or methyl molecule that when produced and released will act as an "upper atmosphere earth air conditioner and reverse global warming".""
Despite that the brilliance of his ideas so obviously extended the work of Archimedes the Greek, it took the reincarnated Archimedes 44 years to realize that he was in fact Archimedes:
In autumn of 1994 he claims to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.
What I want to know is why we continue to dwell so much on Archimedes' old work when he has been producing so much insight as of late and it has yet to be properly appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a properly edited version. Only took a few minutes to match question and answer, but that was obviously beyond the abilities of Slashdot's paid editors.
How has technology changed acting for you?
by wired_parrot
TV and movie productions have become more technically elaborate over the years, evolving from what were essentially filmed theatrical productions, to elaborate and technically demanding productions that require a large industry of people to support it. In your view, how has technology changed the role and experience of acting since you started?
Do you think young actors today have it easier?
by elrous0
In your early days, there were only a few major television networks, and it was much more difficult to move back and forth between television and movies. Today, with so many cable shows, the internet, and with actors moving much more freely between movies and television, do you think young actors have it easier? Or do you think that the proliferation of reality television and the "noise" of so many channels/series has actually made things harder for scripted actors?
Answer to both: Performing a role is always the same. You take a deep breath, you speak words, you hit marks, and you listen to what other people say. What has changed is the amount of light that is necessary to get your image on film - which by now is candlelight. So that it's not any harder and certainly not any easier to be an actor. Yes, there is more need for content, but so much of that content doesn't require experience, talent, the ability to speak English or in fact, the ability to stand upright (e.g. The Jersey Shore).
The cerebral characters you've played vs. pure action heroes?
by jd
Are there times you wish you'd had a quieter, more sedate career like, say, Roger Moore or Bruce Lee, or is there a part of you that craves the geekier, more cerebral hero roles you've played?
Answer: There is a great deal of fun in doing stunts. It makes for a lot of physical activity. You have to remember to do your pushups but sitting in a chair and talking about how you feel is also entertainment, at least for the actor. Now if you have a thinking man's action hero, that would be ideal.
Uniforms
by milbournosphere
Mr. Shatner: I recently watched my way through The Original Series and you were constantly pulling your uniform shirt down. I've also heard that the red uniforms from the movies were quite cumbersome to design and wear. Which was more uncomfortable to you, the uniforms from the original television episodes or the red command uniforms from the movies?
Answer: Wardrobe is certainly a consideration in many instances. It is possible to be beautifully dressed and to be your character especially if you get to keep the expensive wardrobe. The Star Trek wardrobes were made of stretch material so if your lunch was more than bread and water, you had to keep pulling those shirts down because they tended to ride up.
Favorite non-Star Trek roles?
by loftwyr
Outside of the Star Trek series, you've had a large number of regular, one-off and recurring roles. What would be your favorite role prior to the beginnings of Star Trek and after the original ST series run? If different, what was your favourite one-off?
Answer: I don't think of favorite roles like 'This was my favorite thing to do, and that isn't.' I just wish they hadn't cancelled Shit My Dad Says because I could bicycle to work.
Boston Legal
by gurps_npc
You seemed to have a great relationship with Mr. Spader - was that all fantastic acting, or did you become friends - as in you still see/speak with him even after the show ended?
Answer: It's best to be friendly with the people you are working with and that goes for everything including acting. If you dislike a person and you have to say 'I love you,' it certainly makes things difficult. I have remained friends with most of the people I have worked with through the years.
Right now I am wo
Until these two studies were published, there was not a single piece of literature suggesting that finasteride could cause sexual dysfunction persisting after cessation of the medication. The Irwig paper expressly says as much in one of the early paragraphs. Cite me something that says otherwise and we'll talk.
No, they don't have every right to sue the pharma company. Unless they can prove also that the pharmaceutical company knew about the problem and intentionally hid the information.
Well, not quite. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but at least in my country I believe the standard is a negligent, not intentional, failure to disclose the risk.* So, it's only necessary to show that the pharmaceutical company should have known, not that they did. I would be surprised if that is not the case here. Merck has reportedly been tipped off numerous times by patients and doctors over the past 10 years and has not acted. Moreover, the drug has shipped in Europe with a persistent sexual side effects warning since 2008 due to pressure from regulators there. How ignorant could Merck be then? Not to mention Merck's history: they essentially covered up the side effects of Vioxx only a few years ago.
I should add that I fully agree that a drug company that quite innocently puts a drug on the market having taken all prudent measures to ensure all relevant risks are disclosed should not be held responsible for issues that weren't foreseeable at the time. But this situation is unlikely to be one of those times.
If you read the description label and it lists impotence as a side effect, temporary or otherwise, you don't take that drug, unless you are happy to be permanently impotent.
Sorry, but how on earth does that make any sense? Temporary impotence which goes away as soon as you stop taking the drug is not even remotely similar to losing sexual function for the rest of your life. I am inclined to think the men involved in this debacle agree.
*There is also a statutory cause of action under consumer protection legislation that sets an even lower standard for the plaintiff, but I can't recall the elements off the top of my head.
It's been known for decades that continual ingestion of anti-androgens (for a period of over 6 months) can cause permanent loss of potency.
Simply wrong. They provide a loss of potency while on the medication - which, in the case of prostate cancer, is usually years. And yes, the loss of potency worsens after several months. But it does not persist after treatment. Here is a quote from Merck's page for Propecia: "A small number of men had sexual side effects, with each occurring in less than 2% of men. These include less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, and a decrease in the amount of semen. These side effects went away in men who stopped taking PROPECIA because of them." That information has turned out to be wrong. Are you seriously telling me they shouldn't be liable for giving prospective patients wrong information about side effects? If so, why not?
...Propecia is an anti-androgen! Duh.
This is the correct answer. Anyone that doesn't understand this shit should be suing their doctor for not telling them, not the drug company.
Antiandrogens are only supposed to have that effect temporarily, while you're taking them. The significance of these new studies is that they show Propecia is causing permanent impotence - it persists even after you stop the drug. That is not a known behaviour of antiandrogens, and was not disclosed to patients considering Propecia.
...Propecia is an anti-androgen! Duh.
This is the correct answer. Anyone that doesn't understand this
Whether a drug is worth the risk for the benefits should be up to the PATIENT, not some damned ambulance chaser!
Right, and in this case the patients weren't warned of the risk of irreversible impotence, only reversible impotence that was supposed to go away after they stopped taking the drug. They weren't in any position to weigh up the real risks and benefits, and have every right to sue the pharmaceutical company for that.
Propecia is an antiandrogen, and has always been known to cause sexual dysfunction while the user was on the drug. What's significant about these new studies is that they show that sexual dysfunction can persist AFTER you stop taking Propecia. That contradicts what Merck has always said - their product guidance warns of sexual side effects but expressly states that they always stop after ceasing the drug - and the advice that doctors give to patients considering taking Propecia. That's why there's a lawsuit - no one was ever warned that these sexual side effects might be permanent.
In fact, it remains a mystery how the drug could have this effect: its half life is only a few days, and it really should be ceasing any effect within that time. At least one doctor (Dr Alan Jacobs, a neuroendocrinologist in NYC) is speculating that Propecia is inducing permanent changes to the expression of genes governing the androgen system. IANAD so I express no view on that.
If you want to learn more about this issue, go to propeciahelp.com. There are people there who have been suffering from post-Propecia symptoms - not just sexual dysfunction, but other symptoms associated with low testosterone like cognitive impairment, fatigue, etc - for upwards of 10 years after stopping Propecia. If that's not worth a big payout from a pharma company that expressly told that that all side effects would cease after taking the medication, I'm not sure what is.
"our parliament is a virtual dictatorship"
If by "dictatorship" you mean elected body, then yes.
"crossing the floor on the basis of principle is almost entirely unheard of and considered to be little better than treason"
The last time a member of the ruling Coalition -- and not the opposition parties, which vote against Coalition legislation frequently -- crossed the floor was about a year ago, but internal dissent scuppered some immigration laws this year. Anyway, since when was the measure of a democracy the lack of discipline of the ruling party? What's undemocratic about an elected ruling party voting for its own legislation? On the contrary, if, after being elected with a majority in both houses, the government were unable to make new laws, that would be a failure of democracy.
"with none of the individual rights in our Constitution"
Our constitution may suck, but Australia is still a free country. Freedom House rated us a 1 1, meaning we have an excellent record on both civil liberties and political rights.
Come to Australia. Our GDP per capita is higher than the major European countries', and our Human Development Index is third in the world -- behind only Iceland and Norway.
brittneyspearsporno.avi.mpeg.exe
Link please.
Third, be aware that the state of 3d under Linux sucks. I'm sorry, but that's how it is.
Wrong. nVidia's Linux drivers are as fast, and almost as full-featured, as its Windows ones. Using an ATI card in Linux is worse than it is in Windows, it is true, but modern cards should still be able to play the sort of game the poster described, which is designed to accomodate lower-end systems.
ATI and NVidia ship binary drivers that produce friction from the kernel folks.
Sometimes the latest binary drivers won't work on the latest kernel, but otherwise this problem is decidedly minor. It is certainly not considerable enough to say "3d under Linux sucks".
The open-source drivers are uselessly slow, by the way, so I'm not sure why you brought them up as an alternative to binary ones.
Thirteenth, expect your port to lose money.
If you read the summary, you'd know that the poster's approach was to offer a share of the profits to porters. I hardly see how that could possibly lose money. I guess that comment was in keeping with the overly general nature of your post (such as when you suggested he use SDL, though he already said that he had).
People making ports to Linux may want to consider 2d strategy or adventure games as good options for ports.
I play games like UT2004 on Linux, and I play Windows games on Linux with Cedega. While it's true that Linux games are not big moneymakers, it is not true that Linux cannot support 3D games for technical reasons.
Leela: Hold it Santa! Consider this: you are programmed to destroy the naughty... I submit to you, that you are in fact naughty, and that, logically, you must destroy yourself.
Santa: Nice try, but my head was built with paradox absorbing crumple zones.
Please, it just has big bones. (And needs them to carry all that fat...)
Just kidding, kidding!!!
Or do we need patents on website content?
Seeing as website content is not an invention, I'd say not.
Copywrites? [sic]
Anything published is given automatic copyright -- and copyright is the thing that would disallow all the examples you gave below.
So the guy pulls the plug. beerandporn dot com dies. Or did it? It seems others liked his hobby as well, and downloaded all the content, and started hosting it. Problem is, google now links to these new sites, with his face and work for the world to see.
Should this guy have a right to erase his past creations?
The guy has a right to expect -- and demand -- that his creations aren't republished and redistributed. It's really that simple. He could request Google to remove it from their cache, which they'd do, and he could ask archive.org to do the same. This is really not and dilemma, and your hypothesis that things you have done in the past may bear upon the things you do in the future is neither interesting nor insightful.
When someone puts up a website... That is their property. Nobody has a right to take a snapshot of it, store it, or recreate it.
Um, do you realise that just by visiting a webpage, a copy of it is transferred from the server to your computer, and then cached by your browser? That amounts to taking a snapshot of it, storing it, and, if you use your back button, recreating it.
A more legitimate question would be if people such as Google or archive.org are allowed to redistribute content it finds on sites, which is what it does by showing you its cached versions of those sites.
Today was a great day in the battle for a free and open information infrastructure, and for a favorable business environment in Europe for enterprises that use or produce software.
Not just that, but it was a great day for European democracy, with the EU's elected body asserting itself totally over the unelected, untransparent Council.
Archive.org has a great video on a "physically-based, deformable, 3D" virtual brush developed by the University of North Carolina that allows artists to paint as naturally on a computer as they would on a canvas.
As you would know, Theo, there isFree music available. The lyrics are even about Freedom, so you don't have to have anything to do with Non-Freedom.
Enforcing and Amalgamating Trustworthy Copyright Regulations, Assurances and Protections -- Countering the Onerous, Nefarious and Stupid Underming of Many Elites' Riches
1. John Locke's philosophical ideas aren't fundamentally logical. Why is man innately dignified? Why are all men "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"? There's no proof for this thought; it's a pure emotional appeal, made with persuasive rhetoric.
2. American political dialogue, today, is among the most unintellectual in the world. You have senators who quote from Star Wars; politicians can play the national security card to trump all other concerns; your anarchic leftists blame everything on corporations and attribute anything and everything to "American imperialism". Even your political commentators, like Joe Klein, are populists, whining that Democrats and Republicans aren't putting aside their "partisanship" to appeal to some apparently nonpartisan notion of "common sense". Most countries do, of course, have their fair share of demagoguery. My point is merely that yours has more, not less, than the average.
3. Libertarianism is an undeveloped, incomplete and yes, naïve political ideology. It's very nice to claim that American political thought is based on reasoning, but if the reasoning is so generalized that it rides roughshod over specificity and practicality the way libertarianism does, then you'd be better off just with your popularism. At least your popularism doesn't claim universality.
4. There's nothing wrong with appealing to a sense of social justice and compassion. After all, there was no pragmatic reason for the Allied Powers to stop the Armenian Genocide, so they didn't. That's rather regarded to have been wrong, now; lassez faire politics are rarely looked back on as having produced the humane result. Though universal health care has plenty of pragmatic arguments in favour of it, I support it because I believe in the right of all men to be healed. The document with those other "certain unalienable Rights" is equally a work of principle, not logic, and on that basis I strongly admire it.
This is hardly new nor interesting. There are plenty of programs that work with the iPod other than iTunes. Behold just a few:
- Anapod Explorer
- PodUtils
- GTKpod
- GNUpod
And rhythmbox, for example, offers nice integration of music management and iPod operability -- if that's what is supposed to have made this newsworthy.
as Archimedes Plutonium. According to the aforelinked repository of unblemished truth that is Wikipedia, Archimedes has since discovered
1. Plutonium Atom Totality theory. According to this theory, there was no Big Bang, but rather growth from a "Hydrogen Atom Totality" into the present "Plutonium Atom Totality", in which "the galaxies are dots of the electron dot cloud".
2. Fusion Barrier Principle. Quoting Plutonium, "Fission energy is the highest form of energy that is able to be controlled and surpass breakeven".
3. Unification of the Forces of Physics as a Coulomb Unification.
4. Stonethrowing theory. This theory states that the difference between apes and humans resulted some 8 to 10 million years ago from a solo quadruped ape that "started throwing rocks overarm and overhead". This activity gave the ape advantages in getting food and more females for mating purposes "by killing other rivals using throwing".
5. Possibility of global warming reversal. According to Plutonium's theory, there exists a CFC variant or methyl molecule that when produced and released will act as an "upper atmosphere earth air conditioner and reverse global warming".""
Despite that the brilliance of his ideas so obviously extended the work of Archimedes the Greek, it took the reincarnated Archimedes 44 years to realize that he was in fact Archimedes:
In autumn of 1994 he claims to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.
What I want to know is why we continue to dwell so much on Archimedes' old work when he has been producing so much insight as of late and it has yet to be properly appreciated.
lick my balls
Okay, Zonky Wonky, just turn off that silly computer and come back to bed.
when was this?
Two weeks ago.