OK, so now that we're all back to having to tell each other what building downtown contains what businesses (since, I presume, you wouldn't even want the Yellow Pages to exist)...
How does your local farmer communicate the fact that, this week, he's got some really nice radishes? Let's see... he can't put up a sign (eeeek! advertising!). He can't stand on the corner and fill you in on his inventory for the week (gaaah! advertising!)... no, he has to wait for everyone to call HIM and ask what he's got, right? What if he suddenly has to pony up for a new tractor transmission (um, assuming that he's actually aware of where to shop for one at a good price, since no one in that line of work is allowed to advertise, right?), so he's interested in quickly generating customers for a bunch of his produce at a better than usual price. Of course, you wouldn't want him to be able to actually tell anyone that they're able to save some money, this week, by doing business with him, would you?
No point bothering with more of this. I'm sorry that you're so unable to exercise critical thinking in the marketplace. I'm sorry that you think it's better to outlaw communication about goods and services than it is to expect parents to teach their kids how to prioritize a little bit, or critically evaluate something that's being said to them. Those skills will also help them when evaluating other pitches. Say, from politicians that are trying to sell them on the notion that, if elected, they'll save them from their own inability not to buy things, by outlawing advertising. Sweet, sweet irony. Nice to hear from you, though, here on advertising-supported slashdot.
Kidding! My favorite of his publications: "Wack 'Em, Stack 'Em, and Pack 'Em"
He's a pretty interesting guy, actually. If you can get him to slow down for five minutes - he sort of freaks people out sometimes because they can't keep up. Go Ted, go!
Sometimes a little rhetorical absurdity works, I think. All I'm doing is challenging the anonymous coward to actually spell out the distinction between the thought he probably never gives to the vast number of critters that die in industrial agriculture, vs. one that can't survive proximity to human existance. Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you should be paralyzed into doing nothing, of course.
it is immoral to kill conscious beings
Sentience is indeed a tricky business. Alert animals that exhibit complex reactions to complex surroundings and circumstances are certainly different than, say, an insect. But plenty of people would suggest that a bee-hive, taken as a whole, is more "cognitively complex" than a rabbit. And yet we enslave bees, don't we? They are killed with a swat at the slightest perception that they'll sting. I'm inclined to look at a given valley's deer population in much the same way. When the population reaches the point where the animals are - in search of less populated turf - wandering in front of cars and being painfully injured and killed, or when there are so many crowded into a small area that the healthy ones are quickly picking up diseases from the few that would normally already have wandered off alone to die - it's a situation that's way out of balance. And there are no predators left to deal with it. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions are no longer allowed to take care of business. And believe me, I do weigh carefully the similarities between a deer and myself. If you've never personally field dressed a deer that you've killed 10 minutes before, that's at least one way in which you've never confronted your own mortality, believe me. But then, if you've never had a drug-free, ultra-lean venison tenderloin roasted with some fruit and served with a nice Petit Syrah, you've also missed out.
Um, just to clarify things, people who hunt are sadists.
Never met one. Every hunter I know goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that the animals they eat - which live in the wild and pretty much never die of old age - meet a rather instantaneous end. Do you eat fish? When was the last time you saw to it that your salmon had a nice peaceful death, or a completely abrupt one? Hooking or netting a fish is a painful, panicky thing, just like capturing crabs, or running cattle into a chute for slaughter. I take very seriously my opportunity and responsibility to take wild game in an ethical manner.
I also participate in keeping the eastern seaboard whitetail deer population under control. Since the natural predators are gone from suburbia, and such developments create ideal deer habitat, you wind up with many times the population of deer that were present even 300 years ago. When poor weather happens, or during the rut, you get vast number of these animals moving across highways or gathering in unnatually large herds. The result is painful (and sometimes drawn-out) death by injury from a vehicle, or very high rates of disease transmission from over crowding. People who want deer to live like that are sadists (to use your word). People who take the role that wolves used to play (in keeping the herds properly thinned out) not only are doing the species a service, but are also putting into their freezers some very healthy, lean meat that isn't soaked in steroids and anti-biotics, and which didn't involve huge farming operations (which burn tons of fuel and drench the soil with fertalizers) to raise and transport. While performing this little service, we (hunters) also pay large sums of money into state coffers, and support all sorts of wildlife conservation programs. Hunters do more to ensure the long term viability of wildlife (from ducks to deer to foxes and wild turkey) than most any other group.
Since you so obviously want everyone to know that you are a sadist you must be even more deranged than the average hunter.
Says the anonymous coward.
I'm more than happy to tell people where the holiday meal they're eating came from. In my family, it's nice pheasant appetizers followed by a really good venison roast. All taken by me, in the field, while on my two feet. While I'm at it, I pick up trash, dispose of old abandoned barbwire, report poachers to the game wardens, tell farmers what I've seen on their back 40, and reduce - by at least a few meals - the demand for factory farming and all of the waste that goes with it.
So, since you're a vegetarian, tell me everything you know about how the soybean farmers you buy from don't ever shoot the varmits that dig holes in their crop sections. Tell me how they tuck each groundhog and jackrabbit into bed every night. Do you sleep better at night knowing that the farmers you deal with use special combines that are guaranteed not to slowly crush voles, mice, and other small mammals as they drive over those animals' home turf? Oops! I forgot. That's simply not true, is it? Tell me what you know about the "organic" operations that, none the less, still practice ditch-to-ditch farming, thus reducing the very habitat that would provide homes for grouse or quail. You know, nature's little pest-bug patrol. In fact, tell me what you know about any of this whatsoever, since your previous comment would imply that you're an ignorant fool that thinks all food is produced by extracting it from rainbows, and delivered by My Little Pony to your grocery store. Hunters aren't sadists. But people who eat meat and wear leather without every personally doing the work of producing it are: cowards (and usually shrill, hypocritical asses, as well).
People are a lot less likely to die in knifings and beatings. The gun ban works.
It sure doesn't help the person who'd very much like to not be stabbed or beaten, and could prevent it entirely by bringing a gun into the equation. Here in the US, states that have passed more liberal possesion and right-to-carry laws have seen a dramatic drop in the rates of all such assaults, robberies, burglaries, rapes, etc. Because when someone doesn't know if the person he's about to assault may be able to kill them, less of it happens. When they know that they cannot, they take more chances, and an usually succeed with a knife.
As for this issue, let's stick to morality, since this is a moral issue.
Um, just to clarify a few things, please lay out your moral framework, as it relates to which living creatures it's OK to kill, and by what means. If it's a moral issue, that should be very simple for you to describe, since surely you're not basing that notion on any mixed premises or anything.
Are you a vegan? And if so, what steps are you taking to make sure that a particular sub-species of earthworm that lives only in a little valley where thin, pale-looking organic farmers use ox-drawn iron-age plows to greenly raise the plants from which your Thanksgiving tofurkey was molded are all cut to ribbons in the process? You could be partly responsible for wormicide.
Or, do your moral considerations vary as a function of animal cuteness or whether or not it was portrayed as good or evil in Narnia?
I hate to see anything extinct, and wish that Giant Cave Bears still existed to eat granola-crunching naturalists that talk to trees on a first name basis, but you'd better be careful about the distinction between "dumb" and "immoral." Because once you cast the damage or support done to/for a particular species in moral terms, you're into some deep water. That is, if you have any intellectual honesty whatsoever.
The cold isn't the only thing that would-be colonists would be facing, right? Don't the gas giants have some helacious radiation belts? I seem to recall that Titan is sitting right in the middle of one, too. Perhaps a pro can chime in on that. Sure, we could warm up a nice little ice cave and whatnot, but would all that ice also be a worthy shield against the EM nastiness?
complimentary! nice shoes! (that was a COMPLIMENT) oh.. you meant COMPLEMENTARY!
No. The articles are complimentary about the businesses being discussed. As in, "they have a nice business." That is indeed a compliment, and thus the article is complimentary. It's certainly possible that the article and company's web site are also complementary, but that's not what I was saying. I pointed out the complimentary nature of the articles as a way to mention that the businesses can hardly complain if I land higher in the search results.
What's the point of suing the blogger? If Google is the one that creates the page rankings, and is the reason why that blog is ranked higher than his website, how is it the blogger's fault?
I'm sorry, sir, but we won't be needing you and your fancy rational thinking on the jury. Have a nice day!
On a site I run, I've got articles I've written about other businesses (typically complimentary) that invariably rank higher than the businesses' own web sites, especially on slightly odd-ball searches, but often on something as simple as the business's name. And the only thing I'm doing is using better grammar, and generally carrying on in a more conservative way. Google seems to reward restraint. Breathless promotional material always seems to take a back seat to lucid, well-constructed information.
Sure, Google ranks plenty of blatant trash higher than it sometimes should, but it's not always that way. My own experience is that actual, real content remains king. Small businesses frequently don't take the time to actually write any real meat for their own web sites. Hell, a lot my older stuff still isn't even all that standards-compliant (I swear I'll get around that CSS stuff one of these days), but it usually exceeds the sites about which I'm writing. And, of course, it's a feedback loop. The more credible some of my pages appear, the higher the new ones rank, too. No witchcraft, no magic sauce: just careful writing and resisting the urge to run content from the slimier ad engines.
Good news photogs are still going to get the shots they've always been there for. They also get access to places and events that other people don't get access to. Being part of the press corps does give you that chance to capture Gerald Ford tripping down the stairs, or Bill Clinton ginning up some Oscar-worthy tears, etc. But to the extent that a lot people are more interested in stuff that happens to normal people, even cheesy low-res MPGs are more relevent because they exist.
The other thing, here, is the presence of more enthusiasts' cameras in and around events/scenes that would normally never rate the presence of a professional. Not the county fair, etc., but oddball sports/leagues, minor-league political events, that sort of thing. I've found that some of my own special-interest events (outdoorsy stuff among the bird dog crowd) has been bone dry of any media coverage that doesn't come from within. Um, except when the vice president accidentally peppers a lawyer while quail hunting - then all the sudden everyone wants images from that world... for exactly a week, anyway.
But when I shoot stuff at an event, there can be twenty other people there with their cell-phone-cams, and it's the nerd with the heavy duty DSLR that produces the images people actually want. Most folks simply won't carry around enough glass to produce the sort of images that a pro or an insane amateur can produce, since it's just too inconvenient. Doesn't matter how many pixels a cell phone's sensor can pack in - the laws of physics are still in the way of those tiny lenses producing really good workable images, especially of active subjects in mediocre light.
I've also found that carrying a macho camera and strobes gets you in places. It's sort of like all of those times that I used a mic cable and got around college bar cover charges saying, "I'm with the band."
But the sheer number of images produced by all of those portables (say, the stuff from the Madrid train bombings) will certainly result in lots of web/broadcast coverage that an assigned pro would never produce. But what a professional (with his/her practiced eye, journalistic sensibilities, better gear, and credentialed access) can produce will never be replaced by the ubiquitous phone-cam. These things are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. But look at how the Michael Richards video clip circulated... that stuff will certainly eclipse other material's airtime when it's compelling enough.
But of course, the tranmission and the particles are traveling at the speed of light so the transmission doesn't get there in time
You can't outrun lightning on the golf course, either. But you can check the radar before you book a tee-time. I suppose the point is that there are some indicators of when we will have some fast-as-light (or very-fast-particles) crap coming our way - based on other behaviors - and that, like predicting earthquakes (another thing you can't outrun), we can still take a few precautions when things look a little dodgy.
Re:And the universe begins to look more electric
on
Predicting Space Weather
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And the universe begins to look more electric
I don't think that theory is very well grounded. *rim-shot*
Thank you, I'll be here all afternoon. Try the cold pizza.
People like claiming "I never got that e-mail" or "It must have gotten lost somewhere in the system" becase it's a easy way to get them off the hook. It's a bit like "I was writing a document yesterday and now it's gone!" (it's saved in their My Documents, they just never bothered to look). Or "My dog ate my homework".
Well, not really. Were you in on this conversation? I think that counts as a lot of lost mail.
Of course, it's nothing like saving someone's life. It's like saving 1 second twice a day. Meaningless.
But... but... it's a Mac thing! It's a Steve Freakin' Jobs thing! It has to have iMeaning.
Actually, it reminds me of the old saw about this sort of thing: "We need a baby in a hurry. We'll get nine women working on it, so let's call it one month."
Actually, I wasn't going to bother with poking fun at you directly, but since you obviously can't tell that calling you a baboon was an illustration of how anyone can call anyone anything, and thus have them either labeled that way - or be seen "in denial" of being that way - then, actually, perhaps you are a baboon. You're certainly not the least bit able to pick up on a little bit of nuance, that's for sure.
In the USA guns kill more people by suicide and accident than murder.
So, you're thinking that people who want to kill themselves would not want to kill themselves if guns weren't handy? Japan as a very high suicide rate, and that hardly ever involves guns. What's your point, exactly? People that desparate use whatever tool they choose to use. The tool doesn't make them WANT to end their lives.
Accidents? Please compare to falling down stairs, crashing cars, electrocution, choking on food, taking the wrong meds, cleaning gutters from ladders, etc. The only reason anybody dies accidentally while handling a gun is because they haven't been shown how to do it safely. The gun doesn't CAUSE the accident. Carelessness, just like with chainsaws, causes the accident. What's your point, exactly?
"Bush Denies He Is In Denial" is one of my favorite headlines
You are a baboon. What's that? You're denying it?
Just like lawyers say that you can indict a ham sandwich, reporters and talking heads and any idealogue can say anything they want about anybody, especially someone holding a high public office. What is it, exactly, that you say I'm in denial about? Are you saying that I misquoted a press conference? Shall we start linking to transcripts, or will you just substantiate your assertion?
If this actually gets to the point where it needs to stop at the White House, then it will. This isn't one of those things (yet, if ever).
And why does Bush refer to himself as "the decider"?
Clearly context doesn't mean much to you, but of course you know that he used that phrase while speaking about a specific topic, indicating that another party wasn't going to be making a decision, he was. Just like when you get some unsolicited (or even asked-for) advice from someone else. You're still the one to decide on a course of action. If you don't have that juice, then you're not The Decider on that particular topic. Doesn't matter - you're presuming this is something that's already on the C-in-C's desk, and I'll bet that it's not... at least, not in any way that matters.
Here's a better idea: stop allowing copyright to be assignable or inheritable. If you write something then you and only you can ever hold the copyright on it, and after a certain amount of time has passed, or when you die (whichever comes first), it automatically and immediately becomes Public Domain.
Nah.
Let's say that you just spent three years working on a recording or a film, etc. Or a novel. You know that you'll be getting good money for your work as it sells, especially in the next couple or three years, and that's going to be an important part of your family's income. The book/film/recording publishing deal kicks in, and your work starts to get in front of your audience, and all of the sacrifice you and your long-suffering wife have made is about to pay off. And you get hit by a bus on the way to the book signing/premier/etc.
Is it really unreasonable to say that your wife, who perhaps was supporting you while you spent all that time typing/filming/recording, to (as you would certainly have wished) benefit from your work? Are you so insistent that someone else get to pretend that Mickey Mouse isn't a Disney character and release Porno Mickey movies that you'd make the dead author's work public domain the day after he got done writing it, and leave his family holding the bag? That's definitely the sentiment of someone who's never worked on anything that took more than a week to create.
If criminals know that the average person is armed it is not going to stop them.
Wrong. Letting one know that I was armed did stop him. Perfectly. A nobody got killed or hurt (um, not counting what may or may not have happened to him in prison, later - but that's a separate conversation).
They will make sure that they are armed too with a resulting increase in injury and death
They already are! And if you take away that tool from the non-criminals, you get insane conversations - as you've had in Britain - about whether or not to criminalize kitchen knives.
And American kids die when they find a gun and play with it - dreadful
Exactly as dreadful as kids that die burning down their house while playing with matches, or die emulating some stupid stunt they saw on TV. It's almost as if... when they haven't been shown how to be sensible, they do stupid things. I was introduced to firearms early and often. My family took all of the mystery out of firearms when I was little, and made a point of demonstrating their danger. I grew up seeing them exactly as I would see an acetylene welding torch in the garage: a dangerous tool with which you didn't screw around. I can say the same for all of my friends, too. The kids who hurt themselves with guns only do so because of idiot parents.
Now, I'm not sure if the stats for "numbers of homicides" means individual deaths, or "incidents" (which may involve multiple deaths). An interesting way to break down the stats would be to look at the number of deaths per "incident" for each type of weapon (or non-weapon). I think you'll find that statistically there are a *lot* more deaths per "incident" when guns are involved.
If you're going down that road, you'd better also look at the number of "incidents" in which the use (typically, brandishing) of a firearm prevented someone from getting harmed. Speaking as someone for whom that has been personally helpful, I can tell you it's a very meaningful aspect of the issue. You would also want to take into account places like Australia, which have seen a jump in good old fashioned beatings and knifings since the confiscatory gun ban there took place some years back.
But I don't give a rat's ass about the overall stats. I've used my gun, without killing anyone, to protect my family from a violent person. I won't bother with the details here unless it's worth getting into - but you can google for some stats on self defense, deterrence, and related issues. It's much more significant than your comment would imply that you know.
Actually, any educated individual (and lawyers have to have a lot of education) knows that life expectancy is going up, and so is the cost of ever-improving medical care. And yet they still signed the agreements. So bitching about something you knew about already is pointless. You knew about it, and you're bitching about it now because it's no longer convenient for you. Then why'd you sign it?
I don't think that people negotiating a union retirement healthcare deal in the 1960's, for an employee that retired in, say, the 1980s, would have had the ability to predict the litigious nature of the current healthcare environment. You know, the one that makes doctors use million dollar machines to perform half a dozen $5k tests that probably have no bearing on a patient's terminal condition... but which they do anyway because otherwise the dying patient's relatives will (and do) sue the hell out of them. Everyone's bitching about artists' children staking a claim on their family's work, but a lot of children of terminal patients see that parent's lingering death as a cash cow, too - and exploit it. The only defense, medically, is to do everything that the current technology supports, just so a jury can't be told they didn't.
What's technically possible now, and what it costs, is completely stratospheric compared to what was likely when a union contract was being negotiated 30 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertising is evil, and shouldn't be permitted.
Whew.
OK, so now that we're all back to having to tell each other what building downtown contains what businesses (since, I presume, you wouldn't even want the Yellow Pages to exist)...
How does your local farmer communicate the fact that, this week, he's got some really nice radishes? Let's see... he can't put up a sign (eeeek! advertising!). He can't stand on the corner and fill you in on his inventory for the week (gaaah! advertising!)... no, he has to wait for everyone to call HIM and ask what he's got, right? What if he suddenly has to pony up for a new tractor transmission (um, assuming that he's actually aware of where to shop for one at a good price, since no one in that line of work is allowed to advertise, right?), so he's interested in quickly generating customers for a bunch of his produce at a better than usual price. Of course, you wouldn't want him to be able to actually tell anyone that they're able to save some money, this week, by doing business with him, would you?
No point bothering with more of this. I'm sorry that you're so unable to exercise critical thinking in the marketplace. I'm sorry that you think it's better to outlaw communication about goods and services than it is to expect parents to teach their kids how to prioritize a little bit, or critically evaluate something that's being said to them. Those skills will also help them when evaluating other pitches. Say, from politicians that are trying to sell them on the notion that, if elected, they'll save them from their own inability not to buy things, by outlawing advertising. Sweet, sweet irony. Nice to hear from you, though, here on advertising-supported slashdot.
Ted Nugent rocks!
Who?
Kidding! My favorite of his publications: "Wack 'Em, Stack 'Em, and Pack 'Em"
He's a pretty interesting guy, actually. If you can get him to slow down for five minutes - he sort of freaks people out sometimes because they can't keep up. Go Ted, go!
This is painfully spurious reasoning.
Sometimes a little rhetorical absurdity works, I think. All I'm doing is challenging the anonymous coward to actually spell out the distinction between the thought he probably never gives to the vast number of critters that die in industrial agriculture, vs. one that can't survive proximity to human existance. Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you should be paralyzed into doing nothing, of course.
it is immoral to kill conscious beings
Sentience is indeed a tricky business. Alert animals that exhibit complex reactions to complex surroundings and circumstances are certainly different than, say, an insect. But plenty of people would suggest that a bee-hive, taken as a whole, is more "cognitively complex" than a rabbit. And yet we enslave bees, don't we? They are killed with a swat at the slightest perception that they'll sting. I'm inclined to look at a given valley's deer population in much the same way. When the population reaches the point where the animals are - in search of less populated turf - wandering in front of cars and being painfully injured and killed, or when there are so many crowded into a small area that the healthy ones are quickly picking up diseases from the few that would normally already have wandered off alone to die - it's a situation that's way out of balance. And there are no predators left to deal with it. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions are no longer allowed to take care of business. And believe me, I do weigh carefully the similarities between a deer and myself. If you've never personally field dressed a deer that you've killed 10 minutes before, that's at least one way in which you've never confronted your own mortality, believe me. But then, if you've never had a drug-free, ultra-lean venison tenderloin roasted with some fruit and served with a nice Petit Syrah, you've also missed out.
Um, just to clarify things, people who hunt are sadists.
Never met one. Every hunter I know goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that the animals they eat - which live in the wild and pretty much never die of old age - meet a rather instantaneous end. Do you eat fish? When was the last time you saw to it that your salmon had a nice peaceful death, or a completely abrupt one? Hooking or netting a fish is a painful, panicky thing, just like capturing crabs, or running cattle into a chute for slaughter. I take very seriously my opportunity and responsibility to take wild game in an ethical manner.
I also participate in keeping the eastern seaboard whitetail deer population under control. Since the natural predators are gone from suburbia, and such developments create ideal deer habitat, you wind up with many times the population of deer that were present even 300 years ago. When poor weather happens, or during the rut, you get vast number of these animals moving across highways or gathering in unnatually large herds. The result is painful (and sometimes drawn-out) death by injury from a vehicle, or very high rates of disease transmission from over crowding. People who want deer to live like that are sadists (to use your word). People who take the role that wolves used to play (in keeping the herds properly thinned out) not only are doing the species a service, but are also putting into their freezers some very healthy, lean meat that isn't soaked in steroids and anti-biotics, and which didn't involve huge farming operations (which burn tons of fuel and drench the soil with fertalizers) to raise and transport. While performing this little service, we (hunters) also pay large sums of money into state coffers, and support all sorts of wildlife conservation programs. Hunters do more to ensure the long term viability of wildlife (from ducks to deer to foxes and wild turkey) than most any other group.
Since you so obviously want everyone to know that you are a sadist you must be even more deranged than the average hunter.
Says the anonymous coward.
I'm more than happy to tell people where the holiday meal they're eating came from. In my family, it's nice pheasant appetizers followed by a really good venison roast. All taken by me, in the field, while on my two feet. While I'm at it, I pick up trash, dispose of old abandoned barbwire, report poachers to the game wardens, tell farmers what I've seen on their back 40, and reduce - by at least a few meals - the demand for factory farming and all of the waste that goes with it.
So, since you're a vegetarian, tell me everything you know about how the soybean farmers you buy from don't ever shoot the varmits that dig holes in their crop sections. Tell me how they tuck each groundhog and jackrabbit into bed every night. Do you sleep better at night knowing that the farmers you deal with use special combines that are guaranteed not to slowly crush voles, mice, and other small mammals as they drive over those animals' home turf? Oops! I forgot. That's simply not true, is it? Tell me what you know about the "organic" operations that, none the less, still practice ditch-to-ditch farming, thus reducing the very habitat that would provide homes for grouse or quail. You know, nature's little pest-bug patrol. In fact, tell me what you know about any of this whatsoever, since your previous comment would imply that you're an ignorant fool that thinks all food is produced by extracting it from rainbows, and delivered by My Little Pony to your grocery store. Hunters aren't sadists. But people who eat meat and wear leather without every personally doing the work of producing it are: cowards (and usually shrill, hypocritical asses, as well).
People are a lot less likely to die in knifings and beatings. The gun ban works.
It sure doesn't help the person who'd very much like to not be stabbed or beaten, and could prevent it entirely by bringing a gun into the equation. Here in the US, states that have passed more liberal possesion and right-to-carry laws have seen a dramatic drop in the rates of all such assaults, robberies, burglaries, rapes, etc. Because when someone doesn't know if the person he's about to assault may be able to kill them, less of it happens. When they know that they cannot, they take more chances, and an usually succeed with a knife.
As for this issue, let's stick to morality, since this is a moral issue.
Um, just to clarify a few things, please lay out your moral framework, as it relates to which living creatures it's OK to kill, and by what means. If it's a moral issue, that should be very simple for you to describe, since surely you're not basing that notion on any mixed premises or anything.
Are you a vegan? And if so, what steps are you taking to make sure that a particular sub-species of earthworm that lives only in a little valley where thin, pale-looking organic farmers use ox-drawn iron-age plows to greenly raise the plants from which your Thanksgiving tofurkey was molded are all cut to ribbons in the process? You could be partly responsible for wormicide.
Or, do your moral considerations vary as a function of animal cuteness or whether or not it was portrayed as good or evil in Narnia?
I hate to see anything extinct, and wish that Giant Cave Bears still existed to eat granola-crunching naturalists that talk to trees on a first name basis, but you'd better be careful about the distinction between "dumb" and "immoral." Because once you cast the damage or support done to/for a particular species in moral terms, you're into some deep water. That is, if you have any intellectual honesty whatsoever.
The cold isn't the only thing that would-be colonists would be facing, right? Don't the gas giants have some helacious radiation belts? I seem to recall that Titan is sitting right in the middle of one, too. Perhaps a pro can chime in on that. Sure, we could warm up a nice little ice cave and whatnot, but would all that ice also be a worthy shield against the EM nastiness?
complimentary! nice shoes! (that was a COMPLIMENT) oh.. you meant COMPLEMENTARY!
No. The articles are complimentary about the businesses being discussed. As in, "they have a nice business." That is indeed a compliment, and thus the article is complimentary. It's certainly possible that the article and company's web site are also complementary, but that's not what I was saying. I pointed out the complimentary nature of the articles as a way to mention that the businesses can hardly complain if I land higher in the search results.
What's the point of suing the blogger? If Google is the one that creates the page rankings, and is the reason why that blog is ranked higher than his website, how is it the blogger's fault?
I'm sorry, sir, but we won't be needing you and your fancy rational thinking on the jury. Have a nice day!
On a site I run, I've got articles I've written about other businesses (typically complimentary) that invariably rank higher than the businesses' own web sites, especially on slightly odd-ball searches, but often on something as simple as the business's name. And the only thing I'm doing is using better grammar, and generally carrying on in a more conservative way. Google seems to reward restraint. Breathless promotional material always seems to take a back seat to lucid, well-constructed information.
Sure, Google ranks plenty of blatant trash higher than it sometimes should, but it's not always that way. My own experience is that actual, real content remains king. Small businesses frequently don't take the time to actually write any real meat for their own web sites. Hell, a lot my older stuff still isn't even all that standards-compliant (I swear I'll get around that CSS stuff one of these days), but it usually exceeds the sites about which I'm writing. And, of course, it's a feedback loop. The more credible some of my pages appear, the higher the new ones rank, too. No witchcraft, no magic sauce: just careful writing and resisting the urge to run content from the slimier ad engines.
Good news photogs are still going to get the shots they've always been there for. They also get access to places and events that other people don't get access to. Being part of the press corps does give you that chance to capture Gerald Ford tripping down the stairs, or Bill Clinton ginning up some Oscar-worthy tears, etc. But to the extent that a lot people are more interested in stuff that happens to normal people, even cheesy low-res MPGs are more relevent because they exist.
The other thing, here, is the presence of more enthusiasts' cameras in and around events/scenes that would normally never rate the presence of a professional. Not the county fair, etc., but oddball sports/leagues, minor-league political events, that sort of thing. I've found that some of my own special-interest events (outdoorsy stuff among the bird dog crowd) has been bone dry of any media coverage that doesn't come from within. Um, except when the vice president accidentally peppers a lawyer while quail hunting - then all the sudden everyone wants images from that world... for exactly a week, anyway.
But when I shoot stuff at an event, there can be twenty other people there with their cell-phone-cams, and it's the nerd with the heavy duty DSLR that produces the images people actually want. Most folks simply won't carry around enough glass to produce the sort of images that a pro or an insane amateur can produce, since it's just too inconvenient. Doesn't matter how many pixels a cell phone's sensor can pack in - the laws of physics are still in the way of those tiny lenses producing really good workable images, especially of active subjects in mediocre light.
I've also found that carrying a macho camera and strobes gets you in places. It's sort of like all of those times that I used a mic cable and got around college bar cover charges saying, "I'm with the band."
But the sheer number of images produced by all of those portables (say, the stuff from the Madrid train bombings) will certainly result in lots of web/broadcast coverage that an assigned pro would never produce. But what a professional (with his/her practiced eye, journalistic sensibilities, better gear, and credentialed access) can produce will never be replaced by the ubiquitous phone-cam. These things are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. But look at how the Michael Richards video clip circulated... that stuff will certainly eclipse other material's airtime when it's compelling enough.
But of course, the tranmission and the particles are traveling at the speed of light so the transmission doesn't get there in time
You can't outrun lightning on the golf course, either. But you can check the radar before you book a tee-time. I suppose the point is that there are some indicators of when we will have some fast-as-light (or very-fast-particles) crap coming our way - based on other behaviors - and that, like predicting earthquakes (another thing you can't outrun), we can still take a few precautions when things look a little dodgy.
And the universe begins to look more electric
I don't think that theory is very well grounded. *rim-shot*
Thank you, I'll be here all afternoon. Try the cold pizza.
Quite right.
People like claiming "I never got that e-mail" or "It must have gotten lost somewhere in the system" becase it's a easy way to get them off the hook. It's a bit like "I was writing a document yesterday and now it's gone!" (it's saved in their My Documents, they just never bothered to look). Or "My dog ate my homework".
Well, not really. Were you in on this conversation? I think that counts as a lot of lost mail.
Of course, it's nothing like saving someone's life. It's like saving 1 second twice a day. Meaningless.
But... but... it's a Mac thing! It's a Steve Freakin' Jobs thing! It has to have iMeaning.
Actually, it reminds me of the old saw about this sort of thing: "We need a baby in a hurry. We'll get nine women working on it, so let's call it one month."
Heh. That one never gets old.
Thanks for the ad hominems too
Actually, I wasn't going to bother with poking fun at you directly, but since you obviously can't tell that calling you a baboon was an illustration of how anyone can call anyone anything, and thus have them either labeled that way - or be seen "in denial" of being that way - then, actually, perhaps you are a baboon. You're certainly not the least bit able to pick up on a little bit of nuance, that's for sure.
In the USA guns kill more people by suicide and accident than murder.
So, you're thinking that people who want to kill themselves would not want to kill themselves if guns weren't handy? Japan as a very high suicide rate, and that hardly ever involves guns. What's your point, exactly? People that desparate use whatever tool they choose to use. The tool doesn't make them WANT to end their lives.
Accidents? Please compare to falling down stairs, crashing cars, electrocution, choking on food, taking the wrong meds, cleaning gutters from ladders, etc. The only reason anybody dies accidentally while handling a gun is because they haven't been shown how to do it safely. The gun doesn't CAUSE the accident. Carelessness, just like with chainsaws, causes the accident. What's your point, exactly?
"Bush Denies He Is In Denial" is one of my favorite headlines
You are a baboon. What's that? You're denying it?
Just like lawyers say that you can indict a ham sandwich, reporters and talking heads and any idealogue can say anything they want about anybody, especially someone holding a high public office. What is it, exactly, that you say I'm in denial about? Are you saying that I misquoted a press conference? Shall we start linking to transcripts, or will you just substantiate your assertion?
What happened to the buck stops here?
If this actually gets to the point where it needs to stop at the White House, then it will. This isn't one of those things (yet, if ever).
And why does Bush refer to himself as "the decider"?
Clearly context doesn't mean much to you, but of course you know that he used that phrase while speaking about a specific topic, indicating that another party wasn't going to be making a decision, he was. Just like when you get some unsolicited (or even asked-for) advice from someone else. You're still the one to decide on a course of action. If you don't have that juice, then you're not The Decider on that particular topic. Doesn't matter - you're presuming this is something that's already on the C-in-C's desk, and I'll bet that it's not... at least, not in any way that matters.
Here's a better idea: stop allowing copyright to be assignable or inheritable. If you write something then you and only you can ever hold the copyright on it, and after a certain amount of time has passed, or when you die (whichever comes first), it automatically and immediately becomes Public Domain.
Nah.
Let's say that you just spent three years working on a recording or a film, etc. Or a novel. You know that you'll be getting good money for your work as it sells, especially in the next couple or three years, and that's going to be an important part of your family's income. The book/film/recording publishing deal kicks in, and your work starts to get in front of your audience, and all of the sacrifice you and your long-suffering wife have made is about to pay off. And you get hit by a bus on the way to the book signing/premier/etc.
Is it really unreasonable to say that your wife, who perhaps was supporting you while you spent all that time typing/filming/recording, to (as you would certainly have wished) benefit from your work? Are you so insistent that someone else get to pretend that Mickey Mouse isn't a Disney character and release Porno Mickey movies that you'd make the dead author's work public domain the day after he got done writing it, and leave his family holding the bag? That's definitely the sentiment of someone who's never worked on anything that took more than a week to create.
If criminals know that the average person is armed it is not going to stop them.
Wrong. Letting one know that I was armed did stop him. Perfectly. A nobody got killed or hurt (um, not counting what may or may not have happened to him in prison, later - but that's a separate conversation).
They will make sure that they are armed too with a resulting increase in injury and death
They already are! And if you take away that tool from the non-criminals, you get insane conversations - as you've had in Britain - about whether or not to criminalize kitchen knives.
And American kids die when they find a gun and play with it - dreadful
Exactly as dreadful as kids that die burning down their house while playing with matches, or die emulating some stupid stunt they saw on TV. It's almost as if... when they haven't been shown how to be sensible, they do stupid things. I was introduced to firearms early and often. My family took all of the mystery out of firearms when I was little, and made a point of demonstrating their danger. I grew up seeing them exactly as I would see an acetylene welding torch in the garage: a dangerous tool with which you didn't screw around. I can say the same for all of my friends, too. The kids who hurt themselves with guns only do so because of idiot parents.
If 50% +1 of the people says that YOU are to be raped, tortured, and enslaved .. does the fact that it's a democratic process make it all okay somehow?
Oh, sure, get all reasonable 'n' stuff.
Of course, what you've just said explains exactly why we're a republic, and not a simple democracy. Founding Fathers: smart cookies.
Now, I'm not sure if the stats for "numbers of homicides" means individual deaths, or "incidents" (which may involve multiple deaths). An interesting way to break down the stats would be to look at the number of deaths per "incident" for each type of weapon (or non-weapon). I think you'll find that statistically there are a *lot* more deaths per "incident" when guns are involved.
If you're going down that road, you'd better also look at the number of "incidents" in which the use (typically, brandishing) of a firearm prevented someone from getting harmed. Speaking as someone for whom that has been personally helpful, I can tell you it's a very meaningful aspect of the issue. You would also want to take into account places like Australia, which have seen a jump in good old fashioned beatings and knifings since the confiscatory gun ban there took place some years back.
But I don't give a rat's ass about the overall stats. I've used my gun, without killing anyone, to protect my family from a violent person. I won't bother with the details here unless it's worth getting into - but you can google for some stats on self defense, deterrence, and related issues. It's much more significant than your comment would imply that you know.
Then be clearer. You say, "if you want money, do some work." You're talking about people who are still alive.
Actually, any educated individual (and lawyers have to have a lot of education) knows that life expectancy is going up, and so is the cost of ever-improving medical care. And yet they still signed the agreements. So bitching about something you knew about already is pointless. You knew about it, and you're bitching about it now because it's no longer convenient for you. Then why'd you sign it?
I don't think that people negotiating a union retirement healthcare deal in the 1960's, for an employee that retired in, say, the 1980s, would have had the ability to predict the litigious nature of the current healthcare environment. You know, the one that makes doctors use million dollar machines to perform half a dozen $5k tests that probably have no bearing on a patient's terminal condition... but which they do anyway because otherwise the dying patient's relatives will (and do) sue the hell out of them. Everyone's bitching about artists' children staking a claim on their family's work, but a lot of children of terminal patients see that parent's lingering death as a cash cow, too - and exploit it. The only defense, medically, is to do everything that the current technology supports, just so a jury can't be told they didn't.
What's technically possible now, and what it costs, is completely stratospheric compared to what was likely when a union contract was being negotiated 30 years ago.