It's a well-known truism in some circles, so take that for what it's worth...:)
There's a possibly apocryphal story about a Congressman who retired from Congress and retreated to a professorship at a small university, thinking it would be a calming haven. A year later he had left the university and was preparing to run for office again -- the politics in the university were too nasty for him to deal with.
I'm sorry, but if you don't think that academics are fierce and dirty politicians, then you have either not spent enough time in academia to see it, or you haven't been paying attention. The political maneuvering that happens at academic institutions is far more vicious than most anything that happens in Washington.
Gah! I know it's OT, but I can't stand it anymore!
The legal protection for creative works is copyright, as in the right to copy. A work that's protected by copyright is said to be copyrighted
Someone whose job it is to write advertising material and press releases, which writing is commonly called "copy" in those businesses, is a copywriter. Such copy isn't said to be "copywritten", but merely "written". There's no such word as "copywritten".
Someone whose occupation it is to create a thing is called a "wright", as in "wheelwright" or "playwright". (No, not "playwrite". Yes I know that plays are written down, but that's not what we say.) "Wright" here is related to the past tense "wrought", which we almost never hear nowadays except as an adjective, as in "wrought iron". There's no such thing as a "copywright".
Civil courts have a notoriously lower standard for proof than criminal courts, presumably because the penalties are fines and not jailtime or execution.
No, the "penalties" are financial compensation paid by a losing defendant to a winning plaintiff. That's not a fine. The lower standard of proof is far from "notorious", it's only fair. Civil suits take place between parties that are theoretically equal in the eyes of the law, so there's no reason to automatically favor one party over the other. Criminal law is heavily weighted in favor of the defendant because it's presumed that citizens need more protection from a potentially draconian government than they do from each other.
IOW, mod grandparent down. It's an ill-informed comment from someone who has little understanding of the court system. He ought to have learned better from The People's Court, if nowhere else.
No. The fact that any inertial frame of reference can be regarded as equally valid does not begin with Einstein, it's fundamental to the way all physics is done. Einstein's insight was that regardless of your frame of reference, light appears to always be travelling at the same speed relative to you.
The key word here is inertial. An orbiting body is accelerating towards the center, and is therefore not an inertial frame of reference by definition. As far as calculations on the surface of the Earth go, non-inertial effects (also present because of Earth's rotation) can generally be ignored for comparatively small times and distances without significant loss of accuracy, but on the scale of the Solar System and other systems where celestial mechanics are employed, they cannot be ignored. Epicycles introduce a new non-inertial component, and therefore can't be regarded as merely relative.
Humor impaired today, aren't we? Maybe you should cut back on the caffeine.
As it happens, I have used VB when it was the appropriate tool. That was exactly once, in a situation where the lack of bitwise logical functions and operators was extremely annoying, but then again I practically never have to program for Windows. For which I thank God.
High retention rates in higher education is not necessarily a good thing. Not everyone can benefit from such an education, and the sooner they find that out the better.
The problem with your idea is that the "simple to use" languages that are most often taught are too simple and are too many generations removed from what the computer was actually doing. Years ago, even using BASIC on a TRS-80 would teach you a lot about how the machine worked. To get the best performance out of the thing you had to at least be familiar with the memory map, and that inevitably led you to further investigation.
I gather that Visual Basic is among the more commonly used introductory languages, but when so many layers are placed between the programming language and the machine how are you supposed to learn what's going on at the bottom?
For you to claim that someone doesn't care about his kid because he bans Barney is just absurd. There are lots and lots of educational shows, and Barney is far from the best of them. Kids can get far more out of something like Blue's Clues or Bear in the Big Blue House.
We don't get broadcast TV or cable at my house, so everything we watch is on tape or DVD. I've banned Barney in my house and allow (some) Disney. So there. But we have dozens of other educational shows on the video rack that actually teach some worthwhile things. And since we're almost always in the same room as the kid and the TV, his shows had better be something adults can tolerate.
Oh, if it looks like I've spent much too much time thinking about this movie... I have a 5-year-old who every so often wants to see the "Llama movie". So I've watched it far more often than a normally sane adult might have otherwise.
Possibly we'd have seen the dead parents in "Empire of the Sun", which is what the project was originally called. By the time it had metamorphosed into "The Emperor's New Groove" they'd been pushed offstage. Kuzco is 18 and the reigning emperor. No visible mother or father, and his advisor Yzma mentions at one point that she "practically raised him." So yeah, mommy and daddy are dead, but we don't see them croak here. The one happily married couple we do see survives unscathed.
I meant that it wasn't a mucical; there was no romantic storyline; no comic-relief sidekick like the monkey in Aladdin, that stupid dragon in Mulan or the gargoyles in Hunchback; no hopeless climactic fight against impossible odds that were overcome by courage/innate goodness/magic/semi-divine intervention; and nothing notable in the way of marketing tie-ins. They decided to do characterization and plot instead.
Yeah, what Slarty says. I despise Spade, but he's actually tolerable in The Emperor's New Groove. You don't actually see his face, and the movie's all about his character's utter humiliation. It's pretty enjoyable.
This was something of a bastard stepchild at the Disney studios. It started out following the standard Disney formula but took a different turn somewhere along the road and became something extremely enjoyable. I think it flopped because Disney plumb didn't know what to do with it, and they were already pouring all their resources into promoting Treasure Planet (ugh) which came out around the same time.
Think an hour-and-a-half of classic Loony Toons, and that's pretty much The Emperor's New Groove.
I first went to a LWE in San Jose back in 1998, I think. At that time, the pavillion was arranged as a group of reserved booth spaces surrounding a common area. It was a great setting for socializing, seeing what was going on among the genuine geeks, and just hanging out. (The free pinball and driving game helped too.) In later years, it devolved into a couple of rows of standard booths with aisles in the middle. There was no "common space", and the.org reps were more or less stuck in their booths with no real way of socializing among themselves, at least during hours. It was a much less congenial environment.
I'm very much hoping they've gone back to the older arrangement.
Yeah, like that one time when I tripped over a coax while walking behind a row of Apollo DN660s and yanked it clean out of the connector. Yeesh! Tokens everywhere! I had to get the mop out, and here I was not even in the janitors' union. That by itself could have gotten me fired. As it was I didn't get caught for that, but the network went down and everyone knew it was my fault because of all the squashed token guts on the bottom of my shoes.
We were finding the damn things in the ventilators for weeks afterward.
I've so far avoided getting a dedicated DVD player just because they have region coding, preferring to use a software-based open source dvd player.
Not a problem if you select your DVD player carefully. There are existing hacks for many of them that remove region coding. Sometimes there's a hidden menu that you have to access with a series of obscure manipulations of the remote, sometimes you can burn a CD with a hacked version of the firmware that the player can use to reprogram itself, or you might need to program an EEPROM with the hacked firmware.
If I were personally that ambitious, I'd have about 3 different websites running even as we speak.
Actually, I don't know how many monasteries sell items that really are aimed (deliberately or not) at the geek lifestyle. Mostly they sell religious items, which shouldn't be too surprising but which also limits interested customers to their co-religionists. It might end up as a rather small listing if it aims at geek- or general-interest products.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a possibly apocryphal story about a Congressman who retired from Congress and retreated to a professorship at a small university, thinking it would be a calming haven. A year later he had left the university and was preparing to run for office again -- the politics in the university were too nasty for him to deal with.
I'm sorry, but if you don't think that academics are fierce and dirty politicians, then you have either not spent enough time in academia to see it, or you haven't been paying attention. The political maneuvering that happens at academic institutions is far more vicious than most anything that happens in Washington.
"Copyright" is also a transitive verb, meaning to secure a copyright. It has a valid past tense. look it up if you don't believe me.
Unless he gets caught. Then we'd have to call him an "inmate".
Gah! I know it's OT, but I can't stand it anymore!
The legal protection for creative works is copyright, as in the right to copy. A work that's protected by copyright is said to be copyrighted
Someone whose job it is to write advertising material and press releases, which writing is commonly called "copy" in those businesses, is a copywriter. Such copy isn't said to be "copywritten", but merely "written". There's no such word as "copywritten".
Someone whose occupation it is to create a thing is called a "wright", as in "wheelwright" or "playwright". (No, not "playwrite". Yes I know that plays are written down, but that's not what we say.) "Wright" here is related to the past tense "wrought", which we almost never hear nowadays except as an adjective, as in "wrought iron". There's no such thing as a "copywright".
That's "Unaccompanied Sonata". Yes, very haunting. It's one of those stories you never forget once you've read it.
No, the "penalties" are financial compensation paid by a losing defendant to a winning plaintiff. That's not a fine. The lower standard of proof is far from "notorious", it's only fair. Civil suits take place between parties that are theoretically equal in the eyes of the law, so there's no reason to automatically favor one party over the other. Criminal law is heavily weighted in favor of the defendant because it's presumed that citizens need more protection from a potentially draconian government than they do from each other.
IOW, mod grandparent down. It's an ill-informed comment from someone who has little understanding of the court system. He ought to have learned better from The People's Court, if nowhere else.
Sorry, no. It goes back at least to Newton.
The key word here is inertial. An orbiting body is accelerating towards the center, and is therefore not an inertial frame of reference by definition. As far as calculations on the surface of the Earth go, non-inertial effects (also present because of Earth's rotation) can generally be ignored for comparatively small times and distances without significant loss of accuracy, but on the scale of the Solar System and other systems where celestial mechanics are employed, they cannot be ignored. Epicycles introduce a new non-inertial component, and therefore can't be regarded as merely relative.
As it happens, I have used VB when it was the appropriate tool. That was exactly once, in a situation where the lack of bitwise logical functions and operators was extremely annoying, but then again I practically never have to program for Windows. For which I thank God.
The problem with your idea is that the "simple to use" languages that are most often taught are too simple and are too many generations removed from what the computer was actually doing. Years ago, even using BASIC on a TRS-80 would teach you a lot about how the machine worked. To get the best performance out of the thing you had to at least be familiar with the memory map, and that inevitably led you to further investigation.
I gather that Visual Basic is among the more commonly used introductory languages, but when so many layers are placed between the programming language and the machine how are you supposed to learn what's going on at the bottom?
Allow me to paraphrase Jack Handey here:
It takes a big man to admit to using Visual Basic. It takes an even bigger man to mock him mercilessly for it.
We don't get broadcast TV or cable at my house, so everything we watch is on tape or DVD. I've banned Barney in my house and allow (some) Disney. So there. But we have dozens of other educational shows on the video rack that actually teach some worthwhile things. And since we're almost always in the same room as the kid and the TV, his shows had better be something adults can tolerate.
No, wait...
Oh, if it looks like I've spent much too much time thinking about this movie... I have a 5-year-old who every so often wants to see the "Llama movie". So I've watched it far more often than a normally sane adult might have otherwise.
Possibly we'd have seen the dead parents in "Empire of the Sun", which is what the project was originally called. By the time it had metamorphosed into "The Emperor's New Groove" they'd been pushed offstage. Kuzco is 18 and the reigning emperor. No visible mother or father, and his advisor Yzma mentions at one point that she "practically raised him." So yeah, mommy and daddy are dead, but we don't see them croak here. The one happily married couple we do see survives unscathed.
I meant that it wasn't a mucical; there was no romantic storyline; no comic-relief sidekick like the monkey in Aladdin, that stupid dragon in Mulan or the gargoyles in Hunchback; no hopeless climactic fight against impossible odds that were overcome by courage/innate goodness/magic/semi-divine intervention; and nothing notable in the way of marketing tie-ins. They decided to do characterization and plot instead.
And it turned out to be a good movie! Who knew?
This was something of a bastard stepchild at the Disney studios. It started out following the standard Disney formula but took a different turn somewhere along the road and became something extremely enjoyable. I think it flopped because Disney plumb didn't know what to do with it, and they were already pouring all their resources into promoting Treasure Planet (ugh) which came out around the same time.
Think an hour-and-a-half of classic Loony Toons, and that's pretty much The Emperor's New Groove.
I first went to a LWE in San Jose back in 1998, I think. At that time, the pavillion was arranged as a group of reserved booth spaces surrounding a common area. It was a great setting for socializing, seeing what was going on among the genuine geeks, and just hanging out. (The free pinball and driving game helped too.) In later years, it devolved into a couple of rows of standard booths with aisles in the middle. There was no "common space", and the .org reps were more or less stuck in their booths with no real way of socializing among themselves, at least during hours. It was a much less congenial environment.
I'm very much hoping they've gone back to the older arrangement.
We were finding the damn things in the ventilators for weeks afterward.
Not a problem if you select your DVD player carefully. There are existing hacks for many of them that remove region coding. Sometimes there's a hidden menu that you have to access with a series of obscure manipulations of the remote, sometimes you can burn a CD with a hacked version of the firmware that the player can use to reprogram itself, or you might need to program an EEPROM with the hacked firmware.
Come on... You know you want to!
At first glance I read "Plone Founders" as "Phone Pounders." Imagine my reaction.
Actually, I don't know how many monasteries sell items that really are aimed (deliberately or not) at the geek lifestyle. Mostly they sell religious items, which shouldn't be too surprising but which also limits interested customers to their co-religionists. It might end up as a rather small listing if it aims at geek- or general-interest products.
Sounds like a good idea for a website.
It's so curvy, so penannular, so je ne sais quoi! What's not to love?