That's nice. The Pledge doesn't say "One God." It just says "under God" without even an article, which suggests you can put any interpretation on the word you'd like.
And there's no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian concept of God." Jews and Christians have very different ideas about what God is like. Please educate yourself before criticizing.
If your six-year-old is being caused "anguish", that's the teacher's fault. In matters like this, the teachers ought to bow to the wishes of the parents. If they're not, they need a stern talking to.
conservatives hold static documents as ideals and will battle to the death on this issue
so I should spend my time trying to eliminate the elitist monarchy in Canada
Can't you see you're trying to have your cake and eat it too? The documents mean we're a nation governed by laws, not by men. (And they're hardly static. The US Constitution has been amended 27 times in its history.) This is what you must do if you don't want to be ruled by a monarchy, becuase otherwise you're ruled by the whims of whatever magistrates happen to take jurisdiction over you. The fact that activist judges try to do just this has seriously undermined the prestige and perceived validity of their offices.
On the other hand you claim to want to eliminate rule by men by ridding yourself of the monarchy. So which is it? Laws or men? You've got to have one or the other, unless you want anarchy, which is an utterly insupportable.
Yes we can, if the child has acutal convictions in the matter. It's routine for the children of Jehovah's Witnesses not to say the pledge, and has been for many years. Yes, there was one in my classes in elementary school, and yes she never said the pledge even when she was 8 years old and younger. This was back in the late 60s and early 70s, so it's been the case for a very long time.
"Going to school should not require a child to have to make daily moral decisions." !!! What an astonishing thing to say. Every day involves some moral decisions no matter what we're doing, and that's part of what we need to learn to do as we grow up. What better way to do it than to stand by your convictions even when it's not what most other people are doing! And what an excellent argument for leaving the pledge just the way it is!
Or would you rather raise a generation of amoral slugs?
The dad who was fighting against the pledge "for his little girl" apparently is raising a little girl who actually LIKES to say it. Maybe you should take a moment and ask your children what they think before shooting your mouth off and telling everyone what you think they think.
The dad in question actually isn't raising the girl at all. He's divorced, and it's his ex-wife who's raising the girl in a religious household. That's why she doesn't mind saying it; she's a believer herself. The father is just using her as an excuse to file the lawsuit and further his own agenda. Her opinions mean nothing to him. IMO he ought to have his parental rights terminated for using his daughter so cynically.
You will not find "separation of church and state" anywhere in the Constitution, and the fact that the courts have tended to see this phantom in the phrases delimiting church and state relations doesn't magically put the words in.
Your position, taken to its logical conclusion, would indeed force atheism onto the country since it would exclude from public discourse anyone whose opinion is informed by their religious beliefs. This is unacceptable, and I refuse to be disenfranchised in this way.
It's "establishment" in no sense of the word. An "established" religion is one like the CoE in England. Here is a brief discussion of the idea of Establishment, with some comments near the beginning on how the American courts have misinterpreted the phrase in recent times. Yes, whatever interpretation the courts impose is the law. That doesn't make it correct, and the Supreme Court has the opportunity to make a correct interpretation here.
That's because the Constitution assigns the authority to coin money to Congress and no one else. Every coin design is approved by an act of Congress. There was nothing unique about the way the motto was placed on them.
Despite the episodes of violence it contains, Lord of the Rings isn't a particularly violent novel and the story does not naturally lend itself to adaptation as an action film, but that's the direction Jackson decided to go. It's at the heart of everything that's wrong with these films. A competent director knows very well how to build and release dramatic tension without resorting to baser means of stimulating an audience's adrenal glands. Either this was beyond Jackon's capacity or he didn't think he could get a movie like that funded.
Consider as an example the race to Bucklebury Ferry in the first movie. Any hack film-noir director could have filmed that scene very effectively as written, and it would have been positively spooky. Jackson's approach was to make it an Indiana Jones-type last-second escape. This set up a completely different dynamic with regard to the Nazgul, draining them of any real feeling of menace. Tolkien used them as he did because, as he pointed out, their main weapon was fear. Jackson's version of the Nazgul didn't look like anything to be frightened of.
The focus on action instead of character and mood led to other distortions. Saruman's role was exaggerated hugely in the first movie. To cover for the imbalances this introduced into the story, it was exaggerated even further in the second. An audience could be forgiven if it forgets that Sauron, not Saruman, is supposed to be the main enemy here. (And that ridiculous literal firey eye glowing atop Barad-Dur! Far from frightening, it was almost funny!) So much was made of Helm's Deep that PJ will likely have very little room for the seige of Minas Tirith. That means that one of the most dramatic and filmable moments in the story, the madness and suicide of Denethor, will probably be given short shrift. (And indeed, since Faramir has been mangled into merely a slightly smarter copy of Boromir, he and his dad will have little to disagree over.)
Yes, some plot alterations are inevitable for the reasons you say. A limited amount of character modification is also inevitable. But too far is too far. Here's how I explained it to a friend who had trouble understanding why I didn't like TTT. Suppose your favorite book was a deeply metaphorical work about a vengeful whaler captain's worldwide hunt for a particular whale, as told from the point of view of one of his crew. After many years and a notorious failed attempt, a movie is made of this book that by all accounts has every chance of succeeding. In all eagerness and willingness to like this movie, you sit down to watch. As the film progresses, you see that the hunt doesn't take place over all the world's seas, but over a small stretch of water off the coast of New England. And it's not a whaler and it's mad captain, but a fishing boat and a hard-bitten, cynical skipper. And the POV character isn't one of his crew -- he has no crew -- but the law enforcement official who hired him. And it's not a white whale, but a great white shark. And it dawns on you that this film isn't Moby-Dick at all, but rather Ja
...in the opening lines of a technology article goes to The Tech Report for this gem:
The question with any new graphics chip, of course, is whether it can survive and prosper in the brutal world of graphics.
Gee guys, I never would have guessed that a graphics chip had to be successful at graphics. Thank you, thank you ever so, for pointing that up for us n00bs!
This also makes me wonder why anyone hasn't implemented a VAX-like versioning filesystem for Linux (maybe they have and I'm not aware of them). The idea is that when a file is saved, only the changes are saved (sort of like with CVS or something). This way any specific version of a file can be recovered.
This isn't how the VMS filesystem works. It actually creates an entirely new copy of the file, incrementing the version number. As you may imagine this often takes up lots of disk space, so the PURGE command exists to clear away all versions except the latest. Purged versions of a file are not recoverable unless you've backed them up conventionally.
The CVS-type system that runs on VMS, CMS, does store succeeding generations as changes over the previous one, and in that case all generations back to the first are recoverable at any time. But no one in their right mind would use it for a filesystem.
About 10 years ago I moved from "Silicon Valley" to an isloated canyon just off the Pacific coast near Ano Nuevo State Reserve. A good-sized cabin on an acre could be had there for less than $1000/month, not much more than my wife and I had been paying for an apartment in Campbell. The commute turned out to be a killer so I ended up moving to a less remote area of Santa Cruz County, but I miss the place deeply. Out on Hwy 1, a bit of a glow from the other side of the mountains was visible to the east, but to the west all was darkness and the stars were brilliant. In the canyon itself, the light pollution was cut off by the ridges on either side, and what stars could be seen above about a 30 degree elevation shone out clearly.
So what do my idiot landlords do just before we move in but install an automatic high pressure sodium street light right outside the house! Not only that, but they installed it facing the bedroom window! It went on automatically when it got dark, and there wasn't even a way to turn it off. They had wired it directly into another circuit that we were generally using, and hadn't installed a switch to it or anything. What the hell were they thinking? Did they suppose people moved to the middle of the woods to have the damn place lit up like suburbia?
Fortunately, the light stopped working after a few months. Just like them to put in a cheap piece of crap that fell apart before long, but that was the right thing to do for once. (Or at least, it was the less wrong thing.) We didn't ask them to fix it.
Is there some new business strategy for totally changing industries that I should be aware of?
It's called "diversification", and isn't very new at all. It's a way of making sure your company stays afloat if its original business model becomes obsolete for some reason.
Someone else mentioned Nokia. There are a few other Japanese examples. Nintendo began selling playing cards. Toyota began life as the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. In the US, Philip Morris, one of the leading tobacco companies, has morphed into The Altria Group encompassing brands like Nabisco, Maxwell House, and Kraft.
Large companies do this kind of thing all the time. There's no reason to be surprised when you see it.
Not to mention realtime telemetry processing, which is what we still use Fortran for. The graphical front end is a Motif app written in C (yes, plain old C) but the backend stuff is all Fortran. Although there are a number of modules, mostly low-level utilities, that haven't been touched in over 10 years, large parts of our system are still actively upgraded with new features on a continuing basis.
If by "used for Tuvalu citizens" you mean "pull some money into a dirt-poor country so that maybe the economy will grow and everyone can afford running water and electricity someday" -- then yes.
Not exact wording, but you're close. And they very often do use the word "own". I think I've more often heard, "Now you can own [insert movie title] on DVD!" with "own" emphasized by the narrator. If they didn't really mean it, they're faking it real well.
If you want a very good education, as opposed to merely "decent", you find a school that offers the best one you can possibly afford. There are many other criteria to consider besides monetary cost, if you're making a wise decision. Stevens is focused on engineering, and the work you do there to earn a degree is comparable to what you would go through at Caltech or MIT even if the place isn't so well-known. (So much for "prestigious". Prestigious places are well-known by definition.) This is also a place where most of the professors are in disciplines you would call "hard science", yet their availability was the rule rather than the exception.
But there's more to an education than just professors. By the time you're in college, you're practically an adult. It's you, not your teachers, who are primarily responsible for your education in that environment. The school facilitates that as best it can, and the better the school the better facilities it offers. I have to wonder about the educational opportunities offered by any institution even one of its apparent boosters calls "trash".
In my lightest (but certainly not easiest) semester, I carried 16 hours. My heaviest courseload was 21 hours. This was intensive work, far more intensive than anything you'll encounter. When you complete a course of study like this with a better than 3.0 GPA, with grades you know you earned because you were judged against an objective scale in "hard" subjects, you know you've achieved something. It was well worth the expense.
Incidentally, this was almost 20 years ago for me, so the expense was far less than you're probably imagining. Regardless, if you think I'd even contemplate moving from New Jersey to British Columbia just to attend a "trash" school (which had no permanent campus at the time and offered no Bachelor degrees) you're badly mistaken.
I thought that professors were supposed to be at a school to teach.
No, not usually. Professors are at a school for a variety of reasons, and it's not uncommon for them to regard teaching as the least important of them. Often they're there mostly to do research. Publication enhances their prestige and that of the school, which is why successful research and publication is so important in achieving a professorship. Less so actual teaching in most cases, although one of the the burdens that must be shouldered by the up-and-coming in academia is the lion's share of the instruction, mainly when the professors don't want to deal with it.
I was fortunate enough to have attended a private college where I never encountered a single professor who was uninterested in teaching or who ever tried to avoid the students. (This was also a place where the huge lectures with the professor followed by smaller recitation sessions with TAs were the norm only during freshman year. After that, the professors mostly taught their classes personally.) But I've heard enough horror stories to understand that this is far from being the case everywhere.
One needn't go so far as to look up the FRCP to discover this. (Which, if you were paying attention as closely as you'd have to have been to justify your attitude, doesn't establish jurisdiction of the Federal courts in general, but only which Federal court has original jurisdiction for certain types of cases.) Try Article 3 Section 2 of the US Constitution, which specificly grants Federal courts jurisdiction in cases between "a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects." I was simplifying -- perhaps over-simplifying -- for the sake of dashing off a brief answer.
The courts excercise their authority in part through law enforcement agencies, but just as much through the aura of power and prestige that surrounds them. The Supreme Court, for example, has no means at all to compel adherence to its decisions; it relies rather on public perception of its legitimacy and its prestige to cause decisions it issues to be obeyed without much question. This is one reason judges retain ceremonial robes and other symbols of authority that modern society generally deems obsolete in other contexts. Courts are therefore reluctant in general to make decisions or issue orders that can be ignored with impunity because it makes them appear powerless, as they in fact are in some cases. It detracts from their perceived authority and diminishes their prestige. This is just such a case, as would be obvious to the court if the facts were correctly stated in the suit. The defendant is an organization not located in the US, has no principals in the US, does no business (in the normal sense of the word; exchanging goods and services for payment or other consideration) in the US, has no US assets, and the sole service it provides for free is to make a list available for download that's hosted on a server outside the US under a domain name registered by a non-US company. Sure, a court could issue a restraining order and order a jury trial as the suit demands. It would accomplish precisely nothing. It would make the court look ridiculous. They wouldn't do it.
How do you get an American court to have jurisdiction over a company that does not sell products to US consumers - since it does not sell anything - and does not have any divisions in the US?
You don't. That's why the plaintiff had to lie about the Spamhaus' and Steve Linford's whereabouts, about US residents being principals in Spamhaus, and to falsely suggest that it might have a US office. Otherwise the suit would be thrown out at as soon as it landed on a judge's desk.
Let's just hope this applet isn't sending the SSN back in cleartext, otherwise everyone who uses this system will have security or privacy issues at some point.
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And there's no such thing as a "Judeo-Christian concept of God." Jews and Christians have very different ideas about what God is like. Please educate yourself before criticizing.
If your six-year-old is being caused "anguish", that's the teacher's fault. In matters like this, the teachers ought to bow to the wishes of the parents. If they're not, they need a stern talking to.
so I should spend my time trying to eliminate the elitist monarchy in Canada
Can't you see you're trying to have your cake and eat it too? The documents mean we're a nation governed by laws, not by men. (And they're hardly static. The US Constitution has been amended 27 times in its history.) This is what you must do if you don't want to be ruled by a monarchy, becuase otherwise you're ruled by the whims of whatever magistrates happen to take jurisdiction over you. The fact that activist judges try to do just this has seriously undermined the prestige and perceived validity of their offices.
On the other hand you claim to want to eliminate rule by men by ridding yourself of the monarchy. So which is it? Laws or men? You've got to have one or the other, unless you want anarchy, which is an utterly insupportable.
"Going to school should not require a child to have to make daily moral decisions." !!! What an astonishing thing to say. Every day involves some moral decisions no matter what we're doing, and that's part of what we need to learn to do as we grow up. What better way to do it than to stand by your convictions even when it's not what most other people are doing! And what an excellent argument for leaving the pledge just the way it is!
Or would you rather raise a generation of amoral slugs?
The dad in question actually isn't raising the girl at all. He's divorced, and it's his ex-wife who's raising the girl in a religious household. That's why she doesn't mind saying it; she's a believer herself. The father is just using her as an excuse to file the lawsuit and further his own agenda. Her opinions mean nothing to him. IMO he ought to have his parental rights terminated for using his daughter so cynically.
Your position, taken to its logical conclusion, would indeed force atheism onto the country since it would exclude from public discourse anyone whose opinion is informed by their religious beliefs. This is unacceptable, and I refuse to be disenfranchised in this way.
It's "establishment" in no sense of the word. An "established" religion is one like the CoE in England. Here is a brief discussion of the idea of Establishment, with some comments near the beginning on how the American courts have misinterpreted the phrase in recent times. Yes, whatever interpretation the courts impose is the law. That doesn't make it correct, and the Supreme Court has the opportunity to make a correct interpretation here.
That's because the Constitution assigns the authority to coin money to Congress and no one else. Every coin design is approved by an act of Congress. There was nothing unique about the way the motto was placed on them.
Despite the episodes of violence it contains, Lord of the Rings isn't a particularly violent novel and the story does not naturally lend itself to adaptation as an action film, but that's the direction Jackson decided to go. It's at the heart of everything that's wrong with these films. A competent director knows very well how to build and release dramatic tension without resorting to baser means of stimulating an audience's adrenal glands. Either this was beyond Jackon's capacity or he didn't think he could get a movie like that funded.
Consider as an example the race to Bucklebury Ferry in the first movie. Any hack film-noir director could have filmed that scene very effectively as written, and it would have been positively spooky. Jackson's approach was to make it an Indiana Jones-type last-second escape. This set up a completely different dynamic with regard to the Nazgul, draining them of any real feeling of menace. Tolkien used them as he did because, as he pointed out, their main weapon was fear. Jackson's version of the Nazgul didn't look like anything to be frightened of.
The focus on action instead of character and mood led to other distortions. Saruman's role was exaggerated hugely in the first movie. To cover for the imbalances this introduced into the story, it was exaggerated even further in the second. An audience could be forgiven if it forgets that Sauron, not Saruman, is supposed to be the main enemy here. (And that ridiculous literal firey eye glowing atop Barad-Dur! Far from frightening, it was almost funny!) So much was made of Helm's Deep that PJ will likely have very little room for the seige of Minas Tirith. That means that one of the most dramatic and filmable moments in the story, the madness and suicide of Denethor, will probably be given short shrift. (And indeed, since Faramir has been mangled into merely a slightly smarter copy of Boromir, he and his dad will have little to disagree over.)
Yes, some plot alterations are inevitable for the reasons you say. A limited amount of character modification is also inevitable. But too far is too far. Here's how I explained it to a friend who had trouble understanding why I didn't like TTT. Suppose your favorite book was a deeply metaphorical work about a vengeful whaler captain's worldwide hunt for a particular whale, as told from the point of view of one of his crew. After many years and a notorious failed attempt, a movie is made of this book that by all accounts has every chance of succeeding. In all eagerness and willingness to like this movie, you sit down to watch. As the film progresses, you see that the hunt doesn't take place over all the world's seas, but over a small stretch of water off the coast of New England. And it's not a whaler and it's mad captain, but a fishing boat and a hard-bitten, cynical skipper. And the POV character isn't one of his crew -- he has no crew -- but the law enforcement official who hired him. And it's not a white whale, but a great white shark. And it dawns on you that this film isn't Moby-Dick at all, but rather Ja
VeriSign Worldwide Headquarters
487 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: 650-961-7500
FAX: 650-961-7300
Have fun!
This isn't how the VMS filesystem works. It actually creates an entirely new copy of the file, incrementing the version number. As you may imagine this often takes up lots of disk space, so the PURGE command exists to clear away all versions except the latest. Purged versions of a file are not recoverable unless you've backed them up conventionally.
The CVS-type system that runs on VMS, CMS, does store succeeding generations as changes over the previous one, and in that case all generations back to the first are recoverable at any time. But no one in their right mind would use it for a filesystem.
That's ridiculous. Please cite the building code section that says this.
Just so you know, the dot-com in question is Google...
So what do my idiot landlords do just before we move in but install an automatic high pressure sodium street light right outside the house! Not only that, but they installed it facing the bedroom window! It went on automatically when it got dark, and there wasn't even a way to turn it off. They had wired it directly into another circuit that we were generally using, and hadn't installed a switch to it or anything. What the hell were they thinking? Did they suppose people moved to the middle of the woods to have the damn place lit up like suburbia?
Fortunately, the light stopped working after a few months. Just like them to put in a cheap piece of crap that fell apart before long, but that was the right thing to do for once. (Or at least, it was the less wrong thing.) We didn't ask them to fix it.
It's called "diversification", and isn't very new at all. It's a way of making sure your company stays afloat if its original business model becomes obsolete for some reason.
Someone else mentioned Nokia. There are a few other Japanese examples. Nintendo began selling playing cards. Toyota began life as the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. In the US, Philip Morris, one of the leading tobacco companies, has morphed into The Altria Group encompassing brands like Nabisco, Maxwell House, and Kraft.
Large companies do this kind of thing all the time. There's no reason to be surprised when you see it.
Not to mention realtime telemetry processing, which is what we still use Fortran for. The graphical front end is a Motif app written in C (yes, plain old C) but the backend stuff is all Fortran. Although there are a number of modules, mostly low-level utilities, that haven't been touched in over 10 years, large parts of our system are still actively upgraded with new features on a continuing basis.
If by "used for Tuvalu citizens" you mean "pull some money into a dirt-poor country so that maybe the economy will grow and everyone can afford running water and electricity someday" -- then yes.
What do you think the towel was for?
Not exact wording, but you're close. And they very often do use the word "own". I think I've more often heard, "Now you can own [insert movie title] on DVD!" with "own" emphasized by the narrator. If they didn't really mean it, they're faking it real well.
But there's more to an education than just professors. By the time you're in college, you're practically an adult. It's you, not your teachers, who are primarily responsible for your education in that environment. The school facilitates that as best it can, and the better the school the better facilities it offers. I have to wonder about the educational opportunities offered by any institution even one of its apparent boosters calls "trash".
In my lightest (but certainly not easiest) semester, I carried 16 hours. My heaviest courseload was 21 hours. This was intensive work, far more intensive than anything you'll encounter. When you complete a course of study like this with a better than 3.0 GPA, with grades you know you earned because you were judged against an objective scale in "hard" subjects, you know you've achieved something. It was well worth the expense.
Incidentally, this was almost 20 years ago for me, so the expense was far less than you're probably imagining. Regardless, if you think I'd even contemplate moving from New Jersey to British Columbia just to attend a "trash" school (which had no permanent campus at the time and offered no Bachelor degrees) you're badly mistaken.
No, not usually. Professors are at a school for a variety of reasons, and it's not uncommon for them to regard teaching as the least important of them. Often they're there mostly to do research. Publication enhances their prestige and that of the school, which is why successful research and publication is so important in achieving a professorship. Less so actual teaching in most cases, although one of the the burdens that must be shouldered by the up-and-coming in academia is the lion's share of the instruction, mainly when the professors don't want to deal with it.
I was fortunate enough to have attended a private college where I never encountered a single professor who was uninterested in teaching or who ever tried to avoid the students. (This was also a place where the huge lectures with the professor followed by smaller recitation sessions with TAs were the norm only during freshman year. After that, the professors mostly taught their classes personally.) But I've heard enough horror stories to understand that this is far from being the case everywhere.
The courts excercise their authority in part through law enforcement agencies, but just as much through the aura of power and prestige that surrounds them. The Supreme Court, for example, has no means at all to compel adherence to its decisions; it relies rather on public perception of its legitimacy and its prestige to cause decisions it issues to be obeyed without much question. This is one reason judges retain ceremonial robes and other symbols of authority that modern society generally deems obsolete in other contexts. Courts are therefore reluctant in general to make decisions or issue orders that can be ignored with impunity because it makes them appear powerless, as they in fact are in some cases. It detracts from their perceived authority and diminishes their prestige. This is just such a case, as would be obvious to the court if the facts were correctly stated in the suit. The defendant is an organization not located in the US, has no principals in the US, does no business (in the normal sense of the word; exchanging goods and services for payment or other consideration) in the US, has no US assets, and the sole service it provides for free is to make a list available for download that's hosted on a server outside the US under a domain name registered by a non-US company. Sure, a court could issue a restraining order and order a jury trial as the suit demands. It would accomplish precisely nothing. It would make the court look ridiculous. They wouldn't do it.
You don't. That's why the plaintiff had to lie about the Spamhaus' and Steve Linford's whereabouts, about US residents being principals in Spamhaus, and to falsely suggest that it might have a US office. Otherwise the suit would be thrown out at as soon as it landed on a judge's desk.
Duct tape, what else?
Let's just hope this applet isn't sending the SSN back in cleartext, otherwise everyone who uses this system will have security or privacy issues at some point.