They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution.
Please pay attention to the political media. This was a provision that was part of the major energy bill that two days ago died in congress. It's NOT becoming law any time soon. Congress could not agree primarily because of this provision. Republicans wouldn't take it out, Democrats didn't want it in. They probably compromised by letting the medicare bill go through but killing the energy bill.
- No scripting - must be knowledgeable on the topic and products/services offered
I disagree somewhat, since I work in a callcenter. The initial purpose of scripting is to eliminate the stupid things that stupid people forget to do, like reboot the machine, jiggle the cables, and plug in the power cord. My call center however takes it a step further and has knowledge beyond that.
If we had to do everything from memory, we'd remember about 7 of 10 things that needed to be done and then forget the other 3 and start troubleshooting all the deep weird crap when in fact its just one of those things we forgot.
The problem with scripting is of course getting into the rut that 99.9999999 of your problems are all basic and all you need to do is put a body in a seat and read a monitor to someone on the other end of the phone. This isn't true and investing in support has real, tangible benefits.
Except for the parts that are leading the moral and social revolution when it comes to homosexual marriage rights and universal health care.
Only Americans claim Canada is irrelevant, but that's because America is so relevant that they can't understand how BADLY relevant it can be sometimes.
It makes me so sick I want to move to Canada damnit!
I personally feel that US companies were simply scrambling to cut costs by outsourcing over the past few years, and many probably overcompensated. Now that the economy is improving, people will not only be able to take the time to see that outsourcing overseas is not always the best thing for IT, and that they also can add value by providing someone with expertise who can relate to the people they are working with.
The upshot being that the outsourcing trend will slow and the IT market will begin to pick up again. This is good news for people who need a job or are looking for a new one.
I have no doubt people would enjoy firefly. The problem with things like this is that its not about getting enough ratings to keep it on the air, its really about getting enough ratings to beat the competition. The problem with network TV is that its always about getting more market share than the other stations.
There's plenty of demand for a lot of shows, but I have an opinion that if Firefly was pitched to Sci-fi, it would probably still be on the air because you don't need as much of a ratings share to keep a show on the air.
Also, buffy appealed to teens when it first came out, and its not as sci-fi as it is gothic or horror or teen action drama. It developed a loyal following because it crossed genres. It kept that base until the series ended.
Sci-fi is relegated to too much of a niche compared to other forms of entertainment. Movies can afford fantasy and sci-fi special effects but even there most "sci-fi" is a glorified action or war movie which people can relate to.
People want to relate to what they are watching. A sci-fi movie or TV show can do well if you manage to explain the technology and the world without bogging down the plot and by creating a plot and characters people can get into.
Firefly was too good. It created a whole new world, but it tried to make it familiar by throwing in a very very clever wild west element. It was so subtle it didn't seem camp, just a light seasoning that made me believe "hey, its possible!"
The problem was it was centuries in the future, there is no America, no Russia, no islamic fundamentalists, and no cute teens agonizing over frivolous issues. Not enough people in the US like sci fi enough to make it successful beyond UPN or the sci-fi channel. It's a demand thing, and it sucks.
And to be honest, its not because people are frivolous or stupid or just want the same old thing. It's quite simply because perfectly nice and reasonable people just don't relate to sci-fi.
Re:The CIS majors must know something the CS don't
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 1
Your damn right I would have. The statement the author made was stupid, and that is all I was commenting on, but he was right about Sculley; he was an idiot for a CEO of a tech company:)
Your statement is incorrect, and frankly so is the statement made by the author of the book.
There are tons of examples of decent handwriting recognition. This was an attempt by the author of the book to sound clever and funny while pointing out Sculley as a bad CEO (and to the trained eye, it was a failed attempt). Sculley WAS as bad CEO, but that was simply because he had no understanding of technology over all. To a businessman, nothing is impossible, but a good technology CEO knows the limits of what can technology can provide vs how much money can be spent.
If you frame the statement correctly you are right. For example you can't make a handwriting recognition system that's not based on a fully sentient AI that could recognize any one person's distinct handwriting and translate it into digital characters. But you can make perfectly acceptable systems, depending on who you are making it for, that is effectively handwriting writing recognition.
The CIS majors must know something the CS don't
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible.
Yes it is, and Apple did it. This is not a pro apple rant, but the 1.1 release of the Newton handwriting recognition system was lauded as "pretty good." That's something funny to say, but at the time no one came close to that level except for Palm. Palm has a handwriting recognition system that also works very well, except you simply have to write a certain way, and it doesn't recognize your specific style. Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software. Exactly what is so impossible about handwriting recognition?
I was a CIS major, and hell I didn't know handwriting recognition wasn't possible? I always thought the CIS majors were smarter, and now I have proof!
Today, the economics, convenience and safety of traditional air travel are hard to beat.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA...
I'm sorry, but when a magazine gives such obvious pandering to an industry so NOT reflective of whatever they are talking about, I have change my pants.
Safe... definitely more so than driving but safety is OVER played these days and I don't care how safe it is, I might have a heart attack from the stress of dealing with the "convenience" and "economy" of flying.
I was afraid the device would be unusually large compared to the GBA with it's 2.9" screen. Obviously those worries were unfounded."
As the article states, this is only a concept design, and that the final product may be less sleek. I wish people would pay attention, this is not the final PSP and its not coming out next week.
I also wish/. would do more content proofreading but oviously those worries continue to be founded and unaddressed.
Sure, competition is great in an emerging market, but at some point you'll reach that high water mark where adding more stuff just degrades the product. Honestly, I can't think of a single feature relating to digital music that I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there.
Just because you can't think of improvements does not mean improvements cannot be made. That's the beauty of a free market. Someone comes along with an idea to do things better and suddenly every business is turned on their heads and the consumer suddenly wins.
The only thing competition will do is drive price. At 0.99 per track, there's very little profit in there for digital downloads (most is eaten up by credit card fees and licensing). Competition will ensure that price doesn't go up in the near future, but I don't think it will see it go down at all.
You make it sound like this is a bad thing. I also disagree with your statement./.ers have been screaming for years that CDs are overpriced, then we get/.ers saying that Apple isn't making any money here. What if CD sales were competing with the iTunes store (which they are) and what if CD sales cannot be sustained because both trading and online music are too easy. The natural reaction to sales decreasing is by lowering prices to increase sales. Somewhere in the music business continuum, the current CD price has to break and drop, forcing all music sales down.
Whilst I'm posting, my take on this whole thing: I still cannot understand why on earth the US moved away from the pencil-and-paper, put-an-X-in-the-box system used (AFAIK) by the rest of the world (certainly that's how it works here in the UK.) Simple, cheap, robust, reliable, transparent... why complicate a system that's already a model of simplicity and correctness? Can someone explain to me what the problem is that 'voting machines' (of any sort, including the mechanical punched-card type) are trying to solve, exactly?
My response is slightly off topic, but important.
The answer:
To save people from their own stupidity. I tend to lean towards the idea that everyone's vote should be counted, and counted correctly. As it was shown in florida, a number of people who didn't understand what the hell they were doing punched a vote for pat buchanon, as president, but then realized their mistake and said "oh no wait, I didn't read it right, I want Gore" and then punched a second time for Gore. This invalidated their votes.
Now this gets into huge debates over how to guarentee that even the smallest, most innocent mistake is avoided. Many of those people could have just been stupid, but how many people had bad eyesight, or were in a hurry, or were new to voting? THOUSANDS of people made this mistake. If that many people screw up on a vote, could it be the voting system or the person?
Now, as for paper and pencil, you tell me. Do you trust a system where by you can mark a ballot by pencil but someone, during the count, could easily erase your mark and put someone elses down? Gee, I'd love have my vote counted by a man in Colombia who's family has a gun to their heads. You could change the pencil to a pen but then you completely ruin the ability to correct mistakes. You could give the person a second ballot, but then you create havoc with whatever system you have in place to guarentee each person gets one, and only one, vote. In the US, a numbering system is used to make sure that while you aren't identified by your vote, you aren't double voting either.
A lot of places in the US use a Lever system. This is by far one of the best systems I've seen, and I think most if not all major cities us it. I think smaller counties don't because the initial expense to purchasing it makes it unattractive and well, people don't like spending the money either. The lever system basically minimizes errors by clearly labeling all candidates and parties, allows you to change your mind, correct a mistake before you commit the ballot, and gives you a simple interface where by you can vote for an entire party or select your specific candidates. There's a space you can write in if you want to write in a candidate instead of pulling a lever. It even has numbers on the levers so that candidates can easily advertise: "if you want to vote for me, pull lever 666 on election day!"
The voter never sees the full ballot, but its stored away with permanent easy to read marks that are easily counted later.
It is my personal, and perhaps radical, opinion that all voting systems world wide should be based on this lever system. Computers and punch cards be damned.
But not if the space junk is actually a highly evolved space-dwelling creature which was currently unknown before and cannot be detected with sensors. If that's the case, they'll need to uncouple the Heisenberg compensator.
My company writes enterprise software, albeit badly. The QA process I feel could be much better, but at least it gives a support rep like me a job.
Twice a month, we release patches which fix any number of bugs we may have found since the original release of the software. About 1/3 of the patches we release introduce NEW bugs that weren't there before the patch! These new bugs can easily and often cripple important parts of the software.
I knew a 4 month stretch where this happened on every release for those 4 months, 8 patches in a row!
Most of our customers update every few months, and they keep an eye on our website, and the public customer email lists constantly throw out emails which the bleeding edge leaders complain of problems introduced on new builds (which they have every right to complain about).
Now I can't speak for any other company, including Microsoft, but sometimes upgrading right away when you aren't really currently experiencing an active problem is worse than not upgrading at all.
You obviously haven't purchased any instrument for a school band. My son wants to be in the band and has a clarinet. That easily cost $350, but I could have the bill wrong and it might be $450. Also, he wants to play the saxophone, and the band would not let him without clarinet experience first, so the sax will cost another $350 to $450 itself.
And this is all passed onto the parents, and not paid for by the school!
As for depreciation, you haven't tried re-selling an instrument after 4 years that was thoroughly beat up by a middle schooler/high schooler, have you?
If you want to split hairs, I disagree. The previous post explicitly stated (wrongly) that it was the gay community's own fault for the perceptions that people have of them. In my example, its stating that its the woman's fault ofr her own rape.
Both conclusions are wrong, because the actions of said object of the offense are not their own fault, but the fault of the people around them who are making false conclusions. Its obviously a difference in extremes, but then again, if you were a gay man in today's society, with all the gay bashing and homophobia that results from these perceptions, you might not think its all that extreme either.
No Godwins were harmed in the forming of this conclusion my friend.
I can't believe this was modded up. This argument is the same argument that a woman was raped because she dressed provokatively, that a hacker is inherently evil because the media has played up the word hacker, and that its okay if the public at large attaches a label to others with little information!!!!!
See the movie "To Wong Fu, thanks for the Memories, Julie Newmar." There's a nice explanation between all the different "categories," if you permit me to categorize, of this type of psychology.
There are men who are heterosexual who like to dress in women's clothing (transvestite). There are men who want to act or feel feminine, and some of them even get operations to be as close to female as possible (transsexual or transgendered). There are men who, in the words of Wesley Snipes character "Gay men who have way too much fashion sense" who are "drag queens" and dress up and act as women but do not do it for sexual pleasure.
There are many different levels to homosexuality and lesbianism. As with just about every other goddamn thing on the planet, its complicated and layered and just because one is ignorant does not give anyone the right to make gross generalizations and say its okay to make them because that's the only thing they "see."
Junk fax laws are based on the fax that they tie up resources. Its primarily a matter of degree. While not everyone has it, caller ID and call waiting can help you avoid or block an incoming call. Also, it takes you a few seconds to hang up on a telemarketer where it takes you upwards of a minute to even determine that a fax is a junk fax while you are waiting for at least part of it to print. And how many people know how to hang up on a fax and stop it from printing? By then the "damage" is done and someone else trying to send you a fax is being denied until the line freed up. It tied up your line, and it's using your paper, dumping more of the cost onto you. Faxes can also be automated like spam and you could junk bomb a fax number into uselessness.
This affects businesses the most because of if you have massive numbers of fax machines, the cost is increased exponentially. Because businesses are involved its also why it probably got early attention.
I'm not sure if junk fax laws exempt these groups but I have a feeling they don't, because its about resource tying up, and not about the rights to free speech.
An opt out list itself is not unconstitutional. The problem is the judge has determined the FTC cannot regulate communications and has no authority to put up this list, and not that the list itself is unconstitutional. Commercial speech like this is not protected, and you have the right to not be subjected to it.
On the other hand, it's really annoying that they stole from me the images of characers I've treasured since childhood.
This has to be the cheesiest complaint I've ever heard. How exactly does one blame other people for "forgetting" something? Losing imagery is the fault of your own brain, not the fault of any media corporation. Does the media bombard you and every other consumer with imagery? Yes, but you have every right to ignore it and even still, if you "lost" this imagery I doubt it was very strong in your head.
The point is that the artistic types will tend to cling to their ways...who knows why.
Easy to explain.
Artists have a vision of the end result of their art. As another person in this thread mentioned, writers often string words together not because they are grammatically correct, but because, on top of being grammatically correct, also invoke a certain emotion in the reader.
Writers accept whatever process they take to bring that art to life. Many cinematographers don't like digital photography because to their trained eye something doesn't look right, and it interferes with their vision. Many directors don't like CGI because it just doesn't look right for certain scenes and it, again, just doesn't look right.
Art is a very emotional experience, and so is the process of creating it. See the movie Pollock to see just how illogical and emotional it can be. If a tool interferes with your vision, you just don't use it.
That said, most of the software Microsoft creates is for business of some sort or another, or run of the mill home use. Business writing is homogenized and (usually) logically ordered. Writing an article or book is anything but homogenized, unless your last name is Grisham, King, or Steele.
Slashdot Mirror
She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks.
I read this and I couldn't help but think of a CDW commercial:
Clueless pointy-haired boss to the camera: "Fred? I think I just crashed the Internet."
They have a majority on a bill indemnifying oil companies for MTBE pollution.
Please pay attention to the political media. This was a provision that was part of the major energy bill that two days ago died in congress. It's NOT becoming law any time soon. Congress could not agree primarily because of this provision. Republicans wouldn't take it out, Democrats didn't want it in. They probably compromised by letting the medicare bill go through but killing the energy bill.
- No scripting - must be knowledgeable on the topic and products/services offered
I disagree somewhat, since I work in a callcenter. The initial purpose of scripting is to eliminate the stupid things that stupid people forget to do, like reboot the machine, jiggle the cables, and plug in the power cord. My call center however takes it a step further and has knowledge beyond that.
If we had to do everything from memory, we'd remember about 7 of 10 things that needed to be done and then forget the other 3 and start troubleshooting all the deep weird crap when in fact its just one of those things we forgot.
The problem with scripting is of course getting into the rut that 99.9999999 of your problems are all basic and all you need to do is put a body in a seat and read a monitor to someone on the other end of the phone. This isn't true and investing in support has real, tangible benefits.
Except for the parts that are leading the moral and social revolution when it comes to homosexual marriage rights and universal health care.
Only Americans claim Canada is irrelevant, but that's because America is so relevant that they can't understand how BADLY relevant it can be sometimes.
It makes me so sick I want to move to Canada damnit!
I personally feel that US companies were simply scrambling to cut costs by outsourcing over the past few years, and many probably overcompensated. Now that the economy is improving, people will not only be able to take the time to see that outsourcing overseas is not always the best thing for IT, and that they also can add value by providing someone with expertise who can relate to the people they are working with.
The upshot being that the outsourcing trend will slow and the IT market will begin to pick up again. This is good news for people who need a job or are looking for a new one.
I have no doubt people would enjoy firefly. The problem with things like this is that its not about getting enough ratings to keep it on the air, its really about getting enough ratings to beat the competition. The problem with network TV is that its always about getting more market share than the other stations.
There's plenty of demand for a lot of shows, but I have an opinion that if Firefly was pitched to Sci-fi, it would probably still be on the air because you don't need as much of a ratings share to keep a show on the air.
Also, buffy appealed to teens when it first came out, and its not as sci-fi as it is gothic or horror or teen action drama. It developed a loyal following because it crossed genres. It kept that base until the series ended.
Sci-fi is relegated to too much of a niche compared to other forms of entertainment. Movies can afford fantasy and sci-fi special effects but even there most "sci-fi" is a glorified action or war movie which people can relate to.
People want to relate to what they are watching. A sci-fi movie or TV show can do well if you manage to explain the technology and the world without bogging down the plot and by creating a plot and characters people can get into.
Firefly was too good. It created a whole new world, but it tried to make it familiar by throwing in a very very clever wild west element. It was so subtle it didn't seem camp, just a light seasoning that made me believe "hey, its possible!"
The problem was it was centuries in the future, there is no America, no Russia, no islamic fundamentalists, and no cute teens agonizing over frivolous issues. Not enough people in the US like sci fi enough to make it successful beyond UPN or the sci-fi channel. It's a demand thing, and it sucks.
And to be honest, its not because people are frivolous or stupid or just want the same old thing. It's quite simply because perfectly nice and reasonable people just don't relate to sci-fi.
Your damn right I would have. The statement the author made was stupid, and that is all I was commenting on, but he was right about Sculley; he was an idiot for a CEO of a tech company :)
Your statement is incorrect, and frankly so is the statement made by the author of the book.
There are tons of examples of decent handwriting recognition. This was an attempt by the author of the book to sound clever and funny while pointing out Sculley as a bad CEO (and to the trained eye, it was a failed attempt). Sculley WAS as bad CEO, but that was simply because he had no understanding of technology over all. To a businessman, nothing is impossible, but a good technology CEO knows the limits of what can technology can provide vs how much money can be spent.
If you frame the statement correctly you are right. For example you can't make a handwriting recognition system that's not based on a fully sentient AI that could recognize any one person's distinct handwriting and translate it into digital characters. But you can make perfectly acceptable systems, depending on who you are making it for, that is effectively handwriting writing recognition.
When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible.
Yes it is, and Apple did it. This is not a pro apple rant, but the 1.1 release of the Newton handwriting recognition system was lauded as "pretty good." That's something funny to say, but at the time no one came close to that level except for Palm. Palm has a handwriting recognition system that also works very well, except you simply have to write a certain way, and it doesn't recognize your specific style. Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software. Exactly what is so impossible about handwriting recognition?
I was a CIS major, and hell I didn't know handwriting recognition wasn't possible? I always thought the CIS majors were smarter, and now I have proof!
Today, the economics, convenience and safety of traditional air travel are hard to beat.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA...
I'm sorry, but when a magazine gives such obvious pandering to an industry so NOT reflective of whatever they are talking about, I have change my pants.
Safe... definitely more so than driving but safety is OVER played these days and I don't care how safe it is, I might have a heart attack from the stress of dealing with the "convenience" and "economy" of flying.
I was afraid the device would be unusually large compared to the GBA with it's 2.9" screen. Obviously those worries were unfounded."
/. would do more content proofreading but oviously those worries continue to be founded and unaddressed.
As the article states, this is only a concept design, and that the final product may be less sleek. I wish people would pay attention, this is not the final PSP and its not coming out next week.
I also wish
Sure, competition is great in an emerging market, but at some point you'll reach that high water mark where adding more stuff just degrades the product. Honestly, I can't think of a single feature relating to digital music that I'd like to see in iTunes that isn't already there.
/.ers have been screaming for years that CDs are overpriced, then we get /.ers saying that Apple isn't making any money here. What if CD sales were competing with the iTunes store (which they are) and what if CD sales cannot be sustained because both trading and online music are too easy. The natural reaction to sales decreasing is by lowering prices to increase sales. Somewhere in the music business continuum, the current CD price has to break and drop, forcing all music sales down.
Just because you can't think of improvements does not mean improvements cannot be made. That's the beauty of a free market. Someone comes along with an idea to do things better and suddenly every business is turned on their heads and the consumer suddenly wins.
The only thing competition will do is drive price. At 0.99 per track, there's very little profit in there for digital downloads (most is eaten up by credit card fees and licensing). Competition will ensure that price doesn't go up in the near future, but I don't think it will see it go down at all.
You make it sound like this is a bad thing. I also disagree with your statement.
Whilst I'm posting, my take on this whole thing: I still cannot understand why on earth the US moved away from the pencil-and-paper, put-an-X-in-the-box system used (AFAIK) by the rest of the world (certainly that's how it works here in the UK.) Simple, cheap, robust, reliable, transparent... why complicate a system that's already a model of simplicity and correctness? Can someone explain to me what the problem is that 'voting machines' (of any sort, including the mechanical punched-card type) are trying to solve, exactly?
My response is slightly off topic, but important.
The answer:
To save people from their own stupidity. I tend to lean towards the idea that everyone's vote should be counted, and counted correctly. As it was shown in florida, a number of people who didn't understand what the hell they were doing punched a vote for pat buchanon, as president, but then realized their mistake and said "oh no wait, I didn't read it right, I want Gore" and then punched a second time for Gore. This invalidated their votes.
Now this gets into huge debates over how to guarentee that even the smallest, most innocent mistake is avoided. Many of those people could have just been stupid, but how many people had bad eyesight, or were in a hurry, or were new to voting? THOUSANDS of people made this mistake. If that many people screw up on a vote, could it be the voting system or the person?
Now, as for paper and pencil, you tell me. Do you trust a system where by you can mark a ballot by pencil but someone, during the count, could easily erase your mark and put someone elses down? Gee, I'd love have my vote counted by a man in Colombia who's family has a gun to their heads. You could change the pencil to a pen but then you completely ruin the ability to correct mistakes. You could give the person a second ballot, but then you create havoc with whatever system you have in place to guarentee each person gets one, and only one, vote. In the US, a numbering system is used to make sure that while you aren't identified by your vote, you aren't double voting either.
A lot of places in the US use a Lever system. This is by far one of the best systems I've seen, and I think most if not all major cities us it. I think smaller counties don't because the initial expense to purchasing it makes it unattractive and well, people don't like spending the money either. The lever system basically minimizes errors by clearly labeling all candidates and parties, allows you to change your mind, correct a mistake before you commit the ballot, and gives you a simple interface where by you can vote for an entire party or select your specific candidates. There's a space you can write in if you want to write in a candidate instead of pulling a lever. It even has numbers on the levers so that candidates can easily advertise: "if you want to vote for me, pull lever 666 on election day!"
The voter never sees the full ballot, but its stored away with permanent easy to read marks that are easily counted later.
It is my personal, and perhaps radical, opinion that all voting systems world wide should be based on this lever system. Computers and punch cards be damned.
But not if the space junk is actually a highly evolved space-dwelling creature which was currently unknown before and cannot be detected with sensors. If that's the case, they'll need to uncouple the Heisenberg compensator.
As far as looks go, it's not an iPod any more than my 1990 Accord is a Porsche 911.
;)
The fact that its a 13 year old car doesn't help the appearance factor either. How's the paint job holding up?
My company writes enterprise software, albeit badly. The QA process I feel could be much better, but at least it gives a support rep like me a job.
Twice a month, we release patches which fix any number of bugs we may have found since the original release of the software. About 1/3 of the patches we release introduce NEW bugs that weren't there before the patch! These new bugs can easily and often cripple important parts of the software.
I knew a 4 month stretch where this happened on every release for those 4 months, 8 patches in a row!
Most of our customers update every few months, and they keep an eye on our website, and the public customer email lists constantly throw out emails which the bleeding edge leaders complain of problems introduced on new builds (which they have every right to complain about).
Now I can't speak for any other company, including Microsoft, but sometimes upgrading right away when you aren't really currently experiencing an active problem is worse than not upgrading at all.
You obviously haven't purchased any instrument for a school band. My son wants to be in the band and has a clarinet. That easily cost $350, but I could have the bill wrong and it might be $450. Also, he wants to play the saxophone, and the band would not let him without clarinet experience first, so the sax will cost another $350 to $450 itself.
And this is all passed onto the parents, and not paid for by the school!
As for depreciation, you haven't tried re-selling an instrument after 4 years that was thoroughly beat up by a middle schooler/high schooler, have you?
If you want to split hairs, I disagree. The previous post explicitly stated (wrongly) that it was the gay community's own fault for the perceptions that people have of them. In my example, its stating that its the woman's fault ofr her own rape.
Both conclusions are wrong, because the actions of said object of the offense are not their own fault, but the fault of the people around them who are making false conclusions. Its obviously a difference in extremes, but then again, if you were a gay man in today's society, with all the gay bashing and homophobia that results from these perceptions, you might not think its all that extreme either.
No Godwins were harmed in the forming of this conclusion my friend.
I can't believe this was modded up. This argument is the same argument that a woman was raped because she dressed provokatively, that a hacker is inherently evil because the media has played up the word hacker, and that its okay if the public at large attaches a label to others with little information!!!!!
See the movie "To Wong Fu, thanks for the Memories, Julie Newmar." There's a nice explanation between all the different "categories," if you permit me to categorize, of this type of psychology.
There are men who are heterosexual who like to dress in women's clothing (transvestite). There are men who want to act or feel feminine, and some of them even get operations to be as close to female as possible (transsexual or transgendered). There are men who, in the words of Wesley Snipes character "Gay men who have way too much fashion sense" who are "drag queens" and dress up and act as women but do not do it for sexual pleasure.
There are many different levels to homosexuality and lesbianism. As with just about every other goddamn thing on the planet, its complicated and layered and just because one is ignorant does not give anyone the right to make gross generalizations and say its okay to make them because that's the only thing they "see."
Junk fax laws are based on the fax that they tie up resources. Its primarily a matter of degree. While not everyone has it, caller ID and call waiting can help you avoid or block an incoming call. Also, it takes you a few seconds to hang up on a telemarketer where it takes you upwards of a minute to even determine that a fax is a junk fax while you are waiting for at least part of it to print. And how many people know how to hang up on a fax and stop it from printing? By then the "damage" is done and someone else trying to send you a fax is being denied until the line freed up. It tied up your line, and it's using your paper, dumping more of the cost onto you. Faxes can also be automated like spam and you could junk bomb a fax number into uselessness.
This affects businesses the most because of if you have massive numbers of fax machines, the cost is increased exponentially. Because businesses are involved its also why it probably got early attention.
I'm not sure if junk fax laws exempt these groups but I have a feeling they don't, because its about resource tying up, and not about the rights to free speech.
An opt out list itself is not unconstitutional. The problem is the judge has determined the FTC cannot regulate communications and has no authority to put up this list, and not that the list itself is unconstitutional. Commercial speech like this is not protected, and you have the right to not be subjected to it.
The "poor" in a capitalist society are far better off than the "poor" in any other system
Because the boxes that hold the big-screen TVs of rich people are bigger and more well suited for people to live in on the street?
On the other hand, it's really annoying that they stole from me the images of characers I've treasured since childhood.
This has to be the cheesiest complaint I've ever heard. How exactly does one blame other people for "forgetting" something? Losing imagery is the fault of your own brain, not the fault of any media corporation. Does the media bombard you and every other consumer with imagery? Yes, but you have every right to ignore it and even still, if you "lost" this imagery I doubt it was very strong in your head.
The point is that the artistic types will tend to cling to their ways...who knows why.
Easy to explain.
Artists have a vision of the end result of their art. As another person in this thread mentioned, writers often string words together not because they are grammatically correct, but because, on top of being grammatically correct, also invoke a certain emotion in the reader.
Writers accept whatever process they take to bring that art to life. Many cinematographers don't like digital photography because to their trained eye something doesn't look right, and it interferes with their vision. Many directors don't like CGI because it just doesn't look right for certain scenes and it, again, just doesn't look right.
Art is a very emotional experience, and so is the process of creating it. See the movie Pollock to see just how illogical and emotional it can be. If a tool interferes with your vision, you just don't use it.
That said, most of the software Microsoft creates is for business of some sort or another, or run of the mill home use. Business writing is homogenized and (usually) logically ordered. Writing an article or book is anything but homogenized, unless your last name is Grisham, King, or Steele.
And then, of course, if God had a sense of humor we'd discover that Marx was right all along.
:)
I'm sorry I'm missing something... are you trying to describe a paradox here?