Just for kicks I grabbed three hardcover books and compared them:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - 62 characters/line x 37 lines/page.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - 65 x 35
American Gods by Neil Gaiman - 61 x 39
The HP pages are much smaller, though, but have a lot less white space on them, particularily on the edges and the line spacing is smaller than the other two. On the other hand, if you take the German version of Harry Potter, particularly the first couple of books, the numbers are 50x33 so you get 448 pages for the der Gefangene von Askaban v. 317 pages for the Prisoner of Azkaban (my German isn't good enough to read the latter HP books in German, so I don't have them).
She didn't bother trying to mess around with any deeper commentary
I'm sorry, but that's one of the silliest things I've read by someone who enjoys the books. She says the books are about death, but I see them as being about racism, particularly the Nazi genocide type. The Dursley's are all about child abuse (not the physical kind, but mental); there is corruption in government, huge amounts on freedom of the press, etc., etc.
One of the reason's I love the book is because of the social commentary she brings into it without ramming it down your throat.
There is an explanation about the letter, Dumbledore replied to her letter asking to come to Hogwarts. It doesn't say it was him explicitly, but we can assume it was from him. What really, really annoyed me is that Rowling said that the colour of Harry's eyes are important, but it was never revealed. Some say that it's showed Snape who Harry was related to, but that's quite weak.
Thanks, I've already added a couple of those sites to my bookmarks, too bad they don't have RSS feeds. Ill look at some of the rest of them in a bit.
As for me, being Canadian, (but living in Europe) and using a lot of politics with my teaching (English teacher), I try and keep a diversified list. I'll try and list them more by theme than amount visited.
Canadian: The CBC - Dissapointing RSS feed, they don't have too much/day, but it's always good to see what they have to say on Canadian politcs. The Globe and Mail - The best site for at least a bit thoughtful Canadian news. The CTV - OK, pulp, but once in awhile it's interesting to see what pulp has to say about things. TSN - Sports, got to keep up with hockey and curling, none better. Macleans - The Canadian equivalent of Time, some of their stuff is really great.
International: The BBC - Probably the best English language news in the world, enough said. The Guardian - Better analysis than the BBC, but not the sheer volume. Al Jazeera - More balanced than what you'd think, at least the English version... well, except for the editorial cartoons. NY Times - Amazingly crummy RSS feed, seeing as it's one of the biggest newspapers in the US (but probably still better than the CBC). Deutche Welle - Not the best site, either, but as I'm living in Germany...
For actually thinking: The Christian Science Monitor - I'm not religious, and except for a few things (see their "about us"), neither are they. What they are is the most balanced news in the US I've ever seen. They are thoughtful, honest and as far as I can see don't pander to any particular point of view. Sign and Sight - This is only if you want to spend some time actually reading, as it's not meant for the masses. It takes articles by thinking people from across Europe and translates them into English.
Others:
The Register - Tech news with a British sense of humour, and people think they are biased because of it. Neil Gaiman's Blog - Not as interesting as it used to be, but I've learnt a lot about the book/publishing world through his blog.
Yes, I'm an information hound, and I like to see as many points of view as possible. I've tried fox news a couple of times, but most of the topics I'm interested in they've just taken things off the wire, so nothing new. What I also do is search google news when I find an article I want to get more points of view on. I don't use the service itself, but they are great for finding out who is saying what about a particular topic - you might even find a new angle that hadn't been said 100 times before.
If this ever went to court, assuming what you say is correct, then both will lose. Cisco would lose the trademark, but Apple would lose time. Apple wants to start selling the product this year: how long do you think it'll take for the courts to settle this? I would put money in not a short enough time frame for Apple's liking.
Almost, but not quite. What you need to add in there is the employee goes down to the ship and helps with the nutritional intake for the crew, just enough so the chains won't slip off and they'll be able to work 18 hours a day instead of the 14 they are now. Of course this will cost the manager more, but the benefits will outweigh the costs.
What your confusing is their blatant editorial/sarcasm that they mix in with their news stories. It's not that the news isn't trustworthy, is that they deliver it with humour and their own style.
For instance: "CEO swaps, stagnant shares and scandal behind it, HP appears to have reached retirement age for some of its veterans. Last week, HP Labs director Dick Lampman announced that he would depart in 2007, and this week CFO Bob Wayman said that he'll vanish at year end."
This is a big step in getting more businesses to accept OpenOffice.org. As you all know, it's one of the problems between the two camps with MS holding the biggest cards. By providing this plugin, it takes one more major obstacle away from businesses/governments using OpenOffice.org.
Novell SUSE is trying to set themselves up as the desktop Linux vendor, a market that Red Hat has abandoned. To do this they have to make sure that their distro plays nice with MS and other desktop offerings. It's not only a good thing, but necessary. In the medium term OpenOffice.org to be able to open and save in "OPEN" XML format. I'm self employed and if I couldn't communicate with my clients using doc format I would have to get MS Office, no way around it. I'm just happy I'll be able to stick with OpenOffice.org in the future as I'm not holding my breath of all my clients changing soon.
Thanks for the link. One important thing the CBC article mentions which isn't in the original is that this firewall only operates with sites outside of Canada. If a site is found within Canada it isn't blocked, but the normal legal means are used to have it taken down and the people who run it charged under Canadian laws. A far better article than the original.
One thing that the collective you might not have thought of is that this has taken place in Canada. Although I'm Canadian, I have no clue what the equivelent of "Common Carrier" is in Canada. Verizon may be free and in the clear because what one of their ssubsidiaries does outside of the US will have no impact on their status within the US.
In other words, they probably wouldn't have done the same thing in the US because it could open them up to the legal ramifications everyone has been talking about.
Sorry for taking so long to respond, I don't use my laptop except for work and then I can't check on these things and have been too lazy to boot it up to find out. OK, the short answer is no, it all looks fine (agetty tt* linux, though). It hasn't been a problem so far as I use this computer for so little the likelihood of my having to get into the console is very small.
I used to dual boot my labtop (Viao PIII 650) because I needed a couple of small programmes that you couldn't get for Linux. OK, so there is WINE, but they (or was it one of them, I can't remember) wouldn't run with SUSE, my usual distro, or any other distro I tried. I installed Gentoo and even with an older version of WINE than I had running on my SUSE box (desktop with faster everything) it all worked perfectly. I've found Gentoo to have less strange problems than SUSE does.
Saying that, I've had/have some strange problems. My WLAN card only will work if I plug it in after it's booted. After the most recent major update (not 2006.0 - 2006.1) I can not get into the console unless I use a terminal in GNOME or boot into single user mode. Maybe a few other small problems, but nothing like mplayer not working with firefox. It runs fairly fast even using GNOME 2.14 with 198 MB memory.
I'm not a Linux expert, I started with it just under two years ago and really played around with Gentoo on a spare box until I figured out how to install it. You really have to read the directions carefully, though. Saying that, they are the most clear directions out there and I've learned so much about how to solve problems with SUSE because of it. Take a chance, you won't regret it.
The two party system you have in the US isn't inherently bad, what is bad is that the American politicians aren't scared enough of the voters. In most western countries which have a pariamentary system there can be changes in the whole government - the legislative and executive - at the same time. In the US, especially the legislative never has wholesale changes. Yes, there is a change from Dem. to Rep. and vice versa, but lets face it, most of the people who hold those positions can do so for a very long time.
What needs to happer every once in awhile (say ever 10 - 12 years) is for the current party that holds the majority to be really swept out of office, enough that the party has to sit down and figure out why they screwed up. It's not a cure-all but you bet with that threat hanging over their heads they will be much more careful what they do. Too many people are tied to one party. Yes, this happens in certian pockets in other countries, but in the US it's too strong.
Thinking about that, it may be the executives way of putting the onus on the agent to not oversell. In other words, if the agent takes advantage of someone who doesn't know all the facts then the company can come down hard on the agent and look like the good guy. Let's face it, the over 70 clientel is only a small portion of their business and being seen as taking advantage of seniors can really hurt. Of course it backfired on them, so which is better?
In my opinion, it may look small, but the simple fact that Intel is partnering with a Linux distro will mean that other hardware vendors will accelerate their development for Linux. This, in my opinion is still one of the biggest hurdles. I'm not a developer and think that those who are are doing a great job, but I still have hardware problems (HP LaserJet 1000 on SuSE, tv cards, etc.).
Let's see what else comes out of this, but I think it's a wake-up call to other hardware vendors.
Mass confustion reigns here. From the article: Drive capacity - 300GB followed by 800GB to 1.6TB; Transfer speeds - 20Mbps; Density - 512Mb per inch. Indeed the drive capacity is Gigabites, the rest is as you say, though. (rereading your post, I think you just left out the word density).
The stream analogy isn't quite accurate, as a stream isn't able to provide the same/nearly same function to the end user as a water company, FOSS does. It is more like the government giving away a service that a company is charging for - say medical services. FOSS is a viable alternative to MS (more or less, depending on your POV) and is in direct competition with them. A stream isn't really in competition with a water company. Even a well is so far removed from having the same function as a water company coming into your house that using it as an analogy isn't the best.
As for the Oxford definition, I was too lazy to pick up my Oxford, that was sitting about 50cm from my hand and type in its definition. Still, I don't think the definitions are so much different.
A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors.
definition source
In other words, you could have called the desktop OS industry an oligopoly in the '80s/early 90s, but with the advent of FOSS it throws that into a loop - how can you affect the price of something that doesn't have one? Microsoft was/is (your call) as close to a monopoly, especially in the business desktop, as you can get without actually being one. They defined the prices and had a huge impact on their competitors (again, FOSS has/is on its way to changing that).
You are both missing the point. It isn't the presidential election
you should be talking about, but more for the congressional
elections. Presidents, in the end, come and go after a maximum of 8
years, but members of congress can stay on for decades without really
having to worry about opposition for many (most) of them. In reality
a president only has as much power as Congress will allow and since
they have no fear of losing their positions, they can do what they
want.
What really needs to happen is American politicians need to be
afraid of the electorate, only then will they try and do what is best
for them. Because I'm Canadian, I'll use Canada as an example, but a
lot of other parliamentary democracies work the same way. In 1984,
the Liberal Party of Canada was in power with a majority of seats
147-103-32, but the government, even with a new leader, was
considered old and needing change (long story short), the Progressive
Conservative Party came to power with a majority of 211-40-30-1 and
subsequently won in 1988 with 169-83-43, by 1993, the situation had
changed with a vast majority of Canadians being royally pissed off at
the PC party and the Liberals came back into power with a majority of
177-2 (yes, the PC Party went from 169 down to 2 seats)-9-52-54
(includes two new parties).
Unfortunately for Canada, the PC party splintered after this
election and its descendant(s) have a. Not been able to get their
acts together and b. have been perceived as moving too far right,
especially religiously, for the Canadian public. If that hadn't
happened, then there would have been another major shift last year
back towards them. This had lead the governing party to become
arrogant and take Canadian people for granted (you could argue that
that changed in 2004, though with the coming to power of Paul Martin
and the subsequent minority government).
OK, maybe you won't buy this, but Americans should really throw
head first the members of the House and Senate out of there at least
once every 15 years (probably more often for the House) and the
president will realise that the people can't be taken for granted. Other than that, there are a lot of advantages of having a two party system, which most countries really are (even if more than one party exists and does get some power (read: NDP in Canada, Greens in Germany, Liberals in the UK, etc.)
If you check Hasbro's own Trademarks and Copyright page, you'll see that Risk is not mentioned once. It seems that when it matters they know they don't have the copyright to the name.
OK, you got me curious. My "Concise Oxford English Dictionary" (240k words) has both of those as well as cunt. My "Collins Gem Mini English Dictionary" (unstated word count) has none of the above.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for kicks I grabbed three hardcover books and compared them:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - 62 characters/line x 37 lines/page.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - 65 x 35
American Gods by Neil Gaiman - 61 x 39
The HP pages are much smaller, though, but have a lot less white space on them, particularily on the edges and the line spacing is smaller than the other two. On the other hand, if you take the German version of Harry Potter, particularly the first couple of books, the numbers are 50x33 so you get 448 pages for the der Gefangene von Askaban v. 317 pages for the Prisoner of Azkaban (my German isn't good enough to read the latter HP books in German, so I don't have them).
She didn't bother trying to mess around with any deeper commentary
I'm sorry, but that's one of the silliest things I've read by someone who enjoys the books. She says the books are about death, but I see them as being about racism, particularly the Nazi genocide type. The Dursley's are all about child abuse (not the physical kind, but mental); there is corruption in government, huge amounts on freedom of the press, etc., etc.
One of the reason's I love the book is because of the social commentary she brings into it without ramming it down your throat.
There is an explanation about the letter, Dumbledore replied to her letter asking to come to Hogwarts. It doesn't say it was him explicitly, but we can assume it was from him. What really, really annoyed me is that Rowling said that the colour of Harry's eyes are important, but it was never revealed. Some say that it's showed Snape who Harry was related to, but that's quite weak.
Thanks, I've already added a couple of those sites to my bookmarks, too bad they don't have RSS feeds. Ill look at some of the rest of them in a bit.
As for me, being Canadian, (but living in Europe) and using a lot of politics with my teaching (English teacher), I try and keep a diversified list. I'll try and list them more by theme than amount visited.
Canadian:
The CBC - Dissapointing RSS feed, they don't have too much/day, but it's always good to see what they have to say on Canadian politcs.
The Globe and Mail - The best site for at least a bit thoughtful Canadian news.
The CTV - OK, pulp, but once in awhile it's interesting to see what pulp has to say about things.
TSN - Sports, got to keep up with hockey and curling, none better.
Macleans - The Canadian equivalent of Time, some of their stuff is really great.
International: ... well, except for the editorial cartoons. ...
The BBC - Probably the best English language news in the world, enough said.
The Guardian - Better analysis than the BBC, but not the sheer volume.
Al Jazeera - More balanced than what you'd think, at least the English version
NY Times - Amazingly crummy RSS feed, seeing as it's one of the biggest newspapers in the US (but probably still better than the CBC).
Deutche Welle - Not the best site, either, but as I'm living in Germany
For actually thinking:
The Christian Science Monitor - I'm not religious, and except for a few things (see their "about us"), neither are they. What they are is the most balanced news in the US I've ever seen. They are thoughtful, honest and as far as I can see don't pander to any particular point of view.
Sign and Sight - This is only if you want to spend some time actually reading, as it's not meant for the masses. It takes articles by thinking people from across Europe and translates them into English.
Others: The Register - Tech news with a British sense of humour, and people think they are biased because of it.
Neil Gaiman's Blog - Not as interesting as it used to be, but I've learnt a lot about the book/publishing world through his blog.
Yes, I'm an information hound, and I like to see as many points of view as possible. I've tried fox news a couple of times, but most of the topics I'm interested in they've just taken things off the wire, so nothing new. What I also do is search google news when I find an article I want to get more points of view on. I don't use the service itself, but they are great for finding out who is saying what about a particular topic - you might even find a new angle that hadn't been said 100 times before.
If this ever went to court, assuming what you say is correct, then both will lose. Cisco would lose the trademark, but Apple would lose time. Apple wants to start selling the product this year: how long do you think it'll take for the courts to settle this? I would put money in not a short enough time frame for Apple's liking.
Almost, but not quite. What you need to add in there is the employee goes down to the ship and helps with the nutritional intake for the crew, just enough so the chains won't slip off and they'll be able to work 18 hours a day instead of the 14 they are now. Of course this will cost the manager more, but the benefits will outweigh the costs.
What your confusing is their blatant editorial/sarcasm that they mix in with their news stories. It's not that the news isn't trustworthy, is that they deliver it with humour and their own style.
For instance: "CEO swaps, stagnant shares and scandal behind it, HP appears to have reached retirement age for some of its veterans. Last week, HP Labs director Dick Lampman announced that he would depart in 2007, and this week CFO Bob Wayman said that he'll vanish at year end."
This is a big step in getting more businesses to accept OpenOffice.org. As you all know, it's one of the problems between the two camps with MS holding the biggest cards. By providing this plugin, it takes one more major obstacle away from businesses/governments using OpenOffice.org.
Novell SUSE is trying to set themselves up as the desktop Linux vendor, a market that Red Hat has abandoned. To do this they have to make sure that their distro plays nice with MS and other desktop offerings. It's not only a good thing, but necessary. In the medium term OpenOffice.org to be able to open and save in "OPEN" XML format. I'm self employed and if I couldn't communicate with my clients using doc format I would have to get MS Office, no way around it. I'm just happy I'll be able to stick with OpenOffice.org in the future as I'm not holding my breath of all my clients changing soon.
Thanks for the link. One important thing the CBC article mentions which isn't in the original is that this firewall only operates with sites outside of Canada. If a site is found within Canada it isn't blocked, but the normal legal means are used to have it taken down and the people who run it charged under Canadian laws. A far better article than the original.
I'm just wondering why everyone is saying that part of the agreement is that Microsoft won't sue Novell when the Novell has clearly stated that "does not include a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft to Novell (or, for that matter, from Novell to Microsoft). Novell's customers receive a covenant not to sue directly from Microsoft."
One thing that the collective you might not have thought of is that this has taken place in Canada. Although I'm Canadian, I have no clue what the equivelent of "Common Carrier" is in Canada. Verizon may be free and in the clear because what one of their ssubsidiaries does outside of the US will have no impact on their status within the US.
In other words, they probably wouldn't have done the same thing in the US because it could open them up to the legal ramifications everyone has been talking about.
Sorry for taking so long to respond, I don't use my laptop except for work and then I can't check on these things and have been too lazy to boot it up to find out. OK, the short answer is no, it all looks fine (agetty tt* linux, though). It hasn't been a problem so far as I use this computer for so little the likelihood of my having to get into the console is very small.
Thanks again
Iago
I used to dual boot my labtop (Viao PIII 650) because I needed a couple of small programmes that you couldn't get for Linux. OK, so there is WINE, but they (or was it one of them, I can't remember) wouldn't run with SUSE, my usual distro, or any other distro I tried. I installed Gentoo and even with an older version of WINE than I had running on my SUSE box (desktop with faster everything) it all worked perfectly. I've found Gentoo to have less strange problems than SUSE does.
Saying that, I've had/have some strange problems. My WLAN card only will work if I plug it in after it's booted. After the most recent major update (not 2006.0 - 2006.1) I can not get into the console unless I use a terminal in GNOME or boot into single user mode. Maybe a few other small problems, but nothing like mplayer not working with firefox. It runs fairly fast even using GNOME 2.14 with 198 MB memory.
I'm not a Linux expert, I started with it just under two years ago and really played around with Gentoo on a spare box until I figured out how to install it. You really have to read the directions carefully, though. Saying that, they are the most clear directions out there and I've learned so much about how to solve problems with SUSE because of it. Take a chance, you won't regret it.
... Puppies! Sorry, this story has stunned my mind so much my IQ has been temporarily lowered by many points and that's the best I could come up with.
Whoever modded this "troll" has no sense of humour.
The two party system you have in the US isn't inherently bad, what is bad is that the American politicians aren't scared enough of the voters. In most western countries which have a pariamentary system there can be changes in the whole government - the legislative and executive - at the same time. In the US, especially the legislative never has wholesale changes. Yes, there is a change from Dem. to Rep. and vice versa, but lets face it, most of the people who hold those positions can do so for a very long time.
What needs to happer every once in awhile (say ever 10 - 12 years) is for the current party that holds the majority to be really swept out of office, enough that the party has to sit down and figure out why they screwed up. It's not a cure-all but you bet with that threat hanging over their heads they will be much more careful what they do. Too many people are tied to one party. Yes, this happens in certian pockets in other countries, but in the US it's too strong.
Thinking about that, it may be the executives way of putting the onus on the agent to not oversell. In other words, if the agent takes advantage of someone who doesn't know all the facts then the company can come down hard on the agent and look like the good guy. Let's face it, the over 70 clientel is only a small portion of their business and being seen as taking advantage of seniors can really hurt. Of course it backfired on them, so which is better?
Let's see what else comes out of this, but I think it's a wake-up call to other hardware vendors.
"bytes", that is.
Mass confustion reigns here. From the article: Drive capacity - 300GB followed by 800GB to 1.6TB; Transfer speeds - 20Mbps; Density - 512Mb per inch. Indeed the drive capacity is Gigabites, the rest is as you say, though. (rereading your post, I think you just left out the word density).
As for the Oxford definition, I was too lazy to pick up my Oxford, that was sitting about 50cm from my hand and type in its definition. Still, I don't think the definitions are so much different.
oligopoly n. pl. oligopolies
A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors.
definition source In other words, you could have called the desktop OS industry an oligopoly in the '80s/early 90s, but with the advent of FOSS it throws that into a loop - how can you affect the price of something that doesn't have one? Microsoft was/is (your call) as close to a monopoly, especially in the business desktop, as you can get without actually being one. They defined the prices and had a huge impact on their competitors (again, FOSS has/is on its way to changing that).Iago
You are both missing the point. It isn't the presidential election you should be talking about, but more for the congressional elections. Presidents, in the end, come and go after a maximum of 8 years, but members of congress can stay on for decades without really having to worry about opposition for many (most) of them. In reality a president only has as much power as Congress will allow and since they have no fear of losing their positions, they can do what they want.
What really needs to happen is American politicians need to be afraid of the electorate, only then will they try and do what is best for them. Because I'm Canadian, I'll use Canada as an example, but a lot of other parliamentary democracies work the same way. In 1984, the Liberal Party of Canada was in power with a majority of seats 147-103-32, but the government, even with a new leader, was considered old and needing change (long story short), the Progressive Conservative Party came to power with a majority of 211-40-30-1 and subsequently won in 1988 with 169-83-43, by 1993, the situation had changed with a vast majority of Canadians being royally pissed off at the PC party and the Liberals came back into power with a majority of 177-2 (yes, the PC Party went from 169 down to 2 seats)-9-52-54 (includes two new parties).
Unfortunately for Canada, the PC party splintered after this election and its descendant(s) have a. Not been able to get their acts together and b. have been perceived as moving too far right, especially religiously, for the Canadian public. If that hadn't happened, then there would have been another major shift last year back towards them. This had lead the governing party to become arrogant and take Canadian people for granted (you could argue that that changed in 2004, though with the coming to power of Paul Martin and the subsequent minority government).
OK, maybe you won't buy this, but Americans should really throw head first the members of the House and Senate out of there at least once every 15 years (probably more often for the House) and the president will realise that the people can't be taken for granted. Other than that, there are a lot of advantages of having a two party system, which most countries really are (even if more than one party exists and does get some power (read: NDP in Canada, Greens in Germany, Liberals in the UK, etc.)
Canadian Elections in the '80s and '90s
Other Canadian Federal Elections
If you check Hasbro's own Trademarks and Copyright page, you'll see that Risk is not mentioned once. It seems that when it matters they know they don't have the copyright to the name.
OK, you got me curious. My "Concise Oxford English Dictionary" (240k words) has both of those as well as cunt. My "Collins Gem Mini English Dictionary" (unstated word count) has none of the above.