Well, let me stoke your interest a bit. They found life on Mars long ago, but have kept it under wraps. It's all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Apollo 18 was not canceled, it was rather simply rescheduled and sent to Mars by President Reagan. When they arrived, the cosmonauts (American astronauts could not be trusted to keep it a secret, whereas Russians would never be believed when they returned, anyhow) found many fairly recent decaying dodo bird corpses. It turns out that they never went extinct - they were just banished to Mars by Napoleon. But the conservative whack-jobs running our country and all of its media have covered it up.
I'd like to tell you more, but there's someone at the door.
Actually, while I am not a lawyer and have no particular expertise in trademark law, I suspect that it may be helpful to use (R) and TM to avoid being sued. For instance, if I talk at length about Coca-Cola and never point out that it's trademarked, someone may be stupid enough to think I am using Coca-Cola as my own term. If enough stupid someones thought that, Coca-Cola Inc. would probably sue me.
But in general, I don't think excessive use of trademark symbols helps anyone. Use it once per term per document, at most, and put in a footnote about all trademarks being the property of their respective owners. More than that gets on my nerves.
I have a related question. Back when I was heavy into Jabber, I found that the inter-protocol transports lacked something that, to me, was a show-stopper. Their developers were of the mindset that "We don't know why you would want that feature, so therefore it must be worthless to anyone and we will not even look at your patch that implements it." I do not know if this applied to the AIM transport, as at the time I did not use AIM.
Anyhow, the feature is this: The Jabber protocol is the single best there is at handling multiple connections to the same account. Each connection can be uniquely identified so messages can be directed to a particular one, and it is easy to control which one gets messages directed at an account but not to a particular connection from that account. However, the transports all vomit (either gracefully or not so gracefully) when confronted with multiple connections to the same account. They should not. They should do smart things like not crash, and deliver messages to the highest-priority connection. They should track the away/available status of the highest-priority connection (updating to track the highest remaining priority after a connection is terminated, and so forth). In general, they should be as good about this as the Jabber protocol itself is.
Crummy interoperation with other IM networks is why I quit using Jabber despite my love affair with it (I even built a general-purpose distributed computing system for my undergraduate thesis project, using Jabber as the communication layer - my project remains the only one with all of its features, to my knowledge, thanks largely to its use of Jabber).
Will a Google Talk AIM gateway suck or will it be a good thing, in this respect?
I never said dissolution was common, but it has happened. I think that the case you mention is extreme, but certainly not out of the ordinary. And that's why we need the civil justice system to keep them accountable - by suing them and getting enough punitive damages to make proper disposal seem like a cheap alternative.
It still seems odd to me that Australia makes it so easy to go after the owners of a company. That would be like putting Enron's shareholders in jail for what its directors did. In the US, even putting the directors in jail is extreme.
Does Australia have a constitution that guarantees the right to free speech?
The thing that strikes me about this story is that in the US, corporate crimes are punished by fines or by dissolution of the corporation, except in cases like Enron where it was not the corporation doing bad things but its directors. Even so, the directors were punished, not the owners (i.e., shareholders).
There's no reason to believe that they won't, or for that matter that they shouldn't. That said, sentience is an important trait here - if we can convince them that we're also sentient, then we should be alright if they're cosmopolitan (bad pun! down, boy!) enough to consider all sentient life as being sacred.
The reason we're anthropocentric is not that we lack other life forms to consider our equals, it's that we lack other sentient life to deal with.
Anthropocentrism is not bullshit. It's probably a necessary component to human society, and other than extremely arrogant forms of it (such as global warming as being both human-caused and within the grasp of human control to stop) it is a healthy mindset for humans to have.
List of world's tallest structures. The tallest structure is a TV mast in eastern North Dakota. Taipei 101 is the tallest skyscraper unless you count the masts on top of the Sears Tower, and then that one wins out. See this article for more details.
The Pentagon is the world's largest office building. The largest building by volume is the Boeing plant that manufactures 747's, 767's, and 777's in Washington. The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building is second or third.
But as far as pressure on the bedrock, I would have no problem accepting that Taipei 101 tops the list. It is an extremely big skyscraper on a relatively very small footprint.
Only the most diehard Slashdot moderators mark this kind of post with a lower score than an AC's FP. Do you dipshits not know what a troll is anymore? Offtopic, redundant, and possibly flamebait, sure - this one embodies those. It is not a troll. Obviously, the moderators are just as literate as the story submitters and editors are.
I always find it humorous when someone gets one joke but fails to get one made in response to it. You're the guy who laughs at "Why did the chicken cross the road?" but not "To get to the other side."
If qualified people left because the employer refuses to hire them without a cheerfulness term in their contract, then the companies that require such terms would go out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let me stoke your interest a bit. They found life on Mars long ago, but have kept it under wraps. It's all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Apollo 18 was not canceled, it was rather simply rescheduled and sent to Mars by President Reagan. When they arrived, the cosmonauts (American astronauts could not be trusted to keep it a secret, whereas Russians would never be believed when they returned, anyhow) found many fairly recent decaying dodo bird corpses. It turns out that they never went extinct - they were just banished to Mars by Napoleon. But the conservative whack-jobs running our country and all of its media have covered it up.
I'd like to tell you more, but there's someone at the door.
Actually, while I am not a lawyer and have no particular expertise in trademark law, I suspect that it may be helpful to use (R) and TM to avoid being sued. For instance, if I talk at length about Coca-Cola and never point out that it's trademarked, someone may be stupid enough to think I am using Coca-Cola as my own term. If enough stupid someones thought that, Coca-Cola Inc. would probably sue me.
But in general, I don't think excessive use of trademark symbols helps anyone. Use it once per term per document, at most, and put in a footnote about all trademarks being the property of their respective owners. More than that gets on my nerves.
I have a related question. Back when I was heavy into Jabber, I found that the inter-protocol transports lacked something that, to me, was a show-stopper. Their developers were of the mindset that "We don't know why you would want that feature, so therefore it must be worthless to anyone and we will not even look at your patch that implements it." I do not know if this applied to the AIM transport, as at the time I did not use AIM.
Anyhow, the feature is this: The Jabber protocol is the single best there is at handling multiple connections to the same account. Each connection can be uniquely identified so messages can be directed to a particular one, and it is easy to control which one gets messages directed at an account but not to a particular connection from that account. However, the transports all vomit (either gracefully or not so gracefully) when confronted with multiple connections to the same account. They should not. They should do smart things like not crash, and deliver messages to the highest-priority connection. They should track the away/available status of the highest-priority connection (updating to track the highest remaining priority after a connection is terminated, and so forth). In general, they should be as good about this as the Jabber protocol itself is.
Crummy interoperation with other IM networks is why I quit using Jabber despite my love affair with it (I even built a general-purpose distributed computing system for my undergraduate thesis project, using Jabber as the communication layer - my project remains the only one with all of its features, to my knowledge, thanks largely to its use of Jabber).
Will a Google Talk AIM gateway suck or will it be a good thing, in this respect?
...out of a cannon. Into the sun.
Cohen would be another good one to interview.
(excessively optimistically) May yet?!?
-- Jurassic Bark, I believe
You and Fermat. :)
You can't trust a guy who writes Pascal-style comments to write a good letter to a corporation. (* Or can you? *)
;-)
I never said dissolution was common, but it has happened. I think that the case you mention is extreme, but certainly not out of the ordinary. And that's why we need the civil justice system to keep them accountable - by suing them and getting enough punitive damages to make proper disposal seem like a cheap alternative.
It still seems odd to me that Australia makes it so easy to go after the owners of a company. That would be like putting Enron's shareholders in jail for what its directors did. In the US, even putting the directors in jail is extreme.
Does Australia have a constitution that guarantees the right to free speech?
The thing that strikes me about this story is that in the US, corporate crimes are punished by fines or by dissolution of the corporation, except in cases like Enron where it was not the corporation doing bad things but its directors. Even so, the directors were punished, not the owners (i.e., shareholders).
There's no reason to believe that they won't, or for that matter that they shouldn't. That said, sentience is an important trait here - if we can convince them that we're also sentient, then we should be alright if they're cosmopolitan (bad pun! down, boy!) enough to consider all sentient life as being sacred.
The reason we're anthropocentric is not that we lack other life forms to consider our equals, it's that we lack other sentient life to deal with.
Yes, we should definitely either treat people as indistinct from animals or animals as people.
Anthropocentrism is not bullshit. It's probably a necessary component to human society, and other than extremely arrogant forms of it (such as global warming as being both human-caused and within the grasp of human control to stop) it is a healthy mindset for humans to have.
I hope she's hot.
Think of all the chicks you'd get...
That didn't take long at all.
I can't name names, but I can tell you this:
they all use Google.
List of world's tallest structures. The tallest structure is a TV mast in eastern North Dakota. Taipei 101 is the tallest skyscraper unless you count the masts on top of the Sears Tower, and then that one wins out. See this article for more details.
The Pentagon is the world's largest office building. The largest building by volume is the Boeing plant that manufactures 747's, 767's, and 777's in Washington. The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building is second or third.
But as far as pressure on the bedrock, I would have no problem accepting that Taipei 101 tops the list. It is an extremely big skyscraper on a relatively very small footprint.
Who decides what is questionable for whom?
Your duly elected representative government decides this. If they make a bad decision, you are entitled to duly elect a new representative government.
In that case, they should learn what their own mod points mean. :P
Only the most diehard Slashdot moderators mark this kind of post with a lower score than an AC's FP. Do you dipshits not know what a troll is anymore? Offtopic, redundant, and possibly flamebait, sure - this one embodies those. It is not a troll. Obviously, the moderators are just as literate as the story submitters and editors are.
Maybe the gravitational waves changed the i into an a.
No, in my last post, I was not a Bob. It's about tone of voice, which admittedly doesn't come through well online.
I always find it humorous when someone gets one joke but fails to get one made in response to it. You're the guy who laughs at "Why did the chicken cross the road?" but not "To get to the other side."
Somehow I doubt that this company has such a monopoly, or even enough market leverage to force anyone to smile who wasn't smiling already.
When did mid-6-digits become "badassly low"? ;-D
If qualified people left because the employer refuses to hire them without a cheerfulness term in their contract, then the companies that require such terms would go out of business.