Sounds great to me. I'd extend it to blood donors, with quantity donated moving you further up.
Well, except that blood transfusion tends to be a bit more immediate than getting a new organ. Can you imagine getting admitted to the ER, with major blood loss after a car accident, and the nurses having to take the time to look up how many pints you've donated before they'll give you a transfusion and take you into surgery? (What if you are in another city or state? Will this info be available immediately to every hospital) And then they have to do a comparison to everyone else in the area served by the local blood supply to make sure nobody (in this ER or in any other local hospital) has donated more than you before they give you the blood? All the while, the patient is pumping blood all over the ER floor from his injuries while his exact spot in the 'blood transfusion priority list' is determined. Yeah, that's just bloody brilliant! You should be a hospital administrator!
It's not the same situation with blood. There is a finite number of organs that can be donated (you can only donate one liver), whereas blood is a renewable resource. Which is why people in need of organs end up on waiting lists. We should not need 'waiting lists' or 'priority lists' for blood transfusions, since people can give blood repeatedly (regular donors make up for some people being unable to donate) and blood can be stored.
A driver's license is proof you had training in operating a potentially dangerous piece of machinery around others. Which is why they have ticky boxes for things like "chauffeur" and "commercial" on it. You know, because it's about driving. I agree, it shouldn't be used for anything other than employment as a driver, traffic violations, and insurance purposes! In fact, it's a perfect example of how the "oh, this card will only be used for X" is so easily corrupted!
Want to know what hysteria is? It's the "OMG TEH MEXICANS ARE STEALIN' MAH JOB!". Nevermind that these 'patriot' xenophobes tend to be the same group that practically worship symbols like the Statue of Liberty, but don't even bother to learn the inscription she carries (I'll give you a hint: "Give me your tired, your poor...") Instead of radio-collaring everyone, why don't we concentrate on fixing the broken immigration system that keeps legal applicants in limbo for years, pushing some to come here illegally instead. Oh wait, that's going to take a lot of effort and won't appease the xenophobes, so let's just put a shiny band-aid on it to get re-elected. (And with all the immigration hysteria, the fools won't even notice that we've chipped away a little more of their freedom!)
3D tech aside, the rendering in Avatar has raised the bar for animation to unprecedented heights.
Because of this work, the technology is very close now to being able to convincingly simulate humans.
I already saw that movie. It came out in 2001 and was called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And after the "OOOH SHINY!" wore off, we're left with a dull movie that I really don't care if I ever see again. That is the movie I think of when I see a lot of reviews that rave about the "cutting edge animation" of Avatar, then forgive the ho-hum story. When Avatar's CGI has been surpassed in a decade, will we still want to watch it?
If you are honestly comparing the sophistication of the animation and rendering in Avatar to that of The Smurfs then you really just need to be quiet because clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
And you missed the point. Cutting edge CGI does not a movie make. If it's just Dances with Smurfs in 3D!!!!, where will the film be when its CGI is no longer dazzling you because something newer and shinier has come along? Is the story good enough to be enjoyable long after the CGI has become commonplace and "old tech"?
Look at Pixar, filmmakers who know how to incorporate the shiny new things with solid stories and memorable characters. Toy Story was cutting edge animation when it came out, but has since been far surpassed by the other Pixar films in the CGI department. An Animation 101 student can render CGI at Toy Story's level nowadays. However, the reason I still watch Toy Story is that it didn't depend on the "OOOH SHINY!", it has a solid story and wonderful characters that still makes it enjoyable a decade after its "cutting edge" animation has lost its shine.
Having whizz-bang "cutting edge" effects does not give a free pass to have a lame story.
The sentence is referring to two separate agencies: DHS and TSA. Rewrite the sentence to "How has they addressed the repeated posting..." vs. "How have they addressed the repeated posting...", and you'll see the error.
If the rules should have been taught long ago, then he shouldn't have had any grammar mistakes in his writing. If he wants his paper read for content, then he should not waste the teacher's time by filling it with elementary grammar errors.
If this was English 101 and the criteria for writing the assignment was "correct punctuation and grammar", then he needs to meet the criteria and have correct punctuation and grammar. If it's any sort of "formal" writing, then there is no excuse for incorrect usage of the language. Unless it is a creative writing assignment where the teacher specifies they can get creative with their grammar, then his teenage-angst short story with incorrect grammar can be done on his own time.
I agree that a computer would not be able to grade creative writing because of allowed variations to the rules in that genre, but even in creative writing you cannot just haphazardly write with crappy grammar and then expect to get a free pass because "It's creative writing. Grammar doesn't matter!" Yes, grammar does still matter. You need to know all the rules before you can break them, and "good writing" means they were broken in deliberate and thoughtful ways. It's usually easy to tell which are "thoughtful errors" and which are just plain laziness. For every wonderful piece of creative work, there is a ton of bad paintings, bad music, bad photography, and I've seen plenty of "creative uses of grammar" that made me want to claw my eyes out, all of which can quite easily be graded as "bad". Even painting, music and photography have their own version of "grammar", and I think in many, if not most cases of "bad" art, it's a matter of the artist either not knowing the rules in the first place, or else breaking the rules through sloppiness and laziness rather than thoughtful deviation.
Ooooh, well aren't we just the special little snowflakes.
They kept saying that it would take time to diagnose the problem and that they had to take care of the people in front of her.
OMG, they made you wait in line behind people who were there first. How dare they. HOW DARE THEY!! And I suppose you get to cut in line at the grocery store, too, when you have 25 items and the people in front of you have full carts? And how dare that shoe salesman continue helping the family of four who were there first, when you only need one pair! That pretentious prick!
Fucking hell, you and the wife are like the poster children for Generation Narcissist.
They need to be smart enough to recognize the people who have a quick fix versus the lady who will spend an hour trying to get her desktop configured just so.
So they have to waste resources triaging everyone who comes in, and the poor schmucks with more complicated problems keep getting shoved to the back of the line. Oh, well that will just solve everything, won't it? Or -- and I know this is crazy talk -- maybe they could implement some sort of system where you can call ahead and arrange a specific time that they will set aside to devote to your problem, so you can arrive at the appointed time and get the problem taken care of quickly.
"I'm not getting a Mac laptop if I have to make an appointment to some pretentious technician for the simplest of problems".
And, here's a free clue for you: you make an appointment so you don't have to wait in line! Dun dun Duuuuuuuuuhhhhh!!
I made an appointment to get my desktop looked at. And right at the appointed time, a tech called me over to work on the problem. Wow, what a concept! Maybe doctors and dentists and auto mechanics should look into using this "appointment" thingie.
Emergency use (1 alert/month) - £5 ($8).
Standard use (60 alerts/month) - £10 ($16)
Advanced use (90 alerts/month) - £13 ($21)
Unlimited use (unlimited alerts/month) - £20 ($32)
$32 is less than what a family spends at a restaurant. Go out to eat one less time per month, have plenty of money for the top-level subscription. And yeah, it's very much worth it if you can give your autistic kid a little more freedom and yourself a back-up system to keeping an eye on them.
Same here. My son has pulled the disappearing act on us a couple times. Both times we got extremely lucky, and both times were "look away for five minutes because he seemed to be busy doing something and then he was gone". He's getting better now that he's getting older about asking if he can go somewhere, but we still can't completely trust him not to wander off. Since we like to travel, we spend a lot of time in new (and often remote) areas. And since he's almost a teenager, it would be nice to be able to let him explore on his own (within a boundary) without us having to hover over him.
Why is it so hard to understand that liking the outdoors/road and having internet are not opposites.
Actually, they ARE opposites. These people said they want "remote". I'm guessing you've never been to "remote" before? Remote means that at the campground the toilet very well may be just a seat over a hole in the ground, the water comes from a hand pump, most likely no electricity, and you may have to drive 50 miles to get cell phone coverage.
Maybe they are from NYC and their idea of "remote" is Chicago, but it's kind of the definition of "remote" that you are away from many of the amenities of civilization -- including internet access.
The internet is just as much a tool as a frying pan or a tent these days, and having access to it at all times is very useful.
And guess what? When I want to get remote, I make sacrifices. When I backpack into the wilderness, I don't carry a frying pan (far too heavy) and I use a light-weight tent that barely squeezes two people into it (once again, weight is an issue). And I don't expect there to be internet access, or even cell coverage for that matter! Yes, it would be very useful if I could pack in a comfy mattress and a bathroom, but if I really need those things that badly, I can take my vacations at a hotel or just stay home.
If they must have a constant connection for gaming, and satellite isn't good enough for them, then they should forget about remote and just stay at KOAs as others have suggested. Or a Holiday Inn.
I've lived two places that have very cold winters, with lots of cloud cover and large accumulation of snow (upper Great Lakes and the Great Plains) and I don't think it's as easy-peasy as they make it out to be. I'm guessing these people have never lived in a region that gets a ton of snow in a short amount of time. So lets ignore the problem of these panels collecting enough energy after a month of cloud cover to not only keep up with the daily accumulation (oh, and fulfill the original goal of providing power) but also melt the two feet of snow that got dumped by a blizzard overnight. The snow is not going to magically disappear. It turns into water. So where is all this water going to go? And what is it going to do when it flows off the toasty solar panel and onto, say, non-solar roads. It's going to FREEZE. So non-solar roads connecting to the solar roads will have a nice layer of ice forming at the intersection. So now rather than making quick runs up and down roads tossing snow out of the way, plows are going to have to deal with the icy death traps wherever ice is being formed in inconvenient places by the rapid melting of a large amount of snow in freezing temperatures (And as plows aren't exactly precision instruments, chances are the solar panels at these intersections will be hit). I'd prefer non-heated solar panels that can be plowed over ice rinks at intersections, thanks.
The panels would probably work great in the southern states (where any snowfall would be just a tiny amount), but it's laughable to think about putting this in places that get real winter.
You are reading too much into what he is saying, because that is what he just said. This is from his blog, not a legal analysis of copyright law, and are his thoughts on an argument he was having with his agent, who was claiming that all rights to the spoken version of the book are sold separately, including text-to-speech. Neil is saying that this is true for professionally produced Audiobook versions, but that a person being able to read aloud (whether with their own voice or a text-to-speech device) is part of owning a book (included in the purchase price, so to speak), not something that must be purchased separately as the publishers/lawyers are demanding.
If you want to be a Disgruntled Pedant, Neil Gaiman is the wrong person to direct it at. He's on your side. Really.
Neil Gaiman has expressed his opinion of this issue in his blog.
My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.
Rowling simply copied the primary character types from Every other fantasy book,
Yes, much like Tolkien copied from myth and legend, sometimes to the point that today he would be considered a plagiarist. The poem "Where now the horse and the rider?" from The Two Towers was pretty much lifted from The Wanderers, an Old English poem. Read Beowulf and you'll get a crick in your neck from all the double-takes when you stumble across familiar LOTR names. Magic rings? Try The Ring of the Nibelung. I love Tolkien's work, but I'm more than a little tired of him being put on this pedestal as if LOTR sprang pure and fully formed from his own mind, while other fantasy authors are considered 'hacks' for doing the same sort of borrowing.
And oh yes, JK Rowling is sooooo greedy for suing a guy she left alone until he tried to ride her coattails and make money from his copy & paste of her work without adding anything significant of his own to the effort. Boo fucking hoo.
They may be overpopluated now, but they are heading for a very huge crash in the future if they don't do something about the cultural pressure to have a son (and using sex selection to get a boy). The One Child policy to control the population can work as long as you're not skewing your future generations to be disproportionately male. And not only are you losing the capacity to keep your population stable, you also end up with a lot of frustrated and angry young men who can't find a wife (a problem they are currently facing).
Right... so what happens if being born female happens to be treated like a genetic defect in your country?
Well, as China is discovering, what happens is that you learn it is a BIG MISTAKE to remove girls from the population through sex selection, as the creation of embryos using two sperm, along with male pregnancy, have not yet been made viable options. Females are pretty much required to keep your country populated and functioning. You can get by with fewer males, but removing a large number of females from the population is essentially suicide for a culture/country.
I wasn't getting into the ethics of using private open wi-fi networks. I was pointing out the stupidity of using 'Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain. Water isn't free." as a rebuttal to the example of walking into someone's house and using their telephone without permission. To keep the water analogy, I pointed out that using someone's telephone without permission is the same as using their outdoor faucet. It is not the same as using a public drinking fountain. A drinking fountain is the same as a municipal network--meant to be publicly available and no permission required--so cannot be compared to using home telephones or private open wi-fi networks.
Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain? You know water isn't free.
Except drinking fountains are the equivalent of municipal wi-fi -- paid for by taxes to benefit the public, or provided inside a publicly accessible building for the benefit of visitors. Unless it's in a private, non-publicly accessible building, they are generally understood to be available to anyone, with the cost of the water provided to strangers being willingly paid for by the owner.
I think the example you're looking for is: "Do you ask permission to hook your hose up to your neighbor's faucet to water your lawn? You know water isn't free."
disaster waiting to happen, just like the World Trade Center
A disaster? WTF do you have to do to be considered a success for this guy?
A fuel-laden commercial jet slams into a 110 story building (x2) and a little less than 3,000 people died.
The buildings could have collapsed immediately and killed, what, about 20,000 people? But both stood long enough (56 minutes and 102 minutes) to evacuate most of the occupants. Sounds like a pretty damn successful building design to me.
As the mother of an autistic (PDD) child--thank you for saying all that.
I'm so fucking sick and tired of these geeks who think autism is some sort of neato cool thing to have which makes your life a magical fairyland of math and science genius while explaining away their aversion to dating and soap. That attitude alone tells me they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.
Autism is not a benefit and it's not fun and games. It's a fucking nightmare! I can't even begin to imagine what my son goes through when he "short circuits" on sensory overload. And he's old enough now to realize something is going wrong, but he can't do anything to stop it. How come none of the "autism wannabes" out there ever talk about that aspect? Maybe because they're not actually autistic? Trust me, if I could I'd take my son's autism away from him and give it to one of those "autism is so kewl!" geeks so their dream of being autistic can come true.
However, check out his recent "Anansi Boys" - I really enjoyed that and feels a lot less forced than American Gods (which I enjoyed more on the second reading, btw)
I enjoyed it more on the second reading, too. I can't really pinpoint why. I think I liked Shadow a little better the second time around. And maybe I was paying more attention to Anansi, because I was re-reading it before Anansi Boys (which I really enjoyed on the first read) came out.
The article explains how indie kids are drawn to vinyl because "the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes."
By transcoding the stuff. You can't transcode DRMed stuff. I was referring to why I don't but into DRMed music.
You could transcode music from your non-DRM'd backup CD. But why do you even care, as you say you don't buy from iTMS in the first place?
Also the thread was about people not wanting DRMed music. I brought the derailed thread back on topic. How rude!
Perhaps you should write a chiding note to cskrat, as it was that post that brought up the subject I was replying to. Because, as we all know, topics NEVER branch off into other topics on Slashdot. That would be rude!
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Sounds great to me. I'd extend it to blood donors, with quantity donated moving you further up.
Well, except that blood transfusion tends to be a bit more immediate than getting a new organ. Can you imagine getting admitted to the ER, with major blood loss after a car accident, and the nurses having to take the time to look up how many pints you've donated before they'll give you a transfusion and take you into surgery? (What if you are in another city or state? Will this info be available immediately to every hospital) And then they have to do a comparison to everyone else in the area served by the local blood supply to make sure nobody (in this ER or in any other local hospital) has donated more than you before they give you the blood? All the while, the patient is pumping blood all over the ER floor from his injuries while his exact spot in the 'blood transfusion priority list' is determined. Yeah, that's just bloody brilliant! You should be a hospital administrator!
It's not the same situation with blood. There is a finite number of organs that can be donated (you can only donate one liver), whereas blood is a renewable resource. Which is why people in need of organs end up on waiting lists. We should not need 'waiting lists' or 'priority lists' for blood transfusions, since people can give blood repeatedly (regular donors make up for some people being unable to donate) and blood can be stored.
A driver's license is proof you had training in operating a potentially dangerous piece of machinery around others. Which is why they have ticky boxes for things like "chauffeur" and "commercial" on it. You know, because it's about driving. I agree, it shouldn't be used for anything other than employment as a driver, traffic violations, and insurance purposes! In fact, it's a perfect example of how the "oh, this card will only be used for X" is so easily corrupted!
Want to know what hysteria is? It's the "OMG TEH MEXICANS ARE STEALIN' MAH JOB!". Nevermind that these 'patriot' xenophobes tend to be the same group that practically worship symbols like the Statue of Liberty, but don't even bother to learn the inscription she carries (I'll give you a hint: "Give me your tired, your poor...") Instead of radio-collaring everyone, why don't we concentrate on fixing the broken immigration system that keeps legal applicants in limbo for years, pushing some to come here illegally instead. Oh wait, that's going to take a lot of effort and won't appease the xenophobes, so let's just put a shiny band-aid on it to get re-elected. (And with all the immigration hysteria, the fools won't even notice that we've chipped away a little more of their freedom!)
3D tech aside, the rendering in Avatar has raised the bar for animation to unprecedented heights.
Because of this work, the technology is very close now to being able to convincingly simulate humans.
I already saw that movie. It came out in 2001 and was called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And after the "OOOH SHINY!" wore off, we're left with a dull movie that I really don't care if I ever see again. That is the movie I think of when I see a lot of reviews that rave about the "cutting edge animation" of Avatar, then forgive the ho-hum story. When Avatar's CGI has been surpassed in a decade, will we still want to watch it?
If you are honestly comparing the sophistication of the animation and rendering in Avatar to that of The Smurfs then you really just need to be quiet because clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
And you missed the point. Cutting edge CGI does not a movie make. If it's just Dances with Smurfs in 3D!!!!, where will the film be when its CGI is no longer dazzling you because something newer and shinier has come along? Is the story good enough to be enjoyable long after the CGI has become commonplace and "old tech"?
Look at Pixar, filmmakers who know how to incorporate the shiny new things with solid stories and memorable characters. Toy Story was cutting edge animation when it came out, but has since been far surpassed by the other Pixar films in the CGI department. An Animation 101 student can render CGI at Toy Story's level nowadays. However, the reason I still watch Toy Story is that it didn't depend on the "OOOH SHINY!", it has a solid story and wonderful characters that still makes it enjoyable a decade after its "cutting edge" animation has lost its shine.
Having whizz-bang "cutting edge" effects does not give a free pass to have a lame story.
The sentence is referring to two separate agencies: DHS and TSA. Rewrite the sentence to "How has they addressed the repeated posting..." vs. "How have they addressed the repeated posting...", and you'll see the error.
ROTFLMAO! Thanks for making my day!
If the rules should have been taught long ago, then he shouldn't have had any grammar mistakes in his writing. If he wants his paper read for content, then he should not waste the teacher's time by filling it with elementary grammar errors.
If this was English 101 and the criteria for writing the assignment was "correct punctuation and grammar", then he needs to meet the criteria and have correct punctuation and grammar. If it's any sort of "formal" writing, then there is no excuse for incorrect usage of the language. Unless it is a creative writing assignment where the teacher specifies they can get creative with their grammar, then his teenage-angst short story with incorrect grammar can be done on his own time.
I agree that a computer would not be able to grade creative writing because of allowed variations to the rules in that genre, but even in creative writing you cannot just haphazardly write with crappy grammar and then expect to get a free pass because "It's creative writing. Grammar doesn't matter!" Yes, grammar does still matter. You need to know all the rules before you can break them, and "good writing" means they were broken in deliberate and thoughtful ways. It's usually easy to tell which are "thoughtful errors" and which are just plain laziness. For every wonderful piece of creative work, there is a ton of bad paintings, bad music, bad photography, and I've seen plenty of "creative uses of grammar" that made me want to claw my eyes out, all of which can quite easily be graded as "bad". Even painting, music and photography have their own version of "grammar", and I think in many, if not most cases of "bad" art, it's a matter of the artist either not knowing the rules in the first place, or else breaking the rules through sloppiness and laziness rather than thoughtful deviation.
Ooooh, well aren't we just the special little snowflakes.
They kept saying that it would take time to diagnose the problem and that they had to take care of the people in front of her.
OMG, they made you wait in line behind people who were there first. How dare they. HOW DARE THEY!! And I suppose you get to cut in line at the grocery store, too, when you have 25 items and the people in front of you have full carts? And how dare that shoe salesman continue helping the family of four who were there first, when you only need one pair! That pretentious prick!
Fucking hell, you and the wife are like the poster children for Generation Narcissist.
They need to be smart enough to recognize the people who have a quick fix versus the lady who will spend an hour trying to get her desktop configured just so.
So they have to waste resources triaging everyone who comes in, and the poor schmucks with more complicated problems keep getting shoved to the back of the line. Oh, well that will just solve everything, won't it? Or -- and I know this is crazy talk -- maybe they could implement some sort of system where you can call ahead and arrange a specific time that they will set aside to devote to your problem, so you can arrive at the appointed time and get the problem taken care of quickly.
"I'm not getting a Mac laptop if I have to make an appointment to some pretentious technician for the simplest of problems".
And, here's a free clue for you: you make an appointment so you don't have to wait in line! Dun dun Duuuuuuuuuhhhhh!!
I made an appointment to get my desktop looked at. And right at the appointed time, a tech called me over to work on the problem. Wow, what a concept! Maybe doctors and dentists and auto mechanics should look into using this "appointment" thingie.
... will have run out of money. That "montly subscription" is sure as hell gonna wring every last buck out of yout wallet once they got you hooked.
Try reading the website next time:
Emergency use (1 alert/month) - £5 ($8).
Standard use (60 alerts/month) - £10 ($16)
Advanced use (90 alerts/month) - £13 ($21)
Unlimited use (unlimited alerts/month) - £20 ($32)
$32 is less than what a family spends at a restaurant. Go out to eat one less time per month, have plenty of money for the top-level subscription. And yeah, it's very much worth it if you can give your autistic kid a little more freedom and yourself a back-up system to keeping an eye on them.
Same here. My son has pulled the disappearing act on us a couple times. Both times we got extremely lucky, and both times were "look away for five minutes because he seemed to be busy doing something and then he was gone". He's getting better now that he's getting older about asking if he can go somewhere, but we still can't completely trust him not to wander off. Since we like to travel, we spend a lot of time in new (and often remote) areas. And since he's almost a teenager, it would be nice to be able to let him explore on his own (within a boundary) without us having to hover over him.
Why is it so hard to understand that liking the outdoors/road and having internet are not opposites. Actually, they ARE opposites. These people said they want "remote". I'm guessing you've never been to "remote" before? Remote means that at the campground the toilet very well may be just a seat over a hole in the ground, the water comes from a hand pump, most likely no electricity, and you may have to drive 50 miles to get cell phone coverage. Maybe they are from NYC and their idea of "remote" is Chicago, but it's kind of the definition of "remote" that you are away from many of the amenities of civilization -- including internet access. The internet is just as much a tool as a frying pan or a tent these days, and having access to it at all times is very useful. And guess what? When I want to get remote, I make sacrifices. When I backpack into the wilderness, I don't carry a frying pan (far too heavy) and I use a light-weight tent that barely squeezes two people into it (once again, weight is an issue). And I don't expect there to be internet access, or even cell coverage for that matter! Yes, it would be very useful if I could pack in a comfy mattress and a bathroom, but if I really need those things that badly, I can take my vacations at a hotel or just stay home. If they must have a constant connection for gaming, and satellite isn't good enough for them, then they should forget about remote and just stay at KOAs as others have suggested. Or a Holiday Inn.
I've lived two places that have very cold winters, with lots of cloud cover and large accumulation of snow (upper Great Lakes and the Great Plains) and I don't think it's as easy-peasy as they make it out to be. I'm guessing these people have never lived in a region that gets a ton of snow in a short amount of time. So lets ignore the problem of these panels collecting enough energy after a month of cloud cover to not only keep up with the daily accumulation (oh, and fulfill the original goal of providing power) but also melt the two feet of snow that got dumped by a blizzard overnight. The snow is not going to magically disappear. It turns into water. So where is all this water going to go? And what is it going to do when it flows off the toasty solar panel and onto, say, non-solar roads. It's going to FREEZE. So non-solar roads connecting to the solar roads will have a nice layer of ice forming at the intersection. So now rather than making quick runs up and down roads tossing snow out of the way, plows are going to have to deal with the icy death traps wherever ice is being formed in inconvenient places by the rapid melting of a large amount of snow in freezing temperatures (And as plows aren't exactly precision instruments, chances are the solar panels at these intersections will be hit). I'd prefer non-heated solar panels that can be plowed over ice rinks at intersections, thanks.
The panels would probably work great in the southern states (where any snowfall would be just a tiny amount), but it's laughable to think about putting this in places that get real winter.
Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor
Hulu does. I'm running Hulu Desktop on a G5.
You are reading too much into what he is saying, because that is what he just said. This is from his blog, not a legal analysis of copyright law, and are his thoughts on an argument he was having with his agent, who was claiming that all rights to the spoken version of the book are sold separately, including text-to-speech. Neil is saying that this is true for professionally produced Audiobook versions, but that a person being able to read aloud (whether with their own voice or a text-to-speech device) is part of owning a book (included in the purchase price, so to speak), not something that must be purchased separately as the publishers/lawyers are demanding.
If you want to be a Disgruntled Pedant, Neil Gaiman is the wrong person to direct it at. He's on your side. Really.
Neil Gaiman has expressed his opinion of this issue in his blog.
My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.
Rowling simply copied the primary character types from Every other fantasy book,
Yes, much like Tolkien copied from myth and legend, sometimes to the point that today he would be considered a plagiarist. The poem "Where now the horse and the rider?" from The Two Towers was pretty much lifted from The Wanderers, an Old English poem. Read Beowulf and you'll get a crick in your neck from all the double-takes when you stumble across familiar LOTR names. Magic rings? Try The Ring of the Nibelung. I love Tolkien's work, but I'm more than a little tired of him being put on this pedestal as if LOTR sprang pure and fully formed from his own mind, while other fantasy authors are considered 'hacks' for doing the same sort of borrowing.
And oh yes, JK Rowling is sooooo greedy for suing a guy she left alone until he tried to ride her coattails and make money from his copy & paste of her work without adding anything significant of his own to the effort. Boo fucking hoo.
They may be overpopluated now, but they are heading for a very huge crash in the future if they don't do something about the cultural pressure to have a son (and using sex selection to get a boy). The One Child policy to control the population can work as long as you're not skewing your future generations to be disproportionately male. And not only are you losing the capacity to keep your population stable, you also end up with a lot of frustrated and angry young men who can't find a wife (a problem they are currently facing).
Right... so what happens if being born female happens to be treated like a genetic defect in your country?
Well, as China is discovering, what happens is that you learn it is a BIG MISTAKE to remove girls from the population through sex selection, as the creation of embryos using two sperm, along with male pregnancy, have not yet been made viable options. Females are pretty much required to keep your country populated and functioning. You can get by with fewer males, but removing a large number of females from the population is essentially suicide for a culture/country.
I wasn't getting into the ethics of using private open wi-fi networks. I was pointing out the stupidity of using 'Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain. Water isn't free." as a rebuttal to the example of walking into someone's house and using their telephone without permission. To keep the water analogy, I pointed out that using someone's telephone without permission is the same as using their outdoor faucet. It is not the same as using a public drinking fountain. A drinking fountain is the same as a municipal network--meant to be publicly available and no permission required--so cannot be compared to using home telephones or private open wi-fi networks.
Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain? You know water isn't free.
Except drinking fountains are the equivalent of municipal wi-fi -- paid for by taxes to benefit the public, or provided inside a publicly accessible building for the benefit of visitors. Unless it's in a private, non-publicly accessible building, they are generally understood to be available to anyone, with the cost of the water provided to strangers being willingly paid for by the owner.
I think the example you're looking for is: "Do you ask permission to hook your hose up to your neighbor's faucet to water your lawn? You know water isn't free."
disaster waiting to happen, just like the World Trade Center
A disaster? WTF do you have to do to be considered a success for this guy?
A fuel-laden commercial jet slams into a 110 story building (x2) and a little less than 3,000 people died.
The buildings could have collapsed immediately and killed, what, about 20,000 people? But both stood long enough (56 minutes and 102 minutes) to evacuate most of the occupants. Sounds like a pretty damn successful building design to me.
Forgive me for laughing, but that is a wonderfully accurate description. I may have to borrow it.
;-)
Feel free to borrow. Spread the word!
I truly believe we need something like Godwin's Law for "'ZOMG! Autism!" turning up in a discussion.
As the mother of an autistic (PDD) child--thank you for saying all that.
I'm so fucking sick and tired of these geeks who think autism is some sort of neato cool thing to have which makes your life a magical fairyland of math and science genius while explaining away their aversion to dating and soap. That attitude alone tells me they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.
Autism is not a benefit and it's not fun and games. It's a fucking nightmare! I can't even begin to imagine what my son goes through when he "short circuits" on sensory overload. And he's old enough now to realize something is going wrong, but he can't do anything to stop it. How come none of the "autism wannabes" out there ever talk about that aspect? Maybe because they're not actually autistic? Trust me, if I could I'd take my son's autism away from him and give it to one of those "autism is so kewl!" geeks so their dream of being autistic can come true.
However, check out his recent "Anansi Boys" - I really enjoyed that and feels a lot less forced than American Gods (which I enjoyed more on the second reading, btw)
I enjoyed it more on the second reading, too. I can't really pinpoint why. I think I liked Shadow a little better the second time around. And maybe I was paying more attention to Anansi, because I was re-reading it before Anansi Boys (which I really enjoyed on the first read) came out.
The article explains how indie kids are drawn to vinyl because "the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes."
CDs aren't physical objects?
By transcoding the stuff. You can't transcode DRMed stuff. I was referring to why I don't but into DRMed music.
You could transcode music from your non-DRM'd backup CD. But why do you even care, as you say you don't buy from iTMS in the first place?
Also the thread was about people not wanting DRMed music. I brought the derailed thread back on topic. How rude!
Perhaps you should write a chiding note to cskrat, as it was that post that brought up the subject I was replying to. Because, as we all know, topics NEVER branch off into other topics on Slashdot. That would be rude!