One of the biggest problems the Council of Nicaea faced regarding the dating of Easter was that the imperfection of the Julian Calendar had already thrown off the date of the Spring Equinox by about 4 days in the four centuries since it had been enacted. But rather than resetting the calendar (as they did about 1300 years later with the Gregorian reforms), the Council decided to simply redefine the dates of the equinoxes.
December 25 (the old Winter Equinox) was already becoming popular at the time for Jesus's "birthday;" but it wasn't yet officially established. By the time it became "officially" recognized as such (a few decades later), everyone had forgotten why the date was chosen in the first place (the Equinox), or even that the date wasn't even the original December 25th in the first place!
So the fact that the African-American infant mortality rate in this country is two-and-a-half times higher than it is for white babies must mean that we've got one helluva health care system set up for our inner-city minorities. Somebody ought to contact the NAACP; they seem to have the impression that there's something wrong with this state of affairs.
And what is going on with this country when even the frackin' Puerto Ricans and Native Americans are doing better than white people? Dammit, what is their secret, that they can get infant mortality rates approaching 1.5 times to twice that of the white kids?
So yeah, a big problem with big numbers is that most folks reach false impressions based only on the surface data. And then there are the people who only drill down far enough to get the answers that they wanted all along.
Is coming along with nary a hitch, as far as I can tell. They started late last year, have a good chunk of the city up and running under it already, and should be done with the whole project by the end of the year. I don't have any real-world experience with it (I live in St. Paul), but I haven't heard anything but good about it, so far.
Seriously, the city is making setting up wifi look about as difficult as slapping together legos; I can't figure out how these other cities have managed to screw it up so badly.
And the St. Paul city government just voted to go with a fiber optic rollout for their municipal broadband. Of course, no word on where the $200+ million is going to come from to pay for it, so it's really just vaporware at the moment.
But God knows there's enough fiber laid down out there up to the curb. It's been almost ten years since they buried those suckers; might as well light plug 'em in and see how well they light up.
Sorry to disappoint y'all, but it turns out it was the bees all along. When The Big Guy said "be fruitful and multiply," did you honestly believe He was talking to you, when so many more obvious candidates were buzzing like maniacs all over creation?
I mean, this is the same Dude who once treated you guys like some pack of gophers He found chewing up His lawn, isn't He? Yeah, I thought so...
Dude. You haven't lived until you've lived within smelling distance of an ethanol plant. Here in St. Paul, we had a (now defunct) brewery that was so desperate for cash that it conned the city into letting it turn most of its production over to ethanol.
It was barely a mile from downtown -- and upwind of it, too! I can't imagine how awful it must have been for them; I lived up a hill and two miles away from the joint (and away from the prevailing air currents), and I still smelled them half the time... imagine a jillion bakery ovens, all cooking the sickliest-smelling, yeastiest bread ever, and you'll get an idea of what St. Paul smelled like for the few years it was operational.
But, ya know, the thing's gone now. And the whole town's lousy with ethanol pumps; I'm well within walking distance of more than one of 'em. So as long as the plant is properly NIMBY'ed (say... Fargo, or thereabouts), ethanol ain't such a bad deal for the Average Midwesterner.
There's every possibility you could walk away from a session of Spore as a Fukuyama-quoting, Hegel-worshipping neocon. To quote the article:
Once you successfully pass from the "clash of civilizations" stage to the "end of history," the game grants you that ultimate in Hegelian rewards: a spaceship.
So let me get this straight... Hegel wrote space opera? Serves me right for never having had the stamina to read him through to the end.
I'm pretty sure Marx's Communist Manifesto doesn't end with any spaceships; but now I'm gonna have to go re-read the thing just to be certain.
All the software you mention probably exists in Linux, it's just so insanely named that you have no idea it's what you need until you take a chance and install it.
I still love the Penguin (well, actually, I'm more of a BSD fan); but that's been my experience, software-wise.
Ya know, I read and re-read the article at least three times (I really did!), because all I kept getting out of it was the sheer cluelessness of its premise. Seriously, Outlook? Is there anyone out there whose spent more than five minutes ruminating over computer OS issues who believes that Microsoft is seriously gonn get behind Linux/Unix versions of its flagship products?
Besides Dvorak, I mean.
The article also cites Shockwave and iTunes as examples; but I've never felt even remotely outta the loop for being without either one of them. I frankly don't understood the weird obsession with those silly little Mac music players (my 2-year-old, 20gb, non-DRM compliant, format agnostic iRiver still kicks serious enough ass, thank you); and as for Shockwave... well... in I dunno how many years of XP usage I've had to put up with, I've never even had to bother with using Shockwave, so why install it? So I can... what... finally have that full, uncrippled Disney.com experience?
There's only one thing that ever brings me back to Windows with any regularity. And that's gaming, pure and simple. You show me a critical mass of support from the mainstream PC gaming industry for Linux/Unix support, and I'll be outta here faster than Mindy Gates can say "Microsoft Bob."
If Kennedy was the only thing keeping the Democrats from KO'ing the moonshot/space program, then how come NASA's Houston command post is called Johnson Space Center?
And listen, mac. Maybe you don't want him to be one, but that still doesn't change the fact that JFK was a Democrat. Not a single history book I've ever read attempts to claim otherwise. If you judged a President's party affiliation by how in sync he was with the rest of the gang, then this country hasn't had a Democratic President since Andy Jackson. That party has just never worked that way; remember what Will Rogers said?
Dealing with the origins of the Apollo program, Kay points to the lack of any direct, proven relationship between the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy's decision to go to the Moon. He does, however, note that in early 1961 the new administration suffered one blow after another, including Gagarin's first manned flight. The author also explains how, for once, the White House and Congressional leadership were in agreement. This gave the Moon program powerful political momentum that allowed it to survive the inevitable crises and loss of Congressional and public enthusiasm.
So if Congressional favor for the space program eventually waned, it was more a reflection of growing voter cynicism in general than a knee-jerk Democratic Party hatred of all things space-related. Such an attitude clearly wasn't there at the beginning; and with a full five years of post-Kennedy full Democratic control of the government, you'd think they would have gotten around to shutting the program down sometime, if they'd really wanted to.
In fact, the (Democratic Party nominated) Kennedy-Johnson ticket campaigned on a pro-space platform, and against the Eisenhauer-Nixon Administration's (unjustifiably) perceived ineptitude at it -- if only as a sideshow to the "Missile Gap" Big Dog issue of the 1960 elections.
For the record: weigh, way, and whey are not homonyms in many English dialects. In many parts of the US, "whey" is pronounced with an unvoiced "w," while the other two are pronounced voiced. The difference is subtle to a non-speaker of the dialect, probably not even realized by most of the speakers doing it (and possibly on the decline even where it is), but it IS still there. And they do it.
Witch/which. Wear/where. Wile/while. Weather/whether. Wales/whales. In each case, the "h" signifies a distinct phonetic difference in the pronounciation of the first consonant, and thus an entirely different word.
If you put your hand just in front of your mouth while pronouncing the above word combinations, and you feel a puff of air while saying the second word in each combo, then you are pronouncing an unvoiced "w." Congratulations.
It's our right to make poop. Some of it can even be used as fertilizer.
In fact, that's the first statement I've read in this whole inane thread that actually gets it. Certainly the parent didn't. To quote the 19th-century statesman Otto Von Bismarck:
"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
See? In political discourse, as in politics itself, folks usually just throw whatever they've got at the fan; and whatever sticks... well, that's what gets included in the history books.
I have to agree with you. I figured out how to send you this paperless telegram, after all. Certainly, the imaging device was a little hard to get used to; but the type-writing tablet it was attached to was not unfamiliar to me at all.
It's also gratifying to see that, after all these years, the flivvers are still quite recognizable as such; and you've largely gotten rid of those clunky streetcars. That's nice.
But wireless telephones? I really don't see what this Mr. Dvorak thinks I should find so amazing about that. I already have a radio in my parlor at home, you know. So his works both ways and is smaller; I should hope so after nearly 90 years of ruminating on the matter. In fact, I've got four-year-old (I'm sorry, ninety-year-old) copies of The Electrical Experimenter and Radio Amateur News I could show him that discuss the very possibility.
The one thing I cannot get used to, however, is all this noise. How do you people stand it? Just because you have talking pictures nowadays doesn't mean you have to play it so dag-blamed loud. You have sound with your motion pictures -- I get it -- now please stop foghorning it in my face! It's enough to give a fella a rager of a headache, and with not a single radium martini to be found anywhere.
Which reminds me, can anybody tell me where I can get one? I gather from the number of baby grands I've seen out straining the sidewalks that the healthful, slimming benefits of radium must not be as well known in your time as they are in my day. But, come on man, there must be some place where I can still get one.
And speaking of pointing things out -- where are all the mechanical butlers? I was really hoping to bring back a mechanical butler...
Ah well, that's about all I got time for, for now. Got to go rest up my arm for the big trip home. Time machines don't crank themselves, you know.
A couple of years ago an entirely different impact crater was discovered in Australia, with preliminary dating indicating that it happened at about the same time as this one. It, too, is huge -- not as monstrous as this here Antarctica sockdollager, but apparently about as apocalyptic as the one that reputedly KO'd the dinosaurs. Considering the history of our Solar System, I don't think that a multiple-impact armaggedon is at all out of the question. Hell, maybe we'll find even more impact craters, and have to come to the conclusion that it was some kind of supersized rain of fire that reset the planetary ecology switch.
And then, of course, we shouldn't forget about the largest volcanic eruption in the history of the planet that sparked up at just about the same time, too. An area roughly the size of Scandinavia simply melted into a mass of sulfurous, poisonous, volcanic goo for a couple of million years before settling down. I'm not terribly firm on my Permian Era geography, but I'd be willing to bet that the Siberian Traps event was pretty close to the opposite side of the planet at the time of the impacts.
Funny and informative. Good show, sport. In fact, I think that honestly figures to be a big part of their revenue supplementation.
That, and I suspect that because of the nature of the FCC license they're applying for, they'll have to restrict the adult content on their network to an ID-check, pay-per-surf basis.
Over the years laboratory experiments have shown that birds orient themselves based on cues from the sun, stars, Earth's magnetic field, and by memorizing landmarks while migrating. But the relative importance of such cues was unknown and a source of scientific debate.
Makes sense. Any animal whose life cycle was entirely dependent on a single environmental variable would be one that wouldn't exist for any longer than an evolutionary flash in the pan.
I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.
Cheaper than free? While I can't speak knowledgeably about the entire U.S. of A (polling issues are handled on a state-by-state basis), I do know that most (if not all) of the poll workers in this country are there on a volunteer basis. Maybe some of 'em are paid a stipend or something... I dunno... but I doubt that would make hand-counting any more expensive than buying and maintaining those damned machines. Arguably, it might even be less expensive in the long run.
At any rate, none of the arguments I've seen in favor of touch-screen voting have anything directly to do with the bottom line. Usually it's voter-privacy issues for people with disabilities (who would otherwise need to rely on a "volunteer" to correctly read and mark their votes for them), and language issues for "English-challenged" citizens (who wouldn't be able to read or understand the ballot). The National Federation For The Blind, for instance, has been in and out of bed with Diebold for years over the issue of ballot accessibility.
It took a collection of American scientists to invent the Robotic Tentacle. Man, the Japanese really have lost their edge.
I think it's very, very important for the rest of us to do whatever we can to prevent our American roboticists from mingling with their Asian counterparts. For the sake of the children, if nothing else.
It's usually closer to $2.50 a can/bottle where I come from, even more if you buy it at a coffee shop or a bar... and that's usually an eight ounce can of the stuff.
Virtually nobody orders coffee in less than 12-ounce sizes any more. Compare about $1.60 per 12-ounces of coffee bought in a shop to one can of Red Bull, et al., and you have a beverage that is well over twice as expensive as regular joe.
The main source of the fad for energy drinks is the strength of their marketing, plus the fact that Kids Today (TM) have figured out how easy these drinks are to combine with hard alcohol for a "tasty," goofball-style night of binge drinking.
I'm looking at one right now, and I don't see Splenda ("sucralose") anywhere on the ingredient list. I see NutraSweet ("aspartame") near the top of the list; and waaay down near the bottom (just above caffeine) is aspartame's synergistc boyfriend: acesulfame potassium. Unfortunately, too much aspartame gives me a wicked headache, so while I like Coke Zero, I won't be drinking it in quantity any time soon.
There is a Diet Coke made with Splenda; I like it, and it gives me no head pain, but it seems to be becoming harder and harder to find. I suspect Coke is preparing to phase it out as a failed experiment.
Rumour has it that someone on the same Computer Science degree course as me installed Linux for the first time on his only computer that he was preparing his final year project on (worth something like 20% of the whole degree) 3 weeks before the deadline without having first taken backups.
Ack. But you forgot the part about when the dude reaches down to remove his Gentoo disc from the CD-ROM drive -- and there, in the dim, green LED light of his Alienware case, he notices... A HOOK DANGLING FROM THE CD TRAY!!!
I dunno about you, but that part always scared the bejeesus outta me at all the geek slumber parties.
In today's "Comment & Analysis" section of the Financial Times, they voice a rather different interpretation of what's bogging down our quest for the Next Big Thing:
Anyone who gets a patent on that bit of the invention -- not difficult in a world of overworked and under-resourced patent examiners -- can hold the whole product hostage, to extrace a settlement far more valuable than the worth of the original idea, they say.
The key to all this power is that federal courts will almost always grant an injunction in cases where infringement has already been proved -- stopping people who make things from continuing to do so, even if the patent they have breached is only a tiny fraction of the total.
It's kinda hard to keep on truckin' down the Innovation Superhighway when you gotta stop and pay every damn Patent Troll that lumbers out at you from beneath the underpasses. How many Looneys does RIM have to shell out again just to keep the Blackberries of the world from becoming paperweights?
Ain't a particularly original point, I know (especially around here); but I noticed that the notion never once surfaced in the original article. And since I can't imagine Mr. Donofrio had never heard of it, my guess is that he's ignoring it.
Not that the Financial Times has, however. They've been foaming at the mouth over this issue for almost as long as Slashdot has.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even more "off" than that.
One of the biggest problems the Council of Nicaea faced regarding the dating of Easter was that the imperfection of the Julian Calendar had already thrown off the date of the Spring Equinox by about 4 days in the four centuries since it had been enacted. But rather than resetting the calendar (as they did about 1300 years later with the Gregorian reforms), the Council decided to simply redefine the dates of the equinoxes.
December 25 (the old Winter Equinox) was already becoming popular at the time for Jesus's "birthday;" but it wasn't yet officially established. By the time it became "officially" recognized as such (a few decades later), everyone had forgotten why the date was chosen in the first place (the Equinox), or even that the date wasn't even the original December 25th in the first place!
So the fact that the African-American infant mortality rate in this country is two-and-a-half times higher than it is for white babies must mean that we've got one helluva health care system set up for our inner-city minorities. Somebody ought to contact the NAACP; they seem to have the impression that there's something wrong with this state of affairs.
And what is going on with this country when even the frackin' Puerto Ricans and Native Americans are doing better than white people? Dammit, what is their secret, that they can get infant mortality rates approaching 1.5 times to twice that of the white kids?
So yeah, a big problem with big numbers is that most folks reach false impressions based only on the surface data. And then there are the people who only drill down far enough to get the answers that they wanted all along.
Is coming along with nary a hitch, as far as I can tell. They started late last year, have a good chunk of the city up and running under it already, and should be done with the whole project by the end of the year. I don't have any real-world experience with it (I live in St. Paul), but I haven't heard anything but good about it, so far.
Seriously, the city is making setting up wifi look about as difficult as slapping together legos; I can't figure out how these other cities have managed to screw it up so badly.
And the St. Paul city government just voted to go with a fiber optic rollout for their municipal broadband. Of course, no word on where the $200+ million is going to come from to pay for it, so it's really just vaporware at the moment.
But God knows there's enough fiber laid down out there up to the curb. It's been almost ten years since they buried those suckers; might as well light plug 'em in and see how well they light up.
Who cares about D&D when there's a whole new, revamped edition of TRAVELLER coming out in a few months?
I'll see your Fireball Spell and raise you one FGMP-15.
Sorry to disappoint y'all, but it turns out it was the bees all along. When The Big Guy said "be fruitful and multiply," did you honestly believe He was talking to you, when so many more obvious candidates were buzzing like maniacs all over creation?
I mean, this is the same Dude who once treated you guys like some pack of gophers He found chewing up His lawn, isn't He? Yeah, I thought so ...
Dude. You haven't lived until you've lived within smelling distance of an ethanol plant. Here in St. Paul, we had a (now defunct) brewery that was so desperate for cash that it conned the city into letting it turn most of its production over to ethanol.
It was barely a mile from downtown -- and upwind of it, too! I can't imagine how awful it must have been for them; I lived up a hill and two miles away from the joint (and away from the prevailing air currents), and I still smelled them half the time ... imagine a jillion bakery ovens, all cooking the sickliest-smelling, yeastiest bread ever, and you'll get an idea of what St. Paul smelled like for the few years it was operational.
But, ya know, the thing's gone now. And the whole town's lousy with ethanol pumps; I'm well within walking distance of more than one of 'em. So as long as the plant is properly NIMBY'ed (say ... Fargo, or thereabouts), ethanol ain't such a bad deal for the Average Midwesterner.
Sure, y'all are laughing now, but ... if we've already gone all Dr. Strangelove on 'em once, we can sure as heck do it again!
There's every possibility you could walk away from a session of Spore as a Fukuyama-quoting, Hegel-worshipping neocon. To quote the article:
So let me get this straight ... Hegel wrote space opera? Serves me right for never having had the stamina to read him through to the end.
I'm pretty sure Marx's Communist Manifesto doesn't end with any spaceships; but now I'm gonna have to go re-read the thing just to be certain.
Seriously, though: I keep seeing "jive" used wherever "jibe" oughtta be in a sentence -- and it's driving me nuts.
The question shouldn't be whether or not it really is Al. The question should be whether or not it's an honest-to-Allah MySpace site.
I mean, if it really is a MySpace site, then how come my eyes aren't bleeding?
All the software you mention probably exists in Linux, it's just so insanely named that you have no idea it's what you need until you take a chance and install it.
I still love the Penguin (well, actually, I'm more of a BSD fan); but that's been my experience, software-wise.
Ya know, I read and re-read the article at least three times (I really did!), because all I kept getting out of it was the sheer cluelessness of its premise. Seriously, Outlook? Is there anyone out there whose spent more than five minutes ruminating over computer OS issues who believes that Microsoft is seriously gonn get behind Linux/Unix versions of its flagship products?
Besides Dvorak, I mean.
The article also cites Shockwave and iTunes as examples; but I've never felt even remotely outta the loop for being without either one of them. I frankly don't understood the weird obsession with those silly little Mac music players (my 2-year-old, 20gb, non-DRM compliant, format agnostic iRiver still kicks serious enough ass, thank you); and as for Shockwave ... well ... in I dunno how many years of XP usage I've had to put up with, I've never even had to bother with using Shockwave, so why install it? So I can ... what ... finally have that full, uncrippled Disney.com experience?
There's only one thing that ever brings me back to Windows with any regularity. And that's gaming, pure and simple. You show me a critical mass of support from the mainstream PC gaming industry for Linux/Unix support, and I'll be outta here faster than Mindy Gates can say "Microsoft Bob."
If Kennedy was the only thing keeping the Democrats from KO'ing the moonshot/space program, then how come NASA's Houston command post is called Johnson Space Center?
And listen, mac. Maybe you don't want him to be one, but that still doesn't change the fact that JFK was a Democrat. Not a single history book I've ever read attempts to claim otherwise. If you judged a President's party affiliation by how in sync he was with the rest of the gang, then this country hasn't had a Democratic President since Andy Jackson. That party has just never worked that way; remember what Will Rogers said?
And I found a history article here that sez:
So if Congressional favor for the space program eventually waned, it was more a reflection of growing voter cynicism in general than a knee-jerk Democratic Party hatred of all things space-related. Such an attitude clearly wasn't there at the beginning; and with a full five years of post-Kennedy full Democratic control of the government, you'd think they would have gotten around to shutting the program down sometime, if they'd really wanted to.
In fact, the (Democratic Party nominated) Kennedy-Johnson ticket campaigned on a pro-space platform, and against the Eisenhauer-Nixon Administration's (unjustifiably) perceived ineptitude at it -- if only as a sideshow to the "Missile Gap" Big Dog issue of the 1960 elections.
For the record: weigh, way, and whey are not homonyms in many English dialects. In many parts of the US, "whey" is pronounced with an unvoiced "w," while the other two are pronounced voiced. The difference is subtle to a non-speaker of the dialect, probably not even realized by most of the speakers doing it (and possibly on the decline even where it is), but it IS still there. And they do it.
Witch/which. Wear/where. Wile/while. Weather/whether. Wales/whales. In each case, the "h" signifies a distinct phonetic difference in the pronounciation of the first consonant, and thus an entirely different word.
If you put your hand just in front of your mouth while pronouncing the above word combinations, and you feel a puff of air while saying the second word in each combo, then you are pronouncing an unvoiced "w." Congratulations.
In fact, that's the first statement I've read in this whole inane thread that actually gets it. Certainly the parent didn't. To quote the 19th-century statesman Otto Von Bismarck:
"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
See? In political discourse, as in politics itself, folks usually just throw whatever they've got at the fan; and whatever sticks ... well, that's what gets included in the history books.
But it's always been a messy process.
Oh. And for the record: bush is teh gh3y.
I have to agree with you. I figured out how to send you this paperless telegram, after all. Certainly, the imaging device was a little hard to get used to; but the type-writing tablet it was attached to was not unfamiliar to me at all.
It's also gratifying to see that, after all these years, the flivvers are still quite recognizable as such; and you've largely gotten rid of those clunky streetcars. That's nice.
But wireless telephones? I really don't see what this Mr. Dvorak thinks I should find so amazing about that. I already have a radio in my parlor at home, you know. So his works both ways and is smaller; I should hope so after nearly 90 years of ruminating on the matter. In fact, I've got four-year-old (I'm sorry, ninety-year-old) copies of The Electrical Experimenter and Radio Amateur News I could show him that discuss the very possibility.
The one thing I cannot get used to, however, is all this noise. How do you people stand it? Just because you have talking pictures nowadays doesn't mean you have to play it so dag-blamed loud. You have sound with your motion pictures -- I get it -- now please stop foghorning it in my face! It's enough to give a fella a rager of a headache, and with not a single radium martini to be found anywhere.
Which reminds me, can anybody tell me where I can get one? I gather from the number of baby grands I've seen out straining the sidewalks that the healthful, slimming benefits of radium must not be as well known in your time as they are in my day. But, come on man, there must be some place where I can still get one.
And speaking of pointing things out -- where are all the mechanical butlers? I was really hoping to bring back a mechanical butler ...
Ah well, that's about all I got time for, for now. Got to go rest up my arm for the big trip home. Time machines don't crank themselves, you know.
A couple of years ago an entirely different impact crater was discovered in Australia, with preliminary dating indicating that it happened at about the same time as this one. It, too, is huge -- not as monstrous as this here Antarctica sockdollager, but apparently about as apocalyptic as the one that reputedly KO'd the dinosaurs. Considering the history of our Solar System, I don't think that a multiple-impact armaggedon is at all out of the question. Hell, maybe we'll find even more impact craters, and have to come to the conclusion that it was some kind of supersized rain of fire that reset the planetary ecology switch.
And then, of course, we shouldn't forget about the largest volcanic eruption in the history of the planet that sparked up at just about the same time, too. An area roughly the size of Scandinavia simply melted into a mass of sulfurous, poisonous, volcanic goo for a couple of million years before settling down. I'm not terribly firm on my Permian Era geography, but I'd be willing to bet that the Siberian Traps event was pretty close to the opposite side of the planet at the time of the impacts.
Funny and informative. Good show, sport. In fact, I think that honestly figures to be a big part of their revenue supplementation.
That, and I suspect that because of the nature of the FCC license they're applying for, they'll have to restrict the adult content on their network to an ID-check, pay-per-surf basis.
Indeed, they do use other cues:
Makes sense. Any animal whose life cycle was entirely dependent on a single environmental variable would be one that wouldn't exist for any longer than an evolutionary flash in the pan.
I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.
Cheaper than free? While I can't speak knowledgeably about the entire U.S. of A (polling issues are handled on a state-by-state basis), I do know that most (if not all) of the poll workers in this country are there on a volunteer basis. Maybe some of 'em are paid a stipend or something ... I dunno ... but I doubt that would make hand-counting any more expensive than buying and maintaining those damned machines. Arguably, it might even be less expensive in the long run.
At any rate, none of the arguments I've seen in favor of touch-screen voting have anything directly to do with the bottom line. Usually it's voter-privacy issues for people with disabilities (who would otherwise need to rely on a "volunteer" to correctly read and mark their votes for them), and language issues for "English-challenged" citizens (who wouldn't be able to read or understand the ballot). The National Federation For The Blind, for instance, has been in and out of bed with Diebold for years over the issue of ballot accessibility.
It took a collection of American scientists to invent the Robotic Tentacle. Man, the Japanese really have lost their edge.
I think it's very, very important for the rest of us to do whatever we can to prevent our American roboticists from mingling with their Asian counterparts. For the sake of the children, if nothing else.
It's usually closer to $2.50 a can/bottle where I come from, even more if you buy it at a coffee shop or a bar ... and that's usually an eight ounce can of the stuff.
Virtually nobody orders coffee in less than 12-ounce sizes any more. Compare about $1.60 per 12-ounces of coffee bought in a shop to one can of Red Bull, et al., and you have a beverage that is well over twice as expensive as regular joe.
The main source of the fad for energy drinks is the strength of their marketing, plus the fact that Kids Today (TM) have figured out how easy these drinks are to combine with hard alcohol for a "tasty," goofball-style night of binge drinking.
I'm looking at one right now, and I don't see Splenda ("sucralose") anywhere on the ingredient list. I see NutraSweet ("aspartame") near the top of the list; and waaay down near the bottom (just above caffeine) is aspartame's synergistc boyfriend: acesulfame potassium. Unfortunately, too much aspartame gives me a wicked headache, so while I like Coke Zero, I won't be drinking it in quantity any time soon.
There is a Diet Coke made with Splenda; I like it, and it gives me no head pain, but it seems to be becoming harder and harder to find. I suspect Coke is preparing to phase it out as a failed experiment.
Ack. But you forgot the part about when the dude reaches down to remove his Gentoo disc from the CD-ROM drive -- and there, in the dim, green LED light of his Alienware case, he notices ... A HOOK DANGLING FROM THE CD TRAY!!!
I dunno about you, but that part always scared the bejeesus outta me at all the geek slumber parties.
In today's "Comment & Analysis" section of the Financial Times, they voice a rather different interpretation of what's bogging down our quest for the Next Big Thing:
Anyone who gets a patent on that bit of the invention -- not difficult in a world of overworked and under-resourced patent examiners -- can hold the whole product hostage, to extrace a settlement far more valuable than the worth of the original idea, they say.
The key to all this power is that federal courts will almost always grant an injunction in cases where infringement has already been proved -- stopping people who make things from continuing to do so, even if the patent they have breached is only a tiny fraction of the total.
It's kinda hard to keep on truckin' down the Innovation Superhighway when you gotta stop and pay every damn Patent Troll that lumbers out at you from beneath the underpasses. How many Looneys does RIM have to shell out again just to keep the Blackberries of the world from becoming paperweights?
Ain't a particularly original point, I know (especially around here); but I noticed that the notion never once surfaced in the original article. And since I can't imagine Mr. Donofrio had never heard of it, my guess is that he's ignoring it.
Not that the Financial Times has, however. They've been foaming at the mouth over this issue for almost as long as Slashdot has.