All of the above seem reasonable, but are completely banned in the US. It's nice to go to a country where the huge companies do not simply write whatever laws they want, but have to contest with the needs of the consumer, who have alternatives to the restrictive legal route.
This sounds great and it got you a score of 5 for "insightful", but it's not true. Consumers are allowed, by US law, to import one copy of any CD, DVD or VCD they want for personal use. It's only when you try to get more than one copy of the same title that you run into potential legal issues. There were some court cases in the 1980s involving imported records and CDs and the US courts ruled that individuals may import one copy of any title for personal use, but if more than one copy is imported, it gets into sticky royalty payment issues. So despite what you think, it's certainly not illegal for US citizens to buy foreign CDs, VCDs and DVDs or to bring them back from trips. I do both all the time and never has US customs interfered with anything I have brought with me or had shipped through the mail.
It's also not illegal in the US to own a region free DVD player. Hollywood hates it and they fought against it, but there's no law against it. I'm no fan of the MPAA or RIAA, but it does no one any good to say that things are illegal when they are not.
If we're not ever allowed to view the high quality media in it's full glory because all outputs have to be degraded or disabled, what's the point of distributing high quality media in the first place?
The entertainment industry does want you to have high quality media, but here's the catch. They really want you to watch it only on a television through a standalone player because they can build copy protection into those players. They know that the old rule is "If a PC can play it, it can be copied", so they want to marginalize PC playback to make this an impractical alternative to buying a standalone player and watching it on a TV. Mickeysoft could be a little less enthusiastic about gleefully giving us a worse user experience with high def playback, but it's all about the money. They believe there is more money to be made by screwing over the customer than by standing up for the customer.
It is utterly bewildering that 'Fifth Element' could end up looking so poor.
Sony basically botched its early releases on BluRay, one of which was "The Fifth Element". Across the board everyone was underwhelmed with the whole lot of first releases. Sony couldn't get anything but MPEG-2 working by release time (that is not true now, but it was true this summer), so they had to encode all the first BluRay discs with MPEG-2 at high bitrates. I've seen MPEG-2 in high definition and it can look great with a high bit rate, but based on the reviews I read, it seems that Sony didn't encode these first releases as well as they could have.
Please don't forget that a judge's instructions are worthless and that you as a member of the jury have all the power and the final say. You have the power to decide whether a law is just or unjust and are free to ignore it and do as you wish. Anything that comes out of the judge's mouth means diddly-squat. What the law says means diddly-squat. You create the law if you're on a jury.
Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
You are right, but you might be surprised how many Americans don't know this, including perhaps the person you are replying to. I've heard several times of jurors saying "We wanted to acquit the guy, but we had to vote guilty" without realizing that on a jury you don't have to vote any way you don't want to.
My best friend is a lawyer and I asked him about judges throwing out jury verdicts, as a follow up post below talks about. He told me that while judges do have the power to do this, they almost never do so because if they do this, the case will almost certainly be appealed and appelate courts take a dim view in most cases of judges who ignore jury verdicts.
Why is the RIAA trying to sue someone in another country. The US has no jurisdiction.
You're right, but AllOfMP3 won't show up or if they do will lose, so RIAA will win in court. With this victory, they will get the Bush administration to lean more heavily on Russia to "do something".
Please America, don't try to bring your horrible legal system to the rest of the world. We don't want it.
I'm American and I admit we are too litigious and everything here is always somebody else's fault. However, the more I pay attention, the less convinced I am that overall the American legal system is the worst. One the negative side, yes, you can sue over anything and maybe win. On the positive side, if you do something bad (ie. kill someone), you may actually pay a high price for it. Consider the following: 1) A few years ago Japan tried and convicted some US Marines for raping a schoolgirl. The ringleader got a "very long sentence" (those are the exact words of the account I read) of 7 years. In the US he could have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime. I'm sorry, but 7 years is not a "long time". 2) Did you know that according to the Brazilian constitution you can't be sentenced to more 30 years in jail for anything? Serial killers rejoice. In fact, Brazilian sentences are never more than 29 years because to give someone 30 involves an automatic appeal. There's no death penalty in Brazil either, although strangely enough the cops have an awful lot of leeway to shoot you and kill you prior to you getting arrested should you flee or resist. 3) Italians in particular (although the majority of the EU has the same problem) actually feel sorry for criminals. One of the Achille Lauro hijackers got a 30 year sentence and was put on work release from which he ran away. He was eventually recaptured, but it says a lot about Italian "justice" that the guy got on work release to begin with. The weak Italian justice system is why when the follow-up bombers failed in London a few years ago that one of them fled to Italy and fought vigorously to be tried there because he knew the Italians would feel sorry for him and he'd get out of jail eventually.
The one positive thing about the American legal system is that if you do something bad and you get convicted, you'll pay for it. It may be the death penalty, it may be life in prison without parole, or a truly long sentence, but we won't feel sorry for you and put you on work release while you're doing your time.
Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
My first job after graduating from college was working as a computer programmer at a US Air Force base. I worked in the main building for our section of the base and our colonel one day was having a VIP come by to visit him. He walked out to the main area and smelled something burning. Convinced that his canine sense of smell had saved the day and wanting to show off for his visitor, he promptly called the base fire department and demanded that they send a truck out to investigate "the burning wires smoldering within one of the walls". The base fire department dispatched a truck and the firemen investigated and told the colonel that what he smelled was burnt popcorn from the break room and there was nothing smoldering within the walls. The colonel then did the only thing that a military man who has just embarassed himself could do. He promptly banned microwave popcorn.
I know I'm asking a lot in asking Slashdot readers to be realistic, but I'll try. I find it amusing that a few people say "The US will just make it illegal to own such players." Really? What evidence do you have for this? It's not currently illegal to import foreign DVD players, even ones that have been modified to overlook region codes. You're giving Hollywood an awful lot of power here.
Secondly, let's just say for sake of argument that there are no problems to import EVD players. I buy DVDs of Chinese movies from time to time because I like Asian cinema. Unfortunately, I don't speak any dialect of Chinese, which means I need subtitles. I hate to break it to you, but domestic Chinese DVDs typically don't have English subtitles, ever. Even if we are able to get the players, a good question is - Is there going to be anything we can play on it with English subtitles? Probably not. I have to get my DVDs from Hong Kong because most DVDs in Hong Kong have English subtitles. There might be some gee whiz factor to being the first guy you know to have an EVD player, but unless you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, it's not going to be of any practical use for you unless China starts releasing cheap versions of Hollywood movies in the format and to the best of my knowledge they have not done so.
I just wanted to mention that a couple of months ago I had a chance to meet Billy West at a SciFi convention and he was extremely nice. He was just a super guy, very friendly and happy to talk to anyone who wanted to talk about his work. He told me that he was really happy to be working on Futurama again. It seems that everyone connected with the show enjoyed working on it.
Technically it's the Hong Kong SAR, which is NOT covered by Chinese law. The HK SAR basically still uses the British legal system that was in place at the time of the handover. I was shocked to see the judge's name because her name is as Anglo as they come, so it's not impossible to conceive that she's actually a Brit who decided to stay in Hong Kong after the handover. I would fully consider such a judge to be immune from Chinese political pressure. That doesn't mean that HK authorities didn't deliberately seek to find a guy they could easily convict of "piracy" to tell the US "We care about piracy. We really do!" but I doubt that this conviction was because Beijing ordered it.
Do teleworkers actually think they'll receive promotions? At the companies I've worked for, 9 times out of 10 the teleworker is working from home to have a better work/life balance, not because the employer asked them to.
While I think this is generally true, my previous employer ordered a rather large number of our employees to work from home so they could consolidate office space and save money on office rent. It is correct to say that the employees were ordered to work from home. They had no choice in the matter. I would guess that perhaps 60% or more of our employees worked from home. What I thought was funny was that they forced people to work from home and then bitched that not enough people were coming into the office one or two days a week to use the tiny temporary cubicles they set up for home workers to use when working in the office. If you order people to work from home, don't be surprised if they don't want to come in at all.
Now we know how our grandparents felt when broadcasters switched to a color signal. Their old black-and-white tv's (which couldn't read the color signal at all in many/most cases) suddenly became excessively-large paperweights.
I'll spare you a snide comment and instead ask politely "Are you from a country that uses PAL as its TV broadcast standard?". What you said is pure nonsense for NTSC-land, like the USA and Canada. NTSC color television was designed specifically for backwards compatibility with black and white TVs. Some sources state that a technologically superior version of color television was bypassed in the USA because it wasn't compatible at all with the black and white TVs of the time. In the USA all broadcasts switched to color in 1967 I believe and though I was a child at the time, my family had a black and white television and I can assure you that it did not become a paperweight and it worked fine on color broadcasts, they just showed up in black and white.
I have no idea if Hans Reiser killed Nina Resier or not. However, I do believe she is dead. Nina Resier was Russian and I have had experience with women from the former Soviet Union. They can be very loving and very feminine and this what attracts men to them. Unfortunately, many of them have anger management issues and can turn into screaming demons from hell at little provocation. My ex-fiancee was from Ukraine and we didn't complete the process to get her a fiancee visa so she could immigrate to America because of her anger. My experience has been that unfortunately most, but not all, of the women in that part of the world tend to be control freaks and have anger management issues. My ex-fiancee would scream at me at the top of her lungs for trivial things, like sitting too close to the TV. From what I've read, I'd say that Nina is probably a typical angry Russian woman and one might think that maybe an angry woman would just disappear to set up an estranged husband.
However, there are two things that trump that. One is that it really is not typical of these women to disappear. Their style is to hire a good lawyer and try to take everything you've got in a divorce case. They can be vindictive beyond belief. The other thing is that these women are unbelievably devoted mothers and there is no chance at all that Nina would abandon her children. None. A Russian woman would never abandon her children. She might fight in court to keep them away from her husband, but abandon them to him? Never. That is why I am convinced that Nina is dead.
Paul knows a lot about this last part after suing the other Beatles for many of the McLennon songs & subsequently selling them to Michael Jackson.
Paul McCartney sued the Beatles to dissolve their partnership because he objected to the other 3 naming Allen Klein as their manager over his objections. Not only did Paul win in court, he was proven right that Allen Klein was a bad choice. Paul McCartney NEVER sued the Beatles over songs he wrote. Making that up doesn't make it true.
Sigh. Again, you are wrong. Paul McCartney NEVER sold his songs to Michael Jackson. In the late 1960s, the Beatles (yes ALL FOUR OF THEM) agreed to sell their music publishing company specifically to raise money to start Apple Corporation. George and Ringo owned only minority stakes in Maclen Publishing (a.k.a. Northern Songs in the good ol' USA), but all four agreed. Sir Lew Grade bought the publishing. Sir Lew Grade sold those songs to Michael Jackson. He did give Paul McCartney a chance to buy them back, but Paul later said that Yoko thought the price was too high and refused to go in with Paul on the deal and Paul felt that he owed it to John to go in with Yoko to buy the songs. While Paul was trying to talk Yoko into a deal, Michael Jackson offered Sir Lew significantly more money for the songs. I don't remember the exact figures, but I think Yoko was quibbling at $100 million or so and Michael offered maybe $500 million. Sir Lew didn't wait and he took Michael's offer. Your supposed quote by Paul that he sold the songs to Michael, which you admit is by your memory, is completely untrue. Paul can't have said that he sold the songs to Michael Jackson because he didn't own them and you can't legally sell what you don't own, right? Paul has commented many times on the sale and he might have said that he "allowed" Michael Jackson to buy them, which isn't really true, but he certainly never sold them to Michael.
An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps.
You have a point and I suppose that in theory that could happen, but in reality I think not. Russia has only pushed around countries like Belarus and Ukraine, which were getting natural gas at below market costs. This also had something to do with Russia's loss of influence in both countries, but a lot of it is just money. As long as you guys keep paying your bills on time, they won't turn off the tap. Believe me when I tell you that in that part of the world, money is everything. Russia needs your money. If they get too testy, you guys will just try to do an end run and go to another supplier if possible. Russia saw some movement towards that last year when they tried to cut off Ukraine. The last thing Russia wants is the EU to cut a deal with Turkey or one of the "stan" countries and just bypass Russia altogether in the future. Right now the EU has plans for the future to get some of its gas from non-Russian sources and the last thing Russia would want is for that to change to the EU getting 100% of its gas from countries other than Russia.
participated in an apple tasting festival a year or so ago, and I only really learned one thing. The uglier the variety of apple, the better it tastes. A perfectly-colored, gargantuan Red Delicious from the store has nearly no flavor whatsoever. By contrast, if you find one that looks like a potato, you are in for a treat.
In fact, studies have shown that the redder the apple, the worse it tastes. This along with a decision by growers to select cultivars for appearance and not taste is why Red Delicious is certainly not delicious but more often than not mush when you taste it. I'm a little skeptical that increasing the amount of anthocyanins in apples is a good idea because I think those tend to be bitter in taste and bitterness is not a desirable characteristic of apples.
From the looks of it, SCO's last good week was back in 2000:
You're right, but SCOX is still traiding at $2 a share, even with this bad news. In the past year, the lowest it got was $1.52 a share and it climbed up after that. That is exactly why I said yesterday that I expect SCO to survive until the trial starts in September.
And the Downward Spiral begins; SCO stock down 10%; rated 'HOLD - Dangerous Risk/Reward Rating.'
Your goose is downright cooked, SCO.
I'd truly love to believe this about their goose being cooked (and props to cacepi for correctly using "your" and not "you're"), but experience tells me otherwise. Why? Neither investors nor stock brokers/analysts understand technology or the law. SCOX will most likely hang on until the September 2007 trial. I'd love to be wrong, but until SCOX starts trading at under a dollar a share and facing potential delisting action, I see the stock surviving through next year. You have to love broker talk where despite the "dangerous risk/reward rating" they are advising people to neither buy more of the stock nor to sell what they have. That's what "hold" means.
SCOX has lost 25 cents at the time of writing. Unless it plummets today or tomorrow, I think unfortunately it's going to be around for a while. It's still trading at over $2 a share.
what the study group is recommending is "cut and run" or possibly, "cut and walk".
Not that it really matters since Bush is already planning to ignore what the study group says. He'll just continue to "Stay the course".
You are correct. Bush will ignore what the panel recommends and force the next president to do it.
I considered myself to be pretty much a "yellow dog Republican" prior to this election. For you non-USAers, the short explanation of this term means that you would vote for anyone, even a yellow dog, as long as they run under a particular party's banner. I have to give the Republicans credit that whoever invented the "cut and run" statement was able with 3 words to stop all rational discussion of the issue by turning it into a debate on cowardness. All anyone has to do is say "cut and run" and rational debate is over because it's now been shifted into an emotional issue. What finally did it for me and made me vote Democrat a few weeks ago was that I concluded that Henry Kissinger is right that Iraq is not winnable in a conventional sense. More troops won't shore up the porous borders around Iraq that allow the non-stop flow of weapons that are fueling the Shiite-Sunni civil war. The Republicans try to fear monger that the second we leave, Al Queda will come in, but I finally concluded that we aren't stopping Al Queda right now anyway, so why are we still there?
Unfortunately I didn't realize this until after the 2004 elections where I foolishly voted for Bush, but I finally figured out last year exactly why he does what he does. There is a small subset of people who see the world in black and white. He is one of those people. Most people don't see the world in black and white, so they don't know what it is like to deal with these people because there aren't a lot of them. People who see the world in black and white don't agonize over any decisions. They make their minds up very quickly and rarely change them. If they do change them, they go completely to the other side. Ever heard of former smokers who now compaign non-stop to stop everyone, everywhere from smoking? That's kind of how these people are when they change their minds. The biggest problem with these people who see everything in black and white is that they are completely unable to see the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with them. It's because to them, everything is crystal clear and it's so clear that if you don't see it that way, you must be crazy. Any dissenting words are just "crazy talk" and their minds are completely closed. This is why Bush says things like "If you aren't with us, you're against us." He sees everything in black and white. Once Chaney and Rumsfield and a few others convinced him that Iraq had to be invaded, it was game over. He'll never back down because to him, it's all crystal clear that he was right to go to Iraq and to leave is wrong. I'm amazed that more people don't understand this about Bush. Once you grasp how he sees the world, it's not difficult to understand what he'll do. It explains why he refuses to talk to North Korea except in those bogus "6 party talks". He's made up his mind that the 6 party talks are the only way to resolve it and he can't conceive of a one-on-one approach because that's "crazy talk". Bush is never going to remove troops from Iraq because to him, the issue is clear cut. He's right, his opponents are wrong, end of story.
I read the article. Did you? Obviously not. Nowhere in it did Gringrich say exactly how or what he would suggest changing with regards to free speech. Yet that's enough to send the/. pundits through the roof. Perhaps in the future it might be helpful to know exactly what you are getting upset about before losing your mind.
By the way morons, he hasn't served in Congress since 1998, so it's not like he is running the show any more.
The fact that Hollywood actually thinks this would be something people would pay to see is a great example as to why I no longer watch American movies, despite the fact that I am American and live in the good old USA. I see maybe 2-3 American movies a year. Man, Hollywood is just desperate for ideas. I've started watching Asian films and every now and then a European film because at least they are still trying to make good movies in other countries.
I'm American and it truly saddens me that I know more about the British Empire than the original poster.
The following places all have English as an official language: Belize Guyana The Bahamas Cayman Islands Trinidad and Tobago Jamaica a few other Carribean islands I'm too lazy to look up
There are other countries I could name as well, but let's just politely say that you probably won't want to live there.
You don't read Scott Adam's blog a lot, do you? Scott Adams is all about parodies and is always laughing about something, specially about the people who takes seriously what he says. His proposal of Bill Gates as president is just yet another funny post of crazy ways to be president of the united states.
The only problem is that it's not funny. At all. Not even a little. When you tell a joke and nobody laughs, maybe, just maybe it's not a very good joke.
For what it's worth, in the late 1990s I went to a user's conference where Scott Adams was hired to speak and sign copies of his (at the time) current Dilbert book and he was a very nice, pleasant person and it was a real pleasure to meet him.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the above seem reasonable, but are completely banned in the US. It's nice to go to a country where the huge companies do not simply write whatever laws they want, but have to contest with the needs of the consumer, who have alternatives to the restrictive legal route.
This sounds great and it got you a score of 5 for "insightful", but it's not true. Consumers are allowed, by US law, to import one copy of any CD, DVD or VCD they want for personal use. It's only when you try to get more than one copy of the same title that you run into potential legal issues. There were some court cases in the 1980s involving imported records and CDs and the US courts ruled that individuals may import one copy of any title for personal use, but if more than one copy is imported, it gets into sticky royalty payment issues. So despite what you think, it's certainly not illegal for US citizens to buy foreign CDs, VCDs and DVDs or to bring them back from trips. I do both all the time and never has US customs interfered with anything I have brought with me or had shipped through the mail.
It's also not illegal in the US to own a region free DVD player. Hollywood hates it and they fought against it, but there's no law against it. I'm no fan of the MPAA or RIAA, but it does no one any good to say that things are illegal when they are not.
If we're not ever allowed to view the high quality media in it's full glory because all outputs have to be degraded or disabled, what's the point of distributing high quality media in the first place?
The entertainment industry does want you to have high quality media, but here's the catch. They really want you to watch it only on a television through a standalone player because they can build copy protection into those players. They know that the old rule is "If a PC can play it, it can be copied", so they want to marginalize PC playback to make this an impractical alternative to buying a standalone player and watching it on a TV. Mickeysoft could be a little less enthusiastic about gleefully giving us a worse user experience with high def playback, but it's all about the money. They believe there is more money to be made by screwing over the customer than by standing up for the customer.
It is utterly bewildering that 'Fifth Element' could end up looking so poor.
Sony basically botched its early releases on BluRay, one of which was "The Fifth Element". Across the board everyone was underwhelmed with the whole lot of first releases. Sony couldn't get anything but MPEG-2 working by release time (that is not true now, but it was true this summer), so they had to encode all the first BluRay discs with MPEG-2 at high bitrates. I've seen MPEG-2 in high definition and it can look great with a high bit rate, but based on the reviews I read, it seems that Sony didn't encode these first releases as well as they could have.
Please don't forget that a judge's instructions are worthless and that you as a member of the jury have all the power and the final say. You have the power to decide whether a law is just or unjust and are free to ignore it and do as you wish. Anything that comes out of the judge's mouth means diddly-squat. What the law says means diddly-squat. You create the law if you're on a jury.
Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
You are right, but you might be surprised how many Americans don't know this, including perhaps the person you are replying to. I've heard several times of jurors saying "We wanted to acquit the guy, but we had to vote guilty" without realizing that on a jury you don't have to vote any way you don't want to.
My best friend is a lawyer and I asked him about judges throwing out jury verdicts, as a follow up post below talks about. He told me that while judges do have the power to do this, they almost never do so because if they do this, the case will almost certainly be appealed and appelate courts take a dim view in most cases of judges who ignore jury verdicts.
Why is the RIAA trying to sue someone in another country. The US has no jurisdiction.
You're right, but AllOfMP3 won't show up or if they do will lose, so RIAA will win in court. With this victory, they will get the Bush administration to lean more heavily on Russia to "do something".
Please America, don't try to bring your horrible legal system to the rest of the world. We don't want it.
I'm American and I admit we are too litigious and everything here is always somebody else's fault. However, the more I pay attention, the less convinced I am that overall the American legal system is the worst. One the negative side, yes, you can sue over anything and maybe win. On the positive side, if you do something bad (ie. kill someone), you may actually pay a high price for it. Consider the following:
1) A few years ago Japan tried and convicted some US Marines for raping a schoolgirl. The ringleader got a "very long sentence" (those are the exact words of the account I read) of 7 years. In the US he could have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime. I'm sorry, but 7 years is not a "long time".
2) Did you know that according to the Brazilian constitution you can't be sentenced to more 30 years in jail for anything? Serial killers rejoice. In fact, Brazilian sentences are never more than 29 years because to give someone 30 involves an automatic appeal. There's no death penalty in Brazil either, although strangely enough the cops have an awful lot of leeway to shoot you and kill you prior to you getting arrested should you flee or resist.
3) Italians in particular (although the majority of the EU has the same problem) actually feel sorry for criminals. One of the Achille Lauro hijackers got a 30 year sentence and was put on work release from which he ran away. He was eventually recaptured, but it says a lot about Italian "justice" that the guy got on work release to begin with. The weak Italian justice system is why when the follow-up bombers failed in London a few years ago that one of them fled to Italy and fought vigorously to be tried there because he knew the Italians would feel sorry for him and he'd get out of jail eventually.
The one positive thing about the American legal system is that if you do something bad and you get convicted, you'll pay for it. It may be the death penalty, it may be life in prison without parole, or a truly long sentence, but we won't feel sorry for you and put you on work release while you're doing your time.
Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
My first job after graduating from college was working as a computer programmer at a US Air Force base. I worked in the main building for our section of the base and our colonel one day was having a VIP come by to visit him. He walked out to the main area and smelled something burning. Convinced that his canine sense of smell had saved the day and wanting to show off for his visitor, he promptly called the base fire department and demanded that they send a truck out to investigate "the burning wires smoldering within one of the walls". The base fire department dispatched a truck and the firemen investigated and told the colonel that what he smelled was burnt popcorn from the break room and there was nothing smoldering within the walls. The colonel then did the only thing that a military man who has just embarassed himself could do. He promptly banned microwave popcorn.
I know I'm asking a lot in asking Slashdot readers to be realistic, but I'll try. I find it amusing that a few people say "The US will just make it illegal to own such players." Really? What evidence do you have for this? It's not currently illegal to import foreign DVD players, even ones that have been modified to overlook region codes. You're giving Hollywood an awful lot of power here.
Secondly, let's just say for sake of argument that there are no problems to import EVD players. I buy DVDs of Chinese movies from time to time because I like Asian cinema. Unfortunately, I don't speak any dialect of Chinese, which means I need subtitles. I hate to break it to you, but domestic Chinese DVDs typically don't have English subtitles, ever. Even if we are able to get the players, a good question is - Is there going to be anything we can play on it with English subtitles? Probably not. I have to get my DVDs from Hong Kong because most DVDs in Hong Kong have English subtitles. There might be some gee whiz factor to being the first guy you know to have an EVD player, but unless you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, it's not going to be of any practical use for you unless China starts releasing cheap versions of Hollywood movies in the format and to the best of my knowledge they have not done so.
Cervantes Gymnasium. Am I the only one that thought "that must be where the Soul Calibur people go to train."
I bet most Slashdotters don't know the following, which comes from http://www.dictionary.com/
Gymnasium - An academic high school in some central European countries, especially Germany, that prepares students for the university.
The term is used a lot in the former Soviet Union. I've heard it used in Ukraine to describe what we in America would call "high school".
I just wanted to mention that a couple of months ago I had a chance to meet Billy West at a SciFi convention and he was extremely nice. He was just a super guy, very friendly and happy to talk to anyone who wanted to talk about his work. He told me that he was really happy to be working on Futurama again. It seems that everyone connected with the show enjoyed working on it.
Technically it's the Hong Kong SAR, which is NOT covered by Chinese law. The HK SAR basically still uses the British legal system that was in place at the time of the handover. I was shocked to see the judge's name because her name is as Anglo as they come, so it's not impossible to conceive that she's actually a Brit who decided to stay in Hong Kong after the handover. I would fully consider such a judge to be immune from Chinese political pressure. That doesn't mean that HK authorities didn't deliberately seek to find a guy they could easily convict of "piracy" to tell the US "We care about piracy. We really do!" but I doubt that this conviction was because Beijing ordered it.
Do teleworkers actually think they'll receive promotions? At the companies I've worked for, 9 times out of 10 the teleworker is working from home to have a better work/life balance, not because the employer asked them to.
While I think this is generally true, my previous employer ordered a rather large number of our employees to work from home so they could consolidate office space and save money on office rent. It is correct to say that the employees were ordered to work from home. They had no choice in the matter. I would guess that perhaps 60% or more of our employees worked from home. What I thought was funny was that they forced people to work from home and then bitched that not enough people were coming into the office one or two days a week to use the tiny temporary cubicles they set up for home workers to use when working in the office. If you order people to work from home, don't be surprised if they don't want to come in at all.
According to TFA, it wasn't pollution, but rather overfishing and shipping traffic that did them in.
And their being similar in taste to chicken. That sure didn't help any.
I know that some of you out there were thinking this too.
Now we know how our grandparents felt when broadcasters switched to a color signal. Their old black-and-white tv's (which couldn't read the color signal at all in many/most cases) suddenly became excessively-large paperweights.
I'll spare you a snide comment and instead ask politely "Are you from a country that uses PAL as its TV broadcast standard?". What you said is pure nonsense for NTSC-land, like the USA and Canada. NTSC color television was designed specifically for backwards compatibility with black and white TVs. Some sources state that a technologically superior version of color television was bypassed in the USA because it wasn't compatible at all with the black and white TVs of the time. In the USA all broadcasts switched to color in 1967 I believe and though I was a child at the time, my family had a black and white television and I can assure you that it did not become a paperweight and it worked fine on color broadcasts, they just showed up in black and white.
I have no idea if Hans Reiser killed Nina Resier or not. However, I do believe she is dead. Nina Resier was Russian and I have had experience with women from the former Soviet Union. They can be very loving and very feminine and this what attracts men to them. Unfortunately, many of them have anger management issues and can turn into screaming demons from hell at little provocation. My ex-fiancee was from Ukraine and we didn't complete the process to get her a fiancee visa so she could immigrate to America because of her anger. My experience has been that unfortunately most, but not all, of the women in that part of the world tend to be control freaks and have anger management issues. My ex-fiancee would scream at me at the top of her lungs for trivial things, like sitting too close to the TV. From what I've read, I'd say that Nina is probably a typical angry Russian woman and one might think that maybe an angry woman would just disappear to set up an estranged husband.
However, there are two things that trump that. One is that it really is not typical of these women to disappear. Their style is to hire a good lawyer and try to take everything you've got in a divorce case. They can be vindictive beyond belief. The other thing is that these women are unbelievably devoted mothers and there is no chance at all that Nina would abandon her children. None. A Russian woman would never abandon her children. She might fight in court to keep them away from her husband, but abandon them to him? Never. That is why I am convinced that Nina is dead.
Paul knows a lot about this last part after suing the other Beatles for many of the McLennon songs & subsequently selling them to Michael Jackson.
Paul McCartney sued the Beatles to dissolve their partnership because he objected to the other 3 naming Allen Klein as their manager over his objections. Not only did Paul win in court, he was proven right that Allen Klein was a bad choice. Paul McCartney NEVER sued the Beatles over songs he wrote. Making that up doesn't make it true.
Sigh. Again, you are wrong. Paul McCartney NEVER sold his songs to Michael Jackson. In the late 1960s, the Beatles (yes ALL FOUR OF THEM) agreed to sell their music publishing company specifically to raise money to start Apple Corporation. George and Ringo owned only minority stakes in Maclen Publishing (a.k.a. Northern Songs in the good ol' USA), but all four agreed. Sir Lew Grade bought the publishing. Sir Lew Grade sold those songs to Michael Jackson. He did give Paul McCartney a chance to buy them back, but Paul later said that Yoko thought the price was too high and refused to go in with Paul on the deal and Paul felt that he owed it to John to go in with Yoko to buy the songs. While Paul was trying to talk Yoko into a deal, Michael Jackson offered Sir Lew significantly more money for the songs. I don't remember the exact figures, but I think Yoko was quibbling at $100 million or so and Michael offered maybe $500 million. Sir Lew didn't wait and he took Michael's offer. Your supposed quote by Paul that he sold the songs to Michael, which you admit is by your memory, is completely untrue. Paul can't have said that he sold the songs to Michael Jackson because he didn't own them and you can't legally sell what you don't own, right? Paul has commented many times on the sale and he might have said that he "allowed" Michael Jackson to buy them, which isn't really true, but he certainly never sold them to Michael.
He does claim that everything is hunky dorry, or that there are no problems.
Umm, I think you forgot to insert the word not (or the contraction n't ) between "He does" and "claim". Kind of changes the meaning without it.
An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps.
You have a point and I suppose that in theory that could happen, but in reality I think not. Russia has only pushed around countries like Belarus and Ukraine, which were getting natural gas at below market costs. This also had something to do with Russia's loss of influence in both countries, but a lot of it is just money. As long as you guys keep paying your bills on time, they won't turn off the tap. Believe me when I tell you that in that part of the world, money is everything. Russia needs your money. If they get too testy, you guys will just try to do an end run and go to another supplier if possible. Russia saw some movement towards that last year when they tried to cut off Ukraine. The last thing Russia wants is the EU to cut a deal with Turkey or one of the "stan" countries and just bypass Russia altogether in the future. Right now the EU has plans for the future to get some of its gas from non-Russian sources and the last thing Russia would want is for that to change to the EU getting 100% of its gas from countries other than Russia.
participated in an apple tasting festival a year or so ago, and I only really learned one thing. The uglier the variety of apple, the better it tastes. A perfectly-colored, gargantuan Red Delicious from the store has nearly no flavor whatsoever. By contrast, if you find one that looks like a potato, you are in for a treat.
In fact, studies have shown that the redder the apple, the worse it tastes. This along with a decision by growers to select cultivars for appearance and not taste is why Red Delicious is certainly not delicious but more often than not mush when you taste it. I'm a little skeptical that increasing the amount of anthocyanins in apples is a good idea because I think those tend to be bitter in taste and bitterness is not a desirable characteristic of apples.
From the looks of it, SCO's last good week was back in 2000:
You're right, but SCOX is still traiding at $2 a share, even with this bad news. In the past year, the lowest it got was $1.52 a share and it climbed up after that. That is exactly why I said yesterday that I expect SCO to survive until the trial starts in September.
And the Downward Spiral begins; SCO stock down 10%; rated 'HOLD - Dangerous Risk/Reward Rating.'
Your goose is downright cooked, SCO.
I'd truly love to believe this about their goose being cooked (and props to cacepi for correctly using "your" and not "you're"), but experience tells me otherwise. Why? Neither investors nor stock brokers/analysts understand technology or the law. SCOX will most likely hang on until the September 2007 trial. I'd love to be wrong, but until SCOX starts trading at under a dollar a share and facing potential delisting action, I see the stock surviving through next year. You have to love broker talk where despite the "dangerous risk/reward rating" they are advising people to neither buy more of the stock nor to sell what they have. That's what "hold" means.
SCOX has lost 25 cents at the time of writing. Unless it plummets today or tomorrow, I think unfortunately it's going to be around for a while. It's still trading at over $2 a share.
what the study group is recommending is "cut and run" or possibly, "cut and walk".
Not that it really matters since Bush is already planning to ignore what the study group says. He'll just continue to "Stay the course".
You are correct. Bush will ignore what the panel recommends and force the next president to do it.
I considered myself to be pretty much a "yellow dog Republican" prior to this election. For you non-USAers, the short explanation of this term means that you would vote for anyone, even a yellow dog, as long as they run under a particular party's banner. I have to give the Republicans credit that whoever invented the "cut and run" statement was able with 3 words to stop all rational discussion of the issue by turning it into a debate on cowardness. All anyone has to do is say "cut and run" and rational debate is over because it's now been shifted into an emotional issue. What finally did it for me and made me vote Democrat a few weeks ago was that I concluded that Henry Kissinger is right that Iraq is not winnable in a conventional sense. More troops won't shore up the porous borders around Iraq that allow the non-stop flow of weapons that are fueling the Shiite-Sunni civil war. The Republicans try to fear monger that the second we leave, Al Queda will come in, but I finally concluded that we aren't stopping Al Queda right now anyway, so why are we still there?
Unfortunately I didn't realize this until after the 2004 elections where I foolishly voted for Bush, but I finally figured out last year exactly why he does what he does. There is a small subset of people who see the world in black and white. He is one of those people. Most people don't see the world in black and white, so they don't know what it is like to deal with these people because there aren't a lot of them. People who see the world in black and white don't agonize over any decisions. They make their minds up very quickly and rarely change them. If they do change them, they go completely to the other side. Ever heard of former smokers who now compaign non-stop to stop everyone, everywhere from smoking? That's kind of how these people are when they change their minds. The biggest problem with these people who see everything in black and white is that they are completely unable to see the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with them. It's because to them, everything is crystal clear and it's so clear that if you don't see it that way, you must be crazy. Any dissenting words are just "crazy talk" and their minds are completely closed. This is why Bush says things like "If you aren't with us, you're against us." He sees everything in black and white. Once Chaney and Rumsfield and a few others convinced him that Iraq had to be invaded, it was game over. He'll never back down because to him, it's all crystal clear that he was right to go to Iraq and to leave is wrong. I'm amazed that more people don't understand this about Bush. Once you grasp how he sees the world, it's not difficult to understand what he'll do. It explains why he refuses to talk to North Korea except in those bogus "6 party talks". He's made up his mind that the 6 party talks are the only way to resolve it and he can't conceive of a one-on-one approach because that's "crazy talk". Bush is never going to remove troops from Iraq because to him, the issue is clear cut. He's right, his opponents are wrong, end of story.
I read the article. Did you? Obviously not. Nowhere in it did Gringrich say exactly how or what he would suggest changing with regards to free speech. Yet that's enough to send the /. pundits through the roof. Perhaps in the future it might be helpful to know exactly what you are getting upset about before losing your mind.
By the way morons, he hasn't served in Congress since 1998, so it's not like he is running the show any more.
The fact that Hollywood actually thinks this would be something people would pay to see is a great example as to why I no longer watch American movies, despite the fact that I am American and live in the good old USA. I see maybe 2-3 American movies a year. Man, Hollywood is just desperate for ideas. I've started watching Asian films and every now and then a European film because at least they are still trying to make good movies in other countries.
I'm American and it truly saddens me that I know more about the British Empire than the original poster.
The following places all have English as an official language:
Belize
Guyana
The Bahamas
Cayman Islands
Trinidad and Tobago
Jamaica
a few other Carribean islands I'm too lazy to look up
There are other countries I could name as well, but let's just politely say that you probably won't want to live there.
You don't read Scott Adam's blog a lot, do you? Scott Adams is all about parodies and is always laughing about something, specially about the people who takes seriously what he says. His proposal of Bill Gates as president is just yet another funny post of crazy ways to be president of the united states.
The only problem is that it's not funny. At all. Not even a little. When you tell a joke and nobody laughs, maybe, just maybe it's not a very good joke.
For what it's worth, in the late 1990s I went to a user's conference where Scott Adams was hired to speak and sign copies of his (at the time) current Dilbert book and he was a very nice, pleasant person and it was a real pleasure to meet him.