I agree, plants help add color and life to a cube. Spider plants (aka "airplane plants") are darn near impossible to kill. They also help filter the air, and get nice and bushy and "plant-like". Bonus, they send off shoots with babies ("paratroopers") that you can cut off, re-pot and give to friends.
Aloe vera plants are pretty easy to grow too, and (IMHO) are a little friendlier-looking than cacti. Pepperomia (sp?) are easy too; mine survived just fine when I went on vacation for a week and forgot to get someone to water it.
Oh man. Please please, post the brand/model of the "unbreakable" laptop. I really need a laptop for what I do but I just know it'd get dropped. That is exactly what I need!
of windows-using Qwest users switching to another provider out of protest?
I doubt it very much. Qwest charges like $30 administrative fee to switch ISPs (I had to switch ISP's about 6 months ago because my service with my old ISP was unusable for about a month and they were unable/unwilling to fix it), and your service is down for a day when they do it. I think most people will decide that MSN can't be any worse than Qwest.net and go along. Besides, there's a good chance that if you're using the default Qwest.net that you don't even know that there are other ISP's out there, let alone who they are and what they charge.
I read recently (not sure where, perhaps in Discover?) that doctors have developed an injection that when given once a month supresses menstruation. Much easier and more convenient than the current workaround, taking birth control pills every day instead of skipping a week to induce menstruation.
Part of why this is so interesting is because since women have stopped spending most of their lives pregnant, they menstruate monthly, which is actually not healthy; more periods (eg. not being pregnant often) is linked with increased incidence of endometriosis and cervical cancer. So not only would it make life easier for women, but could help prevent disease. I hope this pans out and gets into common use.
As for being over-the-counter, I doubt we'll see that, since hormone-affecting pills can have serious side effects. I'd be more interested to see if insurance companies will cover the treatment; many currently do not cover birth control pills even when prescribed for non-contraceptive reasons. <rant>Oh, but they'll cover Viagra...</rant> ---
Perhaps it has something to do with this? The 4300 is listed as one of the models it's installed on. Might be a starting place to look, anyway. Here is a "white paper" on it.
Actually that's pretty much what happens in the development of neural pathways for motor control in babies. We start out with tons more neurons than we need, and the brain figures out which paths are the best and eliminates the extraneous ones. Seems to work reasonably well, but then, humans have had a lot of evolutionary time to get it right. I'll wager yields will be good enough once they get it perfected. ---
It is socially acceptable that employers would "monitor" voice phone calls, even personal calls to/from family members or friends, even during breaks and lunch hour?
Socially acceptable, perhaps not. Completely legal, yes. Don't want your employer listening in? Don't make personal calls on their equipment.
You've missed the point: the expense isn't from changing the packaging. It's from keeping track of every single ingredient and whether or not it could have been contaminated with GMO products. Like the taco shells fiasco; some taco shell company had to recall a whole bunch of shells because they found out the corn used in them had been mixed, at the co-op's silo, with GMO corn, and so some GMO corn could have gotten into the product. So people threw a fit and they recalled the shells. The expense for tracking where every ingredient in a product came from is pretty prohibitive. If you want companies to guarantee whether or not they use GMO ingredients, you must be willing to pay extra. ---
This is a terribly uninformed post. Legally, commercial speech, for example advertising, does not receive the same free-speech protections as other speech. There are legal categories of speech and the protections accorded them are different. A mass unsolicited mailing is not necessarily the same as a mass unsolicited advertising mailing, so your example doesn't work. I might not want my mailbox filled with mass emails about Chinese human rights abuses, but I'd prefer that to the "Make Money Fast" and such. It's not a "slippery double-standard." It's a legal definition, the recognizing that some forms of speech should be accorded higher protections than others.
One of the major cases on this issue is Valentine v. Chrestensen. There is a short version of the relevant points here, the full argument can be found by searching for "commercial speech" here.
Furthermore, the first amendment only applies to the government's actions to restrict speech. "Congress shall make no law..." It has nothing to do with what individual companies or persons do to restrict speech. If an ISP decides they're not going to deliver or relay spam because it costs them money and resources to do so, that is their business and not a violation of the first amendment.
This is a great idea, and "open art" is a grand concept, but how do you propose that artists eat, or pay rent? The "I created it, it is mine to sell" mentality is not going anywhere, because there is not an alternative means of earning money from art. How will artists be compensated for their creative work?
How much less art would be made if all artists could only practice their craft in their spare time after working 40 hours a week to pay the bills?
Precisely what I was going to suggest. Something like this:
"This message has been digitally signed using the PGP protocol as proof of its authenticity. The following block of characters is the verifiable signature. Please see [insert url for pgp/gpg/whatever here] for more information if you would like to check this signature."
Although that wording may still be too technical for the complaining "managerial types."
What do we, or they, or anyone, consider to be art? To me, "fine art" (in this sense) is any creative expression through a visual medium. You may hold a different personal definition. Is a bunch of paint splatters art? To some people yes, to some no. Is a cartoon art? Again, some would say no, though many would say yes. I happen to prefer Monet paintings to Navajo blankets, but that does not make either one more or less worthy of the moniker "art." Art is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, many of those in the art world have a vested interest in keeping art defined in a very narrow way that suits them.
It took many years before cartoonists were regarded as artists, and in many circles cartooning is still seen as "lesser art" than painting or sculpting. Computer-based art, art though it is, has a long road ahead before it will break through similar prejudices in the art community.
It is not a simple trademark question. AOL registered the trademark 2 years after GAIM was released. (Did you even read the post?) Using your (awful) analogy, it would be more like if a competitor started making a soft drink called "Boca-Cola" between when Coca-Cola came out and when they registered "Coca-Cola" as a trademark for their product name. Yes, the two could be considered "confusingly similar," but since the trademark was not in force when the second product came out, it is not an open-and-shut case.
Point taken. She should definitely also get her legal fees reimbursed. If Rogers is going to be penalized, though, perhaps it should be in the form of requiring them to always reimburse customers for outage days plus some bonus for the inconvenience? I don't know if that could be done though.
$5000 to one customer just seems like an excessive request given the situation. My guess is she doesn't really expect to win, and is asking for more than she realistically ought to get, on purpose. I'm really curious to see how this turns out, and I hope she does win at least a moral victory if not a financial one.
It happens just like that all the time. How many times have you heard of someone winning a suit and being awarded damages of $1? Doing that says, yes, you're right, but you don't deserve an excessive award. I _don't_ think she's entitled to ~$5000. She's entitled to the money they owe her, the amount of the credit that was supposed to appear on her bill.
I agree, this is more about the press than the money. I think an acceptable outcome would be for her to win, but be awarded only the value of the credit she was supposed to get on her bill. The principle of the thing, that is, not having to pay for service that you did not recieve, is the real point. I understand that it may really have been due to issues beyond Rogers Cable's control, but that doesn't make it right to charge for services not recieved.
Personally, I wish I'd had the time and energy to sue my old DSL ISP in small claims court to get back the the two months of charges for service they failed to provide. Hours and hours on the phone with techs with no clue, lies about "widespread outages," and much bullshit. Finally gave up and switched to a wonderful new ISP with techs who really know their stuff. I'll be interested to see how this turns out.
What's at issue is not whether Gracenote owns the data users have submitted, or whether that data can be sold. The question being litigated is, can Gracenote _copyright_ the CDDB. If they make money off of user contributions, well, good for them. They have the database, they can sell info from it if they want. I won't contribute if I'm not compensated, but that's a different issue.
Copyright and ownership are two very related yet distinct concepts. CDDB is not copyrightable, just like that spam list is not copyrightable, even though both have value.
Now, I don't normally have a problem with spiders. They eat the other creepy-crawlies that get into my apartment. But if something with a 9-inch legspan was coming at me, I'd most likely flip.
We used to do something in a similar vein with cucumbers, just for fun. When the cucumber is teeny, stick it through the neck of a bottle. The cucumber then grows in the bottle, and gets too big to pull back through. We'd cut them off the stem and put pickling brine in the bottle. It ends up a little like the "ship in a bottle" idea; here's this pickle that clearly didn't fit through the neck of the bottle, but there it is!
A few years ago, the CS department considered redoing their curriculum and making the intro programming courses for CS majors Java-based rather than C++. The thought being, this is what employers will want, Java is the up-and-coming thing, so we should be ahead of the curve. But people were questioning why they should go to all the work of redoing curricula, without justification. So they asked the employers, the companies that hire our grads in large numbers. The response came back a surprising "No!" The reason being, it's a lot easier to train someone who knows C++ to work in Java than the other way around. The syntax is very much the same for both, but C++ is more complex. There's just some concepts, like pointers and addressing, that you don't get if you only do Java (or VB for that matter). If your goal is to be a database admin and never see a hardware address for the rest of your life, that's fine. But to graduate students in CS without the right in-depth knowledge is to do them a great disservice and potentially limit their future job prospects.
The Ames Municipal power plant here is a combination coal/RDF (refuse-derived fuel) burning plant. About 10% of the fuel used is burnable garbage. This keeps customers' costs down (my rates were WAY lower than those of my parents on the other side of the state, a very big deal this winter), helps out a lot with emissions, and reduces dependence on coal. A nuclear plant just isn't feasable in this area; if for no other reason, it would take too much land, and every inch of non-populated, flat land is farmed. But what we've got is a great quasi-alternative generation method. Check it out.
I think that once in a while it is important to recognize that this sort of thing is out there. To Joe AOLer, this web site has as much credibility as an article on cnn.com; it was on the internet so it must be true, right? We need to be reminded of why internet sites are still not as acceptable as references in research papers as print media, why knowing your source is important, and that anyone with a few minutes and FrontPage can throw something up on a web page. Yes, there may be more interesting, informative, or relevant people that could be interviewed, but to say that it was a waste of time is to oversimplify the situation. ---
Yes, companies can print whatever they want. And if you don't like the terms of the license "contract", you take the product back and choose not to use it. You have rights, but when you enter in to a contract you are able to give up rights. Example: a bank loan. The terms of loan say that the bank can come take your car, house, whatever you used as collateral, if you miss a payment. If you had not entered into that contract, it would be stealing; because you did, though, they have the right to take your stuff.
I agree that people are too willing to accept license terms that overstep appropriate bounds. We should not put up with terms that are balanced too far in favor of the corporation. However, just because those terms are excessive does not mean they are illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Aloe vera plants are pretty easy to grow too, and (IMHO) are a little friendlier-looking than cacti. Pepperomia (sp?) are easy too; mine survived just fine when I went on vacation for a week and forgot to get someone to water it.
Oh man. Please please, post the brand/model of the "unbreakable" laptop. I really need a laptop for what I do but I just know it'd get dropped. That is exactly what I need!
of windows-using Qwest users switching to another provider out of protest?
I doubt it very much. Qwest charges like $30 administrative fee to switch ISPs (I had to switch ISP's about 6 months ago because my service with my old ISP was unusable for about a month and they were unable/unwilling to fix it), and your service is down for a day when they do it. I think most people will decide that MSN can't be any worse than Qwest.net and go along. Besides, there's a good chance that if you're using the default Qwest.net that you don't even know that there are other ISP's out there, let alone who they are and what they charge.
I read recently (not sure where, perhaps in Discover?) that doctors have developed an injection that when given once a month supresses menstruation. Much easier and more convenient than the current workaround, taking birth control pills every day instead of skipping a week to induce menstruation.
Part of why this is so interesting is because since women have stopped spending most of their lives pregnant, they menstruate monthly, which is actually not healthy; more periods (eg. not being pregnant often) is linked with increased incidence of endometriosis and cervical cancer. So not only would it make life easier for women, but could help prevent disease. I hope this pans out and gets into common use.
As for being over-the-counter, I doubt we'll see that, since hormone-affecting pills can have serious side effects. I'd be more interested to see if insurance companies will cover the treatment; many currently do not cover birth control pills even when prescribed for non-contraceptive reasons. <rant>Oh, but they'll cover Viagra...</rant>
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Actually that's pretty much what happens in the development of neural pathways for motor control in babies. We start out with tons more neurons than we need, and the brain figures out which paths are the best and eliminates the extraneous ones. Seems to work reasonably well, but then, humans have had a lot of evolutionary time to get it right. I'll wager yields will be good enough once they get it perfected.
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Socially acceptable, perhaps not. Completely legal, yes. Don't want your employer listening in? Don't make personal calls on their equipment.
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You've missed the point: the expense isn't from changing the packaging. It's from keeping track of every single ingredient and whether or not it could have been contaminated with GMO products. Like the taco shells fiasco; some taco shell company had to recall a whole bunch of shells because they found out the corn used in them had been mixed, at the co-op's silo, with GMO corn, and so some GMO corn could have gotten into the product. So people threw a fit and they recalled the shells. The expense for tracking where every ingredient in a product came from is pretty prohibitive. If you want companies to guarantee whether or not they use GMO ingredients, you must be willing to pay extra.
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One of the major cases on this issue is Valentine v. Chrestensen. There is a short version of the relevant points here, the full argument can be found by searching for "commercial speech" here.
Furthermore, the first amendment only applies to the government's actions to restrict speech. "Congress shall make no law..." It has nothing to do with what individual companies or persons do to restrict speech. If an ISP decides they're not going to deliver or relay spam because it costs them money and resources to do so, that is their business and not a violation of the first amendment.
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How much less art would be made if all artists could only practice their craft in their spare time after working 40 hours a week to pay the bills?
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"This message has been digitally signed using the PGP protocol as proof of its authenticity. The following block of characters is the verifiable signature. Please see [insert url for pgp/gpg/whatever here] for more information if you would like to check this signature."
Although that wording may still be too technical for the complaining "managerial types."
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It took many years before cartoonists were regarded as artists, and in many circles cartooning is still seen as "lesser art" than painting or sculpting. Computer-based art, art though it is, has a long road ahead before it will break through similar prejudices in the art community.
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$5000 to one customer just seems like an excessive request given the situation. My guess is she doesn't really expect to win, and is asking for more than she realistically ought to get, on purpose. I'm really curious to see how this turns out, and I hope she does win at least a moral victory if not a financial one.
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Personally, I wish I'd had the time and energy to sue my old DSL ISP in small claims court to get back the the two months of charges for service they failed to provide. Hours and hours on the phone with techs with no clue, lies about "widespread outages," and much bullshit. Finally gave up and switched to a wonderful new ISP with techs who really know their stuff. I'll be interested to see how this turns out.
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Copyright and ownership are two very related yet distinct concepts. CDDB is not copyrightable, just like that spam list is not copyrightable, even though both have value.
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*shudders*
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I think that once in a while it is important to recognize that this sort of thing is out there. To Joe AOLer, this web site has as much credibility as an article on cnn.com; it was on the internet so it must be true, right? We need to be reminded of why internet sites are still not as acceptable as references in research papers as print media, why knowing your source is important, and that anyone with a few minutes and FrontPage can throw something up on a web page. Yes, there may be more interesting, informative, or relevant people that could be interviewed, but to say that it was a waste of time is to oversimplify the situation.
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I agree that people are too willing to accept license terms that overstep appropriate bounds. We should not put up with terms that are balanced too far in favor of the corporation. However, just because those terms are excessive does not mean they are illegal.
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