Hey, there's plenty of font-watching to go around. I'm personally focusing on p22's beautifully done "Daddy-o" or "Pop Art" series as the answer to any remote temptations to use Comic Sans. Their "Kane" is such a perfect answer to Papyrus for display type that it leaves me stunned. Not posting the URL because I hold them in too much affection to see them slashdotted, but they should be easy enough to find if you're interested in such things.
I've saved this classic text for years and years. Not only was it the first serious programming language I ever took up, but the imaginary programmer addressed throughout the text was a female--like me. I loved it. Did that fact have anything to do with the philosophy of the developers of the language? Probably not, but it somehow spoke volumes about the people I knew who coded in it. (Back when the Earth was still cooling...)
I suspect she's young, struggling in any case, and inexperienced in legal matters. The RIAA tactics are fearsome, and they're deliberately calculated to induce the state of mind she's in now. They've evoked the kinds of feelings of helplessness or hopelessness that can lead to suicidal thoughts in vulnerable people. It's to be hoped that she's able to secure some kind of counseling (or legal counsel) to put the situation into perspective. If you look back, you don't see the RIAA attacking well-established, well-heeled middle aged people. They go after the young, the inexperienced, the poor, the elderly, and the sick--just the sorts of people who are vulnerable. They'd probably be delighted by a suicide. It would scare a few more victims.
It's a whole new arena from which the Chinese hackers can continue to launch their lame--but oh, so annoying--port scans and root login attempts. I'm jaded enough to be willing to bet money that the security will be up to the usual high Chinese standards--absent unless they decide to block something. Every day I have the same struggle: Bad Self says, "Just block the whole goddamned country." Good Self says, "Shame on you." One of these days, Bad Self is going to win.
(Speaking of lame login attempts, the firewall just blocked the first one ever from Rwanda. Good Self is telling me that I should be encouraged that they actually have an Internet there...)
I don't know why you got "trolled" for this. While I could quibble slightly with the word "joke" (cavalier neglect would be my take on it), when you refer to this as cruel, you're spot-on.
I tend to be a non-admirer of Microsoft in general, but I don't think this is a uniquely Microsoft thing. It is, rather, the same greed and cruelty that seems to have overtaken much of corporate America. At such times one wants to believe in karma, divine retribution, or perhaps pursuit by the Furies.
I spent some time in Alabama and have a clear recollection of seeing the phone company out to paint some kind of substance on the above-ground wires. It seems that the red squirrels in that area like to chew on the insulation, and this causes problems. I asked the foreman if the stuff was poisonous, and he replied no. "It just burns the hell out of their little feet." Don't know what the stuff was or if it would be suitable for indoor cables.
I also agree that you need to talk management into expanding your exterminating budget. Rats are unhealthy for the human inhabitants of your facility.
I have, and it's a puzzling experience. I was there on IT business for a week, about a year before they hosted the Olympics.
In the area around Park City, you didn't need to join the "private club." At a casual Italian place, we all wanted to order a beer. You couldn't say to the server, "What do you have on tap?" She replied by bringing a beer menu because it wasn't appropriate (perhaps illegal?) for her to actually discuss the alcoholic beverages with us.
We did the "private club" thing at a very good steakhouse in Salt Lake City. I believe it was $10 for the "membership." If you ordered a mixed drink--any mixed drink--the server automatically said, "Would you like a sidecar with that?" (A sidecar being an additional measured shot of whatever booze was involved.) Martinis arrived in glasses only 3/4 full because the hooch was so precisely measured.
The freakish thing about it was that, because it was a "private club," it was perfectly OK to smoke anywhere--right at the table, right next to a table that might or might not have been hosting smokers. No problem. So the other big Mormon no-no, tobacco, is apparently not quite as regulated.
My observation over the week were that the Mormons among our hosts had no problems at all with our ordering a drink, beer, or wine at dinner. The company hosted us at a very nice private dinner party on our last evening, and alcohol was readily available. I chose not to drink that evening to conform to their sensibilities, then screwed up by ordering an iced tea.
Over the years I have named groups of servers after:
Aircraft carriers (was working for the Navy and somebody Up Above thought it would be a good idea) Ex boyfriends--to everybody else it was just a group of guys' names Ice cream flavors Movie monsters--apparently a favorite of several other people Cars
I also had a workstation named Elvis because in those faraway days you could type: "ping Elvis" and get the answer: "Elvis is alive..."
Really basic stuff--certainly far beneath your capabilities and/or interests, but so important:
1) If a group has computers, volunteer to keep them patched, updated, and malware-free. Teach someone to do the same. 2) If a group needs a Web presence, offer to set them up with a blog or simple CMS. Commit to keep it updated and invader-free. Teach someone to do the same. Teach someone to update it/post to it. 3) Teach some office-related skills--word processor, spreadsheet, yadda--in a friendly, non-judgmental way. Consider people trying to find jobs or improve their situations. Your local women's shelter is another possibility. 4) Use your contacts--and you have more than you know--to keep an eye out for reasonably up-to-date hardware that can be slotted in for old, creaky hardware. 5) Find out who in your area is fostering small-scale entrepreneurs. Offer to give a class or two on best practices.
The opportunities are endless. I've done each one of them at some point over a long-ish career. The one I'm into now is #2. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour of my time each week.
I had a car recalled a number of years ago due to a defective secondary hood latch. It seemed the latch could fail when you were driving at highway speeds, causing the hood to fly up, "possibly seriously impairing driver visibility." This sounds a bit like that. I had the car fixed.
Did you ever read Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam"? She defines folly as an organization or government's deliberate pursuit of policies that are against their own best interests, often despite ample evidence and warnings. Aside from the semi-mythic Troy and the very real United States, she also looks at the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, England at the time of the American Revolution, and a couple of others. It's a fascinating book, even twenty-odd years after its first publication. Every time I read one of these RIAA posts, I'm reminded of it. Their actions seem to me to meet all her criteria for folly.
As far as I'm concerned, you're asking half of the Great Imponderable Question. I'll add the other half:
1) They can't be making any money off this. The kinds of people they sue aren't among the wealthier members of society. There's a big difference between getting a judgment and actually collecting the money.
2) It's not acting as a deterrent. People are still out there doing what they do as recording sales continue to fall.
So the other half of the question is: Why do they keep doing this?
Because they're non-invasive and way, way cheaper. Try hitting up your average orthopedic surgeon with "Gee. Ever since I heaved my briefcase up into the overhead bin on the plane, I've been having headaches and this horrible stiff neck..." As I said in my original post, you have to choose carefully. The younger ones aren't talking about the flow of energy. They're more likely to be looking after the guys on your local football team.
You have to choose your chiropractor carefully. For sports-type injuries, aching backs and knees, and stiff necks, their treatments can be very effective. (And I seem to remember a credible clinical study to that effect from a few years ago.) The ones to stay away from are the ones who advise you that aligning your back can prevent cancer or who want to give your children adjustments in lieu of their childhood immunizations.
Thank you for the first reasonable post in this thread! (I know there are others to follow.) People who don't know any better can talk about birth rates all they want, but it's the infant mortality rate that tells the tale. Combine that with the number of otherwise healthy adults dying from diseases like HIV/AIDS and you have places in Africa where the few children remaining are being raised by their few remaining grandmothers because there aren't any parents left to do the job--or to put in the crops or otherwise bring in money and food.
For the past eight years, very capable American agencies have had their hands tied because they can't mention (for example) the fact that you can prevent the spread of HIV by the use of condoms or that you can space the births of your children by means of condoms or other birth control. I'm optimistic that all this is about to change with the new administration, but a lot of ground has been lost in eight years.
The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is that birth rates may be higher in rural, agrarian, or subsistence-level economies because it takes more people per family to make a living. Children, and large families of them, have been an asset across thousands of years. It's only in the past couple of hundred that this has changed.
Also, idly, I'd entertain thoughts of taking the "let the babies die" folks on a stroll through a neonatal intensive care unit and allowing them to choose which of the babies got to live and which had to die. That's because I also believe at some level that humans who haven't been conditioned or brutalized have a natural instinct to try to save any distressed human young that we happen to run across.
This explains why my Christmas sales are in the toilet. I'm glad I took a break and decided to read Slashdot. I've had fairly good luck with my OSC connection directly into USPS. Guess not now, huh?
...in another case that interests me a great deal, that of a blogger in the UK who received a rather heavy-handed "cease and desist" notice last July from a pair of American religious fanatics. For a few short days, this pair (who happen to be lawyers) attempted to "cease and desist" anyone who mentioned the initial notice or reposted the material they objected to. It soon became a game of legal whack-a-mole, and they apparently realized that desistance was futile. This hasn't stopped them from undertaking all kinds of other actions of questionable legality in the UK and in the US as well.
A Facebook group was formed, and interested people are able to keep in touch with what is going on. It enables group members to post to their own blogs, to sign petitions or send correspondence, and generally to assist in whatever ways they can to provide support to and to secure justice for the victims.
I had absolutely no need for, or interest in, Facebook until all this came about. Now I realize just how useful it can be for circumstances such as these.
NYCL, I hope you will continue to vex the RIAA. They deserve it.
Not to me, it's not. We had a dog when we were first married who was much loved by everyone. She died at a ripe old age, and mostly due to work and school commitments, we didn't get another dog. Years later we had two scary break-ins/robberies in three months. In the aftermath, I began to hear her footsteps on the hardwood floor, just as I always had when she was living. The only problem is we have carpeted floors. I like to think I'm fairly rational, so I looked into my own mind, and the message was fairly obvious: "You'll feel safer if you get a dog."
I'm not surprised that people experience this type of hallucination in times of grief or stress. I'd view it as more of a confirmation of or even a tribute to the deep attachments we form to those we love.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, there's plenty of font-watching to go around. I'm personally focusing on p22's beautifully done "Daddy-o" or "Pop Art" series as the answer to any remote temptations to use Comic Sans. Their "Kane" is such a perfect answer to Papyrus for display type that it leaves me stunned. Not posting the URL because I hold them in too much affection to see them slashdotted, but they should be easy enough to find if you're interested in such things.
You're right, but I have to say that I've observed "Papyrus" making sneak inroads. Watch for it at an indie crafts website near you...
I've saved this classic text for years and years. Not only was it the first serious programming language I ever took up, but the imaginary programmer addressed throughout the text was a female--like me. I loved it. Did that fact have anything to do with the philosophy of the developers of the language? Probably not, but it somehow spoke volumes about the people I knew who coded in it. (Back when the Earth was still cooling...)
I suspect she's young, struggling in any case, and inexperienced in legal matters. The RIAA tactics are fearsome, and they're deliberately calculated to induce the state of mind she's in now. They've evoked the kinds of feelings of helplessness or hopelessness that can lead to suicidal thoughts in vulnerable people. It's to be hoped that she's able to secure some kind of counseling (or legal counsel) to put the situation into perspective. If you look back, you don't see the RIAA attacking well-established, well-heeled middle aged people. They go after the young, the inexperienced, the poor, the elderly, and the sick--just the sorts of people who are vulnerable. They'd probably be delighted by a suicide. It would scare a few more victims.
Oh, it's a lot worse than that! My laptop keeps telling me that all my base are belong to them, but it won't tell me who they are...
Just shedding a tear for my favorite o/s ever, OS/2. Did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it--and quickly, too. Gone, but not forgotten. . .
As for left-behind os's, I left Windows behind in 2002 and have never looked back.
I'm glad you said that, since I had a vision of people sitting in front of their computers scooping ramen out of bowls with their Visa cards...
It's a whole new arena from which the Chinese hackers can continue to launch their lame--but oh, so annoying--port scans and root login attempts. I'm jaded enough to be willing to bet money that the security will be up to the usual high Chinese standards--absent unless they decide to block something. Every day I have the same struggle: Bad Self says, "Just block the whole goddamned country." Good Self says, "Shame on you." One of these days, Bad Self is going to win.
(Speaking of lame login attempts, the firewall just blocked the first one ever from Rwanda. Good Self is telling me that I should be encouraged that they actually have an Internet there...)
I don't know why you got "trolled" for this. While I could quibble slightly with the word "joke" (cavalier neglect would be my take on it), when you refer to this as cruel, you're spot-on.
I tend to be a non-admirer of Microsoft in general, but I don't think this is a uniquely Microsoft thing. It is, rather, the same greed and cruelty that seems to have overtaken much of corporate America. At such times one wants to believe in karma, divine retribution, or perhaps pursuit by the Furies.
I spent some time in Alabama and have a clear recollection of seeing the phone company out to paint some kind of substance on the above-ground wires. It seems that the red squirrels in that area like to chew on the insulation, and this causes problems. I asked the foreman if the stuff was poisonous, and he replied no. "It just burns the hell out of their little feet." Don't know what the stuff was or if it would be suitable for indoor cables.
I also agree that you need to talk management into expanding your exterminating budget. Rats are unhealthy for the human inhabitants of your facility.
He may have a sp-peech, imp-pediment, you insensitive clod!
I have, and it's a puzzling experience. I was there on IT business for a week, about a year before they hosted the Olympics.
In the area around Park City, you didn't need to join the "private club." At a casual Italian place, we all wanted to order a beer. You couldn't say to the server, "What do you have on tap?" She replied by bringing a beer menu because it wasn't appropriate (perhaps illegal?) for her to actually discuss the alcoholic beverages with us.
We did the "private club" thing at a very good steakhouse in Salt Lake City. I believe it was $10 for the "membership." If you ordered a mixed drink--any mixed drink--the server automatically said, "Would you like a sidecar with that?" (A sidecar being an additional measured shot of whatever booze was involved.) Martinis arrived in glasses only 3/4 full because the hooch was so precisely measured.
The freakish thing about it was that, because it was a "private club," it was perfectly OK to smoke anywhere--right at the table, right next to a table that might or might not have been hosting smokers. No problem. So the other big Mormon no-no, tobacco, is apparently not quite as regulated.
My observation over the week were that the Mormons among our hosts had no problems at all with our ordering a drink, beer, or wine at dinner. The company hosted us at a very nice private dinner party on our last evening, and alcohol was readily available. I chose not to drink that evening to conform to their sensibilities, then screwed up by ordering an iced tea.
Oh, it was a small, elite group of servers.
Over the years I have named groups of servers after:
Aircraft carriers (was working for the Navy and somebody Up Above thought it would be a good idea)
Ex boyfriends--to everybody else it was just a group of guys' names
Ice cream flavors
Movie monsters--apparently a favorite of several other people
Cars
I also had a workstation named Elvis because in those faraway days you could type:
"ping Elvis"
and get the answer:
"Elvis is alive..."
Really basic stuff--certainly far beneath your capabilities and/or interests, but so important:
1) If a group has computers, volunteer to keep them patched, updated, and malware-free. Teach someone to do the same.
2) If a group needs a Web presence, offer to set them up with a blog or simple CMS. Commit to keep it updated and invader-free. Teach someone to do the same. Teach someone to update it/post to it.
3) Teach some office-related skills--word processor, spreadsheet, yadda--in a friendly, non-judgmental way. Consider people trying to find jobs or improve their situations. Your local women's shelter is another possibility.
4) Use your contacts--and you have more than you know--to keep an eye out for reasonably up-to-date hardware that can be slotted in for old, creaky hardware.
5) Find out who in your area is fostering small-scale entrepreneurs. Offer to give a class or two on best practices.
The opportunities are endless. I've done each one of them at some point over a long-ish career. The one I'm into now is #2. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour of my time each week.
How about "crashing through the underbrush"?
I had a car recalled a number of years ago due to a defective secondary hood latch. It seemed the latch could fail when you were driving at highway speeds, causing the hood to fly up, "possibly seriously impairing driver visibility." This sounds a bit like that. I had the car fixed.
Did you ever read Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam"? She defines folly as an organization or government's deliberate pursuit of policies that are against their own best interests, often despite ample evidence and warnings. Aside from the semi-mythic Troy and the very real United States, she also looks at the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, England at the time of the American Revolution, and a couple of others. It's a fascinating book, even twenty-odd years after its first publication. Every time I read one of these RIAA posts, I'm reminded of it. Their actions seem to me to meet all her criteria for folly.
As far as I'm concerned, you're asking half of the Great Imponderable Question. I'll add the other half:
1) They can't be making any money off this. The kinds of people they sue aren't among the wealthier members of society. There's a big difference between getting a judgment and actually collecting the money.
2) It's not acting as a deterrent. People are still out there doing what they do as recording sales continue to fall.
So the other half of the question is: Why do they keep doing this?
Because they're non-invasive and way, way cheaper. Try hitting up your average orthopedic surgeon with "Gee. Ever since I heaved my briefcase up into the overhead bin on the plane, I've been having headaches and this horrible stiff neck..." As I said in my original post, you have to choose carefully. The younger ones aren't talking about the flow of energy. They're more likely to be looking after the guys on your local football team.
You have to choose your chiropractor carefully. For sports-type injuries, aching backs and knees, and stiff necks, their treatments can be very effective. (And I seem to remember a credible clinical study to that effect from a few years ago.) The ones to stay away from are the ones who advise you that aligning your back can prevent cancer or who want to give your children adjustments in lieu of their childhood immunizations.
Thank you for the first reasonable post in this thread! (I know there are others to follow.) People who don't know any better can talk about birth rates all they want, but it's the infant mortality rate that tells the tale. Combine that with the number of otherwise healthy adults dying from diseases like HIV/AIDS and you have places in Africa where the few children remaining are being raised by their few remaining grandmothers because there aren't any parents left to do the job--or to put in the crops or otherwise bring in money and food.
For the past eight years, very capable American agencies have had their hands tied because they can't mention (for example) the fact that you can prevent the spread of HIV by the use of condoms or that you can space the births of your children by means of condoms or other birth control. I'm optimistic that all this is about to change with the new administration, but a lot of ground has been lost in eight years.
The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is that birth rates may be higher in rural, agrarian, or subsistence-level economies because it takes more people per family to make a living. Children, and large families of them, have been an asset across thousands of years. It's only in the past couple of hundred that this has changed.
Also, idly, I'd entertain thoughts of taking the "let the babies die" folks on a stroll through a neonatal intensive care unit and allowing them to choose which of the babies got to live and which had to die. That's because I also believe at some level that humans who haven't been conditioned or brutalized have a natural instinct to try to save any distressed human young that we happen to run across.
This explains why my Christmas sales are in the toilet. I'm glad I took a break and decided to read Slashdot. I've had fairly good luck with my OSC connection directly into USPS. Guess not now, huh?
...in another case that interests me a great deal, that of a blogger in the UK who received a rather heavy-handed "cease and desist" notice last July from a pair of American religious fanatics. For a few short days, this pair (who happen to be lawyers) attempted to "cease and desist" anyone who mentioned the initial notice or reposted the material they objected to. It soon became a game of legal whack-a-mole, and they apparently realized that desistance was futile. This hasn't stopped them from undertaking all kinds of other actions of questionable legality in the UK and in the US as well.
A Facebook group was formed, and interested people are able to keep in touch with what is going on. It enables group members to post to their own blogs, to sign petitions or send correspondence, and generally to assist in whatever ways they can to provide support to and to secure justice for the victims.
I had absolutely no need for, or interest in, Facebook until all this came about. Now I realize just how useful it can be for circumstances such as these.
NYCL, I hope you will continue to vex the RIAA. They deserve it.
Not to me, it's not. We had a dog when we were first married who was much loved by everyone. She died at a ripe old age, and mostly due to work and school commitments, we didn't get another dog. Years later we had two scary break-ins/robberies in three months. In the aftermath, I began to hear her footsteps on the hardwood floor, just as I always had when she was living. The only problem is we have carpeted floors. I like to think I'm fairly rational, so I looked into my own mind, and the message was fairly obvious: "You'll feel safer if you get a dog."
I'm not surprised that people experience this type of hallucination in times of grief or stress. I'd view it as more of a confirmation of or even a tribute to the deep attachments we form to those we love.