I don't think your post is offtopic at all. There's a lot of truth to the old proverb, "Necessity is the mother of invention." And you can certainly have necessity when you're in a deadline situation. There are plenty of people around who create artificial deadlines for themselves by procrastination or other means. Too much stress can stifle creative thought. Occasional stress may help solutions or approaches bubble up into conscious thought. Otherwise, why do we all still enjoy watching "MacGuyver?" (ahem)
Well, Duke is certainly well endowed financially. But why should they spend even one minute of administrative time, or one dollar of university resources, to serve as the RIAA's flunky and errand boy? I'd have to guess that they're more than tired of it. Without some kind of concrete evidence in hand, it's a complete mis-allocation of their time and money.
1) No sneakers or running shoes to be worn on election day. Leather soled shoes only. 2) Attire for men should consist of corduroy pants and jackets, wool shirts, wool socks. 3) Women should wear the same with the substitution of nylons. Silk shirts, velvet suits are optional. 4) Good grooming is important. Bring a comb or hair brush and use it frequently during the day. 5) Try to present a happy and relaxed appearance to voters. Snappin' your fingers and shufflin' your feet would be sufficient. Balloons in patriotic colors will be provided. 6) In the event of rain or damp weather, please use the dehumidifiers provided. 7) Your election boss will instruct you in the proper handling of the sensitive electronic voting equipment.
Birmingham, Alabama. There is an expressway cut through Red Mountain, and the various layers--coal and limestone, but also iron ore--are beautifully exposed. They had a wonderful museum there for a while, mostly for kids but fascinating for everyone. You could go along an elevated walkway and see fossils from all the levels. The museum seems to have closed, but even wandering around somebody's back yard there can yield a pocket full of small treasures. I recall sitting on someone's stone patio one time and realizing that the stones were full of fossils.
Road cuts in general can be sources of great fascination for those brave or stupid enough to climb them. Having a nice elevated walkway is a real bonus.
Getting rid of the credit card data after X weeks seems like an excellent idea.
It's not easy to get a room at a decent hotel without a credit card. Certainly in some places you can pay cash in advance--but you can't use the phone, order a meal, connect to their network. If they require a credit card, or make it too difficult to procure their services without one, then they should absolutely be held accountable for the safety of the information.
Organizations of all sorts--retail, airlines, hotels, hospitals, insurance companies, banks, potential employers, not to mention government agencies--are ravenous for your personal information. They go to great lengths to get hold of as much of it as they can, whenever they can, using whatever methods they can. If they want it that badly, they should be responsible for its safety and security, and they should be held accountable when it's compromised.
We received a letter from our bank a couple of years ago saying that my husband's debit card (never used online) had been compromised, that he should stop using it, and that a new one would be issued. It arrived in due course, but they would never reveal who had screwed up or what had happened. It had to have been a local entity, but it could've been a supermarket, a restaurant, a gas station--we will never know. We don't even have the recourse of not giving them more business and further opportunities to screw up.
That's interesting, and I will certainly have a look. While traveling, I used the preset scene modes so that I didn't have to lose a shot while futzing with all...those...menus. Here at home with the products, I generally shoot a white card, bring that shot to Photoshop, and fool around until I get the white balance set. Strangely (to me, anyway), the product photos seem to tend to the yellowish while the indoor and outdoor shots I took in Paris were decidedly blue. That may be a function of the lights I use here. Or, maybe the camera had a built-in sensor that detected that I only had three short days to spend there...
I'm starting to wonder. I was one of the last holdouts for buying a digital camera, and what finally pushed me over the edge was needing to take pictures of products I sell on the Web. I picked a mid-range "point and shoot" and have had trouble with the color fidelity from the outset. The only salvation has been to use Photoshop's "white point" or sometimes "gray point" to alter each shot. All this despite careful color and lighting setups both on the computer (a Mac) and in the actual shots.
This summer, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Paris--certainly an occasion for taking lots of pictures. The digital went along. To my disgust, every shot I took--indoors and outdoors--had an indigo blue cast, fortunately correctable with Photoshop's color balance.
After a long and tedious process of adding a dash of yellow to each shot, I have come to two conclusions: 1) I need to shell out for a digital SLR. That's a whack of cash and a lot more camera than I need, but I'm tired of messing with this expensive toy. 2) I'm thinking with great nostalgia of my now-unused Minolta film camera. While I won't use it for products, it's likely to ride along on the next trip I take.
But I'll post this anyway. Your efforts are sincerely appreciated by many of us. I've read the article, and I hope that judges who read it will take a serious look.
I am currently actively involved in supporting a blogger in the UK whose right to free speech was recently threatened. I would not have had the interest or courage to become involved in this effort if I had not been exposed to the RIAA issue on Slashdot. Though the two types of cases differ greatly, the underlying message is the same: Individual freedoms must not be tampered with or trampled. You have expressed that basic truth very eloquently, and I hope you will continue to do so for a very long time.
You've been more than patient with him as he's vented his spleen. You've given him a hearing. He's become abusive. He's a troll, so twit him. It's your site.
I dunno. There is a certain fairly popular blog in the U.K. that I read daily. (The blog has a basically religious content. Please read past that if it might bother you.) A couple of years ago, it seems that a pair of American lawyers, brothers from Texas, decided to launch a campaign to convert England to (Russian) Orthodoxy. To that end, they formed a "Charitable Trust," presumably under the laws of the UK.
At about the same time, the oldest chain of religious booksellers in England (the SPCK, which actually dates back to the 1600's) found itself in financial turmoil at a number of its stores. The Texas lawyers somehow winkled a large number of these stores away from the SPCK at fire-sale terms, in exchange for vague promises to keep things basically the way they were--in terms of the variety of stock, the employees, and other aspects of the stores. Apparently the SPCK shops were widely respected because they carried a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical tomes representing many viewpoints as opposed to confining themselves to Christian theology.
The story of what happened next was pretty tragic, and the blogger in question chronicled it faithfully. Books on philosophy and theologies other than Christian were swept away wholesale to be replaced by narrow, fundamentalist pop-tripe. Agreements with employees were terminated, often without notice. People had their vacation hours and sick/personal days taken away despite being represented by a union (or the British version of a union). Customers began staying away in droves. A rather pathetic Website was installed that was basically an amazon.uk storefront. A few days later, Google pronounced it unsafe and refused to allow people to visit it from search results without a strongly-worded warning not to do so.
Still the blogger continued to blog about it, though his regular focus is generally a lot more humourous. There were times when no one else was saying a word. Bookstores began to be closed. People continued to be fired without notice or arrived at work to find the shops shuttered.
The union representing a number of the employees signaled its intention to seek relief for them through the British courts. That, in turn, seemed to cause the Texas lawyers to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in their native Texas, far away from England. They then argued in the British courts that this should protect them from the action by the union.
Meanwhile, the blogger continued to blog. Newspapers ran an occasional article, but his blog had become the default gathering point for former employees, people who just plain missed the old bookstores, and people who were outraged at the heavy-handed behavior of the foreign lawyers- turned-missionaries.
Tragedy struck about a month ago in the form of a suicide by a longstanding and much-respected bookstore manager who became despondent after being let go along with his staff. That attracted the interest of several national papers, and his funeral was so large they had to hold it in a cathedral as opposed to his regular parish church. Naturally, messages of condolence and outrage piled up in the blogger's blog as well as in other blogs with similar interests.
This went on until about three days ago, when the blog contained a tersely worded message. The blogger had been the recipient of a cease-and-desist letter from one of the brothers. He did not have the funds to retain legal counsel or continue the fight. All references to the issue had been removed, together with their comments. Twenty-four hours later, even that post was removed.
As nearly as I can tell, after having followed this for over a year, no libel was committed, either in blog posts or in comments. People who wanted to attack the Texas lawyers personally were gently but firmly reminded that this wouldn't be tolerated, and their comments were removed.
I'd have to say that a voice in the UK has gone silent that should have been allowed to continue speaking. While this affects only a small section of the gen
Hmm. Clearly you weren't raised on tales like "Little Black Sambo," "Epaminondas," and the "Miss Minerva" stories. You may never have opened a book whose preface included the assertion "The Negro is naturally lazy, and we have rendered his speech as authentically as possible." None of this trash was read to my kids, and they don't seem to have missed anything by it. The fact that I can remember it with such distaste means that it created an unsavory impression on me at a very early age. Frankly, it offended my childish sense of fair play.
There was enough racist trash floating around the U.S. in the twentieth century that it's threatened at odd times to drag classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Huckleberry Finn" down with it.
I've read each of the works you've cited, including all of Shakespeare's histories.
The authors you mention were all able to render dialect with a carefully tuned ear and a determination to advance whatever story they had chosen to tell. And even so, two of those authors are in danger of being damned as politically incorrect.
There's another whole category of dialect writers who choose to write in their own dialects and accents. Robert Burns comes to mind first, and American literature is also richly endowed with writers of both poetry and prose who speak with forceful, authentic accents.
I was more concerned with authors who somehow place themselves above it all. You've cited authors who were deeply involved with their stories and their characters.
(Would you care to join me in a rousing chorus of "For old long since?")
OK, I know I'm older than God, but there must be other people around who remember or have read the "dialect" renderings in stories and novels. I'm thinking of anything between, say, "Honestly, Miz Scyallet, ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies..." all the way to "We don't need no steenking badges..." That includes a lot of childrens' stories that have now thankfully been banished.
What it boiled down to was that if your skin was dark, or you were "foreign," your speech was rendered as "dialect" by some white person somewhere. Seeking kavya's question quoted verbatim somehow transports me back in time. Even the use of "sic" seems somehow to say, "I know this is a deviation from standard English. I just want you to know I didn't originate it, and I'm literate enough to know the difference."
I almost (but not quite) think I might prefer just having the conversation related to me. Or, as an earlier commenter has said, throw the whole thing out and find a better way to cite Web comments.
Oh, he will tell you why his wife left--for a price. According to CNN, you have to subscribe to his website. It's apparently called "alifeforsale.com".
Too bad I don't have points to mod you up. Instead, I offer this recent story from the Baltimore Sun about a trial that's going on right now. These folks started out with a legitimate professional pharmacy delivering prescriptions to local nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. The online drugs marked proved to be too lucrative, the drug of choice was hydrocodone. They're also in trouble over a lot of subsidiary issues like tax evasion. The genuine irony of this piece is behind the scenes. I recalled reading the article but not the exact date, so I used the Sun's search box with "internet drugs trial." The results came back just fine--along with a paid advert for "Canadian Online Pharmacy."
The people to be pitied in all this aren't the ones abusing pain meds. It's the middle-aged suddenly unemployed guy who takes meds for hypertension or the elderly person who's in the notorious "hole" in the middle of the Medicare drug benefit or the financially struggling young couple with a child who needs some lifesaving drug or other. Or, perhaps, the employed person whose health care benefit has shriveled to nothing.
Hmm. I would never have guessed that, but I suppose the fifty-year rule could still apply. I buy a lot of beads, what with one thing and another, and I have a few observations. First, if everything billed as mammoth ivory were really mammoth ivory, the mammoths would never have become extinct. Second, I do not sell on Ebay and trust very little of what I buy there. I use it only for the very cheapest staple items, and I purchase trivial lots first when I'm checking out a seller. I'd never buy gemstone beads there, and there are precisely two sellers from whom I'll by vintage beads. So a healthy dose of skepticism can be your best friend. Finally, I collect vintage and new fountain pens. I guess that's similar to straight razors in some senses. While I've had a couple of stellar buys on Ebay, I regard that as "hobby money" and would not cry too hard if "stung." Still, I've found it's better to become involved with several groups of like-minded collectors. In smaller groups, it's easier to check out reputations, etc. For these purposes, something like Yahoo can turn out to be a good starting point; if you're collecting it, chances are there's a group of people into the same thing. That can serve as as a connecting point to other groups and to reputable buyers and sellers. (I suggest Yahoo because many collectors aren't especially technical and find it easiest to use.) It's also possible, within a good group, to gain reliable knowledge about things like Germany's ivory laws.
The convention among people who might be interested in ivory is that objects more than 50 years old are OK. You would most likely be both legally and morally in the clear with an old piano and antique razors. I would guess that nobody has manufactured straight razors with ivory handles in the past 50 years, and celluloid keys for pianos have also prevailed in that time frame. The problem comes with people who lie about the age of the ivory they're selling. (Incidentally, for people who might be interested in the "look and feel" of ivory without the slaughter, I'd strongly suggest a look at "vegetable ivory," or tagua. It is a nut-kernel product that actually has the look, feel, grain, and strength of the real stuff. It can be worked, carved, and shaped just like the real thing, and it lasts just as long. It's entirely renewable, and its harvest and preparation provide employment for people in several economically distressed areas of the world. Any amateur carvers or makers of jewelry would do well to investigate its excellent properties.)
I find myself siding with the music mafia. Not in the "Piracy" sense but in the "boycott" sense.
I'd like nothing better than to boycott Baidu. Their Baidu Spiders arrive in hordes and spend hours crawling my site. They ignore crawl-delays and denies. They're looking for online poker files that were placed there by some illustrious Chinese citizen or other in an attempt to deface my website about two months ago. That lasted about four hours (from the middle of the night, local time, until I woke up next morning and made it go away), but I'm still dealing with the Baidu invasion. They're worse than Genghis Khan. An attempt to contact the email address provided resulted in a bounce stating that my ISP (Comcast) is blocked in China. My next step will probably be simply to block any contact with Baidu at all, and I've been tempted to extend that to the whole of China.
So while I generally deplore the actions of the Music Mafia, my perception is that Baidu has invited the actions by their own behavior, which is by no means above reproach.
(In other words, I'm a Democrat striving for civility.) I would suggest to you that most types of fraudulent activity will take place where you can't see them--that is, not in your presence. These machines have a lot of vulnerabilities, and it's not necessary to stand there and tamper with them while you are pretending to vote. My first thought on being confronted with one of Maryland's soon-to-be-vanished Diebold systems was that I could have brought in a pocket full of cards containing whatever I wanted them to contain. Assuming that your jurisdiction is still making gestures towards the secrecy of the ballot (via the privacy screens), you and your counterpart wouldn't even see that. I suppose that the poll watcher/election judge/whoever who is assigned to escort voters to the machines and get them started could watch for clumsy fraudsters dropping extra cards out of their pockets. Aside from that, if the fraud happens, you won't see it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think your post is offtopic at all. There's a lot of truth to the old proverb, "Necessity is the mother of invention." And you can certainly have necessity when you're in a deadline situation. There are plenty of people around who create artificial deadlines for themselves by procrastination or other means. Too much stress can stifle creative thought. Occasional stress may help solutions or approaches bubble up into conscious thought. Otherwise, why do we all still enjoy watching "MacGuyver?" (ahem)
I'd mod you back up if I could.
Well, Duke is certainly well endowed financially. But why should they spend even one minute of administrative time, or one dollar of university resources, to serve as the RIAA's flunky and errand boy? I'd have to guess that they're more than tired of it. Without some kind of concrete evidence in hand, it's a complete mis-allocation of their time and money.
Don't worry. They (the classmates) probably just want to collect the money you owed them when you finished school.
I'm so glad I read this. I was about to make a redundant post.
So sorry to hear about the death of your husband . . . glad you have found a good revenue stream.
Rules for Poll Workers:
1) No sneakers or running shoes to be worn on election day. Leather soled shoes only.
2) Attire for men should consist of corduroy pants and jackets, wool shirts, wool socks.
3) Women should wear the same with the substitution of nylons. Silk shirts, velvet suits are optional.
4) Good grooming is important. Bring a comb or hair brush and use it frequently during the day.
5) Try to present a happy and relaxed appearance to voters. Snappin' your fingers and shufflin' your feet would be sufficient. Balloons in patriotic colors will be provided.
6) In the event of rain or damp weather, please use the dehumidifiers provided.
7) Your election boss will instruct you in the proper handling of the sensitive electronic voting equipment.
You really should get that chip off your shoulder.
Birmingham, Alabama. There is an expressway cut through Red Mountain, and the various layers--coal and limestone, but also iron ore--are beautifully exposed. They had a wonderful museum there for a while, mostly for kids but fascinating for everyone. You could go along an elevated walkway and see fossils from all the levels. The museum seems to have closed, but even wandering around somebody's back yard there can yield a pocket full of small treasures. I recall sitting on someone's stone patio one time and realizing that the stones were full of fossils.
Road cuts in general can be sources of great fascination for those brave or stupid enough to climb them. Having a nice elevated walkway is a real bonus.
He should let them set his password to whatever they please . . . for as long as it takes him to clear his money out of there and into another bank.
Getting rid of the credit card data after X weeks seems like an excellent idea.
It's not easy to get a room at a decent hotel without a credit card. Certainly in some places you can pay cash in advance--but you can't use the phone, order a meal, connect to their network. If they require a credit card, or make it too difficult to procure their services without one, then they should absolutely be held accountable for the safety of the information.
Organizations of all sorts--retail, airlines, hotels, hospitals, insurance companies, banks, potential employers, not to mention government agencies--are ravenous for your personal information. They go to great lengths to get hold of as much of it as they can, whenever they can, using whatever methods they can. If they want it that badly, they should be responsible for its safety and security, and they should be held accountable when it's compromised.
We received a letter from our bank a couple of years ago saying that my husband's debit card (never used online) had been compromised, that he should stop using it, and that a new one would be issued. It arrived in due course, but they would never reveal who had screwed up or what had happened. It had to have been a local entity, but it could've been a supermarket, a restaurant, a gas station--we will never know. We don't even have the recourse of not giving them more business and further opportunities to screw up.
That's interesting, and I will certainly have a look. While traveling, I used the preset scene modes so that I didn't have to lose a shot while futzing with all...those...menus. Here at home with the products, I generally shoot a white card, bring that shot to Photoshop, and fool around until I get the white balance set. Strangely (to me, anyway), the product photos seem to tend to the yellowish while the indoor and outdoor shots I took in Paris were decidedly blue. That may be a function of the lights I use here. Or, maybe the camera had a built-in sensor that detected that I only had three short days to spend there...
I'm starting to wonder. I was one of the last holdouts for buying a digital camera, and what finally pushed me over the edge was needing to take pictures of products I sell on the Web. I picked a mid-range "point and shoot" and have had trouble with the color fidelity from the outset. The only salvation has been to use Photoshop's "white point" or sometimes "gray point" to alter each shot. All this despite careful color and lighting setups both on the computer (a Mac) and in the actual shots.
This summer, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Paris--certainly an occasion for taking lots of pictures. The digital went along. To my disgust, every shot I took--indoors and outdoors--had an indigo blue cast, fortunately correctable with Photoshop's color balance.
After a long and tedious process of adding a dash of yellow to each shot, I have come to two conclusions:
1) I need to shell out for a digital SLR. That's a whack of cash and a lot more camera than I need, but I'm tired of messing with this expensive toy.
2) I'm thinking with great nostalgia of my now-unused Minolta film camera. While I won't use it for products, it's likely to ride along on the next trip I take.
The "National Enquirer" is a notorious scandal sheet.
The "Philadelphia Inquirer" is a respectable daily newspaper.
I just felt the need to point that out.
But I'll post this anyway. Your efforts are sincerely appreciated by many of us. I've read the article, and I hope that judges who read it will take a serious look.
I am currently actively involved in supporting a blogger in the UK whose right to free speech was recently threatened. I would not have had the interest or courage to become involved in this effort if I had not been exposed to the RIAA issue on Slashdot. Though the two types of cases differ greatly, the underlying message is the same: Individual freedoms must not be tampered with or trampled. You have expressed that basic truth very eloquently, and I hope you will continue to do so for a very long time.
You've been more than patient with him as he's vented his spleen. You've given him a hearing. He's become abusive. He's a troll, so twit him. It's your site.
I dunno. There is a certain fairly popular blog in the U.K. that I read daily. (The blog has a basically religious content. Please read past that if it might bother you.) A couple of years ago, it seems that a pair of American lawyers, brothers from Texas, decided to launch a campaign to convert England to (Russian) Orthodoxy. To that end, they formed a "Charitable Trust," presumably under the laws of the UK.
At about the same time, the oldest chain of religious booksellers in England (the SPCK, which actually dates back to the 1600's) found itself in financial turmoil at a number of its stores. The Texas lawyers somehow winkled a large number of these stores away from the SPCK at fire-sale terms, in exchange for vague promises to keep things basically the way they were--in terms of the variety of stock, the employees, and other aspects of the stores. Apparently the SPCK shops were widely respected because they carried a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical tomes representing many viewpoints as opposed to confining themselves to Christian theology.
The story of what happened next was pretty tragic, and the blogger in question chronicled it faithfully. Books on philosophy and theologies other than Christian were swept away wholesale to be replaced by narrow, fundamentalist pop-tripe. Agreements with employees were terminated, often without notice. People had their vacation hours and sick/personal days taken away despite being represented by a union (or the British version of a union). Customers began staying away in droves. A rather pathetic Website was installed that was basically an amazon.uk storefront. A few days later, Google pronounced it unsafe and refused to allow people to visit it from search results without a strongly-worded warning not to do so.
Still the blogger continued to blog about it, though his regular focus is generally a lot more humourous. There were times when no one else was saying a word. Bookstores began to be closed. People continued to be fired without notice or arrived at work to find the shops shuttered.
The union representing a number of the employees signaled its intention to seek relief for them through the British courts. That, in turn, seemed to cause the Texas lawyers to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in their native Texas, far away from England. They then argued in the British courts that this should protect them from the action by the union.
Meanwhile, the blogger continued to blog. Newspapers ran an occasional article, but his blog had become the default gathering point for former employees, people who just plain missed the old bookstores, and people who were outraged at the heavy-handed behavior of the foreign lawyers- turned-missionaries.
Tragedy struck about a month ago in the form of a suicide by a longstanding and much-respected bookstore manager who became despondent after being let go along with his staff. That attracted the interest of several national papers, and his funeral was so large they had to hold it in a cathedral as opposed to his regular parish church. Naturally, messages of condolence and outrage piled up in the blogger's blog as well as in other blogs with similar interests.
This went on until about three days ago, when the blog contained a tersely worded message. The blogger had been the recipient of a cease-and-desist letter from one of the brothers. He did not have the funds to retain legal counsel or continue the fight. All references to the issue had been removed, together with their comments. Twenty-four hours later, even that post was removed.
As nearly as I can tell, after having followed this for over a year, no libel was committed, either in blog posts or in comments. People who wanted to attack the Texas lawyers personally were gently but firmly reminded that this wouldn't be tolerated, and their comments were removed.
I'd have to say that a voice in the UK has gone silent that should have been allowed to continue speaking. While this affects only a small section of the gen
Hmm. Clearly you weren't raised on tales like "Little Black Sambo," "Epaminondas," and the "Miss Minerva" stories. You may never have opened a book whose preface included the assertion "The Negro is naturally lazy, and we have rendered his speech as authentically as possible." None of this trash was read to my kids, and they don't seem to have missed anything by it. The fact that I can remember it with such distaste means that it created an unsavory impression on me at a very early age. Frankly, it offended my childish sense of fair play.
There was enough racist trash floating around the U.S. in the twentieth century that it's threatened at odd times to drag classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Huckleberry Finn" down with it.
I've read each of the works you've cited, including all of Shakespeare's histories.
The authors you mention were all able to render dialect with a carefully tuned ear and a determination to advance whatever story they had chosen to tell. And even so, two of those authors are in danger of being damned as politically incorrect.
There's another whole category of dialect writers who choose to write in their own dialects and accents. Robert Burns comes to mind first, and American literature is also richly endowed with writers of both poetry and prose who speak with forceful, authentic accents.
I was more concerned with authors who somehow place themselves above it all. You've cited authors who were deeply involved with their stories and their characters.
(Would you care to join me in a rousing chorus of "For old long since?")
OK, I know I'm older than God, but there must be other people around who remember or have read the "dialect" renderings in stories and novels. I'm thinking of anything between, say, "Honestly, Miz Scyallet, ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies..." all the way to "We don't need no steenking badges..." That includes a lot of childrens' stories that have now thankfully been banished.
What it boiled down to was that if your skin was dark, or you were "foreign," your speech was rendered as "dialect" by some white person somewhere. Seeking kavya's question quoted verbatim somehow transports me back in time. Even the use of "sic" seems somehow to say, "I know this is a deviation from standard English. I just want you to know I didn't originate it, and I'm literate enough to know the difference."
I almost (but not quite) think I might prefer just having the conversation related to me. Or, as an earlier commenter has said, throw the whole thing out and find a better way to cite Web comments.
Interesting. I interpreted the "slam pitpatpitpat screeeech vroom!" as getting a running start on foot like Fred Flintstone.
Oh, he will tell you why his wife left--for a price. According to CNN, you have to subscribe to his website. It's apparently called "alifeforsale.com".
Too bad I don't have points to mod you up. Instead, I offer this recent story from the Baltimore Sun about a trial that's going on right now. These folks started out with a legitimate professional pharmacy delivering prescriptions to local nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. The online drugs marked proved to be too lucrative, the drug of choice was hydrocodone. They're also in trouble over a lot of subsidiary issues like tax evasion. The genuine irony of this piece is behind the scenes. I recalled reading the article but not the exact date, so I used the Sun's search box with "internet drugs trial." The results came back just fine--along with a paid advert for "Canadian Online Pharmacy."
The people to be pitied in all this aren't the ones abusing pain meds. It's the middle-aged suddenly unemployed guy who takes meds for hypertension or the elderly person who's in the notorious "hole" in the middle of the Medicare drug benefit or the financially struggling young couple with a child who needs some lifesaving drug or other. Or, perhaps, the employed person whose health care benefit has shriveled to nothing.
Hmm. I would never have guessed that, but I suppose the fifty-year rule could still apply. I buy a lot of beads, what with one thing and another, and I have a few observations. First, if everything billed as mammoth ivory were really mammoth ivory, the mammoths would never have become extinct. Second, I do not sell on Ebay and trust very little of what I buy there. I use it only for the very cheapest staple items, and I purchase trivial lots first when I'm checking out a seller. I'd never buy gemstone beads there, and there are precisely two sellers from whom I'll by vintage beads. So a healthy dose of skepticism can be your best friend. Finally, I collect vintage and new fountain pens. I guess that's similar to straight razors in some senses. While I've had a couple of stellar buys on Ebay, I regard that as "hobby money" and would not cry too hard if "stung." Still, I've found it's better to become involved with several groups of like-minded collectors. In smaller groups, it's easier to check out reputations, etc. For these purposes, something like Yahoo can turn out to be a good starting point; if you're collecting it, chances are there's a group of people into the same thing. That can serve as as a connecting point to other groups and to reputable buyers and sellers. (I suggest Yahoo because many collectors aren't especially technical and find it easiest to use.) It's also possible, within a good group, to gain reliable knowledge about things like Germany's ivory laws.
The convention among people who might be interested in ivory is that objects more than 50 years old are OK. You would most likely be both legally and morally in the clear with an old piano and antique razors. I would guess that nobody has manufactured straight razors with ivory handles in the past 50 years, and celluloid keys for pianos have also prevailed in that time frame. The problem comes with people who lie about the age of the ivory they're selling. (Incidentally, for people who might be interested in the "look and feel" of ivory without the slaughter, I'd strongly suggest a look at "vegetable ivory," or tagua. It is a nut-kernel product that actually has the look, feel, grain, and strength of the real stuff. It can be worked, carved, and shaped just like the real thing, and it lasts just as long. It's entirely renewable, and its harvest and preparation provide employment for people in several economically distressed areas of the world. Any amateur carvers or makers of jewelry would do well to investigate its excellent properties.)
I find myself siding with the music mafia. Not in the "Piracy" sense but in the "boycott" sense.
I'd like nothing better than to boycott Baidu. Their Baidu Spiders arrive in hordes and spend hours crawling my site. They ignore crawl-delays and denies. They're looking for online poker files that were placed there by some illustrious Chinese citizen or other in an attempt to deface my website about two months ago. That lasted about four hours (from the middle of the night, local time, until I woke up next morning and made it go away), but I'm still dealing with the Baidu invasion. They're worse than Genghis Khan. An attempt to contact the email address provided resulted in a bounce stating that my ISP (Comcast) is blocked in China. My next step will probably be simply to block any contact with Baidu at all, and I've been tempted to extend that to the whole of China.
So while I generally deplore the actions of the Music Mafia, my perception is that Baidu has invited the actions by their own behavior, which is by no means above reproach.
(In other words, I'm a Democrat striving for civility.) I would suggest to you that most types of fraudulent activity will take place where you can't see them--that is, not in your presence. These machines have a lot of vulnerabilities, and it's not necessary to stand there and tamper with them while you are pretending to vote. My first thought on being confronted with one of Maryland's soon-to-be-vanished Diebold systems was that I could have brought in a pocket full of cards containing whatever I wanted them to contain. Assuming that your jurisdiction is still making gestures towards the secrecy of the ballot (via the privacy screens), you and your counterpart wouldn't even see that. I suppose that the poll watcher/election judge/whoever who is assigned to escort voters to the machines and get them started could watch for clumsy fraudsters dropping extra cards out of their pockets. Aside from that, if the fraud happens, you won't see it.