My most recent car is a 2021 Mazda 3 - love it. The reviews said the non-touch screen controls (big wheel/knob in the center console, similar to BMW) take some getting used to. I've grown to appreciate that, esp. compared to driving our minivan with touch screen controls. Little glance to the center screen at times, but not near as much as when I'm trying to touch a specific square.

Admiral Adama: "I'm gonna go to the head, do something constructive. A little project I've been working on." -BSG, Season 4

Fine post, I couldn't agree more. Engineer/analyst (defense industry), married, four kids, my wife was an engineer also until our first was born, and is now a stay at home mom. Plan when we got married was to eventually move from AZ to the DC area, so huge CoL increase. Turned down a decent gig in DC in 2004 (pre-kids), since we weren't certain she'd have the choice to stay at home - looked at other areas, not quite in the city, but say, Dahlgren, Charlottesville, etc, lower CoL than DC. Kept plugging along with our plan - 3, then 4 kids, but took advantage of a work-reimbursed masters degree, upsized the house in AZ first, then finally moved outside of DC (Carroll County, MD) about two years ago - still on one income. Would love for her to go back to work eventually, but more for the intellectual stimulation - not a financial necessity. We cook at home a lot, but go out for dinner at least once a month. No CC debt, and paid cash for the last two cars. It's certainly possible, helps that we paid down a lot of debt in the DINK days, didn't go nuts then. It isn't w/o sacrifice, for sure, but for the benefits to the kids having her home, figure we've come out ahead in the game.

I watched that very episode this morning while eating breakfast!

Last time I checked, it was not illegal to download p0rn. Why are you lumping it in with illegal activities?

And yes, there are illegal ways of downloading p0rn (copyrighted or underage). But, regardless of the ethical considerations, there is no law against downloading a video of consenting adults engaged in sexual activities. (At least, no federal law that I know of. I am sure some of the more conservative states have laws against it)

So for those people who *are able* to grasp the second meaning, it is art, and for those who can't, it is not ? You just justified Ebert's opinion (for him, it ain't art) and nullified your position (art has an objective definition). We're back again to whatever a person calls art, is art.

No, I didn't say it wasn't art. I wasn't trying to imply that the 'art test' decided what was art. Anything that's created with the intent of multiple meanings, or 'found' and displayed with that intent is art.

Just like any collection of sounds that people make to try to convey a meaning is speech, and any collection of plant and animals prepared with the intent that people eat them is food.

Anything people can't generally figure out the secondary meaning, however, is not worth treating as art. It is speech in a secret language only you can understand, it is food that is it not possible to ingest.

Art without any communication is art that is an utter failure. It is 'art', in the same way that someone speaking nonsense is creating 'speech', or someone who made a 'tree bark salad' is creating 'food', and that should be about the level of attention we pay those artists.

Don't confuse that with bad art, which is art that does not get its intended meaning across well. Even with incredibly bad art, you can figure out what the creator was trying to say, even if they have failed. I.e., it's someone who mumbles and you miss a few words, or it's someone who burned the food...you can figure it out what was supposed to be going on, but they were not up to the task.

I don't know what kind of women you know who would use such a product named "Visual Studio." Eww.

I wouldn't personally want one if they gave it to me for free. If it's anything like the iPhone, to even turn it on you have to enter into an expensive 2-year data plan. I guess I could use it as a paperweight or sell it on ebay.

I disagree here is that paragraph

If I have a beef with the iPad, it's that while it's a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn't do much to facilitate its creation. The computer is the greatest all-purpose creativity tool since the pen. It put a music studio, a movie studio, a darkroom and a publishing house on everybody's desk. The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people's masterpieces. In that sense, it's a step backward. Not much of a fairy-tale ending. Except for the people who are selling content.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976932-2,00.html#ixzz0lePJ0cD3

I don't own any Apple products. I am not a fanboy. I use Ubuntu.

The author gets it wrong. The iPad is not a home computer replacement. It is a consumption device so that you can consume other people's content comfortably away from home ( or at home on a couch ). If you want to do the things you do on a computer, you go to your computer and I am sure Apple is hoping people will buy both.

If I ever buy anything like iPad that is how I will do it. If I have one it will be for reading the web on a plane ride, not a place where I will likely be doing photoshop or composing music.

Thankfully, we only get "thank you letter to Kathy.ppt" round these parts.

IMHO, I think the parent might be being a bit dramatic, but they're not too off the mark. Sure this is an entertainment company, but when they get away with treating customers like garbage other companies follow suit.

If Linux Corp. says it should support both, then it should support both. This is a major corporate operating system. It's not like just anyone can go and put together a Linux distribution. Linux Corp. wouldn't allow that. There would be law suits and drive by shootings and such.

Example of Normalized English Input to NLESB

Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).
An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.

Subsection (a).    IF AND ONLY IF
(1)(A)    A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
    bodily harm on himself, OR
    (B)    The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
    behavior, OR
    (C)    The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
    and serious physical harm to them, OR
    (D)    The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
    specific risks, AND
(2)    There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur,
THEN
(3)    The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
    purposes of subsection (b).

Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF
(1)    A person is mentally ill, AND
(2)    The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
    the mental illness, AND
(3)    The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
    illness, AND
(4)    All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
    treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person,
THEN
(5)    The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
    treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/NLESB-normal.html

Natural-Language Legal Expert System Builder (NLESB)

NLESB enables a lawyer to build a useful legal expert system in ordinary English without being a computer expert. It accepts rules in ordinary English, though in normalized form, and parses them into propositional data structures that it can use to draw inferences. NLESB has some features, particularly in its logic, that are peculiar to the needs of legal expert systems.
Send me mail for reprints or if you are interested in using our prototype implementation.

Publications (reverse chronological order):

A Logic for Statutory Law, by John Nolt, Grayfred B. Gray, Bruce J. MacLennan, and Donald J. Ploch, Jurimetics 35, 2 (Winter 1995), pp. 121–151. Winner of Loevinger Prize.

Legal Expert System Building: A Semi-Intelligent Computer Program Makes It Easier, by Grayfred B. Gray, Bruce J. MacLennan, John E. Nolt & Donald R. Ploch, John Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law, 12 (1994), pp. 555–583.

Readability of the Law: Forms of Law for Building Legal Expert Systems, by Donald R. Ploch, Bethany K. Dumas, Grayfred B. Grey, Bruce J. MacLennan, and John E. Nolt, Jurimetrics 33, 2 (Winter 1993), pp. 189–221.

Law Reading Experiment, by Donald R. Ploch, Bethany K. Dumas, Grayfred H. Gray, Bruce MacLennan, & John Nolt, Pre-Proceedings of the III International Conference, Logica Informatica Diritto: Legal Expert Systems, A. A. Martino (ed.), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto per la documentazione giuridica, Florence, Italy, November 2-5, 1989, Vol. 2, pp. 681–704.

In college, my freshman year roommate was Indian. India has a wonderful educational system left over from British colonial rule (if you are rich enough to send your children).

Q:How does this fit in?
A: My roommate spoken English English and not the shit that Americans call English.

This leads us to the first day of class and I am coming back to the dorm and smoking a cigarette which is something my roommate had yet to see me do. As I walk up to Dushie (his nickname) and his friends he loudly calls out to me over the 20 or so meters I have yet to cover, "What are you doing with that fag hanging out of your mouth?" I stopped and looked around to see what he was referring to because, after all, this was college . . .