d'oh. I forgot to sign in. Not trying to be anonymous, or cowardly.

ach. yes. really. http://anitra.net/homelessness/columns/anitra/eightmyths.html

Find me someone who’s happily living high on the hog in a housing project in NOLA, who isn’t drug-addicted or crazy, who wouldn’t rather be working, who doesn’t struggle to scrape by every day, and I’ll give you $1. I’m not saying there aren’t people on welfare, but I’ve never heard of anyone, who was relatively sane, who thought it was preferable to working.

mod parent down. This is troll talk. There’s no talk of free healthcare, and the “welfare queen/king” myth is, at best disingenuous.

Agreed. I had a photography teacher in high school who used to say that photography was 50% science and 50% art — that you needed to master the technical stuff (chemical temperatures, film speeds, aperture size / shutter speed etc.) in order to be able to forget it and concentrate on the art. Apple has worked hard to shorten the initial learning curve on most of their products — osx the iphone, the ipod all tend to be easier to learn initially than comparative products. That’s pretty much why most artists I know (and I’m one of them) like to use them. It has nothing to do with their technical power. In fact, I think most artists wouldn’t disagree that Windows machines, for instance, are probably more powerful and ultimately able to do more than Mac. But apple computers are very easy to use, and allow you (with some major exceptions) to do what you want on them — whether it’s edit photos, or record music, or make movies. So you can get through the technical stuff a little faster, and get to the art — the stuff that most artists are more interested in. I personally like mac machines and I recommend them to friends. I don’t think much about what it “says” about me. If there were a cheaper PC that was as easy to figure out, as free from hassles, viruses, spyware, adware, and crap, and had all the software I wanted, I’d use it.

OTOH, if the "shock" of the affair happens often enough, it will finally get to the point where no one actually cares (this is starting to happen, I think) and then hopefully, people will remember that being faithful to your spouse isn't actually a necessary job qualification for being a politician. At least, we can hope.

It teaches the human marker to look for only the things the computer would score, and to ignore essays that may either be brilliant in a nonstandard way. The result for the essays is the same.

Right. Except that fire can be spontaneously created and mules can't. So the trouble is not that mules aren't alive and fire is, the trouble is the simple wikipedia definition is wrong.

I think it's "whingeing"