If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have colonized the solar system 50 years ago instead of just putting a man in space.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have pwned particle physics so hard it would be taught to 4th graders today in private religious schools the way God intended.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, you would be able to buy a spacecraft at your local Ford dealership in any of 40 different models, 5 different trim levels, and hundreds of different colors.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, no one would care about Mach 3.35 except the hippies that own Prii today. Everyone else would be getting on with their lives commuting between the Earth and Mars in their Ford spacecraft at a quarter of the speed of light.
PS... NASA still has operating SR-71's, so we technically still have a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. And, God only knows what the slow, Government-teat-sucking, mouth-breathing engineers have been able to cook up in the past 50 years. Maybe they have us up to Mach 4 now.
You know, your point that everyone is influenced by marketing is well-taken, but your examples are horrible.
Do you think the iPhone has a more attractive design than another smartphone? Yes, I do. And your point? You cannot possibly believe that attractive design is based solely on marketing. For starters, Apple's marketing of the iPhone has exclusively focused on usability from day one. Every commercial for the iPhone and iPad has this premise: show what you can do with the device. It looks sexy in the commercials because it is sexy. The D&AD folks didn't give it a black pencil because of Apple commercials. Regardless of what you think of the iPhone from a technical standpoint, it did reboot the smartphone and deserves design accolades. However, you could ask: "Do you think Apple invented the smartphone and tablet computer?" That question would show how effectively Apple marketing is on most people.
Do you think a Lexus or Porsche has better design than Chevy? Which Lexus, which Porsche, and which Chevy? Porsche design is boring and uninspired. The Lexus IS 300 had some inspired design, especially the chronograph instrument cluster, but the Lexus SC is ugly as sin. The Corvette is always beautiful if you ignore the 80's and 90's, but the thin plastic bits on newer models that flex in a stiff breeze sort of ruins it a little. I can guarantee that I have been exposed to the same amount of Lexus, Porsche, and Chevy marketing as any five other random guys and we could spend the next decade debating the merits and flaws of all three car makers.
You could ask a question about car quality and innovation, but that would be a dumb question too since you are comparing a car maker that mostly caters to the low- to middle-end versus two car makers that cater to the high- to super-high end. Yes, all three have had quality issues, but you can't compare a plastic econo-box to a $30k+ luxury sedan or a $75k+ sports car made for the unlimited speed sections of the Autobahn. Hell, even the Corvette is, overall, of a lower quality than similar sports cars with the same price despite some impressive technical innovations Chevy has achieved in the Corvette over the decades.
Why is "shiny" and "hard" considered superior to "matte" and "cushy" in handheld communications technology? Why is aluminum and glass better than plastic? Why do you think one "feels better" than another? Why do you assume people unquestionably do not like plastic? Plastic doesn't have to look like crap; the iPhone 3G and 3GS were made with semi-gloss plastic backs that had a cushy feel (also, the back of the iPhone 1 was matte, not shiny). They still looked great. Saturn did a really good job of designing good looking cars. They were definitely not as sexy as any Nissan Z or a 60's Corvette, but they were good looking cars that also happened to appeal to a lot of people. Any stigma attached to plastic is basically rooted in it being the material of choice when you want to make something cheap. As a result, plastic is associated with a lot of cheaply built, generic looking, disposable things.
I was six watching outside from Largo (almost directly west on the opposite coast from Cape Canaveral for those unfamiliar with Florida) with my class. My dad and I watched a lot of launches and I knew pretty much immediately something was really wrong. From Largo, all I really saw was the white trail puff and go gray with the SRB trails streaking randomly around...but that was enough. I do not really remember anything from that day past that moment when, as I stared at the aftermath hanging in the sky, I realized what happened.
I can't say it ever killed my enthusiasm for watching launches, though. My dad and I still watched launches whenever we could. We loved it too much. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy and become an astronaut in those days. I was that in love with it all.
Eventually, I found my niche in engineering and dropped the idea of becoming an astronaut. But, watching those launches with my dad really shaped my interest in science, technology, computers, and aviation (I did at least become a pilot). For all those reasons, I still feel a choking sadness when seeing pictures or video of the explosion.
I'm with you. I didn't say it, but you were right, she did raise the tax. I was just responding to clarify that the tax is linked to the price of oil.
Idle observations unrelated to the original issue and not really jabs at Palin specifically...
One thing that's interesting... Looking through Sunshine Review, it appears that balancing the budget had no effect.
They are running deficits again, oil revenue is back down to the pre-windfall levels (which is weird unless the windfall was temporary or oil production has gone way down), and Alaska's debt has been increasing even through the windfall surplus days.
My cousin recently mentioned to me that Alaska is a shining beacon of responsible government. Token taxes, solvent state, and people get money back every year! She lives in Rhode Island and felt Rhode Island's taxes are just crazy and over-burden RI citizens.
So, I ran some numbers. Now, they assume direct taxation on citizens, no corporate taxes. Which is unrealistic, but it is the worst possible case. The numbers come from the states' revenue departments and are for 2009, I believe.
Alaska
----------
Citizens: ~700,000
Revenue: ~$5.6B
Revenue from oil: ~$4.95B
Revenue from taxes AND annual federal subsidies: ~0.65B
Debt: $10B
Tax burden if all revenue came from personal taxes: $8,000 / person
Rhode Island
-------------------
Citizens: ~1,100,000
Revenue: ~$3.6B
Tax burden if all revenue came from personal taxes: $2,742 / person
Debt: $9B
And, I am pretty sure oil revenue has been roughly 85-90% of Alaska's total revenue for a long time. If she negotiated any increases, it would probably be insignificant compared to shift in revenue caused by the price of oil going from $60/barrel to a steady $80-$90/barrel.
She probably didn't. Oil prices went from ~$60/barrel to ~150/barrel, then down ~$60/barrel over the course of a year and a half. The prices climbed back up fairly quickly to the $80-$90/barrel range in late 2007. She might have trimmed a few programs here and there, but she likely didn't have to change much. The state probably didn't have enough time to really go crazy during the $150/barrel days, and the price recovered to a point higher than it was before the spike.
Oh, and as the Wikipedia article points out... The ox experience does not prove crowd intelligence. It merely points out that members of the crowd are going to have varying levels of expertise on factual matters. The crowd breaks down on non-deterministic matters unless it adheres to the author's very specific rules.
Just from the Wikipedia article (which could be wrong)... The author says that crowd intelligence needs four things to succeed: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. Aggregation being defined as "[A mechanism] for turning private judgments into a collective decision." A strong leader fits that definition.
There is a big difference between the crowd of random (but not necessarily diverse) people acting with no direction or organization to which Drew Curtis refers and the well-constructed, organized crowd to which that author refers, and both seem to be saying the same thing: crowd intelligence is based on choosing a diverse population, keeping those people thinking independently, and having a leader aggregate the information.
They may not have started the Tea Bagger movement and they may not directly organize the Tea Bagger marches, but... Having your "correspondents" take part in the "protests," having your producers fire up the "protesters" for the cameras, and constantly vomiting drivel about taking back the country from the Socialists is exactly yellow journalism. Worse even since they are using it to shape public opinion, to effect a national agenda, and their "correspondents" and "journalists" are unapologetic about being entertainment under the banner of a news organization.
By and large, video games are marketed to children and always have been. But, even if video games had always been marketed to people in their 30s, you failed to include the paragraph that follows the one you quoted:
If what I'm doing doesn't deprive other people of these three rights, I should be able to do it.
You can argue that stealing a car or running a Ponzi scheme do not deprive anyone of those three rights in a strict sense...which is pretty much why I do not like Libertarian viewpoints. They are too simplistic. Libertarianism is merely a starting point for a larger, longer conversation.
You are not guaranteed "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Rather, that is an ideology that guided the Constitution and current legislation.
And the conversation about video games has never been about what you do by yourself in your own home. The conversation about video games has always been about how they have been traditionally marketed to children and how there is (or was???) no explicit regulation on the sale of video/sexual/obscene games to children.
Does that conversation have any merit? No. But at least represent it correctly.
More apt analogies would be: Should we allow religions to market their mythologies to children? Should we allow parents to send their children to Bible camps for brainwashing?
As to the argument about the actual person being a primary source... Yes, Wikipedia says that you should not write or contribute to articles about yourself.
My original point stands here: an encyclopedia is a repository of citations with a summary of knowledge. It is not a collection of autobiographies.
An autobiography is in no way definitive. It is a primary source, but it is subject to as much as, if not more, bias than any other kind of source. Not discouraging autobiographical edits would introduce more bias and factual errors than it already has.
The mission of an encyclopedia is to collect as many sources as possible, including a person's autobiography, summarize them, and provide you with the citations necessary to aide you in your own research.
So, I still don't see problem. Especially in this case since the problem was fixed quickly. Think if Britannica had gotten it wrong in a print version. Even with printed errata, the error would persist for years.
Do you see the 216 notes, the "Reference" section, the "Further Reading" section, and the "External Links" section at the bottom?
Welcome to Research 101 where you learn to use an encyclopedia as a repository of citations accompanied by a summary of knowledge instead of as a definitive source.
Once you wrap your mind around that basic concept, you can start learning how to critically examine the encyclopedia article by making judgments about the quality of the citations.
When you reach that level, it might suddenly become clear why factual errors in Wikipedia are not a problem.
This was never an issue with printed copies of Britannica...people just knew that you do not cite encyclopedias. Really, my third grade teacher taught us not to never cite an encyclopedia. The Britannica set our school had was riddled with errors and years out of date. So, I have a really hard time understanding how Wikipedia is a problem.
That is the frustrating part. There has to be hundreds of people at Microsoft that could take Microsoft's vast stacks of cash money and lead that company toward a golden age where they carry at least some street cred on/.
For some reason, though, no one will fire Ballmer...and, if there is no one willing to fire Ballmer, there is no one in the upper echelons capable of telling a good leader from rock.
So frustrating.
Of course, this is true in all sectors...especially the auto industry.
Jobs does not do anything magical. It might have been his idea to make a better phone, but he did not design the iPhone.
Rather, he had the vision of how a phone would fit into the ``iLife,'' he held designs to high standards, and he made sure that everyone focused on integration with existing products and the consistency of the experience.
Standards and focus are what most people view as his ``dictator'' personality.
This is pretty much what, I feel anyway, Microsoft has always lacked.
They have no vision. Remember Ballmer scoffing the very notion that the iPhone would have any success at all, let alone surpass WinMo as it just did.
I cannot say that they have low standards per se. Rather, their standard is to let the user design their software (the focus groups that designed Vista; something about which Gates was proud).
They lack any sort of focus. Vista is a prime example of this. It is obvious when using Vista that no one had a plan. No one provided any focus. Compound this with the myriad of products Microsoft makes which barely even work each other...even in the same product family (incompatibilities between Mac Office and Win Office).
So, yeah, those are the three qualities I want to see in a successor to Jobs. There should be plenty of people at Apple with those qualities. Actually, there are plenty of those people anywhere...people like Ballmer just do not recognize them or think they are important. I trust Jobs to find an appropriate person to replace him.
Also, let's not forget to embrace change. Even someone like Jobs needs to be replaced eventually. They just have to be replaced carefully.
Am I the only one that wants to start a website exclusively dedicated to giving everyone, including criminals of all sorts, detailed instructions on how to use free software to make it very very hard for the police to access their systems?
Not that I condone child porn or any other OMG! crime du jour, but everyone has rights and I think this would be a great form of protest.
Whenever the police whine about wanting their jobs to be easier, it makes me want to throw up.
Not at all. Metaphors only go so far and then you start running into the limitations of the hardware used to interface with the visuals.
For instance, making a virtual store sounds good and might seem familiar to your hypothetical 65 year-old. However, this person did not grow up using a keyboard and mouse to walk through stores. So, the metaphor breaks down very quickly when you have to start implementing controls for navigation through this world. Ultimately, the experience will be more inefficient and frustrating than if the person just went to a real store.
Further, you are only modeling one aspect of the experience: walking through the store. You are not using a "walk out front door, get in car, put key in ignition, drive to store" metaphor to model how to get to that virtual store.
If this hypothetical person is able to start his/her computer, start a web browser, and navigate to the virtual store page, then it is very likely that he/she is also able to understand how to use a web page like Amazon to find products to buy. Therefore, the effort to model the virtual world is moot unless all you want is eye candy that makes the whole experience incredibly inefficient.
Soldiers are supposed to want to fight. If you want the Peace Corps, send in the Peace Corps. If you want the Marine Corps, send in the Marine Corps.
What? Really, what does that mean? The Peace Corps does not kill, let alone kill without emotion, so how are ``ethical killing machines'' that kill without emotion equivalent to the Peace Corps? And, by the way, the Marine Corps is supposed to fight with ethics. So, what's your point here?
The whole things sounds like a bunch of Leftist grad students angling for funding. The concept, given the current state of technology, is a pathetic attempt at political correctness.
Read Who Owns Death?. The quest for ``ethical'' means of killing is merely a way to legitimize institutional killing, be it war or the death penalty. It has nothing to do with Left, Right, or Political Correctness.
I'm sure there are some people that would not be horrified by the sight of an inmate catching on fire because the execution staff failed to properly prep him for electrocution. However, a lot of people, both supporters and opponents of the death penalty, were, and that's why Florida does not use the electric chair anymore. It's not that leathal injection is any more humane, really. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it is not. But, it seems humane enough and it allows supporters of the death penalty to think they have the moral high ground.
Same goes for war. It's exactly the same mentality that produces stuff like ``smart'' bombs, UAVs, and now ``ethical killing machines''.
Actually, I disagree with you on one point. Most people do not believe in small/less-intrusive government and free markets. A true conservative does, but most people are not true conservatives.
You can write off ~50% of people that are Democrats leaving you with, more or less, half the country that is Republican.
As far as free markets go, most Republicans do not understand what ``free market'' means. Most ``free market'' people, especially those with kids, would completely freak out if we followed true free market principles and abolished the FDA. These would be the same people calling Obama a socialist while sending their kids to public schools.
As far as less-intrusive government goes, most people are all for using government as a tool to impose their will. One side wants national health care, the other side wants abortion banned. One side is for gun control, the other side is for the PATRIOT Act. Either way, both sides are for government intruding on our lives.
As for smaller government, national health care and the PATRIOT Act are very good examples of how neither side wants smaller government. They just want the parts of government they disagree with to loose resources so that the parts they do agree with can have more.
Slashdot Mirror
Doh.
Me too.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have colonized the solar system 50 years ago instead of just putting a man in space.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have pwned particle physics so hard it would be taught to 4th graders today in private religious schools the way God intended.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, you would be able to buy a spacecraft at your local Ford dealership in any of 40 different models, 5 different trim levels, and hundreds of different colors.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, no one would care about Mach 3.35 except the hippies that own Prii today. Everyone else would be getting on with their lives commuting between the Earth and Mars in their Ford spacecraft at a quarter of the speed of light.
PS... NASA still has operating SR-71's, so we technically still have a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. And, God only knows what the slow, Government-teat-sucking, mouth-breathing engineers have been able to cook up in the past 50 years. Maybe they have us up to Mach 4 now.
You know, your point that everyone is influenced by marketing is well-taken, but your examples are horrible.
Do you think the iPhone has a more attractive design than another smartphone? Yes, I do. And your point? You cannot possibly believe that attractive design is based solely on marketing. For starters, Apple's marketing of the iPhone has exclusively focused on usability from day one. Every commercial for the iPhone and iPad has this premise: show what you can do with the device. It looks sexy in the commercials because it is sexy. The D&AD folks didn't give it a black pencil because of Apple commercials. Regardless of what you think of the iPhone from a technical standpoint, it did reboot the smartphone and deserves design accolades. However, you could ask: "Do you think Apple invented the smartphone and tablet computer?" That question would show how effectively Apple marketing is on most people.
Do you think a Lexus or Porsche has better design than Chevy? Which Lexus, which Porsche, and which Chevy? Porsche design is boring and uninspired. The Lexus IS 300 had some inspired design, especially the chronograph instrument cluster, but the Lexus SC is ugly as sin. The Corvette is always beautiful if you ignore the 80's and 90's, but the thin plastic bits on newer models that flex in a stiff breeze sort of ruins it a little. I can guarantee that I have been exposed to the same amount of Lexus, Porsche, and Chevy marketing as any five other random guys and we could spend the next decade debating the merits and flaws of all three car makers.
You could ask a question about car quality and innovation, but that would be a dumb question too since you are comparing a car maker that mostly caters to the low- to middle-end versus two car makers that cater to the high- to super-high end. Yes, all three have had quality issues, but you can't compare a plastic econo-box to a $30k+ luxury sedan or a $75k+ sports car made for the unlimited speed sections of the Autobahn. Hell, even the Corvette is, overall, of a lower quality than similar sports cars with the same price despite some impressive technical innovations Chevy has achieved in the Corvette over the decades.
Why is "shiny" and "hard" considered superior to "matte" and "cushy" in handheld communications technology? Why is aluminum and glass better than plastic? Why do you think one "feels better" than another? Why do you assume people unquestionably do not like plastic? Plastic doesn't have to look like crap; the iPhone 3G and 3GS were made with semi-gloss plastic backs that had a cushy feel (also, the back of the iPhone 1 was matte, not shiny). They still looked great. Saturn did a really good job of designing good looking cars. They were definitely not as sexy as any Nissan Z or a 60's Corvette, but they were good looking cars that also happened to appeal to a lot of people. Any stigma attached to plastic is basically rooted in it being the material of choice when you want to make something cheap. As a result, plastic is associated with a lot of cheaply built, generic looking, disposable things.
I was six watching outside from Largo (almost directly west on the opposite coast from Cape Canaveral for those unfamiliar with Florida) with my class. My dad and I watched a lot of launches and I knew pretty much immediately something was really wrong. From Largo, all I really saw was the white trail puff and go gray with the SRB trails streaking randomly around...but that was enough. I do not really remember anything from that day past that moment when, as I stared at the aftermath hanging in the sky, I realized what happened.
I can't say it ever killed my enthusiasm for watching launches, though. My dad and I still watched launches whenever we could. We loved it too much. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy and become an astronaut in those days. I was that in love with it all.
Eventually, I found my niche in engineering and dropped the idea of becoming an astronaut. But, watching those launches with my dad really shaped my interest in science, technology, computers, and aviation (I did at least become a pilot). For all those reasons, I still feel a choking sadness when seeing pictures or video of the explosion.
I'm with you. I didn't say it, but you were right, she did raise the tax. I was just responding to clarify that the tax is linked to the price of oil. Idle observations unrelated to the original issue and not really jabs at Palin specifically...
One thing that's interesting... Looking through Sunshine Review, it appears that balancing the budget had no effect.
They are running deficits again, oil revenue is back down to the pre-windfall levels (which is weird unless the windfall was temporary or oil production has gone way down), and Alaska's debt has been increasing even through the windfall surplus days.
It's not risky at all. Read the Alaska Department of Revenue's forecast report.
My cousin recently mentioned to me that Alaska is a shining beacon of responsible government. Token taxes, solvent state, and people get money back every year! She lives in Rhode Island and felt Rhode Island's taxes are just crazy and over-burden RI citizens.
So, I ran some numbers. Now, they assume direct taxation on citizens, no corporate taxes. Which is unrealistic, but it is the worst possible case. The numbers come from the states' revenue departments and are for 2009, I believe.
Alaska
----------
Citizens: ~700,000
Revenue: ~$5.6B
Revenue from oil: ~$4.95B
Revenue from taxes AND annual federal subsidies: ~0.65B
Debt: $10B
Tax burden if all revenue came from personal taxes: $8,000 / person
Rhode Island
-------------------
Citizens: ~1,100,000
Revenue: ~$3.6B
Tax burden if all revenue came from personal taxes: $2,742 / person
Debt: $9B
And, I am pretty sure oil revenue has been roughly 85-90% of Alaska's total revenue for a long time. If she negotiated any increases, it would probably be insignificant compared to shift in revenue caused by the price of oil going from $60/barrel to a steady $80-$90/barrel.
She probably didn't. Oil prices went from ~$60/barrel to ~150/barrel, then down ~$60/barrel over the course of a year and a half. The prices climbed back up fairly quickly to the $80-$90/barrel range in late 2007. She might have trimmed a few programs here and there, but she likely didn't have to change much. The state probably didn't have enough time to really go crazy during the $150/barrel days, and the price recovered to a point higher than it was before the spike.
So, have you never read this, or were you being ironic with your signature?
Oh, and as the Wikipedia article points out... The ox experience does not prove crowd intelligence. It merely points out that members of the crowd are going to have varying levels of expertise on factual matters. The crowd breaks down on non-deterministic matters unless it adheres to the author's very specific rules.
Did you read that book?
Just from the Wikipedia article (which could be wrong)... The author says that crowd intelligence needs four things to succeed: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. Aggregation being defined as "[A mechanism] for turning private judgments into a collective decision." A strong leader fits that definition.
There is a big difference between the crowd of random (but not necessarily diverse) people acting with no direction or organization to which Drew Curtis refers and the well-constructed, organized crowd to which that author refers, and both seem to be saying the same thing: crowd intelligence is based on choosing a diverse population, keeping those people thinking independently, and having a leader aggregate the information.
They may not have started the Tea Bagger movement and they may not directly organize the Tea Bagger marches, but... Having your "correspondents" take part in the "protests," having your producers fire up the "protesters" for the cameras, and constantly vomiting drivel about taking back the country from the Socialists is exactly yellow journalism. Worse even since they are using it to shape public opinion, to effect a national agenda, and their "correspondents" and "journalists" are unapologetic about being entertainment under the banner of a news organization.
By and large, video games are marketed to children and always have been. But, even if video games had always been marketed to people in their 30s, you failed to include the paragraph that follows the one you quoted:
Does that conversation have any merit? No.
If what I'm doing doesn't deprive other people of these three rights, I should be able to do it.
You can argue that stealing a car or running a Ponzi scheme do not deprive anyone of those three rights in a strict sense...which is pretty much why I do not like Libertarian viewpoints. They are too simplistic. Libertarianism is merely a starting point for a larger, longer conversation.
You are not guaranteed "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Rather, that is an ideology that guided the Constitution and current legislation.
And the conversation about video games has never been about what you do by yourself in your own home. The conversation about video games has always been about how they have been traditionally marketed to children and how there is (or was???) no explicit regulation on the sale of video/sexual/obscene games to children.
Does that conversation have any merit? No. But at least represent it correctly.
More apt analogies would be: Should we allow religions to market their mythologies to children? Should we allow parents to send their children to Bible camps for brainwashing?
Well, I have heard it put forth in the past, that the keys to the Constitution of the US are "terrorists" and "child pr0n".
It is more straightforward than that. Fear is the key to the Constitution.
I misread it.
As to the argument about the actual person being a primary source... Yes, Wikipedia says that you should not write or contribute to articles about yourself.
My original point stands here: an encyclopedia is a repository of citations with a summary of knowledge. It is not a collection of autobiographies.
An autobiography is in no way definitive. It is a primary source, but it is subject to as much as, if not more, bias than any other kind of source. Not discouraging autobiographical edits would introduce more bias and factual errors than it already has.
The mission of an encyclopedia is to collect as many sources as possible, including a person's autobiography, summarize them, and provide you with the citations necessary to aide you in your own research.
So, I still don't see problem. Especially in this case since the problem was fixed quickly. Think if Britannica had gotten it wrong in a print version. Even with printed errata, the error would persist for years.
An article about a person: Barrack Obama
Do you see the 216 notes, the "Reference" section, the "Further Reading" section, and the "External Links" section at the bottom?
Welcome to Research 101 where you learn to use an encyclopedia as a repository of citations accompanied by a summary of knowledge instead of as a definitive source.
Once you wrap your mind around that basic concept, you can start learning how to critically examine the encyclopedia article by making judgments about the quality of the citations.
When you reach that level, it might suddenly become clear why factual errors in Wikipedia are not a problem.
This was never an issue with printed copies of Britannica...people just knew that you do not cite encyclopedias. Really, my third grade teacher taught us not to never cite an encyclopedia. The Britannica set our school had was riddled with errors and years out of date. So, I have a really hard time understanding how Wikipedia is a problem.
That is the frustrating part. There has to be hundreds of people at Microsoft that could take Microsoft's vast stacks of cash money and lead that company toward a golden age where they carry at least some street cred on /.
For some reason, though, no one will fire Ballmer...and, if there is no one willing to fire Ballmer, there is no one in the upper echelons capable of telling a good leader from rock.
So frustrating.
Of course, this is true in all sectors...especially the auto industry.
Jobs does not do anything magical. It might have been his idea to make a better phone, but he did not design the iPhone.
Rather, he had the vision of how a phone would fit into the ``iLife,'' he held designs to high standards, and he made sure that everyone focused on integration with existing products and the consistency of the experience.
Standards and focus are what most people view as his ``dictator'' personality.
This is pretty much what, I feel anyway, Microsoft has always lacked.
They have no vision. Remember Ballmer scoffing the very notion that the iPhone would have any success at all, let alone surpass WinMo as it just did.
I cannot say that they have low standards per se. Rather, their standard is to let the user design their software (the focus groups that designed Vista; something about which Gates was proud).
They lack any sort of focus. Vista is a prime example of this. It is obvious when using Vista that no one had a plan. No one provided any focus. Compound this with the myriad of products Microsoft makes which barely even work each other...even in the same product family (incompatibilities between Mac Office and Win Office).
So, yeah, those are the three qualities I want to see in a successor to Jobs. There should be plenty of people at Apple with those qualities. Actually, there are plenty of those people anywhere...people like Ballmer just do not recognize them or think they are important. I trust Jobs to find an appropriate person to replace him.
Also, let's not forget to embrace change. Even someone like Jobs needs to be replaced eventually. They just have to be replaced carefully.
Am I the only one that wants to start a website exclusively dedicated to giving everyone, including criminals of all sorts, detailed instructions on how to use free software to make it very very hard for the police to access their systems?
Not that I condone child porn or any other OMG! crime du jour, but everyone has rights and I think this would be a great form of protest.
Whenever the police whine about wanting their jobs to be easier, it makes me want to throw up.
Not at all. Metaphors only go so far and then you start running into the limitations of the hardware used to interface with the visuals.
For instance, making a virtual store sounds good and might seem familiar to your hypothetical 65 year-old. However, this person did not grow up using a keyboard and mouse to walk through stores. So, the metaphor breaks down very quickly when you have to start implementing controls for navigation through this world. Ultimately, the experience will be more inefficient and frustrating than if the person just went to a real store.
Further, you are only modeling one aspect of the experience: walking through the store. You are not using a "walk out front door, get in car, put key in ignition, drive to store" metaphor to model how to get to that virtual store.
If this hypothetical person is able to start his/her computer, start a web browser, and navigate to the virtual store page, then it is very likely that he/she is also able to understand how to use a web page like Amazon to find products to buy. Therefore, the effort to model the virtual world is moot unless all you want is eye candy that makes the whole experience incredibly inefficient.
Wow, this is +5:Insightful, really?
Soldiers are supposed to want to fight. If you want the Peace Corps, send in the Peace Corps. If you want the Marine Corps, send in the Marine Corps.
What? Really, what does that mean? The Peace Corps does not kill, let alone kill without emotion, so how are ``ethical killing machines'' that kill without emotion equivalent to the Peace Corps? And, by the way, the Marine Corps is supposed to fight with ethics. So, what's your point here?
The whole things sounds like a bunch of Leftist grad students angling for funding. The concept, given the current state of technology, is a pathetic attempt at political correctness.
Read Who Owns Death?. The quest for ``ethical'' means of killing is merely a way to legitimize institutional killing, be it war or the death penalty. It has nothing to do with Left, Right, or Political Correctness.
I'm sure there are some people that would not be horrified by the sight of an inmate catching on fire because the execution staff failed to properly prep him for electrocution. However, a lot of people, both supporters and opponents of the death penalty, were, and that's why Florida does not use the electric chair anymore. It's not that leathal injection is any more humane, really. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it is not. But, it seems humane enough and it allows supporters of the death penalty to think they have the moral high ground.
Same goes for war. It's exactly the same mentality that produces stuff like ``smart'' bombs, UAVs, and now ``ethical killing machines''.
Actually, I disagree with you on one point. Most people do not believe in small/less-intrusive government and free markets. A true conservative does, but most people are not true conservatives.
You can write off ~50% of people that are Democrats leaving you with, more or less, half the country that is Republican.
As far as free markets go, most Republicans do not understand what ``free market'' means. Most ``free market'' people, especially those with kids, would completely freak out if we followed true free market principles and abolished the FDA. These would be the same people calling Obama a socialist while sending their kids to public schools.
As far as less-intrusive government goes, most people are all for using government as a tool to impose their will. One side wants national health care, the other side wants abortion banned. One side is for gun control, the other side is for the PATRIOT Act. Either way, both sides are for government intruding on our lives.
As for smaller government, national health care and the PATRIOT Act are very good examples of how neither side wants smaller government. They just want the parts of government they disagree with to loose resources so that the parts they do agree with can have more.