Re:Comics as real literature
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To be honest I'm not sure that any comics really rise to the level of greatness possible in books and film.
Thats ok, most books and film dont rise to the level of greatness possible in those formats.
Its not the format, its the telling that matters. The vast majority of books, even some of the ones people consider classic, are not as good as they could be.
Re:It's a serious art form
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 1
you fail to include the most relevant detail
he tells them what he is going to do... AFTER he has already done it. Thats not exactly Hollywood 101.
What about the interweaving of the story within a story. The pirate comic book that the kid is reading and the way it intertwines with the main plot line. That was one of my favorite bits of the watchmen
I'm no going to sit here and argue about the Watchmen as great literature (we would have to start by defining great literature), but I think you are being a bit short sighted in calling it juvenile.
if the point of wikipedia is simply to become an academic source then clearly we need a new repository of general knowledge.
What I find confusing about all this though, is why they bother removing data about fictional characters. Does having 500 page of Pokemon somehow make the pages of information on quantum physics "less right." Should I start ignoring Britannica's articles because it has an article on a fictional character?
If the only thing that makes wikipedia non-academic is the fact that anyone can edit it... well your not going to get away from that. The whole idea was to have a collaborative collection of knowledge. Is it worth giving that up?
If you really want an academic subset of wikipeida, make a new site with a new domain and promote articles from wikipedia that have passed some kind of vetting process. Provide notice of this in wikipedia itself. I don't think anyone will complain about their favorite pokemon not making the academic cut.
why would that be a threat to safari? Does apple somehow make money when you use safari on the iPhone? If some users want IE on their iPhone (maybe to get to some damn bank website) I dont see why apple would really care. Most users would just stick with safari, just like they still stick with IE on a windows box even though the alternatives are better.
the ER costs that are being passed on to you are far higher than reasonable doctors visits. Yes, the money comes from somewhere but it currently comes from somewhere too and a more logical use of that money could result in lower costs. Right now the uninsured are effectively "stealing" health care which drives up costs for everyone by quite a bit. A different distribution of the money could result in lower overall costs. Its like an HMO.
An HMO wants you to go to your PCP before going to a specialist, overall this saves money for the HMO since it prevents people from going straight to high cost specialists when they don't need to. HMOs are generally cheaper than PPOs. This would be a similar situation, if the poor no longer go to the very expensive ER (passing that cost on to you because they don't pay and as you say, the money has to come from somewhere) overall health care costs can be driven down.
Ultimately it should be employers paying for most of this and not individual tax payers. Corporations stand to save a lot of money no longer insuring their employees. Any reasonable plan should include taxing away that savings from corporations to fund universal health care. Anything less and you should expect an increase in wage from your employers if capitalism holds up.
clearly the UK monitoring is more big brother-esque but at least its not open to the public, thats why people are less concerned. These aren't people who are worried about being arrested for something they do on camera, these are people who are worried that their co-worker will find out that the frequent a gay BDSM club ever Thursday night wearing leather chaps.
Personally, im more worried about the government monitoring at this point, but I don't care if my coworkers see me in chaps:-)
generally I agree with you, but I use my laptop as a desktop replacement, its my primary machine, so I spend a bit more money on it than other people do.
Still, I can see plenty of use for a $200 machine for email and web browsing. In the end I might change my buying habits if the market keeps going this way. Go with a powerful desktop and a cheep laptop instead of trying to get it all in one machine.
MS must have approved the machine to have a "ready for vista" sticker. They must have set those required specs and apparently the chose to allow anyone with a bare minimum specked computer to put one of those stickers on. They should have at least required the "preferred" specs for such a program to avoid stuff like this.
Don't get me wrong, most people on this site should know better, but we arent the target of this campaign.
if it was called "Secrets of OS X" instead of "The Missing Manual" nobody would bitch. People are more than happy to take any opportunity they can to take a shot at apple. My girlfriend recently bought a vista laptop. It didn't come with a vista manual (or even install/recovery disks)... but there is no "Vista: The missing manual (and recovery disk)"
there is a difference between abuse and addiction. Both are bad in that the substance in question can come to interfere in the day to day life of the user, but one has a physiological component. specifically tolerance and withdrawal. Pot is not addictive but it can be abused.
Then again, almost anything can be abused. There are plenty of people who abuse video games based on the definition but video games have never been shown to be addictive.
There are people out there who use "addictive" substances like heroin without experiencing many of the issues associated with abuse (failure to fulfill obligations, legal/social issues) but do end up with the withdrawal and tolerance bits of addiction. People tend to treat this sort of thing like its all the same, but it isnt. Drug abuse and drug addiction are two very different things.
And I knew kids who were kicked out of school because they sat in their room dicking around on MUDs all day.
College students getting their first taste of real freedom and not being able to handle it is not a drug related issue, its a maturity related issue. I knew plenty of people who smoked pot in college and after college and they are successful, productive members of society. Many of these productive members of society do, in fact, smoke pot.
Smoking pot doesn't make you into a waste of space, being a lazy ass slacker makes you a waste of space. The fact that some slackers choose to spend their lazy, slacker time smoking pot is not relevant. If pot vanished from the planet tomorrow the lazy slackers would just find some other chemical to fill their empty meaningless lives.
I dont think they will and I don't think they have to. If they can move productivity apps off of the desktop and onto the web then a large part of Microsoft's monopoly falls apart. If the stuff that 90% of users do on the web can be done on any internet enabled machine, even an iPhone, then all that matters is the other 10% of what you want to do.
Sure, that stuff will still be OS dependent but most people never do that stuff anyway and the ones that do can choose the platform they want for it. You want to edit videos, maybe you buy a mac, you don't have to worry about all your other applications being incompatible with your windows friends because all your productivity apps are from google and work just fine in firefox on the mac or windows or linux.
Its not so much the OS that gives MS its strength, its the application platform. If applications migrate to a new platform (the web) Microsoft's strength is reduced.
Now I'm not convinced that buying Yahoo could help them with this problem, but I don't see how SAP is going to help them out any.
I priced out a dell and an iMac just the other day for a friend. When I bumped the dell up to a 21" screen (this was not the all in one, since that wasnt a necessary feature for my friend) it came out to under $100 less than the iMac. The two machines were very similar, processor, hard drive, memory and video card.
Sure, the iMac was a touch more expensive but it was in line with the dells cost. In the end I suspect my friend will get the iMac, pretty much because of OS X.
Sure, one could put together a cheeper dell, but it wouldnt compare with the iMac and would be more inline with the Mac Mini.
He was fired, overall, for violating a type of non-compete agreement, but I wonder how enforceable that particular bit of contract is. Non-competes are tricky and are often written in a way that is not legally valid. I am not a lawyer and really wouldn't know, but I would be curious if this particular one is even valid.
how does the average citizen distinguish between a hard worker with the best interests of the country at heart and a very good actor who has his own interest, or some special interest, at heart.
This is the issue... in the end, everything falls apart if the masses elect the wrong people and there is a lot to be gained by looking good while doing bad, so there will always be sleaze in politics.
But since vivid makes DVDs and is threated by the growth of web sites like the ones he would like google to block, I wouldnt go praising him just yet. This is just an attempt to hold on to another dying business model.
religious folks used to be very democratic in the US, its only in recent decades that the republicans have taken over that demographic. Many people believe this is due to a highly organized campaign of talk radio throughout the "bible belt." Rush would be a big part of this actually.
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To be honest I'm not sure that any comics really rise to the level of greatness possible in books and film.
Thats ok, most books and film dont rise to the level of greatness possible in those formats.
Its not the format, its the telling that matters. The vast majority of books, even some of the ones people consider classic, are not as good as they could be.
you fail to include the most relevant detail
he tells them what he is going to do... AFTER he has already done it. Thats not exactly Hollywood 101.
What about the interweaving of the story within a story. The pirate comic book that the kid is reading and the way it intertwines with the main plot line. That was one of my favorite bits of the watchmen
I'm no going to sit here and argue about the Watchmen as great literature (we would have to start by defining great literature), but I think you are being a bit short sighted in calling it juvenile.
if the point of wikipedia is simply to become an academic source then clearly we need a new repository of general knowledge.
What I find confusing about all this though, is why they bother removing data about fictional characters. Does having 500 page of Pokemon somehow make the pages of information on quantum physics "less right." Should I start ignoring Britannica's articles because it has an article on a fictional character?
If the only thing that makes wikipedia non-academic is the fact that anyone can edit it... well your not going to get away from that. The whole idea was to have a collaborative collection of knowledge. Is it worth giving that up?
If you really want an academic subset of wikipeida, make a new site with a new domain and promote articles from wikipedia that have passed some kind of vetting process. Provide notice of this in wikipedia itself. I don't think anyone will complain about their favorite pokemon not making the academic cut.
why would that be a threat to safari? Does apple somehow make money when you use safari on the iPhone? If some users want IE on their iPhone (maybe to get to some damn bank website) I dont see why apple would really care. Most users would just stick with safari, just like they still stick with IE on a windows box even though the alternatives are better.
the ER costs that are being passed on to you are far higher than reasonable doctors visits. Yes, the money comes from somewhere but it currently comes from somewhere too and a more logical use of that money could result in lower costs. Right now the uninsured are effectively "stealing" health care which drives up costs for everyone by quite a bit. A different distribution of the money could result in lower overall costs. Its like an HMO.
An HMO wants you to go to your PCP before going to a specialist, overall this saves money for the HMO since it prevents people from going straight to high cost specialists when they don't need to. HMOs are generally cheaper than PPOs. This would be a similar situation, if the poor no longer go to the very expensive ER (passing that cost on to you because they don't pay and as you say, the money has to come from somewhere) overall health care costs can be driven down.
Ultimately it should be employers paying for most of this and not individual tax payers. Corporations stand to save a lot of money no longer insuring their employees. Any reasonable plan should include taxing away that savings from corporations to fund universal health care. Anything less and you should expect an increase in wage from your employers if capitalism holds up.
clearly the UK monitoring is more big brother-esque but at least its not open to the public, thats why people are less concerned. These aren't people who are worried about being arrested for something they do on camera, these are people who are worried that their co-worker will find out that the frequent a gay BDSM club ever Thursday night wearing leather chaps.
Personally, im more worried about the government monitoring at this point, but I don't care if my coworkers see me in chaps
perhaps he was taken in by packaging that looked something like this
why would that be any worse than one of these power strips?
Squids are the only way to go. Once you have used them a traditional power strip just seems silly.
generally I agree with you, but I use my laptop as a desktop replacement, its my primary machine, so I spend a bit more money on it than other people do.
Still, I can see plenty of use for a $200 machine for email and web browsing. In the end I might change my buying habits if the market keeps going this way. Go with a powerful desktop and a cheep laptop instead of trying to get it all in one machine.
MS must have approved the machine to have a "ready for vista" sticker. They must have set those required specs and apparently the chose to allow anyone with a bare minimum specked computer to put one of those stickers on. They should have at least required the "preferred" specs for such a program to avoid stuff like this.
Don't get me wrong, most people on this site should know better, but we arent the target of this campaign.
OK... I stand corrected
There most certainly is a missing manual for vista.
if it was called "Secrets of OS X" instead of "The Missing Manual" nobody would bitch. People are more than happy to take any opportunity they can to take a shot at apple. My girlfriend recently bought a vista laptop. It didn't come with a vista manual (or even install/recovery disks)... but there is no "Vista: The missing manual (and recovery disk)"
there is a difference between abuse and addiction. Both are bad in that the substance in question can come to interfere in the day to day life of the user, but one has a physiological component. specifically tolerance and withdrawal. Pot is not addictive but it can be abused.
Then again, almost anything can be abused. There are plenty of people who abuse video games based on the definition but video games have never been shown to be addictive.
There are people out there who use "addictive" substances like heroin without experiencing many of the issues associated with abuse (failure to fulfill obligations, legal/social issues) but do end up with the withdrawal and tolerance bits of addiction. People tend to treat this sort of thing like its all the same, but it isnt. Drug abuse and drug addiction are two very different things.
http://www.tcnj.edu/~sa/adep/factsheets/dsm2.htm
And I knew kids who were kicked out of school because they sat in their room dicking around on MUDs all day.
College students getting their first taste of real freedom and not being able to handle it is not a drug related issue, its a maturity related issue. I knew plenty of people who smoked pot in college and after college and they are successful, productive members of society. Many of these productive members of society do, in fact, smoke pot.
Smoking pot doesn't make you into a waste of space, being a lazy ass slacker makes you a waste of space. The fact that some slackers choose to spend their lazy, slacker time smoking pot is not relevant. If pot vanished from the planet tomorrow the lazy slackers would just find some other chemical to fill their empty meaningless lives.
I dont think they will and I don't think they have to. If they can move productivity apps off of the desktop and onto the web then a large part of Microsoft's monopoly falls apart. If the stuff that 90% of users do on the web can be done on any internet enabled machine, even an iPhone, then all that matters is the other 10% of what you want to do.
Sure, that stuff will still be OS dependent but most people never do that stuff anyway and the ones that do can choose the platform they want for it. You want to edit videos, maybe you buy a mac, you don't have to worry about all your other applications being incompatible with your windows friends because all your productivity apps are from google and work just fine in firefox on the mac or windows or linux.
Its not so much the OS that gives MS its strength, its the application platform. If applications migrate to a new platform (the web) Microsoft's strength is reduced.
Now I'm not convinced that buying Yahoo could help them with this problem, but I don't see how SAP is going to help them out any.
I priced out a dell and an iMac just the other day for a friend. When I bumped the dell up to a 21" screen (this was not the all in one, since that wasnt a necessary feature for my friend) it came out to under $100 less than the iMac. The two machines were very similar, processor, hard drive, memory and video card.
Sure, the iMac was a touch more expensive but it was in line with the dells cost. In the end I suspect my friend will get the iMac, pretty much because of OS X.
Sure, one could put together a cheeper dell, but it wouldnt compare with the iMac and would be more inline with the Mac Mini.
that whole section of the article is poorly written but if you look at the whole list you can figure it out.
He was fired, overall, for violating a type of non-compete agreement, but I wonder how enforceable that particular bit of contract is. Non-competes are tricky and are often written in a way that is not legally valid. I am not a lawyer and really wouldn't know, but I would be curious if this particular one is even valid.
Kind of cyber-punk isn't it?
how does the average citizen distinguish between a hard worker with the best interests of the country at heart and a very good actor who has his own interest, or some special interest, at heart.
This is the issue... in the end, everything falls apart if the masses elect the wrong people and there is a lot to be gained by looking good while doing bad, so there will always be sleaze in politics.
But since vivid makes DVDs and is threated by the growth of web sites like the ones he would like google to block, I wouldnt go praising him just yet. This is just an attempt to hold on to another dying business model.
I think his point was that neither side smells like a rose and the sooner people start to realize that the better.
please, the arrogance you reference is at least as common on the right as on the left.
religious folks used to be very democratic in the US, its only in recent decades that the republicans have taken over that demographic. Many people believe this is due to a highly organized campaign of talk radio throughout the "bible belt." Rush would be a big part of this actually.