Interesting as a possible side cause
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are, as with all things, multiple factors:
1. Genetics 2. Environment 3. Disease
Someone who is prone to ulcers (genetics) and works as a stock trader on the floor of Wall Street and doesn't eat well/doesn't exercise (environment) and catches the right germ (disease) is more likely to come down with an ulcer than the sheep herder in Wyoming who's only worry is someone using the word "brokeback" to them.
The same thing could be here. I know people who have struggled with their weight - they exercise, they try to eat well, and yet the pounds don't come off. Perhaps, like ulcers, there can be a simple protein check before dieting and exercise of "OK - looks like you have the virus. Let's clear that up while we change your eating and exercise habits", which will give many people hope before they have to resort to surgery.
Hopefully it won't just be an excuse for the lazy, like the Wall Street trader who'd rather take a pill for the ulcer rather than taking time out to go relax with their family and loved ones.
Now, with that said, I'm heading out and getting a whopper;).
1. Congress gave us this power (which they didn't, sorry) when they approved going to war against Al Queada, and 2. If someone from Al Queada is calling, then we want to know about it - and quick!
However, as another poster pointed out, this latter argument falls apart under the FISA laws which state that you can start a wiretap as long as you go to the courts within 72 hours to get the subpeana. And even at that - it's a secret court! Nobody has to know save for a few people.
So, why not do it? I'm convinced it's because of 1 of 2 reasons:
1. They don't care to have people know at all because they don't think that they could get past any kind of judicial review, 2. They aren't doing specific wire taps, but are scanning and reviewing automatically any phone call from a foreign source.
A combination of the two is probably in effect. I'm willing to bet that their scanning every call coming in from either specific areas (such as Afganistan) and having the computer start checking it out, then alerting an NSA staff member if something sounds interesting (either through voice recognition or just checking the number - if it looks like one that's been used in the past or might have been used by a suspected terrorist, start tracking it).
Either way, it's rather troubling. It's not that I don't think that Bush & Co aren't serious about trying to stop terrorism - I think they're serious about it. The issue is that this kind of behavior is always rife for corruption. J. Edgar Hoover used it to stop "communists", but most of the time it was to keep his power base in check with blackmail and intimidation. Nixon tried to use his power to keep his powerbase by spying on the Democrats (aka - Watergate).
And we're suppose to believe that this power - unchecked and unregulated would only be used for good? What are the odds that someone won't be tempted to listen in on Christian Amanpour's recordings - after all, she talks to Afganistans and middle eastern people all the time, and just happen to listen to her husband's conversations about how to manage the Kerry campaign (or some other ranking Democrat).
Even if people say they won't, we know that absolute power corrupts. If they want to listen on phone calls, fine - they have a process for that to help keep corruption down. If they want to scan all incoming and outgoing calls from the US to other countries, that's fine as long as they get the laws passed to give them the power to do so and check unbalanced power.
Otherwise, the temptation to do something bad will be too much for some - it was too much for President Nixon whom, by all accounts, was a pretty good President. Remember, he thought he was doing the right thing by staying in office, and never dreamed that maybe - just maybe - he had taken his powers too far.
Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong.
First - ever think that the primary job of the ombudsman is to find somebody a Bud when things get bad?
Second - it seems that most of the anger was from a comment that tied Abramoff to both democrats and republicans. Republicans, of course, want to say it's a problem for both sides - the old "Well, don't get mad at us - we were both bad!"
Democrats get mad at that because Abramoff evidently never *directly* gave money to any Democrats. Note the use of the word "directly", since Abramoff's firm *did* give money to some Dems, but nobody's found a Dem that got money right from Abramoff unlike some Repubs.
So now you get one side pissed off because of a percieved inaccuracy (and literally, they are right), and the other side feeling like they have to defend themselves (which they should), and then it's a flame war and OMG! LIKE THE END of the WORLD or something! Oh noes! Teh internets are on FIRE!
Either way, it seems like the Post just didn't handle their filter system. Slashdot and Digg and Kero5hin and a few others have the "self modifying system" - things like "anonymous users get lower views than registered users", "users can label people flamers/spammers/etc". The Post should have put that in first, or just put comments in a separate area so regular readers wouldn't be plagued by Dem and Repub fankids on either side mucking up the issue. Now, they have to throw away the baby with the bathwater (which is too bad, because babies don't like getting thrown into the dumpster. Or so I've heard.)
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
If you're Steve Jobs, you have to be thinking "OK, if I own 5% of Disney, what will that get me?"
Better opportunities for Pixar movies and resources? Check. Better control to keep Disney from making Toy Story 3 horrible? Check.
But more importantly, will this really give him what he really wants at this stage: media control. I think his goal now is to set up iTunes and Apple as the next Sony - make itself the "one stop portal" for all things music/tv/movie, so no matter what you want, you click iTunes and for over that credit card number to get it, then play it on your iPod/computer/Apple TV (or whatever they may call the rumored "Plasma TV's with OS X").
In this way, Apple can truly become the next Sony, including a strong movie/music lineup in its back pocket.
On the other hand, will 5% of Disney really get him there? It's a hard question. It will get him influence, but my bet it that he would want control of the whole pie so he can say "We *will* be putting these movies on iTunes at $9 a pop, and if you don't like it, go form your own animation studio".
It might also buy more problems with Sony, which has its own music/movie center. Right now, Apple is independant enough that it can go to Sony and say "Look, let us sell your music and movies on iTunes - we're not your competitor in the movie space". But if Jobs teams with Apple, how long until Sony decides its better to cut off its own nose rather than allow their entertainment rival to make money off of their products?
He may hold out for a little more, as in "5% of stock plus extra voting powers", and some control over the technology (which would let him walk into the software development area and say "See this stuff? Make it Mac compatible before the next version of 'Disney Horse Adventures' ship.").
I'm betting he won't take it - he's got what he wants on both sides of technology and entertainment, he has control, and it keeps him just independant enough where he can work with either side.
Of course, that's just my opinion - I could be wrong.
Therefore, these proud patroits in West Virginia (death to all tyrants!) were simply providing a means for Americans to purchase pirated movies without supporting Al Queada (or however they spell thier name). After all, we've learned that breaking the law is perfectly legal as long as you put the words "fighting the war on terrorism" in front of it.
Now, if we can just get them to take care of that whole "get money from oil revenues to finance terrorism" thing, and we've got it licked!
Oh. My. Goodness. I have not read about stupidity on such a level since my 7th grade algebra teacher. I read through the issues. Sunlight reflecting? Pulling out a Godwin to compare windmills to Nazi torture tactics? Women having extra periods?
What the hell kind of stupidity is going on here? I used to think that all of the inbreeding was occuring in rural states - but this has got to be the biggest level of stupidity ever. And like my daddy used to say, I can abide a dumb person - that's just an ignorant one.
These people are stupid - which means the inability to learn.
Nor is.Mac a Web portal with all the external content and Web services-a missed opportunity. It has many of the applications that users get for free on other services and with more storage capacity. Apple charges $99.95 for.Mac because it can, but millions of loyal, fanatic Mac users are not using.Mac Mail or iPhoto and instead have well Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr etc. Why should they pay Apple for email and bunch of other ancillary services.
Of course, in each of those cases, there is something the company gets - Google gets to run ads, Yahoo Mail does the same plus hopes you'll spend more for other services, and Flickr hopes you'll sign up for a pro account (which I did so I'd have family members stop bugging me to email photos - now it's camera -> iPhoto -> Flickr, and they get them).
Apple could do something similiar with a tiered system, such that:
Level 1: Free, but you have ads, and ads inserted into the bottom of your emails if you recieve them via SPOP/SIMAP, only X number of photos you can upload at a given time (a la Flickr free account), and you have ads on your photo/blog site.
Level 2: Medium price - full email functionality, some limits on photo space per month, no apple ads.
Level 3: Have at it, kids - it's all yours, no ads on your site (unless you want to put them there to earn your own money), big file storage.
That would get people in - heck, I'd start with the free, and once my wife got into it like the Flickr, she'd have me pay the money.
Of course, this is all just my opinion - I could be wrong.
Just buy an iPod and the upcoming Griffen Tunecenter - it finally does the one thing I've wanted from the video iPod - display a menu on the TV.
Seems that most of the HTPC's I've run across just run into odd complications (usually because they won't just let me rip my DVD's to the hard drive, for fear of having the crap sued out of them). Which leaves either MythTV, or this iPod solution.
Apple's fascination by the media has to do with 3 things:
1. Dominance in entertainment (graphic artists, movie makers, etc). So when most journalists who interact with their geeky movie making counterparts, odds are they're going to see a Mac, no matter what they may be using. So Apple news has a direct impact on these people.
2. Steve Jobs has charisma. You look at the interviews with Bill Gates, or Ellison, or McNealy, and I'm sorry, but these guys are just not photogenic. They hardly sound interesting, and they talk about boring stuff. (More on that in a moment.) But at least Jobs - and the drama of his life, the "rags to riches" story, is at least interesting. Even with his mistakes, at least he makes them *big* and bold.
3. Most technology news is boring. Routers? Boring. Enterprise management? To the usual person, boring. New computer that lets you make movies? Well, that's kind of interesting! Music? That's something people are interested in, not "We can get 10,000 people to use a server to access a database!". My wife gets music - she could care less about using LDAP calls to Active Directory.
The rest of it - the fascination the tech industry has with Apple - is because usually their the first ones to do things in an interesting way. Not all of the ideas are really unique - like the iPod, or cameras on a computer. But they put it on with a style that few companies save Sony perhaps can match, so it feels like it's innovative - and sometimes, the way that Apple does it, it is.
As the article mentions, will this translate into bigger sales? MS dominated thanks to their IBM deal and focusing on business, while Jobs focused on the home. Gates won that part of the war. But now the war is moving into the entertainment business, where Microsoft keeps pushing their product but making slow headway while Apple is embraced by the same media who is fascinated with them.
Eh - so who knows about the future. I know I'll probably pick up a Macbook Pro sometime in the future and try it out, probably put a Windows partition or just use Cedaga for OS X whenever that arises. But I'm sure the fascination with Apple will continue as long as Jobs continues to be interesting.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Most of the responses to this story appear to be "Myspace is just for people to put ugly pictures of themselves!"
But they totally miss where a lot of the appeal of MySpace was coming from. It wasn't from the teenage angst bloggers - it was from the independant bands.
Listen to just about any music based podcast, from "Coverville" to "Insomnia Radio" - especially the latter which emphasizes independant music. Most of the time, you'll hear "the band is at myspace.com/blahblahblah".
Add in the ability to sell your music through MySpace in a simple format, and you have the potential of an iTunes competitor. Not as popular, perhaps, but for a new band, you can make most of your own money, you still own your own music, and you get a known purchasing source which will take care of most of the nitty gritty details for you. Most of the tracks appear to be MP3 DRM-free music. (Shock! Awe!)
It's a long tail kind of thing - the same way that Google and eBay and Apple iTunes Store made money, only more "independant", which gives it the possiblity of being interesting.
*That* is where MySpace is beginning to succeed, and that's why you saw Murdoch trying to control it when people pointed to other sources. It's also why you saw MySpace reverse course - they weren't worried about teen angst. They were worried about the independant musicians jumping elsewhere and MySpace becoming less in the process. I wonder how well the MySpace competitors did when this started happening, and if that's what caused MySpace to go "Crap - our future as an iTunes competitor is about to be SNAFU'ed if we don't stop now".
So, *that's* the real source of the issue, as I see it. Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong.
I have a Tivo, and while I know I could build a MythTV I like the "near idiot proof" nature of the little box so I can let my wife use it to tape her shows (American Idol) while I tape my shows (MythBusters) and our shows and then had to hunt for a USB compatible network device, all I could think was "WTF? Why not spend $10 on Ethernet?"
The other thing I'm very pleased about is the inclusion of the Cablecard option - this gives Tivo a chance to complete with cable boxes - though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
Ah, and I was so hoping to see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo". Somehow, I think I'll survive. WIth the ability to plug in external drives, this has seriously upset my plans to convert my spare PC into a Tivo replacement once the service on the current box runs out in October.
Of course, there's always the possibility Apple will introduce something - but if they do introduce a PVR/Media device, I'm going to expect it to have the same capabilities down to the cablecard that this new Tivo does before I consider it.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
From watching my daughter and her friends, I think they just want to wear the grown up clothing. And when you watch the cartoons, like "Totally Spies", which for the most part is all right save the belly baring outfits, and "Winx Club" which has the girls looking like their about to ask for $50 for "services", it's hard to tell your 6 year old daughter it's just not right.
Odds are, most of the animators/etc who draw teenage heroines in shows don't think about that. They look at the styles and put them in since they're cool. (Now, "W.I.T.C.H." is a good one - I like the story, the girls are strong, and save the "going magical while naked" thing they got from "Sailor Moon", I have little complaint on the clothes. Most of the time.)
And this is a discussion that I've had with my sister in law. The idea isn't to keep her from seeing anything. I know she hears worse at school. She can see things already, and the goal is twofold:
1. To explain what it is so she doesn't get wrong ideas. (For example, if she asks me about gay people getting married, it's not "OMG! THEY'RE GOING TO HELL!", nor is it "Oh, well, you'll find out later." It's a discussion about what it means, why they do it, why some people don't like it, ect.)
At a young age, it's my job as a father to make sure the information sources she runs into as a 6 year old are controlled, so that people don't go "Hey, little girl - getting naked with a 40 year old man is fun!" For now, she knows that strangers can be bad for her, as she grows up and becomes more discerning through meeting people she'll gain her own ability to gauge for herself. How will she know what's "good" and "bad" for her, then? Which leads us to #2.
2. Let her know what her father expects standards of behavior to be.
Right now, my daughter knows that outfits that show off her belly are not allowed, neither are spagetti strings, anything that shows her chest, or skirts that go too high. (And before some dumb ass pipes in, no, we're not talking victorian age clothing. We're talking about T-shirts and jeans and normal skirts, while keeping my daughter from looking like a kinderslut.) She knows that certain words are not to be used unless she wants to get in trouble, and that we don't call people (even her little brother) names. And the younger is learning the same lessons (though at 3, he's still too young for some things.)
My sister in law told me that my daughter, when she becomes a teenager, will probably change into clothes I won't find appropriate and swear and who knows what. I know. I expect it. But - she will know what I expect of her, and she will know that I know she knows.
So when she's a teenager, she probably won't go "Oh, that mean Daddy wouldn't let me play Mario Kart with that guy I met on the Internet with I was six." She probably won't care. But she will know the kinds of people that her father wanted her to associate with, and will know what his standards of her friends are (aka - do they do drugs, are they child molesters, etc). At that point, if she wants to be stupid, there's little I can do.
But she will know the difference. If she learns bad words at school or pictures, she knows these are things that her parents don't find "good". Later, when she can judge for herself, she can learn that subtle difference between "art" and "smut", and decide what she wants.
Hope that clears it up a bit. Because I don't need an invisibility cloak to know what happens at my daughter's school. I just need to let her know what's appropriate.
I agree. I was mentioning the same thing to my wife the other day, how I would let my daughter play the Mario Kart on line. Animal Crossing at least means she has to "know" the other person first - which I can still monitor at a young age.
I'm curious to see if something similar happens on the upcoming Pokemon DS games. Matches can easily be done without exchanging a word - you find an opponent (either random or you enter their 16 digit code a la "Animal Crossing" for someone you know). But you don't have to do any speaking. A simple message of "This opponent wants to fight you!", or "this person wants to trade pokemon".
You don't even have to know the names of their pokemon - just "player sent out an oddish" and using the generic names prevents people from "player sends out penisbreath" or something inane. All that remains is a simple filter to keep out bad player names, and it will be pretty kid friendly and still entertaining. If you need to speak "out of bounds", you're welcome to use email/IM/real world chat.
As cool as Xbox live? Probably not - but as a guy with three little ones, certainly something I could trust.
We know that there was some minor hacking done on the 360 to cheat at Hexic, which caused scores to skyrocket for some players. There was word of another game having the same thing happen (I don't recall the link), so I'm not sure that I buy the "Oh, there was just a bug that's why the scores vanished". More like, they found the problem, fixed it, and don't want to admit that somebody broke a minor security point. It would be better just to say "We found some cheaters, now it's taken care of".
I could almost understand his issue with violent video games like "Grand Theft Auto III" and such. As a father, I don't let my children play them (ages 6, 3, and 1), and reserve those for my own use. While I don't feel that such games contribute to overall violence, I also know there are many better games to be playing with my children (like "Dragon Quest VIII", "Mario Kart", etc).
But I can give a certain amount of respect to Mr. Thompson for standing up for his beliefs and going after them. Or, I would, except his true views were shown when he went after Bill Gates for making "Microsoft Flight Simulator".
By accusing MS for being part of the cause of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Towers, I'm afraid that Mr. Thompson has shown a view that's, well, crazy, for lack of a more polite word. In his universe, flight simulators aren't used to give people an idea of what it's like to fly a plane - it's used by terrorists to kill people. In his world, Tetris probably isn't a challenging puzzle game - it's a method for people to learn how to fit blocks together to seal people inside a la "The Cask of Amontillado".
By Mr. Thompson standards, we would be banished into a world as bad as that ruled by the Taliban, where music, dancing, games, laughter and fun are simply scary things to trick people into doing evil. A game of "cops and robbers" played out by kids 20 years ago would be seen by him as encouraging crime.
So, while he might have had my respect in the past for at least working on something he perceived as a problem, he's shown himself to be in the worst light of those who would deny any human joy for fear of corruption.
Sorry, Jack. When I get home, I'm going to play a game of Chess with my daughter and Sorry with my son - or in your mind, "encouraging my daughter to commit mass atrocities on the battlefield and teaching my son to inflict suffering upon others and encouraging retribution".
From your perspective, it would appear that archeology is a useless science, since it can not "predict" what civilizations will do. Oh, it can tell you "without water, food, etc a group of people will die out", and can recommend possible solutions - but each civilization has made their own way in ways that people can't predict (or, at least not accurately, since we're talking about living organisms.)
The same would be true of evolutionary studies. You can say "Well, based on what we've seen in the past, since this area is dying out, the creatures will need to evolve to deal with less water", but what that solution will be is simply not predictable with current methods (and, if they were, then they could be testable). For example, the solution for some fish dealing with water was to evolve a lung. Other fish survived by a mutation that let them migrate to other streams. Other fish might simply hibernate.
Like an archeology, you can say "We know how someone did it in the past, so these solutions would work", but we can't state what organism will gain a mutation that will let them survive better - at least not with our current tools. Perhaps as we gain a greater understanding of genetics and tie that into raw computing power, we can say "Well, if we put this alligator species *here* it should evolve like this. Let's see if it does!"
I think the confusion is how you're trying to measure this science. Evolution is about *history*, and *why* that history came to be, and what forces triggered it. Using this basic tool, we've been able to see what happens as something like bacteria evolves to deal with new antibiotics: evolve. So from that point of view, it's very accurate in how it predicts. The bacteria that evolve will survive. *How* they do it is area of molecular biologists and geneticists to show what mutations arose, and then evolutionary biologists can match in how those mutations helped them survive and maybe chart what they'll do next.
Sorry if this seems overly argumentative, but there's something about your viewpoint that I'm just not getting. Are you saying the Theory of Evolution is useless because it makes no predictions (which it does, as in my example of the 100,000,000 year old fossil versus the 25,000,000 year old fossil, and "predicting" that there should be a fossil 50,000,000 years old with characteristics of both), or because you think it's all a bunch of rubbish so who cares?
This is one of the indirect questions often raised when people discuss Titan. What conditions are required for life to be possible, and is it possible for it to start without a push from somewhere else?
Not the area of evolution. Evolution studies how species evolve, not how life originated. For that one, ask a different kind of biologist. The answer so far is "considering it was 4 billion years ago, we have some ideas but nothing that pans out. Maybe we'll know in another hundred or a thousand years or something." So as far as Titan is concerned, most people would say "too cold", as far as Venus "too hot", and the Earth "just right". But other than that, we don't know much else, so other scientists are working on it - with testable, provable or disprovable experiments. If you want to pitch ID for the creation of life, then have it be testable, not just "Well, something must of done it - it was God."
I think God's smart enough to make things happen without having to "course correct it", but that's just me.
Second, how accurate are our measurements for dating? I've heard before (I don't work in the field, so I put it on about the same level as rumour), that one of the big criteria for dating samples are where they are in the strata.
This is simplified, but most of the ideas revolve around knowing how things age. For example, carbon dating. We know the decay of carbon, so we can say with certainty "This is X years old because when it was set and not renewing its carbon content, X amount of carbon went through change, so it's this old. Therefore, the thing inside of it should be the same age."
I'll let you go look it up, but that's the premise: knowing how long it takes item A to age and then going backwards from there, then extrapolating the items around it. Perfect? No - but for within a few hundreds or thousands of years against millions of years, it's "close enough" until something better comes along.
Are you honestly telling me that by looking at fossils biologists are able to judge which organism is better able to survive in a given environment?
Yes. If Species 1 had populations that existed for 1,000,000 years, and species 2 stopped reproducing and went extinct after 10,000 years, I think we have a clear example of which one was superior. We have that in the homo sapiens record. There were other offshoots of the hominid account - the ones that died out didn't succeed.
As Mr. Miyagi might have said about how to win: "Him that dead, don't."
But this is a belief. Not a theory. And I will not throw out a perfectly working theory that has been held up under scientific processes just because I like my belief better.
My belief, a paragraph above, was:
Who cares? Until such a being gets on the Megaphone of the Cosmos and says "Hey, dudes - check out Chromosome #15 where I spelled out 'Jesus if fucking metal", I'll trust that They wrote the universe so that we could understand it and grow closer to Them.
My statement goes like this:
You believe until something better comes along. When I was a child, I believed that babies came from storks. When I got older, I had a better belief: babies come from bumping uglies between a man and a woman.
So I won't throw out evolution - a proven and tested theory - for my belief, because evolution does a better job of explaining how species went from fish to humans. My belief dealt with the why, and as an untestable position, it can never be a theory (until we can actually ask said Creator for ourselves - then it becomes testable.)
Faith is fine in its place, but not in the classroom nor as a method of displacing things that can be tested and proven by independent means.
As far as disproving, things are disproved all the time. It's the very system of science.
The world is flat.
Disproved: People sailed around the world and did not fall off.
Evolution could even be disproved - all you need is to provide not "Oh, it's very complex so it can't work", but a real experiment. What experiment would that be? I don't know - that's up to you to figure out. But if you can come up with a real working experiment and go to the fossil record and prove it, then we can let it into science class.
Until then, sorry - it's not even a scientific theory, but a hypothesis.
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There are, as with all things, multiple factors:
;).
1. Genetics
2. Environment
3. Disease
Someone who is prone to ulcers (genetics) and works as a stock trader on the floor of Wall Street and doesn't eat well/doesn't exercise (environment) and catches the right germ (disease) is more likely to come down with an ulcer than the sheep herder in Wyoming who's only worry is someone using the word "brokeback" to them.
The same thing could be here. I know people who have struggled with their weight - they exercise, they try to eat well, and yet the pounds don't come off. Perhaps, like ulcers, there can be a simple protein check before dieting and exercise of "OK - looks like you have the virus. Let's clear that up while we change your eating and exercise habits", which will give many people hope before they have to resort to surgery.
Hopefully it won't just be an excuse for the lazy, like the Wall Street trader who'd rather take a pill for the ulcer rather than taking time out to go relax with their family and loved ones.
Now, with that said, I'm heading out and getting a whopper
The argument has been made in two ways:
1. Congress gave us this power (which they didn't, sorry) when they approved going to war against Al Queada, and
2. If someone from Al Queada is calling, then we want to know about it - and quick!
However, as another poster pointed out, this latter argument falls apart under the FISA laws which state that you can start a wiretap as long as you go to the courts within 72 hours to get the subpeana. And even at that - it's a secret court! Nobody has to know save for a few people.
So, why not do it? I'm convinced it's because of 1 of 2 reasons:
1. They don't care to have people know at all because they don't think that they could get past any kind of judicial review,
2. They aren't doing specific wire taps, but are scanning and reviewing automatically any phone call from a foreign source.
A combination of the two is probably in effect. I'm willing to bet that their scanning every call coming in from either specific areas (such as Afganistan) and having the computer start checking it out, then alerting an NSA staff member if something sounds interesting (either through voice recognition or just checking the number - if it looks like one that's been used in the past or might have been used by a suspected terrorist, start tracking it).
Either way, it's rather troubling. It's not that I don't think that Bush & Co aren't serious about trying to stop terrorism - I think they're serious about it. The issue is that this kind of behavior is always rife for corruption. J. Edgar Hoover used it to stop "communists", but most of the time it was to keep his power base in check with blackmail and intimidation. Nixon tried to use his power to keep his powerbase by spying on the Democrats (aka - Watergate).
And we're suppose to believe that this power - unchecked and unregulated would only be used for good? What are the odds that someone won't be tempted to listen in on Christian Amanpour's recordings - after all, she talks to Afganistans and middle eastern people all the time, and just happen to listen to her husband's conversations about how to manage the Kerry campaign (or some other ranking Democrat).
Even if people say they won't, we know that absolute power corrupts. If they want to listen on phone calls, fine - they have a process for that to help keep corruption down. If they want to scan all incoming and outgoing calls from the US to other countries, that's fine as long as they get the laws passed to give them the power to do so and check unbalanced power.
Otherwise, the temptation to do something bad will be too much for some - it was too much for President Nixon whom, by all accounts, was a pretty good President. Remember, he thought he was doing the right thing by staying in office, and never dreamed that maybe - just maybe - he had taken his powers too far.
Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong.
First - ever think that the primary job of the ombudsman is to find somebody a Bud when things get bad?
Second - it seems that most of the anger was from a comment that tied Abramoff to both democrats and republicans. Republicans, of course, want to say it's a problem for both sides - the old "Well, don't get mad at us - we were both bad!"
Democrats get mad at that because Abramoff evidently never *directly* gave money to any Democrats. Note the use of the word "directly", since Abramoff's firm *did* give money to some Dems, but nobody's found a Dem that got money right from Abramoff unlike some Repubs.
So now you get one side pissed off because of a percieved inaccuracy (and literally, they are right), and the other side feeling like they have to defend themselves (which they should), and then it's a flame war and OMG! LIKE THE END of the WORLD or something! Oh noes! Teh internets are on FIRE!
Either way, it seems like the Post just didn't handle their filter system. Slashdot and Digg and Kero5hin and a few others have the "self modifying system" - things like "anonymous users get lower views than registered users", "users can label people flamers/spammers/etc". The Post should have put that in first, or just put comments in a separate area so regular readers wouldn't be plagued by Dem and Repub fankids on either side mucking up the issue. Now, they have to throw away the baby with the bathwater (which is too bad, because babies don't like getting thrown into the dumpster. Or so I've heard.)
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
If you're Steve Jobs, you have to be thinking "OK, if I own 5% of Disney, what will that get me?"
Better opportunities for Pixar movies and resources? Check.
Better control to keep Disney from making Toy Story 3 horrible? Check.
But more importantly, will this really give him what he really wants at this stage: media control. I think his goal now is to set up iTunes and Apple as the next Sony - make itself the "one stop portal" for all things music/tv/movie, so no matter what you want, you click iTunes and for over that credit card number to get it, then play it on your iPod/computer/Apple TV (or whatever they may call the rumored "Plasma TV's with OS X").
In this way, Apple can truly become the next Sony, including a strong movie/music lineup in its back pocket.
On the other hand, will 5% of Disney really get him there? It's a hard question. It will get him influence, but my bet it that he would want control of the whole pie so he can say "We *will* be putting these movies on iTunes at $9 a pop, and if you don't like it, go form your own animation studio".
It might also buy more problems with Sony, which has its own music/movie center. Right now, Apple is independant enough that it can go to Sony and say "Look, let us sell your music and movies on iTunes - we're not your competitor in the movie space". But if Jobs teams with Apple, how long until Sony decides its better to cut off its own nose rather than allow their entertainment rival to make money off of their products?
He may hold out for a little more, as in "5% of stock plus extra voting powers", and some control over the technology (which would let him walk into the software development area and say "See this stuff? Make it Mac compatible before the next version of 'Disney Horse Adventures' ship.").
I'm betting he won't take it - he's got what he wants on both sides of technology and entertainment, he has control, and it keeps him just independant enough where he can work with either side.
Of course, that's just my opinion - I could be wrong.
that's why I got myself a screen protector - something I learned from the palm pilot days. A fairly low cost - at least compared to another $130.
We know that the MPAA has claimed that buying pirated movies supports terrorism.
Therefore, these proud patroits in West Virginia (death to all tyrants!) were simply providing a means for Americans to purchase pirated movies without supporting Al Queada (or however they spell thier name). After all, we've learned that breaking the law is perfectly legal as long as you put the words "fighting the war on terrorism" in front of it.
Now, if we can just get them to take care of that whole "get money from oil revenues to finance terrorism" thing, and we've got it licked!
Oh. My. Goodness. I have not read about stupidity on such a level since my 7th grade algebra teacher. I read through the issues. Sunlight reflecting? Pulling out a Godwin to compare windmills to Nazi torture tactics? Women having extra periods?
What the hell kind of stupidity is going on here? I used to think that all of the inbreeding was occuring in rural states - but this has got to be the biggest level of stupidity ever. And like my daddy used to say, I can abide a dumb person - that's just an ignorant one.
These people are stupid - which means the inability to learn.
(Sigh.) So, uh, any space up in Canada?
Of course, in each of those cases, there is something the company gets - Google gets to run ads, Yahoo Mail does the same plus hopes you'll spend more for other services, and Flickr hopes you'll sign up for a pro account (which I did so I'd have family members stop bugging me to email photos - now it's camera -> iPhoto -> Flickr, and they get them).
Apple could do something similiar with a tiered system, such that:
Level 1: Free, but you have ads, and ads inserted into the bottom of your emails if you recieve them via SPOP/SIMAP, only X number of photos you can upload at a given time (a la Flickr free account), and you have ads on your photo/blog site.
Level 2: Medium price - full email functionality, some limits on photo space per month, no apple ads.
Level 3: Have at it, kids - it's all yours, no ads on your site (unless you want to put them there to earn your own money), big file storage.
That would get people in - heck, I'd start with the free, and once my wife got into it like the Flickr, she'd have me pay the money.
Of course, this is all just my opinion - I could be wrong.
Just buy an iPod and the upcoming Griffen Tunecenter - it finally does the one thing I've wanted from the video iPod - display a menu on the TV.
Seems that most of the HTPC's I've run across just run into odd complications (usually because they won't just let me rip my DVD's to the hard drive, for fear of having the crap sued out of them). Which leaves either MythTV, or this iPod solution.
Apple's fascination by the media has to do with 3 things:
1. Dominance in entertainment (graphic artists, movie makers, etc). So when most journalists who interact with their geeky movie making counterparts, odds are they're going to see a Mac, no matter what they may be using. So Apple news has a direct impact on these people.
2. Steve Jobs has charisma. You look at the interviews with Bill Gates, or Ellison, or McNealy, and I'm sorry, but these guys are just not photogenic. They hardly sound interesting, and they talk about boring stuff. (More on that in a moment.) But at least Jobs - and the drama of his life, the "rags to riches" story, is at least interesting. Even with his mistakes, at least he makes them *big* and bold.
3. Most technology news is boring. Routers? Boring. Enterprise management? To the usual person, boring. New computer that lets you make movies? Well, that's kind of interesting! Music? That's something people are interested in, not "We can get 10,000 people to use a server to access a database!". My wife gets music - she could care less about using LDAP calls to Active Directory.
The rest of it - the fascination the tech industry has with Apple - is because usually their the first ones to do things in an interesting way. Not all of the ideas are really unique - like the iPod, or cameras on a computer. But they put it on with a style that few companies save Sony perhaps can match, so it feels like it's innovative - and sometimes, the way that Apple does it, it is.
As the article mentions, will this translate into bigger sales? MS dominated thanks to their IBM deal and focusing on business, while Jobs focused on the home. Gates won that part of the war. But now the war is moving into the entertainment business, where Microsoft keeps pushing their product but making slow headway while Apple is embraced by the same media who is fascinated with them.
Eh - so who knows about the future. I know I'll probably pick up a Macbook Pro sometime in the future and try it out, probably put a Windows partition or just use Cedaga for OS X whenever that arises. But I'm sure the fascination with Apple will continue as long as Jobs continues to be interesting.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Now when they start talking about "phase shifting" on Star Trek, it's not just technobabble - it's science!
Most of the responses to this story appear to be "Myspace is just for people to put ugly pictures of themselves!"
But they totally miss where a lot of the appeal of MySpace was coming from. It wasn't from the teenage angst bloggers - it was from the independant bands.
Listen to just about any music based podcast, from "Coverville" to "Insomnia Radio" - especially the latter which emphasizes independant music. Most of the time, you'll hear "the band is at myspace.com/blahblahblah".
Add in the ability to sell your music through MySpace in a simple format, and you have the potential of an iTunes competitor. Not as popular, perhaps, but for a new band, you can make most of your own money, you still own your own music, and you get a known purchasing source which will take care of most of the nitty gritty details for you. Most of the tracks appear to be MP3 DRM-free music. (Shock! Awe!)
It's a long tail kind of thing - the same way that Google and eBay and Apple iTunes Store made money, only more "independant", which gives it the possiblity of being interesting.
*That* is where MySpace is beginning to succeed, and that's why you saw Murdoch trying to control it when people pointed to other sources. It's also why you saw MySpace reverse course - they weren't worried about teen angst. They were worried about the independant musicians jumping elsewhere and MySpace becoming less in the process. I wonder how well the MySpace competitors did when this started happening, and if that's what caused MySpace to go "Crap - our future as an iTunes competitor is about to be SNAFU'ed if we don't stop now".
So, *that's* the real source of the issue, as I see it. Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong.
I have a Tivo, and while I know I could build a MythTV I like the "near idiot proof" nature of the little box so I can let my wife use it to tape her shows (American Idol) while I tape my shows (MythBusters) and our shows and then had to hunt for a USB compatible network device, all I could think was "WTF? Why not spend $10 on Ethernet?"
The other thing I'm very pleased about is the inclusion of the Cablecard option - this gives Tivo a chance to complete with cable boxes - though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
Ah, and I was so hoping to see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo". Somehow, I think I'll survive. WIth the ability to plug in external drives, this has seriously upset my plans to convert my spare PC into a Tivo replacement once the service on the current box runs out in October.
Of course, there's always the possibility Apple will introduce something - but if they do introduce a PVR/Media device, I'm going to expect it to have the same capabilities down to the cablecard that this new Tivo does before I consider it.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
From watching my daughter and her friends, I think they just want to wear the grown up clothing. And when you watch the cartoons, like "Totally Spies", which for the most part is all right save the belly baring outfits, and "Winx Club" which has the girls looking like their about to ask for $50 for "services", it's hard to tell your 6 year old daughter it's just not right.
Odds are, most of the animators/etc who draw teenage heroines in shows don't think about that. They look at the styles and put them in since they're cool. (Now, "W.I.T.C.H." is a good one - I like the story, the girls are strong, and save the "going magical while naked" thing they got from "Sailor Moon", I have little complaint on the clothes. Most of the time.)
That was implied. I just didn't tell *you* because I didn't want to go on for 40 pages about child care according to John Hummel.
I mean - duh.
Actually, already been there.
And this is a discussion that I've had with my sister in law. The idea isn't to keep her from seeing anything. I know she hears worse at school. She can see things already, and the goal is twofold:
1. To explain what it is so she doesn't get wrong ideas. (For example, if she asks me about gay people getting married, it's not "OMG! THEY'RE GOING TO HELL!", nor is it "Oh, well, you'll find out later." It's a discussion about what it means, why they do it, why some people don't like it, ect.)
At a young age, it's my job as a father to make sure the information sources she runs into as a 6 year old are controlled, so that people don't go "Hey, little girl - getting naked with a 40 year old man is fun!" For now, she knows that strangers can be bad for her, as she grows up and becomes more discerning through meeting people she'll gain her own ability to gauge for herself. How will she know what's "good" and "bad" for her, then? Which leads us to #2.
2. Let her know what her father expects standards of behavior to be.
Right now, my daughter knows that outfits that show off her belly are not allowed, neither are spagetti strings, anything that shows her chest, or skirts that go too high. (And before some dumb ass pipes in, no, we're not talking victorian age clothing. We're talking about T-shirts and jeans and normal skirts, while keeping my daughter from looking like a kinderslut.) She knows that certain words are not to be used unless she wants to get in trouble, and that we don't call people (even her little brother) names. And the younger is learning the same lessons (though at 3, he's still too young for some things.)
My sister in law told me that my daughter, when she becomes a teenager, will probably change into clothes I won't find appropriate and swear and who knows what. I know. I expect it. But - she will know what I expect of her, and she will know that I know she knows.
So when she's a teenager, she probably won't go "Oh, that mean Daddy wouldn't let me play Mario Kart with that guy I met on the Internet with I was six." She probably won't care. But she will know the kinds of people that her father wanted her to associate with, and will know what his standards of her friends are (aka - do they do drugs, are they child molesters, etc). At that point, if she wants to be stupid, there's little I can do.
But she will know the difference. If she learns bad words at school or pictures, she knows these are things that her parents don't find "good". Later, when she can judge for herself, she can learn that subtle difference between "art" and "smut", and decide what she wants.
Hope that clears it up a bit. Because I don't need an invisibility cloak to know what happens at my daughter's school. I just need to let her know what's appropriate.
I agree. I was mentioning the same thing to my wife the other day, how I would let my daughter play the Mario Kart on line. Animal Crossing at least means she has to "know" the other person first - which I can still monitor at a young age.
I'm curious to see if something similar happens on the upcoming Pokemon DS games. Matches can easily be done without exchanging a word - you find an opponent (either random or you enter their 16 digit code a la "Animal Crossing" for someone you know). But you don't have to do any speaking. A simple message of "This opponent wants to fight you!", or "this person wants to trade pokemon".
You don't even have to know the names of their pokemon - just "player sent out an oddish" and using the generic names prevents people from "player sends out penisbreath" or something inane. All that remains is a simple filter to keep out bad player names, and it will be pretty kid friendly and still entertaining. If you need to speak "out of bounds", you're welcome to use email/IM/real world chat.
As cool as Xbox live? Probably not - but as a guy with three little ones, certainly something I could trust.
I just ordered a copy - should be here by next week!
We know that there was some minor hacking done on the 360 to cheat at Hexic, which caused scores to skyrocket for some players. There was word of another game having the same thing happen (I don't recall the link), so I'm not sure that I buy the "Oh, there was just a bug that's why the scores vanished". More like, they found the problem, fixed it, and don't want to admit that somebody broke a minor security point. It would be better just to say "We found some cheaters, now it's taken care of".
We are all made of stars?
I could almost understand his issue with violent video games like "Grand Theft Auto III" and such. As a father, I don't let my children play them (ages 6, 3, and 1), and reserve those for my own use. While I don't feel that such games contribute to overall violence, I also know there are many better games to be playing with my children (like "Dragon Quest VIII", "Mario Kart", etc).
But I can give a certain amount of respect to Mr. Thompson for standing up for his beliefs and going after them. Or, I would, except his true views were shown when he went after Bill Gates for making "Microsoft Flight Simulator".
By accusing MS for being part of the cause of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Towers, I'm afraid that Mr. Thompson has shown a view that's, well, crazy, for lack of a more polite word. In his universe, flight simulators aren't used to give people an idea of what it's like to fly a plane - it's used by terrorists to kill people. In his world, Tetris probably isn't a challenging puzzle game - it's a method for people to learn how to fit blocks together to seal people inside a la "The Cask of Amontillado".
By Mr. Thompson standards, we would be banished into a world as bad as that ruled by the Taliban, where music, dancing, games, laughter and fun are simply scary things to trick people into doing evil. A game of "cops and robbers" played out by kids 20 years ago would be seen by him as encouraging crime.
So, while he might have had my respect in the past for at least working on something he perceived as a problem, he's shown himself to be in the worst light of those who would deny any human joy for fear of corruption.
Sorry, Jack. When I get home, I'm going to play a game of Chess with my daughter and Sorry with my son - or in your mind, "encouraging my daughter to commit mass atrocities on the battlefield and teaching my son to inflict suffering upon others and encouraging retribution".
I guess I still don't get your problem.
From your perspective, it would appear that archeology is a useless science, since it can not "predict" what civilizations will do. Oh, it can tell you "without water, food, etc a group of people will die out", and can recommend possible solutions - but each civilization has made their own way in ways that people can't predict (or, at least not accurately, since we're talking about living organisms.)
The same would be true of evolutionary studies. You can say "Well, based on what we've seen in the past, since this area is dying out, the creatures will need to evolve to deal with less water", but what that solution will be is simply not predictable with current methods (and, if they were, then they could be testable). For example, the solution for some fish dealing with water was to evolve a lung. Other fish survived by a mutation that let them migrate to other streams. Other fish might simply hibernate.
Like an archeology, you can say "We know how someone did it in the past, so these solutions would work", but we can't state what organism will gain a mutation that will let them survive better - at least not with our current tools. Perhaps as we gain a greater understanding of genetics and tie that into raw computing power, we can say "Well, if we put this alligator species *here* it should evolve like this. Let's see if it does!"
I think the confusion is how you're trying to measure this science. Evolution is about *history*, and *why* that history came to be, and what forces triggered it. Using this basic tool, we've been able to see what happens as something like bacteria evolves to deal with new antibiotics: evolve. So from that point of view, it's very accurate in how it predicts. The bacteria that evolve will survive. *How* they do it is area of molecular biologists and geneticists to show what mutations arose, and then evolutionary biologists can match in how those mutations helped them survive and maybe chart what they'll do next.
Sorry if this seems overly argumentative, but there's something about your viewpoint that I'm just not getting. Are you saying the Theory of Evolution is useless because it makes no predictions (which it does, as in my example of the 100,000,000 year old fossil versus the 25,000,000 year old fossil, and "predicting" that there should be a fossil 50,000,000 years old with characteristics of both), or because you think it's all a bunch of rubbish so who cares?
Not the area of evolution. Evolution studies how species evolve, not how life originated. For that one, ask a different kind of biologist. The answer so far is "considering it was 4 billion years ago, we have some ideas but nothing that pans out. Maybe we'll know in another hundred or a thousand years or something." So as far as Titan is concerned, most people would say "too cold", as far as Venus "too hot", and the Earth "just right". But other than that, we don't know much else, so other scientists are working on it - with testable, provable or disprovable experiments. If you want to pitch ID for the creation of life, then have it be testable, not just "Well, something must of done it - it was God."
I think God's smart enough to make things happen without having to "course correct it", but that's just me.
This is simplified, but most of the ideas revolve around knowing how things age. For example, carbon dating. We know the decay of carbon, so we can say with certainty "This is X years old because when it was set and not renewing its carbon content, X amount of carbon went through change, so it's this old. Therefore, the thing inside of it should be the same age."
I'll let you go look it up, but that's the premise: knowing how long it takes item A to age and then going backwards from there, then extrapolating the items around it. Perfect? No - but for within a few hundreds or thousands of years against millions of years, it's "close enough" until something better comes along.
Yes. If Species 1 had populations that existed for 1,000,000 years, and species 2 stopped reproducing and went extinct after 10,000 years, I think we have a clear example of which one was superior. We have that in the homo sapiens record. There were other offshoots of the hominid account - the ones that died out didn't succeed.
As Mr. Miyagi might have said about how to win: "Him that dead, don't."
My belief, a paragraph above, was:
My statement goes like this:
You believe until something better comes along. When I was a child, I believed that babies came from storks. When I got older, I had a better belief: babies come from bumping uglies between a man and a woman.
So I won't throw out evolution - a proven and tested theory - for my belief, because evolution does a better job of explaining how species went from fish to humans. My belief dealt with the why, and as an untestable position, it can never be a theory (until we can actually ask said Creator for ourselves - then it becomes testable.)
Faith is fine in its place, but not in the classroom nor as a method of displacing things that can be tested and proven by independent means.
As far as disproving, things are disproved all the time. It's the very system of science.
The world is flat.
Disproved: People sailed around the world and did not fall off.
Evolution could even be disproved - all you need is to provide not "Oh, it's very complex so it can't work", but a real experiment. What experiment would that be? I don't know - that's up to you to figure out. But if you can come up with a real working experiment and go to the fossil record and prove it, then we can let it into science class.
Until then, sorry - it's not even a scientific theory, but a hypothesis.