"I...I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too." Anakin Skywalker Episode II. The most cringe worthy scene in the entire series.
Yes, that was horrible. But one of so damn many. For me it was the drivel about Midichlorians, and then a child's half-baked "yippee"s in horrid Episode 1. The prequels broke suspension of disbelief many many times, but even Jar-Jar didn't bug me as bad as the boy actor playing young Annakin because, you know, the whole damned story is ultimately about Annakin. The kid was so poorly directed and his lines so bad, I never believed in him or in any of his abilities or that someday he would become an arch-villain who would choke the life out of people as easy as look at them. Every seen he was in, every line, and every ridiculously contrived tie-in with the other films (I fucking built C-3PO!!!) shoved me out of the movie to look for the nearest exit. I couldn't forgive that shit. Kids can act well and carry a movie if a director takes them serious enough (e.g., The Sixth Sense), but Lucas didn't bother to give a shit.
Count Dooku in Episode II was pretty fucking cringe-worthy as well, stopping a fight with Yoda because, you know, let's fight with light saber instead. And does Yoda defeat him? No... he does a little thing and walks away, leaving three Jedi holding their limp little dicks. Clued me in on something, though: the Force sucks, particularly the good side. "Failed, have I" in Episode III. No shit, Yoda, because you SUCK! Mace Windu almost smoked Palpatine, except the good side didn't clue him in to an attack coming from amateur Annakin.
You didn't watch the prequels, you fucking endured them, waiting out one dull scene after another, hoping something redemptively cool would happen. Next thing you know, the movie's over. Two hours and ten bucks you'll never have again. Fuck you, Lucas. Take your billions, buy an island, and live on it with all the most expensive, pure, uncut highest-quality coke money your billions can buy. That'll get your mind off Disney giving you the shove.
Behold the "Entrapment Bot." Indistinguishably human-appearing bots everywhere inviting you to chat, e-mail, speak, whatever, and applying continuously evolving AI to lure you into doing something sufficient to justify and automatically generate search and arrest warrants.
More fun, the back-end server can invite law enforcement and IT personnel to place bets how many chats it will take to get you to incriminate yourself. Sound stupid? Some contractor's gonna make millions selling this to surveillance-crazed governments world-wide before writing one line of code.
You saw it here first, folks. Someday, the only safe way to talk shit with somebody is in person, down in a bug-proof hole. And the Entrapment Replicants will number those days, too.
Not raining on the parade, but the last two attempts were out in the ocean, so if something went wrong, a very large object with fuel still in it wouldn't fall on someone's minivan on I-95 on the way to grandma's house in Boca Raton.
How come this time around SpaceX had the cajones to return the vehicle to Florida? At the altitude this thing reaches, wouldn't a small ballistic error and motor failure (resulting, say, from a little software error that reboots the controller) send the launcher anywhere from a few feet to multiple miles off target? Like Ft. Lauderdale?
I mean, it's fuck crazy cool what just happened, truly, but I sure hope it's got old-fashioned parachutes as a backup before it lands by accident in a retirement community, because the plan is to launch and land a lot more of them and something is bound to go a little wack.
I think my number (1) pretty well covers (4). Do nothing is the 'right thing to do' but politically its not going happen. If you stop people like Trump and Cruz from solving the problem in their lousy but not all together bad for you and I way, you will get Hilliary, Jeb, or Marco doing something that will be a whole lot more shitty.
"Politically" the "do nothing" may seem impossible, but "realistically" it probably will. Candidates say a lot of shit on the road to get their drones to yell and scream on TV so that they appear popular, and thereby get people to support them in polls because you don't want to look like you're backing a loser. Thus, the Trump-radical snowball effect.
But exactly HOW is anyone going to "shut down", or even "monitor", the Internet, particularly without also affecting the MONEY that depends on the Internet every day?
Trump's running as a Republican, and the only thing Republicans can agree on is they don't like government doing anything with money, be that spending it or regulating it. Doing anything significant to the Internet will require a LOT of BOTH. The NSA is already spending metric tons of cash on the latest gear to sniff out the Internet, and they didn't catch a whiff of this (then again, if you're a crazed loner like the Colorado Springs shooter, anyone remember him? shutting down the Internet wouldn't have done a damn thing).
Thus, this is the kind of thing that will get a lot of lip service, but if actually elected, will get nowhere.
Thank you for setting us straight. But I would like to politely remind you that the beta period for Windows 10 was supposed to end last Summer, and Windows 10 is now supposed to be in general release. This kind of mess shouldn't be happening.
Those of us with longer memories remember that this is Microsoft standard procedure with its operating systems: beta test via the general public for at least a year, including taking liberties to break people's machines in the interest of getting the OS right. This happened with Win 2000 until the first or second SP, XP until the second SP, and Windows 7 was kind of an SP for Vista (plus allowing time for hardware and drivers to catch up).
The reason XP and 7 stick around is because they each have evolved into something solid and reliable, but they got that way through a painful first year or so, after which Microsoft stopped adding features and just stuck with fixing critical bugs. So, warts and all, XP and 7 are stable, and you can write software and drivers for them and pretty much count on them working into the foreseeable future.
With 10, however, Microsoft is not only chasing the desktop, but also this crazy goal of grabbing the phone and tablet market. So how long should the Windows community expect Windows 10 to re-arrange itself whenever Microsoft feels like it? Windows 10 Home Edition (and Pro? can't remember) is the first OS I know of that actually forces updates upon people, kind of like the androids turning red in "I, Robot". Sure, this eliminates the problem of users who stick with buggy, malware-prone versions so common with XP, but more thoughtful users (and IT managers) now have to consider whether 10 is going to render something unusable, literally overnight with a mandatory update. Microsoft is apparently aware of this problem, which is why they permit Enterprise users to shut off automatic updates.
But non-Enterprise users want a stable, reliable platform, too. Right now, that means sticking with 7. My guess is that's part of Microsoft's master plan, why 7 is still officially supported, whereas people with 10 are still considered "early adopters" who should expect to go along with all the updates and spyware intended to "improve the Windows 10 experience".
Would be nice to know when beta is really over, hopefully before 7 goes the way of XP.
It's not about sympathy, and may not even be about the family. It's about lawyers, and whether it can be shown that the kid was singled-out because of his appearance or (what people assume to be) his religion.
Yeah, today it's fun/acceptable to assume he's a bad guy because his name is Ahmed. But sub in some other minority (e.g., Asian, Canadian, Mutant, Prawn, or White-Male) who got the third-degree over a completely false alarm, and you clearly have a case that has been time-tested in the courts. The lawyer just has to show a jury that none of this would have happened if the offensive clock had belonged to Susie Blue-eyes with curly red hair and a polka-dot skirt, instead of a brown-skinned boy named Ahmed (or an even darker-skinned fellow named Flav). If so, he was singled-out because of his ethnicity/color of his skin, and we can move on to discussing damages.
Q: How do you know she is a witch? A: She looks like one!
Regardless, it's entirely about lawyers now. Ahmed is reduced to just a pawn in a bigger game, particularly as he's just a kid and all. Chances are anyway this will end in a settlement. By the time this ever gets to trial, maybe some other ethnic group will be on the hot-seat.
RALPH: Now, look Norton, your gonna go to the school with this clock I made that looks just like a bomb from the movies.
NORTON: Okay! What happens then, Ralph?
RALPH: What happens then? What happens then? Then, they go completely ape shit, and they arrest you and cuff you and give you a good cavity search, and then, you and me call this lawyer I heard about, and we SUE and make MILLIONS! It's fool-proof, Norton! FOOL-PROOF!
NORTON: I dunno Ralph! What if they think it's just a clock?
RALPH: Norton!
Enter ALICE
ALICE: Ralph Kramden! Are you cooking up another one of your schemes again?
RALPH: One of these days, Alice... POW!!! Right in the kisser!
THIS. My bet is they did not once ask him to name his religion or what religious establishment his parents drag him to each week. Nor would they have cared what his answer was. It wouldn't have mattered if had a stack of Joel Osteen books in his locker and a card-carrying member of the "700 Club"... he LOOKS LIKE one of 'em terrerists ya see on TV, and had the NERVE to come to school with a thing with wires and flashy lights on it.
Pharma ads have been growing like weeds in TV spots, pushing aside old stalwarts like cars and beer. Even better for the networks, pharma ads tends to be long, 60 seconds or even more, easily filling ad space, including some of the most expensive ad space a network sells (like the Evening News). If they all went away, big revenue for the big networks would go up in smoke.
Of course, I'd love it. Save me from having to skip over them all the time, 'cause they're horrible, the way they show idyllic scenes of fantasy family life while a voice-over rattles off legaleze and side-effects. Good drinking game, take a shot every time you hear the phrase "can lead to death".
How else will you learn that the miracle drug you saw advertised a week ago is causing death and injury worthy of substantial compensation?
Week one: "Hoomirratt has made a difference in my lung function!" Week two: "This is an Important Announcement for people who took Hoomirratt, or their grieving loved ones." Two shots if both ads are running at the same time.
While it's a good thing to take a moment and thoughtfully consider where ISIS may be coming from ("know your enemy" is may be distasteful for the impatient, but it's the smart way to go), once you get past all the smoke and mirrors of all the religious and political propaganda, ISIS is a blown up street gang making their way by the classic trades of evil: murder, rape, pillaging, and extortion. That's how they survive. That's how the organization sustains itself, and the unknown fatcats who run it.
You think ISIS takes territory in Iraq over some holy mission? The Caliphate? Bullshit! They take territory because they gotta eat and buy more ammunition, or else the whole thing will start coming apart leaving the leaders with no protection. They rape and blow up ancient artifacts to keep themselves occupied during down time, lest some of the new recruits leave or start fighting each other or seek out revenge against the bosses who beat on them.
Every crime organization has some narrative for excusing the fact that they have to steal or extort everything they have, why they can't lead ordinary lives. ISIS is a glorified street gang, and once their completely invested in rape-murder-pillage-extortion for making their way in the world such that there's no turning back, you've got evil.
Again, it's good to think about them and figure their point of view, but recall the President in Independent Day. Even after DC, New York, and god knows where else had been blown up by the aliens, he was still like "they're not evil" until he accidentally mind-melded with one of them. Then, that idiot finally got what everyone in the audience already knew. Don't be like him. You don't have to mind-meld with a guy who makes a living strapping bombs onto kids to know he's an evil fuck, no matter what religious verses come out of his mouth.
Maybe this video will help you, some schmuck lighting up a news chopper, caught on film. It doesn't take much, particularly at night. In the video, when the laser hits just right, the entire canopy lights up green. Even through the video camera, the light shows as very, very bright, bright enough to burn the eyelid and cornea leading to blindness (which is not cool when you need to be piloting an aircraft).
It should be common knowledge by now that this is stupid stupid shit. It's only sheer luck that this idiocy hasn't incapacitated a pilot to the point that the aircraft went down.
You mean something like this? Seriously... how did the 401K become the predominant retirement vehicle in the U.S., anyway? Does it REALLY make sense to expect markets to increase in value without limit, at a sufficient rate to keep retirees alive? Does it really make sense to expect every American to be a part-time investor, or expect commercial retirement funds to "do the right thing" and invest everybody's nest eggs wisely and successfully? Maybe pensions sound like "wasteful spending" these days, but they're a helluva lot better than grandpa knocking on the door, hoping to live at your place for the rest of his life 'cause the oil market took a hit (and your account ain't lookin' so hot either). And if anyone's a true believer in the trustworthiness of the financial industry, I URGE them to take your car title to to a title loan company, and enjoy a big spoonful of what the industry is ready to dish out.
The report goes on to say "Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also invited the teenager to drop by his California-based company. "Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed," he wrote on his Facebook page.
I maintain that he shortly will be on the circuit of morning news shows. Congrats, kid, you're a star. Don't blow it.
From the report:
The incident has launched a social media campaign called #IStandWithAhmed, which was the No. 1 trending topic in the United States on Twitter on Wednesday with about 600,000 tweets, many critical of the school district and police.
"My hobby is to invent stuff," Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News in a video it posted online.
He told the newspaper he enjoys robotics and was looking to continue his interests as he started high school so he showed the clock, which had a digital display and a circuit board, to a teacher. The teacher notified officials.
"They took me to a room filled with five officers," Mohamed told the Morning News.
A spokeswoman for the Irving Independent School District said at a news conference that school officials could not discuss the matter to protect the student's privacy. Police said no charges have been filed and they considered the case closed.
Mohamed was handcuffed and taken to a detention center where he was fingerprinted and had mug shots taken. He was freed when his parents came for him.
Mohamed has been suspended from school, the Morning News said.
Police said the device was in a case and could be mistaken for a bomb. Police spokesman James McLellan said Mohamed's religion had nothing to do with their response.
Two school police officers initially questioned the student and he told them he had built a clock. He did not offer further explanation, McLellan said.
"He didn't explain properly what it was and they felt compelled to arrest him," McLellan said.
If this kid is not to become a terrorist (or spend the rest of his life on a no-fly list), his parents need to contact a publicist and GET HIS ASS ON THE TODAY SHOW. Tearfully explain to Matt Lauer that it was all a big misunderstanding, how frightened his parents were, show some tears running down Matt's face as he speaks softly and sympathetic and reports that nobody from the school or police or governor's office returned requests for comment... the kid will get his 15 minutes of fame and the scholarships will start to roll in. Kickstarter to help this family move to a decent, tolerant town. Four more years, he'll be at an Ivy League school (oh, you're THAT kid!).
That wasn't in the GA release, there was a Dial-Up Networking update that eventually got rolled into a Service Pack. Before that you have to install PPP drivers etc supplied by your ISP.
You gotta razor-sharp memory on you, my friend. I guess my Gateway came with the update already packaged, so I never knew early adopters still had to hassle with SLIP or PPP apps. Either way, Microsoft deserves credit for making dial-up as painless as your modem and your ISP could allow.
Another aspect of Win 95, kinda lost now, was it was fun. The Plus! cd packed in all these themes that actually worked, changing fonts, icons, colors, wallpaper, screensaver, and (my favorite) system sounds to an aquarium, a haunted house, sports, and other cool time-wasting stuff. The aquarium screensaver was quite impressive. Sure it ate some CPU, but by the time Pentium 133's were common, who cared? Some of the system sounds from that era I still keep around and plug into Windows, 'cause some of them were just plain well done.
One of my ongoing beefs with Microsoft is how, with each release, they take more of this away. I didn't mind "Luna" on XP, at least not in principle, but they only released 3 possible colors (plus a black Zune theme if you could find it). Otherwise, Luna was locked down (although "classic" was still available).
It got worse from there. On a lot of systems, you have to go through a lot of settings to get Aero to start working even if you have adequate display hardware, and once it's working there's not much you can do with it. Moreover, these things they call "themes" in Windows 7-10 aren't themes at all - they're little more than a wallpaper (albeit a pretty one). Little else can be changed. You have to go skinning or buy Windows Blinds to do anything close to what Windows 95 offered with Plus!, and these methods involve messing with system files which Win 10's mandatory system updates may well wipe out on a regular basis.
Windows 95 was a product that Microsoft was determined to make people want to use on a PC at home. But the guys behind it have probably all retired with their stock options, and the new people figure you'll buy Windows 'cause you just have to. Fuck having fun, give us your ID, your browsing history and your shopping habits. Click on this live tile, watch this ad. Buy a tablet and a phone, so we can track where you're at. It's been 20 years since Windows 95 and we got TELEMETRY!
Windows 95, if I remember correctly, solved the modem-to-internet problem. Up until then, I remember getting a modem to dial out meant starting some specialized dialer app or other (like AOL), and this might make it possible for other internet programs like FTP or telnet or Gopher or Navigator to work. Windows 95 had all this plumbing built-in. You set up your dial-up number (or two) and account information in a control panel applet, and then whenever an IP-aware program or app tapped for an address that wasn't available locally, the modem would automagically wake up and dial your ISP while your program patiently waited for the handshaking to complete.
This was pretty damned cool. You could have a LAN card and a modem on the same system, do all sorts of LAN-based stuff and the modem would stay asleep until you pinged a host outside the LAN. It. Just. Worked. With Windows 95, people could ditch AOL, and just subscribe to something cheap and simple like Earthlink. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Macs got this functionality until the iMac in 1998. For Windows 95 users, this made the Internet a LOT easier to use, and meant any internet app like Navigator would just plain work.
This magic carried on into Windows 2000. I once carried a mid-size office LAN over a single dial-up bridged by a Windows 2000 box and a modem. Windows reliably squeezed every packet through, and re-dialed automatically whenever the connection went down. Slow, but it worked! Why do something like this? Because Verizon couldn't deliver our T1 on time!
History will tell you that Apple was in decline when Windows 95 came out. This was the period of the Centris and the Performa lines, plasticky John Sculley potato-chip models (just take the same ingredients and re-package 'em), followed by the rocky PowerPC transition that never delivered the holy-shit-fast performance that it promised, even while "Jean-Louis Gassée... steadfastly refused to lower the profit margins on Mac computers" and helped solidify Apple's reputation as being overpriced for what you get (you wanna cd-rom with that?), particularly as Intel forged steadily forward with the Pentium.
So even if Apple was first, in the mid-90's the desktop computer market was ripe for the taking. All Microsoft had to do was re-invent Windows without the Program Manager and make it work on any and all those crappy 386's still out there, with their shitty 14-inch color monitors, and fuck knows what peripherals. But they did it. It might run slow as shit on a 386, but on a Pentium with some RAM and a decent graphics card (S3 anyone? Matrox? Number-9?), you could drive a 19-inch monitor at full resolution. and the sound card worked! and this kind of rig was affordable! Remember computer shopper? Fully loaded PC's were getting CHEAP! and with Windows 95, they could launch and run Doom and Duke 3D (and, oh yeah, Lotus 123)!
All praise to the right-click menu. The right-click context menu was so intuitively useful that even Apple-users started missing that second mouse button. Apple eventually caved and adopted context menus in their own OS, and started making mice that, if tweaked in the control panel, would behave as if they had an honest right-side button.
If some other UI did this first, somebody post about it. Otherwise, Windows 95 gets a lot of respect for getting this right.
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"I...I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too." Anakin Skywalker Episode II. The most cringe worthy scene in the entire series.
Yes, that was horrible. But one of so damn many. For me it was the drivel about Midichlorians, and then a child's half-baked "yippee"s in horrid Episode 1. The prequels broke suspension of disbelief many many times, but even Jar-Jar didn't bug me as bad as the boy actor playing young Annakin because, you know, the whole damned story is ultimately about Annakin. The kid was so poorly directed and his lines so bad, I never believed in him or in any of his abilities or that someday he would become an arch-villain who would choke the life out of people as easy as look at them. Every seen he was in, every line, and every ridiculously contrived tie-in with the other films (I fucking built C-3PO!!!) shoved me out of the movie to look for the nearest exit. I couldn't forgive that shit. Kids can act well and carry a movie if a director takes them serious enough (e.g., The Sixth Sense), but Lucas didn't bother to give a shit.
Count Dooku in Episode II was pretty fucking cringe-worthy as well, stopping a fight with Yoda because, you know, let's fight with light saber instead. And does Yoda defeat him? No... he does a little thing and walks away, leaving three Jedi holding their limp little dicks. Clued me in on something, though: the Force sucks, particularly the good side. "Failed, have I" in Episode III. No shit, Yoda, because you SUCK! Mace Windu almost smoked Palpatine, except the good side didn't clue him in to an attack coming from amateur Annakin.
You didn't watch the prequels, you fucking endured them, waiting out one dull scene after another, hoping something redemptively cool would happen. Next thing you know, the movie's over. Two hours and ten bucks you'll never have again. Fuck you, Lucas. Take your billions, buy an island, and live on it with all the most expensive, pure, uncut highest-quality coke money your billions can buy. That'll get your mind off Disney giving you the shove.
or have a short memory, particularly where something involves getting laid or getting rich.
Behold the "Entrapment Bot." Indistinguishably human-appearing bots everywhere inviting you to chat, e-mail, speak, whatever, and applying continuously evolving AI to lure you into doing something sufficient to justify and automatically generate search and arrest warrants.
More fun, the back-end server can invite law enforcement and IT personnel to place bets how many chats it will take to get you to incriminate yourself. Sound stupid? Some contractor's gonna make millions selling this to surveillance-crazed governments world-wide before writing one line of code.
You saw it here first, folks. Someday, the only safe way to talk shit with somebody is in person, down in a bug-proof hole. And the Entrapment Replicants will number those days, too.
I get it. And nice graphic of the flight plan, BTW. FL remains safe from space debris and Space-X rocks. Looking forward to seeing them repeat.
Not raining on the parade, but the last two attempts were out in the ocean, so if something went wrong, a very large object with fuel still in it wouldn't fall on someone's minivan on I-95 on the way to grandma's house in Boca Raton.
How come this time around SpaceX had the cajones to return the vehicle to Florida? At the altitude this thing reaches, wouldn't a small ballistic error and motor failure (resulting, say, from a little software error that reboots the controller) send the launcher anywhere from a few feet to multiple miles off target? Like Ft. Lauderdale?
I mean, it's fuck crazy cool what just happened, truly, but I sure hope it's got old-fashioned parachutes as a backup before it lands by accident in a retirement community, because the plan is to launch and land a lot more of them and something is bound to go a little wack.
I think my number (1) pretty well covers (4). Do nothing is the 'right thing to do' but politically its not going happen. If you stop people like Trump and Cruz from solving the problem in their lousy but not all together bad for you and I way, you will get Hilliary, Jeb, or Marco doing something that will be a whole lot more shitty.
"Politically" the "do nothing" may seem impossible, but "realistically" it probably will. Candidates say a lot of shit on the road to get their drones to yell and scream on TV so that they appear popular, and thereby get people to support them in polls because you don't want to look like you're backing a loser. Thus, the Trump-radical snowball effect.
But exactly HOW is anyone going to "shut down", or even "monitor", the Internet, particularly without also affecting the MONEY that depends on the Internet every day?
Trump's running as a Republican, and the only thing Republicans can agree on is they don't like government doing anything with money, be that spending it or regulating it. Doing anything significant to the Internet will require a LOT of BOTH. The NSA is already spending metric tons of cash on the latest gear to sniff out the Internet, and they didn't catch a whiff of this (then again, if you're a crazed loner like the Colorado Springs shooter, anyone remember him? shutting down the Internet wouldn't have done a damn thing).
Thus, this is the kind of thing that will get a lot of lip service, but if actually elected, will get nowhere.
Thank you for setting us straight. But I would like to politely remind you that the beta period for Windows 10 was supposed to end last Summer, and Windows 10 is now supposed to be in general release. This kind of mess shouldn't be happening.
Those of us with longer memories remember that this is Microsoft standard procedure with its operating systems: beta test via the general public for at least a year, including taking liberties to break people's machines in the interest of getting the OS right. This happened with Win 2000 until the first or second SP, XP until the second SP, and Windows 7 was kind of an SP for Vista (plus allowing time for hardware and drivers to catch up).
The reason XP and 7 stick around is because they each have evolved into something solid and reliable, but they got that way through a painful first year or so, after which Microsoft stopped adding features and just stuck with fixing critical bugs. So, warts and all, XP and 7 are stable, and you can write software and drivers for them and pretty much count on them working into the foreseeable future.
With 10, however, Microsoft is not only chasing the desktop, but also this crazy goal of grabbing the phone and tablet market. So how long should the Windows community expect Windows 10 to re-arrange itself whenever Microsoft feels like it? Windows 10 Home Edition (and Pro? can't remember) is the first OS I know of that actually forces updates upon people, kind of like the androids turning red in "I, Robot". Sure, this eliminates the problem of users who stick with buggy, malware-prone versions so common with XP, but more thoughtful users (and IT managers) now have to consider whether 10 is going to render something unusable, literally overnight with a mandatory update. Microsoft is apparently aware of this problem, which is why they permit Enterprise users to shut off automatic updates.
But non-Enterprise users want a stable, reliable platform, too. Right now, that means sticking with 7. My guess is that's part of Microsoft's master plan, why 7 is still officially supported, whereas people with 10 are still considered "early adopters" who should expect to go along with all the updates and spyware intended to "improve the Windows 10 experience".
Would be nice to know when beta is really over, hopefully before 7 goes the way of XP.
It's not about sympathy, and may not even be about the family. It's about lawyers, and whether it can be shown that the kid was singled-out because of his appearance or (what people assume to be) his religion.
Yeah, today it's fun/acceptable to assume he's a bad guy because his name is Ahmed. But sub in some other minority (e.g., Asian, Canadian, Mutant, Prawn, or White-Male) who got the third-degree over a completely false alarm, and you clearly have a case that has been time-tested in the courts. The lawyer just has to show a jury that none of this would have happened if the offensive clock had belonged to Susie Blue-eyes with curly red hair and a polka-dot skirt, instead of a brown-skinned boy named Ahmed (or an even darker-skinned fellow named Flav). If so, he was singled-out because of his ethnicity/color of his skin, and we can move on to discussing damages.
Q: How do you know she is a witch? A: She looks like one!
Regardless, it's entirely about lawyers now. Ahmed is reduced to just a pawn in a bigger game, particularly as he's just a kid and all. Chances are anyway this will end in a settlement. By the time this ever gets to trial, maybe some other ethnic group will be on the hot-seat.
RALPH: Now, look Norton, your gonna go to the school with this clock I made that looks just like a bomb from the movies.
NORTON: Okay! What happens then, Ralph?
RALPH: What happens then? What happens then? Then, they go completely ape shit, and they arrest you and cuff you and give you a good cavity search, and then, you and me call this lawyer I heard about, and we SUE and make MILLIONS! It's fool-proof, Norton! FOOL-PROOF!
NORTON: I dunno Ralph! What if they think it's just a clock?
RALPH: Norton!
Enter ALICE
ALICE: Ralph Kramden! Are you cooking up another one of your schemes again?
RALPH: One of these days, Alice... POW!!! Right in the kisser!
ALICE: Ahhh, shaddap Ralph!
[Laughter, Applause]
THIS. My bet is they did not once ask him to name his religion or what religious establishment his parents drag him to each week. Nor would they have cared what his answer was. It wouldn't have mattered if had a stack of Joel Osteen books in his locker and a card-carrying member of the "700 Club"... he LOOKS LIKE one of 'em terrerists ya see on TV, and had the NERVE to come to school with a thing with wires and flashy lights on it.
FYI, genetic science and the big bang theory began with members of the clergy.
Please cite. Like, seriously, would like to know.
Pharma ads have been growing like weeds in TV spots, pushing aside old stalwarts like cars and beer. Even better for the networks, pharma ads tends to be long, 60 seconds or even more, easily filling ad space, including some of the most expensive ad space a network sells (like the Evening News). If they all went away, big revenue for the big networks would go up in smoke.
Of course, I'd love it. Save me from having to skip over them all the time, 'cause they're horrible, the way they show idyllic scenes of fantasy family life while a voice-over rattles off legaleze and side-effects. Good drinking game, take a shot every time you hear the phrase "can lead to death".
How else will you learn that the miracle drug you saw advertised a week ago is causing death and injury worthy of substantial compensation?
Week one: "Hoomirratt has made a difference in my lung function!"
Week two: "This is an Important Announcement for people who took Hoomirratt, or their grieving loved ones."
Two shots if both ads are running at the same time.
While it's a good thing to take a moment and thoughtfully consider where ISIS may be coming from ("know your enemy" is may be distasteful for the impatient, but it's the smart way to go), once you get past all the smoke and mirrors of all the religious and political propaganda, ISIS is a blown up street gang making their way by the classic trades of evil: murder, rape, pillaging, and extortion. That's how they survive. That's how the organization sustains itself, and the unknown fatcats who run it.
You think ISIS takes territory in Iraq over some holy mission? The Caliphate? Bullshit! They take territory because they gotta eat and buy more ammunition, or else the whole thing will start coming apart leaving the leaders with no protection. They rape and blow up ancient artifacts to keep themselves occupied during down time, lest some of the new recruits leave or start fighting each other or seek out revenge against the bosses who beat on them.
Every crime organization has some narrative for excusing the fact that they have to steal or extort everything they have, why they can't lead ordinary lives. ISIS is a glorified street gang, and once their completely invested in rape-murder-pillage-extortion for making their way in the world such that there's no turning back, you've got evil.
Again, it's good to think about them and figure their point of view, but recall the President in Independent Day. Even after DC, New York, and god knows where else had been blown up by the aliens, he was still like "they're not evil" until he accidentally mind-melded with one of them. Then, that idiot finally got what everyone in the audience already knew. Don't be like him. You don't have to mind-meld with a guy who makes a living strapping bombs onto kids to know he's an evil fuck, no matter what religious verses come out of his mouth.
Well, at least he had the dignity to quit. Real politicians double-down on their crazy until a fanbase emerges because he's being a "maverick".
Maybe this video will help you, some schmuck lighting up a news chopper, caught on film. It doesn't take much, particularly at night. In the video, when the laser hits just right, the entire canopy lights up green. Even through the video camera, the light shows as very, very bright, bright enough to burn the eyelid and cornea leading to blindness (which is not cool when you need to be piloting an aircraft).
It should be common knowledge by now that this is stupid stupid shit. It's only sheer luck that this idiocy hasn't incapacitated a pilot to the point that the aircraft went down.
You mean something like this?
Seriously... how did the 401K become the predominant retirement vehicle in the U.S., anyway? Does it REALLY make sense to expect markets to increase in value without limit, at a sufficient rate to keep retirees alive? Does it really make sense to expect every American to be a part-time investor, or expect commercial retirement funds to "do the right thing" and invest everybody's nest eggs wisely and successfully? Maybe pensions sound like "wasteful spending" these days, but they're a helluva lot better than grandpa knocking on the door, hoping to live at your place for the rest of his life 'cause the oil market took a hit (and your account ain't lookin' so hot either). And if anyone's a true believer in the trustworthiness of the financial industry, I URGE them to take your car title to to a title loan company, and enjoy a big spoonful of what the industry is ready to dish out.
Boehner to Pope: "Holy Father, I can't take this anymore."
Pope to Boehner: "Life is short, my son. Dump these idiots and learn to drive a truck."
The "bomb" is pictured here, as part of a Reuters story that the kid has won a personal invitation from President Barack Obama on Wednesday to attend an astronomy night at the White House.
The report goes on to say "Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also invited the teenager to drop by his California-based company. "Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed," he wrote on his Facebook page.
I maintain that he shortly will be on the circuit of morning news shows. Congrats, kid, you're a star. Don't blow it.
From the report:
The incident has launched a social media campaign called #IStandWithAhmed, which was the No. 1 trending topic in the United States on Twitter on Wednesday with about 600,000 tweets, many critical of the school district and police.
"My hobby is to invent stuff," Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News in a video it posted online.
He told the newspaper he enjoys robotics and was looking to continue his interests as he started high school so he showed the clock, which had a digital display and a circuit board, to a teacher. The teacher notified officials.
"They took me to a room filled with five officers," Mohamed told the Morning News.
A spokeswoman for the Irving Independent School District said at a news conference that school officials could not discuss the matter to protect the student's privacy. Police said no charges have been filed and they considered the case closed.
Mohamed was handcuffed and taken to a detention center where he was fingerprinted and had mug shots taken. He was freed when his parents came for him.
Mohamed has been suspended from school, the Morning News said.
Police said the device was in a case and could be mistaken for a bomb. Police spokesman James McLellan said Mohamed's religion had nothing to do with their response.
Two school police officers initially questioned the student and he told them he had built a clock. He did not offer further explanation, McLellan said.
"He didn't explain properly what it was and they felt compelled to arrest him," McLellan said.
If this kid is not to become a terrorist (or spend the rest of his life on a no-fly list), his parents need to contact a publicist and GET HIS ASS ON THE TODAY SHOW. Tearfully explain to Matt Lauer that it was all a big misunderstanding, how frightened his parents were, show some tears running down Matt's face as he speaks softly and sympathetic and reports that nobody from the school or police or governor's office returned requests for comment... the kid will get his 15 minutes of fame and the scholarships will start to roll in. Kickstarter to help this family move to a decent, tolerant town. Four more years, he'll be at an Ivy League school (oh, you're THAT kid!).
That's how it's done in America.
That wasn't in the GA release, there was a Dial-Up Networking update that eventually got rolled into a Service Pack. Before that you have to install PPP drivers etc supplied by your ISP.
You gotta razor-sharp memory on you, my friend. I guess my Gateway came with the update already packaged, so I never knew early adopters still had to hassle with SLIP or PPP apps. Either way, Microsoft deserves credit for making dial-up as painless as your modem and your ISP could allow.
Another aspect of Win 95, kinda lost now, was it was fun. The Plus! cd packed in all these themes that actually worked, changing fonts, icons, colors, wallpaper, screensaver, and (my favorite) system sounds to an aquarium, a haunted house, sports, and other cool time-wasting stuff. The aquarium screensaver was quite impressive. Sure it ate some CPU, but by the time Pentium 133's were common, who cared? Some of the system sounds from that era I still keep around and plug into Windows, 'cause some of them were just plain well done.
One of my ongoing beefs with Microsoft is how, with each release, they take more of this away. I didn't mind "Luna" on XP, at least not in principle, but they only released 3 possible colors (plus a black Zune theme if you could find it). Otherwise, Luna was locked down (although "classic" was still available).
It got worse from there. On a lot of systems, you have to go through a lot of settings to get Aero to start working even if you have adequate display hardware, and once it's working there's not much you can do with it. Moreover, these things they call "themes" in Windows 7-10 aren't themes at all - they're little more than a wallpaper (albeit a pretty one). Little else can be changed. You have to go skinning or buy Windows Blinds to do anything close to what Windows 95 offered with Plus!, and these methods involve messing with system files which Win 10's mandatory system updates may well wipe out on a regular basis.
Windows 95 was a product that Microsoft was determined to make people want to use on a PC at home. But the guys behind it have probably all retired with their stock options, and the new people figure you'll buy Windows 'cause you just have to. Fuck having fun, give us your ID, your browsing history and your shopping habits. Click on this live tile, watch this ad. Buy a tablet and a phone, so we can track where you're at. It's been 20 years since Windows 95 and we got TELEMETRY!
Windows 95, if I remember correctly, solved the modem-to-internet problem. Up until then, I remember getting a modem to dial out meant starting some specialized dialer app or other (like AOL), and this might make it possible for other internet programs like FTP or telnet or Gopher or Navigator to work. Windows 95 had all this plumbing built-in. You set up your dial-up number (or two) and account information in a control panel applet, and then whenever an IP-aware program or app tapped for an address that wasn't available locally, the modem would automagically wake up and dial your ISP while your program patiently waited for the handshaking to complete.
This was pretty damned cool. You could have a LAN card and a modem on the same system, do all sorts of LAN-based stuff and the modem would stay asleep until you pinged a host outside the LAN. It. Just. Worked. With Windows 95, people could ditch AOL, and just subscribe to something cheap and simple like Earthlink. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Macs got this functionality until the iMac in 1998. For Windows 95 users, this made the Internet a LOT easier to use, and meant any internet app like Navigator would just plain work.
This magic carried on into Windows 2000. I once carried a mid-size office LAN over a single dial-up bridged by a Windows 2000 box and a modem. Windows reliably squeezed every packet through, and re-dialed automatically whenever the connection went down. Slow, but it worked! Why do something like this? Because Verizon couldn't deliver our T1 on time!
History will tell you that Apple was in decline when Windows 95 came out. This was the period of the Centris and the Performa lines, plasticky John Sculley potato-chip models (just take the same ingredients and re-package 'em), followed by the rocky PowerPC transition that never delivered the holy-shit-fast performance that it promised, even while "Jean-Louis Gassée... steadfastly refused to lower the profit margins on Mac computers" and helped solidify Apple's reputation as being overpriced for what you get (you wanna cd-rom with that?), particularly as Intel forged steadily forward with the Pentium.
So even if Apple was first, in the mid-90's the desktop computer market was ripe for the taking. All Microsoft had to do was re-invent Windows without the Program Manager and make it work on any and all those crappy 386's still out there, with their shitty 14-inch color monitors, and fuck knows what peripherals. But they did it. It might run slow as shit on a 386, but on a Pentium with some RAM and a decent graphics card (S3 anyone? Matrox? Number-9?), you could drive a 19-inch monitor at full resolution. and the sound card worked! and this kind of rig was affordable! Remember computer shopper? Fully loaded PC's were getting CHEAP! and with Windows 95, they could launch and run Doom and Duke 3D (and, oh yeah, Lotus 123)!
All praise to the right-click menu. The right-click context menu was so intuitively useful that even Apple-users started missing that second mouse button. Apple eventually caved and adopted context menus in their own OS, and started making mice that, if tweaked in the control panel, would behave as if they had an honest right-side button.
If some other UI did this first, somebody post about it. Otherwise, Windows 95 gets a lot of respect for getting this right.