Yes - kind of makes you wonder... What is it that Windows does that Linux (or any brand X) doesn't.
It's bleedin' obvious, innit? What Windows does well is run Windows software natively -- aka 95% of the software out there. In a hypothetical world where any application could be run equally well under any OS, Windows would be a distant also-ran... unfortunately, we live in a world where customer lock-in is the prime determinant of desktop OS success or failure.
Microsoft will make sure that it has agreements with all major computer suppliers to have Vista installed on all newly sold PCs, and make XP available only as a special option (maybe at additional cost)
Hm, this sounds very familiar.... oh yes, it was precisely what Microsoft did to BeOS and OS/2 to effectively remove them from the market. It will be interesting to see what happens when they start applying their anti-competitive strategies against themselves...:^)
All this system can do is compare letters, words and sentence length. It cannot compare ideas.
A system that compared ideas would be fairly useless: how many different ideas can a school paper on an assigned topic have? Let's face it, most school papers are all about regurgitating someone else's ideas in your own words.
Then the Republican senator from I-don't-know-where came up and mumbled some weasel words which said "But it's too haaard!" without actually saying it, looking at his shoes like a cheap Ayn Rand villain.
Now flash forward to 2006, and Toyota is wiping the floor with American auto companies, because Toyota was willing to do the work to improve fuel efficiency while GM and Ford invested all their money into lawsuits and bribes^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign donations to ensure that they could continue to produce the same old oversized gas guzzlers year after year. Those short-sighted gits have nobody to blame but themselves.
Brazil has the advantage of being a tropical nation where they can easily grow sugarcane, which is far, far easier to ferment into ethanol than corn is.
True... on the other hand, the USA has the advantage of being the dominant nation on Earth, with the largest economy and most advanced technological capabilities ever. So you'll have to pardon me if my sympathy seems limited where our unwillingness to kick the oil habit is concerned.
And in this country, the environmentalists will scream bloody murder if we try to actually use the coal resources we have (global warming and all) to acheive more energy independence
Well they should, shouldn't they? Simply trading one major problem for another wouldn't help us much at all -- we need to solve both problems. Coal is a valuable resource, but we need to find a way to use it that doesn't cause massive global warming. We put a man on the moon, didn't we? Surely we can stop snivelling for a while and do this. For all our talk about ingenuity and sacrifice and "the Greatest Generation" and "A Shining City on a Hill" and all that, we sure come across like a bunch of wankers sometimes.
Yes, and just in time for the 2008 elections too...
Just in time for the 2006 elections actually... but that ignores the larger points: (a) Clinton couldn't run for President again even if he wanted to, he's already served two terms, and (b) why is it that nobody can do anything good anymore without some cynic suggesting that it's nothing more than an empty political ploy? Have we become so cynical that we literally cannot imagine anyone genuinely trying to improve the state of the world?
I suppose Mother Theresa was only trying to score brownie points with God in Calcutta, too....:^P
Ah yes, WWII, the Republican Model For How Everything Should Be. The only problem is, our current situation is nothing like WWII. We are not fighting two or three nation-states with clearly defined territories and governments, where all you have to do is march into their capital city and declare victory. And the sooner our government realizes that the "war on terror" isn't a war that can be won militarily (any more than the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty" could be won militarily), the sooner they'll stop shooting themselves in the foot with inappropriate and counter-productive strategies.
And contrary to your belief, the only way to stop bad guys from trying to kill you, is to kill enough of them that they stop.
If the terrorists would just line up in nice orderly rows and engage us in proper open battle, I'd agree with you. But they won't, for obvious reasons -- their tactic is to turn our own military force against us by trying to lure us into causing as much 'collateral damage' as possible, thereby turning people against us, which results in them getting more volunteers and support. It's important not to fall into their trap and reduce ourselves to their level. The only way to win is cut off their support, and the only way to do that is convince everyone that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. And the only way to do that is to take the high ground, and hold ourselves to the highest moral standard. Abu Ghraib isn't going to cut it.
Those who attack innocents and use them for shields have no moral high ground and have forfeited their rights under international treaty.
Care to point out where in "international treaty" (I assume you mean the Geneva convention, let me know if I am mistaken) it lays out the conditions under which people forfeit their rights? Or are you just telling me what you think the treaty should say?
I believe the technology is out there to make a battery that can last longer than a week. It's just a conspiracy to get more money from me when all my gizmos run out of juice on a weekly basis.
Don't tell anyone I told you this, but I haven't had to change the battery in my watch for over a year.
Democrats had effective control of the government for some 60 years from the New Deal through '94, with a few breaks. How'd they do with terrorism? How did they treat the first WTC attack? Kobar towers? The Cole attack?
They didn't use any of those as an excuse to launch a $500 billion "pet project" against an unrelated country, you've got to give them that. Nor did they use any of those as an excuse to engage in torture or other civil rights abuses. As any terrorist will tell you, most of the harm inflicted in a successful terrorist attack comes not from the attack itself, but from the resulting panic and subsequent (over)reaction of the attacked government. A competent government sizes up the terrorist threat with a sober mind, and neither minimizes the threat nor exaggerates it.
Secret military tribunals make it safer for you to fly?
Yes. Especially against combatants who do not adhere to the Geneva accords.
You're not looking at the larger picture. In the short term, it's likely that secret tribunals (and other un-democratic techniques, such as kidnappings, assassinations, torture, etc) do make us safer -- they remove known and suspected terrorists from the picture. In the long term, however, they hurt more than they help, because word gets out and we lose the war of ideas. After September 11th, we had the support of the entire world in the fight against terror. Now most of the world thinks that the USA is a bigger threat to world peace than Al-Quaeda. That translates directly into a weakening of US power, because we now must fight the 'bad guys' alone, rather than as part of a team. Furthermore, when the US bases its moral arguments on the virtues of democracy, and then fails to live up to its own standards, it looks hypocritical in the eyes of everyone. This makes it very easy for terrorists to recruit more allies: because the US no longer occupies the moral high ground, the terrorists can claim it for themselves. (i.e. "we're not terrorists, we're freedom fighters against an unjust empire") That is a valuable and very real marketing tool that the Bush administration hands to Al Quaeda for free every time it acts as if the traditional ideals of American government are mere platitudes to be mouthed but not followed.
Please cite an example of this. Seriously. And realize that with the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, there is precedent for this. But I would like a current example.
Suspending habeas corpus was wrong during the Civil War, and it's even more wrong now, when our situation is nowhere near as dire. You might as well argue that there is precedent for slavery, therefore slavery is acceptable now.
Maybe you should re-read the Wikipedia text you quoted. "Does not need to change" is not the same thing as "cannot be changed". If you want to shut down your I-name and start another one, you have the option of doing so. I also don't see any reason why you couldn't open several simulaneous accounts if you wanted to.
Taking offense at someone voicing or defining their own stereo-type. Bah! Sounds kinda silly to me. How bout I get really pissed the next time someone offers me sunblock? "OMG, they assume because I have white skin that I'm prone to sunburns! How dare them!" Hehe, yeah that would be pretty silly.
I think there's a distinction to be made between traits that are in fact genetically/racially derived (as in your example above) and ones that aren't. A better example might be if someone bought you a case of whiskey for your birthday, based solely on their knowledge that you are of Irish descent, plus their idea that "Irish people like to get drunk". In that case, you might well be offended, and justifiably so IMHO.
I didn't find anything remotely racist in what he said. He was giving her a compliment.
Compliments can be racist. E.g. the classic "that black guy was so articulate during the job interview!", with its connotation that black people are usually inarticulate. Or the ever-popular "Asians are so smart and hard-working!". In both cases, the person probably means well, but they are still engaging in racist thinking: assuming that someone's race is an indicator of some other trait which is not, in fact, racially/genetically determined. This tends to annoy the target of the compliment because they (rightly) feel that they are being unfairly typecast/pigeonholed.
But if one is saying that blacks are basketball players because they are keenly athletic, that is a compliment, isn't it?
Disclaimer: I think this all much ado about nothing.
That said, it's not a question of whether the adjectives used are 'complimentary' or not, but rather the generalization across an entire race that offends (some) people. They feel that racial generalizations (aka stereotypes) are unhelpful and inaccurate, and have a major history of abuse.
I would like to avoid a format war if one format between these two is clearly superior to the other
I don't see why a format war is inevitable... different hard drives also use different storage technologies, but as long as they all provide the same interface (e.g. SCSI or IDE) nobody needs to know or care what sort of magic is going on inside.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government knows what a proxy server is and how to use one (although they are usually on the other side of the equation!)
Have a closed API that you must be registered for
What's to stop anyone from just downloading the content via good old HTTP? Honestly, this is silly -- it's impossible for Wikipedia to be both open and closed at the same time.
The fact the only DRM'd tracks in iTunes are those you buy from the iTMS which are not in MP3 format?
What about the songs you rip from your own CDs using iTunes? Are those not created in AAC format by default? (I'm not an iPod or iTunes user, so I don't actually know)
Apple is worse in a lot of ways. While competition has driven them to use more open software, I don't view that as likely to remain the case if they were to become dominant.
You may well be right. Fortunately, the point is moot, because Apple has no chance in hell of "becoming dominant" -- at least, not in the Microsoftian sense. There are simply too many computers out there already running Windows already.
I think his pointing to the fact that some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user.
I don't quite follow -- if you never took your iPod out of its box, how do you even know how much effort it takes to set one up?
Frankly, the "people are buying iPods and throwing them away without opening the box" thing sounds like FUD to me. Very few people are both rich enough to throw away new items unopened, and stupid enough to buy things they don't even want.
I'm sorry, but I highly doubt I'll be consuming any more Tropicana products if they're going to be made from steam of vaporized landfill waste... There's just something unsettling about that.
You think that's bad? Just wait until you find out what they fertilize the orange trees with...
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Eating is so passe. Cut out the middle man, learn to photosynthesize!
It's bleedin' obvious, innit? What Windows does well is run Windows software natively -- aka 95% of the software out there. In a hypothetical world where any application could be run equally well under any OS, Windows would be a distant also-ran... unfortunately, we live in a world where customer lock-in is the prime determinant of desktop OS success or failure.
Hm, this sounds very familiar.... oh yes, it was precisely what Microsoft did to BeOS and OS/2 to effectively remove them from the market. It will be interesting to see what happens when they start applying their anti-competitive strategies against themselves...
A system that compared ideas would be fairly useless: how many different ideas can a school paper on an assigned topic have? Let's face it, most school papers are all about regurgitating someone else's ideas in your own words.
Now flash forward to 2006, and Toyota is wiping the floor with American auto companies, because Toyota was willing to do the work to improve fuel efficiency while GM and Ford invested all their money into lawsuits and bribes^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign donations to ensure that they could continue to produce the same old oversized gas guzzlers year after year. Those short-sighted gits have nobody to blame but themselves.
True... on the other hand, the USA has the advantage of being the dominant nation on Earth, with the largest economy and most advanced technological capabilities ever. So you'll have to pardon me if my sympathy seems limited where our unwillingness to kick the oil habit is concerned.
And in this country, the environmentalists will scream bloody murder if we try to actually use the coal resources we have (global warming and all) to acheive more energy independence
Well they should, shouldn't they? Simply trading one major problem for another wouldn't help us much at all -- we need to solve both problems. Coal is a valuable resource, but we need to find a way to use it that doesn't cause massive global warming. We put a man on the moon, didn't we? Surely we can stop snivelling for a while and do this. For all our talk about ingenuity and sacrifice and "the Greatest Generation" and "A Shining City on a Hill" and all that, we sure come across like a bunch of wankers sometimes.
Just in time for the 2006 elections actually... but that ignores the larger points: (a) Clinton couldn't run for President again even if he wanted to, he's already served two terms, and (b) why is it that nobody can do anything good anymore without some cynic suggesting that it's nothing more than an empty political ploy? Have we become so cynical that we literally cannot imagine anyone genuinely trying to improve the state of the world?
I suppose Mother Theresa was only trying to score brownie points with God in Calcutta, too....
Ah yes, WWII, the Republican Model For How Everything Should Be. The only problem is, our current situation is nothing like WWII. We are not fighting two or three nation-states with clearly defined territories and governments, where all you have to do is march into their capital city and declare victory. And the sooner our government realizes that the "war on terror" isn't a war that can be won militarily (any more than the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty" could be won militarily), the sooner they'll stop shooting themselves in the foot with inappropriate and counter-productive strategies.
And contrary to your belief, the only way to stop bad guys from trying to kill you, is to kill enough of them that they stop.
If the terrorists would just line up in nice orderly rows and engage us in proper open battle, I'd agree with you. But they won't, for obvious reasons -- their tactic is to turn our own military force against us by trying to lure us into causing as much 'collateral damage' as possible, thereby turning people against us, which results in them getting more volunteers and support. It's important not to fall into their trap and reduce ourselves to their level. The only way to win is cut off their support, and the only way to do that is convince everyone that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. And the only way to do that is to take the high ground, and hold ourselves to the highest moral standard. Abu Ghraib isn't going to cut it.
Those who attack innocents and use them for shields have no moral high ground and have forfeited their rights under international treaty.
Care to point out where in "international treaty" (I assume you mean the Geneva convention, let me know if I am mistaken) it lays out the conditions under which people forfeit their rights? Or are you just telling me what you think the treaty should say?
Wouldn't genuine Italian food be food that was made in Italy? Otherwise it's only Italian-style food...
(thus sayeth the pedant
week. It's just a conspiracy to get more money from me when all my gizmos run out of juice on a weekly basis.
Don't tell anyone I told you this, but I haven't had to change the battery in my watch for over a year.
They didn't use any of those as an excuse to launch a $500 billion "pet project" against an unrelated country, you've got to give them that. Nor did they use any of those as an excuse to engage in torture or other civil rights abuses. As any terrorist will tell you, most of the harm inflicted in a successful terrorist attack comes not from the attack itself, but from the resulting panic and subsequent (over)reaction of the attacked government. A competent government sizes up the terrorist threat with a sober mind, and neither minimizes the threat nor exaggerates it.
Secret military tribunals make it safer for you to fly?
Yes. Especially against combatants who do not adhere to the Geneva accords.
You're not looking at the larger picture. In the short term, it's likely that secret tribunals (and other un-democratic techniques, such as kidnappings, assassinations, torture, etc) do make us safer -- they remove known and suspected terrorists from the picture. In the long term, however, they hurt more than they help, because word gets out and we lose the war of ideas. After September 11th, we had the support of the entire world in the fight against terror. Now most of the world thinks that the USA is a bigger threat to world peace than Al-Quaeda. That translates directly into a weakening of US power, because we now must fight the 'bad guys' alone, rather than as part of a team. Furthermore, when the US bases its moral arguments on the virtues of democracy, and then fails to live up to its own standards, it looks hypocritical in the eyes of everyone. This makes it very easy for terrorists to recruit more allies: because the US no longer occupies the moral high ground, the terrorists can claim it for themselves. (i.e. "we're not terrorists, we're freedom fighters against an unjust empire") That is a valuable and very real marketing tool that the Bush administration hands to Al Quaeda for free every time it acts as if the traditional ideals of American government are mere platitudes to be mouthed but not followed.
Please cite an example of this. Seriously. And realize that with the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, there is precedent for this. But I would like a current example.
Suspending habeas corpus was wrong during the Civil War, and it's even more wrong now, when our situation is nowhere near as dire. You might as well argue that there is precedent for slavery, therefore slavery is acceptable now.
Maybe you should re-read the Wikipedia text you quoted. "Does not need to change" is not the same thing as "cannot be changed". If you want to shut down your I-name and start another one, you have the option of doing so. I also don't see any reason why you couldn't open several simulaneous accounts if you wanted to.
I think there's a distinction to be made between traits that are in fact genetically/racially derived (as in your example above) and ones that aren't. A better example might be if someone bought you a case of whiskey for your birthday, based solely on their knowledge that you are of Irish descent, plus their idea that "Irish people like to get drunk". In that case, you might well be offended, and justifiably so IMHO.
We do! "News for Nerds", remember?
Compliments can be racist. E.g. the classic "that black guy was so articulate during the job interview!", with its connotation that black people are usually inarticulate. Or the ever-popular "Asians are so smart and hard-working!". In both cases, the person probably means well, but they are still engaging in racist thinking: assuming that someone's race is an indicator of some other trait which is not, in fact, racially/genetically determined. This tends to annoy the target of the compliment because they (rightly) feel that they are being unfairly typecast/pigeonholed.
Disclaimer: I think this all much ado about nothing.
That said, it's not a question of whether the adjectives used are 'complimentary' or not, but rather the generalization across an entire race that offends (some) people. They feel that racial generalizations (aka stereotypes) are unhelpful and inaccurate, and have a major history of abuse.
Based on Intel's recent naming conventions, I think they'll call it the "Core 2 Duo Duo", so as to generate as much confusion as possible
I don't see why a format war is inevitable... different hard drives also use different storage technologies, but as long as they all provide the same interface (e.g. SCSI or IDE) nobody needs to know or care what sort of magic is going on inside.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government knows what a proxy server is and how to use one (although they are usually on the other side of the equation!)
Have a closed API that you must be registered for
What's to stop anyone from just downloading the content via good old HTTP? Honestly, this is silly -- it's impossible for Wikipedia to be both open and closed at the same time.
What about the songs you rip from your own CDs using iTunes? Are those not created in AAC format by default? (I'm not an iPod or iTunes user, so I don't actually know)
You may well be right. Fortunately, the point is moot, because Apple has no chance in hell of "becoming dominant" -- at least, not in the Microsoftian sense. There are simply too many computers out there already running Windows already.
work for the user.
I don't quite follow -- if you never took your iPod out of its box, how do you even know how much effort it takes to set one up?
Frankly, the "people are buying iPods and throwing them away without opening the box" thing sounds like FUD to me. Very few people are both rich enough to throw away new items unopened, and stupid enough to buy things they don't even want.
Is there any (non-anecdotal) evidence to back up the above assertion?
You think that's bad? Just wait until you find out what they fertilize the orange trees with...
I don't know if you can right now... after all, why would they want to buy your garbage when they can get it from their local landfill for free?