Hardly a rhetorical question. The FBI is simply a poster child for bureaucracy, politics, and obsessive secrecy run amuck. It's not so much that it's full of idiots as that it's structured so that idiots are guaranteed to be the key decision makers. It assumed its current form during the Teapot Dome Scandal when the Justice Department Bureau of Investigation was essentially decapitated because its top officials were implicated. New leadership was brought in under J. Edgar Hoover, who remained in charge for 48 years, until he died in 1972. Like many closeted homosexuals, Hoover was obsessed with secrecy, and with other peoples secrets. Avoiding any real supervision or oversight by his superiors in the executive branch or by congress, he avoided dealing with some of the issues you'd expect federal cops to be interested in, such as organized crime, and developed a nasty obsession with eliminating political factions he considered "un-American".
There are actually people in the FBI worth of respect. But they're fighting a losing battle against the organizational culture that Hoover created.
On a personal note, I'm very concerned that the FBI has taken note of my repeated purchase of halvah, a middle-eastern candy. I can only hope that they've also noticed that I've purchased matzo ball soup!
That's the one where a bear is found wandering in Springfield and everybody storms Mayor Quimby's office demanding that he Do Something about the bear problem. ("Think of the children!") So he institutes an expensive helicopter-borne Bear Patrol, which makes everybody happy — until they get their tax bills. So their storm the office again, demanding that he Do Something about high taxes. ("Think of the children!") Funny because it's sadly true.
OK, you're not quoting the Simpsons, you're just using jokes that we've all heard before.
I agree that it's lame to expect people to dissect their own jokes. I don't recall asking you to.
Getting tired of hearing the sames jokes over and over hardly indicates a missing sense of humor. Rather the opposite, I think. I actually laughed at the "think of the children!" line the first time I heard it — on the Simpsons.
That would certainly explain why they're being so hush-hush. On the one hand, ignoring a sexual harassment complaint can get you sued. On the other hand, saying one of your people is accused of sexual harassment can also get you sued.
General principal: when somebody is being really, really tight-lipped, either they're planning on invading a foreign country or they're trying to avoid litigation. And the security measures are less extreme for the invasion! I've been in meetings about such issues where I was told not to take notes, not to discuss the issue in email, and not to discuss the issue at all with anybody who didn't have a specific need to know. And don't ask for hints, because that could get me fired — and probably sued myself.
Guess what? Communism doesn't work. See also: The Tragedy of the Commons.
Gimme a break. By "Communism," you mean the Soviet Union. The failure of which only proves that creating a brand new society out of elaborate speculative theories and a willingness to kill anybody who disagrees with you leads to a rigid pyramid-shaped social structure that can't compete economically. Especially when you do it in a country that has a long tradition of autocratic rule — a tradition that continues to its post-Soviet present.
The ideology you're really arguing with is properly known as "socialism", and yes in its pure form unchecked by testing it against reality it's a recipe for economic and social disaster. But that's true of any ideology that fools its adherents into believing that they've found The Truth and reject all critics as pathological naysayers. To find a perfect example on the other side of the political spectrum, you need look no further than the White House.
Unrestrained socialism and unrestrained capitalism are both evil. Mix the two intelligently and with an eye to your citizenry's liking and distrust of one or the other, and you can do all right. Take socialism, mix it a bit a realism, acknowledge that you need to give a people a chance to get filthy rich, and maintain a serious respect for the dignity of the individual, and you have the political system that runs most of Western Europe, and does a reasonably good job of it.
Military logistics folks have a saying: don't fall in love with your plan: it won't survive contact with reality. Change "plan" to "ideology" or "social theory" and you have a principle a lot of people could learn from. Doesn't mean plans or ideologies are useless. You just need to take them with a grain of salt.
As for "the tragedy of the commons" your understanding of that concept is superficial. Commons were key elements of the agrarian economy of Europe for centuries. As long as maintaining common land was in everybody's interest (and their obligation to do so was wired into the feudal legal and economic structure), the commons worked very well. It was only when feudalism was replaced by the market economy that everybody lost their motivation to not overexploit the commons.
That's one theory, anyway. Another is that investors saw that common land wasn't living up to its economic potential, and made up bogus claims that the peasants were overexploiting the land. This gave them an excuse to force the peasants off the land and convert it into uses that benefited from economies of scale.
I hear you saying "progress" and maybe you're right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the peasants couldn't have continued to make the commons work indefinitely, if they'd been left alone. So enough with this crap about "the tragedy of the commons".
Now let's talk about the Tragedy of the Market Economy. You have an ethos and economic model that says that anything you can do to make yourself rich and put people to work is cool, even if what you're doing assumes that finite resources are inifinite, that there's nothing wrong with herding people into sweatshops and making their lives a living hell, and that suggestions that the planet is rapidly becoming uninhabitable can be safely ignored.
Those yellow bicycles weren't destroyed by people's selfishness. They were destroyed by the assumption that selfishness is a law of nature. It's not. Even in the rigorously antisocialist U.S. we've sometimes acted together for the greater good. Hell, this country wouldn't even exist if we didn't have the ability. We need to make use of it while there's still some left.
Now I know what happened to Roberto Gonzales: he went to your town and got himself appointed chief of police. Most low enforcers are more realistic about how much people value their privacy.
The telecom monopolies actually play a minor role. Far more important are the entertainment content monopolies, which refuse to release most content in any non-physical format. Otherwise you could "rent" a DRM managed DVD quality file. Sure, it would take hours to download, but that's still faster, cheaper, and less likely to get lost in transit.
First of all, I'd like some links to back up your version of events. I did a lot of Googling, and I couldn't find anything to back up the notion that Leopard was supposed to fully support ZFS. All I did find was a lot of rumors and speculation.
Secondly, ZFS does have other features that add value to desktop systems. It's a lot more efficient in storing both very small files (which modern OSs have by the thousand) and very big files (like those big video files you buy on iTunes). It makes it easier to create filesystems that span disks, or that use striping. There's more.
Well yeah, shows that only appeal to a few hard core fans are sure money losers. But the suits tend to put any show or movie that doesn't meet the standard formulas in that category. That's why almost every TV show and movie has some suit attached to it whose job is to say, "OK, I like what you're doing, but we could really appeal to a broader audience by making the characters nicer. And can't they have a nicer place to live? And not so many unpleasant things happening to them? And couldn't we have more excitement? Couldn't the dad be a cop?" And on and on, until everybody's doing the same meaningless, predictable crap.
Was Firefly just a "hard core fans" show? Maybe. But the suits never gave it a chance to prove it wasn't. Because it was obvious to them that they could never reduce it to the kind of pablum they feel safe producing.
To boil your argument down to its essentials: there's a huge audience for crap. You're right, of course, but it's not the only audience. All the big entertainment companies chase that audience because big companies think in terms of economies of scale.
There was a time when movies and TV was more diverse, because the companies that produced and distributed it were more diverse, and some of them could specialize in more limited audiences.
Fine, you like watching a story out of order. Most people don't. And that must have hurt the shows ratings. Especially since they didn't show the pilot until the series was almost over — and this was a double-length episode that did a lot to set up the situation.
This was supposed be an SF-geek's TV show, where the logic of events was everything. By screwing up the story arc, they deprived everybody of a chance to enjoy that. Which probably wouldn't have saved the show, but surely would have helped the ratings just a bit.
My conspiracy theory aside, it's true that TV networks took a long time to figure out that serial story arcs have a way of building up a show's following, so fans stick with it even when the stories get a little weak, because they have to know how things come out. That's why there are so many pure serials like Lost and 24 on the air now. In that respect, Whedon was a little ahead of his time.
You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.
You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.
About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also because a lot of conspiracy-minded folks accused both me and the webmaster of fireflyfans.net of being shills for Fox. (Nothing like being pissed of to reinforce your memory.) The irony of being both a conspiracy believer and accused conspirator in connection with the same guy was too much for me to resist, so I had to link your old post. Only took me 30 seconds to Google it. And then, of course I had to see what you were up to and correct your latest logical leap....
Let me get this right: it doesn't matter if the Prez is an ignorant twit, as long as he listens to "the right people"? Isn't that pretty much how we got into this Iraq quaqmire?
"Judgment" isn't a knack that you acquire through some mysterious magic process. It comes through education and experience. Being able to talk in a knowledgeable way about stuff relevant to your job is a pretty strong indicator that have the right E&E.
You're making a joke (and not a bad one), but you pretty much describe what happened to Firefly. The decision to buy the show came from a top, but there was a huge faction at Fox that hated the idea of putting on an "anti-Star Trek" and did everything they could to sabotage it. These are your standard network suits who hate Science Fiction (especially "space opera") because it costs a lot to produce and only targets a narrow audience. They much prefer reality shows and sitcoms, which are cheap and popular.
They did a lot of stuff that at the time I attributed to simple corporate ineptitude, like promoting the show with really badly designed web site, and putting out this really horrible souvenir poster (featuring a common housefly with a lightbulb up its ass!). Then they forced Whedon to water down the scripts, showed them out of order, and finally scheduled the premier on a night where it was sure to be delayed in many markets by late-running baseball games. I usually hate conspiracy theories (speaking as a former "conspirator") but here it's hard to avoid having one.
On top of all that, Joss Whedon is notoriously bad at corporate politics. So yeah, it's quite possible that his new show has already been cancelled.
What do you mean it's not a meaningful idea? It communicates an opinion. The fact that that opinion is childish, etc., may make it less credible, but it doesn't make it any less real.
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Hardly a rhetorical question. The FBI is simply a poster child for bureaucracy, politics, and obsessive secrecy run amuck. It's not so much that it's full of idiots as that it's structured so that idiots are guaranteed to be the key decision makers. It assumed its current form during the Teapot Dome Scandal when the Justice Department Bureau of Investigation was essentially decapitated because its top officials were implicated. New leadership was brought in under J. Edgar Hoover, who remained in charge for 48 years, until he died in 1972. Like many closeted homosexuals, Hoover was obsessed with secrecy, and with other peoples secrets. Avoiding any real supervision or oversight by his superiors in the executive branch or by congress, he avoided dealing with some of the issues you'd expect federal cops to be interested in, such as organized crime, and developed a nasty obsession with eliminating political factions he considered "un-American".
There are actually people in the FBI worth of respect. But they're fighting a losing battle against the organizational culture that Hoover created.
On a personal note, I'm very concerned that the FBI has taken note of my repeated purchase of halvah, a middle-eastern candy. I can only hope that they've also noticed that I've purchased matzo ball soup!
And in fact TFA doesn't say that. It does say that PC demand is way up, but doesn't draw a connection between that and falling disk prices.
There is a connection, but it's the other way: cheaper drives means cheaper PCs mean more people buy PCs.
What really bugs me (bugs me, get it?) is that nobody quotes the best joke from that same episode: "Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!"
Dude, you have the fundamental right to make any joke you want. I have the fundamental right to point out that the joke is lame.
That's the one where a bear is found wandering in Springfield and everybody storms Mayor Quimby's office demanding that he Do Something about the bear problem. ("Think of the children!") So he institutes an expensive helicopter-borne Bear Patrol, which makes everybody happy — until they get their tax bills. So their storm the office again, demanding that he Do Something about high taxes. ("Think of the children!") Funny because it's sadly true.
OK, you're not quoting the Simpsons, you're just using jokes that we've all heard before.
I agree that it's lame to expect people to dissect their own jokes. I don't recall asking you to.
Getting tired of hearing the sames jokes over and over hardly indicates a missing sense of humor. Rather the opposite, I think. I actually laughed at the "think of the children!" line the first time I heard it — on the Simpsons.
Why do so many people think that simply regurgitating Simpson's dialog is so fucking funny? It has to be the least creative form of humor imaginable.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it!
That would certainly explain why they're being so hush-hush. On the one hand, ignoring a sexual harassment complaint can get you sued. On the other hand, saying one of your people is accused of sexual harassment can also get you sued.
General principal: when somebody is being really, really tight-lipped, either they're planning on invading a foreign country or they're trying to avoid litigation. And the security measures are less extreme for the invasion! I've been in meetings about such issues where I was told not to take notes, not to discuss the issue in email, and not to discuss the issue at all with anybody who didn't have a specific need to know. And don't ask for hints, because that could get me fired — and probably sued myself.
You can't fire somebody for having bad taste in men.
Did anybody think to look under the sofa cushions?
And that relates to this thread how?
The insight is that cliches are valid way to make fun of people whose very behavior is a cliche. Anyone you know?
The ideology you're really arguing with is properly known as "socialism", and yes in its pure form unchecked by testing it against reality it's a recipe for economic and social disaster. But that's true of any ideology that fools its adherents into believing that they've found The Truth and reject all critics as pathological naysayers. To find a perfect example on the other side of the political spectrum, you need look no further than the White House.
Unrestrained socialism and unrestrained capitalism are both evil. Mix the two intelligently and with an eye to your citizenry's liking and distrust of one or the other, and you can do all right. Take socialism, mix it a bit a realism, acknowledge that you need to give a people a chance to get filthy rich, and maintain a serious respect for the dignity of the individual, and you have the political system that runs most of Western Europe, and does a reasonably good job of it.
Military logistics folks have a saying: don't fall in love with your plan: it won't survive contact with reality. Change "plan" to "ideology" or "social theory" and you have a principle a lot of people could learn from. Doesn't mean plans or ideologies are useless. You just need to take them with a grain of salt.
As for "the tragedy of the commons" your understanding of that concept is superficial. Commons were key elements of the agrarian economy of Europe for centuries. As long as maintaining common land was in everybody's interest (and their obligation to do so was wired into the feudal legal and economic structure), the commons worked very well. It was only when feudalism was replaced by the market economy that everybody lost their motivation to not overexploit the commons.
That's one theory, anyway. Another is that investors saw that common land wasn't living up to its economic potential, and made up bogus claims that the peasants were overexploiting the land. This gave them an excuse to force the peasants off the land and convert it into uses that benefited from economies of scale.
I hear you saying "progress" and maybe you're right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the peasants couldn't have continued to make the commons work indefinitely, if they'd been left alone. So enough with this crap about "the tragedy of the commons".
Now let's talk about the Tragedy of the Market Economy. You have an ethos and economic model that says that anything you can do to make yourself rich and put people to work is cool, even if what you're doing assumes that finite resources are inifinite, that there's nothing wrong with herding people into sweatshops and making their lives a living hell, and that suggestions that the planet is rapidly becoming uninhabitable can be safely ignored.
Those yellow bicycles weren't destroyed by people's selfishness. They were destroyed by the assumption that selfishness is a law of nature. It's not. Even in the rigorously antisocialist U.S. we've sometimes acted together for the greater good. Hell, this country wouldn't even exist if we didn't have the ability. We need to make use of it while there's still some left.
Now I know what happened to Roberto Gonzales: he went to your town and got himself appointed chief of police. Most low enforcers are more realistic about how much people value their privacy.
Do the words "irony" or "satire" mean anything to you? Guess not.
The telecom monopolies actually play a minor role. Far more important are the entertainment content monopolies, which refuse to release most content in any non-physical format. Otherwise you could "rent" a DRM managed DVD quality file. Sure, it would take hours to download, but that's still faster, cheaper, and less likely to get lost in transit.
First of all, I'd like some links to back up your version of events. I did a lot of Googling, and I couldn't find anything to back up the notion that Leopard was supposed to fully support ZFS. All I did find was a lot of rumors and speculation.
Secondly, ZFS does have other features that add value to desktop systems. It's a lot more efficient in storing both very small files (which modern OSs have by the thousand) and very big files (like those big video files you buy on iTunes). It makes it easier to create filesystems that span disks, or that use striping. There's more.
Well yeah, shows that only appeal to a few hard core fans are sure money losers. But the suits tend to put any show or movie that doesn't meet the standard formulas in that category. That's why almost every TV show and movie has some suit attached to it whose job is to say, "OK, I like what you're doing, but we could really appeal to a broader audience by making the characters nicer. And can't they have a nicer place to live? And not so many unpleasant things happening to them? And couldn't we have more excitement? Couldn't the dad be a cop?" And on and on, until everybody's doing the same meaningless, predictable crap.
Was Firefly just a "hard core fans" show? Maybe. But the suits never gave it a chance to prove it wasn't. Because it was obvious to them that they could never reduce it to the kind of pablum they feel safe producing.
To boil your argument down to its essentials: there's a huge audience for crap. You're right, of course, but it's not the only audience. All the big entertainment companies chase that audience because big companies think in terms of economies of scale.
There was a time when movies and TV was more diverse, because the companies that produced and distributed it were more diverse, and some of them could specialize in more limited audiences.
Fine, you like watching a story out of order. Most people don't. And that must have hurt the shows ratings. Especially since they didn't show the pilot until the series was almost over — and this was a double-length episode that did a lot to set up the situation.
This was supposed be an SF-geek's TV show, where the logic of events was everything. By screwing up the story arc, they deprived everybody of a chance to enjoy that. Which probably wouldn't have saved the show, but surely would have helped the ratings just a bit.
My conspiracy theory aside, it's true that TV networks took a long time to figure out that serial story arcs have a way of building up a show's following, so fans stick with it even when the stories get a little weak, because they have to know how things come out. That's why there are so many pure serials like Lost and 24 on the air now. In that respect, Whedon was a little ahead of his time.
You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.
You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.
About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also because a lot of conspiracy-minded folks accused both me and the webmaster of fireflyfans.net of being shills for Fox. (Nothing like being pissed of to reinforce your memory.) The irony of being both a conspiracy believer and accused conspirator in connection with the same guy was too much for me to resist, so I had to link your old post. Only took me 30 seconds to Google it. And then, of course I had to see what you were up to and correct your latest logical leap....
Let me get this right: it doesn't matter if the Prez is an ignorant twit, as long as he listens to "the right people"? Isn't that pretty much how we got into this Iraq quaqmire?
"Judgment" isn't a knack that you acquire through some mysterious magic process. It comes through education and experience. Being able to talk in a knowledgeable way about stuff relevant to your job is a pretty strong indicator that have the right E&E.
But what do I know? I'm just a shill for Fox.
You're making a joke (and not a bad one), but you pretty much describe what happened to Firefly. The decision to buy the show came from a top, but there was a huge faction at Fox that hated the idea of putting on an "anti-Star Trek" and did everything they could to sabotage it. These are your standard network suits who hate Science Fiction (especially "space opera") because it costs a lot to produce and only targets a narrow audience. They much prefer reality shows and sitcoms, which are cheap and popular.
They did a lot of stuff that at the time I attributed to simple corporate ineptitude, like promoting the show with really badly designed web site, and putting out this really horrible souvenir poster (featuring a common housefly with a lightbulb up its ass!). Then they forced Whedon to water down the scripts, showed them out of order, and finally scheduled the premier on a night where it was sure to be delayed in many markets by late-running baseball games. I usually hate conspiracy theories (speaking as a former "conspirator") but here it's hard to avoid having one.
On top of all that, Joss Whedon is notoriously bad at corporate politics. So yeah, it's quite possible that his new show has already been cancelled.
What do you mean it's not a meaningful idea? It communicates an opinion. The fact that that opinion is childish, etc., may make it less credible, but it doesn't make it any less real.