I think it's funny how Ohio can't even be their own state. On the news they said, "Ohio is the Florida of 2004". How can a state be another state. Oh well, I digress.
I think it's pretty clear that they mean it in the same sense as when people say "pink is the new black."
Actually, as I read that back, it would take ten Arizonas to match the mere 10% production of our nuclear power production.
To match out total production would take about a hundred Arizonas (assuming these numbers are correct.) The Canadians might be a little miffed when we start panelling over them to meet our power needs.
Our sixth-largest state is 114,006 square miles. Using your formula of 1 kilowatt per square mile (an easy enough calculation), that's 114,006 kilowatts.
In 1998 (the first year for which I was able to find energy statistics via google), our nuclear production alone (which was dwarfed by oil production) gave us about 673 billion kilowatt hours. (A kWh is a non-SI calculation of simply multiplying killowatts times hours.)
Your all-of-Arizona solar plant would produce (114,006 kw, times about 400 daylight hours per year) just over 50 million kwh.
Since nuclear power currently represents about 10% of our electrical power, you would need nine more Arizona's to pull it off. So, my "whole earth" comment (which was really meant as an exaggeration) is way off, but it takes a lot more than Arizona. We would probably all be living in a network of tunnels underneath the solar panels.
Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats in Minnesota don't particularly want trucks full of nuclear waste driving down the Interstates
You mean just like the billions of tons of HazMat that travels over our highways every year?
The highways were built for this sort of purpose. We had nuclear missiles hidden in trucks rolling all over the country on our highways for most of the Cold War.
The highways are definately a safer place for nuclear waste than sitting on Prairie Island, slowly contaminating our water, which is the alternative. All the scare-mongering about trucks full of waste on the highways was being done for the sole purpose of eventually forcing the plant to shut down due to lack of available waste storage. If you have been following Minnesota politics at all, you actually already know this and are being very disingenuous.
I believe that you thought of this in 8th grade. Here are some important facts that they apparantly did not teach you in 9-12.
A solar plant the size of a large city would be required to match the power output of a single oil plant. We don't even have enough material to build all the solar plants we would need to power the country, let alone enough land to put it on.
Wind power is currently being used in parts of South Dakota, the most windy place in the US, and in spite of peppering the landscape with windmills, it still does not produce enough power that the state can give up on oil entirely, and that's a tiny state. Imagine trying to power New York City with wind: It simply can not be done.
Hydroelectric power turns rivers into lakes, wetlands into deserts, and mighty rivers into dead ends. From an environmental impact perspective, it's horrible. From a cost perspective, it's even worse. The Hoover Dam required a massive federal investment. Plus, there are only so many great rivers we could destroy.
BioChemical power? Even less practical than any of the above options.
Nobody likes to hear it, but oil will remain the answer for at least another 50 years.
Alternative power options with some promise a few generations down the road:
Undersea turbines Space-based solar collectors Space-based nuclear reactors
And of course, the dream: Controlled Fusion Reactions
It is a political problem, but not a stupid one. Breeder reactors produce an abundance of weapons-grade materials. If the world started counting on them for power, those who would like to do us harm would have thousands of easy targets from which to steal what they need to wipe out cities.
(a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout.
They forgot:
(d) We don't even know how the hell to deal with the solid waste we're producing from nuclear plants now, let alone if we ramped it up.
Here in Minnesota, we are storing our nuclear waste on a swampy island, and the storage facility is running out of space. A proposal was brought up to ship the stuff out of the state to a safer location, but Democrats in our state government shot it down, because they seemed to think that it anything which makes nuclear storage safer will only encourage its use.
Until we get a handle on a safe way to harness fusion, nuclear power has some major drawbacks.
In terms of the amount of power generated for the lowest cost and least environmental impact, it's still hard to beat oil. Even solar power can't compete yet, as you would need to cover the whole damned Earth in mirrors to meet our electricity needs.
Short-term, oil remains the way to go. Long-term, I think space-based solar collectors & nuclear reactors, using targeted radiation transmission to get the juice down to us, or something along those lines, is probably what it will take as more and more of the world catches up with our level of industrialization.
I would put it to you that the people "on the street" that the press likes to talk to are not the brightest bulbs on the tree, regardless of which side they are from. I could cite plenty of mindless sheep by selecting random attendees of a typical moveon.org rally... that doesn't mean all Kerry voters are like them.
The examples reveal this guy to be just as tainted as the gamers he disdains. Let's run it down:
Permanent Death He lists all kinds of advantages of a Permanent Death world, and they are real and worht considering, but he conveniently ingores the downside: PD discourages risk-taking. Once people play a character long enough, they become invested in the success of that character, and want to keep playing it. Therefore, they will avoid any challenge which they are not certain to survive. Fantasy adventures are supposed to be about getting in over your head once in a while, not simply chopping up little bunnies with your sword often enough to be called a hero.
Instancing: He laments that this will make you feel like you are not interacting with the world, but how is that any different from "monster farming", where you are still making zero impact on the gaming world. Raid the orc city as many times as you like, and wipe them all out including the king. In five minutes, they will all still be there. Instancing reduces lag and allowes you and your team to go on small adventures where your characters are the sole heroes, and return to the main gathering places as champions who went off and did something where help could not be called for. It works remarkably well, unless you have been trained to believe that this is not The Way It Should Be.
Teleportation: Anybody who traveled by foot and boat from Erud to Kelethin back in the early days of Everquest before 'ports became easy to come by will be able to tell you that teleportation is a TERRIFIC idea. Few things in a Graphical MMORPG can possibly be more boring that running, by yourself, across miles and miles of terrain which you've seen before. You can't even get up and fetch a cup of coffee while doing it, as you need to be careful to avoid running into unwanted conflicts. This is Not Fun. Why would anybody want to play a game which is Not Fun?
Banks: In any convincing reality, people should have places to keep stuff besides their pockets and backpacks. City of Heroes has "guild halls" planed for this purpose, which will even be exposed to the chance of burglary raids by PC super-villians, adding yet another dimension of interesting game-play.
This line was telling: Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss a session? Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always having to group with the same people of the same level and run a treadmill the whole time?
Look, I have often enjoyed meeting somebody from Bumblefuck, Egypt and striking up a friendly conversation followed by a couple hours of gaming together, but most of us play multi-player games for the sake of enjoying the company of steady associations, either among friends from outside the game, or among a tight group of friends who meet in-game (which is the whole reason people form guilds in the first place.) Anything which makes it more difficult to team up with people you know and like being around should probably be considered a design flaw.
Yes, it seems to be the democratically correct outcome. But some would argue that it demonstrates that the critical thinking skills of the voters themselves need "fixing".
Good point! It can't possibly be true that reasonable people can disagree. It must be that all of us who voted for Bush are short-sighted idiots. Thank you for contributing so much to the sensible dialog between political viewpoints.
It must be nice to know for certain that nobody who disagrees with you could possibly understand facets of our national debate which have eluded you, because you are so wise, and we are so incapable of thought and reason.
It must also be nice to be so sure that the problem with us is that they simply have not been made to understand your arguments yet. If only you could find a way to enlighten the poor, misguided boobs from their prison of ignorance. If only we could just glimpse the light of left-wing thought for the obvious One True Way that it is, perhaps there would be hope for America!!! What more can you, the elite, possibly do to raise us from this morass of childishly thinking that low taxes, limited government, and an aggressive offense against terrorism are good ideas!?
The Dems have some rising stars, such as Obama, but Edwards is not among them.
He not only failed to carry his home state for the ticket, but he gave up a Senate seat to the Republicans in the attempt. He is, for the Democrats, a much less successful version of what Quayle was for the Republicans.
Look for '08 to feature the return of Dean, a few new faces, and (obviously) Hillary Clinton.
The interesting thing about '08 is that the current VP has no aspirations to become the next President, and most of the rising stars of the GOP are cultural moderates like McCain & Powell who are far less likely to inspire the Southern evangelical vote the way Bush did, but more likely to close the gap in some of the "Blue States." It will be interesting to see if the GOP Southerners try to dig up a Gary Bauer type to champion the cultural conservatives. It's looking like it certainly will not be Alan Keyes, after the way he got utterly trounced in Illinois yesterday.
I disagree. We are better off as a federal union of states in which the government of that union is presided over by somebody elected by the states. If Bush had lost Ohio and Iowa, then it should have meant a Kerry presidency regardless of the popular vote.
Not that it matters this time around. The parent to your post is correct: By every measure, Bush won, so there is no case made by this particular election that there's something which needs fixing.
I was considering buying an iPod but I was not aware that Apple discourages iPod backups and future iPods will probably try to make backups impossible
Since the iPod contents are basically nothing more than a duplication of your iTunes library, backing up the playlist which you are synching the iPod from gives you a complete backup. Done.
For that matter, your playlist itself is pretty much already a backup of your iPod. If your iPod ever gets stolen or destroyed, simply plug a new one into your computer, and then click "yes" when it asks if you want to sync with the playlist.
There are only two occasions when you would want to rip songs from the iPod to the computer: 1. Your computer's HD got wiped and you had no other backup of your playlist other than the iPod itself. 2. You are copying music from somebody else's iPod.
The first case will never come up as long as you are the sort of person who backs up their PC. The second case is the reason why Apple obfuscates the means of doing this: They don't want their device perceived as a tool for easilly stealing music.
Abolishing the electoral college would not change much when it comes to campaigning, all it would do is eliminate the crap that happened in 2000...
I doubt it would do any such thing.
The national popular vote was closer, by percantage, than the disputed vote in Florida. If there was no Electoral College, we would have had a nation-wide recount, complete with court cases over dead people voting in Illinois, "get out the vote" drives giving cigarettes and other gifts for voting Democrat in Wisconsin, and God only knows how many other ugly disputes all over the country. We probably still would have been sorting out who was supposed to be President when the 9/11 attack happened almost a year later.
He talks about the need to have someone with knowledge (not JR himelf, but someone who has read a couple of books con cognitive sciences, and interface design) in the designer team.
Which all assumes that Jobs did not hire design people who understood such issues.
The truth is that NeXT, while a commercial failure, had a UI which was already superior to the Mac in several ways, and included many former Mac-heads among it's fanatical followers.
OS X is an improvedment on the NeXT concepts, which also retained many of the best things about the old Macintosh interface.
At the same time, it gave the option to dump things it supplanted... As a former MacOS7/8/9 user (I couldn't afford a NeXT Cube), I originally was keeping my internal HD's mounted on the desktop, just like any Aplle True Believer would probably insist on. The Finder for OS X has become so useful, however, that now the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting. I'm sure Apple would turn it off by default if it weren't for all the Jeff Raskin types who consider the old desktop metaphor such a vital security blanket that the thought of accessing all their drives through that icon on the left side of the dock merely frightens and confuses them.
The more I use OS X, the more I like it, and the more certain I am that I would never want to go back to the way that OS 9 organized the UI.
Instead of attacking the person, try to attack his points.
When he has one, I'll give it a shot.
OS X is vastly more simple for a beginner to use than the old "System 7" Macintosh. He's coming at OS X the same way a Windows geek does, as somebody who is used to the way a different operating system does things, and therefore a slanted opinion about the way things "should" be done.
The dock, the new multi-tiered finder, and the "no button" mouse are all ultra-friendly on-ramps for a new user to get up and running on all the basic apps. Once the stuff "grandma" needs to learn to do e-mail and surf are mastered, digging deeper into the OS is remarkably simple. After a year or so with her first iMac, my previously-computer-illiterate aunt is comfortably trouble-shooting her own network issues.
The old Mac OS was simple and elegant for the apps and environments which existed in 1989, but ten years later it was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of the paradigms which seemed like simplicity itself did not adapt well to the way people are using computers today.
Pat yourself on the back for making something which was way ahead of the pack at the time, Raskin, but stop being a crybaby now that your work has been eclipsed and made redundant.
You don't hear this kind of whining about the web from people who used to write CD-ROM encyclopedias, but this article is pretty much the same sort of thing.
iTunes stores album art images (or a different image, if you prefer) with the info tags of each song, and songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store have the album art attached by default.
As soon as color screens are cheap enough, you can bet that there will be a new generation of iPods which display the album art for the currently-playing song.
Saying "music you like sucks" to people is always flamebait.
U2's new sound lost a lot of old fans of their old "dangadangadanga"-guitar-droning, black-flag-waving, bloody-revolution-shouting, dick-swinging, ultra-simple rock-n-roll sound.
It also won a lot of new fans.
When the Joshua Tree came out, a lot of people who dismissed their music as simple political rants over even simpler guitar jams were astonished that U2 could put out anything with the sophistication of "One Tree Hill" or "Mothers of the Disappeared."
As for the albums that followed, you can't tell me that "When Love Comes To Town", their duet with B. B. King lacked soul.
Nor can you ever get me to agree with your dismissal of such haunting balads as "Stay (Faraway, So Close)", "One", "All I Want Is You" and "If God Will Send His Angels" as mere pop tripe. I personally value any one of those songs more than the entire album of "War" (arguably the best album of their early period.)
"Pop" was possible their worst album between Joshua Tree and their latest works, but I would hold up songs like "Staring at the Sun" against some of the best prog-rock of the 70s (or the best neo-prog bands like the Flaming Lips), and it would not suffer for the comparison.
Did their "hey look at us pretend to be shallow, self-important pop divas" act get too old, too cute, and too tiresome? Yes. Absolutely. Every TV interview Bono gave during the 90s made me want to puke, but they created a lot of damn good music during that period.
You are entitled to disagree, but calling music that many other people like and connect with "souless, meaningless, empty crap" in a public chat forum can't be considered anythign other than inflamitory.
They might even have a few albums from the Rolling Stones they can loan you, but you will need a special antique playback device, which can only be plugged in to amplifiers specifically designed for its type of input, in order to listen to them.
Some of these devices can spin the album at different speeds, and playing it at the incorrect speed can result in incorrect playback. If they loan you a full-length album, set the device to rotate 33 and one-third times per minute. You can recognize a full-length album because it's about the same size as those "Laser Disks" your parents used to watch before DVD's came out.
Singles, on the other hand, are slightly larger than CD's and DVD's, and must be played at a higher speed: 45 revolutions per minute. I know it may seem strange that something so large can hold such a small amount of data, but such was the nature of storage systems back in those days.
If the storage disks are in good condition, prepare to be astonished at what terrific sound quality can come from such ancient equipment.
After that, maybe Grandpa can teach you how to actually throw a real football with your bare hands, just like the animated characters in Madden 2005!
Under that system, if a small number of Nader voters (let's say one quarter) are libertarians who consider Kerry to be the worst-case scenario, then it looks like this:
15% Nader, Kerry, Bush 5% Nader, Bush, Kerry 35% Kerry, Nader, Bush 45% Bush, Kerry, Nader
Now you have a two-way tie, with Bush and Kerry both getting 50%, and we are right back where we were.
Furthermore, some Kerry voters (the so-called "security moms") would probably prefer Bush over Nader, and some Bush voters (angry vets) would probaby prefer Nader over Kerry.
Now you are going to see something more like this:
Kerry beats Bush in 50% of the votes Kerry beats Nader in 50% of the votes Bush beats Kerry in 50% of the votes Bush beats Nader in 50% of the votes
A convoluted three-way "tie", in which one candidate has a signifigantly large plurality over the other two of first-choice votes. Under such a scenario, Ralph Nader, the least popular of the three and the first choice of only 20% of voters, could win the election.
You can't tell me that people would feel they were better represented by a system that works like that.
Not only that, but consider that the metro areas of New England, Southern California, and Chicago alone combine to represent enough votes that a candidate could win the popular vote just by getting their support and little else. The needs, interests, and even civil rights of people living in "fly-over land" could safely be ignored, so long as a national candidate can bring the bacon home to those urban centers.
I'm for George Bush, and this year it looks like there is a strong chance of him losing the election the same way Gore lost it last time: coming up short on electoral votes in spite of winning a narrow lead in the popular vote. In spite of the fact that my prefered candidate might lose the election as a result, I consider the preservation of the electoral college and our system of electing presidents far more important than which candidate wins this particular election.
People who tell you "this is the most important election in our lifetime" are just raising the hype level to encourage us to vote. There are many differences between Bush and Kerry when it comes to political philosophy, but in terms of policy likely to be enacted over the next four years, the differences are very small.
Bush want to renew the PATRIOT Act as-is. Kerry wants to Amend it. Congress is determined to amend it, so Bush would not get his way if elected. Either way, the PATRIOT Act gets tweaked.
Kerry wants a federal health plan similar to what the Clinton's proposed in 1991. Bush wants private insurance plans to follow you as you change or lose your job. The Congress will never adopt Kerry's health plan. Either way, a plan similar to what Bush proposes will probably be passed.
Bush believes he was right to lead us into Iraq. Kerry believes it was a mistake, but a conflict which we now must win. Either way, we continue our presense there for several more years.
People make a big deal about the possibility of partisan judges getting on the Supreme Court, but this is the post-Bork era. Any appointee is going to face terrific scrutiny, even if those opposing them are in the Congressional minority. This means that any judge even perceived as "too" partisan has little chance of even getting out of committee for a vote, and will have their name dragged through the mud.
So what it comes down to is this: If you want the miniscule, tiny, pathetic tax cuts which Bush passed to be rolled back, vote Kerry. If you want another miniscule, tiny, pathetic tax cut or two passed in addition to keeping the useless ones we had in his first term, re-elect Bush. Either way, you will be paying around 30% of your income to the Feds (depending on your bracket), and either way the deficit is not coming down until the economy completes its recovery phase.
Hmm... Neither Google nor Bartlet's has yielded anything in the 30 seconds or so that I looked, so it may be that I owe our guest an apology for that crass accusation, but I could swear I've heard that same gag (that being famous disqualifies you from being recognized by High Society) somewhere before. Now it's going to bug me all day...
I'm thinking a Google search just might yield prior art. Not that there's anything wrong with stealing old jokes, but writers are usually in the habit of crediting them to the originator of the quip.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's funny how Ohio can't even be their own state. On the news they said, "Ohio is the Florida of 2004". How can a state be another state. Oh well, I digress.
I think it's pretty clear that they mean it in the same sense as when people say "pink is the new black."
My bad. I would mod you up for your correction, had I not already been in the discussion.
Actually, as I read that back, it would take ten Arizonas to match the mere 10% production of our nuclear power production.
To match out total production would take about a hundred Arizonas (assuming these numbers are correct.) The Canadians might be a little miffed when we start panelling over them to meet our power needs.
Our sixth-largest state is 114,006 square miles. Using your formula of 1 kilowatt per square mile (an easy enough calculation), that's 114,006 kilowatts.
In 1998 (the first year for which I was able to find energy statistics via google), our nuclear production alone (which was dwarfed by oil production) gave us about 673 billion kilowatt hours. (A kWh is a non-SI calculation of simply multiplying killowatts times hours.)
Your all-of-Arizona solar plant would produce (114,006 kw, times about 400 daylight hours per year) just over 50 million kwh.
Since nuclear power currently represents about 10% of our electrical power, you would need nine more Arizona's to pull it off. So, my "whole earth" comment (which was really meant as an exaggeration) is way off, but it takes a lot more than Arizona. We would probably all be living in a network of tunnels underneath the solar panels.
Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats in Minnesota don't particularly want trucks full of nuclear waste driving down the Interstates
You mean just like the billions of tons of HazMat that travels over our highways every year?
The highways were built for this sort of purpose. We had nuclear missiles hidden in trucks rolling all over the country on our highways for most of the Cold War.
The highways are definately a safer place for nuclear waste than sitting on Prairie Island, slowly contaminating our water, which is the alternative. All the scare-mongering about trucks full of waste on the highways was being done for the sole purpose of eventually forcing the plant to shut down due to lack of available waste storage. If you have been following Minnesota politics at all, you actually already know this and are being very disingenuous.
I believe that you thought of this in 8th grade. Here are some important facts that they apparantly did not teach you in 9-12.
A solar plant the size of a large city would be required to match the power output of a single oil plant. We don't even have enough material to build all the solar plants we would need to power the country, let alone enough land to put it on.
Wind power is currently being used in parts of South Dakota, the most windy place in the US, and in spite of peppering the landscape with windmills, it still does not produce enough power that the state can give up on oil entirely, and that's a tiny state. Imagine trying to power New York City with wind: It simply can not be done.
Hydroelectric power turns rivers into lakes, wetlands into deserts, and mighty rivers into dead ends. From an environmental impact perspective, it's horrible. From a cost perspective, it's even worse. The Hoover Dam required a massive federal investment. Plus, there are only so many great rivers we could destroy.
BioChemical power? Even less practical than any of the above options.
Nobody likes to hear it, but oil will remain the answer for at least another 50 years.
Alternative power options with some promise a few generations down the road:
Undersea turbines
Space-based solar collectors
Space-based nuclear reactors
And of course, the dream: Controlled Fusion Reactions
It is a political problem, but not a stupid one. Breeder reactors produce an abundance of weapons-grade materials. If the world started counting on them for power, those who would like to do us harm would have thousands of easy targets from which to steal what they need to wipe out cities.
(a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout.
They forgot:
(d) We don't even know how the hell to deal with the solid waste we're producing from nuclear plants now, let alone if we ramped it up.
Here in Minnesota, we are storing our nuclear waste on a swampy island, and the storage facility is running out of space. A proposal was brought up to ship the stuff out of the state to a safer location, but Democrats in our state government shot it down, because they seemed to think that it anything which makes nuclear storage safer will only encourage its use.
Until we get a handle on a safe way to harness fusion, nuclear power has some major drawbacks.
In terms of the amount of power generated for the lowest cost and least environmental impact, it's still hard to beat oil. Even solar power can't compete yet, as you would need to cover the whole damned Earth in mirrors to meet our electricity needs.
Short-term, oil remains the way to go. Long-term, I think space-based solar collectors & nuclear reactors, using targeted radiation transmission to get the juice down to us, or something along those lines, is probably what it will take as more and more of the world catches up with our level of industrialization.
I would put it to you that the people "on the street" that the press likes to talk to are not the brightest bulbs on the tree, regardless of which side they are from. I could cite plenty of mindless sheep by selecting random attendees of a typical moveon.org rally... that doesn't mean all Kerry voters are like them.
The examples reveal this guy to be just as tainted as the gamers he disdains. Let's run it down:
Permanent Death
He lists all kinds of advantages of a Permanent Death world, and they are real and worht considering, but he conveniently ingores the downside: PD discourages risk-taking. Once people play a character long enough, they become invested in the success of that character, and want to keep playing it. Therefore, they will avoid any challenge which they are not certain to survive. Fantasy adventures are supposed to be about getting in over your head once in a while, not simply chopping up little bunnies with your sword often enough to be called a hero.
Instancing:
He laments that this will make you feel like you are not interacting with the world, but how is that any different from "monster farming", where you are still making zero impact on the gaming world. Raid the orc city as many times as you like, and wipe them all out including the king. In five minutes, they will all still be there. Instancing reduces lag and allowes you and your team to go on small adventures where your characters are the sole heroes, and return to the main gathering places as champions who went off and did something where help could not be called for. It works remarkably well, unless you have been trained to believe that this is not The Way It Should Be.
Teleportation:
Anybody who traveled by foot and boat from Erud to Kelethin back in the early days of Everquest before 'ports became easy to come by will be able to tell you that teleportation is a TERRIFIC idea. Few things in a Graphical MMORPG can possibly be more boring that running, by yourself, across miles and miles of terrain which you've seen before. You can't even get up and fetch a cup of coffee while doing it, as you need to be careful to avoid running into unwanted conflicts. This is Not Fun. Why would anybody want to play a game which is Not Fun?
Banks:
In any convincing reality, people should have places to keep stuff besides their pockets and backpacks. City of Heroes has "guild halls" planed for this purpose, which will even be exposed to the chance of burglary raids by PC super-villians, adding yet another dimension of interesting game-play.
This line was telling:
Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss a session?
Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always having to group with the same people of the same level and run a treadmill the whole time?
Look, I have often enjoyed meeting somebody from Bumblefuck, Egypt and striking up a friendly conversation followed by a couple hours of gaming together, but most of us play multi-player games for the sake of enjoying the company of steady associations, either among friends from outside the game, or among a tight group of friends who meet in-game (which is the whole reason people form guilds in the first place.) Anything which makes it more difficult to team up with people you know and like being around should probably be considered a design flaw.
Yes, it seems to be the democratically correct outcome. But some would argue that it demonstrates that the critical thinking skills of the voters themselves need "fixing".
Good point! It can't possibly be true that reasonable people can disagree. It must be that all of us who voted for Bush are short-sighted idiots. Thank you for contributing so much to the sensible dialog between political viewpoints.
It must be nice to know for certain that nobody who disagrees with you could possibly understand facets of our national debate which have eluded you, because you are so wise, and we are so incapable of thought and reason.
It must also be nice to be so sure that the problem with us is that they simply have not been made to understand your arguments yet. If only you could find a way to enlighten the poor, misguided boobs from their prison of ignorance. If only we could just glimpse the light of left-wing thought for the obvious One True Way that it is, perhaps there would be hope for America!!! What more can you, the elite, possibly do to raise us from this morass of childishly thinking that low taxes, limited government, and an aggressive offense against terrorism are good ideas!?
The Dems have some rising stars, such as Obama, but Edwards is not among them.
He not only failed to carry his home state for the ticket, but he gave up a Senate seat to the Republicans in the attempt. He is, for the Democrats, a much less successful version of what Quayle was for the Republicans.
Look for '08 to feature the return of Dean, a few new faces, and (obviously) Hillary Clinton.
The interesting thing about '08 is that the current VP has no aspirations to become the next President, and most of the rising stars of the GOP are cultural moderates like McCain & Powell who are far less likely to inspire the Southern evangelical vote the way Bush did, but more likely to close the gap in some of the "Blue States." It will be interesting to see if the GOP Southerners try to dig up a Gary Bauer type to champion the cultural conservatives. It's looking like it certainly will not be Alan Keyes, after the way he got utterly trounced in Illinois yesterday.
I disagree. We are better off as a federal union of states in which the government of that union is presided over by somebody elected by the states. If Bush had lost Ohio and Iowa, then it should have meant a Kerry presidency regardless of the popular vote.
Not that it matters this time around. The parent to your post is correct: By every measure, Bush won, so there is no case made by this particular election that there's something which needs fixing.
Since the iPod contents are basically nothing more than a duplication of your iTunes library, backing up the playlist which you are synching the iPod from gives you a complete backup. Done.
For that matter, your playlist itself is pretty much already a backup of your iPod. If your iPod ever gets stolen or destroyed, simply plug a new one into your computer, and then click "yes" when it asks if you want to sync with the playlist.
There are only two occasions when you would want to rip songs from the iPod to the computer: 1. Your computer's HD got wiped and you had no other backup of your playlist other than the iPod itself. 2. You are copying music from somebody else's iPod.
The first case will never come up as long as you are the sort of person who backs up their PC. The second case is the reason why Apple obfuscates the means of doing this: They don't want their device perceived as a tool for easilly stealing music.
Abolishing the electoral college would not change much when it comes to campaigning, all it would do is eliminate the crap that happened in 2000...
I doubt it would do any such thing.
The national popular vote was closer, by percantage, than the disputed vote in Florida. If there was no Electoral College, we would have had a nation-wide recount, complete with court cases over dead people voting in Illinois, "get out the vote" drives giving cigarettes and other gifts for voting Democrat in Wisconsin, and God only knows how many other ugly disputes all over the country. We probably still would have been sorting out who was supposed to be President when the 9/11 attack happened almost a year later.
He talks about the need to have someone with knowledge (not JR himelf, but someone who has read a couple of books con cognitive sciences, and interface design) in the designer team.
Which all assumes that Jobs did not hire design people who understood such issues.
The truth is that NeXT, while a commercial failure, had a UI which was already superior to the Mac in several ways, and included many former Mac-heads among it's fanatical followers.
OS X is an improvedment on the NeXT concepts, which also retained many of the best things about the old Macintosh interface.
At the same time, it gave the option to dump things it supplanted... As a former MacOS7/8/9 user (I couldn't afford a NeXT Cube), I originally was keeping my internal HD's mounted on the desktop, just like any Aplle True Believer would probably insist on. The Finder for OS X has become so useful, however, that now the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting. I'm sure Apple would turn it off by default if it weren't for all the Jeff Raskin types who consider the old desktop metaphor such a vital security blanket that the thought of accessing all their drives through that icon on the left side of the dock merely frightens and confuses them.
The more I use OS X, the more I like it, and the more certain I am that I would never want to go back to the way that OS 9 organized the UI.
Instead of attacking the person, try to attack his points.
When he has one, I'll give it a shot.
OS X is vastly more simple for a beginner to use than the old "System 7" Macintosh. He's coming at OS X the same way a Windows geek does, as somebody who is used to the way a different operating system does things, and therefore a slanted opinion about the way things "should" be done.
The dock, the new multi-tiered finder, and the "no button" mouse are all ultra-friendly on-ramps for a new user to get up and running on all the basic apps. Once the stuff "grandma" needs to learn to do e-mail and surf are mastered, digging deeper into the OS is remarkably simple. After a year or so with her first iMac, my previously-computer-illiterate aunt is comfortably trouble-shooting her own network issues.
The old Mac OS was simple and elegant for the apps and environments which existed in 1989, but ten years later it was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of the paradigms which seemed like simplicity itself did not adapt well to the way people are using computers today.
Pat yourself on the back for making something which was way ahead of the pack at the time, Raskin, but stop being a crybaby now that your work has been eclipsed and made redundant.
You don't hear this kind of whining about the web from people who used to write CD-ROM encyclopedias, but this article is pretty much the same sort of thing.
iTunes stores album art images (or a different image, if you prefer) with the info tags of each song, and songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store have the album art attached by default.
As soon as color screens are cheap enough, you can bet that there will be a new generation of iPods which display the album art for the currently-playing song.
Saying "music you like sucks" to people is always flamebait.
U2's new sound lost a lot of old fans of their old "dangadangadanga"-guitar-droning, black-flag-waving, bloody-revolution-shouting, dick-swinging, ultra-simple rock-n-roll sound.
It also won a lot of new fans.
When the Joshua Tree came out, a lot of people who dismissed their music as simple political rants over even simpler guitar jams were astonished that U2 could put out anything with the sophistication of "One Tree Hill" or "Mothers of the Disappeared."
As for the albums that followed, you can't tell me that "When Love Comes To Town", their duet with B. B. King lacked soul.
Nor can you ever get me to agree with your dismissal of such haunting balads as "Stay (Faraway, So Close)", "One", "All I Want Is You" and "If God Will Send His Angels" as mere pop tripe. I personally value any one of those songs more than the entire album of "War" (arguably the best album of their early period.)
"Pop" was possible their worst album between Joshua Tree and their latest works, but I would hold up songs like "Staring at the Sun" against some of the best prog-rock of the 70s (or the best neo-prog bands like the Flaming Lips), and it would not suffer for the comparison.
Did their "hey look at us pretend to be shallow, self-important pop divas" act get too old, too cute, and too tiresome? Yes. Absolutely. Every TV interview Bono gave during the 90s made me want to puke, but they created a lot of damn good music during that period.
You are entitled to disagree, but calling music that many other people like and connect with "souless, meaningless, empty crap" in a public chat forum can't be considered anythign other than inflamitory.
Ask your grandparents.
They might even have a few albums from the Rolling Stones they can loan you, but you will need a special antique playback device, which can only be plugged in to amplifiers specifically designed for its type of input, in order to listen to them.
Some of these devices can spin the album at different speeds, and playing it at the incorrect speed can result in incorrect playback. If they loan you a full-length album, set the device to rotate 33 and one-third times per minute. You can recognize a full-length album because it's about the same size as those "Laser Disks" your parents used to watch before DVD's came out.
Singles, on the other hand, are slightly larger than CD's and DVD's, and must be played at a higher speed: 45 revolutions per minute. I know it may seem strange that something so large can hold such a small amount of data, but such was the nature of storage systems back in those days.
If the storage disks are in good condition, prepare to be astonished at what terrific sound quality can come from such ancient equipment.
After that, maybe Grandpa can teach you how to actually throw a real football with your bare hands, just like the animated characters in Madden 2005!
Under that system, if a small number of Nader voters (let's say one quarter) are libertarians who consider Kerry to be the worst-case scenario, then it looks like this:
15% Nader, Kerry, Bush
5% Nader, Bush, Kerry
35% Kerry, Nader, Bush
45% Bush, Kerry, Nader
Now you have a two-way tie, with Bush and Kerry both getting 50%, and we are right back where we were.
Furthermore, some Kerry voters (the so-called "security moms") would probably prefer Bush over Nader, and some Bush voters (angry vets) would probaby prefer Nader over Kerry.
Now you are going to see something more like this:
15% Nader, Kerry, Bush
5% Nader, Bush, Kerry
30% Kerry, Nader, Bush
5% Kerry, Bush, Nader
30% Bush, Nader, Kerry
15% Bush, Kerry, Nader
Now you run the numbers, and:
Kerry beats Bush in 50% of the votes
Kerry beats Nader in 50% of the votes
Bush beats Kerry in 50% of the votes
Bush beats Nader in 50% of the votes
A convoluted three-way "tie", in which one candidate has a signifigantly large plurality over the other two of first-choice votes. Under such a scenario, Ralph Nader, the least popular of the three and the first choice of only 20% of voters, could win the election.
You can't tell me that people would feel they were better represented by a system that works like that.
Not only that, but consider that the metro areas of New England, Southern California, and Chicago alone combine to represent enough votes that a candidate could win the popular vote just by getting their support and little else. The needs, interests, and even civil rights of people living in "fly-over land" could safely be ignored, so long as a national candidate can bring the bacon home to those urban centers.
I'm for George Bush, and this year it looks like there is a strong chance of him losing the election the same way Gore lost it last time: coming up short on electoral votes in spite of winning a narrow lead in the popular vote. In spite of the fact that my prefered candidate might lose the election as a result, I consider the preservation of the electoral college and our system of electing presidents far more important than which candidate wins this particular election.
People who tell you "this is the most important election in our lifetime" are just raising the hype level to encourage us to vote. There are many differences between Bush and Kerry when it comes to political philosophy, but in terms of policy likely to be enacted over the next four years, the differences are very small.
Bush want to renew the PATRIOT Act as-is. Kerry wants to Amend it. Congress is determined to amend it, so Bush would not get his way if elected. Either way, the PATRIOT Act gets tweaked.
Kerry wants a federal health plan similar to what the Clinton's proposed in 1991. Bush wants private insurance plans to follow you as you change or lose your job. The Congress will never adopt Kerry's health plan. Either way, a plan similar to what Bush proposes will probably be passed.
Bush believes he was right to lead us into Iraq. Kerry believes it was a mistake, but a conflict which we now must win. Either way, we continue our presense there for several more years.
People make a big deal about the possibility of partisan judges getting on the Supreme Court, but this is the post-Bork era. Any appointee is going to face terrific scrutiny, even if those opposing them are in the Congressional minority. This means that any judge even perceived as "too" partisan has little chance of even getting out of committee for a vote, and will have their name dragged through the mud.
So what it comes down to is this: If you want the miniscule, tiny, pathetic tax cuts which Bush passed to be rolled back, vote Kerry. If you want another miniscule, tiny, pathetic tax cut or two passed in addition to keeping the useless ones we had in his first term, re-elect Bush. Either way, you will be paying around 30% of your income to the Feds (depending on your bracket), and either way the deficit is not coming down until the economy completes its recovery phase.
Oh, my God. Thank you for being the only one here to catch that joke!
Some people are too busy getting upset that I sounded critical of their favorite author to see that.
Hmm... Neither Google nor Bartlet's has yielded anything in the 30 seconds or so that I looked, so it may be that I owe our guest an apology for that crass accusation, but I could swear I've heard that same gag (that being famous disqualifies you from being recognized by High Society) somewhere before. Now it's going to bug me all day...
Classic, in that it sounds awfully familiar...
I'm thinking a Google search just might yield prior art. Not that there's anything wrong with stealing old jokes, but writers are usually in the habit of crediting them to the originator of the quip.