Maybe not, but I still think that "smart links" are not going to gain much ground. NBCi's "Quick Clicks" died a quiet death for the same reason: most users don't follow contextual links.
If anything, I think it will result in a flooding of MS support channels from people complaining that their browser is "broken" because all the words have squiggly lines under them.
Jon's article started out this time with more of the MS-bashing, US-bashing hysteria from part one, but after a couple of paragraphs, his main points seem to be:
1. MS is coming out with some irresistible new products. 2. MS is one of the most solvent companies in the world. 3. MS can not possibly lose.
I'm starting to think that Jon Katz is actually a Microsoft shareholder, and that he wants to make them out to be an unstoppable juggernaught so his stock value will rise more.
Somebody should call the SEC and have this guy checked out.
Hehe...those script kiddies are gonna have a field day creating virii that insert links to www.goatse.cx:)
I know you were mostly joking, AC... but for those who really hate the feature, that is the obvious way to break it.
If you don't want MS filling your page with smart links, spoof a bunch of them right on your page, all going to useless and/or really gross sites. If enough people do that, people will start to avoid following those damned things at all.
Besides, while it was the way people once thought HTML would someday be used, nobody but us geeks ever follow contextual web links anyway. Regular users go to the sites they know, and only find other sites through Yahoo, "links" pages, or their favorite commercial portal. Most of them only revisit the same 5 pages 90% of the time, and seldom "browse" in the mid-90's sense of the word.
Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
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Napster Going Legit
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Wasn't their a recent story about Mr. Kurzweill (of synth invention fame) manipulating his own voice to sound like an 18-year old female pop singer?
It seemed like it was just a matter of time before something like that was bound to happen.
Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
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Napster Going Legit
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· Score: 1
as a musician I have to speak in support of Britney's vocal abilities.
As another musician, I have to point out that she has a slightly above-average voice, at best.
I can walk into any High School in any major city in America and find at least 3 girls who can sing as well as she does.
You would be surprised how good you can make a mediocre singer sound if you mic them just right, use the best take, and choose your effects carefully.
Re:You underestimate the following of groups
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Napster Going Legit
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LimpBizkit, Marilyn Manson, Linkin park, Blink182 T-shirt sales and merchandise are higher than ever, even beating sales of Iron Maiden and Ozzy T-shirts in the 80's.
1: Ozzy has not mattered since his Black Sabbath days. 2: Iron Maiden never did.
Both examples you gave of 80's success are small niche players. Even Bruce freakin' Springstein filled more stadiums than either of those acts.
Do any of the current bands you mention have the cultural impact of The Who, Led Zep, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley or even Pink Floyd?
Will anybody have anything more than a foggy recolection of who the fuck Limp Bizkit was in two years?
Most people have figured out that Marilyn Manson is just a weak Alice Cooper wanna-be, except he is about 20 years too late, and nobody bothers to be shocked by the used-up horror-movie-drag schtick anymore.
Blink182? More like Blink And You'll Miss Them. By the time W is out of the White House, Blink182 will be in the cut-out bins that have long since cleared out the Dead Eye Dick CD's from waaay back the mid-90's.
A "greatest hits" CD of a band from the 1960's was #1 on the Billboard charts this year. That tells you everything you need to know about the current state of pop music.
Kind of reminds me in ROTJ when Palpatine says to Luke, "Take your weapon...
You are tipping us off about how young you are.
Anybody over the age of 30 is far more likely to be reminded of Princess Leia's defiant warning to General Tarken.
Quoting it would be redundant, as we all have the whole film memorized.:)
Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
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Napster Going Legit
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· Score: 1
She is not entitled to 100% of it. Which is why the record companies paid those people a salary.
Considering how small her contribution to the product was compared to the rest of them, they probably should have her on salary as well.
If the world you propose did not exist two years ago, Briney Spears would be just another teenager with hyperactive glands.
The labels create the demand for the pop stars' products. Without them, there are no pop stars, and nobody (except for the small handful that already got rich in the studio system) can afford to hire producion and management teams of that scale on their own.
IMHO, the death of major labes and the pop stars they produce, would be a Good Thing, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that the label owes anything to Britney Spears beyond what they are already paying her. She is a replacable cog in a very big machine.
There used to be a time when the record companies used to work for musicians.
Really?
That must have been "long ago, when the dew of creation was fresh upon the earth, and the gods were young and playful", because it certainly has not happened within recorded history.
Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
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Napster Going Legit
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· Score: 5
We hear the argument "pay the musician directly" a lot around here, but there is an obvious problem with that:
Nobody would buy, copy, or download a single Briney Spears song if the record label did not
1: Hire studio rats to program the synth-pop music she sings over. 2: Hire a producer and recording engineer team able to make a child singer sound "sexy" 3: Produce expensive videos that wave Ms. Spears's two most obvious selling points in front of the camera. 4: Get it played on the radio (in this case, her records come from Disney, who is a top-5 player in almost every radio market)
To suggest that Ms. Spears is somehow entitled to 100% (or even more than a small percentage) of the revenue generated by her "art" is to ignore who is doing all the work.
The answer is obvious: Ignore major label music entirely. Turn off the radio, stop watching MTV, and allow yourself to lose touch with popular culture. (People are supposed to do that when they start growing up, anyway.)
The truth is, it has already started happening. Concert attendance has been plumetting over the last 10 years, because nobody seriously thinks any band really matters anymore. The biggest draws are leftover bands from the era when people actually cared (like U2). It seems to me that most people no longer consider their favorite music to be an integral part of their identity the way they did in the past. While the latest release from Weezer might be mildly entertaining, nobody is going to worship them the way throngs of stoners once went apeshit over Led Zeppelin; nobody is going to follow them from city to city the way caravans followed the Grateful Dead. Rock n Roll has become a dead religion.
This year, I heard that a band called "Destiny's Child" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 3-part harmonies over shopworn hip-hop beats. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Except that the prosecution is already complete. All that remains is the appeals process. There are no further findings of fact to be done.
In any case, I think that a lot of oversimplification is being done here. The idea that GWB is somehow in bed with the MS camp (simply because he seems to be less aggressive about anti-trust enforcement that Clinton was) gets bounced around a lot here, but the truth is a little more complex.
While many small business PAC's have been very strongly Republican over the last couple decades, Bill Clinton won the endorsements of a lot of larger corporations, and has a history of being a friend of Big Business, going back all the way to his second term as Governor of Arkansas.
If Microsoft was in clear violation of anti-trust law (and to me it seems that this was the case), then they are probably going to get spanked no matter what the political philosophy of the Justice Department is, because it is a matter of law, not a matter of politics.
If there is as much gray area as the MS shills are hoping to take advantage of, if the over-riding idea here is "they are eeeeevil and Must Be Stopped", then we would be talking about a purely political crusade, in which case the Clinton Justice Department was out of line to persue it in the first place.
While it is not difficult to make the case that Federal enforcement under Clinton was a bit overzealous *cough*RubyRidge*cough*, I tend to agree with the case made by the previous AG.
While the current AG (the often-maligned John Ashcroft) has been sympathetic towards MS in the past, he has publicly acknowledges that he sees it as his duty to continue to press the Justice Department's case against MS throught the appeals process.
You need to keep in mind that a large part of a bureaucratic department like the DOJ is made up of people who do not leave when presidential cabinets change. A new AG is not likely to result in a total realignment of opinion on a case that took as many resources as it did.
Bottom line: MS just might beat the rap (re: avoid total break-up) if the DC court sees things their way. GWB's opinion on the matter is not likely to have much influence on that ruling, as nobody seriously thought it would survive appeal back when we thought Gore would be the next POTUS.
I was not the one who made the claim that NPR has been bought by Ford or anybody else. While they certainly do rely on corporate sponsorships, that was not the emphasis of my post.
I was merely pointing out that the suggestion that they are somehow more virtuous than other broadcasters just because they claim a status of "non-profit" is not only misguided, but it is based on an assumption which is not entirely true.
If Photoshop were the same price as Half-Life they would make twice as much money.
If that was true, Photoshop would be the same price as Half-Life.
Photoshop (using the numbers in this thread) costs $609. Half-Life is in bargain bins for about $15-$20... but let's for a moment use $50.
That would mean that Photoshop, in order to make "twice as much money" would need to sell 12 times as many copies!
Every serious digital photographer is already buying Photoshop at $609, and every college kid is already using warez versions of photoshop for free.
Are you saying that for every current buyer of Photoshop, there are 11 "casual" digital image editors out there that would pay $50 for the color separation features of Photoshop, rather than use GIMP? I think you are probably wrong about that.
from the worldview-formerly-known-as-hysteria dept.
First of all, Bill Gates is not the "CEO of the Corporate Republic" for several reasons. 1: He is not even the CEO of his own company any more, 2: There is no reason to be so certain that Microsoft's.NET strategy will actually work, and 3: We are not (as was firmly established in the replies to the last Katz article) living in a "Corporate Republic".
Secondly, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is made up of judges which were appointed before the current president (who you love to hate) was elected. Most of them were probably appointed by the same administration (Clinton) that brought the case before Judge Jackson... So when you try to frame this as a case of W bailing Bill Gates out, you are just making as ass of yourself.
Finally, MS stock went up (in spite of the recent NASDAQ slump) not because of some corporate dystopian nightmare, but because any investment advisor will tell you to put your money into market leaders, and rely on them even more during the slumps (when some of their weaker competitors might dry up and blow away). Want to buy stock in a soda company during a market slump? Buy Coca-cola.
In spite of the NASDAQ drop, the tech sector is still a good buy, but investors are less willing to play the long shots until the market becomes a little bit less of a mine field. Since MS sells the OS used on over 90% of all desktop computers and completely owns the office suite market, they are (in spite of the possibility of a break-up) an extremely good risk. They are far-and-away the least likely company to go under or be bought out in all of the tech world. Does anybody here seriosly believe that Netscape has a bright future ahead, even if MS is broken up?
He's got a point. Shada is vastly inferior to some of Adams's other Dr. Who episodes, yet it outsells most other episodes in the show's history. (Although that is perhaps only because Shada was broadcast, while most fanboy Whovians have seen all the other episodes and are starved for a little more of the show. I'm guilty of sitting through it myself, and might have bought it if a friend didn't already have a copy to loan me.)
All "non-profit" means is that you never pay our dividends to the owners of the company. You can still make profits, but they all must be socked away or spent.
There are lots of multi-billion dollar "non-profit" companies out there. I used to work for one. The way the game is played is this: If you have a surprisingly successful quarter, you pay out huge "bonuses" to your executive staff. That way, they come out just as well as if they were shareholding execs in a for-profit venture.
It's really just a difference of semantics.
Even setting that aside, your theory has one small problem...
If you are a human being, you are biased.
There is no such thing as purely objective journalism. Even those who try be "just the facts" reporters will allow their bias to bleed into their selection of stories, their choices of emphasis, and the "experts" they choose to interview.
As one example, Jim Lehrer of PBS's "News Hour" tries his darndest to be fair and objective, yet vast majority of Republicans who are invited to appear as talking heads on his show are liberal republicans like David Gergan. You are not likely to ever see the likes of Jack Kemp on his show. Mr. Lehrer does not have a similar aversion to the far left, so debates on his show are usually held between a liberal Democrat and a liberal Republican (which results in a very civil debate... lots of consensus of opinion is usually found between them.)
That's why, when I want to read or watch news analysis, I always turn to the extremists on both sides. Why? Because they are up front about their bias. On the Internet, The Smoking Gun makes no secret of being a JonKatzian-style anti-corporate leftist site, while The Drudge Report is published by an unapologetic Republican cheerleader.
The panel of the quirky-yet-entertaining PBS show "Mental Engineering" probably don't really think of themselves as lefties, but do such a poor job of hiding their bias that they might as well have a running caption that says "we hate capitalist marketing". And on the same network we have William F. Buckley's "Firing Line". Nobody ever accused Mr. Buckley of pretending to be unbiased.
When you consume media that is open about their bias, it invites critical thinking, which is a Good Thing. In our local radio market, there is a conservative blowhard named Jason Lewis who dominates the late afternoon drive. I find that about half the time, I disagree with either his position, or the argument he uses to support a position I would otherwise agree with, but I appreciate that he comes right out of the blocks proclaiming his bias. I wish more journalists would do the same.
Not only that, but the public broadcasters have a for-profit branch, which sells CD's, DVD's, books, merchandise, and tapes of Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion. (If you are a member of either a public radio or public TV station, you get a spiffy catalog of overpriced yuppie toys, coffee mugs, etc. which IIRC is called "Signals". All of that stuff is for profit.)
The people who run NPR and PBS make huge profits, they just hide them by putting all their profitable ventures under the umbrella of a separate company.
I'm not at all surprised that a club DJ would want lots of quiet. As a musician and former DJ myself, I know all too well the way sound can wear you down. Ears need rest.
When I am not listening to (or playing) music, I find total silence to be absolutely blissful.
Back in the days when I was a sysadmin monkey during the day, the noise of the server room was enough to make me want to stab somebody.
Most of Shada was filmed. You can buy a partially-restored version of it from almost any video store large enough to have old TV sci fi.
It's kind of dry to watch. The unfilmed scenes are filled in with Tom Baker narrating text based on the events in the screenplay. (Or just raw text, if you watch one of the early bootlegs).
There's also a couple of scenes where they did not get around to looping K9's voice, so you just see The Doctor holding one end of a conversation with long pauses in between.
Judging by the comments here, I must be the only person on Earth who thinks that "Mostly Harmless" was a better book that "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish".
"So Long" was too happy. Arthur leans that Earth is still there and then spends a few chapters having flying sex with a total hottie while listening to Dire Straits records. The tone of the story was completely different than in the first three, which introduced a lot of very dark themes. (You can't escape bureaucrats; truely understanding the world would make you go mad; life is short, cruel, and usually unfair; etc.)
In "So Long", Adams abandoned the motif of depression that defined the series up until then in order to meditate upon just how sexy Mark Knopfler's guitar solos are.
The "rain god" was funny, but probably would have been a better fit in a Dirk Gently novel.
I will grant you that Adams at his worst was still better than a lot of authors at their best *cough*Pratchet*cough*, but I really consider "So Long" to be the weakest of the five books.
"Mostly Harmless" was a return to form. Of course the Vogon bureaucracy would have ultimate vicory in the end... could it really be any other way?
Except that "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" was not a novel, and came out before the 5th book ("Mostly Harmless") was released... so calling it the sixth novel would be silly.
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, I think it will result in a flooding of MS support channels from people complaining that their browser is "broken" because all the words have squiggly lines under them.
Jon's article started out this time with more of the MS-bashing, US-bashing hysteria from part one, but after a couple of paragraphs, his main points seem to be:
1. MS is coming out with some irresistible new products.
2. MS is one of the most solvent companies in the world.
3. MS can not possibly lose.
I'm starting to think that Jon Katz is actually a Microsoft shareholder, and that he wants to make them out to be an unstoppable juggernaught so his stock value will rise more.
Somebody should call the SEC and have this guy checked out.
I know you were mostly joking, AC... but for those who really hate the feature, that is the obvious way to break it.
If you don't want MS filling your page with smart links, spoof a bunch of them right on your page, all going to useless and/or really gross sites. If enough people do that, people will start to avoid following those damned things at all.
Besides, while it was the way people once thought HTML would someday be used, nobody but us geeks ever follow contextual web links anyway. Regular users go to the sites they know, and only find other sites through Yahoo, "links" pages, or their favorite commercial portal. Most of them only revisit the same 5 pages 90% of the time, and seldom "browse" in the mid-90's sense of the word.
It seemed like it was just a matter of time before something like that was bound to happen.
As another musician, I have to point out that she has a slightly above-average voice, at best.
I can walk into any High School in any major city in America and find at least 3 girls who can sing as well as she does.
You would be surprised how good you can make a mediocre singer sound if you mic them just right, use the best take, and choose your effects carefully.
1: Ozzy has not mattered since his Black Sabbath days.
2: Iron Maiden never did.
Both examples you gave of 80's success are small niche players. Even Bruce freakin' Springstein filled more stadiums than either of those acts.
Do any of the current bands you mention have the cultural impact of The Who, Led Zep, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley or even Pink Floyd?
Will anybody have anything more than a foggy recolection of who the fuck Limp Bizkit was in two years?
Most people have figured out that Marilyn Manson is just a weak Alice Cooper wanna-be, except he is about 20 years too late, and nobody bothers to be shocked by the used-up horror-movie-drag schtick anymore.
Blink182? More like Blink And You'll Miss Them. By the time W is out of the White House, Blink182 will be in the cut-out bins that have long since cleared out the Dead Eye Dick CD's from waaay back the mid-90's.
A "greatest hits" CD of a band from the 1960's was #1 on the Billboard charts this year. That tells you everything you need to know about the current state of pop music.
You are tipping us off about how young you are.
Anybody over the age of 30 is far more likely to be reminded of Princess Leia's defiant warning to General Tarken.
Quoting it would be redundant, as we all have the whole film memorized. :)
Considering how small her contribution to the product was compared to the rest of them, they probably should have her on salary as well.
If the world you propose did not exist two years ago, Briney Spears would be just another teenager with hyperactive glands.
The labels create the demand for the pop stars' products. Without them, there are no pop stars, and nobody (except for the small handful that already got rich in the studio system) can afford to hire producion and management teams of that scale on their own.
IMHO, the death of major labes and the pop stars they produce, would be a Good Thing, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that the label owes anything to Britney Spears beyond what they are already paying her. She is a replacable cog in a very big machine.
Former President Bill Clinton can name 90,000 examples of why your number might be off a little bit.
Politics can circumvent justice with ease, but the law itself is a little tougher to get around.
Really?
That must have been "long ago, when the dew of creation was fresh upon the earth, and the gods were young and playful", because it certainly has not happened within recorded history.
Nobody would buy, copy, or download a single Briney Spears song if the record label did not
1: Hire studio rats to program the synth-pop music she sings over.
2: Hire a producer and recording engineer team able to make a child singer sound "sexy"
3: Produce expensive videos that wave Ms. Spears's two most obvious selling points in front of the camera.
4: Get it played on the radio (in this case, her records come from Disney, who is a top-5 player in almost every radio market)
To suggest that Ms. Spears is somehow entitled to 100% (or even more than a small percentage) of the revenue generated by her "art" is to ignore who is doing all the work.
The answer is obvious: Ignore major label music entirely. Turn off the radio, stop watching MTV, and allow yourself to lose touch with popular culture. (People are supposed to do that when they start growing up, anyway.)
The truth is, it has already started happening. Concert attendance has been plumetting over the last 10 years, because nobody seriously thinks any band really matters anymore. The biggest draws are leftover bands from the era when people actually cared (like U2). It seems to me that most people no longer consider their favorite music to be an integral part of their identity the way they did in the past. While the latest release from Weezer might be mildly entertaining, nobody is going to worship them the way throngs of stoners once went apeshit over Led Zeppelin; nobody is going to follow them from city to city the way caravans followed the Grateful Dead. Rock n Roll has become a dead religion.
This year, I heard that a band called "Destiny's Child" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 3-part harmonies over shopworn hip-hop beats. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
In any case, I think that a lot of oversimplification is being done here. The idea that GWB is somehow in bed with the MS camp (simply because he seems to be less aggressive about anti-trust enforcement that Clinton was) gets bounced around a lot here, but the truth is a little more complex.
While many small business PAC's have been very strongly Republican over the last couple decades, Bill Clinton won the endorsements of a lot of larger corporations, and has a history of being a friend of Big Business, going back all the way to his second term as Governor of Arkansas.
If Microsoft was in clear violation of anti-trust law (and to me it seems that this was the case), then they are probably going to get spanked no matter what the political philosophy of the Justice Department is, because it is a matter of law, not a matter of politics.
If there is as much gray area as the MS shills are hoping to take advantage of, if the over-riding idea here is "they are eeeeevil and Must Be Stopped", then we would be talking about a purely political crusade, in which case the Clinton Justice Department was out of line to persue it in the first place.
While it is not difficult to make the case that Federal enforcement under Clinton was a bit overzealous *cough*RubyRidge*cough*, I tend to agree with the case made by the previous AG.
While the current AG (the often-maligned John Ashcroft) has been sympathetic towards MS in the past, he has publicly acknowledges that he sees it as his duty to continue to press the Justice Department's case against MS throught the appeals process.
You need to keep in mind that a large part of a bureaucratic department like the DOJ is made up of people who do not leave when presidential cabinets change. A new AG is not likely to result in a total realignment of opinion on a case that took as many resources as it did.
Bottom line: MS just might beat the rap (re: avoid total break-up) if the DC court sees things their way. GWB's opinion on the matter is not likely to have much influence on that ruling, as nobody seriously thought it would survive appeal back when we thought Gore would be the next POTUS.
I was merely pointing out that the suggestion that they are somehow more virtuous than other broadcasters just because they claim a status of "non-profit" is not only misguided, but it is based on an assumption which is not entirely true.
If that was true, Photoshop would be the same price as Half-Life.
Photoshop (using the numbers in this thread) costs $609.
Half-Life is in bargain bins for about $15-$20... but let's for a moment use $50.
That would mean that Photoshop, in order to make "twice as much money" would need to sell 12 times as many copies!
Every serious digital photographer is already buying Photoshop at $609, and every college kid is already using warez versions of photoshop for free.
Are you saying that for every current buyer of Photoshop, there are 11 "casual" digital image editors out there that would pay $50 for the color separation features of Photoshop, rather than use GIMP? I think you are probably wrong about that.
First of all, Bill Gates is not the "CEO of the Corporate Republic" for several reasons. 1: He is not even the CEO of his own company any more, 2: There is no reason to be so certain that Microsoft's .NET strategy will actually work, and 3: We are not (as was firmly established in the replies to the last Katz article) living in a "Corporate Republic".
Secondly, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is made up of judges which were appointed before the current president (who you love to hate) was elected. Most of them were probably appointed by the same administration (Clinton) that brought the case before Judge Jackson... So when you try to frame this as a case of W bailing Bill Gates out, you are just making as ass of yourself.
Finally, MS stock went up (in spite of the recent NASDAQ slump) not because of some corporate dystopian nightmare, but because any investment advisor will tell you to put your money into market leaders, and rely on them even more during the slumps (when some of their weaker competitors might dry up and blow away). Want to buy stock in a soda company during a market slump? Buy Coca-cola.
In spite of the NASDAQ drop, the tech sector is still a good buy, but investors are less willing to play the long shots until the market becomes a little bit less of a mine field. Since MS sells the OS used on over 90% of all desktop computers and completely owns the office suite market, they are (in spite of the possibility of a break-up) an extremely good risk. They are far-and-away the least likely company to go under or be bought out in all of the tech world. Does anybody here seriosly believe that Netscape has a bright future ahead, even if MS is broken up?
He's got a point. Shada is vastly inferior to some of Adams's other Dr. Who episodes, yet it outsells most other episodes in the show's history. (Although that is perhaps only because Shada was broadcast, while most fanboy Whovians have seen all the other episodes and are starved for a little more of the show. I'm guilty of sitting through it myself, and might have bought it if a friend didn't already have a copy to loan me.)
(Follow the link to see the lyrics to their notorious song about radio payola.)
There are lots of multi-billion dollar "non-profit" companies out there. I used to work for one. The way the game is played is this: If you have a surprisingly successful quarter, you pay out huge "bonuses" to your executive staff. That way, they come out just as well as if they were shareholding execs in a for-profit venture.
It's really just a difference of semantics.
Even setting that aside, your theory has one small problem...
If you are a human being, you are biased.
There is no such thing as purely objective journalism. Even those who try be "just the facts" reporters will allow their bias to bleed into their selection of stories, their choices of emphasis, and the "experts" they choose to interview.
As one example, Jim Lehrer of PBS's "News Hour" tries his darndest to be fair and objective, yet vast majority of Republicans who are invited to appear as talking heads on his show are liberal republicans like David Gergan. You are not likely to ever see the likes of Jack Kemp on his show. Mr. Lehrer does not have a similar aversion to the far left, so debates on his show are usually held between a liberal Democrat and a liberal Republican (which results in a very civil debate... lots of consensus of opinion is usually found between them.)
That's why, when I want to read or watch news analysis, I always turn to the extremists on both sides. Why? Because they are up front about their bias. On the Internet, The Smoking Gun makes no secret of being a JonKatzian-style anti-corporate leftist site, while The Drudge Report is published by an unapologetic Republican cheerleader.
The panel of the quirky-yet-entertaining PBS show "Mental Engineering" probably don't really think of themselves as lefties, but do such a poor job of hiding their bias that they might as well have a running caption that says "we hate capitalist marketing". And on the same network we have William F. Buckley's "Firing Line". Nobody ever accused Mr. Buckley of pretending to be unbiased.
When you consume media that is open about their bias, it invites critical thinking, which is a Good Thing. In our local radio market, there is a conservative blowhard named Jason Lewis who dominates the late afternoon drive. I find that about half the time, I disagree with either his position, or the argument he uses to support a position I would otherwise agree with, but I appreciate that he comes right out of the blocks proclaiming his bias. I wish more journalists would do the same.
The people who run NPR and PBS make huge profits, they just hide them by putting all their profitable ventures under the umbrella of a separate company.
When I am not listening to (or playing) music, I find total silence to be absolutely blissful.
Back in the days when I was a sysadmin monkey during the day, the noise of the server room was enough to make me want to stab somebody.
It's kind of dry to watch. The unfilmed scenes are filled in with Tom Baker narrating text based on the events in the screenplay. (Or just raw text, if you watch one of the early bootlegs).
There's also a couple of scenes where they did not get around to looping K9's voice, so you just see The Doctor holding one end of a conversation with long pauses in between.
"So Long" was too happy. Arthur leans that Earth is still there and then spends a few chapters having flying sex with a total hottie while listening to Dire Straits records. The tone of the story was completely different than in the first three, which introduced a lot of very dark themes. (You can't escape bureaucrats; truely understanding the world would make you go mad; life is short, cruel, and usually unfair; etc.)
In "So Long", Adams abandoned the motif of depression that defined the series up until then in order to meditate upon just how sexy Mark Knopfler's guitar solos are.
The "rain god" was funny, but probably would have been a better fit in a Dirk Gently novel.
I will grant you that Adams at his worst was still better than a lot of authors at their best *cough*Pratchet*cough*, but I really consider "So Long" to be the weakest of the five books.
"Mostly Harmless" was a return to form. Of course the Vogon bureaucracy would have ultimate vicory in the end... could it really be any other way?
Except that "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" was not a novel, and came out before the 5th book ("Mostly Harmless") was released... so calling it the sixth novel would be silly.
Somebody just made a stupid movie this year called "Dude, Where's My Car?". Does that lock up the trademark on the word "dude"? Nope.
In related news, the movie Perl Harbor is "fantastic", according to director Michael Bay.
This just in: Most fans of the Los Angeles Lakers say they would like to see the Lakers win the NBA championship, according to a recent poll.