Seeing as how the labels still own the catalog and can distribute through anybody they please, Apple is no more likely to become a monopoly source of downloads than Wal-Mart is of CD's.
Apple is essentially in the position of being a huge music reseller, like any record store. That's a very different thing from becoming a music label.
Avast! Lash that scalliwag 'cross the keel, and hoist the main sail 'gainst a fair wind, me hearties! 'Tis the only medicine for such scullduggery. Gyarr!
Do you know how many foreign leader out there "support terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States"?
Seventeen?
Okay, that was a wild-assed guess. I don't feel like combing through the World Factbook for the answer.
The question is not whether Saddam was a threat to the US. We know that he was. The question is not whether he was the only threat to the US. We know he was not.
The question is, was he enough of a threat (or "gathering threat" as Bush likes to keep repeating) to justify going to war? Since it's a matter of guaging many complex factors, different people are going to arrive at different conclusions. The Bush and Blair administrations concluded it was. Critics of them have concluded that it was not. The matter is still not settled.
My previous post (in spite of the assumption you seem to be making) made no attempt to answer that question, nor am I going to do so here. I was commenting on a misleading poll interpretation, not the rightness or wrongness of the war.
I mean, geothermal and solar activity are contributing to the warming right now, they could actually change in subtle ways that result in cooling 20 years from now. There are those who insist that this would already be happening, were it not for the greenhouse effect of the Industrial Age. Maybe we are in fact holding back ecological disaster by our seemingly-irresponsible actions. Maybe "cleaning up our act" could result in a catastrophic Ice Age.
It's a discussion which nobody wants to have, because there is vast political capital in fretting over how agriculture and oil wells are "ruining" the planet.
As long as you're lumping me in with eco-nuts, why not?
I must have missed the line where I commented on you at all, let alone accused you of being a "nut" of any sort. My comments were strictly on the issue.
If disagreeing with something you said counts as a personal attack, then I don't think we really have a foundation in place to discuss anything, and we might as well go our separate ways. Cheers.
I find that it does a terrific job of demonstrating one thing: It's damn hard to be funny in written text.
There are those who find Ferber amusing, others who laugh at Hunter S. Thompson. Still others are tickled pink by Christopher Buckley or the scrbblings of Patrick McManus or George Carlin. Many sci-fi nerds swear by Douglas Adams, while would-be hobbits worship at the shrines of Peirs Anthony or Terry Pratchett...
But unless you happened to be this guy, you are not likely to ever be universally recognized as funny by the English-speaking world.
Simply coming up with a quip that gets a giggle and a "+1, Funny" mod out of the Slashdot crowd is a challenge. To write an actual work of satire which is not tiresome and sad is simply nigh impossible for the vast majority of people who think they are able to do it.
If you disagree, go read the Uncyclopedia a little while and you will quickly be joining my camp in this debate. There are a lot of people out there who think they are funny enough to write for The Onion or something very much like it, and they simply are not. They desperately need a "Simon Cowell" type to bluntly urge them to direct their energies elsewhere.
YMMV, obviously. Who am I to tell other people what they should or should not find amusing?
I'll lump you in with others, perhaps unfairly, who seem to think that any attempt at conservation will DESTROY OUR ECONOMY...
Translation: I realize everything you said is valid, but I think I'll make you guilty by association with the most radical reactionaries out there, because I need a straw-man to take down, dammit.
Don't know what state you live in, but here in Texas it's not too bright to have one on your car. It'll be gone pretty soon and you'll be lucky if you're not keyed as well.
I live in Minnesota, and they are all over the place. Never heard of one being torn off somebody else's car until reading this thread. Seems like a rather petty thing to do.
The thing that people forget is that "slow down a little" also has a cost.
This is not a matter of greed. Macro-economics is about survival. When economic times are bad, rich people get by fine, but poor people suffer and die.
Restricting the use of oil raises the cost of both energy and transportation, which means that those people who could just barely afford to eat, heat their homes, ride the train to work, etc., will suddenly be able to almost afford to eat, heat their homes, ride the train to work, etc.
So we should only damage the economy in the fight against global warming after several important assumptions have been demonstrated to be correct:
1. Global warming is happening and will continue. 2. Changing our behavior can prevent it. 3. Allowing it to continue will result in greater harm than the measures it will take to prevent it.
Some people are still arguing over points 1 and 2, and nobody I've seen has made a convincing case for point 3.
In fact, it could well be that we will all be far better off in the long run if the global climate rises four or five degrees. Most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics, where warmer temperatures means more productive agriculture and less need for heating fuel.
Yes, our behavior is impacting nature, but that is as it should be. As a species, we have always been better at adapting our environment to ourselves than ourselves to the environment. We can't grow thick hides so we farm for cotton. We can't run down enough antelope to keep us fed so we raise cattle. We can't communicate across vast distances by howling, so we run copper wire all over the place. This is simply part of what we are.
So while I agree that there is cause for concern, it would be simply reckless for us to negatively impact the lives of people today without first making a very solid case that the way we are currently changing our environment will ultimately do us harm, and that the cure is not worse than the disease.
If you knew more of the people over here in America who had them, you probably would feel differently about it.
The real message the "Darwin" fish sends is:
"I am a tiresome snob who parrots every shopworn joke you've ever heard about religious nuts, yet for all my free-thinking idealism I have never once had an original thought. Please leave me off the invitation list of all your parties, because I'm no fun to be around. I don't understand even the basics of evolution at all, but I've embraced it as dogma with the same furvor that the Muhajadeen embraces the teachings of their Mullahs."
On the other side of the coin, I also shun people who home-school their kids out of fear of all that science their little moppets might get exposed to.
Bottom line: I don't like hanging around with group-think zealots, whether they consider me to be on their "side" or not.
It's a parody of the little metal fish which many Christians like to decorate their cars with. (Back in Roman times, a line-drawing of a fish was used by early Christians as a sort of graffitti tag to identify themselves.)
Basically, it's the same fish, but with little feet attached to it and the name "Darwin" written where lettering is usually used to indicate Christ.
It doesn't actually piss off creationists, as far as I've ever been able to tell.
If anything, it would be far more likely to piss off Darwin, were he alive, because: 1. Darwin was at least a nominal Christian himself, and might be put out by seeing his name used like that, and 2. As a biologist, he would probably be appalled to think that educated people who should know better find a fish walking on four legs to be a meaningful shorthand reference to his theory of Evolution.
What it does accomplish is it separates a few dollars from fools who desperately want to show how cool they are by mocking religious kooks, while providing the rest of us with an easy marker for identifying somebody we have no need of taking seriously. If I see a car with a Darwin fish, I can safely assume that the person who owns that car has absolutely nothing useful or original to say, and ignore them forever.
In an August 2002 Gallup survey, 86% said they think "Saddam Hussein is involved in supporting terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States."
The statement used in that poll:
1. Does not mention 9/11
2. Is known to have been completely true.
Therefore, you are merely echoing the same mistake I was railing against: that people must think Saddam was behind 9/11 because some poll says that people believe he supported anti-US terrorism.
You know, I've heard from hundreds of people who think that everybody thinks Saddam was linked to 9/11, but I've yet to meet a single person who actually thinks that what you think they think.
Here's how it goes:
George Bush (or one of his asshole flunkies) says something along the lines of, "Saddam supported terrorism, and 9/11 taught us just how horrible that can be."
Then some talking head or columnist says, "there go those Republican assholes again, trying to link 9/11 to Saddam in the minds of Joe Sixpack."
Then some red-state Joe Sixpack says, "I'm glad we took Saddam out, because he was supporting terrorism. Hooray for George Bush! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drive my SUV while smoking a cigarette and talking about my oil investments on a cell phone as I cut people off in traffic."
Then some modern, caring, sensitive liberal hears that (without listening very closely) and says, "Joe Sixpack actually bought into the lies of the Republican assholes who are trying to link Saddam to 9/11, and that's total bullshit!!!1!!!one!! Buck Fush! I'd complain about it more, but I want to go buy one of those 'Darwin' fish for my car, so I can show everybody how incredibly witty I am while pissing off backwards creationists."... and the cycle of people merely talking around each other continues...
Or "Instead of delaying it even longer, we'll fix it as we go along and hope no one notices we are releasing patches for stuff we should have fixed before roll-out".
Well, to be fair, nearly every software company plays that game these days. It wasn't always like this... The ability to release patches via the Internet has led to a mentality that missed dates are a bigger problem than critical post-release bugs.
Works great with my $500 Mac mini (once I added enough memory.)
In spite of the published box specs, it handles it just fine.
Even if you believe their blurb about needing a "Dual G5", that spec was published back when dual G5 systems were well under 2 GHz. Systems which you can pick up on eBay for a little over $1000.
If you can't afford a $1000 computer, you are probably not wealthy enough to need an HDTV PVR anyway, because you don't own a high-def television set.
It's refreshing to know that there are still people out there who hear the words "street gang" and think of the cast of West Side Story before anything else.
Swerving back on topic, it's been my experience that all MMORPG's are essentially chat rooms with fair-to-middling games bolted on to them. What makes a guild really thrive is getting a bunch of people together who can manage to not be total dicks all the time.
Not in England it doesn't. If a newspaper there publishes pictures proving that a rich man is a closet transvestite, he can still sue them for libel and win.
It's 2005, how could such a rumor possibly damage a person in this day and age?
I mean, are there even any rich English men who are not transvestites?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure. Patrick F. McManus writes humorous books about hunting and fishing. He's actually rather popular among those who like that sort of thing.
Seeing as how the labels still own the catalog and can distribute through anybody they please, Apple is no more likely to become a monopoly source of downloads than Wal-Mart is of CD's.
Apple is essentially in the position of being a huge music reseller, like any record store. That's a very different thing from becoming a music label.
The real question is: Why name them at all?
It's a rainstorm. A big, swirly rainstorm.
Here in Minnesota, we don't get hurricanes. We get blizards. If you suggested naming any kind of snowstorm with human names, you would be laughed at.
People in Minnesota still sometimes talk about "the big Halloween blizard" from a little over ten years ago.
Compare news items:
"A category 5 hurricane flooded New Orleans."
vs.
"Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 storm, flooded New Orleans."
Apart from some useless trivia to stump your friends with a few years down the road, what do you really gain by naming it?
Avast! Lash that scalliwag 'cross the keel, and hoist the main sail 'gainst a fair wind, me hearties! 'Tis the only medicine for such scullduggery. Gyarr!
Do you know how many foreign leader out there "support terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States"?
Seventeen?
Okay, that was a wild-assed guess. I don't feel like combing through the World Factbook for the answer.
The question is not whether Saddam was a threat to the US. We know that he was. The question is not whether he was the only threat to the US. We know he was not.
The question is, was he enough of a threat (or "gathering threat" as Bush likes to keep repeating) to justify going to war? Since it's a matter of guaging many complex factors, different people are going to arrive at different conclusions. The Bush and Blair administrations concluded it was. Critics of them have concluded that it was not. The matter is still not settled.
My previous post (in spite of the assumption you seem to be making) made no attempt to answer that question, nor am I going to do so here. I was commenting on a misleading poll interpretation, not the rightness or wrongness of the war.
It's really not.
That got a chucle out of me.
QED.
Your debate team must be terrified of you, Doctor Johnson.
Unless thing change.
I mean, geothermal and solar activity are contributing to the warming right now, they could actually change in subtle ways that result in cooling 20 years from now. There are those who insist that this would already be happening, were it not for the greenhouse effect of the Industrial Age. Maybe we are in fact holding back ecological disaster by our seemingly-irresponsible actions. Maybe "cleaning up our act" could result in a catastrophic Ice Age.
It's a discussion which nobody wants to have, because there is vast political capital in fretting over how agriculture and oil wells are "ruining" the planet.
As long as you're lumping me in with eco-nuts, why not?
I must have missed the line where I commented on you at all, let alone accused you of being a "nut" of any sort. My comments were strictly on the issue.
If disagreeing with something you said counts as a personal attack, then I don't think we really have a foundation in place to discuss anything, and we might as well go our separate ways. Cheers.
I find that it does a terrific job of demonstrating one thing: It's damn hard to be funny in written text.
There are those who find Ferber amusing, others who laugh at Hunter S. Thompson. Still others are tickled pink by Christopher Buckley or the scrbblings of Patrick McManus or George Carlin. Many sci-fi nerds swear by Douglas Adams, while would-be hobbits worship at the shrines of Peirs Anthony or Terry Pratchett...
But unless you happened to be this guy, you are not likely to ever be universally recognized as funny by the English-speaking world.
Simply coming up with a quip that gets a giggle and a "+1, Funny" mod out of the Slashdot crowd is a challenge. To write an actual work of satire which is not tiresome and sad is simply nigh impossible for the vast majority of people who think they are able to do it.
If you disagree, go read the Uncyclopedia a little while and you will quickly be joining my camp in this debate. There are a lot of people out there who think they are funny enough to write for The Onion or something very much like it, and they simply are not. They desperately need a "Simon Cowell" type to bluntly urge them to direct their energies elsewhere.
YMMV, obviously. Who am I to tell other people what they should or should not find amusing?
I'll lump you in with others, perhaps unfairly, who seem to think that any attempt at conservation will DESTROY OUR ECONOMY...
Translation: I realize everything you said is valid, but I think I'll make you guilty by association with the most radical reactionaries out there, because I need a straw-man to take down, dammit.
Don't know what state you live in, but here in Texas it's not too bright to have one on your car. It'll be gone pretty soon and you'll be lucky if you're not keyed as well.
I live in Minnesota, and they are all over the place. Never heard of one being torn off somebody else's car until reading this thread. Seems like a rather petty thing to do.
The thing that people forget is that "slow down a little" also has a cost.
This is not a matter of greed. Macro-economics is about survival. When economic times are bad, rich people get by fine, but poor people suffer and die.
Restricting the use of oil raises the cost of both energy and transportation, which means that those people who could just barely afford to eat, heat their homes, ride the train to work, etc., will suddenly be able to almost afford to eat, heat their homes, ride the train to work, etc.
So we should only damage the economy in the fight against global warming after several important assumptions have been demonstrated to be correct:
1. Global warming is happening and will continue.
2. Changing our behavior can prevent it.
3. Allowing it to continue will result in greater harm than the measures it will take to prevent it.
Some people are still arguing over points 1 and 2, and nobody I've seen has made a convincing case for point 3.
In fact, it could well be that we will all be far better off in the long run if the global climate rises four or five degrees. Most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics, where warmer temperatures means more productive agriculture and less need for heating fuel.
Yes, our behavior is impacting nature, but that is as it should be. As a species, we have always been better at adapting our environment to ourselves than ourselves to the environment. We can't grow thick hides so we farm for cotton. We can't run down enough antelope to keep us fed so we raise cattle. We can't communicate across vast distances by howling, so we run copper wire all over the place. This is simply part of what we are.
So while I agree that there is cause for concern, it would be simply reckless for us to negatively impact the lives of people today without first making a very solid case that the way we are currently changing our environment will ultimately do us harm, and that the cure is not worse than the disease.
If you knew more of the people over here in America who had them, you probably would feel differently about it.
The real message the "Darwin" fish sends is:
"I am a tiresome snob who parrots every shopworn joke you've ever heard about religious nuts, yet for all my free-thinking idealism I have never once had an original thought. Please leave me off the invitation list of all your parties, because I'm no fun to be around. I don't understand even the basics of evolution at all, but I've embraced it as dogma with the same furvor that the Muhajadeen embraces the teachings of their Mullahs."
On the other side of the coin, I also shun people who home-school their kids out of fear of all that science their little moppets might get exposed to.
Bottom line: I don't like hanging around with group-think zealots, whether they consider me to be on their "side" or not.
Nothing in my post indicated whether the war was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. I was not trying to make any such case.
But thank you for completely talking around my post, and thereby proving my point about how far too many people are merely talking around each other.
It's a parody of the little metal fish which many Christians like to decorate their cars with. (Back in Roman times, a line-drawing of a fish was used by early Christians as a sort of graffitti tag to identify themselves.)
Basically, it's the same fish, but with little feet attached to it and the name "Darwin" written where lettering is usually used to indicate Christ.
It doesn't actually piss off creationists, as far as I've ever been able to tell.
If anything, it would be far more likely to piss off Darwin, were he alive, because: 1. Darwin was at least a nominal Christian himself, and might be put out by seeing his name used like that, and 2. As a biologist, he would probably be appalled to think that educated people who should know better find a fish walking on four legs to be a meaningful shorthand reference to his theory of Evolution.
What it does accomplish is it separates a few dollars from fools who desperately want to show how cool they are by mocking religious kooks, while providing the rest of us with an easy marker for identifying somebody we have no need of taking seriously. If I see a car with a Darwin fish, I can safely assume that the person who owns that car has absolutely nothing useful or original to say, and ignore them forever.
In an August 2002 Gallup survey, 86% said they think "Saddam Hussein is involved in supporting terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States."
The statement used in that poll:
1. Does not mention 9/11
2. Is known to have been completely true.
Therefore, you are merely echoing the same mistake I was railing against: that people must think Saddam was behind 9/11 because some poll says that people believe he supported anti-US terrorism.
You know, I've heard from hundreds of people who think that everybody thinks Saddam was linked to 9/11, but I've yet to meet a single person who actually thinks that what you think they think.
... and the cycle of people merely talking around each other continues...
Here's how it goes:
George Bush (or one of his asshole flunkies) says something along the lines of, "Saddam supported terrorism, and 9/11 taught us just how horrible that can be."
Then some talking head or columnist says, "there go those Republican assholes again, trying to link 9/11 to Saddam in the minds of Joe Sixpack."
Then some red-state Joe Sixpack says, "I'm glad we took Saddam out, because he was supporting terrorism. Hooray for George Bush! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drive my SUV while smoking a cigarette and talking about my oil investments on a cell phone as I cut people off in traffic."
Then some modern, caring, sensitive liberal hears that (without listening very closely) and says, "Joe Sixpack actually bought into the lies of the Republican assholes who are trying to link Saddam to 9/11, and that's total bullshit!!!1!!!one!! Buck Fush! I'd complain about it more, but I want to go buy one of those 'Darwin' fish for my car, so I can show everybody how incredibly witty I am while pissing off backwards creationists."
If Microsoft wants me to switch, they had better come out with something truly special rather than simply aping the rest of the industry.
Simply aping the rest of the industry has always worked for them before. Why change now?
Well, the sysadmins who know...
;)
As for the other 80%...
Jeez, you make it sound like all it takes to get an MCSE is cram for a bunch of multiple-choice tests in your spare time.
Or "Instead of delaying it even longer, we'll fix it as we go along and hope no one notices we are releasing patches for stuff we should have fixed before roll-out".
Well, to be fair, nearly every software company plays that game these days. It wasn't always like this... The ability to release patches via the Internet has led to a mentality that missed dates are a bigger problem than critical post-release bugs.
Basically they are saying that "Black Tuesday" becomes "Black Nine Fifteen In The Morning."
I'm sure sysdmins in MS-centric shops all over the world are rejoicing.
Works great with my $500 Mac mini (once I added enough memory.)
In spite of the published box specs, it handles it just fine.
Even if you believe their blurb about needing a "Dual G5", that spec was published back when dual G5 systems were well under 2 GHz. Systems which you can pick up on eBay for a little over $1000.
If you can't afford a $1000 computer, you are probably not wealthy enough to need an HDTV PVR anyway, because you don't own a high-def television set.
It's refreshing to know that there are still people out there who hear the words "street gang" and think of the cast of West Side Story before anything else.
Swerving back on topic, it's been my experience that all MMORPG's are essentially chat rooms with fair-to-middling games bolted on to them. What makes a guild really thrive is getting a bunch of people together who can manage to not be total dicks all the time.
Not in England it doesn't. If a newspaper there publishes pictures proving that a rich man is a closet transvestite, he can still sue them for libel and win.
It's 2005, how could such a rumor possibly damage a person in this day and age?
I mean, are there even any rich English men who are not transvestites?
There are no real affordable do it yourself HDTV PVR solutions.
Only if you are a rabid anti-Mac bigot.