Ugh. I do like his personality, and he's clearly a smart guy who writes in a nice, approachable manner, and he does pepper his notes with qualifiers like, "It might be" and "We should not be surprised if", but he still tends towards the same annoying absolutes which science media people often embrace so blindly. Here's an example. ..
"An advanced civilization is not going to send Capt. Kirk in a huge, expensive star ship. This is inefficient. More likely, they will send robot probes, which land on distant moons. (Moons are stable over billions of years.) They will then create a robot factory capable of reproducing themselves by the millions."
Oh they will, will they?
The amount of in-the-box raw assumption and tunnel vision opinion in his prose is no better than the average weekday on Slashdot with regard to this stuff.
When it comes to science heroes, it struck me today that all the really big names, the Newtons and the Teslas and the Einsteins. . , these were deeply spiritual men who were less engineers than they were seers. I like the story about how Tesla became interested in researching the idea of radio; about how his mother experienced a traumatic event while out of the country and he instantly knew about it.
We all know that little gem of wisdom. . , "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Well, I think of Microsoft as having accepted the truth of that statement and simply concentrates on making sure the one big variable, "Some" remains as large a piece of the pie as they can get. They also take the term, "Fool" and sort of merge it into the term, "Strong-arm". (Getting Asus to sell EEE's loaded with WinXP for less than Linux was pretty astounding.)
But I do see that changing.
It has been hard for people to adopt alternative OS's because they've been written by geeks for geeks. It's like trying to sell D&D to a boring office drone/exec. Won't happen. It's too fringe and too hard to grasp, and who the heck wants to emulate the office geek?
Google, however, will not call it Linux and they won't make it seem geeky. They'll give it the same sort of approachable air as a Pixar film. The market surveys have been done, I have zero doubt. Geeks and Office drone/execs will feel comfortable and unthreatened by it. It will come with Google's stamp of authority and past success, so everybody will feel confident in giving it a shot. And "Free" is hard to ignore, especially when you don't have the intellectually threatening IT geek just waiting for you to screw up. Google is friendly. Just look at those soothing colors.
And mutually assured destruction? Not going to happen. Microsoft is clinging to a worldview which is sliding away from them; the internet is more and more defining the user experience, and Windows sucks at it. They've consistently not gotten it. Remember; the roots of their business is still stuck in an age where there was no internet. --Bill was providing software to isolated machines so that people could give the fancy office printer something to do, and run the odd game now and again. The whole connectivity thing was a secondary bit of catch up, and given the fact that even after a decade and a half of development, my laptop and my tower still have trouble talking to each other when using Windows software. . , well that just goes to show how great a job the boys have done over at Redmond in working outside their domain. But their core business model is pretty good. I can run third party software on my Windows machine and I can manage my files with little trouble. They've gotten that down to the point where I don't even see it and barring thunder storms, it's completely reliable. And that's great. But this Internet thing. . ? Microsoft has made a bloody mess of it.
Google, on the other hand, is a child of the Internet. If they can get their OS to run lots of useful software as well as do the internet thing really efficiently. . . Well, sign me up.
I suspect that MS will be able to strong-arm their way into continued market relevance for a while yet, but if they find themselves fighting to sell something which you can get for free, then they really have nowhere to run. --And remember, this isn't like Windows v.s. Linux, where geeks are usually running a silent meta program in the backs of their minds whereby they deliberately/unconsciously try to make it hard for normal people to be like them. And it isn't Ubuntu, which despite Mark Shuttleworth's noble efforts, started with an immature product which STILL can't run a frickin' graphics tablet properly. This is Google. Google is the happy Lego Borg with WAY more money than Ubuntu, hires on the best of the best, and they're out to assimilate you. That's what they do. Google's up-front goal is to consume EVERYTHING. We just don't happen to mind, probably because they also have learned how to share. Sharing is what gives them all their power, and it's why they will exist long after Microsoft is another forgotten blip. A railway tycoon or that matchstick king guy.
I was talking to an old programmer who has done some pretty, um. . , interesting jobs in the past, who told me that one of the Facebook silent partners is indeed you know who. (Do not speak IT's name.)
So long as the information flows, the whole system will have all the funding it needs, as has clearly been the case thus far.
You're right though, this new trend towards trying to encourage gaming in social networks does seem a little. . , I don't know. . , desperate, like, "Come on you little white mice! We built all these cool experi- um, 'games' for you to play. Go on, play them. Please?"
I mean, shite, when ALL the games are basically personality tests. . . Even just selling that kind of info to marketing firms would have been profitable enough.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
Yes, that was about as close to a Matrix-like time-blip as I've ever experienced. (Of course, I was young and it didn't take much to surprise me).
But there was this really neat period where Commodore in particular was doing some really interesting things. Then suddenly the universe went entirely PC. --It really came home when Lucasarts released the very first X-Wing simulator exclusively for PC. I knew several people who radically changed their lives around so as to play that game, one of whom dropped a couple thousand on a top-end (386?) and never looked back. That was also around the time when Commodore began its terminal nose-dive. (I remember reading long ago, but simply cannot find any breath of it now, that a handful of ex-government spooks got involved in Commodore shortly before the whole shop crashed and the next Amiga hit the skids before release. I'd love to know the full story on that someday!)
The biggest shift I noticed, almost immediately, was that hardware development rocketed forward while "cleverness" began to lag. --That is, with a machine like an old Tandy Color Computer, the time between hardware updates was so long and the state of the hardware that everybody used was so uniform and stable that in order to gain an increase in performance, people had to really work to understand their system. As a result, every year saw faster and more brilliant bits of software emerge for essentially the same machine. By the end of the product cycle on any of these closed systems, like the Color Computer or the Amiga, the performance being squeezed out of them was really amazing. --I mean, humans are really awesome that way; when given limitations and a desire to surpass them, they really begin to glow. Heck, some of those computers had very limited color pallets, and yet through interlacing schemes and such, extra colors were brought into being. I read how another guy on an old Apple ][ system had managed to double the absolute and finite resolution of certain screen graphics using some clever trick, eliciting ooohs and ahhhs from the industry.
With the shift to PCs and the endless hardware upgrade, I feel as though programmers have never really been able to settle down and really grow powerful in their craft. When you look at the demo scene, at what kinds of astonishing things can be achieved in as little as 4Kb on a modern machine, I sometimes wish that hardware development would completely halt for ten years or so just to see how far we could actually take these computers of ours.
There are parts of Japanese culture which are very cool indeed, but when it comes to respecting certain kinds of law, it's the Wa Wa West.
American culture is nuts, but because we live it, it's hard to see. Japanese culture is also bloody insane, but it's also far enough away to fit into the view finder.
That means a dedicated Fox viewer has mod points to spend. Just be glad s/he is spending them here in a silly forum rather than actually doing anything in the real world. Because that would be dangerous.
Anyway. . , the best lies are seeded with just enough truth to keep you listening and trusting. This is why it doesn't matter if they happen to be right once in (very long) while. Over-all their intention is to harm your mind, so it's best to sever your connection to them altogether. There are far better sources of information out there.
Mind you, ALL big media is misleading, even the 'good' guys avoid talking about real stuff. Fox is just the Strawman for everybody to poke at and keep the circus spinning. Those sad people who actually take Fox at face value are so low down the food chain of awareness that they essentially deserve what's coming. It might take a hundred more lives or so, but they'll learn eventually. Right now, however, they're just above "Retarded Child" on the awareness index. Pity them, but treat them like a roaring house fire. Stand well back and certainly don't get intimately involved!
It was a terrible movie, not the kind I like to watch anyway, but for some reason I felt compelled to view the damned thing twice in two days.
The Big Bad Threat in the film was all about something called a Fire Sale, ("It All Has To Go"), where the population's fear level is spiked up into a panic by a group of bad guys deliberately crashing the national infrastructure by way of hacking all the most important computer systems. --All to create a giant distraction so that the stock market could be plundered by thievesssssss! The story is weirdly in keeping with the theme of this Slashdot article.
Consider: Everything is a metaphor in this big old world of ours where matter and energy are based on nothing more than space and the vague notion that there is something which exists. With no matter to speak of, the whole of reality is little more than a hologram, and that being the case, the power of thought and awareness holds about the same amount of substance, if not more. --The subconscious is connected quite well to the whole affair, and events of some magnitude like today's server outages will tend to send ripples through reality so that poor shmucks like me find themselves watching in fascination stupid movies they hate without knowing why.
All I know for sure is that Bruce Willis was a lot more fun to watch when he was playing opposite Cybill Shepherd.
The advantage that young people have is two-fold; That of Time, and Easy Cross-Cultural Networking.
Back when you were a kid, you didn't have to work. (School work, even when hard, is minimal.) Kids don't have kids, they don't have to worry about car or house payments. They don't have to go grocery shopping. They have all their free time to think about and explore the new trends.
Second, they have the biggest water-cooler to chat around. All day. --After you grow up and enter the work force, you are suddenly segregated into one social category or another and with that, you lose perspective. When you are a kid in school, however, you are rubbing shoulders with everybody; kids who will grow up to become doctors and nuclear scientists and politicos and hair-stylists and crack-heads. You see it all and you have the time to process it. You live right there in the big picture. You just don't have the brains to realize the power of that scenario.
See, on the down side, when you are a kid, you have cognitive blinders on which are so big that when you reach your thirties, you are stunned at the fact that you managed to survive for all the stupid things you did and blind-spots you functioned within. Kids are functionally retarded. --And I say that in the nicest way, because it's a process of growing up and we all go through it. Or at least this has been my own experience, and when I ask others, they nod and sigh deeply. Perhaps you are different, but I doubt it. Brains don't stop growing until you turn 18 or 19 after all, and your internal knowledge processing networks don't really crystallize into a rich enough understanding of reality to be terribly useful for another ten years at least. There's nothing wrong with this. It's called, "Growing up".
So. . . The trick is to make sure that when you reach your thirties you work to put yourself into a position where you have tons of free time and where you can connect with every social class you can reach. If you can do that. . , well then, now you're getting somewhere.
That article was like reading a page from a le Carre spy novel. I feel mildly thrilled and disgusted at the same time.
Why is it when the best of the best get together to make a neat machine, it has to be suffused with a bunch of creepy moneyed assholes? A prerequisite for purchasing this car will be that you are an illegal arms merchant, drug dealer or a CEO for some Enron-style business model. Honestly, corrupt bastards will make up MORE than half the clientele for a toy like this. That's just how the system works. What do they say? "You can ask me how I made my first hundred million; I'd be happy to spell it all out for the Vanity Fair reporter. But how I made my first ten million? No. Do not ask me that."
Ah well. Even the author of this article was feeling nervous around the edges. In the same way that "World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones", he was quite clear that this might well be the last king of the gas guzzlers. The very same fuckers who drive these things will be the ones most intimately responsible for despoiling the human race to the point where nobody can drive anything on the planet's surface again.
Yeah, it's parly rant, but it's truth; and that's exactly why I expect to get modded down again.
Mod points should be reserved for those who make sense in some direction which can be agreed with or disagreed with. You're ranting, however, would make Rush Limbaugh clear his throat awkwardly and say, "Sure, yeah man. Right on!" while mentally ticking you off the invite list for being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
I'd be interested in seeing well thought out disagreements, of course.
That's a very Canadian attitude. I wish there was more of it up here, but still. . , it's one of the reasons I like living here.:)
As for my disagreement. ..
The land/idea similarity doesn't really work, and others have tried to point out why with some success. Here's my go at it. ..
--The desire to deny access to land you own is there generally because you fear people affecting a finite resource. You want the land to exist according to your desires, and you want to feel safe while living on it, etc. Your personal experience of the land is what you want to control because any changes to it made by others makes the previous version vanish! There is only one, so control over it matters.
Ideas are different. So long as you have enough disks or paper, ideas can be reproduced indefinitely, so the fear of losing control over your personal experience of that piece of ephemeral property, the idea, can safely be relaxed.
What people are left with are petty desires. --Which to me, (I find myself besieged by friends who have become parents of young kids these days), are best seen in mean little girls who want to stop nice little girls from singing the same songs, wearing the same colors, telling the same stories or drawing the same rainbows. Control over the group for selfish benefit. It's amazing how you can see the entire world in microcosm while sitting at a picnic table with a bunch of kids and a box of crayons. I should also add that little boys are much more relaxing. They don't try to control others minds until they get older.
The paradox is this; people need to eat, and if your expertise happens to be that of writing or playing music or being artistic, then you somehow have to convert your art into food and shelter. The funny part is that Artists are rarely the ones complaining about being compensated. It's the corporate owners who do all the heavy pushing. I've seen artists who are good at their craft and who make things others want to experience, establish very comfortable lives for themselves, and they way they do it is to get their work out there as much as possible in conjunction with having a large stock of items which they can sell to the public. Encouraging sharing is a great way to secure future sales as well as other forms of indirect income.
I write, for instance, and I've given away tons of work for free. The more of my work which is out there, the more often I am invited (and paid) to speak, make bulk sales, do private contracts. For an artist, the money doesn't come just from selling a copy of the work; it comes from many sources. For the corporate middle-man, (the record label, for instance), the money ONLY comes from selling copies, and so they are the ones who dread sharing. --The corporation also needs a lot more money for its private jets and tall buildings and other needless bullshit. An artist doesn't need millions of dollars to be secure, comfortable and productive.
Anyway. . , back at the picnic table and around town, I've noticed that the controlling kids tend to spend a lot of time and energy at the task and everybody watching can see them doing it. Observers quietly note this behavior and if opportunities come up, there is a silent but powerful force which resists allowing the mean kids from getting what they want, and which works equally to offer security and resources to the nice kids. And that's great! Mean behavior should not be rewarded in a community, especially among adults.
The trick is being aware. I make a point of quietly making life hell for people who are mean and controlling while making life great for nice and giving people. People are naturally like this, and so all you have to do is be very open when people are being mean and manipulative and not keep it a secret, (as the mean and manipulative people ALWAYS want you to do). The community will take care of the rest in a very organic way. Interesti
If you want stirling examples of angry defensiveness and pomposity, take a look at your own post. Clearly you'd rather just fling poo than engage in anything like a constructive debate. Just be aware that you're not likely to influence anyone's opinion with the attitude -- if you're happy with just ranting for no real reason, then hey, have fun with that.
Fair enough. But I also happen to be right.
The interesting part is that my tone with these last couple of posts is about par for the course for me, but on this particular subject, people seem to get very upset. I was actually surprised to see my 'score' plummet as it did. I honestly half expected it to shoot in the other direction. I clearly don't have my finger entirely tuned to the pulse of popular human awareness, which is probably why I'm still here. Learning how the rest of the monkeys think.
The intensity of the knee-jerk always says a lot about how deeply and tightly tied the emotional knots are. The subject of human knowledge, what we do and do not know, is a very prickly one. The ego is intimately linked to it, particularly with geeks.
Why is it that people who don't read the article or comprehend what they have just read and who then invariably jump in line to adopt the most reactionary conservative viewpoint ALSO happen to spell like ignorant morons?
Maybe it's because they really ARE ignorant morons? Just a theory.
The sad/amazing part is that they also tend to be too hopelessly stupid to feel ashamed by this or to stop talking when it is pointed out. Woe is us.
I'm not really kidding. Your anti-Wikipedia rant is entertaining, but it doesn't provide any substance. Speaking for myself, when I go to Wikipedia for a refresher on something I already know about, I'm generally pleased with the quality of the results, which makes me think that the articles on subjects I don't know much about are likely to be pretty good too.
So. . , it is good at re-enforcing your current belief structure, and when exploring new areas of knowledge, you trust it to maintain the calming, authoritative feeling of security. How nice that must be for you. You must feel right with the world when you close your browser.
You want examples? You mean you want me to work for your benefit when you are a smarmy ass whose belief system I really don't give two figs about and who would work hard to reject anything offered which doesn't fit with his comfortable dream-version of reality? Can you even take a small personal criticism without becoming angry and defensive? Most people cannot, so how the heck would you manage with having firmly held beliefs examined? Why on earth would I want to waste such enormous amounts of energy on such an individual? Answer: "I don't."
Your line about "political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities" provides a clue as to what really bothers you about Wikipedia: reality's well-known liberal bias. Unless you can provide specific examples, with citations, it's reasonable to assume that the Wikipedia groupmind knows more about the way things really work than some random dude on/.
When you say the "Wikipedia groupmind" I assume you mean "Human groupmind", and pardon me for coughing somewhat at that. Our world is a giant ridiculous mess and it was put there thanks to the Human groupmind. Reality's well-known liberal bias? -???- Aside from the fact that I'm probably more genuinely left than your average hippie, bent politics are a given in Wikipedia, and the war for Left and Right rages on while I don't actually care much since that combat zone is very small and very deliberately provoked and contained, and thus, simply Does Not Matter.
Rather, it's the "Learning Channel" style of pompous assumption and tone affected by every entry where it might matter. Look up the entry for James Randi, for instance. The dream version of that reality is very well cited and documented on WP, and so the illusion remains comforting and intact while the other side of the story remains ignored. And that other side? Sorry. You're an ass, so I'm not going to give you anything which you could find out for yourself.
Why don't you Just use your encyclopedia from the 40s and don't think about wikipedia, if that really seems more useful to you.
Thank-you. I already do that. I also tap a multitude of other information sources. It's call "research". It's what you have to do when, "the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment," fails to deliver.
So... no you compare WP to a imaginary guide? Didn't you just accuse the rest of humanity of trying to live in a dream state? It would be more effective if you showed us how bad wikipedia is by comparing it to something, you know, existing.
When so many others have equated the two and found themselves happily pleased with the results, it is entirely fair for me to subject that same comparison to more objective lighting. If you have trouble with that, then you're not looking at the whole picture, but are simply picking out disposable items to put in your fish barrel for easy target practice. But otherwise, congratulations on a devastating argument.
I go to Wikipedia for two things; when I want summarized descriptions of fictional stories, and information about weights and measures and official standards. And boring details nobody has any opinion about which are so chipped in stone, I don't have to worry about how fractured and tangled up the editors' various emotional/intellectual states were at the time of the entry inclusion. Stories are safe because they're not real, and it's hard for Official Culture to get along when it distorts the way you convert miles to kilometers. (Though it would bloody do so if it thought it could get away with it!)
Other than that, Wikipedia is Humanity's dream-state navel-gazing summary of what it WISHES were real and not what IS. There is so much content on Wikipedia I disagree with that I barely even notice the red-light flashing in my brain when I scan any given article, or as more often happens, the lack of an article.
No wonder you can cram that thing into 8 gigs. Hell, I was flipping through an encyclopedia from the 40's, and under "Dynamite", it had detailed instructions on how to MAKE it yourself and how to blast rocks from your property. --Wikipedia isn't even as informative as a general knowledge set of dead-tree books from last century. But it IS smaller and more portable. I guess that's good.
And sorry, XKCD fans, but the Hitchhiker's Guide, (fictional though it is), isn't hamstrung with political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities. Maybe when humanity grows up and can handle looking at reality straight on will Wikipedia become something to be proud of. At the moment it's merely the litmus test for social maturity with embarrassing results.
But what color ARE those spots, exactly. . ? I wondered about this and decided to do a quick (Google) search for Microsoft's Mission Statement, and found this. . . (From here.
Microsoft Mission Statement
Our Mission At Microsoft, we work to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. This is our mission. Everything we do reflects this mission and the values that make it possible.
Our Values As a company, and as individuals, we value:
Integrity and honesty. Passion for customers, for our partners, and for technology. Openness and respectfulness. Taking on big challenges and seeing them through. Constructive self-criticism, self-improvement, and personal excellence. Accountability to customers, shareholders, partners, and employees for commitments, results, and quality.
So either the people with decision-making power working over at Redmond have failed to read the darned thing, or employees live in a state of cognitive dissonance, REALLY, HONESTLY believing that they are working to, "help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
And if that's the case, Microsoft isn't just evil. It's insane.
IMO people freaking out about privacy is just a way for people to feel important.
How interesting. Now will you please include here for public scrutiny your real name, address, phone number as well as your social security number and the last 500 sites you have visited, the last 100 books you read, a disclosure of all the women/men you've slept with, your medical conditions, all the drugs you've taken (legal and not), all the times and locations you've perpetrated any crime including traffic or tax violations and a full list of all copyrighted media you have downloaded, your political and religious affiliations as well as a full list of your employers, schools attended and all your immediate friends and family. Please also include anything we might not have thought of but which you might find potentially harmful were it in the public domain.
Please rest assured that nobody here would EVER mis-use your information and we take your privacy seriously.
The system you grew up with has a life span which will end at some point and you will be left feeling either bitter or so old you just don't care. --Either that, or evolution will reach a plateau of suitable perfect-ness in bio-feedback device and stay there for 20 million years. I doubt even the Mouse, Screen & Keyboard will manage this, though as of yet, nothing seems to match it for getting yourself from one end of an Operating System to the other.
For games. . . Any controller which has a limit to its usefulness in moving stuff around on screen, and all controllers seem to, will irritate some engineer/designer somewhere enough to spawn some new brand of tool. The kids new to video games will be more than willing to train themselves on whatever cool new system is offered so long as it activates all their happy circuits, and whatever solution you were content (ecstatic) with while growing up will have to shuffle over to make room, and will eventually find itself relegated to a niche market. And you won't understand what your kids are talking about half the time. Welcome to parenthood. You're not cool anymore. Laugh at it. The other option is to wear leather pants and buy a sports car and look really sad and desperate.
Best to age with a little grace. Let the Nintendo button thingy go. You don't want to be the old guy saying, "When I was young, we had to play our games with a STICK! In 8 bits! And we LIKED it!"
Hm. Actually, it might be kind of fun to be that guy.
the 767 broke up BECAUSE IT FLEW TOO FAST WHEN IT LEFT CONTROLLED FLIGHT
Exactly.
The thing is, there is no indication that the current plane in question left controlled flight before disintegrating, so while you're using the same words, they do not communicate the same thing as in the article. The speaker didn't say, "The plane might have turned sideways while in flight and the resulting forces tore it apart". --Yes, technically, this might be called, "flying too fast", but it's an extremely weird way of putting it.
The only thing I can think of which might explain such a peculiar wording is if the man happened to be French and there was an awkward translation which the reporting journalist took verbatim. But I doubt that's what you were thinking, (what with the caps lock engaged and all.)
A bolide was sighted by another pilot coming down in the area. We know that they can cause massive air explosions. The crash debris fits with this. It's just a hypothesis.
Two articles, one in the NYT and the other in the Christian Science Monitor, both taking the slant that, of course, suppressing information is the right thing to do, and gee, look, here's a case where they were right to do so.
This sickening example of self-serving behavior smacks not just of opportunism but of deliberation. --Remember all those episodes of various prime time shows including Alias, and 24 and even ****ing Star Trek (Enterprise) which laid out the compelling argument for the use of torture using the exact same narrative template? No? I'll recap in one paragraph. . .
There's a *ticking bomb of some sort* (oh no!) but We, (the Good Guys) have caught the Bad Man who knows *The Secret Code*. But we would NEVER torture for the information; we're Good People, after all. So instead we set up an elaborate, expensive, time-consuming mind-game sham act to trick the captive into thinking that he's escaped, forgotten he's escaped, and that the person who helped him escape should be told *The Secret Code*! But alas, the captive sees through the whole act at the last moment and laughs his cruel Bad Guy laugh, enraging us. And we, the Good Guys TRIED so hard! --Can anybody blame us for bowing as the ALPHA MALE character of the show who stomps in and sets to work on the captive's finger nails with a pair of pliers, retrieving the information in under five minutes and *Saves The Day*? Heck no! We cheer!
The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor? Come on! One is the CIA's lap dog and the other is the product of a 2000 year-old hate-on for anybody in a turban. This current bit of bullshit is a handy bit of spy craft. Please allow me to present the following narrative. . .
A journalist is kidnapped. Nothing new there; it happens all the time. Except this just happened to be a kidnapping which fits nicely. So just when this opportune kidnapping occurs, enter the CIA or Homeland Security or whoever is in charge of sculpting public perception through the media. Back in the World War, it was an office called, "The Department of Propaganda" which did this kind of thing, boasting clandestine relationships with a whole stack of willing (and perhaps not-so-willing journalists) during the war. --We'd be insane to believe anything has changed except for the worse.
The result? We get this latest bit of horse manure designed to make people think that it's good and noble not JUST to pull out people's finger nails, but that we should applaud the choking off of reliable public sector information using this retarded, "Real Life and totally honest and un-massaged example" to show why Big Brother has its reasons for the news seeming 'wrong' somehow. (Though you'll never know which parts or why.) What's that? It just can't be, you say? --Two men's lives were at stake, after all. They wouldn't risk the lives of two of their own just to perpetrate a mind game on the public. They just wouldn't DO that! --Well, if this emotionalism seems like a rational bit of thinking to you, then I'd suggest a quick review of the last hundred years to see just how much the corporate/government cares about the human lives in its care.
In short, I get a strong sense that This Is Crap.
Anybody who falls for this kind of scam and says, "Oh yes. I see your reasonable argument, and because it happens to make sense, I will allow you to lie to me and I will submit to this willingly." News Flash: Socrates illustrated just how bullshit so-called "Logic" is; a good debater can prove that the sky is plaid. Anybody who falls for this latest scam will probably also tell you that in some instances, it's okay to get out the waterboard. Do not trust such people. --They're too stupid to think clearly and therefore too dangerous to trust. How much would it take to convince them that YOU are a "Bad Guy" and that YOUR fingers should be the ones being snipped off? Not very much, I'd wager. Such people are only one week of manipulated news away from burning you and your family alive on your front lawn.
How about the 1991 Lauda Air 767 disaster, in which an uncommanded reverser deployment caused partial stall of the left wing, resulting in a roll and dive where the airspeed rapidly exceeded VNE, followed by failure of the fin due to airloads, which in turn struck and tore off the horizontal stabilzer, which in turn caused the nose to tuck down with such violence that both wings tore off.
Charming. But what does this have to do with flying too fast, as suggested by the post-mortem guys? The damage in the present case suggests multiple catastrophic system failures all at the same moment. Not the brakes accidentally getting turned on. And I don't believe for an instant that a passenger jet can accidentally "fly too fast" and self-destruct as a result. I'm sure we would have heard about this sometime before in the history of commercial aviation. Just because a PR agency stars spouting 'facts' with authority doesn't make them true, though geeks are certainly shell-shocked enough to absorb any dumb notion so long as it is presented in the right tone of voice by somebody in a lab coat with a clip board.
and there were no, repeat, no little green men shooting at the aircraft.
Okay. So for the benefit of anybody who might not have been crystal clear on the matter, 'little green men' were never on the list. Don't know why you point this out with such verve, but there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. I do like his personality, and he's clearly a smart guy who writes in a nice, approachable manner, and he does pepper his notes with qualifiers like, "It might be" and "We should not be surprised if", but he still tends towards the same annoying absolutes which science media people often embrace so blindly. Here's an example. . .
Oh they will, will they?
The amount of in-the-box raw assumption and tunnel vision opinion in his prose is no better than the average weekday on Slashdot with regard to this stuff.
When it comes to science heroes, it struck me today that all the really big names, the Newtons and the Teslas and the Einsteins. . , these were deeply spiritual men who were less engineers than they were seers. I like the story about how Tesla became interested in researching the idea of radio; about how his mother experienced a traumatic event while out of the country and he instantly knew about it.
-FL
We all know that little gem of wisdom. . , "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Well, I think of Microsoft as having accepted the truth of that statement and simply concentrates on making sure the one big variable, "Some" remains as large a piece of the pie as they can get. They also take the term, "Fool" and sort of merge it into the term, "Strong-arm". (Getting Asus to sell EEE's loaded with WinXP for less than Linux was pretty astounding.)
But I do see that changing.
It has been hard for people to adopt alternative OS's because they've been written by geeks for geeks. It's like trying to sell D&D to a boring office drone/exec. Won't happen. It's too fringe and too hard to grasp, and who the heck wants to emulate the office geek?
Google, however, will not call it Linux and they won't make it seem geeky. They'll give it the same sort of approachable air as a Pixar film. The market surveys have been done, I have zero doubt. Geeks and Office drone/execs will feel comfortable and unthreatened by it. It will come with Google's stamp of authority and past success, so everybody will feel confident in giving it a shot. And "Free" is hard to ignore, especially when you don't have the intellectually threatening IT geek just waiting for you to screw up. Google is friendly. Just look at those soothing colors.
And mutually assured destruction? Not going to happen. Microsoft is clinging to a worldview which is sliding away from them; the internet is more and more defining the user experience, and Windows sucks at it. They've consistently not gotten it. Remember; the roots of their business is still stuck in an age where there was no internet. --Bill was providing software to isolated machines so that people could give the fancy office printer something to do, and run the odd game now and again. The whole connectivity thing was a secondary bit of catch up, and given the fact that even after a decade and a half of development, my laptop and my tower still have trouble talking to each other when using Windows software. . , well that just goes to show how great a job the boys have done over at Redmond in working outside their domain. But their core business model is pretty good. I can run third party software on my Windows machine and I can manage my files with little trouble. They've gotten that down to the point where I don't even see it and barring thunder storms, it's completely reliable. And that's great. But this Internet thing. . ? Microsoft has made a bloody mess of it.
Google, on the other hand, is a child of the Internet. If they can get their OS to run lots of useful software as well as do the internet thing really efficiently. . . Well, sign me up.
I suspect that MS will be able to strong-arm their way into continued market relevance for a while yet, but if they find themselves fighting to sell something which you can get for free, then they really have nowhere to run. --And remember, this isn't like Windows v.s. Linux, where geeks are usually running a silent meta program in the backs of their minds whereby they deliberately/unconsciously try to make it hard for normal people to be like them. And it isn't Ubuntu, which despite Mark Shuttleworth's noble efforts, started with an immature product which STILL can't run a frickin' graphics tablet properly. This is Google. Google is the happy Lego Borg with WAY more money than Ubuntu, hires on the best of the best, and they're out to assimilate you. That's what they do. Google's up-front goal is to consume EVERYTHING. We just don't happen to mind, probably because they also have learned how to share. Sharing is what gives them all their power, and it's why they will exist long after Microsoft is another forgotten blip. A railway tycoon or that matchstick king guy.
Just my opinion
-FL
I was talking to an old programmer who has done some pretty, um. . , interesting jobs in the past, who told me that one of the Facebook silent partners is indeed you know who. (Do not speak IT's name.)
So long as the information flows, the whole system will have all the funding it needs, as has clearly been the case thus far.
You're right though, this new trend towards trying to encourage gaming in social networks does seem a little. . , I don't know. . , desperate, like, "Come on you little white mice! We built all these cool experi- um, 'games' for you to play. Go on, play them. Please?"
I mean, shite, when ALL the games are basically personality tests. . . Even just selling that kind of info to marketing firms would have been profitable enough.
-FL
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
Yes, that was about as close to a Matrix-like time-blip as I've ever experienced. (Of course, I was young and it didn't take much to surprise me).
But there was this really neat period where Commodore in particular was doing some really interesting things. Then suddenly the universe went entirely PC. --It really came home when Lucasarts released the very first X-Wing simulator exclusively for PC. I knew several people who radically changed their lives around so as to play that game, one of whom dropped a couple thousand on a top-end (386?) and never looked back. That was also around the time when Commodore began its terminal nose-dive. (I remember reading long ago, but simply cannot find any breath of it now, that a handful of ex-government spooks got involved in Commodore shortly before the whole shop crashed and the next Amiga hit the skids before release. I'd love to know the full story on that someday!)
The biggest shift I noticed, almost immediately, was that hardware development rocketed forward while "cleverness" began to lag. --That is, with a machine like an old Tandy Color Computer, the time between hardware updates was so long and the state of the hardware that everybody used was so uniform and stable that in order to gain an increase in performance, people had to really work to understand their system. As a result, every year saw faster and more brilliant bits of software emerge for essentially the same machine. By the end of the product cycle on any of these closed systems, like the Color Computer or the Amiga, the performance being squeezed out of them was really amazing. --I mean, humans are really awesome that way; when given limitations and a desire to surpass them, they really begin to glow. Heck, some of those computers had very limited color pallets, and yet through interlacing schemes and such, extra colors were brought into being. I read how another guy on an old Apple ][ system had managed to double the absolute and finite resolution of certain screen graphics using some clever trick, eliciting ooohs and ahhhs from the industry.
With the shift to PCs and the endless hardware upgrade, I feel as though programmers have never really been able to settle down and really grow powerful in their craft. When you look at the demo scene, at what kinds of astonishing things can be achieved in as little as 4Kb on a modern machine, I sometimes wish that hardware development would completely halt for ten years or so just to see how far we could actually take these computers of ours.
-FL
Yep. That's Japanese thinking to a tee.
Ever see, Marusa no onna by Juzo Itami?
There are parts of Japanese culture which are very cool indeed, but when it comes to respecting certain kinds of law, it's the Wa Wa West.
American culture is nuts, but because we live it, it's hard to see. Japanese culture is also bloody insane, but it's also far enough away to fit into the view finder.
-FL
Well, Fantastic Chump, allow me to explain a simple little thing for you. Among the media, there ARE NO 'good' guys.
Actually, that was one of my points. Sadly, we're on the same page.
With friends like these. . .
-FL
Holy smokes!
All the dedicated Fox Viewers have mod points today!
Ha ha! The Slashdot editors have an awesome sense of humor. --Kind of like giving chili peppers and bubble gum to the house pets, except not cruel.
-FL
Somebody modded this 'Troll'?
That means a dedicated Fox viewer has mod points to spend. Just be glad s/he is spending them here in a silly forum rather than actually doing anything in the real world. Because that would be dangerous.
Anyway. . , the best lies are seeded with just enough truth to keep you listening and trusting. This is why it doesn't matter if they happen to be right once in (very long) while. Over-all their intention is to harm your mind, so it's best to sever your connection to them altogether. There are far better sources of information out there.
Mind you, ALL big media is misleading, even the 'good' guys avoid talking about real stuff. Fox is just the Strawman for everybody to poke at and keep the circus spinning. Those sad people who actually take Fox at face value are so low down the food chain of awareness that they essentially deserve what's coming. It might take a hundred more lives or so, but they'll learn eventually. Right now, however, they're just above "Retarded Child" on the awareness index. Pity them, but treat them like a roaring house fire. Stand well back and certainly don't get intimately involved!
-FL
It was a terrible movie, not the kind I like to watch anyway, but for some reason I felt compelled to view the damned thing twice in two days.
The Big Bad Threat in the film was all about something called a Fire Sale, ("It All Has To Go"), where the population's fear level is spiked up into a panic by a group of bad guys deliberately crashing the national infrastructure by way of hacking all the most important computer systems. --All to create a giant distraction so that the stock market could be plundered by thievesssssss! The story is weirdly in keeping with the theme of this Slashdot article.
Consider: Everything is a metaphor in this big old world of ours where matter and energy are based on nothing more than space and the vague notion that there is something which exists. With no matter to speak of, the whole of reality is little more than a hologram, and that being the case, the power of thought and awareness holds about the same amount of substance, if not more. --The subconscious is connected quite well to the whole affair, and events of some magnitude like today's server outages will tend to send ripples through reality so that poor shmucks like me find themselves watching in fascination stupid movies they hate without knowing why.
All I know for sure is that Bruce Willis was a lot more fun to watch when he was playing opposite Cybill Shepherd.
-FL
The advantage that young people have is two-fold; That of Time, and Easy Cross-Cultural Networking.
Back when you were a kid, you didn't have to work. (School work, even when hard, is minimal.) Kids don't have kids, they don't have to worry about car or house payments. They don't have to go grocery shopping. They have all their free time to think about and explore the new trends.
Second, they have the biggest water-cooler to chat around. All day. --After you grow up and enter the work force, you are suddenly segregated into one social category or another and with that, you lose perspective. When you are a kid in school, however, you are rubbing shoulders with everybody; kids who will grow up to become doctors and nuclear scientists and politicos and hair-stylists and crack-heads. You see it all and you have the time to process it. You live right there in the big picture. You just don't have the brains to realize the power of that scenario.
See, on the down side, when you are a kid, you have cognitive blinders on which are so big that when you reach your thirties, you are stunned at the fact that you managed to survive for all the stupid things you did and blind-spots you functioned within. Kids are functionally retarded. --And I say that in the nicest way, because it's a process of growing up and we all go through it. Or at least this has been my own experience, and when I ask others, they nod and sigh deeply. Perhaps you are different, but I doubt it. Brains don't stop growing until you turn 18 or 19 after all, and your internal knowledge processing networks don't really crystallize into a rich enough understanding of reality to be terribly useful for another ten years at least. There's nothing wrong with this. It's called, "Growing up".
So. . . The trick is to make sure that when you reach your thirties you work to put yourself into a position where you have tons of free time and where you can connect with every social class you can reach. If you can do that. . , well then, now you're getting somewhere.
How old were the guys who came up with the iPod?
I'm betting they weren't twenty year-olds.
-FL
Very true, which means. . .
According to Andreessen's own remarks, he's already dangerously behind the curve.
-FL
That article was like reading a page from a le Carre spy novel. I feel mildly thrilled and disgusted at the same time.
Why is it when the best of the best get together to make a neat machine, it has to be suffused with a bunch of creepy moneyed assholes? A prerequisite for purchasing this car will be that you are an illegal arms merchant, drug dealer or a CEO for some Enron-style business model. Honestly, corrupt bastards will make up MORE than half the clientele for a toy like this. That's just how the system works. What do they say? "You can ask me how I made my first hundred million; I'd be happy to spell it all out for the Vanity Fair reporter. But how I made my first ten million? No. Do not ask me that."
Ah well. Even the author of this article was feeling nervous around the edges. In the same way that "World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones", he was quite clear that this might well be the last king of the gas guzzlers. The very same fuckers who drive these things will be the ones most intimately responsible for despoiling the human race to the point where nobody can drive anything on the planet's surface again.
Queasy.
-FL
Yeah, it's parly rant, but it's truth; and that's exactly why I expect to get modded down again.
Mod points should be reserved for those who make sense in some direction which can be agreed with or disagreed with. You're ranting, however, would make Rush Limbaugh clear his throat awkwardly and say, "Sure, yeah man. Right on!" while mentally ticking you off the invite list for being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Mod points are for the sane.
-FL
I'd be interested in seeing well thought out disagreements, of course.
That's a very Canadian attitude. I wish there was more of it up here, but still. . , it's one of the reasons I like living here. :)
As for my disagreement. . .
The land/idea similarity doesn't really work, and others have tried to point out why with some success. Here's my go at it. . .
--The desire to deny access to land you own is there generally because you fear people affecting a finite resource. You want the land to exist according to your desires, and you want to feel safe while living on it, etc. Your personal experience of the land is what you want to control because any changes to it made by others makes the previous version vanish! There is only one, so control over it matters.
Ideas are different. So long as you have enough disks or paper, ideas can be reproduced indefinitely, so the fear of losing control over your personal experience of that piece of ephemeral property, the idea, can safely be relaxed.
What people are left with are petty desires. --Which to me, (I find myself besieged by friends who have become parents of young kids these days), are best seen in mean little girls who want to stop nice little girls from singing the same songs, wearing the same colors, telling the same stories or drawing the same rainbows. Control over the group for selfish benefit. It's amazing how you can see the entire world in microcosm while sitting at a picnic table with a bunch of kids and a box of crayons. I should also add that little boys are much more relaxing. They don't try to control others minds until they get older.
The paradox is this; people need to eat, and if your expertise happens to be that of writing or playing music or being artistic, then you somehow have to convert your art into food and shelter. The funny part is that Artists are rarely the ones complaining about being compensated. It's the corporate owners who do all the heavy pushing. I've seen artists who are good at their craft and who make things others want to experience, establish very comfortable lives for themselves, and they way they do it is to get their work out there as much as possible in conjunction with having a large stock of items which they can sell to the public. Encouraging sharing is a great way to secure future sales as well as other forms of indirect income.
I write, for instance, and I've given away tons of work for free. The more of my work which is out there, the more often I am invited (and paid) to speak, make bulk sales, do private contracts. For an artist, the money doesn't come just from selling a copy of the work; it comes from many sources. For the corporate middle-man, (the record label, for instance), the money ONLY comes from selling copies, and so they are the ones who dread sharing. --The corporation also needs a lot more money for its private jets and tall buildings and other needless bullshit. An artist doesn't need millions of dollars to be secure, comfortable and productive.
Anyway. . , back at the picnic table and around town, I've noticed that the controlling kids tend to spend a lot of time and energy at the task and everybody watching can see them doing it. Observers quietly note this behavior and if opportunities come up, there is a silent but powerful force which resists allowing the mean kids from getting what they want, and which works equally to offer security and resources to the nice kids. And that's great! Mean behavior should not be rewarded in a community, especially among adults.
The trick is being aware. I make a point of quietly making life hell for people who are mean and controlling while making life great for nice and giving people. People are naturally like this, and so all you have to do is be very open when people are being mean and manipulative and not keep it a secret, (as the mean and manipulative people ALWAYS want you to do). The community will take care of the rest in a very organic way. Interesti
If you want stirling examples of angry defensiveness and pomposity, take a look at your own post. Clearly you'd rather just fling poo than engage in anything like a constructive debate. Just be aware that you're not likely to influence anyone's opinion with the attitude -- if you're happy with just ranting for no real reason, then hey, have fun with that.
Fair enough. But I also happen to be right.
The interesting part is that my tone with these last couple of posts is about par for the course for me, but on this particular subject, people seem to get very upset. I was actually surprised to see my 'score' plummet as it did. I honestly half expected it to shoot in the other direction. I clearly don't have my finger entirely tuned to the pulse of popular human awareness, which is probably why I'm still here. Learning how the rest of the monkeys think.
The intensity of the knee-jerk always says a lot about how deeply and tightly tied the emotional knots are. The subject of human knowledge, what we do and do not know, is a very prickly one. The ego is intimately linked to it, particularly with geeks.
-FL
Why is it that people who don't read the article or comprehend what they have just read and who then invariably jump in line to adopt the most reactionary conservative viewpoint ALSO happen to spell like ignorant morons?
Maybe it's because they really ARE ignorant morons? Just a theory.
The sad/amazing part is that they also tend to be too hopelessly stupid to feel ashamed by this or to stop talking when it is pointed out. Woe is us.
-FL
I'm not really kidding. Your anti-Wikipedia rant is entertaining, but it doesn't provide any substance. Speaking for myself, when I go to Wikipedia for a refresher on something I already know about, I'm generally pleased with the quality of the results, which makes me think that the articles on subjects I don't know much about are likely to be pretty good too.
So. . , it is good at re-enforcing your current belief structure, and when exploring new areas of knowledge, you trust it to maintain the calming, authoritative feeling of security. How nice that must be for you. You must feel right with the world when you close your browser.
You want examples? You mean you want me to work for your benefit when you are a smarmy ass whose belief system I really don't give two figs about and who would work hard to reject anything offered which doesn't fit with his comfortable dream-version of reality? Can you even take a small personal criticism without becoming angry and defensive? Most people cannot, so how the heck would you manage with having firmly held beliefs examined? Why on earth would I want to waste such enormous amounts of energy on such an individual? Answer: "I don't."
Your line about "political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities" provides a clue as to what really bothers you about Wikipedia: reality's well-known liberal bias. Unless you can provide specific examples, with citations, it's reasonable to assume that the Wikipedia groupmind knows more about the way things really work than some random dude on /.
When you say the "Wikipedia groupmind" I assume you mean "Human groupmind", and pardon me for coughing somewhat at that. Our world is a giant ridiculous mess and it was put there thanks to the Human groupmind. Reality's well-known liberal bias? -???- Aside from the fact that I'm probably more genuinely left than your average hippie, bent politics are a given in Wikipedia, and the war for Left and Right rages on while I don't actually care much since that combat zone is very small and very deliberately provoked and contained, and thus, simply Does Not Matter.
Rather, it's the "Learning Channel" style of pompous assumption and tone affected by every entry where it might matter. Look up the entry for James Randi, for instance. The dream version of that reality is very well cited and documented on WP, and so the illusion remains comforting and intact while the other side of the story remains ignored. And that other side? Sorry. You're an ass, so I'm not going to give you anything which you could find out for yourself.
-Some Random Guy on Slashdot.
Why don't you Just use your encyclopedia from the 40s and don't think about wikipedia, if that really seems more useful to you.
Thank-you. I already do that. I also tap a multitude of other information sources. It's call "research". It's what you have to do when, "the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment," fails to deliver.
So... no you compare WP to a imaginary guide? Didn't you just accuse the rest of humanity of trying to live in a dream state? It would be more effective if you showed us how bad wikipedia is by comparing it to something, you know, existing.
When so many others have equated the two and found themselves happily pleased with the results, it is entirely fair for me to subject that same comparison to more objective lighting. If you have trouble with that, then you're not looking at the whole picture, but are simply picking out disposable items to put in your fish barrel for easy target practice. But otherwise, congratulations on a devastating argument.
-FL
I go to Wikipedia for two things; when I want summarized descriptions of fictional stories, and information about weights and measures and official standards. And boring details nobody has any opinion about which are so chipped in stone, I don't have to worry about how fractured and tangled up the editors' various emotional/intellectual states were at the time of the entry inclusion. Stories are safe because they're not real, and it's hard for Official Culture to get along when it distorts the way you convert miles to kilometers. (Though it would bloody do so if it thought it could get away with it!)
Other than that, Wikipedia is Humanity's dream-state navel-gazing summary of what it WISHES were real and not what IS. There is so much content on Wikipedia I disagree with that I barely even notice the red-light flashing in my brain when I scan any given article, or as more often happens, the lack of an article.
No wonder you can cram that thing into 8 gigs. Hell, I was flipping through an encyclopedia from the 40's, and under "Dynamite", it had detailed instructions on how to MAKE it yourself and how to blast rocks from your property. --Wikipedia isn't even as informative as a general knowledge set of dead-tree books from last century. But it IS smaller and more portable. I guess that's good.
And sorry, XKCD fans, but the Hitchhiker's Guide, (fictional though it is), isn't hamstrung with political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities. Maybe when humanity grows up and can handle looking at reality straight on will Wikipedia become something to be proud of. At the moment it's merely the litmus test for social maturity with embarrassing results.
Sorry for ranting, but honestly!
-FL
Yeah, yeah, no surprise here.
A snake cannot change its spots.
But what color ARE those spots, exactly. . ? I wondered about this and decided to do a quick (Google) search for Microsoft's Mission Statement, and found this. . . (From here.
So either the people with decision-making power working over at Redmond have failed to read the darned thing, or employees live in a state of cognitive dissonance, REALLY, HONESTLY believing that they are working to, "help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
And if that's the case, Microsoft isn't just evil. It's insane.
Good to know.
-FL
IMO people freaking out about privacy is just a way for people to feel important.
How interesting. Now will you please include here for public scrutiny your real name, address, phone number as well as your social security number and the last 500 sites you have visited, the last 100 books you read, a disclosure of all the women/men you've slept with, your medical conditions, all the drugs you've taken (legal and not), all the times and locations you've perpetrated any crime including traffic or tax violations and a full list of all copyrighted media you have downloaded, your political and religious affiliations as well as a full list of your employers, schools attended and all your immediate friends and family. Please also include anything we might not have thought of but which you might find potentially harmful were it in the public domain.
Please rest assured that nobody here would EVER mis-use your information and we take your privacy seriously.
-FL
Here's how it works. . .
The system you grew up with has a life span which will end at some point and you will be left feeling either bitter or so old you just don't care. --Either that, or evolution will reach a plateau of suitable perfect-ness in bio-feedback device and stay there for 20 million years. I doubt even the Mouse, Screen & Keyboard will manage this, though as of yet, nothing seems to match it for getting yourself from one end of an Operating System to the other.
For games. . . Any controller which has a limit to its usefulness in moving stuff around on screen, and all controllers seem to, will irritate some engineer/designer somewhere enough to spawn some new brand of tool. The kids new to video games will be more than willing to train themselves on whatever cool new system is offered so long as it activates all their happy circuits, and whatever solution you were content (ecstatic) with while growing up will have to shuffle over to make room, and will eventually find itself relegated to a niche market. And you won't understand what your kids are talking about half the time. Welcome to parenthood. You're not cool anymore. Laugh at it. The other option is to wear leather pants and buy a sports car and look really sad and desperate.
Best to age with a little grace. Let the Nintendo button thingy go. You don't want to be the old guy saying, "When I was young, we had to play our games with a STICK! In 8 bits! And we LIKED it!"
Hm. Actually, it might be kind of fun to be that guy.
-FL
the 767 broke up BECAUSE IT FLEW TOO FAST WHEN IT LEFT CONTROLLED FLIGHT
Exactly.
The thing is, there is no indication that the current plane in question left controlled flight before disintegrating, so while you're using the same words, they do not communicate the same thing as in the article. The speaker didn't say, "The plane might have turned sideways while in flight and the resulting forces tore it apart". --Yes, technically, this might be called, "flying too fast", but it's an extremely weird way of putting it.
The only thing I can think of which might explain such a peculiar wording is if the man happened to be French and there was an awkward translation which the reporting journalist took verbatim. But I doubt that's what you were thinking, (what with the caps lock engaged and all.)
A bolide was sighted by another pilot coming down in the area. We know that they can cause massive air explosions. The crash debris fits with this. It's just a hypothesis.
-FL
Two articles, one in the NYT and the other in the Christian Science Monitor, both taking the slant that, of course, suppressing information is the right thing to do, and gee, look, here's a case where they were right to do so.
This sickening example of self-serving behavior smacks not just of opportunism but of deliberation. --Remember all those episodes of various prime time shows including Alias, and 24 and even ****ing Star Trek (Enterprise) which laid out the compelling argument for the use of torture using the exact same narrative template? No? I'll recap in one paragraph. . .
There's a *ticking bomb of some sort* (oh no!) but We, (the Good Guys) have caught the Bad Man who knows *The Secret Code*. But we would NEVER torture for the information; we're Good People, after all. So instead we set up an elaborate, expensive, time-consuming mind-game sham act to trick the captive into thinking that he's escaped, forgotten he's escaped, and that the person who helped him escape should be told *The Secret Code*! But alas, the captive sees through the whole act at the last moment and laughs his cruel Bad Guy laugh, enraging us. And we, the Good Guys TRIED so hard! --Can anybody blame us for bowing as the ALPHA MALE character of the show who stomps in and sets to work on the captive's finger nails with a pair of pliers, retrieving the information in under five minutes and *Saves The Day*? Heck no! We cheer!
The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor? Come on! One is the CIA's lap dog and the other is the product of a 2000 year-old hate-on for anybody in a turban. This current bit of bullshit is a handy bit of spy craft. Please allow me to present the following narrative. . .
A journalist is kidnapped. Nothing new there; it happens all the time. Except this just happened to be a kidnapping which fits nicely. So just when this opportune kidnapping occurs, enter the CIA or Homeland Security or whoever is in charge of sculpting public perception through the media. Back in the World War, it was an office called, "The Department of Propaganda" which did this kind of thing, boasting clandestine relationships with a whole stack of willing (and perhaps not-so-willing journalists) during the war. --We'd be insane to believe anything has changed except for the worse.
The result? We get this latest bit of horse manure designed to make people think that it's good and noble not JUST to pull out people's finger nails, but that we should applaud the choking off of reliable public sector information using this retarded, "Real Life and totally honest and un-massaged example" to show why Big Brother has its reasons for the news seeming 'wrong' somehow. (Though you'll never know which parts or why.) What's that? It just can't be, you say? --Two men's lives were at stake, after all. They wouldn't risk the lives of two of their own just to perpetrate a mind game on the public. They just wouldn't DO that! --Well, if this emotionalism seems like a rational bit of thinking to you, then I'd suggest a quick review of the last hundred years to see just how much the corporate/government cares about the human lives in its care.
In short, I get a strong sense that This Is Crap.
Anybody who falls for this kind of scam and says, "Oh yes. I see your reasonable argument, and because it happens to make sense, I will allow you to lie to me and I will submit to this willingly." News Flash: Socrates illustrated just how bullshit so-called "Logic" is; a good debater can prove that the sky is plaid. Anybody who falls for this latest scam will probably also tell you that in some instances, it's okay to get out the waterboard. Do not trust such people. --They're too stupid to think clearly and therefore too dangerous to trust. How much would it take to convince them that YOU are a "Bad Guy" and that YOUR fingers should be the ones being snipped off? Not very much, I'd wager. Such people are only one week of manipulated news away from burning you and your family alive on your front lawn.
-FL
How about the 1991 Lauda Air 767 disaster, in which an uncommanded reverser deployment caused partial stall of the left wing, resulting in a roll and dive where the airspeed rapidly exceeded VNE, followed by failure of the fin due to airloads, which in turn struck and tore off the horizontal stabilzer, which in turn caused the nose to tuck down with such violence that both wings tore off.
Charming. But what does this have to do with flying too fast, as suggested by the post-mortem guys? The damage in the present case suggests multiple catastrophic system failures all at the same moment. Not the brakes accidentally getting turned on. And I don't believe for an instant that a passenger jet can accidentally "fly too fast" and self-destruct as a result. I'm sure we would have heard about this sometime before in the history of commercial aviation. Just because a PR agency stars spouting 'facts' with authority doesn't make them true, though geeks are certainly shell-shocked enough to absorb any dumb notion so long as it is presented in the right tone of voice by somebody in a lab coat with a clip board.
and there were no, repeat, no little green men shooting at the aircraft.
Okay. So for the benefit of anybody who might not have been crystal clear on the matter, 'little green men' were never on the list. Don't know why you point this out with such verve, but there it is.
-FL