Sad but true. And, unfortunately, that's probably why terraforming will probably be done first by China, or some other similar authoritarian government that sees the benefit and doesn't care what the Luddite Of The Month club has to say about it. That's a bad thing for a lot reasons, but if we're unwilling to evaluate the issues rationally and proceed then we shouldn't be surprised.
You're right. But in addition to "bigger and bettter" we also get lots of things that were unavailable at any price to a previous generation. My great grandmother would've been amazed at fresh papaya available in wintertime. My father the photographer would've been thrilled on a digital SLR and Photoshop. My grandfather might still be alive if he'd had access to today's routine heart attack treatments. The severe athsma that cast a shadow over my own childhood would be easily treated with modern medications. These sorts of advancements happen so slowly and silently that many people don't even realize how much we benefit from them, not even when we've lived through them.
Some $500k house in LA is an artificially high price, considering the real costs of building the house. Its high because everyone wants it and anyone buying it knows they can sell it for more later.
Just a quibble, that price isn't "artificially high". It's high, yes, but aside from taxes and stuff it's pretty much the real market value. OTOH, a price that did not consider factors like the attractive location, likely resale value, etc. would be artificially low.
All of this technology is suppose to make our lives easier. It used to be all one had to do was go out and hunt for some food a couple ours a day (if even that). Nowadays, we work 8+ hours a day just to make ends meet.
Are you serious? In hunter/gatherer societies, hunting for food was a constant obsession. So was starvation, because huntable food seldom just stands around waiting to be caught and eaten. And besides food you also had to hunt for drinkable water, firewood, shelter, etc. This usually required the constant efforts of every able-bodied male. The women often stayed home and had babies, which was a good thing because they needed a lot of babies to replace all the people who constantly died of starvation, exposure, sickness, and injury. It's not an efficient lifestyle; that's why hunter/gatherers died out. The more flexible ones intuitively realized that way of life was a dead end and gradually turned agrarian, and then industrial.
But I suppose you're right. After a typical 8-hour day "making ends meet" as wage slaves in our horrible, dystopian modern world we go home or stop at a convenient restaurant, eat too much, goof off, watch some TV, hang out on Slashdot, and go to bed. Only to do the same thing every day. Well, except for vacations and weekends and sick days. The pain! The pain!
That's true, reliability is a relative concept. The world of the Model-T included a lot of people who were already familiar with basic mechanical work. It was popular with farmers, for example, who regularly repaired their own tractors (which were likely also made by Ford), or tinkerers for whom a real production-quality vehicle was a luxury. It was designed to rugged and relatively easy to repair, but, most of all, cheap to manufacture. Expectations for performance and safety were pretty low, too, so cobbled-together repairs and "mostly working" cars were acceptable to none at all.
Or maybe they'll get the idea that good parents actually supervise their children and exersize parental authority. Or maybe they'll grow up without the ridiculous notion that things done on public web sites are magically "private". Or maybe they'll understand that adults and children have different roles and responsibilities in society and should be treated differently. Crazy ideas, I know, but it just might work.
So does their device withstand extremes of temperature duration both operation and storage? High humidity? Is it impervious to dust? How does it handle shock and vibration?
No offense, but that's the problem. There are times when all those factors are important, even vital. Like in a helicopter or a weapons system. But there are also plenty of times when those high standards become self-defeating.
If you're building a Pentagon-style do-everything system that costs $90,000 per unit then you want them to last a good long time. If you're adapting off-the-shelf technology and each unit costs more like $400 then it doesn't matter nearly as much. You build a a couple hundred thousand of the things and give them to everyone with a uniform. When yours breaks, which it will, you just borrow the one from guy next to you and pick up a new one for yourself when you get back to base. Cheap, ubiquitous and naturally redundant. And those are important design factors, too.
Of course, "in the good old days" most people who could not start a fire, ride a horse, milk a cow, kill and gut an animal, grow food, cook meals, sew clothing, wield a weapon, etc. were all likely to be considered idiots. At least if they were over the age of 13 or so.
So it's good thing that all the superior minds who vaguely understand microwaves and post on Slashdot have mastered that list of basic knowledge so thoroughly. Wouldn't want to burn off anyone's genitals by mistake!
Except that environmentalists interests are for the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants, not for the increased wealth of acorporation and its stockholders. A rather significant difference, wouldn't you agree?
I would not agree.
That is a very charitable evaluation, but your conclusion doesn't make much sense. The Spanish Inquisition (bet you didn't expect that) would have claimed, quite sincerely, that their goal was the general welfare and spiritual well being of the planet and its inhabitants. All they required was absolute obedience and license to do pretty much anything they wanted. By your logic they would rank as one of the most trustworthy and wonderful organizations in history. Most of their victims would not agree. Good intentions do not automatically bring about good results.
So sre environmentalists the Spanish Inquisition, blessed with absolute knowledge of right and wrong and empowered to change the world and crush all dissent? No, of course not. But some of them sure seem to wish they were.
Is science done by people with alleged good intentions always right, and science paid for by people with a profit motive always suspect? No, obviously not. I don't care who pays for what. All that matters is whether the science is sound enough to stand up to scrutiny. A lot of climate science is really, really slipshod stuff rigged up to support foregone ideological conclusion. Regardless of whether you agree with the conclusions or not, that's not science.
Amen. If I had mod points right now, they would be yours.
Re:Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek proble
on
Why Vista Took So Long
·
· Score: 1
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion.
I don't think it's "more choices" that add confusion. It's the poor presentation and the non-intuitive implementation of the choices that are presented. Joel's suggested alternative actually preserves almost all of the choices (and flexibility) of the actual bloated menu. What makes it so much better is that most of the choices are made by direct user action (walk away for 15 minutes = hibernate, log on as someone else = switch user) rather than a list of vague yet explicit options. You're not telling the computer what you plan to do. You're just doing it, and the computer functions appropriately.
But you're right about presenting a few, salient choices at a time. The lesson here isn't that we have to take away people's options to make them happy. It's that we need to present the spectrum of choices with sensible defaults and within some kind of context that makes sense. I think even Joel is unclear when talking about this point sometimes.
This is so utterly bankrupt. HE IS THE MANAGEMENT, HE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STRATEGY.
Well, sort of. He is a VP. In the real world, however, corporate VPs are not demigods or dictators. They can't fire off an email and make "strategy" happen without the support of their peers and the concurrence of their subordinates. That's true even at small organizations. In a company that has autonomous divisions and decentralized control like Yahoo the problem is much worse. In fact his main complaint seems to be that the company has too many tangled chains of command and confused redundant managers. Lots of places have the same sorts of problems to one degree or another. Even recognizing that there is a problem is hard for some companies, so I've gotta give him credit for that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending this guy in particular. I have no idea what he's done right or wrong. Just because he's management doesn't mean his views aren't useful.
Laying people off or spinning off divisions may really be necessary and responsible (sometimes it is). Unfortunately, based on the list of duplicate functions, they seem to have a serious conflict brewing between their "Buy The Best" and "Not Invented Here" factions. It's been left unaddressed for such a long time that I have grave doubts about Yahoo's ability to make the right decisions to fix the problem.
I suppose it depends on how you (and God, and Moses) define "murder". It's not the same as "kill", of course. Some killing is murder, and some isn't.
Sadly, I don't think any of the myriad other religions (including the non-theistic ones) have done much better. As another part of the Bible notes, we all fall short of the Glory.
When people who are obsessed with absolute personal accountability realize that not everything is a conscious decision, then the world will be a better place overall.
Well, generally, the problem isn't that people make one stupid decision that dooms them for life, it's that they make a whole series of bad choices, or the same bad choice over and over again. Choices have consequences, and some consquences are not easily undone. It's hard to become an addict if you don't decide to become an habitual user.
True addiction, meanwhile, knows no boundaries.
Perhaps. But "true addiction" has nothing to do with playing too many freakin' video games. It's just a leisure activity that some people prefer to do even when there are other priorities that require their time. Like watching too much football on tv, or spending all your time tending the flower garden, or every weekend out on the golf course. None of those things are "addictions", and it just triviales real addictions to call them such. It's just jumbled priorities and bad time management, and those aren't anything new or especially mysterious. Giving it a dramatic name may make lazy people feel better about their unwillingness to live their own lives and take responsibility for themselves, but it doesn't do anyone any good.
Yeah, I know what you mean. For example, I often visit Matt Denton's photography site (mattdentonphoto.com). His pages used to reside on Apple's free hosting service until he moved everything over to a dedicated domain. That was quite a while ago, six months at least, but Google still returns results on the now-404'd homepage.mac.com pages in preference to the identical content on his actual, live site. It doesn't seem like that should happen.
Interesting. I suspect the reason Amazon operates like that is because their ordering and billing system is agnostic about what each box contains, or which warehouse it is shipped from. I think most companies think of the packing slips as a purchase reference for the recipient, not an inventory for the customs office or the shipping company. They probably should change it, but it might be a harder fix than you'd expect.
The VAT system also sounds like it's designed to fail in a way that's more expensive for the customer. Why don't the customs people take an overall packing list and the number of boxes that make up the order (as indicated by a bunch of identical packing lists associated with the same purchase) and just call it a day?
Agreed. But it's not just about "visual satisfaction", it's about proper reporting. I've never heard of a Mold-A-Rama before and had no idea what they were talking about until I did a search. I have seen those plastic toys, though, and I would've understood what they were talking about if they'd bothered to show me some pictures.
Decent digital cameras are so cheap that there's no excuse for not including photos in an online news story. Heck, if the reporter is a desk jockey they can even find an appropriately licensed photo from flickr or one of the stock sites. How hard is that?
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit). Photoshop/GIMP/Silkypix/any other image processor is no different, and represents just an extension of the photography/development process.
There's a huge difference between varying the RAW conversion parameters or applying curve corrections, and cloning in fake smoke. (Or removing people, adding hair, painting in crowds, or any of the similar tricks that Soviet and Chinese photo editors used to do back when "propaganda" actually meant something.) Most dishonest photographers don't have the skill to fake a photo convincingly. The just take staged photos of greiving widows on Hezbollah's guided tours, or, even easier, just lie about when and where the photo was taken.
But, granting your larger point, only the original file is even close to trustworthy. So obviously the easy way to avoid this sort of fraud is for newspapers and wire services to make the original, unretouched files of all their published photos available online to the public. Suspect a photo's been played with? Convert it and take a closer look. Have suspicions about the timing of a series of pictures? Look at the EXIF data in that RAW file and see for yourself. If a news agency really wants a reputation for caring about honesty and accuracy they can give their best PJ's and trusted stringers GPS-equipped cameras that stamp the location in the file, too. (Yes, it is possible to edit EXIF data inside a RAW file, but it isn't easy. And I'm sure the clever folks here could suggest encrypted archive formats that could add yet another layer of tamper-detection.)
This isn't the first time this has happened, not even recently. It's clear that the news editors are themselves too gullible or intellecutualy dishonest to police their own reporters. I can't figure out why at least one of the major wire services or newspapers doesn't don't do this already. They'd immediately be seen as the verifiable and trusted source for accurate news photography. I suspect it's a mixture of technological ignorance and just plain arrogance.
"Internet access at reasonable speeds in Washtenaw county as in many places is provided by the Cable company ($60/month) or the phone company (DSL is $70/month). These outrageous prices hurt everyone."
The key word there that argument is "the", as in the cable company and the phone company. In many places there's only one of each, because the companies were granted monopolies years ago by the local governments. There's no reason for that to continue. The solution to outrageously priced high-speed access is not to spend yet more tax money on setting up and maintaining a wireless network, it's to allow competing phone and cable companies.
Must be us fat ol' Americans gorging ourselves on ice cream and cheese again. Sometimes we just buy a frozen cow to save time.:)
Actually, it's probably because many American families have more kids than their European counterparts. Or they're like me and my wife. Just the two of us, but we buy some things in bulk sizes because it's cheaper. We divvy up the large portions at home into convenient two-person sizes, freeze everything we don't need right away, and then prepare it at our leisure. The store saves on wasteful packaging, and we save money.
This also means that we go to the supermarket once every two weeks, because we have better ways to spend our time (that's particularly important in more rural parts of America, where the nearest supermarket with a nice selection may be a long drive from home; Europeans sometimes don't intuitively grasp how much larger and less densely populated the US is, compared to their own countries.)
The procedures at the National Archives sound fairly effective. However, the boxes are not missing from the National Archives. According to the PDF the 700 boxes were removed from the Archives for transfer to the Goddard Space Flight Center, and then lost sometime after that:
In 1970, the tapes were placed in the US National Archives in Accession #69A4099. By 1984, all but two of the over 700 boxes of Apollo era magnetic tapes placed in the Accession, were removed and returned to the GSFC for permanent retention. These tapes are now missing.
The two boxes left at the Archives are still accounted for, so apparently the GSFC is to blame for misplacing the rest of them. They're probably in some half-forgotten storage facility somewhere.
BTW, I hope the folks at the Archives are looking into using RFID tags or something similar. It'd make a lot easier to find boxes when they're inevitably misplaced.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
There's no entity in the Constitution known as "the press". The Consitution just talks about the people. And freedom of the press is the freedom of the people to publish things. That included, then and now, both professional reporters and anyone else who wanted to distribute a broadside/ pamphlet/blog/videotape/podcast. The founders were intimiately familiar with the power of self-publishing and knew how important it was to protect it. That also means that the special "above the law" attitude among many professional journalists is seriously mistaken. They have to obey the same laws and exersize the same responsibility as any other average citizen.
But you're right that this case doesn't have anything to do with freedom of the press. If the guy had uploaded the video to YouTube or somewhere, and then was forced to remove it by the police then maybe it would, but that didn't happen.
The excesses you attribute to communisim are no worse than those found in many theocracies.
That's because Communism basically is a religion. A cult, to be more specific. Which is why some people keep making excuses for it and inflicting it on innocent people. All despite decades of practical experience showing that it's one of the most destructive and horrific belief systems ever to spring from the mind of man. It's even worse than National Socialism in some ways, because it lacks the obvious warning signs of spittle-flecked anti-Semitism, and has the glossy veneer of science to lure the gullible into thinking that it's something more than a totalitarian scam.
FWIW, I live in rural Maryland. We have aboveground lines here and we've had similar heavy rain and flooding in nearby areas. Our power hasn't so much as blipped. The UPS hasn't even beeped to signal an under- or over-voltage condition. I'm more worried about brownouts later this summer than storm-related outages.
In fact, it's only gone out, fairly briefly, once or twice in the four years I've lived here. In that same timeframe the underground fiber at work, a few miles away, has been severed twice by construction.
And I have no idea what the OP means by "storms becoming worse and worse". I've lived in the Maryland/DC area all my life, and I remember some pretty hellacious storms, hurricanes, and blizzards over the last 30 years. We haven't had anything nearly as bad lately.
"I don't like The Man tracking my activities, right down to where and when I park"
You're concerned about The Man knowing where you park your registered motor vehicle, license plate clearly visible as required by law, on a public street? As you enter and exit your vehicle in public view. Yep, that's some highly sensitive and privileged information right there.
On a free market, competition forces the price to fall towards the cost of production, driving production into ever higher efficiency to create profit margins. This in itself means more wealth is created for the same amount of effort, thus creating an ever more wealthy economy, and benefiting society as a whole.
On commodity goods, sure. That's why blank CDs are dirt cheap. That's why you can buy a DVD player for $20. But companies don't make a whole lot of money on boring commodity goods, which is why they prefer to supplement their product lines with specialty items. Or set apart their offerings in some other way.
So, seen the price of a CD lately? If 'the market' had 'sorted it out', it ought to be around a few cents for the more widely produced mass produced products. Oops, nope, not there. And the amortized cost of Windows should be a couple of bucks. Oh, not there either.
Seems the market isnt sorting things out that good, eh?
You seem to think that "the market" consists of other people selling their goods at a price you expect. That's not how it works. If the market thinks that most music CDs are too expensive to justify the selection and the convenience, then the market will respond by turning to other alternatives. People will shun high-priced big-label CDs and buy their music from less expensive labels. Or they'll give up on CDs altogether and buy music online at prices they like better. Or they'll trade their time, bandwidth, and some minimal risk and use a P2P app. DRM suddenly makes your expensive CDs too inconvenient? The balance shifts, and behavior changes.
The same applies to Windows. Neither you nor I nor the government has any business setting Microsoft's software prices. They own the software, so that's up to them. You don't like the price they've decided on? See the alternatives above. If the product is inferior, or the premium price isn't worth your time and your effort then you're free to take your wallet and go elsewhere. Eventually MS will adapt to the new market environment or die. They can attempt to create a bubble of monopoly to avoid change, but that's just a holding action at best.
Indeed. Intellectual monopoly legislation needs to be removed. There is nothing that justifies the legal intervention of copyrights or patents in the market, and the damage is obvious.
We've had copyrights and patents for longer than any of us have been alive. They're fine, even necessary. The problem isn't with the concept, it's with the warped implementations that have been sneaking through in the last couple decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad but true. And, unfortunately, that's probably why terraforming will probably be done first by China, or some other similar authoritarian government that sees the benefit and doesn't care what the Luddite Of The Month club has to say about it. That's a bad thing for a lot reasons, but if we're unwilling to evaluate the issues rationally and proceed then we shouldn't be surprised.
You're right. But in addition to "bigger and bettter" we also get lots of things that were unavailable at any price to a previous generation. My great grandmother would've been amazed at fresh papaya available in wintertime. My father the photographer would've been thrilled on a digital SLR and Photoshop. My grandfather might still be alive if he'd had access to today's routine heart attack treatments. The severe athsma that cast a shadow over my own childhood would be easily treated with modern medications. These sorts of advancements happen so slowly and silently that many people don't even realize how much we benefit from them, not even when we've lived through them.
Some $500k house in LA is an artificially high price, considering the real costs of building the house. Its high because everyone wants it and anyone buying it knows they can sell it for more later.
Just a quibble, that price isn't "artificially high". It's high, yes, but aside from taxes and stuff it's pretty much the real market value. OTOH, a price that did not consider factors like the attractive location, likely resale value, etc. would be artificially low.
All of this technology is suppose to make our lives easier. It used to be all one had to do was go out and hunt for some food a couple ours a day (if even that). Nowadays, we work 8+ hours a day just to make ends meet.
Are you serious? In hunter/gatherer societies, hunting for food was a constant obsession. So was starvation, because huntable food seldom just stands around waiting to be caught and eaten. And besides food you also had to hunt for drinkable water, firewood, shelter, etc. This usually required the constant efforts of every able-bodied male. The women often stayed home and had babies, which was a good thing because they needed a lot of babies to replace all the people who constantly died of starvation, exposure, sickness, and injury. It's not an efficient lifestyle; that's why hunter/gatherers died out. The more flexible ones intuitively realized that way of life was a dead end and gradually turned agrarian, and then industrial.
But I suppose you're right. After a typical 8-hour day "making ends meet" as wage slaves in our horrible, dystopian modern world we go home or stop at a convenient restaurant, eat too much, goof off, watch some TV, hang out on Slashdot, and go to bed. Only to do the same thing every day. Well, except for vacations and weekends and sick days. The pain! The pain!
That's true, reliability is a relative concept. The world of the Model-T included a lot of people who were already familiar with basic mechanical work. It was popular with farmers, for example, who regularly repaired their own tractors (which were likely also made by Ford), or tinkerers for whom a real production-quality vehicle was a luxury. It was designed to rugged and relatively easy to repair, but, most of all, cheap to manufacture. Expectations for performance and safety were pretty low, too, so cobbled-together repairs and "mostly working" cars were acceptable to none at all.
Or maybe they'll get the idea that good parents actually supervise their children and exersize parental authority. Or maybe they'll grow up without the ridiculous notion that things done on public web sites are magically "private". Or maybe they'll understand that adults and children have different roles and responsibilities in society and should be treated differently. Crazy ideas, I know, but it just might work.
So does their device withstand extremes of temperature duration both
operation and storage? High humidity? Is it impervious to dust?
How does it handle shock and vibration?
No offense, but that's the problem. There are times when all those factors are important, even vital. Like in a helicopter or a weapons system. But there are also plenty of times when those high standards become self-defeating.
If you're building a Pentagon-style do-everything system that costs $90,000 per unit then you want them to last a good long time. If you're adapting off-the-shelf technology and each unit costs more like $400 then it doesn't matter nearly as much. You build a a couple hundred thousand of the things and give them to everyone with a uniform. When yours breaks, which it will, you just borrow the one from guy next to you and pick up a new one for yourself when you get back to base. Cheap, ubiquitous and naturally redundant. And those are important design factors, too.
Of course, "in the good old days" most people who could not start a fire, ride a horse, milk a cow, kill and gut an animal, grow food, cook meals, sew clothing, wield a weapon, etc. were all likely to be considered idiots. At least if they were over the age of 13 or so.
So it's good thing that all the superior minds who vaguely understand microwaves and post on Slashdot have mastered that list of basic knowledge so thoroughly. Wouldn't want to burn off anyone's genitals by mistake!
Except that environmentalists interests are for the general welfare of the planet and its inhabitants, not for the increased wealth of acorporation and its stockholders. A rather significant difference, wouldn't you agree?
I would not agree.
That is a very charitable evaluation, but your conclusion doesn't make much sense. The Spanish Inquisition (bet you didn't expect that) would have claimed, quite sincerely, that their goal was the general welfare and spiritual well being of the planet and its inhabitants. All they required was absolute obedience and license to do pretty much anything they wanted. By your logic they would rank as one of the most trustworthy and wonderful organizations in history. Most of their victims would not agree. Good intentions do not automatically bring about good results.
So sre environmentalists the Spanish Inquisition, blessed with absolute knowledge of right and wrong and empowered to change the world and crush all dissent? No, of course not. But some of them sure seem to wish they were.
Is science done by people with alleged good intentions always right, and science paid for by people with a profit motive always suspect? No, obviously not. I don't care who pays for what. All that matters is whether the science is sound enough to stand up to scrutiny. A lot of climate science is really, really slipshod stuff rigged up to support foregone ideological conclusion. Regardless of whether you agree with the conclusions or not, that's not science.
Amen. If I had mod points right now, they would be yours.
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. I don't think it's "more choices" that add confusion. It's the poor presentation and the non-intuitive implementation of the choices that are presented. Joel's suggested alternative actually preserves almost all of the choices (and flexibility) of the actual bloated menu. What makes it so much better is that most of the choices are made by direct user action (walk away for 15 minutes = hibernate, log on as someone else = switch user) rather than a list of vague yet explicit options. You're not telling the computer what you plan to do. You're just doing it, and the computer functions appropriately. But you're right about presenting a few, salient choices at a time. The lesson here isn't that we have to take away people's options to make them happy. It's that we need to present the spectrum of choices with sensible defaults and within some kind of context that makes sense. I think even Joel is unclear when talking about this point sometimes.
This is so utterly bankrupt. HE IS THE MANAGEMENT, HE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STRATEGY.
Well, sort of. He is a VP. In the real world, however, corporate VPs are not demigods or dictators. They can't fire off an email and make "strategy" happen without the support of their peers and the concurrence of their subordinates. That's true even at small organizations. In a company that has autonomous divisions and decentralized control like Yahoo the problem is much worse. In fact his main complaint seems to be that the company has too many tangled chains of command and confused redundant managers. Lots of places have the same sorts of problems to one degree or another. Even recognizing that there is a problem is hard for some companies, so I've gotta give him credit for that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending this guy in particular. I have no idea what he's done right or wrong. Just because he's management doesn't mean his views aren't useful.
Laying people off or spinning off divisions may really be necessary and responsible (sometimes it is). Unfortunately, based on the list of duplicate functions, they seem to have a serious conflict brewing between their "Buy The Best" and "Not Invented Here" factions. It's been left unaddressed for such a long time that I have grave doubts about Yahoo's ability to make the right decisions to fix the problem.
I suppose it depends on how you (and God, and Moses) define "murder". It's not the same as "kill", of course. Some killing is murder, and some isn't.
Sadly, I don't think any of the myriad other religions (including the non-theistic ones) have done much better. As another part of the Bible notes, we all fall short of the Glory.
When people who are obsessed with absolute personal accountability realize that not everything is a conscious decision, then the world will be a better place overall.
Well, generally, the problem isn't that people make one stupid decision that dooms them for life, it's that they make a whole series of bad choices, or the same bad choice over and over again. Choices have consequences, and some consquences are not easily undone. It's hard to become an addict if you don't decide to become an habitual user.
True addiction, meanwhile, knows no boundaries.
Perhaps. But "true addiction" has nothing to do with playing too many freakin' video games. It's just a leisure activity that some people prefer to do even when there are other priorities that require their time. Like watching too much football on tv, or spending all your time tending the flower garden, or every weekend out on the golf course. None of those things are "addictions", and it just triviales real addictions to call them such. It's just jumbled priorities and bad time management, and those aren't anything new or especially mysterious. Giving it a dramatic name may make lazy people feel better about their unwillingness to live their own lives and take responsibility for themselves, but it doesn't do anyone any good.
Yeah, I know what you mean. For example, I often visit Matt Denton's photography site (mattdentonphoto.com). His pages used to reside on Apple's free hosting service until he moved everything over to a dedicated domain. That was quite a while ago, six months at least, but Google still returns results on the now-404'd homepage.mac.com pages in preference to the identical content on his actual, live site. It doesn't seem like that should happen.
Interesting. I suspect the reason Amazon operates like that is because their ordering and billing system is agnostic about what each box contains, or which warehouse it is shipped from. I think most companies think of the packing slips as a purchase reference for the recipient, not an inventory for the customs office or the shipping company. They probably should change it, but it might be a harder fix than you'd expect.
The VAT system also sounds like it's designed to fail in a way that's more expensive for the customer. Why don't the customs people take an overall packing list and the number of boxes that make up the order (as indicated by a bunch of identical packing lists associated with the same purchase) and just call it a day?
Agreed. But it's not just about "visual satisfaction", it's about proper reporting. I've never heard of a Mold-A-Rama before and had no idea what they were talking about until I did a search. I have seen those plastic toys, though, and I would've understood what they were talking about if they'd bothered to show me some pictures.
Decent digital cameras are so cheap that there's no excuse for not including photos in an online news story. Heck, if the reporter is a desk jockey they can even find an appropriately licensed photo from flickr or one of the stock sites. How hard is that?
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit). Photoshop/GIMP/Silkypix/any other image processor is no different, and represents just an extension of the photography/development process.
There's a huge difference between varying the RAW conversion parameters or applying curve corrections, and cloning in fake smoke. (Or removing people, adding hair, painting in crowds, or any of the similar tricks that Soviet and Chinese photo editors used to do back when "propaganda" actually meant something.) Most dishonest photographers don't have the skill to fake a photo convincingly. The just take staged photos of greiving widows on Hezbollah's guided tours, or, even easier, just lie about when and where the photo was taken.
But, granting your larger point, only the original file is even close to trustworthy. So obviously the easy way to avoid this sort of fraud is for newspapers and wire services to make the original, unretouched files of all their published photos available online to the public. Suspect a photo's been played with? Convert it and take a closer look. Have suspicions about the timing of a series of pictures? Look at the EXIF data in that RAW file and see for yourself. If a news agency really wants a reputation for caring about honesty and accuracy they can give their best PJ's and trusted stringers GPS-equipped cameras that stamp the location in the file, too. (Yes, it is possible to edit EXIF data inside a RAW file, but it isn't easy. And I'm sure the clever folks here could suggest encrypted archive formats that could add yet another layer of tamper-detection.)
This isn't the first time this has happened, not even recently. It's clear that the news editors are themselves too gullible or intellecutualy dishonest to police their own reporters. I can't figure out why at least one of the major wire services or newspapers doesn't don't do this already. They'd immediately be seen as the verifiable and trusted source for accurate news photography. I suspect it's a mixture of technological ignorance and just plain arrogance.
"Internet access at reasonable speeds in Washtenaw county as in many places is provided by the Cable company ($60/month) or the phone company (DSL is $70/month). These outrageous prices hurt everyone."
The key word there that argument is "the", as in the cable company and the phone company. In many places there's only one of each, because the companies were granted monopolies years ago by the local governments. There's no reason for that to continue. The solution to outrageously priced high-speed access is not to spend yet more tax money on setting up and maintaining a wireless network, it's to allow competing phone and cable companies.
Must be us fat ol' Americans gorging ourselves on ice cream and cheese again. Sometimes we just buy a frozen cow to save time. :)
Actually, it's probably because many American families have more kids than their European counterparts. Or they're like me and my wife. Just the two of us, but we buy some things in bulk sizes because it's cheaper. We divvy up the large portions at home into convenient two-person sizes, freeze everything we don't need right away, and then prepare it at our leisure. The store saves on wasteful packaging, and we save money.
This also means that we go to the supermarket once every two weeks, because we have better ways to spend our time (that's particularly important in more rural parts of America, where the nearest supermarket with a nice selection may be a long drive from home; Europeans sometimes don't intuitively grasp how much larger and less densely populated the US is, compared to their own countries.)
The two boxes left at the Archives are still accounted for, so apparently the GSFC is to blame for misplacing the rest of them. They're probably in some half-forgotten storage facility somewhere.
BTW, I hope the folks at the Archives are looking into using RFID tags or something similar. It'd make a lot easier to find boxes when they're inevitably misplaced.
There's no entity in the Constitution known as "the press". The Consitution just talks about the people. And freedom of the press is the freedom of the people to publish things. That included, then and now, both professional reporters and anyone else who wanted to distribute a broadside/ pamphlet/blog/videotape/podcast. The founders were intimiately familiar with the power of self-publishing and knew how important it was to protect it. That also means that the special "above the law" attitude among many professional journalists is seriously mistaken. They have to obey the same laws and exersize the same responsibility as any other average citizen.
But you're right that this case doesn't have anything to do with freedom of the press. If the guy had uploaded the video to YouTube or somewhere, and then was forced to remove it by the police then maybe it would, but that didn't happen.
The excesses you attribute to communisim are no worse than those found in many theocracies.
That's because Communism basically is a religion. A cult, to be more specific. Which is why some people keep making excuses for it and inflicting it on innocent people. All despite decades of practical experience showing that it's one of the most destructive and horrific belief systems ever to spring from the mind of man. It's even worse than National Socialism in some ways, because it lacks the obvious warning signs of spittle-flecked anti-Semitism, and has the glossy veneer of science to lure the gullible into thinking that it's something more than a totalitarian scam.
FWIW, I live in rural Maryland. We have aboveground lines here and we've had similar heavy rain and flooding in nearby areas. Our power hasn't so much as blipped. The UPS hasn't even beeped to signal an under- or over-voltage condition. I'm more worried about brownouts later this summer than storm-related outages.
In fact, it's only gone out, fairly briefly, once or twice in the four years I've lived here. In that same timeframe the underground fiber at work, a few miles away, has been severed twice by construction.
And I have no idea what the OP means by "storms becoming worse and worse". I've lived in the Maryland/DC area all my life, and I remember some pretty hellacious storms, hurricanes, and blizzards over the last 30 years. We haven't had anything nearly as bad lately.
"I don't like The Man tracking my activities, right down to where and when I park"
You're concerned about The Man knowing where you park your registered motor vehicle, license plate clearly visible as required by law, on a public street? As you enter and exit your vehicle in public view. Yep, that's some highly sensitive and privileged information right there.