Oh, I see. He's the friendly sort of chap who only sues companies who decide to actually fight his ridiculous patent. That certainly satisifies me. Clearly Firefox, Safari, and other developers of web apps have absolutely nothing to fear from such a reasonable and upstanding fellow. At least not until he's done with Microsoft.
You're kidding, right? Superman is, in the end, a big goofy boy-scout in blue tights. He's not a sophisticated urban socialite with a dark secret like Bruce Wayne; he's an all-American country boy who does what's right, by golly! You can't get away from the silliness by going nasty and gothic, like you can with the Gotham crowd; Superman will always be a bit camp.
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible to have a character who's idealistic without it being campy. (The "Kingdom Come" graphic novel does a good job of it, just to give one example. The first Superman movie, too.) Most modern campiness is a product of lazy and/or jaded writers who refuse to take any character seriously unless they're made over to be all grim-n-gritty and tortured. It's getting old.
Besides, the "Superman as boy scout" meme and the tension between Batman and Superman is is actually a pretty modern invention. Writers decided to play up the "Batman as brooding loner" characterization and decided Superman would be his opposite number. That's no longer innovative but it works fine if properly handled. As you say, however, those stories are no more definitive than any others in the character's long history. That includes the earlier portrayal of Batman and Superman as personal friends who worked as the "World's Finest" crime fighting team, and also the original 1930's Superman threatening to kill wife-beaters or drop criminals to their deaths.
Nonsense. It's not "America" that's risk-averse. It's NASA, a huge government beauracracy that's gone so far off the rails that they're unlikely ever to be useful again. NASA's operating in an environment where every single thing they do or don't do is endlessly picked apart, so their natural inclination is to do as little as possible and hope no one hits them again.
Most Americans aren't happy with this attitude at all, despite what you might have heard. That's why private individuals like Burt Rutan are bypassing NASA and actually getting stuff done.
(And since you brought it up, Americans, in general, are not risk-averse. If we were, we'd probably have elected Kerry and probably would never had gone to Iraq in the first place. The same misplaced desire for safety with the losses in Iraq, which has gone stunningly well. Better than any war, ever. But you'd never know that based on what you typically see reported.)
That's silly. Seriously, a classroom lecture is not a private or privileged conversation in any way I can see. Except insofar as you choose to extend a courtesy to your instructor, I don't see how they can possibly enforce a ban on recording.
I'm sure there will be resistance, however, until it becomes so ubiquitous as to be unstoppable. In my experience many instructors spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about someone stealing their precious teaching materials.
Ah, but if you can do it cheap enough you can have more probes operating for about the same cost. If we had six disposable rovers on Mars or a new Voyager probe each year then it's not as big a deal when one of them dies.
Of course, there are overhead costs right now that are harder to eliminate. It costs a lot of money to process the data (though I'm not sure it should cost as much as it does). And it's a big deal to put a rover on mars or launch a Voyager 6. But that problem is also, arguably, another manifestation of the same issue. If we could crank out a space probe in a month made from off-the-shelf components and out it into space the next day then it wouldn't be a tragedy if it blew up on the launchpad or malfunctioned en-route.
Making things cheaper and faster is a part of making something routine, and once space exploration becomes routine in practice (instead of just a mistaken perception) then we've made a huge step forward.
Good post, AC. The Russians also accepted long ago that space is dangerous and people are going to die. Of course they prefer to minimize the number of deaths and the loss of expensive equipment, but they don't make an impossible level of safety the primary principle behind their space program. (Especially when it really doesn't end up being all that much safer.)
Which is why NASA is paralyzed for ridiculous lengths of time when anything goes wrong, and why private space programs are likely to make much faster progress. Private companies do all sorts of dangerous stuff all the time, people sometimes die, equipment is lost, and life goes on. It's as safe as it can afford to be given the mission at hand and the demands of competition, and that's usually Good Enough. If you're willing to spend the money from public coffers a millitary space program (as the Soviet-era space program essentially was) would also be pretty efficient.
DDT accumulates in the food chain. The beluga population is severly affected by DDT poisoning to this day even though it has been banned for a very long time.
It's also the most effective (and cost-effective) method of controlling malaria that we've ever discovered, despite decades of research.
And there's little or no evidence that DDT harms people, either from controlled studies or actual experience. The danger of malaria, OTOH, is a real and present danger to many millions of people. We can prove people are dying from lack of DDT. Can you prove the opposite?
I am very sensitive to aspartame, if I absentmindedly accept a sugarless mint or gum from someone, I'll suffer a severe migraine wich renders me totally incapable of doing anything for hours. Safe my ass...
Wow, how convincing. You know, I have exactly the same reaction to chocolate. Seriously. If I eat so much as one Hershey's Kiss I'm sure to get a pounding headache within an hour. Chocolate is clearly a dangerous toxic substance and should be banned immediately. Think of the children.
Food allergies to various natural and artificial substances are pretty common, you know. Or maybe you're phenylketonuric, like it warns about on the aspartame package.
Larry Niven already thought of that one, sort of. In his Known Space short story "Wait it Out", equipment failure leaves two astronauts stranded on Pluto. They're gonna die, so one astronaut decides to take the quick way out and remove his helmet outside, freezing instantly. The second realizes that, hey, someone just might be able to thaw us out alive someday. So he does the same, and is surprised to discover that he's not dead - his flash-frozen brain becomes a superconductor and he regains consciousness after Plutonian sunset.
Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.
In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.
Ok, so in your example we can presumably examine the mecahnical mechanism of the machine and see that there was a problem. I certainly agree that any electronic (or mechanical) system needs to fail in an obvious and trackable way.
But what does that have to do with determining voter intent? How can votes miscast or left uncast due to mechanical error be recovered? How do you know they even exist? You can't do either of those things. It's a bad situation, but many potential solutions are worse than the problem. It may be "noble" to honor the unexpressed and unknowable intent of an unknown voter, but it's also impossible.
That's why the federal election system is designed in part to compensate for inevitable problems like this. Lost and miscast votes are not a new phenomenon. And seen by the multiple independent recounts in Florida (all verifying that Bush did in fact win) the system works even when the margin is very small. Can we do better? Sure, we should always try. But voting machines can't read people's minds.
Many large instititions would rather not know about problems, because the biggest problems require actual effort to fix.
Clear-headed self-examination and constructive criticism are seldom encouraged. Nobody is praised for fixing a problem, because the implication is that the problem was their fault too, or the fault of someone higher up who's disfavor is too risky.
This leads to a management structure that's too concerned with avoiding blame and grabbing credit to rationally assess the results of their efforts. Efforts become unfocused, fixes are driven down to the lowest level where they're least effective, and people who are innovative or proactive are punished or ignored rather than rewarded.
With luck the company sees the problem and changes, or else it dies.
WTF are you talking about? You've managed to pack an amazing about of nonsense into one paragraph.
You've been watching too much Fox news. There are no Saddam loyalists. The freedom fighters are just that - fighting for control of their own country.
And you're burying your head in the sand. There most certainly are Saddam loyalists, leftover remnants of the feyadeen. Most of the attackers are non-Iraqis or disaffected political opportunists who care nothing for the people of Iraq. They just want their dictatorship back and see anyone who stands in their way as a target. The Iraqis know this, which is why thousands of them
rallied in the
streets against the terrorists earlier this month. That's why they're happily helping the new Iraqi police force and the coalition forces to round them up. Because, unlike you, they're observant enough to distinguish friend from foe. And they care more about the future of their country than about useless international posturing.
You can't dismiss as everyone who is anti-US as an Islamic terrorist, because you'd be branding practically the rest of the world as Islamic terrorists.
My, what a nuanced and insightful argument.
No, we're branding islamic terroists as islamic terrorists. And the citizens of Iraq who are living with this have no qualms about calling the people who are killing them "terrorists", so why won't you?
And remember: one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
Apparently your "freedom fighters" are the average Iraqi's terrorist. But hey, I guess they're missing the big picture. When the local Carbombs For Freedom chapter opens in your neighborhood I think you might better understand the actual distinction.
"I won't claim that I know, but judging by the interviews and reporters I've seen from Iraq, many say they are far worse off at this moment."
So, basically you think Iraqis would happily go back to living under Saddam if the gas lines were a little shorter. Oh, and it would be nice if his sons raped only one daughter at a time. We wouldn't do that, of course, but hey, they're just silly brown people, they probably like psychopathic dictators!
Media outlets are most definitely not giving you the whole picture, either out of bias or laziness or simple incompetence. Things are not hell on earth or a quagmire. Read some of the blogs from Iraq. Did you hear about the huge anti-terrorism/pro-democracy rally earlier this month? Did you see the Iraqis dancing in the streets when Saddam was captured? Have you read the angry statements of Iraqis who are tired of having these things ignored because they don't fit the preconcieved assumptions of the reporters? Maybe you should find better news sources.
"For instance, all prisoners were let out of jail when Saddam fell. A political and unfair law system may work better than no law at all..."
Yeah, those people might have been in there for something really serious! Like owning a satellite dish or having relatives with unapproved political views. Some prisoners were released and some of them probably shouldn't have been. But when your former police force was an arm of a government that regularly tortured people and locked up children for parent's offenses you can't trust anything they did.
But in this case, the cylons are now our computers run amok. OK, while I can deal with this change, they never then touched on why they want to kill us? Because we wanted to kill them? Why do they want to kill us now? What does it benefit them? What computational values make them _want_ to expend the resources, et al to go to war with us? They just glanced that one over, and in the end, said, hey, the cylons want to kill us, so there.
Yeah, they could've made that clearer. The Cylon that Adama met seemed to believe that the human race had failed to meet their spiritual potential, and that the Cylons have been chosen by God's as humanity's replacements. It's not clear if the Cylon's "God" is a religious, supernatural deity or another machine intelligence, or even one of their original human inventors.
If I had a disease which could potentially be cured through some kind of research, but someone else wants to prohibit that research on religious grounds, they are as guilty of murder as "christian" "scientist" "parents" who withhold treatment from their sick children (won't someone please think of the children?) for religious reasons.
Not religious grounds, ethical grounds. The two frequently overlap but they're not the same thing.
Many medical problems could be "solved" by allowing experiments of dubious ethical character, but the solution is often worse than the problem. We could inject expectant mothers with known toxins to better understand birth defects. No more expensive and time consuming drug trials - we could just sell untested medicines and see what happens to them and their offspring. We could take healthy donor organs from inmates and the mentally defective. We could dunk people in cold water and see how long it takes for them to die. But we might find a cure, so it's ok, right?
But there are reasons why we don't do those things -- and they have nothing to do with which church you choose to attend.
I don't know how you'd craft such a law to apply to businesses. If I send an unsolicited resume to their HR department, a complaint to their CEO, or a problem report to a tech in IT, would that fall afoul of the spam laws?
I'm not sure I trust US corporations to 'do the right thing' any more than I trust the Chinese government.
Well, then you're not very smart. Show me a US corporation that runs over students with tanks, kills millions of inconvenient surplus citizens with manufactured famines, exersizes draconian population control, and has nuclear weapons. Oh, but China hasn't tried to stop us from downloading free MP3's or playing DVDs on our Linux boxes, so I guess it all balances out.
Digital is NOT the way to learn photography. It encourages you to take way too many pictures,
I've heard that argument before but I still think it's silly. There's no reason to discourage a beginner from taking as many photos as possible of as many things as possible. Digital just takes the pain and tedium out of the process. You can compare the results immediately and see what works and what doesn't. There's no better way to learn than by seeing, and with digital you've got the exposure data, focal length, etc. embedded directly in the photo for reference.
and has way too much error correction built into the systems.
Not if you don't want it. Decent digital SLRs let you shoot in manual mode and turn off all that stuff. Unless you want it.
Go out and shoot one (1) roll of film...
That's all good advice, but you can do all that with a digital SLR in less time and with less inconvenience. Without the expense of film or worry about variations in developing. And you might even learn how to salvage otherwise worthless shots while you're at it.
Re: the digital rebel-- it's ~$1000k, with an 18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on.
Good point. A beginner would be better served using a good, inexpensive lens like the Canon 50mm f1.8. It's not as nice as their lovely f1.4, but at $70 it's a darn good place to start. (The wide-angle zoom is nice to have, too, though, for those shots that you just can't get any other way.)
And the fact that it's so gawd awefully difficult to operate in full-manual (I'm assuming it's no easier than on my elan 7e) means that you'll be sliding into full auto long before you know enough about exposure to understand what you're doing, or catch the computer when it sets a bad expo.
I've never used an elan 7e, but I never had any trouble using manual options on the D30, D60, or my current 10D. Certainly no more than I did with my old AE1-P.
Learn the craft honestly, then go get the best lenses you can afford, and a decent body to hang them on. You'll be taking great shots within a few months.
Yup. However you learn, great photos are what it's all about.
Besides, the billions we're spending now in Iraq had nothing to do with Iraqi lives. The original argument was to protect American lives and everyone else from the weapons of mass destruction Saddam was supposedly ready to unleash.
No. It was always about all of those things, and your "everyone else" included the people who live in Iraq. But actions to stop the mass murder of tens of thousands of people were not backed by UN resolutions, oddly enough. WMDs were, and Saddam was in clear violation of those by the UN's own standards. Not that they really cared much, but at least the issue was open. It's a little like arresting Al Capone on tax evasion charges rather than serial murder, which is exactly what happened.
If we had been serious about those 61,000 lives you mention, we could have saved many more of them for much less money if we had practiced a better policy in the middle east YEARS ago. But we didn't seem too upset about it then.
Er, sure. Give me the keys to your time machine and and I'll go take care of it. Actually, we were pretty upset in 1991, and we did everything we were authorized to do to stop those deaths, and more, from happening. Our misguided adherence to world opinion was responsible for thousands of deaths when the Kurds and Iraqis who thought they'd be rid of Saddam were killed when coalition forces stopped short. If not for the US-enforced no-fly zone and insistence on UN sanctions there'd have been even more death. Better policy sometimes means war sooner rather than later.
Anyone who says billions are better spent on war than on peaceful scientific exploration had better have some amazingly damn good reasons for war.
It's not really an either-or, but survival seems like a good reason. Or freeing countries from homicidal dictatorships so that their citizens can join us in contemplating the wonders of peaceful scientific exploration, instead of worrying about vanishing forever because they watched the Discovery Channel with a forbidden satellite dish.
It's not a pressure from the media elite that says blogs don't belong high ranked in Google, it's users. Blogs are great at telling Google what articles in other publications are most authoritative on a topic, but a "blog" is by definition not one.
Apparently you're operating under a unique definition, or you're visiting the wrong weblogs. The commentary on many good blogs is just as useful as the articles they cite. Sometimes other bloggers write those very same articles.
(Of course, blog software can be used to run an authoritiative site... but that's a different category all together.)
No it isn't. It's just a different style of blog, or a different post on the same blog.
Basicially, the idea of "I'll link to you if you link to me, and we'll both move up in Google!" now does more harm than good.
But that's not what's really happening with blogs, at least not generally. The close interlinking of various sites is inherent in the way blogs work. I link to an article (or another blog) and say something, you comment on your blog and trackback to my post, article elsewhere references both our sites. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I agree that cross-linkage alone shouldn't be enough for that reason for a high page rank all by itself, but penalizing a blog for exhibiting blog-like behavior isn't useful either.
It's even more important than freedom of music. It's our freedom of culture that's at stake.
I Agree. When someone can control the songs your kids can sing around the campfire, or demand payment for singing Happy Birthday without being laughed into silence then things are seriously screwed up.
Our true culture has been stolen from us and replaced with manufactured culture.
Have to disagree there. Culture has always been a combination of grass-roots folk tradition and manufactured content. Great works of classical music, drama, and literature were written, ultimately, to make money, either directly from the populous or via commissions from wealthy private patrons (often business owners). It's only historial myopia that leads us to see today's balance as all that different.
The difference is that those who created those works had no illusion that they had perpetial and unlimited control over their contributions once they became part of the common cuture.
Ok, you're right, I jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and was rude on top of that. I'm sorry.
Some places do pay for building improvements and some don't. And some improvements are traditionally "absorbed" into the building even when a tenant leaves.
But you're right, whatever they do, the building management should be consistent about it. If they recognize the benefit of new carpet and paint and pay for that, then they ought to do the same for IT infrastructure, too.
I still think tearing it out is the wrong way to go, but I can understand why you'd do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see. He's the friendly sort of chap who only sues companies who decide to actually fight his ridiculous patent. That certainly satisifies me. Clearly Firefox, Safari, and other developers of web apps have absolutely nothing to fear from such a reasonable and upstanding fellow. At least not until he's done with Microsoft.
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible to have a character who's idealistic without it being campy. (The "Kingdom Come" graphic novel does a good job of it, just to give one example. The first Superman movie, too.) Most modern campiness is a product of lazy and/or jaded writers who refuse to take any character seriously unless they're made over to be all grim-n-gritty and tortured. It's getting old.
Besides, the "Superman as boy scout" meme and the tension between Batman and Superman is is actually a pretty modern invention. Writers decided to play up the "Batman as brooding loner" characterization and decided Superman would be his opposite number. That's no longer innovative but it works fine if properly handled. As you say, however, those stories are no more definitive than any others in the character's long history. That includes the earlier portrayal of Batman and Superman as personal friends who worked as the "World's Finest" crime fighting team, and also the original 1930's Superman threatening to kill wife-beaters or drop criminals to their deaths.
Nonsense. It's not "America" that's risk-averse. It's NASA, a huge government beauracracy that's gone so far off the rails that they're unlikely ever to be useful again. NASA's operating in an environment where every single thing they do or don't do is endlessly picked apart, so their natural inclination is to do as little as possible and hope no one hits them again.
Most Americans aren't happy with this attitude at all, despite what you might have heard. That's why private individuals like Burt Rutan are bypassing NASA and actually getting stuff done.
(And since you brought it up, Americans, in general, are not risk-averse. If we were, we'd probably have elected Kerry and probably would never had gone to Iraq in the first place. The same misplaced desire for safety with the losses in Iraq, which has gone stunningly well. Better than any war, ever. But you'd never know that based on what you typically see reported.)
That's silly. Seriously, a classroom lecture is not a private or privileged conversation in any way I can see. Except insofar as you choose to extend a courtesy to your instructor, I don't see how they can possibly enforce a ban on recording.
I'm sure there will be resistance, however, until it becomes so ubiquitous as to be unstoppable. In my experience many instructors spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about someone stealing their precious teaching materials.
Ah, but if you can do it cheap enough you can have more probes operating for about the same cost. If we had six disposable rovers on Mars or a new Voyager probe each year then it's not as big a deal when one of them dies.
Of course, there are overhead costs right now that are harder to eliminate. It costs a lot of money to process the data (though I'm not sure it should cost as much as it does). And it's a big deal to put a rover on mars or launch a Voyager 6. But that problem is also, arguably, another manifestation of the same issue. If we could crank out a space probe in a month made from off-the-shelf components and out it into space the next day then it wouldn't be a tragedy if it blew up on the launchpad or malfunctioned en-route.
Making things cheaper and faster is a part of making something routine, and once space exploration becomes routine in practice (instead of just a mistaken perception) then we've made a huge step forward.
Golly, I guess she shouldn't have committed a felony then. Cry me a river.
She could have done much worse. The fact that she didn't doesn't excuse her from what she did.
(And it's "lose", not "loose")
Good post, AC. The Russians also accepted long ago that space is dangerous and people are going to die. Of course they prefer to minimize the number of deaths and the loss of expensive equipment, but they don't make an impossible level of safety the primary principle behind their space program. (Especially when it really doesn't end up being all that much safer.)
Which is why NASA is paralyzed for ridiculous lengths of time when anything goes wrong, and why private space programs are likely to make much faster progress. Private companies do all sorts of dangerous stuff all the time, people sometimes die, equipment is lost, and life goes on. It's as safe as it can afford to be given the mission at hand and the demands of competition, and that's usually Good Enough. If you're willing to spend the money from public coffers a millitary space program (as the Soviet-era space program essentially was) would also be pretty efficient.
DDT accumulates in the food chain. The beluga population is severly affected by DDT poisoning to this day even though it has been banned for a very long time.
It's also the most effective (and cost-effective) method of controlling malaria that we've ever discovered, despite decades of research.
And there's little or no evidence that DDT harms people, either from controlled studies or actual experience. The danger of malaria, OTOH, is a real and present danger to many millions of people. We can prove people are dying from lack of DDT. Can you prove the opposite?
I am very sensitive to aspartame, if I absentmindedly accept a sugarless mint or gum from someone, I'll suffer a severe migraine wich renders me totally incapable of doing anything for hours. Safe my ass...
Wow, how convincing. You know, I have exactly the same reaction to chocolate. Seriously. If I eat so much as one Hershey's Kiss I'm sure to get a pounding headache within an hour. Chocolate is clearly a dangerous toxic substance and should be banned immediately. Think of the children.
Food allergies to various natural and artificial substances are pretty common, you know. Or maybe you're phenylketonuric, like it warns about on the aspartame package.
Larry Niven already thought of that one, sort of. In his Known Space short story "Wait it Out", equipment failure leaves two astronauts stranded on Pluto. They're gonna die, so one astronaut decides to take the quick way out and remove his helmet outside, freezing instantly. The second realizes that, hey, someone just might be able to thaw us out alive someday. So he does the same, and is surprised to discover that he's not dead - his flash-frozen brain becomes a superconductor and he regains consciousness after Plutonian sunset.
Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.
In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.
Ok, so in your example we can presumably examine the mecahnical mechanism of the machine and see that there was a problem. I certainly agree that any electronic (or mechanical) system needs to fail in an obvious and trackable way.
But what does that have to do with determining voter intent? How can votes miscast or left uncast due to mechanical error be recovered? How do you know they even exist? You can't do either of those things. It's a bad situation, but many potential solutions are worse than the problem. It may be "noble" to honor the unexpressed and unknowable intent of an unknown voter, but it's also impossible.
That's why the federal election system is designed in part to compensate for inevitable problems like this. Lost and miscast votes are not a new phenomenon. And seen by the multiple independent recounts in Florida (all verifying that Bush did in fact win) the system works even when the margin is very small. Can we do better? Sure, we should always try. But voting machines can't read people's minds.
Many large instititions would rather not know about problems, because the biggest problems require actual effort to fix.
Clear-headed self-examination and constructive criticism are seldom encouraged. Nobody is praised for fixing a problem, because the implication is that the problem was their fault too, or the fault of someone higher up who's disfavor is too risky.
This leads to a management structure that's too concerned with avoiding blame and grabbing credit to rationally assess the results of their efforts. Efforts become unfocused, fixes are driven down to the lowest level where they're least effective, and people who are innovative or proactive are punished or ignored rather than rewarded.
With luck the company sees the problem and changes, or else it dies.
WTF are you talking about? You've managed to pack an amazing about of nonsense into one paragraph.
You've been watching too much Fox news. There are no Saddam loyalists. The freedom fighters are just that - fighting for control of their own country.
And you're burying your head in the sand. There most certainly are Saddam loyalists, leftover remnants of the feyadeen. Most of the attackers are non-Iraqis or disaffected political opportunists who care nothing for the people of Iraq. They just want their dictatorship back and see anyone who stands in their way as a target.
The Iraqis know this, which is why thousands of them
rallied in the
streets against the terrorists earlier this month. That's why they're happily helping the new Iraqi police force and the coalition forces to round them up. Because, unlike you, they're observant enough to distinguish friend from foe. And they care more about the future of their country than about useless international posturing.
You can't dismiss as everyone who is anti-US as an Islamic terrorist, because you'd be branding practically the rest of the world as Islamic terrorists.
My, what a nuanced and insightful argument.
No, we're branding islamic terroists as islamic terrorists. And the citizens of Iraq who are living with this have no qualms about calling the people who are killing them "terrorists", so why won't you?
And remember: one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
Apparently your "freedom fighters" are the average Iraqi's terrorist. But hey, I guess they're missing the big picture. When the local Carbombs For Freedom chapter opens in your neighborhood I think you might better understand the actual distinction.
"I won't claim that I know, but judging by the interviews and reporters I've seen from Iraq, many say they are far worse off at this moment."
So, basically you think Iraqis would happily go back to living under Saddam if the gas lines were a little shorter. Oh, and it would be nice if his sons raped only one daughter at a time. We wouldn't do that, of course, but hey, they're just silly brown people, they probably like psychopathic dictators!
Media outlets are most definitely not giving you the whole picture, either out of bias or laziness or simple incompetence. Things are not hell on earth or a quagmire. Read some of the blogs from Iraq. Did you hear about the huge anti-terrorism/pro-democracy rally earlier this month? Did you see the Iraqis dancing in the streets when Saddam was captured? Have you read the angry statements of Iraqis who are tired of having these things ignored because they don't fit the preconcieved assumptions of the reporters? Maybe you should find better news sources.
"For instance, all prisoners were let out of jail when Saddam fell. A political and unfair law system may work better than no law at all..."
Yeah, those people might have been in there for something really serious! Like owning a satellite dish or having relatives with unapproved political views. Some prisoners were released and some of them probably shouldn't have been. But when your former police force was an arm of a government that regularly tortured people and locked up children for parent's offenses you can't trust anything they did.
He probably just has cataracts. Seriously.
But in this case, the cylons are now our computers run amok. OK, while I can deal with this change, they never then touched on why they want to kill us? Because we wanted to kill them? Why do they want to kill us now? What does it benefit them? What computational values make them _want_ to expend the resources, et al to go to war with us? They just glanced that one over, and in the end, said, hey, the cylons want to kill us, so there.
Yeah, they could've made that clearer. The Cylon that Adama met seemed to believe that the human race had failed to meet their spiritual potential, and that the Cylons have been chosen by God's as humanity's replacements. It's not clear if the Cylon's "God" is a religious, supernatural deity or another machine intelligence, or even one of their original human inventors.
If I had a disease which could potentially be cured through some kind of research, but someone else wants to prohibit that research on religious grounds, they are as guilty of murder as "christian" "scientist" "parents" who withhold treatment from their sick children (won't someone please think of the children?) for religious reasons.
Not religious grounds, ethical grounds. The two frequently overlap but they're not the same thing.
Many medical problems could be "solved" by allowing experiments of dubious ethical character, but the solution is often worse than the problem. We could inject expectant mothers with known toxins to better understand birth defects. No more expensive and time consuming drug trials - we could just sell untested medicines and see what happens to them and their offspring. We could take healthy donor organs from inmates and the mentally defective. We could dunk people in cold water and see how long it takes for them to die. But we might find a cure, so it's ok, right?
But there are reasons why we don't do those things -- and they have nothing to do with which church you choose to attend.
I don't know how you'd craft such a law to apply to businesses. If I send an unsolicited resume to their HR department, a complaint to their CEO, or a problem report to a tech in IT, would that fall afoul of the spam laws?
I'm not sure I trust US corporations to 'do the right thing' any more than I trust the Chinese government.
Well, then you're not very smart. Show me a US corporation that runs over students with tanks, kills millions of inconvenient surplus citizens with manufactured famines, exersizes draconian population control, and has nuclear weapons. Oh, but China hasn't tried to stop us from downloading free MP3's or playing DVDs on our Linux boxes, so I guess it all balances out.
Digital is NOT the way to learn photography. It encourages you to take way too many pictures,
I've heard that argument before but I still think it's silly. There's no reason to discourage a beginner from taking as many photos as possible of as many things as possible. Digital just takes the pain and tedium out of the process. You can compare the results immediately and see what works and what doesn't. There's no better way to learn than by seeing, and with digital you've got the exposure data, focal length, etc. embedded directly in the photo for reference.
and has way too much error correction built into the systems.
Not if you don't want it. Decent digital SLRs let you shoot in manual mode and turn off all that stuff. Unless you want it.
Go out and shoot one (1) roll of film...
That's all good advice, but you can do all that with a digital SLR in less time and with less inconvenience. Without the expense of film or worry about variations in developing. And you might even learn how to salvage otherwise worthless shots while you're at it.
Re: the digital rebel-- it's ~$1000k, with an 18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on.
Good point. A beginner would be better served using a good, inexpensive lens like the Canon 50mm f1.8. It's not as nice as their lovely f1.4, but at $70 it's a darn good place to start. (The wide-angle zoom is nice to have, too, though, for those shots that you just can't get any other way.)
And the fact that it's so gawd awefully difficult to operate in full-manual (I'm assuming it's no easier than on my elan 7e) means that you'll be sliding into full auto long before you know enough about exposure to understand what you're doing, or catch the computer when it sets a bad expo.
I've never used an elan 7e, but I never had any trouble using manual options on the D30, D60, or my current 10D. Certainly no more than I did with my old AE1-P.
Learn the craft honestly, then go get the best lenses you can afford, and a decent body to hang them on. You'll be taking great shots within a few months.
Yup. However you learn, great photos are what it's all about.
Besides, the billions we're spending now in Iraq had nothing to do with Iraqi lives. The original argument was to protect American lives and everyone else from the weapons of mass destruction Saddam was supposedly ready to unleash.
No. It was always about all of those things, and your "everyone else" included the people who live in Iraq. But actions to stop the mass murder of tens of thousands of people were not backed by UN resolutions, oddly enough. WMDs were, and Saddam was in clear violation of those by the UN's own standards. Not that they really cared much, but at least the issue was open. It's a little like arresting Al Capone on tax evasion charges rather than serial murder, which is exactly what happened.
If we had been serious about those 61,000 lives you mention, we could have saved many more of them for much less money if we had practiced a better policy in the middle east YEARS ago. But we didn't seem too upset about it then.
Er, sure. Give me the keys to your time machine and and I'll go take care of it. Actually, we were pretty upset in 1991, and we did everything we were authorized to do to stop those deaths, and more, from happening. Our misguided adherence to world opinion was responsible for thousands of deaths when the Kurds and Iraqis who thought they'd be rid of Saddam were killed when coalition forces stopped short. If not for the US-enforced no-fly zone and insistence on UN sanctions there'd have been even more death. Better policy sometimes means war sooner rather than later.
Anyone who says billions are better spent on war than on peaceful scientific exploration had better have some amazingly damn good reasons for war.
It's not really an either-or, but survival seems like a good reason. Or freeing countries from homicidal dictatorships so that their citizens can join us in contemplating the wonders of peaceful scientific exploration, instead of worrying about vanishing forever because they watched the Discovery Channel with a forbidden satellite dish.
The author should stop griping about the difficulties of playing DVD's, because the MPAA has not allowed linux users a free, legal way to play dvd's.
Yep, that's a problem. But it's not my problem.
The typical user doesn't give a damn about why it doesn't work, only that it doesn't. The only way to compete is to stop making excuses and fix it.
Which of your competitors are doing these things? I'd prefer to not do any business with them.
It's not a pressure from the media elite that says blogs don't belong high ranked in Google, it's users. Blogs are great at telling Google what articles in other publications are most authoritative on a topic, but a "blog" is by definition not one.
Apparently you're operating under a unique definition, or you're visiting the wrong weblogs. The commentary on many good blogs is just as useful as the articles they cite. Sometimes other bloggers write those very same articles.
(Of course, blog software can be used to run an authoritiative site... but that's a different category all together.)
No it isn't. It's just a different style of blog, or a different post on the same blog.
Basicially, the idea of "I'll link to you if you link to me, and we'll both move up in Google!" now does more harm than good.
But that's not what's really happening with blogs, at least not generally. The close interlinking of various sites is inherent in the way blogs work. I link to an article (or another blog) and say something, you comment on your blog and trackback to my post, article elsewhere references both our sites. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I agree that cross-linkage alone shouldn't be enough for that reason for a high page rank all by itself, but penalizing a blog for exhibiting blog-like behavior isn't useful either.
It's even more important than freedom of music. It's our freedom of culture that's at stake.
I Agree. When someone can control the songs your kids can sing around the campfire, or demand payment for singing Happy Birthday without being laughed into silence then things are seriously screwed up.
Our true culture has been stolen from us and replaced with manufactured culture.
Have to disagree there. Culture has always been a combination of grass-roots folk tradition and manufactured content. Great works of classical music, drama, and literature were written, ultimately, to make money, either directly from the populous or via commissions from wealthy private patrons (often business owners). It's only historial myopia that leads us to see today's balance as all that different.
The difference is that those who created those works had no illusion that they had perpetial and unlimited control over their contributions once they became part of the common cuture.
Ok, you're right, I jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and was rude on top of that. I'm sorry.
Some places do pay for building improvements and some don't. And some improvements are traditionally "absorbed" into the building even when a tenant leaves.
But you're right, whatever they do, the building management should be consistent about it. If they recognize the benefit of new carpet and paint and pay for that, then they ought to do the same for IT infrastructure, too.
I still think tearing it out is the wrong way to go, but I can understand why you'd do it.