Re:They're not talking about used ads.
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Recycling TV Ads
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At the end of all this, there are hundreds of commercials that are brilliantly done and well-produced - that you've never, ever seen. Many are probably edgier and more interesting than anything you've ever seen as a television ad.
No offense intended, but I think that's the biggest problem with advertising today. Everyone's more focused on the execution ("edgy") than on the product that you're supposed to be selling. You can do both, but most commercials don't--and commercials that can be trivially recycled for a completely different company clearly aren't saying much about the product.
That's why people marvel at that catchy song or that hot chick in the commercial but can't for the life of them remember what the commercial was supposed to sell.
There was no cabling from our suite to the phone room. We had to install about 250 feet of plenum-rated phone wiring.
Wow, that sucks. Wonder why they didn't have any cable installed?
What did we do? Sawed it off at the entrance to our suite. Why? Because the building management wouldn't either compensate us for the price of installing the cable nor allow us to remove it. We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw.
Golly, do you think that the previous tenant might have done the same thing?
Sorry, but that sort of scorched earth infrastructure policy is just stupid. Unless you were you actually planning on taking the cables with you to your next location and re-using them you should just leave them alone for the next person.
If you put down new carpet or painted the walls, would your rip it all out and trash the place when you left, just out of spite?
Not working? Seems to be working pretty well. Al Queda has been reduced from staging elaborate and symbolically powerful hijacking schemes on Americans to random car bomb attacks against their muslim neighbors. In doing so they've been forced to abandon any pretense of historical or ideological justification and reveal themselves as the power-crazed murdering thugs they've always been.
Many high-ranking members are dead or in custody. Even the UN's assessment agrees that their international command structure is in complete shambles. The point isn't how much it costs them to do things, it's whether they have the organizational capacity to carry out their plans. Asking them to pretty please with sugar on top stop killing people would have been cheaper, but I don't think it would have worked nearly as well.
I don't mean to belabor the point, but neither of those statements are actual quotes from anyone at Microsoft. They're paraphrases with an unknown amount of spin, all amplified by the usual Slashdot open-source-rulez echo chamber.
If an MS employee actually said "We think open source is dead! Pushing up dasies! Gone and joined the Choir Celestial!" then why didn't they print that quote? All the published MS quotes about Linux and open source are surprisingly positive. If anyone's inserting FUD here it's not MS, it's the author.
A loss leader is a particular product or service sold at a loss in order to bring other benefits, either in the short or long term. It doesn't require that a whole company go into debt. Usually the goal is to strengthen a position in a competitive market and/or attract people to your other services and products that actually turn a profit. Seems Apple's doing both of those things.
How much money did these 'Baathist' actually borrow since the second gulf war? (You do know of course that 'operation desert storm' was in fact the second major war in not much more then a decade, or did the years of the war with Iran slip your mind?) The country was devasted even before it invaded Kuwait, but not because those nasty Baathists put all money in their own pocket, but rather because they put most of it in a few wars and the rest in their own pocket. Of course, now it suits you better to forget about that earlier war where America and rest of the west were entierly on those nasty baathists side.
No, I didn't forget about it, but it's not really relevant. The point is that contrary to the original poster's assertions, the US is not responsible for everything bad in Iraq. Despite the potential for tremendous wealth the country was a horrible mess long before the current war. As for the war between Iraq and Iran, it was a choice of two evils, as the real world often is. And, at the time, Iraq was slightly less horrible than Iran.
What do mosques have to do with Baathists? Or did you just tuck that in to ride on the 'nasty muslims' feeling?
Yes, I'm sure that must be it. Witness my spittle-flecked invective and wild-eyed mania. It doesn't matter if they were huge elaborate mosques or a chain of huge elaborate Saddam & Sons Fish & Chips eateries. The point is that Hussein government, controlled by the Baath party, did, in fact, siphone off huge amounts of humanitarian aid money not to reconstruct their war-torn coutry but instead to build huge, elaborate, and self-aggrandizing structures.
Aid in the form of a very strict embargo you mean? Or maybe you mean the weekly bombing of all sorts of infrastructure probably?
Yes, aid in the form of a UN-administered trade sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War and never repealed because Hussein never met the terms of the original cease-fire. During which sanctions most of the aforementioned structures were built. The damaged infrastructure was apparently not a priority.
You mean the millitary overflights in the no-fly zone? Of course, the no-fly zone existed to prevent Hussein from implementing his own unqiue brand of urban renewal, which consisted of digging lots of deep holes and filling them up with Kurds.
Very much not. Most of that money is to be spent on your own troops and private contractors.
Yes, the money goes to support the millitary, who are actively rebuilding, training, and preventing the country from sliding back into despotism, and contractors, who will also be rebuilding.
If you hadn't invade there wouldn't have been a need for those bilions.
Ok. If we hadn't invaded then the Husseins would still be in power, doing all the same things he's been doing. The sanctions would still be in effect. The infrastruture would still be broken. Political dissidents would still be dying in torture chambers. And the people of Iraq would be better off...how, exactly? Odd that they don't share your contentment for the former status quo.
And there wouldn't have been a need for as much reconstruction in the first place. (Still, admittedly, a lot of infrastructure was already gone before your last war, as I mentioned above.)
What the first sentence giveth, the second sentence taketh away.
You haven't kept up with the news latey, have you? Your Karzai fellow isn't too popular outside of Kabul it seems. Ah, but it's the UNs fault, of course. Good thing they aren't messing things up for you in Baghdad then, I guess.
Damn straight.
Very informed indeed, when you confuse fundamentalist islamists with Iraqi Baathists. Of course they are all 'terrorists' now, so what more does one need to know?
I'm not confusing anything. They're just two flavors of the same poison. Iraq proudly sponsored suicide bombings, and there have already been suicide attacks in Iraq. If the "secular
Listen to the trucker who posted - signal is blocked all the time so drivers can get enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep means you're more dangerous on the road. Thousands of rigs driven by sleepy drivers is going to kill and injure more people than a 1% chance of terrorists crashing a gas truck.
Ok, I have to admit that I don't quite understand this. Why do the truckers have to block the transponder signal to get some sleep? Is there another solution (turn down the volume?) that doesn't require screwing with the system and pretending to make their trucks disappear for eight hours? If not, then I think the trucking companies and the truckers now have a mutual problem to be fix.
It's obviously in everyone's best interest to have well rested truck drivers. It's obviously in everyone's best interest to make hijacking hazardous materials more difficult. If something is preventing those two good things from getting along then it seems like we've got a bug, not a feature.
But if the satellite signal is blocked and stays blocked for a long time, then that would be an indication that something strange is going on. Especially if there were also other indications that the truck is off its planned route. If deliberately blocking the signal were prohibited then long, overnight outages would become exceptions that could be checked.
You're right that if the signal were blocked then there'd be no remote shutdown, but at least someone would have a chance to investigate and potentially stop something bad from happening. Even if that only meant asking local police to stop and advise if located.
This isn't intended to be a complete solution to the problem of hijacking tanker trucks. It's just another data point that can be used to better track the movements of potentially dangerous materials and offer an option in certain circumstances. It seems like a good idea for lots of reasons, even without the threat of terrorists.
Then you are not following what is happening. Iraq had borrowed heavily to build new infrastructure which was destroyed in the war.
No, it's utterly obvious that the large sums of money borrowed by the Baathist government for public infrastructure improvements was not actually used for that purpose. The electrical distribution network, for example, was using 1950's technology, and outside of Baghdad there was no power for much of the day. The water purification plants and sewage plants were in a state of terrible neglect. Even the earmarked oil-for-food money was diverted, thanks to the incompetently lax management of the UN. Look at the huge palaces and mosques. The only improvements made were those that contributed to directly the glorification and comfort of the ruling officials, especially Hussein himself.
They are now expected to use the oil revenue to rebuild what was destroyed in the war. America decides who gets the contracts to rebuild and awards the contracts to American companies that submit closed bids. The oil flows again and America gets the money. Iraq has to pay yet again for infrastructure that it still has to pay for the first building of. And America wonders why the Arabs hate them ?
See above. Much of the infrastructure that hadn't already fallen apart due to deliberate neglect was damaged in the Gulf War of 1991, when Hussein invaded Kuwait. (Remember that?) It was not rebuilt, despite claims to the contrary by the Hussein government and despite aid given them for that purpose.
As for American companies getting the many of the contracts, yeah, so what? You may have noticed that we're also paying $87 billion for the reconstruction. The recent "study" which attempted to coorelate campaign contributions to contracts is so flawed as to be completely bogus. And the UN has turned tail and run, clearly showing how interested they really are in long term results.
Forget Palestine, just follow what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What's happening in Afganistan? We dealt one of the world's major terrorist operations a critical if not fatal blow. We've freed the people who live there from a regime that killed people for such horrible transgressions as being a female teacher, and kept those same people from reasserting control. And then, unfortunately, we turned over reconstruction to the UN, which has spent most of the time since shuffling paper and contemplating their navels instead of fixing things.
What's happening in Iraq? We're rebuilding infrastructure that's been broken for decades, often using the huge piles of cash that the Baathists had hidden for their own use. We're establishing a police force that's not controlled by a sadistic madman and his sons. We're rebuilding hospitals and given them modern equipment. We're opening schools where the students aren't required to sing songs praising said dictator or arrested and taken from their parents for criticism of the government. For the first time in memory, Iraqi's are allowed demonstrations, private newspapers, and free speech. There are people who don't want these things to happen, including the ones that style themselves as martyrs and kill civillians to encourage a return to the good old days when all these things were illegal and the people knew their place. Right under their heels, of course.
Do not forget that the rest of us get hurt in the revenge attacks that American actions create... I am fed up with terrorism and am therefore against this American war on Terrorism and the terrorism that it creates. I think that it is time the rest of the world started a war on terrorism and stopped the US stupidities.
Er, yes, because there was no terrorism before bad ol' America got involved. Just like there were no Nazis before Churchill got all worked up over that silly Poland thing and ruined peace in our time.
If we were all just nice to the terrorists and left them alone, why then they wouldn't have to hijack planes and
Hardware hacking concerns don't prevent the sale of radios, and software hacking concerns shouldn't prevent the sale of radio drivers.
Actually, hardware hacking concerns do prevent the sale of radios. A decade ago many scanner radios (basically programmable wideband recievers) were pulled off the market because they could be easily modified to recieve cellular phone conversations. The radios were redesigned to prevent access to those bands (or make the modifications prohibitively difficult.)
How delightfully manipulative of them. Just because the Nazis had some really nasty and horrible idiology doesn't mean that EVERYTHING they did was bad. They did not stop making regular decisions because it wasn't evil enough.
As Perry Mason might say, it goes to motive and opportunity. Did the National Socialist Party enact gun control because they were terribly concerned about innocent German citizens being killed, or because it was more convenient to have an unarmed populace? Were the results of that particular legislation positive or negative?
You may take for granted that everyone who favors gun control legislation has the purest of motives, and it may be so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else must agree with your assumptions.
If somebody is using new software, they need to accept that they are using new software, and not insist that it behave in exactly the same way, shape, form that their old software did.
People don't need to accept anything. The developers need to accept that other people got there before them and established certain conventions and expectations that need to be met.
If they want IE they need to use IE.
And if you disregard their expectations that's just what they'll continue to do. Is that what you want?
As a final note, the hospital is already liable, because the woman sent patient records to the hospital via email. Unless the email was encrypted and only opened by the doctors giving care to the patients in record, then the hospital is liable.
How do you figure that? It's not like the doctor is a one-man hospital. Other trusted parties are routinely given access to medical records. Medical transcriptionists, secretaries, nurses, clerks, supervisors, etc.
US cell systems are not as good as GSM (which allows for lots of things), along with bureaucracy and software patents...
It's not that simple. GSM is less complex, but CDMA is in many ways far more flexible and robust than GSM. GSM also runs into serious problems in areas of low population density, like much of the United States and unlike most of Europe.
Two articles about the relative merits of the two systems, both by people who know a lot more about cellular phones than most of us:
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G. sh tml
http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com/2002_10_06_m ic haeljennings_archive.html#82598395
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations.
Er, so all people everywhere lived exactly the same way for thousands of generations? Not hardly.
So were they satisfied? Got me, I don't have your time machine, so I can't go ask them. But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alternative. Would you?
Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...
No, we're not "working against millions of years of evolution". We're fulfilling it. The same genetic code that gives humans the unprecidented intelligence and adapatibility to survive also hardwires the desire to do it better.
Subsistence farmers got tired of being hunter-gatherers. They figured out the advantages of living together in towns and cities, working together instead of living in mutual fear. And somewhere along the way, someone realized that pounding grain into flour all day with a rock was a stupid waste of their time, so they built a machine to do it for them. And a couple thousand years later, someone came to the same conclusion about walking all day long to get anywhere, and they did the same thing. The rest, as they say, is history.
You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before.
Oh, nothing urgent at all, I'm sure. "Well, our daughters were raped and killed by the tribe over the hill, and our crops failed, and our life expectancy is about 40 years, and everyone we know is dying covered with weeping pustules, and none of us are allowed to read or write. But thank God we aren't forced to sit in traffic jams and contemplate the state of our inboxes."
But hey, I'm not GROUNDED like they were, so what do I know?
But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes.
Speak for yourself. We've never had it so good.
And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)
No, the point is that this is normal. The way it's always been. Today's pace only seems faster and less manageable to some because they're alive now and experiencing it, rather than romanticizing the past. Stop imagining that happy time when everyone was "satisfied", before all this evil ol' civilzation and technology came along and screwed stuff up. It never existed, and, short of St Peter's Pearly Gates, it never will.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website.
I think that's true, but it's changing. Many private weblogs do a better and more evenhanded job of reporting the news than professional media outlets do. And a good blog author is certainly more responsive to reader interests and more likely to correct their mistakes.
Most local papers in smaller markets just aren't very good, and their web sites are generally even worse. I think that within a year or so local bloggers (perhaps even the better reporters who work for the papers) with an interest in covering this stuff will reach the same level of prominence and usefulness as their national counterparts already have. In some places this will take longer than others, but I think it's going to happen.
FACT: Microsoft is a private company that is expected to obey the child protection laws of the countries in which they operate.
Morally speaking, parents are, of course, ultimately responsible for the welfare of their children. But that doesn't mean that a child in a public place is not protected by the law.
If a child is dragged from their mother's arms while walking down a city sidewalk we don't dismiss the issue by telling the mother that, oh well, I guess she should have held on just a bit tighter.
You forgot: 5. Repeat for turning off: auto capitalization, autocomplete, automatic help; changing fonts, margins, etc, etc... which really was the whole point of the article.. Sure once you know how you can figure out how to do all these things, but unless you are an expert with Word it'll take a bit of time per feature, which adds up to a lot of time, which you'd probably rather be spending writing, because that's why you have the software in the first place.
The post to whom I responded didn't mention any of those other features. How do we know that the user they're helping doesn't want them? I despise auto-formatting, for example, but I have a nasty tendency to transpose letters in certain words, so the autocorrection feature can be helpful.
It doesn't take that long to configure those options. All the "Auto" options are under one place, after all. And you only have to do it once to set it the way you want it. The settings are per-user, too, for shared machines.
Or in other words, good documentation is not a substitute for sensible program design
I certainly agree with you there. Far too many programs use "RTFM" as a crutch for a bad interface. That said, I don't think Word's interface is all that bad. Even the much-maligned Office Assistant can be helpful for beginners. But a more consistent presentation and a simplified set of options might help get new users started without inconveniencing those who know exactly what settings they want.
These damned features are *hard* for normal people to turn off. You may think that it's easy as a seasoned computer user. Just yesterday a friend of mine called me on my cell, just to ask how she could turn off automatic spell checking in Word. She is not dumb at all, but for her this was a task that she could not do alone.
Let's see...
1. Bring up Help. 2. Type "turn off automatic spell checking". 3. Read the first item, "Turn on or off automatic spelling and grammar checking" 4. Select the stated menu option and checkbox
Yes, clearly this is an insurmountable task not to be attempted without a trained professional. And you should also wear safety goggles.
Never say that people are stupid because they don't know how to use computers. Otherwhise we are stupid for not being able to write reports at insane speeds.
I never say that anyone is stupid because they don't understand an application. Disinterested or lazy, at worst, but never stupid.
It that particular case I can only assume that it was easier for your friend to call you up and gripe than to take three minutes and look up the answer themselves. But changing the program you give them won't help that problem, it'll just change the sorts of questions you're asked. ("How do I make this vi thing do automatic spell checking?")
Therefore it would seem to me to be reasonable to state that greenhouse gasses seem a likely cause and take action to reduce them while simultaneously doing more research on the subject to figure out what the cause is for sure.
And despite what some might have you believe we are making strides to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions. But changes like that aren't without consequences and can't be undertaken lightly. It's easy for you and I to make demands, but what will it take to make them happen, and who might be hurt in the process?
Reducing carbon emissions in the developing world, for example, may mean that widespread, cheap electricity and cheap refrigeration aren't practical, which means continued deaths from a whole host of problems that we don't even think about. It may mean that whole towns are put out of work for no good reason. Those are the broader issues that responsible public officials have to consider, not leaping on "just in case" possibilities. There are always unintended consequences.
Onscreen keypads/keyboards don't work well for that sort of thing. Too easy to enter keys by accident, and too difficult to use without looking at the keypad. Small touch screens really only work well for things that use a stylus, like handwriting recognition, and that requires two hands.
How much wil it cost? A lot. Who will pay? Why not save far more than half of the money and only send machines for the next 30 years? What is this corny, backwards obsession with wanting to have an actual flesh-and-bones human up there?
You're absolutely right. Instead of going on vacation this year, just sit at your desk and watch this videotape of the beach. When you're done, you can read this book about scuba diving. It's even better than being there!
Damn straight it'll cost a lot. So what? So does everything else. Add up the development costs from the first transistor to the computer sitting on my desk and you'd get a staggering sum. Get NASA out of the way, get rid of the expectation that that space is the exclusive domain of governments, and let private industry actually do something on their own. Any project's more expensive when you're hauling around a massive beauracracy behind you.
Manned space flight is not practical, it only gets in the way. It prevents rather than promotes space exploration.
Nothing's practical until after it's done often enough to make it practical. Space exploration isn't even the point. It's just a required prerequisite to actually doing something based on what you find. Most useful things involve humans: intelligent activities conducted in real-time, setting up colonies, and terraforming.
I suppose we could wait until some arbitrary date in the future to figure out how to get people to the places we've sent the probes, but since it's an inevitable development we might as well work it out now.
Plus, until very recently the.edu TLD was arbitrarily restricted to only certain educational institutions, forcing many others to register domains under other TLDs.
But can you please explain why it's such a big worry?
I can understand the desire for privacy, but certain information can't reasonably be regarded as private. Your name is not private. Your email and mailing addresses are not private. The fact that you've decided to register a domain name is not something you can reasonably regard as a "secret". So why would you worry about that information being available? I don't get it.
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At the end of all this, there are hundreds of commercials that are brilliantly done and well-produced - that you've never, ever seen. Many are probably edgier and more interesting than anything you've ever seen as a television ad.
No offense intended, but I think that's the biggest problem with advertising today. Everyone's more focused on the execution ("edgy") than on the product that you're supposed to be selling. You can do both, but most commercials don't--and commercials that can be trivially recycled for a completely different company clearly aren't saying much about the product.
That's why people marvel at that catchy song or that hot chick in the commercial but can't for the life of them remember what the commercial was supposed to sell.
There was no cabling from our suite to the phone room. We had to install about 250 feet of plenum-rated phone wiring.
Wow, that sucks. Wonder why they didn't have any cable installed?
What did we do? Sawed it off at the entrance to our suite. Why? Because the building management wouldn't either compensate us for the price of installing the cable nor allow us to remove it. We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw.
Golly, do you think that the previous tenant might have done the same thing?
Sorry, but that sort of scorched earth infrastructure policy is just stupid. Unless you were you actually planning on taking the cables with you to your next location and re-using them you should just leave them alone for the next person.
If you put down new carpet or painted the walls, would your rip it all out and trash the place when you left, just out of spite?
Not working? Seems to be working pretty well. Al Queda has been reduced from staging elaborate and symbolically powerful hijacking schemes on Americans to random car bomb attacks against their muslim neighbors. In doing so they've been forced to abandon any pretense of historical or ideological justification and reveal themselves as the power-crazed murdering thugs they've always been.
Many high-ranking members are dead or in custody. Even the UN's assessment agrees that their international command structure is in complete shambles. The point isn't how much it costs them to do things, it's whether they have the organizational capacity to carry out their plans. Asking them to pretty please with sugar on top stop killing people would have been cheaper, but I don't think it would have worked nearly as well.
I don't mean to belabor the point, but neither of those statements are actual quotes from anyone at Microsoft. They're paraphrases with an unknown amount of spin, all amplified by the usual Slashdot open-source-rulez echo chamber.
If an MS employee actually said "We think open source is dead! Pushing up dasies! Gone and joined the Choir Celestial!" then why didn't they print that quote? All the published MS quotes about Linux and open source are surprisingly positive. If anyone's inserting FUD here it's not MS, it's the author.
A loss leader is a particular product or service sold at a loss in order to bring other benefits, either in the short or long term. It doesn't require that a whole company go into debt. Usually the goal is to strengthen a position in a competitive market and/or attract people to your other services and products that actually turn a profit. Seems Apple's doing both of those things.
How much money did these 'Baathist' actually borrow since the second gulf war? (You do know of course that 'operation desert storm' was in fact the second major war in not much more then a decade, or did the years of the war with Iran slip your mind?) The country was devasted even before it invaded Kuwait, but not because those nasty Baathists put all money in their own pocket, but rather because they put most of it in a few wars and the rest in their own pocket. Of course, now it suits you better to forget about that earlier war where America and rest of the west were entierly on those nasty baathists side.
No, I didn't forget about it, but it's not really relevant. The point is that contrary to the original poster's assertions, the US is not responsible for everything bad in Iraq. Despite the potential for tremendous wealth the country was a horrible mess long before the current war. As for the war between Iraq and Iran, it was a choice of two evils, as the real world often is. And, at the time, Iraq was slightly less horrible than Iran.
What do mosques have to do with Baathists? Or did you just tuck that in to ride on the 'nasty muslims' feeling?
Yes, I'm sure that must be it. Witness my spittle-flecked invective and wild-eyed mania.
It doesn't matter if they were huge elaborate mosques or a chain of huge elaborate Saddam & Sons Fish & Chips eateries. The point is that Hussein government, controlled by the Baath party, did, in fact, siphone off huge amounts of humanitarian aid money not to reconstruct their war-torn coutry but instead to build huge, elaborate, and self-aggrandizing structures.
Aid in the form of a very strict embargo you mean? Or maybe you mean the weekly bombing of all sorts of infrastructure probably?
Yes, aid in the form of a UN-administered trade sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War and never repealed because Hussein never met the terms of the original cease-fire. During which sanctions most of the aforementioned structures were built. The damaged infrastructure was apparently not a priority.
You mean the millitary overflights in the no-fly zone? Of course, the no-fly zone existed to prevent Hussein from implementing his own unqiue brand of urban renewal, which consisted of digging lots of deep holes and filling them up with Kurds.
Very much not. Most of that money is to be spent on your own troops and private contractors.
Yes, the money goes to support the millitary, who are actively rebuilding, training, and preventing the country from sliding back into despotism, and contractors, who will also be rebuilding.
If you hadn't invade there wouldn't have been a need for those bilions.
Ok. If we hadn't invaded then the Husseins would still be in power, doing all the same things he's been doing. The sanctions would still be in effect. The infrastruture would still be broken. Political dissidents would still be dying in torture chambers. And the people of Iraq would be better off...how, exactly? Odd that they don't share your contentment for the former status quo.
And there wouldn't have been a need for as much reconstruction in the first place. (Still, admittedly, a lot of infrastructure was already gone before your last war, as I mentioned above.)
What the first sentence giveth, the second sentence taketh away.
You haven't kept up with the news latey, have you? Your Karzai fellow isn't too popular outside of Kabul it seems. Ah, but it's the UNs fault, of course. Good thing they aren't messing things up for you in Baghdad then, I guess.
Damn straight.
Very informed indeed, when you confuse fundamentalist islamists with Iraqi Baathists. Of course they are all 'terrorists' now, so what more does one need to know?
I'm not confusing anything. They're just two flavors of the same poison. Iraq proudly sponsored suicide bombings, and there have already been suicide attacks in Iraq. If the "secular
Listen to the trucker who posted - signal is blocked all the time so drivers can get enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep means you're more dangerous on the road. Thousands of rigs driven by sleepy drivers is going to kill and injure more people than a 1% chance of terrorists crashing a gas truck.
Ok, I have to admit that I don't quite understand this. Why do the truckers have to block the transponder signal to get some sleep? Is there another solution (turn down the volume?) that doesn't require screwing with the system and pretending to make their trucks disappear for eight hours? If not, then I think the trucking companies and the truckers now have a mutual problem to be fix.
It's obviously in everyone's best interest to have well rested truck drivers. It's obviously in everyone's best interest to make hijacking hazardous materials more difficult. If something is preventing those two good things from getting along then it seems like we've got a bug, not a feature.
But if the satellite signal is blocked and stays blocked for a long time, then that would be an indication that something strange is going on. Especially if there were also other indications that the truck is off its planned route. If deliberately blocking the signal were prohibited then long, overnight outages would become exceptions that could be checked.
You're right that if the signal were blocked then there'd be no remote shutdown, but at least someone would have a chance to investigate and potentially stop something bad from happening. Even if that only meant asking local police to stop and advise if located.
This isn't intended to be a complete solution to the problem of hijacking tanker trucks. It's just another data point that can be used to better track the movements of potentially dangerous materials and offer an option in certain circumstances. It seems like a good idea for lots of reasons, even without the threat of terrorists.
Then you are not following what is happening. Iraq had borrowed heavily to build new infrastructure which was destroyed in the war.
No, it's utterly obvious that the large sums of money borrowed by the Baathist government for public infrastructure improvements was not actually used for that purpose. The electrical distribution network, for example, was using 1950's technology, and outside of Baghdad there was no power for much of the day. The water purification plants and sewage plants were in a state of terrible neglect. Even the earmarked oil-for-food money was diverted, thanks to the incompetently lax management of the UN. Look at the huge palaces and mosques. The only improvements made were those that contributed to directly the glorification and comfort of the ruling officials, especially Hussein himself.
They are now expected to use the oil revenue to rebuild what was destroyed in the war. America decides who gets the contracts to rebuild and awards the contracts to American companies that submit closed bids. The oil flows again and America gets the money. Iraq has to pay yet again for infrastructure that it still has to pay for the first building of. And America wonders why the Arabs hate them ?
See above. Much of the infrastructure that hadn't already fallen apart due to deliberate neglect was damaged in the Gulf War of 1991, when Hussein invaded Kuwait. (Remember that?) It was not rebuilt, despite claims to the contrary by the Hussein government and despite aid given them for that purpose.
As for American companies getting the many of the contracts, yeah, so what? You may have noticed that we're also paying $87 billion for the reconstruction. The recent "study" which attempted to coorelate campaign contributions to contracts is so flawed as to be completely bogus. And the UN has turned tail and run, clearly showing how interested they really are in long term results.
Forget Palestine, just follow what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What's happening in Afganistan? We dealt one of the world's major terrorist operations a critical if not fatal blow. We've freed the people who live there from a regime that killed people for such horrible transgressions as being a female teacher, and kept those same people from reasserting control. And then, unfortunately, we turned over reconstruction to the UN, which has spent most of the time since shuffling paper and contemplating their navels instead of fixing things.
What's happening in Iraq? We're rebuilding infrastructure that's been broken for decades, often using the huge piles of cash that the Baathists had hidden for their own use. We're establishing a police force that's not controlled by a sadistic madman and his sons. We're rebuilding hospitals and given them modern equipment. We're opening schools where the students aren't required to sing songs praising said dictator or arrested and taken from their parents for criticism of the government. For the first time in memory, Iraqi's are allowed demonstrations, private newspapers, and free speech. There are people who don't want these things to happen, including the ones that style themselves as martyrs and kill civillians to encourage a return to the good old days when all these things were illegal and the people knew their place. Right under their heels, of course.
Do not forget that the rest of us get hurt in the revenge attacks that American actions create... I am fed up with terrorism and am therefore against this American war on Terrorism and the terrorism that it creates. I think that it is time the rest of the world started a war on terrorism and stopped the US stupidities.
Er, yes, because there was no terrorism before bad ol' America got involved. Just like there were no Nazis before Churchill got all worked up over that silly Poland thing and ruined peace in our time.
If we were all just nice to the terrorists and left them alone, why then they wouldn't have to hijack planes and
Hardware hacking concerns don't prevent the sale of radios, and software hacking concerns shouldn't prevent the sale of radio drivers.
Actually, hardware hacking concerns do prevent the sale of radios. A decade ago many scanner radios (basically programmable wideband recievers) were pulled off the market because they could be easily modified to recieve cellular phone conversations. The radios were redesigned to prevent access to those bands (or make the modifications prohibitively difficult.)
How delightfully manipulative of them. Just because the Nazis had some really nasty and horrible idiology doesn't mean that EVERYTHING they did was bad. They did not stop making regular decisions because it wasn't evil enough.
As Perry Mason might say, it goes to motive and opportunity. Did the National Socialist Party enact gun control because they were terribly concerned about innocent German citizens being killed, or because it was more convenient to have an unarmed populace? Were the results of that particular legislation positive or negative?
You may take for granted that everyone who favors gun control legislation has the purest of motives, and it may be so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else must agree with your assumptions.
If somebody is using new software, they need to accept that they are using new software, and not insist that it behave in exactly the same way, shape, form that their old software did.
People don't need to accept anything. The developers need to accept that other people got there before them and established certain conventions and expectations that need to be met.
If they want IE they need to use IE.
And if you disregard their expectations that's just what they'll continue to do. Is that what you want?
As a final note, the hospital is already liable, because the woman sent patient records to the hospital via email. Unless the email was encrypted and only opened by the doctors giving care to the patients in record, then the hospital is liable.
How do you figure that? It's not like the doctor is a one-man hospital. Other trusted parties are routinely given access to medical records. Medical transcriptionists, secretaries, nurses, clerks, supervisors, etc.
It's not that simple. GSM is less complex, but CDMA is in many ways far more flexible and robust than GSM. GSM also runs into serious problems in areas of low population density, like much of the United States and unlike most of Europe.
Two articles about the relative merits of the two systems, both by people who know a lot more about cellular phones than most of us:
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/GSM3G
http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com/2002_10_06_
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations.
... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...
Er, so all people everywhere lived exactly the same way for thousands of generations? Not hardly.
So were they satisfied? Got me, I don't have your time machine, so I can't go ask them. But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alternative. Would you?
Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way
No, we're not "working against millions of years of evolution". We're fulfilling it. The same genetic code that gives humans the unprecidented intelligence and adapatibility to survive also hardwires the desire to do it better.
Subsistence farmers got tired of being hunter-gatherers. They figured out the advantages of living together in towns and cities, working together instead of living in mutual fear. And somewhere along the way, someone realized that pounding grain into flour all day with a rock was a stupid waste of their time, so they built a machine to do it for them. And a couple thousand years later, someone came to the same conclusion about walking all day long to get anywhere, and they did the same thing. The rest, as they say, is history.
You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before.
Oh, nothing urgent at all, I'm sure. "Well, our daughters were raped and killed by the tribe over the hill, and our crops failed, and our life expectancy is about 40 years, and everyone we know is dying covered with weeping pustules, and none of us are allowed to read or write. But thank God we aren't forced to sit in traffic jams and contemplate the state of our inboxes."
But hey, I'm not GROUNDED like they were, so what do I know?
But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes.
Speak for yourself. We've never had it so good.
And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)
No, the point is that this is normal. The way it's always been. Today's pace only seems faster and less manageable to some because they're alive now and experiencing it, rather than romanticizing the past. Stop imagining that happy time when everyone was "satisfied", before all this evil ol' civilzation and technology came along and screwed stuff up. It never existed, and, short of St Peter's Pearly Gates, it never will.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website.
I think that's true, but it's changing. Many private weblogs do a better and more evenhanded job of reporting the news than professional media outlets do. And a good blog author is certainly more responsive to reader interests and more likely to correct their mistakes.
Most local papers in smaller markets just aren't very good, and their web sites are generally even worse. I think that within a year or so local bloggers (perhaps even the better reporters who work for the papers) with an interest in covering this stuff will reach the same level of prominence and usefulness as their national counterparts already have. In some places this will take longer than others, but I think it's going to happen.
FACT: Microsoft is a private company that is expected to obey the child protection laws of the countries in which they operate.
Morally speaking, parents are, of course, ultimately responsible for the welfare of their children. But that doesn't mean that a child in a public place is not protected by the law.
If a child is dragged from their mother's arms while walking down a city sidewalk we don't dismiss the issue by telling the mother that, oh well, I guess she should have held on just a bit tighter.
You forgot:
5. Repeat for turning off: auto capitalization, autocomplete, automatic help; changing fonts, margins, etc, etc... which really was the whole point of the article..
Sure once you know how you can figure out how to do all these things, but unless you are an expert with Word it'll take a bit of time per feature, which adds up to a lot of time, which you'd probably rather be spending writing, because that's why you have the software in the first place.
The post to whom I responded didn't mention any of those other features. How do we know that the user they're helping doesn't want them? I despise auto-formatting, for example, but I have a nasty tendency to transpose letters in certain words, so the autocorrection feature can be helpful.
It doesn't take that long to configure those options. All the "Auto" options are under one place, after all. And you only have to do it once to set it the way you want it. The settings are per-user, too, for shared machines.
Or in other words, good documentation is not a substitute for sensible program design
I certainly agree with you there. Far too many programs use "RTFM" as a crutch for a bad interface. That said, I don't think Word's interface is all that bad. Even the much-maligned Office Assistant can be helpful for beginners. But a more consistent presentation and a simplified set of options might help get new users started without inconveniencing those who know exactly what settings they want.
These damned features are *hard* for normal people to turn off. You may think that it's easy as a seasoned computer user. Just yesterday a friend of mine called me on my cell, just to ask how she could turn off automatic spell checking in Word. She is not dumb at all, but for her this was a task that she could not do alone.
Let's see...
1. Bring up Help.
2. Type "turn off automatic spell checking".
3. Read the first item, "Turn on or off automatic spelling and grammar checking"
4. Select the stated menu option and checkbox
Yes, clearly this is an insurmountable task not to be attempted without a trained professional. And you should also wear safety goggles.
Never say that people are stupid because they don't know how to use computers. Otherwhise we are stupid for not being able to write reports at insane speeds.
I never say that anyone is stupid because they don't understand an application. Disinterested or lazy, at worst, but never stupid.
It that particular case I can only assume that it was easier for your friend to call you up and gripe than to take three minutes and look up the answer themselves. But changing the program you give them won't help that problem, it'll just change the sorts of questions you're asked. ("How do I make this vi thing do automatic spell checking?")
Therefore it would seem to me to be reasonable to state that greenhouse gasses seem a likely cause and take action to reduce them while simultaneously doing more research on the subject to figure out what the cause is for sure.
And despite what some might have you believe we are making strides to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions. But changes like that aren't without consequences and can't be undertaken lightly. It's easy for you and I to make demands, but what will it take to make them happen, and who might be hurt in the process?
Reducing carbon emissions in the developing world, for example, may mean that widespread, cheap electricity and cheap refrigeration aren't practical, which means continued deaths from a whole host of problems that we don't even think about. It may mean that whole towns are put out of work for no good reason. Those are the broader issues that responsible public officials have to consider, not leaping on "just in case" possibilities. There are always unintended consequences.
Onscreen keypads/keyboards don't work well for that sort of thing. Too easy to enter keys by accident, and too difficult to use without looking at the keypad. Small touch screens really only work well for things that use a stylus, like handwriting recognition, and that requires two hands.
So why didn't the hardworking engineers bother to tell anyone they'd removed the bolts? How long can that take?
How much wil it cost? A lot. Who will pay? Why not save far more than half of the money and only send machines for the next 30 years? What is this corny, backwards obsession with wanting to have an actual flesh-and-bones human up there?
You're absolutely right. Instead of going on vacation this year, just sit at your desk and watch this videotape of the beach. When you're done, you can read this book about scuba diving. It's even better than being there!
Damn straight it'll cost a lot. So what? So does everything else. Add up the development costs from the first transistor to the computer sitting on my desk and you'd get a staggering sum. Get NASA out of the way, get rid of the expectation that that space is the exclusive domain of governments, and let private industry actually do something on their own. Any project's more expensive when you're hauling around a massive beauracracy behind you.
Manned space flight is not practical, it only gets in the way. It prevents rather than promotes space exploration.
Nothing's practical until after it's done often enough to make it practical. Space exploration isn't even the point. It's just a required prerequisite to actually doing something based on what you find. Most useful things involve humans: intelligent activities conducted in real-time, setting up colonies, and terraforming.
I suppose we could wait until some arbitrary date in the future to figure out how to get people to the places we've sent the probes, but since it's an inevitable development we might as well work it out now.
What he said.
.edu TLD was arbitrarily restricted to only certain educational institutions, forcing many others to register domains under other TLDs.
Plus, until very recently the
But can you please explain why it's such a big worry?
I can understand the desire for privacy, but certain information can't reasonably be regarded as private. Your name is not private. Your email and mailing addresses are not private. The fact that you've decided to register a domain name is not something you can reasonably regard as a "secret". So why would you worry about that information being available? I don't get it.