Here's the difference: the first amendment prohibits Congress from passing any legislation intended to, in some manner, link secular state institutions with religious establishments. Under all circumstances. Period. No room for discussion (in theory, of course).
The fourth amendment prohibits the government from engaging in *unreasonable* search and seizure. In practice, this means that they can't just pull you up and start frisking you without cause. However, in an airport there is both the cause (to ensure safety of all involved), and consent given (the notices posted around the airport). If you consent to search, then its all perfectly Constitutional.
The only way you can claim that airport searches are illegal is if you mean to suggest that air travel is a unalienable right, rather than just a convienient form of transportation. In that case, you'd have a case. Until then, if you don't like it, you don't have to consent to the terms. But, by the same token, if you don't consent to the terms, no one's going to let you run around an airport/plane.
I am constantly amazed by the number of people who cling to the idea that George Orwell was in any way putting forward a prediction of what the future would be like. He wasn't that kind of author, and 1984 is clearly fanciful in a great many of its details.
If anything, 1984 was a parody of social conditions in Great Britian in 1948, when it was written, not recognition of some disturbing trend. It was an attack on the kind of society promoted by Britian's socialists and social democrats, and at the flaws in that breed of idealism. It's what he did when he wrote Animal Farm: a dark satire of current events where the ideal and the reality were disconnected (Big Brother in 1984, the pigs in Animal Farm).
To say that we're "on the road to 1984" (or to refute it as if it were a distinct possibility) misses the point. If we see similarities between the book and our present reality, it's because many of the social conditions present in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s persist in some form or another. But, as a work of prophecy, or as a warning against what Orwell felt was likely to happen in the future, 1984 is about as reliable as Flash Gordon.
Y'know, there are many legitimate complaints to throw at the final seasons of "Doctor Who." The producer, John Nathan-Turner, was saddled with a show he had repeatedly stated his wish to leave, and the BBC started taking a blunderingly hands-on approach to filling the cast and production crew (hence the firing of Colin Baker, the sixth actor to play the Doctor).
But I don't think it can be said that the "later episodes were driven by the view that it was a kids show." The ostensible reason for the firing of Colin Baker was that the stories had taken a positively morbid turn: season twenty-two was driven by at times blisteringly dark comedy and body horror. "Attack of the Cybermen" goes into excrutiating detail, describing the process of converting humans into robotic Cybermen. "Vengeance on Varos" was an often bitter satirical attack on television production, with rather graphic torture sequences. "The Two Doctors" deals with cannibalism, and "Revelation of the Daleks," like "Varos," was extremely violent, and a partial homage to "Soylent Green."
Even after Baker's firing, though, the show kept its dark edge. The series's final script editor, Andrew Cartmel, oversaw a serious attempt to darken the Doctor himself. Some of the stories *did* take on seemingly goofy premises, but almost always in service of serious social commentary. The twenty sixth and final season also saw "Ghost Light," a twisted mystery set in a Victorian manor house, and the classic "Curse of Fenric," dealing with WWII era politics, Norse mythology, and environmentalism.
It's also important to note that, throughout these years, there was a decided return to the sort of character-, as opposed to situation-, driven stories of the very earliest years of the show. Both the aforementioned "Ghost Light" and "Curse of Fenric" were part of a mini-story arc comprising most of season 26 concerning the past of the Doctor's then-companion, Ace.
Though a lot of people dislike these years, they really weren't "kiddie" by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Personally, I feel the show was experiencing something of a renaissance in its final years, only to be finally destroyed by poor promotion and scheduling by the BBC, placing it against Britain's number one soap opera, "Coronation Street," and providing absolutely no advertising for the final season.
Truth be told, the BBC doesn't seem interested in bringing back the series. The 1996 Fox co-produced TV movie was a hit in Britain, and spawned a renewed interest in DW merchandise. But it was a failure in the United States, and Fox wasn't interested in pursuing a full series. The BBC probably wouldn't mind seeing the series again, they just don't want to foot the bill....
Like the original "Star Trek," though, its almost certain to return at some point. Merchandise actually increased after the cancellation, and the series now lays claim to the largest series of original novels to have derived from a TV show (being published twice monthly for almost a decade), and original CD-based audio drama series, a long-running magazine, and numerous other products. It's got a large fanbase that doesn't seem to have shrunk substantially since 1989, when the show was cancelled.
Correct me if my history is wrong here, but I understand that the taxes levied by the British on stamps, molasses, and other products reached oppressive proportions before the colonists rebelled.
Ah, yes, this old chestnut. Yes, the British did levy taxes against a number of staples, but, far from being "oppressive," the average American was going to be somewhat unlikely to notice it at all. The only party taking a significant hit was the mercantile classes, and, indeed, most of our founding fathers were wealthy merchants and plantation owners. The justification for the taxation, as a way to pay off the cost of the French and Indian War, which had been fought largely for the benefit of the American colonies on American soil, was relatively sound, as well. The American Revolution was by no stretch of the imagination a mass populist uprising, and attracted the support of a relatively small percentage of the population.
It's actually very easy to equate it to a quasi-terrorist uprising, though probably not a good idea to belabor the point, as Washington and company were generally more cautious about civilians getting caught in the crossfire. But then, this wasn't special for the time period, either: even up to the American Civil War, few civilians ever had their lives directly touched by war. There are stories, from the Civil War period, of families heading out to picnic and watch the battle unfold, only to be greeted by an unusually brutal and all-encompassing conflict. The brutality of war as we currently know it only came into being within the past two hundred years, and civilians didn't really start to become targets in their own right until around the time of the Second World War.
The British in the 18th century were also not the evil empire we like to think of them as. Yeah, there was the whole "taxation without representation" thing, but this was in absolutely no way unique to the Americans. Your average Londoner had little representation in Parliament, and Britain was probably the most robust parliamentary system at that time.
All of which isn't to say that the revolution wasn't justified. It's just that, if it was, it was less about how comparatively wronged the Americans were, or how awful the British were, but about a broader ideological viewpoint.
Yeah, to a degree. But making use of GPL code involves some sacrifices for the enduser that non-open code does not: you need to be willing to get a little more technical, to put up with potentially more (or at least different) frustration, and so forth. It also has numerous benefits that non-open code does not.
If you're willing to put up with the differences in exchange for the benefits, good for you. I was, and that's why I'm a devoted Linux user.
After five years I should be used to this sort of misinformation being accepted as fact, but I'm not....
Square left Nintendo for monetary reasons alone, and they did nothing to mislead Nintendo. The issue most likely had to do with the release of the N64: the PSX was already out, the N64 was on the horizon, after several delays. It had already been a year or two since the last major game from Square, and the shareholders were getting antsy. The PSX was there, Sony was looking for developers and willing to bend over backwards to please them, and it worked out for Square's favor.
Nintendo was surprised, but Square hadn't promised them anything. Certainly, they had collaborated before, and Nintendo was relatively notorious for keeping a close family of developers, so it was unexpected, but not a betrayal in anything other than the eyes of a few rabid fans. Square had, contrary to popular belief, never started producing FF7 for the N64: they had produced a small little SGI demo using characters from FF6 to show off what they could do on next-gen systems, but it was never anything more than a technology showcase.
The true feud didn't seem to begin until the two companies started throwing insults at each other susbequently, for whatever reason. Square acted more or less as any company would have, under the circumstances, and Nintendo reacted in an understandable manner.
Even the more recent pieces of evidence for some sort of blood feud have been blown out of proportion: Nintendo apparently instituted a "package deal" policy requiring developers to produce for the GameCube if they wanted to produce for the GBA. Square was interested in producing for the GBA but not the GC, and Nintendo wasn't interested in that deal. Now, Square's changed their mind, and Nintendo's fine with that.
I think people have been reading more into this than has really ever been there....
Re:GNOME vs KDE for the newbie
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GNOME 2.0 Beta
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Try "tar xjvf foobar.tar.bz2".
No, I don't understand where the "j" came from, but it gets the job done....
The first console-style video game I ever played was Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior here in the US of A) back during the greatest Nintendo Power subscription giveaway ever. I didn't really get into it at the time. Not a bad game, I just wasn't really into gaming at the time as a whole.
Then, about five years down the line, I got a chance to play Final Fantasy VI (or, if you prefer Final Fantasy III). I enjoyed it. There were a number of problems with it, and it doesn't rank particularly highly in my personal rankings of the series today, but there was something special about it. I scrounged up Final Fantasy IV (...er, FFII) and the original in secondhand bins and enjoyed them. At that point, I considered myself a fan of the series, and eagerly awaited Final Fantasy VII.
And it was good. Real good. A lot of the same problems which plagued the sixth game were still there, primarily associated with balancing the storytelling aspects and actual play mechanics. But the story was awesome, and it was a truly immersive experience.
In was during the period between FFVII and FFVIII that I managed to play and beat the other games in the series, including the three games unreleased in the US. Two of these rank as my favorite games in the series, though for different reasons than I liked FFVII. But then came Final Fantasy VIII....
Its amazing how hated this game is. I've never been able to understand it. Actually, that's not true. I understand it quite well. I understand it in the same way that I understand the period back when any Street Fighter clone could make millions, or when any vaguely Doom-like game dominated the computer marketplace, regardless of quality. I just try to deny it....
Final Fantasy VIII was uneven. It had its problems, and it could have been better balanced by a long shot. But practically every complaint is the same: "interactive movie," "draw system sucked," etc. And many of these points contradict each other: why do so many people who complain about the game being so entirely unchallenging complain about the difficulty of the final boss, for instance? Why do people simeltaneously complain about spending hours drawing magic and then say the game is too simple because magic is too plentiful? Ultimately, the major complaint about FFVIII is that it wasn't what people were used to. They were expecting the same ol' stuff, or, at the very most, a minor evolution. Take, for instance, Chrono Trigger, which I've always considered a fun diversion, but nothing particularly revolutionary. The aesthetics were different, and there were some evolutionary changes, many of which introduced a whole new set of problems, but the base system was markedly similar to the Final Fantasy series, and the game, IMO, of course, is certainly not worthy of sheer degree of accolades it recieves to this day.
For all the cries of evolution and change in video games, little actually does change on the mechanical level (if not the aesthetic level): current FPSes are certainly different from the games in the heyday of Wolfenstein 3D but the differences are not entirely drastic. Things have been refined and developed, and I don't mean to suggest that games like Serious Sam or American McGee's Alice are neccessarily the same, but there is a clear continuity. When this continuity is broken, people complain. About anything and everything the game might feature, regardless of its relevance, or, in extreme cases, even logic.
Is Final Fantasy I a good game? Of course. I enjoyed it at the time, and I enjoy it today. But it is in no way, shape, or form, the pinnacle of video game entertainment. I for one, would rather play a game which at least makes some motions toward an attempt at a clear break with tradition: the tried and true is good, but complacency is not. For that reason, I find Final Fantasy VIII to be the best game in the PSX trilogy, and would rather play it any day over the rather regrettable Final Fantasy IX which adopted such a wholesale and uncritical invocation of the past that it wound up feeling and playing like a bad parody of the series.
Am I right in my views? Well, no, of course not. Heck, I seem to be a distinct minority. But I'm used to that. I'm telling anyone that my way of looking at things is right or wrong, just noting some oddities I've observed over the years. Oh well....
(And Chrono Cross was a wonderful game, IMO, and easily surpassed its predeccessor. But despite some strong late-game story connections, there's little connecting the games in structure or style)
Market share does not determine monopoly status. Even if they had 100% of all desktops with sign of moving, they wouldnt necessarily make them a monopoly.
Erm... no. That definitionally makes them a monopoly. It's what the word means, for heaven's sake. The almost insignificantly small market share of Linux doesn't represent a credible threat to Microsoft's statistical dominance of the market, and, despite relatively good press, doesn't seem likely to be a serious contender under the current system.
But the problem isn't whether or not Microsoft is a monopoly. That, in and of itself, isn't the criminal act. It's the leveraging of monopolistic power that's really in question. Biased as I may be, I think its relatively clear that Microsoft has misued their position at the head of the pack, by way of illegal bundling, scare tactics, and the like. Hell, their corporate policy of "embrace and extend" comes of with a distinct sense of dubious legality.
Which, of course, doesn't change the fact that the trial against Microsoft was initially motivated by less than altruistic reasons, or that Judge Jackson acted inappropriately, or that the breakup ruling *as formulated* had some distinct problems of its own (the "mini-monopoly" problem: it could very well have maintained the MS monopoly, just over multiple different companies). But Microsoft's actions don't really leave much doubt that they are a monopoly, and that they're not afraid to use that status to their advantage, legal, ethical, or not.
What most people don't realize is that if you are smart enough to figure out how to be eligible for lots of grants and loans, you *are* going to be able to not pay a dime out of your own pocket until after you get out of school. By my senior year, I received *all* grants as financial aid - so my senior year was essentially free.
Excellent. I envy you. And you're certainly correct in pointing out that you get out what you put in: if you don't go into school with the intention and desire to work for your education, you won't get one.
But the nature of (most) grants is competitive. If everyone was stupid, we'd still get almost as many people recieving grants for their education. If everyone was genuis-level material, there'd still be a large number of people working their fingers to the bone and not getting the subsidization. That's the nature of our society, love it or leave it: some worthy people are going to fall through the cracks, no matter what, and some losers are going to get a free ride.
Besides, the other problem with most grants is that they tend to favor academic subjects currently "in vogue". In the 1980s, you could have sailed through school with federal grant money provided you pursued a curriculum of Russian studies. Come 1991, you may have been able to list every Soviet bureaucrat ever to sit on the Politburo, but you'd have trouble finding a job from it. And before the big Internet explosion of the 1990s, it was substantially harder to get grant money to pursue computer science.
The problem here is that it leads to an academic career of simply chasing the money. If you want a fully subsidized education, you learn what the people with the grants want you to learn, or hope you get lucky in a field with substantially less grant money available. Which essentially defeats the strongest argument for a liberal arts education in the first place.
I'm not deriding your skills and worth in recieving grant money, and I fully recognize that there are a goodly number of people who would have at least wanted to pursue their academic interests even if they had not been able to achieve significant outside aid. If anything, I wish there were a better way to structure the system so that those with a genuine interest weren't forced to compete with those just following the cash flow.
Well, to be fair, the warp system has changed somewhat over the years. By the time of TNG, warp 1 was the speed of light, and warp 10 represented infinite speed, and therefore unreachable. But in TOS, they managed to reach warp 14.1, so presumably there was a reevaluation of the scale at some point.
The Neptune quote is a bit of a pain, but, hey, so they goofed:-)
BBC America actually stopped showing it just a few weeks ago... and it was no great loss, all things considered. They never got the rights to air more than a handful of serials (no more than 20 of the 150+ stories produced), and scheduled it at ridiculous times (I believe the final time slot was 5:30 AM). In addition, because the original 25 minute timeslot (produced for noncommercial British television) didn't suit American commercial needs, they managed to insert more than half-an-hour of commercials into it to produce an hour-long show.
About Tab command line completion: that was in Win2K. It probably wasn't enabled by default, but I distinctly remember it being there, and most of the other "features" are easily available via third party (particularly faxing, since most modem manufacturers deliver their own programs with the hardware).
WinXP does look promising, to some degree. I like that they've apparently been able to merge the 9X/NT kernels and work in effective multimedia support without crashing all of the time. The interface redesign is promising, more or less, and its certainly a passable upgrade. However, there are still plenty of problems. Microsoft is back at it with the "kitchen sink" approach, throwing in a bunch of software, like the faxing stuff, which is, at best, redundant or, at worst, anti-competitive.
But my big problem is, of course, the much maligned license scheme. I routinely repartition, uninstall, reinstall, etc. my operating systems, and most of my PCs, by the end of the operational lifespan, resemble nothing as much as Frankenstein's monster, a near-horrific mish mash of hardware cribbed from various sources. I find the concept of having to justify to Microsoft how I use my computer, and this alone is probably why I'll stay well away from WinXP.
Generally speaking, public transit should be cheaper, given upkeep, maintenance, and miscellaneous costs. Its just that economic reckoning can lag behind rather heavily. Which is one of the many reasons I don't trust free market economics, but that's neither here nor there.
And, anyway, the original post was speaking of hypotheticals. When fossil fuel supplies get down to the point where demand significantly outpaces supply, which is not only concievable, but, some would say, likely within our lifetimes, public transportation will be cheaper, as its much, much less expensive to load 30 people on a bus or train than to have 30 people driving cars, even if one bus uses more fuel than one car (assuming the economics stay true).
Yeah, they did go over budget, but the announcement that they weren't going to make another movie didn't really have much to do with that information. According to most sources, they simply produced this film to show off their tech, and will put forward any future film concepts (should the film do well enough to warrant any) to Sony/Columbia or other producers, and take on more of an oversight job
The simple fact that significant doubt exists, coupled with the disastrous possibilities should it be proven correct, should be setting off warning lights.
Fine, I'm not trying to argue that the debate rages on, and I outright said so in my initial post. My question goes beyond that: what is the harm in assuming the worst? Certainly the world won't be worse off for reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, even if it turns out we won't end up destroying the ecosystem if we don't. And yet the response to any significant attempt to broach the subject ultimately comes out like a broken record: "but we don't know that anything's wrong in the first place."
This is, generally speaking, not the attitude taken by a calm critic sure of his view, but the kind of knee-jerk reaction of someone who dare not contemplate changing his/her current behavior. Not the sort of "march of progress" attitude that gives itself well to the belief that science will allow us to get through any problem we should happen to face.
And in other late-breaking news: New York has not yet been nuked back into the stone age, the ebola virus has not spread like wildfire across Europe and North America, and a massive meteorite has not crashed into the surface of the planet and driven humans to extinction.
None of this has happened. All of this is within the realm of possibility. Just because we've been able to come up with some technologically impressive ways to circumvent problems before doesn't mean we will always be able to. The question is are we going to keep rushing forward, half-cocked, until we run into a problem we can't technologically bluff our way out of, or are we going to be a little more cautious so we don't have to rely on blind faith alone?
And what is this miraculous "something" that will allow us to survive massive, suddent climate change? Am I to assume that you've got it in your garage, then?
This is the nerd's folly: unwavering faith in the march of technology to get us out of whatever mess we find ourselves in. It doesn't work like that. We can't just assume that, for instance, should the earth become too inhospitable, we can pack our bags and move to Mars. Is it possible? Yeah, sure. But since it's not evenly remotely feasible now, we should treat out as what it is: a possibility, not a certainty.
It's even more depressing considering that this is the exact same reason people have trouble accepting the concept of global warming: we can't prove with 100% accuracy that it exists, so we should assume it doesn't. This is stupid. Adjusting our practices to be slightly less damaging isn't going to seriously harm anyone in the long run, and if global warming can eventually be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, we're in significantly better shape.
But nonetheless, people won't be willing to accept something like global warming until (if) the planet turns into a giant toaster oven, yet are perfectly willing to place their unwavering faith in a pipe dream that ensures that humanity can use its vast knowledge to adapt to whatever situation it finds itself in. And that, my friends, is a hypocrisy even worse than self-extinctionist hyperbole, because it has the potential to harm others just as readily as it can harm one's self.
Keep in mind, I've not said whether or not I believe in global warming, and I do believe that it is concievably possible that we could "build something that will let us survive" should the predicted catastrophes that would accompany it arrive. But I still don't see the point in betting our entire society and way of life, if not our continued existence as a species itself, on such a gamble.
He's not saying that paying for a site requires that said site change. Just that he won't pay for the priveledge of viewing the site unless they change.
Everyone always trots this out when issues like this come up, and it completely and blithely misses the point. In a capitalist system, business is supposed to strive for the patronage of the consumer. Somehow, somewhere along the line this has gotten disturbingly inversed, and now we have a kind of odd equivalent of a "priviledge of use tax" wherein business takes priority over the consumer. If people won't pay for sites like Slashdot in its current form then it would be dumb, and should be corporate suicide, for Slashdot to start charging without some serious changes.
Hey, I may not consider myself a capitalist, but, for god's sake, if we're going to nominally adhere to the model, we should at least try to get the ideological basis right.
Wait a moment... you blast Square while celebrating Enix, the very company whose American localization wing more or less fell off the face of the Earth following the SNES transition? Square didn't even have a nominal US localization group until after the release of Final Fantasy IV (the poor translation being the work of two employees of Square in Japan).
Oh, and when the original Final Fantasy was rereleased for the WonderSwan, Bandai had previously announced that the system was due for American release. The fact that they dropped the ball can hardly be blamed on Square.
They responded slowly to the American market, but they certainly did respond, and did so much better than, say, Enix, who more or less gave up when Nintendo of America lost interest. The vast majority of Square's Playstation releases have reached American shores, despite early production shakeups right before the switch to Playstation (Ted Woolsey and most of the former employees of SquareSoft quit to form Crave).
You're not being fair, and you know it. Square was not an especially large company for most of its history. When push came to shove, Japan ranked higher than the United States in terms of coverage. SquareSoft didn't have the time or resources to translate all of their SNES-era games, so they had to pick and choose, and they choose Secret of Mana over Final Fantasy V. Yeah, it sucks that SquareSoft didn't get the chance to do more in America until the Playstation era, but its hardly unexpected. And they've still done more in both the SNES and PSX eras than Enix, or, indeed, any other Japanese RPG producer, has done since the NES era.
The Federal Reserve Board is an independent agency of the United States government (i.e., not directly beholden to any of the 14 cabinet-level departments). It was created by Congress in 1913 in order to increase stability of the economy. Ultimately, it has little direct control of currency, which is handled by the Department of the Treasury and its subagencies.
The Federal Reserve has several duties, which basically consist of acting as an advisory body to the rest of the government, and helping to define fiscal policy. But, more importantly, they are an oversight body for the banking system of the United States, and most of their power comes from their ability to supervise the nation's banks (which is exercised by things such as raising/lowering interest rates).
Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Board does not handle the issuing of Federal Reserve Notes, which is generally left to Congress. The Chairman of the seven person FRB could not, for instance, decide to stop issuing notes, particularly now that they are the only currency in circulation. What the Board does do is to determine how to distribute them through the banking systems of the country: the central Board distributes the notes to its seven regional banks, who then put the notes into circulation, depending on the needs of the public.
And they do not collect your money. The Reserve Board simply helps facilitate the banking system; the nitty gritty details are handled by the Treasury. They have a lot of power over our currency, but its hardly complete power. The seven-member board is appointed by Congress.
BTW, the homepage for the Board of the Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the technical name for the FRB) is http://www.federalreserve.gov/ which is, last time I checked, a government site. I don't know what you're talking about when you say that it isn't.
The Newsweek article on this last week suggested that its only the internal backup battery that has the 30 minute life. The external batteries, which the device would presumably obtain the majority of its power, lasts two hours.
It also then tells the story of a former recipient (presumably of the older, more invasive type) who accidently placed half-used batteries into his power supply before going to the dentist and had to rush home halfway through a root canal, worried that he'd get held up in traffic and his heart would stop. Why on earth you wouldn't bring a spare set with you, I don't know....
An insulin pump is just a portable IV system, the same as you'd get in any hospital for relatively routine procedures. In total, it reaches no more than 1 inch into the skin, and is replaced anyway, once or twice a week. The power supply is housed in the device, externally.
The power supply for a device like this would have to (before now) be supplied via a power cable that went directly to the heart. That goes far deeper than an insulin pump, and does have direct access to the center of the circulatory system, meaning any infection could get just about anywhere.
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Here's the difference: the first amendment prohibits Congress from passing any legislation intended to, in some manner, link secular state institutions with religious establishments. Under all circumstances. Period. No room for discussion (in theory, of course).
The fourth amendment prohibits the government from engaging in *unreasonable* search and seizure. In practice, this means that they can't just pull you up and start frisking you without cause. However, in an airport there is both the cause (to ensure safety of all involved), and consent given (the notices posted around the airport). If you consent to search, then its all perfectly Constitutional.
The only way you can claim that airport searches are illegal is if you mean to suggest that air travel is a unalienable right, rather than just a convienient form of transportation. In that case, you'd have a case. Until then, if you don't like it, you don't have to consent to the terms. But, by the same token, if you don't consent to the terms, no one's going to let you run around an airport/plane.
I am constantly amazed by the number of people who cling to the idea that George Orwell was in any way putting forward a prediction of what the future would be like. He wasn't that kind of author, and 1984 is clearly fanciful in a great many of its details.
If anything, 1984 was a parody of social conditions in Great Britian in 1948, when it was written, not recognition of some disturbing trend. It was an attack on the kind of society promoted by Britian's socialists and social democrats, and at the flaws in that breed of idealism. It's what he did when he wrote Animal Farm: a dark satire of current events where the ideal and the reality were disconnected (Big Brother in 1984, the pigs in Animal Farm).
To say that we're "on the road to 1984" (or to refute it as if it were a distinct possibility) misses the point. If we see similarities between the book and our present reality, it's because many of the social conditions present in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s persist in some form or another. But, as a work of prophecy, or as a warning against what Orwell felt was likely to happen in the future, 1984 is about as reliable as Flash Gordon.
Y'know, there are many legitimate complaints to throw at the final seasons of "Doctor Who." The producer, John Nathan-Turner, was saddled with a show he had repeatedly stated his wish to leave, and the BBC started taking a blunderingly hands-on approach to filling the cast and production crew (hence the firing of Colin Baker, the sixth actor to play the Doctor).
But I don't think it can be said that the "later episodes were driven by the view that it was a kids show." The ostensible reason for the firing of Colin Baker was that the stories had taken a positively morbid turn: season twenty-two was driven by at times blisteringly dark comedy and body horror. "Attack of the Cybermen" goes into excrutiating detail, describing the process of converting humans into robotic Cybermen. "Vengeance on Varos" was an often bitter satirical attack on television production, with rather graphic torture sequences. "The Two Doctors" deals with cannibalism, and "Revelation of the Daleks," like "Varos," was extremely violent, and a partial homage to "Soylent Green."
Even after Baker's firing, though, the show kept its dark edge. The series's final script editor, Andrew Cartmel, oversaw a serious attempt to darken the Doctor himself. Some of the stories *did* take on seemingly goofy premises, but almost always in service of serious social commentary. The twenty sixth and final season also saw "Ghost Light," a twisted mystery set in a Victorian manor house, and the classic "Curse of Fenric," dealing with WWII era politics, Norse mythology, and environmentalism.
It's also important to note that, throughout these years, there was a decided return to the sort of character-, as opposed to situation-, driven stories of the very earliest years of the show. Both the aforementioned "Ghost Light" and "Curse of Fenric" were part of a mini-story arc comprising most of season 26 concerning the past of the Doctor's then-companion, Ace.
Though a lot of people dislike these years, they really weren't "kiddie" by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Personally, I feel the show was experiencing something of a renaissance in its final years, only to be finally destroyed by poor promotion and scheduling by the BBC, placing it against Britain's number one soap opera, "Coronation Street," and providing absolutely no advertising for the final season.
Truth be told, the BBC doesn't seem interested in bringing back the series. The 1996 Fox co-produced TV movie was a hit in Britain, and spawned a renewed interest in DW merchandise. But it was a failure in the United States, and Fox wasn't interested in pursuing a full series. The BBC probably wouldn't mind seeing the series again, they just don't want to foot the bill....
Like the original "Star Trek," though, its almost certain to return at some point. Merchandise actually increased after the cancellation, and the series now lays claim to the largest series of original novels to have derived from a TV show (being published twice monthly for almost a decade), and original CD-based audio drama series, a long-running magazine, and numerous other products. It's got a large fanbase that doesn't seem to have shrunk substantially since 1989, when the show was cancelled.
Ah, yes, this old chestnut. Yes, the British did levy taxes against a number of staples, but, far from being "oppressive," the average American was going to be somewhat unlikely to notice it at all. The only party taking a significant hit was the mercantile classes, and, indeed, most of our founding fathers were wealthy merchants and plantation owners. The justification for the taxation, as a way to pay off the cost of the French and Indian War, which had been fought largely for the benefit of the American colonies on American soil, was relatively sound, as well. The American Revolution was by no stretch of the imagination a mass populist uprising, and attracted the support of a relatively small percentage of the population.
It's actually very easy to equate it to a quasi-terrorist uprising, though probably not a good idea to belabor the point, as Washington and company were generally more cautious about civilians getting caught in the crossfire. But then, this wasn't special for the time period, either: even up to the American Civil War, few civilians ever had their lives directly touched by war. There are stories, from the Civil War period, of families heading out to picnic and watch the battle unfold, only to be greeted by an unusually brutal and all-encompassing conflict. The brutality of war as we currently know it only came into being within the past two hundred years, and civilians didn't really start to become targets in their own right until around the time of the Second World War.
The British in the 18th century were also not the evil empire we like to think of them as. Yeah, there was the whole "taxation without representation" thing, but this was in absolutely no way unique to the Americans. Your average Londoner had little representation in Parliament, and Britain was probably the most robust parliamentary system at that time.
All of which isn't to say that the revolution wasn't justified. It's just that, if it was, it was less about how comparatively wronged the Americans were, or how awful the British were, but about a broader ideological viewpoint.
Yeah, to a degree. But making use of GPL code involves some sacrifices for the enduser that non-open code does not: you need to be willing to get a little more technical, to put up with potentially more (or at least different) frustration, and so forth. It also has numerous benefits that non-open code does not.
If you're willing to put up with the differences in exchange for the benefits, good for you. I was, and that's why I'm a devoted Linux user.
After five years I should be used to this sort of misinformation being accepted as fact, but I'm not....
Square left Nintendo for monetary reasons alone, and they did nothing to mislead Nintendo. The issue most likely had to do with the release of the N64: the PSX was already out, the N64 was on the horizon, after several delays. It had already been a year or two since the last major game from Square, and the shareholders were getting antsy. The PSX was there, Sony was looking for developers and willing to bend over backwards to please them, and it worked out for Square's favor.
Nintendo was surprised, but Square hadn't promised them anything. Certainly, they had collaborated before, and Nintendo was relatively notorious for keeping a close family of developers, so it was unexpected, but not a betrayal in anything other than the eyes of a few rabid fans. Square had, contrary to popular belief, never started producing FF7 for the N64: they had produced a small little SGI demo using characters from FF6 to show off what they could do on next-gen systems, but it was never anything more than a technology showcase.
The true feud didn't seem to begin until the two companies started throwing insults at each other susbequently, for whatever reason. Square acted more or less as any company would have, under the circumstances, and Nintendo reacted in an understandable manner.
Even the more recent pieces of evidence for some sort of blood feud have been blown out of proportion: Nintendo apparently instituted a "package deal" policy requiring developers to produce for the GameCube if they wanted to produce for the GBA. Square was interested in producing for the GBA but not the GC, and Nintendo wasn't interested in that deal. Now, Square's changed their mind, and Nintendo's fine with that.
I think people have been reading more into this than has really ever been there....
Try "tar xjvf foobar.tar.bz2".
No, I don't understand where the "j" came from, but it gets the job done....
Kartia is also noteworthy for having character designs by the great Yoshitaka Amano, of Final Fantasy fame, in full, 32-bit prerendered PSX glory....
Hmm... I wonder sometimes.
The first console-style video game I ever played was Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior here in the US of A) back during the greatest Nintendo Power subscription giveaway ever. I didn't really get into it at the time. Not a bad game, I just wasn't really into gaming at the time as a whole.
Then, about five years down the line, I got a chance to play Final Fantasy VI (or, if you prefer Final Fantasy III). I enjoyed it. There were a number of problems with it, and it doesn't rank particularly highly in my personal rankings of the series today, but there was something special about it. I scrounged up Final Fantasy IV (...er, FFII) and the original in secondhand bins and enjoyed them. At that point, I considered myself a fan of the series, and eagerly awaited Final Fantasy VII.
And it was good. Real good. A lot of the same problems which plagued the sixth game were still there, primarily associated with balancing the storytelling aspects and actual play mechanics. But the story was awesome, and it was a truly immersive experience.
In was during the period between FFVII and FFVIII that I managed to play and beat the other games in the series, including the three games unreleased in the US. Two of these rank as my favorite games in the series, though for different reasons than I liked FFVII. But then came Final Fantasy VIII....
Its amazing how hated this game is. I've never been able to understand it. Actually, that's not true. I understand it quite well. I understand it in the same way that I understand the period back when any Street Fighter clone could make millions, or when any vaguely Doom-like game dominated the computer marketplace, regardless of quality. I just try to deny it....
Final Fantasy VIII was uneven. It had its problems, and it could have been better balanced by a long shot. But practically every complaint is the same: "interactive movie," "draw system sucked," etc. And many of these points contradict each other: why do so many people who complain about the game being so entirely unchallenging complain about the difficulty of the final boss, for instance? Why do people simeltaneously complain about spending hours drawing magic and then say the game is too simple because magic is too plentiful? Ultimately, the major complaint about FFVIII is that it wasn't what people were used to. They were expecting the same ol' stuff, or, at the very most, a minor evolution. Take, for instance, Chrono Trigger, which I've always considered a fun diversion, but nothing particularly revolutionary. The aesthetics were different, and there were some evolutionary changes, many of which introduced a whole new set of problems, but the base system was markedly similar to the Final Fantasy series, and the game, IMO, of course, is certainly not worthy of sheer degree of accolades it recieves to this day.
For all the cries of evolution and change in video games, little actually does change on the mechanical level (if not the aesthetic level): current FPSes are certainly different from the games in the heyday of Wolfenstein 3D but the differences are not entirely drastic. Things have been refined and developed, and I don't mean to suggest that games like Serious Sam or American McGee's Alice are neccessarily the same, but there is a clear continuity. When this continuity is broken, people complain. About anything and everything the game might feature, regardless of its relevance, or, in extreme cases, even logic.
Is Final Fantasy I a good game? Of course. I enjoyed it at the time, and I enjoy it today. But it is in no way, shape, or form, the pinnacle of video game entertainment. I for one, would rather play a game which at least makes some motions toward an attempt at a clear break with tradition: the tried and true is good, but complacency is not. For that reason, I find Final Fantasy VIII to be the best game in the PSX trilogy, and would rather play it any day over the rather regrettable Final Fantasy IX which adopted such a wholesale and uncritical invocation of the past that it wound up feeling and playing like a bad parody of the series.
Am I right in my views? Well, no, of course not. Heck, I seem to be a distinct minority. But I'm used to that. I'm telling anyone that my way of looking at things is right or wrong, just noting some oddities I've observed over the years. Oh well....
(And Chrono Cross was a wonderful game, IMO, and easily surpassed its predeccessor. But despite some strong late-game story connections, there's little connecting the games in structure or style)
But the problem isn't whether or not Microsoft is a monopoly. That, in and of itself, isn't the criminal act. It's the leveraging of monopolistic power that's really in question. Biased as I may be, I think its relatively clear that Microsoft has misued their position at the head of the pack, by way of illegal bundling, scare tactics, and the like. Hell, their corporate policy of "embrace and extend" comes of with a distinct sense of dubious legality.
Which, of course, doesn't change the fact that the trial against Microsoft was initially motivated by less than altruistic reasons, or that Judge Jackson acted inappropriately, or that the breakup ruling *as formulated* had some distinct problems of its own (the "mini-monopoly" problem: it could very well have maintained the MS monopoly, just over multiple different companies). But Microsoft's actions don't really leave much doubt that they are a monopoly, and that they're not afraid to use that status to their advantage, legal, ethical, or not.
But the nature of (most) grants is competitive. If everyone was stupid, we'd still get almost as many people recieving grants for their education. If everyone was genuis-level material, there'd still be a large number of people working their fingers to the bone and not getting the subsidization. That's the nature of our society, love it or leave it: some worthy people are going to fall through the cracks, no matter what, and some losers are going to get a free ride.
Besides, the other problem with most grants is that they tend to favor academic subjects currently "in vogue". In the 1980s, you could have sailed through school with federal grant money provided you pursued a curriculum of Russian studies. Come 1991, you may have been able to list every Soviet bureaucrat ever to sit on the Politburo, but you'd have trouble finding a job from it. And before the big Internet explosion of the 1990s, it was substantially harder to get grant money to pursue computer science.
The problem here is that it leads to an academic career of simply chasing the money. If you want a fully subsidized education, you learn what the people with the grants want you to learn, or hope you get lucky in a field with substantially less grant money available. Which essentially defeats the strongest argument for a liberal arts education in the first place.
I'm not deriding your skills and worth in recieving grant money, and I fully recognize that there are a goodly number of people who would have at least wanted to pursue their academic interests even if they had not been able to achieve significant outside aid. If anything, I wish there were a better way to structure the system so that those with a genuine interest weren't forced to compete with those just following the cash flow.
Well, to be fair, the warp system has changed somewhat over the years. By the time of TNG, warp 1 was the speed of light, and warp 10 represented infinite speed, and therefore unreachable. But in TOS, they managed to reach warp 14.1, so presumably there was a reevaluation of the scale at some point.
:-)
The Neptune quote is a bit of a pain, but, hey, so they goofed
Sure... I always pronounce PNG as "ping", and it is rather more humorous to say than "gif", anyway :)
A number of PBS stations still carry the program, however. A list of said stations is available at the Nitro-9 site, specifically at http://nitro9.earth.uni.edu/doctor/broadcast.html.
WinXP does look promising, to some degree. I like that they've apparently been able to merge the 9X/NT kernels and work in effective multimedia support without crashing all of the time. The interface redesign is promising, more or less, and its certainly a passable upgrade. However, there are still plenty of problems. Microsoft is back at it with the "kitchen sink" approach, throwing in a bunch of software, like the faxing stuff, which is, at best, redundant or, at worst, anti-competitive.
But my big problem is, of course, the much maligned license scheme. I routinely repartition, uninstall, reinstall, etc. my operating systems, and most of my PCs, by the end of the operational lifespan, resemble nothing as much as Frankenstein's monster, a near-horrific mish mash of hardware cribbed from various sources. I find the concept of having to justify to Microsoft how I use my computer, and this alone is probably why I'll stay well away from WinXP.
And, anyway, the original post was speaking of hypotheticals. When fossil fuel supplies get down to the point where demand significantly outpaces supply, which is not only concievable, but, some would say, likely within our lifetimes, public transportation will be cheaper, as its much, much less expensive to load 30 people on a bus or train than to have 30 people driving cars, even if one bus uses more fuel than one car (assuming the economics stay true).
Yeah, they did go over budget, but the announcement that they weren't going to make another movie didn't really have much to do with that information. According to most sources, they simply produced this film to show off their tech, and will put forward any future film concepts (should the film do well enough to warrant any) to Sony/Columbia or other producers, and take on more of an oversight job
Fine, I'm not trying to argue that the debate rages on, and I outright said so in my initial post. My question goes beyond that: what is the harm in assuming the worst? Certainly the world won't be worse off for reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, even if it turns out we won't end up destroying the ecosystem if we don't. And yet the response to any significant attempt to broach the subject ultimately comes out like a broken record: "but we don't know that anything's wrong in the first place."
This is, generally speaking, not the attitude taken by a calm critic sure of his view, but the kind of knee-jerk reaction of someone who dare not contemplate changing his/her current behavior. Not the sort of "march of progress" attitude that gives itself well to the belief that science will allow us to get through any problem we should happen to face.
None of this has happened. All of this is within the realm of possibility. Just because we've been able to come up with some technologically impressive ways to circumvent problems before doesn't mean we will always be able to. The question is are we going to keep rushing forward, half-cocked, until we run into a problem we can't technologically bluff our way out of, or are we going to be a little more cautious so we don't have to rely on blind faith alone?
This is the nerd's folly: unwavering faith in the march of technology to get us out of whatever mess we find ourselves in. It doesn't work like that. We can't just assume that, for instance, should the earth become too inhospitable, we can pack our bags and move to Mars. Is it possible? Yeah, sure. But since it's not evenly remotely feasible now, we should treat out as what it is: a possibility, not a certainty.
It's even more depressing considering that this is the exact same reason people have trouble accepting the concept of global warming: we can't prove with 100% accuracy that it exists, so we should assume it doesn't. This is stupid. Adjusting our practices to be slightly less damaging isn't going to seriously harm anyone in the long run, and if global warming can eventually be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, we're in significantly better shape.
But nonetheless, people won't be willing to accept something like global warming until (if) the planet turns into a giant toaster oven, yet are perfectly willing to place their unwavering faith in a pipe dream that ensures that humanity can use its vast knowledge to adapt to whatever situation it finds itself in. And that, my friends, is a hypocrisy even worse than self-extinctionist hyperbole, because it has the potential to harm others just as readily as it can harm one's self.
Keep in mind, I've not said whether or not I believe in global warming, and I do believe that it is concievably possible that we could "build something that will let us survive" should the predicted catastrophes that would accompany it arrive. But I still don't see the point in betting our entire society and way of life, if not our continued existence as a species itself, on such a gamble.
Everyone always trots this out when issues like this come up, and it completely and blithely misses the point. In a capitalist system, business is supposed to strive for the patronage of the consumer. Somehow, somewhere along the line this has gotten disturbingly inversed, and now we have a kind of odd equivalent of a "priviledge of use tax" wherein business takes priority over the consumer. If people won't pay for sites like Slashdot in its current form then it would be dumb, and should be corporate suicide, for Slashdot to start charging without some serious changes.
Hey, I may not consider myself a capitalist, but, for god's sake, if we're going to nominally adhere to the model, we should at least try to get the ideological basis right.
Oh, and when the original Final Fantasy was rereleased for the WonderSwan, Bandai had previously announced that the system was due for American release. The fact that they dropped the ball can hardly be blamed on Square.
They responded slowly to the American market, but they certainly did respond, and did so much better than, say, Enix, who more or less gave up when Nintendo of America lost interest. The vast majority of Square's Playstation releases have reached American shores, despite early production shakeups right before the switch to Playstation (Ted Woolsey and most of the former employees of SquareSoft quit to form Crave).
You're not being fair, and you know it. Square was not an especially large company for most of its history. When push came to shove, Japan ranked higher than the United States in terms of coverage. SquareSoft didn't have the time or resources to translate all of their SNES-era games, so they had to pick and choose, and they choose Secret of Mana over Final Fantasy V. Yeah, it sucks that SquareSoft didn't get the chance to do more in America until the Playstation era, but its hardly unexpected. And they've still done more in both the SNES and PSX eras than Enix, or, indeed, any other Japanese RPG producer, has done since the NES era.
The Federal Reserve has several duties, which basically consist of acting as an advisory body to the rest of the government, and helping to define fiscal policy. But, more importantly, they are an oversight body for the banking system of the United States, and most of their power comes from their ability to supervise the nation's banks (which is exercised by things such as raising/lowering interest rates).
Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Board does not handle the issuing of Federal Reserve Notes, which is generally left to Congress. The Chairman of the seven person FRB could not, for instance, decide to stop issuing notes, particularly now that they are the only currency in circulation. What the Board does do is to determine how to distribute them through the banking systems of the country: the central Board distributes the notes to its seven regional banks, who then put the notes into circulation, depending on the needs of the public.
And they do not collect your money. The Reserve Board simply helps facilitate the banking system; the nitty gritty details are handled by the Treasury. They have a lot of power over our currency, but its hardly complete power. The seven-member board is appointed by Congress.
BTW, the homepage for the Board of the Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the technical name for the FRB) is http://www.federalreserve.gov/ which is, last time I checked, a government site. I don't know what you're talking about when you say that it isn't.
It also then tells the story of a former recipient (presumably of the older, more invasive type) who accidently placed half-used batteries into his power supply before going to the dentist and had to rush home halfway through a root canal, worried that he'd get held up in traffic and his heart would stop. Why on earth you wouldn't bring a spare set with you, I don't know....
The power supply for a device like this would have to (before now) be supplied via a power cable that went directly to the heart. That goes far deeper than an insulin pump, and does have direct access to the center of the circulatory system, meaning any infection could get just about anywhere.