Everyone has a UI that was "just right" while everything since just hasn't been quite... right. Mine was AmigaOS 2.04. They made changes in Workbench 3 that were probably aimed at at fixing some inconsistencies (ie everything you had to push was 3D in 2.04, except the scroll bars, so they made them 3D in 3) that, to my mind, just didn't really work out. And Workbench 1.x was godawful.
The best Mac OS/Mac OS X look, to me, was Jaguar's. Very clean. But it was flawed in some ways, and Apple tinkered with it and came up with something a little more usable but, alas, missing much of the beauty of Jaguar.
Now, GNOME seems to be heading in the opposite direction. I've not seen a version of GNOME under Ubuntu that wasn't better looking than the previous iteration.
And I'm sorry, but installing stuff on Linux is not the cute story in the blog but an archaic pain of entering lines upon lines of commands into a terminal.
Oh really? Mr Fancy Pants "Oooh I'm a sys admin, look at me enter commands on a command line console because I don't know how to flip electrons with a laser pen." REAL Lunix users don't use command lines, we actually short electrodes in order to program in raw machine code to download the packages we want. Also we don't use packages, we write the applications from scratch.
BTW, you may have heard of this thing called a GUI. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have one called GNOME available. I've heard, *gasp*, people use this to install applications. In a way that, staggeringly, is easier than the majority of modern Mac apps (when did this stupid crap of having to run installers to install apps under Mac OS come from anyway? You used to be able to just drag the folder to your hard drive), and infinitely easier than the Windows "way" of doing it.
You're saying that the alternative to Uncle Steve banning the Flash plug-in is him installing it on everyone's iPhones and forcing it to be switched on at all times?
There is a happy medium you know.
Although if "Uncle Steve" thinks like that and thinks everyone will somehow be forced to run Flash the moment it appears in the app-store, it would explain a lot. Not because it explains his logic for banning it, so much as it re-enforces the idea that the man has gone completely cuckoo.
It's a rival to Fair and Balanced C. In both languages, you give both sides (C, some half-assed SmallTalk implementation) equal time, regardless of which is actually any good.
Fair and Balanced C is the version that includes Geraldo Rivera's implementation of Python.
And those of us with any sense run Flashblock, so we can get Flash when we need it, and pretend it doesn't exist at all other times (though the need for tools like FB is somewhat sad. Why exactly should a plug-in run without my asking it to anyway?)
Having actually read the article in question, it's fairly obvious "iPhone losing guy" is not their source. In addition to it not being part of the story, Apple also disabled the phone within hours of the loss, indicating iLG did, indeed, report the loss to Apple as soon as it was noticed.
Both "Ironic" and "Caused by". It's no accident that the one place in the US where the railways work is the one area of the US that was already developed by the time the railways came along.
The railways that were built elsewhere where generally built for all the wrong reasons. The Union Pacific, for example, was originally a scam, riding on a wave of idealism, in which Congress was bribed to "fund" a transcontinental line with little or no oversight for the builders. Using a fake construction company, the UP built the cheapest line they could while simultaneously charging the government several times the cost.
Why? Because at the time, most businessmen steered clear of the TR project, believing it to be destined to be unprofitable, so the only people left were the scammers, and well-connected scammers set up the UP as a way to get huge amounts of money from the government rather than to set up a functional railway as a going concern.
The consequences of this and other expansion plans, also funded by taxes or other non-rail revenue (Flagler's FEC, for example, was created as a way to make his hotel resorts profitable), was a cheap railway system that started to show serious weaknesses as soon as alternative methods of transportation became viable. Outside of the North East, the majority of lines are not grade separated, and they're mostly single track. They're just about usable for freight, as long as you don't mind it taking days for an intermodal container to go from, say, Miami to New York, but it's impossible to run trains at moderate speeds (100mph, considered "ordinary" in most of the world, is rarely achievable here, where 60mph is generally the fastest trains go outside of the NEC), and impossible to run the high frequency trains needed for passenger service to be viable.
By the mid sixties, it was largely over. High taxes and poor Unionism pushed the systems over the edge, but there was little hiding the fact that passenger levels had plummeted for reasons of practicality. Whereas passenger numbers in, say, Britain, remained largely at the same order of magnitude (even if they had dropped), passengers had all but deserted the US lines.
What the US needs is a system of sane upgrades, but alas right now most of the efforts are going into building expensive intercity high speed lines. Double tracking and grade separating the existing lines would make a much bigger difference, but it's unsexy, and thus not likely to happen.
16GB is plenty of room for a single, Blu-ray or HD DVD quality, HD movie of average length, and easily more than enough for an ATSC quality movie, even using MPEG-2. And if you want to go for "HD download" quality of the Apple TV variety (720p H.264) then all bets are off.
Remember that BD movies generally only weigh in at 20GB+ because of the extra overheads of having to carry a pseudo-lossless soundtrack or two, plus several other languages, plus a possible extra PIP video, etc. The actual "video" portion of a Blu-ray (or HD DVD) release tends to be in the 5-7GB/hour range.
The myth it requires some huge amount of storage dates back to the original BD vs HD DVD wars in which fans of the former kept stating as fact that you had to have some ungodly amount of storage to store the video that just happened to be slightly more than a single HD DVD layer. You don't. The original reason BD went for 5X the storage capacity of DVD was that it expected to have to store 5X as much data - originally BD was slated to use, and only use, MPEG2. The success of H.264 turned that on its head, with much higher quality video being stored at a much lower bit-rate. As if to add insult to injury, even MPEG-2 circa 2005-2007 is not MPEG-2 circa 2010, with ATSC's adoption of the format for HD video doing astonishing things to the development of better compressors.
I'm disappointed flash memory prices haven't fallen faster over the last year or two, and wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is a desire to save the optical industry for a little bit (or give it a chance to establish itself) as we were getting very close to a point that HD movies could be distributed on SD cards, either owned by a customer (buy a 128GB drive, take it to a store and have them copy the movie you want with the soundtracks and extras you want, for a fee, or use some kind of studio-approved software to download and store the movie in the same way) or actually mass produced for a price not far off an optical disk. I suspect the magic figure to get that going is around 2G/$ in small sizes (eg 20G for $10, not 200G for $100.) With this kind of technology, we'd be looking at the players themselves costing $10-20, perhaps even players built into TVs rather than appearing as separate boxes.
The sooner we get rid of spinning plastic discs, the better, and I'm hopeful that flash will take us there.
Pro-Confederacy overtones? Did you watch the same show that I did? I know it was based on the experiences of Confederate veterans but the underlying theme seemed to be one of individualism and mistrust of Government. That could just as easily have applied to any number of independence movements in human history.
Well, obviously I did watch the same one as you because we agree that the sympathetic characters are based on Confederate veterans. You underplay the theme, seeing it as potentially generic and therefore generic. What I suggest though is to think about how the show comes across to an ordinary viewer. Mal is a veteran from a war based on the American Civil War... and Mal was on the losing side (ding!) and shares the same mistrust of the government of the winners that those in the South did (ding ding!)
Forget the idea that it's just a starting point, that a story about Confederate veterans is inherently interesting, and think more about the general feeling it'll give a large number of people who want to watch it.
I'm a huge fan of Dollhouse. I loved the fact Whedon didn't wimp out in his portrayal of the Dollhouse's local management as sympathetic people who follow a recognizable moral code, one that leads "good" people to facilitate a system that tore the souls from living people. I thought that was absolutely fantastic. Moreover, unlike Firefly, where it's "all OK" because it's not really the Confederacy, that's just an analogy but it's the future so all the bad stuff that's associated with the confederacy can't have happened and it must really have been a war of Alliance Aggression or whatever, Whedon throws the darkness in your face, no excuses, no apologies, that's what happened.
The show was fantastic. And a flop. And given that my praising it for "Dramatizing the Milgram Experiment" lead me to be flamed as a supporter of rapists (no, I'm serious, and the forums I read were full of people talking about it as "that rape show"), I think a major factor was that people just didn't get over the fact that the sympathetic people were responsible for terrible things, and allied with terrible causes.
Forget whether Firefly was genuinely about veterans of the Confederacy. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that it went out of its way to ensure people made those associations. And in doing so, it gave people reasons to feel uncomfortable watching it.
(Cue the "It was a war of Northern Aggression! It was never about slavery, it was about State's rights! Slaves were very well treated! The Confederacy was great!" revisionists here...)
As I said above, Firefly was intended as a replacement for Dark Angel. Why would they show the replacement on a different day?
Interestingly, Friday is considered a good day by the Sci-fi/Syfy channel, whose ratings are normally fairly good on that day. Supposedly Friday being considered a "Death Slot" by the networks is a recent phenomenon, and is probably self-fulfilling.
An additional point: even taken as read, a network has certain expectations of Friday shows which take into account supposedly fewer viewers. If it didn't, it wouldn't commission them.
Just because some cancellations were due to Fox's incompetence doesn't mean all of them are.
Fox did enough wrong with Firefly to obscure the real problems with the show, which was that it was a space-opera-cum-western with pro-Confederacy overtones with little appeal outside of a small cadre of "science fiction nerds who like that kind of thing."
Fox didn't commission Firefly because they were enthusiastic about the concept, but because they needed to kill the absurdly expensive and rapidly tanking Dark Angel, but do so without angering James Cameron. Commissioning a replacement science fiction show from a rising star (as Whedon was at the time) was a move that would look good enough on paper that it wouldn't appear to be a slap in the face to Cameron.
Firefly was commissioned for all the wrong reasons, it was a flop, subsequent events, such as the disastrous box office figures for Serenity (a low to medium budget film whose box office receipts - half of which are kept by the cinemas - was lower than its budget), show that the concept had virtually no appeal, and it's really only a combination of Fox's screwing with the schedule - understandable given they realized early on they had a lemon on their hands - and decent DVD sales - that's created the myth it was somehow a superb, popular, series that would have been as popular as Buffy had it just had the same level of support.
Fox also put pressure on Whedon to do things to early episodes of Dollhouse that also caused a run of barely watchable episodes until Episode 6. However, the show getting back on track, losing the abysmal Terminator ball and chain, and being nurtured by Fox did nothing to improve ratings, despite switching from barely watchable to arguably the smartest show on television. Sometimes concepts just don't work. Had Dollhouse been canceled by, say, episode 11, there'd have been enough people who had become fans of the concept for it to develop a similar cult following, who'd have likewise assumed that the problem was with Fox rather than the show itself.
But we know that isn't the case. Despite becoming good, the ratings continued to drop. Sometimes shows just don't have appeal. Sometimes the concept just isn't strong enough to attract viewers. Dollhouse was a great show that fits that description. And, alas, Firefly was a somewhat poorer show (not a bad show, don't get me wrong, but I've never understood the obsession with it as "the greatest science fiction show ever!" It's not even science fiction, it's a space opera damn it!) that also fits the description.
People have the cause and effect backward. Firefly didn't fail because Fox messed around with it. Fox messed around with it, and in the end stopped caring about it, because it was a failure.
I generally agree, but I would point out that Apple and Adobe are rivals for the DRM-infested multimedia market. Apple produces Quicktime, which is incompatible but functionally identical to Flash.
For the love of God, you've had how many people explain it to you, and you STILL engage in fucking insults and idiotic comparisons in some bizarre attempt to pretend the Insurance Reform bill was complex because of a bunch of lawyers trying to get their hand in?
Let me be the latest tool to put you out of your misery: let's start with the basics.
US HCR law = Health Insurer regulations. Canadian law = Single Payer Healthcare.
They're not the same thing. They're not trying to do the same thing. Pretending they are is like pretending a FUCKING SATURN V ROCKET is comparable to a THREE WHEELER because they both MOVE PEOPLE. And claiming the Saturn V Rocket IS AS COMPLEX AS IT IS because of some elaborate CONSPIRACY by a CABAL of ENGINEERS.
The US laws came about because too many people with power were opposed to single payer healthcare, while recognizing that the US system is utter shit. So it's a tinkering around the edges of the current system. It's a big mix of reforms to the current system designed to somehow fix it.
Is it pisspoor and utterly stupid? Why yes, it is! But that's not because the reforms are "too complex" and "designed to keep lawyers in jobs", it's because they're fucking retarded, put together by a bunch of ideologically hampered cretins who put right-wing ideology ahead of practicality and who were supported by sell-out wonks who wouldn't know practical if it slapped them around the head with a shark. But, hey, here's the thing, if we kept the model Romneycare (for it is that) uses, and fixed it, say, by putting in a proper control (say, the Public Option), removed the Insurer's anti-trust immunity, and federalized the exchanges, that'd be EVEN MORE COMPLEX, not less. It'd be an EVEN LONGER BILL, because on top of reforming a hundred existing entities, it'd be doing all of the above things too!
None of which changes the fact that the bill is an insurance regulation bill. Is it more complex than the Canadian Healthcare law? I take your word for it that it is. I have no idea whether there are less lines in it than, say, the Amtrak funding appropriation acts, or the law that makes it illegal to remove the tags from duvets, or the Texas constitution, but those comparisons are no less irrelevant.
They're different bills doing different things to different ends. Get over it.
A video surfaces in which soldiers fire upon a group of unarmed (well, one or two bodyguards have AK-47s, but they're not provoking anything) civilians. A discussion arises about whether it constitutes a war crime. The subject of terrorists comes up, they don't wear uniforms gosh-darn it, and there are terrorists over there!
The implicit assertion (for if the assertion were not being made, the discussion would be at an end for this subthread would be considered a tasteless foray into the irrelevant) is that the crowd being fired upon were terrorists.
You know, Chomsky gets a lot of stick for some whacko views of his, but in terms of his essays on the use of language to justify governmental malfeasance, he's dead on, except, arguably, he doesn't credit the willingness of people to follow the narrative and extend it all by themselves without establishment prompting. The establishment sows the seeds, and after a while, the narrative is so pervasive people just pick it up and run with it anyway.
There were no terrorists. The people fired upon were not terrorists.
In all honesty, a tragic misjudgment was made by a group of almost certainly stressed, shocked, heavily armed soldiers. That happens rather a lot in wars.
That's one reason why wars are bad, And being that they're bad, wards should be avoided if at all possible.
But wars being bad is an awfully inconvenient fact when you're trying to push one for strategic reasons, because you believe that a war will help you achieve goals that require the invasion and occupation of countries by force. Which is why our glorious establishment has done its best to portray those concerned about war as "far left" unserious whackos. And it's why the media drills into its consumers, over, and over, and over again, the little threads of justifications and subconscious cues that lead a clear cut case of a government covering up a major unprovoked massacre being sanitized and rationalized as some kind of attack on a group of scary terrorists.
Actually, yes, there are a few people who are more afraid of dieing than 25 years in prison
I didn't say there weren't.
What I said was that in terms of deterrence, there's no difference. Virtually nobody would commit a murder knowing that if caught they'd spend 25 years in prison that wouldn't if the penalty is death. Which they'd be more afraid of is beside the point, just as the relative masses of Jupiter and Saturn do not change the fact that both are well beyond the threshold that if Earth crashed into either, it'd be destroyed.
And, FWIW, there are people more afraid of 25 years in prison than death. I'm one of them. I'd rather not have either, but if something happens such that I actually do something deserving of that degree of punishment, I'll be begging for death.
Given a system built on equal rights, it's fair to say that a murderer has forsaken his own right to not be killed by murdering someone
No, that's just a value system you made up and a bizarre one at that. Leaving aside the fact that life is not a privilege, it isn't something an individual can forfeit, we as a society might legitimately say that someone should die, but that's not the same thing, there's the more awkward aspect that we're not failing to observe someone's "right not to be killed", we're actually killing them. If your value system were applicable, then the Judge's hammer would fall, and the Judge would say "Anyone who wants to can kill you. You may now go free."
That's not what happens. We kill. We kill in the name of saying what a senseless and immoral act killing is. We kill in a peculiarly smug and rotten way: we kill because we're think better than them because we don't kill. And when we do, we're not.
Now imagine a same sex encounter as a hetero inclined child, raised hetero, perhaps even to believe homosexuality is wrong. Imagine it vividly.
Starting to get the point?
Nope.
We're talking Children here. You're not "hetero" or otherwise inclined as a child, you have practically no sexuality and what little bits of your brain are tuned that way aren't really working in any particular direction, let alone thinking about genital entanglement. I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would think the way you are, unless you're essentially claiming that kids are sexual already, and are developed enough to have concepts of sexual correctness (and I'm not talking about "Men and women live together" type stuff, there's a difference between understanding sexual attraction and seeing two adults in the same room).
And, personally, as someone who was a kid once, I know that at least one kid didn't think that way, and that's despite being told what sex was at a relatively early age. Maybe I'm extrapolating from me a little too much, but I don't have another benchmark, and it seems very, very, improbable that I was the only 5, 7, 10 year old, whatever, who didn't think in those terms.
Rape is rape. It's rotten whatever age you are. It's especially rotten when you lack the faculties and experience to at any level understand its nature as an undeserved assault upon you. At an age when you know of sex, if you do at all, only in the abstract, the gender of your attacker surely cannot make a blind bit of difference.
Homosexual child fuckers on the other hand are the most disturbing of their species
Personally I don't understand why homosexuality makes a difference though your comment does reflect an attitude I've heard is prevalent, that somehow pedophilia perpetrated by a male against a girl is natural, but against a boy isn't.
I really don't understand why people would think that way. What difference does it make to the evilness of acts of pedophilia whether the genders of the victims are the same as their attackers?
Speaking personally, if I were not wrongly charged, and I was likely to lose, I'd fire the lawyer, plead guilty, and ask for the Death Penalty.
If I were wrongly charged, then the equation changes completely. Sure, a lot of innocent people end up spending decades behind bars, but no innocent person expects to spend decades behind bars at the beginning. They assume there will be an appeal, they'll win the appeal, and it'll all be over in six months. For that reason, they plead not-guilty, and try to ensure if convicted anyway the sentence they get gives them the capability of being released when their innocence becomes obvious.
I absolutely definitely would rather be executed than spend thirty years in jail. But systematically, it's hard to actually predict whether you're going to spend that time in jail if you're innocent (or if you're guilty and you for some reason think you can convince people you're innocent anyway.)
If I were innocent, and convicted in a place like Texas where the system's been rigged to make it virtually impossible to get a successful appeal, I'd probably ask for the Death Penalty as soon as I'm convicted, and tell the judge exactly why so there's no doubt in anyone's minds about the reasons. But that's 'cos I'm smart enough to know when I'm beaten.
The "Someone did something we don't like, therefore we should hurt them" thing is to engrained in people's minds as the "It's right, because it's what I want" for it to be likely to be overcome in the justice system any time soon, but I wish it were possible for most people to step back a little occasionally and look at the problems with that logic, especially when it's taken to the N'th degree.
Death Penalty? People still promote that? Well, of course they do! Nothing says "Justice" more than wiping the person you dislike off of the face of the Earth. But in practical, realistic, terms, is it actually any better than a sentence of, say, twenty five years in prison?
I say this because the purpose of the sentence in the justice system is generally (justified as being) to deter, and to make someone who committed a crime to pay back for what it is they did, if not directly, then in some superficial "I'll suffer for what I did to someone else" way. As far as deterrence goes, it's hard to believe there's anyone out there who'd think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd spending twenty five years of my life in an 8x8 cell" but not think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd get executed." In both cases, the penalty is significantly higher than anyone would sanely consider bearable.
And as far as pay back goes, leaving aside the fact it isn't positive pay back - nobody's getting compensated, the question has to be asked whether executions would actually be worse than long term imprisonment for anyone but an innocent person expecting to win an appeal anyway. I know I'd rather die than spend decades in jail. Actually, I'd consider death an acceptable alternative to spending five years in jail. Is Death a punishment, or an end?
And yes, I know people fight executions anyway, but I'd wager a fair few do so in the expectation they'll eventually find a way to get released, and released soon, whether that's because they're innocent (and we know a frighteningly large number of innocent people get executed), or because they believe somewhere, somehow, that there's some mitigating set of circumstances that means they don't deserve to be punished and that, one day, they'll convince someone of that. That latter group is not in any rational way "punished" via the Death Penalty either, they go the chair believing themselves to be right.
And, of course, there's an inherent logic that needs to be considered: every time we, as a society, kill someone because we don't like what they did, we're promoting the concept that it's OK to kill someone if you don't like what they did. Every time.
Punishment needs to be contained. A civilized society does contain its punishments, because it accepts that a society is not perfect, that it does not operate a perfect system, and that even those that really have wronged others are more complex than the simplistic human laws of revenge suggest.
The Justice system's system of sentencing needs to be saner and to accept the complexities of real life. Deterrence will always be necessary, and always have a major place in the system. It is not necessary for the government to threaten to kill its citizens to deter them from committing crimes. Likewise payback does not have to be 100% punishment.
Yup, and then there's the space, imagine having to find space for all three computers, that means space for three 250W PSUs, three high-end nVidia Graphics cards, three 3.5" SATA drives, three..
OK, I'm kidding, but I'm kidding to make a point: cost really isn't the reason. While the computers in a Prius cost a fair bit, the costs are to do with development, not per-unit manufacturing: it's a fair guess to suggest that simply tripling the number of computers (without doing anything else, but see below because you would have to do something else...) would add dollars, rather than hundreds of dollars, to the price of a Prius.
Here's the real reason: think of what the respective Airbus A320 (the classic FBW) vs Prius computers actually do. The Airbus system is designed to make controlling a giant jet aircraft as easy as playing a computer game. Turn the joystick and the plane will fly in the direction you want it to at the speed you've told the plane to fly at the altitude you want. That's not easy, that's not even trivial in a small single engine craft, it's much more complex in a giant four engine 300+ passenger plane. Flying is a complex activity, made all the more complex by, well, being a huge aircraft. That's part of the reason why FBW was invented in the first place.
The Prius, by comparison, does very little automatically. The computer is designed to keep things chugging along in a fuel efficient manner rather than doing figuring out how to safely bank the entire car every time the driver turns the steering wheel.
Now, with that in mind, what do you think would be more complex in a Prius? The part of the computer that deals with the brake pedal and decides what systems to engage to slow the car, or devices all over the car that take votes from three or more different computers to determine whether to engage its particular subsystem?
The answer is: probably the computer, but only just. You're not really buying much safety by having a redundant system if you make the subsystems the computers are supposed to control more complex. In an aircraft - yeah, because the computers are doing very, very, complex work. In a Prius? Nope.
BTW, I just want to say that the fact I'm posting to this article does not mean I in any way take it seriously. I've seen some bullshit posted on Slashdot in my time and... unfortunately this isn't even the worst example. Geez.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone has a UI that was "just right" while everything since just hasn't been quite... right. Mine was AmigaOS 2.04. They made changes in Workbench 3 that were probably aimed at at fixing some inconsistencies (ie everything you had to push was 3D in 2.04, except the scroll bars, so they made them 3D in 3) that, to my mind, just didn't really work out. And Workbench 1.x was godawful.
The best Mac OS/Mac OS X look, to me, was Jaguar's. Very clean. But it was flawed in some ways, and Apple tinkered with it and came up with something a little more usable but, alas, missing much of the beauty of Jaguar.
Now, GNOME seems to be heading in the opposite direction. I've not seen a version of GNOME under Ubuntu that wasn't better looking than the previous iteration.
Oh really? Mr Fancy Pants "Oooh I'm a sys admin, look at me enter commands on a command line console because I don't know how to flip electrons with a laser pen." REAL Lunix users don't use command lines, we actually short electrodes in order to program in raw machine code to download the packages we want. Also we don't use packages, we write the applications from scratch.
BTW, you may have heard of this thing called a GUI. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have one called GNOME available. I've heard, *gasp*, people use this to install applications. In a way that, staggeringly, is easier than the majority of modern Mac apps (when did this stupid crap of having to run installers to install apps under Mac OS come from anyway? You used to be able to just drag the folder to your hard drive), and infinitely easier than the Windows "way" of doing it.
Well, maybe they just want the brakes to work.
You're saying that the alternative to Uncle Steve banning the Flash plug-in is him installing it on everyone's iPhones and forcing it to be switched on at all times?
There is a happy medium you know.
Although if "Uncle Steve" thinks like that and thinks everyone will somehow be forced to run Flash the moment it appears in the app-store, it would explain a lot. Not because it explains his logic for banning it, so much as it re-enforces the idea that the man has gone completely cuckoo.
It's a rival to Fair and Balanced C. In both languages, you give both sides (C, some half-assed SmallTalk implementation) equal time, regardless of which is actually any good.
Fair and Balanced C is the version that includes Geraldo Rivera's implementation of Python.
You don't have to run it, you know.
And those of us with any sense run Flashblock, so we can get Flash when we need it, and pretend it doesn't exist at all other times (though the need for tools like FB is somewhat sad. Why exactly should a plug-in run without my asking it to anyway?)
Having actually read the article in question, it's fairly obvious "iPhone losing guy" is not their source. In addition to it not being part of the story, Apple also disabled the phone within hours of the loss, indicating iLG did, indeed, report the loss to Apple as soon as it was noticed.
Both "Ironic" and "Caused by". It's no accident that the one place in the US where the railways work is the one area of the US that was already developed by the time the railways came along.
The railways that were built elsewhere where generally built for all the wrong reasons. The Union Pacific, for example, was originally a scam, riding on a wave of idealism, in which Congress was bribed to "fund" a transcontinental line with little or no oversight for the builders. Using a fake construction company, the UP built the cheapest line they could while simultaneously charging the government several times the cost.
Why? Because at the time, most businessmen steered clear of the TR project, believing it to be destined to be unprofitable, so the only people left were the scammers, and well-connected scammers set up the UP as a way to get huge amounts of money from the government rather than to set up a functional railway as a going concern.
The consequences of this and other expansion plans, also funded by taxes or other non-rail revenue (Flagler's FEC, for example, was created as a way to make his hotel resorts profitable), was a cheap railway system that started to show serious weaknesses as soon as alternative methods of transportation became viable. Outside of the North East, the majority of lines are not grade separated, and they're mostly single track. They're just about usable for freight, as long as you don't mind it taking days for an intermodal container to go from, say, Miami to New York, but it's impossible to run trains at moderate speeds (100mph, considered "ordinary" in most of the world, is rarely achievable here, where 60mph is generally the fastest trains go outside of the NEC), and impossible to run the high frequency trains needed for passenger service to be viable.
By the mid sixties, it was largely over. High taxes and poor Unionism pushed the systems over the edge, but there was little hiding the fact that passenger levels had plummeted for reasons of practicality. Whereas passenger numbers in, say, Britain, remained largely at the same order of magnitude (even if they had dropped), passengers had all but deserted the US lines.
What the US needs is a system of sane upgrades, but alas right now most of the efforts are going into building expensive intercity high speed lines. Double tracking and grade separating the existing lines would make a much bigger difference, but it's unsexy, and thus not likely to happen.
16GB is plenty of room for a single, Blu-ray or HD DVD quality, HD movie of average length, and easily more than enough for an ATSC quality movie, even using MPEG-2. And if you want to go for "HD download" quality of the Apple TV variety (720p H.264) then all bets are off.
Remember that BD movies generally only weigh in at 20GB+ because of the extra overheads of having to carry a pseudo-lossless soundtrack or two, plus several other languages, plus a possible extra PIP video, etc. The actual "video" portion of a Blu-ray (or HD DVD) release tends to be in the 5-7GB/hour range.
The myth it requires some huge amount of storage dates back to the original BD vs HD DVD wars in which fans of the former kept stating as fact that you had to have some ungodly amount of storage to store the video that just happened to be slightly more than a single HD DVD layer. You don't. The original reason BD went for 5X the storage capacity of DVD was that it expected to have to store 5X as much data - originally BD was slated to use, and only use, MPEG2. The success of H.264 turned that on its head, with much higher quality video being stored at a much lower bit-rate. As if to add insult to injury, even MPEG-2 circa 2005-2007 is not MPEG-2 circa 2010, with ATSC's adoption of the format for HD video doing astonishing things to the development of better compressors.
I'm disappointed flash memory prices haven't fallen faster over the last year or two, and wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is a desire to save the optical industry for a little bit (or give it a chance to establish itself) as we were getting very close to a point that HD movies could be distributed on SD cards, either owned by a customer (buy a 128GB drive, take it to a store and have them copy the movie you want with the soundtracks and extras you want, for a fee, or use some kind of studio-approved software to download and store the movie in the same way) or actually mass produced for a price not far off an optical disk. I suspect the magic figure to get that going is around 2G/$ in small sizes (eg 20G for $10, not 200G for $100.) With this kind of technology, we'd be looking at the players themselves costing $10-20, perhaps even players built into TVs rather than appearing as separate boxes.
The sooner we get rid of spinning plastic discs, the better, and I'm hopeful that flash will take us there.
Well, obviously I did watch the same one as you because we agree that the sympathetic characters are based on Confederate veterans. You underplay the theme, seeing it as potentially generic and therefore generic. What I suggest though is to think about how the show comes across to an ordinary viewer. Mal is a veteran from a war based on the American Civil War... and Mal was on the losing side (ding!) and shares the same mistrust of the government of the winners that those in the South did (ding ding!)
Forget the idea that it's just a starting point, that a story about Confederate veterans is inherently interesting, and think more about the general feeling it'll give a large number of people who want to watch it.
I'm a huge fan of Dollhouse. I loved the fact Whedon didn't wimp out in his portrayal of the Dollhouse's local management as sympathetic people who follow a recognizable moral code, one that leads "good" people to facilitate a system that tore the souls from living people. I thought that was absolutely fantastic. Moreover, unlike Firefly, where it's "all OK" because it's not really the Confederacy, that's just an analogy but it's the future so all the bad stuff that's associated with the confederacy can't have happened and it must really have been a war of Alliance Aggression or whatever, Whedon throws the darkness in your face, no excuses, no apologies, that's what happened.
The show was fantastic. And a flop. And given that my praising it for "Dramatizing the Milgram Experiment" lead me to be flamed as a supporter of rapists (no, I'm serious, and the forums I read were full of people talking about it as "that rape show"), I think a major factor was that people just didn't get over the fact that the sympathetic people were responsible for terrible things, and allied with terrible causes.
Forget whether Firefly was genuinely about veterans of the Confederacy. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that it went out of its way to ensure people made those associations. And in doing so, it gave people reasons to feel uncomfortable watching it.
(Cue the "It was a war of Northern Aggression! It was never about slavery, it was about State's rights! Slaves were very well treated! The Confederacy was great!" revisionists here...)
There are probably some ATMs left that haven't been replaced that run it.
As I said above, Firefly was intended as a replacement for Dark Angel. Why would they show the replacement on a different day?
Interestingly, Friday is considered a good day by the Sci-fi/Syfy channel, whose ratings are normally fairly good on that day. Supposedly Friday being considered a "Death Slot" by the networks is a recent phenomenon, and is probably self-fulfilling.
An additional point: even taken as read, a network has certain expectations of Friday shows which take into account supposedly fewer viewers. If it didn't, it wouldn't commission them.
I just did. You just didn't like the answer.
Just because some cancellations were due to Fox's incompetence doesn't mean all of them are.
Fox did enough wrong with Firefly to obscure the real problems with the show, which was that it was a space-opera-cum-western with pro-Confederacy overtones with little appeal outside of a small cadre of "science fiction nerds who like that kind of thing."
Fox didn't commission Firefly because they were enthusiastic about the concept, but because they needed to kill the absurdly expensive and rapidly tanking Dark Angel, but do so without angering James Cameron. Commissioning a replacement science fiction show from a rising star (as Whedon was at the time) was a move that would look good enough on paper that it wouldn't appear to be a slap in the face to Cameron.
Firefly was commissioned for all the wrong reasons, it was a flop, subsequent events, such as the disastrous box office figures for Serenity (a low to medium budget film whose box office receipts - half of which are kept by the cinemas - was lower than its budget), show that the concept had virtually no appeal, and it's really only a combination of Fox's screwing with the schedule - understandable given they realized early on they had a lemon on their hands - and decent DVD sales - that's created the myth it was somehow a superb, popular, series that would have been as popular as Buffy had it just had the same level of support.
Fox also put pressure on Whedon to do things to early episodes of Dollhouse that also caused a run of barely watchable episodes until Episode 6. However, the show getting back on track, losing the abysmal Terminator ball and chain, and being nurtured by Fox did nothing to improve ratings, despite switching from barely watchable to arguably the smartest show on television. Sometimes concepts just don't work. Had Dollhouse been canceled by, say, episode 11, there'd have been enough people who had become fans of the concept for it to develop a similar cult following, who'd have likewise assumed that the problem was with Fox rather than the show itself.
But we know that isn't the case. Despite becoming good, the ratings continued to drop. Sometimes shows just don't have appeal. Sometimes the concept just isn't strong enough to attract viewers. Dollhouse was a great show that fits that description. And, alas, Firefly was a somewhat poorer show (not a bad show, don't get me wrong, but I've never understood the obsession with it as "the greatest science fiction show ever!" It's not even science fiction, it's a space opera damn it!) that also fits the description.
People have the cause and effect backward. Firefly didn't fail because Fox messed around with it. Fox messed around with it, and in the end stopped caring about it, because it was a failure.
I generally agree, but I would point out that Apple and Adobe are rivals for the DRM-infested multimedia market. Apple produces Quicktime, which is incompatible but functionally identical to Flash.
For the love of God, you've had how many people explain it to you, and you STILL engage in fucking insults and idiotic comparisons in some bizarre attempt to pretend the Insurance Reform bill was complex because of a bunch of lawyers trying to get their hand in?
Let me be the latest tool to put you out of your misery: let's start with the basics.
US HCR law = Health Insurer regulations. Canadian law = Single Payer Healthcare.
They're not the same thing. They're not trying to do the same thing. Pretending they are is like pretending a FUCKING SATURN V ROCKET is comparable to a THREE WHEELER because they both MOVE PEOPLE. And claiming the Saturn V Rocket IS AS COMPLEX AS IT IS because of some elaborate CONSPIRACY by a CABAL of ENGINEERS.
The US laws came about because too many people with power were opposed to single payer healthcare, while recognizing that the US system is utter shit. So it's a tinkering around the edges of the current system. It's a big mix of reforms to the current system designed to somehow fix it.
Is it pisspoor and utterly stupid? Why yes, it is! But that's not because the reforms are "too complex" and "designed to keep lawyers in jobs", it's because they're fucking retarded, put together by a bunch of ideologically hampered cretins who put right-wing ideology ahead of practicality and who were supported by sell-out wonks who wouldn't know practical if it slapped them around the head with a shark. But, hey, here's the thing, if we kept the model Romneycare (for it is that) uses, and fixed it, say, by putting in a proper control (say, the Public Option), removed the Insurer's anti-trust immunity, and federalized the exchanges, that'd be EVEN MORE COMPLEX, not less. It'd be an EVEN LONGER BILL, because on top of reforming a hundred existing entities, it'd be doing all of the above things too!
None of which changes the fact that the bill is an insurance regulation bill. Is it more complex than the Canadian Healthcare law? I take your word for it that it is. I have no idea whether there are less lines in it than, say, the Amtrak funding appropriation acts, or the law that makes it illegal to remove the tags from duvets, or the Texas constitution, but those comparisons are no less irrelevant.
They're different bills doing different things to different ends. Get over it.
Let's try again: Who would want to emulate a mythical greek hero?
This is a great conversation isn't it?
A video surfaces in which soldiers fire upon a group of unarmed (well, one or two bodyguards have AK-47s, but they're not provoking anything) civilians. A discussion arises about whether it constitutes a war crime. The subject of terrorists comes up, they don't wear uniforms gosh-darn it, and there are terrorists over there!
The implicit assertion (for if the assertion were not being made, the discussion would be at an end for this subthread would be considered a tasteless foray into the irrelevant) is that the crowd being fired upon were terrorists.
You know, Chomsky gets a lot of stick for some whacko views of his, but in terms of his essays on the use of language to justify governmental malfeasance, he's dead on, except, arguably, he doesn't credit the willingness of people to follow the narrative and extend it all by themselves without establishment prompting. The establishment sows the seeds, and after a while, the narrative is so pervasive people just pick it up and run with it anyway.
There were no terrorists. The people fired upon were not terrorists.
In all honesty, a tragic misjudgment was made by a group of almost certainly stressed, shocked, heavily armed soldiers. That happens rather a lot in wars.
That's one reason why wars are bad, And being that they're bad, wards should be avoided if at all possible.
But wars being bad is an awfully inconvenient fact when you're trying to push one for strategic reasons, because you believe that a war will help you achieve goals that require the invasion and occupation of countries by force. Which is why our glorious establishment has done its best to portray those concerned about war as "far left" unserious whackos. And it's why the media drills into its consumers, over, and over, and over again, the little threads of justifications and subconscious cues that lead a clear cut case of a government covering up a major unprovoked massacre being sanitized and rationalized as some kind of attack on a group of scary terrorists.
I didn't say there weren't.
What I said was that in terms of deterrence, there's no difference. Virtually nobody would commit a murder knowing that if caught they'd spend 25 years in prison that wouldn't if the penalty is death. Which they'd be more afraid of is beside the point, just as the relative masses of Jupiter and Saturn do not change the fact that both are well beyond the threshold that if Earth crashed into either, it'd be destroyed.
And, FWIW, there are people more afraid of 25 years in prison than death. I'm one of them. I'd rather not have either, but if something happens such that I actually do something deserving of that degree of punishment, I'll be begging for death.
No, that's just a value system you made up and a bizarre one at that. Leaving aside the fact that life is not a privilege, it isn't something an individual can forfeit, we as a society might legitimately say that someone should die, but that's not the same thing, there's the more awkward aspect that we're not failing to observe someone's "right not to be killed", we're actually killing them. If your value system were applicable, then the Judge's hammer would fall, and the Judge would say "Anyone who wants to can kill you. You may now go free."
That's not what happens. We kill. We kill in the name of saying what a senseless and immoral act killing is. We kill in a peculiarly smug and rotten way: we kill because we're think better than them because we don't kill. And when we do, we're not.
Nope.
We're talking Children here. You're not "hetero" or otherwise inclined as a child, you have practically no sexuality and what little bits of your brain are tuned that way aren't really working in any particular direction, let alone thinking about genital entanglement. I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would think the way you are, unless you're essentially claiming that kids are sexual already, and are developed enough to have concepts of sexual correctness (and I'm not talking about "Men and women live together" type stuff, there's a difference between understanding sexual attraction and seeing two adults in the same room).
And, personally, as someone who was a kid once, I know that at least one kid didn't think that way, and that's despite being told what sex was at a relatively early age. Maybe I'm extrapolating from me a little too much, but I don't have another benchmark, and it seems very, very, improbable that I was the only 5, 7, 10 year old, whatever, who didn't think in those terms.
Rape is rape. It's rotten whatever age you are. It's especially rotten when you lack the faculties and experience to at any level understand its nature as an undeserved assault upon you. At an age when you know of sex, if you do at all, only in the abstract, the gender of your attacker surely cannot make a blind bit of difference.
Personally I don't understand why homosexuality makes a difference though your comment does reflect an attitude I've heard is prevalent, that somehow pedophilia perpetrated by a male against a girl is natural, but against a boy isn't.
I really don't understand why people would think that way. What difference does it make to the evilness of acts of pedophilia whether the genders of the victims are the same as their attackers?
Speaking personally, if I were not wrongly charged, and I was likely to lose, I'd fire the lawyer, plead guilty, and ask for the Death Penalty.
If I were wrongly charged, then the equation changes completely. Sure, a lot of innocent people end up spending decades behind bars, but no innocent person expects to spend decades behind bars at the beginning. They assume there will be an appeal, they'll win the appeal, and it'll all be over in six months. For that reason, they plead not-guilty, and try to ensure if convicted anyway the sentence they get gives them the capability of being released when their innocence becomes obvious.
I absolutely definitely would rather be executed than spend thirty years in jail. But systematically, it's hard to actually predict whether you're going to spend that time in jail if you're innocent (or if you're guilty and you for some reason think you can convince people you're innocent anyway.)
If I were innocent, and convicted in a place like Texas where the system's been rigged to make it virtually impossible to get a successful appeal, I'd probably ask for the Death Penalty as soon as I'm convicted, and tell the judge exactly why so there's no doubt in anyone's minds about the reasons. But that's 'cos I'm smart enough to know when I'm beaten.
Nice to hear someone making the argument.
The "Someone did something we don't like, therefore we should hurt them" thing is to engrained in people's minds as the "It's right, because it's what I want" for it to be likely to be overcome in the justice system any time soon, but I wish it were possible for most people to step back a little occasionally and look at the problems with that logic, especially when it's taken to the N'th degree.
Death Penalty? People still promote that? Well, of course they do! Nothing says "Justice" more than wiping the person you dislike off of the face of the Earth. But in practical, realistic, terms, is it actually any better than a sentence of, say, twenty five years in prison?
I say this because the purpose of the sentence in the justice system is generally (justified as being) to deter, and to make someone who committed a crime to pay back for what it is they did, if not directly, then in some superficial "I'll suffer for what I did to someone else" way. As far as deterrence goes, it's hard to believe there's anyone out there who'd think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd spending twenty five years of my life in an 8x8 cell" but not think "I'll kill this person, the worst that can happen to me is that I'd get executed." In both cases, the penalty is significantly higher than anyone would sanely consider bearable.
And as far as pay back goes, leaving aside the fact it isn't positive pay back - nobody's getting compensated, the question has to be asked whether executions would actually be worse than long term imprisonment for anyone but an innocent person expecting to win an appeal anyway. I know I'd rather die than spend decades in jail. Actually, I'd consider death an acceptable alternative to spending five years in jail. Is Death a punishment, or an end?
And yes, I know people fight executions anyway, but I'd wager a fair few do so in the expectation they'll eventually find a way to get released, and released soon, whether that's because they're innocent (and we know a frighteningly large number of innocent people get executed), or because they believe somewhere, somehow, that there's some mitigating set of circumstances that means they don't deserve to be punished and that, one day, they'll convince someone of that. That latter group is not in any rational way "punished" via the Death Penalty either, they go the chair believing themselves to be right.
And, of course, there's an inherent logic that needs to be considered: every time we, as a society, kill someone because we don't like what they did, we're promoting the concept that it's OK to kill someone if you don't like what they did. Every time.
Punishment needs to be contained. A civilized society does contain its punishments, because it accepts that a society is not perfect, that it does not operate a perfect system, and that even those that really have wronged others are more complex than the simplistic human laws of revenge suggest.
The Justice system's system of sentencing needs to be saner and to accept the complexities of real life. Deterrence will always be necessary, and always have a major place in the system. It is not necessary for the government to threaten to kill its citizens to deter them from committing crimes. Likewise payback does not have to be 100% punishment.
If Jesus didn't exist, then whose Tomb is it that James Cameron found? Eh? Eh?
*Steps back and waits for explosions from all sides*
Yup, and then there's the space, imagine having to find space for all three computers, that means space for three 250W PSUs, three high-end nVidia Graphics cards, three 3.5" SATA drives, three..
OK, I'm kidding, but I'm kidding to make a point: cost really isn't the reason. While the computers in a Prius cost a fair bit, the costs are to do with development, not per-unit manufacturing: it's a fair guess to suggest that simply tripling the number of computers (without doing anything else, but see below because you would have to do something else...) would add dollars, rather than hundreds of dollars, to the price of a Prius.
Here's the real reason: think of what the respective Airbus A320 (the classic FBW) vs Prius computers actually do. The Airbus system is designed to make controlling a giant jet aircraft as easy as playing a computer game. Turn the joystick and the plane will fly in the direction you want it to at the speed you've told the plane to fly at the altitude you want. That's not easy, that's not even trivial in a small single engine craft, it's much more complex in a giant four engine 300+ passenger plane. Flying is a complex activity, made all the more complex by, well, being a huge aircraft. That's part of the reason why FBW was invented in the first place.
The Prius, by comparison, does very little automatically. The computer is designed to keep things chugging along in a fuel efficient manner rather than doing figuring out how to safely bank the entire car every time the driver turns the steering wheel.
Now, with that in mind, what do you think would be more complex in a Prius? The part of the computer that deals with the brake pedal and decides what systems to engage to slow the car, or devices all over the car that take votes from three or more different computers to determine whether to engage its particular subsystem?
The answer is: probably the computer, but only just. You're not really buying much safety by having a redundant system if you make the subsystems the computers are supposed to control more complex. In an aircraft - yeah, because the computers are doing very, very, complex work. In a Prius? Nope.
BTW, I just want to say that the fact I'm posting to this article does not mean I in any way take it seriously. I've seen some bullshit posted on Slashdot in my time and... unfortunately this isn't even the worst example. Geez.