I think you will find some with truly no way out and didn't have a chance from the start.
I'm not arguing that. What I am saying is that the trillions of dollars of government intervention in the last 50 years has done precious little to mitigate these circumstances, and in fact, has done a lot to make things worse.
why is Obama (the executive) the one pushing for reform, when it's Congress that makes the laws?
Because maybe he's rightfully pointing out that Congress is doing these things because they want to, and that they shouldn't. Why should Congress change their behavior when it's been so incredibly successful... for them. Whether or not the President is doing this in the spirit of true reform or for his own political ends, he's got a good point.
It has nothing to do with stereotypes and everything to do with the fact that people capable of succeeding are capable of succeeding even when the odds are against them. How is it a stereotype to suggest that successful Asians (or anyone else for that matter) are likely to be successful even if they don't have certain advantages? Remember the question was "Why are Asian immigrants generally more successful than others?" I guess by acknowledging this indisputable fact, I am a racist. Frankly, I find being accused of racism is a compliment. It means I've made some liberal idiot angry, not that that is some kind of real accomplishments, since most liberals are only just shy of the perpetual rage of radical Muslims. I find it hard to debate with people when I'm constantly dodging little flecks of spittle, but I must confess a percerse satisfaction out of aggravating small people with small minds.
Of course, crying "racism" has become the universal rebuttal to any assertion in these days of absurd, irrational, and above all content-free public discourse. Don't like the Democrats? You're a racist! Support welfare reform? You're a racist! Believe in the Rule of Law? You're a racist! Question environmental extremist dogma? You're a racist! Don't like the pizza toppings? You're a racist! (Unless of course you hate the Jews... that's encouraged).
Good point. Nevertheless, you can compare illegal immigrants to native blacks (and other perpetually poor people, which include all races) and the immigrants still come out ahead. At some point you have to stop making excuses for people, even while trying to help them.
the majority of African Americans are descended from slaves
It's been almost 150 years since there were any slaves in the U.S.. How long are people going to be excused for something that happened to their great-to-the-nth-grandparents?
Ironically, it only takes one generation to break the cycle, at which point a familial background of slavery is irrelevant. In fact, it's irrelevant anyway. Current racism is certainly relevant but is nowhere near as bad as many make it out, but events that happened more than a century before most of us were born aren't as influential as they are made out to be. The fact that we have had a black president (even if his ancestors were far more likely to have been slavers than slaves), blacks on the Supreme Court and in many Cabinet positions, as well as in leadership posts in Congress and the major political parties has to count for something.
Absolutely no one can argue that the President's children are likely to become anything other than successful in business or politics or whatever else they choose, regardless of their heritage, nor could be said the children of any person with any modicum of success and self-reliance.
On the other hand, the "soft racism of diminushed expectations" which in my mind is anything but soft, will effectively hold people thrall for as long as it is allowed to exist. It's human nature.
You can blame the individual, but you should also blame their circumstances.
Absolutely, and yet the circumstances you speak of, which are extremely significant, are also hugely influenced by the very things created to help remediate them. The Welfare State has been a huge factor in the skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births, and especially of children being raised by single mothers, which is a guarantee of significant disadvantages throughout life and a demonstrated factor leading to increased delinquency, drug-abuse, violence, and many other effects that rob these poor folks of their chance to become self-sufficient.
The very proponents who throw ever more increasing amounts of money into a broken education system while simultaneously cementing the self-serving power of the teacher unions who are a very effective roadblock to proper reform, resulting in schools in many cities that are on the level with those in the poorest third-world countries, all the while refusing to budge an inch on issues like vouchers, which are perhaps the only way possible to give many poor people a decent education, do nothing but perpetuate the cycle of despair and dependency.
Politicians who constantly invoke class-warfare rhetoric do nothing but perpetuate envy and resentment at a system that can provide the means for economic freedom to almost everyone subvert the very people they are seeking to represent by casting them as helpless victims rather than working to offer true alternatives, and encouragement to try to join the system rather than mindlessly protest it.
How does it help anyone when all these people hear is how they need the government to GIVE them everything, rather than needing the government to HELP them get things themselves? When our sitting President flat-out says his goal is to "redistribute the wealth", how does that encourage anyone to want to do anything more than sit around and wait for a handout? When the Reverend White, and his ilk, who strike me as being much closer in ideology to radical Muslims than any Christian I've ever known, literally preaches hatred for this country and the majority of its citizens, how can he expect to reap anything but anger and perhaps even violence, instead of real reform and real good?
So yes, I do blame the circumstances, but more importantly, I blame the people who have ensured that these circumstances, both economic and psychological, remain bad, and will never get better.
You seem to be suggesting that those who pimp out the lowered expectations do it on purpose & with full knowledge of it's effect for their own gain. I can't believe they are doing so with a full understanding of their effect.
Well, maybe I'm a little more cynical than you. I can't imagine everyone who buys into that mindset is out to exploit the unfortunate, but the effects are the same in either case. The "Great Society" has precious little to show for the trillions it saps from our national coffers.
I found it much easier to believe when the Republicans and Democrats have both colluded to keep illegal immigration relatively easy, and extremely prolific. The Democrats, of course, seem to see these immigrants as a huge untapped political resource, since they are relatively uneducated and relatively poor (otherwise they wouldn't need to come here), which make them highly susceptible to the political bribe tactics that party uses. The Republicans seem to see these immigrants as a handout to businesses who use them to avoid paying taxes and to some extent skirting labor laws.
Both parties seem to see the immigrants as a perpetual underclass that can be exploited in ways that allow the U.S. to compete economically with all those other countries with lower corporate taxes (which is most of them) and more lax labor protections (which is most of the Third World). The erosion of law and order, along with the Balkanization of part of the U.S., the obvious terror threat porous borders encourages, and the inevitable backlash against legitimate immigrants (or even those illegals) who just want to come here for a chance to work hard and succeed, is apparently irrelevant to them.
Given the incredible cynicism our politicians have shamelessly, even arrogantly, displayed on the immigration issue, I have no doubts of their cynicism and destructive self-interest on any other issue where their stated goals and what they seem to be doing are not consistent.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. It doesn't take money to climb the socio-economic ladder (although it surely helps a lot), it takes initiative, drive and holding education in value. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
It most assuredly is culture that a large factor in the success of some people and the continual failure of others. When everyone around you, including your church leaders and government leaders are telling you that whitey is keeping you down (like, say, our President's pastor for almost half his life), how is it surprising if you believe it and give up on life?
The biggest factor afflicting the perennially poor, of which blacks comprise and unfortunately large proportion, is the people who exploit them by pounding into their heads that they are now and can only ever be victims: and those people are also too often black themselves and mostly liberals. They are the ones keeping the poor down, by stripping them of their dignity and enslaving them in the chains of lowered expectations, and perpetual dependency. After all, if the persistent underclass were to rise out their problems, who would want to listen to the stupid class-warfare rhetoric that so many of our leaders spew like a KKK Grand Wizard?
Well, it's a big step up from Office 2003 where OOo could open up Word documents that Office couldn't.
I lost whatever lingering dregs of respect I had for Microsoft when writing a Word document on the Mac, and Word crashed, corrupting the saved document as well. This was in 2005. I can't even remember the last time an app crashed _and_ managed to toast the document on disk too. Probably in 80's. After I rewrote the document from scratch (in OOo, where is was so much easier to make simple table it wasn't funny, and it wasn't modal for crying out loud, why is Word modal, especially since it's in really subtle ways?!), someone suggested that OOo possibly could have opened the document since it had a reputation of not being as bad as Microsoft at their own format.
Of course, with Microsoft you're always dealing with crap you thought you'd never see again 10 years ago.
I kind of guess, although one of my kids saw "Ghost Rider" and liked it, so I put it on my Netflix. I'll still give it a spin. I'm curious to see if there's ever going be a movie with Nicholas Cage in it that I like.
The thing that blew my mind when I finally decided to look at the Analog TV code that the Apple ][ screensaver a couple others uses is that it's not just faking the effects, but it's actually simulating the real effects of interference, etc, on a picture tube. In other words, it simulates the operation of a CRT and what happens to the signal to cause the various effects we used to see in the Good Ol' Days.
I definitely didn't understand it all, but it's a very cool and convincing effect.
I don't think "Spider-Man 3" sucked, although I agree about the criticism of cramming too many characters into it. The worst Marvel movie of the "modern era" (i.e., everything since "Spider-Man") had to have been "X-Men 3"... and yes I'm including the first Hulk movie in that (although not "Elektra" and "Ghost Rider" since I didn't see them).
They took possibly the best superhero story I ever read and turned into a huge incoherent mess of a movie that deviated substantially from the original story for no reason whatsoever. It wasn't done for dramatic effect and it made the story just plain suck. Whereas in the books Jean Grey was a character you'd grown to love over the years, and who became much more interesting (and a little scary) after her transformation into Phoenix (no, I don't play retcon games, I interpret the story as written)... in the movie she was just another computer sprite who needed to be offed so we could get to the closing credits.
That's okay. I heard Ripley might show up towards the end, when they blow up the Enterprise and Kirk dies.... and then T. J. Hooker sits up in bed and exclaims, "You wouldn't believe the dream I had..."
I actually worked at AOL for a while. Never used it, but I did work there. I got cut in one of the annual mass layoffs. I'm much happier now.
Oh, and for the record, I think autorun was one of the worst features ever, especially since it wasn't until relatively recently that you could effectively turn it off... at least without some kind of registry juju. I don't want it. I've never wanted it. Yet for years I would tell it to "Always do this action" where the action is "Do Nothing", which never worked. It's just like Microsoft to create a feature that should be optional, is incredibly annoying to a small subset of users (like me) and can't be turned off.
It similar with turning off file extensions by default. I still cannot come up with a single reason why that ever would have made sense to anyone. Let's see, I'm looking at this program I want to install. There are 6 files named "Setup", but I'm sure I can identify the correct one by identifying one of the completely inscrutable 8x8 icons. And if you ever actually found a file named "README", Windows XP would have no idea what to do with it. I recall that was one of the first things I did when first using XP, and it offers to look online for an answer (which it never finds). I couldn't believe my eyes. Microsoft spends umpty-ump billion dollars creating the allegedly smartest, easiest to use OS ever and it doesn't know how to handle possibly the most common filename in all of computing history.
I wonder if Windows 7 will account for the concept of a file without an extension? Can you assign an action to an empty extension in Vista? You sure couldn't in XP. Yet another in a long string of stupid things I never would have imagined possible until I saw it.
The obsession with pixel perfect rendering and the complete ignorance on readable results is truly annoying and goes against anything that was considered "good practice" in the good old days.
What? You act like HTML wasn't intended to be a WYSIWYG presentation and GUI application platform but some kind of markup language describing the semantics of your document so that a browser can render it in some theoretically arbitrary, but meaningful and readable way.
Next you'll be telling me fat clients are on the way out.
What's ridiculous is that compared to a hundred years ago, the use of language is deteriorating rapidly. At the rate we are going in another century we'll be using Orwell's Newspeak (as the political correctness types would like) or just grunting at each other (if the education types are allowed to keep running the schools). Either way, as the populace gets more and more ignorant our leaders will continue to become worse and worse.
Maybe the Europeans just assume that the government is taking care of the source code. The problem is that any time the government adopts source code, it slowly but inevitably morphs into COBOL. The U.S. government still maintains the Strategic Reserve of Ada that dates from the Cold War era. Although a small amount of the code was repurposed to run elevators, no one has any use for the vast majority of all that old code. Pressure from environmental groups have made burying it in/dev/null politically risky, and no one can convince people to adopt code that's sitting on tape in a warehouse in Nebraska. It's a tough situation with no obvious solutions.
I'll have to remember that trick for when mine are old enough to start playing crap on the radio. "Sorry, m'boy. The only way we can keep the boogy-man away is to spin up some of Dad's Floyd albums. Maybe you can listen to your music really quietly in the basement."
My oldest is 15, and so far he has been immune to peer pressure on the subject of music. And most other things too... he's a good kid. In any event, he's been exposed to a lot of good music since he was a baby, and has definitely acquired a taste that is similar to mine (and to a lesser extent his Mom's, but only since she doesn't listen to music nearly as much as I do). The same thing happened to me growing up. I ended up really liking what I was hearing from my Dad ("classic" rock, back before it was a cliche, some country, some proto-progressive music), and my tastes branched off from there. I completely bypassed disco (ugh!) and punk and other popular movements.
My kids are free to listen to whatever they like, but since they've been exposed to so much good stuff at home (all kinds of progressive rock, jazz and classical) they tend to like that. Will they change their tastes or interests as they get older? Maybe... and that's fine. Nevertheless, my plan has been to set the example and let things grow as they may. The contrast between what I consider to be "good" music and what's popular is much stronger than it was in the 70s when pop music hadn't yet completely devolved to the level it's at today.
My little brother (13 years younger) liked some of the same things as me when I was still living at home. After I moved out, he went through a brief rap phase, discovered the "classics" (big air quotes because I refer to "classic rock", not classical music) and now digs jam bands and bluegrass. There's are not often my cuppa, but are definitely something I think is cool.
It's all a matter of what you're exposed to. In the absence of good music, many people won't find that overly simplistic and repetitious music can get tiresome, or that better alternatives are out there. Some people never see music as more than background noise or something to dance to. I also have a personal pet theory that tone deafness is a spectrum and that most people have it to some degree or other, so melody and harmony just don't have the same effect on them as it does for others. Others don't have the patience or interest in acquiring the taste. (e.g., I sometimes didn't like many of my favorites the first time I heard them). And other people just like what they like, and there's never anything wrong with that.
Of course, I find the idea of scary stories very appealing...
The last time I had a Big Mac, which was around 15 years ago, I formulated a theory that McDonalds extracts all the joy from their burgers and sells it to Wendy's on the side.
My sensation after eating a Big Mac was that I felt like I had eaten something. I certainly remembered it. I could feel the weight of it in my stomach. But I had no memory of enjoyment of food.
I'm no food snot... I like junk food. I like fast food, but McDonalds burgers are in a category all by themselves. They do have some products I like. Their fries are good. Their fish sammitches are OK. Their salads are pretty good. Some of their pseudo-Mexican things are OK.
But burgers? They are almost but not quite entirely unlike food.
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I think you will find some with truly no way out and didn't have a chance from the start.
I'm not arguing that. What I am saying is that the trillions of dollars of government intervention in the last 50 years has done precious little to mitigate these circumstances, and in fact, has done a lot to make things worse.
Why the hell cant you get it right microsoft? WHY?
Because obviously they hadn't had the luxury of your well-reasoned, thoroughly detailed, and above all, well-worded criticism. 'S obvious innit?
why is Obama (the executive) the one pushing for reform, when it's Congress that makes the laws?
Because maybe he's rightfully pointing out that Congress is doing these things because they want to, and that they shouldn't. Why should Congress change their behavior when it's been so incredibly successful... for them. Whether or not the President is doing this in the spirit of true reform or for his own political ends, he's got a good point.
It has nothing to do with stereotypes and everything to do with the fact that people capable of succeeding are capable of succeeding even when the odds are against them. How is it a stereotype to suggest that successful Asians (or anyone else for that matter) are likely to be successful even if they don't have certain advantages? Remember the question was "Why are Asian immigrants generally more successful than others?" I guess by acknowledging this indisputable fact, I am a racist. Frankly, I find being accused of racism is a compliment. It means I've made some liberal idiot angry, not that that is some kind of real accomplishments, since most liberals are only just shy of the perpetual rage of radical Muslims. I find it hard to debate with people when I'm constantly dodging little flecks of spittle, but I must confess a percerse satisfaction out of aggravating small people with small minds.
Of course, crying "racism" has become the universal rebuttal to any assertion in these days of absurd, irrational, and above all content-free public discourse. Don't like the Democrats? You're a racist! Support welfare reform? You're a racist! Believe in the Rule of Law? You're a racist! Question environmental extremist dogma? You're a racist! Don't like the pizza toppings? You're a racist! (Unless of course you hate the Jews... that's encouraged).
You're missing something very obvious here.
Good point. Nevertheless, you can compare illegal immigrants to native blacks (and other perpetually poor people, which include all races) and the immigrants still come out ahead. At some point you have to stop making excuses for people, even while trying to help them.
the majority of African Americans are descended from slaves
It's been almost 150 years since there were any slaves in the U.S.. How long are people going to be excused for something that happened to their great-to-the-nth-grandparents?
Ironically, it only takes one generation to break the cycle, at which point a familial background of slavery is irrelevant. In fact, it's irrelevant anyway. Current racism is certainly relevant but is nowhere near as bad as many make it out, but events that happened more than a century before most of us were born aren't as influential as they are made out to be. The fact that we have had a black president (even if his ancestors were far more likely to have been slavers than slaves), blacks on the Supreme Court and in many Cabinet positions, as well as in leadership posts in Congress and the major political parties has to count for something.
Absolutely no one can argue that the President's children are likely to become anything other than successful in business or politics or whatever else they choose, regardless of their heritage, nor could be said the children of any person with any modicum of success and self-reliance.
On the other hand, the "soft racism of diminushed expectations" which in my mind is anything but soft, will effectively hold people thrall for as long as it is allowed to exist. It's human nature.
You can blame the individual, but you should also blame their circumstances.
Absolutely, and yet the circumstances you speak of, which are extremely significant, are also hugely influenced by the very things created to help remediate them. The Welfare State has been a huge factor in the skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births, and especially of children being raised by single mothers, which is a guarantee of significant disadvantages throughout life and a demonstrated factor leading to increased delinquency, drug-abuse, violence, and many other effects that rob these poor folks of their chance to become self-sufficient.
The very proponents who throw ever more increasing amounts of money into a broken education system while simultaneously cementing the self-serving power of the teacher unions who are a very effective roadblock to proper reform, resulting in schools in many cities that are on the level with those in the poorest third-world countries, all the while refusing to budge an inch on issues like vouchers, which are perhaps the only way possible to give many poor people a decent education, do nothing but perpetuate the cycle of despair and dependency.
Politicians who constantly invoke class-warfare rhetoric do nothing but perpetuate envy and resentment at a system that can provide the means for economic freedom to almost everyone subvert the very people they are seeking to represent by casting them as helpless victims rather than working to offer true alternatives, and encouragement to try to join the system rather than mindlessly protest it.
How does it help anyone when all these people hear is how they need the government to GIVE them everything, rather than needing the government to HELP them get things themselves? When our sitting President flat-out says his goal is to "redistribute the wealth", how does that encourage anyone to want to do anything more than sit around and wait for a handout? When the Reverend White, and his ilk, who strike me as being much closer in ideology to radical Muslims than any Christian I've ever known, literally preaches hatred for this country and the majority of its citizens, how can he expect to reap anything but anger and perhaps even violence, instead of real reform and real good?
So yes, I do blame the circumstances, but more importantly, I blame the people who have ensured that these circumstances, both economic and psychological, remain bad, and will never get better.
You seem to be suggesting that those who pimp out the lowered expectations do it on purpose & with full knowledge of it's effect for their own gain. I can't believe they are doing so with a full understanding of their effect.
Well, maybe I'm a little more cynical than you. I can't imagine everyone who buys into that mindset is out to exploit the unfortunate, but the effects are the same in either case. The "Great Society" has precious little to show for the trillions it saps from our national coffers.
I found it much easier to believe when the Republicans and Democrats have both colluded to keep illegal immigration relatively easy, and extremely prolific. The Democrats, of course, seem to see these immigrants as a huge untapped political resource, since they are relatively uneducated and relatively poor (otherwise they wouldn't need to come here), which make them highly susceptible to the political bribe tactics that party uses. The Republicans seem to see these immigrants as a handout to businesses who use them to avoid paying taxes and to some extent skirting labor laws.
Both parties seem to see the immigrants as a perpetual underclass that can be exploited in ways that allow the U.S. to compete economically with all those other countries with lower corporate taxes (which is most of them) and more lax labor protections (which is most of the Third World). The erosion of law and order, along with the Balkanization of part of the U.S., the obvious terror threat porous borders encourages, and the inevitable backlash against legitimate immigrants (or even those illegals) who just want to come here for a chance to work hard and succeed, is apparently irrelevant to them.
Given the incredible cynicism our politicians have shamelessly, even arrogantly, displayed on the immigration issue, I have no doubts of their cynicism and destructive self-interest on any other issue where their stated goals and what they seem to be doing are not consistent.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. It doesn't take money to climb the socio-economic ladder (although it surely helps a lot), it takes initiative, drive and holding education in value. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
It most assuredly is culture that a large factor in the success of some people and the continual failure of others. When everyone around you, including your church leaders and government leaders are telling you that whitey is keeping you down (like, say, our President's pastor for almost half his life), how is it surprising if you believe it and give up on life?
The biggest factor afflicting the perennially poor, of which blacks comprise and unfortunately large proportion, is the people who exploit them by pounding into their heads that they are now and can only ever be victims: and those people are also too often black themselves and mostly liberals. They are the ones keeping the poor down, by stripping them of their dignity and enslaving them in the chains of lowered expectations, and perpetual dependency. After all, if the persistent underclass were to rise out their problems, who would want to listen to the stupid class-warfare rhetoric that so many of our leaders spew like a KKK Grand Wizard?
Well, it's a big step up from Office 2003 where OOo could open up Word documents that Office couldn't.
I lost whatever lingering dregs of respect I had for Microsoft when writing a Word document on the Mac, and Word crashed, corrupting the saved document as well. This was in 2005. I can't even remember the last time an app crashed _and_ managed to toast the document on disk too. Probably in 80's. After I rewrote the document from scratch (in OOo, where is was so much easier to make simple table it wasn't funny, and it wasn't modal for crying out loud, why is Word modal, especially since it's in really subtle ways?!), someone suggested that OOo possibly could have opened the document since it had a reputation of not being as bad as Microsoft at their own format.
Of course, with Microsoft you're always dealing with crap you thought you'd never see again 10 years ago.
The beam could "dwell" on a specific spot or line if needed, making it glow like nobody's mamma.
My mamma worked at Chernobyl, you insensitive clod!
I kind of guess, although one of my kids saw "Ghost Rider" and liked it, so I put it on my Netflix. I'll still give it a spin. I'm curious to see if there's ever going be a movie with Nicholas Cage in it that I like.
The thing that blew my mind when I finally decided to look at the Analog TV code that the Apple ][ screensaver a couple others uses is that it's not just faking the effects, but it's actually simulating the real effects of interference, etc, on a picture tube. In other words, it simulates the operation of a CRT and what happens to the signal to cause the various effects we used to see in the Good Ol' Days.
I definitely didn't understand it all, but it's a very cool and convincing effect.
I don't think "Spider-Man 3" sucked, although I agree about the criticism of cramming too many characters into it. The worst Marvel movie of the "modern era" (i.e., everything since "Spider-Man") had to have been "X-Men 3"... and yes I'm including the first Hulk movie in that (although not "Elektra" and "Ghost Rider" since I didn't see them).
They took possibly the best superhero story I ever read and turned into a huge incoherent mess of a movie that deviated substantially from the original story for no reason whatsoever. It wasn't done for dramatic effect and it made the story just plain suck. Whereas in the books Jean Grey was a character you'd grown to love over the years, and who became much more interesting (and a little scary) after her transformation into Phoenix (no, I don't play retcon games, I interpret the story as written)... in the movie she was just another computer sprite who needed to be offed so we could get to the closing credits.
That's okay. I heard Ripley might show up towards the end, when they blow up the Enterprise and Kirk dies. ... and then T. J. Hooker sits up in bed and exclaims, "You wouldn't believe the dream I had..."
I actually worked at AOL for a while. Never used it, but I did work there. I got cut in one of the annual mass layoffs. I'm much happier now.
Oh, and for the record, I think autorun was one of the worst features ever, especially since it wasn't until relatively recently that you could effectively turn it off... at least without some kind of registry juju. I don't want it. I've never wanted it. Yet for years I would tell it to "Always do this action" where the action is "Do Nothing", which never worked. It's just like Microsoft to create a feature that should be optional, is incredibly annoying to a small subset of users (like me) and can't be turned off.
It similar with turning off file extensions by default. I still cannot come up with a single reason why that ever would have made sense to anyone. Let's see, I'm looking at this program I want to install. There are 6 files named "Setup", but I'm sure I can identify the correct one by identifying one of the completely inscrutable 8x8 icons. And if you ever actually found a file named "README", Windows XP would have no idea what to do with it. I recall that was one of the first things I did when first using XP, and it offers to look online for an answer (which it never finds). I couldn't believe my eyes. Microsoft spends umpty-ump billion dollars creating the allegedly smartest, easiest to use OS ever and it doesn't know how to handle possibly the most common filename in all of computing history.
I wonder if Windows 7 will account for the concept of a file without an extension? Can you assign an action to an empty extension in Vista? You sure couldn't in XP. Yet another in a long string of stupid things I never would have imagined possible until I saw it.
The obsession with pixel perfect rendering and the complete ignorance on readable results is truly annoying and goes against anything that was considered "good practice" in the good old days.
What? You act like HTML wasn't intended to be a WYSIWYG presentation and GUI application platform but some kind of markup language describing the semantics of your document so that a browser can render it in some theoretically arbitrary, but meaningful and readable way.
Next you'll be telling me fat clients are on the way out.
If the only appropriate down mod is -1, Overrated, don't mod!
Overrated and underrated are metamods and have no business being moderation types. But I don't expect that to ever change.
Is "Exceleration" what you feel when you use Microsoft's Spreadsheet software?
What's ridiculous is that compared to a hundred years ago, the use of language is deteriorating rapidly. At the rate we are going in another century we'll be using Orwell's Newspeak (as the political correctness types would like) or just grunting at each other (if the education types are allowed to keep running the schools). Either way, as the populace gets more and more ignorant our leaders will continue to become worse and worse.
Unless Supergrass is some new extra potent marijuana blend, it sounds like you're doing great. ;-)
Maybe the Europeans just assume that the government is taking care of the source code. The problem is that any time the government adopts source code, it slowly but inevitably morphs into COBOL. The U.S. government still maintains the Strategic Reserve of Ada that dates from the Cold War era. Although a small amount of the code was repurposed to run elevators, no one has any use for the vast majority of all that old code. Pressure from environmental groups have made burying it in /dev/null politically risky, and no one can convince people to adopt code that's sitting on tape in a warehouse in Nebraska. It's a tough situation with no obvious solutions.
Are all of you people that write this joke former SNL writers trying to sharpen your skills?
And the sad part is that they apparently save their good material for /.
I'll have to remember that trick for when mine are old enough to start playing crap on the radio. "Sorry, m'boy. The only way we can keep the boogy-man away is to spin up some of Dad's Floyd albums. Maybe you can listen to your music really quietly in the basement."
My oldest is 15, and so far he has been immune to peer pressure on the subject of music. And most other things too... he's a good kid. In any event, he's been exposed to a lot of good music since he was a baby, and has definitely acquired a taste that is similar to mine (and to a lesser extent his Mom's, but only since she doesn't listen to music nearly as much as I do). The same thing happened to me growing up. I ended up really liking what I was hearing from my Dad ("classic" rock, back before it was a cliche, some country, some proto-progressive music), and my tastes branched off from there. I completely bypassed disco (ugh!) and punk and other popular movements.
My kids are free to listen to whatever they like, but since they've been exposed to so much good stuff at home (all kinds of progressive rock, jazz and classical) they tend to like that. Will they change their tastes or interests as they get older? Maybe... and that's fine. Nevertheless, my plan has been to set the example and let things grow as they may. The contrast between what I consider to be "good" music and what's popular is much stronger than it was in the 70s when pop music hadn't yet completely devolved to the level it's at today.
My little brother (13 years younger) liked some of the same things as me when I was still living at home. After I moved out, he went through a brief rap phase, discovered the "classics" (big air quotes because I refer to "classic rock", not classical music) and now digs jam bands and bluegrass. There's are not often my cuppa, but are definitely something I think is cool.
It's all a matter of what you're exposed to. In the absence of good music, many people won't find that overly simplistic and repetitious music can get tiresome, or that better alternatives are out there. Some people never see music as more than background noise or something to dance to. I also have a personal pet theory that tone deafness is a spectrum and that most people have it to some degree or other, so melody and harmony just don't have the same effect on them as it does for others. Others don't have the patience or interest in acquiring the taste. (e.g., I sometimes didn't like many of my favorites the first time I heard them). And other people just like what they like, and there's never anything wrong with that.
Of course, I find the idea of scary stories very appealing...
>A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick's estate...
In that single collection of words is everything that's wrong with our copyright system...
Nonsense. It doesn't include the terms "Sonny Bono" and "Disney".
The last time I had a Big Mac, which was around 15 years ago, I formulated a theory that McDonalds extracts all the joy from their burgers and sells it to Wendy's on the side.
My sensation after eating a Big Mac was that I felt like I had eaten something. I certainly remembered it. I could feel the weight of it in my stomach. But I had no memory of enjoyment of food.
I'm no food snot... I like junk food. I like fast food, but McDonalds burgers are in a category all by themselves. They do have some products I like. Their fries are good. Their fish sammitches are OK. Their salads are pretty good. Some of their pseudo-Mexican things are OK.
But burgers? They are almost but not quite entirely unlike food.