Take all the best parts of the movie. String them together in one 2-minute epileptic-seizure-inducing orgasm of light and sound, preferably with some modern rock/psuedo-metal song in the background. Stick your title on the end in a grunge or techno font along with "This movie has not yet been rated," and a release date between 6 months and a year into the future.
No, that's a teaser.
A trailer is where you start with some soothing an peaceful scene, when
[Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells"/Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs' "Louie Louie"/Smashmouth's "All-Star"]
starts playing and Don LaFontaine intones the words "In a world
[gone mad/where dreams come true/where shit happens]..."
and some fast paced cuts show the the audience that this movie is supposed to be
[scary/funny/action-packed].
Then Mr. Fontaine tells us about the "one
[man/woman/dog]
[brave/smart/stupid]
enough to
[fight for something/change everything/screw everything up]"
while we see our protagonist looking
[determined/happy/dumb as a sack of hammers].
Then a quick montage of the
[funniest/exploding-est/tear-jerking-est]
scenes interspersed with a voiceover telling us what
[A-list/B-list/C-list]
celebrities have top billing and that the movie is
[based on a book by somebody/based on a true story/based on an older, better movie/from the director of some other movie that made money],
then finally we get the title of the movie and a screenful of tiny text acknowledging all the people who got paid enough to feed a village in Botswana for a
[month/year/decade]
for their work on the film.
This is a standard part of any film school curriculum, you see. Job applications in Hollywood test you on this stuff.
This camera is an OEM version of the Smalcamera Ultra-Pocket. See smalcamera.com for the original developer of this camera. It won "Best of Show" at CES 2001. It's been on sale in Japan for a while as the "eyeplate" under the Fuji AXIA brand - see here. The english version of the eyeplate manual is available for download here.
I ordered one of these from japan a few weeks ago, and it's the coolest little thing. The battery is lithium-polymer and recharges from the USB port while you download pictures, so really, one never has to worry about the battery at all (a *HUGE* plus). It's only a 640x480 CMOS camera, but it fits in my wallet, and takes reasonable photos for web/email use.
The AXIA version only has 8 megs of flash, compared to the Logitech's 16, but I much prefer the eyeplate's slimmer design. It's a flat 6 mm thick - the lens/viewfinder assembly pops up when you turn it on, and to turn it off yo just push the lens assembly back - way cool!
Actually, in 1998 the HST directly imaged Betelgeuse, but then, it's a supergiant with a diameter greater than the orbit of Jupiter, and only 600 light-years distant.
-Isaac
Re:Blogs (and /.) are most definitely journalism!
on
Blogging for Dummies?
·
· Score: 2
No it isn't. Yes, Slashdot has some original content, but the signal to noise ratio is way off balance. The majority of Slashdot is links to other sites, with editorial comments added in for the sake of it. A news digest? Maybe. Journalism? No. Throwing links around doesn't make the site a hotbed of journalistic goodness.
Some articles merit only a link and a sentence -e.g., "At last, the long awaited Mozilla 1.0 is released, and has emerged on the ftp.mozilla.org ftp-server." - but it's news! Sure, I could diligently check mozilla.org regularly, but then I could also go to the police department directly to find out about crime in my town. I do neither of these things because I have Slashdot and a newspaper, respectively. "Journalism" doesn't have a length requirement - not all reporting need be Pulitzer-bait.
In a very broad and basic sense, yes, you could consider Slashdot and "blogs" to be "journalism." You could also consider someone who did a paint-by-numbers picture to be an "artist" as well. But in the end, you won't see that paint-by-numbers picture in an art museum, nor will you see Slashdot "journalism" in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal...or even your local hometown newspaper.
No paint-by-numbers in an art museum? I guess Warhol and Duchamp never lived.
As to whether one sees Slashdot "journalism" in the Times, I wonder what you mean. I've seen links to Slashdot stories from other media outlets that could certainly be considered "real media" - or did you mean a reprint of a Slashdot article? What would be the difference between a newspaper reprinting a/. article and/. linking to a newspaper article? Or maybe you meant no newspaper would use/.'s style. Fair enough. But that doesn't make Slashdot "not journalism".
Because they are (usually) opinionated and show bias, both big no-nos in traditional journalism. Opinion writing is a part of journalism, but it is not what journalism is all about. That's why newspapers dedicate one or two pages to op-ed pieces.
Ah, here we go. The "unbiased" canard. You are absolutely naive if you believe that *ANY* journalist or media outlet is without biases that are reflected in its reporting. At least a blog wears its biases on its sleeve, unlike the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (compare the two, sometime). Do you believe that reporters don't take a certain angle on a story based on their own biases? Do you honestly believe that editorial bias plays no part in deciding what goes above the fold in the NYT or WSJ, or what makes the top story on CNN or FoxNews? Hell, have you ever wondered why Ha'aretz and Al Hayat read so differently?
The savvy consumer of news considers many sources to interpolate what really happened. Ever read Rashomon?
You can call "blogs" journalism all you want, but until you've actually been in the trenches and worked with real journalists, who do it as a profession, you probably won't understand what journalism is all about.
Tee-hee, you snobs are cute. Look, I'm not saying Slashdot (or any blog to date) is worthy of the Pulitzer. I'm just saying that "journalism" is a word broad enough to cover Slashdot and other blogs. Sorry if you don't like it.
"When I use a word, "Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all."
Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1896.
-Isaac
Re:Blogs (and /.) are most definitely journalism!
on
Blogging for Dummies?
·
· Score: 2
Because you're an idiot that wants to call a lemon an apple? Slashdot is to journalism as Freshmeat is to Python. You'll find links to both, but neither includes it.
Slashdot has original articles, interviews, and reviews, as well as links to other sites. It is not simply a directory. Ergo, it is rightly called journalism, IMO.
And personal journals are journalism now? WTF? I guess my IRC logs are journalism too, now. Get a grip.
Why aren't personal journals journalism? They're often more informative than articles from other media outlets that are retreads of press releases or press conferences that I could read on my own - at least Slashdot has the dignity to just link instead of going through the farce of paraphrasing.
Your IRC logs might not be journalism per se, but if you presented them in a cohesive fashion, with attention to the meaning of the conversations logged, that might well be journalism.
-Isaac
Blogs (and /.) are most definitely journalism!
on
Blogging for Dummies?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Please, take a look around at your mass media outlets. Really read the articles closely and look for sources. What do you find? Much, if not most of what passes for news comes from official statements and press releases. Sometime's it's damned difficult when reading a news article to find the actual source - it's usually an off-hand clause like "Foo, according to a report by such-and-such organization" or "According to General So-and-so, bar" buried somewhere in the third or fifth paragraph. Frequently, stories may be based off of other stories - "According to the Associated Press,..." - particularly in TV news. This sort of reporting is no better than what Slashdot provides, and I am, consequently, disinclined to call Slashdot something other than journalism.
My hunch, in fact, is that considering the various reviews, interviews, and articles, Slashdot's percentage of original content compares favorably with lots of so-called mass media outlets. In fact, it's got a big leg up on mass media insofar as one often finds the people mentioned in the stories, or people with a personal connection to the story, posting comments, giving readers a different perspective on the article. I'm not prone to hyperbole, so I won't call slashdot "visionary" or "groundbreaking" but I do call it "really cool" and, most definitely, "journalism".
Blogs, too, are journalism. Personal diaries may be the most trivial form of journalism, but it is, at least, reporting. It may not be up to the standards of Columbia, or conformant to the AP style guide, but I've read a lot of crap in "real" news outlets and a lot of informative, if non-traditional, reporting on blog sites. In any case, I'm leery of refusing to call blogs journalism, as it plays into the hands of those who would separate "journalists" from the rest of the public and confer upon them rights that are (IMO) properly invested in us all - particularly freedoms of speech and of the press.
Consider the case of Paul Trummel who has been jailed for refusing to take down articles on his website, on the grounds that he is "not really a journalist." Understand why I'm not so keen on drawing a line between "journalist" and blogger?
My internship with Raytheon was actually doing development work for this project. Although they were still behind schedule then, what they did have up and running at the time sure looked a hell of a lot better than the old system.
Are you an air traffic controller? The salient question is not whether the Raytheon system looks better, but whether it works better. According to some of the people who actually have to work with the system in the real world on a daily basis, it doesn't work better.
The old system wasn't pretty, or even the most reliable, but at least its most common failure mode leaves radar data on the screen, albeit without flight or transponder information. The STARS system, according to the DOT memo linked at the top, sometimes fails to display some planes AT ALL which seems a much, much more serious failure mode. I also wonder if STARS can suffer a computer outage and still display unadorned radar data (as the existing system typically can), or if it's entirely and totally computer dependent.
Indeed, the anti-death-penalty groups have spent years looking for a posterboy, for a case they can point to of someone who was wrongfully executed. I find it very reassuring that they have not yet found one...
It's tough to find a "posterboy" when evidence in capital cases is destroyed after the sentence is carried out. I think it likely that at least some innocents have been executed in this country in the last century, but we may differ on this point. My personal belief is that the wrongful execution of even one is unjustifiable, and if any possibility of this exists, then the death penalty cannot be justified.
No one is per se defending our record with the Native American tribes, just as no one is defending the genocidal wars those tribes were waging against each other over the same land when we arrived. But that's hardly a current complaint, now is it?
I'm just saying that our country has broken treaties before, so it wouldn't be a stretch to think that we might break more in the future. You ignored this, went off on a rant about Kyoto and ABM, and now are trying to misdirect the discussion with some dishonest hand-waving that boils down to "Hey, I'm not saying we didn't break treaties, but hey, they deserved it, and besides, that was a long time ago."
Well, with a nick like neocon and your style of posts, I am willing to bet you are familiar with the Free Republic. So consider a few recent examples here and here that rather give lie to the notion that we have changed our ways entirely. There's also some interesting background reading linked here. You might also look into the Federal Relocation Policy (aka Termination Policy) of the 1950's.
Now, what terrorist would possibly use these undersea cables for communications? You can be certain that the bad guys know about the US's capabilities. If I were organizing a multinational terror organization, I'd make sure that my communications didn't get routed via tappable cables. Or use some sort of code, encryption or steganography to hide the message. Easy enough.
So what's the point of monitoring these communications?
Traffic analysis. Knowing who's talking to whom, and when and where, is often more valuable than the contents of the message itself.
I would argue that the US does. Perhaps you disagree, but be prepared to provide cites if so...
I do disagree. Our haphazard application of the death penalty is one example - Since I have the links handy, I invite you to consider this report on the rate of error in capital cases. If you'd prefer to read the executive summary, it is available here. The study was updated this year. This was in the news afewtimes. I'm also none too thrilled about our civil forfeiture policies, or our covert support of paramilitaries in South America, or the School of the Americas, or COINTELPRO.
I'm not saying we're worse than China, but I am saying that human rights have often taken a back seat to other concerns in our government's formulation of domestic and foreign policy. Reasonable people may differ as to whether or not this is a bad thing.
Nor do we `break' treaties we find problematic. The ABM treaty had specific provisions for either party to pull out given six months notice, and we used those provisions. Choosing not to sign nonsense treaties like Kyoto is not the same as `breaking' them. But perhaps you had another example in mind?
Yes I did - why did you go put Kyoto in my mouth? We never signed Kyoto, so we couldn't abrogate it. How is that relevant? I didn't mention ABM either, because, as you correctly stated, we withdrew in accordance with that treaties provisions.
Though you seem to have missed it, I specifically mentioned our government's notorious penchant for unilaterally abrogating or ignoring its agreements with Native American tribes. Our federal courts have been complicit in this. See Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 552 (1903).
Which is well and good, but what do you propose as an alternative? The UN has a terrible record in either human rights or in the ability to run projects of anything near this scale efficiently. The Chinese are hardly a model of internationalism or concern for human rights. No one else is on there way up there. Do we not go because no one else is going?
Well, let's be fair - unless there's a clandestine Scandanavian space program, no country that might conceivably launch humans to another celestial body has a sterling human rights record.
I agree with the author that the Outer Space Treaty forbids merely claims of sovereignty by earthbound gov'ts, not private property claims. The author fears UN sovereignty over the private property, but this is ludicrous - the UN can't even launch a mission to establish such sovereignty if it wanted to.
I don't think the idea of national claims to areas of celestial bodies are per se problematic - my problem has more to do with the mentality that we should break any treaty we don't like because, hey, who's gonna stop us? Similarly, breaking the outer space treaty but saying "don't worry, we'll still adhere to the weapons ban (until that part no longer suits our whims)" won't exactly spread a message of good will to the world, but will make the world fear and distrust the US (even more), and unlike some, I don't see this as a good thing.
The gist of the article is, simply, that since our promise is no longer in our interest, we should renounce it. Truly, there nothing new under the sun (see our gov'ts long history of abrogating treaties with various indigenous Nations).
More explicitly, the thinking seems to be that now that there's no danger of the Rooskies forcing us to spend terabucks in a race to establish sovereignty over the moon and planets, we should go ahead and lay claim to them. After all, who's gonna challenge our claim? The Russians are broke and the Chinese space program is still embryonic.
This is the logic of hegemony, nothing more.
Re:Physician heal thyself
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Jeff Bezos built the business he wanted to build, not the one Mike Daisey wanted. If Mike Daisey wants a different kind of business, he should build it himself.
It's easy to bitch, not so easy to build a business.
Mike Daisey did build a business - his book and touring show, based on his hilarious gripes. Sounds like he's done pretty well at it, too.
From the photo it looks like you're giving up two PCI slots for the tube and associated electronics, which are about as far away from the audio output as one could possibly place them. So you have to run the tube'd audio past all this noise, and they're not advertising balanced lines.
According to HardOCP, that thing that looks like a power connector near the audio circuitry is actually the audio output header, so as least the signal isn't going quite so far on dinky traces.
For your own safety, and your employer's, you really need to install proper lightning arrestors on your outdoor antennas, or you could be in a world of hurt (and liability) if a fire starts in your house or your employer's building as a result of a strike.
(I also question the wisdom of allowing outsiders on your employer's network, since you never know what kind of illegal activities the random users might be up to. Your employer says everything's cool, though so he's probably assumed this risk.)
Ummm, that emusic is a better deal than paying $1/track. Was I unclear? I said "[i]f you're going to pay a major label (VivendiUniversal bought emusic a while back) your hard-earned cash to support a business model based around unencumbered MP3's, emusic seems like a better deal." That is, emusic gives you many (>1)unencumbered MP3 files from many (>1) good artists for a lower cost-per-track than the offer that is the subject of this slashdot article. If you like many of the artists on emusic, and have a broadband connection, the cost-per-track rapidly approaches zero because emusic is an all-you-can-download service.
I thought my comment was pretty straightforward. Standard English.
Damn, y'all. Emusic has been offering all-you-can-eat, unencumbered mp3 downloads for years now, for a modest fee ($10-$15/month depending on the plan), and not just sample tracks of no-name garage bands, but complete albums of real artists from Bad Religion and NOFX, to John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Belle and Sebastian, to Bob Marley, to Guided by Voices, to Yo La Tengo, to Pizzicato Five, to Pavement, to Willie Nelson, to Bush, to Isaac Hayes, to The Donnas, to Apples in Stereo, to Edith Piaf, to Otis Redding, to the Goo Goo Dolls, to George Carlin, etc. etc. ad nauseam. (and, yes, They Might Be Giants - blah)
More often than not, they even have an entire artist's career, not just an album or two.
I'll don't understand why people are lining up to pay Vivendi $1 for one lousy track. If you're going to pay a major label (VivendiUniversal bought emusic a while back) your hard-earned cash to support a business model based around unencumbered MP3's, emusic seems like a better deal.
I am sure that extending the Internet to the whole world sped the development of the web. But to pretend that we would still be limited to Gopher and FTP had the Internet not been internationalized is simply a denial of reality. Had Tim Berners-Lee not "invented the web", someone else would have.
You're right! I'm sure AOL would have come up with something nice for us. Or maybe Compuserve. Of course, you can pretty much forget about creating your own content under those systems, but who wants that ability?
As to Linux, I used BBSs before the web was available. Collaborative software development worked that way, too.
Sorry, not on the same scale - not even the same order of magnitude. Fidonet didn't work *that* well.
The internet's extension outside the U.S. predicated the birth of the world-wide-web, which was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a high-energy physicist at CERN in Switzerland. It also allowed the early development of Linux back when Linus Torvalds lived in Finland.
Maybe YOU don't care for the WWW or for Linux, but both have brought "most U.S. users" more "gain" than "pain."
I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication.
Geez. Don't have to club you over the head with bat, do we. You have to eat. s/bread/food-housing-car-electronics-etc.etc.etc./
Bread, or not, you have to buy sh*t.
We track imbedded tax load, you moron. We happen to do it for bread 'cus everyone (but you apparently) buys it. Bread serves as the proxy for EVERYTHING you buy
Hey now, I'm not calling you a moron - let's be civil here. You are saying that embedded in the cost of goods is the tax burden on the producers (all the way up the chain). I am agreeing with you. I am also saying that someone NOT purchasing a PARTICULAR good is NOT paying that PARTICULAR producers' tax burden, except in the most diffuse way. I thought I was clear.
TAX load imbedded within a loaf of bread? According to Price Waterhouse...27.7%. That excludes explicit sales taxes
Interesting! You know, I've never been able to find that Price Waterhouse study. After an extensive search on Google, Nexis, and Westlaw, The only place I can find this figure bandied about is in an article by Ralph Reiland (who seems to get the figure from Americans for Tax Reform), a short blurb on the Americans for Tax Reform website, Grover Norquist's congressional testimony of 2/26/98, or articles citing to Mr. Norquist's ATR organization.
The figures seem to vary a little bit as this blurb gets passed around - the study found the tax on a $1.09 loaf of bread to be 30 cents according to some sites, 31 cents according to Mr. Norquist's testimony. The percentage is variously described as 27% or 27.2% (no place I found called it 27.7%). This variability and the fact that all references cite Mr. Norquist's congressional testimony or his organization as the source, not Price Waterhouse, leave me a bit skeptical. I wonder if you could provide a proper citation to this study?
I am willing to believe that the aggregate tax on a loaf of bread is 30 or 31 cents, but I would like some corroboration as to the existence and methodology of this study before I accept this figure. In other words, I'm calling your hand on this point. I'd also like to mention that it is disingenuous to say that this figure, even if it is correct, "excludes sales taxes" - no state that I'm aware of imposes sales taxes on a staple food like bread.
> whether collecting taxes from a smaller number of business is more or less efficient (economically speaking) than collecting taxes from the much larger number of individials..
Yes, it does. Every individual files tax documents. The cost of collection at the individual level is sunk. Adding additional collection processes for business taxes is a lessening of efficiency through duplication.
Ah, now that's an answer! I'll accept that. I was thinking of collecting taxes from businesses vs. from individuals, not the existing scheme of collecting from both, but given the current system, your point is fair.
> So... if we take your proposed regime where there are no corporate taxes, how could one incent space development (the original point of the parent) with a selective tax moratorium, since there would be no taxes to begin with?
By paying for it directly. Nothing like a check to incent someone.
Sounds good to me! But this isn't really a tax moratorium, which is the idea I was originally criticizing.
If you don't but the bread, the bakery goes out of business and you buy the bread elsewhere. To live, you eat. To eat, you buy bread. To buy bread, you pay taxes. Once on your income you need to pay for the bread; and again on the taxes bundled into the cost of the bread.
I'm talking about a bakery with other customers, not a private baker that serves only me. Suppose I'm allergic to wheat, and don't buy baked goods. The lack of my patronage probably won't drive a bakery with many other customers out of business. My point was that if I don't patronize a particular business, and do not pay that business for goods and services, then it doesn't matter if the business' tax burden is included in the price - I'm not paying the business, so I'm not paying that business' tax, except in the most diffuse way. Put simply, a business passes its tax burden most directly onto its customers - I don't think we're in disagreement on this rather tangential point.
> Might it be more efficient to collect taxes from businesses rather than individuals?
No, actually it serves to keep them hidden. How else could one extort a total tax rate of 50-55% of income from almost everyone. If people knew they worked more for the Goverenment than they did for themselves, they might get, well, irritated.
It might serve to keep them hidden, but that is orthogonal to the question of whether collecting taxes from a smaller number of business is more or less efficient (economically speaking) than collecting taxes from the much larger number of individials. Philosophy is not an answer to a question of efficiency.
>Consider two identical products, one slightly cheaper, but made with the blood of kittens. Is the cheaper one better?
Again, little to do with moratoriums. Nor does dead kitten blood equate well with the business drive to minimize passt-thru expenses.
My point related to your original conflation of "cheaper" and "better." I was suggesting that the cheaper product might only be better if one externalized other costs in producing it - labor costs, environmental costs, tax costs. If you're philosophically opposed to all business taxes, that's fine, except that the ability of a business to evade taxes has more to do with its size than anything else, and such tax avoidance by large firms increases the share borne by smaller ones. This is the gist of my beef, so to speak.
Anyway, your claim that a moratorium would be great "if companies actually paid taxes" is false. It applies only if you consider Federal Income. Companies do pay taxes, and abating them would offer some market advantage to the company.
So... if we take your proposed regime where there are no corporate taxes, how could one incent space development (the original point of the parent) with a selective tax moratorium, since there would be no taxes to begin with? My original offhand gripe was based on the inequitable application of the existing tax structure that already allows large companies (the only sort with the necessary resources to commercially develop space) to avoid taxes, which would limit the efficacy of such a tax incentive. I stand by this analysis.
Guess what... Corporate taxes are your taxes. Buy a loaf of bread and that evil corporation's taxes are just part of the price YOU pay.
Of course. Don't be snarky, I realize the implications of business taxes. Consider: What if I don't buy that loaf of bread, and the bakery still pays taxes. Am I paying the taxes? Sure, in some totally diffuse way, but tracing the pennies is pretty tough. Might it be more efficient to collect taxes from businesses rather than individuals? Probably, which is why businesses are responsible for individual income tax witholdings, even though they're not responsible for the filing.
My point is not that corporate taxes don't affect my wallet, but that there is a tax structure that many corporations, mainly large ones, are dodging. Your regional bakery is probably not incorporated in Barbados - is it a good thing or a bad thing that a transnational corporation has tax shelters available to it that a small business does not? I'm not of the belief that our tax structure should incentivize size this way - the rewards of size should be economies of scale, not tax shelters. This is a philosophical position, but I think it is reasonable to suggest that bigness is not itself a virtue.
When Tyco avoids $400 million, if they really are avoiding it, the products you buy are that much cheaper/better.
Cheaper is not necessarily better. Consider two identical products, one slightly cheaper, but made with the blood of kittens. Is the cheaper one better? Maybe if you don't like cats. Myself, I like cats, so I'll take the kitten-free product as the better, though it comes at a marginally higher cost. Of course, if you only consider the finished product, rather than its origin, then the cheaper one might be better, but you only reach that analysis by externalizing the kittens.
Anyway, focusing on Fed. taxes is pointless. Corporations pay all kinds of taxes, real estate, fuel, etc. etc. The fact they are deducted from the Fed. tax doesn't make them any less paid in the first place. It just makes them charged once into the product's price. Indeed, for you, it keeps YOU from paying the tax 3 times over.
I'm not talking about deductions, I'm talking about reincorporating in tax shelters, when the only presence a company may have there is a PO Box. I'm talking about transferring profits to offshore subsidiaries in order to write off fictional losses. This isn't Enron-type stuff (off-books partnerships to hide debt), these are mainstream tax strategies for large corporate entities, and they're ugly, and people would be (IMO, justifiably) pissed if they realized the implications.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's a teaser.
A trailer is where you start with some soothing an peaceful scene, when
[Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells"/Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs' "Louie Louie"/Smashmouth's "All-Star"]
starts playing and Don LaFontaine intones the words "In a world
[gone mad/where dreams come true/where shit happens]..."
and some fast paced cuts show the the audience that this movie is supposed to be
[scary/funny/action-packed].
Then Mr. Fontaine tells us about the "one
[man/woman/dog]
[brave/smart/stupid]
enough to
[fight for something/change everything/screw everything up]"
while we see our protagonist looking
[determined/happy/dumb as a sack of hammers].
Then a quick montage of the
[funniest/exploding-est/tear-jerking-est]
scenes interspersed with a voiceover telling us what
[A-list/B-list/C-list]
celebrities have top billing and that the movie is
[based on a book by somebody/based on a true story/based on an older, better movie/from the director of some other movie that made money],
then finally we get the title of the movie and a screenful of tiny text acknowledging all the people who got paid enough to feed a village in Botswana for a
[month/year/decade]
for their work on the film.
This is a standard part of any film school curriculum, you see. Job applications in Hollywood test you on this stuff.
-Isaac
I ordered one of these from japan a few weeks ago, and it's the coolest little thing. The battery is lithium-polymer and recharges from the USB port while you download pictures, so really, one never has to worry about the battery at all (a *HUGE* plus). It's only a 640x480 CMOS camera, but it fits in my wallet, and takes reasonable photos for web/email use.
The AXIA version only has 8 megs of flash, compared to the Logitech's 16, but I much prefer the eyeplate's slimmer design. It's a flat 6 mm thick - the lens/viewfinder assembly pops up when you turn it on, and to turn it off yo just push the lens assembly back - way cool!
-Isaac
-Isaac
-Isaac
Some articles merit only a link and a sentence -e.g., "At last, the long awaited Mozilla 1.0 is released, and has emerged on the ftp.mozilla.org ftp-server." - but it's news! Sure, I could diligently check mozilla.org regularly, but then I could also go to the police department directly to find out about crime in my town. I do neither of these things because I have Slashdot and a newspaper, respectively. "Journalism" doesn't have a length requirement - not all reporting need be Pulitzer-bait.
No paint-by-numbers in an art museum? I guess Warhol and Duchamp never lived.
As to whether one sees Slashdot "journalism" in the Times, I wonder what you mean. I've seen links to Slashdot stories from other media outlets that could certainly be considered "real media" - or did you mean a reprint of a Slashdot article? What would be the difference between a newspaper reprinting a /. article and /. linking to a newspaper article? Or maybe you meant no newspaper would use /.'s style. Fair enough. But that doesn't make Slashdot "not journalism".
Ah, here we go. The "unbiased" canard. You are absolutely naive if you believe that *ANY* journalist or media outlet is without biases that are reflected in its reporting. At least a blog wears its biases on its sleeve, unlike the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (compare the two, sometime). Do you believe that reporters don't take a certain angle on a story based on their own biases? Do you honestly believe that editorial bias plays no part in deciding what goes above the fold in the NYT or WSJ, or what makes the top story on CNN or FoxNews? Hell, have you ever wondered why Ha'aretz and Al Hayat read so differently?
The savvy consumer of news considers many sources to interpolate what really happened. Ever read Rashomon?
Tee-hee, you snobs are cute. Look, I'm not saying Slashdot (or any blog to date) is worthy of the Pulitzer. I'm just saying that "journalism" is a word broad enough to cover Slashdot and other blogs. Sorry if you don't like it.
-Isaac
Slashdot has original articles, interviews, and reviews, as well as links to other sites. It is not simply a directory. Ergo, it is rightly called journalism, IMO.
Why aren't personal journals journalism? They're often more informative than articles from other media outlets that are retreads of press releases or press conferences that I could read on my own - at least Slashdot has the dignity to just link instead of going through the farce of paraphrasing.
Your IRC logs might not be journalism per se, but if you presented them in a cohesive fashion, with attention to the meaning of the conversations logged, that might well be journalism.
-Isaac
My hunch, in fact, is that considering the various reviews, interviews, and articles, Slashdot's percentage of original content compares favorably with lots of so-called mass media outlets. In fact, it's got a big leg up on mass media insofar as one often finds the people mentioned in the stories, or people with a personal connection to the story, posting comments, giving readers a different perspective on the article. I'm not prone to hyperbole, so I won't call slashdot "visionary" or "groundbreaking" but I do call it "really cool" and, most definitely, "journalism".
Blogs, too, are journalism. Personal diaries may be the most trivial form of journalism, but it is, at least, reporting. It may not be up to the standards of Columbia, or conformant to the AP style guide, but I've read a lot of crap in "real" news outlets and a lot of informative, if non-traditional, reporting on blog sites. In any case, I'm leery of refusing to call blogs journalism, as it plays into the hands of those who would separate "journalists" from the rest of the public and confer upon them rights that are (IMO) properly invested in us all - particularly freedoms of speech and of the press.
Consider the case of Paul Trummel who has been jailed for refusing to take down articles on his website, on the grounds that he is "not really a journalist." Understand why I'm not so keen on drawing a line between "journalist" and blogger?
-Isaac
Are you an air traffic controller? The salient question is not whether the Raytheon system looks better, but whether it works better. According to some of the people who actually have to work with the system in the real world on a daily basis, it doesn't work better.
The old system wasn't pretty, or even the most reliable, but at least its most common failure mode leaves radar data on the screen, albeit without flight or transponder information. The STARS system, according to the DOT memo linked at the top, sometimes fails to display some planes AT ALL which seems a much, much more serious failure mode. I also wonder if STARS can suffer a computer outage and still display unadorned radar data (as the existing system typically can), or if it's entirely and totally computer dependent.
-Isaac
It's tough to find a "posterboy" when evidence in capital cases is destroyed after the sentence is carried out. I think it likely that at least some innocents have been executed in this country in the last century, but we may differ on this point. My personal belief is that the wrongful execution of even one is unjustifiable, and if any possibility of this exists, then the death penalty cannot be justified.
I'm just saying that our country has broken treaties before, so it wouldn't be a stretch to think that we might break more in the future. You ignored this, went off on a rant about Kyoto and ABM, and now are trying to misdirect the discussion with some dishonest hand-waving that boils down to "Hey, I'm not saying we didn't break treaties, but hey, they deserved it, and besides, that was a long time ago."
Well, with a nick like neocon and your style of posts, I am willing to bet you are familiar with the Free Republic. So consider a few recent examples here and here that rather give lie to the notion that we have changed our ways entirely. There's also some interesting background reading linked here. You might also look into the Federal Relocation Policy (aka Termination Policy) of the 1950's.
OK, I'm done with the off-topic tangent.
-Isaac
Traffic analysis. Knowing who's talking to whom, and when and where, is often more valuable than the contents of the message itself.
-Isaac
I do disagree. Our haphazard application of the death penalty is one example - Since I have the links handy, I invite you to consider this report on the rate of error in capital cases. If you'd prefer to read the executive summary, it is available here. The study was updated this year. This was in the news afew times. I'm also none too thrilled about our civil forfeiture policies, or our covert support of paramilitaries in South America, or the School of the Americas, or COINTELPRO.
I'm not saying we're worse than China, but I am saying that human rights have often taken a back seat to other concerns in our government's formulation of domestic and foreign policy. Reasonable people may differ as to whether or not this is a bad thing.
Yes I did - why did you go put Kyoto in my mouth? We never signed Kyoto, so we couldn't abrogate it. How is that relevant? I didn't mention ABM either, because, as you correctly stated, we withdrew in accordance with that treaties provisions.
Though you seem to have missed it, I specifically mentioned our government's notorious penchant for unilaterally abrogating or ignoring its agreements with Native American tribes. Our federal courts have been complicit in this. See Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 552 (1903).
-Isaac
Well, let's be fair - unless there's a clandestine Scandanavian space program, no country that might conceivably launch humans to another celestial body has a sterling human rights record.
I agree with the author that the Outer Space Treaty forbids merely claims of sovereignty by earthbound gov'ts, not private property claims. The author fears UN sovereignty over the private property, but this is ludicrous - the UN can't even launch a mission to establish such sovereignty if it wanted to.
I don't think the idea of national claims to areas of celestial bodies are per se problematic - my problem has more to do with the mentality that we should break any treaty we don't like because, hey, who's gonna stop us? Similarly, breaking the outer space treaty but saying "don't worry, we'll still adhere to the weapons ban (until that part no longer suits our whims)" won't exactly spread a message of good will to the world, but will make the world fear and distrust the US (even more), and unlike some, I don't see this as a good thing.
-Isaac
The gist of the article is, simply, that since our promise is no longer in our interest, we should renounce it. Truly, there nothing new under the sun (see our gov'ts long history of abrogating treaties with various indigenous Nations).
More explicitly, the thinking seems to be that now that there's no danger of the Rooskies forcing us to spend terabucks in a race to establish sovereignty over the moon and planets, we should go ahead and lay claim to them. After all, who's gonna challenge our claim? The Russians are broke and the Chinese space program is still embryonic.
This is the logic of hegemony, nothing more.
Mike Daisey did build a business - his book and touring show, based on his hilarious gripes. Sounds like he's done pretty well at it, too.
-Isaac
According to HardOCP, that thing that looks like a power connector near the audio circuitry is actually the audio output header, so as least the signal isn't going quite so far on dinky traces.
Agreed about the external DAC, though.
-Isaac
That's no power input - it's the audio output header. See this HardOCP article (towards the bottom of the page) for a few more details.
I still think it's a gimmick, though. Really, the D/A should be external in its own shielded enclosure for optimum results.
Another gimmick of this board is that it includes a CD player application that you can boot into instead of Windows. Interesting, I guess.
-Isaac
For your own safety, and your employer's, you really need to install proper lightning arrestors on your outdoor antennas, or you could be in a world of hurt (and liability) if a fire starts in your house or your employer's building as a result of a strike.
(I also question the wisdom of allowing outsiders on your employer's network, since you never know what kind of illegal activities the random users might be up to. Your employer says everything's cool, though so he's probably assumed this risk.)
Just be careful.
-Isaac
As others have pointed out, the scary part is that an ISP (in this case, Microsoft) is being held liable for material posted by its users.
The precedent part is somewhat less relevant as the German legal system does not rely on precedent the same way as the US or British systems do.
-Isaac
Ummm, that emusic is a better deal than paying $1/track. Was I unclear? I said "[i]f you're going to pay a major label (VivendiUniversal bought emusic a while back) your hard-earned cash to support a business model based around unencumbered MP3's, emusic seems like a better deal." That is, emusic gives you many (>1)unencumbered MP3 files from many (>1) good artists for a lower cost-per-track than the offer that is the subject of this slashdot article. If you like many of the artists on emusic, and have a broadband connection, the cost-per-track rapidly approaches zero because emusic is an all-you-can-download service.
I thought my comment was pretty straightforward. Standard English.
-Isaac
Damn, y'all. Emusic has been offering all-you-can-eat, unencumbered mp3 downloads for years now, for a modest fee ($10-$15/month depending on the plan), and not just sample tracks of no-name garage bands, but complete albums of real artists from Bad Religion and NOFX, to John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Belle and Sebastian, to Bob Marley, to Guided by Voices, to Yo La Tengo, to Pizzicato Five, to Pavement, to Willie Nelson, to Bush, to Isaac Hayes, to The Donnas, to Apples in Stereo, to Edith Piaf, to Otis Redding, to the Goo Goo Dolls, to George Carlin, etc. etc. ad nauseam. (and, yes, They Might Be Giants - blah)
More often than not, they even have an entire artist's career, not just an album or two.
I'll don't understand why people are lining up to pay Vivendi $1 for one lousy track. If you're going to pay a major label (VivendiUniversal bought emusic a while back) your hard-earned cash to support a business model based around unencumbered MP3's, emusic seems like a better deal.
-Isaac
You're right! I'm sure AOL would have come up with something nice for us. Or maybe Compuserve. Of course, you can pretty much forget about creating your own content under those systems, but who wants that ability?
Sorry, not on the same scale - not even the same order of magnitude. Fidonet didn't work *that* well.
-Isaac
The internet's extension outside the U.S. predicated the birth of the world-wide-web, which was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a high-energy physicist at CERN in Switzerland. It also allowed the early development of Linux back when Linus Torvalds lived in Finland.
Maybe YOU don't care for the WWW or for Linux, but both have brought "most U.S. users" more "gain" than "pain."
I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication.
-Isaac
Hey now, I'm not calling you a moron - let's be civil here. You are saying that embedded in the cost of goods is the tax burden on the producers (all the way up the chain). I am agreeing with you. I am also saying that someone NOT purchasing a PARTICULAR good is NOT paying that PARTICULAR producers' tax burden, except in the most diffuse way. I thought I was clear.
Interesting! You know, I've never been able to find that Price Waterhouse study. After an extensive search on Google, Nexis, and Westlaw, The only place I can find this figure bandied about is in an article by Ralph Reiland (who seems to get the figure from Americans for Tax Reform), a short blurb on the Americans for Tax Reform website, Grover Norquist's congressional testimony of 2/26/98, or articles citing to Mr. Norquist's ATR organization.
The figures seem to vary a little bit as this blurb gets passed around - the study found the tax on a $1.09 loaf of bread to be 30 cents according to some sites, 31 cents according to Mr. Norquist's testimony. The percentage is variously described as 27% or 27.2% (no place I found called it 27.7%). This variability and the fact that all references cite Mr. Norquist's congressional testimony or his organization as the source, not Price Waterhouse, leave me a bit skeptical. I wonder if you could provide a proper citation to this study?
I am willing to believe that the aggregate tax on a loaf of bread is 30 or 31 cents, but I would like some corroboration as to the existence and methodology of this study before I accept this figure. In other words, I'm calling your hand on this point. I'd also like to mention that it is disingenuous to say that this figure, even if it is correct, "excludes sales taxes" - no state that I'm aware of imposes sales taxes on a staple food like bread.
Ah, now that's an answer! I'll accept that. I was thinking of collecting taxes from businesses vs. from individuals, not the existing scheme of collecting from both, but given the current system, your point is fair.
Sounds good to me! But this isn't really a tax moratorium, which is the idea I was originally criticizing.
-Isaac
I'm talking about a bakery with other customers, not a private baker that serves only me. Suppose I'm allergic to wheat, and don't buy baked goods. The lack of my patronage probably won't drive a bakery with many other customers out of business. My point was that if I don't patronize a particular business, and do not pay that business for goods and services, then it doesn't matter if the business' tax burden is included in the price - I'm not paying the business, so I'm not paying that business' tax, except in the most diffuse way. Put simply, a business passes its tax burden most directly onto its customers - I don't think we're in disagreement on this rather tangential point.
It might serve to keep them hidden, but that is orthogonal to the question of whether collecting taxes from a smaller number of business is more or less efficient (economically speaking) than collecting taxes from the much larger number of individials. Philosophy is not an answer to a question of efficiency.
My point related to your original conflation of "cheaper" and "better." I was suggesting that the cheaper product might only be better if one externalized other costs in producing it - labor costs, environmental costs, tax costs. If you're philosophically opposed to all business taxes, that's fine, except that the ability of a business to evade taxes has more to do with its size than anything else, and such tax avoidance by large firms increases the share borne by smaller ones. This is the gist of my beef, so to speak.
So... if we take your proposed regime where there are no corporate taxes, how could one incent space development (the original point of the parent) with a selective tax moratorium, since there would be no taxes to begin with? My original offhand gripe was based on the inequitable application of the existing tax structure that already allows large companies (the only sort with the necessary resources to commercially develop space) to avoid taxes, which would limit the efficacy of such a tax incentive. I stand by this analysis.
-Isaac
Of course. Don't be snarky, I realize the implications of business taxes. Consider: What if I don't buy that loaf of bread, and the bakery still pays taxes. Am I paying the taxes? Sure, in some totally diffuse way, but tracing the pennies is pretty tough. Might it be more efficient to collect taxes from businesses rather than individuals? Probably, which is why businesses are responsible for individual income tax witholdings, even though they're not responsible for the filing.
My point is not that corporate taxes don't affect my wallet, but that there is a tax structure that many corporations, mainly large ones, are dodging. Your regional bakery is probably not incorporated in Barbados - is it a good thing or a bad thing that a transnational corporation has tax shelters available to it that a small business does not? I'm not of the belief that our tax structure should incentivize size this way - the rewards of size should be economies of scale, not tax shelters. This is a philosophical position, but I think it is reasonable to suggest that bigness is not itself a virtue.
Cheaper is not necessarily better. Consider two identical products, one slightly cheaper, but made with the blood of kittens. Is the cheaper one better? Maybe if you don't like cats. Myself, I like cats, so I'll take the kitten-free product as the better, though it comes at a marginally higher cost. Of course, if you only consider the finished product, rather than its origin, then the cheaper one might be better, but you only reach that analysis by externalizing the kittens.
I'm not talking about deductions, I'm talking about reincorporating in tax shelters, when the only presence a company may have there is a PO Box. I'm talking about transferring profits to offshore subsidiaries in order to write off fictional losses. This isn't Enron-type stuff (off-books partnerships to hide debt), these are mainstream tax strategies for large corporate entities, and they're ugly, and people would be (IMO, justifiably) pissed if they realized the implications.
-Isaac