I've always wanted to take a laser range finder, attach it to a pitch modulator, and see if it would be possible to walk down the street manually scanning around to see the depth of the world around you, one point at a time.
But then you have large corporations who live across state boundaries. They want laws as consistent as possible, because one state requiring all egg cartons to be in only english and another state requiring all egg cartons to be also in French makes it maddeningly difficult to manage your inventory without tons of waste. This means that the federal government needs to set baselines on things like "What kinds of plastics are legal to sell in the US" so that you don't have small businesses in Montana eating the cost of stock from a middleman in Detroit because the tent lining from China was made to Texas materials standards.
Individual states having separate money systems would also be maddening. Healthcare and car insurance are largely regulated at a state level, and as someone who changes locations frequently those state-to-state changes are tremendously inefficient.
I don't disagree that the Federal Government is much larger than it should be right now, and that it needs to become a bit more fiscally responsible. But at the same time, as business and manufacturing have shown us, there are a lot of efficiencies in having one set of rules to follow in an area.
Business people identify companies to a large degree on their stock ticker. It is a handy 4 letter shortcut that they stare at a lot when making decisions. There is a wealth of information and reports about potential business partners which lives with that shortcut.
I might list out a server with IP address, like "PrinterElrond(127.0.0.1)" That IP address is so common to me as a techie that it's just how I think about servers.
IANAL, but I believe that's Canada you're thinking of. And the "downloading is fine" claim seems to have been elevated to myth. Like Myth, I'd love to see something factual to back it up.
In the US, you have both reproduction and distribution rights. If you download a DVD, you're infringing reproduction rights. If you make a DVD available to other people (even if no actual infringement can be shown to occur) it has been argued that infringes distribution rights. Considering that filesharing can't happen without sharing, that seems like a moot point. How is this example, then. Giving a friend a mix tape of 24 songs is actually not punishable in the US, but filesharing 24 songs has resulted in an actual final ruling of 54,000 dollars, which was reduced from 1.9 million. In that last case, there was no evidence that anyone actually downloaded songs from her.
Either way, my point still stands: what makes this sort of atrocious ambulance-chasing possible is the ridiculously disproportionate penalties associated with copyright infringement. Make the penalties in line with the actual crime, and the enforcement will (as it should) fall back towards punative rather than profitable ends.
If you get caught stealing a DVD from a store in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with up to a $400 fine. If you are a repeat offender, you may get up to 6 months in jail.
If you get caught downloading a DVD in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with $150,000 damages, an additional $100,000 fine, and legal fees (let's say 50k). Oh, and up to 1 year in jail, if pursued.
$400 for stealing a DVD, or $300,000 dollars for copying it. I think right there you have your problem.
Kernel aside, Windows 7 still has tremendous amounts of Legacy kruft behind it. The Registry is still just about the least secure and safe idea ever. NTFS is badly in need of modernization. The hardcoded folder hierarchies that underlie how Windows 7 handles files is amazingly archaic. I remember renaming and moving folders around willy-nilly in OS7 in 92. 18 years later, renaming a folder in Windows is just begging everything to break. They're up to about 60 control panels, since they can't re-organize any of them for fear of breaking other dependencies. When sharing a folder in Windows 7 you can share as a network folder share, a Windows Media share, or specific group shares, all with separate interaction points and methods. And have you looked through the Windows->System32 folder recently? Or how shortcuts are STILL handled?
Windows is a hugely bloated with old kruft that is holding it back from being as intelligent, usable, or spry as it could be. When Apple switched from OS9 to OSX, they wrote a compatibility layer that pretended to be OS9 within the new structure that they were creating. They created a little sandbox for the old stuff to play in, while they end-of-lifed it. Microsoft has traditionally added to their existing structures, so as not to break true backwards compatibility with old software. This can be fortunate... I recently had to replace a dying 386, and the software from the mid 80's ran fine on a new Vista machine. But at the same time this means fundamental properties of the operating system remain badly dated. Even small things like how the operating system handles changing icons remains the same terrible implementation that Windows 95 had.
I hated OO//Calc's look and feel, and the graphs were terrible. But it's actually much easier to have scripts run the interface, as OO//Calc properly queues up inputs while Office just drops the extras. Having switched over to Calc full time, it really does have all of the features of Excel, plus a few new ones and some really nice bug fixes. Shame about the graphs, though.
You are right in that there is no viable alternative to Outlook's meeting requests. Every other function has a good, or better, equivalent out there, but the meeting requests and calendaring is unassailable.
If you play around with Open Office, their spreadsheet app is in many ways better than Excel. It can do everything that Excel can, but it handles external automation much better. Word's advanced features like Revision Tracking have found their way into many other products by now. Pages is a solid substitute for baseline office functionality. Numbers similarly covers Excel's non-BASIC functionality. Visio is about the worst piece of junk I've ever had the displeasure of working with, and hasn't been genuinely updated since Microsoft bought it. There are much better diagram and layout options out there. Project is similarly overused, and has been surpassed in functionality and not-breaking-downability by many online project tracking systems. Of course, your "average" user isn't whipping out Visio and Project on a daily basis, unless you have more management than other workers.
Version control is, of course, a huge part of any creative or knowledge industry, and the iPad's lack of Perforce or other version control (or files, really) hurts it there. But having experimented with an online-only office place, it's not as far off as you would think. The ways you interact with software are different, but the outcome is the same. Again, Outlook's calendaring functions are the biggest stumbling block.
For anything Adobe Creative Suite related you need at least Mac OSX. As much as I hate to say this, there isn't really an open source alternative for creative professionals for many of those tools.
but some folks will have a cow at the idea that their page might be formatted into something they literally can't imagine by a device they know nothing about.
That's what standards are about. I hand you carefully structured package X, and trust that your device will do what's best with it. Device Y takes a package, and carefully displays it the best way it can. If it's not on paper, that's how it has to work.
As an example, books from Amazon need to display both on their iPhone app, as well as Kindle devices. If everything were carefully laid out at a fixed size / resolution for the Kindle, the iPhone version would be far too small to read. If everything were laid out for the iPhone, they would be gigantic on the Kindle, and have color cues that wouldn't be displayable on those devices. Add in the iPad or PC versions and the needs of those platforms, and you have a pretty wide range of target platforms.
A combination of HTML 5, with its much improved typography and embedded fonts, and PDF, with pica-precise layout, should handle the two conditions that publishers really need: Books that are about their actual writing ("pot boiler romances" like Joseph Heller's CATCH-22) and books that are more visually based (like comic books, textbooks, pretentiously high-concept art books, etc). Alternatively, LaTex, ePub, or any one of a number of standards should suffice for the former. Just pick one, standardize, and move on.
Yes, sorry. I didn't mean to seem like I was attempting to contradict what you said.
Everyone uses some degree of parts off the shelf. These are put together at the same factories overseas. Apple should not be singled out for scorn for doing this, as the great-grandparent seemed to imply.
Apple does a lot more customization of parts than most. They also have one of the most unique supply chains, from beginning to end. Singling out Apple for any one of these is foolish, as they do more in this respect than most of the industry.
For reference, other major brands who use Foxconn include:
Intel Dell Zoostrom Sony Nintendo Microsoft (yes, all 3 major consoles come from Foxconn, at least partially) Motorola Amazon Kindle Cisco Hewlett-Packard ATI
Most have issued statements regarding the number of suicides at the factory. But none other than Apple, as far as I'm aware, have taken steps this large and publically towards resolving the problem.
And all of these are being built in the same factories overseas, contracted out from a few people. The actual LCD in your HDTV is made by either LG, Sony, or Samsung, no matter what the branding on the outside is. These are mixed with different technologies under the hood, circuit boards, etc, and sold by different brands. Sometimes a TV will come off the line and be slapped with stickers from multiple brands, or will be custom built to a particular brand's specifications.
Apple is no different. They contract out manufacturing to different factories overseas, with parts from some and other parts from others. They always invest a lot of time and effort into unique software interfaces. Sometimes, as with Firewire, they help develop and push hardware standards. They also create custom casings, motherboards, and hardware configurations. In the case of the iPad they helped develop the custom processor underlying the entire thing.
Apple participates in the realities of world manufacturing, just like everyone else. They can actually do this a lot more since they abandoned the rarer PowerPC platform and moved to X86, which specifically saved on the custom manufacturing. That's how it is done. To deride them for manufacturing this way would be like singling them out for making products with plastic, or shipping hardware in large cardboard boxes.
This has come up as an issue because of political cartoons referencing Mohammad for completely legitimate reasons. The nature of political cartoons as a speech medium basically requires caricatures or personifications of famous people in order to make a point. In the case of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the point was the censorship of dialog about Muslim and how it relates to modern Danish living. Compare the outrage and censorship of those pieces, to how we treat othermajorpublicfigures, and you'll find that a definite double standard is being applied. Christians,Jews,Hindus, etc deal with blasphemy all of the time in western cultures. Part of freedom of expression involves dealing productively with not liking what other people might say.
Which is not to say that political cartoons haven't become superficial in the last 30 years. But the medium requires pictograms, and the legitimate representations of those particular players is essential to the communication. If you can't draw Mohammad in a political cartoon, you can't critique Muslim culture.
I'd say at least then they know what content you're interested in, but they already know that from the website.
Really, they need to re-invent presenting text-based information in a way that takes advantage of the iPad's strengths above and beyond HTML. For the life of me, I can't figure out what those might be. You could do walkthroughs of 3d models and spaces, but nobody wants to generate those resources. You could create interactive systems that replicate what the article is talking about, but nobody wants to generate those resources (and could be done in flash anyway). Any sort of discussion system is better suited for HTML.
Really, the only way this will be anything other than an additional way of selling a dead-tree edition or a PDF of the website is if they broke the structure entirely and went with some sort of whacked-out information metaphor spacing similar articles near eachother in 3D space, floated related back-issue information nearby, and possibly had unicorns that crapped screen readable serif fonts. They don't seem to be willing to take the risk making a jump into a radical new way of browsing information, so the actual use of the program is a bit moot.
I don't want to minimize how awful tornadoes are, but it is good to be aware of the parts of the country which might be about to go away. People were saying for years that a sufficiently strong storm would likely break the levies and wipe out most of New Orleans, and that it exactly what happened. That was about 280 square miles of city.
A 9.0 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest would be shockingly bad. Remember, that's a logarithmic scale, with the major 89 SF quake a 7.9. A 9.0 would be about 10 of those, all at once. That is guaranteed to throw a tremendous tsunami at all of the west coast north of San Francisco. People are estimating that at 100 feet. If it happens near enough to land, you could see 8.0 magnitude shocks hitting several major cities at once. And movement that large would probably trigger the San Andreas fault, which has been linked to the Cascadia.
So, think of about 2k miles of coastline wiped out with a 100 foot tsunami, along with their inhabitants. You might get an additional million homes destroyed between Seattle, Portland, and the surrounding communities. Then add in the San Andreas, for another million or so in displaced people between LA or San Francisco. That's about 3 thousand miles and potentially 3 million people worth of rescue operations.
And yes, that's a pretty bad case scenario. It may never happen. But, of course, they said the same thing about New Orleans. 9.0's happen pretty regularly on this fault, with historical and geological records of major catastrophies for the tribes who lived here.
Tornadoes are bad, but I have yet to see one create that much damage.
Considering that scientists have been predicting catastrophic quakes for California for years, and catastrophic quakes keep happening to California, I fail to see what the difference here is. Sure, this will help convince communities to upgrade their zoning and building standards, though California has some of the most stringent in the world. And the big number 9 is interesting, compared to "yet another 8.0." That's an engineering target to shoot for. But how do you engineer differently for a 9 as opposed to an 8.5?
Big number, and interesting viewpoint. But how is this really different?
Not to tangent, but is there a way of releasing the pressure? Firefighters routinely set controlled blazes to prevent kindling buildup and help stop uncontrolled burns. Might there be a way to encourage subduction at regular, controlled intervals, instead of having the pressure build up for generations?
I tend to find textbooks to be an outmoded form of communication anyway. In the classes I'm in we tend to switch between lab work, reading individual papers, reading smaller subject-specific paperbacks, etc. Most of the traditional thick / hardbound textbooks I've bought in the past year have just sat on the shelf. It's important background information that doesn't help you understand the political climate of China, why graphic designers work the way they do, or how to build flash applications.
Maybe Amazon should be targeting the smaller, single-use books in some way. Maybe buying individual chapters, so that professors can tailor a curriculum more tightly. Or having one-stop information compendiums that make it easier to buy everything for a specific class. Spend 100 dollars, and get the relevant chapters from 2 different textbooks, a few individual copies of relevant softbacks, and PDF archive versions of specific web pages that the class will use.
People joke on the street about taking drugs all the time. I couldn't imagine batting an eye if I heard that walking by a group of strangers.
Some people see the internet as a big newspaper, with all of the authority, authenticity, and formality that entails. Something showing up on the internet is documented in a library permanently. Anyone looking up anything related to that person will inevitably come across that thing, tie that thing back to their employer. The West Allis police department would forever be associated with hiring a drug-using loony online.
Of course, that's not the case at all (at least, not until they made it newsworthy). The internet is dirtier, louder, and with a lot more noise. Nobody outside of that particular Emergency Dispatcher's family and friends were ever likely to see that post. The sheer volume of noise around the department, and even that particular dispatcher, made that possibility basically zero. And anyone digging that deeply would find far more controversial revelations about the city. This is, after all, the city that gave us both Liberace and Jeffery Dahmer.
It's like when photographs of schoolteachers drinking at weddings appear on the internet. Or when someone follows a twitter feed of a controversial gay rights advocate. People have to have lives outside of their jobs. They have to make controversial art, put up silly christmas displays, and protest government policies they disagree with. This all will get photographed or filmed by someone, and somehow it will go up on Flickr or YouTube. Some people in our society are still calibrated on the older scale, and can't deal with the idea that things which are OK to do in private frequently finds its way online.
This is especially significant when there are real problems out there. A one-sentence obvious joke about drug use is a major public relations nightmare? The high school students in my area sneak into bathrooms to shoot up, and one of their teachers was laid off for sleeping with them. We have a mugger prowling the area, along with a ton of dealers. And this is in a relatively safe city. Making a joke about doing drugs on Facebook isn't even a blip. Have they heard anything that is said in the fire department's locker rooms?
A simple "that's not cool, please take that down" would have resulted in the content being gone from the internet forever, and an employee a bit better educated about what the city is comfortable with. Also, it would have sidestepped this lawsuit. Destroying a career for it, though, is extreme. The only other alternative is to strive as hard as you can to keep any personally identifiable information or photographs off of the internet (how long before ip reverse lookup tables are trivial?), and down that road lies madness.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wanted to take a laser range finder, attach it to a pitch modulator, and see if it would be possible to walk down the street manually scanning around to see the depth of the world around you, one point at a time.
But then you have large corporations who live across state boundaries. They want laws as consistent as possible, because one state requiring all egg cartons to be in only english and another state requiring all egg cartons to be also in French makes it maddeningly difficult to manage your inventory without tons of waste. This means that the federal government needs to set baselines on things like "What kinds of plastics are legal to sell in the US" so that you don't have small businesses in Montana eating the cost of stock from a middleman in Detroit because the tent lining from China was made to Texas materials standards.
Individual states having separate money systems would also be maddening. Healthcare and car insurance are largely regulated at a state level, and as someone who changes locations frequently those state-to-state changes are tremendously inefficient.
I don't disagree that the Federal Government is much larger than it should be right now, and that it needs to become a bit more fiscally responsible. But at the same time, as business and manufacturing have shown us, there are a lot of efficiencies in having one set of rules to follow in an area.
Business people identify companies to a large degree on their stock ticker. It is a handy 4 letter shortcut that they stare at a lot when making decisions. There is a wealth of information and reports about potential business partners which lives with that shortcut.
I might list out a server with IP address, like "PrinterElrond(127.0.0.1)" That IP address is so common to me as a techie that it's just how I think about servers.
IANAL, but I believe that's Canada you're thinking of. And the "downloading is fine" claim seems to have been elevated to myth. Like Myth, I'd love to see something factual to back it up.
In the US, you have both reproduction and distribution rights. If you download a DVD, you're infringing reproduction rights. If you make a DVD available to other people (even if no actual infringement can be shown to occur) it has been argued that infringes distribution rights. Considering that filesharing can't happen without sharing, that seems like a moot point. How is this example, then. Giving a friend a mix tape of 24 songs is actually not punishable in the US, but filesharing 24 songs has resulted in an actual final ruling of 54,000 dollars, which was reduced from 1.9 million. In that last case, there was no evidence that anyone actually downloaded songs from her.
Either way, my point still stands: what makes this sort of atrocious ambulance-chasing possible is the ridiculously disproportionate penalties associated with copyright infringement. Make the penalties in line with the actual crime, and the enforcement will (as it should) fall back towards punative rather than profitable ends.
If you get caught stealing a DVD from a store in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with up to a $400 fine. If you are a repeat offender, you may get up to 6 months in jail.
If you get caught downloading a DVD in Los Angeles, you'll be hit with $150,000 damages, an additional $100,000 fine, and legal fees (let's say 50k). Oh, and up to 1 year in jail, if pursued.
$400 for stealing a DVD, or $300,000 dollars for copying it. I think right there you have your problem.
Kernel aside, Windows 7 still has tremendous amounts of Legacy kruft behind it. The Registry is still just about the least secure and safe idea ever. NTFS is badly in need of modernization. The hardcoded folder hierarchies that underlie how Windows 7 handles files is amazingly archaic. I remember renaming and moving folders around willy-nilly in OS7 in 92. 18 years later, renaming a folder in Windows is just begging everything to break. They're up to about 60 control panels, since they can't re-organize any of them for fear of breaking other dependencies. When sharing a folder in Windows 7 you can share as a network folder share, a Windows Media share, or specific group shares, all with separate interaction points and methods. And have you looked through the Windows->System32 folder recently? Or how shortcuts are STILL handled?
Windows is a hugely bloated with old kruft that is holding it back from being as intelligent, usable, or spry as it could be. When Apple switched from OS9 to OSX, they wrote a compatibility layer that pretended to be OS9 within the new structure that they were creating. They created a little sandbox for the old stuff to play in, while they end-of-lifed it. Microsoft has traditionally added to their existing structures, so as not to break true backwards compatibility with old software. This can be fortunate... I recently had to replace a dying 386, and the software from the mid 80's ran fine on a new Vista machine. But at the same time this means fundamental properties of the operating system remain badly dated. Even small things like how the operating system handles changing icons remains the same terrible implementation that Windows 95 had.
I hated OO//Calc's look and feel, and the graphs were terrible. But it's actually much easier to have scripts run the interface, as OO//Calc properly queues up inputs while Office just drops the extras. Having switched over to Calc full time, it really does have all of the features of Excel, plus a few new ones and some really nice bug fixes. Shame about the graphs, though.
You are right in that there is no viable alternative to Outlook's meeting requests. Every other function has a good, or better, equivalent out there, but the meeting requests and calendaring is unassailable.
If you play around with Open Office, their spreadsheet app is in many ways better than Excel. It can do everything that Excel can, but it handles external automation much better. Word's advanced features like Revision Tracking have found their way into many other products by now. Pages is a solid substitute for baseline office functionality. Numbers similarly covers Excel's non-BASIC functionality. Visio is about the worst piece of junk I've ever had the displeasure of working with, and hasn't been genuinely updated since Microsoft bought it. There are much better diagram and layout options out there. Project is similarly overused, and has been surpassed in functionality and not-breaking-downability by many online project tracking systems. Of course, your "average" user isn't whipping out Visio and Project on a daily basis, unless you have more management than other workers.
Version control is, of course, a huge part of any creative or knowledge industry, and the iPad's lack of Perforce or other version control (or files, really) hurts it there. But having experimented with an online-only office place, it's not as far off as you would think. The ways you interact with software are different, but the outcome is the same. Again, Outlook's calendaring functions are the biggest stumbling block.
For anything Adobe Creative Suite related you need at least Mac OSX. As much as I hate to say this, there isn't really an open source alternative for creative professionals for many of those tools.
[Did not intend to post anonymously. Slashdot seems to be acting strangely about that today.]
but some folks will have a cow at the idea that their page might be formatted into something they literally can't imagine by a device they know nothing about.
That's what standards are about. I hand you carefully structured package X, and trust that your device will do what's best with it. Device Y takes a package, and carefully displays it the best way it can. If it's not on paper, that's how it has to work.
As an example, books from Amazon need to display both on their iPhone app, as well as Kindle devices. If everything were carefully laid out at a fixed size / resolution for the Kindle, the iPhone version would be far too small to read. If everything were laid out for the iPhone, they would be gigantic on the Kindle, and have color cues that wouldn't be displayable on those devices. Add in the iPad or PC versions and the needs of those platforms, and you have a pretty wide range of target platforms.
A combination of HTML 5, with its much improved typography and embedded fonts, and PDF, with pica-precise layout, should handle the two conditions that publishers really need: Books that are about their actual writing ("pot boiler romances" like Joseph Heller's CATCH-22) and books that are more visually based (like comic books, textbooks, pretentiously high-concept art books, etc). Alternatively, LaTex, ePub, or any one of a number of standards should suffice for the former. Just pick one, standardize, and move on.
(for the record, I don't know why this showed up anonymously. That's me up there.)
Yes, sorry. I didn't mean to seem like I was attempting to contradict what you said.
Everyone uses some degree of parts off the shelf. These are put together at the same factories overseas. Apple should not be singled out for scorn for doing this, as the great-grandparent seemed to imply.
Apple does a lot more customization of parts than most. They also have one of the most unique supply chains, from beginning to end. Singling out Apple for any one of these is foolish, as they do more in this respect than most of the industry.
In a 1.5 lb package? With a similar software investment in making the experience one of anything other than sheer pain?
For reference, other major brands who use Foxconn include:
Intel
Dell
Zoostrom
Sony
Nintendo
Microsoft (yes, all 3 major consoles come from Foxconn, at least partially)
Motorola
Amazon Kindle
Cisco
Hewlett-Packard
ATI
Most have issued statements regarding the number of suicides at the factory. But none other than Apple, as far as I'm aware, have taken steps this large and publically towards resolving the problem.
And all of these are being built in the same factories overseas, contracted out from a few people. The actual LCD in your HDTV is made by either LG, Sony, or Samsung, no matter what the branding on the outside is. These are mixed with different technologies under the hood, circuit boards, etc, and sold by different brands. Sometimes a TV will come off the line and be slapped with stickers from multiple brands, or will be custom built to a particular brand's specifications.
Apple is no different. They contract out manufacturing to different factories overseas, with parts from some and other parts from others. They always invest a lot of time and effort into unique software interfaces. Sometimes, as with Firewire, they help develop and push hardware standards. They also create custom casings, motherboards, and hardware configurations. In the case of the iPad they helped develop the custom processor underlying the entire thing.
Apple participates in the realities of world manufacturing, just like everyone else. They can actually do this a lot more since they abandoned the rarer PowerPC platform and moved to X86, which specifically saved on the custom manufacturing. That's how it is done. To deride them for manufacturing this way would be like singling them out for making products with plastic, or shipping hardware in large cardboard boxes.
This has come up as an issue because of political cartoons referencing Mohammad for completely legitimate reasons. The nature of political cartoons as a speech medium basically requires caricatures or personifications of famous people in order to make a point. In the case of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the point was the censorship of dialog about Muslim and how it relates to modern Danish living. Compare the outrage and censorship of those pieces, to how we treat other major public figures, and you'll find that a definite double standard is being applied. Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc deal with blasphemy all of the time in western cultures. Part of freedom of expression involves dealing productively with not liking what other people might say.
Which is not to say that political cartoons haven't become superficial in the last 30 years. But the medium requires pictograms, and the legitimate representations of those particular players is essential to the communication. If you can't draw Mohammad in a political cartoon, you can't critique Muslim culture.
I'd say at least then they know what content you're interested in, but they already know that from the website.
Really, they need to re-invent presenting text-based information in a way that takes advantage of the iPad's strengths above and beyond HTML. For the life of me, I can't figure out what those might be. You could do walkthroughs of 3d models and spaces, but nobody wants to generate those resources. You could create interactive systems that replicate what the article is talking about, but nobody wants to generate those resources (and could be done in flash anyway). Any sort of discussion system is better suited for HTML.
Really, the only way this will be anything other than an additional way of selling a dead-tree edition or a PDF of the website is if they broke the structure entirely and went with some sort of whacked-out information metaphor spacing similar articles near eachother in 3D space, floated related back-issue information nearby, and possibly had unicorns that crapped screen readable serif fonts. They don't seem to be willing to take the risk making a jump into a radical new way of browsing information, so the actual use of the program is a bit moot.
I don't want to minimize how awful tornadoes are, but it is good to be aware of the parts of the country which might be about to go away. People were saying for years that a sufficiently strong storm would likely break the levies and wipe out most of New Orleans, and that it exactly what happened. That was about 280 square miles of city.
A 9.0 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest would be shockingly bad. Remember, that's a logarithmic scale, with the major 89 SF quake a 7.9. A 9.0 would be about 10 of those, all at once. That is guaranteed to throw a tremendous tsunami at all of the west coast north of San Francisco. People are estimating that at 100 feet. If it happens near enough to land, you could see 8.0 magnitude shocks hitting several major cities at once. And movement that large would probably trigger the San Andreas fault, which has been linked to the Cascadia.
So, think of about 2k miles of coastline wiped out with a 100 foot tsunami, along with their inhabitants. You might get an additional million homes destroyed between Seattle, Portland, and the surrounding communities. Then add in the San Andreas, for another million or so in displaced people between LA or San Francisco. That's about 3 thousand miles and potentially 3 million people worth of rescue operations.
And yes, that's a pretty bad case scenario. It may never happen. But, of course, they said the same thing about New Orleans. 9.0's happen pretty regularly on this fault, with historical and geological records of major catastrophies for the tribes who lived here.
Tornadoes are bad, but I have yet to see one create that much damage.
Considering that scientists have been predicting catastrophic quakes for California for years, and catastrophic quakes keep happening to California, I fail to see what the difference here is. Sure, this will help convince communities to upgrade their zoning and building standards, though California has some of the most stringent in the world. And the big number 9 is interesting, compared to "yet another 8.0." That's an engineering target to shoot for. But how do you engineer differently for a 9 as opposed to an 8.5?
Big number, and interesting viewpoint. But how is this really different?
Being hugged to death by a government that cares?
Not to tangent, but is there a way of releasing the pressure? Firefighters routinely set controlled blazes to prevent kindling buildup and help stop uncontrolled burns. Might there be a way to encourage subduction at regular, controlled intervals, instead of having the pressure build up for generations?
I tend to find textbooks to be an outmoded form of communication anyway. In the classes I'm in we tend to switch between lab work, reading individual papers, reading smaller subject-specific paperbacks, etc. Most of the traditional thick / hardbound textbooks I've bought in the past year have just sat on the shelf. It's important background information that doesn't help you understand the political climate of China, why graphic designers work the way they do, or how to build flash applications.
Maybe Amazon should be targeting the smaller, single-use books in some way. Maybe buying individual chapters, so that professors can tailor a curriculum more tightly. Or having one-stop information compendiums that make it easier to buy everything for a specific class. Spend 100 dollars, and get the relevant chapters from 2 different textbooks, a few individual copies of relevant softbacks, and PDF archive versions of specific web pages that the class will use.
Perhaps they mean that censorship of creative output is indecent.
I'd be inclined to %&*$ing agree.
People joke on the street about taking drugs all the time. I couldn't imagine batting an eye if I heard that walking by a group of strangers.
Some people see the internet as a big newspaper, with all of the authority, authenticity, and formality that entails. Something showing up on the internet is documented in a library permanently. Anyone looking up anything related to that person will inevitably come across that thing, tie that thing back to their employer. The West Allis police department would forever be associated with hiring a drug-using loony online.
Of course, that's not the case at all (at least, not until they made it newsworthy). The internet is dirtier, louder, and with a lot more noise. Nobody outside of that particular Emergency Dispatcher's family and friends were ever likely to see that post. The sheer volume of noise around the department, and even that particular dispatcher, made that possibility basically zero. And anyone digging that deeply would find far more controversial revelations about the city. This is, after all, the city that gave us both Liberace and Jeffery Dahmer.
It's like when photographs of schoolteachers drinking at weddings appear on the internet. Or when someone follows a twitter feed of a controversial gay rights advocate. People have to have lives outside of their jobs. They have to make controversial art, put up silly christmas displays, and protest government policies they disagree with. This all will get photographed or filmed by someone, and somehow it will go up on Flickr or YouTube. Some people in our society are still calibrated on the older scale, and can't deal with the idea that things which are OK to do in private frequently finds its way online.
This is especially significant when there are real problems out there. A one-sentence obvious joke about drug use is a major public relations nightmare? The high school students in my area sneak into bathrooms to shoot up, and one of their teachers was laid off for sleeping with them. We have a mugger prowling the area, along with a ton of dealers. And this is in a relatively safe city. Making a joke about doing drugs on Facebook isn't even a blip. Have they heard anything that is said in the fire department's locker rooms?
A simple "that's not cool, please take that down" would have resulted in the content being gone from the internet forever, and an employee a bit better educated about what the city is comfortable with. Also, it would have sidestepped this lawsuit. Destroying a career for it, though, is extreme. The only other alternative is to strive as hard as you can to keep any personally identifiable information or photographs off of the internet (how long before ip reverse lookup tables are trivial?), and down that road lies madness.