Actually, I'm more concerned about the *organization* as a single point of failure. If you rely on, say, Oracle (ugh), and Oracle goes bankrupt or a court orders them to stop selling their database or they simply decide to stop supporting some feature, you're still in business, and have a pretty good shot at moving to some similar database management system.
If you built a mission critical system on Amazon's cloud services, a single court order not aimed at you could put you out of business. If Amazon was forced or decided to get out of the cloud hosting business, you'd have a heck of a time transitioning over to another cloud service because Amazon's services are so architecturally unique.
So far as I can see NB and Eclipse are pretty comparable in the "bloat" department. In the early days, Eclipse was a bit less java-centric than NB, so I suppose dealing with that might lead one to perceive it as more "bloated". On the other hand, it was much faster than NB (no perceptible difference today), which I found often ground to a halt trying to be helpful (no longer true).
Eclipse seems to have a far greater variety of (largely poorly documented but sometimes useful) plug-ins. Netbeans and Glassfish make a very nice J2EE development stack. I'd say NB is a tad nicer than Eclipse for J2EE, although Netbeans has not quite reached the point of being J2EE nirvana, taking all the boring details out of your hands and executing them perfectly.
Naturally if you want to develop for Android, Eclipse is the way to go. Google has done a bang-up job on that. Had they chosen Netbeans instead, it'd probably be just as nice. Most ambitious plug-ins on either platform fall pretty far short. There are other specific plug-ins for Eclipse I like, and quite a few that are disappointments. Same on NB.
And of course Eclipse is also a desktop UI framework. Which is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, although I suppose if you're already in the business of writing Eclipse plug-ins that's a nice bonus.
If you put it all together, I find it convenient to have *both* Netbeans and Eclipse on my machine. With very few exceptions, differences between these IDEs are marginal when it comes to Java development. In any case, I think it's a bad idea to become too dependent on the features and facilities of any IDE. It's the code that counts, being able to check it out, modify it, build it, test it and deploy it. You should be able to do this quickly without having *either* IDE available. It makes more sense to rely on Maven than to work in some kind of IDE-centric manner. An IDE and its various plug-ins can become more irrelevant dependencies that make it hard to maintain code that's been sitting in a repository for a while. An IDE is ultimately a glorified editor; or it *should* be.
I do not care which thing has which feature. I just care that I can seamlessly access the Internet no matter where I am.
But the 3G carriers *do* care about which devices have access. I've been hoping for PANs (personal area networks) to catch on for a decade, but the main application has been mere cable replacement. Why? Because many of the devices in that personal network should really have access to the Internet and the carriers hate tethering. They hate it because they don't want to become commodity bandwidth providers. They don't want to become commodity suppliers because its very easy to compare prices for commodity suppliers. Just as I can easily compare two quotes for so many tons of pork bellies or pig iron, I can compare the charges for so many GB per month at a minimum guaranteed rate.
That's why the carriers are constantly dreaming up so many half-baked network "services" like picture mail or music streaming, and why they hate network neutrality. It's much harder to compare the value of constellations of complicated features than it is a simple commodity like bandwidth, especially if the choice to go to another service involves different network performance or switching providers altogether. Oh, yes, and that means changing your *phone* too.
The incentive for the carriers is to make their prices hard to compare to other carriers, and the decision to change carriers highly inconvenient. But in the end, the one thing they provide we can't get from any old company is bandwidth. Unfortunately selling bandwidth, particularly *wireless* bandwidth is a crappy business unless you can lock your customers in somehow. If everyone's phone worked on any network provider, and all the network providers did was supply bandwidth, then you could switch your carrier every month if somebody offered a better deal.
While cost obviously *is* a factor in any material's success, I disagree that it has to be cheap relative to steel to be successful. A material doesn't have to be cheaper in *every* application than anything else to be successful. It need only solve a problem *within a certain set of valuable constraints* more cheaply than anything else.
Steel's remarkable versatility and cheapness makes it seem like a universal material, but we already have successful materials that are "stronger than steel" by various measures. They don't have to be cheaper than steel or displace steel in every application to be useful. We use materials like carbon fiber for properties they offer that steel cannot match at any price. That's why you'll see carbon fiber in aircraft but not bridge members. It's *economical* to use it in aircraft where you can because the weight savings is well worth the price. Likewise the ability to cheaply fabricate lightweight, corrosion resistant, elaborately shaped pieces of fiberglass makes it a great material for boat hulls, but for railroad cars a steel box with some paint slapped on is more economical.
Look, the deficiencies of the customary measurement system aren't *moral* failings. They're what you get when you take a system designed for one task and use it for a completely different task.
A modern economy is *vertically integrated*. The chain of buyers and sellers between when a customer purchases a widget and when the various raw materials for that widget were dug out of the ground or harvested is long. Furthermore, it branches out like a tree to encompass all kinds of specializations. And at every node on that tree where a lump of matter is handed from one party to another, some kind of unit conversion is apt to take place. The metric system is designed to reduce the number and complexity of conversions, and performs that particular task well.
"Customary units" (the US does NOT use imperial units, which are similar but different in an arbitrary way) are designed to optimize certain measuring *tasks*. It's a pretty good system for a low tech economy. Suppose you are plowing a field with an ox team:
1 rod == length of typical ox goad (16.5 feet) 1 surveyor's chain == 4 rods == width of typical field to be plowed. 1 furlong == 10 chains == longest continuous row a typical ox team can plow without needing rest. 1 acre == 1 furlong x 1 chain == area a typical ox team can plow in one day.
This is actually pretty cool. You take your ox goad, lay out length of rope equal to ten of them, and you have the basic tools to lay out an optimal day's work. Your rows aren't so long you've got to stop to rest in the middle, nor so short that you waste time unhitching your team and turning everything around. You plow a straight line until the animals need a rest, then you unhitch them and turn the plow around.
This admirably handy system only becomes a problem when you start using to completely unrelated things like lay out a spur for a suburban railroad. Then you've got to reckon the number of railroad ties which are manufactured using length measures that are convenient for building crude timber framed houses, or tell the foundry how much rail you're going to need (who knows what customary units *they* find "natural").
So when everyone switches to metric, suddenly materials planning and cost accounting becomes a lot easier, at the cost of convenience for specific tasks. For example, customers for your suburban rail spur know the distance is 2 leagues; that tells them that walking the distance would take them two hours because a league is defined as the distance one can typically walk in one hour at a comfortable pace (nominally a bit less than three and a half miles). Now you will be telling them that the length of the spur is 11 km, and they have to do the conversion into walking hours by dividing by 5.5 km/hr.
But that doesn't explain the gap in expectations. You'd expect people who have such responsible positions not to be representative of the population, and I expect they're not. The lack. may be more one of imagination than intelligence.
The one exceptional virtue of a bureaucracy is consistency ; the corresponding vice is inflexibility. People who rise in them reflect. this. They may be very reliable persons, but expecting them to wonder whether something actually works the way it appears to might be too much.
Of course it takes all kinds. I wouldn't want to rely on a hacker to process my reimbursement requests and get me paid on time.
Nothing strange here. People are reacting to a / . summary of some blogger's characterization of the speech as anti-tech or anti-Ipad. I think it might better be characterized as anti-China and pro-trade barrier, at least so far as trade with regimes with anti-Anerican values is concerned.
Everyone knows that the Chinese regime is an abuser of individual liberties, but nobody sees it as their responsibility to take that into account when presented with a chance to share in the spoils.Even pro-regime thinkers believe China will become more open and democratic at some unspecified future date, just as they once thought the state apparatus would by some unidentified mechanism melt away and be replaced with an anarchist paradise. The reality is that the rights of individuals are seldom trampled for the benefit of future generations, they're trampled for the benefit of the people doing the trampling and their associates who choose to look the other way.
And now that's all of us who aren't going to join an Amish community, thanks to decades of opportunistic policies where stagnant economic development in the US was masked by taking advantage of a brutal collective dictatorship. We're all culpable to some degree, but Jackson is right to single out individuals who took advantage and might have made a difference if they'd chosen to pay more than lip service to the problem. Jobs gets well-deserved credit for the financial benefits of transforming Apple from a manufacturing company to a design and marketing company. It's only fair he shoulder a share of the blame for the negative consequences. Saying that dealing with the fundamental corruption of the Chinese system isn't his job simply means he has in effect outsourced that corruption while stills enjoying its benefits.
Gosh, think what life would be like if our ancestors took this attitude. "Yeah, they've been saying how this iron stuff is going to take over from bronze for centuries now, but every time somebody scrapes together enough iron to cast a sword, when they take the mold apart it comes out brittle as pottery."
I'd buy a dilapidated old gamekeeper's hut high up on the moor. Every morning, fortified by a heart-stopping fry-up I'd pull on my Wellies, don my tweed coat and cap, and grab my blackthorn walking stick for brisk walk down the moors to the village pub, we're I'd hear the news. Hour after hour, pint after pint I'd join in the general complaining about the state of the government, the weather, and the livestock. I'd then make my tipsy way back to my hut, falling exhausted into bed for nine hours or so of dreamless sleep, then wake up and do it again. This would go on until one day I drunkenly wandered into the fatal mire on the way home. Then, as I was sucked down to be preserved as a curiosity for future generations of archaeologists, I'd pull out my emergency hip flask of gin. I'd pour a stiff shot into the chrome flask cap, then toast a life of dogged utility crowned by one brief, glorious interlude of useless, low-tech pleasure.
Now I know I'll never get down to the pub, because I'll be checking Slashdot "before I go out". Soon I'd be ordering liquor off the Internet, because "it was more convenient". I might as well spend my declining years back here in the States in a high rise apartment block.
Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately?... yet none of our leaders have done anything to address it.
Why would politicians do something to address a sentiment they created? Confident, optimistic people are hard to push around. You want people to feel helpless and afraid if you want them to be your political zombies.
Of course the key ingredient that turns people into zombies is cynicism. You want your zombies to confuse cynicism with skepticism. A skeptic weighs new ideas and occasionally decides one is a good idea. A cynic just rejects them out of hand rather than thinking critically about them. A *scared* cynic is a first class sucker. He needs a plan of action, but can no longer think for himself. He's primed to believe anything you tell him to.
Fear. Helplessness. Cynicism. Scapegoating. Credulous nostalgia. These are the basic tools for politically emasculating an electorate.
When Churchill rallied Britain in WW2, did he encourage Britons to be *afraid*? To despair? To lose confidence in their public institutions? To turn on each other? To feel helpless? To believe their best days were behind them? Obviously not. When you *really* are facing a crisis, you want people to be confident. To hope. To support public initiatives. To feel united, and capable, and optimistic about the future.
Storing secret keys is what your TPM chip is for, among other things. Contriving to get it working with your laptop's TPM (if it has one) would make more sense.
These people have more money than anyone could ever possibly spend, yet STILL manage to be greedy, cheap bastards.
You way you put that makes it sound like it's suppose to be self-contradictory. It's like you said, "I always eat like a pig but I'm STILL gaining weight," or "I've robbed every bank in town but I've STILL got these $%*# canvas money bags cluttering up my apartment."
Well, the question shouldn't be how frequently *other* authors abuse a device. The question should be whether a specific *story* abuses a device.
I think "abuse" in this case means the author undermining the logic of his own story to achieve something that takes more skill than he's displayed. Killing a character off for emotional impact then simply saying, "well death is a reversible process in this universe" throws doubt on *everything* in the story. That doesn't preclude resurrecting a character, but the resurrection has to be handled on a level above in-universe machinery if the reader is not to feel cheated.
I've heard a lot of literary complaints about LotR over the years, and most of them are from people with an obviously superficial understanding of the story. Yet the criticism that Gandalf's resurrection is a bit of a dodge is one of the ones most worth considering. Perhaps the strongest defense that can be mounted for Tolkien is that Gandalf's resurrection was narratively *unnecessary*. We saw Gandalf fall and *assumed* he was killed, but Tolkien takes pains to show that we jumped to a premature conclusion. Gandalf actually survived the fall, and only perished (if I recall) several days later after hunting down and killing the Balrog.
This actually shows some unusual artistic instinct on Tolkien's part. Normally resurrection would be a cheap plot device to get a killed off character back, but Tolkien actually takes the trouble of getting the character back *without recourse to resurrection*. This leaves him free to put resurrection on the table without making the reader feel cheated. Furthermore since Gandalf is already in an exempt category as an immortal (we know, for example, that *Sauron* came back after he was presumed dead), he *can* be resurrected without bringing all deaths in the story into question. Gandalf's resurrection doesn't mean that Boromir or Theoden or any of the various other mortal characters might return.
You think we've reached the height of human folly with coal? Well, just wait and see what a crash effort to build our way out of our entirely foreseeable future energy problems can do with nuclear power. And that crash course is coming, because if there's one thing you can count on people faced with a difficult and intractable problem to do, it is absent-mindedly kicking the can down the road until they have to desperately grasp for a quick fix.
That's why I'm *for* building a modest number of nuclear power plants based on new designs *now*. What goes down, comes up. Today the public is down on nuclear power. When oil hits $200/bbl or more with no return in sight, then all will be forgiven and forgotten. Better to continue to gain knowledge in the technology *before* it's needed. Better to spend a few decades of bickering over the problems of nuclear power than to wait until we're in such desperate straits that even bringing those problems up makes you an enemy of the people.
I have watched every single president since Richard Nixon declare that dependency of foreign oil is a serious threat to the United States, and I've watched every president since Richard Nixon fail to do anything about that threat, because it's easier to hand that hot potato to the next President. Nuclear is coming, one way or the other, because as a species we don't have the discipline to tackle problems we can avoid.
The Japanese have a saying for situations like the earthquake, Tsunami and the immediate aftermath: "It can't be helped." There's nothing that can be done about the tens of thousands of people who were killed. For the most part everything that can be done for the survivors is being done.
The Fukushima situation is not a misfortune on the scale of the tsunami, but it *is* an ongoing crisis. What sets a crisis apart from a misfortune is that it generates a never-ending stream of new and unexpected questions to be answered. What shall we do about the radioactive water when we don't know where its coming from? What should we do about the effect of radioactivity releases on the food supply? How are we going to put this situation to bed with a team that's been working in crisis mode for a month straight?
Of course the immediate run-up to and aftermath of the tsunami was a crisis too, but now we no longer have a parade of new and unexpected problems, but rather a collection lingering and intractable ones. Those demand attention too, but that doesn't mean you can write off the Fukushima situation as something not meriting much attention.
Thanks for that. One thing about getting older is that your memory doesn't dish up all the bits you need on time. So you end up having conversations like this:
Me: Hahaha! Wife: What's so funny? Me: Look what this guy wrote: 'That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!' Haha! Wife: Why is that funny? Me [frowning]: I don't know.
What, you mean the way they acquired Stacker? Or Netscape?
I have no objection to MS acquiring companies, provided that they pass anti-trust regulation and aren't using their monopoly stick to reduce the size of the carrot they're offering.
With cold, heartless indifference, Google deprived the founders of a whole year's worth of labor; cynically stripped them of eleven and a half million dollars of hard-won venture capital and left them with nothing but 1.65 billion dollars of Google stock.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm more concerned about the *organization* as a single point of failure. If you rely on, say, Oracle (ugh), and Oracle goes bankrupt or a court orders them to stop selling their database or they simply decide to stop supporting some feature, you're still in business, and have a pretty good shot at moving to some similar database management system.
If you built a mission critical system on Amazon's cloud services, a single court order not aimed at you could put you out of business. If Amazon was forced or decided to get out of the cloud hosting business, you'd have a heck of a time transitioning over to another cloud service because Amazon's services are so architecturally unique.
So far as I can see NB and Eclipse are pretty comparable in the "bloat" department. In the early days, Eclipse was a bit less java-centric than NB, so I suppose dealing with that might lead one to perceive it as more "bloated". On the other hand, it was much faster than NB (no perceptible difference today), which I found often ground to a halt trying to be helpful (no longer true).
Eclipse seems to have a far greater variety of (largely poorly documented but sometimes useful) plug-ins. Netbeans and Glassfish make a very nice J2EE development stack. I'd say NB is a tad nicer than Eclipse for J2EE, although Netbeans has not quite reached the point of being J2EE nirvana, taking all the boring details out of your hands and executing them perfectly.
Naturally if you want to develop for Android, Eclipse is the way to go. Google has done a bang-up job on that. Had they chosen Netbeans instead, it'd probably be just as nice. Most ambitious plug-ins on either platform fall pretty far short. There are other specific plug-ins for Eclipse I like, and quite a few that are disappointments. Same on NB.
And of course Eclipse is also a desktop UI framework. Which is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, although I suppose if you're already in the business of writing Eclipse plug-ins that's a nice bonus.
If you put it all together, I find it convenient to have *both* Netbeans and Eclipse on my machine. With very few exceptions, differences between these IDEs are marginal when it comes to Java development. In any case, I think it's a bad idea to become too dependent on the features and facilities of any IDE. It's the code that counts, being able to check it out, modify it, build it, test it and deploy it. You should be able to do this quickly without having *either* IDE available. It makes more sense to rely on Maven than to work in some kind of IDE-centric manner. An IDE and its various plug-ins can become more irrelevant dependencies that make it hard to maintain code that's been sitting in a repository for a while. An IDE is ultimately a glorified editor; or it *should* be.
I do not care which thing has which feature. I just care that I can seamlessly access the Internet no matter where I am.
But the 3G carriers *do* care about which devices have access. I've been hoping for PANs (personal area networks) to catch on for a decade, but the main application has been mere cable replacement. Why? Because many of the devices in that personal network should really have access to the Internet and the carriers hate tethering. They hate it because they don't want to become commodity bandwidth providers. They don't want to become commodity suppliers because its very easy to compare prices for commodity suppliers. Just as I can easily compare two quotes for so many tons of pork bellies or pig iron, I can compare the charges for so many GB per month at a minimum guaranteed rate.
That's why the carriers are constantly dreaming up so many half-baked network "services" like picture mail or music streaming, and why they hate network neutrality. It's much harder to compare the value of constellations of complicated features than it is a simple commodity like bandwidth, especially if the choice to go to another service involves different network performance or switching providers altogether. Oh, yes, and that means changing your *phone* too.
The incentive for the carriers is to make their prices hard to compare to other carriers, and the decision to change carriers highly inconvenient. But in the end, the one thing they provide we can't get from any old company is bandwidth. Unfortunately selling bandwidth, particularly *wireless* bandwidth is a crappy business unless you can lock your customers in somehow. If everyone's phone worked on any network provider, and all the network providers did was supply bandwidth, then you could switch your carrier every month if somebody offered a better deal.
While cost obviously *is* a factor in any material's success, I disagree that it has to be cheap relative to steel to be successful. A material doesn't have to be cheaper in *every* application than anything else to be successful. It need only solve a problem *within a certain set of valuable constraints* more cheaply than anything else.
Steel's remarkable versatility and cheapness makes it seem like a universal material, but we already have successful materials that are "stronger than steel" by various measures. They don't have to be cheaper than steel or displace steel in every application to be useful. We use materials like carbon fiber for properties they offer that steel cannot match at any price. That's why you'll see carbon fiber in aircraft but not bridge members. It's *economical* to use it in aircraft where you can because the weight savings is well worth the price. Likewise the ability to cheaply fabricate lightweight, corrosion resistant, elaborately shaped pieces of fiberglass makes it a great material for boat hulls, but for railroad cars a steel box with some paint slapped on is more economical.
Pfft, easy. My *robot dog* ate my homework.
When I read the subject of your post, my next thought was "Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound..."
Look, the deficiencies of the customary measurement system aren't *moral* failings. They're what you get when you take a system designed for one task and use it for a completely different task.
A modern economy is *vertically integrated*. The chain of buyers and sellers between when a customer purchases a widget and when the various raw materials for that widget were dug out of the ground or harvested is long. Furthermore, it branches out like a tree to encompass all kinds of specializations. And at every node on that tree where a lump of matter is handed from one party to another, some kind of unit conversion is apt to take place. The metric system is designed to reduce the number and complexity of conversions, and performs that particular task well.
"Customary units" (the US does NOT use imperial units, which are similar but different in an arbitrary way) are designed to optimize certain measuring *tasks*. It's a pretty good system for a low tech economy. Suppose you are plowing a field with an ox team:
1 rod == length of typical ox goad (16.5 feet)
1 surveyor's chain == 4 rods == width of typical field to be plowed.
1 furlong == 10 chains == longest continuous row a typical ox team can plow without needing rest.
1 acre == 1 furlong x 1 chain == area a typical ox team can plow in one day.
This is actually pretty cool. You take your ox goad, lay out length of rope equal to ten of them, and you have the basic tools to lay out an optimal day's work. Your rows aren't so long you've got to stop to rest in the middle, nor so short that you waste time unhitching your team and turning everything around. You plow a straight line until the animals need a rest, then you unhitch them and turn the plow around.
This admirably handy system only becomes a problem when you start using to completely unrelated things like lay out a spur for a suburban railroad. Then you've got to reckon the number of railroad ties which are manufactured using length measures that are convenient for building crude timber framed houses, or tell the foundry how much rail you're going to need (who knows what customary units *they* find "natural").
So when everyone switches to metric, suddenly materials planning and cost accounting becomes a lot easier, at the cost of convenience for specific tasks. For example, customers for your suburban rail spur know the distance is 2 leagues; that tells them that walking the distance would take them two hours because a league is defined as the distance one can typically walk in one hour at a comfortable pace (nominally a bit less than three and a half miles). Now you will be telling them that the length of the spur is 11 km, and they have to do the conversion into walking hours by dividing by 5.5 km/hr.
But that doesn't explain the gap in expectations. You'd expect people who have such responsible positions not to be representative of the population, and I expect they're not. The lack. may be more one of imagination than intelligence.
The one exceptional virtue of a bureaucracy is consistency ; the corresponding vice is inflexibility. People who rise in them reflect. this. They may be very reliable persons, but expecting them to wonder whether something actually works the way it appears to might be too much.
Of course it takes all kinds. I wouldn't want to rely on a hacker to process my reimbursement requests and get me paid on time.
Nothing strange here. People are reacting to a / . summary of some blogger's characterization of the speech as anti-tech or anti-Ipad. I think it might better be characterized as anti-China and pro-trade barrier, at least so far as trade with regimes with anti-Anerican values is concerned.
Everyone knows that the Chinese regime is an abuser of individual liberties, but nobody sees it as their responsibility to take that into account when presented with a chance to share in the spoils.Even pro-regime thinkers believe China will become more open and democratic at some unspecified future date, just as they once thought the state apparatus would by some unidentified mechanism melt away and be replaced with an anarchist paradise. The reality is that the rights of individuals are seldom trampled for the benefit of future generations, they're trampled for the benefit of the people doing the trampling and their associates who choose to look the other way.
And now that's all of us who aren't going to join an Amish community, thanks to decades of opportunistic policies where stagnant economic development in the US was masked by taking advantage of a brutal collective dictatorship. We're all culpable to some degree, but Jackson is right to single out individuals who took advantage and might have made a difference if they'd chosen to pay more than lip service to the problem. Jobs gets well-deserved credit for the financial benefits of transforming Apple from a manufacturing company to a design and marketing company. It's only fair he shoulder a share of the blame for the negative consequences. Saying that dealing with the fundamental corruption of the Chinese system isn't his job simply means he has in effect outsourced that corruption while stills enjoying its benefits.
Gosh, think what life would be like if our ancestors took this attitude. "Yeah, they've been saying how this iron stuff is going to take over from bronze for centuries now, but every time somebody scrapes together enough iron to cast a sword, when they take the mold apart it comes out brittle as pottery."
Practically everything we take for granted about the Internet was what I'd call a "WTF proposition" when it was proposed.
Which went like this:
I'd buy a dilapidated old gamekeeper's hut high up on the moor. Every morning, fortified by a heart-stopping fry-up I'd pull on my Wellies, don my tweed coat and cap, and grab my blackthorn walking stick for brisk walk down the moors to the village pub, we're I'd hear the news. Hour after hour, pint after pint I'd join in the general complaining about the state of the government, the weather, and the livestock. I'd then make my tipsy way back to my hut, falling exhausted into bed for nine hours or so of dreamless sleep, then wake up and do it again. This would go on until one day I drunkenly wandered into the fatal mire on the way home. Then, as I was sucked down to be preserved as a curiosity for future generations of archaeologists, I'd pull out my emergency hip flask of gin. I'd pour a stiff shot into the chrome flask cap, then toast a life of dogged utility crowned by one brief, glorious interlude of useless, low-tech pleasure.
Now I know I'll never get down to the pub, because I'll be checking Slashdot "before I go out". Soon I'd be ordering liquor off the Internet, because "it was more convenient". I might as well spend my declining years back here in the States in a high rise apartment block.
Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately? ... yet none of our leaders have done anything to address it.
Why would politicians do something to address a sentiment they created? Confident, optimistic people are hard to push around. You want people to feel helpless and afraid if you want them to be your political zombies.
Of course the key ingredient that turns people into zombies is cynicism. You want your zombies to confuse cynicism with skepticism. A skeptic weighs new ideas and occasionally decides one is a good idea. A cynic just rejects them out of hand rather than thinking critically about them. A *scared* cynic is a first class sucker. He needs a plan of action, but can no longer think for himself. He's primed to believe anything you tell him to.
Fear. Helplessness. Cynicism. Scapegoating. Credulous nostalgia. These are the basic tools for politically emasculating an electorate.
When Churchill rallied Britain in WW2, did he encourage Britons to be *afraid*? To despair? To lose confidence in their public institutions? To turn on each other? To feel helpless? To believe their best days were behind them? Obviously not. When you *really* are facing a crisis, you want people to be confident. To hope. To support public initiatives. To feel united, and capable, and optimistic about the future.
Storing secret keys is what your TPM chip is for, among other things. Contriving to get it working with your laptop's TPM (if it has one) would make more sense.
More like Mental International, if he thinks anyone believes bullshit like that.
Close. It's actually *Mental Institutional*
Money may not grant you love but it does give you more freedom to choose your destiny..
You mean ... if you're rich you don't have to die?
These people have more money than anyone could ever possibly spend, yet STILL manage to be greedy, cheap bastards.
You way you put that makes it sound like it's suppose to be self-contradictory. It's like you said, "I always eat like a pig but I'm STILL gaining weight," or "I've robbed every bank in town but I've STILL got these $%*# canvas money bags cluttering up my apartment."
Pfft. That's nothing. My browser release goes all the way to 11. It also supports the "beating-a-dead-meme" tag.
Well, the question shouldn't be how frequently *other* authors abuse a device. The question should be whether a specific *story* abuses a device.
I think "abuse" in this case means the author undermining the logic of his own story to achieve something that takes more skill than he's displayed. Killing a character off for emotional impact then simply saying, "well death is a reversible process in this universe" throws doubt on *everything* in the story. That doesn't preclude resurrecting a character, but the resurrection has to be handled on a level above in-universe machinery if the reader is not to feel cheated.
I've heard a lot of literary complaints about LotR over the years, and most of them are from people with an obviously superficial understanding of the story. Yet the criticism that Gandalf's resurrection is a bit of a dodge is one of the ones most worth considering. Perhaps the strongest defense that can be mounted for Tolkien is that Gandalf's resurrection was narratively *unnecessary*. We saw Gandalf fall and *assumed* he was killed, but Tolkien takes pains to show that we jumped to a premature conclusion. Gandalf actually survived the fall, and only perished (if I recall) several days later after hunting down and killing the Balrog.
This actually shows some unusual artistic instinct on Tolkien's part. Normally resurrection would be a cheap plot device to get a killed off character back, but Tolkien actually takes the trouble of getting the character back *without recourse to resurrection*. This leaves him free to put resurrection on the table without making the reader feel cheated. Furthermore since Gandalf is already in an exempt category as an immortal (we know, for example, that *Sauron* came back after he was presumed dead), he *can* be resurrected without bringing all deaths in the story into question. Gandalf's resurrection doesn't mean that Boromir or Theoden or any of the various other mortal characters might return.
You think we've reached the height of human folly with coal? Well, just wait and see what a crash effort to build our way out of our entirely foreseeable future energy problems can do with nuclear power. And that crash course is coming, because if there's one thing you can count on people faced with a difficult and intractable problem to do, it is absent-mindedly kicking the can down the road until they have to desperately grasp for a quick fix.
That's why I'm *for* building a modest number of nuclear power plants based on new designs *now*. What goes down, comes up. Today the public is down on nuclear power. When oil hits $200/bbl or more with no return in sight, then all will be forgiven and forgotten. Better to continue to gain knowledge in the technology *before* it's needed. Better to spend a few decades of bickering over the problems of nuclear power than to wait until we're in such desperate straits that even bringing those problems up makes you an enemy of the people.
I have watched every single president since Richard Nixon declare that dependency of foreign oil is a serious threat to the United States, and I've watched every president since Richard Nixon fail to do anything about that threat, because it's easier to hand that hot potato to the next President. Nuclear is coming, one way or the other, because as a species we don't have the discipline to tackle problems we can avoid.
Not really.
The Japanese have a saying for situations like the earthquake, Tsunami and the immediate aftermath: "It can't be helped." There's nothing that can be done about the tens of thousands of people who were killed. For the most part everything that can be done for the survivors is being done.
The Fukushima situation is not a misfortune on the scale of the tsunami, but it *is* an ongoing crisis. What sets a crisis apart from a misfortune is that it generates a never-ending stream of new and unexpected questions to be answered. What shall we do about the radioactive water when we don't know where its coming from? What should we do about the effect of radioactivity releases on the food supply? How are we going to put this situation to bed with a team that's been working in crisis mode for a month straight?
Of course the immediate run-up to and aftermath of the tsunami was a crisis too, but now we no longer have a parade of new and unexpected problems, but rather a collection lingering and intractable ones. Those demand attention too, but that doesn't mean you can write off the Fukushima situation as something not meriting much attention.
Dang. They *are* running the government like a business down there.
Thanks for that. One thing about getting older is that your memory doesn't dish up all the bits you need on time. So you end up having conversations like this:
Me: Hahaha!
Wife: What's so funny?
Me: Look what this guy wrote: 'That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!' Haha!
Wife: Why is that funny?
Me [frowning]: I don't know.
What, you mean the way they acquired Stacker? Or Netscape?
I have no objection to MS acquiring companies, provided that they pass anti-trust regulation and aren't using their monopoly stick to reduce the size of the carrot they're offering.
With cold, heartless indifference, Google deprived the founders of a whole year's worth of labor; cynically stripped them of eleven and a half million dollars of hard-won venture capital and left them with nothing but 1.65 billion dollars of Google stock.