they live in a state of ignorance because of the governments cultural sandbox.
This statement is half right. The lessons of twentieth century totalitarianism is that what you call a "cultural sandbox" doesn't work. If so, a little perestoika wouldn't have been enough to cause the Soviet Union to fly apart. The truth was that the pablum of the state had never been internalized by the citizens. A thinking totalitarian would learn from this failure. You can't assume that because they're values are different from ours that they are too stupid to learn.
There are plenty of Chinese people who travel overseas for business or deal with foreigners. Each one of these is a potential vector for what the authorities would consider malignant ideas. I don't deny that the state acts like things like the Great Firewall are politically important. Perhaps they have their uses, but I actually think they may be as symptomatic as they are cause.
It's not enough to create a vacuum of information in peoples' heads. You have to put something there.
It isn't ubiquitous surveillance that does the trick, it's ubiquitous potential surveillance. Likewise iron fisted rule is crude and inefficient. The true art is to rule without rules. China has high sounding and extremely vague legal principles. Put the two together and you are never (a) sure if you are not being watched nor (b) if what you are doing is legal.
When you've achieved this, you don't need Big Brother. Every citizen is his own Big Brother.
You almost have to admire this system. It is tyranny, perfected.
It was and is possible for us to travel in weather worse than cars can deal with. They do leave metaphorical piles of shit behind them, it's just more spread out.
The key is that automobiles are a scalable technology. We can see that a number of ways. Their fuel can be stockpiled or transported in vast quantities; forage is no longer a limiting factor in the growth of cities, its a limiting factor in the growth of national economies.
If you had to start a transportation system from scratch, draught animal based technologies are attractive. They most difficult part of production is done by the animals themselves, and they enjoy it. It's still cheaper to buy a horse than a car. If only they didn't burn fuel when you weren't using them...
Imagination can be a liability in inventing. Really.
Mark Twain lost all his money on an automatic typesetting machine invention. It's not surprising that he would be interested in the technology, given that one of his early jobs was manual typesetting. The machine, while elegant and impressive while it worked, was continually breaking down because of its complexity. That's a very common theme in technology creation: every stage of progress has it's "bugs"; it's always easy to imagine getting the current set of bugs out; on paper they don't look as formidable as the problems you've solved to get this far. But your solutions tend have their own bugs too, and so ad infinitum. One of three things happens. You run out of money before you have a practical product; a competitor gets a good enough product on the market before you're ready (as happened to Twain), or you succeed with a somewhat buggy product. You never succeed with a perfect technology. The key is for the problems to accumulate after your customers have decided they're happy. Or even better: dump the customer's problems on somebody else.
Automobiles are a great example of this. They're a tremendously successful technology, but we find we have things like radio call in shows dedicated to the problems people have with them, and all kinds of amazingly unpredictable problems like illegal tire dumps breeding mosquitoes.
Ur, by the way, was a major city for about 2000 years, from about 2600 BCE to 600. That's a pretty good run. Too bad they never worked out a solution to that semi-millennial drought problem.
the kind that applies the detail you are looking or right now, but no others. Oh, yes, I really mean right now, whether or not you know what it is. That's ideal.
Well, the players are obviously having trouble getting notes out the thing. Where they do, some of them sound flat to me, which makes me wonder whether they got the instrument this piece was designed for correct. Can the instrument actually produce the scale the piece was written for?
The problem with HIGs is that so few developers are really all that interested in conforming. Commercial developers are trying to differentiate their products, after all. Open source developers tend to get tunnel vision; they're so intimately familiar with what they're working on they often can't see the usability forest for the trees. Users don't demand strict HIG compliance because never having lived in a world where there was strict compliance, they don't know better.
That said, I've found the apps bundled with major linux distros to be -- not all that bad in terms of standardization. Oh, it's no as good as it ought to be, but if you remember the very early days of GUI adoption of apps, what we live with as Linux users is far from the worst case. I think Linux developer UI consistency is actually better than Windows developer consistency. It gets positively weird when you install a Windows device and it comes with its own extremely wacky management application. I'm supposed to jump for joy because my consumer dollars have paid for this? And there's all that vertical market software in Windows. At best it's plain jane MDA, and regular old fashioned menus and dialogs. Yeah, MDA sucks, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you get when some vertical market app developer starts getting creative with user interfaces. It's really very hard to do things differently in a way that amounts to an improvement.
Re:Actually it does win on features
on
Palm Pre Reviewed
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· Score: 0, Troll
You can decry the iPhone as a creature of marketing all you like, but you're only deluding yourself and will never understand the real reason why anything succeeds or fails.
The subtext usually is: people who disagree with me are stupid, in this case because they're marketing led sheep.
People can be stupid about certain things. In my experience people are very bad at expressing what it is that they want. But they are very good at recognizing once it's in their hands. It's quite possible that Apple nefariously incites technological lust in potential buyers, but if somebody loves their iPhone (as many users I know do), it's probably because Apple did something right in its design. It might not be one of the kinds of things you can put on a bullet list of features, but only a fool would tell somebody who really liked a device they were using that they were a fool to do so, because there are other devices whose specs appear better. A thousand features are worthless if they are not well implemented individually, or convenient to use collectively.
Well, as is always the case in these matters, you have to consider what would need be done to fix the problem. The solution is simple: you hire enough talent of sufficient quality that you can do your own requirements analysis.
The problem is that inflates head count. There are people who *hate* anybody who has the temerity to work for them as a public employee, and they'll go beserk when they see state government ballooning. They have some sound points as well. A larger headcount means that it is more complex and painful to tighten the fiscal belt during hard times. Rather than not letting as many contracts, you've got to let *people* go.
The other thing is that you've got to grade the positions you hire very high if you want to hire *experienced* people. One of the things you give up, if you are a public employee drawing a pension, is the right to collect Social Security. You don't even get your contributions back. So if you hire a guy who's been paying into Social Security for fifteen years, you've got to pay him enough to make up for his future retirement losses. Or, you have to restrict yourselves to inexperienced hires, or hires that have worked their entire career in public service, which makes growing the corps of experienced IT people difficult.
So all told, this might be better than the alternative. You pay more than low bid, but you get free systems analysis. The alternative to is to increase head count in a way that will be extremely disruptive to deal with if you want to reduce it later. You can shit on the public employees later, of course, but that doesn't get you *efficient* government. It gets you government run by employees looking to get some of their own back. I've seen this in the most rabidly anti-public employee states. They have the most corrupt an inefficient governments.
The truth is that Microsoft has never had much marketing ability.
That's definitely not true. "Marketing" is not something monolithic. Companies have positions, identities, brands -- even cultures -- that work better or worse in different market segments.
What Microsoft has never been good at is marketing to consumers.
It's always been good at marketing to institutions like large companies. It designs and manages its products in a way that keep them on the treadmill. It doesn't mean they hit a home run 100% of the time, or that they aren't vulnerable to game changing trends like open source, but they've done as well as you can reasonably expect any commercial outfit to do, going after the people in suits. I'm not a gamer, but I wonder whether XBox marketing works the same. Don't game titles largely drive console sales? So you've got to get, I dunno, a little, sweaty voice in the back of my head keeps saying, "developers!!! developers!!! developers!!!"
Now Apple is wonderful at marketing to consumers, but has never showed a knack for marketing to institutions. It makes you wonder whether a company has to be one or the other.
It's an opinion piece. Conservatives are allowed to express opinions too.
Some of the opinions in the piece are interesting, e.g. the danger of politicizing TLD issues and the good track record of US management.
Some of them are stating the obvious, e.g. that any government or international body can set up its own DNS.
Some of them are silly, like the reason that the US invented the Internet is that the government leaves telecom to private industry. Of course the opposite is just as silly, that the Internet as we know it is purely a government creation.
There is no single reason the US created the Internet. You can point to a number of things, like the fact we spent such a huge amount of money on defense. In terms of national values that might have contributed to the creation of the Internet, I think our great strength is a kind of dynamic between public and private Interests. A nation with a government run on strict laissez-faire economic principles would never have invented the Internet; nor would a command economy. It started with the government doing something unprofitable, but in the public interest, and it took off when in the public interest the government let private interests use it.
the structures of which favor less populated agricultural states.
Once we realized the environmental disaster MTBE was, we started replacing it with ethanol, and suddenly farmers and agribusiness saw that they could be in the energy business. It was like striking oil in the cornfield. That's driving ethanol, not the local mechanic or even Detroit.
I'm not anti-biofuels. That doesn't make any sense; I'm against a biofuels program that is driven by profits in the next couple of years for one group of businesses. Unless biofuels are formulated (like biodiesel) to be an exact replacement for some fossil fuel, they're not a quick fix.
Well, it isn't just nice for the recreational divers, it's good for the tour companies, hotels, restaurants and bars that cater to them as well.
In any case, this is not the only ship waiting to be scrapped. If it were economically valuable to recycle those ships at a higher rate, it would happen. As it is, there is currently a glut of steel, so the choice would be to keep the vessel dry docked indefinitely until steel prices rise enough to justify scrapping. World annual steel production is something like 1.4 billion tons; the ten thousand tons of steel in this thing is less than one thousandth of one percent of that. It's not like we're throwing away ships left and right, we're just using this steel in a different way.
That's the mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is a huge opportunity for our species to reduce its environmental footprint, but that doesn't invalidate reuse. The important thing is not to create cause celebres out of cases like this, but to reduce the use of resources (we use 9x the steel in this ship annually to make steel caskets in the US), and to build better systems for capturing lost materials. We use 2.9 million tons of steel in food cans annually in the US, 40% of which are lost: that's 116x the steel in this vessel; a 1% improvement in that would exceed the amount of steel in this vessel.
I suspect this ship's interesting superstructure makes it an interesting candidate for artificial reef as well as tourist attraction. There are museums based on retired navy vessels in many places; this is the same thing only under water.
I'm not sure that progress towards "true AI" (whatever that might be) would be linear. Consider how long humanity has dreamed of flying. On December 17, 1903, the first controlled, powered flight took place. Progress in the following twenty years was greater than all the progress humanity had made towards the dream of flight in all of its history. There was a kind of boiling point at which enough of the things needed for sustained flight (particularly engine technology) existed.
"True AI" will look very different a decade after the watershed event than it will a decade before. For that reason we can't say how close we are for sure.
The interesting question is whether a "True AI" robot would be more morally expendable than a human being.
Abrams and company obviously believe such people are lobotomized morons, since that's the level they pitched the movie to.
Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.
What he was going for was the more like the original Star Wars, where the effects were so cheesy that Lucas didn't want you to look at them for very long. Despite many big budget attempts to cash in (including those by Lucas himself), they seldom get the break-neck pacing right. You want to get people saying, "did I just see that?" before they start looking too closely at the foam rubber masks.
Star Trek is about optimistic, character driven stories with some pretense of philosophical significance. I think the franchise often suffers from self-consciously attempting to say "significant" things, weighing down the narrative. Philosophical pretension is like special effects; a little bit of it enhances the story, too much weighs it down. The awful Star Wars prequels were overburdened with both.
The latest movie is a step in the right direction, but it overcompensates. As such, I don't think this is one that will stick with fans on its storytelling merits the way "Wrath of Khan" did. "Khan" was brisk, but gave you time to enjoy the story. If you tell a dramatic story with compelling characters, it almost has to say something interesting.
I'd say the reboot is more of a solid base hit than a home run. It did what it had to do: it gave us a taste of what the new actors will do with the characters. It showed us a future in which we'd actually want to live in (aside from the incursion of the occasional genocidal alien). What it didn't do is give us a great story, a story worth taking the time to think about. Like Lucas' cheesy rubber masks, the movie goes by too quickly for us to get a real good look at its weaknesses.
A second movie just like this one would be dull, and I don't think Abrams has a better Star Trek movie in him. I'd like to see what a director like Alfonso CuarÃn could do with the franchise.
Speaking of the fight scene on the space drill, it was very poorly choreographed. I understand John Cho spent months on fight training, and it showed. It takes years of training to make that kind of stuff look good. If they wanted to do that, they should have hired a Hong Kong fight choreographer, who knows how to make an actor with limited expertise look good. It's kind of a shame, because Cho starts the scene with that Chow Yun Fat "I'm going to kick your ass" look, but it fell flat after that.
Difference here is that the guy saying 'boots on the ground' realizes that there's a difference between the boot and the soldier, and knows what a boot is.
It's only a matter of time before the words acquire a new meaning. "Partisan" used to mean a kind of pole weapon.
Only if you believe everything Armitage says here, some of which is very self-serving.
The claim that Wilson was blabbing this about is ridiculous. First of all, he knew damn well his wife wasn't an analyst. She was an operative. Claiming she was an analyst was as good as telling the world she was an operative, because she worked for a front company. He'd be outing her, and he knew damn well that would be a crime with dozens of witnesses: everyone he told.
The "analyst" bit was what got Armitage off here. He's claiming to be repeating scuttlebutt that originated with Wilson. It couldn't have. There's no documented evidence that anybody without a clearance knew her status until the conversation you cite. However making her an "analyst" makes it should like you're repeating poorly sourced scuttlebutt. Since there was no chance this originated with Wilson, it originated with somebody with access to classified information, and it was carefully engineered to be a plausible rumor that Armitage could repeat without getting into too much trouble. Armitage could be the source, or he could be a catspaw, but somebody set her up.
As for it being a non-story, she was working on getting information on the Iranian nuclear program. That remains a serious international issue and US national security concern today. So I'd call interfering with that a "story".
Well, it's more than a wii-mote. The question is how much more than the sum of the additions? I think that's a critical question.
I'm wary of any kind of kitchen-sink approach to inventing. An invention should somehow be more than the sum of its parts, otherwise where's the originality? If you said, take a wii-mote and add this one specific element and now something qualitatively new becomes possible, then you'd have a good argument that you invented something. If you say, take a wii-mote and add everything you can think onto it, and gee, it does more than the original wii-mote, that's not very creative.
Actually, she was an active duty agent. She just wasn't stationed overseas. She has "non official cover" (that is she used her own name and identity while working for a front company). In that capacity she traveled overseas and met with foreign intelligence "assets".
Under the circumstances, she was not put in immediate danger, but anybody overseas she met with was placed in grave danger.
The reason there were no convictions was that Scooter took the fall for obstruction and perjury. Bush commuted his sentence before he spilled his guts.
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they live in a state of ignorance because of the governments cultural sandbox.
This statement is half right. The lessons of twentieth century totalitarianism is that what you call a "cultural sandbox" doesn't work. If so, a little perestoika wouldn't have been enough to cause the Soviet Union to fly apart. The truth was that the pablum of the state had never been internalized by the citizens. A thinking totalitarian would learn from this failure. You can't assume that because they're values are different from ours that they are too stupid to learn.
There are plenty of Chinese people who travel overseas for business or deal with foreigners. Each one of these is a potential vector for what the authorities would consider malignant ideas. I don't deny that the state acts like things like the Great Firewall are politically important. Perhaps they have their uses, but I actually think they may be as symptomatic as they are cause.
It's not enough to create a vacuum of information in peoples' heads. You have to put something there.
secrecy.
It isn't ubiquitous surveillance that does the trick, it's ubiquitous potential surveillance. Likewise iron fisted rule is crude and inefficient. The true art is to rule without rules. China has high sounding and extremely vague legal principles. Put the two together and you are never (a) sure if you are not being watched nor (b) if what you are doing is legal.
When you've achieved this, you don't need Big Brother. Every citizen is his own Big Brother.
You almost have to admire this system. It is tyranny, perfected.
It was and is possible for us to travel in weather worse than cars can deal with. They do leave metaphorical piles of shit behind them, it's just more spread out.
The key is that automobiles are a scalable technology. We can see that a number of ways. Their fuel can be stockpiled or transported in vast quantities; forage is no longer a limiting factor in the growth of cities, its a limiting factor in the growth of national economies.
If you had to start a transportation system from scratch, draught animal based technologies are attractive. They most difficult part of production is done by the animals themselves, and they enjoy it. It's still cheaper to buy a horse than a car. If only they didn't burn fuel when you weren't using them...
Imagination can be a liability in inventing. Really.
Mark Twain lost all his money on an automatic typesetting machine invention. It's not surprising that he would be interested in the technology, given that one of his early jobs was manual typesetting. The machine, while elegant and impressive while it worked, was continually breaking down because of its complexity. That's a very common theme in technology creation: every stage of progress has it's "bugs"; it's always easy to imagine getting the current set of bugs out; on paper they don't look as formidable as the problems you've solved to get this far. But your solutions tend have their own bugs too, and so ad infinitum. One of three things happens. You run out of money before you have a practical product; a competitor gets a good enough product on the market before you're ready (as happened to Twain), or you succeed with a somewhat buggy product. You never succeed with a perfect technology. The key is for the problems to accumulate after your customers have decided they're happy. Or even better: dump the customer's problems on somebody else.
Automobiles are a great example of this. They're a tremendously successful technology, but we find we have things like radio call in shows dedicated to the problems people have with them, and all kinds of amazingly unpredictable problems like illegal tire dumps breeding mosquitoes.
Ur, by the way, was a major city for about 2000 years, from about 2600 BCE to 600. That's a pretty good run. Too bad they never worked out a solution to that semi-millennial drought problem.
the kind that applies the detail you are looking or right now, but no others. Oh, yes, I really mean right now, whether or not you know what it is. That's ideal.
Well, the players are obviously having trouble getting notes out the thing. Where they do, some of them sound flat to me, which makes me wonder whether they got the instrument this piece was designed for correct. Can the instrument actually produce the scale the piece was written for?
The problem with HIGs is that so few developers are really all that interested in conforming. Commercial developers are trying to differentiate their products, after all. Open source developers tend to get tunnel vision; they're so intimately familiar with what they're working on they often can't see the usability forest for the trees. Users don't demand strict HIG compliance because never having lived in a world where there was strict compliance, they don't know better.
That said, I've found the apps bundled with major linux distros to be -- not all that bad in terms of standardization. Oh, it's no as good as it ought to be, but if you remember the very early days of GUI adoption of apps, what we live with as Linux users is far from the worst case. I think Linux developer UI consistency is actually better than Windows developer consistency. It gets positively weird when you install a Windows device and it comes with its own extremely wacky management application. I'm supposed to jump for joy because my consumer dollars have paid for this? And there's all that vertical market software in Windows. At best it's plain jane MDA, and regular old fashioned menus and dialogs. Yeah, MDA sucks, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you get when some vertical market app developer starts getting creative with user interfaces. It's really very hard to do things differently in a way that amounts to an improvement.
You can decry the iPhone as a creature of marketing all you like, but you're only deluding yourself and will never understand the real reason why anything succeeds or fails.
The subtext usually is: people who disagree with me are stupid, in this case because they're marketing led sheep.
People can be stupid about certain things. In my experience people are very bad at expressing what it is that they want. But they are very good at recognizing once it's in their hands. It's quite possible that Apple nefariously incites technological lust in potential buyers, but if somebody loves their iPhone (as many users I know do), it's probably because Apple did something right in its design. It might not be one of the kinds of things you can put on a bullet list of features, but only a fool would tell somebody who really liked a device they were using that they were a fool to do so, because there are other devices whose specs appear better. A thousand features are worthless if they are not well implemented individually, or convenient to use collectively.
Well, as is always the case in these matters, you have to consider what would need be done to fix the problem. The solution is simple: you hire enough talent of sufficient quality that you can do your own requirements analysis.
The problem is that inflates head count. There are people who *hate* anybody who has the temerity to work for them as a public employee, and they'll go beserk when they see state government ballooning. They have some sound points as well. A larger headcount means that it is more complex and painful to tighten the fiscal belt during hard times. Rather than not letting as many contracts, you've got to let *people* go.
The other thing is that you've got to grade the positions you hire very high if you want to hire *experienced* people. One of the things you give up, if you are a public employee drawing a pension, is the right to collect Social Security. You don't even get your contributions back. So if you hire a guy who's been paying into Social Security for fifteen years, you've got to pay him enough to make up for his future retirement losses. Or, you have to restrict yourselves to inexperienced hires, or hires that have worked their entire career in public service, which makes growing the corps of experienced IT people difficult.
So all told, this might be better than the alternative. You pay more than low bid, but you get free systems analysis. The alternative to is to increase head count in a way that will be extremely disruptive to deal with if you want to reduce it later. You can shit on the public employees later, of course, but that doesn't get you *efficient* government. It gets you government run by employees looking to get some of their own back. I've seen this in the most rabidly anti-public employee states. They have the most corrupt an inefficient governments.
Your post doesn't make any sense.
Are you saying that the government ought *not* be involved in aviation security? Or that we just have to live with this kind of thing?
The truth is that Microsoft has never had much marketing ability.
That's definitely not true. "Marketing" is not something monolithic. Companies have positions, identities, brands -- even cultures -- that work better or worse in different market segments.
What Microsoft has never been good at is marketing to consumers.
It's always been good at marketing to institutions like large companies. It designs and manages its products in a way that keep them on the treadmill. It doesn't mean they hit a home run 100% of the time, or that they aren't vulnerable to game changing trends like open source, but they've done as well as you can reasonably expect any commercial outfit to do, going after the people in suits. I'm not a gamer, but I wonder whether XBox marketing works the same. Don't game titles largely drive console sales? So you've got to get, I dunno, a little, sweaty voice in the back of my head keeps saying, "developers!!! developers!!! developers!!!"
Now Apple is wonderful at marketing to consumers, but has never showed a knack for marketing to institutions. It makes you wonder whether a company has to be one or the other.
It's an opinion piece. Conservatives are allowed to express opinions too.
Some of the opinions in the piece are interesting, e.g. the danger of politicizing TLD issues and the good track record of US management.
Some of them are stating the obvious, e.g. that any government or international body can set up its own DNS.
Some of them are silly, like the reason that the US invented the Internet is that the government leaves telecom to private industry. Of course the opposite is just as silly, that the Internet as we know it is purely a government creation.
There is no single reason the US created the Internet. You can point to a number of things, like the fact we spent such a huge amount of money on defense. In terms of national values that might have contributed to the creation of the Internet, I think our great strength is a kind of dynamic between public and private Interests. A nation with a government run on strict laissez-faire economic principles would never have invented the Internet; nor would a command economy. It started with the government doing something unprofitable, but in the public interest, and it took off when in the public interest the government let private interests use it.
the structures of which favor less populated agricultural states.
Once we realized the environmental disaster MTBE was, we started replacing it with ethanol, and suddenly farmers and agribusiness saw that they could be in the energy business. It was like striking oil in the cornfield. That's driving ethanol, not the local mechanic or even Detroit.
I'm not anti-biofuels. That doesn't make any sense; I'm against a biofuels program that is driven by profits in the next couple of years for one group of businesses. Unless biofuels are formulated (like biodiesel) to be an exact replacement for some fossil fuel, they're not a quick fix.
Well, it isn't just nice for the recreational divers, it's good for the tour companies, hotels, restaurants and bars that cater to them as well.
In any case, this is not the only ship waiting to be scrapped. If it were economically valuable to recycle those ships at a higher rate, it would happen. As it is, there is currently a glut of steel, so the choice would be to keep the vessel dry docked indefinitely until steel prices rise enough to justify scrapping. World annual steel production is something like 1.4 billion tons; the ten thousand tons of steel in this thing is less than one thousandth of one percent of that. It's not like we're throwing away ships left and right, we're just using this steel in a different way.
That's the mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is a huge opportunity for our species to reduce its environmental footprint, but that doesn't invalidate reuse. The important thing is not to create cause celebres out of cases like this, but to reduce the use of resources (we use 9x the steel in this ship annually to make steel caskets in the US), and to build better systems for capturing lost materials. We use 2.9 million tons of steel in food cans annually in the US, 40% of which are lost: that's 116x the steel in this vessel; a 1% improvement in that would exceed the amount of steel in this vessel.
I suspect this ship's interesting superstructure makes it an interesting candidate for artificial reef as well as tourist attraction. There are museums based on retired navy vessels in many places; this is the same thing only under water.
I'm not sure that progress towards "true AI" (whatever that might be) would be linear. Consider how long humanity has dreamed of flying. On December 17, 1903, the first controlled, powered flight took place. Progress in the following twenty years was greater than all the progress humanity had made towards the dream of flight in all of its history. There was a kind of boiling point at which enough of the things needed for sustained flight (particularly engine technology) existed.
"True AI" will look very different a decade after the watershed event than it will a decade before. For that reason we can't say how close we are for sure.
The interesting question is whether a "True AI" robot would be more morally expendable than a human being.
The good news: Robots are going to get a guide to ethics.
The bad news: It was drafted by Focus on the Family.
Abrams and company obviously believe such people are lobotomized morons, since that's the level they pitched the movie to.
Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.
What he was going for was the more like the original Star Wars, where the effects were so cheesy that Lucas didn't want you to look at them for very long. Despite many big budget attempts to cash in (including those by Lucas himself), they seldom get the break-neck pacing right. You want to get people saying, "did I just see that?" before they start looking too closely at the foam rubber masks.
Star Trek is about optimistic, character driven stories with some pretense of philosophical significance. I think the franchise often suffers from self-consciously attempting to say "significant" things, weighing down the narrative. Philosophical pretension is like special effects; a little bit of it enhances the story, too much weighs it down. The awful Star Wars prequels were overburdened with both.
The latest movie is a step in the right direction, but it overcompensates. As such, I don't think this is one that will stick with fans on its storytelling merits the way "Wrath of Khan" did. "Khan" was brisk, but gave you time to enjoy the story. If you tell a dramatic story with compelling characters, it almost has to say something interesting.
I'd say the reboot is more of a solid base hit than a home run. It did what it had to do: it gave us a taste of what the new actors will do with the characters. It showed us a future in which we'd actually want to live in (aside from the incursion of the occasional genocidal alien). What it didn't do is give us a great story, a story worth taking the time to think about. Like Lucas' cheesy rubber masks, the movie goes by too quickly for us to get a real good look at its weaknesses.
A second movie just like this one would be dull, and I don't think Abrams has a better Star Trek movie in him. I'd like to see what a director like Alfonso CuarÃn could do with the franchise.
Speaking of the fight scene on the space drill, it was very poorly choreographed. I understand John Cho spent months on fight training, and it showed. It takes years of training to make that kind of stuff look good. If they wanted to do that, they should have hired a Hong Kong fight choreographer, who knows how to make an actor with limited expertise look good. It's kind of a shame, because Cho starts the scene with that Chow Yun Fat "I'm going to kick your ass" look, but it fell flat after that.
Difference here is that the guy saying 'boots on the ground' realizes that there's a difference between the boot and the soldier, and knows what a boot is.
It's only a matter of time before the words acquire a new meaning. "Partisan" used to mean a kind of pole weapon.
It's magic.
A non-story?
Only if you believe everything Armitage says here, some of which is very self-serving.
The claim that Wilson was blabbing this about is ridiculous. First of all, he knew damn well his wife wasn't an analyst. She was an operative. Claiming she was an analyst was as good as telling the world she was an operative, because she worked for a front company. He'd be outing her, and he knew damn well that would be a crime with dozens of witnesses: everyone he told.
The "analyst" bit was what got Armitage off here. He's claiming to be repeating scuttlebutt that originated with Wilson. It couldn't have. There's no documented evidence that anybody without a clearance knew her status until the conversation you cite. However making her an "analyst" makes it should like you're repeating poorly sourced scuttlebutt. Since there was no chance this originated with Wilson, it originated with somebody with access to classified information, and it was carefully engineered to be a plausible rumor that Armitage could repeat without getting into too much trouble. Armitage could be the source, or he could be a catspaw, but somebody set her up.
As for it being a non-story, she was working on getting information on the Iranian nuclear program. That remains a serious international issue and US national security concern today. So I'd call interfering with that a "story".
Let's not get hasty and overhaul our entire academic system. Surely getting rid of telephones and televisions would be less drastic.
Well, it's more than a wii-mote. The question is how much more than the sum of the additions? I think that's a critical question.
I'm wary of any kind of kitchen-sink approach to inventing. An invention should somehow be more than the sum of its parts, otherwise where's the originality? If you said, take a wii-mote and add this one specific element and now something qualitatively new becomes possible, then you'd have a good argument that you invented something. If you say, take a wii-mote and add everything you can think onto it, and gee, it does more than the original wii-mote, that's not very creative.
Well, according to this declassified exhibit in United States vs. Libby, Valerie Plame was an undercover agent.
Therefore by your own logic Novak is a liar.
Actually, she was an active duty agent. She just wasn't stationed overseas. She has "non official cover" (that is she used her own name and identity while working for a front company). In that capacity she traveled overseas and met with foreign intelligence "assets".
Under the circumstances, she was not put in immediate danger, but anybody overseas she met with was placed in grave danger.
The reason there were no convictions was that Scooter took the fall for obstruction and perjury. Bush commuted his sentence before he spilled his guts.