It's not the accuracy of the metaphor that is at question its the aptness for purpose. From the point of lawmaking and regulation, "tubes" is an extremely bad way of thinking of the Internet. It's really not that helpful even in a technical sense, at least to a layman, as we could all tell from Sen. Stevens tortured explanation of why his staff email was taking so long to reach him.
In fact, the what the Internet really is is something that a typical lawmaker should find very easy to understand. It is a set of agreements; agreements about how to address and deliver data. The people who own the "tubes" part of it would like you to think of it as just "tubes", but in fact the tubes are just an implementation detail. It's the conventions that make the thing so useful. You could switch the "tubes" completely, and there is still Internet. But keep the exact same "tubes", run according to a different conventions, and you have something very different.
One of the conventions that makes the Internet what it is, is net neutrality That particular convention is key to the wealth generation potential of the Internet, because anybody with a good implementation of a decent idea can reach anybody else who might want to use that idea. I appreciate that success for the Internet entrepreneur is a headache for the telecom companies, but their solution is to take the profit incentive out of Internet innovation and putting in owning strategic parcels of "tubing" real estate. Like medieval barons, they will the be able to tax the "excess profit" out of anything that has to pass through.
It's true, of course that some apps will come sooner under a proprietary "Internet-like" network; but those apps will come eventually. It's the applications that will never be that we should be concerned with. Looking at the Internet as merely "tubing" leads you to think the only thing that matters is having the most and largest tubes; not the best and most creative content moving through those tubes.
Actually, this is something that's always bothered me about time travel stories.
Not that the Earth moves -- I assume you plot your destination in time and space. The problem I have is the same one I have with teleportation: seemingly insignificant changes in barometric pressure are going to be very uncomfortable when experienced instantaneously: like having your ears pop in a fast elevator, only more so. Maybe like diving in the ocean.
I can't remember any teleportation or time travel story that mentions this obvious thing.
Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with standards, higher or otherwise.
I think it has been in "beta" so long, that if it were ever announced to be "released", people would expect something new and whizzy, which completely destroys the point of distinguishing "beta software" from "release software". However its questionable whether these categories have much value any longer.
The reason the beta doesn't come off is that there isn't any such thing as released software anymore. In the early days, the beta label warned people that gmail might not work with their browser; these that warning is as close to superfluous as it will ever be. What has changed since the "beta/release" terminology was introduced into the common language is the discrediting of the waterfall project management model -- not that people are any better at project management than they used to be. Using agile methods, you're continually do small releases, so you never have a final "released" product.
It's only dishonest if the party making the offer is disingenuous about its terms.
I'm sure the FSF would be delighted to work with Microsoft -- if Microsoft released all of its source under the GPL. Of course, everyone knows that its unreasonable to believe Microsoft would accept these terms in our lifetime, so it would do no good to announce this.
This shows to have PR value, an offer has to have something that might interest MS. It must be something in which MS could recognize its own enlightened self-interest. It's possible to imagine this happening fairly soon, if there are significant developments that MS cannot profitably fight or coopt. If we imagine sub-$400 linux laptops taking off big time, it might turn defending that part of MS's monopoly from a cash cow into a cash sink. That kind of thing might signal a smart time for MS to reposition itself.
It'd be momentous, to be sure. But not impossible to imagine.
Who is "they" that they can bear collective responsibility and punishment? Did every Palestinian who lost his home take part in military hostilities against Israel? There weren't any who simply evacuated their families to keep them away from the fighting?
The problem with this situation is that it is so easy to confuse legend with fact. Legends aren't usually complete fabrications, they embellish and streamline the facts in order to make a point. There has been active legend formation on both sides of this conflict, which means that each side acts as if it is living in an alternate reality, instead of having to share this one.
How do you launch a rocket into an area with innocent people and children? Simple: you think of them as elements in a story, not people who feel hurt the way you do. How do you justify occupying territory you have no intention of claiming, depriving its residents of self-government? Simple: you demonstrate that "they all" asked for this.
It is true that Arabs who remained in Israel are citizens, but they are a minority who don't have the power to tip the balance towards one coalition or another. That's why despite acting as if it would be fully justified in doing so, Israel doesn't annex all the territories it occupies. If it were simply a matter of the spoils going to the victor, this would be the right and sensible thing to do. The problem with this is that they'd either have to make the second class citizen status of the Arabs official, or they'd have to give up control of the country to the Arabs.
In order to maintain its identity as both a Jewish state and a democracy, Israel must continue to try to cede control of territory within Eretz Yisrael to the Palestinians, although it needn't actually succeed. Ironically, it is the desire of Israel to remain a democracy that in large part keeps this conflict going generation after generation. It can't absorb the people it rules without handing them power, nor can it rule them effectively and remain a democracy.
Before government got really, really big. Too big to hide a major agency.
There used to be a kind of convention in Washington where if you said you worked for "The State Department" it was understood you meant the CIA. Normally people who worked for State would say something like "I work in the office of the Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs," which would be totally comprehensible to anybody on the DC cocktail circuit. People who worked for the NSA said they worked for "The Department of Defense". Very few people would have known about the agency in the first decades of its existence, in fact in the early days its existence was a secret. But people know that the DoD had employees who didn't talk about what where they worked.
The NSA has roots that go back as far as 1949, during the height of the Red Scare. This story -- while it may well be apocryphal -- is no more odd than many things the government of the era did in the cloak-and-dagger game. And you can't start an agency like the NSA overnight. It's not like you can put an announcement in the Federal Register and have a couple of thousand employees a few months later.
Still, the best place to hide something is, as Poe observed in The Purloined Letter, in plain sight. It would make much more sense to give the early agency a small building on the site of an extremely large and busy military installation. But it doesn't mean that the people who did the initial organization necessarily had the sense to see that.
In any case, the NSA HQ building at Fort Meade is really cool; if you were wandering around looking for the NSA headquarters you'd have no trouble figuring out which one it is: it's the one that looks like a huge, shiny black box.
Well, my theory of criticism is that it's pointless to tell somebody they ought to like something. But it should be possible to explain why some people do.
There are a number of books of Tolkien criticsm, by Tom Shippey and others, that should be possible to get at your local library. These, I think can show some of the reason for his continued fascination of readers.
The important thing for a Tolkien fan is not to be too much of a fan. LotR is not perfect. Tolkien struggled early on with giving the book direction; one of the thing popular guides to writing popular fiction say is to get your hero into action as soon as possible. If you're familiar with the Star Trek NG series, they always started off with a teaser segment before the credits where they'd do something like (apparently) blow up the ship. Tolkien dithers quite a bit and goes down a few blind alleys (almost everybody detests Tom Bombadil) before he gets the story into gear, then suddenly the story gets so complicated that you can easily go from bored to lost, if you started out bored.
The thing about LotR is that it is an extremely serious work, loaded with meditations about death and purpose. Tolkien's early life was marred by death and violence, and experiences that would channel others into nihilism or existential philosophy moved Tolkien into the world of fantasy. But LotR is a very serious work, perhaps the first or only serious literary work many people ever read voluntarily; it's intellectually disreputable fantasy setting only makes it more palatable.
For me, the fascination of the work is the beauty of its writing; few writers have Tolkien's understanding of language. Consider the name "Bilbo Baggins", which is a revealing one for somebody living the life of a country squire. His cousins are the detestable "Sackville-Bagginses", who not only affect the pretense of a hyphenated name, but a frenchified one. The explicit poetry in the work is an acquired taste, but the real poetry is in the prose. If you have a copy of LotR handy, flip through to the chapter where Frodo is leaving Bag End for what he thinks is the final time.
Finally, there's the landscape. Tolkien loved nature. The characters in LotR may be archetypal, but the landscape is extremely specific and realistic. When a character looks up and notices the moon and the stars, they are the right ones for the season and place, and by the way give the (very) attentive reader a way to coordinate actions taking place hundreds of miles apart. Somebody once said a poet ought to the a professor of the five senses. You can often tell how a place would smell, from the alkaline tang of dust choked Mordor to the set, loamy and herb scented forest of Ithilien, and of course the Shire itself which would smell of summer in the country, of hay, with hints of hearth fires and barnyards.
This is not to say you should like Tolkien. Liking is something nobody should presume to dictate to anybody else. But hopefully, you can see the appeal he has, and you won't assume a fan is necessarily so because he's following a fad.
Sure, and it was a waste of time finishing Shubert's 8th Symphony when there is a universe of unwritten music to be considered, some of which is undoubtedly better.
The appeal is that it is the unfinished work of a master. Anybody can have an opinion about how it should be finished. Finishing it in a satisfying way would be a great achievement.
It's easy to overestimate how much people understand how an open and free society is supposed to work.
I was lying in bed one recent morning, listening to a profile of an anti-immigration politician. I practically jumped out bed when I heard he was advocating for a law which would limit the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the offspring of illegal immigrants. How could anybody so ignorant get elected to office?
It's distressing when a senior law enforcement officer or an elected official is so clueless, because they're in a position to do far more harm than they're proposing to prevent.
I read The Hobbit to my seven year old son, which he liked tremendously. As soon as we finished, he immediately asked, "Is there a Hobbit II?"
Questions like that just make you want to sigh. It is sad that Tolkien finished so few books.
They say Tolkien was the kind of writer who never let go of a manuscript until it was ripped from his unwilling hands. "Hobbit II" was exactly what LotR started out to be; it ended up being the final episode of the Silmarillion, bringing to an end the Elvish presence in Middle Earth.
Think about that. Practically every chapter in the Silmarillion would be an entire LotR sized work, if it were expanded to the scale it had in Tolkien's head. The story of the Children of Hurin is not exception. It wants to be over a thousand pages of lush mythopoetic prose. What it is, as published, is a couple of hundred pages of story sketches reworked into reasonably acceptable narrative consistency.
Furthermore, it is not finshed by a writer with J.R.R. Tolkien's gift for language. It's not that there aren't occasional bad pieces of prose in LotR, which in a work that size is not surprising. But there is so much that is so elegantly written and perceptively detailed in it. Reading the Silmarillion, and The Children of Hurin, is like reading a plot synopsis of a great opera. Some operas have better plots than others, but it's never the plot that makes them great.
Some day, when the works have gone into the public domain, there may be writers who successfully turn their hand into finishing the pieces from Tolkien's mythology. Sadly, most of us will not live to see that day.
It's not necessarily so bad. They don't have to split your sternum open, they can just make a keyhole slit to access the interface. It's not something you'd do for fun, but it beats worrying about worrying about whether you're pacemaker settings are accessible to the outside world to make "adjustments", either unintentionally via EMI or deliberately.
Based on what I know about non-specialists designing security into ad hoc network protocols, I'm not very optimistic about biomedical engineers getting it right, bright as they may otherwise be.
He needs the support and agreement of one third of each of the houses of Congress. In effect, a supermajority is required to pass any law in the face of opposition by the President.
The reason that it doesn't happen all the time is that the President wants things from Congress he can' get any other way. It works better than you'd think, but it makes slanting the power balance between Congress and the President in the direction of the President a very bad idea. The veto power makes that balance unstable the moment the President can pursue his ends without Congressional cooperation. As soon as the President and his aides feel they can operate independently of Congressional oversight and appropriations power, Congress becomes powerless and Presidential power becomes practically unlimited.
That's what made the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan administration a much bigger deal than most people realized. It wasn't just that it was a strategically stupid thing to do, what prompted the stupidity was the desire of the Reagan administration to develop their own sources of funding which Congress did not control, in fact was completely unaware of. To a lesser degree, that's why the Bush administration's insistence on exempting the DHS from civil service worrisome. Civil service regulations are a form of Congressional oversight; the idea that the President should be able to move personnel around and have them do whatever he wants is really giving him a kind of de jure power to alter the DHS budget under any circumstances whatsoever, over and above the de facto power he has to do this in a clear national emergency.
There are a number of structural faults in the US Constitution, and one of them is the delicacy of balance between the President and Congress. The basic idea was patterned on the relationship between George Washington and the Continental Congress: you get a powerful leader who has a free hand within the scope of his powers, but that "free hand" is subject to oversight, regulation and budgetary restraint. When this works, it works extremely well. But when you have a narcissistic and self-righteous President, supported by a sufficiently large block of Congressional sycophants, his power is only limited by what he imagines it to be.
You need to rework your post so that analogies are what are being compared to explosives.
In any case, I've gone back and forth between management and engineering over the years. The bottom line is that good IT is no cure for bad management, and good management doesn't tolerate bad IT.
IT people often forget hey are a support, not line function.
On the third hand, IT departments are often not staffed adequately, either in butts in chair or in the quality of the heads over those butts. It seems absurd to think about using IT to achieve breakthroughs in productivity or competitiveness when they seem to spend more time restricting the work that goes through the department than actually getting things done.
The bottom line is that skill is distributed on a normal curve, and the vast majority of people are mediocre. That includes top management; most companies have mediocre leadership. When the leadership of a company is weak, there's not much IT can do to make things better. They really are just a facilities type function.
The thing is, they must know something about how language is wired to the buying impulse, because they're extremely successful and extremely insistent upon this point.
My brother is a bigshot in the food service industry. He's very good at what he does. One day I mentioned to him that I'd ordered a medium soft drink at a fast food restaurant and it turned out to be 32 ounces -- as much soda as we used to order for the entire family when we were kids. According to him, this is a way to maximize sales. People tend to order a "medium" drink, regardless of the actual volume that is called "medium". They can't complain they aren't getting a good value, because it is, after all, a whole quart of soda.
In the grand -- or shall we say "venti" -- scheme of things, what Starbucks is doing is not especially nefarious. They aren't manipulating their customers into drinking whole quarts of sugar water at a sitting. In a sense, by introducing a completely meaningless terminology to describe sizes, they're making it easier to actually think about how much you really want.
In any case, the thing I like about Starbucks is that they hire good people and seem to keep them happy. It makes the place pleasant to visit, although I don't think their coffee is particularly good. I also like the way they try to tie each store into its neighborhood, instead of each being completely alike. My neighborhood Starbucks operates as a gallery for artists in town, hosts regular performances of local musicians, and is active in community philanthropy.
I think Google has shown that it is possible to maintain trust while selling advertising, although I think the Sponsored Link results at the top are skating close to the edge. In fact, Google use is so ubiquitous most people are trained now to mentally segregate content from advertising, providing that the design is clean and consistent about the segregation.
The key is to do a good job on integrating the ads into the site design, so they don't feel intrusive nor are they confused with content.
If you provide the best possible service, people will use it. If you are clear about what is advertising and what is content, people won't distrust you. If you aren't so greedy about selling eyeballs that you abuse the user's time by making him cut through a thicket of advertisements to get to his stuff (like Yahoo), you end up selling a smaller amount of prime real estate than a acres and acres of dump.
I don't think it's support time; they're probably taking them out of the stores because they aren't really there to be sold, any more than you go to a department store and buy the mannequin in the clothing department.
You have to understand the Walmart pricing strategy, which is to advertise the cheapest widget in its class to get you into the store, then up sell you when you actually compare the $99 widget advertised to the $499 widget sitting right next to it.
While Walmart prices are competitive, they create the impression that they have the magical ability to sell widgets for hundreds of dollars less than their competitors. In fact, you can buy the $99 widget if you want to, but they're banking on the fact you'll really prefer the $499 widget. In fact, Walmart is a bit more expensive than they appear, because the $499 widget is probably a Walmart only SKU that looks comparable to the $499 widgets sold elsewhere, but has corners cut in places that don't show, like quality.
The key is to have that one cheap SKU that will get bodies into the store, even if you have to price it so you don't make any money.
If you believe the conventional wisdom that Linux isn't ready for ordinary desktop users, a $199 Linux desktop would appear to be a perfect item for Walmart. You advertise a $199 computer, which you can use to check your email, word processing, spreadsheets, and everything all included. You get there and it's running some weird funky operating system you've never seen, it won't run MS Office or PC games. Oh, and by the way, your ISP is not going to give you any help getting it online. But you can plunk down your money and it will do everything as advertised.
The flaw of course, is that most people are perfectly happy with a modern Linux distribution, and they save a bundle by not having to buy an office suite. Also, many people have broadband, and ethernet support in Linux is excellent, so all they have to do is plug the thing in, unless they are using wi-fi (which is still a bit dicey depending on your adapter).
So a few stubborn cheapskates are going to buy the $199 box, plug it in, and have it work right away. To their delight, they'll find they don't need to buy any additional software, since everything they need can be downloaded and installed in seconds, for free. Most of it is pretty good; some of it is a bit funky, but it's free and that's important. If those cheapskates are anything like the cheapskates I know, everybody they know will be hearing about the $199 ad nauseum, and Walmart will end up selling a lot of these boxes. That's not good for Walmart, because these boxes aren't in the lineup to actually be sold. They're there to sell more expensive PCs.
You miss my point. I've worked with offshore resources too. Some are good, some are bad.
But I'm not talking about good or bad workers. I'm talking about individuals with unique abilities, like Amar Bose for example, who I understand is a nasty piece of work, but a net job creator.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the accuracy of the metaphor that is at question its the aptness for purpose. From the point of lawmaking and regulation, "tubes" is an extremely bad way of thinking of the Internet. It's really not that helpful even in a technical sense, at least to a layman, as we could all tell from Sen. Stevens tortured explanation of why his staff email was taking so long to reach him.
In fact, the what the Internet really is is something that a typical lawmaker should find very easy to understand. It is a set of agreements; agreements about how to address and deliver data. The people who own the "tubes" part of it would like you to think of it as just "tubes", but in fact the tubes are just an implementation detail. It's the conventions that make the thing so useful. You could switch the "tubes" completely, and there is still Internet. But keep the exact same "tubes", run according to a different conventions, and you have something very different.
One of the conventions that makes the Internet what it is, is net neutrality That particular convention is key to the wealth generation potential of the Internet, because anybody with a good implementation of a decent idea can reach anybody else who might want to use that idea. I appreciate that success for the Internet entrepreneur is a headache for the telecom companies, but their solution is to take the profit incentive out of Internet innovation and putting in owning strategic parcels of "tubing" real estate. Like medieval barons, they will the be able to tax the "excess profit" out of anything that has to pass through.
It's true, of course that some apps will come sooner under a proprietary "Internet-like" network; but those apps will come eventually. It's the applications that will never be that we should be concerned with. Looking at the Internet as merely "tubing" leads you to think the only thing that matters is having the most and largest tubes; not the best and most creative content moving through those tubes.
Actually, this is something that's always bothered me about time travel stories.
Not that the Earth moves -- I assume you plot your destination in time and space. The problem I have is the same one I have with teleportation: seemingly insignificant changes in barometric pressure are going to be very uncomfortable when experienced instantaneously: like having your ears pop in a fast elevator, only more so. Maybe like diving in the ocean.
I can't remember any teleportation or time travel story that mentions this obvious thing.
we'll be seeing computed gotos written into laws. In other words, same-old, same-old.
Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with standards, higher or otherwise.
I think it has been in "beta" so long, that if it were ever announced to be "released", people would expect something new and whizzy, which completely destroys the point of distinguishing "beta software" from "release software". However its questionable whether these categories have much value any longer.
The reason the beta doesn't come off is that there isn't any such thing as released software anymore. In the early days, the beta label warned people that gmail might not work with their browser; these that warning is as close to superfluous as it will ever be. What has changed since the "beta/release" terminology was introduced into the common language is the discrediting of the waterfall project management model -- not that people are any better at project management than they used to be. Using agile methods, you're continually do small releases, so you never have a final "released" product.
It's only dishonest if the party making the offer is disingenuous about its terms.
I'm sure the FSF would be delighted to work with Microsoft -- if Microsoft released all of its source under the GPL. Of course, everyone knows that its unreasonable to believe Microsoft would accept these terms in our lifetime, so it would do no good to announce this.
This shows to have PR value, an offer has to have something that might interest MS. It must be something in which MS could recognize its own enlightened self-interest. It's possible to imagine this happening fairly soon, if there are significant developments that MS cannot profitably fight or coopt. If we imagine sub-$400 linux laptops taking off big time, it might turn defending that part of MS's monopoly from a cash cow into a cash sink. That kind of thing might signal a smart time for MS to reposition itself.
It'd be momentous, to be sure. But not impossible to imagine.
Who is "they" that they can bear collective responsibility and punishment? Did every Palestinian who lost his home take part in military hostilities against Israel? There weren't any who simply evacuated their families to keep them away from the fighting?
The problem with this situation is that it is so easy to confuse legend with fact. Legends aren't usually complete fabrications, they embellish and streamline the facts in order to make a point. There has been active legend formation on both sides of this conflict, which means that each side acts as if it is living in an alternate reality, instead of having to share this one.
How do you launch a rocket into an area with innocent people and children? Simple: you think of them as elements in a story, not people who feel hurt the way you do. How do you justify occupying territory you have no intention of claiming, depriving its residents of self-government? Simple: you demonstrate that "they all" asked for this.
It is true that Arabs who remained in Israel are citizens, but they are a minority who don't have the power to tip the balance towards one coalition or another. That's why despite acting as if it would be fully justified in doing so, Israel doesn't annex all the territories it occupies. If it were simply a matter of the spoils going to the victor, this would be the right and sensible thing to do. The problem with this is that they'd either have to make the second class citizen status of the Arabs official, or they'd have to give up control of the country to the Arabs.
In order to maintain its identity as both a Jewish state and a democracy, Israel must continue to try to cede control of territory within Eretz Yisrael to the Palestinians, although it needn't actually succeed. Ironically, it is the desire of Israel to remain a democracy that in large part keeps this conflict going generation after generation. It can't absorb the people it rules without handing them power, nor can it rule them effectively and remain a democracy.
I would if it went on for sixty years.
Before government got really, really big. Too big to hide a major agency.
There used to be a kind of convention in Washington where if you said you worked for "The State Department" it was understood you meant the CIA. Normally people who worked for State would say something like "I work in the office of the Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs," which would be totally comprehensible to anybody on the DC cocktail circuit. People who worked for the NSA said they worked for "The Department of Defense". Very few people would have known about the agency in the first decades of its existence, in fact in the early days its existence was a secret. But people know that the DoD had employees who didn't talk about what where they worked.
The NSA has roots that go back as far as 1949, during the height of the Red Scare. This story -- while it may well be apocryphal -- is no more odd than many things the government of the era did in the cloak-and-dagger game. And you can't start an agency like the NSA overnight. It's not like you can put an announcement in the Federal Register and have a couple of thousand employees a few months later.
Still, the best place to hide something is, as Poe observed in The Purloined Letter, in plain sight. It would make much more sense to give the early agency a small building on the site of an extremely large and busy military installation. But it doesn't mean that the people who did the initial organization necessarily had the sense to see that.
In any case, the NSA HQ building at Fort Meade is really cool; if you were wandering around looking for the NSA headquarters you'd have no trouble figuring out which one it is: it's the one that looks like a huge, shiny black box.
Well, my theory of criticism is that it's pointless to tell somebody they ought to like something. But it should be possible to explain why some people do.
There are a number of books of Tolkien criticsm, by Tom Shippey and others, that should be possible to get at your local library. These, I think can show some of the reason for his continued fascination of readers.
The important thing for a Tolkien fan is not to be too much of a fan. LotR is not perfect. Tolkien struggled early on with giving the book direction; one of the thing popular guides to writing popular fiction say is to get your hero into action as soon as possible. If you're familiar with the Star Trek NG series, they always started off with a teaser segment before the credits where they'd do something like (apparently) blow up the ship. Tolkien dithers quite a bit and goes down a few blind alleys (almost everybody detests Tom Bombadil) before he gets the story into gear, then suddenly the story gets so complicated that you can easily go from bored to lost, if you started out bored.
The thing about LotR is that it is an extremely serious work, loaded with meditations about death and purpose. Tolkien's early life was marred by death and violence, and experiences that would channel others into nihilism or existential philosophy moved Tolkien into the world of fantasy. But LotR is a very serious work, perhaps the first or only serious literary work many people ever read voluntarily; it's intellectually disreputable fantasy setting only makes it more palatable.
For me, the fascination of the work is the beauty of its writing; few writers have Tolkien's understanding of language. Consider the name "Bilbo Baggins", which is a revealing one for somebody living the life of a country squire. His cousins are the detestable "Sackville-Bagginses", who not only affect the pretense of a hyphenated name, but a frenchified one. The explicit poetry in the work is an acquired taste, but the real poetry is in the prose. If you have a copy of LotR handy, flip through to the chapter where Frodo is leaving Bag End for what he thinks is the final time.
Finally, there's the landscape. Tolkien loved nature. The characters in LotR may be archetypal, but the landscape is extremely specific and realistic. When a character looks up and notices the moon and the stars, they are the right ones for the season and place, and by the way give the (very) attentive reader a way to coordinate actions taking place hundreds of miles apart. Somebody once said a poet ought to the a professor of the five senses. You can often tell how a place would smell, from the alkaline tang of dust choked Mordor to the set, loamy and herb scented forest of Ithilien, and of course the Shire itself which would smell of summer in the country, of hay, with hints of hearth fires and barnyards.
This is not to say you should like Tolkien. Liking is something nobody should presume to dictate to anybody else. But hopefully, you can see the appeal he has, and you won't assume a fan is necessarily so because he's following a fad.
Sure, and it was a waste of time finishing Shubert's 8th Symphony when there is a universe of unwritten music to be considered, some of which is undoubtedly better.
The appeal is that it is the unfinished work of a master. Anybody can have an opinion about how it should be finished. Finishing it in a satisfying way would be a great achievement.
So, how long before somebody tries the Nintendo DS trick, and gloms two cheap 7" screens together?
It's easy to overestimate how much people understand how an open and free society is supposed to work.
I was lying in bed one recent morning, listening to a profile of an anti-immigration politician. I practically jumped out bed when I heard he was advocating for a law which would limit the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the offspring of illegal immigrants. How could anybody so ignorant get elected to office?
It's distressing when a senior law enforcement officer or an elected official is so clueless, because they're in a position to do far more harm than they're proposing to prevent.
I read The Hobbit to my seven year old son, which he liked tremendously. As soon as we finished, he immediately asked, "Is there a Hobbit II?"
Questions like that just make you want to sigh. It is sad that Tolkien finished so few books.
They say Tolkien was the kind of writer who never let go of a manuscript until it was ripped from his unwilling hands. "Hobbit II" was exactly what LotR started out to be; it ended up being the final episode of the Silmarillion, bringing to an end the Elvish presence in Middle Earth.
Think about that. Practically every chapter in the Silmarillion would be an entire LotR sized work, if it were expanded to the scale it had in Tolkien's head. The story of the Children of Hurin is not exception. It wants to be over a thousand pages of lush mythopoetic prose. What it is, as published, is a couple of hundred pages of story sketches reworked into reasonably acceptable narrative consistency.
Furthermore, it is not finshed by a writer with J.R.R. Tolkien's gift for language. It's not that there aren't occasional bad pieces of prose in LotR, which in a work that size is not surprising. But there is so much that is so elegantly written and perceptively detailed in it. Reading the Silmarillion, and The Children of Hurin, is like reading a plot synopsis of a great opera. Some operas have better plots than others, but it's never the plot that makes them great.
Some day, when the works have gone into the public domain, there may be writers who successfully turn their hand into finishing the pieces from Tolkien's mythology. Sadly, most of us will not live to see that day.
It's not necessarily so bad. They don't have to split your sternum open, they can just make a keyhole slit to access the interface. It's not something you'd do for fun, but it beats worrying about worrying about whether you're pacemaker settings are accessible to the outside world to make "adjustments", either unintentionally via EMI or deliberately.
Based on what I know about non-specialists designing security into ad hoc network protocols, I'm not very optimistic about biomedical engineers getting it right, bright as they may otherwise be.
He doesn't.
He needs the support and agreement of one third of each of the houses of Congress. In effect, a supermajority is required to pass any law in the face of opposition by the President.
The reason that it doesn't happen all the time is that the President wants things from Congress he can' get any other way. It works better than you'd think, but it makes slanting the power balance between Congress and the President in the direction of the President a very bad idea. The veto power makes that balance unstable the moment the President can pursue his ends without Congressional cooperation. As soon as the President and his aides feel they can operate independently of Congressional oversight and appropriations power, Congress becomes powerless and Presidential power becomes practically unlimited.
That's what made the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan administration a much bigger deal than most people realized. It wasn't just that it was a strategically stupid thing to do, what prompted the stupidity was the desire of the Reagan administration to develop their own sources of funding which Congress did not control, in fact was completely unaware of. To a lesser degree, that's why the Bush administration's insistence on exempting the DHS from civil service worrisome. Civil service regulations are a form of Congressional oversight; the idea that the President should be able to move personnel around and have them do whatever he wants is really giving him a kind of de jure power to alter the DHS budget under any circumstances whatsoever, over and above the de facto power he has to do this in a clear national emergency.
There are a number of structural faults in the US Constitution, and one of them is the delicacy of balance between the President and Congress. The basic idea was patterned on the relationship between George Washington and the Continental Congress: you get a powerful leader who has a free hand within the scope of his powers, but that "free hand" is subject to oversight, regulation and budgetary restraint. When this works, it works extremely well. But when you have a narcissistic and self-righteous President, supported by a sufficiently large block of Congressional sycophants, his power is only limited by what he imagines it to be.
Or, as we used to call them "buccanees", those "scouges of the sea, who pey upon commece".
Because "Jeff Vernon Merkey" is an anagram for "Re: Jerk off envy men." Not that I'd dream of putting that in his Wikipedia entry.
You need to rework your post so that analogies are what are being compared to explosives.
In any case, I've gone back and forth between management and engineering over the years. The bottom line is that good IT is no cure for bad management, and good management doesn't tolerate bad IT.
The gaussian curve is the curve that maximizes entropy that has no hard upper or lower limit for x, and a finite integral on [-inf,+inf].
So, really, you need to provide citations for other than a normal distribution.
IT people often forget hey are a support, not line function.
On the third hand, IT departments are often not staffed adequately, either in butts in chair or in the quality of the heads over those butts. It seems absurd to think about using IT to achieve breakthroughs in productivity or competitiveness when they seem to spend more time restricting the work that goes through the department than actually getting things done.
The bottom line is that skill is distributed on a normal curve, and the vast majority of people are mediocre. That includes top management; most companies have mediocre leadership. When the leadership of a company is weak, there's not much IT can do to make things better. They really are just a facilities type function.
The thing is, they must know something about how language is wired to the buying impulse, because they're extremely successful and extremely insistent upon this point.
My brother is a bigshot in the food service industry. He's very good at what he does. One day I mentioned to him that I'd ordered a medium soft drink at a fast food restaurant and it turned out to be 32 ounces -- as much soda as we used to order for the entire family when we were kids. According to him, this is a way to maximize sales. People tend to order a "medium" drink, regardless of the actual volume that is called "medium". They can't complain they aren't getting a good value, because it is, after all, a whole quart of soda.
In the grand -- or shall we say "venti" -- scheme of things, what Starbucks is doing is not especially nefarious. They aren't manipulating their customers into drinking whole quarts of sugar water at a sitting. In a sense, by introducing a completely meaningless terminology to describe sizes, they're making it easier to actually think about how much you really want.
In any case, the thing I like about Starbucks is that they hire good people and seem to keep them happy. It makes the place pleasant to visit, although I don't think their coffee is particularly good. I also like the way they try to tie each store into its neighborhood, instead of each being completely alike. My neighborhood Starbucks operates as a gallery for artists in town, hosts regular performances of local musicians, and is active in community philanthropy.
I think Google has shown that it is possible to maintain trust while selling advertising, although I think the Sponsored Link results at the top are skating close to the edge. In fact, Google use is so ubiquitous most people are trained now to mentally segregate content from advertising, providing that the design is clean and consistent about the segregation.
The key is to do a good job on integrating the ads into the site design, so they don't feel intrusive nor are they confused with content.
If you provide the best possible service, people will use it. If you are clear about what is advertising and what is content, people won't distrust you. If you aren't so greedy about selling eyeballs that you abuse the user's time by making him cut through a thicket of advertisements to get to his stuff (like Yahoo), you end up selling a smaller amount of prime real estate than a acres and acres of dump.
I don't think it's support time; they're probably taking them out of the stores because they aren't really there to be sold, any more than you go to a department store and buy the mannequin in the clothing department.
You have to understand the Walmart pricing strategy, which is to advertise the cheapest widget in its class to get you into the store, then up sell you when you actually compare the $99 widget advertised to the $499 widget sitting right next to it.
While Walmart prices are competitive, they create the impression that they have the magical ability to sell widgets for hundreds of dollars less than their competitors. In fact, you can buy the $99 widget if you want to, but they're banking on the fact you'll really prefer the $499 widget. In fact, Walmart is a bit more expensive than they appear, because the $499 widget is probably a Walmart only SKU that looks comparable to the $499 widgets sold elsewhere, but has corners cut in places that don't show, like quality.
The key is to have that one cheap SKU that will get bodies into the store, even if you have to price it so you don't make any money.
If you believe the conventional wisdom that Linux isn't ready for ordinary desktop users, a $199 Linux desktop would appear to be a perfect item for Walmart. You advertise a $199 computer, which you can use to check your email, word processing, spreadsheets, and everything all included. You get there and it's running some weird funky operating system you've never seen, it won't run MS Office or PC games. Oh, and by the way, your ISP is not going to give you any help getting it online. But you can plunk down your money and it will do everything as advertised.
The flaw of course, is that most people are perfectly happy with a modern Linux distribution, and they save a bundle by not having to buy an office suite. Also, many people have broadband, and ethernet support in Linux is excellent, so all they have to do is plug the thing in, unless they are using wi-fi (which is still a bit dicey depending on your adapter).
So a few stubborn cheapskates are going to buy the $199 box, plug it in, and have it work right away. To their delight, they'll find they don't need to buy any additional software, since everything they need can be downloaded and installed in seconds, for free. Most of it is pretty good; some of it is a bit funky, but it's free and that's important. If those cheapskates are anything like the cheapskates I know, everybody they know will be hearing about the $199 ad nauseum, and Walmart will end up selling a lot of these boxes. That's not good for Walmart, because these boxes aren't in the lineup to actually be sold. They're there to sell more expensive PCs.
Gray. It comes from knowing too much about economics.
You miss my point. I've worked with offshore resources too. Some are good, some are bad.
But I'm not talking about good or bad workers. I'm talking about individuals with unique abilities, like Amar Bose for example, who I understand is a nasty piece of work, but a net job creator.