There's not a lot to be done about zombies, especially if they have automated, no-interference access to your checkbook. Hell, I suspect that it's more lucrative to simply steal money from them than to go to the effort of acquiring customers for your zombie network.
A cynical part of me says that maybe draining the pocketbooks of a few lusers will get them to patch their boxes. The more practical part says that I could be one of those idiots myself.
In practice a good design of the software would make it tricky for the spammers to get a hold of the relevant passwords they'd need. They couldn't do their current trick of building in their own SMTP server, so they'd need to hack the mail program. Outlook isn't quite as horrific as it once was.
Depending on the scenario, most users wouldn't have bonded accounts, so no help for the spammers there. In those scenarios where most users do have accounts (e.g. AOL decides to make them mandatory), I suspect that there would be caps on email to limit losses.
So zombies are a problem, but they're their own problem, independent of spam.
Wow, dude, sorry you got hit some moron posting crap at you. I get nervous every time an AC replies to me.
To answer your question, the reason spammers can't hide from this is that they have to pay money to send messages via this mechanism.
In the limit case, you can choose to receive messages ONLY from people who send mail this way. Even your friends would pay money to send you email, but since you'd mark all of their messages as "worthwhile" it wouldn't cost them anything.
You'd get no spam, but you'd lose the ability to get mail from anonymous sources. Sometimes you want that (e.g. potential customers sending you questions.) It would also make it hard to subscribe to things like joke-of-the-day services, since they'd have to filter out dimwits who subscribe and then mark the message as worthless to receive the attention bond.
If you don't go all the way, you can still set messages coming from this service to bypass your spam filter. Existing spammers can continue to spam, but they risk being filtered out. It would help you tune your spam filter better.
This is aimed at people genuinely marketing genuine products via mass-email. They're basically paying you to read their ad, which means that they're going to be a bit more selective about whom they send it to. This is spam sent by people who don't wish to hide, to people who wish to read it.
Say you're a grocery store and you want to send out coupons every week. You send your message out via this server, and pay $.01 per person to guarantee that the message is worthwhile. Then you have some mechanism so that you only send it to real opt-ins, who somehow guarantee that they won't take the money. The message goes out, people get their coupons, and you get all of your "attention bond" back.
The "some mechanism" for guaranteeing only opt-ins is the tricky part; it's prone to people scamming it for the cash. So there are variations of this plan, but basically they all crumble under the weight of lots of small bits of money moving around, which is currently too expensive to solve.
So I hope that explains the thing you think you're missing: spammers can't hide because they don't want to hide. They want you to read it and are willing to pay in advance. They're then free to spew all they want, but it'll cost them big time. Spam only works when it's basically free, since the response rate is so low.
Mostly that your public playing on a boombox is a transitory event. You play it, it's over. A perfect copy of an MP3 is forever.
That's what they have to sell: the ability to hear the songs whenever you want. That used to be a working business model, since not many people owned the ability to make reasonable copies.
Now that they do, it sounds like they have two choices. They can either ask people to play by the expected rules of their old business model, before the technology changed out from under them, or they can make a new business model.
If it is your right to buy a CD and then make perfect copies for the entire world, they'll just have to raise the price of that CD. Say, a few hundred thousand dollars. Fine with them. As long as they sell a copy or two, they're making the same money.
Probably just one, to some guy who'll share it with everybody else. But he'll probably try to make back his investment, so he'll probably charge you. And he'll probably put some DRM on it. The guy's name is Steve Jobs.
Of course you'd be welcome to buy a copy, too, and kick that Jobs guy in the butt. How many CDs fit in your CD budget?
I saw a green one, once, at the Smithsonian. Harry Winston had sponsored a show with fabulous examples of a diamond of several colors, including red, yellow, orange, and green, to go with the famous blue Hope Diamond. (They also built a new case to for the Hope, which shows it off far better than the old one, which looked like a vault with the door open, the diamond stuffed in the back.)
The green one was truly remarkable. The exhibit notes claimed that it's not due to chemicals mixed in but due to variations in the structure caused by radioactivity, and that most green diamonds (unlike this one) were artificially irradiated.
If so, I see no reason why they couldn't make artificially-green cultured diamonds.
Honestly, yellow doesn't go with anybody's skin tone. Well, very few. I knew a woman from Ghana once who was so dark she had blue undertones, and yellow would look great on her. Learning to do makeup for her was a trip; I had to throw out everything I'd learned. (I'm a stage director, not a beautician, but close enough.)
So I don't think that yellow stones will sell all that well; the canary stones look better in the case than on your finger or around your neck. They get big points for different and interesting, but that's about all.
I seriously doubt that we're 25/25/50. I think we're more likely to be 25/25/6/1/1/1/1/1/1/.01/.0024/.0000034.
Yeah, I know, that doesn't add up to 100, but you get the gist. There is no Disaffected Party that unifies all of those people. I don't expect the politically agnostic to be motivated by anybody.
There are issues not being discussed by either party. Last election I was infuriated that neither candidate ran as a "deficit hawk"; I'm young and it's a critical issue to me, because I'm the one who's going to pay that off. The Republicans are nominally the party of fiscal responsibility, but have done a miserable job of it. That left a huge opportunity for a fiscally conservative Democrat, but the early Democratic primaries kicked them all out.
So why don't I rally around some fiscally conservative third party? Because all they have to offer is spinach, and most people are going to vote for the candy being offered by the two major parties. Sure, that screws me, and a great many others who don't recognize it, but hey, as long as there's candy today why worry about the spinach tomorrow? (Republicans in fact will tell you that it's candy today and that the Invisible Hand will provide candy tomorrow. Democrats say they'll worry about tomorrow later; we have a crisis today.)
So if you've got a way to motivate the agnostic, go for it. But I'm afraid you're going to find them agnostic for a reason.
Totally agreed. You'll notice I put ala carte in my fantasy-but-it's-never-gonna-happen scenario.
Me, all I get is Netflix, no cable or satellite at all. That's as a la carte as I expect to ever see. I watch TV shows years after they come out. I only saw the Buffy finale a few months ago. But that won't work for everybody.
And, of course, it works only because there's somebody willing to watch it over the air the first time. If they didn't have that kind of promotion they wouldn't be making it in the first place. "Direct to video" is still a derogatory term and I don't expect that to change soon.
Step 1: Make a crappy TV show on the cheap Step 2: Make it available for free over the Internet Step 3: Profit when billions of people show up to see how crappy it is
My point, actually, is that I find the "free advertising" argument somewhat self-serving. Billions of people don't show up due to your selfless advertising. Or at least, it hasn't been proven to my satisfaction they get more commercial-watching viewers through your free advertising than they lose to downloaders.
(And it's all about the commercials. They wouldn't do it at all if somebody weren't watching the commercials. The network execs know that their product isn't TV shows and the audience isn't their customer. The advertiser is the customer and the product is you.)
So I'm always reluctant to accept, "I'm doing this thing that you don't want me to do because maybe it's good for you" arguments. Even without examining the numbers, it's always healthy to be suspicious of somebody who claims they're doing something in my own best interests.
Unlike with software, they don't make ad-free paid copies of the TV show available. At least not immediately. It comes out on DVD, commercial-free, months later.
That works for me; it's like I'm years behind on my TV watching but gradually catching up.
(At least I hope it remains commercial-free. Sooner or later somebody will get the idea to put a non-skippable ad in the middle of the show. I stop buying all DVDs in perpetuity from the company that tries that. I'm serious: I really don't care that much about Sidney Bristow's latest antics.)
But many people would rather be able to discuss the current episode of 24 around the water-cooler the next day. It would be interesting if they made it available on a pay-for-download, heavily DRMed version. That would cut the rate advertisers would be willing to pay, of course, but in theory the fees balance that out.
But the economics don't work. Eventually somebody would notice that they could be making more money from their airtime (which they sort of pay for, though not really; either way it's a scarce resource). Then they'd make some shows "over-the-air only", which would have higher ad fees. Those would be the more popular shows.
How I'd want it to work, of course, is that gradually we get ala carte downloadable TV only. My cable fees stop subsidizing the channels I don't watch. The airtime gets put to better use than CSI: Waukeegan; say, cheaper cell calls and wifi broadband.
Alternatively, we can send up another rover. It's way cheaper than getting a human being all the way to Mars alive. And we don't have to worry about bringing it back.
So yeah, when you say that "the 2 things holding us back are price and safety," those aren't two little things. They're the whole ball game. For the price of sending a human to Mars we could send scores, perhaps hundreds, of rovers, with zero risk to human life. No, we don't learn as much, but it means that when we do finally send humans they go fully prepared.
When hand washing interferes with your life, you've got a problem, but when something evolves that can't be washed off with soap and water we're in real trouble. The difference between hand washing and medication is that soap can be far, far harsher than anything you'd put inside your body. Killing HIV is easy; the trick is killing it in such a way that it doesn't kill you.
You can tinker with the voting scheme, but they gave a Nobel prize to the guy who pointed out that it doesn't really help. It's prone to being gamed by throwing in multiple alternatives to split the vote for a candidate you're opposed to. There are all kinds of ways you can fiddle with it to move the unfairness around, but you can't get rid of it.
Besides that, the fact is that George W. Bush won the election despite the fact that 49% of the country really, really, really despises him. Had Kerry won, at least 49% of the country would have really, really, really despised him, too. Ultimately the real problem is that we only get to elect one president.
That's not too bad, since we get to change our minds every four years, but between congressional redistricting and lifetime judicial appointments it gets harder and harder to make changes.
While it is often correct to blame Microsoft, Kodak is the problem in this instance, not Microsoft.
Possibly the blame rests with Kodak (and certainly for not failing a bit more gracefully), but the question is, what features does EasyShare need that MS makes available only with admin privileges? Compartmentalizing is hard in Windows (and frankly I haven't seen it be much better in Unix-derived OSes, either), and all-or-nothing is easier on the user. Except, of course, for the security nightmare.
I can't imagine what features EasyShare really needs that Windows isn't providing. I suspect it's probably a device-driver installation issue for scanners, or something like that. If that's it, they're really blowing it by having a modal dialogue pop up every start for a rarely-used operation that should be done outside the application anyway. But that's just a guess.
It does sound like the real problem is that he's kind of a prick. No offense. But it means that the execs are less likely to cut him slack. They kept saying in the documentary that he had a "reputation" for going over budget, which I suspect is mostly a reputation for being hard to work with.
Never met him myself; I'm just inferring. I loved many of his movies.
Personally, I found it weird that he thought there could be only one actor in the world who could play Don Quixote, and one who had to be taught English to boot. I mean, hey, Peter O'Toole's still alive. It doesn't mean he could necessarily drop back and start over, but it meant that the discussion got cut short real quick.
I think about it frequently. Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that a two-party system is a very stable state. Any new party rarely draws evenly from both of the existing ones, and therefore weakens the party with which it is most similar. So the eventually either merge or one goes out of business.
More to the point, it's rarely in the interest of an individual voter to vote for a "third" party. Often, all that does is draw votes away from the most similar party (most visibly, the Nader candidacy of 2000, but the logic applies at the local level as well). So it's very hard to get a new party that jump start to, say, 5% of voters that would make it more visible. Again, three parties collapse into two major ones.
The final problem I'm going to bring up is that there is never "a" third party. There could potentially be hundreds of additional parties, mostly around special interest groups, but no one of them is important enough to present a serious challenge to the two major ones. If they all got together and formed one party, maybe they'd have something (the way the Democrats are a loose coalition of labor, environmental interests, minorities, and women, who often violently disagree but who have found enough common ground.)
It's not to say it never happens, but I can count the number of times it's happened in the US on my fingers. And yeah, the rules aren't particularly conducive to new parties. They don't get to participate in Presidential debates, for example. But clearly the debates would be useless if they didn't set some pretty stringent standards for who could participate. Third-party candidates are welcome to participate in other forums, but those won't be televised becaue they're not particularly interesting.
Could there be a truly radically different third pary? Say, the libertarians? Sure. They're not "just" a special interest group. Roughly speaking they interest moderate voters from both parties about equally.
But it doesn't take conscious effort by the other two parties to keep them from succeeding. No district wants to send a Libertarian Congressman; he'd be a trivial minority and thus forced to side with one or the other. And so any Presidential candidate is going to find themselves without any Congressional backing.
And the Libertarians don't seem to have any interest in the local fights. They don't seem to run for city council, or Mayor. At least not that I'm aware. And their various policies (pro-drug-legalization, for example) scare off enough people to make any fight hard.
Even in a multi-party parliamentary system, semi-permanent coalitions form around the two major parties. In the US they're just called "special interest groups" rather than separate parties, and they shift alliances with one of the two parties as seems fit. In the UK it's been Labor and Tories forever; in Israel it's been Labor and Conservatives for a long time.
So yeah, I've thought about it. I've presented only the tip of the iceberg here.
I think you have smarter voters in Ireland. We in the US have enough trouble getting people to check one box per office. It's why they felt that had to go to computer-aided inputs in the first place.
Actually I'm not entirely convinced that fancier voting systems represent the popular vote more accurately. Arrow's Theorem says that it's always possible to game the system no matter what voting system you use.
The real problem, from my point of view, is the fact that we have a country divided enough that we have 51/49 elections. There's just no way to win with any sort of majority-rules system.
Even with something where you get more proportional result, like a congress or parliament, there's always some point where a decision goes up-or-down no matter how narrow the margin is. Here in the US we're having a major debate over a quirk of the rules that allows certain decisions to be forced to a 60% vote, and the 55% majority party is fuming. "Just allow a simple up or down vote," they say, knowing perfectly well they'll win, and in this case appointing somebody to a lifetime office. Get a temporary majority; stay in power forever.
It's not like I've got an alternative; all of the other options are worse. But I'm afraid we're screwed either way, so when in doubt I'll go with the simplest solution when the more complex solutions are at least as wrong.
Richard Harris missed the third movie on account of his being dead. I like Michael Gambon in the role, but I'd happily have Richard Harris back.
The books have been aimed at Rowling's own children, who get older significantly faster than Harry does. So they get darker and more grown-up.
The upcoming book is going to be very dark, I'm sure. I'd love to see them get Cuaron back to direct one of the really dark books. Perhaps this upcoming one, which I suspect will have a serious romatic subplot.
I'd have expected to see Richard Newell do the fifth book, containing Harry's first kiss. That's such a sweet moment, and Newell has done some very sweet work. I'm sure that the little romatic encounters in the fourth book will be played up nicely. (Emma Watson cleans up nicely in the trailer.)
Too bad he thinks that. Cuaron had nothing but nice things to say Columbus on the commentaries. Duh, and if you read between the lines you can see that Cuaron wasn't entirely pleased.
But Cuaron rightly praised Columbus for a number of things right with those movies. He picked a knockout cast, both kids and adults, and an awesome location.
Some of the failings of the first three (yeah, all three) I put on the screenwriter, who seems to have a tendency to substitute action scenes for character moments. That made the first two movies rather long for kids' movies and still leaving out some important scenes from the books. Still, that's Rowling's chosen screenwriter, so I guess it's what she wanted.
I much prefer the gritty realism of the third movie to the first two. But for Gilliam to dismiss Sorcerer's Stone as "crap", given that he's been rather hit-and-miss himself, seems undeservedly arrogant.
Columbus made basic kiddie fare. Gilliam's would have been a fascinating change, though in some ways I like the idea of the first intro movie being a more pedestrian adaptation of the book, to serve as a foundation for the sequels to be more interesting. I'd love to see Gilliam direct one of the future movies, but with an attitude like that there's no way they're going to let him.
Of course, the studio was probably dead set against him from the start. He has a tendency to create truly grand visions and then run over schedule and budget. Baron Munchausen almost didn't make it, and his Don Quixote did fail. He blames it on circumstances and cheapskate studios.
Me, I'm a director myself (stage, rather than film), and I know that disasters happen and you need to be flexible to fix them. The documentary Lost in La Mancha is very favorable to him, and he did have a run of bad luck, but it also sounds to me like he failed to have backup plans and cut things too close to the wire. Under those circumstances projects will always fail, because things go wrong.
He needs a better unit production manager, or he needs to listen more closely to the one he has.
Slashdot Mirror
There's not a lot to be done about zombies, especially if they have automated, no-interference access to your checkbook. Hell, I suspect that it's more lucrative to simply steal money from them than to go to the effort of acquiring customers for your zombie network.
A cynical part of me says that maybe draining the pocketbooks of a few lusers will get them to patch their boxes. The more practical part says that I could be one of those idiots myself.
In practice a good design of the software would make it tricky for the spammers to get a hold of the relevant passwords they'd need. They couldn't do their current trick of building in their own SMTP server, so they'd need to hack the mail program. Outlook isn't quite as horrific as it once was.
Depending on the scenario, most users wouldn't have bonded accounts, so no help for the spammers there. In those scenarios where most users do have accounts (e.g. AOL decides to make them mandatory), I suspect that there would be caps on email to limit losses.
So zombies are a problem, but they're their own problem, independent of spam.
Wow, dude, sorry you got hit some moron posting crap at you. I get nervous every time an AC replies to me.
To answer your question, the reason spammers can't hide from this is that they have to pay money to send messages via this mechanism.
In the limit case, you can choose to receive messages ONLY from people who send mail this way. Even your friends would pay money to send you email, but since you'd mark all of their messages as "worthwhile" it wouldn't cost them anything.
You'd get no spam, but you'd lose the ability to get mail from anonymous sources. Sometimes you want that (e.g. potential customers sending you questions.) It would also make it hard to subscribe to things like joke-of-the-day services, since they'd have to filter out dimwits who subscribe and then mark the message as worthless to receive the attention bond.
If you don't go all the way, you can still set messages coming from this service to bypass your spam filter. Existing spammers can continue to spam, but they risk being filtered out. It would help you tune your spam filter better.
This is aimed at people genuinely marketing genuine products via mass-email. They're basically paying you to read their ad, which means that they're going to be a bit more selective about whom they send it to. This is spam sent by people who don't wish to hide, to people who wish to read it.
Say you're a grocery store and you want to send out coupons every week. You send your message out via this server, and pay $.01 per person to guarantee that the message is worthwhile. Then you have some mechanism so that you only send it to real opt-ins, who somehow guarantee that they won't take the money. The message goes out, people get their coupons, and you get all of your "attention bond" back.
The "some mechanism" for guaranteeing only opt-ins is the tricky part; it's prone to people scamming it for the cash. So there are variations of this plan, but basically they all crumble under the weight of lots of small bits of money moving around, which is currently too expensive to solve.
So I hope that explains the thing you think you're missing: spammers can't hide because they don't want to hide. They want you to read it and are willing to pay in advance. They're then free to spew all they want, but it'll cost them big time. Spam only works when it's basically free, since the response rate is so low.
It fails, but not because the spammers hide.
Mostly that your public playing on a boombox is a transitory event. You play it, it's over. A perfect copy of an MP3 is forever.
That's what they have to sell: the ability to hear the songs whenever you want. That used to be a working business model, since not many people owned the ability to make reasonable copies.
Now that they do, it sounds like they have two choices. They can either ask people to play by the expected rules of their old business model, before the technology changed out from under them, or they can make a new business model.
If it is your right to buy a CD and then make perfect copies for the entire world, they'll just have to raise the price of that CD. Say, a few hundred thousand dollars. Fine with them. As long as they sell a copy or two, they're making the same money.
Probably just one, to some guy who'll share it with everybody else. But he'll probably try to make back his investment, so he'll probably charge you. And he'll probably put some DRM on it. The guy's name is Steve Jobs.
Of course you'd be welcome to buy a copy, too, and kick that Jobs guy in the butt. How many CDs fit in your CD budget?
It's fair use to share a CD with ten thousand of your closest friends?
Huh. Makes you wonder why they don't charge more.
Mary had a little lamb
But now it is no more
For what she thought was H2O
Was H2SO4
I saw a green one, once, at the Smithsonian. Harry Winston had sponsored a show with fabulous examples of a diamond of several colors, including red, yellow, orange, and green, to go with the famous blue Hope Diamond. (They also built a new case to for the Hope, which shows it off far better than the old one, which looked like a vault with the door open, the diamond stuffed in the back.)
The green one was truly remarkable. The exhibit notes claimed that it's not due to chemicals mixed in but due to variations in the structure caused by radioactivity, and that most green diamonds (unlike this one) were artificially irradiated.
If so, I see no reason why they couldn't make artificially-green cultured diamonds.
Honestly, yellow doesn't go with anybody's skin tone. Well, very few. I knew a woman from Ghana once who was so dark she had blue undertones, and yellow would look great on her. Learning to do makeup for her was a trip; I had to throw out everything I'd learned. (I'm a stage director, not a beautician, but close enough.)
So I don't think that yellow stones will sell all that well; the canary stones look better in the case than on your finger or around your neck. They get big points for different and interesting, but that's about all.
Now if they can learn to make synthetic greens...
Schwarzenegger for president!
Yeah, I kinda figured. But it was an opportunity for me to say, "ooh, ooh, I know the answer!" Too many smart people on Slashdot got there before me.
I seriously doubt that we're 25/25/50. I think we're more likely to be 25/25/6/1/1/1/1/1/1/.01/.0024/.0000034.
Yeah, I know, that doesn't add up to 100, but you get the gist. There is no Disaffected Party that unifies all of those people. I don't expect the politically agnostic to be motivated by anybody.
There are issues not being discussed by either party. Last election I was infuriated that neither candidate ran as a "deficit hawk"; I'm young and it's a critical issue to me, because I'm the one who's going to pay that off. The Republicans are nominally the party of fiscal responsibility, but have done a miserable job of it. That left a huge opportunity for a fiscally conservative Democrat, but the early Democratic primaries kicked them all out.
So why don't I rally around some fiscally conservative third party? Because all they have to offer is spinach, and most people are going to vote for the candy being offered by the two major parties. Sure, that screws me, and a great many others who don't recognize it, but hey, as long as there's candy today why worry about the spinach tomorrow? (Republicans in fact will tell you that it's candy today and that the Invisible Hand will provide candy tomorrow. Democrats say they'll worry about tomorrow later; we have a crisis today.)
So if you've got a way to motivate the agnostic, go for it. But I'm afraid you're going to find them agnostic for a reason.
It's painstaking as in "taking pains".
Totally agreed. You'll notice I put ala carte in my fantasy-but-it's-never-gonna-happen scenario.
Me, all I get is Netflix, no cable or satellite at all. That's as a la carte as I expect to ever see. I watch TV shows years after they come out. I only saw the Buffy finale a few months ago. But that won't work for everybody.
And, of course, it works only because there's somebody willing to watch it over the air the first time. If they didn't have that kind of promotion they wouldn't be making it in the first place. "Direct to video" is still a derogatory term and I don't expect that to change soon.
Step 1: Make a crappy TV show on the cheap
Step 2: Make it available for free over the Internet
Step 3: Profit when billions of people show up to see how crappy it is
My point, actually, is that I find the "free advertising" argument somewhat self-serving. Billions of people don't show up due to your selfless advertising. Or at least, it hasn't been proven to my satisfaction they get more commercial-watching viewers through your free advertising than they lose to downloaders.
(And it's all about the commercials. They wouldn't do it at all if somebody weren't watching the commercials. The network execs know that their product isn't TV shows and the audience isn't their customer. The advertiser is the customer and the product is you.)
So I'm always reluctant to accept, "I'm doing this thing that you don't want me to do because maybe it's good for you" arguments. Even without examining the numbers, it's always healthy to be suspicious of somebody who claims they're doing something in my own best interests.
Unlike with software, they don't make ad-free paid copies of the TV show available. At least not immediately. It comes out on DVD, commercial-free, months later.
That works for me; it's like I'm years behind on my TV watching but gradually catching up.
(At least I hope it remains commercial-free. Sooner or later somebody will get the idea to put a non-skippable ad in the middle of the show. I stop buying all DVDs in perpetuity from the company that tries that. I'm serious: I really don't care that much about Sidney Bristow's latest antics.)
But many people would rather be able to discuss the current episode of 24 around the water-cooler the next day. It would be interesting if they made it available on a pay-for-download, heavily DRMed version. That would cut the rate advertisers would be willing to pay, of course, but in theory the fees balance that out.
But the economics don't work. Eventually somebody would notice that they could be making more money from their airtime (which they sort of pay for, though not really; either way it's a scarce resource). Then they'd make some shows "over-the-air only", which would have higher ad fees. Those would be the more popular shows.
How I'd want it to work, of course, is that gradually we get ala carte downloadable TV only. My cable fees stop subsidizing the channels I don't watch. The airtime gets put to better use than CSI: Waukeegan; say, cheaper cell calls and wifi broadband.
Oh, well. I'm just gonna go read a book.
Alternatively, we can send up another rover. It's way cheaper than getting a human being all the way to Mars alive. And we don't have to worry about bringing it back.
So yeah, when you say that "the 2 things holding us back are price and safety," those aren't two little things. They're the whole ball game. For the price of sending a human to Mars we could send scores, perhaps hundreds, of rovers, with zero risk to human life. No, we don't learn as much, but it means that when we do finally send humans they go fully prepared.
Overmedicating is definitely a problem.
When hand washing interferes with your life, you've got a problem, but when something evolves that can't be washed off with soap and water we're in real trouble. The difference between hand washing and medication is that soap can be far, far harsher than anything you'd put inside your body. Killing HIV is easy; the trick is killing it in such a way that it doesn't kill you.
You can tinker with the voting scheme, but they gave a Nobel prize to the guy who pointed out that it doesn't really help. It's prone to being gamed by throwing in multiple alternatives to split the vote for a candidate you're opposed to. There are all kinds of ways you can fiddle with it to move the unfairness around, but you can't get rid of it.
Besides that, the fact is that George W. Bush won the election despite the fact that 49% of the country really, really, really despises him. Had Kerry won, at least 49% of the country would have really, really, really despised him, too. Ultimately the real problem is that we only get to elect one president.
That's not too bad, since we get to change our minds every four years, but between congressional redistricting and lifetime judicial appointments it gets harder and harder to make changes.
As an immunologist, I fully expect another 'Black Plague' to emerge and wipe out 25% of the world's population within my lifetime.
Ah... med school paranoia. Nothing like that first Infectious Diseases class to turn one into an OCD-style hand washer.
It's amazing how fragile the body seems when you study it closely enough. "Intelligent design", my ass. "Shitty design", more like.
While it is often correct to blame Microsoft, Kodak is the problem in this instance, not Microsoft.
Possibly the blame rests with Kodak (and certainly for not failing a bit more gracefully), but the question is, what features does EasyShare need that MS makes available only with admin privileges? Compartmentalizing is hard in Windows (and frankly I haven't seen it be much better in Unix-derived OSes, either), and all-or-nothing is easier on the user. Except, of course, for the security nightmare.
I can't imagine what features EasyShare really needs that Windows isn't providing. I suspect it's probably a device-driver installation issue for scanners, or something like that. If that's it, they're really blowing it by having a modal dialogue pop up every start for a rarely-used operation that should be done outside the application anyway. But that's just a guess.
It does sound like the real problem is that he's kind of a prick. No offense. But it means that the execs are less likely to cut him slack. They kept saying in the documentary that he had a "reputation" for going over budget, which I suspect is mostly a reputation for being hard to work with.
Never met him myself; I'm just inferring. I loved many of his movies.
Personally, I found it weird that he thought there could be only one actor in the world who could play Don Quixote, and one who had to be taught English to boot. I mean, hey, Peter O'Toole's still alive. It doesn't mean he could necessarily drop back and start over, but it meant that the discussion got cut short real quick.
Ever thought of that, huh?
I think about it frequently. Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that a two-party system is a very stable state. Any new party rarely draws evenly from both of the existing ones, and therefore weakens the party with which it is most similar. So the eventually either merge or one goes out of business.
More to the point, it's rarely in the interest of an individual voter to vote for a "third" party. Often, all that does is draw votes away from the most similar party (most visibly, the Nader candidacy of 2000, but the logic applies at the local level as well). So it's very hard to get a new party that jump start to, say, 5% of voters that would make it more visible. Again, three parties collapse into two major ones.
The final problem I'm going to bring up is that there is never "a" third party. There could potentially be hundreds of additional parties, mostly around special interest groups, but no one of them is important enough to present a serious challenge to the two major ones. If they all got together and formed one party, maybe they'd have something (the way the Democrats are a loose coalition of labor, environmental interests, minorities, and women, who often violently disagree but who have found enough common ground.)
It's not to say it never happens, but I can count the number of times it's happened in the US on my fingers. And yeah, the rules aren't particularly conducive to new parties. They don't get to participate in Presidential debates, for example. But clearly the debates would be useless if they didn't set some pretty stringent standards for who could participate. Third-party candidates are welcome to participate in other forums, but those won't be televised becaue they're not particularly interesting.
Could there be a truly radically different third pary? Say, the libertarians? Sure. They're not "just" a special interest group. Roughly speaking they interest moderate voters from both parties about equally.
But it doesn't take conscious effort by the other two parties to keep them from succeeding. No district wants to send a Libertarian Congressman; he'd be a trivial minority and thus forced to side with one or the other. And so any Presidential candidate is going to find themselves without any Congressional backing.
And the Libertarians don't seem to have any interest in the local fights. They don't seem to run for city council, or Mayor. At least not that I'm aware. And their various policies (pro-drug-legalization, for example) scare off enough people to make any fight hard.
Even in a multi-party parliamentary system, semi-permanent coalitions form around the two major parties. In the US they're just called "special interest groups" rather than separate parties, and they shift alliances with one of the two parties as seems fit. In the UK it's been Labor and Tories forever; in Israel it's been Labor and Conservatives for a long time.
So yeah, I've thought about it. I've presented only the tip of the iceberg here.
I think you have smarter voters in Ireland. We in the US have enough trouble getting people to check one box per office. It's why they felt that had to go to computer-aided inputs in the first place.
Actually I'm not entirely convinced that fancier voting systems represent the popular vote more accurately. Arrow's Theorem says that it's always possible to game the system no matter what voting system you use.
The real problem, from my point of view, is the fact that we have a country divided enough that we have 51/49 elections. There's just no way to win with any sort of majority-rules system.
Even with something where you get more proportional result, like a congress or parliament, there's always some point where a decision goes up-or-down no matter how narrow the margin is. Here in the US we're having a major debate over a quirk of the rules that allows certain decisions to be forced to a 60% vote, and the 55% majority party is fuming. "Just allow a simple up or down vote," they say, knowing perfectly well they'll win, and in this case appointing somebody to a lifetime office. Get a temporary majority; stay in power forever.
It's not like I've got an alternative; all of the other options are worse. But I'm afraid we're screwed either way, so when in doubt I'll go with the simplest solution when the more complex solutions are at least as wrong.
Richard Harris missed the third movie on account of his being dead. I like Michael Gambon in the role, but I'd happily have Richard Harris back.
The books have been aimed at Rowling's own children, who get older significantly faster than Harry does. So they get darker and more grown-up.
The upcoming book is going to be very dark, I'm sure. I'd love to see them get Cuaron back to direct one of the really dark books. Perhaps this upcoming one, which I suspect will have a serious romatic subplot.
I'd have expected to see Richard Newell do the fifth book, containing Harry's first kiss. That's such a sweet moment, and Newell has done some very sweet work. I'm sure that the little romatic encounters in the fourth book will be played up nicely. (Emma Watson cleans up nicely in the trailer.)
Too bad he thinks that. Cuaron had nothing but nice things to say Columbus on the commentaries. Duh, and if you read between the lines you can see that Cuaron wasn't entirely pleased.
But Cuaron rightly praised Columbus for a number of things right with those movies. He picked a knockout cast, both kids and adults, and an awesome location.
Some of the failings of the first three (yeah, all three) I put on the screenwriter, who seems to have a tendency to substitute action scenes for character moments. That made the first two movies rather long for kids' movies and still leaving out some important scenes from the books. Still, that's Rowling's chosen screenwriter, so I guess it's what she wanted.
I much prefer the gritty realism of the third movie to the first two. But for Gilliam to dismiss Sorcerer's Stone as "crap", given that he's been rather hit-and-miss himself, seems undeservedly arrogant.
Columbus made basic kiddie fare. Gilliam's would have been a fascinating change, though in some ways I like the idea of the first intro movie being a more pedestrian adaptation of the book, to serve as a foundation for the sequels to be more interesting. I'd love to see Gilliam direct one of the future movies, but with an attitude like that there's no way they're going to let him.
Of course, the studio was probably dead set against him from the start. He has a tendency to create truly grand visions and then run over schedule and budget. Baron Munchausen almost didn't make it, and his Don Quixote did fail. He blames it on circumstances and cheapskate studios.
Me, I'm a director myself (stage, rather than film), and I know that disasters happen and you need to be flexible to fix them. The documentary Lost in La Mancha is very favorable to him, and he did have a run of bad luck, but it also sounds to me like he failed to have backup plans and cut things too close to the wire. Under those circumstances projects will always fail, because things go wrong.
He needs a better unit production manager, or he needs to listen more closely to the one he has.
Except that IBM doesn't make Thinkpads any more. They sold that business to Lenovo last week.