When is the last time you've seen a typewriter or for that matter a secretary
When's the last time you were in an office?
Secretaries abound, though the title may have changed to "office manager." The duties are still the same as way back when - make sure the boss doesn't screw up, cover up for the boss, make decisions when the boss doesn't have a clue, give the boss advice, act as a sounding board, take care off the employees egos when the boss has thrown a shit fit, alert the boss to potential problems before they come to a head, make sure that the suppliers are happy, keep visitors occupied, know who does what, cover up for people having a bad day, put a good face on the business, run out for the odds and end that are needed every so often, suggest new ways to do things that will benefit everyone, screen resumes, get rid of nuisances, be a sounding board, be discrete, answer the phone, write up, edit, and review all sorts of stuff, etc.
"Secretary" has never meant "typing and filing clerk".
Everyone who deals with businesses knows that secretaries and receptionists hold life-and-death power over vendors. Piss off a secretary and your proposal or quote never sees the light of day - or worse, it ends up in your competitors hands.
Just to clarify. When they gave the teachers the 'smart boards' (in her case, basically a digital overhead projector that can also work as a 'classic' computer projector) nobody told anyone how to work them. They gave her the box, software CD, and thats it. Nothing was installed for them, the crap wasn't even unpackaged.
Cry me a river. If a teacher can't figure out how to connect something like that themselves, they're probably a lousy teacher. Lack of curiosity shows in traits such as "I don't know how to do this, so someone has to show me." It's not rocket science. Then again, these people probably need the warning that comes with their blender "do not stick fingers in blades while running." - and they think "Why would I take a blender while jobbong?"
Or they could just have asked their students to figure it out for them - at least a few of them haven't been contaminated with "learned helplessness."
"Oh, but RTFM is too HARD for a teacher!"
If you can't teach yourself, you have no business teaching anyone else.
Unfortunately, every time anyone tries to put "technology" into public schools, it fails miserably. Students are much better off taking notes from a lecture written on a chalkboard
If they're busy taking notes, they're not learning. They're just stenographers at that point.
The first thing I did when I taught computers (grades 4 to 6) was tell the students that we weren't going to be using the computers. At first, they were disappointed - but I made the discussions (note - discussion, NOT lectures) interesting enough that they quickly forgot about the "boxes". Good teachers interact with their students. We say that ne of the biggest reasons for failure in business is lack of communications, but our teachers are, for the most part, TERRIBLE communicators; is it any wonder that when people enter the business world, they accept the same crappy "lefture-style" mode of organizing work that dooms them to failure?
Better to fire half the teachers, and give the students to the other half. I never had a problem keeping 30-some-odd kids involved - teachers who cry about having more than 15 should be fired because they are clearly incompetent.
LCD displays have a problem - they have to block light to create dark areas, and even the best don't do a perfect job. They get around this now by "dynamic contrast", which means that instead of having one backlight, they have multiple back-lights (dividing the screen into multiple areas).. Sure, it's better, but it's not enough, because if you have even one bright spot in an otherwise dark area, guess what - it has to either brighten that zones' backlight, making the blacks less black, or keep the backlight dark, making the light spot less light.
With plasma TVs, there is no backlight - what you see is what you get.
Also, the demos you see in the store of the difference between 120hz (or 240 hz) and 60hz is mostly bogus. Look at just the "60hz" side and you'll see that the picture is crap compared to what you wee when the tv is not showing the demo. If your input is 60hz, all you're getting anyway is some interpolation (which means that the picture information will actually be less accurate) between scenes - and also you're INDUCING LAG, since the TV has to have both images so it can then do the interpolation. So, even if the response time is 0ms (and it never will be), you're inducing a lag of at least 1000/60, or about 20ms. Add that to the disolays' inherent 5ms delay, and you can really see the problems that interpolation causes for games (though not so much for non-interactive content).
The newer 600hz plasma TVs don't interpolate between scenes - the pixels fire 10x a second. Remember how a CRT works? The image is scanned, and the pixels fire. The phosphors have a certain amount of "persistence", so they continue to glow for a small amount of time, then they go dark until they get hit by the electron beam again. Plasmas fire the same pixel 10x for each 60hz frame (as opposed to 8x in the 480hz models), meaning that the pixel reaches peak intensity 10 times for each image, resulting in the perception of sharper, more intense colours. The transition between frames is complete in 1/600 of a second, so you also perceive the image as being crisper, and there's a lot less lag (and NO induced lag from frame interpolation).
The newer plasmas also run a lot cooler. Part of this is the "flashbulb" effect. Since the pixels are firing 600x a second, they don't have to have such a high peak output. It's the same as a flashbulb - it might not put out as much light over the course of a second as all the other lighting in a room, but for that fraction of a second, all you see is the flash. By firing their pixels 600x a second, the same amount of energy gives what appears to be a brighter image in a bright room - or less energy to give a good image in a darker room. That's why they can now run as cool - or cooler - than an LCD.
I mentioned the Baby Boomer generation in particular because they lived through the color transition, during which the purchase of a color set gave them the exact same channels they had before in glorious color, while making it painfully obvious which stations were still broadcasting in black and white. The digital transition is far different, requiring separate digital channels and only offering (compared to color anyway) far more subtle improvements in the picture.
The same set will tune in both HD and ST content, so you can compare the two signals side-by-side... and the difference between SD and full HD is like night and day.
Also said generation is getting older, and their vision is starting to fade.
Having lived through the black-and-white to colour transition, and now through the SD to HD transition, I can tell you that the "vision is starting to fade" thing works contrary to how you would think - older people benefit from sharper content. (Then again, I'm spoiled... I'm typing this on dual 26" 1920x1200 lcds, and my tv is a 50" 60hz plasma - HD is a lot easier on the eyes).
Yeah, because the eyes of aging directors and the average eyes of the audience are crap. Also, motion blur helps.
But it's still distracting. You just learn to ignore it if you don't have the budget to make your own films. "Good enough for most" is all you get, I'm afraid.
You don't want hyper-realistic. Look at the problems the porn industry is having now that they're starting to shoot in HD. They have to hide the wrinkles, the zits, etc. Even in real life, we tend not to notice, because we quickly move our focus elsewhere - real life is IMMERSIVE. However, on TV or video games, the ONLY place we're looking is on-screen - so we really can't ignore the faults. "Good enough" is sometimes superior to "excellent rendition". 24fps id "good enough."
But what about the TV makers? Why shouldn't they provide cables to plug into every input on their TVs? They don't. We know why they don't and we accept it.
One of the criteria for my tv was that it have vga in and vga audio in. It also has 2 component in, 4 hdmi in, rf in, dual composite+audio in, usb in... right there, we're talking a LOT of cables. Why should they ship what would probably be the wrong length of cable for each input (my laptop cables are 16') or the wrong end connector (one of the component inputs is connected to the Wii's non-standard component out), or redundant cables (I already have a few component and composite cables hanging around)?
They might actually be the ones who realize that there's really no big difference in the viewing experience of HDTV, versus Joe BestBuyCustomer who is liable to be talked into buying an HDTV.
Nice troll:-) There's a HUGE difference. Just like there is for gaming - especially with a Wii, where you have to move around a lot. Try snowboarding in front of a 50" that does decent up-scaling. It's NOT the same as standing in front of a tiny screen.
Besides, people don't have to be "talked into" buying an HDTV. It's an "I know I want one - and if it's better than my neighbors, so much the better!"
Of course, if you've waited this long, you can get something MUCH better than what your neighbor bought a few years ago, for MUCH less.
I've hooked my Wii up to a 28" Philips CRT via Composite, and to two different Sharp Aquos 1080p sets and the result is the same
The problem might be with you, or with the titles you chose. Some games just have crappy graphics, and most of the people I've met who complain about the Wii graphics only have a half-dozen titles or less - and those are mostly the el-cheapo games. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
And some TVs have crappy upscaling.
I moved my Wii from a 27" crt to a 50" plasma and the difference is simply astounding.
Then again, I did my research first - if you're buying a TV for gaming (I bought this one spefically for the Wii), go plasma. LCDs still aren't "there" for big-screen gaming, dollar-for-dollar.
Just out of curiosity, how many of these households actually received HD programming as well as owned an HD set? I'm willing to bet that most of the Baby Boomer houses with HDTVs in them actually are hooked up to analog cable or to an STB via composite video or even RF,
You don't need to "hook up" an HDTV to anything more complex than a cheap pair of rabbit-ears to receive HD broadcasts - and they might be better quality than what you'll get through your cable company or satellite provider's crappy recompression algorithm. So a lot of them CAN receive HD boradcasts - they just need the TV, not any fancy cable or satellite package.
I live in an area where some channels I couldn't even get via analog come in just fine - 1080 lines HD content, several sub-channels, crystal-clear audio, no fuzzies or blockiness. That's the good thing about digital - it either works, or it doesn't.
Well, people that have an air-conditioned home aren't exactly of average income...
Maybe if you take the average income for the entire world... but with air conditioners going for under $100 for a one-room window unit, and 10,000 btu window units at $250 (buy one of each and you can cool 1,000 square feet on 90 degree days), if you can't afford air conditioning, you probably also can't afford games.
I agree, size DOES matter. Most HDTVs sold today have pretty decent up-scalers. Show someone Wii Resort on a 50" 600hz plaama, and after their first few rounds of swordfighting, it's "I've SO gotta get myself one of these."
If screen size didn't matter, we'd all be sitting in front of 14" 4:3 screens.
You can get an excellent TV for what a half-decent gaming rig cost a few years ago.
Watching a movie at anything less than 30 fps will also break the illusion.
Movies are shot at 24fps. This has been the standard for almost 90 years. It hasn't had to change, despite technical improvements, because the eye and brain haven't changed.
So why not use PPP - Parity of Purchasing Power. Canada has 1/9 the population of the US, but we passed parity in terms of purchasing power, even with a slightly lower dollar and lower per-capita income. I'm not talking just about each dollar buying more - I'm saying that the average Canadian is better off economically than the average American, despite a slightly lower annual income, in slightly lower Canadian dollars.
A huge part of that is because Canadians don't have to pay huge health-care premiums - our per-capita costs are lower, and we cover everyone, so we can actually enjoy a better standard of living on less money (we live longer and have lower infant mortality rates).
The same can be said for the EU. "Socialist medicine" pays economic dividends.
Canadians don't go bankrupt from medical bills. The majority of US bankruptcies up until the housing crisis were from medical bills - and 70% of those people were insured... but the co-pay and exclusions got the be too much.
Fix your health-care system, lower your infant mortality and raise your life expectancy, and then we'll talk.
So what? Doesn't invalidate the original poster's point that the EU economy is larger than the US economy.
Of course, it also fails to point out that the ratio between the EU and US economies will only grow, as the US continues to destroy its' currency via the printing press and higher public debt levels.
also, most countries operate on a first-to-file basis, since that's easier to establish.
Even in the US, the filing takes precedence - anything challenging it has to be proven first. The legal presumption is with the patent holder. It's going to cost more to do the legal challenge (it can go into the millions) than to file for the patent in the first place.
On top of which, software should more properly be protected by copyright, not patent. The GPL works because copyright protection works. Windows is copyrighted, not patented. OSX is copyrighted, not patented. This is slashdot - we're supposed to be recognize the stupidity of business and software patents (we got it right wrt these bogus patents well before the courts and general public started to get a clue).
I think we'd be better off going directly to the asteroids. Easier to mine, no gravity well, we can even spin one up and if it stays together (don't do this with slushballs, obviously - choose an iron/stone asteroid), we've got "artificial gravity." No worries about aerobraking. Less worries about the corrosive peroxides that permeate the martian dust. Don't need much power to send stuff back to earth on a low-energy trajectory. No sand-storms, and a nice hard vacuum is conveniently available for all sorts of manufacturing processes. Consistent solar energy (no clouds, sand-storms, etc).
Just dig in and make yourself at home.
Compared to the asteroids, Mars is a cul-de-sac, a dead end, a waste of oxygen - literally.
Harper's politics in a minority are not his politics if he had a majority. Plain and simple.
Which is why we're lucky in Kanukistan to be able to have minority governments, unlike our neighbours to the bi-polarized south. We HEART minority governments - they have to be more responsible to the electorate during their term, since if they piss off too many people, we can throw the bums out.
Maybe we should pass an amendment requiring that every government be allocated seats in such a manner that any majority is redistributed among the losers so that we are guaranteed a minority government. Just a thought.
1. To dunk ones scrotum into the open mouth of another person
2. 1) To insert one's nuts into the mouth of another (of either gender), usually while they are sleeping. Can either be a situation of laughter or of excruciating pain, depending on whether the victim is a biter.
2. 2) When after being brutally killed in Halo 2, your opponent squats repeatedly on you, imitating the act of dipping his balls on you. Rather humiliating, especially when there's more than one of them doing it.
2. 3) A small bag of dried herbs, that magically makes tea when you add water and give it some time to steep.
2. 4) The scrotum of a man who has had his testicles removed.
There's 66 different definitions in all, most having to do with men's "package" or "nutsack".
So you have this urge to tell us you enjoy sucking on "women's teabags"? Please don't share any pics, and we'll pretend it didn't happen.
Including collapsing the government on a friday, using a non-confidence motion, after everyone had already gone home.
Joe Clark said he was going to govern as if he had a majority. Very arrogant, stupid thing to do, and the consequences were predictable. It wasn't like he wasn't warned, but he went to a political knife-fight with only his fists, and got cut up badly as a result.
Harper isn't repeating that mistake. Shows that people CAN learn.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's written in Engrish - god forbid that they try to figure it out.
Suffering from synaesthesia, are we?
Interesting is seeing of sounds, hearing of colours, tasting of posts on slushduh!
When's the last time you were in an office?
Secretaries abound, though the title may have changed to "office manager." The duties are still the same as way back when - make sure the boss doesn't screw up, cover up for the boss, make decisions when the boss doesn't have a clue, give the boss advice, act as a sounding board, take care off the employees egos when the boss has thrown a shit fit, alert the boss to potential problems before they come to a head, make sure that the suppliers are happy, keep visitors occupied, know who does what, cover up for people having a bad day, put a good face on the business, run out for the odds and end that are needed every so often, suggest new ways to do things that will benefit everyone, screen resumes, get rid of nuisances, be a sounding board, be discrete, answer the phone, write up, edit, and review all sorts of stuff, etc.
"Secretary" has never meant "typing and filing clerk".
Everyone who deals with businesses knows that secretaries and receptionists hold life-and-death power over vendors. Piss off a secretary and your proposal or quote never sees the light of day - or worse, it ends up in your competitors hands.
Cry me a river. If a teacher can't figure out how to connect something like that themselves, they're probably a lousy teacher. Lack of curiosity shows in traits such as "I don't know how to do this, so someone has to show me." It's not rocket science. Then again, these people probably need the warning that comes with their blender "do not stick fingers in blades while running." - and they think "Why would I take a blender while jobbong?"
Or they could just have asked their students to figure it out for them - at least a few of them haven't been contaminated with "learned helplessness."
"Oh, but RTFM is too HARD for a teacher!"
If you can't teach yourself, you have no business teaching anyone else.
If they're busy taking notes, they're not learning. They're just stenographers at that point.
The first thing I did when I taught computers (grades 4 to 6) was tell the students that we weren't going to be using the computers. At first, they were disappointed - but I made the discussions (note - discussion, NOT lectures) interesting enough that they quickly forgot about the "boxes". Good teachers interact with their students. We say that ne of the biggest reasons for failure in business is lack of communications, but our teachers are, for the most part, TERRIBLE communicators; is it any wonder that when people enter the business world, they accept the same crappy "lefture-style" mode of organizing work that dooms them to failure?
Better to fire half the teachers, and give the students to the other half. I never had a problem keeping 30-some-odd kids involved - teachers who cry about having more than 15 should be fired because they are clearly incompetent.
LCD displays have a problem - they have to block light to create dark areas, and even the best don't do a perfect job. They get around this now by "dynamic contrast", which means that instead of having one backlight, they have multiple back-lights (dividing the screen into multiple areas).. Sure, it's better, but it's not enough, because if you have even one bright spot in an otherwise dark area, guess what - it has to either brighten that zones' backlight, making the blacks less black, or keep the backlight dark, making the light spot less light.
With plasma TVs, there is no backlight - what you see is what you get.
Also, the demos you see in the store of the difference between 120hz (or 240 hz) and 60hz is mostly bogus. Look at just the "60hz" side and you'll see that the picture is crap compared to what you wee when the tv is not showing the demo. If your input is 60hz, all you're getting anyway is some interpolation (which means that the picture information will actually be less accurate) between scenes - and also you're INDUCING LAG, since the TV has to have both images so it can then do the interpolation. So, even if the response time is 0ms (and it never will be), you're inducing a lag of at least 1000/60, or about 20ms. Add that to the disolays' inherent 5ms delay, and you can really see the problems that interpolation causes for games (though not so much for non-interactive content).
The newer 600hz plasma TVs don't interpolate between scenes - the pixels fire 10x a second. Remember how a CRT works? The image is scanned, and the pixels fire. The phosphors have a certain amount of "persistence", so they continue to glow for a small amount of time, then they go dark until they get hit by the electron beam again. Plasmas fire the same pixel 10x for each 60hz frame (as opposed to 8x in the 480hz models), meaning that the pixel reaches peak intensity 10 times for each image, resulting in the perception of sharper, more intense colours. The transition between frames is complete in 1/600 of a second, so you also perceive the image as being crisper, and there's a lot less lag (and NO induced lag from frame interpolation).
The newer plasmas also run a lot cooler. Part of this is the "flashbulb" effect. Since the pixels are firing 600x a second, they don't have to have such a high peak output. It's the same as a flashbulb - it might not put out as much light over the course of a second as all the other lighting in a room, but for that fraction of a second, all you see is the flash. By firing their pixels 600x a second, the same amount of energy gives what appears to be a brighter image in a bright room - or less energy to give a good image in a darker room. That's why they can now run as cool - or cooler - than an LCD.
The same set will tune in both HD and ST content, so you can compare the two signals side-by-side ... and the difference between SD and full HD is like night and day.
Having lived through the black-and-white to colour transition, and now through the SD to HD transition, I can tell you that the "vision is starting to fade" thing works contrary to how you would think - older people benefit from sharper content. (Then again, I'm spoiled ... I'm typing this on dual 26" 1920x1200 lcds, and my tv is a 50" 60hz plasma - HD is a lot easier on the eyes).
You don't want hyper-realistic. Look at the problems the porn industry is having now that they're starting to shoot in HD. They have to hide the wrinkles, the zits, etc. Even in real life, we tend not to notice, because we quickly move our focus elsewhere - real life is IMMERSIVE. However, on TV or video games, the ONLY place we're looking is on-screen - so we really can't ignore the faults. "Good enough" is sometimes superior to "excellent rendition". 24fps id "good enough."
One of the criteria for my tv was that it have vga in and vga audio in. It also has 2 component in, 4 hdmi in, rf in, dual composite+audio in, usb in ... right there, we're talking a LOT of cables. Why should they ship what would probably be the wrong length of cable for each input (my laptop cables are 16') or the wrong end connector (one of the component inputs is connected to the Wii's non-standard component out), or redundant cables (I already have a few component and composite cables hanging around)?
Nice troll :-) There's a HUGE difference. Just like there is for gaming - especially with a Wii, where you have to move around a lot. Try snowboarding in front of a 50" that does decent up-scaling. It's NOT the same as standing in front of a tiny screen.
Besides, people don't have to be "talked into" buying an HDTV. It's an "I know I want one - and if it's better than my neighbors, so much the better!"
Of course, if you've waited this long, you can get something MUCH better than what your neighbor bought a few years ago, for MUCH less.
The problem might be with you, or with the titles you chose. Some games just have crappy graphics, and most of the people I've met who complain about the Wii graphics only have a half-dozen titles or less - and those are mostly the el-cheapo games. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
And some TVs have crappy upscaling.
I moved my Wii from a 27" crt to a 50" plasma and the difference is simply astounding.
Then again, I did my research first - if you're buying a TV for gaming (I bought this one spefically for the Wii), go plasma. LCDs still aren't "there" for big-screen gaming, dollar-for-dollar.
You don't need to "hook up" an HDTV to anything more complex than a cheap pair of rabbit-ears to receive HD broadcasts - and they might be better quality than what you'll get through your cable company or satellite provider's crappy recompression algorithm. So a lot of them CAN receive HD boradcasts - they just need the TV, not any fancy cable or satellite package.
I live in an area where some channels I couldn't even get via analog come in just fine - 1080 lines HD content, several sub-channels, crystal-clear audio, no fuzzies or blockiness. That's the good thing about digital - it either works, or it doesn't.
Maybe if you take the average income for the entire world ... but with air conditioners going for under $100 for a one-room window unit, and 10,000 btu window units at $250 (buy one of each and you can cool 1,000 square feet on 90 degree days), if you can't afford air conditioning, you probably also can't afford games.
I agree, size DOES matter. Most HDTVs sold today have pretty decent up-scalers. Show someone Wii Resort on a 50" 600hz plaama, and after their first few rounds of swordfighting, it's "I've SO gotta get myself one of these."
If screen size didn't matter, we'd all be sitting in front of 14" 4:3 screens.
You can get an excellent TV for what a half-decent gaming rig cost a few years ago.
Movies are shot at 24fps. This has been the standard for almost 90 years. It hasn't had to change, despite technical improvements, because the eye and brain haven't changed.
So why not use PPP - Parity of Purchasing Power. Canada has 1/9 the population of the US, but we passed parity in terms of purchasing power, even with a slightly lower dollar and lower per-capita income. I'm not talking just about each dollar buying more - I'm saying that the average Canadian is better off economically than the average American, despite a slightly lower annual income, in slightly lower Canadian dollars.
A huge part of that is because Canadians don't have to pay huge health-care premiums - our per-capita costs are lower, and we cover everyone, so we can actually enjoy a better standard of living on less money (we live longer and have lower infant mortality rates).
The same can be said for the EU. "Socialist medicine" pays economic dividends.
Canadians don't go bankrupt from medical bills. The majority of US bankruptcies up until the housing crisis were from medical bills - and 70% of those people were insured ... but the co-pay and exclusions got the be too much.
Fix your health-care system, lower your infant mortality and raise your life expectancy, and then we'll talk.
So what? Doesn't invalidate the original poster's point that the EU economy is larger than the US economy.
Of course, it also fails to point out that the ratio between the EU and US economies will only grow, as the US continues to destroy its' currency via the printing press and higher public debt levels.
If they were in Euros (they're not), they would mean that the EU is TWICE the size of the US market.
The procedures of the patent office have changed in the last year. Not even provisional patents any more : http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-poor-mans-patent
also, most countries operate on a first-to-file basis, since that's easier to establish.
Even in the US, the filing takes precedence - anything challenging it has to be proven first. The legal presumption is with the patent holder. It's going to cost more to do the legal challenge (it can go into the millions) than to file for the patent in the first place.
On top of which, software should more properly be protected by copyright, not patent. The GPL works because copyright protection works. Windows is copyrighted, not patented. OSX is copyrighted, not patented. This is slashdot - we're supposed to be recognize the stupidity of business and software patents (we got it right wrt these bogus patents well before the courts and general public started to get a clue).
I think we'd be better off going directly to the asteroids. Easier to mine, no gravity well, we can even spin one up and if it stays together (don't do this with slushballs, obviously - choose an iron/stone asteroid), we've got "artificial gravity." No worries about aerobraking. Less worries about the corrosive peroxides that permeate the martian dust. Don't need much power to send stuff back to earth on a low-energy trajectory. No sand-storms, and a nice hard vacuum is conveniently available for all sorts of manufacturing processes. Consistent solar energy (no clouds, sand-storms, etc).
Just dig in and make yourself at home.
Compared to the asteroids, Mars is a cul-de-sac, a dead end, a waste of oxygen - literally.
Which is why we're lucky in Kanukistan to be able to have minority governments, unlike our neighbours to the bi-polarized south. We HEART minority governments - they have to be more responsible to the electorate during their term, since if they piss off too many people, we can throw the bums out.
Maybe we should pass an amendment requiring that every government be allocated seats in such a manner that any majority is redistributed among the losers so that we are guaranteed a minority government. Just a thought.
European Union: $18,85 trillion
US: 14,33 trillion
Bullshit, bullshit, and yet more bullshit.
You may have seen it "stand up in court" for other purposes, but not for patents.
Search for "poor man's patent' - what you're saying is an urban legend.
What your grandfather may or may not have done is of no import in today's world.
Women don't have "teabags"".
There's 66 different definitions in all, most having to do with men's "package" or "nutsack".
So you have this urge to tell us you enjoy sucking on "women's teabags"? Please don't share any pics, and we'll pretend it didn't happen.
Joe Clark said he was going to govern as if he had a majority. Very arrogant, stupid thing to do, and the consequences were predictable. It wasn't like he wasn't warned, but he went to a political knife-fight with only his fists, and got cut up badly as a result.
Harper isn't repeating that mistake. Shows that people CAN learn.