And the US Bill of Rights just doesn't apply to non-citizens. That's the way things work, whether you like it or not.
I find it bizarre that so many people seem to believe this. Where are you getting your information?
Let's just start with the millions of completely legal, permanent, Green Card-carrying noncitizen residents now in the U.S. You're saying the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to them?
News flash for you -- it does apply to them, and it even applies to illegal immigrants. The text of the Bill of Rights quite specifically refers to people and persons, not citizens.
McNealy drove them into the ground with a complete failure to read the market and respond to threats to Java and/or external influences on Java.
Sorry, but although I've had strong words for Sun myself in the past, I think this analysis is utter hogwash.
So Java failed in the marketplace, did it? Enterprises aren't using Java EE, mobile phone vendors aren't using Java ME? As a technology it's just sitting there gathering dust, because Sun never responded to the threats that came along and (apparently) killed Java?
Now you have the promise of Java revolutionizing the desktop all but dead to.NET, and IBM and Apache effectively in control of Java in the server space.
If you really thought Java was going to "revolutionize the desktop," that's your business. If you were paying attention, you'd know that the so-called Java Desktop System started life as a Linux distro, and now it's Solaris. Java's strongest suit was and remains the server; it's only now trying to go after the desktop aggressively once again, with JavaFX -- and good luck with that, but personally I think it's irrelevant. Certainly it's not a "revolution," any more than.Net is.
And to say that IBM and Apache are "effectively in control of Java in the server space" is a little silly. Tell you what, though, let's say you throw Oracle (which owns BEA) into the mix and I'll buy it. So what? Hasn't Java been driven by a Community Process for years?
Taking McNealy's advice on technology is about as smart as taking Kenneth Lay's advice on energy independence.
No. Taking McNealy's advice about how to run a technology business might be a bad idea. But all of the above is evidence that Sun has been and remains a remarkably canny and sophisticated company, technologically speaking. Solaris still leads Linux in certain feature areas. Java still leads.Net in the enterprise and it's found on more handsets than Windows Mobile. Sun continues to be a technology trailblazer in many areas, including servers and storage.
What you're mad about is the fact that, for all that, Sun can't seem to make any money. But Obama never asked McNealy for a discourse on business, he asked about the advantages of open source -- and no doubt that's from a customer's perspective, not a technology company's.
I can't see this as anything other than a potential win for all of us. What's to come of it? Who knows. Maybe the Fed starts using more open source. Maybe they pass tax incentives for companies that use open source. Maybe they invest in open source development efforts. I don't know. But how can anyone lose?
Seems as though the only people I know who actively choose Sprint choose it because Sprint is the only viable option where they live. The GSM carriers' coverage really starts to suffer in the big, wide-open spaces of the Midwest.
Then both you and the grandparent are idiots who have never heard the phrase "any port in a storm".
"Any port in a storm" applies to ships at sea, because a ship can only be one place at a time. An employee stuck in a metaphorical storm off the metaphorical horn of Africa, on the other hand, has the luxury of finding out whether there's a storm off Lisbon too, and if there isn't, the employee can miraculously teleport there rather than sailing on through the storm.
The jackass may have won that round and the promotion, but in a lot of cases, as soon as the ass gets to a position where he can't set others up for failure or take credit, that's when payback happens... that, or they end up a manager and nobody in a company notices.
Your assessment sounds optimistic to me. In my experience, the higher up the org chart that bottom-feeders rise, the easier it is for them to do the blame-and-credit game. Because the higher up you are, the less hands-on you're expected to be, right? You are all but mandated to delegate responsibility, and that automatically puts someone in line to take the hits for you. And unfortunately these situations often take a long time to get sorted out, because the real problem is usually someone even higher up that has enough conniving/nepotistic/irrational faith in the bottom-feeder to be blind to the problem.
I agree with parent, if the management is good enough, they should follow well enough to know who really deserve a promotion and who is just doing enough to have enough time to ask for a promotion 10 times a week...
Sadly, there is very few employers who can do that...
OK, so here's an idea. Maybe manager Kelly, when she was approached by Doug and heard his case for staying on, should have requested a meeting with Stuart to hear his side of the story. She could have explained that she had a decision to make and that Doug had raised certain issues with regard to his performance.
I mean, what if Doug was out-and-out lying? And to take the word of a single subordinate as the basis for staffing decisions... just, wow. Does this company not do annual performance reviews? I sense a certain amount of org-chart politics in this, but to my mind, for Kelly to initiate a layoff based on a single, closed-door meeting with a subordinate seems like very poor management, indeed.
Of course I don't know the real facts, but I agree with the grandparent... this does not sound like the kind of company where I would like to work. I know it's tough times and all, but in tough times would you rather work at a company that's liable to fire you at any minute or at one that at least respects your contribution enough to not let subjective evaluations of your personality decide your future?
Well, look at it this way: It sounds as if this game is none too good or fun to play. But suppose it was? What if it had excellent game play, great art, good ideas, and was an all-around winner... but wasn't based on a licensed property?
Based on my very brief time working in entertainment software, competing for shelf space in stores is hell. Games are a cutthroat business, and not everybody has the kind of marketing dollars Microsoft has to pump into the latest Halo franchise. How excited is your average gamer going to be about a game that takes place in Yet Another Generic Fantasy World (and let's not forget -- most Generic Fantasy Worlds are basically ripped off from Tolkien)? A game that doesn't get noticed dies, and then what happens to the company that invested all the money to produce it?
On the other hand, suppose you had the exact same great game, and instead of some generic fantasy setting, you were able to secure a Lord of the Rings license and skin the characters and the game world based on that franchise. All of a sudden you have automatic marketing. Your game is going to get reviewed. It's going to get noticed. Now it's a success.
So cut 'em some slack. Making a bad game is not a crime, it's just nothing to crow about. But for every game that you call "cashing in," there are probably a whole bunch of designers and developers sweating and fretting and toiling away on something that feels (to them) like a Hail Mary pass.
Well, if as you say it's legal in your jurisdiction, then it sounds like yes, she should pay, unless she wants to risk damage to her credit.
Maybe for this reason everybody should get into the habit of calling it OpenOffice.org. That's the name of the software. Not OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org. So where do you get it? OpenOffice.org. What's the cost? Find out at OpenOffice.org. What's the latest version? OpenOffice.org will tell you. Et cetera.
No hallucinations that I remember, but it was not fun.
My girlfriend at the time had a couple of caffeine pills, which for some reason I remembered from my youth as not having much of an effect on me. So I downed them both, then went home and proceeded to make and drink an entire pot of black coffee for my all-nighter.
By 4am I was shaking like a junkie. I was having hot flashes and cold sweats, alternately. I felt so nauseated that I went to the bathroom repeatedly and stuck my finger down my throat, praying that something would come up. Nothing did but a little bit of brown sludge. My head was spinning. My teeth were clenching. My eyes were darting around. I felt confused, like I couldn't really concentrate on anything.
Did I mention that I needed to be at the airport by 6am for a business trip?
On the cab ride to the airport, I was hanging my head out the window like a dog. The cabbie kept shooting me dirty looks, like I was going to puke in his cab. Sorry pal; believe me, I wish I could. First thing I did at the airport was make a beeline for the men's room and get down on my knees again. I felt really bad for the poor guy in the stall next to me who had to listen to my retching as I dry-heaved. Still, it didn't help. In the mirror I looked like a wax manikin soaked in sweat.
On the plane I started to feel better. "Oh thank god," I thought. "What I need now is water... maybe even a little orange juice." I had the flight attendant bring me a beverage. Mistake. Two sips in, and the barf bag was in my lap. Lucky for everyone on the flight, though -- I still couldn't puke.
Anyway, this went on for the entire day. When I got back home from my trip at about 9pm, I went straight to bed, still shaking, still pale, still sweaty. And I lay there. Probably it was about four hours before I could get to sleep.
The next day I told my girlfriend about my ordeal and she explained that she'd thought it was a little strange that I'd taken both of the caffeine pills at once. When she was driving cross-country from New Jersey, she said, she'd usually take half a pill with a little bit of water.
So I learned my lesson -- but the upshot was that I'm not sure I was ever the same again. An ounce or two into a strong cup of Pete's coffee would almost throw me into a panic attack, because I could feel all the effects coming on again. One time, the coffee machine at the office was broken so that it wasn't sending the full amount of water through the grounds -- in other words, you ended up with a strong pot. I didn't realize this, and I ended up having to go home early.
So, to the parent's point: Hell yeah it's a drug, and some people mess around with it too lightly.
Does Michael Dell play dirty tricks When he's handing out jobs to the Micks? "No," he says with a laugh, "We just fuck 'em all daft "Then we close up the plant in Limerick."
Billy Corgan vs. the Beatles? I am baffled at how you can compare a guitar player from the to a guitar player who recorded most of his music decades earlier. You don't really think Corgan was a prodigy who was born with a guitar in his hands, do you? That's like saying you love John Williams' theme to Star Wars, which makes him better than Mozart. You don't have to be "more skilled or special" if you were the guy who invented it and the other guy learned from what you did.
I won't argue with it at all. It's just not to my taste. For the most part. You strike a nerve with "Ticket to Ride," which is a great song, and even after I posted that post I realized that "And I Love Her" from a year earlier is as sick as all get-out. In fact, both those albums are full of solid stuff.
It was "c," and I was never totally sure how I felt about it. We used to say you should never date anybody born after the theatrical release of Star Wars. She was born after the theatrical release of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Now, say it! SAY IT!! Tell me I'm lying! COMPLETE THE MEME, DAMMIT! I NEED CLOSURE!
OK -- and mind you it's not as if I listen to Beatles records every day or anything -- but for starters it largely depends on what you're listening to.
Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog, and I'm certainly among those. My favorite albums are probably Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road, and I like some of the stuff in between. I can not listen to songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," so I can't defend them.
As for what makes it good music, believe it or not, at the time a lot of it was highly creative and original. Though a lot of the songs are credited Lennon/McCartney, in truth the Beatles were a band in the truest sense, with all four members contributing. (Witness the fact that none of their solo efforts were as good as the Beatles stuff.)
Furthermore, they really were good musicians, as well as songwriters/arrangers. If you walked up to Jimmy Page tomorrow and told him to his face that you think George Harrison was a better guitar player than he is, he might just agree with you.
As far as Beatles fans go, I myself am a "Paul." I think he wrote great melodies and just really nice songs. You can call them pop if you want, but then all of rock n' roll up until probably the mid-90s could just as easily be categorized as pop.
And I don't think you can really discount that there really hadn't been any music that sounded like that before the Beatles came along. In other words, hindsight is golden.
Example: Me, the first new music that was really compelling to me in my teenage years was Suicidal Tendencies, GBH, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. Then I discovered Metallica and Slayer, and I ran in that direction. Then one day somebody played me a Black Sabbath record from the 1970s. My reaction? It's crap. It sounds like crap, it's too slow, it's not "heavy," the singing is weak and silly. Well, look -- I was wrong. And really not a single one of those bands I mentioned would have come around had it not been for Black Sabbath. I just wasn't experienced enough, I didn't understand music or recording or anything else enough, to properly be able to appreciate what had come before the bands I was familiar with. I'm thinking a lot of the Beatles-haters in this thread are falling victim to some of the same.
Someone else in this thread said that the Beatles lacked anyone with the "power" of a Jim Morrison. Oh really? And John Lennon had no cultural impact, did he? Interesting.
I'm the first to admit that a lot of the Beatles' stuff is commercial -- particularly, I think they get way too much credit for inspiring the psychedelic movement -- but to pretend that they weren't groundbreaking, highly original, highly creative, highly talented musicians just makes a person sound ignorant.
The moment everybody who remembers them from their youth dies, The Beatles will fade into obscurity and/or will become an musicophiliac's thing.
Kind of like... oh, any musician ever born? Some prophet, you.
Hell, Marlene Dietrich was "timeless", now most people don't even know who she was, same goes for people like von Braun, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando etc. etc. All very well known, all very timeless, all almost unknown of amongst the modern youth.
Yeah. Kind of like Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, et al? Or do you hear the modern youth bumpin' those classics as they roll down the block? Yeah, man, music is dead all right. Might as well cut off our ears.
No. How about this one? Fuck the modern youth. What did the modern youth ever know?
Much as you might not like the Beatles, some (but not all) of their rather broad and diverse catalog still stomps the crap out of just about any rock band that ever existed. Yeah, Led Zeppelin was great, too -- but much of their stuff is pompous, self-indulgent claptrap. Pink Floyd was great, but a lot of their stuff was silly, navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual rubbish, with a good measure of holier-than-thou arrogance thrown in. And honestly, I doubt that either of those bands would deny the debt they owe to the Beatles.
And FWIW, at 35 I'm hardly the Beatles' "original fan base." To me, for you to imply that nobody but a bunch of rotting mummies listens to one of the greatest rock bands ever just shows you out as your basic, self-important young person who thinks you know everything. Guess what? The older you get, the more you'll "forget."
And P.S. my last girlfriend's favorite band was the Beatles, and she was 21.
Presumably because you can't pull a ZFS-formatted SDXC card out of your digital camera, plug it into your Windows laptop's onboard reader, and pull the photos off onto your desktop.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
Actually, very few people seem to even understand Negroponte's real idea. The OLPC had no competitors. It was an education project, not a product. It was never about selling a novel hardware device; that was just a means to an end. Unfortunately, there had never been a similar project to set a precedent, so the press and analysts could only view it in terms that they understood: the terms of the U.S. consumer technology industry. As such, it looked as if the OLPC would have to "compete" with cheapie laptops from Intel, Asus, or whomever, despite the fact that none of these later offerings really had the same goals as the OLPC. I think far more damning to the OLPC was the fact that when it shipped it couldn't actually deliver on the project's goals. When you're asking a government to spend a few million dollars on mass orders of a piece of technology, "someday this will set you free" doesn't sound half as good as "turn it on and it runs Windows."
It's a little different these days here in California. Many traditional pot "dealers" are being phased out by the new medical marijuana industry. Most friends who buy the occasional eighth now just get it from one of their friends who smokes a whole lot more than they do. That friend will almost certainly have a "pot club card," and he'll just go in and buy a little extra to sell off to his friends in need.
Yes, if you have a card you can literally walk into a store and ask for the amount of weed you want to buy. And the selection is better than most traditional dealers ever had. Most have hash, hash oil, whatever you want -- even various pot-infused brownies and candies, many of which have amusing "stoney" labels based on other products/brands. (There is an actual legitimate medical rationale for this -- many of the people for whom the medical marijuana laws were intended, cancer patients and the like, have difficulty inhaling marijuana smoke and prefer to eat it.)
I don't smoke myself, so it's hard for me to judge whether this all seems as bizarre to longtime pot smokers as it does to me. But it beats the pants out of getting busted by the cops every few months.
BTW, your dad's scenario sounds a little more hardcore than any of the pot dealers I've known. Most of them had jobs. If high-margin drug sales as a profession is your bag, you'd be much better served as an in-call cocaine dealer. Hang around a bar or club, sell to the staff, then slowly develop a low-key clientele and don't sell to anyone you don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Try entering a search query but prefacing it with "-site:wikipedia.org." So here's the original search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+shakespeare
...and now here's the one with Wikipedia excluded:
http://www.google.com/search?q=-site:wikipedia.org+shakespeare
Doubtless you could rig your own Firefox search bar plugin that includes this option for you.
And the US Bill of Rights just doesn't apply to non-citizens. That's the way things work, whether you like it or not.
I find it bizarre that so many people seem to believe this. Where are you getting your information?
Let's just start with the millions of completely legal, permanent, Green Card-carrying noncitizen residents now in the U.S. You're saying the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to them?
News flash for you -- it does apply to them, and it even applies to illegal immigrants. The text of the Bill of Rights quite specifically refers to people and persons, not citizens.
McNealy drove them into the ground with a complete failure to read the market and respond to threats to Java and/or external influences on Java.
Sorry, but although I've had strong words for Sun myself in the past, I think this analysis is utter hogwash.
So Java failed in the marketplace, did it? Enterprises aren't using Java EE, mobile phone vendors aren't using Java ME? As a technology it's just sitting there gathering dust, because Sun never responded to the threats that came along and (apparently) killed Java?
Now you have the promise of Java revolutionizing the desktop all but dead to .NET, and IBM and Apache effectively in control of Java in the server space.
If you really thought Java was going to "revolutionize the desktop," that's your business. If you were paying attention, you'd know that the so-called Java Desktop System started life as a Linux distro, and now it's Solaris. Java's strongest suit was and remains the server; it's only now trying to go after the desktop aggressively once again, with JavaFX -- and good luck with that, but personally I think it's irrelevant. Certainly it's not a "revolution," any more than .Net is.
And to say that IBM and Apache are "effectively in control of Java in the server space" is a little silly. Tell you what, though, let's say you throw Oracle (which owns BEA) into the mix and I'll buy it. So what? Hasn't Java been driven by a Community Process for years?
Taking McNealy's advice on technology is about as smart as taking Kenneth Lay's advice on energy independence.
No. Taking McNealy's advice about how to run a technology business might be a bad idea. But all of the above is evidence that Sun has been and remains a remarkably canny and sophisticated company, technologically speaking. Solaris still leads Linux in certain feature areas. Java still leads .Net in the enterprise and it's found on more handsets than Windows Mobile. Sun continues to be a technology trailblazer in many areas, including servers and storage.
What you're mad about is the fact that, for all that, Sun can't seem to make any money. But Obama never asked McNealy for a discourse on business, he asked about the advantages of open source -- and no doubt that's from a customer's perspective, not a technology company's.
I can't see this as anything other than a potential win for all of us. What's to come of it? Who knows. Maybe the Fed starts using more open source. Maybe they pass tax incentives for companies that use open source. Maybe they invest in open source development efforts. I don't know. But how can anyone lose?
Seems as though the only people I know who actively choose Sprint choose it because Sprint is the only viable option where they live. The GSM carriers' coverage really starts to suffer in the big, wide-open spaces of the Midwest.
A ship led by a rabid baboon who whips his crew for fun is still better than a wet grave, right ?
Okay, you defeated my bad analogy. I will go to sleep tonight dreaming of rabid baboons who make me dig my own grave in the rain...
Then both you and the grandparent are idiots who have never heard the phrase "any port in a storm".
"Any port in a storm" applies to ships at sea, because a ship can only be one place at a time. An employee stuck in a metaphorical storm off the metaphorical horn of Africa, on the other hand, has the luxury of finding out whether there's a storm off Lisbon too, and if there isn't, the employee can miraculously teleport there rather than sailing on through the storm.
My God, that was a stretched analogy.
The jackass may have won that round and the promotion, but in a lot of cases, as soon as the ass gets to a position where he can't set others up for failure or take credit, that's when payback happens... that, or they end up a manager and nobody in a company notices.
Your assessment sounds optimistic to me. In my experience, the higher up the org chart that bottom-feeders rise, the easier it is for them to do the blame-and-credit game. Because the higher up you are, the less hands-on you're expected to be, right? You are all but mandated to delegate responsibility, and that automatically puts someone in line to take the hits for you. And unfortunately these situations often take a long time to get sorted out, because the real problem is usually someone even higher up that has enough conniving/nepotistic/irrational faith in the bottom-feeder to be blind to the problem.
I agree with parent, if the management is good enough, they should follow well enough to know who really deserve a promotion and who is just doing enough to have enough time to ask for a promotion 10 times a week... Sadly, there is very few employers who can do that...
OK, so here's an idea. Maybe manager Kelly, when she was approached by Doug and heard his case for staying on, should have requested a meeting with Stuart to hear his side of the story. She could have explained that she had a decision to make and that Doug had raised certain issues with regard to his performance.
I mean, what if Doug was out-and-out lying? And to take the word of a single subordinate as the basis for staffing decisions ... just, wow. Does this company not do annual performance reviews? I sense a certain amount of org-chart politics in this, but to my mind, for Kelly to initiate a layoff based on a single, closed-door meeting with a subordinate seems like very poor management, indeed.
Of course I don't know the real facts, but I agree with the grandparent ... this does not sound like the kind of company where I would like to work. I know it's tough times and all, but in tough times would you rather work at a company that's liable to fire you at any minute or at one that at least respects your contribution enough to not let subjective evaluations of your personality decide your future?
Well, look at it this way: It sounds as if this game is none too good or fun to play. But suppose it was? What if it had excellent game play, great art, good ideas, and was an all-around winner ... but wasn't based on a licensed property?
Based on my very brief time working in entertainment software, competing for shelf space in stores is hell. Games are a cutthroat business, and not everybody has the kind of marketing dollars Microsoft has to pump into the latest Halo franchise. How excited is your average gamer going to be about a game that takes place in Yet Another Generic Fantasy World (and let's not forget -- most Generic Fantasy Worlds are basically ripped off from Tolkien)? A game that doesn't get noticed dies, and then what happens to the company that invested all the money to produce it?
On the other hand, suppose you had the exact same great game, and instead of some generic fantasy setting, you were able to secure a Lord of the Rings license and skin the characters and the game world based on that franchise. All of a sudden you have automatic marketing. Your game is going to get reviewed. It's going to get noticed. Now it's a success.
So cut 'em some slack. Making a bad game is not a crime, it's just nothing to crow about. But for every game that you call "cashing in," there are probably a whole bunch of designers and developers sweating and fretting and toiling away on something that feels (to them) like a Hail Mary pass.
But of course that's unethical. If she agreed to a legal fee and received goods in exchange then she has an ethical obligation to pay her bill.
Would I pay it, under these circumstances? Probably not. <rollseyes>At least, not until I came and asked Slashdot what to do, that is.</rollseyes>
Well, if as you say it's legal in your jurisdiction, then it sounds like yes, she should pay, unless she wants to risk damage to her credit.
Maybe for this reason everybody should get into the habit of calling it OpenOffice.org. That's the name of the software. Not OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org. So where do you get it? OpenOffice.org. What's the cost? Find out at OpenOffice.org. What's the latest version? OpenOffice.org will tell you. Et cetera.
No hallucinations that I remember, but it was not fun.
My girlfriend at the time had a couple of caffeine pills, which for some reason I remembered from my youth as not having much of an effect on me. So I downed them both, then went home and proceeded to make and drink an entire pot of black coffee for my all-nighter.
By 4am I was shaking like a junkie. I was having hot flashes and cold sweats, alternately. I felt so nauseated that I went to the bathroom repeatedly and stuck my finger down my throat, praying that something would come up. Nothing did but a little bit of brown sludge. My head was spinning. My teeth were clenching. My eyes were darting around. I felt confused, like I couldn't really concentrate on anything.
Did I mention that I needed to be at the airport by 6am for a business trip?
On the cab ride to the airport, I was hanging my head out the window like a dog. The cabbie kept shooting me dirty looks, like I was going to puke in his cab. Sorry pal; believe me, I wish I could. First thing I did at the airport was make a beeline for the men's room and get down on my knees again. I felt really bad for the poor guy in the stall next to me who had to listen to my retching as I dry-heaved. Still, it didn't help. In the mirror I looked like a wax manikin soaked in sweat.
On the plane I started to feel better. "Oh thank god," I thought. "What I need now is water... maybe even a little orange juice." I had the flight attendant bring me a beverage. Mistake. Two sips in, and the barf bag was in my lap. Lucky for everyone on the flight, though -- I still couldn't puke.
Anyway, this went on for the entire day. When I got back home from my trip at about 9pm, I went straight to bed, still shaking, still pale, still sweaty. And I lay there. Probably it was about four hours before I could get to sleep.
The next day I told my girlfriend about my ordeal and she explained that she'd thought it was a little strange that I'd taken both of the caffeine pills at once. When she was driving cross-country from New Jersey, she said, she'd usually take half a pill with a little bit of water.
So I learned my lesson -- but the upshot was that I'm not sure I was ever the same again. An ounce or two into a strong cup of Pete's coffee would almost throw me into a panic attack, because I could feel all the effects coming on again. One time, the coffee machine at the office was broken so that it wasn't sending the full amount of water through the grounds -- in other words, you ended up with a strong pot. I didn't realize this, and I ended up having to go home early.
So, to the parent's point: Hell yeah it's a drug, and some people mess around with it too lightly.
Does Michael Dell play dirty tricks
When he's handing out jobs to the Micks?
"No," he says with a laugh,
"We just fuck 'em all daft
"Then we close up the plant in Limerick."
Billy Corgan vs. the Beatles? I am baffled at how you can compare a guitar player from the to a guitar player who recorded most of his music decades earlier. You don't really think Corgan was a prodigy who was born with a guitar in his hands, do you? That's like saying you love John Williams' theme to Star Wars, which makes him better than Mozart. You don't have to be "more skilled or special" if you were the guy who invented it and the other guy learned from what you did.
Dammit, tell her to give me back all my Beatles records, then!!! That bitch...
I won't argue with it at all. It's just not to my taste. For the most part. You strike a nerve with "Ticket to Ride," which is a great song, and even after I posted that post I realized that "And I Love Her" from a year earlier is as sick as all get-out. In fact, both those albums are full of solid stuff.
Uncle Frank, is that you?? Aw, Uncle Frank...
Not a thing in the world wrong with not liking the Beatles.
Of course not. But "Britney Spears of the 60s"? Ridiculous.
It was "c," and I was never totally sure how I felt about it. We used to say you should never date anybody born after the theatrical release of Star Wars. She was born after the theatrical release of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Now, say it! SAY IT!! Tell me I'm lying! COMPLETE THE MEME, DAMMIT! I NEED CLOSURE!
OK -- and mind you it's not as if I listen to Beatles records every day or anything -- but for starters it largely depends on what you're listening to.
Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog, and I'm certainly among those. My favorite albums are probably Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Abbey Road, and I like some of the stuff in between. I can not listen to songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," so I can't defend them.
As for what makes it good music, believe it or not, at the time a lot of it was highly creative and original. Though a lot of the songs are credited Lennon/McCartney, in truth the Beatles were a band in the truest sense, with all four members contributing. (Witness the fact that none of their solo efforts were as good as the Beatles stuff.)
Furthermore, they really were good musicians, as well as songwriters/arrangers. If you walked up to Jimmy Page tomorrow and told him to his face that you think George Harrison was a better guitar player than he is, he might just agree with you.
As far as Beatles fans go, I myself am a "Paul." I think he wrote great melodies and just really nice songs. You can call them pop if you want, but then all of rock n' roll up until probably the mid-90s could just as easily be categorized as pop.
And I don't think you can really discount that there really hadn't been any music that sounded like that before the Beatles came along. In other words, hindsight is golden.
Example: Me, the first new music that was really compelling to me in my teenage years was Suicidal Tendencies, GBH, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. Then I discovered Metallica and Slayer, and I ran in that direction. Then one day somebody played me a Black Sabbath record from the 1970s. My reaction? It's crap. It sounds like crap, it's too slow, it's not "heavy," the singing is weak and silly. Well, look -- I was wrong. And really not a single one of those bands I mentioned would have come around had it not been for Black Sabbath. I just wasn't experienced enough, I didn't understand music or recording or anything else enough, to properly be able to appreciate what had come before the bands I was familiar with. I'm thinking a lot of the Beatles-haters in this thread are falling victim to some of the same.
Someone else in this thread said that the Beatles lacked anyone with the "power" of a Jim Morrison. Oh really? And John Lennon had no cultural impact, did he? Interesting.
I'm the first to admit that a lot of the Beatles' stuff is commercial -- particularly, I think they get way too much credit for inspiring the psychedelic movement -- but to pretend that they weren't groundbreaking, highly original, highly creative, highly talented musicians just makes a person sound ignorant.
Being the first they perhaps weren't quite talentless, but they were as creative and artistic as Britney Spears.
Let me guess: You don't play any instruments, do you?
The moment everybody who remembers them from their youth dies, The Beatles will fade into obscurity and/or will become an musicophiliac's thing.
Kind of like ... oh, any musician ever born? Some prophet, you.
Hell, Marlene Dietrich was "timeless", now most people don't even know who she was, same goes for people like von Braun, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando etc. etc. All very well known, all very timeless, all almost unknown of amongst the modern youth.
Yeah. Kind of like Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, et al? Or do you hear the modern youth bumpin' those classics as they roll down the block? Yeah, man, music is dead all right. Might as well cut off our ears.
No. How about this one? Fuck the modern youth. What did the modern youth ever know?
Much as you might not like the Beatles, some (but not all) of their rather broad and diverse catalog still stomps the crap out of just about any rock band that ever existed. Yeah, Led Zeppelin was great, too -- but much of their stuff is pompous, self-indulgent claptrap. Pink Floyd was great, but a lot of their stuff was silly, navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual rubbish, with a good measure of holier-than-thou arrogance thrown in. And honestly, I doubt that either of those bands would deny the debt they owe to the Beatles.
And FWIW, at 35 I'm hardly the Beatles' "original fan base." To me, for you to imply that nobody but a bunch of rotting mummies listens to one of the greatest rock bands ever just shows you out as your basic, self-important young person who thinks you know everything. Guess what? The older you get, the more you'll "forget."
And P.S. my last girlfriend's favorite band was the Beatles, and she was 21.
Presumably because you can't pull a ZFS-formatted SDXC card out of your digital camera, plug it into your Windows laptop's onboard reader, and pull the photos off onto your desktop.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
Actually, very few people seem to even understand Negroponte's real idea. The OLPC had no competitors. It was an education project, not a product. It was never about selling a novel hardware device; that was just a means to an end. Unfortunately, there had never been a similar project to set a precedent, so the press and analysts could only view it in terms that they understood: the terms of the U.S. consumer technology industry. As such, it looked as if the OLPC would have to "compete" with cheapie laptops from Intel, Asus, or whomever, despite the fact that none of these later offerings really had the same goals as the OLPC. I think far more damning to the OLPC was the fact that when it shipped it couldn't actually deliver on the project's goals. When you're asking a government to spend a few million dollars on mass orders of a piece of technology, "someday this will set you free" doesn't sound half as good as "turn it on and it runs Windows."
It's a little different these days here in California. Many traditional pot "dealers" are being phased out by the new medical marijuana industry. Most friends who buy the occasional eighth now just get it from one of their friends who smokes a whole lot more than they do. That friend will almost certainly have a "pot club card," and he'll just go in and buy a little extra to sell off to his friends in need.
Yes, if you have a card you can literally walk into a store and ask for the amount of weed you want to buy. And the selection is better than most traditional dealers ever had. Most have hash, hash oil, whatever you want -- even various pot-infused brownies and candies, many of which have amusing "stoney" labels based on other products/brands. (There is an actual legitimate medical rationale for this -- many of the people for whom the medical marijuana laws were intended, cancer patients and the like, have difficulty inhaling marijuana smoke and prefer to eat it.)
I don't smoke myself, so it's hard for me to judge whether this all seems as bizarre to longtime pot smokers as it does to me. But it beats the pants out of getting busted by the cops every few months.
BTW, your dad's scenario sounds a little more hardcore than any of the pot dealers I've known. Most of them had jobs. If high-margin drug sales as a profession is your bag, you'd be much better served as an in-call cocaine dealer. Hang around a bar or club, sell to the staff, then slowly develop a low-key clientele and don't sell to anyone you don't know.