NYCC's mistake was to jump ahead to what they'd be able to get away with in a few years. If they'd kept the tweets "benign (and true)" as you suggest, people would've squawked briefly, but gotten over it and accepted it as "the new normal" for businesses to tweet bland ads in their feed. (One step beyond what Facebook already does with their "Ray Morris likes Starbucks" ads.) Then, in 2 or 3 years, when the ads started to get more huckstery and misleading, they'd probably get away with that too. The secret to boiling a live frog is to turn the temperature up slowly.
And perhaps more importantly, this finding goes a long way toward explaining why almost aliens in the universe look surprisingly identical to humans (though still doesn't explain why they all speak English).
Simple convergent evolution explains why Vulcans, Betazoids, and Klingons (sometimes) look so much like humans, but this genetic analysis explains* why hybrids such as Spock, Deanna Troi, and B'Elanna Torres are genetically possible.
As American society becomes more culturally, linguistically, religiously, etc. diverse, public schools are one of the few things holding it together. The U.S. is the great "melting pot" that takes people from various backgrounds and melds them into a somewhat coherent society with certain shared values. The free-to-enroll public school is one of the things that made that possible, teaching the majority of young people a common national history, a shared understanding of science, and so on.
But as education becomes increasingly factionalized, with Catholic schools teaching that contraception is evil, Fundamentalist Protestant schools teaching that evolution is a lie, charter schools endorsing the cult of the Market (which is their reason for being), home schools teaching who-the-hell-knows-what, and each one editing history to support their individual agenda, that commonality is being lost. Families who once insisted (in the face of racially-integrated bussing) that neighborhood schools were essential to the healthy social development of children are now driving their kids miles to the education outlet whose curriculum and student body matches their preconceptions (and their racial, religious, and economic standards). When you look at survey or poll results and wonder "how can these people believe that?", or looked at the legislators elected by people of other districts, the answer is that it reflects whatever they were taught to believe, at whatever school they attended.
Contrary to popular psychosis, the solution is not always "less government".
Re:good for the goose, good for the gander
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The notion that economic success is somehow punished in our society is a classic self-serving martyr complex. We merely place limits (or at least we should) on how much success one is entitled to enjoy at the expense of others.
OK: I would never go to a dentist who was this fucking stupid. Better?
good for the goose, good for the gander
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 2
I think breaking up Microsoft would be for the better.... and the same with Apple, Google, and a whole bunch of other megacorporations. At some point that "unified vision" becomes a straightjacket preventing the various divisions from innovating and responding to the market, and all three of those are past that.
My primary motivation for buying a Nook instead of a Kindle was my interest in supporting competition for the 8000-ton gorilla that is Amazon. Consumers benefit when there are at least two comparable options to choose from. Also, as a long-standing bookseller with experience dealing with calls for censorship, B&N has also been less prone to kneejerk removal of books, and (as far as I've heard) they haven't been caught purging their ebook catalog of fiction that touches on controversial themes. (Which is an example of why competition is needed.)
I replaced my Nook with the latest model when the original one was damaged because I'd found that it was also just a plain good device. I especially like the big page-turning buttons, which make it easy to operate while running on the treadmill at the gym.
Considering that the iMacs have been far and away the best-selling AIOs on the market pretty much since the first iMac was introduced, calling it a "minor exception" seems like a bit of tunnel vision. While they've never been the cutting-edge powerhouses that the Power Mac/Mac Pro have usually been, the iMac line has always included configurations with very respectable "desktop-grade" specs, especially as of the dates when new models are released. (The current line-up is about a year old, which might explain why it seems so "last year".) I know plenty of visual-arts professionals who've used iMacs as their primary work machines for years, a phenomenon that has contributed to the persistent (but evidently incorrect) rumors that Apple was abandoning the Mac Pro line as superfluous.
Even though identical twins spend the first several years of their lives in much the same environment, the difference between being "the one who sleeps by the window" vs. "the one who sleeps by the door", or "the one who got nipped by the dog" vs. "the one who didn't" can lead to all sorts of personality differences.
A time-displaced genetic twin of John Lennon growing up in a later century would look a lot like John, but would not be John in any meaningful sense. You could even place him with foster parents in Liverpool... but they wouldn't be Mimi and George, and Liverpool isn't the Liverpool it once was. Et cetera.
Good point. The new theater I was talking about is outside of suburbia, located halfway between two big cities, so the property isn't particularly valuable. The established theater is on the outskirts of a city in decline, so there isn't a lot of demand to use the land for something else. Most of the drive-ins elsewhere in Michigan are in areas like one or the other.
That Slashdot crowd? You're part of it. The part that posts petty and condescending attacks on people without actually contributing a fucking thing to the conversation.
A new drive-in (a mom-n-pop type operation) opened this year in West Michigan, and seems to be doing quite well, and there's a long-standing 4-screen drive-in complex (owned by the local cinema chain) – already converted to digital – about an hour away. Meanwhile there's a popular weekly free-movies-in-the-park program in East Grand Rapids. Watching movies outdoors is still pretty popular, so if they're run properly, offering a social experience that people can't get in the living room or crowded into theater rows, there's no reason drive-ins can't stay in business.
"Apple and Google rule the smart phone world now, but before the iPhone you wanted WinCE devices like the XDA and iPaq."
No, I very seriously did not. For years I nursed along an old Psion PDA running an early version of SymbianOS, holding it together with tape and paper clips (literally), rather than use a "wince" device. (I tried and gave up on a PalmOS device too.) The original iPhone allowed me to retire that old unit, because there was finally a modern piece of hardware with software I found usable.
He's mistaking the superficial smoke and mirrors for what is/isn't going on under the hood.
Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.
OS X had fresh eye candy, and a somewhat revolutionary software framework behind it. It rocked.
WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.
The bottom line is that everything new is going to be loaded with new eye candy, because it can be. If you want to determine whether that eye candy is trying to disguise problems with the underlying system software and company behind it... you need to look at that underlying system software and the company behind it.
Yeah, I've been in Scotland (57N) in December and in Iceland (65N) in June, so I'm familiar with the phenomenon.* But I never camped out either place, so I can't comment on the effects of it there.
*I like to tell people about how in Reykjavík I'd go out drinking until the sun came up... which was about 1AM.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean New York subway trains will be able to talk clearly and understandably?
NYCC's mistake was to jump ahead to what they'd be able to get away with in a few years. If they'd kept the tweets "benign (and true)" as you suggest, people would've squawked briefly, but gotten over it and accepted it as "the new normal" for businesses to tweet bland ads in their feed. (One step beyond what Facebook already does with their "Ray Morris likes Starbucks" ads.) Then, in 2 or 3 years, when the ads started to get more huckstery and misleading, they'd probably get away with that too. The secret to boiling a live frog is to turn the temperature up slowly.
"The goal here seems to be go, plant flag, possibly destroy ecosystem, get in history books and die."
So the model here isn't Neil Armstrong, but more like Christopher Columbus.
One of the cardinal rules of litigation is that the list of defendants includes everyone involved (in any way) who has money.
Clerical/technical fuck up. Probably soon to be fixed. Move along.
Simple convergent evolution explains why Vulcans, Betazoids, and Klingons (sometimes) look so much like humans, but this genetic analysis explains* why hybrids such as Spock, Deanna Troi, and B'Elanna Torres are genetically possible.
*ignoring ST:TNG "The Chase"
As American society becomes more culturally, linguistically, religiously, etc. diverse, public schools are one of the few things holding it together. The U.S. is the great "melting pot" that takes people from various backgrounds and melds them into a somewhat coherent society with certain shared values. The free-to-enroll public school is one of the things that made that possible, teaching the majority of young people a common national history, a shared understanding of science, and so on.
But as education becomes increasingly factionalized, with Catholic schools teaching that contraception is evil, Fundamentalist Protestant schools teaching that evolution is a lie, charter schools endorsing the cult of the Market (which is their reason for being), home schools teaching who-the-hell-knows-what, and each one editing history to support their individual agenda, that commonality is being lost. Families who once insisted (in the face of racially-integrated bussing) that neighborhood schools were essential to the healthy social development of children are now driving their kids miles to the education outlet whose curriculum and student body matches their preconceptions (and their racial, religious, and economic standards). When you look at survey or poll results and wonder "how can these people believe that?", or looked at the legislators elected by people of other districts, the answer is that it reflects whatever they were taught to believe, at whatever school they attended.
Sometimes it is, actually.
Contrary to popular psychosis, the solution is not always "less government".
The notion that economic success is somehow punished in our society is a classic self-serving martyr complex. We merely place limits (or at least we should) on how much success one is entitled to enjoy at the expense of others.
OK: I would never go to a dentist who was this fucking stupid. Better?
I think breaking up Microsoft would be for the better.... and the same with Apple, Google, and a whole bunch of other megacorporations. At some point that "unified vision" becomes a straightjacket preventing the various divisions from innovating and responding to the market, and all three of those are past that.
My primary motivation for buying a Nook instead of a Kindle was my interest in supporting competition for the 8000-ton gorilla that is Amazon. Consumers benefit when there are at least two comparable options to choose from. Also, as a long-standing bookseller with experience dealing with calls for censorship, B&N has also been less prone to kneejerk removal of books, and (as far as I've heard) they haven't been caught purging their ebook catalog of fiction that touches on controversial themes. (Which is an example of why competition is needed.)
I replaced my Nook with the latest model when the original one was damaged because I'd found that it was also just a plain good device. I especially like the big page-turning buttons, which make it easy to operate while running on the treadmill at the gym.
Considering that the iMacs have been far and away the best-selling AIOs on the market pretty much since the first iMac was introduced, calling it a "minor exception" seems like a bit of tunnel vision. While they've never been the cutting-edge powerhouses that the Power Mac/Mac Pro have usually been, the iMac line has always included configurations with very respectable "desktop-grade" specs, especially as of the dates when new models are released. (The current line-up is about a year old, which might explain why it seems so "last year".) I know plenty of visual-arts professionals who've used iMacs as their primary work machines for years, a phenomenon that has contributed to the persistent (but evidently incorrect) rumors that Apple was abandoning the Mac Pro line as superfluous.
See also: Julian Lennon, Sean Lennon.
Even though identical twins spend the first several years of their lives in much the same environment, the difference between being "the one who sleeps by the window" vs. "the one who sleeps by the door", or "the one who got nipped by the dog" vs. "the one who didn't" can lead to all sorts of personality differences.
A time-displaced genetic twin of John Lennon growing up in a later century would look a lot like John, but would not be John in any meaningful sense. You could even place him with foster parents in Liverpool... but they wouldn't be Mimi and George, and Liverpool isn't the Liverpool it once was. Et cetera.
I would never go to a dentist whose grasp of biology was this tenuous.
Good point. The new theater I was talking about is outside of suburbia, located halfway between two big cities, so the property isn't particularly valuable. The established theater is on the outskirts of a city in decline, so there isn't a lot of demand to use the land for something else. Most of the drive-ins elsewhere in Michigan are in areas like one or the other.
I read it. Converting to digital is a temporary financing issue. I was talking about the business model's general viability.
That Slashdot crowd? You're part of it. The part that posts petty and condescending attacks on people without actually contributing a fucking thing to the conversation.
A new drive-in (a mom-n-pop type operation) opened this year in West Michigan, and seems to be doing quite well, and there's a long-standing 4-screen drive-in complex (owned by the local cinema chain) – already converted to digital – about an hour away. Meanwhile there's a popular weekly free-movies-in-the-park program in East Grand Rapids. Watching movies outdoors is still pretty popular, so if they're run properly, offering a social experience that people can't get in the living room or crowded into theater rows, there's no reason drive-ins can't stay in business.
Tony Stark has been doing this for 50 years.
"Apple and Google rule the smart phone world now, but before the iPhone you wanted WinCE devices like the XDA and iPaq."
No, I very seriously did not. For years I nursed along an old Psion PDA running an early version of SymbianOS, holding it together with tape and paper clips (literally), rather than use a "wince" device. (I tried and gave up on a PalmOS device too.) The original iPhone allowed me to retire that old unit, because there was finally a modern piece of hardware with software I found usable.
This typical Microsoft approach is simply... typical. Ever tried accessing iCloud.com on an Android device?
He's mistaking the superficial smoke and mirrors for what is/isn't going on under the hood.
... you need to look at that underlying system software and the company behind it.
Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.
OS X had fresh eye candy, and a somewhat revolutionary software framework behind it. It rocked.
WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.
The bottom line is that everything new is going to be loaded with new eye candy, because it can be. If you want to determine whether that eye candy is trying to disguise problems with the underlying system software and company behind it
Yeah, I've been in Scotland (57N) in December and in Iceland (65N) in June, so I'm familiar with the phenomenon.* But I never camped out either place, so I can't comment on the effects of it there.
... which was about 1AM.
*I like to tell people about how in Reykjavík I'd go out drinking until the sun came up