What I find signficant about this article is how the modern (basically post-Carter) MSM (MainStream Media) so often try to spin things to suit ideological perspectives. The entire approach here is to create an inflammatory attack on the entire scientific endeavor based on a sample that ultimately comes down to a very small number of papers. The headline is a totally preposterous overgeneralization based on the data actually discussed in the article. The "obvious conclusion" (for the mindless) is that since a third of the studies produce bad results, we should cut research budgets by that much. The secret conclusion is that the research that gets cut should be the stuff that "attacks" the Bible. No wonder MSM like CNN are losing their credibility. Publishing garbage like this, they deserve to be ignored.
Totally and utterly bogus. Actually, real science is about failure, and if only 1/3 of the research doesn't produce useful results, that would be an incredibly good batting average for real-world science. Actually, I think the real success rate is more like 5%, but of course most of the failures never get as far as being published, and especially not in relatively prestigious journals.
Coincidentally, I just now happen to be reading the excellent Science: A History 1543-2001 by John Gribbin. A recurrent theme is how religious lunacy interferes with scientific progress. Can't stop it, though the main historical effect is that the progress is slowed up in one place, and takes off in some other place where the religious nuts have less control.
Stop using (public) education to divide society
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
Sorry for the negative topic, but it's hard to put it in positive terms in a short Subject space. However, I think it is clear that the main problem in America (and elsewhere) is polarization, and education is being used as just another tool in the political manipulations.
Society really has a strongly vested interest in producing well educated people for the next generation, but the meaning of "well educated" is the point of manipulation. I think it includes educated in the knowledge needed to be free and responsible people. Our current elite leaders think it means the mass of people should be educated to follow orders and work efficiently for their own children, who will of course be educated to own the factories and run the government. In other words, "leaders" like Dubya want to use the education system to perpetuate and even increase their own political and economic superiority.
I believe the magnet schools program is the most damaging tool being used for these purposes, because it affects the largest number of students. A Texas "innovation", by the way. This gives many members of the power elite a cheap back door through the public schools, with their own children getting superior educations. More importantly, it destroys the motivation to improve the entire public school system, because the people who actually do care about good education can just channel their own children into the elite magnet schools. Meanwhile, the bulk of the students (and future voters) are practically in jail, and not really expected to learn anything except for how to behave and how to pass the current test.
There are are problems, but they are smaller. For example, there are many elitists who are so selfish and short-sighted that they simply don't want to pay any taxes for education that benefits the entire society. There are also people who want to control their children's education to perpetuate their own beliefs, usually bizarre religious beliefs that can't stand the light of reason. However, these are relatively minor problems compared to the effective destruction of the mainstream education system.
I'm not following you. The ThinkPad comes "out of the box" with the fingerprint recognition, though only for certain models. I know that because I work next door to where they designed them. (Disclaimer time: Yes, I'm in the IBM food chain.) No way for Linux to be first for something that already exists.
I also referred to the preposterous of the alternative reading, since the scope of "Linux" is so broad. Of course, a good editor should also be a good writer--and a good writer will not write such ambiguous and misleading stuff in the first place.
Since the introduction was so misguided, I admit I didn't even read the article. There's no reasonable way it could be talking about something else like an add-on fingerprint scanner, because in that case it wouldn't be limited to the T series.
Sorry, but the "stimulating" question is obviously foolish. By the definition implied by the question, the answer is "Obviously not", since the feature already exists for Windows on this particular IBM box, and there is no way that all Linux boxes will support it any time soon. Any way you try to slice that question, it comes out broken. The editors often add feeble attempts to encourage conversation, but this one is outstandingly feeble.
I don't mind that the editors want to be slightly provocative. What I mostly mind is that the the/. moderation system frequently penalizes people who rise to the bait. I suppose I should also be bothered that such leading questions sometimes provoke trolling, but the moderation system usually handles the trolls pretty well. Not always, however.
By the way, can any moderators (M1ers) out there answer a couple of questions about M1? My theory is that M1ers also do M2--but they do it differently than I do. I just answer honestly, the way it says in the M2 instructions, but I rarely agree with 90% of the M1s (I think it's more like 70% on average), and I think that prevents me from being asked to M1. Two implications are that the description of M2 is misleading (or false), and that some M1ers are probably gaming the system by always M2ing at 100% agreement, and this gets them more chances to do M1.
Yes, I admit this meta-topic is wandering away from the current topic, but that's one of the side effects of picking a bad topic, so I'm blaming the/. editor. Well, actually the topic isn't bad, but (as already noted) the "provocative question" is terrible.
Actually, the obvious root of the problem here is that our situation has gotten completely out of whack. Rumsfeld was partly right when he said asymetric weapons were an increasing problem, but he doesn't think very clearly anymore. The deeper problem is asymetric society, where the complexity has increased much faster than our ability to keep all the grit out of the gears. Our complex systems sometimes fail even when no one is trying to disrupt them, but the current situation is that BushCo is working feverously to increase the asymetries and motivate more and more losers to want to throw grit into the system. Amusingly enough, it very much reminds me of what happened to the communists, though the polarazation of society between the party faithful and the sheep is not yet so well developed.
Right now the nastiest grit throwers are the terrorists, but we are so far fortunate that they are even more stupid than Rumsfeld. We are *SO* lucky that this attack was just conventional explosives and not chemical weapons. I was actually trying to use the Tokyo subway the day the religious crazies attacked with a relatively weak form of sarin. In fact, I'm kind of amazed that Al Qaeda hasn't done something like that yet, but this new scanner would do nothing except show a bottle of liquid. The problem the Aum Shinri Kyo had was that they didn't have a supply of suicidal maniacs in their organization, or they could have killed thousands of people... Al Qaeda is probably saving it for the States.
It's an infinite loop of insanity now. I see no real hope for America's future. At least Blair seems to understand that we need to go after the causes, and reduce the pressure that is driving the insanity.
Okay, it's not directly on the banking network, but this is the background of the situation as it exists now. We have an increasingly complicated and fragile infrastructure, and it's all bandaids.
Basically, based on 9/11, BushCo has demanded and received great power. They claimed they needed these new powers to fight "the terrorists". Instead, they mostly ignored the terrorists and applied the military parts of the power to Iraq, and applied the political power to increasing their control of America.
The results? BushCo has greatly increased their political power in America, so that part is a "success", as they see it. Most of the world is increasingly polarized against America. UBL is about where he was before, though Al Qaeda is now estimated to have grown from a few hundred hard-core fanatics on 9/11 (of 2001) to tens of thousands of fanatics. In addition, BushCo has created a vast pool of revenge seekers and other potential recruits. Al Qaeda can apparently attack at will, and we just have to be greatful for trivialities, such as no chemical weapons--this time.
Iraq was in bad shape under Saddam, but now it is a total disaster zone. If BushCo left tomorrow it would be a total loss, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars gone. BushCo claims those losses now have to be considered an investment, and we have to keep pouring more good lives and good money down the the drain. And meanwhile, their own companies continue to make enormous profits on the entire fiasco. In particular, their oil interests make increasing profits as the price of oil skyrockets. Their military companies profit on new bombs. Their construction companies will profit again on cleaning up Iraq, assuming we ever get to that stage.
Finally, to close the loop, much of that money is being piped to the Saudis and other Islamic extremists, who then leak some of it to Al Qaeda, thus helping them commit fresh atrocities such as the latest attacks in London, thus justifying more political power for BushCo.
Excuse me, but the robust banking network is *NOT* important.
I'm not up to writing it, but that song gave me an idea for another song, about the tragedy of SCO stock never getting high enough to be shorted. It's been fluttering around $4 for a long time now, but it has to get over $5 before before it can be shorted.
From SCO's perspective, it probably would have been just as well to have been delisted. I'm still not sure if getting delisted wasn't their real plan for this year, but they chickened out for some reason.
Yeah, I get lots of exercise jumping up and down and screaming abuse at the spammers. On the morning of a major spam attack I'm liable to lose 5 kg, easy.
However, I'll bet the study didn't check their blood pressure.
Hear, hear on the politeness aspect. However, the sad fact is that many authors are writing to hear themselves think, and they don't give a fig about being polite to their readers. Often seems unfortunate that they are not able to quietly marshall their thoughts in private.
What confuses the issue is that their related lack of consideration is quite often combined with other forms of stupidity, and since they've written something in public, there is a tendency to respond to the stupidity at multiple levels, both the grammatical and semantic. The resulting mishmash quickly sinks into the mire.
My current theory is that many Bushevik/Rushevik trolls now do this deliberately. Even when they know how to spell words correctly, they deliberately write them incorrectly to divert the discussion from anything more substantive. Or perhaps it's just their self-perceived urgency to outshout the anti-American enemies by posting LOUDER and more often?
Won't work unless there is some perimeter of "privacy defense". I think we need to change the law around to say that our personal data, including such things as credit card information, belong to us, and theft of such information is the same as any other kind of theft and should be prosecuted directly. That should also include retention of personal information after the transaction is completed. The information should be stored on *MY* hardware, and if you need to see it again, you tell me why, ask for my permission, and I'll think about it. Anyone who tries to use my personal information would already be committing a crime in the attempt, and the crime would be obvious since the information was not coming from *MY* machine, which is the only legitimate place to store it.
(Minor technical note, but of course they would add checksums to my personal information when they returned it to me for storage.)
Isn't it odd that a gung-ho American company that's all for free market capitalism can so very easily make itself look like a soul-crushing, freedom-hating, communist-friendly entity by just removing a couple of words from all its websites?
Uh... Monopolistic strategy is not the same as free-market capitalism, but I'll give Microsoft credit for being gung-ho about it. You're characterization of the Chinese rulers is probably too kind. Unfortunate that BushCo is selling America's future to them, isn't it?
Kind of says something about the state of affairs in America these days.
This is really crossing between two areas of epistemology. One is the distinction between raw data and meaningful information. We certainly have much more data than ever before, and most people are not at all equipped to do the active processing required to "make sense" of it. From that perspective, the Internet is mostly just a source of noise--meaningless garbage that obscures the real signal. For an admitedly extreme example, go visit alt.fan.rush-limbaugh.
The other area is related to truth itself. You can have *LOTS* of bad data and therefore come to a false conclusion. That's actually BushCo's current excuse for what happened in Iraq. (Not a valid excuse in that case, however, since they also had resources to check the validity of the data.) Another interesting example is all the American voters who think they had a good reason to vote for Dubya. However, I think the extreme case here is the Jeff-Gannon/Jim-Guckert (call him JG?) non-story.
It's a little bit difficult to clarify, though it is interesting that some bloggers were involved here. The JG story is a kind of meta-news story about deliberate manipulation of the truth. It has pretty much all the elements required for a sensational news story. Presidential politics, secrecy, and some unusual sex and tax evasion thrown in for the spice. But *POOF*. It disappears without a trace. At least as far as the MSM is concerned.
Remember the joke about why sharks won't attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.
So now the "real" journalists refuse to go after JG. Is that professional courtesy, too? But JG's other profession was prostitution. No wonder they call them media whores, eh?
Remember when journalism was supposed to be some sort of impassioned search to discover the truth and tell the people about it? Poor Benjamin Franklin must be spinning in his grave.
That's a deliberate juxtaposition because these issues are all so tightly related. For example, if information about the abuses of power was freely available, it would often be more difficult to abuse it. On the other hand, if our personal information was more freely available, it could often be used against us. We value our own privacy, but that's essentially the same as saying we want the right of censorship over who knows our personal information. Meanwhile BushCo wants to keep private such things as how the energy policy was created and how and when the decision was made to take out Saddam...
Anyway, my own primary interest is at the personal side of things. I think we need to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around our personal information, or the very notion of privacy will soon be non-existant. That will become just another power used against each of us.
Okay, so they could add an option to keep some of the latest email on the Web server. Why do they need to keep all of it? And do you really want *ALL* of your email to be accessible to anyone who manages to put a key logger on any computer you happen to check your email from?
Frankly, I've been increasingly suspicious of Google since they decided it was such a neat idea to keep other people's email. That's something with serious opportunities for abuse--and there's no good reason these days. Everyone (who counts) has GBs of disk space and powerful CPUs, and there's no reason that the email couldn't be stored, indexed, and searched on your local machine. Why do they need *MY* email on *THEIR* machines? Something is wrong there.
This new event is something different. It doesn't matter how polite they are about it. They are flexing their muscles, and putting on my historian's hat, power always gets abused. They talk about empowering the little guys and doing good, but when push comes to shove, look who got shoved.
It's okay. We already slashdotted his server. Ain't no spam going through there now. All the rest of the deletions were apparently celebratory. Celebatory? Whatever.
Already it's close to 10 years ago, but I still visit almost monthly. In the last couple of years there has been a *LOT* of construction and rebuilding going on, and the appearance of the neighborhood is changing drastically. I think it's mostly for the better, and in particular, the yakuza seem to be much less visible (though I suspect that may be part of a general campaign throughout Chiyoda-ku).
With regards to this article, I've never felt like the otaku were an absolute majority, though there are plenty of them around. As noted in the linked articles above, I've also never been very impressed by the rumors of bargains to be found in Akihabara. If there ever were such days, they had already ended before I worked there. Most of the "bargains" are obsolete and leftover junk. Also, I think a lot of the "bargains" some stolen stuff and pirate copies, and that kind of stuff has also become much less visible, too.
I think the main special thing about Akihabara is that they often test market new models there, so you can get stuff early. Of course the problem there is that the new models may have problems or may not succeed, so you can wind up with a lemon or orphan.
Ah, but they did not make DOS 1. They bought it from some local guy.
Having said that, I, too, regard W2K as the best OS Microsoft has produced to date. However, they have a marketing cycle that, in the absence of real competition, requires that they produce a couple of years of garbage so that at some point they'll produce a good one they can really market. W95 was like that, and W2K. I'm doubtful that Longhorn is the real one, actually. I think they're still retrenching and they won't actually need another good product until around 2009. Then again, maybe Longhorn will be delayed that long...
I still think Word XP is still a deeply offensive product compared to Word 2000...
On the basis that he's an idiot believing what he wants to believe. Now he's feeling some cognitive dissonance because those darned old facts are just so persistent.
Actually, it's an interesting question as to how much history the Busheviks will be able to rewrite. Me, I optimistically believe in truth and freedom, so I think the increasing amount of raw data being recorded along with the evolving analytic tools will result in more historical clarity.
Gosh, you're stupidity and ignorance are awesome. You *DESERVE* what you're getting for it. Too bad fools like you are flushing the entire country down the toilet for the greater profits of BushCo.
If you want the actual facts, historical and otherwise, they're actually quite widely available and quite persistent. At some point you will be forced to acknowledge them, no matter how much you want to believe something else.
However, "the force" has nothing on the power of the will to believe.
On the one hand, we have a couple of people who very obviously had no idea what would happen to gasoline under those circumstances. They could have learned the dangers without destroying the rest of their lives, but they didn't. Too late now.
On the other hand, we have a bunch of supposedly more intelligent people making jokes about the tragedy. Good thing that being morally defective is not fatal, eh?
Linkage? They're all equally badly educated, and we all wind up paying costs for it. In the first case, these two ignorant-about-gasoline fools would have had normal working lives, contributing their efforts and productivity to a society that all of us benefit from. In the second case, these morally-ignorant people will go vote for fools like Dubya and contribute to destroying a once-great nation.
Not intended as a joke, but the Darwin Awards should be classified and have levels. Most specifically, a Darwin Award 1st Class should only be awarded when the loser/winner dies before reproducing (or exterminates the descendants, too, in the course of "winning" the award). Someone who dies stupidly after reproducing has not removed those genes from the gene pool, and should only get a 2nd Class or lower award.
Actually, in extreme cases, it might be possible to kill oneself spectacularly and foolishly, but in a way that saves other people's lives, even if only by way of avoiding the bad example when they hear about it. For really spectacular demises, there should be special orders of merit, say a fig leaf cluster for dying of stupidity on television...
No, sorry to inform you, but profit is not the highest god above all others. Not even stock prices. That malarky is just the current politically correct BS, which is especially hilarious given that most of the politicians have never earned real profits.
First I better include the disclaimer that I'm in the IBM food chain--and maybe I shouldn't comment at all, but I definitely have a different take on this... I think IBM is a pretty good company, and it is quite difficult to get a job there. If the hiring system is working properly, then anyone who IBM has hired is a better than average person, and losing that person is a loss to the company. If the hiring system is *NOT* working properly, then that's a different and much more serious problem.
I think it's really unfortunate when any company fires people for no fault of their own. What that really means is that the employees will start diverting some of their energies away from the company's business and to trying to "insure" their own job security. It doesn't really matter what "strategy" they use, trying to be indispensible, pushing other employees down so they have better survival chances, or whatever, the company is the big loser.
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope I have a foe slot available to ignore you with.
Totally and utterly bogus. Actually, real science is about failure, and if only 1/3 of the research doesn't produce useful results, that would be an incredibly good batting average for real-world science. Actually, I think the real success rate is more like 5%, but of course most of the failures never get as far as being published, and especially not in relatively prestigious journals.
Coincidentally, I just now happen to be reading the excellent Science: A History 1543-2001 by John Gribbin. A recurrent theme is how religious lunacy interferes with scientific progress. Can't stop it, though the main historical effect is that the progress is slowed up in one place, and takes off in some other place where the religious nuts have less control.
Society really has a strongly vested interest in producing well educated people for the next generation, but the meaning of "well educated" is the point of manipulation. I think it includes educated in the knowledge needed to be free and responsible people. Our current elite leaders think it means the mass of people should be educated to follow orders and work efficiently for their own children, who will of course be educated to own the factories and run the government. In other words, "leaders" like Dubya want to use the education system to perpetuate and even increase their own political and economic superiority.
I believe the magnet schools program is the most damaging tool being used for these purposes, because it affects the largest number of students. A Texas "innovation", by the way. This gives many members of the power elite a cheap back door through the public schools, with their own children getting superior educations. More importantly, it destroys the motivation to improve the entire public school system, because the people who actually do care about good education can just channel their own children into the elite magnet schools. Meanwhile, the bulk of the students (and future voters) are practically in jail, and not really expected to learn anything except for how to behave and how to pass the current test.
There are are problems, but they are smaller. For example, there are many elitists who are so selfish and short-sighted that they simply don't want to pay any taxes for education that benefits the entire society. There are also people who want to control their children's education to perpetuate their own beliefs, usually bizarre religious beliefs that can't stand the light of reason. However, these are relatively minor problems compared to the effective destruction of the mainstream education system.
I also referred to the preposterous of the alternative reading, since the scope of "Linux" is so broad. Of course, a good editor should also be a good writer--and a good writer will not write such ambiguous and misleading stuff in the first place.
Since the introduction was so misguided, I admit I didn't even read the article. There's no reasonable way it could be talking about something else like an add-on fingerprint scanner, because in that case it wouldn't be limited to the T series.
I don't mind that the editors want to be slightly provocative. What I mostly mind is that the the /. moderation system frequently penalizes people who rise to the bait. I suppose I should also be bothered that such leading questions sometimes provoke trolling, but the moderation system usually handles the trolls pretty well. Not always, however.
By the way, can any moderators (M1ers) out there answer a couple of questions about M1? My theory is that M1ers also do M2--but they do it differently than I do. I just answer honestly, the way it says in the M2 instructions, but I rarely agree with 90% of the M1s (I think it's more like 70% on average), and I think that prevents me from being asked to M1. Two implications are that the description of M2 is misleading (or false), and that some M1ers are probably gaming the system by always M2ing at 100% agreement, and this gets them more chances to do M1.
Yes, I admit this meta-topic is wandering away from the current topic, but that's one of the side effects of picking a bad topic, so I'm blaming the /. editor. Well, actually the topic isn't bad, but (as already noted) the "provocative question" is terrible.
Do they have a meta-funny mod?
Right now the nastiest grit throwers are the terrorists, but we are so far fortunate that they are even more stupid than Rumsfeld. We are *SO* lucky that this attack was just conventional explosives and not chemical weapons. I was actually trying to use the Tokyo subway the day the religious crazies attacked with a relatively weak form of sarin. In fact, I'm kind of amazed that Al Qaeda hasn't done something like that yet, but this new scanner would do nothing except show a bottle of liquid. The problem the Aum Shinri Kyo had was that they didn't have a supply of suicidal maniacs in their organization, or they could have killed thousands of people... Al Qaeda is probably saving it for the States.
It's an infinite loop of insanity now. I see no real hope for America's future. At least Blair seems to understand that we need to go after the causes, and reduce the pressure that is driving the insanity.
If you actually believe in something, why don't you want it associated with you? Noticed the smell, eh?
Just realized the mistake on the title, but nothing can be done there...
Basically, based on 9/11, BushCo has demanded and received great power. They claimed they needed these new powers to fight "the terrorists". Instead, they mostly ignored the terrorists and applied the military parts of the power to Iraq, and applied the political power to increasing their control of America.
The results? BushCo has greatly increased their political power in America, so that part is a "success", as they see it. Most of the world is increasingly polarized against America. UBL is about where he was before, though Al Qaeda is now estimated to have grown from a few hundred hard-core fanatics on 9/11 (of 2001) to tens of thousands of fanatics. In addition, BushCo has created a vast pool of revenge seekers and other potential recruits. Al Qaeda can apparently attack at will, and we just have to be greatful for trivialities, such as no chemical weapons--this time.
Iraq was in bad shape under Saddam, but now it is a total disaster zone. If BushCo left tomorrow it would be a total loss, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars gone. BushCo claims those losses now have to be considered an investment, and we have to keep pouring more good lives and good money down the the drain. And meanwhile, their own companies continue to make enormous profits on the entire fiasco. In particular, their oil interests make increasing profits as the price of oil skyrockets. Their military companies profit on new bombs. Their construction companies will profit again on cleaning up Iraq, assuming we ever get to that stage.
Finally, to close the loop, much of that money is being piped to the Saudis and other Islamic extremists, who then leak some of it to Al Qaeda, thus helping them commit fresh atrocities such as the latest attacks in London, thus justifying more political power for BushCo.
Excuse me, but the robust banking network is *NOT* important.
From SCO's perspective, it probably would have been just as well to have been delisted. I'm still not sure if getting delisted wasn't their real plan for this year, but they chickened out for some reason.
However, I'll bet the study didn't check their blood pressure.
What confuses the issue is that their related lack of consideration is quite often combined with other forms of stupidity, and since they've written something in public, there is a tendency to respond to the stupidity at multiple levels, both the grammatical and semantic. The resulting mishmash quickly sinks into the mire.
My current theory is that many Bushevik/Rushevik trolls now do this deliberately. Even when they know how to spell words correctly, they deliberately write them incorrectly to divert the discussion from anything more substantive. Or perhaps it's just their self-perceived urgency to outshout the anti-American enemies by posting LOUDER and more often?
(Minor technical note, but of course they would add checksums to my personal information when they returned it to me for storage.)
The other area is related to truth itself. You can have *LOTS* of bad data and therefore come to a false conclusion. That's actually BushCo's current excuse for what happened in Iraq. (Not a valid excuse in that case, however, since they also had resources to check the validity of the data.) Another interesting example is all the American voters who think they had a good reason to vote for Dubya. However, I think the extreme case here is the Jeff-Gannon/Jim-Guckert (call him JG?) non-story.
It's a little bit difficult to clarify, though it is interesting that some bloggers were involved here. The JG story is a kind of meta-news story about deliberate manipulation of the truth. It has pretty much all the elements required for a sensational news story. Presidential politics, secrecy, and some unusual sex and tax evasion thrown in for the spice. But *POOF*. It disappears without a trace. At least as far as the MSM is concerned.
Remember the joke about why sharks won't attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.
So now the "real" journalists refuse to go after JG. Is that professional courtesy, too? But JG's other profession was prostitution. No wonder they call them media whores, eh?
Remember when journalism was supposed to be some sort of impassioned search to discover the truth and tell the people about it? Poor Benjamin Franklin must be spinning in his grave.
Anyway, my own primary interest is at the personal side of things. I think we need to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around our personal information, or the very notion of privacy will soon be non-existant. That will become just another power used against each of us.
Even Gandhi had enemies.
This new event is something different. It doesn't matter how polite they are about it. They are flexing their muscles, and putting on my historian's hat, power always gets abused. They talk about empowering the little guys and doing good, but when push comes to shove, look who got shoved.
(This /. thing *still* needs a spelling checker.)
Not really up to date, but kind of background information from when I was working in Akihabara. I had forgotten about the first one.
http://shanenj.tripod.com/gofj/gofj1.html
http://shanenj.tripod.com/gofj/gofj3.html
Already it's close to 10 years ago, but I still visit almost monthly. In the last couple of years there has been a *LOT* of construction and rebuilding going on, and the appearance of the neighborhood is changing drastically. I think it's mostly for the better, and in particular, the yakuza seem to be much less visible (though I suspect that may be part of a general campaign throughout Chiyoda-ku).
With regards to this article, I've never felt like the otaku were an absolute majority, though there are plenty of them around. As noted in the linked articles above, I've also never been very impressed by the rumors of bargains to be found in Akihabara. If there ever were such days, they had already ended before I worked there. Most of the "bargains" are obsolete and leftover junk. Also, I think a lot of the "bargains" some stolen stuff and pirate copies, and that kind of stuff has also become much less visible, too.
I think the main special thing about Akihabara is that they often test market new models there, so you can get stuff early. Of course the problem there is that the new models may have problems or may not succeed, so you can wind up with a lemon or orphan.
Having said that, I, too, regard W2K as the best OS Microsoft has produced to date. However, they have a marketing cycle that, in the absence of real competition, requires that they produce a couple of years of garbage so that at some point they'll produce a good one they can really market. W95 was like that, and W2K. I'm doubtful that Longhorn is the real one, actually. I think they're still retrenching and they won't actually need another good product until around 2009. Then again, maybe Longhorn will be delayed that long...
I still think Word XP is still a deeply offensive product compared to Word 2000...
Actually, it's an interesting question as to how much history the Busheviks will be able to rewrite. Me, I optimistically believe in truth and freedom, so I think the increasing amount of raw data being recorded along with the evolving analytic tools will result in more historical clarity.
If you want the actual facts, historical and otherwise, they're actually quite widely available and quite persistent. At some point you will be forced to acknowledge them, no matter how much you want to believe something else.
However, "the force" has nothing on the power of the will to believe.
On the other hand, we have a bunch of supposedly more intelligent people making jokes about the tragedy. Good thing that being morally defective is not fatal, eh?
Linkage? They're all equally badly educated, and we all wind up paying costs for it. In the first case, these two ignorant-about-gasoline fools would have had normal working lives, contributing their efforts and productivity to a society that all of us benefit from. In the second case, these morally-ignorant people will go vote for fools like Dubya and contribute to destroying a once-great nation.
Not intended as a joke, but the Darwin Awards should be classified and have levels. Most specifically, a Darwin Award 1st Class should only be awarded when the loser/winner dies before reproducing (or exterminates the descendants, too, in the course of "winning" the award). Someone who dies stupidly after reproducing has not removed those genes from the gene pool, and should only get a 2nd Class or lower award.
Actually, in extreme cases, it might be possible to kill oneself spectacularly and foolishly, but in a way that saves other people's lives, even if only by way of avoiding the bad example when they hear about it. For really spectacular demises, there should be special orders of merit, say a fig leaf cluster for dying of stupidity on television...
First I better include the disclaimer that I'm in the IBM food chain--and maybe I shouldn't comment at all, but I definitely have a different take on this... I think IBM is a pretty good company, and it is quite difficult to get a job there. If the hiring system is working properly, then anyone who IBM has hired is a better than average person, and losing that person is a loss to the company. If the hiring system is *NOT* working properly, then that's a different and much more serious problem.
I think it's really unfortunate when any company fires people for no fault of their own. What that really means is that the employees will start diverting some of their energies away from the company's business and to trying to "insure" their own job security. It doesn't really matter what "strategy" they use, trying to be indispensible, pushing other employees down so they have better survival chances, or whatever, the company is the big loser.