"A survey of public opinion in 16 countries released by the Pew Global Attitudes Project on June 23 found a dismal opinion of the U.S. Most said the world was more dangerous after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, rated China more favorably than the U.S., and said the world would be better off if a group of countries emerged as a rival to U.S. military power."
No, we probably won't. One of my persistent beliefs is that human lifespan is too short to truly appreciate global change. Consider:
In all probability, the Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet. Accounts of its numbers sound like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and strain our credulity today. Alexander Wilson, the father of scientific ornithology in America, estimated that one flock consisted of two billion birds. Wilson's rival, John James Audubon, watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour. Elongated nesting colonies several miles wide could reach a length of forty miles. In these colonies, droppings were thick enough to kill the forest understory.
On an even less tasteful personal note, I was talking a few years ago to a kid who had just proudly finished the program to be a government agricultural advisor from a Big 10. I told him how the frogs were so dense on highway lowlands back where I grew up as a kid that the crunching and shwishing sound the tires made was nauseating and I wondered where the frogs all went. (Well, there _seemed_ to be a viable crop each year for the cars.) He informed me that agriculture is taught as a science today and such anecdotes from older people are to be discounted.
The song begins to play automatically just as our fictional victim recognizes that he is experiencing a heart attack and he desperately clicks the Skype window to dial emergency services. But all he sees on the screen is a big notice:
DETECTION OF UNLICENSED USE OF MEDIA: SYSTEM SHUT DOWN.
It is unlikely our Congressmen would give a twit about the logic of this example. The remedy is clear: the survivors sue the spammer for damages.
Similar to courts upholding that city police can confiscate and auction off the car of a guy cruising for prostitutes EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HIS WIFE'S CAR.
The law's the law and civil lawsuits are today's answer for cleaning up whatever collateral damage they cause.
From my perspective, edutainment began before the PC. The original Mr. Wizard shows are available http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/ and in my opinion still far superior as a teaching tool than the more kinetic (and Fun! Fun! Fun!) Big Blue Marble of the 70s and 80s.
I've always been unhappy with linux legacy claims. It seems like they are rooted in the days when linux was primarily a server and a person could run a custom install command-line. Sure it ran more efficiently than NT.
But OpenOffice.org on KDE with mplayer displaying a movie in the corner of the screen? Come on! You don't get something for nothing. The opposite side of the coin is that, sure, you can run Damn Small Linux with less than 64 meg but you seriously have to ask whether the available applications present the user with a better experience than a Win9X install with Office 97 for example. No one should be running a Win9X anymore you might say and DSL provides a more secure experience, but, fortunately, the whole question is moot.
Don't you have to make a point of finding a piece of junk with less than 256 meg these days? Seems to me I can get 256 meg and a Sempron 2000-something for $299.95 + monitor and, excepting gaming, that will make the office app/web browsing user happy whether it is Windows or linux.
Basically, I see hardware efficiency as a silly issue to debate and if this is where Microsoft wants to fight linux, "Bring it on!" They are saying "Windows is not worse than linux!" And that is a good position to see them in.
Why do we continually let wrong-doing companies settle lawsuits by giving away advertising?
Minnesota suit didn't. But, if not shrink-wrap software or a complete PC, it had to be something a clueless user could plug into the box -- no video cards and the like. Massa Gates bought us a refurb '02 scanner, a cheap inkjet and a couple Cheapbytes keyboards with Tux replacing the Microsoft keys.
Interestingly, if the connection is indeed what you make it, then that means Walmart is suggesting that white people are apes. Outrageous!
Indeed. Let's unleash the Godly wrath of the evangelical right upon WalMart for spreading such material. That'll give people in rural Red State areas something to do with their free time and put WalMart in a world of hurt.
"Michael said it was a joke," Forchione said. "We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke."
Being 18, they showed him, indeed, considering he will have a felony in the database tracking him for the rest of his life. In lieu of a job, I guess he can get a book from Loompanics on how to cook meth and be a drug dealer.
But I suppose they had to balance the ethical issues to reach a wise decision. I mean, it's hard to imagine the horror of school web sites crashing around the country. That would send a signal that we're weak on terra.
The more the idea takes hold in my mind, the easier it is to see examples of what cowardly bullies Americans are. Yup, the Canton police really showed this kid what happens when you mess with the school web site. "Take that computer-using high school kid!"
Maybe Kevin Mitnick can get him gigs speaking at the high school circuit?
Me too (usually a pedestrian). There are significantly more pedestrian deaths in the U.S. _every_year_ than the World Trade Center deaths but I don't see people getting all weepy over it. (http://www.carwrecks.com/info8.html)
Being a long-term survivor of pedestrianism is one of the best ways to become a cynic of the human condition. It annoys me that my local media have to make a point that "alcohol and drugs were not involved" -- to which I always think, "Great, a clean kill." Running over a pedestrian is the safest way to experience the thrill of murder. Unlikely you'll even get the workhouse if you aren't too blatent about it. But be warned that if you only wing your pedestrian you could be paying off the multi-million dollar lawsuit for the rest of your life under the new bankrupcy rules. So in the end it's smarter not to run over pedestrians, ok?
[Aside from personal experience, I tend to be even more cynical because working in various places and talking about walking to work I have met _three_ secretaries who each had their father killed at a stop sign or stop light pedestrian walk.]
Because once they are sold, they are no longer "public" airwaves and if you don't like what media corporations shove your way you can shove it and go amuse yourself by learning to play the bango on your porch?
Which might not be all bad. Of course, if anyone heard you, you'd have to pay royalties.
It's true. You should have gotten some "funny" or "insightful" points, your choice. As long as the machines are testing for those, what's the controversy? It's just saving the vintner money. When they start telling us that a ten-year-old cabernet lacks the tang of a fresh cabernet, we'll know marketing has taken over the farm.
I don't about bartenders and how they pour but any wine drinker can tell you that a wider glass will make a good drink more pleasurable because you can smell it better. Wouldn't be surprising if that led to more comsumption.
It seems particularly incongruous at the high-end "would you like to sample the brie with the Slovenian raspberry compote today, Sir" grocery we frequent that is just converting over to the d*mn things. Not only does it seem advantageous to help the poor folks keep their jobs at the till (not everybody's going to retrain to be a rocket scientist), what is the appeal of slogging your own stuff past the scanner when there is someone there to do it for you? Yet, self-service is very popular and they've phased in about 1/3 of the traffic in a month. I don't get the attraction of being your own checkout clerk.
In retrospect, it seems like there was less excuse and more wisdom to the Afrikaaner woman who told me in the '80s, "Sure we could get a washing machine and a dryer and a power mower, etc. etc. -- but hiring a servant provides a job."
No, the version _FOR_ Windows didn't have the Microsoft pieces bundled, because you already had them as part of your current Windows. And IBM didn't have to pay Micro$haft to re-distribute them.
Isn't that what I implied?
The intent was to sell one version cheaper for people who already had Windows 3.1 and didn't need the capabilities of WinOS2.
Sigh. You don't get it either?
If I said this Volkswagen is FOR Toyota, what the hell does that mean? A Volkswagen is a car and a Toyota is a car. Windows 3.1 was an OS and OS/2 was an OS/2. In what earthly sense was OS/2 ever "FOR" Windows?
I used OS/2 for 6 years at home and it was good. However, one of the several weird things about marketing the product is that IBM sold OS/2 Warp 3 and OS/2 Warp 3 _for_ [emphasis mine] Windows. The intent was to sell one version cheaper for people who already had Windows 3.1 and didn't need the capabilities of WinOS2.
However, I always thought labeling it as _FOR_ Windows was moronic. What was that supposed to imply to the purchaser? That it was a Windows add-on?
Maybe this linux screensaver is a final OS/2 team joke to confuse the hell out of selected users. I'm not sure I don't approve.
Does anyone care? Probably not, but I have to try.
Me too. You don't need extermination camps to be fascist. The issue was perhaps most recently arguing in the question of labeling apartheid South Africa fascist.
I quote from Ebenstein, Today's Isms, 5th ed, p. 115 (because I'm old and I took PoliSc 101 a long time ago):
"[T]he principle elements of the fascist outlook:
(1) Distrust of reason (2) Denial of basic human equality (3) Code of behavior based on lies and violence (4) Government by elite (5) Totalitarianism (6) Racialism and imperialism (7) Opposition to international law and order"
the question of the Military controling the civilian population in the United States is settled law from the Civil War and the Posse Comitatus Act [uscg.mil].
Unfortunately, the point is that this White House isn't too concerned about law or the opinions of the "reality-based community".
The WSJ also lists familiar reasons for the decline -- 'online piracy, CD burning, high prices and competition for consumer dollars from videogames and DVDs
I would say _very_ "familiar" WSJ reasons. Seems to me the music industry is a particularly sensitive canary to the overall wealth of a society. The wealthy will only buy so many CDs no matter how much tax cuts syphon a society's money in their direction. Maybe the WSJ should have noted:
David J. Contis, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich Co., which operates 80 malls nationwide, estimated that luxury stores at its centers had high single to double-digit sales gains this weekend from the year-ago period. But at the rest of the stores, sales were anywhere from unchanged to slightly up.
So music sales are bad in comparison to _MOST_ sales which are "unchanged" [flat] to slightly up". Could it be because:
Although retailers are not panicking yet, there were plenty of generous deals this past weekend, most of which had been planned. Macy's flagship store in New York offered 50 percent off on jewelry and had a plentiful array of sweaters that were marked down 40 percent.
[ibid]
Hey, music industry, where are your 40-50% off Christmas sales? Then maybe you can have an "unchanged to slightly up" year!
Heh, heh. Now there's a marketing model to make the music mafia spit latte. Not even on their radar.
Not at all. Stewart Brand, the 60s-70s Whole Earth Catalog guy published a pulp called Space Colonies. Personally in favor of them, he tried to offer good and bad points and, similar to Philip K. Dick's suspicions that off-world labor would be for chumps, Brand left me thoroughly convinced that space colonies would be awful at least in the near term. Considering you don't want somebody smuggling up a gun to blow holes in a wall or going crazy and blowing an air lock, the level of constant monitoring would be overpowering. I also recommend the seldom discussed movie, Outland.
Trust me. I know a couple guys with a bunch of computers each I wouldn't trust around any of my machines if they were on fire. I figure it is the modern equivalent to having several cars on blocks in front of your trailer home.
I think the moral here is that the argument/alibi for excusable irresponsibility because the network was unsecured probably isn't working so well.
I would suggest printing to file, with any postscript (PS) print driver, then convert to PDF with ghostscript, ps2pdf.com, acrobat distiller, etc.
Yes, theoretically "could" but crazily inefficient as a way to do all work all the time.
I worked with a proprietary DB application whose client had some reporting features but, aside from dead tree print, had no way for the users to save or share the results. In that case, adding a printer to their desktops to print postscript to file was the available workaround with Ghostscript as the file's associated application at the "receiving end".
But I think I was soothing my conscience in believing that glomp was a clever hack. I can't see a government running itself on a system like that all day every day.
Slashdot Mirror
"A survey of public opinion in 16 countries released by the Pew Global Attitudes Project on June 23 found a dismal opinion of the U.S. Most said the world was more dangerous after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, rated China more favorably than the U.S., and said the world would be better off if a group of countries emerged as a rival to U.S. military power."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0703-25.htm
If other countries have a better opinion of China than the U.S. maybe it is time to reflect that the U.S. is doing something _very_ wrong?
We won't notice a mass extinction event?!?!??
No, we probably won't. One of my persistent beliefs is that human lifespan is too short to truly appreciate global change. Consider:
In all probability, the Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet. Accounts of its numbers sound like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and strain our credulity today. Alexander Wilson, the father of scientific ornithology in America, estimated that one flock consisted of two billion birds. Wilson's rival, John James Audubon, watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour. Elongated nesting colonies several miles wide could reach a length of forty miles. In these colonies, droppings were thick enough to kill the forest understory.
http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/Pigeon_Essay.html
On an even less tasteful personal note, I was talking a few years ago to a kid who had just proudly finished the program to be a government agricultural advisor from a Big 10. I told him how the frogs were so dense on highway lowlands back where I grew up as a kid that the crunching and shwishing sound the tires made was nauseating and I wondered where the frogs all went. (Well, there _seemed_ to be a viable crop each year for the cars.) He informed me that agriculture is taught as a science today and such anecdotes from older people are to be discounted.
agoraphobia _is_ an adaptive behavior.
The song begins to play automatically just as our fictional victim recognizes that he is experiencing a heart attack and he desperately clicks the Skype window to dial emergency services. But all he sees on the screen is a big notice:
DETECTION OF UNLICENSED USE OF MEDIA: SYSTEM SHUT DOWN.
It is unlikely our Congressmen would give a twit about the logic of this example. The remedy is clear: the survivors sue the spammer for damages.
Similar to courts upholding that city police can confiscate and auction off the car of a guy cruising for prostitutes EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HIS WIFE'S CAR.
The law's the law and civil lawsuits are today's answer for cleaning up whatever collateral damage they cause.
From my perspective, edutainment began before the PC. The original Mr. Wizard shows are available http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/ and in my opinion still far superior as a teaching tool than the more kinetic (and Fun! Fun! Fun!) Big Blue Marble of the 70s and 80s.
What happened since last month's article that claimed e-paper was going to be so cheap it'd be on every cereal box?
1 5/1720224&tid=126&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/
Cue the Monty Python references.
Or Quentin Tarantino interpreted by Pee Wee Herman.
Who posts a Japanese mouse strangulation story at 5:30 a.m. for my morning wake-up news?
I've always been unhappy with linux legacy claims. It seems like they are rooted in the days when linux was primarily a server and a person could run a custom install command-line. Sure it ran more efficiently than NT.
But OpenOffice.org on KDE with mplayer displaying a movie in the corner of the screen? Come on! You don't get something for nothing. The opposite side of the coin is that, sure, you can run Damn Small Linux with less than 64 meg but you seriously have to ask whether the available applications present the user with a better experience than a Win9X install with Office 97 for example. No one should be running a Win9X anymore you might say and DSL provides a more secure experience, but, fortunately, the whole question is moot.
Don't you have to make a point of finding a piece of junk with less than 256 meg these days? Seems to me I can get 256 meg and a Sempron 2000-something for $299.95 + monitor and, excepting gaming, that will make the office app/web browsing user happy whether it is Windows or linux.
Basically, I see hardware efficiency as a silly issue to debate and if this is where Microsoft wants to fight linux, "Bring it on!" They are saying "Windows is not worse than linux!" And that is a good position to see them in.
Why do we continually let wrong-doing companies settle lawsuits by giving away advertising?
Minnesota suit didn't. But, if not shrink-wrap software or a complete PC, it had to be something a clueless user could plug into the box -- no video cards and the like. Massa Gates bought us a refurb '02 scanner, a cheap inkjet and a couple Cheapbytes keyboards with Tux replacing the Microsoft keys.
Hey, it's something.
Interestingly, if the connection is indeed what you make it, then that means Walmart is suggesting that white people are apes. Outrageous!
Indeed. Let's unleash the Godly wrath of the evangelical right upon WalMart for spreading such material. That'll give people in rural Red State areas something to do with their free time and put WalMart in a world of hurt.
"Michael said it was a joke," Forchione said. "We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke."
Being 18, they showed him, indeed, considering he will have a felony in the database tracking him for the rest of his life. In lieu of a job, I guess he can get a book from Loompanics on how to cook meth and be a drug dealer.
But I suppose they had to balance the ethical issues to reach a wise decision. I mean, it's hard to imagine the horror of school web sites crashing around the country. That would send a signal that we're weak on terra.
The more the idea takes hold in my mind, the easier it is to see examples of what cowardly bullies Americans are. Yup, the Canton police really showed this kid what happens when you mess with the school web site. "Take that computer-using high school kid!"
Maybe Kevin Mitnick can get him gigs speaking at the high school circuit?
Me too (usually a pedestrian). There are significantly more pedestrian deaths in the U.S. _every_year_ than the World Trade Center deaths but I don't see people getting all weepy over it. (http://www.carwrecks.com/info8.html)
Being a long-term survivor of pedestrianism is one of the best ways to become a cynic of the human condition. It annoys me that my local media have to make a point that "alcohol and drugs were not involved" -- to which I always think, "Great, a clean kill." Running over a pedestrian is the safest way to experience the thrill of murder. Unlikely you'll even get the workhouse if you aren't too blatent about it. But be warned that if you only wing your pedestrian you could be paying off the multi-million dollar lawsuit for the rest of your life under the new bankrupcy rules. So in the end it's smarter not to run over pedestrians, ok?
[Aside from personal experience, I tend to be even more cynical because working in various places and talking about walking to work I have met _three_ secretaries who each had their father killed at a stop sign or stop light pedestrian walk.]
Because once they are sold, they are no longer "public" airwaves and if you don't like what media corporations shove your way you can shove it and go amuse yourself by learning to play the bango on your porch?
Which might not be all bad. Of course, if anyone heard you, you'd have to pay royalties.
It's true. You should have gotten some "funny" or "insightful" points, your choice. As long as the machines are testing for those, what's the controversy? It's just saving the vintner money. When they start telling us that a ten-year-old cabernet lacks the tang of a fresh cabernet, we'll know marketing has taken over the farm.
I don't about bartenders and how they pour but any wine drinker can tell you that a wider glass will make a good drink more pleasurable because you can smell it better. Wouldn't be surprising if that led to more comsumption.
For example, self-checkout lanes.
It seems particularly incongruous at the high-end "would you like to sample the brie with the Slovenian raspberry compote today, Sir" grocery we frequent that is just converting over to the d*mn things. Not only does it seem advantageous to help the poor folks keep their jobs at the till (not everybody's going to retrain to be a rocket scientist), what is the appeal of slogging your own stuff past the scanner when there is someone there to do it for you? Yet, self-service is very popular and they've phased in about 1/3 of the traffic in a month. I don't get the attraction of being your own checkout clerk.
In retrospect, it seems like there was less excuse and more wisdom to the Afrikaaner woman who told me in the '80s, "Sure we could get a washing machine and a dryer and a power mower, etc. etc. -- but hiring a servant provides a job."
No, the version _FOR_ Windows didn't have the Microsoft pieces bundled, because you already had them as part of your current Windows. And IBM didn't have to pay Micro$haft to re-distribute them.
Isn't that what I implied?
The intent was to sell one version cheaper for people who already had Windows 3.1 and didn't need the capabilities of WinOS2.
Sigh. You don't get it either?
If I said this Volkswagen is FOR Toyota, what the hell does that mean? A Volkswagen is a car and a Toyota is a car. Windows 3.1 was an OS and OS/2 was an OS/2. In what earthly sense was OS/2 ever "FOR" Windows?
Oh, well. OS/2 is almost gone. Time to move on.
I used OS/2 for 6 years at home and it was good. However, one of the several weird things about marketing the product is that IBM sold OS/2 Warp 3 and OS/2 Warp 3 _for_ [emphasis mine] Windows. The intent was to sell one version cheaper for people who already had Windows 3.1 and didn't need the capabilities of WinOS2.
However, I always thought labeling it as _FOR_ Windows was moronic. What was that supposed to imply to the purchaser? That it was a Windows add-on?
Maybe this linux screensaver is a final OS/2 team joke to confuse the hell out of selected users. I'm not sure I don't approve.
To call it such is at the least a bit ignorant.
Does anyone care? Probably not, but I have to try.
Me too. You don't need extermination camps to be fascist. The issue was perhaps most recently arguing in the question of labeling apartheid South Africa fascist.
I quote from Ebenstein, Today's Isms, 5th ed, p. 115 (because I'm old and I took PoliSc 101 a long time ago):
"[T]he principle elements of the fascist outlook:
(1) Distrust of reason
(2) Denial of basic human equality
(3) Code of behavior based on lies and violence
(4) Government by elite
(5) Totalitarianism
(6) Racialism and imperialism
(7) Opposition to international law and order"
Discuss and contrast
the question of the Military controling the civilian population in the United States is settled law from the Civil War and the Posse Comitatus Act [uscg.mil].
Unfortunately, the point is that this White House isn't too concerned about law or the opinions of the "reality-based community".
Hard to imagine something that complex played in prehistory.
The WSJ also lists familiar reasons for the decline -- 'online piracy, CD burning, high prices and competition for consumer dollars from videogames and DVDs
o liday_shopping;_ylt=Aglg.QQadCZX3GvXHlKBhm.s0NUE;_ ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
I would say _very_ "familiar" WSJ reasons. Seems to me the music industry is a particularly sensitive canary to the overall wealth of a society. The wealthy will only buy so many CDs no matter how much tax cuts syphon a society's money in their direction. Maybe the WSJ should have noted:
David J. Contis, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich Co., which operates 80 malls nationwide, estimated that luxury stores at its centers had high single to double-digit sales gains this weekend from the year-ago period. But at the rest of the stores, sales were anywhere from unchanged to slightly up.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051212/ap_on_bi_ge/h
So music sales are bad in comparison to _MOST_ sales which are "unchanged" [flat] to slightly up". Could it be because:
Although retailers are not panicking yet, there were plenty of generous deals this past weekend, most of which had been planned. Macy's flagship store in New York offered 50 percent off on jewelry and had a plentiful array of sweaters that were marked down 40 percent.
[ibid]
Hey, music industry, where are your 40-50% off Christmas sales? Then maybe you can have an "unchanged to slightly up" year!
Heh, heh. Now there's a marketing model to make the music mafia spit latte. Not even on their radar.
The moon, I guess
Not at all. Stewart Brand, the 60s-70s Whole Earth Catalog guy published a pulp called Space Colonies. Personally in favor of them, he tried to offer good and bad points and, similar to Philip K. Dick's suspicions that off-world labor would be for chumps, Brand left me thoroughly convinced that space colonies would be awful at least in the near term. Considering you don't want somebody smuggling up a gun to blow holes in a wall or going crazy and blowing an air lock, the level of constant monitoring would be overpowering. I also recommend the seldom discussed movie, Outland.
Trust me. I know a couple guys with a bunch of computers each I wouldn't trust around any of my machines if they were on fire. I figure it is the modern equivalent to having several cars on blocks in front of your trailer home.
I think the moral here is that the argument/alibi for excusable irresponsibility because the network was unsecured probably isn't working so well.
I would suggest printing to file, with any postscript (PS) print driver, then convert to PDF with ghostscript, ps2pdf.com, acrobat distiller, etc.
Yes, theoretically "could" but crazily inefficient as a way to do all work all the time.
I worked with a proprietary DB application whose client had some reporting features but, aside from dead tree print, had no way for the users to save or share the results. In that case, adding a printer to their desktops to print postscript to file was the available workaround with Ghostscript as the file's associated application at the "receiving end".
But I think I was soothing my conscience in believing that glomp was a clever hack. I can't see a government running itself on a system like that all day every day.