So, your replacement for a simple, obvious solution which would accomplish something despite being imperfect - your replacement is a complicated, obvious solution which would never get passed or implemented due to its complexity and its economic and political infeasability.
Let me see... 1) simple, "wrong" but would accomplish something - VS - 2) complicated, "right" but would never happen.
I think I'll take option 1, thanks very much.
Until you outline what is really "wrong" with option 1 besides the fact that you don't like the principle of the thing.
Solar is much better than nuclear and has just as great a potential to provide all our energy. Cover all the roofs with solar panels, even in places with lots of clouds, and you'll get all the power we need. Especially combined with wind, tidal, etc.
Nuclear sounds nice until one remembers the real nuclear waste problems: uranium mine tailings and depleted uranium. Don't ever forget that depleted uranium makes up over 98% of the mass of refined uranium ore. Nuclear plants themselves are pretty clean, and they're a lot safer these days, but mining for uranium, and dealing with depleted uranium, are hurdles best not tackled when we have better alternatives.
Looking forward to this - but the big question will be, can you import video, or does it all have to come from iTunes Music Store? Namely, will Apple support via iTunes, just as they do for CDs, importing DVDs? Because a set top box that can only play video from an iTunes-bearing computer is relatively useless in comparison with Tivo/DVR/EyeTV/whathaveyou. Combine your standard cable company's DVR box with EyeTV and you can get any video you want on your Mac mini. No need for an "iTV" then. I guess if they just want to make it easy for people to get their iTunes videos onto their TV screen, that'll be good for most, but I would hope they at least provide some advanced functionality.
Not even just an a-hole, Jason Fortuny is a childish a-hole. Why is this all about fem-dom sex? Because childish people seem to not understand the wide range and validity of human sexual interests. People like him are still suffering from puritan hangups. He probably thinks people who would respond to such an ad are sickos or deviants or something and deserve to be ridiculed. He's wrong, and he's just proven he's the one who needs to be ridiculed thoroughly and publicly for behaving like a little brat bully about the sexual practices of mature adults.
You are probably correct (I don't know since I don't own a tree farm). The GPP was uninformative and counterproductive.
Still, there are great savings to be had by recycling paper instead of producing virgin paper:
For every tonne of paper used for recycling the savings are:
* at least 30000litres of water
* 3000 - 4000 KWh electricity (enough for an average 3 bedroom house for one year)
* 95% of air pollution.
And I see in a lower post that you'd rather be selling 10year wood for timber, so maybe it doesn't matter to you if there's more paper recycling:)
I recall a lot of fear & stories about airplane hijackings throughout my growing-up life, throughout the 80's and 90's - and I know there's a Monty Python sketch about hijacking. I would definitely call plane hijacking a form of terrorism, and it's been done by many groups.
It just so happens that Islamic terrorists have, amongst their many other non-airplane-related attempts, had two very high-profile (aimed at the U.S.) airplane-related attacks.
So naturally people who aren't paying attention think "oh, those Muslims, they like to use planes!" Sure, forget all the other people who have messed with air traffic such that hijacking was a common cultural topic going back to the '60s. Forget that Al-qaida has gone after boats, buildings, etc. and not just airplanes. Forget that in 9/11 the planes were just a convenient way to go after buildings.
Fine with me. As long as people who remember the facts are the ones who make the decisions. Unfortunately...
Sheesh, take a deep breath and relax - OK, so maybe bittorrent shouldn't be there. I don't know, I was just throwing out ideas. To me, downloading is inherently a part of browsing, and bittorrent is getting popular as a way to download things. I see no reason it can't be a transparent part of web browsing. "Oh, hey, there's a bittorrent download option, I'll just click that and - hey, Firefox is downloading it.
But yeah, apps like Azureus offer much better bittorrent downloading, so maybe it shouldn't be part of the browser.
I think the principle stands - just because lots of people disagree on what constitutes the "browsing task" as separate from the "communicating" task or the "web development" task doesn't mean the basic principle of keeping these tasks separate isn't a bad idea - and I see from your last paragraph that you agree.
Re:Keep Mozilla Simple
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...they effectively killed off the original Mozilla suite because it was getting too bloated... Now it seems they want to add new cruft into Firefox.
I disagree. They killed the original Mozilla suite because it was bloated with things you don't need while browsing. As a web browser, it did a basic job - "but wait, there's more! You also get this email client you may not need, which doubles as a newsreader; you get an IRC client, an HTML editor, and let's see what else we can cram in here!"
To compete with Internet Explorer, you want to pare it down to just a browser, and enhance the browsing experience. All those other things are completely different products. If I feel I need to replace my existing email client, let me decide separately. Same for the rest. I just want the best browsing experience I can have. Firefox is an attempt to deliver that, and nothing else.
So I say, if they can incorporate clever extensions as default options that enhance the everyday browsing experience, like tabs or better bookmarks or even bittorrent (a transparent download enhancement?), that makes perfect sense. However, extra tools that are effectively different tasks altogether unrelated to browsing, like IRC chat or internet telephony - those should probably stay as user-installable extensions.
I'll browse the web efficiently with Firefox, and if I decide I need to get on the FooBar internet bandwagon, maybe there's a neat extension that does that job for me right from firefox. But if it has little to do with browsing, it doesn't belong in the default download.
Sadly for those of us who don't like such things, "the franchise is not dying" can easily mean just comic books or paperback novels or whatever. I'd be highly surprised if they find anywhere else to go. At best we might get a movie...
Nope, Sci-Fi is the channel where good things go to die. Farscape, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and now Stargate SG1... Hell, they bought the rights to do a miniseries of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars a few years back and nothing's come of it. They just don't care about science fiction any more, if they ever did.
What, no love for PhysOrg? OK, someone did mention it, but it bears repeating. A nice all-in-one stop for actual science news, from across the spectrum.
Nah, this is all (TFA included) a case of people thinking artistic "greatness" is something tangible and measurable outside of the human experience.
Take Hamlet to a culture that doesn't have a concept of ghosts, and they'll stumble at the first act. Take Saul Williams to someone with an unfamiliarity with his cultural reference points, and it falls flat for them.
But give Hamlet to people who share Shakespeare's context, or at least can grasp it easily, and they recognize something special. Is it inherent in the work itself, or the people reading it? Or some combination thereof?
I quite liked the lyrics by Saul Williams - and I've heard some of his music before, too. It doesn't stroke my "god that is the best thing ever!" mental clitoris, but I can see the goodness in it.
There are different levels of greatness, and they largely reflect the ideas of the perceiver, rather than the creator, of the art.
The original article is bunk. The question is bunk. Why are there no highbrow computer games? The real question is why the author of the article can't see them. And do we really need to call them "highbrow"? This snobbish perception of "other people's art" is what keeps people apart and maintains tribal tensions in society. We need less of this hatred of the other and more - well, it doesn't mean you have to like the other. You don't have to start liking Tupac and the author doesn't have to start liking all video games. We just need more understanding of the simple truth: "Different strokes for different folks."
There's a difference between intelligence and education. Most people probably could understand technology, if they'd received an adequate education. But our education system has been under attack and/or allowed to fall into disrepair for so long that most people alive right now haven't the basis for using their own intelligence.
Um, you don't need to run for President to make a difference. And you don't need to run in a minority party (ie. irrelevant outside a parliamentary system), either.
And I've seen more announce their campaigns for offices small and large on DailyKos.
Now, you may scoff, they'll just become corrupted. Perhaps eventually. But you have to get the power to do something before you can do it. All steps forward in America have come from some person or group grabbing some power and making the change, and sometimes those somebodies have been "fresh" politicians.
And if you say, "good for them, but I'm a conservative" - well, hey, surely with all the "traditional conservative" and "libertarian conservative" criticism of Bush and his administration lately, surely many such people will start running for offices large and small to exert power on the Republican Party and "take it back?" Surely all is not lost?
Rather than regulation, the solution would seem to me to be to change the law to disallow corporate structures that remove responsibility.
Or, perhaps an idea more appealing to libertarians who like how markets (not free ones, since there is no such thing) harness human self-interest to actually do something good - why not harness that even more, making all employees self-interested owners in their businesses? Something like a co-op which someone else mentioned.
Rather than being responsible only to distant shareholders, responsibility could be expanded to their own employees. This sort of thing worked pretty well for Henry Ford. I wonder why corporate America forgot it?
Perhaps we should use the law to redefine corporations. It probably would be better than using the government to regulate them.
One that realizes that incompetent government-hating right-wing leadership will always screw up necessary programs like disaster relief, defense, and medical care. Conservatives cannot run government programs because they believe they are all illegitimate. Naturally said programs suffer under their control.
Do you think being on an international call during a time of war should somehow be protected from surveillance?
We're not a war. Congress has not declared a war on any person or nation.
I have a problem with this. While you are technically correct, I don't think it should matter. You're accepting the parent's argument that, sure, if we were in war, Americans should be expected to give up rights. Maybe you agree.
But I don't and I'm tired of seeing backtracking from this ridiculous assumption. No, Americans should not be expected to give up rights, even "little" rights like privacy, just because we're at war. In America's history, war has always been used as an excuse to remove a few rights here and there. The early 20th C sedition and espionage acts come to mind. Japanese internment comes to mind. These things should not be acceptable to real Americans. The fact that many Americans, probably a majority, accept the idea that their rights are temporarily granted to them by the state, and revokable in "times of war" shows just how far we've fallen.
As a proud liberal Democrat I say to everyone: your rights are yours, not the Government's, and you need to know them and defend them at all times.
War shouldn't happen. It's barbaric, uncivilized, and ideas of "wartime ethics" make it worse, not better. Whether we're actually at war or not, to use it as an excuse to abrogate your rights is fundamentally offensive and repugnant. It's bad enough that most Americans nowadays seem to be easily appeased with 24-hour cable news war porn. It's throwing salt on the wounds to accept the "revokable" view of our rights.
I'm just part of a ridiculously small minority of people who are abhorred by what's going on, and would be regardless of what party was running the show this week.
No, it's not that small a group of people, you're just letting your political prejudice keep you from looking in the right places.
But if I don't know who you are, why do I care about what you're writing? It may as well be fiction. Which is fine, if you're fine with that, but then why not just write fiction? Because that's the level at which your writing will be appreciated... If it's not good writing, why would anyone want to read it?
Seems to me this is easily solved by developers saying "That feature is coming, we're working on it" instead of "It's already in CVS! Stop complaining!"
CNN isn't crazy like FOX, but they're not a good source for real journalism, either. Their brand of bad journalism is less intentional - it's more from simple laziness and corporate-media silliness. That and general US journalist paranoia about being perceived as "too liberal." Heaven forbid conservative nutjobs write reams of letters and books about a liberal media. They'll do that no matter what...
But I digress.
I would argue there is no respectable news source in the USA, at least not akin to the BBC.
Slashdot Mirror
So, your replacement for a simple, obvious solution which would accomplish something despite being imperfect - your replacement is a complicated, obvious solution which would never get passed or implemented due to its complexity and its economic and political infeasability.
Let me see... 1) simple, "wrong" but would accomplish something - VS - 2) complicated, "right" but would never happen.
I think I'll take option 1, thanks very much.
Until you outline what is really "wrong" with option 1 besides the fact that you don't like the principle of the thing.
solar panels = mine tailings - reference please?
And BTW, chill. I didn't say anything about terrorists. Seriously, chill. Unhinged response, anyone?
Solar is much better than nuclear and has just as great a potential to provide all our energy. Cover all the roofs with solar panels, even in places with lots of clouds, and you'll get all the power we need. Especially combined with wind, tidal, etc.
Nuclear sounds nice until one remembers the real nuclear waste problems: uranium mine tailings and depleted uranium. Don't ever forget that depleted uranium makes up over 98% of the mass of refined uranium ore. Nuclear plants themselves are pretty clean, and they're a lot safer these days, but mining for uranium, and dealing with depleted uranium, are hurdles best not tackled when we have better alternatives.
Looking forward to this - but the big question will be, can you import video, or does it all have to come from iTunes Music Store? Namely, will Apple support via iTunes, just as they do for CDs, importing DVDs? Because a set top box that can only play video from an iTunes-bearing computer is relatively useless in comparison with Tivo/DVR/EyeTV/whathaveyou. Combine your standard cable company's DVR box with EyeTV and you can get any video you want on your Mac mini. No need for an "iTV" then. I guess if they just want to make it easy for people to get their iTunes videos onto their TV screen, that'll be good for most, but I would hope they at least provide some advanced functionality.
Yay, you took the bait and wasted another 10 minutes of your life! Hooray for you, you're the winner!
Not even just an a-hole, Jason Fortuny is a childish a-hole. Why is this all about fem-dom sex? Because childish people seem to not understand the wide range and validity of human sexual interests. People like him are still suffering from puritan hangups. He probably thinks people who would respond to such an ad are sickos or deviants or something and deserve to be ridiculed. He's wrong, and he's just proven he's the one who needs to be ridiculed thoroughly and publicly for behaving like a little brat bully about the sexual practices of mature adults.
Still, there are great savings to be had by recycling paper instead of producing virgin paper:
And I see in a lower post that you'd rather be selling 10year wood for timber, so maybe it doesn't matter to you if there's more paper recycling
I recall a lot of fear & stories about airplane hijackings throughout my growing-up life, throughout the 80's and 90's - and I know there's a Monty Python sketch about hijacking. I would definitely call plane hijacking a form of terrorism, and it's been done by many groups.
It just so happens that Islamic terrorists have, amongst their many other non-airplane-related attempts, had two very high-profile (aimed at the U.S.) airplane-related attacks.
So naturally people who aren't paying attention think "oh, those Muslims, they like to use planes!" Sure, forget all the other people who have messed with air traffic such that hijacking was a common cultural topic going back to the '60s. Forget that Al-qaida has gone after boats, buildings, etc. and not just airplanes. Forget that in 9/11 the planes were just a convenient way to go after buildings.
Fine with me. As long as people who remember the facts are the ones who make the decisions. Unfortunately...
Sheesh, take a deep breath and relax - OK, so maybe bittorrent shouldn't be there. I don't know, I was just throwing out ideas. To me, downloading is inherently a part of browsing, and bittorrent is getting popular as a way to download things. I see no reason it can't be a transparent part of web browsing. "Oh, hey, there's a bittorrent download option, I'll just click that and - hey, Firefox is downloading it.
But yeah, apps like Azureus offer much better bittorrent downloading, so maybe it shouldn't be part of the browser.
I think the principle stands - just because lots of people disagree on what constitutes the "browsing task" as separate from the "communicating" task or the "web development" task doesn't mean the basic principle of keeping these tasks separate isn't a bad idea - and I see from your last paragraph that you agree.
I disagree. They killed the original Mozilla suite because it was bloated with things you don't need while browsing. As a web browser, it did a basic job - "but wait, there's more! You also get this email client you may not need, which doubles as a newsreader; you get an IRC client, an HTML editor, and let's see what else we can cram in here!"
To compete with Internet Explorer, you want to pare it down to just a browser, and enhance the browsing experience. All those other things are completely different products. If I feel I need to replace my existing email client, let me decide separately. Same for the rest. I just want the best browsing experience I can have. Firefox is an attempt to deliver that, and nothing else.
So I say, if they can incorporate clever extensions as default options that enhance the everyday browsing experience, like tabs or better bookmarks or even bittorrent (a transparent download enhancement?), that makes perfect sense. However, extra tools that are effectively different tasks altogether unrelated to browsing, like IRC chat or internet telephony - those should probably stay as user-installable extensions.
I'll browse the web efficiently with Firefox, and if I decide I need to get on the FooBar internet bandwagon, maybe there's a neat extension that does that job for me right from firefox. But if it has little to do with browsing, it doesn't belong in the default download.
Sadly for those of us who don't like such things, "the franchise is not dying" can easily mean just comic books or paperback novels or whatever. I'd be highly surprised if they find anywhere else to go. At best we might get a movie...
Nope, Sci-Fi is the channel where good things go to die. Farscape, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and now Stargate SG1... Hell, they bought the rights to do a miniseries of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars a few years back and nothing's come of it. They just don't care about science fiction any more, if they ever did.
What, no love for PhysOrg? OK, someone did mention it, but it bears repeating. A nice all-in-one stop for actual science news, from across the spectrum.
Well, if you'd link to the post with your brilliant line of Latin, I might be able to appreciate it.
Nah, this is all (TFA included) a case of people thinking artistic "greatness" is something tangible and measurable outside of the human experience.
Take Hamlet to a culture that doesn't have a concept of ghosts, and they'll stumble at the first act. Take Saul Williams to someone with an unfamiliarity with his cultural reference points, and it falls flat for them.
But give Hamlet to people who share Shakespeare's context, or at least can grasp it easily, and they recognize something special. Is it inherent in the work itself, or the people reading it? Or some combination thereof?
I quite liked the lyrics by Saul Williams - and I've heard some of his music before, too. It doesn't stroke my "god that is the best thing ever!" mental clitoris, but I can see the goodness in it.
There are different levels of greatness, and they largely reflect the ideas of the perceiver, rather than the creator, of the art.
The original article is bunk. The question is bunk. Why are there no highbrow computer games? The real question is why the author of the article can't see them. And do we really need to call them "highbrow"? This snobbish perception of "other people's art" is what keeps people apart and maintains tribal tensions in society. We need less of this hatred of the other and more - well, it doesn't mean you have to like the other. You don't have to start liking Tupac and the author doesn't have to start liking all video games. We just need more understanding of the simple truth: "Different strokes for different folks."
There's a difference between intelligence and education. Most people probably could understand technology, if they'd received an adequate education. But our education system has been under attack and/or allowed to fall into disrepair for so long that most people alive right now haven't the basis for using their own intelligence.
Um, you don't need to run for President to make a difference. And you don't need to run in a minority party (ie. irrelevant outside a parliamentary system), either.
Cases in point:
Stephen Thibodeau (inspired by DailyKos)
(also inspired by DailyKos)
And I've seen more announce their campaigns for offices small and large on DailyKos.
Now, you may scoff, they'll just become corrupted. Perhaps eventually. But you have to get the power to do something before you can do it. All steps forward in America have come from some person or group grabbing some power and making the change, and sometimes those somebodies have been "fresh" politicians.
And if you say, "good for them, but I'm a conservative" - well, hey, surely with all the "traditional conservative" and "libertarian conservative" criticism of Bush and his administration lately, surely many such people will start running for offices large and small to exert power on the Republican Party and "take it back?" Surely all is not lost?
Rather than regulation, the solution would seem to me to be to change the law to disallow corporate structures that remove responsibility.
Or, perhaps an idea more appealing to libertarians who like how markets (not free ones, since there is no such thing) harness human self-interest to actually do something good - why not harness that even more, making all employees self-interested owners in their businesses? Something like a co-op which someone else mentioned.
Rather than being responsible only to distant shareholders, responsibility could be expanded to their own employees. This sort of thing worked pretty well for Henry Ford. I wonder why corporate America forgot it?
Perhaps we should use the law to redefine corporations. It probably would be better than using the government to regulate them.
One that realizes that incompetent government-hating right-wing leadership will always screw up necessary programs like disaster relief, defense, and medical care. Conservatives cannot run government programs because they believe they are all illegitimate. Naturally said programs suffer under their control.
I have a problem with this. While you are technically correct, I don't think it should matter. You're accepting the parent's argument that, sure, if we were in war, Americans should be expected to give up rights. Maybe you agree.
But I don't and I'm tired of seeing backtracking from this ridiculous assumption. No, Americans should not be expected to give up rights, even "little" rights like privacy, just because we're at war. In America's history, war has always been used as an excuse to remove a few rights here and there. The early 20th C sedition and espionage acts come to mind. Japanese internment comes to mind. These things should not be acceptable to real Americans. The fact that many Americans, probably a majority, accept the idea that their rights are temporarily granted to them by the state, and revokable in "times of war" shows just how far we've fallen.
As a proud liberal Democrat I say to everyone: your rights are yours, not the Government's, and you need to know them and defend them at all times.
War shouldn't happen. It's barbaric, uncivilized, and ideas of "wartime ethics" make it worse, not better. Whether we're actually at war or not, to use it as an excuse to abrogate your rights is fundamentally offensive and repugnant. It's bad enough that most Americans nowadays seem to be easily appeased with 24-hour cable news war porn. It's throwing salt on the wounds to accept the "revokable" view of our rights.
I'm just part of a ridiculously small minority of people who are abhorred by what's going on, and would be regardless of what party was running the show this week.
No, it's not that small a group of people, you're just letting your political prejudice keep you from looking in the right places.
But if I don't know who you are, why do I care about what you're writing? It may as well be fiction. Which is fine, if you're fine with that, but then why not just write fiction? Because that's the level at which your writing will be appreciated... If it's not good writing, why would anyone want to read it?
Or maybe it's just a soul so big it had to be two people.
And if they're sharing a soul, it could explain the way that identical twins reportedly feel "connected."
Another question: how many angels can dance on the head of an identical twin?
Seems to me this is easily solved by developers saying "That feature is coming, we're working on it" instead of "It's already in CVS! Stop complaining!"
CNN isn't crazy like FOX, but they're not a good source for real journalism, either. Their brand of bad journalism is less intentional - it's more from simple laziness and corporate-media silliness. That and general US journalist paranoia about being perceived as "too liberal." Heaven forbid conservative nutjobs write reams of letters and books about a liberal media. They'll do that no matter what...
But I digress.
I would argue there is no respectable news source in the USA, at least not akin to the BBC.
What is the difference between this guy and waiters who snigger at customers who choose bad wine? The former has a blog, that's what.
Nope. No difference.