Actually, he only used his with his laptop, which has an easy-to-use keypad. I, on the other hand, was doing things such as story editing, php code marathons, page layout in InDesign and image manipulation in Photoshop -- some of which can involve very fine-tuned mouse control. Actually, when I story edit, I highlight the paragraph I'm reading with a triple-click, so that uses some clicks, too.
I'm so tuned into my keyboard shortcuts I sometimes can't talk other people through simple tasks because I don't have any idea where it is on the menu and really don't "know" what the keyboard shortcut is except by muscle memory. I once was extremely tired and said something very stupid to a coworker. I immediately gestured in the air with a thumb-down-middle-finger-flick-forward -- an air-Command-Z undo. Thankfully I was talking to a fellow designer who just burst into complete laughter because she knew exactly what I was doing.
Actually, no, iMacs come with optical mice. Apple doesn't sell any other type and hasn't for a few years.
I had a boss who insisted on outfitting me with an all (clear) glass desk and a wireless mouse and keyboard. The glass desk made the optical mouse about worthless -- I had to get a mouse pad. But even worse was that I was working sometimes 18 hours a day, and the wireless mouse and keyboard were constantly running out of power. I had to get a bunch of rechargeable batteries and a station, but eventually I just replaced them with a wired set because it was just a pain in the ass and I didn't care about how it looked. It took my boss eight months to use up the batteries in his wireless mouse, though. That probably says something...
I still use a mouse pad no matter what the surface is, though, because I find that any uneven or slightly reflective surface makes the pointer jump. The semi-gloss desk at my new job is just terrible for the optical mouse -- and my wife gave me this neat-looking mouse pad that is glossy and has the same problem.
Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based (even if it runs off of one machine as a server without the Internet) and forgetaboutit. Keep it as basic and generic as possible and then the hardware will never matter.
What it means is that state and local legislators will start making data illegal or expensive to obtain. This has already happened. In Kansas there is now a fee for motor vehical records. That's because a local reporter ran the motor vehicle records of school bus drivers and reveled how many offenses they have. This was so embarrasing that they made a fee to make it cost prohibative to datamine AND they spun off the school bus business to a private company that is not subject to public review (legally).
But reporters -- good reporters -- have been doing this sort of data mining since data has been kept on computers. This is just more of the same thing.
Each paper has to report what really is the news for its readers. I ran two newspapers whose main content was event listings -- music, arts, movies and general events. That was news. Stories about those events? Limited in their popularity and almost zero utility. Critical reviews of things that are still going on, however, have utility and really are news. That was the other big part of what we did. The web site and print versions had nearly identical numbers of readers, and the people who found those papers tended to love them. My paper was a generally break-even (but still growing) by the time the investors pulled out. (The first one, the one near my heart, was called "F5" and its slogan here in Wichita, KS, was "Work like a farmer, party like a rock star.")
But daily newspapers have gotten into the habit of regurgitating wire stories or writing feature articles about the one-off events that will never happen again. They don't do a good job with local content such as letting people know about what's going on in the community. When I said, "fluff and bake sales," I really meant "personal narrative columns about what the reporter's baby has figured out." Our local paper has a reporter -- a good friend of mine who is an incredible writing talent -- writing about American Idol and her home life. It can be goddamn cute, but it is nothing that I need to know. Subscriptions come from utility. Readers have to need the paper.
The whole thing, as far as I know. (I live in Kansas and am neither a daily reader of the print version nor interested in reading every bit of the local news.) The screen is small, but high resolution AND you can zoom in by spreading your fingers on the screen (or out by pinching). My former college roommate Kelly works at Google in NYC but lives just outside Philly. He commutes by driving to Jersey and taking the train in. He uses his iPhone the whole time to read news and catch up on his morning Slashdot, etc. My commute, oth, is only six miles and usually I ride my bicycle to stay in shape. So I listen to podcasts the whole 25-30 minutes. The headphones that come with it have a mic in the cord that lets me answer the phone and start talking if I get a call. Much easier than trying to dig my phone out of my pocket while riding. I just had a birthday and my wife commissioned a cake that looked like an iPhone keyboard with "Happy Birthday to my favorite iPhone Junkie!" on the "screen."
iPhone. Not only can you download the times and read it daily, but it's a phone and you can surf the web. Or, as I'm doing right now, reply to posts on slashdot. Oh, and email and music. And games. I'm not addicted. Addicts go to meetings. There are no iPhone addiction meetings in my iCal schedule, so I must he fine.
The big problem with "newspapers" is that, subtract the porn, what you describe is most of what you have left. Local newspapers, anyway.
As a former employee of the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and founder of two alternative weekly newspapers, I have some experience with the actual creation and operation of newspapers as a business. To keep it short, I'll keep it to a few points:
1) For years, the big newspaper chains have owed their problems more to shareholder expectations than to ability to actually make money. It created an environment where increased corporate profit (annually) was the only goal; when you can't charge more for product you decrease labor costs. Instead of investing in what makes their product useful (news), they rely on wire services (the AP) and use local writers for drivel. (See below.) So every year, if they did not make more money than they made the year before, their stoke prices fell. When their stock prices fell, they became more and more vulnerable to corporate takeover. Newspaper companies became more and more gobbled up into larger and larger companies. Large companies could hide the loses of inefficient newspapers with the massive profits of efficient newspapers. But when the company decides to cut employees, it doesn't say, "Paper A, you are a turd and you are going to lose all your employees, and we may shut you down. Paper B, you are the goose that lays the golden egg, and we shall not touch a feather." No, a corporate newspaper company says, "We are going to lay off 10 percent of our workforce," then everyone loses 10 percent, usually by early retirement and seniority, relatively arbitrary and simple methods of reducing workforce that don't involve anyone saying, "you suck; you're fired."
2) Some corporate idiot started asking the public what they wanted. Survey after survey showed that people "don't like bad news." Well, no kidding. But that's what they buy the paper for. It speaks to our primal need to find and avoid dangers. It scares the hell out of us so that we'll remember it, like watching your buddy get jumped by a lion on the plains. You think to yourself, "I better remember that Bob got jumped right there." And when you get back to the tribe, you don't say "Bob and I had a great day finding berries and hunting." You say, "Bob, hunter gatherer, killed in lion attack." But, 95% of the stories in your local newspapers will be about berries. Readers only remember the lions -- the other five percent -- which are bad news. Which makes you wonder why they bother with the 95 percent at all. It is a significant waste of one's resources. Those corporate tools also see statehouse reporting (for example) coverage as redundant, so save the local guy for the really local bourgeois stuff -- bake sales, feel-good ditties about toy runs and the Salvation Army, all the other things that no one complains (or cares) about. So, for years now corporately owned regional and local newspapers have been cutting back and back and back on any coverage that can be pooled. Then they wonder why nobody reads their publication to get the news. Well, because CNN had the same story from the AP posted on the web last night, you jackass. Break some news.
3) Newsprint is just a physical media. For some publications, it is perfect. Anything where you want people who are out and about to pick it up and carry it with you. But it's hella expensive. Not as expensive as people to write, but expensive. Still, the people are the really expensive part. My newspapers had almost all volunteer staffs and the newsprint was about 1/3 of the cost. But 1/3 less is 1/3 less.
Newspapers may die, but written journalism will live on. The shock to everyone is going to be that if you want to get paid for writing news then you are going to have to go out and report some new news all the time. Sorry, people aren't going to by regurgitated stories about Bob's lion attack when they've already heard it.
Local TV news is likewise doomed. Without a local newspaper to crib from, they
Actually, you'll note that some of these botches of the web actually predate the web. It is easy to mock in hindsight.
In the fall of 1994, I was the first editor of the third daily newspaper to go online daily (the Kansas State Collegian, which followed the Kentucky Kernel (which beat us by a few days as their school year started earlier) and the Raleigh News and Observer (nando.net -- now a McClatchy holding -- which was online with news everyday at some point that summer). In the spring of 1995 I had a newspaper management class and the publisher of the Kansas City Star spoke about how it had invested millions in this new thing that was going to let people read their newspapers at home on their PCs. When he was done, I invited him back to the student newsroom and showed him the Internet. ("It's kinda like AOL," I told him.) What we were doing -- for the cost of two part-time student salaries and one retired yet dedicated Mac SE 30 -- was almost exactly what he described. He was both amazed and pissed. The Star project was canceled months later.
We were originally going to do a Gopher site to archive our newspaper, but some jackass at the ever competitive University of Kansas had done a mock up of the University Daily Kansan as a web page (spring of 1994). Spurred into action, we changed our plans and did that web thing instead. Why? Because it let us display images with the stories. But if Kelly Campbell, our technical brains, hadn't been curiously checking out our options, we'd have done a Gopher site and it would have been complete obscurity. One curious tech was the difference between bleeding edge correct and looking goofy. (Kelly, btw, is a senior programer for Google now.)
When that KU jackass got his degree, he went to work for Knight-Ridder and led its Internet efforts. Then it created the "RealCities" horseshit that the article describes. I witnessed firsthand the RealCities disaster, as I was working at the Wichita Eagle (a Knight-Ridder paper), and called it when I saw it -- but nobody who mattered listened.
Pretty much everything after 1995 is open for mockery. But those early efforts are just bleeding edge research projects that could have gone any direction. The whole idea of open standards just didn't exist for anything but automotive cigarette lighters. We were all just guessing, and some were willing to put their money where their mouths were.
That, and he got his PhD in nutrition. Listen to Dr. Phil if he's telling you to eat your carrots, but otherwise he's mildly less qualified than your bartender.
More interesting is that point 6 of the filing is a complete lie. It says, "At the beginning of Oakridge Lane, there is a clearly marked 'Private Road' sign." There is not. How do I know, sitting here in my living room in Kansas? Google Street View. And if one follows the road all the way from where it begins to the Boring house, there is no such sign anywhere along it. The road simply turns into their driveway.
The problem is not that people do not learn, it is that people learn how to reinforce their prejudice. That is, as a species we tend to gather information that reinforces our fears. My mother in law will forever fixate on anything that proves her theory that leaving the house in general is a bad idea. Information to the contrary -- statistics about airline safety, for example -- will be disregarded. Anecdotes about blonde women raped and murdered in the Caribbean will be referenced on a daily basis.
As soon as we learn a model for the world, we want to actively support that model. We emotionally invest. Few of us have the capacity to re-examine that model constantly. Sometimes, overwhelming evidence will cause a sea change in certain groups' world view, but generally we like to stick to our own.
Some people have a world view that includes a just and active Christian God with a book that explains the way the world works; any evidence to the contrary is dismissed out of hand and any evidence to support it is grabbed on to no matter how irrational. Some (a few) people are just the opposite: they would dismiss any evidence of a deity and hold fast to any seeming contradiction in dogma, no matter how badly translated. I'm in the later group, and I dismiss out of hand anything anyone says about the existence of any god. I'm prejudiced that way, for better or worse.
But simply trying to explain things to the parents will probably not make any great inroads in society. Perhaps, but probably not. More likely, you'll get a group of 10 people pissed off and they'll have nothing better to do than to repeatedly call your boss/underwriter until you are forced to go sell hot dogs on the street for simply suggesting that we should all get along and that no one should be nailed to anything for it. I'm just saying.
Or, read any of Rush's own books -- but you'll have to do all the fact checking yourself. But you may be able to pick out plenty without doing a lot of research, such as when he says in See, I Told You So that "There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived." (There are fewer than 2 million Americans claiming native ancestry now, but there were between 5 million and 15 million Native Americans in 1492. Or, sticking to the same theme from the same book, Rush said "There are more acres of forestland in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492." In fact, there is a quarter billion fewer acres of forest. But those aren't honest mistakes. Those are lies.
I have no doubt that if HE had Parkinson's, HE would play up the severity of his symptoms.
you have not brought any evidence to support this claim.
Really? The only claim there is that "I have no doubt...." That is, it is my opinion. Consider it original research, but I assure you that it is my opinion.
The guy who championed family values has been married and divorced three times.
and what exactly is wrong with divorce? family values isn't about sticking together no matter how much you totally can't stand each other. if you would have said he cheated on his wives that would be a different matter.
Well, he met his last wife via Compuserve in 1990. In 1992 she divorced her then husband. She married Rush in 1994. In 2000, she bought a house of her own. In 2004 they were divorced. He has been married a total of 16 years to three wives and spent more than seven of those years separate from his wife. Rush told the Palm Beach Post that "Marriage is about raising children. That's the purpose of the institution." He has no children. He has no interest in making a successful marriage. He has said, "If you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do." And that makes him a complete hypocrite.
Why not try to understand reality according to what it is, rather than according to how you would like it to be?
A good question for Rush.
the best way to get rid of racism is to stop using racist term like "African American" or "white".
Maybe in terms of plot line. But the game was a lot more clever than just the plot. It was really nuanced. You couldn't just shoot your way through Marathon -- there were times when you had to stop and really puzzle some things out. There are things in the Halo series where you _can_ puzzle them out, but they are only value-added -- they are not required. And Marathon had plenty of value-added stuff, too. Halo did retain many of the things that made Marathon great -- music that can creep one out or get the heart pumping, intuitive controls, and quirky humor in the middle of battle.
Actually, the game that Halo is grown out of, Marathon, was a far more sophisticated story -- the equivalent of video game literature. Bungie created a multi-layered story in a FPS. Like a good Twain novel, it can be taken at face value or at one of its other layers. Even after you are done with the game (or series) you still aren't 100% sure what's going on with every piece, but it's a lot of fun to think about and speculate. Halo and Halo 2 were relative void of those multiple layers; Halo 3 sort of put some of that back in, but it wasn't nearly as deep.
Rush Limbaugh is a habitual lier. I don't say that as an insult. It's a well documented fact. When I was in college and Rush still had his TV show, my roommate and I would watch the show and throw a throw pillow at the screen every time he said something that was false or misleading. If we made it to a commercial break with ANY pillows left on the couch, then we knew we weren't up on our current events and needed to study.
I have no doubt that if HE had Parkinson's, HE would play up the severity of his symptoms. Instead, he says things such as that for feminists "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The guy who dismissed torture at Abu Ghraib as "emotional release." Scientist after scientist has denounced him for misrepresenting their work for political gain. The guy who championed family values has been married and divorced three times.
He couldn't "inject more honesty in a charged political debate" if he had a turkey baster and a voltmeter.
The real problem with Rush having any real problems is that he is, by default, a distracting touchstone for flamewars. If it was reported that he thought the sky was blue, there'd be 1000 people saying "Yup, it is! And Michael J Fox is an asshole," and 1000 people saying "it's clearly gray, and that fucker is addicted to drugs," and one meteorologist saying "partly cloudy with high wind and a chance of rain later in the afternoon."
OK, Ironic as hell, but I have to admit that I just locked up my G4. Playing -- hold your fucking jokes -- Fallout 2. I probably could have used my laptop to log in to the desktop G4 via ssh and shut down the crashed game and got things back to normal, but it's just a lot easier to curse and hit the power button.
So, will this work on participants in the OS Flame Wars? They seem to be acting like they were hit with nerve gas over at "Leopard As The New Vista right now. Maybe they just need some tranquilizers.
It's not a complete fallacy, though. Apple is on 10.4.10 -- the version I'm actually using, thanks -- which is the culmination of two and a half years of updates. There have been many, many little updates as well, but those system upgrades are not "update Tuesday" updates. That's a system update roughly every three months. I'd say that the uptime on my Macs usually top out around two months before Apple sends me some sort of update that forces a reboot.
But frankly, if I wasn't semi obsessed about updating my system all the time I think the uptime on my six-year-old G4 would be "the last time the power went out" and my Intel laptop would be "that time I was vacationing in the Bahamas and got stuck in an airport watching movies with no outlet to recharge." My office machine -- which runs XP S2, thanks -- has an uptime of usually a few days at best. It didn't crash today (though was turned off when I came in because of a power outage, ha ha) but crashed three times yesterday. It's largely my company's fault that they force me to use knowingly wobbly software, but that's not to say that I'm unaware of what's available for both platforms.
The point is that people say of Vista, "Wait until SP1 to upgrade." People say of Leopard, "Wait until 10.5.1 (or 10.5.2 or 10.5.3)." But even if you wait until.3, that'd be 9 months. Well, we don't see Vista SP 1 in 9 months. And there's no proof that we'll actually see it in a year.
A witch hunt is when one creates a fictional enemy and then goes looking for real people to foot the bill. See McCarthyism.
Clinton was actually the victim of a prolonged "fishing expedition" Which is "Legal grasping at straws; the use of pre-trial investigation (discovery) or witness questioning in an unfocused attempt to uncover damaging evidence you can use against your adversary." Basically, they asked him enough questions about enough stuff that they eventually were able to paint him into an embarrassing corner that no president in U.S. history had every been painted into -- i.e., publicly explain your mistresses or lie on the stand. We all know now what his error was.
Cheney is not a witch hunt, nor is it a fishing expedition. There is real and substantial evidence that that man is just a little less scrupulous than Satan. He doesn't make Faustian deals; he insists on waterboarding suspected rag heads until they confess to wearing their mother's underpants. And, perhaps, the problem is that Cheney has made a Faustian deal on behalf of the country, trading our liberty for security that doesn't actually make us more secure.
But Nixon was a pussycat compared to Cheney. So he broke into the Democratic headquarters and spied on them; so he made the White House Secret Service detail wear uniforms reminiscent of the Beefeaters; so he was a bit of an asshole who walked all over our civil liberties -- he did not start any wars and he did not funnel any contracts to any companies that he was a major stockholder of. I'm not a fan of the guy, but I'd never go so far as to compare him to Cheney. It's like comparing a drunk driver to a serial killer. Neither are good, but one is wantonly, ridiculously worse than the other.
English, as a language, is a tar baby. Punch it and it will stick to you. English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will) for two -- no, three -- reasons. One, money and power. Two, it's as flexible as it is convoluted. Three, pure entertainment.
Don't think American's use collective nouns? Bull. Don't think British English uses the subjective form? They must not be watching TV.
If you want rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling that don't keep up with the actual usage, go speak French. Or Latin. Or be the 27th idiot to learn Esperanto, which has no problem keeping up with actual usage (your contributions would be welcome, I'm sure).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he only used his with his laptop, which has an easy-to-use keypad. I, on the other hand, was doing things such as story editing, php code marathons, page layout in InDesign and image manipulation in Photoshop -- some of which can involve very fine-tuned mouse control. Actually, when I story edit, I highlight the paragraph I'm reading with a triple-click, so that uses some clicks, too.
I'm so tuned into my keyboard shortcuts I sometimes can't talk other people through simple tasks because I don't have any idea where it is on the menu and really don't "know" what the keyboard shortcut is except by muscle memory. I once was extremely tired and said something very stupid to a coworker. I immediately gestured in the air with a thumb-down-middle-finger-flick-forward -- an air-Command-Z undo. Thankfully I was talking to a fellow designer who just burst into complete laughter because she knew exactly what I was doing.
Oh, he was a well-meaning idiot. Water under the bridge.
Actually, no, iMacs come with optical mice. Apple doesn't sell any other type and hasn't for a few years.
I had a boss who insisted on outfitting me with an all (clear) glass desk and a wireless mouse and keyboard. The glass desk made the optical mouse about worthless -- I had to get a mouse pad. But even worse was that I was working sometimes 18 hours a day, and the wireless mouse and keyboard were constantly running out of power. I had to get a bunch of rechargeable batteries and a station, but eventually I just replaced them with a wired set because it was just a pain in the ass and I didn't care about how it looked. It took my boss eight months to use up the batteries in his wireless mouse, though. That probably says something ...
I still use a mouse pad no matter what the surface is, though, because I find that any uneven or slightly reflective surface makes the pointer jump. The semi-gloss desk at my new job is just terrible for the optical mouse -- and my wife gave me this neat-looking mouse pad that is glossy and has the same problem.
Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based (even if it runs off of one machine as a server without the Internet) and forgetaboutit. Keep it as basic and generic as possible and then the hardware will never matter.
What it means is that state and local legislators will start making data illegal or expensive to obtain. This has already happened. In Kansas there is now a fee for motor vehical records. That's because a local reporter ran the motor vehicle records of school bus drivers and reveled how many offenses they have. This was so embarrasing that they made a fee to make it cost prohibative to datamine AND they spun off the school bus business to a private company that is not subject to public review (legally).
But reporters -- good reporters -- have been doing this sort of data mining since data has been kept on computers. This is just more of the same thing.
Each paper has to report what really is the news for its readers. I ran two newspapers whose main content was event listings -- music, arts, movies and general events. That was news. Stories about those events? Limited in their popularity and almost zero utility. Critical reviews of things that are still going on, however, have utility and really are news. That was the other big part of what we did. The web site and print versions had nearly identical numbers of readers, and the people who found those papers tended to love them. My paper was a generally break-even (but still growing) by the time the investors pulled out. (The first one, the one near my heart, was called "F5" and its slogan here in Wichita, KS, was "Work like a farmer, party like a rock star.")
But daily newspapers have gotten into the habit of regurgitating wire stories or writing feature articles about the one-off events that will never happen again. They don't do a good job with local content such as letting people know about what's going on in the community. When I said, "fluff and bake sales," I really meant "personal narrative columns about what the reporter's baby has figured out." Our local paper has a reporter -- a good friend of mine who is an incredible writing talent -- writing about American Idol and her home life. It can be goddamn cute, but it is nothing that I need to know. Subscriptions come from utility. Readers have to need the paper.
The whole thing, as far as I know. (I live in Kansas and am neither a daily reader of the print version nor interested in reading every bit of the local news.) The screen is small, but high resolution AND you can zoom in by spreading your fingers on the screen (or out by pinching). My former college roommate Kelly works at Google in NYC but lives just outside Philly. He commutes by driving to Jersey and taking the train in. He uses his iPhone the whole time to read news and catch up on his morning Slashdot, etc. My commute, oth, is only six miles and usually I ride my bicycle to stay in shape. So I listen to podcasts the whole 25-30 minutes. The headphones that come with it have a mic in the cord that lets me answer the phone and start talking if I get a call. Much easier than trying to dig my phone out of my pocket while riding. I just had a birthday and my wife commissioned a cake that looked like an iPhone keyboard with "Happy Birthday to my favorite iPhone Junkie!" on the "screen."
iPhone. Not only can you download the times and read it daily, but it's a phone and you can surf the web. Or, as I'm doing right now, reply to posts on slashdot. Oh, and email and music. And games. I'm not addicted. Addicts go to meetings. There are no iPhone addiction meetings in my iCal schedule, so I must he fine.
The big problem with "newspapers" is that, subtract the porn, what you describe is most of what you have left. Local newspapers, anyway.
As a former employee of the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and founder of two alternative weekly newspapers, I have some experience with the actual creation and operation of newspapers as a business. To keep it short, I'll keep it to a few points:
1) For years, the big newspaper chains have owed their problems more to shareholder expectations than to ability to actually make money. It created an environment where increased corporate profit (annually) was the only goal; when you can't charge more for product you decrease labor costs. Instead of investing in what makes their product useful (news), they rely on wire services (the AP) and use local writers for drivel. (See below.) So every year, if they did not make more money than they made the year before, their stoke prices fell. When their stock prices fell, they became more and more vulnerable to corporate takeover. Newspaper companies became more and more gobbled up into larger and larger companies. Large companies could hide the loses of inefficient newspapers with the massive profits of efficient newspapers. But when the company decides to cut employees, it doesn't say, "Paper A, you are a turd and you are going to lose all your employees, and we may shut you down. Paper B, you are the goose that lays the golden egg, and we shall not touch a feather." No, a corporate newspaper company says, "We are going to lay off 10 percent of our workforce," then everyone loses 10 percent, usually by early retirement and seniority, relatively arbitrary and simple methods of reducing workforce that don't involve anyone saying, "you suck; you're fired."
2) Some corporate idiot started asking the public what they wanted. Survey after survey showed that people "don't like bad news." Well, no kidding. But that's what they buy the paper for. It speaks to our primal need to find and avoid dangers. It scares the hell out of us so that we'll remember it, like watching your buddy get jumped by a lion on the plains. You think to yourself, "I better remember that Bob got jumped right there." And when you get back to the tribe, you don't say "Bob and I had a great day finding berries and hunting." You say, "Bob, hunter gatherer, killed in lion attack." But, 95% of the stories in your local newspapers will be about berries. Readers only remember the lions -- the other five percent -- which are bad news. Which makes you wonder why they bother with the 95 percent at all. It is a significant waste of one's resources. Those corporate tools also see statehouse reporting (for example) coverage as redundant, so save the local guy for the really local bourgeois stuff -- bake sales, feel-good ditties about toy runs and the Salvation Army, all the other things that no one complains (or cares) about. So, for years now corporately owned regional and local newspapers have been cutting back and back and back on any coverage that can be pooled. Then they wonder why nobody reads their publication to get the news. Well, because CNN had the same story from the AP posted on the web last night, you jackass. Break some news.
3) Newsprint is just a physical media. For some publications, it is perfect. Anything where you want people who are out and about to pick it up and carry it with you. But it's hella expensive. Not as expensive as people to write, but expensive. Still, the people are the really expensive part. My newspapers had almost all volunteer staffs and the newsprint was about 1/3 of the cost. But 1/3 less is 1/3 less.
Newspapers may die, but written journalism will live on. The shock to everyone is going to be that if you want to get paid for writing news then you are going to have to go out and report some new news all the time. Sorry, people aren't going to by regurgitated stories about Bob's lion attack when they've already heard it.
Local TV news is likewise doomed. Without a local newspaper to crib from, they
Actually, you'll note that some of these botches of the web actually predate the web. It is easy to mock in hindsight.
In the fall of 1994, I was the first editor of the third daily newspaper to go online daily (the Kansas State Collegian, which followed the Kentucky Kernel (which beat us by a few days as their school year started earlier) and the Raleigh News and Observer (nando.net -- now a McClatchy holding -- which was online with news everyday at some point that summer). In the spring of 1995 I had a newspaper management class and the publisher of the Kansas City Star spoke about how it had invested millions in this new thing that was going to let people read their newspapers at home on their PCs. When he was done, I invited him back to the student newsroom and showed him the Internet. ("It's kinda like AOL," I told him.) What we were doing -- for the cost of two part-time student salaries and one retired yet dedicated Mac SE 30 -- was almost exactly what he described. He was both amazed and pissed. The Star project was canceled months later.
We were originally going to do a Gopher site to archive our newspaper, but some jackass at the ever competitive University of Kansas had done a mock up of the University Daily Kansan as a web page (spring of 1994). Spurred into action, we changed our plans and did that web thing instead. Why? Because it let us display images with the stories. But if Kelly Campbell, our technical brains, hadn't been curiously checking out our options, we'd have done a Gopher site and it would have been complete obscurity. One curious tech was the difference between bleeding edge correct and looking goofy. (Kelly, btw, is a senior programer for Google now.)
When that KU jackass got his degree, he went to work for Knight-Ridder and led its Internet efforts. Then it created the "RealCities" horseshit that the article describes. I witnessed firsthand the RealCities disaster, as I was working at the Wichita Eagle (a Knight-Ridder paper), and called it when I saw it -- but nobody who mattered listened.
Pretty much everything after 1995 is open for mockery. But those early efforts are just bleeding edge research projects that could have gone any direction. The whole idea of open standards just didn't exist for anything but automotive cigarette lighters. We were all just guessing, and some were willing to put their money where their mouths were.
I thought Microsoft would do this, but I didn't think to patent it first. Crap. Just thinking that I probably owe it money now.
Yeah, but a shotgun won't save you from a non-violent thief. It will just give them something extra to take.
That, and he got his PhD in nutrition. Listen to Dr. Phil if he's telling you to eat your carrots, but otherwise he's mildly less qualified than your bartender.
More interesting is that point 6 of the filing is a complete lie. It says, "At the beginning of Oakridge Lane, there is a clearly marked 'Private Road' sign." There is not. How do I know, sitting here in my living room in Kansas? Google Street View. And if one follows the road all the way from where it begins to the Boring house, there is no such sign anywhere along it. The road simply turns into their driveway.
The problem is not that people do not learn, it is that people learn how to reinforce their prejudice. That is, as a species we tend to gather information that reinforces our fears. My mother in law will forever fixate on anything that proves her theory that leaving the house in general is a bad idea. Information to the contrary -- statistics about airline safety, for example -- will be disregarded. Anecdotes about blonde women raped and murdered in the Caribbean will be referenced on a daily basis.
As soon as we learn a model for the world, we want to actively support that model. We emotionally invest. Few of us have the capacity to re-examine that model constantly. Sometimes, overwhelming evidence will cause a sea change in certain groups' world view, but generally we like to stick to our own.
Some people have a world view that includes a just and active Christian God with a book that explains the way the world works; any evidence to the contrary is dismissed out of hand and any evidence to support it is grabbed on to no matter how irrational. Some (a few) people are just the opposite: they would dismiss any evidence of a deity and hold fast to any seeming contradiction in dogma, no matter how badly translated. I'm in the later group, and I dismiss out of hand anything anyone says about the existence of any god. I'm prejudiced that way, for better or worse.
But simply trying to explain things to the parents will probably not make any great inroads in society. Perhaps, but probably not. More likely, you'll get a group of 10 people pissed off and they'll have nothing better to do than to repeatedly call your boss/underwriter until you are forced to go sell hot dogs on the street for simply suggesting that we should all get along and that no one should be nailed to anything for it. I'm just saying.
That's easy enough. People write books about his lies. Amongst them:
Or, read any of Rush's own books -- but you'll have to do all the fact checking yourself. But you may be able to pick out plenty without doing a lot of research, such as when he says in See, I Told You So that "There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived." (There are fewer than 2 million Americans claiming native ancestry now, but there were between 5 million and 15 million Native Americans in 1492. Or, sticking to the same theme from the same book, Rush said "There are more acres of forestland in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492." In fact, there is a quarter billion fewer acres of forest. But those aren't honest mistakes. Those are lies.
Still need evidence that he is a liar? How about Rush saying that he's glad the mid-term elections are over so that he doesn't have to lie for the Republicans anymore? "There have been a bunch of things going on in Congress. Some of this legislation coming out of there that I have just cringed at. And it has been difficult coming in here trying to make the case for it when the people who supposedly in favor of it can't even make the case themselves."
Really? The only claim there is that "I have no doubt ... ." That is, it is my opinion. Consider it original research, but I assure you that it is my opinion.
Well, he met his last wife via Compuserve in 1990. In 1992 she divorced her then husband. She married Rush in 1994. In 2000, she bought a house of her own. In 2004 they were divorced. He has been married a total of 16 years to three wives and spent more than seven of those years separate from his wife. Rush told the Palm Beach Post that "Marriage is about raising children. That's the purpose of the institution." He has no children. He has no interest in making a successful marriage. He has said, "If you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do." And that makes him a complete hypocrite.
A good question for Rush.
Maybe in terms of plot line. But the game was a lot more clever than just the plot. It was really nuanced. You couldn't just shoot your way through Marathon -- there were times when you had to stop and really puzzle some things out. There are things in the Halo series where you _can_ puzzle them out, but they are only value-added -- they are not required. And Marathon had plenty of value-added stuff, too. Halo did retain many of the things that made Marathon great -- music that can creep one out or get the heart pumping, intuitive controls, and quirky humor in the middle of battle.
Actually, the game that Halo is grown out of, Marathon, was a far more sophisticated story -- the equivalent of video game literature. Bungie created a multi-layered story in a FPS. Like a good Twain novel, it can be taken at face value or at one of its other layers. Even after you are done with the game (or series) you still aren't 100% sure what's going on with every piece, but it's a lot of fun to think about and speculate. Halo and Halo 2 were relative void of those multiple layers; Halo 3 sort of put some of that back in, but it wasn't nearly as deep.
Not taking meds != exaggerated symptoms.
Rush Limbaugh is a habitual lier. I don't say that as an insult. It's a well documented fact. When I was in college and Rush still had his TV show, my roommate and I would watch the show and throw a throw pillow at the screen every time he said something that was false or misleading. If we made it to a commercial break with ANY pillows left on the couch, then we knew we weren't up on our current events and needed to study.
I have no doubt that if HE had Parkinson's, HE would play up the severity of his symptoms. Instead, he says things such as that for feminists "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The guy who dismissed torture at Abu Ghraib as "emotional release." Scientist after scientist has denounced him for misrepresenting their work for political gain. The guy who championed family values has been married and divorced three times.
He couldn't "inject more honesty in a charged political debate" if he had a turkey baster and a voltmeter.
The real problem with Rush having any real problems is that he is, by default, a distracting touchstone for flamewars. If it was reported that he thought the sky was blue, there'd be 1000 people saying "Yup, it is! And Michael J Fox is an asshole," and 1000 people saying "it's clearly gray, and that fucker is addicted to drugs," and one meteorologist saying "partly cloudy with high wind and a chance of rain later in the afternoon."
OK, Ironic as hell, but I have to admit that I just locked up my G4. Playing -- hold your fucking jokes -- Fallout 2. I probably could have used my laptop to log in to the desktop G4 via ssh and shut down the crashed game and got things back to normal, but it's just a lot easier to curse and hit the power button.
So, will this work on participants in the OS Flame Wars? They seem to be acting like they were hit with nerve gas over at "Leopard As The New Vista right now. Maybe they just need some tranquilizers.
It's not a complete fallacy, though. Apple is on 10.4.10 -- the version I'm actually using, thanks -- which is the culmination of two and a half years of updates. There have been many, many little updates as well, but those system upgrades are not "update Tuesday" updates. That's a system update roughly every three months. I'd say that the uptime on my Macs usually top out around two months before Apple sends me some sort of update that forces a reboot.
.3, that'd be 9 months. Well, we don't see Vista SP 1 in 9 months. And there's no proof that we'll actually see it in a year.
But frankly, if I wasn't semi obsessed about updating my system all the time I think the uptime on my six-year-old G4 would be "the last time the power went out" and my Intel laptop would be "that time I was vacationing in the Bahamas and got stuck in an airport watching movies with no outlet to recharge." My office machine -- which runs XP S2, thanks -- has an uptime of usually a few days at best. It didn't crash today (though was turned off when I came in because of a power outage, ha ha) but crashed three times yesterday. It's largely my company's fault that they force me to use knowingly wobbly software, but that's not to say that I'm unaware of what's available for both platforms.
The point is that people say of Vista, "Wait until SP1 to upgrade." People say of Leopard, "Wait until 10.5.1 (or 10.5.2 or 10.5.3)." But even if you wait until
Pattern, maybe. But timetable, no.
... uh, you can get the beta.
... well, whatever.
Vista release: Jan. 30, 2007. Vista SP1 release date:
Leopard (10.5) release: Oct. 26, 2007. Leopard 10.5.1 release date: Nov. 15, 2007.
Sit around and bitch about new software having unfound bugs if you want, but don't compare Apples to
I think you're having trouble with definitions.
A witch hunt is when one creates a fictional enemy and then goes looking for real people to foot the bill. See McCarthyism.
Clinton was actually the victim of a prolonged "fishing expedition" Which is "Legal grasping at straws; the use of pre-trial investigation (discovery) or witness questioning in an unfocused attempt to uncover damaging evidence you can use against your adversary." Basically, they asked him enough questions about enough stuff that they eventually were able to paint him into an embarrassing corner that no president in U.S. history had every been painted into -- i.e., publicly explain your mistresses or lie on the stand. We all know now what his error was.
Cheney is not a witch hunt, nor is it a fishing expedition. There is real and substantial evidence that that man is just a little less scrupulous than Satan. He doesn't make Faustian deals; he insists on waterboarding suspected rag heads until they confess to wearing their mother's underpants. And, perhaps, the problem is that Cheney has made a Faustian deal on behalf of the country, trading our liberty for security that doesn't actually make us more secure.
But Nixon was a pussycat compared to Cheney. So he broke into the Democratic headquarters and spied on them; so he made the White House Secret Service detail wear uniforms reminiscent of the Beefeaters; so he was a bit of an asshole who walked all over our civil liberties -- he did not start any wars and he did not funnel any contracts to any companies that he was a major stockholder of. I'm not a fan of the guy, but I'd never go so far as to compare him to Cheney. It's like comparing a drunk driver to a serial killer. Neither are good, but one is wantonly, ridiculously worse than the other.
English, as a language, is a tar baby. Punch it and it will stick to you. English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will) for two -- no, three -- reasons. One, money and power. Two, it's as flexible as it is convoluted. Three, pure entertainment.
Don't think American's use collective nouns? Bull. Don't think British English uses the subjective form? They must not be watching TV.
If you want rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling that don't keep up with the actual usage, go speak French. Or Latin. Or be the 27th idiot to learn Esperanto, which has no problem keeping up with actual usage (your contributions would be welcome, I'm sure).
Now, excuse me while I lie about getting laid.