The main objective is to learn, thats what educations about, if they learnt, why are they being punished?
Because presumably they were supposed to learn about something more than: google -> cut -> paste.
THEY were supposed to learn about something, THINK about it themselves and and organize and refine their own thoughts enough write a reasonably lucid paper on them. Simply finding somebody elses paper and turning it in doesn't exhibit that they learned anything.
Sure their papers are on some existing subject and there are probably thousands of other papers, books and articles that say pretty much the same thing. But if they say the same thing in *exactly* the same way (which is what plagerism detectors detect) that is a pretty good indication that not only is there very little learning going on but that what is going on is deceit to maintain the *illusion* of learning.
"Industry standard choices" means WMA, WMV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4.
Apparently not, since Apple is using one of those standards: AAC *IS* MPEG-4 (well, the audio layer). I'll grant you though that they have added their own proprietary DRM on top of it. But, then WMA is proprietary from top to bottom.
I suppose they could be saying "standard" to mean "popular" but it seems Apple's implementation of AAC is starting to fulfill that definition as well and THAT is what Microsoft and Dell (which has backed M$'s format) have a problem with.
Using the proprietary Windows Media formats requires licensing fee's to Microsoft in exactly the same way that using Apples proprietary DRM requires fees to Apple. As this story and others prove, Apple just as willing to license their format as Microsoft. Microsoft is just the pot calling the kettle black. They're not really complaining about a proprietary non-standard format that limits choice becoming the defacto standard. They're complaining because it's not THEIR proprietary, non-standard format that limits choice.
Also, AFAIK just like Quicktime (on which it is based) the MPEG-4 standard is also a container. The standard audio codec AAC is not.
I tend to think of a corporation as being the sum of its employees (or at least its board members!) Thanks for the info.
Technically, the corporation is NOT the employees or the management. The idea of a corporation is that a group of people are acting "corporately" as though they were a single individual. Those individuals are the stockholders and "the corporation" is all of them acting as one, and treated for many purposes as though they were a single individual. Each corporation has it's own rules for how they as a group make their collective decisions to direct the corporation as a unitary entity. This is where shareholder meetings, proxy votes, boards of directors, etc. come in. Of course the first decision is usually to hire managment that in turns hires everybody else & runs things on a day-to-day basis. But in the end even the CEO is only an employee working for "the corporation". Even the board of directors, while usually members/shareholders in the corporation are just elected officers who can be thrown out and replaced in another election.
as well as an agreement that would allow MS to buy future Apple developments. (This has a lot to do with why XP looks so much like a Macintosh OS in some ways.)
The money, and the promise to continue developing the Mac versions of Office, was part of a settlement in a patent dispute over technology MS had allegedly stolen from Apple. The agreement ended up being a patent cross-licensing deal which would settle the patent dispute and let M$ save face and not admit any wrong since they were *officially* just paying that large undisclosed sum to make up for the fact that Applehad significantly more patents than MS (at that time). In reality of course they were paying the large sum because Apple had caught them red handed but didn't want to stake their future on a long drawn out lawsuit.
However, the whole deal has now expired and presumably Microsoft has purged their technology so that they aren't using any of Apple's patents. If XP DOES still have Apple patented stuff in it it's either the result of another deal or they are potentially looking at another lawsuit. Also, MS is now free to drop development of Office.
Valid point but what you are talking about is "installed base" which isn't quite the same as "market share". Market share is a flexible enough term that it *could* refer to installed base BUT most people use it to mean "percentage of new machines sold" it is, after all MARKET share.
As apple sells more and more music, they are approaching profitability
I actually recall an Apple exec a while ago saying that they were already close to breaking even. It was a while after this that another exec said they were not seeing a profit on it. This could mean that they are already at or near the tipping point where it becomes profitable with greater sales volume or that it IS profitable but they are plowing the profits back into expanding the service, adding new features etc. Or that it is modestly profitable but not in any way that is significant to a company the size of Apple. At best it's now a mere 25-30 million in revenues that's nice but not very significant to a company that has revenues of $4-5 Billion.
However, I could see it being a real cash cow if it succeeds in appealing to the general population. Sure it's only a few pennies of clear profit for every dollar in revenue, but that could potentially be a LOT of revenue. That is one of the reasons I think they missed the boat with the iPod mini pricing. They need a model at a price point which will have true mass appeal and become the next "big thing". The mini is just too expensive to fit that bill. If they don't watch out someone else is going to hit that magic price and steal their market from them.
That's just it. The camera captures separate images through various filters (possibly red, green, and blue), which are then merged back on earth to produce a color photo.
My understanding is that they have 8 filters on each camera. 2 of the 8 are identical for the stereo images. So the total number of different filters is 14. One camera (from my faulty memory of the press conference) has mostly filters for non-visible portions of the spectrum. One "filter" is actually no filter at all for low light conditions and one is almost totally opaque like a welder's mask for taking pictures of the sun.
Looking at the images I'm not sure that the original article is correct about "colorizing" (though as I said I'm sure there is plenty of color correcting). The sky does appear orange but most of what we are seeing is right along the horizon. It may be my imaginations but it appears to me that some portions higher up in some images do start to have a bluish tint to them. That seems consistent with a hazy (or to be accurate, dusty) day. The dust deposits look like it is a fine powder. I doubt it would take much of a breeze to put a lot of particulates into the air, and it would probably stay there for a long time lending an orange/red cast to what "should" be a blue sky.
I was watching a press conference on CSPAN and the guys at JPL actually brought this up themselves. The thing is the camera's have filters for a wide variety of wavelengths many of which aren't visual light at all. Each camera has a different array of filters and actually only share two filters in common for stereo vision.
I got the impression that many of the fiters that ARE within the visual portion of the spectrum were only letting in narrow bands of the spectrum. Exactly what color SHOULD infra-red images be? For obvoius reasons keeping them in their "orignal" spectrum would be fairly useless - though "red" would be as close as we can come.
For just pretty pictures rather than scientific data NASA is color-correcting the images - I think it is more involved than simply colorizing a black and white image. They mentioned compositing together several images from different filters to get a fair approximation of what the human eye would percieve if it was there.
In terms of criticising their decision to hold onto their fat profit margin I'm talking less about the days of Apple II and more about the late 80's to mid 90's. Apple maintained fat profit margins on the Mac while their share of the market plummeted. If they had lowered their prices back when they were competing with clearly inferior products but cheaper products (DOS and later Windows 3.x) I think they could have maintained their low double digit marketshare instead of the paltry ~3% they have now.
Of course the decision to hold on to their profit margins wasn't their only mistake. The biggest failure was that they let their technology stagnate for nearly a decade while they pursued and then dropped a variety of OS initiatives. Imagine if they had not wasted all that time with Pink/Taligent/Copeland. One failure in that area is perhaps to be expected but the string of them was unforgivable and nearly killed Apple. Given that more fundamental failure perhaps it's good they piled up a lot of cash while they had the chance. But imagine a world where Apple had something akin to MacOS X four or five years earlier, had hardware prices 10-15% lower than they were, and was starting with around 10-12% of the market. I think the personal computing world would look a little different than it does now.
How are they working to increase market share and compete with the Wintel market?
The stated goal of the Apple stores is to increase their share of the consumer market by getting their products in front of consumers.
Aside from that they are using apple produced, mac-only software to expand their presence in various niches: creative consumers (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD); Music production (Logic); Film & Video production (FinalCut Pro, FinalCut Express. Shake, Soundtrack, DVDstudio Pro); and Education (PowerSchool, eMac, iBook).
They are also interested in science (BLAST, 64 bit CPU's & clusters).
An Apple executive once said something like "if you own all the niches, you own the whole market". It seems that Apple is looking to expand it's marketshare by going after more, and more niches. If they are successful in dominating the ones they are currently targetting I'm sure they will start to look at others where they either have footholds or that overlap with the ones they already dominate. For instance: 3D modelling, architecture, law firms & other soho businesses. I wouldn't be suprised to see Apple do the same kind of thing they did with Logic and Shake in new markets. Buy a software developer that dominates a small niche - Upgrade the product, drop support for Windows, and drop the price to encourage the entire niche to 'switch'.
If your higher capacity iPods are selling like mad (and they are) then why cut into those sales and profits by introducing a cheaper model?
Because technology keeps moving forward, and only so many people want a $300 music player. A $100 player will sell to a *LOT* more people and keep any competitors from sneaking up and stealing Apple's thunder.
They tried to hold on to fat profits before with the Mac and saw their marketshare drop, and drop, and drop.
I disagree, to some degree Apple's premium pricing as a marketing strategy is making a virtue out of necessity. Apple computers are a niche product, they lost the option of true mass marketting and big marketshare years ago. When the PC market exploded they chose to maintain their fat profit margins rather than maintaining or even expanding their market share - it's pretty clear that it was the wrong decision. They hauled in the cash for a while but they became more and more a niche player. At this point they're stuck in that niche. Cutting their margins to the bone wouldn't produce that many new customers.
The MP3 player market is a whole new ball game, and a second chance. Apple is again the market leader in an emerging market (just as they were in the long ago days of the Apple II). This time I think they are going to go for marketshare. They have to maintain the quality that people expect from the brand, and for that reason they're ever going to go for the very bottom of the bargain barrel. But if they can use superior industrial design/engineering and relationships with vendors to beat their competitors on price while still delivering high quality they are going to go for it.
Lewis is much more direct and, in my oppinion, a much more skilled writer (notice I say writer, not story teller)
One of the most beautiful little passages in "The Lord of the Rings" isn't in the book, but Lewis' blurb on the back promoting it: "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron." which is exactly how I feel about that particular turn of phrase. In itself it evokes the same complex emotion (a pang of nostalgia?) that The Lord of the Rings as a whole did.
I notice the beauty of his writing even more in his theological & philosophical books. I'm always struck with the way he can turn a phrase or craft a perfect, striking metaphor to bring his point home. He takes some of the driest theological or philosphical issue and make it read almost like poetry. It says a lot for the kind of classical education in both logic and rhetoric that he recieved.
He *cheats*. "Oh, well, actually you think you've gone through all this, but actually you were in a railroad accident, and you're all dead."
NO, they DO go through all this, & come back, & back into Narnia & then different kids go & come back, etc. etc. The only ones who get squished by a railroad accident are the protagonists of the last book. Which makes sense for those particular characters in that particular story since they go to heaven in Narnia which would be a bit problematic if they're in not dead back on earth.
Oh, I don't even know where to begin with what is wrong with that statment.
Actually on second thought, you may have a point. The book "The Godfather" was pretty straightforward, gangster pulp fiction. It was entertaining but not what anyone would mistake for "literature" or even "thought provoking". Coppola took what was a shallow, forgettable book and made one of the deepest most complex movies. The plot was pretty much exactly the same but on film, in Coppola's (& Brando's & Pacino's) hands it came out as one of best movies ever made.
The Christian religious undertones of the previous books become the overtones of The Last Battle. It clearly shifts from being a fantasy series to being a Christian theological tretise.
It's really a matter of subjective opinion but I have to say I disagree with this. I think the christian allegory is quite prominent and more fundamental to the story of The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. Perhaps I see it this way because the story of TLTWATW is really the essential essence of the gospel whereas the theological content of The Last Battle is about relatively perhipheral issues.
I do hope that they don't do anything to make the movie "PC" and lessen or undermine Lewis' christian message. It was essential to what he wrote, and why he wrote it.
in a parliamentary democracy the "government" is the group who command the majority in the paarliament.
What do you call the aggregate of all those ministries and bureacracies that the parlimentarians are in charge of? Americans mean something different and more fundamental when they talk about "stable government". The Iraqi's definitely need "stable government" according the the American usage even if it's not so necessary to have "stable government" in the parlimentarian usage. Out of curiosity what would someone used to the parlimentarian usage say to get across the American meaning of the phrase? I had always assumed that the phrase is perfectly capable of both usages with it's precise meaning implicit by the context, but I confess I haven't spoken enough about such matters with Canadians or Brits (etc.) to know.
as for agricultural surplus, if people are hungry everything else goes to hell.
I will grant that sufficient food is at the very top of the list. The ability to renewably sustain that supply through an agricultural surplus is down at the very bottom if it makes the list at all. Especially if you have other natural resources (oil) with which you can pay someone else to sell you their surplus.
government's themselves can be unstable without causing amjor problems.
Many European parliament's see several Governments in a year as parliamnetary majorities shift and collapse without a break in the provision of essential services
You are misunderstaing what is meant by "stable government" in this context. Despite the instability of the party in power the goverment that is being controlled is itself quite stable. The rules by which the parties compete are stable; the positions to be filled are stable; the agencies, programs, personel etc. and most importantly the laws are all stable. No matter how sweeping an agenda the new party in power may have, they find themselves the managers of a going concern. THAT is a stable government, it is only the top level (who's power to change the rest is more limited than you imagine) that is "unstable".
In Iraq they don't have any of that, they don't really have anything. They have no existing government for the parties to compete for the control of. They have no rules to govern HOW they compete.
I think your list is OK but I'd put "Agricultural surplus" at the bottom, just above Democracy - at least for the short term. I'd put "rule of law" way at the top, also for the short term. In the medium to long term it is important that the Law that is ruling includes freedoms, accountability, transparency etc. but all those things need to be codified into law and that law has to be adhered to.
I've read that they had broken even pretty early on. More recently though that they were not making a profit, and that they didn't plan on doing so. I'm guessing that they are running it at around cost with maybe a small profit or maybe a small loss.
Of course it's great advertising, it not only pushes iPods (which DO make a profit) but it advertises Apple as a brand. They're in the news constantly, they're "cool". The whole thing is definitely worth it to them even if it never makes money (as long as it doesn't lose too much either).
one could certainly load 55+ OSes native on a PC notebook, all directly bootable with one of those new-fangled boot managers.:p
Ahh... but with VirtualPC you can run the all AT THE SAME TIME. Or at the very least you are running your primary OS at the same time as whichever one (or two or three) you are working with.
Of course you can do the same with VirtualPC for windows but then you are stuck with windows as your primary OS.
I'm curious if you are aware of Richard Mellon-Scaife?
Sure, he and his political patronage are quite well known. He's sort of like a magic talisman that Democrats wave around to avoid the difficult truth that despite their PR they are the onese that get all the big money while the Republicans clobber them when it comes to the small donors.
In the 2002 election there were 23 "hyper-rich" individuals that gave over one million dollars in political donations for a total of $52.7 million dollars. Out of that $4.4 million went to the Republicans - the remaining $48 million(!) went to the Democrats. There were about 400 people that donated over $100K for a total of $132.8 million. 67% or $88.2 million of that money went to the Democrats.
By contrast the Republicans picked up 64% of the money from donors of under $200 for a total of $333 million dollars vs. the Democrats $182 million.
Most Americans are not. They heard about Soros because he came out and said what he was going to do.
As does Richard Mellon-Scaife. The contributions by his foundation are well documented on the foundations web site.
There is not a bit of difference between Sorros and Mellon-Scaife. They are both extreme but also sincere partisans. The both believe they are right and are willing to spend a great deal of money in promoting their views. The only difference is that Sorros believes it should be illegal for Mr. Scaife to do so while Scaife believes that Mr. Sorros has every right to do what he is doing
It won't surpirse me if the Supreme Court will again decide the outcome of a presidential election in the near future.
The vote may be close but I think it going back to the courts like last time is highly unlikely. It wasn't just that the vote was close but that in one state (FL) that it was close. And it wasn't just close - it was phenominally close: the margin of victory was far below the margin of error and the system didn't handle it well (or the way it was supposed - but that's another rant).
Four years have gone by and even the small demographic changes that have occurred, not to mention the significant national events that have taken place will have an effect that will make another FL style electoral train wrech as statistically improbable as ever.
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The main objective is to learn, thats what educations about, if they learnt, why are they being punished?
Because presumably they were supposed to learn about something more than: google -> cut -> paste.
THEY were supposed to learn about something, THINK about it themselves and and organize and refine their own thoughts enough write a reasonably lucid paper on them. Simply finding somebody elses paper and turning it in doesn't exhibit that they learned anything.
Sure their papers are on some existing subject and there are probably thousands of other papers, books and articles that say pretty much the same thing. But if they say the same thing in *exactly* the same way (which is what plagerism detectors detect) that is a pretty good indication that not only is there very little learning going on but that what is going on is deceit to maintain the *illusion* of learning.
"Industry standard choices" means WMA, WMV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4.
Apparently not, since Apple is using one of those standards: AAC *IS* MPEG-4 (well, the audio layer). I'll grant you though that they have added their own proprietary DRM on top of it. But, then WMA is proprietary from top to bottom.
I suppose they could be saying "standard" to mean "popular" but it seems Apple's implementation of AAC is starting to fulfill that definition as well and THAT is what Microsoft and Dell (which has backed M$'s format) have a problem with.
Using the proprietary Windows Media formats requires licensing fee's to Microsoft in exactly the same way that using Apples proprietary DRM requires fees to Apple. As this story and others prove, Apple just as willing to license their format as Microsoft. Microsoft is just the pot calling the kettle black. They're not really complaining about a proprietary non-standard format that limits choice becoming the defacto standard. They're complaining because it's not THEIR proprietary, non-standard format that limits choice.
Also, AFAIK just like Quicktime (on which it is based) the MPEG-4 standard is also a container. The standard audio codec AAC is not.
I tend to think of a corporation as being the sum of its employees (or at least its board members!) Thanks for the info.
Technically, the corporation is NOT the employees or the management. The idea of a corporation is that a group of people are acting "corporately" as though they were a single individual. Those individuals are the stockholders and "the corporation" is all of them acting as one, and treated for many purposes as though they were a single individual. Each corporation has it's own rules for how they as a group make their collective decisions to direct the corporation as a unitary entity. This is where shareholder meetings, proxy votes, boards of directors, etc. come in. Of course the first decision is usually to hire managment that in turns hires everybody else & runs things on a day-to-day basis. But in the end even the CEO is only an employee working for "the corporation". Even the board of directors, while usually members/shareholders in the corporation are just elected officers who can be thrown out and replaced in another election.
One wonders then how it is they were able to deal with crime before the advent of technology.
Umm.. intercept and open letters?
as well as an agreement that would allow MS to buy future Apple developments. (This has a lot to do with why XP looks so much like a Macintosh OS in some ways.)
The money, and the promise to continue developing the Mac versions of Office, was part of a settlement in a patent dispute over technology MS had allegedly stolen from Apple. The agreement ended up being a patent cross-licensing deal which would settle the patent dispute and let M$ save face and not admit any wrong since they were *officially* just paying that large undisclosed sum to make up for the fact that Applehad significantly more patents than MS (at that time). In reality of course they were paying the large sum because Apple had caught them red handed but didn't want to stake their future on a long drawn out lawsuit.
However, the whole deal has now expired and presumably Microsoft has purged their technology so that they aren't using any of Apple's patents. If XP DOES still have Apple patented stuff in it it's either the result of another deal or they are potentially looking at another lawsuit. Also, MS is now free to drop development of Office.
Valid point but what you are talking about is "installed base" which isn't quite the same as "market share". Market share is a flexible enough term that it *could* refer to installed base BUT most people use it to mean "percentage of new machines sold" it is, after all MARKET share.
As apple sells more and more music, they are approaching profitability
I actually recall an Apple exec a while ago saying that they were already close to breaking even. It was a while after this that another exec said they were not seeing a profit on it. This could mean that they are already at or near the tipping point where it becomes profitable with greater sales volume or that it IS profitable but they are plowing the profits back into expanding the service, adding new features etc. Or that it is modestly profitable but not in any way that is significant to a company the size of Apple. At best it's now a mere 25-30 million in revenues that's nice but not very significant to a company that has revenues of $4-5 Billion.
However, I could see it being a real cash cow if it succeeds in appealing to the general population. Sure it's only a few pennies of clear profit for every dollar in revenue, but that could potentially be a LOT of revenue. That is one of the reasons I think they missed the boat with the iPod mini pricing. They need a model at a price point which will have true mass appeal and become the next "big thing". The mini is just too expensive to fit that bill. If they don't watch out someone else is going to hit that magic price and steal their market from them.
That's just it. The camera captures separate images through various filters (possibly red, green, and blue), which are then merged back on earth to produce a color photo.
My understanding is that they have 8 filters on each camera. 2 of the 8 are identical for the stereo images. So the total number of different filters is 14. One camera (from my faulty memory of the press conference) has mostly filters for non-visible portions of the spectrum. One "filter" is actually no filter at all for low light conditions and one is almost totally opaque like a welder's mask for taking pictures of the sun.
Looking at the images I'm not sure that the original article is correct about "colorizing" (though as I said I'm sure there is plenty of color correcting). The sky does appear orange but most of what we are seeing is right along the horizon. It may be my imaginations but it appears to me that some portions higher up in some images do start to have a bluish tint to them. That seems consistent with a hazy (or to be accurate, dusty) day. The dust deposits look like it is a fine powder. I doubt it would take much of a breeze to put a lot of particulates into the air, and it would probably stay there for a long time lending an orange/red cast to what "should" be a blue sky.
I was watching a press conference on CSPAN and the guys at JPL actually brought this up themselves. The thing is the camera's have filters for a wide variety of wavelengths many of which aren't visual light at all. Each camera has a different array of filters and actually only share two filters in common for stereo vision.
I got the impression that many of the fiters that ARE within the visual portion of the spectrum were only letting in narrow bands of the spectrum. Exactly what color SHOULD infra-red images be? For obvoius reasons keeping them in their "orignal" spectrum would be fairly useless - though "red" would be as close as we can come.
For just pretty pictures rather than scientific data NASA is color-correcting the images - I think it is more involved than simply colorizing a black and white image. They mentioned compositing together several images from different filters to get a fair approximation of what the human eye would percieve if it was there.
Ah, Dusty! Infamous is when you're more than famous! This Big Mac is not just famous, it's IN-famous!
In terms of criticising their decision to hold onto their fat profit margin I'm talking less about the days of Apple II and more about the late 80's to mid 90's. Apple maintained fat profit margins on the Mac while their share of the market plummeted. If they had lowered their prices back when they were competing with clearly inferior products but cheaper products (DOS and later Windows 3.x) I think they could have maintained their low double digit marketshare instead of the paltry ~3% they have now.
Of course the decision to hold on to their profit margins wasn't their only mistake. The biggest failure was that they let their technology stagnate for nearly a decade while they pursued and then dropped a variety of OS initiatives. Imagine if they had not wasted all that time with Pink/Taligent/Copeland. One failure in that area is perhaps to be expected but the string of them was unforgivable and nearly killed Apple. Given that more fundamental failure perhaps it's good they piled up a lot of cash while they had the chance. But imagine a world where Apple had something akin to MacOS X four or five years earlier, had hardware prices 10-15% lower than they were, and was starting with around 10-12% of the market. I think the personal computing world would look a little different than it does now.
How are they working to increase market share and compete with the Wintel market?
The stated goal of the Apple stores is to increase their share of the consumer market by getting their products in front of consumers.
Aside from that they are using apple produced, mac-only software to expand their presence in various niches: creative consumers (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD); Music production (Logic); Film & Video production (FinalCut Pro, FinalCut Express. Shake, Soundtrack, DVDstudio Pro); and Education (PowerSchool, eMac, iBook). They are also interested in science (BLAST, 64 bit CPU's & clusters).
An Apple executive once said something like "if you own all the niches, you own the whole market". It seems that Apple is looking to expand it's marketshare by going after more, and more niches. If they are successful in dominating the ones they are currently targetting I'm sure they will start to look at others where they either have footholds or that overlap with the ones they already dominate. For instance: 3D modelling, architecture, law firms & other soho businesses. I wouldn't be suprised to see Apple do the same kind of thing they did with Logic and Shake in new markets. Buy a software developer that dominates a small niche - Upgrade the product, drop support for Windows, and drop the price to encourage the entire niche to 'switch'.
If your higher capacity iPods are selling like mad (and they are) then why cut into those sales and profits by introducing a cheaper model?
Because technology keeps moving forward, and only so many people want a $300 music player. A $100 player will sell to a *LOT* more people and keep any competitors from sneaking up and stealing Apple's thunder.
They tried to hold on to fat profits before with the Mac and saw their marketshare drop, and drop, and drop.
I disagree, to some degree Apple's premium pricing as a marketing strategy is making a virtue out of necessity. Apple computers are a niche product, they lost the option of true mass marketting and big marketshare years ago. When the PC market exploded they chose to maintain their fat profit margins rather than maintaining or even expanding their market share - it's pretty clear that it was the wrong decision. They hauled in the cash for a while but they became more and more a niche player. At this point they're stuck in that niche. Cutting their margins to the bone wouldn't produce that many new customers.
The MP3 player market is a whole new ball game, and a second chance. Apple is again the market leader in an emerging market (just as they were in the long ago days of the Apple II). This time I think they are going to go for marketshare. They have to maintain the quality that people expect from the brand, and for that reason they're ever going to go for the very bottom of the bargain barrel. But if they can use superior industrial design/engineering and relationships with vendors to beat their competitors on price while still delivering high quality they are going to go for it.
Lewis is much more direct and, in my oppinion, a much more skilled writer (notice I say writer, not story teller)
One of the most beautiful little passages in "The Lord of the Rings" isn't in the book, but Lewis' blurb on the back promoting it: "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron." which is exactly how I feel about that particular turn of phrase. In itself it evokes the same complex emotion (a pang of nostalgia?) that The Lord of the Rings as a whole did.
I notice the beauty of his writing even more in his theological & philosophical books. I'm always struck with the way he can turn a phrase or craft a perfect, striking metaphor to bring his point home. He takes some of the driest theological or philosphical issue and make it read almost like poetry. It says a lot for the kind of classical education in both logic and rhetoric that he recieved.
He *cheats*. "Oh, well, actually you think you've gone through all this, but actually you were in a railroad accident, and you're all dead."
NO, they DO go through all this, & come back, & back into Narnia & then different kids go & come back, etc. etc. The only ones who get squished by a railroad accident are the protagonists of the last book. Which makes sense for those particular characters in that particular story since they go to heaven in Narnia which would be a bit problematic if they're in not dead back on earth.
...another kick-ass series like Dragonlance.
Oh, I don't even know where to begin with what is wrong with that statment.
Actually on second thought, you may have a point. The book "The Godfather" was pretty straightforward, gangster pulp fiction. It was entertaining but not what anyone would mistake for "literature" or even "thought provoking". Coppola took what was a shallow, forgettable book and made one of the deepest most complex movies. The plot was pretty much exactly the same but on film, in Coppola's (& Brando's & Pacino's) hands it came out as one of best movies ever made.
The Christian religious undertones of the previous books become the overtones of The Last Battle. It clearly shifts from being a fantasy series to being a Christian theological tretise.
It's really a matter of subjective opinion but I have to say I disagree with this. I think the christian allegory is quite prominent and more fundamental to the story of The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. Perhaps I see it this way because the story of TLTWATW is really the essential essence of the gospel whereas the theological content of The Last Battle is about relatively perhipheral issues.
I do hope that they don't do anything to make the movie "PC" and lessen or undermine Lewis' christian message. It was essential to what he wrote, and why he wrote it.
in a parliamentary democracy the "government" is the group who command the majority in the paarliament.
What do you call the aggregate of all those ministries and bureacracies that the parlimentarians are in charge of? Americans mean something different and more fundamental when they talk about "stable government". The Iraqi's definitely need "stable government" according the the American usage even if it's not so necessary to have "stable government" in the parlimentarian usage. Out of curiosity what would someone used to the parlimentarian usage say to get across the American meaning of the phrase? I had always assumed that the phrase is perfectly capable of both usages with it's precise meaning implicit by the context, but I confess I haven't spoken enough about such matters with Canadians or Brits (etc.) to know.
as for agricultural surplus, if people are hungry everything else goes to hell.
I will grant that sufficient food is at the very top of the list. The ability to renewably sustain that supply through an agricultural surplus is down at the very bottom if it makes the list at all. Especially if you have other natural resources (oil) with which you can pay someone else to sell you their surplus.
government's themselves can be unstable without causing amjor problems.
Many European parliament's see several Governments in a year as parliamnetary majorities shift and collapse without a break in the provision of essential services
You are misunderstaing what is meant by "stable government" in this context. Despite the instability of the party in power the goverment that is being controlled is itself quite stable. The rules by which the parties compete are stable; the positions to be filled are stable; the agencies, programs, personel etc. and most importantly the laws are all stable. No matter how sweeping an agenda the new party in power may have, they find themselves the managers of a going concern. THAT is a stable government, it is only the top level (who's power to change the rest is more limited than you imagine) that is "unstable".
In Iraq they don't have any of that, they don't really have anything. They have no existing government for the parties to compete for the control of. They have no rules to govern HOW they compete.
I think your list is OK but I'd put "Agricultural surplus" at the bottom, just above Democracy - at least for the short term. I'd put "rule of law" way at the top, also for the short term. In the medium to long term it is important that the Law that is ruling includes freedoms, accountability, transparency etc. but all those things need to be codified into law and that law has to be adhered to.
I've read that they had broken even pretty early on. More recently though that they were not making a profit, and that they didn't plan on doing so. I'm guessing that they are running it at around cost with maybe a small profit or maybe a small loss.
Of course it's great advertising, it not only pushes iPods (which DO make a profit) but it advertises Apple as a brand. They're in the news constantly, they're "cool". The whole thing is definitely worth it to them even if it never makes money (as long as it doesn't lose too much either).
There is a farm down the street from me that did this.
They don't anymore.
Sadly, there are plenty of consumers out there that ARE potential criminals.
one could certainly load 55+ OSes native on a PC notebook, all directly bootable with one of those new-fangled boot managers. :p
Ahh... but with VirtualPC you can run the all AT THE SAME TIME. Or at the very least you are running your primary OS at the same time as whichever one (or two or three) you are working with.
Of course you can do the same with VirtualPC for windows but then you are stuck with windows as your primary OS.
I'm curious if you are aware of Richard Mellon-Scaife?
Sure, he and his political patronage are quite well known. He's sort of like a magic talisman that Democrats wave around to avoid the difficult truth that despite their PR they are the onese that get all the big money while the Republicans clobber them when it comes to the small donors.
In the 2002 election there were 23 "hyper-rich" individuals that gave over one million dollars in political donations for a total of $52.7 million dollars. Out of that $4.4 million went to the Republicans - the remaining $48 million(!) went to the Democrats. There were about 400 people that donated over $100K for a total of $132.8 million. 67% or $88.2 million of that money went to the Democrats.
By contrast the Republicans picked up 64% of the money from donors of under $200 for a total of $333 million dollars vs. the Democrats $182 million.
Most Americans are not. They heard about Soros because he came out and said what he was going to do.
As does Richard Mellon-Scaife. The contributions by his foundation are well documented on the foundations web site.
There is not a bit of difference between Sorros and Mellon-Scaife. They are both extreme but also sincere partisans. The both believe they are right and are willing to spend a great deal of money in promoting their views. The only difference is that Sorros believes it should be illegal for Mr. Scaife to do so while Scaife believes that Mr. Sorros has every right to do what he is doing
It won't surpirse me if the Supreme Court will again decide the outcome of a presidential election in the near future.
The vote may be close but I think it going back to the courts like last time is highly unlikely. It wasn't just that the vote was close but that in one state (FL) that it was close. And it wasn't just close - it was phenominally close: the margin of victory was far below the margin of error and the system didn't handle it well (or the way it was supposed - but that's another rant).
Four years have gone by and even the small demographic changes that have occurred, not to mention the significant national events that have taken place will have an effect that will make another FL style electoral train wrech as statistically improbable as ever.