He may have been a great Geologist but he was a lousy economist. He's changing one variable (or one set of variables) in the economy and assuming that all the others will stay static. In reality changing that one variable has an effect on all the others. Unless the change in supply is very sudden the economy adjusts quite nicely to changes in supply. Supply, demand and price all impact each other. As the supply falls the price goes up, which moderates demand. The price rises but more gradually than the doomsayers models. At the new price level alternatives that were previously too expensive to develop become economically viable. It's possible (even probable) that as those alternatives are adopted they benefit from economies of scale that leaves not only their price, but the price of the original commodity lower than it was prior to their development.
In the case of fuel oil there are dozens of alternatives out there that will become competitive as prices rise. Oil can be extracted from tar sands and oil shale, from Coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process or from just about anything else through Thermal Depolymerization. With our existing infrastructure and automobiles we could use either ethanol or methanol as fuels. You can get 15,000 gallons/year of bio-diesel from an acre of algae ponds (which as a side benefit find carbon emissions a tasty snack). As oil prices rise one, or several of these alternatives will start supplying some significant percentage of the demand. Further out requiring more significant changes to our technology and infrastructure there is the possibility of electric vehicles (perhaps with hydrogen cells as batteries).
Such simplistic economists have been making these predictions since Malthus (1766-1830), they have always been wrong. In 1980 Paul Ehrlich the ecologist bet Julian Simon the economist that the prices of five metals (chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten were chosen by Ehrlich) would rise (in real terms) over the course of the next decade. In 1990 Ehrlich paid up - all the prices had fallen.
In the long term "Peak Oil" will have the same catastrophic effects that "Peak *Whale* Oil" had in the last century.
Does anyone know the precise nature of these wiretaps? I've heard conflicting things in the media and haven't found a description from a credible non-biased source. What I mean is: most media are simply calling this "domestic surveillance" whereas some more detailed descriptions (but from sources that might be spinning for the administration) are describing this as surveillance between a foreign source and a domestic one.
For me at least that may be an important distinction. Are these cases of a foreign surveillance target who just happens to be calling (or receiving a call) from someone in the US? It might run afoul of FISA but personally I have much less of a problem with that than if it is purely domestic surveillance. In fact in a legitimate intelligence operation looking into terrorist cells those foreign to domestic communications would be those we'd MOST want to keep track of.
To make the administrations best case example: According to the text of FISA you could monitor OBL's phone calls but you had to stick your fingers in your ears if he called Mohammed Atta because Atta was in the USA. Getting a warrant might require that you have a good reason to suspect Mohammed Atta aside from the fact that OBL is the one calling him. Sure you could also listen and later get a retroactive warrant (what happens if that retroactive warrant is rejected? Does the law say?) but I can certainly see how the agencies involved in a case like that might still see it as a bureaucratic impediment and potential source of leaks. In the presence of at least some case law that appears to render FISA a dead letter in purely intelligence operations (as opposed to criminal investigations) and the administrations position is at least debatable.
Which brings me to my next point, if these guys cost 1/3rd of the price it brings the question who actually wants to earn one third what they could in life? Practically nobody even if cost of living is cheaper.
This simply isn't true. There are plenty of people that are willing to work for less money if the money they get will both go further and let them live somewhere they prefer.
I DO think that a lot of these consultants will probably end up being a little older though. A kid right out of college is probably more willing and more likely to prefer to live in the big city. There are a lot of benefits to living in the "middle of it" when you are young, unattached & don't have many expenses. But a few years on when that kid gets married, has a kid (or two, three... more?) that moving someplace away from the big coastal cities will start to have a lot of appeal for them. Especially if they already owned a (small) home and can also cash out of the high-cost housing market and upgrade while also get completely out of debt moving to a lower-cost market that has a small-town atmosphere that they think is more conducive to raising children.
IIRC Apple has a contract with the music companies
That's actually why it's been in the news so much, and why there has been so much commentary back and forth between Apple and the Labels.... the contracts are nearing the end of their term. All this public commentary is trial balloons and appeals to the business world and public at large to exert pressure on the other party for the contract negotiations for the NEXT contract.
Of course they counted you. Then again they counted me as a Windows user for the exact same reason. I have a windows machine as a debugging machine for the sites I develop. It is solely to see how things look in a windows browser. I still rely on the Mac for everything else.
The problem with your argument is that the program he's taking to task is Photoshop. It's NEVER been sold as so easy to use "that even someone completely untrained can use it" but as a complex program for professionals. Photoshop may claim it can "turn the red dress blue" it even claims it is "easy". For the people it made that claim to: professional designers & photographers... it was.
It's not akin to your magical bycical sold as so easy even the untrained can use it but an expensive racing bike that makes otherwise impossible feats "easy" for professionals.
According to NOAA statistics (Fig 1., fig. 2, table). neither 1933 nor 2004-5 have been "freaks". 1933 was in the middle couple of decades of intense activity which was at it's peak in the 30's and was followed by a lull through the 60's - 90's which we appear to be coming out of now (something that's been predicted for a while on account of the decades long cycle of water temp fluctuation in the atlantic).
Who pays for smokers who can't work because of emphysema?
The same people who pay their social security checks & medical bills if they live far longer because they didn't smoke.
The "government budget" argument against smoking (or for sin taxes)is fallacious . Smokers COST LESS because they die quicker and aren't on the public dole (Social Security, Medicaid etc.) for nearly as long.
Keep the lawyers in the storm cellar where they belong... or run them the hell over. Either way, it'd make our lives a whole lot better.
To quote Danny DeVito in Other People's Money: "Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. They have theirs, so I have mine, but as soon as you use them they **** up everything."
Wal*Mart speeding up their lines is a move to provide more production per unit investment. It's motivated by profit, plain and simple. (Not that it's a bad thing.)
I know someone that was involved in talking to Wal*Mart about RFID early on and when they mentioned that Wal*Mart could increase their profits the executives looked at him like he had three heads. Wal*Mart has a very strong corporate culture that always seeks to lower prices at the expense of almost everything else. All that heavy handed pressure to cut costs goes right back out as low prices to the consumer, the profit they make is all they want to make, they want to increase their business by making that same (fairly modest) profit on more revenue at the absolute lowest possible price. Even aside from that pragmatic business model I think the top executives have also (to one extent or another) "drunk the cool-aid" and really do feel a something like a moral obligation to drive their prices lower (at the expense in many peoples minds of *other* moral obligations). Business week once famously remarked that the obsession with low prices was so extreme that Wal*mart is a "cult masquerading as a company".
Because it's a contract. The (legally binding) promises each party makes in a contract can be largely arbitrary. If he found the terms of his contract intolerable he shouldn't have entered in to it.
He has the right to do anything he damn well pleases. *Including* the right to make promises (of any sort) that he can later be held to. If he chose to make a particular promise who are we to tell him he can't? That being said there are sometimes good reasons for the government to take that right away from people for their own protection (by making certain promises unenforcable). But personally I think we should tread lightly there.
Music videos are not even popular enough to support a cable network channel ("MTV" is almost entirely crap "reality" shows these days), so what makes anybody think that they can support a "buy-to-watch-on-a-two-inch-screen" market?
I think Music Videos are just the first step. Not really worth it for their own sake but valuable as a proof-of-concept and learning experience for an eventual movie download business. Music video is easy for Apple to get into, they have the relationships and a music video is probably the shortest (smallest download) video content that people will buy. If that is successful I'd expect to see ITMS (ITVS? IMVS?) expand into TV shows and eventually feature length movies as they prove themselves to the necessary businesses and as the technology matures.
What Mr Franck should have said is that he is disappointed because O'Conner kept deciding against things he liked instead of trying to pull the "flip flop" card
No, because that is NOT Mr Franck's point. John Paul Steven's or Ruth Bader Ginsburg presumably keep deciding against things he liked far more often than O'Connor. BUT, he thinks O'Connor is a worse judge DESPITE the fact she sometimes (even often) rules in ways he would prefer (while Ginsburg rarely does) because she refuses to rule in ways that set a real precedent either way. This is VERY BAD because it means the law is never settled, you never know whether certain things are legal or not. in some areas of law EITHER of two available courses of action may be illegal, a series of costly lawsuits are inevitable no matter what you decide and in the end you can only know which decision was the legal one after it goes to the supreme court. That is unavoidable when dealing with new laws and novel situations but it's ridiculous when the reason the law isn't settled one way or the other is because Justice O'Connor has switched back and forth in cases that are dealing with identical issues.
I don't know if you have any other sources for this but the Wikipedia appears to be in error. The source provided in the link next to the paragraph you cite is this.
It's to a news organization that I've never heard of (consortium news) written in a rather partisan tone* that didn't do any research themselves but only cite a Newsweek article saying that the Florida judge *Considered* counting overvotes (ballots with two votes recorded in a single race) but that the news articles that vindicated the Bush victory only looked at undervotes. (Quote for Wikipedia's source: "Lewis has said in more recent interviews that he might well have expanded the recount to include those 'overvotes.'" )
Far from asserting that "the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted..." it actually says:
"...front-page stories of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other leading news outlets, which stated that Bush would have won regardless of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling..."
To be fair the source does contain the statement that the overvotes would have resulted in a Gore victory "according to an examination of those ballots by a group of leading news organizations."
But going to the ACTUAL source (those leading news organizations themselves the story is rather different. The actual report tested several scenarios and stated that their own recount included many subjective judgments and had a large margin of error.
Scenario one: If the statewide recount (that O'Connor stopped) had continued as it had been going with the standards as they had been set in the different counties: Bush wins by 493 votes.
Scenario Two: Only Gore's preferred four counties are re-counted: Bush wins by 225 votes.
Scenario Three: Use of the most expansive definition of a valid vote (The "Palm Beach" standard) Gore wins by 42 votes.
Scenario Four: Inclusion of overvotes: Gore wins by "less than" 200 votes (a precise number wasn't given by cnn)
The study noted the subjective nature of such vote counting: For instance they found that male investigators were more likely to find votes than females and that there was a statistically significant relationship between the candidate votes found and the partisan affiliation of the investigator. (Important to consider when you realize that the investigators were trained and only doing the counting for academic purposes whereas the county commissioners actually doing the real counting were serious partisans of either stripe and playing for all the marbles. Even subconscious desires played a role, never mind outright fraud (something I'm quite sure occurred. One guy with a skewer and a stack of punch card ballots would produce enough votes for his guy and/or spoiled ballots for the other guy to swing the election.
*Here is an example of the dispassionate reporting in the source cited by Wikipedia :
"It turns out that the thousands of demonstrators who protested Bush's Inauguration were closer to the truth when they shouted at his motorcade, "Hail to the Thief!"
Calling that ruling "liberal" merely shows that you have a deep failure to understand the term.
The term "liberal" is admittedly problematic (by the classical definition many "liberals" are not in fact liberal while many conservatives are) But, from the point of view of contemporary common usage I think it's fair to call this a "liberal" ruling. It was supported by the most "liberal" members (Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) of the court and opposed by the most conservative (Thomas, Scalia and Rehnquist) with the two "swing" justices (Kennedy and O'Connor) split.
Many "liberals" I'm sure were horrified at the ruling and I'm happy to hear them praising Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist while castigating Sourter, Breyer and Ginsburg. But I'd argue they're horrified only because of the particulars of the case not about the principles involved. Looked at through the prism of abstract principle and ignoring the individuals involved it's easy to see why this was considered a "liberal" ruling. It was about governments ability to do things for the "greater good" versus individual property rights. Liberals (using the informal contemporary usage of the term) are very supportive of government action and the "greater good" and not very supportive at all of property rights. Supreme court justices because they are setting binding precedents are more concerned with the principles established than with the particulars. So this time it was the "liberals" supporting corporate greed and conservatives standing up for the little guy.
Just because neo-cons evolved from right-wingers doesn't mean that they're not communist.
You mean LEFT wingers. The definition of a neo-con is a left-winger who turned right. Most prominent Neo-cons were in fact bona-fide communists (or at least particularly radical socialists). Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle et al are all either former socialist party members and/or the children of socialist party members.
That being said I don't know of any neo-cons lauding the Kelo decision, indeed they few I have seen comment on it were vehemently against it. They seem much more inclined to Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and O'Conners view of private property.
Oddly enough, it was mainly the so-called "progressives" on the court who voted to give the Big Bad Corporate World the legal means to get governments to push you out of your homes by promising to deliver better tax revenues with the land.
I don't understand the "oddly enough", perhaps you meant "As would be expected"? This was about the prerogatives of government versus the property rights of the individual. "Progressives" consistently favor the government in such cases, and "conservatives" consistently favor the individual. The confusion only arises because usually the "Big bad corporate world" is usually on the individual rights side of such disputes and in this case they weren't. The progressives and the conservatives were each consistent to their principles rather than their (perceived) allies. Justices after all have to be concerned with not just the one case they are deciding but with the fact that they are setting a precedent and establishing the principles that future (often quite different) cases will be decided by. The progressives don't want to establish a principle that limits the prerogatives of government and the conservatives don't want to establish a principle that enlarges it.
The only reason the Mac is so strong in this market is inertia
No, that's not the *only* reason. Graphic design is a project based (tight deadlines) service industry (billed by the hour) performed by very small companies or individual freelancers. The computer is the essential tool of their trade. They don't have an IT budget, any hour spent fixing a computer problem is an hour they can't bill, and worse is one more hour they can't afford because that big project for their important client is due by the end of business today.
For those reasons having a computer that "Just works" & that they can figure out for themselves is *extremely* important to them. Ironically this is why a lot of them are still using OS 9 despite the fact that it's a crash prone mess. They know it's limitations & how to work around them and they haven't had the time & don't want to take the risk of moving to something new.
People have been trademarking common words since trademarks were invented. It's nothing new and aside from completely made up words it's hard to avoid.
The more common the word in the industry it's used in the less protection your trademark gives you. A completely made up word (c.f. "Exxon") and you can claim infringement in almost any use by your competitors. "Apple" is just an arbitrary word in the industry it's in so it still gives them pretty good protection. Apple could certainly stop a competitor (but not an orchard) from being named "Apple Systems, Inc." "Numbers" is NOT arbitrary, it's descriptive so Apple would probably have to live with a company in a related field called "NumberSystems Inc." or a product called "Number Cruncher" even if a similar use of a more arbitrary trademark would have been a violation of their trademark.
Common words are trademarked all the time in all sorts of businesses (As are just plain numbers contra a previous post. "76" Gasoline, 501 Blue Jeans, 505 both blue jeans and a cleaning solution, and of course Channell No. 5)
Trademarks don't prevent other people from using the word it just prevents people from naming their product, in the same industry, the exact same word that you already have. Or, to use one that is close enough to either cause confusion or to trade on your popularity.
He didn't believe in Biblical inerrancy; that is to say, although he believed that the 66 books contained in the Bible are in fact divinely inspired, he didn't believe that all of them were historically accurate. He didn't believe, for example, that Jonah actually got swallowed by the whale, or that the earth is only 8,000 years old. They are scriptures in the sense that they are divine teachings, but they are also myth (according to his line of thinking).
I think you are misreading Lewis. He believed that the account of Jonah was *possibly* not literal truth because of the book's structure as a "moral romance" -- he thought it was an extended parable rather than a historical book. BUT.. he did emphatically believe in the historical, literal truth of miracles found in the Gospels (water into wine, walking on water, the resurrection, et al), or the historical books of the old testament (the sun standing still, the red sea parting etc.)
Much of Lewis' apologetics were spent defending the literal truth of such accounts. In his fiction figures representing scientific materialism or liberal theology that turn what he believed to be literal truths into metaphors are objects of derisive humor. For instance the scientist in "The Magicians Nephew" that can't believe in talking animals so he just can't hear them talking, or the dwarves in "The Last Battle" who since they don't believe in the supernatural become delusional and can only see the jail they were in rather than the paradise around them. The horse Bree in "A Horse and His Boy" stands in for liberal theologians when he denies that Aslan is a real lion, and that the stories depicting him as a lion or just metaphors unaware all the time that a flesh and blood Aslan is creeping up on him.
Lewis believed that peoples innate understanding of God (an idea found in Romans 2) led them to create myths that reflected the actual truth... but he believed that they were TRUE myths. The story of Jesus' resurrection was an example of the "Corn God" myth that shows up in countless cultures BUT the accounts of the Gospels was different. They are not told as myth but as literal, historical truth with all sorts of historical detail that are alien to mythology. Lewis believe that the historical, literally true account of the gospels was the fundamental truth that the other mythical examples were reflections of.
No. You're thinking of "The Magician's Nephew" which was published after "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" but comes first in the fictional chronology. Recently the publisher has switched the books around to put them in chronological order rather than the order in which they were written.
I think this is a big mistake. "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" really is the first book in the series. It introduces Narnia and the central characters for the first time to the reader. 'The Magician's Nephew" is a prequel that explains things that were introduced in TLTWATW... putting it first robs the books of a lot of their magic. A lot of the charm is the little unexplained slightly surreal elements... the wardrobe itself as a portal to another world... an urban streetlamp in the middle of a forest... the elderly Uncle who fully believes the children's stories and seems to know more than he lets on, etc. Explaining all the loose ends and mysterious elements is OK but to START with the explanation? That sucks the magic right out of it.
Those elements didn't start with the logical explanation. C.S. Lewis has said he started his stories with just the mysterious visual elements
Slashdot Mirror
He may have been a great Geologist but he was a lousy economist. He's changing one variable (or one set of variables) in the economy and assuming that all the others will stay static. In reality changing that one variable has an effect on all the others. Unless the change in supply is very sudden the economy adjusts quite nicely to changes in supply. Supply, demand and price all impact each other. As the supply falls the price goes up, which moderates demand. The price rises but more gradually than the doomsayers models. At the new price level alternatives that were previously too expensive to develop become economically viable. It's possible (even probable) that as those alternatives are adopted they benefit from economies of scale that leaves not only their price, but the price of the original commodity lower than it was prior to their development.
In the case of fuel oil there are dozens of alternatives out there that will become competitive as prices rise. Oil can be extracted from tar sands and oil shale, from Coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process or from just about anything else through Thermal Depolymerization. With our existing infrastructure and automobiles we could use either ethanol or methanol as fuels. You can get 15,000 gallons/year of bio-diesel from an acre of algae ponds (which as a side benefit find carbon emissions a tasty snack). As oil prices rise one, or several of these alternatives will start supplying some significant percentage of the demand. Further out requiring more significant changes to our technology and infrastructure there is the possibility of electric vehicles (perhaps with hydrogen cells as batteries).
Such simplistic economists have been making these predictions since Malthus (1766-1830), they have always been wrong. In 1980 Paul Ehrlich the ecologist bet Julian Simon the economist that the prices of five metals (chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten were chosen by Ehrlich) would rise (in real terms) over the course of the next decade. In 1990 Ehrlich paid up - all the prices had fallen.
In the long term "Peak Oil" will have the same catastrophic effects that "Peak *Whale* Oil" had in the last century.
Does anyone know the precise nature of these wiretaps? I've heard conflicting things in the media and haven't found a description from a credible non-biased source. What I mean is: most media are simply calling this "domestic surveillance" whereas some more detailed descriptions (but from sources that might be spinning for the administration) are describing this as surveillance between a foreign source and a domestic one.
For me at least that may be an important distinction. Are these cases of a foreign surveillance target who just happens to be calling (or receiving a call) from someone in the US? It might run afoul of FISA but personally I have much less of a problem with that than if it is purely domestic surveillance. In fact in a legitimate intelligence operation looking into terrorist cells those foreign to domestic communications would be those we'd MOST want to keep track of.
To make the administrations best case example: According to the text of FISA you could monitor OBL's phone calls but you had to stick your fingers in your ears if he called Mohammed Atta because Atta was in the USA. Getting a warrant might require that you have a good reason to suspect Mohammed Atta aside from the fact that OBL is the one calling him. Sure you could also listen and later get a retroactive warrant (what happens if that retroactive warrant is rejected? Does the law say?) but I can certainly see how the agencies involved in a case like that might still see it as a bureaucratic impediment and potential source of leaks. In the presence of at least some case law that appears to render FISA a dead letter in purely intelligence operations (as opposed to criminal investigations) and the administrations position is at least debatable.
Which brings me to my next point, if these guys cost 1/3rd of the price it brings the question who actually wants to earn one third what they could in life? Practically nobody even if cost of living is cheaper.
This simply isn't true. There are plenty of people that are willing to work for less money if the money they get will both go further and let them live somewhere they prefer.
I DO think that a lot of these consultants will probably end up being a little older though. A kid right out of college is probably more willing and more likely to prefer to live in the big city. There are a lot of benefits to living in the "middle of it" when you are young, unattached & don't have many expenses. But a few years on when that kid gets married, has a kid (or two, three... more?) that moving someplace away from the big coastal cities will start to have a lot of appeal for them. Especially if they already owned a (small) home and can also cash out of the high-cost housing market and upgrade while also get completely out of debt moving to a lower-cost market that has a small-town atmosphere that they think is more conducive to raising children.
IIRC Apple has a contract with the music companies
That's actually why it's been in the news so much, and why there has been so much commentary back and forth between Apple and the Labels.... the contracts are nearing the end of their term. All this public commentary is trial balloons and appeals to the business world and public at large to exert pressure on the other party for the contract negotiations for the NEXT contract.
Of course they counted you. Then again they counted me as a Windows user for the exact same reason. I have a windows machine as a debugging machine for the sites I develop. It is solely to see how things look in a windows browser. I still rely on the Mac for everything else.
err... he said "A 'buck'". For $5.00 you can get 5 movies that are 40, 50 or even 60+ years old.
The problem with your argument is that the program he's taking to task is Photoshop. It's NEVER been sold as so easy to use "that even someone completely untrained can use it" but as a complex program for professionals. Photoshop may claim it can "turn the red dress blue" it even claims it is "easy". For the people it made that claim to: professional designers & photographers... it was.
It's not akin to your magical bycical sold as so easy even the untrained can use it but an expensive racing bike that makes otherwise impossible feats "easy" for professionals.
1933 was a freak year. 2005 isn't.
Do you have a citation for this theory?
According to NOAA statistics (Fig 1., fig. 2, table). neither 1933 nor 2004-5 have been "freaks". 1933 was in the middle couple of decades of intense activity which was at it's peak in the 30's and was followed by a lull through the 60's - 90's which we appear to be coming out of now (something that's been predicted for a while on account of the decades long cycle of water temp fluctuation in the atlantic).
Who pays for smokers who can't work because of emphysema?
The same people who pay their social security checks & medical bills if they live far longer because they didn't smoke.
The "government budget" argument against smoking (or for sin taxes)is fallacious . Smokers COST LESS because they die quicker and aren't on the public dole (Social Security, Medicaid etc.) for nearly as long.
Keep the lawyers in the storm cellar where they belong... or run them the hell over. Either way, it'd make our lives a whole lot better.
To quote Danny DeVito in Other People's Money: "Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. They have theirs, so I have mine, but as soon as you use them they **** up everything."
Wal*Mart speeding up their lines is a move to provide more production per unit investment. It's motivated by profit, plain and simple. (Not that it's a bad thing.)
I know someone that was involved in talking to Wal*Mart about RFID early on and when they mentioned that Wal*Mart could increase their profits the executives looked at him like he had three heads. Wal*Mart has a very strong corporate culture that always seeks to lower prices at the expense of almost everything else. All that heavy handed pressure to cut costs goes right back out as low prices to the consumer, the profit they make is all they want to make, they want to increase their business by making that same (fairly modest) profit on more revenue at the absolute lowest possible price. Even aside from that pragmatic business model I think the top executives have also (to one extent or another) "drunk the cool-aid" and really do feel a something like a moral obligation to drive their prices lower (at the expense in many peoples minds of *other* moral obligations). Business week once famously remarked that the obsession with low prices was so extreme that Wal*mart is a "cult masquerading as a company".
Because it's a contract. The (legally binding) promises each party makes in a contract can be largely arbitrary. If he found the terms of his contract intolerable he shouldn't have entered in to it.
He has the right to do anything he damn well pleases. *Including* the right to make promises (of any sort) that he can later be held to. If he chose to make a particular promise who are we to tell him he can't? That being said there are sometimes good reasons for the government to take that right away from people for their own protection (by making certain promises unenforcable). But personally I think we should tread lightly there.
Music videos are not even popular enough to support a cable network channel ("MTV" is almost entirely crap "reality" shows these days), so what makes anybody think that they can support a "buy-to-watch-on-a-two-inch-screen" market?
I think Music Videos are just the first step. Not really worth it for their own sake but valuable as a proof-of-concept and learning experience for an eventual movie download business. Music video is easy for Apple to get into, they have the relationships and a music video is probably the shortest (smallest download) video content that people will buy. If that is successful I'd expect to see ITMS (ITVS? IMVS?) expand into TV shows and eventually feature length movies as they prove themselves to the necessary businesses and as the technology matures.
What Mr Franck should have said is that he is disappointed because O'Conner kept deciding against things he liked instead of trying to pull the "flip flop" card
No, because that is NOT Mr Franck's point. John Paul Steven's or Ruth Bader Ginsburg presumably keep deciding against things he liked far more often than O'Connor. BUT, he thinks O'Connor is a worse judge DESPITE the fact she sometimes (even often) rules in ways he would prefer (while Ginsburg rarely does) because she refuses to rule in ways that set a real precedent either way. This is VERY BAD because it means the law is never settled, you never know whether certain things are legal or not. in some areas of law EITHER of two available courses of action may be illegal, a series of costly lawsuits are inevitable no matter what you decide and in the end you can only know which decision was the legal one after it goes to the supreme court. That is unavoidable when dealing with new laws and novel situations but it's ridiculous when the reason the law isn't settled one way or the other is because Justice O'Connor has switched back and forth in cases that are dealing with identical issues.
It's to a news organization that I've never heard of (consortium news) written in a rather partisan tone* that didn't do any research themselves but only cite a Newsweek article saying that the Florida judge *Considered* counting overvotes (ballots with two votes recorded in a single race) but that the news articles that vindicated the Bush victory only looked at undervotes. (Quote for Wikipedia's source: "Lewis has said in more recent interviews that he might well have expanded the recount to include those 'overvotes.'" )
Far from asserting that "the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted
But going to the ACTUAL source (those leading news organizations themselves the story is rather different. The actual report tested several scenarios and stated that their own recount included many subjective judgments and had a large margin of error.
Scenario one: If the statewide recount (that O'Connor stopped) had continued as it had been going with the standards as they had been set in the different counties: Bush wins by 493 votes.
Scenario Two: Only Gore's preferred four counties are re-counted: Bush wins by 225 votes.
Scenario Three: Use of the most expansive definition of a valid vote (The "Palm Beach" standard) Gore wins by 42 votes.
Scenario Four: Inclusion of overvotes: Gore wins by "less than" 200 votes (a precise number wasn't given by cnn)
The study noted the subjective nature of such vote counting: For instance they found that male investigators were more likely to find votes than females and that there was a statistically significant relationship between the candidate votes found and the partisan affiliation of the investigator. (Important to consider when you realize that the investigators were trained and only doing the counting for academic purposes whereas the county commissioners actually doing the real counting were serious partisans of either stripe and playing for all the marbles. Even subconscious desires played a role, never mind outright fraud (something I'm quite sure occurred. One guy with a skewer and a stack of punch card ballots would produce enough votes for his guy and/or spoiled ballots for the other guy to swing the election.
*Here is an example of the dispassionate reporting in the source cited by Wikipedia :
Oops, forgot justice Stevens (and he wrote the majority opinion too)
Calling that ruling "liberal" merely shows that you have a deep failure to understand the term.
The term "liberal" is admittedly problematic (by the classical definition many "liberals" are not in fact liberal while many conservatives are) But, from the point of view of contemporary common usage I think it's fair to call this a "liberal" ruling. It was supported by the most "liberal" members (Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) of the court and opposed by the most conservative (Thomas, Scalia and Rehnquist) with the two "swing" justices (Kennedy and O'Connor) split.
Many "liberals" I'm sure were horrified at the ruling and I'm happy to hear them praising Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist while castigating Sourter, Breyer and Ginsburg. But I'd argue they're horrified only because of the particulars of the case not about the principles involved. Looked at through the prism of abstract principle and ignoring the individuals involved it's easy to see why this was considered a "liberal" ruling. It was about governments ability to do things for the "greater good" versus individual property rights. Liberals (using the informal contemporary usage of the term) are very supportive of government action and the "greater good" and not very supportive at all of property rights. Supreme court justices because they are setting binding precedents are more concerned with the principles established than with the particulars. So this time it was the "liberals" supporting corporate greed and conservatives standing up for the little guy.
Just because neo-cons evolved from right-wingers doesn't mean that they're not communist.
You mean LEFT wingers. The definition of a neo-con is a left-winger who turned right. Most prominent Neo-cons were in fact bona-fide communists (or at least particularly radical socialists). Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle et al are all either former socialist party members and/or the children of socialist party members.
That being said I don't know of any neo-cons lauding the Kelo decision, indeed they few I have seen comment on it were vehemently against it. They seem much more inclined to Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and O'Conners view of private property.
Oddly enough, it was mainly the so-called "progressives" on the court who voted to give the Big Bad Corporate World the legal means to get governments to push you out of your homes by promising to deliver better tax revenues with the land.
I don't understand the "oddly enough", perhaps you meant "As would be expected"? This was about the prerogatives of government versus the property rights of the individual. "Progressives" consistently favor the government in such cases, and "conservatives" consistently favor the individual. The confusion only arises because usually the "Big bad corporate world" is usually on the individual rights side of such disputes and in this case they weren't. The progressives and the conservatives were each consistent to their principles rather than their (perceived) allies. Justices after all have to be concerned with not just the one case they are deciding but with the fact that they are setting a precedent and establishing the principles that future (often quite different) cases will be decided by. The progressives don't want to establish a principle that limits the prerogatives of government and the conservatives don't want to establish a principle that enlarges it.
The only reason the Mac is so strong in this market is inertia
No, that's not the *only* reason. Graphic design is a project based (tight deadlines) service industry (billed by the hour) performed by very small companies or individual freelancers. The computer is the essential tool of their trade. They don't have an IT budget, any hour spent fixing a computer problem is an hour they can't bill, and worse is one more hour they can't afford because that big project for their important client is due by the end of business today.
For those reasons having a computer that "Just works" & that they can figure out for themselves is *extremely* important to them. Ironically this is why a lot of them are still using OS 9 despite the fact that it's a crash prone mess. They know it's limitations & how to work around them and they haven't had the time & don't want to take the risk of moving to something new.
Hello? The company is Apple(TM).
People have been trademarking common words since trademarks were invented. It's nothing new and aside from completely made up words it's hard to avoid.
The more common the word in the industry it's used in the less protection your trademark gives you. A completely made up word (c.f. "Exxon") and you can claim infringement in almost any use by your competitors. "Apple" is just an arbitrary word in the industry it's in so it still gives them pretty good protection. Apple could certainly stop a competitor (but not an orchard) from being named "Apple Systems, Inc." "Numbers" is NOT arbitrary, it's descriptive so Apple would probably have to live with a company in a related field called "NumberSystems Inc." or a product called "Number Cruncher" even if a similar use of a more arbitrary trademark would have been a violation of their trademark.
Well you can't trademark *a* number...
1 Dale Ernhardt Inc.
(3)Level 3 Communications
4Swingline, Inc.
5 Chanel
31 Baskin Robbins
"33" Latrobe Brewing
57 H.J. Heinz Company
501 Levi Strauss & Co.
747 Boeing
umm... "Apple"
Common words are trademarked all the time in all sorts of businesses (As are just plain numbers contra a previous post. "76" Gasoline, 501 Blue Jeans, 505 both blue jeans and a cleaning solution, and of course Channell No. 5)
Trademarks don't prevent other people from using the word it just prevents people from naming their product, in the same industry, the exact same word that you already have. Or, to use one that is close enough to either cause confusion or to trade on your popularity.
He didn't believe in Biblical inerrancy; that is to say, although he believed that the 66 books contained in the Bible are in fact divinely inspired, he didn't believe that all of them were historically accurate. He didn't believe, for example, that Jonah actually got swallowed by the whale, or that the earth is only 8,000 years old. They are scriptures in the sense that they are divine teachings, but they are also myth (according to his line of thinking).
I think you are misreading Lewis. He believed that the account of Jonah was *possibly* not literal truth because of the book's structure as a "moral romance" -- he thought it was an extended parable rather than a historical book. BUT.. he did emphatically believe in the historical, literal truth of miracles found in the Gospels (water into wine, walking on water, the resurrection, et al), or the historical books of the old testament (the sun standing still, the red sea parting etc.)
Much of Lewis' apologetics were spent defending the literal truth of such accounts. In his fiction figures representing scientific materialism or liberal theology that turn what he believed to be literal truths into metaphors are objects of derisive humor. For instance the scientist in "The Magicians Nephew" that can't believe in talking animals so he just can't hear them talking, or the dwarves in "The Last Battle" who since they don't believe in the supernatural become delusional and can only see the jail they were in rather than the paradise around them. The horse Bree in "A Horse and His Boy" stands in for liberal theologians when he denies that Aslan is a real lion, and that the stories depicting him as a lion or just metaphors unaware all the time that a flesh and blood Aslan is creeping up on him.
Lewis believed that peoples innate understanding of God (an idea found in Romans 2) led them to create myths that reflected the actual truth... but he believed that they were TRUE myths. The story of Jesus' resurrection was an example of the "Corn God" myth that shows up in countless cultures BUT the accounts of the Gospels was different. They are not told as myth but as literal, historical truth with all sorts of historical detail that are alien to mythology. Lewis believe that the historical, literally true account of the gospels was the fundamental truth that the other mythical examples were reflections of.
"Doesn't it start with the birth of Narnia? "
No. You're thinking of "The Magician's Nephew" which was published after "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" but comes first in the fictional chronology. Recently the publisher has switched the books around to put them in chronological order rather than the order in which they were written.
I think this is a big mistake. "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" really is the first book in the series. It introduces Narnia and the central characters for the first time to the reader. 'The Magician's Nephew" is a prequel that explains things that were introduced in TLTWATW... putting it first robs the books of a lot of their magic. A lot of the charm is the little unexplained slightly surreal elements... the wardrobe itself as a portal to another world... an urban streetlamp in the middle of a forest... the elderly Uncle who fully believes the children's stories and seems to know more than he lets on, etc. Explaining all the loose ends and mysterious elements is OK but to START with the explanation? That sucks the magic right out of it.
Those elements didn't start with the logical explanation. C.S. Lewis has said he started his stories with just the mysterious visual elements