The problem is that Apple seems to be schizophrenic in their relationship with Windows. On one hand, they smugly deride Windows at every opportunity ("Hasta la vista" and the like). On the other hand, they release stuff like bootcamp (a tacit admission that their platform is sorely lacking in ports of games and other software).
If you knew that someone with a secure market position was going to come along and willy-nilly copy whatever you do that rocks, and there isn't anything that you can do about it (legal options have been exhausted and public opinion doesn't care), then what would you do? I say putting on a wry face, taking the proud underdog position (i.e. pointed teasing is allowed), and keeping the good stuff secret as long as possible, are justifiable tactics. If Apple were in the superior market position and poking fun at their poorer competitors, that would classify as smug. That's underdog politics, using unspoken public rules.
It isn't really schizo, it's just complex. They are both competitors and co-dependent. MS has been trying to outright squash Quicktime etc. for a decade, and plays by dirty, sleazy rules. Windows gets sold along with legitimate installs of BootCamp. MBU is the biggest Mac developer outside of Apple, and profitable.
For what I do, I often find Windows is sorely lacking in decent software. If you think BootCamp is mainly about games, well, you are blinded by your own obsessive niche. It's about a secure feeling, and using a mac at work for that unavoidable in-house software, etc.
Really, what we mean by silence is "below the limit of sensitivity." It's all about resting the apparatus in question. And, regarding the Planck frontier: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can't measure it, doesn't mean it's not...
This research sends me looking for a research paper I have here somewhere, done during WWII on radio communications. Seems they found that interrupting speech on the radio with bursts of static left it much more intelligible than doing the same with gaps of silence.
Silence is a sorely understudied aspect of communication, in general. It's such a fundamental part of everyday communication, yet little research like this is published.
What Magnasco et al. have done is to move our data processing closer to the kind of predictive observation we think we do with our ears. For instance, the ear habituates to sounds that don't fluctuate much, like that computer fan--they aren't as loud and bothersome after a while. But you notice when the fridge stops. Our hearing is all about dynamic change, and relative silences pattern everything.
So, good on the researchers for tapping into this. I like this quote:
the auditory system is the fastest of the five senses. Researchers credit this discrepancy to a series of lightning-fast calculations in the brain that translate minimal input into maximal understanding. And whatever those calculations are, they're far more precise than any sound-analysis program that exists today.
Basically, they're hinting that auditory processing uses a kind of predictive processing and compression to work quickly. Considering that hearing is basically sloshing fluid tickling tiny hairs, with a couple of transductions in there, it is amazingly fast. Another great thing about this research: using spatial representation for a spatial sense.
Correction: when I wrote "the Brotherhood" I was thinking of "The Family," operating under various names like "The Fellowship Foundation" etc. They're a cellularly organized, semi-public prayer group who pull many strings of national and international power, and it's all for a Nietzchean-style Jesus. See wikipedia or the fascinating Harper's article by Jeffrey Sharlet. As Source Watch points out, they aren't all that 'open,' either.
Really. And just how big a threat do you think these folks are to us? That is to say, where does the probability of being killed by an Islamic fanatic rank against the probability of being killed by automobile accident, drowning, lightning, snakebite, heart attack, or cancer? This terrorist business has been blown waaaaay out of proportion.
What? I thought the GP was referring to cellphone chattering commuting SUV suburbanites, the real daily threat to most of us.
i recently found my wife's older g3 ibook. i added some ram, got a new battery (4 hours of life!!!), and put panther on it
Panther is really necessary on these machines, due to the 800x600 display--Expose is a lifesaver. If there's one mod I'd like to do to the old 366 firewire machine I still use for mobile stuff, it would be changing the screen to 1024X768. Sure, it looks like a purse/toiletseat, but you can throw it, burn it, kick it, run over it with the car, and it won't die, or even need a reboot, and it renders Final Cut Pro projects just fine, when it isn't surfing or playing kid's games in Classic. Six years old and counting.
You, sir, and your fellow slashdotters, are representative of the only paltry, disempowered, cranky and nearly ineffective oversight we have left. When a trillion are spent on the military, 25 times more than Russia alone, many billions of that going into 'black' projects that even the president isn't allowed to know about; when there are over 700 military bases on foreign soil and no admission of imperial designs; when 'the Brotherhood' operates in the open, yet no-one really knows about them; when the PNAC is honest about their designs, and now has power but there isn't panic; then you know that complaining about things is of little use, however necessary.
Not to be a pessimist, or anything. There is a groundswell of dissent. But few, if any, really can grasp the entirety of global geopolitics, and just how many long-running unjust plans are well under way.
Zbigniw Brzezinski is one of those in the know, like Kissinger: "as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."
The sad fact is, I enjoy having to muck with stuff.
You have an opportunity to muck about in a different way with the latest appliance-style Macs. The form-factor of the iMac or the mini is hostile to internal fiddling. However, they're great for things like case-mods or built-in installations, especially the mini.
Really, part of what you're buying when you get a Mac is the great case and integrated engineering. Not perfect, mind you, just well-done. If you want to mess with the basic hardware components, well, there are a few options, but it only makes sense with older towers, do you really want to go into a somewhat justifiably expensive new dual-G5 water-cooled tower with multiple independent fan systems and screw with it?
That said, I've upgraded the hell out of some older all-in-one seemingly un-upgradeable Macs, like old iMacs etc. Not really worth it, in the end, other than the tinkering fun. It's more fun messing with the software side of things, on Macs; since you can now run most of the software on the planet, there are endless options.
I'm a heavy gamer so I tend to look at the PC market first. Maybe with Windows on the Mac I can switch?
You can run windows on a mac, sure, but if you're the bleeding-edge type, you'll always be disappointed in gaming on a Mac. They are, by design, aimed at a different demographic: the average consumer or the workflow-intensive media producer. I'm guessing the next generation of towers will be a very different story, you may want to wait for them.
Most Mac users don't bother to poke away at upgrading components piecemeal, they sell the whole machine on the used market and trade up. This is due to several factors, including a kind of anti-geekery and the hardware engineering, but most importantly, it's economics.
PC users often don't realize that the used Mac market is expensive. Macs simply hold their value much more than x86 boxes. This is due to supply and demand, in part, but also because Macs really are, on average, slightly slower to sink into obsolescence. For instance, I have a six year-old low-end iBook 366MHz laptop that has built-in firewire and still works adequately as a very basic mobile video editing station, running the latest OS. The same $350 would buy you a faster, newer PC laptop with a better screen, but not necessarily one that is as capable or durable.
The economics are in favour of simply buying a new(er) machine; subtracting the gains from selling on the used market generally nets a better performer than replacing components.
How long ago did they get rid of the special tool without which it was impossible to (nondestructively) open the case? The sheer hostility of that move stuck with me for a very long time. I'm finally considering a mini for porting, but I've heard they have many of the same upgrade limitations as a laptop, so it may have to be a throwaway (if the Intel switch ever pushes down prices on used PPC models).
Well, there was the ultra-long torx wrench and case-cracker combo, but that was more than 15 years ago...
I guess you're thinking of the Mini, which needs a spatula-style implement to spread the case snaps out to lift the shell off. No big deal really, just a factor of having a snug, small case with no obvious screws, a trade-off for nifty appliance-like design features. Given how easy it is to get into the iMac, I don't think Apple's particularly hostile to you getting in there. If you need to, you can. If you can't go to a support website, you shouldn't be in there anyway,:p
Regarding treating a Mac as a throwaway: let me introduce you to the used Mac market. It's outrageously overpriced, ostensibly because Macs obsolete more slowly, so you don't need to trash or upgrade, just trade up. I hate computer/car metaphors, but in this case, resale value of a Mac really is like that of a Honda. Often the price of upgrading is more than selling your old machine and buying a new one, if you sell at the right time (18 months or so, I can't remember the metric).
The choice to use Macs is typically because either they have always used Macs or that is what they were trained on.
Um. The choice to use Macs in the 2-D graphics industry STILL has much to do with colour management, automated workflow (think applescript), ROI, and compatibility, not just maintaining an ongoing investment in training, software, and hardware. And in 2-D motion graphics and video, it's similar, though you also have some drool-worthy Mac-only software in that niche. I guess you don't talk business with pixel pushers much, eh?
I would be quite all right on a part time salary, but I would feel silly telling people I work part time so I can work on my hobbies.
Thank you for illustrating my point. Essentially, you are saying that there is enormous social pressure to work for the interests of others instead of yourself. Somehow, your 'hobby' interests are seen as non-economic, and therefore frivolous--never mind that that's where most entrepeneurs start. You need to be putting yourself into a position of subservience, i.e. a waged job, in order to be legitimate.
This is the root of a power imbalance, especially since the typical american workplace is highly hierarchical, and much of the typical profit comes from paying you less than you make for the company. No-one in particular is forcing you to do that, however, so it is clearly a signal of ideology at work. Where there's ideology, there's an embarassing power differential, as a rule.
one of the most significant predictors of health is the gap between rich and poor. The larger this gap, the worse the health of both groups.
If I remember correctly, it isn't so much the gap of wealth as power that was named a significant determinant of health in the various studies mentioned. Power in the workplace, in particular, is a key factor, as much as one's sense of power in the overall society.
While it seems easy to say money=power, it's always much more complicated than that, though Americans seem to have worked hard to reduce things to that. Power can be something simple like saying "I'm going to take lunch at two to do some banking."
Mainly, power is always relative. I remember being more shocked by poverty in New York City than in Calcutta: a constant flow of limos and mercedes past cardboard homes is so much more repugnant.
Such an organization is based on coercion and resignation. More egalitarian societies do not engender the negative emotions needed to sustain a hierarchy.
Yes, and Amerikkka has a legacy of incredible racism that just won't go away. The pain and guilt of slavery are still a huge part of the American semi-consciousness. Race is just in your face. I was working with a school in Toronto that counted 80 different ethnicities in one group; the equivalent sized group in a Detroit school reduced their ethnicity to three: White, Black, Latino. I mean, WTF? No wonder people are stressed.
It's fairly common, actually -- Richard Nixon even appeared on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in"
You know, I'm actually old enough to remember that? As a rerun in the 70's, mind you.
But I have two questions for you: 1) does this common activity actually open the politicians up to self-immolation on the pyre of humour, or do they just have cameos? 2) do you really think referring to one notable event 38 years ago--before most readers' birth--really convinces anyone that it's a common event?
Who'da thunk it? Here I was, smug that Monty Python exemplified very british values like self-mockery, and that the canadian export of comedians was because we're always trying to make up for coming last, and then americans go and prove that excessive blind jingoistic patriotism doesn't exclude a little poke in one's own eye now and then.
Really! I've been saying that one thing that sets Canada apart from our important southern neighbOUrs is that we regularly have our leaders immolate themselves on the pyre of national comedy television, and you'll not see something like that in the land of the brave. I mean, it isn't entirely a hair shirt kind of penance that GW did, since it was an elite gathering for the Gang, and not explicitly a guest appearance at one's own national skewering, like Chretien letting Rick Mercer put extra pepper on his burger (Jean once commented on the pepper sprayings at APEC that he just liked it on his steak).
Giving Colbert the lectern without a trap door, and doing the mumbling chimp routine with his doppleganger, that really took cojones. I haven't had that much political fun since Mary Walsh got Chretien to whack her with a golf club, in his own office.
"By the way Mr. President, thanks for agreeing to be on my show" --one of the jokes. I mean why not? It's not like he doesn't have time. The guy gets more holidays than a perfesser.
For those of you having trouble understanding how this case is more about leaking private information than it is about protecting free speech, just think of it in terms of kindergarten ethics.
You don't have a right to gossip; in fact you have a responsibility to refrain from it when it hurts others. Gossip is meddling and a breach of trust.
On the other hand, when the topic at hand is about a real risk, and of concern to the person you're talking to, then it isn't gossip, it's whistleblowing. In that case, it's your responsibility to make sure the right people know about the risk. It's really about making a good decision in order to protect people from harm.
The world has a surplus of gossips and a shortage of whistleblowers. Which one are you, at this moment?
The molluscs shall inherit the Earth.
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It seems that the central-brained creature in TFA would, in most practical terms, resemble a mollusk. However, on this planet, invertebrates aren't the creatures that developed sentience...
You could be right, but we don't know for sure. It depends on how one defines sentience, and what we discover as we explore the oceans, as we're just beginning to do.
The case could be made that the mollusc body plan is the most successful on the planet. Squid, for instance, out-mass pretty much all other animals, in an astonishing variety of ecological niches (okay, not sure about krill... any biologists care to refresh my memory?). Molluscs can be found in just about any part of the earth.
As far as sentience goes, if humans crap out and extinct ourselves, my vote for the next evolutionary chance at the reign of intelligence would be for the cephalopods. They're adaptable, have a proven problem-solving intelligence, are highly communicative in ways we're just beginning to understand, have excellent eyesight, and octopuses in particular are highly dextrous.
Don't underestimate the mighty mollusc.
Re:I actually agree with the CRIA on something..
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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Why the hell should I be paying a private (music) copying levy for a CD-R that I buy which will never contain any music?
Being over 40 and canadian, I used to make compilation tapes from my own collection of vinyl, friends and library lendings occasionally, and kept it to a useful 'fair use' minimum, party mixes, road tapes, etc.
Then in the late 90's I started backing up data to CD-R, and discovered the levy, which pissed me off. But I no longer felt like dubbing off of friends was a fair use issue, it was a justice issue. If I must pay for dubbing, then not dubbing is being ripped off.
Now I make sure that about 5 CD's out of every stack of 50 is letting me get my money's worth and exercising my copyright rights. Downloading P2P content is a chore, so I prrefer borrowing friends' CD's.
I am not a significant consumer of music, normally. I buy CD's from friend artists and occasionally when I want something fresh--music isn't an identity thing or compulsion. In other words, the levy has made me into a regular compatriot of the pirates. Arrrr!
Good point! They're both greedy, overconsuming, borg-like, repressive, agressive, corrupt powermongering nation-states.
Oh, c'mon, this is too easy.
So try something difficult: find a just model for social organization that respects some basic malthusian ecological premises, and work from it. I don't think Denmark or New Zealand will really work, either. The problems are endemic, it just gets worse as you scale up.
many humans seem not to have this capability for analytical thought you would like to teach. I'm not sure whether its been beaten out of kids by their brainless parents, or whether they were born that way, but a large proportion of the current adult population really can't think analytically at all.
What do you expect? Nearly everyone around us is a product of a system that is designed to suppress and misalign critical thinking and dissent, including the teachers. Does a fish know it's in the water? In other words, I think it's educamated out of us.
Frederick W. Taylor is one of the architects of the modern school system, along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Morgan. 2+2=WillingWorkers.
Add to that the incredible conditioning and propaganda tool that is television and its advertising.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
-John Taylor Gatto
Re:IE and Firefox only for now
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Google Calendar
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for what it's worth, "anyways" is dialectic English, common in Canada at least. I used to have to make a conscious effort not to say it. Heck, I know people from my neck of the woods who say "anywheres" too!
Uh, while yer at this grammar thing, eh, "dialectic" refers to philosophical discussions, not common idiom. Anyways, the average canuck does engage in a kind of philosophical discussion daily, such as "What the hell's wrong with the Oilers, anyways?" Not to, like, stereotype or anything, eh.
Does anyone remember Frank Herbert's book "The White Plague"?
SPOILER alert
Yeah, I read that about a month ago. Not one of his best, but compelling. It has some thin psychological premises (pharmaceutical scientist driven mad with grief over the IRA bombing of his family becomes evil genius) and the science is pretty sketchy, even to a lay lumpen like me. Most of the book is taken up by Herbert's typical meditations on power and deception and violence as a way of life, but this time he goes on and on and on about the bloody heritage of the Irish and how maudlin the culture is.
What interested me is the premise that a disease that takes out women brings out the worst in men, and the way he dealt with that. Not a feminist book, more a pessimist book. Global martial law, warlords, distrust and panicked sterilization of whole regions. Yay Frank, people are screwed up, we know already. Most of the political manoevering is over how to use the knowledge of the elusive cure as a further bioweapon. The scientists stage a kind of end-run around the politicians with the cure. In the end, garage start-up bioweapons capability creates a kind of detente.
building roads and sewers is a big jump from planning social engineering
OK, wait. Not really a big jump, just further along in the continuum.
For instance, the road network of north america, its malls and suburbs and lack of other means of travel, is an enormous undertaking of social engineeering. Likewise, sewers work in conjunction with health education.
To "discourage" belief in Intelligent Design is an act of social engineering - controling education, media, creating propoganda, etc.
Likewise, ignoring it would be too. Education is the very wellspring of ideological conditioning, and a battleground, like it or not. ID has a socio-political purpose that proposes to emphasize a set of morals along with its cosmological assertions. It places itself, unfortunately, squarely in the territory of debate around legislating morality, and thus invokes policy decisions down the road. I should hope that policy makers have some reasonable information about what's going on out there when they face these decisions.
For me, I like the active plurality that Canadian society is moving towards. We don't melt together, we unite and remain distinct, in the spirit of a progressive neighbourliness; at least that's the principle, and it might just work. Morality laws and monocultural theocracy interfere with this, so research like this could be important to assess whether an educational policy (or lack of) results in propaganda and suppression or not.
And that's what my point is- getting you to see life from another point of view.
*Sigh* yes I know, you're missing my point, it's always easier to see others' blind spots, just like halitosis is something other people have.
You're trying to read too much into a slim comment or two. I've lived in numerous religious communities, been raised catholic, baptised anglican, was joyously pentecostal for two years, I've meditated for weeks under the grandchild of the pipal tree that the buddha gautama came to enlightenment under and been to the week-long kalachakra initiation by the Dalai Lama, participated in daoist firewalking festivals, have walked yatra to the place where the Ganges emerges from the glacier, celebrated Yalda with Parsi friends and Samhain with neo-gaels, lost myself in a sweat lodge, read the Bhagavad Gita and Quran a few times over, tell my kids stories about Anansi and KitchiManitou, had long philosphical discussions with imam, sadhu, jain, daoist, what have you. I don't agree with any of them, but grant them their own personal validity within limits. My masters thesis hung on a critique of reductionism in science and explored supporting multiple simultaneous perceptual filters. You could say that my form of worship embraces all human piety.
Nevertheless, while I move courteously through others' religious traditions, I reserve the right to struggle against the political forces that would reduce this rich harvest to a monocrop.
you don't actually seem to understand the connection between the two- or for that matter the true purpose behind fatherhood.
Now you're bandying about absolutes and stooping to ad hominems. Which of the many true purposes? I'm a successful parent, and see my role through more facets than an uncut gem. So I guess I should go make them lunch...
Just as evolution has also been forced on people using taboo...science does this just as effectively as fundamentalist christianity does- in other words not very well.
Well, I agree with you in principle, but not in degree. You're comparing feathers and lead, and I think there are more honest scientists than there are honest preachers. An afghani mujahedeen once convinced me that there are more buddhists in the world than any other religion, because they are generally honest about it, while followers of other faiths mostly fudge it or fail to understand their own worship. I still somewhat agree. See my previous post about 'good enough' myths -- skepticism will not only make a better concrete, but a better set of laws.
Allowing control over other people's lives-
You seem to be conflating what happens in the demonstrably enormous cosmos with our puny social arrangements, and this ideological blind-spot is precisely what I'm concerned about. It's a sleight-of-mind that's used to make a human story appear to be a universal law; because we have such deeply imperfect understandings of the astonishingly complex physical cosmos and the perhaps even more astonishingly complex human condition, they're functionally equivalent. Not! I mean, go ahead and speculate and regulate your own life, but don't impose morality based on that blind-spot.
never forget that it's just a story- just a bigger model describing exactly the same thing.
I may be one of the most relativist people you'll meet in daily interactions with others, yet I think you're making the mountains into a plain. Things just aren't that equal! Water gets you wet, fire burns you, and some strange things happen in between, but one has to be practical and get on with cooking, which means respecting everyday lay chemistry. In this respect, the buddhists and daoists have some pretty good suggestions, and excessively relativist arguments such as the one you seem to be glibly tossing off would benefit from them.
Who is Quinn? Is that that Ishmael stuff?
[It's a pretty big electromagnetic spectrum, and we only see a wee slice. Just sayin.] -- And that, in short, is the end re
Wouldn't it be better if my life WAS NOT impacted by government and bureaurcratic policy decisions?
I'm guessing you're being a bit glib. Obviously, too much policy is a burden, but if you want to live in cities, with stock exchanges, transportation hubs, massive infrastructure projects, and social checks and balances, well then, no, society-wide policy is simply unavoidable.
Not that I'm apologizing for the kleptocrats, or agree with the way we go about policy. Just saying that as soon as you have a road between communities, you invoke policy decisions, and it escalates from there. Even if we were to smash the state and take up municipal libertarianism, with autonomy at the truly local level, we'd still have to appoint people willing to make these choices.
I think what you're really saying is that it would be better if those inevitable policy decisions were so good that you didn't notice them, because they coincide with your wishes. Things like, you know, painting lines on roads, or ensuring that crib paint isn't full of lead.
Slashdot Mirror
If you knew that someone with a secure market position was going to come along and willy-nilly copy whatever you do that rocks, and there isn't anything that you can do about it (legal options have been exhausted and public opinion doesn't care), then what would you do? I say putting on a wry face, taking the proud underdog position (i.e. pointed teasing is allowed), and keeping the good stuff secret as long as possible, are justifiable tactics. If Apple were in the superior market position and poking fun at their poorer competitors, that would classify as smug. That's underdog politics, using unspoken public rules.
It isn't really schizo, it's just complex. They are both competitors and co-dependent. MS has been trying to outright squash Quicktime etc. for a decade, and plays by dirty, sleazy rules. Windows gets sold along with legitimate installs of BootCamp. MBU is the biggest Mac developer outside of Apple, and profitable.
For what I do, I often find Windows is sorely lacking in decent software. If you think BootCamp is mainly about games, well, you are blinded by your own obsessive niche. It's about a secure feeling, and using a mac at work for that unavoidable in-house software, etc.
Absolutely. :-)
Really, what we mean by silence is "below the limit of sensitivity." It's all about resting the apparatus in question. And, regarding the Planck frontier: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can't measure it, doesn't mean it's not...
Silence is a sorely understudied aspect of communication, in general. It's such a fundamental part of everyday communication, yet little research like this is published.
What Magnasco et al. have done is to move our data processing closer to the kind of predictive observation we think we do with our ears. For instance, the ear habituates to sounds that don't fluctuate much, like that computer fan--they aren't as loud and bothersome after a while. But you notice when the fridge stops. Our hearing is all about dynamic change, and relative silences pattern everything.
So, good on the researchers for tapping into this. I like this quote:
Basically, they're hinting that auditory processing uses a kind of predictive processing and compression to work quickly. Considering that hearing is basically sloshing fluid tickling tiny hairs, with a couple of transductions in there, it is amazingly fast. Another great thing about this research: using spatial representation for a spatial sense.
Really. And just how big a threat do you think these folks are to us? That is to say, where does the probability of being killed by an Islamic fanatic rank against the probability of being killed by automobile accident, drowning, lightning, snakebite, heart attack, or cancer? This terrorist business has been blown waaaaay out of proportion.
What? I thought the GP was referring to cellphone chattering commuting SUV suburbanites, the real daily threat to most of us.
Panther is really necessary on these machines, due to the 800x600 display--Expose is a lifesaver. If there's one mod I'd like to do to the old 366 firewire machine I still use for mobile stuff, it would be changing the screen to 1024X768. Sure, it looks like a purse/toiletseat, but you can throw it, burn it, kick it, run over it with the car, and it won't die, or even need a reboot, and it renders Final Cut Pro projects just fine, when it isn't surfing or playing kid's games in Classic. Six years old and counting.
You, sir, and your fellow slashdotters, are representative of the only paltry, disempowered, cranky and nearly ineffective oversight we have left. When a trillion are spent on the military, 25 times more than Russia alone, many billions of that going into 'black' projects that even the president isn't allowed to know about; when there are over 700 military bases on foreign soil and no admission of imperial designs; when 'the Brotherhood' operates in the open, yet no-one really knows about them; when the PNAC is honest about their designs, and now has power but there isn't panic; then you know that complaining about things is of little use, however necessary.
Not to be a pessimist, or anything. There is a groundswell of dissent. But few, if any, really can grasp the entirety of global geopolitics, and just how many long-running unjust plans are well under way.
Zbigniw Brzezinski is one of those in the know, like Kissinger: "as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."
You have an opportunity to muck about in a different way with the latest appliance-style Macs. The form-factor of the iMac or the mini is hostile to internal fiddling. However, they're great for things like case-mods or built-in installations, especially the mini.
Really, part of what you're buying when you get a Mac is the great case and integrated engineering. Not perfect, mind you, just well-done. If you want to mess with the basic hardware components, well, there are a few options, but it only makes sense with older towers, do you really want to go into a somewhat justifiably expensive new dual-G5 water-cooled tower with multiple independent fan systems and screw with it?
That said, I've upgraded the hell out of some older all-in-one seemingly un-upgradeable Macs, like old iMacs etc. Not really worth it, in the end, other than the tinkering fun. It's more fun messing with the software side of things, on Macs; since you can now run most of the software on the planet, there are endless options.
I'm a heavy gamer so I tend to look at the PC market first. Maybe with Windows on the Mac I can switch?
You can run windows on a mac, sure, but if you're the bleeding-edge type, you'll always be disappointed in gaming on a Mac. They are, by design, aimed at a different demographic: the average consumer or the workflow-intensive media producer. I'm guessing the next generation of towers will be a very different story, you may want to wait for them.
PC users often don't realize that the used Mac market is expensive. Macs simply hold their value much more than x86 boxes. This is due to supply and demand, in part, but also because Macs really are, on average, slightly slower to sink into obsolescence. For instance, I have a six year-old low-end iBook 366MHz laptop that has built-in firewire and still works adequately as a very basic mobile video editing station, running the latest OS. The same $350 would buy you a faster, newer PC laptop with a better screen, but not necessarily one that is as capable or durable.
The economics are in favour of simply buying a new(er) machine; subtracting the gains from selling on the used market generally nets a better performer than replacing components.
Well, there was the ultra-long torx wrench and case-cracker combo, but that was more than 15 years ago...
I guess you're thinking of the Mini, which needs a spatula-style implement to spread the case snaps out to lift the shell off. No big deal really, just a factor of having a snug, small case with no obvious screws, a trade-off for nifty appliance-like design features. Given how easy it is to get into the iMac, I don't think Apple's particularly hostile to you getting in there. If you need to, you can. If you can't go to a support website, you shouldn't be in there anyway, :p
Regarding treating a Mac as a throwaway: let me introduce you to the used Mac market. It's outrageously overpriced, ostensibly because Macs obsolete more slowly, so you don't need to trash or upgrade, just trade up. I hate computer/car metaphors, but in this case, resale value of a Mac really is like that of a Honda. Often the price of upgrading is more than selling your old machine and buying a new one, if you sell at the right time (18 months or so, I can't remember the metric).
Um. The choice to use Macs in the 2-D graphics industry STILL has much to do with colour management, automated workflow (think applescript), ROI, and compatibility, not just maintaining an ongoing investment in training, software, and hardware. And in 2-D motion graphics and video, it's similar, though you also have some drool-worthy Mac-only software in that niche. I guess you don't talk business with pixel pushers much, eh?
Thank you for illustrating my point. Essentially, you are saying that there is enormous social pressure to work for the interests of others instead of yourself. Somehow, your 'hobby' interests are seen as non-economic, and therefore frivolous--never mind that that's where most entrepeneurs start. You need to be putting yourself into a position of subservience, i.e. a waged job, in order to be legitimate.
This is the root of a power imbalance, especially since the typical american workplace is highly hierarchical, and much of the typical profit comes from paying you less than you make for the company. No-one in particular is forcing you to do that, however, so it is clearly a signal of ideology at work. Where there's ideology, there's an embarassing power differential, as a rule.
If I remember correctly, it isn't so much the gap of wealth as power that was named a significant determinant of health in the various studies mentioned. Power in the workplace, in particular, is a key factor, as much as one's sense of power in the overall society.
While it seems easy to say money=power, it's always much more complicated than that, though Americans seem to have worked hard to reduce things to that. Power can be something simple like saying "I'm going to take lunch at two to do some banking."
Mainly, power is always relative. I remember being more shocked by poverty in New York City than in Calcutta: a constant flow of limos and mercedes past cardboard homes is so much more repugnant.
Such an organization is based on coercion and resignation. More egalitarian societies do not engender the negative emotions needed to sustain a hierarchy.
Yes, and Amerikkka has a legacy of incredible racism that just won't go away. The pain and guilt of slavery are still a huge part of the American semi-consciousness. Race is just in your face. I was working with a school in Toronto that counted 80 different ethnicities in one group; the equivalent sized group in a Detroit school reduced their ethnicity to three: White, Black, Latino. I mean, WTF? No wonder people are stressed.
You know, I'm actually old enough to remember that? As a rerun in the 70's, mind you.
But I have two questions for you: 1) does this common activity actually open the politicians up to self-immolation on the pyre of humour, or do they just have cameos? 2) do you really think referring to one notable event 38 years ago--before most readers' birth--really convinces anyone that it's a common event?
Really! I've been saying that one thing that sets Canada apart from our important southern neighbOUrs is that we regularly have our leaders immolate themselves on the pyre of national comedy television, and you'll not see something like that in the land of the brave. I mean, it isn't entirely a hair shirt kind of penance that GW did, since it was an elite gathering for the Gang, and not explicitly a guest appearance at one's own national skewering, like Chretien letting Rick Mercer put extra pepper on his burger (Jean once commented on the pepper sprayings at APEC that he just liked it on his steak).
Giving Colbert the lectern without a trap door, and doing the mumbling chimp routine with his doppleganger, that really took cojones. I haven't had that much political fun since Mary Walsh got Chretien to whack her with a golf club, in his own office.
"By the way Mr. President, thanks for agreeing to be on my show" --one of the jokes. I mean why not? It's not like he doesn't have time. The guy gets more holidays than a perfesser.
You don't have a right to gossip; in fact you have a responsibility to refrain from it when it hurts others. Gossip is meddling and a breach of trust.
On the other hand, when the topic at hand is about a real risk, and of concern to the person you're talking to, then it isn't gossip, it's whistleblowing. In that case, it's your responsibility to make sure the right people know about the risk. It's really about making a good decision in order to protect people from harm.
The world has a surplus of gossips and a shortage of whistleblowers. Which one are you, at this moment?
You could be right, but we don't know for sure. It depends on how one defines sentience, and what we discover as we explore the oceans, as we're just beginning to do.
The case could be made that the mollusc body plan is the most successful on the planet. Squid, for instance, out-mass pretty much all other animals, in an astonishing variety of ecological niches (okay, not sure about krill... any biologists care to refresh my memory?). Molluscs can be found in just about any part of the earth.
As far as sentience goes, if humans crap out and extinct ourselves, my vote for the next evolutionary chance at the reign of intelligence would be for the cephalopods. They're adaptable, have a proven problem-solving intelligence, are highly communicative in ways we're just beginning to understand, have excellent eyesight, and octopuses in particular are highly dextrous.
Don't underestimate the mighty mollusc.
Being over 40 and canadian, I used to make compilation tapes from my own collection of vinyl, friends and library lendings occasionally, and kept it to a useful 'fair use' minimum, party mixes, road tapes, etc.
Then in the late 90's I started backing up data to CD-R, and discovered the levy, which pissed me off. But I no longer felt like dubbing off of friends was a fair use issue, it was a justice issue. If I must pay for dubbing, then not dubbing is being ripped off.
Now I make sure that about 5 CD's out of every stack of 50 is letting me get my money's worth and exercising my copyright rights. Downloading P2P content is a chore, so I prrefer borrowing friends' CD's.
I am not a significant consumer of music, normally. I buy CD's from friend artists and occasionally when I want something fresh--music isn't an identity thing or compulsion. In other words, the levy has made me into a regular compatriot of the pirates. Arrrr!
Good point! They're both greedy, overconsuming, borg-like, repressive, agressive, corrupt powermongering nation-states.
Oh, c'mon, this is too easy.
So try something difficult: find a just model for social organization that respects some basic malthusian ecological premises, and work from it. I don't think Denmark or New Zealand will really work, either. The problems are endemic, it just gets worse as you scale up.
What do you expect? Nearly everyone around us is a product of a system that is designed to suppress and misalign critical thinking and dissent, including the teachers. Does a fish know it's in the water? In other words, I think it's educamated out of us.
Frederick W. Taylor is one of the architects of the modern school system, along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Morgan. 2+2=WillingWorkers.
Add to that the incredible conditioning and propaganda tool that is television and its advertising.
Uh, while yer at this grammar thing, eh, "dialectic" refers to philosophical discussions, not common idiom. Anyways, the average canuck does engage in a kind of philosophical discussion daily, such as "What the hell's wrong with the Oilers, anyways?" Not to, like, stereotype or anything, eh.
SPOILER alert
Yeah, I read that about a month ago. Not one of his best, but compelling. It has some thin psychological premises (pharmaceutical scientist driven mad with grief over the IRA bombing of his family becomes evil genius) and the science is pretty sketchy, even to a lay lumpen like me. Most of the book is taken up by Herbert's typical meditations on power and deception and violence as a way of life, but this time he goes on and on and on about the bloody heritage of the Irish and how maudlin the culture is.
What interested me is the premise that a disease that takes out women brings out the worst in men, and the way he dealt with that. Not a feminist book, more a pessimist book. Global martial law, warlords, distrust and panicked sterilization of whole regions. Yay Frank, people are screwed up, we know already. Most of the political manoevering is over how to use the knowledge of the elusive cure as a further bioweapon. The scientists stage a kind of end-run around the politicians with the cure. In the end, garage start-up bioweapons capability creates a kind of detente.
OK, wait. Not really a big jump, just further along in the continuum.
For instance, the road network of north america, its malls and suburbs and lack of other means of travel, is an enormous undertaking of social engineeering. Likewise, sewers work in conjunction with health education.
To "discourage" belief in Intelligent Design is an act of social engineering - controling education, media, creating propoganda, etc.
Likewise, ignoring it would be too. Education is the very wellspring of ideological conditioning, and a battleground, like it or not. ID has a socio-political purpose that proposes to emphasize a set of morals along with its cosmological assertions. It places itself, unfortunately, squarely in the territory of debate around legislating morality, and thus invokes policy decisions down the road. I should hope that policy makers have some reasonable information about what's going on out there when they face these decisions.
For me, I like the active plurality that Canadian society is moving towards. We don't melt together, we unite and remain distinct, in the spirit of a progressive neighbourliness; at least that's the principle, and it might just work. Morality laws and monocultural theocracy interfere with this, so research like this could be important to assess whether an educational policy (or lack of) results in propaganda and suppression or not.
If it is a careful study, that is.
*Sigh* yes I know, you're missing my point, it's always easier to see others' blind spots, just like halitosis is something other people have.
You're trying to read too much into a slim comment or two. I've lived in numerous religious communities, been raised catholic, baptised anglican, was joyously pentecostal for two years, I've meditated for weeks under the grandchild of the pipal tree that the buddha gautama came to enlightenment under and been to the week-long kalachakra initiation by the Dalai Lama, participated in daoist firewalking festivals, have walked yatra to the place where the Ganges emerges from the glacier, celebrated Yalda with Parsi friends and Samhain with neo-gaels, lost myself in a sweat lodge, read the Bhagavad Gita and Quran a few times over, tell my kids stories about Anansi and KitchiManitou, had long philosphical discussions with imam, sadhu, jain, daoist, what have you. I don't agree with any of them, but grant them their own personal validity within limits. My masters thesis hung on a critique of reductionism in science and explored supporting multiple simultaneous perceptual filters. You could say that my form of worship embraces all human piety.
Nevertheless, while I move courteously through others' religious traditions, I reserve the right to struggle against the political forces that would reduce this rich harvest to a monocrop.
you don't actually seem to understand the connection between the two- or for that matter the true purpose behind fatherhood.
Now you're bandying about absolutes and stooping to ad hominems. Which of the many true purposes? I'm a successful parent, and see my role through more facets than an uncut gem. So I guess I should go make them lunch...
Just as evolution has also been forced on people using taboo...science does this just as effectively as fundamentalist christianity does- in other words not very well.
Well, I agree with you in principle, but not in degree. You're comparing feathers and lead, and I think there are more honest scientists than there are honest preachers. An afghani mujahedeen once convinced me that there are more buddhists in the world than any other religion, because they are generally honest about it, while followers of other faiths mostly fudge it or fail to understand their own worship. I still somewhat agree. See my previous post about 'good enough' myths -- skepticism will not only make a better concrete, but a better set of laws.
Allowing control over other people's lives-
You seem to be conflating what happens in the demonstrably enormous cosmos with our puny social arrangements, and this ideological blind-spot is precisely what I'm concerned about. It's a sleight-of-mind that's used to make a human story appear to be a universal law; because we have such deeply imperfect understandings of the astonishingly complex physical cosmos and the perhaps even more astonishingly complex human condition, they're functionally equivalent. Not! I mean, go ahead and speculate and regulate your own life, but don't impose morality based on that blind-spot.
never forget that it's just a story- just a bigger model describing exactly the same thing.
I may be one of the most relativist people you'll meet in daily interactions with others, yet I think you're making the mountains into a plain. Things just aren't that equal! Water gets you wet, fire burns you, and some strange things happen in between, but one has to be practical and get on with cooking, which means respecting everyday lay chemistry. In this respect, the buddhists and daoists have some pretty good suggestions, and excessively relativist arguments such as the one you seem to be glibly tossing off would benefit from them.
Who is Quinn? Is that that Ishmael stuff?
[It's a pretty big electromagnetic spectrum, and we only see a wee slice. Just sayin.] -- And that, in short, is the end re
I'm guessing you're being a bit glib. Obviously, too much policy is a burden, but if you want to live in cities, with stock exchanges, transportation hubs, massive infrastructure projects, and social checks and balances, well then, no, society-wide policy is simply unavoidable.
Not that I'm apologizing for the kleptocrats, or agree with the way we go about policy. Just saying that as soon as you have a road between communities, you invoke policy decisions, and it escalates from there. Even if we were to smash the state and take up municipal libertarianism, with autonomy at the truly local level, we'd still have to appoint people willing to make these choices.
I think what you're really saying is that it would be better if those inevitable policy decisions were so good that you didn't notice them, because they coincide with your wishes. Things like, you know, painting lines on roads, or ensuring that crib paint isn't full of lead.