Re:The first ever "bargain" Mac
on
Apple Revises eMac
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This box is not designed for power users or even 'prosumer' high-end home users.
True, but that's consumerism for you. There's a high-productivity video production studio downstairs from me, and they bought an eMac just to develop interfaces and do preliminary graphics work, plus After Effects rendering on the side.
Considering a lot of power users in the video trades are still using their tricked-out early G4's (it ain't broke, don't fix it--I even know an audio project-studio still doing their main recording and mixing on a Blue&white G3), a compact 1+GHz G4 with OS X and a near graphics-grade screen slots into the workflow just fine thankyouverymuch.
I remember walking around and enjoying seeing everyone hanging out on their front steps, and sharing food.
I also remember imagining a refrigerator-sized fuel-cell generator on every block, so this wouldn't happen (until the hydrogen supply ran out). Then I mentally added various redundancies, like rooftop solar and a windmill. Then I read the paper about the oil wars that continue to broil.
Now I find more handwaving and mistruths and wonder if 10 does the same messy things. ..
System 7 on up to 9.2 wound up with all kinds of scat dribbled throughout the various subdirectories in the system folder, as well as associated files in the application folder -- but only some applications were to blame -- many classic apps are self enclosed and install with a drag'n'drop. OS X improves the ratio somewhat with its bundles, an even greater proportion of apps are install-friendly. Some developers still love to pollute files everywhere (are you listening Adobe?) -- though since we're generally talking about/Library, it isn't as big an issue as the conflicts arising out of the Extensions folder in Classic.
It's all relative, though. Give me the 100,000+ file complexity of OS X with it's well-designed directory structure over a simpler but kludgy Mac OS 9 or Win9x anyday.
"So why not convert to ethanol? It would benefit farmers, certainly. Can be produced locally, etc."
Because our agricultural system is incredibly fuel hungry. Growing food (and industrial crops) requires many gallons/litres of fuel and water per pound of sustenance. It's energy-hungry, and certainly not an efficient way to produce energy (unless you want to replace all those trucks and heavy equipment with 19th century methods).
Ethanol burns relatively cleanly, and takes care of overproduction by farmers, which are it's main attractions. It's a net loss when it comes to fuel, ultimately less efficient than gas.
oil companies are huge, corrupt, and monopolistic. Think Microsoft as an oil company, and that's what we have.
Agribusinesses are arguably worse. They're called the Life Sciences companies, and they're huge and everywhere. Microsoft is a pussy compared with Cargill or Monsanto.
If you've ever had to care for toddlers, the standard social engineering required to maintain peace, sanity, and quiet is to offer three choices:
1. Something you want 2. Something you want and the toddler wants 3. Something not possible
(3) is optional, depending on the time available to demonstrate just how impossible it is. It's a good idea to point out its impossibility beforehand, to CYA and avoid tears.
From that point, you begin to realize that most adults are just toddlers with a thin veneer of civility, so extend from there.
Of course, YMMV. Some toddlers will be way ahead of you.
"When you go to the grocery, do you ask for 'meat', or do you specify species and cut?"
Disingenuous comparison. Most people buy meat/tofu/whatever every week, and watched a caregiver do it as a child. It's a survival skill.
Cars are, for most users, black boxes with basic controls. They don't have to know much to buy one, and to operate one is a regulated activity with minimal skills required.
Operating systems are magical. Shake rattle and dance to make it work, or put in some serious alchemical study. Do you have any concept of just how many hours are required to get a newbie up to speed on something like what tcp/ip is?
I think the best option is to have tons of configurability and modularity hiding two layers down below a stable, best-of-breed set of simple tools/interface. Something that installs itself with a few personal details, and then just keeps working securely with little need to install anything more or update, unless you're a 'power user.'
The best example of this currently is Mac OS X (panther), though Aqua isn't really configurable enough an interface and has some considerable shortcomings still. Out of the box, it is secure enough, ready to go, and productive in a variety of everyday chores for the average newbie. If you're a 'poweruser' then open up a terminal or three and tweak away. Choice is there: with virtualPC I can run any software on nearly any platform except some highly specialized hardware/dongle - specific apps, though many thousands are available natively.
That said, I'm a pluralist and like all the options: but simple, default installs are absolutely necessary as first choice for newbies.
[EG: a close relative has been a management and financier type in IT industries for 20 years, and gets lost very quickly in the desktop metaphor, moving platform to platform is hell: he can grok the technological outlines of remote sensing and laser-ID tagging diamonds, but operating two different laptops is like managing ferrets in a gunny sack. He doesn't have time to dick around with the computer's perceived innards. He's a perennial newbie--and really wants a simplified but capable interface.]
99.9967% of the documents I receive need only be Rich Text Format in order to maintain formatting and readability. Some of the stuff I get that tries to use multiple columns or fields are simply window-painting, not even windowdressing.
What's even worse is that MS claims of compatibility are laughable. I receive documents with nasty font variations, with weird text-box anomalies, and useless graphics that the text won't flow around properly. Then people send me.wpd files that are only meeting minutes, and I'm on a mac that afternoon (Corel killed WP for the mac), and Word can't deal. So I move over to the Win2K box, which means converting to rtf anyway. Plus, Word can't read older formats: 100's of MB of bloatware, and get clippy but I can't read my v5.1a documents?!
Power disparity in the workplace is a big factor. Here we are, we know what is going to work best, what is going to save money, what is going to make people's lives easier, what should be automated and what it a waste of time, and we have PHB's telling us they know best, decisions based on superficials or unneccesary complications, spending based on budget cycles not needs, systems too powerful or too weak. And we shut up and do it, since there are plenty out of work who want your job. Then we have to tiptoe around [L]user egos, baby boomers who fancy themselves technologists but forget how to make a printer the default.
There was a study of "determinants of health" conducted in the early 90's in 5 different industrialized nations, which discovered that power disparity was at least as big a factor on well-being (heart disease, depression etc.) as wealth/poverty or difficulty of job--upper middle managers who felt stifled were worse off than low-income workers with relative independence and greater unfettered responsibilty. Poverty=poor health studies may be weighted wrongly due to these findings: it's not just about money, power on the interpersonal scale counts strongly.
I'd like to see someone try at getting a total cost/benefits analysis out of programs like this. The technology spinoffs are huge, needless to say, and one could consider the benefits of things like international partnerships.
Economics isn't very good at whole-cost accounting, so it would be tough.
Obviously it wouldn't be able to include things like black-box military uses in such an analysis, but some decent estimates (lies, damn lies, and statistics notwithstanding) would be useful fodder.
Yeah, has anyone here played that game? Probably not, it seems to be designed to prey on those subject to a particular brand of newage. My mom sent me a link to this game this morning, and I checked out the setup: three skin resistance and heartrate monitors that slip over fingers.
Not that these don't work, can't say either way, it's probably pretty cool. It just figures that it's aimed at the snake oil market.
Biofeedback based on skin resistance and heartrate variability aren't brainwave monitors, however, they may be more reliable indicators of what's really going on in a head, due to interface.
I call BS. Your questions were intended to mislead and now you are trying to spin it when others responded with facts.
They weren't intended to mislead, but to lead people to investigate how the military leaders in the US were expecting surrender shortly, were trying to find a way to make it culturally easy (basically: "you can keep your emperor"), and perpetuated what are now crimes of war in the interest of experiment (let's see, uranium or plutonium? let's try both) and mass destruction (Grove was disappointed they didn't nail Kyoto because of its larger population being a good test), as well as forcing them to surrender to the US instead of the Soviets. Those are my conclusions based on facts revealed by first-hand accounts of intelligence and strategy at the end of the war: the assertions made by many others in this thread are based on propaganda used to avoid guilt. I just didn't expect people to believe them because of patriotism.
Are you sure you want to use the word "articulated?"
OK haha. But the fact that Bush & Co. can make such statements and not be shouted down by internal political process is why opponents and supporters alike need to be very careful when discussing USA's patriotic paroxysms.
At that time Togo had already sent feelers to the Russians exploring the possiblity of surrender. Japan's resistance was teetering and they were shopping for terms of surrender, so your estimates of their resistance and the resulting deathtoll is doubtful, and doesn't match US military analysts of the time. Deterrence of a competing invading force is no justification for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Please go back and study the statements by Eisenhower, MacArthur, Hoover, Admiral Leahy, John McLoy -- all people in the know about the strategic situation -- on the reasons for using the bombs, and their strongly held beliefs that ending the war expediently didn't require them. Here's an especially telling quote from the guy who wrote the strategic air campaign scenario for that part of the war, Paul Nitze:
The plan I devised was essentially this: Japan was already isolated from the standpoint of ocean shipping. The only remaining means of transportation were the rail network and intercoastal shipping, though our submarines and mines were rapidly eliminating the latter as well. A concentrated air attack on the essential lines of transportation, including railroads and (through the use of the earliest accurately targetable glide bombs, then emerging from development) the Kammon tunnels which connected Honshu with Kyushu, would isolate the Japanese home islands from one another and fragment the enemy's base of operations. I believed that interdiction of the lines of transportation would be sufficiently effective so that additional bombing of urban industrial areas would not be necessary.
While I was working on the new plan of air attack... [I] concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945.
(Quoted from his book From Hiroshima to Glasnost but off the 'net, read this 10 years ago, very interesting read.) Please don't tell me to go back and study until you can refute what these first-hand decision-makers at the time have to say.
Great. Thanks, so you manage to put Open Source and anti-American in a sentence. That's the last thing that OSS needs: "OSS developed by terrorists". Stop splitting the world into American and anti-American; it's not that simple, and surely the number of people who sit that and go "I'm going to develop this cool software because I hate America" must be tiny. Most of them are doing it for the glory.
Argh! This is a premium example of why so many who do not hate the USA or its citizens are 'anti-American' -- it's that "yer with us or agin' us" attitude that comes off as so peurile, and it makes the electorate seem bellicose and dangerous. There is the kneejerk belief that comes up: if you aren't waving stars 'n stripes(TM), you're a potential enemy, or divisive. It's an emotional response that goes against the grain of the Constitution, but never mind hypocrisy.
Anti-american != terrorist, okay? Terrorists are extremely rare; opponents to the strategic geopolitics of the USA are globally in the majority. Anti-american is a catch-all phrase that incorporates many concepts, including resistance to: economic/cultural expansion/neo-colonialism, foreign policy apparently as cynical as imperial Rome, a populace ignorant of or uncaring of the secrets and excesses of its leaders, and of course more than half the world's military expenditures being used to enforce dubious (Dubyous?) goals, etc. etc.
Patriotic blindness to the validity of external criticisms aside, the US government and its intelligence agencies provide no reason for other nations and their industries to trust software produced in the USA. Don't forget that most espionage is nationalistic industrial intelligence.
Let us not forget the recent example of China: why should any government implement critical installations of software that may have been compromised by the NSA and its affiliates? If you can't see the source, you have no assurance of code integrity. What good is strong crypto if your info is intercepted before it's encoded?
Go with an entirely open-source solution, and you can make sure there are no built-in trojans, watchers-at-the-gate, or other boojums lurking behind the desktop.
Many of the responses to my questions were as vehemently defensive as I predicted, though I was not trolling, I truly want to know the answer to these questions -- though I don't expect to find them on/.
Disclaimer: I am not "swallowing the left-wing crap you are fed" (you flaming donut) -- I am truly skeptical of history written by victors, as well as that written by the victors' critics who do not have the full story due to secrecy, so I am not "implying conclusions." Skepticism is the fundament of an open mind. I believe we can't really answer these questions since the picture is larger and far more complex (and in some cases, more privately interpersonal) than we can grasp with the available materials.
My line of questioning is admittedly somewhat leading, since I think it's more important to provoke discussion on the ethics of the situation in terms of what were current standards and in terms of what is now acceptable, than it is to argue about things we don't have enough information about. My real point: I'm tired of patriotic jingoism spouted through the standard but impoverished versions of history, which are then used to obscure current ethical problems, like who should be nuked, or have nukes.
I agree with those who point out that firebombing was commonplace; Dresden was as much a catastrophe to those on the ground as Nagasaki. And, I think that Nanking (yes I'm familiar with this horror) was worse than either, on par with Kampuchea. I even accept the assertion (hinted at in this thread but not stated) that the bombings shook Nippon into a more beneficial cultural framework.
The victors did horrific things too. They may or may not have been morally justified then, I reserve judgement. However, these kinds of mass destructions aren't morally justifiable now, regardless of the behaviour of the 'other side.'
Some posters propose that the strategic movement of Soviet troops precipitated some pretty drastic moves on the Pacific theatre chess board, culminating in the Bombs. This makes lots of sense given what info we have, though I doubt the Soviets fully understood the janus-nature of bushido on-and-off the home islands, so might have taken much longer to subjugate Nippon than predicted.
Don't assume that the history you get about top-secret war projects (like how they start and end) is anything like disclosure; none of the posters point out that the US was an imperial power in imperial Nippon's back yard, and that confrontation was inevitable.
The general populace of the USA haven't owned up to their own atrocities, or do a bad job justifying them, yet love to yell about others'; so any arguments about Japanese atrocities with respect to american atrocities are disingenuous. War is hell. What does that have to do with honour? Well, lots, in theory.
Most 'Americans' naturalize and universalize their own cultural responses to international political situations, with great consistency, and get very huffy when others question them, especially the contradictions. This is astonishingly consistent in an ethnically diverse land founded on slavery and cheap imported labour, but there it is. Something endemic to 'imperial' centres, I think. Kudos to those who don't go with the flow.
I think that the combination of the world's largest stockpiles of WMD's, biological/chem weapons, and high-tech mercenary military, with the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth nationalism (that is actually quite muted on/. in comparison to US society at large), is potentially as dangerous and berserk as any political entity in history. Well, worse, I guess, since nuclear holocaust has been just around the next corner since my birth.
Questions for you to research (you wouldn't believe my conclusions anyway, nor should you):
Was the attack really sneak, and intended to be so? Did the US also draw Japan into war using pressure around oil and rubber resources, as well as deception?
Did attacking a military base require revenge in the form of destroying cities? (Your suggestion is that it did.)
Given that Hirohito was actually offered a realistic opportunity to surrender, would it have been possible for him given internal politics? If not, did the US military know that?
Was it necessary to detonate over a city? Why not out past Tokyo harbour, in full view? Consider it a warning shot, factor in cultural elements.
Given that one is convinced that nuking a city was necessary, was it necessary to nuke a second city?
Was there intent and significant motivation to conduct these detonations as experiments?
I suggest that your research not focus on reportage coming out of the fog of war or patriotism, but on declassified documents and their analyses by scholars.
Good luck. (One might then apply the results of above questions to the people of Bikini, the Aleuts, the Navaho, etc., including those the French, English, and Russians experimented on, just for a bigger picture.)
Jobs has lots of credibility with portions of different business sectors and is a perennial tech design leader to a lot of hardware manufacturers, a tiny bit of research would've told you this. Many of us think he's a just a megalomaniac salesman with some pretty good ideas, but he has some interesting compensation happening for a CEO, and the tech visionary thing, well, chances are you're working on a machine that this guy with no cred influenced strongly.
And VirginiaTech didn't get the educational discount initially--which isn't that much for Apple hardware anyway. That's an easy bit of research too. It's hard to reach the google field from high up on your perch, eh LordK?
Well, I'm being flamed by a frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacist, so I guess that's a good thing, but anyway:
Then you really don't know what fascism is. You are stuck in the materialistic world of the present, where the cult of economics defines our lives. Fascism has very little to do with economics, and in fact seeks to transcend that inherently inhuman pseudoscience.
Do you mean fascism as practiced by its ideological architects, or by various subsects of skinheads, or by hairy backcountry double-barreled bunker-builders in Idaho, or by suit-wearing middle-aged guys with square rimless glasses and hair parted to one side? Or contemporary european ultra-nationalists? Or as discussed in political science, sociology, history, etc? Or do you mean your particular self-aggrandizing version of it? I guess you don't mean the version referred to in common parlance by/. readers.
I most certainly am ignorant of your particular self-aggrandizing version. That's OK, though, no need to elaborate, I'm satisfied with my research on the other versions to date.
Well, since we have clearly established your ignorance....
Funny, I didn't read any facts, citations, references, examples, analysis, or even a whit of measured discourse in your post. All you established were the flecks of foam on your chin.
You are ignorant of the definition of the word "to reign".
Pfft, dude, uncross your eyes. Wordplay requires the intentional and shared inversion of meanings; I even gave you a clue by using the word "irony," but as the saying goes, 'irony is wasted on the..." oh nevermind. 'Jumbo shrimp' and 'anarchy reigns' are in the category of humour known as oxymora. Look it up, golem.
anarchy, the abscence [sic] of a governmenal system
That definition sucks in this context. Try "self-governing organization without control by a central state" and by your own standards you would be more accurate. Most anarchists who are serious about political reorganization are actually more like libertarian municipalists.
Your assertion that economics and fascism have little to do with each other is absurd in practise, since the self-avowed fascists who achieved power always did so with close collaboration by industrialists and banks, and so results in a hegemony by murderous brutes and capitalist plutocrats. But I'm guessing that you aren't referring to historical record, but something else. By the way, since you're concerned about the definition of fascism, shall we invite an authority to weigh in on the matter? I'm sure you're familiar with the source material...
A National Socialist state must begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape. . ..
It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children . . ..
And that, I think, invokes Godwin's Law, which means the thread is dead, and I lost the argument by default. Oh well.
Well, even though I'm here often, I'm not a bona fide nerd, as you can tell from my random sample of jacket pocketses:
* a toque (I'm canadian eh) * bus transfer and taxi receipt from 13 months ago * pen cap * $5 imitation multitool held shut by rubber bands * sunglasses, no case, surprisingly unscratched * one (1) toddler's sock * fingerless gloves, grubby * more rubber bands * zippo lighter, pouch of Drum tobacco, rollies * many unlabelled keys on a long chain * a slim digital watch sans straps * pocket version of sun-tzu * scrap paper, grubby * ancient crumpled receipts beyond deciphering * a pay-as-you-go Nokia that I rebel against (so it's been out of funds the last 2 weeks) * one (1) strike-anywhere wooden match * a short length of rope for practising knots
The range between the poor and rich is huge in India. But you would be on the higher end, so I don't think you'd have to worry.
That's interesting. Living on the high end of an extreme disparity scale was very distressing to me, since I didn't want to do what was required for sanity, which was to build a rationale and learn to ignore the suffering around me as much as possible.
Being part of a gross injustice is sh*tty on both sides, once you've stopped joking around and lived it for awhile. Even for those around me who loved being 'high on the hog', the disparity really took the shine off of things.
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True, but that's consumerism for you. There's a high-productivity video production studio downstairs from me, and they bought an eMac just to develop interfaces and do preliminary graphics work, plus After Effects rendering on the side.
Considering a lot of power users in the video trades are still using their tricked-out early G4's (it ain't broke, don't fix it--I even know an audio project-studio still doing their main recording and mixing on a Blue&white G3), a compact 1+GHz G4 with OS X and a near graphics-grade screen slots into the workflow just fine thankyouverymuch.
No I didn't, you insensitive...
I remember walking around and enjoying seeing everyone hanging out on their front steps, and sharing food.
I also remember imagining a refrigerator-sized fuel-cell generator on every block, so this wouldn't happen (until the hydrogen supply ran out). Then I mentally added various redundancies, like rooftop solar and a windmill. Then I read the paper about the oil wars that continue to broil.
System 7 on up to 9.2 wound up with all kinds of scat dribbled throughout the various subdirectories in the system folder, as well as associated files in the application folder -- but only some applications were to blame -- many classic apps are self enclosed and install with a drag'n'drop. OS X improves the ratio somewhat with its bundles, an even greater proportion of apps are install-friendly. Some developers still love to pollute files everywhere (are you listening Adobe?) -- though since we're generally talking about /Library, it isn't as big an issue as the conflicts arising out of the Extensions folder in Classic.
It's all relative, though. Give me the 100,000+ file complexity of OS X with it's well-designed directory structure over a simpler but kludgy Mac OS 9 or Win9x anyday.
Because our agricultural system is incredibly fuel hungry. Growing food (and industrial crops) requires many gallons/litres of fuel and water per pound of sustenance. It's energy-hungry, and certainly not an efficient way to produce energy (unless you want to replace all those trucks and heavy equipment with 19th century methods).
Ethanol burns relatively cleanly, and takes care of overproduction by farmers, which are it's main attractions. It's a net loss when it comes to fuel, ultimately less efficient than gas.
oil companies are huge, corrupt, and monopolistic. Think Microsoft as an oil company, and that's what we have.
Agribusinesses are arguably worse. They're called the Life Sciences companies, and they're huge and everywhere. Microsoft is a pussy compared with Cargill or Monsanto.
If you've ever had to care for toddlers, the standard social engineering required to maintain peace, sanity, and quiet is to offer three choices:
1. Something you want
2. Something you want and the toddler wants
3. Something not possible
(3) is optional, depending on the time available to demonstrate just how impossible it is. It's a good idea to point out its impossibility beforehand, to CYA and avoid tears.
From that point, you begin to realize that most adults are just toddlers with a thin veneer of civility, so extend from there.
Of course, YMMV. Some toddlers will be way ahead of you.
"When you go to the grocery, do you ask for 'meat', or do you specify species and cut?"
Disingenuous comparison. Most people buy meat/tofu/whatever every week, and watched a caregiver do it as a child. It's a survival skill.
Cars are, for most users, black boxes with basic controls. They don't have to know much to buy one, and to operate one is a regulated activity with minimal skills required.
Operating systems are magical. Shake rattle and dance to make it work, or put in some serious alchemical study. Do you have any concept of just how many hours are required to get a newbie up to speed on something like what tcp/ip is?
I think the best option is to have tons of configurability and modularity hiding two layers down below a stable, best-of-breed set of simple tools/interface. Something that installs itself with a few personal details, and then just keeps working securely with little need to install anything more or update, unless you're a 'power user.'
The best example of this currently is Mac OS X (panther), though Aqua isn't really configurable enough an interface and has some considerable shortcomings still. Out of the box, it is secure enough, ready to go, and productive in a variety of everyday chores for the average newbie. If you're a 'poweruser' then open up a terminal or three and tweak away. Choice is there: with virtualPC I can run any software on nearly any platform except some highly specialized hardware/dongle - specific apps, though many thousands are available natively.
That said, I'm a pluralist and like all the options: but simple, default installs are absolutely necessary as first choice for newbies.
[EG: a close relative has been a management and financier type in IT industries for 20 years, and gets lost very quickly in the desktop metaphor, moving platform to platform is hell: he can grok the technological outlines of remote sensing and laser-ID tagging diamonds, but operating two different laptops is like managing ferrets in a gunny sack. He doesn't have time to dick around with the computer's perceived innards. He's a perennial newbie--and really wants a simplified but capable interface.]
[NOT RTFA, just .rtf, eh]
.wpd files that are only meeting minutes, and I'm on a mac that afternoon (Corel killed WP for the mac), and Word can't deal. So I move over to the Win2K box, which means converting to rtf anyway. Plus, Word can't read older formats: 100's of MB of bloatware, and get clippy but I can't read my v5.1a documents?!
99.9967% of the documents I receive need only be Rich Text Format in order to maintain formatting and readability. Some of the stuff I get that tries to use multiple columns or fields are simply window-painting, not even windowdressing.
What's even worse is that MS claims of compatibility are laughable. I receive documents with nasty font variations, with weird text-box anomalies, and useless graphics that the text won't flow around properly. Then people send me
RTF or TXT, or if it must be pretty, PDF please.
>> It appears that bitching and moaning, and taking things for granted,
>> is common in popular spoon-fed TV-enslaved western culture.
>Well said!
Utopia or Oblivion! Smash the [tv] Set! Oh, wait, I'm a videographer.
There is no Spoon [until I put it in with AfterEffects].
Power disparity in the workplace is a big factor. Here we are, we know what is going to work best, what is going to save money, what is going to make people's lives easier, what should be automated and what it a waste of time, and we have PHB's telling us they know best, decisions based on superficials or unneccesary complications, spending based on budget cycles not needs, systems too powerful or too weak. And we shut up and do it, since there are plenty out of work who want your job. Then we have to tiptoe around [L]user egos, baby boomers who fancy themselves technologists but forget how to make a printer the default.
There was a study of "determinants of health" conducted in the early 90's in 5 different industrialized nations, which discovered that power disparity was at least as big a factor on well-being (heart disease, depression etc.) as wealth/poverty or difficulty of job--upper middle managers who felt stifled were worse off than low-income workers with relative independence and greater unfettered responsibilty. Poverty=poor health studies may be weighted wrongly due to these findings: it's not just about money, power on the interpersonal scale counts strongly.
I'd be quite satisfied popping 24TB of RAM into a machine using a part the size of a slim watch battery. I think my grubby paws could handle that.
I'd like to see someone try at getting a total cost/benefits analysis out of programs like this. The technology spinoffs are huge, needless to say, and one could consider the benefits of things like international partnerships.
Economics isn't very good at whole-cost accounting, so it would be tough.
Obviously it wouldn't be able to include things like black-box military uses in such an analysis, but some decent estimates (lies, damn lies, and statistics notwithstanding) would be useful fodder.
The parent flame illustrates all the points of my grandparent post beautifully, thank you.
Yeah, has anyone here played that game? Probably not, it seems to be designed to prey on those subject to a particular brand of newage. My mom sent me a link to this game this morning, and I checked out the setup: three skin resistance and heartrate monitors that slip over fingers.
Not that these don't work, can't say either way, it's probably pretty cool. It just figures that it's aimed at the snake oil market.
Biofeedback based on skin resistance and heartrate variability aren't brainwave monitors, however, they may be more reliable indicators of what's really going on in a head, due to interface.
They weren't intended to mislead, but to lead people to investigate how the military leaders in the US were expecting surrender shortly, were trying to find a way to make it culturally easy (basically: "you can keep your emperor"), and perpetuated what are now crimes of war in the interest of experiment (let's see, uranium or plutonium? let's try both) and mass destruction (Grove was disappointed they didn't nail Kyoto because of its larger population being a good test), as well as forcing them to surrender to the US instead of the Soviets. Those are my conclusions based on facts revealed by first-hand accounts of intelligence and strategy at the end of the war: the assertions made by many others in this thread are based on propaganda used to avoid guilt. I just didn't expect people to believe them because of patriotism.
Are you sure you want to use the word "articulated?"
OK haha. But the fact that Bush & Co. can make such statements and not be shouted down by internal political process is why opponents and supporters alike need to be very careful when discussing USA's patriotic paroxysms.
(Quoted from his book From Hiroshima to Glasnost but off the 'net, read this 10 years ago, very interesting read.) Please don't tell me to go back and study until you can refute what these first-hand decision-makers at the time have to say.
Argh! This is a premium example of why so many who do not hate the USA or its citizens are 'anti-American' -- it's that "yer with us or agin' us" attitude that comes off as so peurile, and it makes the electorate seem bellicose and dangerous. There is the kneejerk belief that comes up: if you aren't waving stars 'n stripes(TM), you're a potential enemy, or divisive. It's an emotional response that goes against the grain of the Constitution, but never mind hypocrisy.
Anti-american != terrorist, okay? Terrorists are extremely rare; opponents to the strategic geopolitics of the USA are globally in the majority. Anti-american is a catch-all phrase that incorporates many concepts, including resistance to: economic/cultural expansion/neo-colonialism, foreign policy apparently as cynical as imperial Rome, a populace ignorant of or uncaring of the secrets and excesses of its leaders, and of course more than half the world's military expenditures being used to enforce dubious (Dubyous?) goals, etc. etc.
Patriotic blindness to the validity of external criticisms aside, the US government and its intelligence agencies provide no reason for other nations and their industries to trust software produced in the USA. Don't forget that most espionage is nationalistic industrial intelligence.
Let us not forget the recent example of China: why should any government implement critical installations of software that may have been compromised by the NSA and its affiliates? If you can't see the source, you have no assurance of code integrity. What good is strong crypto if your info is intercepted before it's encoded?
Go with an entirely open-source solution, and you can make sure there are no built-in trojans, watchers-at-the-gate, or other boojums lurking behind the desktop.
Many of the responses to my questions were as vehemently defensive as I predicted, though I was not trolling, I truly want to know the answer to these questions -- though I don't expect to find them on /.
/. in comparison to US society at large), is potentially as dangerous and berserk as any political entity in history. Well, worse, I guess, since nuclear holocaust has been just around the next corner since my birth.
Disclaimer: I am not "swallowing the left-wing crap you are fed" (you flaming donut) -- I am truly skeptical of history written by victors, as well as that written by the victors' critics who do not have the full story due to secrecy, so I am not "implying conclusions." Skepticism is the fundament of an open mind. I believe we can't really answer these questions since the picture is larger and far more complex (and in some cases, more privately interpersonal) than we can grasp with the available materials.
My line of questioning is admittedly somewhat leading, since I think it's more important to provoke discussion on the ethics of the situation in terms of what were current standards and in terms of what is now acceptable, than it is to argue about things we don't have enough information about. My real point: I'm tired of patriotic jingoism spouted through the standard but impoverished versions of history, which are then used to obscure current ethical problems, like who should be nuked, or have nukes.
I agree with those who point out that firebombing was commonplace; Dresden was as much a catastrophe to those on the ground as Nagasaki. And, I think that Nanking (yes I'm familiar with this horror) was worse than either, on par with Kampuchea. I even accept the assertion (hinted at in this thread but not stated) that the bombings shook Nippon into a more beneficial cultural framework.
The victors did horrific things too. They may or may not have been morally justified then, I reserve judgement. However, these kinds of mass destructions aren't morally justifiable now, regardless of the behaviour of the 'other side.'
Some posters propose that the strategic movement of Soviet troops precipitated some pretty drastic moves on the Pacific theatre chess board, culminating in the Bombs. This makes lots of sense given what info we have, though I doubt the Soviets fully understood the janus-nature of bushido on-and-off the home islands, so might have taken much longer to subjugate Nippon than predicted.
Don't assume that the history you get about top-secret war projects (like how they start and end) is anything like disclosure; none of the posters point out that the US was an imperial power in imperial Nippon's back yard, and that confrontation was inevitable.
The general populace of the USA haven't owned up to their own atrocities, or do a bad job justifying them, yet love to yell about others'; so any arguments about Japanese atrocities with respect to american atrocities are disingenuous. War is hell. What does that have to do with honour? Well, lots, in theory.
Most 'Americans' naturalize and universalize their own cultural responses to international political situations, with great consistency, and get very huffy when others question them, especially the contradictions. This is astonishingly consistent in an ethnically diverse land founded on slavery and cheap imported labour, but there it is. Something endemic to 'imperial' centres, I think. Kudos to those who don't go with the flow.
I think that the combination of the world's largest stockpiles of WMD's, biological/chem weapons, and high-tech mercenary military, with the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth nationalism (that is actually quite muted on
Questions for you to research (you wouldn't believe my conclusions anyway, nor should you):
Was the attack really sneak, and intended to be so? Did the US also draw Japan into war using pressure around oil and rubber resources, as well as deception?
Did attacking a military base require revenge in the form of destroying cities? (Your suggestion is that it did.)
Given that Hirohito was actually offered a realistic opportunity to surrender, would it have been possible for him given internal politics? If not, did the US military know that?
Was it necessary to detonate over a city? Why not out past Tokyo harbour, in full view? Consider it a warning shot, factor in cultural elements.
Given that one is convinced that nuking a city was necessary, was it necessary to nuke a second city?
Was there intent and significant motivation to conduct these detonations as experiments?
I suggest that your research not focus on reportage coming out of the fog of war or patriotism, but on declassified documents and their analyses by scholars.
Good luck. (One might then apply the results of above questions to the people of Bikini, the Aleuts, the Navaho, etc., including those the French, English, and Russians experimented on, just for a bigger picture.)
Jobs has lots of credibility with portions of different business sectors and is a perennial tech design leader to a lot of hardware manufacturers, a tiny bit of research would've told you this. Many of us think he's a just a megalomaniac salesman with some pretty good ideas, but he has some interesting compensation happening for a CEO, and the tech visionary thing, well, chances are you're working on a machine that this guy with no cred influenced strongly.
And VirginiaTech didn't get the educational discount initially--which isn't that much for Apple hardware anyway. That's an easy bit of research too. It's hard to reach the google field from high up on your perch, eh LordK?
Then you really don't know what fascism is. You are stuck in the materialistic world of the present, where the cult of economics defines our lives. Fascism has very little to do with economics, and in fact seeks to transcend that inherently inhuman pseudoscience.
Do you mean fascism as practiced by its ideological architects, or by various subsects of skinheads, or by hairy backcountry double-barreled bunker-builders in Idaho, or by suit-wearing middle-aged guys with square rimless glasses and hair parted to one side? Or contemporary european ultra-nationalists? Or as discussed in political science, sociology, history, etc? Or do you mean your particular self-aggrandizing version of it? I guess you don't mean the version referred to in common parlance by /. readers.
I most certainly am ignorant of your particular self-aggrandizing version. That's OK, though, no need to elaborate, I'm satisfied with my research on the other versions to date.
Well, since we have clearly established your ignorance....
Funny, I didn't read any facts, citations, references, examples, analysis, or even a whit of measured discourse in your post. All you established were the flecks of foam on your chin.
You are ignorant of the definition of the word "to reign".
Pfft, dude, uncross your eyes. Wordplay requires the intentional and shared inversion of meanings; I even gave you a clue by using the word "irony," but as the saying goes, 'irony is wasted on the..." oh nevermind. 'Jumbo shrimp' and 'anarchy reigns' are in the category of humour known as oxymora. Look it up, golem.
anarchy, the abscence [sic] of a governmenal system
That definition sucks in this context. Try "self-governing organization without control by a central state" and by your own standards you would be more accurate. Most anarchists who are serious about political reorganization are actually more like libertarian municipalists.
Your assertion that economics and fascism have little to do with each other is absurd in practise, since the self-avowed fascists who achieved power always did so with close collaboration by industrialists and banks, and so results in a hegemony by murderous brutes and capitalist plutocrats. But I'm guessing that you aren't referring to historical record, but something else. By the way, since you're concerned about the definition of fascism, shall we invite an authority to weigh in on the matter? I'm sure you're familiar with the source material...
And that, I think, invokes Godwin's Law, which means the thread is dead, and I lost the argument by default. Oh well.Well, even though I'm here often, I'm not a bona fide nerd, as you can tell from my random sample of jacket pocketses:
* a toque (I'm canadian eh)
* bus transfer and taxi receipt from 13 months ago
* pen cap
* $5 imitation multitool held shut by rubber bands
* sunglasses, no case, surprisingly unscratched
* one (1) toddler's sock
* fingerless gloves, grubby
* more rubber bands
* zippo lighter, pouch of Drum tobacco, rollies
* many unlabelled keys on a long chain
* a slim digital watch sans straps
* pocket version of sun-tzu
* scrap paper, grubby
* ancient crumpled receipts beyond deciphering
* a pay-as-you-go Nokia that I rebel against (so it's been out of funds the last 2 weeks)
* one (1) strike-anywhere wooden match
* a short length of rope for practising knots
Yes, this jacket gots lotsa pockets.
That's interesting. Living on the high end of an extreme disparity scale was very distressing to me, since I didn't want to do what was required for sanity, which was to build a rationale and learn to ignore the suffering around me as much as possible.
Being part of a gross injustice is sh*tty on both sides, once you've stopped joking around and lived it for awhile. Even for those around me who loved being 'high on the hog', the disparity really took the shine off of things.