In 1974, when Suzanne Shell was seventeen years old, her father punched her in the face.
It was an isolated event, but it had a profound effect on her life. Her family was investigated; despite being a straight-A student, a cheerleader and a member of the marching band at her Minnesota high school, she was labeled an "out-of-control teenager" and placed in a foster home for her entire senior year.
Compared to the horror stories of abuse and neglect in foster care that she's collected over the past decade, Shell's brush with the child-protection system was relatively benign. "I was in a very good foster home," she says. "Still, I was nothing more than a live-in babysitter and housekeeper. And it disturbed me how the social worker and my foster parents would speak so badly about my father. That incident didn't define who he was as a father, but they felt the need to constantly undermine my relationship with him."
Hrmm. I think I'm starting to understand her more. Her father punched her in the face but this was isolated, apparently...... it seems like a lot of the text on her website is about protecting parents against abuse charges, etc.
I don't know, I don't know enough about her and this case, but it seems like she might be saying that just a "little" abuse is OK..... i.e. just because you punch your kid in the face, you aren't a bad parent.
I don't think he meant that the iPhone itself would replace this. The speculation though is that Apple will eventually be coming out with a more traditional ultraportable Mac (i.e. one that wouldn't be a closed or restricted platform like the iPhone) that would be closer to something like this FlipStart. The iPhone is more a preview of the direction of other Apple products, essentially (the future of the iPod, the possible future of portable Macs, etc.).
And I do agree with the problem of receiving your education in a disadvantaged minority district. There are clearly bigger problems that are also a major piece of the puzzle. It's a very good point though, there is no single thing that can solve everything. Even if affirmative action were to work perfectly, there would still be the problems out laid out.
I should probably clarify and say that I am talking about the general idea behind affirmative action, not necessarily how it is actually implemented.
Again, I would say that the concept behind affirmative action (which includes sex, by the way, not just race - since it has to do with the problems facing women in hiring, etc. as well) is not racist in concept. The idea behind it, as I mentioned above, is that if left to their own devices, people with hiring power had and have a tendency to skip over qualified minority applicants over white and male applicants. How much of this is still a problem is hard to tell (not to mention how many people there are who would still pass over a minority applicant if given a choice).
I would say that low intelligence applicants are a different issue. Affirmative action shouldn't be used to make someone hire someone with lower intelligence. I can certainly grant that this does happen though, and I would agree that that is wrong. In a perfect world at least, the purpose would be to avoid the most egregious problems; something where an equally qualified minority applicant is passed over in favor of a lesser qualified white or male applicant.
I think it is also true that this has fueled contempt and racism, although again I think this is because people like yourself seem to distort the purpose of it (and also because some companies, etc. seem to misunderstand the purpose of affirmative action). Certainly someone with your perspective (who says that the purpose of it is to help people with lower intelligence get hired, etc.) would not like it.
You mentioned "higher intelligence/SES blacks do not need assistance at all" - but that's exactly my point actually. Those ARE the main people affirmative action is designed to help; the reason the concept came about is specifically because you had situations where a black person with higher intelligence was passed over anyway in favor of a white person specifically because of their race.
Is affirmative action perfect? No, clearly not, and clearly there are problems with how it is seen and implemented. But I will still stand by my original point that the idea behind it is necessary and important.
There are commercials on the talk and news stations, etc. I believe both Sirius and XM have commercial free music stations though (although XM at least has 4 or 5 channels that are programmed by Clear Channel, and have commercials....... it doesn't affect me though, since the whole reason I got XM was to avoid radio stations programmed by Clear Channel).
That is completely ridiculous. If you're referring to affirmative action, etc. - it isn't based around the idea that certain races are inferior and need special rights and privileges to succeed at an equal level. It is based on the knowledge that the white majority race historically doesn't give minorities a fair shot (i.e. white managers will tend to hire white employees over equally qualified minority employees).
Really, I'm sick of reading stuff like this where people try and twist affirmative action into something else, in order to try and portray proponents of it as racists, and to get the people who make it necessary off the hook.
So again; at least for the most part, affirmative action has NOTHING to do with a belief that minorities are inferior and need special privileges to compete on equal footing. The only people I know who believe this are generally affirmative action opponents who DO believe that that is its main purpose, to help make sure that inferior minorities will get hired over superior white people.
Yeah, I think this is where I'm starting to come down on this question. I didn't realize there was a "Fermi paradox" that described this, but I used to also make a similar assumption in regards to UFOs.... that surely there would be a few intelligent species out there that would visit us).
But it seems like it is a very real possibility that the kind of spacetravel required to visit other species might just be impossible. I don't think one could take it as proof that other intelligent life doesn't exist just because they haven't managed to conquer the galaxy.
I'm not sure I understand the logic. You have Tiger right now, and you are unhappy that they will be charging (or at least possibly charging) for Boot Camp for Tiger, and that is the reason you will not upgrade to 10.5. But 10.5 will have Boot Camp included as part of its featureset, so it would not cost any more or less than what it would if you had been planning on upgrading to 10.5 anyway. So I'm not sure I understand why charging for Boot Camp for Tiger affects your decision to upgrade to 10.5?
What everyone has right now is a time limited beta, I think, so it will eventually expire. I'm not quite sure how that will work though (i.e. if it will prevent you from accessing the other partition, or just not let you create a new bootable partition, etc.).
Umm, yes? Because they have already, and it will be an integrated feature of OS X 10.5? And Boot Camp does in fact do what it claims to do, make it very easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS? It seems like this is mainly something to give people who don't want to pay the full amount to upgrade to Leopard the ability to at least buy the Boot Camp functionality if that's all they care about.
What do you mean everything starts tiny and gets larger? The fretboard in the game is larger at the bottom of the screen and goes off into the distance in 3D.... so really, the fretmarkers start largest at the bottom and get smaller as they go off into the distance (not that it matters, since you've already played the notes anyway). I don't quite get what you mean really. Also, I never got the feeling that Guitar Hero takes itself too seriously; what specifically makes you think it does?
Learn the truth about MLK from a website hosted by the Stormfront White Nationalist Community? Alright! I'm sure they are definitely the go-to guys to learn about MLK.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I like my Treo 650 too; and mostly for the third party stuff, like Salling Clicker (which I also use to control ZoomPlayer and iTunes remotely on my PC). But the OS has been stagnating for years, and the UI of a lot of the apps are kind of clunky. For a lot of what I do ultimately use my Treo for, it is kind of a pain in the ass. I.e. web browsing; Blazer just stinks, and I've practically given up on even bothering to use real websites with it, instead using WAP versions of sites when I can. From what I've seen of the iPhone demonstrations, Apple has really moved things forward interface wise.
I certainly do hope to see the iPhone become a better platform for third party apps eventually, but even with nothing else, I can see ditching my Treo when it comes out. And I'm hoping that the few third party apps I do use on the Treo do make their way to the iPhone, one way or the other..... would love to have Salling Clicker on it, for example.
Actually, the other big thing I use my Treo for is as a host for TomTom navigator, but I could probably see giving that up to and just getting a physical TomTom device instead.
Can you point me to some of the phones with those features, specifically a phone with an interface even close to what the iPhone has? I love Japanese technology, but I hadn't really seen anything quite like it before.
I don't think that really counts. From the article, it is described as "Post Och Inrikes Tidningar, the official Swedish publication for bankruptcies, company and government announcements" - this sounds way too specific to be considered a "major newspaper", which I think is the point of the prediction.
I have to say, that really galls me. Any criticism of what the Bush administration does is basically boiled down to "they are just criticizing them because they are anti-Bush". It's a really shameless way to avoid any actual discussion of these issues, and take any merit from them away because the people bringing them up are supposed to be "anti-Bush". Seriously, do you really believe that any criticism of the administration if founded on just being anti-Bush?
Aside from that, please name the serious wrongs missing from the list and the petty wrongs that are added to it. Which "wrongs" do you feel on that list are petty (and why), and which serious wrongs do you feel are not on that list?
That is, of course, ridiculous. If Apple or Nintendo were to do this, you would see plenty of people criticizing them for it, saying it was lame, etc. Seriously, there seems to be this notion that Apple or Nintendo never get criticized here, but that seems pretty far from reality.
The big difference of course though is that Apple and Nintendo currently don't NEED to do this. They didn't need to create fake blogs to get people to talk about current or upcoming products, because there are plenty of real ones that do this for them. Sony of course doesn't always need to do this either........ if you have a successful or in-demand product like the PS3, you don't need to create a website like alliwantforxmasisaps3.com.
Outside of that though, historically speaking, Apple and Nintendo haven't really had to do this, or even when you could say they had to do, it isn't the kind of thing they normally would do. I mean, remember, the Mac has minuscule marketshare, all things being equal. Nintendo's GameCube came in third place. But Apple and Nintendo haven't used that as an excuse to create some goofy fake site to try and add hipness or something to their product lines.
And really, Sony doesn't have to do that either. The other tact to take with the PSP is to keep releasing high quality titles like MGS: Portable Ops, and get REAL buzz going again for the platform from real people.
I get the impression you weren't actually looking for responses, but I'll go ahead and tell you.
I have personally never purchased an iPod because it was "hip" or "cool". Before I owned an iPod, my primary MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500. I recall also having looked at things like the Creative Nomad Jukebox, which appealed to me because of their capacity, but I didn't like the size or the navigation. I remember trying out the Nomad Jukebox, and finding it to be kind of a pain to navigate around, etc. And as I recall, there wasn't much in the way of good software for it either, but I never used it personally, so I can't say for sure.
When the iPod first came out, I actually didn't buy one right away, but a few things appealed to me when I tried it out in stores, etc. The first was the scrollwheel, which to this day I still consider a significant technical advantage over other mp3 players. I've tried a ton of other players, and I just prefer the navigation scheme of the iPod. I'm not going to say it's "better", as there are certainly other perfectly good navigation schemes out there (one of my friends has one of the newer Samsung Flash players and I thought the navigation was pretty solid on that as well), but I've found it to be the most natural for me.
The size of course also appealed to me, as the main reason I didn't buy the Jukebox was that it was about as big as a CD player, and I wanted something closer in size to my Rio 500. The iPod definitely fit the bill in that regard.
Finally, the iTunes synching appealed to me a great deal. One of the things I never really liked with the Rio 500 was just the whole idea that I had to drag music manually back and forth, and it was never really convenient.
I've found the iTunes/iPod combination to be really good for me personally, because I like being able to just create playlists or sync my entire library, and have the exact same music setup on my personal music player as I do on my desktop computer. I know that some people prefer just manually organizing their music on their mp3 player, but I personally like the sync concept. I remember the other annoyance I used to have was that if I got rid of an album or song on my computer, I had to also remember to remove it from my mp3 player as well. With iTunes library synching, this is no longer an issue for me.
And yes, generally speaking, I like the design of the iPod. That's certainly a factor for me too. I currently have an 8GB second generation Nano, which might be my favorite iPod yet because it has enough storage to let me carry a lot of my music with me, while also being small enough that I take it with me just about everywhere (something which I didn't always do with the larger hard drive-based iPods).
On to your larger point; Apple has certainly had a pretty effective advertising campaign, but I would argue that it's been pretty minimalist, all things being equal. Really, when you think about it, the iPod ads, for the most part, are advertising the primary "feature" of the iPod; using it to listen to music.
I don't think this is so crazy; I know that a lot of people say "Oh, the iPod doesn't have all these advanced features that my music player does", but I can at least personally say that I am someone who bought the iPod primarily to listen to music, and I don't think it's crazy to have an ad campaign centered around that.
The thing with the iPod though is that in large part it has become something that sells itself. You can only get so far on creating a "hip" image for a product, if the product itself is no good. If the iPod itself were just a fad, it would have died out by this point, because people wouldn't keep buying new iPods.
I certainly acknowledge that my case is not necessarily representative of all iPod buyers, and I do know that there are people out there who buy iPods more for status symbols, etc. or just because of that perceived notion of "hipness". But that is also something that probably goes beyond just advertisin
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Hrmm. I think I'm starting to understand her more. Her father punched her in the face but this was isolated, apparently...... it seems like a lot of the text on her website is about protecting parents against abuse charges, etc.
I don't know, I don't know enough about her and this case, but it seems like she might be saying that just a "little" abuse is OK..... i.e. just because you punch your kid in the face, you aren't a bad parent.
I don't think he meant that the iPhone itself would replace this. The speculation though is that Apple will eventually be coming out with a more traditional ultraportable Mac (i.e. one that wouldn't be a closed or restricted platform like the iPhone) that would be closer to something like this FlipStart. The iPhone is more a preview of the direction of other Apple products, essentially (the future of the iPod, the possible future of portable Macs, etc.).
.....err, never mind.
And I do agree with the problem of receiving your education in a disadvantaged minority district. There are clearly bigger problems that are also a major piece of the puzzle. It's a very good point though, there is no single thing that can solve everything. Even if affirmative action were to work perfectly, there would still be the problems out laid out.
Again, I would say that the concept behind affirmative action (which includes sex, by the way, not just race - since it has to do with the problems facing women in hiring, etc. as well) is not racist in concept. The idea behind it, as I mentioned above, is that if left to their own devices, people with hiring power had and have a tendency to skip over qualified minority applicants over white and male applicants. How much of this is still a problem is hard to tell (not to mention how many people there are who would still pass over a minority applicant if given a choice).
I would say that low intelligence applicants are a different issue. Affirmative action shouldn't be used to make someone hire someone with lower intelligence. I can certainly grant that this does happen though, and I would agree that that is wrong. In a perfect world at least, the purpose would be to avoid the most egregious problems; something where an equally qualified minority applicant is passed over in favor of a lesser qualified white or male applicant.
I think it is also true that this has fueled contempt and racism, although again I think this is because people like yourself seem to distort the purpose of it (and also because some companies, etc. seem to misunderstand the purpose of affirmative action). Certainly someone with your perspective (who says that the purpose of it is to help people with lower intelligence get hired, etc.) would not like it.
You mentioned "higher intelligence/SES blacks do not need assistance at all" - but that's exactly my point actually. Those ARE the main people affirmative action is designed to help; the reason the concept came about is specifically because you had situations where a black person with higher intelligence was passed over anyway in favor of a white person specifically because of their race.
Is affirmative action perfect? No, clearly not, and clearly there are problems with how it is seen and implemented. But I will still stand by my original point that the idea behind it is necessary and important.
There are commercials on the talk and news stations, etc. I believe both Sirius and XM have commercial free music stations though (although XM at least has 4 or 5 channels that are programmed by Clear Channel, and have commercials....... it doesn't affect me though, since the whole reason I got XM was to avoid radio stations programmed by Clear Channel).
Really, I'm sick of reading stuff like this where people try and twist affirmative action into something else, in order to try and portray proponents of it as racists, and to get the people who make it necessary off the hook.
So again; at least for the most part, affirmative action has NOTHING to do with a belief that minorities are inferior and need special privileges to compete on equal footing. The only people I know who believe this are generally affirmative action opponents who DO believe that that is its main purpose, to help make sure that inferior minorities will get hired over superior white people.
But it seems like it is a very real possibility that the kind of spacetravel required to visit other species might just be impossible. I don't think one could take it as proof that other intelligent life doesn't exist just because they haven't managed to conquer the galaxy.
From looking at the Haiku OS website, it says it is inspired by BeOS.
Or "it has".
It's OK, honestly I just wanted to make an ASCII porn joke....:)
Of course there was an Internet back then, but since it was all just ASCII porn back in those days, your point is still valid.
I'm not sure I understand the logic. You have Tiger right now, and you are unhappy that they will be charging (or at least possibly charging) for Boot Camp for Tiger, and that is the reason you will not upgrade to 10.5. But 10.5 will have Boot Camp included as part of its featureset, so it would not cost any more or less than what it would if you had been planning on upgrading to 10.5 anyway. So I'm not sure I understand why charging for Boot Camp for Tiger affects your decision to upgrade to 10.5?
What everyone has right now is a time limited beta, I think, so it will eventually expire. I'm not quite sure how that will work though (i.e. if it will prevent you from accessing the other partition, or just not let you create a new bootable partition, etc.).
Umm, yes? Because they have already, and it will be an integrated feature of OS X 10.5? And Boot Camp does in fact do what it claims to do, make it very easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS? It seems like this is mainly something to give people who don't want to pay the full amount to upgrade to Leopard the ability to at least buy the Boot Camp functionality if that's all they care about.
What do you mean everything starts tiny and gets larger? The fretboard in the game is larger at the bottom of the screen and goes off into the distance in 3D.... so really, the fretmarkers start largest at the bottom and get smaller as they go off into the distance (not that it matters, since you've already played the notes anyway). I don't quite get what you mean really. Also, I never got the feeling that Guitar Hero takes itself too seriously; what specifically makes you think it does?
Learn the truth about MLK from a website hosted by the Stormfront White Nationalist Community? Alright! I'm sure they are definitely the go-to guys to learn about MLK.
I certainly do hope to see the iPhone become a better platform for third party apps eventually, but even with nothing else, I can see ditching my Treo when it comes out. And I'm hoping that the few third party apps I do use on the Treo do make their way to the iPhone, one way or the other..... would love to have Salling Clicker on it, for example.
Actually, the other big thing I use my Treo for is as a host for TomTom navigator, but I could probably see giving that up to and just getting a physical TomTom device instead.
Can you point me to some of the phones with those features, specifically a phone with an interface even close to what the iPhone has? I love Japanese technology, but I hadn't really seen anything quite like it before.
I have a hard time believing that he would ever make an obvious promotional statement like that. Don't you know that Disco Stu doesn't advertise?
faggots? And now I know why most people ignore bigots. They're PR is also done by assholes.
I don't think that really counts. From the article, it is described as "Post Och Inrikes Tidningar, the official Swedish publication for bankruptcies, company and government announcements" - this sounds way too specific to be considered a "major newspaper", which I think is the point of the prediction.
Aside from that, please name the serious wrongs missing from the list and the petty wrongs that are added to it. Which "wrongs" do you feel on that list are petty (and why), and which serious wrongs do you feel are not on that list?
The big difference of course though is that Apple and Nintendo currently don't NEED to do this. They didn't need to create fake blogs to get people to talk about current or upcoming products, because there are plenty of real ones that do this for them. Sony of course doesn't always need to do this either........ if you have a successful or in-demand product like the PS3, you don't need to create a website like alliwantforxmasisaps3.com.
Outside of that though, historically speaking, Apple and Nintendo haven't really had to do this, or even when you could say they had to do, it isn't the kind of thing they normally would do. I mean, remember, the Mac has minuscule marketshare, all things being equal. Nintendo's GameCube came in third place. But Apple and Nintendo haven't used that as an excuse to create some goofy fake site to try and add hipness or something to their product lines.
And really, Sony doesn't have to do that either. The other tact to take with the PSP is to keep releasing high quality titles like MGS: Portable Ops, and get REAL buzz going again for the platform from real people.
I have personally never purchased an iPod because it was "hip" or "cool". Before I owned an iPod, my primary MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500. I recall also having looked at things like the Creative Nomad Jukebox, which appealed to me because of their capacity, but I didn't like the size or the navigation. I remember trying out the Nomad Jukebox, and finding it to be kind of a pain to navigate around, etc. And as I recall, there wasn't much in the way of good software for it either, but I never used it personally, so I can't say for sure.
When the iPod first came out, I actually didn't buy one right away, but a few things appealed to me when I tried it out in stores, etc. The first was the scrollwheel, which to this day I still consider a significant technical advantage over other mp3 players. I've tried a ton of other players, and I just prefer the navigation scheme of the iPod. I'm not going to say it's "better", as there are certainly other perfectly good navigation schemes out there (one of my friends has one of the newer Samsung Flash players and I thought the navigation was pretty solid on that as well), but I've found it to be the most natural for me.
The size of course also appealed to me, as the main reason I didn't buy the Jukebox was that it was about as big as a CD player, and I wanted something closer in size to my Rio 500. The iPod definitely fit the bill in that regard.
Finally, the iTunes synching appealed to me a great deal. One of the things I never really liked with the Rio 500 was just the whole idea that I had to drag music manually back and forth, and it was never really convenient.
I've found the iTunes/iPod combination to be really good for me personally, because I like being able to just create playlists or sync my entire library, and have the exact same music setup on my personal music player as I do on my desktop computer. I know that some people prefer just manually organizing their music on their mp3 player, but I personally like the sync concept. I remember the other annoyance I used to have was that if I got rid of an album or song on my computer, I had to also remember to remove it from my mp3 player as well. With iTunes library synching, this is no longer an issue for me.
And yes, generally speaking, I like the design of the iPod. That's certainly a factor for me too. I currently have an 8GB second generation Nano, which might be my favorite iPod yet because it has enough storage to let me carry a lot of my music with me, while also being small enough that I take it with me just about everywhere (something which I didn't always do with the larger hard drive-based iPods).
On to your larger point; Apple has certainly had a pretty effective advertising campaign, but I would argue that it's been pretty minimalist, all things being equal. Really, when you think about it, the iPod ads, for the most part, are advertising the primary "feature" of the iPod; using it to listen to music.
I don't think this is so crazy; I know that a lot of people say "Oh, the iPod doesn't have all these advanced features that my music player does", but I can at least personally say that I am someone who bought the iPod primarily to listen to music, and I don't think it's crazy to have an ad campaign centered around that.
The thing with the iPod though is that in large part it has become something that sells itself. You can only get so far on creating a "hip" image for a product, if the product itself is no good. If the iPod itself were just a fad, it would have died out by this point, because people wouldn't keep buying new iPods.
I certainly acknowledge that my case is not necessarily representative of all iPod buyers, and I do know that there are people out there who buy iPods more for status symbols, etc. or just because of that perceived notion of "hipness". But that is also something that probably goes beyond just advertisin