Honestly, the smartest thing they could do would be a series of small bombs at high school football games, graduations, shopping malls - you can't be safe anywhere. It's a lot cheaper and easier than taking an airplane, and with people already riled up and scared, I think it would be just as effective.
As for airport security... my company has had three laptops stolen out of checked baggage in the last year because people ignored the company policy of carrying them on. If they can't keep the airport baggage handlers straight (who have FAR more access to the plane than anyone riding as a passenger), why should we trust that any of their other "improvements" are worthwhile?
My father works in arts and music education, as one of those travelling school performers who occasionally shows up to do a show that teacher kids history using music and theatre.
He's going to have to find a new job this year due to NCLB.
Funding for anything that is not on the NCLB standardized tests has completely dried up. Schools *have* to do well on those standardized exams, and they don't have the funding to be able to handle the extra costs of keeping up with them *and* having any sort of art/theatre/music department.
If you force everyone to teach to a test, no one will fund learning anything that isn't on the test. And that's exactly what's happening.
My mother is a grade school teacher, and she says she has not met a single teacher who feels that NCLB has caused an improvement in the education they can give their students. Every attempt at standardized testing just means that they have to spend more time administering the tests instead of teaching, more time reviewing for the tests instead of teaching, more time teaching the students how to take the test than actually teaching them something useful. Not to mention the fact that if you work in a low-income school district with no family support for education, suddenly your job is in danger because the kids don't test as well as the upper class schools.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom. There's only so much that schools can do to help kids with a broken home life - but it starts with giving them interesting things to do outside of getting in trouble, small enough class sizes that teachers can do more than herd cats all day, and paying enough to attract intelligent, talented people to teaching instead of just those who love it enough to put up with it and those who thought it was an easy degree.
That may be the case for many of the smaller (and undeniably useful) open source projects, but it seems like all of the big names ones started out as a commercial or internal project.
Open source to make makes the most sense anywhere a company benefits from having a specific product available enough to spend development effort on it, but where they are unable or unwilling to bring it to market as a commercial offering.
Sun gets a lot out of having OpenOffice exist, but they have no chance of having it be a real commercial competitor to Office.
Apache is a similar situation - a whole bunch of people want a stable webserver, but building one from the ground up is expensive and difficult, and selling it afterwards is even harder. So by making something open source you get other people to help you develop it at no cost to you.
To a corporation, it seems like much more of a super-improved version of an in-house solution competing with commercial solutions. The volunteer aspect of open source is amazing, it's great, it's wonderful - but a lot of the big development comes from people being paid to improve part of it because their company thought that improving the common solution would be a lot better than writing their own. Which largely invalidates MS's argument.
The country belongs to my societal group because we conquered the neighboring ones and took it.
My particular plot belongs to me because that's how my society decided to allocate it.
There are no property "rights", as in the inherit, inalienable type, but there are property privileges bestowed by society in exchange for your membership. You play by the rules, you hopefully have some say in what the rules are, and society in exchange lets you have your happy little piece of earth.
The whole point of culture and orderly society is to limit warfare and direct competition (ie, take the land by force) to outside groups instead of individuals, allowing most people to live comfortably most of the time. The history of and development of the human race has been an outgrowth of this tribal level of competition - with tribes just getting bigger and bigger.
So, if you want to say you have a "right" to the land... yes, you do, but only because you grandpappy kicked someone else's grandpappy's butt to take it. By the basic rules of our nature and history, (and honestly, biology), taking foreigners land is good, taking your neighbor's land is bad.
Yep, I consider it completely reasonable to go through the standard checks once - although it does get a little old when the checklist includes things that are obviously not a problem (me: "I'm dropping 5% of my packets" - them: "ok, is the cable plugged in and the modem turned on?"). I mean, they're the first things I try to check, too, and the first things I make anyone I'm helping out do when they say they have a problem.
But I don't think I'm ever again going to put up with doing them again and again just because the phone queue was full at the level 2 direct number so they bumped me back to general support.
I think I may have just hit into some nasty loop where because we couldn't replicate the problem by the time I actually talked to someone with knowledge, my problem got marked as "resolved," and they wouldn't open it back up as an extension of the original.
The biggest frustration I have is when a company does not seem to keep a ticket record of my previous problems and their attempts to fix it.
Once my ISP had a switch or router or some of their equipment down the street go bad to where it started dropping packets - but only at peak load.
So every time I called, by the time I had gone through level 1, level 2, and all the waiting on hold - by the time I got to level 3 (*if* I ever got there) the problem (which at this point, all I knew on my end was that I was losing packets, somehow) had stopped.
The most frustrating thing is that every time I called to continue to resolve the issue - they started me at step one again. They actually sent a tech out to my house three times to say "huh, I don't know why they sent me out here" and for some time refused to escalate me to level 3 without sending the tech out again.
If they would have just kept some record that I had already gone through all of their earlier steps, I could have talked to a level 3, explained the problem, and worked out a solution. Eventually I figured out the problem myself and called up to tell *them* what it was - their equipment, and exactly where even. I wanted to charge them a consulting fee.
I have no problem having to go through the standard "unplug/replug" rigmarole once - sometimes it's even fixed it as I forgot one step. But when I call back, let me go straight to where I left off, please!
That's why I'm not freaking out about this yet - I don't think we're going to run out of energy fast enough that the normal market forces won't encourage someone to finance a replacement.
The rough part of this is balancing raider's accomplishments with having anything to do if you aren't in a raiding guild.
I've seen the inside of every heroic in the game, kara, za, etc. But I don't have the time or desire to join a full on raiding guild (a. my schedule isn't reliable enough and b. I have friends in my guild). There needs to be some upgrade path to keep me playing as well.
I disagree completely with badge gear at a tier 6 level - but a 5-10 progression through full tier 5 equivalent makes plenty of sense to me.
The new badge gear is (I expect) a jump start to get new people into a level of gear that they can join a raiding guild and see the rest of BC content before WotLK comes out. Otherwise even if you farm the life out of 10 mans a raiding guild's going to have to stop back in SSC to farm your sorry butt something to wear to their newest illidan kill that their guild actually wants to go do. Nothing rips a guild apart faster than massive disparities in gear - when one group who has been running an instance for ages has to keep going back there to bring up the new recruits if they want to ever have the manpower to take on higher end stuff... eventually it all falls apart. There are now how many levels of gearing that you have to do to get to illidan? Stuck between grinding the new guy through all of ssc to prepare and telling him to go grind forever and come back when he's got his badge gear, I know which one I'd pick.
Nothing changes until Intel Extreme Graphics either stop stucking or stop dominating the market. Or people bother putting "get a real graphics card" in their buying a pc for dummies guides.
Even if every system today shipped with something equivalent to a six year top of the line nvidia or ati chipset, it would be significantly faster than the current generation of "extreme" graphics that gets slapped into every bargain basement pc currently made. It's nearly impossible to write anything fancier than popcap when that's your base platform you're stuck with.
It all depends on what kind of a job you get. There are still fun and cool software engineering jobs out there - I got lucky enough to hit one - but you have to be willing to look around, maybe move, take a bit more of a risk (ie, working for a start up instead of big corporate), and most of all - work hard enough that you're good enough to beat out the other people who want the fun jobs.
The very fact that companies can get away with treating their engineers like dirt just means that they haven't actually hit a shortage yet.
In my family it seems to trace partially to the transition from a agrarian to city lifestyle.
My parents grew up on farms, fairly poor, and eating moderate portions of very fatty foods (meat, gravy, potatoes) and living in a culture where you did manual labor all day for a job. Food was definitely a cultural thing - part of family get-togethers, and eating a lot was fine and good because you're going to work it off the next day, and anyway, you can't afford to eat that much all the time.
They then grew up, got desk jobs which paid more, which allowed them to buy feast level amounts of food all the time - and normally the same fatty, unhealthy stuff they grew up on.
It's a consistent difference in thought - a good meal is being able to buy twice as much hamburger instead of upgrading to a small steak. They want the same simple foods they've always enjoyed, and splurging means just getting *more* of it.
My whole family has gotten fairly fat (I'm right over the edge of overweight on BMI scale) and we barely touch candy or twinkies, and don't even eat out that much. But you do have seconds of the mashed potatoes or grandma doesn't think you liked them:(
And I honestly thought the Olympic committee was handling this extremely fairly up until this point.
They had a university's athletic department's research center do a massive amount of analysis to determine whether his artificial legs give him a mechanic advantage over the other runners. The answer was yes.
If he came back and someone made artificial legs that put him within a reasonable margin of error of what the other athletes have to work with, I'd say sure, let him run.
Apparently you live somewhere with reasonable taxi service.
Flying small aircraft like this for fun and convenience, you land in a lot of one strip airfields with one guy, a radio, and a single bathroom. You'll have to wait as long as your flight for a cab driver to come out to meet you.
I can see this being quite useful for people who want to use their pilot's license to travel wherever they want like this.
Re:So can we now be told...
on
iMac Turns 10
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· Score: 3, Informative
There was, I believe a SCSI adapter for it and a Voodoo2 video card. The voodoo2 was the best upgrade you could get for one of those at the time.
I'm still not sure what it was supposed to be for, either.
I wouldn't call a video application using DirectShow a "toy" application. I'd call it every modern video player made for Windows, and a core part of OS functionality.
The difference is that Mac OS X was a cutoff line for all of that backwards compatible crap. A whole lot of stuff broke with Mac OS X, and it sucked for a while.
Then everyone started using the new shiny API's and it started getting a lot better.
He's complaining that the windows API's are still hauling along cruft and junk and nastiness from 15 years ago. It hurts MS's ability to improve them, it hurts developers ability to use them, because they have to wade through pages of deprecated functions to find the correct ones, or hit strange inconsistencies that have been hanging around for years. It's also just bad for the general consistency of the experience - see the comment about the system32 on Windows 64.
He knows that bad developers doing stupid things isn't Microsoft's fault. But how you react to bad developers is. It's a tough decision to make - do you slap the bad developers on the wrist and break things because *they* were doing something stupid, or do you keep letting them have their way until it's their decisions that rule the API and the platform?
Not that bikes are unsafe, but that riding a bike on the same roads that people are driving cars and SUV's on is unsafe.
I don't know a single road biker who hasn't been in at least one somewhat serious accident in the last couple years. Some of them have been in several.
But how would I get to work if I road a bike? There are even bike paths around here, but I have to go through some pretty seriously busy roads to get to them.
And that still doesn't address the "I'm soaked with sweat and reek like a gym sock when I arrive at work" problem. No, it's not because I'm out of shape (I'm not) it's because it's warm and I sweat a lot. I tried to ride a bike to school for a while (5-10 miles) and had to give it up if I wanted to preserve any bit of my meager social life.
You could rearrange our transportation system so bikes became the main form of transport to solve the safety issue. But you could do that for trains/footpaths/segways, too - it wouldn't be cheap, and you'd be burning a ton of oil and construction supplies to get it done:/
I see much more of the problem as that everyone is driving a 4-7 person vehicle to work every day... alone. Even a prius gets only 45 mpg/person if you have one person in it. Stack four or five people into an SUV and it'll match that. Stack four people into a civic and you're getting better mileage per person than these fancy new concepts are getting. We're wasting so much energy moving 3,000 lbs of car to move 200 lbs of person.
Motorcycles make more sense for individual commuting, but again, you have the safety issues (much more likely to kill yourself with no cars around, arguably safer when in the company of cars (because at least you have some acceleration).
If they could make them affordable and safe enough, I could see moving to sort of a two-car solution without having to trash the infrastructure - sell "city commute" cars that are really just a hybrid motorcycle with a cabin and some safety features, and keep a more tradition car if you make longer trips often. Seems like it'd be hard to convince people to spend the money on that, though.
And personally, I really enjoy my fast car:) But it still at least gets 30 mpg.
I think most complaints I've heard have been less about cuts than about pointless, damaging changes or additions.
There are probably 15-30 minutes of changed or added scenes in both Two Towers and Return of the King that changed characters and took up time that could have been either a) made the movies shorter and more palatable or b) been used to include more of the good stuff from the book.
I think overall he did a great job of capturing the look of the whole thing, and a decent job of capturing the main thrust of most of the characters - but some of the changes just kind of.. sucked, from a logical standpoint. Not to mention the character assassination on Faramir.
I have no problem with this if they make it good, and don't interrupt it with other advertising.
Ever seen the series of short internet films BMW made? It's called The Hire www.thehire.tv.
They brought in some big name directors and actors, gave them a good budget, premise, and some creative control - and they ended up with some really cool films that also happen to be some of the most effective commercials I've seen.
The trick is that the BMW car is there... but no one shouts it out at you, it's just the tool that the main character uses to do his job (which largely involves cool car chases). And that they're well done films to begin with.
Do I expect NBC to do something similarly cool? I doubt it, but I have no problem with the concept:)
And yet he remains the "third party" candidate to win the most votes in a hundred years. He ran without the support of the two main party machines, that's the important part.
New parties rarely spring forth fully formed - they splinter off of an existing party. Had he won, there was a chance he could have done that. And "progressive republican" is a sort of candidate we've been missing for a while.
A lot of the problem is that people pay so much more attention to the presidential race than to ones where they can actually make a change.
A third party candidate has no chance in hell of winning the presidency - but with enough local support you can have a decent chance of becoming mayor, being elected to the state legislature, or maybe even to the House of Representatives. I mean, Ron Paul's far outside of normal republicans, but he is at least in the house.
The only times a third party or outside viewpoint has done well at all nationally is when it is centered around a cult of personality - Theodore Roosevelt, Ross Perot, even Jesse Ventura. It only lasts as long as that person is in the spotlight.
The only thing we can do with our little voices and few votes is try to provide some force at a local level - and you do see decisions reflecting that. California's gun laws or emissions laws versus Texas, for example. Regardless of which approach you agree with, those are prime examples of local action and results that are significantly different from the national approach.
Rather than trying to guess which of the national candidates is going to suck less and arguing whether we're "throwing out vote away," we should be trying to influence votes that we can actually change. Maybe eventually some of those low-level politicians can rise to higher office - who knows?
So, even ceding you this point - because I'm going off of what I have heard, but google didn't find proof either way yet - why do most people in other countries, when watching American movies, watch a subtitled version?
There's something to be said for the original performance.
You think all these elitists really prefer to be reading a translation instead of watching the artwork? I just still haven't seen a dub that was as good as the original voice work. And it's not just the foreign aspect disguising the inflection - my friends with significantly more experience living in Japan than I do agree completely. So if it's "elitist" to say that you shouldn't watch an quantifiably inferior version of a show just so that you don't have to read, all right, I'm elitist.
Having watched the first GitS both with an without subtitles, I would argue that yes, they don't have decent actors. Not trying to be offensive to the people working hard to bring anime to the US, but it just isn't as good.
GitS isn't as bad as many have been, but it's nowhere near the quality of the original cast.
And then of course there are those of us who just enjoy seeing a work in its original form - like seeing the original broadway cast of a play.
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Honestly, the smartest thing they could do would be a series of small bombs at high school football games, graduations, shopping malls - you can't be safe anywhere. It's a lot cheaper and easier than taking an airplane, and with people already riled up and scared, I think it would be just as effective.
As for airport security... my company has had three laptops stolen out of checked baggage in the last year because people ignored the company policy of carrying them on. If they can't keep the airport baggage handlers straight (who have FAR more access to the plane than anyone riding as a passenger), why should we trust that any of their other "improvements" are worthwhile?
My father works in arts and music education, as one of those travelling school performers who occasionally shows up to do a show that teacher kids history using music and theatre.
He's going to have to find a new job this year due to NCLB.
Funding for anything that is not on the NCLB standardized tests has completely dried up. Schools *have* to do well on those standardized exams, and they don't have the funding to be able to handle the extra costs of keeping up with them *and* having any sort of art/theatre/music department.
If you force everyone to teach to a test, no one will fund learning anything that isn't on the test. And that's exactly what's happening.
My mother is a grade school teacher, and she says she has not met a single teacher who feels that NCLB has caused an improvement in the education they can give their students. Every attempt at standardized testing just means that they have to spend more time administering the tests instead of teaching, more time reviewing for the tests instead of teaching, more time teaching the students how to take the test than actually teaching them something useful. Not to mention the fact that if you work in a low-income school district with no family support for education, suddenly your job is in danger because the kids don't test as well as the upper class schools.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom. There's only so much that schools can do to help kids with a broken home life - but it starts with giving them interesting things to do outside of getting in trouble, small enough class sizes that teachers can do more than herd cats all day, and paying enough to attract intelligent, talented people to teaching instead of just those who love it enough to put up with it and those who thought it was an easy degree.
That may be the case for many of the smaller (and undeniably useful) open source projects, but it seems like all of the big names ones started out as a commercial or internal project.
Open source to make makes the most sense anywhere a company benefits from having a specific product available enough to spend development effort on it, but where they are unable or unwilling to bring it to market as a commercial offering.
Sun gets a lot out of having OpenOffice exist, but they have no chance of having it be a real commercial competitor to Office.
Apache is a similar situation - a whole bunch of people want a stable webserver, but building one from the ground up is expensive and difficult, and selling it afterwards is even harder. So by making something open source you get other people to help you develop it at no cost to you.
To a corporation, it seems like much more of a super-improved version of an in-house solution competing with commercial solutions. The volunteer aspect of open source is amazing, it's great, it's wonderful - but a lot of the big development comes from people being paid to improve part of it because their company thought that improving the common solution would be a lot better than writing their own. Which largely invalidates MS's argument.
Individual versus societal rights.
The country belongs to my societal group because we conquered the neighboring ones and took it.
My particular plot belongs to me because that's how my society decided to allocate it.
There are no property "rights", as in the inherit, inalienable type, but there are property privileges bestowed by society in exchange for your membership. You play by the rules, you hopefully have some say in what the rules are, and society in exchange lets you have your happy little piece of earth.
The whole point of culture and orderly society is to limit warfare and direct competition (ie, take the land by force) to outside groups instead of individuals, allowing most people to live comfortably most of the time. The history of and development of the human race has been an outgrowth of this tribal level of competition - with tribes just getting bigger and bigger.
So, if you want to say you have a "right" to the land... yes, you do, but only because you grandpappy kicked someone else's grandpappy's butt to take it. By the basic rules of our nature and history, (and honestly, biology), taking foreigners land is good, taking your neighbor's land is bad.
Yep, I consider it completely reasonable to go through the standard checks once - although it does get a little old when the checklist includes things that are obviously not a problem (me: "I'm dropping 5% of my packets" - them: "ok, is the cable plugged in and the modem turned on?"). I mean, they're the first things I try to check, too, and the first things I make anyone I'm helping out do when they say they have a problem.
But I don't think I'm ever again going to put up with doing them again and again just because the phone queue was full at the level 2 direct number so they bumped me back to general support.
I think I may have just hit into some nasty loop where because we couldn't replicate the problem by the time I actually talked to someone with knowledge, my problem got marked as "resolved," and they wouldn't open it back up as an extension of the original.
The biggest frustration I have is when a company does not seem to keep a ticket record of my previous problems and their attempts to fix it.
Once my ISP had a switch or router or some of their equipment down the street go bad to where it started dropping packets - but only at peak load.
So every time I called, by the time I had gone through level 1, level 2, and all the waiting on hold - by the time I got to level 3 (*if* I ever got there) the problem (which at this point, all I knew on my end was that I was losing packets, somehow) had stopped.
The most frustrating thing is that every time I called to continue to resolve the issue - they started me at step one again. They actually sent a tech out to my house three times to say "huh, I don't know why they sent me out here" and for some time refused to escalate me to level 3 without sending the tech out again.
If they would have just kept some record that I had already gone through all of their earlier steps, I could have talked to a level 3, explained the problem, and worked out a solution. Eventually I figured out the problem myself and called up to tell *them* what it was - their equipment, and exactly where even. I wanted to charge them a consulting fee.
I have no problem having to go through the standard "unplug/replug" rigmarole once - sometimes it's even fixed it as I forgot one step. But when I call back, let me go straight to where I left off, please!
That's why I'm not freaking out about this yet - I don't think we're going to run out of energy fast enough that the normal market forces won't encourage someone to finance a replacement.
The rough part of this is balancing raider's accomplishments with having anything to do if you aren't in a raiding guild.
I've seen the inside of every heroic in the game, kara, za, etc. But I don't have the time or desire to join a full on raiding guild (a. my schedule isn't reliable enough and b. I have friends in my guild). There needs to be some upgrade path to keep me playing as well.
I disagree completely with badge gear at a tier 6 level - but a 5-10 progression through full tier 5 equivalent makes plenty of sense to me.
The new badge gear is (I expect) a jump start to get new people into a level of gear that they can join a raiding guild and see the rest of BC content before WotLK comes out. Otherwise even if you farm the life out of 10 mans a raiding guild's going to have to stop back in SSC to farm your sorry butt something to wear to their newest illidan kill that their guild actually wants to go do. Nothing rips a guild apart faster than massive disparities in gear - when one group who has been running an instance for ages has to keep going back there to bring up the new recruits if they want to ever have the manpower to take on higher end stuff... eventually it all falls apart. There are now how many levels of gearing that you have to do to get to illidan? Stuck between grinding the new guy through all of ssc to prepare and telling him to go grind forever and come back when he's got his badge gear, I know which one I'd pick.
I work in the defense industry - it's illegal for them to outsource what I do ;-)
Nothing changes until Intel Extreme Graphics either stop stucking or stop dominating the market. Or people bother putting "get a real graphics card" in their buying a pc for dummies guides.
Even if every system today shipped with something equivalent to a six year top of the line nvidia or ati chipset, it would be significantly faster than the current generation of "extreme" graphics that gets slapped into every bargain basement pc currently made. It's nearly impossible to write anything fancier than popcap when that's your base platform you're stuck with.
It all depends on what kind of a job you get. There are still fun and cool software engineering jobs out there - I got lucky enough to hit one - but you have to be willing to look around, maybe move, take a bit more of a risk (ie, working for a start up instead of big corporate), and most of all - work hard enough that you're good enough to beat out the other people who want the fun jobs.
The very fact that companies can get away with treating their engineers like dirt just means that they haven't actually hit a shortage yet.
In my family it seems to trace partially to the transition from a agrarian to city lifestyle.
:(
My parents grew up on farms, fairly poor, and eating moderate portions of very fatty foods (meat, gravy, potatoes) and living in a culture where you did manual labor all day for a job. Food was definitely a cultural thing - part of family get-togethers, and eating a lot was fine and good because you're going to work it off the next day, and anyway, you can't afford to eat that much all the time.
They then grew up, got desk jobs which paid more, which allowed them to buy feast level amounts of food all the time - and normally the same fatty, unhealthy stuff they grew up on.
It's a consistent difference in thought - a good meal is being able to buy twice as much hamburger instead of upgrading to a small steak. They want the same simple foods they've always enjoyed, and splurging means just getting *more* of it.
My whole family has gotten fairly fat (I'm right over the edge of overweight on BMI scale) and we barely touch candy or twinkies, and don't even eat out that much. But you do have seconds of the mashed potatoes or grandma doesn't think you liked them
And I honestly thought the Olympic committee was handling this extremely fairly up until this point.
They had a university's athletic department's research center do a massive amount of analysis to determine whether his artificial legs give him a mechanic advantage over the other runners. The answer was yes.
If he came back and someone made artificial legs that put him within a reasonable margin of error of what the other athletes have to work with, I'd say sure, let him run.
Apparently you live somewhere with reasonable taxi service.
Flying small aircraft like this for fun and convenience, you land in a lot of one strip airfields with one guy, a radio, and a single bathroom. You'll have to wait as long as your flight for a cab driver to come out to meet you.
I can see this being quite useful for people who want to use their pilot's license to travel wherever they want like this.
There was, I believe a SCSI adapter for it and a Voodoo2 video card. The voodoo2 was the best upgrade you could get for one of those at the time.
I'm still not sure what it was supposed to be for, either.
I wouldn't call a video application using DirectShow a "toy" application. I'd call it every modern video player made for Windows, and a core part of OS functionality.
The difference is that Mac OS X was a cutoff line for all of that backwards compatible crap. A whole lot of stuff broke with Mac OS X, and it sucked for a while.
Then everyone started using the new shiny API's and it started getting a lot better.
He's complaining that the windows API's are still hauling along cruft and junk and nastiness from 15 years ago. It hurts MS's ability to improve them, it hurts developers ability to use them, because they have to wade through pages of deprecated functions to find the correct ones, or hit strange inconsistencies that have been hanging around for years. It's also just bad for the general consistency of the experience - see the comment about the system32 on Windows 64.
He knows that bad developers doing stupid things isn't Microsoft's fault. But how you react to bad developers is. It's a tough decision to make - do you slap the bad developers on the wrist and break things because *they* were doing something stupid, or do you keep letting them have their way until it's their decisions that rule the API and the platform?
The problem with bikes is safety.
:/
:) But it still at least gets 30 mpg.
Not that bikes are unsafe, but that riding a bike on the same roads that people are driving cars and SUV's on is unsafe.
I don't know a single road biker who hasn't been in at least one somewhat serious accident in the last couple years. Some of them have been in several.
But how would I get to work if I road a bike? There are even bike paths around here, but I have to go through some pretty seriously busy roads to get to them.
And that still doesn't address the "I'm soaked with sweat and reek like a gym sock when I arrive at work" problem. No, it's not because I'm out of shape (I'm not) it's because it's warm and I sweat a lot. I tried to ride a bike to school for a while (5-10 miles) and had to give it up if I wanted to preserve any bit of my meager social life.
You could rearrange our transportation system so bikes became the main form of transport to solve the safety issue. But you could do that for trains/footpaths/segways, too - it wouldn't be cheap, and you'd be burning a ton of oil and construction supplies to get it done
I see much more of the problem as that everyone is driving a 4-7 person vehicle to work every day... alone. Even a prius gets only 45 mpg/person if you have one person in it. Stack four or five people into an SUV and it'll match that. Stack four people into a civic and you're getting better mileage per person than these fancy new concepts are getting. We're wasting so much energy moving 3,000 lbs of car to move 200 lbs of person.
Motorcycles make more sense for individual commuting, but again, you have the safety issues (much more likely to kill yourself with no cars around, arguably safer when in the company of cars (because at least you have some acceleration).
If they could make them affordable and safe enough, I could see moving to sort of a two-car solution without having to trash the infrastructure - sell "city commute" cars that are really just a hybrid motorcycle with a cabin and some safety features, and keep a more tradition car if you make longer trips often. Seems like it'd be hard to convince people to spend the money on that, though.
And personally, I really enjoy my fast car
I think most complaints I've heard have been less about cuts than about pointless, damaging changes or additions.
There are probably 15-30 minutes of changed or added scenes in both Two Towers and Return of the King that changed characters and took up time that could have been either a) made the movies shorter and more palatable or b) been used to include more of the good stuff from the book.
I think overall he did a great job of capturing the look of the whole thing, and a decent job of capturing the main thrust of most of the characters - but some of the changes just kind of.. sucked, from a logical standpoint. Not to mention the character assassination on Faramir.
I have no problem with this if they make it good, and don't interrupt it with other advertising.
:)
Ever seen the series of short internet films BMW made? It's called The Hire www.thehire.tv.
They brought in some big name directors and actors, gave them a good budget, premise, and some creative control - and they ended up with some really cool films that also happen to be some of the most effective commercials I've seen.
The trick is that the BMW car is there... but no one shouts it out at you, it's just the tool that the main character uses to do his job (which largely involves cool car chases). And that they're well done films to begin with.
Do I expect NBC to do something similarly cool? I doubt it, but I have no problem with the concept
And yet he remains the "third party" candidate to win the most votes in a hundred years. He ran without the support of the two main party machines, that's the important part.
New parties rarely spring forth fully formed - they splinter off of an existing party. Had he won, there was a chance he could have done that. And "progressive republican" is a sort of candidate we've been missing for a while.
A lot of the problem is that people pay so much more attention to the presidential race than to ones where they can actually make a change.
A third party candidate has no chance in hell of winning the presidency - but with enough local support you can have a decent chance of becoming mayor, being elected to the state legislature, or maybe even to the House of Representatives. I mean, Ron Paul's far outside of normal republicans, but he is at least in the house.
The only times a third party or outside viewpoint has done well at all nationally is when it is centered around a cult of personality - Theodore Roosevelt, Ross Perot, even Jesse Ventura. It only lasts as long as that person is in the spotlight.
The only thing we can do with our little voices and few votes is try to provide some force at a local level - and you do see decisions reflecting that. California's gun laws or emissions laws versus Texas, for example. Regardless of which approach you agree with, those are prime examples of local action and results that are significantly different from the national approach.
Rather than trying to guess which of the national candidates is going to suck less and arguing whether we're "throwing out vote away," we should be trying to influence votes that we can actually change. Maybe eventually some of those low-level politicians can rise to higher office - who knows?
So, even ceding you this point - because I'm going off of what I have heard, but google didn't find proof either way yet - why do most people in other countries, when watching American movies, watch a subtitled version?
There's something to be said for the original performance.
You think all these elitists really prefer to be reading a translation instead of watching the artwork? I just still haven't seen a dub that was as good as the original voice work. And it's not just the foreign aspect disguising the inflection - my friends with significantly more experience living in Japan than I do agree completely. So if it's "elitist" to say that you shouldn't watch an quantifiably inferior version of a show just so that you don't have to read, all right, I'm elitist.
Having watched the first GitS both with an without subtitles, I would argue that yes, they don't have decent actors. Not trying to be offensive to the people working hard to bring anime to the US, but it just isn't as good.
GitS isn't as bad as many have been, but it's nowhere near the quality of the original cast.
And then of course there are those of us who just enjoy seeing a work in its original form - like seeing the original broadway cast of a play.