unparalleled ability to wrap cutting-edge technology in a user-friendly, marketable package. But let's not confuse that with innovation.
Exactly why I suggested the article should be about Apple's effective PR machine, and did not mention "innovation" in any technical sense.
As far as the press world being full of "diehard Mac users," I'm not seeing it. I will say, graphics has been so Mac-dominated that for many years all the screen shots you'd see in Ads and so on would have Mac window elements, but that's about it. The games columns, how-to articles, and so on in the paper are all overwhelmingly Windows-centric. Reflects the market, and that's about it.
When I read or hear people whinging about "bias" now, my skepticism is immediately up.
It's like comparing Scorcese to Bruckheimer. Critics love Scorcese more and everyone will agree that Scorcese makes a superior product, but Bruckheimer is the one with the blockbuster hits.
Jerry Bruckheimer is the devil. His name on something is enough to make me run away with my hands in the air. And he, like Gates, does get his share of press. The opening showing of "Pearl Harbor" on a U.S. Navy carrier, for example, got tons of press.
Which makes it an especial delight to point out that, in the case of this particular analogy, Jobs's role at Pixar makes him both the critical and the box office winner over Gates, hands down.
Intelligence agencies instilling moral values in their agents. What will they think of next?
Kidding aside, the overriding principle of intelligence in the U.S. used to be "Speak truth to power," once upon a time. The bending of those agencies' souls in the run-up to Iraq is terrifying to anyone who remembers the elder Bush's term at the CIA. George H.W. Bush didn't preside over an agency whose sole purpose was to buttress decisions already made by "instinct."
"Intelligence" groups do have their principles. They aren't what you'd call morality, exactly, but when they're distorted it ain't any good at all.
iMac that's as powerful as a PowerMac? Who's gonna wanna buy PowerMacs for the next couple months?
The same question has been asked with each generation of the iMac line. The original CRT G3 machines were priced very attratively for performance next to the pro models when they were released. Same with the lampshade G4s, and with the flat G5s.
When the iMac line gets to the point where it's slipping next to the pro models, it's been freshened with a new design. Apple's extremely conscious of how their range of products fits the spaces in the market, as anyone who's considered an iPod knows. Start thinking about a shuffle, and you ladder up by $50 increments until you hit your sweet spot.
The one case where the "pro" line hasn't bumped up to compete was the languishing G4 PowerBook line -- so hello "MacBook," and the intel processors necessary for it.
You could even get tricky and make a separate karma just for story submission, with some sort of moderation system. This moderation could be done by the editors themselves, or it could be opened up to the readership. I've read dozens of comments over the years where the submitter wished they could moderate the story. Perhaps it's time to add that functionality to slashcode.
The only qualification to that basic idea I'd offer would be: What makes it "tricky," again?
We already have the mod system, with categories that are overbroad but that basically work. We have a mechanism for pushing posts up or down the page based on recency, mod scores, or whatever the user's chosen in her prefs. There's a separate pref that lets us choose to see all stories on a topic, none of them, or just the "best," too -- only what counts as the "best" if we're not modding?
We wanna be able to mod "the latest Jon Dovrak troll column" as a troll. Half the posts to any Dvorak story are just going to amount to that anyway.
Similarly, we do have enemies lists that we can cause to mod down by a value we set, yes? Just let me do that to posters, by user name. Problem solved, no editorial intervention required.
(If it was up to me, I'd use some sort of mod system to screen proposed stories and determine which ones were worthy of the home page. That would require some real recasting of the mod system, but I don't see why applying the existing system to stories that are already up would take that much at all...)
What the heck -- anyone else notice that the linked article doesn't get around to what made this journalist "outspoken"? We're told that terms like "freedom" and "democracy" were removed from the Chinese flavor of MSN in 2005, and that previous postings on Yahoo led to someone's arrest last fall. Presumably this was comparable content... But why doesn't the article tell us?
We report that the views were controversial for China, but apparently that makes them unreportable. What, are we hoping a Chinese audience will be able to find the story now?
(As far as Microsoft being ever so scrupulous about adhering to international standards, it's impressive how multinational corporations cover their butts when an authoritarian state is offended. Their commitment to international practices is even more impressive when local labor standards give them what amounts to slave labor.)
Funny how punitive damages are so extreme when it's an individual shyster whose game got called, but become cause celebres when a massive corporation like Mickey-D's is on the defending end.
Last I heard MacDonalds was initially assessed damages equivalent to a couple of days' coffee sales (or profits?) in a case where they were singularly arrogant (and idiotic) in their own defense. The pop media turned that into a case for tort reform, and it eventually got settled for less money -- but people still whinge about how unjust it was that the old lady with the skin grafts on her crotch got too much cash from the multinational company.
The individual who tries to
I'm no fan of SPAM, but this is out of hand. In general extreme punishments to make an example of people disgust me. Justice has to be proportionate.
It's interesting to scan down the list of titles different sources gave this same basic story. They all basically parrot back the headline the report used, but lots don't even get that right.
While several of the stories (like this one on/.) are saying a slightly higher percentage of women now use the 'net, the first bullet point on The Pew site says "The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men." Later in their summary Pew gives the bland tag news sources probably reacted to: "In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up. "
The report itself is far more wide-ranging, and most of its interesting content gets left out of the usual suspects. I mean, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents -- 80% to 60%, which is a BIG difference. And so on. Even dramatic stuff gets discarded in favor of a horse-race-between-the-sexes thing, here. And I'll bet Pew phrased their own headline as a gender gap thing as a way of getting the attention of news sources, too -- the problem perpetuates itself.
Why is it that general news sources touch on only one or two aspects of something like this, but the original source's press release is much richer in the same space? It's like the whole "force a dialectic on the story even if there isn't one" thing is causing reporters to discard tons of primary information to sell a faked-up conflict that isn't there. (The more tabloid a source is, the worse it gets, too. Fox makes a hell of a living pimping every story up like this.)
In a reporting world like that, reporters aren't being asked to turn stories on their heads. They're just regurgitating press releases and reinforcing stereotypes.
What do you think China will do with 1 cm accuracy? Track Pandas?
Um, actually, yes, that's one thing they do use GPS for now...
Your entire post begins from the premise that the US must continue to keep absolute control of GPS systems to defend itself. Back in the days of the Soviet Union/Empire, the same rationale was used for the iron curtain.
I do agree, the US will anticipate use of any rival system by hostiles. The air force already has policies to do with that, obviously, and to do with hypothetical hostile satellites for that matter.
But if you want to ask why the Europeans are doing this, perhaps you might look at the radically unilateral actions and rhetoric of the current US administration. This is a pretty good example of a practical way in which even our closest allies have responded to W. Bush exiting the multilateral world.
Why doesn't MS offer compatibility between their own formats??? The world may never know...
Sometimes it happens within a given app's features. For several generations, Word's outline and style features were quite incompatible with one another. Apply one, you couldn't use the other without messing everything up. That's just good old lack of communication between groups developing in parallel.
Columnists' jobs are to provoke reactions, and Dvorak is all about getting eyes on the page. He's particularly irritating, yes, but it's a type of writer. Sports pages always have one guy like this, whose columns rip the home teams to provoke readers to write letters and so on.
The difference with Dvorak is that he's got a sort of instinctive tendency to side with the bullies on the block. He identifies with MS, you can see it in his choice of topics over the years pretty clearly. Back in the day he was a big IBM guy.
(The recurring front page items with this guy's blunders make me want the ability to mod stories themselves. Why am I a worse judge of what should rate home page priority than Taco? Give us a shared right to mod prospective stories; we can also edit them Wikipedia style. The results would be much better.)
We well remember the circumstances under which a law called "the PATRIOT Act" got passed to begin with. Yes. You might do better for your side of the ideological divide not to remind anyone of that process. This discussion is already about the abuse of power, you don't need to score points for the other side.
does NOT introduce one new power not already available to the government or a DA in some form to Drug Dealers.
You need to maybe edit this sentence so we have the slightest idea what you're saying. I think I can make a guess, but your point is badly garbled.
do the research and actually read through the entire legislation before making a judgement
Had you noticed that the debate about this law's renewal has had two sides:
the Republican leadership, arguing that it must be renewed in its entirety, with no changes, or we're screwed; and
the Democrats, who want to revise specific provisions of the bill?
Which of those sides seems to be staking out an adult position? Which reflects a thorough understanding of the bill? I ask you.
The objections to this legislation reflect specific concerns about it, they aren't an incoherent rant on the level of your post. I guess we'll just have to cut you some slack, though, as you're busy reading the 342-page text of the act, I feel certain.
It would've been with some thought
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Kong Lives!
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It makes it a lot more interesting when a decision you make early on in the game effects it a lot later on
Okay, but this one sounds more like a "get 40 rebounds in a game and you unlock Wilt Chamberlain's shoes" perk from an NBA game to me. I agree with you, what you're describing sounds nice, but games mostly make it happen based on some arbitrary point total or something. (Those 250,000 points mean nothing to me playing as Kong. I want a big banana -- hey, maybe that commuter train.)
When things like that happen organically, that's when it works great. The whole open world thing from GTA got its appeal because it seemed to go a little that way, but really it's not a generational thing. Some pretty old school games like Escape Velocity (a flat-screen space RPG, sort of) and the old Fallout series manage to give you real influence over how things occur, and have endless subplots and quests that affect each other, and character traits that affect whether you can get the different branches.
Probably it has to be a basic design choice for this to work well. Otherwise it's just this sort of patched-on, alternate ending deal... Go back home? What about the one where he sticks with the program and becomes a big Broadway hit, touring with the Rockettes in his dotage?
Maybe the point of departure on the line toward overt evil is when practical or even just conventional law -- on the level of which side of the street you drive on, or how to prepare food safely -- takes on some sort of assumed morality. Because the rules are basically arbitrary, the argument in support of a religious, holy basis for how one dresses at church becomes arbitrary too: arbitrary authority, attributed to God. Authoritarianism is the end of that line.
(If you read my sig, you'll know that isn't my favorite outcome.)
...we tend to ignore facts that don't fit preconceived notions and both recognize and remember better ones that do.
Had an undergrad course that dealt with the intersection of political science and psychology. One of the assigned books was about schema theory; I think it was called "Processing the News." It dealt with how people react to news stories.
The human mind is wired to look for patterns. We try to identify them even in random data, meaningless data, and once we've got a working idea about a pattern we'll test new information to see if it can possibly fit in. The "schema" become self-reinforcing to some extent; it's hard to pile up enough contrary evidence, or evidence that just doesn't "fit" well enough, to make people question or revise their dearly held beliefs.
Pretty consistently when I hear a politician speak, or read a newspaper (or God forbid see the TV news), that book comes to mind. People who're trying to win you over know how to toss out the words that will let you fit ideas into the prejudices you carry around with you. A newspaper writer knows, in writing about a robbery, that you can either fit it into the "gang violence" slot or the "kid lost the bike she'd saved her allowance for" slot, and they tailor what they say to help you along.
Conspiracy wonks are pretty good examples of how extreme this tendency can be. It's truly sad how easily they can be manipulated, too, when someone wants to. Pretty clearly Israel was not responsible for 9/11, but the idea that the Mossad was behind it does fit what certain people want to think...
What tense was that in, again? Your future kids?
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Games That Travel Well
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My kids will be armed with digital cameras and a handheld GPS back there. They will be encouraged to track our progress on the GPS as well as find waypoints as well as taking photos of a list of items.
Both of which keeps them somewhat quiet...
Your tenses are inconsistent, but I'm getting the distinct feeling that your kids are hypothetical, or at least that their potential game playing days are in the future.
I'm a single father of 12-year-old boy/girl twins, having raised them alone since they were born. On long car trips -- we do a 17-plus hour drive from Minnesota to our Colorado cabin every summer -- you find a balance of things to do and think about, or to sometimes zone out over. Not everything has to fit the program. Kids will not fit your program anyway.
Concentrate on providing them with positive stuff to do -- and helping you figure out the map is a great one -- rather than laying into anything they enjoy that doesn't meet your standards for edutainment. The kids'll be much happier, they won't regard learning as a burden because you'll have lured them to it rather than cracking down and forcing it on them, and you're going to be oh so much saner.
With respect to video games in particular, I would suggest that borrowing a gameboy sort of thing for long-distance trips isn't such a bad deal.
In all seriousness, the only parent I know well who actually attempts to constantly make every experience into an educational wonderland actually is a control freak whose child is pretty miserable. Kid has a reading disorder of some sort, and the father is unreal about it. It's sad to be around.
Just my advice based on experience in the past (and present).
Perhaps you misunderstood me to be saying "Black Box" starts with a discussion of fossil whales. I didn't say that.
Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling Mesonychid ancestors (8). Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed. --Kenneth R. Miller's review of "Darwin's Black Box"
You're right, though -- his ID goofiness was outpaced by science inside of a single year, and it's only been 11 years since he made such a total ass of himself over the whale fossils. I plead "casual internet posting."
It's an interesting interpretation of the state of the universe, but it answers exactly zero questions about it.
The gist of the problem is, ID is unscientific more because it *poses* no questions than because it answers none.
The M.O. of Intelligent Design's advocates forever now has been to go to the edges of what science knows and identify something out there that hasn't been fully explained yet. They then claim the as-yet-unexplained area is evidence of things being so complicated there can be no explanation except a godlike "designer." When science figures out the supposedly irreducible complexity of whatever the example was, the IDers just move the goalposts to whatever's on the edge now.
Michael Behe -- author of "Darwin's Black Box" -- for example, started out talking about fossil whales. Why weren't there intermediary whale forms between mesonychids and true whales? Oops -- over the next 20 years many, many steps in between turned up. "Black Box" is the same watch-watchmaker argument, only about subcellular structures like cilia. The logic's flawed in the same way, and his book is out-of-date in several of its claims. Don't worry, ID types will move the terms of the debate out somewhere else. We're never going to be omniscient, so they'll always have something to seize on.
The trick is, if the ID vision of the universe being so complex it can't be explained by anything but a God was accepted, nobody would ever have asked *any* questions about how things work. In these people's minds, every- every- everything is so infinitely complex that the only possible response to the world is to worship its creator. They've been making this argument since well before Darwin was around, it's not specific to evolution.
It's not just that their idea doesn't answer any questions. No questions would even get asked, if these people ran the world, or your school system.
(And of course that would suit them just fine, because their religious views are about preserving their authority, not about explaining the world or helping anyone lead a moral life.)
Santa boxing his own ideological shadow, maybe?
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Hacking Santa
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Or maybe Santa could make a lot of noise about how he's being persecuted -- despite the overwhelming evidence that nobody's out to do away with Santa or Christmas. That'd come standard in the fundie model. Fundies like to talk about how they're being persecuted rather than about flaky stuff like, you know, human fellowship and peace.
Seriously, I have relatives who are convinced that the multi-language instruction book on a Timex watch is an example of how they're being marginalized by the liberal society around them. Real example. And yes, whatever Santa could say by default would somehow be wrong for those folks. Doesn't really matter what it is.
But while Allard's "grand vision" of the Xbox 360 sounds amazing, it's hard for me to imagine Microsoft actually pulling it off. He claims that they're going to attract casual gamers, yet the launch lineup was aimed squarely at the same audience that bought the Xbox 1. He says that Microsoft can change their reputation through their actions, but their actions are only giving us PGR3, Halo 3, PDZ, and Kameo.
So: Does all the talk about philosophy and innovation match up with the product? If not, you can safely ignore it as PR puffery. Even within his quotes here, Allard talks about breaking new ground and then talks about hitting all his goals from three years ago. If there's a philosophy there, it's one to do with mediocrity.
The conspicuous presence in this market that actually seems to believe in all those PR terms is Nintendo.
The real beauty in this set of quotes has to be the exchange with "someone who was very involved in the planning about three years ago":
'Son of a gun, if you guys didn't do 95 per cent of the original vision of the machine!' And I looked at him and said, 'Well, what was the other five per cent, what did we drop?' and he said, 'I don't know. I couldn't find it!'
Gee whiz! It's nice to know the people involved in XBox planning were so very, very up on their math skills. Now go out there and give the team 120 percent, boys!
Note to Microsoft Execs: If you laid out your product plan three years back and then plodded along and hit this percentage (whatever it was) of your goals, that's a perfect example of this not being "a machine built around a philosophy, not a set of tech specs." Your vision didn't change a bit in three years, and you're claiming to break new philosophical ground? I don't see the evidence of anything at all new in your final product, or in the release lineup you're puffing up here.
One comparison that comes to mind is Apple and the intel choice. Jobs had a black ops group compiling OS X on the other chips for years in advance, so they had the option around. Inside of six months after making the decision, we've got a spate of rumors about new laptops and consumer machines next month. Apple will turn its entire product line over to new chips in the time it took MS to spiff the XBox's stats for "much more of the same." Pretty dramatic contrast.
Swear to goodness, the post/don't post decisions on this site seem to obey no laws whatsoever. There'd be no real "dupe" problem for me if other stories weren't getting buried in the process too.
This site model does work reasonably well, assuming you have some conscious editors behind it. When did our esteemed/. gatekeepers become the equivalent of Jack Elrod and Johnny Hart from the comics page, coasting on their few laurels and not paying much attention?
Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell -- no points for guessing which party he belongs to -- controversially left Diebold among the potential vote machine vendors the state could choose from. That was a week after O'Dell had written his letter talking about delivering the state to Bush in '04.
The State legislature then overrode members who argued for the necessity of a voter verified paper trail. Again, guess which side the Dems were on in that debate and which side the Republicans were on. (The Republicans simply argued that a paper trail was unnecessary.) So Blackwell signed a $100-million contract for voting machines with two companies who'd both shown a political bias toward the right.
Google "Plain Dealer" and "Diebold" and you'll get a bunch of stories like that. There's no shortage of evidence of bias, all through the whole system, and lots of "We can't assume the worst" excuses for not doing anything about it. Stinks to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly why I suggested the article should be about Apple's effective PR machine, and did not mention "innovation" in any technical sense.
As far as the press world being full of "diehard Mac users," I'm not seeing it. I will say, graphics has been so Mac-dominated that for many years all the screen shots you'd see in Ads and so on would have Mac window elements, but that's about it. The games columns, how-to articles, and so on in the paper are all overwhelmingly Windows-centric. Reflects the market, and that's about it.
When I read or hear people whinging about "bias" now, my skepticism is immediately up.
Jerry Bruckheimer is the devil. His name on something is enough to make me run away with my hands in the air. And he, like Gates, does get his share of press. The opening showing of "Pearl Harbor" on a U.S. Navy carrier, for example, got tons of press.
Which makes it an especial delight to point out that, in the case of this particular analogy, Jobs's role at Pixar makes him both the critical and the box office winner over Gates, hands down.
Bill Gates and his wife just got named people of the year in Time Magazine, for criminy's sake.
This story might as well be "Why is Apple's PR effective where other companies' isn't?" Instead it's trotting out a charge of bias that's just lame.
Kidding aside, the overriding principle of intelligence in the U.S. used to be "Speak truth to power," once upon a time. The bending of those agencies' souls in the run-up to Iraq is terrifying to anyone who remembers the elder Bush's term at the CIA. George H.W. Bush didn't preside over an agency whose sole purpose was to buttress decisions already made by "instinct."
"Intelligence" groups do have their principles. They aren't what you'd call morality, exactly, but when they're distorted it ain't any good at all.
The same question has been asked with each generation of the iMac line. The original CRT G3 machines were priced very attratively for performance next to the pro models when they were released. Same with the lampshade G4s, and with the flat G5s.
When the iMac line gets to the point where it's slipping next to the pro models, it's been freshened with a new design. Apple's extremely conscious of how their range of products fits the spaces in the market, as anyone who's considered an iPod knows. Start thinking about a shuffle, and you ladder up by $50 increments until you hit your sweet spot.
The one case where the "pro" line hasn't bumped up to compete was the languishing G4 PowerBook line -- so hello "MacBook," and the intel processors necessary for it.
The only qualification to that basic idea I'd offer would be: What makes it "tricky," again?
We already have the mod system, with categories that are overbroad but that basically work. We have a mechanism for pushing posts up or down the page based on recency, mod scores, or whatever the user's chosen in her prefs. There's a separate pref that lets us choose to see all stories on a topic, none of them, or just the "best," too -- only what counts as the "best" if we're not modding?
We wanna be able to mod "the latest Jon Dovrak troll column" as a troll. Half the posts to any Dvorak story are just going to amount to that anyway.
Similarly, we do have enemies lists that we can cause to mod down by a value we set, yes? Just let me do that to posters, by user name. Problem solved, no editorial intervention required.
(If it was up to me, I'd use some sort of mod system to screen proposed stories and determine which ones were worthy of the home page. That would require some real recasting of the mod system, but I don't see why applying the existing system to stories that are already up would take that much at all...)
We report that the views were controversial for China, but apparently that makes them unreportable. What, are we hoping a Chinese audience will be able to find the story now?
(As far as Microsoft being ever so scrupulous about adhering to international standards, it's impressive how multinational corporations cover their butts when an authoritarian state is offended. Their commitment to international practices is even more impressive when local labor standards give them what amounts to slave labor.)
Last I heard MacDonalds was initially assessed damages equivalent to a couple of days' coffee sales (or profits?) in a case where they were singularly arrogant (and idiotic) in their own defense. The pop media turned that into a case for tort reform, and it eventually got settled for less money -- but people still whinge about how unjust it was that the old lady with the skin grafts on her crotch got too much cash from the multinational company.
The individual who tries to
I'm no fan of SPAM, but this is out of hand. In general extreme punishments to make an example of people disgust me. Justice has to be proportionate.
While several of the stories (like this one on /.) are saying a slightly higher percentage of women now use the 'net, the first bullet point on The Pew site says "The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men." Later in their summary Pew gives the bland tag news sources probably reacted to: "In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up. "
The report itself is far more wide-ranging, and most of its interesting content gets left out of the usual suspects. I mean, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents -- 80% to 60%, which is a BIG difference. And so on. Even dramatic stuff gets discarded in favor of a horse-race-between-the-sexes thing, here. And I'll bet Pew phrased their own headline as a gender gap thing as a way of getting the attention of news sources, too -- the problem perpetuates itself.
Why is it that general news sources touch on only one or two aspects of something like this, but the original source's press release is much richer in the same space? It's like the whole "force a dialectic on the story even if there isn't one" thing is causing reporters to discard tons of primary information to sell a faked-up conflict that isn't there. (The more tabloid a source is, the worse it gets, too. Fox makes a hell of a living pimping every story up like this.)
In a reporting world like that, reporters aren't being asked to turn stories on their heads. They're just regurgitating press releases and reinforcing stereotypes.
Um, actually, yes, that's one thing they do use GPS for now...
Your entire post begins from the premise that the US must continue to keep absolute control of GPS systems to defend itself. Back in the days of the Soviet Union/Empire, the same rationale was used for the iron curtain.
I do agree, the US will anticipate use of any rival system by hostiles. The air force already has policies to do with that, obviously, and to do with hypothetical hostile satellites for that matter.
But if you want to ask why the Europeans are doing this, perhaps you might look at the radically unilateral actions and rhetoric of the current US administration. This is a pretty good example of a practical way in which even our closest allies have responded to W. Bush exiting the multilateral world.
Sometimes it happens within a given app's features. For several generations, Word's outline and style features were quite incompatible with one another. Apply one, you couldn't use the other without messing everything up. That's just good old lack of communication between groups developing in parallel.
The difference with Dvorak is that he's got a sort of instinctive tendency to side with the bullies on the block. He identifies with MS, you can see it in his choice of topics over the years pretty clearly. Back in the day he was a big IBM guy.
(The recurring front page items with this guy's blunders make me want the ability to mod stories themselves. Why am I a worse judge of what should rate home page priority than Taco? Give us a shared right to mod prospective stories; we can also edit them Wikipedia style. The results would be much better.)
We well remember the circumstances under which a law called "the PATRIOT Act" got passed to begin with. Yes. You might do better for your side of the ideological divide not to remind anyone of that process. This discussion is already about the abuse of power, you don't need to score points for the other side.
does NOT introduce one new power not already available to the government or a DA in some form to Drug Dealers.
You need to maybe edit this sentence so we have the slightest idea what you're saying. I think I can make a guess, but your point is badly garbled.
do the research and actually read through the entire legislation before making a judgement
Had you noticed that the debate about this law's renewal has had two sides:
Which of those sides seems to be staking out an adult position? Which reflects a thorough understanding of the bill? I ask you.
The objections to this legislation reflect specific concerns about it, they aren't an incoherent rant on the level of your post. I guess we'll just have to cut you some slack, though, as you're busy reading the 342-page text of the act, I feel certain.
Okay, but this one sounds more like a "get 40 rebounds in a game and you unlock Wilt Chamberlain's shoes" perk from an NBA game to me. I agree with you, what you're describing sounds nice, but games mostly make it happen based on some arbitrary point total or something. (Those 250,000 points mean nothing to me playing as Kong. I want a big banana -- hey, maybe that commuter train.)
When things like that happen organically, that's when it works great. The whole open world thing from GTA got its appeal because it seemed to go a little that way, but really it's not a generational thing. Some pretty old school games like Escape Velocity (a flat-screen space RPG, sort of) and the old Fallout series manage to give you real influence over how things occur, and have endless subplots and quests that affect each other, and character traits that affect whether you can get the different branches.
Probably it has to be a basic design choice for this to work well. Otherwise it's just this sort of patched-on, alternate ending deal... Go back home? What about the one where he sticks with the program and becomes a big Broadway hit, touring with the Rockettes in his dotage?
Maybe the point of departure on the line toward overt evil is when practical or even just conventional law -- on the level of which side of the street you drive on, or how to prepare food safely -- takes on some sort of assumed morality. Because the rules are basically arbitrary, the argument in support of a religious, holy basis for how one dresses at church becomes arbitrary too: arbitrary authority, attributed to God. Authoritarianism is the end of that line.
(If you read my sig, you'll know that isn't my favorite outcome.)
Had an undergrad course that dealt with the intersection of political science and psychology. One of the assigned books was about schema theory; I think it was called "Processing the News." It dealt with how people react to news stories.
The human mind is wired to look for patterns. We try to identify them even in random data, meaningless data, and once we've got a working idea about a pattern we'll test new information to see if it can possibly fit in. The "schema" become self-reinforcing to some extent; it's hard to pile up enough contrary evidence, or evidence that just doesn't "fit" well enough, to make people question or revise their dearly held beliefs.
Pretty consistently when I hear a politician speak, or read a newspaper (or God forbid see the TV news), that book comes to mind. People who're trying to win you over know how to toss out the words that will let you fit ideas into the prejudices you carry around with you. A newspaper writer knows, in writing about a robbery, that you can either fit it into the "gang violence" slot or the "kid lost the bike she'd saved her allowance for" slot, and they tailor what they say to help you along.
Conspiracy wonks are pretty good examples of how extreme this tendency can be. It's truly sad how easily they can be manipulated, too, when someone wants to. Pretty clearly Israel was not responsible for 9/11, but the idea that the Mossad was behind it does fit what certain people want to think...
My kids will be armed with digital cameras and a handheld GPS back there. They will be encouraged to track our progress on the GPS as well as find waypoints as well as taking photos of a list of items.
Both of which keeps them somewhat quiet...
Your tenses are inconsistent, but I'm getting the distinct feeling that your kids are hypothetical, or at least that their potential game playing days are in the future.
I'm a single father of 12-year-old boy/girl twins, having raised them alone since they were born. On long car trips -- we do a 17-plus hour drive from Minnesota to our Colorado cabin every summer -- you find a balance of things to do and think about, or to sometimes zone out over. Not everything has to fit the program. Kids will not fit your program anyway.
Concentrate on providing them with positive stuff to do -- and helping you figure out the map is a great one -- rather than laying into anything they enjoy that doesn't meet your standards for edutainment. The kids'll be much happier, they won't regard learning as a burden because you'll have lured them to it rather than cracking down and forcing it on them, and you're going to be oh so much saner.
With respect to video games in particular, I would suggest that borrowing a gameboy sort of thing for long-distance trips isn't such a bad deal.
In all seriousness, the only parent I know well who actually attempts to constantly make every experience into an educational wonderland actually is a control freak whose child is pretty miserable. Kid has a reading disorder of some sort, and the father is unreal about it. It's sad to be around.
Just my advice based on experience in the past (and present).
You're right, though -- his ID goofiness was outpaced by science inside of a single year, and it's only been 11 years since he made such a total ass of himself over the whale fossils. I plead "casual internet posting."
The gist of the problem is, ID is unscientific more because it *poses* no questions than because it answers none.
The M.O. of Intelligent Design's advocates forever now has been to go to the edges of what science knows and identify something out there that hasn't been fully explained yet. They then claim the as-yet-unexplained area is evidence of things being so complicated there can be no explanation except a godlike "designer." When science figures out the supposedly irreducible complexity of whatever the example was, the IDers just move the goalposts to whatever's on the edge now.
Michael Behe -- author of "Darwin's Black Box" -- for example, started out talking about fossil whales. Why weren't there intermediary whale forms between mesonychids and true whales? Oops -- over the next 20 years many, many steps in between turned up. "Black Box" is the same watch-watchmaker argument, only about subcellular structures like cilia. The logic's flawed in the same way, and his book is out-of-date in several of its claims. Don't worry, ID types will move the terms of the debate out somewhere else. We're never going to be omniscient, so they'll always have something to seize on.
The trick is, if the ID vision of the universe being so complex it can't be explained by anything but a God was accepted, nobody would ever have asked *any* questions about how things work. In these people's minds, every- every- everything is so infinitely complex that the only possible response to the world is to worship its creator. They've been making this argument since well before Darwin was around, it's not specific to evolution.
It's not just that their idea doesn't answer any questions. No questions would even get asked , if these people ran the world, or your school system.
(And of course that would suit them just fine, because their religious views are about preserving their authority, not about explaining the world or helping anyone lead a moral life.)
Seriously, I have relatives who are convinced that the multi-language instruction book on a Timex watch is an example of how they're being marginalized by the liberal society around them. Real example. And yes, whatever Santa could say by default would somehow be wrong for those folks. Doesn't really matter what it is.
So: Does all the talk about philosophy and innovation match up with the product? If not, you can safely ignore it as PR puffery. Even within his quotes here, Allard talks about breaking new ground and then talks about hitting all his goals from three years ago. If there's a philosophy there, it's one to do with mediocrity.
The conspicuous presence in this market that actually seems to believe in all those PR terms is Nintendo.
Gee whiz! It's nice to know the people involved in XBox planning were so very, very up on their math skills. Now go out there and give the team 120 percent, boys!
Note to Microsoft Execs: If you laid out your product plan three years back and then plodded along and hit this percentage (whatever it was) of your goals, that's a perfect example of this not being "a machine built around a philosophy, not a set of tech specs." Your vision didn't change a bit in three years, and you're claiming to break new philosophical ground? I don't see the evidence of anything at all new in your final product, or in the release lineup you're puffing up here.
One comparison that comes to mind is Apple and the intel choice. Jobs had a black ops group compiling OS X on the other chips for years in advance, so they had the option around. Inside of six months after making the decision, we've got a spate of rumors about new laptops and consumer machines next month. Apple will turn its entire product line over to new chips in the time it took MS to spiff the XBox's stats for "much more of the same." Pretty dramatic contrast.
This site model does work reasonably well, assuming you have some conscious editors behind it. When did our esteemed /. gatekeepers become the equivalent of Jack Elrod and Johnny Hart from the comics page, coasting on their few laurels and not paying much attention?
The State legislature then overrode members who argued for the necessity of a voter verified paper trail. Again, guess which side the Dems were on in that debate and which side the Republicans were on. (The Republicans simply argued that a paper trail was unnecessary.) So Blackwell signed a $100-million contract for voting machines with two companies who'd both shown a political bias toward the right.
Google "Plain Dealer" and "Diebold" and you'll get a bunch of stories like that. There's no shortage of evidence of bias, all through the whole system, and lots of "We can't assume the worst" excuses for not doing anything about it. Stinks to hell.
(Oh, yes, I'm well aware of that actually. Just noticed that nobody'd mentioned good old Stanley yet, and wanted to put in a word for him.)