You make ID sound like a new thing recently proposed by fundamentalist politicians. This is not the case; the idea has been around for as long as I can remember (admittedly, that's only about two decades, but still...), and has long been held as a possibility by Christian scientists...
Darwin describes the essential outlines of the ID argument in "Origin of Species." He's often misquoted by creationists (IDers, other permutations thereon) who don't realize (or at least admit) that he proposed ways to argue against his ideas, and that they're quoting him from those passages. Darwin was an intelligent man who genuinely was interested in arriving at the truth as far as human beings could.
Despite the "it's so complex we don't understand it" frontier having moved from areas like the human eye (early on) to fossil whales (recently) to subcellular structures, the same essential argument has continued to be made, and re-made, by people objecting to evolution. ID isn't really even a variation on it; it's as simple as the argument that a watch is so complex it must've been designed rather than spontaneously appearing in the world.
But I basically agree: the difference here is that we've gotten to a sort of tipping point at which politicians see this sort of "social right" position as a wedge issue they can use to win elections. (Personally I pray to God they lose that bet and wind up having allied themselves to a thoroughly disgraced Presidency that results in a Republican party I could imagine voting for again someday.)
Most ID I've heard has tended to be things like "God invented the eyeball"...
That's probably accurate for the run-of-the-mill IDer on the street. "Look at your hand, isn't it a marvel of engineering" is close to the mark. The public face of the IDer thing, though, is more like Michael Behe, who wrote "Darwin's Black Box."
Behe's not publishing anything in peer review journals (HA!) but he'd like to at least present a front that's intellectually coherent for the sympathetic layperson. As a result he concedes evolution on the species level, and even on the cellular level if memory serves. (Lots of his readers don't seem to realize this, of course, but he does it in the book's forward.)
Behe's particular "irreducible" argument is made on a subcellular level, about things like cilia. In the end it's just another form of his previous watch-watchmaker arguments about things like whale ancestors -- those were disproven as that particular niche in the fossil record got lots of work done in the last 20 years or so. He just chose the edges of whatever science was working on when he wrote his book, same as he did with the whales. Also his book is out-of-date, with lots and lots of his examples seeming to have been explained since he said they were unexplainable. He probably needs to re-edit it to reflect God's being just that little bit more complex now.;-)
And yeah, it's still a whacked theory. I don't think Behe does (or anyway argued in his book for) the "Humans are outside of macroevolution" thing our parent poster tried, but it's just as much of a mess the other way. God created the cilia, which is complex and can't be explained, way back in time, and then intervened in the bajillion specific bioligical interactions along the way to human evolution, so as to produce John the Baptist? That didn't exactly clean things up for me...
In the end I'd like to give these people credit for sincerity at least. Between science and the ID PR onslaught, though, it's pretty clear which "side" enforces a process and method that can correct for human foibles, and which side is just an example of those foibles.
No pro user will rely on Rosetta. On the other hand, one would assume Apple with have its iWork and iLife suites flipped, along with the applications which come with OS X. That will allow home users to make the switch in fairly short order. I'm sure the rumored widescreen iBooks will sell well right out of the box.
From the moment the intel announcement was made, Jobs and Apple have emphasized that the first machines that'll get moved over will be lower-end, consumer boxes. They've badly needed to bump the portable lineup higher, having been stuck in the G4s. He talked (in interesting terms) about performance per watt in that keynote, not about speed running photoshop filters. So the first wave of new machines is manifestly not going to be aimed at the "pro" users you're talking about, and Jobs has said so, several times.
(I still think this could kill Apple. The thing that almost killed them in 1993-4-5 was a long absence of an Apple presence in the laptap market, and then the execrable quality of the PB5300 [the first PPC model] when it did finally come out. Apple lost a market "space" it had just owned. Jobs is trying to plug that gap before it recurs, this time on his watch -- but the sort of thing you're talking about still does matter to home users. Combined with this long interregnum in which I'm not exactly inclined to replace the family lampshade iMac at home because I want to see those first consumer machines, a subpar laptop lineup could do serious damage to the company's stock. They're trying to ride the iMac wave long enough to do it right.)
the immersion experience is relative to the size of the screen. No matter how big your TV screen is, you'd like to be watching a bigger one. If your screen is only a few inches large, I would guess that this distraction would be constant.
Sound does accomplish part of the immersion thing pretty well. When you've got some okay headphones on, even with the teeny screen, you can hear the rumble of the rush on Akaba in Lawrence of Arabia. You just can't see the wide screen image.
And you're right, music you listen to in parallel with other stuff, whereas video you have to focus on, and those are different. It's hard to see the convergence of the iPod player and portable DVD players any time soon. You'd need some sort of projection screen...
Or alternatively, you can make the size of the screen completely irrelevant by just bringing it closer to your eyes. When some Jonathan Ives type cooks up "TV Glasses" that don't look as "stylish and comfortable" (and headache-inducing) as this, then we'll be getting someplace. For portable video, you just can't be wedded to the physical screen across the room the way we are now. You have to approach the problem from another angle.
Jobs pitched video as a little perk added in the update to the top-end iPods, and that was just about right.
Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes, I would be more than happy to pay $5/movie
Whether the Register's original 2003 story was (or remains) accurate or not about the "loss leader" status of the iTMS, the store at least isn't the hugely profitable cash engine in that mix. It's the end-to-end experience Apple is selling, and a huge part of that is the iPod, which is where the big profits come in. They make their money on the players.
From the POV of a movie studio, an analogous model would be one where they distributed the movie itself at something like cost, and made their big profits by selling tiVos or something to watch it with in a seamless, easy-to-use way. I'm not seeing how Sony, which does make TVs, is going to particularly win iPod-like market share in the arena of the TV market or even the digital recorder market. That's leaving alone the other studios that don't have any analog to the iPod at all.
I'm a big movie buff. Oddly, I love the pay-per-track model of the iTMS and was amazed how long it took someone to offer it for real -- but for movies I'm more inclined to do the subscription thing. We have the 3-films-at-a-time Netflix subscription, paying a monthly fee. It's going to be dang hard for a studio that's siloed into its own library of Warner or Miramax films to compete with that, even if the online distribution's easier than Netflix's (very well-done) mail system. For my modest fee I get any DVD released, across them all, from Netflix.
Another response gets it dead-on: Will we pay $5 apiece to watch "Roman Holiday"s? Well, once in a blue moon, from Blockbuster when we used to do it that way. (Actually I own that DVD, but leave that.) But when we're paying by the month, I do find those old titles and TV shows in collections and stuff I'll take a chance on just to see. Just got into the BBC "The Office" that way.
What I'd suggest is a modest subscription fee per month for "channels" independent of studio source and gathered by subject just like some of today's basic cable channels. That matches up with the way people are used to seeing TV; you sort of know what Lifetime or Hallmark is going to show you. Pay $10 a month for the "Independents" channel and you can get as many indie movies as you want, point to point, from the available library. That's about what people pay for the HBO or Cinemax packages, and they get more control over the programming. It'd be the baby step away from the current system that gives us a lot more power as point-to-point consumers.
As far as DRM, I personally would accept a transient copies model if I'd paid for Showtime or HBO, which a lot of people do. Buying by subject type ("The Adventure Channel") and being able to choose the movies on the fly still offers me a ton more; if it was available at around the same price people would jump.
"Business" doesn't mean you can't have a soul
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Pixar For Sale?
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Everybody is moaning and complaining that the sale would be no good for the purchasing company, as all the good employees will leave. Well, from the seller's point of view, that's the problem of the new owner.
If the seller can't address the potential for an employee exodus, the value of what's being sold will diminish. The seller does have a big interest in helping prevent that. You'd be short-sighted if you didn't anticipate problems for the buyer and try to address them.
The buyer, if they wish to keep the creative talent and continue making gobs of money with their new acquisition, needs to make sure the "new" employees stay happy where they are.
And the point of the groaning posters is that a buyout by a company like Disney would probably fail for the precise reason that Disney won't be able to pull that off. We're talking about a company whose writers routinely refer to it as "Mousewitz," you know?
While we bemoan the plight of the employees in the purchase, the simple fact is that they don't own the company, and are always subject to a sale when the owner(s) feel the price is right or that the value has peaked.
Somehow I missed the part where you necessarily have to discard any sort of human feeling (for employees) or artistic enjoyment (for the movies) in order to accept the realities of business. Yep, it'd be permissible for Steve Jobs to sell Pixar. If he sent it to a soulless buyer, it would also suck. Saying "that's business" doesn't mean something cool wouldn't probably be ruined for us and the people who work there.
Or, in other words, I don't want to get fired -- and my boss is the sort of mediocrity whose unexpected success has distorted his perception of himself so badly that any discussion of his methods, even just to compare them to others', is seen as criticism. He wants servility, not people to work with, and I'm here to deliver!
Other examples include the related White Shark
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Warm-blooded Fish?
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As the article itself says:
Salmon sharks are lamnids, a group of sharks that also includes the mako and great white. Numerous studies have shown that lamnid sharks and tunas share many anatomical and physiological specializations that endow them with their impressive swimming power and speed.
So yeah, other sharks and the tuna are being mentioned in posts here for good reason. The news here is that Salmon Sharks hadn't been looked at for this before. We don't know that much about them. (Scientists observing them, for example, had no idea a few years ago whether they'd be safe to swim with; they bear a fair resemblance to white sharks.)
Radiating into a new niche with a new adaptation is hardly new. Bull sharks are easily the most common serious shark attack, because they're able to move into brackish or even fresh water. Adapting to a new niche opens up new opportunities to take advantage of that niche. (It's not all predation, of course. Bull sharks seem to move into the shallows in more numbers during years where they're mating there in numbers, mostly, but then attacks are associated with them there. [The Matewan Creek attacks in New Jersey, which inspired Jaws and that whole great white thang, were most likely made by bull sharks.])
And dang it, you can't even Google up a picture of the thing. I'd really like to see if you're right.
You're right, if people had any standards and would demand decent products... Well, I can't even imagine the results, so it must be pretty unlikely.
I'd rather have elegance than cuteness
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Sid Meier Responds
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· Score: 2, Interesting
CIV II had really humerous (sic) videos of the advisory council... Civ III, while cute...
To each her own, but the cutesy videos of the council got very old very quickly. "Cute" isn't the goal at all in your typical world domination game, is it? Spaceward Ho, maybe...
For me, any good simulation game is one where after you understand the core concept well enough, you can, with a little luck and good planning, have a decent chance of winning most scenarios hands down vs the computer AI...
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with difficulty settings? The lowest setting in any Civ game would give you what you want.
For my money I could do without essentially all of the graphic engine changes from II to III. The addition of "culture" and the way the previous games' rules (about military units being "away from home," about moving through "enemy" territory) were worked into it made for a huge, huge improvement. That was an elegant way to fold in some previously awkward and conspicuously unrealistic mechanics.
In no game do I care a whit for repetitively "cute" video sequences that give me no useful information. Those things were painful after the first time through, and in a Civ game replay value is every-, every-, everything.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did you say that your reading of the novel is affected by critics claims that he has denied?
The thing is, even if OSC didn't intend it that way, once you've heard the gist of this critique -- that the books are a sort of apologia for fascism and Hitler in particular -- it's hard to avoid. Some of the details are uncanny. Given any thought to Brazil being chosen as a locale later in the series?
Ayn Rand was about as unlikely a cult leader as I can imagine, given her public persona. Behind that she was a domineering cult leader. The public protestations don't amount to much in retrospect.
The 7.1 outline point brings up another great critique that Ender's Game was actually written by a committee of Mormons to warm people up to forgiving.
Hyup, and I'm bright enough to measure claims against the work and judge for myself which ones ring true. The fact that a lot of flaky people think W. Bush is evil for various imagined conspiratorial reasons doesn't mean he's not badly wrong on ideological and moral grounds. I can make those judgments for myself, I'm not just reading from an outline.
It isn't necessarily a feature list you're really pining for. If the current makers of alarm clocks added the stuff you want, they'd do so with 12 extra incomprehensible little plastic buttons, all of which would be tucked in back of the clock and all of which would look and feel the same. The volume control would be a wheel exactly like the tuning control on the radio, with one on the left side and one on the right, and you'd always have to re-learn which was which.
What's needed is some thoughtful design.
Alarm clocks are a prime example of a product in which the inmates are running the asylum. Each new half-baked feature clock makers add gets appended in the clunkiest possible way. These things aren't designed around the user, they're made according to the specs of the parts.
The gold standard for our new design will be: I must be able to operate the clock's basic features when I wake up in the morning, blurry-headed and without my contacts in. This basic problem -- that they're used by sleepy people -- seems to have escaped current makers of alarm clocks.
None of this has anything to do with "long time" though, not any more than with atomic clocks. (One of the obvious, obvious features of a decent alarm clock being that it'll synch with the atomic clocks and get back on track after a power outage or whatever...)
I look at it this way, if I never read about OSC's world view then I can still enjoy his work and get out of it what I read into it. I assume the same thing goes for L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi, but I've honestly never read any of his work because I read about scientology first.
Those Hubbard books are awful and hackneyed. They wouldn't be in print if not for the Dianetics connection.
My brother bought a few of L Ron's together as remainder hardcovers, and Steve's pretty bread and butter as a Sci Fi fan. Even for someone who just wants an okay space opera sort of deal, he said they were terrible. Leafing through one of them I'd agree. Embarrassingly bad writing.
There's a special place in the world of artistic endeavor, though, for authors and artists whose egos and world views come to vitiate their work, spoiling it for me. For example:
Whether it be a movie, book (Ender's Game was great), music, or whatever.
Lots of OSC's critics argue that "Ender's Game" amounts to an extended apologia for Hitler. (Look in the little outline at point 7.1.) Given OSC's general world view, yeah, that does affect my reading of the novel.
It's also hard for me to idolize Bobby Fischer at this point. Sad but true. And no matter how cool a modern artist is, no matter how amazing her use of material and so on, if she's constantly referring directly and indirectly to how much she detests Serbs/Croats/Kosovar Albanians, it'll detract from the work for me. I can't just shrug and say the colors are really well-chosen and leave with just the good, not if she's shoving her ideology down my throat.
Can anyone but a sicko really want OJ's autograph on a football now? I was a kid when he was huge, I remember how cool he was then. Only makes me wince now.
Doesn't make the artist an "animal," but it does compromise any satisfaction from the art.
I think a company like this should be publicly shamed. It should be presented to the public that they are cooperating with these regimes in assisting in the enslavement of their people.
I bet it'll keep us all from buying cheap goods manufactured in China, too. Get the word out. Once the weight of public shame gets out there, we'll all stop buying the stuff.
Granted, those examples aren't quite to this point: Toys R Us isn't actively selling products for the quasi-enslavement of China's factory laborers, it's contributing to those working conditions at one (slight) remove. In the case of Halliburton, though, the company was working to find loopholes in the oil for food program. Under Cheney. At least borderline illegal, and the shame didn't seem to hold them back...
Too bad it never seems to change from being only promising.
Yeah, that whole microwave oven thing is vastly overrated. And the dweebs at college carrying around backpack computers, they're completely losing their nerdy minds over the idea that someday we'll all be using computers embedded in the simplest daily things.
Take a look around you at all the lasers you encounter. Played a CD lately?
Almost nothing's ever the panacea that real true believers think it might be, but if anything the pace of change is accelerating, "Connections"-style.
"If humans had such pads they could leap 100-storey buildings"
That sounds like unsubstantiated exxageration- eg no reality behind it. Now it may be true, but seems highly improbable to me?
One does tend to suspect any popular press story that makes mistakes of scaling like unto the ones in 1950s science fiction movies that have giant ants running around. For a basic primer on the goofiness of this claim, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics would be one source.
There's nothing surprising about a trait evolving many different times. The idea that organisms are moving from a more primitive state toward something more advanced is basically all there is to the idea that flight should only have evolved once.
Knowing that things have branched more than once for a given trait isn't just interesting for paleontologists, either. For example, the group of flat worms that include modern tapeworms has evolved parasitism several different times over its history. Knowing that it didn't just happen once lets us find close living relations of tapeworms that aren't parasitic -- so we can develop treatments for tapeworms much more easily, because a lab doesn't need to deal with test worms that are paired with host animals. Viola, better medicines against tapeworms.
It's intuitive to think flight is somehow special because it places extreme physiological demands on the animals that use it, but it's just like any other evolutionary trait. Life is fertile, time is deep. That dinosaurs would maybe develop the trait twice isn't astonishing at all. They were around for a long time, and they maybe had some basic traits (bones with the potential for bird-like light internal structure or something) that made it more likely.
It's "good better best" across the product lines
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New iPods on the Horizon
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Apple does this across all their major product lines. Want a G5 iMac? They have the base model, a higher-performance one with the same monitor size in the middle, and then the 20-inch model on top.
This model is one of those Steve Jobs things. Most any other company would have kept the Mini in its lineup when the nano came out, but Jobs believes religiously in giving the consumer a pretty clear set of choices that way.
(Sometimes you can see new product lines coming just by looking for the holes in existing ones. We have the middle and high-end iPods, but they're priced high; cue the Shuffle.)
By your stated definition (belief being the only requirement for a "Christian"), Satan would be a "Christian".
I again make no attempt to put words in the mouth or mind of Satan. If you're specifically talking about Matthew 4, I don't actually see that Satan is described as "believing" anything. But that's beside the point, as I'm a) hardly a Biblical literalist and b) not here to score points, as you seem to be.
Nor am I attempting to speak for all Christianity -- though you're very earnestly working to somehow corner me into committing myself to that. I don't personally think there is a coherent set of criteria that could be listed in the way you're wanting, not for any of the "book religions," though that's really what the books seem to be attempting. In that sense I think the great book religions have failed to deliver on what they promised.
The prating admonition to read my Bible more is just a sort of rhetorical throat clearing, better suited to the sort of trolling "I scored a point!" arguments that people have all day long on boards like this. I've never myself up as the oracular source of wisdom on all criteria that constitute Christian belief. Are you trying to catch me in a hypocrisy I have no inclination to commit, or what? If that's all you're about, let it go.
Are you saying that following Christ's teaching can be contrary to what your conscience tells you is "right" or "good"?
I am saying, very simply and to return to my original post, that "right" and "good" are inherent to certain actions and moral choices -- and that it is fundamentally a mistake and a grievous one to think that rightness and goodness derive from any authority figure. Things are not right or good because God or Jesus said they were. I think that's essentially a front for worldly figures who want to speak with God's authority.
To give you another example, I find most Christian doctrine surrounding the idea that "good works" can't earn a spot in heaven deeply troubling. In order to find a place for good works in their theology, fundamentalists emphasize that any good work is really just an expression of obedience to God's will. For them the crucial point is the obedience, not the morality of a given choice. I think that's exactly backward. Trying to follow that sort of moral code is only going to bend one's conscience to obedience to the wrong authorities here on earth. It doesn't provide the simplicity it claims to provide, either, because...
...I certainly, to answer at least one of your (falsely reductive) "can a Christian disagree morally with Jesus?" questions, think that there are many situations in life for which the Bible doesn't give us anything like clear moral instruction. A morality in which obedience to divine will (as expressed in the Bible) is the only real moral principle doesn't do much to prepare me for the moral questions that go with working for a large modern multinational corporation, for example. I don't find moral instruction, or even consolation, in the Bible -- not for those questions.
Most people who buy the nano/mini/shuffle etc are people who place fashion over utility, the amount of songs the device can hold is nearly inconsequential, or at most second place.
You probably buy your computer based on megahertz speeds, right?
"Utility" encompasses more than the amount of storage in a device. It can also, in the case of something like the nano, include the device's being small enough to carry with you more easily. Or it might include a color screen for pictures (or TEEENY videos).
My big brother's 1980 stereo could do a lot of stuff that my iPod can't. It had a turntable and a cassette deck, and would let me record from the radio, which it also had inside. It had RCA in jacks that I could use with a CD player. I'm pretty sure I can get a stereo of that vintage for well under the price of a nano at a garage sale. The difference is not pure vanity.
(Now, say the same thing about people buying full-sized SUVs instead of minivans, and I can give you a real good case on that one... There the difference appears to be pure shallow vanity for the vast majority of buyers.)
Personally, I believe maps should have their own subsection within Intellectual Property laws. People do need an incentive to make them generally, but with aerial photographs, this is getting easier and easier as time goes on. Blueprinted building and track ways makes this even more trivial, and once you get down to it, a map is just a graphical representation of the factual geography of a location.
Some background (and disclosure I s'pose): My father worked his entire career with an aerial survey and mapping company. That company essentially doesn't exist now, though I believe its name is still out there. It was trying to use aerial photography taken from specially modified Lear jets, and that was too expensive and not competitive next to the satellite photos we see in places like Google.
You use the words "easier and easier" and "even more trivial," and I can't agree. Maps are "just" a graphical representation of physical reality in the same sense that good instructional diagrams for building a complex piece of machinery are "just" CAD drawings with labels.
In particular, a subway map has to convey a lot of information to the user without becoming a jumble of information. Lines, side lines, junctions, the exit points on the street for different stops... There's significant work behind that. And the source isn't an aerial photo. Ahem, it's a subway. The relationship between the lines and the surface world can't be seen in the easy way you describe.
I work in a big IS&T organization with a network that connects sites across the continental US. Doing something like a map of where all the printers are in all our offices, with network names for them all, would be a big task. Spending some time to make such a map intelligible and easy to use would be worth it. Not "trivial" at all.
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Darwin describes the essential outlines of the ID argument in "Origin of Species." He's often misquoted by creationists (IDers, other permutations thereon) who don't realize (or at least admit) that he proposed ways to argue against his ideas, and that they're quoting him from those passages. Darwin was an intelligent man who genuinely was interested in arriving at the truth as far as human beings could.
Despite the "it's so complex we don't understand it" frontier having moved from areas like the human eye (early on) to fossil whales (recently) to subcellular structures, the same essential argument has continued to be made, and re-made, by people objecting to evolution. ID isn't really even a variation on it; it's as simple as the argument that a watch is so complex it must've been designed rather than spontaneously appearing in the world.
But I basically agree: the difference here is that we've gotten to a sort of tipping point at which politicians see this sort of "social right" position as a wedge issue they can use to win elections. (Personally I pray to God they lose that bet and wind up having allied themselves to a thoroughly disgraced Presidency that results in a Republican party I could imagine voting for again someday.)
That's probably accurate for the run-of-the-mill IDer on the street. "Look at your hand, isn't it a marvel of engineering" is close to the mark. The public face of the IDer thing, though, is more like Michael Behe, who wrote "Darwin's Black Box."
Behe's not publishing anything in peer review journals (HA!) but he'd like to at least present a front that's intellectually coherent for the sympathetic layperson. As a result he concedes evolution on the species level, and even on the cellular level if memory serves. (Lots of his readers don't seem to realize this, of course, but he does it in the book's forward.)
Behe's particular "irreducible" argument is made on a subcellular level, about things like cilia. In the end it's just another form of his previous watch-watchmaker arguments about things like whale ancestors -- those were disproven as that particular niche in the fossil record got lots of work done in the last 20 years or so. He just chose the edges of whatever science was working on when he wrote his book, same as he did with the whales. Also his book is out-of-date, with lots and lots of his examples seeming to have been explained since he said they were unexplainable. He probably needs to re-edit it to reflect God's being just that little bit more complex now. ;-)
And yeah, it's still a whacked theory. I don't think Behe does (or anyway argued in his book for) the "Humans are outside of macroevolution" thing our parent poster tried, but it's just as much of a mess the other way. God created the cilia, which is complex and can't be explained, way back in time, and then intervened in the bajillion specific bioligical interactions along the way to human evolution, so as to produce John the Baptist? That didn't exactly clean things up for me...
In the end I'd like to give these people credit for sincerity at least. Between science and the ID PR onslaught, though, it's pretty clear which "side" enforces a process and method that can correct for human foibles, and which side is just an example of those foibles.
From the moment the intel announcement was made, Jobs and Apple have emphasized that the first machines that'll get moved over will be lower-end, consumer boxes. They've badly needed to bump the portable lineup higher, having been stuck in the G4s. He talked (in interesting terms) about performance per watt in that keynote, not about speed running photoshop filters. So the first wave of new machines is manifestly not going to be aimed at the "pro" users you're talking about, and Jobs has said so, several times.
(I still think this could kill Apple. The thing that almost killed them in 1993-4-5 was a long absence of an Apple presence in the laptap market, and then the execrable quality of the PB5300 [the first PPC model] when it did finally come out. Apple lost a market "space" it had just owned. Jobs is trying to plug that gap before it recurs, this time on his watch -- but the sort of thing you're talking about still does matter to home users. Combined with this long interregnum in which I'm not exactly inclined to replace the family lampshade iMac at home because I want to see those first consumer machines, a subpar laptop lineup could do serious damage to the company's stock. They're trying to ride the iMac wave long enough to do it right.)
Sound does accomplish part of the immersion thing pretty well. When you've got some okay headphones on, even with the teeny screen, you can hear the rumble of the rush on Akaba in Lawrence of Arabia. You just can't see the wide screen image.
And you're right, music you listen to in parallel with other stuff, whereas video you have to focus on, and those are different. It's hard to see the convergence of the iPod player and portable DVD players any time soon. You'd need some sort of projection screen...
Or alternatively, you can make the size of the screen completely irrelevant by just bringing it closer to your eyes. When some Jonathan Ives type cooks up "TV Glasses" that don't look as "stylish and comfortable" (and headache-inducing) as this, then we'll be getting someplace. For portable video, you just can't be wedded to the physical screen across the room the way we are now. You have to approach the problem from another angle.
Jobs pitched video as a little perk added in the update to the top-end iPods, and that was just about right.
Whether the Register's original 2003 story was (or remains) accurate or not about the "loss leader" status of the iTMS, the store at least isn't the hugely profitable cash engine in that mix. It's the end-to-end experience Apple is selling, and a huge part of that is the iPod, which is where the big profits come in. They make their money on the players.
From the POV of a movie studio, an analogous model would be one where they distributed the movie itself at something like cost, and made their big profits by selling tiVos or something to watch it with in a seamless, easy-to-use way. I'm not seeing how Sony, which does make TVs, is going to particularly win iPod-like market share in the arena of the TV market or even the digital recorder market. That's leaving alone the other studios that don't have any analog to the iPod at all.
I'm a big movie buff. Oddly, I love the pay-per-track model of the iTMS and was amazed how long it took someone to offer it for real -- but for movies I'm more inclined to do the subscription thing. We have the 3-films-at-a-time Netflix subscription, paying a monthly fee. It's going to be dang hard for a studio that's siloed into its own library of Warner or Miramax films to compete with that, even if the online distribution's easier than Netflix's (very well-done) mail system. For my modest fee I get any DVD released, across them all, from Netflix.
Another response gets it dead-on: Will we pay $5 apiece to watch "Roman Holiday"s? Well, once in a blue moon, from Blockbuster when we used to do it that way. (Actually I own that DVD, but leave that.) But when we're paying by the month, I do find those old titles and TV shows in collections and stuff I'll take a chance on just to see. Just got into the BBC "The Office" that way.
What I'd suggest is a modest subscription fee per month for "channels" independent of studio source and gathered by subject just like some of today's basic cable channels. That matches up with the way people are used to seeing TV; you sort of know what Lifetime or Hallmark is going to show you. Pay $10 a month for the "Independents" channel and you can get as many indie movies as you want, point to point, from the available library. That's about what people pay for the HBO or Cinemax packages, and they get more control over the programming. It'd be the baby step away from the current system that gives us a lot more power as point-to-point consumers.
As far as DRM, I personally would accept a transient copies model if I'd paid for Showtime or HBO, which a lot of people do. Buying by subject type ("The Adventure Channel") and being able to choose the movies on the fly still offers me a ton more; if it was available at around the same price people would jump.
If the seller can't address the potential for an employee exodus, the value of what's being sold will diminish. The seller does have a big interest in helping prevent that. You'd be short-sighted if you didn't anticipate problems for the buyer and try to address them.
The buyer, if they wish to keep the creative talent and continue making gobs of money with their new acquisition, needs to make sure the "new" employees stay happy where they are.
And the point of the groaning posters is that a buyout by a company like Disney would probably fail for the precise reason that Disney won't be able to pull that off. We're talking about a company whose writers routinely refer to it as "Mousewitz," you know?
While we bemoan the plight of the employees in the purchase, the simple fact is that they don't own the company, and are always subject to a sale when the owner(s) feel the price is right or that the value has peaked.
Somehow I missed the part where you necessarily have to discard any sort of human feeling (for employees) or artistic enjoyment (for the movies) in order to accept the realities of business. Yep, it'd be permissible for Steve Jobs to sell Pixar. If he sent it to a soulless buyer, it would also suck. Saying "that's business" doesn't mean something cool wouldn't probably be ruined for us and the people who work there.
You missed the real story, though:
(George Lucas isn't quite the movie producer version of David Brent, though. That would probably be Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer.)
So yeah, other sharks and the tuna are being mentioned in posts here for good reason. The news here is that Salmon Sharks hadn't been looked at for this before. We don't know that much about them. (Scientists observing them, for example, had no idea a few years ago whether they'd be safe to swim with; they bear a fair resemblance to white sharks.)
Radiating into a new niche with a new adaptation is hardly new. Bull sharks are easily the most common serious shark attack, because they're able to move into brackish or even fresh water. Adapting to a new niche opens up new opportunities to take advantage of that niche. (It's not all predation, of course. Bull sharks seem to move into the shallows in more numbers during years where they're mating there in numbers, mostly, but then attacks are associated with them there. [The Matewan Creek attacks in New Jersey, which inspired Jaws and that whole great white thang, were most likely made by bull sharks.])
You're right, if people had any standards and would demand decent products... Well, I can't even imagine the results, so it must be pretty unlikely.
To each her own, but the cutesy videos of the council got very old very quickly. "Cute" isn't the goal at all in your typical world domination game, is it? Spaceward Ho, maybe...
For me, any good simulation game is one where after you understand the core concept well enough, you can, with a little luck and good planning, have a decent chance of winning most scenarios hands down vs the computer AI...
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with difficulty settings? The lowest setting in any Civ game would give you what you want.
For my money I could do without essentially all of the graphic engine changes from II to III. The addition of "culture" and the way the previous games' rules (about military units being "away from home," about moving through "enemy" territory) were worked into it made for a huge, huge improvement. That was an elegant way to fold in some previously awkward and conspicuously unrealistic mechanics.
In no game do I care a whit for repetitively "cute" video sequences that give me no useful information. Those things were painful after the first time through, and in a Civ game replay value is every-, every-, everything.
The thing is, even if OSC didn't intend it that way, once you've heard the gist of this critique -- that the books are a sort of apologia for fascism and Hitler in particular -- it's hard to avoid. Some of the details are uncanny. Given any thought to Brazil being chosen as a locale later in the series?
Ayn Rand was about as unlikely a cult leader as I can imagine, given her public persona. Behind that she was a domineering cult leader. The public protestations don't amount to much in retrospect.
The 7.1 outline point brings up another great critique that Ender's Game was actually written by a committee of Mormons to warm people up to forgiving.
Hyup, and I'm bright enough to measure claims against the work and judge for myself which ones ring true. The fact that a lot of flaky people think W. Bush is evil for various imagined conspiratorial reasons doesn't mean he's not badly wrong on ideological and moral grounds. I can make those judgments for myself, I'm not just reading from an outline.
What's needed is some thoughtful design.
Alarm clocks are a prime example of a product in which the inmates are running the asylum. Each new half-baked feature clock makers add gets appended in the clunkiest possible way. These things aren't designed around the user, they're made according to the specs of the parts.
The gold standard for our new design will be: I must be able to operate the clock's basic features when I wake up in the morning, blurry-headed and without my contacts in. This basic problem -- that they're used by sleepy people -- seems to have escaped current makers of alarm clocks.
None of this has anything to do with "long time" though, not any more than with atomic clocks. (One of the obvious, obvious features of a decent alarm clock being that it'll synch with the atomic clocks and get back on track after a power outage or whatever...)
My brother bought a few of L Ron's together as remainder hardcovers, and Steve's pretty bread and butter as a Sci Fi fan. Even for someone who just wants an okay space opera sort of deal, he said they were terrible. Leafing through one of them I'd agree. Embarrassingly bad writing.
Whether it be a movie, book (Ender's Game was great), music, or whatever.
Lots of OSC's critics argue that "Ender's Game" amounts to an extended apologia for Hitler. (Look in the little outline at point 7.1.) Given OSC's general world view, yeah, that does affect my reading of the novel.
It's also hard for me to idolize Bobby Fischer at this point. Sad but true. And no matter how cool a modern artist is, no matter how amazing her use of material and so on, if she's constantly referring directly and indirectly to how much she detests Serbs/Croats/Kosovar Albanians, it'll detract from the work for me. I can't just shrug and say the colors are really well-chosen and leave with just the good, not if she's shoving her ideology down my throat.
Can anyone but a sicko really want OJ's autograph on a football now? I was a kid when he was huge, I remember how cool he was then. Only makes me wince now.
Doesn't make the artist an "animal," but it does compromise any satisfaction from the art.
According to those Nigerian money scams were 8% of the total, with an average of two-and-a-half grand lost per victim, in 2004.
(I can't say this group isn't overstating the problem to boost its own importance, but those are stats, anyway.)
We need to audition for the definitive "You may be eaten by a Grue" voice.
As a grade school violist, I should really be kicking myself now. Happily I just don't have the energy...
Sure, that'll keep Halliburton from dealing with the Saddam Hussein regime through offshore subsidiaries.
I bet it'll keep us all from buying cheap goods manufactured in China, too. Get the word out. Once the weight of public shame gets out there, we'll all stop buying the stuff.
Granted, those examples aren't quite to this point: Toys R Us isn't actively selling products for the quasi-enslavement of China's factory laborers, it's contributing to those working conditions at one (slight) remove. In the case of Halliburton, though, the company was working to find loopholes in the oil for food program. Under Cheney. At least borderline illegal, and the shame didn't seem to hold them back...
Yeah, that whole microwave oven thing is vastly overrated. And the dweebs at college carrying around backpack computers, they're completely losing their nerdy minds over the idea that someday we'll all be using computers embedded in the simplest daily things.
Take a look around you at all the lasers you encounter. Played a CD lately?
Almost nothing's ever the panacea that real true believers think it might be, but if anything the pace of change is accelerating, "Connections"-style.
That sounds like unsubstantiated exxageration- eg no reality behind it. Now it may be true, but seems highly improbable to me?
One does tend to suspect any popular press story that makes mistakes of scaling like unto the ones in 1950s science fiction movies that have giant ants running around. For a basic primer on the goofiness of this claim, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics would be one source.
Knowing that things have branched more than once for a given trait isn't just interesting for paleontologists, either. For example, the group of flat worms that include modern tapeworms has evolved parasitism several different times over its history. Knowing that it didn't just happen once lets us find close living relations of tapeworms that aren't parasitic -- so we can develop treatments for tapeworms much more easily, because a lab doesn't need to deal with test worms that are paired with host animals. Viola, better medicines against tapeworms.
It's intuitive to think flight is somehow special because it places extreme physiological demands on the animals that use it, but it's just like any other evolutionary trait. Life is fertile, time is deep. That dinosaurs would maybe develop the trait twice isn't astonishing at all. They were around for a long time, and they maybe had some basic traits (bones with the potential for bird-like light internal structure or something) that made it more likely.
This model is one of those Steve Jobs things. Most any other company would have kept the Mini in its lineup when the nano came out, but Jobs believes religiously in giving the consumer a pretty clear set of choices that way.
(Sometimes you can see new product lines coming just by looking for the holes in existing ones. We have the middle and high-end iPods, but they're priced high; cue the Shuffle.)
I again make no attempt to put words in the mouth or mind of Satan. If you're specifically talking about Matthew 4, I don't actually see that Satan is described as "believing" anything. But that's beside the point, as I'm a) hardly a Biblical literalist and b) not here to score points, as you seem to be.
Nor am I attempting to speak for all Christianity -- though you're very earnestly working to somehow corner me into committing myself to that. I don't personally think there is a coherent set of criteria that could be listed in the way you're wanting, not for any of the "book religions," though that's really what the books seem to be attempting. In that sense I think the great book religions have failed to deliver on what they promised.
The prating admonition to read my Bible more is just a sort of rhetorical throat clearing, better suited to the sort of trolling "I scored a point!" arguments that people have all day long on boards like this. I've never myself up as the oracular source of wisdom on all criteria that constitute Christian belief. Are you trying to catch me in a hypocrisy I have no inclination to commit, or what? If that's all you're about, let it go.
Are you saying that following Christ's teaching can be contrary to what your conscience tells you is "right" or "good"?
I am saying, very simply and to return to my original post, that "right" and "good" are inherent to certain actions and moral choices -- and that it is fundamentally a mistake and a grievous one to think that rightness and goodness derive from any authority figure. Things are not right or good because God or Jesus said they were. I think that's essentially a front for worldly figures who want to speak with God's authority.
To give you another example, I find most Christian doctrine surrounding the idea that "good works" can't earn a spot in heaven deeply troubling. In order to find a place for good works in their theology, fundamentalists emphasize that any good work is really just an expression of obedience to God's will. For them the crucial point is the obedience, not the morality of a given choice. I think that's exactly backward. Trying to follow that sort of moral code is only going to bend one's conscience to obedience to the wrong authorities here on earth. It doesn't provide the simplicity it claims to provide, either, because...
...I certainly, to answer at least one of your (falsely reductive) "can a Christian disagree morally with Jesus?" questions, think that there are many situations in life for which the Bible doesn't give us anything like clear moral instruction. A morality in which obedience to divine will (as expressed in the Bible) is the only real moral principle doesn't do much to prepare me for the moral questions that go with working for a large modern multinational corporation, for example. I don't find moral instruction, or even consolation, in the Bible -- not for those questions.
You probably buy your computer based on megahertz speeds, right?
"Utility" encompasses more than the amount of storage in a device. It can also, in the case of something like the nano, include the device's being small enough to carry with you more easily. Or it might include a color screen for pictures (or TEEENY videos).
My big brother's 1980 stereo could do a lot of stuff that my iPod can't. It had a turntable and a cassette deck, and would let me record from the radio, which it also had inside. It had RCA in jacks that I could use with a CD player. I'm pretty sure I can get a stereo of that vintage for well under the price of a nano at a garage sale. The difference is not pure vanity.
(Now, say the same thing about people buying full-sized SUVs instead of minivans, and I can give you a real good case on that one... There the difference appears to be pure shallow vanity for the vast majority of buyers.)
Some background (and disclosure I s'pose): My father worked his entire career with an aerial survey and mapping company. That company essentially doesn't exist now, though I believe its name is still out there. It was trying to use aerial photography taken from specially modified Lear jets, and that was too expensive and not competitive next to the satellite photos we see in places like Google.
You use the words "easier and easier" and "even more trivial," and I can't agree. Maps are "just" a graphical representation of physical reality in the same sense that good instructional diagrams for building a complex piece of machinery are "just" CAD drawings with labels.
In particular, a subway map has to convey a lot of information to the user without becoming a jumble of information. Lines, side lines, junctions, the exit points on the street for different stops... There's significant work behind that. And the source isn't an aerial photo. Ahem, it's a subway. The relationship between the lines and the surface world can't be seen in the easy way you describe.
I work in a big IS&T organization with a network that connects sites across the continental US. Doing something like a map of where all the printers are in all our offices, with network names for them all, would be a big task. Spending some time to make such a map intelligible and easy to use would be worth it. Not "trivial" at all.