Nintendo did just drop their price on the DS by twenty bucks, yes? Along with the delay on the new Zelda title, they wanted some more palatable news, partly. But that can't mean sales are all that amazing, can it?
Honestly, I think Nintendo is having trouble getting a range of the natural titles out for it, too. The stylus (for quick environment interactions), the extra screen (for stats and inventory), and the networking (for your party) would make this a killer handheld for RPGs -- it could be the platform for the most accessible, beloved MMORPGs around. I don't see those titles out there.
This was supposed to push their demographic older and broader. It seems like the really fun titles with some "buzz" on the DS are Nintendogs, the networked update to (the charming and underrated) Animal Crossing, and the Kirby thing that uses the stylus so well. Those are pitched squarely at the same audience they already had with the GBA series.
At best the DS is holding serve so far, I'm thinking. This from someone who bought one for his two 12-year-olds.
This morning I accidentally stumbled on the New > Shortcut contextual menu here on my work W2k machine. Man, that feature seemingly hasn't changed since the W95 release, and it's still as ill-thought-out as it was in the betas from a year-plus before that.
Apple's "Aliases" were easier to deal with in 1995, and they've gone several steps further since then. (Move something, the alias will find it. Use them to move down complete drive trees from your toolbar. Smoothly worked into the UI and API, conversant with drag and drop in ways that work everywhere, and so on.)
Mostly the Windows shortcut is just a booby trap when I'm trying to figure out how some fool developer crammed features into my right click. The only place I see people use them, for the most part, is as static links to applications from their desktops -- because apparently people don't want to wade into their Start menus to find apps.
Why can't I turn off the darn pain receptors?
Why, as a (okay, this next bit is questionable, but just go with it) intelligent being can't I just acknowledge those signals, and snooze them or something?
I know. It hurts. Leave me alone until I get to the hospital.
Because if you can consciously 'snooze' nerves, you will reinjure yourself by trying to do stuff you shouldn't. (My knee hurts, so I think I'll just shut that pain down... Oops, I guess it wasn't good to try to push the accelerator normally on my way to the hospital. Is that supposed to bend that way?)
Leprosy isn't associated with immediate mortality. People die of it indirectly, though, because they don't have the nerve feedback they need to protect themselves. Your conscious snooze system would run the same risks.
Meanwhile the body does prevent you from feeling pain in some circumstances. People who break their legs can get past the point where they feel the pain any more. And the body sort of knows when that'd be best, for my money, better than I would.
If you'd like to start shutting stuff down, I suggest bowing to the hystrionic news coverage from a couple of years back and turning off your car's airbag system. Just for starters.
This will probably get modded down by those American Boeing supporters, who have made nothing but new versions of 40 year old aircraft.
This is one of the most hilarious "they" boogeymen I've seen lately. Yeah, "Boeing supporters" will probably try to silence your extremely profound "the technology exists, 'they' (another they??) just need to optimize it" observation.
Similarly, Boeing lackeys have stifled my own "The technology to live underwater exists, they just need to optimize it" and "The technology to colonize the moon exists, they just need to optimize it" arguments. Boeing sees how underwater living would obviate the need for air travel. They've set their astroturf posters loose on Slashdot to keep me quiet. It's, like, censorship...
Here's that poll showing 70-some percent approval of stem cell research on the part of US Christians. I guess they must all be confused about "Biblical principles."
You folks live in an echo chamber, thinking you are representative of the world because you can only hear your own voice. It isn't so.
without being flamed to a crisp for providing what is arguably an accurate perspective into the minds of _most_ Christians. Not to mention his viewpoint is probably the most simple (and therefore, most likely to be correct) interpretation of the pertinent Biblical principles.
There's another post here, with a succint description of the results of a poll taken about stem cell research using discarded fertility treatment embryos. The question used in the poll is quite clearly stated. Substantial majorities of every subset of "Christians" indicated that "on balance, they would support such research."
Meanwhile, national ambassadors speak for their nations because they were appointed to those posts by people who won elections. I didn't vote for the parent poster, and s/he is making indefensible statements on my behalf. It's not a "flame" to point that out.
As far as the "Biblical principles" go, I would be more than happy to explore those with you if you attended my church. We aren't Biblical literalists, however, if that makes you nervous.
Sidenote: My Southern Baptist relations go to a church at which, commonly, people refer to "converting the Catholics to Christianity." They regard the Pope as the antithesis of Christian ethics... but they're not really clear on why any more.
I think the original reasons for animosity between certain protestant sects and Catholicism (w/capital C) had to do with the authoritarian nature of the Catholic power structure -- the priesthood, papal infallibility, and so on. However, at least for my relations, that's confused now -- they themselves have become so authoritarian that it's a question of which authority figure they think is infallible, which one has the pure and literal reading of the Bible down pat, and so on.
Also the Catholic church has recognized evolution as a revelation of God's work in the world for a while now, whereas the creationists who're so influential in the US and Australia (and nowhere else) have trouble with that.
Christians are not opposed to stem cell research - only the source of stem cells being aborted humans. We have no problem with
Hey, as long as you're speaking for all Christians everywhere -- evidently including me and my extended family, despite none of us ever having signed over any plenipotentiary powers to you -- why don't you go ahead and just tell us what God thinks? You're already speaking for other human beings whose minds you plainly DO NOT KNOW; why not go for the Go(l)d?
See, there's a subtle distinction to be made, there -- or really a not so subtle one, yeah? -- about your own views versus those of all Christianity. It's a distinction that you've missed a handful of times in the course of your three sentence post.
Which makes me a little wary of handing over any sort of moral authority to you and your like-minded authoritarian wannabes when it comes to medical science. You dig?
A debate on whether or not parents should take some responsibility turns into a rant about video games and music and violent movies. Whats up with that?
Your ironic turnaround would make so much more sense if that initial debate about "whether or not parents should take some responsibility" was really taking place.
And I mean a real debate about, for example, the effects of an economy that essentially requires two working parents on our children. I'm no "social conservative" and it seems to me the only people who're bringing that up just now are the fundies, who obviously have their own ideological axes to grind and who are more interested in manipulating people's anxieties than in allaying them.
If Americans are especially conscious of how parenting has changed in just my lifetime, I think they're trying not to admit it to themselves. If anything they're pushing their anxieties about the changes into red herrings like "video games are responsible for all our problems."
As a starting point, hopefully we'd put work out control populations on these studies so as to see whether X set of kids (whose behaviors, thoughts, etc. are affected by the games) also correlate with a certain set of parents. Not that it's easy to objectively categorize "parenting styles" so as to apply those controls, but c'mon -- do some reasonably exhaustive interviewing of the parents to see what their attitudes are toward the games themselves, at the very least. The correlations would be at least as meaningful as those between the kids and the games, surely.
It would interest me to know how many parents are really the utter zombies I seem to see around at the mall. Just basic checks getting at "Are you making conscious choices at ALL?" might show a shocking level of apathy. (Apathy like that in, oh, American voters?)
My 12-year-old boy/girl twins both play video games, and I'm pretty attentive about which ones but I'm cool with that. I'm also pretty easygoing about half of what gets an R rating for movies -- the kids see little violence, but skin I think they are familiar with seeing as how they have some, so that doesn't bother me as much. The basic deal is that you have to be making conscious choices about what to expose your kids to.
The advocacy groups who object most vociferously to video games aren't about those conscious choices at all. They're about arbitrary standards, imposed by some sort of body of authority. I don't trust that impulse a bit.
The question has never been "Can stuff kids play with affect their attitudes toward the world?" Duh, yes it can. The question is whether video games are somehow the pervasive, destructive influence that luddites and a weird mixture of nannystaters and "social conservatives" think they are. Or are they just a form of media that parents need to keep an eye on, like -- duh again -- everything else including TV? I'm a reasonable parent, and personally I think MTV (for one example) is a much more corrosive presence in kids' lives. It's a nakedly brazen front for all things consumerist and sexist. Video games don't have nearly the same cultural weight behind them. Where game writers are mostly just trying to make a buck building something fun, advertizers are actively, consciously doing everything they can to exploit my kids and brainwash them to spend a lifetime thinking about nothing but products and money. There are whole academic fields -- "advertizing psychology" -- in support of that effort.
Sea turtles are routinely classified as "marine megafauna" in popular use. The largest leatherback turtle on record was 916 kg -- you're talking just over a ton in US poundage. Mega = large, fauna- = animal. A turtle that weighs a ton is a large animal.
Personally I would buy any chip, or computer, or product, offered by Apple Computer, which featured a design or even just a name to do with sea turtles. Steve Jobs doesn't need his RDF on that one. Just put a little baby sea turtle icon on the side, and I'll pay an extra $50.
Heh... You're right, loose jargon rolling on deck, there.
The basics of the comparison is: Wolves run at 30 mph, taking your number. Pronghorn have been clocked at over sixty, and unlike cheetahs they can go for much long distances (albeit at a sort of cruising speed). What the heck predator did they evolve to avoid?
Cheetah did live in the Western hemisphere until the end of the Pleistocene. You wouldn't figure pronghorn needed to run marathons to get away from cheetahs, though.
The last "floating it out there" idea about bison was to declare North and South Dakota a "Buffalo commons" and set 'em loose there, wasn't it? That's been bounced around for at least ten years, mostly as a pop-media crack about the Dakotas.
I agree with you, this makes little sense. Importing cheetahs isn't going to necessarily result in their preying on pronghorn -- whose natural predators we don't really understand. (They're an evolutionary backwater: pronghorn are way fast, can run forever unlike cheetahs who only sprint... and it's unclear what they were avoiding. Mostly they lose fawns to coyotes and that kind of thing now, but they didn't develop into such a keen little athlete surviving against coyotes or wolves. They're more than an order of magnitude faster.)
In the US, we plant a lot of Honeylocust trees. You don't see too many female specimens (they're dioecious) in people's back yard, because they have long seed pods that people regard as a mess. (Suburban nature-as-a-carpeted-living-room values -- this is how we got golf courses.)
In Africa, related species of tree have their seed spread around by elephants, mainly, but there's nothing living here to reach and munch on those pods while they're tasty. Without elephants, or mammoths or whatever, to eat them, the trees' seeds don't spread in the same way at all. They tend to stay in riverbottoms and that kind of thing, spreading just by falling, instead of traveling with herds. Or people plant them in yards -- all males. Weird.
Even just restoring that one type of tree, honeylocusts, to its original spot would have all sorts of indirect challenges and consequences. Maybe we can wishfully hope elephants would put it all right again, but no way is that true.
These people would do better to concentrate on something like the American Chestnut -- the most important non-mast species of tree, in terms of wildlife, in the eastern US, an ideal lumber, and it's been wiped out by the blight people brought over on asiatic chestnuts for their gardens. That we could fix in real life. This is a fun premise for SciFi and Discover Magazine articles.
as long as the toothpaste is out of the tube you get better results with the carrot than the stick
Oy, I keep rereading that... In a post about "Apple," no less. The protective goggles, they do nothing!
Ubiquitous piracy made Microsoft Windows big and Linux a contender.
Okay, so let me just double check this: You think Microsoft's lenient approach to "piracy" is what made Windows big? Really, and truly? BSA and all that notwithstanding?
I'd be interested in hearing what ethical vegetarians think about eating cruelty-free meat.
How about us unscrupulous, unethical vegetarian types?
It may come across as some sort of pure metals, ramrod-straight-backbone ethical decision from the outside, but most vegetarians choose their diet for a variety of reasons. Has some to do with how animals are raised and slaughtered on corporate farms, maybe, and some to do with health, and lots with taste.
If I'm any representative, and I'm at least someone who doesn't tend to order or prepare meat when I have other decent choices, well... ick? I don't eat "tofurkey" for Thanksgiving dinner, why do I want someone else's take on pretend meat?
As far as the ethics of meat that doesn't come from an animal go, I dunno, ask me when I'm confronted with an actual system. Lots of stuff that doesn't seem to carry any particular moral weight -- transportation, for example -- does if you consider it in context. Buying a Hummer would not be my choice, and that's partly for reasons to do with ethics, yeah... (Also taste, again.)
If you need a well-written email to do phishing...
Well, we all know you don't need something "well-written" at all.
There are a few disturbing sides to phishing, but the one that hits me hardest is that people fall for messages that are incredibly poorly written. Anyone who reads regularly and who has any sense of graceful language should see though the vast majority of phish attempts in a second or two. Phishers generally are truly bad, tone-deaf writers. Your bank isn't going to botch the spelling of "account" in a message asking for your SSN. Nobody from American Express would send a curt four-sentence message threatening bluntly to "remove your account."
It always seemed to me like the Nigeria messages were successful partly because people found the garbled language appropriate for the supposed sender. Those phishes play to the stereotype.
Because you and the idiot businessmen you write for decided it was too expensive, and pushed your pet politicians to cut funding for it and dump productive space programs in exchange for pork, business pay-offs, tax cuts, and other corrupt practices.
As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?
With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.
Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
Whoa, there, keep your vorpal blade in its scabbard, big fellah.
The ethics of creating a parody work of art that pretty clearly digs some ground about consumer culture and disposability are not exactly one-sided slam dunks for the "thou shalt not" morality you're peddling. I understand: in terms of a Kantian categorical imperative, we couldn't argue that everyone should take advantage of the free boxes to do this. On the other hand, we could argue that everyone could exercise the kind of independent thought and artistic impulse this person did.
As far as the inflated prices of business for everyone else: c'mon, FedEx has a business model that counts on massive waste of the free boxes. If that really added anything of consequence to their bottom line, that wouldn't be their M.O., would it? Isn't this sort of a parable about an individual response to market dynamics that, when they trickle down to the individual level, can't be perceived as anything but deeply irrational? (And isn't the lawsuit about the irrational corporate response to that?)
As far as your "friendly" quality goes, hey, I suggest you read your post again. Tell me who's talking (quite gratuitously, in a sort of 'public' setting) about colonectomies. "Piss poor example of humanity"? Does this seem like an incredibly harsh and self-righteous response from someone who's instructing me about friendliness?
Rest awhile by the tum tum tree in thought, is my advice...
somehow this is the BIG idea in the energy bill as it is being reported
Hey, laws on this scale are so massive that you really can't take in the larger sense of them at all. That's how all the pork sneaks in -- in the form of incentives encouraging oil companies to explore deep drilling techniques they would have tried anyway, for one example here -- and Jane Voter can only wonder "How big is so-many billion dollars? Is it more or less than we spend in Iraq in a given week?" The sense of perspective just isn't there.
(Which is partly how the idea that "the welfare state" is responsible for out-of-control spending can be perpetuated. A sense of proportion about the federal budget would tell you Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" has a lot more to do with that. But I digress.)
What the media's doing is seizing on a detail that's meaningful for people. We can understand what this one would do. With the larger fiscal and economic consequences, we do have a shocking lack of real public debate about stuff like this bill, but that's because it just doesn't have a clear storyline to it. My VCR won't start screwing up if Exxon gets one more egregious handout.
I would not qualify this movie as a nature documentary. For me it is genuine bona fida "escapist entertainment": 90 minutes to gawk at something so alien to your existence that it puts everything else in perspective when you emerge blinking from the theater.
That's what nature documentaries always do for me. Check out the "Blue Planet" episode about the deep ocean sometime. The movie in the theater now, "Deep Blue," includes some of the same footage, but it makes bad choices about tone that drag it down a half notch. Trying to be everything to everyone.
Most of what passes for escapist entertainment right now doesn't take me away at all. I can't tell the difference between the 20 minutes of blaring pre-show ads and promotional shorts and the main attraction. My kids playing with Star Wars figures are more escapist than the latest movie. It all comes in a can now.
But then that's me, and I think "Nature" and "The American Experience" are the best shows on TV. (Not so much now that George Page's narration is gone from Nature, but still...)
It'd be interesting until they started stoning each other and selling slaves at the Biblically-prescribed rates of sale, and then it'd get grim.
The really weird part is how the literalist interpretations start wandering around based on whatever hangup the latest leader has -- as if trying to reconcile all the whacko stuff in the Book of Numbers with the teachings of Jesus wasn't enough work. They need more challenge than that, by jiminy.
(That Mormon cult that killed all their dogs is a pretty good example -- where was that in the Book of Mormon, again? Those people claim to have a direct line to heaven anyway, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I think Nintendo is having trouble getting a range of the natural titles out for it, too. The stylus (for quick environment interactions), the extra screen (for stats and inventory), and the networking (for your party) would make this a killer handheld for RPGs -- it could be the platform for the most accessible, beloved MMORPGs around. I don't see those titles out there.
This was supposed to push their demographic older and broader. It seems like the really fun titles with some "buzz" on the DS are Nintendogs, the networked update to (the charming and underrated) Animal Crossing, and the Kirby thing that uses the stylus so well. Those are pitched squarely at the same audience they already had with the GBA series.
At best the DS is holding serve so far, I'm thinking. This from someone who bought one for his two 12-year-olds.
Apple's "Aliases" were easier to deal with in 1995, and they've gone several steps further since then. (Move something, the alias will find it. Use them to move down complete drive trees from your toolbar. Smoothly worked into the UI and API, conversant with drag and drop in ways that work everywhere, and so on.)
Mostly the Windows shortcut is just a booby trap when I'm trying to figure out how some fool developer crammed features into my right click. The only place I see people use them, for the most part, is as static links to applications from their desktops -- because apparently people don't want to wade into their Start menus to find apps.
And ever it shall be so.
I know. It hurts. Leave me alone until I get to the hospital.
Because if you can consciously 'snooze' nerves, you will reinjure yourself by trying to do stuff you shouldn't. (My knee hurts, so I think I'll just shut that pain down... Oops, I guess it wasn't good to try to push the accelerator normally on my way to the hospital. Is that supposed to bend that way?)
Leprosy isn't associated with immediate mortality. People die of it indirectly, though, because they don't have the nerve feedback they need to protect themselves. Your conscious snooze system would run the same risks.
Meanwhile the body does prevent you from feeling pain in some circumstances. People who break their legs can get past the point where they feel the pain any more. And the body sort of knows when that'd be best, for my money, better than I would.
If you'd like to start shutting stuff down, I suggest bowing to the hystrionic news coverage from a couple of years back and turning off your car's airbag system. Just for starters.
What are you, some sort of AC astroturf poster in support of the next Zorro sequel?
This is one of the most hilarious "they" boogeymen I've seen lately. Yeah, "Boeing supporters" will probably try to silence your extremely profound "the technology exists, 'they' (another they??) just need to optimize it" observation.
Similarly, Boeing lackeys have stifled my own "The technology to live underwater exists, they just need to optimize it" and "The technology to colonize the moon exists, they just need to optimize it" arguments. Boeing sees how underwater living would obviate the need for air travel. They've set their astroturf posters loose on Slashdot to keep me quiet. It's, like, censorship...
You folks live in an echo chamber, thinking you are representative of the world because you can only hear your own voice. It isn't so.
There's another post here, with a succint description of the results of a poll taken about stem cell research using discarded fertility treatment embryos. The question used in the poll is quite clearly stated. Substantial majorities of every subset of "Christians" indicated that "on balance, they would support such research."
Meanwhile, national ambassadors speak for their nations because they were appointed to those posts by people who won elections. I didn't vote for the parent poster, and s/he is making indefensible statements on my behalf. It's not a "flame" to point that out.
As far as the "Biblical principles" go, I would be more than happy to explore those with you if you attended my church. We aren't Biblical literalists, however, if that makes you nervous.
I'll look that one up. Got a 12-year-old who would love to skim that one, too.
I think the original reasons for animosity between certain protestant sects and Catholicism (w/capital C) had to do with the authoritarian nature of the Catholic power structure -- the priesthood, papal infallibility, and so on. However, at least for my relations, that's confused now -- they themselves have become so authoritarian that it's a question of which authority figure they think is infallible, which one has the pure and literal reading of the Bible down pat, and so on.
Also the Catholic church has recognized evolution as a revelation of God's work in the world for a while now, whereas the creationists who're so influential in the US and Australia (and nowhere else) have trouble with that.
Hey, as long as you're speaking for all Christians everywhere -- evidently including me and my extended family, despite none of us ever having signed over any plenipotentiary powers to you -- why don't you go ahead and just tell us what God thinks? You're already speaking for other human beings whose minds you plainly DO NOT KNOW; why not go for the Go(l)d?
See, there's a subtle distinction to be made, there -- or really a not so subtle one, yeah? -- about your own views versus those of all Christianity. It's a distinction that you've missed a handful of times in the course of your three sentence post.
Which makes me a little wary of handing over any sort of moral authority to you and your like-minded authoritarian wannabes when it comes to medical science. You dig?
Your ironic turnaround would make so much more sense if that initial debate about "whether or not parents should take some responsibility" was really taking place.
And I mean a real debate about, for example, the effects of an economy that essentially requires two working parents on our children. I'm no "social conservative" and it seems to me the only people who're bringing that up just now are the fundies, who obviously have their own ideological axes to grind and who are more interested in manipulating people's anxieties than in allaying them.
If Americans are especially conscious of how parenting has changed in just my lifetime, I think they're trying not to admit it to themselves. If anything they're pushing their anxieties about the changes into red herrings like "video games are responsible for all our problems."
It would interest me to know how many parents are really the utter zombies I seem to see around at the mall. Just basic checks getting at "Are you making conscious choices at ALL?" might show a shocking level of apathy. (Apathy like that in, oh, American voters?)
My 12-year-old boy/girl twins both play video games, and I'm pretty attentive about which ones but I'm cool with that. I'm also pretty easygoing about half of what gets an R rating for movies -- the kids see little violence, but skin I think they are familiar with seeing as how they have some, so that doesn't bother me as much. The basic deal is that you have to be making conscious choices about what to expose your kids to.
The advocacy groups who object most vociferously to video games aren't about those conscious choices at all. They're about arbitrary standards, imposed by some sort of body of authority. I don't trust that impulse a bit.
The question has never been "Can stuff kids play with affect their attitudes toward the world?" Duh, yes it can. The question is whether video games are somehow the pervasive, destructive influence that luddites and a weird mixture of nannystaters and "social conservatives" think they are. Or are they just a form of media that parents need to keep an eye on, like -- duh again -- everything else including TV? I'm a reasonable parent, and personally I think MTV (for one example) is a much more corrosive presence in kids' lives. It's a nakedly brazen front for all things consumerist and sexist. Video games don't have nearly the same cultural weight behind them. Where game writers are mostly just trying to make a buck building something fun, advertizers are actively, consciously doing everything they can to exploit my kids and brainwash them to spend a lifetime thinking about nothing but products and money. There are whole academic fields -- "advertizing psychology" -- in support of that effort.
Personally I would buy any chip, or computer, or product, offered by Apple Computer, which featured a design or even just a name to do with sea turtles. Steve Jobs doesn't need his RDF on that one. Just put a little baby sea turtle icon on the side, and I'll pay an extra $50.
The basics of the comparison is: Wolves run at 30 mph, taking your number. Pronghorn have been clocked at over sixty, and unlike cheetahs they can go for much long distances (albeit at a sort of cruising speed). What the heck predator did they evolve to avoid?
Cheetah did live in the Western hemisphere until the end of the Pleistocene. You wouldn't figure pronghorn needed to run marathons to get away from cheetahs, though.
I agree with you, this makes little sense. Importing cheetahs isn't going to necessarily result in their preying on pronghorn -- whose natural predators we don't really understand. (They're an evolutionary backwater: pronghorn are way fast, can run forever unlike cheetahs who only sprint... and it's unclear what they were avoiding. Mostly they lose fawns to coyotes and that kind of thing now, but they didn't develop into such a keen little athlete surviving against coyotes or wolves. They're more than an order of magnitude faster.)
In the US, we plant a lot of Honeylocust trees. You don't see too many female specimens (they're dioecious) in people's back yard, because they have long seed pods that people regard as a mess. (Suburban nature-as-a-carpeted-living-room values -- this is how we got golf courses.)
In Africa, related species of tree have their seed spread around by elephants, mainly, but there's nothing living here to reach and munch on those pods while they're tasty. Without elephants, or mammoths or whatever, to eat them, the trees' seeds don't spread in the same way at all. They tend to stay in riverbottoms and that kind of thing, spreading just by falling, instead of traveling with herds. Or people plant them in yards -- all males. Weird.
Even just restoring that one type of tree, honeylocusts, to its original spot would have all sorts of indirect challenges and consequences. Maybe we can wishfully hope elephants would put it all right again, but no way is that true.
These people would do better to concentrate on something like the American Chestnut -- the most important non-mast species of tree, in terms of wildlife, in the eastern US, an ideal lumber, and it's been wiped out by the blight people brought over on asiatic chestnuts for their gardens. That we could fix in real life. This is a fun premise for SciFi and Discover Magazine articles.
When Captain Hector comes by like that, you always want to be sure he hasn't drained half your life savings. And jump to hyperspace right away.
Oy, I keep rereading that... In a post about "Apple," no less. The protective goggles, they do nothing!
Ubiquitous piracy made Microsoft Windows big and Linux a contender.
Okay, so let me just double check this: You think Microsoft's lenient approach to "piracy" is what made Windows big? Really, and truly? BSA and all that notwithstanding?
How about us unscrupulous, unethical vegetarian types?
It may come across as some sort of pure metals, ramrod-straight-backbone ethical decision from the outside, but most vegetarians choose their diet for a variety of reasons. Has some to do with how animals are raised and slaughtered on corporate farms, maybe, and some to do with health, and lots with taste.
If I'm any representative, and I'm at least someone who doesn't tend to order or prepare meat when I have other decent choices, well... ick? I don't eat "tofurkey" for Thanksgiving dinner, why do I want someone else's take on pretend meat?
As far as the ethics of meat that doesn't come from an animal go, I dunno, ask me when I'm confronted with an actual system. Lots of stuff that doesn't seem to carry any particular moral weight -- transportation, for example -- does if you consider it in context. Buying a Hummer would not be my choice, and that's partly for reasons to do with ethics, yeah... (Also taste, again.)
Well, we all know you don't need something "well-written" at all.
There are a few disturbing sides to phishing, but the one that hits me hardest is that people fall for messages that are incredibly poorly written. Anyone who reads regularly and who has any sense of graceful language should see though the vast majority of phish attempts in a second or two. Phishers generally are truly bad, tone-deaf writers. Your bank isn't going to botch the spelling of "account" in a message asking for your SSN. Nobody from American Express would send a curt four-sentence message threatening bluntly to "remove your account."
It always seemed to me like the Nigeria messages were successful partly because people found the garbled language appropriate for the supposed sender. Those phishes play to the stereotype.
This is a documentary. Does anyone want to argue that a healthy share of disk space on BBS systems wasn't devoted to "dirty" pictures?
Does the documentary not mention that? I'd think it was worth at least some acknowledgement. It's, um, the truth?
As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?
With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.
Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
The ethics of creating a parody work of art that pretty clearly digs some ground about consumer culture and disposability are not exactly one-sided slam dunks for the "thou shalt not" morality you're peddling. I understand: in terms of a Kantian categorical imperative, we couldn't argue that everyone should take advantage of the free boxes to do this. On the other hand, we could argue that everyone could exercise the kind of independent thought and artistic impulse this person did.
As far as the inflated prices of business for everyone else: c'mon, FedEx has a business model that counts on massive waste of the free boxes. If that really added anything of consequence to their bottom line, that wouldn't be their M.O., would it? Isn't this sort of a parable about an individual response to market dynamics that, when they trickle down to the individual level, can't be perceived as anything but deeply irrational? (And isn't the lawsuit about the irrational corporate response to that?)
As far as your "friendly" quality goes, hey, I suggest you read your post again. Tell me who's talking (quite gratuitously, in a sort of 'public' setting) about colonectomies. "Piss poor example of humanity"? Does this seem like an incredibly harsh and self-righteous response from someone who's instructing me about friendliness?
Rest awhile by the tum tum tree in thought, is my advice...
Hey, laws on this scale are so massive that you really can't take in the larger sense of them at all. That's how all the pork sneaks in -- in the form of incentives encouraging oil companies to explore deep drilling techniques they would have tried anyway, for one example here -- and Jane Voter can only wonder "How big is so-many billion dollars? Is it more or less than we spend in Iraq in a given week?" The sense of perspective just isn't there.
(Which is partly how the idea that "the welfare state" is responsible for out-of-control spending can be perpetuated. A sense of proportion about the federal budget would tell you Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" has a lot more to do with that. But I digress.)
What the media's doing is seizing on a detail that's meaningful for people. We can understand what this one would do. With the larger fiscal and economic consequences, we do have a shocking lack of real public debate about stuff like this bill, but that's because it just doesn't have a clear storyline to it. My VCR won't start screwing up if Exxon gets one more egregious handout.
That's what nature documentaries always do for me. Check out the "Blue Planet" episode about the deep ocean sometime. The movie in the theater now, "Deep Blue," includes some of the same footage, but it makes bad choices about tone that drag it down a half notch. Trying to be everything to everyone.
Most of what passes for escapist entertainment right now doesn't take me away at all. I can't tell the difference between the 20 minutes of blaring pre-show ads and promotional shorts and the main attraction. My kids playing with Star Wars figures are more escapist than the latest movie. It all comes in a can now.
But then that's me, and I think "Nature" and "The American Experience" are the best shows on TV. (Not so much now that George Page's narration is gone from Nature, but still...)
The really weird part is how the literalist interpretations start wandering around based on whatever hangup the latest leader has -- as if trying to reconcile all the whacko stuff in the Book of Numbers with the teachings of Jesus wasn't enough work. They need more challenge than that, by jiminy.
(That Mormon cult that killed all their dogs is a pretty good example -- where was that in the Book of Mormon, again? Those people claim to have a direct line to heaven anyway, though.)