Excuse me, sir or madame, but you've just referred to historical information in a way that doesn't clearly take an ideological stance about the Cuban regime, which we're all bound by tacit patriotic loyalty oaths to revile root and branch. You did so in a manner that referred, obliquely, both to current anticorporate sentiment in "the states" and to potentially sympathetic positions taken by an Out of Bounds Bad Guy. This unseemly display of ambiguously-intended "nuance" has caused your name to be included in a certain list down at the office.
I wonder if you wouldn't mind stepping over here and putting your hands up on the wall...
One more/.er who strikes me as being maybe 20 years old, telling me about parenthood.
A parent can turn off the TV. (A parent can even get rid of the TV.) A parent can make sure that their children eat well. A parent can make sure that their children get an adequate amount of exercise.
And a parent can choose to use certain tools to get to the right balance point for all of that, all without finding it necessary to stake out an absolute position on the relative morality (or even efficacy) of the technology.
If these things aren't already happening, a stupid pair of shoes won't help.
Your positions would apply to basically any technology, not just these flaky shoes. (I can see the shoes for certain cases, personally. Pediatric onset diabetes? Seems about like a bed wetting alarm for certain kids, to me. Doesn't work and isn't necessary for everyone, so everyone doesn't have one.)
Personally I was once tempted by a "TV Allowance" box that let you put in a certain amount of time for each kid per week. And yeah, they could go to a friend's house, or steal each other's codes, or whatever -- the point isn't to find the absolutely ideal solution, the point is to set up enough of a reminder/nuisance to help shape the behavior, hopefully at a reasonable cost for the practical benefit. And no, the enormous and ever-so-crucial philosophical distinction between "Dad told me that's enough 'Sabrina'" and "The time limit Dad set is up" doesn't matter as much to me as it seems to matter to you.
Personally I think the cruxes are positive reinforcement (rather than chiding) and modeling the right behavior (rather than prating about something you won't do yourself). Parents who show their kids that they evercise themselves have a heck of a lot better chance to convince the kids. But why a dorky technology like this couldn't help that, I don't know. I was planning on giving myself the same allowance the kids had, on the box thing.
These shoes do seem like a niche product -- but I can see them being usable in those senses. I'd be more impressed by some sort of family pedometer tracking system, personally, but to each her own.
Ebert's going through the motions in my book. He's mouthing a lot of the commonly accepted wisdom of the usual media sources, and adding almost nothing of his own real reactions.
The one that really disappoints me is -- from the review:
After "Episode II" got so bogged down in politics that it played like the Republic covered by C-Span,
First off, C-Span is a lot more watchable than bland dreck like "Everybody Loves Raymond." But more to the point: C'mon, people, the problems with the first two movies weren't to do with their having overly complex plots. They were to do with their having particularly stupid plots. And within those stupid plots, the individual scenes, and the actions taken by the characters, were also often spectacularly brainless.
At the end of EP II, before nonsensically going off to fight the war they cannot be expected to fight, the Jedi Council arrives at a moment that I think sums up the political complexity of these goofy plotlines: "Hmm. Maybe we should keep an eye on the Senate. Almost seems like they can't be trusted..." You could almost see the light go off above Yoda's head. Shrewd thinking by the council.
To say that Anikin buzzing out to visit his mom -- and arriving at JUST the moment of her death -- was bad because the politics of Sand People were overwrought, that would be wrong. That whole sequence was bad because it stunk, period, in maybe 15 distinctly idiotic ways.
Anyone who's read a mediocre Sci Fi epic has read much more complicated, much more convincing political plotting than these movies offer the viewer. Decent but not great Hollywood thrillers -- "7 Days in May" -- are so much better in every way, despite having far more complex plotting.
Sometimes the market just isn't there yet
on
Apple's First Flops
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· Score: 1
All of which amounts to saying that Apple tries to get ahead of the market sometimes -- and takes some bruises doing it. As someone who bought their very first digital camera -- $700, grainy black and white images worthy of their original B&W monitors -- I can attest to that.
The Newton actually kicked butt next to competition from years later -- but when it came out, people weren't ready for "learn how to write every letter in the alphabet differently" so we whinged about the handwriting recognition. (Okay, maybe I'm just sympathetic because I can't read my own handwriting; why expect the Newton to do it?) It was also priced higher than it would have been a couple of years later. As a design they were pretty cool, way cool for the time.
With the Lisa, the shortcomings were partly there because the market for systems like that just wasn't clear. It's hard to even remember how early that all was. Even the first Macs didn't come with hard drives, for years.
Looking at the history, they do much better when they identify a big gap in an existing market, rather than trying to get out ahead of things too much. "Digital Hub" and so on. Jobs has a pretty good eye for those niches to fill. iPod is a step away from what the competition had, but you at least understood what the product did.
Backward compatibility matters to me. I don't have either an X-Box or a PS2 -- the kids are younger, we have a GameCube they got as a present. At the moment when I bought a system, it'd mean a lot to know it worked for the older games.
It would matter to me for early adoption -- to pick up a handful of bargain bin older games for cheap, so we could play something.
It would matter to them because their friends with other games could bring them over for sleepovers or whatever.
And it would matter to me because having two separate systems set up means five hundred wires that 11-year-olds will forget to put away when they're done. I'm not 21, I'm not living in a dorm. Putting one box away in its wicker basket under the TV is much nicer.
Ding! Your answers are ready. It's me.
Developer support and "killer features" matter
on
PlayStation 3 Unveiled
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The items from that list that might matter to me would probably be:
backward compatibility edge for Sony (in overall "you don't have to worry" scope, in vastly larger number of games, and in previous market share);
WiFi ready as opposed to built-in
Technical specs could theoretically have made the difference for Dreamcast -- if one or the other had just conspicuously kicked the competitor's butt -- but for Joe buyer it comes down to "There are two cool new systems, and they're both about the same in coolness. Which one has [fill in game franchise]?" XBox has tried for the 'monopoly on cool games' thing already. So has Nintendo with its younger niche. Neither one's going to take out Sony on that ground.
Unless XBox really has a feature that sets it out -- amazing advantage in networking -- it and Nintendo will probably still be on the edges. (Personally I'll probably still get coerced into buying Nintendo's next system unless it's completely marginalized or my kids turn the teen corner in a big way. They're 11 now, and still way into those franchises. The quality of the real name games -- Zelda, the Mario stuff -- is consistently very high, and I kind of prefer a more innocent tone myself anyway.)
We always agitate for it, but it does have its downside. Selective pressure on the human thumb joints, for example. The evolutionary consequences of PS controllers are underappreciated in the peer reviewed literature.
The inconsistent use of tabs in the Windows API is just one more example of the fact that MS doesn't "get" what an API friggin' does for user interfaces. It isn't just Office. It's everything. We're all the blind men with the elephant in this OS. Every part of the elephant is separately designed by an MS team that isn't talking to all the other teams.
The way tabs have been used in "Control Panels" over the years is a decent example. How many times have you looked at an open Control Panel tab with "OK," "Cancel," and "Apply" buttons, along with a little X on the upper right, all of which are going to do exactly the same thing, because the last change you made was on another tab? The developers seem to have gotten as far as "tabs save space!" without thinking of how they affect what the buttons do for us. DUH.
Not that anyone's perfect, but Microsoft is spectacularly bad at consistently implementing its own API rules, to the extent that they even exist. Get to a third party developer, and you may as well throw whatever you know as a user out the window... so to speak.
There's a problem with the specific security measures used at this particular school... and there's also another specific set of problems to do specifically with SSNs, which include no checksum digit for one example... and then there's a more general problem to do with any sort of attempted eggs-in-one-basket "universal ID".
it should not be necessary to keep one's SSN any more secret than the account and routing numbers printed on personal checks.
A whole lot of people don't think of those two numbers as being at all different in terms of how secure they keep them. I know people who carry their SSN card in their blinkin' wallets.
Try reading the book "Persepolis." Easy graphic novel, about a young woman from Iran -- you'll finish it in a night. It's absurd, you're right, but not that funny.
A lot of posters are bent out of shape about MS charging for this service, but this would be an impaired product either way.
Look, it's true, MS doesn't do enough to make Joe User more secure. But the main reason Windows is a target for all things viral and spyware is because it's such a huge share of the market. If you want to do the most harm, you target Windows. MS negligence makes that much worse, granted.
The bigger problem with this is, if the same people who produce the OS produce the AV software, what you get is less protection. The same principle of the monoculture applies. To protect your system, and for the health of the overall market too, what you want is a variety of evolutionary lines in your viral protection. The blind spots MS has, maybe Symantec doesn't have. And even if they overlook the same angles, their protection methods are going to vary. That's a harder target.
If MS gave this away for free with the OS, Joe User would likely say to himself, "Cool, I'm protected." And virus writers would have a vast, similar pool of target systems whose traits they could predict down to the specific directory. Does that sound good?
writing and telling a good story is still the most important element......But no, for the first two seasons we had Andy Griffith in space (yes it really was THAT boring),
Brzt. Does Not Compute.
Andy Griffith's like a lot of other classic TV -- if you watch it now next to the latest crop of new sitcoms, you realize how well-written the thing was. Each episode's basically a little one-act play, and it's pretty tight writing. It's basically superior to Enterprise in the traits you're talking about, despite no story arc from episode to episode. That would explain why people still remember favorite episodes of Andy Griffith decades after its run ended, whereas Enterprise is dying of neglect despite a colossal built-in audience.
TV used to do so much better with character actors than it does now. The Mary Tyler Moore show wasn't episode after episode of "Mary goes on another date," you know? (Ted, Murray, Lou Grant, Sue Ellen, Rhoda, Phyllis, Georgette.)Heck, "Leave It to Beaver" looks like a friggin' Pulitzer Prize-winning play next to Voyager or Enterprise, and the cast of regulars was more interesting, despite them all being whitebread suburbanites.
a diversion to give yoda time to assemble the army...
We both know why this makes absolutely no sense. It's not just the time involved... It Made No Sense.
It made almost as much sense as how Dooku flew away at the end by... just flying away. Nice blockade, good thinking. Or as much sense as Anikin being a complete bonehead, to the point where he made my then-9-year-old kids laugh out loud, in The Big Light Saber Fight. That was so bad it was funny, and yet not bad enough to be really fun. Lame, lame, lame.
Never attribute to sneakiness that which can be adequately explained by the Force.
Except he got caught in the most routine way possible -- so, you know, it can't be explained by the force, or by any of George Lucas's remarkably lame attempts to claim he's poaching on classical mythology, or anything really other than total lameness...
it was founded, and is still owned and controlled, by investors "associated with" the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church;
it's consistently ultra-conservative in outlook;
it was endorsed by then-President Reagan;
and continue with the queasying bedfellows angle...
The FAIR site has a nice quote from "Former top UC official Steve Hassan" to the effect that the paper's a Trojan Horse -- "Conservative politics is glad to have a voice through the Times, but ultimately it has nothing to do with conservatism. It has to do with fascism." (As if today's conservatives would know the difference, given the people they elect and their own fundie-authoritarian leanings.)
By Episode II I'd decided these didn't rate paying for tickets any more. Mostly it was the reviews, even though they weren't that bad. They sounded a little like this set: "He's returning to the form of ESB," they say.
I watched Episode II while ironing, at home on a Netflix rental. It was so, so bad. (Somebody please explain how the whole "Jedi rescue mission" capper to the movie wasn't utterly stupid and pointless. "We don't fight wars... let's go fight a whole army in a big pitched battle, though." Or please, describe how sneaky Obi Wan was to park his ship right outside the enemy hideout's entrance and then to stand outside it and send his spy message back to the council. Oh, the lameness!)
I wouldn't pay for this unless my various friends came back with unbelievable word of mouth to go with these reviews. The hype machine is so polished right now that, as it comes up for release, any big summer film has this sort of "It's better than expectations" spin on it. I'll trust my friends more.
So it'll go on my Netflix queue. Even then, it won't be that high on the list. Unless real people tell me it's really worth it.
The storyline will be OK, the fall of the senate and rise of emperor and empire will be interesting.
Lucas writes these things about on the level of a SciFi fan who doesn't quite "get it."
I'll never forget how lame Episode II was on the whole political machinations thing. How long did it take the Jedi Council to get to the point where Yoda was suggesting, just suggesting, that maybe the Senate couldn't be trusted? Ooh, elaborate plotting. Imagining what a good writer could do with the atmosphere in a political body that enormous, well, it just makes me sigh.
He also says that he doesn't think Microsoft should be involved in most public policy issues.
When did our enormous corporations decide they shouldn't be the only voice at the table in our government? I must've missed the memo. (Maybe that one got sent during the formulation of our energy policy, so Cheney thought it was a protected secret of the Executive Branch? Oops, that memo can't have come from those meetings...)
I've liked that site since Roger Ebert referred to it in one of his Movie Man columns a long while back -- but even collected reviews like that are still going to suffer from the Dopplar effect of modern movie reviews. Beforehand the sound of approaching hype skews everything to a higher, better tone. It's only as they recede behind you that you realize how often "3-of-4-stars"-level movies totally stunk.
The reviews for Episode II said the same sorts of "It marks a return to The Empire Strikes Back" stuff. The tomatometer's at 65%. That movie made my kids laugh at how bad it was, more than once. Give it two more years, and watch the tomato turn green in retrospect. I dunno how, but it happens. I swear, when "Pearl Harbor" came out, on balance the reviews liked it okay and talked about how it'd inspire interest in the real history. Back in 2001 the Tomatometer doesn't seem like it had PH at 25%.
Is it just me, or does every blockbuster now come with a pre-release spin fest of "It's so much better than you expect, given that it's this sort of movie, that you should see it anyway"? It's like the stock market, with "retail earnings better than expected" for this April being the headline -- even though the expectations were exceptionally low.
This is maybe the tenth time I've read a story posted here in which Dvorak's name appears in the headline. My reaction, upon consideration, has always been the same:
Where oh where is the option for us to mod articles themselves? I really, really need to peg Dvorak with a "troll -1" mod.
There are "contrarian view" columnists like this in every industry, meant to get our ire up, but few of those are so blatant (and so blatantly wrong) for so bloody long.
There are definitely times when I wish Cupertino was as interested in loosening (or just plain changing) doctrinaire API choices as it is in the packaging...
But you know, every last thing I buy from them does feel like blinkin' Christmas morning to open. Anyone who has an iPod, and obviously they're out there, did a little "that's cool" reexamination of the box once they'd gotten the thing out. God knows why it makes a difference, but it does.
Maybe Apple just regards it as a way to stake out their market position as (Steve J's analogy) the BMW of the desktop set. Same thing happens in optics: I'm a birder, and if you buy Swarovski or Leica or Zeiss, you get a very cool box around your thousand-dollar binoculars.
Having considered the iMac and Mini lines a while ago with a friend, we came to the conclusion that neither one of them was mature just yet. It was actually a wash, in terms of which one would work best for us, based on the current models.
To wit: in terms of hard drive access speed, the G5 iMac actually scored somewhat slower than the G4 Mini on benchmarks available at Macintouch. So for our purposes, which included some video editing, we'd have been torn between the two models.
I'm waiting on an incremental change in the iMac's guts to make that choice again. Maybe by then the Mini's got some more kick to it, too. (Meanwhile my friend got a Mini, swapped it into his existing monitor and peripherals, and has had nothing negative to say about performance or anything else.)
Good parents never have problems setting rules, because they can explain their purposes.
Hey, I'm a pretty good dad -- raised two 11-year-olds alone from the age of 2 weeks, and they're awfully nice kids -- little malice, good grades, the usual stuff you say about decent children.
To say I "never have problems setting rules" would be a wild exaggeration, and even a sort of denial of what parenting really is, in my book. That's sort of like the churchy idea that faith in God is about making moral choices easier for the flock. Making things easy is not the point at all. Moral decisions are about struggling to figure out what's right, not resorting to reassuringly rigid conventional laws based on what some authority figure passed down on stone tablets. Being a good parent isn't about being able to easily impose limitations on the kids; it's about consciously working through this kind of crap to figure out what those limitations should be. It's not enforcing the rules that's most important, it's the act of figuring out what the rules should be.
That's my problem with this sort of thing -- it's limited to following the ESRB ratings, which are only a nudge up from the MPAA's surreal movie ratings in my book. That's the stone tablet model. In that sense any V-chip is taking the decision out of my hands, not helping me make and enforce it. What I need isn't a nuisance level of security to put up as an obstacle. What I need is information to help in making the choices.
(Which explains why I'm the parent who reads game reviews, though they're often more about control layouts and multi-player modes than content.)
Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but you guys here on/. make it sound like we have nothing else to do of our time than to think about the mighty US of America, how to annoy it, how to counter it.
The overwhelming preponderance of/. readers' responses to this story seems to have been a thoughtless regurgitation of all things anti-French. I sort of feel like pointing out that, based on those posts, at least on this side of the Atlantic precisely the sort of idiotic self-centeredness you're describing holds true. The French don't think that way, no, but apparently slashdot does.
This isn't about France -- it's about the suppression of dissenting views. The entirety of the anti-French idiocy over here amounts to one big "ad hominem" attack; nobody really had an answer to Villepain's Security Council arguments, so we demonized the speaker rather than countering the speech.
(Cue jokes about how the French won the American Revolution by pitching in with their navy at the opportune moment... Oh, never mind, we're supposed to forget that one. Surrender monkeys and all that. Yeah. That stuff. Belgian fries. Etcetera.)
It's completely true, but it's not as comforting as it might seem.
You just touched on something that came up today at the (proverbial) water cooler. Depending on whether one wants people to feel alarmed or reassured, one can describe large numbers as either:
volumes (reassuring); or
distances (scary)
If you want to describe, say, the national debt, and your goal is to make it seem manageable, your preferred image is a volume. ("All those dollar bills would fit in a dumpster that's x feet by y feet by 5 feet deep." The dumpster doesn't have to be that big.) If you want to make the numbers seem staggering, you say "stack up those dollar bills in a pile -- they'd reach to the moon and back" (or whatever it works out to).
Another example I remember was from a (not-too-special) book by the author of "Innumeracy," and it used the Grand Canyon to do exactly what you're doing here with Texas. The population of the world, it's true, would fit into the Grand Canyon, with fair-sized apartments for each individual.
But that's the "make it less frightening" approach. If we want to make it seem like the lid's blowing off, we can always say "In 1850 if everyone had stood shoulder to shoulder they'd have gone around the world once, whereas today we'd go around X number of times."
...And any real sense of how world population trends work out would depend on a much more nuanced (look out! John Kerry's wishy washy word!) view. For example: the worldwide rate of population growth peaked in the late 1960s and has been falling since then. There's a colossal difference in the rate of growth between "developing" and industrial states, though. Wade into those numbers -- look at the different problems facing Japan (low birth rate, aging population) and Nigeria (huge birth rate, not nearly enough investment to educate all the kids) despite the fact that Nigeria's the 9th biggest population on the planet and Japan's 10th -- and suddenly "distribution" starts to look like the problematic knot of all Gordian knots. The demographic fault lines are pretty dramatic, even if we could stack everyone in a Texas-sized dumpster, slap a "Don't mess with Texas" sticker on the side, and have done.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, sir or madame, but you've just referred to historical information in a way that doesn't clearly take an ideological stance about the Cuban regime, which we're all bound by tacit patriotic loyalty oaths to revile root and branch. You did so in a manner that referred, obliquely, both to current anticorporate sentiment in "the states" and to potentially sympathetic positions taken by an Out of Bounds Bad Guy. This unseemly display of ambiguously-intended "nuance" has caused your name to be included in a certain list down at the office.
I wonder if you wouldn't mind stepping over here and putting your hands up on the wall...
A parent can turn off the TV. (A parent can even get rid of the TV.) A parent can make sure that their children eat well. A parent can make sure that their children get an adequate amount of exercise.
And a parent can choose to use certain tools to get to the right balance point for all of that, all without finding it necessary to stake out an absolute position on the relative morality (or even efficacy) of the technology.
If these things aren't already happening, a stupid pair of shoes won't help.
Your positions would apply to basically any technology, not just these flaky shoes. (I can see the shoes for certain cases, personally. Pediatric onset diabetes? Seems about like a bed wetting alarm for certain kids, to me. Doesn't work and isn't necessary for everyone, so everyone doesn't have one.)
Personally I was once tempted by a "TV Allowance" box that let you put in a certain amount of time for each kid per week. And yeah, they could go to a friend's house, or steal each other's codes, or whatever -- the point isn't to find the absolutely ideal solution, the point is to set up enough of a reminder/nuisance to help shape the behavior, hopefully at a reasonable cost for the practical benefit. And no, the enormous and ever-so-crucial philosophical distinction between "Dad told me that's enough 'Sabrina'" and "The time limit Dad set is up" doesn't matter as much to me as it seems to matter to you.
Personally I think the cruxes are positive reinforcement (rather than chiding) and modeling the right behavior (rather than prating about something you won't do yourself). Parents who show their kids that they evercise themselves have a heck of a lot better chance to convince the kids. But why a dorky technology like this couldn't help that, I don't know. I was planning on giving myself the same allowance the kids had, on the box thing.
These shoes do seem like a niche product -- but I can see them being usable in those senses. I'd be more impressed by some sort of family pedometer tracking system, personally, but to each her own.
The one that really disappoints me is -- from the review:
First off, C-Span is a lot more watchable than bland dreck like "Everybody Loves Raymond." But more to the point: C'mon, people, the problems with the first two movies weren't to do with their having overly complex plots. They were to do with their having particularly stupid plots. And within those stupid plots, the individual scenes, and the actions taken by the characters, were also often spectacularly brainless.
At the end of EP II, before nonsensically going off to fight the war they cannot be expected to fight, the Jedi Council arrives at a moment that I think sums up the political complexity of these goofy plotlines: "Hmm. Maybe we should keep an eye on the Senate. Almost seems like they can't be trusted..." You could almost see the light go off above Yoda's head. Shrewd thinking by the council.
To say that Anikin buzzing out to visit his mom -- and arriving at JUST the moment of her death -- was bad because the politics of Sand People were overwrought, that would be wrong. That whole sequence was bad because it stunk, period, in maybe 15 distinctly idiotic ways.
Anyone who's read a mediocre Sci Fi epic has read much more complicated, much more convincing political plotting than these movies offer the viewer. Decent but not great Hollywood thrillers -- "7 Days in May" -- are so much better in every way, despite having far more complex plotting.
The Newton actually kicked butt next to competition from years later -- but when it came out, people weren't ready for "learn how to write every letter in the alphabet differently" so we whinged about the handwriting recognition. (Okay, maybe I'm just sympathetic because I can't read my own handwriting; why expect the Newton to do it?) It was also priced higher than it would have been a couple of years later. As a design they were pretty cool, way cool for the time.
With the Lisa, the shortcomings were partly there because the market for systems like that just wasn't clear. It's hard to even remember how early that all was. Even the first Macs didn't come with hard drives, for years.
Looking at the history, they do much better when they identify a big gap in an existing market, rather than trying to get out ahead of things too much. "Digital Hub" and so on. Jobs has a pretty good eye for those niches to fill. iPod is a step away from what the competition had, but you at least understood what the product did.
Ding! Your answers are ready. It's me.
Technical specs could theoretically have made the difference for Dreamcast -- if one or the other had just conspicuously kicked the competitor's butt -- but for Joe buyer it comes down to "There are two cool new systems, and they're both about the same in coolness. Which one has [fill in game franchise]?" XBox has tried for the 'monopoly on cool games' thing already. So has Nintendo with its younger niche. Neither one's going to take out Sony on that ground.
Unless XBox really has a feature that sets it out -- amazing advantage in networking -- it and Nintendo will probably still be on the edges. (Personally I'll probably still get coerced into buying Nintendo's next system unless it's completely marginalized or my kids turn the teen corner in a big way. They're 11 now, and still way into those franchises. The quality of the real name games -- Zelda, the Mario stuff -- is consistently very high, and I kind of prefer a more innocent tone myself anyway.)
We always agitate for it, but it does have its downside. Selective pressure on the human thumb joints, for example. The evolutionary consequences of PS controllers are underappreciated in the peer reviewed literature.
The inconsistent use of tabs in the Windows API is just one more example of the fact that MS doesn't "get" what an API friggin' does for user interfaces. It isn't just Office. It's everything. We're all the blind men with the elephant in this OS. Every part of the elephant is separately designed by an MS team that isn't talking to all the other teams.
The way tabs have been used in "Control Panels" over the years is a decent example. How many times have you looked at an open Control Panel tab with "OK," "Cancel," and "Apply" buttons, along with a little X on the upper right, all of which are going to do exactly the same thing, because the last change you made was on another tab? The developers seem to have gotten as far as "tabs save space!" without thinking of how they affect what the buttons do for us. DUH.
Not that anyone's perfect, but Microsoft is spectacularly bad at consistently implementing its own API rules, to the extent that they even exist. Get to a third party developer, and you may as well throw whatever you know as a user out the window... so to speak.
it should not be necessary to keep one's SSN any more secret than the account and routing numbers printed on personal checks.
A whole lot of people don't think of those two numbers as being at all different in terms of how secure they keep them. I know people who carry their SSN card in their blinkin' wallets.
Try reading the book "Persepolis." Easy graphic novel, about a young woman from Iran -- you'll finish it in a night. It's absurd, you're right, but not that funny.
Look, it's true, MS doesn't do enough to make Joe User more secure. But the main reason Windows is a target for all things viral and spyware is because it's such a huge share of the market. If you want to do the most harm, you target Windows. MS negligence makes that much worse, granted.
The bigger problem with this is, if the same people who produce the OS produce the AV software, what you get is less protection. The same principle of the monoculture applies. To protect your system, and for the health of the overall market too, what you want is a variety of evolutionary lines in your viral protection. The blind spots MS has, maybe Symantec doesn't have. And even if they overlook the same angles, their protection methods are going to vary. That's a harder target.
If MS gave this away for free with the OS, Joe User would likely say to himself, "Cool, I'm protected." And virus writers would have a vast, similar pool of target systems whose traits they could predict down to the specific directory. Does that sound good?
Brzt. Does Not Compute.
Andy Griffith's like a lot of other classic TV -- if you watch it now next to the latest crop of new sitcoms, you realize how well-written the thing was. Each episode's basically a little one-act play, and it's pretty tight writing. It's basically superior to Enterprise in the traits you're talking about, despite no story arc from episode to episode. That would explain why people still remember favorite episodes of Andy Griffith decades after its run ended, whereas Enterprise is dying of neglect despite a colossal built-in audience.
TV used to do so much better with character actors than it does now. The Mary Tyler Moore show wasn't episode after episode of "Mary goes on another date," you know? (Ted, Murray, Lou Grant, Sue Ellen, Rhoda, Phyllis, Georgette.)Heck, "Leave It to Beaver" looks like a friggin' Pulitzer Prize-winning play next to Voyager or Enterprise, and the cast of regulars was more interesting, despite them all being whitebread suburbanites.
We both know why this makes absolutely no sense. It's not just the time involved... It Made No Sense.
It made almost as much sense as how Dooku flew away at the end by... just flying away. Nice blockade, good thinking. Or as much sense as Anikin being a complete bonehead, to the point where he made my then-9-year-old kids laugh out loud, in The Big Light Saber Fight. That was so bad it was funny, and yet not bad enough to be really fun. Lame, lame, lame.
Except he got caught in the most routine way possible -- so, you know, it can't be explained by the force, or by any of George Lucas's remarkably lame attempts to claim he's poaching on classical mythology, or anything really other than total lameness...
The FAIR site has a nice quote from "Former top UC official Steve Hassan" to the effect that the paper's a Trojan Horse -- "Conservative politics is glad to have a voice through the Times, but ultimately it has nothing to do with conservatism. It has to do with fascism." (As if today's conservatives would know the difference, given the people they elect and their own fundie-authoritarian leanings.)
As far as space stories go, the WT op/ed page reads like a throwback to Sputnik, which I guess isn't much of a surprise. (Of Chinese moon plans and our apparent lack of response: "'Space dominance is a 21st-century challenge we dare not refuse.")
I watched Episode II while ironing, at home on a Netflix rental. It was so, so bad. (Somebody please explain how the whole "Jedi rescue mission" capper to the movie wasn't utterly stupid and pointless. "We don't fight wars... let's go fight a whole army in a big pitched battle, though." Or please, describe how sneaky Obi Wan was to park his ship right outside the enemy hideout's entrance and then to stand outside it and send his spy message back to the council. Oh, the lameness!)
I wouldn't pay for this unless my various friends came back with unbelievable word of mouth to go with these reviews. The hype machine is so polished right now that, as it comes up for release, any big summer film has this sort of "It's better than expectations" spin on it. I'll trust my friends more.
So it'll go on my Netflix queue. Even then, it won't be that high on the list. Unless real people tell me it's really worth it.
Lucas writes these things about on the level of a SciFi fan who doesn't quite "get it."
I'll never forget how lame Episode II was on the whole political machinations thing. How long did it take the Jedi Council to get to the point where Yoda was suggesting, just suggesting, that maybe the Senate couldn't be trusted? Ooh, elaborate plotting. Imagining what a good writer could do with the atmosphere in a political body that enormous, well, it just makes me sigh.
When did our enormous corporations decide they shouldn't be the only voice at the table in our government? I must've missed the memo. (Maybe that one got sent during the formulation of our energy policy, so Cheney thought it was a protected secret of the Executive Branch? Oops, that memo can't have come from those meetings...)
The reviews for Episode II said the same sorts of "It marks a return to The Empire Strikes Back" stuff. The tomatometer's at 65%. That movie made my kids laugh at how bad it was, more than once. Give it two more years, and watch the tomato turn green in retrospect. I dunno how, but it happens. I swear, when "Pearl Harbor" came out, on balance the reviews liked it okay and talked about how it'd inspire interest in the real history. Back in 2001 the Tomatometer doesn't seem like it had PH at 25%.
Is it just me, or does every blockbuster now come with a pre-release spin fest of "It's so much better than you expect, given that it's this sort of movie, that you should see it anyway"? It's like the stock market, with "retail earnings better than expected" for this April being the headline -- even though the expectations were exceptionally low.
Where oh where is the option for us to mod articles themselves? I really, really need to peg Dvorak with a "troll -1" mod.
There are "contrarian view" columnists like this in every industry, meant to get our ire up, but few of those are so blatant (and so blatantly wrong) for so bloody long.
But you know, every last thing I buy from them does feel like blinkin' Christmas morning to open. Anyone who has an iPod, and obviously they're out there, did a little "that's cool" reexamination of the box once they'd gotten the thing out. God knows why it makes a difference, but it does.
Maybe Apple just regards it as a way to stake out their market position as (Steve J's analogy) the BMW of the desktop set. Same thing happens in optics: I'm a birder, and if you buy Swarovski or Leica or Zeiss, you get a very cool box around your thousand-dollar binoculars.
To wit: in terms of hard drive access speed, the G5 iMac actually scored somewhat slower than the G4 Mini on benchmarks available at Macintouch. So for our purposes, which included some video editing, we'd have been torn between the two models.
I'm waiting on an incremental change in the iMac's guts to make that choice again. Maybe by then the Mini's got some more kick to it, too. (Meanwhile my friend got a Mini, swapped it into his existing monitor and peripherals, and has had nothing negative to say about performance or anything else.)
Hey, I'm a pretty good dad -- raised two 11-year-olds alone from the age of 2 weeks, and they're awfully nice kids -- little malice, good grades, the usual stuff you say about decent children.
To say I "never have problems setting rules" would be a wild exaggeration, and even a sort of denial of what parenting really is, in my book. That's sort of like the churchy idea that faith in God is about making moral choices easier for the flock. Making things easy is not the point at all. Moral decisions are about struggling to figure out what's right, not resorting to reassuringly rigid conventional laws based on what some authority figure passed down on stone tablets. Being a good parent isn't about being able to easily impose limitations on the kids; it's about consciously working through this kind of crap to figure out what those limitations should be. It's not enforcing the rules that's most important, it's the act of figuring out what the rules should be.
That's my problem with this sort of thing -- it's limited to following the ESRB ratings, which are only a nudge up from the MPAA's surreal movie ratings in my book. That's the stone tablet model. In that sense any V-chip is taking the decision out of my hands, not helping me make and enforce it. What I need isn't a nuisance level of security to put up as an obstacle. What I need is information to help in making the choices.
(Which explains why I'm the parent who reads game reviews, though they're often more about control layouts and multi-player modes than content.)
The overwhelming preponderance of /. readers' responses to this story seems to have been a thoughtless regurgitation of all things anti-French. I sort of feel like pointing out that, based on those posts, at least on this side of the Atlantic precisely the sort of idiotic self-centeredness you're describing holds true. The French don't think that way, no, but apparently slashdot does.
This isn't about France -- it's about the suppression of dissenting views. The entirety of the anti-French idiocy over here amounts to one big "ad hominem" attack; nobody really had an answer to Villepain's Security Council arguments, so we demonized the speaker rather than countering the speech.
(Cue jokes about how the French won the American Revolution by pitching in with their navy at the opportune moment... Oh, never mind, we're supposed to forget that one. Surrender monkeys and all that. Yeah. That stuff. Belgian fries. Etcetera.)
You just touched on something that came up today at the (proverbial) water cooler. Depending on whether one wants people to feel alarmed or reassured, one can describe large numbers as either:
If you want to describe, say, the national debt, and your goal is to make it seem manageable, your preferred image is a volume. ("All those dollar bills would fit in a dumpster that's x feet by y feet by 5 feet deep." The dumpster doesn't have to be that big.) If you want to make the numbers seem staggering, you say "stack up those dollar bills in a pile -- they'd reach to the moon and back" (or whatever it works out to).
Another example I remember was from a (not-too-special) book by the author of "Innumeracy," and it used the Grand Canyon to do exactly what you're doing here with Texas. The population of the world, it's true, would fit into the Grand Canyon, with fair-sized apartments for each individual.
But that's the "make it less frightening" approach. If we want to make it seem like the lid's blowing off, we can always say "In 1850 if everyone had stood shoulder to shoulder they'd have gone around the world once, whereas today we'd go around X number of times."
...And any real sense of how world population trends work out would depend on a much more nuanced (look out! John Kerry's wishy washy word!) view. For example: the worldwide rate of population growth peaked in the late 1960s and has been falling since then. There's a colossal difference in the rate of growth between "developing" and industrial states, though. Wade into those numbers -- look at the different problems facing Japan (low birth rate, aging population) and Nigeria (huge birth rate, not nearly enough investment to educate all the kids) despite the fact that Nigeria's the 9th biggest population on the planet and Japan's 10th -- and suddenly "distribution" starts to look like the problematic knot of all Gordian knots. The demographic fault lines are pretty dramatic, even if we could stack everyone in a Texas-sized dumpster, slap a "Don't mess with Texas" sticker on the side, and have done.