You might want to look the word up. Then look up "irony."
I was imagining Bill's business practices, played in microcosm as an attempt to filch that $400 piece of hardware. Imagine the equivalent of BSA strongarming, on that small scale. Golly, no, I was not literally suggesting that Bill needs an iPod.
Your entire response was exactly the sort of petty crap you're so bravely fomenting against. You just did exactly what you'd do in real life -- which is, go spew a bunch of attitude.
I think the NEJM had a study with the exact same conclusion in 1997 or around there. The "headsets don't have any effect" angle has also been prevalent in previous studies, including that one. Popular accounts always play up the "equivalent to being legally drunk" angle.
That said, similar arguments were also made against the first radios that people included with cars. Probably those arguments had a point, too -- but new technologies do just tend to elicit this kind of fear and public backlash.
At another "campus," seeing that would have provoked a positive ton of good-natured ribbing. The person with the iPod would have given some back, and in the end maybe the music division would have gotten a(nother) quick sense of why even an MS employee could have made that choice. Might have resulted in an actual competitive advantage for the eventual MS product.
I guess my suspicions about the level of communication at MS are pretty well verified. It's never seemed like the people writing the "outline" feature in Word were talking to the people who wrote the "styles" feature. Partly it's just a big company thing, but I dunno, I'm tempted to think there's something more there...
these muggings that happen to all these people wearing iPods in... large, patrolled software giant campuses.
The mind reels with examples of ways in which Bill G. and his cohorts might go about acquiring someone else's iPod.
Business ethics are one of the few areas in life where I honestly do think things "trickle down." Petty theft isn't at all unheard of at big corporate "campuses."
But where ever business memo must be written in such a way that you csn't tell the truth because it might be used against you in a court of law, your have a big problem with your tort system.
Um, wherever putting details about your business model down on paper would result in serious legal liability, you have a big problem with your business model. Yes? The problem with Enron wasn't that they might get caught, it was that they used fundamentally dishonest accounting practices -- whether they wrote those practices down or not.
I have no problem with talking about tort reform, but the idea that trial lawyers are "running" anyone's economy is ludicrous. It's ludicrous on the same level that "trial lawyers are jacking up our medical expenses" is a ludicrous overstatement of the effect of malpractice suits.
Behind your post lies the assumption that basically anything goes for businesses, as long as they don't get held accountable for their unsavory actions. I'll take a balanced economy, thanks. Regulation of industry for the public interest, checks and balances in the legal system... It's all radical communism by you, I'm sure, but I'll choose it all the same.
Mod up -- the 5300 had a few diff't sides
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
The PB5300 was truly a spectacular flameout.
Not only was the product itself of questionable quality -- a big anchor around Apple's service contract system -- but the thing was so late claiming space in the laptop market that, just as portables really took off, Apple lost what had been a huge advantage in that market niche.
Up until around the time when they broke ground on "docks" with their Duo line, Apple had the best laptops out there. There was a long gap where they just didn't have any models, and they lost market share in a huge way while all they had was 68040 chip models to sell.
Of all the "supply chain"-style problems Apple's ever had, this may have been the most damaging on a high level. They were market leaders, and then they fell on their faces. Then the 5300 came in and it was plain shoddy. Those were bad times.
At the same time, it's a kind of sad testament to the power of ego in human life.
How does that rank next to buying a new video card to get better frame rates in the latest shooter that you can already run?
We can think of around a bajillion worse testaments to ego. People are driving around in cars that cost them several grand more than what they needed for no reason, paying huge insurance premiums, and getting godawful mileage. White supremacists are out there thinking the "whole problem with this country today" has to do with treating anyone else like a human being with rights. People are installing hideous pop songs as ring tones on their Palm Phones, which they don't actually use to store much of anything but phone numbers. Oh, the humanity!
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but its nice having an alternative to go to when you aren't finding what you want on Google.
Yeah, boy, we never heard of any other search engines. That's new.
If I wanted to get some straight talk about, oh, Mormonism, is there any search engine I'd trust less not to be prioritizing based on some black box criteria that were influenced by "stockholders' concerns"? Nope. Not only is MS dug into a deep credibility hole for me -- I don't think I'd trust any search engine entity that isn't more autonomous from a massive tech company. Apple won't be getting my search engine business either, for example.
Google has done a decent job of using the "sponsored" links thing without compromising the integrity of the basic search rankings. I have no faith whatsoever in Microsoft's even pretending to have integrity in that sense.
Word 6? MS saw what it could get away with
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
I've always thought of Word 6 as the moment when Microsoft realized what it could pass off on the American corporate world. That was the moment when they started doing stuff like changing the way rulers worked in tables for no reason at all other than to sell another incremental release in their Office apps.
Word 5.1a or so was just about the point at which their releases stopped being useful upgrades and started being calculated mostly to control the market as part of the Office suite. I don't think I've ever run across anyone who used Word in a way 5.1a couldn't have handled, in any significant sense, but MS keeps on selling their "change for change's sake" upgrade path.
So I guess I'm with you. This wasn't Apple's bad, it was the lip of the MS cliff.
For an extra $20 you can bet I'll take GE over Hotpoint any day of the week!... Will I pay 50 cents extra for a GE bulb over a no-name brand?
Ironically, doing a Google, it sure looks like "hotpoint" may be a GE spinoff or alternative branding. They take the same exact parts on lots of stuff. But let's leave that alone.
The value of GE's brand in the sense you're talking about is that they make generic, crappy stuff with a brand name on it that people recognize. To cite this as a huge brand advantage seems odd, given that next to any other recognizable brand name GE would, if anything, be at a disadvantage for most products. Go to that hardware store shelf again. There's a GE (thing) and a 3M (thing). The 3M thing is 40 cents more. I'd choose the 3M product every day of the danged week. GE's in a lot of product categories, but the only advantage it would have in any of them would be against something we didn't recognize. That would be the lowest brand on the totem pole, not the best one. Its advantage is that it's pricing stuff very low across a lot of markets while keeping some recognition. I "get" how the business folks think that's something to cheer about, but c'mon.
A fairer question to ask in assessing the brand's true value would be: If you had two roughly equivalent dishwashers or clothes dryers or fridges next to each other, would you be inclined to take the GE over the Maytag, Whirlpool, or Kenmore models? Would you ever buy a GE phone over an AT&T or Southwestern Bell phone at roughly the same price point? Would you buy a GE television over anything else other than (fill in "store brand" name) based on names?
The answer is basically "no." I can't think of a single product category in which that'd be true. GE has brand recognition, all right. I recognize them as a maker of essentially generic products. People know "Chevrolet" cars too. Most people would buy a Chevy Malibu over a Hyundai Excel. Hoo-ray. Chevy sure has a big brand advantage.
On the other hand, would I choose an Apple music device over Dell's or Hewlett Packard's? Even at a price premium? Well, around 70% of the market for players has now made that choice. Sounds like a real, substantial brand advantage to me, at least in that market niche.
Also, keep in mind, until the first iMac Apple essentially did no advertising other than that 1984 ad, and still had tremendously high brand recognition in its market. Pretty unreal.
As for the looks issue. I keep getting this in response. Who cares?
Ever had to choose between two car models that were basically equivalent in terms of reliability, longevity and so on -- one of which included much better quality design in the interior? Go look at a Mitsubishi and a Volkswagen. In each class, they're both around average in reliability. VW has a huge edge in design, just everywhere on the car. The antenna, sitting up on the back of the cars right in the middle. You know? Even when the design isn't practical -- VW's glove boxes and storage spaces are sometimes a case of looks over function -- the German engineering thing trips the right synapses. VW can ask for a ton more for whatever they're selling right now.
People do care about this stuff. They care about the amount of noise their computer makes. They care whether the little knobs on the dashboard of their car give them a tiny measure of pleasure to use. Whether it's enough to make people try a brand of car that only runs on diesel -- that's about the level of question we're looking at, here.
(But Macs aren't like asking people to spend $6,000 more to drive a gas-guzzling, poor-handling tricked up truck just for image... Oh, people do that too. People can be pretty odd.)
Prior to MPAA ratings, there were just organization "Seal of approval" sorts of relationships.
Actually for a long time there was "the Hays code," the strict era of censorship in Hollywood that made it impossible to refer to such extreme topics as divorce in any kind of positive light, that limited the length of kisses on screen, that essentially prohibited movies in which the bad guys didn't get theirs, and so on. The code came about earlier, but started being enforced in the early 50s or so I think. (Gee, right around when the HUAC started pillorying writers, too. Whaddaya know.)
Even back then the movie industry was bowing to pressures from a subset of the religious right. Mostly, for whatever reasons, it's been a Catholic thing. Hays himself was very much a public Catholic in a political sense. As a result, both ratings and the earlier censorship was hard on any sort of sexual material and far easier on violence.
I do take your point, but it doesn't dispel the basic irony: the MPAA isn't making any effort to "help parents" but it routinely claims to be -- as with this lovely, helpful piece of spyware.
Let's hear it for the MPAA and its efforts to make things easier for parents.
For example, their ratings system does a graet job of giving "Billy Elliott" and "Waiting for Guffman" R ratings, because goodness knows no 13-year-old has ever hear bad language or encountered tacitly gay characters. Violence like Daredevil's "paperclips stabbing your throat until you choke to death" gets a PG-13 -- and so does a fantastic family movie like "Whale Rider" -- because there was apparently a bong in the background in one scene.
We're ever so eager to hear their parenting advice in other areas.
Yeah, and we'll only get excited about the new models when the one we've got actually dies or when someone comes out with something as fundamentally pleasing and necessary as intermittent wipers or antilock brakes. Until then, I like what I'm driving.
Looks like the "commodity" thing is really coming true.
(Actually I would get excited about GM's 'skateboard' concept cars with the electronic controls. About as likely to erally come out in 2006 as the aforementioned Longhorn, though. And a new Msoft OS? Shrug...)
That's what they want it to "sound like"
on
China Bans 50 Games
·
· Score: 1
That's a nice front for what's going on, but consider the Chinese market, rife with piracy as it supposedly is, and consider that even some of the seemingly innocent titles on this list -- FIFA 2005, for the sake of Pete? -- have a little touch of sting for the Beijing regime.
FIFA, for example, includes a Taiwanese team. The Vietnam games are going to reflect a non-sanctioned view of the war. And so on.
Censorship for reasons of political manipulation masquerading as something else? the heck you say! (I'd throw stones, but then I listened to Howard Stern once last year when he was laying into Bush and company.)
A more eloquent cry in the wilderness I've seldom seen on slashdot.
You're right, they mostly build statues to people who have power and money and who want to pose for them. Your real heroes who had flaws and who weren't posing as preening saints for PR's sake -- Helen Keller, Edward Howard Armstrong -- either wind up being sanitized against their will (Keller) or mostly forgotten (Armstrong).
The parent story is just a little reminder that, sometimes, science can give the right person that little slice of faux-immortality. Naturalists naming species after fellow naturalists, that kind of thing.
I guarantee you the Americans espousing freedom and human rights were NOT the same people as those ignorant assholes in Abu Ghraib.
Rhetoric about "freedom" has become about as empty (and calculated) as rhetoric about "supporting the troops" lately. There certainly are Americans who seem to be willing to make an ends-and-means calculation about the sorts of torture that happened at Abu Graib.
My Southern Baptist relations dismissed those photos as one of the necessities of fighting this kind of war, to use one example, and they're all for spreading "freedom" in the world. Big backers of W's, those folks, and just fine with torturing a few people to get it.
Personally I think there's both moral and legal responsibility at a higher level, of course. But some of the same people are okay with both "freedom" and what happened at Abu Graib.
'Hard-right' republicans believe in personal effort -- you get the results of the hard work you do.
This must be why Donald Trump is such an outspoken proponent of conservative fiscal policies. It's all about the "hard work" he did to inherit his millions. Steve Forbes, ditto. It's a matter of high principle to these thoughtful gentlemen that we benefit only from our own hard work. Similarly, George W., who could never have been accepted at Yale without his family history behind him, rails against the wrongheadedness of "social promotions" in our schools.
Face it, there's a stark irony to the reactions many people have against affirmative action. For example: ever noticed how conscientiously the Republicans have practiced what they preach against -- within their own freaking party -- over at least the last three national election cycles? Gee, it seems to me like they've been promoting minorities into positions of influence over the heads of equally qualified non-minority candidates. How can that be happening? They themselves explain it, in Trent Lott's estimation, as an aggressive attempt to expand their base. By using non-race-neutral selection criteria! Golly. It's a topsy-turvy world, ain't it?
In particular what I was reacting to in my parenthetical throwaway there was the almost communistic tone and language that suddenly gets used in cases like the Michigan thing last year. From the party that turned against John McCain's use of "Marxist-Leninist" terms in his economic plan, it's plenty, plenty bizarre to read some of the arguments that get made.
The submitter had no reason to insert those last two statements except to provoke negative comments.
The/. entry form does let you specify a "department," doesn't it? And one of the choices is "the ends-justify-the-means" department. Maybe our submitter was just fishing for a category.
(Personally, if I'd submitted this story I might have included a reference to Andrew Carnegie. Maybe that'd have been a hot button too? I've wondered whether B.G. is comparing himself to Carnegie before...)
Yes, that would be catastrophic to us, but not to the planet.
You just touched on the colossal, huge, central point that virtually every dimisser of global warming fails to "get." It's not that the world won't survive. Life on earth has survived, and thrived, at higher global temperatures than we have now. It's just that, when major transitions occur, the dominant forms of life do not remain dominant. And that would mean us.
This ain't about hugging spotted owls. It's not about whether Sandhill cranes have a place to roost on their way north in the spring. The debate's about our survival. When we read:
...could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.
Those are serious risks. Any *one* of those would stand a considerable risk of destabilizing the world as we know it. Imagine a Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons as it is, whose politics were affected by a massive drought. That's the easiest thing to predict in the world; climate change precipitated the Mfcane, which set loose a huge migration of people in southern Africa, which in turn had a lot to do with the military dictatorship of Shaka Zulu. Governments, in a state of global climate change, would be made drastically unstable.
The risk of nuclear war, during the cold war, was not a certainty -- it was a risk. We spent untold resources to address that risk, on both sides. The question is, how much do we commit to addressing this one? When an overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is playing the role of Cassandra, how seriously do you take the possible tragedy?
"Subconsciously taking more breaths"? That's pretty funny, no offense intended.
If you want a sense of how a change like this could radically change favored adaptations, think about grazing mammals that evolved to take advantage of grasses. As grasses became more prevalent, animals who could eat grass well exploded in population. Big niches got to be dominated by some pretty mundane-seeming adaptations to the digestive process. Seems like a subtle edge, doesn't it?
Reading the article, the folks making this argument have considered potential long-term adaptations to the atmospheric changes they're describing:
"Some of us have been toying with the idea that dinosaurs evolved to be a low-oxygen adaptation," resulting from this era, Ward said. "We know birds can live at much lower oxygen concentrations than we do, and we think there were similar lung adaptations in dinosaurs."
(People don't realize how radical the indirect effects of climate change could be, partly because they're thinking stuff like this. You know -- "If it gets warmer in the winter, I'll just wear less sweaters." If, say, the gulf stream were to shut down, and Europe's economies took a tremendous hit under a much cooler regional climate, putting on more sweaters will make as much sense as asking everyone in England to just "breathe less.")
How about saying, of a piece of software, that it has "surprising equipment" -- just like that character in the crying game? Now you're talkin' bad analogies.
I also love it when I hear "out of the box." Because, you know, just using the dang analogy is a completely trite thing by now -- it's the hackneyed way of thinking inside the dang box, and has been since sometime in the 1980s when Deming really caught on in MBA jargon. The analogy that means exactly the opposite thing, yeah? That's got to rank.
There are tons of examples of one side or another attaching amendments to bills in order to undercut their support. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill eventually included provisions about gender as well as race; the usual social conservatives thought that would take the bill down because the idea was so obnoxious. (Oops! The bill passed.)
So was the proposed legislation loaded with actual "pork" -- meaning costly projects for people's home districts? It doesn't even read, in your version, like a deliberate attempt to undercut it. It sounds more like the bill was an overrreach -- "more anti-gun legislature" (legislation, right?) was on it, and it got voted down.
It's called a representative democracy. Messy process, isn't it?
If you're going to buy into something that's never been done, as a good business person, you have to take steps to mitigate the risks. Jeff Bezos can get some lawyers and insurance people who know basically what the risks are in shooting something up in more-or-less the same old way. What will those same people tell him about an elevator? What sort of premium does he pay on that? Leave that alone -- What sort of problems would you have just getting it set up in the necessary equatorial spot?
An elevator starts to look way more complicated to pull off than touching off one more rocket, and this one with a private logo on the side. I love the idea, always have, but for a private investor to throw money at that would be early. If it's going to get done, it'll be at the level of money governments throw around, won't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I was imagining Bill's business practices, played in microcosm as an attempt to filch that $400 piece of hardware. Imagine the equivalent of BSA strongarming, on that small scale. Golly, no, I was not literally suggesting that Bill needs an iPod.
(Sheesh.)
Does the cognitive dissonance hurt any?
That said, similar arguments were also made against the first radios that people included with cars. Probably those arguments had a point, too -- but new technologies do just tend to elicit this kind of fear and public backlash.
At another "campus," seeing that would have provoked a positive ton of good-natured ribbing. The person with the iPod would have given some back, and in the end maybe the music division would have gotten a(nother) quick sense of why even an MS employee could have made that choice. Might have resulted in an actual competitive advantage for the eventual MS product.
I guess my suspicions about the level of communication at MS are pretty well verified. It's never seemed like the people writing the "outline" feature in Word were talking to the people who wrote the "styles" feature. Partly it's just a big company thing, but I dunno, I'm tempted to think there's something more there...
The mind reels with examples of ways in which Bill G. and his cohorts might go about acquiring someone else's iPod.
Business ethics are one of the few areas in life where I honestly do think things "trickle down." Petty theft isn't at all unheard of at big corporate "campuses."
Um, wherever putting details about your business model down on paper would result in serious legal liability, you have a big problem with your business model. Yes? The problem with Enron wasn't that they might get caught, it was that they used fundamentally dishonest accounting practices -- whether they wrote those practices down or not.
I have no problem with talking about tort reform, but the idea that trial lawyers are "running" anyone's economy is ludicrous. It's ludicrous on the same level that "trial lawyers are jacking up our medical expenses" is a ludicrous overstatement of the effect of malpractice suits.
Behind your post lies the assumption that basically anything goes for businesses, as long as they don't get held accountable for their unsavory actions. I'll take a balanced economy, thanks. Regulation of industry for the public interest, checks and balances in the legal system... It's all radical communism by you, I'm sure, but I'll choose it all the same.
Not only was the product itself of questionable quality -- a big anchor around Apple's service contract system -- but the thing was so late claiming space in the laptop market that, just as portables really took off, Apple lost what had been a huge advantage in that market niche.
Up until around the time when they broke ground on "docks" with their Duo line, Apple had the best laptops out there. There was a long gap where they just didn't have any models, and they lost market share in a huge way while all they had was 68040 chip models to sell.
Of all the "supply chain"-style problems Apple's ever had, this may have been the most damaging on a high level. They were market leaders, and then they fell on their faces. Then the 5300 came in and it was plain shoddy. Those were bad times.
How does that rank next to buying a new video card to get better frame rates in the latest shooter that you can already run?
We can think of around a bajillion worse testaments to ego. People are driving around in cars that cost them several grand more than what they needed for no reason, paying huge insurance premiums, and getting godawful mileage. White supremacists are out there thinking the "whole problem with this country today" has to do with treating anyone else like a human being with rights. People are installing hideous pop songs as ring tones on their Palm Phones, which they don't actually use to store much of anything but phone numbers. Oh, the humanity!
Don't be too hard on yourself, kid.
Yeah, boy, we never heard of any other search engines. That's new.
If I wanted to get some straight talk about, oh, Mormonism, is there any search engine I'd trust less not to be prioritizing based on some black box criteria that were influenced by "stockholders' concerns"? Nope. Not only is MS dug into a deep credibility hole for me -- I don't think I'd trust any search engine entity that isn't more autonomous from a massive tech company. Apple won't be getting my search engine business either, for example.
Google has done a decent job of using the "sponsored" links thing without compromising the integrity of the basic search rankings. I have no faith whatsoever in Microsoft's even pretending to have integrity in that sense.
Word 5.1a or so was just about the point at which their releases stopped being useful upgrades and started being calculated mostly to control the market as part of the Office suite. I don't think I've ever run across anyone who used Word in a way 5.1a couldn't have handled, in any significant sense, but MS keeps on selling their "change for change's sake" upgrade path.
So I guess I'm with you. This wasn't Apple's bad, it was the lip of the MS cliff.
Ironically, doing a Google, it sure looks like "hotpoint" may be a GE spinoff or alternative branding. They take the same exact parts on lots of stuff. But let's leave that alone.
The value of GE's brand in the sense you're talking about is that they make generic, crappy stuff with a brand name on it that people recognize. To cite this as a huge brand advantage seems odd, given that next to any other recognizable brand name GE would, if anything, be at a disadvantage for most products. Go to that hardware store shelf again. There's a GE (thing) and a 3M (thing). The 3M thing is 40 cents more. I'd choose the 3M product every day of the danged week. GE's in a lot of product categories, but the only advantage it would have in any of them would be against something we didn't recognize. That would be the lowest brand on the totem pole, not the best one. Its advantage is that it's pricing stuff very low across a lot of markets while keeping some recognition. I "get" how the business folks think that's something to cheer about, but c'mon.
A fairer question to ask in assessing the brand's true value would be: If you had two roughly equivalent dishwashers or clothes dryers or fridges next to each other, would you be inclined to take the GE over the Maytag, Whirlpool, or Kenmore models? Would you ever buy a GE phone over an AT&T or Southwestern Bell phone at roughly the same price point? Would you buy a GE television over anything else other than (fill in "store brand" name) based on names?
The answer is basically "no." I can't think of a single product category in which that'd be true. GE has brand recognition, all right. I recognize them as a maker of essentially generic products. People know "Chevrolet" cars too. Most people would buy a Chevy Malibu over a Hyundai Excel. Hoo-ray. Chevy sure has a big brand advantage.
On the other hand, would I choose an Apple music device over Dell's or Hewlett Packard's? Even at a price premium? Well, around 70% of the market for players has now made that choice. Sounds like a real, substantial brand advantage to me, at least in that market niche.
Also, keep in mind, until the first iMac Apple essentially did no advertising other than that 1984 ad, and still had tremendously high brand recognition in its market. Pretty unreal.
Ever had to choose between two car models that were basically equivalent in terms of reliability, longevity and so on -- one of which included much better quality design in the interior? Go look at a Mitsubishi and a Volkswagen. In each class, they're both around average in reliability. VW has a huge edge in design, just everywhere on the car. The antenna, sitting up on the back of the cars right in the middle. You know? Even when the design isn't practical -- VW's glove boxes and storage spaces are sometimes a case of looks over function -- the German engineering thing trips the right synapses. VW can ask for a ton more for whatever they're selling right now.
People do care about this stuff. They care about the amount of noise their computer makes. They care whether the little knobs on the dashboard of their car give them a tiny measure of pleasure to use. Whether it's enough to make people try a brand of car that only runs on diesel -- that's about the level of question we're looking at, here.
(But Macs aren't like asking people to spend $6,000 more to drive a gas-guzzling, poor-handling tricked up truck just for image... Oh, people do that too. People can be pretty odd.)
Actually for a long time there was "the Hays code," the strict era of censorship in Hollywood that made it impossible to refer to such extreme topics as divorce in any kind of positive light, that limited the length of kisses on screen, that essentially prohibited movies in which the bad guys didn't get theirs, and so on. The code came about earlier, but started being enforced in the early 50s or so I think. (Gee, right around when the HUAC started pillorying writers, too. Whaddaya know.)
Even back then the movie industry was bowing to pressures from a subset of the religious right. Mostly, for whatever reasons, it's been a Catholic thing. Hays himself was very much a public Catholic in a political sense. As a result, both ratings and the earlier censorship was hard on any sort of sexual material and far easier on violence.
I do take your point, but it doesn't dispel the basic irony: the MPAA isn't making any effort to "help parents" but it routinely claims to be -- as with this lovely, helpful piece of spyware.
For example, their ratings system does a graet job of giving "Billy Elliott" and "Waiting for Guffman" R ratings, because goodness knows no 13-year-old has ever hear bad language or encountered tacitly gay characters. Violence like Daredevil's "paperclips stabbing your throat until you choke to death" gets a PG-13 -- and so does a fantastic family movie like "Whale Rider" -- because there was apparently a bong in the background in one scene.
We're ever so eager to hear their parenting advice in other areas.
Yeah, and we'll only get excited about the new models when the one we've got actually dies or when someone comes out with something as fundamentally pleasing and necessary as intermittent wipers or antilock brakes. Until then, I like what I'm driving.
Looks like the "commodity" thing is really coming true.
(Actually I would get excited about GM's 'skateboard' concept cars with the electronic controls. About as likely to erally come out in 2006 as the aforementioned Longhorn, though. And a new Msoft OS? Shrug...)
FIFA, for example, includes a Taiwanese team. The Vietnam games are going to reflect a non-sanctioned view of the war. And so on.
Censorship for reasons of political manipulation masquerading as something else? the heck you say! (I'd throw stones, but then I listened to Howard Stern once last year when he was laying into Bush and company.)
You're right, they mostly build statues to people who have power and money and who want to pose for them. Your real heroes who had flaws and who weren't posing as preening saints for PR's sake -- Helen Keller, Edward Howard Armstrong -- either wind up being sanitized against their will (Keller) or mostly forgotten (Armstrong).
The parent story is just a little reminder that, sometimes, science can give the right person that little slice of faux-immortality. Naturalists naming species after fellow naturalists, that kind of thing.
Rhetoric about "freedom" has become about as empty (and calculated) as rhetoric about "supporting the troops" lately. There certainly are Americans who seem to be willing to make an ends-and-means calculation about the sorts of torture that happened at Abu Graib.
My Southern Baptist relations dismissed those photos as one of the necessities of fighting this kind of war, to use one example, and they're all for spreading "freedom" in the world. Big backers of W's, those folks, and just fine with torturing a few people to get it.
Personally I think there's both moral and legal responsibility at a higher level, of course. But some of the same people are okay with both "freedom" and what happened at Abu Graib.
This must be why Donald Trump is such an outspoken proponent of conservative fiscal policies. It's all about the "hard work" he did to inherit his millions. Steve Forbes, ditto. It's a matter of high principle to these thoughtful gentlemen that we benefit only from our own hard work. Similarly, George W., who could never have been accepted at Yale without his family history behind him, rails against the wrongheadedness of "social promotions" in our schools.
Face it, there's a stark irony to the reactions many people have against affirmative action. For example: ever noticed how conscientiously the Republicans have practiced what they preach against -- within their own freaking party -- over at least the last three national election cycles? Gee, it seems to me like they've been promoting minorities into positions of influence over the heads of equally qualified non-minority candidates. How can that be happening? They themselves explain it, in Trent Lott's estimation, as an aggressive attempt to expand their base. By using non-race-neutral selection criteria! Golly. It's a topsy-turvy world, ain't it?
In particular what I was reacting to in my parenthetical throwaway there was the almost communistic tone and language that suddenly gets used in cases like the Michigan thing last year. From the party that turned against John McCain's use of "Marxist-Leninist" terms in his economic plan, it's plenty, plenty bizarre to read some of the arguments that get made.
The /. entry form does let you specify a "department," doesn't it? And one of the choices is "the ends-justify-the-means" department. Maybe our submitter was just fishing for a category.
(Personally, if I'd submitted this story I might have included a reference to Andrew Carnegie. Maybe that'd have been a hot button too? I've wondered whether B.G. is comparing himself to Carnegie before...)
You just touched on the colossal, huge, central point that virtually every dimisser of global warming fails to "get." It's not that the world won't survive. Life on earth has survived, and thrived, at higher global temperatures than we have now. It's just that, when major transitions occur, the dominant forms of life do not remain dominant. And that would mean us.
This ain't about hugging spotted owls. It's not about whether Sandhill cranes have a place to roost on their way north in the spring. The debate's about our survival. When we read:
Those are serious risks. Any *one* of those would stand a considerable risk of destabilizing the world as we know it. Imagine a Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons as it is, whose politics were affected by a massive drought. That's the easiest thing to predict in the world; climate change precipitated the Mfcane, which set loose a huge migration of people in southern Africa, which in turn had a lot to do with the military dictatorship of Shaka Zulu. Governments, in a state of global climate change, would be made drastically unstable.
The risk of nuclear war, during the cold war, was not a certainty -- it was a risk. We spent untold resources to address that risk, on both sides. The question is, how much do we commit to addressing this one? When an overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is playing the role of Cassandra, how seriously do you take the possible tragedy?
If you want a sense of how a change like this could radically change favored adaptations, think about grazing mammals that evolved to take advantage of grasses. As grasses became more prevalent, animals who could eat grass well exploded in population. Big niches got to be dominated by some pretty mundane-seeming adaptations to the digestive process. Seems like a subtle edge, doesn't it?
Reading the article, the folks making this argument have considered potential long-term adaptations to the atmospheric changes they're describing:
(People don't realize how radical the indirect effects of climate change could be, partly because they're thinking stuff like this. You know -- "If it gets warmer in the winter, I'll just wear less sweaters." If, say, the gulf stream were to shut down, and Europe's economies took a tremendous hit under a much cooler regional climate, putting on more sweaters will make as much sense as asking everyone in England to just "breathe less.")
How about saying, of a piece of software, that it has "surprising equipment" -- just like that character in the crying game? Now you're talkin' bad analogies.
I also love it when I hear "out of the box." Because, you know, just using the dang analogy is a completely trite thing by now -- it's the hackneyed way of thinking inside the dang box, and has been since sometime in the 1980s when Deming really caught on in MBA jargon. The analogy that means exactly the opposite thing, yeah? That's got to rank.
How are you using the term "pork barrel," there?
There are tons of examples of one side or another attaching amendments to bills in order to undercut their support. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill eventually included provisions about gender as well as race; the usual social conservatives thought that would take the bill down because the idea was so obnoxious. (Oops! The bill passed.)
So was the proposed legislation loaded with actual "pork" -- meaning costly projects for people's home districts? It doesn't even read, in your version, like a deliberate attempt to undercut it. It sounds more like the bill was an overrreach -- "more anti-gun legislature" (legislation, right?) was on it, and it got voted down.
It's called a representative democracy. Messy process, isn't it?
An elevator starts to look way more complicated to pull off than touching off one more rocket, and this one with a private logo on the side. I love the idea, always have, but for a private investor to throw money at that would be early. If it's going to get done, it'll be at the level of money governments throw around, won't it?