And when taking office as Attorney General, he called on Clarence Thomas to do the anointing. These are truly inspirational times for secular rule in America.
Or how about those songs? The "Let the Eagle Soar" thing that shows up in the previews for the Michael Moore movie is just the tip of the iceberg. This guy writes his own patriotic songs, which he wants his staff to join him in singing for inspiration at morning meetings. You've seen Tony Robbins on the infomercials and attended mandatory High School "Pep Fests," but the Attorney General of the United States outdoes them both in grotesquely bizarre "true believer" motivational techniques.
But what would our Attorneys General be without the Republican party? Don't forget your former KKK member who held the office: Ed Meese. Reagan was feeling especially "optimistic" the day he appointed Meese to uphold our nation's laws. It's a rich vein of history, that trail of Christian Right-appeasing Attorneys General...
Also, little companies that make stuff like DragThing have been doing that and only that for a while. They're small, they need to be tuned into their market in order to get water past the financial gills, and as a result they're pretty agile. Ask the DragThing people for a feature; they're already working on it, or they have a really good reason not to.
I look at the Apple dock, and it's okay, a spare and workable design -- but it seems like Apple just has to let their deign gurus make the choices from the mountaintop, partly, so they don't take advantage of that huge base of developers out there.
Seems to me they could take some of those Konfabulator-type developers under their wing and the whole developer world would be a lot more likely to extend itself for them. Steve Jobs supposedly "gets" karma, but not in that way.
That's the exact question that should have been asked about the Glomar Explorer.
The Russian sub they built the Explorer to salvage wasn't a particularly interesting design -- it was a "Golf" class, nothing new -- and we could have gotten basically all the worthwhile intelligence from the wreck by going in through the hull and retrieving the cipher equipment. Instead the CIA built a massive white elephant of a drilling ship, with a cover story about oil drilling, to pull up the entire sub. (It didn't work -- the sub broke on the way up.)
The popular book "Blind Man's Bluff" derides this as one of the CIA's most colossal sinkholes for money. It quotes a handful of deep sea salvage experts to the effect that there wasn't any point in even trying to perform the full salvage. (Not the best-edited book, but it's a pretty good telling of Cold War-era sub espionage.)
those regulations may have had unintended (or disregarded) side effects, but you're going way out of your way to justify an assumption of maliciousness here.
I'd agree with you... if I hadn't spent nine months after 9/11 arguing with my friends that we should too give Bush a chance, that the unintended consequences weren't the result of malicious intent.
I finally gave up the argument during the mid-term elections. Mostly it was the "poison pill" restriction of civil rights for people within the Dept. of Homeland Security. That was nothing, nothing but a low tactic, and it was one they had to go out of their way to carry out. No unintended consequences there. They knew who they were choosing to screw, and that they were doing it to paint guys like Max Cleland as unpatriotic to win their elections.
Look up. You have a President whose administration has argued a)that we're fighting a war whose beginning and end can only be declared by him; and b)that he's got all-but-dictatorial power when we're at war. Sometimes, he grants, he chooses not to exercise that power -- but he says he has it, and puts his signature by that. His legal advisors are set to work justifying that position.
Arbitrary power has arbitrary consequences -- to wit, this example. The cracking end of that whip happens in places like Abu Graib.
I'll judge us by how we correct the unintended consequences, not by how well we rationalize them. And I don't see one shred of effort by those in power right now to do anything but bury stories they think are unfavorable to their staying in power. Bush will try to paint Kerry as a raving lunatic for wanting to restrict the Patriot Act in libraries. He'd do the same if Kerry talked about model rocket hobbyists. There's nothing unintentional about those choices, either. They know what they're doing.
I think it is also illegal to broadcast an entire album from a band non stop, at least in the US anyway.
Hmm. They used to do at least a full LP side at a time on classic rock stations locally. This was a late-night tradition for a while in Minneapolis. The promotion was based on its being non-stop, but I guess it wasn't the whole thing; they'd pause in between the sides to talk and throw a few Clearasil ads.
(We don't really need laws to prevent stations from playing music without commercials. The stations don't make any money that way.)
Bigger brains -- possibly higher intelligence, definitely higher risk in the birth canal.
Faster rabbit -- sometimes runs out and gets nabbed by a hawk when the more cautious ones are holding back.
Higher metabolism and endothermism -- requires more energy to keep going. (Similar cost for huge muscles.)
There's a popular idea that things are getting "better" through natural selection and evolution. The things is, our ideas of what "better" would be are usually kind of silly and superficial. "Better adapted" is probably the way to think about it.
Imagine a genetic trend toward, say, bolder, more aggressive personalities, as Nazi eugenicists would have wanted things to go. People who aren't afraid of life, who'll go out and seize it and try to change things for the better! Great, right? Except maybe a more cautious social nature is a heck of a good thing, given how complex human society is. Maybe personalities like that would be a disaster: wars, instability in our societies, and so on.
There's a reason why mutations don't happen all the time.
They happen 'all the time' -- often enough -- but they mostly just don't result in an advantage that'll make you more successful, natural selection wise.
You'd have to think, though, that dying at 35 might not stop some people. Tonight's the NBA draft. There's a 7 foot-5 inch European center who'll get taken mid-lottery or so. The kid has a growth hormone problem, diagnosed, that he's being treated for; teams regard it as an advantage, pretty clearly. Andre the Giant didn't live to old age, but he sure could pull down a paycheck in the meantime. If you take a look at steroid use, you'll see a bunch of people who might think this'd be worth it...
...making them less likely to reproduce and have their children reproduce, probably, unless the gruopie factor outweighs the difference. Selected against, on balance.
(I love the popular idea that natural selection and evolution are constantly "improving the product." Super muscles! Rabbits get faster and faster, snakes get more and more poisonous! -- that idea. Sometimes the faster rabbits run out and get eaten by hawks before their more cautious friends. Sometimes a big brain means you're more likely to kill your mother during childbirth, reducing your chances of thriving and reproducing yourself. "Better" in that 6 Million Dollar Man sense isn't necessarily an evolutionary advantage at all.)
Whatever other merits this turns out to have, it's going to pack that "Whoaa" reaction the article described at the trade shows, for sure. People respond to contrast.
I bought some high-end binoculars a while back. When you're looking through all the Nikons and Swarovskis and Leicas side by side, you start to realize when your eyes feel the little zing. It isn't pure resolution that does it, and your eyes compensate rapidly enough to changes in brightness (due to objective size or quality) that you don't often perceive differences except at dusk and dawn. (The only exceptions for me were old-style tank commander Zeiss binocs. Very bright.)
But when you hit a binoc that felt right for contrast, ahhh -- those were my handful of last choices. It's like seeing the world with the slanting light at around 6:30 on a summer night -- everything just pops out, so clear, and the slight 3-D exaggeration of the binocular view brings it out just that little bit more. The optics store people said that was a pretty common reaction -- a slight edge in contrast was a huge advantage.
Sounds like this screen has that going for it. Big selling point, next to potential competitors, if they can get it around the right price point.
They may not have worked out the control equations for a scrubbed flight. Perhaps attempting to land from his release point would put him hundreds of miles off course.
Gee, here I was feeling all impressed -- until you implied that they apparently hadn't planned for the most basic contingencies before they took their shot Monday. I could see it once the engine's firing, the Shuttle can't scrub under those circumstances -- but they've surely figured out "control equations" for a non-launch in their previous flights.
And hundreds of miles off? The entire normal flight takes place right above the airport:
SpaceShipOne's flight lasts roughly 25 minutes. It will rocket to space, spend about three minutes weightless outside the atmosphere, then enter the earth's atmosphere in a high-drag configuration. It will glide back toward Mojave, circle overhead, then land directly in front of the public viewing area
on the same runway on which it took off about 1 hour and 25 minutes earlier.
I'm pretty sure a significant number of people are saying "Give me something I don't fumble for in my purse when I get a call." (Otherwise stated as: "The damn things get lost or stolen too easily," to quote a wise person I once read...)
Wearable phones are an attempt to answer that request from users. Yes? And the "vision" is when the designers try to figure out how to do it.
Your general "standardised" and "extensible not overpackaged" points are what you'd call "creative tensions" across basically all technological markets. (MSWord/PDAs/digital cameras are overpackaged, should be more extensible in features or software -- you could say it about products in most niches.) Meeting a price point is pretty obvious. And skinning has been around for many years, especially in phones which were among the first products to get that idea.
Your "core modules" would be roughly analogous to asking computer manufacturers to all use the same motherboard configurations or graphics cards. The problem's the same sort of leapfrogging standards one we see in basically everything. The business model could work if you wanted to try to take the low end of the market, assuming you could get enough accessory companies to support your first core module release. It's not gonna get supported across the entire market; Motorola isn't going to shut down its plants and make the same chips as someone else. They all view their proprietary models as a competitive advantage, to start with. In two years whatever standard we've all locked into will be unable to support whatever (granted, lame) new accessory people are apparently willing to buy, God bless their little consumer-confidence-boosting souls. And someone's going to want to make a killing on that (granted, stupid) high-end of the market.
When you get the phone industry to buy into this, though, talk to someone about GE's Autonomy 'skateboard' base for cars. The base of the car can take a wide variety of flavors on top. Think Toyota will want to go into the business of selling accessories for GM's chassis?
For my money, Nixon's "The astronauts will die on the moon" speech is the hardest, oddest example of "the other speech" out there. Someone dies suddenly in an accident, that's understandable -- but the idea of being stranded up there unable to get back, that'd be a hard moment for any President to handle.
WriteNow was great, and I still have a copy on my OS X machine. (Backward compatibility -- check.)
WN was also specifically optimized for the pre-PPC chip, and its speed advantage wasn't as amazing when that change happened. Emulated it was okay, but not wow! great. Still a lean, purpose-driven little WP, but it wasn't the quickest-feeling-WP-ever any more.
I dunno, though, whether WriteNow was Word's equal with stuff like Mail Merge and tables. Those two features, in Word 5.1a-era when you still had real rulers to tell you where your table was on the page and so on, would have been a strong argument for Word for a lot of admins.
(The article's completely right that Word, post-5.1a, was the start of change for its own sake in the Office line. WriteNow never committed that sin against its users -- and never got to sell all the subsequent revs as a result. Goodbye, WriteNow.)
But the (smaller) gun fires a single shot with a range is limited to 7m, which makes it nearly useless for crowd control, especially in hotspots such as Iraq...
Yeah, I seem to remember a lot of situations in Iraq where there was a crowd rioting, and everything would have been better if only we'd had a stun gun to take them all out at once...
Oh, no, actually that really only applies from Saddam Hussein's POV. Take out your crowd of demonstrators, you know? The insurgency in Iraq has been made up largely of well-timed attacks against weak points. They're looking for the spots where we're not vigilant. If we knew where they'd be next, we could use a stun gun I guess... But we don't.
This is a weapon designed to use in case of protests or riots. What kinds of governments need this sort of weapon? The nearest thing to a potential use I can think of in the US would be the Rodney King verdict riots, maybe -- and would you want that? Would you want the LAPD to have this weapon?
People don't seem to like the original sources
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Japanese Balloon Battle
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Until the US govt. starts setting up a national firewall like China, there's not much excuse for people not getting to the bottom of news stories. There's all sides available on the Net, and quite often the original source!
The part that makes me scratch my head is, people actually express a mix of indignation and boredom over the original sources. What they seem to want to watch instead is talking heads -- "pundits" -- spewing nonsense.
Imagine the difference with something like this balloon story. You could interview the Japanese policy makers and have them describe why they chose to do it when they did. You could look at blueprints and documents, talk to the makers, and see how the things worked. You could compare this to other intercontinental weapons -- interesting angle -- to see how their (potential) use might be different. World War II as the genesis of "strategic" weapons and the end of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant populations, you know?
But no, we'd put lots of bilious fools on TV to remind us that the Japanese hated America, or some such stupidity. Because supposedly, the other stuff, the real history, is boring. Or so our TV ratings would seem to suggest. Cut to political ad in which Japanese face "morphs" into the face of myu political opponent. It's depressing.
This is profoundly stupid because, ta dum, there's no market for it, and no prospect of a market for it.
The two potential uses I can think of for disposable DVDs would be: a) "screener" disks and b) maybe giveaway disks on cereal boxes? Neither one of those even makes much sense. For the screener problem, this would introduce a nuisance copy protection measure. (Note to industry; have those ever done anything to prevent copying?) For cheap giveaways, I'm missing why you'd want kids not to play your commercials-for-Fox-programs disk as many times as they'd want.
But this product page calls these "the new video rental." For anything like a Blockbuster chain, these'd *cut profits*. Rental places don't want to be paying extra for the media that get thrown away, and they make a ton of their money on late fees. I could almost, almost, imagine a model with re-recordable disks and a deposit system, but even that would just create a big nuisance for both customers and the store, with no payoff for them. Moot point, these aren't re-recordable.
If you imagine them as one-time-only purchases (as in "I want to watch this movie, but only once"), the priced had danged well better be way less than a ticket at the multiplex.
Where's the blinkin' market? Who's going to sell this to the audience? What market is there? Steve Jobs couldn't pitch this crap...
It really is as if, in some incredible example of snake-eats-its-own-tail self-reflexive logic, media companies are working steadily to assault their own audiences and remove their own products from circulation. They rant about how they don't want customers to have "near perfect" versions of their stuff, because that'd let people rip them. (You want me to have an inferior version of your product?!?) They steadily try to introduce restrictive DRM measures that prevent people who DO want to buy their products from feeling comfortable about it. Presented with the original Napster, they try to conduct a scorched earth war with their audience.
We didn't choose to accept this mission. The tape should not self-destruct in two minutes.
I'm thinking we are nearing the end of the major advances in digital cameras. Not that we can't improve them, but they are practically at the quality/price levels of film cameras.
Not so sure. For a long time I was convinced I'd get whichever Canon digital SLR dropped below a grand, to use with my set of old EOS lenses preferably. But you know, there's a huge difference in size from the Sony snappy we've picked up in the meantime and an SLR body. There are limits to what one can do with glass, but I'm going to say we have at least one generation of significant size and weight (and resulting design) change coming for that level of camera. I want my Rebel-level camera, swappable lenses and filters and all, to be easy to carry around too. Take a look at digital camcorders like Canon's Elura or Optura series, or Sony's little uprights. Those aren't pro-grade, no, and really they're almost too small to use well in my hands, but I was sorely tempted by them before I decided on a mid-(still very compact)-sized Sony model with the same basic quality for less. You could carry those anywhere.
'Cause I'm spoiled, that's why. And right now the price of a Canon Digital Rebel is more than twice what I paid for a film Rebel in maybe 1988, so there's room for that to come down too...
So far the stills from various camcorders are crap next to inexpensive still cameras. Everyone but the real pros could end up tossing dedicated still cameras in favor of hybrid models, if that improves somewhat.
The whole "digital hub" model could seriously reshape how we think about cameras too. Makes storage a different sort of issue, if you're tagging off the camera with your laptop all the time. Between that and potential hybrid movie/still models, you'd have to think storage will be an interesting question, anyway. That's just an obvious detail. There've got to be other implications we just haven't come to yet.
Seems like room for change yet, to me. Some major, some incremental.
Two MP was maybe the standard, what, two years ago? Three hundred for a 2 MP camera today would be extravagantly overpriced unless it was small enough to fit inside your shirt button or something. You can get 2 MP for half that price, $150, from a commodity discount store.
Three MP, or something like 3.2, is now below $300, more like $250.
The mid-range models are now at four -- that's the current standard, more-or-less, for solid point-and-shooters.
Personally I know from experience that if you're going to want to make enlargements, you want something like four at least. Three will be okay, but there's some degradation of the image, especially if you're going up to 8x10. That's not a microscope, it's just a picture for your desk at work. A 2 MP camera is going to be painful at that size.
Some guy in his skivvies? Rupert Murdoch? Bill C?
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Some guy in his underwear who can take down the President? Other than the President himself, you mean?
Seriously, I don't think this is quite true. It's not the case that an isolated blog is capable of single-handedly taking down an administration. They can maybe be a spark, or at most kindling, for that fire. It still has to get into "legit" big media right now in order to do someone in.
Blogs are the sort of "echo chamber" that right wing radio has been -- they try to punch a story up, and media organizations catch onto some stuff. The blogs alone wouldn't do it though.
A classic example is the Trent Lott thing. For days after he made his comments about how we'd have been so much better off electing Strom Thurmond back when he was a segregationist, the mainstream media ignored it. A bunch of incredulous blog writers wrote harangues about how people were ignoring it, and eventually it did catch on with the big news sources.
The papers vetted the Lott story, made sure the details of the story hung together, in a way I wouldn't trust any Blog to do. Not that papers are pure truth or anything, but a Blogger can claim anything without answering to the editors and the owner and the public at all. At least with a news source you know they have something to lose if they're wrong.
This is a sort of creative tension, though, that we haven't had. That's completely true. Some guy in his skivvies is helping to set the news agenda, and that can't be all that bad.
When an american company does business in asia, we learn the local language, or hire someone who does.
Ha! As someone with a fair amount of experience dealing with US businesses trying to work in other cultures, I can tell you this assumption is unfortunately naive.
My brother's spending a lot of time in China lately. The country's crawling with American businessmen, small businessmen, who'd be analogous to this electronics/junk dealer. You'd be amazed at the attitudes, given your post. (Translator? They'll come to us, right?) It's screwy, but even when their small business depends on this one contract, they just don't "get" it.
That's leaving alone far more approachable, familiar, western cultures. I went to France in March. You want to be sympathetic to your American overseas, it's a situation they might not know that well -- but you know, fairly often they make no effort at all. Even in the UK, where there's a common language, there's a large share of American business types who just don't try to be polite, let alone spell "colour" like the natives would spell it.
"...Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use"
They don't have to be in "widespread" use if they reproduce exponentially, do they? Two tribbles is all it takes. And nobody has to "use" them to keep them around.
Personally I don't think this concern is plausible right now, and it doesn't seem like nanotechnology would redefine the basic laws of energy or evolution -- they're not going to reproduce somehow without the amounts of energy it'd take to reproduce.
But take a look at introduced species. Dandelions. Rabbits in Australia. Purple loosestrife. Godawful Eurasian House Sparrows in the US. Those species don't violate the rules of life either, and they can't be got rid of right now without massive effort on our part. It didn't take more than a few introduced pairs of sparrows, breeding in Central Park, to infest the entire continental US.
Natural history says even stuff that has trouble getting established at first can explode on you. That's what weeds are.
You know, I instinctively wince when I see a post like that, but... you're right. I'd buy that. It does what I've been wanting to do, in a few different ways.
Huh. It's weird to believe something.
If Jobs can come through with a comparably elegant car angle, he's got me for that too. Tape adapters kind of suck, FM transmitters are so weak they lose signal strength from the dashboard to the antenna on my rear window. I want a little cradle or something, and not one with wires straggling all over the place.
Leaving alone wannabe Heinrich Schliemanns like the "lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast" we run across in this article, you don't necessarily even have to be looking for a pattern to think you see it.
Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" does a decent job of summing up the problem and how it works with ideas like this: People's minds are wired to look for patterns. They look for patterns that relate to other patterns they're familiar with, mostly, or those are the ones they think they see anyway. Show me a Rorschach blob, or a random scattering of data, and I'm going to try to figure out what it means. Faces on Mars! My fate, written in the tea leaves! Your character, in the lines on your palm! And so on.
In the case of Atlantis, though, it takes a special kind of thinking to ignore all the obvious political context for Plato -- his and his family's opposition to the way Athens had gone, the whole Republic-as-an-ideal-Sparta thing -- but to seize on the few physical details he describes for Atlantis. They're not missing the forest for the trees: they're imagining the forest where they imagine there's a tree. Based on two rectangles near some concentric circles, no less. Yow.
Granted, Atlantis has become a larger myth, okay. But it started with Plato. No literature before plato refers to Atlantis -- kind of striking given Homeric poetry that's hinted at Mycenean geography and so on.
Plato's references to Atlantis, specifically, are basically a sequel to his Republic, which is in turn an idealized version of the Spartan state. The Republic is mostly about an anti-democratic reaction to the direction Athens chose to go. The Atlantis myth is essentially a way of describing early Athens as virtuously fighting against an outside invader. Plato was using his created myth, to quote a skeptic's article on this, as a "noble lie."
The specific physical characteristics being cited in this article are so ludicrously overgeneral that I'm amazed they don't have more than one match to go on. All you have to know is what the article says: "The features were originally spotted by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who studied photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato." This is another Heinrich Schliemann. They'll be planting golden masks next.
(Hey, I've found another ancient city of Troy! It's an Anasazi settlement. Go ahead... prove it ain't. Or maybe Atlantis was on Santorini. Or was that Troy? Or Tyre. Yeah... Tyre.)
Any commentary about how "it's different with cars, they aren't obselete in 3 years" is pointless: the automotive industry's pace of improvement and innovation is much, much slower than the PC industry's.
A big, simple reason innovation in cars (or airplanes, or coffee makers) is slower than that in computers: computers are still a young industry. Bill Gates likes to use this sort of comparison by way of arguing that MS hasn't stifled innovation: "If airplanes had changed as much between 1980 and today as computers, they'd fly us cross-country for 50 cents in ten minutes," that kind of thing. But all those other industries changed at a vastly higher rate when they were young too. Flying machines changed an awful lot from Santos-Dumont's balloons to World War I to the German jets at the end of WWII, in every imaginable way, right?
But back to your point: Cars won't be obsolete in 3 or 5 years, and that difference really isn't "pointless." If I trick up my Civic, it'll be out-of-style in three years, but it'll get me there on the gas they sell at SA. With a gaming computer, I can spend through the nose and be below box specs for some of the games that come out next year. Partly that's just the young industry again. But you know, you can still find places to land your biplane.
Between the gaming wonks trying to one-up each other and the game studios whose idea of innovation is better texture effects in FPS titles, the lack of imagination is pretty amazing. You'd think this would be such a creative thing, games, but instead we get the equivalent of U.S. blockbuster movies over and over again. You'd think the wonks would at least show some individuality in their tastes... Car geeks and EAA airplane kit builders are a lot more interesting, for my two cents.
Okay, first we had the WiFi McDonald's franchises trying to poach on Starbucks' market, or set themselves up as better traveling pit stops for the highway... or something.
Now we see the incredible overlap between: a)people who eat Big Macs; and b) people who download music from pay services.
Seems to me like Mickey-D's is trying to reinvent itself for another market, one that's much more upscale than its middle-to-lower-middle-class roots. And yeah, I guess 'computer types' eat fast food... But are these the *same* computer people? Seems to me the people plugging their laptops in at Starbucks for the WiFi access, and downloading songs in a way that's defining that pay market, are who? Mac users. Driving Volkwagens. Um, not your McDonald's market, however much they want it to be.
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And when taking office as Attorney General, he called on Clarence Thomas to do the anointing. These are truly inspirational times for secular rule in America.
Or how about those songs? The "Let the Eagle Soar" thing that shows up in the previews for the Michael Moore movie is just the tip of the iceberg. This guy writes his own patriotic songs, which he wants his staff to join him in singing for inspiration at morning meetings. You've seen Tony Robbins on the infomercials and attended mandatory High School "Pep Fests," but the Attorney General of the United States outdoes them both in grotesquely bizarre "true believer" motivational techniques.
But what would our Attorneys General be without the Republican party? Don't forget your former KKK member who held the office: Ed Meese. Reagan was feeling especially "optimistic" the day he appointed Meese to uphold our nation's laws. It's a rich vein of history, that trail of Christian Right-appeasing Attorneys General...
Also, little companies that make stuff like DragThing have been doing that and only that for a while. They're small, they need to be tuned into their market in order to get water past the financial gills, and as a result they're pretty agile. Ask the DragThing people for a feature; they're already working on it, or they have a really good reason not to.
I look at the Apple dock, and it's okay, a spare and workable design -- but it seems like Apple just has to let their deign gurus make the choices from the mountaintop, partly, so they don't take advantage of that huge base of developers out there.
Seems to me they could take some of those Konfabulator-type developers under their wing and the whole developer world would be a lot more likely to extend itself for them. Steve Jobs supposedly "gets" karma, but not in that way.
The Russian sub they built the Explorer to salvage wasn't a particularly interesting design -- it was a "Golf" class, nothing new -- and we could have gotten basically all the worthwhile intelligence from the wreck by going in through the hull and retrieving the cipher equipment. Instead the CIA built a massive white elephant of a drilling ship, with a cover story about oil drilling, to pull up the entire sub. (It didn't work -- the sub broke on the way up.)
The popular book "Blind Man's Bluff" derides this as one of the CIA's most colossal sinkholes for money. It quotes a handful of deep sea salvage experts to the effect that there wasn't any point in even trying to perform the full salvage. (Not the best-edited book, but it's a pretty good telling of Cold War-era sub espionage.)
I'd agree with you... if I hadn't spent nine months after 9/11 arguing with my friends that we should too give Bush a chance, that the unintended consequences weren't the result of malicious intent.
I finally gave up the argument during the mid-term elections. Mostly it was the "poison pill" restriction of civil rights for people within the Dept. of Homeland Security. That was nothing, nothing but a low tactic, and it was one they had to go out of their way to carry out. No unintended consequences there. They knew who they were choosing to screw, and that they were doing it to paint guys like Max Cleland as unpatriotic to win their elections.
Look up. You have a President whose administration has argued a)that we're fighting a war whose beginning and end can only be declared by him; and b)that he's got all-but-dictatorial power when we're at war. Sometimes, he grants, he chooses not to exercise that power -- but he says he has it, and puts his signature by that. His legal advisors are set to work justifying that position.
Arbitrary power has arbitrary consequences -- to wit, this example. The cracking end of that whip happens in places like Abu Graib.
I'll judge us by how we correct the unintended consequences, not by how well we rationalize them. And I don't see one shred of effort by those in power right now to do anything but bury stories they think are unfavorable to their staying in power. Bush will try to paint Kerry as a raving lunatic for wanting to restrict the Patriot Act in libraries. He'd do the same if Kerry talked about model rocket hobbyists. There's nothing unintentional about those choices, either. They know what they're doing.
Hmm. They used to do at least a full LP side at a time on classic rock stations locally. This was a late-night tradition for a while in Minneapolis. The promotion was based on its being non-stop, but I guess it wasn't the whole thing; they'd pause in between the sides to talk and throw a few Clearasil ads.
(We don't really need laws to prevent stations from playing music without commercials. The stations don't make any money that way.)
Faster rabbit -- sometimes runs out and gets nabbed by a hawk when the more cautious ones are holding back.
Higher metabolism and endothermism -- requires more energy to keep going. (Similar cost for huge muscles.)
There's a popular idea that things are getting "better" through natural selection and evolution. The things is, our ideas of what "better" would be are usually kind of silly and superficial. "Better adapted" is probably the way to think about it.
Imagine a genetic trend toward, say, bolder, more aggressive personalities, as Nazi eugenicists would have wanted things to go. People who aren't afraid of life, who'll go out and seize it and try to change things for the better! Great, right? Except maybe a more cautious social nature is a heck of a good thing, given how complex human society is. Maybe personalities like that would be a disaster: wars, instability in our societies, and so on.
They happen 'all the time' -- often enough -- but they mostly just don't result in an advantage that'll make you more successful, natural selection wise.
You'd have to think, though, that dying at 35 might not stop some people. Tonight's the NBA draft. There's a 7 foot-5 inch European center who'll get taken mid-lottery or so. The kid has a growth hormone problem, diagnosed, that he's being treated for; teams regard it as an advantage, pretty clearly. Andre the Giant didn't live to old age, but he sure could pull down a paycheck in the meantime. If you take a look at steroid use, you'll see a bunch of people who might think this'd be worth it...
...making them less likely to reproduce and have their children reproduce, probably, unless the gruopie factor outweighs the difference. Selected against, on balance.
(I love the popular idea that natural selection and evolution are constantly "improving the product." Super muscles! Rabbits get faster and faster, snakes get more and more poisonous! -- that idea. Sometimes the faster rabbits run out and get eaten by hawks before their more cautious friends. Sometimes a big brain means you're more likely to kill your mother during childbirth, reducing your chances of thriving and reproducing yourself. "Better" in that 6 Million Dollar Man sense isn't necessarily an evolutionary advantage at all.)
I bought some high-end binoculars a while back. When you're looking through all the Nikons and Swarovskis and Leicas side by side, you start to realize when your eyes feel the little zing. It isn't pure resolution that does it, and your eyes compensate rapidly enough to changes in brightness (due to objective size or quality) that you don't often perceive differences except at dusk and dawn. (The only exceptions for me were old-style tank commander Zeiss binocs. Very bright.)
But when you hit a binoc that felt right for contrast, ahhh -- those were my handful of last choices. It's like seeing the world with the slanting light at around 6:30 on a summer night -- everything just pops out, so clear, and the slight 3-D exaggeration of the binocular view brings it out just that little bit more. The optics store people said that was a pretty common reaction -- a slight edge in contrast was a huge advantage.
Sounds like this screen has that going for it. Big selling point, next to potential competitors, if they can get it around the right price point.
Gee, here I was feeling all impressed -- until you implied that they apparently hadn't planned for the most basic contingencies before they took their shot Monday. I could see it once the engine's firing, the Shuttle can't scrub under those circumstances -- but they've surely figured out "control equations" for a non-launch in their previous flights.
And hundreds of miles off? The entire normal flight takes place right above the airport:
Wearable phones are an attempt to answer that request from users. Yes? And the "vision" is when the designers try to figure out how to do it.
Your general "standardised" and "extensible not overpackaged" points are what you'd call "creative tensions" across basically all technological markets. (MSWord/PDAs/digital cameras are overpackaged, should be more extensible in features or software -- you could say it about products in most niches.) Meeting a price point is pretty obvious. And skinning has been around for many years, especially in phones which were among the first products to get that idea.
Your "core modules" would be roughly analogous to asking computer manufacturers to all use the same motherboard configurations or graphics cards. The problem's the same sort of leapfrogging standards one we see in basically everything. The business model could work if you wanted to try to take the low end of the market, assuming you could get enough accessory companies to support your first core module release. It's not gonna get supported across the entire market; Motorola isn't going to shut down its plants and make the same chips as someone else. They all view their proprietary models as a competitive advantage, to start with. In two years whatever standard we've all locked into will be unable to support whatever (granted, lame) new accessory people are apparently willing to buy, God bless their little consumer-confidence-boosting souls. And someone's going to want to make a killing on that (granted, stupid) high-end of the market.
When you get the phone industry to buy into this, though, talk to someone about GE's Autonomy 'skateboard' base for cars. The base of the car can take a wide variety of flavors on top. Think Toyota will want to go into the business of selling accessories for GM's chassis?
Tricky Dick did pretty well with the topic.
WN was also specifically optimized for the pre-PPC chip, and its speed advantage wasn't as amazing when that change happened. Emulated it was okay, but not wow! great. Still a lean, purpose-driven little WP, but it wasn't the quickest-feeling-WP-ever any more.
I dunno, though, whether WriteNow was Word's equal with stuff like Mail Merge and tables. Those two features, in Word 5.1a-era when you still had real rulers to tell you where your table was on the page and so on, would have been a strong argument for Word for a lot of admins.
(The article's completely right that Word, post-5.1a, was the start of change for its own sake in the Office line. WriteNow never committed that sin against its users -- and never got to sell all the subsequent revs as a result. Goodbye, WriteNow.)
But the (smaller) gun fires a single shot with a range is limited to 7m, which makes it nearly useless for crowd control, especially in hotspots such as Iraq...
Yeah, I seem to remember a lot of situations in Iraq where there was a crowd rioting, and everything would have been better if only we'd had a stun gun to take them all out at once...
Oh, no, actually that really only applies from Saddam Hussein's POV. Take out your crowd of demonstrators, you know? The insurgency in Iraq has been made up largely of well-timed attacks against weak points. They're looking for the spots where we're not vigilant. If we knew where they'd be next, we could use a stun gun I guess... But we don't.
This is a weapon designed to use in case of protests or riots. What kinds of governments need this sort of weapon? The nearest thing to a potential use I can think of in the US would be the Rodney King verdict riots, maybe -- and would you want that? Would you want the LAPD to have this weapon?
The part that makes me scratch my head is, people actually express a mix of indignation and boredom over the original sources. What they seem to want to watch instead is talking heads -- "pundits" -- spewing nonsense.
Imagine the difference with something like this balloon story. You could interview the Japanese policy makers and have them describe why they chose to do it when they did. You could look at blueprints and documents, talk to the makers, and see how the things worked. You could compare this to other intercontinental weapons -- interesting angle -- to see how their (potential) use might be different. World War II as the genesis of "strategic" weapons and the end of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant populations, you know?
But no, we'd put lots of bilious fools on TV to remind us that the Japanese hated America, or some such stupidity. Because supposedly, the other stuff, the real history, is boring. Or so our TV ratings would seem to suggest. Cut to political ad in which Japanese face "morphs" into the face of myu political opponent. It's depressing.
But then, I actually watch C-Span...
The two potential uses I can think of for disposable DVDs would be:
a) "screener" disks and
b) maybe giveaway disks on cereal boxes? Neither one of those even makes much sense. For the screener problem, this would introduce a nuisance copy protection measure. (Note to industry; have those ever done anything to prevent copying?) For cheap giveaways, I'm missing why you'd want kids not to play your commercials-for-Fox-programs disk as many times as they'd want.
But this product page calls these "the new video rental." For anything like a Blockbuster chain, these'd *cut profits*. Rental places don't want to be paying extra for the media that get thrown away, and they make a ton of their money on late fees. I could almost, almost, imagine a model with re-recordable disks and a deposit system, but even that would just create a big nuisance for both customers and the store, with no payoff for them. Moot point, these aren't re-recordable.
If you imagine them as one-time-only purchases (as in "I want to watch this movie, but only once"), the priced had danged well better be way less than a ticket at the multiplex.
Where's the blinkin' market? Who's going to sell this to the audience? What market is there? Steve Jobs couldn't pitch this crap...
It really is as if, in some incredible example of snake-eats-its-own-tail self-reflexive logic, media companies are working steadily to assault their own audiences and remove their own products from circulation. They rant about how they don't want customers to have "near perfect" versions of their stuff, because that'd let people rip them. (You want me to have an inferior version of your product?!?) They steadily try to introduce restrictive DRM measures that prevent people who DO want to buy their products from feeling comfortable about it. Presented with the original Napster, they try to conduct a scorched earth war with their audience.
We didn't choose to accept this mission. The tape should not self-destruct in two minutes.
I'm thinking we are nearing the end of the major advances in digital cameras. Not that we can't improve them, but they are practically at the quality/price levels of film cameras.
Not so sure. For a long time I was convinced I'd get whichever Canon digital SLR dropped below a grand, to use with my set of old EOS lenses preferably. But you know, there's a huge difference in size from the Sony snappy we've picked up in the meantime and an SLR body. There are limits to what one can do with glass, but I'm going to say we have at least one generation of significant size and weight (and resulting design) change coming for that level of camera. I want my Rebel-level camera, swappable lenses and filters and all, to be easy to carry around too. Take a look at digital camcorders like Canon's Elura or Optura series, or Sony's little uprights. Those aren't pro-grade, no, and really they're almost too small to use well in my hands, but I was sorely tempted by them before I decided on a mid-(still very compact)-sized Sony model with the same basic quality for less. You could carry those anywhere.
'Cause I'm spoiled, that's why. And right now the price of a Canon Digital Rebel is more than twice what I paid for a film Rebel in maybe 1988, so there's room for that to come down too...
So far the stills from various camcorders are crap next to inexpensive still cameras. Everyone but the real pros could end up tossing dedicated still cameras in favor of hybrid models, if that improves somewhat.
The whole "digital hub" model could seriously reshape how we think about cameras too. Makes storage a different sort of issue, if you're tagging off the camera with your laptop all the time. Between that and potential hybrid movie/still models, you'd have to think storage will be an interesting question, anyway. That's just an obvious detail. There've got to be other implications we just haven't come to yet.
Seems like room for change yet, to me. Some major, some incremental.
Three MP, or something like 3.2, is now below $300, more like $250.
The mid-range models are now at four -- that's the current standard, more-or-less, for solid point-and-shooters.
Personally I know from experience that if you're going to want to make enlargements, you want something like four at least. Three will be okay, but there's some degradation of the image, especially if you're going up to 8x10. That's not a microscope, it's just a picture for your desk at work. A 2 MP camera is going to be painful at that size.
Seriously, I don't think this is quite true. It's not the case that an isolated blog is capable of single-handedly taking down an administration. They can maybe be a spark, or at most kindling, for that fire. It still has to get into "legit" big media right now in order to do someone in.
Blogs are the sort of "echo chamber" that right wing radio has been -- they try to punch a story up, and media organizations catch onto some stuff. The blogs alone wouldn't do it though.
A classic example is the Trent Lott thing. For days after he made his comments about how we'd have been so much better off electing Strom Thurmond back when he was a segregationist, the mainstream media ignored it. A bunch of incredulous blog writers wrote harangues about how people were ignoring it, and eventually it did catch on with the big news sources.
The papers vetted the Lott story, made sure the details of the story hung together, in a way I wouldn't trust any Blog to do. Not that papers are pure truth or anything, but a Blogger can claim anything without answering to the editors and the owner and the public at all. At least with a news source you know they have something to lose if they're wrong.
This is a sort of creative tension, though, that we haven't had. That's completely true. Some guy in his skivvies is helping to set the news agenda, and that can't be all that bad.
Ha! As someone with a fair amount of experience dealing with US businesses trying to work in other cultures, I can tell you this assumption is unfortunately naive.
My brother's spending a lot of time in China lately. The country's crawling with American businessmen, small businessmen, who'd be analogous to this electronics/junk dealer. You'd be amazed at the attitudes, given your post. (Translator? They'll come to us, right?) It's screwy, but even when their small business depends on this one contract, they just don't "get" it.
That's leaving alone far more approachable, familiar, western cultures. I went to France in March. You want to be sympathetic to your American overseas, it's a situation they might not know that well -- but you know, fairly often they make no effort at all. Even in the UK, where there's a common language, there's a large share of American business types who just don't try to be polite, let alone spell "colour" like the natives would spell it.
They don't have to be in "widespread" use if they reproduce exponentially, do they? Two tribbles is all it takes. And nobody has to "use" them to keep them around.
Personally I don't think this concern is plausible right now, and it doesn't seem like nanotechnology would redefine the basic laws of energy or evolution -- they're not going to reproduce somehow without the amounts of energy it'd take to reproduce.
But take a look at introduced species. Dandelions. Rabbits in Australia. Purple loosestrife. Godawful Eurasian House Sparrows in the US. Those species don't violate the rules of life either, and they can't be got rid of right now without massive effort on our part. It didn't take more than a few introduced pairs of sparrows, breeding in Central Park, to infest the entire continental US.
Natural history says even stuff that has trouble getting established at first can explode on you. That's what weeds are.
Huh. It's weird to believe something.
If Jobs can come through with a comparably elegant car angle, he's got me for that too. Tape adapters kind of suck, FM transmitters are so weak they lose signal strength from the dashboard to the antenna on my rear window. I want a little cradle or something, and not one with wires straggling all over the place.
Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" does a decent job of summing up the problem and how it works with ideas like this: People's minds are wired to look for patterns. They look for patterns that relate to other patterns they're familiar with, mostly, or those are the ones they think they see anyway. Show me a Rorschach blob, or a random scattering of data, and I'm going to try to figure out what it means. Faces on Mars! My fate, written in the tea leaves! Your character, in the lines on your palm! And so on.
In the case of Atlantis, though, it takes a special kind of thinking to ignore all the obvious political context for Plato -- his and his family's opposition to the way Athens had gone, the whole Republic-as-an-ideal-Sparta thing -- but to seize on the few physical details he describes for Atlantis. They're not missing the forest for the trees: they're imagining the forest where they imagine there's a tree. Based on two rectangles near some concentric circles, no less. Yow.
Plato's references to Atlantis, specifically, are basically a sequel to his Republic, which is in turn an idealized version of the Spartan state. The Republic is mostly about an anti-democratic reaction to the direction Athens chose to go. The Atlantis myth is essentially a way of describing early Athens as virtuously fighting against an outside invader. Plato was using his created myth, to quote a skeptic's article on this, as a "noble lie."
The specific physical characteristics being cited in this article are so ludicrously overgeneral that I'm amazed they don't have more than one match to go on. All you have to know is what the article says: "The features were originally spotted by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who studied photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato." This is another Heinrich Schliemann. They'll be planting golden masks next.
(Hey, I've found another ancient city of Troy! It's an Anasazi settlement. Go ahead... prove it ain't. Or maybe Atlantis was on Santorini. Or was that Troy? Or Tyre. Yeah... Tyre.)
A big, simple reason innovation in cars (or airplanes, or coffee makers) is slower than that in computers: computers are still a young industry. Bill Gates likes to use this sort of comparison by way of arguing that MS hasn't stifled innovation: "If airplanes had changed as much between 1980 and today as computers, they'd fly us cross-country for 50 cents in ten minutes," that kind of thing. But all those other industries changed at a vastly higher rate when they were young too. Flying machines changed an awful lot from Santos-Dumont's balloons to World War I to the German jets at the end of WWII, in every imaginable way, right?
But back to your point: Cars won't be obsolete in 3 or 5 years, and that difference really isn't "pointless." If I trick up my Civic, it'll be out-of-style in three years, but it'll get me there on the gas they sell at SA. With a gaming computer, I can spend through the nose and be below box specs for some of the games that come out next year. Partly that's just the young industry again. But you know, you can still find places to land your biplane.
Between the gaming wonks trying to one-up each other and the game studios whose idea of innovation is better texture effects in FPS titles, the lack of imagination is pretty amazing. You'd think this would be such a creative thing, games, but instead we get the equivalent of U.S. blockbuster movies over and over again. You'd think the wonks would at least show some individuality in their tastes... Car geeks and EAA airplane kit builders are a lot more interesting, for my two cents.
Now we see the incredible overlap between: a)people who eat Big Macs; and b) people who download music from pay services.
Seems to me like Mickey-D's is trying to reinvent itself for another market, one that's much more upscale than its middle-to-lower-middle-class roots. And yeah, I guess 'computer types' eat fast food... But are these the *same* computer people? Seems to me the people plugging their laptops in at Starbucks for the WiFi access, and downloading songs in a way that's defining that pay market, are who? Mac users. Driving Volkwagens. Um, not your McDonald's market, however much they want it to be.