Wow, a portable video player with a tiny, tiny screen. This one, rather than storing stuff on a HD, limits you to VHF and UHF signals -- so I guess it's in a different niche than the various "iPod killers" we see coming down the pike lately.
Instead it's the "I want to hear (and kinda squint to watch) the broadcast while I'm at the game" niche. This has the same appeal as an old lug-it-to-the-game TV from 1980ish. The article's right: it's for the "news/sports junkie" and that's about it. Only, of course, news junkies want CNN and sports junkies want ESPN, neither of which'll come in.
What this article mainly does is impress me with the product Seiko made 20 years ago. The market for the new version isn't any better now -- if anything it's smaller, because people don't think of broadcast signals as the entire universe of TV any more. Eh (shrugs).
This is an uncool thing to admit, but I *saw* Gigli, and it's not as bad as it was made out to be. It's painfully bad in spots, but overall it's a mediocre movie that just plain didn't work. When you're making a "black" comedy and it goes bad, it really goes bad in places.
Pieces of several movies were so bad I had to close my eyes, but not Gigli, except maybe when the fish nibbled on the brain in their tank. Worse than Gigli, off the top of my head:
"Return of the Jedi."Walked out, and I was about as big a fan of ESB as anyone alive.
"Episode II." I walked out on the video someone else had rented, it was so bad.
"Johnny Dangerously."
The live action remake of "101 Dalmations." Poor Glenn Close.
"Jingle All the Way." Unrelentingly mean and stupid.
All worse than Bennifer at their worst.
Even staying with "artificial" movies that were tremendously sour for me, I'd nominate "Pearl Harbor." It took a real subject and made it artificial, in every sense. When you spotted the nuclear submarine in escort of the Japanese carrier group, that was a tremendously bad movie. Probably the worst I've ever seen, in so many ways. Impossible physics for various special effects, truly awful use of okay actors... that stunk so badly.
Er, we have no way of assessing whether that's a true statement or not. When Microsoft comes out with something for which this is true, you let us know.
Near as I can tell, everything past Word 5.1a has gone in exactly the opposite direction, and even that old 1993-or-so Word wasn't faster than what came before -- it was just reasonably lean and built for what it needed to do. You may be right, but the assertion's not falsifiable.;-)
People have said this before, but maybe you didn't catch it: Successive releases of OS X have actually been noticably faster, even on older machines.
Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's review of Panther for example:
Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.
I've had my 10gb birthday present for a year now. It may have skipped once. Wasn't sure if it was a battery giving out or a skip or what -- it was during a treadmill run, the battery was low.
The hard drive isn't going to be the problem with these things. If you break it, it'll be because of something like the little slide "lock" switch, or the headphone jack, or the port on the bottom. The HDs are rated against a certain level of shock, but little plastic switches and headphone jacks...
I've dropped mine a handful of times and never had a glitch. Ran into someone on a bulletin board who'd dropped hers *just right* and had the lock switch stick in "on" position, so that she couldn't use the controls.
It's the weak stuff that breaks, not necessarily the expensive or "important-seeming" parts. O-rings on the space shuttle, yes?
What car dealers want you to do is think in terms of a payment, not the real cost. Once you're in that murky world, they can manipulate the terms of any agreement, buy or lease, enough to make their money and then some. There are situations where a lease would make sense, but it plays with most consumers as a variation of exactly what car dealers want to do to you. They love this stuff.
Take a look at the contract anyone signs on their lease, and you see mileage caps they can't exceed (with big per-mile fees for going past them), "wear and tear" charges on return, huge balloon payments at the end if they want to buy out, and so on. That's not to mention having car payments all the time rather than half the time, assuming a 10 year life on cars. Add to that no downpayment money from a trade-in when you do turn leases over -- which you do much more often. Just the big money up front should make you leary, leaving along the lump at the other end.
I don't "get" the model being offered here by Sun, and the specter of Microsoft running a show like that completely freaks me out. It only really works if I'm buying into a monolithic model for software distribution. The existing stuff that works more-or-less by this business model -- loss-leader console to sell cartridges -- seems to be plagued by the exact sort of warring standards balkanization that no business user would want...
Much as I'd like to encourage this, it's a solution in search of a problem.
More like just the wrong solution? I just spent an hour ironing last night for this week's clothes. These are just my workaday clothes, not some sales person's suits. I don't want to pay to dry clean them or go through that hassle, not to mention dry cleaning not being particularly environmentally friendly. There's a niche there.
In general this would be in the class of problems that seem to me to be begging for a better solution. Think how much energy an iron soaks up. Turn on your hair dryer and your iron at the same time and pray for the circuit breaker, you know? Dry cleaning's not a stand-in, and the existing process is a nuisance and a fire or injury hazard... Just seems like this solution's priced way high and not quite there yet.
Personally I'm waiting on someone to invent the new clothes line. (Partly for the glory of the moment when Microsoft tries to extend the standard.)
This news story is like empty camera mounts at the convenience store -- meant to deter, but we know there's no camera there.
And hey, you know, maybe that'll work to dissuade some kid from grabbing an off-center video grab of the nekkid scene, once or twice. Maybe. It'll scare off the basically innocent 14-year-old who might do something like this on a lark. They might be just slightly nervous.
The copies all over the net supposedly are taken after hours in empty theaters, for cleaner copies, or they're ripped from preview CDs within the industry. Neither of those is going to be stopped as a result of this news. Neither crime is committed by 14-year-olds who'll fall for this.
That's leaving alone the task they've just (supposedly) inflicted on mid-level managers at huge movie chains. You think the 28-year-old guy who spends his days trying to get minimum wage teens to serve popcorn faster really wants the task of policing for this? Theater chains don't have enough people to catch bad focus that consistently -- and we think they have the spare time to stand vigilantly over each showing with their goggles on?
As for global warming, again, the "new" environment will be different, it will suck in some ways and be better in others. Lastly, in all of this...
We see this a lot -- a sort of glib "If Minnesota turns into Kansas, we'll just be a little hotter, next subject..." You're just not thinking that through at all.
Sometime take out a map of the world and look at the scale of the Sahara desert. Consider that that region was once habitable savannah or grassland, in which millett was cultivated (first evidence being around 8000 years ago).
The Sahara's transition to desert happened rather quickly a few thousand years ago due to a rapid climate change. Depending on your sources that may have happened due to a shift in the gulf stream, or there are some other ideas. Whatever the causes of that one: consider what would happen to a civilization in that region. Something more severe than, say, the Mfecane in Southern Africa?
"A combination of local factors--population growth, the depletion of natural resources, and devastating drought and famine--led to revolutionary changes in the political, economic, and social structure of Bantu-speaking communities in southern Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thousands of people died because of ecological catastrophe and warfare; thousands more were displaced. Large centralized states of tens of thousands of people with standing armies of up to 40,000 men and autocratic leaders emerged where before there had been only small-scale political entities and no chief had had total power. This period of revolutionary change--known as the mfecane (or crushing--see Glossary) by the Zulu and the difaqane (see Glossary) by the Sotho--is also often referred to as "the time of troubles" (see fig. 5)."
http://www.workmall.com/wfb2001/south_africa/south _africa_history_background_to_the_mfecane.html--
Global climate change would radically destabilize the human world in ways the writer of that paragraph would recognize. More to the point, a huge preponderance of scientists are telling us it's already resulting in the first notes of a new mass extinction. Previous mass extinctions have never -- never -- seen the dominant type of animals before the extinction remain dominant after them. Think hard now: who are the dominant animals on earth right now?
Try to imagine a world in which, say, a nuclear power like Russia suddenly undergoes massive drought for, oh, fifty years. The Mfecane resulted in Shaka Zulu's rise to power as an absolute ruler. Put those two together. Russia's not that stable a nation now. Picture it as an Iraq or Afghanistan "weak state" in the middle of a staggering drought. With nuclear weapons. How safe does that make you feel? Imagine a ruthless dictator emerging from that chaos. Make you feel better? How many historical examples of changes like this do you need in order to accept those possibilities?
Global warming is not going to be a "more sunscreen" sort of a problem. "Better in some ways, worse in others" is wishful thinking, and wilfull ignorance of what science and history are telling you.
We don't have to imagine exotic dinosaur muscle properties being involved to see animals considerably bigger than elephants.
Indricotheres were considerably bigger than elephants -- around twice the mass. They're mammals, the closest living relations being rhinos. Dinosaur-sized mammals, easily. Think giraffe height with the mass of a rhino.
Obviously an old post and all, but you're too tangled up in your own limbs to allow through that "Exit" sign...
"We invade. We don't find the what at the where. We don't find the what anywhere... Conclusion: Bush and Co did NOT have exact knowledge."
"Iraq had plenty of advance notice we were coming. Argument rejected."
Um, was the rationale for this war supposed to be to prevent acts of terrorism against the US using WMDs? Seems to ring a bell, and seems to be the argument you're still wanting to make.
What you're now describing is a situation in which the war has moved the WMDs from a state where we know (supposedly) where they're being manufactured, where they're stored, and so on -- the terrible, dangerous, volatile pre-war starting point that we couldn't live with for a few more months according to our UN Security Council arguments -- to a state in which they've been hidden away in a "weak" nation that's crawling with fanatical insurgents who've shown just how willing they are to make reckless attacks on our troops -- who in their turn happen to have been made much more convenient targets. That's not mentioning whatever influence or presence Al Quaeda how has in the country; Ansar Al Islam, not having apparently been a focus of our rush-to-the-capital war strategy, seems to have easily fled, and now we have no reliable border security to keep anything in or out. Where might the hidden WMDs go under those circumstances? If the WMDs are across the border in Syria or something, so much the worse...
Hey, I have an alternative to this policy: we could have just shipped a bunch of suspected Al Quaeda operatives to abandoned biological weapons research areas in the former Soviet Union and left them there unsupervised. Problem solved! Except, of course, in the case of the former Soviet sites there's at least skeletal oversight, and we really do know where those sites are... Also there aren't US military bases nearby for them to take pot shots at with conventional weapons like RPGs, leaving alone biological or chemical agents. I guess that wouldn't be as reckless as this war -- according to *your* premises.
Take an introductory symbolic logic class sometime. Your first provisional assumption -- that we invaded to prevent attacks by WMDs -- falls apart whether or not I accept your second one involving the hidden weapons, doesn't it? Either way the policy is an abject, utter failure -- and you're basing your claims of an "open mind" about it on a classic "black swan" argument that's as "lame" as you think your debate partner's "tooth fairy" characterization of it is. (The next step is telling me the war has prevented Great White Shark attacks in my home state of Minnesota. We can fully expect political ads this fall in which Democrats' faces "morph" into those of leering sharks. Same logic.)
Even accepting your WMD arguments, this was pretty damned calamitous as a policy. And try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who, at this point, does not give Bush Deux and his junta that benefit of the doubt -- someone who's seen the yellow cake argument, the Wolfowitz admission that WMDs were just the argument that everyone could agree on, the "boutique intelligence" approach of the Department of Defence, and so on. It looks much *much* worse. The completely unacceptable (for any audience other than Bush's core of domestic support) "we liberated them" argument has been reduced to "We don't torture people as badly as Saddam did, though now the country's in a state of chaos and bleeding U.S. money by the billion." How good does this policy look? How justifiable?
This morning according to a poll of Iraqis, 70 percent think supporting the US occupation forces would mean their lives were in danger. That's including the Kurdish areas, which slant all such polls heavily in our favor. That's "liberation." The President of the United States is seriously trying to argue that a handful of 'depraved' National Guard soldiers spontaneously came
Donny Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney make me think mostly of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat whose cheerleading for an expedition against Syracuse eventually sunk a generation of Athenians in a ruinous seige of that city. Without that reckless attempt, Athens had every chance in the Peloponnesian war.
"Hubris" is the word, though, you'd so right about that.
Smithsonian Magazine ran a high-profile article about this ages ago, at least a year back. The WSJ article here, true to form, dumbs down its take on Starcraft:
"a game of strategy that's like a combination of high-speed chess and Risk."
to the point where anyone who's actually played the thing would say it's a generic description of all RTS titles. Yeah, they're writing for an audience of stockholders and CEOs, they think, but c'mon -- they could have differentiated it from every other title, couldn't they? (Especially because it's interesting that Starcraft is the center of this little cult despite being a rather old title?)
This is the conservative paper of record, at least for the George Will set, and anything I have any personal experience with they completely botch. I'll never forget the WSJ report, seemingly years after the fad, that men were starting to wear pony tails in office settings.
(But how about that etching of the video game star? Mostly it's just middle-aged businessmen gazing imperiously over their mahogany desks, but here we get a video game hero. Quite odd to see.)
Actually Agnostics can curse each other and understand it -- it's just neither side will claim to have divinely-inspired information or absolute knowledge in so doing.
As a result, they don't tend to kill each other as the argument escalates.
Several of that support person's "peeves" are basic human nature, and are just plain going to be there because of the how the relationship works. Cops whose job is to catch traffic violations all day long are going to develop a certain attitude about drivers, you know? And people who wait in a long line feel a certain way about the people behind the counter whom they're waiting to see.
I mean,
"I'm having the same trouble I was having yesterday." "Yes, ma'am, what's that?"
"The same thing that happened yesterday is still happening today."
"Ma'am, I'm not the person you spoke to yesterday. I don't know what happened. Would you please tell me?"
"Well, it would be easier if you just asked the man I talked to then. Why don't you ask him?"
"Who did you talk to?"
"I don't remember his name."
Sounds like a lack of good tools is frustrating both the Rep and the caller. Especially when they have to fight through a button tree to reach you, people will assume there's some sort of call management software that's tracking their calls and recording the problems they have.
A little bit of sympathy on both ends, and everybody's job gets easier. Duh.
ACLU stands for "American Civil Liberties Union." You might want to check a dictionary for definitions of those words.
They understand that they're going to sometimes be defending unpopular positions and people. They defend the rights of white supremacists to march in public, for example. They've also defended Rush Limbaugh against what they view as intrusive attempts by the police to get at his medical records and show that he was "doctor shopping" to feed his addiction. They're making those choices consciously, according to principles which they state conspicuously.
You, meanwhile, don't seem to be doing anything more than bitch for reasons you haven't thought through.
First off: when, exactly, has the ACLU complained that not enough is being done to fight terrorism? Hello? Anyone home? Or were you just confusing "liberals" or "Democrats" with the ACLU?
And more to the point: "Potential terrorists"? When you start using a term like that, perhaps you'd like to devote some thought to it. Because the FBI has, in the past, regarded people like Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "potential terrorist." Because, you know, that let them bug his hotel rooms and accumulate evidence that he wasn't faithful to his wife, which put some nice blackmail material in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover.
The ACLU tries to protect American citizens from the abusive use of power. You, meanwhile, resent them for 'getting in the way.' What does that say about you, exactly? Maybe you want to think that through rather than sleepwalking through your life vaguely angry at those pesky liberals.
This "Aren't my enemies rooting against our troops?" sophistry is worthy of the derision it brings out in others. Is that the "disappointment" you're referring to? (Your version is: "Aren't those danged liberals rooting for heterosexuals to die of AIDS?")
Male-to-male sexual contact (and the same with IV drug use too): just over 480,000 deaths.
IV Drug use: 240,268 deaths.
Heterosexual contact: 135,628 deaths.
(That's leaving out the "other" category of blood transfusions and so on.)
Gays and IV drug users are easily at the most risk, but 135 thousand US citizens, give or take, died of AIDS due to heterosexual transmission last year. For comparison, in 2001 the CDC says 163,538 died of a stroke in this country. Note that the number of deaths from AIDS not due to male-to-male contact was 375,896, just 100,000 fewer than among gay men. That's including the drug users.
(I'm still wondering what the heck point you thought you were making about religious nut cases who want AIDS to wipe out all the gay people. The simple truth is that there are loads of fundie religious folks who want that -- and who else? What other large groups want all the gay people to die due to AIDS? You're right that people are nuts in so many different ways, but this one belongs to the fundamentalists, no question.)
In the case of the Mullets, it wasn't just "camera men, editors, (and) janitors." A lot of hair stylists hit the unemployment line, too, dang it. But back to our question: Is producing a mediocre show or movie "better than nothing"?
Star Wars Episodes one and two made money. For their producers they were better than nothing, no question. For the soul of the series, they were unmitigated disasters. The really amazing movie in the series, Empire..., now looks worse as a result of being in the same room with Jar Jar.
Do we really need other examples of your point about damaging the franchise? Try the cartoon Lord of the Rings -- that set back Tolkien mania for a long time, and it's really not as bad a disaster as people say, it was just ordinarily mediocre for its time.
Personally I'm not really rooting against Enterprise, because other than TNG there hasn't been a Star Trek series for me since I was 10. I don't really care either way. But then, that kind of underscores your point...
A couple of years back, one of the old WWII-era planes that just got grounded crashed on Highway 36 east of Estes Park, Colorado. We're a couple of miles off the other highway into Estes Park, up a mountain, and between the fire and the crash we had to take a different route home that year.
What happened in that 2002 crash was, one of the wings of the plane just sheared off in flight as it came out of a turn. It was structural fatigue, as this article says. The plane involved was just under 60 years old, IIRC.
The pilots got profiled in the papers. Impressive people. Most pilots are flying for the love of it, they get paid next-to-nothing even for the airlines until they have tons of seniority, but these guys were what you'd call heroic characters.
They're truly old planes; it was like seeing a B-24 Liberator at an airshow, only instead of being carefully eased along in their dotage they were still hauling massive loads of water at low altitudes and speed, flying risky in the mountains in this case, for decades after the war. Pretty hard use.
As far as personal qualities go, I understand Pol Pot was a heck of a family man. Not to be too flip, but sometimes that isn't the best predicter of your ideal leader.
But tell me --
...totally agree with you that India is a truly secular and open-minded country. But, the secularism is being abused in some cases.
-- what specifically are you saying there? I'm not trying to strike up sparks, here, just curious what "abuses" we're talking about in "some cases." What harm's recently been done under the banner of secularism in India?
(I'm having some trouble imagining similar abuses in the US. Armies of secular people doing what? Marching in Pro Choice rallies, or something?)
I see science not as competition for religion, but as complimentary.
And both most bioliogists and the Vatican are on your side, there, when it comes to evolution. The vatican has basically been on board with evolution and natural selection for a long while now, right? This article is about a Vatican person discussing Extraterrestrial life, so clearly they don't believe it'd necessarily mean God is gone.
Creationism is a protestant thing, both in the US and in Australia -- the only two places where it has any grip at all on the culture. My Southern Baptist relations talk, I swear, about "Converting the Catholics to Christianity."
none of which have to do with proving or disproving God. Either task is impossible, BTW.
The guts of Agnosticism -- "strong" flavor. See, we can all get along after all.
As simple as the list of Ten Commandments seems, have you kept them? Everyone says what an excellent set of rules they are, but I don't know anyone that has managed to keep them.
Nope, not everyone says they're an excellent set of rules. I don't. I for one think they're just about on par with any other ancient code of behavior or law -- a mix of obviousness and muddled ambiguity handed down by yet another set of self-appointed spokespeople for God.
We had a brief thing with the 10 Commandments at my kids' Public school, actually. Supposedly the existing "Code of Conduct" was all too "PC" -- a term mostly used to attack things you disagree with nowadays -- and we had a few parents who asked why we couldn't also post the Commandments instead (or failing that, also). So, we got a good chance to examine the two lists.
The current behavior code was full of stuff like "Show respect for others" and various words about becoming a good student and a good citizen -- an emphasis on learning how to be a good person and how to participate in American society. There was an interesting strain of "Civics Lesson."
The Commandments, well... We don't actually have a problem with students murdering each other at our little school, and as far as coveting our neighbor's wives goes, there isn't much danger of it among the grade schoolers I happen to know, and I'm not sure an advanced warning was all that useful for them. As a public school, Noble doesn't encourage idols of any sort (that being one of the several reasons for which the idea of posting the Commandments themselves was voted down). And so on.
In short the Commandments frankly didn't seem relevant to my kids' school lives, or really to their lives -- surely not more than any other list of advice. Not nearly as relevant as the existing conduct code, anyway. Where they did apply, they were mostly staggeringly obvious (Don't kill anyone). They reflected social mores of 2000 years ago; the "neighbor's wife" thing is more about women as property than about being faithful to your own spouse -- note that it doesn't mention husbands or tell you not to fool around with single college girls if you're married. (How many wives did Solomon have, again?) Granted, this was the KJV translation, but then nobody asked us to post anything in Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek.
That's leaving alone the whole "We're all evil by default thing, which is just so very Christian and so very not useful in figuring out how to live a moral life. If God wants to blame me for my inherent flaws, I defer to God entirely -- but not to a human spokeperson for God. No - Thank - You.
So no -- brzzzt -- not everyone says they're such a great idea. I personally think you'd do much better reading a Cliff's Notes version of Kant, as far as leading a moral life.
Weren't the first credit cards faced with a lot of the same potential abuses -- use by non-owners, less limited than cash so a thief (or you) can run up a massive bill, and so on? And credit cards have always been exceptionally prone to abuse -- by their owners and by people who're trying to scam the owners.
People tend to overspend on cards, yes? For much the same reasons that they'd overspend using their chip? This despite generations of experience that (you'd think) would've led to more measures to prevent that problem. Banks want us to abuse the things, so there's a pressure *not* to put "checks" in place, too. They don't want fraud, but they want you to overspend. They offer you perks to do it.
It took a long time for credit cards to get to the relatively more protected model we're in now, where there's limited liability for fraud, checksum digits are on the reverse of the card, and so on. Most cards still don't even have built-in photo ID, which seems like a basic point. We only went to checking every card for almost every purchase in the 90s; until then it was "If it's a big purchase you can call an 800 number to verify that the card's good." Maybe RFID can piggyback on that network of fraud checks from the cards, but if credit cards had to deal with unexpected abuses so will this.
You have to be right that there are more "checks" to these things than we're thinking, but as far as being an early adopter -- nah, no thanks.
The only safe assumption a Commander in Chief could make based on that evidence is that he still has the weapons. Anthrax just does not dissappear, after all.
(I particularly groaned at "safe assumption." Perhaps you'd like to talk to the family of the poor guy whose head was chopped off on television today. Safety is a relative thing, sure, but the word "safe" does not in any sense describe our foreign policy under Bush II. "Careful" also would be inappropriate. "Considered" would be an extreme reach. You need words like "daring" to comfort yourself with.)
Let's take the pre-war (pre-revisionist history) version of this argument at its face for a moment, though, because you're willing to. You're saying there's a lot of anthrax left around. Hmm.
So, now we've got a radically destabilized nation in which, unlike pre-invasion Iraq, all manner of Al Quaeda activities can mix with the amorphous ranks of "insurgents" without our being able to tell the difference any better than we can apparently tell Iraqi cops from the bad guys. Assuming that what you say is true, there are also stockpiles of WMDs around that we can't find. Presumably these would have been hidden somewhere. Perhaps by people with ties to the insurgency. You think?
So how, exactly, did this invasion help prevent terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction? What's to keep these terrorists from getting hold of the WMDs you say are still there? Hellooooo? Is anyone home? I'm hearing an echo -- is that the cognitive dissonance?
Or did the weapons run across the border into Iran or Syria? Is that how the invasion helped secure us against attack? Because I'm not finding it all that reassuring...
If Bush and company believed their "He might give them to the terrorists" argument, they wouldn't have invaded the way they did to start with. Ansar Al-Islam scooted out of Iraq before the fighting even got to them -- they were in the Kurdish-controlled area, up north. Powell specifically talked about the danger of Ansar Al-Islam getting weapons from Saddam, but we didn't even fight the war like that was our reason for being there. We ran for the capital.
And now that things are over, Bush and his supporters have largely slipped from their original rationale for the war -- though they'll refer to 9/11 as a sort of ghost of the idea, without being able to connect their phantom dots any more. I don't blame them; accepting the original arguments would only make them look more reckless.
This war didn't do what it claimed to want to do. With this junta in charge, it's not going to do anything but sink us into the tar baby.
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Instead it's the "I want to hear (and kinda squint to watch) the broadcast while I'm at the game" niche. This has the same appeal as an old lug-it-to-the-game TV from 1980ish. The article's right: it's for the "news/sports junkie" and that's about it. Only, of course, news junkies want CNN and sports junkies want ESPN, neither of which'll come in.
What this article mainly does is impress me with the product Seiko made 20 years ago. The market for the new version isn't any better now -- if anything it's smaller, because people don't think of broadcast signals as the entire universe of TV any more. Eh (shrugs).
Pieces of several movies were so bad I had to close my eyes, but not Gigli, except maybe when the fish nibbled on the brain in their tank. Worse than Gigli, off the top of my head:
All worse than Bennifer at their worst.
Even staying with "artificial" movies that were tremendously sour for me, I'd nominate "Pearl Harbor." It took a real subject and made it artificial, in every sense. When you spotted the nuclear submarine in escort of the Japanese carrier group, that was a tremendously bad movie. Probably the worst I've ever seen, in so many ways. Impossible physics for various special effects, truly awful use of okay actors... that stunk so badly.
Near as I can tell, everything past Word 5.1a has gone in exactly the opposite direction, and even that old 1993-or-so Word wasn't faster than what came before -- it was just reasonably lean and built for what it needed to do. You may be right, but the assertion's not falsifiable. ;-)
Don't take my word for it -- take Ars Technica's review of Panther for example:
The hard drive isn't going to be the problem with these things. If you break it, it'll be because of something like the little slide "lock" switch, or the headphone jack, or the port on the bottom. The HDs are rated against a certain level of shock, but little plastic switches and headphone jacks...
I've dropped mine a handful of times and never had a glitch. Ran into someone on a bulletin board who'd dropped hers *just right* and had the lock switch stick in "on" position, so that she couldn't use the controls.
It's the weak stuff that breaks, not necessarily the expensive or "important-seeming" parts. O-rings on the space shuttle, yes?
What car dealers want you to do is think in terms of a payment, not the real cost. Once you're in that murky world, they can manipulate the terms of any agreement, buy or lease, enough to make their money and then some. There are situations where a lease would make sense, but it plays with most consumers as a variation of exactly what car dealers want to do to you. They love this stuff.
Take a look at the contract anyone signs on their lease, and you see mileage caps they can't exceed (with big per-mile fees for going past them), "wear and tear" charges on return, huge balloon payments at the end if they want to buy out, and so on. That's not to mention having car payments all the time rather than half the time, assuming a 10 year life on cars. Add to that no downpayment money from a trade-in when you do turn leases over -- which you do much more often. Just the big money up front should make you leary, leaving along the lump at the other end.
I don't "get" the model being offered here by Sun, and the specter of Microsoft running a show like that completely freaks me out. It only really works if I'm buying into a monolithic model for software distribution. The existing stuff that works more-or-less by this business model -- loss-leader console to sell cartridges -- seems to be plagued by the exact sort of warring standards balkanization that no business user would want...
More like just the wrong solution? I just spent an hour ironing last night for this week's clothes. These are just my workaday clothes, not some sales person's suits. I don't want to pay to dry clean them or go through that hassle, not to mention dry cleaning not being particularly environmentally friendly. There's a niche there.
In general this would be in the class of problems that seem to me to be begging for a better solution. Think how much energy an iron soaks up. Turn on your hair dryer and your iron at the same time and pray for the circuit breaker, you know? Dry cleaning's not a stand-in, and the existing process is a nuisance and a fire or injury hazard... Just seems like this solution's priced way high and not quite there yet.
Personally I'm waiting on someone to invent the new clothes line. (Partly for the glory of the moment when Microsoft tries to extend the standard.)
And hey, you know, maybe that'll work to dissuade some kid from grabbing an off-center video grab of the nekkid scene, once or twice. Maybe. It'll scare off the basically innocent 14-year-old who might do something like this on a lark. They might be just slightly nervous.
The copies all over the net supposedly are taken after hours in empty theaters, for cleaner copies, or they're ripped from preview CDs within the industry. Neither of those is going to be stopped as a result of this news. Neither crime is committed by 14-year-olds who'll fall for this.
That's leaving alone the task they've just (supposedly) inflicted on mid-level managers at huge movie chains. You think the 28-year-old guy who spends his days trying to get minimum wage teens to serve popcorn faster really wants the task of policing for this? Theater chains don't have enough people to catch bad focus that consistently -- and we think they have the spare time to stand vigilantly over each showing with their goggles on?
We see this a lot -- a sort of glib "If Minnesota turns into Kansas, we'll just be a little hotter, next subject..." You're just not thinking that through at all.
Sometime take out a map of the world and look at the scale of the Sahara desert. Consider that that region was once habitable savannah or grassland, in which millett was cultivated (first evidence being around 8000 years ago).
The Sahara's transition to desert happened rather quickly a few thousand years ago due to a rapid climate change. Depending on your sources that may have happened due to a shift in the gulf stream, or there are some other ideas. Whatever the causes of that one: consider what would happen to a civilization in that region. Something more severe than, say, the Mfecane in Southern Africa?
Global climate change would radically destabilize the human world in ways the writer of that paragraph would recognize. More to the point, a huge preponderance of scientists are telling us it's already resulting in the first notes of a new mass extinction. Previous mass extinctions have never -- never -- seen the dominant type of animals before the extinction remain dominant after them. Think hard now: who are the dominant animals on earth right now?
Try to imagine a world in which, say, a nuclear power like Russia suddenly undergoes massive drought for, oh, fifty years. The Mfecane resulted in Shaka Zulu's rise to power as an absolute ruler. Put those two together. Russia's not that stable a nation now. Picture it as an Iraq or Afghanistan "weak state" in the middle of a staggering drought. With nuclear weapons. How safe does that make you feel? Imagine a ruthless dictator emerging from that chaos. Make you feel better? How many historical examples of changes like this do you need in order to accept those possibilities?
Global warming is not going to be a "more sunscreen" sort of a problem. "Better in some ways, worse in others" is wishful thinking, and wilfull ignorance of what science and history are telling you.
Indricotheres were considerably bigger than elephants -- around twice the mass. They're mammals, the closest living relations being rhinos. Dinosaur-sized mammals, easily. Think giraffe height with the mass of a rhino.
Um, was the rationale for this war supposed to be to prevent acts of terrorism against the US using WMDs? Seems to ring a bell, and seems to be the argument you're still wanting to make.
What you're now describing is a situation in which the war has moved the WMDs from a state where we know (supposedly) where they're being manufactured, where they're stored, and so on -- the terrible, dangerous, volatile pre-war starting point that we couldn't live with for a few more months according to our UN Security Council arguments -- to a state in which they've been hidden away in a "weak" nation that's crawling with fanatical insurgents who've shown just how willing they are to make reckless attacks on our troops -- who in their turn happen to have been made much more convenient targets. That's not mentioning whatever influence or presence Al Quaeda how has in the country; Ansar Al Islam, not having apparently been a focus of our rush-to-the-capital war strategy, seems to have easily fled, and now we have no reliable border security to keep anything in or out. Where might the hidden WMDs go under those circumstances? If the WMDs are across the border in Syria or something, so much the worse...
Hey, I have an alternative to this policy: we could have just shipped a bunch of suspected Al Quaeda operatives to abandoned biological weapons research areas in the former Soviet Union and left them there unsupervised. Problem solved! Except, of course, in the case of the former Soviet sites there's at least skeletal oversight, and we really do know where those sites are... Also there aren't US military bases nearby for them to take pot shots at with conventional weapons like RPGs, leaving alone biological or chemical agents. I guess that wouldn't be as reckless as this war -- according to *your* premises.
Take an introductory symbolic logic class sometime. Your first provisional assumption -- that we invaded to prevent attacks by WMDs -- falls apart whether or not I accept your second one involving the hidden weapons, doesn't it? Either way the policy is an abject, utter failure -- and you're basing your claims of an "open mind" about it on a classic "black swan" argument that's as "lame" as you think your debate partner's "tooth fairy" characterization of it is. (The next step is telling me the war has prevented Great White Shark attacks in my home state of Minnesota. We can fully expect political ads this fall in which Democrats' faces "morph" into those of leering sharks. Same logic.)
Even accepting your WMD arguments, this was pretty damned calamitous as a policy. And try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who, at this point, does not give Bush Deux and his junta that benefit of the doubt -- someone who's seen the yellow cake argument, the Wolfowitz admission that WMDs were just the argument that everyone could agree on, the "boutique intelligence" approach of the Department of Defence, and so on. It looks much *much* worse. The completely unacceptable (for any audience other than Bush's core of domestic support) "we liberated them" argument has been reduced to "We don't torture people as badly as Saddam did, though now the country's in a state of chaos and bleeding U.S. money by the billion." How good does this policy look? How justifiable?
This morning according to a poll of Iraqis, 70 percent think supporting the US occupation forces would mean their lives were in danger. That's including the Kurdish areas, which slant all such polls heavily in our favor. That's "liberation." The President of the United States is seriously trying to argue that a handful of 'depraved' National Guard soldiers spontaneously came
"Hubris" is the word, though, you'd so right about that.
to the point where anyone who's actually played the thing would say it's a generic description of all RTS titles. Yeah, they're writing for an audience of stockholders and CEOs, they think, but c'mon -- they could have differentiated it from every other title, couldn't they? (Especially because it's interesting that Starcraft is the center of this little cult despite being a rather old title?)
This is the conservative paper of record, at least for the George Will set, and anything I have any personal experience with they completely botch. I'll never forget the WSJ report, seemingly years after the fad, that men were starting to wear pony tails in office settings.
(But how about that etching of the video game star? Mostly it's just middle-aged businessmen gazing imperiously over their mahogany desks, but here we get a video game hero. Quite odd to see.)
As a result, they don't tend to kill each other as the argument escalates.
I mean,
Sounds like a lack of good tools is frustrating both the Rep and the caller. Especially when they have to fight through a button tree to reach you, people will assume there's some sort of call management software that's tracking their calls and recording the problems they have.
A little bit of sympathy on both ends, and everybody's job gets easier. Duh.
They understand that they're going to sometimes be defending unpopular positions and people. They defend the rights of white supremacists to march in public, for example. They've also defended Rush Limbaugh against what they view as intrusive attempts by the police to get at his medical records and show that he was "doctor shopping" to feed his addiction. They're making those choices consciously, according to principles which they state conspicuously.
You, meanwhile, don't seem to be doing anything more than bitch for reasons you haven't thought through.
First off: when, exactly, has the ACLU complained that not enough is being done to fight terrorism? Hello? Anyone home? Or were you just confusing "liberals" or "Democrats" with the ACLU?
And more to the point: "Potential terrorists"? When you start using a term like that, perhaps you'd like to devote some thought to it. Because the FBI has, in the past, regarded people like Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "potential terrorist." Because, you know, that let them bug his hotel rooms and accumulate evidence that he wasn't faithful to his wife, which put some nice blackmail material in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover.
The ACLU tries to protect American citizens from the abusive use of power. You, meanwhile, resent them for 'getting in the way.' What does that say about you, exactly? Maybe you want to think that through rather than sleepwalking through your life vaguely angry at those pesky liberals.
CDC Mortality numbers for 2003 break down the mortality rates due to HIV infection like this:
(That's leaving out the "other" category of blood transfusions and so on.)
Gays and IV drug users are easily at the most risk, but 135 thousand US citizens, give or take, died of AIDS due to heterosexual transmission last year. For comparison, in 2001 the CDC says 163,538 died of a stroke in this country. Note that the number of deaths from AIDS not due to male-to-male contact was 375,896, just 100,000 fewer than among gay men. That's including the drug users.
(I'm still wondering what the heck point you thought you were making about religious nut cases who want AIDS to wipe out all the gay people. The simple truth is that there are loads of fundie religious folks who want that -- and who else? What other large groups want all the gay people to die due to AIDS? You're right that people are nuts in so many different ways, but this one belongs to the fundamentalists, no question.)
Star Wars Episodes one and two made money. For their producers they were better than nothing, no question. For the soul of the series, they were unmitigated disasters. The really amazing movie in the series, Empire..., now looks worse as a result of being in the same room with Jar Jar.
Do we really need other examples of your point about damaging the franchise? Try the cartoon Lord of the Rings -- that set back Tolkien mania for a long time, and it's really not as bad a disaster as people say, it was just ordinarily mediocre for its time.
Personally I'm not really rooting against Enterprise, because other than TNG there hasn't been a Star Trek series for me since I was 10. I don't really care either way. But then, that kind of underscores your point...
What happened in that 2002 crash was, one of the wings of the plane just sheared off in flight as it came out of a turn. It was structural fatigue, as this article says. The plane involved was just under 60 years old, IIRC.
The pilots got profiled in the papers. Impressive people. Most pilots are flying for the love of it, they get paid next-to-nothing even for the airlines until they have tons of seniority, but these guys were what you'd call heroic characters.
They're truly old planes; it was like seeing a B-24 Liberator at an airshow, only instead of being carefully eased along in their dotage they were still hauling massive loads of water at low altitudes and speed, flying risky in the mountains in this case, for decades after the war. Pretty hard use.
But tell me --
-- what specifically are you saying there? I'm not trying to strike up sparks, here, just curious what "abuses" we're talking about in "some cases." What harm's recently been done under the banner of secularism in India?
(I'm having some trouble imagining similar abuses in the US. Armies of secular people doing what? Marching in Pro Choice rallies, or something?)
And both most bioliogists and the Vatican are on your side, there, when it comes to evolution. The vatican has basically been on board with evolution and natural selection for a long while now, right? This article is about a Vatican person discussing Extraterrestrial life, so clearly they don't believe it'd necessarily mean God is gone.
Creationism is a protestant thing, both in the US and in Australia -- the only two places where it has any grip at all on the culture. My Southern Baptist relations talk, I swear, about "Converting the Catholics to Christianity."
none of which have to do with proving or disproving God. Either task is impossible, BTW.
The guts of Agnosticism -- "strong" flavor. See, we can all get along after all.
Or words to that effect.
Nope, not everyone says they're an excellent set of rules. I don't. I for one think they're just about on par with any other ancient code of behavior or law -- a mix of obviousness and muddled ambiguity handed down by yet another set of self-appointed spokespeople for God.
We had a brief thing with the 10 Commandments at my kids' Public school, actually. Supposedly the existing "Code of Conduct" was all too "PC" -- a term mostly used to attack things you disagree with nowadays -- and we had a few parents who asked why we couldn't also post the Commandments instead (or failing that, also). So, we got a good chance to examine the two lists.
The current behavior code was full of stuff like "Show respect for others" and various words about becoming a good student and a good citizen -- an emphasis on learning how to be a good person and how to participate in American society. There was an interesting strain of "Civics Lesson."
The Commandments, well... We don't actually have a problem with students murdering each other at our little school, and as far as coveting our neighbor's wives goes, there isn't much danger of it among the grade schoolers I happen to know, and I'm not sure an advanced warning was all that useful for them. As a public school, Noble doesn't encourage idols of any sort (that being one of the several reasons for which the idea of posting the Commandments themselves was voted down). And so on.
In short the Commandments frankly didn't seem relevant to my kids' school lives, or really to their lives -- surely not more than any other list of advice. Not nearly as relevant as the existing conduct code, anyway. Where they did apply, they were mostly staggeringly obvious (Don't kill anyone). They reflected social mores of 2000 years ago; the "neighbor's wife" thing is more about women as property than about being faithful to your own spouse -- note that it doesn't mention husbands or tell you not to fool around with single college girls if you're married. (How many wives did Solomon have, again?) Granted, this was the KJV translation, but then nobody asked us to post anything in Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek.
That's leaving alone the whole "We're all evil by default thing, which is just so very Christian and so very not useful in figuring out how to live a moral life. If God wants to blame me for my inherent flaws, I defer to God entirely -- but not to a human spokeperson for God. No - Thank - You.
So no -- brzzzt -- not everyone says they're such a great idea. I personally think you'd do much better reading a Cliff's Notes version of Kant, as far as leading a moral life.
People tend to overspend on cards, yes? For much the same reasons that they'd overspend using their chip? This despite generations of experience that (you'd think) would've led to more measures to prevent that problem. Banks want us to abuse the things, so there's a pressure *not* to put "checks" in place, too. They don't want fraud, but they want you to overspend. They offer you perks to do it.
It took a long time for credit cards to get to the relatively more protected model we're in now, where there's limited liability for fraud, checksum digits are on the reverse of the card, and so on. Most cards still don't even have built-in photo ID, which seems like a basic point. We only went to checking every card for almost every purchase in the 90s; until then it was "If it's a big purchase you can call an 800 number to verify that the card's good." Maybe RFID can piggyback on that network of fraud checks from the cards, but if credit cards had to deal with unexpected abuses so will this.
You have to be right that there are more "checks" to these things than we're thinking, but as far as being an early adopter -- nah, no thanks.
(I particularly groaned at "safe assumption." Perhaps you'd like to talk to the family of the poor guy whose head was chopped off on television today. Safety is a relative thing, sure, but the word "safe" does not in any sense describe our foreign policy under Bush II. "Careful" also would be inappropriate. "Considered" would be an extreme reach. You need words like "daring" to comfort yourself with.)
Let's take the pre-war (pre-revisionist history) version of this argument at its face for a moment, though, because you're willing to. You're saying there's a lot of anthrax left around. Hmm.
So, now we've got a radically destabilized nation in which, unlike pre-invasion Iraq, all manner of Al Quaeda activities can mix with the amorphous ranks of "insurgents" without our being able to tell the difference any better than we can apparently tell Iraqi cops from the bad guys. Assuming that what you say is true, there are also stockpiles of WMDs around that we can't find. Presumably these would have been hidden somewhere. Perhaps by people with ties to the insurgency. You think?
So how, exactly, did this invasion help prevent terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction? What's to keep these terrorists from getting hold of the WMDs you say are still there? Hellooooo? Is anyone home? I'm hearing an echo -- is that the cognitive dissonance?
Or did the weapons run across the border into Iran or Syria? Is that how the invasion helped secure us against attack? Because I'm not finding it all that reassuring...
If Bush and company believed their "He might give them to the terrorists" argument, they wouldn't have invaded the way they did to start with. Ansar Al-Islam scooted out of Iraq before the fighting even got to them -- they were in the Kurdish-controlled area, up north. Powell specifically talked about the danger of Ansar Al-Islam getting weapons from Saddam, but we didn't even fight the war like that was our reason for being there. We ran for the capital.
And now that things are over, Bush and his supporters have largely slipped from their original rationale for the war -- though they'll refer to 9/11 as a sort of ghost of the idea, without being able to connect their phantom dots any more. I don't blame them; accepting the original arguments would only make them look more reckless.
This war didn't do what it claimed to want to do. With this junta in charge, it's not going to do anything but sink us into the tar baby.