As I recall, Alexander Haig (yup, that guy) was deeply involved in the project,
He was supposedly a decent candidate for "Deep Throat," the Watergate informer who helped bring Nixon down. He declared he was "in charge" at the White House (Constitution be damned) during the Reagan assassination attempt. Now he's involved with cell phone access schemes?
These airships become more mysterious and sinister all the time, don't they?...
The iron ore industry in northern Minnesota has been depressed for decades, basically. Maybe you'd pay to have the minor population centers south of Duluth sent to Mars to mine the ore we already have here?
Lewis and Clark speculated about the value of minerals in the Rockies. Didn't spend their lives mining it, though, as without the Missouri and the Columbia hooking up, they'd have had no way to transport their raw materials out. Mining and transportation -- railways in the case of the rockies -- go hand in hand. We're not remotely near ready to lay tracks to Mars.
NPR had a call-in session with someone who was involved with Sojourner (I think), and one of the callers actually asked this question.
The visiting expert laughed and said he hadn't heard that one before, basically. If I remember right, he responded that that'd add weight and complexity with little return. (He also said that Mars's axis is tilted [it's around 25 degree, much like earth], making for seasonal changes in the effectiveness of solar panels at any given location.)
Good point: Nationalism is a bad joke on all of us
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Spirit Rolls on Mars
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You did notice that the Mars Express is doing just fine, right? You remember, the orbiter that's going to give us unprecedented looks from above the planet? And you remember that Beagle 2 was built on a shoestring, for less than half the cost of the lost NASA Polar Lander, right?
NASA's had the Mars Odyssey looking for Beagle 2. Mars Express comes from the European Space Agency. Beagle 2 was British-built. I doubt anyone at NASA's crowing about this. They wouldn't have that little class.
Electricity doesn't magically make it "clean", it just moves the problems elsewhere.
Who said it was magic?
One advantage of moving to an electric lawn mower, or car, is that it's considerably easier to improve pollution controls, and to gain efficiency, at a power plant than it is to, say, set up emissions tests and required repairs for many millions of individual cars. Think of all the grossly inefficient two-cycle lawn mowers out there -- spewing white smoke, flooded. Would you rather take on the task of repairing all those so they burn cleaner and more efficiently, or would you rather move to some sort of electric mower and be able to address pollution and energy inefficiency at the source? Setting aside what we do with the spent batteries, the electric is a decent option. It doesn't just "move the problem somewhere else," it moves it somewhere where you can address it head-on.
The idea is to separate production of the energy from distribution of it, so that you can get the best value during production. That would also be a huge advantage of a hydrogen fuel cell model: yes, liquid hydrogen costs energy to produce, but you can do that at the power plant. Let's say someone develops a better way to control emissions made during production: you get that advantage right away, rather than needing to turn over a generation of cars before you see that incremental change in efficiency or pollution control.
That's for consumer goods, anyway. The argument's different in scale or degree, I guess, for trains, but it's similar: would you rather replace or refurb fabulously expensive train engines when some new pollution-busting technology comes online, or would you rather apply it at the power plant and have everyone benefit right away?
My final taskbar complaint has to do with the way Windows names windows. Often, the title of the window is the application name followed by the document name.
Arggggggh. At least they reversed this for their own apps. (Do we really need to feel like every page on the internet starts with "Microsoft Internet Explorer"? Talk about "branding.")
I have a bunch of apps that I want to categorize in folders and keep out of the dock. I also want to be able to access them through a menu rather than digging through my applications folder. The chooser (sort of like a start menu on windows) would be great for this.
The chooser in classic Mac OS wasn't "like a start menu." The "Apple Menu" was what the start menu was cribbed from. The chooser was on it, but you used it to "choose" your printer and to mount network drives, and that was it.
You could try dropping an alias (or the originals) for all these things you want to categorize into some sort of folder structure, organized as you like it, and then put the top level folder on the dock. Right-(or option-) click on the dock item, you get your menu. Hoop-de-doo. For a big set of documents, it'd be just fine. Most people seem to have their Apps folder this way, don't they?
If you want something that's sort of a combo of the dock behavior and the menus you say you want, I personally think DragThing is a decent choice. Dragthing also includes a process dock that shows you open apps at all times.
(As far as "Windows does this by shoving every window title into the taskbar," well, no, it doesn't for me. On W2k, here, individual Apps behave differently. DreamWeaver pre-MX showed every open page as a task bar icon; from MX on it's just got one item on the bar at all times. Sometimes Windows will open several instances of a given app on me, depending on how I chose the documents I wanted to open. Highly idiosyncratic behavior for a very basic function.)
I'm looking over his history, and in cases he hasn't been the complete MS shill I imagined based on what you said. More like an opinionated "pundit" type who feels his own weight a little too much, and whose judgment is shaped by how he makes his living. He's feeding off MS, and in particular he makes money by talking about MS security and how to "shore it up" at various events.
He reported on the iTMS exploit by DVD Jon, for example, and he threw in this:
"Apple's primary competitor, Microsoft, created its own DRM scheme for its popular Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) formats but built renewing capabilities into the technology, which helps Microsoft survive security exploits."
Not sure I agree that MS is the main competitor in online music sales (yet), and if you're talking about the two of them you might want to acknowledge that one reason Apple's DRM took off was because it wasn't perceived as being as odious as MS's. Still, he did at least close with: "...Apple has worked hard to strike deals with the recording industry and did a fantastic job of jump-starting the concept of inexpensive, downloadable, legitimate music. Let's hope that this DRM breach won't cause record companies to reverse their decisions to work with online music services."
Not a troll, just a big bad bias? He seems to have said basically positive stuff about Mozilla, too. Still, there are more than enough statements like:
For starters, isn't it true that the 60's technology that got us to the moon is largely lost? I remember reading somewhere that the plans for the Apollo missions were lost in a sea of red tape somewhere.
That's an "urban" legend, up there with the supposed bureaucratic folly behind NASA's pens, which is also nonsense. When it shut down the Apollo program, NASA didn't shrug and say "Nice trip, let's throw away the map." They kept the Saturn V plans for the future, of course. The problem with a new Saturn V would be recreating old technology -- making boosters would be a particular sticking point -- and getting the launch pad stuff ready for them rather than, say, shuttles.
(Not that going to Mars necessarily has anything to do with Saturn Vs -- or Atlas-Agena B target ships for that matter, as long as we're assuming we're re-creating old technologies.)
Look at the failures of unmanned Mars spacecraft. Even if we had the technology, you would expect a few human-less dry runs first, much like the Apollo missions.
What does that have to do with anything? Um, yeah, speaking of Agena-B unmanned docking ships, they'd obviously have some steps along the way.
The loss of robotic probes, meanwhile, is a reflection of the way those programs work; they accept higher risks in exchange for the lower costs, because there's not the same safety concern. The rover on Mars right now landed in the higher-risk of the two landing sites chosen by the science team. They played the odds, hoping they'd get at least one of them down safely. You can take chances with robots. Beagle 2 was made on the cheap, for an example, with little redundancy in systems. (Oh, well -- it was really the orbiter with its deep-scanning radar that's the bread and butter of that mission, though we're disappointed in the lost chance on the ground.)
Those "honoured" in the past by Time have included the Ayatollah Khomeni -- "Man of the Year" in 1979. A choice to put Rumsfeld on the cover would have been a huge nod to his influence -- after all, he's been writing letters to the President saying we should invade Iraq for security reasons since just after he stopped shaking Saddam Hussein's hand as a private citizen -- but it wouldn't have meant any sort of endorsement on the part of Time.
If anything the POTY issue would have become a two-edged sword: acknowledging, but also revealing, the extent of his influence -- and surely, surely discussing his role as a lightning rod for those who disagree with Bush's policies. (And even for those who agree; Italy and Spain begged Bush to keep Rummy on a leash before the Security Council's meeting with Powell, because all his "old Europe" comments were pissing everyone off.)
According to "The Hill," from which this story came,
Time Managing Editor James Kelly...in an editor's note recount(ed) that when he and several other editors "met with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in November to talk about the war, [the Defense Secretary] made the pitch, unsolicited by us, that the Person of the Year should be the American soldier. (Or as he put it, the American volunteer.)"
What Rummy did was shrewd. He's deflecting fire from himself by equating the military with the policies it carries out.
Time, meanwhile, has just accepted editorial direction from Donald Rumsfeld. (Those rascally liberals in the media! What won't they do to shoot down this President! It's an outrage!)
Would anyone on Slashdot respond just to "score points" for the edification of some imagined third party? Heck, not me.
We'd agree that live music played as a part of a performance, with silent movies, is a different animal than recorded soundtracks including voices -- and that the change was a "revolution" in the sense you mean. What I was reacting to was just that characterization of silent movie music:
"a human voice not of your choosing and a piano"
That isn't what happened at silent movies. It's a stereotype. People already were hearing music with their movies, and it wasn't just some guy banging out ragtime hits, it was a small professional orchestra. In reality the big change was being able to synchronize voices with the image. Somewhat more control over the music's timing and so on was a lot less "revolutionary."
Maybe your terms are somewhat off your point for me, too. "Quality" and "Quantity" don't seem like the words you want -- as "points on a continuum" they don't quite work. I do "get" the idea that at some point enough change in, say, the speed of video cards will become, or at least almost force, a difference in the essential character of what's being done. Somewhere in there we got from "ever-more cool sprites" to "3-D modeling" and then later to "holodeck fantasy episodes." It's just the terms that are muddled, for me. ("Quality" is pretty loaded: "character" comes with less baggage, maybe?)
understanding what is possible with "a guy and a piano" will only give you the barest hint of what is possible with a full soundtrack.
What was revolutionary was dialog, voices. The music involved was under more studio control as a result of soundtracks, but that's a tradeoff.
Music for silent movies was a significant artistic "industry." House bands were pros, working many hours a day, and they had to really know their stuff. Studios might specify a theme for certain parts of a movie, and if the theater had that in their library -- theaters had music libraries -- they'd play it. Otherwise they might choose from similar keys and moods. (Under tight time constraints, movie studios use a pretty limited range of themes for their previews now. Think of how many movies use "Carmina Burana" or something close to it for their trailers.)
You wouldn't believe how complete the score could seem, based on the rudimentary "cue sheets" that a movie came with; they could do an hour-and-a-half of music (for a major release) based on cues on one side of a sheet of paper. We're talking about significant live performances of music, not just some guy banging the keys playing ragtime.
Sometime find a local art museum showing, say, an old silent Sci Fi title, and go see someone playing the theremin alongside it. Live music adds something, even if it doesn't synch with the movie as perfectly as a modern score does. It's different, not just a change in quality.
The structure of the Kiplingers "interview" process was seriously awkward when I used their product two years ago. I've found TurboTax to be pretty easy to live with by comparison, the other three times now I've gone with software. Kiplingers just wasn't giving me the same sense of context: where am I in filling this out? What holes are left? That kind of thing.
It may just be a matter of taste, but there was a distinct lack of continuity to TaxCut, from my POV.
and his efforts in the Israel mess have actually been very evenhanded.
We'd completely differ on that one. Bush has backed Sharon's policies one-sidedly, on the grounds that he's fighting terrorism. He's aligned himself with the hard-line Likud, which of course you'd expect given that the opposition is "labor."
As far as the elitism and Walmart and NASCAR goes, I'm not seeing it. I live in Minnesota. Do my compost-pile-obsessing friends typically go to NASCAR events or Walmart? No. Do they spend a lot of time deriding people who do? Not particularly. The upper-middle-class liberals you're speaking for don't say those things to me. Seems like an attitude that's being projected on them, to me.
as well as bruised egos left the people ripe for ideological exploitation like Hitler did.
One of my pet peeves is the way we assume we know stuff about the psychological state of "the German people" in this particular case. I had a textbook in college about how the Germans, each and every one of them, had a father complex as a result of The Great War. Seriously.
Can't we just accept the consequences of Versailles without going into a bunch of mumbo-jumbo pop psychology? I don't mind sociological explanations -- resentment of Versailles, and in particular of its economic consequences -- just the mind reading we're supposed to be able to use to explain an entire society at once.
This is like saying Americans are accepting these increased security measures because we're all so "co-dependent." You may as well cite Chinese astrology to explain that the "Ram Generation" in America is particularly accepting of involvement in Afghanistan due to its fondness for mountains.
He created scapegoats for existing problems in the person of the Jew....
If Hitler "created" antisemitism, there's a long history I just don't understand. This biography I'm reading about several generations of Czech women makes no sense at all...
When the alarm goes off, you'd have to demonstrate that you are awake by repeating a random pattern of button presses on the clock.
Your described game is actually my experience every morning. For some reason basically all the alarm clocks I can find come with impossible-to-operate-when-groggy switches, plastic tabs, hard-to-press tiny buttons, and so on, making every morning an adventure. I seriously shopped for something cool and new in these for about three weeks before I completely gave up. There's a nightmare of idiotic user interfaces out there, all meant to be used when sleepy.
Before we knock ourselves out getting someone to develop elaborate games to make waking up even more ridiculous, could we maybe get one alarm clock maker to market a decent, acceptable, basic clock?
Buttons big enough to use, comfortably, with my human fingers?
No, we don't need the time projected onto the wall or ceiling -- just make it readable without my prescription lenses, that's enough.
I should be able to turn the alarm off without "missing" that spot on the miniscule sliding switch and overshooting it to some other lame setting. While I am still sleepy. Without squinting too much to find the tiny labels you used.
When I'm setting the alarm time, do you think maybe I could clearly tell that I'm not screwing up the time instead? Please don't make them two totally identical-looking buttons differentiated by tiny label text printed on some smooth, rounded surface of the case.
And speaking of identical-looking things, why is "PM" the same exact little dot as "Alarm on," only in a different position? Do these seem like analogous messages to anyone??
The battery backup thing is halfway there, but if it's still plugged in this is the one clock that really needs that "set by atomic clock signal" feature. When it bounces, my alarm clock needs to recover and be right.
Then we can get them to add the neat stuff they've failed to think of:
"Don't let me snooze past this point (specific time, number of repetitions) setting, please.
Variable-length snooze would be good, if it could be simply controlled.
It'd also be cool, when I've hit snooze, to be able to see a sort of countdown of how long until it goes off again. Ever find yourself half-awake, wondering how long?
Various nature noise features that nobody asked for, but that are kind of fun to hear before you realize how crappy the tinny speaker really is.
Simon games, and so on.
But criminy, could they at least make the basic thing work, first?
If it has a CF Slot and allows me to download my pictures from my digitial camera to it, It will be valuable to me
A hard drive for storing and looking at pictures? Um, probably not at this price point, given the relative expenses of the iPod or a tablet PC. Not along with MS's DRM and standards-takeover undercurrents, surely.
a GPS device, and there is Mapopolis... I already use my iPaq for that, it just seems that this has a bigger HD and a Bigger Screen.
This is meant to be a purpose-built "portable multimedia device," and the fact that we're reaching to think of the stuff it might hypothetically be good for instead means it's not hitting any sort of sweet spot there. If they meant it as a glorified PDA you can do all sorts of other stuff with, that's sure not what they're saying it is right now...
Not sure if you can get to actual sucking in R ratings, yet. Handling, yes, but sucking? In the US we're still way more squeamish about sex (as opposed to implied sex) than about violence.
I went to see a PG-13 movie last year, and it was full of incredibly disturbing violent images. Someone choked someone else to death -- played for laughs in the movie. Someone stabbed someone else's neck many times until, all on camera, the victim wheezed and died. PG-13.
Meanwhile, if you see anything more than a glimpse of flesh, of if (Lord forbid) you have a character say the "F word" more than twice, you get slapped with an automatic "R" rating. (The F word in particular seems to be an MPAA rule: count the number of them, and you know what to rate the movie. 'Cause, you know, kids between 13 and 17 never hear that word. Wouldn't want to corrupt them with this reference to "F'ing.")
I'm with Lenny Bruce: Nobody ever commits a murder in an X-rated movie, so really I'd rather my kids saw those than the latest superviolent "action" film that glorifies unrepentent killing.
What nature shows are you watching???
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Lonely Planets
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...is there any species that is more "advanced" than another that doesn't prey on the weaker species?
Lions do not prey on ants or cranes. Orangutans don't catch the rabbits that live in their enclosure with them at one of my local zoos. Why aren't they attacking each other? Which of those species is most "advanced"?
You don't know what you mean by that word, even as it applies to nature.
In nature, it seems that the strong always dominate the weak.
Not so. The natural world is way the heck more complex, and far more likely to result in peaceful coexistence or symbiotic relationships, than you're imagining. I notice the chickadees and nuthatches and wrens in my back yard aren't engaged in anything but a sort of indirect competition for the resources that they all need. I notice that some species of bird choose to "mob" birds of prey when it's mating season, whereas others do it all year round, and others don't at all. Which species is "stronger" than the others, please?
In this case, anyway, what you're saying amounts to a variation on social Darwinism, so let's take an example: Columbus landed in the new world, and one of the things his crew noticed immediately was that people lived much longer among the "Indians" than they did in Europe. Everyone was struck by all the elderly people around. So, which society was "more advanced"? Were the Europeans 'superior models' because they'd been exposed to diseases that American populations had never seen? (Does that make Africans superior to Europeans who never could truly colonize the malarial latitudes there?)
Life as a hierarchy of "advanced" and "less advanced" creatures is a misrepresentation of nature (and Darwinism), and applied to social interactions among intelligent beings, it's even more ridiculously oversimplified.
(In my book you'd be more justifiably nervous based on the way invasive, non-native species have devastated native populations. The equivalents of Chestnut Blight should keep you up at night, if you're really worried about aliens. Eurasian House Sparrows are much closer to the real worry - unintended and indirect consequences being far more likely than little green men with Napoleon complexes.)
Your examples aren't real
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The truth is, of course, much more complicated, but I think it must fit nicely with their opinion of Americans in general.
I have a friend traveling in Indonesia right now. When she got off the plane with her husband and child, a neighbor of her relations there was nice enough to give them a ride to the home they're staying in. Guy had an Osama Bin Laden sticker in the window of his car.
My point being: things are a lot more complicated, you bet. For example, a quite moderate, friendly, helpful Muslim from a pretty typical rural area has this sticker in his car. He told her he put it up there after Bush's "Crusade" comment early on after 9/11, speaking of W.'s gift for finessing international relations. Her impression was that he regarded it about on the level of the "Support OUR Troops" stickers you see in the US. And this person is quite capable of seeing the difference between "Americans in general" and the policies of a particular administration, and remembers, in excruiciating detail, the claims made about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. More than I can say for my Southern Baptist relations, who've sort of let those details slip if they ever followed them at all.
It ain't just a stereotype on that end. Nor is it in Europe. Like you say: more complicated. If anything Americans have much more stereotypical ideas about French people 'in general' than the other way around, from my experience.
This sort of falls into the same category as effete upper-middle-class liberals sneering at NASCAR fans and Wal-Mart shoppers; apparently arrogant elitism is no longer considered rude.
You maybe haven't yet learned that that entire chapter of Ann Coulter's book was based on a lie? The New York times did run a story the day after Earnhardt's death, you can look. The Walmart reference came from another story a few days later, written by an "effete," Southern, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist. (Is it rude, or just unscrupulous, to make stuff up like that? You'd have to ask Ann.)
Expose would sure clean up my working experience -- W2k, ugh, ugh, ugh -- but to be honest I've never had that much trouble poking around on my home Macs.
Partly I've just got less stuff going on at once, 'cause it's my home machine -- but back when I did graphic design in a Mac shop I was never particularly prone to confusion. (Here in the world of Windows, on the other hand...)
So you're not alone, anyway. It's one okay feature, among several.
Funny how certain stories will catch fire (ahem) every once in a while. If only sharks were to catch brain tumors after having used cell phones habitually, then we'd have a "trend" on our hands. Whoo-boy.
And the trend would be "People develop irrational fears over stuff they don't understand, and once they're in the grip of fear they'll perpetuate it instead of even trying to understand..." Welcome to my Southern Baptist relations' world view.
Incidentally, bull sharks do tend to be involved in more attacks every several years. Something will change about where and when they're mating, apparently. That's when the attacks tend to occur. They're the only big shark that heads into shallow, briny- (or even fresh-)water areas to mate, and people aren't used to watching out for them. The famous New Jersey attacks that inspired Jaws were an example of that. Our big shark stories from a while back didn't even bother telling us that, though. And you're right, the number of attacks that year wasn't particularly high. Sharks just caught the news industry's fancy.
In this case it's just the usual PR release that some lazy reporters and editors passed on to the public. If the shark stories had been shilling repellent devices, that'd be comparable. Personally my elephant repellent business hasn't been doing so well; I'm thinking of writing a press release.
That basically was a press release, or pieces of it. As for how they had this early, try asking Time Canada about the iMac revamp, they may have something to tell you.
My experience working for a PR department showed me that newspapers, particularly smaller or less-renowned ones but the local "big" papers as well, just cobble together pieces of your press release and call it "reporting." This sure looked like some sort of variation on that, to me -- like the Standard's editors hacked up some original copy from Apple.
It's not like they came up with that story based on the rumor sites. It's plain not phrased like a rumor site would have it -- those sites have a clue about store media, capacity, and so on.
All very well and good -- but like most newspapers, they basically seem to have cut-and-pasted bits of a press release from Apple. What, you think they made this up themselves, based on Web sites that're self-described as carrying "rumors"?
I used to work in an art museum, and the local papers would basically print our releases verbatim, with a few nips and tucks for pride's sake, as "news" in the entertainment section. Sure looks like that's what's going on here. (And whatever mediocrity you may see in the paper, well, try seeing it in the fact that they released this story well ahead of its publishing window, the dorks...)
Article "It is intended to target people who want a digital music player but do not need one which can hold music from more CDs then most people could ever own."
And for the people who actually use all those gigs of space, it won't be a replacement backup tool. That wouldn't stop others from treating it like a glorified floppy, though.
800 songs is still some serious space. My 10gb model has, let's see -- 974 songs, with 5.5gb open right now. This'd obsolete my sister's keychain hard drive collection, at any rate.
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He was supposedly a decent candidate for "Deep Throat," the Watergate informer who helped bring Nixon down. He declared he was "in charge" at the White House (Constitution be damned) during the Reagan assassination attempt. Now he's involved with cell phone access schemes?
These airships become more mysterious and sinister all the time, don't they?...
Lewis and Clark speculated about the value of minerals in the Rockies. Didn't spend their lives mining it, though, as without the Missouri and the Columbia hooking up, they'd have had no way to transport their raw materials out. Mining and transportation -- railways in the case of the rockies -- go hand in hand. We're not remotely near ready to lay tracks to Mars.
The visiting expert laughed and said he hadn't heard that one before, basically. If I remember right, he responded that that'd add weight and complexity with little return. (He also said that Mars's axis is tilted [it's around 25 degree, much like earth], making for seasonal changes in the effectiveness of solar panels at any given location.)
NASA's had the Mars Odyssey looking for Beagle 2. Mars Express comes from the European Space Agency. Beagle 2 was British-built. I doubt anyone at NASA's crowing about this. They wouldn't have that little class.
Who said it was magic?
One advantage of moving to an electric lawn mower, or car, is that it's considerably easier to improve pollution controls, and to gain efficiency, at a power plant than it is to, say, set up emissions tests and required repairs for many millions of individual cars. Think of all the grossly inefficient two-cycle lawn mowers out there -- spewing white smoke, flooded. Would you rather take on the task of repairing all those so they burn cleaner and more efficiently, or would you rather move to some sort of electric mower and be able to address pollution and energy inefficiency at the source? Setting aside what we do with the spent batteries, the electric is a decent option. It doesn't just "move the problem somewhere else," it moves it somewhere where you can address it head-on.
The idea is to separate production of the energy from distribution of it, so that you can get the best value during production. That would also be a huge advantage of a hydrogen fuel cell model: yes, liquid hydrogen costs energy to produce, but you can do that at the power plant. Let's say someone develops a better way to control emissions made during production: you get that advantage right away, rather than needing to turn over a generation of cars before you see that incremental change in efficiency or pollution control.
That's for consumer goods, anyway. The argument's different in scale or degree, I guess, for trains, but it's similar: would you rather replace or refurb fabulously expensive train engines when some new pollution-busting technology comes online, or would you rather apply it at the power plant and have everyone benefit right away?
Arggggggh. At least they reversed this for their own apps. (Do we really need to feel like every page on the internet starts with "Microsoft Internet Explorer"? Talk about "branding.")
The chooser in classic Mac OS wasn't "like a start menu." The "Apple Menu" was what the start menu was cribbed from. The chooser was on it, but you used it to "choose" your printer and to mount network drives, and that was it.
You could try dropping an alias (or the originals) for all these things you want to categorize into some sort of folder structure, organized as you like it, and then put the top level folder on the dock. Right-(or option-) click on the dock item, you get your menu. Hoop-de-doo. For a big set of documents, it'd be just fine. Most people seem to have their Apps folder this way, don't they?
If you want something that's sort of a combo of the dock behavior and the menus you say you want, I personally think DragThing is a decent choice. Dragthing also includes a process dock that shows you open apps at all times.
(As far as "Windows does this by shoving every window title into the taskbar," well, no, it doesn't for me. On W2k, here, individual Apps behave differently. DreamWeaver pre-MX showed every open page as a task bar icon; from MX on it's just got one item on the bar at all times. Sometimes Windows will open several instances of a given app on me, depending on how I chose the documents I wanted to open. Highly idiosyncratic behavior for a very basic function.)
He reported on the iTMS exploit by DVD Jon, for example, and he threw in this:
"Apple's primary competitor, Microsoft, created its own DRM scheme for its popular Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) formats but built renewing capabilities into the technology, which helps Microsoft survive security exploits."
Not sure I agree that MS is the main competitor in online music sales (yet), and if you're talking about the two of them you might want to acknowledge that one reason Apple's DRM took off was because it wasn't perceived as being as odious as MS's. Still, he did at least close with: "...Apple has worked hard to strike deals with the recording industry and did a fantastic job of jump-starting the concept of inexpensive, downloadable, legitimate music. Let's hope that this DRM breach won't cause record companies to reverse their decisions to work with online music services."
Not a troll, just a big bad bias? He seems to have said basically positive stuff about Mozilla, too. Still, there are more than enough statements like:
"When you aggregate all the Linux distributions, Linux, not Windows, has had the most security vulnerabilities, year after year."
That's an "urban" legend, up there with the supposed bureaucratic folly behind NASA's pens, which is also nonsense. When it shut down the Apollo program, NASA didn't shrug and say "Nice trip, let's throw away the map." They kept the Saturn V plans for the future, of course. The problem with a new Saturn V would be recreating old technology -- making boosters would be a particular sticking point -- and getting the launch pad stuff ready for them rather than, say, shuttles.
(Not that going to Mars necessarily has anything to do with Saturn Vs -- or Atlas-Agena B target ships for that matter, as long as we're assuming we're re-creating old technologies.)
Look at the failures of unmanned Mars spacecraft. Even if we had the technology, you would expect a few human-less dry runs first, much like the Apollo missions.
What does that have to do with anything? Um, yeah, speaking of Agena-B unmanned docking ships, they'd obviously have some steps along the way.
The loss of robotic probes, meanwhile, is a reflection of the way those programs work; they accept higher risks in exchange for the lower costs, because there's not the same safety concern. The rover on Mars right now landed in the higher-risk of the two landing sites chosen by the science team. They played the odds, hoping they'd get at least one of them down safely. You can take chances with robots. Beagle 2 was made on the cheap, for an example, with little redundancy in systems. (Oh, well -- it was really the orbiter with its deep-scanning radar that's the bread and butter of that mission, though we're disappointed in the lost chance on the ground.)
If anything the POTY issue would have become a two-edged sword: acknowledging, but also revealing, the extent of his influence -- and surely, surely discussing his role as a lightning rod for those who disagree with Bush's policies. (And even for those who agree; Italy and Spain begged Bush to keep Rummy on a leash before the Security Council's meeting with Powell, because all his "old Europe" comments were pissing everyone off.)
According to "The Hill," from which this story came,
Time Managing Editor James Kelly ...in an editor's note recount(ed) that when he and several other editors "met with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in November to talk about the war, [the Defense Secretary] made the pitch, unsolicited by us, that the Person of the Year should be the American soldier. (Or as he put it, the American volunteer.)"
What Rummy did was shrewd. He's deflecting fire from himself by equating the military with the policies it carries out.
Time, meanwhile, has just accepted editorial direction from Donald Rumsfeld. (Those rascally liberals in the media! What won't they do to shoot down this President! It's an outrage!)
We'd agree that live music played as a part of a performance, with silent movies, is a different animal than recorded soundtracks including voices -- and that the change was a "revolution" in the sense you mean. What I was reacting to was just that characterization of silent movie music:
"a human voice not of your choosing and a piano"
That isn't what happened at silent movies. It's a stereotype. People already were hearing music with their movies, and it wasn't just some guy banging out ragtime hits, it was a small professional orchestra. In reality the big change was being able to synchronize voices with the image. Somewhat more control over the music's timing and so on was a lot less "revolutionary."
Maybe your terms are somewhat off your point for me, too. "Quality" and "Quantity" don't seem like the words you want -- as "points on a continuum" they don't quite work. I do "get" the idea that at some point enough change in, say, the speed of video cards will become, or at least almost force, a difference in the essential character of what's being done. Somewhere in there we got from "ever-more cool sprites" to "3-D modeling" and then later to "holodeck fantasy episodes." It's just the terms that are muddled, for me. ("Quality" is pretty loaded: "character" comes with less baggage, maybe?)
What was revolutionary was dialog, voices. The music involved was under more studio control as a result of soundtracks, but that's a tradeoff.
Music for silent movies was a significant artistic "industry." House bands were pros, working many hours a day, and they had to really know their stuff. Studios might specify a theme for certain parts of a movie, and if the theater had that in their library -- theaters had music libraries -- they'd play it. Otherwise they might choose from similar keys and moods. (Under tight time constraints, movie studios use a pretty limited range of themes for their previews now. Think of how many movies use "Carmina Burana" or something close to it for their trailers.)
You wouldn't believe how complete the score could seem, based on the rudimentary "cue sheets" that a movie came with; they could do an hour-and-a-half of music (for a major release) based on cues on one side of a sheet of paper. We're talking about significant live performances of music, not just some guy banging the keys playing ragtime.
Sometime find a local art museum showing, say, an old silent Sci Fi title, and go see someone playing the theremin alongside it. Live music adds something, even if it doesn't synch with the movie as perfectly as a modern score does. It's different, not just a change in quality.
It may just be a matter of taste, but there was a distinct lack of continuity to TaxCut, from my POV.
We'd completely differ on that one. Bush has backed Sharon's policies one-sidedly, on the grounds that he's fighting terrorism. He's aligned himself with the hard-line Likud, which of course you'd expect given that the opposition is "labor."
As far as the elitism and Walmart and NASCAR goes, I'm not seeing it. I live in Minnesota. Do my compost-pile-obsessing friends typically go to NASCAR events or Walmart? No. Do they spend a lot of time deriding people who do? Not particularly. The upper-middle-class liberals you're speaking for don't say those things to me. Seems like an attitude that's being projected on them, to me.
One of my pet peeves is the way we assume we know stuff about the psychological state of "the German people" in this particular case. I had a textbook in college about how the Germans, each and every one of them, had a father complex as a result of The Great War. Seriously.
Can't we just accept the consequences of Versailles without going into a bunch of mumbo-jumbo pop psychology? I don't mind sociological explanations -- resentment of Versailles, and in particular of its economic consequences -- just the mind reading we're supposed to be able to use to explain an entire society at once.
This is like saying Americans are accepting these increased security measures because we're all so "co-dependent." You may as well cite Chinese astrology to explain that the "Ram Generation" in America is particularly accepting of involvement in Afghanistan due to its fondness for mountains.
He created scapegoats for existing problems in the person of the Jew....
If Hitler "created" antisemitism, there's a long history I just don't understand. This biography I'm reading about several generations of Czech women makes no sense at all...
Your described game is actually my experience every morning. For some reason basically all the alarm clocks I can find come with impossible-to-operate-when-groggy switches, plastic tabs, hard-to-press tiny buttons, and so on, making every morning an adventure. I seriously shopped for something cool and new in these for about three weeks before I completely gave up. There's a nightmare of idiotic user interfaces out there, all meant to be used when sleepy.
Before we knock ourselves out getting someone to develop elaborate games to make waking up even more ridiculous, could we maybe get one alarm clock maker to market a decent, acceptable, basic clock?
Then we can get them to add the neat stuff they've failed to think of:
But criminy, could they at least make the basic thing work, first?
A hard drive for storing and looking at pictures? Um, probably not at this price point, given the relative expenses of the iPod or a tablet PC. Not along with MS's DRM and standards-takeover undercurrents, surely.
a GPS device, and there is Mapopolis... I already use my iPaq for that, it just seems that this has a bigger HD and a Bigger Screen.
This is meant to be a purpose-built "portable multimedia device," and the fact that we're reaching to think of the stuff it might hypothetically be good for instead means it's not hitting any sort of sweet spot there. If they meant it as a glorified PDA you can do all sorts of other stuff with, that's sure not what they're saying it is right now...
Not sure if you can get to actual sucking in R ratings, yet. Handling, yes, but sucking? In the US we're still way more squeamish about sex (as opposed to implied sex) than about violence.
I went to see a PG-13 movie last year, and it was full of incredibly disturbing violent images. Someone choked someone else to death -- played for laughs in the movie. Someone stabbed someone else's neck many times until, all on camera, the victim wheezed and died. PG-13.
Meanwhile, if you see anything more than a glimpse of flesh, of if (Lord forbid) you have a character say the "F word" more than twice, you get slapped with an automatic "R" rating. (The F word in particular seems to be an MPAA rule: count the number of them, and you know what to rate the movie. 'Cause, you know, kids between 13 and 17 never hear that word. Wouldn't want to corrupt them with this reference to "F'ing.")
I'm with Lenny Bruce: Nobody ever commits a murder in an X-rated movie, so really I'd rather my kids saw those than the latest superviolent "action" film that glorifies unrepentent killing.
Lions do not prey on ants or cranes. Orangutans don't catch the rabbits that live in their enclosure with them at one of my local zoos. Why aren't they attacking each other? Which of those species is most "advanced"?
You don't know what you mean by that word, even as it applies to nature.
In nature, it seems that the strong always dominate the weak.
Not so. The natural world is way the heck more complex, and far more likely to result in peaceful coexistence or symbiotic relationships, than you're imagining. I notice the chickadees and nuthatches and wrens in my back yard aren't engaged in anything but a sort of indirect competition for the resources that they all need. I notice that some species of bird choose to "mob" birds of prey when it's mating season, whereas others do it all year round, and others don't at all. Which species is "stronger" than the others, please?
In this case, anyway, what you're saying amounts to a variation on social Darwinism, so let's take an example: Columbus landed in the new world, and one of the things his crew noticed immediately was that people lived much longer among the "Indians" than they did in Europe. Everyone was struck by all the elderly people around. So, which society was "more advanced"? Were the Europeans 'superior models' because they'd been exposed to diseases that American populations had never seen? (Does that make Africans superior to Europeans who never could truly colonize the malarial latitudes there?)
Life as a hierarchy of "advanced" and "less advanced" creatures is a misrepresentation of nature (and Darwinism), and applied to social interactions among intelligent beings, it's even more ridiculously oversimplified.
(In my book you'd be more justifiably nervous based on the way invasive, non-native species have devastated native populations. The equivalents of Chestnut Blight should keep you up at night, if you're really worried about aliens. Eurasian House Sparrows are much closer to the real worry - unintended and indirect consequences being far more likely than little green men with Napoleon complexes.)
The truth is, of course, much more complicated, but I think it must fit nicely with their opinion of Americans in general.
I have a friend traveling in Indonesia right now. When she got off the plane with her husband and child, a neighbor of her relations there was nice enough to give them a ride to the home they're staying in. Guy had an Osama Bin Laden sticker in the window of his car.
My point being: things are a lot more complicated, you bet. For example, a quite moderate, friendly, helpful Muslim from a pretty typical rural area has this sticker in his car. He told her he put it up there after Bush's "Crusade" comment early on after 9/11, speaking of W.'s gift for finessing international relations. Her impression was that he regarded it about on the level of the "Support OUR Troops" stickers you see in the US. And this person is quite capable of seeing the difference between "Americans in general" and the policies of a particular administration, and remembers, in excruiciating detail, the claims made about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. More than I can say for my Southern Baptist relations, who've sort of let those details slip if they ever followed them at all.
It ain't just a stereotype on that end. Nor is it in Europe. Like you say: more complicated. If anything Americans have much more stereotypical ideas about French people 'in general' than the other way around, from my experience.
This sort of falls into the same category as effete upper-middle-class liberals sneering at NASCAR fans and Wal-Mart shoppers; apparently arrogant elitism is no longer considered rude.
You maybe haven't yet learned that that entire chapter of Ann Coulter's book was based on a lie? The New York times did run a story the day after Earnhardt's death, you can look. The Walmart reference came from another story a few days later, written by an "effete," Southern, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist. (Is it rude, or just unscrupulous, to make stuff up like that? You'd have to ask Ann.)
Partly I've just got less stuff going on at once, 'cause it's my home machine -- but back when I did graphic design in a Mac shop I was never particularly prone to confusion. (Here in the world of Windows, on the other hand...)
So you're not alone, anyway. It's one okay feature, among several.
Funny how certain stories will catch fire (ahem) every once in a while. If only sharks were to catch brain tumors after having used cell phones habitually, then we'd have a "trend" on our hands. Whoo-boy.
And the trend would be "People develop irrational fears over stuff they don't understand, and once they're in the grip of fear they'll perpetuate it instead of even trying to understand..." Welcome to my Southern Baptist relations' world view.
Incidentally, bull sharks do tend to be involved in more attacks every several years. Something will change about where and when they're mating, apparently. That's when the attacks tend to occur. They're the only big shark that heads into shallow, briny- (or even fresh-)water areas to mate, and people aren't used to watching out for them. The famous New Jersey attacks that inspired Jaws were an example of that. Our big shark stories from a while back didn't even bother telling us that, though. And you're right, the number of attacks that year wasn't particularly high. Sharks just caught the news industry's fancy.
In this case it's just the usual PR release that some lazy reporters and editors passed on to the public. If the shark stories had been shilling repellent devices, that'd be comparable. Personally my elephant repellent business hasn't been doing so well; I'm thinking of writing a press release.
My experience working for a PR department showed me that newspapers, particularly smaller or less-renowned ones but the local "big" papers as well, just cobble together pieces of your press release and call it "reporting." This sure looked like some sort of variation on that, to me -- like the Standard's editors hacked up some original copy from Apple.
It's not like they came up with that story based on the rumor sites. It's plain not phrased like a rumor site would have it -- those sites have a clue about store media, capacity, and so on.
I used to work in an art museum, and the local papers would basically print our releases verbatim, with a few nips and tucks for pride's sake, as "news" in the entertainment section. Sure looks like that's what's going on here. (And whatever mediocrity you may see in the paper, well, try seeing it in the fact that they released this story well ahead of its publishing window, the dorks...)
And for the people who actually use all those gigs of space, it won't be a replacement backup tool. That wouldn't stop others from treating it like a glorified floppy, though.
800 songs is still some serious space. My 10gb model has, let's see -- 974 songs, with 5.5gb open right now. This'd obsolete my sister's keychain hard drive collection, at any rate.