Looking around a little, it seems like OS X didn't support Hebrew until 10.2 -- "Jaguar."
Just one of the many things that OS X plain didn't have going for it on release. (Personally I've never thought the Finder was up to the design standard of the pre-X OS. "Panther" does a lot to smooth that out; all the little perceived speed gains mean as much as Expose for me.)
Looks like Apple only claims two new "international" features for the Panther release:
Keyboard Viewer Palette View keyboard layout and enter text with mouse clicks via system floating palette.
Unicode 4 Support Take advantage of support for new languages as defined by the latest Unicode standard.
Both Arabic and Hebrew were on the "broad support for" list as of 10.2 -- whatever "broad support" may mean... If you were using 10.1 or earlier, it claimed no Hebrew support to speak of.
"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."
How would you feel about ArsTechnica's review, which included benchmarks? First sentence: "Panther is faster than Jaguar." They've got benchmarks -- albeit on a G5 not a "Wallstreet" -- but more to the point, they also go into exactly the sort of "anecdotal" stuff you're dismissing in your search for pure metals:
"But "perceived performance" is where Mac OS X has always suffered. As far as the user experience is concerned, if it "feels slow," it is slow. Panther has improved here as well. I am hard-pressed to find any part of the user interface that does not feel noticeably faster in Panther than it does in Jaguar. It's as if the cobwebs have been removed from the OS. There are far fewer "uncomfortable pauses" in the UI. Animations have fewer frames, and therefore complete faster. Yes, even windows resize slightly faster."
Boot speed across basically any system capable of running OS X has also been improved markedly. This is one of Steve Jobs' "things"; as far back as the original Macs, one of the "insanely great" things he insisted on was a boot speed within a certain amount of time.
This person's friend is reacting to a genuine effort by Apple to improve their users' experience.
I've seen people using the OS to browse and do basic office stuff in Japanese, anyway, in OS X -- they were using what (scrounging on Apple's site) Apple seems to call the "advanced predictive input method for typing, which guesses which character you want based on context." Said it was handy.
OS X claims to support:
"localized versions of English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Brazilian and Portuguese
with broad support for:
many additional languages, including Thai, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Hawaiian, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Armenian, Russian and Greek"
That would be the default install of 10.3. One of the intall disks for Panther is basically full of the international options; lots of users turn it off when they do the install, to save space on their hard drives.
One of the biggest challenges seems to be to 'calibrate' all the measurements that were done over time with different methods.
First thing I thought of -- Ships' logs took weather damn seriously in the age of sail, but all the various experimental instruments to gauge salinity and temperature at different depths and so on would be just crazy to try to work with now. (Humboldt would be so proud to know we're using his stuff, but he was hardly confident in the results he got even then.)
We're talking about captains who carried multiple chronometers on board because they had serious trouble with something as basic as longitude, you know? Just figuring out where the ship is when it makes a log entry would take some work.
Hard to imagine not looking at this stuff, though, given how much data there is and how long it was recorded. That's a serious load of climate information, by people for whom it was life's blood.
Isn't that one of your favorite arguments made by people who don't want to even consider action to address GW? "It's been hot before, and earth supported lots of life then." Brilliant.
Any even passing knowledge of history, just little old human history, will show you the sorts of catastrophic social changes that occur as a result of serious climate change. The Mfecane in SE Africa was a massive migration caused by climate change there: Shaka Zulu was the end result. Krakatoa erupting around 535 A.D., affecting the global climate for a handful of years, may have indirectly caused "plague, famine, death, great migration, the fall of the great Mexican city of Teotihuacan, the Anglo-Saxon victory over the Celts, and may even have played a role in the rise of Islam."
Global climate change will make the world a much more volatile place, and that doesn't just mean floods and tornados. Would we like to have a nuclear power like Russia, or the United States, go through catastrophic climate change? No, that would be a bad thing. It doesn't take any imagination at all to see what the potential effects might be -- it just takes the barest respect for history.
This ain't something we can hide our heads in the sand over. But as long as a facile argument will soothe us back to sleep, we'll try to ignore it, best we can.
don't you think it'll get into the baby without going through the mother's breast first?
I get your point, but maybe you aren't remembering how the whole nursing scene works? During the first, oh, six months of life, babies that are breastfed basically get all their nourishment from mom. They're not eating fish themselves, no. And their nervous system isn't a fully-developed adult one at that time, it's developing -- so mercury, say, can do more damage to them.
(And I don't know -- in the world of US politics today, isn't this a way to keep the house from burning? A few years ago, when environmentalists brought a fish from a badly polluted, mercury-heavy river to one of our esteemed governors, the guy ate the fish at a press conference -- that'll show those environuts, right? Boy, we really scored a symbolic victory there.... In a climate like that, where you gonna start? With the population that's immediately vulnerable, maybe. Babies are vulnerable to the short-sighted decisions we make. People can't sniff and dismiss babies in quite the same offhand way they do every other attempt to wake them up -- "Spotted Owl hugger" doesn't quite do the trick.)
Fallout and the sequel were great (though F2 was really "more and bigger of the same" in my book). But those are basically what the parent is talking about -- "fantasy" SF. They don't introduce any real variation to the fantasy game play model. One-on-one combat, big scary boss monsters, a party that collects more-or-less "magic" esoteric artifacts, and so on.
I basically agree that having the dragons be "death claws" worked pretty well, and that I could just die before I see another dwarf or wizard. But if Fallout's as close to a departure as we can think of, well... that apple ain't too far from the tree.
the guy must have been using the battery in something else before he got is iPod.
So let's see... S/he bought an original iPod right when it came out, but then immediately swapped out the battery it came with for an older one from something else? Gosh, I'm sure glad the other one fit. Otherwise that might be a completely awkward thing to do, in addition to being stupid and pointless.
We'll take that as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion and continue to assume that the original post here is trolling somewhat clumsily.
Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been much of a movie if the Japanese hadn't attacked
Um, how much worse could it possibly have been?
On the CGI point, I guess, "Pearl" might have been considerably better without the real-life shots of the American carrier group standing in for the Japanese fleet... what with the nuclear carrier along in escort and all. I'd rather have seen "fake" versions that looked like the Kaga and the Akagi, in that case.
Personally I found the colossal scale of the Two Towers battles not to capture the feeling I had about the same battles reading the books back when. Tolkien had been through a war, he understood that the people in them didn't really have the view we've got in that movie -- above it all, seeing the scale of it and all. War's dehumanizing effects on people were a big part of the books. The battles are much less central, and the way they were used in "Towers" put me off. I'd have been happy with less screaming orcs.
Well, cut 'em some slack. Even the headline on the article itself is misleading: "When Words Collide: Organizing Your E-mail Inbox." Doesn't say it's organizing the message contents, just the inbox.
And this idea is sort of like doing both. It's not just that you see the contents of a given chain of responses nested this way; the messages themselves aren't discrete in that way any more. Or so they say:
In Venolia's interface you view conversations as a whole instead of as individual messages.
Personally, I don't see this helping me in e-mail. The branching method quickly becomes ambiguous, looking at their screen shot, and any vagueness (as when Joel G. says something about "getting" the music story instead) is going to lead to too many branches -- the kicker being no one place to look for a clear summary of what got resolved. With an e-mail, I have that final list in one discrete place, which is kind of where I want it, you know? I don't want to have to reconstruct the tree of the conversation to find out that Joel's on the big Charity Ball item and not on the Jaywalking one he started with... And is he doing the Music story? I'm at a loss on that last point, given the example they're using to show me how useful this is. The other two get resolved in two separate places, too. Ugh.
(Add to that the little details, like archiving. What happens when my godawful Notes server runs out of space and I start having users archive messages? Can they only do it by "conversation"? Lots of people start a new "conversation" by quickly replying to an old message they have around; how many screwed up message trees will that create?)
Like I said, seems like chat to me. If people could effectively quote each other and remember to copy each other on messages, I'd be happy with regular old e-mail for what it does.
...I don't see Apple just porting the store and not the rest of the features iTunes has. From what I've seen, they seem to want to keep everything together in products like that, because the presentation and the total package are a vital part of their image.
Hyup, that would be Apple. Pretty clearly, the iTMS basically works as a Web application; they could do the whole thing using an analogous Web site and be able to sell to basically anyone, if what they wanted was to sell tracks of music. Instead they've restricted access to the store for their player only.
iTunes is a very nice little jukebox, it rips and burns (at okay but not great speeds), it has the little store, and it works awfully well with your iPod. the package is all very "together" and decently designed, in the Generalisimo Jobs tradition. That last part is the whole reason for the iTMS: the iTMS is a loss leader for selling iPods, or that's why they did it anyway.
Similarly, the iLife "suite" -- iMovie, iPhoto, etc. -- is a loss leader for selling Apple machines, too. That'd be Apple. (And I'm a satisfied little customer myself, FWIW. Enjoyable to use.)
Leaving alone the "War on Terror" promotional posters on military bases, take a look at the recruitment ads. Awfully polished, that Army of One thing. Does anyone else find it a little disturbing that the Army's contracted for that free "America's Army" FPS game, to show kids the crossover between shooters and the service? Sort of takes the fun out of it for me, you know?
It's kind of interesting, actually, that candidates for office don't do this stuff. Even Arnold S. didn't play up his action hero image in running for Gub'nor. If anything he dressed much more schlubbily for the campaign. Apparently we like a little nerdy wonkishness in our leaders? Is that it?
(Who knows, though -- maybe we'll see Wesley Clark try it. There are at least a couple of action hero moments in that guy's career, complete with the car winch from the front of my G.I. Joe jeep in one case I think... He's got no experience in any office, but give him a decent director and the guy's got some good footage in him.)
This sort of thing gets said about planes all the time, the contrast being with computers pretty often. Bill Gates, I think, has said stuff like "If airplanes had progressed as much as computers in the last X years, we'd be flying to x-and-so for $10 in 10 minutes." And progress was that rapid for a while.
Thing is, any industry will go through a period during which it grows by leaps and bounds at first, but then levels off and doesn't change nearly as dramatically.
You can describe the same rough curve in talking about, say, your skills as a tennis player. At first almost anything you learn is going to improve your game dramatically, right? (Hey, now I can hit a backhand that'll get near the court!) As you get better and better, the period between big jumps in your ability is going to be longer. Eventually, at the pro level, the difference in skills between one player and another is very fine, and you can't just improve 10 places in the rankings by spending an extra day practicing like you could before.
(And while the planes aren't changing that much, I'd say our ability to work the logistics of how to move them around has in the last twenty-five years or so. Fedex was a risky proposition, at first, 'cause nobody thought it'd work economically. Similarly, in military applications the way planes have folded in new innovations in computing and communications has been impressive.)
This is the company that held out against the dreaded letterboxing for years, with critics as vocal as Roger Ebert laying into them all the while. They wouldn't carry any DVD that didn't include a "Full screen" version.
Either they've recently gotten a clue, or the financial and logistic irritations of region coding just are far more present for them than any artistic concern.
Either way, yes, they do have the clout to make a huge difference on this one. Blockbuster alone was enough to keep some films coming out with a "special" Full screen version.
Easily the most atmospheric music I've heard in a game. These CDs weren't a collection of singles, they weren't thrashing "momentum music." They did what a great movie soundtrack does: evoked the mood and setting, and just plain were full of very decent scored music.
This seriously isn't meant as a troll; I'm basically agreeing in general but not in specific with the parent post -- but take a look at the way this sort of "opinion piece - rebuttal" dialog goes in the political realm, and you get a sense of why this guy responded as he did. It isn't just that he was pissed off, it's that sometimes you have to puncture the hot air balloon a bit.
Take Ann Coulter -- not to pick sides, but just as the best example of this phenomenon that occurs to me. Coulter makes a big, long rant about how the New York Times didn't even cover Dale Earnhardt's death until days later into the centerpiece of one of her books. The Times, she says, didn't even run a story until days later, when they ran a snooty piece about how the Wal-Mart was silent in mourning. And so on. She's running down the Times in every possible way for its arrogance and elitism, and so on.
Al Franken, in his recent book, points out that this would be a great example for Ann to use, if only it were true. And he photocopies the front page of the Times the day after Earnhardt's death -- on which they ran a very large headline about the accident and Earnhardt's life.
Now, does it rank as a horrible insult and a discredit to his position that Franken includes Coulter among his list of "Liars"? Does it really discredit this guy's arguments when he describes the PC Magazine column by saying it "epitomizes the concept of yellow journalism"? To my mind, not if he makes that specific charge into more than a name. And he does -- he demonstrates how the PC Mag. article proceeded from its biases and manipulated the reader, seemingly out of malice and to promote a certain POV for its own sake.
Reading both opinion columns, this rebuttal was well within bounds. At most he fed a troll, but you know, a published troll is somehow fairer game than just anyone's/. post.
Smithsonian magazine had a sort of overview of Korean history and culture a few months back. (That's a big pdf of the whole article. The link page at http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issue s03/jul03/korea.html doesn't mention the gaming angle.)
The article's framed as a look at the time since the Korean war, so the modern "PC bang" culture in the South makes a nice contrast. Detail:
"With 400 computer terminals, Megawebstation, located deep in the COEX mall, is one of the largest PC bangs. It is also the site of tournament matches for Starcraft, an on-line game. Oh's cable station broadcasts the matches to a nationwide audience of millions. Why in the world, I wonder, would so many people watch televised games they could play themselves? "For the same reason people watch championship golf," says Oh. "They want to see the best athletes and maybe pick up techniques to improve their own game."
The Eisenhower interstates are often built through and into the hearts of our major cities, and that wasn't an inevitable thing; there was real tension and debate over whether to just make them skirt the big towns, rather than going in.
In California, for example, Reagan pushed to have the interstate come right out into the Fisherman's Wharf area, but that got nixed. In the Twin Cities, where I live, we have a "Days of Rondo" celebration every year -- the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul having been cut in two and basically destroyed by the construction of the highway. (Poor [and black] neighborhood, had no political clout to defend itself.)
Anyway, though, we paid such an expense before, once. The social cost to this one would be less, but the physical costs of construction would boggle the mind. The Minneapolis airport's tunnel for light rail was a huge endeavor, and that's when the city's been planning ahead for twenty-odd years at least.
Okay, this is kind of a neat idea, but doesn't it seem like jerking the mission people's sleep cycles around all the time might be kind of a bad thing?
Do you perform your best when you're exhausted, or even when you're just out of your routine? I know I flub routine stuff then -- or I spend energy remembering where I put my keys, so that the more challenging, more abstract stuff on my list gets less attention.
Maybe NASA needs to ask factories that have changing shift structures how they get things done, you know?
And who pays for this? Seems different.
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Smart Billboards
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Out of passing (pun intended) curiosity, will this work for anything but the wholly-owned model like the Ford sales lot in the NYT article? I can see that idea -- country listeners want the F150s, the "alternative" station maybe gets the Ford Focus picture. But many companies don't have products for every demographic. Do they just not want to consider this option, then?
Most billboard business is based on renting the space. If you have to rely on a radio station's demographic to get your ad up there, how would you pro-rate that rental fee? Does the radio station get anything out of it, if you try it that way? And so on. Seems like a substantially different business model could build around this idea -- something "hits"-like.
(And more importantly, what does this mean for public service announcements? If I'm driving down the road and all the billboards are tailoring themselves to messages about the D.A.R.E. program, am I listening to Rush Limbaugh, or what? How about if all the pictures turn to messages about abortion?)
If by "fixing the tone" you meant "conducting a scorched earth presidency," then yep, I guess he "fixed" it. I notice you're not willing to put your name to that little AC troll, though.
(I'm an independent voter, voted for Bush's dad, and our previous Republican governor, and for Clinton. I read a fair amount of history, and Eisenhower would be on my list of deeply admired public figures. W. Bush is so far outside my voting range I can't imagine voting for him. Make me a screaming leftist?)
During the 2000 race, when Georgie W. went to Bob Jones University, he was doing it for exactly this reason. The primaries are when you court people a little to one side of your party, and then once you're elected you "move toward the center." Bush went hard to the social right, that was the signal he was flying at Bob Jones, and then once he was the nominee he soft-shoed those sides of his platform.
During the nomination process for any office you'll see this. Tim Pawlenty, our Minnesota Governor, was much more open about his right leanings durnig the nomination process. Once he got into the general election phase he emphasized his fiscal responsibility pitch. Totally obvious truism of the election process in this nation.
And in case you were wondering, you might want to ask yourself whether Bush, after having run on the promise of restoring trust and "fixing the tone" in Washington, has done anything to live up to those promises. Does anyone think Bush has "fixed the tone" in Washington?
The administration is hiding those documents because they demonstrate ineptitude.
Mostly that, surely. Of course, the 9/11 commission is intended to address exactly that; the whole reason it's in existence is to establish where we were inept and address it. Bush is stalling improvements to our response to terrorism, apparently, for political reasons.
The other half of what he's not wanting to show, though, is how close we may have been to a bigger, badder situation. During 9/11 the "Doomsday Plane" was scrambled from Edwards. Frontline had some home video of it taking off, if you want to see. That's just ammo for the terrorists -- shows they rattled us just like they meant to, if they needed any further reinforcement of that.
The Republican connections of this company are part of what got it these contracts in the first place. Do a google or two and you can find newpaper articles in which the company's "networking" the various legislatures. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had some.
Also they offered "carrots" like, in Ohio, the potential of manufacturing the machines themselves in the state.
These were competitive bids, and there's at least a significant appearance of a conflict of interest. Something is wrong not just with this company, and not just with irresponsible states, but with the lack of an appropriate process for giving out the contracts. So you're right -- moaning that Diebold is evil (and has the worst PR department in the history of banking) isn't quite up to the level of this problem.
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Looking around a little, it seems like OS X didn't support Hebrew until 10.2 -- "Jaguar."
Just one of the many things that OS X plain didn't have going for it on release. (Personally I've never thought the Finder was up to the design standard of the pre-X OS. "Panther" does a lot to smooth that out; all the little perceived speed gains mean as much as Expose for me.)
Looks like Apple only claims two new "international" features for the Panther release:
Both Arabic and Hebrew were on the "broad support for" list as of 10.2 -- whatever "broad support" may mean... If you were using 10.1 or earlier, it claimed no Hebrew support to speak of.
"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."
Boot speed across basically any system capable of running OS X has also been improved markedly. This is one of Steve Jobs' "things"; as far back as the original Macs, one of the "insanely great" things he insisted on was a boot speed within a certain amount of time.
This person's friend is reacting to a genuine effort by Apple to improve their users' experience.
OS X claims to support:
That would be the default install of 10.3. One of the intall disks for Panther is basically full of the international options; lots of users turn it off when they do the install, to save space on their hard drives.
First thing I thought of -- Ships' logs took weather damn seriously in the age of sail, but all the various experimental instruments to gauge salinity and temperature at different depths and so on would be just crazy to try to work with now. (Humboldt would be so proud to know we're using his stuff, but he was hardly confident in the results he got even then.)
We're talking about captains who carried multiple chronometers on board because they had serious trouble with something as basic as longitude, you know? Just figuring out where the ship is when it makes a log entry would take some work.
Hard to imagine not looking at this stuff, though, given how much data there is and how long it was recorded. That's a serious load of climate information, by people for whom it was life's blood.
Any even passing knowledge of history, just little old human history, will show you the sorts of catastrophic social changes that occur as a result of serious climate change. The Mfecane in SE Africa was a massive migration caused by climate change there: Shaka Zulu was the end result. Krakatoa erupting around 535 A.D., affecting the global climate for a handful of years, may have indirectly caused "plague, famine, death, great migration, the fall of the great Mexican city of Teotihuacan, the Anglo-Saxon victory over the Celts, and may even have played a role in the rise of Islam."
Global climate change will make the world a much more volatile place, and that doesn't just mean floods and tornados. Would we like to have a nuclear power like Russia, or the United States, go through catastrophic climate change? No, that would be a bad thing. It doesn't take any imagination at all to see what the potential effects might be -- it just takes the barest respect for history.
This ain't something we can hide our heads in the sand over. But as long as a facile argument will soothe us back to sleep, we'll try to ignore it, best we can.
I get your point, but maybe you aren't remembering how the whole nursing scene works? During the first, oh, six months of life, babies that are breastfed basically get all their nourishment from mom. They're not eating fish themselves, no. And their nervous system isn't a fully-developed adult one at that time, it's developing -- so mercury, say, can do more damage to them.
(And I don't know -- in the world of US politics today, isn't this a way to keep the house from burning? A few years ago, when environmentalists brought a fish from a badly polluted, mercury-heavy river to one of our esteemed governors, the guy ate the fish at a press conference -- that'll show those environuts, right? Boy, we really scored a symbolic victory there.... In a climate like that, where you gonna start? With the population that's immediately vulnerable, maybe. Babies are vulnerable to the short-sighted decisions we make. People can't sniff and dismiss babies in quite the same offhand way they do every other attempt to wake them up -- "Spotted Owl hugger" doesn't quite do the trick.)
I basically agree that having the dragons be "death claws" worked pretty well, and that I could just die before I see another dwarf or wizard. But if Fallout's as close to a departure as we can think of, well... that apple ain't too far from the tree.
So let's see... S/he bought an original iPod right when it came out, but then immediately swapped out the battery it came with for an older one from something else? Gosh, I'm sure glad the other one fit. Otherwise that might be a completely awkward thing to do, in addition to being stupid and pointless.
We'll take that as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion and continue to assume that the original post here is trolling somewhat clumsily.
Um, how much worse could it possibly have been?
On the CGI point, I guess, "Pearl" might have been considerably better without the real-life shots of the American carrier group standing in for the Japanese fleet... what with the nuclear carrier along in escort and all. I'd rather have seen "fake" versions that looked like the Kaga and the Akagi, in that case.
Personally I found the colossal scale of the Two Towers battles not to capture the feeling I had about the same battles reading the books back when. Tolkien had been through a war, he understood that the people in them didn't really have the view we've got in that movie -- above it all, seeing the scale of it and all. War's dehumanizing effects on people were a big part of the books. The battles are much less central, and the way they were used in "Towers" put me off. I'd have been happy with less screaming orcs.
Well, cut 'em some slack. Even the headline on the article itself is misleading: "When Words Collide: Organizing Your E-mail Inbox." Doesn't say it's organizing the message contents, just the inbox.
And this idea is sort of like doing both. It's not just that you see the contents of a given chain of responses nested this way; the messages themselves aren't discrete in that way any more. Or so they say:
Personally, I don't see this helping me in e-mail. The branching method quickly becomes ambiguous, looking at their screen shot, and any vagueness (as when Joel G. says something about "getting" the music story instead) is going to lead to too many branches -- the kicker being no one place to look for a clear summary of what got resolved. With an e-mail, I have that final list in one discrete place, which is kind of where I want it, you know? I don't want to have to reconstruct the tree of the conversation to find out that Joel's on the big Charity Ball item and not on the Jaywalking one he started with... And is he doing the Music story? I'm at a loss on that last point, given the example they're using to show me how useful this is. The other two get resolved in two separate places, too. Ugh.
(Add to that the little details, like archiving. What happens when my godawful Notes server runs out of space and I start having users archive messages? Can they only do it by "conversation"? Lots of people start a new "conversation" by quickly replying to an old message they have around; how many screwed up message trees will that create?)
Like I said, seems like chat to me. If people could effectively quote each other and remember to copy each other on messages, I'd be happy with regular old e-mail for what it does.
Hyup, that would be Apple. Pretty clearly, the iTMS basically works as a Web application; they could do the whole thing using an analogous Web site and be able to sell to basically anyone, if what they wanted was to sell tracks of music. Instead they've restricted access to the store for their player only.
iTunes is a very nice little jukebox, it rips and burns (at okay but not great speeds), it has the little store, and it works awfully well with your iPod. the package is all very "together" and decently designed, in the Generalisimo Jobs tradition. That last part is the whole reason for the iTMS: the iTMS is a loss leader for selling iPods, or that's why they did it anyway.
Similarly, the iLife "suite" -- iMovie, iPhoto, etc. -- is a loss leader for selling Apple machines, too. That'd be Apple. (And I'm a satisfied little customer myself, FWIW. Enjoyable to use.)
It's kind of interesting, actually, that candidates for office don't do this stuff. Even Arnold S. didn't play up his action hero image in running for Gub'nor. If anything he dressed much more schlubbily for the campaign. Apparently we like a little nerdy wonkishness in our leaders? Is that it?
(Who knows, though -- maybe we'll see Wesley Clark try it. There are at least a couple of action hero moments in that guy's career, complete with the car winch from the front of my G.I. Joe jeep in one case I think... He's got no experience in any office, but give him a decent director and the guy's got some good footage in him.)
This sort of thing gets said about planes all the time, the contrast being with computers pretty often. Bill Gates, I think, has said stuff like "If airplanes had progressed as much as computers in the last X years, we'd be flying to x-and-so for $10 in 10 minutes." And progress was that rapid for a while.
Thing is, any industry will go through a period during which it grows by leaps and bounds at first, but then levels off and doesn't change nearly as dramatically.
You can describe the same rough curve in talking about, say, your skills as a tennis player. At first almost anything you learn is going to improve your game dramatically, right? (Hey, now I can hit a backhand that'll get near the court!) As you get better and better, the period between big jumps in your ability is going to be longer. Eventually, at the pro level, the difference in skills between one player and another is very fine, and you can't just improve 10 places in the rankings by spending an extra day practicing like you could before.
(And while the planes aren't changing that much, I'd say our ability to work the logistics of how to move them around has in the last twenty-five years or so. Fedex was a risky proposition, at first, 'cause nobody thought it'd work economically. Similarly, in military applications the way planes have folded in new innovations in computing and communications has been impressive.)
Either they've recently gotten a clue, or the financial and logistic irritations of region coding just are far more present for them than any artistic concern.
Either way, yes, they do have the clout to make a huge difference on this one. Blockbuster alone was enough to keep some films coming out with a "special" Full screen version.
Pretty great nostalgia by now, I guess.
Take Ann Coulter -- not to pick sides, but just as the best example of this phenomenon that occurs to me. Coulter makes a big, long rant about how the New York Times didn't even cover Dale Earnhardt's death until days later into the centerpiece of one of her books. The Times, she says, didn't even run a story until days later, when they ran a snooty piece about how the Wal-Mart was silent in mourning. And so on. She's running down the Times in every possible way for its arrogance and elitism, and so on.
Al Franken, in his recent book, points out that this would be a great example for Ann to use, if only it were true. And he photocopies the front page of the Times the day after Earnhardt's death -- on which they ran a very large headline about the accident and Earnhardt's life.
Now, does it rank as a horrible insult and a discredit to his position that Franken includes Coulter among his list of "Liars"? Does it really discredit this guy's arguments when he describes the PC Magazine column by saying it "epitomizes the concept of yellow journalism"? To my mind, not if he makes that specific charge into more than a name. And he does -- he demonstrates how the PC Mag. article proceeded from its biases and manipulated the reader, seemingly out of malice and to promote a certain POV for its own sake.
Reading both opinion columns, this rebuttal was well within bounds. At most he fed a troll, but you know, a published troll is somehow fairer game than just anyone's /. post.
The article's framed as a look at the time since the Korean war, so the modern "PC bang" culture in the South makes a nice contrast. Detail:
In California, for example, Reagan pushed to have the interstate come right out into the Fisherman's Wharf area, but that got nixed. In the Twin Cities, where I live, we have a "Days of Rondo" celebration every year -- the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul having been cut in two and basically destroyed by the construction of the highway. (Poor [and black] neighborhood, had no political clout to defend itself.)
Anyway, though, we paid such an expense before, once. The social cost to this one would be less, but the physical costs of construction would boggle the mind. The Minneapolis airport's tunnel for light rail was a huge endeavor, and that's when the city's been planning ahead for twenty-odd years at least.
Do you perform your best when you're exhausted, or even when you're just out of your routine? I know I flub routine stuff then -- or I spend energy remembering where I put my keys, so that the more challenging, more abstract stuff on my list gets less attention.
Maybe NASA needs to ask factories that have changing shift structures how they get things done, you know?
Most billboard business is based on renting the space. If you have to rely on a radio station's demographic to get your ad up there, how would you pro-rate that rental fee? Does the radio station get anything out of it, if you try it that way? And so on. Seems like a substantially different business model could build around this idea -- something "hits"-like.
(And more importantly, what does this mean for public service announcements? If I'm driving down the road and all the billboards are tailoring themselves to messages about the D.A.R.E. program, am I listening to Rush Limbaugh, or what? How about if all the pictures turn to messages about abortion?)
(I'm an independent voter, voted for Bush's dad, and our previous Republican governor, and for Clinton. I read a fair amount of history, and Eisenhower would be on my list of deeply admired public figures. W. Bush is so far outside my voting range I can't imagine voting for him. Make me a screaming leftist?)
During the nomination process for any office you'll see this. Tim Pawlenty, our Minnesota Governor, was much more open about his right leanings durnig the nomination process. Once he got into the general election phase he emphasized his fiscal responsibility pitch. Totally obvious truism of the election process in this nation.
And in case you were wondering, you might want to ask yourself whether Bush, after having run on the promise of restoring trust and "fixing the tone" in Washington, has done anything to live up to those promises. Does anyone think Bush has "fixed the tone" in Washington?
Mostly that, surely. Of course, the 9/11 commission is intended to address exactly that; the whole reason it's in existence is to establish where we were inept and address it. Bush is stalling improvements to our response to terrorism, apparently, for political reasons.
The other half of what he's not wanting to show, though, is how close we may have been to a bigger, badder situation. During 9/11 the "Doomsday Plane" was scrambled from Edwards. Frontline had some home video of it taking off, if you want to see. That's just ammo for the terrorists -- shows they rattled us just like they meant to, if they needed any further reinforcement of that.
Also they offered "carrots" like, in Ohio, the potential of manufacturing the machines themselves in the state.
These were competitive bids, and there's at least a significant appearance of a conflict of interest. Something is wrong not just with this company, and not just with irresponsible states, but with the lack of an appropriate process for giving out the contracts. So you're right -- moaning that Diebold is evil (and has the worst PR department in the history of banking) isn't quite up to the level of this problem.