Sadly enough, of course, Bob Graham has just announced that he'll be retiring after this term. He's easily the most popular Democrat in Florida, and stands a pretty good chance of being a VP nominee for whoever gets the party's nomination.
Hillary and Chuck Schumer aren't going to oppose this legislaton. Gee, I wonder who will...
C'mon, everything about this story has troll written all over it. The source, the author, and the phrasing of the post are just begging for a response from Mac zealots.
I had a Radius "tilt" monitor for a while in the early 90s, as one of the three monitors at my Mac workstation in a design firm. You'd have thought the idea of being able to reorient the screen would have appealed then, too -- sometimes you want landscape for layout, sometimes you want portrait to see a whole text document at once. At the time people's monitors (resolutions) weren't able to show an entire page at once, so they were doing it for the same reason -- to cram more into a smallish space.
Anyway, it didn't catch on much. They weren't amazingly overpriced monitors, or maybe I just didn't pay for mine and didn't notice. What was the objection?
I interviewed a guy, Jurgen something, who'd flown across the North Pole in his private plane back in the late 80's and who write a little book about it. Still have the book around the house somewhere.
Half of his story was about all the contingency planning you need to do for something like this. What happens if there's a mechanical failure? He had several ways of navigating -- it isn't that easy at the poles to know which way's home. All his route legs had alternatives, and he knew exactly where he'd go in this and that situation.
Doesn't seem like the South Pole has as much leeway, okay, but it's the responsibility of our would-be tourist to figure out his options beforehand. I'm with the people on the ground there; their role isn't to be someone's backup, and their treatment of the guy seems more than fair.
It's the tabloidization of news sources, the way Michael and OJ before him (and Kobe) displace real news, that freaks me out. Entertainment and true crime basically belong to a larger category -- distractions. SWIII is for fun, right, but let's not let it push the real news off the front page.
Heck, this Star Wars story could easily run on the front of my local papers. To wit: On one of the two locals today the "U.S. Bars War Foes from Iraq Contracts" sidebar is considerably smaller than the one about, and I quote, "Garlic Bulb Meets the Jetsons in Public Art." Big news, that. It got a color picture, too. (Maybe there just wasn't a keen picture to take of the various figures from Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, and so on, all fuming at the US policy and threatening to cut us off for future money, restructuring of Iraqi debt, and so on.)
Did I mention the big front page story? It's framed in a giant color photo of apparently abducted college student Dru Sjodin, with all the usual trappings of speculative "true crime" stories, including details about the knife used, her car, the suspect's car, her shoe (to be used as evidence), the DNA match, and so on. We pissed off the known world and threw untold money at Halliburton after killing the anti-war-profiteering laws with respect to our latest war.
Take a look. Sigh. If only Paul Wolfowitz would dress like the Sith Lord he is, maybe we could get him some attention.
The "Department of Homeland Security" is easily the most Orwellian Government entity ever, right down to its name, and it's accomplishing exactly what you'd expect -- giving people the soft fuzzies about someone important working on our security while actively undermining the constitutional protections that've kept us secure.
Welcome to the new America, where the "Forest Service" has finally completed its transformation into a lumber industry-owned and -operated body, the "Immigration and Naturalization Service" uses a voluntary registration program to evict the foreign residents who show up, and the "Environmental Protection Agency" has its rules set by the industries who're meant to be restrained by them. Meanwhile "Family Planning" is about keeping information away from women -- or about pushing false information to do with bogus correlations between abortions and breast cancer. Oh, and did I mention that when terrorists blow our kids' legs off that's a good thing, because it means we're fighting them where they live? (When they don't blow up our kids, naturally, that's also proof we're winning...)
We've had our moments before -- the idea of Nuclear deterrent never did quite convince anyone that "Peacemaker" was the perfect name for a missile -- but truly, there's never been a more quintessentially Orwellian moment in American history. This is the real goods. Take a look at that name: "Homeland Security."
You and dad have a problem, but it's the OS
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Am I the only one who has a father (or some other relation), that knows nothing about computers, yet insists upon playing with all the settings they can find?
Both your attitudes are symptoms of the problem. Your OS should be solid enough that an inexperienced user can fool around and not feel scared about what she's going to do.
And you -- You're basically saying newbies should shut up and work and not tweak anything?
Movies don't seem to be managing any real "bonus content" either. The only thing I can think of is the special Pokemon card that came with some movie my kids saw a few years ago, as far as handouts.
To compete with "home theaters," movie houses are now... Well, they're blasting the music in way too loud. Their screens and projectors haven't improved, though at least they've figured out "arena seating" so short people can see them now.
A big part of the reason you go to a movie is the social thing -- it's a date, it's a thing to do with your coworkers, that kind of stuff. The 20 minutes of ads before the movie are now blaring so loudly that the most you can hear is a loud heckler, though, so goodbye chat before it starts. Instead of adding to the experience they're making it more impersonal and generic.
Offhand you can easily think of "bonus" stuff to do for a movie. For a kids' movie, Burger King-level giveaway toys. Collectible tickets would be cool for big releases -- "I saw all three Star Wars movies when they came out" would have played pretty well for me. (All 2 1/2 of the real Star Wars movies, I mean.) Even some sort of "Movietone News" short would break up the commercial feeling. You'd think studios, or theaters, or an independent producer, could sell that as a perk of seeing things in the theater.
But the theater experience is basically generic, with me being shunted down a cattle chute to the individual screen even. And that makes me much more inclined to wait. "Cable Movie" means a mediocre movie I wouldn't bother seeing in a theater, now. Lots of cable movies out there, and nothing special to lure me to the theater experience.
You want reactionary? The RIAA would actually love music to be "rented" in exactly the way you describe: I pay every time I "take it home" to play it.
People don't treat music in that way now. Nor do they want to buy a Word Processor that way -- paying MicroSoft a licensing fee to keep using it for another year or whatever.
Not a surprise they'd need to reinvent it, then, is it?
As I wrote that, I got a new message in my Notes client here at the office. Not that it told me; the pop-up alert is hidden so that in order to notice it I need to consciously switch to the Notes process. "Alert" is perhaps not the right description for this dialog box. Okay, new message -- I click "OK." I am returned to my browser instead of staying in Notes. Switch back to Notes again. Go to inbox. Which way is the inbox sorting today? Sigh... An alert that doesn't work and three or four extra steps just to see a new message. This would be the basics.
Let's not get into the philosophical difference between one's "Sent" view and the "Inbox" folder. I've tried to delve into those metaphysics with countless people who've just thrown away their "extra" copy of some crucial message, but they're so emotional then, you know?
You may think it cute to equate the two, I don't see the point.
Cute? Like it or not, when written material botches spellings and includes blatant grammatical mistakes, its credibility takes a serious hit. Any kind of active editorial process will catch that stuff. If an author's work hasn't been reviewed by anyone, it's just that much less credible.
"Seems to have" was the telling phrase from your post. You have no idea whether this is credible stuff, and you're going on instinct. My instincts tell me that sloppy work is suspect.
The article: DW:...My guess is that it's more likely we'll discover an artifact of a civilization's technology rather than a signal directed to us for the purpose of interstellar communication - perhaps we'll discover navigational beacon, an asteroid radar system, radio signals leaking off their planet, or something completely unexpected...
We're all of us monkeys. I gotta admit, even if what we find is an Alien coconut trap with some tasty treats inside and a hole too small to pull our fist out of, I'd rather devote my life to that puzzle that withdraw into the self-indulgent solipsism my family calls its particular religion.
The more than 100 known extrasolar planets are mostly whoppers, 'cause we're mostly still looking for cases in which a planet's big enough to cause the light coming from a star to wobble. (Exceptions involve cases like Vega -- it's got a dust field around it, and the computer models say the best explanation for how that dust looks is a Neptune-sized planet in about Neptune's orbit. Again, it's a planet discovered indirectly, by inferring things about its gravity.)
None of the known extrasolar planets are supposed to be particularly good candidates for life, though that Vega case maybe indicates a solar system a little like ours, with rocky planets in the interior orbits... or that's the speculation.
We've still got a ways to go in refining our way of just looking for the things. To narrow any search based on them would be premature.
Criminy. I look down the message tree and see people talking about how "socialism" only makes the problem worse. Okay, let's just let the private airlines decide when and where their planes fly, unhampered by any (socialist) regulation, and then we'll allow the market to decide whether houses under those routes are soundproofed, and how valuable those houses are.
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards.
We have some highway construction near my home right now. Part of the project involves some new noise barriers -- walls. Believe it or not, the civil engineers working on the project know about how the acoustics of those walls work, they've done some serious homework about how the local topography will affect bouncing sound, how cars might tend to accelerate and decelerate in certain areas, and so on. Where they're making a somewhat lower wall for a church, they've planted some evergreen trees in a pattern that will soak up as much sound as possible for residents right by the church. And -- gasp -- they let the residents come to city hall to talk about the changes and how they'll affect them.
Welcome to a mixed economy, in which the government has some influence over private industry in the interest of the common good. I kind of like living here; maybe you'll take to it. Or maybe you'd like to have the private airlines put in a new runway and start bringing 747s in low over your back yard, with no power to do squat about it.
Take a look at "Love Actually" and compare it to an old episode of "The Love Boat." In terms of the plot structure, even the points-of-departure opening and closing: they're almost identical. Both basically involve bringing in "guest stars" to walk through braided storylines that are written so boringly that they'd fall apart if you saw any one plot together in sequence.
It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's thoroughly mediocre and commercial. The stars kindle some "chemistry" maybe, but the movie has no idea about "love" whatsoever. (Plus which, it actually refers to 9/11 at the beginning as if it has a single clue about how "love" bears on those events. And then it winds up with a big chase scene in which a 10-year-old foils airport security by running fast. Yelch.)
(/review)
I nearly walked out of the theater in disgust when I heard the word "micron" used as a unit of time.
Later on I'm sure you were thrilled at those big whomping speakers. I understand they had to adjust the phase transponders to get 'em to rumble like that.;-)
This half-truth has more to do with the patient
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
If you have that much friction with your doctor, then change doctors.:)
I've just read down this thread, and let me assure you -- this person has already had trouble with a string of different medical providers. (You've just been added to the list -- "She did it for the money and you know it" being an accusation that you were lying, right?)
We're not hearing anything like a full, honest story on this one. I'd place money that the supposed apology by the doctor involved was nothing like what we're reading, to start with. What happened was, the doctor brushed this person off when he started ranting about the way things got categorized on the HMO bill. This person has no idea of the context and doesn't want to hear you try to explain.
Pretty sad, really. Sort of reminds me of my college days working in a retail bookstore; we had customers like this all the day long.
...it sure reads to me like the people who're skeptical about the price are saying "That price for those features? Hmm. I'd pay X, but not X plus $100."
In my book this is aimed at the intersection of the hardcore audiophile and computerphile crowds -- and I'm not sure how big a market that is, really. A fair number of them would be high school and college students, wouldn't they? Is this the same set of people who'd buy an iPod? Seems a little less mainstream and a little more hard core, to me -- people who care if it's lossless, right?
(And yeah, our poster seems to respond to the price point argument by saying "Why would I overpay for this? BECAUSE I CAN." S/he'd probably like to dispute the price point, but got a little worked up and went off before s/he aimed things just right. Oops)
Battlestar Galactica was hardly an original series even when it was the original series. This will be like a CGI rendition of a photocopy of a carbon copy of Star Wars.
And yes, I saw the movie release of the original -- in SENSAROUND! Which meant, back then, bass speakers less impressive than those playing in the "Love Boat" revamp I saw last weekend, "Love Actually." (That movie took the high road, though, and did not call the loser who traveled to Wisconsin "Gopher.")
with cheap equipment the small minority not willing to purchase it, for whatever reason, simply does not matter (if not willing to spend $50, chances are not likely to spend a lot on advertised products, so no value to advertisers, so no value as an audience).
That strikes me as a market-decides sort of an argument -- the people we can't advertise to don't count part, especially -- which puzzles me just a titch. The current market doesn't seem to be driving people toward digital broadcasts or digital-capable sets on the other end. Tell me I'm bitching about fifty bucks or not; I'm still more than a little skeptical about the burning need for the FCC to push this down our throats when the market isn't moving in that direction itself in any convincing way.
Whoever's interests are being represented, they aren't mine. And, um, I expect government entities to act in my interests, at least in principle. You know? Or at least I don't expect them to go out of their way to add a $50- to $100 surcharge on a ubiquitous piece of consumer electronics for every existing set. The argument hasn't won me over, in terms of that being for the public good. Seems more like a big fat public nuisance.
Personally I honestly loved the animated Hobbit, as a ten-year-old when it came out on TV. It did awfully well with the overall throw of the story, which is more cinematic in scope than the Rings books to start with anyway. Gandalf is such a perfect role for John Huston's voice I was shocked to like Ian Richardson as much as I did. The old songs worked -- they used Tolkien's lyrics from the books and made them work, which is something Peter Jackson couldn't tackle. In all it was a very decent adaptation. Bitching about the way the animators did the wood elves is pretty finicky stuff in my book. I'd take that Elrond, either way.
The Rings animated adaptation was doomed partly by the scope of the books, but your reaction's just colored by your having seen the live action first. My kids chose it to rent out last year too, and it had some things going for it, it genuinely did. I'd take the animated version of the hobbits' meeting with Strider over Peter Jackson's; it did a much better job of allowing him to be enigmatic, whereas the recent Fellowship telegraphed that scene badly. (I'm not so into Vigo in the role, he's way self-conscious.) In general the animated version has a lot less time for orcs screaming their lungs out to shell shock the audience, too, which ain't so bad to do without.
Not that they're perfect, but this isn't nearly as much of a train wreck as Attack of the Clones, or not in my book. The adapters did "get" the original stories, they understood the lines of each scene. If the Rings cartoon breaks down, it's mostly because of scope and their production values. And no, they didn't let the dwarves become a running short joke, either, or Legolas a rad surfer dude.
Just googled around to confirm that Godzilla, the remake, actually made money. Partly owing to the international market, it did pretty well despite the colossal production expense. Big action movies cross cultures okay, the dialog means so little.
Not that I'm enthusiastic to report this, mind you. Never saw the thing myself. (Won't be going to see "The Cat in the Hat," either. Apparently other people have kids who didn't take one look at the ads on TV and say "That looks totally gross." I'll put the money on my kids' reaction, though.)
The two worthwhile versions of King Kong starred Fay Wray and Homer ("Maybe you should eat more vegetables and less people") Simpson. Remakes can work, honest.
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In a major victory for free speech enthusiasts on the Internet, Diebold Inc. has agreed not to sue voting rights advocates who publish leaked documents about the alleged security breaches of electronic voting...
"Enthusiasts"? Sort of makes it sound like the Bill of Rights is a remote-controlled airplane, doesn't it? (Hey, what's your hobby? Mine is living in a free society... That and Pinochle.)
Odd word choice in an odd story altogether. (Diebold, a banking company that makes ATMs, bought out this voting machine company. Amazing how their expertise in the one area seemingly doesn't translate. I mean, this story starts when someone cracks into their e-mail system using an employee's ID. Bad start to a story about the lack of security, yes? The e-mails show a geuinely cavalier attitude about the perception of their clients -- bizarre in a banker, you'd think. Then they bluster around sending their C&D letters, the effect only being to make their problems more conspicuous. Does this make sense in a company that makes banking equipment? You'd think they'd have their PR act together. Bankers do not project this sort of cavalier bluster.)
You're trotting out some of the usual vaguenesses that creationists try to put out there, with a lurking motive when it comes to evolution and a side of "maybe God did so create it" when it comes to the "Big Bang."
Dogged resistance to Copernican theory was cultural, based as it was on religious ideas about our central role in the universe. To suggest that the earth-centered universe lasted for 2,000 years despite the scientific method, to use it as an example of the flaws of the scientific method... that's darned rich foolishness, friend. You use the example of Galileo, but you don't seem to know how the story goes -- or even how it turns out. Or are you willing to say the Heliocentric solar system, too, may go by the wayside in 500 years?
Fast forward to Darwin. You may recognize yourself on one side of the old Copernicus story this time, clinging to an ideology rather than trying to understand the world as clearly as people can make it out. You're also engaged in a truly sloppy, relativistic argument -- seemingly in the service of an absolute truth you'd prefer not to admit to, for fear of scaring people off. Pretty murky territory. Does it worry you to lie in service of that higher truth, at all? It'd make my stomach a little queasy.
As far as your specific objections to evolution go, you don't make any, so I'll just leave you to your Michael Behe, Watch-Watchmaker reading. Might want to try something in a peer review journal sometime. Just a suggestion. (That's assuming you're not a Richard Milton sort of a dork; I wouldn't dream of insulting someone that way...)
Slashdot Mirror
Hillary and Chuck Schumer aren't going to oppose this legislaton. Gee, I wonder who will...
This ain't "news for nerds," it's just bait.
Anyway, it didn't catch on much. They weren't amazingly overpriced monitors, or maybe I just didn't pay for mine and didn't notice. What was the objection?
Half of his story was about all the contingency planning you need to do for something like this. What happens if there's a mechanical failure? He had several ways of navigating -- it isn't that easy at the poles to know which way's home. All his route legs had alternatives, and he knew exactly where he'd go in this and that situation.
Doesn't seem like the South Pole has as much leeway, okay, but it's the responsibility of our would-be tourist to figure out his options beforehand. I'm with the people on the ground there; their role isn't to be someone's backup, and their treatment of the guy seems more than fair.
It's the tabloidization of news sources, the way Michael and OJ before him (and Kobe) displace real news, that freaks me out. Entertainment and true crime basically belong to a larger category -- distractions. SWIII is for fun, right, but let's not let it push the real news off the front page.
Heck, this Star Wars story could easily run on the front of my local papers. To wit: On one of the two locals today the "U.S. Bars War Foes from Iraq Contracts" sidebar is considerably smaller than the one about, and I quote, "Garlic Bulb Meets the Jetsons in Public Art." Big news, that. It got a color picture, too. (Maybe there just wasn't a keen picture to take of the various figures from Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, and so on, all fuming at the US policy and threatening to cut us off for future money, restructuring of Iraqi debt, and so on.)
Did I mention the big front page story? It's framed in a giant color photo of apparently abducted college student Dru Sjodin, with all the usual trappings of speculative "true crime" stories, including details about the knife used, her car, the suspect's car, her shoe (to be used as evidence), the DNA match, and so on. We pissed off the known world and threw untold money at Halliburton after killing the anti-war-profiteering laws with respect to our latest war.
Take a look. Sigh. If only Paul Wolfowitz would dress like the Sith Lord he is, maybe we could get him some attention.
Welcome to the new America, where the "Forest Service" has finally completed its transformation into a lumber industry-owned and -operated body, the "Immigration and Naturalization Service" uses a voluntary registration program to evict the foreign residents who show up, and the "Environmental Protection Agency" has its rules set by the industries who're meant to be restrained by them. Meanwhile "Family Planning" is about keeping information away from women -- or about pushing false information to do with bogus correlations between abortions and breast cancer. Oh, and did I mention that when terrorists blow our kids' legs off that's a good thing, because it means we're fighting them where they live? (When they don't blow up our kids, naturally, that's also proof we're winning...)
We've had our moments before -- the idea of Nuclear deterrent never did quite convince anyone that "Peacemaker" was the perfect name for a missile -- but truly, there's never been a more quintessentially Orwellian moment in American history. This is the real goods. Take a look at that name: "Homeland Security."
Both your attitudes are symptoms of the problem. Your OS should be solid enough that an inexperienced user can fool around and not feel scared about what she's going to do.
And you -- You're basically saying newbies should shut up and work and not tweak anything?
To compete with "home theaters," movie houses are now... Well, they're blasting the music in way too loud. Their screens and projectors haven't improved, though at least they've figured out "arena seating" so short people can see them now.
A big part of the reason you go to a movie is the social thing -- it's a date, it's a thing to do with your coworkers, that kind of stuff. The 20 minutes of ads before the movie are now blaring so loudly that the most you can hear is a loud heckler, though, so goodbye chat before it starts. Instead of adding to the experience they're making it more impersonal and generic.
Offhand you can easily think of "bonus" stuff to do for a movie. For a kids' movie, Burger King-level giveaway toys. Collectible tickets would be cool for big releases -- "I saw all three Star Wars movies when they came out" would have played pretty well for me. (All 2 1/2 of the real Star Wars movies, I mean.) Even some sort of "Movietone News" short would break up the commercial feeling. You'd think studios, or theaters, or an independent producer, could sell that as a perk of seeing things in the theater.
But the theater experience is basically generic, with me being shunted down a cattle chute to the individual screen even. And that makes me much more inclined to wait. "Cable Movie" means a mediocre movie I wouldn't bother seeing in a theater, now. Lots of cable movies out there, and nothing special to lure me to the theater experience.
People don't treat music in that way now. Nor do they want to buy a Word Processor that way -- paying MicroSoft a licensing fee to keep using it for another year or whatever.
Seems like a bogus comparison to me.
Sent the site's author an e-mail, too... his site was running on Apache.
As I wrote that, I got a new message in my Notes client here at the office. Not that it told me; the pop-up alert is hidden so that in order to notice it I need to consciously switch to the Notes process. "Alert" is perhaps not the right description for this dialog box. Okay, new message -- I click "OK." I am returned to my browser instead of staying in Notes. Switch back to Notes again. Go to inbox. Which way is the inbox sorting today? Sigh... An alert that doesn't work and three or four extra steps just to see a new message. This would be the basics.
Let's not get into the philosophical difference between one's "Sent" view and the "Inbox" folder. I've tried to delve into those metaphysics with countless people who've just thrown away their "extra" copy of some crucial message, but they're so emotional then, you know?
You may think it cute to equate the two, I don't see the point.
Cute? Like it or not, when written material botches spellings and includes blatant grammatical mistakes, its credibility takes a serious hit. Any kind of active editorial process will catch that stuff. If an author's work hasn't been reviewed by anyone, it's just that much less credible.
"Seems to have" was the telling phrase from your post. You have no idea whether this is credible stuff, and you're going on instinct. My instincts tell me that sloppy work is suspect.
We're all of us monkeys. I gotta admit, even if what we find is an Alien coconut trap with some tasty treats inside and a hole too small to pull our fist out of, I'd rather devote my life to that puzzle that withdraw into the self-indulgent solipsism my family calls its particular religion.
None of the known extrasolar planets are supposed to be particularly good candidates for life, though that Vega case maybe indicates a solar system a little like ours, with rocky planets in the interior orbits... or that's the speculation.
We've still got a ways to go in refining our way of just looking for the things. To narrow any search based on them would be premature.
Criminy. I look down the message tree and see people talking about how "socialism" only makes the problem worse. Okay, let's just let the private airlines decide when and where their planes fly, unhampered by any (socialist) regulation, and then we'll allow the market to decide whether houses under those routes are soundproofed, and how valuable those houses are.
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards. We have some highway construction near my home right now. Part of the project involves some new noise barriers -- walls. Believe it or not, the civil engineers working on the project know about how the acoustics of those walls work, they've done some serious homework about how the local topography will affect bouncing sound, how cars might tend to accelerate and decelerate in certain areas, and so on. Where they're making a somewhat lower wall for a church, they've planted some evergreen trees in a pattern that will soak up as much sound as possible for residents right by the church. And -- gasp -- they let the residents come to city hall to talk about the changes and how they'll affect them.
Welcome to a mixed economy, in which the government has some influence over private industry in the interest of the common good. I kind of like living here; maybe you'll take to it. Or maybe you'd like to have the private airlines put in a new runway and start bringing 747s in low over your back yard, with no power to do squat about it.
Take a look at "Love Actually" and compare it to an old episode of "The Love Boat." In terms of the plot structure, even the points-of-departure opening and closing: they're almost identical. Both basically involve bringing in "guest stars" to walk through braided storylines that are written so boringly that they'd fall apart if you saw any one plot together in sequence.
It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's thoroughly mediocre and commercial. The stars kindle some "chemistry" maybe, but the movie has no idea about "love" whatsoever. (Plus which, it actually refers to 9/11 at the beginning as if it has a single clue about how "love" bears on those events. And then it winds up with a big chase scene in which a 10-year-old foils airport security by running fast. Yelch.) (/review)
I nearly walked out of the theater in disgust when I heard the word "micron" used as a unit of time. Later on I'm sure you were thrilled at those big whomping speakers. I understand they had to adjust the phase transponders to get 'em to rumble like that. ;-)
If you have that much friction with your doctor, then change doctors. :)
I've just read down this thread, and let me assure you -- this person has already had trouble with a string of different medical providers. (You've just been added to the list -- "She did it for the money and you know it" being an accusation that you were lying, right?)
We're not hearing anything like a full, honest story on this one. I'd place money that the supposed apology by the doctor involved was nothing like what we're reading, to start with. What happened was, the doctor brushed this person off when he started ranting about the way things got categorized on the HMO bill. This person has no idea of the context and doesn't want to hear you try to explain.
Pretty sad, really. Sort of reminds me of my college days working in a retail bookstore; we had customers like this all the day long.
In my book this is aimed at the intersection of the hardcore audiophile and computerphile crowds -- and I'm not sure how big a market that is, really. A fair number of them would be high school and college students, wouldn't they? Is this the same set of people who'd buy an iPod? Seems a little less mainstream and a little more hard core, to me -- people who care if it's lossless, right?
(And yeah, our poster seems to respond to the price point argument by saying "Why would I overpay for this? BECAUSE I CAN." S/he'd probably like to dispute the price point, but got a little worked up and went off before s/he aimed things just right. Oops)
And yes, I saw the movie release of the original -- in SENSAROUND! Which meant, back then, bass speakers less impressive than those playing in the "Love Boat" revamp I saw last weekend, "Love Actually." (That movie took the high road, though, and did not call the loser who traveled to Wisconsin "Gopher.")
with cheap equipment the small minority not willing to purchase it, for whatever reason, simply does not matter (if not willing to spend $50, chances are not likely to spend a lot on advertised products, so no value to advertisers, so no value as an audience).
That strikes me as a market-decides sort of an argument -- the people we can't advertise to don't count part, especially -- which puzzles me just a titch. The current market doesn't seem to be driving people toward digital broadcasts or digital-capable sets on the other end. Tell me I'm bitching about fifty bucks or not; I'm still more than a little skeptical about the burning need for the FCC to push this down our throats when the market isn't moving in that direction itself in any convincing way.
Whoever's interests are being represented, they aren't mine. And, um, I expect government entities to act in my interests, at least in principle. You know? Or at least I don't expect them to go out of their way to add a $50- to $100 surcharge on a ubiquitous piece of consumer electronics for every existing set. The argument hasn't won me over, in terms of that being for the public good. Seems more like a big fat public nuisance.
The Rings animated adaptation was doomed partly by the scope of the books, but your reaction's just colored by your having seen the live action first. My kids chose it to rent out last year too, and it had some things going for it, it genuinely did. I'd take the animated version of the hobbits' meeting with Strider over Peter Jackson's; it did a much better job of allowing him to be enigmatic, whereas the recent Fellowship telegraphed that scene badly. (I'm not so into Vigo in the role, he's way self-conscious.) In general the animated version has a lot less time for orcs screaming their lungs out to shell shock the audience, too, which ain't so bad to do without.
Not that they're perfect, but this isn't nearly as much of a train wreck as Attack of the Clones, or not in my book. The adapters did "get" the original stories, they understood the lines of each scene. If the Rings cartoon breaks down, it's mostly because of scope and their production values. And no, they didn't let the dwarves become a running short joke, either, or Legolas a rad surfer dude.
Not that I'm enthusiastic to report this, mind you. Never saw the thing myself. (Won't be going to see "The Cat in the Hat," either. Apparently other people have kids who didn't take one look at the ads on TV and say "That looks totally gross." I'll put the money on my kids' reaction, though.)
The two worthwhile versions of King Kong starred Fay Wray and Homer ("Maybe you should eat more vegetables and less people") Simpson. Remakes can work, honest.
"Enthusiasts"? Sort of makes it sound like the Bill of Rights is a remote-controlled airplane, doesn't it? (Hey, what's your hobby? Mine is living in a free society... That and Pinochle.)
Odd word choice in an odd story altogether. (Diebold, a banking company that makes ATMs, bought out this voting machine company. Amazing how their expertise in the one area seemingly doesn't translate. I mean, this story starts when someone cracks into their e-mail system using an employee's ID. Bad start to a story about the lack of security, yes? The e-mails show a geuinely cavalier attitude about the perception of their clients -- bizarre in a banker, you'd think. Then they bluster around sending their C&D letters, the effect only being to make their problems more conspicuous. Does this make sense in a company that makes banking equipment? You'd think they'd have their PR act together. Bankers do not project this sort of cavalier bluster.)
Dogged resistance to Copernican theory was cultural, based as it was on religious ideas about our central role in the universe. To suggest that the earth-centered universe lasted for 2,000 years despite the scientific method, to use it as an example of the flaws of the scientific method... that's darned rich foolishness, friend. You use the example of Galileo, but you don't seem to know how the story goes -- or even how it turns out. Or are you willing to say the Heliocentric solar system, too, may go by the wayside in 500 years?
Fast forward to Darwin. You may recognize yourself on one side of the old Copernicus story this time, clinging to an ideology rather than trying to understand the world as clearly as people can make it out. You're also engaged in a truly sloppy, relativistic argument -- seemingly in the service of an absolute truth you'd prefer not to admit to, for fear of scaring people off. Pretty murky territory. Does it worry you to lie in service of that higher truth, at all? It'd make my stomach a little queasy.
As far as your specific objections to evolution go, you don't make any, so I'll just leave you to your Michael Behe, Watch-Watchmaker reading. Might want to try something in a peer review journal sometime. Just a suggestion. (That's assuming you're not a Richard Milton sort of a dork; I wouldn't dream of insulting someone that way...)