In presidential elections, at least, the taller candidate wins pretty consistently. Mike Dukakis really should've cemented that rule.
Two exceptions -- George W. is 5'11" and Gore was 6'1" -- but then W. only got the electoral college and the supreme court. Also Jimmy Carter is only 5'9", and Ford was six two. But those are the only times it's gone the other way.
The Daily Standard has a throwaway article on the subject. Very informative about the height of Kerry's hair, if you ask me.
Basically any system that tried to make this really work would need to have one of two things:
-- quite linear plotlines, so that the "quests" or whatever you wanted to call them would be intelligible and fun to play toward; or
-- actively involved "GMs" who could recognize and reward interesting styles of play.
This is why MMORPGs don't turn my crank right now. The oversight of the admins isn't enough to keep up with abusers of the system, leave alone reward cool styles of play. Any 14-year-old D&D GM could do better. And the open-ended play, while it sounds like such a cool idea, just doesn't seem to end up rewarding anyone but thugs, in one sense or another.
Even linear, single-player systems don't manage to do this very well. Fallout was a great game, but the little side quests wouldn't come close to the XPs from three Death Claws in a nest. And there they had a chance to carefully place the stuff in the plot, which you can't do in an MMORPG. The lack of structure encourages the kill-to-level-up treadmill. Probably the payment structure does too.
Spacing them out may not be so bad
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A few people have said MS should be following Apple's example, with substantial OS releases every year or so. I'm wondering, are these the same people who moan about the $99 cost every year or so too?
Independent of the technical nature of the changes, if you want to seriously hype an OS maybe every-few-years is the way to go. It's hard to gear yourself up for a massive [sales jargon]paradigm shift[/jargon] every 12 months. The Mac OS that went out in 1984 basically underwent evolutionary change until OS 7, which brought true multitasking. Even OS 7 wasn't that jarring a change. Then it bounced happily along until OS X, really, if you don't count the hardware changes involved in the PowerPC chips and then the G3s.
Not that I'm exactly enthused about Longhorn, or anything -- OS X will do fine for now. But the delay isn't necessarily going to hurt the marketing, here. People need a little rest between blockbusters -- when it's one must-see movie after another they get bored with it.
Four trends, no revolutions
on
TV's Tipping Point
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
1. consumers are...choosing not just the 'what' they watch but also the when, how and where they watch it.
2. the audience increasingly wants to join in and get closer to their media.
3....consuming more media simultaneously...
4....the last trend -- sharing.
So in the future, we will watch multiple reality shows we can shape with our various "votes" at the same time -- a time of our choosing. We'll have sent each other some of the shows, too. This is a revolution?
No one mindblowing idea here -- basically it seems like the BBC's thinking about that "Super -Electronic Programme Guide" to get a little ahead on interfaces, and they don't want to stonewall peer-to-peer models the way the music industry did.
Personally I like to read the program notes before the orchestra starts to play, and somehow I'm thinking there's not much you need to add on-the-fly to your notes about the Symphonie Fantastique. What's the breaking news?
This sort of thing would make tons more sense for sports events, where drilling down to see someone's stats against this pitcher (or whatever) would add to your experience without detracting from others'. For concerts? We're replacing rustling paper with the chit chits of styluses scrabbling over PDAs, but what did we gain, again?
I personally don't go see a movie in the theatre unless it is a 'Spectacular' movie. One where the experience of seeing it on a Big screen cannot be duplicated by any other means and actually plays an integral part of the film.
Sounds exactly like the way the movies (successfully) responded to the advent of TV. All those Cinemascope huge screens, all the sprawling epics like The Robe and so on, were basically made because TV couldn't compete with a huge screen. TV really changed the movies that got made, in a big way: suddenly Westerns and Biblical epics, huge movies, were the rule.
I don't think bigger (and louder) is going to be better this time, though. The studios are trying to outcompete home theaters now by moving everything up that extra notch -- just blasting the sound, and making the picture explode with every frame. Those kinds of movies are exactly what turn me off. Hey, my brother's home theater can rattle the walls too, and the screen's pretty big. Movies like The Big Country look pretty watchable on my 32" set at home now, even.
They need something more than an overwhelming sensory assault on the audience, we can have that any day of the week at home. Right now there are plenty of video games more visually interesting than Star Wars Episode II. And those are interactive.
If it was me I'd try to do something to play up the social side of it. People go to movies on dates, they go with their kids on Saturdays, it's a social thing. Instead of playing to that, they're blaming us for it -- we share files with each other, how awful. Seems like a misjudgment.
Is Merrill Lynch the company that fell behind in its market by not offering Web brokerage when competitors like Charles Schwab were leading the way? Is this the same company that clung to a traditional model in which its agents played up stocks they knew were questionable based on orders from the home office, relying on the isolation of their clients from real information?
Ever see the old UK comedy "The Man in the White Suit"? Alec Guinness plays a man who discovers the perfect material -- it's perpetually clean and dry in all conditions, and it won't wear out. Of course, clothing manufacturers and everyone else turn on him in a heartbeat.
My point being, if someone does get to those qualities you're talking about, hey, the computer's going to be the part that goes obsolete every two years, or that fries in the rain, causing you to run out and buy a new outfit at the outlet mall. Go wearable computing! Keep those garment workers' consumer confidence up!
In little more than a decade, the United States has fallen significantly behind other countries in its ability to simulate and predict long-term shifts in climate
So in "little more than a decade" we've fallen behind someone in ways that can only really be proven by data from a longitudinal study over many years? I'm not sure how we can be sure of that; we'd need more than a decade to compare long-term predictions to the results, right?
(I "get" where you're going, and it's an interesting point: Is our largely politicized skepticism about global warming change preventing us from investing in climate research? Basically I'm in sympathy with that question being asked, at least. But the data's still out on the actual results, isn't it?)
If you left out the BBC-sexy-up-styling to comment, I might have taken you seriously. So go back and keep getting your news and political insight from a webpage that has a zoo animal for a logo.
The article quoted from was in the New York Times originally, wasn't it?
I don't gather how you can say that America know the LEAST about climate science because the EU/Japn have fast computers.
Hey, here's an idea for anonymous cowards everywhere -- If you actually read the article, all the way through, you might not have to post anonymously. Then you might see exactly what the article says about the US's ability to predict long-term climate, see, instead of just responding to one paragraph out of context. Zoinks, wouldn't that be informative?
Yeah, what i want to see is a bunch of people not trying to do the right thing, but rather acting out a series of stereotypical characters like every other lame sci-fi series. Lots of space battles, too, 'cause that hasn't been done before.
Oh, and they should all be white... because it distracts me, otherwise.
Oh, God, I hope they don't go with smooth CGI effects. Five years ago Star Trek TNG was already much too glitzy for Dr. Who.
What this show is is a quick, enjoyably-written little Sci Fi serial thing. Everything should be done low-budget. The casting always was -- when someone got too pricey the Dr. got a new incarnation, right?
And costumes -- how could anyone ever get a cheap costume device that's as good as Tom Baker's scarf?
Cheap and fun. Concentrate on adapting decent little Sci Fi short story ideas for scripts. This could be a Simpsons, if you get the right mix.
The BBC story mentions the names of the previous series, but fails to insert the faked-up notion that there's some sort of conflict involving the potential gayness of the Doctor or something. It also doesn't go out of its way to describe the earlier series as "controversial."
Nobody said the story was bogus, the poster just winced at the weird sidelight of anxiety that this big time Dr. Who fan was going to write him as a flaming cross-dresser or something. I had the same reaction to the Telegraph article, without any real bias about the Telegraph coming in.
Sure does read like the article's looking for some controversy there, doesn't it? The BBC person "insisting" that she doesn't expect a gay Dr. Who is conspicuous -- whenever a simple assertion is described as "insisting" or "admitting" something, it makes a person wary.
Note to Telegraph writers and editors: it's possible for gay people to have interests outside of their gayness, however distracted you may be by that side of their lives. (Additional note: Dr. Who fandom is probably a more distinctive trait than this writer's sexual orientation.)
It isn't the password thing in particular -- it's the fact that the chief engineer of a company that sells electronic voting systems is spending more time massaging the perceptions of his clients than he is making sure those clients have anything like a secure system. His attitude is basically "Whatever we can say to reassure these people, sell 'em on that argument." The banking industry wouldn't accept that level of schmoozed explanation for a security problem, and we ought to be holding our vote counters to something like that higher standard. If you and I can erase or alter the audit trail in that file without even using a login of any sort, what sort of integrity does this process have? When there's a controversy, who're you going to ask -- the CEO of the company, who's vowing to deliver electoral votes for partisan reasons?
And I agree that MDB passwords would be nuisance level security, but so's anything at some point. I happen to know my medical records are protected, within many clinics, by a handful of similarly low-level security systems -- file cabinet locks, some Access (clinics tend to track stuff in local MDBs), and stuff like that. Makes me feel better than if the janitor can go in and edit things without going out of his way, personally.
Right now if your visit to the rehab clinic gets spilled to the public, whoever slipped faces a steep (max $500,000?) fine under HIPAA. Apparently our vote counters aren't feeling anything like that sort of pressure, to judge by Diebold.
Salon's article referred to the Cleveland Plain Dealer's earlier story on this:
"in August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."
The internal memos from Diebold (they get referred to from Salon) show a shockingly cavalier chief engineer 'managing' the security concerns of various clients, steadily resisting the idea of even password protecting the.mdb file (.mdb file!?!) so that just anyone couldn't overwrite audit logs. Nothing overtly political in those memos, though, thank God.
Still -- how does it affect the credibility of any (new, or old) voting system for the people overseeing it to be acknowledged partisans? Imagine a Florida 2000 in which there were no physical records, and in which the systems that counted votes were frighteningly insecure and had been programmed by a company headed by a partisan figure. We already had more than enough partisan elements there -- the brother who happens to be governor, the Supreme Court justice who has a wife on Bush's transition team, the different standards for counting absentee ballots in different counties, and so on.
The thing about those memos is, they really show the states to be one more relatively uninformed client of an IT company. They'll buy the FUD of the Diebold person as long as he sounds assured enough, you know? Even when it comes to something as obvious as "I double-clicked the file of votes and it opened with no password, is that bad?" Which is all the more reason to be sure you're dealing with someone who has no conflict of interest, right?
Saw the last one on a DVD my brother lent me, and ironed through the latter half of the movie only because the kids were half-watching too. It's a mess, they were more interested in playing with my old action figures than watching the movie.
So no, this Star Wars kid, who found himself during the denouement of the Death Star unconsciously "flying" with his hands in the theater, who remembers seeing The Empire Strikes Back without any warning of the Luke's father thing and being staggered, staggered, in the theater, this one didn't see EP I until the bargain theaters, and never put a penny toward EP II after that.
I'm just dying to know -- how is it that "political correctness" has spoiled Star Wars in particular? You've just said it would ruin the series if we let it go any further, right?
Seems to me like if Lucas'd left out the Stepinfetchit CGI character, and maybe made the trade confederation something other than cardboard standups with vaguely asian traits, he'd have had better movies the last two times around -- just as popcorn movies, leaving alone any sort of "correctness" you want to whine about. Isn't it bad writing in service of bigger-is-better effects that've bored me to the point where I didn't see the last one until video last time?
Frankly I could use a few characters who try to do the right thing and struggle with it, rather than just adhering to that grand, archetypal vision Lucas has convinced himself he had at one point. No problem with the lesbian pair idea, either (ahem)... or really any characters with any chemistry whatsoever, good or bad, between them. If that's "political correctness," please, let's have more.
Maybe this counts as astonishing in the Orwellian, counter-truth world of the MPAA, where piratical 13-year-olds are able to conjure complete clean copies of pre-release movies because they're just, you know, so darned malevolently evil? Did they think those copies were the result of undetected exploits by hackers, or something?
Oddly, the objection that copies could kill sales may be right in this case -- because movies are mostly not worth it, and if we get more than a spoon-fed preview we aren't going to pony up $30 for, oh, Daredevil. My DVD collection's maybe 50 movies, but I'd still pay to see Dr. Strangelove in a crowd again, once in a while. Movies you love, you see a few times. Movies that are mediocre, well, free copies just expose the shoddy product.
A million dollar plane would be nothin' much -- probably someone's vanity canard turbojet for private business travel.
The little commuter planes everyone carps about are multi-million dollar planes. A 737 is about $55 million. A factory Airbus A340 or Boeing 777 prices out at around $165 million, minus any expensive wheel rims you might be looking into for the landing gear. Seriously.
If you want to purchase something moderate, say an old 727 you'd like to haul freight in, expect to write a check for maybe $5 million. The "previously owned" market has a lot to do with how long the engines can wait for an overhaul. The engines alone are worth serious change.
And I still think that MSWord 5.2a was the best word processor to exist. It's a high point that hasn't again been reached.
Weird to read you saying it. I would've put it at around 5.1a -- the decent, simple toolbar -- but basically I've run across loads of people who give a rip who say Word 5.something was the best mainstream word processor they've used. Almost a universal sentiment among people who really know and use the nuts and bolts of a WP -- as opposed to the masses, who really should be using something like a *Works app for what they do.
Coincidentally, though, isn't it with the Office suite that packaged Word 6.x that MS began to completely dominate the world of "productivity suites"? Where I worked, that was the one that stomped out all the Lotus 1-2-3s and Wordperfects. Shrewd sales technique in the corporate world -- but Word 6.0 was bloated, klunky trash as a product next to the earlier one, and it was just change for change's sake from then on.
I honestly think he's just taking potshots at the party for effectively booting him, and because he has a massive ego and can't stand being out of the limelight.
Riiight. And any criticism from the Democrats, of course, is also motivated by personal animosity. Just a grudge. Pay it no mind.
Pat's whole Jewish angle is scary and typical of him, and I'm not in line with his world view at all -- but my personal feelings about his motives don't make the sources he's quoting from go away. These are people close to Bush.
Your totally fatuous, recklessly immature example must be right.
Which is why I think you should go in front of the American people and honestly explain this position of yours: "I'm sending your children overseas with the specific goal of destabilizing the Middle East, because I think that's a 'creative' thing to do." I'm sure that'll go over awfully, awfully well.
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Two exceptions -- George W. is 5'11" and Gore was 6'1" -- but then W. only got the electoral college and the supreme court. Also Jimmy Carter is only 5'9", and Ford was six two. But those are the only times it's gone the other way.
The Daily Standard has a throwaway article on the subject. Very informative about the height of Kerry's hair, if you ask me.
Basically any system that tried to make this really work would need to have one of two things:
-- quite linear plotlines, so that the "quests" or whatever you wanted to call them would be intelligible and fun to play toward; or
-- actively involved "GMs" who could recognize and reward interesting styles of play.
This is why MMORPGs don't turn my crank right now. The oversight of the admins isn't enough to keep up with abusers of the system, leave alone reward cool styles of play. Any 14-year-old D&D GM could do better. And the open-ended play, while it sounds like such a cool idea, just doesn't seem to end up rewarding anyone but thugs, in one sense or another.
Even linear, single-player systems don't manage to do this very well. Fallout was a great game, but the little side quests wouldn't come close to the XPs from three Death Claws in a nest. And there they had a chance to carefully place the stuff in the plot, which you can't do in an MMORPG. The lack of structure encourages the kill-to-level-up treadmill. Probably the payment structure does too.
Independent of the technical nature of the changes, if you want to seriously hype an OS maybe every-few-years is the way to go. It's hard to gear yourself up for a massive [sales jargon]paradigm shift[/jargon] every 12 months. The Mac OS that went out in 1984 basically underwent evolutionary change until OS 7, which brought true multitasking. Even OS 7 wasn't that jarring a change. Then it bounced happily along until OS X, really, if you don't count the hardware changes involved in the PowerPC chips and then the G3s.
Not that I'm exactly enthused about Longhorn, or anything -- OS X will do fine for now. But the delay isn't necessarily going to hurt the marketing, here. People need a little rest between blockbusters -- when it's one must-see movie after another they get bored with it.
2. the audience increasingly wants to join in and get closer to their media.
3. ...consuming more media simultaneously...
4. ...the last trend -- sharing.
So in the future, we will watch multiple reality shows we can shape with our various "votes" at the same time -- a time of our choosing. We'll have sent each other some of the shows, too. This is a revolution?
No one mindblowing idea here -- basically it seems like the BBC's thinking about that "Super -Electronic Programme Guide" to get a little ahead on interfaces, and they don't want to stonewall peer-to-peer models the way the music industry did.
Personally I like to read the program notes before the orchestra starts to play, and somehow I'm thinking there's not much you need to add on-the-fly to your notes about the Symphonie Fantastique. What's the breaking news?
This sort of thing would make tons more sense for sports events, where drilling down to see someone's stats against this pitcher (or whatever) would add to your experience without detracting from others'. For concerts? We're replacing rustling paper with the chit chits of styluses scrabbling over PDAs, but what did we gain, again?
Sounds exactly like the way the movies (successfully) responded to the advent of TV. All those Cinemascope huge screens, all the sprawling epics like The Robe and so on, were basically made because TV couldn't compete with a huge screen. TV really changed the movies that got made, in a big way: suddenly Westerns and Biblical epics, huge movies, were the rule.
I don't think bigger (and louder) is going to be better this time, though. The studios are trying to outcompete home theaters now by moving everything up that extra notch -- just blasting the sound, and making the picture explode with every frame. Those kinds of movies are exactly what turn me off. Hey, my brother's home theater can rattle the walls too, and the screen's pretty big. Movies like The Big Country look pretty watchable on my 32" set at home now, even.
They need something more than an overwhelming sensory assault on the audience, we can have that any day of the week at home. Right now there are plenty of video games more visually interesting than Star Wars Episode II. And those are interactive.
If it was me I'd try to do something to play up the social side of it. People go to movies on dates, they go with their kids on Saturdays, it's a social thing. Instead of playing to that, they're blaming us for it -- we share files with each other, how awful. Seems like a misjudgment.
They're speaking from experience, anyway.
My point being, if someone does get to those qualities you're talking about, hey, the computer's going to be the part that goes obsolete every two years, or that fries in the rain, causing you to run out and buy a new outfit at the outlet mall. Go wearable computing! Keep those garment workers' consumer confidence up!
So in "little more than a decade" we've fallen behind someone in ways that can only really be proven by data from a longitudinal study over many years? I'm not sure how we can be sure of that; we'd need more than a decade to compare long-term predictions to the results, right?
(I "get" where you're going, and it's an interesting point: Is our largely politicized skepticism about global warming change preventing us from investing in climate research? Basically I'm in sympathy with that question being asked, at least. But the data's still out on the actual results, isn't it?)
The article quoted from was in the New York Times originally, wasn't it?
I don't gather how you can say that America know the LEAST about climate science because the EU/Japn have fast computers.
Hey, here's an idea for anonymous cowards everywhere -- If you actually read the article, all the way through, you might not have to post anonymously. Then you might see exactly what the article says about the US's ability to predict long-term climate, see, instead of just responding to one paragraph out of context. Zoinks, wouldn't that be informative?
Er, no you don't. Tons of mp3s on mine. Why do you think people bought these before the iMusic store existed, out of passing curiosity?
Oh, and they should all be white... because it distracts me, otherwise.
Yeesh.
NASA will want to visit the bars on every planet, to make sure there aren't any missions available.
What this show is is a quick, enjoyably-written little Sci Fi serial thing. Everything should be done low-budget. The casting always was -- when someone got too pricey the Dr. got a new incarnation, right?
And costumes -- how could anyone ever get a cheap costume device that's as good as Tom Baker's scarf?
Cheap and fun. Concentrate on adapting decent little Sci Fi short story ideas for scripts. This could be a Simpsons, if you get the right mix.
Nobody said the story was bogus, the poster just winced at the weird sidelight of anxiety that this big time Dr. Who fan was going to write him as a flaming cross-dresser or something. I had the same reaction to the Telegraph article, without any real bias about the Telegraph coming in.
Note to Telegraph writers and editors: it's possible for gay people to have interests outside of their gayness, however distracted you may be by that side of their lives. (Additional note: Dr. Who fandom is probably a more distinctive trait than this writer's sexual orientation.)
It isn't the password thing in particular -- it's the fact that the chief engineer of a company that sells electronic voting systems is spending more time massaging the perceptions of his clients than he is making sure those clients have anything like a secure system. His attitude is basically "Whatever we can say to reassure these people, sell 'em on that argument." The banking industry wouldn't accept that level of schmoozed explanation for a security problem, and we ought to be holding our vote counters to something like that higher standard. If you and I can erase or alter the audit trail in that file without even using a login of any sort, what sort of integrity does this process have? When there's a controversy, who're you going to ask -- the CEO of the company, who's vowing to deliver electoral votes for partisan reasons?
And I agree that MDB passwords would be nuisance level security, but so's anything at some point. I happen to know my medical records are protected, within many clinics, by a handful of similarly low-level security systems -- file cabinet locks, some Access (clinics tend to track stuff in local MDBs), and stuff like that. Makes me feel better than if the janitor can go in and edit things without going out of his way, personally.
Right now if your visit to the rehab clinic gets spilled to the public, whoever slipped faces a steep (max $500,000?) fine under HIPAA. Apparently our vote counters aren't feeling anything like that sort of pressure, to judge by Diebold.
"in August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for President Bush. In a letter to fellow Republicans, O'Dell said that he was "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR."
The internal memos from Diebold (they get referred to from Salon) show a shockingly cavalier chief engineer 'managing' the security concerns of various clients, steadily resisting the idea of even password protecting the .mdb file (.mdb file!?!) so that just anyone couldn't overwrite audit logs. Nothing overtly political in those memos, though, thank God.
Still -- how does it affect the credibility of any (new, or old) voting system for the people overseeing it to be acknowledged partisans? Imagine a Florida 2000 in which there were no physical records, and in which the systems that counted votes were frighteningly insecure and had been programmed by a company headed by a partisan figure. We already had more than enough partisan elements there -- the brother who happens to be governor, the Supreme Court justice who has a wife on Bush's transition team, the different standards for counting absentee ballots in different counties, and so on.
The thing about those memos is, they really show the states to be one more relatively uninformed client of an IT company. They'll buy the FUD of the Diebold person as long as he sounds assured enough, you know? Even when it comes to something as obvious as "I double-clicked the file of votes and it opened with no password, is that bad?" Which is all the more reason to be sure you're dealing with someone who has no conflict of interest, right?
Saw the last one on a DVD my brother lent me, and ironed through the latter half of the movie only because the kids were half-watching too. It's a mess, they were more interested in playing with my old action figures than watching the movie.
So no, this Star Wars kid, who found himself during the denouement of the Death Star unconsciously "flying" with his hands in the theater, who remembers seeing The Empire Strikes Back without any warning of the Luke's father thing and being staggered, staggered, in the theater, this one didn't see EP I until the bargain theaters, and never put a penny toward EP II after that.
Fool me twice, nuh-uh.
I'm just dying to know -- how is it that "political correctness" has spoiled Star Wars in particular? You've just said it would ruin the series if we let it go any further, right?
Seems to me like if Lucas'd left out the Stepinfetchit CGI character, and maybe made the trade confederation something other than cardboard standups with vaguely asian traits, he'd have had better movies the last two times around -- just as popcorn movies, leaving alone any sort of "correctness" you want to whine about. Isn't it bad writing in service of bigger-is-better effects that've bored me to the point where I didn't see the last one until video last time?
Frankly I could use a few characters who try to do the right thing and struggle with it, rather than just adhering to that grand, archetypal vision Lucas has convinced himself he had at one point. No problem with the lesbian pair idea, either (ahem)... or really any characters with any chemistry whatsoever, good or bad, between them. If that's "political correctness," please, let's have more.
Oddly, the objection that copies could kill sales may be right in this case -- because movies are mostly not worth it, and if we get more than a spoon-fed preview we aren't going to pony up $30 for, oh, Daredevil. My DVD collection's maybe 50 movies, but I'd still pay to see Dr. Strangelove in a crowd again, once in a while. Movies you love, you see a few times. Movies that are mediocre, well, free copies just expose the shoddy product.
A million dollar plane would be nothin' much -- probably someone's vanity canard turbojet for private business travel.
The little commuter planes everyone carps about are multi-million dollar planes. A 737 is about $55 million. A factory Airbus A340 or Boeing 777 prices out at around $165 million, minus any expensive wheel rims you might be looking into for the landing gear. Seriously.
If you want to purchase something moderate, say an old 727 you'd like to haul freight in, expect to write a check for maybe $5 million. The "previously owned" market has a lot to do with how long the engines can wait for an overhaul. The engines alone are worth serious change.
Weird to read you saying it. I would've put it at around 5.1a -- the decent, simple toolbar -- but basically I've run across loads of people who give a rip who say Word 5.something was the best mainstream word processor they've used. Almost a universal sentiment among people who really know and use the nuts and bolts of a WP -- as opposed to the masses, who really should be using something like a *Works app for what they do.
Coincidentally, though, isn't it with the Office suite that packaged Word 6.x that MS began to completely dominate the world of "productivity suites"? Where I worked, that was the one that stomped out all the Lotus 1-2-3s and Wordperfects. Shrewd sales technique in the corporate world -- but Word 6.0 was bloated, klunky trash as a product next to the earlier one, and it was just change for change's sake from then on.
Riiight. And any criticism from the Democrats, of course, is also motivated by personal animosity. Just a grudge. Pay it no mind.
Pat's whole Jewish angle is scary and typical of him, and I'm not in line with his world view at all -- but my personal feelings about his motives don't make the sources he's quoting from go away. These are people close to Bush.
Your totally fatuous, recklessly immature example must be right.
Which is why I think you should go in front of the American people and honestly explain this position of yours: "I'm sending your children overseas with the specific goal of destabilizing the Middle East, because I think that's a 'creative' thing to do." I'm sure that'll go over awfully, awfully well.