Particularly since Pat's turned a 180 since leaving the Rep. party.
180 degrees means a full turnaround. Let's see, in 1996 Pat was to the right of the Republican party. You've just said he's now an ultra-liberal. Writing "liberal propaganda" for American Conservative magazine. That weasel!
(This fits Pat's messages in the last two presidential races perfectly. He's always been an isolationist, more or less -- his opposition to NAFTA matches up very well with this reaction to neocon ambition in our foreign policy.)
So far you've dropped the charge that it's exclusively liberal propaganda that's the story here, which is what I was answering. Moving on:
So you have a few articles from some nutball conservatives who wants America to take over the world.
Not quite there yet, but you seem to have read a little bit of it this time, so I'll give you another bite: We have a few articles from some "nutball conservatives" -- your words -- who want America to take over the world who are presently in positions within Bush's cabinet where they weild enormous influence, and who urged Bush's current Iraq policies on Clinton back in 1998.
Ever hear of Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld's, and Dick Cheney's, roles as founding members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)? PNAC is what Pat Buchanan is writing about, here -- they've enunciated the 'strategic vision' Buchanan's quoting from at length, and did so back in the late 90s in various papers on the subject.
Why does this register as a story that should be covered more? Because they laid out their plan for attacking Iraq well before Sept 11th, 2001 -- placing it squarely within the context of their "creative destabilization" ideas about the middle east. They urged Clinton to go to war against Iraq and remove Saddam because he was a "hazard" to "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil". They also called for America to go to war alone, attacked the United Nations and said the US should not be "crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council". In 1998.
Other members of PNAC: Bush's current Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle; Richard Armitage, the number two at the State Department; John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky, under-secretaries of state; Elliott Abrams, the presidential adviser for the Middle East and a member of the National Security Council; and Peter W Rodman, assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs. The letter was also signed by Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition; ex-director James Woolsey and Robert B Zoelick, the US trade representative.
That's Patrick Buchanan writing this stuff about Bush's neocon advisers.
You may remember, way back two or three messages ago, your dismissing the idea of this story as "liberal propaganda." Please write Pat and let him know how he's fallen into sin and error. How surprised he's going to be!
Text said that Prez has pissed off the Arab world. Duh! That's not a "Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance."
Maybe you would like to read the article? Try starting with the quote I helpfully included in that first post. I tried to make it easy on you that way, see? A little more, in case you doubt it's down there:
In The War Against the Terror Masters, (Ledeen) identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia.... Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged....We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution.... Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as "an unworthy American mission," Ledeen goes on to define America's authentic "historic mission":
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.... [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
...our leftist friends have conveniently forgotten about the butload of arms the Soviet Union poured into Africa...
The idea that American leftists are somehow secretly in sympathy with the Soviet Union is so ludicrously antiquated that it's hard to even believe you said that one. Last I heard the Soviet Union was universally denounced as a totalitarian nightmare state. What newspapers do you read, the 1953 kind?
Maybe, just maybe, the Soviet Union isn't being blamed for trying to take over the world right now because it no longer exists. You think?
Both superpowers poured arms into Africa. That's your "stage," and the story now is whether we do something to defuse it or continue to make foreign policy choices that rip the region apart. And sorry, those are our choices -- a story about how Leonid Breschnev wouldn't have fixed things either isn't all that relevant next to our actual policies today.
No, but when EVERY one of those "censored" stories clearly have the same agenda (ie, being miles left of center), it is fair to assume that the site's reporting is pretty highly slanted. Every one of those was an attack piece with damned shady "evidence". That's not news, that's propaganda.
#1: The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance:
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
And so on, into the intimate details of how the neocons have exercised their influence, and spelling out in detail the series of papers that laid out their rationale well before September 11th, 2001. This in a publication that has a quote from Patrick Buchanan on the header.
Take a look at the things George Will has said recently about this administration. Has he been fronting the liberal propaganda movement any time recently?
Take a look at any cell phone belt clip. Our on-call phone has a lame (p)leather-and-plastic cover on it that bulks up the relatively sleek little phone, making the surface squishy to hold and dial. It's the IT Support Guy's version of plumber's butt, that phone.
Went to CompUSA and looked at the only armband they have for my iPod. It's a huge, too-wide band of stretch fabric with the same stupid black leather-and-plastic cover over the iPod itself. Black? Bulky? Did they notice the iPod itself is white and pretty danged sleek? I wanted something that'd be like a watchband to wear, and they gave me scuba gear.
Take a look at technologies that are more mature, and you have a different level of refinement altogether. Binoculars, high end ones, really do give a rip about balance, the strap design distributing weight, and every little detail of focus speed and so on. My Swarovskis cost just under a grand retail, and every little detail of their design reflects thought about how you can use them for days at a time in comfort. No ostentation, just good design.
IMO, CNN is a little left slanted, but that's mostly because they cater to the "world" audience and, surprisingly, I'd say Americans are more conservative about a lot of things than many other nations in the world. (Especially Europe)
Aside -- CNN broadcasts a different network internationally than they do in the US, actually. Think of it like the BBC America. Traveling in Turkey last year, I was amazed at how different it really is overseas.
(TV ratings aren't quite pure mathematical metals, I grant you, but "anecdotal" wouldn't be the word either.)
I have in-laws who would never concede any such thing. They contend that Fox is the only unbiased source, and that CNN is much too slanted toward the left. Also every other new source -- they are all much too liberal, and Fox is the only antidote. So they say.
Fox also wins in the ratings over CNN. Not that they get the same advertising dollars -- CNN still makes that money, because they're more credible. But Fox has a lot of people out there believing the line.
Imagine if post-Columbus the various European nations had sent out a couple of row boats every few years...
If there hadn't been any foreseeable potential payoff for continued expeditions, that probably would have happened after Columbus.
If there was a clearly attainable economic benefit to space exporation anything like the one European powers recognized in the "new" world, we'd be much more serious about the whole thing, right? Spain gambled on Columbus because they were looking for a new spice route, and governments established colonies in America because it was doable and promised potential big returns. Space presently doesn't really promise any payoff that can approach the expense of going anywhere much. Satellites in orbit, on the other hand, are worth the expense, and we're way into them.
Not that it won't happen, not that we're not all boosters, but you can't say it's a lack of will that keeps us from the grand gestures right now -- it's a lack of any realistic incentive. All the asteroid mining plans in the world aren't going to make the costs work out, not yet.
I say we work nice and steadily at developing a caravelle, with each step within our means -- without sacrificing our economy or defense along the way. Going to Mars'd be nice, but I want to collect Social Security too, you know?
you have to admit that Al Jazeera doesn't have the objective standards that other newspapers try to adhere to.
First off, Al Jazeera is a TV Network, not a newspaper. The Web site is an extension of the TV network.
All I'm saying is, there's a reason Al Jazeera has an audience, and that audience is not just blindly kneeling at the altar of Arab nationalism, no. There is a bias, definitely -- and it mostly takes the same form we see on something like Fox News in the US: points of view that are closer to the station ideologically get first-person, direct defenses and more time on the air, and the ones the station is less aligned with -- notably Israeli sources -- get less representation and are often described indirectly, at one remove. Anyone who watched Fox describing the protests before and during our recent war will understand exactly what I mean by that. The anchors would go out of their way to frame stories about the protests by saying they were made up of a very few people and so on, and Fox didn't put footage on in which the protestors' point of view was directly expressed by advocates on the air nearly as much as they characterized those views at one remove. (The contempt Fox felt for those protesters was palpable. The anchors practically sneered going into those segments.)
For all, that, here's an Al Jazeera producer on your bias charge:
Hafiz al-Mirazi, Al Jazeera's Washington bureau chief, sounds weary when asked about accusations of bias. "The network is much more balanced than it gets credit for," he says. "During this crisis we have been criticized for making Al Jazeera a mouthpiece for the U.S. government. Why? Almost on a daily basis we bring on spokespersons for the administration."
Al Jazeera did have Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Ross, a former American ambassador to Syria who speaks fluent Arabic, on the air. Tony Blair has appeared too.
The Norm for Al Jazeera is Arab Nationalism. They're catering to their viewers, of course, but they're doing so at the cost of objectivity. It's more like a circus than a news show. More entertainment than news. Have you ever watched it?
Absolutely I've seen it. Nationalistic news sources suck, I totally agree with you there. Al Jazeera gets called "The Arab CNN," mostly, when people are trying to describe why it was created and the role it plays. It's struck me as a lot closer to Fox News than CNN, for what it's worth. CNN has always been about direct news feeds with traditional anchors and so on, whereas Fox is much more talk/advocacy driven, and much closer in tone to the last ten years of my US talk radio. Al Jazeera has a lot of really confrontational talk programs on the air, contentious ones, that Fox or MSNBC would be my closest US analog to.
You're totally right -- looks to be a story cribbed from Space Daily. Gee, I wonder why they didn't spice it up with a bunch of anti-American references and bash the Pentagon angle. Seems like a clear case where they had the chance to, doesn't it? And let's see, why do you think Al Jazeera keeps a relationship with Space Daily rather than reporting on the level of, in this case, the USA Today? Seems like they made a decent choice.
Funny -- I read their story first, mostly to see if I could spot any particular bias or overriding point of view. I will say, the Al Jazeera project clearly identified the Pentagon's connection to the project:
In a Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery's source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity.
They didn't go on to show any especial suspicion about that, they just noted it. Later on, at the end of the article, they described the Military applications -- "the US Department of Defence was interested in it for powering underwater microphones and sonar to spot passing ships and submarines." They were quite positive, all told, describing the batteries as remarkable for a proof-of-concept. They mentioned applications in impoverished areas, using batteries working from sewage for example.
On the other hand, USA Today didn't mention the Pentagon connection, describing the scientists only as being "at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst." The USA Today story was considerably shorter, lacked Al Jazeera's detailed description of how the thing worked ("...each side containing a graphite electrode and separated by a membrane. On one side was R ferriducens swimming in a glucose solution, which it broke down into carbon dioxide (CO2) and electrons. The electrons were transported to the nearby electrode...") and just generally read much more superficially.
I wouldn't describe the Al Jazeera story as amazingly well-written -- it included some grammatical slips that read as if they'd been made in translation -- but it was a more complete bit of reporting by far, and showed no determined bias other than noting the military connection in a neutral way, IMHO.
I'd bet the story's submitter included that Al Jazeera link because it's just plain better. Take a look yourself.
(And as far as the world news thing goes, you should try to understand why it is that the Arab world watches this channel rather than the Western World's channels, which they see as bought and paid for by US corporate interests. It is a point of view, and you might want to understand it even if you don't agree.)
This story reminds me of the movie Capricorn One. NASA was shown as running scared, doing anything necessary to cover their mistakes.
We get what you're saying, something about paranoia -- but this story reminds you of fiction in which NASA faked the moon landings and is involved in a murderous, high-stakes coverup involving murdering astronauts?
Um, maybe you want to call Fox and tell them you've got a new investigative special... Or did they run that one?
Requests like this are ones you make from positions of strength. The RIAA is blustering, trying to scare us that little bit more. Who'd give them her name at this point? The same people who, during the cultural revolution, would've admitted to sometimes having doubts about the party:
"All you have to do, comrade, is submit a complete confession in order to redeem yourself. Now sit down with this pen and make a clear conscience of it."
Overall, recorded music sales are down 31 percent since mid-2000, when the Napster online file-sharing phenomenon was in full bloom, said RIAA President Cary Sherman.
How very odd. Napster was open and legal, and it seems to me you cracked down on it. Didn't the crackdown work, guys? On the level of the argument being made here, they'd better re-open the old freewheeling Napster right away. Good for business. Right?
Moreover, sales of top 10 selling albums, which generate the bulk of profits for record labels, have dropped from 60 million units in 2000 to 34 million units last year, Sherman said.
"It's obvious we have a very serious problem," Sherman said. "Those are the revenue streams that have financed this industry, and they are shrinking."
And it's equally obvious your solutions have amounted to wrongheaded tactical measures with no strategic vision for your industry, and that those tactics have alienated the buying public -- and that your recent legal actions are only an escalation of them reflecting your paranoia and inaction in the face of the real issues. Hello? Anyone home?
Talk about your dog and pony show of a press conference. Even as a correlation-equals-causality argument, it doesn't quite make sense. The moronic pleasure of that last statement from Sherman is so thorough, too... "It's obvious we have a problem. Not enough money. Big bad problem." Blame your customers, quick.
One jet pack that came true: Used to be, the impossible dream was computers in every home. Even when Sci Fi authors imagined them, they were ponderous things, physically and in terms of how you worked with them -- central to your life if you lived with one.
We have some old 1950s Popular Mechanics magazines -- around 1958 to 1960 -- in our family cabin in Colorado. They aren't all that much different than today's versions of the same publication. Some of the stuff that comes up in 1958 and 1998:
Anything from everyday life that involves flying. Jet packs and cars mainly, with gyrocopters for variety. The emphasis is usually on "You'll be commuting with THIS!"
Shooting nuclear weapons at stuff in space. In 1958 PS seriously suggested that the first logical step in going to the moon would be shooting nuclear weapons at it -- so we could be sure we had our guidance systems working. Just yesterday on Slashdot someone posted about shooting the armageddon asteroid with "enough nukes" to send it away. Familiar.
Artificial intelligence. Duh.
Modes of public transportation that involve space travel, or at least extreme high-altitudes. (Soon you'll be taking vacation like THIS.)
Too many users seem chagrined about not being able to create fluid epics via iDVD. I'm always amused by the ones that complain about the 60~90 minute limit of iDVD.
...For those that think they're getting the world with the iLife suite, think again.
Thing is, did anybody think that? Did someone seriously think they were getting professional-level video editing software, in iMovie, with the free suite? Does anyone mistake iPhoto for Photoshop?
Personally I thought I was getting some really handy organizational software for all those digital snaps, a nice little database interface for lots of songs, and movie authoring stuff that'd be great for anything on the level of a home movie. That's what the "digital hub" claims to be, right? Judging by my nine(now ten)-year-old kids' success in using the suite of programs, it's a resounding success. For home users the limits are well-chosen, to judge by us.
For example, the 60-minute limit on highest-quality iDVD burns is a lot of video. We're talking home movies, here. We can fit half a summer's worth of video onto one disk, easily, in anything like an edited form.
Infinite Canvas? Why aren't Web ads that way?
on
The Rebirth of Comics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Anyone familiar with the publishing of Web-based ads -- you know, banners? banners with standard sizes and pricing for levels of traffic? -- could tell you that Web publishing faces some of the same constraints traditional paper models do.
Strips within Flash movies -- to use an example from the article -- just replace the four-panel, left-to-right constraint with another set of limitations. Have the right player? How big a monitor? Do sites that might want to syndicate your comic have a layout that'll accomodate your "infinite" canvas? Maybe we should agree on some standards to help people along... Sound familiar? Take a look at the flash-based ads you see around; they're a standard size, usually more or less square, so as to be set into a variety of text articles.
I'm not convinced that a subscription service is the model that'll reach critical mass, either. A dedicated site of comics for $3 a month will reach solid fans, but it won't have the same broad appeal as the funnies in your paper. And there was already a specialty market for graphic novels, right? We're talking about freeing the popular, daily strip from the tyranny of four-boxes-in-a-row. To do that you'd want to get to a sort of syndication model: ISPs might allow their users' custom home/news pages to include a certain comic, something like that. Again, you're facing some standardization to make something like that work.
It's a publishing thing, not just a magic Web thing.
And the other obvious question : wouldn't it be easier to simply teach people why they should use properly formed passwords that are not "mom", "dad", "john1" or "s00persekrit"?
Hmm. Why don't we ask the couple of generations of IT people who've tried to teach people this very lesson? Maybe they have something to say about that one. I could start with our call center: their number one call every month for the last five years has been "Please reset my password" despite several "education" campaigns.
People don't use "bad" passwords because they're uneducated nitwits, they do it because there are so many dang systems asking for passwords that they'd be driven crazy by the exercise of keeping them all straight otherwise. Either that or they'd have to write 'em all down, which kind of defeats the purpose, yes?
This motion signatures thing probably isn't the solution -- but hey, at least it does try to build on a model users know. Existing ID and authentication methods do sort of suck, so it's not like this is a solution without a problem.
Of course the eco freaks won't like the idea of Orion being nuclear powered...
Wow, you worked pretty hard to take a shot at those nasty "eco freaks" there -- the idea being that those freaks will object, Cassini-style, to the power source of the lifter itself, despite its cargo of "enough nukes"? I guess potential armageddon's as good an excuse to whine about environmentalists as any... Nicely thought through.
Another feature of the EPC is its 96-bit format, which some say is large enough to generate a unique code for every grain of rice on the planet. "Every molecule on Earth is what the MIT boys said," Abell said.
Rich area of pop-cultural history, examples like this. "All the grains of rice in the world" sure sounds like a lot. When people want to describe a huge expense, they often stack one-dollar bills "to the moon and back" a certain number of times. (If they want to diminish a similarly huge cost number, they can store those same bills in a modest-sized imaginary dumpster.) They didn't used to use the moon so much, it was more "X times around the world" back in 19th century papers, I think. Grains of rice are a good one, though sand would be more impressive.
Every molecule, though -- kind of transcends metaphor, doesn't it? How do they even get an estimate of the number of molecules in the world? Makes you wonder how God handles revision control...
If Al Gore gave up and acted like a graceful loser
Or, ahem, if Bush had?
Did you, um, ever see the things Gore said after the court's highly partisan final decision? You know, right after Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 case, allowing his wife to continue her work on Bush's transition team? Seemed fairly graceful to me, after the closest, most bitterly contested presidential election in US history had been decided in a state whose governor was the brother of one candidate but refused in any meaningful way to recuse himself or his political cronies from the process... You might want to take a look at the things Bush's own transition team said about Gore at that point.
Maybe you and I have different standards of behavior. Maybe, to you, the way in which the Bush team contested military ballots in Gore-friendly territory but loosened their standards for them in Bush-friendly ones, maybe that was "graceful"? (Do you mean "gracious"?)
But what am I thinking? You're a troll, pure and simple. Beg pardon.
When has vaporware ever been admitted so openly? Has anyone ever just plain admitted that they never even started developing something they'd previously claimed was in late beta? I'm trying to think of an example. I mean,
...the development had not formally been started, and it appears not a single line of code has been written. FWB has not to date even received the source code upon which any development would use as the foundation to build a new RealPC for OSX.
"We said it was almost done, but apparently we never had anyone working on it at all." Pretty danged total vapor.
For the people who use it, Applescript is a whole lot simpler than something like PERL. Take a look at the syntax somewhere, you'll see the difference.
And who are those people? Graphic designers have loved Applescript for a looong time, because they can write stuff for Photoshop without any hassles. Big advertizing departments will often have a huge collection of legacy scripts they've written for various big tasks -- "See the dimensions of all the graphics in this directory and add those numbers, formatted this way, to the end of the file names." They aren't programmers, their minds don't work that way, but they do have large programmatic tasks they need to get done.
Let's put it this way: I saw that title, "In 24 Hours," and I wondered how it could possibly take that long.
The article doesn't describe "tests" with air traffic controllers, it mentions a "prototype" system that uses a model of the ATC user's usual behavior to interpret situations.
In their prototype they say 9 out of 10 times, the computer interprets situations the way the user does. This is after a "cognitive model" of the user's behavior has been built to start with. The M.O. is to abet the user's typical process, not to instruct her or him in how to "use a computer" -- it isn't clippy in any sense, though we've had a few posts about how ATCs shouldn't have to be "taught" this way. The idea is:
Such a computer could alert the operator to a problem the operator hasn't picked up on yet.
In such a system, how close is a 90% score to useful? Seems like a potential distraction at that rate of failure, but the article isn't clear about what that 90% really means...
Slashdot Mirror
180 degrees means a full turnaround. Let's see, in 1996 Pat was to the right of the Republican party. You've just said he's now an ultra-liberal. Writing "liberal propaganda" for American Conservative magazine. That weasel!
(This fits Pat's messages in the last two presidential races perfectly. He's always been an isolationist, more or less -- his opposition to NAFTA matches up very well with this reaction to neocon ambition in our foreign policy.)
So far you've dropped the charge that it's exclusively liberal propaganda that's the story here, which is what I was answering. Moving on:
So you have a few articles from some nutball conservatives who wants America to take over the world.
Not quite there yet, but you seem to have read a little bit of it this time, so I'll give you another bite: We have a few articles from some "nutball conservatives" -- your words -- who want America to take over the world who are presently in positions within Bush's cabinet where they weild enormous influence, and who urged Bush's current Iraq policies on Clinton back in 1998.
Ever hear of Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld's, and Dick Cheney's, roles as founding members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)? PNAC is what Pat Buchanan is writing about, here -- they've enunciated the 'strategic vision' Buchanan's quoting from at length, and did so back in the late 90s in various papers on the subject.
Why does this register as a story that should be covered more? Because they laid out their plan for attacking Iraq well before Sept 11th, 2001 -- placing it squarely within the context of their "creative destabilization" ideas about the middle east. They urged Clinton to go to war against Iraq and remove Saddam because he was a "hazard" to "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil". They also called for America to go to war alone, attacked the United Nations and said the US should not be "crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council". In 1998.
Here's the letter on the PNAC's Web site.
Other members of PNAC: Bush's current Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle; Richard Armitage, the number two at the State Department; John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky, under-secretaries of state; Elliott Abrams, the presidential adviser for the Middle East and a member of the National Security Council; and Peter W Rodman, assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs. The letter was also signed by Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition; ex-director James Woolsey and Robert B Zoelick, the US trade representative.
You may remember, way back two or three messages ago, your dismissing the idea of this story as "liberal propaganda." Please write Pat and let him know how he's fallen into sin and error. How surprised he's going to be!
Maybe you would like to read the article? Try starting with the quote I helpfully included in that first post. I tried to make it easy on you that way, see? A little more, in case you doubt it's down there:
The idea that American leftists are somehow secretly in sympathy with the Soviet Union is so ludicrously antiquated that it's hard to even believe you said that one. Last I heard the Soviet Union was universally denounced as a totalitarian nightmare state. What newspapers do you read, the 1953 kind?
Maybe, just maybe, the Soviet Union isn't being blamed for trying to take over the world right now because it no longer exists. You think?
Both superpowers poured arms into Africa. That's your "stage," and the story now is whether we do something to defuse it or continue to make foreign policy choices that rip the region apart. And sorry, those are our choices -- a story about how Leonid Breschnev wouldn't have fixed things either isn't all that relevant next to our actual policies today.
#1: The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance:
Perhaps you'd like to hear this from American Conservative Magazine, then?
And so on, into the intimate details of how the neocons have exercised their influence, and spelling out in detail the series of papers that laid out their rationale well before September 11th, 2001. This in a publication that has a quote from Patrick Buchanan on the header.
Take a look at the things George Will has said recently about this administration. Has he been fronting the liberal propaganda movement any time recently?
Went to CompUSA and looked at the only armband they have for my iPod. It's a huge, too-wide band of stretch fabric with the same stupid black leather-and-plastic cover over the iPod itself. Black? Bulky? Did they notice the iPod itself is white and pretty danged sleek? I wanted something that'd be like a watchband to wear, and they gave me scuba gear.
Take a look at technologies that are more mature, and you have a different level of refinement altogether. Binoculars, high end ones, really do give a rip about balance, the strap design distributing weight, and every little detail of focus speed and so on. My Swarovskis cost just under a grand retail, and every little detail of their design reflects thought about how you can use them for days at a time in comfort. No ostentation, just good design.
Aside -- CNN broadcasts a different network internationally than they do in the US, actually. Think of it like the BBC America. Traveling in Turkey last year, I was amazed at how different it really is overseas.
(TV ratings aren't quite pure mathematical metals, I grant you, but "anecdotal" wouldn't be the word either.)
I have in-laws who would never concede any such thing. They contend that Fox is the only unbiased source, and that CNN is much too slanted toward the left. Also every other new source -- they are all much too liberal, and Fox is the only antidote. So they say.
Fox also wins in the ratings over CNN. Not that they get the same advertising dollars -- CNN still makes that money, because they're more credible. But Fox has a lot of people out there believing the line.
If there hadn't been any foreseeable potential payoff for continued expeditions, that probably would have happened after Columbus.
If there was a clearly attainable economic benefit to space exporation anything like the one European powers recognized in the "new" world, we'd be much more serious about the whole thing, right? Spain gambled on Columbus because they were looking for a new spice route, and governments established colonies in America because it was doable and promised potential big returns. Space presently doesn't really promise any payoff that can approach the expense of going anywhere much. Satellites in orbit, on the other hand, are worth the expense, and we're way into them.
Not that it won't happen, not that we're not all boosters, but you can't say it's a lack of will that keeps us from the grand gestures right now -- it's a lack of any realistic incentive. All the asteroid mining plans in the world aren't going to make the costs work out, not yet.
I say we work nice and steadily at developing a caravelle, with each step within our means -- without sacrificing our economy or defense along the way. Going to Mars'd be nice, but I want to collect Social Security too, you know?
First off, Al Jazeera is a TV Network, not a newspaper. The Web site is an extension of the TV network.
All I'm saying is, there's a reason Al Jazeera has an audience, and that audience is not just blindly kneeling at the altar of Arab nationalism, no. There is a bias, definitely -- and it mostly takes the same form we see on something like Fox News in the US: points of view that are closer to the station ideologically get first-person, direct defenses and more time on the air, and the ones the station is less aligned with -- notably Israeli sources -- get less representation and are often described indirectly, at one remove. Anyone who watched Fox describing the protests before and during our recent war will understand exactly what I mean by that. The anchors would go out of their way to frame stories about the protests by saying they were made up of a very few people and so on, and Fox didn't put footage on in which the protestors' point of view was directly expressed by advocates on the air nearly as much as they characterized those views at one remove. (The contempt Fox felt for those protesters was palpable. The anchors practically sneered going into those segments.)
For all, that, here's an Al Jazeera producer on your bias charge:
Al Jazeera did have Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Ross, a former American ambassador to Syria who speaks fluent Arabic, on the air. Tony Blair has appeared too.
The Norm for Al Jazeera is Arab Nationalism. They're catering to their viewers, of course, but they're doing so at the cost of objectivity. It's more like a circus than a news show. More entertainment than news. Have you ever watched it?
Absolutely I've seen it. Nationalistic news sources suck, I totally agree with you there. Al Jazeera gets called "The Arab CNN," mostly, when people are trying to describe why it was created and the role it plays. It's struck me as a lot closer to Fox News than CNN, for what it's worth. CNN has always been about direct news feeds with traditional anchors and so on, whereas Fox is much more talk/advocacy driven, and much closer in tone to the last ten years of my US talk radio. Al Jazeera has a lot of really confrontational talk programs on the air, contentious ones, that Fox or MSNBC would be my closest US analog to.
You're totally right -- looks to be a story cribbed from Space Daily. Gee, I wonder why they didn't spice it up with a bunch of anti-American references and bash the Pentagon angle. Seems like a clear case where they had the chance to, doesn't it? And let's see, why do you think Al Jazeera keeps a relationship with Space Daily rather than reporting on the level of, in this case, the USA Today? Seems like they made a decent choice.
In a Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery's source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity.
They didn't go on to show any especial suspicion about that, they just noted it. Later on, at the end of the article, they described the Military applications -- "the US Department of Defence was interested in it for powering underwater microphones and sonar to spot passing ships and submarines." They were quite positive, all told, describing the batteries as remarkable for a proof-of-concept. They mentioned applications in impoverished areas, using batteries working from sewage for example.
On the other hand, USA Today didn't mention the Pentagon connection, describing the scientists only as being "at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst." The USA Today story was considerably shorter, lacked Al Jazeera's detailed description of how the thing worked ("...each side containing a graphite electrode and separated by a membrane. On one side was R ferriducens swimming in a glucose solution, which it broke down into carbon dioxide (CO2) and electrons. The electrons were transported to the nearby electrode...") and just generally read much more superficially.
I wouldn't describe the Al Jazeera story as amazingly well-written -- it included some grammatical slips that read as if they'd been made in translation -- but it was a more complete bit of reporting by far, and showed no determined bias other than noting the military connection in a neutral way, IMHO.
I'd bet the story's submitter included that Al Jazeera link because it's just plain better. Take a look yourself.
(And as far as the world news thing goes, you should try to understand why it is that the Arab world watches this channel rather than the Western World's channels, which they see as bought and paid for by US corporate interests. It is a point of view, and you might want to understand it even if you don't agree.)
We get what you're saying, something about paranoia -- but this story reminds you of fiction in which NASA faked the moon landings and is involved in a murderous, high-stakes coverup involving murdering astronauts?
Um, maybe you want to call Fox and tell them you've got a new investigative special... Or did they run that one?
Requests like this are ones you make from positions of strength. The RIAA is blustering, trying to scare us that little bit more. Who'd give them her name at this point? The same people who, during the cultural revolution, would've admitted to sometimes having doubts about the party:
"All you have to do, comrade, is submit a complete confession in order to redeem yourself. Now sit down with this pen and make a clear conscience of it."
Overall, recorded music sales are down 31 percent since mid-2000, when the Napster online file-sharing phenomenon was in full bloom, said RIAA President Cary Sherman.
How very odd. Napster was open and legal, and it seems to me you cracked down on it. Didn't the crackdown work, guys? On the level of the argument being made here, they'd better re-open the old freewheeling Napster right away. Good for business. Right?
Moreover, sales of top 10 selling albums, which generate the bulk of profits for record labels, have dropped from 60 million units in 2000 to 34 million units last year, Sherman said.
"It's obvious we have a very serious problem," Sherman said. "Those are the revenue streams that have financed this industry, and they are shrinking."
And it's equally obvious your solutions have amounted to wrongheaded tactical measures with no strategic vision for your industry, and that those tactics have alienated the buying public -- and that your recent legal actions are only an escalation of them reflecting your paranoia and inaction in the face of the real issues. Hello? Anyone home?
Talk about your dog and pony show of a press conference. Even as a correlation-equals-causality argument, it doesn't quite make sense. The moronic pleasure of that last statement from Sherman is so thorough, too... "It's obvious we have a problem. Not enough money. Big bad problem." Blame your customers, quick.
We have some old 1950s Popular Mechanics magazines -- around 1958 to 1960 -- in our family cabin in Colorado. They aren't all that much different than today's versions of the same publication. Some of the stuff that comes up in 1958 and 1998:
...For those that think they're getting the world with the iLife suite, think again.
Thing is, did anybody think that? Did someone seriously think they were getting professional-level video editing software, in iMovie, with the free suite? Does anyone mistake iPhoto for Photoshop?
Personally I thought I was getting some really handy organizational software for all those digital snaps, a nice little database interface for lots of songs, and movie authoring stuff that'd be great for anything on the level of a home movie. That's what the "digital hub" claims to be, right? Judging by my nine(now ten)-year-old kids' success in using the suite of programs, it's a resounding success. For home users the limits are well-chosen, to judge by us.
For example, the 60-minute limit on highest-quality iDVD burns is a lot of video. We're talking home movies, here. We can fit half a summer's worth of video onto one disk, easily, in anything like an edited form.
Anyone familiar with the publishing of Web-based ads -- you know, banners? banners with standard sizes and pricing for levels of traffic? -- could tell you that Web publishing faces some of the same constraints traditional paper models do.
Strips within Flash movies -- to use an example from the article -- just replace the four-panel, left-to-right constraint with another set of limitations. Have the right player? How big a monitor? Do sites that might want to syndicate your comic have a layout that'll accomodate your "infinite" canvas? Maybe we should agree on some standards to help people along... Sound familiar? Take a look at the flash-based ads you see around; they're a standard size, usually more or less square, so as to be set into a variety of text articles.
I'm not convinced that a subscription service is the model that'll reach critical mass, either. A dedicated site of comics for $3 a month will reach solid fans, but it won't have the same broad appeal as the funnies in your paper. And there was already a specialty market for graphic novels, right? We're talking about freeing the popular, daily strip from the tyranny of four-boxes-in-a-row. To do that you'd want to get to a sort of syndication model: ISPs might allow their users' custom home/news pages to include a certain comic, something like that. Again, you're facing some standardization to make something like that work.
It's a publishing thing, not just a magic Web thing.
Hmm. Why don't we ask the couple of generations of IT people who've tried to teach people this very lesson? Maybe they have something to say about that one. I could start with our call center: their number one call every month for the last five years has been "Please reset my password" despite several "education" campaigns.
People don't use "bad" passwords because they're uneducated nitwits, they do it because there are so many dang systems asking for passwords that they'd be driven crazy by the exercise of keeping them all straight otherwise. Either that or they'd have to write 'em all down, which kind of defeats the purpose, yes?
This motion signatures thing probably isn't the solution -- but hey, at least it does try to build on a model users know. Existing ID and authentication methods do sort of suck, so it's not like this is a solution without a problem.
Wow, you worked pretty hard to take a shot at those nasty "eco freaks" there -- the idea being that those freaks will object, Cassini-style, to the power source of the lifter itself, despite its cargo of "enough nukes"? I guess potential armageddon's as good an excuse to whine about environmentalists as any... Nicely thought through.
Rich area of pop-cultural history, examples like this. "All the grains of rice in the world" sure sounds like a lot. When people want to describe a huge expense, they often stack one-dollar bills "to the moon and back" a certain number of times. (If they want to diminish a similarly huge cost number, they can store those same bills in a modest-sized imaginary dumpster.) They didn't used to use the moon so much, it was more "X times around the world" back in 19th century papers, I think. Grains of rice are a good one, though sand would be more impressive.
Every molecule, though -- kind of transcends metaphor, doesn't it? How do they even get an estimate of the number of molecules in the world? Makes you wonder how God handles revision control...
Or, ahem, if Bush had?
Did you, um, ever see the things Gore said after the court's highly partisan final decision? You know, right after Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 case, allowing his wife to continue her work on Bush's transition team? Seemed fairly graceful to me, after the closest, most bitterly contested presidential election in US history had been decided in a state whose governor was the brother of one candidate but refused in any meaningful way to recuse himself or his political cronies from the process... You might want to take a look at the things Bush's own transition team said about Gore at that point.
Maybe you and I have different standards of behavior. Maybe, to you, the way in which the Bush team contested military ballots in Gore-friendly territory but loosened their standards for them in Bush-friendly ones, maybe that was "graceful"? (Do you mean "gracious"?)
But what am I thinking? You're a troll, pure and simple. Beg pardon.
When has vaporware ever been admitted so openly? Has anyone ever just plain admitted that they never even started developing something they'd previously claimed was in late beta? I'm trying to think of an example. I mean,
"We said it was almost done, but apparently we never had anyone working on it at all." Pretty danged total vapor.
And who are those people? Graphic designers have loved Applescript for a looong time, because they can write stuff for Photoshop without any hassles. Big advertizing departments will often have a huge collection of legacy scripts they've written for various big tasks -- "See the dimensions of all the graphics in this directory and add those numbers, formatted this way, to the end of the file names." They aren't programmers, their minds don't work that way, but they do have large programmatic tasks they need to get done.
Let's put it this way: I saw that title, "In 24 Hours," and I wondered how it could possibly take that long.
In their prototype they say 9 out of 10 times, the computer interprets situations the way the user does. This is after a "cognitive model" of the user's behavior has been built to start with. The M.O. is to abet the user's typical process, not to instruct her or him in how to "use a computer" -- it isn't clippy in any sense, though we've had a few posts about how ATCs shouldn't have to be "taught" this way. The idea is:
In such a system, how close is a 90% score to useful? Seems like a potential distraction at that rate of failure, but the article isn't clear about what that 90% really means...