We're turning over lots of taxonomies based on some cladistics-minded genetics lately. National Geographic threw in a chart and a couple of pages about re-grouping mammals a while back.
The chimps percentage might be a bit higher than we usually hear, but that number's basically been around. (Question is, how could our definition of a genus be this open to debate?)
Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
Jeez, someone mod this "hilarious."
Was the war meant to prevent the use of these Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorists to whom Saddam threatened to give them? Seems to me I recall Bush telling me it was... If waging the war has prompted the weapons to be neatly scurried across the border into Iran or Syria, how exactly does that prevent them from reaching the hands of terrorists, please?
Your alternative, of course, is to say they're just hard to find. That's what the administration's still basically saying. In that case, the war has merely created a vaccuum of power in which the secret underground facilities or whatever can be raided by exactly the sorts of radicals we've worried about with the former Soviet Union's stockpiles of chemical and biological agents. You remember how looters can break into stuff we aren't guarding, right? We aren't guarding these WMDs, 'cause we can't find them.
Thing is, the people objecting to this war weren't just meddlesome a-holes trying to spoil your groove. It isn't just about defending your rationale for the war on some right-wing talk show -- it's about the war actually exacerbating the risks it was supposedly trying to address. Telling me that Ansar al Islam or whoever ran across the border into Iran with the Anthrax might seem to you like a way to show the war was right after all, but I don't find it particularly reassuring, friend.
(Well, it's a little more reassuring than the "Bush has intelligence he just can't reveal to us" angle you threw out. We'll be invading Canada next based on these mysterious, unprovable intelligence sources. Or how about Nigeria, based on that forged document?)
"PR Problem" != undermining US foreign policy
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Satellite Imagery
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· Score: 1
I think it'll be a PR problem if they don't find WMDs, but in the end we're already seeing it was the right thing to do.
When, as a US President, you go about explicitly undermining the UN, saying it'll be irrelevant if it doesn't rubber-stamp your own controversial, aggressively unilateral policies, that's more serious than a "PR problem." There's a colossal difference between the domestic take on this issue and the international one. "PR" doesn't adequately describe the damage.
In world opinion, the question was "Why attack Iraq now?" The answers the Bush administration gave were a) there's a 9/11 or Al Quaeda link, Saddam's sponsoring terrorism; and b) Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction, so he could give those to the terrorists. Well, the Al Quada link to Ansar al Islam doesn't get mentioned much now, maybe because that intelligence was iffy or maybe because the war had the effect of letting Ansar al Islam slip easily out of the country during the chaos. (Duh.) Nobody at the UN seriously bought the Al Quaeda thing, even the CIA was forced by Rumsfeld to "reassess" its earlier memos dismissing that possibility in order to back the administration's arguments. The supposed 9/11 connection seems to have been a total, utter reach; all the European intelligence agencies were totally unconvinced by that argument.
So, we were left with the WMD option, and Colin Powell went to the security council and puffed it up, and some of what he said was based on a forgery we already knew about... and now we haven't found anything but equivocal evidence of a much smaller program than we were making claims about.
And if those WMDs were so easy to shuttle out of the country, if they're so hard to find now, who's to say the current post-war chaos in Iraq hasn't given the sorts of radicals and terrorists we were afraid of access to them? That's exactly what the dissent here has been saying forever -- that a war would only destabilize the middle east, making terrorist attacks more likely. We've been worried about stores of biological and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union forever for exactly those reasons.
Not exactly a "PR problem" we can ignore because Fox News says we did the right thing. The question wasn't whether Saddam was a brutal guy, it was whether the war would make it worse.
"a stimulating alternative to 'snoozing, daydreaming, overconsuming food and beverages, or sitting like a mindless slug waiting for time to pass."
My parents didn't buy it when I told 'em Intellivision was good for my hand-eye coordination, either. (Honest, "Utopia" is really building my management skills... for use in "Civilization" later on.)
No chance this sort of thing happens on a big scale in the white collar sweat shop that is US IT right now. During the dot com boom, employers were into the whole Ping-Pong-for-morale idea, but now they've got us by the short hairs.
But it makes total sense to officially sanction something in a "public" break area or whatever that you think might be a problem for people sitting in their individual veal stall/cube. If it's going to happen, get your spin on how it happens. Use it to make people like their jobs and their coworkers. Can that be bad? Can it be worse than an office of people with their fingers poised on Ctrl-tab to hide minesweeper?
The alternative is in place here. We've got hidden processes taking "inventory" of our systems, sniffing out potentially illicit activity all the time. They don't find the real abusers, but they succeed in crushing the morale of people who take it casually. Those are the ones who get caught. And of course, the people responsible for monitoring it are the LAN team sorts who know where to hide their own. Pretty much a gulag of a network, complete with the guards knowing how to get contraband through the gates. Let's hear it for authoritarian approaches to social problems...
'The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible,' Albert Einstein once remarked.
Sounds like the sort of thing a director says about her movie, to bullshit her way through the questions at a film festival. Orson Welles had a million of 'em.
Not to be too cynical -- I love these sorts of pithy statements, and they'd sure rate a +5 insightful on slashdot -- but are we required to assume that because he was amazing in one field, his sentiments about life and happiness are necessarily grand Higher Truths? He sure was a good quote, but there's a sort of Mark Twain trying-this-statement-on-for-size quality to Einstein sometimes, isn't there?
Field researchers have tons of tracking applications, and they're always using transmitters in awkward collars and so on. Not having the thing on the surface where it can get bashed around by the hard lives animals lead (and interfere with their range of motion and so on) might be an advantage?
the average Apple user is buying songs at a rate of 2-3 a year. Hardly a figure that would impress anyone.
We're not buying any numbers about the rate of sales to "the average Mac user" unless you've got a source or a much clearer description of your supposed stat -- what population are you using, please? -- but let me ask you this: What would "impress" you? Apparently a profitable online method for music retailing that convinces the big labels to allow unintrusive, intuitive DRM in the files and a per-song sales model, that doesn't impress you... Not when it's only selling around 90 songs a minute or around 1.4 songs a second.
In 16 days, Apple's store has more than doubled the sales from the other "legit" online music resellers put together last year. I wonder if they're at all impressed. If not, we shouldn't expect them to try to move to a similar sales model...
Removing the words he doesn't know and the ones that just plain aren't to his tastes (like "regret," or saying "please" to other nations, or admitting accidental mistakes), you get:
Dear North Korea,
Allow me to vaporiz(e/ing) your country while attempting to help save the world from future nuclear calamities. We look forward to your nuclear winter.
And there you have it, folks -- U.S. "preemptive" foreign policy.
Steve Jobs mentioned adding the indies in several interviews and in his key note. Supposedly the small labels are eager, but there wasn't time.
We haven't seen much in the way of results yet, and it's still okay to be a little skeptical. It'd make me feel better to see a new category full of smaller labels introduced with some fanfare.
In general Apple'd be smart to add big new sections of content -- "We're opening a new such-and-so wing of the store" -- rather than adding the Doors one day and Alanis Morissette another, in dribs and drabs. It'd be better press, and get my attention. (They could even just re-cast existing categories in new groupings for effect: we're opening the "American Songbook" store, you know? No reason you shouldn't use it like the database it is.)
Perhaps your argument was a bit misdirected? I suggest you re-read the parent.
The parent said the battery life wasn't going to be competitive with the competition. ('If I can't easily recharge, 1 or 2 hours of battery won't cut it.') You seem to think that's a moot point because it's awfully easy to find outlets when you travel -- but even in my car with extra power outlets, I'm saying marginal battery life does add a little nuisance to my life. It does line up under "con" in the list about this one.
Not that I'm that eager to shovel video games at my kids anyway...
I think I finally understand, now, why grocery stores don't use the more efficient single-queue/multiple-registers model for check-out.
I agree this patent is more about autofilling as advertising, to encourage impulse buys.
Not sure that's really what Amazon wants to do, though. They're already doing a ton of suggestive selling, what with "People who wear clothes also bought clean underwear from Target" lines on every search return. (Or is it, ulp, just mine??) At some point that's just a nuisance, like a cluttered cash wrap with too many crappy "suggestions." You filter it all out.
You use the grocery example. Well, bookstores mostly do use a single queue, to make everyone file past all the potential impulse items along it (rather than just the few at a given register). Maybe it's just me, but probably the grocery store's aware of how long and awkward a single line of carts would be (and seem) for shoppers. Imagine a stacked-up line of 14 gilled carts, complete with young kids leaning on half the cart handles. Ugh... Even if it went a little faster, it'd scare me off in a heartbeat. That's a bad feeling.
Popups telling me to buy Pokemon stuff might be in that area, for me.
Road trip: cigarette lighter socket.
Flight: Accessory outlet
train: Same
If we wanted to be plugged into a wall, we'd buy a PS2. Last I checked this was meant to compete with the GBA, which probably has the power advantage hands down: 10 hours with the backlight, 18 hours without it turned on.
I have two nine-year-olds and a Newfoundland to take on the big family trip. Does it sound obnoxious to be fooling with wires and adapters? You bet it does. Big nuisance.
The biggest strength Pixar has is that it really hones the personality of a character with tiny little well-considered style points. The writing's okay, it's not completely rote Disney crap, but it's the little stuff in a character like Woody that makes it work.
Think of that first short with the lamp, way back -- who'd have thought they could make it so expressive? Or all those birds on the line; they all look alike, but the little character touches set each one apart.
George Lucas, on the other hand, can have someone like Samuel L. Jackson in a movie and make him deeply boring -- even as a Jedi Freakin' Knight! Does anyone think Lucas improves his actors? Anyone? Does he direct for nice little character touches??
What George wants this splinter company to do is make huge, distractingly detailed landscapes and gratuitously gigantic battle scenes. Take a look at the battle at the end of Episode II; that's what he thinks computer animation is about. He's as bad with character touches as any director out there.
Wasn't there a pop media story a couple of years back where someone composed the "perfect" painting, based on focus groups and "research" much like this? The result was set in a lovely little landscape at sunset, it had a family at its focus, and so on, in well-considered proportions that had to do with what respondents said they liked. Not quite one of those bogus Kincaid prints that were supposed to be so valuable, but just as bland.
The earlier thing was intended to provoke people to ask why the idea of "ideal" art was so wrong... This one's just an advertiser's formula for avoiding risk.
Sorry, though -- low risk means lower gain, too. Out of Africa doesn't match up with the formula all that well, but in the mid 80s it had a huge marketing impact. That movie set fashions going -- none of the big designers were planning on a sort of "Safari" line at the time, but the movie touched it off. Banana Republic owed a ton of its business to that one movie for maybe five years. And I don't think advertisers could have figured that out using this formula; they'd have had to see the movie and get the idea it was going to look a certain way and appeal to a certain type of person.
Have to say, I was on the edge with this movie. Everyone kept drooling over the thing, the Slashdot crowd would turn on you for even hinting that it risked just being another sequel. Someone compared it to Empire Strikes Back, and I tried to see it that way... I was trying to keep an open mind despite the obvious signs of empty hype. And then that commercial. Oh, man.
That one thing spoiled the entire mojo of the event-movie-about-to-arrive feeling, just completely shot it to hell, didn't it? What were they thinking? You want to feel excited to see the trailer, you want to be worked up with the expectation of that atmospheric opening to the movie, but instead you've already seen the thing coming in a beer commercial. Deflates it.
The video game made a little sense, with this particular movie, but c'mon -- Heineken??
every saturday morning watching Ghost Busters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, reruns of Transformers, Thundercats, even the old tapes of He-Man
That's like a list about the debasement of the kid cartoon, not about the classics. You were on the cusp of the every-show-is-an-excuse-to-push-action-figures generation, but not quite there yet. Transformers was actually over the edge... Not that the production values were so bad, with Orson Welles in the movie and all, but that was well on the way to Pokemon.
"Classics" would be Wagner's Ring Cycle as done by Bugs and Elmer, not Voltron.
Nixon and Mondale -- grey shades
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That last bit of testimony from Robert F. Thompson included some stuff about Nixon -- can you believe it? -- collaborating in misleading congress. In this case, it was about how often the shuttle could be launched, the resulting cost per pound of cargo, and the overall cost estimate for the program. The leading congressional opponent, seen then as a "luddite" (Washington Post) who'd gut NASA if he could: Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota.
Today's neoconservatives often disparage the shuttle as high-tech socialism, and I've talked to more than a few different people who regard the whole program as a tax-and-spend legacy of an earlier governmental style. (Low-cost probes like Pathfinder and so on are their usual ideal.) Just goes to show you, the world's not black and white.
Mondale would be practically a liberal dinosaur by today's standards, and generally speaking he was arguing for funding social programs above NASA -- but his objections to cost estimates for this program seem to have been basically right, don't they? You have to respect that. Nixon's got a conservative's rep, but he was a Keynesian in economic terms and he definitely committed to a massive spending program here based on bogus estimates. With his eyes wide open about it, too.
Yep -- it's DVD-Plus, as in VCR-Plus
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TiVo Basic
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Absolutely. This is basically about where your old VCR that had "VCR-Plus" put you, only you're not entering codes from the paper and carefully leaving a tape in the player and the power off and all that.
This amounts to a nice little recording app for the DVD player(s) it's bundled with. It has little to do with TiVO other than that the company's smart enough to put its name on it to maybe get a lower-cost entry point for people to buy into its larger service. Seems shrewd, and I bet it didn't cost them much for the "branding" it gives them.
I'd definitely think of this as a deciding feature if I was in the market for a new DVD player. It'd set that model a notch up from the others at Best Buy, no doubt at all.
Because Cassini is the last real NASA probe, made in the old way. None of that cheaper/faster/destroyed on entry/by miscommunication/flat out lost in space crap.
Until it gets there and works, we don't know that your fisrt sentence necessarily leads to your second. The fact they built it at greater cost and with a much more lavish set of features may mean that one simple problem could be devastating, whereas the cheaper model at least might spread the risk around by sending several more task-specific probes. To wit:
...the European Space Agency admitted a serious and embarrassing problem due to a a glaring design error which no one had caught during years of design reviews and ground tests.
It now turns out that the Huygens data receiver on Cassini isn't properly adjusted to the Doppler change in the frequency of Huygens' received signal caused by the fact that Cassini will be barreling toward Titan (and Huygens) at over 21,000 km per hour during its listening period.
That's why they sell 'em in a group -- the second and third movie wouldn't rate buying otherwise.
The first Raiders is a great movie. Have to say, having caught #2 on cable and just seen the previews for #3, I had no interest in 'em at all. They wasted the historical setting pretty badly, IMHO, and lost the feeling they were telling a story independent of stunts and character "chemistry." Pretty rote efforts.
Quick, how many people would say #2 or #3 are among their favorite movies? The first one's on a lot of lists.
How dark a day is it when we start presuming that our glorious technology couldn't be to blame, so we reach for excuses to do with the pilots in the Tornado "goofing off"? Does it pain you at all to slander the dead this way?
You provide no motive for this supposed recklessness -- "because, hey, he's in a Tornado" doesn't explain anything at all -- and your "I remember hearing" amounts to the regurgitated speculation of a Fox News anchor, I'm betting. I especially loved the "The coalition noticed" part -- where you don't want to deal with the fact that it was an American Patriot crew shooting down a pair of British fliers.
There is no "culture of US corporatism" stomping around evilly destroying foreign victims.
Oddly enough, you know, the people who're presently bitterly resenting our foreign policy are decrying exactly such a culture. And I'm not just talking about in Iraq, or Syria, or Egypt -- I'm talking about in France and in our closest ally, the UK, too. Out of passing curiosity, had you ever considered actually listening to the nature of the criticisms against us? Or are you completely isolated in your solipsistic echo chamber?
Because we have the freedom to pursue whatever business we like, Americans have gotten very good at supplying what people want... It seems like simple logic to me that any human being would naturally gravitate toward systems that bring greater satisfaction. There, no complex motives required, just basic human behavior.
It's the echo chamber, then... Talk about your "propoganda (sic)." The Arab world hates us because our businesses are so efficient at giving people what they want. It's all just basic human nature.
Gee, how do you explain the Shias in Iraq right now? They were cheering when the tanks went into Baghdad; why are they now telling us to go home, if they're gravitating toward more satisfaction as you say? Why is the Shiite reaction so similar to their reaction to the British in 1919? Were the British also exceptionally good at giving the people the satisfaction they wanted? Or does this explanation of yours float in a totally ahistorical fantasy universe where you don't need to deal with comparisons like that?
More to the point: supply us with one clear case in which this has motivated a specific terrorist act. We know a fair amount about the 9/11 hijackers. Were Mohammed Atta's attitudes toward skyscrapers born of this way of thinking you describe? They seem to fit the "corporatism" critique much better, to me.
Please, please, look into how the educated Arab world feels about US foreign policy. There are many, many people out there whose desperate desire is to bring secular, democratized states to the Arab world, but who also seem to understand the sources of terrorism. They do understand the despotic regimes out there -- they seem particularly aware of ones like Egypt, and of the Shah in Iran. You know, the ones the US props up? Like in Pakistan, where Bush W. applauded the military coup that brought Musharraf to power back during the 2000 election? (Those regimes really don't fit into your idea of leaders oppressing the people to preserve the status quo, incidentally. The people resent our backing their leaders. Ever notice that? Ever hear of Anwar Sadat?) Those people aren't living in fantasy la-la land where "The terrorists hate us because we provide the people with more satisfaction." They're saying things about how US foreign policy is counterproductive. You might want to try listening.
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
Fine, so you carry it around on your wrist. Sure looks like you don't use it there, you take it off and hold it like a... well, like a phone. Another poster backs that up. But whatever.
Aren't cells small enough now that you should be able to slip them into any number of different carrying rigs? I want one in my pocket protector, of course, or in my slide rule case... Those cool LAN people clip them onto their belts, the studs. Laptop cases should have protected, dedicated exterior pouches, people on a treadmill might want an armband strap like for their iPod, and so on...
Aside from getting a little design spark out of consumers, I don't see the pros of pushing the design in some particularly specialized direction. Sell me a $15 accessory that lets me jog with it, don't sell me a whole new phone.
Slashdot Mirror
We're turning over lots of taxonomies based on some cladistics-minded genetics lately. National Geographic threw in a chart and a couple of pages about re-grouping mammals a while back.
The chimps percentage might be a bit higher than we usually hear, but that number's basically been around. (Question is, how could our definition of a genus be this open to debate?)
Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
Jeez, someone mod this "hilarious."
Was the war meant to prevent the use of these Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorists to whom Saddam threatened to give them? Seems to me I recall Bush telling me it was... If waging the war has prompted the weapons to be neatly scurried across the border into Iran or Syria, how exactly does that prevent them from reaching the hands of terrorists, please?
Your alternative, of course, is to say they're just hard to find. That's what the administration's still basically saying. In that case, the war has merely created a vaccuum of power in which the secret underground facilities or whatever can be raided by exactly the sorts of radicals we've worried about with the former Soviet Union's stockpiles of chemical and biological agents. You remember how looters can break into stuff we aren't guarding, right? We aren't guarding these WMDs, 'cause we can't find them.
Thing is, the people objecting to this war weren't just meddlesome a-holes trying to spoil your groove. It isn't just about defending your rationale for the war on some right-wing talk show -- it's about the war actually exacerbating the risks it was supposedly trying to address. Telling me that Ansar al Islam or whoever ran across the border into Iran with the Anthrax might seem to you like a way to show the war was right after all, but I don't find it particularly reassuring, friend.
(Well, it's a little more reassuring than the "Bush has intelligence he just can't reveal to us" angle you threw out. We'll be invading Canada next based on these mysterious, unprovable intelligence sources. Or how about Nigeria, based on that forged document?)
When, as a US President, you go about explicitly undermining the UN, saying it'll be irrelevant if it doesn't rubber-stamp your own controversial, aggressively unilateral policies, that's more serious than a "PR problem." There's a colossal difference between the domestic take on this issue and the international one. "PR" doesn't adequately describe the damage.
In world opinion, the question was "Why attack Iraq now?" The answers the Bush administration gave were a) there's a 9/11 or Al Quaeda link, Saddam's sponsoring terrorism; and b) Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction, so he could give those to the terrorists. Well, the Al Quada link to Ansar al Islam doesn't get mentioned much now, maybe because that intelligence was iffy or maybe because the war had the effect of letting Ansar al Islam slip easily out of the country during the chaos. (Duh.) Nobody at the UN seriously bought the Al Quaeda thing, even the CIA was forced by Rumsfeld to "reassess" its earlier memos dismissing that possibility in order to back the administration's arguments. The supposed 9/11 connection seems to have been a total, utter reach; all the European intelligence agencies were totally unconvinced by that argument.
So, we were left with the WMD option, and Colin Powell went to the security council and puffed it up, and some of what he said was based on a forgery we already knew about... and now we haven't found anything but equivocal evidence of a much smaller program than we were making claims about.
And if those WMDs were so easy to shuttle out of the country, if they're so hard to find now, who's to say the current post-war chaos in Iraq hasn't given the sorts of radicals and terrorists we were afraid of access to them? That's exactly what the dissent here has been saying forever -- that a war would only destabilize the middle east, making terrorist attacks more likely. We've been worried about stores of biological and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union forever for exactly those reasons.
Not exactly a "PR problem" we can ignore because Fox News says we did the right thing. The question wasn't whether Saddam was a brutal guy, it was whether the war would make it worse.
"a stimulating alternative to 'snoozing, daydreaming, overconsuming food and beverages, or sitting like a mindless slug waiting for time to pass."
My parents didn't buy it when I told 'em Intellivision was good for my hand-eye coordination, either. (Honest, "Utopia" is really building my management skills... for use in "Civilization" later on.)
No chance this sort of thing happens on a big scale in the white collar sweat shop that is US IT right now. During the dot com boom, employers were into the whole Ping-Pong-for-morale idea, but now they've got us by the short hairs.
But it makes total sense to officially sanction something in a "public" break area or whatever that you think might be a problem for people sitting in their individual veal stall/cube. If it's going to happen, get your spin on how it happens. Use it to make people like their jobs and their coworkers. Can that be bad? Can it be worse than an office of people with their fingers poised on Ctrl-tab to hide minesweeper?
The alternative is in place here. We've got hidden processes taking "inventory" of our systems, sniffing out potentially illicit activity all the time. They don't find the real abusers, but they succeed in crushing the morale of people who take it casually. Those are the ones who get caught. And of course, the people responsible for monitoring it are the LAN team sorts who know where to hide their own. Pretty much a gulag of a network, complete with the guards knowing how to get contraband through the gates. Let's hear it for authoritarian approaches to social problems...
Sounds like the sort of thing a director says about her movie, to bullshit her way through the questions at a film festival. Orson Welles had a million of 'em.
Not to be too cynical -- I love these sorts of pithy statements, and they'd sure rate a +5 insightful on slashdot -- but are we required to assume that because he was amazing in one field, his sentiments about life and happiness are necessarily grand Higher Truths? He sure was a good quote, but there's a sort of Mark Twain trying-this-statement-on-for-size quality to Einstein sometimes, isn't there?
Field researchers have tons of tracking applications, and they're always using transmitters in awkward collars and so on. Not having the thing on the surface where it can get bashed around by the hard lives animals lead (and interfere with their range of motion and so on) might be an advantage?
We're not buying any numbers about the rate of sales to "the average Mac user" unless you've got a source or a much clearer description of your supposed stat -- what population are you using, please? -- but let me ask you this: What would "impress" you? Apparently a profitable online method for music retailing that convinces the big labels to allow unintrusive, intuitive DRM in the files and a per-song sales model, that doesn't impress you... Not when it's only selling around 90 songs a minute or around 1.4 songs a second.
In 16 days, Apple's store has more than doubled the sales from the other "legit" online music resellers put together last year. I wonder if they're at all impressed. If not, we shouldn't expect them to try to move to a similar sales model...
Dear North Korea,
Allow me to vaporiz(e/ing) your country while attempting to help save the world from future nuclear calamities. We look forward to your nuclear winter.
And there you have it, folks -- U.S. "preemptive" foreign policy.
We haven't seen much in the way of results yet, and it's still okay to be a little skeptical. It'd make me feel better to see a new category full of smaller labels introduced with some fanfare.
In general Apple'd be smart to add big new sections of content -- "We're opening a new such-and-so wing of the store" -- rather than adding the Doors one day and Alanis Morissette another, in dribs and drabs. It'd be better press, and get my attention. (They could even just re-cast existing categories in new groupings for effect: we're opening the "American Songbook" store, you know? No reason you shouldn't use it like the database it is.)
The parent said the battery life wasn't going to be competitive with the competition. ('If I can't easily recharge, 1 or 2 hours of battery won't cut it.') You seem to think that's a moot point because it's awfully easy to find outlets when you travel -- but even in my car with extra power outlets, I'm saying marginal battery life does add a little nuisance to my life. It does line up under "con" in the list about this one.
Not that I'm that eager to shovel video games at my kids anyway...
I agree this patent is more about autofilling as advertising, to encourage impulse buys.
Not sure that's really what Amazon wants to do, though. They're already doing a ton of suggestive selling, what with "People who wear clothes also bought clean underwear from Target" lines on every search return. (Or is it, ulp, just mine??) At some point that's just a nuisance, like a cluttered cash wrap with too many crappy "suggestions." You filter it all out.
You use the grocery example. Well, bookstores mostly do use a single queue, to make everyone file past all the potential impulse items along it (rather than just the few at a given register). Maybe it's just me, but probably the grocery store's aware of how long and awkward a single line of carts would be (and seem) for shoppers. Imagine a stacked-up line of 14 gilled carts, complete with young kids leaning on half the cart handles. Ugh... Even if it went a little faster, it'd scare me off in a heartbeat. That's a bad feeling.
Popups telling me to buy Pokemon stuff might be in that area, for me.
Flight: Accessory outlet
train: Same
If we wanted to be plugged into a wall, we'd buy a PS2. Last I checked this was meant to compete with the GBA, which probably has the power advantage hands down: 10 hours with the backlight, 18 hours without it turned on.
I have two nine-year-olds and a Newfoundland to take on the big family trip. Does it sound obnoxious to be fooling with wires and adapters? You bet it does. Big nuisance.
Think of that first short with the lamp, way back -- who'd have thought they could make it so expressive? Or all those birds on the line; they all look alike, but the little character touches set each one apart.
George Lucas, on the other hand, can have someone like Samuel L. Jackson in a movie and make him deeply boring -- even as a Jedi Freakin' Knight! Does anyone think Lucas improves his actors? Anyone? Does he direct for nice little character touches??
What George wants this splinter company to do is make huge, distractingly detailed landscapes and gratuitously gigantic battle scenes. Take a look at the battle at the end of Episode II; that's what he thinks computer animation is about. He's as bad with character touches as any director out there.
The earlier thing was intended to provoke people to ask why the idea of "ideal" art was so wrong... This one's just an advertiser's formula for avoiding risk.
Sorry, though -- low risk means lower gain, too. Out of Africa doesn't match up with the formula all that well, but in the mid 80s it had a huge marketing impact. That movie set fashions going -- none of the big designers were planning on a sort of "Safari" line at the time, but the movie touched it off. Banana Republic owed a ton of its business to that one movie for maybe five years. And I don't think advertisers could have figured that out using this formula; they'd have had to see the movie and get the idea it was going to look a certain way and appeal to a certain type of person.
Have to say, I was on the edge with this movie. Everyone kept drooling over the thing, the Slashdot crowd would turn on you for even hinting that it risked just being another sequel. Someone compared it to Empire Strikes Back, and I tried to see it that way... I was trying to keep an open mind despite the obvious signs of empty hype. And then that commercial. Oh, man.
That one thing spoiled the entire mojo of the event-movie-about-to-arrive feeling, just completely shot it to hell, didn't it? What were they thinking? You want to feel excited to see the trailer, you want to be worked up with the expectation of that atmospheric opening to the movie, but instead you've already seen the thing coming in a beer commercial. Deflates it.
The video game made a little sense, with this particular movie, but c'mon -- Heineken??
That's like a list about the debasement of the kid cartoon, not about the classics. You were on the cusp of the every-show-is-an-excuse-to-push-action-figures generation, but not quite there yet. Transformers was actually over the edge... Not that the production values were so bad, with Orson Welles in the movie and all, but that was well on the way to Pokemon.
"Classics" would be Wagner's Ring Cycle as done by Bugs and Elmer, not Voltron.
Today's neoconservatives often disparage the shuttle as high-tech socialism, and I've talked to more than a few different people who regard the whole program as a tax-and-spend legacy of an earlier governmental style. (Low-cost probes like Pathfinder and so on are their usual ideal.) Just goes to show you, the world's not black and white.
Mondale would be practically a liberal dinosaur by today's standards, and generally speaking he was arguing for funding social programs above NASA -- but his objections to cost estimates for this program seem to have been basically right, don't they? You have to respect that. Nixon's got a conservative's rep, but he was a Keynesian in economic terms and he definitely committed to a massive spending program here based on bogus estimates. With his eyes wide open about it, too.
This amounts to a nice little recording app for the DVD player(s) it's bundled with. It has little to do with TiVO other than that the company's smart enough to put its name on it to maybe get a lower-cost entry point for people to buy into its larger service. Seems shrewd, and I bet it didn't cost them much for the "branding" it gives them.
I'd definitely think of this as a deciding feature if I was in the market for a new DVD player. It'd set that model a notch up from the others at Best Buy, no doubt at all.
Until it gets there and works, we don't know that your fisrt sentence necessarily leads to your second. The fact they built it at greater cost and with a much more lavish set of features may mean that one simple problem could be devastating, whereas the cheaper model at least might spread the risk around by sending several more task-specific probes. To wit:
That's why they sell 'em in a group -- the second and third movie wouldn't rate buying otherwise.
The first Raiders is a great movie. Have to say, having caught #2 on cable and just seen the previews for #3, I had no interest in 'em at all. They wasted the historical setting pretty badly, IMHO, and lost the feeling they were telling a story independent of stunts and character "chemistry." Pretty rote efforts.
Quick, how many people would say #2 or #3 are among their favorite movies? The first one's on a lot of lists.
You provide no motive for this supposed recklessness -- "because, hey, he's in a Tornado" doesn't explain anything at all -- and your "I remember hearing" amounts to the regurgitated speculation of a Fox News anchor, I'm betting. I especially loved the "The coalition noticed" part -- where you don't want to deal with the fact that it was an American Patriot crew shooting down a pair of British fliers.
You, friend, are living Orwell's worst nightmare.
Oddly enough, you know, the people who're presently bitterly resenting our foreign policy are decrying exactly such a culture. And I'm not just talking about in Iraq, or Syria, or Egypt -- I'm talking about in France and in our closest ally, the UK, too. Out of passing curiosity, had you ever considered actually listening to the nature of the criticisms against us? Or are you completely isolated in your solipsistic echo chamber?
Because we have the freedom to pursue whatever business we like, Americans have gotten very good at supplying what people want... It seems like simple logic to me that any human being would naturally gravitate toward systems that bring greater satisfaction. There, no complex motives required, just basic human behavior.
It's the echo chamber, then... Talk about your "propoganda (sic)." The Arab world hates us because our businesses are so efficient at giving people what they want. It's all just basic human nature.
Gee, how do you explain the Shias in Iraq right now? They were cheering when the tanks went into Baghdad; why are they now telling us to go home, if they're gravitating toward more satisfaction as you say? Why is the Shiite reaction so similar to their reaction to the British in 1919? Were the British also exceptionally good at giving the people the satisfaction they wanted? Or does this explanation of yours float in a totally ahistorical fantasy universe where you don't need to deal with comparisons like that?
More to the point: supply us with one clear case in which this has motivated a specific terrorist act. We know a fair amount about the 9/11 hijackers. Were Mohammed Atta's attitudes toward skyscrapers born of this way of thinking you describe? They seem to fit the "corporatism" critique much better, to me.
Please, please, look into how the educated Arab world feels about US foreign policy. There are many, many people out there whose desperate desire is to bring secular, democratized states to the Arab world, but who also seem to understand the sources of terrorism. They do understand the despotic regimes out there -- they seem particularly aware of ones like Egypt, and of the Shah in Iran. You know, the ones the US props up? Like in Pakistan, where Bush W. applauded the military coup that brought Musharraf to power back during the 2000 election? (Those regimes really don't fit into your idea of leaders oppressing the people to preserve the status quo, incidentally. The people resent our backing their leaders. Ever notice that? Ever hear of Anwar Sadat?) Those people aren't living in fantasy la-la land where "The terrorists hate us because we provide the people with more satisfaction." They're saying things about how US foreign policy is counterproductive. You might want to try listening.
Looks like the spammers are winning their guerrilla war, then. We're suggesting responding with disproportionate force in a way that puts the main burden on noncombatants -- always the sign you're about to lose something like this.
I mean, we'd be throwing a huge burden on a system that basically works in order to go after abusers who've already shown they're not going to give up in an arms race for their survival. Good thinking. It's not like spammers would try to, say, abuse other people's servers to send messages without an attributable (read: taxable) source on them. No way. They wouldn't think of that one, no precedent for that... Or were we creating a big new policing division of the U.S. Postal service to defend e-mail servers?
Seriously, how wrongheaded is this? Extremely. It'd be impossible to administer and track without seriously degrading the flexibility and increasing the cost of e-mail systems we have right now on the cheap. How many times has your address changed? Who's tracking your tax bill across all those? Etc. etc. etc. Classic blindered thinking -- a pet idea we should pat on the head and move past. (Exactly how does this tax get collected across borders? Person hasn't addressed the international nature of the internet. Person suggests a "progressive" version, flying in the face of 20-some years of U.S. taxation trends. And so on.)
Aren't cells small enough now that you should be able to slip them into any number of different carrying rigs? I want one in my pocket protector, of course, or in my slide rule case... Those cool LAN people clip them onto their belts, the studs. Laptop cases should have protected, dedicated exterior pouches, people on a treadmill might want an armband strap like for their iPod, and so on...
Aside from getting a little design spark out of consumers, I don't see the pros of pushing the design in some particularly specialized direction. Sell me a $15 accessory that lets me jog with it, don't sell me a whole new phone.