You should have gotten the "insightfuls" that got attached to my lame post. If only one could cede them.
Exactly.
Apparently their "prime" was after conception?
on
Cut Down In Their Prime
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"In their prime" would refer to something that had a prime to begin with. Pre-release cancellations would maybe be "stillborn," forgiving the crudeness of referring to it that way.
The litany of reasons for the cancelled games:
Decided it would never be profitable.
Studio working on it was shut down due to broader financial troubles.
Studio sold off to another company.
Sequel to a poorly received release "never got off the ground."
Studio cancelled it to concentrate on another title, then closed up shop altogether owing to financial troubles.
Had a successful MMORPG, didn't want to siphon subscribers from it to a new one.
Second sequel to that same game cancelled, developers devoted to the original.
"Wasn't coming along as planned." This was a precursor to "The Sims Online."
"Internal problems" (followed by developer essentially shutting down).
Weren't ever serious about it. ("This was a game we had to give to our publisher in order to get a very sweet deal in another area. We've since talked them out of it.")
Well underway, but LucasArts decided it would never be profitable and pulled the plug.
Just plain "decided to cancel."
Missed its release date and eventually (sort of) got released using a different engine.
Shut down development, developers laid off.
Just plain cancelled.
That's almost all financial troubles and projections -- "Our studio is strapped for cash and can't follow through," or "We don't think there's a market." Aside from the Sims title, the absence of "We got halfway there and decided it just didn't work that well" from the list is conspicuous.
Another indication of how much like movie producing the games industry has become. Indies strapped for cash that can't follow through, big studios making projections about market space...
Tucker Carlson and the entire breed of televised "pundits" are little more than trolls. Think John Dvorak. People read them for the same reason this story caught our eye; because their job is to provoke reactions and get "eyeballs" on their show, or reading their column... And here we are, reacting.
The most interesting aspect of this species of critter is their seemingly complete lack of self-reflection. They've got images -- the bow tie -- but they're entirely externally facing, and seem not to be subject to introspection. It's like the trade requires a sort of obtuseness in that area, to the point where stuff like Jon Stewart reaming him probably got filed away as "People who didn't follow the script" by Carlson.
Small example of this lack of reflection: Carlson himself has an extremely high "nerd radar" presence for me. He doesn't seem that far from Trekkie country himself. Does he?
If you're looking for a massive plague that would have conferred resistance on survivors, that would suit the argument.
(And yet we're looking at the bird flu now. Also the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. The picture's muddied by modern vaccination practices, which were having some grab by '57.)
Yes yes, it's easy to find free FAQs to get you past that spot where you're stuck. I'm not sure how that even qualifies as a "strategy" guide. Those are walkthroughs broken into Q and A formats, basically. Most published strategy guides are a little better only because they include screen shots and maybe maps.
But there are a couple of examples of strategy guides on my kids' shelf that blew me away.
The conspicuous example was for one of the GameBoy Color Pokemon titles, believe it or not. Those games were superbly good, incidentally, and don't deserve begin cubbyholed as kids' titles. They're so open-ended that they can be tinkered around in long after someone's played through. Do you want to breed specific species of Pokemon? Collect a bunch of some artifact? Develop a whole new set of critters for use in a new setting, and then compare stables with your friends? Compete in beauty contests for your Pokemon? Win all sorts of different side trophies? They're very, very open-ended titles, and Nintendo produced some beautiful little guides for them.
Let's just say this: As a way of displaying the relative strengths and weaknesses of different species, the Nintendo-produced guides included easily-read, well-laid-out spider graphs for the different traits. When was the last time you saw a spider graph (or really anything but a bar graph) in your local newspaper? The catalogs of all the Pokemon types in those early guides were lovely examples of solid technical writing. You'd be fortunate to encounter software manuals as well-composed, they were a pleasure to read, and in the case of stuff like those graphs they actually bordered on the educational for my kids.
I do give them kodos for allowing the hack contest to take place. The best
way to test your software is to allow others to try and break it. Hopefully
they will fix the exploit and run the contest again.
Try reading the article or at least the/. post. Limiting yourself to the slashdot headline won't quite do. This wasn't Apple holding a contest. It was a single "enthusiast" in Sweden.
Through the ancient and hallowed technology known as 'feet', students and faculty will be able to seamlessly move from classes to dorm rooms
You oversell the simplicity of the technology. In order to accomplish this using feet, we've got to get dressed, potentially against all sorts of different weather conditions. The shoes alone run, like $40 for a generic pair and $65 for something decent, just to get started! Then you have all the virus protection expenses incurred indirectly by the University -- people to clean the floors and prevent the spread of athlete's foot, and so on.
The cost of moving through the university using a series of interleaving virtual reality films is less costly, involving only a central set of accessible data. Students can take classes remotely, transportation and parking become non-issues, the buildings need less upkeep... I see no advantage to this "feet" idea, next to wifi at least. Might as well run a steam railway through all the classrooms, as long as we're advocating obsolete tech.
The cd's packaging will make clear that the cd is interactive in nature.
"Interactive" in the sense that the GOP-slanted questions will troll for your kneejerk responses to hot button issues like abortion and gay marriage, and then after seeing which wedge issues light your fire they'll come back grubbing for money based on those. Also similar to AOL in that I'm pretty sure once you're on their list, it's heck to get your "service" cancelled.
Certainly not "interactive" in the sense that you could cause them to change their mind or position about anything.
(I live in Minnesota. Our Republican party used to call itself the "Independent" Republicans. Somewhere in the mid-1990s or so, they strayed from the old genuine conservatism, which we had a fine tradition of here, to become one more state party headed largely by the fundie organizers who wring scads of money from outstate rural districts. At that point the "IR" decided the "Independent" part didn't convey their alignment with the national party well enough, and they removed the extra word. It was just so awkward to have around, "Independent." Haven't gotten any votes from me since, and I try to spread my choices across all available parties if I can.)
Why in the world would Sony launch a new console while thier PS2 is the current best selling console? They would only be competing with themselves, and that my friend is bad business.
Even in the keynote where Stevie Jobs introduced the nano line, he specifically went over the continuing success of the Minis, which the nanos then promptly replaced.
Apple competed with itself in the sense you're talking about, and it hasn't been bad business at all.
If memory serves Ask Jeeves or another search engine of the same vintage advertized its cash prizes pretty heavily on TV some years ago. Would have been pre-2k, I'm guessing.
(And yeah, boy, that whole "You have to tell us who you are so we can write out a check" tradeoff had never occurred to me. When I take the restaurant survey in hopes of winning $25 grand, they probably put me in their database, too.)
the next time a manager tells me that I need to leverage my win-win situation and core competencies to think outside the box to create a robust solution synergisticly going forward on an as-needed basis,
In my work group, we spend staff meetings keeping track of the jargon used by management. It's interesting to track over time.
We all know you're good with a camera. Now try to learn about telling a story with some efficiency.
After the second LOTR title, I decided it wasn't worth it to go back for Return of the King. Not only did Jackson introduce a whole lot of surfing-on-the-shield bozoness, he also spent roughly half of the first two movies shoving screaming CGI-ified orcs in my face. In particular his direction of dialog, which is hardly a strength of the Tolkien originals anyway, stunk like a wet sock drawer. My patience for declarative sentences -- "And so.... It Begins!" -- was at an all-time low after movie number two.
The real miracle with those movies wasn't Jackson, it was that someone shelled out the coin to make a well-produced version of the stories. The direction was mediocre at best.
For my money one director who really can make a difference would be Christopher Nolan, of "Memento" and "Following" indie reputation. I haven't seen "Batman Begins" or "Insomnia," but I'm curious because Nolan did stuff on a shoestring that Hollywood can't make happen by pouring money on projects.
Jackson's just a case of the money-pouring approach. His completely conventional comparisons between games and film here show that, again. Ooh, the new consoles are more powerful, so we can show more realistic looking actors...
So let's see, what kind of groundbreaking approaches could we expect from Mr. Jackson?
"I think that intrinsically, most video games, and virtually all movies, do one basic thing: tell stories... (Y)ou still have characters, plot, environments, dialogue, or types of interactions and this is standard fare."
"Each new console amazes me with the graphics, sound, and what video game makers can accomplish," he said. "I definitely see improved graphics and sound as continuously positive attributes for consideration among the Hollywood community. Actors will look more 'life-like' in HD and the sound continues to get closer to the theatrical movie experience -- this makes it easier to provide sound effects, artwork, and talent when you, as a filmmaker, know that the final game will be a strong representation of the film."
"I'm excited that with the new hardware and such amazing leaps forward in technology, I may be able to experience games that even I can't imagine..."
He also uses music videos as an example of the kind of innovation he means.
Does it sound like it'd take that much to push this guy's imagination, though, anyway? Does any of this sound especially amazing to anyone? He lauds new consoles not because of anything new they do, but because they're technically faster. (Ooh, life-line actors.) His ideas about interactive stories don't seem as open-ended as, say, the "Fallout" RPGs.
I guess it doesn't amaze me to see him hinting at a sequel as the parting shot teaser for this article... Oh joy, a sequel to your movie tie-in game.
(For that matter about halfway through the "Fellowship" movie I got pretty sick of the screaming CGI orcs. But leave that alone.)
...every single item mentioned in the article that applied to GPS Navigation systems could be applied to conventional maps
Let us review the/. summary:
A survey released by an insurance company shows that drivers with in-car navigation systems are more likely to lose concentration than drivers who unfold a map while driving.
The article says it's 19% distracted with a nav system vs. 17% using a map, supposedly. That's a comparison between the two technologies, not a simple declaration that the nav gadgets are distracting and therefore dangerous.
But I take your point. In general I think basically everything that can distract the driver is baddish news. For example, why are we not talking about radios? When they first showed up in cars, people had objections similar to those about cell phones today. Subjectively one can easily argue that people with thumpa thump bass systems whomping away at a light can't hear ambulances and are in general less aware of traffic due to the fact that their music is sterilizing city rats as they drive by...
(For me, the worst possible distraction is someone I don't know very well in the passenger's seat, conversing with me. I drive much less alertly then. Maybe someday they'll come out with Date 2.0, with the improved interface.)
The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable... This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
One of the examples from the story is a 1950 assessment by the intelligence folks to the effect that the People's Republic of China was unlikely to intervene directly in the Korean war that year. As anyone who watched an episode of two of "MASH" could tell you, the red Chinese did come across the border in 1950.
In that case, the history the CIA (and whatever other agencies -- we're not allowed to know who's even involved) is erasing is the history of their own mistakes. If that's not "Orwellian" what is? Seriously.
Mod that puppy up, someone. The BrCA example was on my mind too. It's a perfect example of the sort of insanity-by-degress that happens when you're well-intentioned but you don't think through the means to those ends. (Speaking of US foreign policy... Oh, wait, how well-intentioned was that war, again?)
Sounds like the guy who created/designed the username filter for Yahoo was hired right out of college with little or no real-world experience, or at least no imagination whatsoever...
As I think we've all learned long since, in this arms race the trolls and spammers of the world always eventually show more imagination and perseverence than the filter writers. I'm pretty sure I know how to write "A11ah." Have they thought of that one yet?
My two twelve-year-olds are currently eagerly anticipating "Twilight Princess." They've had it on their lists at Amazon for months. They delay in its release gave the two of them fits.
Maybe Windwaker wasn't to everyone's taste -- it was mine -- but Zelda has to be up there with the best of the best. What other series has lasted nearly as long, producing a mid-arc title (in Ocarina of Time) that's regarded as one of the best games of all time?
Aside from the various EA sports titles, you don't have anything else with near as much longevity, and Madden and company partly just sell you updated rosters every year.
Joe Biden questioning our Attorney General the other day about the supposed damage to our intelligence system because of the NSA leak:
BIDEN: Thank you very much. General, how has this revelation damaged the program? I'm almost confused by it but, I mean, it seems to presuppose that these very sophisticated Al Qaida folks didn't think we were intercepting their phone calls.
GONZALES: Well, Senator, I would first refer to the experts in the Intel Committee who are making that statement, first of all. I'm just the lawyer. And so, when the director of the CIA says this should really damage our intel capabilities, I would defer to that statement. I think, based on my experience, it is true - you would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance.
But if they're not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.
So, see, you're wrong. While those more difficult-to-eavesdrop-on methods are available to our enemies, sometimes, sometimes, they forget and set up simple, unencrypted hotmail accounts. Sometimes they use their credit card numbers without a secure sockets layer, too, and we get the numbers and use them to charge ammunition for the war against terror.
Thus argueth the Attorney General of the United States of America.
A relative of mine was in France during the height of those riots. The news was far, far more dramatic in covering them here in Minnesota than it was in Tours, France, where my relation was playing in a series of cultural events. She didn't much notice the riots, and she was watching the French news outlets to be sure she was safe to travel back through Paris. (No problems with the travel, either.)
Television news is extremely misleading and demeaning. Maybe the French were downplaying events -- though I've stayed in Paris for a time and found the local shows all too willing to blow events out of proportion. Generally speaking, modern TV news plays to stereotypes and the lowest, most squalid sides of human nature.
Those bright studios throw off more heat than light.
behind me was the wolf enclosure, and 3 very large wolves standing up on the rise, staring at me.
Had that happen once at a zoo here in Minnesota, too. The morning there'd been an ice storm, and the place was basically deserted, but I took my twins around in their dual umbrella stroller. They were between one and two, probably. In the big cat building my son toddled out ahead of me, and I knew it was a bad idea suddenly, even though the room was empty of other people. Came around the corner and one of the female lions had fixed her attention on my son; she was hunkered down at the glass wall, with her eyes wide, looking every bit the predator.
(Personally I think this is an effect of memory, not a true "sixth sense" thing, and that the AC who responded talking about selective memory probably has it right. With the sharks, though -- well, if they're sensing electricity there's at least the precedent of something happening this way with them.)
It's as if science writing is the low man on the totem pole job, so it's almost always given to someone without a science background.
That beat often goes to the underlings and newbies, unfortunately. Somehow the more lucrative jobs at the paper are the troll opinion columnists, whose job is to get eyeballs on the page by being controversial dorks.
Here's a nice little counterexample, though: A while ago I noticed a story in the Daytona Beach newspaper about the Chilean "globster" that washed up on the beach in 2003. A reporter named Dinah Pulver, who actually has some seniority at the Daytona paper, wrote things up well. The story was pretty darn good for a popular source, including solid historical context and plenty of well-fleshed-out detail. I wrote Ms. Pulver to tell her it had impressed me, and we corresponded a little.
That single story was enough to win some loyalty from me, and since then the Daytona Beach paper has been among my regular news stops, despite me living in Minnesota. In general I'm impressed by the intelligent tone of the whole newspaper, but Ms. Pulver's science writing was what won me over.
So, good reporting wins readership. Sometimes. (At least for people who find the Bill O'Reilly trolls of the world to be empty blowhards.)
This headline hit me the wrong way. On Saturday I take the kids on a week-long Hawaii trip, and we've been following a little series of white shark sightings near the islands. It seems like some of the big female whites are out there -- a shark tour guy got out and swam with a "sisterhood"-scale 20-footer whose girth was astonishing in the pictures.
Anyway, one of the hard-to-pin-down aspects of shark encounters is a "sense" people report having just before they become fully aware of a big shark's presence. This may just be memory colored by the adrenaline rush that came with the encounter -- but it's very commonly reported that, moments before the water starts boiling or whatever, the surfer gets a cold, "something isn't right here" feeling.
(Which would also be a touch of an evolutionary advantage for the person able to sense it, yeah?)
An important aspect of the UI design for something like this might be the inclusion of some sort of aural cue for when the enhanced vision was activated...
But what sound did Steve Austin's eye make, again?
Okay, so you seem to fit a certain spot on the $50-a-step ladder of iPod prices... And apparently you can't imagine belonging to some other tier.
Apple's been very shrewd since Jobs's return about presenting consumers with simple, tiered pricing arrangements. Across most of its product lines you're looking at something like a "good - better - best" set of choices to start with.
In the case of iPods you have more steps in the ladder, but it works about the same. The golden rule there is something like "fifty bucks for the next one." For around $50 more, you can always get to the next step in the ladder with more storage or more and better features. In that sense this move makes loads of sense -- even if the 1 GB nano doesn't have what you personally need. The lowest shuffle moves down, the 1GB shuffle hits a $100, adding the nano's screen is another fifty, and so on.
I'm kind of relieved to see Apple not losing its pricing discipline. It's a pricing model that plainly works. The new intel boxes have come out with only a couple of basic configurations, though, and somehow that's ringing false for me...
Parent: So why does gov't get involved in the institution of marriage at all?
That's the poster's original question, and it's one I haven't yet seen or heard answered well.
Last year at the height of pre-election spin there was a Massachusetts legislator, IIRC, who reluctantly proposed removing the state from "marriage" per se and recognizing the equivalent of "civil unions" for everyone instead. Even he hated the idea, and he was proposing it as a sort of scorched earth defense of marriage.
But why is that such a bad idea? Do I need the state's power to tell me someone's married?
You: Marriage is about commitment between two people, and that's all it's about.
Er, no, actually that makes a decent, suitably broad definition of marriage -- but "what it's all about" in terms of the state has a whole lot to do with property. When Ben Franklin took his common law wife, the state cared because there were principles of inheritance and so on under the law that had to be dealt with. Similarly, the state of Minnesota and my employer both care whether I'm married or not for purposes of health insurance, taxes, and so on. (Traditionally, too, the woman involved were more a matter of property anyway.)
The problem comes from the religious christians who view marriage as their deity approving of a union between two people. Christianity is clearly opposed to homosexuality, so (their) deity approving of that is obviously wrong. Thus the major opposition to gay marriage. If the christians can just admit this, we'll have made progress. Until then it's just lie after lie that they tell themselves to hide their own true beliefs.
Amen. Given the current strains of fundamentalism expressing themselves in our body politic, I don't have much more for their redemption in this sense.
"Intelligent Design" is as tortuous a watch-watchmaker argument as can be, constantly moving the goalposts as supposedly irreducible complexities (cilia, whale ancestors) get tackled by science. In order to get it past the constitutional gates, the IDers claim they're not really creationists, and that it's not God they mean, just "a designer." In court this last year the presiding judge blasted them for their essential dishonesty on several levels. They hid money trails, lied about their testimony and their school board meetings, and so on.
Gay marriage is another good example of them just not being willing to own up to their beliefs, even as they try to foist them on us with strangled rationalizations. They also have to put out their own eyes about changes in the institution of marriage in the past, so as to assert its inviolable nature -- which means they lie about history. As you say: until they admit why they're against it, the self-deception only compounds itself.
I just want to know: Why can't we sell people who believe their faith is everything on the idea that their minister, or preacher, or priest should be in charge of "marriage" and the state should concern itself only with the legal ramifications? I have to assume they want the state's power for themselves, essentially -- and that that's the larger lie here. It's not all that well hidden, as lies go.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
The litany of reasons for the cancelled games:
That's almost all financial troubles and projections -- "Our studio is strapped for cash and can't follow through," or "We don't think there's a market." Aside from the Sims title, the absence of "We got halfway there and decided it just didn't work that well" from the list is conspicuous.
Another indication of how much like movie producing the games industry has become. Indies strapped for cash that can't follow through, big studios making projections about market space...
The most interesting aspect of this species of critter is their seemingly complete lack of self-reflection. They've got images -- the bow tie -- but they're entirely externally facing, and seem not to be subject to introspection. It's like the trade requires a sort of obtuseness in that area, to the point where stuff like Jon Stewart reaming him probably got filed away as "People who didn't follow the script" by Carlson.
Small example of this lack of reflection: Carlson himself has an extremely high "nerd radar" presence for me. He doesn't seem that far from Trekkie country himself. Does he?
If you're looking for a massive plague that would have conferred resistance on survivors, that would suit the argument.
(And yet we're looking at the bird flu now. Also the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. The picture's muddied by modern vaccination practices, which were having some grab by '57.)
But there are a couple of examples of strategy guides on my kids' shelf that blew me away.
The conspicuous example was for one of the GameBoy Color Pokemon titles, believe it or not. Those games were superbly good, incidentally, and don't deserve begin cubbyholed as kids' titles. They're so open-ended that they can be tinkered around in long after someone's played through. Do you want to breed specific species of Pokemon? Collect a bunch of some artifact? Develop a whole new set of critters for use in a new setting, and then compare stables with your friends? Compete in beauty contests for your Pokemon? Win all sorts of different side trophies? They're very, very open-ended titles, and Nintendo produced some beautiful little guides for them.
Let's just say this: As a way of displaying the relative strengths and weaknesses of different species, the Nintendo-produced guides included easily-read, well-laid-out spider graphs for the different traits. When was the last time you saw a spider graph (or really anything but a bar graph) in your local newspaper? The catalogs of all the Pokemon types in those early guides were lovely examples of solid technical writing. You'd be fortunate to encounter software manuals as well-composed, they were a pleasure to read, and in the case of stuff like those graphs they actually bordered on the educational for my kids.
I'll pay $15 for that.
Try reading the article or at least the /. post. Limiting yourself to the slashdot headline won't quite do. This wasn't Apple holding a contest. It was a single "enthusiast" in Sweden.
(And the term is "kudos.")
You oversell the simplicity of the technology. In order to accomplish this using feet, we've got to get dressed, potentially against all sorts of different weather conditions. The shoes alone run, like $40 for a generic pair and $65 for something decent, just to get started! Then you have all the virus protection expenses incurred indirectly by the University -- people to clean the floors and prevent the spread of athlete's foot, and so on.
The cost of moving through the university using a series of interleaving virtual reality films is less costly, involving only a central set of accessible data. Students can take classes remotely, transportation and parking become non-issues, the buildings need less upkeep... I see no advantage to this "feet" idea, next to wifi at least. Might as well run a steam railway through all the classrooms, as long as we're advocating obsolete tech.
"Interactive" in the sense that the GOP-slanted questions will troll for your kneejerk responses to hot button issues like abortion and gay marriage, and then after seeing which wedge issues light your fire they'll come back grubbing for money based on those. Also similar to AOL in that I'm pretty sure once you're on their list, it's heck to get your "service" cancelled.
Certainly not "interactive" in the sense that you could cause them to change their mind or position about anything.
(I live in Minnesota. Our Republican party used to call itself the "Independent" Republicans. Somewhere in the mid-1990s or so, they strayed from the old genuine conservatism, which we had a fine tradition of here, to become one more state party headed largely by the fundie organizers who wring scads of money from outstate rural districts. At that point the "IR" decided the "Independent" part didn't convey their alignment with the national party well enough, and they removed the extra word. It was just so awkward to have around, "Independent." Haven't gotten any votes from me since, and I try to spread my choices across all available parties if I can.)
Even in the keynote where Stevie Jobs introduced the nano line, he specifically went over the continuing success of the Minis, which the nanos then promptly replaced.
Apple competed with itself in the sense you're talking about, and it hasn't been bad business at all.
(And yeah, boy, that whole "You have to tell us who you are so we can write out a check" tradeoff had never occurred to me. When I take the restaurant survey in hopes of winning $25 grand, they probably put me in their database, too.)
You aren't to critical mass yet:
In my work group, we spend staff meetings keeping track of the jargon used by management. It's interesting to track over time.
After the second LOTR title, I decided it wasn't worth it to go back for Return of the King. Not only did Jackson introduce a whole lot of surfing-on-the-shield bozoness, he also spent roughly half of the first two movies shoving screaming CGI-ified orcs in my face. In particular his direction of dialog, which is hardly a strength of the Tolkien originals anyway, stunk like a wet sock drawer. My patience for declarative sentences -- "And so.... It Begins!" -- was at an all-time low after movie number two.
The real miracle with those movies wasn't Jackson, it was that someone shelled out the coin to make a well-produced version of the stories. The direction was mediocre at best.
For my money one director who really can make a difference would be Christopher Nolan, of "Memento" and "Following" indie reputation. I haven't seen "Batman Begins" or "Insomnia," but I'm curious because Nolan did stuff on a shoestring that Hollywood can't make happen by pouring money on projects.
Jackson's just a case of the money-pouring approach. His completely conventional comparisons between games and film here show that, again. Ooh, the new consoles are more powerful, so we can show more realistic looking actors...
Does it sound like it'd take that much to push this guy's imagination, though, anyway? Does any of this sound especially amazing to anyone? He lauds new consoles not because of anything new they do, but because they're technically faster. (Ooh, life-line actors.) His ideas about interactive stories don't seem as open-ended as, say, the "Fallout" RPGs.
I guess it doesn't amaze me to see him hinting at a sequel as the parting shot teaser for this article... Oh joy, a sequel to your movie tie-in game.
(For that matter about halfway through the "Fellowship" movie I got pretty sick of the screaming CGI orcs. But leave that alone.)
Let us review the /. summary:
The article says it's 19% distracted with a nav system vs. 17% using a map, supposedly. That's a comparison between the two technologies, not a simple declaration that the nav gadgets are distracting and therefore dangerous.
But I take your point. In general I think basically everything that can distract the driver is baddish news. For example, why are we not talking about radios? When they first showed up in cars, people had objections similar to those about cell phones today. Subjectively one can easily argue that people with thumpa thump bass systems whomping away at a light can't hear ambulances and are in general less aware of traffic due to the fact that their music is sterilizing city rats as they drive by...
(For me, the worst possible distraction is someone I don't know very well in the passenger's seat, conversing with me. I drive much less alertly then. Maybe someday they'll come out with Date 2.0, with the improved interface.)
The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable... This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
One of the examples from the story is a 1950 assessment by the intelligence folks to the effect that the People's Republic of China was unlikely to intervene directly in the Korean war that year. As anyone who watched an episode of two of "MASH" could tell you, the red Chinese did come across the border in 1950.
In that case, the history the CIA (and whatever other agencies -- we're not allowed to know who's even involved ) is erasing is the history of their own mistakes. If that's not "Orwellian" what is? Seriously.
Sounds like the guy who created/designed the username filter for Yahoo was hired right out of college with little or no real-world experience, or at least no imagination whatsoever...
As I think we've all learned long since, in this arms race the trolls and spammers of the world always eventually show more imagination and perseverence than the filter writers. I'm pretty sure I know how to write "A11ah." Have they thought of that one yet?
Maybe Windwaker wasn't to everyone's taste -- it was mine -- but Zelda has to be up there with the best of the best. What other series has lasted nearly as long, producing a mid-arc title (in Ocarina of Time) that's regarded as one of the best games of all time?
Aside from the various EA sports titles, you don't have anything else with near as much longevity, and Madden and company partly just sell you updated rosters every year.
So, see, you're wrong. While those more difficult-to-eavesdrop-on methods are available to our enemies, sometimes, sometimes, they forget and set up simple, unencrypted hotmail accounts. Sometimes they use their credit card numbers without a secure sockets layer, too, and we get the numbers and use them to charge ammunition for the war against terror.
Thus argueth the Attorney General of the United States of America.
A relative of mine was in France during the height of those riots. The news was far, far more dramatic in covering them here in Minnesota than it was in Tours, France, where my relation was playing in a series of cultural events. She didn't much notice the riots, and she was watching the French news outlets to be sure she was safe to travel back through Paris. (No problems with the travel, either.)
Television news is extremely misleading and demeaning. Maybe the French were downplaying events -- though I've stayed in Paris for a time and found the local shows all too willing to blow events out of proportion. Generally speaking, modern TV news plays to stereotypes and the lowest, most squalid sides of human nature.
Those bright studios throw off more heat than light.
Had that happen once at a zoo here in Minnesota, too. The morning there'd been an ice storm, and the place was basically deserted, but I took my twins around in their dual umbrella stroller. They were between one and two, probably. In the big cat building my son toddled out ahead of me, and I knew it was a bad idea suddenly, even though the room was empty of other people. Came around the corner and one of the female lions had fixed her attention on my son; she was hunkered down at the glass wall, with her eyes wide, looking every bit the predator.
(Personally I think this is an effect of memory, not a true "sixth sense" thing, and that the AC who responded talking about selective memory probably has it right. With the sharks, though -- well, if they're sensing electricity there's at least the precedent of something happening this way with them.)
That beat often goes to the underlings and newbies, unfortunately. Somehow the more lucrative jobs at the paper are the troll opinion columnists, whose job is to get eyeballs on the page by being controversial dorks.
Here's a nice little counterexample, though: A while ago I noticed a story in the Daytona Beach newspaper about the Chilean "globster" that washed up on the beach in 2003. A reporter named Dinah Pulver, who actually has some seniority at the Daytona paper, wrote things up well. The story was pretty darn good for a popular source, including solid historical context and plenty of well-fleshed-out detail. I wrote Ms. Pulver to tell her it had impressed me, and we corresponded a little.
That single story was enough to win some loyalty from me, and since then the Daytona Beach paper has been among my regular news stops, despite me living in Minnesota. In general I'm impressed by the intelligent tone of the whole newspaper, but Ms. Pulver's science writing was what won me over.
So, good reporting wins readership. Sometimes. (At least for people who find the Bill O'Reilly trolls of the world to be empty blowhards.)
Anyway, one of the hard-to-pin-down aspects of shark encounters is a "sense" people report having just before they become fully aware of a big shark's presence. This may just be memory colored by the adrenaline rush that came with the encounter -- but it's very commonly reported that, moments before the water starts boiling or whatever, the surfer gets a cold, "something isn't right here" feeling.
(Which would also be a touch of an evolutionary advantage for the person able to sense it, yeah?)
But what sound did Steve Austin's eye make, again?
Apple's been very shrewd since Jobs's return about presenting consumers with simple, tiered pricing arrangements. Across most of its product lines you're looking at something like a "good - better - best" set of choices to start with.
In the case of iPods you have more steps in the ladder, but it works about the same. The golden rule there is something like "fifty bucks for the next one." For around $50 more, you can always get to the next step in the ladder with more storage or more and better features. In that sense this move makes loads of sense -- even if the 1 GB nano doesn't have what you personally need. The lowest shuffle moves down, the 1GB shuffle hits a $100, adding the nano's screen is another fifty, and so on.
I'm kind of relieved to see Apple not losing its pricing discipline. It's a pricing model that plainly works. The new intel boxes have come out with only a couple of basic configurations, though, and somehow that's ringing false for me...
That's the poster's original question, and it's one I haven't yet seen or heard answered well.
Last year at the height of pre-election spin there was a Massachusetts legislator, IIRC, who reluctantly proposed removing the state from "marriage" per se and recognizing the equivalent of "civil unions" for everyone instead. Even he hated the idea, and he was proposing it as a sort of scorched earth defense of marriage.
But why is that such a bad idea? Do I need the state's power to tell me someone's married?
You: Marriage is about commitment between two people, and that's all it's about.
Er, no, actually that makes a decent, suitably broad definition of marriage -- but "what it's all about" in terms of the state has a whole lot to do with property. When Ben Franklin took his common law wife, the state cared because there were principles of inheritance and so on under the law that had to be dealt with. Similarly, the state of Minnesota and my employer both care whether I'm married or not for purposes of health insurance, taxes, and so on. (Traditionally, too, the woman involved were more a matter of property anyway.)
The problem comes from the religious christians who view marriage as their deity approving of a union between two people. Christianity is clearly opposed to homosexuality, so (their) deity approving of that is obviously wrong. Thus the major opposition to gay marriage. If the christians can just admit this, we'll have made progress. Until then it's just lie after lie that they tell themselves to hide their own true beliefs.
Amen. Given the current strains of fundamentalism expressing themselves in our body politic, I don't have much more for their redemption in this sense.
"Intelligent Design" is as tortuous a watch-watchmaker argument as can be, constantly moving the goalposts as supposedly irreducible complexities (cilia, whale ancestors) get tackled by science. In order to get it past the constitutional gates, the IDers claim they're not really creationists, and that it's not God they mean, just "a designer." In court this last year the presiding judge blasted them for their essential dishonesty on several levels. They hid money trails, lied about their testimony and their school board meetings, and so on.
Gay marriage is another good example of them just not being willing to own up to their beliefs, even as they try to foist them on us with strangled rationalizations. They also have to put out their own eyes about changes in the institution of marriage in the past, so as to assert its inviolable nature -- which means they lie about history. As you say: until they admit why they're against it, the self-deception only compounds itself.
I just want to know: Why can't we sell people who believe their faith is everything on the idea that their minister, or preacher, or priest should be in charge of "marriage" and the state should concern itself only with the legal ramifications? I have to assume they want the state's power for themselves, essentially -- and that that's the larger lie here. It's not all that well hidden, as lies go.