This is a group that developed the first operational jet fighters, and that kept the U-2 and SR-71 and stealth planes out of the public eye forever. We think the Wall Street Journal is getting the real story from them? If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
more public incentive in terms of supporting conservation efforts.
Swear to God, the folks who think "environmentalists" are irritating luddites who want to return humanity to the stone age have already long since had the thought: "If these 'near extinction' species can be found in a place like this, then they don't need to be protected quite so much. What was all the stink about? Can the island of Komodo put out licenses on dragons yet?..."
Those people bend any environmental issue into a caricature. Spotted owls were just a representative of the entire temperate rainforest ecosystem they lived in, they weren't the whole story. It still took no time for the stereotype of the whacky environmentalist who wants to ruin a whole industry to protect the spotted owl to spring up.
Even convincing that sort of person to preserve "hot spots" like this one is an uphill battle, leaving alone general conservation issues. In the US, the Republican Party that produced Teddy Roosevelt is long gone, having been split in the 1910s...
Those excerpts were well worth a look. Among the bits from Mr. Deutsch's college career, we get an off-the-wall apologia for the defense team in the trial over Laci Peterson's death. Young Mr. Deutsch buys the satanic cult that framed Scott Peterson. Because, you know, well... "Satanism -- Boo"!
The position that IDers' "Teach kids the controversy" position was a slippery slope has just been vindicated, again. Deutsch is right, his position is "more than a science issue." No matter what the area of discussion, he's going to bounce things off his religious beliefs. The thing is, his religious beliefs aren't about truth or morality or justice; they're about reinforcing human authority to speak for God with absolute authority. If it's convenient to cast doubt on a murder conviction because it'll fan the spectacular claims of rampant satanic cults running loose in America, so be it. That helps keep the flock in line. Good deal, write it up George.
In a theocracy, religion gets inserted into every area of life, with the aim being to reinforce the power of those in charge. That's what these people want. They want scientists to be running scared from the local party representative. It's their very own Cultural Revolution, albeit with different idols to worship. And it can happen, even here.
In the U.S., we're talking about a nation that seems to have bugged members of the U.N. Security Council before the big vote on a second Iraq resolution. Hans Blix, the weapons inspector, also thought he'd been tapped by U.S. spy agencies.
It's not like the Executive Branch has just asserted its right to basically do what it pleases in the name of fighting terrorism, is it?
I understand your list of usual suspects, but something on the level of what's described doesn't sound like the Russians. Why would they do it? (And to the same objection about the States -- they've already proven their willingness and ability...)
The only bit not present in that post was the role played by the science officer on board. (He set the computer to calculating PI, effectively disabling the autodestruct.)
I want them fixed. So I don't have to pay extra for every product I buy. So I don't have to be afraid I'll be the one who gets robbed-by-court-ruling. So I don't lose my job or my health care because of liability expenses.
Yet you fail to suggest any measure that would lead to those outcomes.
An(d) so we can go back to being a free country instead of one ruled by judges and lawyers.
That's a tried and true rhetorical fluorish, but personally I don't feel that "judges and lawyers" are ruling our country at all. We do have a government. It's true that our y2k election got called by a clean partisan split down the Supreme Court, but even in that case it was the political figures who appointed those judges who ultimately made that bed.
Legislators make the law, judges enforce it according to its constitutionality. The idea that personal injury attorneys are running rampant doesn't match my limited experience -- but it gets pimped up in the pop media like I can hardly believe...
The assumptions made in this post of yours are insulting to essentially everyone involved in any court case. Perhaps you should experience what it's like to be on a jury, civil or criminal, and then come to a more considered judgment.
Granted, the U.S. system has its flaws, and any oppositional model presents a jurist with seemingly crazy, contradictory information to work through, but I'm not stumbling across better models out there anywhere. What's your alternative? Solomonic wisdom dispensed by all-powerful judges? Or what?
Our civil court system does put the burden of frivolous lawsuits on the people bringing them. Personally, for example, I'm not considering suing Microsoft for the endless frustration their risibly awful API has brought me -- because I'd have to foot a lawyer's bill with no chance of winning, and Microsoft has the legal resources to eat my lunch. The lawyers know that'd be a losing case so they won't take it without the money up front. Ta da! Deterrence.
In any case the U.S. legal system is hardly, hardly skewed against big corporations and for the "little guy." Paid any attention to politics over the last 26 years?
It's appalling to me how completely the "tort reform" folks, whose position is always that we need to limit damages, control public discussion of the legal system. They distort unbelievable corporate conduct until the public has its head up its ass about stuff like the Mickey-D's coffee case. These folks don't have your best interests at heart, or those of our society. They're about protecting the people who give them money. And that's not you or me.
but have you ever had one of those slim cellphones? they snap in half which is what the nano can easily do.
A quick google finds me a lot of people who say they think this must be a problem, but I'm not finding anyone who says it's happened to them.
Personally I'm convinced I'd just plain lose a Nano, and the scratching put me off to start with, but "snaps in half" doesn't register on my list of concerns. Evidence?
$129 is for the 1GB version. The 512MB is very popular at $99, a full $100 less than the iPod Nano...
...Even at $150, the Nano would be priced a bit too high for such a range.
One thing Steve Jobs brought to Apple on his return that was novel (to his past experience) and that has persisted is an almost rigid dedication to tiered pricing arrangements. As an iPod buyer, you have models to choose from at around $50 from each other all through the spectrum.
It's been the same for their laptops and desktops, albeit with bigger bumps for the more expensive hardware. You used to have your "Good - Better - Best" choices for most of their product lines. Their online store was built around it.
I wonder if that's changing. There are just the two new intellified iMacs so far, and two models of "MacBook." On the other hand the iPod Mini died in favor of the Nano at almost the same price points, so they replaced a rung in that ladder pretty straightforwardly, even though they were killing a very popular product.
That price points thing is something they've shown a lot of discipline over. It seems like Apple's lines are muddling a little over this right now. (And the Shuffle might be an example of that too. Is it the lowest-tier iPod, or is it a slightly different animal for the reasons you suggest? A USB key, with music as a bonus? How does it fit?)
I don't think it would be inappropriate for the "authorities" to have a conversation with somebody taking pictures, as long as that conversation didn't include "You need to stop that", or "You're coming with us".
Yep, like I said, it's sort of nice to know they're awake.
Unfortunately the tone of these "conversations" eventually comes down to intimidation. They could just as easily determine how likely I am to be a terrorist by asking a few curious questions about what I'm doing. They don't do that -- the tone is very much "We're here to brush people off; now what the hell are you doing interrupting our day?"
And I'm not taking pictures of the stacks for my research on particulate emissions, or anything like that. I'm aimed in the other direction, at a cold-looking kingfisher huddled against the cold. The tiniest bit of initiative and they can see I'm no threat.
I live in Minnesota. One way to see rarities during the colder months of the year is to find open water, on which wandering water birds will show up.
One way to find open water, of course, is to be near the runoff from a power plant -- a "sensitive location" if ever there was one.
I've been interrogated multiple times by security guards and a couple of times by cops, and I don't even really frequent those spots much. When I do I have my Swarovskis and a medium-sized digital camera with a long lens, though. Bird shots need a long lens.
It sort of goes with the territory, I guess. I'd rather know they're awake, anyway. Taking me away would be another thing.
The BBC is reporting that a leading scientist in area of Developmental Psychopathology, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, is indicating that there is good chance that there is a scientific basis to the observed phenomenon that children with highly analytical parents are more likely to be autistic.
Let's clean that up a little:
Research hints at a scientific basis for the perceived correlation between highly analytical parents and autistic children. A BBC article interviews this expert, and etcetera.
I suspect the original article glosses the proposed genetic link, or presents it in the usual faked-up-dialectic manner, with opposite poles for analysis and social skills -- but this is the popular press, so I guess we've learned to accept it. Hardly as "analytical" as I'd like. Maybe the reporters are looking out for their kids.
Andrew Carnegie, the great steel baron, initially seems to fit the Gates profile -- ruthless, not to say unscrupulous, competitor who buries his competition and then turns to charity. But Carnegie did this Buffett thing, too.
His "Gospel of Wealth", published in 1889, said that "all personal wealth beyond that required to satisy the needs of one's family should be regarded as a trust fund to be administered for the benefit of the community." Very similar to Buffett's stance, and Carnegie was the world's richest man saying it.
Basically the guy almost single handedly built the public library system in the United States, among many other charitable ventures. His money went into the still-active Carnegie Corporation to promote "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." That "trust fund" for the public is still paying dividends.
Everyone involved in Health Care has HIPAA in mind, but IT people are among the hardest hit by it. I can definitely see a server admin sort coming up with a quick and dirty solution like this and not paying that much attention.
Okay, granted, "I'll make photocopies of the paper files and put them in the back of my Gremlin" doesn't come close to any standard of privacy protection, with or without the law. But HIPAA's so far-reaching that it can sort of paralyze people and organizations, to the point where the guy who's willing to cut corners can feel like he's cutting through the B.S. and just getting things done.
HIPAA's a pretty big nonspecific anxiety for lots of people in health care. Health insurers have teams of lawyers, and hire outside lawyers, just to consult over the implications of the thing and to train their people and so on.
...starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60...
Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...
Also sounds like Steve Jobs was on his startup time hobby horse again, hectoring the engineers about startup time. He's had a thing about that since 1984; one of the "insanely great" traits of the first Macs was their startup time, from an OS on a single floppy no less.
(It's interesting that anyone notices, really, given how stable OS X is. I haven't rebooted since we painted around the outlet our kitchen iMac is plugged into.)
Politicians may not know what the word means, but they've heard it all right. You hit the nail on the head:
This all start(ed) with the Howard Dean campaign using blogging and other online tools to raise money.
They caught that last part, believe me.
Heck, even beyond the money, politicos used "the blogosphere" with some success to spin their issues in the '04 election cycle, mere months after Dean's Iowa flameout. The newest wave of "Swift Boat Veteran" groups will try to drive all sorts of political wedges into the voting public via blogs.
Politicians aren't interested in its for its own sake, necessarily, but the uses aren't lost on them.
The existing DS's power switch was a face button, very similar to start and select, on the upper left. Seems to be moved elsewhere -- probably to a side switch? -- in the new model.
(If they could get the two screens closer to each other, that'd matter more to me.)
A couple of days back we were speculating that maybe the MacBook at Jobs's keynote was more of a prototype, a little more rough around the edges than it should have been. No battery life numbers, and so on.
Now we get this "hands-on" review, but I'm not convinced anything has changed. He subjectively says the performance "cooks" -- but that's likely just the intel-happy finder. All he has is Apple's oddly vague words to go on about battery performance. The rest of it could have come from the press release about the keynote announcement.
We know where you stand, obviously, but I didn't say one party, or end of the political spectrum, was guilty of this. What I said was that people who posed as being particularly pious usually weren't thinking ahead very well.
Applies to the left and the right. There's no shortage of posing moral crusaders on either end, is there?
If I see a game as being marketed specifically at females, my initial response is to avoid it like the plague. Barbie Horse Adventures, anyone?
No kidding. But it doesn't matter if the game's "for girls" or "for Hispanics"; anything that starts out by trying to pander to a given group ends up sucking. Genre novels that are "for gays" or "about a black detective" suffer from the same thing.
My local paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, went through a phase where they introduced a bunch of what they clearly saw as "niche-market" comics. "La Cucaracha" was meant for the Hispanic audience, and then they tossed in the gawdawful irony-for-the-irony-impaired "Mallard Fillmore" to placate the right wing, and so on. They all stunk. I don't care if the strip is conservative or liberal; it should try to be funny though.
But you're right:
one of the biggest is that even a reasonably dorky and hard-core gaming female, like myself, tends to be repulsed by or at best "tunes out" the sophomoric sexuality present in many games
I have 12-year-old twins, one of whom is a girl. Even within fairly innocent titles, my daughter's choices among the female characters are invariably dressed head-to-toe in latex, or baring their legs up to their ribcage, or (worse) channeling "My Little Pony" commercials. The Jedis all seemed to want to dress like Leia as Jabba's slave girl in Jedi Academy. "Princess Peach" plays her Mario Tennis in a short skirt, iirc.
As a parent, it's hard to find games that don't throw that in your face.
...there are differences, chief among them being that neither Jobs nor Lasseter is a former CEO of Disney, and as such are not necessarily as familiar with the culture and market as Jobs was with Apple.
The CEO title might mean something, but I think Lasseter has shown he knows "the market," at least for animated films, perfectly well.
It's the cultural problem that's going to be the big hurdle. Disney's treatment of its writers is a huge, conspicuous problem, and has been forever. This is the company whose writers refer to it as "Maushwitz." (I hate to repeat something that plays on the Holocaust, but there it is. You can't much like your place of employment to be thinking that way.)
Pixar has been a very, very different company in terms of its priority on story. Lasseter is going to have to bring that into the new culture. Big obstacle.
It sure seems like he'll have the Disney powers behind him at least at first, though. The other part of the comparison that you didn't make was: Michael Eisner and Gil Amelio, whose leadership created the void into which Jobs stepped. Eisner may already have broken the back of the beast, as far as resistant cultures go.
Ah, there is the epitome of sustainable government taxation: tax things you want to destroy.
In general, don't you find that conspicuously pious posturing and an inability to think through consequences go hand in hand?
Seriously. This guy is probably a so-called "small government" conservative, too, but he has no problem with the idea of government regulating which video games are violent, and which aren't quite violent enough, to require his new tax.
At least with tobacco and alcohol, which are the classic models for this, you can make the case that the tax money partly addresses problems created by the "sin" in question. Don't even get me started on the abortion side of this. That's unreal. (If you're pro-life, do you really want an idiot like this on your side? Work on Roe V. Wade, whatever, but a $10,000 tax? That's just dumb, and would be about as legal as Jim Crow poll taxes.)
The problem's with the folks what elected this bumpkin. Note to American voters: if you're looking for a good, decent person to hold office, try finding someone who actually struggles with moral questions, rather than someone who claims they're easy to decided on for reasons of religious faith or whatever. People who think moral questions are easy are either a) of Godlike divinity; or b) on the wrong side of those questions, but wearing a nice white robe because it gets them power. And I'm fairly sure this guy isn't divine.
"[T]he tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.... It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin." -- Benjamin Elijah Mays, American educator and president of Morehouse College (1895-1984)
Slashdot Mirror
Skunk Works.
This is a group that developed the first operational jet fighters, and that kept the U-2 and SR-71 and stealth planes out of the public eye forever. We think the Wall Street Journal is getting the real story from them? If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
Swear to God, the folks who think "environmentalists" are irritating luddites who want to return humanity to the stone age have already long since had the thought: "If these 'near extinction' species can be found in a place like this, then they don't need to be protected quite so much. What was all the stink about? Can the island of Komodo put out licenses on dragons yet?..."
Those people bend any environmental issue into a caricature. Spotted owls were just a representative of the entire temperate rainforest ecosystem they lived in, they weren't the whole story. It still took no time for the stereotype of the whacky environmentalist who wants to ruin a whole industry to protect the spotted owl to spring up.
Even convincing that sort of person to preserve "hot spots" like this one is an uphill battle, leaving alone general conservation issues. In the US, the Republican Party that produced Teddy Roosevelt is long gone, having been split in the 1910s...
The position that IDers' "Teach kids the controversy" position was a slippery slope has just been vindicated, again. Deutsch is right, his position is "more than a science issue." No matter what the area of discussion, he's going to bounce things off his religious beliefs. The thing is, his religious beliefs aren't about truth or morality or justice; they're about reinforcing human authority to speak for God with absolute authority. If it's convenient to cast doubt on a murder conviction because it'll fan the spectacular claims of rampant satanic cults running loose in America, so be it. That helps keep the flock in line. Good deal, write it up George.
In a theocracy, religion gets inserted into every area of life, with the aim being to reinforce the power of those in charge. That's what these people want. They want scientists to be running scared from the local party representative. It's their very own Cultural Revolution, albeit with different idols to worship. And it can happen, even here.
It's not like the Executive Branch has just asserted its right to basically do what it pleases in the name of fighting terrorism, is it?
I understand your list of usual suspects, but something on the level of what's described doesn't sound like the Russians. Why would they do it? (And to the same objection about the States -- they've already proven their willingness and ability...)
The only bit not present in that post was the role played by the science officer on board. (He set the computer to calculating PI, effectively disabling the autodestruct.)
Yet you fail to suggest any measure that would lead to those outcomes.
An(d) so we can go back to being a free country instead of one ruled by judges and lawyers.
That's a tried and true rhetorical fluorish, but personally I don't feel that "judges and lawyers" are ruling our country at all. We do have a government. It's true that our y2k election got called by a clean partisan split down the Supreme Court, but even in that case it was the political figures who appointed those judges who ultimately made that bed.
Legislators make the law, judges enforce it according to its constitutionality. The idea that personal injury attorneys are running rampant doesn't match my limited experience -- but it gets pimped up in the pop media like I can hardly believe...
Granted, the U.S. system has its flaws, and any oppositional model presents a jurist with seemingly crazy, contradictory information to work through, but I'm not stumbling across better models out there anywhere. What's your alternative? Solomonic wisdom dispensed by all-powerful judges? Or what?
Our civil court system does put the burden of frivolous lawsuits on the people bringing them. Personally, for example, I'm not considering suing Microsoft for the endless frustration their risibly awful API has brought me -- because I'd have to foot a lawyer's bill with no chance of winning, and Microsoft has the legal resources to eat my lunch. The lawyers know that'd be a losing case so they won't take it without the money up front. Ta da! Deterrence.
In any case the U.S. legal system is hardly, hardly skewed against big corporations and for the "little guy." Paid any attention to politics over the last 26 years?
It's appalling to me how completely the "tort reform" folks, whose position is always that we need to limit damages, control public discussion of the legal system. They distort unbelievable corporate conduct until the public has its head up its ass about stuff like the Mickey-D's coffee case. These folks don't have your best interests at heart, or those of our society. They're about protecting the people who give them money. And that's not you or me.
A quick google finds me a lot of people who say they think this must be a problem, but I'm not finding anyone who says it's happened to them.
Personally I'm convinced I'd just plain lose a Nano, and the scratching put me off to start with, but "snaps in half" doesn't register on my list of concerns. Evidence?
...Even at $150, the Nano would be priced a bit too high for such a range.
One thing Steve Jobs brought to Apple on his return that was novel (to his past experience) and that has persisted is an almost rigid dedication to tiered pricing arrangements. As an iPod buyer, you have models to choose from at around $50 from each other all through the spectrum.
It's been the same for their laptops and desktops, albeit with bigger bumps for the more expensive hardware. You used to have your "Good - Better - Best" choices for most of their product lines. Their online store was built around it.
I wonder if that's changing. There are just the two new intellified iMacs so far, and two models of "MacBook." On the other hand the iPod Mini died in favor of the Nano at almost the same price points, so they replaced a rung in that ladder pretty straightforwardly, even though they were killing a very popular product.
That price points thing is something they've shown a lot of discipline over. It seems like Apple's lines are muddling a little over this right now. (And the Shuffle might be an example of that too. Is it the lowest-tier iPod, or is it a slightly different animal for the reasons you suggest? A USB key, with music as a bonus? How does it fit?)
Yep, like I said, it's sort of nice to know they're awake.
Unfortunately the tone of these "conversations" eventually comes down to intimidation. They could just as easily determine how likely I am to be a terrorist by asking a few curious questions about what I'm doing. They don't do that -- the tone is very much "We're here to brush people off; now what the hell are you doing interrupting our day?"
And I'm not taking pictures of the stacks for my research on particulate emissions, or anything like that. I'm aimed in the other direction, at a cold-looking kingfisher huddled against the cold. The tiniest bit of initiative and they can see I'm no threat.
One way to find open water, of course, is to be near the runoff from a power plant -- a "sensitive location" if ever there was one.
I've been interrogated multiple times by security guards and a couple of times by cops, and I don't even really frequent those spots much. When I do I have my Swarovskis and a medium-sized digital camera with a long lens, though. Bird shots need a long lens.
It sort of goes with the territory, I guess. I'd rather know they're awake, anyway. Taking me away would be another thing.
Let's clean that up a little:
I suspect the original article glosses the proposed genetic link, or presents it in the usual faked-up-dialectic manner, with opposite poles for analysis and social skills -- but this is the popular press, so I guess we've learned to accept it. Hardly as "analytical" as I'd like. Maybe the reporters are looking out for their kids.
His "Gospel of Wealth", published in 1889, said that "all personal wealth beyond that required to satisy the needs of one's family should be regarded as a trust fund to be administered for the benefit of the community." Very similar to Buffett's stance, and Carnegie was the world's richest man saying it.
Basically the guy almost single handedly built the public library system in the United States, among many other charitable ventures. His money went into the still-active Carnegie Corporation to promote "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." That "trust fund" for the public is still paying dividends.
Okay, granted, "I'll make photocopies of the paper files and put them in the back of my Gremlin" doesn't come close to any standard of privacy protection, with or without the law. But HIPAA's so far-reaching that it can sort of paralyze people and organizations, to the point where the guy who's willing to cut corners can feel like he's cutting through the B.S. and just getting things done.
HIPAA's a pretty big nonspecific anxiety for lots of people in health care. Health insurers have teams of lawyers, and hire outside lawyers, just to consult over the implications of the thing and to train their people and so on.
Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...
Also sounds like Steve Jobs was on his startup time hobby horse again, hectoring the engineers about startup time. He's had a thing about that since 1984; one of the "insanely great" traits of the first Macs was their startup time, from an OS on a single floppy no less.
(It's interesting that anyone notices, really, given how stable OS X is. I haven't rebooted since we painted around the outlet our kitchen iMac is plugged into.)
They caught that last part, believe me.
Heck, even beyond the money, politicos used "the blogosphere" with some success to spin their issues in the '04 election cycle, mere months after Dean's Iowa flameout. The newest wave of "Swift Boat Veteran" groups will try to drive all sorts of political wedges into the voting public via blogs.
Politicians aren't interested in its for its own sake, necessarily, but the uses aren't lost on them.
(If they could get the two screens closer to each other, that'd matter more to me.)
Now we get this "hands-on" review, but I'm not convinced anything has changed. He subjectively says the performance "cooks" -- but that's likely just the intel-happy finder. All he has is Apple's oddly vague words to go on about battery performance. The rest of it could have come from the press release about the keynote announcement.
Book's still out?
(You're right though, hardly the worst example, even if it doesn't cut both ways.)
Applies to the left and the right. There's no shortage of posing moral crusaders on either end, is there?
No kidding. But it doesn't matter if the game's "for girls" or "for Hispanics"; anything that starts out by trying to pander to a given group ends up sucking. Genre novels that are "for gays" or "about a black detective" suffer from the same thing.
My local paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, went through a phase where they introduced a bunch of what they clearly saw as "niche-market" comics. "La Cucaracha" was meant for the Hispanic audience, and then they tossed in the gawdawful irony-for-the-irony-impaired "Mallard Fillmore" to placate the right wing, and so on. They all stunk. I don't care if the strip is conservative or liberal; it should try to be funny though.
But you're right:
I have 12-year-old twins, one of whom is a girl. Even within fairly innocent titles, my daughter's choices among the female characters are invariably dressed head-to-toe in latex, or baring their legs up to their ribcage, or (worse) channeling "My Little Pony" commercials. The Jedis all seemed to want to dress like Leia as Jabba's slave girl in Jedi Academy. "Princess Peach" plays her Mario Tennis in a short skirt, iirc.
As a parent, it's hard to find games that don't throw that in your face.
The CEO title might mean something, but I think Lasseter has shown he knows "the market," at least for animated films, perfectly well.
It's the cultural problem that's going to be the big hurdle. Disney's treatment of its writers is a huge, conspicuous problem, and has been forever. This is the company whose writers refer to it as "Maushwitz." (I hate to repeat something that plays on the Holocaust, but there it is. You can't much like your place of employment to be thinking that way.)
Pixar has been a very, very different company in terms of its priority on story. Lasseter is going to have to bring that into the new culture. Big obstacle.
It sure seems like he'll have the Disney powers behind him at least at first, though. The other part of the comparison that you didn't make was: Michael Eisner and Gil Amelio, whose leadership created the void into which Jobs stepped. Eisner may already have broken the back of the beast, as far as resistant cultures go.
In general, don't you find that conspicuously pious posturing and an inability to think through consequences go hand in hand?
Seriously. This guy is probably a so-called "small government" conservative, too, but he has no problem with the idea of government regulating which video games are violent, and which aren't quite violent enough, to require his new tax.
At least with tobacco and alcohol, which are the classic models for this, you can make the case that the tax money partly addresses problems created by the "sin" in question. Don't even get me started on the abortion side of this. That's unreal. (If you're pro-life, do you really want an idiot like this on your side? Work on Roe V. Wade, whatever, but a $10,000 tax? That's just dumb, and would be about as legal as Jim Crow poll taxes.)
The problem's with the folks what elected this bumpkin. Note to American voters: if you're looking for a good, decent person to hold office, try finding someone who actually struggles with moral questions, rather than someone who claims they're easy to decided on for reasons of religious faith or whatever. People who think moral questions are easy are either a) of Godlike divinity; or b) on the wrong side of those questions, but wearing a nice white robe because it gets them power. And I'm fairly sure this guy isn't divine.
"[T]he tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.... It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin."
-- Benjamin Elijah Mays, American educator and president of Morehouse College (1895-1984)
When we want a superbly well-rounded game, I'll ask Bungie or the Zelda team at Nintendo.