You don't need an airliner to kill a couple of hundred people. A truck filled with ammonium nitrate does just fine.
Which is why you have to present ID to rent a truck. Can we shut the fuck up now, please?
And before you jump in with the "almost 3000" figure from 9/11, that was a one-time event. Airline passengers are never going to sit still for a hijacking again.
Have you not read the 9/11 Commission report? You are suffering from a failure of imagination.
I think you mean "riddled." Unless you mean "horsey," which is cute but makes little sense.
The problem is the over-simplification that inevitably results from "soundbites" and the "30 second pitch."
Nope. That's not a problem. In fact, the problem is inherent in your sentence. It's not "over-simplification." There's no such thing as "over-simplification." If an idea can be simplified, simplify it! Continue until the idea is simple.
If you can't get there, that's your problem.
First of all, all I said was that the mass-media and the "sound bite" have changed politics in America. It was a statement of fact.
Yes, and I told you that it's basically bullshit. Did I stutter?
Whether this change is for the advancement or detriment of participatory democracy, only time will tell.
Sigh. You can talk just to hear yourself talk if you want to, but don't think you're fooling anybody.
But the presidential election is quite unique in terms of politics, is it not?
"Quite unique?" How can something be "quite unique?" Either it's unique or it's not. It can't be a little unique, or very unique, or slightly unique, or "quite unique."
Maybe the reason you're having so much trouble simplifying your ideas is that you're just barely literate. I'm sure you're going to accuse me of being "ridden with unnecessary personal attacks" again, but you know, I just don't care that much.
Anyway, returning to your point: no. You're wrong. The Presidential election is not "quite unique."
You said, "Most anything can be explained in 30 seconds." I took that as nearly any idea, including some of the most complex ones (which can be defined as "infinite" for our purposes) can be explained in 30 seconds. Sure, it may only have been a figure of speech on your part, but the rest of my post was equally rhetorical in nature and served only to question the basis of your conclusion.
I don't know if you noticed, but you didn't say anything at all there. You made word-like marks on the screen, but no meaning was encapsulated in them.
No wonder you have a hard time thinking in simple terms.
In other words, make it devoid of all true understanding of the material
Remember back when I said to stop being an elitist snob? You really should have listened.
It is possible to understand without knowing all the details. I understand coronary artery bypass surgery. Does that mean I'm a heart surgeon? No. Is it necessary for me to be a heart surgeon in order to understand coronary artery bypass surgery? No.
I was reading an article the other day that described how the "sound bite" and modern media in general have irreversibly changed politics in the U.S.
Yeah, that's basically bullshit. Some people love to talk about how mass communication has taken us further from some ideal of participatory democracy, but they forget that before mass communication things were even worse.
For example, rather than say anything risky or possibly requiring an in-depth understanding of an issue
Untrue. Both Presidential candidates are giving hour-plus stump speeches that go into great detail about their policies and agendas. (Well, Bush is. Kerry, not so much. But that's because he's a lousy candidate. It's not an indictment of any kind of system.)
Funny... and here I was spending years at college when I could just spent a few minutes sitting down with the right people. Don't I feel like a fool...
You most certainly should. Because after "years at college" you're completely incapable of understanding the difference between a lecture and a pitch.
This may be related to your being an idiot. I'm not sure.
I really fail to understand this mentality that every idea in the world can be simplified to a 30 second "sound-bite" without losing or missing anything important.
That's right. You really fail to understand. Rather than bragging about this on the Internet, how about you try to rectify it?
If that's the case: why 30 seconds? Why not 20? Or 10, for that matter?
The notion of a "figure of speech" is evidently also lost on you.
I recently found out that at my daughter's school, the use PowerPoint to call the role. There's something deeply wrong about that, but I just can't quite put my finger on it...
On the contrary. Most anything can be explained in 30 seconds. You just have to have both the ability and the willingness to tell the person you're talking to what he needs to know by relating it to things he already understands.
You need to stop thinking in terms of encyclopedia pages and start thinking in terms of sound bites.
Oh, one more thing: quit being such an elitist snob. You apparently don't know the first thing about business, or why businesses make or lose money.
Hardly anyone takes advantage of it because voice-command for a computer is generally such a useless feature.
You and I have different definitions of "useless." I like being able to click an icon and say, "Send this to (name from my address book)." An email pops up with the file attached and all I have to do is hit "send." Or being able to say "Make a new appointment on April 15th at one o'clock." And so on.
For example, it's completely impractical in shared environments.
Headset. Works great. Soon: Bluetooth.
Syntax is easy; semantics and solution are the real killers.
I love the way you're talking about theoretical problems that the engineers have already worked around.
Maybe by Jim Kirk's time we'll have that licked, but you'll notice that he was usually the only one on the bridge who got to use the voice interface; Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, and Spock all did their jobs by pushing buttons.
Um. You know that "Star Trek" was a television show, right? What we can learn from it about how computers work is... limited.
The question for me is, does Apple have enough clever ideas to make a tablet computer really work?
AirPort Extreme for wireless networking. Rendezvous for zero-configuration connectivity to stuff like AirPort Express. Bluetooth for use with an optional keyboard. Inkwell for real-time handwriting recognition. A voice-driven interface that surprisingly few people take advantage of. And so forth and so on.
Yeah, I think Apple does have enough clever ideas. What they don't have is miniaturization technology. They could certainly build a table about the size of a closed PowerBook, but they couldn't put a G5 processor in it. From a marketing point of view, I think it would be hard to sell any new system with a G4 processor, just from the point of view of customer perception.
Jesus Christ. You certainly expended a lot of words to say something very simple: "I fail to comprehend."
Thomas Paine wrote a tract in which he professed a belief in a non-specific, ill-defined God. He spent his entire political life, on the other hand, vehemently arguing against the existence of God, and against His inclusion in our political philosophy.
There's no shame in being uneducated, but your arrogance is disappointing.
OmniPage Pro X is sufficiently close to 100% accurate as to make no difference. Starting with INCREDIBLY bad documents--photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of declassified memos--OmniPage Pro X just churns thought them. It's almost eerie. It's too good. It's like it knows.
But even print Encyclopedia's would include intentially false information so that people blindly copying from them would easily be identified.
Bull.
Earlier versions of the Britannica had Thomas Paine as an athiest despite writing "The Age of Reason" which advocates Deism.
Go back to high school American history and try this one again. Paine is infamous for arguing against the thesis of the Declaration of Independence because it was precipitated on the idea of a Creator.
His flagrant denials notwithstanding, Thomas Paine is believed by most historians to have been an atheist.
They would have have then ordered abdominal MRI scans, because these tumors (in the Islet of Langerhans) would likely be too small to see by CT scans).
Not necessarily. My girlfriend, who is a doctor but not a specialist in either the abdomen or cancer, told me about a patient with an islet tumor the size of a baseball. She (the patient was female) noticed it when she felt a hard mass just under her rib-cage.
They removed it, snip snip, and she was provisionally deemed to be cancer-free. Apparently islet tumors are often totally self-contained and non-metastatic.
In all fairness, he did say that Steve should think about how good a color iPod with Bluetooth would be.
I think it's fair to assume that he intended for Steve to go, "Hmm... hmm... hmm... not at all," and then go back to thinking about whatever the next big thing is going to be.
First of all, where I come from (Canada), there's no such thing as high school civics.
That explains a lot.
I want you to write whatever the heck you guys use for Congressmen up there and demand that kids be better prepared by their schools than you were.
Are you saying that the jump to freedom of information should not be made?
I'm saying that you're so far out of your area of expertise right now that you don't even have the basic vocabulary. Surely you know what happens when somebody moves past his area of expertise, yes? Surely you know what happens when someone who is educated and informed on one subject begins to speak on another subject?
That's right. He makes an ass out of himself.
Right now you are so far out of your depth that "ass" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Just take a step back, recognize the limits of your knowledge, and go crack a book before opening your big fat mouth again.
It's a ridiculously tiny jump from freedom of speech to freedom of information.
You have just retroactively earned an F in high school civics. You're going to have to go back and take the class over again or risk getting your high school and college diplomas revoked.
How long must Wikipedia's editors "[demonstrate] themselves to be trustworthy" to get this kind of review?
If they signed their articles, maybe fifty years or so. But since they don't, and since they let anybody go in and change anything at any time, I don't see it ever happening.
If you go to Wikipedia right now and look something up, you have no way of knowing whether what you're reading is fact or a lie. You can only trust in the tenacity of the site's editors to check each new revision by hand, and if you trust that I've got some real estate you might be interested in.
I saw it as another point adding to a theme where free software and free documentation become competitive to the point where businesses can't all stay around.
Yeah... thing is, that's never happened, and there's not yet any evidence to indicate that it might happen. It's blue-sky stuff, a myth, a rumor.
Have faith in your pet projects, but don't bet the farm on them.
I read his statement a prediction we can look at in the future to measure how true it is.
Um. Duh. Yes, his statement was a prediction. It was an incredibly arrogant and short-sighted prediction.
It's not so much the fact that the articles were written by random people. I'm sure that there are articles on the site that were written by experts in their fields.
The problem comes down to a web of trust. The authors of Wikipedia articles--to the extend that anything on Wikipedia can be said to even have an author, due to the nature of the site--are not recognized authorities in their fields. They are not trusted. That's not to say that they're informed or uninformed, right or wrong. Just that they're not trusted.
When you read something in the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be pretty confident that it's accurate and complete, because the editors of that encyclopedia have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy. This is not presently the case with respect to Wikipedia.
How can we fix this? Well, it would involve a compromise. Right now, anybody is allowed to edit Wikipedia articles. That's seen as one of the institution's strengths. But it's also a key weakness. To improve the Wikipedia's trustworthiness, we would have to diminish its flexibility.
I've got a better idea. How about we let the Encyclopedia Britannica be the Encyclopedia Britannica and let Wikipedia be Wikipedia.
In other words, no, Wikipedia will not "crush" traditional repositories of knowledge "out of existence." That was an unbelievably arrogant and short-sighted statement.
That's funny. I would have sworn that I said the title of the movie isn't a trademark. And then you said it was "nonsense" and went on to list half a dozen other trademarks.
Slashdot Mirror
Blah blah, some nonsense
Look at you! Aren't you a big boy! What's that you're doing? No! No! Stop it! No! We do that outside!
Nope, I haven't read it. Could you enlighten me?
"I find thick books scary because I have the attention span of a lightning bug."
Nobody says you have to be informed. Nobody says you have to be educated But if you opt not to be, you should really shut the fuck up.
You don't need an airliner to kill a couple of hundred people. A truck filled with ammonium nitrate does just fine.
Which is why you have to present ID to rent a truck. Can we shut the fuck up now, please?
And before you jump in with the "almost 3000" figure from 9/11, that was a one-time event. Airline passengers are never going to sit still for a hijacking again.
Have you not read the 9/11 Commission report? You are suffering from a failure of imagination.
because it was ridden
I think you mean "riddled." Unless you mean "horsey," which is cute but makes little sense.
The problem is the over-simplification that inevitably results from "soundbites" and the "30 second pitch."
Nope. That's not a problem. In fact, the problem is inherent in your sentence. It's not "over-simplification." There's no such thing as "over-simplification." If an idea can be simplified, simplify it! Continue until the idea is simple.
If you can't get there, that's your problem.
First of all, all I said was that the mass-media and the "sound bite" have changed politics in America. It was a statement of fact.
Yes, and I told you that it's basically bullshit. Did I stutter?
Whether this change is for the advancement or detriment of participatory democracy, only time will tell.
Sigh. You can talk just to hear yourself talk if you want to, but don't think you're fooling anybody.
But the presidential election is quite unique in terms of politics, is it not?
"Quite unique?" How can something be "quite unique?" Either it's unique or it's not. It can't be a little unique, or very unique, or slightly unique, or "quite unique."
Maybe the reason you're having so much trouble simplifying your ideas is that you're just barely literate. I'm sure you're going to accuse me of being "ridden with unnecessary personal attacks" again, but you know, I just don't care that much.
Anyway, returning to your point: no. You're wrong. The Presidential election is not "quite unique."
You said, "Most anything can be explained in 30 seconds." I took that as nearly any idea, including some of the most complex ones (which can be defined as "infinite" for our purposes) can be explained in 30 seconds. Sure, it may only have been a figure of speech on your part, but the rest of my post was equally rhetorical in nature and served only to question the basis of your conclusion.
I don't know if you noticed, but you didn't say anything at all there. You made word-like marks on the screen, but no meaning was encapsulated in them.
No wonder you have a hard time thinking in simple terms.
In other words, make it devoid of all true understanding of the material
Remember back when I said to stop being an elitist snob? You really should have listened.
It is possible to understand without knowing all the details. I understand coronary artery bypass surgery. Does that mean I'm a heart surgeon? No. Is it necessary for me to be a heart surgeon in order to understand coronary artery bypass surgery? No.
I was reading an article the other day that described how the "sound bite" and modern media in general have irreversibly changed politics in the U.S.
Yeah, that's basically bullshit. Some people love to talk about how mass communication has taken us further from some ideal of participatory democracy, but they forget that before mass communication things were even worse.
For example, rather than say anything risky or possibly requiring an in-depth understanding of an issue
Untrue. Both Presidential candidates are giving hour-plus stump speeches that go into great detail about their policies and agendas. (Well, Bush is. Kerry, not so much. But that's because he's a lousy candidate. It's not an indictment of any kind of system.)
Funny... and here I was spending years at college when I could just spent a few minutes sitting down with the right people. Don't I feel like a fool...
You most certainly should. Because after "years at college" you're completely incapable of understanding the difference between a lecture and a pitch.
This may be related to your being an idiot. I'm not sure.
I really fail to understand this mentality that every idea in the world can be simplified to a 30 second "sound-bite" without losing or missing anything important.
That's right. You really fail to understand. Rather than bragging about this on the Internet, how about you try to rectify it?
If that's the case: why 30 seconds? Why not 20? Or 10, for that matter?
The notion of a "figure of speech" is evidently also lost on you.
even infinitely complex ideas
Hyperbole does not make you more attractive.
I recently found out that at my daughter's school, the use PowerPoint to call the role.
There's something deeply wrong about that, but I just can't quite put my finger on it...
That was unintentionally hilarious.
On the contrary. Most anything can be explained in 30 seconds. You just have to have both the ability and the willingness to tell the person you're talking to what he needs to know by relating it to things he already understands.
You need to stop thinking in terms of encyclopedia pages and start thinking in terms of sound bites.
Oh, one more thing: quit being such an elitist snob. You apparently don't know the first thing about business, or why businesses make or lose money.
Much better advice: go to the Apple site and watch any of Steve Jobs' presentations.
Hint: don't try to extemporize from your slides. Write your speech, deliver it well, and use your slides as punctuation marks.
You are unclear on the basic concepts involved. A word processor is not a typesetting program, nor vice-versa.
While you're at it, please stop trying to open your mail with a screwdriver.
So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off?
Because Office 2004 is a set of pretty darned good programs, while Open Office is... well, poop.
Why waste time trying to put lipstick on a pig?
Hardly anyone takes advantage of it because voice-command for a computer is generally such a useless feature.
You and I have different definitions of "useless." I like being able to click an icon and say, "Send this to (name from my address book)." An email pops up with the file attached and all I have to do is hit "send." Or being able to say "Make a new appointment on April 15th at one o'clock." And so on.
For example, it's completely impractical in shared environments.
Headset. Works great. Soon: Bluetooth.
Syntax is easy; semantics and solution are the real killers.
I love the way you're talking about theoretical problems that the engineers have already worked around.
Maybe by Jim Kirk's time we'll have that licked, but you'll notice that he was usually the only one on the bridge who got to use the voice interface; Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, and Spock all did their jobs by pushing buttons.
Um. You know that "Star Trek" was a television show, right? What we can learn from it about how computers work is... limited.
Any tablet worth it's salt will have handwriting recognition replace the need for a keyboard, and for the real sticklers, a virtual keyboard onscreen.
And a Bluetooth controller so it can work with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard. No wires.
Also: Inkwell. Handwriting recognition has been built into Mac OS X for years now.
The question for me is, does Apple have enough clever ideas to make a tablet computer really work?
AirPort Extreme for wireless networking. Rendezvous for zero-configuration connectivity to stuff like AirPort Express. Bluetooth for use with an optional keyboard. Inkwell for real-time handwriting recognition. A voice-driven interface that surprisingly few people take advantage of. And so forth and so on.
Yeah, I think Apple does have enough clever ideas. What they don't have is miniaturization technology. They could certainly build a table about the size of a closed PowerBook, but they couldn't put a G5 processor in it. From a marketing point of view, I think it would be hard to sell any new system with a G4 processor, just from the point of view of customer perception.
That's not to say I wouldn't take one.
And don't even get me started about the deals you can get on wrecked Ferraris.
Bad analogy. A totaled Ferarri is worth a fortune for the spare parts alone.
You must be new around here.
Jesus Christ. You certainly expended a lot of words to say something very simple: "I fail to comprehend."
Thomas Paine wrote a tract in which he professed a belief in a non-specific, ill-defined God. He spent his entire political life, on the other hand, vehemently arguing against the existence of God, and against His inclusion in our political philosophy.
There's no shame in being uneducated, but your arrogance is disappointing.
OmniPage Pro X is sufficiently close to 100% accurate as to make no difference. Starting with INCREDIBLY bad documents--photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of declassified memos--OmniPage Pro X just churns thought them. It's almost eerie. It's too good. It's like it knows.
But even print Encyclopedia's would include intentially false information so that people blindly copying from them would easily be identified.
Bull.
Earlier versions of the Britannica had Thomas Paine as an athiest despite writing "The Age of Reason" which advocates Deism.
Go back to high school American history and try this one again. Paine is infamous for arguing against the thesis of the Declaration of Independence because it was precipitated on the idea of a Creator.
His flagrant denials notwithstanding, Thomas Paine is believed by most historians to have been an atheist.
They would have have then ordered abdominal MRI scans, because these tumors (in the Islet of Langerhans) would likely be too small to see by CT scans).
Not necessarily. My girlfriend, who is a doctor but not a specialist in either the abdomen or cancer, told me about a patient with an islet tumor the size of a baseball. She (the patient was female) noticed it when she felt a hard mass just under her rib-cage.
They removed it, snip snip, and she was provisionally deemed to be cancer-free. Apparently islet tumors are often totally self-contained and non-metastatic.
In all fairness, he did say that Steve should think about how good a color iPod with Bluetooth would be.
I think it's fair to assume that he intended for Steve to go, "Hmm... hmm... hmm... not at all," and then go back to thinking about whatever the next big thing is going to be.
First of all, where I come from (Canada), there's no such thing as high school civics.
That explains a lot.
I want you to write whatever the heck you guys use for Congressmen up there and demand that kids be better prepared by their schools than you were.
Are you saying that the jump to freedom of information should not be made?
I'm saying that you're so far out of your area of expertise right now that you don't even have the basic vocabulary. Surely you know what happens when somebody moves past his area of expertise, yes? Surely you know what happens when someone who is educated and informed on one subject begins to speak on another subject?
That's right. He makes an ass out of himself.
Right now you are so far out of your depth that "ass" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Just take a step back, recognize the limits of your knowledge, and go crack a book before opening your big fat mouth again.
It's a ridiculously tiny jump from freedom of speech to freedom of information.
You have just retroactively earned an F in high school civics. You're going to have to go back and take the class over again or risk getting your high school and college diplomas revoked.
No, Metropolis was basically Manhattan south of 57th and the Upper West Side. Gotham was Morningside Heights and up.
How long must Wikipedia's editors "[demonstrate] themselves to be trustworthy" to get this kind of review?
If they signed their articles, maybe fifty years or so. But since they don't, and since they let anybody go in and change anything at any time, I don't see it ever happening.
If you go to Wikipedia right now and look something up, you have no way of knowing whether what you're reading is fact or a lie. You can only trust in the tenacity of the site's editors to check each new revision by hand, and if you trust that I've got some real estate you might be interested in.
I saw it as another point adding to a theme where free software and free documentation become competitive to the point where businesses can't all stay around.
Yeah... thing is, that's never happened, and there's not yet any evidence to indicate that it might happen. It's blue-sky stuff, a myth, a rumor.
Have faith in your pet projects, but don't bet the farm on them.
I read his statement a prediction we can look at in the future to measure how true it is.
Um. Duh. Yes, his statement was a prediction. It was an incredibly arrogant and short-sighted prediction.
It's not so much the fact that the articles were written by random people. I'm sure that there are articles on the site that were written by experts in their fields.
The problem comes down to a web of trust. The authors of Wikipedia articles--to the extend that anything on Wikipedia can be said to even have an author, due to the nature of the site--are not recognized authorities in their fields. They are not trusted. That's not to say that they're informed or uninformed, right or wrong. Just that they're not trusted.
When you read something in the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be pretty confident that it's accurate and complete, because the editors of that encyclopedia have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy. This is not presently the case with respect to Wikipedia.
How can we fix this? Well, it would involve a compromise. Right now, anybody is allowed to edit Wikipedia articles. That's seen as one of the institution's strengths. But it's also a key weakness. To improve the Wikipedia's trustworthiness, we would have to diminish its flexibility.
I've got a better idea. How about we let the Encyclopedia Britannica be the Encyclopedia Britannica and let Wikipedia be Wikipedia.
In other words, no, Wikipedia will not "crush" traditional repositories of knowledge "out of existence." That was an unbelievably arrogant and short-sighted statement.
That's funny. I would have sworn that I said the title of the movie isn't a trademark. And then you said it was "nonsense" and went on to list half a dozen other trademarks.
Bizarre.