The iTunes software is not entirely free but is available at no charge to end users on the Windows platform.
No, it's entirely free. Anybody can download it at no charge. There are versions available for Mac or Windows, and neither one of them has a price tag.
[idle speculation]
Whatever. Any one of those may be true, or none of them. The point remains: the fact that Ogg does not have a license fee attached matters not one damn bit to end users.
Apple already paid it for you -- which means you paid when you bought it. All legal mp3 players have to pay for a license. They just pass it on to you in the price of your player.
How much did it cost me? Let's say I paid $300 for my iPod; how much of that $300 went to the MP3 playback license?
This fails to address iTunes, of course. I didn't pay for that at all, and yet it includes a licensed MP3 encoder. So that doesn't quite add up.
What I'm getting at is this: the fact that Ogg doesn't cost anything to license doesn't matter to the end user. Not at all. So if you want to use Ogg as a selling point, you're going to have to come up with something better than "it's cheap."
[I don't pay any license fees to run my mp3 players] Yet.
Perhaps I'm overconfident, but I'm fairly sure that nobody's going to show up at my house and demand a check to pay for the continued use of my iPod.
[much ranting]
I read it twice, but I guess I missed the part where you answered the question. I don't pay to use either my iPod or iTunes; both include MP3 encoding and playback. (Also AAC, which I also don't pay for.) So why should I give a damn that Ogg is free? It's not easier to use (it's considerably harder), it's not demonstrably superior (it's a wash at best), so what's the big whoop?
(I know what the argument is for OEM's and whatnot. I'm trying to get at what the argument is for end-users. Or, if that doesn't work, convince you to stop trying to tout Ogg as some kind of competitive advantage all by itself and to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters.)
The second item on the first page of examples includes a note that you can copy-and-paste error text from alert boxes. The sample includes an alert that says
Could not start process Unable to create io-slave:
klauncher said: Error loading 'kio-audiocd'.
A truly desktop-ready operating system would never display an error like that. I mean, hell; is it so much to ask that if an error has to be cryptic, it should at least be grammatically correct?
So, if I am promoting Toby Keith's new album on Fox News channel, and they start running stories sympathetic to such un-American causes as gay marriage or peace rallies, I'm blowing steam out my ears because my target market is switching over to the Speed Channel as fast as the name might suggest.
If there were such a thing as real-time ratings feedback, you might be right. But ratings for television are determined twice a year using thirty-day sample spreads.
Why to you think GWB etc all put so much effort into defining what is and is not acceptable thought for Real Americans (TM).
That never happened. You're referring to one comment from one administration official which was taken completely out of context. The comment was, in paraphrase: "Don't be an asshole. People are very upset right now [by the events of 9/11], so you might want to think about being a little sensitive when you're holding a microphone."
Quite the mind-control project, huh?
Dixie Chicks, anyone?
Nobody censored the Dixie Chicks, if you'll recall. If censorship really goes on, they would have been thrown in cells for the rest of their lives. Rather, their audience decided that what they said wasn't cool.
Surely you don't think they should have been allowed to go overseas, address an audience of foreigners, and speak ill of the sitting president of the United States without any sort of consequences whatsoever, do you? Words have consequences. The things you say affects people's opinions of you. This is not censorship; this is the marketplace of ideas.
Various news organizations bury stories for various reasons.
More conspiracy-theory nonsense.
And yes, Virginia, sponsors really do pressure news editors.
They really, really don't. I just kinda have to appeal to my own experience: I know what I'm talking about here. Take it or leave it.
Investigative reporting has become so marginalized that the only places you can find it are conspiracy pages.
You sound like Don Quixote, bemoaning the fact that all there are to fight are windmills.
The days of the dark coverup have come and gone, my friend. The reason you don't see Deep Throat-style investigative journalism today is that there's nothing that needs that kind of investigation. The people in power, from elected officials to business magnates to celebrities, know that they can't keep secrets, at least not for very long, so why bother trying?
The problem is that persons such as yourself somehow remain convinced that things are happening just out of sight, around the corners and in the back rooms. The fact that you're not hearing about them becomes evidence of massive coverups spanning all levels of society.
You never stop to consider the much more likely scenario.
After all, Bill Maher lost his show, Politically Incorrect, because the advertisers pulled out when he said something controversial.
Ah, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. If audience share drops sharply, or if an advertiser's association with a particular news outlet becomes negative rather than neutral or positive, the advertiser will be disinclined to continue the relationship.
The advertisers pulled out based on the content of the show, not based on the numbers.
No, the advertisers pulled out because their sponsorship of the show had become bad publicity for them.
That doesn't make much sense, but that is what happened.
It is what happened, and it makes perfect sense.
Keep in mind, though, that Bill Maher's show had nothing to do with news. It was strictly entertainment. Nothing like what he pulled would ever have been allowed to be part of a news show.
Are you deliberately trying to be dense in order to shift the argument to different terms?
I'll assume you really don't know how this works.
The people elect representatives and an executive. The executive, with the approval of the representatives, appoints delegates to carry out the will of the people. One of those delegates is the Federal Communications Commission, which exists under a mandate from Congress to administer, among other things, the publicly owned airwaves.
The FCC gets its instructions from the Congress, which is the sovereign, elected voice of the people.
In other words, the FCC is just doing what we tell them to do.
BTW, nobody asked me, my relatives, my friends or you if some occassional (sp?) cursing in TV is allowable.
Nobody asked you whether the Fed should cut interest rates, either. Or whether to build an interstate highway system. Or whether to fund public education.
We don't make these decisions directly. Instead, we appoint representatives to take care of the business of governance for us. And you were given the opportunity to participate in that process. Whether you chose to take that opportunity or not is another question.
If you don't like the FCC's policies on the airwaves, express your opinion through your representatives. That's what they're there for. Call, write, or visit.
Our country is not run in secret, smoky, back-room meetings of oligarchs. It happens right out there in the open. But nobody's going to pound on your door and force you to participate in the process. Getting informed and exercising your voice are your responsibilities, nobody else's.
I remember a reporter (from ABC I think)
Who remains conveniently unnamed, I see.
if he tried to follow the troops (a privilege reserved to CNN reporters only)
To the extent that journalists are allowed "to follow the troops" at all, pretty much anybody with press credentials can get in. I say "pretty much" because the security measures are almost laughable. If you have a valid United States passport, or a valid passport from a country that's not on the State Department's "list of concern"; have credentials in good standing with any recognized news-gathering organization, including those issued to freelancers and stringers; and have not been convicted of a felony, you're in.
It's not just CNN.
Now, it's obvious from your remarks on this subject that you just made some stuff up, or blindly repeated something that somebody else made up. I think it'd be great if we could raise the level of debate a little bit and leave that sort of thing behind. Don't you?
Beef scares and wardrobe malfunctions get more coverage than a nations most basic principles and beliefs and you dont call that censorship?
Nope, for two reasons. First, because Diebold's experiments with new types of voting machines are hardly representative of our "most basic principles and beliefs." They're experiments, nothing more. If they work, they'll be used widely. If they don't, they'll be improved or replaced. That's as far as it goes.
(Your interest in Diebold is probably inspired more by the fact that it's tangentially related to computer programming than by any true love of democracy. Just a guess on my part, but I think it's a good one.)
And second, no one person, organization, or group makes the decisions about what stories end up on the front page of your hometown newspaper or at the top of the hour on the evening news. There can be no censorship because there's no single point of control. It just isn't happening like that.
Why are "beef scares" front page news? Because Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease kills people, and you get it by eating contaminated beef. Lots and lots of people eat lots and lots of beef, and if some of it's contaminated, people can die. The stakes are incredibly high, even though the odds are low.
Janet Jackson's boob was front-page news because nearly three hundred million people saw it happen on live television. And notice, if you will, what things have occurred since it happened? The effects have been broad, even though they've been quite benign.
And dont get me started on tv censorship, in America you cant even say shit on tv.
Of course you can. You can't say it on broadcast television, of course, because the airwaves are collectively owned by the people and the people don't want cursing during prime time. But broadcast television makes up for a very small part of the medium we call TV.
Besides, it's just a word. A word that is not uttered in polite company. You can say "feces," which is a synonym. So there's no censorship there. Merely the application of a minimum standard of polite behavior.
instead of killing people for having some political leaflets, we have a nice advanced hierachy of various people paying eachother off for not mentioning things
Care to back that assertion up with some kind of fact? Or are you just spewing paranoid ramblings with no concern for truth?
I like to think that anonymous writers could post news and opinions online and build up a reputation and be heard, like Locke and Demosthenes in "Ender's Game".
Please recall that the two characters you mentioned were consummate liars whose only agenda was to gain power for themselves. An agenda they advanced, incidentally, by manipulating the masses by telling them what they wanted to hear.
That's information availability, a cornerstone of democracy.
The big challenge facing democracy in the 21st century is not the availability of information. If we've learned anything in the past fifty years, it's that information is like sand: it finds its way in through cracks and openings that were far too small to see, and fills your tent, your bunk, and your boots. The ubiquity of information is not the problem.
The problem is thought. Have you ever heard the expression, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing?" It's true, it's true. To be partially informed and to think yourself wise is far, far worse than to be ignorant and to know it.
When you figure out how to write a computer program that makes people aware of the limits of their knowledge, please let me know. That'd be something worth having.
this assumes you don't buy in to Chomsky's 'Propoganda Model', which suggests that mainstream sources cover things in a manner that makes their advertisers happy, NOT necessarily the mainstream/reader-base.
I am not an expert, but I know a thing or two about news.
Advertisers, be they print or broadcast, do not buy space or airtime based on the editorial leanings of the news desk. They buy space or airtime based simply on the number of people that will be exposed to that space or airtime. The measurement of those numbers is not exactly a science, but it is a finely honed craft. Numbers mean everything.
News outlets live and die by their audience numbers. An outlet with a broad reach or circulation will be more successful at securing advertising dollars than one with a smaller audience.
So, in essence, yes. News outlets must provide the coverage that the audience wants.
The thing about the audience, though, is that it's not homogenous. There are people out there who will read or watch just about anything. You want to deliver just-the-facts, objective news? There's an audience for that. You want to do deliver leftward-leaning analysis? There's an audience for that. You want to deliver rightward-leaning analysis? There's an audience for that. And if you want to deliver tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories or anti-establishment rants, there's an audience out there for that, too.
The idea that all news is the same because all news outlets are competing for the same audience is bogus. Multiple news outlets exist in print, on television, on the radio, and on the web precisely because they're all reaching for different audiences.
If a story gets ignored by the various major outlets, it's probably got nothing to do with business or audience share, and it's certainly got nothing to do with propaganda. The culture of news is such that the dissemination of propaganda is essentially impossible. Rather, if a story gets ignored, it's probably because it set off the bullshit detectors of desk editors everywhere and got bumped from the news budget accordingly.
thereby escaping the grasp of the censors' attempts to control the spread of forbidden information.
Like what?
Seriously. This is the 21st century. How long has it been since anybody in the Western, industrialized world actually considered any information "forbidden?"
If you wanna talk about samizdat for the Islamic world or something like that, go right ahead. But peer-to-peer computer networks aren't it. Peer-to-peer requires either a small network of dedicated hosts (in which case it's peer-to-peer in name only), or a vast network of part-time hosts. Neither of these things exists in the repressive parts of the world.
It's a neat idea, but let's not overestimate our own importance, hmm?
On a dual 1.2 Ghz G4, The Onion takes about 11 seconds to display with Omniweb, which isn't faster than Safari v60.
I think there might be something wrong with your setup. I'm using a dual 1 GHz G4, and Safari v. 60, and "The Onion" takes about three seconds to render their main page once you get past that interstitial ad thing.
To do a more scientific test, try it against a locally stored HTML file instead of against a web site. That way you'll separate the renderer from the network code, or at least as much as you can.
IE for macintosh was actually a fine browser (it blows away all competition in classic-land).
I think you're confused. IE 5 for Mac OS 9 was a great browser that blew away all competition everywhere, at the time. It was the most standards-compliant browser available when it debuted, and it was rock-solid stable to boot.
But IE 5 for Mac OS X is just crap. It's unbelievably slow, and unbelievably buggy. It fails to load pages for apparently no reason at what seems to be random. It goes catatonic when faced with a proxy server that works fine with other browsers. And, of course, it still uses old-school font rendering, which just adds insult to injury.
I fired up IE for OS X just a few days ago to visit a web site that stauchly refused to work with anything else. It was the first time I'd run it in at least a year. I've been using Safari full-time since the day it came out, and before that it was OmniWeb. First thing I saw? After the oh-so-1993 splash screen, I mean? A giant alert box that said, "The file could not be found." Faced with little choice, I clicked "OK," but I had to ask myself, "What file? Was it an important file? Who was looking for the file, exactly?" I did what I had to do and got the hell out of IE-land as fast as I could.
(Turns out it was an error in my preferences. I had IE pointed to a home page that didn't exist any more. Why it ignored the system-wide preference in favor of its own is a mystery that I shall save for another day.)
Long story short: whichever of the three options Microsoft might choose, I doubt most Mac OS X users will ever even hear about it.
And there you go again. Missing the point, I mean. What thread are you responding to, exactly? Because it doesn't sound like you're responding to this one.
This is all well and good, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem arises when people such as yourself, who prefer things one way, think that those same things are good, or even acceptable, for those of us who prefer things another way.
OpenBSD/NetBSD is definitely not up her alley, and the FreeBSD ports tree would probably scare the bejesus out of her.
Not scare. This is a common misconception among Linux users, that complicated things scare us. (By us I mean the non-geeks and ex-geeks of the world, those of us who, in Tsu Dho Nimh's words, do not consider computers to be a hobby.) It's not true. Complicated things, like the ports tree, and for that matter all UNIX and UNIXesque operating systems other than Mac OS X, do not scare us. They piss us off. We get pissed off when things that should work, won't. We get pissed off when things that should be easy to find and use, aren't. We get pissed off when things are harder, more complex, more time consuming, or more needful of our attention than we want them to be.
That's the key, you know. The ticket is not to ask yourself, "What can we do to keep from scaring the users?" The ticket is, "What can we do to keep from pissing off the users?"
I really don't mean to be an ass, but the principles represented by Ender's tactics were the military equivalent of nine o'clock, day one. Surprise, initiative, misdirection... these are not complicated or revolutionary ideas. The very first thing you learn when you study tactics is to figure out what the enemy expects, and then to do the opposite. Even taking into account the fact that the enemy knows you're going to do that, and is anticipating it.
It's not some big insight that comes with genius or years of experience; it's the first thing you learn. Well, the second thing. The first thing is always to wear clean socks.
I'm not trying to put you down or anything like that. I just want to make sure you don't read Ender's Game and come away thinking you've learned something about military tactics.
However, in the specific case of a right to privacy, I think it is a right. It seems implicit in the 4th amendment to me
I disagree. The fourth amendment guarantees that we're free from unreasonable searches and seizures. It's a long way from there to a generalized right to privacy. For example, imagine the government were to put video cameras up everywhere that's not a private residence and record every person's comings and goings. Is that a violation of the fourth amendment? Well, while it's certainly open to interpretation, I say not. Simply observing what can already be observed by anybody who happens to be in the right place at the right time does not, in my mind, constitute an unreasonable search, though you could certainly argue that it violates the right to privacy... if you accept the notion of a right to privacy.
Which is really the bigger point. The question is not whether the fourth amendment can be interpreted to permit or prohibit any particular activity on the part of the government; that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The question is whether the fourth amendment implies a more general right to privacy.
Besides, there's always the old intent-by-omission argument. If the framers had meant for the fourth amendment to protect privacy more generally, they could have written it in such a way that it would. They didn't, so that must not have been what they meant. Not that strong an argument, but one that has to be considered at least.
Slashdot Mirror
The iTunes software is not entirely free but is available at no charge to end users on the Windows platform.
No, it's entirely free. Anybody can download it at no charge. There are versions available for Mac or Windows, and neither one of them has a price tag.
[idle speculation]
Whatever. Any one of those may be true, or none of them. The point remains: the fact that Ogg does not have a license fee attached matters not one damn bit to end users.
Apparently, MPEG-1 audio layer 3 decoding costs $15,000 for the first 20,000 units shipped in each fiscal year and 0.75 USD for each additional unit.
And yet iTunes is free.
How does that work, exactly?
Apple already paid it for you -- which means you paid when you bought it. All legal mp3 players have to pay for a license. They just pass it on to you in the price of your player.
How much did it cost me? Let's say I paid $300 for my iPod; how much of that $300 went to the MP3 playback license?
This fails to address iTunes, of course. I didn't pay for that at all, and yet it includes a licensed MP3 encoder. So that doesn't quite add up.
What I'm getting at is this: the fact that Ogg doesn't cost anything to license doesn't matter to the end user. Not at all. So if you want to use Ogg as a selling point, you're going to have to come up with something better than "it's cheap."
[I don't pay any license fees to run my mp3 players] Yet.
Perhaps I'm overconfident, but I'm fairly sure that nobody's going to show up at my house and demand a check to pay for the continued use of my iPod.
[much ranting]
I read it twice, but I guess I missed the part where you answered the question. I don't pay to use either my iPod or iTunes; both include MP3 encoding and playback. (Also AAC, which I also don't pay for.) So why should I give a damn that Ogg is free? It's not easier to use (it's considerably harder), it's not demonstrably superior (it's a wash at best), so what's the big whoop?
(I know what the argument is for OEM's and whatnot. I'm trying to get at what the argument is for end-users. Or, if that doesn't work, convince you to stop trying to tout Ogg as some kind of competitive advantage all by itself and to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters.)
So, if I am promoting Toby Keith's new album on Fox News channel, and they start running stories sympathetic to such un-American causes as gay marriage or peace rallies, I'm blowing steam out my ears because my target market is switching over to the Speed Channel as fast as the name might suggest.
If there were such a thing as real-time ratings feedback, you might be right. But ratings for television are determined twice a year using thirty-day sample spreads.
Why to you think GWB etc all put so much effort into defining what is and is not acceptable thought for Real Americans (TM).
That never happened. You're referring to one comment from one administration official which was taken completely out of context. The comment was, in paraphrase: "Don't be an asshole. People are very upset right now [by the events of 9/11], so you might want to think about being a little sensitive when you're holding a microphone."
Quite the mind-control project, huh?
Dixie Chicks, anyone?
Nobody censored the Dixie Chicks, if you'll recall. If censorship really goes on, they would have been thrown in cells for the rest of their lives. Rather, their audience decided that what they said wasn't cool.
Surely you don't think they should have been allowed to go overseas, address an audience of foreigners, and speak ill of the sitting president of the United States without any sort of consequences whatsoever, do you? Words have consequences. The things you say affects people's opinions of you. This is not censorship; this is the marketplace of ideas.
Various news organizations bury stories for various reasons.
More conspiracy-theory nonsense.
And yes, Virginia, sponsors really do pressure news editors.
They really, really don't. I just kinda have to appeal to my own experience: I know what I'm talking about here. Take it or leave it.
Investigative reporting has become so marginalized that the only places you can find it are conspiracy pages.
You sound like Don Quixote, bemoaning the fact that all there are to fight are windmills.
The days of the dark coverup have come and gone, my friend. The reason you don't see Deep Throat-style investigative journalism today is that there's nothing that needs that kind of investigation. The people in power, from elected officials to business magnates to celebrities, know that they can't keep secrets, at least not for very long, so why bother trying?
The problem is that persons such as yourself somehow remain convinced that things are happening just out of sight, around the corners and in the back rooms. The fact that you're not hearing about them becomes evidence of massive coverups spanning all levels of society.
You never stop to consider the much more likely scenario.
After all, Bill Maher lost his show, Politically Incorrect, because the advertisers pulled out when he said something controversial.
Ah, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. If audience share drops sharply, or if an advertiser's association with a particular news outlet becomes negative rather than neutral or positive, the advertiser will be disinclined to continue the relationship.
The advertisers pulled out based on the content of the show, not based on the numbers.
No, the advertisers pulled out because their sponsorship of the show had become bad publicity for them.
That doesn't make much sense, but that is what happened.
It is what happened, and it makes perfect sense.
Keep in mind, though, that Bill Maher's show had nothing to do with news. It was strictly entertainment. Nothing like what he pulled would ever have been allowed to be part of a news show.
Now "the people" is another synonym for the FCC?
Are you deliberately trying to be dense in order to shift the argument to different terms?
I'll assume you really don't know how this works.
The people elect representatives and an executive. The executive, with the approval of the representatives, appoints delegates to carry out the will of the people. One of those delegates is the Federal Communications Commission, which exists under a mandate from Congress to administer, among other things, the publicly owned airwaves.
The FCC gets its instructions from the Congress, which is the sovereign, elected voice of the people.
In other words, the FCC is just doing what we tell them to do.
BTW, nobody asked me, my relatives, my friends or you if some occassional (sp?) cursing in TV is allowable.
Nobody asked you whether the Fed should cut interest rates, either. Or whether to build an interstate highway system. Or whether to fund public education.
We don't make these decisions directly. Instead, we appoint representatives to take care of the business of governance for us. And you were given the opportunity to participate in that process. Whether you chose to take that opportunity or not is another question.
If you don't like the FCC's policies on the airwaves, express your opinion through your representatives. That's what they're there for. Call, write, or visit.
Our country is not run in secret, smoky, back-room meetings of oligarchs. It happens right out there in the open. But nobody's going to pound on your door and force you to participate in the process. Getting informed and exercising your voice are your responsibilities, nobody else's.
I remember a reporter (from ABC I think)
Who remains conveniently unnamed, I see.
if he tried to follow the troops (a privilege reserved to CNN reporters only)
To the extent that journalists are allowed "to follow the troops" at all, pretty much anybody with press credentials can get in. I say "pretty much" because the security measures are almost laughable. If you have a valid United States passport, or a valid passport from a country that's not on the State Department's "list of concern"; have credentials in good standing with any recognized news-gathering organization, including those issued to freelancers and stringers; and have not been convicted of a felony, you're in.
It's not just CNN.
Now, it's obvious from your remarks on this subject that you just made some stuff up, or blindly repeated something that somebody else made up. I think it'd be great if we could raise the level of debate a little bit and leave that sort of thing behind. Don't you?
Beef scares and wardrobe malfunctions get more coverage than a nations most basic principles and beliefs and you dont call that censorship?
Nope, for two reasons. First, because Diebold's experiments with new types of voting machines are hardly representative of our "most basic principles and beliefs." They're experiments, nothing more. If they work, they'll be used widely. If they don't, they'll be improved or replaced. That's as far as it goes.
(Your interest in Diebold is probably inspired more by the fact that it's tangentially related to computer programming than by any true love of democracy. Just a guess on my part, but I think it's a good one.)
And second, no one person, organization, or group makes the decisions about what stories end up on the front page of your hometown newspaper or at the top of the hour on the evening news. There can be no censorship because there's no single point of control. It just isn't happening like that.
Why are "beef scares" front page news? Because Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease kills people, and you get it by eating contaminated beef. Lots and lots of people eat lots and lots of beef, and if some of it's contaminated, people can die. The stakes are incredibly high, even though the odds are low.
Janet Jackson's boob was front-page news because nearly three hundred million people saw it happen on live television. And notice, if you will, what things have occurred since it happened? The effects have been broad, even though they've been quite benign.
And dont get me started on tv censorship, in America you cant even say shit on tv.
Of course you can. You can't say it on broadcast television, of course, because the airwaves are collectively owned by the people and the people don't want cursing during prime time. But broadcast television makes up for a very small part of the medium we call TV.
Besides, it's just a word. A word that is not uttered in polite company. You can say "feces," which is a synonym. So there's no censorship there. Merely the application of a minimum standard of polite behavior.
instead of killing people for having some political leaflets, we have a nice advanced hierachy of various people paying eachother off for not mentioning things
Care to back that assertion up with some kind of fact? Or are you just spewing paranoid ramblings with no concern for truth?
Then stop speculating about technological solutions to social problems and go do something constructive.
No computer program has ever changed the world. Only people can do that.
I like to think that anonymous writers could post news and opinions online and build up a reputation and be heard, like Locke and Demosthenes in "Ender's Game".
Please recall that the two characters you mentioned were consummate liars whose only agenda was to gain power for themselves. An agenda they advanced, incidentally, by manipulating the masses by telling them what they wanted to hear.
That's information availability, a cornerstone of democracy.
The big challenge facing democracy in the 21st century is not the availability of information. If we've learned anything in the past fifty years, it's that information is like sand: it finds its way in through cracks and openings that were far too small to see, and fills your tent, your bunk, and your boots. The ubiquity of information is not the problem.
The problem is thought. Have you ever heard the expression, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing?" It's true, it's true. To be partially informed and to think yourself wise is far, far worse than to be ignorant and to know it.
When you figure out how to write a computer program that makes people aware of the limits of their knowledge, please let me know. That'd be something worth having.
this assumes you don't buy in to Chomsky's 'Propoganda Model', which suggests that mainstream sources cover things in a manner that makes their advertisers happy, NOT necessarily the mainstream/reader-base.
I am not an expert, but I know a thing or two about news.
Advertisers, be they print or broadcast, do not buy space or airtime based on the editorial leanings of the news desk. They buy space or airtime based simply on the number of people that will be exposed to that space or airtime. The measurement of those numbers is not exactly a science, but it is a finely honed craft. Numbers mean everything.
News outlets live and die by their audience numbers. An outlet with a broad reach or circulation will be more successful at securing advertising dollars than one with a smaller audience.
So, in essence, yes. News outlets must provide the coverage that the audience wants.
The thing about the audience, though, is that it's not homogenous. There are people out there who will read or watch just about anything. You want to deliver just-the-facts, objective news? There's an audience for that. You want to do deliver leftward-leaning analysis? There's an audience for that. You want to deliver rightward-leaning analysis? There's an audience for that. And if you want to deliver tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories or anti-establishment rants, there's an audience out there for that, too.
The idea that all news is the same because all news outlets are competing for the same audience is bogus. Multiple news outlets exist in print, on television, on the radio, and on the web precisely because they're all reaching for different audiences.
If a story gets ignored by the various major outlets, it's probably got nothing to do with business or audience share, and it's certainly got nothing to do with propaganda. The culture of news is such that the dissemination of propaganda is essentially impossible. Rather, if a story gets ignored, it's probably because it set off the bullshit detectors of desk editors everywhere and got bumped from the news budget accordingly.
thereby escaping the grasp of the censors' attempts to control the spread of forbidden information.
Like what?
Seriously. This is the 21st century. How long has it been since anybody in the Western, industrialized world actually considered any information "forbidden?"
If you wanna talk about samizdat for the Islamic world or something like that, go right ahead. But peer-to-peer computer networks aren't it. Peer-to-peer requires either a small network of dedicated hosts (in which case it's peer-to-peer in name only), or a vast network of part-time hosts. Neither of these things exists in the repressive parts of the world.
It's a neat idea, but let's not overestimate our own importance, hmm?
On a dual 1.2 Ghz G4, The Onion takes about 11 seconds to display with Omniweb, which isn't faster than Safari v60.
I think there might be something wrong with your setup. I'm using a dual 1 GHz G4, and Safari v. 60, and "The Onion" takes about three seconds to render their main page once you get past that interstitial ad thing.
To do a more scientific test, try it against a locally stored HTML file instead of against a web site. That way you'll separate the renderer from the network code, or at least as much as you can.
IE for macintosh was actually a fine browser (it blows away all competition in classic-land).
I think you're confused. IE 5 for Mac OS 9 was a great browser that blew away all competition everywhere, at the time. It was the most standards-compliant browser available when it debuted, and it was rock-solid stable to boot.
But IE 5 for Mac OS X is just crap. It's unbelievably slow, and unbelievably buggy. It fails to load pages for apparently no reason at what seems to be random. It goes catatonic when faced with a proxy server that works fine with other browsers. And, of course, it still uses old-school font rendering, which just adds insult to injury.
I fired up IE for OS X just a few days ago to visit a web site that stauchly refused to work with anything else. It was the first time I'd run it in at least a year. I've been using Safari full-time since the day it came out, and before that it was OmniWeb. First thing I saw? After the oh-so-1993 splash screen, I mean? A giant alert box that said, "The file could not be found." Faced with little choice, I clicked "OK," but I had to ask myself, "What file? Was it an important file? Who was looking for the file, exactly?" I did what I had to do and got the hell out of IE-land as fast as I could.
(Turns out it was an error in my preferences. I had IE pointed to a home page that didn't exist any more. Why it ignored the system-wide preference in favor of its own is a mystery that I shall save for another day.)
Long story short: whichever of the three options Microsoft might choose, I doubt most Mac OS X users will ever even hear about it.
And there you go again. Missing the point, I mean. What thread are you responding to, exactly? Because it doesn't sound like you're responding to this one.
Just like Final Cut Pro brought Avid-level power to the masses
Final Cut Pro is a thousand bucks. Which "masses" are you talking about, exactly?
I'm afraid you don't get it. Thanks for responding, but you completely missed the point.
This is all well and good, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem arises when people such as yourself, who prefer things one way, think that those same things are good, or even acceptable, for those of us who prefer things another way.
OpenBSD/NetBSD is definitely not up her alley, and the FreeBSD ports tree would probably scare the bejesus out of her.
Not scare. This is a common misconception among Linux users, that complicated things scare us. (By us I mean the non-geeks and ex-geeks of the world, those of us who, in Tsu Dho Nimh's words, do not consider computers to be a hobby.) It's not true. Complicated things, like the ports tree, and for that matter all UNIX and UNIXesque operating systems other than Mac OS X, do not scare us. They piss us off. We get pissed off when things that should work, won't. We get pissed off when things that should be easy to find and use, aren't. We get pissed off when things are harder, more complex, more time consuming, or more needful of our attention than we want them to be.
That's the key, you know. The ticket is not to ask yourself, "What can we do to keep from scaring the users?" The ticket is, "What can we do to keep from pissing off the users?"
Ender's game had brilliant military strategies.
I really don't mean to be an ass, but the principles represented by Ender's tactics were the military equivalent of nine o'clock, day one. Surprise, initiative, misdirection... these are not complicated or revolutionary ideas. The very first thing you learn when you study tactics is to figure out what the enemy expects, and then to do the opposite. Even taking into account the fact that the enemy knows you're going to do that, and is anticipating it.
It's not some big insight that comes with genius or years of experience; it's the first thing you learn. Well, the second thing. The first thing is always to wear clean socks.
I'm not trying to put you down or anything like that. I just want to make sure you don't read Ender's Game and come away thinking you've learned something about military tactics.
However, in the specific case of a right to privacy, I think it is a right. It seems implicit in the 4th amendment to me
I disagree. The fourth amendment guarantees that we're free from unreasonable searches and seizures. It's a long way from there to a generalized right to privacy. For example, imagine the government were to put video cameras up everywhere that's not a private residence and record every person's comings and goings. Is that a violation of the fourth amendment? Well, while it's certainly open to interpretation, I say not. Simply observing what can already be observed by anybody who happens to be in the right place at the right time does not, in my mind, constitute an unreasonable search, though you could certainly argue that it violates the right to privacy... if you accept the notion of a right to privacy.
Which is really the bigger point. The question is not whether the fourth amendment can be interpreted to permit or prohibit any particular activity on the part of the government; that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The question is whether the fourth amendment implies a more general right to privacy.
Besides, there's always the old intent-by-omission argument. If the framers had meant for the fourth amendment to protect privacy more generally, they could have written it in such a way that it would. They didn't, so that must not have been what they meant. Not that strong an argument, but one that has to be considered at least.
do you really think terrorism is a threat to your life?
My life? Yes, very much so. But I don't expect you to share this opinion; it's influenced strongly by where I am and what I do for a living.
go see bowling for columbine if you havent already.
I know you're not serious. You know Bowling for Columbine grossly misrepresented its subject matter, right?