Okay, so maybe it's not quite on the same level as Sonic the Hedgehog (who looked more like a blue fox than a hedgehog), but there is an all-new Hello Kitty MMORPG ready to debut.
The editorial points to a kind of shift from the happy game landscapes of Mario and Sonic, but I didn't see any welcoming treatment of Hello Kitty. How can you get much more happy, fun and vibrant than Hello Kitty?
The assertion in the editorial is that mascots are just too cutesy-kidsey to have much appeal anymore, but I think that the recent slew of game concepts/storylines is probably not easy to align with a mascot image... but this could change.
Consider this game premise: You are part of a band of mutant gun-toting grenade-lobbing prairie dogs who must encircle and destroy a hedgehog settlement as you defend against the attacks on a horde of evil gophers. Find something cute and fuzzy, put a chaingun in its hand and a bandanna on its head and you've got a mascot. In the premise, it could be "Hank the PO'd Prairie Dog"! Pick another name for the gopher-king and the hedgehog sultan and you've got mascots Galore!
I did RTFA, so I'll address a couple of his points.
re: Scoring
I don't mind seeing scores, so much, as long as I have an inkling as to how they were arrived at. Admittedly, when you see a score (like in PCGamer, for example) you have to take it with a grain or two of salt to begin with. Still, if a 100 point score could be proken down into four categories that offer 25-point rages, that might be helpful. In such a case, having a game score in the 90s would be pretty rare, but if all of the objective criteria added up to that, then it would at least be a bona-fide 90-ish score.
re: Hype/Buzz
To some degree, having hype and buzz in a review can't be avoided, but it can be moderated. Consider a "panel" approach. After the review, you could offer a pithy paragraph from each of maybe 6 other people at the mag/site who also played the game. The hype could be neatly confined to the review and the buzz could be neatly confined to the impressions related by the panel. Maybe the whole review should be made by a panel of players, just to create a little bit of objectivity.
My experience, FWIW
In my LAN gaming group, we always take time to grab any demo we think might be interesting and show it off to the other members. Some in our group are more activist about demoing and sharing their results, while others (like me) tend to wait until there's some consensus in the group as to what looks like a good title to actually go out and buy. By the time I go out and buy something, then, I tend to be satisfied that not only will I play it, but I'll enjoy playing it with the rest of the group.
An earlier post on this topic made the point that there's not much said about the multiplayer aspects of games in moost reviews. I'd agree. If a game has a multiplayer capability, I'd like some description of it. I bought Call of Duty knowing that I'd enjoy the single player part, but also because I thought that the multiplayer game would have some kind of Co-op mode we could enjoy when our group meets... I was disappointed because I was led to believe that the AI was good enough to support a co-op mode. I ended up trying to get Red Orchestra to feed that fix.
Ditto on the SNL sketch. Shatner does have a sense of humor, after all.
As for Wil Wheaton, I confess to not liking his Wes Crusher character very much up until the last few episodes he appeared in. With the Traveller showing up, and the discovery that Wes had an incredible untapped potential wrt moving in spacetime, I thought that the character became a lot more interesting. I was hoping that he'd come back in a few episodes down the road, a la Q, but it never happened. I moved on and almost forgot about him until about a year ago, when...
I was having dinner with an old friend of mine, and perhaps because he knew that I was a Trekkie/Whovian that attended the cons every year while in high school, he asked me what I thought about Wil Wheaton. I related exactly what I did in the previous paragraph. He agreed with my assessment and we both came to the conclusion that for the most part the Wes Crusher character seemed a bit of a suckup and a goody-two-shoes. So I asked if he knew what Wil Wheaton was doing since leaving the show, and he said that he'd been spending time reading at Wil's website, http://www.wilwheaton.net/. My buddy suggested that I give it a visit and see what I thought.
So I did, and I gotta say that whatever I've heard about him from others, or here at slashdot, he's actually a very funny and thought-provoking person to read. I suggest taking a spin through his FAQ. Thowing feces? I didn't read any of that. Sure he may have had a hard time as a young actor adjusting to the popularity of the show and the sometime dislike people had for his character, but who really ever handles fame like that with total poise and dignity ALL THE TIME. Very few people, I'd say.
Anyhow, I'd write more, but I suggest that you give the man the benefit of the doubt and check out his blog and other tidbits on the site before characterizing him. I think that's fair, don't you?
You're right about him taking every side of every issue, but you may have lost sight of the reason why.
Kerry was one of NINE democratic contenders for the nomination. Six of those nine were totally unelectable by any standard, and were just in it to make the others squirm a bit. (Al Sharpton for president? Jeez. Now THAT's a joke!) It was a case where dems wanted to use the shotgun approach to pick the nominee (throw all nine at an issue and see who sticks). Not a bad tactic if you throw the same nine at every issue. You pick the guy that sticks the most.
The problem, and the reason for the poor dem pres showing this cycle, was the endless series of debates that caused the dem candidates to accentuate differences between them and shift their positions based on each other... and with nine people competing, those positions were all over the map. To compete for the nomination, you had to take all sides of every issue. If you're a dem watching other dems argue the position points, you see the shifts in position as refinements of policy, but if you're unaffiliated or republican, you see these shifts as flipflops.
I think that the next dem pres candidate should be selected NOT in the endless circuit of a dozen public debates, but at the convention, where it's supposed to happen. The debates ruined the positions of the dem candidates for nomination.
You know, I wouldn't worry about it or let the extra fifteen minutes of customs paperwork frighten you away from a visit. I read the international press (even Al Jazeera) along with our own rags and there's this perception that things are clamped down a lot harder than they really are. As an Australian, you're far far less likely to encounter problems than, say, a Brit (let Richard Reid and Cat Stevens serve as the endpoints on that line).
That said, if you've committed a felony in your lifetime, you probably won't make it in the front door. However, if the most worrysome thing in your background is that you belong to a peacenik/treehugger/dolphin-kissing organization, you might get a little extra attention, but you won't be barred from entry. Odds are that you'd be allowed in as a muslim, too.
The easiest way to pave your way is to visit your local US consulate and find out what the restrictions are, if any exist for you at all. My educated guess is that there are none for you. No worries.
There is a siginificant slump in international tourism here, but it's not because of restrictions -- rather, it's because most people in the world simply don't want to travel here, given the state of geopolitics. There's also still the tail end of a domestic slump in tourism that springs from the recent recession.
From an economic perspective, the dollar will probably weaken somewhat over the next couple years, which may boost international tourism a bit. Everyone likes to have their money go farther when they travel abroad. Is this a reason to postpone travel to the states? Probably not.
Anecdotally, I travelled to Great Britain and Ireland about eight months after 9/11 and the level of paranoia and security angst was much higher then. When I came back into the country, I was subjected to bomb/explosive residue checks and baggage searches. The procedures were much less standardized than they are today, and the took much longer than they do today.
So, in short, don't think you can't travel here. There will be a few extra minutes of delay at customs, but the odds are slim-to-none that you'll see any additional inconvenience after that.
You know, even stupid, uninformed, shallow people have the right to vote, and it's a great country we have that allows them to do so. The idea that only well-informed, contemplative, insightful and well-reasoned people should vote is just plain nutty.
Would you say that only Harvard MBAs should start businesses? Would you say that only gay men should be allowed to tell people how to decorate or what to wear? Would you say that only dentists are allowed to tell kids to brush their teeth? It's an elitist concept that you're promulgating.
Maybe not everyone has your ability to stay informed on all the issues, and maybe they don't have well-reasoned and insightful opinions on all of them. Maybe they're too busy putting bread on the table and paying the bills. Maybe they prefer to watch a rerun of last week's WWF Smackdown over CSPAN coverage of the latest house vote. (I confess that I do prefer WWF Smackdown over almost all CSPAN coverage, myself.) Maybe they just don't care. Maybe they take cues on who they trust based on more emotional perceptions.
Once you accept the premise that democracy is best left to those who are competent to vote, you accept the notion that there are lesser people -- (the incompetent -- the great unwashed masses -- the halfwit tools of the elite) -- who just can't be trusted to pick the person or ballot initiative they like. Of course, once you marginalize a group, it's easy to restrict them from other things like jobs or health care services or educational opportunities or life itself. In Germany of the thirties, they executed these people first, years before they got around to the jews. I'm not suggesting you're a Nazi or anything, but I am pointing out that the slope is slippery and can lead to places that most people would prefer to avoid.
It's a hard thing to accept, I'll admit. A person who is voting for the guy with the best hairstyle has just as much of a vote as someone who's been doing weekly economic analyses and in-depth research on American sociopolitical issues and their effect on international relations. Seems a little unequal, to be sure. The upshot is that the people who vote on hairstyle preference are far far more unlikely to vote in elections at all. They're more likely to be excited about voting for the next American Idol.
If your worry is that the thoughtful, informed voters will be cancelled out by the tawdry whims of the great unwashed masses, be reassured by the knowledge that even thoughtful, informed voters can make bad choices, and have the additional comfort of knowing that the uninformed and uncaring can sometimes also have an innate understanding of people and issues without needing to examine the details.
You're pointing out an ideosynchrasy, admittedly. I do spend somewhere around 1000/yr on computer equipment, but I also have five systems to maintain. (2 linux and 2 xp and one solaris x86). So maybe the mouse comment was a red herring. I'll accept that.
Oddly enough, I've never had BIOS issues -- ever. I know it's comparatively rare for those of us that like to build-our-own, but it's been my experience.
Apple is always the packaged system buy, though. When you buy a Mac you don't have that many choices. I like the choices I get with the PC platform.
I've come very close to buying Apple systems on a couple occasions, but when it comes to gaming, I just don't feel like they offer the flexibility I want in terms of configuration choices.
Like I said, I'll start saving now for another reconsideration of an Apple next year, but as a gaming system, it's just not what I want just yet -- in terms of gaming software available and system configuration.
Shell game, 3-card monty, whatever you want to call it. I'm convinced that the republicans have fixed it. I really hope I'm wrong. I'll be delighted if I'm wrong.
After 2000, I realized that the GOP would do anything to win, and I beleive that they've spent four years refining their tactics. Where democrats have been accused of voter registration irregularities, they're all about registering people multiple times, or registering fictitious names/characters that will never show up at the polls. Where republicans have been accused of voter registration irregularities, they're all about tearing up or invalidating democratic registrations. Even if you're registered thirty-five times (as one guy in my state is), you can only vote once. If you're not registered at all, you can't vote at all. You decide which of the two parties is doing something that will actually affect the outcome of the election. You may not believe it now, with all the hype that's going on, but I'm predicting many court cases next year that involve voter suppression/disenfranchisement on the part of the GOP and their buddy-boy network. That's all I have to say on that topic.
On a lighter note, I seem to recall as a kid that the "red" states were democratic states, and the "blue" states were republican-held. It seems like the colors have been reversed this year. Has anyone else made a similar observation?
It's a good question, but I don't see PC gaming drying up in the same way you suggest.
I guess the point I'd offer is that there are many games in popular categories that do not fit well in the console paradigm: Real-Time Strategy and Role Playing Games are two at the top of my mind, but I would also go as far as saying that FPS is walking the knife-edge between the two.
Any game that has or uses a multiple-document interface (MDI) is not a good fit on a console, because consoles use a single-document interface for the most part. (I don't seem to recall any console games that use dialog boxes -- they seem to use screen hierarchies to get past the problem.) Could you put MDI-based games on a console, yeah, probably, but it would likely come off as awkward.
There's also the quality of the hardware in consoles. PCs have the advantage here, and that will never go away. Sure, you can hack your XBox, but at the end of the day the XBox is still an underpowered PC. The graphics quality of consoles make them a poor choice for anything requiring high resolution -- the standard TV just can't deliver the visual experience that an ordinary 19in CRT monitor can give.
I think the most telling indicator that PC games are not going away anytime soon is HALO. This is a game that was built for the console right from the start, and when I tried it on the PC it sucked. To my knowledge, game ports from PC to console go a lot better.
You know, there are a few reasons why I can't bring myself to buy an apple machine.
In the interest of fairness and disclosure, my first machine (used for school papers, etc.) was a CPM-based box, and the first machine on which I played games that I enjoyed was the Apple ][.
The reasons are:
I've never been able to use a mouse with one button. All of the games I like to play use two buttons and a scrollwheel -- in essence, a Microsoft mouse.
I like being able to freely swap out a graphics card for another one whenever I feel like I need to upgrade.
I'm not familiar with any way to build a Mac using standard PC (read: Intel-based) processing hardware. Maybe there's a way to do this, but I'm not clued into it.
I have a Linux box for web browsing and email duties. I'd rather have my Linux box be able to play all these games than have to buy a significantly overpriced Apple machine.
Apple is an all-in-one vendor. They sell the hardware and the OS as a bundle. I want the hardware choices that I feel will make my gaming experience the best possible -- and the freedom to have hundreds of hardware choices and combinations at my fingertips.
All apple stuff is soooo expensive. When I look in the markdown bin at the software store, I NEVER see Mac games in there -- only the PC titles. When I peer into the Mac aisle, some of the oldest games there are still full price.
When it comes down to it, to get past even a few of the items I've listed here, Apple would have to undergo a culture-shift. They'd have to be keen on not producing their own hardware. They'd also have to be keen on selling the OS seperately. Slashdotters love to gripe about how windows is so expensive and you end up having to buy the same OS many times over a decade. If Apple went to selll the OS seperately, they run the risk of becoming the same kind of company as MSoft -- with all the headaches and griping that comes with that territory. If you sell the OS seperately, you have to be ready to write drivers (or support that activity by others) for all of the devices that people want to have in their machines. This involves a lot more administrative and development overhead than most people (I mean game players) are aware of. Apple would also have to be prepared to run more Microsoft software on its platform than they want to. They appear to have been okay with the idea when it came to Microsoft's office suite, but there are a huge number of games that are developed under Microsoft-sponsored aegis. Assuming they're okay with the idea, will microsoft-sponsored game development firms be comfortable with having to wrestle with the overhead of the porting issues in the process of regular product development? I don't know the answer to this (the situation is, admittedly, hypothetical) but Microsoft may have the opinion that they don't want to spend money on development activity for platforms that don't benefit them directly.
It's a very interesting idea, but I think there will have to be a sea-change at Apple before it even stands the chance at becoming a reality. I'll start saving up for a Mac right now, just in case it happens.
There are tens of thousands of expatriot Americans (Americans who live/work abroad) who have the opportunity to vote in the election. We have absentee ballots for these folks, just as we do for American Armed Service personnel abroad.
These folks (and I can say this because I've been one of them, working at one time for a software shop in Germany) usually have the same ISP that everyone else in the country has. (Mine was Deutsche Telekom.) When they're at work, they're using the same internet services that everyone else at the office has. If you're an expat American and you're prevented from reaching out to the online election information sources that you might use to decide on your candidate choices, you don't have the campaign message that comes straight from the source... from the President's campaign. Instead, you have to rely on filtered sources like news organizations. (Prolly FOX, but other conservative rags will suffice to some degree.)
If I was an expat republican, I'd be a little concerned and would consider this as news. However I'd go a little further and submit that people in countries around the world are keenly interested in the choices that American voters are facing this year. They're also interested in knowing what the messages of the candidates are -- not because they have a vote to cast, but because they're looking for signs/information about how foreign and trade policies will be conducted, and to get a feel for what the domestic climate might be under one administration or another. On this level, I think it's also news.
Like it or not, people in all the other nations of the world look to the President as the primary representative of our country's policies. Sure, individual Americans are also representatives, but individual citizens don't have the leadership responsibilities that the President has. Consequently, any message that comes straight from the President or his party brain-trust is pretty valuable from an information standpoint.
Yeah, you could say that the effect isn't that great, and in totality I'd agree. I do believe, though, that people anywhere in the world ought to have the ability to learn about the Bush re-election campaign and get their information from the source.
That's a good question. It wasn't that I felt like "because I'm being watched by a bunch of policemen I feel like I won't get beat up". Rather, it was more like "if I get beat up, or have to defend myself, there will be some record of the incident that can corroborate the circumstances".
Honestly, before I went to London, I thought that with all those cameras out there, it must a worse police state than we've got here in the states... my assumption was that if the cops saw something, they'd be on it in a heartbeat. It turned out that the cameras didn't prevent public drunkenness, muggings, junkies in the alleyways, burglaries, etc. Instead, they gave the cops some evidence to start with.
Here's a disadvantage:
Let's say you're wearing a t-shirt that says "Skinheads Suck" and you're walking through a neighborhood that's peppered with little cams. If a skinhead was just hanging out on the web, checkin' out the cams, and saw you, knew where you were, and had a phone handy, violent forces could be deployed on you with potentially deadly consequences. If you don't think that skinheads would gladly beat the crap out of someone like that, you're very sadly wrong. It happens all the time.
My point is that it's not that you're being "filmed", but that you cannot control who has access and authority to do something with the "film". Obviously, not everyone who'd be watching the feed would have bad intentions, but some would. The most awful thing would be to have a goody-two-shoes watching a feed looking for a way to report minor infractions or misdemeanors... a snitch.
They'd alert the police as soon as they had irrefutable proof of the slow-glide-through-the-stop-sign, or the littered candy wrapper, or the jaywalk, or someone smoking a funny cigarette outside a nightclub or something. The number of calls going to your local police office would go through the roof, all for petty stuff that draws time and attention from very serious matters.
I trust the police more than I trust joe-shut-in-with-a-crime-crusade. It's very easy to give up privacy/anonymity and impossible to get it back when it's gone. Why not proceed with caution?
The article combines aspects of two of my favorite books: The Artificial Kid (Bruce Sterling) and 1984 (George Orwell). I've recently re-read both of them. The amazing thing is that the snitch-cam concept may supercede so-called "reality TV". The awful thing is that people will inevitably use it to not only validate the conformity of others, but as a vehicle for a snitch-based cash income.
When I was in London a couple years ago, I knew that I was on-camera everywhere I went and I felt safer. Part of that was because I knew that policemen were watching. I think that if I knew that the people watching and analyzing my behavior were just people with an axe of one type or another to grind, or goody-two-shoes types that want to force their morals on everyone, I'd feel less safe rather than more safe.
Curiouser and curiouser, and doubleplusbad, methinks.
I disagree that the problem is consumers. (Do you work for BestBuy, by chance?) While we do respond to hype, the hype is not coming only from the software shop or game conglomerate (EA, Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc.) you expect to get it from. It's also coming from the gaming magazines, G4 shows and published reviews that are quite often far too generous.
While I don't play console games, I know that the console mags are often unable or unprepared to give realistic reviews on the hyped new title. PC games mags go the same way. In one sense, you might expect it, because the game company is an advertiser in the magazine that is reviewing the game. The magazine's customer is the advertiser first and then the reader, and so the mag is often afraid to point out any shortcomings in games that are being advertised in the pages -- that stinks, imho.
I can't count the number of titles that I picked up after reading a review only to find that the review was FAR too generous with praise and FAR too short on critique.
I'd rather see more folks whining to the publications that sugar-coat their appraisals of games.
The ordinary numbers game that is a lottery is a great way to make money. The numbers racket is still alive and well in organized crime. The problem is that a numbers game like a lottery is a regressive tax -- that is, it disproportionately taxes the poorest among us. Okay, admittedly, a lottery is not a tax per se because taxes are as mandatory as death, but it's more along the lines of a voluntary tax -- espcially as state-sanctioned lotteries go.
Who plays the lottery? The poorest people. Why? Because they want the money and have aspirations of wealth.
If a lottery were implemented to encourage voting, I'm all for it -- with a twist. The twist is to make it a voluntary progressive tax rather than a regressive one. How to do this? If you make less than 100K/yr, you get to enter for 20 cents. From 100K-200K you get to enter for a dollar. From 200K to 300K, you get to enter for twenty-five dollars. From 300K to 400K you get in for a thousand dollars. 400K to 500K, you get in for ten thousand dollars. From 500K to the roof you pay twenty-five thousand dollars per 500K of income. There you have it, a progressively taxing lottery for voting.
Who would vote under these conditions? The ones who could not afford to spend money on lobbyists or 10K-per-plate chicken-and-peas fundraising events. At the same time, the people who can afford the high-dollar issue and candidate contributions would stay away. Xanadu!
Okay, maybe not realistic, but definetly fun to think about.
Understood. Naturally, beccause a turbine is meant to run at a relatively consistent speed, it can't really idle efficiently, or accelerate/decelerate nearly as fast as the internal combusion engine. One approach might be to store a charge (in a battery, presumably) that would keep the turbine moving (though not actually burning anything) for about ten minutes. Once movement is required, fuel would be added to the intake and power could be continued.
I do know that turbines have become more efficient since the 50s and 60s. At the time of those experiments you refer to, the turbine was not used in a hybrid context -- the rotational power of the turbine was being directed to the wheels of the car through some clever transmission engineering of the type you see in turbine-powered helicopters. Idling (while admittedly inefficient) may be more within-scope today than it was then.
Regardless of how you approach the idle problem, it seems to me that the idea of the turbine-powered hybrid electric car is worthy of re-examination. That's all I meant to say.
My feeling is that the Rosen Motors concept would do well for the consumer, but not so well for automobile producers and mechanics.
OK, maybe it was teensy bit offtopic. To return to the topic...
I guess the really small size and relatively high output of electricity from these little jobbers in the article is appealing for some things DoD, but as the responses have alluded -- there's still exhaust. There's also the given that people are going to be walking around with little vials full of flammable materials. Do you think you'll be let on a plane with something like this? No way. OTOH, I can see something like the micro turbine having great use for powering portable televisions, sat phones, lighting systems, etc.
I guess I see the advantages of this technology being more outdoor-ready rather than applying to all portable devices.
Truth is that I saw no back-bulge, heard no delay. (or is that de Lay?). I saw the president at his best, extemporaneous, and being himself.
As I saw it, even at his best, the "Show me" crowd was unconvinced... proof that he's a comic salesman that depends on christian religeous shills and people that think that being pro-troops means being pro-war.
The faces of the crowd were indelibly warmer to Kerry and blank to Bush. For once, the president didn't have resounding cheers to his cute country one-liners. He folded after about 45 minutes because he knew that even though the audience could not respond by cheering, they could not respond by smiling, either, even when he put on his best domestic coat.
I feel sorry for the guy. He shoulda used the earpiece.
I concur that it may very well be a breaking of the debate rules (I haven't read the rules, but I'll take your word for it.) and to do so is wrong.
That said, what can anyone do about the rule-breaking? He's the president, and he can do whatever he wants, whether it beaks the rules or not. Nobody can touch him.
I'm not trying to flamebait by saying that. The examples abound. For instance:
For the entirety of his time in office, he has used the secret service to prevent those who might disagree or even question his positions from attending his own campaign rallies, and even public taxpayer-paid presidential events -- a clear violation of the right of peaceable assembly.
The suspected terrorists rounded up in the post 9-11 dragnet are sitting in gitmo precisely so that they can avoid being covered under any rules that would grant the accused "enemy combatants" any rights to counsel or public proceedings regarding their detention. Non-citizens are guaranteed these rights in the constitution, but the administration (read: Ashcroft) has cleverly exploited a gray area in territorial law that makes gitmo as a leased territory both a US-occupied area and simultaneously NOT American territory.
The only three US citizens detained as enemy combatants (Yassir Hamdi, Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh (Lindh being the only one picked up outside the US)) have been detained under near-secret conditions in stateside military brigs, denied counsel for as long as the Supreme Court would tolerate, and similarly denied all rights to hear the charges and evidence against them. This, too, is an abbrogation of Constitutional rights. Note that to avoid being caught by the letter of the law, the administration has seen to it that Padilla's case should suddenly lurched forward into hearing, Lindh has been permitted to plea bargain and Hamdi has gone back to Saudi Arabia.
So while the rule-breaking in the debates is wrong, I think that the broken constitutional rules are much more serious, and the president is clearly immune from any impeachment proceedings that could be raised in congress. He is free to break as many rules as he sees fit, unfortunately.
I don't much care for the situation, personally, but the wrongness of the suspected earpiece is but a minnow among the much larger rule-breaking fish I hope to see fried on this Friday.
I don't think it's done in any malicious way, though. He's had this problem (and you see it in press conferences, especially when the question diverts from his memorized position-blurbs) where he's often at a loss for words. He's thinking about what he's going to say, and trying to figure out if he knows any relevant facts, and he's not terribly articulate. So, he's getting some help.
The biggest evidence of this, as far as I saw it, was that he didn't mispronounce or mangle that many words. I was amazed. At first I chalked it up to coaching, but almost every one 4 and 5 syllable words he used were perfectly enunciated. Honestly, I don't fault the guy when he mispronounces stuff -- he knows what he wants to say and maybe he doesn't hit every word on the head, but I can tell where he's going with his points most of the time.
I'm a little dyslexic myself, but it was caught when I was really young. Every now and again, I'll read or write a word with transposed letters. (Ex. I'll read "tevelision" but will still understand it as "television") I practiced a lot as a kid to read, write, spell and speak carefully. It's tough enough as a kid, but at the president's age, you're pretty much locked into your condition.
I don't think getting earpiece help is a bad thing, particularly for speeches or at functions that require the delivery of a planned address. I do, however, see the debates as a way for the candidates to speak in a less scripted way -- a more extemporaneous approch to delivering the messages. I would rather see the president not use the earpiece for the debates and thereby let his natural way of speaking be a part of the show. Clearly, he's going in prepped to the hilt, and he knows where he stands on the issues even if his delivery is a little awkward. That awkwardness is actually the better part of his "folksy" charm, because he's so open about it.
I won't be voting for the president in November, but I don't hate him, either, and if he wants to use an earpiece to make himself appear more erudite, then that's fine by me. I truly believe that he's a good man and that he honestly wants what he believes is the best for the country. I like the man and his motives. I'm just not dazzled by his performance while in office.
Where I think the earpiece can go bad is when he's depending on it for everything -- when he ceases to be himself and becomes the moving mouthparts of some other person (Rove, his wife, whoever) with better language, cognitive and memory skills. I hope he avoids depending on it for his answers. In a townhall venue like this upcoming debate, it will be less easy to fall back on an earpiece, anyway.
I'll be watching for the long pauses before he starts talking, like last time, and if I see them, I'll be very disappointed in him, even more disppointed than I've been with the progress he's been able to make for the country.
Actually, I started a documentation wiki (with FAQ) for a popular open source software project. The FAQ was the hardest part, but once started, the FAQ evolved into a fairly substantive collection of questions and answers that repeatedly showed up in the mailing list.
The things that make a wiki a really rotten place for an FAQ are (there's probably more than four, actually):
the VERY REAL potential for accidental or malicious WikiMindWipe
the previously mentioned problem with questions being posted directly to the FAQ
the assumption that some users make that because they've had a question and found an answer to that specific problem, that it has FAQ-level value.
Since it's wiki, you have to TRUST people who add to it to know that the question is commonly asked and that their answer is agreed to be appropriate and factually acurate. Wikis are all about trust, after all.
I submit that a wiki can be a great vessel for documentation and discussion, but it requires a little care and feeding to keep the value of the content (FAQ or otherwise) as high as possible. The best way we found to handle questions was via the mailing list, but those of us who watched the list would frequently spot the topics that kept showing up and put them in the FAQ when we got tired of typing the same responses. By solidifying the answers in the FAQ, the variablity that comes with having many differently-worded answers to the same question is mitigated somewhat.
fwiw, my technique for starting the FAQ was to look back over six months of mailing list srchives and find questions that had come up a few times -- all about the same topic/problem, with perhaps a little allowance for variance. Once you have those messages collected, write the basic question that all of the messages are submitting. Once the question is in-hand, collect all the answers to it and smoosh them together, tossing out the parts that were specific to each users situation. This answer almost never makes sense at first smoosh, but once they're all together, you can edit it to answer the basic question and also supply the extra bits of knowledge that each respondent included in their individual answers.
I recently moved completely over to linux for my generic home PC needs. I keep one windows box in my entertainment center just for music, and another one just for gaming. I've got a third windows box that hasn't had much action since I made the switch to Linux. Email, browsing, and simple document composition are all handled quite well by OpenOffice/Ximian tools. I really don't notice much difference. Everything on my general-purpose Linux box behaves prettty much like how things behave on mu old general-purpose box in WinWorld.
In any job I've had, anyone on a win workstation liked the microsoft apps for word processing, spreadsheets, email and corporate intranet stuff. To talk to and use remote UNIX boxes on the network, some flips and twists (like using ReflectionX or NTSFU) were necessary.
The generic quality of the MS Office app suite is universally recognized. With a little adjustment, wordperfect users can get used to using Word, for example. Some of the ways that each of those 2 products handled things like page layout and headers & footers are a little different, but usually people learn how to do what they need to do and don't stray (or explore, depending on how you look at it) into application functionalities that they don't need.
Word is Soooo feature rich that half the toolbars and palettes are turned off in the default installation. It's just too much for an all-new word user (are there still any of these, btw?) to take in, but that collection of tools makes the app extremely powerful. When you buy an office app suite for your enterprise, you want something that's going to cover all of your various groups of users, who will have needs that vary. OpenOffice is similarly powerful, but the preponderance of CIOs (particularly in large enterprises like AT&T) still have the justifiably skeptical view of free applications. "How could anything free be as good as what you pay for?", they wonder.
(I ran into this a couple weeks ago at my new job when I was deprived of ReflectionX for doing xterms to UNIX boxes on the network. I installed cygwin and when I had to ask a couple questions about host configuration, the greybeard head systems engr said, "No wonder you're having problems, that's free software. When you install that buggy crap, you're on your own." (a direct quote))
Most enterprise users are not really using the OS -- they're using the apps that ride on the OS. The greatest drawback I've encountered with the OpenOffice suite is that in order to work in a world that is dominated by MS office apps, you have to be able to read and write in MS document file formats. Parts of those formats have been reverse-engineered, but other parts are obscure binary mishmash that's apparently been designed to conceal what the MS app in question is doing with the data in the file. OpenOffice gets pretty close, but it can only go so far. As a CIO, I'd be inclined, in the best interest of my customers, employees and shareholders, to make the offfice app suite choice that doesn't just get me CLOSE, but actually gets me ALL THE WAY to interoperability with the rest of the MS dominated office application world.
A very old friend of mine was a PC guy (for all his general purpose computing needs) for 15 years and then, when MS finally ported the whole office suite over to the mac, he switched to the mac. Why? It was because he liked OSX for the kernel (which he used) and the interface and the stability, but he needed the apps that linked him to the rest of the MS world.
So, I think the talk of "We're considering Linux for our 70,000 desktops..." may not be solely about getting cheaper prices, but also to encourage Redmond to consider porting MS office to Linux. Truthfully, if there was such a port, I would definetly consider buying it. I won't pay for the OS, but the apps do have value, even if OpenOffice proves that the price of the apps is inflated.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so maybe it's not quite on the same level as Sonic the Hedgehog (who looked more like a blue fox than a hedgehog), but there is an all-new Hello Kitty MMORPG ready to debut.
The editorial points to a kind of shift from the happy game landscapes of Mario and Sonic, but I didn't see any welcoming treatment of Hello Kitty. How can you get much more happy, fun and vibrant than Hello Kitty?
The assertion in the editorial is that mascots are just too cutesy-kidsey to have much appeal anymore, but I think that the recent slew of game concepts/storylines is probably not easy to align with a mascot image... but this could change.
Consider this game premise: You are part of a band of mutant gun-toting grenade-lobbing prairie dogs who must encircle and destroy a hedgehog settlement as you defend against the attacks on a horde of evil gophers. Find something cute and fuzzy, put a chaingun in its hand and a bandanna on its head and you've got a mascot. In the premise, it could be "Hank the PO'd Prairie Dog"! Pick another name for the gopher-king and the hedgehog sultan and you've got mascots Galore!
re: Scoring
I don't mind seeing scores, so much, as long as I have an inkling as to how they were arrived at. Admittedly, when you see a score (like in PCGamer, for example) you have to take it with a grain or two of salt to begin with. Still, if a 100 point score could be proken down into four categories that offer 25-point rages, that might be helpful. In such a case, having a game score in the 90s would be pretty rare, but if all of the objective criteria added up to that, then it would at least be a bona-fide 90-ish score.
re: Hype/Buzz
To some degree, having hype and buzz in a review can't be avoided, but it can be moderated. Consider a "panel" approach. After the review, you could offer a pithy paragraph from each of maybe 6 other people at the mag/site who also played the game. The hype could be neatly confined to the review and the buzz could be neatly confined to the impressions related by the panel. Maybe the whole review should be made by a panel of players, just to create a little bit of objectivity.
My experience, FWIW
In my LAN gaming group, we always take time to grab any demo we think might be interesting and show it off to the other members. Some in our group are more activist about demoing and sharing their results, while others (like me) tend to wait until there's some consensus in the group as to what looks like a good title to actually go out and buy. By the time I go out and buy something, then, I tend to be satisfied that not only will I play it, but I'll enjoy playing it with the rest of the group.
An earlier post on this topic made the point that there's not much said about the multiplayer aspects of games in moost reviews. I'd agree. If a game has a multiplayer capability, I'd like some description of it. I bought Call of Duty knowing that I'd enjoy the single player part, but also because I thought that the multiplayer game would have some kind of Co-op mode we could enjoy when our group meets... I was disappointed because I was led to believe that the AI was good enough to support a co-op mode. I ended up trying to get Red Orchestra to feed that fix.
As for Wil Wheaton, I confess to not liking his Wes Crusher character very much up until the last few episodes he appeared in. With the Traveller showing up, and the discovery that Wes had an incredible untapped potential wrt moving in spacetime, I thought that the character became a lot more interesting. I was hoping that he'd come back in a few episodes down the road, a la Q, but it never happened. I moved on and almost forgot about him until about a year ago, when ...
I was having dinner with an old friend of mine, and perhaps because he knew that I was a Trekkie/Whovian that attended the cons every year while in high school, he asked me what I thought about Wil Wheaton. I related exactly what I did in the previous paragraph. He agreed with my assessment and we both came to the conclusion that for the most part the Wes Crusher character seemed a bit of a suckup and a goody-two-shoes. So I asked if he knew what Wil Wheaton was doing since leaving the show, and he said that he'd been spending time reading at Wil's website, http://www.wilwheaton.net/. My buddy suggested that I give it a visit and see what I thought.
So I did, and I gotta say that whatever I've heard about him from others, or here at slashdot, he's actually a very funny and thought-provoking person to read. I suggest taking a spin through his FAQ. Thowing feces? I didn't read any of that. Sure he may have had a hard time as a young actor adjusting to the popularity of the show and the sometime dislike people had for his character, but who really ever handles fame like that with total poise and dignity ALL THE TIME. Very few people, I'd say.
Anyhow, I'd write more, but I suggest that you give the man the benefit of the doubt and check out his blog and other tidbits on the site before characterizing him. I think that's fair, don't you?
Kerry was one of NINE democratic contenders for the nomination. Six of those nine were totally unelectable by any standard, and were just in it to make the others squirm a bit. (Al Sharpton for president? Jeez. Now THAT's a joke!) It was a case where dems wanted to use the shotgun approach to pick the nominee (throw all nine at an issue and see who sticks). Not a bad tactic if you throw the same nine at every issue. You pick the guy that sticks the most.
The problem, and the reason for the poor dem pres showing this cycle, was the endless series of debates that caused the dem candidates to accentuate differences between them and shift their positions based on each other ... and with nine people competing, those positions were all over the map. To compete for the nomination, you had to take all sides of every issue. If you're a dem watching other dems argue the position points, you see the shifts in position as refinements of policy, but if you're unaffiliated or republican, you see these shifts as flipflops.
I think that the next dem pres candidate should be selected NOT in the endless circuit of a dozen public debates, but at the convention, where it's supposed to happen. The debates ruined the positions of the dem candidates for nomination.
That said, if you've committed a felony in your lifetime, you probably won't make it in the front door. However, if the most worrysome thing in your background is that you belong to a peacenik/treehugger/dolphin-kissing organization, you might get a little extra attention, but you won't be barred from entry. Odds are that you'd be allowed in as a muslim, too.
The easiest way to pave your way is to visit your local US consulate and find out what the restrictions are, if any exist for you at all. My educated guess is that there are none for you. No worries.
There is a siginificant slump in international tourism here, but it's not because of restrictions -- rather, it's because most people in the world simply don't want to travel here, given the state of geopolitics. There's also still the tail end of a domestic slump in tourism that springs from the recent recession.
From an economic perspective, the dollar will probably weaken somewhat over the next couple years, which may boost international tourism a bit. Everyone likes to have their money go farther when they travel abroad. Is this a reason to postpone travel to the states? Probably not.
Anecdotally, I travelled to Great Britain and Ireland about eight months after 9/11 and the level of paranoia and security angst was much higher then. When I came back into the country, I was subjected to bomb/explosive residue checks and baggage searches. The procedures were much less standardized than they are today, and the took much longer than they do today.
So, in short, don't think you can't travel here. There will be a few extra minutes of delay at customs, but the odds are slim-to-none that you'll see any additional inconvenience after that.
Would you say that only Harvard MBAs should start businesses? Would you say that only gay men should be allowed to tell people how to decorate or what to wear? Would you say that only dentists are allowed to tell kids to brush their teeth? It's an elitist concept that you're promulgating.
Maybe not everyone has your ability to stay informed on all the issues, and maybe they don't have well-reasoned and insightful opinions on all of them. Maybe they're too busy putting bread on the table and paying the bills. Maybe they prefer to watch a rerun of last week's WWF Smackdown over CSPAN coverage of the latest house vote. (I confess that I do prefer WWF Smackdown over almost all CSPAN coverage, myself.) Maybe they just don't care. Maybe they take cues on who they trust based on more emotional perceptions.
Once you accept the premise that democracy is best left to those who are competent to vote, you accept the notion that there are lesser people -- (the incompetent -- the great unwashed masses -- the halfwit tools of the elite) -- who just can't be trusted to pick the person or ballot initiative they like. Of course, once you marginalize a group, it's easy to restrict them from other things like jobs or health care services or educational opportunities or life itself. In Germany of the thirties, they executed these people first, years before they got around to the jews. I'm not suggesting you're a Nazi or anything, but I am pointing out that the slope is slippery and can lead to places that most people would prefer to avoid.
It's a hard thing to accept, I'll admit. A person who is voting for the guy with the best hairstyle has just as much of a vote as someone who's been doing weekly economic analyses and in-depth research on American sociopolitical issues and their effect on international relations. Seems a little unequal, to be sure. The upshot is that the people who vote on hairstyle preference are far far more unlikely to vote in elections at all. They're more likely to be excited about voting for the next American Idol.
If your worry is that the thoughtful, informed voters will be cancelled out by the tawdry whims of the great unwashed masses, be reassured by the knowledge that even thoughtful, informed voters can make bad choices, and have the additional comfort of knowing that the uninformed and uncaring can sometimes also have an innate understanding of people and issues without needing to examine the details.
You're pointing out an ideosynchrasy, admittedly. I do spend somewhere around 1000/yr on computer equipment, but I also have five systems to maintain. (2 linux and 2 xp and one solaris x86). So maybe the mouse comment was a red herring. I'll accept that.
Oddly enough, I've never had BIOS issues -- ever. I know it's comparatively rare for those of us that like to build-our-own, but it's been my experience.
Apple is always the packaged system buy, though. When you buy a Mac you don't have that many choices. I like the choices I get with the PC platform.
I've come very close to buying Apple systems on a couple occasions, but when it comes to gaming, I just don't feel like they offer the flexibility I want in terms of configuration choices.
Like I said, I'll start saving now for another reconsideration of an Apple next year, but as a gaming system, it's just not what I want just yet -- in terms of gaming software available and system configuration.
After 2000, I realized that the GOP would do anything to win, and I beleive that they've spent four years refining their tactics. Where democrats have been accused of voter registration irregularities, they're all about registering people multiple times, or registering fictitious names/characters that will never show up at the polls. Where republicans have been accused of voter registration irregularities, they're all about tearing up or invalidating democratic registrations. Even if you're registered thirty-five times (as one guy in my state is), you can only vote once. If you're not registered at all, you can't vote at all. You decide which of the two parties is doing something that will actually affect the outcome of the election. You may not believe it now, with all the hype that's going on, but I'm predicting many court cases next year that involve voter suppression/disenfranchisement on the part of the GOP and their buddy-boy network. That's all I have to say on that topic.
On a lighter note, I seem to recall as a kid that the "red" states were democratic states, and the "blue" states were republican-held. It seems like the colors have been reversed this year. Has anyone else made a similar observation?
I guess the point I'd offer is that there are many games in popular categories that do not fit well in the console paradigm: Real-Time Strategy and Role Playing Games are two at the top of my mind, but I would also go as far as saying that FPS is walking the knife-edge between the two.
Any game that has or uses a multiple-document interface (MDI) is not a good fit on a console, because consoles use a single-document interface for the most part. (I don't seem to recall any console games that use dialog boxes -- they seem to use screen hierarchies to get past the problem.) Could you put MDI-based games on a console, yeah, probably, but it would likely come off as awkward.
There's also the quality of the hardware in consoles. PCs have the advantage here, and that will never go away. Sure, you can hack your XBox, but at the end of the day the XBox is still an underpowered PC. The graphics quality of consoles make them a poor choice for anything requiring high resolution -- the standard TV just can't deliver the visual experience that an ordinary 19in CRT monitor can give.
I think the most telling indicator that PC games are not going away anytime soon is HALO. This is a game that was built for the console right from the start, and when I tried it on the PC it sucked. To my knowledge, game ports from PC to console go a lot better.
Anyhow, my two bits.
In the interest of fairness and disclosure, my first machine (used for school papers, etc.) was a CPM-based box, and the first machine on which I played games that I enjoyed was the Apple ][.
The reasons are:
When it comes down to it, to get past even a few of the items I've listed here, Apple would have to undergo a culture-shift. They'd have to be keen on not producing their own hardware. They'd also have to be keen on selling the OS seperately. Slashdotters love to gripe about how windows is so expensive and you end up having to buy the same OS many times over a decade. If Apple went to selll the OS seperately, they run the risk of becoming the same kind of company as MSoft -- with all the headaches and griping that comes with that territory. If you sell the OS seperately, you have to be ready to write drivers (or support that activity by others) for all of the devices that people want to have in their machines. This involves a lot more administrative and development overhead than most people (I mean game players) are aware of. Apple would also have to be prepared to run more Microsoft software on its platform than they want to. They appear to have been okay with the idea when it came to Microsoft's office suite, but there are a huge number of games that are developed under Microsoft-sponsored aegis. Assuming they're okay with the idea, will microsoft-sponsored game development firms be comfortable with having to wrestle with the overhead of the porting issues in the process of regular product development? I don't know the answer to this (the situation is, admittedly, hypothetical) but Microsoft may have the opinion that they don't want to spend money on development activity for platforms that don't benefit them directly.
It's a very interesting idea, but I think there will have to be a sea-change at Apple before it even stands the chance at becoming a reality. I'll start saving up for a Mac right now, just in case it happens.
There are tens of thousands of expatriot Americans (Americans who live/work abroad) who have the opportunity to vote in the election. We have absentee ballots for these folks, just as we do for American Armed Service personnel abroad.
These folks (and I can say this because I've been one of them, working at one time for a software shop in Germany) usually have the same ISP that everyone else in the country has. (Mine was Deutsche Telekom.) When they're at work, they're using the same internet services that everyone else at the office has. If you're an expat American and you're prevented from reaching out to the online election information sources that you might use to decide on your candidate choices, you don't have the campaign message that comes straight from the source... from the President's campaign. Instead, you have to rely on filtered sources like news organizations. (Prolly FOX, but other conservative rags will suffice to some degree.)
If I was an expat republican, I'd be a little concerned and would consider this as news. However I'd go a little further and submit that people in countries around the world are keenly interested in the choices that American voters are facing this year. They're also interested in knowing what the messages of the candidates are -- not because they have a vote to cast, but because they're looking for signs/information about how foreign and trade policies will be conducted, and to get a feel for what the domestic climate might be under one administration or another. On this level, I think it's also news.
Like it or not, people in all the other nations of the world look to the President as the primary representative of our country's policies. Sure, individual Americans are also representatives, but individual citizens don't have the leadership responsibilities that the President has. Consequently, any message that comes straight from the President or his party brain-trust is pretty valuable from an information standpoint.
Yeah, you could say that the effect isn't that great, and in totality I'd agree. I do believe, though, that people anywhere in the world ought to have the ability to learn about the Bush re-election campaign and get their information from the source.
Noooo! Not room 101! Nooooo!
Honestly, before I went to London, I thought that with all those cameras out there, it must a worse police state than we've got here in the states... my assumption was that if the cops saw something, they'd be on it in a heartbeat. It turned out that the cameras didn't prevent public drunkenness, muggings, junkies in the alleyways, burglaries, etc. Instead, they gave the cops some evidence to start with.
My point is that it's not that you're being "filmed", but that you cannot control who has access and authority to do something with the "film". Obviously, not everyone who'd be watching the feed would have bad intentions, but some would. The most awful thing would be to have a goody-two-shoes watching a feed looking for a way to report minor infractions or misdemeanors ... a snitch.
They'd alert the police as soon as they had irrefutable proof of the slow-glide-through-the-stop-sign, or the littered candy wrapper, or the jaywalk, or someone smoking a funny cigarette outside a nightclub or something. The number of calls going to your local police office would go through the roof, all for petty stuff that draws time and attention from very serious matters.
I trust the police more than I trust joe-shut-in-with-a-crime-crusade. It's very easy to give up privacy/anonymity and impossible to get it back when it's gone. Why not proceed with caution?
When I was in London a couple years ago, I knew that I was on-camera everywhere I went and I felt safer. Part of that was because I knew that policemen were watching. I think that if I knew that the people watching and analyzing my behavior were just people with an axe of one type or another to grind, or goody-two-shoes types that want to force their morals on everyone, I'd feel less safe rather than more safe.
Curiouser and curiouser, and doubleplusbad, methinks.
*sigh*
While I don't play console games, I know that the console mags are often unable or unprepared to give realistic reviews on the hyped new title. PC games mags go the same way. In one sense, you might expect it, because the game company is an advertiser in the magazine that is reviewing the game. The magazine's customer is the advertiser first and then the reader, and so the mag is often afraid to point out any shortcomings in games that are being advertised in the pages -- that stinks, imho.
I can't count the number of titles that I picked up after reading a review only to find that the review was FAR too generous with praise and FAR too short on critique.
I'd rather see more folks whining to the publications that sugar-coat their appraisals of games.
Who plays the lottery? The poorest people. Why? Because they want the money and have aspirations of wealth.
If a lottery were implemented to encourage voting, I'm all for it -- with a twist. The twist is to make it a voluntary progressive tax rather than a regressive one. How to do this? If you make less than 100K/yr, you get to enter for 20 cents. From 100K-200K you get to enter for a dollar. From 200K to 300K, you get to enter for twenty-five dollars. From 300K to 400K you get in for a thousand dollars. 400K to 500K, you get in for ten thousand dollars. From 500K to the roof you pay twenty-five thousand dollars per 500K of income. There you have it, a progressively taxing lottery for voting.
Who would vote under these conditions? The ones who could not afford to spend money on lobbyists or 10K-per-plate chicken-and-peas fundraising events. At the same time, the people who can afford the high-dollar issue and candidate contributions would stay away. Xanadu!
Okay, maybe not realistic, but definetly fun to think about.
I do know that turbines have become more efficient since the 50s and 60s. At the time of those experiments you refer to, the turbine was not used in a hybrid context -- the rotational power of the turbine was being directed to the wheels of the car through some clever transmission engineering of the type you see in turbine-powered helicopters. Idling (while admittedly inefficient) may be more within-scope today than it was then.
Regardless of how you approach the idle problem, it seems to me that the idea of the turbine-powered hybrid electric car is worthy of re-examination. That's all I meant to say.
Info?:
http://www.designnews.com/article/CA150458.html
http://longman.awl.com/englishpages/tech_talking_h ardware.htm
My feeling is that the Rosen Motors concept would do well for the consumer, but not so well for automobile producers and mechanics.
OK, maybe it was teensy bit offtopic. To return to the topic ...
I guess the really small size and relatively high output of electricity from these little jobbers in the article is appealing for some things DoD, but as the responses have alluded -- there's still exhaust. There's also the given that people are going to be walking around with little vials full of flammable materials. Do you think you'll be let on a plane with something like this? No way. OTOH, I can see something like the micro turbine having great use for powering portable televisions, sat phones, lighting systems, etc.
I guess I see the advantages of this technology being more outdoor-ready rather than applying to all portable devices.
Darn. I'm eatin' perch again.
Truth is that I saw no back-bulge, heard no delay. (or is that de Lay?). I saw the president at his best, extemporaneous, and being himself.
As I saw it, even at his best, the "Show me" crowd was unconvinced... proof that he's a comic salesman that depends on christian religeous shills and people that think that being pro-troops means being pro-war.
The faces of the crowd were indelibly warmer to Kerry and blank to Bush. For once, the president didn't have resounding cheers to his cute country one-liners. He folded after about 45 minutes because he knew that even though the audience could not respond by cheering, they could not respond by smiling, either, even when he put on his best domestic coat.
I feel sorry for the guy. He shoulda used the earpiece.
That said, what can anyone do about the rule-breaking? He's the president, and he can do whatever he wants, whether it beaks the rules or not. Nobody can touch him.
I'm not trying to flamebait by saying that. The examples abound. For instance:
So while the rule-breaking in the debates is wrong, I think that the broken constitutional rules are much more serious, and the president is clearly immune from any impeachment proceedings that could be raised in congress. He is free to break as many rules as he sees fit, unfortunately.
I don't much care for the situation, personally, but the wrongness of the suspected earpiece is but a minnow among the much larger rule-breaking fish I hope to see fried on this Friday.
The biggest evidence of this, as far as I saw it, was that he didn't mispronounce or mangle that many words. I was amazed. At first I chalked it up to coaching, but almost every one 4 and 5 syllable words he used were perfectly enunciated. Honestly, I don't fault the guy when he mispronounces stuff -- he knows what he wants to say and maybe he doesn't hit every word on the head, but I can tell where he's going with his points most of the time.
I'm a little dyslexic myself, but it was caught when I was really young. Every now and again, I'll read or write a word with transposed letters. (Ex. I'll read "tevelision" but will still understand it as "television") I practiced a lot as a kid to read, write, spell and speak carefully. It's tough enough as a kid, but at the president's age, you're pretty much locked into your condition.
I don't think getting earpiece help is a bad thing, particularly for speeches or at functions that require the delivery of a planned address. I do, however, see the debates as a way for the candidates to speak in a less scripted way -- a more extemporaneous approch to delivering the messages. I would rather see the president not use the earpiece for the debates and thereby let his natural way of speaking be a part of the show. Clearly, he's going in prepped to the hilt, and he knows where he stands on the issues even if his delivery is a little awkward. That awkwardness is actually the better part of his "folksy" charm, because he's so open about it.
I won't be voting for the president in November, but I don't hate him, either, and if he wants to use an earpiece to make himself appear more erudite, then that's fine by me. I truly believe that he's a good man and that he honestly wants what he believes is the best for the country. I like the man and his motives. I'm just not dazzled by his performance while in office.
Where I think the earpiece can go bad is when he's depending on it for everything -- when he ceases to be himself and becomes the moving mouthparts of some other person (Rove, his wife, whoever) with better language, cognitive and memory skills. I hope he avoids depending on it for his answers. In a townhall venue like this upcoming debate, it will be less easy to fall back on an earpiece, anyway.
I'll be watching for the long pauses before he starts talking, like last time, and if I see them, I'll be very disappointed in him, even more disppointed than I've been with the progress he's been able to make for the country.
The things that make a wiki a really rotten place for an FAQ are (there's probably more than four, actually):
I submit that a wiki can be a great vessel for documentation and discussion, but it requires a little care and feeding to keep the value of the content (FAQ or otherwise) as high as possible. The best way we found to handle questions was via the mailing list, but those of us who watched the list would frequently spot the topics that kept showing up and put them in the FAQ when we got tired of typing the same responses. By solidifying the answers in the FAQ, the variablity that comes with having many differently-worded answers to the same question is mitigated somewhat.
fwiw, my technique for starting the FAQ was to look back over six months of mailing list srchives and find questions that had come up a few times -- all about the same topic/problem, with perhaps a little allowance for variance. Once you have those messages collected, write the basic question that all of the messages are submitting. Once the question is in-hand, collect all the answers to it and smoosh them together, tossing out the parts that were specific to each users situation. This answer almost never makes sense at first smoosh, but once they're all together, you can edit it to answer the basic question and also supply the extra bits of knowledge that each respondent included in their individual answers.
my 2 bits
In any job I've had, anyone on a win workstation liked the microsoft apps for word processing, spreadsheets, email and corporate intranet stuff. To talk to and use remote UNIX boxes on the network, some flips and twists (like using ReflectionX or NTSFU) were necessary.
The generic quality of the MS Office app suite is universally recognized. With a little adjustment, wordperfect users can get used to using Word, for example. Some of the ways that each of those 2 products handled things like page layout and headers & footers are a little different, but usually people learn how to do what they need to do and don't stray (or explore, depending on how you look at it) into application functionalities that they don't need.
Word is Soooo feature rich that half the toolbars and palettes are turned off in the default installation. It's just too much for an all-new word user (are there still any of these, btw?) to take in, but that collection of tools makes the app extremely powerful. When you buy an office app suite for your enterprise, you want something that's going to cover all of your various groups of users, who will have needs that vary. OpenOffice is similarly powerful, but the preponderance of CIOs (particularly in large enterprises like AT&T) still have the justifiably skeptical view of free applications. "How could anything free be as good as what you pay for?", they wonder.
(I ran into this a couple weeks ago at my new job when I was deprived of ReflectionX for doing xterms to UNIX boxes on the network. I installed cygwin and when I had to ask a couple questions about host configuration, the greybeard head systems engr said, "No wonder you're having problems, that's free software. When you install that buggy crap, you're on your own." (a direct quote))
Most enterprise users are not really using the OS -- they're using the apps that ride on the OS. The greatest drawback I've encountered with the OpenOffice suite is that in order to work in a world that is dominated by MS office apps, you have to be able to read and write in MS document file formats. Parts of those formats have been reverse-engineered, but other parts are obscure binary mishmash that's apparently been designed to conceal what the MS app in question is doing with the data in the file. OpenOffice gets pretty close, but it can only go so far. As a CIO, I'd be inclined, in the best interest of my customers, employees and shareholders, to make the offfice app suite choice that doesn't just get me CLOSE, but actually gets me ALL THE WAY to interoperability with the rest of the MS dominated office application world.
A very old friend of mine was a PC guy (for all his general purpose computing needs) for 15 years and then, when MS finally ported the whole office suite over to the mac, he switched to the mac. Why? It was because he liked OSX for the kernel (which he used) and the interface and the stability, but he needed the apps that linked him to the rest of the MS world.
So, I think the talk of "We're considering Linux for our 70,000 desktops..." may not be solely about getting cheaper prices, but also to encourage Redmond to consider porting MS office to Linux. Truthfully, if there was such a port, I would definetly consider buying it. I won't pay for the OS, but the apps do have value, even if OpenOffice proves that the price of the apps is inflated.