Artificial intelligence! Sounds mighty impressive. So this search algorithm can pass a Turing test, huh? What a breakthrough!
Sounds like data mining to me. The concept is not new, and the incorrect use of buzzwords is a serious red flag. Perhaps the system is indeed powerful and maybe even innovative, but AI? No. If this thing gains sentience and annihilates mankind, I will apologize to it for saying that.
I would be more concerned about my home town (well, home area, it's really several towns) if other parts of the US seemed to be prospering. But the way I see it, we're still doing as well as any, and better than most. We are still home to companies that get a lot of good press and make a lot of money. Yes, it costs a lot to live here, because this is still a great place to live.
The better question, to me, is whether or not the US in general is in long-term decline. I think the jury is still out on that one. There's certainly cause for concern. But how many of the products we use every day were invented in China? Fireworks and spaghetti? The simple fact is that top talent still seems to be dying to get out of China (or India, or Eastern Europe, or wherever) and come here.
People have been writing this type of story for decades now. They've all been wrong so far. That doesn't mean that they'll always be wrong. But I'm going to go ahead and stick it out here, and watch stories on the news about blizzards that happen to other people. All good things do come to an end, but I think we've got at least one more good boom left in us.
>>Wouldn't you really just need to have two accounts
Yeah, that's one way to go. But it's a hassle to be signed into two at once. Not a huge hassle, but using two browsers at once is just beyond the average dipshit user.
Companies need to tread very carefully when they make big changes. One thing I used to enjoy about Yahoo previously was the aliases. You signed into your account with one main ID, but you could have sub accounts that looked to others just like a separate account. So it was easy to be "JohnRSmith" to one group and "hung4fun" to another. They did away with that, and the outcry resulted page after page of angry comments on the developer's blog.
And then to add insult to insult, they made a second huge error at the same time, in a belated effort to be more facebookey. They blanked out everyone's profile, in an effort to force them to migrate to the new facebook-ish profiles. And now a year later, the vast majority of Yahoo users have blank profiles. They simply didn't use Yahoo in the same way they used Facebook, and they didn't want to.
I think it all came about as a result of Yahoo realizing that their core constituents were aging, and that the kids had moved on to something new. The right way to respond to that was to buy MySpace in about 2001, but Yahoo is too slow and dumb to do things like that. I was working at Yahoo in 2001 when a co-worker said "dude, you gotta check out this MySpace thingy. It's full of hot young babes and it's free". Within a month, all the Yahoo employees had a MySpace account. When all of your employees are using some other website, that's maybe a clue that you need to take action. But companies get big, then they get slow, and then they get dumb. Then they (usually) die. It's the circle of life, I suppose.
I think this is an excellent point. You don't need an MBA to understand that the digital version costs less to produce than the physical version, whether we're talking about books, newspapers, audio, or video. If the digital version isn't less than half the cost of the physical one, most people will see it as a rip-off.
Five dollars a week to read a website seems insane to me. I'd have gone with a model that still gave away plenty of free content, but charged a modest fee (30 bucks a year or so) to read "premium" content. The free stuff is what you can get anywhere, and tends to be brief and superficial. The in depth coverage, the actual reporting, is what costs you most to provide, and is what people should be most willing to pay a bit for. I seems like that model has worked well enough for espn.com over the years.
The model ought to work even better if you're Rupert Murdoch or a similar bastard, and you run about a million media outlets. He could have offered premium access to all Murdoch sites for 5.95 a month, while still providing enough free content to keep the (legions of) broke people showing up. That might actually have found a few takers.
Your post reminds me of this Seanbaby quote:
[quote]You're only allowed to bring three ounces of liquid on a plane. Kind of. You might have a four-ounce bottle of toothpaste that's almost empty, but airport security guards are so stupid they're not allowed to do that kind of math. This is a problem, but I have an idea. Since we don't have enough money to hire dentists to inspect everyone's toothpaste, we should put a chimpanzee at each checkpoint. Then, every passenger gets to select two items from their bags to carry into battle against the chimp. This will not only quickly identify each commuter's two best weapons, but if they choose toothpaste, hold on, there's something up with this guy's toothpaste.[/quote]
It's all so ridiculous...
All of this is designed, essentially, to prevent "another 9/11". But another 9/11 was already impossible on 9/11/01, as proven by the fact that the fourth plane did not hit its target. Once ordinary people realized what was going on, they were essentially willing to die rather than allow another plane to get used as a missile. It takes a clever idea to succeed in terror, and those clever ideas tend to only work once.
Most terrorists are pretty stupid. But in the rare cases when they are clever, we're going to be too busy inspecting the shoes of elderly travelers to notice that something is up.
They do though. By blocking the ads, they speed up the page load time, which helps you to get through all 17 pages (to read a 200 word article) in a shorter time. Plus, the lack of distracting flashing objects also reduces the total time required to read the article.
You didn't sound that way to me. I appreciated your honesty, and I congratulate you on finding something that works for you. I'm in a pretty similar boat - I'm 38 and just starting to feel like I really need to change my diet. Your story was inspirational to me, so thanks.
Did you read TFA? It's intent is clearly to be humorous, not analytical. Perhaps posting it here was inappropriate, but the article itself is harmless, and certainly not trying to masquerade as journalism.
Your post is another worthless piece of what passes for a 5 point "informative" comment these days.
>> I think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like.
Ah.... kids these days, with their myfaces and their spacebooks!
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do think it's a bit odd that your anecdote tends to disprove your assertion. You didn't require any special training to know that the high end stereo sounded good. So shouldn't today's kids be similarly able to discern quality?
I think that a good number of people really do have a poor innate ability to discern more accurate sound reproduction. Another group has that ability, if they develop it, and a third type can tell the difference without any previous exposure.
The article does not explicitly state how many hours were spent, so I suppose we're both making assumptions. It's possible that they really did spend an inordinate amount of time on it. But I just didn't get that sense from the article. Yes, months passed without resolution, but the sense I got was that Collins and wife had done little more than make a few phone calls. It just didn't seem like a huge deal to me.
>>All I was suggesting was that the guy is wasting too much of his life complaining about (1) something that he can't change and (2) something that probably isn't worth the trouble of bothering with anyway.
But he can change it. That's why I found your post so puzzling. Yeah, it's going to end up taking months for it to happen, but now that he's gotten some press on it, I expect that the issue will land on the desk of someone who can fix it.
>>You do seem to be taking this very personally.
No, like I said, I'm curious about what motivated you to post what you did, but it seems like you've got no insight for me there. I have nothing against you.
i said that because that's what he said in TFA. But I guess you didn't bother reading that, did you?
I did read TFA. So you've made another incorrect assumption, in the form of a snotty accusation. Once again - animosity. Did you mommy just not hug you enough, or what?
TFA said nothing to indicate that he spent a significant portion of his time on this over the months the dispute lasted, which is what "spending months" means. If I spend 15 minutes a day brushing my teeth over the last 30 years, did I just spend 30 years brushing my teeth? Obviously not. So why exaggerate things? Why distort the facts? What axe are you grinding here? It's clear that this story set off some feelings of rage or inadequacy in you, and I'm just curious to know more about that. I find your impotent flailing to be fascinating. Why do you do what you do, Mr. Troll?
What makes you think that he didn't do all of the things you said? Even if he had his music up on a dozen sites, it still makes sense for him to want access to MySpace's rather large audience.
And saying that he was "spending months" on this is equally silly. His wife made a few phone calls. I think they probably took a few minutes out of their battle against MySpace to go to the bathroom and tend to other business.
And characterizing him as "wining"... why? I just don't get it. Why the animosity? I really have no idea what motivates a person to make a senseless and mean-spirited post like yours.
Speaking of Orwellian, you're a fascist. No one is rioting. That's a lie that you just made up. I've read several accounts of what has been going on, and I find nothing about damage or what I would call a "riot". What the protesters are accused of is "unlawful assembly", but I've also found nothing about what makes the gathering unlawful. So that makes you a fascist who hates our constitution and our freedoms, in my book.
It doesn't matter what they think they are accomplishing. They have a first amendment right to protest, and shooting them with pain cannons seems to fly in the face of that right. If someone breaks a window, obviously that person should be arrested, but you can't arrest people for crimes that you think they might be about to commit when there is no evidence that any crime is imminent. And you can't take away the first amendment rights of most of the crowd just because it might contain a few trouble-makers.
As to what they might be trying to accomplish, you don't seem to have thought about it too hard. It doesn't take much research to learn that the nature of the G20 organization is undemocratic. How does a country get represented in these talks? It's by invitation only. Poor countries are not welcome at these talks. Neither are poor people.
This meeting is simply the rich people who run the world getting together outside of the formal bounds of government to decide how the world will be run in order to protect their interests. The world's poor people will not be represented.
I think that might have something to do with why people are protesting. So what do you suppose that you were accomplishing with your slanderous tales of "riots" and "punks"? Besides being a fascist, I mean.
"It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too."
My grandmother was a grandmother, you insensitive clod! Why shouldn't she understand too? Just because she began life as a humble nerf-herder does not mean that people don't want her money, and she spends a lot on qvc.com, if she can figure out how to get to it. There's a lot more grandmas in the world than/. readers.
What it really comes down to is this: if this is truly a more "intuitive" UI, then it will be used all over. If not, it will die out. It seems a bit early to tell for certain, although I'm sure a bunch of MS useability folks disagree.
I trust that the good people of the mozilla foundation will include a way to switch to the "classic" UI for those of us who hate change.
>>When has Google sued or threatened to sue anyone over patent violations?
They haven't... yet. But Google hasn't been around long, either. Most 10 year olds have never driven a car. Doesn't mean they won't ever do so.
The road to evil has many steps. Each of them seems unfortunate, but necessary and minor. And then one day you look up and you are smack dab in the middle of Eviltown, USA.
First off, I think you meant to say that my point was moot, not mute. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just pointing that out so that some future jerkwad doesn't take you to task over it.
As to the funding issue, there's a huge difference between congress voting to start a war, and congress voting to fund a war. Once the war has begun, if congress votes not to fund it, then the opposition says that they are abandoning our troops, leaving them to die without adequate supplies. Nearly any politician will vote to continue funding so as not to look unpatriotic. But if the was has not yet started, then voting against it makes that same politician look like a champion of peace.
As to the timing of the vote to authorize military action in Iraq, please note that I said "essentially after the fact". I think that this is valid, because Bush moved thousands of troops to places like Kuwait and Qatar at least 2 months before congress voted, making it clear that he was going in no matter what congress said. Also, there were CIA special forces teams inside Iraq as early as July 02. So in many ways, the war had started, although the full scale invasion had not yet begun.
I would argue that the constitution didn't fail so much as it was simply ignored. The constitution says that only congress can declare war. Everyone seems to be pretty much in agreement on the fact that our military adventures in Iraq are a war. Yet congress did not declare it. Congress "authorized" it, essentially after the fact.
The intent of the founding fathers is pretty clear - no one man has the power to start a war. And yet for the last 50 years or so, this part of the constitution has been flagrantly ignored. Can you imagine if Bush had been required to get congress to pass a declaration of war? It's possible that we would not have attacked Iraq at all.
My point in saying all this is that I do believe that Bush and his administration deserve sole blame for the Iraq war. Whatever figure you choose to believe as to the cost of the war, it was certainly expensive. What with the near collapse of our economy, and other issues like global warming, we'd be a lot better off if we were somewhere close to a trillion less in the hole financially. If we had spent some or all of that money developing new greener energy technologies, things would look a lot better right now. But we spent it on a big murderous camping trip in the desert.
You raise some interesting points here, my anonymous cowardly friend, and your logic is sound enough. But I think you are wrong.
I'm speaking as one of those introverted, video-game-playing depressed people. I identify very much with your comments. But, I don't think you've linked introversion and depression closely enough. The way you word things, it sounds like introverts and extroverts are equally likely to get depressed. I just don't think that's the case. I have no science or numbers to back that up, but since your assertions are anecdotal as well, I guess I'm on firm enough ground.
I'm not saying that extroverts don't get sad. They do. But they are so involved in the lives of others that they have far less time to sit and ponder how fucked up life is. And it's not all vapid nightclubbers who are extroverts. Extroverts could be at a church group, smoking crack with their crackhead buddies, or maybe just getting crazy with their LARP friends. The point is that they are not so self-centered. They don't sit in their batcave brooding for 4 or 5 hours a night. They are emotionally involved with and invested in the lives of at least a few other people.
When you do that, you realize that your problems are not the center of the world. When you have a large circle of friends, you have perspective. There's always some triumph or tragedy going on. The cyclical nature of the univers is far more readily apparent. And because you give a shit about these people, it all [i]matters[/i]. Life does not seem to meaningless... existential crisis averted.,
In short, AC, no one cares about you. You are a spoiled rich kid. Care about something other than yourself.
Yeah, in this case, it's a lot better. Cigarette smoke is filled with carcinogens... a regular rogues gallery toxic chemicals. And not all of them are put there by man. I'm sure plenty of folks would want the benefits without the harm.
It's not like you'd have the option of just smoking your drug the old fashioned way removed. But please, don't do it anywhere near me. Tobacco smells gross and lingers in my clothes forever. Unless you're a hot chick. Then, suddenly, it's not nearly so offensive...
To me, the thing that will hamper the 360 in the long term is the fact that they use DVDs to deliver the games. This limits the amount of content. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offered a much larger world and a much greater variety of tasks than GTA: IV. The graphical elements of IV take up so much more room on the disk that the world has to be smaller. I appreciated the greater realism in the graphics and the engine in general, but found that I really missed fun elements like the bicycle, jetpack, and parachute.
I don't see how you can call anything "next generation" that uses a media format developed in 1993. While use of the DVD format kept costs down and helped Microsoft to win the first round or two, I can't help but wonder if PS3 will really take off as the price of BluRay players drops.
No offense, but if you haven't used it, how can you be sure what's it's full of? This is the first I've heard of this stuff, so I am asking out of true ignorance, not to be snarky.
There are other ways to screw content creators out of their "points". When Fox sold the syndication rights to The X Files, they sold them to themselves (F/X network)... for cheap. That meant that there wasn't nearly as much profit to share with David Duchovney and others who had a share coming to them. Series creator Chris Carter sued Fox, which is one of the reasons the second X Files movie took so long to get started.
The thing is, this suit is not being initiated by the creator of the original content... this is his descendants wanting money for work that their ancestor did in 1937. I'm all for providing incentive for people to create original works, but this is ridiculous. No one deserves unearned income for work that grampa did 75 years ago. The copyright clause of the US constitution says that copyrights should be for a "limited time". I think that 75 years is functionally an unlimited time, given that it is very close to the average life expectancy for a person. Wouldn't 25 years or even 50 have been plenty? Would anyone suggest that if copyrights were only for 50 years, Tolkein would never have written his books? Preposterous!
No, this is nothing to get excited about. It's not even newsworthy. Dozens of other potential vaccines have made a splash in the media, but ultimately proved ineffective. I really do hope that this is the one, but... call me when it WORKS.
So let me get this straight... your message to a "pack of queers" is "fuck you". Interesting choice of words. Something tells me that you spend a lot of time in airport bathrooms, tap tap tappin' away...
The thing is, I totally agree with your point. The fashion industry has promoted an unhealthy ideal for decades. So why did you have to ruin your post with the homophobia? I'm not doubting that there are tons of gays in fashion, I'm just saying that it's a huge homophobic leap to go from that to "teh homogays made wimmen hate themselves".
The guy who discovered Twiggy, the stick-figure prototype of the modern model, was hetero enough to have two kids with her. I know that doesn't prove anything, but still... are you sure that you're not full of shit?
I think you're dying to wear your Peter Pan costume to work tomorrow. And you know what? I hope one day you do give yourself permission to be who you really are. I'll support you in that!
Slashdot Mirror
Artificial intelligence! Sounds mighty impressive. So this search algorithm can pass a Turing test, huh? What a breakthrough!
Sounds like data mining to me. The concept is not new, and the incorrect use of buzzwords is a serious red flag. Perhaps the system is indeed powerful and maybe even innovative, but AI? No. If this thing gains sentience and annihilates mankind, I will apologize to it for saying that.
I would be more concerned about my home town (well, home area, it's really several towns) if other parts of the US seemed to be prospering. But the way I see it, we're still doing as well as any, and better than most. We are still home to companies that get a lot of good press and make a lot of money. Yes, it costs a lot to live here, because this is still a great place to live.
The better question, to me, is whether or not the US in general is in long-term decline. I think the jury is still out on that one. There's certainly cause for concern. But how many of the products we use every day were invented in China? Fireworks and spaghetti? The simple fact is that top talent still seems to be dying to get out of China (or India, or Eastern Europe, or wherever) and come here.
People have been writing this type of story for decades now. They've all been wrong so far. That doesn't mean that they'll always be wrong. But I'm going to go ahead and stick it out here, and watch stories on the news about blizzards that happen to other people. All good things do come to an end, but I think we've got at least one more good boom left in us.
>>Wouldn't you really just need to have two accounts
Yeah, that's one way to go. But it's a hassle to be signed into two at once. Not a huge hassle, but using two browsers at once is just beyond the average dipshit user.
Companies need to tread very carefully when they make big changes. One thing I used to enjoy about Yahoo previously was the aliases. You signed into your account with one main ID, but you could have sub accounts that looked to others just like a separate account. So it was easy to be "JohnRSmith" to one group and "hung4fun" to another. They did away with that, and the outcry resulted page after page of angry comments on the developer's blog.
And then to add insult to insult, they made a second huge error at the same time, in a belated effort to be more facebookey. They blanked out everyone's profile, in an effort to force them to migrate to the new facebook-ish profiles. And now a year later, the vast majority of Yahoo users have blank profiles. They simply didn't use Yahoo in the same way they used Facebook, and they didn't want to.
I think it all came about as a result of Yahoo realizing that their core constituents were aging, and that the kids had moved on to something new. The right way to respond to that was to buy MySpace in about 2001, but Yahoo is too slow and dumb to do things like that. I was working at Yahoo in 2001 when a co-worker said "dude, you gotta check out this MySpace thingy. It's full of hot young babes and it's free". Within a month, all the Yahoo employees had a MySpace account. When all of your employees are using some other website, that's maybe a clue that you need to take action. But companies get big, then they get slow, and then they get dumb. Then they (usually) die. It's the circle of life, I suppose.
Timothy McVeigh was no Muslim, you bigot.
I think this is an excellent point. You don't need an MBA to understand that the digital version costs less to produce than the physical version, whether we're talking about books, newspapers, audio, or video. If the digital version isn't less than half the cost of the physical one, most people will see it as a rip-off.
Five dollars a week to read a website seems insane to me. I'd have gone with a model that still gave away plenty of free content, but charged a modest fee (30 bucks a year or so) to read "premium" content. The free stuff is what you can get anywhere, and tends to be brief and superficial. The in depth coverage, the actual reporting, is what costs you most to provide, and is what people should be most willing to pay a bit for. I seems like that model has worked well enough for espn.com over the years.
The model ought to work even better if you're Rupert Murdoch or a similar bastard, and you run about a million media outlets. He could have offered premium access to all Murdoch sites for 5.95 a month, while still providing enough free content to keep the (legions of) broke people showing up. That might actually have found a few takers.
Your post reminds me of this Seanbaby quote: [quote]You're only allowed to bring three ounces of liquid on a plane. Kind of. You might have a four-ounce bottle of toothpaste that's almost empty, but airport security guards are so stupid they're not allowed to do that kind of math. This is a problem, but I have an idea. Since we don't have enough money to hire dentists to inspect everyone's toothpaste, we should put a chimpanzee at each checkpoint. Then, every passenger gets to select two items from their bags to carry into battle against the chimp. This will not only quickly identify each commuter's two best weapons, but if they choose toothpaste, hold on, there's something up with this guy's toothpaste.[/quote] It's all so ridiculous... All of this is designed, essentially, to prevent "another 9/11". But another 9/11 was already impossible on 9/11/01, as proven by the fact that the fourth plane did not hit its target. Once ordinary people realized what was going on, they were essentially willing to die rather than allow another plane to get used as a missile. It takes a clever idea to succeed in terror, and those clever ideas tend to only work once.
Most terrorists are pretty stupid. But in the rare cases when they are clever, we're going to be too busy inspecting the shoes of elderly travelers to notice that something is up.
>>ad blocker can't do anything about those
They do though. By blocking the ads, they speed up the page load time, which helps you to get through all 17 pages (to read a 200 word article) in a shorter time. Plus, the lack of distracting flashing objects also reduces the total time required to read the article.
>>Please don't think I'm being egotistical
You didn't sound that way to me. I appreciated your honesty, and I congratulate you on finding something that works for you. I'm in a pretty similar boat - I'm 38 and just starting to feel like I really need to change my diet. Your story was inspirational to me, so thanks.
Did you read TFA? It's intent is clearly to be humorous, not analytical. Perhaps posting it here was inappropriate, but the article itself is harmless, and certainly not trying to masquerade as journalism.
Your post is another worthless piece of what passes for a 5 point "informative" comment these days.
>> I think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like.
Ah.... kids these days, with their myfaces and their spacebooks!
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do think it's a bit odd that your anecdote tends to disprove your assertion. You didn't require any special training to know that the high end stereo sounded good. So shouldn't today's kids be similarly able to discern quality?
I think that a good number of people really do have a poor innate ability to discern more accurate sound reproduction. Another group has that ability, if they develop it, and a third type can tell the difference without any previous exposure.
>>Either that says what it says or it doesn't.
The article does not explicitly state how many hours were spent, so I suppose we're both making assumptions. It's possible that they really did spend an inordinate amount of time on it. But I just didn't get that sense from the article. Yes, months passed without resolution, but the sense I got was that Collins and wife had done little more than make a few phone calls. It just didn't seem like a huge deal to me. >>All I was suggesting was that the guy is wasting too much of his life complaining about (1) something that he can't change and (2) something that probably isn't worth the trouble of bothering with anyway. But he can change it. That's why I found your post so puzzling. Yeah, it's going to end up taking months for it to happen, but now that he's gotten some press on it, I expect that the issue will land on the desk of someone who can fix it. >>You do seem to be taking this very personally. No, like I said, I'm curious about what motivated you to post what you did, but it seems like you've got no insight for me there. I have nothing against you.
i said that because that's what he said in TFA. But I guess you didn't bother reading that, did you?
I did read TFA. So you've made another incorrect assumption, in the form of a snotty accusation. Once again - animosity. Did you mommy just not hug you enough, or what?
TFA said nothing to indicate that he spent a significant portion of his time on this over the months the dispute lasted, which is what "spending months" means. If I spend 15 minutes a day brushing my teeth over the last 30 years, did I just spend 30 years brushing my teeth? Obviously not. So why exaggerate things? Why distort the facts? What axe are you grinding here? It's clear that this story set off some feelings of rage or inadequacy in you, and I'm just curious to know more about that. I find your impotent flailing to be fascinating. Why do you do what you do, Mr. Troll?
What makes you think that he didn't do all of the things you said? Even if he had his music up on a dozen sites, it still makes sense for him to want access to MySpace's rather large audience.
And saying that he was "spending months" on this is equally silly. His wife made a few phone calls. I think they probably took a few minutes out of their battle against MySpace to go to the bathroom and tend to other business.
And characterizing him as "wining"... why? I just don't get it. Why the animosity? I really have no idea what motivates a person to make a senseless and mean-spirited post like yours.
Speaking of Orwellian, you're a fascist. No one is rioting. That's a lie that you just made up. I've read several accounts of what has been going on, and I find nothing about damage or what I would call a "riot". What the protesters are accused of is "unlawful assembly", but I've also found nothing about what makes the gathering unlawful. So that makes you a fascist who hates our constitution and our freedoms, in my book.
It doesn't matter what they think they are accomplishing. They have a first amendment right to protest, and shooting them with pain cannons seems to fly in the face of that right. If someone breaks a window, obviously that person should be arrested, but you can't arrest people for crimes that you think they might be about to commit when there is no evidence that any crime is imminent. And you can't take away the first amendment rights of most of the crowd just because it might contain a few trouble-makers.
As to what they might be trying to accomplish, you don't seem to have thought about it too hard. It doesn't take much research to learn that the nature of the G20 organization is undemocratic. How does a country get represented in these talks? It's by invitation only. Poor countries are not welcome at these talks. Neither are poor people.
This meeting is simply the rich people who run the world getting together outside of the formal bounds of government to decide how the world will be run in order to protect their interests. The world's poor people will not be represented.
I think that might have something to do with why people are protesting. So what do you suppose that you were accomplishing with your slanderous tales of "riots" and "punks"? Besides being a fascist, I mean.
"It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too."
/. readers.
My grandmother was a grandmother, you insensitive clod! Why shouldn't she understand too? Just because she began life as a humble nerf-herder does not mean that people don't want her money, and she spends a lot on qvc.com, if she can figure out how to get to it. There's a lot more grandmas in the world than
What it really comes down to is this: if this is truly a more "intuitive" UI, then it will be used all over. If not, it will die out. It seems a bit early to tell for certain, although I'm sure a bunch of MS useability folks disagree.
I trust that the good people of the mozilla foundation will include a way to switch to the "classic" UI for those of us who hate change.
>>When has Google sued or threatened to sue anyone over patent violations?
;)
They haven't... yet. But Google hasn't been around long, either. Most 10 year olds have never driven a car. Doesn't mean they won't ever do so.
The road to evil has many steps. Each of them seems unfortunate, but necessary and minor. And then one day you look up and you are smack dab in the middle of Eviltown, USA.
Have you learned nothing from the Star Wars PT?
First off, I think you meant to say that my point was moot, not mute. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just pointing that out so that some future jerkwad doesn't take you to task over it.
As to the funding issue, there's a huge difference between congress voting to start a war, and congress voting to fund a war. Once the war has begun, if congress votes not to fund it, then the opposition says that they are abandoning our troops, leaving them to die without adequate supplies. Nearly any politician will vote to continue funding so as not to look unpatriotic. But if the was has not yet started, then voting against it makes that same politician look like a champion of peace.
As to the timing of the vote to authorize military action in Iraq, please note that I said "essentially after the fact". I think that this is valid, because Bush moved thousands of troops to places like Kuwait and Qatar at least 2 months before congress voted, making it clear that he was going in no matter what congress said. Also, there were CIA special forces teams inside Iraq as early as July 02. So in many ways, the war had started, although the full scale invasion had not yet begun.
I would argue that the constitution didn't fail so much as it was simply ignored. The constitution says that only congress can declare war. Everyone seems to be pretty much in agreement on the fact that our military adventures in Iraq are a war. Yet congress did not declare it. Congress "authorized" it, essentially after the fact.
The intent of the founding fathers is pretty clear - no one man has the power to start a war. And yet for the last 50 years or so, this part of the constitution has been flagrantly ignored. Can you imagine if Bush had been required to get congress to pass a declaration of war? It's possible that we would not have attacked Iraq at all.
My point in saying all this is that I do believe that Bush and his administration deserve sole blame for the Iraq war. Whatever figure you choose to believe as to the cost of the war, it was certainly expensive. What with the near collapse of our economy, and other issues like global warming, we'd be a lot better off if we were somewhere close to a trillion less in the hole financially. If we had spent some or all of that money developing new greener energy technologies, things would look a lot better right now. But we spent it on a big murderous camping trip in the desert.
You raise some interesting points here, my anonymous cowardly friend, and your logic is sound enough. But I think you are wrong.
I'm speaking as one of those introverted, video-game-playing depressed people. I identify very much with your comments. But, I don't think you've linked introversion and depression closely enough. The way you word things, it sounds like introverts and extroverts are equally likely to get depressed. I just don't think that's the case. I have no science or numbers to back that up, but since your assertions are anecdotal as well, I guess I'm on firm enough ground.
I'm not saying that extroverts don't get sad. They do. But they are so involved in the lives of others that they have far less time to sit and ponder how fucked up life is. And it's not all vapid nightclubbers who are extroverts. Extroverts could be at a church group, smoking crack with their crackhead buddies, or maybe just getting crazy with their LARP friends. The point is that they are not so self-centered. They don't sit in their batcave brooding for 4 or 5 hours a night. They are emotionally involved with and invested in the lives of at least a few other people.
When you do that, you realize that your problems are not the center of the world. When you have a large circle of friends, you have perspective. There's always some triumph or tragedy going on. The cyclical nature of the univers is far more readily apparent. And because you give a shit about these people, it all [i]matters[/i]. Life does not seem to meaningless... existential crisis averted.,
In short, AC, no one cares about you. You are a spoiled rich kid. Care about something other than yourself.
Yeah, in this case, it's a lot better. Cigarette smoke is filled with carcinogens... a regular rogues gallery toxic chemicals. And not all of them are put there by man. I'm sure plenty of folks would want the benefits without the harm.
It's not like you'd have the option of just smoking your drug the old fashioned way removed. But please, don't do it anywhere near me. Tobacco smells gross and lingers in my clothes forever. Unless you're a hot chick. Then, suddenly, it's not nearly so offensive...
To me, the thing that will hamper the 360 in the long term is the fact that they use DVDs to deliver the games. This limits the amount of content. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offered a much larger world and a much greater variety of tasks than GTA: IV. The graphical elements of IV take up so much more room on the disk that the world has to be smaller. I appreciated the greater realism in the graphics and the engine in general, but found that I really missed fun elements like the bicycle, jetpack, and parachute.
I don't see how you can call anything "next generation" that uses a media format developed in 1993. While use of the DVD format kept costs down and helped Microsoft to win the first round or two, I can't help but wonder if PS3 will really take off as the price of BluRay players drops.
No offense, but if you haven't used it, how can you be sure what's it's full of? This is the first I've heard of this stuff, so I am asking out of true ignorance, not to be snarky.
There are other ways to screw content creators out of their "points". When Fox sold the syndication rights to The X Files, they sold them to themselves (F/X network)... for cheap. That meant that there wasn't nearly as much profit to share with David Duchovney and others who had a share coming to them. Series creator Chris Carter sued Fox, which is one of the reasons the second X Files movie took so long to get started.
The thing is, this suit is not being initiated by the creator of the original content... this is his descendants wanting money for work that their ancestor did in 1937. I'm all for providing incentive for people to create original works, but this is ridiculous. No one deserves unearned income for work that grampa did 75 years ago. The copyright clause of the US constitution says that copyrights should be for a "limited time". I think that 75 years is functionally an unlimited time, given that it is very close to the average life expectancy for a person. Wouldn't 25 years or even 50 have been plenty? Would anyone suggest that if copyrights were only for 50 years, Tolkein would never have written his books? Preposterous!
No, this is nothing to get excited about. It's not even newsworthy. Dozens of other potential vaccines have made a splash in the media, but ultimately proved ineffective. I really do hope that this is the one, but... call me when it WORKS.
So let me get this straight... your message to a "pack of queers" is "fuck you". Interesting choice of words. Something tells me that you spend a lot of time in airport bathrooms, tap tap tappin' away...
The thing is, I totally agree with your point. The fashion industry has promoted an unhealthy ideal for decades. So why did you have to ruin your post with the homophobia? I'm not doubting that there are tons of gays in fashion, I'm just saying that it's a huge homophobic leap to go from that to "teh homogays made wimmen hate themselves".
The guy who discovered Twiggy, the stick-figure prototype of the modern model, was hetero enough to have two kids with her. I know that doesn't prove anything, but still... are you sure that you're not full of shit?
I think you're dying to wear your Peter Pan costume to work tomorrow. And you know what? I hope one day you do give yourself permission to be who you really are. I'll support you in that!