I'm not sure about that: this Alabama test doesn't seem difficult, although you are right about the prejudiced way it was enforced (usually under a literal "grandfather clause", if your grandfather was a qualified voter, so you were you.)
Of course, if you are under, say, 25 years old, the idea of actually buying a CD will be anathema to you as you'll have to wait for it to arrive by mail and you'd rather slit your emo wrists than do anything that doesn't lead to instant gratification.
And if you're over, say, 30 years old, the idea of downloading music seems like scary voodoo as music is supposed to be a plastic disc instead of data, and you'd rather yell at kids to get off your lawn than do anything to save natural resources.
Maybe you're more famous than me. All I could expect from approaching them is several awkward hours of standing out at the front gate buzzing the intercom and saying, "I have a wonderful idea for a partnership, will you please let me in and let me make an appointment with a high ranking executive?"
This might surprise you, since you never set foot outside your mother's basement and only speak to her when she brings you dinner or clean laundry, but some people enjoy interacting with others, and some people enjoy sharing their knowledge.
For that matter, witness how much they fsck'd up battlestar gallactica.
The new series may have flaws, but anyone who thinks the original was better immediately proves they have no taste. Any series whose pilot episode follows the genocide of the human race (which happens for no reason) with a journey to the casino planet, and follows that up with a dozen episodes about disco Egyptians fighting robots in space, is a dumb series. It might be cheesy fun, but it doesn't hold a candle to the new series.
Child pornography is defined as sexualized pictures of anyone below the age of 18.
Even more stupidly, the age of consent in some states is 16. So if I have a 16 year old girlfriend (I don't), I can see her naked body, I can have sex with her, but as soon as I take and keep pictures, I'm a sex offender? If I take pictures and give them to her, I'm not only a child pornographer, but I am distributing pornography to a minor. I'm a felon! That does not make sense.
I don't actually disagree with you, it's just that this is nothing like "illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours" because "illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours" involves taking known quantified facts and reducing them by mathematical proportion to more understandable amounts, whereas the doomsday clock is, as you point out, a "metaphore" (sic).
The root problems behind the Spindler-era failures did rest with Sculley. Sculley was the one who initiated the change to PPC, expanded the product line beyond all reason (the Performa started under the Sculley era as the home equivalent of the Quadra, while the LC became the education version), botched the Newton, and lost control of the company. Yet Sculley wasn't all bad. His conception of what computers would sell was more reality-based than Jobs, who opposed introducing hard drives to the Macintosh. If it wasn't for repeatedly falling on his face at NeXT, Steve Jobs would be as dangerous to Apple now as he was in the mid-80's.
As for Amelio--absolutely. He did everything that was necessary to return Apple to profitability and ensure its future survival as a computer vendor. Amelio (and Fred Anderson, his CFO) made history by floating the largest bond issue yet at the time, but as a testament to the gamble, Apple shortly moved to a state of holding no long-term debt. Amelio also inaugurated the practice of slaughtering unnecessary and unfocused projects, eliminating a lot of Apple product lines. But if it wasn't for Jobs, there would have been no iPod or iPhone, no iTunes, dozens of clone vendors cannibalizing Apple's market share, and none of the marketing to underly these successes. Amelio gets a bad reputation because he lost a billion dollars in a single quarter, but that billion dollars has long since earned itself back in profit. About half of that went to buy NeXT, after all. Steve Jobs alone is probably worth a billion dollars to Apple--throwing in what would become Mac OS X is just gravy.
Sculley was CEO from April 1983 until June 1993, which is ten years and two months. Jobs has been CEO since September 1997 (interim until January 2000), which is nine years and four months.
I come from the future, bearing good news: Steve Jobs is still CEO!
Apple had another CEO like that once. His name was John Sculley. Visionary, charismatic superstar...Sculley was even seated between Hillary Clinton and Alan Greenspan at Clinton's first State of the Union, for God's sakes! Long story made short, he burned out and made some mistakes, and Apple fell into the disaster that was the mid-to-late 90's. Jobs has been CEO longer than Sculley was, and he never made that mistake. (One crucial difference: like Jobs, Sculley had visionary ideas. One of them was the Newton. Unlike Jobs, however, Sculley was no perfectionist, and the Newton shipped prematurely. Sculley was also nowhere near the control freak Jobs is, and engineering fell out of his influence and under Gassee's.)
It would be like Domino's pizza objecting to a movie that glorified the two kids who went on a rampage at that school.
Have you played the Columbine RPG? I have, and it doesn't glorify them at all. If anything it's an attempt to help you to understand them, but it doesn't really succeed at that, except perhaps by asserting that to the two shooters, the massacre held the same unreality as a video game does to us.
What if I decide to make a game where the player is a rapist? The player earns experience by going around raping women and children. Or worse, how about a game where the player works at a Nazi concentration camp massacring innocents?
It probably wouldn't be that enjoyable to most of us, but rape and genocide have been addressed in literature and film--I don't see why video games wouldn't be an appropriate medium. The game Defcon simulates mass murder by nuclear exchange, and from what I've gathered from those who play it, it communicates the chilling and almost unreal nature of nuclear war as effectively as any other artistic expression of that topic. I could easily imagine a Holocaust simulator where the player manages a slave labor camp to optimize efficiency, balancing extermination demand with production quotas and food costs. It wouldn't be that fun, but it would illustrate the banality of evil and help us to gain some understanding of the people who did such things in life. You are right in one thing--such a game would completely abandon entertainment in favor of artistic expression--but it would be a worthwhile exercise.
Comparing Second Life to IRC is an apt analogy, given that the most entertaining use of each is to pretend to be female and get men to have cybersex with you. Actually, I like to suggest this as an exercise in cross-gender understanding, and not merely as a means to amuse yourself by deceiving others.
Apes who know sign language can only chain together simple concepts--an ape probably wouldn't even understand what "lawyer" MEANS, let alone ask for one.
Whenever I'm reading something in Safari, the act of reading itself focuses me enough that I don't need to maximize--I don't even see the other windows. And most people who lack the ability to focus like that are usually natural multitaskers. I don't think there's a large number of regular users who have that unique combination of being easy to distract and wanting to focus on a single task--and those who do exist could easily hide or close any distracting programs to avoid distraction. People want to maximize Safari because they're used to Windows and afraid of change.
Single-tasking is what humans are optimized for. There's a reason IQ goes down when you try to do more than one thing at a time.
Well of course if you divide your attention along multiple tasks, you won't do as well on any one task. That's called subdividing a finite amount of resources. Coding is a singletasking activity--that's why on Mac OS X, Xcode can easily be set to maximize itself. Editing video is a singletasking activity--that's why Final Cut Pro takes up the entire screen by design. Answering emails, instant messaging, and web surfing aren't singletasking activities--that's why iChat, Mail, and Safari don't take up the whole screen. Mac OS X leaves the design choice of whether an app maximizes to the application because some applications are singletasking and others aren't.
Yeah, but you expressed a desire to focus on a single task at a time. Windows is more about letting you do that--Mac OS X is more about letting you divide your focus when appropriate.
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I'm not sure about that: this Alabama test doesn't seem difficult, although you are right about the prejudiced way it was enforced (usually under a literal "grandfather clause", if your grandfather was a qualified voter, so you were you.)
We had this in the United States, but it ended up that black people always failed the tests, so we made it illegal because it was racist.
And if you're over, say, 30 years old, the idea of downloading music seems like scary voodoo as music is supposed to be a plastic disc instead of data, and you'd rather yell at kids to get off your lawn than do anything to save natural resources.
You misspelled "whatever legal basis they could claim to enslave and lynch black people unmolested".
Maybe you're more famous than me. All I could expect from approaching them is several awkward hours of standing out at the front gate buzzing the intercom and saying, "I have a wonderful idea for a partnership, will you please let me in and let me make an appointment with a high ranking executive?"
Anybody who kills himself over a TV series about disco Egyptians fighting robots in space insults his own memory.
This might surprise you, since you never set foot outside your mother's basement and only speak to her when she brings you dinner or clean laundry, but some people enjoy interacting with others, and some people enjoy sharing their knowledge.
The new series may have flaws, but anyone who thinks the original was better immediately proves they have no taste. Any series whose pilot episode follows the genocide of the human race (which happens for no reason) with a journey to the casino planet, and follows that up with a dozen episodes about disco Egyptians fighting robots in space, is a dumb series. It might be cheesy fun, but it doesn't hold a candle to the new series.
Even more stupidly, the age of consent in some states is 16. So if I have a 16 year old girlfriend (I don't), I can see her naked body, I can have sex with her, but as soon as I take and keep pictures, I'm a sex offender? If I take pictures and give them to her, I'm not only a child pornographer, but I am distributing pornography to a minor. I'm a felon! That does not make sense.
I don't actually disagree with you, it's just that this is nothing like "illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours" because "illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours" involves taking known quantified facts and reducing them by mathematical proportion to more understandable amounts, whereas the doomsday clock is, as you point out, a "metaphore" (sic).
"30's, hot, 20's, nice
10's, cold, 0's, ice."
Except without any basis in mathematical fact or measured reality.
The root problems behind the Spindler-era failures did rest with Sculley. Sculley was the one who initiated the change to PPC, expanded the product line beyond all reason (the Performa started under the Sculley era as the home equivalent of the Quadra, while the LC became the education version), botched the Newton, and lost control of the company. Yet Sculley wasn't all bad. His conception of what computers would sell was more reality-based than Jobs, who opposed introducing hard drives to the Macintosh. If it wasn't for repeatedly falling on his face at NeXT, Steve Jobs would be as dangerous to Apple now as he was in the mid-80's.
As for Amelio--absolutely. He did everything that was necessary to return Apple to profitability and ensure its future survival as a computer vendor. Amelio (and Fred Anderson, his CFO) made history by floating the largest bond issue yet at the time, but as a testament to the gamble, Apple shortly moved to a state of holding no long-term debt. Amelio also inaugurated the practice of slaughtering unnecessary and unfocused projects, eliminating a lot of Apple product lines. But if it wasn't for Jobs, there would have been no iPod or iPhone, no iTunes, dozens of clone vendors cannibalizing Apple's market share, and none of the marketing to underly these successes. Amelio gets a bad reputation because he lost a billion dollars in a single quarter, but that billion dollars has long since earned itself back in profit. About half of that went to buy NeXT, after all. Steve Jobs alone is probably worth a billion dollars to Apple--throwing in what would become Mac OS X is just gravy.
I come from the future, bearing good news: Steve Jobs is still CEO!
Apple had another CEO like that once. His name was John Sculley. Visionary, charismatic superstar...Sculley was even seated between Hillary Clinton and Alan Greenspan at Clinton's first State of the Union, for God's sakes! Long story made short, he burned out and made some mistakes, and Apple fell into the disaster that was the mid-to-late 90's. Jobs has been CEO longer than Sculley was, and he never made that mistake. (One crucial difference: like Jobs, Sculley had visionary ideas. One of them was the Newton. Unlike Jobs, however, Sculley was no perfectionist, and the Newton shipped prematurely. Sculley was also nowhere near the control freak Jobs is, and engineering fell out of his influence and under Gassee's.)
It's been done.
It's a relatively important exception, since it's the exception that made almost the entire planet habitable by human beings.
Care to tell me how I can tell the difference?
Have you played the Columbine RPG? I have, and it doesn't glorify them at all. If anything it's an attempt to help you to understand them, but it doesn't really succeed at that, except perhaps by asserting that to the two shooters, the massacre held the same unreality as a video game does to us.
It probably wouldn't be that enjoyable to most of us, but rape and genocide have been addressed in literature and film--I don't see why video games wouldn't be an appropriate medium. The game Defcon simulates mass murder by nuclear exchange, and from what I've gathered from those who play it, it communicates the chilling and almost unreal nature of nuclear war as effectively as any other artistic expression of that topic. I could easily imagine a Holocaust simulator where the player manages a slave labor camp to optimize efficiency, balancing extermination demand with production quotas and food costs. It wouldn't be that fun, but it would illustrate the banality of evil and help us to gain some understanding of the people who did such things in life. You are right in one thing--such a game would completely abandon entertainment in favor of artistic expression--but it would be a worthwhile exercise.
Did you get any of the Burger King Xbox 360 games while you were there? They're like 9 bucks.
Comparing Second Life to IRC is an apt analogy, given that the most entertaining use of each is to pretend to be female and get men to have cybersex with you. Actually, I like to suggest this as an exercise in cross-gender understanding, and not merely as a means to amuse yourself by deceiving others.
Apes who know sign language can only chain together simple concepts--an ape probably wouldn't even understand what "lawyer" MEANS, let alone ask for one.
Whenever I'm reading something in Safari, the act of reading itself focuses me enough that I don't need to maximize--I don't even see the other windows. And most people who lack the ability to focus like that are usually natural multitaskers. I don't think there's a large number of regular users who have that unique combination of being easy to distract and wanting to focus on a single task--and those who do exist could easily hide or close any distracting programs to avoid distraction. People want to maximize Safari because they're used to Windows and afraid of change.
Well of course if you divide your attention along multiple tasks, you won't do as well on any one task. That's called subdividing a finite amount of resources. Coding is a singletasking activity--that's why on Mac OS X, Xcode can easily be set to maximize itself. Editing video is a singletasking activity--that's why Final Cut Pro takes up the entire screen by design. Answering emails, instant messaging, and web surfing aren't singletasking activities--that's why iChat, Mail, and Safari don't take up the whole screen. Mac OS X leaves the design choice of whether an app maximizes to the application because some applications are singletasking and others aren't.
Yeah, but you expressed a desire to focus on a single task at a time. Windows is more about letting you do that--Mac OS X is more about letting you divide your focus when appropriate.