Have you seen the surface of the moon? You know, the one pockmarked by all sizes of craters and pulverized to a fine dust? Space is a terrible place for long-term (billion-year) longevity of unprotected objects; anything you put there will end up ground to bits by micrometeorites in the long term, even in a rather hefty concrete capsule. Having a planetary atmosphere to take care of all but the biggest chunks of space debris is extremely useful; far better protection than quite a few meters of concrete.
You're right; I should have specified that access to academic meritocracy only occurs after you've gotten "into the system." Coming from a wealthier, well-educated family lets you get a decent primary and undergraduate education, which is a major obstacle facing a large portion of the population not given that opportunity (in common with all of US society). However, once you're in grad school and above, you're generally considered by the quality of your work, not the wealth/connections/lineage you and your buddies have. For Nobel Laureates, in particular, note that you're also sampling the academic culture from about half a century ago --- Nobel Prizes often go to older career scientists, who established their positions under social conditions different from the current situation. Fifty years from now, I suspect Nobel Prizes will reflect the increased (but imperfect) racial/gender/economic diversity of today's students.
There is still pervasive gender and racial discrimination, creating higher barriers to advancement for women and people of color. The medical field is perhaps one of the most class-stratified --- the campus med school is where you see students driving BMWs, and six-figure salaries are expected. There's a long way for US academia to go to be entirely meritocratic --- and, unfortunately, it's often heading in the wrong direction. However, I'd say its still notably better than the US private industry culture of power and privilege. There is not a 500:1 pay ratio between top professors and bottom-rung grad students; coming from an academically-oriented family background may bolster your personal academic abilities, but generally no one cares about your lineage when reading your papers; etc.. The adoption of management-centric "business culture" into academia is only pushing it further from meritocracy.
For US society as a whole, social mobility is documented to be abysmally low. However, academia in the US is perhaps one exception to that --- places where people are doing the kinds of research likely to win Nobel Prizes are typically not run on the megacorporate model that dominates the rest of US society. Success in research does not generally come from being golfing buddies with some multi-millionaire executive, but from actually being good at what you do. Granted, there has been a move in recent decades to transition universities to "run like a business" models, with high-paid management and disposable research labor, which is likely to result in US academia moving towards the much less meritocratic state of broader US society.
To be clear, in evaluating Reagan's presidency, I am generally referring to his administration as a whole (including various acts that the Hollywood Fake Cowboy might claim were not done with his knowledge). Also, don't forget that policy decisions can have impacts decades later.
A few items that come to mind are:
Iran Contra scandal, and general support for the violent overthrow of South American democracies by US-supported right wing dictators;
Promulgation of the fabricated racist mythology of the "welfare queen" in political discourse as a way to shift blame to the poor for economic harms to the middle class in favor of the rich; frequently giving speeches portraying fictitiously embellished instances of rare welfare fraud as the norm.
Deep cuts to federal programs in early childhood education and mental care for veterans, with demographic impacts persisting decades later.
Increasing economic inequality, disenfranchising the middle class as an economic force
You can't tell that some historical facts/evaluations are as close as you'll get to objective in history? This might be a philosophically somewhat lower standard of rigor than "the world is round." Nonetheless, "Reagan was bad for the common man" (domestically and internationally) is an objective historical fact supported by abundant evidence, like "Hitler was bad for the Jews."
Your children may also have been taught things like "the world is round." Why do you find the Reagan fact particularly remarkable? After all, his presidency and policies were a disaster for the "common man," and began the era of stagnating and reversing all the gains made by the US middle class in the mid-century period (for the trickle-up benefit of a tiny wealthy elite). No to mention harm to the "common man" all over the globe, such as funding murderous South American far-right militias to overthrow democracy with money from secret arms sales to Iran.
If you're a mercenary --- someone who does research for corporate profit --- then you worry about spies. If you're a scientist --- someone who does research for the joy of discovery and advancement of human knowledge --- then you don't.
For the projects I work on as a scientist, I don't care if every other collaborator is a Chinese spy. Well, perhaps I do care --- I'm tickled pink that someone else gives a damn about what I'm researching. If China's Politburo gets hold of our results a week before we toss them on the preprint server for the whole world to see, good for them. In fact, where do I send a thank-you card for sending us more smart and helpful folks for our collaboration?
Well, RomneyCare already did work pretty well when rolled out to Massachusetts --- it's a tried, tested system. Not as well as single-payer systems or socialized healthcare that cut insurance companies entirely out of the profit loop; but, what do you expect from a plan concocted by right-wing think tanks?
The trick to proper delivery by forklift is to find a long approach path, so you can get up to full rolling speed in advance. Then, coordinate tipping down the forklift blades with slamming on the brakes, and you should be able to toss the package over the recipient's fence with ease. Bonus points for lifting the package by skewering the forklift blades through it, instead of coming from underneath.
Depends on the corner, and how the lights are configured. In some places, this is true (no button press = no pedestrian signal). However, in some cities at some intersections, the lights go through the same cycle regardless (including pedestrian crossing indicators), and the button is just left there as a placebo so pedestrians aren't left wondering what to do to get a crossing signal.
Perhaps there was an unstated assumption in the definition of "weight management" in the post above yours, of "keeping one's weight down while maintaining a higher quality of life than a Nazi death camp inmate." For people who want to control their weight, while not feeling miserable and lethargic and excruciatingly famished all the time, there will be more to the process than "calories in vs. calories out" --- specifically, finding ways to achieve a good caloric in/out balance that do not result in misery (for which some food/activity combinations may be better than others).
The fact that Bach's compositions reflect "frustrations with the limitations" of the instrument is probably the best argument for performing them on that instrument: built into the structure of the pieces are all the best-effort inventions to push the boundary of those limitations (which tend to get lost, or simply rendered irrelevant, in piano performances). Bach may have preferred to write and perform on a piano-forte, but he knew what instrument he was primarily writing for.
The limitations of pre-piano keyboard instruments for large-scale performance halls don't seem to be a big problem if you're focusing on making a recording (rather than giving a big live performance). With modern recording technology, we really live in a golden age for more intimate chamber music --- you no longer have to be wealthy enough to hire a private orchestra to enjoy "small-scale" productions in the comfort of your own home on a pair of headphones or speakers. The emphasis on making instruments big and loud enough to fill a concert hall (much of the drive behind the development of the piano) is less important if most of your listeners will be via a digital recording anyway.
I have nothing particularly against piano performances of these pieces; they can be quite enjoyable and musically well-done. Gould's work is well done, as is Ishizaka's previously released set of the Goldberg Variations. My objection here is that, if you present something as intended to be a "reference" edition for hearing and understanding Bach, that ought to include presenting the specific instrumental limitations that Bach was working with/around (rather than erasing Bach's efforts for what he "might have done" in a world where the piano became popular a few decades earlier).
Much of the "tinny sounding" reputation for harpsichords was due to poorly made harpsichord reproductions from the 1930's-'50s, before good scholarship on re-inventing the art of harpsichord building had been collected, so "harpsichords" were rigged together from iron-frame, metal-stringed piano parts. A variety of more modern reproduction instruments, and restored originals, indicates that members of the harpsichord family don't generally have the clanky, tinny sound associated with mid-20th-century harpsichord music (during the initial revival of interest in older musical forms). The clavier family was often closely associated with the lute --- a very "delicate" and nuanced instrument --- during its heyday.
I think having the "limitation" of pre-piano movements (little/no control over volume from key velocity) is important to performing Bach's keyboard music "authentically" (for a "cultural reference" production), since alternate ways around that are built into the composition/performance of pieces (nuances lost on a piano), which allow proper performances to actually be quite dynamic. One can find plenty of clavier-family instruments with a more pleasing tone to modern ears than more "aggressive" examples of harpsichords, especially not "tinny sounding" poor reproduction instruments.
A piano is a tremendously wonderful instrument for piano music. But this (Well-Tempered Clavier) is not piano music! You can make a decent-sounding performance of clavier music on the piano, just like you can transcribe a vocal for violin, but you lose a lot of the specific things the composer --- especially a master of the instrument like Bach --- put into the work. Basically, all intricate and fast-moving detail in a piece gets mushed up and lost on the piano, which is designed for a smoother, more "blended" sound than the clearly articulated single notes of pre-piano predecessors. Please, if you want an open cultural reference to Bach's keyboard music, play it on appropriate kinds of keyboard!
Your "Taco Bell" example is a great example of why your proposition is totally full of shit. Replace what you said by "go to Vegas and keep doubling up on the roulette wheel" makes about as much sense: for one-in-a-million who hits lucky success, it works out great; everyone else ends up busted. You think your exponential taco truck growth will work for tens of millions of unemployed? What happens is that a tiny few end up on top --- the Taco Bells of the world --- who then have economies of scale and massive advertising propaganda edge to soak up most of the available market (and increase automation to decrease the amount/quality of jobs they provide). A few tiny niche businesses take up the rest. The other 99.99% of people who might try this end up with a load of fail, out-competed by Taco Bell and back on the streets with the workers Taco Bell lays off thanks to automation. Pretty soon, you have massively depressed areas where even all your friends and family together can't scrape together enough cash for a taco truck (yes, this is a reality for millions of able and willing unemployed workers).
Doesn't help the fact that if you're laid off from a hubcap factory, you probably don't have hundreds of millions of dollars in savings waiting for a new project. No matter what industry you'd want to start up in: you're competing against rich people who can afford to buy robots and set up large factories, starting from a laid-off hubcap worker's savings (if you're lucky to have a positive net worth at all)? How the heck do you think that's gonna work? Unless you're already part of the rich investor class with loads of money to throw around, not some poor working class Joe who just lost his paycheck, you very likely aren't just going to be able to start a business --- and anything local and small scale won't have much of a market, because all your neighbors are also low-wage or unemployed thanks to robots.
But, there won't be a huge change in the overall supply of cars (widgets), especially with no demand to buy them. Rather than flooding society with more cars than ever by keeping all workers employed at higher productivity, the capitalist class will just keep producing whatever amount maximizes their cut of the profit, laying off workers. Thus, you end up in a situation where there are a huge number of potentially productive, willing-to-work, but unemployed workers, that no one with money will hire because they don't have a profitable market to sell the additional goods (lack of demand from all the unemployed and poorly-paid workers).
Easily re-programmed robots won't help if the working class has no money to buy new robotic goods with, because they lost their jobs to flexible robots, which are owned by a tiny wealthy elite.
Straight off the Wikipedia page on labor productivity (not the final definitive source, but a good start for someone starting from zero information like yourself), check this basic summary plot:
Note how labor productivity and wages are rising together in unison from ~1945 to '75, so gains in productivity helped the average citizen over that period. Then, from '75 on, (inflation-adjusted) wages completely flatline while productivity increases. This is also the point where executive salaries and the wealth of the 1% (and the 1% of the 1%) started skyrocketing upwards, taking all the gains that used to be shared over the whole population.
Maybe because (a) laid off workers don't have a few hundred million dollars lying around to start up a high-tech factory (using automation to get high productivity per labor input), and (b) the market is already saturated with more widgets than a bunch of laid-off laborers can afford to buy. The people with the short end of the stick in capitalism (the working class) can't afford to start businesses when they're struggling to even keep a roof over their own head; only those already awash in money taken from the labor of others can afford to do so.
They wouldn't "cost so much" if working/middle-class salaries had grown with increase in productivity over the last 3 decades. However, basically all the economic gains from productivity have gone to a tiny wealthy oligarchy. Consider a worker who could build 10 widgets a year and afford to buy 5 widgets back in "the old days." With improvements in technology, now a worker can build 50 widgets a year --- and gets paid enough to buy 4, because they're competing for jobs with all the other workers laid off who now can afford to buy 0. All the gains in productivity are captured by the capitalist management/investment class, who get to pocket the savings in wages per unit produced for themselves.
Having no need for Windows, I really don't keep up with its capabilities. But, really, this is the year 2013 --- Windows is still that pathetic, that basic tasks like syncing files between multiple computers take special software that doesn't just come with the OS? Why is anyone still using that crap? Are corporations really so utterly incompetent on IT issues that they'd put up with shit like this because they don't know any better?
Right, I'm not trying to excuse Apple --- this is a bug, and shouldn't happen. However, it's maybe something a bit more subtle than "crashes on Arabic plain text," which would have been caught much more quickly. The AC above (assuming you're the same one?) was "disappointed" that this wasn't using "weird characters" --- but stacking a bunch of diacriticals not normally used with the script (the Arabic block apparently contains its own diacriticals) in an invalid way is getting pretty "weird." The breakdown of the problematic string, reduced to a minimal example that causes problems, is:
d8ae normal Arabic character 20 space ccb7 ccb4 cc90 three diacriticals from outside the Arabic block, stacked atop a "space" character right after switching from Arabic diacritical handling
However, is this particular combination of combining diacriticals a "valid" one in Arabic? The U+03XX diacriticals are "general use" and not Arabic-specific, so this might be an unusual (or even "invalid") combination in Arabic orthography (which I don't know much about). Note, I seem to be able to get the crash just with the two characters + diacriticals "\xcc\xb7\xcc\xb4\xcc\x90\xd8\xae \xcc\xb7\xcc\xb4\xcc\x90" (tell python to print that in Terminal.app under OS10.8.2 kills Terminal.app...). Is this a combination that should occur in "ordinary" Arabic text?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen the surface of the moon? You know, the one pockmarked by all sizes of craters and pulverized to a fine dust? Space is a terrible place for long-term (billion-year) longevity of unprotected objects; anything you put there will end up ground to bits by micrometeorites in the long term, even in a rather hefty concrete capsule. Having a planetary atmosphere to take care of all but the biggest chunks of space debris is extremely useful; far better protection than quite a few meters of concrete.
You're right; I should have specified that access to academic meritocracy only occurs after you've gotten "into the system." Coming from a wealthier, well-educated family lets you get a decent primary and undergraduate education, which is a major obstacle facing a large portion of the population not given that opportunity (in common with all of US society). However, once you're in grad school and above, you're generally considered by the quality of your work, not the wealth/connections/lineage you and your buddies have. For Nobel Laureates, in particular, note that you're also sampling the academic culture from about half a century ago --- Nobel Prizes often go to older career scientists, who established their positions under social conditions different from the current situation. Fifty years from now, I suspect Nobel Prizes will reflect the increased (but imperfect) racial/gender/economic diversity of today's students.
There is still pervasive gender and racial discrimination, creating higher barriers to advancement for women and people of color. The medical field is perhaps one of the most class-stratified --- the campus med school is where you see students driving BMWs, and six-figure salaries are expected. There's a long way for US academia to go to be entirely meritocratic --- and, unfortunately, it's often heading in the wrong direction. However, I'd say its still notably better than the US private industry culture of power and privilege. There is not a 500:1 pay ratio between top professors and bottom-rung grad students; coming from an academically-oriented family background may bolster your personal academic abilities, but generally no one cares about your lineage when reading your papers; etc.. The adoption of management-centric "business culture" into academia is only pushing it further from meritocracy.
For US society as a whole, social mobility is documented to be abysmally low. However, academia in the US is perhaps one exception to that --- places where people are doing the kinds of research likely to win Nobel Prizes are typically not run on the megacorporate model that dominates the rest of US society. Success in research does not generally come from being golfing buddies with some multi-millionaire executive, but from actually being good at what you do. Granted, there has been a move in recent decades to transition universities to "run like a business" models, with high-paid management and disposable research labor, which is likely to result in US academia moving towards the much less meritocratic state of broader US society.
To be clear, in evaluating Reagan's presidency, I am generally referring to his administration as a whole (including various acts that the Hollywood Fake Cowboy might claim were not done with his knowledge). Also, don't forget that policy decisions can have impacts decades later.
A few items that come to mind are:
Iran Contra scandal, and general support for the violent overthrow of South American democracies by US-supported right wing dictators;
Promulgation of the fabricated racist mythology of the "welfare queen" in political discourse as a way to shift blame to the poor for economic harms to the middle class in favor of the rich; frequently giving speeches portraying fictitiously embellished instances of rare welfare fraud as the norm.
Deep cuts to federal programs in early childhood education and mental care for veterans, with demographic impacts persisting decades later.
Increasing economic inequality, disenfranchising the middle class as an economic force
Financial deregulation leading to the Savings and Loan crisis
Department of Housing and Urban Development grant rigging to fraudulently award lucrative contracts to campaign contributors and lobbyists.
You can't tell that some historical facts/evaluations are as close as you'll get to objective in history? This might be a philosophically somewhat lower standard of rigor than "the world is round." Nonetheless, "Reagan was bad for the common man" (domestically and internationally) is an objective historical fact supported by abundant evidence, like "Hitler was bad for the Jews."
Your children may also have been taught things like "the world is round." Why do you find the Reagan fact particularly remarkable? After all, his presidency and policies were a disaster for the "common man," and began the era of stagnating and reversing all the gains made by the US middle class in the mid-century period (for the trickle-up benefit of a tiny wealthy elite). No to mention harm to the "common man" all over the globe, such as funding murderous South American far-right militias to overthrow democracy with money from secret arms sales to Iran.
If you're a mercenary --- someone who does research for corporate profit --- then you worry about spies.
If you're a scientist --- someone who does research for the joy of discovery and advancement of human knowledge --- then you don't.
For the projects I work on as a scientist, I don't care if every other collaborator is a Chinese spy. Well, perhaps I do care --- I'm tickled pink that someone else gives a damn about what I'm researching. If China's Politburo gets hold of our results a week before we toss them on the preprint server for the whole world to see, good for them. In fact, where do I send a thank-you card for sending us more smart and helpful folks for our collaboration?
Well, RomneyCare already did work pretty well when rolled out to Massachusetts --- it's a tried, tested system. Not as well as single-payer systems or socialized healthcare that cut insurance companies entirely out of the profit loop; but, what do you expect from a plan concocted by right-wing think tanks?
The trick to proper delivery by forklift is to find a long approach path, so you can get up to full rolling speed in advance. Then, coordinate tipping down the forklift blades with slamming on the brakes, and you should be able to toss the package over the recipient's fence with ease. Bonus points for lifting the package by skewering the forklift blades through it, instead of coming from underneath.
Depends on the corner, and how the lights are configured. In some places, this is true (no button press = no pedestrian signal). However, in some cities at some intersections, the lights go through the same cycle regardless (including pedestrian crossing indicators), and the button is just left there as a placebo so pedestrians aren't left wondering what to do to get a crossing signal.
If I ever find myself on a Windows machine, I figure woe already done gone betided me.
Perhaps there was an unstated assumption in the definition of "weight management" in the post above yours, of "keeping one's weight down while maintaining a higher quality of life than a Nazi death camp inmate." For people who want to control their weight, while not feeling miserable and lethargic and excruciatingly famished all the time, there will be more to the process than "calories in vs. calories out" --- specifically, finding ways to achieve a good caloric in/out balance that do not result in misery (for which some food/activity combinations may be better than others).
tantalum resistors: also useful when you need something that smells funny to tell you when you've installed it backwards and let the magic smoke out.
The fact that Bach's compositions reflect "frustrations with the limitations" of the instrument is probably the best argument for performing them on that instrument: built into the structure of the pieces are all the best-effort inventions to push the boundary of those limitations (which tend to get lost, or simply rendered irrelevant, in piano performances). Bach may have preferred to write and perform on a piano-forte, but he knew what instrument he was primarily writing for.
The limitations of pre-piano keyboard instruments for large-scale performance halls don't seem to be a big problem if you're focusing on making a recording (rather than giving a big live performance). With modern recording technology, we really live in a golden age for more intimate chamber music --- you no longer have to be wealthy enough to hire a private orchestra to enjoy "small-scale" productions in the comfort of your own home on a pair of headphones or speakers. The emphasis on making instruments big and loud enough to fill a concert hall (much of the drive behind the development of the piano) is less important if most of your listeners will be via a digital recording anyway.
I have nothing particularly against piano performances of these pieces; they can be quite enjoyable and musically well-done. Gould's work is well done, as is Ishizaka's previously released set of the Goldberg Variations. My objection here is that, if you present something as intended to be a "reference" edition for hearing and understanding Bach, that ought to include presenting the specific instrumental limitations that Bach was working with/around (rather than erasing Bach's efforts for what he "might have done" in a world where the piano became popular a few decades earlier).
Much of the "tinny sounding" reputation for harpsichords was due to poorly made harpsichord reproductions from the 1930's-'50s, before good scholarship on re-inventing the art of harpsichord building had been collected, so "harpsichords" were rigged together from iron-frame, metal-stringed piano parts. A variety of more modern reproduction instruments, and restored originals, indicates that members of the harpsichord family don't generally have the clanky, tinny sound associated with mid-20th-century harpsichord music (during the initial revival of interest in older musical forms). The clavier family was often closely associated with the lute --- a very "delicate" and nuanced instrument --- during its heyday.
I think having the "limitation" of pre-piano movements (little/no control over volume from key velocity) is important to performing Bach's keyboard music "authentically" (for a "cultural reference" production), since alternate ways around that are built into the composition/performance of pieces (nuances lost on a piano), which allow proper performances to actually be quite dynamic. One can find plenty of clavier-family instruments with a more pleasing tone to modern ears than more "aggressive" examples of harpsichords, especially not "tinny sounding" poor reproduction instruments.
A piano is a tremendously wonderful instrument for piano music. But this (Well-Tempered Clavier) is not piano music! You can make a decent-sounding performance of clavier music on the piano, just like you can transcribe a vocal for violin, but you lose a lot of the specific things the composer --- especially a master of the instrument like Bach --- put into the work. Basically, all intricate and fast-moving detail in a piece gets mushed up and lost on the piano, which is designed for a smoother, more "blended" sound than the clearly articulated single notes of pre-piano predecessors. Please, if you want an open cultural reference to Bach's keyboard music, play it on appropriate kinds of keyboard!
Your "Taco Bell" example is a great example of why your proposition is totally full of shit. Replace what you said by "go to Vegas and keep doubling up on the roulette wheel" makes about as much sense: for one-in-a-million who hits lucky success, it works out great; everyone else ends up busted. You think your exponential taco truck growth will work for tens of millions of unemployed? What happens is that a tiny few end up on top --- the Taco Bells of the world --- who then have economies of scale and massive advertising propaganda edge to soak up most of the available market (and increase automation to decrease the amount/quality of jobs they provide). A few tiny niche businesses take up the rest. The other 99.99% of people who might try this end up with a load of fail, out-competed by Taco Bell and back on the streets with the workers Taco Bell lays off thanks to automation. Pretty soon, you have massively depressed areas where even all your friends and family together can't scrape together enough cash for a taco truck (yes, this is a reality for millions of able and willing unemployed workers).
Doesn't help the fact that if you're laid off from a hubcap factory, you probably don't have hundreds of millions of dollars in savings waiting for a new project. No matter what industry you'd want to start up in: you're competing against rich people who can afford to buy robots and set up large factories, starting from a laid-off hubcap worker's savings (if you're lucky to have a positive net worth at all)? How the heck do you think that's gonna work? Unless you're already part of the rich investor class with loads of money to throw around, not some poor working class Joe who just lost his paycheck, you very likely aren't just going to be able to start a business --- and anything local and small scale won't have much of a market, because all your neighbors are also low-wage or unemployed thanks to robots.
But, there won't be a huge change in the overall supply of cars (widgets), especially with no demand to buy them. Rather than flooding society with more cars than ever by keeping all workers employed at higher productivity, the capitalist class will just keep producing whatever amount maximizes their cut of the profit, laying off workers. Thus, you end up in a situation where there are a huge number of potentially productive, willing-to-work, but unemployed workers, that no one with money will hire because they don't have a profitable market to sell the additional goods (lack of demand from all the unemployed and poorly-paid workers).
Easily re-programmed robots won't help if the working class has no money to buy new robotic goods with, because they lost their jobs to flexible robots, which are owned by a tiny wealthy elite.
Straight off the Wikipedia page on labor productivity (not the final definitive source, but a good start for someone starting from zero information like yourself), check this basic summary plot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg
Note how labor productivity and wages are rising together in unison from ~1945 to '75, so gains in productivity helped the average citizen over that period. Then, from '75 on, (inflation-adjusted) wages completely flatline while productivity increases. This is also the point where executive salaries and the wealth of the 1% (and the 1% of the 1%) started skyrocketing upwards, taking all the gains that used to be shared over the whole population.
Maybe because (a) laid off workers don't have a few hundred million dollars lying around to start up a high-tech factory (using automation to get high productivity per labor input), and (b) the market is already saturated with more widgets than a bunch of laid-off laborers can afford to buy. The people with the short end of the stick in capitalism (the working class) can't afford to start businesses when they're struggling to even keep a roof over their own head; only those already awash in money taken from the labor of others can afford to do so.
So why do cars still cost so much?
They wouldn't "cost so much" if working/middle-class salaries had grown with increase in productivity over the last 3 decades. However, basically all the economic gains from productivity have gone to a tiny wealthy oligarchy. Consider a worker who could build 10 widgets a year and afford to buy 5 widgets back in "the old days." With improvements in technology, now a worker can build 50 widgets a year --- and gets paid enough to buy 4, because they're competing for jobs with all the other workers laid off who now can afford to buy 0. All the gains in productivity are captured by the capitalist management/investment class, who get to pocket the savings in wages per unit produced for themselves.
Having no need for Windows, I really don't keep up with its capabilities. But, really, this is the year 2013 --- Windows is still that pathetic, that basic tasks like syncing files between multiple computers take special software that doesn't just come with the OS? Why is anyone still using that crap? Are corporations really so utterly incompetent on IT issues that they'd put up with shit like this because they don't know any better?
Right, I'm not trying to excuse Apple --- this is a bug, and shouldn't happen. However, it's maybe something a bit more subtle than "crashes on Arabic plain text," which would have been caught much more quickly. The AC above (assuming you're the same one?) was "disappointed" that this wasn't using "weird characters" --- but stacking a bunch of diacriticals not normally used with the script (the Arabic block apparently contains its own diacriticals) in an invalid way is getting pretty "weird." The breakdown of the problematic string, reduced to a minimal example that causes problems, is:
d8ae normal Arabic character
20 space
ccb7 ccb4 cc90 three diacriticals from outside the Arabic block, stacked atop a "space" character right after switching from Arabic diacritical handling
how much more "weird" were you hoping for?
However, is this particular combination of combining diacriticals a "valid" one in Arabic? The U+03XX diacriticals are "general use" and not Arabic-specific, so this might be an unusual (or even "invalid") combination in Arabic orthography (which I don't know much about). Note, I seem to be able to get the crash just with the two characters + diacriticals "\xcc\xb7\xcc\xb4\xcc\x90\xd8\xae \xcc\xb7\xcc\xb4\xcc\x90" (tell python to print that in Terminal.app under OS10.8.2 kills Terminal.app...). Is this a combination that should occur in "ordinary" Arabic text?