Well, that's the impression you might get from the New York Times, but a few more people than that were involved. Here's a traffic cam video of the 9/12 Washington D.C. march. As you can see, rather more than "a few hundred people." And there were scores and scores of other demonstrations at other times.
But it's a matter of proportion and degree. If a newspaper wants to publish editorials about the injustice of a country club's admission policies, fine. If they publish a few news stories about it, that's fine too. But a news story roughly every three days for nine months is clearly using the news section to push an agenda, and trying to turn a minor controversy into something more than it is. The Times didn't give last year's Tea Party demonstrations anywhere near that degree of news coverage, despite the fact that they involved millions of people.
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
There are many, many examples, but here's a personal favorite: back in 2002/2003, the Times ran 95 stories in nine months on the supposedly big controversy involving the Augusta National Golf Club, which didn't admit women as members. When the time came for the big demonstration against the club, about 40 people showed up. I humbly suggest that so many stories about such a minor controversy is good evidence of a political agenda driving news coverage.
As for ignoring stories that don't fit their biases, readers of the Times were probably surprised when Van Jones resigned, because until then there hadn't been any coverage of the controversy.
Rather than remake something, or have some ignorant Hollywood producer create some new but clichéd and/or stupid story, why not go look to the great science fiction writers and put them on the screen (suitably updated)? Now that special effects are no longer any sort of obstacle, how about something based on Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Underpeople? E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series? Why not a TV series based on Pohl's Heechee stories? Maybe an Iain Banks novel, as someone mentioned above. How about Heinlein? Asimov? Charles Stross? Larry Niven? Keith Laumer's Retief (sort of a tongue-in-cheek James Bond-ish diplomat dealing with various troublesome alien species) could be huge, and there are enough stories for a dozen films. Any sf fan could list more.
It's annoying when all Hollywood seems to consider is remakes, "original" stories that aren't often good science fiction, and maybe things by Philip Dick. There are literally hundreds of great sf stories that could make fine films and TV series.
If 9/11 changed the rules as you say, then why have there been several successful (read: control of the plane was taken) hijackings since then?
IIRC there have been no successful hijackings of American airplanes since 9/11. Perhaps passengers on foreign airliners didn't learn the lesson of 9/11 quite so well.
A relatively dumb device that only runs a web browser to use web apps (googles or anyone else's provided their signed by google) to do their work.
It sounds like a television, with more interactivity. Hook the appliance into a screen, connect to the broadband service and you'll have a functioning computer.
Hmmm, why does this make me think of the huge data center Apple is building in North Carolina?
If these are the same idiots who "authorized" that god-awful movie
It's not really their fault. Here's how Hollywood works: when the film rights to a story are bought, the filmmakers almost always have the right to do whatever they want with it. This means they can totally rewrite the story, or even slap the title alone on a different, barely-related story. This is why Graham Greene (IIRC) once said that the best deal authors could get from Hollywood was when the film rights were bought but no movie was ever made. (This frequently happens: the rights to Stranger in a Strange Land, the Foundation Trilogy, and many other works have been bouncing around in Hollywood for many years.)
There's a lot of living stuff right here at home that doesn't fit any of those categories, so there's no reason to automatically assume that there can't be any life at all on Mars.
The Gaia hypothesis is one reason. Sure, there are extremophile species on Earth, but there's life all over Earth. If there were life on Mars, it has probably, like on Earth, had hundreds of millions of years to evolve, grow, and spread across the planet in one form or another, changing the environment to make it even more suitable for life. So the Gaia hypothesis argument is basically that we are unlikely to find just a little life on Mars, because there would either be so much that we could easily see it, or none at all.
If that is the case, then NASA really needs to work on hiring and/or training more Program Managers.
Sorry, I don't think feeding the giant bureaucracy that NASA has become will get the results we want. Here's my manned space program:
Take the money NASA gets for manned space and give it to Burt Rutan.
Tell Burt to get people into orbit and to the Moon.
Stand back.
Just standard clothespins
on
Hung Out to Dry
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You can tell from the picture that the clothesline is threaded through the kid's clothes. The clothespins are just for show and aren't actually holding him up.
I think you're on the right track with a low monthly fee, but I'd rather see a micro-payment system from the start. Set the per-item fees so low (a penny or less) that few would complain, because it would only add up to maybe a dollar or so per month for most web users. Of course it would have to be secure (e.g.: an article can't say it's $.05, then charge you $5) and easy for everyone to use. Legal issues aside, I think the newspapers might be able set something up by partnering with ISPs, so that the software can be installed at the ISP level, with no user downloads/plug-ins needed. Offer the ISPs half the income, and they might go for it.
I realize there are many problems: privacy, foreign readers, etc. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple, easy, widespread way to pay a tiny amount of money for something online? Think of all the writers, artists, musicians, coders, etc. who could benefit. PayPal is too cumbersome and not fine-grained enough. Would you pay a penny for a blog post that made you laugh out loud? Or to hear one song by an unknown band you think you might like? I would. Multiply that by tens of thousands of web users, and those folks are making a living.
Of course, the newspapers will probably see this as too penny-ante, be too impatient to start something small and make it grow, and want $$/month subscriptions, which just won't work for most of them.
the BBC doesn't have to pander to advertisers and makes the viewing audience their primary customer. This raises the standard of TV across the board, and it's no wonder commercial broadcasters like Sky hate it as they have to spend more than they otherwise would.
Could it be that the commercial broadcasters resent having a competitor funded by a tax on every TV, while they have to do hard stuff like get good ratings and sell advertising?
All bureaucracies tend to become less efficient over time: see the Peter Principle, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, Parkinson's Law, etc. They grow sclerotic with timeservers and brownnosers, work more for themselves and less for their supposed goals, and the highest-quality employees retire or leave for greener pastures. And if you are more or less a government-authorized monopoly you don't worry much about the competition.
Here's how I'd get back to the Moon: 1) Give Burt Rutan $10 billion. 2) Tell him to get us back to the Moon. 3) Stand back.
I wonder why this doesn't happen more often. The vast majority of online scams (fake drugs, etc.) and spammers get their money through credit cards. Why not more effort to cut off their source of funds? It seems like a weak point in the operations.
Come on, of course it was state-sponsored. Russia clearly had the most motive of any country, and has a government with authoritarian leanings and a track record of things like assassinating critics. But set aside motive/means/opportunity and look at it this way: does anyone really believe that in today's Russia someone could mount a large, sustained cyber attack on a neighboring country without the government knowing about it? Does anyone think that Russia couldn't have stopped the attacks if they'd wanted to? It was just unconventional warfare with plausible deniability.
So for the US, a space weapons ban is a no-brainer. The trick will be getting the Russians and the Chinese to sign on (at this point no one is suggesting a unilateral ban on space weapons and such a policy would obviously be inane from a national security standpoint.)
The naiveté here is the assumption that everyone who signs on will follow through. The history of such high-minded arms agreements suggests otherwise. The Kellogg-Briand Pact didn't work. After signing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the Soviets continued their programs. There was also evidence that they violated the 1972 ABM treaty.
An international weapons ban is just like gun control: the people most likely to obey the law are the law-abiding citizens you usually don't have to worry about, while the people you most want to disarm are the criminals who are least likely to obey the law.
This will not work unless there's a really, really broad coalition that makes sure that the vast majority of the Internet population has a micropayment account.
Indeed, which is why I wonder if it couldn't be done at the ISP level. If I were the newspaper industry (being killed by the web, because web ad revenue isn't close to replacing declining subscriptions and ads-on-paper), I'd approach ISPs with a micropayment system that they hosted and got a cut of. And I do mean micro: it shouldn't add more than a few dollars to the average user's account per month, so we're talking fractional cents per story. It has to be so small an amount that nobody sane can complain. Then, the content producers can make it up in volume. We already know they can't do it by charging dollars per story or tens of dollars per year per site.
Slashdot Mirror
it'll take another generation or two for Android to catch up
I suspect Apple and the iPhone won't be just standing still while that happens....
Well, that's the impression you might get from the New York Times, but a few more people than that were involved. Here's a traffic cam video of the 9/12 Washington D.C. march. As you can see, rather more than "a few hundred people." And there were scores and scores of other demonstrations at other times.
But it's a matter of proportion and degree. If a newspaper wants to publish editorials about the injustice of a country club's admission policies, fine. If they publish a few news stories about it, that's fine too. But a news story roughly every three days for nine months is clearly using the news section to push an agenda, and trying to turn a minor controversy into something more than it is. The Times didn't give last year's Tea Party demonstrations anywhere near that degree of news coverage, despite the fact that they involved millions of people.
There are many, many examples, but here's a personal favorite: back in 2002/2003, the Times ran 95 stories in nine months on the supposedly big controversy involving the Augusta National Golf Club, which didn't admit women as members. When the time came for the big demonstration against the club, about 40 people showed up. I humbly suggest that so many stories about such a minor controversy is good evidence of a political agenda driving news coverage.
As for ignoring stories that don't fit their biases, readers of the Times were probably surprised when Van Jones resigned, because until then there hadn't been any coverage of the controversy.
Rather than remake something, or have some ignorant Hollywood producer create some new but clichéd and/or stupid story, why not go look to the great science fiction writers and put them on the screen (suitably updated)? Now that special effects are no longer any sort of obstacle, how about something based on Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Underpeople? E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series? Why not a TV series based on Pohl's Heechee stories? Maybe an Iain Banks novel, as someone mentioned above. How about Heinlein? Asimov? Charles Stross? Larry Niven? Keith Laumer's Retief (sort of a tongue-in-cheek James Bond-ish diplomat dealing with various troublesome alien species) could be huge, and there are enough stories for a dozen films. Any sf fan could list more.
It's annoying when all Hollywood seems to consider is remakes, "original" stories that aren't often good science fiction, and maybe things by Philip Dick. There are literally hundreds of great sf stories that could make fine films and TV series.
IIRC there have been no successful hijackings of American airplanes since 9/11. Perhaps passengers on foreign airliners didn't learn the lesson of 9/11 quite so well.
Hmmm, why does this make me think of the huge data center Apple is building in North Carolina?
It's not really their fault. Here's how Hollywood works: when the film rights to a story are bought, the filmmakers almost always have the right to do whatever they want with it. This means they can totally rewrite the story, or even slap the title alone on a different, barely-related story. This is why Graham Greene (IIRC) once said that the best deal authors could get from Hollywood was when the film rights were bought but no movie was ever made. (This frequently happens: the rights to Stranger in a Strange Land, the Foundation Trilogy, and many other works have been bouncing around in Hollywood for many years.)
The Gaia hypothesis is one reason. Sure, there are extremophile species on Earth, but there's life all over Earth. If there were life on Mars, it has probably, like on Earth, had hundreds of millions of years to evolve, grow, and spread across the planet in one form or another, changing the environment to make it even more suitable for life. So the Gaia hypothesis argument is basically that we are unlikely to find just a little life on Mars, because there would either be so much that we could easily see it, or none at all.
Sounds like a good argument for having showers available at workplaces.
Sorry, I don't think feeding the giant bureaucracy that NASA has become will get the results we want. Here's my manned space program:
You can tell from the picture that the clothesline is threaded through the kid's clothes. The clothespins are just for show and aren't actually holding him up.
It's just that in the future, you'll get your news 2.5 hours later....
I think you're on the right track with a low monthly fee, but I'd rather see a micro-payment system from the start. Set the per-item fees so low (a penny or less) that few would complain, because it would only add up to maybe a dollar or so per month for most web users. Of course it would have to be secure (e.g.: an article can't say it's $.05, then charge you $5) and easy for everyone to use. Legal issues aside, I think the newspapers might be able set something up by partnering with ISPs, so that the software can be installed at the ISP level, with no user downloads/plug-ins needed. Offer the ISPs half the income, and they might go for it.
I realize there are many problems: privacy, foreign readers, etc. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple, easy, widespread way to pay a tiny amount of money for something online? Think of all the writers, artists, musicians, coders, etc. who could benefit. PayPal is too cumbersome and not fine-grained enough. Would you pay a penny for a blog post that made you laugh out loud? Or to hear one song by an unknown band you think you might like? I would. Multiply that by tens of thousands of web users, and those folks are making a living.
Of course, the newspapers will probably see this as too penny-ante, be too impatient to start something small and make it grow, and want $$/month subscriptions, which just won't work for most of them.
Could it be that the commercial broadcasters resent having a competitor funded by a tax on every TV, while they have to do hard stuff like get good ratings and sell advertising?
All bureaucracies tend to become less efficient over time: see the Peter Principle, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, Parkinson's Law, etc. They grow sclerotic with timeservers and brownnosers, work more for themselves and less for their supposed goals, and the highest-quality employees retire or leave for greener pastures. And if you are more or less a government-authorized monopoly you don't worry much about the competition.
Here's how I'd get back to the Moon: 1) Give Burt Rutan $10 billion. 2) Tell him to get us back to the Moon. 3) Stand back.
Indeed, that's very possible: the contract between the Communication Workers of America and AT&T expired on April 11th.
Having coal mine fires that burn 20 million tons of coal a year is a huge factor. In fact, the amount of CO2 they produce is about 2-3% of annual worldwide production from fossil fuels, or roughly equal to the CO2 emissions of all the cars and light trucks in the U.S.
Then who are the Dutch?
(Seinfeld reference)
Obviously there's a woman on the cotton swab assembly line who leads a secret life of crime!
I wonder why this doesn't happen more often. The vast majority of online scams (fake drugs, etc.) and spammers get their money through credit cards. Why not more effort to cut off their source of funds? It seems like a weak point in the operations.
Come on, of course it was state-sponsored. Russia clearly had the most motive of any country, and has a government with authoritarian leanings and a track record of things like assassinating critics. But set aside motive/means/opportunity and look at it this way: does anyone really believe that in today's Russia someone could mount a large, sustained cyber attack on a neighboring country without the government knowing about it? Does anyone think that Russia couldn't have stopped the attacks if they'd wanted to? It was just unconventional warfare with plausible deniability.
Where do you get that idea? The average combined federal and state corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 39.3 percent, second among OECD countries to Japan's combined rate of 39.5 percent.
The naiveté here is the assumption that everyone who signs on will follow through. The history of such high-minded arms agreements suggests otherwise. The Kellogg-Briand Pact didn't work. After signing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the Soviets continued their programs. There was also evidence that they violated the 1972 ABM treaty.
An international weapons ban is just like gun control: the people most likely to obey the law are the law-abiding citizens you usually don't have to worry about, while the people you most want to disarm are the criminals who are least likely to obey the law.
Indeed, which is why I wonder if it couldn't be done at the ISP level. If I were the newspaper industry (being killed by the web, because web ad revenue isn't close to replacing declining subscriptions and ads-on-paper), I'd approach ISPs with a micropayment system that they hosted and got a cut of. And I do mean micro: it shouldn't add more than a few dollars to the average user's account per month, so we're talking fractional cents per story. It has to be so small an amount that nobody sane can complain. Then, the content producers can make it up in volume. We already know they can't do it by charging dollars per story or tens of dollars per year per site.