And here I've been being without the benefit of an electronic assistant. I wonder how much more efficiently I could 'be' with this? Could I be twice as often? Twice as quickly? Or does it add another layer of being? Like a multibe-er or something.
I've learned that the IT policy language hasn't been permanently defeated - its just been shifted out of sight to an "outside section" of the current budget bill.
Of course not. But blogging is a new thing that's getting a lot of play, and Flock (after an afternoon of fiddling with it) very comfortably and seamlessly integrates all of these so you can just DO. I'm very impressed with it - there's nothing particularly innovative about it, but it takes flickr, blogging, and lots of other stuff and hands it to less savvy users. Wouldn't it be cool if blogs weren't only about tech stuff but also about old cars, old movies, and so on? Wouldn't it be neat if it were accessible in one app (without having to figure out how to install extensions) that allowed WWII vets (internationally) to post remembrances? It really is a point-and-click kind of thing with a pleasant interface that will allow a much wider group of people to communicate. I think it's cool, even if it isn't bleeding-edge.
With all due respect to your reaction (I don't disagree), I can't believe that this has you gagging and (for example) the U.S. government's attempts at regulating the Internet in favor of big business got less of a reaction from your peristaltic impulses.
All I'm saying is that Slashdot is full of pukable news caused by bureaucratic windbags who don't understand the technology they attack with legislation. SCO will get shot down every time (in the meantime costing everyone involved buckets of money), but this legal stuff can stick for a long, long time.
They are bulkier, but they are also rugged (as mentioned in other responses to your post). They're expensive (prohibitively so for me) but I'd buy a tricked-out ThinkPad if I could. The keyboards are the best in the land. I now buy Toshibas and put up with occasional meltdowns (the one I'm writing on now has had EVERYTHING replaced under warranty due to a well-documented problem). I don't like the problems, but I think the keyboards are the best of the consumer-grade laptops. I really like good keyboards and hate to adapt my actions to crappy ones.
Er... I agree with your first statement, though would add the next word:
"Congress shall make no law RESTRICTING..."
The point of the Constitution is to protect citizens, not politicians. I know, I know, politicians are citizens. But really, they take on a different role when they enter a race. Most politicians run for office based on integrity and policy, so they themselves offer up their own personal character for public analysis.
Given what has happened in the past, say, fifteen years, McCain-Feingold is an unfortunate necessity. People are willing to lie about their own (or their candidates') integrity in order to gain office. Moreover, people are willing to work very hard to obfuscate their own status as donors. I classify myself as a moderate liberal, and don't typically go in for legally-based restrictions on what people can do with their bucks. But the fact that people are lying willy-nilly about who they are and their status as donors makes me think that McCain-Feingold needs to happen. Even if it gets overturned later (though let's hope it's properly structured so it doesn't get overturned OR restrict the rights of people who want to donate money to candidates that they believe to be good for us all), it will send a message that the bullshit needs to stop and the jerks will get caught.
Here in Illinois, our previous Governor's trial is currently in jury deliberation. And our current Governor, who again won the primary last week, is in constant threat of getting bogged down in legal silliness himself. So I wish I could thumb my nose at the world, but we suck at this stuff around here. The point is that Congress sadly HAS to make laws because no one can win if they play by the ethical rules upon which our country was founded.
... I think ugly has nothing to do with it. Nor does pretty - csszendesign.com (as mentioned elsewhere) courts graphic designers rather than interface engineers, and it shows. The sites there are magnificently beautiful and almost exclusively unusable.
To use a dating site may seem like a bad example, but I think it's perfect - simplicity, usability (or clicks that translate into instant results), and content that people want are all more important in the long run than pretty stuff. This is not to say that pretty isn't important for some - a corporate site should reflect an elegance that will breed confidence in the company itself. But any kind of down-and-dirty sales site should be content-first. It can be done attractively (amazon.com is, of course, a great example of simple-but-broad usability with a pleasant design), but content is what sells.
So an ugly dating site with pics of hot chicks will sell. The interface is worth picking through for visitors. An elegant and usable design without the pictures of hot chicks simply wouldn't work.
If you haven't already, read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug http://www.stevekrug.com/. It's a brilliant and simple gateway drug into the endless world of usability. First you read that, then you read his friend Lou Rosenberg's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and before you know it you're reading Edward Tufte and sneaking around behind your wife's back building XUL or Python apps.
Once you're hooked, read The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. The former...
... is ancient by web chronology, but it sure does offer insight into interface design (including a great article about building a touch screen for Koko the sign-language-taught gorilla). The latter...
... is what happens when you get so deeply into interface design that you forget that the average users need things to stick to some of the more common conventions (right or wrong). Still, it offers a great view of where to start thinking about maximum interface efficiency.
Point is, all of this usability information is great and very important to know if you do this stuff for a living for a broad range of clients. However, it's not the be-all-end-all when it comes to pure information transfer. If you can get a fast-loading site with fewer usability conventions to sell your widgets (in the example given, that shouldn't be hard), why add to load times or add to the potential problems users will have? Go ugly and let your content sell itself.
Larry - great post, first of all! I hope I don't make a fool of myself trying to respond to it.
The problem with that ambivalence is: what defines a legitimate government? We (in the west) have developed the theory that for a government to be legitimate, it must have the consent of the governed, and that such legitimate governance is a fundamental human right. The question then becomes, how do the governed give that consent? For a couple thousand years in the west (ok, save the dark period between Octavian and the birth of western democracies) that has been via voting from time to time. Unfortunately, as we have seen in our nation recently, just because 50.01% of the public vote for one side doesn't mean the other 49.99% will happily accept the result. Fortunately, those in the west have learned to direct their unhappiness at waging future electoral combat, not civil war.
Good point, though that dark period you mention lasted about 1200 years until the Magna Carta (correct me if I'm wrong, though). And the system of government we're trying to spread didn't come along for almost 1800 years. So while I agree that these are better systems (though more about that below), I would beg to differ that we've been doing it for a couple of thousand years. It's a relatively new development (in its current form) on the scale of human self-ranking.
Semantics aside, though, I guess my point is (and you allude to this above) that not only does 50.1% of the vote not guarantee leadership by consent of the governed, victory in an election still does not guarantee that the leadership will act on the will of the people. Bush has lousy numbers right now and everything he does seems less popular than the previous act. He won on the electoral vote the first time and a hair of the popular vote this time, and he took that as a "mandate" to do more harm to our country, Constitution, and our trust of government. But I digress...
The point being: how can we accept that it is our fundamental human right, yet not the fundamental human right of Ahmed? Do we really believe that the government in power in Egypt is legitimate? The Taliban? Saddam? Assad? Or, Hu? How do we in the West deal with governments that are, given our fundamental beliefs, inherently illegitimate? Personally, I agree 100% with Bush that it should be our diplomatic goal to spread democracy, meaning government by the consent of the governed, around the world to every nation and every human. Not through war, but through pressure, through strings on our foreign aid, through the funding of education and opposition, and so on. Deal with the current, illegitimate government when we need to, but don't be shy that our goal is to eventually, sooner rather than later, deal with a legitimate one.
Good point. I would argue, though, that Democracy is something that can only be taken as birthright by its constituents, not imposed by another nation. Ahmed needs to want it badly enough to take it for himself. I can't think of anywhere with a democractic system that succeeded because it was forced by an invading nation. Sanctions and other techniques can work to some extent, as they expose the weaknesses of the current regime and eventually drive citizens to seek something better. But I think imposing freedom on people doesn't work any better than imposing other systems - people are quick to resent the new system and reject it as handily as others.
You might argue that the founding fathers of the U.S. were a minority but they knew what was best and fought and died for it. This is true, but they still did it themselves (with fortunate help from other countries who had entirely and almost exclusively self-serving reasons for doing it). I would venture to say that we got lucky - they guys who cared the most about Democracy in this country also saw fit to act equitably (up to a point) with the power they gained and design a system filled with safety valves. Haiti is a good example of elected officials exploiting the s
I like your bat idea - it would certainly ensure that the only remaining hijackers would have to be REALLY dedicated to what they were doing!
As for your second point, well put. I don't know if Democracy is the be-all-end-all, though. I mean, I certainly enjoy the benefits of it, but I hesitate to believe it should be spread around the world just because it provides our flavor of freedom. This is, in fact, one of many places where I and my president differ - I don't think we have a right to go spreading Democracy just because we think it works well. It works well in America (all editorial comments about the current state of things aside), but we are a very specific culture that doesn't necessarily represent human beings as a whole. Could be that some cultures prefer to have more decisions made for them by people who represent a higher power (in this case, the imams). I would suggest that what we call freedom isn't as important to some as the comfort of knowing that very holy men are making decisions on their behalf based on scripture (or whatever you call it).
Now, I'll grant you that my 1% vs. 99% thing is indeed oversimplistic. There are as many kinds of Muslims as there are kinds of Christians. Or Jews. Or Buddhists. Or whatever. I would bring up Pakistan (and maybe Indonesia, but I hesitate to speak so far out of my knowledge base) as a counter to your argument that there are no democracies that are basically Muslim. I honestly don't know how open the elections there are, and I could be totally wrong. But we as a country haven't had any philosophical differences with them - they seem to be Muslim AND on the same page as us (except when they're not, of course).
However, I'm talking completely out of my butt - I don't know all the political ins and outs of Pakistan. What I do know is that we made damn sure that democratic elections were held in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both countries largely used free and mostly fair elections to elect many of the same people we disapproved of in the first place. So perhaps that means that Islam and Democracy are incompatible, or maybe it means that Democracy isn't wanted or preferred by a large section of the population of the planet. At that point, you have to ask yourself if it's proper to keep insisting that countries do it - if they use Democracy to reject Democracy, that's a compelling argument against it (and for it, in a way, I suppose).
I certainly enjoy the benefits of Democracy, but I have a very Western ideology that works well with it. Besides, I'm Unitarian and an atheist - there's no way I could get behind a religious state. So take everything I say with a grain of salt - I was raised a bleeding-heart liberal and though I try not to let that color my analysis of things, I'm sure it does. Still, I can't help but notice that we as a nation try so hard to impose our ideology on other nations while we condemn China for doing the same (and the U.S.S.R. before them). To some extent they're just different systems, each with good and bad attributes that hurt and help people (in varying ratios, of course). To argue that there are hungry people in Communist countries (something that's been argued since the Reagan administration, as I remember it) is to ignore the hungry people here. To argue that Democracy gives people freedom here that is denied to others in other countries is to ignore the people who never learn to read in our schools and then are left behind when they can't read a ballot or a newspaper with election information.
But I sound more like a granola liberal with every character I type. I'm not without moderation, but I do wonder if we're not much better at pointing out the faults in other systems than fixing those in our own, you know?
I meant that in the face of all the silly and very dangerous rhetoric against Islam as a whole, perhaps playing to the over-simplistic mentality of the audience is warranted. Everyone seems to be scared of Muslims, despite the fact that a relative few self-proclaimed Muslims have successfully used the religion's name to scare the bananas out of the entire western world while millions of Muslims condemn this behavior and would never think to bastardize Islam for such purposes. So if the average Joe is scared of Islam because of a few hundred nutcases with lots of dollars and a significant ability to destroy humans and the sense of comfort held by the remaining humans, it stands to reason that the scared will be better spoken to if you generalize things a bit.
Also, there is one part of your otherwise insightful post where, in an apparent desire to be evenhanded, I think you misstep. You say:
"In the U.S., we're living in completely irrational fear of nineteen hijackers who are already dead (and one apparent moron who is currently on trial)."
Actually, we're living with the perfectly rational awareness that one or more of the people behind the attack, including a certain multibillionaire who possesses the will (and possibly still the means) to carry out such an attack, is still out there. I'm not saying the U.S. has handled everything the way I think it should have been handled -- far from it. But that's not the same thing as saying it's "irrational." That's like saying from 1942-1945, the U.S. was driven by an irrational fear of a few hundred Japanese naval aviators.
I completely agree with parts of that, but I still think there's irrational thought at play. When we travel in the U.S., we have to take our shoes off (due to Richard Reid, a very ineffective guy with a Bic lighter and explosive shoes), but our water supply and subway systems seem to still be fairly vulnerable. If I were an Al Qaeda guy, I wouldn't give another thought to attacking air travel - it's too well protected now (and I don't argue that there's value in that). But we keep looking for things under the streetlight, so to speak - it's easy to get all muscular at the airport, but we're still not thinking creatively about the very dangerous things people who hate us can do with a little energy.
Islam didn't make this stuff happen - I'd be willing to bet that under 1% of Muslims are causing 99% of the fear and reactionary behavior that occurs now. However, the more we discriminate in this country and the West in general, the more that 1% is going to increase out of simple survivalist fear of the West's opinions of Islam. We've seen how Iraq turned into an Al Qaeda-fought war based on our presence there. And if we keep being such chowderheads and generalizing about ALL Muslims (or ALL Sunnis, or ALL Shiites, or ALL Iraqis, or ALL Iranians, or whatever), more and more Muslims will begin to defend themselves against the West, causing a real divide between religions and cultures.
Agreed. However, I suspect what's happening here is that the exhibit curators are trying desperately to remind people that now-Muslim peoples are not just terrorist monsters. I think it's probably a quite sloppy and amateurish but very well-meant attempt by academics to use what they have at their fingertips (a bunch of antiquities and information) to prove to the western world that people we now think of as Muslims are not all simply religious fundamentalists or zealots.
Again, I do think it's sloppy and misleading. But if we (the West) are in a fight to prove or disprove the validity of a category of millions of individuals with a religion and region in common, is it any less valid to paint with a broad brush in response to broad-brush racism and discrimination? I know they're academics and should stick to ONLY facts (don't get me started about the Hollywood-inspired silliness that even invades the exhibits at the Field Museum here in Chicago), but we're at a bit of a turning point in the relationship between the West and the Middle East. Maybe the thought was that in the current climate it couldn't hurt to pump up the beauty of a region of people.
It's still dumb and kind of lazy, but I think the idea behind it may well be good. In the U.S., we're living in completely irrational fear of nineteen hijackers who are already dead (and one apparent moron who is currently on trial). In the UK, they/you are living in somewhat irrational fear of a relatively small number of past and future subway and bus bombers. The fear is real (as much as I want to be dismissive of it, I would be lying if I said I didn't think about September 11 every time I go downtown to the tall buildings or go to the airport), and perhaps the curators are simply trying to tap into something interesting and thought-provoking to counter it. I know I'd be tempted to if I had a basement full of things that proved that Muslims aren't fundamentally bad people.
It would be even better if they had put more thought and energy into the angle taken by the name of the exhibit (and maybe they have - it's too far [eight hours by plane] for me to go see it). But the semantics of the exhibit may simply be a combination of what will draw people to the exhibit and what will explain (if a bit clumsily) one global value of a VERY large and diverse group of people.
Before I begin, let me say that I am a space idiot and an optics idiot. I'm a graphic designer, for God's sake, and I admit up-front that I know NOTHING about this.
HOWEVER, I wonder out loud (and ask for all your input as I'd like to learn) if some of the resolution issues discussed here aren't VERY different between Earth and Mars based on the atmosphere. Earth has, as I understand it, a very heavy atmosphere, and Mars (according to a quick Google search) seems to have a thin, light atmosphere. But whether you assume light to be a wave or energy (or both or neither), would it not follow that all the water and crap in the atmosphere wouldn't create a somewhat unpredictable lens (or more to the point, several layers of lenses) that would obviously have to be accounted for? I'm sure this is figured in to the calculations of the orbiter lens designs, but I can't help but wonder if the relatively low resolution is also a product of the variation in the relative sludge (compared to from-space or from-the-surface shots) through which the pictures will be shot.
This looks like a computer game I had in the '90s called Mendel. It was a little walking bot like this (six legs, looked like a bug) that actually learned a little bit as you guided it through various space-stationish environments. Obviously it was all in a very controlled virtual environment, but it did start to object and resist if you walked it off an edge too many times. You could get it to become resistant to self-destructive behavior, but if you abused the privilege, you couldn't get it to do anything after a while.
Don't get me wrong - I only mention this as an example of what one would do under desperate circumstances. Given a completely me-or-her scenario, I'll start pitching kidneys willy-nilly. Hell, I bet that given proper incentive, I could eject one right now. But here in the U.S., that doesn't tend to come up. I was thinking more of third-world countries where one's commodities are a bit more raw than here.
My main point is less about whether I'd personally need to sell organs and more about what I think the "typical" parent would do for their kid. If all other avenues of income are exhausted (which DOES happen in less opulent countries than mine), I can completely understand how a parent would offer organs in exchange for food. Of course, such more routinely desperate environments tend to create different reactions in different people - life is less or more valuable, depending on gender, health, surroundings, and who-knows-what-else. You know, survival vs. living.
It's all grisly - I sincerely hope that no one ever has to make such a choice about their own or the recently dead's organs. If my kid were facing life without innoculations and I had a big bag full of valuable organs in front of me (or in me), I might make some very morally compromising decisions.
NOW, ALL THAT BEING SAID... I get the impression that this story is more about profit than despair. These people should go down - no excuses.
Gotta say, my opinions have changed since I had a child.
If I were in more dire straits than I am and needed to weigh a grim future for my child against my own ability to supply several body parts that would net enough to feed her until adulthood, it would genuinely be a tough choice. Desperation breeds ingenuity (or moral flexibility), in a sense.
This is not to say that I am in that situation or that I need to do this - all I'm saying is that there are countless outside influences that could make you willingly apply for something like this. Alastair Cooke and his unwilling counterparts (now THAT'S a funny word in all of this) notwithstanding, I bet there are plenty of people who really see value in the ability to sell organs. Be it through desperation or greed or whatever, it kind of boils down to just another commodity like livestock, grain, or intellectual property. We do what we needs to for our families, and poverty or desperation or boredom dictates how far we will go.
I had a TRS-80 model III, followed by a model 4P (portable only because of the handle bolted to it) and then a 100. Somewhere in there I had a TI99-4a, as well. After that, I got my first old PC XT and progressed to where I am today (with about three Windows machines, two Linux boxes [both KubunTu], and a couple of Macs [both running Tiger]).
All tired MS bashing aside, I prefer to have a bit of diversity in my security. Seems to me that one product means one exploit can potentially bring it ALL down, whereas ZoneAlarm, NAV, AdAware, SpyBot, and whatever else you want to use gives you more of a chance of avoiding a complete meltdown.
'Course, I'm no security expert (so I may be off-base). But then I don't write all-in-one security software that fixes my own shortcomings and sell it for fifty bongos to trapped, desperate, and uneducated customers, either.
Okay, a LITTLE bashing...
Please correct me if I'm wrong - I really don't know much about this end of things and would like to know more. But logic seems to be all one needs. The only upside is that Slashdot's ubiquitous "My Grandmother" can go to Target or Best Buy and buy something that installs reliably and only has to be done once. This has more value than can be calculated - we deal with a lot of random customers in our family business and we get a ridiculous amount of infected mail and files. I suspect if there was a solid product that you could just roll into Windows Update (I know, I know), a lot of these problems would go away for a while. Not a great solution, but better than nothing.
'Course, if it breaks, you're sunk. And breakage in the "My Grandmother" scenario above is completely devastating. Personally, give me the Sony rootkit over this any day.
I don't know that it matters whether it's right or wrong that this guy goes to jail - the fact is that the law currently states that this guy goes to jail. IANAL, but I understand that sentencing leeway for judges tends to be fairly tight. Maybe the law should change or maybe it shouldn't, but this guy broke a law for which there is a punishment (sorry, a "correctional action"), and therefore he's going to the clink for three months. Now granted, I'd rather something else happen to him and the dealer on my corner take that cell space, but them's the breaks.
You think you've got troubles, brother - in fact, I didn't understand it, but pretended like I did sitting here at home alone in my office. "Great," says I, "what a windfall!"
And then I had to read the article to figure it out. Who on EARTH am I trying to impress here? How square are you if you try to outnerd yourself in an otherwise empty room?
Slashdot Mirror
And here I've been being without the benefit of an electronic assistant. I wonder how much more efficiently I could 'be' with this? Could I be twice as often? Twice as quickly? Or does it add another layer of being? Like a multibe-er or something.
... multibeer ...
Mmmm
So can we now use the Freedom of Information Act to request this data legally?
So is Massachusetts outsourcing laws now?
Of course not. But blogging is a new thing that's getting a lot of play, and Flock (after an afternoon of fiddling with it) very comfortably and seamlessly integrates all of these so you can just DO. I'm very impressed with it - there's nothing particularly innovative about it, but it takes flickr, blogging, and lots of other stuff and hands it to less savvy users. Wouldn't it be cool if blogs weren't only about tech stuff but also about old cars, old movies, and so on? Wouldn't it be neat if it were accessible in one app (without having to figure out how to install extensions) that allowed WWII vets (internationally) to post remembrances? It really is a point-and-click kind of thing with a pleasant interface that will allow a much wider group of people to communicate. I think it's cool, even if it isn't bleeding-edge.
With all due respect to your reaction (I don't disagree), I can't believe that this has you gagging and (for example) the U.S. government's attempts at regulating the Internet in favor of big business got less of a reaction from your peristaltic impulses.
All I'm saying is that Slashdot is full of pukable news caused by bureaucratic windbags who don't understand the technology they attack with legislation. SCO will get shot down every time (in the meantime costing everyone involved buckets of money), but this legal stuff can stick for a long, long time.
How do you pronounce the dollar sign in "M$ Winblows"?
They are bulkier, but they are also rugged (as mentioned in other responses to your post). They're expensive (prohibitively so for me) but I'd buy a tricked-out ThinkPad if I could. The keyboards are the best in the land. I now buy Toshibas and put up with occasional meltdowns (the one I'm writing on now has had EVERYTHING replaced under warranty due to a well-documented problem). I don't like the problems, but I think the keyboards are the best of the consumer-grade laptops. I really like good keyboards and hate to adapt my actions to crappy ones.
"The man behind Online Pr0n's Steve Lightspeed" seemed to indicate the story would not be about him, but about some other dude.
... welcome our new organizational management overlords.
Er ... I agree with your first statement, though would add the next word:
..."
"Congress shall make no law RESTRICTING
The point of the Constitution is to protect citizens, not politicians. I know, I know, politicians are citizens. But really, they take on a different role when they enter a race. Most politicians run for office based on integrity and policy, so they themselves offer up their own personal character for public analysis.
Given what has happened in the past, say, fifteen years, McCain-Feingold is an unfortunate necessity. People are willing to lie about their own (or their candidates') integrity in order to gain office. Moreover, people are willing to work very hard to obfuscate their own status as donors. I classify myself as a moderate liberal, and don't typically go in for legally-based restrictions on what people can do with their bucks. But the fact that people are lying willy-nilly about who they are and their status as donors makes me think that McCain-Feingold needs to happen. Even if it gets overturned later (though let's hope it's properly structured so it doesn't get overturned OR restrict the rights of people who want to donate money to candidates that they believe to be good for us all), it will send a message that the bullshit needs to stop and the jerks will get caught.
Here in Illinois, our previous Governor's trial is currently in jury deliberation. And our current Governor, who again won the primary last week, is in constant threat of getting bogged down in legal silliness himself. So I wish I could thumb my nose at the world, but we suck at this stuff around here. The point is that Congress sadly HAS to make laws because no one can win if they play by the ethical rules upon which our country was founded.
... I think ugly has nothing to do with it. Nor does pretty - csszendesign.com (as mentioned elsewhere) courts graphic designers rather than interface engineers, and it shows. The sites there are magnificently beautiful and almost exclusively unusable.
To use a dating site may seem like a bad example, but I think it's perfect - simplicity, usability (or clicks that translate into instant results), and content that people want are all more important in the long run than pretty stuff. This is not to say that pretty isn't important for some - a corporate site should reflect an elegance that will breed confidence in the company itself. But any kind of down-and-dirty sales site should be content-first. It can be done attractively (amazon.com is, of course, a great example of simple-but-broad usability with a pleasant design), but content is what sells.
So an ugly dating site with pics of hot chicks will sell. The interface is worth picking through for visitors. An elegant and usable design without the pictures of hot chicks simply wouldn't work.
If you haven't already, read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug http://www.stevekrug.com/. It's a brilliant and simple gateway drug into the endless world of usability. First you read that, then you read his friend Lou Rosenberg's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and before you know it you're reading Edward Tufte and sneaking around behind your wife's back building XUL or Python apps.
Once you're hooked, read The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. The former ...
1 42879216/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
...
1 42879290/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201517973/qid=1
... is ancient by web chronology, but it sure does offer insight into interface design (including a great article about building a touch screen for Koko the sign-language-taught gorilla). The latter
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201379376/qid=1
... is what happens when you get so deeply into interface design that you forget that the average users need things to stick to some of the more common conventions (right or wrong). Still, it offers a great view of where to start thinking about maximum interface efficiency.
Point is, all of this usability information is great and very important to know if you do this stuff for a living for a broad range of clients. However, it's not the be-all-end-all when it comes to pure information transfer. If you can get a fast-loading site with fewer usability conventions to sell your widgets (in the example given, that shouldn't be hard), why add to load times or add to the potential problems users will have? Go ugly and let your content sell itself.
Larry - great post, first of all! I hope I don't make a fool of myself trying to respond to it.
The problem with that ambivalence is: what defines a legitimate government? We (in the west) have developed the theory that for a government to be legitimate, it must have the consent of the governed, and that such legitimate governance is a fundamental human right. The question then becomes, how do the governed give that consent? For a couple thousand years in the west (ok, save the dark period between Octavian and the birth of western democracies) that has been via voting from time to time. Unfortunately, as we have seen in our nation recently, just because 50.01% of the public vote for one side doesn't mean the other 49.99% will happily accept the result. Fortunately, those in the west have learned to direct their unhappiness at waging future electoral combat, not civil war.
Good point, though that dark period you mention lasted about 1200 years until the Magna Carta (correct me if I'm wrong, though). And the system of government we're trying to spread didn't come along for almost 1800 years. So while I agree that these are better systems (though more about that below), I would beg to differ that we've been doing it for a couple of thousand years. It's a relatively new development (in its current form) on the scale of human self-ranking.
Semantics aside, though, I guess my point is (and you allude to this above) that not only does 50.1% of the vote not guarantee leadership by consent of the governed, victory in an election still does not guarantee that the leadership will act on the will of the people. Bush has lousy numbers right now and everything he does seems less popular than the previous act. He won on the electoral vote the first time and a hair of the popular vote this time, and he took that as a "mandate" to do more harm to our country, Constitution, and our trust of government. But I digress ...
The point being: how can we accept that it is our fundamental human right, yet not the fundamental human right of Ahmed? Do we really believe that the government in power in Egypt is legitimate? The Taliban? Saddam? Assad? Or, Hu? How do we in the West deal with governments that are, given our fundamental beliefs, inherently illegitimate? Personally, I agree 100% with Bush that it should be our diplomatic goal to spread democracy, meaning government by the consent of the governed, around the world to every nation and every human. Not through war, but through pressure, through strings on our foreign aid, through the funding of education and opposition, and so on. Deal with the current, illegitimate government when we need to, but don't be shy that our goal is to eventually, sooner rather than later, deal with a legitimate one.
Good point. I would argue, though, that Democracy is something that can only be taken as birthright by its constituents, not imposed by another nation. Ahmed needs to want it badly enough to take it for himself. I can't think of anywhere with a democractic system that succeeded because it was forced by an invading nation. Sanctions and other techniques can work to some extent, as they expose the weaknesses of the current regime and eventually drive citizens to seek something better. But I think imposing freedom on people doesn't work any better than imposing other systems - people are quick to resent the new system and reject it as handily as others.
You might argue that the founding fathers of the U.S. were a minority but they knew what was best and fought and died for it. This is true, but they still did it themselves (with fortunate help from other countries who had entirely and almost exclusively self-serving reasons for doing it). I would venture to say that we got lucky - they guys who cared the most about Democracy in this country also saw fit to act equitably (up to a point) with the power they gained and design a system filled with safety valves. Haiti is a good example of elected officials exploiting the s
Hi, Jack! (oops ...)
I like your bat idea - it would certainly ensure that the only remaining hijackers would have to be REALLY dedicated to what they were doing!
As for your second point, well put. I don't know if Democracy is the be-all-end-all, though. I mean, I certainly enjoy the benefits of it, but I hesitate to believe it should be spread around the world just because it provides our flavor of freedom. This is, in fact, one of many places where I and my president differ - I don't think we have a right to go spreading Democracy just because we think it works well. It works well in America (all editorial comments about the current state of things aside), but we are a very specific culture that doesn't necessarily represent human beings as a whole. Could be that some cultures prefer to have more decisions made for them by people who represent a higher power (in this case, the imams). I would suggest that what we call freedom isn't as important to some as the comfort of knowing that very holy men are making decisions on their behalf based on scripture (or whatever you call it).
Now, I'll grant you that my 1% vs. 99% thing is indeed oversimplistic. There are as many kinds of Muslims as there are kinds of Christians. Or Jews. Or Buddhists. Or whatever. I would bring up Pakistan (and maybe Indonesia, but I hesitate to speak so far out of my knowledge base) as a counter to your argument that there are no democracies that are basically Muslim. I honestly don't know how open the elections there are, and I could be totally wrong. But we as a country haven't had any philosophical differences with them - they seem to be Muslim AND on the same page as us (except when they're not, of course).
However, I'm talking completely out of my butt - I don't know all the political ins and outs of Pakistan. What I do know is that we made damn sure that democratic elections were held in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both countries largely used free and mostly fair elections to elect many of the same people we disapproved of in the first place. So perhaps that means that Islam and Democracy are incompatible, or maybe it means that Democracy isn't wanted or preferred by a large section of the population of the planet. At that point, you have to ask yourself if it's proper to keep insisting that countries do it - if they use Democracy to reject Democracy, that's a compelling argument against it (and for it, in a way, I suppose).
I certainly enjoy the benefits of Democracy, but I have a very Western ideology that works well with it. Besides, I'm Unitarian and an atheist - there's no way I could get behind a religious state. So take everything I say with a grain of salt - I was raised a bleeding-heart liberal and though I try not to let that color my analysis of things, I'm sure it does. Still, I can't help but notice that we as a nation try so hard to impose our ideology on other nations while we condemn China for doing the same (and the U.S.S.R. before them). To some extent they're just different systems, each with good and bad attributes that hurt and help people (in varying ratios, of course). To argue that there are hungry people in Communist countries (something that's been argued since the Reagan administration, as I remember it) is to ignore the hungry people here. To argue that Democracy gives people freedom here that is denied to others in other countries is to ignore the people who never learn to read in our schools and then are left behind when they can't read a ballot or a newspaper with election information.
But I sound more like a granola liberal with every character I type. I'm not without moderation, but I do wonder if we're not much better at pointing out the faults in other systems than fixing those in our own, you know?
Thanks - I had a blast writing it. :)
I meant that in the face of all the silly and very dangerous rhetoric against Islam as a whole, perhaps playing to the over-simplistic mentality of the audience is warranted. Everyone seems to be scared of Muslims, despite the fact that a relative few self-proclaimed Muslims have successfully used the religion's name to scare the bananas out of the entire western world while millions of Muslims condemn this behavior and would never think to bastardize Islam for such purposes. So if the average Joe is scared of Islam because of a few hundred nutcases with lots of dollars and a significant ability to destroy humans and the sense of comfort held by the remaining humans, it stands to reason that the scared will be better spoken to if you generalize things a bit.
I completely agree with parts of that, but I still think there's irrational thought at play. When we travel in the U.S., we have to take our shoes off (due to Richard Reid, a very ineffective guy with a Bic lighter and explosive shoes), but our water supply and subway systems seem to still be fairly vulnerable. If I were an Al Qaeda guy, I wouldn't give another thought to attacking air travel - it's too well protected now (and I don't argue that there's value in that). But we keep looking for things under the streetlight, so to speak - it's easy to get all muscular at the airport, but we're still not thinking creatively about the very dangerous things people who hate us can do with a little energy.
Islam didn't make this stuff happen - I'd be willing to bet that under 1% of Muslims are causing 99% of the fear and reactionary behavior that occurs now. However, the more we discriminate in this country and the West in general, the more that 1% is going to increase out of simple survivalist fear of the West's opinions of Islam. We've seen how Iraq turned into an Al Qaeda-fought war based on our presence there. And if we keep being such chowderheads and generalizing about ALL Muslims (or ALL Sunnis, or ALL Shiites, or ALL Iraqis, or ALL Iranians, or whatever), more and more Muslims will begin to defend themselves against the West, causing a real divide between religions and cultures.
Agreed. However, I suspect what's happening here is that the exhibit curators are trying desperately to remind people that now-Muslim peoples are not just terrorist monsters. I think it's probably a quite sloppy and amateurish but very well-meant attempt by academics to use what they have at their fingertips (a bunch of antiquities and information) to prove to the western world that people we now think of as Muslims are not all simply religious fundamentalists or zealots.
Again, I do think it's sloppy and misleading. But if we (the West) are in a fight to prove or disprove the validity of a category of millions of individuals with a religion and region in common, is it any less valid to paint with a broad brush in response to broad-brush racism and discrimination? I know they're academics and should stick to ONLY facts (don't get me started about the Hollywood-inspired silliness that even invades the exhibits at the Field Museum here in Chicago), but we're at a bit of a turning point in the relationship between the West and the Middle East. Maybe the thought was that in the current climate it couldn't hurt to pump up the beauty of a region of people.
It's still dumb and kind of lazy, but I think the idea behind it may well be good. In the U.S., we're living in completely irrational fear of nineteen hijackers who are already dead (and one apparent moron who is currently on trial). In the UK, they/you are living in somewhat irrational fear of a relatively small number of past and future subway and bus bombers. The fear is real (as much as I want to be dismissive of it, I would be lying if I said I didn't think about September 11 every time I go downtown to the tall buildings or go to the airport), and perhaps the curators are simply trying to tap into something interesting and thought-provoking to counter it. I know I'd be tempted to if I had a basement full of things that proved that Muslims aren't fundamentally bad people.
It would be even better if they had put more thought and energy into the angle taken by the name of the exhibit (and maybe they have - it's too far [eight hours by plane] for me to go see it). But the semantics of the exhibit may simply be a combination of what will draw people to the exhibit and what will explain (if a bit clumsily) one global value of a VERY large and diverse group of people.
Before I begin, let me say that I am a space idiot and an optics idiot. I'm a graphic designer, for God's sake, and I admit up-front that I know NOTHING about this.
HOWEVER, I wonder out loud (and ask for all your input as I'd like to learn) if some of the resolution issues discussed here aren't VERY different between Earth and Mars based on the atmosphere. Earth has, as I understand it, a very heavy atmosphere, and Mars (according to a quick Google search) seems to have a thin, light atmosphere. But whether you assume light to be a wave or energy (or both or neither), would it not follow that all the water and crap in the atmosphere wouldn't create a somewhat unpredictable lens (or more to the point, several layers of lenses) that would obviously have to be accounted for? I'm sure this is figured in to the calculations of the orbiter lens designs, but I can't help but wonder if the relatively low resolution is also a product of the variation in the relative sludge (compared to from-space or from-the-surface shots) through which the pictures will be shot.
Well, shoot - I guess you can't hit Mars EVERY time you shoot something at it ... still, an 80% strike rate is pretty good for wartime.
This looks like a computer game I had in the '90s called Mendel. It was a little walking bot like this (six legs, looked like a bug) that actually learned a little bit as you guided it through various space-stationish environments. Obviously it was all in a very controlled virtual environment, but it did start to object and resist if you walked it off an edge too many times. You could get it to become resistant to self-destructive behavior, but if you abused the privilege, you couldn't get it to do anything after a while.
Don't get me wrong - I only mention this as an example of what one would do under desperate circumstances. Given a completely me-or-her scenario, I'll start pitching kidneys willy-nilly. Hell, I bet that given proper incentive, I could eject one right now. But here in the U.S., that doesn't tend to come up. I was thinking more of third-world countries where one's commodities are a bit more raw than here.
... I get the impression that this story is more about profit than despair. These people should go down - no excuses.
My main point is less about whether I'd personally need to sell organs and more about what I think the "typical" parent would do for their kid. If all other avenues of income are exhausted (which DOES happen in less opulent countries than mine), I can completely understand how a parent would offer organs in exchange for food. Of course, such more routinely desperate environments tend to create different reactions in different people - life is less or more valuable, depending on gender, health, surroundings, and who-knows-what-else. You know, survival vs. living.
It's all grisly - I sincerely hope that no one ever has to make such a choice about their own or the recently dead's organs. If my kid were facing life without innoculations and I had a big bag full of valuable organs in front of me (or in me), I might make some very morally compromising decisions.
NOW, ALL THAT BEING SAID
Gotta say, my opinions have changed since I had a child.
If I were in more dire straits than I am and needed to weigh a grim future for my child against my own ability to supply several body parts that would net enough to feed her until adulthood, it would genuinely be a tough choice. Desperation breeds ingenuity (or moral flexibility), in a sense.
This is not to say that I am in that situation or that I need to do this - all I'm saying is that there are countless outside influences that could make you willingly apply for something like this. Alastair Cooke and his unwilling counterparts (now THAT'S a funny word in all of this) notwithstanding, I bet there are plenty of people who really see value in the ability to sell organs. Be it through desperation or greed or whatever, it kind of boils down to just another commodity like livestock, grain, or intellectual property. We do what we needs to for our families, and poverty or desperation or boredom dictates how far we will go.
... Galaga or Ms. Pacman or Centipede, it's of no use to me.
I had a TRS-80 model III, followed by a model 4P (portable only because of the handle bolted to it) and then a 100. Somewhere in there I had a TI99-4a, as well. After that, I got my first old PC XT and progressed to where I am today (with about three Windows machines, two Linux boxes [both KubunTu], and a couple of Macs [both running Tiger]).
All tired MS bashing aside, I prefer to have a bit of diversity in my security. Seems to me that one product means one exploit can potentially bring it ALL down, whereas ZoneAlarm, NAV, AdAware, SpyBot, and whatever else you want to use gives you more of a chance of avoiding a complete meltdown.
...
'Course, I'm no security expert (so I may be off-base). But then I don't write all-in-one security software that fixes my own shortcomings and sell it for fifty bongos to trapped, desperate, and uneducated customers, either.
Okay, a LITTLE bashing
Please correct me if I'm wrong - I really don't know much about this end of things and would like to know more. But logic seems to be all one needs. The only upside is that Slashdot's ubiquitous "My Grandmother" can go to Target or Best Buy and buy something that installs reliably and only has to be done once. This has more value than can be calculated - we deal with a lot of random customers in our family business and we get a ridiculous amount of infected mail and files. I suspect if there was a solid product that you could just roll into Windows Update (I know, I know), a lot of these problems would go away for a while. Not a great solution, but better than nothing.
'Course, if it breaks, you're sunk. And breakage in the "My Grandmother" scenario above is completely devastating. Personally, give me the Sony rootkit over this any day.
I don't know that it matters whether it's right or wrong that this guy goes to jail - the fact is that the law currently states that this guy goes to jail. IANAL, but I understand that sentencing leeway for judges tends to be fairly tight. Maybe the law should change or maybe it shouldn't, but this guy broke a law for which there is a punishment (sorry, a "correctional action"), and therefore he's going to the clink for three months. Now granted, I'd rather something else happen to him and the dealer on my corner take that cell space, but them's the breaks.
You think you've got troubles, brother - in fact, I didn't understand it, but pretended like I did sitting here at home alone in my office. "Great," says I, "what a windfall!"
And then I had to read the article to figure it out. Who on EARTH am I trying to impress here? How square are you if you try to outnerd yourself in an otherwise empty room?