In the event of #3, if my understanding of Newton's Laws is accurate, the winning astronaut will still die of a massive injury to the back of the head as he careens backwards.
Which would also serve to solve the problem of people who pick fights in tight quarters.
Thought I don't think the article goes into the breakdown within the snail mail set, I would think that handwriting would add a big variable to the perceived sanity of the sender. While the snail mail set seemed less insane to the researchers, I'd be interested to know what percentage was handwritten.
Of course, the criteria used to determine relative sanity (or other factors) in these letters is largely subjective anyway. What qualifies as profanity, for example? So while the study is not invalid because of this, it's clearly based on subjective assessments of the letters and therefore things like handwriting (which is subject to interpretation) are going to increase your chances of seeming nuts.
In other words, with even the best handwriting out there, I'd think you'll seem at best no MORE nuts than someone who types a letter.
I hear you, and do agree to some extent. I think Bush 43 is a somewhat unique example, though -- the other 42 presidents, with few exceptions, didn't do as much to change the country. Personally I think it's changed for the worse, and I think it's important to a) start changing things back (as it's going to take a while), and b) present a very united front in this next election. The numbers will pan out okay if Colbert gets a delegate, but I think the image of a serious and united focus is important, too. Not only to take back the country from Bush and his ilk, but to show BOTH sides of Congress once again what the people want. They didn't get it when we elected them, so a little extra firmness in our resolve this time around is all the more important.
I guess what I'm saying in part is that I don't feel this is the election to start experimenting with comedians (by profession, not by nature) running for president. This one needs to feel like a crusade to people, with all the gravity that goes along with that. And once we get the country back and start fixing what's broken, we can start thinking again about better ways of electing people that allow for greater choice (I'm personally a fan of approval voting, but there are plenty of better alternatives to our current electoral system). But we have to take it back first, and a country under Giuliani or Romney (or any Republican, save for perhaps Ron Paul) won't allow for much change.
He wasn't rejected by any kind of election commission -- he was rejected by the South Carolina Democratic Party, on whose ticket he was trying to run. I happen to love Stephen Colbert and watch almost every night, but if there's a tight race in South Carolina (which there might be given Clinton's general popularity and Edwards' southern appeal), they can't afford to water down the votes in South Carolina by allowing a TV personality to make a statement. If I understand what Colbert is going for, it's a valid statement. But I think the general idea is that too much is at stake this time around, and we need to have definitive votes for real candidates so the Democratic Party can circle the wagons and put a well-supported candidate out there.
Again, I happen to really enjoy Stephen Colbert. But what if he skims significant votes from Clinton, Obama, or Edwards in the primary? He will have a fun win in South Carolina, but it will weaken the position of the Democrats nationally. It won't be on the scale of Ralph Nader, but it will give the Republicans a talking point that the Democrats don't want to give them.
Colbert made his point, I think, and was not likely to pursue this to the end anyway. I think he meant to make a statement and was not seriously pursuing actually being President. And our current bozo of a president is an example of that very phenomenon.
I know you're kidding, but your statement really does represent a lot of the reasons why new users are intimidated by Linux. It's not hard but it's different, and asking a simple question in a forum is often met with ten snotty comments about reading the manual (which is often incomplete or cryptic) and no actual helpful answers. People don't like to feel dumb, and sadly we geeks have a tendency to accidentally or intentionally demean new users when we should be trying to encourage and help them.
It's a given that big corporate entities like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all the others are going to try to patent everything they can. It's been discussed here before, and it's just a cold war effect -- if you're the only company NOT trying to patent everything, you lose. It's a dumb way to run a world, but there you go.
But the USPTO is the problem. Granting a patent like this just reinforces the grabby, greedy behavior of the big companies and creates an environment where companies are pitted against each other not in services or products but in ownership of intellectual property. If my company can get the edge in my industry by patenting something my competition uses (prior art be damned), there are going to be a bunch of businesspeople and attorneys within my company (not to mention shareholders) who are going to insist I file the patent. It's up to the USPTO to call bullshit on these things, and it's not doing it.
Not to mention that the big companies seem to get these things to go through while little guys seem to come up empty when they try to do it. If you have enough attorneys, you can pretty much do anything anymore. But that's a rant for another day...
"You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rmp you press the joystick and it takes off," Abdullahi explained from the cockpit.
A quick search for "RMP" comes up with "Risk Management Plan," something that will no doubt come in handy in any homemade helicopter.
The Chicago-to-London Rail Express could be a little hard to work out.
No, wait, we'll just take the Chicago to Paris and transfer to the Chunnel train...
Seriously, though, this is dumb. Terrorists with the ability to blow up a plane (or fly one in to a building) also have the resources to have false identification AND enough lead time to wait three days. This does not deter the bad guys, and it only bogs down the lives of law-abiding citizens.
Somewhere down the line, I see a per-play fee replacing the per-track fee. Pretty soon we'll be tracked and billed at the end of the month for our music usage. Not to be paranoid about it, of course, but every time I think I've seen the most ridiculous behavior by the recording industry they do something a little more invasive and restrictive.
... but for now a $400 computer with Windows sounds pretty good to most people, too. And the learning process (particularly if they choose XP over Vista, as they can for now) will be significantly less arduous for the average joe user with some previous Windows experience. Not that the friendlier Linux distros (Ubuntu and its ilk) are hard to use, but they're more intimidating than what people already know backwards and forwards.
Okay, I'm being facetious. But that does beg another question -- if the rules specifically include public figures, what if some event beyond your control makes you a public figure? Does that then mean you can be used in advertising? For example, Richard Jewell was a security guard at the Atlanta Olympic bombing and was subsequently wrongly accused of being the bomber. His face was everywhere for months, thus clearly making him a public figure (certainly against his wishes). Could his image then be used in advertising? You know, for Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal or something?
As to who's at fault, I suspect it's got to be Virgin. The end user is the one who has to ensure that there was a model release, not any or all of the parties along the way. This string of parties is fairly small, but you could see how you might have five or ten parties along the line with something like this. And expecting any of them but the last one, the one who uses the photos commercially, to ensure that there's a release is impractical and probably impossible.
There are other issues about the youth counselor pasting the wrong kind of license on it in the first place, but that's almost a whole other discussion.
Several people have died from this crap, unfortunately. I agree with some of the people around here that the Taser is deemed to be non-lethal force and therefore gets used to subdue people a lot more freely than a handgun or a club. But given the number of fatalities from Tasers (the CBS story linked above counts about 70 deaths, and that was just up to 2004), it could be that the police are coming a lot closer to killing people than they think. And if they don't know the scope of the force they're imparting upon someone, they'd better not impart it. They're the ones who are supposed to be in control of themselves, you know?
I hear ya, but "airplane mode" is a very different description than "off." When I turn off the phone on my Treo, it says "Phone off." That's really all I'm saying -- the message should state the, well, state of the phone. And has been pointed out elsewhere, this guy really should have spent a moment with his manual when he got the phones. Still, it's a good reminder for interface designers that simple phrasing is always better.
For example, if someone has never been on a plane and doesn't know the drill, traveling out of range (say, by ship as seems to be the case here) will still run up the bill and at no time have anything to do with an airplane.
I know it sounds like splitting hairs, but it's phrasing that relied fairly heavily on users interpreting what "airplane mode" must mean. I'll grant you that most iPhone users could probably figure it out (or at the very least have their curiosity piqued to the point that they'd read the manual), but it's kind of muddy language. Particularly given Apple's claims to very clean, intuitive interfaces.
IANAB (I am not a botanist), but I know that you can get quite sick burning things like poison ivy, poison oak, and so on -- you can inhale the irritants and basically end up with poison ivy in your windpipe and lungs. So I'd be curious as to exactly HOW this stuff is poisonous -- if its natural oils are irritants like the ones I mention above, I wonder what you'd have to do to extract all that poison before putting it in a combustion engine and, well, combusting it.
Or if the constipation cure would be the worst result of the exhaust, you'd have a whole lot of motorists driving very dangerously in a hurry to get home...
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the iPhone isn't just a phone. It's a PDA, mp3 player, and so on.
Moreover, when I travel I very often need to have a phone immediately upon arrival at home (whoever is picking me up usually has to wait at a staging area a few minutes away from baggage claim, so I have to call them and tell them to come on ahead).
"Airplane Mode" isn't a proper name for having all external signals turned off. On my Treo, you can turn off the phone portion very easily and still use the rest of the PDA. Sounds like the iPhone is far less intuitive.
Indeed. To everyone who responded with lists of conservative blogs, I know of the biggies. But I didn't bring up DailyKos as the be-all, end-all (and given the reaction here, it was a poor choice for an example) -- I just think if you could count (which you can't, and I'm just going on a hunch here), you'd find a lot more small liberal blogs than small conservative blogs. I just think the average age of liberals is younger than that of conservatives -- not wrong or right, just how I suspect it is. And the young blog more than the old. So to the average conservative out there, it's going to feel like there are more liberal blogs than conservative ones.
I'm not trying to cast judgment -- I happen to be a liberal, but my original post was a genuine attempt to understand out loud some of the suspicion and irritation I've read among some conservatives. On my little personal blog, I have one conservative guy who comes around (he found me through a friend), and we have great conversations and debates and we respect each other a lot. To be honest, I get very excited when I see a post from him -- they're always artistically and brilliantly designed to make me defend my stance while never getting nasty. Sometimes I can defend my points and sometimes I can't, but he keeps me honest and I try to do the same on his blog (though I take a bit of a drubbing from his readers when I do -- he's got a lot more traffic and conservative views are the only focus of his blog).
I'd love for there to be more little blogs (liberal OR conservative OR Martian or whatever) where that kind of discourse can take place. Unfortunately, it seems like many of the ones I've checked out are mostly preaching to their own choir (this one guy aside, mine too). The froth factor is high -- people of like mind getting each other all boiled up about things they know they all commonly disagree with. But a lot of the little conservative ones I've read seem to have this undertone of feeling like they're alone in the universe. Just my experience -- it could be that I've lucked into reading the right combination of blogs to give me this impression. But that's how it seems to me -- there are just more liberals blogging than conservatives. I just think the vote-to-blog-reader/writer ratio is very different between liberals and conservatives. And I was suggesting that this could cause some feelings of threat/jealousy/indignation among conservatives, who (according to my home-grown logic) may be less represented on the Web.
But to suggest that the greater coverage of the DailyKos is an indication of the media's liberal bent? I disagree. DailyKos loudly disagrees with the current administration, which makes for really good sensationalist news bites (bytes?). If there was a liberal administration and it was being loudly denounced by a conservative blog, I bet it would get a bunch of press, too. Fights are good "news" (quotes very much intended as sarcastic finger quotes). As it stands, agreeing with whoever is in the White House makes for boring copy as far as the CNNs of the world are concerned.
This seems to be good news (though I'll admit that I haven't been following the issue as much as I'd like to have -- I'm sure someone will point out a very reasonable downside to it).
I think the bad feelings (and subsequent reactionary attempts at regulation) come from the fact that the conservative voter base tends to be a bit older and less Internet-savvy. There's no reason they couldn't have the conservative equivalent of DailyKos, but it just wouldn't get read as much. So to conservatives it feels like there's an unfair advantage and that bloggers should follow the same rules as those who advertise on the Marconi Wireless to "level the playing field." But really, the right reaction would be to educate their voter base on this great new medium. I don't know if it would work, but I'm glad this sense of unfairness didn't result in opinion and discourse being subjected to the same regulations as advertising and fund raising. They're very different, and the latter two become empty manipulation without the first two.
When this first came up, I figured it was a lock that bloggers would get nailed (the FEC has a very colorful history of not understanding when technology is good and when technology is bad).
Slashdot Mirror
In the event of #3, if my understanding of Newton's Laws is accurate, the winning astronaut will still die of a massive injury to the back of the head as he careens backwards.
Which would also serve to solve the problem of people who pick fights in tight quarters.
Thought I don't think the article goes into the breakdown within the snail mail set, I would think that handwriting would add a big variable to the perceived sanity of the sender. While the snail mail set seemed less insane to the researchers, I'd be interested to know what percentage was handwritten.
Of course, the criteria used to determine relative sanity (or other factors) in these letters is largely subjective anyway. What qualifies as profanity, for example? So while the study is not invalid because of this, it's clearly based on subjective assessments of the letters and therefore things like handwriting (which is subject to interpretation) are going to increase your chances of seeming nuts.
In other words, with even the best handwriting out there, I'd think you'll seem at best no MORE nuts than someone who types a letter.
I hear you, and do agree to some extent. I think Bush 43 is a somewhat unique example, though -- the other 42 presidents, with few exceptions, didn't do as much to change the country. Personally I think it's changed for the worse, and I think it's important to a) start changing things back (as it's going to take a while), and b) present a very united front in this next election. The numbers will pan out okay if Colbert gets a delegate, but I think the image of a serious and united focus is important, too. Not only to take back the country from Bush and his ilk, but to show BOTH sides of Congress once again what the people want. They didn't get it when we elected them, so a little extra firmness in our resolve this time around is all the more important.
I guess what I'm saying in part is that I don't feel this is the election to start experimenting with comedians (by profession, not by nature) running for president. This one needs to feel like a crusade to people, with all the gravity that goes along with that. And once we get the country back and start fixing what's broken, we can start thinking again about better ways of electing people that allow for greater choice (I'm personally a fan of approval voting, but there are plenty of better alternatives to our current electoral system). But we have to take it back first, and a country under Giuliani or Romney (or any Republican, save for perhaps Ron Paul) won't allow for much change.
He wasn't rejected by any kind of election commission -- he was rejected by the South Carolina Democratic Party, on whose ticket he was trying to run. I happen to love Stephen Colbert and watch almost every night, but if there's a tight race in South Carolina (which there might be given Clinton's general popularity and Edwards' southern appeal), they can't afford to water down the votes in South Carolina by allowing a TV personality to make a statement. If I understand what Colbert is going for, it's a valid statement. But I think the general idea is that too much is at stake this time around, and we need to have definitive votes for real candidates so the Democratic Party can circle the wagons and put a well-supported candidate out there. Again, I happen to really enjoy Stephen Colbert. But what if he skims significant votes from Clinton, Obama, or Edwards in the primary? He will have a fun win in South Carolina, but it will weaken the position of the Democrats nationally. It won't be on the scale of Ralph Nader, but it will give the Republicans a talking point that the Democrats don't want to give them. Colbert made his point, I think, and was not likely to pursue this to the end anyway. I think he meant to make a statement and was not seriously pursuing actually being President. And our current bozo of a president is an example of that very phenomenon.
I know you're kidding, but your statement really does represent a lot of the reasons why new users are intimidated by Linux. It's not hard but it's different, and asking a simple question in a forum is often met with ten snotty comments about reading the manual (which is often incomplete or cryptic) and no actual helpful answers. People don't like to feel dumb, and sadly we geeks have a tendency to accidentally or intentionally demean new users when we should be trying to encourage and help them.
... they're still monkeys and we're running the show -- they have no concept of Numero Uno.
It's a given that big corporate entities like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all the others are going to try to patent everything they can. It's been discussed here before, and it's just a cold war effect -- if you're the only company NOT trying to patent everything, you lose. It's a dumb way to run a world, but there you go.
...
But the USPTO is the problem. Granting a patent like this just reinforces the grabby, greedy behavior of the big companies and creates an environment where companies are pitted against each other not in services or products but in ownership of intellectual property. If my company can get the edge in my industry by patenting something my competition uses (prior art be damned), there are going to be a bunch of businesspeople and attorneys within my company (not to mention shareholders) who are going to insist I file the patent. It's up to the USPTO to call bullshit on these things, and it's not doing it.
Not to mention that the big companies seem to get these things to go through while little guys seem to come up empty when they try to do it. If you have enough attorneys, you can pretty much do anything anymore. But that's a rant for another day
A quick search for "RMP" comes up with "Risk Management Plan," something that will no doubt come in handy in any homemade helicopter.
I love that song! "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers ..."
The Chicago-to-London Rail Express could be a little hard to work out.
...
No, wait, we'll just take the Chicago to Paris and transfer to the Chunnel train
Seriously, though, this is dumb. Terrorists with the ability to blow up a plane (or fly one in to a building) also have the resources to have false identification AND enough lead time to wait three days. This does not deter the bad guys, and it only bogs down the lives of law-abiding citizens.
Criminy, where does the TSA get this crap?
Doh! You're right. I work in part in the printing world and must have a bit of a muscle memory problem. Thank you, sir or madam.
Somewhere down the line, I see a per-play fee replacing the per-track fee. Pretty soon we'll be tracked and billed at the end of the month for our music usage. Not to be paranoid about it, of course, but every time I think I've seen the most ridiculous behavior by the recording industry they do something a little more invasive and restrictive.
You'd just be sued by R.R. Donnelly for misuse of their copyrighted material.
... but for now a $400 computer with Windows sounds pretty good to most people, too. And the learning process (particularly if they choose XP over Vista, as they can for now) will be significantly less arduous for the average joe user with some previous Windows experience. Not that the friendlier Linux distros (Ubuntu and its ilk) are hard to use, but they're more intimidating than what people already know backwards and forwards.
It's broken here -- WinXP SP2, MS Office 2007 (Excel v. 12.0.6024.5000).
I've done a lot of defending of MS for Office 2007, but this is a little scary. Word can suck in spots, but math really has to work.
Yeah, but they just MADE her a public figure ...
Okay, I'm being facetious. But that does beg another question -- if the rules specifically include public figures, what if some event beyond your control makes you a public figure? Does that then mean you can be used in advertising? For example, Richard Jewell was a security guard at the Atlanta Olympic bombing and was subsequently wrongly accused of being the bomber. His face was everywhere for months, thus clearly making him a public figure (certainly against his wishes). Could his image then be used in advertising? You know, for Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal or something?
As to who's at fault, I suspect it's got to be Virgin. The end user is the one who has to ensure that there was a model release, not any or all of the parties along the way. This string of parties is fairly small, but you could see how you might have five or ten parties along the line with something like this. And expecting any of them but the last one, the one who uses the photos commercially, to ensure that there's a release is impractical and probably impossible.
There are other issues about the youth counselor pasting the wrong kind of license on it in the first place, but that's almost a whole other discussion.
Several people have died from this crap, unfortunately. I agree with some of the people around here that the Taser is deemed to be non-lethal force and therefore gets used to subdue people a lot more freely than a handgun or a club. But given the number of fatalities from Tasers (the CBS story linked above counts about 70 deaths, and that was just up to 2004), it could be that the police are coming a lot closer to killing people than they think. And if they don't know the scope of the force they're imparting upon someone, they'd better not impart it. They're the ones who are supposed to be in control of themselves, you know?
... parking metres?
...
tee hee
I hear ya, but "airplane mode" is a very different description than "off." When I turn off the phone on my Treo, it says "Phone off." That's really all I'm saying -- the message should state the, well, state of the phone. And has been pointed out elsewhere, this guy really should have spent a moment with his manual when he got the phones. Still, it's a good reminder for interface designers that simple phrasing is always better.
For example, if someone has never been on a plane and doesn't know the drill, traveling out of range (say, by ship as seems to be the case here) will still run up the bill and at no time have anything to do with an airplane.
I know it sounds like splitting hairs, but it's phrasing that relied fairly heavily on users interpreting what "airplane mode" must mean. I'll grant you that most iPhone users could probably figure it out (or at the very least have their curiosity piqued to the point that they'd read the manual), but it's kind of muddy language. Particularly given Apple's claims to very clean, intuitive interfaces.
Cool. Got it. Thanks!
IANAB (I am not a botanist), but I know that you can get quite sick burning things like poison ivy, poison oak, and so on -- you can inhale the irritants and basically end up with poison ivy in your windpipe and lungs. So I'd be curious as to exactly HOW this stuff is poisonous -- if its natural oils are irritants like the ones I mention above, I wonder what you'd have to do to extract all that poison before putting it in a combustion engine and, well, combusting it.
...
Or if the constipation cure would be the worst result of the exhaust, you'd have a whole lot of motorists driving very dangerously in a hurry to get home
Can you type a little more slowly? I'm having trouble keeping up ...
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the iPhone isn't just a phone. It's a PDA, mp3 player, and so on.
Moreover, when I travel I very often need to have a phone immediately upon arrival at home (whoever is picking me up usually has to wait at a staging area a few minutes away from baggage claim, so I have to call them and tell them to come on ahead).
"Airplane Mode" isn't a proper name for having all external signals turned off. On my Treo, you can turn off the phone portion very easily and still use the rest of the PDA. Sounds like the iPhone is far less intuitive.
Indeed. To everyone who responded with lists of conservative blogs, I know of the biggies. But I didn't bring up DailyKos as the be-all, end-all (and given the reaction here, it was a poor choice for an example) -- I just think if you could count (which you can't, and I'm just going on a hunch here), you'd find a lot more small liberal blogs than small conservative blogs. I just think the average age of liberals is younger than that of conservatives -- not wrong or right, just how I suspect it is. And the young blog more than the old. So to the average conservative out there, it's going to feel like there are more liberal blogs than conservative ones.
I'm not trying to cast judgment -- I happen to be a liberal, but my original post was a genuine attempt to understand out loud some of the suspicion and irritation I've read among some conservatives. On my little personal blog, I have one conservative guy who comes around (he found me through a friend), and we have great conversations and debates and we respect each other a lot. To be honest, I get very excited when I see a post from him -- they're always artistically and brilliantly designed to make me defend my stance while never getting nasty. Sometimes I can defend my points and sometimes I can't, but he keeps me honest and I try to do the same on his blog (though I take a bit of a drubbing from his readers when I do -- he's got a lot more traffic and conservative views are the only focus of his blog).
I'd love for there to be more little blogs (liberal OR conservative OR Martian or whatever) where that kind of discourse can take place. Unfortunately, it seems like many of the ones I've checked out are mostly preaching to their own choir (this one guy aside, mine too). The froth factor is high -- people of like mind getting each other all boiled up about things they know they all commonly disagree with. But a lot of the little conservative ones I've read seem to have this undertone of feeling like they're alone in the universe. Just my experience -- it could be that I've lucked into reading the right combination of blogs to give me this impression. But that's how it seems to me -- there are just more liberals blogging than conservatives. I just think the vote-to-blog-reader/writer ratio is very different between liberals and conservatives. And I was suggesting that this could cause some feelings of threat/jealousy/indignation among conservatives, who (according to my home-grown logic) may be less represented on the Web.
But to suggest that the greater coverage of the DailyKos is an indication of the media's liberal bent? I disagree. DailyKos loudly disagrees with the current administration, which makes for really good sensationalist news bites (bytes?). If there was a liberal administration and it was being loudly denounced by a conservative blog, I bet it would get a bunch of press, too. Fights are good "news" (quotes very much intended as sarcastic finger quotes). As it stands, agreeing with whoever is in the White House makes for boring copy as far as the CNNs of the world are concerned.
This seems to be good news (though I'll admit that I haven't been following the issue as much as I'd like to have -- I'm sure someone will point out a very reasonable downside to it).
I think the bad feelings (and subsequent reactionary attempts at regulation) come from the fact that the conservative voter base tends to be a bit older and less Internet-savvy. There's no reason they couldn't have the conservative equivalent of DailyKos, but it just wouldn't get read as much. So to conservatives it feels like there's an unfair advantage and that bloggers should follow the same rules as those who advertise on the Marconi Wireless to "level the playing field." But really, the right reaction would be to educate their voter base on this great new medium. I don't know if it would work, but I'm glad this sense of unfairness didn't result in opinion and discourse being subjected to the same regulations as advertising and fund raising. They're very different, and the latter two become empty manipulation without the first two.
When this first came up, I figured it was a lock that bloggers would get nailed (the FEC has a very colorful history of not understanding when technology is good and when technology is bad).