I use phpicalendar and Apple's iCal to do this. You have to have a separate calendar for each subset of information, but they all appear at the same time (in different transparent colors) and it works really well. You can even password protect different calendars (although I don't bother). It requires some admin work to get setup, but once it is running it is rock solid.
There are a couple of problems with a la carte. First, there is a fixed cost to providing any cable service at all, so there would have to be a charge of probably around $15 just to be able to order a channel.
Second, the infrastructure doesn't support it yet. You need to have an all-digital infrastructure with cable boxes that support per channel filtering. I'm not sure where the cable set top boxes are, but there is still a lot of analog infrastructure out there. It will probably be phased out by the end of the decade, but until then you would have to pay for the analog basic cable package.
Third, and I think biggest, is that currently the niche networks get somewhere around a dime a subscriber, maybe a quarter, as part of large channel bundles. The big players, like ESPN and Discovery, negotiate their own deals separately with each provider and get a buck or two per subscriber. If you switch to an opt-in, a la carte model, suddenly that revenue stream for all of those niche networks is cut by a factor of ten or a hundred or even more. They have to make up for that lost revenue and they can't do it with advertising, because they have just lost a bunch of market share. All of those people that stop on their channel when randomly flipping have just disapppeared, so their ratings and therefore ad rates have decreased. So now they've got to charge at least a buck or two per subscriber, which is going to get marked up by the cable providers. So by the time you get the five channels you really want, you are already paying as much as you were with the basic digital cable option. It isn't going to increase diversity in programming and will probably hurt it because market share is going to be concentrated in the few major brands that people will automatically get, like Discovery, ESPN and HBO, while niche channels like Sci-Fi will drop to the hard core scifi fans and subsequently whither and die. A show like Battlestar Galactica would never have made it to a second season (or been produced in the first place, for that matter) because a lot of the people that watched it aren't the type that would subscribe to Sci-Fi.
Really, a la carte pricing doesn't make much economic sense, because the incremental costs of providing a ton of channels versus one channel are very small. The real costs of cable TV come from the network, primarily infrastructure costs (upgrading to digital and set-top boxes) and corporate profits. If you are really interested in lowering you cable bill, then you should focus on better models for management of that infrastructure. I think a for-profit monopoly, especially one that is only nominally regulated, has proven to be very inefficient (for everyone but shareholders). My current favorite model is community-owned infrastructure (preferably fiber) run by a publicly accountable non-profit, preferably one with a publicly elected board of directors.
Yeah, I know, I just couldn't help making fun of that one sentence.
Seriously, though, the infrastructure costs for a wireless network aren't insignificant. You have to have feeds to each of those access points, which usually means a physical connection of some kind, and you still have a CPE (customer premise equipment), even if you are using standard 802.11, because you are going to have a hard time penetrating houses and other structures (and no chance of clients being able to get their signal back to you). Look at your own example. It was a lot easier and far cheaper for me to switch my landline to VOIP (over fiber) than it was for me to switch my cell from Verizon to ATT.
Also, just like you can only run so many cables to a house, you can only have so many wireless providers and each one is going to cause more interference and overall lower service. So while the capital costs are much lower (as are the benefits) than a fully wired infrastructure, I think you underestimate how much they have in common.
Which might be true if we were talking about physical infrastructure.
Yeah, because WiFi exists on a transcendental plane and has shed its physical infrastructure limitations to become one with universe. One simply has to open one's mind to free one's consciousness from the physical plane and become one with the multitude in the WiFi Internet.
Hopefully you are just going to rhetorical excess in trying to make your case and don't actually believe that. Of course, I would find your argument more convincing if it were based in reality. But that's just me. I hear the reality-based community isn't all that big these days.
My point on the iPod was that if it is regularly skipping, you might have a bad iPod or you are doing something that only a solid state music player could survive, but either way, it is completely irrelevant to a discussion of hard drive speeds. That isn't a factor.
Go download a full-screen Star Wars movie trailer and play it on a 12" iBook. Now do that three straight times and tell me it never noticeably dropped frames or skipped slightly.
Depending on the codec, the playback method (Quicktime is in serious need of an overhaul), and the resolution that you mean by full-screen, of course you can get it to skip. But look at the CPU usage, not the disk activity. Hell, it should be able to keep a whole clip in RAM. On my iBook, with the stock drive (30GB, 4200RPM), I was able to watch a DivX movie streaming off of the hard drive, copy files over my 802.11g network, and rip a DVD to the hard drive (not transcode, just DeCSS) without the hard drive breaking a sweat.
And what do you mean by "laptop hard drives don't have a big enough cache to handle throwing full-screen video constantly"? They aren't supposed to. That belongs in the application. It is very simple: if you don't want skipping, pre-buffer. MPlayer, VLC, and most other players all do this and often allow you to set the amount of buffer to use. I play movies streaming over my wireless network. If I set the cache to a sufficient size (8 or 16 megs will do it), I never notice when someone uses the microwave or any of the other little fluctuations in bandwidth on a WiFi network. Same with content viewed over the Internet.
The bottomline is: any skipping has nothing to do with the hard drive and the stock hard drive in the Mini has a high enough transfer rate to completely choke the CPU for any given distribution codec.
Sorry, the hard disk concerns are crap. The 4200 RPM drives Apple is using can sustain aroun 15 MB per second. In comparison, HDTV has a maximum data rate of 2.4MBps (19.2Mbps) and Blu-ray has a maximum data rate of 4.5MBps (36Mbps). The hard drives won't be a problem.
I've never had music skip on my iPod mini and the issue wouldn't be the speed of the hard drive, which on any iPod is at least 3MB per second (do you have any MP3s encoded at 3145728-bit? Mine generally max out at 320). Instead, it would be some heavy jostling preventing reads from the HD while either running out the RAM cache or skipping to new songs not in the RAM cache (which doesn't happen to me even when I go jogging), or possibly a decoding error (although far more likely an encoding error).
I'd be really interested in seeing... a comparison between NFL 2k5 and Madden, which I suspect was the primary target of this ploy.
The Short but Sweet Life of Mr. Obvious:
A one act play
[Mr. Obvious wakes up and heads downstairs]
Ahh, time to eat breakfast. Mmmm, that looks good. I suspect I'm the primary target of this plate. Oh look, the school bus. I suspect my kids are the primary target of this form of mass transit. Hmm, time to read the newspaper. I would love to see an article on how the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has affected Osama bin Laden, who I suspect was the primary target of that action. Who's that at the door? It looks an awful lot like that guy I testified against last year. I suspect I just might be the primary target of this -- arrghg grlglrlg [thump].
Look back at any great discovery and imagine if the answer that we came to were simply ruled out from day one.
I don't understand this attitude that a lot of people who don't believe in anthropogenic climate change seem to have, that a whole bunch of scientists just woke up one day and decided that humans were causing the Earth's temperature to increase. And that decades of scientific research have been shaped by these scientists' perceptions of global warming, rather than scientists' perceptions of global warming having been shaped by decades of scientific research.
Yeah, you hear all about the $60,000 "studies" that show that chocolate is brown.
No, you hear about the studies that show *why* chocolate is brown. There are a lot of things we know the answer to but we can't explain why that answer is correct. It is the same with climate research. Even if someone came out with some great research definitively proving the question one way or the other, even if they supplied the *answer*, there is still a lot we don't know about the *why*. The idea that tomorrow someone could publish a paper that shows humans have no impact on the Earth's climate and the whole field of climatology, atmospheric sciences, etc. suddenly disappears is less than realistic. And yet that is the motive you ascribe to scientists for rejecting in peer review good research that shows humans aren't responsible for climate change: "They lose ALL their funding."
There is no longer a panic-hysteria about trying to solve something that cannot be solved.
What planet do you live on? The whole problem with climate change is that we aren't doing anything at all about it and most people don't even believe it exists. Where is there "panic-hysteria"? Great troll.
Umm, no. First, you didn't even have a grasp of the subject you were arguing about. It hardly makes the argument for OS X security weaker because you didn't know how it works.
Second, it is different from Windows. I have never had to enter a password in Windows after logging in. I have admin rights, as does all of the code I run. Period. OS X at least tries for least privilege, only giving you admin rights when you verify you need them.
It is not a good practice to do much of anything as an administrator.
So what is your solution? Have a separate administrator account? So, instead of entering their password, users have to quick-user switch to the only admin account, run whatever they were trying to run, and then enter their password. Great. They still did exactly what they were going to do, but now they are justifiably pissed off at you for your crappy design.
It's no more secure, it just happens to have assigned the name "Administrator" to a non-administrator account.
WTF? How is it not an administrator account? It is part of the admin group. It just isn't root.
In Unix, attempts to access resources you don't have permissions to, just fail. If it pops up a window that says "would you like to give this program access" then you're just as screwed as the rest of the world...
So your position is that it would be safer if it just ran without a security dialog? You might want to rethink that. Only people with admin rights get the security dialog. In your example, the code would just run on a "normal Unix system" without double-checking with the admin. Sounds less safe to me. You can't protect computers from their owners.
It is very easy to pop up a dialog that looks like the standard system one asking for an admin password.
This is complete crap. First, you still have to get an Administrator user to run your malware. Second, you can't spoof the Authenticate panel because any other panel has to be associated with an application. When the user clicks on it, the first menu is going to be "Malware" (this would be even better if Authentication dialogs were associated with an "Authentication" application, but it will still be clear it is your app requesting authorization). Assuming the Admin user continues to type in their password, the game is already over. The system's administrator has chosen to run untrusted code and authorize it, and no computer can protect itself against that without severely limiting its usefulness. Third, so what? Now you have the password, but you would have been better off actually getting authorized, because the program can't do anything with the password on its own (it has to be entered by a user for any actual authorization). Sure, it could disseminate it and then run a server on an unprivileged port, but you'd be better of running a shell as root on a port like this exploit does (it saves you the step of typing in a password).
So, what is the point? It can't fake the application it is associated with, because unlike a system dialog, it is attached to it. The only thing it could do is misrepresent the privilege it was requesting ("Requested right: system.daisies.pick"), but whoopty-doo.
3. Pop-up blocking. This is another small-but-useful interface feature that Microsoft could add to IE but hasn't yet (although there are many add-ons for IE that do).
When I switch someone over to Firefox, 1 & 3 are the things they care about. As much as I love tabs, it is really a "power-user" feature that few non-technical people use and it takes a while for them to grasp its usefulness. But 1 & 3 means I don't know anyone who has switched who has thought of going back.
I think in Zell's case it was more about the question wasn't allowed to be answered.
Since you obviously didn't see it, try reading the transcript. Zell Miller was angry the entire time and Chris Matthews was a dick as usual. What did Zell expect? Chris tried to get him to admit that the spitballs comment was a bit of rhetorical excess comparable to a Democrat accusing a Republican of wanting to starve children or close schools and Zell just couldn't understand his point. It certainly isn't a reason to wish you could challenge someone to a duel.
MATTHEWS: I want to ask you about the most powerful line in your speech. And it had so many.
"No pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry."
Do you believe that John Kerry and Ted Kennedy really only believe in defending America with spitballs?
MILLER: Well, I certainly don't believe they want to defend America by putting the kind of armor and the kind of equipment that we have got to have out there for our troops. I mean, nothing could be clearer than that, than what John Kerry did when he voted against that $87 billion in appropriations, that would have provided protective armor for our troops and armored vehicles.
MATTHEWS: All right, let me ask you. Senator, you are the expert. Many times, as a conservative Republican, you have had to come out on the floor and obey party whips and vote against big appropriations passed by the Democrats when they were in power.
You weren't against feeding poor people. You weren't against Social Security. You weren't against a lot of programs that, because of the nature of parliamentary procedure and combat, you had to vote against the whole package. Didn't you many times vote against whole packages of spending, when you would have gladly gone for a smaller package?
MILLER: Well, I didn't make speeches about them and I didn't put them in my platform.
Right here is what John Kerry put out as far as his U.S. Senate platform, was, he was talking about he wanted to cancel the M.X. missile, the B-1 bomber, the anti-satellite system. This is not voting for something that was in a big bill.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Which of those systems was effective in either Afghanistan
or Iraq? The M.X. certainly wasn't, thank God, nor was the other
(CROSSTALK)
The threat isn't until much further in the interview. As someone who saw it, it was pretty pathetic.
Regardless, I highly suggest anyone even remotely interested in politics and journalism read the transcript.
No, watch it. It is so much better. I've watched it a couple of times now with different friends and I'm sending DVDs to my friends and family. If you absolutely can't watch it, read the transcript, but your jaw will drop a lot further if you watch it.
Seriously, you HAVE to see it. There is no comparison between watching it and reading the transcript. Jon Stewart is brilliantly biting and merciless in his deadpan delivery. I wish I was half as quick on my feet as he was. He just devastates them. You don't get that from the transcript, especially how quick he was. Most of those lines were overlapping.
I agree with the first responder, I thought Jon Stewart did great and I think you are using the wrong criteria to judge his performance. If you watch a half-hour interview, do you complain that it didn't go into as much detail as the 2 hour documentary on the same topic? He did great given the format. He was bitingly hilarious, he kept them off balance, and he made his point (which you missed): they aren't intellectually honest and they aren't concerned about debate, but instead about theater and ratings.
What does "intellectually honest" mean? It means that you make an effort to understand the other person's argument and argue against that. Instead, they play a game of "gotcha!", in which they do their best to completely distort the other side's position. And the worst part is that they are doing this knowingly. They know that isn't the other side's position, but they also know they can distort this comment and take that comment out of context and generate some fireworks.
I think the perfect example of what Jon Stewart was talking about was the discussion of Kerry's use of the phrase "global test" in the debate. I happened to be at the hospital after that and I watched the news channels (I don't have TV at home) and it amazed me how intellectually dishonest the discussion was. Wolf Blitzer showed Kerry's entire answer, which starts with "The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike[s]", and then talked about whether there was a new "Kerry Doctrine" that required us to get permission from other countries before we could defend ourselves! That is outrageous and completely intellectually dishonest. Now, Kerry certainly opened himself up with his clumsy (and politically stupid) phrasing, but there are some great discussions that Kerry's question raises, such as "what is the standard we have to set for ourselves before we attack a country preemptively?" or "how do we determine we have the moral authority to invade another country?" Because our current mechanism is broken. Whether you support the war or not, you have to admit that our justification (WMD and al-Qaeda ties) was wrong. I mean, Colin Powell got up in front of the United Nations and completely lied to them. Knowingly or unknowingly (I think unknowingly), he told them things that were flat out untrue. My dad and I had a great debate over whether we had to justify ourselves to the rest of the world and how you determine you've done that. But the news networks listened to the Republican spin ("Kerry says we have to pass a global test before we can defend ourselves") and treated it as if it were a legitimate interpretation of Kerry's views. And they do that with both sides.
So, how do you fight that? The politicians aren't going to change it and neither is the media, because whoever steps up is going to get hit. People will turn the channel to the easier, more entertaining theater. I saw Jon's performance as media-reform activism. He went on their show and said it was stupid and he wasn't going to play their game. He made fun of them and offered insightful criticism, turning their own tools against them. We need more of that, not less. We need people to point out the absurdity and ineffectiveness of the news organizations and to demand better from them. You know, that wasn't just a flippant, meaningless action. Jon made a sacrifice. I might applaud him, but he just lost some of his access to the media. He certainly won't be on Crossfire again anytime soon and there are probably a lot of other programs that will be less likely to allow him on after this. How much that means or is worth is debatable, but I thought it was a great gesture.
Alright, this has turned into something of a rant and I certainly don't have a problem with you not liking his performance. But I think some of your criticisms were incorrect and you might want to take another look at it. And, just FYI, you have to watch it (not saying you didn't) rather than read the transcript. There is literally no comparison. I wish I could be that quick on my feet.
BTW, I've listened to that Freshair interview and it is great. And his Larry King appearance in June was pretty good when he let his guard down.
However, I have always believed in leading by example. The singlehanded largest way and I think the only meaningful way he could have come on that show and insult them was if he were to come on and point out how he has a competitive REAL news program that doesn't lean one way or the other (dreaming I know). Making fun of the media with your own show doesn't help the situation in any form to me.
You are saying that to criticize someone, not only do you have to be in the same field as they are, but you also have to be better than them? Otherwise, your criticism isn't "meaningful"?
[Jon Stewart] doesn't do any better of a job at news reporting then them.
Yes, he does. He only has 10 minutes or so, but what he covers in that ten minutes he reports on better than any "real" news channel does in 24 hours. And you know why?
He isn't afraid to show someone is a liar. Bill O'Reilly and others like to throw that term around and call people liars, but Jon Stewart actually shows the goods.
He's honest. I don't think I've ever seen them take someone out of context or try to misrepresent what someone said. They make fun of gaffes and satirize people's positions, but they are intellectually honest (or at least more so than the news channels).
He gives context. When Bush talks about nation building, they run a "debate" between what Bush said in 2000 about not nation building and what he is saying now. That is what the media is supposed to do: they are supposed to provide context, to be our memory, to NOT let things fall into the memory hole.
He is brief. He doesn't have to fill 24 hours so he doesn't try to drag things out and make stories out of nothing. He can't even fit in everything he wants to get to, so he has to cut it down to its very essence.
He filters. I don't have time to listen to everything every Kerry or Bush flack has to say and I certainly don't have time to check if it is true. He incisively cuts to the heart of the issues, offers some biting criticism, or deadpan incredulity that perfectly summarizes the situation.
Viewers of The Daily Show, despite it being a comedic, media satire program whose lead-in is a show about puppets making crank phone calls, are better informed than anyone getting their news from newspapers, network news, or cable news!!! And Jon's point is that that is sad. It is sad that his show, a comedy show satirizing the media, is a better news show than any actual news show. It is proof that the media is not living up to its responsibility of furthering the public debate and the exchange of information. Instead, they are drastically decreasing the signal to noise ratio. In fact, after watching the news, you will be LESS INFORMED!
If you want a two button mouse with no wires on a laptop, go buy a Bluetooth mouse. PowerBooks come with Bluetooth.
That is one more thing I have to carry around. I'm getting a 12" PowerBook because I value the portability, being able to just grab it and go. I don't want to also have to grab my mouse. I agree that the PowerBooks should come with two button mouse pads. Just have configure both buttons to do the same thing out of the box! Then there is no usability price to pay.
The PowerMacs should come with multi-button mice as well. Anyone buying a Power* computer is assumed to be a pro user, why not start treating them as one? Again, have the software configured for every button doing the same thing out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
I use phpicalendar and Apple's iCal to do this. You have to have a separate calendar for each subset of information, but they all appear at the same time (in different transparent colors) and it works really well. You can even password protect different calendars (although I don't bother). It requires some admin work to get setup, but once it is running it is rock solid.
There are a couple of problems with a la carte. First, there is a fixed cost to providing any cable service at all, so there would have to be a charge of probably around $15 just to be able to order a channel.
Second, the infrastructure doesn't support it yet. You need to have an all-digital infrastructure with cable boxes that support per channel filtering. I'm not sure where the cable set top boxes are, but there is still a lot of analog infrastructure out there. It will probably be phased out by the end of the decade, but until then you would have to pay for the analog basic cable package.
Third, and I think biggest, is that currently the niche networks get somewhere around a dime a subscriber, maybe a quarter, as part of large channel bundles. The big players, like ESPN and Discovery, negotiate their own deals separately with each provider and get a buck or two per subscriber. If you switch to an opt-in, a la carte model, suddenly that revenue stream for all of those niche networks is cut by a factor of ten or a hundred or even more. They have to make up for that lost revenue and they can't do it with advertising, because they have just lost a bunch of market share. All of those people that stop on their channel when randomly flipping have just disapppeared, so their ratings and therefore ad rates have decreased. So now they've got to charge at least a buck or two per subscriber, which is going to get marked up by the cable providers. So by the time you get the five channels you really want, you are already paying as much as you were with the basic digital cable option. It isn't going to increase diversity in programming and will probably hurt it because market share is going to be concentrated in the few major brands that people will automatically get, like Discovery, ESPN and HBO, while niche channels like Sci-Fi will drop to the hard core scifi fans and subsequently whither and die. A show like Battlestar Galactica would never have made it to a second season (or been produced in the first place, for that matter) because a lot of the people that watched it aren't the type that would subscribe to Sci-Fi.
Really, a la carte pricing doesn't make much economic sense, because the incremental costs of providing a ton of channels versus one channel are very small. The real costs of cable TV come from the network, primarily infrastructure costs (upgrading to digital and set-top boxes) and corporate profits. If you are really interested in lowering you cable bill, then you should focus on better models for management of that infrastructure. I think a for-profit monopoly, especially one that is only nominally regulated, has proven to be very inefficient (for everyone but shareholders). My current favorite model is community-owned infrastructure (preferably fiber) run by a publicly accountable non-profit, preferably one with a publicly elected board of directors.
Yeah, I know, I just couldn't help making fun of that one sentence.
Seriously, though, the infrastructure costs for a wireless network aren't insignificant. You have to have feeds to each of those access points, which usually means a physical connection of some kind, and you still have a CPE (customer premise equipment), even if you are using standard 802.11, because you are going to have a hard time penetrating houses and other structures (and no chance of clients being able to get their signal back to you). Look at your own example. It was a lot easier and far cheaper for me to switch my landline to VOIP (over fiber) than it was for me to switch my cell from Verizon to ATT.
Also, just like you can only run so many cables to a house, you can only have so many wireless providers and each one is going to cause more interference and overall lower service. So while the capital costs are much lower (as are the benefits) than a fully wired infrastructure, I think you underestimate how much they have in common.
Which might be true if we were talking about physical infrastructure.
Yeah, because WiFi exists on a transcendental plane and has shed its physical infrastructure limitations to become one with universe. One simply has to open one's mind to free one's consciousness from the physical plane and become one with the multitude in the WiFi Internet.
Hopefully you are just going to rhetorical excess in trying to make your case and don't actually believe that. Of course, I would find your argument more convincing if it were based in reality. But that's just me. I hear the reality-based community isn't all that big these days.
Except in this case, the yellow jackets have the hose. If they weren't soaking us, we'd stop kicking their nest.
The point is that the iPod occasionally skips.
My point on the iPod was that if it is regularly skipping, you might have a bad iPod or you are doing something that only a solid state music player could survive, but either way, it is completely irrelevant to a discussion of hard drive speeds. That isn't a factor.
Go download a full-screen Star Wars movie trailer and play it on a 12" iBook. Now do that three straight times and tell me it never noticeably dropped frames or skipped slightly.
Depending on the codec, the playback method (Quicktime is in serious need of an overhaul), and the resolution that you mean by full-screen, of course you can get it to skip. But look at the CPU usage, not the disk activity. Hell, it should be able to keep a whole clip in RAM. On my iBook, with the stock drive (30GB, 4200RPM), I was able to watch a DivX movie streaming off of the hard drive, copy files over my 802.11g network, and rip a DVD to the hard drive (not transcode, just DeCSS) without the hard drive breaking a sweat.
And what do you mean by "laptop hard drives don't have a big enough cache to handle throwing full-screen video constantly"? They aren't supposed to. That belongs in the application. It is very simple: if you don't want skipping, pre-buffer. MPlayer, VLC, and most other players all do this and often allow you to set the amount of buffer to use. I play movies streaming over my wireless network. If I set the cache to a sufficient size (8 or 16 megs will do it), I never notice when someone uses the microwave or any of the other little fluctuations in bandwidth on a WiFi network. Same with content viewed over the Internet.
The bottomline is: any skipping has nothing to do with the hard drive and the stock hard drive in the Mini has a high enough transfer rate to completely choke the CPU for any given distribution codec.
Sorry, the hard disk concerns are crap. The 4200 RPM drives Apple is using can sustain aroun 15 MB per second. In comparison, HDTV has a maximum data rate of 2.4MBps (19.2Mbps) and Blu-ray has a maximum data rate of 4.5MBps (36Mbps). The hard drives won't be a problem.
I've never had music skip on my iPod mini and the issue wouldn't be the speed of the hard drive, which on any iPod is at least 3MB per second (do you have any MP3s encoded at 3145728-bit? Mine generally max out at 320). Instead, it would be some heavy jostling preventing reads from the HD while either running out the RAM cache or skipping to new songs not in the RAM cache (which doesn't happen to me even when I go jogging), or possibly a decoding error (although far more likely an encoding error).
Oh, I thought it was Managment Consultant, Telephone Sanitizer and Hair Dresser.
I'd be really interested in seeing... a comparison between NFL 2k5 and Madden, which I suspect was the primary target of this ploy.
The Short but Sweet Life of Mr. Obvious: A one act play [Mr. Obvious wakes up and heads downstairs] Ahh, time to eat breakfast. Mmmm, that looks good. I suspect I'm the primary target of this plate. Oh look, the school bus. I suspect my kids are the primary target of this form of mass transit. Hmm, time to read the newspaper. I would love to see an article on how the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has affected Osama bin Laden, who I suspect was the primary target of that action. Who's that at the door? It looks an awful lot like that guy I testified against last year. I suspect I just might be the primary target of this -- arrghg grlglrlg [thump].
I don't understand this attitude that a lot of people who don't believe in anthropogenic climate change seem to have, that a whole bunch of scientists just woke up one day and decided that humans were causing the Earth's temperature to increase. And that decades of scientific research have been shaped by these scientists' perceptions of global warming, rather than scientists' perceptions of global warming having been shaped by decades of scientific research.
No, you hear about the studies that show *why* chocolate is brown. There are a lot of things we know the answer to but we can't explain why that answer is correct. It is the same with climate research. Even if someone came out with some great research definitively proving the question one way or the other, even if they supplied the *answer*, there is still a lot we don't know about the *why*. The idea that tomorrow someone could publish a paper that shows humans have no impact on the Earth's climate and the whole field of climatology, atmospheric sciences, etc. suddenly disappears is less than realistic. And yet that is the motive you ascribe to scientists for rejecting in peer review good research that shows humans aren't responsible for climate change: "They lose ALL their funding."
There is no longer a panic-hysteria about trying to solve something that cannot be solved.
What planet do you live on? The whole problem with climate change is that we aren't doing anything at all about it and most people don't even believe it exists. Where is there "panic-hysteria"? Great troll.
Second, it is different from Windows. I have never had to enter a password in Windows after logging in. I have admin rights, as does all of the code I run. Period. OS X at least tries for least privilege, only giving you admin rights when you verify you need them.
It is not a good practice to do much of anything as an administrator.
So what is your solution? Have a separate administrator account? So, instead of entering their password, users have to quick-user switch to the only admin account, run whatever they were trying to run, and then enter their password. Great. They still did exactly what they were going to do, but now they are justifiably pissed off at you for your crappy design.
It's no more secure, it just happens to have assigned the name "Administrator" to a non-administrator account.
WTF? How is it not an administrator account? It is part of the admin group. It just isn't root.
So your position is that it would be safer if it just ran without a security dialog? You might want to rethink that. Only people with admin rights get the security dialog. In your example, the code would just run on a "normal Unix system" without double-checking with the admin. Sounds less safe to me. You can't protect computers from their owners.
This is complete crap. First, you still have to get an Administrator user to run your malware. Second, you can't spoof the Authenticate panel because any other panel has to be associated with an application. When the user clicks on it, the first menu is going to be "Malware" (this would be even better if Authentication dialogs were associated with an "Authentication" application, but it will still be clear it is your app requesting authorization). Assuming the Admin user continues to type in their password, the game is already over. The system's administrator has chosen to run untrusted code and authorize it, and no computer can protect itself against that without severely limiting its usefulness. Third, so what? Now you have the password, but you would have been better off actually getting authorized, because the program can't do anything with the password on its own (it has to be entered by a user for any actual authorization). Sure, it could disseminate it and then run a server on an unprivileged port, but you'd be better of running a shell as root on a port like this exploit does (it saves you the step of typing in a password).
So, what is the point? It can't fake the application it is associated with, because unlike a system dialog, it is attached to it. The only thing it could do is misrepresent the privilege it was requesting ("Requested right: system.daisies.pick"), but whoopty-doo.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
Since you obviously didn't see it, try reading the transcript. Zell Miller was angry the entire time and Chris Matthews was a dick as usual. What did Zell expect? Chris tried to get him to admit that the spitballs comment was a bit of rhetorical excess comparable to a Democrat accusing a Republican of wanting to starve children or close schools and Zell just couldn't understand his point. It certainly isn't a reason to wish you could challenge someone to a duel.
The threat isn't until much further in the interview. As someone who saw it, it was pretty pathetic.No, watch it. It is so much better. I've watched it a couple of times now with different friends and I'm sending DVDs to my friends and family. If you absolutely can't watch it, read the transcript, but your jaw will drop a lot further if you watch it.
Seriously, you HAVE to see it. There is no comparison between watching it and reading the transcript. Jon Stewart is brilliantly biting and merciless in his deadpan delivery. I wish I was half as quick on my feet as he was. He just devastates them. You don't get that from the transcript, especially how quick he was. Most of those lines were overlapping.
Kudos to Jon Stewart. Even though I don't agree with his political views, I support him in his efforts.
God, that is refreshing to hear.
God, that is refreshing to hear.
What does "intellectually honest" mean? It means that you make an effort to understand the other person's argument and argue against that. Instead, they play a game of "gotcha!", in which they do their best to completely distort the other side's position. And the worst part is that they are doing this knowingly. They know that isn't the other side's position, but they also know they can distort this comment and take that comment out of context and generate some fireworks.
I think the perfect example of what Jon Stewart was talking about was the discussion of Kerry's use of the phrase "global test" in the debate. I happened to be at the hospital after that and I watched the news channels (I don't have TV at home) and it amazed me how intellectually dishonest the discussion was. Wolf Blitzer showed Kerry's entire answer, which starts with "The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike[s]", and then talked about whether there was a new "Kerry Doctrine" that required us to get permission from other countries before we could defend ourselves! That is outrageous and completely intellectually dishonest. Now, Kerry certainly opened himself up with his clumsy (and politically stupid) phrasing, but there are some great discussions that Kerry's question raises, such as "what is the standard we have to set for ourselves before we attack a country preemptively?" or "how do we determine we have the moral authority to invade another country?" Because our current mechanism is broken. Whether you support the war or not, you have to admit that our justification (WMD and al-Qaeda ties) was wrong. I mean, Colin Powell got up in front of the United Nations and completely lied to them. Knowingly or unknowingly (I think unknowingly), he told them things that were flat out untrue. My dad and I had a great debate over whether we had to justify ourselves to the rest of the world and how you determine you've done that. But the news networks listened to the Republican spin ("Kerry says we have to pass a global test before we can defend ourselves") and treated it as if it were a legitimate interpretation of Kerry's views. And they do that with both sides.
So, how do you fight that? The politicians aren't going to change it and neither is the media, because whoever steps up is going to get hit. People will turn the channel to the easier, more entertaining theater. I saw Jon's performance as media-reform activism. He went on their show and said it was stupid and he wasn't going to play their game. He made fun of them and offered insightful criticism, turning their own tools against them. We need more of that, not less. We need people to point out the absurdity and ineffectiveness of the news organizations and to demand better from them. You know, that wasn't just a flippant, meaningless action. Jon made a sacrifice. I might applaud him, but he just lost some of his access to the media. He certainly won't be on Crossfire again anytime soon and there are probably a lot of other programs that will be less likely to allow him on after this. How much that means or is worth is debatable, but I thought it was a great gesture.
Alright, this has turned into something of a rant and I certainly don't have a problem with you not liking his performance. But I think some of your criticisms were incorrect and you might want to take another look at it. And, just FYI, you have to watch it (not saying you didn't) rather than read the transcript. There is literally no comparison. I wish I could be that quick on my feet.
BTW, I've listened to that Freshair interview and it is great. And his Larry King appearance in June was pretty good when he let his guard down.
You are saying that to criticize someone, not only do you have to be in the same field as they are, but you also have to be better than them? Otherwise, your criticism isn't "meaningful"?
[Jon Stewart] doesn't do any better of a job at news reporting then them.
Yes, he does. He only has 10 minutes or so, but what he covers in that ten minutes he reports on better than any "real" news channel does in 24 hours. And you know why?
He isn't afraid to show someone is a liar. Bill O'Reilly and others like to throw that term around and call people liars, but Jon Stewart actually shows the goods.
He's honest. I don't think I've ever seen them take someone out of context or try to misrepresent what someone said. They make fun of gaffes and satirize people's positions, but they are intellectually honest (or at least more so than the news channels).
He gives context. When Bush talks about nation building, they run a "debate" between what Bush said in 2000 about not nation building and what he is saying now. That is what the media is supposed to do: they are supposed to provide context, to be our memory, to NOT let things fall into the memory hole.
He is brief. He doesn't have to fill 24 hours so he doesn't try to drag things out and make stories out of nothing. He can't even fit in everything he wants to get to, so he has to cut it down to its very essence.
He filters. I don't have time to listen to everything every Kerry or Bush flack has to say and I certainly don't have time to check if it is true. He incisively cuts to the heart of the issues, offers some biting criticism, or deadpan incredulity that perfectly summarizes the situation.
Viewers of The Daily Show, despite it being a comedic, media satire program whose lead-in is a show about puppets making crank phone calls, are better informed than anyone getting their news from newspapers, network news, or cable news!!! And Jon's point is that that is sad. It is sad that his show, a comedy show satirizing the media, is a better news show than any actual news show. It is proof that the media is not living up to its responsibility of furthering the public debate and the exchange of information. Instead, they are drastically decreasing the signal to noise ratio. In fact, after watching the news, you will be LESS INFORMED!
Did you notice how all of those "percentages" added up to 9.88?
That is one more thing I have to carry around. I'm getting a 12" PowerBook because I value the portability, being able to just grab it and go. I don't want to also have to grab my mouse. I agree that the PowerBooks should come with two button mouse pads. Just have configure both buttons to do the same thing out of the box! Then there is no usability price to pay.
The PowerMacs should come with multi-button mice as well. Anyone buying a Power* computer is assumed to be a pro user, why not start treating them as one? Again, have the software configured for every button doing the same thing out of the box.