I don't know about Windows users, but 90% of all Mac users I've ever known--the vast majority non-techies--have been in the habit of keeping the OS up to date (give or take a couple years). Many of those have also upgraded their RAM and added external components like hard drives or media app controllers.
As a side note, Apple invented (for all intents and purposes, etc.) the concept of subpixel rendering back in the '80s, and it's been included in the OS since at least Jaguar.
Comments like these would be much more useful if only the poster would include where he/she lives. I've had great experience with T-Mobile in NYC in general, excepting the far corners of the LES and parts of the UWS.
Similarly, the so-called "clash of civilizations" in the Middle East has very little to do with religion, and very much to do with politics and economics.
Not really true about the cities. What's interesting about the last couple generations is that for the first time ever in the history of civilization, more people are choosing to live in cities (depending how you define the term) than to live in their hinterlands. Importantly, this is not due to population growth alone; farmers, rural homesteaders, and even suburbanites have been flocking to the cities because that's where the opportunities have been, since the industrial revolution tipped economies of scale and aggregation decidedly in favor of the urban habitat.
For most of the 20th century, granted, the United States has been the exception. The reason is that mainly, the government (at all levels) has subsidized private homeownership and development that favors sprawl (think the interstate highway system) and disfavors urban centers (benign neglect). Still, even though these policies largely remain in place, the urge for newness and experience is driving even the peripatetic American back into the city center. Chicago, New York, Boston, even Los Angeles are hardly "dens of crime and black holes for opportunity."
You want a frontier? The city is the new frontier. The world is your oyster, when you have all of its best talent assembled within walking distance of your home. Where yesterday's pioneers built homesteads from dirt and tumbleweeds, today's build their empires with information and social capital.
Yeah, I realize this is mostly irrelevant to your point. Sorry. Hope you'll humor my lecture.
Well, as of this week, the state of tabletop fusion is... not hopeful. The guy who claimed to have achieved fusion via acoustic cavitation (that bubble thing) is, if not faking his results, behaving rather suspiciously around colleagues attempting to reproduce the experiment, and allegedly screwing with their equipment.
I guarantee you the vast majority of films released in any given year have always sucked, and will suck always, as long as people keep going in droves to see them, forever and ever. The good news is that in a decade or two, we'll have forgotten Ultraviolet and the rest of the dreck--we'll just remember the classics, and so we'll all still be able to bitch about the decline of modern cinema.
"I admit the Media Center one isn't the greatest design in the world, but at least 10 extra buttons are there because you need to change channels!"
If I were designing a remote control today, I could think of a hundred different ways to let the user change channels. Remembering and entering arbitrary numbers has to be just about the worst. (FWIW, I'd probably end up with some kind of interactive onscreen display.) Where's your imagination, man?
It probably would "collapse." As I've tried to make clear, dollar demand is driven strongly by the fact that the whole world, with negligible exceptions, needs dollars to purchase oil. I'm not sure what you're not understanding here.
I dunno, man. Why restrict the term "terrorism" to only its common usage? Because it doesn't help matters at all to put bank robbery under the umbrella of "terrorism." The motives are different, the goals are different. The level of organization is different. The response needs to be different. We've been living happily in this nation for over 200 years without labeling every petty criminal a "terrorist."
This, as all things, is a matter of drawing lines in the sand, but I will steadfastly refuse to describe the guy who relieved himself on my front stoop a "pee terrorist." The only people whose interest it serves to encircle graffiti with the moniker of terrorism are the people seeking to draw an emotional response against things which, in sobriety, don't merit such kneejerk action.
Dude, I hate to be curt, but you must not be very familiar with S'pore politics if you imagine it's public debate, public discussion, and the ballot that would boot a corrupt official from office, as you seemed to imply in your original post. From the perspective of someone accustomed to democracy as practiced in the West, Singapore's democracy is a very illiberal one, resting somewhere between China's technically multiparty state and America's two-party system (which, for the record, I would argue is quite healthy and vigorous).
Yes, of course, and that's why it's unlikely any significant quantity of oil trades will be made in currencies other than USD in the foreseeable future. The point of the original poster, however, was that if, if a major oil exporter should start demanding euro, yen, gold, Monopoly money, or anything other than the U.S. dollar--for whatever reason, chalk it up to insanity or politics--the dollar would sag, a reasonable projection. Denying the central conceit of the discussion (that if) sort of saps this whole hypothetical situation here of any relevance, so let's stick to the original point.
And it's perfectly easy to imagine that one oil-rich regime or another might decide to start refusing petrodollars in favor of petroeuros, even purely out of spite. Iraq was doing exactly that for several years before the present war.
Besides which, there is actually a good case to be made that switching to euro-denominated exchanges would be in the best interests of oil-rich nations, an argument I'm not going to bother getting into.
So bank robbery is terrorism. Mugging is terrorism (as you know, they've demonstrated violence against your peers). Even graffiti could be terrorism. What the fuck?
Look, you can be as slippery with semantics as you want on your own time, but when you open your mouth in public you're ultimately going to have to settle on definitions for terms that are (a) commonly agreed upon and (b) useful. Defining "terrorism" in such a manner as to include witness intimidation, of all things, is neither.
Well, yeah, but only because said official would be ashamed to step outdoors, and even if they gathered up the courage, they probably wouldn't be able to get anyone to talk to them or look them in the face anyway. In other words, for cultural reasons, and certainly not because the citizens of Singapore's notoriously undemocratic democracy rose up to give them the boot.
Actually, he's right (mostly). Our productivity may be the strength of our economy, but is not the sole strength of the dollar itself. The fact that everyone uses dollars to complete oil trades means that dollars are always in demand on the exchange markets. It's almost tautological to point out that dollar-denominated trades, colloquially, thus prop up the dollar. Check out the bulk of this article, e.g.
Were Gulf countries suddenly to refuse U.S. dollars in exchange for oil, you're right that trades would in a simplistically theoretical model be no different in the long run; unfortunately, that long run would never happen, since shit'd be hitting fans in the meantime.
I don't know. That may have been true from the late '60s through early '80s, but to take the long view, these two decades were but an anomaly in urban vs. suburban settlement patterns over the past few hundred years, if not the entire course of human civilization. Since those dark years, the pendulum's swung vigorously back. Most of the company I keep prefer to live in cities in order to have access to the widest possible range of goods, services, and information. Then again, I admit we probably don't approach life with a suburban mindset, and I admit I wouldn't much care to live in e.g. Detroit.
Well, we could phase out the market distortions that favor sprawl and wasteful land use patterns over compact (ecoheads call them "sustainable") urban communities. Tax deductions for mortgages on single-family homes, zoning laws that prohibit mixed-use development, the massive government funding of the interstate highway system--these are all market distortions we'd be better without. Unfortunately, if we want a smooth transition to aforementioned sustainability, it'll take generations to fix.
Hype, to me, is Microsoft prattling on and on about how revolutionary and exciting its newest shrink-wrapped turd is going to be--twelve months in advance--or, say, NBC sensationalizing the Olympics by changing its logo, running ads 24/7, and inventing "oh I've led a difficult life" stories around every event and athlete to appear onscreen for more than five seconds. Or even Apple's run-up to the iPod in 2001, when the company coyly encouraged speculation about some life-changing new product it was going to introduce by putting a countdown on its homepage.
Hype is far, far from Apple's stock in trade. Apple deals in good taste. Hype is crass.
I guess Apple is "cool" at the moment because its long-running philosophy of design happens to align with current fashion. A certain tasteful set, however, have always considered Apple "cool," due to said philosophy of design. This is unlikely to change even after the iPod and licky-widgets fad is over.
All trolling aside, Apple doesn't really do "hype." Apple's marketing and advertising tends to be understated, even demure, compared with any other company of its size. Hype is the opposite of cool. When you're cool, you don't need to hype yourself. Cool is staying restrained, while you let the media and your (rabid?) fanbase do the dirty work for you.
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I don't know about Windows users, but 90% of all Mac users I've ever known--the vast majority non-techies--have been in the habit of keeping the OS up to date (give or take a couple years). Many of those have also upgraded their RAM and added external components like hard drives or media app controllers.
Dude, learn to use Google.
As a side note, Apple invented (for all intents and purposes, etc.) the concept of subpixel rendering back in the '80s, and it's been included in the OS since at least Jaguar.
Comments like these would be much more useful if only the poster would include where he/she lives. I've had great experience with T-Mobile in NYC in general, excepting the far corners of the LES and parts of the UWS.
Similarly, the so-called "clash of civilizations" in the Middle East has very little to do with religion, and very much to do with politics and economics.
Not really true about the cities. What's interesting about the last couple generations is that for the first time ever in the history of civilization, more people are choosing to live in cities (depending how you define the term) than to live in their hinterlands. Importantly, this is not due to population growth alone; farmers, rural homesteaders, and even suburbanites have been flocking to the cities because that's where the opportunities have been, since the industrial revolution tipped economies of scale and aggregation decidedly in favor of the urban habitat.
For most of the 20th century, granted, the United States has been the exception. The reason is that mainly, the government (at all levels) has subsidized private homeownership and development that favors sprawl (think the interstate highway system) and disfavors urban centers (benign neglect). Still, even though these policies largely remain in place, the urge for newness and experience is driving even the peripatetic American back into the city center. Chicago, New York, Boston, even Los Angeles are hardly "dens of crime and black holes for opportunity."
You want a frontier? The city is the new frontier. The world is your oyster, when you have all of its best talent assembled within walking distance of your home. Where yesterday's pioneers built homesteads from dirt and tumbleweeds, today's build their empires with information and social capital.
Yeah, I realize this is mostly irrelevant to your point. Sorry. Hope you'll humor my lecture.
Well, as of this week, the state of tabletop fusion is... not hopeful. The guy who claimed to have achieved fusion via acoustic cavitation (that bubble thing) is, if not faking his results, behaving rather suspiciously around colleagues attempting to reproduce the experiment, and allegedly screwing with their equipment.
Seconded. If you hadn't posted anonymously, I'd have friended you for this alone.
I guarantee you the vast majority of films released in any given year have always sucked, and will suck always, as long as people keep going in droves to see them, forever and ever. The good news is that in a decade or two, we'll have forgotten Ultraviolet and the rest of the dreck--we'll just remember the classics, and so we'll all still be able to bitch about the decline of modern cinema.
"...and is painfully slow and cumbersome in FireFox."
:-)
Then again, what site isn't?
"I admit the Media Center one isn't the greatest design in the world, but at least 10 extra buttons are there because you need to change channels!"
If I were designing a remote control today, I could think of a hundred different ways to let the user change channels. Remembering and entering arbitrary numbers has to be just about the worst. (FWIW, I'd probably end up with some kind of interactive onscreen display.) Where's your imagination, man?
It probably would "collapse." As I've tried to make clear, dollar demand is driven strongly by the fact that the whole world, with negligible exceptions, needs dollars to purchase oil. I'm not sure what you're not understanding here.
I dunno, man. Why restrict the term "terrorism" to only its common usage? Because it doesn't help matters at all to put bank robbery under the umbrella of "terrorism." The motives are different, the goals are different. The level of organization is different. The response needs to be different. We've been living happily in this nation for over 200 years without labeling every petty criminal a "terrorist."
This, as all things, is a matter of drawing lines in the sand, but I will steadfastly refuse to describe the guy who relieved himself on my front stoop a "pee terrorist." The only people whose interest it serves to encircle graffiti with the moniker of terrorism are the people seeking to draw an emotional response against things which, in sobriety, don't merit such kneejerk action.
Whoops--I reread your original post, and you didn't imply any of that. Apologies.
Dude, I hate to be curt, but you must not be very familiar with S'pore politics if you imagine it's public debate, public discussion, and the ballot that would boot a corrupt official from office, as you seemed to imply in your original post. From the perspective of someone accustomed to democracy as practiced in the West, Singapore's democracy is a very illiberal one, resting somewhere between China's technically multiparty state and America's two-party system (which, for the record, I would argue is quite healthy and vigorous).
Yes, of course, and that's why it's unlikely any significant quantity of oil trades will be made in currencies other than USD in the foreseeable future. The point of the original poster, however, was that if, if a major oil exporter should start demanding euro, yen, gold, Monopoly money, or anything other than the U.S. dollar--for whatever reason, chalk it up to insanity or politics--the dollar would sag, a reasonable projection. Denying the central conceit of the discussion (that if) sort of saps this whole hypothetical situation here of any relevance, so let's stick to the original point.
And it's perfectly easy to imagine that one oil-rich regime or another might decide to start refusing petrodollars in favor of petroeuros, even purely out of spite. Iraq was doing exactly that for several years before the present war.
Besides which, there is actually a good case to be made that switching to euro-denominated exchanges would be in the best interests of oil-rich nations, an argument I'm not going to bother getting into.
So bank robbery is terrorism. Mugging is terrorism (as you know, they've demonstrated violence against your peers). Even graffiti could be terrorism. What the fuck?
Look, you can be as slippery with semantics as you want on your own time, but when you open your mouth in public you're ultimately going to have to settle on definitions for terms that are (a) commonly agreed upon and (b) useful. Defining "terrorism" in such a manner as to include witness intimidation, of all things, is neither.
"...he'd pretty much have to leave the country."
Well, yeah, but only because said official would be ashamed to step outdoors, and even if they gathered up the courage, they probably wouldn't be able to get anyone to talk to them or look them in the face anyway. In other words, for cultural reasons, and certainly not because the citizens of Singapore's notoriously undemocratic democracy rose up to give them the boot.
Actually, he's right (mostly). Our productivity may be the strength of our economy, but is not the sole strength of the dollar itself. The fact that everyone uses dollars to complete oil trades means that dollars are always in demand on the exchange markets. It's almost tautological to point out that dollar-denominated trades, colloquially, thus prop up the dollar. Check out the bulk of this article, e.g.
Were Gulf countries suddenly to refuse U.S. dollars in exchange for oil, you're right that trades would in a simplistically theoretical model be no different in the long run; unfortunately, that long run would never happen, since shit'd be hitting fans in the meantime.
I don't know. That may have been true from the late '60s through early '80s, but to take the long view, these two decades were but an anomaly in urban vs. suburban settlement patterns over the past few hundred years, if not the entire course of human civilization. Since those dark years, the pendulum's swung vigorously back. Most of the company I keep prefer to live in cities in order to have access to the widest possible range of goods, services, and information. Then again, I admit we probably don't approach life with a suburban mindset, and I admit I wouldn't much care to live in e.g. Detroit.
Actually, I agree completely--which is why I think the government should end its subsidies for sprawl (see above).
Well, we could phase out the market distortions that favor sprawl and wasteful land use patterns over compact (ecoheads call them "sustainable") urban communities. Tax deductions for mortgages on single-family homes, zoning laws that prohibit mixed-use development, the massive government funding of the interstate highway system--these are all market distortions we'd be better without. Unfortunately, if we want a smooth transition to aforementioned sustainability, it'll take generations to fix.
And that's exactly why the iPod accessories market has nothing to worry about from Apple. Move along.
Hype, to me, is Microsoft prattling on and on about how revolutionary and exciting its newest shrink-wrapped turd is going to be--twelve months in advance--or, say, NBC sensationalizing the Olympics by changing its logo, running ads 24/7, and inventing "oh I've led a difficult life" stories around every event and athlete to appear onscreen for more than five seconds. Or even Apple's run-up to the iPod in 2001, when the company coyly encouraged speculation about some life-changing new product it was going to introduce by putting a countdown on its homepage.
Hype is far, far from Apple's stock in trade. Apple deals in good taste. Hype is crass.
I guess Apple is "cool" at the moment because its long-running philosophy of design happens to align with current fashion. A certain tasteful set, however, have always considered Apple "cool," due to said philosophy of design. This is unlikely to change even after the iPod and licky-widgets fad is over.
All trolling aside, Apple doesn't really do "hype." Apple's marketing and advertising tends to be understated, even demure, compared with any other company of its size. Hype is the opposite of cool. When you're cool, you don't need to hype yourself. Cool is staying restrained, while you let the media and your (rabid?) fanbase do the dirty work for you.