A law against anyone with political affiliations taking the job of Secretary of State -- a la Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell - would be good too. It should be a genuinely non-partisan job.
Well, I don't know about the far past, but I don't remember it after any election before 2000. Yeah, and I did hear rumors about JFK and Chicago and Texas. But Nixon didn't follow through with any challenges, so it kind of flew away. Johnson/ Goldwater? That would have been tens of millions of ballots. Nixon/Humphrey? Nope. You can go down the list, and there was never any significant challenge of the results. Then came Florida 2000, and it was game on. (Check the newspaper recount: Bush lost Florida, but buried that lede very deep because the results were ready after 9/11.
There's a real problem here only if the systems are allowed to be manufactured and run as anything but open source, by computer schools, and with an obvious paper audit for the voter to verify on the spot, with that paper being used for the ballot. The problems aren't, in fact, enormous. It just takes honesty and the spirit of democracy.
I'd suppose, if String Theory has no fruitful proofs in the next... while, that it will be abandoned as a scientific theory. Phlogiston, anyone? Theories are like that.
"Intelligent design" will never be abandoned until we're all living in the beginning of A Canticle for Liebowitz, at which point the pointy-headed mutant monks will decide that science and rationality are defeated, and the world is safe again for mad a priori assumptions that the clergy can dispense to peasants.
When you turn a knob on a radio -- the volume, for instance -- and the knob clicks to another position, that's a detent. What you're reaching for is "detente".
This is, after all, in the UK, where they probably kept 45s for much longer, and drove them on the wrong side of the groove as well. It is obviously describing a tiny market share in Britain, and mistaking the part for the whole. Not the first time that might have happened -- witness Iraq -- but it doesn't make it any truer. Oh, but then it's CNET, too, that font of misinformation. CmdrTaco, I'm disappointed.
Not "Joe Lieberman" bipartisan. Certainly not W bipartisan, which means, "Do exactly as I say, and I'll make sure to Swift Boat you even harder next time."
Let's talk about actual corruption today, not back in the Big City Democratic Boss days-- which are gone. Besides, any honest observer knows that "everybody does it" is a foolish argument you don't even accept from your kids. The Rove era is much more subtle. First of all, there's monkeying with the voter's lists, as was done, massively, in Florida. Whatever you think of felons being barred from voting for life, the fact is that the lists were cleansed by Choicepoint, misidentifying people all over the place. if you last name was, you know, black, and it sounded like a felon's, you were off. Similar tactics are going on all the time. In three states, Republican voter registration efforts were caught throwing out Democratic registrations. There were very high-ranking GOP members caught tying up the phone banks of the Democrats in New Hampshire, and people have gone to federal prison for that. Never explained was, who did the criminals call in the White House in the days leading up to this? And we haven't even talked about the I.D. card movement in many Republican states that amounts to a poll tax, and is bound to disenfranchise the poor and black, as certainly as an evacuation of New Orleans left those without cars of their own. Or, the big one, the easily-hackable voting machines. One of the first things that Schwarzenegger did was get the Democratic Secretary of State out of there, with his anti-Diebold, pro-paper trail attitude, and put in a guy for whom that's just fine with it. When the voting machine thing actually blows, it will be the biggest scandal in decades.
Now, on the other hand, there are always Republican accusations that Dems use the graveyard, and pay illegals to vote. About the graveyard, that might exist in Chicago, but I'd say it's a dying method. Records are too good today.
Paying people to vote your way has been a problem for a long time. One of my mother's first memories as a child was riding around in a truck at Christmas with her uncle, and handing out turkeys and booze to the Republican homes in Philly. Early '20s. True story. Her uncle was a Republican ward boss. Was it bribery, or just the party looking after its own?
But that kind of corruption requires people paying the bribes, and that's traceable. When Loretta Sanchez beat B-1 Bob Dornan in Orange County by about 1,000 votes, he contested the election, and gave many statements to the effect that some massive number of illegals must have voted. The inquiry found that there were, at most, 300 "questionable" votes. Some of these just couldn't be tracked down. There were a dozen or so, I believe, who had passed all the tests for citizenship, and the instructor said they could vote, even though they couldn't until the actual day of swearing-in. So the degree of "corruption," if that's what it was, was miniscule.
Any politician who paid illegals to vote for him would need his head examined, and he would belong in jail.
But let's not get into the partisan thing about elections. They should be straight and honest. Isn't that bipartisan?
Maybe half a dozen? That's since 2000, when I installed the Beta, and then 10.1. Two causes: when I installed Panther, I got a new USB hub at the same time. Half my kernel panics right then. It was a bad hub that delivered less than its rated power. BAM! Later, when I moved up to the G5, I moved my old OS over from the G4. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, but I screwed up something -- I now use SuperDuper! because it's a real Mac app -- and something got really screwy about root and my admin account. Again, another three reboots. Did a fresh erase and install, no problems since then.
Well, I can tell you right now, don't use SCSI. It's an old technology, most of the adapters suck, bad, and if you want speed, a Firewire 800 drive, or an eSATA with a new Mac or a SATA card is pretty damn fast.
But, we Must Use SCSI. Papa Love SCSI. All the children do, too!
Really? That was brain function? rmd wp51?
The thing is, one's brain function should be engaged in the task, not the interface.
About the business adoption of Windows, well, it was a whole lot easier to use the cheaper platform that demanded that your workers turn themselves into robots rather than the platform where there could be individually creative, which isn't, of course, what business wanted from the comuters. They wanted Miss Jones to be able to use different fonts -- screw WYSIWIG, she could just remember 18 commands. They wanted spreadsheets, so they could figure out the value of things, and presentation software, so they could impress everybody with prepackaged, boring slide shows. Oh, and mailing labels, so everybody could get the junk mail.
It was only when the bosses wanted a computer, or their kids wanted one, when they gave a damn about GUIs.
I love it how I used to hear nothing but, "you can't run Windows on it except that crappy VirtualPC emulator at 2 mph, and it costs a huge amount more, and OS 9 is extremely limited and out of date."
Now, OS X is decidedly not out of date. You can run Windows apps, in a variety of ways. (I just installed Codeweaver's WINE thing on my Mac mini, and it runs older Windows software like a charm.) You can run Ubuntu on it, live or installed, making it a triple-booting machine. VMWare is on its way. AND it's very low in price, comparable in many niches, in fact, to Dell, the low-price leader. So now what? Now it's time to whine that they won't release OS X to play on Windows machines. That they're lowering quality by lowering price. Yada, yada.
You know, when MS-DOS was king, they used to complain that GUIs were for dummies. That it stole processor cycles and ran too slow. Until MS adopted a workable GUI, then GUIs were just great!
I keep on trying to figure out the psychology of the Windows chauvinists, and I can never figure it out. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun -- am I forgetting anybody? -- they all have their good points. I'd like best that you could run anything anywhere, but first the monopolist here would have to stop friggin' around with web and video standards, and the business community, which made Windows King in the first place, would have to get a brain implant.)
I guess I don't follow the geek consensus about Soundjam. I found the interface, with all those windows, a huge pain the ass. Also, "skinnability" struck me as pretty much a total bore. When Apple brought out iTunes -- BEFORE the iPod -- I used it to load up the Rio 32 MB player I had, and it was pretty keen. But it was the interface that just killed me: everything clean, clear and obvious.
When I got the first iPod, ordered the day of the unveiling, and used it with iTunes, I knew they had a hit.
But then, I know, most geeks love Eudora, too. I get lost in all those windows popping up.
No, it's about the struggle of conscience a Windows fanatic feels when confronted with something admirable about the Mac: do I act destructively, or admit, well, that's pretty okay?
As always, when such conflicts are unresolved, the conflicted John Hodgman is left repressed and unhappy.
I think that those who find some moral problem involved with stem cells -- particularly after the discoveries made public yesterday about the non-destructive method of obtaining stem cells -- is kidding themselves about the history of medicine. We would know very little about what makes us tick if human dissections, made possible in many cases by professional grave-robbers, had not taken place in defiance of the religious objections of the day. If adult stem cells can be made useful, that's fine. But experiments with embryonic stem cells remain irreplaceable, and still more likely useful medically. Of course, we don't know for sure, because the research hasn't been DONE.
If we're going to get all squeamish about research and pander to the wishes of one or another religious group at this point in advanced human society, we're going to have to consent to genetic diseases that will have no cure, to diseases evolving to the point that they overwhelm the 19th-century germ science and early-20th-century antibiotics that we have to use against them, and generally to life falling back to the level of the 14th century. Not me.
Frankly, I find it completely bizarre for such tender-hearted regard to be extended to a blob of blastocysts that may produce a human being if everything goes right, while we approach the rest of humanity with the weapons of terror and elimination. Oh, you Christianists. Oh, wait, Christianity is a Religion of Peace, right? It's just a few that spread this terror and superstition.
In Republican America, we are working longer and longer hours, with less overtime, just to stand still... almost. Check out the stats.
60 hours a week has been pretty standard for me since I started working. At first, it was because I was producing a show, and being paid rather nicely. Now I'm doing that time, and not being paid all that well.
This free-trade business means always low prices, always, but a price on everything; and it has also meant the collapse of the American middle class. Watch out when all those interest-only mortgages come due. Or when the properties that people bought and then second-mortgaged into their credit cards get to be a bigger and bigger stretch.
Because capitalists like Benjamin Franklin set it up? And Ayn Rand was nothing, at that time, but a nasty shudder after a nightmarish dream of perverted sex?
It has to do with economies of scale. If you bring out a new PC that you know it going to sell a few million to the business market, you can bring down the price for consumers, too.
I in fact connect to work via my new Mac mini, because my office uses Windows, like 98% of the offices I know of.
In the New York Times, David Pogue makes the argument that Apple will NEVER win the desktop war, because MS went for the IT departments of the world, the guys who can buy 100 or 1000 systems at the same time. MS has saturated the office desktop, and that's not about to change any time soon. They are poised for a major jump in market share, but they can't take the main market for Microsoft, the computer every clerk for the DMV has on his or her desk. "Name?" Type, type, type. "Birthday?" Type, type. "Wait for a minute, sir, it's stalled a bit." "Oh, I see. Is your first name Glen?" "No." "Is your birthday in 1992?" "Nope." Etc.
That computer is running Windows. It will be in the future.
Long term, Microsoft will choke on its own tongue. Just like IBM, which dominated computing for a generation.
At what cost does this Alienware-class machine come to the consumer? Some of the prices I hear are pretty outrageous, way beyond the $2500 base model that Apple has configured.
What do you think of the people who say that PC games are dying? I mean, the Sony and MS gaming consoles will outperform all but the premium PC, at a fraction of the cost. I mean, if you want to spend five grand, go ahead. Most people don't.
And oddly, even video editors don't need the super-extreme video cards. They need RAM, bandwidth, a fast processor and a decent card.
No doubt, the Alienware machines are superior to the Mac Pro -- for gaming. But most people do other things with their computers.
Leopard is 64-bit all the way through. Tiger supports 64-bit in the UNIX part. (My G5 suddenly started encoding video many times faster using ffmpegX.}
On the other hand, if games is what you want, stay with Windows. Yawn. Go ahead, waste your time in foolish pursuits. (I know, flame bait.)
Oh, you clever man! Try telling that to the millions of moms and pops who stare, befuddled, at a machine that's infected with crap. That's the real point. Can an expert figure out how not to get infected? Yes. Can the average buyer, that's the point? No.
It was a good story by Hemingway, right? What does Nokia have to do with it?
Isn't the right word, oh, I don't know, "rival," or something like that?
Unless, of course, the Nokia is equipped to sense the proximity of the PortalPlayer chip, and destroy it with a huge electromagnetic pulse. That would qualify as an iPod "killer."
Slashdot Mirror
A law against anyone with political affiliations taking the job of Secretary of State -- a la Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell - would be good too. It should be a genuinely non-partisan job.
Well, I don't know about the far past, but I don't remember it after any election before 2000. Yeah, and I did hear rumors about JFK and Chicago and Texas. But Nixon didn't follow through with any challenges, so it kind of flew away. Johnson/ Goldwater? That would have been tens of millions of ballots. Nixon/Humphrey? Nope. You can go down the list, and there was never any significant challenge of the results. Then came Florida 2000, and it was game on. (Check the newspaper recount: Bush lost Florida, but buried that lede very deep because the results were ready after 9/11.
There's a real problem here only if the systems are allowed to be manufactured and run as anything but open source, by computer schools, and with an obvious paper audit for the voter to verify on the spot, with that paper being used for the ballot. The problems aren't, in fact, enormous. It just takes honesty and the spirit of democracy.
"Intelligent design" will never be abandoned until we're all living in the beginning of A Canticle for Liebowitz, at which point the pointy-headed mutant monks will decide that science and rationality are defeated, and the world is safe again for mad a priori assumptions that the clergy can dispense to peasants.
When you turn a knob on a radio -- the volume, for instance -- and the knob clicks to another position, that's a detent. What you're reaching for is "detente".
Whoever said it was accurate? Reuters has anotherr story. http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.asp x?view=CN&storyID=2006-09-22T233423Z_01_N22181208_ RTRIDST_0_MEDIA-WALMART-STUDIOS-UPDATE-2.XML&rpc=6 6&type=qcna
This is, after all, in the UK, where they probably kept 45s for much longer, and drove them on the wrong side of the groove as well. It is obviously describing a tiny market share in Britain, and mistaking the part for the whole. Not the first time that might have happened -- witness Iraq -- but it doesn't make it any truer. Oh, but then it's CNET, too, that font of misinformation. CmdrTaco, I'm disappointed.
Not "Joe Lieberman" bipartisan. Certainly not W bipartisan, which means, "Do exactly as I say, and I'll make sure to Swift Boat you even harder next time."
Let's talk about actual corruption today, not back in the Big City Democratic Boss days-- which are gone. Besides, any honest observer knows that "everybody does it" is a foolish argument you don't even accept from your kids. The Rove era is much more subtle. First of all, there's monkeying with the voter's lists, as was done, massively, in Florida. Whatever you think of felons being barred from voting for life, the fact is that the lists were cleansed by Choicepoint, misidentifying people all over the place. if you last name was, you know, black, and it sounded like a felon's, you were off. Similar tactics are going on all the time. In three states, Republican voter registration efforts were caught throwing out Democratic registrations. There were very high-ranking GOP members caught tying up the phone banks of the Democrats in New Hampshire, and people have gone to federal prison for that. Never explained was, who did the criminals call in the White House in the days leading up to this? And we haven't even talked about the I.D. card movement in many Republican states that amounts to a poll tax, and is bound to disenfranchise the poor and black, as certainly as an evacuation of New Orleans left those without cars of their own. Or, the big one, the easily-hackable voting machines. One of the first things that Schwarzenegger did was get the Democratic Secretary of State out of there, with his anti-Diebold, pro-paper trail attitude, and put in a guy for whom that's just fine with it. When the voting machine thing actually blows, it will be the biggest scandal in decades.
Now, on the other hand, there are always Republican accusations that Dems use the graveyard, and pay illegals to vote. About the graveyard, that might exist in Chicago, but I'd say it's a dying method. Records are too good today.
Paying people to vote your way has been a problem for a long time. One of my mother's first memories as a child was riding around in a truck at Christmas with her uncle, and handing out turkeys and booze to the Republican homes in Philly. Early '20s. True story. Her uncle was a Republican ward boss. Was it bribery, or just the party looking after its own?
But that kind of corruption requires people paying the bribes, and that's traceable. When Loretta Sanchez beat B-1 Bob Dornan in Orange County by about 1,000 votes, he contested the election, and gave many statements to the effect that some massive number of illegals must have voted. The inquiry found that there were, at most, 300 "questionable" votes. Some of these just couldn't be tracked down. There were a dozen or so, I believe, who had passed all the tests for citizenship, and the instructor said they could vote, even though they couldn't until the actual day of swearing-in. So the degree of "corruption," if that's what it was, was miniscule.
Any politician who paid illegals to vote for him would need his head examined, and he would belong in jail.
But let's not get into the partisan thing about elections. They should be straight and honest. Isn't that bipartisan?
Maybe half a dozen? That's since 2000, when I installed the Beta, and then 10.1. Two causes: when I installed Panther, I got a new USB hub at the same time. Half my kernel panics right then. It was a bad hub that delivered less than its rated power. BAM! Later, when I moved up to the G5, I moved my old OS over from the G4. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, but I screwed up something -- I now use SuperDuper! because it's a real Mac app -- and something got really screwy about root and my admin account. Again, another three reboots. Did a fresh erase and install, no problems since then.
That's about 6 years now.
Well, I can tell you right now, don't use SCSI. It's an old technology, most of the adapters suck, bad, and if you want speed, a Firewire 800 drive, or an eSATA with a new Mac or a SATA card is pretty damn fast.
But, we Must Use SCSI. Papa Love SCSI. All the children do, too!
Really? That was brain function? rmd wp51? The thing is, one's brain function should be engaged in the task, not the interface. About the business adoption of Windows, well, it was a whole lot easier to use the cheaper platform that demanded that your workers turn themselves into robots rather than the platform where there could be individually creative, which isn't, of course, what business wanted from the comuters. They wanted Miss Jones to be able to use different fonts -- screw WYSIWIG, she could just remember 18 commands. They wanted spreadsheets, so they could figure out the value of things, and presentation software, so they could impress everybody with prepackaged, boring slide shows. Oh, and mailing labels, so everybody could get the junk mail. It was only when the bosses wanted a computer, or their kids wanted one, when they gave a damn about GUIs.
I love it how I used to hear nothing but, "you can't run Windows on it except that crappy VirtualPC emulator at 2 mph, and it costs a huge amount more, and OS 9 is extremely limited and out of date."
Now, OS X is decidedly not out of date. You can run Windows apps, in a variety of ways. (I just installed Codeweaver's WINE thing on my Mac mini, and it runs older Windows software like a charm.) You can run Ubuntu on it, live or installed, making it a triple-booting machine. VMWare is on its way. AND it's very low in price, comparable in many niches, in fact, to Dell, the low-price leader. So now what? Now it's time to whine that they won't release OS X to play on Windows machines. That they're lowering quality by lowering price. Yada, yada.
You know, when MS-DOS was king, they used to complain that GUIs were for dummies. That it stole processor cycles and ran too slow. Until MS adopted a workable GUI, then GUIs were just great!
I keep on trying to figure out the psychology of the Windows chauvinists, and I can never figure it out. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun -- am I forgetting anybody? -- they all have their good points. I'd like best that you could run anything anywhere, but first the monopolist here would have to stop friggin' around with web and video standards, and the business community, which made Windows King in the first place, would have to get a brain implant.)
I guess I don't follow the geek consensus about Soundjam. I found the interface, with all those windows, a huge pain the ass. Also, "skinnability" struck me as pretty much a total bore. When Apple brought out iTunes -- BEFORE the iPod -- I used it to load up the Rio 32 MB player I had, and it was pretty keen. But it was the interface that just killed me: everything clean, clear and obvious.
When I got the first iPod, ordered the day of the unveiling, and used it with iTunes, I knew they had a hit.
But then, I know, most geeks love Eudora, too. I get lost in all those windows popping up.
No, it's about the struggle of conscience a Windows fanatic feels when confronted with something admirable about the Mac: do I act destructively, or admit, well, that's pretty okay?
As always, when such conflicts are unresolved, the conflicted John Hodgman is left repressed and unhappy.
In other words, it's a joke.
I think that those who find some moral problem involved with stem cells -- particularly after the discoveries made public yesterday about the non-destructive method of obtaining stem cells -- is kidding themselves about the history of medicine. We would know very little about what makes us tick if human dissections, made possible in many cases by professional grave-robbers, had not taken place in defiance of the religious objections of the day. If adult stem cells can be made useful, that's fine. But experiments with embryonic stem cells remain irreplaceable, and still more likely useful medically. Of course, we don't know for sure, because the research hasn't been DONE.
If we're going to get all squeamish about research and pander to the wishes of one or another religious group at this point in advanced human society, we're going to have to consent to genetic diseases that will have no cure, to diseases evolving to the point that they overwhelm the 19th-century germ science and early-20th-century antibiotics that we have to use against them, and generally to life falling back to the level of the 14th century. Not me.
Frankly, I find it completely bizarre for such tender-hearted regard to be extended to a blob of blastocysts that may produce a human being if everything goes right, while we approach the rest of humanity with the weapons of terror and elimination. Oh, you Christianists. Oh, wait, Christianity is a Religion of Peace, right? It's just a few that spread this terror and superstition.
In Republican America, we are working longer and longer hours, with less overtime, just to stand still... almost. Check out the stats.
60 hours a week has been pretty standard for me since I started working. At first, it was because I was producing a show, and being paid rather nicely. Now I'm doing that time, and not being paid all that well.
This free-trade business means always low prices, always, but a price on everything; and it has also meant the collapse of the American middle class. Watch out when all those interest-only mortgages come due. Or when the properties that people bought and then second-mortgaged into their credit cards get to be a bigger and bigger stretch.
Nope. It just cropped up out of the ether.
was different.
As it is, this is perfectly normal behavior for a company with a popular product. But here, it's "tradmark trolling."
$300? What do you know? Or are you just talking, um, through your hat?
It's been $129. I think $199 for a 5-license family pack. (I've never bought one.) Were you think of the Server?
Because capitalists like Benjamin Franklin set it up? And Ayn Rand was nothing, at that time, but a nasty shudder after a nightmarish dream of perverted sex?
It has to do with economies of scale. If you bring out a new PC that you know it going to sell a few million to the business market, you can bring down the price for consumers, too.
I in fact connect to work via my new Mac mini, because my office uses Windows, like 98% of the offices I know of.
Price meant the PC could beat the Mac at home.
In the New York Times, David Pogue makes the argument that Apple will NEVER win the desktop war, because MS went for the IT departments of the world, the guys who can buy 100 or 1000 systems at the same time. MS has saturated the office desktop, and that's not about to change any time soon. They are poised for a major jump in market share, but they can't take the main market for Microsoft, the computer every clerk for the DMV has on his or her desk. "Name?" Type, type, type. "Birthday?" Type, type. "Wait for a minute, sir, it's stalled a bit." "Oh, I see. Is your first name Glen?" "No." "Is your birthday in 1992?" "Nope." Etc.
That computer is running Windows. It will be in the future.
Long term, Microsoft will choke on its own tongue. Just like IBM, which dominated computing for a generation.
At what cost does this Alienware-class machine come to the consumer? Some of the prices I hear are pretty outrageous, way beyond the $2500 base model that Apple has configured.
What do you think of the people who say that PC games are dying? I mean, the Sony and MS gaming consoles will outperform all but the premium PC, at a fraction of the cost. I mean, if you want to spend five grand, go ahead. Most people don't.
And oddly, even video editors don't need the super-extreme video cards. They need RAM, bandwidth, a fast processor and a decent card.
No doubt, the Alienware machines are superior to the Mac Pro -- for gaming. But most people do other things with their computers.
Leopard is 64-bit all the way through. Tiger supports 64-bit in the UNIX part. (My G5 suddenly started encoding video many times faster using ffmpegX.}
On the other hand, if games is what you want, stay with Windows. Yawn. Go ahead, waste your time in foolish pursuits. (I know, flame bait.)
Oh, you clever man! Try telling that to the millions of moms and pops who stare, befuddled, at a machine that's infected with crap. That's the real point. Can an expert figure out how not to get infected? Yes. Can the average buyer, that's the point? No.
It was a good story by Hemingway, right? What does Nokia have to do with it?
Isn't the right word, oh, I don't know, "rival," or something like that?
Unless, of course, the Nokia is equipped to sense the proximity of the PortalPlayer chip, and destroy it with a huge electromagnetic pulse. That would qualify as an iPod "killer."