Actually, the Wall Street Journal and the Times are a mirror image of each other. The editorial page of WSJ is as completely wacko conservative as any other opinion source in America, but the reporting, which after all must be objective or else it's useless to business, is what you might call liberal if "objective" is a dirty word to you. They, for instance, went out and reported that the YouTube parody of Al Gore was, in fact, made by a Republican consultancy firm that also has Exxon-Mobil as a client. Astroturfing, it's called, and it's dishonest, whether you agree with its point of view or not.
The New York Times, meanwhile, has a liberal editorial page, minus a couple of conservative voices like Brooks and Tierney. The news is just generally fair, though its political reporting, from the phony stories on Whitewater by Jeff Gerth to Judy Miller's stenography on WMD's, has a little secret: it's tilted to Republicans.
As for "excluding" Arabs from the freelance pool, and censoring their opinion, well, you anticipated being called a lot of names, and you deserve to be.
Al Jazeerah, generally speaking, is a responsible voice of journalism in the Arab world, modeled on the BBC. It's your problem that you call them "the terrorist view." Little Green Footballs, go home!
That's your definition? Why not admit that the conservative position, on each and every one of those issues, is not the majority opinion. Modern Republicanism is, in fact, a cult.
Photoshopping is a no-no, whether it happens on the cover of TIME (OJ), or in an LA Times photo, or this. But darkening the clouds of a real bomb? How is that a political statement? Far too much is being made here. The guy did a no-no to make his picture more dramatic. Well, there's lots of tricks you can do with silver halide, too. Did they establish some kind of objective contrast ratio, a politically-prescribed development time and temperature? There's a famous few pictures taken on the beach at D-Day, where the grain is the size of footballs. It was pushed, because the wrong film was used, and the light hadn't fully come up when they hit the beach. A pro-American lie? It's ridiculous. The guy tried to make his photos more dramatic. His name is Arab, as many of the free-lancers would be in, you know, Lebanon. The case that this is some kind of political manipulation is, in fact, politically motivated. Whether the smoke from that bomb was black, gray or paisley, those kids still died in Qana.
The second the Mac OS gets like Windows, I'm gone.
I think the whole point of this OS conundrum is to make sure that many OSes survive. It would be best if they play nicely together, so that you can move your e-mail for Mac to Linux and so on, and open up Word docs on all platforms, maybe in a free app, but the maintenance of a number of systems in important in a networked world.
That's exactly the point. The whole reason they do this is for deception. You're supposed to think, "Oh, it was on YouTUBE. People must really think Gore is stupid." Well, Exxon and the Republican Party think that, but this thing is a fake.
Given that Apple is acquiring lots of commercial partners, big ones, with the dock connector being the common denominator to full usage, and given that this is something even the "iPod killers" do not have, I'd say they'd be crazy to change the dock connector without say, having an adaptor that would allow connection to the MILLIONS of cars that will be out there.
On the other hand, I've seen lots of new car radios that just have an AUX audio in. That offers the best sound, without the controls.
The "Apple" segment of Slashdot is full of a bunch of stories promoted by bitter Windows/Linux clowns, who don't like the Mac and never will. It's a certain amount of fun to engage with them, and a learning experience for anyone interested in group pathology, but it's profoundly uninteresting to anyone not in the lynch mob.
I use a Windows machine at work. It's okay, you know? Clunky, boring, and at times purposely obscure, but it's okay. I prefer my home Mac, and now that it has a relatively secure UNIX and a processor that will put us on the same starting line as anyone else, I'm looking forward to the plethora of products that will be coming out soon. I'm not interested in being eviscerated for this choice, any more than Linux and Windows users should be put through this juvenile treatment.
This was a set-up, purposely not done with the Apple drivers and chipset, which does NOT have this weakness. Okay, so a lot of people find Apple users smug, and they wanted to tweak us. Okay, fair enough. It is a weakness for any computer when the third-party drivers are developed ad hoc, rushing towards a hardware release date. Bugs develop too easily. Could something be done by Microsoft, Apple, etc., to standardize drivers in some way, so that a different scanner developer, for instance, could just plug in some variables for the new machine and be done with it? Maybe that's naive; or maybe it's something the industry should do, relative to every external device that needs a driver?
Now that's what we might be talking about, rather than looking for a chance to heap scorn on this side or the other.
Apple didn't invent DRM. They're not the only ones who use it. Then this topic belongs on the Main section. "DRM is bad for--" I'm in absolute agreement.
I disabled the side buttons. I think I had expose configured with them, but the Expose windows would just suddenly appear because I was pressing the sides. Aside from that, I like it. (And my Microsoft Mouse didn't have side buttons, anyway.)
You realize that if you wanted to, any USB mouse works, and the OS automatically recognizes two-button mice, etc.
As strange as it sounds to Windoze people, we went since 1984 without needing a multibutton mouse. (Right-click, if you need, was option-click.) It's really only been introduced to smooth the way for Windoze people.
It's certainly not a false argument. Certain specific guns were forbidden, but you could get almost the exact same weapon under other names. By the time the automatic weapons ban was passed, it had almost no teeth. It was in no sense a ban, as in other countries. We live in a country with an open weapons bazaar, like Afghanistan's. Any hunting weapon, or home self-defense, or sports weapon, was and is freely available. Everything short of mortars or machine guns just require your signature and laughable waiting periods and the like.
And after the political price the Democrats paid in the late '90s, there won't be any political party except the God and Guns party.
It's pitiful that the Ashcroft Justice Department, for instance, freely imprisoned hundreds without a trial; that it now emerges that they were tapping our phones without warrant, searching our e-mail, looking at our financial transactions and using proctoscopes to make sure we weren't liable to ask for gay marriage, but every precaution was taken to protect the sacred records of gun purchases.
Your mention of Clinton proves my point. There wasn't a whisper of a hope of a chance that he would enact a real "gun ban." At most, you were going to have to buy a look-alike weapon, and wait an extra weekend to get it, or buy what you wanted at a gun show. The total overreaction of the gun enthusiasts in the US is a study in madness only explicable by the term "castration fantasy." I know pseudo-scientists tell you that crime goes down in states where guns are freely available, but the statistical work is highly dubious. John Lott, the leading researcher, says that the dog ate his homework when you ask him for the data to check his facts. And any effects, if they are there, are miniscule.
The more worthwhile part of the Clinton regulations was the waiting period, the criminal and mental health background check.
But it's all a side issue, anyway; the real question about Britain is, how do they have a miniscule homicide rate compared to ours, in addition to only about 70 handgun deaths a year, relative to our 10,000? On a population basis, it they followed our example, they should have over 2,000 handgun deaths. The same thing goes for every other advanced industrial country. I don't see our weapons bazaar as contributing greatly to that death rate. I see it as a symptom of a deeper problem. Maybe the availabilty of universal medical care is a better indicator of a more peaceful society.
Good lord. At this rate of increase, they will have a gun homicide rate as high as the US in about 750 years. Of course, by that time, the US will have a 0% tax rate, and infinite government income, and every single person not in jail will have a legal death ray, including special death rays for blastocysts, and therefore there will be no crime (and no abortions, if the blastocysts are packin'.)
I can't page through another 6 levels of gun-ranting, penis-deprived raves about how the UK would be just fine if they allowed all the naffies and biddies to carry AKs, all right?
Why do I think of the handkerchief-headed guy on Monty Python with a submachine gun?
What about the original story about iPods? Are THEY the cause of crime? God knows, I'm assaulted every other day with a 30 GB video iPod. There's a guy down the street and--
Well, the truth is, the original story is bullcrap. What the cops actually said was, teenagers have a lot of expensive cell phones and mp3 players in their pockets, and people are robbing them. But C/Net is the anti-iPod net, and every possible bit of anti-Apple and anti-iPod propaganda possible. Gee, I guess you'll have to buy the next "iPod killer," which will have an AK-47 attached (oh, when will Apple FINALLY put a firearm on their crappy iPod?), and you will be able to phone the cops, shoot the robber, and continue to listen to the latest pop hit as you wait for the the coroner.
It was only an accident, in a way, that the gun nuts spotted a story about the gun dystopia in the UK, where the subjects of the crown are deprived of their right to carry mortars and tactical nukes, and thus they live in a hellhole of sick violence and crimes against property.
Funny thing is, I'm waiting for a political party that would actually try to "take away our guns." Given that nobody has called for it, why do you keep fearing it? Ever heard of the psychological term, "castration fear"? It's an unreasonable fear.
The thing is, you want to fry an egg quickly. Otherwise, it gets all rubbery.
Put an egg on a city sidewalk on a hot day. It actually fries. And the point...?
I am a rabid iPod guy, but I agree with you. But there's something you're leaving out of your understanding here. The record labels all insist on DRM. Without that, you're talking pirate sites and those few sites that release little-known, off-label music. They've got us by the short hairs. At the beginning, certainly, Apple didn't give a damn what you put on your iPod. But then Jobs saw the massive use of Napster, along with seeing that it was headed for the cliff, because the labels would never go along with it. So he managed to coax the majors into the iTMS, and demonstrate that they could make a tidy bit of money through the Internets. Now, everybody who knew anything knows that the real advantage to DRM is with the tech company using the DRM.
I personally wouldn't go for the "French" model, where each of the DRMs must cooperate between devices; I think we'll only have a fair and open market when all DRM is gone. But until then, I'm quite happy with my iPod, which will go down in industrial history as a great industrial design, along with the Walkman, the 45 portable record player, the table model FM radio, and on and on.
Here's a quick truth: not enough people listen to radio anymore to make hits, even though payola is now legal (not technically, but something very close to payola is), and the various Pop stations actually pay for broadcasting the latest effluvia of their labels. But ratings are down. Internet buzz is far more efficient and popular than the radio jocks.
Radio broadcasting is a moment that has come and gone. Top 40 is dead. Audience numbers are down all over. Nobody cares, not like they used to. Notice how pop stars just come and go? That's because the marketing machine is completely broken.
Also, an AM/FM tuner that sounded halfway decent would add considerable cost.
You don't have to have a.Mac account to have photos on your iPod. You just have to tell iTunes which folders of pictures you want, and it puts them on the iPod (including new ones) every time you recharge.
You can, if you have.Mac, share photos with all your pals around the world. It doesn't cost an additional penny.
And there is no such scheme to disallow anything not bought at the iTMS on your iPod. That would be completely crazy. Apparently, you think the market leader is crazy. They didn't get there by being that nuts.
You should study the audience figures since the 1996 Telecommunications "Reform" and the rise of the Internet. The radio doesn't decide hits anymore. There isn't anything on it except political shouting and tunes the labels are paying to play that week. It's almost completely irrelevant, culturally. Ratings on all "broadcasting" are down, considerably. Some people care, obviously. But people used to listen to about 25 hours a week of pop music radio. That's way, way down. It's rapidly becoming culturally irrelevant.
Plus, which player has 80% of the North American market? The ones with the radio in it? I didn't think so.
Yeah, but they were business students. They were dorks.
I won't pay for a damn radio in an iPod. I want my 10,000 songs so I don't have to listen to that crap.
Well, I've got to say, with the new Sarbanes-Oxley law after Enron and the other numerous scandals of the late '90s collapse, companies have to use much stricter guidelines about expensing and so on, and if they haven't fully divulged the condition of the company, they are in violation of the law. And also, the CEO -- even the iCEO -- would be responsible for this if he signed off on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Wall Street Journal and the Times are a mirror image of each other. The editorial page of WSJ is as completely wacko conservative as any other opinion source in America, but the reporting, which after all must be objective or else it's useless to business, is what you might call liberal if "objective" is a dirty word to you. They, for instance, went out and reported that the YouTube parody of Al Gore was, in fact, made by a Republican consultancy firm that also has Exxon-Mobil as a client. Astroturfing, it's called, and it's dishonest, whether you agree with its point of view or not. The New York Times, meanwhile, has a liberal editorial page, minus a couple of conservative voices like Brooks and Tierney. The news is just generally fair, though its political reporting, from the phony stories on Whitewater by Jeff Gerth to Judy Miller's stenography on WMD's, has a little secret: it's tilted to Republicans. As for "excluding" Arabs from the freelance pool, and censoring their opinion, well, you anticipated being called a lot of names, and you deserve to be. Al Jazeerah, generally speaking, is a responsible voice of journalism in the Arab world, modeled on the BBC. It's your problem that you call them "the terrorist view." Little Green Footballs, go home!
That's your definition? Why not admit that the conservative position, on each and every one of those issues, is not the majority opinion. Modern Republicanism is, in fact, a cult.
Photoshopping is a no-no, whether it happens on the cover of TIME (OJ), or in an LA Times photo, or this. But darkening the clouds of a real bomb? How is that a political statement? Far too much is being made here. The guy did a no-no to make his picture more dramatic. Well, there's lots of tricks you can do with silver halide, too. Did they establish some kind of objective contrast ratio, a politically-prescribed development time and temperature? There's a famous few pictures taken on the beach at D-Day, where the grain is the size of footballs. It was pushed, because the wrong film was used, and the light hadn't fully come up when they hit the beach. A pro-American lie? It's ridiculous. The guy tried to make his photos more dramatic. His name is Arab, as many of the free-lancers would be in, you know, Lebanon. The case that this is some kind of political manipulation is, in fact, politically motivated. Whether the smoke from that bomb was black, gray or paisley, those kids still died in Qana.
The second the Mac OS gets like Windows, I'm gone. I think the whole point of this OS conundrum is to make sure that many OSes survive. It would be best if they play nicely together, so that you can move your e-mail for Mac to Linux and so on, and open up Word docs on all platforms, maybe in a free app, but the maintenance of a number of systems in important in a networked world.
That's exactly the point. The whole reason they do this is for deception. You're supposed to think, "Oh, it was on YouTUBE. People must really think Gore is stupid." Well, Exxon and the Republican Party think that, but this thing is a fake.
Given that Apple is acquiring lots of commercial partners, big ones, with the dock connector being the common denominator to full usage, and given that this is something even the "iPod killers" do not have, I'd say they'd be crazy to change the dock connector without say, having an adaptor that would allow connection to the MILLIONS of cars that will be out there.
On the other hand, I've seen lots of new car radios that just have an AUX audio in. That offers the best sound, without the controls.
The "Apple" segment of Slashdot is full of a bunch of stories promoted by bitter Windows/Linux clowns, who don't like the Mac and never will. It's a certain amount of fun to engage with them, and a learning experience for anyone interested in group pathology, but it's profoundly uninteresting to anyone not in the lynch mob.
I use a Windows machine at work. It's okay, you know? Clunky, boring, and at times purposely obscure, but it's okay. I prefer my home Mac, and now that it has a relatively secure UNIX and a processor that will put us on the same starting line as anyone else, I'm looking forward to the plethora of products that will be coming out soon. I'm not interested in being eviscerated for this choice, any more than Linux and Windows users should be put through this juvenile treatment.
This was a set-up, purposely not done with the Apple drivers and chipset, which does NOT have this weakness. Okay, so a lot of people find Apple users smug, and they wanted to tweak us. Okay, fair enough. It is a weakness for any computer when the third-party drivers are developed ad hoc, rushing towards a hardware release date. Bugs develop too easily. Could something be done by Microsoft, Apple, etc., to standardize drivers in some way, so that a different scanner developer, for instance, could just plug in some variables for the new machine and be done with it? Maybe that's naive; or maybe it's something the industry should do, relative to every external device that needs a driver?
Now that's what we might be talking about, rather than looking for a chance to heap scorn on this side or the other.
Apple didn't invent DRM. They're not the only ones who use it. Then this topic belongs on the Main section. "DRM is bad for--" I'm in absolute agreement.
Or clean the ball with a little alcohol. Just roll it around, and it's clear.
It will work with Bootcamp, and I suspect that it comes with a driver for Windows. But don't quote me.
Well, why are you reading the Apple section? For Mac users, this is news. Maybe not huge news, but news.
I disabled the side buttons. I think I had expose configured with them, but the Expose windows would just suddenly appear because I was pressing the sides. Aside from that, I like it. (And my Microsoft Mouse didn't have side buttons, anyway.)
You realize that if you wanted to, any USB mouse works, and the OS automatically recognizes two-button mice, etc. As strange as it sounds to Windoze people, we went since 1984 without needing a multibutton mouse. (Right-click, if you need, was option-click.) It's really only been introduced to smooth the way for Windoze people.
It's certainly not a false argument. Certain specific guns were forbidden, but you could get almost the exact same weapon under other names. By the time the automatic weapons ban was passed, it had almost no teeth. It was in no sense a ban, as in other countries. We live in a country with an open weapons bazaar, like Afghanistan's. Any hunting weapon, or home self-defense, or sports weapon, was and is freely available. Everything short of mortars or machine guns just require your signature and laughable waiting periods and the like. And after the political price the Democrats paid in the late '90s, there won't be any political party except the God and Guns party. It's pitiful that the Ashcroft Justice Department, for instance, freely imprisoned hundreds without a trial; that it now emerges that they were tapping our phones without warrant, searching our e-mail, looking at our financial transactions and using proctoscopes to make sure we weren't liable to ask for gay marriage, but every precaution was taken to protect the sacred records of gun purchases. Your mention of Clinton proves my point. There wasn't a whisper of a hope of a chance that he would enact a real "gun ban." At most, you were going to have to buy a look-alike weapon, and wait an extra weekend to get it, or buy what you wanted at a gun show. The total overreaction of the gun enthusiasts in the US is a study in madness only explicable by the term "castration fantasy." I know pseudo-scientists tell you that crime goes down in states where guns are freely available, but the statistical work is highly dubious. John Lott, the leading researcher, says that the dog ate his homework when you ask him for the data to check his facts. And any effects, if they are there, are miniscule. The more worthwhile part of the Clinton regulations was the waiting period, the criminal and mental health background check. But it's all a side issue, anyway; the real question about Britain is, how do they have a miniscule homicide rate compared to ours, in addition to only about 70 handgun deaths a year, relative to our 10,000? On a population basis, it they followed our example, they should have over 2,000 handgun deaths. The same thing goes for every other advanced industrial country. I don't see our weapons bazaar as contributing greatly to that death rate. I see it as a symptom of a deeper problem. Maybe the availabilty of universal medical care is a better indicator of a more peaceful society.
Good lord. At this rate of increase, they will have a gun homicide rate as high as the US in about 750 years. Of course, by that time, the US will have a 0% tax rate, and infinite government income, and every single person not in jail will have a legal death ray, including special death rays for blastocysts, and therefore there will be no crime (and no abortions, if the blastocysts are packin'.)
I can't page through another 6 levels of gun-ranting, penis-deprived raves about how the UK would be just fine if they allowed all the naffies and biddies to carry AKs, all right? Why do I think of the handkerchief-headed guy on Monty Python with a submachine gun? What about the original story about iPods? Are THEY the cause of crime? God knows, I'm assaulted every other day with a 30 GB video iPod. There's a guy down the street and-- Well, the truth is, the original story is bullcrap. What the cops actually said was, teenagers have a lot of expensive cell phones and mp3 players in their pockets, and people are robbing them. But C/Net is the anti-iPod net, and every possible bit of anti-Apple and anti-iPod propaganda possible. Gee, I guess you'll have to buy the next "iPod killer," which will have an AK-47 attached (oh, when will Apple FINALLY put a firearm on their crappy iPod?), and you will be able to phone the cops, shoot the robber, and continue to listen to the latest pop hit as you wait for the the coroner. It was only an accident, in a way, that the gun nuts spotted a story about the gun dystopia in the UK, where the subjects of the crown are deprived of their right to carry mortars and tactical nukes, and thus they live in a hellhole of sick violence and crimes against property.
Funny thing is, I'm waiting for a political party that would actually try to "take away our guns." Given that nobody has called for it, why do you keep fearing it? Ever heard of the psychological term, "castration fear"? It's an unreasonable fear.
Oh, no, you would anyway. Without the "emasculation" threatened by the big, bad democracy.
The thing is, you want to fry an egg quickly. Otherwise, it gets all rubbery. Put an egg on a city sidewalk on a hot day. It actually fries. And the point...?
I am a rabid iPod guy, but I agree with you. But there's something you're leaving out of your understanding here. The record labels all insist on DRM. Without that, you're talking pirate sites and those few sites that release little-known, off-label music. They've got us by the short hairs. At the beginning, certainly, Apple didn't give a damn what you put on your iPod. But then Jobs saw the massive use of Napster, along with seeing that it was headed for the cliff, because the labels would never go along with it. So he managed to coax the majors into the iTMS, and demonstrate that they could make a tidy bit of money through the Internets. Now, everybody who knew anything knows that the real advantage to DRM is with the tech company using the DRM.
I personally wouldn't go for the "French" model, where each of the DRMs must cooperate between devices; I think we'll only have a fair and open market when all DRM is gone. But until then, I'm quite happy with my iPod, which will go down in industrial history as a great industrial design, along with the Walkman, the 45 portable record player, the table model FM radio, and on and on.
Here's a quick truth: not enough people listen to radio anymore to make hits, even though payola is now legal (not technically, but something very close to payola is), and the various Pop stations actually pay for broadcasting the latest effluvia of their labels. But ratings are down. Internet buzz is far more efficient and popular than the radio jocks. Radio broadcasting is a moment that has come and gone. Top 40 is dead. Audience numbers are down all over. Nobody cares, not like they used to. Notice how pop stars just come and go? That's because the marketing machine is completely broken. Also, an AM/FM tuner that sounded halfway decent would add considerable cost. You don't have to have a .Mac account to have photos on your iPod. You just have to tell iTunes which folders of pictures you want, and it puts them on the iPod (including new ones) every time you recharge.
You can, if you have .Mac, share photos with all your pals around the world. It doesn't cost an additional penny.
And there is no such scheme to disallow anything not bought at the iTMS on your iPod. That would be completely crazy. Apparently, you think the market leader is crazy. They didn't get there by being that nuts.
You should study the audience figures since the 1996 Telecommunications "Reform" and the rise of the Internet. The radio doesn't decide hits anymore. There isn't anything on it except political shouting and tunes the labels are paying to play that week. It's almost completely irrelevant, culturally. Ratings on all "broadcasting" are down, considerably. Some people care, obviously. But people used to listen to about 25 hours a week of pop music radio. That's way, way down. It's rapidly becoming culturally irrelevant. Plus, which player has 80% of the North American market? The ones with the radio in it? I didn't think so.
Yeah, but they were business students. They were dorks. I won't pay for a damn radio in an iPod. I want my 10,000 songs so I don't have to listen to that crap.
Is that why Creative lost $100 million?
Well, I've got to say, with the new Sarbanes-Oxley law after Enron and the other numerous scandals of the late '90s collapse, companies have to use much stricter guidelines about expensing and so on, and if they haven't fully divulged the condition of the company, they are in violation of the law. And also, the CEO -- even the iCEO -- would be responsible for this if he signed off on it.