> I have a feeling that the people who would benefit most from this > are the upper middle class who already have wireless enable > commputers.
San Francisco has the Moscone Convention Center, which hosts many conventions and events each year. And with conventions come visitors who go all over the city. Having freely available WiFi could be useful there because visitors could get Internet wherever they go. Want to have an ad hoc meeting in a cafe downtown? You can count on WiFi being there. If you want to set up an Internet-enabled kiosk outside the convention center, you can do it.
Compared to the other big convention cities (Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, New Orleans, etc), this could be very useful in drawing more events, particularly technology events.
Well the actual problem is people on both sides. First you have one group who believes that science is actual truth, and that all the problems in the world can be fixed with science. Then there is an other group who believes that their religion is the full truth and anything to prove the otherwise is evil. Science is a process of formally figuring out how the universe works, it deals with a lot of guess work and we just check to see if our guesses are feasible. Religion on the other hand is more of a combined study where you put together many different studies and look at the truth as a whole, and if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game, if they fit within the philosophy better.
Strawman to the nth degree.
Your comment reveals a profound ignorance of what science is about. Anyone who believes science reveals truth doesn't understand science. Science is the search for fact. not truth. As Indiana Jones memorably said,
Archaeology is the search for fact... not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.
Furthermore, the purpose of science isn't to "solve problems"; it is the search for fact.
And ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment displacing Rationalism in the 18th century, science never seeks to prove anything. In science you can disprove, but you cannot prove because of the principle of skepticism. So the statement "if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game" makes no sense at all.
The purpose of science is the search for fact. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion and philosophy are there to provide commentary on and understanding of the human condition. From that perspective, they have nothing to do with each other and should not be mixed.
I guess it's not clear at this time if the entry was really an advertising effort -- I've read that it was a fan, and I've read it was someone at the BBC. So even if it wasn't an intentional advertisement, you can expect that some two-bit advertiser is going to try now. So, here's a marketing communications tip for future efforts.
Posting the story on the front page of/. will make some people think that this sort of thing works. If you don't want Wikipedia to be used as a marketing tool, then don't click on the wikipedia link for the viral story.
Some people still believe "there's no such thing as bad publicity" -- the former head of our communications department once flippantly said that when someone brought up a nearly universal complaint we had about a previous ad campaign (which had made Business 2.0's 100 dumbest business decisions that year). The assumption is made on the idea that people will remember your name, but not your ad campaign.
It's more complex than that. People may not remember your ad campaign, but they will remember the emotions they felt when they experienced your ad campaign, and if you annoyed them, they will associate that annoyance with your brand. So there is such a thing as bad publicity.
However, this won't stop advertisers because the big thing with viral marketing is it allows the advertisers to sneak their message past the viewers' defenses. There's a concept called "psychological reactance" which means that people will intentionally avoid selling efforts. They'll tune out commercials, they'll flip over ads, or they'll position their eyes so they don't even see ads on a web page. So the advertisers have to think of ways to make their advertisements seem less like advertisements, such as product placements. It looks like Wikipedia is about to be one of the next targets.
If this info was useful, perhaps you'd like to buy my book...
> Unlike the FCC, this system is local and there is no bureaucracy. > The courts handle all the rules, treating each case as a > disagreement between two parties, rather than society granting a > privelege to someone.
Since your tone is more calm than most ACs, I'll answer, but you probably won't like it.
The article excerpt illustrates the danger of arguing by analogy. Further your statement makes no sense:
It might say, "Person A and person B both want to use frequency N, but person A will be granted the right to use it because A was there first. B may use frequency N + M, where M is a number that is great enough such that B's usage won't affect person A."
Okay, here's an elementary example. IS-136 D-AMPS uses a channel bandwidth of 30 kHz. GSM uses a channel bandwidth of 200 kHz. IS-95 CDMA has a channel that is 1.25 MHz (that's 1,250 kHz). Let's say Person A and Person B choose GSM and CDMA respectively. Plus, Person C is doing D-AMPS. Your formula of N+M makes no sense at all in this context. And this just a simple example, and we haven't even touched on something slightly more complex like how differential quadrature phase shift keying as a modulation technique wreaks havoc on regular frequency modulation unless you have a guard band (empty frequencies around the carrier frequency that isolate it from the next carrier). Or the fact that IS-95 CDMA does not work unless you closely monitor the power output for all carriers.
Furthermore, "local level" makes no sense for radio waves that can travel for hundreds of miles. Remember, electromagnetic waves do not obey city, county, or state boundaries.
Some may dismiss these as unnecessary technical details, but it's the technical details that define the problem of why we have the FCC to begin with. Remember, for every complex problem there exists a simple solution that is wrong.
Besides that, I have no idea why someone would knee jerk reject a "bureaucracy" in favor of having courts decide. It seems like another case of someone trying to shoehorn the real world (complex as it is) into an inappropriate solution dictated by their ideology.
> I hope Mr. Swanson doesn't consider himself an RF Engineer
And if so, Texas A&M should be proud. (as a Longhorn, it pleases me to say that)
> Excuse me? The FCC can't detect it? Huh? Even with 'normal' DSS, > it's detectable. If your 'power-footprint' is so impressive, how can > your receivers detect it?
It's like that old saying: if a receiver transmits a signal below the noise floor, and there is no receiver with the receiver sensitivity high enough to detect the signal, does it transmit at 30 Mbps?
> The overall message of the article is interesting, but it appears > to wander throughout the technical communications > landscape. Throwing in multiple buzzwords in close proximity > does not mean it makes sense.
While I was reading the article, I kept being distracted by thoughts of "what do these two topics have to do with each other?" and "what is he talking about?" For example,
> spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no > dead spots
Dead spots aren't just a function of the antenna, but the terrain. And no amount of signal processing is going to make up for coverage anomalies. Soft handoffs mitigate this somewhat, but all that's allowing you to do is combine the signal from several coverage sources.
Good comment, and it illustrates how many free-market ideologues succumb to oversimplification.
I'm afraid the author of the article is missing a huge point. First, I'm not one to defend everything the FCC does, but a few, recent boneheaded ideas of censorship hardly call for the abolition of the agency.
I guess the author is relishing in the seemingly huge number of new wireless technologies. WiFi! WiMAX! 3G! Furthermore, he seems to be trying to equate these new technologies and the IPv6 address space with the heralded perpetual motion machine in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
No one is suggesting that the FCC exists because the technology is limited. It's because the frequency spectrum is limited. Just because you can do billions of addresses with IPv6 does not mean you can support that many users in a wireless environment. (I'm not even sure how those are related, but that's what the article implies).
Those of us who remember when IS-95 CDMA was introduced remembered the promise of 64 users per channel (wow! that's huge compared to GSM's 8-16). However, once you factor in the noise, the usage falls to... well, 10-18. The limitations associated with technologies may not become apparent until they're scaled to hundreds of millions of users-- as in the case with cellular today.
What the author doesn't understand -- from the article it seems his knowledge of electromagnetics is limited-- is that noise and interference must be managed or technologies won't work. The network planning that goes into a cellular network is complex. For example, the service providers have to calculate and track what's called de minimus for all edge cell sites to make sure that they aren't infringing on other companies' coverage areas. And in cases where an adjacent provider was bending the rules, the results were obvious and service degraded noticeably. It's the rules that make sure the service works the way customers expect.
With the technology game, competition provides the players, and regulation provides the rules.
> Um, you do realize that email goes... through... the... Internet, > right?
I'm sorry, I read "put it on the Internet" as "posting on the World Wide Web" (i.e. posting it in a public place), and I inferred this as different from email, since I consider email as going through the Internet, rather than being put on it. I responded accordingly. You are correct, and I hang my head in shame at implying that email is separate from the Internet.
> You gave information to the government, you should expect that > it would be part of public record.
> Political campaign contributions should be public record and > open; how else will we know who is buying seats in Congress
You're right, but I think you missed my point related to availability.
Taking the time to go to Opensecrets.org is a conscious thing, and the act implies a specific purpose of searching out someone's political views. In other words, the person is going to the trouble to see my political background and a hiring policy at a company could discourage that.
However, when this information is available using common search engine means that tons of information is available with no effort -- exactly what the CNET article was illustrating. Except, I'm not a CEO; just a private citizen with a not-impressive job. And the person wasn't necessarily looking for my political background-- they just did a Google search, an innocuous act.
>>"No one has any obligation to talk with any member of the >> press, period."
> Maybe with one notable exeption: governments. If governments > would start to favor certain newspapers and blacklisting others, > it would be highly inappropriate.
A second notable exception: public corporations. It is the nature of a publicly traded corporation to have full-disclosure to shareholders and potential shareholders. And since it is impossible for a company to share information with millions of shareholders at a time, the press (among others) serve as a proxy.
And since Google is a public corporation, they have their obligation. If they didn't want to do this, they should not have gone public.
I for one think that Google refusing to talk to CNET because of an article they wrote does count as "evil." Google should get over it, and use this as a wake-up call to think about how to deal with privacy issues.
And what if I didn't put it on the Internet? What if it was just email?
What if, during the public comments period, I wrote a letter to the DOJ years ago regarding the suit against a large software company who was later found guilty of illegally abusing their monopoly. And the DOJ put all the comments on the Internet and now when someone Google's my name, it comes up. The company I now work for recently became a strategic partner with that very company, which could make things uncomfortable.
What if I gave money to a politician running for president, and as part of a fundraiser, my name was attached with another two dozen people to an invitation. Then someone not associated with the campaign spammed a mailing list with that invitation, and it was posted on a public site as an example of spamming. Now when you Google my name, my name shows up as supporting that candidate. Not to mention looking in places like opensecrets.org.
Why does this matter now? Well, if I start applying for jobs, one can quickly find quite a bit about in the 20 seconds it takes to Google my name. And some employers (even just a rogue HR person) may have a problem with supporting particular candidates or saying something negative about a powerful company.
And we're seeing a worse trend. Earlier this year, the Bush administration, as many may recall, banned Kerry supporters from attending a non-partisian worldwide telecommunications forum:
The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week's meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign. The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants.
Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
So, like in Russia years ago and in other countries, we can quickly move to the point where not having the "right" political beliefs (that is, not sharing the beliefs of whoever is in power) will result in losing your livelihood. As a result, people will stop expressing their political beliefs. And there are many powerful people who would love that to happen.
> People who use the crazy straw man arguments of Ayn Rand tend > to be the type of people who want an excuse to feel good about > doing nothing.
Well said.
It's not enough for Ayn Rand supporters* to have their own justification for being selfish. They want to be considered the most virtuous of all for being selfish. They want to be admired for being selfish. So not only do they shun any form of altruism, they want a medal for it. **
As for Clinton, I don't anyone is calling for banning of violent games. Doing a study isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly because although your average Senator (or middle-aged anybody) understands football, they simply don't understand today's video games. Hell, even my sister doesn't understand Final Fantasy VIII/X and why there would be a concert for it. So at best, the study will help them understand that many video games today could be thought of as interactive movies.
The fact that GTA wasn't rated mature is a problem, and if the industry is going to self-regulate, they're going to have to be serious about it. __ * Look, no name calling! I didn't say "Randroids" although I really, really wanted to!
** The irony is only more painful when one discovers that the Ayn Rand Institute is a charity and is looking for funding handouts. I believe they had a convoluted explanation for this on their web site last time I looked.
>>The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total >>Addressable Market (TAM)
>Market Share refers to the sales cycle. You're talking about > Installed Base. They're not the same and Mac haters have good > reason for choosing to frame the argument in their terms.
Actually the grandparent is more correct than the parent, although the terminology is a little off.
Although I haven't seen good universal definitions for it, Total Adressable Market (TAM) indicates how large the total market of people that could purchase a product is. For a software developer this is a very important number and is often the same as the fraction of the installed base that can run the software. So if there are 100 Macintosh users, 75 on Panther and 25 on Tiger, and your software application requires Tiger, your TAM is 25. It can get confusing when you start talking about Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), in which case, the definition of TAM could be 100 and the SAM is 25. However, those definitions are a bit fuzzy.
Market share is different, but it's a generic term. A good business person does not take the statement "Apple has 4% market share" at face value because frankly it has no meaning. Market share must be defined in terms of what the market segment is, what the time period is, and other factors. You can therefore have installed base market share for a particularly defined segment. And defining the base market can be complex because you can do it based on unit sales or revenue (revenue is easier to come by than unit sales)
Market share can easily be defined as the grandparent said:
> %16 of the household machines currently in use were > Macintoshes
That's more useful because we know the time frame (installed base, so it's cumulative), and what the market segment is (all U.S. households). And unit sales versus revenue is irrelevant. We still need to know more about the segmentation of the households for this to be useful, but it's a good starting place.
That's why when various people quote that Apple has 4% worldwide market share, the figure is so meaningless. Are we talking installed base? Quarterly sales? Quarterly shipments? Share based on unit sales or revenue? What about market segments -- U.S. households, every PC (including those for specialized purposes, like factories or POS units?), etc. What about specifically people that want to purpose my application, what's the share there (getting into SAM here)?
But just like the press can screw up statistics during any election year, the business press can grossly oversimplify market share rendering it useless.
All that said, it's great that Apple's unit shipments are up and growing faster than the industry. What's interesting is the iPod has helped Apple's Macintosh sales better than any ad campaign they've run.
I heard that "Jurassic Bark" generated the most hate mail for the show than they've ever received. And rightfully so, as it was so completely depressing.
I got the feeling that Groening felt like Futurama was being left to rot on the vine by Fox, and maybe he did that episode to illustrate how he felt -- Futurama was Fry's dog and Fox was Fry, I guess.
I watched it on DVD only to listen to the directors' commentary, but it wasn't very enlightening. They made one comment in the beginning about how much people hated the episode, but then they were careful to not talk about the plot, but to focus on the technical aspects of the episode. Almost like they were afraid to rehash the episode's plot again.
The 4th season of Futurama was kind of weak compared to 2 and 3 -- mostly because of that stupid episode where Leela and Fry become super heros, but Jurassic Bark sealed the deal!
> 'Brewster Jennings & Associates' was a CIA front, or at the very > least it had been infiltrated by CIA.
Yeah, or for the slower witted spies, you could just wait for Novak to publish his second article where he identified Brewer Jennings & Associates as a CIA front company:
> In making her April 22, 1999 [to Gore], contribution, Valerie E. > Wilson identified herself as an "analyst" with "Brewster- > Jennings & Associates." No such firm is listed anywhere, but > the late Brewster Jennings was president of Socony-Vacuum > oil company a half-century ago. Any CIA employee working > under "non-official cover" always is listed with a real firm, but > never an imaginary one.
This was at the beginning of Novak attempting to dismiss Wilson's conclusions about his trip because he was "partisan" (even ignoring the fact that Wilson gave money to Bush and Gore, and he served under both parties' presidents). It's considered to be a logical fallacy, but it hasn't stopped Republicans from trying it in the past two years of this WMD debacle. The fact that they exposed information about the CIA for political gain is unconscionable.
> doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was > supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard > the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and > qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing > "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every > document witha Q in it.
My computer is fine here. Right now, I'm trying this out:
1. command+space. Boom! Spotlight opens 2. Press q. Spotlight starts searching. 3. I can easily continue typing 'uicktime' and it works fine. The results pare down to what I'm looking for.
I confirmed that if I type Q (and just wait), I get more than 4,043 results, so I've got plenty of files to look through.
So I don't notice any performance issues with Spotlight here. It works fine for me. Maybe you've got a problem with your disk? Try running Disk First Aid or something like that.
> It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 > imac.
It works great on my 1.5 GHz 'powerboog' and my wife's 1 GHz PowerBook.
In all, I'd hardly call Spotlight "beta". It has room for improvements, but it works great for me.
> Right now, Apple has to market Apple machines vs. Windows > machines, and they are hard to compare. When the PPC is better, > people don't believe it. They are either behind in performance or > MHz/GHz, or something.
I don't believe it either, and it's not "just marketing".
I bought a 17" 1 GHz PowerBook G4 back in April 2003. Then in January 2005, the hard drive failed on that PowerBook, and I didn't have time to deal with it (and I couldn't be without my PowerBook), so I went out and bought a 17" 1.5 GHz PowerBook. A month later, I finally got around to swapping out the hard drive in the first 17" PowerBook, and I gave it to my wife.
My intention was to replace my PowerBook G4 with a PowerBook G5, but to my shock, there wasn't a G5 PowerBook.
When I took home my new PowerBook, it was almost exactly like my previous PowerBook. The first 17" PowerBook G4s were released in January 2003 and in the two years that had elapsed, there was no real difference in performance. In fact, I forgot that I had actually replaced my PowerBook -- that's how similar they were.
Note that while desktop machines are stagnating in sales, laptops are where the growth is. The fact that Apple's flagship portable had basically remained the same for two years is horrible. Contrast this with the changes in operating system. Mac OS X 10.4 is wildly better than the OS that came with my previous PowerBook. So from a software perspective, Apple's doing great. From a hardware perspective, the changes just aren't keeping up.
Ars seems to downplay the fact that IBM missed their 3 GHz target for the G5. More than that, they missed the laptop ready version of the G5, which some could argue is even more serious. People seem to want to blame Jobs or Apple's arrogance, but the point is, IBM hasn't been delivering. Results matter, and Apple's hardware is falling behind. Jobs is a smart guy to say, "we can't keep doing this" and he found a solution in Intel. I say, good for him. Now give me a laptop where two years of progress is noticeable.
> Forgive me and my paranoia, but I really don't want the > government controlling my access to the Internet.....
But you're okay with a multi-billion corporation controlling your access? I'm confused why some people are knee-jerk afraid of the government but not afraid of large corporations.
In a democracy, you at least have some say in the government. You can vote and usually your vote counts*. The fact that each person has one vote, each person theoretically has an equal say in the matter. On top of that, there is a public infrastructure in place (three branches of government/Federal/State/Local/etc) and a set of rules (Constitution/laws/etc). There is even public disclosure (Freedom of Information Act/public records/etc). Naive, I know, but at least theoretically, the government is there to serve the public. For example, one can hope that the government will respect the right to privacy because it's supposed to do that.
On the other hand, with corporations, the only purpose is to make money for shareholders. That's it. Not social responsibility, not rights of the consumer, not protecting the environment, not community support, not "patriotism". Businesses report on their dealings only because the government forces public corporations to do so. During the shareholders' meetings, more money invested in the company results in more votes, so it isn't "one vote/one person." You might have a single vote out of 200 million people when you vote for president, but you have likely less than that when it comes to voting for the CEO of a company.
Luckily, many (okay, "some"?) corporations are managed by people who seek to support these other items in addition to seeking profits. However, from a strictly legal perspective, they are not obligated to do so. So if one day your ISP decides there is a higher profit for selling off customer information than the lost profits due to customers dropping the service that result from this, they will do it.
So from that standpoint, you're better off trusting the government than you are trusting a corporation. Not much better off, so try to remain vigilant.
> none of the Airport set up software can understand about > repeaters. I can only have a star network.
I hope I didn't misunderstand your comment, but isn't that how the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) system works? Isn't it basically a repeater?
I've got an AirPort Extreme base station and an AirPort Express acting as a WDS end node (plus, it serves as an Ethernet bridge for my PS2). My PowerBook has no problems switching between one base station or the other depending on where I am in the house.
> No, this is slashdot. The majority (or at least the vocal/mod > majority) seems to be fairly negative towards Christians and > Christian ideas.
In America, something like 75% people are self-declared Christians. And you practically can't get elected in this country without being a Christian of some sort. To suggest that Christians are being persecuted is laughable.
The issue is there's a difference between Christianity and fundamentalist Christianity. Few people have a problem with love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The mocking begins when the Fundamentalist Christians enter the picture. The world is 6,000 years old and your fossils are lying to you! I found Noah's Ark in my backyard! The Bible told me to hate this group of people! Looka me, I'm speaking in tongues and healing people with the Powa ah Pra-ya!
The Fundamentalists want everyone to believe that their version of Christianity is the only version (strange how all Fundamentalist variants of religions seem to be like that). They perpetuate this by repositioning mocking of their silliness as an attack on the whole religion.
Fundamentalist Christianity diverges from being a philosophy that's supposed to better people and it becomes a crutch for the ignorant and a tool for the unscrupulous who turn it into just another excuse to hate your neighbor.
Remember, a wise man once said,
When you pray, don't be like the hypocrites. They love to stand in the synagogues and on the street corners and pray so people will see them...Your Father sees what is done in secret, and he will reward you
In corporate-speak, there is a related term used when someone has committed the faux pas of geeking out during a meeting. "Let's take this offline," someone will suggest, when the PowerPoint slides grow dark with words. Literally, it means, "I look forward to geeking out on this topic - later." But really it's a polite synonym for "shut up already!"
> Good point. Not that it's germane to this article. I just wanted to > point out that I don't mean to criticize the whole article.
I meant to type, good point, but that's not germane to my post. In other words, I agree with what he wrote there, but the point of my post was to show where I disagreed with article.
Lest anyone think I was just trashing his article, I wanted to point out a part I thought he said well.
> The best reason I've seen for the force being scientific in 1-3 > and mysterious/religious in 4-6 is that with the conflict of the > Empire this science was lost.
Actually that's one of the major points of the movies. 20 years is not that long for a science to die if someone tries hard enough.
First, most people had not seen a Jedi in real life, even with the Republic. For example, in Episode I, Anakin shows he knows little ("no one can kill a Jedi", calls a "lightsaber" a "laser sword"). The viceroy of the trade federation was unfamiliar, too. His assistant asks "have you ever encountered a Jedi before". "No, not really" he replied. So even during the heyday of the Jedi, few people really knew what they were all about.
Second, once the Jedi are declared enemies of the Republic in Episode III, it's not surprising that 20 years later the science had degenerated into mythology and "hokey religions". Even in Episode IV, one of the moffs (I guess that's his rank) equated The Force with sorcery.
Only the Jedi had real knowledge of the Force (and the science behind it), so when they were killed in Episode III, who's left to keep the knowledge up?
All you would have left would be stories and folk tales. And the younger generation wouldn't believe it was true anyway.
Isaac Asimov does a similar theme in his book Foundation.
> In other words, the plot is secondary to the action sequences in > the new movie, and it doesn't matter
While I agree that many people who watch the Star Wars movies don't understand the plot beyond the basics, I don't think it has anything to do with Episodes I-III themselves, but the fact that plenty (if not most) of people watch movies (Episodes IV-VI included) looking at only explosions and the like.
However, the author is implying this is because of the movies:
If you have watched these cartoons - or if you've enjoyed some of the half-dozen "Clone Wars" novels, flipped through the graphic novels, read the short stories or played the video game - you will know that the battle cruiser in question is owned by the New Droid Army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which is backed by the Trade Federation, a commercial guild that is peeved about taxation of trade routes.
...or if you read the opening crawler. If you watched Episode I you would know who they were.
But having to watch Episodes I and II to understand III is no different than Episodes IV-VI. Just like if you didn't see Episode V, you wouldn't know why Jabba the Hutt had Han Solo in carbonite. Or if you didn't see Episode IV, you wouldn't know why Ben was a "force ghost" and not just some hallucination.
If you watch the movie without doing the prep work, General Grievous - who is supposed to be one of the most formidable bad guys in the entire "Star Wars" cycle - will seem like something that just fell out of a Happy Meal.
But is that true? Grievous is a coward. Watch Episode III, most of the time he is threatened, he hides behind his droids. Only once Obi-Wan confronts him with a circle of a couple dozen of Grievous droids around him does Grievous actually stand his ground.
What's interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don't understand.
But that's the same with Episodes IV-VI. For example, people who have seen the movies dozens of times don't really understand what Tarkin means when he says that Palpatine dissolved the Imperial (no longer Republic after Episode III) Senate.
In corporate-speak, there is a related term used when someone has committed the faux pas of geeking out during a meeting. "Let's take this offline," someone will suggest, when the PowerPoint slides grow dark with words. Literally, it means, "I look forward to geeking out on this topic - later." But really it's a polite synonym for "shut up already!"
Good point. Not that it's germane to this article. I just wanted to point out that I don't mean to criticize the whole article.
The first "Star Wars" movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes.... All such content - as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes - was banished in the first of the prequels.... These newer films don't even pretend to tell the whole story
I disagree. Examples:
Episode I, Padme explains the "diversion" with the Gungans. Qui-Gon explains midichlorians. Amidala is manipulated into helping Palpatine into power. We learn of Obi-Wan's defiance.
Episode II: Anakin reveals to Padme that he supports a dictatorship. Obi-Wan unravels who is building the Clones. Dooku gets the separatists to join his plan.
Episode III: Yoda talks about the "prophecy being misunderstood". Palpatine tells the story of the Sith.
There's probably more plot in Episodes I-III than in Episodes IV-VI. Some people have complained that there's not enough action, and too much plot and dialog, but he's complaining about the opposite.
One is welcome to opinion that they don't like Episodes I-III as much as IV-VI, but one should be careful not to justify that opinion based on erroneous information.
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a feeling that the people who would benefit most from this
> are the upper middle class who already have wireless enable
> commputers.
San Francisco has the Moscone Convention Center, which hosts many conventions and events each year. And with conventions come visitors who go all over the city. Having freely available WiFi could be useful there because visitors could get Internet wherever they go. Want to have an ad hoc meeting in a cafe downtown? You can count on WiFi being there. If you want to set up an Internet-enabled kiosk outside the convention center, you can do it.
Compared to the other big convention cities (Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, New Orleans, etc), this could be very useful in drawing more events, particularly technology events.
Strawman to the nth degree.
Your comment reveals a profound ignorance of what science is about. Anyone who believes science reveals truth doesn't understand science. Science is the search for fact. not truth. As Indiana Jones memorably said,
Furthermore, the purpose of science isn't to "solve problems"; it is the search for fact.
And ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment displacing Rationalism in the 18th century, science never seeks to prove anything. In science you can disprove, but you cannot prove because of the principle of skepticism. So the statement "if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game" makes no sense at all.
The purpose of science is the search for fact. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion and philosophy are there to provide commentary on and understanding of the human condition. From that perspective, they have nothing to do with each other and should not be mixed.
I guess it's not clear at this time if the entry was really an advertising effort -- I've read that it was a fan, and I've read it was someone at the BBC. So even if it wasn't an intentional advertisement, you can expect that some two-bit advertiser is going to try now. So, here's a marketing communications tip for future efforts.
/. will make some people think that this sort of thing works. If you don't want Wikipedia to be used as a marketing tool, then don't click on the wikipedia link for the viral story.
...
Posting the story on the front page of
Some people still believe "there's no such thing as bad publicity" -- the former head of our communications department once flippantly said that when someone brought up a nearly universal complaint we had about a previous ad campaign (which had made Business 2.0's 100 dumbest business decisions that year). The assumption is made on the idea that people will remember your name, but not your ad campaign.
It's more complex than that. People may not remember your ad campaign, but they will remember the emotions they felt when they experienced your ad campaign, and if you annoyed them, they will associate that annoyance with your brand. So there is such a thing as bad publicity.
However, this won't stop advertisers because the big thing with viral marketing is it allows the advertisers to sneak their message past the viewers' defenses. There's a concept called "psychological reactance" which means that people will intentionally avoid selling efforts. They'll tune out commercials, they'll flip over ads, or they'll position their eyes so they don't even see ads on a web page. So the advertisers have to think of ways to make their advertisements seem less like advertisements, such as product placements. It looks like Wikipedia is about to be one of the next targets.
If this info was useful, perhaps you'd like to buy my book
> The courts handle all the rules, treating each case as a
> disagreement between two parties, rather than society granting a
> privelege to someone.
Since your tone is more calm than most ACs, I'll answer, but you probably won't like it.
The article excerpt illustrates the danger of arguing by analogy. Further your statement makes no sense:
Okay, here's an elementary example. IS-136 D-AMPS uses a channel bandwidth of 30 kHz. GSM uses a channel bandwidth of 200 kHz. IS-95 CDMA has a channel that is 1.25 MHz (that's 1,250 kHz). Let's say Person A and Person B choose GSM and CDMA respectively. Plus, Person C is doing D-AMPS. Your formula of N+M makes no sense at all in this context. And this just a simple example, and we haven't even touched on something slightly more complex like how differential quadrature phase shift keying as a modulation technique wreaks havoc on regular frequency modulation unless you have a guard band (empty frequencies around the carrier frequency that isolate it from the next carrier). Or the fact that IS-95 CDMA does not work unless you closely monitor the power output for all carriers.
Furthermore, "local level" makes no sense for radio waves that can travel for hundreds of miles. Remember, electromagnetic waves do not obey city, county, or state boundaries.
Some may dismiss these as unnecessary technical details, but it's the technical details that define the problem of why we have the FCC to begin with. Remember, for every complex problem there exists a simple solution that is wrong.
Besides that, I have no idea why someone would knee jerk reject a "bureaucracy" in favor of having courts decide. It seems like another case of someone trying to shoehorn the real world (complex as it is) into an inappropriate solution dictated by their ideology.
> I hope Mr. Swanson doesn't consider himself an RF Engineer
And if so, Texas A&M should be proud. (as a Longhorn, it pleases me to say that)
> Excuse me? The FCC can't detect it? Huh? Even with 'normal' DSS,
> it's detectable. If your 'power-footprint' is so impressive, how can
> your receivers detect it?
It's like that old saying: if a receiver transmits a signal below the noise floor, and there is no receiver with the receiver sensitivity high enough to detect the signal, does it transmit at 30 Mbps?
Or something like that.
> The overall message of the article is interesting, but it appears
> to wander throughout the technical communications
> landscape. Throwing in multiple buzzwords in close proximity
> does not mean it makes sense.
Agreed. To me, the article felt like the product of a spam-generator fed by Newton's Telecom Dictionary.
While I was reading the article, I kept being distracted by thoughts of "what do these two topics have to do with each other?" and "what is he talking about?" For example,
> spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no
> dead spots
Dead spots aren't just a function of the antenna, but the terrain. And no amount of signal processing is going to make up for coverage anomalies. Soft handoffs mitigate this somewhat, but all that's allowing you to do is combine the signal from several coverage sources.
> Free market, you're my hero
... well, 10-18. The limitations associated with technologies may not become apparent until they're scaled to hundreds of millions of users-- as in the case with cellular today.
Good comment, and it illustrates how many free-market ideologues succumb to oversimplification.
I'm afraid the author of the article is missing a huge point. First, I'm not one to defend everything the FCC does, but a few, recent boneheaded ideas of censorship hardly call for the abolition of the agency.
I guess the author is relishing in the seemingly huge number of new wireless technologies. WiFi! WiMAX! 3G! Furthermore, he seems to be trying to equate these new technologies and the IPv6 address space with the heralded perpetual motion machine in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
No one is suggesting that the FCC exists because the technology is limited. It's because the frequency spectrum is limited. Just because you can do billions of addresses with IPv6 does not mean you can support that many users in a wireless environment. (I'm not even sure how those are related, but that's what the article implies).
Those of us who remember when IS-95 CDMA was introduced remembered the promise of 64 users per channel (wow! that's huge compared to GSM's 8-16). However, once you factor in the noise, the usage falls to
What the author doesn't understand -- from the article it seems his knowledge of electromagnetics is limited-- is that noise and interference must be managed or technologies won't work. The network planning that goes into a cellular network is complex. For example, the service providers have to calculate and track what's called de minimus for all edge cell sites to make sure that they aren't infringing on other companies' coverage areas. And in cases where an adjacent provider was bending the rules, the results were obvious and service degraded noticeably. It's the rules that make sure the service works the way customers expect.
With the technology game, competition provides the players, and regulation provides the rules.
> Um, you do realize that email goes... through... the... Internet,
> right?
I'm sorry, I read "put it on the Internet" as "posting on the World Wide Web" (i.e. posting it in a public place), and I inferred this as different from email, since I consider email as going through the Internet, rather than being put on it. I responded accordingly. You are correct, and I hang my head in shame at implying that email is separate from the Internet.
> You gave information to the government, you should expect that
> it would be part of public record.
> Political campaign contributions should be public record and
> open; how else will we know who is buying seats in Congress
You're right, but I think you missed my point related to availability.
Taking the time to go to Opensecrets.org is a conscious thing, and the act implies a specific purpose of searching out someone's political views. In other words, the person is going to the trouble to see my political background and a hiring policy at a company could discourage that.
However, when this information is available using common search engine means that tons of information is available with no effort -- exactly what the CNET article was illustrating. Except, I'm not a CEO; just a private citizen with a not-impressive job. And the person wasn't necessarily looking for my political background-- they just did a Google search, an innocuous act.
That's the problem.
>>"No one has any obligation to talk with any member of the
>> press, period."
> Maybe with one notable exeption: governments. If governments
> would start to favor certain newspapers and blacklisting others,
> it would be highly inappropriate.
A second notable exception: public corporations. It is the nature of a publicly traded corporation to have full-disclosure to shareholders and potential shareholders. And since it is impossible for a company to share information with millions of shareholders at a time, the press (among others) serve as a proxy.
And since Google is a public corporation, they have their obligation. If they didn't want to do this, they should not have gone public.
I for one think that Google refusing to talk to CNET because of an article they wrote does count as "evil." Google should get over it, and use this as a wake-up call to think about how to deal with privacy issues.
And what if I didn't put it on the Internet? What if it was just email?
What if, during the public comments period, I wrote a letter to the DOJ years ago regarding the suit against a large software company who was later found guilty of illegally abusing their monopoly. And the DOJ put all the comments on the Internet and now when someone Google's my name, it comes up. The company I now work for recently became a strategic partner with that very company, which could make things uncomfortable.
What if I gave money to a politician running for president, and as part of a fundraiser, my name was attached with another two dozen people to an invitation. Then someone not associated with the campaign spammed a mailing list with that invitation, and it was posted on a public site as an example of spamming. Now when you Google my name, my name shows up as supporting that candidate. Not to mention looking in places like opensecrets.org.
Why does this matter now? Well, if I start applying for jobs, one can quickly find quite a bit about in the 20 seconds it takes to Google my name. And some employers (even just a rogue HR person) may have a problem with supporting particular candidates or saying something negative about a powerful company.
And we're seeing a worse trend. Earlier this year, the Bush administration, as many may recall, banned Kerry supporters from attending a non-partisian worldwide telecommunications forum:
So, like in Russia years ago and in other countries, we can quickly move to the point where not having the "right" political beliefs (that is, not sharing the beliefs of whoever is in power) will result in losing your livelihood. As a result, people will stop expressing their political beliefs. And there are many powerful people who would love that to happen.
> People who use the crazy straw man arguments of Ayn Rand tend
> to be the type of people who want an excuse to feel good about
> doing nothing.
Well said.
It's not enough for Ayn Rand supporters* to have their own justification for being selfish. They want to be considered the most virtuous of all for being selfish. They want to be admired for being selfish. So not only do they shun any form of altruism, they want a medal for it. **
As for Clinton, I don't anyone is calling for banning of violent games. Doing a study isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly because although your average Senator (or middle-aged anybody) understands football, they simply don't understand today's video games. Hell, even my sister doesn't understand Final Fantasy VIII/X and why there would be a concert for it. So at best, the study will help them understand that many video games today could be thought of as interactive movies.
The fact that GTA wasn't rated mature is a problem, and if the industry is going to self-regulate, they're going to have to be serious about it.
__
* Look, no name calling! I didn't say "Randroids" although I really, really wanted to!
** The irony is only more painful when one discovers that the Ayn Rand Institute is a charity and is looking for funding handouts. I believe they had a convoluted explanation for this on their web site last time I looked.
>>The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total
>>Addressable Market (TAM)
>Market Share refers to the sales cycle. You're talking about
> Installed Base. They're not the same and Mac haters have good
> reason for choosing to frame the argument in their terms.
Actually the grandparent is more correct than the parent, although the terminology is a little off.
Although I haven't seen good universal definitions for it, Total Adressable Market (TAM) indicates how large the total market of people that could purchase a product is. For a software developer this is a very important number and is often the same as the fraction of the installed base that can run the software. So if there are 100 Macintosh users, 75 on Panther and 25 on Tiger, and your software application requires Tiger, your TAM is 25. It can get confusing when you start talking about Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), in which case, the definition of TAM could be 100 and the SAM is 25. However, those definitions are a bit fuzzy.
Market share is different, but it's a generic term. A good business person does not take the statement "Apple has 4% market share" at face value because frankly it has no meaning. Market share must be defined in terms of what the market segment is, what the time period is, and other factors. You can therefore have installed base market share for a particularly defined segment. And defining the base market can be complex because you can do it based on unit sales or revenue (revenue is easier to come by than unit sales)
Market share can easily be defined as the grandparent said:
> %16 of the household machines currently in use were
> Macintoshes
That's more useful because we know the time frame (installed base, so it's cumulative), and what the market segment is (all U.S. households). And unit sales versus revenue is irrelevant. We still need to know more about the segmentation of the households for this to be useful, but it's a good starting place.
That's why when various people quote that Apple has 4% worldwide market share, the figure is so meaningless. Are we talking installed base? Quarterly sales? Quarterly shipments? Share based on unit sales or revenue? What about market segments -- U.S. households, every PC (including those for specialized purposes, like factories or POS units?), etc. What about specifically people that want to purpose my application, what's the share there (getting into SAM here)?
But just like the press can screw up statistics during any election year, the business press can grossly oversimplify market share rendering it useless.
All that said, it's great that Apple's unit shipments are up and growing faster than the industry. What's interesting is the iPod has helped Apple's Macintosh sales better than any ad campaign they've run.
> the ending to Jurassic Bark = depressing
I heard that "Jurassic Bark" generated the most hate mail for the show than they've ever received. And rightfully so, as it was so completely depressing.
I got the feeling that Groening felt like Futurama was being left to rot on the vine by Fox, and maybe he did that episode to illustrate how he felt -- Futurama was Fry's dog and Fox was Fry, I guess.
I watched it on DVD only to listen to the directors' commentary, but it wasn't very enlightening. They made one comment in the beginning about how much people hated the episode, but then they were careful to not talk about the plot, but to focus on the technical aspects of the episode. Almost like they were afraid to rehash the episode's plot again.
The 4th season of Futurama was kind of weak compared to 2 and 3 -- mostly because of that stupid episode where Leela and Fry become super heros, but Jurassic Bark sealed the deal!
> 'Brewster Jennings & Associates' was a CIA front, or at the very
> least it had been infiltrated by CIA.
Yeah, or for the slower witted spies, you could just wait for Novak to publish his second article where he identified Brewer Jennings & Associates as a CIA front company:
> In making her April 22, 1999 [to Gore], contribution, Valerie E.
> Wilson identified herself as an "analyst" with "Brewster-
> Jennings & Associates." No such firm is listed anywhere, but
> the late Brewster Jennings was president of Socony-Vacuum
> oil company a half-century ago. Any CIA employee working
> under "non-official cover" always is listed with a real firm, but
> never an imaginary one.
This was at the beginning of Novak attempting to dismiss Wilson's conclusions about his trip because he was "partisan" (even ignoring the fact that Wilson gave money to Bush and Gore, and he served under both parties' presidents). It's considered to be a logical fallacy, but it hasn't stopped Republicans from trying it in the past two years of this WMD debacle. The fact that they exposed information about the CIA for political gain is unconscionable.
My experience has been different here.
> doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was
> supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard
> the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and
> qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing
> "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every
> document witha Q in it.
My computer is fine here. Right now, I'm trying this out:
1. command+space. Boom! Spotlight opens
2. Press q. Spotlight starts searching.
3. I can easily continue typing 'uicktime' and it works fine. The results pare down to what I'm looking for.
I confirmed that if I type Q (and just wait), I get more than 4,043 results, so I've got plenty of files to look through.
So I don't notice any performance issues with Spotlight here. It works fine for me. Maybe you've got a problem with your disk? Try running Disk First Aid or something like that.
> It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4
> imac.
It works great on my 1.5 GHz 'powerboog' and my wife's 1 GHz PowerBook.
In all, I'd hardly call Spotlight "beta". It has room for improvements, but it works great for me.
> Right now, Apple has to market Apple machines vs. Windows
> machines, and they are hard to compare. When the PPC is better,
> people don't believe it. They are either behind in performance or
> MHz/GHz, or something.
I don't believe it either, and it's not "just marketing".
I bought a 17" 1 GHz PowerBook G4 back in April 2003. Then in January 2005, the hard drive failed on that PowerBook, and I didn't have time to deal with it (and I couldn't be without my PowerBook), so I went out and bought a 17" 1.5 GHz PowerBook. A month later, I finally got around to swapping out the hard drive in the first 17" PowerBook, and I gave it to my wife.
My intention was to replace my PowerBook G4 with a PowerBook G5, but to my shock, there wasn't a G5 PowerBook.
When I took home my new PowerBook, it was almost exactly like my previous PowerBook. The first 17" PowerBook G4s were released in January 2003 and in the two years that had elapsed, there was no real difference in performance. In fact, I forgot that I had actually replaced my PowerBook -- that's how similar they were.
Note that while desktop machines are stagnating in sales, laptops are where the growth is. The fact that Apple's flagship portable had basically remained the same for two years is horrible. Contrast this with the changes in operating system. Mac OS X 10.4 is wildly better than the OS that came with my previous PowerBook. So from a software perspective, Apple's doing great. From a hardware perspective, the changes just aren't keeping up.
Ars seems to downplay the fact that IBM missed their 3 GHz target for the G5. More than that, they missed the laptop ready version of the G5, which some could argue is even more serious. People seem to want to blame Jobs or Apple's arrogance, but the point is, IBM hasn't been delivering. Results matter, and Apple's hardware is falling behind. Jobs is a smart guy to say, "we can't keep doing this" and he found a solution in Intel. I say, good for him. Now give me a laptop where two years of progress is noticeable.
> Forgive me and my paranoia, but I really don't want the
> government controlling my access to the Internet.....
But you're okay with a multi-billion corporation controlling your access? I'm confused why some people are knee-jerk afraid of the government but not afraid of large corporations.
In a democracy, you at least have some say in the government. You can vote and usually your vote counts*. The fact that each person has one vote, each person theoretically has an equal say in the matter. On top of that, there is a public infrastructure in place (three branches of government/Federal/State/Local/etc) and a set of rules (Constitution/laws/etc). There is even public disclosure (Freedom of Information Act/public records/etc). Naive, I know, but at least theoretically, the government is there to serve the public. For example, one can hope that the government will respect the right to privacy because it's supposed to do that.
On the other hand, with corporations, the only purpose is to make money for shareholders. That's it. Not social responsibility, not rights of the consumer, not protecting the environment, not community support, not "patriotism". Businesses report on their dealings only because the government forces public corporations to do so. During the shareholders' meetings, more money invested in the company results in more votes, so it isn't "one vote/one person." You might have a single vote out of 200 million people when you vote for president, but you have likely less than that when it comes to voting for the CEO of a company.
Luckily, many (okay, "some"?) corporations are managed by people who seek to support these other items in addition to seeking profits. However, from a strictly legal perspective, they are not obligated to do so. So if one day your ISP decides there is a higher profit for selling off customer information than the lost profits due to customers dropping the service that result from this, they will do it.
So from that standpoint, you're better off trusting the government than you are trusting a corporation. Not much better off, so try to remain vigilant.
* offer not valid in Florida
> none of the Airport set up software can understand about
> repeaters. I can only have a star network.
I hope I didn't misunderstand your comment, but isn't that how the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) system works? Isn't it basically a repeater?
I've got an AirPort Extreme base station and an AirPort Express acting as a WDS end node (plus, it serves as an Ethernet bridge for my PS2). My PowerBook has no problems switching between one base station or the other depending on where I am in the house.
> Really, finally, a transparent UI you can be bored with in 10
> minutes and put back to being opaque. Such innovation!
Maybe, but luckily your boredom will be cured two minutes after that.
> if the majority (as you claim) are Christians, wouldn't it make
> sense that they want to elect a leader who holds the same
> values?
You'd think they would, but 51% of the voting public voted for Bush instead. I can't figure it out either.
> majority) seems to be fairly negative towards Christians and
> Christian ideas.
In America, something like 75% people are self-declared Christians. And you practically can't get elected in this country without being a Christian of some sort. To suggest that Christians are being persecuted is laughable.
The issue is there's a difference between Christianity and fundamentalist Christianity. Few people have a problem with love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The mocking begins when the Fundamentalist Christians enter the picture. The world is 6,000 years old and your fossils are lying to you! I found Noah's Ark in my backyard! The Bible told me to hate this group of people! Looka me, I'm speaking in tongues and healing people with the Powa ah Pra-ya!
The Fundamentalists want everyone to believe that their version of Christianity is the only version (strange how all Fundamentalist variants of religions seem to be like that). They perpetuate this by repositioning mocking of their silliness as an attack on the whole religion.
Fundamentalist Christianity diverges from being a philosophy that's supposed to better people and it becomes a crutch for the ignorant and a tool for the unscrupulous who turn it into just another excuse to hate your neighbor.
Remember, a wise man once said,
> Good point. Not that it's germane to this article. I just wanted to
> point out that I don't mean to criticize the whole article.
I meant to type, good point, but that's not germane to my post. In other words, I agree with what he wrote there, but the point of my post was to show where I disagreed with article.
Lest anyone think I was just trashing his article, I wanted to point out a part I thought he said well.
Back to your regularly scheduled program.
> The best reason I've seen for the force being scientific in 1-3
.
> and mysterious/religious in 4-6 is that with the conflict of the
> Empire this science was lost.
Actually that's one of the major points of the movies. 20 years is not that long for a science to die if someone tries hard enough.
First, most people had not seen a Jedi in real life, even with the Republic. For example, in Episode I, Anakin shows he knows little ("no one can kill a Jedi", calls a "lightsaber" a "laser sword"). The viceroy of the trade federation was unfamiliar, too. His assistant asks "have you ever encountered a Jedi before". "No, not really" he replied. So even during the heyday of the Jedi, few people really knew what they were all about.
Second, once the Jedi are declared enemies of the Republic in Episode III, it's not surprising that 20 years later the science had degenerated into mythology and "hokey religions". Even in Episode IV, one of the moffs (I guess that's his rank) equated The Force with sorcery.
Only the Jedi had real knowledge of the Force (and the science behind it), so when they were killed in Episode III, who's left to keep the knowledge up?
All you would have left would be stories and folk tales. And the younger generation wouldn't believe it was true anyway.
Isaac Asimov does a similar theme in his book Foundation
> the new movie, and it doesn't matter
While I agree that many people who watch the Star Wars movies don't understand the plot beyond the basics, I don't think it has anything to do with Episodes I-III themselves, but the fact that plenty (if not most) of people watch movies (Episodes IV-VI included) looking at only explosions and the like.
However, the author is implying this is because of the movies:
But having to watch Episodes I and II to understand III is no different than Episodes IV-VI. Just like if you didn't see Episode V, you wouldn't know why Jabba the Hutt had Han Solo in carbonite. Or if you didn't see Episode IV, you wouldn't know why Ben was a "force ghost" and not just some hallucination.
But is that true? Grievous is a coward. Watch Episode III, most of the time he is threatened, he hides behind his droids. Only once Obi-Wan confronts him with a circle of a couple dozen of Grievous droids around him does Grievous actually stand his ground.
But that's the same with Episodes IV-VI. For example, people who have seen the movies dozens of times don't really understand what Tarkin means when he says that Palpatine dissolved the Imperial (no longer Republic after Episode III) Senate.
Good point. Not that it's germane to this article. I just wanted to point out that I don't mean to criticize the whole article.
I disagree. Examples:
Episode I, Padme explains the "diversion" with the Gungans. Qui-Gon explains midichlorians. Amidala is manipulated into helping Palpatine into power. We learn of Obi-Wan's defiance.
Episode II: Anakin reveals to Padme that he supports a dictatorship. Obi-Wan unravels who is building the Clones. Dooku gets the separatists to join his plan.
Episode III: Yoda talks about the "prophecy being misunderstood". Palpatine tells the story of the Sith.
There's probably more plot in Episodes I-III than in Episodes IV-VI. Some people have complained that there's not enough action, and too much plot and dialog, but he's complaining about the opposite.
One is welcome to opinion that they don't like Episodes I-III as much as IV-VI, but one should be careful not to justify that opinion based on erroneous information.