263 karma · joined April 7, 2007
Envision your five-month-old edition of NYT or WSJ, where it quotes Tim Geithner saying the stimulus package will take effect "almost immediately".
Then one day you find that quote corrected to read "within a year".
Paging Winston Smith ...
My wife (who actually IS a lawyer) goes even further. If you bought your hard-copy of _1984_ in good faith (say, from a bookbinder who sold it to you instead of rebinding it for a customer), then in fact you ARE the legal owner of the book, and the customer who got screwed has to seek restitution from the bookbinder -- who might also wind up in jail guilty of fraud. I'm not sure that's justice but according to my wife, that's the law in our state.
This _was_ an ad, right?
Howard Hughes bought the Desert Inn 42 years ago on March 1, 1967, ushering in the corporate takeover of Las Vegas.
The takeover was finished by the time I worked in Las Vegas, 35 years ago -- really. Co-workers Ed M. and Cliff L. were old-timers when I got there. They had the same sentiments as the cabbie. The mob kept the town clean, but now the corporations had taken over and were ruining things. E.g., forcing each casino department (gaming, restaurants, showroom, souvenirs, ...) to turn a minimum profit or be axed. Casinos run by MBAs with diplomas but no common sense.
Net-net, I believe the moral of the story, but not the story itself. 27 years isn't long enough.
But if that were the case, noctilucent clouds would normally be an equatorial -- not a polar -- phenomenon.
Of course my broker supplies all that data and more, but they don't understand the complexities of corporate firewalls and http tunneling. Not to mention information stovepiping -- you know, one page for news, a separate page for quotes, another page for charts ... Yahoo integrates all that for free.
In any event the prediction is NOT for the market to tank within the quoted timeframe ... rather that the market will PEAK between 7/17 and 7/27. This would be followed by a period of weakness possibly leading to a crash. If the experience of the USA in 1929 and 1987 is any guide, you would look for a crash low 55 days later (9/15) or possibly 89 days later (10/19).
Then again, maybe not.
But Microsoft could compete in non-search areas if desired. Specifically (a) fewer ads and (b) better privacy guarantees. Not clear the customer base cares enough about either of those issues to switch, but Microsoft has a lot less to lose so they can at least afford to try.
Trek is a series of standalone 42-minute episodes written by different authors with different agendas. Wars is one man's vision and after the first movie Lucas had all the time and money required for the rest. So it's natural to think of Wars as a better "whole" than Trek.
But in both cases I find myself wishing the vision and writing had been better. Does anybody over the age of 5 think Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea well-executed? No, he was just a plot device. Trek's Wesley Crusher is equally grating in most of his episodes. ("Wesley" is not to be confused with the talented Wil Wheaton, who deserved a better character.)
But when I watch Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, well, I don't think the writing is bad or the characters contrived. Better vision, better writing, better stories.
Possibly somebody will figure out how to make a knock-off battery that the camera recognizes as genuine Panasonic, putting us back at square 1 again.
Of course this suggests a start-up project: a business service that does crowdsourcing. The service would be customized for one task and would have various forms of cheat detection (e.g., CAPTCHAs, user profiling, meta-moderation and maybe some secret sauce).
Mechanical Turk is fine in many cases, but this story shows sometimes it's better to roll your own (or have somebody else roll it for you).
"...How about the ability to install any of 20,000 programs from a convenient package/portage/rpm directory for free in seconds?..."
Well, I tell you, it's just not that simple. Linux distributions may or may not work. Just yesterday (Friday) I installed Ubuntu Drake (you know, the STABLE version) only to find it boots to ... a command line. No graphical desktop. Command 'startx' unrecognized. Try to install xserver-xorg. It appears to succeed but startx complains about font 'fixed' not found. I Google some forums, they say font directories have moved, but by golly I can't find the new directories the forums mention. I'm not alone, but no further advice is to be found. Just for fun I try to install ubuntu-desktop in the early afternoon only to find the installation grinding on for a couple hours then dying with my network partner disconnecting the logical link. The better part of a day wasted trying what should be a simple installation. Right.
If you find Linux installs fine and upgrades painlessly, then I'm happy for you. But don't claim Linux makes MY life any easier. In return, I won't demand support from providers of free software.
Maybe MS has the bad interfaces, but they work where others fail. You've got to give them some credit for that. Of course, this can all change with Vista and maybe even XP eventually. And eventually, when XP is bloated with DRM, maybe even Ubuntu will boot my system to a graphical desktop.