Lori Coulson @ 386 -
For those not following C-Span today:
The House just voted to cite both Bolton and Miers for Contempt of Congress.
The Republican members of the House left the chamber before the vote.
[Keanu]Whoahhh[/Keanu]
In an effort to keep myself brief (watches as everyone wipes their brow in relief) -
What Xopher and Dan said, basically. (and some of what Faren said too - there *are* interesting points of discussion in C Wingate's verbiage).
C Wingate @ 60 -
TL:DR
(okay, actually, I did. But geeze - I thought I was a long-winded so-and-so... the wall of textual blarghh is just as useless as the wall of sonic BS is, in terms of actually having a meaningful conversation) - some bits, however -
...they've all converted me into a skeptic over the years.
You ain't so old that you're teh Master of teh Internets - I suspect the number of Great Old Ones who cut their teeth on bang paths and remember the days when USENET ran at speeds we wouldn't want our modems running at - let alone real broadband connections.
As for me - I'm in the "glass half full" club, I suppose - which is likely to give some of my friends gales of laughter. Skepticism is useful - but only to a point.
The Internet is not without problems (anyone who thinks otherwise just needs to think back to the Year of the Endless September) - but it is also not without its strengths. Acknowledging only one of these things is not a sign of wisdom.
Increasingly it is dominated by A-V streams, which the service providers are not at all happy about.
Too bad for them. They'll live with it, or they will find themselves shut out of the market - even with localized monopolies, etc. if nobody is servicing the market in the way the market desires, someone else will come in (just as FiOs is kicking Comcast's butt among high-bandwidth desiring users, in the markets where they compete).
As for the static content, a trip out from discussion of "word salad" led to a scholarly paper estimating that something like 12% of the static content of the web is crap designed to deceive search engines.
How is this any different from the percentage of television that is ads, newspapers that is... ads, magazines that is... ads, radio play time that is... advertisements. etc. ad nauseum?
I've spent three days watching a controversy based on exactly the kind of misinformation that the internet is supposed to prevent, having just gotten through an argument with another person with revolved around exactly the same problem.
Oh, fer crying out loud. Here's your problem.
The Internet isn't supposed to do anything. It isn't sentient, sapient, or self-aware. It has no purpose on its own.
It makes certain things easier. Just like the difference between a library, and a library with a good librarian and a well-kept card catalog - either one let's you find Wuthering Heights - the second one is easier, but eventually you'll find it either way.
Right now? The Internet is mostly like that first library, compared to what it could be. But it's still head-and-shoulders above many other resources out there.
But consider your reaction, Patrick. You hit me with a burst of emotion, not a rebuttal. You were annoyed at my killjoy responses;
Gee, I wonder why? Patrick found some neat stuff that he (and the rest of us) was excited about talking about, and you came in with hob-nailed boots and all the subtlety and tact of a squad of hobgoblins on a five-day bender and stomped up and down on everything before anyone had really said anything other than "oh, neat? Do tell!" (take a look at your initial posts - did you say one - even one - positive thing about anything Patrick had posted about? One thing?)
Spherical Time @ 77
At #60 Scott: Hey! URSGA! I used to be a member of that, back when they were all crazy. Taught me how to invert any wish and play Settlers & D&D! Do they still have the office in the rafters of Wilson?
When they were all crazy? What makes you think they stopped? :-D
Yup, the office is still in 504 - they share it with the jugglers now (which is all sorts of... interesting, since the jugglers have nowhere else to store their props - including the large plastic balancing balls that they never actually use).
(Simcon is thirty years old this year. Hard to believe...).
Member 2001-2002, although I wasn't on their staff.
Heh. I'm half-convinced people don't actually ever leave URSGA - they just stop coming to meetings...
Xopher @ 72
We're not picking a flawless person here. We're picking the dirty conniving bastard who's better able to serve our interests than the other dirty conniving bastards.
Or, in my case, better able to jack up the dirty conniving bastard I'm voting against because the damn fool is going to (further) ruin my beloved Republic, but the sentiment is there, yeah.
Serge -
Xopher.. We're all going to hold our noses. ("Get your hand off my nose. I can't breathe. Use your own nose!")
Yup. Pretty much.
There is no candidate - in either party - that I'm going to agree 100% with. And the ones who are available tend to be "B, C, C-, A, F, D, B-, C-, C, D-" at best. (and Fs are serious "hold nose" for me - I don't care if your averaged grade is a B-, an F on any topic that is important to me is bad juju).*
So come November, I'll be voting against the Republicans again, and hoping that whomever ends up in office will be so busy with the things I (basically) agree with, or (mostly) don't care about to go screwing up the things that I'd rather they not screw with.
*I could have voted for Dodd with mostly clear nostrils, I think, but I was pretty sure from the beginning that while I might like him, he wasn't going to win.
hummm...
While I'm still a registered Republican (more because Independents don't get to vote for anyone in the two "Important" parties in NY, and I'd rather spoil a Giuliani (or worse) than vote for someone I'm only nominally supporting), were I a Democrat...
...last night, I drove through Twelve Corners, on my way to a Simcon meeting.* There was a support Obama rally going on. With a couple-three hundred people.
In Rochester.
In February. At night.
Now, it's unseasonably warm out right now (47 Fahrenheit). But last night it was ten-fifteen degrees colder, and moist. And there were whole bunches of people out there. Many of them college age, some older, and kids as well.
Obama inspires people. He's getting people interested in politics.
That's good.
*well, actually an URSGA meeting, but I spent more time doing SIMCON fu than URSGA stuff.
So an electoral system which caters almost exclusively to the interests of nine states' populations is better than one that caters to eleven (and pays at least some lip service to the rest)?
Because that's what you're talking about - it takes the population of only nine states to secure a first-past-the-post majority popular election in the US (ten - fifteen if you're feeling insecure in your chances of securing the majority of the population in those states).
What you're basically saying, at the very least, is that the populations of North Dakota, and the other ten least-populated states are utterly irrelevant to the electoral process - because they will be completely sidelined in the entire thing, even moreso than now.
Will Shetterly -
Are you a Republican? If so, I understand why you like the current system.
...
ummmm....
"Ye might want ta... rephrase that, laddie."
Ethan @ 178 -
Speaking of languages I have no functional knowledge of, how does my iTunes randomizer know which songs are in French? And why has it been pretty heavily into them for the past half hour?
I'm semi-convinced* that iTunes is Apple's first successful experiment in artificial intelligence, and either develops moods and preferences in music, or somehow is able to anticipate those of its users, even on random play (whether it chooses to follow or work against the user's preferences is another matter).
Because mine will do stuff like play 6 - 7 Gladiator soundtrack tunes in a row. Or play anime/J-Pop music for half an hour. Or gets on a Star Trek jag. or decides I really want to listen to drum & bass for a while.
Conversely, there are songs (and whole albums) that I haven't heard since I burned them from CD - years ago, in some cases - unless I go in and play them manually.
*No, not really. But, you know...
Joanne @ 92 -
A local purveyor of bookcases has a handy item called a DVD shelf. It's 5.5 inches deep and will hold 7 rows of paperbacks. We've got one in the hall.
The local megagrocery (Wegmans, the One True Grocery) gets a furniture collection (made in Thailand, real wood and brass fixtures, very sturdy, light color, pseudo-Mission style) every fall for the incoming school year. The content varies, but usually includes bookshelves, end tables, round corner shelf units, a TV stand, and the like - the sort of stuff an apartment needs, but a lot higher quality than your typical pressboard crap.
The bookshelves come in two types - three-shelf and five-shelf, are foldable (folding down to a very compact and easy to manhandle package), and really tough. They are also very reasonably priced, and resultingly, I have a lot of those shelves for shelving books.
One year, they had CD shelves - same height and width as the 3-shelf bookshelves, half the depth, and four media shelves... which happen to be perfect height for most mass market paperbacks. Unfortunately, I only got one set of them - while they won't stack with each other, they very nicely stack on top of the 3-shelf units. I would dearly like to get another (or two), but the only ones I've found have been for obscene amounts of money, and not local.
But those are my bookshelves.
(tl:dr version - Inkjets more expensive. Lasers cheaper. All-in-Ones are stupid unless you live in a closet - literally. Make exceptions for limited or special purpose devices. Figure out cost of consumables over lifespan of printer before buying. Printers are something of a scam job.)
Clifton Royston -
Printers in general (and inkjet printers in specific) are increasingly falling in to the razor blade mode of economics - make no money on the printer, make all your scratch on the consumables.
Laser printers (even color ones) usually end up costing far less, in the long run, than buying a succession of inkjets - even though the initial cost is higher, and the individual toner units are as well, you go through so many fewer toner cartridges and other consumables, that the laser costs a lot less in the long run.
(The initial expense can still be a show-stopper, of course - I can't justify the cost of an HP LJ4700C, because I just don't do enough color printing in the course of a year to care. In this case, buying an inkjet, and keeping the toner cartridges locked up in an airtight container when not in use can be cost-effective - you waste a page of paper an ink recalibrating each time you load the ink cartridge(s), but at least they don't dry out between jobs.)
All in wonders (you wonder why anyone would buy them...) are even worse - anything on the damn thing breaks, you're stuck with a semi-functional (at best) piece of clutter - or a more-expensive shipping bill when you send it in for service (since repairs on consumer printers are almost always done by a service depot).
Unless you're working in a very (very) limited amount of space, it's almost always better to buy individual units (printer, scanner, fax machine - if you really actually need one, rather than a cheap "fax from desktop" application) rather than an all-in-one, up until the point where you're buying a workgroup-level Multi-Function Device (which are more reliable - but can be a lot more expensive to repair).
Serge - newer HPs are variable in quality. Avoid their new inkjets - we've had bad luck with them where I work. Their corporate printers are (as always) very good - the home/small office printers I am not as impressed with. Not that they are bad printers - but they do not recall to mind the shear awesomeness of the early HP printers.
I bought a Brother hl-5250dn last year (replacing an HP LJ5L that I'd been using for quite a few years), and have been very happy with it so far. It's sturdy and has chewed up every print job I've thrown at it - it's not the quietest printer out there, nor the fastest, but it's pretty solid (and is both networkable and duplexing, both requirements of mine). I've used it with both Macs and PCs, and the drivers have been rock solid.
re - me at above
That being said, I think I'm done as well. There's simply no profit in it, really.
Abi @ 661 -
Unfortunately, such arguments just tend to resurface and resurface again unless -
1 - dealt with to some level of decisiveness.
2 - everyone burns themselves out on arguing the given topic (either by realizing that a particular individual is never going to change their mind/opinion/stop evangelizing their position when given the opportunity to, or just burning out on the entire topic altogether).
3 - moderators step in, stomp the discussion flat and buried - and then continue to do so every time it rears its head with ruthless alacrity.*
Greg's WarPr0n formula/testing scheme has come up at least four times here - and the reaction has been increasingly allergic.
My personal problem, I finally figured out - it's a measure of how ashamed people are supposed to be about watching/enjoying an entertainment - Greg's continuous references to "guilt-free" viewing seem to bear this out.
If one were to reverse it, and measure movies based on sex**, with additional points for "deviant" practices (insert what some puritan would think is "deviant" here), and minus points for people getting aids, unwanted pregnancies, bad/abusive relationships, etc. - we would be up in arms, and rightly so.
Between this, and Greg's apparent belief that all stories told should be "Just So Stories" with morals to teach and important information to disperse to society, is what rubs me the wrong way about the War crustaceans. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out for myself what I'm supposed to be ashamed of.
*rpg.net has had to do this three times - once for a particularly offensive card game, once with Fr*d Ph*lps, and once with the whole "copying/file sharing is/isn't theft" discussion.
** CAPalert does this, but goes so much further as to be its own particular flavor of monstrosity.
Wesley @ 522 -
This is exactly the vibe I get from the series. To a long-term Who fan, it feels very odd: why should Rose be a harder act to follow than, say, Sarah, or Romana? (Or, for those of us who followed the books while the series was off the air, Bernice?)
That was the vibe I got as well. I was a little put off, but not drastically so - it was pretty clear that
The thing that bothers me about the treatment of Rose and Martha is that both of them were attracted to the Doctor. As a result, in the new series the companion seems coded as "the Doctor's girlfriend." There's less of a sense that someone might travel with the Doctor for their own reasons unconnected to their relationship with him. Evan though Rose and Martha are stronger characters than previous TARDIS crew, in some ways they've been made to look less independent.
It's definitely a new twist - I mean, there's sometimes been sort of an undercurrent of "are they or aren't they" at least with some of the companions, but this is about as explicit as they've ever made it (at least since the Dr. Who movie with McGann). I'm not a huge fan of it (although, since they went that way with Rose, I can utterly understand Martha being discomfited by it), because it does seem to make the companions less of a travelling companion, and more... something else.
(Although I do like the fact that recent companions are much less cast in the "not really all that useful in the end, except occasionally", and more in the "vital member of the team" role - both Rose and Martha have been really important in some episodes, and have proven themselves much more capable in general than many* earlier companions).
*Sarah Jane, Leela, Romana, and Nyssa being notable (but probably not the only) exceptions - I suppose probably Ace as well, but I never really watched any of the Sylvester McCoy episodes, having been somewhat soured on Who by Colin Baker, and the show going off the air locally not long after Sylvester started.
I preferred A View To A Krill, myself....
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 16 |
| 2007 | 32 |
Total: 48 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Scott Taylor:
Show all comments by Scott Taylor.