"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
As Jerry Pournelle says (at the link),
“Now the government that approves an Energy Star Certificate for a gasoline powered alarm clock will now in essence take over administering the Health Care System in the United States. Good luck, America.”
Be sure to follow the link to the NYT article from the comments at Pournelle’s site.
For the most part, notsomuch. I’ve found FB to be an OK way to keep current with real friends and family, but the extended-extended “friends” of “friends” of friends who sometimes enter into political “discussions” on FB entries mostly turn out to have comments and insights of about the caliber of today’s high school sophomores. If that.
Indeed, anything more meaningful than dumps of out-of-context, misapplied (and often not at all understood by the dumper) factoids gleaned from the first hit on a google search is a rarity in FB political “discourse”. Most folks don’t even take time to actually read (assuming they can read and comprehend) initial posts or the material linked, let alone engage their brain before they begin to type.
I can understand how some view “social media” as a way to communicate political ideas with immediacy, but, folks, it’s primarily a means of communicating surface factoids to people with short attention spans and little interest in doing their own homework so they can understand what’s going on.
Stick with real friends and family and what’s going on in your lives.
The soi-disant “Tea Party Express” has come up with a stupid idea: raise $700,000 to offer to Bart Stupak to resign.
“If Bart Stupak is considering resigning then we want to do what we can to help him along in that decision. Exchanging your votes, principles and decisions for money seems to be the modus operandi for Bart Stupak. So how do we find $700,000 to get this corrupt and failed politician out of office, so that we can get a representative of the people, who respects the Constitution, to take Stupak’s seat?” asked Mark Williams, Chairman of the Tea Party Express.
I understand the thought, but it’s still stupid. Paying Danegeld only makes the “Dane” go away until he wants some more. Although Kipling was speaking of nations paying “protection money” to aggressors, the principle’s the same,
Danegeld
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
“We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
I keep giving Firefox and Chrome (and even Safari–heck, I even give Internet Exploder the occasional opportunity to redeem itself!) a shot at my eyeballs, and they all consistently fall short, so don’t even go there.
It’s cross platform, so you have little excuse to keep using the kludgy, clumsy, dumbed-down browsers touted by sell-out tech writers and icognoscenti that require all kinds of add-ons just to almost reach Opera’s basic functionality. It used to frustrate the daylights out of me to work on someone else’s machine and be forced to use an antiquated, kludgy, insecure, clumsy, dumbed-down browser that didn’t even have built-in mouse gesturing, but now I carry a thumb drive with Opera Portable, so I don’t have to put up with other folks’ lack of good sense. *heh* Sadly, Opera Portable is still in version 10.51, but that’s not so very bad, since the 10.52 version I’m running (Build 3347) is a beta–a rock solid beta but still not an official release.
One of the less important new things (well, since 10.51) is the “O” tab in the “Tabs” bar that allows accessing most of what used to be in the menu bar by default. It allows those folks who’ve been seduced by the dumbed-down Chrome interface to have a less “cluttered” view, but still allows folks like me who like having a LOT of information and ready manipulations available to invoke the more informative menu bar.
But little things like making transitions easier for folks used to using a dumb browser are just lil candy sprinkles. The real improvements (even over 10.51) are in security and speed–particularly the java engine. Just download it and give it a run at your eyeballs.
BTW, not using Opera Mobile on your smartphone? Think the iPhone/Safari combo is top dog? Maybe not. (When my youngest nephew got his new Wii, several years ago, he was pleasantly surprised it came with an offer for a free web browser. Opera. And I stopped being surprised years ago that IBM/Lenovo included an imbedded version of Opera in a preboot environment. Just sayin’.)
BTW, brief not-very-techie note: Yes, Opera does seem to use “a lot of memory”. But note that the image above shows I have 30 tabs open. *heh* About average, especially since the first 10 are ALWAYS open and “pinned” so they cannot be accidentally closed. And “a lot of memory”–currently somewhere around 100MB with those 30 tabs open–is a relative term on a modern computer with 4-8GB of physical memory.
BTW#2–a not-at-all-techie note: My install of Opera looks a tad different to what you may download and install for reasons other than my affection for the more informative Menu Bar; I have for years skinned whatever installation of Opera I may have on Windows computers or on Linux or BSD computers differently so that I remember which OS I am browsing in. Yes, the OS makes that little difference (apart from how the scrollwheel works in Linux, but that’d be a whole post in itself). The “skin” in the graphic above is the current version of Tobs Theater Paper (TTT-Paper 7.2).
The Ø! has a powerful deterrent against those who might seek legal means to depose his unconstitutional reign. This is what we’d get if The Ø! were removed from office:
Now, doesn’t that send chills of outright dread down your spine? A politician with the intelligence of a brain damaged gerbil and the ethics of a rabid squirrel in the oval office. A chilling prospect.
You think?
I’ve often referred to the “Apple Straitjacket” (or sometimes, in a rush, misspelled as “straightjacket”–my bad :-)), meaning the artificial limitations Apple places on users of its products. Here’s some unintentional “damning-with-faint-praise” in an article on the iPhad from a writer who thinks that’s just dandy:
…none of the hardware in the iPad pushes the leading edge of design, it just does what it needs to do,” [RapidRepair CEO Aaron] Vronko said. “If you look at the Motorola Droid or Google’s Nexus One—which both have 512MB of memory—they’re pushing the edge of what hardware’s currently available. They want to make sure their devices can take on whatever people decide to throw at them, whereas Apple sits back and says, ‘What do we want this device to be able to do?'”
Exactly. While other companies have a desire to accommodate users needs and desires, Apple seeks to define users “needs” as whatever IT wants a user to “need”. (Sounds like The Ø! and his ilk, doesn’t it?) Straitjacket.
*feh* One more reason to mock Apple.
And another: note this evidence of planned obsolescence for the iPhad’s of early adopters:
One interesting bit, he said, was a section near the top of the iPad, near the light sensor. “I’d say that’s definitely designed to host a camera, [likely in a future model] six months or so from now,” Vronko said.
Just more reason to
Take a stand against vanity, conceit, and the cult of personality. Don’t be fooled by purveyors of dumbed-down, locked-down, semi-functional pieces of planned obsolescence. Computers and electronic devices are tools, not fashion accessories. They do not define who you are or what group you belong to. Any company or culture that insists otherwise is deeply creepy. Apple haters unite!
And more from another source:
You won’t hear much about price elasticity from the first wave of iPad buyers. They will buy the iTurd if Steve Jobs creates it. Apple, however, is targeting the masses. And the masses think in terms of opportunity costs. [As though I really needed to add the emPHAsis *heh*]
*heh*
…compounded by another, even more minor, but nearly as irritating. While reading along in a book by an author I have come to expect to be fairly literate, published by a company that has usually competent editors, I read, “Here, here” in a context that called for “Hear, hear.”
Now, I know that sort of phrase is subject to one of the common classes of typos, and I have even–momentarily–typed “Hear, here” before *heh-heh* 🙂 But really. *sigh* The author, one of the proof readers or the editor ought to have caught that.
(Sadly, this video, which ought to be a brief introduction to the differences between “here” and “hear”–as a way of leading into the etymology of the expression “Hear, hear”– contains a comma splice in the introduction to “here” that is inexcusable in a video purporting to be English instruction. *sigh*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5xDvkk-qxA)
A decent explanation of “Hear, hear!” is here, hear?
Of course, there is one small problem in the explanation linked above. It introduces another expression that most folks have just not bothered to understand: “exception that proves the rule”–;-) Perhaps a slightly better–for not having “exception that proves the rule”–explanation is here-here.