Would U.S. troops obey presidential orders to deploy against the American people and take away our freedoms?
There is no doubt about it. Of course they would, especially if the president told them that our ‘freedom and national security’ depended on it, which he would.
Or to put it more simply: that’s their job. This is the armed forces we’re talking about. You’re taught to follow orders, not to question them (and for good reason). If the morally-active soldiers you see in movies like Avatar were in the real army, they’d be out on their arses pretty quickly, because stopping to think about or question what you’re doing can genuinely get people killed. The chain of command exists so that the people up the top do the thinking.
1 day ago on February 7th, 2010 at 11:14 am | Permalink | Reblog from
The Levellers. These guys used to OWN the festival circuit in England, before the government decided to make such activities a criminal offence, essentially relegating bands to only playing the few large commercially-backed festivals each year.
You can see why they were so popular here. This was their second year at the Glastonbury festival, on the main stage this time after the previous year’s fantastic performance. They leap about the stage with wild abandon, energy pouring from every note. And of course we can’t possibly ignore the addition of Steve Boakes (then the band’s chief tour caterer IIRC) on didgeridoo for the first time, lending an already iconic song an earthy, brooding presence.
Of course, they’re still around(iTunes Link), sometimes listed as ‘The Levellers’. Go buy their stuff. Now.
2 days ago on February 6th, 2010 at 4:24 pm | Permalink
"In a civil procedure on a technical matter, it amounts to blackmail; the cost of defending one of these things is reckoned to be £10,000. You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt. It is straightforward legal blackmail."
Aside: This is why I’m heavily opposed to the House of Commons trying to abolish the House of Lords. The House of Lords doesn’t give purely political answers to things. They don’t have to obey the party whips.
3 days ago on February 5th, 2010 at 9:58 am | Permalink
shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet you can install in your web browser which will automatically hide the comments section of many popular web sites. My gift of a quieter, saner web to you.
I’ve added a little tweak to work for C|Net News.com on my copy:
Also, an alert to any Tumblr users whose themes include {TagsAsClasses}— you’ll need to make sure you don’t use ‘comment’ as a tag. I just did that here, and lo and behold my entire article was hidden from view. Doh.
5 days ago on February 3rd, 2010 at 5:30 pm | Permalink | Reblog from
In English, “tantalizing” means “arousing interest and desire”. It’s a good thing, a sort of Christmas-Eve teasing rich with the promise of eventual joy. A plot point in ABC’s ‘Lost’ may be tantalizing, a new restaurant going up in your neighborhood may post a tantalizing menu.
The word comes from Greek mythology, where Tantalus is a mortal who repulses the gods by serving them the boiled body of his own son - surely the world’s most inept attempt at ritual sacrifice. Even Zeus doesn’t stand for this, so Tantalus gets punished in one of those metaphor-ready ways: he is made to stand in water with fruit hanging over his head. He spends eternity starving and thirsting, as the fruit moves out of his reach when he grasps at it, and the water recedes when he bends down to drink it. It’s pretty creative, and you can try approximating it next time you’re really hungry by buying a meatball sub and starring at it without eating. Chills!
This is why in Croatian, “muke Tantalove” (Tantalus’ suffering) is an expression meaning “unbearable, messing-with-your-head torture”. And this is why I imagine readers of Mac rumors literally starving to painful death when some “tantalizing” prospect is mentioned (e.g. cameras built into screens).
This is why I love philology.
5 days ago on February 3rd, 2010 at 3:19 pm | Permalink | Reblog from
Either I’m missing something, the initial iPad apps are going to suck, or we haven’t yet been told that iPad-native apps won’t be available for some period of time after the iPad’s launch.
…
The problem, of course, is that before day one, we won’t have iPads ourselves for development and testing. … [I]f we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).
This isn’t the only hurdle: Apple isn’t actually accepting iPad apps for review just yet. They’ll announce that at some (unknown) point in the future. This also makes it difficult for companies which want to submit something early to see if the reviewers will pull the ‘duplicates existing functionality’ card.
1 week ago on February 1st, 2010 at 10:19 pm | Permalink | Reblog from
A detailed post from Michael Tamblyn of Kobo about the pricing metrics of eBook publishing, particularly focussing on the agency model being proposed by Macmillan, to which Amazon ‘capitulated’ after cutting them off over the weekend.
Michael includes some interesting information for those following Amazon’s line on the Agency pricing model, particularly this snippet countering the ‘money-grab’ accusations:
It isn’t really a revenue grab for publishers. In most cases, the publisher makes less. That $35.00 Under the Dome that the publisher made $17.00 on? With agency, they might make $10.50. But they won’t run the risk of some retailer forcing them to price it at $15 and making $7.50.
1 week ago on February 1st, 2010 at 10:03 pm | Permalink
"One of the complaints in Wilcox’s piece is how do you print from iWork? Who needs to print? … 1997 called and it wants its ink cartridges back."
People forget that the reason Xerox never did anything with all their user interface research because they didn’t want a ‘paperless office’ to impact their sales of paper-based devices and technology. But nevertheless, that’s the idea the GUI was created to fulfil: a paperless office. Wouldn’t it be great to actually have that, finally?
It’s gotta be better than the bank loan department we’ve been dealing with: they don’t know what to do with PDF files or scans, they insist we print stuff out & fax it. Which actually goes into a computer which generates a raster image to email to them. Which they then print out manually.
*sigh*
1 week ago on January 30th, 2010 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
Many congratulations to my former Morfunk business partner David Kaneda for winning the 14 Days of jQuery Grand Prize for his work on jQTouch. Dave is a fantastically talented guy and I couldn’t wish this accolade on a more deserving person.
1 week ago on January 30th, 2010 at 9:42 am | Permalink
stevenf:
I’ve added a little tweak to work for C|Net News.com on my copy:
Also, an alert to any Tumblr users whose themes include
{TagsAsClasses}— you’ll need to make sure you don’t use ‘comment’ as a tag. I just did that here, and lo and behold my entire article was hidden from view. Doh.