Obama's campaign organization was data driven. They collected data, used every bit of data available to them and most important they trusted the data. They could trust it because they had tested it.
The Romney campaign got sucked into the pro same syndrome that has struck the entire conservative movement. Doctrine is king. All data is viewed through the lens of beliefs and dogma. Karl Rove is now the poster child of this policy. After every major network (including Fox) had called Ohio for Obama Rove was still insisting that Romney had won it. Rove was so insistent that Fox even sent a reporter to grill one of Fox's own data analysts on why they had called Ohio. It was kind of amusing to watch this poor, wide-eyed data analyst who didn't expect to be on live TV defending his findings against Fox orthodoxy.
I think there is a plausible solution to at least part of the problem. It might even happen. The term "Moderate Republican" is almost an oxymoron. In fact, Rush Limbaugh or one of the other right-wing demigods coined a term for them -- Republican In Name Only or "Rino." There are still quite a few Rinos in Congress.
We'll have to see what happens over the next few weeks. If the Tea Party is still asserting itself and claiming that Romney lost because he wasn't conservative enough it might make life even more uncomfortable for the remaining Rinos. The following scenario is then possible.
The Rinos form their own caucus. This outrages the Tea Party wing, and eventually the Rino caucus members decide to bolt the party. The form the core of a centrist "Blue Dog" party that is fiscally conservative, leaves questions of sexual orientation and abortion to the individual (or maybe the states), and takes a pragmatic stance on welfare issues. Such a party would be likely to draw at least a few Democrats. So you would have a third party in Congress. It would not be the majority party, but it would sit in a very powerful position because neither of the traditional parties could pass anything without support from the moderates. Sitting in the middle would give even a small group of moderates an inordinate amount of bargaining power to force compromise.
One thing that would probably be required of the moderates in congress is that they would have to give up any aspirations of running for President for at least a decade. The public might support them, but they would simply not have the organizational structure that the traditional parties have developed over the last 150 years. Almost every member of Congress has fantasies about running for President, so it would be a big sacrifice. On the other hand, if the Republican party continues its drift to the right the chances are small that a Rino could ever get the party nomination.
It depends on who you consider to be the pirates in this case. Would it be the group of graduates who gather at someone's home for a little party, or would it be the people who are trying to extort 15 Euros from them?
I do agree with you on one point. Yes, the pirates do indeed look like ninnies.
The perjury threat is usually very ineffective. However, one time it might be potent is when you are involved in a court case and the perjury incident touches on that case. It is the sort of thing that makes judges very unhappy and prone to challenge claims that might otherwise have gone unquestioned.
>>I don't think this is what Faulkner intended himself...
His heirs seem to be more concerned about a quick money grab. At least on the surface it doesn't look like they care much about his legacy. It also looks like they have not read much of his work, or if they did they didn't take it to heart.
>>It also doesn't help that the movie industry seems to be stuck in a cycle of re-hashing old stuff (comics, cartoons, books...) into movies lately.
When you are spending in the hundreds of millions to make a movie you cannot risk failure. One way to avoid failure, so the thinking goes, is to use a "proven" property.
Another problem they have is that a comic book or a book like The Grinch that Stole Christmas is meant to be read in 15 minutes, but they need to make it into a two-hour movie. So they have to fill in, and they use expensive sets, CGI, and special effects as filler.
Actually, they used to know how to make Sci-fi cheaply.
"Lost in Space" was very cheap. It was intentionally set on an earth-like planet so they could just use ordinary settings. Building the sets for the inside of a space ship isn't all that much different than building a set for inside of a house, and outside the spaceship on an earth-like planet isn't that much different than building any other outdoor set. They had to build the robot and create something that looked like space clothing, but that was about it.
The original "Star Trek" learned from Lost In Space. They only visited Class-M planets which were by definition earth-like. The sets looked elaborate, but they were incredibly cheaply made for the first season. Their clothing was simply and cheaply made (and it didn't take a lot of fabric for a lot of the female costumes!). For Star Trek they did have to make some models, but that was a one-time expense.
The basic problem that both movie and TV have now is that they think that good SciFi depends on CGI and special effects. It doesn't, and it never has. It is the storytelling and acting that make good sci-fi. Too many special effects interfere with both.
Reportedly they did not have much choice. The story is that Obama administration called in the big ISP's and gave them a choice. Either negotiate a "voluntary" program or have one legislated or set by the FCC. This was before the SOPA/PIPA defeat and up until then the copyright industry was getting everything they asked of Congress.
SOPA gave the ISP's an excuse for the delays with a hope of delaying it forever. Now Washington believes that the public has forgotten about SOPA. The ISP's are afraid they may be right. However, any controversy like this one might be enough excuse to allow some further delays or major modification to the program.
Piracy paranoia was at its zenith when Sony decided to prohibit hacking. The massive hit to Sony's reputation and bottom line was one of many costs the big media companies have paid in their futile war on piracy.
I wonder how long it will be until we see the studios seeding torrents and paying people to download their products in an attempt to skew torrent data.
If it is hard to tell whether a patent is not new or obvious then it probably is not new or obvious. If there are serious questions about the idea's originality because there were a lot of similar things running around then it probably was not very original.
The default should be not to grant when the examiners and rexaminers have to strain to see the difference between this "invention" and existing technology.
Re: Re: "the overall story was pretty much what I expected."
Skimming might still be too much of a challenge. Perhaps Mike could figure out a way to explain complex issues as a dot-to-dot picture. Perhaps color-by-number would work better. Or perhaps he should just stick to cartoons. His comments thus far bring this one to mind: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-09-16/
How is Google deciding the life or death of any company? They are either sending traffic to a company or not. If the newspaper does not want the traffic they can modify their robots.txt file. It is not the search engine's fault if the receiving company does not understand how to monitize the increased traffic.
The real question here is whether one company should be taxed to give a failing business a guaranteed revenue stream.
I wonder if they will charge other search engines lilke Bing or just big evil Google. Will it apply to news aggregaters or just ones associated with search? A lot of news sites are now also aggregaters to some extent. Will they have to pay other news organizations?
The French equivalent of "protect the children" is "protect French culture" so I would not be surprised to see search engines that are French companies getting special treatment.
>>I have found plenty of those $5 dvds that were just what I had wanted.
The next logical step is to have the MPAA send goons to your home to collect up your physical DVD's when they get ready to put something "back in the vault" to quote the Disney term for repeat-windowing movies. Obviously that is impractical, but it isn't really different morally from suspending your rights to watch a movie that you thought you had purchased.
The only reason they don't send out the goons is that it cheap to have Amazon flip the "piss off paying customers" switch.
If this is really a very rare situation, then Amazon should be willing to offer a refund. If it is really rare it will happen so rarely it would be cheaper to refund than to take all of the negative publicity and ill-will. My guess is that it isn't all that rare, and that it will become even less rare in the future.
On the post: Obama's Tech Team Was Firing On All Cylinders While Romney's Was Still In Beta
The Romney campaign got sucked into the pro same syndrome that has struck the entire conservative movement. Doctrine is king. All data is viewed through the lens of beliefs and dogma. Karl Rove is now the poster child of this policy. After every major network (including Fox) had called Ohio for Obama Rove was still insisting that Romney had won it. Rove was so insistent that Fox even sent a reporter to grill one of Fox's own data analysts on why they had called Ohio. It was kind of amusing to watch this poor, wide-eyed data analyst who didn't expect to be on live TV defending his findings against Fox orthodoxy.
On the post: Sergey Brin To All Elected Politicians: Withdraw From Your Parties And Go Independent
We'll have to see what happens over the next few weeks. If the Tea Party is still asserting itself and claiming that Romney lost because he wasn't conservative enough it might make life even more uncomfortable for the remaining Rinos. The following scenario is then possible.
The Rinos form their own caucus. This outrages the Tea Party wing, and eventually the Rino caucus members decide to bolt the party. The form the core of a centrist "Blue Dog" party that is fiscally conservative, leaves questions of sexual orientation and abortion to the individual (or maybe the states), and takes a pragmatic stance on welfare issues. Such a party would be likely to draw at least a few Democrats. So you would have a third party in Congress. It would not be the majority party, but it would sit in a very powerful position because neither of the traditional parties could pass anything without support from the moderates. Sitting in the middle would give even a small group of moderates an inordinate amount of bargaining power to force compromise.
One thing that would probably be required of the moderates in congress is that they would have to give up any aspirations of running for President for at least a decade. The public might support them, but they would simply not have the organizational structure that the traditional parties have developed over the last 150 years. Almost every member of Congress has fantasies about running for President, so it would be a big sacrifice. On the other hand, if the Republican party continues its drift to the right the chances are small that a Rino could ever get the party nomination.
On the post: Slovak Collection Society Tells High School Students To Pay Up For Music At Graduation Parties
Re: "Put up a blog post"! THOSE EVIL BEASTS!
I do agree with you on one point. Yes, the pirates do indeed look like ninnies.
On the post: DMCA Censorship: 'Revenge Porn' Site Owner Tries To Censor Criticism With Bogus Takedown Notice
On the post: Faulkner Estate Keeps Suing: Sues Washington Post Over Ad That Quoted One Sentence
Re:
His heirs seem to be more concerned about a quick money grab. At least on the surface it doesn't look like they care much about his legacy. It also looks like they have not read much of his work, or if they did they didn't take it to heart.
On the post: Hollywood Still Resisting The Idea That Cheaper, Better Films Is The Way To Beat TV
Re: Well, DUH...
On the post: Hollywood Still Resisting The Idea That Cheaper, Better Films Is The Way To Beat TV
Re:
When you are spending in the hundreds of millions to make a movie you cannot risk failure. One way to avoid failure, so the thinking goes, is to use a "proven" property.
Another problem they have is that a comic book or a book like The Grinch that Stole Christmas is meant to be read in 15 minutes, but they need to make it into a two-hour movie. So they have to fill in, and they use expensive sets, CGI, and special effects as filler.
On the post: Hollywood Still Resisting The Idea That Cheaper, Better Films Is The Way To Beat TV
Re: What about certain genres?
"Lost in Space" was very cheap. It was intentionally set on an earth-like planet so they could just use ordinary settings. Building the sets for the inside of a space ship isn't all that much different than building a set for inside of a house, and outside the spaceship on an earth-like planet isn't that much different than building any other outdoor set. They had to build the robot and create something that looked like space clothing, but that was about it.
The original "Star Trek" learned from Lost In Space. They only visited Class-M planets which were by definition earth-like. The sets looked elaborate, but they were incredibly cheaply made for the first season. Their clothing was simply and cheaply made (and it didn't take a lot of fabric for a lot of the female costumes!). For Star Trek they did have to make some models, but that was a one-time expense.
The basic problem that both movie and TV have now is that they think that good SciFi depends on CGI and special effects. It doesn't, and it never has. It is the storytelling and acting that make good sci-fi. Too many special effects interfere with both.
On the post: RIAA Apparently Forgot To Tell Six Strikes Coordinators That The 'Independent' Firm It Hired Used To Lobby For The RIAA
Re:
SOPA gave the ISP's an excuse for the delays with a hope of delaying it forever. Now Washington believes that the public has forgotten about SOPA. The ISP's are afraid they may be right. However, any controversy like this one might be enough excuse to allow some further delays or major modification to the program.
On the post: The 'Final' Sony PS3 Hack
On the post: Making The Most Of File Sharing: Free Market Research & A Captive Target Audience
On the post: Oh Sure, Now The Patent Office Realizes Apple's 'Rubberbanding' Patent Is Both Obvious And Not New
The default should be not to grant when the examiners and rexaminers have to strain to see the difference between this "invention" and existing technology.
On the post: Trent Reznor Talks To Techdirt About His Unconventional New Record Deal, And Why He Still Loves DIY
Re: Re: "the overall story was pretty much what I expected."
On the post: Windows 8's Arbitrary App Certification Rules Could Block Skyrim And Other Huge Games
Re: Re:
On the post: Windows 8's Arbitrary App Certification Rules Could Block Skyrim And Other Huge Games
On the post: Google To French Media: We May Have To Cut You Off
Re: Yes but...
The real question here is whether one company should be taxed to give a failing business a guaranteed revenue stream.
On the post: Google To French Media: We May Have To Cut You Off
The French equivalent of "protect the children" is "protect French culture" so I would not be surprised to see search engines that are French companies getting special treatment.
On the post: Court Rules Yellow Pages Are Protected Speech
On the post: Studio To Amazon Instant Video Customer: Thanks For The $$$. Enjoy Your Blank Screen.
Re: Re:
The next logical step is to have the MPAA send goons to your home to collect up your physical DVD's when they get ready to put something "back in the vault" to quote the Disney term for repeat-windowing movies. Obviously that is impractical, but it isn't really different morally from suspending your rights to watch a movie that you thought you had purchased.
The only reason they don't send out the goons is that it cheap to have Amazon flip the "piss off paying customers" switch.
On the post: Studio To Amazon Instant Video Customer: Thanks For The $$$. Enjoy Your Blank Screen.
Re: Re:
Next >>