They nuked the entire "Ask the Movie Answer Man" section, which was one of my favorite things on the site. Even the old archives are gone. A search turns up links, but they are all broken. :-(
>criminals simply don't use weapons on civilians (apart from high value targets, perhaps) because the penalties for doing so are so harsh. Criminals literally throw their guns away in a chase
If they don't use weapons, how do they have guns to throw away?
UK Criminals do use weapons, including knives, to hurt people, which is why you guys have started running anti-knife campaigns, as detailed here:
The main way in which these predictions were off the mark is that media distribution in Cronkite's 2001 is still a one-way street, from news organization to individual news consumer. His future world missed the extent to which arguably the most important content generation is done by the consumers themselves -- Twitter, YouTube, blogs, forums, etc. (Okay, there was no Twitter or YouTube in 2001. But you know what I mean.)
>To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make.
It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.
But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.
In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.
Lost in the bashing of this professor who had the temerity not to want to pay higher taxes, is the fact that he had to invest lots of money to be able to earn his big salary. He probably has at least 7 years of higher education. His wife, as a medical doctor, probably has at least 8, if I understand correctly how med school and internships work. They sank a huge amount of money -- maybe close to $500,000 -- into investing in their careers, while most people in the lower income brackets have spent little, if anything, in that way. And the cost to the professor and his wife is even greater if you factor in the opportunity cost of not working high-paying jobs all those years they were in school. Call it a cool million sunk into their education and training, easily.
So it's hardly greedy of the guy to want to be able to at least pay back his wife's student loans before Obama hits him up even harder to help finance a new era of government expansion. There's a difference between revenue and profits, after all.
As for saying he shouldn't have bought a million-dollar house, that's hardly an unreasonable price for a couple with a combined annual income of roughly half that amount. As a multiple of their income, it's comparable to a couple who makes $125,000 a year buying a house worth $250,000. That doesn't sound so crazy, does it?
Kids tease other kids about ANYTHING. If it weren't about your name, it would be something else. Doesn't mean white society is conspiring to keep Chinese people down.
And that UNC Chapel Hill thing is just disgusting. Not sure someone who would do something like that is a good representative of the attitudes of white people in general.
An article like this without a single reference to the impact and influence of unions is absurd, like trying to explain the workings of the solar system without invoking the concept of gravity.
Adams, as usual, doesn't let facts and his own hypocrisy get in the way of a catchy blog post.
His choosing an airline ticket took a long time precisely because he WASN'T satisfied with "less". If he really wanted less information or fewer options and choices, he could have just used Orbitz without checking JetBlue and the United site, Or he could have just picked a single carrier and taken whatever flight they had available. But he wanted more -- he wanted to know about every possible detail and every available carrier. If he wants to know who to blame for the long time it took him to pick his ticket, he need only look in the mirror.
Coincidentally, I used Orbitz for the first time just two days ago after an unpleasant experience with a human travel agent who I felt was trying to push me into options and prices I did not want. By comparison, Orbitz was much more efficient and offered a good balance between complexity and simplicity IMHO.
Actually, those guys send virtual invitations; you are going to print them out. So not the same thing. But similar in trying to undercut high-priced competitors.
Any financial analyst knows you need to look at year-on-year ("YoY") growth rates for monthly data to eliminate the impact of seasonality. For example, retail sales for a store might fall off sharply in January compared to the preceding December, simply because lots of people were shopping in December for Christmas presents.
So instead of comparing June 2010 to May 2010, you compare May 2010 vs. May 2009 to June 2010 vs. June 2009. So you could say something like, "Facebook registrations were up 30% YoY in May 2010, but were up only 2% YoY in June 2010. Actually, at this point, YoY growth rates might even be negative (i.e., Facebook may have signed up more users in June 2009 than it did in June 2010).
Month-on-month (MoM) comparisons can be interesting, but you need to put them in context to determine if seasonality is affecting the results.
At any rate, the number of new registrations, by definition, says absolutely nothing about whether users are getting burned out on Facebook. You'd need a metric like average time spent on the site per user per month to say something about that.
Nowhere near as good as Steve Jobs' address at Stanford a few years back, which remains the gold standard for these things.
This one seemed mainly like Jeff congratulating himself on the neat things he's done, with very few actionable take-aways for the audience. The ending in particular, with its repetitive "Will you A, or will you B" device, smacked of laziness, as if it were hastily dashed off the night before.