Thank you for posting this. Paglia's commentary is not so much about "How great Revenge of the Sith is!"; its about how empty and devoid and detached the modern art community is from the world today. She doesn't even think its a very good film, but she feels the imagery is very powerful and since it taps very basic archetypes (e.g. jealousy, forbidden love; master/student relationship; how does one become evil) it transcends its medium. Half the planet knows who Darth Vader is. Lucas, despite his weaknesses in dialogue and plot pacing, has a good sense of drama and vision wholistically. People should read the article before they make a judgement. In fairness, the slashdot headline is inflammatory and doesn't provide any context.

The difference of art over technology, is that art's definition is not binary. It changes based on personal experience, experience of exposure to the art itself, and perception of it can have its own meaning changed by evolving society and its values. Ontop of all of that, there's intricacies of language, meter, symbolism, etc that are not immediately apparentt but may be uncovered in time. In short, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean that its bad. Finnegan's Wake is not accessible to a high school english student, and it was never intended to be.

Surface is a tablet that can function as a laptop.

I have an iPad 3. Nice device, solid, great for couch surfing youtube and browsing some websites (non-flash). But everything ends up back at the PC. Want to copy some pics from the camera? Need a usb port. Need to load some stuff onto a USB key? need as usb port. Flash website? Need to go back to the laptop. Want to type a lengthy email? Need to use the 3rd party bluetooth keyboard. And why do all my paid applications need to update every day, and spam me with in-program advertisements? Why can't i load my own applications onto the .... oh yeah, itunes/istore or nothing.

This tablet looks like the first real serious alternative to the iPad. The android and BB devices have been fundamentally flawed, but this might just accomplish it. Integration with active directory is a big plus for enterprises too.

Even if Microsoft can establish this device as the 'corproate standard tablet' vs the iPad (which is sadly lacking in terms of enterprise tools), its a huge market segment.

I think the movie went on a little too long, and tried to accomplish a bit too much... but on the whole, it was very good. Solid visuals, a plot that was consistent filled with characters who had realistic expectations. There were several scenes that were absolutely fantastic.

People wanting a sequel to Aliens forget that Aliens was James Cameron's interpretation of Alien -- more of a psychological thriller than an action film. Both are excellent, but Ridley Scott was never going to do a colonial space marines vs hordes of zulus.

The only reason why Apple stores are popular, is because their product is at the centre of the popular culture zeitgeist at the moment.

Their staff are generally ignorant, pretentious, and the product is vastly overpriced (if you're talking about their PC equipment or co-branded peripherals sold in store).

Give Apple stores 5 years. They'll be sad depressing retail channels eventually as well. There's only so many ipads and iphones you can sell --even with 3 year planned obsolesence cycles.

You are not out of touch. RIM is still profitable and has a large entrenched market share. They are actually growing in BRIC countries, where the better battery life + lower cost + combined e-mail/internet/phone footprint makes alot of sense. Not everyone needs $0.99 fart apps, or can afford $0.99 USD songs for their ipod replacement.

RIM is in trouble, but not disasterously so. Their market share decline isn't an absolute decline; its that the iphone and android market has grown so large due to their consumer focus. The consumer market is bigger than the business/professional market...always has been, always will be.

RIM offers a reliable delivery network not dependent upon a pastiche of ISPs/phone carriers. The central management is a huge advantage for enterprises. And the device itself is more secure and reliable than any of the other whiz-bang devices.

My corporation just completed a 1000 user trial of iphone replacement for BB. The program was cancelled 1 month into the 3 month pilot; the BB's reliability and keyboard (and calendaring) was irreplaceable.

RIM"s biggest challenge at this point is they lack growth (a big no-no in our 'quarterly results' driven culture)... their primary business is replacement sales -- steady revenue. They've missed consumer growth opportunities ... I had a pearl, it was awful. D

As a non-american, the cynical part of me thinks that SOPA would be a good thing... there's some huge opportunities available to foreign nations, while the US conciously cedes its leadership position in a new technology and communication medium.

Less legal restriction and onerous regulated enviornments will be a breeding ground for innovation and investment. The US is a huge market, but the BRIC countries are on the rise and there's still Europe, other South American and Asian nations, Canada, Mexico...

GW1 sold around 7million copies and is now a major franchise. A few things it didn't bring to the table was a persistent, instanced world and large (20+) player 'raiding'. Both of these have been addressed in the sequel that just entered beta testing... and still with no monthly fee.

SW:TOR bring the RPG back to MMORPG. But I think GW2 has the chance to be truly revolutionary -- it destroys the 'holy trinity' model, no monthly fee, and the graphics and gameplay look to be a substantial improvement over the current generation of 'hotkey' MMOs.

We've been doing this in canada for at least a year now, particularly regarding fisheries and lobsters.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2011/07/01/ns-thisfish-tracks-diner-to-water.html

Thanks for elevating the tone of the conversation.

You'll note that Harper has won two minority governments followed by a majority most recently -- canadians in general have become more confident in his leadership over time. So you might just wish to reconsider your arbitrary, completely unconstructive, keyboard warrior comment and reconsider what you should do next.

You might want to consider such topics as: a) Federal vs Provincial jurisdiction, b) the nature of being a resource producing economy in a cold northern climate, c) the necessity of balance of priorities by the leader of a G8 nation, including the replacement of a 40 year old airforce (which will be 50 years old by the time the F35 is available), d) the growth of CO2 on an absolute level worldwide even if Canada were to reduce its emissions to 0 as a nation, e) a framework that esentially excludes the US (they never signed) or gives huge incentives for growing economies to continue unabatted (India, China, Russia) making the collective situation worse.

China and India are more than happy to play up western guilt while they continue to absorb manufacturing and grow their economies. In China's case particularly, they're entirely resistant to 3rd party monitoring and aren't even honest with their own reporting -- something an open, democractic western nation can't avoid.

Canada belled the cat on this one. Kyoto is 20 years dead, never achieved its objectives, and never will. Best to knife the baby, move on, and look at other mechanisms globally to incentivize behaviour. Maybe redirect a tobin tax towards investing in alternative fuels and energies? Maybe a revenue neutral carbon tariff system (although who would police it, is almost as pragmatic).

Canada didn't exit Kyoto because its a CO2 denier, or resistant to change. It exited the treaty because its 20 years broken, is structured in a way that works directly against canada's interests economically, and ultimately would have zero effect upon the worldwide problem even if canada met all its objectives and committments.

Having the moral high ground in international relations is somewhat equivalent to have the best water gun on the western front circa 1916.

I manage a large operations department for a bank. Had chornic overtime issues, employee relations was involved. 60 hour work weeks were the norm.

I mandated that all projects (we did implementations as well as incident support) would not be allowed to budget more than 35 hours a week (5 hours for overhead/utilization) of effort. OT would have to be approved by me directly. All OT had to be paid for by the projects submitting the work.

6 months later, we had regular 40 hour work weeks for 95% of the staff. OT dropped. And the best part? I got the cream of the crop from other departments requesting to work for my shop... they wanted the work/life balance. Normal hours were suddenly a recruiting feature.

Chronic OT is always a sign of either ineffective people managers, or a broken corporate culture. Always.

Agreed. The computing socialist in me who thinks in terms open systems, free market, open source, wild west internet subconciously resists centralized systems like blackberry.

That is, until I have enterprise cost, control, security, and efficiency considerations to take into account. Blackberry administration, security (both device and messaging network), and frankly support are still industry best.

There's no android or iphone device close to the level of security that is offered in a blackberry; if data security (including personal communications) is paramount to your enterprise there's really no other choice. We've tried GOOD and citrix sessions on iphones or tablets, but frankly the performance is crap and the costs prohibitive.

In fairness, they also formed kijiji as a counter to craigslist, which truly threatened to undermine their entire auction infrastructure. Many better companies refused to adapt, and they did.

They now have a low cost/free local garage sale portal that supplanted the defacto standard, and protected their core application (ebay). They also bought paypal, a no-brainer option but at least they're diversified.

I still agree that Meg isnt' qualified to run HP, but then again Gerstner was the cookie company guy before he turned IBM around in the 90s.

So you've never owned a house? Good for you. Most people are at least one to two times their annual income in debt, due to things like homes, car payments, etc.

More importantly, sovereign debt works very differently than personal debt. Sovereigns control things like the currency with which they use to pay on their debts. They must also consider economic factors when adjusting expenditures and taxes (NGDP, RGDP, employment, exchange rates). Also, as RGDP grows, debt loads that remain the relatively static lower as a function of the whole. The rabbit hole goes deeper - and the U.S. is in too much debt (anything upwards of 90-100% of GDP is dangerous territory) - but the Country-as-a-household analogy is a bad one.

The replacement for Jobs is more likely to be sourced from Las Vegas or Hollywood than Silicon Valley -- they need a showman, a salesman of the highest order who can stand on a stage and make the ordinary look extraordinary. Looking good in a black turtleneck is optional.