I knew it was only a matter of time before we'd start seeing some blowback. China couldn't artificially hold down its currency forever.

The reality of the modern globalized multinational is that they will scour the world for the cheapest way of producing things. (We have Wal-Mart to thank for pioneering that business model.) The short term effect of this has been the wholesale destruction of countless time-honoured industries in many developed countries, and the explosive growth of those same industries in poorer countries. The worst hit was manufacturing.

The long term effects, however, remain to be seen. Industries historically have shifted like tides from one part of the world to another anyway, although this was previously mainly caused by wars and supplies of natural resources.

The behaviour of multinational corporations, however, adds in local manufacturing costs as a factor in this equation. This could very easily lead to much more rapid shifting of industries, for better or worse.

One potential upside to this is that it means we may not have to wait 50 years for our old industries to come back as countries' economies begin to equalize under the pressure of market forces. The downside is that this could also mean we're competing with the entire rest of the planet for jobs.

The longer this discussion goes on, the more ironic it gets. No offense, but there is a lot of talk about cultural snobbery here coming from some fairly opinionated sources. Don't forget, folks, that beauty is relative.

Likewise, no matter how much you build it up, art is (and can never be any more than) a commodity. The only reason why it is worth so much is because people like the gallery curators in this film spend so much time talking up its pedigree in grandiose ways.

But no matter how much of a back-story you attach to a painted board or a folded piece of metal, it's still just a painted board or a folded piece of metal. Once you take it out of the showroom and away from the flowery speeches of the saleswomen, a fair portion of the glamour is lost. This is where most art simply becomes decoration.

Sadly, in some cases, especially with much of contemporary art, once you take away all the advertising and marketing stories, the product your left with isn't even noteworthy enough to pass for decoration anymore.

And so it goes with Mr. Tuyman's work. The so-called most important artist of his generation registers with commuters as little more than window dressing. At least I can respect him for his good sportsmanship in participating in this experiment.

I wonder if they sold that mural afterwards... ;-)

This has been happening for years, and not just with the military news. NPR did a special report a couple years back about how expert opinions are bought and sold by corporate and partisan government interests.

If you don't mind my saying, you guys look a bit like the pop band Garbage, only better looking and less grumpy. ;-)

Given all the politics that have unfortunately infused American religion in the past couple of decades, and mobilized so many of the scary evalengelicals, it's easy to forget the time not so long ago where this stuff was actually harmless.

Some of my theology colleagues still study diagrams not unlike these for the sake of comparison. It's an elegant way of expressing this particular perspective's beliefs, and once you can manage to put the bigotry aside, it's an interesting glimpse into another decidedly more primitive take at the universe.

#25, the mistake you made was trying to install the real version of CS3 after installing the demo. Generally, once you've installed the demo of CS3, trying to get a real version to work on your PC is so much more difficult.

Netscape beta was my gateway drug from Prodigy, America Online v2.0 and Sierra's !magination (anyone remember that?) into the proper world wide web, a wild and lawless world where people were just coming to grips with adding images into their web pages when I arrived.
Back then newsgroups were still the dominant type of web community, people were still designing websites for Lynx and Mosaic, and you could still find phone numbers for BBSs to call.

I will miss it the way one would miss watching their first bicycle get thrown away, but I'm not surprised. Given the history of computer science, it isn't surprising that Netscape is now dead. Technological innovation in practice is a viciously competitive place, and if you make enough wrong business or development decisions you'll lose your competitive edge, the true kiss of death for anything having to do with computers.
Several of their priorities (such as DHTML) turned into dead ends, and while the anti-trust lawsuit bought them some time, it's never good for a business to bite the hand of the operating system which runs their software, much less to buck a trend towards integration that still continues today.

It will always have pride of place in history, like the Amiga before it, as an alternate evolutionary path computers might have taken had things gone differently.

And for those anti-Explorer rebels still among us, Mozilla's next of kin Firefox is alive and well.

Hey, it could be worse:

Time it took to cancel the British Telecom account I never activated: 5 months, with a grand total of 60 hours spent on hold. We're still waiting on a letter proving cancellation.

Time it took to cancel my Gold's Gym account: 10 months and 1 week, calling nearly every single week.

Time it took to cancel my Sprint phone account: 6 phone calls.

Time it took to cancel my Washington Mutual savings account: 4 separate phone calls asking for the same cancellation.

Customer service is dead.