Ok, so you generalize that all "pro-lifers" shoot people in the back, while all abortion providers are white as the driven snow, but I'm the one who's biased?
I didn't say "all", or even "most", in either case. To clarify what I did say: many anti-abortionists have committed acts of terrorism in support of their ideology, while I don't know of any pro-choicers who have done so. Furthermore, it's proven very, very difficult to get the mainstream "pro-life" movement to repudiate these terrorists. Does this mean that all "pro-lifers" are shooting doctors and planting bombs? Of course not. But it does mean that until the "pro-life movement" refutes such means, and refuses to give aid and comfort to those who use them, the rest of us will rightly regard it with suspicion.
Gaiman has written plenty about "the very nature of life itself," so I have a hard time believing he's terrified of the Big Subjects. It's more a matter of the fact that while spme people may pressure pregnant girls to have abortions, that pressure generally does not take the form of the vicious attacks so beloved of the anti-abortion crowd. This isn't PC, it's reality. NARAL does not shoot people in the back. "Pro-lifers" do. If you're able to put aside your biases for a moment, I think you'll see why Gaiman would have been hesitant to give people like that any more, er, ammunition.
Re:Creators' Rights Question Didn't Make the Cut,
on
Neil Gaiman Responds
·
· Score: 1
"Knuckles of The Endless" made me snarf coffee out my nose. Thank you.
I don't think OS X has obviated the need for Linux on the desktop at all -- and I'm an OS X user.
I love Macs. I think they're great machines. Whenever anyone asks me for computer-buying advice, my first response is always "get a Mac." I would love it if Apple's market share blew up. My Mac does everything I want a computer to do. My last machine was a Mac, my current machine (obviously) is a Mac, and unless something drastic changes, my next machine will be a Mac too.
But.
What I would never want to see would be Apple becoming Microsoft. I don't want Steve Jobs to own the desktop any more than I want Bill Gates to. And honestly, assuming that the "Unix desktop" ("Unix" here being broadly defined, of course) ever becomes more than a niche market -- which I hope and expect it will -- I wouldn't even want to see Apple have 90+% market share there. Obviously I want them to do well. I don't want them, or anyone else, to dominate.
What I want is competition. I'd love to see Apple and Red Hat and SuSE and Mandrake and yes, even Microsoft, all slugging it out on something resembling a level playing field. I'd like to see the market work the way it's supposed to: the companies that do truly innovative things get rewarded, and their competitors respond with innovations of their own, and we -- the great unwashed desktop-using masses -- are the ones who win.
Obviously we're a long way from that. Right now, OS X and Linux play complementary roles. Linux ensures the growth of Unix as a whole, and that there will be lots of great Unix software out there available for free or for very low cost -- and that software almost always ends up on OS X as well. (Fink is my friend.) OS X provides an example of what a Unix desktop can be, and introduces users who would be put off by the inherent geekery of Linux culture to the wonders of what a Unix system can do.
Um, you might have heard that Microsoft is really pissed off at Apple because Office X isn't selling nearly as well as they'd expected? It's my sense that the Mac community as a whole is getting really tired of using a lousy product made by a company that wants to destroy Apple just because it's the "standard." If a new standard comes along, they'll switch in droves.
This almost happened before, BTW. Back when Novell owned WordPerfect, they came out with a Mac version that was quite possibly the best word processor I've ever used on any platform. And it sold like hotcakes. Then when Corel took it over, they kept it going for a while but stubbornly refused to upgrade it in any meaningful way. And most of those Mac users who had been thrilled to have a M$ Word alternative looked at the handwriting on the wall, sighed, and said, "Oh, well." If Corel had kept pushing WP/Mac instead of trying to lead in the Mac market with their graphics products (which are okay, but don't compare to Adobe's; at the very least they should have tried to build up brand loyalty and name recognition among Mac users with WP and associated products first) IMO Corel would be a healthier company, and OS X would have the world's best office suite, today.
The fact is that MS has used thousands of hours of focus groups and user testing at a cost of $$millions to develop the current UI. There is no way an OSS project could do that type of development without massive resources.
This is one of the stock answers to criticisms of Microsoft, and to a lesser degree of other big software vendors: "They spent all that time and money on R&D, so they must be better!" And yet somehow, miraculously, they aren't. Microsoft spends shitloads of money on R&D in all areas of software engineering, not just UI -- but their products are still insecure, buggy, crash-prone, and a hell of a lot harder to use effectively than they should be. The obvious conclusion (and I don't claim this as an original observation, at all) is that software quality does not scale linearly with the effort expended. Throwing more money at the problem has proven, time and time again, to produce software that is no better than -- and indeed, is often worse than -- that written by a small group of dedicated developers who know what the hell they're doing.
It only runs on Windows. And its interface, which the manufacturers coyly call "industry-standard", is a Microsoft Office clone.
I wish them luck, but I have to wonder when people are going to realize that the way to challenge Microsoft is not to try to be Microsoft. Any product (yes, this includes a lot of Linux software) that slavishly imitates Microsoft is going to be written off, with some justification, as an inferior knock-off. IMO the M$ Office interface is a lousy one; how 'bout trying to write something better, guys, and see how that does? And while you're at it, make Linux and OS X versions -- in fact, try starting in those markets first. Yes, the pool of potential customers may be smaller, but there's no 900-lb. gorilla to compete with. I can almost guarantee that a fast, cheap, reliable, feature-rich office suite with a good non-M$ interface on those platforms would rapidly build up a dedicated customer base, and provide the company with a solid US revenue stream and name recognition while they get ready to tackle the Windows monolith.
Okay, fair enough. Like I said, I don't deny that scientists can fall victim to the right-at-all-costs failing -- what bothers me is the implication that it's a failing of scientists in particular. It's a human failing -- and at least in science, as in few other areas of human endeavor, there is a definite standard for determining whether someone is right or wrong.
What company do you work for? It's quite possible that I've used some of your analyzers. I'll let you know if they don't work.;)
in my experience, most scientists are much, much more interested in being right, it's an ego thing.
And your experience is?
I'm sorry, I have to ask this. Working in biotech as I do, I deal with scientists on a daily basis. (I'd like to call myself one, but honesty won't allow me to do so until I get my PhD.) In my experience, they're human like anyone else -- and like anyone else, of course they'd prefer to be right than wrong; but the nature of the profession is that it ultimately rewards those who check their data carefully and accurately forecast the consequences of their actions, and punishes those who don't.
The idea that scientists are egotists who refuse to acknowledge their failings is a vile stereotype, with no more basis in fact than the idea that they're cold and unfeeling, or sexless geeks, or unable to appreciate art and culture, or... well, you get the idea. So you'll understand if I have my doubts that such a slur comes from someone with much real experience of science and scientists at all. If I'm wrong, please let me know.
I wonder if I'm the only person on the planet who liked Alien Resurrection. Yeah, Winona Ryder was uncharacteristically boring, but the rest of the cast was quite good, IMO; Sigourney Weaver did a brilliant job at showing the monster under the skin, scary and sexy and empathetic all at once, and the rest did a good job as the expected cannon fodder. And there were some scenes -- the underwater chase and the "don't kill me, mommy" bit at the end -- that struck me as some of the best pure horror ever put on film.
(Then again, if you thought Alien, the original, sucked... huh?)
Alien^3 was the only one I disliked out of the series so far. I'm not sure how it managed to take the setup it was given and commit the cardinal sin for any action or horror movie of being boring from start to finish. IMO, Alien was a great horror movie, Aliens was a great war movie, and Alien Resurrection was a great French movie.;) Alien^3 just should never have happened. (And for the record, I wasn't as wild about Fight Club as everyone else seems to have been, either.)
All that being said, I'll no doubt see AVP, but I don't have any great expectations for it. Basically, a bloody romp with great FX is about all I'm looking forward to. If it happens to be more than that (as both Alien and Aliens certainly were) I'll be pleasantly surprised.
I talked my way into a "British Library card" once. I was stationed in the UK as a USAF medic and was spending the day in London. I told them I was doing a research project on historical military medical techniques, showed them my two ID's (the regular military ID card and the "don't shoot this guy" Geneve Convention card that medics get) and was issued a three-day BL card that gave me access to, well, pretty much the whole damn thing.
They were watching me pretty closely, though, so, in a profound fit of geekery, I actually did spend the day browsing through old military medical texts. It was fascinating, actually, but... [shudder] I am really, really glad I was a medic in the late 20th c. rather than any previous era, let me tell you.
Something makes me suspect that John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has a much better understanding of the interactions between solar flares than some random dude on/.
It isn't their fault.. I hear a long story on NPR about it a while ago. Universities tried to stay out of the patent game, but companies would take their research and patent it and then charge the university to use it.. researchers having to pay to use their own findings.
The patent system needs to be overhauled, then maybe we can start opening up the Universities again (and give them some more funding too!)
That's a real problem, but it has a real solution: release the findings as public domain or under a license designed to prevent such abuses. (I'd guess, though I don't know for sure, that this is precisely the situation for which the MIT License was designed.) As far as I'm concerned, private universities can do whatever they want with their research (though I'd be inclined to think better of those -- again, like MIT -- that release it under generous terms) but public universities funded with taxpayer money have a duty to make the fruits of that funding available to the people who paid for it.
This doesn't just apply to schools and state money, of course. The federal government gives huge research grants to corporations which then patent their inventions and make a mint -- the situation is especially bad with defense contractors, who can invoke those magic words "national security" any time someone starts looking too closely at where the money goes and what taxpayers get (or don't get) in return. I'd love to see the whole system overhauled with a requirement that public money implies public domain, end of story. The situation we've got right now is a massive case of corporate welfare.
Well, I'm kind of in the middle ground. I do "believe the best HTML editor is really a text-editor with an HTML quick-reference sheet handy," at least right now -- because I have yet to find any HTML editor that consistently produces clean, maintainable code. Right now, the code turned out by any (allegedly) WYSIWYG HTML editor I've seen is simply crap.
If this project turns out to be at least a partial fix for that problem, I'll applaud it. I'd give it better odds than any of the proprietary systems, simply because it is OSS; that means the authors aren't beholden to any one browser (or even any one HTML rendering engine) and, one can hope, have an idea of what it's like to write clean HTML by hand.
The suits who run the studios are so disconnected* from the techies in the render farms that such issues never enter their brains.** And to big-corp-think, of course, free software -- free anything -- is an abomination and unclean anyway. Understanding this, IMO, is key to understanding everything from the [MP|RI]AA's reaction to piracy, to Microsoft's reaction to Linux. In their perfect world, you pay for everything; more specifically, you pay them for everything. The idea that anyone might be able to get useful stuff for free wakes them up in screaming nightmares. This is not rational cost-benefit analysis. This is a clash of worldviews as fundamental as Galileo's with the Church.
--
* I'm not claiming any special insider knowledge of how Hollywood studios work. This is my guess based on my experience of how big corporations work in general.
** If they have brains. Or hearts. Or courage. All of which are highly debatable.
Extending this -- actually I do have a general system of beliefs that applies to everyone. One of those beliefs is that if you break the law, you should get punished in ways that those who obey the law shouldn't be. Microsoft broke the law. Apple didn't. People like the grandparent poster seem always to forget this [cough] minor detail.
I did realize after I made that post that it sounded a bit like market-speak, but hell, it's the truth. Being able to get to the Unix command line, without having to log into someone else's server to do it, really is so incredibly useful to what I do for both work and school that these days I wonder how I ever got along without it.
Well, as a student, I find having a laptop makes a huge difference in the amount of work I get done. My situation is a bit specialized -- I'm a grad student, and I work as a DBA 30 hrs/wk and take 6 credit hours (this is considered full-time in grad school, although I'd say it's more like 3/4 time) at locations that are fairly far apart. One machine -- my iBook -- serves as my sole computer for work, home, and school. I really like having everything accessible to me, all the time.
The iBook (mine is a 700 MHz G3, a little dated now) is a wonderful machine, and it handles every demand work and school can throw at it. Having the Unix command line accessible at a click is indispensable for both locations. The GUI part of OS X is absurdly easy to use and very powerful; if you're used to XP or any of the common Linux desktops, it will take you about a day to get comfortable with it and a month or two to get over the "I didn't know it could do that! OMFG, that's so cool!" reaction. I'd say that if you buy one of the G4 iBooks, you'll feel that your money was well spent.
Any caveats? Well, yeah. You probably want to spend a little extra on the 3-year AppleCare plan. With luck you'll never need it, but let's face it, life is rough on laptops. And unless you shoot your laptop, give it to your dog as a chewtoy, or drop it in salt water, AppleCare will take care of anything that's likely to go wrong. And, of course, as always, spend every penny you can on boosting the RAM; the default is never enough. But I think you can do all of the above and still stay within your $1,300 limit -- and you'll have a machine that no similarly-priced PC laptop can touch.
I'm wondering if that's actually what these G4's are. "G4" is really a marketing term, not a designation for a single chip; and I remember the "Road Warrior" guy on MacOpinion predicting a few months ago that Apple would eventually stick IBM's 750+Altivec chip inside an iBook and call it a G4. Is it possible that this has already happened? IBM and Apple are both pretty good at keeping their mouths shut these days.
Yeah. I also don't know whether to be disturbed or amused that "Windows 9x" and "VB6" -- i.e., specific, not very good instances of particular products from a particular company -- are classed as "technologies" along with as vast a category as "client-server computing." It's kind of like saying "Fuel injection and the 1998 Ford Taurus are both major automotive technologies." No, one's a technology; the other is a brand name. And when we can't tell branding apart from innovation, we've got a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
But how do we know VerifiedVoting.org is counting signatures properly? I want a paper receipt! ;)
Gaiman has written plenty about "the very nature of life itself," so I have a hard time believing he's terrified of the Big Subjects. It's more a matter of the fact that while spme people may pressure pregnant girls to have abortions, that pressure generally does not take the form of the vicious attacks so beloved of the anti-abortion crowd. This isn't PC, it's reality. NARAL does not shoot people in the back. "Pro-lifers" do. If you're able to put aside your biases for a moment, I think you'll see why Gaiman would have been hesitant to give people like that any more, er, ammunition.
"Knuckles of The Endless" made me snarf coffee out my nose. Thank you.
I don't think OS X has obviated the need for Linux on the desktop at all -- and I'm an OS X user.
I love Macs. I think they're great machines. Whenever anyone asks me for computer-buying advice, my first response is always "get a Mac." I would love it if Apple's market share blew up. My Mac does everything I want a computer to do. My last machine was a Mac, my current machine (obviously) is a Mac, and unless something drastic changes, my next machine will be a Mac too.
But.
What I would never want to see would be Apple becoming Microsoft. I don't want Steve Jobs to own the desktop any more than I want Bill Gates to. And honestly, assuming that the "Unix desktop" ("Unix" here being broadly defined, of course) ever becomes more than a niche market -- which I hope and expect it will -- I wouldn't even want to see Apple have 90+% market share there. Obviously I want them to do well. I don't want them, or anyone else, to dominate.
What I want is competition. I'd love to see Apple and Red Hat and SuSE and Mandrake and yes, even Microsoft, all slugging it out on something resembling a level playing field. I'd like to see the market work the way it's supposed to: the companies that do truly innovative things get rewarded, and their competitors respond with innovations of their own, and we -- the great unwashed desktop-using masses -- are the ones who win.
Obviously we're a long way from that. Right now, OS X and Linux play complementary roles. Linux ensures the growth of Unix as a whole, and that there will be lots of great Unix software out there available for free or for very low cost -- and that software almost always ends up on OS X as well. (Fink is my friend.) OS X provides an example of what a Unix desktop can be, and introduces users who would be put off by the inherent geekery of Linux culture to the wonders of what a Unix system can do.
Um, you might have heard that Microsoft is really pissed off at Apple because Office X isn't selling nearly as well as they'd expected? It's my sense that the Mac community as a whole is getting really tired of using a lousy product made by a company that wants to destroy Apple just because it's the "standard." If a new standard comes along, they'll switch in droves.
This almost happened before, BTW. Back when Novell owned WordPerfect, they came out with a Mac version that was quite possibly the best word processor I've ever used on any platform. And it sold like hotcakes. Then when Corel took it over, they kept it going for a while but stubbornly refused to upgrade it in any meaningful way. And most of those Mac users who had been thrilled to have a M$ Word alternative looked at the handwriting on the wall, sighed, and said, "Oh, well." If Corel had kept pushing WP/Mac instead of trying to lead in the Mac market with their graphics products (which are okay, but don't compare to Adobe's; at the very least they should have tried to build up brand loyalty and name recognition among Mac users with WP and associated products first) IMO Corel would be a healthier company, and OS X would have the world's best office suite, today.
Well, depending on how the EU antitrust case shakes out ...
It only runs on Windows. And its interface, which the manufacturers coyly call "industry-standard", is a Microsoft Office clone.
I wish them luck, but I have to wonder when people are going to realize that the way to challenge Microsoft is not to try to be Microsoft. Any product (yes, this includes a lot of Linux software) that slavishly imitates Microsoft is going to be written off, with some justification, as an inferior knock-off. IMO the M$ Office interface is a lousy one; how 'bout trying to write something better, guys, and see how that does? And while you're at it, make Linux and OS X versions -- in fact, try starting in those markets first. Yes, the pool of potential customers may be smaller, but there's no 900-lb. gorilla to compete with. I can almost guarantee that a fast, cheap, reliable, feature-rich office suite with a good non-M$ interface on those platforms would rapidly build up a dedicated customer base, and provide the company with a solid US revenue stream and name recognition while they get ready to tackle the Windows monolith.
Okay, fair enough. Like I said, I don't deny that scientists can fall victim to the right-at-all-costs failing -- what bothers me is the implication that it's a failing of scientists in particular. It's a human failing -- and at least in science, as in few other areas of human endeavor, there is a definite standard for determining whether someone is right or wrong.
;)
What company do you work for? It's quite possible that I've used some of your analyzers. I'll let you know if they don't work.
I'm sorry, I have to ask this. Working in biotech as I do, I deal with scientists on a daily basis. (I'd like to call myself one, but honesty won't allow me to do so until I get my PhD.) In my experience, they're human like anyone else -- and like anyone else, of course they'd prefer to be right than wrong; but the nature of the profession is that it ultimately rewards those who check their data carefully and accurately forecast the consequences of their actions, and punishes those who don't.
The idea that scientists are egotists who refuse to acknowledge their failings is a vile stereotype, with no more basis in fact than the idea that they're cold and unfeeling, or sexless geeks, or unable to appreciate art and culture, or
"You've got a subpoena!"
I wonder if I'm the only person on the planet who liked Alien Resurrection. Yeah, Winona Ryder was uncharacteristically boring, but the rest of the cast was quite good, IMO; Sigourney Weaver did a brilliant job at showing the monster under the skin, scary and sexy and empathetic all at once, and the rest did a good job as the expected cannon fodder. And there were some scenes -- the underwater chase and the "don't kill me, mommy" bit at the end -- that struck me as some of the best pure horror ever put on film.
... huh?)
;) Alien^3 just should never have happened. (And for the record, I wasn't as wild about Fight Club as everyone else seems to have been, either.)
(Then again, if you thought Alien, the original, sucked
Alien^3 was the only one I disliked out of the series so far. I'm not sure how it managed to take the setup it was given and commit the cardinal sin for any action or horror movie of being boring from start to finish. IMO, Alien was a great horror movie, Aliens was a great war movie, and Alien Resurrection was a great French movie.
All that being said, I'll no doubt see AVP, but I don't have any great expectations for it. Basically, a bloody romp with great FX is about all I'm looking forward to. If it happens to be more than that (as both Alien and Aliens certainly were) I'll be pleasantly surprised.
I talked my way into a "British Library card" once. I was stationed in the UK as a USAF medic and was spending the day in London. I told them I was doing a research project on historical military medical techniques, showed them my two ID's (the regular military ID card and the "don't shoot this guy" Geneve Convention card that medics get) and was issued a three-day BL card that gave me access to, well, pretty much the whole damn thing.
... [shudder] I am really, really glad I was a medic in the late 20th c. rather than any previous era, let me tell you.
They were watching me pretty closely, though, so, in a profound fit of geekery, I actually did spend the day browsing through old military medical texts. It was fascinating, actually, but
Now, those are what I call some HOT AMATEUR PICTURES! ;)
Something makes me suspect that John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has a much better understanding of the interactions between solar flares than some random dude on /.
This doesn't just apply to schools and state money, of course. The federal government gives huge research grants to corporations which then patent their inventions and make a mint -- the situation is especially bad with defense contractors, who can invoke those magic words "national security" any time someone starts looking too closely at where the money goes and what taxpayers get (or don't get) in return. I'd love to see the whole system overhauled with a requirement that public money implies public domain, end of story. The situation we've got right now is a massive case of corporate welfare.
Well, I'm kind of in the middle ground. I do "believe the best HTML editor is really a text-editor with an HTML quick-reference sheet handy," at least right now -- because I have yet to find any HTML editor that consistently produces clean, maintainable code. Right now, the code turned out by any (allegedly) WYSIWYG HTML editor I've seen is simply crap.
If this project turns out to be at least a partial fix for that problem, I'll applaud it. I'd give it better odds than any of the proprietary systems, simply because it is OSS; that means the authors aren't beholden to any one browser (or even any one HTML rendering engine) and, one can hope, have an idea of what it's like to write clean HTML by hand.
The suits who run the studios are so disconnected* from the techies in the render farms that such issues never enter their brains.** And to big-corp-think, of course, free software -- free anything -- is an abomination and unclean anyway. Understanding this, IMO, is key to understanding everything from the [MP|RI]AA's reaction to piracy, to Microsoft's reaction to Linux. In their perfect world, you pay for everything; more specifically, you pay them for everything. The idea that anyone might be able to get useful stuff for free wakes them up in screaming nightmares. This is not rational cost-benefit analysis. This is a clash of worldviews as fundamental as Galileo's with the Church.
--
* I'm not claiming any special insider knowledge of how Hollywood studios work. This is my guess based on my experience of how big corporations work in general.
** If they have brains. Or hearts. Or courage. All of which are highly debatable.
:)
Extending this -- actually I do have a general system of beliefs that applies to everyone. One of those beliefs is that if you break the law, you should get punished in ways that those who obey the law shouldn't be. Microsoft broke the law. Apple didn't. People like the grandparent poster seem always to forget this [cough] minor detail.
If you don't understand why, consider the following question: why is Joe Citizen allowed to own a gun, but Joe Convicted Felon is not?
:) Thanks.
I did realize after I made that post that it sounded a bit like market-speak, but hell, it's the truth. Being able to get to the Unix command line, without having to log into someone else's server to do it, really is so incredibly useful to what I do for both work and school that these days I wonder how I ever got along without it.
Well, as a student, I find having a laptop makes a huge difference in the amount of work I get done. My situation is a bit specialized -- I'm a grad student, and I work as a DBA 30 hrs/wk and take 6 credit hours (this is considered full-time in grad school, although I'd say it's more like 3/4 time) at locations that are fairly far apart. One machine -- my iBook -- serves as my sole computer for work, home, and school. I really like having everything accessible to me, all the time.
The iBook (mine is a 700 MHz G3, a little dated now) is a wonderful machine, and it handles every demand work and school can throw at it. Having the Unix command line accessible at a click is indispensable for both locations. The GUI part of OS X is absurdly easy to use and very powerful; if you're used to XP or any of the common Linux desktops, it will take you about a day to get comfortable with it and a month or two to get over the "I didn't know it could do that! OMFG, that's so cool!" reaction. I'd say that if you buy one of the G4 iBooks, you'll feel that your money was well spent.
Any caveats? Well, yeah. You probably want to spend a little extra on the 3-year AppleCare plan. With luck you'll never need it, but let's face it, life is rough on laptops. And unless you shoot your laptop, give it to your dog as a chewtoy, or drop it in salt water, AppleCare will take care of anything that's likely to go wrong. And, of course, as always, spend every penny you can on boosting the RAM; the default is never enough. But I think you can do all of the above and still stay within your $1,300 limit -- and you'll have a machine that no similarly-priced PC laptop can touch.
I'm wondering if that's actually what these G4's are. "G4" is really a marketing term, not a designation for a single chip; and I remember the "Road Warrior" guy on MacOpinion predicting a few months ago that Apple would eventually stick IBM's 750+Altivec chip inside an iBook and call it a G4. Is it possible that this has already happened? IBM and Apple are both pretty good at keeping their mouths shut these days.
Yeah. I also don't know whether to be disturbed or amused that "Windows 9x" and "VB6" -- i.e., specific, not very good instances of particular products from a particular company -- are classed as "technologies" along with as vast a category as "client-server computing." It's kind of like saying "Fuel injection and the 1998 Ford Taurus are both major automotive technologies." No, one's a technology; the other is a brand name. And when we can't tell branding apart from innovation, we've got a problem.