The whole country has been reduced to partisan bickering. There is no independent thought anymore. You pick a party, and you automatically agree with whatever they believe in. Individual critical thinking does not enter into the process at any point.
And that's the tragedy of it. Sure, part of the point of political parties is so that politicians can pool resources and have built-in allies. But automatic support shouldn't be unconditional support. You should get more people like Specter & co. who said, "This is a good idea no matter what the party leadership says." And it shouldn't translate into unconditional opposition for the other party.
It's been reduced to the level of a football game. Politicians are more concerned with which party "wins" than with what's actually a good idea. And the general populace is just as bad. There's a disturbing number of people -- or at least disturbingly vocal people -- who make the leap from "Dubya/Hillary/whoever supports position X!" to "I must oppose X!" without stopping to think that no, if someone on my side had proposed the same thing, I would be in favor of it. (And vice versa of course.)
Republicans voting yes: 6 out of 49 (1 non-voting)
Hagel (R-NE) Lugar (R-IN) Smith (R-OR) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (R-PA) Sununu (R-NH)
Democrats voting no: none
Every single Democratic senator voted in favor of the amendment. 85% of Republicans voted against it.
Its just sad that legislation to confirm a constitutionally-guaranteed right which (in theory) protects people from government abuse has been reduced to partisan bickering.
I think you should have posted this in response to the "Has it Ever Worked? comment. Placing it here doesn't make sense, as you're talking about takedown notices and the parent comment was talking about the anti-circumvention clause.
Responding to "DMCA clause A is inherently bad and should be repealed" with "DMCA clause B is beneficial" is a non-sequitur at best.
Yes, I do know that Linux and Unix are definitely not the same. If I used one of them in the wrong context, then I apologize. The paper I wrote, it is more politically correct than this Comment I posted.
It's not a matter of political correctness, it's a matter of factual correctness. If you'd said, "Microsoft released OS/2 in 1995," and meant Windows 95, that would be a factual error, and you'd get called on it just the same as you did for saying that Bell Labs created Linux.
I did a double-take too, but if you look at it more closely, he doesn't say Microsoft distributes Linux. What he says is that other OSes including Linux took away their marketshare. Then he lists a bunch of companies that provide OSes, including Microsoft. So he's talking about Windows in that case.
Okay, I'll grant that competition from Linux distributors probably has taken business away from their Unix offerings. (Not that there's a problem with that, it's just the way markets work.) Of course, I'm sure their "we'll sue our customers!" antics didn't help, as the distributors behind such Unix varieties as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX etc. don't seem to be in quite such dire straits.
But let's not forget that a few years back, this SCO was known as Caldera. They were a Linux distributor. They were a founding partner in UnitedLinux. Then they bought Unix -- well, they bought something -- and changed their name to sound like the old SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), and refocused their business on Unix and lawsuits.
Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?
To pull out an old analogy, it's like they started out as an automobile company, and then decided to switch to the buggy-whip business -- and now they're blaming the automobile companies for their business failures.
The new organization doesnt have a name yet, so Ill call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)
I have recently finished the sixth book, and I can begin to see a downward trend. But I so thoroughly enjoyed the first few books, I have to go on. Honestly, the first three books are amazing in my opinion, and you can always count on Robert Jordan to deliver a fantastic final 100 pages, even if the 600 before that were worth speed reading.
If you can slog through books 7-10, book 11 picks things up immensely. It's as if he looked at his outline, said, "crap, I've only got 2 books left to wrap all this stuff up!" and started closing off threads that weren't directly connected to armageddon.
The prequel, New Spring, is also worth reading as a character study of young Moiraine. I enjoyed it much more than I did books 9 or 10. Though that may have been in part because I knew it wasn't going to advance the main story, and wasn't disappointed by the fact that it didn't.
I'm currently re-reading Earthsea for the 4th or 5th time. I highly recommend the original trilogy. They're written in the 1970s, so they're relatively short, and these days you'd probaly see the entire trilogy as one novel.
The later books are vastly different. They sort of have to be, since book 4 was written 15 years after the original trilogy, and the next two books a decade after that. Tehanu is neither adventure story nor travelogue, but an examination of the implications of what we see in the trilogy. My last re-read was around the time that Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind came out, so I've only read each of them once, and I'm currently about a chapter into the first story in Tales. I do remember not liking The Other Wind as much on first read, thinking it retread the themes of The Farthest Shore too much, but I'm interested in seeing how I react on a second read.
Nothing was ever resolved. Whole books were taken up with conflicts that didn't even relate to the plot line of the series. Interesting main characters didn't even show up for whole books, while astoundingly boring third rank characters took up hundreds of pages!
I stopped reading after book 7, and the fact that nothing ever went anywhere just spoils the whole series for me.
True for books 6-10. Subplots that took 4 books to resolve? Yeesh. Book 11, amazingly enough, started wrapping up plotlines like crazy -- I assume in preparation for the finale.
If he was on schedule then he I would think that he should have had a good deal of it done (a 2009 release date is fairly soon, it's not like one typically writes a 1000+ page book and go through editing/printing in a year), though I have no idea if he was anywhere close to on schedule.
From what I recall from recent posts on dragonmount.com (currently slashdotted), he did have the major events planned out, and recently told his wife and... brother-in-law? cousin? (the other relative who posts to the site, I forget how they're related)... the main story.
So people close to him knew the key points, and I'm sure he had tons of notes. No idea how far along he was in actually writing, since he'd been fighting his illness for ~2 years now.
I think the series shows this, as it starts running out of steam around book 3 or 4, and limps along through book 11 and a prequel.
Actually, I'd say it's at book 6 where it starts slowing down. The way I see it, books 1-5 are novels. (And #4 is probably my favorite of the series.) Books 6 and onward are one really long novel split into 1000-page chunks.
I'd gotten tired of the books a couple of years ago, but I let myself get talked into reading the prequel, and enjoyed it much more than I had the last few books in the main series. Then book 11 came along and he started actually resolving plotlines. It was something of a shock. After that, I was really looking forward to the finale.
It certainly seemed like some sort of plot time-dilation was happening in the last few books by their accounts.
Books 6 through book 10, certainly, but things really started to move toward the conclusion in the most recent one. He resolved a number of plot threads that had been hanging around for as long as 5 books, and was clearly moving pieces in place for the endgame.
Hmm, that sounds like the basic tenet of Intelligent Design: the concept of irreducible complexity. "I can't imagine how such a structure might have arisen naturally, therefore God^H^H^H a creator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H designer must have done it."
Re:The public understands science all too well.
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Y o u d o n ' t n e e d t o b e l i e v e i n e v o l u t i o n t o
u s e a c e l l p h o n e...
...but you do need to understand electromagnetism to design one.
Regardless of how crack-pot the theory, it should be able to be tested using scientific method, without being ridiculed because it goes against "established science."/Fortean.
The point of the article, though, is that proponents of these ideas often don't use the scientific method, or don't use it properly. They ignore results that don't fit their preconceived notions (confirmation bias), or they don't use sufficient controls to determine exactly what is causing the effect seen, or jump to conclusions that don't logically follow from the evidence that they've collected.
You want to investigate psychic powers? Fine by me. Just make the investigation scientifically rigorous, and fit your conclusions to the evidence -- not the other way around.
But as another poster above mentioned, they removed the Heroes eps from their website after the DVDs were released.
Just a minor point: they removed the episodes before the DVDs were released. They pulled them from the site (or at least planned to) early in August, and the DVDs came out at the end of the month. There were several weeks during which the episodes weren't available at all. (Well, maybe on iTunes, now that I think about it!)
I think it depends on the show. The few episodes I've seen were of Veronica Mars this past spring, and they were definitely higher-res than 320px, possibly 640x480. They looked fine at fullscreen on 1280x1024. I got the impression, though I don't recall where, that it'll downsample video to the lower resolution when syncing to an iPod, but I could be mistaken.
As for the website's streaming quality, maybe I just need to get a faster connection.
Well, the image quality on the video at NBC's website isn't as good as what I've seen on the few random episodes of shows that I've watched on iTunes. And they do take stuff down over time. I remember there was something like a 1-month gap between NBC dropping the season 1 Heroes episodes from their website and the release of the first season DVD set.
And what about those that don't have iPods (yes, we exist). With only having the stuff on iTunes, I don't have a way to watch it right?
You can watch it right on your computer. Of course, this assumes that you have a Windows or Mac box to run iTunes on (I'm not sure how much of it will run under WINE, never having tried it), both for purchasing and playback.
(Having done that a couple of times, I began to realize just how blurry my TV is. Playing an iTunes video at full screen on a 17" monitor is considerably sharper than watching a standard 20" TV set. I suppose I'll have to start seriously looking at HDTVs soon.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to get technical, more Republicans broke with the party line than Democrats. You can interpret this one of two ways:
Take your pick.
And that's the tragedy of it. Sure, part of the point of political parties is so that politicians can pool resources and have built-in allies. But automatic support shouldn't be unconditional support. You should get more people like Specter & co. who said, "This is a good idea no matter what the party leadership says." And it shouldn't translate into unconditional opposition for the other party.
It's been reduced to the level of a football game. Politicians are more concerned with which party "wins" than with what's actually a good idea. And the general populace is just as bad. There's a disturbing number of people -- or at least disturbingly vocal people -- who make the leap from "Dubya/Hillary/whoever supports position X!" to "I must oppose X!" without stopping to think that no, if someone on my side had proposed the same thing, I would be in favor of it. (And vice versa of course.)
Republicans voting yes: 6 out of 49 (1 non-voting)
Hagel (R-NE)
Lugar (R-IN)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Sununu (R-NH)
Democrats voting no: none
Every single Democratic senator voted in favor of the amendment. 85% of Republicans voted against it.
Its just sad that legislation to confirm a constitutionally-guaranteed right which (in theory) protects people from government abuse has been reduced to partisan bickering.
'Cause the smiley face has been tracked to 1962/1963.
Remember, trademark != copyright.
I think you should have posted this in response to the "Has it Ever Worked? comment. Placing it here doesn't make sense, as you're talking about takedown notices and the parent comment was talking about the anti-circumvention clause.
Responding to "DMCA clause A is inherently bad and should be repealed" with "DMCA clause B is beneficial" is a non-sequitur at best.
It's not a matter of political correctness, it's a matter of factual correctness. If you'd said, "Microsoft released OS/2 in 1995," and meant Windows 95, that would be a factual error, and you'd get called on it just the same as you did for saying that Bell Labs created Linux.
I did a double-take too, but if you look at it more closely, he doesn't say Microsoft distributes Linux. What he says is that other OSes including Linux took away their marketshare. Then he lists a bunch of companies that provide OSes, including Microsoft. So he's talking about Windows in that case.
Okay, I'll grant that competition from Linux distributors probably has taken business away from their Unix offerings. (Not that there's a problem with that, it's just the way markets work.) Of course, I'm sure their "we'll sue our customers!" antics didn't help, as the distributors behind such Unix varieties as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX etc. don't seem to be in quite such dire straits.
But let's not forget that a few years back, this SCO was known as Caldera. They were a Linux distributor. They were a founding partner in UnitedLinux. Then they bought Unix -- well, they bought something -- and changed their name to sound like the old SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), and refocused their business on Unix and lawsuits.
Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?
To pull out an old analogy, it's like they started out as an automobile company, and then decided to switch to the buggy-whip business -- and now they're blaming the automobile companies for their business failures.
From the original announcement:
If you can slog through books 7-10, book 11 picks things up immensely. It's as if he looked at his outline, said, "crap, I've only got 2 books left to wrap all this stuff up!" and started closing off threads that weren't directly connected to armageddon.
The prequel, New Spring, is also worth reading as a character study of young Moiraine. I enjoyed it much more than I did books 9 or 10. Though that may have been in part because I knew it wasn't going to advance the main story, and wasn't disappointed by the fact that it didn't.
I'm currently re-reading Earthsea for the 4th or 5th time. I highly recommend the original trilogy. They're written in the 1970s, so they're relatively short, and these days you'd probaly see the entire trilogy as one novel.
The later books are vastly different. They sort of have to be, since book 4 was written 15 years after the original trilogy, and the next two books a decade after that. Tehanu is neither adventure story nor travelogue, but an examination of the implications of what we see in the trilogy. My last re-read was around the time that Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind came out, so I've only read each of them once, and I'm currently about a chapter into the first story in Tales. I do remember not liking The Other Wind as much on first read, thinking it retread the themes of The Farthest Shore too much, but I'm interested in seeing how I react on a second read.
True for books 6-10. Subplots that took 4 books to resolve? Yeesh. Book 11, amazingly enough, started wrapping up plotlines like crazy -- I assume in preparation for the finale.
From what I recall from recent posts on dragonmount.com (currently slashdotted), he did have the major events planned out, and recently told his wife and... brother-in-law? cousin? (the other relative who posts to the site, I forget how they're related)... the main story.
So people close to him knew the key points, and I'm sure he had tons of notes. No idea how far along he was in actually writing, since he'd been fighting his illness for ~2 years now.
Actually, I'd say it's at book 6 where it starts slowing down. The way I see it, books 1-5 are novels. (And #4 is probably my favorite of the series.) Books 6 and onward are one really long novel split into 1000-page chunks.
I'd gotten tired of the books a couple of years ago, but I let myself get talked into reading the prequel, and enjoyed it much more than I had the last few books in the main series. Then book 11 came along and he started actually resolving plotlines. It was something of a shock. After that, I was really looking forward to the finale.
Books 6 through book 10, certainly, but things really started to move toward the conclusion in the most recent one. He resolved a number of plot threads that had been hanging around for as long as 5 books, and was clearly moving pieces in place for the endgame.
Hmm, that sounds like the basic tenet of Intelligent Design: the concept of irreducible complexity. "I can't imagine how such a structure might have arisen naturally, therefore God^H^H^H a creator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H designer must have done it."
...but you do need to understand electromagnetism to design one.
The point of the article, though, is that proponents of these ideas often don't use the scientific method, or don't use it properly. They ignore results that don't fit their preconceived notions (confirmation bias), or they don't use sufficient controls to determine exactly what is causing the effect seen, or jump to conclusions that don't logically follow from the evidence that they've collected.
You want to investigate psychic powers? Fine by me. Just make the investigation scientifically rigorous, and fit your conclusions to the evidence -- not the other way around.
Great, now you put the song from Avenue Q in my head.
Wait, what am I complaining about?
Just a minor point: they removed the episodes before the DVDs were released. They pulled them from the site (or at least planned to) early in August, and the DVDs came out at the end of the month. There were several weeks during which the episodes weren't available at all. (Well, maybe on iTunes, now that I think about it!)
I think it depends on the show. The few episodes I've seen were of Veronica Mars this past spring, and they were definitely higher-res than 320px, possibly 640x480. They looked fine at fullscreen on 1280x1024. I got the impression, though I don't recall where, that it'll downsample video to the lower resolution when syncing to an iPod, but I could be mistaken.
As for the website's streaming quality, maybe I just need to get a faster connection.
Well, the image quality on the video at NBC's website isn't as good as what I've seen on the few random episodes of shows that I've watched on iTunes. And they do take stuff down over time. I remember there was something like a 1-month gap between NBC dropping the season 1 Heroes episodes from their website and the release of the first season DVD set.
You can watch it right on your computer. Of course, this assumes that you have a Windows or Mac box to run iTunes on (I'm not sure how much of it will run under WINE, never having tried it), both for purchasing and playback.
(Having done that a couple of times, I began to realize just how blurry my TV is. Playing an iTunes video at full screen on a 17" monitor is considerably sharper than watching a standard 20" TV set. I suppose I'll have to start seriously looking at HDTVs soon.)
Sadly, I think tact is in entirely too short supply with this dispute.