USAGE In the sense 'an abnormally small person,' dwarf is normally considered offensive. However, there are no accepted alternatives in the general language, since terms such as person of restricted growth have gained little currency.
Good grief! What would they call the elves, "mortality-challenged?"
imagine ep #666 of lonleygirlsucidediaries15 where she brings up a pair of nikes and "ive finally found what sneakers im gonna use when jumping of the cliff!!"
And may I remind people that this is a Labour Party government, which is much, much farther to the left than anything in the United States.
"Left" and "right" are insufficient designations to indicate likelihood of totalitarianism. The two-dimensional political compass (with separate social and economic axes) is a bit better, though still a gross oversimplification. Their examples are Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union -- both were totalitarian, but economically Germany leaned to the right and the USSR to the left.
It's entirely possible to have a leftist totalitarian state or a rightist totalitarian state. I think the only political leanings that can't be twisted to totalitarianism would be anarchism and some of the more minarchist libertarian philosophies.
I'm far more interested in what, if anything, Peter Jackson has planed for Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series which he recently optioned.
Same here. I just finished the latest book a couple of weeks ago.
I read the first part of the interview, but it seems like Jackson is way too early in the process to have anything beyond, "This would be really cool."
these books are actually banned? this lists sounds more like a list of required-reading books than banned books.
This is, of course, a major point of the banned book lists. Sometimes people will challenge* a book because it's thought-provoking. And sometimes people just miss the point, like those who've wanted to ban To Kill A Mockingbird for being "racist" or 1984 for being "pro-communist."
This particular list was made by taking someone's top 100 novels of the 20th century and looking at which of them had been challenged or outright banned by various nations, states, libraries, etc.
*The ALA list is technically the "Banned and/or Challenged Books" list. Meaning either that someone has deliberately removed the book from a library or school curriculum (for political reasons, not just because the copy was falling apart, or they wanted to teach another book this year) or that someone has attempted to do so.
Because intelligent people don't discuss things using one word to mean many different things.
Well, aside from puns, intelligent people do, from time to time, discuss things where one person uses the word to mean one thing, and the other uses it to mean something else. The usual result of such a situation is a failure to achieve any sort of meaningful debate.
It all comes down to a difference in motivation: I argue in order to prevent the truth from being drowned out, they argue in order to "win" a discussion, without care for facts, truth, or anything but their own narcissistic endeavour.
Wow, you can read my mind through the Internet?
No, wait, you can't.
Here's how this thread of the exchange looks from my POV:
A: X
B: Not X, Y
You: Not Y, X
Me: X and Y
You: Not Y, X
Flame on!
Key:
X = There are six books.
Y = There are three books
I realize that once the flame stage came up I got mixed up as to the origin of the argument and pulled in stuff from other threads. But as to the question of whether it's 3 books or 6, I still see the answer as "Yes."
Actually, it was published in 10 parts according to the foreword in my Swedish edition from 1911, although later editions were shortened due to political statements that were outdated even back then. (My copy is shortened to five parts.)
Hmm, could be. I know a lot of novels were serialized in those days.
As for shortening, I don't think it's mainly political stuff that's usually removed (at least in English translations) so much as historical background and minor characters. Les Miserables is incredibly long and dense. I dragged myself through an unabridged version that was ~1200 pages of small type -- and that's 1200 pages in which he rambles across anything tangentially related. Not an easy read.
Some examples: At the point that Valjean is fleeing Javert with the young Cosette and climbs over a wall, the action stops so that Hugo can spend 20 pages describing the history of convents. Not the convent they happened to have dropped into, but convents in general. When he escapes the barricades to carry the unconscious Marius through the sewers, again, everything stops and there's a 12-page history of the Paris sewer system, just to make sure that you know exactly where he is at each point. IIRC, The first book is called "Fantine" -- and it takes 100 pages before she shows up!
Actually, there's a fantastic 50-page description of the battle of Waterloo in that first section. Unfortunately only the last 2 or 3 of those pages are remotely connected to the story: Thenardier is robbing bodies after the battle, and pulls Marius' father out of a pile. It turns out he's not quite dead yet, and he thinks Thenardier saved his life. (Well, he did, but purely by accident.) As a result, he later instills Marius with a need to find, thank, and possibly pay back the man who saved his father's life.
First off, the Hobbit is only about 30 years prior to "Fellowship."
More like 60 -- Bilbo's around 50* in The Hobbit and 111 in the birthday party in Fellowship. And it's another ~17 years from the party until Frodo and company flee the shire. He's 33 at Bilbo's 111th birthday party (Bilbo keeps making jokes about how their combined age is a gross), and is himself around 50 when they set out. So almost 80 years by the time the story really gets going.
Bilbo will need to look like he did in the prologue of "Fellowship." I think Ian Holm has looked about the same for years, so with just a bit of wrinkle cream, he'd still be fine for the part.
Actually, they had him seriously taped down to hide the wrinkles in that prologue. Probably not a feasible technique for a whole movie, but someone suggested they could do digital de-aging like in the prologue to X-Men 3.
*IIRC, 50 for Hobbits is roughly equivalent to 25 for humans.
In the damn thig it says "Book one", then "Book two", all the way up to six.
Yes, it does. What's your point? If I pick up a three-volume set, are you going to insist that each of those volumes is not a book? If I pick up a one-volume set, are you going to tell me that is not a book?
A book (volume) can contain more than one book (division) or book (literary work).
A book (literary work) can be split across more than one book (volume) and contain more than one book (division).
There is no question that LoTR contains 6 books (divisions). As far as books (volumes), it can be 1, 3, or 6 depending on what edition one looks at.
The only way the question even makes sense is if you're trying to determine how many books (literary work) are involved. So why insist that the only valid answer to the question is in terms of books (divisions)?
The people who argue against this are factually wrong, they based their error on a misinterpretation of the word "book", coupled with ignorance of the content of the work in question.
Or maybe they're using definition (c) "a long written or printed literary composition" and you're using definition (d) "a major division of a treatise or literary work." Those who claim it's one "book" are clearly using the word in the sense that it's one novel. Countering that it's 6 "books" because there are 6 units labeled as "book" is a logical non-sequitur.
The base question is: Did Tolkien think of it as a single work (one "book") or a series (3 or 6 "books"). Because if he considered it a single work, then the labels on the six major chunks of the story aren't relevant to the question.
OK, but if you pick up a random codex with two or more levels of subdivisions, I suspect you'll more likely find one of them labeled "book" than "volume."
I'm just saying that "book" can mean two things, one of which is -- to be more precise -- a codex, often considered the primary format for a complete work and therefore often used to refer to the work as a whole, and one of which is a division within such a codex. So arguing that LOTR is 6, 3 or 1 "book" depends on whether you're treating "book" as meaning "novel" or "division."
So if one person claims that LOTR is 6 books because there are 6 divisions labeled, "book," and another claims that LOTR is one book because it's one work that was completed and then split into three pieces for publication, they aren't arguing about the same thing.
It's like getting into an argument over whether "nine inch nails" refers to a 90s band or a type of hardware.
Even statements like this are subjective and many people still choose to believe; I'm sure there are many slashdot readers (judging from the kind of posts I see here) who believe we are currently in a nascent "civil war" and that, indeed, the "world they thought they were living in was over."
Actually, the civil war prediction is pretty clear-cut. Do we have two or more large factions of Americans shooting each other for political purposes? No. Therefore, while the country is certainly polarized, we aren't in a civil war.
The line may be fuzzy -- people are still arguing over whether Iraq is in a civil war, but they're shooting at each other (and us). So far, though, the USA is clearly on the negative side of that line.
The American civil war is generally agreed to have begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, not with the polarization of the country or even with the first states to secede from the Union.
1. A physical book, a.k.a. a volume. 2. A larger division of a work, which can include its own chapters.
It's not uncommon for a single novel to be divided into anywhere from 3-5 "books."
Les Miserables, for instance, has either five or six "books," but AFAIK it has always been packaged in one volume (often abridged -- that thing is massive). Never mind the many "books" of the Bible, which is itself one book.
So arguing over 3 books vs. 6 is simply arguing at cross-purposes.
There are several US Government sites which "require" Windows, IE and there is no way to get what you need (e.g. fill forms) if you have other browsers or operating systems.
There are specific legal guidelines covering the accessibility of US government websites under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (usually referred to as just Section 508). What I read there doesn't explicitly mention cross-browser/OS compatibility, but compliance with the guidelines would probably preclude the use of IE-only or Windows-only technologies without some sort of fallback.
Unfortunately, many federal sites still don't comply with the regs.
It's theoretically possible to write a program to parse Target's site correctly, so is it Target's problem that this technology does not exist?
It's also theoretically possible to create artificial nerves to bypass damaged tissue and cure paralysis, or to fit paraplegics with robotic legs that work just as well as the real thing, making stairs negotiable. In practice, most people in such a position have to make do with wheelchairs.
Ramps, like website code that follows accessibility guidelines, are possible now.
Paper is for people stuck in the past.... There are many more advantages to using digital data than just saving trees.
On the plus side, you can read a sheet of paper without technology.
Just look at the fiasco with those 30-year-old NASA tapes that no one has the equipment to read. I wrote stuff in the 1980s on an Atari 800 in a word processor whose name I don't even remember. If I needed anything (not likely, since I was 10 and they were mostly bad stories or school reports, but consider that the technology was used by adults at the time), I wouldn't be able to take those 5.25" disks and read them on my modern PC. But if I had a hard copy...
These are things only a few decades old that are difficult to retrieve today. We have bricks from ancient civilizations thousands of years old that can be read with nothing but a pair of eyes and knowledge of the language.
Digital has its advantages, absolutely -- but it also requires constant vigilance to make sure you keep transferring it to modern storage media and formats. 3,000 years from now, a stack of CDs is going to be useless to future historians -- with the possible exception of the labels printed on them.
But then I suppose none of that really applies to this case, since it's all about avoiding permanence.
Based on the description in the article, it looks like it'll require a different technology than a standard laser or inkjet printer. It's more like thermal printing. Rather than placing ink on the paper, it temporarily alters the paper.
If you put this paper in a regular laser printer, you'll still be putting ink on expensive paper -- it won't disappear. And if you put regular paper in the temporary printer, you'll probably get nothing.
So in the short-term, mistakes should be difficult.
Long-term, you can bet on dual-function printers, maybe even printers that can detect which type of paper is in the tray and select a printing method accordingly. And the article says they're researching ways to make this printing permanent after the fact. Once those are available, mistakes will be easier to make.
Slashdot Mirror
pirate > ninja
I mean, seriously, "Ninjas of the Caribbean?" I don't think so!
Arr! Ye'd best not ferget about yer pirate software!
'Course, ye might navigate around that maelstrom if ye rely on open-seas, such as FyreFawkes.
Good grief! What would they call the elves, "mortality-challenged?"
Well, except to Gollum.
Nasty hobbitses!
Not that I'd point out Gollum as a paragon of proper speech, mind you...
And somehow, I instantly think of this exchange from Into the Woods:
Yes, theater major.
We now have the Really Lost, Unfinished Tales of J.R.R. Tolkien
As if Nike needs to be associated more with high-media-profile suicide...
"Left" and "right" are insufficient designations to indicate likelihood of totalitarianism. The two-dimensional political compass (with separate social and economic axes) is a bit better, though still a gross oversimplification. Their examples are Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union -- both were totalitarian, but economically Germany leaned to the right and the USSR to the left.
It's entirely possible to have a leftist totalitarian state or a rightist totalitarian state. I think the only political leanings that can't be twisted to totalitarianism would be anarchism and some of the more minarchist libertarian philosophies.
Same here. I just finished the latest book a couple of weeks ago.
I read the first part of the interview, but it seems like Jackson is way too early in the process to have anything beyond, "This would be really cool."
This is, of course, a major point of the banned book lists. Sometimes people will challenge* a book because it's thought-provoking. And sometimes people just miss the point, like those who've wanted to ban To Kill A Mockingbird for being "racist" or 1984 for being "pro-communist."
This particular list was made by taking someone's top 100 novels of the 20th century and looking at which of them had been challenged or outright banned by various nations, states, libraries, etc.
*The ALA list is technically the "Banned and/or Challenged Books" list. Meaning either that someone has deliberately removed the book from a library or school curriculum (for political reasons, not just because the copy was falling apart, or they wanted to teach another book this year) or that someone has attempted to do so.
Well, aside from puns, intelligent people do, from time to time, discuss things where one person uses the word to mean one thing, and the other uses it to mean something else. The usual result of such a situation is a failure to achieve any sort of meaningful debate.
Wow, you can read my mind through the Internet?
No, wait, you can't.
Here's how this thread of the exchange looks from my POV:
A: X
B: Not X, Y
You: Not Y, X
Me: X and Y
You: Not Y, X
Flame on!
Key:
X = There are six books.
Y = There are three books
I realize that once the flame stage came up I got mixed up as to the origin of the argument and pulled in stuff from other threads. But as to the question of whether it's 3 books or 6, I still see the answer as "Yes."
Hmm, could be. I know a lot of novels were serialized in those days.
As for shortening, I don't think it's mainly political stuff that's usually removed (at least in English translations) so much as historical background and minor characters. Les Miserables is incredibly long and dense. I dragged myself through an unabridged version that was ~1200 pages of small type -- and that's 1200 pages in which he rambles across anything tangentially related. Not an easy read.
Some examples: At the point that Valjean is fleeing Javert with the young Cosette and climbs over a wall, the action stops so that Hugo can spend 20 pages describing the history of convents. Not the convent they happened to have dropped into, but convents in general. When he escapes the barricades to carry the unconscious Marius through the sewers, again, everything stops and there's a 12-page history of the Paris sewer system, just to make sure that you know exactly where he is at each point. IIRC, The first book is called "Fantine" -- and it takes 100 pages before she shows up!
Actually, there's a fantastic 50-page description of the battle of Waterloo in that first section. Unfortunately only the last 2 or 3 of those pages are remotely connected to the story: Thenardier is robbing bodies after the battle, and pulls Marius' father out of a pile. It turns out he's not quite dead yet, and he thinks Thenardier saved his life. (Well, he did, but purely by accident.) As a result, he later instills Marius with a need to find, thank, and possibly pay back the man who saved his father's life.
More like 60 -- Bilbo's around 50* in The Hobbit and 111 in the birthday party in Fellowship. And it's another ~17 years from the party until Frodo and company flee the shire. He's 33 at Bilbo's 111th birthday party (Bilbo keeps making jokes about how their combined age is a gross), and is himself around 50 when they set out. So almost 80 years by the time the story really gets going.
Actually, they had him seriously taped down to hide the wrinkles in that prologue. Probably not a feasible technique for a whole movie, but someone suggested they could do digital de-aging like in the prologue to X-Men 3.
*IIRC, 50 for Hobbits is roughly equivalent to 25 for humans.
...well, not in the Terminator franchise...
Yes, it does. What's your point? If I pick up a three-volume set, are you going to insist that each of those volumes is not a book? If I pick up a one-volume set, are you going to tell me that is not a book?
A book (volume) can contain more than one book (division) or book (literary work).
A book (literary work) can be split across more than one book (volume) and contain more than one book (division).
There is no question that LoTR contains 6 books (divisions). As far as books (volumes), it can be 1, 3, or 6 depending on what edition one looks at.
The only way the question even makes sense is if you're trying to determine how many books (literary work) are involved. So why insist that the only valid answer to the question is in terms of books (divisions)?
Or maybe they're using definition (c) "a long written or printed literary composition" and you're using definition (d) "a major division of a treatise or literary work." Those who claim it's one "book" are clearly using the word in the sense that it's one novel. Countering that it's 6 "books" because there are 6 units labeled as "book" is a logical non-sequitur.
The base question is: Did Tolkien think of it as a single work (one "book") or a series (3 or 6 "books"). Because if he considered it a single work, then the labels on the six major chunks of the story aren't relevant to the question.
OK, but if you pick up a random codex with two or more levels of subdivisions, I suspect you'll more likely find one of them labeled "book" than "volume."
I'm just saying that "book" can mean two things, one of which is -- to be more precise -- a codex, often considered the primary format for a complete work and therefore often used to refer to the work as a whole, and one of which is a division within such a codex. So arguing that LOTR is 6, 3 or 1 "book" depends on whether you're treating "book" as meaning "novel" or "division."
So if one person claims that LOTR is 6 books because there are 6 divisions labeled, "book," and another claims that LOTR is one book because it's one work that was completed and then split into three pieces for publication, they aren't arguing about the same thing.
It's like getting into an argument over whether "nine inch nails" refers to a 90s band or a type of hardware.
Actually, the civil war prediction is pretty clear-cut. Do we have two or more large factions of Americans shooting each other for political purposes? No. Therefore, while the country is certainly polarized, we aren't in a civil war.
The line may be fuzzy -- people are still arguing over whether Iraq is in a civil war, but they're shooting at each other (and us). So far, though, the USA is clearly on the negative side of that line.
The American civil war is generally agreed to have begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, not with the polarization of the country or even with the first states to secede from the Union.
The term "book" can have two meanings:
1. A physical book, a.k.a. a volume.
2. A larger division of a work, which can include its own chapters.
It's not uncommon for a single novel to be divided into anywhere from 3-5 "books."
Les Miserables, for instance, has either five or six "books," but AFAIK it has always been packaged in one volume (often abridged -- that thing is massive). Never mind the many "books" of the Bible, which is itself one book.
So arguing over 3 books vs. 6 is simply arguing at cross-purposes.
There are specific legal guidelines covering the accessibility of US government websites under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (usually referred to as just Section 508). What I read there doesn't explicitly mention cross-browser/OS compatibility, but compliance with the guidelines would probably preclude the use of IE-only or Windows-only technologies without some sort of fallback.
Unfortunately, many federal sites still don't comply with the regs.
I believe the GP was asking a question about a hypothetical "they," not Target specifically.
As in, "Based on this precedent, would a site be liable for..."
It's also theoretically possible to create artificial nerves to bypass damaged tissue and cure paralysis, or to fit paraplegics with robotic legs that work just as well as the real thing, making stairs negotiable. In practice, most people in such a position have to make do with wheelchairs.
Ramps, like website code that follows accessibility guidelines, are possible now.
I trust you're aware that the running gag in Inspector Gadget was a reference to a recurring element in Mission Impossible?
On the plus side, you can read a sheet of paper without technology.
Just look at the fiasco with those 30-year-old NASA tapes that no one has the equipment to read. I wrote stuff in the 1980s on an Atari 800 in a word processor whose name I don't even remember. If I needed anything (not likely, since I was 10 and they were mostly bad stories or school reports, but consider that the technology was used by adults at the time), I wouldn't be able to take those 5.25" disks and read them on my modern PC. But if I had a hard copy...
These are things only a few decades old that are difficult to retrieve today. We have bricks from ancient civilizations thousands of years old that can be read with nothing but a pair of eyes and knowledge of the language.
Digital has its advantages, absolutely -- but it also requires constant vigilance to make sure you keep transferring it to modern storage media and formats. 3,000 years from now, a stack of CDs is going to be useless to future historians -- with the possible exception of the labels printed on them.
But then I suppose none of that really applies to this case, since it's all about avoiding permanence.
Based on the description in the article, it looks like it'll require a different technology than a standard laser or inkjet printer. It's more like thermal printing. Rather than placing ink on the paper, it temporarily alters the paper.
If you put this paper in a regular laser printer, you'll still be putting ink on expensive paper -- it won't disappear. And if you put regular paper in the temporary printer, you'll probably get nothing.
So in the short-term, mistakes should be difficult.
Long-term, you can bet on dual-function printers, maybe even printers that can detect which type of paper is in the tray and select a printing method accordingly. And the article says they're researching ways to make this printing permanent after the fact. Once those are available, mistakes will be easier to make.