Not cause and effect, contrast. The G8 will be discussing the internet and society, but the G8 organisers haven't invited the experts. People like the EFF, the Center for Internet and Society, the OSI, and the like are the folks who think the hardest and longest about how government should and shouldn't interact with the web so that it's good and not crappy. Mark Zuckerberg's there and presumably Larry Lessig isn't.
>>>Contrary to current best practices in policymaking, the invite list has been limited primarily to representatives of government and corporate leaders, who already enjoy disproportionately large influence over Internet regulation.
The signatories of this statement represent most of the groups that wade waist-deep into politics to promote the free and open web. They keep banging on the door, but they don't get a seat at the table. Many of these are the same groups that tried to change the ACTA treaty. As civil society members, they will always be pushing for greater transparency, better access, a more ethical approach. That's their role.
They're right of course that if business leaders (Around 1,500 guests in all says the Guardian article) get access, the third leg of society, civic leaders, should also have a place. However, no one will just open the door and let them in. They need clout to earn a seat, and they're having trouble building it up. They need charismatic leaders, or need to be able to influence blocks of voters. Right now, they have no standing on any political stage, let alone in a summit meeting like this.
No one can be told what Project Xanadu is. You have to see it for yourself. I found that video on youtube of Ted Nelson showing off Xanadu a few years ago.
He might be a mad man, but he's an interesting madman.
I think you have to start by making a distinction between the institution of government and the process of governance in which government, business, and civil society all participate. The idea is, a FOSS-inspired change in the process might improve governance decisions.
I think of it as government of the ones who show up, and it already happens, to some extent, everywhere. In democracies, most of the decisions aren't made by elected officials, but by bureaucrats. The people doing the work. I recently spoke with a young woman who was a junior staffer in one of the highest offices of the executive branch in the George Bush administration. She said that most of the decisions made in the US capitol were actually made by people in their early twenties, just out of college, who were willing to work long hours for peanuts. If these young folks had majored in CS and Math instead of PoliSci and History, they'd have been coding instead of drafting legislation. (Joel Reidenberg and Laurence Lessig have both written cleverly on the parallels between code and law.) In authoritarian states, like for example China, the bureaucracy plays a similar role (wish I could find a reference quickly).
Most existing government structures keep some people away from the decision-making process. Law-makers hide the code of governance (the law) until it's ready to be shipped. Some of us (I don't know the metagovernment people, but I like the way they think) who are interested in both law and code think there's something to learn from FOSS. Maybe the process can be opened up. Let's acknowledge the underlying process of governance, which doesn't have much to do with voting, and more to do with people making decisions by default, because they're in the room when the question comes up.
There are plenty of problems with ideas like this. Of course, you probably don't start tinkering at a national level, but at a local level where the stakes are lower. Maybe the analogy between governance and coding is a false one. But you can't know until you give it a go, see what problems there are, and try to fix them.
Resist the impulse to assume the riots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are all about the USA. I guarantee you, the people on the streets of these countries by and large don't want to live in America or a make their country more like the US in general. They have their own values and desires that you might find surprising.
These angry people are feeling their power as a mob. What we know right now is that these rioters oppose autocratic and corrupt government. Let's say they share those values with Hamas, the Peasants and Workers Party of India, the government of Somaliland, Wikileaks, the US State Department, and the Tea Party. It's much more important, however, what they're for. Whether that means they support -- to take ideas from the parent post -- democracy, free markets, pop-culture, and free expression more than do the leaders they oppose, remains to be seen.
Exactly, under laboratory conditions an arsenic-rich environment doesn't kill it, in fact the bacterium continues to grow, though not as quickly as in an environment that contains phosphorus. Using radioactive isotopes to trace the distribution of arsenic through the organism revealed the chemical in important molecules like proteins, DNA, and ATP. Discover Magazine has published a good blog post that explains what the research does and doesn't show so far.
The scientist who lead the team who conducted the experiment is pretty cool. And it seems she's found a research project for the rest of her life.
From this perspective, what the 'war on terror' costs, the most expensive item on the balance sheet should be the lost opportunities to spend all those lives, time, and treasure on something more constructive. Those billions of dollars could instead have been spent on anything from small business tax incentives, to scientific research, to foreign aid to develop foreign markets for American goods. The money circulates, whether spent on body scanners or on school supplies, but it probably could have circulated to better effect.
Sugar Labs is the OS loaded on the OLPC laptops. It's made for children and one page of its website says that the programs loaded are accessible to children as young as four years old. While I've only given it a cursory glance in a VM myself, it comes as a complete digital learning environment with programming games, text editor, web browser, and an integrated journal system where the young user can record what he or she learns after using each program. I heard Walter Bender describe the project a couple of months ago and apparently the OS opens the FOSS code behind all of the software to the user as well, for learning and tinkering. It's probably most enriching if the child has an adult around who can help them develop good habits, protect them from disturbing content, and reflect on what their figuring out.
Wu shouldn't be afraid of Apple. None of us should. Fear gets in the way and makes you do stupid things. Let's just keep building the open web. Also, maybe advocacy helps.
-- I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. --Bene Gesserit, litany against fear.
My first thought was, like yours, that it might be better to give Telstra a chance to bring itself into compliance before hitting it with the bad publicity stick. However, after reading TFAs, I think Angus Gratton (the one who noticed the violations) did this right. He tried to contact the company first and got no response, so he's leveraging the power of the community and Telstra is responding. The blog post linked to in the summary explains how he went about it all.
Emphasizing compliance over prosecution should make Free Software less threatening to companies (says a guy who's never worked for a big organization). It's the right way to go about things.
If you read Gratton's post, he doesn't write with any rancour. He's sketches the simple steps Telstra can take to become compliant. By they way, he anticipates most of what people are saying in this thread and gives his own pre-emptive responses.
And in the USA, too. Check out the story of a college defensive back at Pace University who was recently killed by police after a misunderstanding outside a night club. Aside, I hope, from terrible guilt, the officers in that case, and many others, wont suffer much for their deadly mistake. Officer Bubbles was wearing body armor. I imagine he carried a firearm and is empowered to use it. That, and protection from even deadly misconduct, give him and many like him power of life and death. And don't think that the fact that a public protest in view of cameras in broad daylight will necessarily make them hold back.
But this applies to power in general, not just government authority. You'll find people who abuse power in the workplace, in crime, among religious leaders, and anywhere else you care to look.
I've never been part of a US actor's union, but in the UK, Equity does a lot of good for people in a profession that consists almost entirely of freelancers. (I'm looking at the website to make sure I'm representing the full range of what they do, since I haven't needed most of their services in this point in my professional life)
They help out actors who need legal help
They collect and distribute royalties
You can ask them for help understanding contracts and the nuances of working overseas
Members get access to special on-the-job insurance
They organize the pension scheme for actors in the UK.
And of course they represent actors in collective bargaining to establish fair wages and healthy working conditions.
And the union performs many other functions as well.
Freelancing is always difficult, and the performers' unions make it easier for actors to make a living doing what we do. Actors generally have little power in the workplace (aside from a few wealthy stars). Collective bargaining helps even the scales. Because of the union's previous work, it's not as central to performers lives as it once was. Most of my colleagues enjoy the standards established by the union without realizing the history or the work the union continues to do to maintain a decent working conditions. It looks like in New Zealand, those standards don't exist yet.
According to TFA this is part of a push by the Australian actors' union to unionise productions in New Zealand. The American film actors unions are acting in solidarity. If stars involved in the production, like Ian McKellan, follow the advisory, it will probably work. Then the actors involved would be compensated in line with actors in Australia. Obviously a "Do Not Work order" is bad for everyone involved, so hopefully in addition to confrontation, the union is trying the carrot as well.
I don't know if this constitutes either news for nerds or stuff that matters. Personally, I wish someone other than Peter Jackson would do this film. I thought his LOTR films were awful.
Any good technical education should include discussions about ethics. In classes for teenagers, I say this is especially important. I'd think the larger moral questions raised by technology would be the most interesting and give students the most to think about. The use, creation, distribution, and limits on computer technology raise all sort of moral problems. Kids should at least be exposed to the ideas of intellectual property, the ethics of sharing (code, commercial music), expectations of privacy, and I'm sure other issues that don't come to my mind quickly.
Using Open Source should make starting this conversation easy. There are ethical ideas in the Debian Social contract, in the Open Source Definition, and of course in the Free Software Definition. I imagine it would be hard to test for, because it's not good if you just teach them to parrot a set of principles. You need to get them thinking about the hard questions. if you're purpose is to educate the future citizens of your democracy, the leaders, voters, and engineers, it's vital they recognize that there's a moral dimension to technology.
He's saying it's legal in Sweden for an organisation protected by Swedish law to publish documents whose publication isn't controlled under Swedish law, such as (one assumes) US classified information. He's saying at this point it's not a conflict between the two governments because the Pirate Party isn't a member of the Swedish government or even a member of the country's legislature. Pirate Party does not equal Sweden just as Green Party does not equal USA. (Couldn't figure out how to use unicode to get the "does not equal" symbol to show up) He's saying as a practical matter it's not clear what the US can do about it, despite all its power and resources, without making more trouble that it's worth. But maybe the US will find a way.
"The Piratbyran" is redundant. With the the Swedish translated into English it means "The the pirate chest". In Swedish the the definite article is tacked on to the the end of words. English: "a chest of drawers" = Swedish: "en byrå" and English: "the chest of drawers" = Swedish: "byran". So if you want to come off really classy, when you want to mean "The Pirate Bay" you could just write: "Piratbyran" or "The Piratbyrå.
I know this is a lost cause before I start, but hey, I'm a pedant. And if there's no room for arguing irrelevant points on Slashdot, then heck, what's it here for?
I don't see how any kind of synthesized music can replace a performance of any quality. They're different kinds of experiences. The point of a performance is that it's relational and human. Various kinds of technological fixes may be able to duplicate the music, but by definition -- in my mind -- they can't replace a performance. I can no longer go hear Bernstein and the NY Phil play Mahler's Symphony #2. I can only hear the recording. Those two things are not interchangeable.
There are aspects of a live performance that recorded or synthesized music can't replace. Good performers raise the temperature in a room. They play for an audience and the audience listens for the musicians' sake.
I'll go a step further and and say that the reason synthesized music can replace musicians on Broadway and touring productions is that these shows have already been losing the essence of live performance. Broadway shows are, for the most part, over-produced, standardized, and dull. If the audience only knew how much more engaging the show would have been if it had a twentieth of the stage set, an eighth of the lighting, and a quarter of the audience size.
I've been to a number of Broadway shows and despite the high quality of the performers I have yet to attend one that was as much fun as an evening with a couple of amateur banjo players who showed up to a private party I attended several years ago. As a director I worked with once said "a dry fuck is always better than a wet wank."
* If a computer is available with Linux, it implies at least SOME amount of Linux support- even if it is just a compatibility guide.
* I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu, anyway, since there are (for me) much better Linuxes. So if they offered a computer with NO OS installed, I would be just has happy.
Therefore it's easy to imagine how the judgement of the cost versus the benefit for Dell of supporting Linux might not weigh strongly in favour of offering pre-loaded Ubuntu, quite apart from any anti-competitive pressure from Microsoft. The Linux market is fractured, Dell offers a lot of hardware configurations, and the OS is easy for the end user to install themselves and get acceptable hardware compatibility. What encourages Dell to go the extra mile?
Based on my experience, one problem Dell faced trying to sell computers with Ubuntu pre-installed is that the OS is so easy to install yourself. Dell could spend time and money configuring and testing Ubuntu to work perfectly with every combination of hardware it sells. Or it can simply save the effort and let customers install their own OS on the machines it offers at no extra cost to the company.
I bought a Dell E6400 laptop a year ago for home business and personal use because the hardware and the price suited me best of any machine I could find on the market. At the time, I asked about Ubuntu, but they didn't offer it for that machine. No problem: I did a bit of research, found that other people had installed Linux without major problems, and simply bought the machine loaded with Vista and installed the OS myself.
The party is young and may not have a full party platform yet, but how are you coming on identifying who the party is? In order to contest an election you have to identify who you're speaking for. Who are the Pirate Party's core constituency? Who can you rely on to spread the word and give you money? Is it just file sharers or do you think you represent the interests of a larger part of the population? It clearly doesn't include publishers, proprietary software companies, or the film industry. Who does it include?
I'm posting this as a response, because it relates to the posts above and I like joining an existing conversation, but I mean this as a question for Andrew Robinson.
On the Free Speech part of the party platform, what's your Pirate Party definition of freedom? Give us some concrete examples. There have been a whole bunch high profile public debates in the UK recent years that could be approached from a free speech point of view. Give us the party line on some of them. For example what's the party's stand on software as protected speech? Inflammatory cartoons? Wearing religious symbols in public facing jobs? Teachers wearing veils in school? Libel laws? The monarchy's place in public life (Prince Charles and his public statements)? What does freedom mean to a pirate?
Yes. I have a system that works for me that is similar. It uses freely available on-line resources and is cheaper than some of the on-line courses too.
Practice daily. Put aside half an hour before you go to bed and practice every single day.
Use several senses. Listen to web radio or podcasts and talk along with it. Many national radio systems broadcast simple news magazines for non-native speakers. Read the newspaper out loud to yourself or download out-of-copyright books from Gutenburg. Stay active while you're learning: clean dishes, do push-ups, etc.
Fit a bit of practice in odd moments of the day. On the commute, while cooking, or on the can.
And that's it. Cheap and easy. By doing this, at the end of a year I can hold carry on an abstract conversation with a native speaker. My grandfather did something similar and learned 10 languages without ever leaving his country.
I had a teacher as a child who told me "art teaches us how to be human." It's a compelling idea that neatly sums up my experience with novels, music, theatre, and some movies. I think, though, if it can also be a deceptive illusion that distracts us and convinces us the world is better than it is and we ourselves are kinder, more knowledgeable, better meaning, more competent than we really are.
If I understand the article right, the idea is that speculative sci-fi helps people beat future shock. By reading/viewing speculative stories, models of good technology use lodge in our minds and we get prepared to make decisions about using tools that come to us. I can see that. But counter that rosy image with the idea that stories featuring high technology instead train us to acquiesce to technology in our lives, not making conscious choices but instead sleepwalking into an isolated, un-fun, inhuman world all the while under the illusion that we're in control of the process.
I'm inclined to think that the best way to make good choices is by paying attention to the here and now, not by putting "the logical part of our brains... 100% in the future at all times." We can recognize good technology by seeing the good it does in our lives, not by comparing it Blade Runner, Star Trek, or District 9. (or Snowcrash, Red Mars, or Neuromancer). Marry that with social interaction, so that adopting/creating new technology is a communal, connected process and we have a good chance of making good decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not cause and effect, contrast. The G8 will be discussing the internet and society, but the G8 organisers haven't invited the experts. People like the EFF, the Center for Internet and Society, the OSI, and the like are the folks who think the hardest and longest about how government should and shouldn't interact with the web so that it's good and not crappy. Mark Zuckerberg's there and presumably Larry Lessig isn't.
>>>Contrary to current best practices in policymaking, the invite list has been limited primarily to representatives of government and corporate leaders, who already enjoy disproportionately large influence over Internet regulation.
The signatories of this statement represent most of the groups that wade waist-deep into politics to promote the free and open web. They keep banging on the door, but they don't get a seat at the table. Many of these are the same groups that tried to change the ACTA treaty. As civil society members, they will always be pushing for greater transparency, better access, a more ethical approach. That's their role.
They're right of course that if business leaders (Around 1,500 guests in all says the Guardian article) get access, the third leg of society, civic leaders, should also have a place. However, no one will just open the door and let them in. They need clout to earn a seat, and they're having trouble building it up. They need charismatic leaders, or need to be able to influence blocks of voters. Right now, they have no standing on any political stage, let alone in a summit meeting like this.
Michelle Rodriguez has the right swagger.
In my dream casting, Jackie Earle Haley plays the Finn and some aging action star plays Armitage (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, or Mel Gibson).
No one can be told what Project Xanadu is. You have to see it for yourself. I found that video on youtube of Ted Nelson showing off Xanadu a few years ago.
He might be a mad man, but he's an interesting madman.
I think you have to start by making a distinction between the institution of government and the process of governance in which government, business, and civil society all participate. The idea is, a FOSS-inspired change in the process might improve governance decisions.
I think of it as government of the ones who show up, and it already happens, to some extent, everywhere. In democracies, most of the decisions aren't made by elected officials, but by bureaucrats. The people doing the work. I recently spoke with a young woman who was a junior staffer in one of the highest offices of the executive branch in the George Bush administration. She said that most of the decisions made in the US capitol were actually made by people in their early twenties, just out of college, who were willing to work long hours for peanuts. If these young folks had majored in CS and Math instead of PoliSci and History, they'd have been coding instead of drafting legislation. (Joel Reidenberg and Laurence Lessig have both written cleverly on the parallels between code and law.) In authoritarian states, like for example China, the bureaucracy plays a similar role (wish I could find a reference quickly).
Most existing government structures keep some people away from the decision-making process. Law-makers hide the code of governance (the law) until it's ready to be shipped. Some of us (I don't know the metagovernment people, but I like the way they think) who are interested in both law and code think there's something to learn from FOSS. Maybe the process can be opened up. Let's acknowledge the underlying process of governance, which doesn't have much to do with voting, and more to do with people making decisions by default, because they're in the room when the question comes up.
There are plenty of problems with ideas like this. Of course, you probably don't start tinkering at a national level, but at a local level where the stakes are lower. Maybe the analogy between governance and coding is a false one. But you can't know until you give it a go, see what problems there are, and try to fix them.
Resist the impulse to assume the riots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are all about the USA. I guarantee you, the people on the streets of these countries by and large don't want to live in America or a make their country more like the US in general. They have their own values and desires that you might find surprising.
These angry people are feeling their power as a mob. What we know right now is that these rioters oppose autocratic and corrupt government. Let's say they share those values with Hamas, the Peasants and Workers Party of India, the government of Somaliland, Wikileaks, the US State Department, and the Tea Party. It's much more important, however, what they're for. Whether that means they support -- to take ideas from the parent post -- democracy, free markets, pop-culture, and free expression more than do the leaders they oppose, remains to be seen.
(reposed after logging in)
Exactly, under laboratory conditions an arsenic-rich environment doesn't kill it, in fact the bacterium continues to grow, though not as quickly as in an environment that contains phosphorus. Using radioactive isotopes to trace the distribution of arsenic through the organism revealed the chemical in important molecules like proteins, DNA, and ATP. Discover Magazine has published a good blog post that explains what the research does and doesn't show so far.
The scientist who lead the team who conducted the experiment is pretty cool. And it seems she's found a research project for the rest of her life.
From this perspective, what the 'war on terror' costs, the most expensive item on the balance sheet should be the lost opportunities to spend all those lives, time, and treasure on something more constructive. Those billions of dollars could instead have been spent on anything from small business tax incentives, to scientific research, to foreign aid to develop foreign markets for American goods. The money circulates, whether spent on body scanners or on school supplies, but it probably could have circulated to better effect.
Sugar Labs is the OS loaded on the OLPC laptops. It's made for children and one page of its website says that the programs loaded are accessible to children as young as four years old. While I've only given it a cursory glance in a VM myself, it comes as a complete digital learning environment with programming games, text editor, web browser, and an integrated journal system where the young user can record what he or she learns after using each program. I heard Walter Bender describe the project a couple of months ago and apparently the OS opens the FOSS code behind all of the software to the user as well, for learning and tinkering. It's probably most enriching if the child has an adult around who can help them develop good habits, protect them from disturbing content, and reflect on what their figuring out.
Wu shouldn't be afraid of Apple. None of us should. Fear gets in the way and makes you do stupid things. Let's just keep building the open web. Also, maybe advocacy helps.
--
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. --Bene Gesserit, litany against fear.
My first thought was, like yours, that it might be better to give Telstra a chance to bring itself into compliance before hitting it with the bad publicity stick. However, after reading TFAs, I think Angus Gratton (the one who noticed the violations) did this right. He tried to contact the company first and got no response, so he's leveraging the power of the community and Telstra is responding. The blog post linked to in the summary explains how he went about it all.
Emphasizing compliance over prosecution should make Free Software less threatening to companies (says a guy who's never worked for a big organization). It's the right way to go about things.
If you read Gratton's post, he doesn't write with any rancour. He's sketches the simple steps Telstra can take to become compliant. By they way, he anticipates most of what people are saying in this thread and gives his own pre-emptive responses.
And in the USA, too. Check out the story of a college defensive back at Pace University who was recently killed by police after a misunderstanding outside a night club. Aside, I hope, from terrible guilt, the officers in that case, and many others, wont suffer much for their deadly mistake. Officer Bubbles was wearing body armor. I imagine he carried a firearm and is empowered to use it. That, and protection from even deadly misconduct, give him and many like him power of life and death. And don't think that the fact that a public protest in view of cameras in broad daylight will necessarily make them hold back.
But this applies to power in general, not just government authority. You'll find people who abuse power in the workplace, in crime, among religious leaders, and anywhere else you care to look.
Surely the right place to ask for help highlighting the selling points and strengths of Plone is on the Plone Forums?
I've never been part of a US actor's union, but in the UK, Equity does a lot of good for people in a profession that consists almost entirely of freelancers. (I'm looking at the website to make sure I'm representing the full range of what they do, since I haven't needed most of their services in this point in my professional life)
Freelancing is always difficult, and the performers' unions make it easier for actors to make a living doing what we do. Actors generally have little power in the workplace (aside from a few wealthy stars). Collective bargaining helps even the scales. Because of the union's previous work, it's not as central to performers lives as it once was. Most of my colleagues enjoy the standards established by the union without realizing the history or the work the union continues to do to maintain a decent working conditions. It looks like in New Zealand, those standards don't exist yet.
According to TFA this is part of a push by the Australian actors' union to unionise productions in New Zealand. The American film actors unions are acting in solidarity. If stars involved in the production, like Ian McKellan, follow the advisory, it will probably work. Then the actors involved would be compensated in line with actors in Australia. Obviously a "Do Not Work order" is bad for everyone involved, so hopefully in addition to confrontation, the union is trying the carrot as well.
I don't know if this constitutes either news for nerds or stuff that matters. Personally, I wish someone other than Peter Jackson would do this film. I thought his LOTR films were awful.
Any good technical education should include discussions about ethics. In classes for teenagers, I say this is especially important. I'd think the larger moral questions raised by technology would be the most interesting and give students the most to think about. The use, creation, distribution, and limits on computer technology raise all sort of moral problems. Kids should at least be exposed to the ideas of intellectual property, the ethics of sharing (code, commercial music), expectations of privacy, and I'm sure other issues that don't come to my mind quickly.
Using Open Source should make starting this conversation easy. There are ethical ideas in the Debian Social contract, in the Open Source Definition, and of course in the Free Software Definition. I imagine it would be hard to test for, because it's not good if you just teach them to parrot a set of principles. You need to get them thinking about the hard questions. if you're purpose is to educate the future citizens of your democracy, the leaders, voters, and engineers, it's vital they recognize that there's a moral dimension to technology.
He's saying it's legal in Sweden for an organisation protected by Swedish law to publish documents whose publication isn't controlled under Swedish law, such as (one assumes) US classified information. He's saying at this point it's not a conflict between the two governments because the Pirate Party isn't a member of the Swedish government or even a member of the country's legislature. Pirate Party does not equal Sweden just as Green Party does not equal USA. (Couldn't figure out how to use unicode to get the "does not equal" symbol to show up) He's saying as a practical matter it's not clear what the US can do about it, despite all its power and resources, without making more trouble that it's worth. But maybe the US will find a way.
"The Piratbyran" is redundant. With the the Swedish translated into English it means "The the pirate chest". In Swedish the the definite article is tacked on to the the end of words. English: "a chest of drawers" = Swedish: "en byrå" and English: "the chest of drawers" = Swedish: "byran". So if you want to come off really classy, when you want to mean "The Pirate Bay" you could just write: "Piratbyran" or "The Piratbyrå.
I know this is a lost cause before I start, but hey, I'm a pedant. And if there's no room for arguing irrelevant points on Slashdot, then heck, what's it here for?
I don't see how any kind of synthesized music can replace a performance of any quality. They're different kinds of experiences. The point of a performance is that it's relational and human. Various kinds of technological fixes may be able to duplicate the music, but by definition -- in my mind -- they can't replace a performance. I can no longer go hear Bernstein and the NY Phil play Mahler's Symphony #2. I can only hear the recording. Those two things are not interchangeable.
There are aspects of a live performance that recorded or synthesized music can't replace. Good performers raise the temperature in a room. They play for an audience and the audience listens for the musicians' sake.
I'll go a step further and and say that the reason synthesized music can replace musicians on Broadway and touring productions is that these shows have already been losing the essence of live performance. Broadway shows are, for the most part, over-produced, standardized, and dull. If the audience only knew how much more engaging the show would have been if it had a twentieth of the stage set, an eighth of the lighting, and a quarter of the audience size.
I've been to a number of Broadway shows and despite the high quality of the performers I have yet to attend one that was as much fun as an evening with a couple of amateur banjo players who showed up to a private party I attended several years ago. As a director I worked with once said "a dry fuck is always better than a wet wank."
Security Week posted has some videos of the presentation that they uploaded to youtube.
* If a computer is available with Linux, it implies at least SOME amount of Linux support- even if it is just a compatibility guide.
* I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu, anyway, since there are (for me) much better Linuxes. So if they offered a computer with NO OS installed, I would be just has happy.
Therefore it's easy to imagine how the judgement of the cost versus the benefit for Dell of supporting Linux might not weigh strongly in favour of offering pre-loaded Ubuntu, quite apart from any anti-competitive pressure from Microsoft. The Linux market is fractured, Dell offers a lot of hardware configurations, and the OS is easy for the end user to install themselves and get acceptable hardware compatibility. What encourages Dell to go the extra mile?
Based on my experience, one problem Dell faced trying to sell computers with Ubuntu pre-installed is that the OS is so easy to install yourself. Dell could spend time and money configuring and testing Ubuntu to work perfectly with every combination of hardware it sells. Or it can simply save the effort and let customers install their own OS on the machines it offers at no extra cost to the company.
I bought a Dell E6400 laptop a year ago for home business and personal use because the hardware and the price suited me best of any machine I could find on the market. At the time, I asked about Ubuntu, but they didn't offer it for that machine. No problem: I did a bit of research, found that other people had installed Linux without major problems, and simply bought the machine loaded with Vista and installed the OS myself.
The party is young and may not have a full party platform yet, but how are you coming on identifying who the party is? In order to contest an election you have to identify who you're speaking for. Who are the Pirate Party's core constituency? Who can you rely on to spread the word and give you money? Is it just file sharers or do you think you represent the interests of a larger part of the population? It clearly doesn't include publishers, proprietary software companies, or the film industry. Who does it include?
I'm posting this as a response, because it relates to the posts above and I like joining an existing conversation, but I mean this as a question for Andrew Robinson.
On the Free Speech part of the party platform, what's your Pirate Party definition of freedom? Give us some concrete examples. There have been a whole bunch high profile public debates in the UK recent years that could be approached from a free speech point of view. Give us the party line on some of them. For example what's the party's stand on software as protected speech? Inflammatory cartoons? Wearing religious symbols in public facing jobs? Teachers wearing veils in school? Libel laws? The monarchy's place in public life (Prince Charles and his public statements)? What does freedom mean to a pirate?
Yes. I have a system that works for me that is similar. It uses freely available on-line resources and is cheaper than some of the on-line courses too.
And that's it. Cheap and easy. By doing this, at the end of a year I can hold carry on an abstract conversation with a native speaker. My grandfather did something similar and learned 10 languages without ever leaving his country.
I had a teacher as a child who told me "art teaches us how to be human." It's a compelling idea that neatly sums up my experience with novels, music, theatre, and some movies. I think, though, if it can also be a deceptive illusion that distracts us and convinces us the world is better than it is and we ourselves are kinder, more knowledgeable, better meaning, more competent than we really are.
If I understand the article right, the idea is that speculative sci-fi helps people beat future shock. By reading/viewing speculative stories, models of good technology use lodge in our minds and we get prepared to make decisions about using tools that come to us. I can see that. But counter that rosy image with the idea that stories featuring high technology instead train us to acquiesce to technology in our lives, not making conscious choices but instead sleepwalking into an isolated, un-fun, inhuman world all the while under the illusion that we're in control of the process.
I'm inclined to think that the best way to make good choices is by paying attention to the here and now, not by putting "the logical part of our brains... 100% in the future at all times." We can recognize good technology by seeing the good it does in our lives, not by comparing it Blade Runner, Star Trek, or District 9. (or Snowcrash, Red Mars, or Neuromancer). Marry that with social interaction, so that adopting/creating new technology is a communal, connected process and we have a good chance of making good decisions.