ClearChannel has created a list of banned songs with "questionable content" in light of the recent tragedies.
Now, call me an establishment stooge, but it seems to me this is because they don't want to inadvertently inflict any further suffering on people who are already undergoing bereavement, tragedy, loss, etc. by broadcasting music that might -- yes, just might -- cause offence.
Yes, it's been done kinda ineptly (sure, they should have had ready-made lists for every imaginable national tragedy). Yes, I'm sure we can all crawl over the lists and criticise inclusions and omissions, ever-so-cleverly, and even raise spooky spectres (ALL these songs will be banned FOREVER! Solemn military music on all channels!). Yes, we can hitch this to our favourite RIAA or DMCA or DECSS protests.
But, seriously, kiddies: haven't you got anything more important to be worrying about today? Can you really not see that innocent victims of these atrocities could maybe do with a little bit of sympathy and understanding right about now?
This isn't censorship -- it's a (ham-fisted, but well-meaning) attempt to do the decent thing by a lot of suffering people. Kinda like pulling "The Towering Inferno" or "Air Force One" from the TV schedules would be.
Sounds like bollocks to me. I work in the City of London (just 5 minutes' walk from the Bank of England), just travelled home by suburban rail, saw no unusual crowds or anything along the way. Maybe some "targets" emptied; maybe some offices closed early; but London Evacuating? Nope.
A buddy of mine played Everquest every night for months. His wife constantly told him what a waste of time it was. Then, one day, he got tired of the game and sold his high level character on EBay for $1500. She hasn't bothered him about playing games since.
Er, izzat because he isn't playing Everquest all the time any more, or for some other (unrelated) reason?
And considering what *I* use hotmail for, namely, a spam catcher, any hacker that got lucky enough would probably discover yet another way to get rich quick.
Yeah, but that message was meant for me! I don't want some no-good cracker to get rich quick by hacking my Hotmail account!
There are an astronomical number of possible board configurations in chess, but they are finite.
Maybe technically finite, but astronomical doesn't give justice to the number. My quick estimate is that even if you could somehow store one game per atom, the entire earth doesn't have enough atoms to save all of the permutations.
With so many possible games, how come I never win?
First, it's weird that you chose a Le Guin book as your first example.
Why? The Earthsea trilogy are kids' classics where I come from. Tehanu is vastly different to the earlier trilogy, and looks weirdly out of place when they're bound together as a four-book set. (Fortunately, the new short-story collection, Tales from Earthsea, is much more "in tune" with the original books).
Man, if you're only getting the Christian alegory of the Narnia books, you did read them young.
A book, written for children, in which the child leads are all killed off -- and that's presented as a "happy ending"? Stuff Christianity, that's un-Christian!
Ultimately, it's the author's right to do or say anything with the world he imagines... it's impossible for the author to "intrude." His is the authoritative word, as it were.
I agree completely. But additions by the author can have an unpleasant effect on the audience, who may have been expecting something different. With "Star Wars" (bringing us belatedly back on topic), it looks like many fans-from-childhood were disappointed that the new film appealed to current children, not to thirtysomething original audience members. The examples I suggested take other paths:
Earthsea - a "mature" sequel to a kids' trilogy;
Narnia - a pretty shocking ending to a series intended for kids;
Middle-Earth - progressively more "complex" add-ons to a kids' book
The thing is, if you enjoyed the "originals" as kids' stuff, you don't necessarily want the add-ons to be more complex. Do we really want to see "dark", "edgy", "adult" themes in kiddie-lit sequels? I doubt it. I want my kids to be able to enjoy the same simple pleasures as me. Including films and books that are aimed at kids, not aging nerds like us.
This is always going to happen when your childhood favourites are extended, even when it's done by the original author (I won't go into the treacheries committed by the estate of Frank Herbert).
Remember finding out about child abuse on Gont, and why wizards from Roke avoided girls, in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu?
Remember when all the kids got killed, and Aslan turned into Jesus, in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle?
Remember when Bilbo Baggins turned into an old, evil monster (if only for a moment) in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- and then the "sequel" to that had no hobbits, only elf genealogy and linguistics?
If it's not what you expected -- that is, what you extrapolated from the first movie(s) or book(s) -- you're not going to like it. We build cosy little worlds from the "original" stories, then hate it when the author intrudes.
No, I don't think there's a solution. But the problem isn't unique to George Lucas. Sequels to creative works you unconditionally love will tend to suck.
Especially with speculative / escapist fiction -- part of the appeal of which is (I assume) that the "world" presented is self-contained, and the (usually young) reader can comprehend it in its totality. Unlike the all-too-confusing real world.
By the same token, I think that we'll probably see MS making their UI/Windowing System skinnable in the not-too-distant future ala Windowblinds to compete...
I think Stardock are already way ahead of you: see this post from the Microsoft Business Connection site.
My favorite Poul Anderson work is the Time Patrol story "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth"
According to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America obituary page (he was a former President of this organisation), the books Poul Anderson wanted to be remembered for are: Tau Zero, Midsummer Tempest, The Boat of a Million Years, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Enemy Stars and Brain Wave.
Quite agree re: "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth"; my own favourites would include The Broken Sword and the Nick van Rijn/Polesotechnic League/Flandry stories -- whenever I can find them! But then, I grew up with those, and not his own proudest works.
I think D&D got its regenerating rubbery trolls from Three Hearts and Three Lions (not Swords, but we seem to have a large enough population of regenerating rubbery trolls here on/. to put that origin into doubt. Unless they were all inspired by Poul's book... nah, I doubt it!
Your company has valid business reasons for wanting to monitor traffic that passes across its network. Encrypted traffic which the company cannot monitor is not going to be acceptable. Just think: how will you prove to that disciplinary hearing that it wasn't you who emailed those corporate secrets outside the company?
Why do you expect privacy and secrecy, when you are using your employer's computer equipment on company time? ("No, boss, I'm not going to tell you where I am, or what I'm doing, or where I'm sending post, or what's in it. You don't need to know...")
If you encrypt all your email and use SSL for all communications, then as long as the DMCA stands, your employer can't spy on you without a jail sentence. People need to start encrypting things, not just your secret stuff, everything.
How do you imagine your employer will determine that it's your "secret stuff," and not his, that is streaming out of the building?
It really doesn't matter that the corporate world doesn't believe in on-line privacy. It's a moot point: Any expections of privacy are folly unless attempts are made to somehow obfuscate the data being transmitted. It's really as simple as that.
If you think your corporation will be any happier with you when you are sending indecipherable, encrypted data from your workplace, you must work for a very stupid corporation indeed. (Or one which possesses no valuable information of any kind, which is much the same thing).
Just think about it for a few seconds...
People need to get used to the idea, and circumvent the problem instead of simply bitch about it.
You don't like your corporation's acceptable usage policies? Get a job somewhere else. Your sysadmins should have professional ethics, but transmission of encrypted data streams from the workplace is going to be a big no-no in anyone's book.
Another Bruce Sterling initiative on-line is the Dead Media Project, qv. It's an attempt to write "a naturalist's field guide for the communications paleontologist." Worth taking a look.
The central character of Zeitgeist, Leggy Starlitz, also appears in two short stories in Globalhead (Hollywood Kremlin and Are You For 86?) and one in A Good Old-Fashioned Future (The Littlest Jackal). If you hate amazon, don't follow those links.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, call me an establishment stooge, but it seems to me this is because they don't want to inadvertently inflict any further suffering on people who are already undergoing bereavement, tragedy, loss, etc. by broadcasting music that might -- yes, just might -- cause offence.
Yes, it's been done kinda ineptly (sure, they should have had ready-made lists for every imaginable national tragedy). Yes, I'm sure we can all crawl over the lists and criticise inclusions and omissions, ever-so-cleverly, and even raise spooky spectres (ALL these songs will be banned FOREVER! Solemn military music on all channels!). Yes, we can hitch this to our favourite RIAA or DMCA or DECSS protests.
But, seriously, kiddies: haven't you got anything more important to be worrying about today? Can you really not see that innocent victims of these atrocities could maybe do with a little bit of sympathy and understanding right about now?
This isn't censorship -- it's a (ham-fisted, but well-meaning) attempt to do the decent thing by a lot of suffering people. Kinda like pulling "The Towering Inferno" or "Air Force One" from the TV schedules would be.
OK, mod me down. I'm through.
Katz writes:
after World War II,
"The Hobbit" was published in 1937. World War II ended in 1945.
As a sidenote, shouldn't there be a way for the ground control to override the controls of a hijacked plane?
So terrorists can take over ground control and turn any number of planes into missiles? Not a very good idea.
Sounds like bollocks to me. I work in the City of London (just 5 minutes' walk from the Bank of England), just travelled home by suburban rail, saw no unusual crowds or anything along the way. Maybe some "targets" emptied; maybe some offices closed early; but London Evacuating? Nope.
Er, izzat because he isn't playing Everquest all the time any more, or for some other (unrelated) reason?
As always, the archives have the story without requiring NYT registration and login.
Q: could Slashcode be modified to transpose these URLs automatically?
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/ 17STUD.html
As always.
Oh, there's worse things the Evil Agents could do with a list of people who have practice at hacking into voting systems. Far worse things...
This is the file with the information that you ask for.
[SecurityHoleWarning.doc.exe]
See you later. Thanks.
A book, written for children, in which the child leads are all killed off -- and that's presented as a "happy ending"? Stuff Christianity, that's un-Christian!
I agree completely. But additions by the author can have an unpleasant effect on the audience, who may have been expecting something different. With "Star Wars" (bringing us belatedly back on topic), it looks like many fans-from-childhood were disappointed that the new film appealed to current children, not to thirtysomething original audience members. The examples I suggested take other paths:
-
Earthsea - a "mature" sequel to a kids' trilogy;
-
Narnia - a pretty shocking ending to a series intended for kids;
-
Middle-Earth - progressively more "complex" add-ons to a kids' book
The thing is, if you enjoyed the "originals" as kids' stuff, you don't necessarily want the add-ons to be more complex. Do we really want to see "dark", "edgy", "adult" themes in kiddie-lit sequels? I doubt it. I want my kids to be able to enjoy the same simple pleasures as me. Including films and books that are aimed at kids, not aging nerds like us.Remember finding out about child abuse on Gont, and why wizards from Roke avoided girls, in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu?
Remember when all the kids got killed, and Aslan turned into Jesus, in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle?
Remember when Bilbo Baggins turned into an old, evil monster (if only for a moment) in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- and then the "sequel" to that had no hobbits, only elf genealogy and linguistics?
If it's not what you expected -- that is, what you extrapolated from the first movie(s) or book(s) -- you're not going to like it. We build cosy little worlds from the "original" stories, then hate it when the author intrudes.
No, I don't think there's a solution. But the problem isn't unique to George Lucas. Sequels to creative works you unconditionally love will tend to suck.
Especially with speculative / escapist fiction -- part of the appeal of which is (I assume) that the "world" presented is self-contained, and the (usually young) reader can comprehend it in its totality. Unlike the all-too-confusing real world.
Quite agree re: "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth"; my own favourites would include The Broken Sword and the Nick van Rijn/Polesotechnic League/Flandry stories -- whenever I can find them! But then, I grew up with those, and not his own proudest works.
I think D&D got its regenerating rubbery trolls from Three Hearts and Three Lions (not Swords, but we seem to have a large enough population of regenerating rubbery trolls here on
Why do you expect privacy and secrecy, when you are using your employer's computer equipment on company time? ("No, boss, I'm not going to tell you where I am, or what I'm doing, or where I'm sending post, or what's in it. You don't need to know...")
Just think about it for a few seconds...
You don't like your corporation's acceptable usage policies? Get a job somewhere else. Your sysadmins should have professional ethics, but transmission of encrypted data streams from the workplace is going to be a big no-no in anyone's book.
Another Bruce Sterling initiative on-line is the Dead Media Project, qv. It's an attempt to write "a naturalist's field guide for the communications paleontologist." Worth taking a look.
The central character of Zeitgeist , Leggy Starlitz, also appears in two short stories in Globalhead (Hollywood Kremlin and Are You For 86?) and one in A Good Old-Fashioned Future (The Littlest Jackal). If you hate amazon, don't follow those links.
Better link here.