I'm sick of seeing this stupid argument!
on
Attack of the Clones
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Jesus, I know there will always be some idiot somewhere who thinks it's a very clever observation when he points out to us that no one is physically forcing us to buy a movie ticket, or something like it.
Sure, Lucas is breaking no law in becoming a total whore and letting some marketing committe script his movies. In the same way, a politician breaks no laws if he sells out his principles and does exactly what some tobacco company tells him to do. Breaking a trust which is not backed up by a contract is something anyone technically has a right to do. And just like no one is forcing you to buy any specific movie ticket, no one forces you to re-elect the backstabbing politician. Does that make this sort of behavior is alright?
Lucas, like some corporate-tool-politician, has shat on the heads of the very people who made him what he is. But it's worse than that in his case. You see, only Lucas can legally make the remaining movies in the Star Wars epic because he owns every last bit of Star Wars IP. There are plenty of directors out there who would be willing and able to finish the series well. Unfortunately, their doing so would be illegal. If LOTR had been made badly, I could have tried to make it again, though better. The future Star Wars movies will be made badly, but we have no recourse. We just have to take it, even if they're opportunistic, poll-driven, stroryless product placement ads (which they will be).
The Lucas of today makes me feel dirty for ever having liked Star Wars and for having spent every cent of my childhood allowance on those overpriced action figures. I imagine some people who voted for Nixon felt betrayed in the same way. Fine... I was a tool, a means to an end for some greedy bastard in whom I once had faith. Excuse me if I'm a little mad about that, but maybe being indignant about this sort of thing is a necessary part of self-respect.
It's great to see a site like this. I only have two objections to ff123's tests:
1. He shouldn't decode MP3s with a decoder known for its inaccuracy. If he insists on Winamp, I recomend the mpg123 plugin.
2. Results at 128 kpbs are of absolutely no interest to me. I know everything will sound crappy at this bitrate. I guess it's easier to for ordinary listeners to hear defects at this bitrate, and one can guess that the best sounding codec at 128 will have a leg up for the higher bitrates--so it's not entirely beside the point... . Still, I would never consider encoding at anything below 160, and try to get VBR to average about 190.
I totally agree. I look forward to the release of "canonical" mp3s on newsgroups, encoded correctly with LAME at a reasonable bitrate (like -V1, ~ 180kbps). Actually, with some good lossless compression, you can squeeze and normal CD release to under 200MB, which is practical for posting. That way people can reconstitute the "perfect" cd from their download, minus the stupid copy protection, of course. Then, the re-encoding with some lossy format is left up to them.
Note that I don't recommend this practice for all CDs; only copy-protected ones.... I figure they're asking for it. If this sort of trade is common and well-publicized, it would really give the RIAA some inscentive to quit copy-protecting their CDs alltogether.
I read an article in Der Spiegel (paper version; I doubt it's archived) about a problem the Royal Air Force was having with their flight simulator: the AI that flew the enemy dogfighting planes was too predictable to challenge the best pilots. They hired the people who made the Norns game to evolve a more challenging AI flight script.
Interestingly, if I remember right, it was all machine code, ultimately a series of conditionals about what stick movements to do as a response to certain patterns of instrument readings. They started the evolution by "rewarding" the code which just kept the plane in the air the longest... which, at first, was like 5 seconds. Within a few days of cranking, the code could achieve level flight with ease, and a few weeks later, with more added parameters, it was dogfighting mutated versions of itself. Then they brought in real RAF pilots and the thing just kept learning.
If I remember right, the article ended by saying that by now the AI, which runs totally incomprehensible code, wins most of the dogfights against human pilots, and uses some very interesting maneuvers which it wasn't taught (it wasn't taught anything). The RAF is impressed, and are thinking about a class of dogfighting planes that fly on AI. These things wouldn't mind doing turns at over 10 G's. My guess is that I've read this three or four years ago. Maybe the subsequent developments of the program got classified or maybe it just fizzled, but it sure seems like a promising avenue of research.
Being who I am, I don't get thrilled about the prospects of fancy new AI killing machines, but on the other hand, I want these designs to penetrate video game AI soon!
For example I now play Civ3, which has pretty good, but not great AI. What would prevent developers from taking that AI, defining a "mutation function" by which certain parameters in it can change randomly, and then play different mutations against each other millions of times on a supercomputer? Or, even better, outsource the whole number-crunching part to a project like seti@home, where our machines do the crunching. Can you imagine an AI war between the best routines from Team Slashdot and Team Anand? Sure it's frivolous, but waay more fun to watch than brute force encryption cracking.
I thought I was doing something wrong, but you have to give it almost a minute for the stream to start. Maybe it's from all the Slashdotting.
This is just awesome for two reasons: the BBC online sounds great now. I've been listening to the Real stream for a long while now, and the OGG stream sounds much better. The second reason why this is awesome is because it's a big shot in the arm for OGG. This might be the core of the big snowballing effect that puts OGG on everybody's computer. After that, deciding about what format you stream in should be a no brainer: OGG is free and sounds great and isn't dominated by some nasty US corporate types.
... strapping Gatorade bottles to their heads and urine bags to their waists...
Of course! Urine bags! Why didn't I think of that? But as for Gatorade, I might like something that will not only hyrdate me but also nourish. Really, something intervenous would be best, just as long as it doesn't get in the way of my gaming. Why don't they sell this stuff in game stores?
I do agree with you that the improvement in OGG is evolutionary. What's really valuable about it is that it's free. But enough people have said that...
You might be right that there will be a "next big thing" in media compression, but I have a feeling this won't be an endless parade. The problem is that compression is doomed to improve more and more slowly as it approaches the asymptote of "no wasted bits." It used to be possible that with a revolutionary compression scheme, a media file would strike the human senses as being just as accurate as... plug in a file encoded in some pre-revolutionary standard.... The file in the new standard was, however, only half the size.
We've seen this a few times, most recently with MPEG4. And I am willing to bet anything that we will never see this again in all the future of humanity. There is just a limit to how much you can compress something, and pretty soon, no one will be able to detect the next step towards maximal compressability. They'll say: hey, bandwith is more available and storage cheaper. I'll just stick with the old standard, even if its files are 15% larger for the same quality.
That's just how it's gonna be; I honestly think we will have a "last" comression format, which will be tuned tinkered with in a backwards-complatible way (like the brilliant LAME team is doing to MP3). It won't be displaced, because the insentive just won't be there.
I'm certainly not saything that I think this generation of compression technologies will remain forever; I don't think that. I don't even think the next generation will stand the test of time. However, after that what else would force people to en masse abandon the familiar system and go for something better? It won't be the improvement in quality/bitrate ratio, because that part will just stop improving for all practical intent. So why would people swith?
Well, I'd be very happy if the Son of Ogg were the music compression default in our long, audio futures.
You're right that any perfect ripping software for these disks would be illegal for DMCA reasons. What I was wondering about was not the legality of the ripping, but rather the technical feasibility. Now that CD protection systems are hitting the big time, one might expect crackerz to to code some illegal remedy for us to download (a la DeCSS, except this should be easier, because there are no "codes" to crack).
It appears there's no newz from the crackerz, but I don't exactly have my ear to the ground much; that's why I'm asking here. Have crackerz gotten lazy, or are they just scared of The Man?
So are there ripping programs right now that can deal with some of these copy-protected disks? Not that I would buy one; I'm just trying to gauge how much extra work we'll have to do before get tracks cleanly ripped from copy-protected CDs.
I worry about this because I basically see three scenarios:
1. Complete RIAA victory (we do our ripping by decoding to analog an re-digitizing). This would be an absolute nightmare. Please, people, don't present this as a "solution"--it is cowardly surrender.
2. Music becomes like warez: Perfect digital duplication is feasible only with some cracking skill and/or special equipment (like a CD player with a digital out, souncard with a digital in). Several elite CD cracking groups spring up all over the world, and when they manage to make perfect rips of a CD, they encode "canonical" MP3s, and distribute them through all the regular channels with fairly high quality. This wouldn't be so bad, but I worry that these good rips would be diluted with crappy analog ones, or deliberately defective MP3s seeded by the suits to polute the pool.
3. There is an easy (though illegal-in-DCMA-land) ripping program that restores the sound from the CD in software. Then, things would go back to the way they are now, except MP3 traders would be breaking two laws instead of one. Only if 3 comes to pass will I even consider buying a copy-protected CD. (One observation about the illegality: you're not writing illegal software if the software is intended to make the new disks playable on a computer. I figure that making them CD-ROM playable and making them rippable go hand in hand.)
So my question is, how close are we to 3? How realistic it?
First point about people who complain that some things are getting worse: Look, some things are getting worse. I gave you reasons for why I thought things were getting worse. You can't just dismiss them by your observation. I doubt you think that every aspect our world is as good as/better than it was before. My last post made me realize that I'm pretty convinced our universities have taken a turn for the worse.
That's not to say I want to resist the intrusion of popular culture into academia, or that I somehow don't like pop culture. I'll bet my car that you can't beat me in Simpsons trivia. And of course you need to study popular culture in media and communications classes. I also understand you can learn a lot by analyzing popular culture with academic care. In the early 90's my girlfriend published the first academic paper about Hillary Clinton jokes. It was a serious study and it was good.
Philosophy is not cultural studies, however. It is the study of reasoned argument about fundamental questions. Of course, one sometimes sees glimmers of reasoned argument about fundamental questions in popular culture, and the Simpsons has more such glimmers than most sitcoms. Still, there is just as much/little philosophical content as there is fundamental physics content. I hope you would agree that "Physics of the Simpsons" should not make a good GE course at a university that hopes all its students learn physics basics. While we're at it, let's have "Civil Engineering of The Simpsons," or how about "Accounting of The Simpsons." I guess I see "Philosophy of the Simpsons" as being equally misguided. If it doesn't seem that way to you, that might be because you never read a book by Kant or Quine.
You say I was "mistakenly implying that anyone is going to throw out Descartes 101 for Barney and Moe" but later go on to say "they are important cultural artifacts at least as worthy of study as your Kant and Nietzche." So it seems you would be comfortable with replacing the greats with pop shows, and that's exactly what I'm not comfortable with.
I worry that what underlies the attitude that "The Philosophy of The Simpsons" makes a fitting course for a university is the belief that philosophy courses aren't really about anything anyway, so we might as well dress them up with The Simpsons. This attitude dissolves very quickly when one reads a book by Hume or Russell, but too few people bother to do so.
I am a Simpsons fan to the point of having most of the 270+ shows memorized verbatim. I also teach philosophy at a US university. Still, I absolutely hate this idea.
More clearly than anything, it represents a real crisis in North American universities today: people think of them as valuable only insofar as they provide job training and a career boost. Departments like History, English, Religion and Philosophy once used to put undergraduates through serious courses that required them to struggle through real scholarship. They resented it at first, but came away with a substantial understanding of our intellectual roots, and of certain timeless questions, along with history's most elligible answers to those questions.
Fast forward to now, and you'll see core departments struggling to attract students in universities that are increasingly asking the departments to compete with one another for students and funding. The cheapest way to win that competition is not to hire an outstanding faculty, provide your students with individual attention, and make demanding courses which require lots of writing. The cheapest way is to pack a huge lecture hall using provocative course titles. Unfortunately, the students don't complain when the course itself is a half-baked piece of crap, designed primarily to stroke the ego of an aging professor trying to overcome his insecurity that he might no longer be "with it." They don't complain when the exams are on bubble sheets; "electronic grading" is, according to their insecure professor, the new, hip thing. The reason why they don't complain is because they don't know what they're missing. Once one department at a university resorts to this strategy, the other departments must respond in kind. It doesn't take long for things to get all fucked up. I've seen this first hand.
Please, students: if you actually want to learn something in college, do your research on a course before enrolling. Sadly, many of your options today are courses that will amuse you, but leave you just as ignorant as you were when the course began. One warning sign that you might be in for mere amusement is: an overly up-to-date or hip course title and topic.
When I was an undergraduate getting my degree in physics, my most important courses were in philosophy. I had to know Kant and Quine and Nietzche inside out, and there was nothing more intellectually rewarding than that. If you take philosophy classes, take some real ones. Only after that should you consider doing something philosophically frivolous like the Philosophy of the Simpsons.
But by all means, watch the Simpsons! It's about to start in 15 minutes!
Spork
Poor DiVX. I fear for its future. If this goes through, DiVX is all washed up. You see, I'm a fan of trading videos with like-minded folks over the net. Right now, the defacto format for online video trading is DiVX. It's biggest competition is VCD-Mpeg, a much less efficient format. Why is it even around? Because many people like to burn their traded files to CD and watch them on their living room DVD player. They're prepared to take the hit in quality and efficiency for that advantage. Now add WMV to the mix: Compression as good as DiVX (or close)... AND you can play it on the living room player. You can be sure there will be many requests on newsgroups like "hey, can you post that pr0n/TV show/movie in WMV?" When you have the quality of DiVX and the convenience of VCD, the only reason to avoid Microsoft's format will be one of principle. How long should we suppose that will hold up?
The absolutely obvious solution to all this is to lure a DVD manufacturer to make a player that can read DiVX. Technically, it would even be legal with DiVX4. Mark my words: if this doesn't happen, the "best" movie trading group in two years will be alt.binaries.movies.wmv. I don't want this kind of future, but I don't see how to prevent it.
Possible salvation: some sane soul makes a linux-based living room DVD player that doesn't have a DVD decode chip but instead a bona fide CPU (Duron? Crusoe?) to do decoding. It also has an ethernet port and can play movies stored anywhere on the home network, and can upload and install new codecs at will--including, of course, DiVX. People, we have the technology to do this now. Please! Please! Can't you hack an X-Box into one of these things? In any case, I promise you I'll buy the first such player that costs US$500 or less.
I'll buy it when it has an S-video output and can play DiVX (and mpeg) movies from my computer. 100MPs Ethernet should be fast enough to move data faster than you can play. Well, I guess DiVX isn't a real streaming format... would that present a problem? Anyway, I think devices like this are the future of living room entertainment; the next (obvious) step is video.
Well, wait a minute: If I found that someone was archiving my IRC postings without my permission and later published them, I'd think that some code of conduct was violated. The same goes for my emails (even the unencrypted ones that I know to be interceptible and third-party archivable).
The analogy of Usenet postings to a "public domain program I released on the net" is flawed. The whole point is that with the latter, you give explicit permission to cite/redistribute. When you don't give that permission I don't have the right to modify/redistribute your program, even if you did post it on the internet. Because the vast majority of usenet postings do not come with an explicit permission to redistribute, I wouldn't think it crazy if they were treated as private communications (which the author does "own"). Not that I think they should be; in my post I was just wondering about whether there is any clear precedent in how to treat this sort of thing.
Good, you're right about solar cells for home/ individual use, but they're just not practical for large-scale powerplants like this one tries to be. Just the task of regularly cleaning solar cells that generate 200MW in an arid desert is nothing to scoff at.
I'm no tech historian, but I have a feeling that History of 20th Century Information Technology will be a big growth field in the humanities. And if in 2020 I had to write a book on, say, the rise and fall of Microsoft, I would love to be able to read all of the insightful comments on Slashdot (especially those by a certain Dr. Spork). So here's my question: Has everything on Slashdot been archived? Who decides what happens to it?
Another question, while we're at it: It's inevitable that historians will include sometimes extended citations from Google's usenet archives in books they sell (much like Katz did for/.). Is it right that Usenet authors will contribute their ideas without their consent and without compensation from those who profit from their work? Do historians know any precedent in cases like this? I mean, I know that personal correspondence is often quoted by historians, but always after the author is dead (or explicitly gives persmission). I know usenet is not like personal correspondence, but it's not exactly like publishing, either. I'm not a social scientist, so I don't know what protocol applies here, but I'd love to hear about this from someone who does know.
Quite right, but even in this limited endeavor, it seems to me that much of his evidence was pretty equivocal. In any case, he's right about the lack of questioning behind ESR's naive thesis, and this does advance the debate. I'd like to see a response in the same style, footnotes and all.
Yes, this is not Harry Potter. It's a light but serious academic piece. So you might actually need a well-rounded education before everything about it makes sense to you, but it's not the author's fault you don't have one.
If I can't read a certain piece of code and accuse the author for the mistake of writing something which is incomprehensible to me, I'm the idiot; not him.
So here you are, too poorly educated to make sense of perfectly understandable expressions used in the article. You're the idiot, not him.
I think this article makes very easy reading--maybe because I'm an academic too. There is a tradition on Slashdot that people who reveal their pathetic ignorance of technical matters get flamed, and we all think they had it coming. In the interest of fairness, we should extend that privilidge to people who reveal their pathetic ignorance of the methods and language in social sciences.
You're right about the maintenance costs. This thing will have many turbines that will eventually need replacing. Probably not off-the-shelf parts, either.
In California, where we put up hundreds of wind generators, a very large fraction of them are idle because they broke and are very expensive to fix. I expect the same problem for this thing. I only wish there were a practical system for generating solar power without moving parts, something you pay for once and use forever. Sigh...
Insightful! (sorry, I burn through my mod points so fast...). I think it's time we all say: Screw Dell! Dell makes gazillions of dollars without giving anything back to the community. At least IBM, Apple, HP and even Compaq have labs where they do real research where they push the envelope. OK, in the case of Compaq it may be more correct to say "had"...
Dell is a parasite on the computer industry. Even Microsoft is a million times more innovative.
Interesting--except the "64-bit 21264E Compaq Alpha" article is from November of last year. Something got in the way since then... Damn Intel! At least AMD is not laying down without a fight. Bless them! As far as I'm concerned, we're all quite justified in telling our wives and/or financal advisors that it's our patriotic duty to buy the fanciest AMD chips available, as often as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, Lucas is breaking no law in becoming a total whore and letting some marketing committe script his movies. In the same way, a politician breaks no laws if he sells out his principles and does exactly what some tobacco company tells him to do. Breaking a trust which is not backed up by a contract is something anyone technically has a right to do. And just like no one is forcing you to buy any specific movie ticket, no one forces you to re-elect the backstabbing politician. Does that make this sort of behavior is alright?
Lucas, like some corporate-tool-politician, has shat on the heads of the very people who made him what he is. But it's worse than that in his case. You see, only Lucas can legally make the remaining movies in the Star Wars epic because he owns every last bit of Star Wars IP. There are plenty of directors out there who would be willing and able to finish the series well. Unfortunately, their doing so would be illegal. If LOTR had been made badly, I could have tried to make it again, though better. The future Star Wars movies will be made badly, but we have no recourse. We just have to take it, even if they're opportunistic, poll-driven, stroryless product placement ads (which they will be).
The Lucas of today makes me feel dirty for ever having liked Star Wars and for having spent every cent of my childhood allowance on those overpriced action figures. I imagine some people who voted for Nixon felt betrayed in the same way. Fine... I was a tool, a means to an end for some greedy bastard in whom I once had faith. Excuse me if I'm a little mad about that, but maybe being indignant about this sort of thing is a necessary part of self-respect.
1. He shouldn't decode MP3s with a decoder known for its inaccuracy. If he insists on Winamp, I recomend the mpg123 plugin.
2. Results at 128 kpbs are of absolutely no interest to me. I know everything will sound crappy at this bitrate. I guess it's easier to for ordinary listeners to hear defects at this bitrate, and one can guess that the best sounding codec at 128 will have a leg up for the higher bitrates--so it's not entirely beside the point... . Still, I would never consider encoding at anything below 160, and try to get VBR to average about 190.
Note that I don't recommend this practice for all CDs; only copy-protected ones.... I figure they're asking for it. If this sort of trade is common and well-publicized, it would really give the RIAA some inscentive to quit copy-protecting their CDs alltogether.
Interestingly, if I remember right, it was all machine code, ultimately a series of conditionals about what stick movements to do as a response to certain patterns of instrument readings. They started the evolution by "rewarding" the code which just kept the plane in the air the longest... which, at first, was like 5 seconds. Within a few days of cranking, the code could achieve level flight with ease, and a few weeks later, with more added parameters, it was dogfighting mutated versions of itself. Then they brought in real RAF pilots and the thing just kept learning.
If I remember right, the article ended by saying that by now the AI, which runs totally incomprehensible code, wins most of the dogfights against human pilots, and uses some very interesting maneuvers which it wasn't taught (it wasn't taught anything). The RAF is impressed, and are thinking about a class of dogfighting planes that fly on AI. These things wouldn't mind doing turns at over 10 G's. My guess is that I've read this three or four years ago. Maybe the subsequent developments of the program got classified or maybe it just fizzled, but it sure seems like a promising avenue of research.
Being who I am, I don't get thrilled about the prospects of fancy new AI killing machines, but on the other hand, I want these designs to penetrate video game AI soon! For example I now play Civ3, which has pretty good, but not great AI. What would prevent developers from taking that AI, defining a "mutation function" by which certain parameters in it can change randomly, and then play different mutations against each other millions of times on a supercomputer? Or, even better, outsource the whole number-crunching part to a project like seti@home, where our machines do the crunching. Can you imagine an AI war between the best routines from Team Slashdot and Team Anand? Sure it's frivolous, but waay more fun to watch than brute force encryption cracking.
This is just awesome for two reasons: the BBC online sounds great now. I've been listening to the Real stream for a long while now, and the OGG stream sounds much better. The second reason why this is awesome is because it's a big shot in the arm for OGG. This might be the core of the big snowballing effect that puts OGG on everybody's computer. After that, deciding about what format you stream in should be a no brainer: OGG is free and sounds great and isn't dominated by some nasty US corporate types.
Of course! Urine bags! Why didn't I think of that? But as for Gatorade, I might like something that will not only hyrdate me but also nourish. Really, something intervenous would be best, just as long as it doesn't get in the way of my gaming. Why don't they sell this stuff in game stores?
You might be right that there will be a "next big thing" in media compression, but I have a feeling this won't be an endless parade. The problem is that compression is doomed to improve more and more slowly as it approaches the asymptote of "no wasted bits." It used to be possible that with a revolutionary compression scheme, a media file would strike the human senses as being just as accurate as ... plug in a file encoded in some pre-revolutionary standard .... The file in the new standard was, however, only half the size.
We've seen this a few times, most recently with MPEG4. And I am willing to bet anything that we will never see this again in all the future of humanity. There is just a limit to how much you can compress something, and pretty soon, no one will be able to detect the next step towards maximal compressability. They'll say: hey, bandwith is more available and storage cheaper. I'll just stick with the old standard, even if its files are 15% larger for the same quality.
That's just how it's gonna be; I honestly think we will have a "last" comression format, which will be tuned tinkered with in a backwards-complatible way (like the brilliant LAME team is doing to MP3). It won't be displaced, because the insentive just won't be there.
I'm certainly not saything that I think this generation of compression technologies will remain forever; I don't think that. I don't even think the next generation will stand the test of time. However, after that what else would force people to en masse abandon the familiar system and go for something better? It won't be the improvement in quality/bitrate ratio, because that part will just stop improving for all practical intent. So why would people swith?
Well, I'd be very happy if the Son of Ogg were the music compression default in our long, audio futures.
It appears there's no newz from the crackerz, but I don't exactly have my ear to the ground much; that's why I'm asking here. Have crackerz gotten lazy, or are they just scared of The Man?
I worry about this because I basically see three scenarios:
1. Complete RIAA victory (we do our ripping by decoding to analog an re-digitizing). This would be an absolute nightmare. Please, people, don't present this as a "solution"--it is cowardly surrender.
2. Music becomes like warez: Perfect digital duplication is feasible only with some cracking skill and/or special equipment (like a CD player with a digital out, souncard with a digital in). Several elite CD cracking groups spring up all over the world, and when they manage to make perfect rips of a CD, they encode "canonical" MP3s, and distribute them through all the regular channels with fairly high quality. This wouldn't be so bad, but I worry that these good rips would be diluted with crappy analog ones, or deliberately defective MP3s seeded by the suits to polute the pool.
3. There is an easy (though illegal-in-DCMA-land) ripping program that restores the sound from the CD in software. Then, things would go back to the way they are now, except MP3 traders would be breaking two laws instead of one. Only if 3 comes to pass will I even consider buying a copy-protected CD. (One observation about the illegality: you're not writing illegal software if the software is intended to make the new disks playable on a computer. I figure that making them CD-ROM playable and making them rippable go hand in hand.)
So my question is, how close are we to 3? How realistic it?
First point about people who complain that some things are getting worse: Look, some things are getting worse. I gave you reasons for why I thought things were getting worse. You can't just dismiss them by your observation. I doubt you think that every aspect our world is as good as/better than it was before. My last post made me realize that I'm pretty convinced our universities have taken a turn for the worse.
That's not to say I want to resist the intrusion of popular culture into academia, or that I somehow don't like pop culture. I'll bet my car that you can't beat me in Simpsons trivia. And of course you need to study popular culture in media and communications classes. I also understand you can learn a lot by analyzing popular culture with academic care. In the early 90's my girlfriend published the first academic paper about Hillary Clinton jokes. It was a serious study and it was good.
Philosophy is not cultural studies, however. It is the study of reasoned argument about fundamental questions. Of course, one sometimes sees glimmers of reasoned argument about fundamental questions in popular culture, and the Simpsons has more such glimmers than most sitcoms. Still, there is just as much/little philosophical content as there is fundamental physics content. I hope you would agree that "Physics of the Simpsons" should not make a good GE course at a university that hopes all its students learn physics basics. While we're at it, let's have "Civil Engineering of The Simpsons," or how about "Accounting of The Simpsons." I guess I see "Philosophy of the Simpsons" as being equally misguided. If it doesn't seem that way to you, that might be because you never read a book by Kant or Quine.
You say I was "mistakenly implying that anyone is going to throw out Descartes 101 for Barney and Moe" but later go on to say "they are important cultural artifacts at least as worthy of study as your Kant and Nietzche." So it seems you would be comfortable with replacing the greats with pop shows, and that's exactly what I'm not comfortable with.
I worry that what underlies the attitude that "The Philosophy of The Simpsons" makes a fitting course for a university is the belief that philosophy courses aren't really about anything anyway, so we might as well dress them up with The Simpsons. This attitude dissolves very quickly when one reads a book by Hume or Russell, but too few people bother to do so.
You must have missed last year's Simpsons Safari if you think the previous Simpsons was lame. I thought it started kinda promising.
More clearly than anything, it represents a real crisis in North American universities today: people think of them as valuable only insofar as they provide job training and a career boost. Departments like History, English, Religion and Philosophy once used to put undergraduates through serious courses that required them to struggle through real scholarship. They resented it at first, but came away with a substantial understanding of our intellectual roots, and of certain timeless questions, along with history's most elligible answers to those questions.
Fast forward to now, and you'll see core departments struggling to attract students in universities that are increasingly asking the departments to compete with one another for students and funding. The cheapest way to win that competition is not to hire an outstanding faculty, provide your students with individual attention, and make demanding courses which require lots of writing. The cheapest way is to pack a huge lecture hall using provocative course titles. Unfortunately, the students don't complain when the course itself is a half-baked piece of crap, designed primarily to stroke the ego of an aging professor trying to overcome his insecurity that he might no longer be "with it." They don't complain when the exams are on bubble sheets; "electronic grading" is, according to their insecure professor, the new, hip thing. The reason why they don't complain is because they don't know what they're missing. Once one department at a university resorts to this strategy, the other departments must respond in kind. It doesn't take long for things to get all fucked up. I've seen this first hand.
Please, students: if you actually want to learn something in college, do your research on a course before enrolling. Sadly, many of your options today are courses that will amuse you, but leave you just as ignorant as you were when the course began. One warning sign that you might be in for mere amusement is: an overly up-to-date or hip course title and topic.
When I was an undergraduate getting my degree in physics, my most important courses were in philosophy. I had to know Kant and Quine and Nietzche inside out, and there was nothing more intellectually rewarding than that. If you take philosophy classes, take some real ones. Only after that should you consider doing something philosophically frivolous like the Philosophy of the Simpsons.
But by all means, watch the Simpsons! It's about to start in 15 minutes! Spork
The absolutely obvious solution to all this is to lure a DVD manufacturer to make a player that can read DiVX. Technically, it would even be legal with DiVX4. Mark my words: if this doesn't happen, the "best" movie trading group in two years will be alt.binaries.movies.wmv. I don't want this kind of future, but I don't see how to prevent it.
Possible salvation: some sane soul makes a linux-based living room DVD player that doesn't have a DVD decode chip but instead a bona fide CPU (Duron? Crusoe?) to do decoding. It also has an ethernet port and can play movies stored anywhere on the home network, and can upload and install new codecs at will--including, of course, DiVX. People, we have the technology to do this now. Please! Please! Can't you hack an X-Box into one of these things? In any case, I promise you I'll buy the first such player that costs US$500 or less.
I'll buy it when it has an S-video output and can play DiVX (and mpeg) movies from my computer. 100MPs Ethernet should be fast enough to move data faster than you can play. Well, I guess DiVX isn't a real streaming format... would that present a problem? Anyway, I think devices like this are the future of living room entertainment; the next (obvious) step is video.
The analogy of Usenet postings to a "public domain program I released on the net" is flawed. The whole point is that with the latter, you give explicit permission to cite/redistribute. When you don't give that permission I don't have the right to modify/redistribute your program, even if you did post it on the internet. Because the vast majority of usenet postings do not come with an explicit permission to redistribute, I wouldn't think it crazy if they were treated as private communications (which the author does "own"). Not that I think they should be; in my post I was just wondering about whether there is any clear precedent in how to treat this sort of thing.
Good, you're right about solar cells for home/ individual use, but they're just not practical for large-scale powerplants like this one tries to be. Just the task of regularly cleaning solar cells that generate 200MW in an arid desert is nothing to scoff at.
Another question, while we're at it: It's inevitable that historians will include sometimes extended citations from Google's usenet archives in books they sell (much like Katz did for /.). Is it right that Usenet authors will contribute their ideas without their consent and without compensation from those who profit from their work? Do historians know any precedent in cases like this? I mean, I know that personal correspondence is often quoted by historians, but always after the author is dead (or explicitly gives persmission). I know usenet is not like personal correspondence, but it's not exactly like publishing, either. I'm not a social scientist, so I don't know what protocol applies here, but I'd love to hear about this from someone who does know.
Quite right, but even in this limited endeavor, it seems to me that much of his evidence was pretty equivocal. In any case, he's right about the lack of questioning behind ESR's naive thesis, and this does advance the debate. I'd like to see a response in the same style, footnotes and all.
Yes, this is not Harry Potter. It's a light but serious academic piece. So you might actually need a well-rounded education before everything about it makes sense to you, but it's not the author's fault you don't have one.
So here you are, too poorly educated to make sense of perfectly understandable expressions used in the article. You're the idiot, not him.
I think this article makes very easy reading--maybe because I'm an academic too. There is a tradition on Slashdot that people who reveal their pathetic ignorance of technical matters get flamed, and we all think they had it coming. In the interest of fairness, we should extend that privilidge to people who reveal their pathetic ignorance of the methods and language in social sciences.
Do you live under a rock? You've never heard of Shumpeter?
In California, where we put up hundreds of wind generators, a very large fraction of them are idle because they broke and are very expensive to fix. I expect the same problem for this thing. I only wish there were a practical system for generating solar power without moving parts, something you pay for once and use forever. Sigh...
Dell is a parasite on the computer industry. Even Microsoft is a million times more innovative.
Interesting--except the "64-bit 21264E Compaq Alpha" article is from November of last year. Something got in the way since then... Damn Intel! At least AMD is not laying down without a fight. Bless them! As far as I'm concerned, we're all quite justified in telling our wives and/or financal advisors that it's our patriotic duty to buy the fanciest AMD chips available, as often as possible.