Technology IS neutral is has no biases to be bloody anything. At its most fundamental, are you suggesting that rocks are evil because people can get hit over the head with them?
What I'm suggesting is that this is a grossly over-simplified view of technology.
To take guns as an example, the introduction of guns has a number of interesting effects. A particular individual might be interested in owning a gun because of their "equalizing" effect,
they tend to neutralize physical strength as deciding factor in a fight. But on the other hand, they also make it really easy to do a lot
of damage by accident, they exaggerate the effects
of a momentary impulse. This is not to say that
you should never choose to own a gun, the point is that you had *better* understand this effect and
think about how you're going to compensate for it.
If technology in general were merely "neutral",
there would be no reason to have any interest in it. The hope behind any new technical development
is that it will be biased toward freedom and prosperity.
I point out we can also build houses and grind corn with them...both offically Good TM. Doesn't this make rocks neutral? See that's why we say tools are neutral...
I'm of the opinion that you like the "tools are neutral" doctrine, because it makes it simple to think about things, even though it doesn't hold up under closer examination.
But consider:
Distilled alcohol
Slot machines
Television
Cell phones
The attitude "Awww, you just need to use 'em right! You can't blame the tool if people are
weak, lazy, or stupid!" is nutty. People genuinely
*are* flawed creatures, and some technologies play
into those flaws.
A case in point: proprietary data formats that
implement some whizzy, pretty feature -- this
plays on human short-sightedness.
"Flash is a non-standard, proprietary data format" er no it isn't, flash SWF is an open [openswf.org] STANDARD data format.
There's room for argument here. My take is that
if it's not endorsed by the w3.org, you shouldn't
be using the protocol on the web. It's nice that
they published the specs -- at one point -- but it
doesn't make it a "STANDARD" technology. One company is still in control of it. Compare "source code under glass" licenses to real open source. (Just using the word "open" doesn't make it an open standard.)
Flash player is a free proprietary player for this open standard. Flash MX 2004 is a Proprietary piece of software that produces SWF files.
And these pieces of proprietary software implement the *real* standard, don't they? If Macromedia, shall we say, drifts away from what they published in 1998, someone making a competing player isn't going to be able to say "Hey, that ain't what it
says on openswf!" and expect that to fly are they?
I submit that this is much closer to the state of affairs with Microsoft Word, than it is with, for example, with Microsoft Internet Explorer. (Gee,
what's the *difference* between those two cases...
why couldn't Microsoft pull a job like Word on the web?
Hm...)
"*completely* contrary to every principle behind the design of the internet"
You really have no clue about this whole internet business at all do you? Who exactly do you think designed it, and for what purpose?... (I'll give you a clue, if you can fit it in a post your model is too simplistic.)
Briefly: DARPA/Academic collaborations in the early 70s, with NSF funding kicking in a little
later. Then there was lots of wrangling between DARPA trying to maintain control and groups at places like SRI trying to play a bigger role. The RFC
process started informally, and gradually took on
weight. TCP/IP and later DNS weren't adopted by
Arpa until the early 80s, and it took some work
to get ISO to adopt
To damn a Tool because some people use it ineptly is like banning
pencils because the guy across the street draws bad stick figure
cartoons.
One more time: Technology is not neutral. All real world
technologies have biases that you need to be aware of, if
you're going to try and use them.
If a tool is consistently mis-used, it's at least worth
considering that this may be a problem with the tool; there
maybe traps built-in to trying to use it.
But all of this is only part of the story. On top of this
is the problem that Flash is a non-standard, proprietary
data format.
This is *completely* contrary to every principle behind the
design of the internet. Get a clue and just say "no" to vendor lock-in.
Then you know what? DON'T GO TO THOSE FUCKING SITES, MORON.
At the *moment* I have a choice about not going to those
sites, because only exceedingly stupidly run sites think
it's a good idea to make Flash a key component.
If we stop bitching about it, there's a danger that
knuckle-dragging "designers" will lock up the web
behind a pretty, whizzy, layer of Flash.
Who the
FUCK do you think you are to determine what does and does not belong
on the web?
No, *I* don't determine what belongs on the web, the w3.org does.
There's a reason why open standards are an important issue.
But it has to do with funny little things abstractions like "freedom"
that you understand so much more deeply than we do.
You sound like a disgruntled old man who hates change.
And you sound like a silly little kid without a clue as to
what really matters.
The internet evolves. Deal with it.
Actually, the internet just might stop evolving, if it
"evolves" away from open standards. As it stands, I do
try and "deal with it"... at the moment I do this by sending
email to flash sites explaining why I refuse to install
flash, and hence will not be looking at their site.
Now that is a great first step. Now once we get Dreamweaver, I can
deploy Linux to all of our developers. Let's face it guys, Dreamweaver
pays for itself (depending on usage, and in my case) after about 3
weeks. Mozilla composer and Quanta pretty much suck. Composer can't
support frames, and Quanta, well, do I really need to go there??
Wow. Someone who still thinks that frames are a good idea.
(Meanwhile, over in engineering they call it "Nightmareweaver".)
In your haste to rant about how much you hate everyone else on then
Intarweb, you've missed or ignored a pretty major point: Flash is just
a tool.
As usual when someone trots out the "just a tool" line,
you've completely missed the actual point. In general:
technology is never neutral. All real technologies have
biases that you need to be aware of.
Now, in specific: proprietary, non-standard data formats
are a tool for *vendor lock-in*. They have no place on the
goddamn *internet*, which was built on top of open standards
and could not possibly exist without them. Buying in to a
proprietary format just because you wanna see the pretty pictures
is incredibly, astoundingly short-sighted.
What's really amazing is that I need to say this on goddamn
slashdot. It's not like you've ever never heard this shit
before, you just seem to be incapable of applying it to
a real world case.
As a result of this (and this "last measure" especially) I decided to
abandon windows altogether and become another convert to *nix. So I
think you can forgive me for not celebrating the porting of this
pesterware to Linux, nor will I be letting it anywhere near my linux
box. Regular banner ads are annoying enough thank you.
Yup. That's about the size of it.
A tip for my fellow Flash haters: delete mozilla's null plugin.
Then it'll stop bugging you about downloading Flash.
(Damn, I guess I won't get to see the latest movie sites.
Fortunately I don't care about them. Or the latest movies either.)
First of all, relax.
Second of all, you're full of shit, it's not your computer, it's their
content, in some cases artwork, and they can decide how they want it
viewed/experianced.
I think you speak more wisely than you know.
When it is their content, it is no longer your computer.
Here's a thought: why doesn't Macromedia turn
"flash" into a w3.org standard? Then they wouldn't
*have* to port their player to different platforms,
there would be an open source player that you
could port to whatever platform you were
interested in.
Of course, it could be I'm missing the point
here, and that Flash needs to be a proprietary
format for it's business model to work.
(Pretend for a minute that Flash was the bright
idea of some other company that begins with an
"M"... how would you feel about it?)
java/perl has a 20 *times* performance hit?
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 1
I'm suprised that there isn't more commentary
on this point:
I can't for the life of me see why people object to the 20% performance hit a microkernel might give you when they program in languages like Java and Perl where you often get a factor 20x performance hit.
A 20x (that's *times*, not *percent*) performance
hit? Compared to what?
I can't speak for Java, but I would be blown away
if you saw even a 20 percent performance hit for
perl compared to C.
As to why someone would care more about kernel
performance than language performance... let's think about that for a minute... because if you
need more performance it's easier to switch to a different language than to change operating systems?
In any case, I'm agnostic on the micro-kernel vs monolithic kernel business. It could be that when
a typical machine has a hundered processors running at a gigahertz each, mico-kernels will make a lot of sense.
The book which launched me to new heights was
Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
-- Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond.
Okay... well, for the uninitiated, maybe I should
explain that this is a religious issue of sorts among
cycle freaks. The "Effective Cycling" crowd (led by John
Forrester of MIT) are rather dogmatic in their
insistence that bikes should simply behave like car
traffic at all times. They're strongly biased against
the idea of "bike lanes", because they might give the
impression that bikes aren't *allowed* anywhere else.
Yes, it's only fair to say that there's a lot of
disagreement on the subject of bike lanes (which I was
trying to avoid by referring to "bike paths" that are
separated from the street, which in general seem to have
heavier evidence against them).
Ah, well that's probably true. On the other hand, by all
accounts places like Amsterdam do fine with them. I imagine
that like a lot of things, it depends on what the populace
at large is used to. In the US, if you tried to, say, put
bike lanes between the sidewalk and the parked cars, that'd
turn every intersection into a death trap: you'd never
convince the right turners in cars to watch out for the bikes.
On the other hand, I don't think it's fair to characterize
Forrester's position as religious dogma, or to say that his
only argument is one of appearances--they present more
practical arguments which also need to be dealt with in any
serious discussion of the issue.
Well, I have to say that when the "chainguard" crew dropped in
on the San Francisco bike lists, they struck me as pretty dogmatic.
This is not to say that they don't have some interesting
points -- Forrester knows a hell of a lot about riding
bikes -- but that they seem to be stuck in the same kind of
mode that you'll find with Computer Science geeks: they
think they can cover all real world problems by rigorous
application of one simple principle.
Anyway, sure, their arguments need to be dealt with... thats
why I posted those links.
Where did you manage to see the Japanese version? I've heard of it playing conventions and possibly
Japanese community theatres, but never of a general release.
It was at the RedVic, a small movie theater in San Francisco on the upper Haight.
The soundtrack to the original G is heavy on the drums and
contrabass wail of the creature. On that question you are
undoubtedly correct. I'm very nearly certain, though, that
the Ifukube "Frigate March" theme used in all the later
pictures does occur as the JDF troops advance to meet the
creature.
Okay, I just listened through the CD "The Best of Godzilla
1954-1975", and I see that part of the trouble is my memory,
but part of it is just that I'm getting the names of the
pieces wrong.
There's some symphonic music used in the original version of
Godzilla, but it's a pretty rapid, monotonous piece, almost
like a military march (and I can believe that it's called
"Frigate March", though that's not mentioned on the notes
for this CD. It goes something like:
Da da da, Da da da, dundadada da da dah...
The music that I for some reason imprinted on as "The
Godzilla Theme" doesn't come up on this CD until the main
titled for "Ghidorah the 3-headed Monster" [1] released in 1964.
It's also by Akira Ifukube. It's a slow, ominous piece,
with a fill in the middle that goes something like:
Raa daa da daaaah, Raa daa da daaaah, Raa daa du daah dun
dah da...
(I bet that makes it all clear.)
I note that this same melody recurrs with more embellishment
in "Destroy All Monsters" (1968) as part of "Showdown on Mt. Fuji".
And unless I'm totally out to lunch, it's also use pretty
prominently in some major destruction scenes in the US
release of "Godzilla"... I would need to see it again to check.
[1] The Ghidorah movie's original japanese title was apparently
something like "The Greatest Giant Monster Battle on Earth".
Ghidorah was always my pick for coolest monster of the
Godzilla pantheon. Three heads, wings, *two* tails,
breathes fire: Ghidorah's got everything.
"1. They are quite easily the most efficient means of transport there is. By a long way."
so you are telling my it's more effecient to put my too young children, members of there soccor team, myself, and some groceries on a bycycles then a car? I think not.
Sit down by the side of the highway some time,
and count the number of single occupancy vehicles vs the number of soccer teams on the road. There
are reasons we're talking about single commuters.
"2. I have a recumbent bicycle. Actually a Pashley PDQ based on the Counterpoint design. Sunbed and exercise bike in one."
I suspect the reason for your post was to 'show off' your expensive toy.
And what are you showing off?
"3. Cycling keeps you healthy." and greatly increase your chance of death via motorist.
"4. It moves you from A to B rapidly, quietly and with minimum environmental impact. Soon after crude is $100 per barrel, cyclists will reclaim their rightful place at the top of the roaduser hierarchy. Grr."
really? What about all the cars that have to wait for a cyclist to pass? did you calculate the cost to the enviroment for every car that has to sit on the raod linger becasue of some slow cycylist?
A lot of you car guys have got this deep seated psychological problem with having a bike in front of you for a couple of minutes... it's really peculiar. Cars get in each other's way far more
often than cyclists do. If you wanted to drive somewhere more easily, you should be trying to figure out how to get everyone else
to ride bikes.
"5. I have a quasi-religious belief that in The Future, everyone will wear matching co-ordinates, and will almost certainly travel by bicycle."
aparently in your futures there are no families, or bad weather, and somehow the government continues to put up roads, even though there is no gas toep-A.
As long as we're doing blue sky theorizing about the future of bike riding in the west, we might
speculate about future technologies like bike trailers, and public transit with bike racks.
But the weather, that's a killer argument that's hard to get around. It helps explain why Los
Angeles is legendary for being a bike friendly city.
(One reason you don't hear bike freaks talk about problems with bad weather is that *real* bike freaks don't think there is any such thing...)
So, while your being a 'geek' on the road, I will already be at work, doing actual geek things. that means my geek time per day is higher then yours.
I win.
A typical commute for me is a 20 minute ride to the train station, followed by a 45 minute train
ride. I could indeed (on good days, barring traffic jams) drive this distance faster, maybe in
40 minutes or so total. But then, I *always* get some exercise in (there's no "damn, I really meant to go to the gym tonight" problem); and instead of trying to find something besides Rush Limbaugh to listen to on the radio, I'm reading O'Reilley books (and many of my fellow commuters are working on their laptops). Which lifestyle is *really* more time efficient?
Does the book have any info on whether cycling in traffic is actually detrimental to your health or not? I honestly want to ride to work, but unless someone has come up with a small oxygen tank and mask I think the damage to my lungs is greater than the benefits of the exercise. Does anyone who's read the book know if there's anything about this in the book?
My understanding is that the people inside of cars
have it even worse than the cyclists. There was a study several years back that showed that cars ride in a tunnel of pollution.
If you look at the issues, I think you'll find that far from being "dangerous" the health benefits of cycling are huge, big enough to overwhelm any other worries, like the risks of collisions (which probably aren't as high as you think they
are anyway). Do some web searches, you'll turn
up things like this.
Separated "bike paths" tend to have the same problems. The
road really is where you want to be--and as someone who has
shared the road with cars on daily commutes, I've found it
works darned well in practice too. Just think of yourself as
any other slow-moving vehicle (like a tractor (well, except
when you have a sufficiently steep downhill...)) and it all
works out
Okay... well, for the uninitiated, maybe I should explain
that this is a religious issue of sorts among cycle freaks.
The "Effective Cycling" crowd (led by John Forrester of
MIT) are rather dogmatic in their insistence that bikes
should simply behave like car traffic at all times.
They're strongly biased against the idea of "bike lanes",
because they might give the impression that bikes aren't
*allowed* anywhere else.
The rest of us recognize that they've got a lot of good
points, but that the situation isn't as simple as they
make it out. The expert cyclist *might* have no need for bike
lanes, but beginning cyclists love them, and it's pretty
clear that bike lanes help a lot to get people out on bikes
(e.g. there've been cases in San Francisco where sticking in a
bike lane on a street doubled the bike traffic). Having
more bikes on the road gets the car drivers used to seeing
bikes out there, and that makes it safer even for the expert riders,
and helps encourage even more beginning cyclists.
Also, I have to say that while you might call me an "expert"
rider I *still* like having bike lanes. They're not a panacea:
you need to understand you have to ride on the *left* side
of the lane to stay out of reach of car doors; you need to
watch out for right turners cutting you off; and you need to
know how to "ride like a car" when you're passing a
double-parked idiot, or heading off into a zone where the city
planners in their infinite wisdom have not yet seen fit to
extend the bike lanes... But even with all those caveats, I
like having a zone of relative safety that I can
retreat to and relax.
Consider this guy's argument:
He makes the point that wide lanes encourage a larger *average* distance between
bikes and passing cars, but in his experience you also get a
smaller *minimum* distance, which would seem to be more important.
If you're going fast enough to hurt someone, you should be forced to take a test and own up to some responsibility for your actions.
Look,
cyclists are considerably less likely to hurt anyone but themselves if they screw up. It's also
arguably a positive social good, i.e. something we should be encouraging (less pollution, more exercise, less road damage, less threat to others
in a collision... just to state the obvious points). Adding a bureaucratic hassle and a license fee to riding a bike around just doesn't make any sense.
If the world's largest dictatorship can live
without bicycle licenses, maybe the "free" world can manage it too...
(Incidentally, the lower risk of damage is the
usual justification for bike riders being sloppy
about compliance with traffic rules, much in the same way that pedestrians don't think much of jaywalking. The usual claim is that the laws are optimized for cars, and that bikes should be held to a different standard, e.g. bikes should treat reds as stops and stops as yields. Which is not to say that there aren't some whacked cyclists around who over do it. By the way, seen any crazy motorists lately?)
The drums and the symphonic Gojira theme are by Akira Ifukube and are from the original.
Hm. Interesting.
Anything you saw less recently than this month in a rep house was the Americanized version (it did tour not too long ago) because this is the first US theatrical release (outside of possibly fan conventions) of the Japanese original.
The version that I saw had no Raymond Burr footage in it. It was billed as the original Japanese version, though it was given the big publicity build-up that this one is.
Either my memory of the soundtrack is totally scrambled (hard to believe, I was listening for "The Godzilla Theme"... I own a double-CD set of the soundtrack music, I'm pretty familiar with it), or there are multiple versions floating around, and the definition of "original" is a little hazier than we're being lead to believe at the moment.
The Shobijin song in the original Mosura was in Malay.
I could swear that I saw this version a few years back in the rep houses, but I suppose I'll need to see it again to see if that was was missing some of this "uncut" footage. In any case, I think the serious quality of the original japanese version is being overplayed, and the unseriousness
of the American version with Raymond Burr is quite exaggerated.
To me the really notable difference was in the music. The Japanese version has some very spare,
slow drumming as it's theme. The American version evidentally introduced the symphonic music with a more "horror movie" feel that I've always thought
of as "The Godzilla Theme" (You know, ra da da DAA... ra dun da DAAAAAAH... ra da da daaaah, da daaaah dah or something like that.). That
theme, combined with the sounds of destruction and carnage strikes me as a pretty obvious precursor to a lot of Industrial music.
(Anyway, you want to see a really strange
film? Try renting "Mothera" sometime. Twin miniature faerie women singing in Balinese to get an "exotic" sound to Japanese ears...)
Use contrast. Dark text on pale background is better on a computer than light text on dark
I was just wondering "why?". I'm a white background hater myself (bring back the greenscreen!). High contrast certainly makes sense, but
I've never understood why it's important for the computer to give you the third degree.
So I checked the site referenced:
The contrast of a light-colored background with a dark colored foreground (text and images) is most widely used and allows for accessibility.
It's "most widely used", yes that I agree with. I've certainly noticed. Post-macintosh, everyone went beserk on the idea that computers should look like dead-trees (except that the dead-trees medium works by
*reflected* light, computer CRTs are light emitting... hm, could it be that this implys that perhaps the standard should be reversed?).
But anyway, "most accessible"? Huh, who says?
At least there's a reference: "Griffin, R. (1998). Visual Design. Chapter 7. Pages 7-1 through 7-22.".
I'll have to look it up some day. I'm sure it'll be very convincing.
In the San Francisco area, you might look into
Immaculate Computers as a place to buy a quiet
machine.
Here's an
Annalee Newitz write-up from the SF Bay Guardian
about them. They're a small San Francisco business doing custom
computers with low lead components and noiseless power
supplies.
Well, what do you propose we do? Spend billions to convince
Joe Farmer that new-q-ler power plant over yonder isn't
going to make his dick turn green and his sister grow an
extra titty?
Okay, so now you're saying the problem is *soley* with "Joe
Farmer", and not with you? Because you're the guy I'm
talking to right now. You are the guy who said this, right?
let's stick with coal/oil until the
nuclear genie is fully out of the bottle, and mabye by
then we can figure out, realistically, what to do with
the waste.
So you've changed your mind in the last couple of
posts?
I mean, hasn't nuclear power pretty much been
tried, sentenced, and executed in the court of public
opinion? There hasn't been a new nuclear plant brought on
line in this country in what, 10 years? 20?
Even if we do move away from coal, which seems unimaginable
considering how much we're sitting on, and that we already
have the infrastructure in place, but let's say we do move
away from it. We'll still have all those trucks and cars
burning oil, unless we're gonna convert them to electric,
which again would require a significant re-tooling of
industry.
Gas burning internal combustion engines are not
exactly my favorite technology, but they are squeaky
clean compared to coal burning.
The environmental movement has *completely* screwed
up in the last three decades by not picking their
battles based on the actual damage done by
the technologies in play.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm suggesting is that this is a grossly over-simplified view of technology.
To take guns as an example, the introduction of guns has a number of interesting effects. A particular individual might be interested in owning a gun because of their "equalizing" effect, they tend to neutralize physical strength as deciding factor in a fight. But on the other hand, they also make it really easy to do a lot of damage by accident, they exaggerate the effects of a momentary impulse. This is not to say that you should never choose to own a gun, the point is that you had *better* understand this effect and think about how you're going to compensate for it.
If technology in general were merely "neutral", there would be no reason to have any interest in it. The hope behind any new technical development is that it will be biased toward freedom and prosperity.
I'm of the opinion that you like the "tools are neutral" doctrine, because it makes it simple to think about things, even though it doesn't hold up under closer examination.
But consider:
The attitude "Awww, you just need to use 'em right! You can't blame the tool if people are weak, lazy, or stupid!" is nutty. People genuinely *are* flawed creatures, and some technologies play into those flaws.
A case in point: proprietary data formats that implement some whizzy, pretty feature -- this plays on human short-sightedness.
There's room for argument here. My take is that if it's not endorsed by the w3.org, you shouldn't be using the protocol on the web. It's nice that they published the specs -- at one point -- but it doesn't make it a "STANDARD" technology. One company is still in control of it. Compare "source code under glass" licenses to real open source. (Just using the word "open" doesn't make it an open standard.)
And these pieces of proprietary software implement the *real* standard, don't they? If Macromedia, shall we say, drifts away from what they published in 1998, someone making a competing player isn't going to be able to say "Hey, that ain't what it says on openswf!" and expect that to fly are they?
I submit that this is much closer to the state of affairs with Microsoft Word, than it is with, for example, with Microsoft Internet Explorer. (Gee, what's the *difference* between those two cases... why couldn't Microsoft pull a job like Word on the web? Hm...)
Briefly: DARPA/Academic collaborations in the early 70s, with NSF funding kicking in a little later. Then there was lots of wrangling between DARPA trying to maintain control and groups at places like SRI trying to play a bigger role. The RFC process started informally, and gradually took on weight. TCP/IP and later DNS weren't adopted by Arpa until the early 80s, and it took some work to get ISO to adopt
If a tool is consistently mis-used, it's at least worth considering that this may be a problem with the tool; there maybe traps built-in to trying to use it.
But all of this is only part of the story. On top of this is the problem that Flash is a non-standard, proprietary data format.
This is *completely* contrary to every principle behind the design of the internet. Get a clue and just say "no" to vendor lock-in.
There's a reason why open standards are an important issue. But it has to do with funny little things abstractions like "freedom" that you understand so much more deeply than we do.
This works on my linux box: rm /usr/local/mozilla/plugins/libnullplugin.so
(Meanwhile, over in engineering they call it "Nightmareweaver".)
Now, in specific: proprietary, non-standard data formats are a tool for *vendor lock-in*. They have no place on the goddamn *internet*, which was built on top of open standards and could not possibly exist without them. Buying in to a proprietary format just because you wanna see the pretty pictures is incredibly, astoundingly short-sighted.
What's really amazing is that I need to say this on goddamn slashdot. It's not like you've ever never heard this shit before, you just seem to be incapable of applying it to a real world case.
A tip for my fellow Flash haters: delete mozilla's null plugin. Then it'll stop bugging you about downloading Flash.
(Damn, I guess I won't get to see the latest movie sites. Fortunately I don't care about them. Or the latest movies either.)
Just say no to proprietary data formats.
And whatever you do, don't relax.
Of course, it could be I'm missing the point here, and that Flash needs to be a proprietary format for it's business model to work.
(Pretend for a minute that Flash was the bright idea of some other company that begins with an "M"... how would you feel about it?)
As to why someone would care more about kernel performance than language performance... let's think about that for a minute... because if you need more performance it's easier to switch to a different language than to change operating systems?
In any case, I'm agnostic on the micro-kernel vs monolithic kernel business. It could be that when a typical machine has a hundered processors running at a gigahertz each, mico-kernels will make a lot of sense.
-- Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond.Ah, well that's probably true. On the other hand, by all accounts places like Amsterdam do fine with them. I imagine that like a lot of things, it depends on what the populace at large is used to. In the US, if you tried to, say, put bike lanes between the sidewalk and the parked cars, that'd turn every intersection into a death trap: you'd never convince the right turners in cars to watch out for the bikes. Well, I have to say that when the "chainguard" crew dropped in on the San Francisco bike lists, they struck me as pretty dogmatic. This is not to say that they don't have some interesting points -- Forrester knows a hell of a lot about riding bikes -- but that they seem to be stuck in the same kind of mode that you'll find with Computer Science geeks: they think they can cover all real world problems by rigorous application of one simple principle.
Anyway, sure, their arguments need to be dealt with... thats why I posted those links.
There's some symphonic music used in the original version of Godzilla, but it's a pretty rapid, monotonous piece, almost like a military march (and I can believe that it's called "Frigate March", though that's not mentioned on the notes for this CD. It goes something like:
The music that I for some reason imprinted on as "The Godzilla Theme" doesn't come up on this CD until the main titled for "Ghidorah the 3-headed Monster" [1] released in 1964. It's also by Akira Ifukube. It's a slow, ominous piece, with a fill in the middle that goes something like: (I bet that makes it all clear.)I note that this same melody recurrs with more embellishment in "Destroy All Monsters" (1968) as part of "Showdown on Mt. Fuji".
And unless I'm totally out to lunch, it's also use pretty prominently in some major destruction scenes in the US release of "Godzilla"... I would need to see it again to check.
[1] The Ghidorah movie's original japanese title was apparently something like "The Greatest Giant Monster Battle on Earth".
Ghidorah was always my pick for coolest monster of the Godzilla pantheon. Three heads, wings, *two* tails, breathes fire: Ghidorah's got everything.
But the weather, that's a killer argument that's hard to get around. It helps explain why Los Angeles is legendary for being a bike friendly city.
(One reason you don't hear bike freaks talk about problems with bad weather is that *real* bike freaks don't think there is any such thing...)
If you look at the issues, I think you'll find that far from being "dangerous" the health benefits of cycling are huge, big enough to overwhelm any other worries, like the risks of collisions (which probably aren't as high as you think they are anyway). Do some web searches, you'll turn up things like this.
The rest of us recognize that they've got a lot of good points, but that the situation isn't as simple as they make it out. The expert cyclist *might* have no need for bike lanes, but beginning cyclists love them, and it's pretty clear that bike lanes help a lot to get people out on bikes (e.g. there've been cases in San Francisco where sticking in a bike lane on a street doubled the bike traffic). Having more bikes on the road gets the car drivers used to seeing bikes out there, and that makes it safer even for the expert riders, and helps encourage even more beginning cyclists.
Also, I have to say that while you might call me an "expert" rider I *still* like having bike lanes. They're not a panacea: you need to understand you have to ride on the *left* side of the lane to stay out of reach of car doors; you need to watch out for right turners cutting you off; and you need to know how to "ride like a car" when you're passing a double-parked idiot, or heading off into a zone where the city planners in their infinite wisdom have not yet seen fit to extend the bike lanes... But even with all those caveats, I like having a zone of relative safety that I can retreat to and relax.
Consider this guy's argument: He makes the point that wide lanes encourage a larger *average* distance between bikes and passing cars, but in his experience you also get a smaller *minimum* distance, which would seem to be more important.
If the world's largest dictatorship can live without bicycle licenses, maybe the "free" world can manage it too...
(Incidentally, the lower risk of damage is the usual justification for bike riders being sloppy about compliance with traffic rules, much in the same way that pedestrians don't think much of jaywalking. The usual claim is that the laws are optimized for cars, and that bikes should be held to a different standard, e.g. bikes should treat reds as stops and stops as yields. Which is not to say that there aren't some whacked cyclists around who over do it. By the way, seen any crazy motorists lately?)
Either my memory of the soundtrack is totally scrambled (hard to believe, I was listening for "The Godzilla Theme"... I own a double-CD set of the soundtrack music, I'm pretty familiar with it), or there are multiple versions floating around, and the definition of "original" is a little hazier than we're being lead to believe at the moment.
Ah, thanks.To me the really notable difference was in the music. The Japanese version has some very spare, slow drumming as it's theme. The American version evidentally introduced the symphonic music with a more "horror movie" feel that I've always thought of as "The Godzilla Theme" (You know, ra da da DAA... ra dun da DAAAAAAH... ra da da daaaah, da daaaah dah or something like that.). That theme, combined with the sounds of destruction and carnage strikes me as a pretty obvious precursor to a lot of Industrial music.
(Anyway, you want to see a really strange film? Try renting "Mothera" sometime. Twin miniature faerie women singing in Balinese to get an "exotic" sound to Japanese ears...)
The next thing you know, we'll all be using the metric system and speaking lojban.
Posted on 5/4/04. Deal.
So I checked the site referenced:
It's "most widely used", yes that I agree with. I've certainly noticed. Post-macintosh, everyone went beserk on the idea that computers should look like dead-trees (except that the dead-trees medium works by *reflected* light, computer CRTs are light emitting... hm, could it be that this implys that perhaps the standard should be reversed?).But anyway, "most accessible"? Huh, who says? At least there's a reference: "Griffin, R. (1998). Visual Design. Chapter 7. Pages 7-1 through 7-22.". I'll have to look it up some day. I'm sure it'll be very convincing.
In the San Francisco area, you might look into Immaculate Computers as a place to buy a quiet machine. Here's an Annalee Newitz write-up from the SF Bay Guardian about them. They're a small San Francisco business doing custom computers with low lead components and noiseless power supplies.
The environmental movement has *completely* screwed up in the last three decades by not picking their battles based on the actual damage done by the technologies in play.