Re:Mozilla is the BEST browser!
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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However if any Mozilla coders are reading this, what needs to be done now to make Mozilla even better, is to start intergrating tools into it, I know all the people on their 486s will scream "BLOAT" But this is what the average user wants, not the average geek.
Mozilla doesn't exactly scream on my aging PII/266, so I don't think it's the folks with 486s you need to worry about. (Not everyone can afford the latest box, sadly) Later you write...
This sounds like feature bloat and yes it could be, but Most windows users have ICQ open and Mozilla open wasting vast amounts of ram, Intergrating these tools in a good way would be nice.
And one more flash of brilliance...
Mozilla also needs better memory management, I know its fast now, its as fast as it can be, but it seems they have stopped focusing on improving the speed, I say they should keep trying to make it as fast and as optimized as possible, this is for the linux using crowd, and the geeks, We want it to be fast and use LESS ram yet remain powerful. Difficult yes, but theres still room for improvement.
So, let me get this straight. You want more features, because IE has them (apparently Mozilla's current modularity isn't good enough for you). But then, you want it to be optimised for speed, use less RAM, and "remain powerful". More features, more speed, less RAM. Uh huh. When the magical fay creatures of the forest have finished modifying the Mozilla source tree on your hard drive, mind uploading those patches for the rest of us? Thanks:-)
And you can play mp3s directly by making use of the "helper application" configuration menu, IIRC. Just use the right mime type.
What it's meant to do is provide a speed bump to people who don't steal things, and wish to use them in the parameters that are suggested by the artists
What I find even more interesting in this statement (and I'm sure others have mentioned it elsewhere), is the explicit admission that the only people affected by the "copy protection technology" discussed here are the folks who "don't steal things". Only in America can someone design a lock to keep out only people who don't desire to steal anything...One assumes, of course, that the gentleman interviewed, while not of the brightest sort, is bright enough to know not to accuse the majority of his (indirect) customers of being thieves. Still, this blatant admission of the futility of the copy-protection exercise is interesting (since it only takes one dishonest person to upload the whole damned album on the PHP network du jour).
More nonsense from the "content industry" and their lackeys. Or, perhaps more likely, an attempt at a "minimum best effort" to meet the requirements of DMCA protection. And we all know how low that barrier is from recent experience. Guess they'd rather take their chances in the legal arena (where their war chest proves quite useful) than in the technological one (where everyone laughs at them)
What exactly do you fear? Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government? Is it just the principle of the thing? Having my email filtered or my phone calls monitored seems like a trivial price to pay if it means I can get on a plane this christmas and fly home without worrying about smashing into a skyscraper or having my throat slit with a box cutter. It's YOUR government listening and YOUR security and life being protected. Why oppose these things?
Wow, I guess some Americans do come cheap. A paltry (by the standard of any war waged by or against this country) five thousand dead, and you're already begging the government to spy on your email and phone conversations, in a desperate attempt to keep you "safe" (or to provide the veneer of safety, which is a more likely result of the nonsense you propose). If casualties had been any higher, one wonders if you wouldn't have tried to crawl back into the womb! I, for one, am thankful that the men who died to preserve the rights I now enjoy had rather more backbone than yourself. Indeed, we would likely still be a British colony, if we had to rely on a brave sot like you to secure our rights.
My advice: be hesitant in giving up fundamental expectations of privacy, whatever the claimed benefit, as you will never see those rights again. And do you really think that the terrorists would have been caught, if every phone conversation and email was vetted by agents of the government? Such naivete is amusing in children, frightening in adults (especially voters).
And claiming that the Consitution is not applicable because it wasn't written in an age of virulent terrorism is disturbingly simple-minded. But thanks for panicking under fire. Enhanced security need not conflict with our treasured civil liberties, and it would be nice if we explore those solutions first, instead of rolling over at the first say-so of the demagogue.
I find it interesting that you differentiate between your right to privacy and your "way of life". Perhaps the battle is already lost, in a nation of frightened children.
People are dying of disease, the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, the earth is warming up and animals are dying out, and some scientists are jacking off trying to make a black hole in a lab. Blah.:P
Ever hear of the Penrose extraction mechanism? It's a way of getting energy out of a black hole. Hardly possible with the objects being created here, but this research might be relevant decades (more likely centuries) from now, if (a big IF) and when we are capable of manipulating larger holes (or stabilising smaller ones). The amount of energy one can extract from a black hole is enormous, by any standard; more than enough to power the entire planet currently (if you'll pardon the pun).
Anyway, even disregarding such far-off potential applications, it is worthwhile to remember that quite a few of the technologies we consider invaluable today were originally questioned as being "impractical" by mundane contemporaries of the underlying basic research. The laser is a notable example, as is the electromagnet. Always a good thing to remember.
Nuclar power was once thought to be the greatest thing ever. It would be safe reliable and the cure all for everything. Just look at chernolye (however it's spelled). I just don't think trying to make a black hole is a good idea. I know the odd's are astronical that it destroy the world.
I might suggest that you learn a thing or two about quantum field theory and relativity, before assuming that your opinion on the formation of quantum singularities is even remotely relevant. Given that this goes against the entire spirit of slashdot, I guess I forgive you;-)
Seriously, though, these do apparently occur naturally, and evapourate quite quickly (generally speaking, a black hole evapourates more quickly as its radius shrinks). The problem will not be preventing the hole from growing out of control and consuming the planet, but keeping it around long enough to learn anything from it.
But then again what are the odd's two jumbo jets would run into the WTC.
Well, the odds are pretty good when they're being willfully directed to do so by the person at the controls. You can hardly claim it to be a random event.
As Galeon, gets better so does Mozilla. When will Galeon support Flash and all those various plugins out there? Konqueror already does this. Konqueror even has application and component embedding for crying out loud. When Galeon reaches this point, Mozilla will be usable, not to mention that Konqueror is here now.
Mozilla/Galeon has been able to use Flash since at least 0.8. I've used this and the RealAudio plugin a number of times (mostly at joecartoon.com:-) You just drop the plugin into/usr/lib/mozilla-0.9.1/plugins, and off you go. . .
There are time zones, you see. Natures way of making sure that it isn't the same time of day everywhere at once. Africa (and Europe) being substantially east of the USA, is 12 hours or so in advance of most of the USA. Noon thursday, Cental african time, happens on your Wednesday evening. Take the time zones into account and you won't be late to the party.
Sigh. In fact, most of Europe is between five and seven hours ahead of EDT, not twelve. Africa, being south of Europe, is the same. So, noon thursday, central african time, is thursday morning EDT. IIRC, EDT+12 is in China, and crosses through India as well.
Is arithmetic really so challenging? The eclipse occurred around noon EDT, which would be afternoon there.
In direct opposition to what the article said, I'd like to posit that stories of dragons and rings and wizards and monsters and other fantasy archetypes were already part of literature long before Tolkien brought us his trilogy.
Elements of these have surely been present in faerie tales for many centuries (IIRC, the first reference to an "orc" occurs in the epic Song of Roland, in the late Middle Ages.) No one claims that Tolkien invented these things; indeed, his formiddable knowledge of Old English epics and mythology (and Celtic, Norse and Teutonic, to the extent that they influenced the former) shine through clearly, not only in the Ring trilogy, but also some of his other works (The Smith of Wotton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham). But I can think of no literary work that embodies these prior to Tolkien. Examples would be appreciated, if you have them.
There is no doubt that he influenced many writers, but the stories that he wrote about the battle between good and evil were just original spins on rehashed ideas.
Well, I think you could make that claim about *any* author in the past several centuries, if you were cynical enough. Face it, in the several thousand year old corpus of human literature, any tale you care to name is going to sound familiar, especially when broken down into its component themes. Campbell discusses this throughout much of his work.
Tolkien is not a god, and his book is nothing special.
De gustibus non disputandem, and all that. I will venture that it's better than anything you've written. Or that I've written, for that matter. I think a lot of folks take the work far too seriously (far more seriously than Tolkien himself), and that draws criticism like that in the Village Voice article. Tolkien gets caught in the vitriol intended for his over-zealous admirers:-)
Many thanks for the link. Actually, I believe my numbers are still correct (1 Jan 1900 was a Monday). Also, the number for February and March had better be the same! (February has 28 days normally, which means that identical days of the month in February and March share the same weekday as well (14 Feb is on the same weekday as 14 March)
I'll go through the link again, and see if why things differ (my German needs polishing rather badly:)
Many years ago, I stumbled upon a book that contained an alternate method for finding the weekday for a given date. Wish I could remember the reference, but I do remember the method:-)
You just need to remember twelve numbers, one for each month:
Jan = 0 Feb = 3 Mar = 3 Apr = 6 May = 1 June = 4
Jul = 6 Aug = 2 Sep = 5 Oct = 0 Nov = 3 Dec = 5
(You can derive these on the fly by remembering how many days are in each month, modulo 7)
Now, subtract 1900 from your year, and take the difference modulo 7.
( 2001 - 1900 ) mod 7 ===> 101 mod 7 ===> 3
Add the number of Leap Years between the year of interest and 1900 (include the current year if it's a leap year, and the date you want is after 28th February)
(2001 - 1900) / 4 = 25 leap years
Add the two numbers, modulo 7: (25 + 3) modulo 7 = 28 modulo 7 == 0
Add the number of the month, above, modulo 7: June = 4, (4 + 0) mod 7 = 4
Add the day of the month, modulo 7: 5th June = 5, (5 + 4) mod 7 = 9 mod 7 = 2
Now, 0 == Sunday, 1 == Monday . . . 6 == Saturday, so:
5th June, 2001 is a Tuesday (if you didn't know already:)
Works for years prior to 1900 as well, just remember how additive moduli work with negative numbers (add, don't subtract), and subtract the number of leap years, don't add them.
Let's try 20th September, 1989 (no reason in particular):
1989 - 1900 = 89 mod 7 = 5
Number of intervening leap years: 22
September = 5
20th = 20
( 5 + 22 + 5 + 20 ) mod 7 == 52 mod 7 == 3 == Wednesday
Not sure if it's much easier than Conway's algorithm, or if I'm just used to it now. Anyway, I didn't see it mentioned elsewhere in the comments, so I thought I'd point it out.
I propose that we discontinue the use of the words "pirate" and "piracy".
Hear, hear nytes! When I read your post, the first thing I thought of was the short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which is the apparativ for Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Now *there's* a way to scare the suits!;-) All we need to do is get Lawrence Lessig to start issuing letters of marque.:-)
not the modernistic "let's sound intellectual" crap used in the movie
The man responsible is Gyorgi Ligeti, a Hungarian composer whose Lux Aeterna, Adventures, Atmospheres and Requiem are all quoted in the film. I personally love the work, as it powerfully conveys the utter horror of confronting an unknown which is, almost by definition, clearly of supernatural (preternatural?) origin. It's supposed to be disturbing and unpleasant. Good music evokes powerful emotions, and they aren't always nice ones...
And he is an intellectual, by the way:-)
Still, if you get a chance, check out Ligeti's work---you might like it, if you hear it in full. Then again...;-)
The democratization of media ALWAYS lessens the quality. The path of music from the Renaissance to the digerati-controlled 21st century is court -> concert -> records -> free MP3's.
In each of these the quality of overall music has decreased. The officials in the court were musically educated and did not admit fluff from their composers. The concert going public were also educated elite, and barely a step down from the court. The early days of the phongraph were also elite (because it was an expensive instrument), though it was not musically advanced until the middle of the first decade of the 1900's (mostly consisting of operas) and not further until the 1930's, where the symphony was first recorded in entirety. The compact disc democratized things further, to the point where you could buy symphonies in tin cans in drug stores, and culminates in free MP3's, where the repertoire consists of youth orchestras recording war horses.
You can also see this in literature. The pre-Gutenberg texts were exclusively for the educated elite (at the time, very elite). The early printing press brought the advent of the novel, but the mass market paperback brought the advent of the romance novel, and dummy books.
Ah, yes. The prattling of the self-described cultural elite---quaint, and tired. The effete snobbery by which you reject `democratisation' (which you use, I believe, as a fancy way of saying "of and for the commoner") sounds so out of place these days, so bourgeois. And yet it is so common! It must be a wonderful world in which you live, sir, where the best music is that which is heard only by a few, the best books only read by the elite (a group to which you obviously feel you belong).
Few Europeans actually heard Mozart or Beethoven until long after both were dead. The cultural and economic revolutions of the last century opened concerts to the commoner, allowing the remarkable musical heritage of 18th and 19th century Europe to truly flourish, no longer tied to the fates of the dying monarchies! Music is enhanced, rather than debased by the number of listeners. So too with great works of literature. Your lament of the romance novel is, perhaps, understandable, but the cheap paperback is also how I managed to afford most of the decent literature that I own. Is it better that the great works of Kafka and Shaw go unread by a public you perceive as somehow unclean and unworthy? If the price of easy access to great literature and philosophy is that some tripe and drivel will invariably be printed as well, then I think we still come out well ahead in the exchange! This access, indeed, lays the best foundation for a democratic republic---yet another reason, no doubt, that the self-described elite find it so objectionable...
So, too, will music come out ahead. The democratisation of this media, like the ones before it, will result in a stronger end product. One in which the average quality is sunk by the banal and superficial, but where the peaks are higher still, as the pool of talent from which such works are drawn inevitably grows the larger.
One thing I wonder about, though, is books. What if a novel equivalent of napster appeared (please excuse the pun:-)? How would authors make money then? Through publicly reading their works? I don't think so.
Why is it that it's quite socially acceptable to exhibit, and even flaunt, bigotry against Christians in the Slashdot community? (This asked as a serious question and is on-topic in light of several comments in this thread.)
Many of you would never dream of condoning a racially inflammatory post, but have no problem tarring Christians with a broad derogatory brush when given half a chance. Painting Christians as racist is even more ridiculous - Christianity was clearly the driving force behind the worldwide elimination of slavery. (A first in world history, by the way...) Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?
You have a very quaint view of the history of American slavery, my friend. As far as that goes, Christians were guilty of starting the problem, as well as finishing it. Which goes to show that they're not all bad. Still a very cogent argument can be made that American Christians only got around to opposing slavery when it was no longer economically useful to them--hence the strong abolitionist presence in the northern states, who, by that time, had plenty of immigrant factory fodder already. But, having abolished slavery, racism is still a very real problem, most especially in the very Christian South.
And while rampant xenophobia is not a problem of Christian communities alone, they certainly do make the biggest show of it. Your comment, "Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?", will be rather less laughable when women are allowed to be priests in every denomination of Christianity, and when homosexuality is no longer treated as a disease needing to be cured by patronising clergy. Or do you know your god so well?
But if you are truly interested in why there is such a strong anti-Christian backlash among literate souls, in this country and elsewhere, I suggest you take a good look around. It's not bigotry, my friend--most people here would staunchly defend you should you find yourself unjustly persecuted. It's simply that some of us fear that we will not be able to enjoy the rights guaranteed by our Constitution in an environment where the ideals promulgated by such fools as the AFA and the so-called `Christian Right' are allowed to become entrenched in the legal corpus of our nation. We are afraid that this is one further step down the agonising road of oppression and theocracy. We do not dare give ground, because we know precisely how hard it is to regain, given the climate of ignorance and apathy that works so greatly to the advantage of the hucksters of the pulpit. We fear that those among us who dare to be sui generis will be cast out--Christianity's record of dealing with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, &cet., is not particularly laudable, and let's not even mention the Christian view of women, though admittedly this attitude has improved slightly in the past thousand years...
Ultimately, we are afraid that, by attempting to `save' our nation, you will destroy all that is worth preserving. Simply put, we know what paves the road to hell...
Anyway, I hope this answers your question. Perhaps this will give you some insight into how Christianity is perceived by those who are not treated well by it:-)
Well said. The issue, of course, is that of verifiability , the notion that a scientific hypothesis can be disproved. Something the overly religious tend to conveniently ignore.
And when will these people actually read a bloody text on Genetics or Evolutionary Biology, instead of getting their information second-hand and sullied by the nearest tireless enemy of Reason?
Sorry, I guess I'm just tired of hearing so many half-truths coming from the mouths of these pontificates of credulity. When the story of creation as outlined by Biblical fantasy is put forward as a hypothesis testable by weight of impartial evidence, I'll take notice, rest assured. But I do not expect this to happen any time soon---religious people have far too much to lose. More importantly, those who maintain the culture of credulity which permeates our nation would have a lot of explaining to do...
This, of course, is the error the original author makes---the onus of proof is on the person proclaiming the existence of a fanciful (and literal) deus ex machina to explain away our current level of biodiversity. And attacking Darwinism (which no one teaches anymore to begin with---biologists have been doing a lot of work in the past century!) by no means serves as evidence of divine intervention. I wish more people would realise that...
Ultimately, you must take the chance of being demonstrably wrong to have any chance at all of glimpsing the Truth. Ask any scientist:-)
Sounds very similar to a Joe Haldeman story, "For White Hill", where the entire surface of the Earth is sterilised by a "nano-virus" that unzips the DNA double helix. The only people who can survive (sans spacesuit) are those humans who have had their DNA engineered so that the helix rotates "backwards". Pretty disturbing stuff, and hopefully many decades down the road...
Slashdot Mirror
However if any Mozilla coders are reading this, what needs to be done now to make Mozilla even better, is to start intergrating tools into it, I know all the people on their 486s will scream "BLOAT" But this is what the average user wants, not the average geek.
:-)
Mozilla doesn't exactly scream on my aging PII/266, so I don't think it's the folks with 486s you need to worry about. (Not everyone can afford the latest box, sadly) Later you write...
This sounds like feature bloat and yes it could be, but Most windows users have ICQ open and Mozilla open wasting vast amounts of ram, Intergrating these tools in a good way would be nice.
And one more flash of brilliance...
Mozilla also needs better memory management, I know its fast now, its as fast as it can be, but it seems they have stopped focusing on improving the speed, I say they should keep trying to make it as fast and as optimized as possible, this is for the linux using crowd, and the geeks, We want it to be fast and use LESS ram yet remain powerful. Difficult yes, but theres still room for improvement.
So, let me get this straight. You want more features, because IE has them (apparently Mozilla's current modularity isn't good enough for you). But then, you want it to be optimised for speed, use less RAM, and "remain powerful". More features, more speed, less RAM. Uh huh. When the magical fay creatures of the forest have finished modifying the Mozilla source tree on your hard drive, mind uploading those patches for the rest of us? Thanks
And you can play mp3s directly by making use of the "helper application" configuration menu, IIRC. Just use the right mime type.
Regards,
The Mouser
What it's meant to do is provide a speed bump to people who don't steal things, and wish to use them in the parameters that are suggested by the artists
What I find even more interesting in this statement (and I'm sure others have mentioned it elsewhere), is the explicit admission that the only people affected by the "copy protection technology" discussed here are the folks who "don't steal things". Only in America can someone design a lock to keep out only people who don't desire to steal anything...One assumes, of course, that the gentleman interviewed, while not of the brightest sort, is bright enough to know not to accuse the majority of his (indirect) customers of being thieves. Still, this blatant admission of the futility of the copy-protection exercise is interesting (since it only takes one dishonest person to upload the whole damned album on the PHP network du jour).
More nonsense from the "content industry" and their lackeys. Or, perhaps more likely, an attempt at a "minimum best effort" to meet the requirements of DMCA protection. And we all know how low that barrier is from recent experience. Guess they'd rather take their chances in the legal arena (where their war chest proves quite useful) than in the technological one (where everyone laughs at them)
Der Mouser
What exactly do you fear? Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government? Is it just the principle of the thing? Having my email filtered or my phone calls monitored seems like a trivial price to pay if it means I can get on a plane this christmas and fly home without worrying about smashing into a skyscraper or having my throat slit with a box cutter. It's YOUR government listening and YOUR security and life being protected. Why oppose these things?
Wow, I guess some Americans do come cheap. A paltry (by the standard of any war waged by or against this country) five thousand dead, and you're already begging the government to spy on your email and phone conversations, in a desperate attempt to keep you "safe" (or to provide the veneer of safety, which is a more likely result of the nonsense you propose). If casualties had been any higher, one wonders if you wouldn't have tried to crawl back into the womb! I, for one, am thankful that the men who died to preserve the rights I now enjoy had rather more backbone than yourself. Indeed, we would likely still be a British colony, if we had to rely on a brave sot like you to secure our rights.
My advice: be hesitant in giving up fundamental expectations of privacy, whatever the claimed benefit, as you will never see those rights again. And do you really think that the terrorists would have been caught, if every phone conversation and email was vetted by agents of the government? Such naivete is amusing in children, frightening in adults (especially voters).
And claiming that the Consitution is not applicable because it wasn't written in an age of virulent terrorism is disturbingly simple-minded. But thanks for panicking under fire. Enhanced security need not conflict with our treasured civil liberties, and it would be nice if we explore those solutions first, instead of rolling over at the first say-so of the demagogue.
I find it interesting that you differentiate between your right to privacy and your "way of life". Perhaps the battle is already lost, in a nation of frightened children.
Michael
People are dying of disease, the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, the earth is warming up and animals are dying out, and some scientists are jacking off trying to make a black hole in a lab. Blah. :P
Ever hear of the Penrose extraction mechanism? It's a way of getting energy out of a black hole. Hardly possible with the objects being created here, but this research might be relevant decades (more likely centuries) from now, if (a big IF) and when we are capable of manipulating larger holes (or stabilising smaller ones). The amount of energy one can extract from a black hole is enormous, by any standard; more than enough to power the entire planet currently (if you'll pardon the pun).
Anyway, even disregarding such far-off potential applications, it is worthwhile to remember that quite a few of the technologies we consider invaluable today were originally questioned as being "impractical" by mundane contemporaries of the underlying basic research. The laser is a notable example, as is the electromagnet. Always a good thing to remember.
Cheers,
Michael
Nuclar power was once thought to be the greatest thing ever. It would be safe reliable and the cure all for everything. Just look at chernolye (however it's spelled). I just don't think trying to make a black hole is a good idea. I know the odd's are astronical that it destroy the world.
;-)
I might suggest that you learn a thing or two about quantum field theory and relativity, before assuming that your opinion on the formation of quantum singularities is even remotely relevant. Given that this goes against the entire spirit of slashdot, I guess I forgive you
Seriously, though, these do apparently occur naturally, and evapourate quite quickly (generally speaking, a black hole evapourates more quickly as its radius shrinks). The problem will not be preventing the hole from growing out of control and consuming the planet, but keeping it around long enough to learn anything from it.
But then again what are the odd's two jumbo jets would run into the WTC.
Well, the odds are pretty good when they're being willfully directed to do so by the person at the controls. You can hardly claim it to be a random event.
Regards,
Michael
As Galeon, gets better so does Mozilla. When will Galeon support Flash and all those various plugins out there? Konqueror already does this. Konqueror even has application and component embedding for crying out loud. When Galeon reaches this point, Mozilla will be usable, not to mention that Konqueror is here now.
:-) You just drop the plugin into /usr/lib/mozilla-0.9.1/plugins, and off you go. . .
Mozilla/Galeon has been able to use Flash since at least 0.8. I've used this and the RealAudio plugin a number of times (mostly at joecartoon.com
Cheers,
Michael
There are time zones, you see. Natures way of making sure that it isn't the same time of day everywhere at once. Africa (and Europe) being substantially east of the USA, is 12 hours or so in advance of most of the USA. Noon thursday, Cental african time, happens on your Wednesday evening. Take the time zones into account and you won't be late to the party.
Sigh. In fact, most of Europe is between five and seven hours ahead of EDT, not twelve. Africa, being south of Europe, is the same. So, noon thursday, central african time, is thursday morning EDT. IIRC, EDT+12 is in China, and crosses through India as well.
Is arithmetic really so challenging? The eclipse occurred around noon EDT, which would be afternoon there.
Elements of these have surely been present in faerie tales for many centuries (IIRC, the first reference to an "orc" occurs in the epic Song of Roland, in the late Middle Ages.) No one claims that Tolkien invented these things; indeed, his formiddable knowledge of Old English epics and mythology (and Celtic, Norse and Teutonic, to the extent that they influenced the former) shine through clearly, not only in the Ring trilogy, but also some of his other works (The Smith of Wotton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham). But I can think of no literary work that embodies these prior to Tolkien. Examples would be appreciated, if you have them.
There is no doubt that he influenced many writers, but the stories that he wrote about the battle between good and evil were just original spins on rehashed ideas.
Well, I think you could make that claim about *any* author in the past several centuries, if you were cynical enough. Face it, in the several thousand year old corpus of human literature, any tale you care to name is going to sound familiar, especially when broken down into its component themes. Campbell discusses this throughout much of his work.
Tolkien is not a god, and his book is nothing special.
De gustibus non disputandem, and all that. I will venture that it's better than anything you've written. Or that I've written, for that matter. I think a lot of folks take the work far too seriously (far more seriously than Tolkien himself), and that draws criticism like that in the Village Voice article. Tolkien gets caught in the vitriol intended for his over-zealous admirers :-)
Cheers, Michael
Many thanks for the link. Actually, I believe my numbers are still correct (1 Jan 1900 was a Monday). Also, the number for February and March had better be the same! (February has 28 days normally, which means that identical days of the month in February and March share the same weekday as well (14 Feb is on the same weekday as 14 March)
:)
I'll go through the link again, and see if why things differ (my German needs polishing rather badly
Cheers,
Michael
Many years ago, I stumbled upon a book that contained an alternate method for finding the weekday for a given date. Wish I could remember the reference, but I do remember the method :-)
:)
You just need to remember twelve numbers, one for each month:
Jan = 0 Feb = 3 Mar = 3 Apr = 6 May = 1 June = 4
Jul = 6 Aug = 2 Sep = 5 Oct = 0 Nov = 3 Dec = 5
(You can derive these on the fly by remembering how many days are in each month, modulo 7)
Now, subtract 1900 from your year, and take the difference modulo 7.
( 2001 - 1900 ) mod 7 ===> 101 mod 7 ===> 3
Add the number of Leap Years between the year of interest and 1900 (include the current year if it's a leap year, and the date you want is after 28th February)
(2001 - 1900) / 4 = 25 leap years
Add the two numbers, modulo 7: (25 + 3) modulo 7 = 28 modulo 7 == 0
Add the number of the month, above, modulo 7: June = 4, (4 + 0) mod 7 = 4
Add the day of the month, modulo 7: 5th June = 5, (5 + 4) mod 7 = 9 mod 7 = 2
Now, 0 == Sunday, 1 == Monday . . . 6 == Saturday, so:
5th June, 2001 is a Tuesday (if you didn't know already
Works for years prior to 1900 as well, just remember how additive moduli work with negative numbers (add, don't subtract), and subtract the number of leap years, don't add them.
Let's try 20th September, 1989 (no reason in particular):
1989 - 1900 = 89 mod 7 = 5
Number of intervening leap years: 22
September = 5
20th = 20
( 5 + 22 + 5 + 20 ) mod 7 == 52 mod 7 == 3 == Wednesday
Not sure if it's much easier than Conway's algorithm, or if I'm just used to it now. Anyway, I didn't see it mentioned elsewhere in the comments, so I thought I'd point it out.
Cheers,
Michael
I propose that we discontinue the use of the words "pirate" and "piracy".
;-) All we need to do is get Lawrence Lessig to start issuing letters of marque. :-)
Hear, hear nytes! When I read your post, the first thing I thought of was the short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which is the apparativ for Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Now *there's* a way to scare the suits!
Arrr, matey! These CD prices be too high, says I!
Cheers, matey,
Michael
not the modernistic "let's sound intellectual" crap used in the movie
:-)
The man responsible is Gyorgi Ligeti, a Hungarian composer whose Lux Aeterna, Adventures, Atmospheres and Requiem are all quoted in the film. I personally love the work, as it powerfully conveys the utter horror of confronting an unknown which is, almost by definition, clearly of supernatural (preternatural?) origin. It's supposed to be disturbing and unpleasant. Good music evokes powerful emotions, and they aren't always nice ones...
And he is an intellectual, by the way
Still, if you get a chance, check out Ligeti's work---you might like it, if you hear it in full. Then again...;-)
Cheers,
Michael
The democratization of media ALWAYS lessens the quality. The path of music from the Renaissance to the digerati-controlled 21st century is court -> concert -> records -> free MP3's.
In each of these the quality of overall music has decreased. The officials in the court were musically educated and did not admit fluff from their composers. The concert going public were also educated elite, and barely a step down from the court. The early days of the phongraph were also elite (because it was an expensive instrument), though it was not musically advanced until the middle of the first decade of the 1900's (mostly consisting of operas) and not further until the 1930's, where the symphony was first recorded in entirety. The compact disc democratized things further, to the point where you could buy symphonies in tin cans in drug stores, and culminates in free MP3's, where the repertoire consists of youth orchestras recording war horses.
You can also see this in literature. The pre-Gutenberg texts were exclusively for the educated elite (at the time, very elite). The early printing press brought the advent of the novel, but the mass market paperback brought the advent of the romance novel, and dummy books.
Ah, yes. The prattling of the self-described cultural elite---quaint, and tired. The effete snobbery by which you reject `democratisation' (which you use, I believe, as a fancy way of saying "of and for the commoner") sounds so out of place these days, so bourgeois. And yet it is so common! It must be a wonderful world in which you live, sir, where the best music is that which is heard only by a few, the best books only read by the elite (a group to which you obviously feel you belong).
Few Europeans actually heard Mozart or Beethoven until long after both were dead. The cultural and economic revolutions of the last century opened concerts to the commoner, allowing the remarkable musical heritage of 18th and 19th century Europe to truly flourish, no longer tied to the fates of the dying monarchies! Music is enhanced, rather than debased by the number of listeners. So too with great works of literature. Your lament of the romance novel is, perhaps, understandable, but the cheap paperback is also how I managed to afford most of the decent literature that I own. Is it better that the great works of Kafka and Shaw go unread by a public you perceive as somehow unclean and unworthy? If the price of easy access to great literature and philosophy is that some tripe and drivel will invariably be printed as well, then I think we still come out well ahead in the exchange! This access, indeed, lays the best foundation for a democratic republic---yet another reason, no doubt, that the self-described elite find it so objectionable...
So, too, will music come out ahead. The democratisation of this media, like the ones before it, will result in a stronger end product. One in which the average quality is sunk by the banal and superficial, but where the peaks are higher still, as the pool of talent from which such works are drawn inevitably grows the larger.
One thing I wonder about, though, is books. What if a novel equivalent of napster appeared (please excuse the pun:-)? How would authors make money then? Through publicly reading their works? I don't think so.
:-)
Ever been to a library, chief?
Why is it that it's quite socially acceptable to exhibit, and even flaunt, bigotry against
Christians in the Slashdot community? (This asked as a serious question and is on-topic in
light of several comments in this thread.)
Many of you would never dream of condoning a racially inflammatory post, but have no
problem tarring Christians with a broad derogatory brush when given half a chance.
Painting Christians as racist is even more ridiculous - Christianity was clearly the driving
force behind the worldwide elimination of slavery. (A first in world history, by the way...)
Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?
You have a very quaint view of the history of American slavery, my friend. As far as that goes, Christians were guilty of starting the problem, as well as finishing it. Which goes to show that they're not all bad. Still a very cogent argument can be made that American Christians only got around to opposing slavery when it was no longer economically useful to them--hence the strong abolitionist presence in the northern states, who, by that time, had plenty of immigrant factory fodder already. But, having abolished slavery, racism is still a very real problem, most especially in the very Christian South.
And while rampant xenophobia is not a problem of Christian communities alone, they certainly do make the biggest show of it. Your comment, "Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?", will be rather less laughable when women are allowed to be priests in every denomination of Christianity, and when homosexuality is no longer treated as a disease needing to be cured by patronising clergy. Or do you know your god so well?
But if you are truly interested in why there is such a strong anti-Christian backlash among literate souls, in this country and elsewhere, I suggest you take a good look around. It's not bigotry, my friend--most people here would staunchly defend you should you find yourself unjustly persecuted. It's simply that some of us fear that we will not be able to enjoy the rights guaranteed by our Constitution in an environment where the ideals promulgated by such fools as the AFA and the so-called `Christian Right' are allowed to become entrenched in the legal corpus of our nation. We are afraid that this is one further step down the agonising road of oppression and theocracy. We do not dare give ground, because we know precisely how hard it is to regain, given the climate of ignorance and apathy that works so greatly to the advantage of the hucksters of the pulpit. We fear that those among us who dare to be sui generis will be cast out--Christianity's record of dealing with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, &cet., is not particularly laudable, and let's not even mention the Christian view of women, though admittedly this attitude has improved slightly in the past thousand years...
Ultimately, we are afraid that, by attempting to `save' our nation, you will destroy all that is worth preserving. Simply put, we know what paves the road to hell...
Anyway, I hope this answers your question. Perhaps this will give you some insight into how Christianity is perceived by those who are not treated well by it
Best Regards,
Michael
Well said. The issue, of course, is that of verifiability , the notion that a scientific hypothesis can be disproved. Something the overly religious tend to conveniently ignore.
:-)
And when will these people actually read a bloody text on Genetics or Evolutionary Biology, instead of getting their information second-hand and sullied by the nearest tireless enemy of Reason?
Sorry, I guess I'm just tired of hearing so many half-truths coming from the mouths of these pontificates of credulity. When the story of creation as outlined by Biblical fantasy is put forward as a hypothesis testable by weight of impartial evidence, I'll take notice, rest assured. But I do not expect this to happen any time soon---religious people have far too much to lose. More importantly, those who maintain the culture of credulity which permeates our nation would have a lot of explaining to do...
This, of course, is the error the original author makes---the onus of proof is on the person proclaiming the existence of a fanciful (and literal) deus ex machina to explain away our current level of biodiversity. And attacking Darwinism (which no one teaches anymore to begin with---biologists have been doing a lot of work in the past century!) by no means serves as evidence of divine intervention. I wish more people would realise that...
Ultimately, you must take the chance of being demonstrably wrong to have any chance at all of glimpsing the Truth. Ask any scientist
Respectfully,
Michael
Sounds very similar to a Joe Haldeman story, "For White Hill", where the entire surface of the Earth is sterilised by a "nano-virus" that unzips the DNA double helix. The only people who can survive (sans spacesuit) are those humans who have had their DNA engineered so that the helix rotates "backwards". Pretty disturbing stuff, and hopefully many decades down the road...