All you really need to know about Marc Benioff is that it took him only 4 years to go from college graduate to vice president of Oracle Corporation.
Yes, that Oracle Corporation.
Making that big a leap in that environment requires a stratospheric level of ruthlessness and ambition, combined with an active willingness to kiss Larry Ellison's ass and swear it tastes like butterscotch. Daily.
Benioff is the guy who coined the phrase "software as a service" - you know, rent seeking? - that has taken the Valley by storm. Because, what the hell, why not take the marks for every possible penny?
(It's worth noting here that Wikipedia's page on Benioff reads like it was written by his PR department.)
Yes, he's big humanitarian. Yada-yada. What's infinitely more important is that his company, Salesforce, is based on a business model of locking its customers into its "platform" (a strategy he adopted from Oracle). Which is to say getting them hooked so firmly on a very expensive sales management solution that it would be castastrophically expensive for them to replace it.
Which makes Marc Benioff a - what's the word I'm groping for?
Jass admitted to school authorities to accessing the emails of Docking, Caldwell, Assistant Vice President Bridgette Winslow, several unnamed fellow faculty members and students, including her stepson. She made these acknowledgements May 8 in a meeting with Human Resources Director Renee Burck; Vice President of Business Affairs Jerry Wright; and Patrick Quinlan, president of the faculty union, according to a timeline put together by the college and contained in the police report.
If I've learned anything about crime from corporations, it's that you should deny everything until the end of time and frustrate the prosecution endlessly until they are willing to let you go with a slap on the wrist but without admitting guilt.
It's worth noting that being a former Jeopardy! champion doesn't mean you're immune from acting foolishly.
There's a reason why Gary Gygax made Intelligence and Wisdom separate character traits, even way back when the D&D ruleset consisted of three stapled pamphlets in a white box...
This attention whore [is] suddenly a passionate proponent of an idea so fundamentally idiotic, so stubbornly anti-scientific, so willfully blind to all the scientific evidence since at least as early as the 13th century
Prompting nukenerd to sneer:
LoL, you protest too much; so much it sounds like you are the one taking the threat to the established view of a round earth seriously - by appealing to evidence for it. Since the 13th century eh? So did you find that by Googling for evidence that it was indeed round because you needed the re-assurance yourself?
Does 1492 ring any bells for you?
As someone points out further down the page, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's diameter pretty accurately - in the 4th century BCE. So, it's not like the fact it's a spheroid is exactly news.
You seem awfully smug for someone so easily entertained...
So, another unscrupulous narcissist hijacks clickbait farms to attract attention to a pointlessly-idiotic stunt.
In what universe is this even arguably "News for Nerds?"
Is there any "nerd" anywhere who takes flat-eartherism seriously?
Seriously?
This attention whore was never a flat-earth advocate - until he figured out that they're dumb enough to be willing to bankroll his stupid, steam-powered suicide machine. Now he's suddenly a passionate proponent of an idea so fundamentally idiotic, so stubbornly anti-scientific, so willfully blind to all the scientific evidence since at least as early as the 13th century that only aggressive dimwits like Atlanta rapper B o B take it seriously?
I'm not even going to facepalm or shake my metaphorical finger at/.'s so-called "editors" over this non-story, because all the evidence to date leads to the inescapable conclusion that such reactions only encourage them to post still more of this kind of horseshit. I am going to say that such blatant manipulation of the click-hungry meda - including/. - becomes progressively more tiresome with each iteration.
Downvoting crap like this is exactly what meta-moderation is for, folks...
of course we should plan now to adapt to the effects of global warming. It doesn't mean we should stop effort to reduce CO2 emissions. It's still worth it.
I agree - and I said that.
I don't think it will accomplish anything other than to delay the inevitable, but that, in itself, is a worthwhile goal, because it will give our species more time to prepare for the catastrophic geophysical and ecological changes to come...
Your whole post is the alarmist's handbook to try and push your various agendas. You take some things we have likely shown to be true, and use them to justify all sorts of doomsday scenarios which have absolutely no degree of certainty behind them.
My agenda?
I have none. I stand to gain or lose nothing, personally, regardless of whether any national or international efforts to constrain the emission of greenhouse gases succeed or fail. I own no stocks, bonds, or commodities, and I have no allegiance to any corporation, NGO, political party, or religious or secular organzaiton of any kind. Given my age and ill-health, I probably won't survive more than another decade or so, thus will be personally unaffected when the greenhouse chickens come home to roost. Nor do I have offspring that I know of, so I have no personal genetic stake in the outcome.
I merely observe - based on my knowledge of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the IPCC's and other scientific reports on climate change, and a keen interest in U.S. and international politics - that AGW is unequivocally real, and that the international community (and certainly the current U.S. administration and Congress) is profoundly unlikely to be able to do anything even marginally effective about it. And I'm not convinced the process could be stopped, even if every major greenhouse gas producer on the planet was able to achieve zero new emissions by the end of this year, because the excess carbon dioxide that's already in the atmosphere will be around for tens of thousands of years to come.
In the meantime, you don't know me, and you sure as hell don't have any basis for imputing motives or agendae to me that are purely products of your own imagination. So cut it out.
Fuck that. When there's smoke coming out of every window in the house, it's too late to raise the alarm...
Prompting fred6666 to remonstrate:
Future generations will live into that house whether you like it or not (it's not as if we will be ready to leave for Mars any time soon).
What you are saying sounds a lot like "the house is going to burn anyway, so why not start a second fire to grill some marshmallows in the kitchen".
Exactly the opposite is true. Did you even bother to read my original comment?
What I said, in essence, was that while the Paris Accord goals are worthwhile (because they will help slow the rate of global warming and consequent catastrophic climate change), meeting them will almost undoubtedly only delay it, for reasons having to do with the persistence of atmospheric carbon dioxide (~50 kiloyears). I also posited that climate stability is a complex system (what used to be known as a "chaotic system" until that coinage was deprecated) that is therefore liable to rapid, catastrophic collapse following even minor alterations in base conditions. The same goes for icecaps. Therefore, the most intelligent and useful strategy we, as a species, can pursue is to plan now for the evacuation of coastal areas and riparian plains adjacent to them, and the relocation (which is to say replacement) of cities (and especially ports) that will inevitably be destroyed by flooding over the next few centuries.
I also noted that, in my view - based on my species' long, regrettable history of acting in the stupidest, most short-sighted and counter-productive fashion imaginable - that it's a pretty sure bet that we will do nothing of the kind. Instead - and please feel free to point and laugh, if I turn out to be wrong about this - I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter that the human race will do everything but that, including, but not limited to, building enormously expensive sea walls around major coastal cities, assuring ourselves that we'll "find a solution to the problem," and generally trying to pretend we're not headed like a hyperloop toward a planetary climate that will eventually resemble that of the Cretaceous era.
Which is to say a flooded Earth with ocean levels 100 meters higher than today, significantly reduced cultivatable land, profoundly altered geography, and greatly reduced species diversity.
Ideally, I'd like to see us work toward a two-prong strategy: pursuing ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneouly making large-scale, realistic plans to cope with the inevitable major increase in ocean levels. However, I'm realistic (and pessimistic) enough to strongly doubt that we will get our collective shit together soon enough to do either of those things effectively.
Oh, and it's profoundly foolish to believe or advocate that the human race can ever evacuate the planet in favor of Mars, the asteroids, artificial orbital habitats, or any such "solution". There are far too many of us for that to be even marginally feasible. The most we'll be able to accomplish in that vein is to establish self-sustaining colonies elsewhere in the Sol system - and the seed population of those colonies will never approach even 1 percent of the Earth's population.
With Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and many, many others, I still think that's a goal worth pursuing, both in terms of its aspirational merits, and as a safeguard against a planetary extinction event (the impact of a bolide even larger than the Chixiculub impactor being the most common example) that would otherwise wipe out our species. Viable extraterrestrial colonies wouldn't save a single resident of this planet from dying, but they could allow humans as a species to survive such a disaster.
Oh, and by way of closing the parentheses here, I think all the rhetoric about the Earth "dying" as a result of catastrophic climte change ill-serv
No matter whether the Paris Accord goal is reachable or not, it's still a lot better if we manage to limit the temperature rise by say, 3 degrees C, than do absolutely nothing and end-up with a rise of 4, 5, or even 6 C.
During the 50-100 kiloyear period over which the Permain extinction occurred, the global temperature is estimated to have risen by 10 degrees Celsius. That's not even taking into account that the event started with a snap ice age - which I suspect may have substantially added to the methane emissions problem, once the minty, fresh permafrost melted.
I've been convinced for some time now that both icecaps and runaway greenhouse events are examples of complex (what used to be known as "chaotic") systems - which is to say that, in both examples, a quite small change in ground state can result in rapid, catastrophic collapse of what otherwise appeared to be a long-term-stable system the classic example is that of a spinning top, which seems stable right up until it loses sufficient rotational energy to become unstable enough to topple over). Note, for instance, that (again, despite starting with an ice age) the Permian climate transitioned to one in which there were NO polar ice caps. Also note that condition persisted for close to 200 million years, until the K-T extinction event created a new snap ice age that ushered in the current, Tertiary (or Paleogene) era.
A 2 degree C rise would give us longer to prepare for the coming geophysical catastrophe, but I very seriously doubt it can or will prevent it altogether, despite the IPCC's optimism on that score. (IMnsHO, its reports are overly influenced by purely political pressure from the USA and the funding truncheon it has used to bludgeon the organization's actual scientists into being less "alarmist".)
Fuck that. When there's smoke coming out of every window in the house, it's too late to raise the alarm...
At one point, virtually all scientists believed you could create gold from iron, too.
At NO point did ANY scientist believe you or anyone else could create gold from iron. Ever.
You are conflating alchemy with science - just as you are conflating fossil fuel industry propaganda with scientific, evidence-based skepticism.
Every climate scientist - with the exception of a tiny handful who are paid by the likes of the Koch brothers - agrees the evidence for AGW is overwhelming. That's a fact, and no amount of handwaving or false-equivalence mongering can wish it away.
The plain, uncomfortable truth is that the Paris Accord goal is unreachable. Short of geo-engineering on a massive scale (which would require trillions of dollars and rely on unproven - and inherently untestable - technologies, and thus won't happen) the average global temperature is going to rise by considerably more than 2 degrees C in the next century or so, regardless of how quickly electric vehicles replace internal combustion-based transportation.
Unfortunately, both gases will very likely cause the ocean floor to warm enough to melt the gigantic quantity of methane clathrate deposits which exist there (I disagree with the Wikipedia article's internal conclusion that the effects of continued ocean warming on those deposits will be "negligible". That's an opinion, not a fact - meanwhile, the rate at which the gas is being released from methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean has dramatically increased in recent years.) Conservatively speaking, methane is approximately 25-30 times more efficient a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide, so gigaton releases could be prospectively catastrophic.
If basically all the trapped methane gets released and carbon dioxide emissions continue to climb for the next 50 or so years, the best model of what will happen is probably the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Setting aside the mass extinction threat (because it's the distinctly secondary problem), the primary challenge that would present to the human species would be the complete melting of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps - which would result in a rise of 100 meters or more in global ocean levels. (Calculations that are based strictly on the volume of water which would be released fail to account for the additional long-term effect of continental rebound on ocean levels. Although the rebound effect initially reduces the impact of the melt water on ocean levels, eventually the resurgent continental mass will drag its surrounding continental shelf up with it, more than reversing that offset.)
So, the bottom line is that all current coastal cities - and a pretty large number of inland ones in riparian plains - are eventually going to wind up underwater. Miami, Houston, and New Orleans are the canaries in our oncoming global coal mine, but they're only the forerunners of much greater challenges to come. What we urgently need to do is to begin planning for the long retreat from today's coasts, so that it can be done with minimum disruption to the world's economies.
What's going to happen instead is that we're going to stick our collective fingers in our ears, screw our eyes shut, and chant, "No, no, no, no, NO!" until the rising waters engulf our individual homes, because humans are such incorrigible, congenital short-term thinkers.
You're not even sharp enough to notice we aren't a group.
It is like if somebody says, "I like rainbows," and you start asking to subscribe to the newsletter. We can tell you're trying to be an asshole, but there is nothing beyond that, not even a childish insult, just the raw intent to be an ass.
In all fairness, though, you have to admit it is a handsome brochure...
A centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number is generally found in the center of the political discourse - and achieving it typically requires compromise on both sides.
A radical centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number can best be achieved by standing the loudest mouths on both extremes of the political shouting match up against a wall and shooting their stupid, uncompromising asses...
For me, the guys who really broke the mould were underground(US)/progressive(UK) groups like The Doors or King Crimson. That has absolutely nothing to do with pop of course.
The Doors had two singles that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts - along with a #3 and two others that just missed hitting the Top Ten.
The Court Of The Crimson King - Part 1 actually made it to #80, as well...
The last step is easy. Just call it the Make American Internet Great Again Act and he'll sign it. You don't think he actually reads the bills that he's asked to sign do you?
Of course not. Donald Trump? Read?
Unfortunately, Stephen Miller does read them - and he's the new Steve Bannon...
They don't need a moderate Republican. Given the current state of the involved politics, what they need is a pissed off Republican who isn't interested in continuing in public service and who will vote to hurt Trump... OK, and who is also somewhat moderate by the standards of Trumpism.
There are a couple of those, if I've been following things as well as I think I have.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, it is not.
What they need - in addition to another Republican vote - is either a signature from the President, or a willingness on his part to allow their repeal bill to become law without his signature.
That might happen, especially if the Democrats cave on funding his ridiculous wall. However, given his record of doing whatever the couch creatures on Fox News tell him to do, that's probably not the way to bet...
Virtually every writer, you say ? I find plenty of major SF writers, with multiple NY Times Bestsellers, who aren't members.
So I did an experiment. I looked at the first 500 names in the SFWA directory. Now, I've been reading SF for 40+ years, and have been to a couple of Worldcons.
I recognized, at least by name, 24 of those 500 names (and several, I've just heard the name. ..). I've read at least 17 of them. I conclude, that SFWA membership is not an indicator of being a "major science fiction writer". . ..
I never said it was. What I said was "virtually every major science fiction writer is a member of SFWA," which is quite a different thing.
Yes, the membership roster includes many, many minor SF writers, as well as most of the major ones. The same is true of, for instance, the Writer's Guild and, in fact, any professional craft guild or association you care to name. As an example, I used to be a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (the folks who give out the Emmys). I can virtually guarantee you've never heard of me in that context, because I was a professional video editor, and I think it's extremely likely that you couldn't name even one of us under imminent threat of having your kneecaps blown off.
It's a simple illustration of set theory: that all members of a specified set are members of a different set in no way either insures or, indeed, implies that all members of the second set are also members of the first.
All Ainu are Japanese - but very fucking few Japanese are Ainu...
who are behind this SFWA thing? So we can avoid them in the future, cause they obviously suck at thinking about technology, the future and what it means for society.
Virtually every major science fiction writer is a member of SFWA, as has been the case since the group was founded in the 1960's and began the Nebula awards. That you don't know that speaks volumes about your knowledge of the field...
Doing all of my thinking on a tight deadline while also doing the actual design or coding involves a lot of bad guessing. But there comes a point where I could just think about all the possibilities forever and never start or get anything done.
Yep. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is never a useful strategy. It's a prescription for inaction.
Having said that, your first point:
Rumination is free labor. If I'm thinking about a project for several weeks when I'm in the shower, trying to sleep, driving - that's extra overtime for free.
is absolutely the case, IMnsHO.
I'm a writer. A key part of my process is thinking about what I'm going to write. In particular, whether it's a chapter in my novel, an opinion piece, or a feature story, the most important product of my rumination is the opening and closing lines. Assuming I've done the necessary research, and I know the points I want to cover, once I have those taped down, the bit in between them almost writes itself.
If you work in journalism, you write to deadlines all the time. Under that kind of pressure, stuff tends to falls on the floor - and sometimes that stuff is important. For the most part, that's where corrections and retractions originate: the need to get the piece submitted by an arbitrary deadline (trying to "scoop" the competition, as a big, fat for-instance) incentivizes sloppiness. That's why there used to be people called "fact checkers" in the industry - and, believe it or not, they had the power to spike a story, if it contained factual errors (or simply assertions for which there was insufficient evidence).
Now? Not so much. The really big guys - NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. - can still afford to pay those people, but they inevitably are a dying breed, like circus elephant trainers. That's driven by economics, of course. As circulation numbers for print media have plummeted like an Acapulco cliff diver, so have ad revenues - and ad revenues, not subscription fees, are where print media makes its principal income. (That's also true of digital publication, where ad revenues are tiny compared to print, so fact checking in the online world is mostly post hoc, and conducted for "Gotcha!" purposes, rather than to ensure the journalistic ducks are properly aligned before you click "Publish!")
The thing is, though, that, for businesses in general, deadlines are a necessary and unavoidable evil. Creative teams rarely work in a vacuum - Google's Project X skunkworks notwithstanding - and it's just impractical to budget and responsibly allocate resources for "When you get around to it... "
It isn't possible all these people independently "discovered" a 20 year old flaw at the same time. Think about it. Google supposedly discovered it six months ago. I don't believe it.
Apparently you haven't heard of steam engine time. If Newton and Liebnitz could (more or less) simultaneously, independently invent "the calculus", why can't three disparate security research teams (more or less) simultaneously, independently discover the same security bug?
Note, as another example from a third field, that both Jennifer Doudna's and Zhang Feng's teams (more or less) simultaneously, independently discovered the CRISPR gene-splicing technique, just a few years ago. This kind of thing happens more frequently than you appear to believe is possible.
Facebook is the ultimate time waster. You've exceeded everyone's expectations in that regard. Nothing left to do there.
FTFY:
Social media is the ultimate time waster.
It's not just FB. Twitter (!), Snapchat, Instagram, or even/. They're all designed to capture their users' attention and keep them on-site, so that the corporations that own them can mine the living shit out of their data streams and sell the bulk data they harvest to advertisers, marketers, and basically anyone who's willing to pay for it.
The thing is, though, FB can be as useful or as valueless as you care to make it. I spend, on average, probably 20 minutes a day on FB. I'm a member of several writers' groups there. I've found much of value to me in them, including beta readers, editors, and cover artists who are also members, and documents and links to websites with quite useful advice on things like Amazon keyword selection (a much more subtle and Byzantine discipline than anyone outside of the field might suspect), reviewer blogs, promotional services (of which a handful are worthwhile and a horde are merely scams - or might as well be, for all the good they do the indie authors who employ them), and many other topics that only writers give a damn about.
I also use it to check in with (and up on) old friends, read the latest Bloom County posts (Berkeley Breathed restarted the strip a couple of years ago. It's still every bit as wise, silly, compassionate, and funny as it ever was, too.), occasionally put items up for sale, and so forth. The key, though, is that I have an agenda whenever I go there. I ignore my "feed", because it is the principal time-wasting feature of FB. Instead, I do what I logged in to do, and then leave.
I also use NoScript's ABE feature to keep FB and other social sites from tracking me around the web, and I rely on Better Privacy to help take care of supercookie BLOBs (which is one of the main reasons why I haven't upgraded to the latest version of Firefox - because Mozilla has decided I won't be allowed to use Better Privacy if I do).
It basically comes down to self-control (something that Americans, in particular, are unskilled in and resistant to), and not taking the path of least resistance as an anodyne to boredom. When I have time on my hands, I play guitar, for instance. It's a helluva lot more satisfyiing than reading my Facebook feed...
The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president's daily briefing.
Daily intelligence briefings for the Chief Executive used to be a vitally important component of policy formulation. Then President Chump was sworn in, and suddenly they became completely irrelevant, because they bored him. He refuses to read or even listen to them, even when they mostly contain brightly-colored graphics, videos, and other visual elements designed to appeal to the functional-illiterate-in-chief. They've also been tailored to avoid topics, such as the latest intelligence on Russian psyops interference in the 2016 election, that push the Orange Oaf's buttons. (Let me point you to an alternative citation, because the Washington Post article may be paywalled for those who don't know how to use private browsing and cookie deletion to get around it.)
Think about how you'd feel if you had dedicated your career to producing detailed, highly-nuanced, daily reports on a whole range of intelligence topics for the most powerful national leader on the planet - only to discover that the new guy is completely uninterested in any information that can't be expressed in crayon drawings and bumper sticker catchphrases. Now throw in civil servant wages, and ask yourself whether that job would be in any way attractive to you?
You have to actually make a monorail do something for which there is no alternative transportation. The Vancouver Skytrain is actually the most efficient way to get across the city, so they get 117.4 million passengers in 2010 and 137.4 million in 2016.
We lived in Vegas when the monorail was built. There was, as you might imagine, a lot of coverage of the proposal, the construction of the track, and the grand opening of the line.
Of course, the coverage by the major dailies and the local media was mostly of the cheerleading kind. The alternative weeklies did a better job, but it didn't keep the deal with the Clark County supervisors from being made mostly behind closed doors. (The Strip, proper, lies entirely outside the City of Las Vegas, so the Vegas city planning commission, city council, and mayor had no seat at the table.)
What it boiled down to was that a private, non-profit (!) corporation formed by the casinos where the train actually has stations floated the bond for design and construction, with the voters on the hook to repay it - a typical Vegas klind of backscratching deal. If you didn't kick in, you didn't get to take advantage of the monorail traffic. Of course, since it was the big casinos financing it, one of the conditions they imposed was that it run behind them, so that patrons would have to walk through the gaming floor of each stop on their way to and from the train.
McCarren International Airport management took one look at the proposal and said, "No, thanks.". (It would have required McCarren to donate, get permits for, and clear the land across which the track would run, and build a terminal station, too - all at no expense to the hotel-casino operators who would gain the only real benefit from it. I thought McCarren's decision showed surprising common sense, under the circumstances.)
So that's why it doesn't run to the airport - or to the actual Strip - or stop at more than a handful of big casino properties. And, likewise, that's why it's an abysmal failure.
Not just teenagers. My BF and I love going out to movies and we are in our 50s. Getting rid of communal entertainment spaces will make people even more isolated and less engaged than before, continuing the atrophication of social skills kicked off by smartphones.
I used to love going to movies. Then, beginning in the 1990's, theater chains decided to stop enforcing basic movie-going civility - for fear that they would drive their teenage customers away.
Since then, going to see movies has become a more and more tooth-grindingly irritating experience for me. Finally, about 2007, I decided I'd had more than enough of assholes carrying on conversations with their friends, shouting advice to the characters on the screen, and (the very last straw) taking and even making calls on their cell phones. I'm sure smartphones have made the problem even worse in the intervening time.
I'm sorry to have lost the experience, but I simply can't accept spending however much money a movie ticket now costs to have my experience utterly ruined by narcissistic jackasses who don't know or care how negatively their oafish behavior impacts other patrons. And they're right that it's okay - because theater owners have allowed it to become okay. That sucks balls.
So now my wife and I watch movies and TV shows on the 55-inch flat screen TV in our living room, with our 7.1 sound system handling audio duties (and it's not one of those weenie, little deals with the juicebox-sized surround speakers, either - our mains have 15" woofers, and the surround and rear speakers are bookshelf speakers with 8" woofers that I'd've been happy to have as my mains back in my 20's), and we've learned not to miss being part of a larger audience.
But I definitely remember what it was like to sit in the dark, surrounded by strangers, all of whom were as enthralled as I was by the spectacle on the screen. Hell, I recall attending the Cinerama premiere of 2001: A Space Odessy in Honolulu (one of only six theaters it played in for its first week in domestic release). That was a freakin' magical experience - as was seeing Star Wars: A New Hope on its first night at the Oakland Paramount Theatre, back before they carved it up into a multiplex. Hell, even seeing Koyyannisqatsi at the UC Theatre in Berkeley was a blast, and that place was always a hole.
Okay - I do miss being part of an audience. But I'll never go back to the multiplex, because I simply can't lose myself in the moviegoing audience experience when every teenage dimwit in the crowd is doing his/her level best to take me out of that experience...
I forgot about Gotham. Yes, it veers from canon - but it's a very well-written, well-cast, well-imagined series that does real justice to its huge (and growing) cast of characters.
Slashdot Mirror
All you really need to know about Marc Benioff is that it took him only 4 years to go from college graduate to vice president of Oracle Corporation.
Yes, that Oracle Corporation.
Making that big a leap in that environment requires a stratospheric level of ruthlessness and ambition, combined with an active willingness to kiss Larry Ellison's ass and swear it tastes like butterscotch. Daily.
Benioff is the guy who coined the phrase "software as a service" - you know, rent seeking? - that has taken the Valley by storm. Because, what the hell, why not take the marks for every possible penny?
(It's worth noting here that Wikipedia's page on Benioff reads like it was written by his PR department.)
Yes, he's big humanitarian. Yada-yada. What's infinitely more important is that his company, Salesforce, is based on a business model of locking its customers into its "platform" (a strategy he adopted from Oracle). Which is to say getting them hooked so firmly on a very expensive sales management solution that it would be castastrophically expensive for them to replace it.
Which makes Marc Benioff a - what's the word I'm groping for?
Oh, yeah: "hypocrite" ...
From TFA:
Jass admitted to school authorities to accessing the emails of Docking, Caldwell, Assistant Vice President Bridgette Winslow, several unnamed fellow faculty members and students, including her stepson. She made these acknowledgements May 8 in a meeting with Human Resources Director Renee Burck; Vice President of Business Affairs Jerry Wright; and Patrick Quinlan, president of the faculty union, according to a timeline put together by the college and contained in the police report.
If I've learned anything about crime from corporations, it's that you should deny everything until the end of time and frustrate the prosecution endlessly until they are willing to let you go with a slap on the wrist but without admitting guilt.
It's worth noting that being a former Jeopardy! champion doesn't mean you're immune from acting foolishly.
There's a reason why Gary Gygax made Intelligence and Wisdom separate character traits, even way back when the D&D ruleset consisted of three stapled pamphlets in a white box ...
I snarled:
This attention whore [is] suddenly a passionate proponent of an idea so fundamentally idiotic, so stubbornly anti-scientific, so willfully blind to all the scientific evidence since at least as early as the 13th century
Prompting nukenerd to sneer:
LoL, you protest too much; so much it sounds like you are the one taking the threat to the established view of a round earth seriously - by appealing to evidence for it. Since the 13th century eh? So did you find that by Googling for evidence that it was indeed round because you needed the re-assurance yourself?
Does 1492 ring any bells for you?
As someone points out further down the page, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's diameter pretty accurately - in the 4th century BCE. So, it's not like the fact it's a spheroid is exactly news.
You seem awfully smug for someone so easily entertained ...
So, another unscrupulous narcissist hijacks clickbait farms to attract attention to a pointlessly-idiotic stunt.
In what universe is this even arguably "News for Nerds?"
Is there any "nerd" anywhere who takes flat-eartherism seriously?
Seriously?
This attention whore was never a flat-earth advocate - until he figured out that they're dumb enough to be willing to bankroll his stupid, steam-powered suicide machine. Now he's suddenly a passionate proponent of an idea so fundamentally idiotic, so stubbornly anti-scientific, so willfully blind to all the scientific evidence since at least as early as the 13th century that only aggressive dimwits like Atlanta rapper B o B take it seriously?
I'm not even going to facepalm or shake my metaphorical finger at /.'s so-called "editors" over this non-story, because all the evidence to date leads to the inescapable conclusion that such reactions only encourage them to post still more of this kind of horseshit. I am going to say that such blatant manipulation of the click-hungry meda - including /. - becomes progressively more tiresome with each iteration.
Downvoting crap like this is exactly what meta-moderation is for, folks ...
fred6666 objected:
of course we should plan now to adapt to the effects of global warming. It doesn't mean we should stop effort to reduce CO2 emissions. It's still worth it.
I agree - and I said that.
I don't think it will accomplish anything other than to delay the inevitable, but that, in itself, is a worthwhile goal, because it will give our species more time to prepare for the catastrophic geophysical and ecological changes to come ...
fatwilbur scoffed:
Your whole post is the alarmist's handbook to try and push your various agendas. You take some things we have likely shown to be true, and use them to justify all sorts of doomsday scenarios which have absolutely no degree of certainty behind them.
My agenda?
I have none. I stand to gain or lose nothing, personally, regardless of whether any national or international efforts to constrain the emission of greenhouse gases succeed or fail. I own no stocks, bonds, or commodities, and I have no allegiance to any corporation, NGO, political party, or religious or secular organzaiton of any kind. Given my age and ill-health, I probably won't survive more than another decade or so, thus will be personally unaffected when the greenhouse chickens come home to roost. Nor do I have offspring that I know of, so I have no personal genetic stake in the outcome.
I merely observe - based on my knowledge of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the IPCC's and other scientific reports on climate change, and a keen interest in U.S. and international politics - that AGW is unequivocally real, and that the international community (and certainly the current U.S. administration and Congress) is profoundly unlikely to be able to do anything even marginally effective about it. And I'm not convinced the process could be stopped, even if every major greenhouse gas producer on the planet was able to achieve zero new emissions by the end of this year, because the excess carbon dioxide that's already in the atmosphere will be around for tens of thousands of years to come.
In the meantime, you don't know me, and you sure as hell don't have any basis for imputing motives or agendae to me that are purely products of your own imagination. So cut it out.
I said:
Fuck that. When there's smoke coming out of every window in the house, it's too late to raise the alarm ...
Prompting fred6666 to remonstrate:
Future generations will live into that house whether you like it or not (it's not as if we will be ready to leave for Mars any time soon). What you are saying sounds a lot like "the house is going to burn anyway, so why not start a second fire to grill some marshmallows in the kitchen".
Exactly the opposite is true. Did you even bother to read my original comment?
What I said, in essence, was that while the Paris Accord goals are worthwhile (because they will help slow the rate of global warming and consequent catastrophic climate change), meeting them will almost undoubtedly only delay it, for reasons having to do with the persistence of atmospheric carbon dioxide (~50 kiloyears). I also posited that climate stability is a complex system (what used to be known as a "chaotic system" until that coinage was deprecated) that is therefore liable to rapid, catastrophic collapse following even minor alterations in base conditions. The same goes for icecaps. Therefore, the most intelligent and useful strategy we, as a species, can pursue is to plan now for the evacuation of coastal areas and riparian plains adjacent to them, and the relocation (which is to say replacement) of cities (and especially ports) that will inevitably be destroyed by flooding over the next few centuries.
I also noted that, in my view - based on my species' long, regrettable history of acting in the stupidest, most short-sighted and counter-productive fashion imaginable - that it's a pretty sure bet that we will do nothing of the kind. Instead - and please feel free to point and laugh, if I turn out to be wrong about this - I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter that the human race will do everything but that, including, but not limited to, building enormously expensive sea walls around major coastal cities, assuring ourselves that we'll "find a solution to the problem," and generally trying to pretend we're not headed like a hyperloop toward a planetary climate that will eventually resemble that of the Cretaceous era.
Which is to say a flooded Earth with ocean levels 100 meters higher than today, significantly reduced cultivatable land, profoundly altered geography, and greatly reduced species diversity.
Ideally, I'd like to see us work toward a two-prong strategy: pursuing ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneouly making large-scale, realistic plans to cope with the inevitable major increase in ocean levels. However, I'm realistic (and pessimistic) enough to strongly doubt that we will get our collective shit together soon enough to do either of those things effectively.
Oh, and it's profoundly foolish to believe or advocate that the human race can ever evacuate the planet in favor of Mars, the asteroids, artificial orbital habitats, or any such "solution". There are far too many of us for that to be even marginally feasible. The most we'll be able to accomplish in that vein is to establish self-sustaining colonies elsewhere in the Sol system - and the seed population of those colonies will never approach even 1 percent of the Earth's population.
With Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and many, many others, I still think that's a goal worth pursuing, both in terms of its aspirational merits, and as a safeguard against a planetary extinction event (the impact of a bolide even larger than the Chixiculub impactor being the most common example) that would otherwise wipe out our species. Viable extraterrestrial colonies wouldn't save a single resident of this planet from dying, but they could allow humans as a species to survive such a disaster.
Oh, and by way of closing the parentheses here, I think all the rhetoric about the Earth "dying" as a result of catastrophic climte change ill-serv
fred6666 objected:
No matter whether the Paris Accord goal is reachable or not, it's still a lot better if we manage to limit the temperature rise by say, 3 degrees C, than do absolutely nothing and end-up with a rise of 4, 5, or even 6 C.
During the 50-100 kiloyear period over which the Permain extinction occurred, the global temperature is estimated to have risen by 10 degrees Celsius. That's not even taking into account that the event started with a snap ice age - which I suspect may have substantially added to the methane emissions problem, once the minty, fresh permafrost melted.
I've been convinced for some time now that both icecaps and runaway greenhouse events are examples of complex (what used to be known as "chaotic") systems - which is to say that, in both examples, a quite small change in ground state can result in rapid, catastrophic collapse of what otherwise appeared to be a long-term-stable system the classic example is that of a spinning top, which seems stable right up until it loses sufficient rotational energy to become unstable enough to topple over). Note, for instance, that (again, despite starting with an ice age) the Permian climate transitioned to one in which there were NO polar ice caps. Also note that condition persisted for close to 200 million years, until the K-T extinction event created a new snap ice age that ushered in the current, Tertiary (or Paleogene) era.
A 2 degree C rise would give us longer to prepare for the coming geophysical catastrophe, but I very seriously doubt it can or will prevent it altogether, despite the IPCC's optimism on that score. (IMnsHO, its reports are overly influenced by purely political pressure from the USA and the funding truncheon it has used to bludgeon the organization's actual scientists into being less "alarmist".)
Fuck that. When there's smoke coming out of every window in the house, it's too late to raise the alarm ...
Some anonymous coward claimed:
At one point, virtually all scientists believed you could create gold from iron, too.
At NO point did ANY scientist believe you or anyone else could create gold from iron. Ever.
You are conflating alchemy with science - just as you are conflating fossil fuel industry propaganda with scientific, evidence-based skepticism.
Every climate scientist - with the exception of a tiny handful who are paid by the likes of the Koch brothers - agrees the evidence for AGW is overwhelming. That's a fact, and no amount of handwaving or false-equivalence mongering can wish it away.
The plain, uncomfortable truth is that the Paris Accord goal is unreachable. Short of geo-engineering on a massive scale (which would require trillions of dollars and rely on unproven - and inherently untestable - technologies, and thus won't happen) the average global temperature is going to rise by considerably more than 2 degrees C in the next century or so, regardless of how quickly electric vehicles replace internal combustion-based transportation.
Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for around 50 kiloyears. More cogently, once the Arctic permafrost thaws, the amount of methane released will be staggering. The only good news there is that it doesn't persist in the atmosphere for long.
Unfortunately, both gases will very likely cause the ocean floor to warm enough to melt the gigantic quantity of methane clathrate deposits which exist there (I disagree with the Wikipedia article's internal conclusion that the effects of continued ocean warming on those deposits will be "negligible". That's an opinion, not a fact - meanwhile, the rate at which the gas is being released from methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean has dramatically increased in recent years.) Conservatively speaking, methane is approximately 25-30 times more efficient a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide, so gigaton releases could be prospectively catastrophic.
If basically all the trapped methane gets released and carbon dioxide emissions continue to climb for the next 50 or so years, the best model of what will happen is probably the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Setting aside the mass extinction threat (because it's the distinctly secondary problem), the primary challenge that would present to the human species would be the complete melting of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps - which would result in a rise of 100 meters or more in global ocean levels. (Calculations that are based strictly on the volume of water which would be released fail to account for the additional long-term effect of continental rebound on ocean levels. Although the rebound effect initially reduces the impact of the melt water on ocean levels, eventually the resurgent continental mass will drag its surrounding continental shelf up with it, more than reversing that offset.)
So, the bottom line is that all current coastal cities - and a pretty large number of inland ones in riparian plains - are eventually going to wind up underwater. Miami, Houston, and New Orleans are the canaries in our oncoming global coal mine, but they're only the forerunners of much greater challenges to come. What we urgently need to do is to begin planning for the long retreat from today's coasts, so that it can be done with minimum disruption to the world's economies.
What's going to happen instead is that we're going to stick our collective fingers in our ears, screw our eyes shut, and chant, "No, no, no, no, NO!" until the rising waters engulf our individual homes, because humans are such incorrigible, congenital short-term thinkers.
A
Aighearach remonstrated:
You're not even sharp enough to notice we aren't a group.
It is like if somebody says, "I like rainbows," and you start asking to subscribe to the newsletter. We can tell you're trying to be an asshole, but there is nothing beyond that, not even a childish insult, just the raw intent to be an ass.
In all fairness, though, you have to admit it is a handsome brochure ...
;>
postbigbang noted:
"radical centrist" seems an oxymoron.
It's really not, though.
A centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number is generally found in the center of the political discourse - and achieving it typically requires compromise on both sides.
A radical centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number can best be achieved by standing the loudest mouths on both extremes of the political shouting match up against a wall and shooting their stupid, uncompromising asses ...
Godwin O'Hitler confessed:
For me, the guys who really broke the mould were underground(US)/progressive(UK) groups like The Doors or King Crimson. That has absolutely nothing to do with pop of course.
The Doors had two singles that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts - along with a #3 and two others that just missed hitting the Top Ten.
The Court Of The Crimson King - Part 1 actually made it to #80, as well ...
I'm an aging radical centrist who despises racism, know-nothingism, homophobia, and falsely-entitled, right-wing bloviators.
And I agree with pretty much everything you've said about music ...
TheRaven64 chortled:
The last step is easy. Just call it the Make American Internet Great Again Act and he'll sign it. You don't think he actually reads the bills that he's asked to sign do you?
Of course not. Donald Trump? Read?
Unfortunately, Stephen Miller does read them - and he's the new Steve Bannon ...
olsmeister urged:
We need to buy a Senator.
Someone with points: please mod parent +1 Funny ... !
Baron Yam observed:
They don't need a moderate Republican. Given the current state of the involved politics, what they need is a pissed off Republican who isn't interested in continuing in public service and who will vote to hurt Trump... OK, and who is also somewhat moderate by the standards of Trumpism.
There are a couple of those, if I've been following things as well as I think I have.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, it is not.
What they need - in addition to another Republican vote - is either a signature from the President, or a willingness on his part to allow their repeal bill to become law without his signature.
That might happen, especially if the Democrats cave on funding his ridiculous wall. However, given his record of doing whatever the couch creatures on Fox News tell him to do, that's probably not the way to bet ...
Salgak1 scoffed:
Virtually every writer, you say ? I find plenty of major SF writers, with multiple NY Times Bestsellers, who aren't members.
So I did an experiment. I looked at the first 500 names in the SFWA directory. Now, I've been reading SF for 40+ years, and have been to a couple of Worldcons.
I recognized, at least by name, 24 of those 500 names (and several, I've just heard the name. . .). I've read at least 17 of them. I conclude, that SFWA membership is not an indicator of being a "major science fiction writer". . . .
I never said it was. What I said was "virtually every major science fiction writer is a member of SFWA," which is quite a different thing.
Yes, the membership roster includes many, many minor SF writers, as well as most of the major ones. The same is true of, for instance, the Writer's Guild and, in fact, any professional craft guild or association you care to name. As an example, I used to be a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (the folks who give out the Emmys). I can virtually guarantee you've never heard of me in that context, because I was a professional video editor, and I think it's extremely likely that you couldn't name even one of us under imminent threat of having your kneecaps blown off.
It's a simple illustration of set theory: that all members of a specified set are members of a different set in no way either insures or, indeed, implies that all members of the second set are also members of the first.
All Ainu are Japanese - but very fucking few Japanese are Ainu ...
klingens demanded:
who are behind this SFWA thing? So we can avoid them in the future, cause they obviously suck at thinking about technology, the future and what it means for society.
Virtually every major science fiction writer is a member of SFWA, as has been the case since the group was founded in the 1960's and began the Nebula awards. That you don't know that speaks volumes about your knowledge of the field ...
omnichad observed:
Doing all of my thinking on a tight deadline while also doing the actual design or coding involves a lot of bad guessing. But there comes a point where I could just think about all the possibilities forever and never start or get anything done.
Yep. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is never a useful strategy. It's a prescription for inaction.
Having said that, your first point:
Rumination is free labor. If I'm thinking about a project for several weeks when I'm in the shower, trying to sleep, driving - that's extra overtime for free.
is absolutely the case, IMnsHO.
I'm a writer. A key part of my process is thinking about what I'm going to write. In particular, whether it's a chapter in my novel, an opinion piece, or a feature story, the most important product of my rumination is the opening and closing lines. Assuming I've done the necessary research, and I know the points I want to cover, once I have those taped down, the bit in between them almost writes itself.
If you work in journalism, you write to deadlines all the time. Under that kind of pressure, stuff tends to falls on the floor - and sometimes that stuff is important. For the most part, that's where corrections and retractions originate: the need to get the piece submitted by an arbitrary deadline (trying to "scoop" the competition, as a big, fat for-instance) incentivizes sloppiness. That's why there used to be people called "fact checkers" in the industry - and, believe it or not, they had the power to spike a story, if it contained factual errors (or simply assertions for which there was insufficient evidence).
Now? Not so much. The really big guys - NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. - can still afford to pay those people, but they inevitably are a dying breed, like circus elephant trainers. That's driven by economics, of course. As circulation numbers for print media have plummeted like an Acapulco cliff diver, so have ad revenues - and ad revenues, not subscription fees, are where print media makes its principal income. (That's also true of digital publication, where ad revenues are tiny compared to print, so fact checking in the online world is mostly post hoc, and conducted for "Gotcha!" purposes, rather than to ensure the journalistic ducks are properly aligned before you click "Publish!")
The thing is, though, that, for businesses in general, deadlines are a necessary and unavoidable evil. Creative teams rarely work in a vacuum - Google's Project X skunkworks notwithstanding - and it's just impractical to budget and responsibly allocate resources for "When you get around to it ... "
https://slashdot.org/~110010001000 protested:
It isn't possible all these people independently "discovered" a 20 year old flaw at the same time. Think about it. Google supposedly discovered it six months ago. I don't believe it.
Apparently you haven't heard of steam engine time. If Newton and Liebnitz could (more or less) simultaneously, independently invent "the calculus", why can't three disparate security research teams (more or less) simultaneously, independently discover the same security bug?
Note, as another example from a third field, that both Jennifer Doudna's and Zhang Feng's teams (more or less) simultaneously, independently discovered the CRISPR gene-splicing technique, just a few years ago. This kind of thing happens more frequently than you appear to believe is possible.
Paranoia is its own punishment ...
zifn4b proclaimed:
Facebook is the ultimate time waster. You've exceeded everyone's expectations in that regard. Nothing left to do there.
FTFY:
Social media is the ultimate time waster.
It's not just FB. Twitter (!), Snapchat, Instagram, or even /. They're all designed to capture their users' attention and keep them on-site, so that the corporations that own them can mine the living shit out of their data streams and sell the bulk data they harvest to advertisers, marketers, and basically anyone who's willing to pay for it.
The thing is, though, FB can be as useful or as valueless as you care to make it. I spend, on average, probably 20 minutes a day on FB. I'm a member of several writers' groups there. I've found much of value to me in them, including beta readers, editors, and cover artists who are also members, and documents and links to websites with quite useful advice on things like Amazon keyword selection (a much more subtle and Byzantine discipline than anyone outside of the field might suspect), reviewer blogs, promotional services (of which a handful are worthwhile and a horde are merely scams - or might as well be, for all the good they do the indie authors who employ them), and many other topics that only writers give a damn about.
I also use it to check in with (and up on) old friends, read the latest Bloom County posts (Berkeley Breathed restarted the strip a couple of years ago. It's still every bit as wise, silly, compassionate, and funny as it ever was, too.), occasionally put items up for sale, and so forth. The key, though, is that I have an agenda whenever I go there. I ignore my "feed", because it is the principal time-wasting feature of FB. Instead, I do what I logged in to do, and then leave.
I also use NoScript's ABE feature to keep FB and other social sites from tracking me around the web, and I rely on Better Privacy to help take care of supercookie BLOBs (which is one of the main reasons why I haven't upgraded to the latest version of Firefox - because Mozilla has decided I won't be allowed to use Better Privacy if I do).
It basically comes down to self-control (something that Americans, in particular, are unskilled in and resistant to), and not taking the path of least resistance as an anodyne to boredom. When I have time on my hands, I play guitar, for instance. It's a helluva lot more satisfyiing than reading my Facebook feed ...
From TFS:
The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president's daily briefing.
Daily intelligence briefings for the Chief Executive used to be a vitally important component of policy formulation. Then President Chump was sworn in, and suddenly they became completely irrelevant, because they bored him. He refuses to read or even listen to them, even when they mostly contain brightly-colored graphics, videos, and other visual elements designed to appeal to the functional-illiterate-in-chief. They've also been tailored to avoid topics, such as the latest intelligence on Russian psyops interference in the 2016 election, that push the Orange Oaf's buttons. (Let me point you to an alternative citation, because the Washington Post article may be paywalled for those who don't know how to use private browsing and cookie deletion to get around it.)
Think about how you'd feel if you had dedicated your career to producing detailed, highly-nuanced, daily reports on a whole range of intelligence topics for the most powerful national leader on the planet - only to discover that the new guy is completely uninterested in any information that can't be expressed in crayon drawings and bumper sticker catchphrases. Now throw in civil servant wages, and ask yourself whether that job would be in any way attractive to you?
Yeah - it's like that.
That's why they're leaving ...
https://slashdot.org/~fluffernutter observed:
You have to actually make a monorail do something for which there is no alternative transportation. The Vancouver Skytrain is actually the most efficient way to get across the city, so they get 117.4 million passengers in 2010 and 137.4 million in 2016.
We lived in Vegas when the monorail was built. There was, as you might imagine, a lot of coverage of the proposal, the construction of the track, and the grand opening of the line.
Of course, the coverage by the major dailies and the local media was mostly of the cheerleading kind. The alternative weeklies did a better job, but it didn't keep the deal with the Clark County supervisors from being made mostly behind closed doors. (The Strip, proper, lies entirely outside the City of Las Vegas, so the Vegas city planning commission, city council, and mayor had no seat at the table.)
What it boiled down to was that a private, non-profit (!) corporation formed by the casinos where the train actually has stations floated the bond for design and construction, with the voters on the hook to repay it - a typical Vegas klind of backscratching deal. If you didn't kick in, you didn't get to take advantage of the monorail traffic. Of course, since it was the big casinos financing it, one of the conditions they imposed was that it run behind them, so that patrons would have to walk through the gaming floor of each stop on their way to and from the train.
McCarren International Airport management took one look at the proposal and said, "No, thanks.". (It would have required McCarren to donate, get permits for, and clear the land across which the track would run, and build a terminal station, too - all at no expense to the hotel-casino operators who would gain the only real benefit from it. I thought McCarren's decision showed surprising common sense, under the circumstances.)
So that's why it doesn't run to the airport - or to the actual Strip - or stop at more than a handful of big casino properties. And, likewise, that's why it's an abysmal failure.
Vegas, baby ...
dskoll disagreed:
Not just teenagers. My BF and I love going out to movies and we are in our 50s. Getting rid of communal entertainment spaces will make people even more isolated and less engaged than before, continuing the atrophication of social skills kicked off by smartphones.
I used to love going to movies. Then, beginning in the 1990's, theater chains decided to stop enforcing basic movie-going civility - for fear that they would drive their teenage customers away.
Since then, going to see movies has become a more and more tooth-grindingly irritating experience for me. Finally, about 2007, I decided I'd had more than enough of assholes carrying on conversations with their friends, shouting advice to the characters on the screen, and (the very last straw) taking and even making calls on their cell phones. I'm sure smartphones have made the problem even worse in the intervening time.
I'm sorry to have lost the experience, but I simply can't accept spending however much money a movie ticket now costs to have my experience utterly ruined by narcissistic jackasses who don't know or care how negatively their oafish behavior impacts other patrons. And they're right that it's okay - because theater owners have allowed it to become okay. That sucks balls.
So now my wife and I watch movies and TV shows on the 55-inch flat screen TV in our living room, with our 7.1 sound system handling audio duties (and it's not one of those weenie, little deals with the juicebox-sized surround speakers, either - our mains have 15" woofers, and the surround and rear speakers are bookshelf speakers with 8" woofers that I'd've been happy to have as my mains back in my 20's), and we've learned not to miss being part of a larger audience.
But I definitely remember what it was like to sit in the dark, surrounded by strangers, all of whom were as enthralled as I was by the spectacle on the screen. Hell, I recall attending the Cinerama premiere of 2001: A Space Odessy in Honolulu (one of only six theaters it played in for its first week in domestic release). That was a freakin' magical experience - as was seeing Star Wars: A New Hope on its first night at the Oakland Paramount Theatre, back before they carved it up into a multiplex. Hell, even seeing Koyyannisqatsi at the UC Theatre in Berkeley was a blast, and that place was always a hole.
Okay - I do miss being part of an audience. But I'll never go back to the multiplex, because I simply can't lose myself in the moviegoing audience experience when every teenage dimwit in the crowd is doing his/her level best to take me out of that experience ...
AmiMoJo noted:
Gotham isn't bad either.
I forgot about Gotham. Yes, it veers from canon - but it's a very well-written, well-cast, well-imagined series that does real justice to its huge (and growing) cast of characters.
Thanks for reminding me ...