After messing with aptitude for 90 minutes, I figured out that some packages on the ftp site weren't signed (or something) and wouldn't install.
Whatever it was, it wasn't a signing problem: you'd have to install apt 0.6 and aptitude 0.3 (from Debian experimental) in order for signatures to be verified.
Downgrading can be done (I've downgraded entire systems from unstable to testing) but the automatic tools won't do it for you and you absolutely have to know what you're doing.
There's no particular effort made to ensure that direct downgrades work smoothly. Of course, you can always remove (or preferably purge) the current version of a program, then install the older version. That's pretty much guaranteed to work.
The strong gender divides and politics don't arise until book 4. There is some suggestion that they exist before that, but they aren't essential to the story -- you could make Roke coed and Ogion a woman, and the books would hang together just fine.
Book 4 was written 20 years after book 3, and contains a number of other continuity problems (eg, characters that were alive that are dead with no explanation); Le Guin tried, fairly transparently, to paper these over in later books. My understanding is that she became involved in feminist politics in the interim, and that's part of the reason for the change in how gender is treated. (can anyone corroborate/deny?)
Personally, I just treat all the later books (Tehanu onwards) as existing in a separate universe from Earthsea, and the question of women and magic as being essentially unanswered in the original Earthsea universe. It's the only way I could appreciate them at all.
As for the TV series: I thought it was actually fun...as long as you realize that it's there to make fun of. Throw popcorn at the screen or something every time something painfully stupid happens.:-)
The premise of the books is pretty much completely different from the movie. The evil king out to rule the world was invented from whole cloth, and the priestesses...well, they have nothing to do with the story of Ged's initial training and the loosing of the shadow, and... well, let's just say that they aren't quite like the movie portrayed them. In fact, only the Ged storyline was vaguely related to the books, and even that was chopped up and distorted.
I enjoyed the original Earthsea trilogy immensely. The books after it are a bit questionable, and I've heard mixed reviews of Le Guin's other work. But "A Wizard of Earthsea", and to a lesser extent "The Tombs of Atuan" and "The Farthest Shore" are classics, hands-down. (although I see a few people here who disagree; you can ask them for their opinions, I suppose) The themes are universal, the prose is beautifully lyrical, and the plot actually makes sense. [0]
I would suggest purging the miniseries from your mind before reading the books, though. A few characters were decently portrayed, but to turn Vetch into comic relief....gah!
Daniel
[0] all of these traits fall away after the (real world) 20-year gap between books 3 and 4.
Also there was some violence, but it certainly wasn't that prevalent considering the plot was about conflict. Did the book have zero violence or something?
Well...umm...
Not really zero violence, but little enough that I can enumerate it (see below). This might be because the book's plot is a coming-of-age story; it's not about a conflict. When Le Guin says they butchered the story, she's understating the case.
(SPOILERS BELOW)
.
.
.
.
.
.
* The raid on the village at the beginning, where Ged first shows his power, is fairly bloody. When Ged conjures the mist, a few Kargs fall off a cliff, but most run away. The rest of the force was trapped (via the burning of their ships) and killed; "the sands of Armouth were brown with blood until the tide came in".
* When Ged looses the shadow, it attacks him and claws his face before Nemmerle drives it away with a spell (not by running up and whacking it with his staff). Incidentally, Nemmerle spends all his power to do this and dies as a result.
* Ged kills a few (young) dragons with spells, by binding their wings together so they fall in the ocean. He also turns himself into a dragon to briefly fight with another of the young dragons, wounding it and driving it away. The old dragon never fights him at all; it just talks to him.
* There's a scene where Ged confronts the gebbeth, but there's not much actual violence: he hits it a few times with his staff, and the staff burns up, then it chases him. In another scene he tries to grab it (when it's in spirit-form again) and can't touch it at all.
* Ged fights the Servants of the Stone with his staff and is unable to save the daughter of Re Albi from them: she tries to fly away as a gull, but when he catches up in hawk-form, they have blood and gull feathers on their mouths. He flies close enough to confirm what happened, then escapes.
Out of the whole book, then, that's 5 incidents of violence; only two involve the killing of a human, and only one of those (the Kargish raid) actually depicts the killing. I can't think of any other violent scenes in the first book, and yet it still managed to tell a gripping and meaningful story.
On the other hand, the miniseries featured several brutal on-screen murders, constant sword-waving threats by the throwaway villain and his thuggish underlings, and the obligatory (if short) castle siege -- in short, a standard generic fantasy movie -- and yet somehow none of those managed to make the lousy story they came up with any more interesting.
I don't know where she got the "sex" part from (there's no sex in the books, but what was in the miniseries was pretty tame), but I think she was right on the violence: it was severely amped up for the TV production, and not to the benefit of the end-product. Part of this might be due to the producers' (or whoevers') decision to graft a stock "evil and bloodthirsty king wants to rule the world" plot onto the core story, but that's just excusing one failing of the show by pointing to a different failing.
Bear in mind that the books were written some 30 years ago. My impression is that Le Guin has become involved in some rather loopy politics since then.
Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that you'll only get as much energy out of this as you put into it. Having seen the miniseries, I doubt that enough energy was put into it to power even a small neighborhood.
While race isn't a plot point in the books, the author is quite clear on what color her characters are. This isn't one or two characters changing from non-white to white; it's the entire population of the Archipelago!
I can certainly imagine a good adaptation of Earthsea where the characters are all white, but to the extent that it's good for adaptations to be similar to the original work, it's a bad sign when details are changed for no particular reason. By "a bad sign", I mean just that: when I saw a bunch of white actors on the screen on Thursday, I started to worry that the adaptation would be wildly inaccurate. Not because I have any real problem with a white Earthsea, but because the authors had demonstrated a predilection for fiddling with the story beyond those necessary to adapt it to the four-hour format, and I figured that they probably wouldn't stop at superficial changes. Unfortunately, I was correct.
Compared to what happened to the Earthsea books, the adaptation of LOTR was incredibly well-done. I can't say I liked every choice made by the producers, but I could at least tell I was watching something more-or-less based on Tolkien's story. The Earthsea miniseries had a few names and a few scenes from the books, and even those were often wrong. (true names switched for use-names, Orm Embar substituted for Yevaud, etc)
There was a substancial amount of storyline from her second book "The Tombs of Atuan" thrown in SciFi's miniseries.
Not really. There were a lot of names and places from the Tombs of Atuan, but the plot might as well have been from another story entirely.
We can start, for instance, with the fact that the priestesses in the miniseries were essentially an order of pacifist and loving nuns, rather than the vicious and bloodthirsty devotees of evil that are found in the book.
Please provide an example of an incident in the first 3 books [0] where skin-color is a significant plot point.
Given that it's hardly ever even mentioned, and then only as part of a description, I doubt you can. The most I remember is some passages where an inhabitant of the Archipelago meets an inhabitant of Karego-At, or vice-versa, and the skin color is part of the overall strangeness of the other.
I thought the skin-color issue was a clever touch in the books, and it was certainly a bad sign that it was removed from the movies, but to read Le Guin's essay you'd think the central point of the books was something to do with race. (which, I suppose, means I've been misunderstanding them all this time..)
Daniel
[0] Books 4 (Tehanu) and onward are set in a different universe than the first 3, so they don't count:-)
* People throwing around each other's true names (witness the girl talking to Ged).
To be fair...I thought so too, but I held my nose and watched a little longer. What actually was going on was (slightly) less stupid: they weren't throwing around true names, they switched Ged's true and use-names! Really! You knew when they said a true name, because those were weird and echoey (I guess to show that they were magic).
But when the gebbeth chases Ged, it shouts his use-name (Ged) at him, in probably probably the biggest example of how the filmmakers managed to utterly miss this particular point.
I have to say that while the Neuros has its problems, it's always been perfectly reliable for me. (with the exception of the time that I turned off the socket it was plugged into, then couldn't figure out why the battery wouldn't charge *oops*) The battery life in particular is amazing; I don't know how long it lasts because it just seems to keep going and going. The only time I managed to run it all the way down was when I used it two days in a row and forgot to charge it overnight.
My arguement is that the person needs to be able to control their creation the way they deem fit - why? Because they invented and it is their choice.
And that was my point: once you assume this, all else falls into place, and as this is essentially a belief (aka an axiom; ie, something you accept as fundamental without proof), arguments against it are guaranteed to lead to lots of hot air and not much else -- at least, not in the short term on a Web forum.
Would someone please explain to me (logically, not emotionally) what is wrong with a patent? What is wrong with someone saying "this is my product, and if you want to use it you gotta play by my rules"
It's hard to do that until you give a logical justification for a patent. The only one I see in your post is that it's nice for inventors to have patents. And, of course, that's absolutely true. But we don't (theoretically, anyway) make laws just because some random individual wants them. Otherwise, I could go outside and say "this is my street, and if you want to use it you gotta play by my rules."
Most justifications of patents that I see take one of two forms:
(1) it's "fair" to the inventor. This is essentially an appeal to emotion. It may or may not be justified, but it's almost impossible to refute logically, because there's no logical grounding for it; it's just assumed to be true. [0]
(2) having patents encourages the development and disclosure of new technology. This argument is the legal basis for patents in the US (which are permitted in the Constitution only "to promote the progress of science and useful arts").
(2) can be logically debated, because it separates patents from the principles underlying them. ie: you can argue about whether patents encourage the development of new technology, and whether this is sufficient to outweigh their downsides. If patents don't encourage the development of technology, according to this argument, they should not be granted. Furthermore, you can make this argument based on empirical factual information, not just general feelings about what's "right".
Unfortunately, you seem to be arguing (1), which means it's very difficult to even address this on a logical level in a way you would find convincing.
All of this is assuming logic will change anyone's mind. In my experience, it almost never does. If people's beliefs come into conflict with logic, they twist the logic instead of changing their beliefs.
Daniel
[0] You can try a counter-assertion: "it's perfectly fair to not have patents", but this doesn't really produce any basis for an argument; as Monty Python said, it's just contradiction.
Basically the only way to defeat this would be to show that patents violate some other tenet of "fairness". Unfortunately, this sort of argument never terminates due to differing (and sometimes shifting) definitions of "fairness".
No worries. When the global economy is destroyed by environmental catastrophe everyone will blame the environmentalists for not giving them enough warnings ahead of time.
Actually, this bill outlaws providing the service *for a fee*. So the net effect of the bill will be to *increase* the amount of tax money going to set the wireless up.
Slashdot Mirror
The definition of irony is whatever someone reading the word irony understands it to be, no more and no less.
Window concomitant breeze bright jump down. Hummus, porcupine sea bark bark spiral? Spatula!
Palm snow walk blue walrus, palm snow walk gearshift: palm snow walk orbit conspiracy flour surf squiggle daisy loop northeast. Raindrop, poodle compass flushing florin.
After messing with aptitude for 90 minutes, I figured out that some packages on the ftp site weren't signed (or something) and wouldn't install.
Whatever it was, it wasn't a signing problem: you'd have to install apt 0.6 and aptitude 0.3 (from Debian experimental) in order for signatures to be verified.
Daniel
Downgrading can be done (I've downgraded entire systems from unstable to testing) but the automatic tools won't do it for you and you absolutely have to know what you're doing.
There's no particular effort made to ensure that direct downgrades work smoothly. Of course, you can always remove (or preferably purge) the current version of a program, then install the older version. That's pretty much guaranteed to work.
Daniel
I believe the grandparent was referring to the fact that RMS won the MacArthur "genius grant" several years ago and is thus more-or-less set for life.
Daniel
The strong gender divides and politics don't arise until book 4. There is some suggestion that they exist before that, but they aren't essential to the story -- you could make Roke coed and Ogion a woman, and the books would hang together just fine.
:-)
Book 4 was written 20 years after book 3, and contains a number of other continuity problems (eg, characters that were alive that are dead with no explanation); Le Guin tried, fairly transparently, to paper these over in later books. My understanding is that she became involved in feminist politics in the interim, and that's part of the reason for the change in how gender is treated. (can anyone corroborate/deny?)
Personally, I just treat all the later books (Tehanu onwards) as existing in a separate universe from Earthsea, and the question of women and magic as being essentially unanswered in the original Earthsea universe. It's the only way I could appreciate them at all.
As for the TV series: I thought it was actually fun...as long as you realize that it's there to make fun of. Throw popcorn at the screen or something every time something painfully stupid happens.
Daniel
Well...for starters...
... well, let's just say that they aren't quite like the movie portrayed them. In fact, only the Ged storyline was vaguely related to the books, and even that was chopped up and distorted.
The premise of the books is pretty much completely different from the movie. The evil king out to rule the world was invented from whole cloth, and the priestesses...well, they have nothing to do with the story of Ged's initial training and the loosing of the shadow, and
I enjoyed the original Earthsea trilogy immensely. The books after it are a bit questionable, and I've heard mixed reviews of Le Guin's other work. But "A Wizard of Earthsea", and to a lesser extent "The Tombs of Atuan" and "The Farthest Shore" are classics, hands-down. (although I see a few people here who disagree; you can ask them for their opinions, I suppose) The themes are universal, the prose is beautifully lyrical, and the plot actually makes sense. [0]
I would suggest purging the miniseries from your mind before reading the books, though. A few characters were decently portrayed, but to turn Vetch into comic relief....gah!
Daniel
[0] all of these traits fall away after the (real world) 20-year gap between books 3 and 4.
Also there was some violence, but it certainly wasn't that prevalent considering the plot was about conflict. Did the book have zero violence or something?
Well...umm...
Not really zero violence, but little enough that I can enumerate it (see below). This might be because the book's plot is a coming-of-age story; it's not about a conflict. When Le Guin says they butchered the story, she's understating the case.
(SPOILERS BELOW)
.
.
.
.
.
.
* The raid on the village at the beginning, where Ged first shows his power, is fairly bloody. When Ged conjures the mist, a few Kargs fall off a cliff, but most run away. The rest of the force was trapped (via the burning of their ships) and killed; "the sands of Armouth were brown with blood until the tide came in".
* When Ged looses the shadow, it attacks him and claws his face before Nemmerle drives it away with a spell (not by running up and whacking it with his staff). Incidentally, Nemmerle spends all his power to do this and dies as a result.
* Ged kills a few (young) dragons with spells, by binding their wings together so they fall in the ocean. He also turns himself into a dragon to briefly fight with another of the young dragons, wounding it and driving it away. The old dragon never fights him at all; it just talks to him.
* There's a scene where Ged confronts the gebbeth, but there's not much actual violence: he hits it a few times with his staff, and the staff burns up, then it chases him. In another scene he tries to grab it (when it's in spirit-form again) and can't touch it at all.
* Ged fights the Servants of the Stone with his staff and is unable to save the daughter of Re Albi from them: she tries to fly away as a gull, but when he catches up in hawk-form, they have blood and gull feathers on their mouths. He flies close enough to confirm what happened, then escapes.
Out of the whole book, then, that's 5 incidents of violence; only two involve the killing of a human, and only one of those (the Kargish raid) actually depicts the killing. I can't think of any other violent scenes in the first book, and yet it still managed to tell a gripping and meaningful story.
On the other hand, the miniseries featured several brutal on-screen murders, constant sword-waving threats by the throwaway villain and his thuggish underlings, and the obligatory (if short) castle siege -- in short, a standard generic fantasy movie -- and yet somehow none of those managed to make the lousy story they came up with any more interesting.
I don't know where she got the "sex" part from (there's no sex in the books, but what was in the miniseries was pretty tame), but I think she was right on the violence: it was severely amped up for the TV production, and not to the benefit of the end-product. Part of this might be due to the producers' (or whoevers') decision to graft a stock "evil and bloodthirsty king wants to rule the world" plot onto the core story, but that's just excusing one failing of the show by pointing to a different failing.
Daniel
Bear in mind that the books were written some 30 years ago. My impression is that Le Guin has become involved in some rather loopy politics since then.
Daniel
Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that you'll only get as much energy out of this as you put into it. Having seen the miniseries, I doubt that enough energy was put into it to power even a small neighborhood.
Daniel
While race isn't a plot point in the books, the author is quite clear on what color her characters are. This isn't one or two characters changing from non-white to white; it's the entire population of the Archipelago!
I can certainly imagine a good adaptation of Earthsea where the characters are all white, but to the extent that it's good for adaptations to be similar to the original work, it's a bad sign when details are changed for no particular reason. By "a bad sign", I mean just that: when I saw a bunch of white actors on the screen on Thursday, I started to worry that the adaptation would be wildly inaccurate. Not because I have any real problem with a white Earthsea, but because the authors had demonstrated a predilection for fiddling with the story beyond those necessary to adapt it to the four-hour format, and I figured that they probably wouldn't stop at superficial changes. Unfortunately, I was correct.
Daniel
That's why I only said slightly less stupid. :-)
Daniel
Compared to what happened to the Earthsea books, the adaptation of LOTR was incredibly well-done. I can't say I liked every choice made by the producers, but I could at least tell I was watching something more-or-less based on Tolkien's story. The Earthsea miniseries had a few names and a few scenes from the books, and even those were often wrong. (true names switched for use-names, Orm Embar substituted for Yevaud, etc)
Daniel
There was a substancial amount of storyline from her second book "The Tombs of Atuan" thrown in SciFi's miniseries.
Not really. There were a lot of names and places from the Tombs of Atuan, but the plot might as well have been from another story entirely.
We can start, for instance, with the fact that the priestesses in the miniseries were essentially an order of pacifist and loving nuns, rather than the vicious and bloodthirsty devotees of evil that are found in the book.
Daniel
Please provide an example of an incident in the first 3 books [0] where skin-color is a significant plot point.
:-)
Given that it's hardly ever even mentioned, and then only as part of a description, I doubt you can. The most I remember is some passages where an inhabitant of the Archipelago meets an inhabitant of Karego-At, or vice-versa, and the skin color is part of the overall strangeness of the other.
I thought the skin-color issue was a clever touch in the books, and it was certainly a bad sign that it was removed from the movies, but to read Le Guin's essay you'd think the central point of the books was something to do with race. (which, I suppose, means I've been misunderstanding them all this time..)
Daniel
[0] Books 4 (Tehanu) and onward are set in a different universe than the first 3, so they don't count
* People throwing around each other's true names (witness the girl talking to Ged).
To be fair...I thought so too, but I held my nose and watched a little longer. What actually was going on was (slightly) less stupid: they weren't throwing around true names, they switched Ged's true and use-names! Really! You knew when they said a true name, because those were weird and echoey (I guess to show that they were magic).
But when the gebbeth chases Ged, it shouts his use-name (Ged) at him, in probably probably the biggest example of how the filmmakers managed to utterly miss this particular point.
Daniel
I have to say that while the Neuros has its problems, it's always been perfectly reliable for me. (with the exception of the time that I turned off the socket it was plugged into, then couldn't figure out why the battery wouldn't charge *oops*) The battery life in particular is amazing; I don't know how long it lasts because it just seems to keep going and going. The only time I managed to run it all the way down was when I used it two days in a row and forgot to charge it overnight.
I suspect the parent poster got a defective unit.
Daniel
Hm, I bought one over a year ago, and was specifically told that I'd have to pay if I wanted to upgrade it.
Daniel
My arguement is that the person needs to be able to control their creation the way they deem fit - why? Because they invented and it is their choice.
And that was my point: once you assume this, all else falls into place, and as this is essentially a belief (aka an axiom; ie, something you accept as fundamental without proof), arguments against it are guaranteed to lead to lots of hot air and not much else -- at least, not in the short term on a Web forum.
Daniel
Would someone please explain to me (logically, not emotionally) what is wrong with a patent? What is wrong with someone saying "this is my product, and if you want to use it you gotta play by my rules"
It's hard to do that until you give a logical justification for a patent. The only one I see in your post is that it's nice for inventors to have patents. And, of course, that's absolutely true. But we don't (theoretically, anyway) make laws just because some random individual wants them. Otherwise, I could go outside and say "this is my street, and if you want to use it you gotta play by my rules."
Most justifications of patents that I see take one of two forms:
(1) it's "fair" to the inventor. This is essentially an appeal to emotion. It may or may not be justified, but it's almost impossible to refute logically, because there's no logical grounding for it; it's just assumed to be true. [0]
(2) having patents encourages the development and disclosure of new technology. This argument is the legal basis for patents in the US (which are permitted in the Constitution only "to promote the progress of science and useful arts").
(2) can be logically debated, because it separates patents from the principles underlying them. ie: you can argue about whether patents encourage the development of new technology, and whether this is sufficient to outweigh their downsides. If patents don't encourage the development of technology, according to this argument, they should not be granted. Furthermore, you can make this argument based on empirical factual information, not just general feelings about what's "right".
Unfortunately, you seem to be arguing (1), which means it's very difficult to even address this on a logical level in a way you would find convincing.
All of this is assuming logic will change anyone's mind. In my experience, it almost never does. If people's beliefs come into conflict with logic, they twist the logic instead of changing their beliefs.
Daniel
[0] You can try a counter-assertion: "it's perfectly fair to not have patents", but this doesn't really produce any basis for an argument; as Monty Python said, it's just contradiction.
Basically the only way to defeat this would be to show that patents violate some other tenet of "fairness". Unfortunately, this sort of argument never terminates due to differing (and sometimes shifting) definitions of "fairness".
Two.
No worries. When the global economy is destroyed by environmental catastrophe everyone will blame the environmentalists for not giving them enough warnings ahead of time.
So, uh, it all evens out in the end. Sorta.
Daniel
...boring and predictable... ...one of the best movies in recent memory...
;-)
Of course, those aren't necessarily contradictory..
Daniel
Actually, this bill outlaws providing the service *for a fee*. So the net effect of the bill will be to *increase* the amount of tax money going to set the wireless up.
Daniel
It's not a victimless crime because it's not a crime.
Daniel
And of the ones that have read it, how much of it have they actually read, on average?
Daniel