I probably should have pointed out that in that the video is an animation layered upon a monologue by Stephen Fry, on his love of language, and how pedantry about grammar is NOT evidence of a love of language, but a failure to appreciate its malleability and potential.
Stephen Fry is a British humorist known for his monologues involving elaborate play with language. Watching some episodes of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" is rewarding.
Even movies for children avoid 'G'
on
Comics Code Dead
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· Score: 1
Recently, we took our kids to see Yogi Bear. It was exactly what you'd expect a movie based upon the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon to be -- inoffensive and insipid. Yet, "Rated PG for some mild rude humor."
From comparing notes with other parents, I gather we're on the restrictive end of the scale -- we actually examine 'M' rated games before deciding whether to allow our 14-year-old to play them, whereas other parents in our circle seem to allow younger kids to play 'M' rated games with no supervision at all. I generally give the go-ahead for our 14-year-old, but I do want to check first. In practice, we're more worried about avoiding high octane nightmare fuel, then about sex or violence, per se.
It's striking to me, though, that I rarely see games that rated below 'T' or 'M', even games that are clearly aimed at young children, just as I rarely see a movie that is rated below 'PG-13'. The overall pattern seems to be a sort of rating inflation, in which the more restrictively rated material is seen as more attractive by most consumers, and there are only disadvantages to having less restrictive ratings.
Overall, rating systems seem to have become almost completely useless, and this is a problem, because I do think parents could use tools to help them screen the content their children will be exposed to, especially younger children.
I was worried about the 250GB cap, when we started watching Netflix daily, but we've never come close to hitting it.
We have always tried to limit our television viewing to, at most, an hour or so on weekdays, and two or three hours each weekend day -- so we already limited our consumption, but those aren't ascetic limits. Once in a while I'll download a computer game or a Linux distribution disk image. Our total usage per month seems to be around 100GB.
I expect that, over time, usage will go up, but at the moment, I think 250GB per month is a reasonably generous limit for residential customers.
One thing my family appreciates about Netflix is that the visual quality of the programs we watch is better than what we get from Comcast itself. I'm guessing that's because Netflix software tests our bandwidth and hardware and adjusts for optimal viewing, unlike Comcast, which just sends HDTV to our SDTV.
I'm curious if we could find a way to calculate the total costs of developing and maintaining the postal system versus developing and maintaining broadband Internet access, per unit of information transferred, and if we could calculate these costs in such a way as to measure the ecological effects.
I'm inclined to think that, in the long run, broadband communication will be both cheaper and better for the environment, but I'd like to see some testing of that hypothesis.
For the record, and for whoever modded this insightful, this was a joke, referencing a Monty Python sketch. I'm no fan of the Pope, but I don't really seriously associate him with the Spanish Inquisition, just because he held the title that was associated with it centuries ago.
Now I remember why I've been avoid the use of satire and sarcasm.
I re-read the article, and I clearly read into it things that weren't there. The author's argument seems more that the US IT industry is harmed by the government's attempts to enlist it.
The most astonishing thing about this atrocious article is that not only does it not question whether it's legitimate for US institutions to undermine and manipulate the political and economic institutions of the world, it actually, openly proposes that openness is a threat, because it inhibits covert action.
The point of free and open source software is freedom. That is not the point of US power blocs and their covert operations.
The really annoying thing is that, "for your security," banks and such only ask for the last four digits of your SSN, which means that someone only needs the last four digits of your SSN to impersonate you to your bank.
But giving them human rights simply because they might be slightly smarter than some other animals is just silly.
It's "not even wrong." Talking about human rights with regards to non-humans is meaningless. Rights only make sense in a context of bidirectional abstract communication, in the context of a social network with participants who can discuss their desires and intentions, who can negotiate and agree to collaborative courses of action.
The best we can do with dolphins is enjoy their company when they choose to approach us, and leave them alone the rest of the time.
I've always understood human rights as being based upon a social contract -- the participants in a social contract are capable of renegotiating the contract. The US Bill of Rights, and most similar lists of civil rights that I can think of, is mostly inapplicable -- most of the defined civil rights involve communication between parties. How would non-human animals exercise the right to free speech, or to petition for a redress of their grievances?
I've long thought that there seems to be something special about cetaceans, especially dolphins, and that therefore we should leave them to live their lives as they please. But we pretty much already do, and mostly, because a lot of people also believe that cetaceans seem special. Dolphins and whales are not supposed to be hunted, under international law; fishing fleets are supposed to exercise care to avoid catching dolphins by accident. The use of cetaceans in aquatic parks might be questionable, but my impression is that those cetaceans are well-treated and (as far as we can tell) happy.
In general, ethical treatment of animals depends upon our trying to guess what animals desire, and the more abstract the desire, the more feeble our guesses. It just doesn't make sense to me to talk of animal rights unless we're talking about an animal with whom we've established a robust means of communicating about abstract concepts. We have, at best, a glimmer that it may eventually be possible to do so with dolphins.
And yet, it's still possible for journalists to cover political protests without interviewing a single organizer or mentioning any of the organizations involved -- unless it's the Tea Party.
Whoosh! I think he refers to the lack of critical analysis regards the reports of dissidents being re-trained.
He said "popular media," as if the oppressiveness of the Soviet and Chinese police states had not been a frequently recurring trope in movies, television, and comics, including direct and indirect references to the abuse of psychiatry and mental hospitals, especially in the '50s and '60s. "The Manchurian Candidate," or many episodes of Twilight Zone, come to mind.
Even relatively recently, Half-Life 2 had an extended segment of the game that took place in a Eastern European mental hospital, full of ominous references to torture and abuse.
In general, much of what I know about Marxism comes from the dissidents, anyway.
Racism was an explicit justification for European and American colonialism, so racism does not adequately explain Chinese isolationism.
If the history of Maoism wasn't so horrible, I'd find it funny that Maoism could reject, in theory and in practice, the elementary principles of Marxism, and still be referred to as Marxist.
I don't find the idea of a nation promoting its own interests to be a weird idea. I find the idea of a nation promoting its own interests at the expense of another nation's interests to be morally reprehensible.
Ethical wisdom is a matter of seeing through the prisoner's dilemma and finding the optimal outcome for all involved parties.
I recall a Marxist argument that the key difference between Europe and China in the period was that in Europe, the bourgeoisie succeeded in resisting the aristocracy and winning a measure of independence -- chartered towns and so forth -- whereas in China, the aristocracy succeeded in keeping the bourgeoisie subordinate. The unsettling implication is that if a ruling class is too powerful, it can enforce stagnation, to the detriment of everyone.
The Marxist interpretation implies that in the present, you need to establish the independence of the working class from all other classes; of course, it's hard to miss that an alternate interpretation is that the independence of the bourgeoisie is the critical issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably should have pointed out that in that the video is an animation layered upon a monologue by Stephen Fry, on his love of language, and how pedantry about grammar is NOT evidence of a love of language, but a failure to appreciate its malleability and potential.
Stephen Fry is a British humorist known for his monologues involving elaborate play with language. Watching some episodes of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" is rewarding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
Recently, we took our kids to see Yogi Bear. It was exactly what you'd expect a movie based upon the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon to be -- inoffensive and insipid. Yet, "Rated PG for some mild rude humor."
From comparing notes with other parents, I gather we're on the restrictive end of the scale -- we actually examine 'M' rated games before deciding whether to allow our 14-year-old to play them, whereas other parents in our circle seem to allow younger kids to play 'M' rated games with no supervision at all. I generally give the go-ahead for our 14-year-old, but I do want to check first. In practice, we're more worried about avoiding high octane nightmare fuel, then about sex or violence, per se.
It's striking to me, though, that I rarely see games that rated below 'T' or 'M', even games that are clearly aimed at young children, just as I rarely see a movie that is rated below 'PG-13'. The overall pattern seems to be a sort of rating inflation, in which the more restrictively rated material is seen as more attractive by most consumers, and there are only disadvantages to having less restrictive ratings.
Overall, rating systems seem to have become almost completely useless, and this is a problem, because I do think parents could use tools to help them screen the content their children will be exposed to, especially younger children.
And never underestimate the power of a well placed TCP RST command.
I hope asking this won't cost me my geek card, but, what do you mean?
I was worried about the 250GB cap, when we started watching Netflix daily, but we've never come close to hitting it.
We have always tried to limit our television viewing to, at most, an hour or so on weekdays, and two or three hours each weekend day -- so we already limited our consumption, but those aren't ascetic limits. Once in a while I'll download a computer game or a Linux distribution disk image. Our total usage per month seems to be around 100GB.
I expect that, over time, usage will go up, but at the moment, I think 250GB per month is a reasonably generous limit for residential customers.
One thing my family appreciates about Netflix is that the visual quality of the programs we watch is better than what we get from Comcast itself. I'm guessing that's because Netflix software tests our bandwidth and hardware and adjusts for optimal viewing, unlike Comcast, which just sends HDTV to our SDTV.
I'm curious if we could find a way to calculate the total costs of developing and maintaining the postal system versus developing and maintaining broadband Internet access, per unit of information transferred, and if we could calculate these costs in such a way as to measure the ecological effects.
I'm inclined to think that, in the long run, broadband communication will be both cheaper and better for the environment, but I'd like to see some testing of that hypothesis.
For the record, and for whoever modded this insightful, this was a joke, referencing a Monty Python sketch. I'm no fan of the Pope, but I don't really seriously associate him with the Spanish Inquisition, just because he held the title that was associated with it centuries ago.
Now I remember why I've been avoid the use of satire and sarcasm.
Pope Benedict XVI
Or FISSION MAILED
That explains what killed everyone.
I re-read the article, and I clearly read into it things that weren't there. The author's argument seems more that the US IT industry is harmed by the government's attempts to enlist it.
The most astonishing thing about this atrocious article is that not only does it not question whether it's legitimate for US institutions to undermine and manipulate the political and economic institutions of the world, it actually, openly proposes that openness is a threat, because it inhibits covert action.
The point of free and open source software is freedom. That is not the point of US power blocs and their covert operations.
Whoosh!
From the sounds of it, Loughner had no coherent political views at all.
The only political question here is how we could do a better job of identifying and treating insanity.
The really annoying thing is that, "for your security," banks and such only ask for the last four digits of your SSN, which means that someone only needs the last four digits of your SSN to impersonate you to your bank.
This seems to me to be exactly the right approach.
But giving them human rights simply because they might be slightly smarter than some other animals is just silly.
It's "not even wrong." Talking about human rights with regards to non-humans is meaningless. Rights only make sense in a context of bidirectional abstract communication, in the context of a social network with participants who can discuss their desires and intentions, who can negotiate and agree to collaborative courses of action.
The best we can do with dolphins is enjoy their company when they choose to approach us, and leave them alone the rest of the time.
Why don't we just leave them to their business, and keep to our own?
I don't know what other reasonable, practical application there could be of a principle that dolphins are persons.
I've always understood human rights as being based upon a social contract -- the participants in a social contract are capable of renegotiating the contract. The US Bill of Rights, and most similar lists of civil rights that I can think of, is mostly inapplicable -- most of the defined civil rights involve communication between parties. How would non-human animals exercise the right to free speech, or to petition for a redress of their grievances?
I've long thought that there seems to be something special about cetaceans, especially dolphins, and that therefore we should leave them to live their lives as they please. But we pretty much already do, and mostly, because a lot of people also believe that cetaceans seem special. Dolphins and whales are not supposed to be hunted, under international law; fishing fleets are supposed to exercise care to avoid catching dolphins by accident. The use of cetaceans in aquatic parks might be questionable, but my impression is that those cetaceans are well-treated and (as far as we can tell) happy.
In general, ethical treatment of animals depends upon our trying to guess what animals desire, and the more abstract the desire, the more feeble our guesses. It just doesn't make sense to me to talk of animal rights unless we're talking about an animal with whom we've established a robust means of communicating about abstract concepts. We have, at best, a glimmer that it may eventually be possible to do so with dolphins.
And yet, it's still possible for journalists to cover political protests without interviewing a single organizer or mentioning any of the organizations involved -- unless it's the Tea Party.
Whoosh! I think he refers to the lack of critical analysis regards the reports of dissidents being re-trained.
He said "popular media," as if the oppressiveness of the Soviet and Chinese police states had not been a frequently recurring trope in movies, television, and comics, including direct and indirect references to the abuse of psychiatry and mental hospitals, especially in the '50s and '60s. "The Manchurian Candidate," or many episodes of Twilight Zone, come to mind.
Even relatively recently, Half-Life 2 had an extended segment of the game that took place in a Eastern European mental hospital, full of ominous references to torture and abuse.
In general, much of what I know about Marxism comes from the dissidents, anyway.
Racism was an explicit justification for European and American colonialism, so racism does not adequately explain Chinese isolationism.
If the history of Maoism wasn't so horrible, I'd find it funny that Maoism could reject, in theory and in practice, the elementary principles of Marxism, and still be referred to as Marxist.
For some strange reason, this has never been memorialized in the popular media.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I don't find the idea of a nation promoting its own interests to be a weird idea. I find the idea of a nation promoting its own interests at the expense of another nation's interests to be morally reprehensible.
Ethical wisdom is a matter of seeing through the prisoner's dilemma and finding the optimal outcome for all involved parties.
I recall a Marxist argument that the key difference between Europe and China in the period was that in Europe, the bourgeoisie succeeded in resisting the aristocracy and winning a measure of independence -- chartered towns and so forth -- whereas in China, the aristocracy succeeded in keeping the bourgeoisie subordinate. The unsettling implication is that if a ruling class is too powerful, it can enforce stagnation, to the detriment of everyone.
The Marxist interpretation implies that in the present, you need to establish the independence of the working class from all other classes; of course, it's hard to miss that an alternate interpretation is that the independence of the bourgeoisie is the critical issue.