The VHF and UHF frequencies do not belong to the broadcasters; they belong to the public. The FCC is the federal body which allows exclusive use of these frequencies, for free, to TV broadcast stations in exchange for serving the public interest.
So far, that has meant broadcasting news & weather reports, playing PSA's, etc.
What we need to do is call our Congressmen (In my case, a Republican House Representative and two Democrat Senators), and tell them that we believe that these kind of heavy handed tactics do not serve the public interest.
Then Congress can give the broadcasters a choice: continue to serve the public by broadcasting an encryption-free stream, or all free use of the airwaves will be revokes and you will be forced to pay for the privilege of exclusive use of the bandwidth.
The VHF and UHF frequencies do not belong to the broadcasters; they belong to the public. The FCC is the federal body which allows exclusive use of these frequencies, for free, to TV broadcast stations in exchange for serving the public interest.
So far, that has meant broadcasting news & weather reports, playing PSA's, etc.
What we need to do is call our Congressmen (In my case, a Republican House Representative and two Democrat Senators), and tell them that we believe that these kind of heavy handed tactics do not serve the public interest.
Then Congress can give the broadcasters a choice: continue to serve the public by broadcasting an encryption-free stream, or all free use of the airwaves will be revokes and you will be forced to pay for the privilege of exclusive use of the bandwidth.
er... that should have read "don't eat at Red Lobster". Typing too fast.
Oh yea... and do you honestly consider f*ing Branson, Missouri to be a hotbed of liberal thought!? You have obviously never been there! We are talking about folks who may very well be the most square people on the face of the Earth, and they are actually proud of it. Hell, they market all their tourism to people based on wow Gosh-Darn-Diddly Wholesome they are. They are so conservative, they make Mormons want to puke.
St. Louis, maybe, especially in the urban core... but Branson!?
Of course P.J. is an elitist asshole. That's what he's paid to be. Rolling Stone magazine isn't interested in publishing nice guys. (Hunter S. Thompson was a delightfully funny asshole in his day as well. O'Rourke is simply carrying on the tradition.)
Oh, BTW, poor folks don't eat a Red Lobster either. He was making fun of the middle class, not the poor.
Max Weinberg's group on Conan is probably the best of the late-night bands. Weinberg himself is Springstein's drummer from the "E Street Band", and his "7" is a crew of studio rats who really know how to play jump-swing. I wouldn't call it "Muzak" though. They generally don't cover vocal melodies on their instruments, and tend to mostly play famous R&B instrumental hooks. (It's kind of fun to play "name that tune" when hearing them. They do a lot of Otis Redding, Wilson Picket, and other great stuff from the 50's and 60's... pretty much anything with a horn section part.) Once in a while, they throw in a Bruce cover, more as an inside joke than anything else.
Letterman's band sounded better on TV when it was a 4-piece group (known as "The World's Most Dangerous Band"). The huge "CBS Orchestra" that they have now sounds kind of muddy and uninteresting.
As for Leno's group... when his show started, it was Branford Marsallis and a collection of pretty good jazzers sitting in with him. Now that Branford is gone, a couple of those good players, like the bass player (IIRC), are still sticking around (hey, it's a steady gig), but I'm sure they are painfully aware of how much the stuff they play now really sucks.
That point is so obvious from the election map of counties that voted for Bush and Gore. Even though Gore got the majority of votes the map shows mostly (geographically) Bush. About half the country is liberal and lives in cities the other half is conservative and lives in sparsely populated areas.
There are several things wrong with your evaluation here.
1. Gore did not get the majority of the popular vote. Both he and Bush got about 49%. The difference between them was a smaller percentage nationally than the narrow difference in the official Florida count, and reports of voter fraud by Democrats in places like Wisconson were, to say the least, alarming. At best, Gore took an extremely narrow plurality (the largest minority) of the popular vote.
2. Bush did not win in rural areas. The electoral map creates that illusion, because Bush carried a lot of states known for wide rural country. However, if you break it down by counties or districts, you see a radically different story. Gore walked away with both the most crowded of urban centers and the most sparse of hillbilly country. Bush's votes came almost entirely from the suburbs, where he dominated. As P.J. O'Rourke put it, Bush won every sqare inch of America that had indoor plumming but was not covered in graffiti. (This should come as no surprise... the rural and urban citizens are the ones who depend the most on government services while being in the lower tax brackets; the suburbanites tend to pay more taxes, and consider the government to be more of a burden than a provider. Gore ran on protecting services, Bush ran on cutting taxes, and every damned one of us voted for whichever man who would fill our wallets the most.)
One last point... in the "rural" states you mention, the vast majority of the population base lives in, or near, a city. Just because Missouri has a lot of open country doesn't mean it is made up entirely of hicks. Most of of them live in and around the cities of St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas City. They have orchestras, major league sports, theater districts, office towers... pretty much everything that you think makes East Coast life so much "better", except on a smaller scale, and with fewer murders.
Actually, the one-punch sound you usually hear is the sound of the bass and snare drums being hit simultaniously. (or the snare as a grace-note lead into the bass: "ch-boom")
A true rim-shot makes a sort of "tock" noise if the drummer holds the bass of the stick on the snare head, or a light "click" noise otherwise. Those sounds are usually used for accompaniment to quiet jazz passages, and are almost never used as accents for comedians.
The problem is one of conflicting jargon:
To a drummer, "rim-shot" means "hit the rim with your stick".
To a commedian, "rim-shot" means "play a 1-4 stroke fill to accent the punch line of a joke." (Although the preferred term for this in some circles is a "zinger").
In a gay bar, "rim-shot" probably means something too gross to even discuss. (As would "zinger", one would imagine.)
However, the practice of supporting a comedian with drumming has become so richly associated with bad comedians, that these days they are usually only used to accent intentionally bad jokes, as a cue to the audience that the joke was meant to be as terrible as it was.
The one exception would be The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where they are actually trying to be funny, but aren't, and frequently enhance the polite, uncomfortable pity-laughter of the crowd with lots of random, tuneless chord-strumming by Keven Eubanks and a few half-hearted thumps from their percussionists.
As I read down through the nested comments, and see yet another compare-and-contrast between Perl and C++, I feel compelled to point something out.
Perl is an interpreted language that lets you quickly hack big jobs with small effort.
C++ is a compiled, object-based language, designed for projects that require the advantages of the OO model and the speed of pre-compiled binary code.
A good all-purpose programmer should learn both. Asking which is better is like asking if a Mack truck is better than a Lotus Esprit Turbo... the answer depends largely on what you want to do with it.
...C++ ! It's often critisized for precicely this reason - too many ways of doing the same thing
Perl proudly exists for the benifit of people who like to embrace "too many ways". It allows you to write crappy code that works while you are learning, and grow as a programmer while producing functional software. Speaking for myself, when I first jumped into writing in Perl for actual applications at my job, I found that it was only a matter of two or three weeks that my code got so much better that I cringed every time I looked at the stuff I wrote on day 1 of the project. A couple months later, I could not stand to look at the crap I had written after 3 weeks. But the point is, all of that lousy code from my days of baby-steps still worked. I could go back and clean it up if I needed to, or I could just leave that pile of spaghetti lying there, functioning perfectly, allowing me to move on to more pressing matters.
If you want your choices limited, to force you into mostly good coding habits, use Java or something.
I often think that the only reason anyone uses vi is so that they can point at people who don't use it and giggle.
There are several reasons why some folks like vi:
1. It is everywhere. Pretty much all *n[iu]x OS has it rolled in, so whether you are sitting at a Solaris box, a Linux box, an old SVR4 box, you can count on vi being available. This allows you to learn one text editor, and use it on any (non-MS) server.
2. It is fairly powerful. Once you learn it, you can do some pretty fast editing of multiple files. vi is not the only editor that supports expressions, sed, awk, etc., but it does it fairly well.
3. It feels a lot like the CLI of the more popular shells. Anybody who learns UNIX will already know a lot of what they need to know to use vi.
4. A lot of first-year college kids are taught how to use it, so it is fairly universal
All that said, there are "better" choices out there (the cheering section for emacs continues to swell), and vi is mostly used due to laziness... but then again, laziness is often considered a virtue in the CS world, is it not?
I'll refrain from getting much deeper into it than that, because nothing in the universe is more tedious that a debate about choice of text editor.
Perl is not THAT bad. But why isn't the obvious obvious ?
Because Perl was not written for doing the obvious. It was written for solving challenging problems. If you evaluate all languages according to how hard "Hello, world!" is to write, you are excluding the mort powerful features of all of them. Yes, all the $_ and \@ stuff looks, at a glance, like it is harder than it should be. The same could be said of the way C handles pointers. Some people find it hard to wrap their heads around Java's use of classes.
All I can say is, use Perl for some hard jobs, instead of just trying in out on "obvious" tasks, and check out how much time you can sometimes save, once you embrace the language. You will be a Perl zealot in no time. (After all, the biggest zealots for anything are always the converted critics.)
Re:lawyer needn't snap -- will pursue immediately
on
RFC for Spammers
·
· Score: 4
Okay, so it is legal for slashdot to use a can of Spam on their headers about junk e-mail...
That does not mean that they must, or even should, be dicks about it.
It is also legal for me to fart at the beginning of a long elevator ride... but a polite person will either do so before boarding, or hold it.
To put it simply, if the law is the only thing guiding your behaviour, your are what We Doctors call and "ass hole".
Changing the icon is easy, the use of it was not really that funny to begin with, and the good people at Hormel would appreciate the change. That seems like reason enough to me.
"Can't we all just get along?"
Disclaimer: No, I am not a doctor, I was recycling an old Graham Chapman bit.
Re:The Computer Age is Over
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 2
The important thing to remember is that the addition of bad content to a medium does not make good content disapear.
In the "golden age" of radio, you were lucky to tune in a handful of stations, and some of them were not on 24/7... but lots of it was good.
Now, radio is filled with crap, but if you use a really good tuner, you can still find a handful of good stations. Small (often public) stations play really good jazz, radio plays, indie music, etc. Sure their signal is weak, and they don't have the money to put up billboards alerting you to their presense... but that was true of the "golden age" stations.
So, you see, nothing much has changed. Before there was a little good content. Now there is a little good content.
The only thing "lost" when a medium grows is the dream that it will somehow expand with nothing but high quality content forever. No matter what method it is delivered by, there are a finite number of people out there who are both willing and able to produce something better than the dreck that fills mainstream radio and TV. Therefore, all "growth" beyond that finite limit is the addition of useless crap. Because of this, when looking at a medium as a whole, the percentage of useful content drops... but that is a meaningless statistic when you stop and think about it. What matters is not the S/N ratio (if you know how to filter out the N properly). What matters is the actual ammount of useful content out there.
In other words, as long as CPAN and cool stuff like this is still out there, I really don't care what MSNBC is up to.
Re:The real shortage isn't content, either
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 1
and each such consumer has a maximum of 24 hours per day of such attention to allocate to content.
Heh. Only if the consumer never sleeps, eats, or works.
(I can see the corporate boardroom buzz now... What we need is a nocturnal interface! If they won't watch our Brintney Spears Pepsi ad on TV, maybe we can make them dream it.)
Most of the time, when people open a book or article by saying an age is "over", that is a pretty good clue that it ain't.
The industrial age may be "over", but nobody starts editorials by saying "the industrial age is over" anymore.
If the computer age were really over, the shock value of saying so would be diminished, to the point that opening a book with that phrase would not be very interesting.
The Gap used to have the best brand-recognition ads on the planet. 30 seconds of Lucious Jackson or Kid Johnny Lang playing music, followed by their logo, and a five-note "fall in to the gap" blurb attached to the end. Brilliant. I used to actually look forward to seeing another one of their ads. It was better than a lot of the shows they were interrupting!
Then they began the slippery slope of using the ads to pimp current products... then the actual musicians were replaced with no-talent actors and models... then the informal jam sessions were replaced with elaborate dancing... with each move, they have managed to make the ads more annoying and unwelcome. The marketing wizzards took what might have been the coolest ad campaign idea since "Burma Shave" road signs, and utterly ruined it.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property
I agree. While we are at it, let's get the same magic pixies who will be providing this "guaranteed income property" to give us some ice cream, too... or would that deplete our magic pixie resources beyond sustainable levels of use?
Fascism can be (and often is) simply defined as philosphy which values the nation (or race) above the individual. Not just the self, but all individual.
Using this definition, the character Elsa most certainly was a fascist hero. Not because it was a "selfless" act. It was an act which put loyalty to the nation above all other considerations. The lesson of Lohengren is that true love takes a back seat to patriotism.
I'm not flaming you, I am simply trying to point out that the line between fascism and patriotism is simply a degree of extremism. To love your country is nationalism; to love your country enough to fight for it is patriotism; to love your country enough to round up all foreigners into death camps in order to "purify" your race... now we are talking about fascism.
Wagner did say, and I quote "we should burn all the Jews". His comments concerning his motivations behind writing the Ring Cycle also reveal a desire to express the supremacy of northern Europe. If that sort of thing does not fit your definition of fascism, I am eager to learn what it does.
I fail to see how marrying for your country or pagan myths are inherently anti-sematic anyway.
Anti-semitism != fascist.
Fascism is a much broader term than you seem to think it is. See my reply to the previous post.
As for the Wagner/Verdi thing, you should maybe do a little more research...
A university degree in the field of Music Education is not enough to comment on Wagner and german nationalism in a slashdot thread? If anything, I should remove myself as having done too much research on the topic, instead of talking out of my ass along with the crowd.
No, I did not mean "Nazi". Nazi is a short-hand way of speaking of the "Nationalist Socialist Party", which Wagner was not.
I meant "fascist", as in extreme nationalism to the point of jingoistic hatred of other nationalities and/or races. The Nazi platform was largely derived from the fascist world-view.
To snip a bit from Webster: "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual"
By this definition, Lohengren was the most fascist opera ever written, as it is about a woman who heroically marries a man she does not love (rejecting the one she does) in order to preserve her nation.
But now what about EVERY other company/individual who wants to write code that produces Acrobat format files? Since the encryption method is secret, Adobe could demand an obsence licence fee...
Them people would stop using it.
There is nothing special about.pdf files that could not be done with a competing format. The only reason it is used so much is because people have agreed to make it a standard, and the only reason it is a standard is because it is a relatively open standard.
If Adobe were to come up with a new extention to.pdf that was not so open, people would just continue to use the old one... or move to something else.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, that has meant broadcasting news & weather reports, playing PSA's, etc.
What we need to do is call our Congressmen (In my case, a Republican House Representative and two Democrat Senators), and tell them that we believe that these kind of heavy handed tactics do not serve the public interest.
Then Congress can give the broadcasters a choice: continue to serve the public by broadcasting an encryption-free stream, or all free use of the airwaves will be revokes and you will be forced to pay for the privilege of exclusive use of the bandwidth.
Who's with me? Can I get a witness?
So far, that has meant broadcasting news & weather reports, playing PSA's, etc.
What we need to do is call our Congressmen (In my case, a Republican House Representative and two Democrat Senators), and tell them that we believe that these kind of heavy handed tactics do not serve the public interest.
Then Congress can give the broadcasters a choice: continue to serve the public by broadcasting an encryption-free stream, or all free use of the airwaves will be revokes and you will be forced to pay for the privilege of exclusive use of the bandwidth.
Who's with me? Can I get a witness?
Just keep your eyes open for Clouseau. He is obviously some kind of genius to be so unpredictable!
Oh yea... and do you honestly consider f*ing Branson, Missouri to be a hotbed of liberal thought!? You have obviously never been there! We are talking about folks who may very well be the most square people on the face of the Earth, and they are actually proud of it. Hell, they market all their tourism to people based on wow Gosh-Darn-Diddly Wholesome they are. They are so conservative, they make Mormons want to puke.
St. Louis, maybe, especially in the urban core... but Branson!?
Oh, BTW, poor folks don't eat a Red Lobster either. He was making fun of the middle class, not the poor.
Letterman's band sounded better on TV when it was a 4-piece group (known as "The World's Most Dangerous Band"). The huge "CBS Orchestra" that they have now sounds kind of muddy and uninteresting.
As for Leno's group... when his show started, it was Branford Marsallis and a collection of pretty good jazzers sitting in with him. Now that Branford is gone, a couple of those good players, like the bass player (IIRC), are still sticking around (hey, it's a steady gig), but I'm sure they are painfully aware of how much the stuff they play now really sucks.
There are several things wrong with your evaluation here.
1. Gore did not get the majority of the popular vote. Both he and Bush got about 49%. The difference between them was a smaller percentage nationally than the narrow difference in the official Florida count, and reports of voter fraud by Democrats in places like Wisconson were, to say the least, alarming. At best, Gore took an extremely narrow plurality (the largest minority) of the popular vote.
2. Bush did not win in rural areas. The electoral map creates that illusion, because Bush carried a lot of states known for wide rural country. However, if you break it down by counties or districts, you see a radically different story. Gore walked away with both the most crowded of urban centers and the most sparse of hillbilly country. Bush's votes came almost entirely from the suburbs, where he dominated. As P.J. O'Rourke put it, Bush won every sqare inch of America that had indoor plumming but was not covered in graffiti. (This should come as no surprise... the rural and urban citizens are the ones who depend the most on government services while being in the lower tax brackets; the suburbanites tend to pay more taxes, and consider the government to be more of a burden than a provider. Gore ran on protecting services, Bush ran on cutting taxes, and every damned one of us voted for whichever man who would fill our wallets the most.)
One last point... in the "rural" states you mention, the vast majority of the population base lives in, or near, a city. Just because Missouri has a lot of open country doesn't mean it is made up entirely of hicks. Most of of them live in and around the cities of St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas City. They have orchestras, major league sports, theater districts, office towers... pretty much everything that you think makes East Coast life so much "better", except on a smaller scale, and with fewer murders.
A true rim-shot makes a sort of "tock" noise if the drummer holds the bass of the stick on the snare head, or a light "click" noise otherwise. Those sounds are usually used for accompaniment to quiet jazz passages, and are almost never used as accents for comedians.
The problem is one of conflicting jargon:
To a drummer, "rim-shot" means "hit the rim with your stick".
To a commedian, "rim-shot" means "play a 1-4 stroke fill to accent the punch line of a joke." (Although the preferred term for this in some circles is a "zinger").
In a gay bar, "rim-shot" probably means something too gross to even discuss. (As would "zinger", one would imagine.)
However, the practice of supporting a comedian with drumming has become so richly associated with bad comedians, that these days they are usually only used to accent intentionally bad jokes, as a cue to the audience that the joke was meant to be as terrible as it was.
The one exception would be The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where they are actually trying to be funny, but aren't, and frequently enhance the polite, uncomfortable pity-laughter of the crowd with lots of random, tuneless chord-strumming by Keven Eubanks and a few half-hearted thumps from their percussionists.
Perl is an interpreted language that lets you quickly hack big jobs with small effort.
C++ is a compiled, object-based language, designed for projects that require the advantages of the OO model and the speed of pre-compiled binary code.
A good all-purpose programmer should learn both. Asking which is better is like asking if a Mack truck is better than a Lotus Esprit Turbo... the answer depends largely on what you want to do with it.
Perl proudly exists for the benifit of people who like to embrace "too many ways". It allows you to write crappy code that works while you are learning, and grow as a programmer while producing functional software. Speaking for myself, when I first jumped into writing in Perl for actual applications at my job, I found that it was only a matter of two or three weeks that my code got so much better that I cringed every time I looked at the stuff I wrote on day 1 of the project. A couple months later, I could not stand to look at the crap I had written after 3 weeks. But the point is, all of that lousy code from my days of baby-steps still worked. I could go back and clean it up if I needed to, or I could just leave that pile of spaghetti lying there, functioning perfectly, allowing me to move on to more pressing matters.
If you want your choices limited, to force you into mostly good coding habits, use Java or something.
I often think that the only reason anyone uses vi is so that they can point at people who don't use it and giggle.
There are several reasons why some folks like vi:
1. It is everywhere. Pretty much all *n[iu]x OS has it rolled in, so whether you are sitting at a Solaris box, a Linux box, an old SVR4 box, you can count on vi being available. This allows you to learn one text editor, and use it on any (non-MS) server.
2. It is fairly powerful. Once you learn it, you can do some pretty fast editing of multiple files. vi is not the only editor that supports expressions, sed, awk, etc., but it does it fairly well.
3. It feels a lot like the CLI of the more popular shells. Anybody who learns UNIX will already know a lot of what they need to know to use vi.
4. A lot of first-year college kids are taught how to use it, so it is fairly universal
All that said, there are "better" choices out there (the cheering section for emacs continues to swell), and vi is mostly used due to laziness... but then again, laziness is often considered a virtue in the CS world, is it not?
I'll refrain from getting much deeper into it than that, because nothing in the universe is more tedious that a debate about choice of text editor.
Perl is not THAT bad. But why isn't the obvious obvious ?
Because Perl was not written for doing the obvious. It was written for solving challenging problems. If you evaluate all languages according to how hard "Hello, world!" is to write, you are excluding the mort powerful features of all of them. Yes, all the $_ and \@ stuff looks, at a glance, like it is harder than it should be. The same could be said of the way C handles pointers. Some people find it hard to wrap their heads around Java's use of classes.
All I can say is, use Perl for some hard jobs, instead of just trying in out on "obvious" tasks, and check out how much time you can sometimes save, once you embrace the language. You will be a Perl zealot in no time. (After all, the biggest zealots for anything are always the converted critics.)
The only reason you were hired is so people have somebody to alert when there is an e-mail problem.
They were all hired to generate revenue.
Mmmmm.... port snouts.... Aaughghghghkhkhkhkh....
That does not mean that they must, or even should, be dicks about it.
It is also legal for me to fart at the beginning of a long elevator ride... but a polite person will either do so before boarding, or hold it.
To put it simply, if the law is the only thing guiding your behaviour, your are what We Doctors call and "ass hole".
Changing the icon is easy, the use of it was not really that funny to begin with, and the good people at Hormel would appreciate the change. That seems like reason enough to me.
"Can't we all just get along?"
Disclaimer: No, I am not a doctor, I was recycling an old Graham Chapman bit.
In the "golden age" of radio, you were lucky to tune in a handful of stations, and some of them were not on 24/7... but lots of it was good.
Now, radio is filled with crap, but if you use a really good tuner, you can still find a handful of good stations. Small (often public) stations play really good jazz, radio plays, indie music, etc. Sure their signal is weak, and they don't have the money to put up billboards alerting you to their presense... but that was true of the "golden age" stations.
So, you see, nothing much has changed. Before there was a little good content. Now there is a little good content.
The only thing "lost" when a medium grows is the dream that it will somehow expand with nothing but high quality content forever. No matter what method it is delivered by, there are a finite number of people out there who are both willing and able to produce something better than the dreck that fills mainstream radio and TV. Therefore, all "growth" beyond that finite limit is the addition of useless crap. Because of this, when looking at a medium as a whole, the percentage of useful content drops... but that is a meaningless statistic when you stop and think about it. What matters is not the S/N ratio (if you know how to filter out the N properly). What matters is the actual ammount of useful content out there.
In other words, as long as CPAN and cool stuff like this is still out there, I really don't care what MSNBC is up to.
Heh. Only if the consumer never sleeps, eats, or works.
(I can see the corporate boardroom buzz now... What we need is a nocturnal interface! If they won't watch our Brintney Spears Pepsi ad on TV, maybe we can make them dream it.)
Most of the time, when people open a book or article by saying an age is "over", that is a pretty good clue that it ain't.
The industrial age may be "over", but nobody starts editorials by saying "the industrial age is over" anymore.
If the computer age were really over, the shock value of saying so would be diminished, to the point that opening a book with that phrase would not be very interesting.
Then they began the slippery slope of using the ads to pimp current products... then the actual musicians were replaced with no-talent actors and models... then the informal jam sessions were replaced with elaborate dancing... with each move, they have managed to make the ads more annoying and unwelcome. The marketing wizzards took what might have been the coolest ad campaign idea since "Burma Shave" road signs, and utterly ruined it.
I agree. While we are at it, let's get the same magic pixies who will be providing this "guaranteed income property" to give us some ice cream, too... or would that deplete our magic pixie resources beyond sustainable levels of use?
That comment, repeated in the subject line, gave me the best laugh I have had all week.
We need yet another moderation category for comments like this:
+1, Malapropism.
Actually, I don't think very highly of Prof. Galbraith's rants either, but I do agree with the main thrust of 4of12's post.
Nonetheless, its usage is primarily confined to advocates pushing a particular view or position
Your reply said: the Corportions turn America into Amerika the Korporate Republic
It looks like you managed to demonstrate the point he was making remarkably well. Thanks.
Fascism can be (and often is) simply defined as philosphy which values the nation (or race) above the individual. Not just the self, but all individual.
Using this definition, the character Elsa most certainly was a fascist hero. Not because it was a "selfless" act. It was an act which put loyalty to the nation above all other considerations. The lesson of Lohengren is that true love takes a back seat to patriotism.
I'm not flaming you, I am simply trying to point out that the line between fascism and patriotism is simply a degree of extremism. To love your country is nationalism; to love your country enough to fight for it is patriotism; to love your country enough to round up all foreigners into death camps in order to "purify" your race... now we are talking about fascism.
Wagner did say, and I quote "we should burn all the Jews". His comments concerning his motivations behind writing the Ring Cycle also reveal a desire to express the supremacy of northern Europe. If that sort of thing does not fit your definition of fascism, I am eager to learn what it does.
Anti-semitism != fascist.
Fascism is a much broader term than you seem to think it is. See my reply to the previous post.
As for the Wagner/Verdi thing, you should maybe do a little more research...
A university degree in the field of Music Education is not enough to comment on Wagner and german nationalism in a slashdot thread? If anything, I should remove myself as having done too much research on the topic, instead of talking out of my ass along with the crowd.
I meant "fascist", as in extreme nationalism to the point of jingoistic hatred of other nationalities and/or races. The Nazi platform was largely derived from the fascist world-view.
To snip a bit from Webster: "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual"
By this definition, Lohengren was the most fascist opera ever written, as it is about a woman who heroically marries a man she does not love (rejecting the one she does) in order to preserve her nation.
Them people would stop using it.
There is nothing special about .pdf files that could not be done with a competing format. The only reason it is used so much is because people have agreed to make it a standard, and the only reason it is a standard is because it is a relatively open standard.
If Adobe were to come up with a new extention to .pdf that was not so open, people would just continue to use the old one... or move to something else.