What you say can be taken in a different way though. Instead of having computer-controlled fuel injection delivering unbeatable performance only to the big boys, it might also work to level the playing field.
When I was into motorcycles as a kid and read everything about them, one of the buzz-words that popped up most often when writers talked about high-performance motorcycles was 'unobtanium.' One of the biggest advantages enjoyed by teams from the biggest companies was access to parts that were engineered to the n-th degree and racing was a game between big companies that was won by the one that could put the most thought into producing advantage by exploiting ever-narrowing margins of difference between machines; 'first make it out of magnesium to make it light, *then* drill some holes in it to make it lighter.'
In any field where hacking the hardware provides the main advantage, the big boys have more, but the value of these innovations evaporate as the technologies they employ become understood by more people. The ability to influence performance through software can be said to improve things for whoever has programming talent.
A small company might not be able to turn half-a-dozen world-class engineers loose on piston head design, but a talented coder can do things that have no material basis, exploiting interrelating factors to improve performance that don't start out life in a cad program like fuel-air mixtures/tire-pressure/tire-temperature and composition.
A ceramic engine block is one thing, but really understanding how *your* vehicle's engine works in a turn and getting the last inch of *extra* out of it might be something that not even a major manufacturer can replicate easily.
I don't know about advertiser's claims and frankly scarlet... What I see when I look at these pictures is a camera that takes some very good pictures. True, it could probably use better *something* but even at high resolutions the images I saw seemed pretty good for the most part.
Sure, Sigma is not stellar quality, but those images werevery vibrant.
i haven't made a cent so far on my website at all to be super-clear. if you think the site is non-technical you should look at some of the articles and stay tuned as i post more details about the inner-workings of the segway ht. cheers, pt
God, it's amazing just *what* can get access to a computer nowadays. I mean, really, that was pathetic.
Mindless, derivative and too materially impossible to enjoy the immeasurable valuable 'ring of truth' that the original Jakov Smirnoff joke possessed, it was just noise. Jesus, guy, couldn't you have just farted instead?
It is interesting to note however that pages and pages of material back from here, the person who stood up and defended 'pt' said that Slashdot had degenerated into a forum for racist posters.
It is only after the defender's tirade that anonymous coward's brain-fart appears, with its noise and anger. This begs the question of whether or not there is a connection between the defender, pt, and the jewel that prompts my response. Without serious log-examination, we'll never know.
Returning to topic for a moment, I have to say that I hate the Segway.
As an admirer of engineering and tinkering, I believe that engineering is the answer to the question, 'how do we best accomplish this,' and as an answer, the Segway is a long incoherent ramble.
Good engineering simplifies or adds complexity only to expand function while the Segway's design-philosophy of adding more and more *stuff* onto what is just an electric scooter destroys the elegant simplicity of the thing at the base of the design.
Standing scooters have been around forever, starting with wood and roller-skate wheels back in the fifties, they evolved into metal scooters with rubber wheels, finally battery and electric motor technology have made cheap electric scooters practical.
The electric scooter, the Zappy, or any of its cousins, have answered the electric scooter question elegantly and well, without resorting to microprocessor-controlled stabilizers ('look, mommy, my submarine has jet engines!'). Nor do other electric scooters require investment in lobbying state and local governments to enact special laws to give them market advantages over simpler and more elegant solutions.
From this viewpoint, stripped of all the diverting comments about obesity, and without attention to anyone's professional commercial ad site from which he has made no money (does he intend to?), the Segway's design is just plain wrong--flawed from its inception--and not all the hype and lobbying in the world is going to change that.
Interesting observations, but you might consider alternative explanations for the some of the ways things have turned out.
1. In a capitalist, industrialized society, slavery is less than useless. A slave's consumption of goods and services is limited by the resources and desires of his/her owner and with few exceptions--most notably, traficking in women in the southern parts of Eastern Europe--it is pretty much absent from anywhere where there is an industrial base.
2. Sympathy for animals and for one's enemies can be seen as related to the level of material comfort that a society offers.
Contrast the levels of development.
Hunter-gatherer societies often revere their pray in religious rites, while Judaism, Islam and Hinduism have extensive rules governing what animals can be eaten (if any) and how the animal is to be slaughtered, dressed and otherwise prepared if its flesh is to be ritually pure.
The followers of the ancient religions that have survived to the present did not proscribe meat-eating but they did regulate everything that surrounded it--even Hindus can be carnivores.
It is only now, however, that we find ourselves in societies so rich that they give rise to psychologies where people are so filled with sympathy for animals that they adopt that part of foreign religious traditions.
Sorry to say this, but, brother, you've got a long, long wait ahead of you.
You can say what you like about his writing, but movies based on anything he writes are cursed.
'Johnny Mnemomic' mangled a lean and interesting sci-fi story by making Johnny into an action hero, while reducing Molly Millions to the cookie-cutter 'woman-in-jeopardy' stereotype.
Henry Rawlins appears as a doctor whose face-recognition alone destroys him as a character while even Dolph Lundgren has a walk-on appearance before his carreer at last twitches and lies still.
If you like Neuromancer,and Johnny Mnemonic is any indicator of what you would have to look forward to, you have to hope really hard that they never, ever make a movie of it.
The whole cash-versus-credit/debit cards question is a combination of the technological and social and three things determine it:
1. Has it been implimented well enough for it to work, replacing what is already there? 2. Does (should) our society and our traditions facilitate its acceptance? 3. Is the individual user comfortable with it and what does that comfort mean?
Debit cards work well in places like New York City, but are there an ATM networks in small towns and will you pay a premium to use them?
How comfortable are you knowing that a truly cash-less credit/debit scheme establishes an rapidly accessable paper-trail on everything you buy everywhere, at any time?
The questions lead to interesting scenarios.
'Pornography is illegal in this state. Your bank's routine data-mining reveals that you bought a copy of Hustler in Connecticut and your spending suggests you drove home without stopping. What did you do with the magazine?'
'It's probably a nuisance suit, but until you've gone to court, your account is frozen. I'm sure you have friends willing to feed you and pay your rent until this is cleared up.'
The most interesting of the three questions is one of who you are in time. Some of the posts here handle cashless transactions and PIN authentication very intelligently, but not even the posters here are as comfortable with the idea of having the annonymous exchange of cash replaced by plastic as kids will be in only a few years time.
Imagine that: a generation-gap that you feel at thirty.
I remember that as one of the old arguments, or conspiracy theories, that seemed to explain our society all too well. Given the ambient wealth of this country, people have often wondered how we can do some things so well that overeating is a persistent problem while overeducation never is. The fun corallary to this is that well-educated members of the masses--people trained both to do and, more importantly, to *THINK* would come to realize that the power and prestige of the upper classes is arbitrary and get nasty about it.
Garbage men have an interesting position that drags secret truths into the light.
As a society, we're willing to tolerate ignorance and pay teachers accordingly--people from better education systems than ours are clamoring to come here--but you can't lowball sanitation workers.
When you underpay teachers, you end up with twenty-year-olds can't read a comic book and no one notices the difference. When you try that with sanitation workers, they stop working in mid-summer and the maggots make it obvious that something has gone wrong.
In the words of T.S. Eliot, '...and where do I begin.'
Since turnabout is fair play, let me call attention to your typo. Paragraph 1, line 1, word 8:
First off: I have friends who have undergon abortions,...
Then let me point out emotional responses are not ordinarily considered arbiters of fact in science. I don't know, but I can hardly imagine that 'grossness' is anywhere mentioned in JAMA when doctors weigh the pros and cons of surgical procedures.
... and the resultant emotional mess alone tells me that there's something seriously wrong with extracting a partially-formed baby, no matter which method is used. Personally, I think it's disgusting, but I also think that gallbladder surgery is kinda gross too, you know? I'm not prolife or prochoice. There are times when either can be appropriate.
In other words, what you personally think about the procedure is not relevant in arguing the ethics, efficacy or safety of it.
However - I was relating what happened to my buddy's g/f (and also to another chick I worked with). Dude's g/f is a basket case still, and the operation was almost four years ago.
What happened to 'your buddy's girlfriend,' has problems as part of an argument:
1. Who are you and are you lying? 2. Can you give meaningful weight to another person's emotional state and its duration? 3. Your using the emotional state of women you've observed in your argument could be said to employ the either very old or very new analytical technique of 'small-sample statistics.'
...Internal parts were gouged by the sharp end of the curette, much like it is described over here [nmh.org] and here [phcofde.org]. They call it "uterine perforation," which (to me) is a nice way of saying "we gouged a hole in your uterus. whoops! better luck next time."
Okay, so you're telling me that for your argument to be true or at least convincing, abortion has to involve medical malpractice.
...is a fairly slackwitted conclusion, since all information related in my prior post was from people who have undergone the procedure directly.
See, 'small-sample,' above.
Your information here is erroneous, as a quick trip to the google [google.com] can show..
According to two decent sources, "Dilation and curettage (D&C) is usually done if another abortion method has failed to completely remove the contents of the uterus. D&C is done to be sure that no tissue is left in the uterus. "
Your quote casts dilation and curettage as a follow-up, either as a method of insuring successful abortion or to effect a tissue removal after a successful abortion by other means. Since you quote a source that says it is by no means the only method, your statement contains my counterargument. Thank you, this saves time.
You then write:
"Again, this ignores the possibility of an undersized foetus or ectopic pregnancy, or a botched first attempt; additionally, according to Yale Newhaven Health [yalenewhavenhealth.org], dilation+curettage+evacuation certainly is the standard for abortions in the second 12 weeks.."
First, the 'again' in the above passage is meaningless. 'Again' implies that there was a first time. There wasn't. It seems to give your statement a weight it simply doesn't have.
Second, a human pregnancy is divided into three trimesters--three, three-month periods. You ignore everything except for situations and methodologies involving a woman's waiting at least twelve weeks, three full months, one third of the full term before procuring an abortion.
Your arguments assume that a woman *must* wait through *three* missed periods before discovering her pregnancy and deciding to do anything about it.
Again I tell you that this is not necessary. Few women in industrialized nations who suspect that they are pregnant are forced to wait for Friends to go into reruns before making their decisions.
You conclude your answer with this:
In case you're wondering, I grabbed my links from the first google for abortion+dilation+vacuum and you can do the same.. I don't discriminate against correct and factual information, even if it does come from a highly biased source. Next time, do some research before trying to enlighten people. Thanks.
Actually, I wasn't wondering, but since you volunteer it, I might mention that an enlightened researcher probably should avoid strongly partisan sources when arguing about an issue: people with other-than-objective viewpoints tend to load their arguments with emotionally-charged language, spurious anecdotal observation and the employment of selective quotation in attempt to propagandize the inattentive.
I disagree completely with the moderator's scoring this, 'informative' for the reasons below.
Yes, an abortion is bound to do strange things to hormonal cycles in women, however, the question the post poses, and to which the times article refers, is whether or not the government is altering scientific data on health-related sites to suit a conservative agenda. The answer The Times article gave can be summed up with the words 'it seems so to many people including pro-choice politicians.'
Having got that out of the way, we can examine the poster's statements to extract an implicit argument.
There's almost always a fair amount of internal damage when tools are used, depending on the method of operation.
This is not accurate. According to one site, the discomfort associated with a D and C procedure (dilation and curettage, the most usual procedure in early stage abortions) is similar to the discomfort of menstral cramps. With this in mind, what the poster says makes things sound like major surgery is going on. That is weird, but things only start to get really hallucinatory when the poster writes about 'the vacuum device.'
The vacuum device (sorry.. don't know the name) that collapses the skull has a sharp edged attachment and it's difficult to maneuver. That's a pretty confined space to work in, after all.
Technical and clinical sounding, and gruesome enough to get your adrenaline pumping, but it has no substance: it is wet and sloshy when it comes to the facts.
This description of the procedure presupposes a long wait before the decision to terminate the pregnancy in question is undertaken. A long wait before one makes the decision is a possible pathway to abortion but it is by no means a necessary one despite the writer's implicit assertion. Dilation and curettage is only one of a number of options open to women in the United States and there is no reason to assume that abortion involving skull-collapsing sharp things that no one knows the name of is the only option or in any way the norm.
Current in-home pregnancy tests can allow a woman to know that she is pregnant within 10 days of conception and the poster works hard to describe a procedure that would note be necessary to abort the fetus after tens of weeks have gone by when in truth, during the second month of pregnancy, during the eighth week, the fetus is a legless thing measuring, 0.63 inches long from crown to rump and weighing four hundredths of an ounce.
The right of men and women to plan and control their reproduction--to control if, when and under what circumstances they will become parents, is an important one. If one is to present arguments where one's tacit assumption is that it's alright to rewrite the conclusions of scientific papers or throw out ideologically inconvenient statistics, one should try to get at least *some* of his facts from somewhere other than pro-life websites or the big book of urban legends.
A long read that is very thought-provoking. Interesting stuff. It makes me wish I could have moderated it. I would have given it 'interesting' or even, 'insightful.'
I've been an NRA member for the sake of shooting in NRA-accredited matches. I've also been a card-carrying member of the United State chess federation. Gun-love is not my religion. Never was, never will be. I do however like the idea of personal ownership of firearms: we're one of the few societies in history that has trusted its citizens with that much power.
In a very real sense, you could say that it is the ultimate badge of citizenship because by owning a firearm legally, you say that you really are a *citizen,* that you live your life in so responsible a fashion that you can trust yourself, your government, and your neighbors as they trust you.
Yes, the world is imperfect. Yes, our government is imperfect. Yes, our model of firearms ownership is wildly flawed and so is the sociology that makes violence spring from it.
All of this is true, but I don't think everyone who chooses to own a firearm and tells you about it is a pro-gun robot. I think, fellow citizen, that both of us can do better than that.
I've been the NRA and I've never seen cause to regret it.
If we predicate that not ALL guns are used in murders--that is, if we grant the same assumption about guns that we make about cars--then we can simply call guns 'consumer products,' in a consumer culture.
With that taken care of, when I replace the 'guns' in your assertion with 'cars,' 'clothes,' 'Cannondale bicyles,' 'Apple computers,' 'Dell computers,' or any other product which I can fetishize as a consumer, I am either as twisted and in need of psychoanalysis as the gun-lover is, or, interestingly enough, if the other consumers are not in need of psychoanalysis at all, then neither am I.
Oddly enough, I choose to follow the latter assumption.
As one of the posts above notes, this response is 'pretty late in the day.' The moderators have almost certainly gone home by now, but the topic's importance makes it deserving of attention.
The thing that makes the original article interesting is not that it concerns itself with an application of current-day technology. It doesn't: biometrics that are in any way practical on a handgun that don't impair its function, and to some, its beauty, are a long, long way off. One question that this sudden concern with the magic bullet of biometrics is 'what is it all worth? What exactly can it be expected to do?'
In any mechanical system there are bound to be places for glitches to live and be exploited and, in a handgun, neither side of the shopworn, 'for-and-against' argument is going to be satisfied. Batteries will wear down and the gun will either fire for no one, or for anyone, or worse, it will fire for a child who comes across it who knows that daddy's handgun, unlocked and improperly stored, is perfectly safe to handle. Mechanically, mandating biometric devices only adds a layer of complexity to an already complex system and there are bound to be unforeseen consequences.
Along other lines, the technical side of, 'the street,' is not just something that William Gibson invented. People have known for a long time that the technical underbelly of society can be rich in its technical understanding and use. The sociology of street-level crime takes technology in new and unexpected directions.
Drug-dealers and thieves have long since adapted beeper and cellular phone technology to criminal transactions, and New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to contend with quasi-literates who have learned that bending transit fare cards in just the right way can get free train rides and they have had to modify all the turnstiles in a seven-hundred-million dollar system as a result.
If there is any way to hack bought or stolen 'smart guns' criminals will know find out about it and spread that knowledge among themselves. We are all human. We all absorb and use information and the assumption that this basic human quality is not shared by everyone is a matter of pure hubris on the part of politicians--an unpleasant discovery what should have been obvious waiting to happen. If you don't believe this yet, imagine how many things you, that is, you personally, can learn to assemble, change or break given a screwdriver, a hammer and all the time you need.
All in all, the legislation in New Jersey is a purely political act; the result of the same type of thinking that often leads to ill-thought-out laws pertaining to computers. Guns are a problem. What we think of them is a problem and how we handle them is a problem and it is our job as a society to find realistic solutions.
The advent of biometrics and laws mandating their use is not helpful lawmaking, but an exercise in smoke and mirrors which distracts us from our impotence when it comes to finding and implementing real solutions to one of the greatest problems in our history and everything that calls attention away from our needing to make hard choices regarding firearms only holds back the day that we will sit down and actually make them.
Mandating biometrics in handguns has no purpose except to allow politicians to say to their constituents, 'look at this beautiful thing that I have done for you' while leaving the real and vital subtexts hidden behind a curtain of self-congratulation. And important things are left unsaid; Things like, 'please don't notice that only the most strictly law-abiding buyers of new handguns are effected, and please, please, please don't anyone mention that New Jersey is one state in a country composed of fifty linked together by a transportation-system that is the envy of the world.'
You can't prove that Gail Cooke is a professional copywriter but you can say that she writes exactly like one.
How's this for evidence:
In a country famous for its difficulties in teaching reading and writing, Ms. Cooke has learned to write in short, concise sentences using well-chosen adjectives and without any of the most common spelling and punctuation errors. She even ends everything with an airy flourish of praise.
If she isnt a professional copywriter, she should be one.
Big hint: Could Amazon be using people like her to write ad-copy into their reviews? Could they also use others? Say, someone with a more masculine voice and approach? Perhaps someone with a love for computers and digital cameras?
Bigger hint: I have a two-sentence resume. It says that I spend a lot of time at home and, that I am rotten to the core.
The original poster hits the nail on the head: facts without an attached interpretation are thin on the ground. There is a great separation of fact from idea on both sides.
The NRA has been using the second amendment line forever completely ignoring the language that essentially says that gun ownership carries with it more responsibility than an occasional oiling. For their part, the anti-gun forces work with the assumption that gave us prohibition: 'if you say that something is illegal, it and all the effects that come from it will vanish with no further complications.'
The only genuinely honest reference I have ever seen is an essay by Paul Fussel (SP), in his book, 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb and other essays.' In it, he takes the second amendment at face value by including the line about 'a well-regulated militia' that the NRA never quotes and uses it as the basis for a very reasonable scheme in which he posits that the government could offer to buy out gun owners at a fixed-price per weapon and that everyone who didn't opt out by taking it would be become a legal member of a national militia.
It is a brilliant attack on the NRA's misquoting The Second Amendment which has been used to support unregulated, freewheeling gun ownership. With the authority of someone who served as a marine during the second world war, Fussel invites the reader to imagine gun-lovin' weekend warriors, subjecting themselves to military discipline, physical fitness training, and the joys of the slit-trench latrine several times a year.
Fussel is very fair in attacking the NRA's position misquoting The Second Amendment and he does in the spirit of bitterness at the nonsense of the NRA's tactics and the misrepresentations those tactics lead to. It is not a diatribe against gun-ownership per se, but rather what is perpetually said in support of it.
On the other side of the argument, California's gun laws are a prime example of what happens when lawmakers find themselves unable to eliminate firearms ownership but have enough support to do what they can. California's gun laws define practically any modern firearm as an 'assault weapon' and limit the functionality of firearms by such determinants as barrel-length and magazine capacity. This trend goes so far in California that many pistols are treated by the law as if they were machine guns and in order to sell there, manufacturers like The Springfield Armory go so far as to make two versions of some of their more popular rifles: one for California and one for everywhere else.
Personally, I think we need a new theory of gun ownership. I think that we should sit down and really think about guns, honestly, not to ban them but to control and regulate their ownership.
Like the original poster, I've shot rifle matches. I have owned firearms and I think if you own a weapon, someone, somewhere should *know* that you own it in the same way that it is required that someone somewhere knows that you own a car or that your construction project involves your possessing dynamite. As the humor-impaired have pointed out here, 'physics kill people,' and when it comes to the possibility of generating the energy that does it, a car and a bullet are similar and yet no one goes red in the face when you talk about, licensing, registering and insuring them before they can use their cars. In the end, it's all a matter of our cultural expectations and the pity of the thing is that the two sides in the debate exemplified by the original poster works to make sure that rationalized gun ownership and gun use will never happen.
Possibly justified hysteria aside, the subject of this thread is a prime example of a thing which provides two equally valid answers to a social question: is the umbrella of 'homeland security'--the name alone is nauseating--being used by the forces of vacuous greed in Washington to provide favors to large, commercial internet businesses, or is the simpler and better assumption that the Wonks in washington just dumb and prone to suggestion?
Before everyone with an I.Q. over ninety buys a plane ticket to Canada, we should consider what we're really dealing with in the U.S. government nowadays. It is easy for a Slashdot-quality mind to spot the sheer, arid uselessness of a ban on free 802.11 and this has got to make you wonder.
On the one hand, WE know that terrorists are far more concerned with keeping secrets than ordinary users are. WE fully understand that terrorists, spies and clever lunatics put real work into hiding their intentions and there are too many ways onto the internet to filter all of them--that is, at least, using any method we know of.
It's easy to imagine, a mind like John Ashcroft's simply bypassing this; you can almost see that sloping brow furrow horribly as it bypasses the obvious fact that terrorists have no need to reach for free radio Ethernet.
On the other hand, it is just as easy to conceive of the current administration's love for corporate power making it despise grass-roots initiatives to provide free internet fill-in-the-blank and ducking fast behind the poor, beleaguered flag at the first murmur of dissent.
Both answers are perfectly imaginable: It is easy to imagine genuine nastiness on the part of any government as piggy-eyed as the one we have right now. At the same time, the absence of a clue on the administration's part is just as credible an explanation.
To paraphrase the name of musical group, 'they might be midgets.'
I've got to agree with the comparison of Chrichton and Stevenson.
By literary standards, where academics tell us that plot is best seen as something that changes characters as they act against adversity, Chrichton is a horrific hack who has actually written the same type of book for decades: rapidly-sketched, cookie-cutter characters find themselves stuck in some place where they must resolve a situation or die. This is the common--and annoying--thread to be found in many of his books and movies:
The Andromeda Strain: locked in an underground installation. Westworld: trapped in a theme park. The Jurassic Park books: stranded on an island. Congo: lost in a maze of remote ruins.
It's all been done before in other venues up to and including the Halloween movies where characters are stalked in, a house, in the woods, in a hospital, and, in the lastest movie--by now, Jason Vorhees must be the stalker with a walker--aboard a space ship. Instead of 'big dude with a butcher knife,' Chrichton treats you to space germs, robots, and killah gorillahs. The rest is all the same.
But more important in the comparison than Stevenson's having more than one plot-skeleton in him is his cleverness with language. Unlike Chrichton, Stevenson is an inventive user of language who trusts his audience instead of reaching for the Big Book of simple language.
In Snow Crash, Stevenson writes with an intelligence and energy that draw the reader in, writing with the electric immediacy of a page-turner, with a real faith that the reader's foolish disbelief will be overwhelmed by a machine-gun progression of ideas.
By contrast with this, a close look at Chrichton's clichéd technique, leaves you reading things that couldn't suspend disbelief with chemicals and a hammer.
The actions of the Disney lawyer are despicable in that they demonstrate cynicism with regard to the public interest and genuine nastiness in his choice of tactics.
The original posting poses a number of inner questions. Here are two:
"Should a lawyer use misrepresentation to convince an organ of the federal government that a group of powerful companies should have control over an information technology to protect and enhance their markets? Is this good for everyone?"
"Should one group of commercial concerns, owned by a tiny segment of the population--one percent? less?--enjoy the right to decide whether or not the general population (in the hundreds of millions) can buy an information technology?"
If the answer to either of these questions is, 'yes,' then the idea is despicable--something that any decent person should view with contempt.
If a Disney representative lied to an agency in an attempt to outlaw condoms because time spent having sex cost Disney market share, no one would be confused.
I realize that responding to this particular thing results in something as off-topic as the original post, but answering it is interesting.
Everything ever written or filmed is a question of aesthetics which are not logically provable. The Romans said, 'you can't argue taste,' today, we know that there is no point in telling a Japanese, 'you really *should* like Limburger cheese washed down with a dark ale.' You can't argue taste directly using pure reason, but you can use pure reason to make others understand the reasons for your disliking a particular work. Here are mine.
A Movie based on something well known by many should follow it closely. If I sit down to watch what I'm told is to be a representation of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' I have every reason to be surprised and disappointed when I find myself watching, 'the Mighty Morphine Power Rangers.' The Lynch movie *did* follow the book closely in many ways, but when it broke from the book, it did so in ways that were so glaringly obvious sops to people who would never, ever read the book that the result was painful.
Between the 'weirding modules,' the 'stoned-out' representation of spice use, the heart plugs and the over-the-top, frenetic representation of baron harkonnen, David Lynch's presentation of Dune was genuinely painful. It might be true that a pure transcription of a book does not automatically create brilliant filmmaking. Film and the written word are two different languages. But the quality and accuracy of the translation are the responsibility of the filmmaker if he is to base his work on a well-known work of fiction and anyone is to say anything about the thing but, 'gee, what a nice paycheck they handed you.'
In this respect, David Lynch's version of Dune, fails. Lynch should have put gotten a tighter grip on the actor who played Baron Harkonnen. He should have told him, 'yes, you're nuts, you're sick, greedy, twisted and sexually rapacious, but you're also intellectually brilliant.' He should have concentrated on the physical savagery and religious fervor of the Fremen as the key to their success against all comers, even the emperor's shock troops, and he should have had the courage to have kept Sting out of the movie if for no other reason than that his face recognition alone detracted from the storytelling.
He should have done all of these things, but then, if he *had* done them, but then, we would never have seen the sci-fi channel's version of Dune because he would already have made it.
The end result was painful: Lynch's version of the book is anathema to the great majority of people who've read the book and no one has seen Lynch a major project by him in more than a decade. He made an unpalatable movie that finished his career.
For me, the answer is the universe of the First two books of Fredrick Pohl's 'Gateway' series. Those books provided one of the most interesting worlds I've read about. It is rare in that it required the kind of real imagination that many sci-fi writers spend lucrative careers demonstrating that they lack:
Gibson and the Cyberpunks were largely a matter of predicting technical trends and greasy sociology.
Niven and other intelligent, highly technical sci-fi writers get the physics right, but write like virgins discussing sex when it comes to human nature... including sex.
Far-future, galactic empire fictions like Dune and Star Wars, tend to impose anachronistic systems of government onto far distant futures with such regularity that the result often looks more like a cheap device than a towering work of the imagination.
By contrast, the Universe in Gateway, is close enough to our own time frame in terms of its sociology and economic perspective that the characters it gives rise to are understandable in present terms; they seem relevant in that they are driven by the same forces that drive us.
Dune offers the reader the story of the son of a fallen Duke rising to fulfill the messianic prophecy of an indigenous people, but his journey provides no characters whose motivations a normally functioning reader can really relate to (i.e., how much time have *YOU* spent with a poisoned needle to your neck?). By contrast, in addition to its many stunning visuals, 'Gateway' offers us a glimpse into human nature using a story in which the science is more than just a backdrop to feudalism and this is the best kind of science fiction; the telling of a story that would be impossible to tell without the science.
Most readers have very little experience of nobility in a time of vendetta, but it's hard to imagine anyone who has never seen the results of greed and guilt.
You seem to have confused your nomenclature to make a non-point about euphemism.
Fuel-air munitions are basically a newish family of anti-personnel weapons which operate by spreading a cloud of highly volatile, aerosolized liquid into an area and detonating it creating powerful overpressures which kill or injure people even in hardened structures which are open to the air (shallow caves, concrete bunkers, etc). In essence, they work by producing hammering impact on the human body everywhere at once.
For their part,'Daisy Cutters' are very large conventional bombs which, when detonated, are powerful enough to knock down trees (hence the name) while collapsing caves, bunkers and whatnot.
What 747's have to do with village destruction escapes me entirely. You should have looked it up.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/m un itions/fae.htm
The drug company analogy may be weak. Especially when you talk about drugs for major public health issues like Aids. For the last few years, manufacturers of drugs to treat HIV have tried to justify the cost of their drugs (and their wildfire profitability) by claiming that they had to recoup their R&D costs.
In response, many have raised the counterargument that the National Institutes of Health are the ones who did or funded the primary research into those drugs and therefore taxpayer money is being used to generate private profit... essentially, very upscale corporate welfare.
This is especially embarrassing when you consider that a company in India has reverse-engineered the drug-coctail(s) in question and offers them at a price that is considerably less than one-tenth that demanded by U.S. drug manufacturers, bringing them to a cost that is less likely to force 3rd world governments to choose between bankrupting themselves and letting their citizens die en masse.
This ties into the computer pricing in an interesting way. Software costs are high, but the assumption in all of the threads I've read are that computer softwares are produced, essentially,'ex nihilo,' from scratch, without resorting to libraries of legacy code which must shorten development cycles and lower costs considerably.
Any debate on the justification of software pricing should take into account that Adobe does not reinvent the wheel with every new version of photoshop.
Slashdot Mirror
Christ, that's ugly.
What you say can be taken in a different way though. Instead of having computer-controlled fuel injection delivering unbeatable performance only to the big boys, it might also work to level the playing field.
When I was into motorcycles as a kid and read everything about them, one of the buzz-words that popped up most often when writers talked about high-performance motorcycles was 'unobtanium.' One of the biggest advantages enjoyed by teams from the biggest companies was access to parts that were engineered to the n-th degree and racing was a game between big companies that was won by the one that could put the most thought into producing advantage by exploiting ever-narrowing margins of difference between machines; 'first make it out of magnesium to make it light, *then* drill some holes in it to make it lighter.'
In any field where hacking the hardware provides the main advantage, the big boys have more, but the value of these innovations evaporate as the technologies they employ become understood by more people. The ability to influence performance through software can be said to improve things for whoever has programming talent.
A small company might not be able to turn half-a-dozen world-class engineers loose on piston head design, but a talented coder can do things that have no material basis, exploiting interrelating factors to improve performance that don't start out life in a cad program like fuel-air mixtures/tire-pressure/tire-temperature and composition.
A ceramic engine block is one thing, but really understanding how *your* vehicle's engine works in a turn and getting the last inch of *extra* out of it might be something that not even a major manufacturer can replicate easily.
I don't know about advertiser's claims and frankly scarlet... What I see when I look at these pictures is a camera that takes some very good pictures. True, it could probably use better *something* but even at high resolutions the images I saw seemed pretty good for the most part.
Sure, Sigma is not stellar quality, but those images werevery vibrant.
i haven't made a cent so far on my website at all to be super-clear. if you think the site is non-technical you should look at some of the articles and stay tuned as i post more details about the inner-workings of the segway ht. cheers, pt
God, it's amazing just *what* can get access to a computer nowadays. I mean, really, that was pathetic.
Mindless, derivative and too materially impossible to enjoy the immeasurable valuable 'ring of truth' that the original Jakov Smirnoff joke possessed, it was just noise. Jesus, guy, couldn't you have just farted instead?
It is interesting to note however that pages and pages of material back from here, the person who stood up and defended 'pt' said that Slashdot had degenerated into a forum for racist posters.
It is only after the defender's tirade that anonymous coward's brain-fart appears, with its noise and anger. This begs the question of whether or not there is a connection between the defender, pt, and the jewel that prompts my response. Without serious log-examination, we'll never know.
Returning to topic for a moment, I have to say that I hate the Segway.
As an admirer of engineering and tinkering, I believe that engineering is the answer to the question, 'how do we best accomplish this,' and as an answer, the Segway is a long incoherent ramble.
Good engineering simplifies or adds complexity only to expand function while the Segway's design-philosophy of adding more and more *stuff* onto what is just an electric scooter destroys the elegant simplicity of the thing at the base of the design.
Standing scooters have been around forever, starting with wood and roller-skate wheels back in the fifties, they evolved into metal scooters with rubber wheels, finally battery and electric motor technology have made cheap electric scooters practical.
The electric scooter, the Zappy, or any of its cousins, have answered the electric scooter question elegantly and well, without resorting to microprocessor-controlled stabilizers ('look, mommy, my submarine has jet engines!'). Nor do other electric scooters require investment in lobbying state and local governments to enact special laws to give them market advantages over simpler and more elegant solutions.
From this viewpoint, stripped of all the diverting comments about obesity, and without attention to anyone's professional commercial ad site from which he has made no money (does he intend to?), the Segway's design is just plain wrong--flawed from its inception--and not all the hype and lobbying in the world is going to change that.
Interesting observations, but you might consider alternative explanations for the some of the ways things have turned out.
1. In a capitalist, industrialized society, slavery is less than useless. A slave's consumption of goods and services is limited by the resources and desires of his/her owner and with few exceptions--most notably, traficking in women in the southern parts of Eastern Europe--it is pretty much absent from anywhere where there is an industrial base.
2. Sympathy for animals and for one's enemies can be seen as related to the level of material comfort that a society offers.
Contrast the levels of development.
Hunter-gatherer societies often revere their pray in religious rites, while Judaism, Islam and Hinduism have extensive rules governing what animals can be eaten (if any) and how the animal is to be slaughtered, dressed and otherwise prepared if its flesh is to be ritually pure.
The followers of the ancient religions that have survived to the present did not proscribe meat-eating but they did regulate everything that surrounded it--even Hindus can be carnivores.
It is only now, however, that we find ourselves in societies so rich that they give rise to psychologies where people are so filled with sympathy for animals that they adopt that part of foreign religious traditions.
Sorry to say this, but, brother, you've got a long, long wait ahead of you.
You can say what you like about his writing, but movies based on anything he writes are cursed.
'Johnny Mnemomic' mangled a lean and interesting sci-fi story by making Johnny into an action hero, while reducing Molly Millions to the cookie-cutter 'woman-in-jeopardy' stereotype.
Henry Rawlins appears as a doctor whose face-recognition alone destroys him as a character while even Dolph Lundgren has a walk-on appearance before his carreer at last twitches and lies still.
If you like Neuromancer,and Johnny Mnemonic is any indicator of what you would have to look forward to, you have to hope really hard that they never, ever make a movie of it.
You not only have to wait. You want to.
The whole cash-versus-credit/debit cards question is a combination of the technological and social and three things determine it:
1. Has it been implimented well enough for it to work, replacing what is already there?
2. Does (should) our society and our traditions facilitate its acceptance?
3. Is the individual user comfortable with it and what does that comfort mean?
Debit cards work well in places like New York City, but are there an ATM networks in small towns and will you pay a premium to use them?
How comfortable are you knowing that a truly cash-less credit/debit scheme establishes an rapidly accessable paper-trail on everything you buy everywhere, at any time?
The questions lead to interesting scenarios.
'Pornography is illegal in this state. Your bank's routine data-mining reveals that you bought a copy of Hustler in Connecticut and your spending suggests you drove home without stopping. What did you do with the magazine?'
'It's probably a nuisance suit, but until you've gone to court, your account is frozen. I'm sure you have friends willing to feed you and pay your rent until this is cleared up.'
The most interesting of the three questions is one of who you are in time. Some of the posts here handle cashless transactions and PIN authentication very intelligently, but not even the posters here are as comfortable with the idea of having the annonymous exchange of cash replaced by plastic as kids will be in only a few years time.
Imagine that: a generation-gap that you feel at thirty.
Yes, there is that.
I remember that as one of the old arguments, or conspiracy theories, that seemed to explain our society all too well. Given the ambient wealth of this country, people have often wondered how we can do some things so well that overeating is a persistent problem while overeducation never is. The fun corallary to this is that well-educated members of the masses--people trained both to do and, more importantly, to *THINK* would come to realize that the power and prestige of the upper classes is arbitrary and get nasty about it.
I couldn't resist either.
Garbage men have an interesting position that drags secret truths into the light.
As a society, we're willing to tolerate ignorance and pay teachers accordingly--people from better education systems than ours are clamoring to come here--but you can't lowball sanitation workers.
When you underpay teachers, you end up with twenty-year-olds can't read a comic book and no one notices the difference. When you try that with sanitation workers, they stop working in mid-summer and the maggots make it obvious that something has gone wrong.
Since turnabout is fair play, let me call attention to your typo. Paragraph 1, line 1, word 8:
First off: I have friends who have undergon abortions,
Then let me point out emotional responses are not ordinarily considered arbiters of fact in science. I don't know, but I can hardly imagine that 'grossness' is anywhere mentioned in JAMA when doctors weigh the pros and cons of surgical procedures.
In other words, what you personally think about the procedure is not relevant in arguing the ethics, efficacy or safety of it.
What happened to 'your buddy's girlfriend,' has problems as part of an argument:
1. Who are you and are you lying?
2. Can you give meaningful weight to another person's emotional state and its duration?
3. Your using the emotional state of women you've observed in your argument could be said to employ the either very old or very new analytical technique of 'small-sample statistics.'
Okay, so you're telling me that for your argument to be true or at least convincing, abortion has to involve medical malpractice.
See, 'small-sample,' above.
Your quote casts dilation and curettage as a follow-up, either as a method of insuring successful abortion or to effect a tissue removal after a successful abortion by other means. Since you quote a source that says it is by no means the only method, your statement contains my counterargument. Thank you, this saves time.
You then write:
"Again, this ignores the possibility of an undersized foetus or ectopic pregnancy, or a botched first attempt; additionally, according to Yale Newhaven Health [yalenewhavenhealth.org], dilation+curettage+evacuation certainly is the standard for abortions in the second 12 weeks.."
First, the 'again' in the above passage is meaningless. 'Again' implies that there was a first time. There wasn't. It seems to give your statement a weight it simply doesn't have.
Second, a human pregnancy is divided into three trimesters--three, three-month periods. You ignore everything except for situations and methodologies involving a woman's waiting at least twelve weeks, three full months, one third of the full term before procuring an abortion.
Your arguments assume that a woman *must* wait through *three* missed periods before discovering her pregnancy and deciding to do anything about it.
Again I tell you that this is not necessary. Few women in industrialized nations who suspect that they are pregnant are forced to wait for Friends to go into reruns before making their decisions.
You conclude your answer with this:
Actually, I wasn't wondering, but since you volunteer it, I might mention that an enlightened researcher probably should avoid strongly partisan sources when arguing about an issue: people with other-than-objective viewpoints tend to load their arguments with emotionally-charged language, spurious anecdotal observation and the employment of selective quotation in attempt to propagandize the inattentive.
Thank you for your response.
Yes, an abortion is bound to do strange things to hormonal cycles in women, however, the question the post poses, and to which the times article refers, is whether or not the government is altering scientific data on health-related sites to suit a conservative agenda. The answer The Times article gave can be summed up with the words 'it seems so to many people including pro-choice politicians.'
Having got that out of the way, we can examine the poster's statements to extract an implicit argument.
This is not accurate. According to one site, the discomfort associated with a D and C procedure (dilation and curettage, the most usual procedure in early stage abortions) is similar to the discomfort of menstral cramps. With this in mind, what the poster says makes things sound like major surgery is going on. That is weird, but things only start to get really hallucinatory when the poster writes about 'the vacuum device.'
Technical and clinical sounding, and gruesome enough to get your adrenaline pumping, but it has no substance: it is wet and sloshy when it comes to the facts.
This description of the procedure presupposes a long wait before the decision to terminate the pregnancy in question is undertaken. A long wait before one makes the decision is a possible pathway to abortion but it is by no means a necessary one despite the writer's implicit assertion. Dilation and curettage is only one of a number of options open to women in the United States and there is no reason to assume that abortion involving skull-collapsing sharp things that no one knows the name of is the only option or in any way the norm.
Current in-home pregnancy tests can allow a woman to know that she is pregnant within 10 days of conception and the poster works hard to describe a procedure that would note be necessary to abort the fetus after tens of weeks have gone by when in truth, during the second month of pregnancy, during the eighth week, the fetus is a legless thing measuring, 0.63 inches long from crown to rump and weighing four hundredths of an ounce.
The right of men and women to plan and control their reproduction--to control if, when and under what circumstances they will become parents, is an important one. If one is to present arguments where one's tacit assumption is that it's alright to rewrite the conclusions of scientific papers or throw out ideologically inconvenient statistics, one should try to get at least *some* of his facts from somewhere other than pro-life websites or the big book of urban legends.
A long read that is very thought-provoking. Interesting stuff. It makes me wish I could have moderated it. I would have given it 'interesting' or even, 'insightful.'
Actually, in my case, you're wrong.
I've been an NRA member for the sake of shooting in NRA-accredited matches. I've also been a card-carrying member of the United State chess federation. Gun-love is not my religion. Never was, never will be. I do however like the idea of personal ownership of firearms: we're one of the few societies in history that has trusted its citizens with that much power.
In a very real sense, you could say that it is the ultimate badge of citizenship because by owning a firearm legally, you say that you really are a *citizen,* that you live your life in so responsible a fashion that you can trust yourself, your government, and your neighbors as they trust you.
Yes, the world is imperfect. Yes, our government is imperfect. Yes, our model of firearms ownership is wildly flawed and so is the sociology that makes violence spring from it.
All of this is true, but I don't think everyone who chooses to own a firearm and tells you about it is a pro-gun robot. I think, fellow citizen, that both of us can do better than that.
I've been the NRA and I've never seen cause to regret it.
An interesting assertion.
If we predicate that not ALL guns are used in murders--that is, if we grant the same assumption about guns that we make about cars--then we can simply call guns 'consumer products,' in a consumer culture.
With that taken care of, when I replace the 'guns' in your assertion with 'cars,' 'clothes,' 'Cannondale bicyles,' 'Apple computers,' 'Dell computers,' or any other product which I can fetishize as a consumer, I am either as twisted and in need of psychoanalysis as the gun-lover is, or, interestingly enough, if the other consumers are not in need of psychoanalysis at all, then neither am I.
Oddly enough, I choose to follow the latter assumption.
As one of the posts above notes, this response is 'pretty late in the day.' The moderators have almost certainly gone home by now, but the topic's importance makes it deserving of attention.
The thing that makes the original article interesting is not that it concerns itself with an application of current-day technology. It doesn't: biometrics that are in any way practical on a handgun that don't impair its function, and to some, its beauty, are a long, long way off. One question that this sudden concern with the magic bullet of biometrics is 'what is it all worth? What exactly can it be expected to do?'
In any mechanical system there are bound to be places for glitches to live and be exploited and, in a handgun, neither side of the shopworn, 'for-and-against' argument is going to be satisfied. Batteries will wear down and the gun will either fire for no one, or for anyone, or worse, it will fire for a child who comes across it who knows that daddy's handgun, unlocked and improperly stored, is perfectly safe to handle. Mechanically, mandating biometric devices only adds a layer of complexity to an already complex system and there are bound to be unforeseen consequences.
Along other lines, the technical side of, 'the street,' is not just something that William Gibson invented. People have known for a long time that the technical underbelly of society can be rich in its technical understanding and use. The sociology of street-level crime takes technology in new and unexpected directions.
Drug-dealers and thieves have long since adapted beeper and cellular phone technology to criminal transactions, and New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to contend with quasi-literates who have learned that bending transit fare cards in just the right way can get free train rides and they have had to modify all the turnstiles in a seven-hundred-million dollar system as a result.
If there is any way to hack bought or stolen 'smart guns' criminals will know find out about it and spread that knowledge among themselves. We are all human. We all absorb and use information and the assumption that this basic human quality is not shared by everyone is a matter of pure hubris on the part of politicians--an unpleasant discovery what should have been obvious waiting to happen. If you don't believe this yet, imagine how many things you, that is, you personally, can learn to assemble, change or break given a screwdriver, a hammer and all the time you need.
All in all, the legislation in New Jersey is a purely political act; the result of the same type of thinking that often leads to ill-thought-out laws pertaining to computers. Guns are a problem. What we think of them is a problem and how we handle them is a problem and it is our job as a society to find realistic solutions.
The advent of biometrics and laws mandating their use is not helpful lawmaking, but an exercise in smoke and mirrors which distracts us from our impotence when it comes to finding and implementing real solutions to one of the greatest problems in our history and everything that calls attention away from our needing to make hard choices regarding firearms only holds back the day that we will sit down and actually make them.
Mandating biometrics in handguns has no purpose except to allow politicians to say to their constituents, 'look at this beautiful thing that I have done for you' while leaving the real and vital subtexts hidden behind a curtain of self-congratulation. And important things are left unsaid; Things like, 'please don't notice that only the most strictly law-abiding buyers of new handguns are effected, and please, please, please don't anyone mention that New Jersey is one state in a country composed of fifty linked together by a transportation-system that is the envy of the world.'
Cooler-than LN effects aside, the trailer seems to point out four problems of sequels of sequels predicated on time-travel:
1. The grandfather paradox: 'You old bastard, I shot you!' 'You didn't! Yes, I did. I swear I did!
2. You fought your way through hell and solved the biggest problem *ever*. Why is it still here?
3. How much money does it take to make a writer spread the way that made madonna famous.
4. Steroids do not help you age well.
'Again, I am a sai-bohg from zhe fyoo-chuh... Already, I sed to you, 'I'll be beck!'
God help us all, I can already feel myself trying to cross my legs in the theater...
The original poster has a great eye!
You can't prove that Gail Cooke is a professional copywriter but you can say that she writes exactly like one.
How's this for evidence:
In a country famous for its difficulties in teaching reading and writing, Ms. Cooke has learned to write in short, concise sentences using well-chosen adjectives and without any of the most common spelling and punctuation errors. She even ends everything with an airy flourish of praise.
If she isnt a professional copywriter, she should be one.
Big hint: Could Amazon be using people like her to write ad-copy into their reviews? Could they also use others? Say, someone with a more masculine voice and approach? Perhaps someone with a love for computers and digital cameras?
Bigger hint: I have a two-sentence resume. It says that I spend a lot of time at home and, that I am rotten to the core.
The original poster hits the nail on the head: facts without an attached interpretation are thin on the ground. There is a great separation of fact from idea on both sides.
The NRA has been using the second amendment line forever completely ignoring the language that essentially says that gun ownership carries with it more responsibility than an occasional oiling. For their part, the anti-gun forces work with the assumption that gave us prohibition: 'if you say that something is illegal, it and all the effects that come from it will vanish with no further complications.'
The only genuinely honest reference I have ever seen is an essay by Paul Fussel (SP), in his book, 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb and other essays.' In it, he takes the second amendment at face value by including the line about 'a well-regulated militia' that the NRA never quotes and uses it as the basis for a very reasonable scheme in which he posits that the government could offer to buy out gun owners at a fixed-price per weapon and that everyone who didn't opt out by taking it would be become a legal member of a national militia.
It is a brilliant attack on the NRA's misquoting The Second Amendment which has been used to support unregulated, freewheeling gun ownership. With the authority of someone who served as a marine during the second world war, Fussel invites the reader to imagine gun-lovin' weekend warriors, subjecting themselves to military discipline, physical fitness training, and the joys of the slit-trench latrine several times a year.
Fussel is very fair in attacking the NRA's position misquoting The Second Amendment and he does in the spirit of bitterness at the nonsense of the NRA's tactics and the misrepresentations those tactics lead to. It is not a diatribe against gun-ownership per se, but rather what is perpetually said in support of it.
On the other side of the argument, California's gun laws are a prime example of what happens when lawmakers find themselves unable to eliminate firearms ownership but have enough support to do what they can. California's gun laws define practically any modern firearm as an 'assault weapon' and limit the functionality of firearms by such determinants as barrel-length and magazine capacity. This trend goes so far in California that many pistols are treated by the law as if they were machine guns and in order to sell there, manufacturers like The Springfield Armory go so far as to make two versions of some of their more popular rifles: one for California and one for everywhere else.
Personally, I think we need a new theory of gun ownership. I think that we should sit down and really think about guns, honestly, not to ban them but to control and regulate their ownership.
Like the original poster, I've shot rifle matches. I have owned firearms and I think if you own a weapon, someone, somewhere should *know* that you own it in the same way that it is required that someone somewhere knows that you own a car or that your construction project involves your possessing dynamite. As the humor-impaired have pointed out here, 'physics kill people,' and when it comes to the possibility of generating the energy that does it, a car and a bullet are similar and yet no one goes red in the face when you talk about, licensing, registering and insuring them before they can use their cars. In the end, it's all a matter of our cultural expectations and the pity of the thing is that the two sides in the debate exemplified by the original poster works to make sure that rationalized gun ownership and gun use will never happen.
Possibly justified hysteria aside, the subject of this thread is a prime example of a thing which provides two equally valid answers to a social question: is the umbrella of 'homeland security'--the name alone is nauseating--being used by the forces of vacuous greed in Washington to provide favors to large, commercial internet businesses, or is the simpler and better assumption that the Wonks in washington just dumb and prone to suggestion?
Before everyone with an I.Q. over ninety buys a plane ticket to Canada, we should consider what we're really dealing with in the U.S. government nowadays. It is easy for a Slashdot-quality mind to spot the sheer, arid uselessness of a ban on free 802.11 and this has got to make you wonder.
On the one hand, WE know that terrorists are far more concerned with keeping secrets than ordinary users are. WE fully understand that terrorists, spies and clever lunatics put real work into hiding their intentions and there are too many ways onto the internet to filter all of them--that is, at least, using any method we know of.
It's easy to imagine, a mind like John Ashcroft's simply bypassing this; you can almost see that sloping brow furrow horribly as it bypasses the obvious fact that terrorists have no need to reach for free radio Ethernet.
On the other hand, it is just as easy to conceive of the current administration's love for corporate power making it despise grass-roots initiatives to provide free internet fill-in-the-blank and ducking fast behind the poor, beleaguered flag at the first murmur of dissent.
Both answers are perfectly imaginable: It is easy to imagine genuine nastiness on the part of any government as piggy-eyed as the one we have right now. At the same time, the absence of a clue on the administration's part is just as credible an explanation.
To paraphrase the name of musical group, 'they might be midgets.'
I've got to agree with the comparison of Chrichton and Stevenson.
By literary standards, where academics tell us that plot is best seen as something that changes characters as they act against adversity, Chrichton is a horrific hack who has actually written the same type of book for decades: rapidly-sketched, cookie-cutter characters find themselves stuck in some place where they must resolve a situation or die. This is the common--and annoying--thread to be found in many of his books and movies:
The Andromeda Strain: locked in an underground installation.
Westworld: trapped in a theme park.
The Jurassic Park books: stranded on an island.
Congo: lost in a maze of remote ruins.
It's all been done before in other venues up to and including the Halloween movies where characters are stalked in, a house, in the woods, in a hospital, and, in the lastest movie--by now, Jason Vorhees must be the stalker with a walker--aboard a space ship. Instead of 'big dude with a butcher knife,' Chrichton treats you to space germs, robots, and killah gorillahs. The rest is all the same.
But more important in the comparison than Stevenson's having more than one plot-skeleton in him is his cleverness with language. Unlike Chrichton, Stevenson is an inventive user of language who trusts his audience instead of reaching for the Big Book of simple language.
In Snow Crash, Stevenson writes with an intelligence and energy that draw the reader in, writing with the electric immediacy of a page-turner, with a real faith that the reader's foolish disbelief will be overwhelmed by a machine-gun progression of ideas.
By contrast with this, a close look at Chrichton's clichéd technique, leaves you reading things that couldn't suspend disbelief with chemicals and a hammer.
The actions of the Disney lawyer are despicable in that they demonstrate cynicism with regard to the public interest and genuine nastiness in his choice of tactics.
The original posting poses a number of inner questions. Here are two:
"Should a lawyer use misrepresentation to convince an organ of the federal government that a group of powerful companies should have control over an information technology to protect and enhance their markets? Is this good for everyone?"
"Should one group of commercial concerns, owned by a tiny segment of the population--one percent? less?--enjoy the right to decide whether or not the general population (in the hundreds of millions) can buy an information technology?"
If the answer to either of these questions is, 'yes,' then the idea is despicable--something that any decent person should view with contempt.
If a Disney representative lied to an agency in an attempt to outlaw condoms because time spent having sex cost Disney market share, no one would be confused.
I realize that responding to this particular thing results in something as off-topic as the original post, but answering it is interesting.
Everything ever written or filmed is a question of aesthetics which are not logically provable. The Romans said, 'you can't argue taste,' today, we know that there is no point in telling a Japanese, 'you really *should* like Limburger cheese washed down with a dark ale.' You can't argue taste directly using pure reason, but you can use pure reason to make others understand the reasons for your disliking a particular work. Here are mine.
A Movie based on something well known by many should follow it closely. If I sit down to watch what I'm told is to be a representation of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' I have every reason to be surprised and disappointed when I find myself watching, 'the Mighty Morphine Power Rangers.' The Lynch movie *did* follow the book closely in many ways, but when it broke from the book, it did so in ways that were so glaringly obvious sops to people who would never, ever read the book that the result was painful.
Between the 'weirding modules,' the 'stoned-out' representation of spice use, the heart plugs and the over-the-top, frenetic representation of baron harkonnen, David Lynch's presentation of Dune was genuinely painful. It might be true that a pure transcription of a book does not automatically create brilliant filmmaking. Film and the written word are two different languages. But the quality and accuracy of the translation are the responsibility of the filmmaker if he is to base his work on a well-known work of fiction and anyone is to say anything about the thing but, 'gee, what a nice paycheck they handed you.'
In this respect, David Lynch's version of Dune, fails. Lynch should have put gotten a tighter grip on the actor who played Baron Harkonnen. He should have told him, 'yes, you're nuts, you're sick, greedy, twisted and sexually rapacious, but you're also intellectually brilliant.' He should have concentrated on the physical savagery and religious fervor of the Fremen as the key to their success against all comers, even the emperor's shock troops, and he should have had the courage to have kept Sting out of the movie if for no other reason than that his face recognition alone detracted from the storytelling.
He should have done all of these things, but then, if he *had* done them, but then, we would never have seen the sci-fi channel's version of Dune because he would already have made it.
The end result was painful: Lynch's version of the book is anathema to the great majority of people who've read the book and no one has seen Lynch a major project by him in more than a decade. He made an unpalatable movie that finished his career.
For me, the answer is the universe of the First two books of Fredrick Pohl's 'Gateway' series. Those books provided one of the most interesting worlds I've read about. It is rare in that it required the kind of real imagination that many sci-fi writers spend lucrative careers demonstrating that they lack:
Gibson and the Cyberpunks were largely a matter of predicting technical trends and greasy sociology.
Niven and other intelligent, highly technical sci-fi writers get the physics right, but write like virgins discussing sex when it comes to human nature... including sex.
Far-future, galactic empire fictions like Dune and Star Wars, tend to impose anachronistic systems of government onto far distant futures with such regularity that the result often looks more like a cheap device than a towering work of the imagination.
By contrast, the Universe in Gateway, is close enough to our own time frame in terms of its sociology and economic perspective that the characters it gives rise to are understandable in present terms; they seem relevant in that they are driven by the same forces that drive us.
Dune offers the reader the story of the son of a fallen Duke rising to fulfill the messianic prophecy of an indigenous people, but his journey provides no characters whose motivations a normally functioning reader can really relate to (i.e., how much time have *YOU* spent with a poisoned needle to your neck?). By contrast, in addition to its many stunning visuals, 'Gateway' offers us a glimpse into human nature using a story in which the science is more than just a backdrop to feudalism and this is the best kind of science fiction; the telling of a story that would be impossible to tell without the science.
Most readers have very little experience of nobility in a time of vendetta, but it's hard to imagine anyone who has never seen the results of greed and guilt.
You seem to have confused your nomenclature to make a non-point about euphemism.
m un itions/fae.htm
Fuel-air munitions are basically a newish family of anti-personnel weapons which operate by spreading a cloud of highly volatile, aerosolized liquid into an area and detonating it creating powerful overpressures which kill or injure people even in hardened structures which are open to the air (shallow caves, concrete bunkers, etc). In essence, they work by producing hammering impact on the human body everywhere at once.
For their part,'Daisy Cutters' are very large conventional bombs which, when detonated, are powerful enough to knock down trees (hence the name) while collapsing caves, bunkers and whatnot.
What 747's have to do with village destruction escapes me entirely. You should have looked it up.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/
The drug company analogy may be weak. Especially when you talk about drugs for major public health issues like Aids. For the last few years, manufacturers of drugs to treat HIV have tried to justify the cost of their drugs (and their wildfire profitability) by claiming that they had to recoup their R&D costs.
In response, many have raised the counterargument that the National Institutes of Health are the ones who did or funded the primary research into those drugs and therefore taxpayer money is being used to generate private profit... essentially, very upscale corporate welfare.
This is especially embarrassing when you consider that a company in India has reverse-engineered the drug-coctail(s) in question and offers them at a price that is considerably less than one-tenth that demanded by U.S. drug manufacturers, bringing them to a cost that is less likely to force 3rd world governments to choose between bankrupting themselves and letting their citizens die en masse.
This ties into the computer pricing in an interesting way. Software costs are high, but the assumption in all of the threads I've read are that computer softwares are produced, essentially,'ex nihilo,' from scratch, without resorting to libraries of legacy code which must shorten development cycles and lower costs considerably.
Any debate on the justification of software pricing should take into account that Adobe does not reinvent the wheel with every new version of photoshop.