in one of the indignant animal-lover emails [and the webmaster's response] in their guestbook:
Your site has been reported to the United
States Department of Agriculture, The Humane Society of the United
States, IP host, and InterNIC. Also your affiliation with your
education (collage) is being flagged. I suggest your site be remove
immediately and not repeated elsewhere. Your site has been copied
entirely for further actions should they occur.
Dear Rust,
We wish to assure you that we have all the
appropriate Bonsai Kitticulture permits required for this simple and
painless procedure. We do not understand what you are flagellating
about. And we doubt that Rust is your real name. Also, common law
copyright exists on these web pages, and we warn you to destroy the
illegal copies that you admit to have made or you will face
prosecution for stealing our creative property.
Also, considering your chances of survival decline exponentially with increasing speeds, driving 5 mph over the speed limit likely will mean the difference between life and death of you, the people in the other car, or your passenger(s).
seems you forgot your subjunctive construction.
what you meant to say was, "driving 5 mph over the speed limit likely would mean the difference between life and death... if one was also a careless driver who did not carefully and intelligently avoid danger in the first place through other methods".
but since you're on a roll here, why stop at the Killing-Precious-Little-Girl-With-Flowers speed of +5 the limit? would it not be safer to have everybody drive at 45? or 35? how about 10?
you feel that speeding threatens your safety. you think your feelings justify your attempt to exercise control over the actions of a Free Human Being[pat. pend.].
i feel that your slow-driving threatens both my safety and my ability to get to my job (32 miles) in less than an hour. i think my feelings justify my ability to exercise my sovereignty as a Free Human Being[pat. pend.]
i also feel that your attitude of control is as dangerous to my well-being as a raving, bomb-laden terrorist. terrorists only kill people. fascists kill entire nations.
the highway system sees you as blockage, and passes around you ---
After they get these in place, they'll have a means whereas patrol cars can stop your car remotely in any instance. Will bring a new meaning to "fascist state"
They said similar stuff about traffic lights and seat belts.
yes. and they were right.
fascism is "the creeping death that threatens democracy". the fact that, after licensing, stop signs, signals, etc., they have now moved on to further consolidate their power -- this only proves the point that "They said" originally.
but don't listen to me, I'm a coward. when it gets so bad that I can't stand living underneath the boot of "the social good", I'll blow my brains out....
that is, if they haven't installed home monitoring devices to make that kind of 'financial drain on healthcare resources' impossible.
people talk as if reaction time were ONLY a function of your speed, which is incorrect.
the alert, intelligent driver never has to worry about having "incredible reaction time" because s/he constantly monitors the environment and understands the clues given by traffic patterns.
if you are paying attention (as i am every time i drive a vehicle), you can tell that the person on your left needs to make the far-right exit lane and is about to swerve in front of you to get there. since you already have seen this, you remove your foot from the accellerator (after checking your mirrors to ensure that no one behind you will be endangered by a slight shift in speed) and leave enough space in front of you so the person will be able to swerver AS SAFELY AS POSSIBLE.
if you cannot drive intelligently and defensively, you are far more dangerous to me than someone who is merely travelling fast.
the beauty of intelligent driving is that it can be done at all speeds. oh sure, driving 90kmh is inherently safer than driving 200kmh, but driving 35kmh is safer than 90kmh, and 5 is safer than 35. but deadly, reckless driving can (and does) occur at any of those speeds, and if your goal is to eliminate unsafe conditions, then your energy would be better spent lobbying for widespread mass-transit than trying to limit everyone to 90kmh.
there are few dangers on the earth that cannot be lessened or wholly avoided by diligent intelligence. ---
the military has a vested interest in making these predictions ("all war will soon take place in space"), because their predictions will be taken seriously by people, who will press their congressperson(s) to fund spacewar programs so we don't get beaten by those inscrutable chinese people, most of the congressperson(s) will eagerly comply since some of their largest campaign donors are companies like Lockheed, Boeing, etc., who will be awarded the contracts to stimulate the newest arms-race. and voila! the next war(s) will indeed take place in space! ps, i hear there's a shortage on toilet paper so all 278 million americans need to run to the store right now and stock up!!!
At least as kids we had the calming placebo of a nuke shelter; now it will be worthless, since satellites can read your mailbox to verify your name and then narrowly target your house/shelter.
whoever made the implication that somehow space-war will be a "kindler, gentler" war is, pardon the expression, building castles in the air -- do you think They (whoever they may be that decade) will knock out Our satellites and then say, "okey-dokey, we won 'cause we ruined your bourgeois DSS reception and now your society will crumble! there's no need to also bomb your cities, invade your land, or anything else that might actually subdue your people" ?
Since SF literature is full of pertinent novels, let me offer what is perhaps the most likely one, given human capacity, no, tendency for setting up the very systems that will destroy it: Fiasco, by the masterful Stanislaw Lem. the characters are so humanly infuriating, and the M.A.D.ness so inexorably self-perpetuating, it could only be true.
i can understand the reasons for wanting to militarize near-space to protect ourselves, but history shows unequivocally that armament only leads to more armament, and merely puts us one step closer to the real "War to End All Wars". i dunno. sometimes i think we deserve it.
Now, children, come on over here. I'm going to tell you a bedtime story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, and they fought and they flew, until suddenly, quite recently, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren't even apes then. We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks. And when we go, nature will start over. With the bees, probably. Nature knows when to give up, David.
If you want the local library to get Pay Per View so you can watch Wrestlemania XXXXIV, you can go to hell. Pay for your own god damned casual entertainment. Public libraries are great institutions as repositories of knowledge available to those without the means to gain that knowledge on their own. If we subvert the legitimacy of the Public Library system by catering to every entertainment whim out there, we shall destroy society's need and support for the institutions, and we shall eventually destroy the institutions themselves.
having worked in all areas (circ, ref, resource management, collection dev.) of various libraries, let me tell you that you are not understanding the basic issue of library services, which is this:
how do we take our limited resources and provide the largest, most useful store of knowledge possible?
the community college library i currently work for does not really need to receive Time, Rolling Stone, or the New Yorker. any information found in these periodicals can be found elsewhere in a more authoritative form -- yet we gladly purchase them as a service to our patrons.
there is no accredited, instructional reason for us to allow students and community members to come use our LAN of research stations to check their email, book travel accomodations, or read "101 Funniest Blonde Jokes" sites -- yet we gladly allow this as a service to our patrons.
there is no immediate academic reason why we should order Terry Pratchett novels, sports biographies, or books on Linear Algebra -- but we scour the book-trade journals to find the best ones as a service to our patrons.
do you see the pattern? we are here, most of us, because we enjoy learning and thinking and arts and sciences and investigation and discovery -- and we want to pass that humanistic pleasure on to others.
perhaps one of the english faculty will offer a class on modern SF Literature. perhaps a student will get bored in his Calc3 class and want to tackle material not typically offered at the 2-year level. perhaps the high point of some poor suburban tract-home kid's week is dropping by the library to look gawk at the bizarre angles and alien contours in the latest issue of Architectural Digest.
what you have especially failed to understand is the difference between State-Mandated Censorship and Local Control.
library professionals have always used reasoned judgement and educated discretion in selecting the materials they believe will serve the Public Interest. Frequently this involves acquisitions which we find offensive -- e.g. i personally would not want to spend my money on Gates' Road Ahead, but because he is who he is, his detritus becomes a part of the civilization in which people are interested, and thus my library, as a repository of the products of civilization, has an interest in obtaining a copy so that the public may make their own judgements.
but federal Rules such as those under discussion require ALL libraries of ALL levels serving ALL manner of patrons to conform to one unyielding standard. blindly global content restrictions are at the dark, immoral heart of censorship, and it has no place in a free society.
i've grown tired of hearing certain political factions constantly whining about how some book, CD, webpage, article, etc. is going to completely ruin the little capsule they've worked hard to place around their children. since it seems to consistently come from the same folks who are so into "consequences of our choices" and "responsibility", i find it strange that they believe that the rest of the world should be responsible for the consequences of their choice to bring their children up completely ignorant of anything approaching reality.
again, the point is not that libraries should not decline from providing access to anything and everything, but that the decision should NOT be made by a washington bureaucrat, but by those with the experience and training to make those judgments.
which is what librarians, despite sometimes brutal persecution, have been doing for thousands of years.
surely you don't all think that the then/than is accidental? umm.. in the couple short years i've been slashdotting, taco and hemos have nearly always written "better then you".
and people have always posted bitching about it.
you think they never once actually had any idea that the two were spelled differently?
since/. miscreants are most interested in the bashing opportunities presented by these common, alternate usages, it seems strangely thick-headed for you all not to realize that your trolling only pisses of the few people who bother to read your sub-thread -- but malda&bates can send a great big "screw you, i get to do what i want while you childishly whine about it on my board. whatever, losers" to thousands of people in one quick stroke.
either that, or they just don't care. do a thought experiment: you oversee a public message board, you post stories you find interesting and 300k+ people read them and scream at each other as if their opinions mattered. plus all the normal booger-picking, car-washing, grocery-buying day-to-day stuff most everybody does ---- and then somehow you're supposed to care about the "literary sensitivities" of a handful of people who have nothing better to do than lurk the www searching for mis-spellings that they pretend are Threatening All Life As We Know It?!?
of course, since most are doing that whole post-post-post-postmodern, anonymous, blowing off steam, i-like-to-think-of-it-as-public-performance-art, whatdya whatdya in posting this kind of picky crap anyway, you already DO know that nobody cares about you and your opinions, and it's precisely these feelings of futile, impotent anger that cause you to act as you do in the first place.
in any case, your compulsive internal wondering "did anyone see my post yet and get angry and reply and oh! any attention is better than none pleez validate my feeeeeelings" post-refresh post-refresh post-refresh runs up more traffic and pageviews for the very people you think you're bringing down. meanwhile, they're logging your IP, pursuing their personal hobbies with revenue generate by your lameness, and laughing.
get it?? basically, what taco/hemos are saying to you, daily, is something you understand very well: YHBT. YHL. HAFND.
It was kind of like watching everyone die at the beginning of Alien3 and wondering "Well, fuck, what was the point of Aliens?"
i couldn't agree more. although elsewhere in this topic i talked about how much i loved the mood of Alien3, i think it's desperately uncharacteristic to think that Ripley just accidentally didn't notice a couple egg pods attached to the walls of the cargo hold.
here is a woman that has repeatedly gone through the horror of surviving a species whose one purpose is to kill and multiply. after just barely surviving, twice, and then having that final battle at the end of Aliens, this intelligent, resourceful, and [with good reason] danger-paranoid spacefarer JUST GOES RIGHT TO COLDSLEEP WITHOUT THOROUGHLY CHECKING THE SHIP for pods, spare aliens, let alone structural damage. i mean, the pods are a couple of feet tall, and about 1.7 feet wide, and any place large enough for the Queen to deposit them is also plenty large to allow a human to at least shine a lite into.
i know, i know, "it's just a movie, however it happens is how it happens". well my theory of enjoyable fiction is that fiction should be a scientific study in which certain properties are initially fixed, and then other conditions are varied to determine their effects on the fixed items. if you, external to the system being tested, suddenly change even one of the properties of the test subjects, you have destroyed the experiment, and your data cannot be usefully correlated. so i don't particularly care if a story is set in a believable, or even likely, universe, but unless the characterizations are consistent, there's no point, no tension, in finding out what happens to the people. you might as well have them suddenly grow wings and fly away or wake up saying "i can't believe it was all just a dream..." and then who cares?
heh, i'm not flaming you or anything, but that's the first time i've heard anyone say they liked Alien:Resurrection BEST of the 4!
i know airing personal opinions online isn't always fun, since the hordes are always waiting to ream us for their expression, but i'd be interested in hearing what it is you liked about Alien:R above the others.
me, i'm just a sucker for a long, detailed, well-developed character study, and since i view Alien3 as the logical end of Lt. Ripley's "Struggle" Arc, i couldn't really take her role in Alien:R seriously. i almost wish they had started over with a new generation (or central character) -- although that type of thing is usually a gimmick to boost the ratings of children's television programs, and, given the aliens as subject, would invariably draw references to "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" or whatdya whatdya. but i don't know if that's any worse than soap-opera-style, "oh, wait, Victoria isn't dead after all!", genetic science or no. personally, i think the Fates zapped them because they desecrated the numerological 7-power of the release dates -- Alien released 1979. +7years Aliens. +7years Alien3. +5years Alien:R???
to be honest, though, i kinda know how you feel, since i thought Alien3 was shatteringly good because of the incredible, tragic beauty of the sets and cinematography; and most people seemed to think it was a horrid betrayal of the first two. sure, it had a few awkward, discontinuous points, but the overall effect was so strongly accomplished that i ignored the plot holes and even, god help me, got teary-eyed at the end. plus, the music kicks ass. i used to put the CD in while playing Doom][. very creepy.
yes! it was also made into a movie, although the critics thoroughly panned it. i've never seen it, but what i've read about it implies that it was a pretty faithful adaptation, aside from leaving out some arguable innuendo about just how close the boy and his dog were.
i have to say that harlan ellison is one of the most rewarding reads available. he has all the bizarre alien landscapes of space-opera SF, the WTF?! effect of psychedelic SF, and the imaginative plot-lines of hardcore SF, while never letting you, the human reader, off the hook. he's a very... emphatic person, and his writings reflect that; demanding that you confront some issue other than the fact that you wanted something entertaining to browse while waiting for your dental appointment.
yet he does this without resorting to the sometimes embarassing theatrics of, say, Spider Robinson, who tried with Time Pressure and other works to do for the eighties what Heinlein did for the sixties. except that, at the time, Heinlein was still with us.
and it was the eighties.
again, though, everyone should at least read a few selections from the Essential Harlan Ellison collection. even if you're turned off by his sharpness, you'll not easily forget the experience of reading it.
i really liked the first book... then again i was around 12 years old and liked pretty much anything containing words like "alien", "autodoc" or "artificial sun".
but, sin duda Garden of Rama is the real winner of the series, partly because of its greater relevance to This Modern World of Ours.
Rendez-vous is infused with all the tensions and militaristic reactions of the US-USSR Cold War era, which doesn't necessarily make it irrelevant; but it does make Garden of Rama a more important portrait of "spaceship earth 2000", especially as pertains to racial, religious, and economic conflict. it tells us something about ourselves, and i find this type of fiction much more interesting than, say, Ringworld, whose popularity puzzles me. yeah, it's a great big world with lots of mystery and potential, but the first book never did enough with that potential to make me care -- the "Luck of Teela Brown" twist was quite clever, but on the whole Louis was a little to swashbuckling for me. i mean, any five-year-old can come up with fantastic landscapes and jarring, surreal plot twists. if all i was after was mere stimulation of my imagination, i can put down the book, stare out the window, unfocus my eyes, and do it myself.
anyway, it doesn't matter that much, because i think the other Rama books would be impossible to film. although come to think of it, they could make a great B5/DS9-type series. [i always liked DS9 more than TNG for the same reasons discussed above -- plus there wasn't enough conflict on TNG. aside from Dr. Pulaski, who got axed quickly, everybody pretty much sat around waiting for Geordi to tachyon-ize the Main Deflector for the zillionth time, while they spent the hour sucking Picard's Ethical Cock].
that's why whenever these admittedly excellent sf books get made into movies i just don't go. the subtextual nuances that make characters interesting or enlightening don't translate to the screen, and the parts that do are boring.
same thing with the upcoming LOTR. oh sure, Bakshi's rotoscope version may not do much for the modern audience, but his commitment to the spirit and literary merit of Tolkien's work cannot be denied. Check out this recent Interview from the Onion to see what i mean:
I heard that Boorman was taking the three books and
collapsing them into one screenplay, and I thought that was madness, certainly a lack of
character on Boorman's part. Why would you want to tamper with anything Tolkien did? So I
approached United Artists and told them the film should be made in animation, and it
should be made in three parts, because there's no way you can take the three books and
condense them into one film. It's a physical impossibility. And here comes the horror
story, right? They said fine, because Boorman handed in this 700-page script, and do I
want to read it? I said, "Well, is it all three books in one?" They said,
"Yes, but he's changed a lot of the characters, and he's added characters. He's got
some sneakers he's merchandising in the middle." I said, "No, I'd rather not
read it. I'd rather do the books as close as we can, using Tolkien's exact dialogue and
scenes." They said, "Fine," which knocked me down, "because we don't
understand a word Boorman wrote. We never read the books." They owned the rights, but
they never read the original books.
but i generally don't even understand the need to make a movie out of everything. it's the same thing as liking both Mocha Almond Fudge ice cream and Meat Lovers pizza -- and then thinking it would necessarily be tasty to pick the almonds out and throw them onto the cheese along with spicy sausage, pepperoni, romano cheese, tomato sauce, and hunks of carmelized fudge, then sticking it in the oven to bake. [there are certain to be a few who claim to like chunky, coffee-flavored pizza, but i think you get the idea].
although our instincts may tell us otherwise, two goods do not always make a "gooder".
Expresso is a dictionary accepted variant. Funny enough, they don't think ficking is a word.
Actually, I think s/he was alluding to a David Sedaris segment from "Naked", but it should be "feck" not "fick", so maybe they're just mocking curse-word censorship, or just being a sorry typist [that "u" key is a whole.6 inches farther than "i", after all...]
In any case, dictionaries are mere repositories of demi-traditional, but mutable, language forms. They should not be viewed as sources of authoritative validation of the orthodoxy of any given particle. Although to be honest, I'm not terribly concerned with whether people use language "properly". I occasionally do so because it pleases me, but as long as I can understand what others are saying I don't get terribly distressed with verbal fudging.
the glory of martyrdom is little comfort to the martyr, and that all the right-wing anti-government gun heroes are dead?
randy weaver, waco, etc.
who operated the weapons that killed them?
the United States Government.
did the poor innocent childlike civilians have weapons to defend themselves from the Big Bad Fedril Guvmint?
yes; in fact, they had more weapons than people to aim them.
despite large stockpiles of munitions, are they not still just as dead?
yes, they are irrevocably gone bye-bye.
technology has moved on, my friend. George Washington & Co. may have been able to use their one-shot rifles to scare off the Redcoats, but you modern folks don't have a chance. if the U.S. government ever really becomes so evil that they begin to mass murder their own people (again, remember Waco?) there will be nothing you can do against tanks, laser/heat guided missiles, and a satellite grid that can read the list of cities on your ok computer concert tee-shirt.
it's over.
you lost.
you're already dead.
now either put your "freedom fighting" where your mouth is and go shoot some "guvmint baddies" or get over it and spare us your whining.
people like to form connections with other people.
one way they do this is by sharing information about their lives.
this is not a bad thing.
i believe he is trying to validate himself by talking about what he does.
of course, many 18-22 year olds are embarassed by this because it reminds them of how they did the same thing just a few years earlier.
because they are so insecure, the way they deal with these feelings is by attacking others (transferance of self-hatred).
if the younger person is hurt enough, s/he will carry that insecurity forward and then in a few years will continue the cycle.
the person you're attacking is 16, and he needs to share what's going on in his life so that he can feel he is okay -- that what he does is affirmed and supported by his peers and by society, because it will help him to become a secure adult who will not want to shoot cruel, bitter people like you when he goes to work.
You can't assume he's monogamous, either, so I guess you'd have to say "significant other or others." And he could be hermaphroditic, so you'd have to include "significant other or others or yourself". Then again, we can't leave out the people who prefer inanimate objects.
yes. both the literal and sarcastic interpretations of what you say are correct.
the human brain is hardwired to prefer sweeping generalizations because they are more efficiently analyzed than trying to consider all individual cases. this is a 'good' development, because it was an important part of our evolution [imagine the proto-human that could not make generalizations such as "all sabre-tooth tigers should be avoided"].
but we should be careful to remember that human beings deserve a higher standard of appraisal than other objects in our environment. i think there is a moral virtue in trying to find out who someone really is and to respond to them as a person and not as "well, statistically you're probably a white nominally christian male who likes pizza, football, and absurdly large breasts, so i'll just treat you that way and never bother to consider any alternative(s)".
Personally, I don't see why a homosexual would be offended when confronted by the fact that men generally prefer women as sexual partners. But that's just me.
it's not a matter of being offended by the statistical reality. it's more related to, especially during adolescence when there's a compulsion to negotiate a place in some social group (and by extension, the larger Society), being constantly confronted with society's apparent belief (or wish) that you don't even exist.
yes, there is a degree of over-defensive whining to this type of "political correctness", but i think you'll understand that those who have been at the receiving end, for whatever reason (race, religion, weight, intelligence level...), of this type of situation are going to feel it important to "correct" it by asking you to give them a place alongside the narrow, exclusively attractive, white, christian, hetero images that are offered to them. whether you care enough about people to accept this other reality is between you and your self-image as a Good Person.
According to the many surveys conducted by government and health organizations, only 1-2% of the population admits to being gay.
such surveys should never be taken as an adequate measure of sexual expression. e.g.:
20. Sex
()Female
()Male 21. Sexual Orientation (check only one)
()Heterosexual
()Homosexual 22. Marital Status....
i hardly think of that as being an accurate description of human behavior. i'm in my mid-twenties, and of the six people i've slept with since turning 18, three would answer the question by checking "Heterosexual", the other three by checking "Homosexual". it's not a matter of "most of them are too afraid to fill out an anonymous surveys truthfully", but rather that those surveys (and our socially-created notions of identity) are using grossly oversimplified categories. in fact, if we're so concerned with surveys, the statistics on men who have had a same-sex experience ending in orgasm are much higher, ranging from 28-35%.
although, as #300 points out, the peculiarities of adolescence lend themselves to more varied experimentation than is found after 30, by which time most people have a well-established sexual identity.
however, as an addition to the sociological/analytical issues above, let me say that i don't particularly care what the exact number of "homosexuals" is. it's pathetic to see the self-appointed Conservative Moral Authority and the self-appointed Gay Leaders fighting over the numbers, as if that had any relevance to the simple, humanitarian fact that we all are possessors of the same inalienable rights. the religious freedoms of relatively small groups like the followers of Nichiren Daishonin buddhism are of equal importance as the religious freedoms of large, influential, christian denominations.
Statistics are irrelevant, your rights will be protected.
(a living, breathing Katz character, you might say)
Do you resent the comparison to Jon Katz?
in this case, he is not being compared to JK as somehow similar in personality or worldview. Rather, he is being referred to as a "Katz character", a person who is the embodiment of several issues that JK has written about -- young, computer-superliterate (and having to walk the difficult path of knowing more than the parents, teachers, etc. to whom he is supposed to be inferior and consequently submissive), involved in an "online community", and viewed as somewhat of a dork by those in his daily environment.
So what if they're on the take? As long as I get my security and benefits and high pay. A few people getting corrupted is worth it if a few thousand get better lives, yes?
Yeah, Computer Programmers Unite!
...except of course, that while the existence of well-developed unions increases an employee's hourly rate and/or benefits "in the micro" -- management makes up the difference by raising prices on products, so that "in the macro" prices generally go up, and so does the C-O-L. [this is especially true in USA, which is still managing to hold on to an economic boom, but when the downward spiral accelerates, people won't be able to pay $2.30 for a jug of milk -- at that point, then, people will starve and companies will flounder].
The problem is that unions are for the immediate benefit of people in their roles as Laborers -- not in their roles as Consumers, and we cannot think of them as a solution to inequality.
or, for those of you who hate non-fic,
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 1
see some rather more interesting, entertaining and damning illustrations of technology's sociological effects by picking up Terry Pratchett's newest, The Truth. read the review at your favorite book source, or go to barnes & noble and quicksearch "pratchett truth".
if you keep creating more slack for john q. public he will never be provoked into defending his rights. historically, every philosophy based on Universal Natural Rights has greatly underestimated habit and laziness as the prime motivators of human behavior.
--- the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
because as slashdotters we're all using linux/oss anyway, right?
so it couldn't possibly matter to anyone here.
these type of stories on slashdot remind me of some group of kvetching grandmothers who wring their hands worrying that somewhere, somehow, some gullible little boy is being convinced to trade his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for leftover tuna casserole.
--- the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
Wake up people; MS ain't all that bad; MS software works and people are using it because it kicks the shit out of StarOffice and other suites.
Ayn Rand
"the best way to help others is to be relentlessly and unashamedly selfish"
what a woman!
in Atlas Shrugged it only took one thousand eighteen pages for her to communicate the single sentence above.
it's too bad the utopia she pontificates about is a fictive creation that requires fanatic, fascist devotion to re-forming oneself into the image of the Perfect Man -- which turns out to be, of course, Ayn Rand herself.
we reject her and her unpracticable moralizing.
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
Slashdot Mirror
Also, considering your chances of survival decline exponentially with increasing speeds, driving 5 mph over the speed limit likely will mean the difference between life and death of you, the people in the other car, or your passenger(s).
seems you forgot your subjunctive construction.
what you meant to say was, "driving 5 mph over the speed limit likely would mean the difference between life and death... if one was also a careless driver who did not carefully and intelligently avoid danger in the first place through other methods".
but since you're on a roll here, why stop at the Killing-Precious-Little-Girl-With-Flowers speed of +5 the limit? would it not be safer to have everybody drive at 45? or 35? how about 10?
you feel that speeding threatens your safety. you think your feelings justify your attempt to exercise control over the actions of a Free Human Being[pat. pend.].
i feel that your slow-driving threatens both my safety and my ability to get to my job (32 miles) in less than an hour. i think my feelings justify my ability to exercise my sovereignty as a Free Human Being[pat. pend.]
i also feel that your attitude of control is as dangerous to my well-being as a raving, bomb-laden terrorist. terrorists only kill people. fascists kill entire nations.
the highway system sees you as blockage, and passes around you
---
fascism is "the creeping death that threatens democracy". the fact that, after licensing, stop signs, signals, etc., they have now moved on to further consolidate their power -- this only proves the point that "They said" originally.
but don't listen to me, I'm a coward. when it gets so bad that I can't stand living underneath the boot of "the social good", I'll blow my brains out....
that is, if they haven't installed home monitoring devices to make that kind of 'financial drain on healthcare resources' impossible.
FITTER, HAPPIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE
people talk as if reaction time were ONLY a function of your speed, which is incorrect.
the alert, intelligent driver never has to worry about having "incredible reaction time" because s/he constantly monitors the environment and understands the clues given by traffic patterns.
if you are paying attention (as i am every time i drive a vehicle), you can tell that the person on your left needs to make the far-right exit lane and is about to swerve in front of you to get there. since you already have seen this, you remove your foot from the accellerator (after checking your mirrors to ensure that no one behind you will be endangered by a slight shift in speed) and leave enough space in front of you so the person will be able to swerver AS SAFELY AS POSSIBLE.
if you cannot drive intelligently and defensively, you are far more dangerous to me than someone who is merely travelling fast.
the beauty of intelligent driving is that it can be done at all speeds. oh sure, driving 90kmh is inherently safer than driving 200kmh, but driving 35kmh is safer than 90kmh, and 5 is safer than 35. but deadly, reckless driving can (and does) occur at any of those speeds, and if your goal is to eliminate unsafe conditions, then your energy would be better spent lobbying for widespread mass-transit than trying to limit everyone to 90kmh.
there are few dangers on the earth that cannot be lessened or wholly avoided by diligent intelligence.
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blockbuster *cough* grocery stores *cough**hrrrmph* friends' houses *achoo*
if you didn't have access to any of these things then 99.99999999% odds are you don't have access to a $200 gaming console in the first place.
At least as kids we had the calming placebo of a nuke shelter; now it will be worthless, since satellites can read your mailbox to verify your name and then narrowly target your house/shelter.
whoever made the implication that somehow space-war will be a "kindler, gentler" war is, pardon the expression, building castles in the air -- do you think They (whoever they may be that decade) will knock out Our satellites and then say, "okey-dokey, we won 'cause we ruined your bourgeois DSS reception and now your society will crumble! there's no need to also bomb your cities, invade your land, or anything else that might actually subdue your people" ?
Since SF literature is full of pertinent novels, let me offer what is perhaps the most likely one, given human capacity, no, tendency for setting up the very systems that will destroy it:
Fiasco, by the masterful Stanislaw Lem. the characters are so humanly infuriating, and the M.A.D.ness so inexorably self-perpetuating, it could only be true.
i can understand the reasons for wanting to militarize near-space to protect ourselves, but history shows unequivocally that armament only leads to more armament, and merely puts us one step closer to the real "War to End All Wars". i dunno. sometimes i think we deserve it.
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the community college library i currently work for does not really need to receive Time, Rolling Stone, or the New Yorker. any information found in these periodicals can be found elsewhere in a more authoritative form -- yet we gladly purchase them as a service to our patrons.
there is no accredited, instructional reason for us to allow students and community members to come use our LAN of research stations to check their email, book travel accomodations, or read "101 Funniest Blonde Jokes" sites -- yet we gladly allow this as a service to our patrons.
there is no immediate academic reason why we should order Terry Pratchett novels, sports biographies, or books on Linear Algebra -- but we scour the book-trade journals to find the best ones as a service to our patrons.
do you see the pattern? we are here, most of us, because we enjoy learning and thinking and arts and sciences and investigation and discovery -- and we want to pass that humanistic pleasure on to others.
perhaps one of the english faculty will offer a class on modern SF Literature. perhaps a student will get bored in his Calc3 class and want to tackle material not typically offered at the 2-year level. perhaps the high point of some poor suburban tract-home kid's week is dropping by the library to look gawk at the bizarre angles and alien contours in the latest issue of Architectural Digest.
what you have especially failed to understand is the difference between State-Mandated Censorship and Local Control.
library professionals have always used reasoned judgement and educated discretion in selecting the materials they believe will serve the Public Interest. Frequently this involves acquisitions which we find offensive -- e.g. i personally would not want to spend my money on Gates' Road Ahead, but because he is who he is, his detritus becomes a part of the civilization in which people are interested, and thus my library, as a repository of the products of civilization, has an interest in obtaining a copy so that the public may make their own judgements.
but federal Rules such as those under discussion require ALL libraries of ALL levels serving ALL manner of patrons to conform to one unyielding standard. blindly global content restrictions are at the dark, immoral heart of censorship, and it has no place in a free society.
i've grown tired of hearing certain political factions constantly whining about how some book, CD, webpage, article, etc. is going to completely ruin the little capsule they've worked hard to place around their children. since it seems to consistently come from the same folks who are so into "consequences of our choices" and "responsibility", i find it strange that they believe that the rest of the world should be responsible for the consequences of their choice to bring their children up completely ignorant of anything approaching reality.
again, the point is not that libraries should not decline from providing access to anything and everything, but that the decision should NOT be made by a washington bureaucrat, but by those with the experience and training to make those judgments.
which is what librarians, despite sometimes brutal persecution, have been doing for thousands of years.
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surely you don't all think that the then/than is accidental? umm.. in the couple short years i've been slashdotting, taco and hemos have nearly always written "better then you". /. miscreants are most interested in the bashing opportunities presented by these common, alternate usages, it seems strangely thick-headed for you all not to realize that your trolling only pisses of the few people who bother to read your sub-thread -- but malda&bates can send a great big "screw you, i get to do what i want while you childishly whine about it on my board. whatever, losers" to thousands of people in one quick stroke.
and people have always posted bitching about it.
you think they never once actually had any idea that the two were spelled differently?
since
either that, or they just don't care. do a thought experiment: you oversee a public message board, you post stories you find interesting and 300k+ people read them and scream at each other as if their opinions mattered. plus all the normal booger-picking, car-washing, grocery-buying day-to-day stuff most everybody does ---- and then somehow you're supposed to care about the "literary sensitivities" of a handful of people who have nothing better to do than lurk the www searching for mis-spellings that they pretend are Threatening All Life As We Know It?!?
of course, since most are doing that whole post-post-post-postmodern, anonymous, blowing off steam, i-like-to-think-of-it-as-public-performance-art, whatdya whatdya in posting this kind of picky crap anyway, you already DO know that nobody cares about you and your opinions, and it's precisely these feelings of futile, impotent anger that cause you to act as you do in the first place.
in any case, your compulsive internal wondering "did anyone see my post yet and get angry and reply and oh! any attention is better than none pleez validate my feeeeeelings" post-refresh post-refresh post-refresh runs up more traffic and pageviews for the very people you think you're bringing down. meanwhile, they're logging your IP, pursuing their personal hobbies with revenue generate by your lameness, and laughing.
get it?? basically, what taco/hemos are saying to you, daily, is something you understand very well: YHBT. YHL. HAFND.
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It was kind of like watching everyone die at the beginning of Alien3 and wondering "Well, fuck, what was the point of Aliens?"
i couldn't agree more. although elsewhere in this topic i talked about how much i loved the mood of Alien3, i think it's desperately uncharacteristic to think that Ripley just accidentally didn't notice a couple egg pods attached to the walls of the cargo hold.
here is a woman that has repeatedly gone through the horror of surviving a species whose one purpose is to kill and multiply. after just barely surviving, twice, and then having that final battle at the end of Aliens, this intelligent, resourceful, and [with good reason] danger-paranoid spacefarer JUST GOES RIGHT TO COLDSLEEP WITHOUT THOROUGHLY CHECKING THE SHIP for pods, spare aliens, let alone structural damage. i mean, the pods are a couple of feet tall, and about 1.7 feet wide, and any place large enough for the Queen to deposit them is also plenty large to allow a human to at least shine a lite into.
i know, i know, "it's just a movie, however it happens is how it happens". well my theory of enjoyable fiction is that fiction should be a scientific study in which certain properties are initially fixed, and then other conditions are varied to determine their effects on the fixed items. if you, external to the system being tested, suddenly change even one of the properties of the test subjects, you have destroyed the experiment, and your data cannot be usefully correlated. so i don't particularly care if a story is set in a believable, or even likely, universe, but unless the characterizations are consistent, there's no point, no tension, in finding out what happens to the people. you might as well have them suddenly grow wings and fly away or wake up saying "i can't believe it was all just a dream..." and then who cares?
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heh, i'm not flaming you or anything, but that's the first time i've heard anyone say they liked Alien:Resurrection BEST of the 4!
i know airing personal opinions online isn't always fun, since the hordes are always waiting to ream us for their expression, but i'd be interested in hearing what it is you liked about Alien:R above the others.
me, i'm just a sucker for a long, detailed, well-developed character study, and since i view Alien3 as the logical end of Lt. Ripley's "Struggle" Arc, i couldn't really take her role in Alien:R seriously. i almost wish they had started over with a new generation (or central character) -- although that type of thing is usually a gimmick to boost the ratings of children's television programs, and, given the aliens as subject, would invariably draw references to "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" or whatdya whatdya. but i don't know if that's any worse than soap-opera-style, "oh, wait, Victoria isn't dead after all!", genetic science or no.
personally, i think the Fates zapped them because they desecrated the numerological 7-power of the release dates -- Alien released 1979. +7years Aliens. +7years Alien3. +5years Alien:R???
to be honest, though, i kinda know how you feel, since i thought Alien3 was shatteringly good because of the incredible, tragic beauty of the sets and cinematography; and most people seemed to think it was a horrid betrayal of the first two. sure, it had a few awkward, discontinuous points, but the overall effect was so strongly accomplished that i ignored the plot holes and even, god help me, got teary-eyed at the end.
plus, the music kicks ass. i used to put the CD in while playing Doom][. very creepy.
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A Boy and his Dog. Now that was SF.
yes! it was also made into a movie, although the critics thoroughly panned it. i've never seen it, but what i've read about it implies that it was a pretty faithful adaptation, aside from leaving out some arguable innuendo about just how close the boy and his dog were.
i have to say that harlan ellison is one of the most rewarding reads available. he has all the bizarre alien landscapes of space-opera SF, the WTF?! effect of psychedelic SF, and the imaginative plot-lines of hardcore SF, while never letting you, the human reader, off the hook. he's a very... emphatic person, and his writings reflect that; demanding that you confront some issue other than the fact that you wanted something entertaining to browse while waiting for your dental appointment. yet he does this without resorting to the sometimes embarassing theatrics of, say, Spider Robinson, who tried with Time Pressure and other works to do for the eighties what Heinlein did for the sixties.
except that, at the time, Heinlein was still with us.
and it was the eighties.
again, though, everyone should at least read a few selections from the Essential Harlan Ellison collection. even if you're turned off by his sharpness, you'll not easily forget the experience of reading it.
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but, sin duda Garden of Rama is the real winner of the series, partly because of its greater relevance to This Modern World of Ours. Rendez-vous is infused with all the tensions and militaristic reactions of the US-USSR Cold War era, which doesn't necessarily make it irrelevant; but it does make Garden of Rama a more important portrait of "spaceship earth 2000", especially as pertains to racial, religious, and economic conflict. it tells us something about ourselves, and i find this type of fiction much more interesting than, say, Ringworld, whose popularity puzzles me. yeah, it's a great big world with lots of mystery and potential, but the first book never did enough with that potential to make me care -- the "Luck of Teela Brown" twist was quite clever, but on the whole Louis was a little to swashbuckling for me.
i mean, any five-year-old can come up with fantastic landscapes and jarring, surreal plot twists. if all i was after was mere stimulation of my imagination, i can put down the book, stare out the window, unfocus my eyes, and do it myself.
anyway, it doesn't matter that much, because i think the other Rama books would be impossible to film. although come to think of it, they could make a great B5/DS9-type series. [i always liked DS9 more than TNG for the same reasons discussed above -- plus there wasn't enough conflict on TNG. aside from Dr. Pulaski, who got axed quickly, everybody pretty much sat around waiting for Geordi to tachyon-ize the Main Deflector for the zillionth time, while they spent the hour sucking Picard's Ethical Cock].
that's why whenever these admittedly excellent sf books get made into movies i just don't go. the subtextual nuances that make characters interesting or enlightening don't translate to the screen, and the parts that do are boring.
same thing with the upcoming LOTR. oh sure, Bakshi's rotoscope version may not do much for the modern audience, but his commitment to the spirit and literary merit of Tolkien's work cannot be denied. Check out this recent Interview from the Onion to see what i mean: but i generally don't even understand the need to make a movie out of everything. it's the same thing as liking both Mocha Almond Fudge ice cream and Meat Lovers pizza -- and then thinking it would necessarily be tasty to pick the almonds out and throw them onto the cheese along with spicy sausage, pepperoni, romano cheese, tomato sauce, and hunks of carmelized fudge, then sticking it in the oven to bake. [there are certain to be a few who claim to like chunky, coffee-flavored pizza, but i think you get the idea].
although our instincts may tell us otherwise, two goods do not always make a "gooder".
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A host is a host from coast to coast / but no one uses a host that's close / unless the host that isn't close
hey, what's the rest of your sig?
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In any case, dictionaries are mere repositories of demi-traditional, but mutable, language forms. They should not be viewed as sources of authoritative validation of the orthodoxy of any given particle. Although to be honest, I'm not terribly concerned with whether people use language "properly". I occasionally do so because it pleases me, but as long as I can understand what others are saying I don't get terribly distressed with verbal fudging.
Herbal fudging , on the other hand, gets me very excited.
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the glory of martyrdom is little comfort to the martyr, and that all the right-wing anti-government gun heroes are dead?
randy weaver, waco, etc.
who operated the weapons that killed them?
the United States Government.
did the poor innocent childlike civilians have weapons to defend themselves from the Big Bad Fedril Guvmint?
yes; in fact, they had more weapons than people to aim them.
despite large stockpiles of munitions, are they not still just as dead?
yes, they are irrevocably gone bye-bye.
technology has moved on, my friend. George Washington & Co. may have been able to use their one-shot rifles to scare off the Redcoats, but you modern folks don't have a chance. if the U.S. government ever really becomes so evil that they begin to mass murder their own people (again, remember Waco?) there will be nothing you can do against tanks, laser/heat guided missiles, and a satellite grid that can read the list of cities on your ok computer concert tee-shirt.
it's over.
you lost.
you're already dead.
now either put your "freedom fighting" where your mouth is and go shoot some "guvmint baddies" or get over it and spare us your whining.
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people like to form connections with other people.
one way they do this is by sharing information about their lives.
this is not a bad thing.
i believe he is trying to validate himself by talking about what he does.
of course, many 18-22 year olds are embarassed by this because it reminds them of how they did the same thing just a few years earlier.
because they are so insecure, the way they deal with these feelings is by attacking others (transferance of self-hatred).
if the younger person is hurt enough, s/he will carry that insecurity forward and then in a few years will continue the cycle.
the person you're attacking is 16, and he needs to share what's going on in his life so that he can feel he is okay -- that what he does is affirmed and supported by his peers and by society, because it will help him to become a secure adult who will not want to shoot cruel, bitter people like you when he goes to work.
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the human brain is hardwired to prefer sweeping generalizations because they are more efficiently analyzed than trying to consider all individual cases. this is a 'good' development, because it was an important part of our evolution [imagine the proto-human that could not make generalizations such as "all sabre-tooth tigers should be avoided"].
but we should be careful to remember that human beings deserve a higher standard of appraisal than other objects in our environment. i think there is a moral virtue in trying to find out who someone really is and to respond to them as a person and not as "well, statistically you're probably a white nominally christian male who likes pizza, football, and absurdly large breasts, so i'll just treat you that way and never bother to consider any alternative(s)".
it's not a matter of being offended by the statistical reality. it's more related to, especially during adolescence when there's a compulsion to negotiate a place in some social group (and by extension, the larger Society), being constantly confronted with society's apparent belief (or wish) that you don't even exist.
yes, there is a degree of over-defensive whining to this type of "political correctness", but i think you'll understand that those who have been at the receiving end, for whatever reason (race, religion, weight, intelligence level...), of this type of situation are going to feel it important to "correct" it by asking you to give them a place alongside the narrow, exclusively attractive, white, christian, hetero images that are offered to them.
whether you care enough about people to accept this other reality is between you and your self-image as a Good Person.
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20. Sex
()Female
()Male
21. Sexual Orientation (check only one)
()Heterosexual
()Homosexual
22. Marital Status....
i hardly think of that as being an accurate description of human behavior.
i'm in my mid-twenties, and of the six people i've slept with since turning 18, three would answer the question by checking "Heterosexual", the other three by checking "Homosexual". it's not a matter of "most of them are too afraid to fill out an anonymous surveys truthfully", but rather that those surveys (and our socially-created notions of identity) are using grossly oversimplified categories. in fact, if we're so concerned with surveys, the statistics on men who have had a same-sex experience ending in orgasm are much higher, ranging from 28-35%.
although, as #300 points out, the peculiarities of adolescence lend themselves to more varied experimentation than is found after 30, by which time most people have a well-established sexual identity.
however, as an addition to the sociological/analytical issues above, let me say that i don't particularly care what the exact number of "homosexuals" is. it's pathetic to see the self-appointed Conservative Moral Authority and the self-appointed Gay Leaders fighting over the numbers, as if that had any relevance to the simple, humanitarian fact that we all are possessors of the same inalienable rights. the religious freedoms of relatively small groups like the followers of Nichiren Daishonin buddhism are of equal importance as the religious freedoms of large, influential, christian denominations.
Statistics are irrelevant, your rights will be protected.
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in this case, he is not being compared to JK as somehow similar in personality or worldview. Rather, he is being referred to as a "Katz character", a person who is the embodiment of several issues that JK has written about -- young, computer-superliterate (and having to walk the difficult path of knowing more than the parents, teachers, etc. to whom he is supposed to be inferior and consequently submissive), involved in an "online community", and viewed as somewhat of a dork by those in his daily environment.
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The problem is that unions are for the immediate benefit of people in their roles as Laborers -- not in their roles as Consumers, and we cannot think of them as a solution to inequality.
see some rather more interesting, entertaining and damning illustrations of technology's sociological effects by picking up Terry Pratchett's newest, The Truth.
read the review at your favorite book source, or go to barnes & noble and quicksearch "pratchett truth".
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if you keep creating more slack for john q. public he will never be provoked into defending his rights.
historically, every philosophy based on Universal Natural Rights has greatly underestimated habit and laziness as the prime motivators of human behavior.
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the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
heh, i type too slow.
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the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
because as slashdotters we're all using linux/oss anyway, right?
so it couldn't possibly matter to anyone here.
these type of stories on slashdot remind me of some group of kvetching grandmothers who wring their hands worrying that somewhere, somehow, some gullible little boy is being convinced to trade his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for leftover tuna casserole.
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the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
what a woman!
in Atlas Shrugged it only took one thousand eighteen pages for her to communicate the single sentence above.
it's too bad the utopia she pontificates about is a fictive creation that requires fanatic, fascist devotion to re-forming oneself into the image of the Perfect Man -- which turns out to be, of course, Ayn Rand herself.
we reject her and her unpracticable moralizing.
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the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties