Can we PLEASE stop using analogies? They don't work unless you are either, really proficient in English studies. Includes near perfect score on verbal SAT's or studying it in school as a profession or teaching it.
Hey, that's me! I'm approved for analogy usage on Slashdot. I'm as happy as a cat on a sunny windowsill!
All joking aside, I agree that these sorts of discussions are often tediously derailed by the introduction of an inept analogy. However, the problem isn't that the analogies are written poorly, but that they're deployed incorrectly.
Example. Someone says "Sniffing passwords is a criminal activity." I reply "No it isn't - you didn't encrypt your communication. It's illegal for me to steam open your bank statement, but it's not illegal for me to read a postcard I find lying face-up on the sidewalk." My analogy may be apt, but instead of clarifying the discussion, all I've done is sidetrack it. Next thing you know, we're arguing about whether a password is more like a postcard or more like a set of car keys, and who the fuck really cares?
Instead of dragging imaginary postcards into the debate, I should take a minute to think about what I'm really trying to say. "Self," I ask myself, "if I feel that sniffing someone's unencrypted password is equivalent to reading a postcard lying face-up on the sidewalk, what exactly is the similarity I am attempting to describe?"
After due pondering, I realize that the point I'm (hypothetically) trying to make, and I instead say "Sniffing an unencrypted password is not an act of intrusion." Our discussion can then continue from that point; if it isn't an intrusion, then what exacly is it? And should it be illegal, or simply frowned-upon in polite society? And then you can point out that in Soviet Union, unencrypted password sniffs YOU, and balance will have been restored to the universe, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Uh..what's the alternative? How would you go about stopping people from writing software which could produce legal problems for the authors or companies selling/releasing the software? What's the point of this article?
It's because he's a boy. Boys just don't understand technology.
But how much technology does a girl need to understand? All we really need is a good, sharp knife. (Or, worst-case scenario, a carefully-wielded student ID card.)
Haha! I did that. Twice. First was a year-long stint in Portland, OR for a company that did political stumping thinly disguised as a survey. (My favorite question, still etched in my mind ten years later: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote in favor of triple trailer trucks if you knew they were three times more likely to roll over and separate?" Three times more likely than WHAT, I always wondered.)
Second was a two-week stint setting appointments for a vacuum cleaner salesman to come over to your house and throw stuff on your carpet, then vacuum it up while gesticulating wildly and loudly declaiming the many virtues of THIS vacuum over the OTHER vacuum you already own.
I sat down in a folding metal chair, my supervisor dropped a copy of the phone book on the card table in front of me, handed me a script, and told me to get to it. I was pretty much the worst appointment-setter EVER. After two weeks I picked up my check and walked out, never to be seen again.
I'm not proud of having been one of those people who pestered people at dinner. But then again, "being one of those people who pestered you at dinner" ranks pretty low on my list of things to be ashamed of.
My friends and I happened to be vacationing in Orlando over the week of the shuttle launch. Being the excitable nerds that we are, we researched the launch times and locations exhaustively, then threw it all out the window, jumped in the car, and drove east towards the coast.
Just before we hit Cocoa Beach, we drove over a causeway which afforded a clear view north and south. Dozens of cars were parked on the shoulder, their drivers milling about with cameras and binoculars. "Must be the place," we figured.
We sat on the rocks at the edge of the water, chatting and goofing off until launch time. Someone behind us was listening to a radio broadcast, and called out the countdown aloud. I was surprised at how excited I was. You see these things every day on TV, but it really is different being there in person.
A bright spark - brighter than I would have thought possible - pushed off from the horizon and rose into the sky, tailed by a billowing contrail. Eight minutes it took for the spark to travel from the launchpad out into space. I'll never forget it.
4MB RAM? I'm jealous! Mine only has 1MB, and (I think) a 5MB internal hard drive. Which worked pretty well, up until I loaned my poor toaster to my friend's roommate for a weekend so that he could type up his thesis paper. As "thanks," said friend's roommate upgraded the OS to System 7.
Much as I appreciated the gesture, System 7 took up pretty much every resource the poor little toaster had at its disposal, rendering it fit for little more than... well, Tetris. I could have reinstalled the old OS from the foot-high stack of original floppy disks, but by that point the SE was already pretty out-of-date, so I decided to let it slip gracefully into irrelevance. (Also, I was too lazy.)
Selling my Kaypro II before I moved to the Lower 48 for college is one of the greatest regrets of my life. *sigh*
At least it went to a good home - I sold it to a bright-eyed fellow who was shipping out to be a school teacher in the Alaska bush country. I hope the poor thing didn't end up being eaten by a grizzly bear. (The school teacher, I mean! Um... yeah!)
Don't look at me, man - this geek girl would rather die than get rid of her beloved Mac SE. Every once in a while I dig it out, boot it up, and play a few rounds of monochromatic Tetris for old time's sake.
People occasionally try to convince me that I should convert it to a Macquarium, but I point at them and hiss "Convert a working Mac to a Macquarium? Sacrelige!"
(Don't even get me started on my late, lamented Kaypro 2! I beat Zork on that baby. Oh, the times we had!)
The Blade Runner origami is pretty standard stuff (i.e. not custom-designed just for the movie). Here's instructions on folding a unicorn, for starters.
Presumably a plastic book would be coffee-proof, mud-puddle-proof, and spaghetti-sauce-proof, as well. If you can't see the use of a book like this, then you're obviously not as clumsy as I am.
I'll admit right up front that bad movies are my business. It's what I DO. I've seen all four Universal Soldier movies. I've seen all SIX Scanners movies (including the Scanner Cop spinoffs).
I've seen more bad movies than most people have seen good movies, and I love each and every one of them. (It took years for me to be able to admit that in public, but I came "out of the closet" about my love for bad movies about three years ago, and never looked back.)
So what's a nice thing I can say about Battlefield Earth? I assume we're looking for a TRUE nice thing, not a fake-nice thing like "It gave me faith in the U.S. military, because it portrays their equipment as fully functional after a thousand years of neglect." I could even point out something neutral like "It perpetuates the strangely common dietary prognostication that in the future, we will eat goop."
There's plenty of things I could say about Battlefield Earth, all of them equally funny, but I don't think any of them would win me that prized O'Reilly book.
So here's one truly nice thing I can say about Battlefield Earth:
In a system geared towards methodically creating blockbuster action movies that are effectively indistinguishable, Battlefield Earth stands out from the crowd.
Here's a little quiz to prove my point: list five distinguishing features for each of the last four James Bond movies, in reverse order. You have thirty seconds. Go.
See what I mean? Most people can't even remember the NAMES of the last four James Bond movies, much less tell them apart. And yet, the James Bond movies are unspeakably successful. Hollywood (and the American movie-going public) rewards consistency, not novelty.
To its credit, Battlefield Earth is thoroughly a product of the conformist micro-society responsible for churning out James Bond movie after James Bond movie... and yet, Battlefield Earth stands out from the crowd. (Boy, DOES it!)
In Hollywood, "different" is a commodity made priceless by its rarity. People will be talking about Battlefield Earth for years to come, because it's _different_. And even if a movie is different-in-a-bad-way, I humbly submit to you that this is a thousand times more valuable than a movie that's same-as-everything-else.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we PLEASE stop using analogies? They don't work unless you are either, really proficient in English studies. Includes near perfect score on verbal SAT's or studying it in school as a profession or teaching it.
Hey, that's me! I'm approved for analogy usage on Slashdot. I'm as happy as a cat on a sunny windowsill!
All joking aside, I agree that these sorts of discussions are often tediously derailed by the introduction of an inept analogy. However, the problem isn't that the analogies are written poorly, but that they're deployed incorrectly.
Example. Someone says "Sniffing passwords is a criminal activity." I reply "No it isn't - you didn't encrypt your communication. It's illegal for me to steam open your bank statement, but it's not illegal for me to read a postcard I find lying face-up on the sidewalk." My analogy may be apt, but instead of clarifying the discussion, all I've done is sidetrack it. Next thing you know, we're arguing about whether a password is more like a postcard or more like a set of car keys, and who the fuck really cares?
Instead of dragging imaginary postcards into the debate, I should take a minute to think about what I'm really trying to say. "Self," I ask myself, "if I feel that sniffing someone's unencrypted password is equivalent to reading a postcard lying face-up on the sidewalk, what exactly is the similarity I am attempting to describe?"
After due pondering, I realize that the point I'm (hypothetically) trying to make, and I instead say "Sniffing an unencrypted password is not an act of intrusion." Our discussion can then continue from that point; if it isn't an intrusion, then what exacly is it? And should it be illegal, or simply frowned-upon in polite society? And then you can point out that in Soviet Union, unencrypted password sniffs YOU, and balance will have been restored to the universe, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Uh..what's the alternative? How would you go about stopping people from writing software which could produce legal problems for the authors or companies selling/releasing the software? What's the point of this article?
It's because he's a boy. Boys just don't understand technology.
But how much technology does a girl need to understand? All we really need is a good, sharp knife. (Or, worst-case scenario, a carefully-wielded student ID card.)
Haha! I did that. Twice. First was a year-long stint in Portland, OR for a company that did political stumping thinly disguised as a survey. (My favorite question, still etched in my mind ten years later: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote in favor of triple trailer trucks if you knew they were three times more likely to roll over and separate?" Three times more likely than WHAT, I always wondered.)
Second was a two-week stint setting appointments for a vacuum cleaner salesman to come over to your house and throw stuff on your carpet, then vacuum it up while gesticulating wildly and loudly declaiming the many virtues of THIS vacuum over the OTHER vacuum you already own.
I sat down in a folding metal chair, my supervisor dropped a copy of the phone book on the card table in front of me, handed me a script, and told me to get to it. I was pretty much the worst appointment-setter EVER. After two weeks I picked up my check and walked out, never to be seen again.
I'm not proud of having been one of those people who pestered people at dinner. But then again, "being one of those people who pestered you at dinner" ranks pretty low on my list of things to be ashamed of.
And as we all know, senior citizens ARE the population segment which is most likely to be reassured by the presence of a robot!
My friends and I happened to be vacationing in Orlando over the week of the shuttle launch. Being the excitable nerds that we are, we researched the launch times and locations exhaustively, then threw it all out the window, jumped in the car, and drove east towards the coast.
Just before we hit Cocoa Beach, we drove over a causeway which afforded a clear view north and south. Dozens of cars were parked on the shoulder, their drivers milling about with cameras and binoculars. "Must be the place," we figured.
We sat on the rocks at the edge of the water, chatting and goofing off until launch time. Someone behind us was listening to a radio broadcast, and called out the countdown aloud. I was surprised at how excited I was. You see these things every day on TV, but it really is different being there in person.
A bright spark - brighter than I would have thought possible - pushed off from the horizon and rose into the sky, tailed by a billowing contrail. Eight minutes it took for the spark to travel from the launchpad out into space. I'll never forget it.
4MB RAM? I'm jealous! Mine only has 1MB, and (I think) a 5MB internal hard drive. Which worked pretty well, up until I loaned my poor toaster to my friend's roommate for a weekend so that he could type up his thesis paper. As "thanks," said friend's roommate upgraded the OS to System 7.
Much as I appreciated the gesture, System 7 took up pretty much every resource the poor little toaster had at its disposal, rendering it fit for little more than... well, Tetris. I could have reinstalled the old OS from the foot-high stack of original floppy disks, but by that point the SE was already pretty out-of-date, so I decided to let it slip gracefully into irrelevance. (Also, I was too lazy.)
Ladder! That was a great game!
Selling my Kaypro II before I moved to the Lower 48 for college is one of the greatest regrets of my life. *sigh*
At least it went to a good home - I sold it to a bright-eyed fellow who was shipping out to be a school teacher in the Alaska bush country. I hope the poor thing didn't end up being eaten by a grizzly bear. (The school teacher, I mean! Um... yeah!)
Don't look at me, man - this geek girl would rather die than get rid of her beloved Mac SE. Every once in a while I dig it out, boot it up, and play a few rounds of monochromatic Tetris for old time's sake.
People occasionally try to convince me that I should convert it to a Macquarium, but I point at them and hiss "Convert a working Mac to a Macquarium? Sacrelige!"
(Don't even get me started on my late, lamented Kaypro 2! I beat Zork on that baby. Oh, the times we had!)
Truthfully, though, I have nothing but respect for anyone who's willing to go on record as predicting that one day, giant squid will roam the forests.
(Fortunately it sounds like we have plenty of time to stockpile garlic and olive oil.)
I do think he got carried away with the carnivorous monkeys and all that, but it was still an interesting exploration.
*knock knock*
"Land squid."
The Blade Runner origami is pretty standard stuff (i.e. not custom-designed just for the movie). Here's instructions on folding a unicorn, for starters.
Does Tolkein's adaptation star Christopher Lambert? Is it set to techno music? I think not!
They've already released the perfect translation. Anything else is simply redundant.
Presumably a plastic book would be coffee-proof, mud-puddle-proof, and spaghetti-sauce-proof, as well. If you can't see the use of a book like this, then you're obviously not as clumsy as I am.
I'll admit right up front that bad movies are my business. It's what I DO. I've seen all four Universal Soldier movies. I've seen all SIX Scanners movies (including the Scanner Cop spinoffs).
I've seen more bad movies than most people have seen good movies, and I love each and every one of them. (It took years for me to be able to admit that in public, but I came "out of the closet" about my love for bad movies about three years ago, and never looked back.)
So what's a nice thing I can say about Battlefield Earth? I assume we're looking for a TRUE nice thing, not a fake-nice thing like "It gave me faith in the U.S. military, because it portrays their equipment as fully functional after a thousand years of neglect." I could even point out something neutral like "It perpetuates the strangely common dietary prognostication that in the future, we will eat goop."
There's plenty of things I could say about Battlefield Earth, all of them equally funny, but I don't think any of them would win me that prized O'Reilly book.
So here's one truly nice thing I can say about Battlefield Earth:
In a system geared towards methodically creating blockbuster action movies that are effectively indistinguishable, Battlefield Earth stands out from the crowd.
Here's a little quiz to prove my point: list five distinguishing features for each of the last four James Bond movies, in reverse order. You have thirty seconds. Go.
See what I mean? Most people can't even remember the NAMES of the last four James Bond movies, much less tell them apart. And yet, the James Bond movies are unspeakably successful. Hollywood (and the American movie-going public) rewards consistency, not novelty.
To its credit, Battlefield Earth is thoroughly a product of the conformist micro-society responsible for churning out James Bond movie after James Bond movie... and yet, Battlefield Earth stands out from the crowd. (Boy, DOES it!)
In Hollywood, "different" is a commodity made priceless by its rarity. People will be talking about Battlefield Earth for years to come, because it's _different_. And even if a movie is different-in-a-bad-way, I humbly submit to you that this is a thousand times more valuable than a movie that's same-as-everything-else.
Thank you, dear readers, and good night.
(Did I win?)