"I would definitely refrain from calling LOTR "postmodern." "
I said that the bandwagon was postmodern, not LOTR!
"I gather that you think that venerated books should be about something "real.""
I think that really great literature should cause us to examine ourselves and our humanity yes. Animal Farm does this in its attempt to force us to examine recent history. I tend to agree about the allegory though. I think something like "Down and out in Paris and London" is far more effective. Orwell was a better journalist than novel writer to my mind.
What I am saying here is that LOTR is a great story. I've read it several times and have always enjoyed it. The strength of the book though is to me found within the book itself and not in the family trees at the back!
"Genius is indicative of vast proficiency in a particular skillset."
Its certainly true that the word genius has become misused to mean proficiency at something. However I don't feel that for instance a golfer should ever be described as a genius no matter how good he is.
"author in question is operating under vastly different motives toward a wholly other purpose."
Yes and as I say the author was trying to write a good story. That's why he wrote LOTR, and that's why he released it as a book. His creation of a world around it was for his personal enjoyment. To see the world creation venerated and the storytelling ignored, would I think have saddened Tolkein.
You are still assuming that the number of divisions is constant with time. I suspect that cells divide more frequently early in life, which means that cloned human would be expected to die earlier than their parent.
Of course this is making the assumption that telomere shortening will result in death. For which we have no evidence.
Phil
Re:Creating a World vs. Literature
on
Lord of the Geeks
·
· Score: 1
"It was creating a new world. "
Which is a pity really, and I think that Tolkein would have been saddened by this. As he said himself he did it as a hobby, and had no real expectation than anyone would be interesting.
What he wanted to do is write a good story. That is something with a plot, characterisation, a beginning, a middle and an ending, that sort of thing. Its a pity his attempts to do this have got eclipsed by his world building, because in reality LOTR actually does have a pretty good story.
"I like it when the Author makes me think about moral issues and such"
Tolkein does not though. Its totally tied up in its own world. Its does not express much of a morality, other than an Little England kind of view. And to be honest if you want to read about that you will find that Evelyn Waugh did it better, and with far more wit.
"the author says that Tolkien is premodern in his sensibility and values."
I think actually he was suggesting that the LOTR bandwagon was rather post-modern. That is its not actually about anything. Which is pretty true.
"Which is probably why Greer, et al., hate LOTR so much."
I suspect that Germaine Greer dislikes it for a number of reasons. But the fact that the book gets venerated out of all proportion would no doubt be one of them. Its a good book yes, and a good story. But there are many other books, many better than LOTR. Its sad to see a story turned into a religion.
"An article like that is just a response from someone who doesn't "get it" and feels obligated to defend himself for not being in the with-it
crowd. "
I think that he is criticising the response to LOTR's rather than the book itself, although he has muddled the two up somewhat.
Personally I think LOTR is a good book. It has a good story, and Tolkiens prose whilst highly mannered has an appealing sytlism. His writing was massively effected by his field of study. In LOTR we see Tolkeins love of Beowulf come to the fore.
The problem is that Tolkein has been taken all out of proporation. His creation of middle earth was a hobby, and not an indication of genius. Sadly many of those who came after Tolkein misunderstood this, and created worlds but forgot about the damn story.
And as for the mythology that has risen out of LOTR then yes this is really rather sad. Even more so because it means that many people are put off from reading the books for what they are. A good adventure story.
"However, it was a good company in its effects. It brought taxation and simple democracy to India. It breathed the first light of the west's wisdom on those dark and primitive lands."
You have to be kidding. The East India company impact on India has been deep, pervasive and terrible.
"And yet, when the government of the day got fed up of it, "
The problem is here that you are thinking of the East India Company as "free enterprise" with a government sitting on top of it. Government, "free trade", and the use of extreme military force went hand in hand during the time of the Raj. To separate out the three is to condemn yourself to misunderstand history, as evidenced by the first paragraph of yours that I quoted.
Its pretty much the same nowadays. Take the oil industry for instance, and then look at the invasions of Indonesia into E.Timor, or the US into Somalia. Or the diamond industry and Sierra Leone. The use of extreme military force is a common place part of the free market, now as always.
M$ will die some day. I don't see that as a cause for celebration or sadness to be honest. Its not M$ that are the problem, but rather the notion that we should run our societies as oligarchies. I could not care whether M$, or the government, or a military dictatorship that is in charge.
"I suppose that what this means is that if humans are going to be cloned, we are going to need to get back to the biological sense of meaning that (warning: this is a bit crude) as soon as you can get it up, it's time for cloning."
The notion is that if cells do not periodically go through the a meiotic or germ line division, during which time they would renew their telomeres the cells are going to croak. So even if we started young we would get into trouble, as cloned individuals would be unable to have children by the same means and would probably get old earlier.
I call this "a notion" because there is remarkably little in practice to show this is how it would be.
I can't for the life of me understanding this cloning malarky. There are some limited technological uses for it sure, but for humans? It makes no sense. The alternative is cheap, reasonably reliable, and a lot of fun. Why the hell would anyone want to go the cloning route.
Has been stirring up lots of excitement for many years, largely because it potentially impacts on aging processes and cancer formation. Anything which might have an impact on these two functions of course is er, a cash cow if you will excuse the pun. It probably makes sense to treat information produced under these circumstances with a pinch of salt.
The problem is that there are a number of good counter examples. For instance mice have telomeres some 10 times the length of humans. Do they live longer therefore than humans. Well no. Also it seems that telomerase (the enzyme which lengthens the telomeres) is active in mouse cells. In other words there telomeres do not get any shorter.
Telomere shortening is an attractive proposition of course for causing many things, but at the moment the evidence is lacking. It might be relavant. Alternatively it might have nothing to do with anything much!
"I don't think I'm alone in saying that I thought the Dirk Gently novels were the most inventive and funny writing "
The first Dirk Gently novel was indeed inventive. At least it was 15 years before when they were Dr Who stories. What I don't understand is why he choose to recycle them in an inferior form later on.
"Writers are their own worst critics...good writers esepcially. "
I think that I agree with you. Douglas Adams was a terrible critic, which was probably why he did not realise that much of his later output was pretty terrible, and to be honest shamed his earlier output.
Many of the hitchhiker books fell over on this, being a pale reflection of the radio series. And what was he playing out with Dirk Gently. Whatever convinced him that cobbling together two Dr Who stories in this way was a good idea?
Douglas Adams was not a great writer. He had a great turn of phrase, an inventive and fertile mind for looking sidewise at issues, and a brilliant flair for one liners. This did not make his a great writer however. Compare HHGTTG for instance with "Catch 22", if you want to see what a great writer can do.
"won't you buy it if it is published?"
I won't buy it no. I have bought much of Douglas Adams' output, but I stopped after Dirk Gently convinced me I was throwing my money away. I do hope however that Radio 4 repeats the HHGTTG, I would certainly look forwards to that.
"Is this me or seems like Slashdot seems to be completely dominated by leftists and liberals. When was a last time you saw any story presented from conservative point of view? "
A very large number of the stories that get posted here, and also a large number of the comments are from a fairly right wing libertarian agenda.
The thing is that slashdot has a fairly international audience and readership these days, and the plain fact is that most of the world does not accept the neo-liberal "the free market should do everything" approach that is common place in the US. What you are seeing is not the activity of the left, just some of the rest of the world.
I think you misunderstand me. I choose to work in the public sector for several reasons. If the government choose to screw around with these reasons that I leave. Many others will do likewise.
The situation is quite simple though. I realise stuff under the GPL. If people want to use the stuff in another way, then that is fine by me. But then they can contribute to the lab, and to my career by giving me money.
Besides the question of what to do with software that is already under GPL raises it head. Should I not contribute to stuff because of the license it is under, because of what others might want to do with it later.
"The reason that I personally am an academic is that I don't have to put up with very much of that sort of BS. "
Well likewise. However the amount of bullshit that has entered into the university system within the last 10 years has been extraordinary. Certainly NDA's are routine now, and we get circulars telling us not to give away reagents or software to other scientists without checking it out with the lawyers first.
"By allowing the funded developer to choose a
licensing strategy such as GPL, the government is not taking a neutral position."
Are you not allowed an opinion just because you are working for a university of other government organisation? This seems fairly strange to me.
As it happens there are very good reasons for writing software under a GPL even if you are working for the government. Universities are partly commercial organisations. If M$ or anyone else wants access to academic software then I do not see any problem with this. They can use it under the GPL if they choose. Or they can pay a license fee and contribute towards the lab and the university that produces it. This is indeed neutral. M$ get treated the same as everyone else.
Whats the problem?
The interview is interesting, because Ballmer seems to think that all GPL software is generated in the US, which is of course far from the truth. The simple fact is that a lot of GPL software is not produced in the US by US government sponsered research.
Now given the nature of the GPL people working for the US government have little choice when they work on the GPL software than to write more of it. It seems clear to me that M$ is going to push hard to prevent university staff from using or contributing to the GPL code base. I think that if they succeeded they would essentially cripple large parts of the computer using research sector in the US.
Of course in the end both US and other research sectors have benefitted from the GPL. It makes collaboration a lot easier, because the GPL is irrevocable. You know that collaborators can not later withdraw data or source code on you. In the days of NDA's this is a welcome relief.
There is also a fascinating
manifesto from one researcher explaining why he choose to release his software under GPL. Well worth reading.
Well its an interesting article, but I think that the technology in Brve new world is someway of yet. The technology for producing placenta like tissue is going to take a while.
Of course I can see lots of uses for this in agriculture. This was the interest behind all the animal cloning work, and the same would be true with this sort of "mass production" technology.
As for 16,000 Britney's all you have to do is go to a Britney gig and you will find large numbers of clones....
"If something is truely "free", then you can't steal it. "
It depends on what you mean by free of course. The word free has meant many things to many people over the centuries, including some things which to me seem to be distinctly constrained!
Every generation defines "freedom" for itself. Its one of those words which at heart is not that useful. "Modernity", "meritocratic", "freedom". The problem is that these things do not mean anything unless you say what you mean more precisely.
Now the free software foundation is quite precise about what it means when it says freedom. It even accepts the point that GPL software has limited freedom to the individual to maximise freedom for society. In other words it balances these two freedoms.
My original example of a free publication is moot. If you take 500 then the publication becomes much less free for everyone else in the world, as there arn't any left.
I think that there is little point in discussing what is more or less free than what else. So long as we each are clear what the other one means, we have understanding.
"It's not exactly fossil... it's produced by micro-organisms, in 'realtime'. "
Are you sure? It seemed to me that were suggesting mining ice which was quite deeply laid. As some of the ice fields takes 10's of 1000's of years to get from formation to the sea this would be "fossil". Or well not exactly fossil, but not exactly "real time" either.
Phil
Price is not the only restriction that can be placed on a commodity. For instance a free publication might say "only one per person". If you took 500 then this would be theft.
Perhaps you are not aware that the "free" in software is meant as in "liberty" rather than "for no cost". In many cases free software comes with restrictions designed to protect this freedom. Hence its quite possible to steal it if you deny these restrictions.
"Outcasts, as not being in the popular crowd, have a lot more time alone, and spend it learning
various things. "
I think the mistaken assumption that you make here is that learning is best undertaken as a solo process. To me this is just totally wrong. Sadly because of concerns about plagarism and "cheating" its a assumption that our education system tends to push fairly hard.
The reality is that in many many fields of study talking to people is by far the best way to learn. In some fields of study, such as music for instance, its not only the best way, its vital. A musician who can not play with other musicians is not really worth the title. Increasingly these days that same is true of computing. If people can not read, understand and modify your code its not worth much.
Personally I cant see any particular problem with this, but I think that in the interest of fairness the parents should agree to have their employers likewise report on them, and preferably have some sort of tracking device implanted.
After all if parents can find kids slopping of behind the bike sheds, the kids should be able to find their parents slopping off down the local pub for an extended liquid lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
I said that the bandwagon was postmodern, not LOTR! "I gather that you think that venerated books should be about something "real.""
I think that really great literature should cause us to examine ourselves and our humanity yes. Animal Farm does this in its attempt to force us to examine recent history. I tend to agree about the allegory though. I think something like "Down and out in Paris and London" is far more effective. Orwell was a better journalist than novel writer to my mind.
What I am saying here is that LOTR is a great story. I've read it several times and have always enjoyed it. The strength of the book though is to me found within the book itself and not in the family trees at the back!
Phil
Its certainly true that the word genius has become misused to mean proficiency at something. However I don't feel that for instance a golfer should ever be described as a genius no matter how good he is.
"author in question is operating under vastly different motives toward a wholly other purpose."
Yes and as I say the author was trying to write a good story. That's why he wrote LOTR, and that's why he released it as a book. His creation of a world around it was for his personal enjoyment. To see the world creation venerated and the storytelling ignored, would I think have saddened Tolkein.
Phil
Of course this is making the assumption that telomere shortening will result in death. For which we have no evidence.
Phil
Which is a pity really, and I think that Tolkein would have been saddened by this. As he said himself he did it as a hobby, and had no real expectation than anyone would be interesting.
What he wanted to do is write a good story. That is something with a plot, characterisation, a beginning, a middle and an ending, that sort of thing. Its a pity his attempts to do this have got eclipsed by his world building, because in reality LOTR actually does have a pretty good story.
"I like it when the Author makes me think about moral issues and such"
Tolkein does not though. Its totally tied up in its own world. Its does not express much of a morality, other than an Little England kind of view. And to be honest if you want to read about that you will find that Evelyn Waugh did it better, and with far more wit.
Phil
I think actually he was suggesting that the LOTR bandwagon was rather post-modern. That is its not actually about anything. Which is pretty true.
"Which is probably why Greer, et al., hate LOTR so much."
I suspect that Germaine Greer dislikes it for a number of reasons. But the fact that the book gets venerated out of all proportion would no doubt be one of them. Its a good book yes, and a good story. But there are many other books, many better than LOTR. Its sad to see a story turned into a religion.
Phil
I think that he is criticising the response to LOTR's rather than the book itself, although he has muddled the two up somewhat.
Personally I think LOTR is a good book. It has a good story, and Tolkiens prose whilst highly mannered has an appealing sytlism. His writing was massively effected by his field of study. In LOTR we see Tolkeins love of Beowulf come to the fore.
The problem is that Tolkein has been taken all out of proporation. His creation of middle earth was a hobby, and not an indication of genius. Sadly many of those who came after Tolkein misunderstood this, and created worlds but forgot about the damn story.
And as for the mythology that has risen out of LOTR then yes this is really rather sad. Even more so because it means that many people are put off from reading the books for what they are. A good adventure story.
Phil
The would be the same length as the parents at the time. Not the same length as the parents were when they were concieved.
"assuming they decrease at a constant length (I don't know one way or the other)"
They would be expected to decrease at a constant rate with respect to the number of cell divisions rather than time.
Phil
You have to be kidding. The East India company impact on India has been deep, pervasive and terrible.
"And yet, when the government of the day got fed up of it, "
The problem is here that you are thinking of the East India Company as "free enterprise" with a government sitting on top of it. Government, "free trade", and the use of extreme military force went hand in hand during the time of the Raj. To separate out the three is to condemn yourself to misunderstand history, as evidenced by the first paragraph of yours that I quoted.
Its pretty much the same nowadays. Take the oil industry for instance, and then look at the invasions of Indonesia into E.Timor, or the US into Somalia. Or the diamond industry and Sierra Leone. The use of extreme military force is a common place part of the free market, now as always.
M$ will die some day. I don't see that as a cause for celebration or sadness to be honest. Its not M$ that are the problem, but rather the notion that we should run our societies as oligarchies. I could not care whether M$, or the government, or a military dictatorship that is in charge.
Phil
The notion is that if cells do not periodically go through the a meiotic or germ line division, during which time they would renew their telomeres the cells are going to croak. So even if we started young we would get into trouble, as cloned individuals would be unable to have children by the same means and would probably get old earlier.
I call this "a notion" because there is remarkably little in practice to show this is how it would be.
I can't for the life of me understanding this cloning malarky. There are some limited technological uses for it sure, but for humans? It makes no sense. The alternative is cheap, reasonably reliable, and a lot of fun. Why the hell would anyone want to go the cloning route.
Phil
The problem is that there are a number of good counter examples. For instance mice have telomeres some 10 times the length of humans. Do they live longer therefore than humans. Well no. Also it seems that telomerase (the enzyme which lengthens the telomeres) is active in mouse cells. In other words there telomeres do not get any shorter.
Telomere shortening is an attractive proposition of course for causing many things, but at the moment the evidence is lacking. It might be relavant. Alternatively it might have nothing to do with anything much!
Phil
The first Dirk Gently novel was indeed inventive. At least it was 15 years before when they were Dr Who stories. What I don't understand is why he choose to recycle them in an inferior form later on.
Phi
I think that I agree with you. Douglas Adams was a terrible critic, which was probably why he did not realise that much of his later output was pretty terrible, and to be honest shamed his earlier output.
Many of the hitchhiker books fell over on this, being a pale reflection of the radio series. And what was he playing out with Dirk Gently. Whatever convinced him that cobbling together two Dr Who stories in this way was a good idea?
Douglas Adams was not a great writer. He had a great turn of phrase, an inventive and fertile mind for looking sidewise at issues, and a brilliant flair for one liners. This did not make his a great writer however. Compare HHGTTG for instance with "Catch 22", if you want to see what a great writer can do.
"won't you buy it if it is published?"
I won't buy it no. I have bought much of Douglas Adams' output, but I stopped after Dirk Gently convinced me I was throwing my money away. I do hope however that Radio 4 repeats the HHGTTG, I would certainly look forwards to that.
Phil
A very large number of the stories that get posted here, and also a large number of the comments are from a fairly right wing libertarian agenda.
The thing is that slashdot has a fairly international audience and readership these days, and the plain fact is that most of the world does not accept the neo-liberal "the free market should do everything" approach that is common place in the US. What you are seeing is not the activity of the left, just some of the rest of the world.
Phil
The situation is quite simple though. I realise stuff under the GPL. If people want to use the stuff in another way, then that is fine by me. But then they can contribute to the lab, and to my career by giving me money.
Besides the question of what to do with software that is already under GPL raises it head. Should I not contribute to stuff because of the license it is under, because of what others might want to do with it later.
Phil
Well likewise. However the amount of bullshit that has entered into the university system within the last 10 years has been extraordinary. Certainly NDA's are routine now, and we get circulars telling us not to give away reagents or software to other scientists without checking it out with the lawyers first.
Yeah right, like I'm going to tell them.
Phil
Are you not allowed an opinion just because you are working for a university of other government organisation? This seems fairly strange to me.
As it happens there are very good reasons for writing software under a GPL even if you are working for the government. Universities are partly commercial organisations. If M$ or anyone else wants access to academic software then I do not see any problem with this. They can use it under the GPL if they choose. Or they can pay a license fee and contribute towards the lab and the university that produces it. This is indeed neutral. M$ get treated the same as everyone else. Whats the problem?
Phil
Now given the nature of the GPL people working for the US government have little choice when they work on the GPL software than to write more of it. It seems clear to me that M$ is going to push hard to prevent university staff from using or contributing to the GPL code base. I think that if they succeeded they would essentially cripple large parts of the computer using research sector in the US.
Of course in the end both US and other research sectors have benefitted from the GPL. It makes collaboration a lot easier, because the GPL is irrevocable. You know that collaborators can not later withdraw data or source code on you. In the days of NDA's this is a welcome relief.
There is also a fascinating manifesto from one researcher explaining why he choose to release his software under GPL. Well worth reading.
Phil
Of course I can see lots of uses for this in agriculture. This was the interest behind all the animal cloning work, and the same would be true with this sort of "mass production" technology.
As for 16,000 Britney's all you have to do is go to a Britney gig and you will find large numbers of clones....
It depends on what you mean by free of course. The word free has meant many things to many people over the centuries, including some things which to me seem to be distinctly constrained!
Every generation defines "freedom" for itself. Its one of those words which at heart is not that useful. "Modernity", "meritocratic", "freedom". The problem is that these things do not mean anything unless you say what you mean more precisely.
Now the free software foundation is quite precise about what it means when it says freedom. It even accepts the point that GPL software has limited freedom to the individual to maximise freedom for society. In other words it balances these two freedoms.
My original example of a free publication is moot. If you take 500 then the publication becomes much less free for everyone else in the world, as there arn't any left.
I think that there is little point in discussing what is more or less free than what else. So long as we each are clear what the other one means, we have understanding.
Phil
Are you sure? It seemed to me that were suggesting mining ice which was quite deeply laid. As some of the ice fields takes 10's of 1000's of years to get from formation to the sea this would be "fossil". Or well not exactly fossil, but not exactly "real time" either. Phil
Price is not the only restriction that can be placed on a commodity. For instance a free publication might say "only one per person". If you took 500 then this would be theft.
Perhaps you are not aware that the "free" in software is meant as in "liberty" rather than "for no cost". In many cases free software comes with restrictions designed to protect this freedom. Hence its quite possible to steal it if you deny these restrictions.
Phil
Fabulous. Just what the world needs. Another source of carbon based fossil fuels. Phil
I think the mistaken assumption that you make here is that learning is best undertaken as a solo process. To me this is just totally wrong. Sadly because of concerns about plagarism and "cheating" its a assumption that our education system tends to push fairly hard.
The reality is that in many many fields of study talking to people is by far the best way to learn. In some fields of study, such as music for instance, its not only the best way, its vital. A musician who can not play with other musicians is not really worth the title. Increasingly these days that same is true of computing. If people can not read, understand and modify your code its not worth much.
Phil
Are you are aware of the concept of a joke? Phil
After all if parents can find kids slopping of behind the bike sheds, the kids should be able to find their parents slopping off down the local pub for an extended liquid lunch.
Phil