The problem here is that unless we adapt to the idea that we cannot continue along the "rape and pillage" model of colonization, all moving onto other planets is going to do is foul up another globe.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for the terraforming and eventual colonization of Mars. If it can be done, the possibilities are neat. But not limitless. It gives us a reprieve from digging ourselves into the ground via unsound and ultimately self-destructive environmental practices, but only a limited one. Quite frankly, I think emphasis needs to be placed on cleaning up our act on this planet before spreading to others. Humanity doesn't need to be a virus, but its kind of difficult to see it as anything else in its current conception.
Also, suggesting that expansion off-planet is neccessary for the survival of the species is utter nonsense. Quite frankly, it reeks of human arrogance and a blind refusal to play by the rather generous rules that nature gives us. Extraterrestrial colonization is still a dream of sci-fi writers: even liberal estimates give thousands of years before Mars will have accumulated enough of an atmosphere to support human life. So let's try and get our act together on this planet first. Anything else is just a placebo.
Not morally, no, but the KDE needed to clarify their position. They did the right thing by refusing to be dragged any further into this tiff. I don't really think Stallman was unjustified, but I also think that it would only hurt KDE's public standing if they silently submitted to criticism, justified or not. They've don't as best as could be expected, working to eliminate the licensing and legal issues that have plagued their work, even admitting to previous mistakes. But they do deserve their own word in edgewise, as much as Stallman deserves his reticience.
It looks like the potentially disastrous legal situation has cooled. KDE and Gnome may still not be the best of friends, but at least it looks like we may be to a point where healthy competition, and not vitriolic rivalry, is possible.
Okay, there was a minor fault in my argument. I was operating under a "Locke-ian" assumption of freedom that is limited such that one person's pursuit thereof may not hinder any other person's freedom (and vice versa).
This is true, but it doesn't contradict my point either. Locke's conception of the social contract was as a limitation of freedom. Any realistic understanding of "freedom" will recognize that there are certain freedoms we forfeit for the greater good of society and for the benefits (namely stability) that society offers. We don't have complete freedom, we never really have, and we're probably better off for it. The trick has always been to walk the line between reasonable limits on freedom for the good of everyone involved in a social system, and over-regulation of individual rights. Going too far over in either direction creates often-serious problems.
As for the United States' government and economy being the oldest and most stable, it's not, really, though its certainly up there. Britain has been up there relatively unchanged for almost as long, if not longer, depending on what you consider a massive change, and the U.S. has gone through some significant changes as well, switching from a confederational system up until the time of the Civil War to a more strongly federalist system thereafter.
But there is always a better model out there. To suggest otherwise is to imply that this is as good as it gets, and, frankly, I'm not prepared to accept that. Even if I differ with traditional Marxism on a number of issues, I do strongly believe in the principle of the social dialectic. Culture and society changes, and there is no system that can adequately encompass all of the different forms a culture can take. Social and economic systems must evolve. A massive change certainly could be fatal, but so could continuing along our current path indefinitely. America's present capitalist system would not have worked in the days of Ancient Greece because supply and communication lines weren't strong enough. And I'm personally convinced that we are approaching, if not already past, a point where Smithian capitalism will not operate for precisely the opposite reason: we have evolved, socially speaking, to a point where things are so interconnected that the competition model doesn't pan out the way it is supposed to. To make an appropriately Slashdot-esque comparision, its like expecting hardware manufactured in 1981 for the Apple II to run Quake III Arena.
The same, of course, applies to Marxist socialism. It was concieved as a response to a very different society in the grasp of a very different form of capitalism over a century ago. Any by-the-book implementation of Marxism would fail for the same reasons that capitalism is failing. But just as we have modelled, but not stayed 100% pure to, Adam Smith's version of capitalism, there are definite possibilites to do the same with socialism, a system which (purely IMO) is not so inherently tied to social structures which are dying in our modern society.
As for incentive for competition, I don't believe competition is going to be as vital in the future as it has been in the past. While there always will be advancements to make and new things to accomplish, the point of a capitalist system is to provide a period of massive social, industrial, and economic growth. When that growth starts to level off, as Marx predicted it would, albeit over a century too early, capitalism becomes a burden, not a blessing. Without enforced competition, there will be a much slower rate of growth, but I think its a laissez-faire fallacy to assume that growth will stop entirely. A number of great achievements have been made by individuals who have completely shunned traditional capitalist incentives. Heck, a number of open-source software designers buck this traditional capitalist tenet.
Oh, of course. I don't think its very far out of the realm of possibility that they will start developing for Nintendo again. But they've already committed themselves to developing on the PS2, again, having announced two Final Fantasy games for the system. And, given Square's history, it seems likely that any work on the GameCube would be original work, and not ports of their games for the PS2.
Square has announced some interest in the GameCube (an incredibly stupid name, IMO, but then, so was Nintendo 64....), but its important to point out that they've already announced a large number of games for the PS2, including two installments of their flagship series, Final Fantasy (IX and X). They don't really have a solid history of porting games (and the results have been varied when they do), so this may not be a massive contender in the Cube's success or failure.
And Sony also has something of a reputation of being better to their developers than Nintendo, which cost the latter company a lot during the switch from SNES to N64 (including Square and, to a large if not exclusive degree, Enix, Konami, and Capcom). And, lest we forget, Microsoft has a lot of problems of its own to deal with that may affect them giving the XBox full attention, and, more importantly, may scare away developers.
Also, remember that what some may see as taking the best of PCs and bringing it to consoles can also be seen as taking the worst of PCs and forcing it upon consoles. Most people here on Slashdot have some bias towards PCs over console systems, and so we see some of the things associated with the XBox (upgradable, more open, more "tweakable") as a benefit. Casual gamers will not. Period. Its the same reason Linux hasn't caught on with everyone: most people want a system they can throw a game in and play. The future of the XBox seems like it may force these types of gamers to pay close attention to system specs and potential future upgrades. We may love this. But its a niche market, and probably not what Microsoft is looking for. Nintendo, Sony, and Sega all have the upper hand in this regard.
Not that Sony will succeed or Mictosoft will fail, but its still all worth keeping in mind...
Yeah. By most accounts it was when Best Brains started scripting out ahead, at the beginning of the Comedy Central run, that Josh Weinstein (Dr. Larry Erdhardt, and the first voice of Tom Servo) was forced out. He was easily the best improv artist of the crew, and shone in the KTMA season, but when the show moved to Comedy Central, he was sort of left without a niche.
A valid point, though one I tried to avoid making because its really rather circular. Everything is a social freedom, if you look at it from the right angle. Murder is a social freedom, as is rape, looting, theft, and lots of other unpleasant bits of nastiness. The very basis of a social contract is to limit social freedom so that society can continue to operate justly. This is the basis of the rather cliched adage "my right to wave my fist around ends at the bridge of your nose."
In the sense I was using it, I was employing "social freedom" to denote something more along the lines of what we consider basic human rights: the freedom to live without fear of being unfairly prosecuted for speaking one's mind, to enjoy a reasonably private personal sphere, etc. "Economic freedoms" was used primarily to denote activites related to the free market: the right to buy and sell commodities, and so on. While you rightly point out that the two are related, there is a bit of difference.
Frankly, you don't have complete economic freedom, even in a laissez-faire capitalist system. There may be no overreaching governmental infrastructure to decree what you can and cannot do, but you are held as slave to the market. To succeed, you can't really go against demand (at least, you shouldn't be able to for very long). And this amounts to what Sony and all the other RIAA-affiliated companies are trying to do. Rather than evolve their business model to keep up with emerging trends, they attempt to trample these trends so they can continue under business-as-usual conditions.
In a healthy capitalist system this doesn't work . Competition forces business to constantly attempt to one-up their competitors, and unless you've got collusion in effect, someone's going to hit upon a model that will utilize new trends and be a hit with consumers. But America has really never been a healthy capitalist system. The RIAA may not be a monopoly in the traditional definition of the term, but it certainly showcases all of the negative effects of a monopoly as outlined in traditional capitalist theory. It wields enough power and clout over both its moneymakers (the musicians) and its consumers to engage in an attempt to commandeer the market. This, to put it simply, just ain't healthy.
I'm not a capitalist, really, and I have some real problems even with the ideal model, but, hey, I much rather have to contend with an system that was at least striving for the ideal of a flawed system than a system which had both those inherent flaws, and some of its own devising.
Wouldn't 1984 be subject to British copyright law? I mean, I don't have the book at hand, but I do know that Orwell was British, and that much of the novel was a comment on the current British social/political scene.
Then again, I'm murky on U.S. copyright law, and even murkier on U.K. copyright law, so what do I know?
This is all true, and piracy is a crime anyway you look at it. But the issue is then what we value more: economic freedom or social freedom. Sony's stated methods of eliminating Napster-spawned piracy may preserve the former (depening on how you look at it), but certainly trample the latter. Objectivists aside, I tend to favor the latter over the former. And the effects can be used for any number of things other than just stamping out piracy. If a precedent is set here, there's nothing stopping the same technology from being used to stamp out "indecent" speech, or any of the same nonsense we've had to put up with as information technology has grown.
People don't really remember this, but the same problem has been faced with the introduction of any new technology: radio, television, audio and video cassettes, etc. None of these have spelled doom for the capitalist system we hold so dear: indeed, their introduction has expanded the marketplace by opening up markets that weren't there before.
Again, let's not excuse piracy: Napster does aid and abet in pirating music. Anyone who still denies this is fooling him/herself. But then, VCRs aid in pirating films, and cassette stereos aided in pirating music well before Napster and Gnutella came along. The question is can people like Sony and the RIAA be allowed to trample new technology, and even individual rights, to protect their model of business? Of course not! This decidedly uncapitalistic, and might even be considered monopolistic, if successful. In a free market system, companies have to adapt to changing systems; if they start to force the systems to conform to their preferred model of doing business, something's gone horribly wrong.
So what is the solution? I can see several; all of them represent a fundamental change in the market, but all of them preserve the roles of groups like the RIAA. Cheaply available equivalents to pirated MP3s could head off a large portion of the drain, when and if it ever gets to be a major drain (Napster has caused little effect on sales thusfar). Tacking on an additional fee to the hardware might work, as well, as was done with audio cassettes. If Sony has the engineering capability to design software which will firewall a user's PC without their consent, surely they can devise somewhat to make an effective business model out of emerging technology, without trampling either the users or technology itself.
The thing here is that Nullsoft released Gnutella under their name. And AOL is held legally responsible for what its subsidaries do.
Even so, this probably won't damage AOL much. They handled the situation relatively quickly, and have had nothing to do with Gnutella since the first posting. But what mp3board may be hoping for is the action to confuse the RIAA (of which AOL-Time Warner is a member) enough to stall things, and perhaps damage their continuing attempts to cast themselves as morally superior. It seems to me to be primarily a stall tactic.
I think something similar was done with the episode "Eegah!" which was recently released on DVD. Using the wonders of modern technology, you can now have the joy of watching not only the MST version, but the original, uncut, unriffed film. Although why you would want to is completely beyond me.
This could be due to any number of factors, but probably not wholly to Mike Nelson's input. He'd been the head writer since the second Comedy Central season, meaning most of Joel's material had been written by Mike for four-odd seasons.
A number of other contributors left the show shortly after Joel's departure. Frank Conniff (TV's Frank) left at the end of season 6, and Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Forrester and the original voice of Crow) left in the gap between the last Comedy Central season (season 7) and the first Sci-Fi Channel season (season 8). I didn't really notice much of a difference, and tended to enjoy the later episodes just as much as the earlier ones (in many cases more so), but a lot of people do complain.
As for Nelson's acting skills, I've always considered him better for the show than Hodgson, as much as I admire Joel. Particularly as the show dragged on, Hodgson tended to have a vaguely condescending air, and in many cases it seemed he treated the show like a bit too much of a bore. Mike brought a fresher taste to the show. I tend to think that a lot of the complaints he recieves have more to do with the changed dynamic of the cast (as was previously mentioned, Mike had more of a "best-friend" relationship with the bots, whereas Joel's relationship was more fatherly), and an inability to adapt to it, than any real lack of skill on Nelson's part.
In any case, his acting skills probably wouldn't affect a written book, anyway. So it's a bit of a moot point.
They never obtained the legal rights to any of the pre-Comedy Central episodes, so they're legally forbidden from ever rerunning them, even assuming they wanted to. Its the same licensing issue they had to contend with towards the end of the Comedy Central run, and with at least one episode during the Sci-Fi Channel era.
On the other hand, its not likely they'll ever really desire to rebroadcast them, anyway. They've indicated a degree of public embarrassment over their earliest work (including the KTMA-broadcast episodes and the first Comedy Central season) and have tended to release them only kicking and screaming (only two or three season one CC episodes have been publicly released, either on video or over the air, since 1994).
Anime has nothing to do with any of that. It's art. Sure, I could uncheck the box in my preferences saying that I don't want to see stories about anime, but you know what? I haven't felt the need to do that for any OTHER topic so far. Not every story posted interests me, but at least they all seem to belong. This just seems like a fringe interest of Rob's or something.
Wait a second... you think anime-related stories don't belong here because you don't want to go uncheck something from your preferences? Isn't that a just a tad self-centered? And, to be fair, Lain belongs here just as much, if not more, than Star Wars news, which seldom seems to get the vitrolic most anime-related items recieve. Lain has heavy ties with the computer industry, ranging from in-jokes (references to BeOS and NeXT) to philosophy about modern tech. The creator designed the series as a critique of what he sees as a predominantly American and often dehumanizing aesthetic. Even if anime news doesn't belong here (and I would contend it belongs here as much as any other topic), Lain deserves some mention.
While I'm not going to argue about Buffy (it's easily my favorite American TV show), I think the points you bring up about anime easily apply to a large number of American programs as well. Speaking as someone who has seen a good number of mould-breaking programs get either killed outright or "retooled" to death by industry-types who insist that anything too atypical will fail, this seems to be more of a universal failing.
South Park, for me, is ruined by the almost self-gratifying humor Messrs. Stone and Parker indulge in, saved only by the fact that when it succeeds, it does so spectacularly. Even Buffy sometimes suffers from being a tad overwritten, surviving largely intact probably because it is aired on a second-tier network.
But the point is I don't think you can single out anime for a penchant for cheap physical humor, or a "Gleek the Space Monkey" type of "selling out." For something to succeed in the long-term, it needs either a rabid cult following, or at least some mainstream support, and the latter is rather easier to attract, sadly.
Depends on your tastes, really. I mean, anime isn't so much a genre as a style, so its difficult to predict what everyone will enjoy. With that in mind, here's a list of what I consider the creme de la creme of what anime has to offer:
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Part Hitchcock, part Twin Peaks, part Kubrick, all wrapped up in a rather deceptive tale of giant bio-robots and the end of the world. Lots of Judeo-Christian imagery, and the character interplay is fascinating. The major problem with the series might be that it tries for a little too much, and, as a result, gets a little cramped, particularly towards the end. But brilliant anyway. Also recommended is the movie Wings of Honneamise, by the same director (Anno Hideaki), which, while different in tone, is equally beautiful.
Serial Experiments Lain: The ultimate nerd anime; a thinly veiled allegory about modern life and the Internet. Great opening theme, too. Its difficult to sum into words without giving too much away, but its well worth a watch.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Although only the first quarter of the series has been released in America, and the series doesn't start getting really good until about halfway through, this one takes the bill for style alone. By the creator of Sailor Moon, although that says very little about what is essentially a psychological drama with some very disturbing undertones (and some excellent music::grin::)
Saber Marionette J: What starts off as a seemingly straightfoward sci-fi adventure, about a world populated by refugees from a crashed space flight, maintained solely through cloning, since there are no women, evolves into both a touching and exciting drama which seems to owe a lot to 2001: A Space Oddesey.
Cowboy Bebop: Part of a recent trend of "outer space westerns," Cowboy Bebop is one of the best. The story of two bounty hunters, Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, and a opportunistic woman named Faye Valentine. Half humor and half action, its a great watch.
Trigun: Another excellent entry into the aforementioned western genre, this one is the story of the legendary "Humanoid Typhoon," Vash the Stampede. But when two insurance surveyors set out after the fiend, they find that reality seldom lives up to legend, and that Vash may not be so much a villain as a klutz....
The Slayers: A humorous fantasy adventures starring ace sorceress Lina Inverse in her attempts to find fame, fortune, and a bite to eat. Fast, furious, and hilarious.
Perfect Blue: Described by legendary B-movie veteran Roger Corman as what would happen if Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney had teamed up, this movie descibes the descent into madness of a Japanese pop vocalist in sometimes grusome detail.
Just a sampling of what I like: there are other good series and movies out there and the best thing to do is to look into them, as everyone's tastes can, and do, vary.
I don't really believe extraterrestrial colonies are a solution. At best, they're just interim fixes. If population continues to grow, we'll just be facing the same problem on down the line, only not just on Earth. Not that I'm against the idea, I just think it may not be the answer to our core problems.
Traditional Marxism takes this into account, and most of the 20th century forms of communism have completely forgot it. Capitalism provides for technological growth, since even Marx recognized that socialist systems provided a lower impetus for technological advancement.
The problem seems to be that Marx misconsidered how far technological advancement would go. He saw the line of division as a little too obvious, where it has proven itself to be anything but.
No, its just that the solutions tend to rub too strongly against our laissez-faire capitalist sensibilities to be taken seriously.
The root of the problem is not lack of food, or lack of distribution, or anything of the sort, though both are elements of the problem. The problem is, quite simply, overpopulation. To solve the environmental problems we face, we need to reduce population and keep it low.
I'd suggest doing this by reducing the number of children born, which can be done any number of ways, even in a capitalist system without any major thumpings of personal freedom (reduce tax burden to married couples with no children, tax number of offspring, even a market-style system to monitor reproduction). But its not a particularly popular viewpoint, I concede.
He who controls the system dedicated to disseminating information also controls what information is disseminated. And no, I don't feel a school funded by a major corporation would be a benefit to taxpayers. I feel it is inherently anti-competitive, because it gives the corporation which controls the school the ability to mold its students to their bottom line.
The extreme of this is the sort of corporate dystopia you see in cyberpunk, but one doesn't need to go that far to see some rather disturbing problems with such a model.
The issue here is whose definition of capitalism we're working from. Certainly not Adam Smith's, since his strong warnings against monopolistic practices have been virtually ignored, even when we factor in the case against Microsoft, and the strong hand the government has taken against mergers of late.
The thing we have to remember is that modern capitalism is a little bit like Frankenstein's monster: an unholy pot-luck of a system which is more defined by what it isn't than what it is. When originally concieved as a system, social limitations made any corporation-like system very difficult, if not nigh-impossible. If you ran a livery stable in Boston, it wasn't practical for you to start expanding into Savannah. The market was much more open to smaller entrepeuners and there was a far more direct route between consumers and producers.
Now, however, this is not neccessarily true. Corporations can survive for decades without neccessarily turning a profit, and the chairman of some corporate board need never interact with the people buying the products his company produces. It is not only possible, but common, for a company that produces computer equipment to also be involved in the media, and various other industrial and commercial systems, which should immediately raise anti-competitive alarms. And yet we still cling to a laissez-faire model that was designed for a social structure two or three centuries removed from where we are now.
And, although I'm closer to socialism on the economic spectrum, the same can be said for socialism, communism, and any other socio-economic system. The last significant political/economic system to have been proposed was Fascism, and that was almost a century ago (and it worked out soooooo beautifully didn't it?::rolls eyes::). Since then, we've just seen multiple patches, if you will, to older systems that, although they fix a number of smaller issues, don't go to the heart of the problem: the rather outdated core. Society has grown exponentionally faster in the 20th century both socially and technologically, and so should our conceptions of economic systems. But they haven't.
I don't claim to have the answers, but I do know that for a capitalist system to work, the consumer's voice needs to be significantly stronger than it is now. The resilience of business has grown steadily since the 1770's, but the consumer's voice has stayed relatively at the same level.
Anyone who tells you the Civil War was not fought over slavery is, to put it simply, rewriting history.
Furthermore, why does everyone presume slavery wasn't economics? It certainly wasn't good economics, and many historians believe that even if the conflict had not come to pass, the southern states would likely have had to drop, or at least seriously cut back, the system for economic reasons (it was impeding industrial growth), but it was economics. The southern economic structure was built upon it, and the reason the conflict did occur was that the northern and non-slave holding states were undergoing enough preliminary industrialization to realize that the southern states were no longer as vital to the economic function of the nation as a whole as they had once been. This allowed people to step back and see how disgusting and destructive the slavery system truly was. Tarriffs were barely an issue at all.
A few other corrections: by the time the Nazis had come to power in Weimar Germany the bulk of Germany's depression had finished (at the height of which the Deutschmark had something like a 1:16,000,000 conversion rate to the USD). They weren't out of the woods, perhaps, but they were better off than they had been a decade earlier.
This continues a misconception: war is seldom good for economies. It can provide a quick jumpstart that can fuel economic recovery, as World War II, providing the impetus that finally dragged the US out of the last vestiges of the Great Depression. But it doesn't do it by and of itself, and can be quite disastrous. The Cold War seriously damaged the Soviet economy (although only after many decades when the strain of the arms race grew too much for Russia to bear... initially it was something of a godsend to the nation), and ultimately destroyed the government. It also seriously damaged the US economy, and probably played a reasonable hand in the economic downturns of the late '80s and early '90s.
This would all be true except for a very basic tenet of capitalism: capital is power. And, as should be obvious to anyone who has had any dealings with power structures, those in power tend to give up power only kicking and screaming.
This wouldn't be so important if resources weren't limited, but they are. Not everyone can live life as a billionaire, and the more people who do, the fewer people can live life even above the poverty line.
You seem to grasping at a straw man here: people can and do work their way out of poverty. This does not mean poverty is not a vicious circle, it just means we don't live in a caste system. The point is that it is exponentionally harder for, say, the son of a bus driver to succeed in life than it is for the family of Bill Gates. Not impossible, of course, and my family has worked its way out of poverty in this manner, but its a hit-and-miss situation, and there's little guarantee of success, no matter how long or hard you work.
Or, to put it more simply, in our current system, you need capital to earn capital. From childhood education to investment in one's own business, or whatever, prosperity doesn't spring fully formed out of some Greek god's head. If you can't provide the initial capital, you'll have a significantly harder time meeting your goals, if you can do so at all.
And this is what welfare, in a small part, seeks to alleviate. It creates a safety net so an unbridled laissez-faire system doesn't unfairly jettison a good chunk of the population, and gives them a chance, albeit perhaps not an equal chance, to succeed.
Too often I see conservatives portraying those living under welfare as lazy and living comfortably off of handouts. They aren't, for the most part (there are of course exceptions, but there will be in any system), and anyone believing life on welfare is roses and wildflowers is rather clearly ignoring the obvious. The only thing welfare really ensures is that you have enough to eat and a place to sleep. Now, I challenge the conservative element to try living under these bare conditions and then complain about those on welfare. There's just as much impetus for those on welfare to succeed as there would be without welfare; all welfare does is ensure that failure isn't fatal.
And one last thing: I find the self-centered attitude of conseratives rather depressing. The money you earn at work is only yours because the government and society provide a stable working and living environment. This is done, in part, by ensuring that the worse-off sectors of society can at least get by. The government survives off of the people, and its a give and take relationship. Taxes aren't the government's way of taking away your money; they are the government's way of paying for the services that benefit all aspects of society. Like it or not, we're all in this together.
I really liked the old interface for Licq QT, where all the pertinent aspects of a conversation were held in one window, divided into multiple tabs. I wish they hadn't dropped that for the traditional ICQ-like multiple window format, which I find a lot more cluttered and slower to navigate.
But yeah, I would consider the AIM interface slightly superior to the ICQ interface (which some caveats: I like ICQ's method of separating online/offline users slightly better). But I still greatly prefer ICQ.
No, I know that. I was just under the impression that AOL's recent actions to retract the TiK protocol may have had them thinking twice about embracing open source and third party alternatives to their products. The bad phrasing was my fault:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for the terraforming and eventual colonization of Mars. If it can be done, the possibilities are neat. But not limitless. It gives us a reprieve from digging ourselves into the ground via unsound and ultimately self-destructive environmental practices, but only a limited one. Quite frankly, I think emphasis needs to be placed on cleaning up our act on this planet before spreading to others. Humanity doesn't need to be a virus, but its kind of difficult to see it as anything else in its current conception.
Also, suggesting that expansion off-planet is neccessary for the survival of the species is utter nonsense. Quite frankly, it reeks of human arrogance and a blind refusal to play by the rather generous rules that nature gives us. Extraterrestrial colonization is still a dream of sci-fi writers: even liberal estimates give thousands of years before Mars will have accumulated enough of an atmosphere to support human life. So let's try and get our act together on this planet first. Anything else is just a placebo.
It looks like the potentially disastrous legal situation has cooled. KDE and Gnome may still not be the best of friends, but at least it looks like we may be to a point where healthy competition, and not vitriolic rivalry, is possible.
As for the United States' government and economy being the oldest and most stable, it's not, really, though its certainly up there. Britain has been up there relatively unchanged for almost as long, if not longer, depending on what you consider a massive change, and the U.S. has gone through some significant changes as well, switching from a confederational system up until the time of the Civil War to a more strongly federalist system thereafter.
But there is always a better model out there. To suggest otherwise is to imply that this is as good as it gets, and, frankly, I'm not prepared to accept that. Even if I differ with traditional Marxism on a number of issues, I do strongly believe in the principle of the social dialectic. Culture and society changes, and there is no system that can adequately encompass all of the different forms a culture can take. Social and economic systems must evolve. A massive change certainly could be fatal, but so could continuing along our current path indefinitely. America's present capitalist system would not have worked in the days of Ancient Greece because supply and communication lines weren't strong enough. And I'm personally convinced that we are approaching, if not already past, a point where Smithian capitalism will not operate for precisely the opposite reason: we have evolved, socially speaking, to a point where things are so interconnected that the competition model doesn't pan out the way it is supposed to. To make an appropriately Slashdot-esque comparision, its like expecting hardware manufactured in 1981 for the Apple II to run Quake III Arena.
The same, of course, applies to Marxist socialism. It was concieved as a response to a very different society in the grasp of a very different form of capitalism over a century ago. Any by-the-book implementation of Marxism would fail for the same reasons that capitalism is failing. But just as we have modelled, but not stayed 100% pure to, Adam Smith's version of capitalism, there are definite possibilites to do the same with socialism, a system which (purely IMO) is not so inherently tied to social structures which are dying in our modern society.
As for incentive for competition, I don't believe competition is going to be as vital in the future as it has been in the past. While there always will be advancements to make and new things to accomplish, the point of a capitalist system is to provide a period of massive social, industrial, and economic growth. When that growth starts to level off, as Marx predicted it would, albeit over a century too early, capitalism becomes a burden, not a blessing. Without enforced competition, there will be a much slower rate of growth, but I think its a laissez-faire fallacy to assume that growth will stop entirely. A number of great achievements have been made by individuals who have completely shunned traditional capitalist incentives. Heck, a number of open-source software designers buck this traditional capitalist tenet.
Oh, of course. I don't think its very far out of the realm of possibility that they will start developing for Nintendo again. But they've already committed themselves to developing on the PS2, again, having announced two Final Fantasy games for the system. And, given Square's history, it seems likely that any work on the GameCube would be original work, and not ports of their games for the PS2.
And Sony also has something of a reputation of being better to their developers than Nintendo, which cost the latter company a lot during the switch from SNES to N64 (including Square and, to a large if not exclusive degree, Enix, Konami, and Capcom). And, lest we forget, Microsoft has a lot of problems of its own to deal with that may affect them giving the XBox full attention, and, more importantly, may scare away developers.
Also, remember that what some may see as taking the best of PCs and bringing it to consoles can also be seen as taking the worst of PCs and forcing it upon consoles. Most people here on Slashdot have some bias towards PCs over console systems, and so we see some of the things associated with the XBox (upgradable, more open, more "tweakable") as a benefit. Casual gamers will not. Period. Its the same reason Linux hasn't caught on with everyone: most people want a system they can throw a game in and play. The future of the XBox seems like it may force these types of gamers to pay close attention to system specs and potential future upgrades. We may love this. But its a niche market, and probably not what Microsoft is looking for. Nintendo, Sony, and Sega all have the upper hand in this regard.
Not that Sony will succeed or Mictosoft will fail, but its still all worth keeping in mind...
Yeah. By most accounts it was when Best Brains started scripting out ahead, at the beginning of the Comedy Central run, that Josh Weinstein (Dr. Larry Erdhardt, and the first voice of Tom Servo) was forced out. He was easily the best improv artist of the crew, and shone in the KTMA season, but when the show moved to Comedy Central, he was sort of left without a niche.
In the sense I was using it, I was employing "social freedom" to denote something more along the lines of what we consider basic human rights: the freedom to live without fear of being unfairly prosecuted for speaking one's mind, to enjoy a reasonably private personal sphere, etc. "Economic freedoms" was used primarily to denote activites related to the free market: the right to buy and sell commodities, and so on. While you rightly point out that the two are related, there is a bit of difference.
Frankly, you don't have complete economic freedom, even in a laissez-faire capitalist system. There may be no overreaching governmental infrastructure to decree what you can and cannot do, but you are held as slave to the market. To succeed, you can't really go against demand (at least, you shouldn't be able to for very long). And this amounts to what Sony and all the other RIAA-affiliated companies are trying to do. Rather than evolve their business model to keep up with emerging trends, they attempt to trample these trends so they can continue under business-as-usual conditions.
In a healthy capitalist system this doesn't work . Competition forces business to constantly attempt to one-up their competitors, and unless you've got collusion in effect, someone's going to hit upon a model that will utilize new trends and be a hit with consumers. But America has really never been a healthy capitalist system. The RIAA may not be a monopoly in the traditional definition of the term, but it certainly showcases all of the negative effects of a monopoly as outlined in traditional capitalist theory. It wields enough power and clout over both its moneymakers (the musicians) and its consumers to engage in an attempt to commandeer the market. This, to put it simply, just ain't healthy.
I'm not a capitalist, really, and I have some real problems even with the ideal model, but, hey, I much rather have to contend with an system that was at least striving for the ideal of a flawed system than a system which had both those inherent flaws, and some of its own devising.
Then again, I'm murky on U.S. copyright law, and even murkier on U.K. copyright law, so what do I know?
People don't really remember this, but the same problem has been faced with the introduction of any new technology: radio, television, audio and video cassettes, etc. None of these have spelled doom for the capitalist system we hold so dear: indeed, their introduction has expanded the marketplace by opening up markets that weren't there before.
Again, let's not excuse piracy: Napster does aid and abet in pirating music. Anyone who still denies this is fooling him/herself. But then, VCRs aid in pirating films, and cassette stereos aided in pirating music well before Napster and Gnutella came along. The question is can people like Sony and the RIAA be allowed to trample new technology, and even individual rights, to protect their model of business? Of course not! This decidedly uncapitalistic, and might even be considered monopolistic, if successful. In a free market system, companies have to adapt to changing systems; if they start to force the systems to conform to their preferred model of doing business, something's gone horribly wrong.
So what is the solution? I can see several; all of them represent a fundamental change in the market, but all of them preserve the roles of groups like the RIAA. Cheaply available equivalents to pirated MP3s could head off a large portion of the drain, when and if it ever gets to be a major drain (Napster has caused little effect on sales thusfar). Tacking on an additional fee to the hardware might work, as well, as was done with audio cassettes. If Sony has the engineering capability to design software which will firewall a user's PC without their consent, surely they can devise somewhat to make an effective business model out of emerging technology, without trampling either the users or technology itself.
Even so, this probably won't damage AOL much. They handled the situation relatively quickly, and have had nothing to do with Gnutella since the first posting. But what mp3board may be hoping for is the action to confuse the RIAA (of which AOL-Time Warner is a member) enough to stall things, and perhaps damage their continuing attempts to cast themselves as morally superior. It seems to me to be primarily a stall tactic.
I think something similar was done with the episode "Eegah!" which was recently released on DVD. Using the wonders of modern technology, you can now have the joy of watching not only the MST version, but the original, uncut, unriffed film. Although why you would want to is completely beyond me.
A number of other contributors left the show shortly after Joel's departure. Frank Conniff (TV's Frank) left at the end of season 6, and Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Forrester and the original voice of Crow) left in the gap between the last Comedy Central season (season 7) and the first Sci-Fi Channel season (season 8). I didn't really notice much of a difference, and tended to enjoy the later episodes just as much as the earlier ones (in many cases more so), but a lot of people do complain.
As for Nelson's acting skills, I've always considered him better for the show than Hodgson, as much as I admire Joel. Particularly as the show dragged on, Hodgson tended to have a vaguely condescending air, and in many cases it seemed he treated the show like a bit too much of a bore. Mike brought a fresher taste to the show. I tend to think that a lot of the complaints he recieves have more to do with the changed dynamic of the cast (as was previously mentioned, Mike had more of a "best-friend" relationship with the bots, whereas Joel's relationship was more fatherly), and an inability to adapt to it, than any real lack of skill on Nelson's part.
In any case, his acting skills probably wouldn't affect a written book, anyway. So it's a bit of a moot point.
On the other hand, its not likely they'll ever really desire to rebroadcast them, anyway. They've indicated a degree of public embarrassment over their earliest work (including the KTMA-broadcast episodes and the first Comedy Central season) and have tended to release them only kicking and screaming (only two or three season one CC episodes have been publicly released, either on video or over the air, since 1994).
South Park, for me, is ruined by the almost self-gratifying humor Messrs. Stone and Parker indulge in, saved only by the fact that when it succeeds, it does so spectacularly. Even Buffy sometimes suffers from being a tad overwritten, surviving largely intact probably because it is aired on a second-tier network.
But the point is I don't think you can single out anime for a penchant for cheap physical humor, or a "Gleek the Space Monkey" type of "selling out." For something to succeed in the long-term, it needs either a rabid cult following, or at least some mainstream support, and the latter is rather easier to attract, sadly.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Part Hitchcock, part Twin Peaks, part Kubrick, all wrapped up in a rather deceptive tale of giant bio-robots and the end of the world. Lots of Judeo-Christian imagery, and the character interplay is fascinating. The major problem with the series might be that it tries for a little too much, and, as a result, gets a little cramped, particularly towards the end. But brilliant anyway. Also recommended is the movie Wings of Honneamise, by the same director (Anno Hideaki), which, while different in tone, is equally beautiful.
- Serial Experiments Lain: The ultimate nerd anime; a thinly veiled allegory about modern life and the Internet. Great opening theme, too. Its difficult to sum into words without giving too much away, but its well worth a watch.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena: Although only the first quarter of the series has been released in America, and the series doesn't start getting really good until about halfway through, this one takes the bill for style alone. By the creator of Sailor Moon, although that says very little about what is essentially a psychological drama with some very disturbing undertones (and some excellent music
::grin::)
- Saber Marionette J: What starts off as a seemingly straightfoward sci-fi adventure, about a world populated by refugees from a crashed space flight, maintained solely through cloning, since there are no women, evolves into both a touching and exciting drama which seems to owe a lot to 2001: A Space Oddesey.
- Cowboy Bebop: Part of a recent trend of "outer space westerns," Cowboy Bebop is one of the best. The story of two bounty hunters, Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, and a opportunistic woman named Faye Valentine. Half humor and half action, its a great watch.
- Trigun: Another excellent entry into the aforementioned western genre, this one is the story of the legendary "Humanoid Typhoon," Vash the Stampede. But when two insurance surveyors set out after the fiend, they find that reality seldom lives up to legend, and that Vash may not be so much a villain as a klutz....
- The Slayers: A humorous fantasy adventures starring ace sorceress Lina Inverse in her attempts to find fame, fortune, and a bite to eat. Fast, furious, and hilarious.
- Perfect Blue: Described by legendary B-movie veteran Roger Corman as what would happen if Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney had teamed up, this movie descibes the descent into madness of a Japanese pop vocalist in sometimes grusome detail.
Just a sampling of what I like: there are other good series and movies out there and the best thing to do is to look into them, as everyone's tastes can, and do, vary.I don't really believe extraterrestrial colonies are a solution. At best, they're just interim fixes. If population continues to grow, we'll just be facing the same problem on down the line, only not just on Earth. Not that I'm against the idea, I just think it may not be the answer to our core problems.
The problem seems to be that Marx misconsidered how far technological advancement would go. He saw the line of division as a little too obvious, where it has proven itself to be anything but.
The root of the problem is not lack of food, or lack of distribution, or anything of the sort, though both are elements of the problem. The problem is, quite simply, overpopulation. To solve the environmental problems we face, we need to reduce population and keep it low.
I'd suggest doing this by reducing the number of children born, which can be done any number of ways, even in a capitalist system without any major thumpings of personal freedom (reduce tax burden to married couples with no children, tax number of offspring, even a market-style system to monitor reproduction). But its not a particularly popular viewpoint, I concede.
The extreme of this is the sort of corporate dystopia you see in cyberpunk, but one doesn't need to go that far to see some rather disturbing problems with such a model.
The thing we have to remember is that modern capitalism is a little bit like Frankenstein's monster: an unholy pot-luck of a system which is more defined by what it isn't than what it is. When originally concieved as a system, social limitations made any corporation-like system very difficult, if not nigh-impossible. If you ran a livery stable in Boston, it wasn't practical for you to start expanding into Savannah. The market was much more open to smaller entrepeuners and there was a far more direct route between consumers and producers.
Now, however, this is not neccessarily true. Corporations can survive for decades without neccessarily turning a profit, and the chairman of some corporate board need never interact with the people buying the products his company produces. It is not only possible, but common, for a company that produces computer equipment to also be involved in the media, and various other industrial and commercial systems, which should immediately raise anti-competitive alarms. And yet we still cling to a laissez-faire model that was designed for a social structure two or three centuries removed from where we are now.
And, although I'm closer to socialism on the economic spectrum, the same can be said for socialism, communism, and any other socio-economic system. The last significant political/economic system to have been proposed was Fascism, and that was almost a century ago (and it worked out soooooo beautifully didn't it? ::rolls eyes::). Since then, we've just seen multiple patches, if you will, to older systems that, although they fix a number of smaller issues, don't go to the heart of the problem: the rather outdated core. Society has grown exponentionally faster in the 20th century both socially and technologically, and so should our conceptions of economic systems. But they haven't.
I don't claim to have the answers, but I do know that for a capitalist system to work, the consumer's voice needs to be significantly stronger than it is now. The resilience of business has grown steadily since the 1770's, but the consumer's voice has stayed relatively at the same level.
Furthermore, why does everyone presume slavery wasn't economics? It certainly wasn't good economics, and many historians believe that even if the conflict had not come to pass, the southern states would likely have had to drop, or at least seriously cut back, the system for economic reasons (it was impeding industrial growth), but it was economics. The southern economic structure was built upon it, and the reason the conflict did occur was that the northern and non-slave holding states were undergoing enough preliminary industrialization to realize that the southern states were no longer as vital to the economic function of the nation as a whole as they had once been. This allowed people to step back and see how disgusting and destructive the slavery system truly was. Tarriffs were barely an issue at all.
A few other corrections: by the time the Nazis had come to power in Weimar Germany the bulk of Germany's depression had finished (at the height of which the Deutschmark had something like a 1:16,000,000 conversion rate to the USD). They weren't out of the woods, perhaps, but they were better off than they had been a decade earlier.
This continues a misconception: war is seldom good for economies. It can provide a quick jumpstart that can fuel economic recovery, as World War II, providing the impetus that finally dragged the US out of the last vestiges of the Great Depression. But it doesn't do it by and of itself, and can be quite disastrous. The Cold War seriously damaged the Soviet economy (although only after many decades when the strain of the arms race grew too much for Russia to bear... initially it was something of a godsend to the nation), and ultimately destroyed the government. It also seriously damaged the US economy, and probably played a reasonable hand in the economic downturns of the late '80s and early '90s.
This wouldn't be so important if resources weren't limited, but they are. Not everyone can live life as a billionaire, and the more people who do, the fewer people can live life even above the poverty line.
You seem to grasping at a straw man here: people can and do work their way out of poverty. This does not mean poverty is not a vicious circle, it just means we don't live in a caste system. The point is that it is exponentionally harder for, say, the son of a bus driver to succeed in life than it is for the family of Bill Gates. Not impossible, of course, and my family has worked its way out of poverty in this manner, but its a hit-and-miss situation, and there's little guarantee of success, no matter how long or hard you work.
Or, to put it more simply, in our current system, you need capital to earn capital. From childhood education to investment in one's own business, or whatever, prosperity doesn't spring fully formed out of some Greek god's head. If you can't provide the initial capital, you'll have a significantly harder time meeting your goals, if you can do so at all.
And this is what welfare, in a small part, seeks to alleviate. It creates a safety net so an unbridled laissez-faire system doesn't unfairly jettison a good chunk of the population, and gives them a chance, albeit perhaps not an equal chance, to succeed.
Too often I see conservatives portraying those living under welfare as lazy and living comfortably off of handouts. They aren't, for the most part (there are of course exceptions, but there will be in any system), and anyone believing life on welfare is roses and wildflowers is rather clearly ignoring the obvious. The only thing welfare really ensures is that you have enough to eat and a place to sleep. Now, I challenge the conservative element to try living under these bare conditions and then complain about those on welfare. There's just as much impetus for those on welfare to succeed as there would be without welfare; all welfare does is ensure that failure isn't fatal.
And one last thing: I find the self-centered attitude of conseratives rather depressing. The money you earn at work is only yours because the government and society provide a stable working and living environment. This is done, in part, by ensuring that the worse-off sectors of society can at least get by. The government survives off of the people, and its a give and take relationship. Taxes aren't the government's way of taking away your money; they are the government's way of paying for the services that benefit all aspects of society. Like it or not, we're all in this together.
But yeah, I would consider the AIM interface slightly superior to the ICQ interface (which some caveats: I like ICQ's method of separating online/offline users slightly better). But I still greatly prefer ICQ.
No, I know that. I was just under the impression that AOL's recent actions to retract the TiK protocol may have had them thinking twice about embracing open source and third party alternatives to their products. The bad phrasing was my fault :-)