Long answer, the degree of insanity required to make a ruler sabotage their own nation by attacking an economic ally is pretty high, and the bigger and wealthier a country is, the harder it is for someone that out of touch with reality to come to power. Think about how far away Michelle Bachmann was from becoming President, and how far away she is from being crazy enough to start a war with China. It would take someone way crazier being way more politically successful to cause the kinds of problems we're talking about here. Ultranationalist looney toons can become dictators of small poor countries relatively easily, but those are precisely the ones who will use guerrilla warfare and terrorism rather than high-cost high-tech high-manpower 20th century warfare.
I disagree. The Cold War needed mutually assured destruction to keep the peace because the capitalist countries and the communist ones weren't trading with each other. And it didn't even do that good a job of keeping the peace. USA and USSR never spilled each other's blood, but Korea and Vietnam were more proxies for USA and China to make unofficial war on each other than anything else. There's no reason to believe we wouldn't have kept finding excuses to get involved in opposite sides of Asian civil wars if we hadn't started trading with each other.
MAD keeps people who want to fight each other from throwing the first punch, or maybe just from escalating after a punch is thrown--shared economic interests keeps them from wanting to fight each other at all. MAD is a last line of defense, nothing more.
Plenty of people have already pointed out the idiocy in the details of TFA's argument, so I won't go into that. The core assumption underlying the whole thing is wrong too: wars are not fought with missiles any more. The nations that can afford enough missiles to pose any kind of threat at all to each other are the wealthy, highly populated ones. All the wealthy, populous nations are economically interdependent now, and always will be. Economically interdependent nations don't wage war on each other. All wars for the foreseeable future will be started by second- or third-world rogue states using terrorism and guerrilla tactics, and ended by first-world superpowers using espionage, tactical bombing, and drone strikes.
Nobody capable of launching ICBM's at us could conceivably ever want to. There is nobody we'll ever need to launch ICBM's at ourselves.
I'm a projectionist at an all-digital theater. Content is sent to us in proprietary file formats, so I can't tell you for sure what's going on inside them, but I can make a pretty good guess based on file size. A 2K movie (which is virtually all movies, only one or two a year are distributed at 4K) in 2D will be about 1 GB per minute of runtime. Uncompressed video at 1080p resolution, 24fps, 24-bit color is more than 8 GB per minute. So it's definitely compressed, and the compression ratio is probably too high for any lossless algorithm to be plausible. But an 8:1 compression ratio for a lossy video codec is still almost absurdly high quality, much better than Blu-Ray, which is already excellent quality. You could make a JPEG of each individual frame, not even taking advantage of the similarity of consecutive frames, and get 8:1 compression.
That's an anti-aliasing issue, not a resolution issue. I'm a projectionist at a theater with all digital 4K projectors (except the digital IMAX which is 2K but fraudulently marketed--by IMAX, not by my employer--as 4K, don't get me started on those fucking scam artists). One thing you probably don't know is that virtually all movies are distributed at 2K. There are only one or two 4K movies a year--Skyfall was not one of them. Avengers was not one of them. Hobbit was not one of them. Almost everything you watch will be 2K even if you're in a 4K-capable auditorium. I see just about every movie that gets released, and I can tell you that for text, AA makes a MUCH bigger difference than resolution. There's almost no visible difference between 4K AA text and 2K AA. 4K non-AA is slightly but noticeably worse than 2K AA, and 2K non-AA is much worse than 4K non-AA.
You may well ask why any studio would put non-AA text in a movie. Or why some movies would have AA text but not others. Hell, in the year 2013, why does non-AA text still exist anywhere at all? If you figure that out, I hope you'll tell me.
The conceptual purpose of a netbook is to be an extremely portable computer with good battery life that's primarily used for web browsing and media consumption, with just enough internal storage to serve as a local cache of data from the internet. They exploded in popularity when Steve Jobs figured out that touchscreens were better input devices than keyboards for that use case.
...to force theaters to switch to digital projectors, and pay for it themselves. Digital distribution is orders of magnitude cheaper than 35mm film distribution, which is why the studios wanted the change. They could say to small independent theaters, "We're not sending you 35mm prints any more, so you better switch or you'll go out of business." But the MPAA needs the big chains like AMC and Regal as much as AMC and Regal need the MPAA. If AMC stops showing Universal's movies, AMC goes out of business, but so does Universal. There were originally negotiations about sharing the cost of the equipment rollout, but no agreement was ever reached. So the studios started making boatloads of 3D movies and hyping them to death so audiences would demand the change. Audiences are starting to catch on that it's just a gimmick, but it's done its job. Most theaters are digital now and the last few exceptions will be switching within the next year or so. And the studios didn't have to contribute a dime.
Back in college, a friend and I were trying to figure out what could possibly make people go mad from the mere sight of Cthulhu. We decided it must have uncountably infinitely many tentacles. A mere countable infinity of tentacles could be visually comprehensible, so long as each one is half the size of its predecessor, or if they were arranged in a fractal tree structure of tentacles upon tentacles. But uncountably many tentacles would drive you insane at first sight.
He faced a situation where he judged the consequences of breaking his oath to be less onerous than the consequences of keeping it. That's not relativism (as opposed to absolutism), it's act utilitarianism (as opposed to rule utilitarianism).
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are defending the Nazi soldiers who were just following orders when they murdered six million Jewish civilians.
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are condemning every whistleblower who has ever broken an oath, violated an NDA, or betrayed the trust of a personal friend to blow the whistle--which is all of them.
If only hyperlinks were identified by a picture of a computer mouse next to a monitor with a stylized mouse cursor hovered over a picture of a linked chain. You could visit the target of the hyperlink by clicking your real mouse on the left button of the picture of the mouse.
Instead of unrehearsed singing for your own entertainment, you're writing and acting out an unrehearsed dramatic or comedic story for your own entertainment. The DM is the director, the players are actors, and they all collaborate as writers.
But rather than explaining what it is to someone, just have them tag along. Bring a book in case they get bored, but they might just want to join in next time.
The MPAA can bully small independent theaters like that. I'd be surprised if they weren't. But too much of their revenue comes from AMC, Regal, Century, and the other megachains for them to make changes that big and expensive by fiat. It'd be like a wholesaler trying to make demands of Walmart. Their realistic choices were to help pay for the transition (which was discussed, but I don't know to what extent it's actually happening) or to create audience demand.
I'm a projectionist at a 24-screen theater that's about half 35mm, half digital. What I'm about to say, I know first-hand to be factual:
The industry's push for 3D is the ONLY reason you have the choice of 2D digital projection at all. Digital projectors are orders of magnitude more expensive, less reliable, and more labor-intensive to operate and maintain than 35mm projectors--even in areas where a single theater chain's monopoly means they don't have to be replaced with newer models every few years. But the studios love them because it is cheaper to ship 5-pound USB hard drives than 50-pound 35mm prints to theaters.
So, the MPAA announced about seven or eight years ago that they were going to start making a lot of 3D films, meaning theaters had to install digital projectors capable of playing them. For the first few years, until approximately 2007, most theaters only had one or two digital projectors, so 3D films were only released at a rate of one every four to six months. The rest of the time, those few digital projectors showed 2D movies. Once it was clear that audiences would actually pay for 3D, the MPAA started ramping up production and speeding up the release cycle to force theaters to convert more and more auditoriums to digital. Today, there are always at least two or three different 3D movies in wide release at a time. So if the theaters near you don't have very many digital screens, most of them will be taken up by 3D films most of the time. I'm sure this is the source of your misconception--a higher percentage of digital showtimes were 2D in the early days of digital, so it's perfectly reasonable to guess that 2D digital is being displaced by the 3D fad. But the phenomenon is really nothing more than an accidental side-effect of theaters trying to stay a step ahead of audience and studio demand for 3D.
In ten years or so, digital will be dominant enough that studios will be able to stop 35mm distribution entirely. No longer needing 3D to be a Trojan horse for cheap digital distribution, the fad will simply die down with no fanfare or public explanation, and you'll have your ubiquitous digital 2D. But make no mistake--if not for the 3D push, digital projectors would be a novelty item, only in huge, popular multiplexes in NYC and LA, and even there only on one or two screens.
"Selling you ROMs" and "a license to use them" are mutually exclusive. You don't need a license to use your own property. You're either being sold a ROM that becomes your property (in which case you can use it however you like) OR you're being sold a license to access a ROM that remains the licensor's property (in which case you can use it in the ways permitted by the terms of the license).
It used to be that, in the past, magazines and newspapers and other "common-man" publications would have essays about heady topics.
Yes, very very rarely. Just like today.
Now you just get articles about how to get rich quick, how some superstar or politician has done something, or some other essentially mundane topic.
Just as it's always been--we only remember the occasional exceptions because they're the only things worth remembering.
Even the "debates" on economics, social norms, climate change, or intellectual property are very sparse on respectful discourse and are instead filled with emotional responses.
Andrew Jackson. Aaron Burr. Adolph Hitler. Eisenhower-Stephenson. McCarthy. As bad as it is now--and it is pretty bad--it was ten times worse in antebellum America, and even that was a dramatic improvement over any previous civilization in the history of the world.
Re:There are several factors at play here
on
The Post-Idea World
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Regarding nostalgia, don't forget the test-of-time effect. We think Victorian literature, 1930s movies, Ancient Greek philosophy, etc. are superior to today's because only the worthwhile stuff stuck around. There was a Michael Bay in early Hollywood. There was a Danielle Steele in 1880s London. There was a Glenn Beck in 1790s Philadelphia. We just don't republish them any more.
Normally, I would ignore anyone who didn't realize that a comment modded +5 Funny was in fact a joke, not intended as a literally true statement. But first, you're wrong in interesting ways. I mean that as a compliment--people who are right or wrong in uninteresting ways are so boring as to be de facto nonentities, and people who are right in interesting ways are exceedingly rare. Second, you express yourself coherently. I therefore deem you to be worth talking to.
Let's deconstruct my joke. In actual fact, France's influence is larger but declining, while Twitbook's is smaller but increasing. Claiming, facetiously, that those trends have gone so far that the situation has reversed emphasizes the trends themselves. It's a statement which is literally false, but in a way that highlights something true. That's something I (and apparently several people with mod points) find funny.
But we do actually disagree--you think I was overstating the influence of social networking, but I was actually understating the influence of France. Social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are a much bigger deal than you claim they are. Point by point:
It doesn't really alter people's values
There has been much discussion, including here on Slashdot, about the effect cable television and the internet are having on people's political views. We can, more and more easily, choose to avoid exposure to differing viewpoints. This positive feedback loop seems to be leading us to hold more and more strongly to more and more extreme positions. I'd call that an alteration of our values. Social networking is not the driving force of that change, but it's certainly a factor.
Just as widely discussed is the rapid, universal devaluation of privacy--primarily and directly due to social networking. Whether that's a good or bad thing is far from clear, but it's definitely a big thing.
it doesn't lead people to do anything new... it's a different way of doing the same thing
The big new thing that Facebook does is that we no longer have to consciously choose to keep in touch with casual friends--we have to consciously choose not to. I'm Facebook-friends with dozens of people I went to high school or college with but haven't seen since graduation, former coworkers, siblings of friends, etc. These continuing relationships are not a big part of my day to day life, but any of them could be rekindled--if we move to the same city, or one of us posts about a common interest we didn't know we shared. That's something that was never possible before, even with earlier social networking sites. Nothing before Facebook had a large enough userbase to have that effect.
You can break all forms of communication down into four categories: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. A conversation in person, or a personal letter, is one-to-one. The written (published) word (or television or pretty much any form of artistic expression) is one-to-many. Democracy is a kind of many-to-one communication, as is survey-based research. But many-to-many communication never existed before the internet, and you could almost use it as the primary distinguishing characteristic of social networking. Social networking is the subset of internet activity that is not just a faster version of traditional one-to-one or one-to-many communication. The major breakthroughs of the other three categories are language, democracy, and the printing press--it's an understatement to call them world-changers. We may not know yet HOW many-to-many communication will change the world, but there's no doubt that it's going to. Check out the last three paragraphs of this speech by Douglas Adams for a somewhat more in-depth discussion of this idea.
Twitter is drastically different from anything else that exists on- or offline, including other social networks. All o
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Yes, Heeding The Call takes its entire melody, and even most of its chord progression, directly from Canon in D--and yet they sound so different that a non-musician wouldn't notice that they had anything in common at all. That's how small a part melody plays in music. And that tiny fragment of common ground--melody--is the ONLY part of the chess music that is generated algorithmically from the game descriptions. The rest--the vast majority--comes from Stokes' imagination.
There's certainly nothing wrong with seeding the creative process with outside information, as I described it. Bach himself used to ask people to hit a few random keys on his harpsichord, then improvise fugues based on the themes they came up with. Whole subgenres of mid-20th century experimental music are built on similar ideas. But that's all this is, just another particular source of outside inspiration, not a new development in (or even an example of!) algorithmic composition.
Slashdot Mirror
Good question, but short answer, yes, I do.
Long answer, the degree of insanity required to make a ruler sabotage their own nation by attacking an economic ally is pretty high, and the bigger and wealthier a country is, the harder it is for someone that out of touch with reality to come to power. Think about how far away Michelle Bachmann was from becoming President, and how far away she is from being crazy enough to start a war with China. It would take someone way crazier being way more politically successful to cause the kinds of problems we're talking about here. Ultranationalist looney toons can become dictators of small poor countries relatively easily, but those are precisely the ones who will use guerrilla warfare and terrorism rather than high-cost high-tech high-manpower 20th century warfare.
I disagree. The Cold War needed mutually assured destruction to keep the peace because the capitalist countries and the communist ones weren't trading with each other. And it didn't even do that good a job of keeping the peace. USA and USSR never spilled each other's blood, but Korea and Vietnam were more proxies for USA and China to make unofficial war on each other than anything else. There's no reason to believe we wouldn't have kept finding excuses to get involved in opposite sides of Asian civil wars if we hadn't started trading with each other.
MAD keeps people who want to fight each other from throwing the first punch, or maybe just from escalating after a punch is thrown--shared economic interests keeps them from wanting to fight each other at all. MAD is a last line of defense, nothing more.
Plenty of people have already pointed out the idiocy in the details of TFA's argument, so I won't go into that. The core assumption underlying the whole thing is wrong too: wars are not fought with missiles any more. The nations that can afford enough missiles to pose any kind of threat at all to each other are the wealthy, highly populated ones. All the wealthy, populous nations are economically interdependent now, and always will be. Economically interdependent nations don't wage war on each other. All wars for the foreseeable future will be started by second- or third-world rogue states using terrorism and guerrilla tactics, and ended by first-world superpowers using espionage, tactical bombing, and drone strikes.
Nobody capable of launching ICBM's at us could conceivably ever want to. There is nobody we'll ever need to launch ICBM's at ourselves.
I'm a projectionist at an all-digital theater. Content is sent to us in proprietary file formats, so I can't tell you for sure what's going on inside them, but I can make a pretty good guess based on file size. A 2K movie (which is virtually all movies, only one or two a year are distributed at 4K) in 2D will be about 1 GB per minute of runtime. Uncompressed video at 1080p resolution, 24fps, 24-bit color is more than 8 GB per minute. So it's definitely compressed, and the compression ratio is probably too high for any lossless algorithm to be plausible. But an 8:1 compression ratio for a lossy video codec is still almost absurdly high quality, much better than Blu-Ray, which is already excellent quality. You could make a JPEG of each individual frame, not even taking advantage of the similarity of consecutive frames, and get 8:1 compression.
That's an anti-aliasing issue, not a resolution issue. I'm a projectionist at a theater with all digital 4K projectors (except the digital IMAX which is 2K but fraudulently marketed--by IMAX, not by my employer--as 4K, don't get me started on those fucking scam artists). One thing you probably don't know is that virtually all movies are distributed at 2K. There are only one or two 4K movies a year--Skyfall was not one of them. Avengers was not one of them. Hobbit was not one of them. Almost everything you watch will be 2K even if you're in a 4K-capable auditorium. I see just about every movie that gets released, and I can tell you that for text, AA makes a MUCH bigger difference than resolution. There's almost no visible difference between 4K AA text and 2K AA. 4K non-AA is slightly but noticeably worse than 2K AA, and 2K non-AA is much worse than 4K non-AA.
You may well ask why any studio would put non-AA text in a movie. Or why some movies would have AA text but not others. Hell, in the year 2013, why does non-AA text still exist anywhere at all? If you figure that out, I hope you'll tell me.
The conceptual purpose of a netbook is to be an extremely portable computer with good battery life that's primarily used for web browsing and media consumption, with just enough internal storage to serve as a local cache of data from the internet. They exploded in popularity when Steve Jobs figured out that touchscreens were better input devices than keyboards for that use case.
...to force theaters to switch to digital projectors, and pay for it themselves. Digital distribution is orders of magnitude cheaper than 35mm film distribution, which is why the studios wanted the change. They could say to small independent theaters, "We're not sending you 35mm prints any more, so you better switch or you'll go out of business." But the MPAA needs the big chains like AMC and Regal as much as AMC and Regal need the MPAA. If AMC stops showing Universal's movies, AMC goes out of business, but so does Universal. There were originally negotiations about sharing the cost of the equipment rollout, but no agreement was ever reached. So the studios started making boatloads of 3D movies and hyping them to death so audiences would demand the change. Audiences are starting to catch on that it's just a gimmick, but it's done its job. Most theaters are digital now and the last few exceptions will be switching within the next year or so. And the studios didn't have to contribute a dime.
You win the internet today.
You mean Facebook enforces its real name policy? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!?!
Back in college, a friend and I were trying to figure out what could possibly make people go mad from the mere sight of Cthulhu. We decided it must have uncountably infinitely many tentacles. A mere countable infinity of tentacles could be visually comprehensible, so long as each one is half the size of its predecessor, or if they were arranged in a fractal tree structure of tentacles upon tentacles. But uncountably many tentacles would drive you insane at first sight.
He faced a situation where he judged the consequences of breaking his oath to be less onerous than the consequences of keeping it. That's not relativism (as opposed to absolutism), it's act utilitarianism (as opposed to rule utilitarianism).
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are defending the Nazi soldiers who were just following orders when they murdered six million Jewish civilians.
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are condemning every whistleblower who has ever broken an oath, violated an NDA, or betrayed the trust of a personal friend to blow the whistle--which is all of them.
If only hyperlinks were identified by a picture of a computer mouse next to a monitor with a stylized mouse cursor hovered over a picture of a linked chain. You could visit the target of the hyperlink by clicking your real mouse on the left button of the picture of the mouse.
Instead of unrehearsed singing for your own entertainment, you're writing and acting out an unrehearsed dramatic or comedic story for your own entertainment. The DM is the director, the players are actors, and they all collaborate as writers.
But rather than explaining what it is to someone, just have them tag along. Bring a book in case they get bored, but they might just want to join in next time.
Man Bites Dog is news. Flaw In YouTube Takedown Process is not news. YouTube Takedown Process Works As Intended is news.
The MPAA can bully small independent theaters like that. I'd be surprised if they weren't. But too much of their revenue comes from AMC, Regal, Century, and the other megachains for them to make changes that big and expensive by fiat. It'd be like a wholesaler trying to make demands of Walmart. Their realistic choices were to help pay for the transition (which was discussed, but I don't know to what extent it's actually happening) or to create audience demand.
I'm a projectionist at a 24-screen theater that's about half 35mm, half digital. What I'm about to say, I know first-hand to be factual:
The industry's push for 3D is the ONLY reason you have the choice of 2D digital projection at all. Digital projectors are orders of magnitude more expensive, less reliable, and more labor-intensive to operate and maintain than 35mm projectors--even in areas where a single theater chain's monopoly means they don't have to be replaced with newer models every few years. But the studios love them because it is cheaper to ship 5-pound USB hard drives than 50-pound 35mm prints to theaters.
So, the MPAA announced about seven or eight years ago that they were going to start making a lot of 3D films, meaning theaters had to install digital projectors capable of playing them. For the first few years, until approximately 2007, most theaters only had one or two digital projectors, so 3D films were only released at a rate of one every four to six months. The rest of the time, those few digital projectors showed 2D movies. Once it was clear that audiences would actually pay for 3D, the MPAA started ramping up production and speeding up the release cycle to force theaters to convert more and more auditoriums to digital. Today, there are always at least two or three different 3D movies in wide release at a time. So if the theaters near you don't have very many digital screens, most of them will be taken up by 3D films most of the time. I'm sure this is the source of your misconception--a higher percentage of digital showtimes were 2D in the early days of digital, so it's perfectly reasonable to guess that 2D digital is being displaced by the 3D fad. But the phenomenon is really nothing more than an accidental side-effect of theaters trying to stay a step ahead of audience and studio demand for 3D.
In ten years or so, digital will be dominant enough that studios will be able to stop 35mm distribution entirely. No longer needing 3D to be a Trojan horse for cheap digital distribution, the fad will simply die down with no fanfare or public explanation, and you'll have your ubiquitous digital 2D. But make no mistake--if not for the 3D push, digital projectors would be a novelty item, only in huge, popular multiplexes in NYC and LA, and even there only on one or two screens.
"Selling you ROMs" and "a license to use them" are mutually exclusive. You don't need a license to use your own property. You're either being sold a ROM that becomes your property (in which case you can use it however you like) OR you're being sold a license to access a ROM that remains the licensor's property (in which case you can use it in the ways permitted by the terms of the license).
Hopefully I'm just being pessimistic.
I hereby present you with the Best Thing Said On The Internet Today award for 8-25-2011.
It used to be that, in the past, magazines and newspapers and other "common-man" publications would have essays about heady topics.
Yes, very very rarely. Just like today.
Now you just get articles about how to get rich quick, how some superstar or politician has done something, or some other essentially mundane topic.
Just as it's always been--we only remember the occasional exceptions because they're the only things worth remembering.
Even the "debates" on economics, social norms, climate change, or intellectual property are very sparse on respectful discourse and are instead filled with emotional responses.
Andrew Jackson. Aaron Burr. Adolph Hitler. Eisenhower-Stephenson. McCarthy. As bad as it is now--and it is pretty bad--it was ten times worse in antebellum America, and even that was a dramatic improvement over any previous civilization in the history of the world.
Regarding nostalgia, don't forget the test-of-time effect. We think Victorian literature, 1930s movies, Ancient Greek philosophy, etc. are superior to today's because only the worthwhile stuff stuck around. There was a Michael Bay in early Hollywood. There was a Danielle Steele in 1880s London. There was a Glenn Beck in 1790s Philadelphia. We just don't republish them any more.
Normally, I would ignore anyone who didn't realize that a comment modded +5 Funny was in fact a joke, not intended as a literally true statement. But first, you're wrong in interesting ways. I mean that as a compliment--people who are right or wrong in uninteresting ways are so boring as to be de facto nonentities, and people who are right in interesting ways are exceedingly rare. Second, you express yourself coherently. I therefore deem you to be worth talking to.
Let's deconstruct my joke. In actual fact, France's influence is larger but declining, while Twitbook's is smaller but increasing. Claiming, facetiously, that those trends have gone so far that the situation has reversed emphasizes the trends themselves. It's a statement which is literally false, but in a way that highlights something true. That's something I (and apparently several people with mod points) find funny.
But we do actually disagree--you think I was overstating the influence of social networking, but I was actually understating the influence of France. Social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are a much bigger deal than you claim they are. Point by point:
There has been much discussion, including here on Slashdot, about the effect cable television and the internet are having on people's political views. We can, more and more easily, choose to avoid exposure to differing viewpoints. This positive feedback loop seems to be leading us to hold more and more strongly to more and more extreme positions. I'd call that an alteration of our values. Social networking is not the driving force of that change, but it's certainly a factor.
Just as widely discussed is the rapid, universal devaluation of privacy--primarily and directly due to social networking. Whether that's a good or bad thing is far from clear, but it's definitely a big thing.
The big new thing that Facebook does is that we no longer have to consciously choose to keep in touch with casual friends--we have to consciously choose not to. I'm Facebook-friends with dozens of people I went to high school or college with but haven't seen since graduation, former coworkers, siblings of friends, etc. These continuing relationships are not a big part of my day to day life, but any of them could be rekindled--if we move to the same city, or one of us posts about a common interest we didn't know we shared. That's something that was never possible before, even with earlier social networking sites. Nothing before Facebook had a large enough userbase to have that effect.
You can break all forms of communication down into four categories: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. A conversation in person, or a personal letter, is one-to-one. The written (published) word (or television or pretty much any form of artistic expression) is one-to-many. Democracy is a kind of many-to-one communication, as is survey-based research. But many-to-many communication never existed before the internet, and you could almost use it as the primary distinguishing characteristic of social networking. Social networking is the subset of internet activity that is not just a faster version of traditional one-to-one or one-to-many communication. The major breakthroughs of the other three categories are language, democracy, and the printing press--it's an understatement to call them world-changers. We may not know yet HOW many-to-many communication will change the world, but there's no doubt that it's going to. Check out the last three paragraphs of this speech by Douglas Adams for a somewhat more in-depth discussion of this idea.
Twitter is drastically different from anything else that exists on- or offline, including other social networks. All o
...that Twitter and Facebook have more influence on global culture than it does.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Wow, that was hilarious, thanks for posting it. I feel for the guy--orchestral trombone parts (I'm a trombonist) are all like that.
Yes, Heeding The Call takes its entire melody, and even most of its chord progression, directly from Canon in D--and yet they sound so different that a non-musician wouldn't notice that they had anything in common at all. That's how small a part melody plays in music. And that tiny fragment of common ground--melody--is the ONLY part of the chess music that is generated algorithmically from the game descriptions. The rest--the vast majority--comes from Stokes' imagination.
There's certainly nothing wrong with seeding the creative process with outside information, as I described it. Bach himself used to ask people to hit a few random keys on his harpsichord, then improvise fugues based on the themes they came up with. Whole subgenres of mid-20th century experimental music are built on similar ideas. But that's all this is, just another particular source of outside inspiration, not a new development in (or even an example of!) algorithmic composition.