"Truth" IS memory. In any way in which it claims to be useful, it is always retrospective and representational. You can make the claim that the causal nexus, as it plays out (i.e. materiality and event before perception) is truth, and I'd agree with you. But I'd also argue that such truth has no practical use since it can't be stored in any way (including in human memory), and even its observation is "lossy" from any perspective, with any tool.
Anything that is conventionally called "truth" is a) historical already (has already occurred and been perceived) and b) representative/reproductive. This goes for photos, text, speeches, memory recall, personal anecdotes... whatever.
Of course, abstract truths are another matter, but as abstractions, one can argue that they are already infinitely perspective-bound and lexically bound, both in linguistic terms and in the larger sense of "shema-lexicality."
It's a good idea, but with a flaw: what's to prove that the supplied "original" is original and unretouched? The identical problem still remains. And even if you pass legislation requiring DRM-signed forensically-controlled cameras so that an "original capture" can be verified at the hardware level, you still have questions: Was a hardware (i.e. lens-mounted) effects filter used? Props? Artificial lighting? Poses?
You're still trying to get at "truth," when all you can ever get in any reproduction of any scene in any format is the perspective (and intent!) of whomever created the reproduction, and/or the tools to make it.
No, I am not saying that this is journalistically ethical, but what I am saying is that your drawing the line as being between "truth" and lies is unhelpful and does a disservice to the public because it reifies the misconception that any photos that aren't pulled are the "real" and "truthful" ones, which they're simply not. A critical eye is, in my opinion, always warranted.
You can take two positions with respect to photography that I will personally agree with:
(1) All images (photos included) are lies. They fall on a spectrum of untruth, yes, from little lies that we can accept to big lies that we probably shouldn't countenance, and intentions while telling those lies vary, but they are ALL lies and must be regarded and examined critically in each case.
or
(2) All images (photos included) are truths. They fall on a spectrum of truth, yes, from "true in the broadest sense possible" to "true in the narrowest possible sense achievable," but they are ALL truths if you look long and hard enough to find the truth in them.
But to attempt to classify images of any kind (photos included) into absolute "truths" and "lies" and to try to draw that line for the public at large is merely to exercise your biases while claiming a transcendence of the limitations of knowledge, perception, context, and representation.
Your trust is misplaced if you are placing it in photos.
You'd be shocked at how often non-photographers see a print of something I shot and say "Wow, that's really interesting, where did you take that?" or "Wow, that's a great shot, wish I'd seen that in person!" only to hear me say, "Um, you were standing right next to me watching me take it an hour ago."
I suspect nearly every photographer has had the same experience a dozen dozen times over.
These photos then go on to document things for people that weren't there. They're absolutely real, or they're absolutely fake... your choice... but don't give them any more or less weight than any other set of photographs.
No. Like about half a dozen others, you miss the point. If I "photoshop" a gun into someone's hand, that's clearly not "real." But saying so also doesn't make any other photo "real."
There is no such thing as a "real" photo. Even in the film days you could shoot in spring and make it look like fall or shoot in day and make it look like night just by using the right film and camera settings. As a working photographer, I can tell you that EVERY SINGLE PHOTO that the public consumes, from any source, has been edited in some way, and that at least some percentage of people will also say that EVERY SINGLE PHOTO does not accurately represent a scene.
The point of my original post is this: yes, this photo is clearly a fake. But unless you realize that they are ALL fakes (or at least not "real" in the sense that too many people think they are) then you are already duped, so there is no reason to be upset about this one in particular.
Even with the most basic "normal" 50mm lens and a manual film camera, just stepping forward by two feet can turn a packed pressroom observing said handshake at podium into an intimate moment where only two people appear to be present. Changing the aperture to soften the background can also turn that intimate moment from a formal one in front of the "blue curtain" into an apparently informal moment in some undisclosed place. People would swear that the photo had no relation to the original scene if they'd been there. And all of that from stepping a foot or two forward.
Either there is no truth in any photo or there is an element of truth in all photos. But to claim that some photos are "true" and others are "not" is to be very, very naive (or at least very, very unaware of one's own biases).
My point still holds (and is meant to include film). Witness the differences in "reality" posed by shooting in Fuji Velvia 50, AGFA Ultra 50, and Tri-X 400... None of which most people would call very "real" if they saw the original scene!
As I said in another reply, I'm not arguing that this image is "true" -- far from it. What I AM saying is that to hold this image up as "false" IN COMPARISON to some other imaginary set of "true" images is to be hopelessly naive and uncritical about the images that one sees every day and that permeate our culture -- 0% of which are "unedited."
I'm not arguing at all that the image in question is "true." I'm just arguing that holding it up as false IN COMPARISON to some other set of "true" images is just as naive as believing that this image is "true."
See my other post (in reply to another reply) about digital sensors picking up stars in broad daylight. That's definitely not the way a human sees the scene... but the data is there. To throw it away upon conversion to JPEG is as big a "lie" as to bring it out and preserve it. Both are lies and that can be the case because cameras and lenses are NOT HUMAN EYES and never will be, and even if they were, NO TWO HUMANS SHARE THE SAME EYES, or the same optical neural components.
Truth IS propaganda, just ask any crowd of 20 people from different backgrounds witnessing the same crime. They will each have truth, and most of these truths will vary.
Even the word "truth" is propaganda. Truth is shorthand for "my perception and subsequent interpretation instead of yours."
Yes, but now things are very different. Sensor data is not subject to ANY limitations and is not by nature AT ALL a visual medium. Thus everything must be decided.
Most modern image processors include things like tone mapping and white balance. When developing from RAW, I can make the same image look like a boring stone bench on a sunny day or an ancient, craggy stone bench on a stormy night just by selecting different tone map and white balance settings. Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them. But if you map the blue tones at the top of the data curve across a much wider space, suddenly there they are -- in a deep blue, detailed sky -- even though you shot on a clear summer's day. The point is that those stars aren't fake, or exaggerated in any absolute sense. They're THERE and the sensor saw them. The only question is how that data is mapped to human visual space. I as the photographer have to choose.
Very often of course the intent is to get the photo as close to "my memory of the scene" as possible, which means trying to discard data beyond human perception without a camera. But is it really philosophically any "more real" to discard data than to map across to human visual characteristics in such a way as to be perceptible? But you'd be shocked in a group of photographers processing RAW images of the same scene just how much "memory" can vary.
These days pros shoot digital. I am a pro, I shoot digital. Somehow people have this impression that only what comes "out of the camera" is "real," but a digital photo is just an A-D conversion with a given set of parameters. I can significantly change the look of a scene just by changing the settings of the camera.
More to the point, I often shoot RAW, which REQUIRES "development" in order to be shown online or printed, since as a file it's just an uncalibrated sensor dump, meaningless data, not an image at all. But the look of a RAW image can change DRASTICALLY when converted to JPG based on the choices I make when selecting things like white balance, exposure, sharpness, contrast, etc. (and these have to be manually selected--i.e. the choices must be made by me in order to get an image file out the other end, there is no "real" initial image).
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit). Photoshop/GIMP/Silkypix/any other image processor is no different, and represents just an extension of the photography/development process.
If a JPEG image comes out of the camera with very low contrast, why is that the "real" scene and not an incorrect camera setting (contrast turned too low)? And if I then take a low contrast image in GIMP and adjust the contrast for better clarity, why is that a "fake" scene and not the "real" scene that I saw?
The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward. Only people forget that digital cameras are just glorified A-D converters and that all of the "auto" settings are calibrated and coded by programmers who are also making decisions about how images will look (high contrast vs. low contrast, expose for shadows vs. expose for highlights, compensate for differences between human lens and camera lens or don't, etc.)
Every step of the photo process, from selecting the camera + lens in the first place all the way to selecting the compression level of the file after all else is said and done, is "editing." All photography is propaganda by the photographer and anyone that doesn't realize this is both naive and missing a great deal of the appreciable "art" involved in the process.
The difference is not in the position, it's in YOU.
As the president of a multinational energy interest, it can safely be assumed that you're educated enough on the science and ecosystem of energy production and consumption to KNOW that global warming is an issue, or you wouldn't have made it that far.
If you began as a regular citizen who thought Gore was a blowhard, you're just a guy with an opinion. But if you reach the energy or policy top of the world and you still think Gore is just a blowhard you're either a) disingenuous or b) idiotic and unfit for the position you hold.
The point: the head of a multinational energy firm is not the same as Joe Blow and any arguments that you can make that are based on such an assumption are doomed to be fallacious.
I bought every Linux game Loki Games ever ported. I still play half of them quite often (under FC5). However, it seems that nobody else did, as they went belly-up and near the end of their life the games were liquidated at EBGames for $5.00/title.
It'll be a while before investors try Linux gaming as a business again, unfortunately.
Maybe some don't need more space, but some of us definitely do. I'm more space constrained than ever.
With a few games, OpenOffice, Firefox, and some graphics editing, my OS and apps basic install is 10-15GB. Add 150+GB for my CD collection (all ripped and encoded myself with lame --r3mix), my books+graphics for them (I've written enough to need 10GB for them) and a few old files, software archive, etc., and I can easily fill up 250+GB with the basics.
Then come the photos, which is half of how I make my living these days. I have what is by current pro standards a smallish 8 megapixel DSLR system. Every time I do a shoot and fill up the card (about 60% of shoots I fill up the card) it's another 8GB of photos. As I process 8GB of RAW files into large TIFF files for my agency, they expand to 15-30GB of data, depending on the images. With a dozen shoots and in-process folders on my drive, I can fill up another 250GB drive easily, and of course since I process panoramas at times and do photo editing work, I need to keep at least 100GB or so open for scratch storage.
I archive to DVD-RAM, 9.4GB per disk, but it's slow to write and I fill the things up like hotcakes. I have 500GB+ of offline storage at this point containing ready-for-press book files, photos, and film I've created myself. I've had to write my own indexing and labeling system for the disks so that I can search for the files I need and easily see the relationships between volumes by looking at the index numbers on their spines.
And I travel a lot so I have to coordinate it all through a laptop with a 100GB hard drive right now, writing all to USB 2.0 devices. I'd kill for a 1TB laptop hard drive. It's just another order of magnitude so that I didn't always have to truck a bunch of external gotta-be-plugged-in USB drives around with me.
I keep thinking I ought to get ahold of one of those ultrabay "2nd hard drive" caddies and run two laptop drives, but not only would that increase power consumption, it would also cut my battery reserve in half, since right now I use a second *battery* in my bay to give me as many hours as possible when I travel (and I travel all the time).
Are you calling me a liar? Or are you calling my family member a liar? I can't quite tell which.
To the people on a walkway that collapses, or stuck in a building that is vibrating to excess, it doesn't matter that the young engineer in question was severely sanctioned afterward. Management was happy to chew them up and spit them out in order to get things done.
Yes, some of the firms involved never, ever got a contract again. I didn't say everyone comes out clean in these things, only that the pressure in public projects often leads to a mentality that says "get it done now and hope nobody sues later." Often, there is liability years down the road. But by then the politician(s) and manager(s) in question have often moved on and/or retired and there is nowhere meaningful for public or institutional outrage to go, other than into repairing/retrofitting the inadequate construction.
I have a relative who is a civil engineer that has done high-profile (space program, public construction, etc.) work for both the public and private sector.
From the sound of things, I'd guess it's not an engineering failure so much as a management failure. The things I know about public construction are scary. Like when an engineer can't finish a design under the schedule that management wants, management steps in after hours, "throws in numbers" and tosses together a design, then sends it out with the engineer's seal on it. Or when an engineer refuses to sign off on an incomplete or incorrect design, the manager brings in a new graduate because they're more "cooperative" (read: will sign anything to get a paycheck) and they go ahead and build it that way.
The cost and political pressure in public engineering projects often leads to engineers being the least powerful people that have input in the design (i.e. ass backward).
NO, you have it backward and that is exactly the point. The Internet is NOT on the wireless provider's property, they are FORCING it onto your property, and you there is nothing that you can do to prevent it. You receive it regardless. You receive the radiation with your head and your tissue and your false teeth whether you want to or not. It is not on THEIR property, they have FORCED IT INTO YOURS.
They cannot then get angry about the interaction that ONE of YOUR pieces of property has with this signal that they force on you (i.e. your PC) any more than they can get angry about the interaction that this signal has with your peaches, your cat, or your glass dinnerware.
THEY HAVE FIRED THE SIGNAL AT YOU, not vice-versa.
The issue is capitalism + technology. Those who own capital can move it inexpensively and at the speed of light to any place in the world, while the labor that capital pays cannot move inexpensively or quickly, if they can move at all. Thus, labor can be made to compete for those jobs, driving wages downward, and enriching capital.
It'll keep happening until an artificial constraint is imposed (as the a previous poster suggested) to make capital less inexpensive or less quick to move.
This is exactly the point that so many "property analogies" miss. If it is in the air I breathe when I am not on your property, then it is mine, period, until the day on which airspace itself becomes private property. Until then, whether you encrypt your signal or not, YOU are FORCING it upon ME even when I am standing across the street. You lose all property rights to it the moment it leaves your property.
For those who use the bike analogy (if I leave my bike in a public place unlocked, does that make it yours?) well, no. But if you toss your bike into my yard, as far as I'm concerned it does. And if you toss your bike into my yard without my permission and six weeks later you come around to collect it after I've already bought a lock and have been riding it to work, I'm going to fight you all the way to say that your tossing the bike into my yard and then forgetting about it for weeks was your express method for disposing of it (i.e. giving it to me without compensation).
If you're going to claim that a signal is your property, you'd better to something to ensure that you're not forcing it upon everyone else OFF of your property. Or to create my own analogy, can I record a record, play it out my window in the direction of your house, and then sue you for piracy since you listened to it without ever buying a copy?
Your post comes off exactly like the stereotype you were complaining about. Hilarious. And being a middle manager in a cube farm is more interesting than running a "crappy" small business? WOW.
He was talking about you, Jones. He was talking about you.
Maintenance? If you can lower the cost of creation enough, it's cheaper to just start from scratch every couple of years. It's the same phenomenon seen in blenders and automobiles. Send it to the landfill and get a new one made.
This phenomenon is only bound to accelerate as software labor costs go through the floor due to offshoring.
I mention Crichton because he's a well-known writer, not because he's a great thinker. The parent to which I was responding complained about the lack of good and interesting writing (IIRC, I'm too lazy at this point to double-check, but that was my impression), and the point is that interesting writing can be interesting either because it's incredibly deep and intellectual, incredibly entertaining, or some combination of both.
But whether the question is about entertaining writing (i.e. name any trashy novelist you want) or incisive and groundbreaking writing (i.e. name any thinker or scientist you want), the point is that the average Joe is not a professional at either.
I spent most of my early undergraduate career working to pay my tuition as an appliance delivery man, riding on trucks to wheel new washers and dryers into apartment buildings and so on. Great guys, but a million miles from deep and completely ungrammatical in every way. They were very happy to accept what (as far as they could see) life gives people: an accidental wife that was a former high-school classmate, some beer, some pizza, things to want to buy as seen in weekly sale mailers, and a sitcom. If you were to track down their myspace pages now (assuming they even had any) I have no doubt that they'd be the most inane, ungrammatical prose about getting laid, liking beer, needing a smoke, and how hard it is to take a proper piss when drunk.
That doesn't mean they aren't nice guys, but the point (and answer to the question is) that if they were Michael Crichton or any other professional or semiprofessional writer (i.e. think: any Salon.com contributor) they could weave layings, beers, smokes, and pissing into at least a light and amusing read, and if they were Einstein or any other professional thinker, they'd intone about what layings, beers, smokes, and pissing say about us all or about the causal nexus or the universe. But either attempt would have given the guys I worked with a severe headache and they'd probably just have ended up punching whomever demanded it--and on that point, I'm positive they'd agree with me (I italicize this in response to others in this thread who call me an elitist).
To expect an average joe to be able to write competently or to write weightily is no different from expecting every Ph.D. to be able to pack a bearing with grease, weld a body panel onto a car, or install and plumb up an icemaker--or to want to.
And no, Michael Crichton is not my favorite writer. In fact, I've never read a single thing he wrote. But he is published and is thus a professional or semiprofessional writer--which is what 99% of myspacers are not.
Slashdot Mirror
"Truth" IS memory. In any way in which it claims to be useful, it is always retrospective and representational. You can make the claim that the causal nexus, as it plays out (i.e. materiality and event before perception) is truth, and I'd agree with you. But I'd also argue that such truth has no practical use since it can't be stored in any way (including in human memory), and even its observation is "lossy" from any perspective, with any tool.
Anything that is conventionally called "truth" is a) historical already (has already occurred and been perceived) and b) representative/reproductive. This goes for photos, text, speeches, memory recall, personal anecdotes... whatever.
Of course, abstract truths are another matter, but as abstractions, one can argue that they are already infinitely perspective-bound and lexically bound, both in linguistic terms and in the larger sense of "shema-lexicality."
It's a good idea, but with a flaw: what's to prove that the supplied "original" is original and unretouched? The identical problem still remains. And even if you pass legislation requiring DRM-signed forensically-controlled cameras so that an "original capture" can be verified at the hardware level, you still have questions: Was a hardware (i.e. lens-mounted) effects filter used? Props? Artificial lighting? Poses?
You're still trying to get at "truth," when all you can ever get in any reproduction of any scene in any format is the perspective (and intent!) of whomever created the reproduction, and/or the tools to make it.
I agree with you on all counts.
No, I am not saying that this is journalistically ethical, but what I am saying is that your drawing the line as being between "truth" and lies is unhelpful and does a disservice to the public because it reifies the misconception that any photos that aren't pulled are the "real" and "truthful" ones, which they're simply not. A critical eye is, in my opinion, always warranted.
You can take two positions with respect to photography that I will personally agree with:
(1) All images (photos included) are lies. They fall on a spectrum of untruth, yes, from little lies that we can accept to big lies that we probably shouldn't countenance, and intentions while telling those lies vary, but they are ALL lies and must be regarded and examined critically in each case.
or
(2) All images (photos included) are truths. They fall on a spectrum of truth, yes, from "true in the broadest sense possible" to "true in the narrowest possible sense achievable," but they are ALL truths if you look long and hard enough to find the truth in them.
But to attempt to classify images of any kind (photos included) into absolute "truths" and "lies" and to try to draw that line for the public at large is merely to exercise your biases while claiming a transcendence of the limitations of knowledge, perception, context, and representation.
Your trust is misplaced if you are placing it in photos.
You'd be shocked at how often non-photographers see a print of something I shot and say "Wow, that's really interesting, where did you take that?" or "Wow, that's a great shot, wish I'd seen that in person!" only to hear me say, "Um, you were standing right next to me watching me take it an hour ago."
I suspect nearly every photographer has had the same experience a dozen dozen times over.
These photos then go on to document things for people that weren't there. They're absolutely real, or they're absolutely fake... your choice... but don't give them any more or less weight than any other set of photographs.
No. Like about half a dozen others, you miss the point. If I "photoshop" a gun into someone's hand, that's clearly not "real." But saying so also doesn't make any other photo "real."
There is no such thing as a "real" photo. Even in the film days you could shoot in spring and make it look like fall or shoot in day and make it look like night just by using the right film and camera settings. As a working photographer, I can tell you that EVERY SINGLE PHOTO that the public consumes, from any source, has been edited in some way, and that at least some percentage of people will also say that EVERY SINGLE PHOTO does not accurately represent a scene.
The point of my original post is this: yes, this photo is clearly a fake. But unless you realize that they are ALL fakes (or at least not "real" in the sense that too many people think they are) then you are already duped, so there is no reason to be upset about this one in particular.
Even with the most basic "normal" 50mm lens and a manual film camera, just stepping forward by two feet can turn a packed pressroom observing said handshake at podium into an intimate moment where only two people appear to be present. Changing the aperture to soften the background can also turn that intimate moment from a formal one in front of the "blue curtain" into an apparently informal moment in some undisclosed place. People would swear that the photo had no relation to the original scene if they'd been there. And all of that from stepping a foot or two forward.
Either there is no truth in any photo or there is an element of truth in all photos. But to claim that some photos are "true" and others are "not" is to be very, very naive (or at least very, very unaware of one's own biases).
My point still holds (and is meant to include film). Witness the differences in "reality" posed by shooting in Fuji Velvia 50, AGFA Ultra 50, and Tri-X 400... None of which most people would call very "real" if they saw the original scene!
As I said in another reply, I'm not arguing that this image is "true" -- far from it. What I AM saying is that to hold this image up as "false" IN COMPARISON to some other imaginary set of "true" images is to be hopelessly naive and uncritical about the images that one sees every day and that permeate our culture -- 0% of which are "unedited."
I'm not arguing at all that the image in question is "true." I'm just arguing that holding it up as false IN COMPARISON to some other set of "true" images is just as naive as believing that this image is "true."
See my other post (in reply to another reply) about digital sensors picking up stars in broad daylight. That's definitely not the way a human sees the scene... but the data is there. To throw it away upon conversion to JPEG is as big a "lie" as to bring it out and preserve it. Both are lies and that can be the case because cameras and lenses are NOT HUMAN EYES and never will be, and even if they were, NO TWO HUMANS SHARE THE SAME EYES, or the same optical neural components.
Truth IS propaganda, just ask any crowd of 20 people from different backgrounds witnessing the same crime. They will each have truth, and most of these truths will vary.
Even the word "truth" is propaganda. Truth is shorthand for "my perception and subsequent interpretation instead of yours."
Yes, but now things are very different. Sensor data is not subject to ANY limitations and is not by nature AT ALL a visual medium. Thus everything must be decided.
Most modern image processors include things like tone mapping and white balance. When developing from RAW, I can make the same image look like a boring stone bench on a sunny day or an ancient, craggy stone bench on a stormy night just by selecting different tone map and white balance settings. Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them. But if you map the blue tones at the top of the data curve across a much wider space, suddenly there they are -- in a deep blue, detailed sky -- even though you shot on a clear summer's day. The point is that those stars aren't fake, or exaggerated in any absolute sense. They're THERE and the sensor saw them. The only question is how that data is mapped to human visual space. I as the photographer have to choose.
Very often of course the intent is to get the photo as close to "my memory of the scene" as possible, which means trying to discard data beyond human perception without a camera. But is it really philosophically any "more real" to discard data than to map across to human visual characteristics in such a way as to be perceptible? But you'd be shocked in a group of photographers processing RAW images of the same scene just how much "memory" can vary.
These days pros shoot digital. I am a pro, I shoot digital. Somehow people have this impression that only what comes "out of the camera" is "real," but a digital photo is just an A-D conversion with a given set of parameters. I can significantly change the look of a scene just by changing the settings of the camera.
More to the point, I often shoot RAW, which REQUIRES "development" in order to be shown online or printed, since as a file it's just an uncalibrated sensor dump, meaningless data, not an image at all. But the look of a RAW image can change DRASTICALLY when converted to JPG based on the choices I make when selecting things like white balance, exposure, sharpness, contrast, etc. (and these have to be manually selected--i.e. the choices must be made by me in order to get an image file out the other end, there is no "real" initial image).
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit). Photoshop/GIMP/Silkypix/any other image processor is no different, and represents just an extension of the photography/development process.
If a JPEG image comes out of the camera with very low contrast, why is that the "real" scene and not an incorrect camera setting (contrast turned too low)? And if I then take a low contrast image in GIMP and adjust the contrast for better clarity, why is that a "fake" scene and not the "real" scene that I saw?
The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward. Only people forget that digital cameras are just glorified A-D converters and that all of the "auto" settings are calibrated and coded by programmers who are also making decisions about how images will look (high contrast vs. low contrast, expose for shadows vs. expose for highlights, compensate for differences between human lens and camera lens or don't, etc.)
Every step of the photo process, from selecting the camera + lens in the first place all the way to selecting the compression level of the file after all else is said and done, is "editing." All photography is propaganda by the photographer and anyone that doesn't realize this is both naive and missing a great deal of the appreciable "art" involved in the process.
The difference is not in the position, it's in YOU.
As the president of a multinational energy interest, it can safely be assumed that you're educated enough on the science and ecosystem of energy production and consumption to KNOW that global warming is an issue, or you wouldn't have made it that far.
If you began as a regular citizen who thought Gore was a blowhard, you're just a guy with an opinion. But if you reach the energy or policy top of the world and you still think Gore is just a blowhard you're either a) disingenuous or b) idiotic and unfit for the position you hold.
The point: the head of a multinational energy firm is not the same as Joe Blow and any arguments that you can make that are based on such an assumption are doomed to be fallacious.
I bought every Linux game Loki Games ever ported. I still play half of them quite often (under FC5). However, it seems that nobody else did, as they went belly-up and near the end of their life the games were liquidated at EBGames for $5.00/title.
It'll be a while before investors try Linux gaming as a business again, unfortunately.
Maybe some don't need more space, but some of us definitely do. I'm more space constrained than ever.
With a few games, OpenOffice, Firefox, and some graphics editing, my OS and apps basic install is 10-15GB. Add 150+GB for my CD collection (all ripped and encoded myself with lame --r3mix), my books+graphics for them (I've written enough to need 10GB for them) and a few old files, software archive, etc., and I can easily fill up 250+GB with the basics.
Then come the photos, which is half of how I make my living these days. I have what is by current pro standards a smallish 8 megapixel DSLR system. Every time I do a shoot and fill up the card (about 60% of shoots I fill up the card) it's another 8GB of photos. As I process 8GB of RAW files into large TIFF files for my agency, they expand to 15-30GB of data, depending on the images. With a dozen shoots and in-process folders on my drive, I can fill up another 250GB drive easily, and of course since I process panoramas at times and do photo editing work, I need to keep at least 100GB or so open for scratch storage.
I archive to DVD-RAM, 9.4GB per disk, but it's slow to write and I fill the things up like hotcakes. I have 500GB+ of offline storage at this point containing ready-for-press book files, photos, and film I've created myself. I've had to write my own indexing and labeling system for the disks so that I can search for the files I need and easily see the relationships between volumes by looking at the index numbers on their spines.
And I travel a lot so I have to coordinate it all through a laptop with a 100GB hard drive right now, writing all to USB 2.0 devices. I'd kill for a 1TB laptop hard drive. It's just another order of magnitude so that I didn't always have to truck a bunch of external gotta-be-plugged-in USB drives around with me.
I keep thinking I ought to get ahold of one of those ultrabay "2nd hard drive" caddies and run two laptop drives, but not only would that increase power consumption, it would also cut my battery reserve in half, since right now I use a second *battery* in my bay to give me as many hours as possible when I travel (and I travel all the time).
Are you calling me a liar? Or are you calling my family member a liar? I can't quite tell which.
To the people on a walkway that collapses, or stuck in a building that is vibrating to excess, it doesn't matter that the young engineer in question was severely sanctioned afterward. Management was happy to chew them up and spit them out in order to get things done.
Yes, some of the firms involved never, ever got a contract again. I didn't say everyone comes out clean in these things, only that the pressure in public projects often leads to a mentality that says "get it done now and hope nobody sues later." Often, there is liability years down the road. But by then the politician(s) and manager(s) in question have often moved on and/or retired and there is nowhere meaningful for public or institutional outrage to go, other than into repairing/retrofitting the inadequate construction.
I have a relative who is a civil engineer that has done high-profile (space program, public construction, etc.) work for both the public and private sector.
From the sound of things, I'd guess it's not an engineering failure so much as a management failure. The things I know about public construction are scary. Like when an engineer can't finish a design under the schedule that management wants, management steps in after hours, "throws in numbers" and tosses together a design, then sends it out with the engineer's seal on it. Or when an engineer refuses to sign off on an incomplete or incorrect design, the manager brings in a new graduate because they're more "cooperative" (read: will sign anything to get a paycheck) and they go ahead and build it that way.
The cost and political pressure in public engineering projects often leads to engineers being the least powerful people that have input in the design (i.e. ass backward).
The most apropos analogy is that it is like shooting a bullet into someone and then getting upset because they have "stolen" your bullet!
NO, you have it backward and that is exactly the point. The Internet is NOT on the wireless provider's property, they are FORCING it onto your property, and you there is nothing that you can do to prevent it. You receive it regardless. You receive the radiation with your head and your tissue and your false teeth whether you want to or not. It is not on THEIR property, they have FORCED IT INTO YOURS.
They cannot then get angry about the interaction that ONE of YOUR pieces of property has with this signal that they force on you (i.e. your PC) any more than they can get angry about the interaction that this signal has with your peaches, your cat, or your glass dinnerware.
THEY HAVE FIRED THE SIGNAL AT YOU, not vice-versa.
The issue is capitalism + technology. Those who own capital can move it inexpensively and at the speed of light to any place in the world, while the labor that capital pays cannot move inexpensively or quickly, if they can move at all. Thus, labor can be made to compete for those jobs, driving wages downward, and enriching capital.
It'll keep happening until an artificial constraint is imposed (as the a previous poster suggested) to make capital less inexpensive or less quick to move.
This is exactly the point that so many "property analogies" miss. If it is in the air I breathe when I am not on your property, then it is mine, period, until the day on which airspace itself becomes private property. Until then, whether you encrypt your signal or not, YOU are FORCING it upon ME even when I am standing across the street. You lose all property rights to it the moment it leaves your property.
For those who use the bike analogy (if I leave my bike in a public place unlocked, does that make it yours?) well, no. But if you toss your bike into my yard, as far as I'm concerned it does. And if you toss your bike into my yard without my permission and six weeks later you come around to collect it after I've already bought a lock and have been riding it to work, I'm going to fight you all the way to say that your tossing the bike into my yard and then forgetting about it for weeks was your express method for disposing of it (i.e. giving it to me without compensation).
If you're going to claim that a signal is your property, you'd better to something to ensure that you're not forcing it upon everyone else OFF of your property. Or to create my own analogy, can I record a record, play it out my window in the direction of your house, and then sue you for piracy since you listened to it without ever buying a copy?
Evolution! Natural Selection! Darwin! Condoms! Abortion! Diplomacy! Secularism! Science! France! Hollywood! Palestine! Environmentalism! Global warming! Nudity!
Hahahahahahaha!
Your post comes off exactly like the stereotype you were complaining about. Hilarious. And being a middle manager in a cube farm is more interesting than running a "crappy" small business? WOW.
He was talking about you, Jones. He was talking about you.
Maintenance? If you can lower the cost of creation enough, it's cheaper to just start from scratch every couple of years. It's the same phenomenon seen in blenders and automobiles. Send it to the landfill and get a new one made.
This phenomenon is only bound to accelerate as software labor costs go through the floor due to offshoring.
I mention Crichton because he's a well-known writer, not because he's a great thinker. The parent to which I was responding complained about the lack of good and interesting writing (IIRC, I'm too lazy at this point to double-check, but that was my impression), and the point is that interesting writing can be interesting either because it's incredibly deep and intellectual, incredibly entertaining, or some combination of both.
But whether the question is about entertaining writing (i.e. name any trashy novelist you want) or incisive and groundbreaking writing (i.e. name any thinker or scientist you want), the point is that the average Joe is not a professional at either.
I spent most of my early undergraduate career working to pay my tuition as an appliance delivery man, riding on trucks to wheel new washers and dryers into apartment buildings and so on. Great guys, but a million miles from deep and completely ungrammatical in every way. They were very happy to accept what (as far as they could see) life gives people: an accidental wife that was a former high-school classmate, some beer, some pizza, things to want to buy as seen in weekly sale mailers, and a sitcom. If you were to track down their myspace pages now (assuming they even had any) I have no doubt that they'd be the most inane, ungrammatical prose about getting laid, liking beer, needing a smoke, and how hard it is to take a proper piss when drunk.
That doesn't mean they aren't nice guys, but the point (and answer to the question is) that if they were Michael Crichton or any other professional or semiprofessional writer (i.e. think: any Salon.com contributor) they could weave layings, beers, smokes, and pissing into at least a light and amusing read, and if they were Einstein or any other professional thinker, they'd intone about what layings, beers, smokes, and pissing say about us all or about the causal nexus or the universe. But either attempt would have given the guys I worked with a severe headache and they'd probably just have ended up punching whomever demanded it--and on that point, I'm positive they'd agree with me (I italicize this in response to others in this thread who call me an elitist).
To expect an average joe to be able to write competently or to write weightily is no different from expecting every Ph.D. to be able to pack a bearing with grease, weld a body panel onto a car, or install and plumb up an icemaker--or to want to.
And no, Michael Crichton is not my favorite writer. In fact, I've never read a single thing he wrote. But he is published and is thus a professional or semiprofessional writer--which is what 99% of myspacers are not.