Of course they care about privacy. They just care about buying power a great deal more.
1) Customers want low prices from the companies with whom they do business. They vote with their feet and dollars by going to the companies who have the lowest prices--subsidized by the sale of customers' private information.
2) Customers want high wages (and thus, by extrapolation, maximum profitability) from their own company. They won't put pressure management not to exploit customers' private information because it would lead to a net loss in revenue.
Thus, the American public votes continuously, day in and day out, that they'd rather have bigger buying power (higher wages, lower prices) than protect their privacy.
The same calculation regrettably applies to protecting the environment, supporting fair labor practices, or having access to quality (read: long lasting) goods.
I'm working on a masters' thesis right now and have just used Word XP in Red Hat 9 for nearly seven hours straight, with styles, tables, graphics, footnotes, etc.
Two days ago, I spent nearly 12 hours straight in Word XP working on a complex document, with revision marks, for use in a publication.
1) I don't find it to be slower than in its native environment (PIII-900, 512MB RAM) 2) It has not crashed on me since I installed it several months ago (neither has Photoshop 6)
I am a former "wine hater" who was never able to get it to do anything useful. It turns out that a large part of making Windows applications work properly in wine is managing the registry and which libraries will be native/non-native for each application.
This is Crossover's value-add to wine: it takes care of all of the wine details for you, so that you don't have to be a wine coder with all of the detailed Windows.DLL and registry knowledge that implies, just to make Windows applications work.
I have to use MS Office XP for my work in print media and publishing. I also need Photoshop from time to time, though with GIMP 2.0 this need is greatly reduced.
MS Office XP, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Windows Media Player all work perfectly under Crossover with Wine. I will never have to use Win4Lin or VMWare again or cope with a full Windows desktop again!
Now that I have seen wine actually work, and work brilliantly, I believe in it to a much greater degree.
A real documentary is supposed to DOCUMENT something. In fact, here's the definition from dictionary.com:
Ummm, that's complete naivete.
Before you speak a single word, simply by choosing what it is you will document, you have already chosen a bias.
Simply to choose to document the plight of poor people in the south, before you ever speak a word or provide any evidence, is to choose to accuse the government and/or corporate America of oppressing someone.
-or- to be more -topical-
Simply to choose to document prison abuse in Iraq, before you ever speak a single word or provide any evidence, is to choose to accuse the military-industrial complex.
Simply to choose to document soldiers working hard in Iraq while omitting prison abuse, before you ever speak a single word or provide any evidence, is to choose to exonerate the military-industrial complex.
Simply to choose to present both soldiers working in Iraq and prison abuse as a subset of those soldiers, but not as representative of all of them, is to choose to make a statement about the size of the prison abuse problem relative to the rest of the military, even at the banal minutes-of-footage-dedicated-to-either level.
Anything you document shows your own bias about what you think is important. And the way you document it, how matter how "objective" you claim to be, shows your own bias about why you think it is important.
Michael Moore seems "objective" to people unclear on the concept simply because they agree with his "what" and his "why." By the same token, Sean Hannity seems "objective" to people unclear on the concept simply because they agree with his "what" and his "why."
Any news that seems "objective" seems objective to you only because you agree with what they have decided to cover and why they have covered it. In other words, your subjective frame of reference matches theirs... So you don't see any bias; you believe both sides of the issue have had a "fair shake" because it's exactly the same "shake" you would have given each side.
But that doesn't make your particular view any more or less "objective" than anyone else's.
Get back in your room and put your tinfoil hat back on. Sell your crazy somewhere else, we're all full up....
The poster is quite correct, actually. Mercury fillings are linked in more than just anecdotes to a number of potential problems, though evidence is far from exhaustive.
However, one thing has been demonstrated repeatedly: in cadavers, when amalgam fillings are extracted and tested, only a fraction of the original mercury content remains, variable directly with the age of the filling. This means one thing: mercury from your amalgam fillings is leeching into you as you eat, drink, or potentially even breathe.
Mercury poisioning is not an imaginary malady, by any stretch of the imagination; ask any dentist about the precautions required for handling mercury as the amalgam is prepared... the precautions are extensive. Yet they will happily insert this substance immediately into your mouth.
My own dentist will admit openly that the amalgam filling is probably dangerous in the long term and is happy to use porcelain instead; he says he uses the amalgam because customers usually prefer it... it's less expensive and lasts longer.
Um, except that when you were buying OS X for your Beige or Blue-and-White hardware, Apple would tell you it was "Supported. Absolutely!"
Would IBM do that? If so, then they're both in the wrong. Supported is supported. If your new OS isn't going to support onboard SCSI, onboard video, onboard floppy, or the hard drive and/or CD-ROM drive that shipped with the unit (as was the case with my Beige G3 and OS X), then you should tell the user that that's the case, rather than selling them a useless piece of software.
There are no [yale.edu] shortage [duke.edu] of [nd.edu] top [ox.ac.uk] universities [uchicago.edu] that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
As someone studying at one of these top universities who has some familiarity with the Divinity school, I am going to humbly suggest that you might be surprised at the percentage of divinity students who are (gasp!) atheists.
To study religion is not the same thing as to want to be employed by it. The bulk of religion scholars want to be academics, not clergy, and they tend to study things like violence and religion, exploitation and religion, nationalism and religion, war and religion, mental illness and religion, history of religious conflict...
So yes, it's the study of religion at a top university, but by no means does this mean that all of these people hope someday to be pope.
How are they "forcing their dull lives down our throats" exactly? I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head, making you visit and read LiveJournal every day. Just because a blog is not chok full of technical details about project-x-gnu-1.16b.tar.gz doesn't mean that it's worthless to everyone, even if it is worthless to you.
I have several friends who post on LiveJournal and I enjoy their blogs very much. In fact, some of the randomSubject() posts have been so insightful that I feel as though I've learned a thing or two about life from them. No, I don't read every day, nor do I have time to do so, but I appreciate their being willing to share a little of themselves with those who are interested (i.e. their friends).
I also keep a blog, though it isn't at LiveJournal. But at LiveJournal or not, I'm not forcing it down your throat any more than anyone else. Why do I keep a blog? Well, it started out as a way to rant online about a girlfriend who dumped me many years ago now. This was before "blogs" were a genre and it was basically an HTML page that I'd edit every couple of days. Why should anyone care? They shouldn't. But I did; it was an avenue of self expression.
As time went by, I realized that it was helpful to me to be able to go back and read my own "entries" and see what I was doing on a given day, what I was thinking, how I was feeling... You forget things about yourself as the months and years pass, and it's more helpful than you'd imagine to be able to re-visit where you've been, without blinders or rose-colored glasses on.
So now I keep a blog proper and I make entries fairly regularly. It's a kind of diary that I can access, read from, and write to, in any part of the world, without having to carry a book and a pen with me and without having to worry whether or not the book will get stolen or soaked in coffee, or...
And yes, my friends read my blog as well, and it turns out to be a nice forum for interpersonal communication when a phone call doesn't seem lightweight enough.
I take the subway all the time with my 4GB microdrive-based player (Creative Muvo) and I keep it in my front trousers pocket as I walk about the city. The damn thing has been dropped a few times (because it's so light and small it's easy to lose track of it physically). I've had no trouble, the filesystem is intact, there's no trace of unwanted head noise (i.e. click-clickety-click) or worn bearings whine. At some point I wonder if the platters and heads are so tiny and light that the physics are more forgiving to motion of all but the most extreme kinds... of course the hard drives in the iPod and iPod mini are of different sizes, so I'd expect the full-size iPods to suffer more stress.
There was a smattering of trouble with earlier CF microdrives, but considering the fact that most of the 1GB microdrives were used by pro digital photographers in intense environments (warzones, sports venues, etc.) and are still in use today, I'd say that microdrives aren't nearly as susceptible to trouble as some would think.
In America, smart kids are not cool. In fact, they are liable to get beat up. In many cases, the smart kids who continue to study hard do so only because they're too small to play football or basketball or don't have musical talent enough to play in a rock band. How does this kind of mentality arise?
The powers that shape our culture (media, advertising, big business) have a vested interest in making sure that the citizenry are a bunch of uncritical consumers -- people who will ultimately buy the goods that the market pushes. Since non-artisan, commodity goods are the easiest to produce in volume (and thus the best engines of capital), it is these, along with a general consumer lifestyle, that are marketed heavily (glorified, if you will) in portrayals, analyses of and references to our culture that bombard us every day: movies, music, television news, magazines, etc., both content and explcit "advertisement" formats.
It is in not the interest of capital and its engines to produce scientists, thinkers, or other critical consumers who will only do "research" that is not profitable in the short term.
It is in the interest of capital and its engines to produce uncritical drones who will work in the same product mills that they also support with their earnings, never noticing that a continuous percentage of their time and labor (cleverly disguised as "profit margins" by these product mills) are skimmed off the top by the ultra-wealthy.
If it's been a while since you tried Linux, try it again. Fedora (Red Hat), Mandrake, and S.u.S.E. have all made huge strides in the last 18 months in usability. I've handed off Fedora CDs to complete Windows-heads and they've been able to install it without any trouble, essentially by booting from CD and clicking "Next" over and over again until they're looking at a Linux desktop that is now easier than ever to use.
Everything is drag-and-drop these days, printers and sound and networks and all that stuff are configured using graphical tools with really easy defaults and nice hints/help not unlike the Windows control panel, software can be installed just by inserting a CD and double-clicking, etc. CD burning is as easy as dragging and dropping files as well.
If the big-name applications you're missing happen to be MS Office or Photoshop, you can now run these Windows applications flawlessly in Linux using Crossover Office, which is very inexpensive and easy to use: insert CD, double-click to install crossover. Then, insert your MS Office or Photoshop CD and run the installer; they'll install just as they would in Windows and will put icons in your start menu, etc. Even things like Windows Media player and Canon's RAW converter for SLR digital cameras work in Linux now when you have crossover installed.
Really, the Linux desktop today is a completely different place than it was even two years ago. The strides have been amazing. I have my mother using Linux, and if this self-proclaimed "scatterbrained little old lady" can use MS Office and Mozilla on Linux for all her needs, then so can most people.
My gimp seems to save the positions of windows that I have open. Close a few, then exit, then restart and see if they're all there. When I start gimp, I only have the main (i.e. tool) dialog. If I need the layers/channels, the tool options, etc., I open them.
Different strokes for different folks. At least ONE person (me) likes the concept that I can have four images open and work on them all simultaneously, because clicking in any one of them opens a menu that acts on that window.
And just to tweak the nose of a few people here even further, I like to compound the GIMP's "many open windows" interface with focus-follows-mouse, which allows me to be MUCH more productive in GIMP (you should see me race my mouse around the screen) than in Photoshop, especially when doing complex manipulations.
I do still have to use Photoshop, though, because:
1) GIMP's unsharp mask can only go down to radius 1.0. 2) GIMP has no 16-bit and no Adobe RGB support.
But other than these two things, I far and away prefer GIMP to Photoshop.
My Chinese father has lived in the west for decades; this hasn't changed his opinions about authority and respect. I can attest to the fact that Chinese culture is a patriarchal culture of not questioning.
There are clear lines of authority in Chinese culture, and to attempt to question these is to dishonor not your family (perhaps by extension), not your nation, but yourself.
There is nothing more shameful in Chinese culture than questioning the wisdom of elders. Elders are not only generational (i.e. grandfather -> father -> son) but also hierarchical (national government -> local government -> individual). To question authority is to show that you have no regard for your family, your citizenship, your fellow man... it is to show, in some sense, that you are a kind of sociopath.
Even in the west, even disagreeing with government policies in democratic nations, my father feels that it is embarrassing and dishonorable to complain too loudly about what government does, because government is, after all, government--the embodiment of the collective. Activism, for him, is certainly sociopathic behavior of the most base kind, disrespectful to fellow citizens.
I wholeheartedly disagree. In some cases, representation or narration may be the mechanism by which art functions, but it is certainly not the purpose of art. Otherwise, art would be a science, and simple one to master, too.
The fact that out of hundreds of millions of representations there is only one Mona Lisa or Nefratete proves my point rather nicely.
Consumer/producer are not roles intrinsic to human being. Capitalism has made you so blind that you're unwilling to see a person as a person who will express his or her life by doing things (i.e. holding a DVD, inserting it into a Linux box, clicking on play), not by playing roles (i.e. "Oh! This Linux player is illegal! Since I am a consumer, I won't watch the film that I hold and own, because as they have explained to me, I somehow don't really hold and own it even though I can see it in my hand right now and have paid for it just a little bit earlier; as a mere consumer and not a producer like them, I certainly must believe what I am told! This film is not here, nor is my Linux DVD player!")
The purpose of art is not representation or narration. The purpose of art is to call into being, and then to show you, something outside of historical, empirical, or scientific fact that has not been seen before. I do not use the word 'seen' in the visual sense (and nor is art necessarily auditory, or tactile, etc., either), but 'seen' in the conceptual sense. Art is about showing you something new, something that history, science, or empiricism can't show you. Art is like an ever-growing canon of conceptual poetics that is meant to be encountered and contextualized, and will therefore enrich the body of your schema; it is not there to be understood as mundanely representative or interpretive.
You have just implied that you only have an interest in being shown things that can be grounded in historical, scientific, or empirical fact or in some kind of narrative or interpretive perspective. Thus, you do not like 'art' anyway, so naturally you won't any subset of works of art that others can name. But don't try to take 'art' away from everyone else, simply because you're too narrow-minded to enjoy it. Indeed, western society funds art because the bulk of the populace have decided that it is something that they value; I doubt this will change anytime soon.
This is not a car, with a physical presence that can destroy property and life. It doesn't need to be regulated on safety grounds.
This is information, which can be replicated and accessed to enrich life at virtually no cost.
It's not information about weapons systems or international spies, so there is also no security issue or danger to society from its spread or any inherent need to control it.
The grounds upon which this information is being regulated aren't even purely "must make profit" grounds, since buying a DVD makes a profit for the movie industry and the bulk of movies are profitable based on theatre and DVD sales alone.
It's simply about control. The MPAA does not want to lose the ability to charge you MORE, LATER, AT WILL... by imposing a fee structure for the player... for the software to look at it... for the transmission of it... or, if they decide they really need a profit bump, by rescinding any licenses to current media and players, releasing some "new" technology and forcing you to buy new media and new licenses to play/see/transmit it all over again, effectively enabling them to charge at will for content that you have already paid for innumerable times, if you want to continue to watch it.
Perhaps in some peoples' moral universes this is "right" and "fair" and the MPAA should be able to do this if they want to and if you don't like it then stop paying for it (even though you've already shelled out $20 for the VHS tape, $10 in IP/trademark license for the VHS technology to play it, $30 for the Laserdisc, $10 for the IP/trademark license for the Laserdisc technology to play it, $35 for the DVD, $10 for the IP/trademark license for the DVD player technology to play it...) and simply give up access to the content, because that's the "right" thing to do.
But I'm telling you that the general public is nowhere near that subtle. The reality of the situation is that if someone holds a VHS or a DVD in their hand and they bought it, they're gonna have no qualms about trying to find whatever they can, hardware or software, at a flea market, at a download site, whatever, to play the film that they "OWN." Trying to explain to them that they a) don't own the technology in the player that they just bought and b) they don't own the DVD that they want to play anyway, so you can't watch the DVD that you're holding under condition x or with player y... is going to be like trying to make water flow uphill.
It goes against all natural sense and logic. It's about as artificial a construct as you can find in the marketplace.
From the page: Linspire DVD Player is compatible with Linspire 4.5 and higher. And from a page linked from that page: Note: Linspire DVD player requires Lindspire 4.5 or higher.
I don't use Linspire. I use Linux. There is no mention of support for Linux, just endless mention of Linspire.
Before anyone says "but it'll probably work with other Linuxes as well," remember that that defeats the entire point of the argument... alicensed player for Linux... This player is clearly not for Linux (i.e. the set of operating systems collectively known as), and I don't have any evidence without buying the product that the EULA even allows me to run it on anything other than Linspire.
So I don't think this link or product particularly alters my reaction to the article, which was to applaud the student (even if he was a bit ham-handed) and to want to vomit on Valenti.
I primarily use Linux, and with sane package maintenance/upgrades, etc. I only usually install once every few years, generally to get new features. Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. all get installed by the distro these days, so last time the first things I installed were a set of older tools to get at older files and then some commercial software:
- The Andrew User Interface System (for ez) - WordPerfect 8 for Linux - xv - Crossover Office - Loki games - Oh, and a custom kernel
I reinstall XP on my Windows partition pretty much every time I need to use Windows; it's the only way to keep the damn thing working properly. So then, the list goes:
- Reinstall XP - Install whatever program I was planning on using
A day or two using XP and IE and the thing is already full of spyware and things are beginning to break (in the XP install that I did last week, Windows Media Player will no longer start, for example).
Re:Oddly, there is still a delay difference
on
Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Each of these cameras has a shutter lag of 40-100ms. For most people, it won't be perceptible at all.
What may have happened to these shooters is the Canon shutter "bug" that many sports pros complained about: the 1D lag varies randomly between 70ms and 80ms (10ms of variability), which may mean difficulty getting the timing right for pros who shoot high-action photography and need to be able to anticipate the exact moment to press the shutter. To my knowledge, the forthcoming 1DII is supposed to reduce this variance to +/- 1ms.
Most people who are complaining about digital shutter lag are complaining about delays of a full second or more between pressing the button and taking a shot and the inability of consumer cameras to take a second shot until the image is fully written to the storage card... They aren't usually complaining about a delay on the order of 80 milliseconds.
The closest thing to what you're looking for is the Olympus E-10, which is smaller than the Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Kodak bodies and can be had right now for $500 or so on the used marketplace. It is 4mp, TTL optical viewfinder, 35-150mm equiv. f2.0-2.4 lens with mechanically linked zoom. Sensor on the E-10/20 (unlike the other SLR cameras mentioned above) is 2/3" so noise can become an issue in low-light situations... but the dynamic range of the camera is excellent, easily better than the Canon D30/D60/10D or the Nikon D70/D100.
The E-10 and E-20 from Olympus were both unique digital SLR cameras in that they were built like an SLR (i.e. optical TTL viewfinder, mechanical zoom, excellent f2.0 optics, zero shutter lag, full manual control as well as aperture/shutter/program priority controls on camera body, not in some menu system), but the lens was fixed and the prism layout allowed for real-time LCD preview (to my knowledge, the only digital SLRs ever to do this).
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Of course they care about privacy. They just care about buying power a great deal more.
1) Customers want low prices from the companies with whom they do business. They vote with their feet and dollars by going to the companies who have the lowest prices--subsidized by the sale of customers' private information.
2) Customers want high wages (and thus, by extrapolation, maximum profitability) from their own company. They won't put pressure management not to exploit customers' private information because it would lead to a net loss in revenue.
Thus, the American public votes continuously, day in and day out, that they'd rather have bigger buying power (higher wages, lower prices) than protect their privacy.
The same calculation regrettably applies to protecting the environment, supporting fair labor practices, or having access to quality (read: long lasting) goods.
I'm working on a masters' thesis right now and have just used Word XP in Red Hat 9 for nearly seven hours straight, with styles, tables, graphics, footnotes, etc.
Two days ago, I spent nearly 12 hours straight in Word XP working on a complex document, with revision marks, for use in a publication.
1) I don't find it to be slower than in its native environment (PIII-900, 512MB RAM)
2) It has not crashed on me since I installed it several months ago (neither has Photoshop 6)
I'm sorry you haven't had the same experience!
I am a former "wine hater" who was never able to get it to do anything useful. It turns out that a large part of making Windows applications work properly in wine is managing the registry and which libraries will be native/non-native for each application.
.DLL and registry knowledge that implies, just to make Windows applications work.
This is Crossover's value-add to wine: it takes care of all of the wine details for you, so that you don't have to be a wine coder with all of the detailed Windows
I have to use MS Office XP for my work in print media and publishing. I also need Photoshop from time to time, though with GIMP 2.0 this need is greatly reduced.
MS Office XP, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Windows Media Player all work perfectly under Crossover with Wine. I will never have to use Win4Lin or VMWare again or cope with a full Windows desktop again!
Now that I have seen wine actually work, and work brilliantly, I believe in it to a much greater degree.
A real documentary is supposed to DOCUMENT something. In fact, here's the definition from dictionary.com:
Ummm, that's complete naivete.
Before you speak a single word, simply by choosing what it is you will document, you have already chosen a bias.
Simply to choose to document the plight of poor people in the south, before you ever speak a word or provide any evidence, is to choose to accuse the government and/or corporate America of oppressing someone.
-or- to be more -topical-
Simply to choose to document prison abuse in Iraq, before you ever speak a single word or provide any evidence, is to choose to accuse the military-industrial complex.
Simply to choose to document soldiers working hard in Iraq while omitting prison abuse, before you ever speak a single word or provide any evidence, is to choose to exonerate the military-industrial complex.
Simply to choose to present both soldiers working in Iraq and prison abuse as a subset of those soldiers, but not as representative of all of them, is to choose to make a statement about the size of the prison abuse problem relative to the rest of the military, even at the banal minutes-of-footage-dedicated-to-either level.
Anything you document shows your own bias about what you think is important. And the way you document it, how matter how "objective" you claim to be, shows your own bias about why you think it is important.
Michael Moore seems "objective" to people unclear on the concept simply because they agree with his "what" and his "why." By the same token, Sean Hannity seems "objective" to people unclear on the concept simply because they agree with his "what" and his "why."
Any news that seems "objective" seems objective to you only because you agree with what they have decided to cover and why they have covered it. In other words, your subjective frame of reference matches theirs... So you don't see any bias; you believe both sides of the issue have had a "fair shake" because it's exactly the same "shake" you would have given each side.
But that doesn't make your particular view any more or less "objective" than anyone else's.
Get back in your room and put your tinfoil hat back on. Sell your crazy somewhere else, we're all full up....
The poster is quite correct, actually. Mercury fillings are linked in more than just anecdotes to a number of potential problems, though evidence is far from exhaustive.
However, one thing has been demonstrated repeatedly: in cadavers, when amalgam fillings are extracted and tested, only a fraction of the original mercury content remains, variable directly with the age of the filling. This means one thing: mercury from your amalgam fillings is leeching into you as you eat, drink, or potentially even breathe.
Mercury poisioning is not an imaginary malady, by any stretch of the imagination; ask any dentist about the precautions required for handling mercury as the amalgam is prepared... the precautions are extensive. Yet they will happily insert this substance immediately into your mouth.
My own dentist will admit openly that the amalgam filling is probably dangerous in the long term and is happy to use porcelain instead; he says he uses the amalgam because customers usually prefer it... it's less expensive and lasts longer.
Um, except that when you were buying OS X for your Beige or Blue-and-White hardware, Apple would tell you it was "Supported. Absolutely!"
Would IBM do that? If so, then they're both in the wrong. Supported is supported. If your new OS isn't going to support onboard SCSI, onboard video, onboard floppy, or the hard drive and/or CD-ROM drive that shipped with the unit (as was the case with my Beige G3 and OS X), then you should tell the user that that's the case, rather than selling them a useless piece of software.
There are no [yale.edu] shortage [duke.edu] of [nd.edu] top [ox.ac.uk] universities [uchicago.edu] that have excellent theology or divinity departments. Some of the world's most influential and interesting thinkers have been theologians.
As someone studying at one of these top universities who has some familiarity with the Divinity school, I am going to humbly suggest that you might be surprised at the percentage of divinity students who are (gasp!) atheists.
To study religion is not the same thing as to want to be employed by it. The bulk of religion scholars want to be academics, not clergy, and they tend to study things like violence and religion, exploitation and religion, nationalism and religion, war and religion, mental illness and religion, history of religious conflict...
So yes, it's the study of religion at a top university, but by no means does this mean that all of these people hope someday to be pope.
How are they "forcing their dull lives down our throats" exactly? I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head, making you visit and read LiveJournal every day. Just because a blog is not chok full of technical details about project-x-gnu-1.16b.tar.gz doesn't mean that it's worthless to everyone, even if it is worthless to you.
I have several friends who post on LiveJournal and I enjoy their blogs very much. In fact, some of the randomSubject() posts have been so insightful that I feel as though I've learned a thing or two about life from them. No, I don't read every day, nor do I have time to do so, but I appreciate their being willing to share a little of themselves with those who are interested (i.e. their friends).
I also keep a blog, though it isn't at LiveJournal. But at LiveJournal or not, I'm not forcing it down your throat any more than anyone else. Why do I keep a blog? Well, it started out as a way to rant online about a girlfriend who dumped me many years ago now. This was before "blogs" were a genre and it was basically an HTML page that I'd edit every couple of days. Why should anyone care? They shouldn't. But I did; it was an avenue of self expression.
As time went by, I realized that it was helpful to me to be able to go back and read my own "entries" and see what I was doing on a given day, what I was thinking, how I was feeling... You forget things about yourself as the months and years pass, and it's more helpful than you'd imagine to be able to re-visit where you've been, without blinders or rose-colored glasses on.
So now I keep a blog proper and I make entries fairly regularly. It's a kind of diary that I can access, read from, and write to, in any part of the world, without having to carry a book and a pen with me and without having to worry whether or not the book will get stolen or soaked in coffee, or...
And yes, my friends read my blog as well, and it turns out to be a nice forum for interpersonal communication when a phone call doesn't seem lightweight enough.
Windows media player runs just fine in Wine, using Crossover Office.
I take the subway all the time with my 4GB microdrive-based player (Creative Muvo) and I keep it in my front trousers pocket as I walk about the city. The damn thing has been dropped a few times (because it's so light and small it's easy to lose track of it physically). I've had no trouble, the filesystem is intact, there's no trace of unwanted head noise (i.e. click-clickety-click) or worn bearings whine. At some point I wonder if the platters and heads are so tiny and light that the physics are more forgiving to motion of all but the most extreme kinds... of course the hard drives in the iPod and iPod mini are of different sizes, so I'd expect the full-size iPods to suffer more stress.
There was a smattering of trouble with earlier CF microdrives, but considering the fact that most of the 1GB microdrives were used by pro digital photographers in intense environments (warzones, sports venues, etc.) and are still in use today, I'd say that microdrives aren't nearly as susceptible to trouble as some would think.
In America, smart kids are not cool. In fact, they are liable to get beat up. In many cases, the smart kids who continue to study hard do so only because they're too small to play football or basketball or don't have musical talent enough to play in a rock band. How does this kind of mentality arise?
The powers that shape our culture (media, advertising, big business) have a vested interest in making sure that the citizenry are a bunch of uncritical consumers -- people who will ultimately buy the goods that the market pushes. Since non-artisan, commodity goods are the easiest to produce in volume (and thus the best engines of capital), it is these, along with a general consumer lifestyle, that are marketed heavily (glorified, if you will) in portrayals, analyses of and references to our culture that bombard us every day: movies, music, television news, magazines, etc., both content and explcit "advertisement" formats.
It is in not the interest of capital and its engines to produce scientists, thinkers, or other critical consumers who will only do "research" that is not profitable in the short term.
It is in the interest of capital and its engines to produce uncritical drones who will work in the same product mills that they also support with their earnings, never noticing that a continuous percentage of their time and labor (cleverly disguised as "profit margins" by these product mills) are skimmed off the top by the ultra-wealthy.
If it's been a while since you tried Linux, try it again. Fedora (Red Hat), Mandrake, and S.u.S.E. have all made huge strides in the last 18 months in usability. I've handed off Fedora CDs to complete Windows-heads and they've been able to install it without any trouble, essentially by booting from CD and clicking "Next" over and over again until they're looking at a Linux desktop that is now easier than ever to use.
Everything is drag-and-drop these days, printers and sound and networks and all that stuff are configured using graphical tools with really easy defaults and nice hints/help not unlike the Windows control panel, software can be installed just by inserting a CD and double-clicking, etc. CD burning is as easy as dragging and dropping files as well.
If the big-name applications you're missing happen to be MS Office or Photoshop, you can now run these Windows applications flawlessly in Linux using Crossover Office, which is very inexpensive and easy to use: insert CD, double-click to install crossover. Then, insert your MS Office or Photoshop CD and run the installer; they'll install just as they would in Windows and will put icons in your start menu, etc. Even things like Windows Media player and Canon's RAW converter for SLR digital cameras work in Linux now when you have crossover installed.
Really, the Linux desktop today is a completely different place than it was even two years ago. The strides have been amazing. I have my mother using Linux, and if this self-proclaimed "scatterbrained little old lady" can use MS Office and Mozilla on Linux for all her needs, then so can most people.
My gimp seems to save the positions of windows that I have open. Close a few, then exit, then restart and see if they're all there. When I start gimp, I only have the main (i.e. tool) dialog. If I need the layers/channels, the tool options, etc., I open them.
Different strokes for different folks. At least ONE person (me) likes the concept that I can have four images open and work on them all simultaneously, because clicking in any one of them opens a menu that acts on that window.
And just to tweak the nose of a few people here even further, I like to compound the GIMP's "many open windows" interface with focus-follows-mouse, which allows me to be MUCH more productive in GIMP (you should see me race my mouse around the screen) than in Photoshop, especially when doing complex manipulations.
I do still have to use Photoshop, though, because:
1) GIMP's unsharp mask can only go down to radius 1.0.
2) GIMP has no 16-bit and no Adobe RGB support.
But other than these two things, I far and away prefer GIMP to Photoshop.
My Chinese father has lived in the west for decades; this hasn't changed his opinions about authority and respect. I can attest to the fact that Chinese culture is a patriarchal culture of not questioning.
There are clear lines of authority in Chinese culture, and to attempt to question these is to dishonor not your family (perhaps by extension), not your nation, but yourself.
There is nothing more shameful in Chinese culture than questioning the wisdom of elders. Elders are not only generational (i.e. grandfather -> father -> son) but also hierarchical (national government -> local government -> individual). To question authority is to show that you have no regard for your family, your citizenship, your fellow man... it is to show, in some sense, that you are a kind of sociopath.
Even in the west, even disagreeing with government policies in democratic nations, my father feels that it is embarrassing and dishonorable to complain too loudly about what government does, because government is, after all, government--the embodiment of the collective. Activism, for him, is certainly sociopathic behavior of the most base kind, disrespectful to fellow citizens.
You mean like your tax-funded congress, your tax-funded police department, or your tax-funded internal revenue service?
I wholeheartedly disagree. In some cases, representation or narration may be the mechanism by which art functions, but it is certainly not the purpose of art. Otherwise, art would be a science, and simple one to master, too.
The fact that out of hundreds of millions of representations there is only one Mona Lisa or Nefratete proves my point rather nicely.
Consumer/producer are not roles intrinsic to human being. Capitalism has made you so blind that you're unwilling to see a person as a person who will express his or her life by doing things (i.e. holding a DVD, inserting it into a Linux box, clicking on play), not by playing roles (i.e. "Oh! This Linux player is illegal! Since I am a consumer, I won't watch the film that I hold and own, because as they have explained to me, I somehow don't really hold and own it even though I can see it in my hand right now and have paid for it just a little bit earlier; as a mere consumer and not a producer like them, I certainly must believe what I am told! This film is not here, nor is my Linux DVD player!")
The purpose of art is not representation or narration. The purpose of art is to call into being, and then to show you, something outside of historical, empirical, or scientific fact that has not been seen before. I do not use the word 'seen' in the visual sense (and nor is art necessarily auditory, or tactile, etc., either), but 'seen' in the conceptual sense. Art is about showing you something new, something that history, science, or empiricism can't show you. Art is like an ever-growing canon of conceptual poetics that is meant to be encountered and contextualized, and will therefore enrich the body of your schema; it is not there to be understood as mundanely representative or interpretive.
You have just implied that you only have an interest in being shown things that can be grounded in historical, scientific, or empirical fact or in some kind of narrative or interpretive perspective. Thus, you do not like 'art' anyway, so naturally you won't any subset of works of art that others can name. But don't try to take 'art' away from everyone else, simply because you're too narrow-minded to enjoy it. Indeed, western society funds art because the bulk of the populace have decided that it is something that they value; I doubt this will change anytime soon.
Don't forget that the licensed decrypting technology at issue is built into the DVD player. So you'd also have to change to:
Panasonic DVD player: License yours for only $359!
Or even better, let's be honest about what the word "license" really means.
Panasonic DVD player: Rent yours today for only $359!
Your analogy is flawed.
This is not a car, with a physical presence that can destroy property and life. It doesn't need to be regulated on safety grounds.
This is information, which can be replicated and accessed to enrich life at virtually no cost.
It's not information about weapons systems or international spies, so there is also no security issue or danger to society from its spread or any inherent need to control it.
The grounds upon which this information is being regulated aren't even purely "must make profit" grounds, since buying a DVD makes a profit for the movie industry and the bulk of movies are profitable based on theatre and DVD sales alone.
It's simply about control. The MPAA does not want to lose the ability to charge you MORE, LATER, AT WILL... by imposing a fee structure for the player... for the software to look at it... for the transmission of it... or, if they decide they really need a profit bump, by rescinding any licenses to current media and players, releasing some "new" technology and forcing you to buy new media and new licenses to play/see/transmit it all over again, effectively enabling them to charge at will for content that you have already paid for innumerable times, if you want to continue to watch it.
Perhaps in some peoples' moral universes this is "right" and "fair" and the MPAA should be able to do this if they want to and if you don't like it then stop paying for it (even though you've already shelled out $20 for the VHS tape, $10 in IP/trademark license for the VHS technology to play it, $30 for the Laserdisc, $10 for the IP/trademark license for the Laserdisc technology to play it, $35 for the DVD, $10 for the IP/trademark license for the DVD player technology to play it...) and simply give up access to the content, because that's the "right" thing to do.
But I'm telling you that the general public is nowhere near that subtle. The reality of the situation is that if someone holds a VHS or a DVD in their hand and they bought it, they're gonna have no qualms about trying to find whatever they can, hardware or software, at a flea market, at a download site, whatever, to play the film that they "OWN." Trying to explain to them that they a) don't own the technology in the player that they just bought and b) they don't own the DVD that they want to play anyway, so you can't watch the DVD that you're holding under condition x or with player y... is going to be like trying to make water flow uphill.
It goes against all natural sense and logic. It's about as artificial a construct as you can find in the marketplace.
From the page: Linspire DVD Player is compatible with Linspire 4.5 and higher. And from a page linked from that page: Note:
Linspire DVD player requires Lindspire 4.5 or higher.
I don't use Linspire. I use Linux. There is no mention of support for Linux, just endless mention of Linspire.
Before anyone says "but it'll probably work with other Linuxes as well," remember that that defeats the entire point of the argument... alicensed player for Linux... This player is clearly not for Linux (i.e. the set of operating systems collectively known as), and I don't have any evidence without buying the product that the EULA even allows me to run it on anything other than Linspire.
So I don't think this link or product particularly alters my reaction to the article, which was to applaud the student (even if he was a bit ham-handed) and to want to vomit on Valenti.
I primarily use Linux, and with sane package maintenance/upgrades, etc. I only usually install once every few years, generally to get new features. Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. all get installed by the distro these days, so last time the first things I installed were a set of older tools to get at older files and then some commercial software:
- The Andrew User Interface System (for ez)
- WordPerfect 8 for Linux
- xv
- Crossover Office
- Loki games
- Oh, and a custom kernel
I reinstall XP on my Windows partition pretty much every time I need to use Windows; it's the only way to keep the damn thing working properly. So then, the list goes:
- Reinstall XP
- Install whatever program I was planning on using
A day or two using XP and IE and the thing is already full of spyware and things are beginning to break (in the XP install that I did last week, Windows Media Player will no longer start, for example).
Each of these cameras has a shutter lag of 40-100ms. For most people, it won't be perceptible at all.
What may have happened to these shooters is the Canon shutter "bug" that many sports pros complained about: the 1D lag varies randomly between 70ms and 80ms (10ms of variability), which may mean difficulty getting the timing right for pros who shoot high-action photography and need to be able to anticipate the exact moment to press the shutter. To my knowledge, the forthcoming 1DII is supposed to reduce this variance to +/- 1ms.
Most people who are complaining about digital shutter lag are complaining about delays of a full second or more between pressing the button and taking a shot and the inability of consumer cameras to take a second shot until the image is fully written to the storage card... They aren't usually complaining about a delay on the order of 80 milliseconds.
The closest thing to what you're looking for is the Olympus E-10, which is smaller than the Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Kodak bodies and can be had right now for $500 or so on the used marketplace. It is 4mp, TTL optical viewfinder, 35-150mm equiv. f2.0-2.4 lens with mechanically linked zoom. Sensor on the E-10/20 (unlike the other SLR cameras mentioned above) is 2/3" so noise can become an issue in low-light situations... but the dynamic range of the camera is excellent, easily better than the Canon D30/D60/10D or the Nikon D70/D100.
The E-10 and E-20 from Olympus were both unique digital SLR cameras in that they were built like an SLR (i.e. optical TTL viewfinder, mechanical zoom, excellent f2.0 optics, zero shutter lag, full manual control as well as aperture/shutter/program priority controls on camera body, not in some menu system), but the lens was fixed and the prism layout allowed for real-time LCD preview (to my knowledge, the only digital SLRs ever to do this).