Balls. The U.S. was more or less a third world country when it got started, and it succeeded.
I must take issue with this staement, on several grounds. Taking them in order:
The 13 States of western America were definitely *not* a Third World Nation when they started down what I believe you think of as the road to Democracy in 1789. There are two issues with that contention. The first is that the concept of 'third world' didn't exist at the time. If you mean 'medieval economy', then you are wrong: certainly the northern four states (aka. the place where the Revolutionary War started: the Boston "Massacre" is not a co-incidence) were not medieval at all at this stage in their history. They compared well with a lot of the states of Europe; technological and social process structures in the US were as well developed if not better developed than in the UK. Secondly, the 'road to democracy' followed by the United States began neither in 1789 nor in the United States. It began with the Restoration in 1688 of the monarchy of the United Kingdom to a constitution under which Parliament proposed and the King disposed. The precepts which developed into the Constitution, frequently touted as the First Democratic Document of the modern era, were proposed by an Englishman, and based on his analysis of the previous 80 years of British constitutional history.
Thus, your first contention is not supportable by the facts at hand. Now to your second contention.
America succeeded in becoming deomcaratic? Only for a very limited use of the word democratic. It is no more democratic than, at random, the United Kingdom or New Zealand. All three states operate effective two-party systems, where the voters are offered little or no choice in policy packages; right and left, or more usually far right and centre right.
To return to the point you were contesting, that 'economic development and a strong middle class' are necessary pre-requisites for democracy: first, lets define democracy. The word was coined for a Greek state of 300 citizens, where every voting citizen sat in the governmental body. Clearly, we aren't discussing that.
So-callled 'modern' democracy, typified by the slogan 'One man, One vote', developed from a number of roots and social pressures in Britain, France and the United States. At a local governmental level it existed de facto if not de jure in the United States prior to the Revolutionary War. As a system, that style of democracy absolutely requires two conditions to operate successfully. First, the economy must support craft labour and/or cottage industry on a commercial rather than local scale. This was true of the States prior to the War. Secondly, the 'caste system' (a medieval concept based on feudal land distribution, in which ones caste is predetermined by birth and is virtually impossible to alter) must have eroded into a 'class system', the modern concept that ones class is means-based and anyone who accumulates the means can travel either up or down the classes. This system had devloped in the United Kingdom over the previous two hundred years and was exported to the United States along with the pilgrims. It was much easier to get ahead in the New World, as there was no remaining immediate aristocracy.
Examining China under these criterion: the first is quite clearly true. China has an industrial system. The second, however, is not true. China has a numerous but not a strong middle class, and it does not have a sufficiently coherent internal social structure for such a class to develop peacefully. There are too many internal conflicts and tensions in Chinese society. Thus, free market democracy would, were it introduced to China today, be running a race with the altering social system. If the social system didn't win, democracy would lose.
Thus, there is certainly reason in the contention made by the original poster. I personally wouldn't like to argue it: I have no particular stake in the 'Democracy good/Communism evil' debate, I just couldn't let pass such an arrantly inaccurate historical statement.
Wrong - use your head man. If all of AT&T's customers used 100% their cable modem's capacity 24 hours a day, you would not be getting broadband for $40 a month.
Now, I don't know about the gentleman to whom you replied, but it is worth pointing out that I, like many other people who are members of this forum, am *not* getting broadband for $40 a month. I'm getting basic, 512x256 broadband for almost $150 a month. And that's considered fairly cheap. 512k by traditional leased line will cost 4 times that.
Flip side is that the T&C's say I can't run a web server, I can run an SMTP server, I'm not allowed to spam, or break any laws. That's pretty much yer lot.
That does not mean that the FBI couldn't put a BIG HONKING device in a couple of places on the internet and globally adjust all routing tables so that packets went to it...
The FBI could not under any circumstances "globally adjust all routing tables". They just can't. Eg: a USA law inforcement agency has no jurisdiction over my BGP configurations on my border routers. I work for Demon Internet, which is a UK company. I can't be told how to route.
I can be told to filter. But not by the FBI. Attempting to route "the internet" through any smaller a number of SPOF's than it already uses would result in a significant world-economy-affecting performance drop, of the kind that all the stupid people were predicting over the Nimda and CodeRed worms. Mess with IP and you don't just affect Microsoft.
i think we're tired of it in general. even if it doesn't happen to us, we can see it happening everywhere else.
I genuinely believe that an intelligent and informed person, such as (from this reply) you appear to be, is. Unfortunately, for the majority of the people in [the us | the uk | france | $country] if it's happening to someone else they either a) won't hear about it for one or other reasons or b) won't care, because it's Somebody Else's Problem. This is why the US has so clearly reacted in such a completely different way to a major terrorist attack on it's own soil than it does to a major terrorist incident in, say, Beiruit. To quote a poster on Slashdot yesterday: "I still can't believe this is happening in New York. This belongs in, I don't know, Beiruit or somewhere".
The US Government doesn't have to "send a message". The American people, believe it or not, actually are angry all on their own because their lives have been disrupted, and they're tired of terrorism.
Even I can't let this one pass.
The American people are TIRED of terrorism? Shocked: nonplussed, disturbed, angry, amazed, stunned... not tired. To get tired of terrorism, you need to spend 50 years ducking when a firework goes off because someone might just have launched a ground to air missile at an office block down the road (this is a way of life for Londoners: the IRA have been operating on the mainland since shortly after the second world war). To get tired of terrorism you have to live with 17 assasination attempts on your state leader in under 2 years (France, OSA) To get tired of terrorism you have to get so blase about suicide bombings in your capital city that they're only front page news if there aren't any conventional troop movements that day (Israel, at any point since the day in 1948 when the UN declared a nation state of Israel, and when 8 seperate nations declared war on that state).
The US mainland has seen precisely three acts of significant terrorism since Antietam. The WTC bombing of 1993, the Oklahoma bombing, and the tragedy which occured on Tuesday. Of those, one was largely ineffective, and one was commited by an American.
The tragic events of Tuesday are the first time the American people have dealt with military agression on their mainland territory since around 1856. Do not tell grieving people that they are 'tired' of terrorism.
~cHris
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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The systemic problem is that after WWII a bunch of Europeans were given land in the Middle East and the people who were there are understandably pissed.
Full marks for intent but the accuracy is a little off.
The Hussein-McMahon letters were exchanged between the Palestinian Arab leader Hussein and the British Foreign Office agent Henry McMahon in 1916, and involved Britain promising Palestinian independence in return for arabic support in the war against Turkey (WWI not II). Simeltaneously the British government had promised national status in Palestine to Zionist groups in return for their support against Turkey (this was the infamous Balfour Declaration). And had also signed an agreement with the French under which Britain got Iran and Palestine, while France got Syria and Iraq. (Hussein, btw, was the man on whom Omar Sharif's character in Lawrence of Arabia was based: T. E. Lawrence was the man on the ground fulfilling the agreement between Hussein and McMahon).
At Versailles, France and Britain did indeed divide up the area according to their agreement. The Foreign Office chose to uphold the Balfour Declaration rather than the promises of the Hussein-McMahon letters, largely because the man appointed Governer to Palestine was an English Jew. However, after the persecution of Jews began in German-controlled Eastern Europe, and migrations into Palestine became significant (around 1935) the British turned their back on this arrangement and began turning away refugee ships. This led to the General Strike of 1936 in which the Zionist guerrilas were attacking the British for reneging on their agreement, and the Palestinian guerrilas were attacking the British for reneging on *theirs*, and the two groups were also fighting each other, largely out of habit.
That's the contribution of the Western European powers to Palestine. You may, however, find it interesting that the same document which established French control of Syria and Iraq versus British control of Palestine and Iran also drew an arbitrary line in the sand which divided the 9th province of Iraq from the rest of the country, and presented said 9th province to the British (for reasons of oil distribution). They called it Kuwait.
You may think ESR is nuts for wanting armed citizens on planes, I think everybody else is nuts for NOT wanting them.
Have you ever seen what happens to a pressurised cabin if someone lets off a.44?
Guns are not the answer. Particularly not at 15,000 feet.
You want something which would be good for the population, in health, in mental stability and courage, in ability to deal with criminals and other armed people? Make instruction in some form of kempo/kung fu part of the elementary curriculum. Teach people from childhood to be healthy, to defend themselves and to be self-controlled.
I understand your sentiments completely. However, when the Afghanistan Talibahn (spelling?) is officially harboring terrorists, what the fuck are you supposed to do?
If they refuse to cooperate, by turning over Osama Bin Laden, then they are hindering the execution of justice.
The Taliban has formally stated that should evidence be brought suggesting that Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden is responsible for yesterday's events they will extradite him to the United States for trial. I think this is a considered response: if it was him, fair enough. If it wasn't, you can sod right off.
I still find it difficult to bend my mind around the idea that today's attacks occurred not in Chechnya or Israel, but in the heart of American civilization.
Why?
Why is it any more feasible when it happens to someone else?
Lybia is desparately trying to find a way to get back on our good side without taking credit for Pan Am 103 (and may end up doing it anyway).
I find it fascinating that to an American, an incident is 'Pan Am 103', where to a Briton, most of Europe, most Africans etc. the same incident is 'The Lockerbie bombing'. A great many things depend heavily on one's point of view.
Just out of curiosity, since you seem to be so in favor of appeasing these criminals. If you walked into your house and watched your wife being raped, and your daughter was apparently next, would you consider it "childish and immature" to retaliate against them to keep them from further damaging your loved ones?
Please, please, do not permit terror to achieve it's aim. In attacking a (possibly strongly worded) call for rationalism and appropriate, consolidated world-wide response to this tragedy, you are perpetuating the success of the terrorist gesture. Furthermore, in reducing wide-scale murder and mayhem to a personal insult and an analogy on a personal scale, you are guilty of severe disrespect to the victims of this operation, and their families.
Thogh he did write quite alot of early material in Quenya and also Sindarin, most of the tales he wrote which Christopher has collected were written in English. A very large amount of 'fragement' material, as well as the academic philological material necessary to 'create' a language, exists but has never been published.
Is Tolkien's Letters published under Christopher Tolkien as well?
It's listed as 'JRRT with Christopher Tolkein'. It is (very marginally) edited.
[barnesandnoble.com]
sell the book, and display quotes from several of the letters.
If you like Book of Lost Tales, you'll probably also like Unfinished Tales
I read Unfinished Tales before I had the chance to read Lost Tales;) It's published as 'edited by Christopher Tolkien'.
Go watch The Insider [imdb.com] and look at how 60 Minutes [cbsnews.com] -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.
Very good film: Russel Crowe and Al Pacion both perform excellently, and the script was top class. One of the most interesting thing about it, hoewever, for those who obtain the DVD, is the extra feature in which they interview (though not in huge depth) the original protagonists: the 60-minutes producer and the tobacco company chemist who are portrayed by Pacion and Crowe in the film. That interview was fascinating.
First of all is the languages. Look at the appendices of Return of the King if you want to know what I mean. These languages are in depth, realistic, and utterly amazing. Many of them closely parallel structure and syntax of North-Germanic languages (e.g. Norwegian, Danish, Old English).
There's a perfectly good reason for this. JRRT was by profession a philologist and lecturer at Oxford University. His academic specialities were Norse, Old English and Saxon saga-form stories. [1] The development which became the Lord of the Rings began with a dream he began having prior to WWI of a great tidal wave engulfing an island, with a norse-style long-ship sailing out of the destruction. This dream later saw the light as the original stories which became, during the 20's, the tale of the Fall of Numenor.
He began evolving a mythology and language for the elves of a semi-Norse alternate past during the twenties, and his aim was to make his experiment in language theory (the intentional creation of working, practical language) as full as possible, by creating the things which influence language: myth, stories and 'history'.
He then wrote a story, which grew out of his enduring love for the Warwickshire and Oxfordshire countryside and the people therof, called The Hobbit. To his eternal surprise, it was a huge success, and he began to be plagued with requests for further stories about Hobbits. While discussing this with Stanley Unwin, he came up with a way he could bring his Hobbits into the world he had begun to create as a setting for his philological experiments, and this he proceeded to do on and off for the next 35 years.
If you're interested in where I got all of that from, the places to start are 'The Book of Lost Tales' (parts one and two, ed. Christopher Tolkein) and 'Tolkein's Letters' (which is an absolute must-read if you're interested in Tolkein himself as well as his middle-earth fiction).
~cHris
[1] His translation of Beowulf was a set text when my sister was studying at degree level in 1994. It's a very good translation.
I hate to say it, but this is not really accurate. To some degree, what crusaders brought back to the west was important, but beyond technology, it was the religious and cultural climate of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries followed by the decline in population of the fourteenth century that really spurred on what we would call the Renaissance.
Nice derivation, particularly given one of Arthur's lines in the legend snip reproduced above. However, the probable derivation for Sir Thomas Mallore's latin Excalibure is a pun: the Cornish and Welsh texts he was plagiarising use the word 'Caliburn', pronounced almost exactly like Galadriel's husband's name. It is thought that he was trying to be funny.
I hate to say it, but this is not really accurate. To some degree, what crusaders brought back to the west was important, but beyond technology, it was the religious and cultural climate of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries followed by the decline in population of the fourteenth century that really spurred on what we would call the Renaissance.
I have to agree with this statement. The Rennaissance grew out of the pressures of climactic change, social change and so on. It was affected heavily by the development of the art of printing, and all that. Lots of men sat up late at night and argued, and thought, and wrote. It is at this point in the process that the greatest impact of contact with the Islamic world can be seen.
One catalytic ingredient was imported from the East by returning crusaders, which fuelled the finest minds of the next 4 centuries through their long and arduous sessions of philosophy and theorising. Coffee! Where would the Reannaissance thinkers have been without their caffeine habit? Asleep in bed! What good was that to world progress?
Thus proving that geeks are in fact the direct descendents in spirit of Gallilleo, Newton and so on.
And, though it technically isn't SciFi (more horror) what about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and it's spin-of "Angel".
I'm going to have to rant about that. Neither Buffy nor Angel are SciFi, as you've said, but they also most certainly aren't horror. Gothic, yes: you do vampires, gothic is kind of inevitable. Buffy is more like Clueless with added stakes than a horror film: Angel is Bladerunner with teeth. Defining them as horror demeans what Joss Whedon managed to write (in my opinion): an admittedly teenaged but relatively dangerous mythical world.
Patents allow someone to make money from the R&D they do.
This line is the answer to your point regarding never seeing a gripe about Qualcomm's patent licensing practices. Qualcomm actually do R&D. People do not object to licensing their patents.
People do object to lawyers or salesmen whose entire business is to obtain bad/overly broad/unpursued patents, with which to litigate for personal gain against actual producers of stuff.
Training (in my view) is geared to the lazy and incompetent.
Lab Time.
I'm a backbone engineer. BGP, OSPF, routers, ATM/Frame switching equipment, Ethernet switching, etc. I've never once worked for a company which had a proper lab where you could actually work with new equipment or a new protocol/design architecture etc before having to use it live. This is because operationally redundant equipment is an expense that managers are unwilling to spring for.
Vendor training courses (the ones I've been on) were 80% practical. Equipment was in the room, and you got to play with it and poke it and break bits and learn how to fix them. This was extremely valuable in operation. And much, much cheaper than outfitting a proper, internal lab.
Software engineering? I can't comment. Networking? Training is not just for the lazy and incompetent.
Qualifications, on the other hand (directs a nasty look at all the 'MCSE' and 'CCIE' incompetent idiots that I've worked with)...
~cHris --
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Microsoft is successful because the general computing public does not know much about alternatives, nor even about what is specifically wrong with MS's products.
I'm afraid I disagree with this statement. Microsoft is successfull because the produce the most effective product to fill a consumer demand.
Not the best: certainly not technically. The most effective. MS windows can be operated by the (virtually) non-computer-literate. *No* free os can say the same. Mac is an alternative, but Mac have a sufficiently restrictive hardware policy that for 90% of the market, the Mac solution is not effective. Windows may not be unbelievably stable. It may not be fast. But most users can find the power button or hit ctrl-alt-delete. A very large section of the market not only can not read, understand and work from the init() or pppd() or whatever man pages, but don't want to, and don't want to learn how. They want to be asked simple questions and to give simple answers and they want all the clever stuff done automagically. In reference to (for example) linux, insufficient quantities of systems administration and maintenance software enable them to do this. So Linux is not their answer.
I don't like MS products. I use them for certain purposes. But, they are providing the most effictive product to meet a significant market need. And that's why they got this big in the first place.
~cHris --
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Slashdot Mirror
Godwin. Once again, proved so correct.
~cHrisI must take issue with this staement, on several grounds. Taking them in order:
The 13 States of western America were definitely *not* a Third World Nation when they started down what I believe you think of as the road to Democracy in 1789. There are two issues with that contention. The first is that the concept of 'third world' didn't exist at the time. If you mean 'medieval economy', then you are wrong: certainly the northern four states (aka. the place where the Revolutionary War started: the Boston "Massacre" is not a co-incidence) were not medieval at all at this stage in their history. They compared well with a lot of the states of Europe; technological and social process structures in the US were as well developed if not better developed than in the UK. Secondly, the 'road to democracy' followed by the United States began neither in 1789 nor in the United States. It began with the Restoration in 1688 of the monarchy of the United Kingdom to a constitution under which Parliament proposed and the King disposed. The precepts which developed into the Constitution, frequently touted as the First Democratic Document of the modern era, were proposed by an Englishman, and based on his analysis of the previous 80 years of British constitutional history.
Thus, your first contention is not supportable by the facts at hand. Now to your second contention.
America succeeded in becoming deomcaratic? Only for a very limited use of the word democratic. It is no more democratic than, at random, the United Kingdom or New Zealand. All three states operate effective two-party systems, where the voters are offered little or no choice in policy packages; right and left, or more usually far right and centre right.
To return to the point you were contesting, that 'economic development and a strong middle class' are necessary pre-requisites for democracy: first, lets define democracy. The word was coined for a Greek state of 300 citizens, where every voting citizen sat in the governmental body. Clearly, we aren't discussing that.
So-callled 'modern' democracy, typified by the slogan 'One man, One vote', developed from a number of roots and social pressures in Britain, France and the United States. At a local governmental level it existed de facto if not de jure in the United States prior to the Revolutionary War. As a system, that style of democracy absolutely requires two conditions to operate successfully. First, the economy must support craft labour and/or cottage industry on a commercial rather than local scale. This was true of the States prior to the War. Secondly, the 'caste system' (a medieval concept based on feudal land distribution, in which ones caste is predetermined by birth and is virtually impossible to alter) must have eroded into a 'class system', the modern concept that ones class is means-based and anyone who accumulates the means can travel either up or down the classes. This system had devloped in the United Kingdom over the previous two hundred years and was exported to the United States along with the pilgrims. It was much easier to get ahead in the New World, as there was no remaining immediate aristocracy.
Examining China under these criterion: the first is quite clearly true. China has an industrial system. The second, however, is not true. China has a numerous but not a strong middle class, and it does not have a sufficiently coherent internal social structure for such a class to develop peacefully. There are too many internal conflicts and tensions in Chinese society. Thus, free market democracy would, were it introduced to China today, be running a race with the altering social system. If the social system didn't win, democracy would lose.
Thus, there is certainly reason in the contention made by the original poster. I personally wouldn't like to argue it: I have no particular stake in the 'Democracy good/Communism evil' debate, I just couldn't let pass such an arrantly inaccurate historical statement.
~cHrisNow, I don't know about the gentleman to whom you replied, but it is worth pointing out that I, like many other people who are members of this forum, am *not* getting broadband for $40 a month. I'm getting basic, 512x256 broadband for almost $150 a month. And that's considered fairly cheap. 512k by traditional leased line will cost 4 times that.
Flip side is that the T&C's say I can't run a web server, I can run an SMTP server, I'm not allowed to spam, or break any laws. That's pretty much yer lot.
~cHrisThe FBI could not under any circumstances "globally adjust all routing tables". They just can't. Eg: a USA law inforcement agency has no jurisdiction over my BGP configurations on my border routers. I work for Demon Internet, which is a UK company. I can't be told how to route.
I can be told to filter. But not by the FBI. Attempting to route "the internet" through any smaller a number of SPOF's than it already uses would result in a significant world-economy-affecting performance drop, of the kind that all the stupid people were predicting over the Nimda and CodeRed worms. Mess with IP and you don't just affect Microsoft.
~cHrisI genuinely believe that an intelligent and informed person, such as (from this reply) you appear to be, is. Unfortunately, for the majority of the people in [the us | the uk | france | $country] if it's happening to someone else they either a) won't hear about it for one or other reasons or b) won't care, because it's Somebody Else's Problem. This is why the US has so clearly reacted in such a completely different way to a major terrorist attack on it's own soil than it does to a major terrorist incident in, say, Beiruit. To quote a poster on Slashdot yesterday: "I still can't believe this is happening in New York. This belongs in, I don't know, Beiruit or somewhere".
~cHrisEven I can't let this one pass.
The American people are TIRED of terrorism? Shocked: nonplussed, disturbed, angry, amazed, stunned... not tired. To get tired of terrorism, you need to spend 50 years ducking when a firework goes off because someone might just have launched a ground to air missile at an office block down the road (this is a way of life for Londoners: the IRA have been operating on the mainland since shortly after the second world war). To get tired of terrorism you have to live with 17 assasination attempts on your state leader in under 2 years (France, OSA) To get tired of terrorism you have to get so blase about suicide bombings in your capital city that they're only front page news if there aren't any conventional troop movements that day (Israel, at any point since the day in 1948 when the UN declared a nation state of Israel, and when 8 seperate nations declared war on that state).
The US mainland has seen precisely three acts of significant terrorism since Antietam. The WTC bombing of 1993, the Oklahoma bombing, and the tragedy which occured on Tuesday. Of those, one was largely ineffective, and one was commited by an American.
The tragic events of Tuesday are the first time the American people have dealt with military agression on their mainland territory since around 1856. Do not tell grieving people that they are 'tired' of terrorism.
~cHrisFull marks for intent but the accuracy is a little off.
The Hussein-McMahon letters were exchanged between the Palestinian Arab leader Hussein and the British Foreign Office agent Henry McMahon in 1916, and involved Britain promising Palestinian independence in return for arabic support in the war against Turkey (WWI not II). Simeltaneously the British government had promised national status in Palestine to Zionist groups in return for their support against Turkey (this was the infamous Balfour Declaration). And had also signed an agreement with the French under which Britain got Iran and Palestine, while France got Syria and Iraq. (Hussein, btw, was the man on whom Omar Sharif's character in Lawrence of Arabia was based: T. E. Lawrence was the man on the ground fulfilling the agreement between Hussein and McMahon).
At Versailles, France and Britain did indeed divide up the area according to their agreement. The Foreign Office chose to uphold the Balfour Declaration rather than the promises of the Hussein-McMahon letters, largely because the man appointed Governer to Palestine was an English Jew. However, after the persecution of Jews began in German-controlled Eastern Europe, and migrations into Palestine became significant (around 1935) the British turned their back on this arrangement and began turning away refugee ships. This led to the General Strike of 1936 in which the Zionist guerrilas were attacking the British for reneging on their agreement, and the Palestinian guerrilas were attacking the British for reneging on *theirs*, and the two groups were also fighting each other, largely out of habit.
That's the contribution of the Western European powers to Palestine. You may, however, find it interesting that the same document which established French control of Syria and Iraq versus British control of Palestine and Iran also drew an arbitrary line in the sand which divided the 9th province of Iraq from the rest of the country, and presented said 9th province to the British (for reasons of oil distribution). They called it Kuwait.
~cHrisHave you ever seen what happens to a pressurised cabin if someone lets off a .44?
Guns are not the answer. Particularly not at 15,000 feet.
You want something which would be good for the population, in health, in mental stability and courage, in ability to deal with criminals and other armed people? Make instruction in some form of kempo/kung fu part of the elementary curriculum. Teach people from childhood to be healthy, to defend themselves and to be self-controlled.
~cHrisIn what kind of weird national setup can $5 US per GALLON be considered expensive?
~cHrisThe Taliban has formally stated that should evidence be brought suggesting that Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden is responsible for yesterday's events they will extradite him to the United States for trial. I think this is a considered response: if it was him, fair enough. If it wasn't, you can sod right off.
~cHrisWhy?
Why is it any more feasible when it happens to someone else?
~cHrisI find it fascinating that to an American, an incident is 'Pan Am 103', where to a Briton, most of Europe, most Africans etc. the same incident is 'The Lockerbie bombing'. A great many things depend heavily on one's point of view.
~cHrisWhat if, as with Oklahoma, the country you want to invade turns out to be the United States of America?
~cHris
Please, please, do not permit terror to achieve it's aim. In attacking a (possibly strongly worded) call for rationalism and appropriate, consolidated world-wide response to this tragedy, you are perpetuating the success of the terrorist gesture. Furthermore, in reducing wide-scale murder and mayhem to a personal insult and an analogy on a personal scale, you are guilty of severe disrespect to the victims of this operation, and their families.
Please, don't do that.
~cHrisThogh he did write quite alot of early material in Quenya and also Sindarin, most of the tales he wrote which Christopher has collected were written in English. A very large amount of 'fragement' material, as well as the academic philological material necessary to 'create' a language, exists but has never been published.
~cHrisIt's listed as 'JRRT with Christopher Tolkein'. It is (very marginally) edited. [barnesandnoble.com] sell the book, and display quotes from several of the letters.
I read Unfinished Tales before I had the chance to read Lost Tales ;) It's published as 'edited by Christopher Tolkien'.
~cHrisVery good film: Russel Crowe and Al Pacion both perform excellently, and the script was top class. One of the most interesting thing about it, hoewever, for those who obtain the DVD, is the extra feature in which they interview (though not in huge depth) the original protagonists: the 60-minutes producer and the tobacco company chemist who are portrayed by Pacion and Crowe in the film. That interview was fascinating.
~cHrisThere's a perfectly good reason for this. JRRT was by profession a philologist and lecturer at Oxford University. His academic specialities were Norse, Old English and Saxon saga-form stories. [1] The development which became the Lord of the Rings began with a dream he began having prior to WWI of a great tidal wave engulfing an island, with a norse-style long-ship sailing out of the destruction. This dream later saw the light as the original stories which became, during the 20's, the tale of the Fall of Numenor.
He began evolving a mythology and language for the elves of a semi-Norse alternate past during the twenties, and his aim was to make his experiment in language theory (the intentional creation of working, practical language) as full as possible, by creating the things which influence language: myth, stories and 'history'.
He then wrote a story, which grew out of his enduring love for the Warwickshire and Oxfordshire countryside and the people therof, called The Hobbit. To his eternal surprise, it was a huge success, and he began to be plagued with requests for further stories about Hobbits. While discussing this with Stanley Unwin, he came up with a way he could bring his Hobbits into the world he had begun to create as a setting for his philological experiments, and this he proceeded to do on and off for the next 35 years.
If you're interested in where I got all of that from, the places to start are 'The Book of Lost Tales' (parts one and two, ed. Christopher Tolkein) and 'Tolkein's Letters' (which is an absolute must-read if you're interested in Tolkein himself as well as his middle-earth fiction).
~cHris[1] His translation of Beowulf was a set text when my sister was studying at degree level in 1994. It's a very good translation.
Nice derivation, particularly given one of Arthur's lines in the legend snip reproduced above. However, the probable derivation for Sir Thomas Mallore's latin Excalibure is a pun: the Cornish and Welsh texts he was plagiarising use the word 'Caliburn', pronounced almost exactly like Galadriel's husband's name. It is thought that he was trying to be funny.
~cHrisI have to agree with this statement. The Rennaissance grew out of the pressures of climactic change, social change and so on. It was affected heavily by the development of the art of printing, and all that. Lots of men sat up late at night and argued, and thought, and wrote. It is at this point in the process that the greatest impact of contact with the Islamic world can be seen.
One catalytic ingredient was imported from the East by returning crusaders, which fuelled the finest minds of the next 4 centuries through their long and arduous sessions of philosophy and theorising. Coffee! Where would the Reannaissance thinkers have been without their caffeine habit? Asleep in bed! What good was that to world progress?
Thus proving that geeks are in fact the direct descendents in spirit of Gallilleo, Newton and so on.
(fx: removes tongue from cheek)
~cHrisI'm going to have to rant about that. Neither Buffy nor Angel are SciFi, as you've said, but they also most certainly aren't horror. Gothic, yes: you do vampires, gothic is kind of inevitable. Buffy is more like Clueless with added stakes than a horror film: Angel is Bladerunner with teeth. Defining them as horror demeans what Joss Whedon managed to write (in my opinion): an admittedly teenaged but relatively dangerous mythical world.
Ok, I'm done.
~cHris
This line is the answer to your point regarding never seeing a gripe about Qualcomm's patent licensing practices. Qualcomm actually do R&D. People do not object to licensing their patents.
People do object to lawyers or salesmen whose entire business is to obtain bad/overly broad/unpursued patents, with which to litigate for personal gain against actual producers of stuff.
~cHrisLab Time.
I'm a backbone engineer. BGP, OSPF, routers, ATM/Frame switching equipment, Ethernet switching, etc. I've never once worked for a company which had a proper lab where you could actually work with new equipment or a new protocol/design architecture etc before having to use it live. This is because operationally redundant equipment is an expense that managers are unwilling to spring for.
Vendor training courses (the ones I've been on) were 80% practical. Equipment was in the room, and you got to play with it and poke it and break bits and learn how to fix them. This was extremely valuable in operation. And much, much cheaper than outfitting a proper, internal lab.
Software engineering? I can't comment. Networking? Training is not just for the lazy and incompetent.
Qualifications, on the other hand (directs a nasty look at all the 'MCSE' and 'CCIE' incompetent idiots that I've worked with) ...
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
I'm afraid I disagree with this statement. Microsoft is successfull because the produce the most effective product to fill a consumer demand.
Not the best: certainly not technically. The most effective. MS windows can be operated by the (virtually) non-computer-literate. *No* free os can say the same. Mac is an alternative, but Mac have a sufficiently restrictive hardware policy that for 90% of the market, the Mac solution is not effective. Windows may not be unbelievably stable. It may not be fast. But most users can find the power button or hit ctrl-alt-delete. A very large section of the market not only can not read, understand and work from the init() or pppd() or whatever man pages, but don't want to, and don't want to learn how. They want to be asked simple questions and to give simple answers and they want all the clever stuff done automagically. In reference to (for example) linux, insufficient quantities of systems administration and maintenance software enable them to do this. So Linux is not their answer.
I don't like MS products. I use them for certain purposes. But, they are providing the most effictive product to meet a significant market need. And that's why they got this big in the first place.
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
Consider, if you will, the fairly high likeliehood that you want to use GNUCash without installing GNOME...
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"