Have you ever seen Romero's batshit film Knightriders? It was his first big studio film. It's about a traveling jousting troupe that rides motorcycles instead of horses. (It's also a fucking disaster of a movie -- watch The Crazies if you want more good early Romero.)
Anyway, these biker-jousters live noble lives, going from town to town to perform these great honorable jousting acts. And what are their audiences like? Brainless, artless, drunken idiots; people who live with no purpose, no ethics, and no honor. The people in the biker-jousting shows are zombies.
This, I claim, cracks the code of Romero's zombie metaphors. In Night and Dawn, the living survivors holed up in the house/mall represent Romero himself and his film crew -- people attempting to be aware of their own existences, and attempting to bring meaning to their lives, and generally trying to live fully. We, the audience, vicariously live by watching their movies; we live by feasting on their ideas. We're the zombies.
> He says look at the WTC, it collapsed because
> of the lack of redundancy.
>
> What?
>
> Seriously, the building was hit by 150,000 lb
> aircraft carrying 20,000 gallons of flammable
> liquid. It was obviously never designed to
> withstand that kind of structural complication.
Totally incorrect. The WTC was designed to withstand being hit by an airliner. I recall this from the various documentaries post-9/11; a web reference describing this is:
Engineers who participated in the design of the World Trade Center have stated, since the attack, that the Towers were designed to withstand jetliner collisions. For example, Leslie Robertson, who is featured on many documentaries about the attack, said he "designed it for a (Boeing) 707 to hit it." Statements and documents predating the attack indicate that engineers considered the effects of not only of jetliner impacts, but also of ensuing fires.
In the future, please use Google searches to verify claims you make in public posts. It's to no one's benefit to have discussions based on speculation and bullshit.
A debater commits the Ad Hominem Fallacy when he introduces irrelevant personal premisses about his opponent. Such red herrings may successfully distract the opponent or the audience from the topic of the debate.
Ad Hominem is the most familiar of informal fallacies, and--with the possible exception of Undistributed Middle--the most familiar logical fallacy of them all. It is also one of the most used and abused of fallacies, and both justified and unjustified accusations of Ad Hominem abound in any debate.
Thanks for playing. Don't forget your gift basket on the way out.
...during an election in, I believe, the mid-70's. (See "Bush's Brain".) All the reporters could tell Rove was behind it, but had to report the bullshit anyway. That's what will happen this time.
The lapdog media will fall for Rove's tricks every chance they get. Like with McCarthy, they have to report lies if someone important says them.
Won't setting xpinstall.enabled to false do the trick? (Type about:config in the url-box-location-bar-whatever-it's-called.) Then lock down the configuration.
The statement tells American voters that Abu Hafs al-Masri supports the re-election campaign of President Bush: "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections."
The statement said Abu Hafs al-Masri needs what it called Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" because they would "wake up" the Islamic world.
The entire notion of an eBook betrays outdated thinking. Web pages were invented to encode and transmit scientific papers. The difference between a collection of papers and a book is negligible.
HTTP readers even include bookmarking, which people claim to want in an "eBook reader." A web browser, like a real book, can place bookmarks ("favorites" in IE) on a specific page.
The eBook baby is born blue and silent, and nothing will wake him up. The web is a superset of the eBook.
And it's the best show on NPR, bar none. They started offering this a month or two back, and the next week had a sample from their deluge of "thank you" letters.
Click and Clack probably haven't noticed this -- busy, as they always are, laughing at their own jokes.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
One size does not fit all -- I use vim at work, which is a microsoft shop. It works great for me, but it's not for everyone.
Similarly, more powerful shells make comprimises in usability and familiarity. The various Scheme shells are what I'm thinking of here -- they do everything you're talking about, and more. But they're a pain to use and a pain to learn.
There are always tradeoffs in software development, and very few new ideas.
No, the MPAA will never be in precisely the same hole. 1) The music industry historically relies on free samples -- radio, before it was destroyed; or filesharing, which they're trying to kill. Without one or both of these, mass-marketed commercial music is much harder to do. Movies don't rely on free samples. 2) Copies of music files are good enough for the overwhelming majority of music fans. This isn't the case with movies -- the pirated copies of films still in theater are shit, and don't compare to a DVD copy. Hell, people even pay extra money to see stuff in theaters instead of at home -- piracy can't change that. 3) Movies are seen as culturally relevant in the U.S. at least -- many folks are passionate about movies, critique them, et cetera. That's dying off for music (largely because of radio's death). People tend to give less of a shit about music than they used to. So if the MPAA pisses people off, they're likely to still enjoy watching moving pictures with sound. If the RIAA pisses them off, folks can just give up on new music for good.
While you have a point about the antisocialism, the fun for many would be increased by adding a real-money component. Many games that are pretty humdrum today -- baseball, coin-operated games like pinball -- were in the days of yore gambling-oriented. When you could bet on baseball in the stands, it was enormously popular. (Today's baseball popularity is a pale shadow, as evidenced by the relatively low stadium attendance.) And coin-operated games used to give a payout for high scores -- and their popularity was high compared to the slowly-dying pinball industry of today.
I say, bring it on. I'd rather get money out of a game of skill (besides poker) than with a game of luck (fuck blackjack.)
One thing to note is that you'd almost certainly have to pay sales tax for each sale. Also, it may be illegal (or questionable) to distribute the ripped copies without distributing the physical media (certainly the RIAA's slaves in congress could be convinced that such a thing should be illegal.)
'Twas a blow-off half-credit class taught by an archeology professor who kept a wide-eyed gee-whiz attitude throughout the semester, but a class in this subject it was nonetheless.
The best techno-ethical dilemma presented was the over-use of antibiotics. That is, we've come to depend on the heavy use of antibiotics -- even for things like insuring food safety. Yet this leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria. So what do you do? Do you legislate? Where's your cutoff point? Can you balance the number of deaths from antibiotic-use reduction (from food poisoning, increased infections, etc.) with the number of deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections?
And there's always the next-to-last chapter in the Tao Te Ching for you: ---- Let there be a little country without many people. Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred, and never use them. Let them be mindful of death and disinclined to long journeys. They'd have ships and carriages, but no place to go. They'd have armor and weapons, but no parades. Instead of writing, they might go back to using knotted cords. They'd enjoy eating, take pleasure in clothes, be happy with their houses, devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close the people could hear cocks crowing and dogs barking there, but they'd get old and die without ever having been there. ----
> At my last job, we were required to play at
> least one game of fooseball per day,
This reminds me of the Mr. Show parody of Paul Allen. The fake Paul Allen would force his employees to take endless Tofutti breaks and lecture them on the glory of "imagineering."
The management's hearts may be in the right place, but foosball-at-gunpoint seems like it would get old eventually. Our company: "Where Ideas Can Hang Out...And Do Whatever!" This sort of thing can make one's gagging hard to control.
Cloning a project, forking a project with essetially the same goals but under different management, can be bad. In Linux distributions, for example, we have the same features implemented many different, annoying ways.
A functional fork, to coin a term, is different. At my company, we have several different version of our client software, all of which does basically the same thing in different contexts. We organize this by placing most common functionality in a shared library, and using different code for each context (email integration, web client, desktop client, et cetera.) The codebases have enough different functionality that different code should be used, with common stuff in its own sandbox.
This is a good way to go. It encourages the core code to be put into a generic library. Having a GIMP for single images and a GIMP for sequential images will move the developers to code in a way that maximizes reuse. They're not (really) competing with each other, so there's nothing to lose by sharing. And they'll each have their own space to work in, without having a poorly-overloaded interface for both single and sequential images.
Or, they could not share code, and it could suck. But the incentive is there for sharing, and the architecture of both systems would naturally improve.
can be found here.
The real problem with debating this is that the terms "fascism" and "corporatism" are vague terms. Furthermore, our definitions of these systems may be different from Mussolini's.
> You refuse to do what the e-mail says, and get > fired. But since you don't have the e-mail or a > printout, you can't prove that you were ordered to > do whatever it said.
But how is this different than your boss giving you an order vocally, without sending a message through the electronic inter-techno-web? In that case, it would go back to your word against your boss', the way it used to be prior to everything being tracked. This is not legally unsolvable, it's the way it's always been except for the past decade. You've become so used to always being monitored that the idea of not having an eRecord of your doings is scary.
DRM has shitty repercussions for the world -- because Microsoft's illegal software monopoly allows it to leverage this against competitors and standards, and because it's another tool in the War on Fair Use.
But these nightmare-scenarios-that-aren't are just silly. Spilling coke on your keyboard will not make your Apple III superintelligent; computer viruses cannot infect you; Kevin Mitnick isn't going to summon a nuclear strike by whistling near the pay phone. You will not be framed for murder with DRM.
it's offensive because the two things are of totally different proportion. (Frankly, calling Bill Gates a Nazi is the same way.) This article's title is like naming your Cisco Router "The Auswitch" because you don't dig the restrictive interface; or equating the VCR with the Boston Strangler.
The Cherokee Nation had a bicameral legislature, newspapers, and cities. This was a full nation that Andrew Jackson forcibly expelled to Oklahoma. Comparing this ethnic cleansing to one's ODBC setup bugaboos is shit-headed.
Hey, I'm not saying whoever wrote this shouldn't be allowed to say it. But neither should that person be kept from derision, like a darling little prince. Whoever thought up the title of this article is a cockmaster. Deal with it.
>> Rather, it's primarily about protecting a >> user's private keys and facilitating >> (through hardware acceleration) a >> serious increase in the use of >> encryption to promote security and privacy.
>
> In other words. It's no different than > buying an add-on board with a crypto > processor. Has anyone found out how much > this will all cost?
Is it? I don't mean this as a troll -- I don't think you'd get the same protection of user private keys with an add-on board as with bios-level verification (which I think they're talking about; flame me in all caps if I'm wrong.) Talking over the bus to an cyrpto-board through a general-purpose interface and talking to another chipset through specialized instructions strike me as two different things. You'd probably hit Rice's Theorem with the first; the second, you could trivially weed out for "non-verified" code. I don't know, whatever. Fucking computers.
> What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include > Mozilla with every copy of Windows? How about > Linux? Should they have to include 1 copy of > FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS and QNX with every sale of > their Windows software?
Yes...these are nightmare scenarios...
> Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as > the next guy in the open source community, but > doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where > does it stop?
It stops when Microsoft stops being a predatory monopoly. It stops when there's competition in the computer industry again. The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence (generally) but because Microsoft, as has been upheld by the courts, illegally leverages its monopoly to crush competiton.
Microsoft makes some good stuff. It would make better stuff if it had to compete fairly. My industry, and the world's economy, would be helped by not allowing Microsoft's unlawful strangulation of technology's progress. So anything that helps competition's return helps me.
> The key word is "claim." The actual value is > probably much lower, and getting increasingly
> lower.
Over the past couple years, I've started getting into blues and jazz (the old, good stuff; not the new, pretentious shit.) At first, I downloaded songs from Napster. This was alright, but it was hard to find really a lot of really obscure stuff. I also had half-downloaded versions of a lot of songs.
Periodically, the Napster mp3s would all get wiped out due to my lazy-assed administration.
Then I subscribed to eMusic. This was really cool, in that I could get full albums of a lot of stuff I'd previously downloaded. Like with Napster, I could get ahold of a lot of different artists, this time with full albums. Again, I was frustrated by the lack of comprehensiveness in the album collections -- it's not like Blind Willie McTell or Billy Murray are a big sellers in these post-wax-cylinder days; they should have the full collections up, goddammit. Eventually my subscription ran out.
Predictably, the eMusic mp3s all got wiped out due to my lazy-assed administration.
So I bought the CDs I'd downloaded. The music collections were much more complete (e.g., BWMcT's obscure duets with his tone-deaf wife, with lyrics railing against "shine"), and the difference in quality was startling (Leadbelly's "House of the Rising Sun" was way different on CD -- full, rich, deep.)
So now I have permanent backups of these Ogg files. I won't subscribe to another music download service, because the quality is less for a little less price and no more convenience. I *will* buy more rippable CDs from artists I've become familiar with. I *would* buy CDs from other artists if I could hear more samples of their songs, as this was how I got into this stuff in the first place.
In my case, downloadable mp3s genuinely *did* work as music advertising (Napster). They didn't work as a way to replace CDs at all (eMusic). They have very much affected which and how many CDs I buy. This is not bullshit! This is not zealotry! This is what has worked best for me.
Re:invisible car
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> the more Bond becomes a cartoonish super-hero > parody of himself, the less we like him.
Bond's always been a cartoonish self-parody. Sweet lord. Remember You Only Live Twice? Remember when Sean Connery went undercover as a Japanese person, his disguise consisting of a black mop-top wig and blackface? Remember Goldfinger, with "Pussy Galore's Flying Circus", that crack team of implicitely-lesbian ace pilots? Remember The Man With The Golden Gun? "Soon I shall fashion a weapon out of solar power! Mwuuuahaha!" Shit, man -- Moonraker? Octopussy? Live And Let Die?
I love all these movies. I read most of the James Bond books as a kid, and am pretty sure I've seen all the (old) movies at some point. But don't kid yourself -- the Bond series was always ludicrous. It's a glorious caricature of '60s badassitude.
Real spies are hunchbacked bureaucrats and dissatisfied knowledge workers. Any other depictions of the Spy's Life should set your bullshit meter to ten.
Slashdot Mirror
Yelp is great for this too:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/muvico-rosemont-18-rosemont#hrid:4wqtTSnvXPwoIYPAZv_qhg/query:muvico
I've actually been there, as I live in Chicago. It's overpriced.
Have you ever seen Romero's batshit film Knightriders? It was his first big studio film. It's about a traveling jousting troupe that rides motorcycles instead of horses. (It's also a fucking disaster of a movie -- watch The Crazies if you want more good early Romero.)
Anyway, these biker-jousters live noble lives, going from town to town to perform these great honorable jousting acts. And what are their audiences like? Brainless, artless, drunken idiots; people who live with no purpose, no ethics, and no honor. The people in the biker-jousting shows are zombies.
This, I claim, cracks the code of Romero's zombie metaphors. In Night and Dawn, the living survivors holed up in the house/mall represent Romero himself and his film crew -- people attempting to be aware of their own existences, and attempting to bring meaning to their lives, and generally trying to live fully. We, the audience, vicariously live by watching their movies; we live by feasting on their ideas. We're the zombies.
> He says look at the WTC, it collapsed because
> of the lack of redundancy.
>
> What?
>
> Seriously, the building was hit by 150,000 lb
> aircraft carrying 20,000 gallons of flammable
> liquid. It was obviously never designed to
> withstand that kind of structural complication.
Totally incorrect. The WTC was designed to withstand being hit by an airliner. I recall this from the various documentaries post-9/11; a web reference describing this is:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.ht ml
which contains the quote (with citation):
Engineers who participated in the design of the World Trade Center have stated, since the attack, that the Towers were designed to withstand jetliner collisions. For example, Leslie Robertson, who is featured on many documentaries about the attack, said he "designed it for a (Boeing) 707 to hit it." Statements and documents predating the attack indicate that engineers considered the effects of not only of jetliner impacts, but also of ensuing fires.
In the future, please use Google searches to verify claims you make in public posts. It's to no one's benefit to have discussions based on speculation and bullshit.
Thanks for playing. Don't forget your gift basket on the way out.
I guess what Ed Gein did was just fine, then, since there were, like, a million books and movies about him.
...during an election in, I believe, the mid-70's. (See "Bush's Brain".) All the reporters could tell Rove was behind it, but had to report the bullshit anyway. That's what will happen this time.
The lapdog media will fall for Rove's tricks every chance they get. Like with McCarthy, they have to report lies if someone important says them.
Won't setting xpinstall.enabled to false do the trick? (Type about:config in the url-box-location-bar-whatever-it's-called.) Then lock down the configuration.
Read the news! Al Qaeda endorsed Bush. Here's the reporting from Fox News, of all places:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,114489,00.html
The statement tells American voters that Abu Hafs al-Masri supports the re-election campaign of President Bush: "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections."
The statement said Abu Hafs al-Masri needs what it called Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" because they would "wake up" the Islamic world.
...they're called "web pages."
The entire notion of an eBook betrays outdated thinking. Web pages were invented to encode and transmit scientific papers. The difference between a collection of papers and a book is negligible.
HTTP readers even include bookmarking, which people claim to want in an "eBook reader." A web browser, like a real book, can place bookmarks ("favorites" in IE) on a specific page.
The eBook baby is born blue and silent, and nothing will wake him up. The web is a superset of the eBook.
And it's the best show on NPR, bar none. They started offering this a month or two back, and the next week had a sample from their deluge of "thank you" letters.
Click and Clack probably haven't noticed this -- busy, as they always are, laughing at their own jokes.
One size does not fit all -- I use vim at work, which is a microsoft shop. It works great for me, but it's not for everyone.
Similarly, more powerful shells make comprimises in usability and familiarity. The various Scheme shells are what I'm thinking of here -- they do everything you're talking about, and more. But they're a pain to use and a pain to learn.
There are always tradeoffs in software development, and very few new ideas.
No, the MPAA will never be in precisely the same hole.
1) The music industry historically relies on free samples -- radio, before it was destroyed; or filesharing, which they're trying to kill. Without one or both of these, mass-marketed commercial music is much harder to do. Movies don't rely on free samples.
2) Copies of music files are good enough for the overwhelming majority of music fans. This isn't the case with movies -- the pirated copies of films still in theater are shit, and don't compare to a DVD copy. Hell, people even pay extra money to see stuff in theaters instead of at home -- piracy can't change that.
3) Movies are seen as culturally relevant in the U.S. at least -- many folks are passionate about movies, critique them, et cetera. That's dying off for music (largely because of radio's death). People tend to give less of a shit about music than they used to. So if the MPAA pisses people off, they're likely to still enjoy watching moving pictures with sound. If the RIAA pisses them off, folks can just give up on new music for good.
I say, bring it on. I'd rather get money out of a game of skill (besides poker) than with a game of luck (fuck blackjack.)
One thing to note is that you'd almost certainly have to pay sales tax for each sale. Also, it may be illegal (or questionable) to distribute the ripped copies without distributing the physical media (certainly the RIAA's slaves in congress could be convinced that such a thing should be illegal.)
Great idea, tho.
> I can't think of anything that typifies Slashdot
> better than posting a four-week old article from
> the Weekly World News.
Posting it twice.
'Twas a blow-off half-credit class taught by an archeology professor who kept a wide-eyed gee-whiz attitude throughout the semester, but a class in this subject it was nonetheless.
The best techno-ethical dilemma presented was the over-use of antibiotics. That is, we've come to depend on the heavy use of antibiotics -- even for things like insuring food safety. Yet this leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria. So what do you do? Do you legislate? Where's your cutoff point? Can you balance the number of deaths from antibiotic-use reduction (from food poisoning, increased infections, etc.) with the number of deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections?
And there's always the next-to-last chapter in the Tao Te Ching for you:
----
Let there be a little country without many people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
and never use them.
Let them be mindful of death
and disinclined to long journeys.
They'd have ships and carriages,
but no place to go.
They'd have armor and weapons,
but no parades.
Instead of writing,
they might go back to using knotted cords.
They'd enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
The next little country might be so close
the people could hear cocks crowing
and dogs barking there,
but they'd get old and die
without ever having been there.
----
> least one game of fooseball per day,
This reminds me of the Mr. Show parody of Paul Allen. The fake Paul Allen would force his employees to take endless Tofutti breaks and lecture them on the glory of "imagineering."
The management's hearts may be in the right place, but foosball-at-gunpoint seems like it would get old eventually. Our company: "Where Ideas Can Hang Out...And Do Whatever!" This sort of thing can make one's gagging hard to control.
A functional fork, to coin a term, is different. At my company, we have several different version of our client software, all of which does basically the same thing in different contexts. We organize this by placing most common functionality in a shared library, and using different code for each context (email integration, web client, desktop client, et cetera.) The codebases have enough different functionality that different code should be used, with common stuff in its own sandbox.
This is a good way to go. It encourages the core code to be put into a generic library. Having a GIMP for single images and a GIMP for sequential images will move the developers to code in a way that maximizes reuse. They're not (really) competing with each other, so there's nothing to lose by sharing. And they'll each have their own space to work in, without having a poorly-overloaded interface for both single and sequential images.
Or, they could not share code, and it could suck. But the incentive is there for sharing, and the architecture of both systems would naturally improve.
can be found here. The real problem with debating this is that the terms "fascism" and "corporatism" are vague terms. Furthermore, our definitions of these systems may be different from Mussolini's.
> You refuse to do what the e-mail says, and get
> fired. But since you don't have the e-mail or a
> printout, you can't prove that you were ordered to
> do whatever it said.
But how is this different than your boss giving you an order vocally, without sending a message through the electronic inter-techno-web? In that case, it would go back to your word against your boss', the way it used to be prior to everything being tracked. This is not legally unsolvable, it's the way it's always been except for the past decade. You've become so used to always being monitored that the idea of not having an eRecord of your doings is scary.
DRM has shitty repercussions for the world -- because Microsoft's illegal software monopoly allows it to leverage this against competitors and standards, and because it's another tool in the War on Fair Use.
But these nightmare-scenarios-that-aren't are just silly. Spilling coke on your keyboard will not make your Apple III superintelligent; computer viruses cannot infect you; Kevin Mitnick isn't going to summon a nuclear strike by whistling near the pay phone. You will not be framed for murder with DRM.
it's offensive because the two things are of totally different proportion. (Frankly, calling Bill Gates a Nazi is the same way.) This article's title is like naming your Cisco Router "The Auswitch" because you don't dig the restrictive interface; or equating the VCR with the Boston Strangler.
The Cherokee Nation had a bicameral legislature, newspapers, and cities. This was a full nation that Andrew Jackson forcibly expelled to Oklahoma. Comparing this ethnic cleansing to one's ODBC setup bugaboos is shit-headed.
Hey, I'm not saying whoever wrote this shouldn't be allowed to say it. But neither should that person be kept from derision, like a darling little prince. Whoever thought up the title of this article is a cockmaster. Deal with it.
>> user's private keys and facilitating
>> (through hardware acceleration) a
>> serious increase in the use of
>> encryption to promote security and privacy.
>
> In other words. It's no different than
> buying an add-on board with a crypto
> processor. Has anyone found out how much
> this will all cost?
Is it? I don't mean this as a troll -- I don't think you'd get the same protection of user private keys with an add-on board as with bios-level verification (which I think they're talking about; flame me in all caps if I'm wrong.) Talking over the bus to an cyrpto-board through a general-purpose interface and talking to another chipset through specialized instructions strike me as two different things. You'd probably hit Rice's Theorem with the first; the second, you could trivially weed out for "non-verified" code. I don't know, whatever. Fucking computers.
--Drunk and Reading Slashdot
> What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include
> Mozilla with every copy of Windows? How about
> Linux? Should they have to include 1 copy of
> FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS and QNX with every sale of
> their Windows software?
Yes...these are nightmare scenarios...
> Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as
> the next guy in the open source community, but
> doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where
> does it stop?
It stops when Microsoft stops being a predatory monopoly. It stops when there's competition in the computer industry again. The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence (generally) but because Microsoft, as has been upheld by the courts, illegally leverages its monopoly to crush competiton.
Microsoft makes some good stuff. It would make better stuff if it had to compete fairly. My industry, and the world's economy, would be helped by not allowing Microsoft's unlawful strangulation of technology's progress. So anything that helps competition's return helps me.
> probably much lower, and getting increasingly
> lower.
Over the past couple years, I've started getting into blues and jazz (the old, good stuff; not the new, pretentious shit.) At first, I downloaded songs from Napster. This was alright, but it was hard to find really a lot of really obscure stuff. I also had half-downloaded versions of a lot of songs.
Periodically, the Napster mp3s would all get wiped out due to my lazy-assed administration.
Then I subscribed to eMusic. This was really cool, in that I could get full albums of a lot of stuff I'd previously downloaded. Like with Napster, I could get ahold of a lot of different artists, this time with full albums. Again, I was frustrated by the lack of comprehensiveness in the album collections -- it's not like Blind Willie McTell or Billy Murray are a big sellers in these post-wax-cylinder days; they should have the full collections up, goddammit. Eventually my subscription ran out.
Predictably, the eMusic mp3s all got wiped out due to my lazy-assed administration.
So I bought the CDs I'd downloaded. The music collections were much more complete (e.g., BWMcT's obscure duets with his tone-deaf wife, with lyrics railing against "shine"), and the difference in quality was startling (Leadbelly's "House of the Rising Sun" was way different on CD -- full, rich, deep.)
So now I have permanent backups of these Ogg files. I won't subscribe to another music download service, because the quality is less for a little less price and no more convenience. I *will* buy more rippable CDs from artists I've become familiar with. I *would* buy CDs from other artists if I could hear more samples of their songs, as this was how I got into this stuff in the first place.
In my case, downloadable mp3s genuinely *did* work as music advertising (Napster). They didn't work as a way to replace CDs at all (eMusic). They have very much affected which and how many CDs I buy. This is not bullshit! This is not zealotry! This is what has worked best for me.
> parody of himself, the less we like him.
Bond's always been a cartoonish self-parody. Sweet lord. Remember You Only Live Twice? Remember when Sean Connery went undercover as a Japanese person, his disguise consisting of a black mop-top wig and blackface? Remember Goldfinger, with "Pussy Galore's Flying Circus", that crack team of implicitely-lesbian ace pilots? Remember The Man With The Golden Gun? "Soon I shall fashion a weapon out of solar power! Mwuuuahaha!" Shit, man -- Moonraker? Octopussy? Live And Let Die?
I love all these movies. I read most of the James Bond books as a kid, and am pretty sure I've seen all the (old) movies at some point. But don't kid yourself -- the Bond series was always ludicrous. It's a glorious caricature of '60s badassitude.
Real spies are hunchbacked bureaucrats and dissatisfied knowledge workers. Any other depictions of the Spy's Life should set your bullshit meter to ten.