This is a wonderful announcement. Information is the currency of our time. The more information becomes availble, the more empowered the disenfranchised will become. The more powerful the disenfranchised become, the more responsible corporations and governments will need to be.
The day of the clockwork computer sucking back data from the ether isn't far away. Then the information age will truly be upon us. I await breathlessly
The idea of setting up a federal tattle-tale system has a legacy rather more sinister than W.A.V.E or other media-hyped agencies of a smiliar ilk.
The Nazis got good currency out of an informant system, as did the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Amongst the most notorius reigned in Romania, Bulgaira and Albania, three of the most depressed countries in the region. The legacy of the tattle-tale lives in as standing out in any way (read, being different from the herd, including being successful) is a cause of fear and neurosis.
The brain-drain that results from an informant system is shocking. Witness the exodus of intellectuals from the former communist block. Project that to America and you'll find parents pulling their ostracised children out the public education sector and into the private.
Who will suffer most? Typically, the ones who would have stood to gain the most: those for whom an intellectually stimulating peer group would have boosted motivation, intellectual discipline and dialogue. And if there's any group who can understand the benefits from a stimulating peer-group, it's the/. crowd.
"I bet you spotted Val Kilmer in 'True Romance'."
Heh. No. But I did hear what he was like during the shooting. Apparently no one in the Oxford Science labs was allowed to look at him as he acted the role of a fellow student? A truly appaling story.
For what it's worth, a review I wrote some time ago that was going to be published in an on-line magazine that never quite made.
Snatch 4.5 / 5
Distributor
Columbia Pictures
Released
1st September 2000
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" was released in 1998. Since then, we've heard more about Guy Ritchie's relationship with Madonna than his work in the cinema. The critics were out for blood when this one appeared--Ritchie had made it too big violating that sacred principle of Britishness: always playing at being the underdog--Ritchie couldn't play any more. He had become a film-making superstar and was living in "domestic" bliss with one of the world's entertainment superstars. He was asking for it. And he got it, if the slating that "Snatch" has received in almost every broadsheet daily is any indication.
I'm not sure what the critics are complaining about. Their comments seem incongruous given the subject. Ritchie hasn't made such much made a film, as a live-action cartoon.
The references throughout the film to scenes from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs should be quite easy to pick out: gangsters caught up in the role of being gangsters--from their names through to the way they speak--caught in a vortex of anger and hatred and violence from which the only way out is death.
The film mocks what should be horrific: shooting, prize fighting, death threats and extortion. But the killings and shootings (at least for the first two-thirds of the film) are slapstick and no more dramatic than a keystone caper. No one can take seriously the sequence that begins with a car chase and ends up with Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) repeatedly shooting Boris the Blade (Rade Serbezija) who keeps muttering threatening invectives in a nod to the famous scene from Monty Python's "The Quest for the Holy Grail". In the meantime, Bullet Tooth Tony and Avi (Dennis Farina) have been in a car accident caused by Darren (Jason Flemyng) throwing Turkish's (Jason Statham) chocolate milk out the moving car window and obliterating the on-coming Bullet Tooth Tony's vision. Turning their heads to watch the accident, three pawn-brokers who much to their regret are involved in the action, don't notice the bound, gagged and blindfolded Boris the Blade stagger out into the middle of the road and run him over.
The characters are drawn with thick, bold lines that give them no room for change or development (they all even wear the same clothes throughout the film). There are almost no women in the film (excepting four minor roles), the stereotypes are painted with an equally broad brush: everyone looks a fool. While the narrator, Turkish, is a passive spectator never quite seeming to believe that he's caught up in the events that he's in--almost as though he's aware that he's in a film... or, at least, of the opinion that he has about as much free will as a character in a film. When nagged by Darren for a solution to a particularly sticky dilemma, he swears and storms out of the caravan where they've been sitting, waiting, like the characters of so many an existential drama, for the revelation of the exact sequence of events that is going to bring about life's one inevitability: death.
Casting Brad Pitt in the role of the Gypsy barn-knuckles boxing champion, One Punch Mickey was a stroke of genius on Ritchie's part. Pitt plays the part perfectly and seems to enjoy his stint outside of Hollywood and the unusual specter of a Hollywood star in a film that sees a European release long before it hits America. It not only demonstrates Ritchie's pulling power as a director but also the increasing might of the British and European film making industries.
Ritchie's film is a success--not a masterpiece, but a success. Don't believe the anti-hype. Ritchie continues on in splendid form!
Not surprisingly, the http://www.aspalliance.com has collapsed. Just as any site daft enough to rely on something as processor intensive as ASP and visited with the volume of traffic that/. sends its way would do.
The wonderful little world of the ASPalliance seems to have fallen down. I wonder when it will get up again?
A lot depends on whether you plan to have the books peer-reviewed.
A good open-source analogy is the peer-review process within academia. Before a thesis can be published, a panel of the author's peers should read and review the work. If the panel tests and approves the author's methods, experiments and conclusions, then the work is deemed publishable. If the peer-review process fails (as with cold fusion), then the work is generally rejected. Often, such rejected works are then published by vanity presses.
Having said that, there's nothing inherently wrong with a vanity press as long as there's a transparent and accountable peer-review process before a book is accepted to press.
Re:The corollary to this, however...
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
...is that the higher the learning curve is, the more difficult it is to convince someone they need something in the first place.
True, if the learning curve is *too* steep. Nevertheless, if someone needs/wants it badly enough, ways will be found. Observe the medium we're operating in... as just one rather obvious case. In 1990, it wasn't nearly so easy to post in a public forum as it is now. Demand had produced a service. Further demand will produce further services. This will always, thank goodness, be a truism.
Necessity is the mother of invention
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
Learning curves, steep or not, are invariably scaled by those with a need to master them.
The point is moot. If an individual needs a service / product / etc. s/he will find a way of acquiring it.
Surely Universal must be planning to sue all those who have aided and abetted those heinous analogue pirates out there.
By their own logic, they should be suing every maker of audio tape/cassette recording equipment, every maker of audio tapes/cassettes and every broadcaster.
MP3.com was no more encouraging pirating than the radio DJ who advertises 'what's coming next' or an advertisement free hour.
Re:Microsoft has donated millions
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 1
Just my point. Except that I think the whole process deserves a little more cynicism than the popular media is giving it.
An interesting fact is that despite Bill's wealth and status as 'the wealthiest man in the world', he is not, as a percentage of the GNP, the wealthiest in American history (Business 2.0, August 8, 2000, p. 178).
Bill's not a dumb person though and knowing full well what a powerful tool information management can be, he's fertilising the political arena with 'gifts'--gifts that in turn make the politicians not only grateful, but dependent.
This is significantly different from the influence of Big Tabacco or Oil money.
Microsoft has donated millions
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 2
I've heard on ZDnet's streaming news broadcast that Microsoft donated a million dollars worth of software to the GOP for their national convention. To be 'fair', they've offered the same amount to all the other major parties.
Smells to me like they've found a way around the tightened restrictions on purchasing indulgances.
The humorous side to all this, or so it seems to me from the report on cnn.com is that the genetic raw material they were using comes from sperm... not just any sperm, but salmon sperm in particular. The number of gags one can spin off from this combination in relation to computing should be worth a chuckle. Imagine what all the dotporn sites can do with this!
Slashdot Mirror
We know that's not true!
The day of the clockwork computer sucking back data from the ether isn't far away. Then the information age will truly be upon us. I await breathlessly
The Nazis got good currency out of an informant system, as did the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Amongst the most notorius reigned in Romania, Bulgaira and Albania, three of the most depressed countries in the region. The legacy of the tattle-tale lives in as standing out in any way (read, being different from the herd, including being successful) is a cause of fear and neurosis.
The brain-drain that results from an informant system is shocking. Witness the exodus of intellectuals from the former communist block. Project that to America and you'll find parents pulling their ostracised children out the public education sector and into the private.
Who will suffer most? Typically, the ones who would have stood to gain the most: those for whom an intellectually stimulating peer group would have boosted motivation, intellectual discipline and dialogue. And if there's any group who can understand the benefits from a stimulating peer-group, it's the /. crowd.
"I bet you spotted Val Kilmer in 'True Romance'." Heh. No. But I did hear what he was like during the shooting. Apparently no one in the Oxford Science labs was allowed to look at him as he acted the role of a fellow student? A truly appaling story.
Snatch 4.5 / 5
DistributorColumbia Pictures
Released
1st September 2000
"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" was released in 1998. Since then, we've heard more about Guy Ritchie's relationship with Madonna than his work in the cinema. The critics were out for blood when this one appeared--Ritchie had made it too big violating that sacred principle of Britishness: always playing at being the underdog--Ritchie couldn't play any more. He had become a film-making superstar and was living in "domestic" bliss with one of the world's entertainment superstars. He was asking for it. And he got it, if the slating that "Snatch" has received in almost every broadsheet daily is any indication.
I'm not sure what the critics are complaining about. Their comments seem incongruous given the subject. Ritchie hasn't made such much made a film, as a live-action cartoon.
The references throughout the film to scenes from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs should be quite easy to pick out: gangsters caught up in the role of being gangsters--from their names through to the way they speak--caught in a vortex of anger and hatred and violence from which the only way out is death.
The film mocks what should be horrific: shooting, prize fighting, death threats and extortion. But the killings and shootings (at least for the first two-thirds of the film) are slapstick and no more dramatic than a keystone caper. No one can take seriously the sequence that begins with a car chase and ends up with Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) repeatedly shooting Boris the Blade (Rade Serbezija) who keeps muttering threatening invectives in a nod to the famous scene from Monty Python's "The Quest for the Holy Grail". In the meantime, Bullet Tooth Tony and Avi (Dennis Farina) have been in a car accident caused by Darren (Jason Flemyng) throwing Turkish's (Jason Statham) chocolate milk out the moving car window and obliterating the on-coming Bullet Tooth Tony's vision. Turning their heads to watch the accident, three pawn-brokers who much to their regret are involved in the action, don't notice the bound, gagged and blindfolded Boris the Blade stagger out into the middle of the road and run him over.
The characters are drawn with thick, bold lines that give them no room for change or development (they all even wear the same clothes throughout the film). There are almost no women in the film (excepting four minor roles), the stereotypes are painted with an equally broad brush: everyone looks a fool. While the narrator, Turkish, is a passive spectator never quite seeming to believe that he's caught up in the events that he's in--almost as though he's aware that he's in a film... or, at least, of the opinion that he has about as much free will as a character in a film. When nagged by Darren for a solution to a particularly sticky dilemma, he swears and storms out of the caravan where they've been sitting, waiting, like the characters of so many an existential drama, for the revelation of the exact sequence of events that is going to bring about life's one inevitability: death.
Casting Brad Pitt in the role of the Gypsy barn-knuckles boxing champion, One Punch Mickey was a stroke of genius on Ritchie's part. Pitt plays the part perfectly and seems to enjoy his stint outside of Hollywood and the unusual specter of a Hollywood star in a film that sees a European release long before it hits America. It not only demonstrates Ritchie's pulling power as a director but also the increasing might of the British and European film making industries. Ritchie's film is a success--not a masterpiece, but a success. Don't believe the anti-hype. Ritchie continues on in splendid form!
The wonderful little world of the ASPalliance seems to have fallen down. I wonder when it will get up again?
Presumably, a security hole, classified as a bug, becomes property of the consortium and a value added commodity.
This gives rise to a potentially revolutionary revenue stream for microsoft and friends...
A good open-source analogy is the peer-review process within academia. Before a thesis can be published, a panel of the author's peers should read and review the work. If the panel tests and approves the author's methods, experiments and conclusions, then the work is deemed publishable. If the peer-review process fails (as with cold fusion), then the work is generally rejected. Often, such rejected works are then published by vanity presses.
Having said that, there's nothing inherently wrong with a vanity press as long as there's a transparent and accountable peer-review process before a book is accepted to press.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
True, if the learning curve is *too* steep. Nevertheless, if someone needs/wants it badly enough, ways will be found. Observe the medium we're operating in... as just one rather obvious case. In 1990, it wasn't nearly so easy to post in a public forum as it is now. Demand had produced a service. Further demand will produce further services. This will always, thank goodness, be a truism.
The point is moot. If an individual needs a service / product / etc. s/he will find a way of acquiring it.
By their own logic, they should be suing every maker of audio tape/cassette recording equipment, every maker of audio tapes/cassettes and every broadcaster.
MP3.com was no more encouraging pirating than the radio DJ who advertises 'what's coming next' or an advertisement free hour.
Just my point. Except that I think the whole process deserves a little more cynicism than the popular media is giving it.
An interesting fact is that despite Bill's wealth and status as 'the wealthiest man in the world', he is not, as a percentage of the GNP, the wealthiest in American history (Business 2.0, August 8, 2000, p. 178).
Bill's not a dumb person though and knowing full well what a powerful tool information management can be, he's fertilising the political arena with 'gifts'--gifts that in turn make the politicians not only grateful, but dependent.
This is significantly different from the influence of Big Tabacco or Oil money.
I've heard on ZDnet's streaming news broadcast that Microsoft donated a million dollars worth of software to the GOP for their national convention. To be 'fair', they've offered the same amount to all the other major parties.
Smells to me like they've found a way around the tightened restrictions on purchasing indulgances.
The humorous side to all this, or so it seems to me from the report on cnn.com is that the genetic raw material they were using comes from sperm... not just any sperm, but salmon sperm in particular. The number of gags one can spin off from this combination in relation to computing should be worth a chuckle. Imagine what all the dotporn sites can do with this!
What's going to happen if someone cobbles together a bit of money to hire a few hundred actors to walk around chanting the de-css code?