If you can't recognize that, then you lack the artistic judgement to contribute to this discussion.
All you really just said is that if I haven't come to the same conclusions you have, it's because I just don't have any artistic judgement. Brilliant. How about I just assert the reverse and we'll call it even until you can come up with anything better.
There are a broad range of reasons for including profanity, sex, and violence into a film. Some of them have nothing to do with artistic integrity. I have a number of friends who have worked (or still work) for Hollywood, and according to them, there really are times where directors and/or producers really do say "let's add some more gratuitous sex/violence/swearin' -- people love that stuff." Obviously the motivation has nothing to do with artistic value in cases like this. But let's say those situations are the small minority of cases. Even when there's a larger thematic element of the story that requires a semantic representation of a violent or sexual act, or strong language, there are an awful lot of possibilities for actual syntax (footage/dialogue) used to express it. Lots of thematic elements and important stories -- if not most -- survive intact when restrained or implicit syntax is used. Most people are remarkably good at reading between the lines. A few actually require explicit portrayal for accurate effect, but even then the director has to balance the inherent semantics in the syntactic elements with the larger intended them (and to complicate the matter, the weight and to some extent even meaning of inherent semantics vary from individual to individual).
I can think of more examples than I can possibly list in a slashdot posting. I've seen Good Will Hunting twice. The first time I saw it was with 'fuck' edited out. I didn't learn anything watching it the second time except people from some areas of the Boston Metro area use the word 'fuck' like punctuation. Big deal: I learned the same thing from living in South Central LA (and in either context, the word loses most of its semantic meaning anyway). No difference in my experience as a filmgoer whatsoever -- except the version with 'fuck' caused distraction and discomfort for the film viewers who had grown up in a place where using that word meant that you were treating a person like they didn't mean anything at all. Without it, it was actually easier for them to concentrate on themes of trust in others and faith in what life has to offer and risk and the interaction between Matt Damon's and Robin William's characters, and the obstacles they faced, and the transformations that each of them make to become more healthy people.
Or there's Fight Club -- absolutely brilliant story, full of fun questions and scenes. I love the mayhem. I love the interplay between the appeal of the idea of blowing the whole system to hell -- and the slow revelation of what we're really being protected from as far as anarchy goes. I love talking about the themes of the film. I can actually remember more of the scenes than people I talk to. But I might not see the film. Some of the images described in the script aren't on the top of my list of things to see. The references in the script are enough for me to get the overall experience.
Or if you want to draw an example from real life, there's the guy I met in Santa Monica who came home one night to find both of his kids murdered in his house, tortured to death, one of them tied to a chair with dozens of unbent coat hangers stuck into him. Do you really need to see that image -- or even worse, see the crime perpetrated -- to understand how that nearly completely unhinged the man, and shook his faith in humanity or any kind of good in the world? I'll bet your imagination is enough. It'd be enough in a film about the event, too. But some filmakers would, of course, show the whole thing. Some viewers wouldn't want to watch it. And they would be accused of lacking in artistic sensibilities by people like you.
Bullshit. When the film says that the director was Scorcese, the viewer has no way to know what Clean Flicks removed from the movie. The viewer normally does not have both the edited and unedited versions in front of them for comparison.
Bullshit yourself. While the viewer may not know specifically what was removed, they have a general idea of what kind of content was removed -- because that's what they asked for. And the whole points is: nobody is mistaking this for Scorcese's original work. People who walk into Clean Flicks know exactly what they're asking for: a cut of a Scorcese work, done according to THEIR preferences. There's no illusion that their getting anything else. You're welcome to identify this as a travesty of art -- just as they're welcome to identify leaving the stuff IN as a travesty of art. But there's no deception at all here.
How many viewers of a Clean Flicks butchered movie will go to a party and say "I hated that movie -- but the only version I saw was edited by Clean Flicks to remove profanity, violence, and sexual content"? Answer: None. The work of the director, actors, and film crew will be maligned by people who have never seen the actual work.
You forget that by and large we're talking about people here who would have disliked the film if the stuff had been left in. There's no loss here if these people see an edited film and don't like it.
As a final (though not necessarily conclusive) note, I might add that I've developed these theories not only from years of thinking about this, but from having actually watched both edited and unedited versions of these films. Clean Flicks makes every effort to preserve continuity of the films within the editing parameters their customers have asked for, and very rarely have I seen edits where an important semantic element is lost from the story and there's a problem with flow. In the few cases where I have, the semantic loss has never made it up to the thematic level. I can think of a few films where that would be a problem, and the only choice people there is to watch most all of the film or not watch. Thank goodness that's still OK... apparently the right to view, listen, or read only PART of a work isn't.
I think the thing that most people were really annoyed with about Titanic was its status as a pop culture phenomenon, not the movie itself. It was a good movie. A little didactic in a place or two, dialogue missing something in a few places, but I really quite enjoyed seeing it once I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried a little bit thinking about the human tragedy of the actual event while watching the film, thought about hubris, and was glad to be on dry land in the middle of a Southwestern US desert.
However, it was terribly annoying to have to put up with that Celine Dion song over and over and the people who saw it 10 times and insisted it was the greatest film ever made and a turning point in their lives.
I think most reactive iconoclasms are that way. It's not so much the thing that's popular itself. It's the utter ridiculous prominence on the landscape that's hard to put up with.
Of course, then there are things like Brittney Spears and O-town, for which there are no excuse...
Then I think that I should be allowed to edit your posts prior to them appearing on Slashdot.
This wouldn't bother me at all -- as long as the original post was still available to anyone who wanted to read it.
In fact, this already happens to some extent -- to the comments as a whole. It's the moderation system. While it's not perfect, it has the merit of offering people customized views while letting others who prefer the raw format view it that way.
Clean Flicks is offering the same service.
I can take out anything I find offensive and then put the messages back together in such a way that it changes the entire tone and meaning of them.
Red Herring. Do we know that Clean Flicks is doing this? That is, have you watched a Clean Flicks film where you felt the themes of the film was significanlty changed or lost because of the editing?
Editing sensitive to overall themes and semantics expressed in a scenes is not exclusive with individuals psycho/social/emotional sensitivities.
But I'll need your user ID so that people think that you wrote the edited version.
More than a Red Herring -- this implies deception on the part of Clean Flicks, where NONE EXISTS. The films are clearly marked as edited by Clean Flicks, and since the whole premise of the business is founded on this awareness, it's impossible to argue someone might wander into their store and accidentally mistake a Clean Flicks version as the real thing.
You don't have a direct line of responsibility for what's happening in China, that's true. There's a need to dispose of old electronics. Some entities have decided they'll meet that need at a price. Others have decided they'll do it for cheaper (or pay) and try to make a profit on the materials.
The problem is: some of these disposing entities will do so as responsibly as possible. Some of these entities won't... they'll cut costs by using poorly informed labor and letting them come in contact with hazards, and also by letting hazardous materials go into the environment.
It's tempting for first world organization to patronize the later irresponsible disposal entities because they're cheaper -- because they externalize costs onto a commons. But by patronizing them, the continuing poisoning of individuals and environment is essentially encouraged, because that's their business model.
It's true that Chinese society could end the issue right now by making the decision on their own. But first world organizations can also stop it by choosing to deal only with responsible recyclers -- ones who don't push costs onto the commons which could eventually come back to bite us anyway. Moral issues aside.
Whether or not YOU personally can do anything has more to do with your ability to influence disposal habits and choose responsible disposal alternatives in as informed and wise manner as possible.
Having multiple opinions about something is often a good idea for many things. It might not be as important for book reviews as it is for say, removing your gall bladder or getting rotator cuff repair, but it's still sortof nice.
The alternative -- "Isn't one opinion good enough for anything?" -- seems rather frightening to me.
It may have also had something to do with economic issues.... spookiness combined with the fact that economically, you're either going to watch it once or twice, for which the $1-$3 from a video store or library seems like a good trade, or buy it and you won't want to have to care about being charged when you watch.
I can't wait for when DRM goes DivX on PCs and the entertainment industry's ultimate goal is unmasked....
I worked as a developer in a major university library for about two years. The system I worked on only tracked requests made to borrow books through other universities, but it kept ALL of them. Your whole history. This system was used at a whole host of other libraries, including NYU, ASU, Berkely, and more.
The main system that kept track of circulation for the whole library also kept all requests. And it gets worse. I shouldn't have known that; it was outside my employee privileges, but several reference librarians kept the username and password posted on post-it notes, and being able to look up my own circulation record via telnet (or tnvt3270 or whatever it was) was way too convenient. From that point, looking up someone else's circ records was often way too interesting.... oh, and did I mention that the library used your SSN as a unique ID?
Anyway, the point is, the system saved ALL your information, and it was fairly easy to get to it. If we were counting on practices of libraries to preserve anonyminity, I wouldn't feel all that secure....
But as far as ethics in business go, there is only one ethic: make money. The system is set up to encourage a company to find the shortest path to greatest profitability, and that's the way it will likely always be. Is this bad? Depends on what you want companies to accomplish. If you want them to achieve economic growth, increasing efficiency, etc, then they are ideally groomed to do this (as our economy has demonstrated over the past decades). But don't expect any higher moral sense to come out of a company unless there is a profit motive behind it. It can happen, but the system isn't designed to encourage it.
And that's the problem with the culture of greed/captilism that's entrenched in the Westerne World.
Somehow, a basically good idea -- that by acquiring capital and using it to meet a human need, you can acquire money, and by letting individuals do this, the needs of society at large are usually met -- turned into "if individuals are pursuing only their own self interest and trying to acquire as much money as possible, then it's good for everybody." Thought the two concepts are similar, it's not even really that fine a distinction, but a lot of people miss it. Some because it's in their own self-interest to do so and they don't give a damn about much else.
Currency and markets and corporations are useful concepts/tools that do a lot of things well, but imagining that they correctly value everything that's important to individuals and society is lunacy as much as the idea that Tahitian Noni juice can cure all your health problems. The "greed is good" ethic needs to be erradicated.
I sold it and am looking forward to the day when I can get a decently fast iBook. Maybe the 700mhz model is a lot faster, but I'd be surprised.
The 700mhz have a larger cache and faster bus if I recall correctly.
On the other hand, I am posting this from a Powerbook G3 running at 333 Mhz, and I'm comfortable with the speed of normal applications. My secret? RAM, my friend, boatloads of RAM. Actually, 320 MB really isn't considered a boatload any more, but it's enough that the OS and most apps speed remarkably.
Of course, when I'm encoding mp3s or doing other signal processing stuff like photoshop, or recompiling PHP, I do sometimes wish for some more speed.
There was an absolutely brilliant article on this whole subject in Brigham Young University's Insight magazine several years back. It revolved around the examination of the concepts of syntax and semantics in film.... ie, the images/audio used in a film vs. the meaning and themes and overall experience created by stringing them together.
You might put syntax into a film that consisted of profanity, violence, illicit sex, substance abuse, theft, deciet, or any other act that could be judged as morally wrong, and it could still be part of a larger semanticity that's worth examining. Camelot-like stories are an excellent example... it's interesting to examine how conflicting passions destroyed an ideal, and the presence of adultery in the story is part of that. No problem. Everyone is probably with me to this point. Adultery, theft, murder, etc. all exist in the world and creating and examining stories about how this matters to human beings is what art is about.
The problem, however, is that the impact of some syntax can overcome its semantic context (especially when the semantic context is poorly concieved or executed). The example from the article was of an anti-porn/anti-rape film that had too much porn and some awfully graphic rape scenes. I'm anti-rape. I can concur with a film that's anti-rape. I don't want to watch a 10 minute graphic rape scene. The concept is horrible enough to me as it is. The syntax recreates to some degree, and experience, and that experience has impact, and ignoring that impact, or grossly mishandling the level of exposure to said experience means that the syntax loses context and distorts the overall film.
The problem gets more complex when you "sensitivity" to syntax vary culturally and individually. Some people are a lost cause... they're not able to construct a larger meaning and syntax is the only thing they see. I don't worry about these people not seeing films... but some people can appreciate films like Good Will Hunting, but they come from a culture and background in which the word "fuck" is a great disrespect to listeners (vs. some cultures/backgrounds in which it is only mildly pale, or among some people who use it as punctuation). It gets in the way of the semantics of the film for these people.... what's wrong with them changing their own copy of the film so they can focus on what they want to?
Because I wanted the sex scene to disgust you, or excite out, or make you feel uncomfortable. That's why I spent those words (or that film) portraying it.
And so you have a right to disgust, excite, or make me feel uncomfortable?
Am I only allowed to listen to a politician's speech if I will agree 100% with what he says?
Am I only allowed access to your ideas by completely accepting your control over me?
Are you comfortable with granting me the same right?
Wrong again, citizen. You will watch all broadcast or otherwised release works in their entirety, and you will also watch the commercials included. Anything else is a wrong against the great artists who created them, and stealing from those who supported their creation.
For your own personal use does not include renting it out to other people. And while setting up specific edit-points may very well pass court scrutiny (because it's adding what effectively amounts to "opinion"), this isn't what the stores are doing
What the stores do is alter videos you have already bought. You already own the "medium on which it is placed" by the time the stores alter it.
You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
Not in the least. The right to alter and redistribute is what's guaranteed by the GPL.
OK, but isn't this sort of like putting a loincloth on David, or covering up Venus's breasts? Or removing the n-work from Huck Finn ? Perhaps some art is intended on being experienced and viewed as harshly as it was created. Perhaps you feel that it is not neccesary (for instance, I don't see what David would lose in a loincloth), but I posit that that choice ought be left to the creator.
Putting a loincloth over the original David, or painting over Venus' breasts in the orginial would be a travesty.
Putting a loincloth over a plaster copy in your house could be any kind of statement.... it could be puckishness or satire or plain old puritanism. And there's nothing wrong with letting people arrange their own homes or lives according to any such sentiment.
This is about what people choose to do with their own stuff. They're not redistributing it or forcing it on anyone else....
What? And give control back to the unwashed masses? They don't know what art is, and we'd rather give up half our market than compromise the artistic purity and integrity of Hollywood....
Puh-lease. The travesty in all this isn't that directors are fighting our ability to buy edited copies of movies, it's that any idiot would try to take the swear words out of a film in the first place. Don't watch the goddam movie if it offends you so much. While we're at it let's erase all the footage of Elvis Presley's "obscene" hip gyrations and file the tits off the Statue of Liberty. Some people just have no sense...
Why the hell should it matter to you whether or not someone doesn't want to hear "fuck" used every other word, but watch Good Will Hunting? Or would rather not have a nude image of Kate Winslet in their head but still (for some reason) watch Titanic? It doesn't take a puritan freak to have decent reasons for wanting either of those.
No, you can't live your whole life holding your breath for fear that exhaling will upset someone, but I just can't see why you are so offended by the idea that somewhere, someone has decided that they don't like the concept embodied by someone's use of the "f-word".
Profanity is a curious thing, yes, just like other social conventions and taboos, but it's a shallow analysis indeed that dismisses the relevancy of such things just because they are "merely" social conventions or taboos.
Remember Folks: It may be unfixable...
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 2
... but it will also be illegal! So you don't have anything to worry about.
Unless you're one of those crooks who would publish the vulnerabilities to anyone but the company itself or the government, of course....
Now in many cases I would love to pay for the one or two album tracks or single remixes that I like
The music industry probably has a dark vault of statistics (or at least nightmares about said vault) where they have information that shows that over 50% of the discs they put out have fewer than 3 songs that appeal to those who buy them.
$15 x 1 disc > $5 x 2 singles..... hmmmm.
They have two choices:
1) produce only the 1-2 good songs. The problem is, the same "good songs" might not appeal to everyone. One album full of 15 songs has a better chance of having 2-3 that appeal to more people.
2) recruit artists that only produce good and appealing material. The problem with this is.... well, you see, the reason we.... I mean, tastes and demographics being what.... confound it, it just can't be done! For the same reason radio stations can't play "O Brother Where Art Thou" and other associated roots music like Alison Kraus and Nickel Creek, despite the fact sales from these artists/recordings tear up the charts. It Just Wouldn't Work (TM) you know. Quality doesn't sell. Or something.
I routinely listen to stuff that will, in all probability, NEVER make the top 40, and have a couple of albums chock-full of goodness by said artists. And yet....
I really like listening to "My Sharona" sometimes. Not extra-intellectual high quality songcraft or anything, but it's lots of fun. Some of the one hits wonders make it because people like them and they are actually likeable. I had high hopes for Lisa Loeb's stuff after that one song, "Stay," (one of the few to hit number 1 by an unsigned artist, and it is a good example of songcraft) but found most of the rest of her stuff somewhat insipid. Does that mean I should not listen to "Stay"?
In other words, I see your point about quality artists who consistently deliver good stuff. But for those artists who hit and miss, there's no reason to stop listening to the stuff they produce.
It would be ideal, however, if we could just buy the single (which is fortunately what I did with Loeb's stuff, thanks to a friend with a cassette deck) instead of the whole album. Of course the record industry they'd make fewer sales...
nobody ever seems to take note of the fact that oil has to be found, drilled for, shipped to a refinery, refined, shipped to storage, shipped to a station to dispense, and finally burned in an internal combustion engine with a current maximum tank-to-wheel efficiency of around 16%
Well.... the oil companies do. And much of the time, they turn a very tidy profit. Ergo, there's some degree of economic efficiency in the current state of things.
OK, maybe the term "tidy" is unfortunate, because they do push certain costs onto society as a whole... pollution being one....
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't recognize that, then you lack the artistic judgement to contribute to this discussion.
All you really just said is that if I haven't come to the same conclusions you have, it's because I just don't have any artistic judgement. Brilliant. How about I just assert the reverse and we'll call it even until you can come up with anything better.
There are a broad range of reasons for including profanity, sex, and violence into a film. Some of them have nothing to do with artistic integrity. I have a number of friends who have worked (or still work) for Hollywood, and according to them, there really are times where directors and/or producers really do say "let's add some more gratuitous sex/violence/swearin' -- people love that stuff." Obviously the motivation has nothing to do with artistic value in cases like this. But let's say those situations are the small minority of cases. Even when there's a larger thematic element of the story that requires a semantic representation of a violent or sexual act, or strong language, there are an awful lot of possibilities for actual syntax (footage/dialogue) used to express it. Lots of thematic elements and important stories -- if not most -- survive intact when restrained or implicit syntax is used. Most people are remarkably good at reading between the lines. A few actually require explicit portrayal for accurate effect, but even then the director has to balance the inherent semantics in the syntactic elements with the larger intended them (and to complicate the matter, the weight and to some extent even meaning of inherent semantics vary from individual to individual).
I can think of more examples than I can possibly list in a slashdot posting. I've seen Good Will Hunting twice. The first time I saw it was with 'fuck' edited out. I didn't learn anything watching it the second time except people from some areas of the Boston Metro area use the word 'fuck' like punctuation. Big deal: I learned the same thing from living in South Central LA (and in either context, the word loses most of its semantic meaning anyway). No difference in my experience as a filmgoer whatsoever -- except the version with 'fuck' caused distraction and discomfort for the film viewers who had grown up in a place where using that word meant that you were treating a person like they didn't mean anything at all. Without it, it was actually easier for them to concentrate on themes of trust in others and faith in what life has to offer and risk and the interaction between Matt Damon's and Robin William's characters, and the obstacles they faced, and the transformations that each of them make to become more healthy people.
Or there's Fight Club -- absolutely brilliant story, full of fun questions and scenes. I love the mayhem. I love the interplay between the appeal of the idea of blowing the whole system to hell -- and the slow revelation of what we're really being protected from as far as anarchy goes. I love talking about the themes of the film. I can actually remember more of the scenes than people I talk to. But I might not see the film. Some of the images described in the script aren't on the top of my list of things to see. The references in the script are enough for me to get the overall experience.
Or if you want to draw an example from real life, there's the guy I met in Santa Monica who came home one night to find both of his kids murdered in his house, tortured to death, one of them tied to a chair with dozens of unbent coat hangers stuck into him. Do you really need to see that image -- or even worse, see the crime perpetrated -- to understand how that nearly completely unhinged the man, and shook his faith in humanity or any kind of good in the world? I'll bet your imagination is enough. It'd be enough in a film about the event, too. But some filmakers would, of course, show the whole thing. Some viewers wouldn't want to watch it. And they would be accused of lacking in artistic sensibilities by people like you.
Bullshit. When the film says that the director was Scorcese, the viewer has no way to know what Clean Flicks removed from the movie. The viewer normally does not have both the edited and unedited versions in front of them for comparison.
Bullshit yourself. While the viewer may not know specifically what was removed, they have a general idea of what kind of content was removed -- because that's what they asked for. And the whole points is: nobody is mistaking this for Scorcese's original work. People who walk into Clean Flicks know exactly what they're asking for: a cut of a Scorcese work, done according to THEIR preferences. There's no illusion that their getting anything else. You're welcome to identify this as a travesty of art -- just as they're welcome to identify leaving the stuff IN as a travesty of art. But there's no deception at all here.
How many viewers of a Clean Flicks butchered movie will go to a party and say "I hated that movie -- but the only version I saw was edited by Clean Flicks to remove profanity, violence, and sexual content"? Answer: None. The work of the director, actors, and film crew will be maligned by people who have never seen the actual work.
You forget that by and large we're talking about people here who would have disliked the film if the stuff had been left in. There's no loss here if these people see an edited film and don't like it.
As a final (though not necessarily conclusive) note, I might add that I've developed these theories not only from years of thinking about this, but from having actually watched both edited and unedited versions of these films. Clean Flicks makes every effort to preserve continuity of the films within the editing parameters their customers have asked for, and very rarely have I seen edits where an important semantic element is lost from the story and there's a problem with flow. In the few cases where I have, the semantic loss has never made it up to the thematic level. I can think of a few films where that would be a problem, and the only choice people there is to watch most all of the film or not watch. Thank goodness that's still OK... apparently the right to view, listen, or read only PART of a work isn't.
I think the thing that most people were really annoyed with about Titanic was its status as a pop culture phenomenon, not the movie itself. It was a good movie. A little didactic in a place or two, dialogue missing something in a few places, but I really quite enjoyed seeing it once I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried a little bit thinking about the human tragedy of the actual event while watching the film, thought about hubris, and was glad to be on dry land in the middle of a Southwestern US desert.
However, it was terribly annoying to have to put up with that Celine Dion song over and over and the people who saw it 10 times and insisted it was the greatest film ever made and a turning point in their lives.
I think most reactive iconoclasms are that way. It's not so much the thing that's popular itself. It's the utter ridiculous prominence on the landscape that's hard to put up with.
Of course, then there are things like Brittney Spears and O-town, for which there are no excuse...
Then I think that I should be allowed to edit your posts prior to them appearing on Slashdot.
This wouldn't bother me at all -- as long as the original post was still available to anyone who wanted to read it.
In fact, this already happens to some extent -- to the comments as a whole. It's the moderation system. While it's not perfect, it has the merit of offering people customized views while letting others who prefer the raw format view it that way.
Clean Flicks is offering the same service.
I can take out anything I find offensive and then put the messages back together in such a way that it changes the entire tone and meaning of them.
Red Herring. Do we know that Clean Flicks is doing this? That is, have you watched a Clean Flicks film where you felt the themes of the film was significanlty changed or lost because of the editing?
Editing sensitive to overall themes and semantics expressed in a scenes is not exclusive with individuals psycho/social/emotional sensitivities.
But I'll need your user ID so that people think that you wrote the edited version.
More than a Red Herring -- this implies deception on the part of Clean Flicks, where NONE EXISTS. The films are clearly marked as edited by Clean Flicks, and since the whole premise of the business is founded on this awareness, it's impossible to argue someone might wander into their store and accidentally mistake a Clean Flicks version as the real thing.
There is some indication that talent is overrated.
You don't have a direct line of responsibility for what's happening in China, that's true. There's a need to dispose of old electronics. Some entities have decided they'll meet that need at a price. Others have decided they'll do it for cheaper (or pay) and try to make a profit on the materials.
The problem is: some of these disposing entities will do so as responsibly as possible. Some of these entities won't... they'll cut costs by using poorly informed labor and letting them come in contact with hazards, and also by letting hazardous materials go into the environment.
It's tempting for first world organization to patronize the later irresponsible disposal entities because they're cheaper -- because they externalize costs onto a commons. But by patronizing them, the continuing poisoning of individuals and environment is essentially encouraged, because that's their business model.
It's true that Chinese society could end the issue right now by making the decision on their own. But first world organizations can also stop it by choosing to deal only with responsible recyclers -- ones who don't push costs onto the commons which could eventually come back to bite us anyway. Moral issues aside.
Whether or not YOU personally can do anything has more to do with your ability to influence disposal habits and choose responsible disposal alternatives in as informed and wise manner as possible.
i forsee a huge backlash,
/'s for regexps.... no danger of having to confuse the use of \'s.
Nonsense. Perl 6 will continue to use
(ooo. should I have said \\'s? )
Having multiple opinions about something is often a good idea for many things. It might not be as important for book reviews as it is for say, removing your gall bladder or getting rotator cuff repair, but it's still sortof nice.
The alternative -- "Isn't one opinion good enough for anything?" -- seems rather frightening to me.
I'm sure businesses -- especially partners or potential partners -- are given more favorable terms in their license agreements than mere consumers.
It may have also had something to do with economic issues.... spookiness combined with the fact that economically, you're either going to watch it once or twice, for which the $1-$3 from a video store or library seems like a good trade, or buy it and you won't want to have to care about being charged when you watch.
I can't wait for when DRM goes DivX on PCs and the entertainment industry's ultimate goal is unmasked....
So.... how does one "retire" (in quotes) to Bolivia?
I worked as a developer in a major university library for about two years. The system I worked on only tracked requests made to borrow books through other universities, but it kept ALL of them. Your whole history. This system was used at a whole host of other libraries, including NYU, ASU, Berkely, and more.
The main system that kept track of circulation for the whole library also kept all requests. And it gets worse. I shouldn't have known that; it was outside my employee privileges, but several reference librarians kept the username and password posted on post-it notes, and being able to look up my own circulation record via telnet (or tnvt3270 or whatever it was) was way too convenient. From that point, looking up someone else's circ records was often way too interesting.... oh, and did I mention that the library used your SSN as a unique ID?
Anyway, the point is, the system saved ALL your information, and it was fairly easy to get to it. If we were counting on practices of libraries to preserve anonyminity, I wouldn't feel all that secure....
But as far as ethics in business go, there is only one ethic: make money. The system is set up to encourage a company to find the shortest path to greatest profitability, and that's the way it will likely always be. Is this bad? Depends on what you want companies to accomplish. If you want them to achieve economic growth, increasing efficiency, etc, then they are ideally groomed to do this (as our economy has demonstrated over the past decades). But don't expect any higher moral sense to come out of a company unless there is a profit motive behind it. It can happen, but the system isn't designed to encourage it.
And that's the problem with the culture of greed/captilism that's entrenched in the Westerne World.
Somehow, a basically good idea -- that by acquiring capital and using it to meet a human need, you can acquire money, and by letting individuals do this, the needs of society at large are usually met -- turned into "if individuals are pursuing only their own self interest and trying to acquire as much money as possible, then it's good for everybody." Thought the two concepts are similar, it's not even really that fine a distinction, but a lot of people miss it. Some because it's in their own self-interest to do so and they don't give a damn about much else.
Currency and markets and corporations are useful concepts/tools that do a lot of things well, but imagining that they correctly value everything that's important to individuals and society is lunacy as much as the idea that Tahitian Noni juice can cure all your health problems. The "greed is good" ethic needs to be erradicated.
I sold it and am looking forward to the day when I can get a decently fast iBook. Maybe the 700mhz model is a lot faster, but I'd be surprised.
The 700mhz have a larger cache and faster bus if I recall correctly.
On the other hand, I am posting this from a Powerbook G3 running at 333 Mhz, and I'm comfortable with the speed of normal applications. My secret? RAM, my friend, boatloads of RAM. Actually, 320 MB really isn't considered a boatload any more, but it's enough that the OS and most apps speed remarkably.
Of course, when I'm encoding mp3s or doing other signal processing stuff like photoshop, or recompiling PHP, I do sometimes wish for some more speed.
There was an absolutely brilliant article on this whole subject in Brigham Young University's Insight magazine several years back. It revolved around the examination of the concepts of syntax and semantics in film.... ie, the images/audio used in a film vs. the meaning and themes and overall experience created by stringing them together.
You might put syntax into a film that consisted of profanity, violence, illicit sex, substance abuse, theft, deciet, or any other act that could be judged as morally wrong, and it could still be part of a larger semanticity that's worth examining. Camelot-like stories are an excellent example... it's interesting to examine how conflicting passions destroyed an ideal, and the presence of adultery in the story is part of that.
No problem. Everyone is probably with me to this point. Adultery, theft, murder, etc. all exist in the world and creating and examining stories about how this matters to human beings is what art is about.
The problem, however, is that the impact of some syntax can overcome its semantic context (especially when the semantic context is poorly concieved or executed). The example from the article was of an anti-porn/anti-rape film that had too much porn and some awfully graphic rape scenes. I'm anti-rape. I can concur with a film that's anti-rape. I don't want to watch a 10 minute graphic rape scene. The concept is horrible enough to me as it is. The syntax recreates to some degree, and experience, and that experience has impact, and ignoring that impact, or grossly mishandling the level of exposure to said experience means that the syntax loses context and distorts the overall film.
The problem gets more complex when you "sensitivity" to syntax vary culturally and individually. Some people are a lost cause... they're not able to construct a larger meaning and syntax is the only thing they see. I don't worry about these people not seeing films...
but some people can appreciate films like Good Will Hunting, but they come from a culture and background in which the word "fuck" is a great disrespect to listeners (vs. some cultures/backgrounds in which it is only mildly pale, or among some people who use it as punctuation). It gets in the way of the semantics of the film for these people.... what's wrong with them changing their own copy of the film so they can focus on what they want to?
Because I wanted the sex scene to disgust you, or excite out, or make you feel uncomfortable. That's why I spent those words (or that film) portraying it.
And so you have a right to disgust, excite, or make me feel uncomfortable?
Am I only allowed to listen to a politician's speech if I will agree 100% with what he says?
Am I only allowed access to your ideas by completely accepting your control over me?
Are you comfortable with granting me the same right?
Wrong again, citizen. You will watch all broadcast or otherwised release works in their entirety, and you will also watch the commercials included. Anything else is a wrong against the great artists who created them, and stealing from those who supported their creation.
For your own personal use does not include renting it out to other people. And while setting up specific edit-points may very well pass court scrutiny (because it's adding what effectively amounts to "opinion"), this isn't what the stores are doing
What the stores do is alter videos you have already bought. You already own the "medium on which it is placed" by the time the stores alter it.
You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
Not in the least. The right to alter and redistribute is what's guaranteed by the GPL.
OK, but isn't this sort of like putting a loincloth on David, or covering up Venus's breasts? Or removing the n-work from Huck Finn ? Perhaps some art is intended on being experienced and viewed as harshly as it was created. Perhaps you feel that it is not neccesary (for instance, I don't see what David would lose in a loincloth), but I posit that that choice ought be left to the creator.
Putting a loincloth over the original David, or painting over Venus' breasts in the orginial would be a travesty.
Putting a loincloth over a plaster copy in your house could be any kind of statement.... it could be puckishness or satire or plain old puritanism. And there's nothing wrong with letting people arrange their own homes or lives according to any such sentiment.
This is about what people choose to do with their own stuff. They're not redistributing it or forcing it on anyone else....
What? And give control back to the unwashed masses? They don't know what art is, and we'd rather give up half our market than compromise the artistic purity and integrity of Hollywood....
Puh-lease. The travesty in all this isn't that directors are fighting our ability to buy edited copies of movies, it's that any idiot would try to take the swear words out of a film in the first place. Don't watch the goddam movie if it offends you so much. While we're at it let's erase all the footage of Elvis Presley's "obscene" hip gyrations and file the tits off the Statue of Liberty. Some people just have no sense...
Why the hell should it matter to you whether or not someone doesn't want to hear "fuck" used every other word, but watch Good Will Hunting? Or would rather not have a nude image of Kate Winslet in their head but still (for some reason) watch Titanic? It doesn't take a puritan freak to have decent reasons for wanting either of those.
No, you can't live your whole life holding your breath for fear that exhaling will upset someone, but I just can't see why you are so offended by the idea that somewhere, someone has decided that they don't like the concept embodied by someone's use of the "f-word".
Profanity is a curious thing, yes, just like other social conventions and taboos, but it's a shallow analysis indeed that dismisses the relevancy of such things just because they are "merely" social conventions or taboos.
... but it will also be illegal! So you don't have anything to worry about.
Unless you're one of those crooks who would publish the vulnerabilities to anyone but the company itself or the government, of course....
Now in many cases I would love to pay for the one or two album tracks or single remixes that I like
The music industry probably has a dark vault of statistics (or at least nightmares about said vault) where they have information that shows that over 50% of the discs they put out have fewer than 3 songs that appeal to those who buy them.
$15 x 1 disc > $5 x 2 singles..... hmmmm.
They have two choices:
1) produce only the 1-2 good songs. The problem is, the same "good songs" might not appeal to everyone. One album full of 15 songs has a better chance of having 2-3 that appeal to more people.
2) recruit artists that only produce good and appealing material. The problem with this is.... well, you see, the reason we.... I mean, tastes and demographics being what.... confound it, it just can't be done! For the same reason radio stations can't play "O Brother Where Art Thou" and other associated roots music like Alison Kraus and Nickel Creek, despite the fact sales from these artists/recordings tear up the charts. It Just Wouldn't Work (TM) you know. Quality doesn't sell. Or something.
I routinely listen to stuff that will, in all probability, NEVER make the top 40, and have a couple of albums chock-full of goodness by said artists. And yet....
I really like listening to "My Sharona" sometimes. Not extra-intellectual high quality songcraft or anything, but it's lots of fun. Some of the one hits wonders make it because people like them and they are actually likeable. I had high hopes for Lisa Loeb's stuff after that one song, "Stay," (one of the few to hit number 1 by an unsigned artist, and it is a good example of songcraft) but found most of the rest of her stuff somewhat insipid. Does that mean I should not listen to "Stay"?
In other words, I see your point about quality artists who consistently deliver good stuff. But for those artists who hit and miss, there's no reason to stop listening to the stuff they produce.
It would be ideal, however, if we could just buy the single (which is fortunately what I did with Loeb's stuff, thanks to a friend with a cassette deck) instead of the whole album. Of course the record industry they'd make fewer sales...
Hmmmm. I've noticed that the battery drains more quickly sleeping under OS X than under OS 9. Not sure why.
And I've also had long wake up times, and (rarely) no-wakeys. Powerbook G3 Bronze/Lombard....
nobody ever seems to take note of the fact that oil has to be found, drilled for, shipped to a refinery, refined, shipped to storage, shipped to a station to dispense, and finally burned in an internal combustion engine with a current maximum tank-to-wheel efficiency of around 16%
Well.... the oil companies do. And much of the time, they turn a very tidy profit. Ergo, there's some degree of economic efficiency in the current state of things.
OK, maybe the term "tidy" is unfortunate, because they do push certain costs onto society as a whole... pollution being one....