"The University of Connecticut (at least the Storrs campus) caps residential users to 5GB/any seven-day period, and drops us to 56k for seven days if we violate that. Do it three times in a semester, and we're at 56k for the rest of it.
"It sucks terribly---it's made utter bastards of all of us. It costs us to help people out (the 5GB limit is combined up/down), so we don't share."
As Kate Hepburn once said so memorably, "I am not moved to tears." 5 gigabytes _per week_? You're not exactly hurting. So you can't "help" people? Help them to do what? You don't "share"? Share what? Is amassing a huge music collection some kind of prerequisite to passing multivariable calculus?
I know that this is an unpopular view, but you're supposed to be at college to study and earn a degree. Everything else--a distant second. While your daddy or the student loans are paying the bill, you're supposed to be getting an education, not "sharing" the latest flight-sim on the university dime.
And don't tell me that you need 5GB/week to do you schoolwork. You want to do research, that's what the library is for (and, having tried recently to do a little research into analytical chemistry online, I can tell you that two hours in the library is worth a week of fruitless sifting through corporate webpages.)
One of the reasons that the early Simpsons episodes were so funny, and continue to remain funny, is that they were not topical, but universal. There were episodes about Bart and Lisa in school, Homer's troubles with his job, strains in Homer's and Marge's marriage--all standard if not hackneyed sitcom plots, you may say, but stories of general appeal, that are still funny more than a decade later. And that's true of nearly _all_ of the classic comedy that's still funny even fifty years later. Watch I Love Lucy or listen to the Jack Benny program and you're not likely to hear any joke or gag about some 40's or 50's political or social event. Both shows _do_ make use of cameos, and those "date" the show to an extent, especially when the star or bigwig has since become rather obscure (hands up everyone who's heard of Dore Schary or Ronald Colman!) But those classic shows, and classic Simpsons, because they avoid topical humor, have aged remarkably well.
Groening's talk of making an Enron episode reminds me of how low the Simpsons have sunk. Who, five years from now, is going to remember Enron? Hell, who cares _now_ about Enron? But the Simpsons went down that primrose way a long time ago, ever since they started cracking jokes about the Internet, and making episodes featuring George Bush and Bill Clinton (I'm reminded that the Simpsons' funniest political episode, the one where Lisa goes to Washington, makes hardly any specific reference to the politics of the day), and running cameos from every two-bit celebrity or band who had their fifteen minutes, from Mark McGwire to N-Sync.
Tackhead, if you think that humor on the level of "bite my shiny metal ass" is funny, then the word for you isn't "adult", but a somewhat longer but similar word, "adolescent".
I'll tell you what _did_ suck about _The Phantom Menace_.
Try that confused mess of a political subplot, something to do with Naboo and the taxation of trade routes and a Trade Federation that came from God knows where and controls God knows which and wants God knows what from Naboo--hell, does _any_ of that make any sense?
Try Johnny one-note characters like Qui Gon, Obi Wan, and Amidala: Qui Gon hardly utters anything other than gnomic pronouncements about the Force and the prophecy (I know, one can argue that Obi Wan from _Star Wars_ was little better, but Alec Guinness is ten times the actor that Liam Neeson is, and he makes Obi Wan interesting in a way that Neeson, with his monotonous delivery, utterly fails to do with Qui Gon.) Obi Wan has hardly any dialogue of importance at all; he's there to swing a lightsaber. Amidala is the concerned child queen and nothing else, aside from a few lines of painful dialogue (e.g. "My caring for you will remain.")
Try the finale of the climactic battle, which uses the "single ship sneaks in and blows up the great fortress" plot for the _third time in four movies_. That it's done by _accident_, by a character whose most memorable dialogue in the whole sequence is, "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick!", makes it all the more painful.
In comparison to all this, Jar Jar is a positive breath of fresh air. I hate to think of how dreary some of the scenes in _Phantom Menace_ would have been without him--hell, in all those interminable scenes at the beginning of the movie where Qui Gon and Obi Wan are trying to get off Naboo, Jar Jar is the only interesting thing on the screen. He's goofy and silly, yes, but oddly thoughtful at times (such as when he tells Amidala that the Gungans aren't going to give up without a fight--he's still proud of the people who banished him.)
But everyone hates him, of course. At least, everyone _here_ hates him. I guess it's all part of that attitude, so prevalent among fans of things like Star Wars and Babylon 5, that _hates_ children and everything that is perceived as childish or reminding one of childhood. I daresay that, considering that many fans are probably only recently emerged from childhood themselves (or, depending on your point of view, still there), this attitude is understandable. Jar Jar, so the conventional wisdom goes, is for the kids--therefore, the sooner he dies a gruesome death, the better.
This is a valid point, and one that occurred to me after I wrote what I did. I guess I'm just as much a victim as many people of the urgency of the Internet--the Internet is there to gratify the _immediate_ desire to satisfy one's curiosities (about current events or anything else) and when I don't get the instant gratification, I get annoyed. You're absolutely right in that it doesn't particularly matter whether I learn about HP today, tomorrow, next week, or never.
hyacinthus.
I think what bothered me most...
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...is wondering whether what the news was that was _not_ getting reported on Slashdot because its powers that be were busy running one joke story after another. I read Slashdot for many reasons--wasting time is probably the chief reason, but another reason is that I'm genuinely curious to know what important events are going down in the high-tech world, and what people think about them. I was hoping, for example, that there'd be an item about the HP-Compaq merger and HP's decision to kick Walter Hewlett off the board, but no--I guess reporting fake stories about Linus Torvalds quitting and Google using pigeons to rank their pages was more important. Hey, I've got an idea--instead of wasting everyone's time, why not post an item linking to several of these gag stories (you know, like a Slashback post) and then get on with the real news. The world doesn't grind to a stop because it's the first of April.
I think much the same thing as you, only I came to the conclusion a bit differently. I first learned about Roger Ebert a few years ago through his online reviews at the Chicago Sun-Times website, and I came to admire him very much; he was (usually) a very lucid writer, and always had something intelligent to say about the movies he reviewed. And, importantly, he seemed to try at all times to enjoy all the movies he watched. He usually managed to find something good to say, even about a movie he didn't particularly care for. He was very different, refreshingly different, from Pauline Kael and all of her third-rate imitators, who always tried to outdo themselves in finding clever put-downs and insults about the movies they reviewed. Occasionally some movie would not sit well with Ebert, and he'd give it a rare one-star (or even no-star) review; his review of Rob Reiner's North is a classic in this regard.
But then I found older Ebert reviews, in old editions of his books and so forth, and I was impressed by how bad they often were. Just to pick an example, somebody track down his original review of Hal Ashby's Being There from twenty years ago, and then compare it to the recent review of it he wrote for his "Great Movies" column on the Sun-Times website. Ebert has definitely improved with age.
I'm probably in a minority of one on Slashdot for thinking this, but what, exactly, is wrong with Celine Dion? I think she has a great singing voice and I like many of her songs. I'd rather listen to "To Love You More" for the hundredth time than listen to anything on "The Mountain"'s playlist more than once. ("The Mountain" is KMTT 103.7 Seattle, and bills itself as the "Seattle alternative" to top-40 stations like "Star" 101.5.)
hyacinthus.
Best screenplay for FOTR? Not by a long shot
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 2
I'm not going so far as to say that the adaptation was a hatchet job, but it's pretty bad. Except for the scene where Bilbo tells Gandalf that he feels he needs a permanent holiday, and the famous exchange between Frodo and Gandalf about Gollum ("Many that live deserve death," &c.--for some reason Jackson rips this scene out of context and crams it into another part of the story), the screenplay preserves hardly any of Tolkien's dialogue. Jackson's attempts to sex the story up are unfortunate (e.g. the stupid "Meet Cute" where Arwen sneaks up on Aragorn), and his attempts to make the story funny are dismal (e.g. everything that was done to Gimli, especially the "Never toss a dwarf!" line.) Important expository or character-building scenes are jettisoned in favor of fight scenes and action set-pieces, most of which either aren't in the book or which Tolkien disposes of in a paragraph or two.
Jackson's film is entertaining enough, but to claim that it merits Best Anything awards is ridiculous. The most that can be said for it is that's it's better than most movie fantasy (one things of wretched stuff like _Legend_ or that D & D movie with Jeremy Irons.) But any script that contains stuff like the dwarf-tossing line, any other of the bits where Gimli acts like a complete fool (e.g. welcoming the Fellowship to Moria and the hospitality of his cousin Balin), a Council of Elrond scene which turns into a barroom brawl, the Gandalf-Saruman slugging match, or the completely fabricated scene where Boromir petulantly cuts himself on Narsil in Rivendell, isn't a Best Adaptation by a long shot.
Meat (or any other inanimate thing) _can't_ be "unhealthy", or "healthy". What you're saying is that "Meat is not ill", which is wrong. The correct word is "unhealthful".
"'After hiding in the bushes, they use those little tin "cricket-clicker" doodads to find each other and regroup.'
"Click-click.
"Click."
I'm reminded sharply of an episode of "Dilbert", where, after Dilbert shows off to Dogbert his latest useless technological toy, Dogbert says to him, "The scary thing is that progress depends on people like you."
I've had a yahoo.com e-mail address for about three years now, and until recently it was my main e-mail address. At home I _always_ used a POP client to read my e-mail, and only used the Web gateway if I were on someone else's computer.
The account's become almost useless lately, because I've been getting so much spam (Yahoo's filters only hold back a fraction of it), so I'm almost glad that Yahoo is giving me an excuse to close the account altogether. Softhome.net is much better.
Well, not _everyone_. Bear in mind that the only people whom are likely to be pissed off by this latest abuse of Google are the relatively small minority of persons who care about such technical matters (e.g. Slashdot readers.) Scientology has probably already written us off as unfit for conversion; they're not losing any potential members by making enemies of us.
The important thing about most of these online antics of Scientology (spamming alt.religion.scientology, going after penet.fi, trying to get their OT documents pulled from websites, &c.) is that they matter very little to most people. Sure, Scientology has made a lot of enemies among the regulars on certain newsgroups and websites, but what of that? Outside of that small group are masses of people to whom Scientology is, at most, perhaps a certain building downtown and a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner, and in that respect is no different from many other cults and religious groups on the fringe. The first I'd ever heard of _public_ opposition of and protest against Scientology was after the Lisa McPherson affair.
I see what you're saying. Spolsky's exact words were, "WINE is going to have to get a lot better before Linux is a threat to the desktop." If one takes "WINE is going to have to get a lot better" to be equivalent to "Linux is going to have to run Windows apps seamlessly", then Spolsky is asserting that running Windows apps is a _necessary_ (but not sufficient) condition to Linux's success. OS/2 satisfied the condition, but perhaps there were others.
I think you'd be hard pressed, though, to think of any condition sufficient to insure Linux's success.
Spolsky asserts that Linux won't be a player in the desktop market until it can run Windows applications. I find this a very puzzling assertion--one I've seen elsewhere. Certainly the case of OS/2 clearly refutes this notion: OS/2 could run Windows applications, could even run them better than Windows itself, but then, why run OS/2 when you could just run Windows, and (more importantly) why _develop_ for OS/2 when by developing for Windows you could cover both bases.
I spot a flaw in my analogy, which is that OS/2 was a commercial competitor, while Linux is "free" and therefore more attractive.
What is this strange attraction, exhibited by people with far too much money, to Buddhism? One thinks also of Richard Gere and [shudder] Steven Seagal claiming to adhere to Buddhist principles. I find that laughable, considering what I remember about the tenets of Buddhism, especially the bits about extinction of the self, freeing oneself from worldly attachments and cravings, and so forth.
hyacinthus.
The inimitability of human intelligence
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 2
It's a little depressing that even a well-designed search engine like Google, with its complex algorithms, _still_ cannot do what the veriest simpleton can do at a glance, which is to tell if a printed page treats with a subject of interest or not. It's also significant that Google, in its attempt to imitate this very basic human faculty, resorts to tricks that nobody _ever_ has to do when quickly evaluating a webpage (e.g. chasing links.)
I don't normally have any truck with trolls like your self, sir, but I'm a generous man, and I thought I'd give you a chance. You see, if you respond as you're wont to do, then you will actually be flaming a _real live homosexual_. Call me a fag, and you'll be right. I'm doing this because, as I said, I'm generous, and I like to give even a jackass like you the chance to be right once in his life.
I just love this old canard, dragged out at least half a dozen times for each Slashdot discussion on music piracy--oh, I'm sorry, "sharing". Piracy is justified...because CD's cost too much! and how do we know they cost too much? Because they're so cheap to manufacture! Look!
You are aware, of course, that the idea that the value of a product should be equal to (or at least derivative from) the cost of its manufacture, the cost of materials and labor, is essentially a Marxist concept.
hyacinthus.
"code until your fingers are bloody stumps"
on
C
·
· Score: 2
Sheesh. Certainly Prof. Greenlee is not the only exponent of this idea, but still, I find myself wondering in how many of his students he confirmed the fraudulent idea that you do your best work in marathon sessions, on your fifth cup of coffee, after three hours' sleep.
So JMS is "utterly incapable" of forgiveness, eh? What a terrible burden it must be for him, to carry all that resentment around with him. (Certainly this explains why he didn't take criticism of his show too well.)
An incomparably finer storyteller in a different age once wrote some words which JMS should take to heart, they start like this: "The quality of mercy is not strained..."
(Oh, and one more thing: "one of the finest storytellers of our age"? Your judgment is abandoning you, Bill. Just because he's an atheist doesn't make him a good writer. And anybody who could write "Thirdspace" isn't that fine a storyteller.)
("The mountains labored, and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse." From Q. Horatius Flaccus.)
That line just about sums up my opinion of "Babylon 5". After years of ceremonious buildup, and plenty of self-promotion from JMS on various online forums, after the mountains labored, they gave birth to a rather mean little story about how mankind is grown up now, and doesn't need the guidance of the wicked, bad, nasty, manipulative Shadows and Vorlons. Ugh. Let's not talk about Season Five, or all of the spinoffs from a show which, as an early episode reminded us, wasn't supposed to be just another "deep space franchise".
Add to this the fact that JMS's ear for dialogue, especially comic dialogue, was often terrible (I cringe at the thought of Bruce Boxleitner saying "Abso-fraggin-lutely"), and suddenly "Jeremiah" doesn't look like anything to get worked up about.
No, I don't agree. Everyone knows that Slashdot is a moderated forum before they post here. If you want to mouth off to your heart's content, there are plenty of unmoderated forums out there; don't pick on this one and whine "censorship" because of the moderation. (Complaining that the moderating isn't doing its job is another matter.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The University of Connecticut (at least the Storrs campus) caps residential users to 5GB/any seven-day period, and drops us to 56k for seven days if we violate that. Do it three times in a semester, and we're at 56k for the rest of it.
"It sucks terribly---it's made utter bastards of all of us. It costs us to help people out (the 5GB limit is combined up/down), so we don't share."
As Kate Hepburn once said so memorably, "I am not moved to tears." 5 gigabytes _per week_? You're not exactly hurting. So you can't "help" people? Help them to do what? You don't "share"? Share what? Is amassing a huge music collection some kind of prerequisite to passing multivariable calculus?
I know that this is an unpopular view, but you're supposed to be at college to study and earn a degree. Everything else--a distant second. While your daddy or the student loans are paying the bill, you're supposed to be getting an education, not "sharing" the latest flight-sim on the university dime.
And don't tell me that you need 5GB/week to do you schoolwork. You want to do research, that's what the library is for (and, having tried recently to do a little research into analytical chemistry online, I can tell you that two hours in the library is worth a week of fruitless sifting through corporate webpages.)
hyacinthus.
A _head-butt_? Come on! That's something I expect to see in a barroom brawl or in Guy Ritchie's latest turkey, not in a Star Wars movie.
hyacinthus.
One of the reasons that the early Simpsons episodes were so funny, and continue to remain funny, is that they were not topical, but universal. There were episodes about Bart and Lisa in school, Homer's troubles with his job, strains in Homer's and Marge's marriage--all standard if not hackneyed sitcom plots, you may say, but stories of general appeal, that are still funny more than a decade later. And that's true of nearly _all_ of the classic comedy that's still funny even fifty years later. Watch I Love Lucy or listen to the Jack Benny program and you're not likely to hear any joke or gag about some 40's or 50's political or social event. Both shows _do_ make use of cameos, and those "date" the show to an extent, especially when the star or bigwig has since become rather obscure (hands up everyone who's heard of Dore Schary or Ronald Colman!) But those classic shows, and classic Simpsons, because they avoid topical humor, have aged remarkably well.
Groening's talk of making an Enron episode reminds me of how low the Simpsons have sunk. Who, five years from now, is going to remember Enron? Hell, who cares _now_ about Enron? But the Simpsons went down that primrose way a long time ago, ever since they started cracking jokes about the Internet, and making episodes featuring George Bush and Bill Clinton (I'm reminded that the Simpsons' funniest political episode, the one where Lisa goes to Washington, makes hardly any specific reference to the politics of the day), and running cameos from every two-bit celebrity or band who had their fifteen minutes, from Mark McGwire to N-Sync.
hyacinthus.
Tackhead, if you think that humor on the level of "bite my shiny metal ass" is funny, then the word for you isn't "adult", but a somewhat longer but similar word, "adolescent".
hyacinthus.
I'll tell you what _did_ suck about _The Phantom Menace_.
Try that confused mess of a political subplot, something to do with Naboo and the taxation of trade routes and a Trade Federation that came from God knows where and controls God knows which and wants God knows what from Naboo--hell, does _any_ of that make any sense?
Try Johnny one-note characters like Qui Gon, Obi Wan, and Amidala: Qui Gon hardly utters anything other than gnomic pronouncements about the Force and the prophecy (I know, one can argue that Obi Wan from _Star Wars_ was little better, but Alec Guinness is ten times the actor that Liam Neeson is, and he makes Obi Wan interesting in a way that Neeson, with his monotonous delivery, utterly fails to do with Qui Gon.) Obi Wan has hardly any dialogue of importance at all; he's there to swing a lightsaber. Amidala is the concerned child queen and nothing else, aside from a few lines of painful dialogue (e.g. "My caring for you will remain.")
Try the finale of the climactic battle, which uses the "single ship sneaks in and blows up the great fortress" plot for the _third time in four movies_. That it's done by _accident_, by a character whose most memorable dialogue in the whole sequence is, "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick!", makes it all the more painful.
In comparison to all this, Jar Jar is a positive breath of fresh air. I hate to think of how dreary some of the scenes in _Phantom Menace_ would have been without him--hell, in all those interminable scenes at the beginning of the movie where Qui Gon and Obi Wan are trying to get off Naboo, Jar Jar is the only interesting thing on the screen. He's goofy and silly, yes, but oddly thoughtful at times (such as when he tells Amidala that the Gungans aren't going to give up without a fight--he's still proud of the people who banished him.)
But everyone hates him, of course. At least, everyone _here_ hates him. I guess it's all part of that attitude, so prevalent among fans of things like Star Wars and Babylon 5, that _hates_ children and everything that is perceived as childish or reminding one of childhood. I daresay that, considering that many fans are probably only recently emerged from childhood themselves (or, depending on your point of view, still there), this attitude is understandable. Jar Jar, so the conventional wisdom goes, is for the kids--therefore, the sooner he dies a gruesome death, the better.
hyacinthus.
This is a valid point, and one that occurred to me after I wrote what I did. I guess I'm just as much a victim as many people of the urgency of the Internet--the Internet is there to gratify the _immediate_ desire to satisfy one's curiosities (about current events or anything else) and when I don't get the instant gratification, I get annoyed. You're absolutely right in that it doesn't particularly matter whether I learn about HP today, tomorrow, next week, or never.
hyacinthus.
...is wondering whether what the news was that was _not_ getting reported on Slashdot because its powers that be were busy running one joke story after another. I read Slashdot for many reasons--wasting time is probably the chief reason, but another reason is that I'm genuinely curious to know what important events are going down in the high-tech world, and what people think about them. I was hoping, for example, that there'd be an item about the HP-Compaq merger and HP's decision to kick Walter Hewlett off the board, but no--I guess reporting fake stories about Linus Torvalds quitting and Google using pigeons to rank their pages was more important. Hey, I've got an idea--instead of wasting everyone's time, why not post an item linking to several of these gag stories (you know, like a Slashback post) and then get on with the real news. The world doesn't grind to a stop because it's the first of April.
I think much the same thing as you, only I came to the conclusion a bit differently. I first learned about Roger Ebert a few years ago through his online reviews at the Chicago Sun-Times website, and I came to admire him very much; he was (usually) a very lucid writer, and always had something intelligent to say about the movies he reviewed. And, importantly, he seemed to try at all times to enjoy all the movies he watched. He usually managed to find something good to say, even about a movie he didn't particularly care for. He was very different, refreshingly different, from Pauline Kael and all of her third-rate imitators, who always tried to outdo themselves in finding clever put-downs and insults about the movies they reviewed. Occasionally some movie would not sit well with Ebert, and he'd give it a rare one-star (or even no-star) review; his review of Rob Reiner's North is a classic in this regard.
But then I found older Ebert reviews, in old editions of his books and so forth, and I was impressed by how bad they often were. Just to pick an example, somebody track down his original review of Hal Ashby's Being There from twenty years ago, and then compare it to the recent review of it he wrote for his "Great Movies" column on the Sun-Times website. Ebert has definitely improved with age.
And he's lost some weight, too.
I'm probably in a minority of one on Slashdot for thinking this, but what, exactly, is wrong with Celine Dion? I think she has a great singing voice and I like many of her songs. I'd rather listen to "To Love You More" for the hundredth time than listen to anything on "The Mountain"'s playlist more than once. ("The Mountain" is KMTT 103.7 Seattle, and bills itself as the "Seattle alternative" to top-40 stations like "Star" 101.5.)
hyacinthus.
I'm not going so far as to say that the adaptation was a hatchet job, but it's pretty bad. Except for the scene where Bilbo tells Gandalf that he feels he needs a permanent holiday, and the famous exchange between Frodo and Gandalf about Gollum ("Many that live deserve death," &c.--for some reason Jackson rips this scene out of context and crams it into another part of the story), the screenplay preserves hardly any of Tolkien's dialogue. Jackson's attempts to sex the story up are unfortunate (e.g. the stupid "Meet Cute" where Arwen sneaks up on Aragorn), and his attempts to make the story funny are dismal (e.g. everything that was done to Gimli, especially the "Never toss a dwarf!" line.) Important expository or character-building scenes are jettisoned in favor of fight scenes and action set-pieces, most of which either aren't in the book or which Tolkien disposes of in a paragraph or two.
Jackson's film is entertaining enough, but to claim that it merits Best Anything awards is ridiculous. The most that can be said for it is that's it's better than most movie fantasy (one things of wretched stuff like _Legend_ or that D & D movie with Jeremy Irons.) But any script that contains stuff like the dwarf-tossing line, any other of the bits where Gimli acts like a complete fool (e.g. welcoming the Fellowship to Moria and the hospitality of his cousin Balin), a Council of Elrond scene which turns into a barroom brawl, the Gandalf-Saruman slugging match, or the completely fabricated scene where Boromir petulantly cuts himself on Narsil in Rivendell, isn't a Best Adaptation by a long shot.
"Meat is not unhealthy."
Meat (or any other inanimate thing) _can't_ be "unhealthy", or "healthy". What you're saying is that "Meat is not ill", which is wrong. The correct word is "unhealthful".
From the article:
"'After hiding in the bushes, they use those little tin "cricket-clicker" doodads to find each other and regroup.'
"Click-click.
"Click."
I'm reminded sharply of an episode of "Dilbert", where, after Dilbert shows off to Dogbert his latest useless technological toy, Dogbert says to him, "The scary thing is that progress depends on people like you."
hyacinthus.
I've had a yahoo.com e-mail address for about three years now, and until recently it was my main e-mail address. At home I _always_ used a POP client to read my e-mail, and only used the Web gateway if I were on someone else's computer.
The account's become almost useless lately, because I've been getting so much spam (Yahoo's filters only hold back a fraction of it), so I'm almost glad that Yahoo is giving me an excuse to close the account altogether. Softhome.net is much better.
hyacinthus.
Well, not _everyone_. Bear in mind that the only people whom are likely to be pissed off by this latest abuse of Google are the relatively small minority of persons who care about such technical matters (e.g. Slashdot readers.) Scientology has probably already written us off as unfit for conversion; they're not losing any potential members by making enemies of us.
The important thing about most of these online antics of Scientology (spamming alt.religion.scientology, going after penet.fi, trying to get their OT documents pulled from websites, &c.) is that they matter very little to most people. Sure, Scientology has made a lot of enemies among the regulars on certain newsgroups and websites, but what of that? Outside of that small group are masses of people to whom Scientology is, at most, perhaps a certain building downtown and a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner, and in that respect is no different from many other cults and religious groups on the fringe. The first I'd ever heard of _public_ opposition of and protest against Scientology was after the Lisa McPherson affair.
hyacinthus.
I see what you're saying. Spolsky's exact words were, "WINE is going to have to get a lot better before Linux is a threat to the desktop." If one takes "WINE is going to have to get a lot better" to be equivalent to "Linux is going to have to run Windows apps seamlessly", then Spolsky is asserting that running Windows apps is a _necessary_ (but not sufficient) condition to Linux's success. OS/2 satisfied the condition, but perhaps there were others.
I think you'd be hard pressed, though, to think of any condition sufficient to insure Linux's success.
hyacinthus.
Spolsky asserts that Linux won't be a player in the desktop market until it can run Windows applications. I find this a very puzzling assertion--one I've seen elsewhere. Certainly the case of OS/2 clearly refutes this notion: OS/2 could run Windows applications, could even run them better than Windows itself, but then, why run OS/2 when you could just run Windows, and (more importantly) why _develop_ for OS/2 when by developing for Windows you could cover both bases.
I spot a flaw in my analogy, which is that OS/2 was a commercial competitor, while Linux is "free" and therefore more attractive.
hyacinthus.
What is this strange attraction, exhibited by people with far too much money, to Buddhism? One thinks also of Richard Gere and [shudder] Steven Seagal claiming to adhere to Buddhist principles. I find that laughable, considering what I remember about the tenets of Buddhism, especially the bits about extinction of the self, freeing oneself from worldly attachments and cravings, and so forth.
hyacinthus.
It's a little depressing that even a well-designed search engine like Google, with its complex algorithms, _still_ cannot do what the veriest simpleton can do at a glance, which is to tell if a printed page treats with a subject of interest or not. It's also significant that Google, in its attempt to imitate this very basic human faculty, resorts to tricks that nobody _ever_ has to do when quickly evaluating a webpage (e.g. chasing links.)
hyacinthus.
Correct use of the word "loose"! Rejoice!
hyacinthus.
I don't normally have any truck with trolls like your self, sir, but I'm a generous man, and I thought I'd give you a chance. You see, if you respond as you're wont to do, then you will actually be flaming a _real live homosexual_. Call me a fag, and you'll be right. I'm doing this because, as I said, I'm generous, and I like to give even a jackass like you the chance to be right once in his life.
Cheerio!
hyacinthus.
I just love this old canard, dragged out at least half a dozen times for each Slashdot discussion on music piracy--oh, I'm sorry, "sharing". Piracy is justified...because CD's cost too much! and how do we know they cost too much? Because they're so cheap to manufacture! Look!
You are aware, of course, that the idea that the value of a product should be equal to (or at least derivative from) the cost of its manufacture, the cost of materials and labor, is essentially a Marxist concept.
hyacinthus.
Sheesh. Certainly Prof. Greenlee is not the only exponent of this idea, but still, I find myself wondering in how many of his students he confirmed the fraudulent idea that you do your best work in marathon sessions, on your fifth cup of coffee, after three hours' sleep.
hyacinthus.
So JMS is "utterly incapable" of forgiveness, eh? What a terrible burden it must be for him, to carry all that resentment around with him. (Certainly this explains why he didn't take criticism of his show too well.)
An incomparably finer storyteller in a different age once wrote some words which JMS should take to heart, they start like this: "The quality of mercy is not strained..."
(Oh, and one more thing: "one of the finest storytellers of our age"? Your judgment is abandoning you, Bill. Just because he's an atheist doesn't make him a good writer. And anybody who could write "Thirdspace" isn't that fine a storyteller.)
("The mountains labored, and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse." From Q. Horatius Flaccus.)
That line just about sums up my opinion of "Babylon 5". After years of ceremonious buildup, and plenty of self-promotion from JMS on various online forums, after the mountains labored, they gave birth to a rather mean little story about how mankind is grown up now, and doesn't need the guidance of the wicked, bad, nasty, manipulative Shadows and Vorlons. Ugh. Let's not talk about Season Five, or all of the spinoffs from a show which, as an early episode reminded us, wasn't supposed to be just another "deep space franchise".
Add to this the fact that JMS's ear for dialogue, especially comic dialogue, was often terrible (I cringe at the thought of Bruce Boxleitner saying "Abso-fraggin-lutely"), and suddenly "Jeremiah" doesn't look like anything to get worked up about.
No, I don't agree. Everyone knows that Slashdot is a moderated forum before they post here. If you want to mouth off to your heart's content, there are plenty of unmoderated forums out there; don't pick on this one and whine "censorship" because of the moderation. (Complaining that the moderating isn't doing its job is another matter.)
hyacinthus