Assuming you're not in a space where noise would be a problem, having a personalized ringtone helps users distinguish their ringing phones from others'.
Whenever I'm in a public space and I hear the "Nokia" ring, I often see 4 or 5 people going for their phones. If those had people personalized their ringtones, they might have been able to save themselves a bit of mad scrambling.
(FWIW, when I'm in public, my cellphone is set to vibrate. No confusion for me.)
Sure, these ring tones are inspired by original tunes, but the process of producing them is not an electronic algorithm. An artist (perhaps of dubious talents) has to "compose" these ringtones so that they sound right.
Ringtones technically are not degraded versions of original sound files; they are compositions "inspired" by other sound files.
Your CD licenses don't cover these ringtone compositions, however derivative they may be.
I think/.'ers concerned about their rights online and also in the domain of fair use should consider not giving another red cent (or silver pfenning, or ridged dracma, etc.) to any business concern directly promoted by Lucasfilm and/or Lucasarts.
Yesterday,/. ran an article about Fox CEO Peter Chernin's call to media and tech companies to work together to combat piracy. Some/.'ers speculated that Lucas's suggestion that media and tech companies form an alliance to prevent piracy is, at best, a disingenuous one. For example, in one post, RobotRunAmok suggested that Lucas is playing the "misguided artist" to Valenti's "evil fat cat suit," the implication being that Lucas is an evil fat cat. In another post, Jippy_ points out that "[s]aying that there won't be film of merit or quality without there first being movies of flashy repetitive garbage" is just plain bad logic.
Lucas would sell our fair use rights down the river if he thought he could make a bigger buck. His last three films stink (he's proven himself to be the much inferior artist compared to his peer Spielberg), and though he is pioneering digital production and delivery, he doesn't seem to understand that such technologies work best when they facilitate rather than obstruct fair use rights.
What really disturbs me is that Lucas--his very person a monument of excess--uses environmentalist language to protect his profit margins. Sure, digital film in the long run may be more environmentally friendly than celluloid, but that's hardly a justification to compare the market forces which drive popular cinema to an endangered ecosystem! The NYTimes has an article that quotes Lucas as saying:
I am begging for co-operation. There are unintended consequences of piracy. If piracy is not stopped, the rainforest of the entertainment business ecosystem will collapse.
If the movie industry, with its increasing resemblance to the recording arts industry and its cozying up to those who would revoke our fair use rights, can be compared to a rainforest, then I say clear cut the whole damn thing.
You offer a lot of caveats and contingent arguments (not proven) to my very simple statement of fact.
One of the main reaons the US cellular system is so screwed up is because it has several standards of communication. I'm not touting GSM as the be-all-end-all of cellular networks, but it seems to work very well in Europe, which has both dense metro areas and sparsely populated outlying areas, no?
You can try to escape my point, but it it will stand unchallenged: regulating the communication protocols of a network will only improve the reach of the network, presuming of course the the protocol scales well. GSM, CDMA might both do OK, but it seems to me that Japan, France, England, Germany, Holland, etc., seem to understand how to make regulate their network so that it works well.
The US "free" market approach seems, for now, to be building a largely broken network, in both outlying areas and in densely populated urban centers.
(I am a US citizen and do own/have used cell phones in the country and the city.)
I'm sorry, but population density is not the reason why cell service in the US sucks.
New York has the highest population density in the US, comparable to the density of Paris and London. New York's cell service sucks, especially if you're on Sprint or Verizon which uses (surprise) Code Division Multiple Access instead of GSM (used in Europe).
You can try to deny it, but regulation matters in questions of standard service. If it's a network, standardization can be facilitated by regulation. Far from hindering the growth of a network, regulation can help. In the case of the US cellular network, a "free" market means a fragmented market which in turn means broken cellular network.
My first reaction to the possibility of an internet playpen for children is revulsion. But then someone like puto posts the parent and I find myself nodding assent. I mean, nothing like protecting the children, right?
Then I think: when I was a kid I wasn't particularly sheltered. Heck, I'm an adult and goatse.cx makes me cringe. Maybe it's my inner child. . . My point is that maybe kids don't need to be sheltered from such things as long as they can pull the plug if they'd like. And if they want to look at things which might disturb me or you, why the hell shouldn't they be able to? Why doesn't freedom of speech and expression extend to children?
I'm not talking about pedophiles luring children with nasty pictures. I'm talking about the natural curiosity that children have about things that adults like, too: i.e. violence, sex, and drugs. Why shouldn't kids be able to see representations of such things?
Maybe I'm missing something here. It seems to me that sheltering our children makes them ignorant. I want my children to be whip smart. I want them to be able to challenge sexist, racist, and dehumanizing representations. And if I believe that they are harming themselves by producing and consuming such images, I will hope that it is still best to let people (even little ones) decide for themselves what kinds of expression they will listen to and read.
I fear that something like kids.us will only produce a bunch of morons who know nothing more (nor better) than Barney and Papa Smurf.
And what about hyperlinks? Will sites on kids.us protect children's surfing behavior, and if so, does that mean that any site in a.kids domain will link only to sites inside that kids domain?
Present day U.S. senators don't seem to understand why their Founding Fathers guaranteed freedom of expression as the First Amendment to their Constitution. With every attempt by lawmakers to protect people (and children) from "bad" speech, the more I'm convinced those original legislators were wise beyond reckoning.
I love amazon as much as the next nerd, but as ever, eBay & half.com are your better friends.
At half.com, you can get a copy of Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters, and Marvels at half.com for about 12 bucks and some change (sorry, I snapped up the 9.99 copy for myself), as opposed to Amazon's $22 copies. Plus at 2002.11.13 10:15 EST Amazon only had two copies in stock.
Now I'm the one who is shame-faced: that's a really good point about the irrelevance of semantically meaningless arguments.
However, I'm not sure I buy your dimunition of omnipotence. Omnipotence means "capable of doing everything," which is especialy true if we're talking about the omnipotence of God, also known as divine omnipotence. The problem is that such a proposition creates logical inconsistencies. It's not a problem of syntax; it's a problem of the condition of divine omnipotence.
To say divine omnipotence means "able to do all that can be done" is neither divine nor omnipotent. Omnipotence is the means by which God works the "impossible," also known as miracles.
So, while I grant your pointing out the irrelevance of my statement (if it is in fact semanticaly void), I don't accept that God's omnipotence is something as pedestrian as "that which can possibly be done."
I mean, really, what kind of God are we talking about here?
I really appreciated your summary of Leibniz's theological analysis of an omnipotent and omniscient being.
A question comes though, what about impossible worlds? Does Leibniz's God, being omniscient, know about worlds that he/she/it cannot make, worlds which are impossible? If so, God is not omnipotent.
Or, maybe there is no such thing as an impossible world. If so, let's imagine one of the worlds in which he/she/it does not exist. That world--the world where God does not exist--is not one God can create. Again, God is not omnipotent.
Hence, God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent simultaneously. Either power is blind, or sight is powerless. Take your pick:
Excluding my grandma who is sysadmin in a linux-only rendering farm (that's a joke), Apple is the only option consumers have to WinTel. Apple's tenacity, inventiveness, and rich *nixy-goodness is why Apple is the darling of the computing world these days, even at 6% market share.
I'm not trolling, but I'm guessing you've not yet used a recent (4 years) machine made by Apple. (My apologies if I've put my foot in my ignormaus. Apple is becoming a favorite among newly converted geeks because they produce good stuff and because they're finally starting to get it: *nix, Photoshop, Apache, SSH, MS Office. Apple's laptops have no WinTel equivalent. The interaction between the command line and Aqua is something at which to gawk.
On a less preach-to-the-choir note, is it so different than announcments for minor revisions of relatively arcane (if beloved) open source software? Not that I'm saying such posts are bad, but that it might be the nature of the Slashdot beast.
Please, first, excuse my ignorance, which is huge regarding telemetry and rocket science. Now that we have that out of the way . ..
A movie (based on true events) which came out in 2000 titled The Dish is about the satellite dish that the US requisitioned (not the right word, but you get the idea) to track Apollo 11 while the Eastern Hemisphere faced the moon. In 1969, that dish was one of the few powerful enough to use as a relay for Apollo 11. But apparently the size of Apollo 11 also meant it wasn't easy to track if you didn't have its recent co-ordinates and velocity.
So, my question comes down to whether it would have been so easy to track Apollo 11 if you were the Soviets. (Did they have information about Apollo's progress?)
There have already been tens of thousands of dollars spent on adjudicating the argument between religious dogma and scientific theory.
The Scopes "Monkey Trial" happened in the early 1920s, with John Scopes fighting to teach evolution in the state of Tennessee. Scopes's lawyer, Darrow, lost.
Refusing to admit crucial evidence, the presiding judge, John T. Raulston, gloried in frustrating the defense and upholding Christian orthodoxy.
These are the kind of people you're up against. Evidence and proof mean nothing. Reality? What's that? You can spend all the money you want, but you'll never convince superstitious zealots that what they believe is wrong.
I agree, it is a typo and is easily ignored. The level and intensity of/.'s typo-whining are generally out of proportion to the significance of whined about typos, but as one/.'er has mentioned, it can be a question of credibility.
/. is one of the premier websites for technical information. And even if that information goes through a highly democratic filtering process (known as moderation), the quality of the content does to some degree reflect on the editorial body of/. Typos that provide misinformation that could be easily corrected should be.
What happens in five weeks from now when Google's spiders cache this story's typo, or when you come searching on/. for that P4 3.06 mhz, or was it Mhz, or no, Ghz? (Sure, you could leave off the hz designation, but my point is that the reason for the failed search would not be clear.) This could easily be corrected by about 33.3 seconds of an editor's time. Instead, we get posts that get modded down as redundant, some of those moderations perhaps done by an editor him or or herself.
The irony in all of this is that/.'s editors can easily correct such errors. I know because I recently (yesterday) posted a thread as an AC that was deleted within minutes. I recognize that deletion as a wise one; I'm not complaining. But it seems to me that other editorial decisions should also be made with the same kind of responsiveness.
/., for all its flaws, is a source of information for many professionals. Its editorship should at least reflect that professionalism especially in matters of technical specification.
(readers dissatisfied with any typos they dind in this post are entitled a full refund)
Our ability to mimic and/or produce human intelligence in machines is severely hampered by our poor understanding of how human intelligence works. The problem is so glaring experts can even barely agree as to what human intelligence is.
Until we understand how our own minds work, we're going to have a hard time getting machines to think as we do.
This comes late in the posting cycle, but I didn't understand the parent until the grandparent got modded up.
Command - Option - ESC (Command = Apple) is indeed force quit on Macs. But if your system locks up solid, which it would sometimes do under OS 9 and lower, force quitting became an exercise in futility.
In that case what the grandparent recommends (with incorrect key names) would work, which is a force restart. That key combo would be
Command - CTRL - Power
where "Power" is the power button. This makes sense only for Apple laptops (on which the power button resides near the keyboard) and with systems using pre-Apple Pro keyboards. Those keyboards have power buttons on them.
Movable Type put the moves on me.
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Movable Type is indeed excellent weblogging donationware. The folks at Movable Type are great at providing requested features and documenting their software. Installation takes (and I mean this) fewer than 15 minutes, set-up maybe 1/2 hour for even the most non-technical of users.
My problem though is that Slashcode requires a dedicated server--or one on which you have root acces--to install. I'm sure this gives Slash many advantages, but those of us who can't afford dedicated server solutions can't make use of those advantages. My web host doesn't even allow shell access.
Movable Type (and a few other brands of weblog software) offers people with cheap web-hosting solutions to successfully install high-quality, customizable, open-source weblog software. The couple who run Movable Type produce a quality product. Check them out if you want to run weblog software but don't have a lot of money.
I wonder if the/. crew couldn't be persuaded to come up with a version of Slash that doesn't require a dedicated server . ..
You deride the ignorance of all those debating the effectiveness and legality of this marketing scheme by arguing (quite rightly) that such speculation is precisley the object of that scheme.
But do you think for a New York second that your meta-analysis is outside of this ploy? Think again.
You might consider taking to heart the your own derisive, condescending reference to Marketing 101. Take a course, you may like it.
Don't get me wrong. This post, too, means that the marketing campaign is green as go. I don't deny it. But at least I'm not so arrogant to believe I'm above the fray.
Marketing is like the unconscious. There is no negation in the unconscious. Everything just accretes, contraries and oppositions just all glom together.
It's late, but I wanted to quickly challenge your cynical dismissal of postmodernism as a school of thought. But before doing so, I want to note that your skepticism is obviously well-informed. You probably deserve a reply more thoughtful than the one I can muster right now, but here I go anyway.
You quote Jameson's line, Any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old 'Culture Industry' concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series.
This is easy to understand for students of cultural theory. Basically, Adorno's criticsm of the "Culture Industry" (also known as the Frankfurt school) was a Marxist critique of Hollywood (an oversimplification to be sure). That critique by today's standards is old-fashioned, but still hold truth for dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. (as a sidenote, Adorno and Horkheimer escaped/fled Nazi Germany and their entire view is largely shaped by interpreting American capitalism as a kind of fascism.)
Jameson's own postmodern theory also has Marxist stripes. But in Jameson's view, our contemporary culture is infinitely more complex than the 1920's-era Hollywood that Adorno was writing about. As a result, a more complex form of critique is necessary.
The whole thing can be symbolized thus:
postmodernism
:Frankfurt School:: MTV:50's television
In English, "postmodernism is to the Frankfurt school of cultural theory as MTV is to 50's television."
(I'm too tired and lazy to hunt down the links that'll make this more than another rant, but you get the idea.)
Postmodernism has its roots in art and cutlural criticism. Expropriations of postmodernism by science, technology, and history end up overlooking the origins of this material. No, it's not science, though science sometimes makes reference to it. Postmodernism is a mode of understanding and it is a specialized discourse, one that's as difficult for non-specialists to understand as assembly language is for the average end-user.
I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.
I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernistphilosopherwhodisavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."
In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.
The directions you supplied are wrong. When I tried using this ReMaster tool following your directions, it *deleted* all the files I had in the directory. This is not +4, Funny, IMHO.
Luckily, I had a backup version of my files in a subdirectory and a friend nearby who told me that the right way to use the ReMaster tool, which is to type 'rm -Rf' instead of the lowercase 'r'.
Thanks for the good-for-nothing advice. Now I'm going to use ReMaster the right way!
Yeah, but 15% of the Slashdot laptop market
on
The Nation of Macintosh?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At least, that's what this/. poll says as of 12:57 EST on 17 October 2002.
Sure, the poll is not scientific, but even its fuzzy numbers (Bushism disavowed) tell us something, and that something is that a full 15% of the ultra-geek crowd totes Apple hardware, and this not even 2 years into Apple's targeting that crowd with OS X
Complain all you want about "small" market share, but my sense is that this is not the last you'll see of this turning tide.
Apple have *always* offered better consumer machines (if you don't count 1995-1997) and now that they have the OS of OS's to boot, the geeks are noticing. The Reality Distortion Field works two ways, it can prevent you from seeing reality and it can also change your reality.
Reality used to be an all-Windows world. Well, it still sort of is, but not where it counts, deep down inside, among some of us nerds and artists and . . . well, some of us.
It's awesome your daughter is willing to try and enjoys FPS's like Q3A.
This is a quickie, but I suspect the reason your son doesn't play on the Barbie site is because there are millions of subtle and not so subtle cues in the culture around him that "acting like a girl" just isn't acceptable.
It's both a problem of nature and nurture, and it's a shame that boys are not encouraged to develop "feminine" skills like conversation-based communication, design sense, and emotional expressivity, among the other million things that women tend to better than men. (I said tend.)
Men might find themselves understanding women a whole lot better if they did more of what women liked to do!
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you're not in a space where noise would be a problem, having a personalized ringtone helps users distinguish their ringing phones from others'.
Whenever I'm in a public space and I hear the "Nokia" ring, I often see 4 or 5 people going for their phones. If those had people personalized their ringtones, they might have been able to save themselves a bit of mad scrambling.
(FWIW, when I'm in public, my cellphone is set to vibrate. No confusion for me.)
Sure, these ring tones are inspired by original tunes, but the process of producing them is not an electronic algorithm. An artist (perhaps of dubious talents) has to "compose" these ringtones so that they sound right.
Ringtones technically are not degraded versions of original sound files; they are compositions "inspired" by other sound files.
Your CD licenses don't cover these ringtone compositions, however derivative they may be.
I think /.'ers concerned about their rights online and also in the domain of fair use should consider not giving another red cent (or silver pfenning, or ridged dracma, etc.) to any business concern directly promoted by Lucasfilm and/or Lucasarts.
Yesterday, /. ran an article about Fox CEO Peter Chernin's call to media and tech companies to work together to combat piracy. Some /.'ers speculated that Lucas's suggestion that media and tech companies form an alliance to prevent piracy is, at best, a disingenuous one. For example, in one post, RobotRunAmok suggested that Lucas is playing the "misguided artist" to Valenti's "evil fat cat suit," the implication being that Lucas is an evil fat cat. In another post, Jippy_ points out that "[s]aying that there won't be film of merit or quality without there first being movies of flashy repetitive garbage" is just plain bad logic.
Lucas would sell our fair use rights down the river if he thought he could make a bigger buck. His last three films stink (he's proven himself to be the much inferior artist compared to his peer Spielberg), and though he is pioneering digital production and delivery, he doesn't seem to understand that such technologies work best when they facilitate rather than obstruct fair use rights.
What really disturbs me is that Lucas--his very person a monument of excess--uses environmentalist language to protect his profit margins. Sure, digital film in the long run may be more environmentally friendly than celluloid, but that's hardly a justification to compare the market forces which drive popular cinema to an endangered ecosystem! The NYTimes has an article that quotes Lucas as saying:
If the movie industry, with its increasing resemblance to the recording arts industry and its cozying up to those who would revoke our fair use rights, can be compared to a rainforest, then I say clear cut the whole damn thing.
I am not a salesperson for GSM netorking.
I'll accept, for now, that part of the reason the US cellular network is chumpy is because of oversubscription. (The NYTimes article claims as much).
However, I still stand by my assertion that regulation could aid the US cellular network.
You offer a lot of caveats and contingent arguments (not proven) to my very simple statement of fact.
One of the main reaons the US cellular system is so screwed up is because it has several standards of communication. I'm not touting GSM as the be-all-end-all of cellular networks, but it seems to work very well in Europe, which has both dense metro areas and sparsely populated outlying areas, no?
You can try to escape my point, but it it will stand unchallenged: regulating the communication protocols of a network will only improve the reach of the network, presuming of course the the protocol scales well. GSM, CDMA might both do OK, but it seems to me that Japan, France, England, Germany, Holland, etc., seem to understand how to make regulate their network so that it works well.
The US "free" market approach seems, for now, to be building a largely broken network, in both outlying areas and in densely populated urban centers.
(I am a US citizen and do own/have used cell phones in the country and the city.)
I'm sorry, but population density is not the reason why cell service in the US sucks.
New York has the highest population density in the US, comparable to the density of Paris and London. New York's cell service sucks, especially if you're on Sprint or Verizon which uses (surprise) Code Division Multiple Access instead of GSM (used in Europe).
You can try to deny it, but regulation matters in questions of standard service. If it's a network, standardization can be facilitated by regulation. Far from hindering the growth of a network, regulation can help. In the case of the US cellular network, a "free" market means a fragmented market which in turn means broken cellular network.
My first reaction to the possibility of an internet playpen for children is revulsion. But then someone like puto posts the parent and I find myself nodding assent. I mean, nothing like protecting the children, right?
Then I think: when I was a kid I wasn't particularly sheltered. Heck, I'm an adult and goatse.cx makes me cringe. Maybe it's my inner child. . . My point is that maybe kids don't need to be sheltered from such things as long as they can pull the plug if they'd like. And if they want to look at things which might disturb me or you, why the hell shouldn't they be able to? Why doesn't freedom of speech and expression extend to children?
I'm not talking about pedophiles luring children with nasty pictures. I'm talking about the natural curiosity that children have about things that adults like, too: i.e. violence, sex, and drugs. Why shouldn't kids be able to see representations of such things?
Maybe I'm missing something here. It seems to me that sheltering our children makes them ignorant. I want my children to be whip smart. I want them to be able to challenge sexist, racist, and dehumanizing representations. And if I believe that they are harming themselves by producing and consuming such images, I will hope that it is still best to let people (even little ones) decide for themselves what kinds of expression they will listen to and read.
I fear that something like kids.us will only produce a bunch of morons who know nothing more (nor better) than Barney and Papa Smurf.
And what about hyperlinks? Will sites on kids.us protect children's surfing behavior, and if so, does that mean that any site in a .kids domain will link only to sites inside that kids domain?
Present day U.S. senators don't seem to understand why their Founding Fathers guaranteed freedom of expression as the First Amendment to their Constitution. With every attempt by lawmakers to protect people (and children) from "bad" speech, the more I'm convinced those original legislators were wise beyond reckoning.
I love amazon as much as the next nerd, but as ever, eBay & half.com are your better friends.
At half.com, you can get a copy of Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters, and Marvels at half.com for about 12 bucks and some change (sorry, I snapped up the 9.99 copy for myself), as opposed to Amazon's $22 copies. Plus at 2002.11.13 10:15 EST Amazon only had two copies in stock.
Now I'm the one who is shame-faced: that's a really good point about the irrelevance of semantically meaningless arguments.
However, I'm not sure I buy your dimunition of omnipotence. Omnipotence means "capable of doing everything," which is especialy true if we're talking about the omnipotence of God, also known as divine omnipotence. The problem is that such a proposition creates logical inconsistencies. It's not a problem of syntax; it's a problem of the condition of divine omnipotence.
To say divine omnipotence means "able to do all that can be done" is neither divine nor omnipotent. Omnipotence is the means by which God works the "impossible," also known as miracles.
So, while I grant your pointing out the irrelevance of my statement (if it is in fact semanticaly void), I don't accept that God's omnipotence is something as pedestrian as "that which can possibly be done."
I mean, really, what kind of God are we talking about here?
I really appreciated your summary of Leibniz's theological analysis of an omnipotent and omniscient being.
A question comes though, what about impossible worlds? Does Leibniz's God, being omniscient, know about worlds that he/she/it cannot make, worlds which are impossible? If so, God is not omnipotent.
Or, maybe there is no such thing as an impossible world. If so, let's imagine one of the worlds in which he/she/it does not exist. That world--the world where God does not exist--is not one God can create. Again, God is not omnipotent.
Hence, God cannot be omniscient and omnipotent simultaneously. Either power is blind, or sight is powerless. Take your pick:
Excluding my grandma who is sysadmin in a linux-only rendering farm (that's a joke), Apple is the only option consumers have to WinTel. Apple's tenacity, inventiveness, and rich *nixy-goodness is why Apple is the darling of the computing world these days, even at 6% market share.
I'm not trolling, but I'm guessing you've not yet used a recent (4 years) machine made by Apple. (My apologies if I've put my foot in my ignormaus. Apple is becoming a favorite among newly converted geeks because they produce good stuff and because they're finally starting to get it: *nix, Photoshop, Apache, SSH, MS Office. Apple's laptops have no WinTel equivalent. The interaction between the command line and Aqua is something at which to gawk.
On a less preach-to-the-choir note, is it so different than announcments for minor revisions of relatively arcane (if beloved) open source software? Not that I'm saying such posts are bad, but that it might be the nature of the Slashdot beast.
Please, first, excuse my ignorance, which is huge regarding telemetry and rocket science. Now that we have that out of the way . . .
A movie (based on true events) which came out in 2000 titled The Dish is about the satellite dish that the US requisitioned (not the right word, but you get the idea) to track Apollo 11 while the Eastern Hemisphere faced the moon. In 1969, that dish was one of the few powerful enough to use as a relay for Apollo 11. But apparently the size of Apollo 11 also meant it wasn't easy to track if you didn't have its recent co-ordinates and velocity.
So, my question comes down to whether it would have been so easy to track Apollo 11 if you were the Soviets. (Did they have information about Apollo's progress?)
There have already been tens of thousands of dollars spent on adjudicating the argument between religious dogma and scientific theory.
The Scopes "Monkey Trial" happened in the early 1920s, with John Scopes fighting to teach evolution in the state of Tennessee. Scopes's lawyer, Darrow, lost.
Refusing to admit crucial evidence, the presiding judge, John T. Raulston, gloried in frustrating the defense and upholding Christian orthodoxy.
These are the kind of people you're up against. Evidence and proof mean nothing. Reality? What's that? You can spend all the money you want, but you'll never convince superstitious zealots that what they believe is wrong.
I agree, it is a typo and is easily ignored. The level and intensity of /.'s typo-whining are generally out of proportion to the significance of whined about typos, but as one /.'er has mentioned, it can be a question of credibility.
/. is one of the premier websites for technical information. And even if that information goes through a highly democratic filtering process (known as moderation), the quality of the content does to some degree reflect on the editorial body of /. Typos that provide misinformation that could be easily corrected should be.
What happens in five weeks from now when Google's spiders cache this story's typo, or when you come searching on /. for that P4 3.06 mhz, or was it Mhz, or no, Ghz? (Sure, you could leave off the hz designation, but my point is that the reason for the failed search would not be clear.) This could easily be corrected by about 33.3 seconds of an editor's time. Instead, we get posts that get modded down as redundant, some of those moderations perhaps done by an editor him or or herself.
The irony in all of this is that /.'s editors can easily correct such errors. I know because I recently (yesterday) posted a thread as an AC that was deleted within minutes. I recognize that deletion as a wise one; I'm not complaining. But it seems to me that other editorial decisions should also be made with the same kind of responsiveness.
/., for all its flaws, is a source of information for many professionals. Its editorship should at least reflect that professionalism especially in matters of technical specification.
(readers dissatisfied with any typos they dind in this post are entitled a full refund)
Our ability to mimic and/or produce human intelligence in machines is severely hampered by our poor understanding of how human intelligence works. The problem is so glaring experts can even barely agree as to what human intelligence is.
Until we understand how our own minds work, we're going to have a hard time getting machines to think as we do.
and, as it were, both right.
This comes late in the posting cycle, but I didn't understand the parent until the grandparent got modded up.
Command - Option - ESC (Command = Apple) is indeed force quit on Macs. But if your system locks up solid, which it would sometimes do under OS 9 and lower, force quitting became an exercise in futility.
In that case what the grandparent recommends (with incorrect key names) would work, which is a force restart. That key combo would be
where "Power" is the power button. This makes sense only for Apple laptops (on which the power button resides near the keyboard) and with systems using pre-Apple Pro keyboards. Those keyboards have power buttons on them.Movable Type is indeed excellent weblogging donationware. The folks at Movable Type are great at providing requested features and documenting their software. Installation takes (and I mean this) fewer than 15 minutes, set-up maybe 1/2 hour for even the most non-technical of users.
I would rather run the latest release of Slash and went so far as to even check out chromatic's Running Weblogs with Slash (NB: /.'ers, /. is a weblog) after reading this recent /. story about "Building Online Communities."
My problem though is that Slashcode requires a dedicated server--or one on which you have root acces--to install. I'm sure this gives Slash many advantages, but those of us who can't afford dedicated server solutions can't make use of those advantages. My web host doesn't even allow shell access.
Movable Type (and a few other brands of weblog software) offers people with cheap web-hosting solutions to successfully install high-quality, customizable, open-source weblog software. The couple who run Movable Type produce a quality product. Check them out if you want to run weblog software but don't have a lot of money.
I wonder if the /. crew couldn't be persuaded to come up with a version of Slash that doesn't require a dedicated server . . .
nor marketing for that matter.
You deride the ignorance of all those debating the effectiveness and legality of this marketing scheme by arguing (quite rightly) that such speculation is precisley the object of that scheme.
But do you think for a New York second that your meta-analysis is outside of this ploy? Think again.
You might consider taking to heart the your own derisive, condescending reference to Marketing 101. Take a course, you may like it.
Don't get me wrong. This post, too, means that the marketing campaign is green as go. I don't deny it. But at least I'm not so arrogant to believe I'm above the fray.
Marketing is like the unconscious. There is no negation in the unconscious. Everything just accretes, contraries and oppositions just all glom together.
It's late, but I wanted to quickly challenge your cynical dismissal of postmodernism as a school of thought. But before doing so, I want to note that your skepticism is obviously well-informed. You probably deserve a reply more thoughtful than the one I can muster right now, but here I go anyway.
You quote Jameson's line, Any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old 'Culture Industry' concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series.
This is easy to understand for students of cultural theory. Basically, Adorno's criticsm of the "Culture Industry" (also known as the Frankfurt school) was a Marxist critique of Hollywood (an oversimplification to be sure). That critique by today's standards is old-fashioned, but still hold truth for dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. (as a sidenote, Adorno and Horkheimer escaped/fled Nazi Germany and their entire view is largely shaped by interpreting American capitalism as a kind of fascism.)
Jameson's own postmodern theory also has Marxist stripes. But in Jameson's view, our contemporary culture is infinitely more complex than the 1920's-era Hollywood that Adorno was writing about. As a result, a more complex form of critique is necessary.
The whole thing can be symbolized thus:
In English, "postmodernism is to the Frankfurt school of cultural theory as MTV is to 50's television."
(I'm too tired and lazy to hunt down the links that'll make this more than another rant, but you get the idea.)Postmodernism has its roots in art and cutlural criticism. Expropriations of postmodernism by science, technology, and history end up overlooking the origins of this material. No, it's not science, though science sometimes makes reference to it. Postmodernism is a mode of understanding and it is a specialized discourse, one that's as difficult for non-specialists to understand as assembly language is for the average end-user.
With all due respect
I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.
I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernist philosopher who disavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."
In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.
Just a thought.
The directions you supplied are wrong. When I tried using this ReMaster tool following your directions, it *deleted* all the files I had in the directory. This is not +4, Funny, IMHO.
Luckily, I had a backup version of my files in a subdirectory and a friend nearby who told me that the right way to use the ReMaster tool, which is to type 'rm -Rf' instead of the lowercase 'r'.
Thanks for the good-for-nothing advice. Now I'm going to use ReMaster the right way!
At least, that's what this /. poll says as of 12:57 EST on 17 October 2002.
Sure, the poll is not scientific, but even its fuzzy numbers (Bushism disavowed) tell us something, and that something is that a full 15% of the ultra-geek crowd totes Apple hardware, and this not even 2 years into Apple's targeting that crowd with OS X
Complain all you want about "small" market share, but my sense is that this is not the last you'll see of this turning tide.
Apple have *always* offered better consumer machines (if you don't count 1995-1997) and now that they have the OS of OS's to boot, the geeks are noticing. The Reality Distortion Field works two ways, it can prevent you from seeing reality and it can also change your reality.
Reality used to be an all-Windows world. Well, it still sort of is, but not where it counts, deep down inside, among some of us nerds and artists and . . . well, some of us.
It's awesome your daughter is willing to try and enjoys FPS's like Q3A.
This is a quickie, but I suspect the reason your son doesn't play on the Barbie site is because there are millions of subtle and not so subtle cues in the culture around him that "acting like a girl" just isn't acceptable.
It's both a problem of nature and nurture, and it's a shame that boys are not encouraged to develop "feminine" skills like conversation-based communication, design sense, and emotional expressivity, among the other million things that women tend to better than men. (I said tend.)
Men might find themselves understanding women a whole lot better if they did more of what women liked to do!
It's a hard lesson to learn, but that's what happens when you don't take enough bathroom breaks while gaming.
I mean, what a way to "go" . . .
(Was it number 1 or number 2?)
Civil Disobedience? As stated above it's not illegal to link to DeCSS for anyone but 2600 (by way of court injunction.
Freedom fighter? Maybe, but links to DeCSS are all over the place as more than one informative /.'er as noted above.
How about:
You think?