Your comment reminds me of something I read in "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense for Business Success" by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. Whew, better catch my breath! It's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember word for word how she covered the topic. The gist of it is this: People and organizations will attempt to hijack both the denotative and conotative meanings of words for personal, political, or organizational gain. Content producers labeling copyright infringement (which is a rather technical and non-emotionaly loaded term) as piracy (a word that has readily identifiable conotations and denotions) is a prime example of this type of vocabulary manipulation.
Everytime I hear the word 'piracy', I am
reminded of the example Dr. Elgin sites in her Gental Art book, with the Army Press Corps use of Sweep and Clear to replace Search and Destroy. This example was also used in a scene in the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket. Rather than arguing or debating the merits of their ideas, those who change keywords and concepts are attempting to exchange the opinions and ideas you already have with those they desire you to have, pro or con. If people are ignorant of the original or more apt description or word for an idea, ('copyright infringement' vs 'piracy')then all the better for the manipulator seeking to affect public opinion and sentiment. This is commonly refered to as 'spin' and it is a supremely effective tactic.
(in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as "bacon" and "murder"), --Mr Gray; Stephen King, Dreamcatcher
For the longest time I thought the Landover site
was for real. After conversing with Christian
zealots in the past, nothing on Landover seems all
that over the top to me. As for the Lion and the Lamb, it's nothing more than nervous handwringing by a bunch of over protective Christian moms.
Thanks for the props! Alpha Centauri is a great work of science fiction as well as a great game. One of these days I'm going to read the books Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs used as research material in the making of A/C's technology tree. I can think of no other game that has ever inspired me to want to explore or learn about the concepts it incorporates. Alpha Centauri has elements to please strategists, futurists, Sci-Fi buffs, philosophers and thinking men and women in general. Oh, and of course the obsessive compulsive person lurking in some of us gamers...
A/C is my favorite game in the whole Civilization series. I know, I know, it's not an 'official' sequel, but we all know it's the spiritual successor to the Civ franchise. I haven't played Civ3 yet, but sadly, from what little I've seen of it in previews and the general consensus; it's far too evolutionary and not revolutionary enough to do it's namesake justice. I guess that I'll just have to settle myself to an occassional bout of A/C, some fan fiction, and the hopes that A/C will be adapted to TV so that we can see REAL science fiction at it's best.
"Beware, you who seek first and final principles; for you are trampling the garden of an angry God, and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!"
--Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
That's the impression I get from Fox and the shitty way that regular Sci-Fi shows take a back seat to baseball and football on their stations. Fox wipes their ass with the loyalty of Sci-Fi viewers for the sake of double dipping the sports ratings. "Fuck it, there's more sports fans than geeks anyways", they say. So, I get set to watch Futurama or a syndicated episode of Startrek or the Simpsons, only to find that 'lick my baseballs' has preempted the show. It pisses me off if I visit a friends house to watch a scheduled season premier, only to see the sports-hype introduction come on the screen. (I don't own a tv anymore, but I do like to keep up with the Simpsons.) Just once I'd like to see a message on the tv, "Sorry, but the scheduled game has been preempted for a special presentation of Star-Trek!!!". I'd relish the thought of sports fans getting a taste of their own medicine, oh how they'd bitch and cry.
I wander what their policy is towards government sponsored trojans and viruses.
According to their website, "Grisoft Inc. is a U.S.-based company established in 1998 as a holding company for Grisoft, s.r.o., a Czech Republic-based high-tech company specializing in the development and marketing of anti-virus software for computer systems since 1990."
I just finished sending them a letter asking what their position on this issue is. I'm hoping for a positive response, that being anything opposite of Symantech's or Network Associates policy.
Thanks, I found your comment interesting and the link that you included most intriguing and timely. Yesterday, I happened upon another web site that expounds upon a similar view.
http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/ffp05.shtml
You can never explore the human condition from enough different perspectives, I say.
At first I thought the word 'corporatist', a label that Jon Katz liberally peppers his articles with, was just a way to add glitz to his editorializing. However, the more I think about it, the more fitting and usefull an adjective I find it to be. Take the root word, corporate, and then ad the 'ist suffix to it and voila!, you've got a handy word that pigeonholes a certain group of people. Individual people I might add, and that's an important distinction because corporations are really just fictional creations used to describe the relationship of certain groups of people to each other and the rest of society. A comparison between corporations and countries would yield the surprising results that many corporations are by far the wealthier and influential of the two in some cases. The more I think of countries and corporations as fictional entities set up to secure the interests of groups of individual people; the more I realize that corporations by design will attempt to make an end run around the democratic principals of nation states.
Hey, thanks for the props and your expansion of the concept that I laid out. Anyway, while browsing this topic I found a link to a site that I think you'd find interesting and thought provoking.
I'm tired of this almost religious reverence for our government that seems to have taken hold lately. Yes, well intentioned and in some cases genuinely brave and courageous; some agents with the FBI undoubtably deserve our gratitude and respect. However, collectively, the FBI has worked diligently to strip away and corrupt the freedoms and principals that make America a great country. For that my friend, they collectively deserve and receive my utmost contempt and scorn.
Think about it, instead of having to pay to dispose of failed batches of beer or raw materials that didn't quite pass QC, the brewing companies can sell their waste and minimize or even mitigate their losses. This reminds me of how in the early days of the steel industry, the byproduct of steel production, ethylene glycol, was often dumped in local rivers. Once the usefull properties of this substance were revealed, a former waste product became a valuable commodity. Maybe one day this kind of recycling will be the norm rather than the exception. But for now, citizens of industrialized countries, and especially America, seem content to throw away wealth in the form of unrealized potential of used goods and byproducts, or outright burn it by spewing it out the exhaust of grossly inefficient SUVs. We have a long way to go towards a sustainable, green economy that delivers on the promises of modern living, but these new innovations in recycling and pollution cleanup are a step in the right direction.
The drug 'problem' wouldn't be a problem for society as a whole, if society as a whole would refrain from sticking it's collective nose in the individual drug user's business. The same principal can be applied to hate speech, which I don't know about Europe, but the constitution here in America clearly protects an individual's right to express and listen to such speech in whatever medium or media they desire. As for filters, there will be technical solutions to such polical problems, such as Freenet.
"The happy life is thought to be one of excellence. Now, an excellent life requires exertion and does not consist in amusement. If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence; it is reasonable that it should be the highest excellence, and this will be that of the best thing in us." --Aristotl, Nichomachean Ethics
We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it. -- La Rochefoucauld
Optimizing Windows sounds like a very usefull book, however, a batch file that makes the necessary deletions and changes would be alot handier than manually pruning out hundreds of files and registry entries. I've wanted to make a streamlined version of Windows to run my games for a long time, if only I knew exactly which files I could get away with pruning. I think that it's unfortunate that David L. Farquhar has chosen to profit from his work rather than share his discoveries in an open forum, the synergy of his work and the highly active tweaking community would be astounding; but I suppose it's his perogative to do with his work as he wishes. When I buy this book I may just write a batch file to automate the task of deleting the files and look for a similar way of automating editing the registry.
Try $22.00 an hour at the Ford Brookpark engine plant in Ohio. And that's for bottom of the food chain fresh hires. I did some contract work in there, and at $18.00 an hour I was being paid less than the Ford guys and gals who swept the floor. The vast majority of the jobs in the plant were technical, maintenance, engineering, or management. Almost all of the actual production and assembly in the plant was highly automated.
If it weren't for the union, that place would be just another shit-hole factory for the entry level employees and probably not a whole lot different than it is now for the engineers and management. As far as productivity goes, it seems like the only way management types seem to know how to 'increase' it, is to fire workers, lower wages, and make the remaining staff work harder and longer. I could do without those kinds of 'productivity' gains, and that's as good a purpose for unions as any.
Then again, I define copyright theft as the current state of laws that unconstitutionaly rob the public domain. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is a prime example of copyright theft. The DMCA is a theft of my rights to fair use and scientist's rights to do encryption research and reverse engineering. So I'm all for an end to all this thievery and swindling that's been going on lately.
While they're at it, why don't they just ask for the right to break into people's cars and homes physically. Then they can search for and destroy 'pirated' copyrighted materials all day. The massive and unrelenting assualts on the freedoms us Americans have come to take for granted make me sick and disillusioned with our government and society in general. I suppose that is what happens when most of us have already lost our fundamental freedoms. Following this link- http://come.to/foundation , should prove very interesting and enlightening on the subject of Americans and our relationship with our government. Though such beacons of hope offer me encouragement, I'm increasingly discouraged and dismayed by most of my fellow American's ignorance and hostility to true notions of freedom. Politics seem like a surmountable barrier, where as the ignorance and apathy of the people seems equally insurmountable in the cause of effecting positive change.
Re:i don't really understand you
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 1
I think that you would just have to have been there. I had her in front of a computer going through the motions of doing this on our office computer. It's not like I was trying to teach her how to program in C or use the DOS command line. My Computer, CDrom, click on setup.exe, how much more simple could I have made it? (And yes I did try going slower before my patience wore thin.) My whole life doesn't revolve around watching tv, but if I wanted to record a movie when I wasn't home, I'd take the time to figure out how to program my VCR. Compared to what I was trying to show this particular user, programing a VCR is rocket science. I'm not an ambassador of the computer world to the unitiated, nor do I wish to be. People who don't want to put forth the barest minimum of effort to learn can kiss my ass and figure things out for themselves, find some other sucker to try and teach them, or PAY me to do things for them.
Re:i don't really understand you
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
I don't consider myself to be a geek, being only an entry-level technician and end user myself. Also, don't patronize me with your 'son' shit and then put words in my mouth. I'm sorry dude, but the only way that I could have made my instructions any easier for this particular individual would have been to drive to her house and install the stupid program myself! My patience ends where the end user's wanton and deliberate ignorance begins. Like I said, you can't exaggerate the ignorance of some end users, especially end users who have hostile attitudes towards computers to begin with. Which, by the way, was the point of my reply.
Re:i don't really understand you
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
I know an end user who needed to install Microsoft Office, but the autorun feature on the cd didn't work. The steps for starting the install program were, open up My Computer, right click on the "cd" looking icon, select open, then search the folder that opens up for setup.exe and double left click it. That's it. What did my end user tell me? Try, "slow down, your'e going too fast for me, can you write that down,". I incredulously told her "Too fast!?", then she got pissed off and told me to forget it. Needless to say, I'm happy to oblige her. For Christ's sake, I even showed her with the office computer how to do this! So, I disagree with you on the point that people exaggerate the stupidity of your average end user. Some people have an irrational fear of computers in the same way that some people are afraid of the dentist. It doesn't matter how much you lower the bar of complication,
there are idiots out there who will complain that computers are too hard to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment reminds me of something I read in "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense for Business Success" by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. Whew, better catch my breath! It's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember word for word how she covered the topic. The gist of it is this: People and organizations will attempt to hijack both the denotative and conotative meanings of words for personal, political, or organizational gain. Content producers labeling copyright infringement (which is a rather technical and non-emotionaly loaded term) as piracy (a word that has readily identifiable conotations and denotions) is a prime example of this type of vocabulary manipulation.
Everytime I hear the word 'piracy', I am
reminded of the example Dr. Elgin sites in her Gental Art book, with the Army Press Corps use of Sweep and Clear to replace Search and Destroy. This example was also used in a scene in the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket. Rather than arguing or debating the merits of their ideas, those who change keywords and concepts are attempting to exchange the opinions and ideas you already have with those they desire you to have, pro or con. If people are ignorant of the original or more apt description or word for an idea, ('copyright infringement' vs 'piracy')then all the better for the manipulator seeking to affect public opinion and sentiment. This is commonly refered to as 'spin' and it is a supremely effective tactic.
(in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as "bacon" and "murder"), --Mr Gray; Stephen King, Dreamcatcher
For the longest time I thought the Landover site
was for real. After conversing with Christian
zealots in the past, nothing on Landover seems all
that over the top to me. As for the Lion and the Lamb, it's nothing more than nervous handwringing by a bunch of over protective Christian moms.
First part: I agree. Second part: Lighten up.
I wander how many employees of KPMG roll their eyes and make jacking-off motions with their hands whenever they hear their company's theme song...
Thanks for the props! Alpha Centauri is a great work of science fiction as well as a great game. One of these days I'm going to read the books Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs used as research material in the making of A/C's technology tree. I can think of no other game that has ever inspired me to want to explore or learn about the concepts it incorporates. Alpha Centauri has elements to please strategists, futurists, Sci-Fi buffs, philosophers and thinking men and women in general. Oh, and of course the obsessive compulsive person lurking in some of us gamers...
A/C is my favorite game in the whole Civilization series. I know, I know, it's not an 'official' sequel, but we all know it's the spiritual successor to the Civ franchise. I haven't played Civ3 yet, but sadly, from what little I've seen of it in previews and the general consensus; it's far too evolutionary and not revolutionary enough to do it's namesake justice. I guess that I'll just have to settle myself to an occassional bout of A/C, some fan fiction, and the hopes that A/C will be adapted to TV so that we can see REAL science fiction at it's best.
"Beware, you who seek first and final principles; for you are trampling the garden of an angry God, and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!"
--Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
"This looks like a way to promote spam more than anything else"
Not really; at least no more than the funny and creative things that people do with AOL CD's have anything to do with the promotion of AOL
That's the impression I get from Fox and the shitty way that regular Sci-Fi shows take a back seat to baseball and football on their stations. Fox wipes their ass with the loyalty of Sci-Fi viewers for the sake of double dipping the sports ratings. "Fuck it, there's more sports fans than geeks anyways", they say. So, I get set to watch Futurama or a syndicated episode of Startrek or the Simpsons, only to find that 'lick my baseballs' has preempted the show. It pisses me off if I visit a friends house to watch a scheduled season premier, only to see the sports-hype introduction come on the screen. (I don't own a tv anymore, but I do like to keep up with the Simpsons.) Just once I'd like to see a message on the tv, "Sorry, but the scheduled game has been preempted for a special presentation of Star-Trek!!!". I'd relish the thought of sports fans getting a taste of their own medicine, oh how they'd bitch and cry.
I wander what their policy is towards government sponsored trojans and viruses.
According to their website, "Grisoft Inc. is a U.S.-based company established in 1998 as a holding company for Grisoft, s.r.o., a Czech Republic-based high-tech company specializing in the development and marketing of anti-virus software for computer systems since 1990."
I just finished sending them a letter asking what their position on this issue is. I'm hoping for a positive response, that being anything opposite of Symantech's or Network Associates policy.
Their web site is www.grisoft.com
Thanks, I found your comment interesting and the link that you included most intriguing and timely. Yesterday, I happened upon another web site that expounds upon a similar view.
http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/ffp05.shtml
You can never explore the human condition from enough different perspectives, I say.
At first I thought the word 'corporatist', a label that Jon Katz liberally peppers his articles with, was just a way to add glitz to his editorializing. However, the more I think about it, the more fitting and usefull an adjective I find it to be. Take the root word, corporate, and then ad the 'ist suffix to it and voila!, you've got a handy word that pigeonholes a certain group of people. Individual people I might add, and that's an important distinction because corporations are really just fictional creations used to describe the relationship of certain groups of people to each other and the rest of society. A comparison between corporations and countries would yield the surprising results that many corporations are by far the wealthier and influential of the two in some cases. The more I think of countries and corporations as fictional entities set up to secure the interests of groups of individual people; the more I realize that corporations by design will attempt to make an end run around the democratic principals of nation states.
Hey, thanks for the props and your expansion of the concept that I laid out. Anyway, while browsing this topic I found a link to a site that I think you'd find interesting and thought provoking.
http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/ffp05.shtml
Regards
I'm tired of this almost religious reverence for our government that seems to have taken hold lately. Yes, well intentioned and in some cases genuinely brave and courageous; some agents with the FBI undoubtably deserve our gratitude and respect. However, collectively, the FBI has worked diligently to strip away and corrupt the freedoms and principals that make America a great country. For that my friend, they collectively deserve and receive my utmost contempt and scorn.
Think about it, instead of having to pay to dispose of failed batches of beer or raw materials that didn't quite pass QC, the brewing companies can sell their waste and minimize or even mitigate their losses. This reminds me of how in the early days of the steel industry, the byproduct of steel production, ethylene glycol, was often dumped in local rivers. Once the usefull properties of this substance were revealed, a former waste product became a valuable commodity. Maybe one day this kind of recycling will be the norm rather than the exception. But for now, citizens of industrialized countries, and especially America, seem content to throw away wealth in the form of unrealized potential of used goods and byproducts, or outright burn it by spewing it out the exhaust of grossly inefficient SUVs. We have a long way to go towards a sustainable, green economy that delivers on the promises of modern living, but these new innovations in recycling and pollution cleanup are a step in the right direction.
The drug 'problem' wouldn't be a problem for society as a whole, if society as a whole would refrain from sticking it's collective nose in the individual drug user's business. The same principal can be applied to hate speech, which I don't know about Europe, but the constitution here in America clearly protects an individual's right to express and listen to such speech in whatever medium or media they desire. As for filters, there will be technical solutions to such polical problems, such as Freenet.
"The happy life is thought to be one of excellence. Now, an excellent life requires exertion and does not consist in amusement. If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence; it is reasonable that it should be the highest excellence, and this will be that of the best thing in us." --Aristotl, Nichomachean Ethics
We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it. -- La Rochefoucauld
Not on my copy of Word 2000.
Ahhh, you said "legacy Windows apps.": I like the way it rolls off my tongue.
Optimizing Windows sounds like a very usefull book, however, a batch file that makes the necessary deletions and changes would be alot handier than manually pruning out hundreds of files and registry entries. I've wanted to make a streamlined version of Windows to run my games for a long time, if only I knew exactly which files I could get away with pruning. I think that it's unfortunate that David L. Farquhar has chosen to profit from his work rather than share his discoveries in an open forum, the synergy of his work and the highly active tweaking community would be astounding; but I suppose it's his perogative to do with his work as he wishes. When I buy this book I may just write a batch file to automate the task of deleting the files and look for a similar way of automating editing the registry.
Try $22.00 an hour at the Ford Brookpark engine plant in Ohio. And that's for bottom of the food chain fresh hires. I did some contract work in there, and at $18.00 an hour I was being paid less than the Ford guys and gals who swept the floor. The vast majority of the jobs in the plant were technical, maintenance, engineering, or management. Almost all of the actual production and assembly in the plant was highly automated.
If it weren't for the union, that place would be just another shit-hole factory for the entry level employees and probably not a whole lot different than it is now for the engineers and management. As far as productivity goes, it seems like the only way management types seem to know how to 'increase' it, is to fire workers, lower wages, and make the remaining staff work harder and longer. I could do without those kinds of 'productivity' gains, and that's as good a purpose for unions as any.
Then again, I define copyright theft as the current state of laws that unconstitutionaly rob the public domain. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is a prime example of copyright theft. The DMCA is a theft of my rights to fair use and scientist's rights to do encryption research and reverse engineering. So I'm all for an end to all this thievery and swindling that's been going on lately.
While they're at it, why don't they just ask for the right to break into people's cars and homes physically. Then they can search for and destroy 'pirated' copyrighted materials all day. The massive and unrelenting assualts on the freedoms us Americans have come to take for granted make me sick and disillusioned with our government and society in general. I suppose that is what happens when most of us have already lost our fundamental freedoms. Following this link- http://come.to/foundation , should prove very interesting and enlightening on the subject of Americans and our relationship with our government. Though such beacons of hope offer me encouragement, I'm increasingly discouraged and dismayed by most of my fellow American's ignorance and hostility to true notions of freedom. Politics seem like a surmountable barrier, where as the ignorance and apathy of the people seems equally insurmountable in the cause of effecting positive change.
I think that you would just have to have been there. I had her in front of a computer going through the motions of doing this on our office computer. It's not like I was trying to teach her how to program in C or use the DOS command line. My Computer, CDrom, click on setup.exe, how much more simple could I have made it? (And yes I did try going slower before my patience wore thin.) My whole life doesn't revolve around watching tv, but if I wanted to record a movie when I wasn't home, I'd take the time to figure out how to program my VCR. Compared to what I was trying to show this particular user, programing a VCR is rocket science. I'm not an ambassador of the computer world to the unitiated, nor do I wish to be. People who don't want to put forth the barest minimum of effort to learn can kiss my ass and figure things out for themselves, find some other sucker to try and teach them, or PAY me to do things for them.
I don't consider myself to be a geek, being only an entry-level technician and end user myself. Also, don't patronize me with your 'son' shit and then put words in my mouth. I'm sorry dude, but the only way that I could have made my instructions any easier for this particular individual would have been to drive to her house and install the stupid program myself! My patience ends where the end user's wanton and deliberate ignorance begins. Like I said, you can't exaggerate the ignorance of some end users, especially end users who have hostile attitudes towards computers to begin with. Which, by the way, was the point of my reply.
I know an end user who needed to install Microsoft Office, but the autorun feature on the cd didn't work. The steps for starting the install program were, open up My Computer, right click on the "cd" looking icon, select open, then search the folder that opens up for setup.exe and double left click it. That's it. What did my end user tell me? Try, "slow down, your'e going too fast for me, can you write that down,". I incredulously told her "Too fast!?", then she got pissed off and told me to forget it. Needless to say, I'm happy to oblige her. For Christ's sake, I even showed her with the office computer how to do this! So, I disagree with you on the point that people exaggerate the stupidity of your average end user. Some people have an irrational fear of computers in the same way that some people are afraid of the dentist. It doesn't matter how much you lower the bar of complication,
there are idiots out there who will complain that computers are too hard to use.