I don't think you can turn it on or off, either; the best you can do is just sort of ignore it. I too went through years of thinking, "Doesn't everyone do that?" and then found out, "Er, no." It's sort of amusing.
I do music as colours, mostly, and smells as colours. I perceive prose as having different textures, although I'd be hard pressed to tell you precisely what. Harlan Ellison feels like filigree; Ernest Hemingway feels like sandpaper studded with tacks (argh!), and some writers change textures so often they're unreadable to me.
Green is kind of crackly to me. Violas are red, or at least they make red notes.
See, silly drug people, even synaesthesiacs don't agree on sensations! It's not consistent, and you can't really use it for much. Even if you had it, you might not know what to do with it.
As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations, whether or not you know (at the time) that they're "really real" or not, and it's not like you can say, "Ok, I'm just not going to see that right now." Synaesthesia manifests much more like peripheral vision: It's kind of there, kind of not. It's not like you're seeing visions and rainbows and colours. As one of the interviewees in the article put it, they're "Martian colours," even to those of us who see colours. In fact, a lot of the time, we have to concentrate on that particular sensory input to even be aware of it. (Which indicates strongly that it's largely superfluous information, but can have some uses.)
I don't personally think that it's coded to memory. The article has some good arguments against that theory, and I can also say that I've been experiencing these things for as long as I can remember: If synaesthesia really were keyed to specific memories, wouldn't you expect it to increase or change over time? Where is the Ur-memory that causes all my different sensations? Keyed to memory? Nope, sorry, don't buy it. Come back again when you know what you're talking about.
Well, speaking as a synaesthesiac, there are benefits, but they mostly manifest as an aid to recall. I mean, if you can remember that that piece of music looks like a black background shot through with gold and red threads -- and you know enough about music theory -- you can reconstruct the song by ear without having heard it recently. That's just one example of something you can do with synaesthesiac inputs.
However, I absolutely guaranfuckingtee you can't use it for "tripping out." It doesn't work like that. It's completely not like being on drugs at all, as far as I understand it (I've never done hallucinogens). It is, however, kind of like peripheral vision: It's not really there 100% but it can come in handy sometimes.
I mean, you people seem to think it's like this constant, centre-of-attention thing at all times, which it's really not. The people in the article say the same thing as I'm saying, too. To make another clumsy metaphor, which is about as well as a synaesthesiac can describe it to a non-synaesthesiac, it's sort of like a supplementary sensory background process. You can foreground it if you want to, usually temporarily, but most of the time, you don't even really notice it's there. For us, it's really quite ordinary, sort of like "normal people's" sensory inputs are to them.
Synaesthesia isn't reliable, and it isn't necessarily consistent, either. How do I know? I have it. Really. I don't have the graphemes-as-colours thing as is described in the article (and analysed in detail) -- thank goodness! -- but I certainly do have the music-as-colours perception, as well as smells-as-colours, and sometimes even music-as-smells/tastes. Sometimes even tactile sensations manifest as colours, smells, or tastes, or sometimes even sounds.
Synaesthesia is pretty complicated and unreliable at best. I doubt if they'll ever be able to find a way to "turn it on and off." I don't blame you guys for not getting it (although I am getting mad at all the druggie posts, because it's not like that either, and I've never done hallucinogens in my life!), because as far as I know, if you don't have it, I can't explain it without resorting to largely unrepresentative metaphors.
I never had a speck of wrist/arm trouble (it ain't carpal tunnel with me, it's tendonitis -- part of the problem is standardized ergonomics and being off on the far left of the normal distribution) with my Amiga kbd, come to think on it, and I hammered on that sucker for hours a day for years at a stretch. I also like my old kbd at home far more than I like my new one here at work -- the action on my old one is so much softer. Analogy time: My old keyboard is like playing a narrow-necked steel string guitar with a low bridge, and my work keyboard is like playing a wide-neck nylon string guitar with a wicked high bridge.
It took me 10 freakin' years to learn to touch-type on a QWERTY keyboard, and now you're opining that everyone should change their kbd layout just to appease any possible RSI problems?! For me that would be like starting all over again from scratch!
I think not.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my suboptimal key layout and my suboptimal fine motor control and be off.
So much for the egocentric philosophical belief that you are the centre of the universe...
...unless of course you enjoy an ego of Beeblebroxian proportions, in which case it's, "More universes? More mes? Now I'm the centre of everything! Freeeow!"
(I can't help but think: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.)
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being.
No, you're both just making sophisticated variations on the spavinned old Argument From Design again. Why does the universe have to have a cause? (Maybe because we observe things in that paradigm, but perhaps the paradigm doesn't work on the macrocosmic scale?)
I'm not even going to address the part about gods, save to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Art imitates art imitates art too. When I found this article a couple of days ago, I told my friend Winston Smith that I had located one of his major influences. He was so happy! He said that he had "thousands" of Radebaugh's illustrations sitting around that he'd painstakingly culled from old magazines and books (his source material), and was thrilled to find out that we'd found the creator of the famous flying cars, etc. He said he'd never been able to find or read a signature on any of the illos before.
I do believe I made his day. Maybe he'll thank me on the end page of his next book too!
This fly is down, anyway -- Slashswatted!
on
Server In A Fly
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The page you get now when you try to access the site says, "Slashdotters: Please bookmark this site and come back next week..." (What?! Is he a glutton for punishment or something?)
Looks like we swatted that fly.:)
Re:Footage and footageheads...the meme...
on
Pattern Recognition
·
· Score: 1
post-current? What the hell does that mean? Is "future" too small a word for you?
Uh, no. "Future" is just not an accurate word in this case. I'm not entirely sure if the novel is taking place in the future, per se, as the reviewer seems to think it's a "version of the present," but the cover copy says it's an "extrapolation," which sort of suggests otherwise. I'm sorry you can't parse a subtle rhetorical distinction like my hedging my bets, since Gibson is notoriously shy on dates.
You do understand that Neuromancer was written in 1984, right?
Yes, and I also understand that computers did exist in 1984, and I further understand that most technologically-oriented people who have looked at Gibson's work have said that his initial Neuromancer world was fantastical, and not really extrapolative, whereas his later works seem to be zeroing in on actual emerging trends and technology. His increase in factual knowledge from which to extrapolate might have something to do with the fact that Gibson wrote Neuromancer using a typewriter, and hadn't so much as even touched a computer in 1984, but he obviously has done so now.
I haven't yet finished the book, true. I only got it two days ago, and, all things considered, I don't read that fast. 900 wpm is peanuts when you haven't put much time into it.
...the Industrial Revolution (the 72 hr. workweek, sweatshop conditions, etc.) because the rich people who own the businesses are nice, did you? (Come to think of it, many programmers have never really left the Industrial Revolution.) Unions were one of the major ways people got important occupational well-being, health, and safety regulations passed.
Just because we work with futuristic technology doesn't mean we must be completely ignorant of the past. Look up some labour history sometime, why don't you? Here is a link to a local IWW chapter dealing almost exclusively with IT workers. Granted, the IWW is the most left-leaning and fanatically political union around, but they have a fascinating history, and might be worth a look for interest's sake, if nothing else. Here is a link to the union which represents unionized programmers in Canada, the CEP/SCEP. So apparently not all programmers think unions are a bad thing.
I agree with the learned AC. When my 8h are up for the day, I leave. Buhbye, seeya, I'm out of here. I like my job, and I have been known to work on it casually outside of work hours ("duty reading" and the like), but I rarely if ever put in any actual "overtime," and, because I'm hourly, I bill for it. All of it. I figure that if my boss wants something done badly enough that I'm in the office from 9AM-7PM and working through my lunch (hypothetically speaking) he can damnwell pay me for it.
That said, I don't get to collect "overtime" per se, because the local jurisdiction's answer to Mussolini just gerrymandered the rules about overtime so if you work greater than an average of 70 hrs a week over a pay period, then you can collect overtime, not before. I usually am in the wind by then...
It's much more important to have a good quality of life than an overweight paycheque, I think. For me, anyway, quality of life !=more money, always. I would rather have time to get extra sleep, time to read, and do my own stuff, than the few extra bucks I could earn by working more than 40 hrs. in a week.
At least Gibson now seems to be at least sort of in touch with current or post-current computer technology, something he most emphatically wasn't in Neuromancer. So far, I'm enjoying it, but (truth in reporting) I haven't finished it yet. (My fiance gave it to me for my birthday, but decided to read it before he gave it to me, and I had a Tom Holt to finish.)
He pointed out something I find pretty hard to ignore now that I'm into the novel: Do any of you others out there think that the "footage" plot is memetically borrowed from a certain quasi-filmic endless joke around here? I'm sure you know the one I mean, gentlemen...all your memes are belong to William Gibson now. (One imagines that in the near future, digital tricksters can get up to mischief slightly more sophisticated than Photoshop and Flash animations.)
5 minutes late? Try 35 minutes late. Or maybe even 60 minutes late, given the appropriate amount of snowstorm. I remember trying to get to work (London, ON) during a snowstorm, and catching a bus that I thought I would have missed, only to be informed by the driver that he was actually driving the bus that was supposed to have come through there an hour ago, and there were four more busses somewhere on the route behind him.
I could use something like that screen. Then I wouldn't always be shuffling through my 50 bus schedules, looking for the one I need (which is always the one that's gone missing).
Obviously not in London, ON. In London, it's practically impossible to say when the bus will get to any particular stop, save for the terminal stops on either end of the route. I've personally observed as much as a 15-minute variance on the routes I take most often, not counting delays for weather. You can be fairly sure the bus will be late during any kind of inclement weather, and early enough days otherwise to completely bollix you. London bus drivers also like to blast through three quarters of their route so they can sit at a convenient Tim Horton's for ten minutes. The general niceness scarcity in the LTC is yet another reason why I desperately want to move back to Toronto.
Boy, you're so technologically sophisticated, you wimps. In my city, we don't have anything as complicated as a bus algorithm (they grow 'em smart in Winnipeg); we just have little paper thingies called "schedules."
...including torch his audio and video collection, read to him from the US/Canadian/your-jurisdiction-here copyright statutes, submit him to a thorough psychiatric evaluation (and/or a drug test), and, failing involuntary committal, have someone assassinate him, but the paperwork would be a stone bitch.
We've long suspected as much, but now we know for sure. Is there anything in that article that he says that isn't an out-and-out lie? He was never against VCRs? That's doubtless why he claimed that VCRs would destroy the movie industry. Statistics I hear suggest that movie tickets are now selling better than they have at any time since Jack Valenti was still getting into movies at the "child" price.
Backups aren't necessary? I wonder if, when he was a kid, he ever dropped a record on his bedroom floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. He obviously really believes that if he scratches a CD, trips and falls and smashes a CD in half, has his cassette player or his VCR eat a tape, or anything like that, he (and we) should all just rush out to buy a new one. No way!
Where does his figure "$3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy" come from? How does he "measure" this loss, being as it's really difficult to measure negative quantities. Is he counting the total street value of large-scale bootleg videotapes, or some sort of hypothetical "if Joe Average hadn't taped Star Trek off the tv, he would have bought the box set" figure?
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. " Well, IANAL, but I quote
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That looks like there's something in law, all right. In Canada, the similar reservation is called "fair dealing," in case you're looking for it.
Oh, how he do go on. He claims to have been in Vietnam. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? That's the only other explanation I can think of...
I don't think I was actually trying to respond to your main point, or perhaps even your comment. I don't think the actual install is a problem at all. I managed a fairly complicated Linux install when I had far less Linux knowledge than I do now, although I did have some help. If I had done a simple install (and if my monitor weren't a weird brand), I would have been totally fine.
Even the desktop itself isn't so bad, but the apps do need work. If Linux is after a user base with minimal computer skills (I hear most users), it's going to have to figure out a way of making itself totally attractive to those users and -- gasp! -- marketing to them, which doesn't just mean advertising. It also means adapting the product to what the users want and need, and not necessarily what the developers think the users want and need.
...what we in the documentation business called the "COIK," for Comprehensible Only If Known problem. When I first started to get into Linux, I decided to do the logical(?) thing and RTFM. Well, guess what? At that stage (slightly more advanced than someone's 63-year-old dad), I didn't understand TFM. (So much for that snarky comeback.) I had to go out and buy myself a series of introductory books on Linux (starting with "Linux For Dummies," which I recommend to the mid-level Windows user who wants to switch), and go to a bunch of introductory Linux websites before I could make any sense whatsoever of most of the documentation.
Yes, it's great that there is lots of documentation. Yes, the documentation is wonderful for refreshing your memory about a certain feature, command, or other piece of Linux; and it's also an excellent resource once you more-or-less know what you're doing. But it's next to useless to the absolute Linux beginner, mostly because it's not written for them. (Please note: That's a statement of fact, not a value judgement.)
On top of which, most "click-and-go" users don't like using the documentation, or the help files (even when those users are programmers -- see Nykaza et al, Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference on Documentation, ACM-SIGDOC, pp. 133-141) -- they want the interface to be as obvious as possible (and if not obvious, then at least familiar), and will more likely pick up the phone and do the other RTFM: "ring the family maven," than get into the manual.
Slashdot Mirror
...we have this all the time, and we're not on drugs!
Fortunately, it's usually very ignorable, although the parasthesia problem can be a bitch.
I don't think you can turn it on or off, either; the best you can do is just sort of ignore it. I too went through years of thinking, "Doesn't everyone do that?" and then found out, "Er, no." It's sort of amusing.
I do music as colours, mostly, and smells as colours. I perceive prose as having different textures, although I'd be hard pressed to tell you precisely what. Harlan Ellison feels like filigree; Ernest Hemingway feels like sandpaper studded with tacks (argh!), and some writers change textures so often they're unreadable to me.
Green is kind of crackly to me. Violas are red, or at least they make red notes.
See, silly drug people, even synaesthesiacs don't agree on sensations! It's not consistent, and you can't really use it for much. Even if you had it, you might not know what to do with it.
As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations, whether or not you know (at the time) that they're "really real" or not, and it's not like you can say, "Ok, I'm just not going to see that right now." Synaesthesia manifests much more like peripheral vision: It's kind of there, kind of not. It's not like you're seeing visions and rainbows and colours. As one of the interviewees in the article put it, they're "Martian colours," even to those of us who see colours. In fact, a lot of the time, we have to concentrate on that particular sensory input to even be aware of it. (Which indicates strongly that it's largely superfluous information, but can have some uses.)
I don't personally think that it's coded to memory. The article has some good arguments against that theory, and I can also say that I've been experiencing these things for as long as I can remember: If synaesthesia really were keyed to specific memories, wouldn't you expect it to increase or change over time? Where is the Ur-memory that causes all my different sensations? Keyed to memory? Nope, sorry, don't buy it. Come back again when you know what you're talking about.
Well, speaking as a synaesthesiac, there are benefits, but they mostly manifest as an aid to recall. I mean, if you can remember that that piece of music looks like a black background shot through with gold and red threads -- and you know enough about music theory -- you can reconstruct the song by ear without having heard it recently. That's just one example of something you can do with synaesthesiac inputs.
However, I absolutely guaranfuckingtee you can't use it for "tripping out." It doesn't work like that. It's completely not like being on drugs at all, as far as I understand it (I've never done hallucinogens). It is, however, kind of like peripheral vision: It's not really there 100% but it can come in handy sometimes.
I mean, you people seem to think it's like this constant, centre-of-attention thing at all times, which it's really not. The people in the article say the same thing as I'm saying, too. To make another clumsy metaphor, which is about as well as a synaesthesiac can describe it to a non-synaesthesiac, it's sort of like a supplementary sensory background process. You can foreground it if you want to, usually temporarily, but most of the time, you don't even really notice it's there. For us, it's really quite ordinary, sort of like "normal people's" sensory inputs are to them.
Synaesthesia isn't reliable, and it isn't necessarily consistent, either. How do I know? I have it. Really. I don't have the graphemes-as-colours thing as is described in the article (and analysed in detail) -- thank goodness! -- but I certainly do have the music-as-colours perception, as well as smells-as-colours, and sometimes even music-as-smells/tastes. Sometimes even tactile sensations manifest as colours, smells, or tastes, or sometimes even sounds.
Synaesthesia is pretty complicated and unreliable at best. I doubt if they'll ever be able to find a way to "turn it on and off." I don't blame you guys for not getting it (although I am getting mad at all the druggie posts, because it's not like that either, and I've never done hallucinogens in my life!), because as far as I know, if you don't have it, I can't explain it without resorting to largely unrepresentative metaphors.
They always use the media to blame everything on the left wing!!
/me ducks and exeunt chortling
I never had a speck of wrist/arm trouble (it ain't carpal tunnel with me, it's tendonitis -- part of the problem is standardized ergonomics and being off on the far left of the normal distribution) with my Amiga kbd, come to think on it, and I hammered on that sucker for hours a day for years at a stretch. I also like my old kbd at home far more than I like my new one here at work -- the action on my old one is so much softer. Analogy time: My old keyboard is like playing a narrow-necked steel string guitar with a low bridge, and my work keyboard is like playing a wide-neck nylon string guitar with a wicked high bridge.
It took me 10 freakin' years to learn to touch-type on a QWERTY keyboard, and now you're opining that everyone should change their kbd layout just to appease any possible RSI problems?! For me that would be like starting all over again from scratch!
I think not.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my suboptimal key layout and my suboptimal fine motor control and be off.
...usually I'm kind of hoping that they'll dry up and die.
Wait...wasn't there another post on parallel universes? Maybe I'm really not on the Slashdot I usually know and love anymore...
So much for the egocentric philosophical belief that you are the centre of the universe...
...unless of course you enjoy an ego of Beeblebroxian proportions, in which case it's, "More universes? More mes? Now I'm the centre of everything! Freeeow!"
(I can't help but think: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.)
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being.
No, you're both just making sophisticated variations on the spavinned old Argument From Design again. Why does the universe have to have a cause? (Maybe because we observe things in that paradigm, but perhaps the paradigm doesn't work on the macrocosmic scale?)
I'm not even going to address the part about gods, save to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Art imitates art imitates art too. When I found this article a couple of days ago, I told my friend Winston Smith that I had located one of his major influences. He was so happy! He said that he had "thousands" of Radebaugh's illustrations sitting around that he'd painstakingly culled from old magazines and books (his source material), and was thrilled to find out that we'd found the creator of the famous flying cars, etc. He said he'd never been able to find or read a signature on any of the illos before.
I do believe I made his day. Maybe he'll thank me on the end page of his next book too!
The page you get now when you try to access the site says, "Slashdotters: Please bookmark this site and come back next week..." (What?! Is he a glutton for punishment or something?)
:)
Looks like we swatted that fly.
post-current? What the hell does that mean? Is "future" too small a word for you?
Uh, no. "Future" is just not an accurate word in this case. I'm not entirely sure if the novel is taking place in the future, per se, as the reviewer seems to think it's a "version of the present," but the cover copy says it's an "extrapolation," which sort of suggests otherwise. I'm sorry you can't parse a subtle rhetorical distinction like my hedging my bets, since Gibson is notoriously shy on dates.
You do understand that Neuromancer was written in 1984, right?
Yes, and I also understand that computers did exist in 1984, and I further understand that most technologically-oriented people who have looked at Gibson's work have said that his initial Neuromancer world was fantastical, and not really extrapolative, whereas his later works seem to be zeroing in on actual emerging trends and technology. His increase in factual knowledge from which to extrapolate might have something to do with the fact that Gibson wrote Neuromancer using a typewriter, and hadn't so much as even touched a computer in 1984, but he obviously has done so now.
I haven't yet finished the book, true. I only got it two days ago, and, all things considered, I don't read that fast. 900 wpm is peanuts when you haven't put much time into it.
...the Industrial Revolution (the 72 hr. workweek, sweatshop conditions, etc.) because the rich people who own the businesses are nice, did you? (Come to think of it, many programmers have never really left the Industrial Revolution.) Unions were one of the major ways people got important occupational well-being, health, and safety regulations passed.
Just because we work with futuristic technology doesn't mean we must be completely ignorant of the past. Look up some labour history sometime, why don't you? Here is a link to a local IWW chapter dealing almost exclusively with IT workers. Granted, the IWW is the most left-leaning and fanatically political union around, but they have a fascinating history, and might be worth a look for interest's sake, if nothing else. Here is a link to the union which represents unionized programmers in Canada, the CEP/SCEP. So apparently not all programmers think unions are a bad thing.
I agree with the learned AC. When my 8h are up for the day, I leave. Buhbye, seeya, I'm out of here. I like my job, and I have been known to work on it casually outside of work hours ("duty reading" and the like), but I rarely if ever put in any actual "overtime," and, because I'm hourly, I bill for it. All of it. I figure that if my boss wants something done badly enough that I'm in the office from 9AM-7PM and working through my lunch (hypothetically speaking) he can damnwell pay me for it.
That said, I don't get to collect "overtime" per se, because the local jurisdiction's answer to Mussolini just gerrymandered the rules about overtime so if you work greater than an average of 70 hrs a week over a pay period, then you can collect overtime, not before. I usually am in the wind by then...
It's much more important to have a good quality of life than an overweight paycheque, I think. For me, anyway, quality of life !=more money, always. I would rather have time to get extra sleep, time to read, and do my own stuff, than the few extra bucks I could earn by working more than 40 hrs. in a week.
At least Gibson now seems to be at least sort of in touch with current or post-current computer technology, something he most emphatically wasn't in Neuromancer. So far, I'm enjoying it, but (truth in reporting) I haven't finished it yet. (My fiance gave it to me for my birthday, but decided to read it before he gave it to me, and I had a Tom Holt to finish.)
He pointed out something I find pretty hard to ignore now that I'm into the novel: Do any of you others out there think that the "footage" plot is memetically borrowed from a certain quasi-filmic endless joke around here? I'm sure you know the one I mean, gentlemen...all your memes are belong to William Gibson now. (One imagines that in the near future, digital tricksters can get up to mischief slightly more sophisticated than Photoshop and Flash animations.)
5 minutes late? Try 35 minutes late. Or maybe even 60 minutes late, given the appropriate amount of snowstorm. I remember trying to get to work (London, ON) during a snowstorm, and catching a bus that I thought I would have missed, only to be informed by the driver that he was actually driving the bus that was supposed to have come through there an hour ago, and there were four more busses somewhere on the route behind him.
I could use something like that screen. Then I wouldn't always be shuffling through my 50 bus schedules, looking for the one I need (which is always the one that's gone missing).
Obviously not in London, ON. In London, it's practically impossible to say when the bus will get to any particular stop, save for the terminal stops on either end of the route. I've personally observed as much as a 15-minute variance on the routes I take most often, not counting delays for weather. You can be fairly sure the bus will be late during any kind of inclement weather, and early enough days otherwise to completely bollix you. London bus drivers also like to blast through three quarters of their route so they can sit at a convenient Tim Horton's for ten minutes. The general niceness scarcity in the LTC is yet another reason why I desperately want to move back to Toronto.
Boy, you're so technologically sophisticated, you wimps. In my city, we don't have anything as complicated as a bus algorithm (they grow 'em smart in Winnipeg); we just have little paper thingies called "schedules."
...including torch his audio and video collection, read to him from the US/Canadian/your-jurisdiction-here copyright statutes, submit him to a thorough psychiatric evaluation (and/or a drug test), and, failing involuntary committal, have someone assassinate him, but the paperwork would be a stone bitch.
We've long suspected as much, but now we know for sure. Is there anything in that article that he says that isn't an out-and-out lie? He was never against VCRs? That's doubtless why he claimed that VCRs would destroy the movie industry. Statistics I hear suggest that movie tickets are now selling better than they have at any time since Jack Valenti was still getting into movies at the "child" price.
Backups aren't necessary? I wonder if, when he was a kid, he ever dropped a record on his bedroom floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. He obviously really believes that if he scratches a CD, trips and falls and smashes a CD in half, has his cassette player or his VCR eat a tape, or anything like that, he (and we) should all just rush out to buy a new one. No way!
Where does his figure "$3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy" come from? How does he "measure" this loss, being as it's really difficult to measure negative quantities. Is he counting the total street value of large-scale bootleg videotapes, or some sort of hypothetical "if Joe Average hadn't taped Star Trek off the tv, he would have bought the box set" figure?
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. " Well, IANAL, but I quote
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That looks like there's something in law, all right. In Canada, the similar reservation is called "fair dealing," in case you're looking for it.
Oh, how he do go on. He claims to have been in Vietnam. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? That's the only other explanation I can think of...
I don't think I was actually trying to respond to your main point, or perhaps even your comment. I don't think the actual install is a problem at all. I managed a fairly complicated Linux install when I had far less Linux knowledge than I do now, although I did have some help. If I had done a simple install (and if my monitor weren't a weird brand), I would have been totally fine.
Even the desktop itself isn't so bad, but the apps do need work. If Linux is after a user base with minimal computer skills (I hear most users), it's going to have to figure out a way of making itself totally attractive to those users and -- gasp! -- marketing to them, which doesn't just mean advertising. It also means adapting the product to what the users want and need, and not necessarily what the developers think the users want and need.
...what we in the documentation business called the "COIK," for Comprehensible Only If Known problem. When I first started to get into Linux, I decided to do the logical(?) thing and RTFM. Well, guess what? At that stage (slightly more advanced than someone's 63-year-old dad), I didn't understand TFM. (So much for that snarky comeback.) I had to go out and buy myself a series of introductory books on Linux (starting with "Linux For Dummies," which I recommend to the mid-level Windows user who wants to switch), and go to a bunch of introductory Linux websites before I could make any sense whatsoever of most of the documentation.
Yes, it's great that there is lots of documentation. Yes, the documentation is wonderful for refreshing your memory about a certain feature, command, or other piece of Linux; and it's also an excellent resource once you more-or-less know what you're doing. But it's next to useless to the absolute Linux beginner, mostly because it's not written for them. (Please note: That's a statement of fact, not a value judgement.)
On top of which, most "click-and-go" users don't like using the documentation, or the help files (even when those users are programmers -- see Nykaza et al, Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference on Documentation, ACM-SIGDOC, pp. 133-141) -- they want the interface to be as obvious as possible (and if not obvious, then at least familiar), and will more likely pick up the phone and do the other RTFM: "ring the family maven," than get into the manual.