Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?
Actually I pay 0.99 GBP (or ~$1.72) for a lot of music online. Why? Because I get it off of Warp Records' Bleep.com website where I can find extremely rare tracks and the money is mostly going right to the artist. And while most of Bleep's big stuff (Boards of Canada, AFX) can be found in many places, none of these artists are cracking out gold records. The fact you can find out of print Detroit electro vinyl (say Dataphysix stuff) is a real boon.
Why would I pay this? Because I've paid $50 bucks for an album that I can now find on there for $15. Sure, for connoisseurs half the fun is the hunt for new albums but in the end you just want to have it sooner so you can listen to it more. So $1.72 per track is a great deal.
What I can't understand is have some sort of adaptive cost. The cost of a single track could fluctuate every day and they could track to see what affect it has on sales. Sales drop: reduce price. Sales rise: increase it. As with simulated annealing have the delta decrease with time. Why does there need to be a static price? A six cent song that sells a million copies is just as good as a sixty cent song that sells 100k.
I read this with an arched eyebrow as/. (and much of the web-based/blog journalism) is one thing above all else: not a content provider. In fact they can be considered content-parasitic as/. makes advertising dollars over people reading content from somewhere else and comments provided for free by unpaid users. If one were to work in the hyperlinking of mainstream media providers by blogs or aggregators like/. we'd probably get a different picture: MSM readership has probably grown but has now been forced into a long-tail economy. Of course the problem is that they are shouldering the bulk of the cost (i.e. the actual reporting and maintenance of foreign bureaus) while sites like/. pay only for basic bandwidth and site-costs and use their content for free.
In the old 80/20 economy newspapers could offset this by having control of the market: to get any news, consumers had to pay for all of the news they deemed to print. Now users are just as able to find their news elsewhere, specialized down to just what they're looking for (the sport's score, the stock-tip, the local police blotter).
And the long-tail doesn't meant he death of the newspaper either, it just means a change in scope. A short, intelligent article on the East Flagstaff Chronicle might get linked up by thousands of blogs and register hundreds of thousand hits from an international audience that might have never read the paper (and probably won't ever again). Smart advertising (Google Ads, Slashvertisements) could customize to the suddenly exponentially larger (and divergent) readership. Local content and editorial that is easily aggregatable and paid via micropayment (or by targetted advertisement) would satisfy the consistent local demand and the papers would thrive (i.e. I'm not going to read the Baltimore Sun for analysis of my Cleveland Browns). This is how the wire services have always been (the only difference being that the papers would no longer be middlemen between wire reports and the readers).
There will always be a demand for international news/editorial and the well-worn names (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) can provide a similar service for news of national and international content. And as much as we like to think our opinions are ours alone, most of them are driven by these very MSM sources we read. Remove that and the content quality of these blog/web communities would drop off savagely from its already debateable level of quality. The only lethal fallacy would be to assume things have never changed, that they can still charge for the whole cow when we just want the milk.
cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy
That's a pretty open-ended definition. So is old-school white collar insider trading or shenanigans now Cyber-Crime just because they do it from a workstation? It'd be interesting to see just what is a cyber-crime now and how it breaks down into that total 150 billion dollars they just throw out there. Of course such data might pop the balloon of FUD as delicious as this.
"As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself."
That isn't postmodernism as postmodernism would be some sort of comment on the hallowed standards of modernist storytelling. The author here tries to tell us that "The Force" is Lucas' comment on the progression of plot ("The Force is... a metaphor for... the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.") Uh, no. The author displays horrific set logic as he mistakes set inclusion with set equivalence. In fact The Force is a part of the plot of the movies; the plot, however, is not just The Force. The author tries to argue that the events in the movie needed to happen for the plot of the movie... well no shit. He earns a gold star for rediscovering the definition of plot. Tomorrow of Slate: "Breaking News! Water is Wet!"
Taken further, The Force is standard romantic narrative and reinforces modernist notions: there are important characters (where the protagonists are "good", the antagonists are "evil"), there is a defined hierarchy of symbols (the artifacts of the Jedi, conformity as an enemy [in either as clone troopers or legions of identical droids], noble natural forces [Jedi powers, wookies with bowcasters] combating dehumanizing industrial ones), the important characters are the only characters of consequence (in that their actions and their actions alone drive the plot and, through that, the universe: Anakin wins his own freedom, Anakin alone defeats the Trade Federation in the first movie, Paplantine alone starts the war, Palpantine alone finishes it, Luke destroys the Death Star, only Vader kills the Emperor, etc. Everyone else is a nameless Redshirt). The Force is just a reartifacting of the classicist text that has existed forever: Fate, God, Dame Fortuna, Generic Script-writing or whatever you want to call it.
This article isn't a deconstruction, it's a validation. The author accepts the Lucas authored structure of the films' text as sacrosanct, a complete undermining of the Derrida idiom that the audience constructs its own structure of the symbols presented. That would be a postmodern critique. Instead the author takes the assumptions of the text (The Force, the balance between light and dark) and uses it to justify every lucky break or bad choice in the series (Harrison Ford adlibbing text, the diminishing returns of Jar-Jar, Lucas' choice of using all digital technology) when application of Ockham's Razor would be that Lucas was just tentative and exhausted of the vitality he leveraged in the original trilogy when filming these movies. This article is just pomobabble disguising a formula analysis. Of course that's what passes for a lot of postmodern criticism these days... hell, you could even say that this article isn't an analysis of Star Wars at all but a metanarrative analysis of analyses of Star Wars. Now that's postmodern.
(which opened at #2 in the US box office this past weekend)
Just a warning but it only did $10.1 million of business against no real competition in a Hollywood dead period. So folks better fill the seats and get the word out or this franchise will pull a Hindenburg. The two major Hollywood seasons are Memorial Day to Labor Day (the Summer Blockbuster months) and Thanksgiving to the Oscars (where Academy Award winners and big holiday films are given a big push. Before Jaws this was the only money period in cinema). September just up to Thanksgiving is a dead period: Hollywood release B features, also rans and things that have been rotting on the shelves. Of course this lack of competition has lead to a surprise breakout every few years and if Serenity can get a good word of mouth campaign to keep up interest then it'll stay solvent.
Why do I have this suspicion that if we google the discovering astronomer and Xena and Gabrielle we'll find some 10 chapter epic slash involving the two amazons meeting Catwoman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
"Gabrielle, this armor... chafes!"
"Oh look, Xena! A hot spring! Here, let me help you off with that..."
Either you go into academia, where you will write papers and give presentations, or you will go into business, where you will write memos and give presentations. Both of these are important in that they will be attached to your record of work and be used to judge how useful you are. You might be the smartest guy on the block, but if you can't express your ideas (especially in a voice-neutral setting such as a 7 page paper in a proceedings) it is all moot.
And this stuff is far from "easy" and "common sense". Everyone has experienced the horrible Powerpoint presentation: too much text, confusing shorthand grammar, no logical flow, no standard of format or presentation. You know, like your average "I haven't RTFA but I'm going to shoot from the hip"/. post. Only this time its a formal communication which your boss will look at when review time comes around. But beyond that it hampers your ability to work in a team, to work in a Greater Scientific Community, etc. Software Engineering 30% of the time is people debating two different things, neither of which is getting the team closer to the product.
Communication should be a lubricant, not a roadblock. And the way you do this is by repetition and critical feedback. Best for that feedback to first come in a classroom setting instead of your boss tossing a paper back at you saying "What the hell is this?" It still takes work, revisions, but after a while it becomes old hand. You soon find it easier to grok other presentations and choices they should've made.
This is the stuff that seperates QA and code-monkey from project leads and the guys who do cool stuff.
The study found that regular downloaders of unlicensed music spent an average of £5.52 a month on legal digital music.
This compares to just £1.27 spent by other music fans.
I think dividing the test set into illegal/not-illegal downloaders might be misleading. I'd be more interested in connected/unconnected. The second group would contain all music purchases without internet access who then would have purchased $0 from the internet. At least comparing digital downloads versus other musical purchases (store, concert, used, etc) could provide insight into the argument that illegal downloaders purchase more music.
For one thing, getting leaked albums is now one of the main uses for illegal downloads (say the Danger Mouse/MF Doom collaboration DangerDoom) or songs that are only on the mixtape circuit. I'd say that these downloaders are what are alluded to by the above study: core audience music consumers with max purchasing potential. These are the folks who spread hype on the mp3 blogs and give semi-anonymous artists with limited marketing relatively large sales through word of mouth. This is the illegal networks working "for" the music industry.
As an example I myself have already bought 47 albums this year, often importing them because of delayed distribution from domestic labels. Conversely I've purchased three songs this year (for the same reason as above). If studies like this could get A&Rs at Interscope from sitting on their hands and release stuff digitally (instead of having to find the right season to "roll out" a new artist that isn't competing with their bread and butter) I'm all for it. Of course I'm the sort of person who puts all of this in a spreadsheet and then creates histograms of time/disc and cost/disc and compares them over the last few years so I'll admit to being in a, uh, minority.
2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency.
The shucking of responsibility./. readers are brilliant and self-educated over the mere mortals who need our superhuman guidance? Yeah... right. I was so mesmerized by the perfect grammar and Mrs. Manners' etiquette here that I didn't notice. It's always someone else's problem. The teacher's, the parent's, the child's. Just throw some money in the pot and pass on the hat.
My suggestion is to bring back caning. Then everyone's solution wouldn't be that it's everyone else's problem.
Re:When I saw the title..
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 1
ESC? Ha! vi Masters don't waste time with ESC! They use the more optimal CTRL+[ that can be entered from the home keys on both a Sun and PC QWERTY keyboard. Sure it is even more esoteric, but why else would you be using vi?;)
They seem to lack a large amount of critical writing in the 20th century. Tragically that pretty much takes out Baldwin and Ellison (save the brilliant Invisible Man. I too am baffled why it isn't there). Derrida, Baudrillard... but that's just opening up a whole other's hornet nest.
I also thought the exclusion of Beckett might have been because of this being about literature, not dramatic theater... but then with Shakespeare in there, that isn't really valid.
This might all be nitpicking. But even after slaving away at 20 years of books, this still would leave a very parochial view of writing.
Midnight's Children. It is usually considered his best work (though Satanic Verses is the one that got him the fame and the fatwa). I'd read that before closing the book on Rushdie.
can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts
And these same fellows expect to glide through both Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake? I thought it was funny in the WSJ article that they mention being spared Ulysses, which is actually readable by your average man, while FW requires you to understand some self-made Gaelic language Joyce made up. Yeah... gonna polish that one off in a weekend.
I agree that the list is a bit odd. You just get a collection of Kafka short stories without including either The Trial or The Castle. Likewise Hesse's Siddartha should probably be paired with or replaced with either Demian or Steppenwolf. In fact this set seems to betray the classic modernist view of literature: pre-colonial, predominantly Western. Though there are some interesting choices. Like The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam. But Borges seems to carry the load for all of South America. And no Rushdie? Murakami? Aren't we missing a hemisphere? And everything seems to stop around Vineland. No DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis or Eggers. Its like literature stopped with the post-modern singularity.
But Harold Bloom would be agree: the entire body of Shakespeare's work is here. So thus goes the Western Canon. I guess if you are going to buy 900 feet of paperbacks and you're going to get them for 40% off, no need to be choosy.
For one I can't imagine taking a woman out... to your house. First off she might take it as... presumptuous and secondly, what is she to expect next? That dinner's going to be some mac n' cheese you just threw in the microwave? That she's going to have to clear a space for herself from your couch (and not there because that's where the cat sits)? Girl might be game and if so, more power to you. But she'll grow bored mighty quick if this is what all evenings' plans entail. Going Out is an expense but it's done for all the intangibles and the luxury of the evening. Good company, a good meal, a good movie, a good club can add up to a good evening. Of course that might involve dressing up a bit and talking to other people.
Also there are many non-megaplex theaters catering to adult sensibilities that offer alcohol (usually wine or bottled beer but you can wait until after if getting shitfaced is the order of business). It's pretty standard for art-house theaters. If there isn't a Landmark Theater near you, there is probably something similar. They even sell Pocky if you lack for a topic for the evening (leading well into bringing up Pocari Sweat).
I'm glad their evidence is the set of Tiger Woods, Adam Brody, and David Arquette all whom are rich, famous, and celebrities in professional golf, television and movies. Ok, so they might not be stepping off a yacht in bespoke suits but really... this is what a geek is now? The day one of them obsesses openly about the GPL I might consider this anything but fluff... and probably one of those marketing hits for the website pimped in the article. Chicks ain't swooning en masse over your DIY distro of Linux yet.
This reminds me of pigeon breeding where there are certain flight-performance traits that can be bred for (rolling and tumbling where the pigeon performs aerobatic tricks). However breeders need to be careful as certain combinations of rollers/tumblers (I forget which) create offspring that become fatalistic super-tumblers. Once entered, they never break out of a tumble and then gravity and the Earth take over. That's not to say that people are like breeding pigeons. Just the first thing I thought of.
Ebert is considered an authority because his opinion can make movies and directors. The best known examples are Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and The Blair Witch Project (and most recently, Million Dollar Baby). Yeah, these films might have taken off on their own but there was a definite force of Ebert to have Hollywood pay attention (more marketing from the studios, more shows by theaters, more Oscar consideration by the Academy). He is big enough that he constitutes something like 90% of the traffic to the Chicago Sun-Times website. He is recognizable enough that he was caricatured in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla for scathing reviews he had given to Emmerich's previous efforts Independence Day and Universal Soldier (something which few writers can say has ever been done in reaction to their work). He pulls a lot of water in the industry.
Some of this is because he is one of the few nationally known film critics (due to At the Movies and it's cultural meme of thumbs up/down like a bunch of Romans). It might also be generational: he's one of the last links to the culturally significant 70's generation of Hollywood critics (personified by the great Pauline Kael). Much like the films made at the time, film critique owed a direct lineage to the French New Wave/Cahiers du cinéma school. Film theory meant something. As he said in his review of Bertolucci's The Dreamers:
"In April of 1969, driving past the Three Penny Cinema on Lincoln Avenue, I saw a crowd lined up under umbrellas on the sidewalk, waiting in the rain to get into the next screening of Godard's "Weekend." Today you couldn't pay most Chicago moviegoers to see a film by Godard, but at that moment, the year after the Battle of Grant Park, at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, it was all part of the same alignment."
He isn't so dense as to be inscrutable to the mainstream. Hell, most younger moviegoers grew up with him on TV and reading him in syndication. When/if he ever retires, that part of history will come to a close.
Additionally to cutting wire, the bayonet is retained for combat morale: a blade out and ready is one of many tools used to get a soldier to go over the top (drilling and instilling a desire to not let down the group are two others). The actual utility of charging and bayonetting an enemy is not really expected. You can tell this by looking at modern bayonets which are usually no more than 8" in length. Compare that to the bayonets of the 19th and early 20th century (when bayonet charges were still considered a viable tactic): lengths were in the 16 to 18 inch range. It in effect transformed the rifle into a spear that could should every once and a while.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all I needed to hear! *pops open a cold one*
Ahhh, it looks like under Daylight Savings Time 8:32 is Beer O'Clock!
Nothing quite like taking something known for its compactness and ease of use and making it bulky and awkward. Go-go engineering!
Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?
Actually I pay 0.99 GBP (or ~$1.72) for a lot of music online. Why? Because I get it off of Warp Records' Bleep.com website where I can find extremely rare tracks and the money is mostly going right to the artist. And while most of Bleep's big stuff (Boards of Canada, AFX) can be found in many places, none of these artists are cracking out gold records. The fact you can find out of print Detroit electro vinyl (say Dataphysix stuff) is a real boon.
Why would I pay this? Because I've paid $50 bucks for an album that I can now find on there for $15. Sure, for connoisseurs half the fun is the hunt for new albums but in the end you just want to have it sooner so you can listen to it more. So $1.72 per track is a great deal.
What I can't understand is have some sort of adaptive cost. The cost of a single track could fluctuate every day and they could track to see what affect it has on sales. Sales drop: reduce price. Sales rise: increase it. As with simulated annealing have the delta decrease with time. Why does there need to be a static price? A six cent song that sells a million copies is just as good as a sixty cent song that sells 100k.
I read this with an arched eyebrow as /. (and much of the web-based/blog journalism) is one thing above all else: not a content provider. In fact they can be considered content-parasitic as /. makes advertising dollars over people reading content from somewhere else and comments provided for free by unpaid users. If one were to work in the hyperlinking of mainstream media providers by blogs or aggregators like /. we'd probably get a different picture: MSM readership has probably grown but has now been forced into a long-tail economy. Of course the problem is that they are shouldering the bulk of the cost (i.e. the actual reporting and maintenance of foreign bureaus) while sites like /. pay only for basic bandwidth and site-costs and use their content for free.
In the old 80/20 economy newspapers could offset this by having control of the market: to get any news, consumers had to pay for all of the news they deemed to print. Now users are just as able to find their news elsewhere, specialized down to just what they're looking for (the sport's score, the stock-tip, the local police blotter).
And the long-tail doesn't meant he death of the newspaper either, it just means a change in scope. A short, intelligent article on the East Flagstaff Chronicle might get linked up by thousands of blogs and register hundreds of thousand hits from an international audience that might have never read the paper (and probably won't ever again). Smart advertising (Google Ads, Slashvertisements) could customize to the suddenly exponentially larger (and divergent) readership. Local content and editorial that is easily aggregatable and paid via micropayment (or by targetted advertisement) would satisfy the consistent local demand and the papers would thrive (i.e. I'm not going to read the Baltimore Sun for analysis of my Cleveland Browns). This is how the wire services have always been (the only difference being that the papers would no longer be middlemen between wire reports and the readers).
There will always be a demand for international news/editorial and the well-worn names (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) can provide a similar service for news of national and international content. And as much as we like to think our opinions are ours alone, most of them are driven by these very MSM sources we read. Remove that and the content quality of these blog/web communities would drop off savagely from its already debateable level of quality. The only lethal fallacy would be to assume things have never changed, that they can still charge for the whole cow when we just want the milk.
cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy
That's a pretty open-ended definition. So is old-school white collar insider trading or shenanigans now Cyber-Crime just because they do it from a workstation? It'd be interesting to see just what is a cyber-crime now and how it breaks down into that total 150 billion dollars they just throw out there. Of course such data might pop the balloon of FUD as delicious as this.
"As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself."
That isn't postmodernism as postmodernism would be some sort of comment on the hallowed standards of modernist storytelling. The author here tries to tell us that "The Force" is Lucas' comment on the progression of plot ("The Force is... a metaphor for... the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.") Uh, no. The author displays horrific set logic as he mistakes set inclusion with set equivalence. In fact The Force is a part of the plot of the movies; the plot, however, is not just The Force. The author tries to argue that the events in the movie needed to happen for the plot of the movie... well no shit. He earns a gold star for rediscovering the definition of plot. Tomorrow of Slate: "Breaking News! Water is Wet!"
Taken further, The Force is standard romantic narrative and reinforces modernist notions: there are important characters (where the protagonists are "good", the antagonists are "evil"), there is a defined hierarchy of symbols (the artifacts of the Jedi, conformity as an enemy [in either as clone troopers or legions of identical droids], noble natural forces [Jedi powers, wookies with bowcasters] combating dehumanizing industrial ones), the important characters are the only characters of consequence (in that their actions and their actions alone drive the plot and, through that, the universe: Anakin wins his own freedom, Anakin alone defeats the Trade Federation in the first movie, Paplantine alone starts the war, Palpantine alone finishes it, Luke destroys the Death Star, only Vader kills the Emperor, etc. Everyone else is a nameless Redshirt). The Force is just a reartifacting of the classicist text that has existed forever: Fate, God, Dame Fortuna, Generic Script-writing or whatever you want to call it.
This article isn't a deconstruction, it's a validation. The author accepts the Lucas authored structure of the films' text as sacrosanct, a complete undermining of the Derrida idiom that the audience constructs its own structure of the symbols presented. That would be a postmodern critique. Instead the author takes the assumptions of the text (The Force, the balance between light and dark) and uses it to justify every lucky break or bad choice in the series (Harrison Ford adlibbing text, the diminishing returns of Jar-Jar, Lucas' choice of using all digital technology) when application of Ockham's Razor would be that Lucas was just tentative and exhausted of the vitality he leveraged in the original trilogy when filming these movies. This article is just pomobabble disguising a formula analysis. Of course that's what passes for a lot of postmodern criticism these days... hell, you could even say that this article isn't an analysis of Star Wars at all but a metanarrative analysis of analyses of Star Wars. Now that's postmodern.
But they have a pretty good recipe for a Vodka Martini. The Kilgour suit is optional.
Didn't write it. You can blame Philip K. Dick. *stomps foot on ground* YOU HEAR THAT?!?
Be on the lookout for a penguin with a rubber glove on its head.
(which opened at #2 in the US box office this past weekend)
Just a warning but it only did $10.1 million of business against no real competition in a Hollywood dead period. So folks better fill the seats and get the word out or this franchise will pull a Hindenburg. The two major Hollywood seasons are Memorial Day to Labor Day (the Summer Blockbuster months) and Thanksgiving to the Oscars (where Academy Award winners and big holiday films are given a big push. Before Jaws this was the only money period in cinema). September just up to Thanksgiving is a dead period: Hollywood release B features, also rans and things that have been rotting on the shelves. Of course this lack of competition has lead to a surprise breakout every few years and if Serenity can get a good word of mouth campaign to keep up interest then it'll stay solvent.
Why do I have this suspicion that if we google the discovering astronomer and Xena and Gabrielle we'll find some 10 chapter epic slash involving the two amazons meeting Catwoman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
"Gabrielle, this armor... chafes!"
"Oh look, Xena! A hot spring! Here, let me help you off with that..."
*Shudder*
Either you go into academia, where you will write papers and give presentations, or you will go into business, where you will write memos and give presentations. Both of these are important in that they will be attached to your record of work and be used to judge how useful you are. You might be the smartest guy on the block, but if you can't express your ideas (especially in a voice-neutral setting such as a 7 page paper in a proceedings) it is all moot.
/. post. Only this time its a formal communication which your boss will look at when review time comes around. But beyond that it hampers your ability to work in a team, to work in a Greater Scientific Community, etc. Software Engineering 30% of the time is people debating two different things, neither of which is getting the team closer to the product.
And this stuff is far from "easy" and "common sense". Everyone has experienced the horrible Powerpoint presentation: too much text, confusing shorthand grammar, no logical flow, no standard of format or presentation. You know, like your average "I haven't RTFA but I'm going to shoot from the hip"
Communication should be a lubricant, not a roadblock. And the way you do this is by repetition and critical feedback. Best for that feedback to first come in a classroom setting instead of your boss tossing a paper back at you saying "What the hell is this?" It still takes work, revisions, but after a while it becomes old hand. You soon find it easier to grok other presentations and choices they should've made.
This is the stuff that seperates QA and code-monkey from project leads and the guys who do cool stuff.
For one thing, getting leaked albums is now one of the main uses for illegal downloads (say the Danger Mouse/MF Doom collaboration DangerDoom) or songs that are only on the mixtape circuit. I'd say that these downloaders are what are alluded to by the above study: core audience music consumers with max purchasing potential. These are the folks who spread hype on the mp3 blogs and give semi-anonymous artists with limited marketing relatively large sales through word of mouth. This is the illegal networks working "for" the music industry.
As an example I myself have already bought 47 albums this year, often importing them because of delayed distribution from domestic labels. Conversely I've purchased three songs this year (for the same reason as above). If studies like this could get A&Rs at Interscope from sitting on their hands and release stuff digitally (instead of having to find the right season to "roll out" a new artist that isn't competing with their bread and butter) I'm all for it. Of course I'm the sort of person who puts all of this in a spreadsheet and then creates histograms of time/disc and cost/disc and compares them over the last few years so I'll admit to being in a, uh, minority.
The shucking of responsibility.
My suggestion is to bring back caning. Then everyone's solution wouldn't be that it's everyone else's problem.
ESC? Ha! vi Masters don't waste time with ESC! They use the more optimal CTRL+[ that can be entered from the home keys on both a Sun and PC QWERTY keyboard. Sure it is even more esoteric, but why else would you be using vi? ;)
They seem to lack a large amount of critical writing in the 20th century. Tragically that pretty much takes out Baldwin and Ellison (save the brilliant Invisible Man. I too am baffled why it isn't there). Derrida, Baudrillard... but that's just opening up a whole other's hornet nest.
I also thought the exclusion of Beckett might have been because of this being about literature, not dramatic theater... but then with Shakespeare in there, that isn't really valid.
This might all be nitpicking. But even after slaving away at 20 years of books, this still would leave a very parochial view of writing.
Midnight's Children. It is usually considered his best work (though Satanic Verses is the one that got him the fame and the fatwa). I'd read that before closing the book on Rushdie.
can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts
And these same fellows expect to glide through both Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake? I thought it was funny in the WSJ article that they mention being spared Ulysses, which is actually readable by your average man, while FW requires you to understand some self-made Gaelic language Joyce made up. Yeah... gonna polish that one off in a weekend.
I agree that the list is a bit odd. You just get a collection of Kafka short stories without including either The Trial or The Castle. Likewise Hesse's Siddartha should probably be paired with or replaced with either Demian or Steppenwolf. In fact this set seems to betray the classic modernist view of literature: pre-colonial, predominantly Western. Though there are some interesting choices. Like The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam. But Borges seems to carry the load for all of South America. And no Rushdie? Murakami? Aren't we missing a hemisphere? And everything seems to stop around Vineland. No DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis or Eggers. Its like literature stopped with the post-modern singularity.
But Harold Bloom would be agree: the entire body of Shakespeare's work is here. So thus goes the Western Canon. I guess if you are going to buy 900 feet of paperbacks and you're going to get them for 40% off, no need to be choosy.
For one I can't imagine taking a woman out... to your house. First off she might take it as... presumptuous and secondly, what is she to expect next? That dinner's going to be some mac n' cheese you just threw in the microwave? That she's going to have to clear a space for herself from your couch (and not there because that's where the cat sits)? Girl might be game and if so, more power to you. But she'll grow bored mighty quick if this is what all evenings' plans entail. Going Out is an expense but it's done for all the intangibles and the luxury of the evening. Good company, a good meal, a good movie, a good club can add up to a good evening. Of course that might involve dressing up a bit and talking to other people.
Also there are many non-megaplex theaters catering to adult sensibilities that offer alcohol (usually wine or bottled beer but you can wait until after if getting shitfaced is the order of business). It's pretty standard for art-house theaters. If there isn't a Landmark Theater near you, there is probably something similar. They even sell Pocky if you lack for a topic for the evening (leading well into bringing up Pocari Sweat).
which features a list of all Google's previous buyouts and some interesting suggestions for the future.
Right at this moment, someone at VA Software sits expectantly near the phone... waiting... counting their LNUX stock...
I'm glad their evidence is the set of Tiger Woods, Adam Brody, and David Arquette all whom are rich, famous, and celebrities in professional golf, television and movies. Ok, so they might not be stepping off a yacht in bespoke suits but really... this is what a geek is now? The day one of them obsesses openly about the GPL I might consider this anything but fluff... and probably one of those marketing hits for the website pimped in the article. Chicks ain't swooning en masse over your DIY distro of Linux yet.
This reminds me of pigeon breeding where there are certain flight-performance traits that can be bred for (rolling and tumbling where the pigeon performs aerobatic tricks). However breeders need to be careful as certain combinations of rollers/tumblers (I forget which) create offspring that become fatalistic super-tumblers. Once entered, they never break out of a tumble and then gravity and the Earth take over. That's not to say that people are like breeding pigeons. Just the first thing I thought of.
Some of this is because he is one of the few nationally known film critics (due to At the Movies and it's cultural meme of thumbs up/down like a bunch of Romans). It might also be generational: he's one of the last links to the culturally significant 70's generation of Hollywood critics (personified by the great Pauline Kael). Much like the films made at the time, film critique owed a direct lineage to the French New Wave/Cahiers du cinéma school. Film theory meant something. As he said in his review of Bertolucci's The Dreamers: He isn't so dense as to be inscrutable to the mainstream. Hell, most younger moviegoers grew up with him on TV and reading him in syndication. When/if he ever retires, that part of history will come to a close.
Damn... s/should/shoot/ in the last sentence.
Additionally to cutting wire, the bayonet is retained for combat morale: a blade out and ready is one of many tools used to get a soldier to go over the top (drilling and instilling a desire to not let down the group are two others). The actual utility of charging and bayonetting an enemy is not really expected. You can tell this by looking at modern bayonets which are usually no more than 8" in length. Compare that to the bayonets of the 19th and early 20th century (when bayonet charges were still considered a viable tactic): lengths were in the 16 to 18 inch range. It in effect transformed the rifle into a spear that could should every once and a while.