Haven't you gotten the memo? It's not about doing actual good, it's all about _appearing_ to do actual good. Anything that can be done without much cost or political fallout will be done, but these are invariably superficial and ineffective, but they make for good sound bites when campaigning, and that's what's important.
Even monopolists such as microsoft will one day have to answer to their customers.
And how many billions of dollars will be swindled, how many thousands of companies will be destroyed, how many millions of customers will be abused, before this happens? Does the average person still have any idea that there is an alternative to Microsoft? I doubt it.
The definition of "monopoly" is that your position in the market is that you can pretty much call all the shots, regardless of what customers or competitors, (or the government in Microsoft's case), tries to do. Is the whole world going to stop using computers, or suddenly switch to Linux or OSX? We wish. Certainly the latter option is happening, but it could easily be a decade or more before there is significant erosion to Microsoft's supremacy, and how much damage can they do in the meantime? How much deceptive marketing? How much bullying and strongarming of OEMs? How much flat-out buying of Congress (who should simply print a price list on the doors of the capitol building and stop pretending they aren't for sale)? When you can throw 11 figures into something, you are going to go a long, long way regardless of anything else. Who's going to stop that? Linus? RMS? Hardly.
I'm not trying to bash OSS and its advocates. I am a huge supporter of OSS and use it whenever possible. The Evil Empire is showing serious cracks, but it is hardly crumbling, and it has many, many tools with which to fight back, of which technology is probably not even in the Top 5. The fight is worth it, and battles are being won, but like the "War on Terror" it is going to be a long, slow battle with no end in sight... yet.
In a sense, the battle of OSS against Microsoft is a mirror of the battle of individual freedoms against the tyranny of domination for "the public good" that is going on the U.S. and elsewhere. Right now, the good guys are losing, IMO. But they are not down and far from out.
The irony here is that the original series was out on DVD in region two about two years before it was out in Region 1. It's so stupid, but any way they can screw, annoy or harass the customer is good if it can make a couple extra bucks.
True, but the fact that Microsoft has allowed these kinds of problems to persist for well over a decade does put some of the culpability on them. After all, they've been claiming every release of their software to be more secure. It's only recently that that's actually started being true.
Does anyone remember the great "security audit" of all of Microsoft's software, when they (claimed to have) stopped all development for a month or more to address security problems. That was in 2000. Security in Windows actually got a lot worse before it started getting better around 2005 or so. Almost a decade later after their great security push they are still just starting to get it under control, mostly by releasing a new operating system that is more secure because of a whole bunch of new features, but mostly because it's so awful no one wants to use it. Now _that's_ computer security. Actually, it's a real problem because if Vista weren't a big steaming pile of hate for users, fewer people would be using the older problematic versions of Windows (i.e., anything in the Win9x line, Windows 2000 and pre-SP2 XP).
There were a number of car wrecks because of Firestone tires a few years back. If people didn't heed the recall, and their car was damaged from a blowout of a defective tire, they could be at least partially blamed. But who is to blame if Firestone were still making bad tires 10 years later?
Microsoft is most certainly to blame when their sieve-like security allows so many millions of Windows computers to compromised for nefarious means.
It's not the wind. It is the earth rotating under the rocks. Not sure of the latitude of the location but the earth is rotating at something around 1000 miles per hour at the equator.
Well, you know of course that why the famous experiment with marbles on a smooth surface works. It's well known that any object on a relatively frictionless surface will slowly drift to the West because of the Earth's rotation. This is why that old design for "air hockey" was unfeasible. That's why marbles on balanced glass always roll Westward. It's how compasses work.
That's also why ice rinks nearer the equator need to be tilted slightly to compensate for the effects of the Earth rotating from under the skaters. I understand that an ice rink built in Quito in 2004 had to be slanted at nearly 7 degrees.
I understand that the government of Indonesia is building a 7 mile long maglev runway that will allow airplanes to be launched at almost 400 miles per hour (wind resistance cuts it down from the full 1000), merely by placing the airplane on the track and letting the Earth's rotation fling it into the air. At that point the engines cut in. The system is expected to cut fuel costs for air travel by almost 30%.
This same effect is what powers that "perpetual motion" turbine that generates power for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station.
Windows 2000 was the biggest competition to XP, but in that case XP had advantages and disadvantages compared to 2000, but the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, especially after the service packs. In the case of Vista, at least with my experience, there is absolutely no advantage over XP, the the disadvantages are huge. I admit the new security features will help the non-technical users, but the last time I got a virus was in 1989, so I don't need the added security (and the huge hassles it incurred).
Since "zero" will never outweigh "too many" I see no reason to ever use Vista until such time as drivers are no longer available, at which point I will use Linux full time. I don't use Linux on my laptop because of too many hardware issues, but it runs on my desktops and I totally love Ubuntu. The true successors to XP will be Linux and OSX, and I couldn't think of a more deserving prize for Microsoft. All the bloat and stupidity that always plagued Office has finally spilled over into the OS, and there is now no current MS product I would willingly use.
When slashdot brings down a site running Apache, we call it slashdotting, not Apache-ing. When slashdot brings down a site running wordpress, we call it slashdotting, not wordpressing.
Except Wordpress comes pre-Slashdotted for your convenience.
I went to Virginia Tech in the 80's so I am very familiar with Blacksburg. It is one of many picturesque towns and wonderful places to live in the Old Dominion. I've also lived in Richmond, which is a really cool town. I'd love to move back someday, but I've been in Leesburg for 9 years and really love it here too.
He said when they approached him to use his movie for MST3K that he initially didn't like the idea, but then changed his mind. That should be obvious from the context.
I also realize that I'd started a sentence, went off on a tangent and never finished the sentence.
First off, I described exactly what you are saying. No reason to be snotty about it.
Finally, you're saying there should only be room for the mainstream on TV? Wow. What a sad, sad comment. Why in the world are you even reading this article when you could be watching "American Idol"?
Your prejudices are likewise very obvious, and you cannot deny you reacted with great prejudice that what I had to say. You made as many or more incorrect assumptions about me as you claim I have of you, so I don't see how you can deny it.
I continue to believe that you have little or no real world experience, or haven't learned from it.
It seems having realized that I'm not the monster you first painted me as, you simply fell back on the last resort of the weak-minded: ad hominem attacks, by claiming out of the blue that my language skills and even my intellect are suspect. This is a tactic of the intellectually bankrupt or of someone "defending the indefensible". I'm not implying anything, just fact. I'm sorry you had to revert to such silliness. It only makes you look bad.
With regard to feelings, here's a little truth that social "scientists", from the way you talk anyway, might not have figured out: People in general, and children in particular are not always rational. Very young children are more or less incapable of acting rationally. If you claim you can reason with a three-year-old on every occasion, you are either lying or have never tried to reason a three-year-old. In fact, the same could be said of a ten-year-old.
You seem to agree that it is a parent's right and responsibility to bring up his child and teach him to live correctly, although not everything you say seems consistent with that. Nevertheless, I believe it and must take it as granted.
Because the "real world", as I called it, is fraught with many dangers, it is necessary to teach your children things they may not, and in fact, will not understand. You do not have the luxury of waiting for them to figure it out by themselves because destruction, injury and even death are likely. A perfect example is teaching a child not to dash out into the road. A less dramatic, but no less important, example is knowing the importance of washing your hands. Another important but more abstract example is teaching children they must not take what is not theirs.
If you are trying to teach someone something and he is not acting rationally, you cannot reason with him, ipso facto. Therefore, it is necessary to use other means to correct him. Other means are, in one form or another, reinforcement, either positive or negative. Positive reinforcement brings about good feelings, because it means the person receives something he likes, whether its something concrete like a physical reward or something abstract like praise. Negative reinforcement brings about bad feelings because it means the person receives something he doesn't like. Some guy named Skinner made a whole career out of stating this blindingly obvious point. I'm sure you've heard of him.
When you reward someone for a behavior you get more of the desired behavior because people like to be rewarded. As the person is capable of being reasoned with, you can replace these more primitive incentives with actual reason, which of course necessitates a strong moral underpinning, which despite your claims to the contrary are not merely the product of opinion. Nature, as you state correctly, is not moral, but neither does nature have will nor intellect. Man, who does have will and intellect, is culpable for his actions and is therefore subject to morality. If you disagree with this, then you'd better be willing to disavow any worth in the entire edifice of civilization.
Ultimately, you cannot teach someone anything without pointing out when he is wrong. Despite our most lofty aspirations of impartial rationality it is almost impossible to escape feeling bad when we are shown to be wrong, and I've never met a child who had achieved such rationality, nor an adult for that matter. Therefore it is impossible to teach someone, to correct someone, without positive or negative feelings. People are not machines, nor Vulcans. Feelings may be misleading, but they are not inherently bad, and in fact are the wellspring of reason, for what originally is
Jim Mallon has the KTMA episodes and owns the rights thereto, as I understand it. He considers them to be of sub-par quality (and in the case of several of the early ones in the season, he is correct, especially when one or more cast members weren't present... when Joel does a whole movie solo, it's pretty weak, his talents notwithstanding), and does not wish them to be seen by the public. No one outside of him has yet shown up with a recording of anything before the 4th episode, and considering this was broadcast almost 20 years ago, that's not too surprising.
Nonetheless, I personally think there are several KTMA-era episodes that are quite good, and would love to see one or more of them released commercially. Of course, at the time, they did not obtain the rights to broadcast the shows the way they did, they were only raiding the Channel 23 film vault and taking on whatever struck their fancy. Of course, several of the movies would be re-treated in later seasons.
Josh changed his name so as not to be confused with the Other Josh Weinstein who, among other things is an executive producer of one of the few shows that can compete with MST3K for my favor, The Simpsons.
I always wondered about possible ad-libs... I get the impression they were few and far between after season 1, because by the time they show was actually being recorded, the actors, who were also all writers, had seen the movies several times. Besides, some jokes are so good they could provoke laughter even if they were scripted.
The problem with the ad-libs was that it's pretty easy to see that you could get long periods of dead air. I personally don't understand J Elvis' insistence that this was somehow better that using a script (although to be fair I haven't produced or acted in my own movie riffing show, although I'm pretty good at it, as are my Mistie kids, and we've kicked around the idea).
I gave up on the Sci-Fi Channel when I realized they were really the Low-Budget Horror Channel with occasional forays into SF.
MST3K was, and always will be a niche show, and TV executives as a group have some sort of bizarre mental block when it comes to niche shows. They don't understand them, don't like them and usually destroy them (see Futurama). If it's not "American Idol" or some similar lowest-common-denominator dreck, they treat it like some kind of radioactive waste. And these guys are geniuses compared to network TV execs who are to good TV what Microsoft is to good software... if any slips out it is almost by accident.
The irony is that as we are approaching the proverbial "500 channels" we've been promised and yet there is still no place for something like MST3K. That's why I turned off satellite, turned on Netflix and have almost worn out my MST3K collection.
Actually, as I understand it, it was Sandy Frank who took great umbrage of MST3K's lambasting of his American adaptations of the Japanese monster movies. I was surprised to see the Godzilla movie too, which I agree was a superb episode, unlike, say, some of those interminable Gamera movies, good riffing notwithstanding. I buy every MST3K release on its release date because I know their availability is often ephemeral.
As for wanting your children to feel a certain way based on what you consider good or bad behaviour is also bizarre and manipulative. Playing mind games with your children's feelings is wrong.
What mind games? What in the world are you talking about? Since when does "unconditional approval" equate to "respect". True respect to a child involves teaching right and wrong, not patting them on the head whether they are curing cancer or massacring a village.
I've tried to be patient with you, but this statement shows me you are completely out of touch with reality. You sound like one of those liberal idiots (i.e., not all liberals are idiots, which is why I qualified it) who think children should be treated like miniature adults and left to make their own choices, whether they are good or they are stupid, and since children are, by definition, incapable of making good choices, they will inevitably do stupid things. If that weren't true, we would allow them to enter into binding contracts and other adult relationships.
When my child does something stupid, I tell him he has done something stupid and why. Please note, before you jerk your knees and possibly pull a tendon, that this is not the same as calling the child stupid. That would be wrong. In fact, I constantly remind my children that they are very intelligent, because they are, and since they are I expect better of them. They appeciate this, and recognize that they can improve themselves. And you know what? Eventually that's exactly what happens. Believe it or not, there is right and there is wrong. Choices matter, and there is objective good and objective evil, something you don't seem to believe. The problem with our screwed up society is the we as often as not reward evil and ridicule good, which is why our society is going to hell (literally or figuratively depending on your point of view).
Children should feel good about their inherent value as people, as all people should. However no one should feel good about doing wrong. If we hadn't forgotten and/or abandoned this simple tautology, we wouldn't be in such moral decline. I am not "manipulating" my kids like some kind of tormentor or experimenter, and the fact that you would draw that conclusion leads me to believe you have no moral center. I am teaching them the objective truths about life, and as a result, I intend that they grow up to be morally upstanding productive people... probably buying french fries or socks from people raised by the kind of parent you think I should be.
You have completely misread many of my comments. I do not "publicize" everything my kids do. All I ever said was that I talk about them, and that it is bizarre, unrealistic, and in fact downright dangerous if everything I do as a parent results in good feeling from my children. That's how you raise an ego-centric idiot with no concept of other people and an unlimited sense of entitlement.
I, like Wil Wheaton, do share things about them, mainly because they are interesting people and do things that impress, amaze, and inspire me, not because of my parenting, which I don't consider to be exceptional but because I have exposed them to good influences, moral, intellectual and artistic. You are really reading some completely bizarre ideas into what I am saying. In typical knee-jerk fashion you have passed judgement on me about something which, by your admission you have no expertise or experience in. Wow! You sound like one of our many bad liberal politicians who would micromanage our lives, claiming on one hand that morals don't exist all the while trying to force their very definite morals down my throat.
For the record, I don't expect and greeting from my children except standard politeness. I expect them to behave according to societal norms, within reason. They run to me excitedly because they love me and enjoy being around me, as I them, and I know that because they say so. And you know what else? They have come to realize that when I do criticize them, sc
It has nothing to do with Joel or Best Brains for a majority of the episodes. It's all about the expiration of the rights for the original movies. Now I can never understand why someone who owns the rights to a total stinkturd of a movie, which most (but not all!) MST3K movies were would choose to leave their work to congeal in obscurity when they could sell thousands more copies of it, but IP is all about control you know.
Robert Fiveson, the director of "Parts: The Clonus Horror" which appeared in MST3K Volume 12 Set was smart about it appeared in an interview clip on the DVD. He said he'd originally realized that while MST3K would certainly mock his movie, which despite its low budget and cheesy production was actually a decent movie, so decent it was totally ripped off to create the recent "The Island" directed by Michael Bay. Fiveson went on to say that he received tremendous support from the MST3K fanbase when he pursued a lawsuit against the makers of "The Island", which ended in a settlement, IIRC. Fiveson said he's very glad to have been associated with the show.
All that said, however, there are still a large number of unreleased episodes of the show based on movies whose copyrights have lapsed or are otherwise in the public domain, and here's hoping Jim Mallon and everyone else in a position to do so will work with Rhino to continue these quality releases of the best TV show ever.
Expensive or not, I'm more than happy to support Best Brains and everyone who made this wonderful treasure of TV. Yes, that means I'd bought them all on VHS originally, but I think all those have subsequently been re-released by Rhino, and sadly, the rights have expired again on some movies meaning they can no longer sell Volumes 1 and 10 (I think those are the two).
Your points are not unreasonable but they sound a little close to the kinds of attitudes that are turning so many of our children into emotional cripples full of hollow self-esteem that will fall to pieces in the real world and end up living in their parents' basement until they are 40 because they don't know how to deal with competition or legitimate criticism, leave alone the kind of criticism you get in the Real World, especially in places like/.
I don't need to get my children's permission to talk about them, whether it's with a neighbor or online, and far as feelings go, if my children do something bad or stupid, they _should_ feel bad, and when they do something good, they should feel good, and that's exactly the kind of feedback they get from me. And you know what's funny? When they recognize do something bad, they feel bad. When they recognize they do something good, they feel good. Guess what they're more likely to do?
You see, my superior judgement as an adult takes precedence over their inferior judgement as children. They are going to have to trust me. They have no choice. And neither do you.
Regardless of what I may or may not be doing right, they are turning out to have a strong moral grounding (e.g., recognizing what's right and wrong sometimes in ways they are beyond their ages), are all creative and funny, are making near straight A's in school, and when I come home from work, all 4 of them, ages 7 to 13 run out to welcome me home with hugs and cheers (well, at least when not wrapped up in a video game, which as we know turns kids into zombies).
Finally, they are all welcome to make their own blogs and talk about me if they want... as long as what they say is true.
And yes, I've made these comments without their permission. I hope CPS won't take them away.
"Writing about" is not the same as "gossip". What makes you think it is?
I write about my kids. Anything I write is a fair and accurate description that does not try to portray them in a poor light. If they dislike it now or later, that's their problem, not mine.
I live in Northern Virginia: more jobs for me. This is another in a long line of gifts that the People's Republic of Maryland has given to the businesses of Virginia. I don't know why they love us in the Old Dominion so much, but I'm sure glad they do.
Maryland is turning into Massachusetts. Sure, their roads may be better than Virginia. In fact, you have to go to Pennsylvania to find _worse_ roads than Virginia, but I'd rather live in a state, er, commonwealth, that supports the idea of enterprise and freedom. It seems more American.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't you gotten the memo? It's not about doing actual good, it's all about _appearing_ to do actual good. Anything that can be done without much cost or political fallout will be done, but these are invariably superficial and ineffective, but they make for good sound bites when campaigning, and that's what's important.
Even monopolists such as microsoft will one day have to answer to their customers.
And how many billions of dollars will be swindled, how many thousands of companies will be destroyed, how many millions of customers will be abused, before this happens? Does the average person still have any idea that there is an alternative to Microsoft? I doubt it.
The definition of "monopoly" is that your position in the market is that you can pretty much call all the shots, regardless of what customers or competitors, (or the government in Microsoft's case), tries to do. Is the whole world going to stop using computers, or suddenly switch to Linux or OSX? We wish. Certainly the latter option is happening, but it could easily be a decade or more before there is significant erosion to Microsoft's supremacy, and how much damage can they do in the meantime?
How much deceptive marketing? How much bullying and strongarming of OEMs? How much flat-out buying of Congress (who should simply print a price list on the doors of the capitol building and stop pretending they aren't for sale)? When you can throw 11 figures into something, you are going to go a long, long way regardless of anything else. Who's going to stop that? Linus? RMS? Hardly.
I'm not trying to bash OSS and its advocates. I am a huge supporter of OSS and use it whenever possible. The Evil Empire is showing serious cracks, but it is hardly crumbling, and it has many, many tools with which to fight back, of which technology is probably not even in the Top 5. The fight is worth it, and battles are being won, but like the "War on Terror" it is going to be a long, slow battle with no end in sight... yet.
In a sense, the battle of OSS against Microsoft is a mirror of the battle of individual freedoms against the tyranny of domination for "the public good" that is going on the U.S. and elsewhere. Right now, the good guys are losing, IMO. But they are not down and far from out.
The irony here is that the original series was out on DVD in region two about two years before it was out in Region 1. It's so stupid, but any way they can screw, annoy or harass the customer is good if it can make a couple extra bucks.
True, but the fact that Microsoft has allowed these kinds of problems to persist for well over a decade does put some of the culpability on them. After all, they've been claiming every release of their software to be more secure. It's only recently that that's actually started being true.
Does anyone remember the great "security audit" of all of Microsoft's software, when they (claimed to have) stopped all development for a month or more to address security problems. That was in 2000. Security in Windows actually got a lot worse before it started getting better around 2005 or so. Almost a decade later after their great security push they are still just starting to get it under control, mostly by releasing a new operating system that is more secure because of a whole bunch of new features, but mostly because it's so awful no one wants to use it. Now _that's_ computer security. Actually, it's a real problem because if Vista weren't a big steaming pile of hate for users, fewer people would be using the older problematic versions of Windows (i.e., anything in the Win9x line, Windows 2000 and pre-SP2 XP).
There were a number of car wrecks because of Firestone tires a few years back. If people didn't heed the recall, and their car was damaged from a blowout of a defective tire, they could be at least partially blamed. But who is to blame if Firestone were still making bad tires 10 years later?
Microsoft is most certainly to blame when their sieve-like security allows so many millions of Windows computers to compromised for nefarious means.
Yeah, I'm getting a real kick out of this 40-year-old "news". Still, I imagine it _is_ news to most people.
It's not the wind. It is the earth rotating under the rocks. Not sure of the latitude of the location but the earth is rotating at something around 1000 miles per hour at the equator.
Well, you know of course that why the famous experiment with marbles on a smooth surface works. It's well known that any object on a relatively frictionless surface will slowly drift to the West because of the Earth's rotation. This is why that old design for "air hockey" was unfeasible. That's why marbles on balanced glass always roll Westward. It's how compasses work.
That's also why ice rinks nearer the equator need to be tilted slightly to compensate for the effects of the Earth rotating from under the skaters. I understand that an ice rink built in Quito in 2004 had to be slanted at nearly 7 degrees.
I understand that the government of Indonesia is building a 7 mile long maglev runway that will allow airplanes to be launched at almost 400 miles per hour (wind resistance cuts it down from the full 1000), merely by placing the airplane on the track and letting the Earth's rotation fling it into the air. At that point the engines cut in. The system is expected to cut fuel costs for air travel by almost 30%.
This same effect is what powers that "perpetual motion" turbine that generates power for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station.
Windows 2000 was the biggest competition to XP, but in that case XP had advantages and disadvantages compared to 2000, but the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, especially after the service packs. In the case of Vista, at least with my experience, there is absolutely no advantage over XP, the the disadvantages are huge. I admit the new security features will help the non-technical users, but the last time I got a virus was in 1989, so I don't need the added security (and the huge hassles it incurred).
Since "zero" will never outweigh "too many" I see no reason to ever use Vista until such time as drivers are no longer available, at which point I will use Linux full time. I don't use Linux on my laptop because of too many hardware issues, but it runs on my desktops and I totally love Ubuntu. The true successors to XP will be Linux and OSX, and I couldn't think of a more deserving prize for Microsoft. All the bloat and stupidity that always plagued Office has finally spilled over into the OS, and there is now no current MS product I would willingly use.
That's nice. Gateway isn't providing XP drivers, and I've told them that I would no longer purchase hardware from them as long as that's true.
Now the site is Wordpressed
When slashdot brings down a site running Apache, we call it slashdotting, not Apache-ing. When slashdot brings down a site running wordpress, we call it slashdotting, not wordpressing.
Except Wordpress comes pre-Slashdotted for your convenience.
So who was it? I've heard that as far back as the 70's. It's probably a lot older than that.
I went to Virginia Tech in the 80's so I am very familiar with Blacksburg. It is one of many picturesque towns and wonderful places to live in the Old Dominion. I've also lived in Richmond, which is a really cool town. I'd love to move back someday, but I've been in Leesburg for 9 years and really love it here too.
Um. What are you talking about?
He said when they approached him to use his movie for MST3K that he initially didn't like the idea, but then changed his mind. That should be obvious from the context.
I also realize that I'd started a sentence, went off on a tangent and never finished the sentence.
First off, I described exactly what you are saying. No reason to be snotty about it.
Finally, you're saying there should only be room for the mainstream on TV? Wow. What a sad, sad comment. Why in the world are you even reading this article when you could be watching "American Idol"?
Your prejudices are likewise very obvious, and you cannot deny you reacted with great prejudice that what I had to say. You made as many or more incorrect assumptions about me as you claim I have of you, so I don't see how you can deny it.
I continue to believe that you have little or no real world experience, or haven't learned from it.
It seems having realized that I'm not the monster you first painted me as, you simply fell back on the last resort of the weak-minded: ad hominem attacks, by claiming out of the blue that my language skills and even my intellect are suspect. This is a tactic of the intellectually bankrupt or of someone "defending the indefensible". I'm not implying anything, just fact. I'm sorry you had to revert to such silliness. It only makes you look bad.
With regard to feelings, here's a little truth that social "scientists", from the way you talk anyway, might not have figured out: People in general, and children in particular are not always rational. Very young children are more or less incapable of acting rationally. If you claim you can reason with a three-year-old on every occasion, you are either lying or have never tried to reason a three-year-old. In fact, the same could be said of a ten-year-old.
You seem to agree that it is a parent's right and responsibility to bring up his child and teach him to live correctly, although not everything you say seems consistent with that. Nevertheless, I believe it and must take it as granted.
Because the "real world", as I called it, is fraught with many dangers, it is necessary to teach your children things they may not, and in fact, will not understand. You do not have the luxury of waiting for them to figure it out by themselves because destruction, injury and even death are likely. A perfect example is teaching a child not to dash out into the road. A less dramatic, but no less important, example is knowing the importance of washing your hands. Another important but more abstract example is teaching children they must not take what is not theirs.
If you are trying to teach someone something and he is not acting rationally, you cannot reason with him, ipso facto. Therefore, it is necessary to use other means to correct him. Other means are, in one form or another, reinforcement, either positive or negative. Positive reinforcement brings about good feelings, because it means the person receives something he likes, whether its something concrete like a physical reward or something abstract like praise. Negative reinforcement brings about bad feelings because it means the person receives something he doesn't like. Some guy named Skinner made a whole career out of stating this blindingly obvious point. I'm sure you've heard of him.
When you reward someone for a behavior you get more of the desired behavior because people like to be rewarded. As the person is capable of being reasoned with, you can replace these more primitive incentives with actual reason, which of course necessitates a strong moral underpinning, which despite your claims to the contrary are not merely the product of opinion. Nature, as you state correctly, is not moral, but neither does nature have will nor intellect. Man, who does have will and intellect, is culpable for his actions and is therefore subject to morality. If you disagree with this, then you'd better be willing to disavow any worth in the entire edifice of civilization.
Ultimately, you cannot teach someone anything without pointing out when he is wrong. Despite our most lofty aspirations of impartial rationality it is almost impossible to escape feeling bad when we are shown to be wrong, and I've never met a child who had achieved such rationality, nor an adult for that matter. Therefore it is impossible to teach someone, to correct someone, without positive or negative feelings. People are not machines, nor Vulcans. Feelings may be misleading, but they are not inherently bad, and in fact are the wellspring of reason, for what originally is
Jim Mallon has the KTMA episodes and owns the rights thereto, as I understand it. He considers them to be of sub-par quality (and in the case of several of the early ones in the season, he is correct, especially when one or more cast members weren't present... when Joel does a whole movie solo, it's pretty weak, his talents notwithstanding), and does not wish them to be seen by the public. No one outside of him has yet shown up with a recording of anything before the 4th episode, and considering this was broadcast almost 20 years ago, that's not too surprising.
Nonetheless, I personally think there are several KTMA-era episodes that are quite good, and would love to see one or more of them released commercially. Of course, at the time, they did not obtain the rights to broadcast the shows the way they did, they were only raiding the Channel 23 film vault and taking on whatever struck their fancy. Of course, several of the movies would be re-treated in later seasons.
Josh changed his name so as not to be confused with the Other Josh Weinstein who, among other things is an executive producer of one of the few shows that can compete with MST3K for my favor, The Simpsons.
I always wondered about possible ad-libs... I get the impression they were few and far between after season 1, because by the time they show was actually being recorded, the actors, who were also all writers, had seen the movies several times. Besides, some jokes are so good they could provoke laughter even if they were scripted.
The problem with the ad-libs was that it's pretty easy to see that you could get long periods of dead air. I personally don't understand J Elvis' insistence that this was somehow better that using a script (although to be fair I haven't produced or acted in my own movie riffing show, although I'm pretty good at it, as are my Mistie kids, and we've kicked around the idea).
I gave up on the Sci-Fi Channel when I realized they were really the Low-Budget Horror Channel with occasional forays into SF.
MST3K was, and always will be a niche show, and TV executives as a group have some sort of bizarre mental block when it comes to niche shows. They don't understand them, don't like them and usually destroy them (see Futurama). If it's not "American Idol" or some similar lowest-common-denominator dreck, they treat it like some kind of radioactive waste. And these guys are geniuses compared to network TV execs who are to good TV what Microsoft is to good software... if any slips out it is almost by accident.
The irony is that as we are approaching the proverbial "500 channels" we've been promised and yet there is still no place for something like MST3K. That's why I turned off satellite, turned on Netflix and have almost worn out my MST3K collection.
Actually, as I understand it, it was Sandy Frank who took great umbrage of MST3K's lambasting of his American adaptations of the Japanese monster movies. I was surprised to see the Godzilla movie too, which I agree was a superb episode, unlike, say, some of those interminable Gamera movies, good riffing notwithstanding. I buy every MST3K release on its release date because I know their availability is often ephemeral.
As for wanting your children to feel a certain way based on what you consider good or bad behaviour is also bizarre and manipulative. Playing mind games with your children's feelings is wrong.
What mind games? What in the world are you talking about? Since when does "unconditional approval" equate to "respect". True respect to a child involves teaching right and wrong, not patting them on the head whether they are curing cancer or massacring a village.
I've tried to be patient with you, but this statement shows me you are completely out of touch with reality. You sound like one of those liberal idiots (i.e., not all liberals are idiots, which is why I qualified it) who think children should be treated like miniature adults and left to make their own choices, whether they are good or they are stupid, and since children are, by definition, incapable of making good choices, they will inevitably do stupid things. If that weren't true, we would allow them to enter into binding contracts and other adult relationships.
When my child does something stupid, I tell him he has done something stupid and why. Please note, before you jerk your knees and possibly pull a tendon, that this is not the same as calling the child stupid. That would be wrong. In fact, I constantly remind my children that they are very intelligent, because they are, and since they are I expect better of them. They appeciate this, and recognize that they can improve themselves. And you know what? Eventually that's exactly what happens. Believe it or not, there is right and there is wrong. Choices matter, and there is objective good and objective evil, something you don't seem to believe. The problem with our screwed up society is the we as often as not reward evil and ridicule good, which is why our society is going to hell (literally or figuratively depending on your point of view).
Children should feel good about their inherent value as people, as all people should. However no one should feel good about doing wrong. If we hadn't forgotten and/or abandoned this simple tautology, we wouldn't be in such moral decline. I am not "manipulating" my kids like some kind of tormentor or experimenter, and the fact that you would draw that conclusion leads me to believe you have no moral center. I am teaching them the objective truths about life, and as a result, I intend that they grow up to be morally upstanding productive people... probably buying french fries or socks from people raised by the kind of parent you think I should be.
You have completely misread many of my comments. I do not "publicize" everything my kids do. All I ever said was that I talk about them, and that it is bizarre, unrealistic, and in fact downright dangerous if everything I do as a parent results in good feeling from my children. That's how you raise an ego-centric idiot with no concept of other people and an unlimited sense of entitlement.
I, like Wil Wheaton, do share things about them, mainly because they are interesting people and do things that impress, amaze, and inspire me, not because of my parenting, which I don't consider to be exceptional but because I have exposed them to good influences, moral, intellectual and artistic. You are really reading some completely bizarre ideas into what I am saying. In typical knee-jerk fashion you have passed judgement on me about something which, by your admission you have no expertise or experience in. Wow! You sound like one of our many bad liberal politicians who would micromanage our lives, claiming on one hand that morals don't exist all the while trying to force their very definite morals down my throat.
For the record, I don't expect and greeting from my children except standard politeness. I expect them to behave according to societal norms, within reason. They run to me excitedly because they love me and enjoy being around me, as I them, and I know that because they say so. And you know what else? They have come to realize that when I do criticize them, sc
It has nothing to do with Joel or Best Brains for a majority of the episodes. It's all about the expiration of the rights for the original movies. Now I can never understand why someone who owns the rights to a total stinkturd of a movie, which most (but not all!) MST3K movies were would choose to leave their work to congeal in obscurity when they could sell thousands more copies of it, but IP is all about control you know.
Robert Fiveson, the director of "Parts: The Clonus Horror" which appeared in MST3K Volume 12 Set was smart about it appeared in an interview clip on the DVD. He said he'd originally realized that while MST3K would certainly mock his movie, which despite its low budget and cheesy production was actually a decent movie, so decent it was totally ripped off to create the recent "The Island" directed by Michael Bay. Fiveson went on to say that he received tremendous support from the MST3K fanbase when he pursued a lawsuit against the makers of "The Island", which ended in a settlement, IIRC. Fiveson said he's very glad to have been associated with the show.
All that said, however, there are still a large number of unreleased episodes of the show based on movies whose copyrights have lapsed or are otherwise in the public domain, and here's hoping Jim Mallon and everyone else in a position to do so will work with Rhino to continue these quality releases of the best TV show ever.
Expensive or not, I'm more than happy to support Best Brains and everyone who made this wonderful treasure of TV. Yes, that means I'd bought them all on VHS originally, but I think all those have subsequently been re-released by Rhino, and sadly, the rights have expired again on some movies meaning they can no longer sell Volumes 1 and 10 (I think those are the two).
Push the button, Frank!
I don't care what the official name of them is, I'm going to call 'em plasmids :)
I'd like to suggest "plasmatics".
Your points are not unreasonable but they sound a little close to the kinds of attitudes that are turning so many of our children into emotional cripples full of hollow self-esteem that will fall to pieces in the real world and end up living in their parents' basement until they are 40 because they don't know how to deal with competition or legitimate criticism, leave alone the kind of criticism you get in the Real World, especially in places like /.
I don't need to get my children's permission to talk about them, whether it's with a neighbor or online, and far as feelings go, if my children do something bad or stupid, they _should_ feel bad, and when they do something good, they should feel good, and that's exactly the kind of feedback they get from me. And you know what's funny? When they recognize do something bad, they feel bad. When they recognize they do something good, they feel good. Guess what they're more likely to do?
You see, my superior judgement as an adult takes precedence over their inferior judgement as children. They are going to have to trust me. They have no choice. And neither do you.
Regardless of what I may or may not be doing right, they are turning out to have a strong moral grounding (e.g., recognizing what's right and wrong sometimes in ways they are beyond their ages), are all creative and funny, are making near straight A's in school, and when I come home from work, all 4 of them, ages 7 to 13 run out to welcome me home with hugs and cheers (well, at least when not wrapped up in a video game, which as we know turns kids into zombies).
Finally, they are all welcome to make their own blogs and talk about me if they want... as long as what they say is true.
And yes, I've made these comments without their permission. I hope CPS won't take them away.
"Writing about" is not the same as "gossip". What makes you think it is?
I write about my kids. Anything I write is a fair and accurate description that does not try to portray them in a poor light. If they dislike it now or later, that's their problem, not mine.
I live in Northern Virginia: more jobs for me. This is another in a long line of gifts that the People's Republic of Maryland has given to the businesses of Virginia. I don't know why they love us in the Old Dominion so much, but I'm sure glad they do.
Maryland is turning into Massachusetts. Sure, their roads may be better than Virginia. In fact, you have to go to Pennsylvania to find _worse_ roads than Virginia, but I'd rather live in a state, er, commonwealth, that supports the idea of enterprise and freedom. It seems more American.
Because the kids may not like that, either now or in the future.
So what? You must not be a parent.