[from the NY times article] So, since the Net is an open architecture that anyone can tap into, those who attain power within that structure will use that power to attain more power until they control everything. Sort of like what happens in meatspace.
Re:Japanese (and American) revisionist history
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
Take the time to visit Japan and check out the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima.
I'd love to -- really. I've seen pictures of it, and was brought to tears by the story of Sadako.
I would have replied to this in e-mail but you have, perhaps wisely (like myself) omitted that option. Well, at this late date nobody but you is likely to be reading this anyway.
Len, one of the reasons/. readers came down so hard on this -- and particularly why I came down so hard on it -- is that you have this habit of bringing a howitzer to bear on a mosquito. If you're going to get into the habit of writing criticism, you need to get in the habit of accepting it gracefully -- even when you are sure it's wrong. Trust me, if you attain any degree of greatness at all people like me will be the least of your worries. If you can't take it from some guys who mostly aren't even using their own names, how are you going to react when somebody important bitchslaps you?
"KUBRICK'S (all caps) 2001"
There is no such thing as "KUBRICK's" (all caps) 2001. He is a principal creator but, as in the case of any movie, the talents of dozens or hundreds of people contributed to the final product. Clarke's contribution is at least as great as Kubrick's, a fact which is borne out in Lost Worlds by the fact that Kubrick kept brainstorming with him well past the point when another director might have said "enough" and just filmed the damn thing. He wanted and felt he needed Clarke's input, and much (though not all) of the final film is a literal transcription of Clarke's vision.
To paraphrase: I did too read Lost Worlds!
Well fine. That makes it all the more mysterious to me how you could have stuck to some of the more far-out aspects of your theory, but any normal person would have probably interpolated your "I have read no..." screed in the same way I did. Normal people do not go around thinking in terms of "X implies Y, therefore Y implies X." They think "This guy wrote 2000 words to refute 500, he's more interested in what he has to say than in what anybody else does."
If it makes you happy, I formally withdraw the "no research at all" accusation. If I were as long-winded as you, I'd proceed to point that it is a LOGICAL FALLACY to conclude that this makes your other assertions sound any saner.
Bowman's Name.
I am probably one of all three people on/. who actually will listen to the idea that there are archetypes which can influence writers subconsciously, but never forget who your audience is. Clarke is one of the most materialistic (in the philosophical sense), practically-minded people who ever lived, and despite his comment I doubt if he really believes the name Bowman has anything to do with the Odyssey. However, he does hang around with a lot of College People (tm) who probably won't shut up about it unless he throws them a bone. The simple fact is that the name was chosen before the metaphor was consciously present in the authors' (you will note the plural please) minds. To argue that Bowman has anything to do with the Odyssey is to argue metaphysics. I am not wholly opposed to metaphysical suggestions, but I do find this one unconvincing.
In short, it seems more reasonable when you don't have the background information. Since unlike some people I read the whole post before I hit [reply] this was an additional, if misleading, Clue toward the idea that you had not done any research.
Clarke says he and Kubrick had the crewmen killed to make 2001 consistent with "The Odyssey." In other words, the deaths of Bowman's crewmen symbolize the deaths of Odysseus's crewmen. So Clark is saying, in effect, that 2001 does contain symbols.
C&K did not have the crewmen killed to make it more consistent with the Odyssey; they realized, after deciding to do it for other reasons, that it was appropriate in that respect too.
The fact that a few very obvious symbols are scattered around does not validate the idea that vague (BOWMAN) or downright farfetched (NO MEAT) symbols are deliberate introductions.
Clarke refers to the Bible's phrase "God made man in his own image." He then says, "This, after all, is the theme of our movie." Whether out of tact, carelessness, or don't-tell-too-much caution, Clarke states that theme backwards. The movie's theme -- really the theme of the Zarathustra allegory -- is Nietzsche's "Man created God in his own image" (i.e., God is imaginary).
Here is where the ice really gives out under you. I think Clarke is in a better position than you are to state his theme; and it is not backwards because the aliens are God, and they very literally create us in their own image. This is a very consistent theme in Clarke's other writing -- since you did your research I'm sure you read Childhood's End, as Kubrick had, so you should know better than this.
(3) No interviews. By the same token, do you really believe that Kubrick blabbed his secrets to someone who has faithfully safeguarded these secrets for 30 odd years but who would have told them to me?
This is a tautology -- you argue that Kubrick's testimony is irrelevant because, if he had secrets to tell, he wouldn't tell them. You ignore the possibility that the evidence of his testomony might reveal that there are no secrets.
As for your insinuation that Kubrick just wasn't interested in name games, consider the following names from Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE
We aren't discussing Dr. Strangelove. Even a 3-year-old can tell there are name and word games being played in Dr. Strangelove. That's the point; you do not have to go through some archetypal source looking for anagrams and clues to tell that there are word games in Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers spends 15 minutes onscreen working out the importance of precious bodily fluids for crying out loud. That's part of the point; nobody who puts that much work into something really wants to hide it. They may, like David Lynch, want you to work for it but it's pointless if it becomes a private joke between you and a few Ph.D.'s, or between you and Dog.
And to wrap up this bit of wastage of slash database...
Len, you really should back up and take a deep breath before you draft another reply. I'm just some guy who isn't using his real name on a board which is moderated mostly by other people who are randomly chosen and who aren't using their real names either. (Though I will throw you a bone: My real name is Roger Williams. Alas, I have no reason to feel uncomfortable with anonymity.) After the few thousand people who bothered to read all this forget about it it will exist only on slashdot's dusty archive, relevant only if someone does a search for your name. (A search for my name is pointless, as it returns the universe.) So if, one day, you make it and become really well known, you might want to consider how this exchange will look if somebody becomes interested enough in you to dredge it up.
The truth is that the US was considering two options, Invasion or Bombing; no others were acceptable to the administration. I'm glad they chose the bombs.
Why were no other options acceptable?
The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that this position itself was acceptable.
Star Trek was a great idea for its day, but let's face it, its day ended before 1970. Paramount did many stupid things during the course of the original show which caused it to deteriorate and finally die prematurely; they foolishly did not bring it back until the entire craft had matured beyond the premise of the original series.
Is there really anything in the Star Trek universe worth saying that has not been said a dozen times in each series, five dozen times total, and at least twice in a movie? The pseudo-physics of the ST universe suffered the same fate as the pseudo-technology of Dr. Who, snarled up in contradictions and failures of vision that kept turning everything into metaphors for modern events. However, while Dr. Who dealt with its 20-year albatross of a history with tongue in cheek and a certain amount of wit, ST is so deathly serious about everything that it has ended up looking ridiculous.
Let's remember, kids, that the original concept was Captain Hornblower in Space according to Gene Roddenberry himself. Anybody remember Captain Hornblower? Let's just say that the number of episodes where Kirk and Spock end up in a dungeon stripped to the waist was in theme.
So we've lost the charming elements that made ST such a hot item with the K/S ladies and replaced them with, hmmm, let's see, androids instead of Vulcans. Boy that is so imaginative. And now we have the technology to show the Holodeck (always in the specs, not filmable in 1967) and the Earth (from the original ST bible, according to David Gerrold: we do not show the Earth, that's why we have starbases). But what has really been added? NOTHING.
No more series, no more episodes, no more movies. I'm sorry to say it but, while ending ST in its original incarnation was a premature mistake, bringing it back has turned out to be a much, much, much bigger mistake. Let's bury this dog before it completely skeletizes and think of something new.
While it's true that FDR's call for unconditional surrender made it harder for the Japanese to surrender, it's not true that the Japanese were suing for peace prior to Hiroshima.
According to Rhodes, the US was intercepting messages between Tokyo and Moscow about using the Soviets as intermediates in peace negotiations. To wit:
July 11, 1945, Foreign Minister Shigenory Togo: "The foreign and domestic situation for the Empire is very serious, and even the termination of the war is now being considered privately...We are also sounding out the extent to which we might employ the USSR in connection with termination of the war... [this is] a matter with which the Imperial Court is... greatly concerned."
July 12: "It is His Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war... However, as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland."
(The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 684-685)
Those were cables we intercepted. We went into Potsdam knowing exactly what the would accept and what they wouldn't, and we deliberately gave them what they wouldn't. Why?
Rhodes quotes Secretary of War Stimson in a remark to Harvey Bundy after Trinity: "Well, I have been responsible for spending two billions of dollars on this atomic venture. Now that it is successful I shall not be sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth." Stimson's comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment existed; it was felt that the expense had to be justified, the bomb had to be used. There was also the matter of ending affairs in such a way that we would not have to share the spoils with the Russians. For those reasons more than any others we needlessly killed 200,000 civilians, as well as as many American and Japanese soldiers died because the war was dragged on for more unnecessary weeks.
Revisionist history? Maybe so, by definition. But it's not a bad thing when you're replacing the lies with the truth. It's bad when it's the other way around.
Unfortunately, the guy's assertion was based on the fact that only Ulysses made it home. Yes, Clarke and Kubrick were drifting away from The Sentinel toward a consciously recognized Ulysses metaphor, but Bowman's name wasn't part of it.
Clarke quotes his own journal:
August 16, 1964: We've also got the name of our hero at last -- Alex Bowman. Hurrah!
October 15, 1965: Stan has decided to kill off all the crew of Discovery and leave Bowman only. Drastic, but it feels right. After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor...
So you see, the name Bowman was chosen at a stage when the script was not an Odyssey (and in fact elsewhere Clarke says their informal name at that point was 'How the Solar System was Won'). The fact that Odysseus was a Bowman is entirely coincidental.
Re:Japanese (and American) revisionist history
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
The truth IMHO is simply that Japan was fully committed to Asian and Pacific domination, even after the fall of the Axis powers.
This is demonstrably false. Read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The Japanese knew it was over and were suing for peace. These overtures were rejected because of one word: We insisted on "unconditional" surrender. The Japanese government was holding out for a guarantee that the Emperor would retain his throne -- a condition which we granted anyway.
After the Axis fell the war could have been ended bloodlessly and quickly at any time had we demonstrated a willingness to bend on "unconditional" surrender. Instead, at Potsdam (boldened by our success at Trinity) we poised to break them. This had as much to do with sending the Soviets a message as it did with ending the war.
I remember hearing somewhere that the initial target wasn't either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but another city.
Kyoto, which had been spared from conventional incendiary bombing along with several other "pristine" targets. Secretary of War Stimson vetoed Kyoto late in the game when he found out it was targeted. Nagasaki wasn't a primary target either -- the original objective for Fat Man was Kokura Arsenal, but the weather did not permit bombing and Sweeney moved on to Nagasaki.
I suppose in a simplistic way you could compare it to boxing. Each fighter would much rather get a knockout and end the punishment of both sides if they can. No boxer wants to go 12 rounds every time they step into the ring if they can help it.
Every atrocity in war is justified in this way. Nobody ever enters a war they think will be long, costly, drawn-out, and vicious. The fact that people are wrong about this so often is a lesson our species seems unable to learn.
Also, accelerated nuclear research and has given us good things despite the bombs.
The truly useful accomplishments nuclear, such as filling out the Periodic Table, working out how stars glow, and MRI imaging would have been discovered without the Manhattan Project. Isotope separation and bulk transmutation have given us little more than a huge pile of insanely dangerous radioactive waste and a lot of dead bodies.
I saw no scripts, read no director's notes, and interviewed nobody.
Obviously so. Despite the fact that there have been many, many interviews with Kubrick and Clarke about how they made the movie, and that Clarke wrote a very informative book The Lost Worlds of 2001 which was specifically about the process of how the movie and book emerged, you used none of that information.
The core criticism is not that some of your interpolations are fanciful or over-the-top, but that they are demonstrably wrong. Clarke and Kubrick have documented much of the process by which 2001 achieved its final form.
To take the only metaphor which Cliff accepted: Dave Bowman's name most definitely is not a reference to Odysseus. How do I know this? Because I read the damn source material and know that Clarke and Kubrick chose Bowman's name at a stage of the project when they expected the crew to survive and return to Earth.
Indeed, Cliff can't bring himself to recognize even some fairly literal symbols, including the ones representing hexagonal bothroom tiles.
And no duh, becuase the engine arrangement in Discovery most certainly isn't meant to harken to bathroom tiles; it is a sensible engineering solution which was probably approved by Kubrick after it originated with a model-maker or engineer (or combination thereof). Kubrick had a large staff of people making props for 2001 and they were largely out of the loop with Kubrick and Clarke, except for vague instructions that "we need a ship that could get to Jupiter" and "we need lunar excavation equipment." As the final form of the book and script continued to morph, there was a race to produce script fast enough to pace production, and also not to over-produce and trip over the evolving script.
Kubrick and Clarke did not sit around thinking up names that were anagrams of Meaningful Phrases or adding up Meaningful Numbers to get patterns. They were too busy to play games like that. That leaves us with the assertion deconstructionists always reach, which is that authors and artists don't do this stuff deliberately -- that these coincidences work themselves into artworks through some subconscious mechanism.
I might even buy that in some cases. But not 2001. The process of creating 2001 has been documented by its creators. To speculate on their hidden motives without taking that documentation into account (even if to refute it) is the height of irresponsibility. Imagine, we are supposed to accept that these poor authors were smart enough to make one of the most influential movies of all time but were too dumb to see these Very Important Symbols which are only visible to someone who has your advanced training in picking them apart! What chutzpah!
This screed reminds me a lot of the people who pore over Roulette and Baccarat scorecards looking for the hidden pattern that will reveal how to bet next. They find patterns, these people do. They find patterns all the time. Humans seem to excel at perceiving patterns in random noise. And I think you've just posted another excellent example of the phenomenon.
Japanese (and American) revisionist history
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 5
My understanding is that the Japanese are very reticent about admitting their role in WWII. I have read several articles about how their schools don't teach it, and it took until just a few years ago to get an apology for the fate of Korean "comfort women" who were abducted and gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. I also believe the Chinese are still miffed that they will not acknowledge just what they did at Nanking.
So yes, an American movie that accurately depicts the sneakiness of the sneak attack might have problems there.
We have our own similar buttons. Pearl Harbor did not justify what we did to Dresden, what Curtis LeMay did to the population centres of Japanese cities, or what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The idea of mass-attacking civilians to terrorize the enemy gradually developed through the war, and we were every bit as guilty as our enemies in deliberately extending the logic of strategic bombing. Yet you still meet people -- lots of them -- who are very defensive about the Manhattan Project and simply refuse to see what an evil thing it was in the end. After more than 55 years we are still pushing unnecessary weapon systems and misguided energy policies because we are unwilling to admit that the whole thing was just a bad idea inseparable from its legacy of misery and death.
This is why you should read Patent It Yourself if you're interested. Many of these fees are not really necessary, though you may have to do some legwork and it may take a bit longer.
Computer, call Mary and tell her I can't make it to her birthday party. Invent some plausible excuse or other.
The poster said SR, not AI.
SR means I could dictate this article. You are proposing a system by which I could say "Computer, draft a reply to this idiot and show me the next post," and this post would be posted automatically.
Using online searches, filing your own papers, and so on you should be able to patent your idea for about $500 including the book from nolo. Of course the more critical the idea the more care you might want to take, hiring patent attorneys and so on. In the book Pressman gives many examples of ordinary people who have taken out lots of patents.
Most likely you simply don't know anything about the process. That's why it's worth the ~$50 for the book. It's complicated, but very do-able at low cost if you're motivated. The particular idea fronted by our parent post is especially suited to the PIY method I think.
Does staring at a computer screen for long periods of time screw up your eyesight?
Yes, it can make you nearsighted, especially if you are young. As with all muscles it is not healthy to keep those which focus the eye in one position all the time, nor is it particularly good for the lens. My girlfriend was told by several opthalmologists that her childhood habit of reading books up close without looking away (she was hiding behind them) resulted in her 6-diopter nearsightedness which she eventually had corrected via Lasik. My own parents both wore BC glasses but my vision at 37 is 20/20.
Speech technology will not make keyboards obsolete any time soon (or ever) for one simple reason. I can type faster, and more accurately, than I can talk. This is not unusual among people who have used computers for 20 years or more.
All the alternative methods proposed -- speech, touchscreens, handwriting recognition, blah blah blah, have the same problem; they are slow and inexact. Handwriting schemes actually cause worse CP problems than keyboards. (Today I get writer's cramp if I have to handwrite more than 1/2 page or so; I can type for hours, with regular brief interruptions, with no problem.) I do not have to use some alternate scheme to inform the computer that I mean "here" instead of "hear" or correct the fact that it heard "beer" or "deer" or "fear." If I type the same thing a lot I can get very very fast at it.
I have watched the operators of machines who have to do a few simple functions over and over move from the touchscreen to the keyboard, and eventually become so proficient that their fingers are not visible they are moving so fast -- with no training at all! This is why, in my job, I never code a function in a GUI or touch environment without a keyboard equivalent. The keyboard is not the most intuitive, but it is the most efficient, man/machine interface designed so far.
The scheme of 100 or so keys arranged in ready proximity to the fingers seems to allow a great deal of information to be transferred from a properly trained brain to a machine with minimal error. None of the alternative methods I have seen proposed come close to this, despite the ease with which some might be picked up by novices.
I give anyone permission to use my above idea, so long as they don't patent it.:)
A fine and noble sentiment, which is completely at variance with the next sentence...
And if they wanna give me some cash for it, I'll gladly take it.
If there is no patent, there is no reason for anyone to give you any cash. It's an idea which can be readily stolen; this is why we have patents.
If you want someone to give you some cash for your idea (which might very well deserve some), go to nolo.com and order a copy of Patent It Yourself. Patent it. Sell your patent to a company that actually makes laptop computers. Congratulate yourself for your productive participation in our fine capitalist society.
...and in fact any input device which you use in a repetetive way without moving your wrists to a new position periodically, will cause carpal tunnel.
I don't personally believe in special keyboards to prevent CP; I've had one brush with wrist pain that I quickly banished by changing my habits, and I only use regular keyboards. (I find the "natural" very annoying because I'm not used to the angle, and it reduces my speed.)
When at work, at least once an hour (and usually a bit more often) I make a point of getting up and walking around a bit. I deliberately stretch and flex my wrists and back. I also make a point of looking for a few moments at some object in the distance, even if it is the far wall of the office.
I too type about 130 wpm. I know this because for years I told people I type about 40, which is what I tested when I graduated from high school. After years of listening to this a coworker said "no way," plopped me down in front of a PC (running WordPerfect 5.1), and said "start typing." When she announced the minute was over I'd pounded out almost 800 characters, including spaces.
There seem to be two keys to this. First, I wasn't copying, so there was no read/translate/transfer step involved. Second, I was on a computer with a backspace key and not being scored on perfection. Both of these are realistic conditions for typing in the modern workplace, BTW.
And I do regularly attain that kind of performance, especially in bursts when I'm pounding out a section of code which contains a lot of keywords I'm used to typing. Yes, fingers are flying; I've noticed (you get where you can actually observe yourself, since you're not thinking of the finger movements) that one finger will be headed toward the wrong key and, before it arrives, the right pinky is already headed toward the back arrow. The true max key rate is probably closer to 150 wpm equiv, because I do a lot of short pauses and backspacing. But this kind of speed is possible on a computer.
If you look at the 1976 picture next to the 1998 or 2001 pictures, you can easily tell how the 1976 image resulted.
The totally unfacelike dropoff was in deep shadow, the unfacelike sharp small features were blurred by the low resolution of the image, and the basic outline of the side that wasn't in shadow in 1976 is easily recognized in the 1998 and 2001 images. It's the same feature, and it's obvious why it looked that way in the 1976 lighting. You can even tell the lighting direction in all the images pretty well by checking the shadow directions.
I have had DSL through BellSouth (e.g. the telephone company) for about 8 months and I am delighted.
I pay $49.95, which is the same rate as cable through @home but I don't have to have cable TV (which I don't have) to get DSL.
I get 1.5 MBPS down and 200 KBPS up, and have actually seen these rates many times.
I have had one outage. I logged onto my dialup backup account, went to bellsouth.net, and saw on the system info page that a DSLAM in my area had gone down. Several hours later service was back up. I didn't have to try to contact bellsouth since their website told me what the problem was.
I live in a suburb 40 miles from New Orleans. It was equipped for DSL a year ago, but the cable modems still haven't arrived.
Although bellsouth explicitly does *not* support home networking, I have a home network which I set up myself and have had no problem with it.
I *like* PPPoE and the new IP address whenever I restart. Some of my cable modem owning friends have been owned by script kiddies. It's not perfect security but it keeps people from pounding my box 24/7.
While the theoretical max speed of DSL is noticeably lower than cable my speed never decreases. Most of my friends are on lightly loaded cable loops (so far) but some of the gamers have already noticed bandwidth clogs on upload during peak times. As someone else mentioned it's a lot easier to add DSLAMs and bandwidth than it is to split cable loops. I'll stick with the excellent DSL service I've gotten, thanks.
You know, if you replace "Democrat" with "Republican" in your post it becomes an on-target criticism of yourself. You replied to a list of specific charges with an ad hominem attack.
I gave a link to a clearinghouse site that in turn links to many more sites, some of which have very good documentation of the things I mentioned. If you don't believe the charges, why don't you supply some counter-evidence?
P.S. I am not a Democrat. Clinton was even worse, because he supported the same corporate agenda in faux liberal drag. One good thing about Bush Jr. having stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hwon the election is that labor and environmental groups, who generally played lapdog for Clinton, are waking up and getting ready to do battle again.
HA! In fact, luckily for Columbine, those dumb bastards couldn't shoot to save their lives.
Actually their marksmanship was pretty good, but their bomb-making skills were definitely in the C- / D+ range. They were apparently depending on the gadgets to dispense the coup de grace after their Viking-funeral-style exit from the scene, but many of them failed.
Taco, corporations cannot force anything on an unwilling person.
That must be a great comfort to the residents of such places as Love Canal and Bhopal.
Do you think that if I committed an "oopsie" that killed several thousand people that I would be let off with a fine equivalent to a few percent of my net worth and a stern "Don't do it again!" from the government?
The problem is not that the government can send jackbooted thugs to arrest you and the corporation can't. The problem is that the government faces the consequences of its actions at the ballot box (or via revolution) while the corporation weasels out, either by fading away with assets safely transferred elsewhere or by simply buying the government and getting privileges passed for itself which ordinary people can only dream of.
Look at our laws regarding drunk driving and drug dealing, and compare that with what we do to corporations that regularly kill and injure people, and tell me there isn't a problem there.
Well, it's been almost 20 years since I was studying EE, but I smell a few holes in this that you could drive a space shuttle through.
As others have pointed out, how can you have "micro-electromechanical-systems" without moving parts?
I am unclear about the part that is "not in the books." While dynamically reconfiguring the antenna would be a neat trick I don't see how that "isn't in the books." This sounds like hype/vapourware ^2.
They claim to be able to isolate an internal antenna from the hand wrapped around the phone and the head it's held up against. I don't see this. RF is RF, once it's created it's gonna act like RF, and if it's in the GHz band and it passes through flesh it's gonna get absorbed.
It seems like a large part of their pitch is the ability to isolate the TX and RX antennas so they can operate at the same time, without switching between functions. I don't see this either -- if it's resonant to incoming signals in the band, it's gonna receive energy in that band. If it's not, it's not. If the TX and RX are on similar frequencies I don't see this isolation happening no matter what nifty tricks you pull with the antenna structure.
And finally, contrary to the AC who submitted the story, the antenna has evolved quite a bit in the last few decades -- that's why cellular phones are possible at all. You might want to go check out a Radio Amateur's Handbook from the early 1980's and read the section on 2 meter autopatch to see what was required to get this functionality in the not too distant past.
Slashdot Mirror
[from the NY times article] So, since the Net is an open architecture that anyone can tap into, those who attain power within that structure will use that power to attain more power until they control everything. Sort of like what happens in meatspace.
I'd love to -- really. I've seen pictures of it, and was brought to tears by the story of Sadako.
Are you offering to pay my airfare?
Len, one of the reasons /. readers came down so hard on this -- and particularly why I came down so hard on it -- is that you have this habit of bringing a howitzer to bear on a mosquito. If you're going to get into the habit of writing criticism, you need to get in the habit of accepting it gracefully -- even when you are sure it's wrong. Trust me, if you attain any degree of greatness at all people like me will be the least of your worries. If you can't take it from some guys who mostly aren't even using their own names, how are you going to react when somebody important bitchslaps you?
"KUBRICK'S (all caps) 2001"
There is no such thing as "KUBRICK's" (all caps) 2001. He is a principal creator but, as in the case of any movie, the talents of dozens or hundreds of people contributed to the final product. Clarke's contribution is at least as great as Kubrick's, a fact which is borne out in Lost Worlds by the fact that Kubrick kept brainstorming with him well past the point when another director might have said "enough" and just filmed the damn thing. He wanted and felt he needed Clarke's input, and much (though not all) of the final film is a literal transcription of Clarke's vision.
To paraphrase: I did too read Lost Worlds!
Well fine. That makes it all the more mysterious to me how you could have stuck to some of the more far-out aspects of your theory, but any normal person would have probably interpolated your "I have read no..." screed in the same way I did. Normal people do not go around thinking in terms of "X implies Y, therefore Y implies X." They think "This guy wrote 2000 words to refute 500, he's more interested in what he has to say than in what anybody else does."
If it makes you happy, I formally withdraw the "no research at all" accusation. If I were as long-winded as you, I'd proceed to point that it is a LOGICAL FALLACY to conclude that this makes your other assertions sound any saner.
Bowman's Name.
I am probably one of all three people on /. who actually will listen to the idea that there are archetypes which can influence writers subconsciously, but never forget who your audience is. Clarke is one of the most materialistic (in the philosophical sense), practically-minded people who ever lived, and despite his comment I doubt if he really believes the name Bowman has anything to do with the Odyssey. However, he does hang around with a lot of College People (tm) who probably won't shut up about it unless he throws them a bone. The simple fact is that the name was chosen before the metaphor was consciously present in the authors' (you will note the plural please) minds. To argue that Bowman has anything to do with the Odyssey is to argue metaphysics. I am not wholly opposed to metaphysical suggestions, but I do find this one unconvincing.
In short, it seems more reasonable when you don't have the background information. Since unlike some people I read the whole post before I hit [reply] this was an additional, if misleading, Clue toward the idea that you had not done any research.
Clarke says he and Kubrick had the crewmen killed to make 2001 consistent with "The Odyssey." In other words, the deaths of Bowman's crewmen symbolize the deaths of Odysseus's crewmen. So Clark is saying, in effect, that 2001 does contain symbols.
Clarke refers to the Bible's phrase "God made man in his own image." He then says, "This, after all, is the theme of our movie." Whether out of tact, carelessness, or don't-tell-too-much caution, Clarke states that theme backwards. The movie's theme -- really the theme of the Zarathustra allegory -- is Nietzsche's "Man created God in his own image" (i.e., God is imaginary).
Here is where the ice really gives out under you. I think Clarke is in a better position than you are to state his theme; and it is not backwards because the aliens are God, and they very literally create us in their own image. This is a very consistent theme in Clarke's other writing -- since you did your research I'm sure you read Childhood's End, as Kubrick had, so you should know better than this.
(3) No interviews. By the same token, do you really believe that Kubrick blabbed his secrets to someone who has faithfully safeguarded these secrets for 30 odd years but who would have told them to me?
This is a tautology -- you argue that Kubrick's testimony is irrelevant because, if he had secrets to tell, he wouldn't tell them. You ignore the possibility that the evidence of his testomony might reveal that there are no secrets.
As for your insinuation that Kubrick just wasn't interested in name games, consider the following names from Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE
We aren't discussing Dr. Strangelove. Even a 3-year-old can tell there are name and word games being played in Dr. Strangelove. That's the point; you do not have to go through some archetypal source looking for anagrams and clues to tell that there are word games in Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers spends 15 minutes onscreen working out the importance of precious bodily fluids for crying out loud. That's part of the point; nobody who puts that much work into something really wants to hide it. They may, like David Lynch, want you to work for it but it's pointless if it becomes a private joke between you and a few Ph.D.'s, or between you and Dog.
And to wrap up this bit of wastage of slash database...
Len, you really should back up and take a deep breath before you draft another reply. I'm just some guy who isn't using his real name on a board which is moderated mostly by other people who are randomly chosen and who aren't using their real names either. (Though I will throw you a bone: My real name is Roger Williams. Alas, I have no reason to feel uncomfortable with anonymity.) After the few thousand people who bothered to read all this forget about it it will exist only on slashdot's dusty archive, relevant only if someone does a search for your name. (A search for my name is pointless, as it returns the universe.) So if, one day, you make it and become really well known, you might want to consider how this exchange will look if somebody becomes interested enough in you to dredge it up.
Why were no other options acceptable?
The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that this position itself was acceptable.
Is there really anything in the Star Trek universe worth saying that has not been said a dozen times in each series, five dozen times total, and at least twice in a movie? The pseudo-physics of the ST universe suffered the same fate as the pseudo-technology of Dr. Who, snarled up in contradictions and failures of vision that kept turning everything into metaphors for modern events. However, while Dr. Who dealt with its 20-year albatross of a history with tongue in cheek and a certain amount of wit, ST is so deathly serious about everything that it has ended up looking ridiculous.
Let's remember, kids, that the original concept was Captain Hornblower in Space according to Gene Roddenberry himself. Anybody remember Captain Hornblower? Let's just say that the number of episodes where Kirk and Spock end up in a dungeon stripped to the waist was in theme.
So we've lost the charming elements that made ST such a hot item with the K/S ladies and replaced them with, hmmm, let's see, androids instead of Vulcans. Boy that is so imaginative. And now we have the technology to show the Holodeck (always in the specs, not filmable in 1967) and the Earth (from the original ST bible, according to David Gerrold: we do not show the Earth, that's why we have starbases). But what has really been added? NOTHING .
No more series, no more episodes, no more movies. I'm sorry to say it but, while ending ST in its original incarnation was a premature mistake, bringing it back has turned out to be a much, much, much bigger mistake. Let's bury this dog before it completely skeletizes and think of something new.
According to Rhodes, the US was intercepting messages between Tokyo and Moscow about using the Soviets as intermediates in peace negotiations. To wit:
July 11, 1945, Foreign Minister Shigenory Togo: "The foreign and domestic situation for the Empire is very serious, and even the termination of the war is now being considered privately...We are also sounding out the extent to which we might employ the USSR in connection with termination of the war ... [this is] a matter with which the Imperial Court is ... greatly concerned."
July 12: "It is His Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war ... However, as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland."
(The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 684-685)
Those were cables we intercepted. We went into Potsdam knowing exactly what the would accept and what they wouldn't, and we deliberately gave them what they wouldn't. Why?
Rhodes quotes Secretary of War Stimson in a remark to Harvey Bundy after Trinity: "Well, I have been responsible for spending two billions of dollars on this atomic venture. Now that it is successful I shall not be sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth." Stimson's comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment existed; it was felt that the expense had to be justified, the bomb had to be used. There was also the matter of ending affairs in such a way that we would not have to share the spoils with the Russians. For those reasons more than any others we needlessly killed 200,000 civilians, as well as as many American and Japanese soldiers died because the war was dragged on for more unnecessary weeks.
Revisionist history? Maybe so, by definition. But it's not a bad thing when you're replacing the lies with the truth. It's bad when it's the other way around.
Unfortunately, the guy's assertion was based on the fact that only Ulysses made it home. Yes, Clarke and Kubrick were drifting away from The Sentinel toward a consciously recognized Ulysses metaphor, but Bowman's name wasn't part of it.
Clarke quotes his own journal:
August 16, 1964: We've also got the name of our hero at last -- Alex Bowman. Hurrah!
October 15, 1965: Stan has decided to kill off all the crew of Discovery and leave Bowman only. Drastic, but it feels right. After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor...
So you see, the name Bowman was chosen at a stage when the script was not an Odyssey (and in fact elsewhere Clarke says their informal name at that point was 'How the Solar System was Won'). The fact that Odysseus was a Bowman is entirely coincidental.
This is demonstrably false. Read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The Japanese knew it was over and were suing for peace. These overtures were rejected because of one word: We insisted on "unconditional" surrender. The Japanese government was holding out for a guarantee that the Emperor would retain his throne -- a condition which we granted anyway.
After the Axis fell the war could have been ended bloodlessly and quickly at any time had we demonstrated a willingness to bend on "unconditional" surrender. Instead, at Potsdam (boldened by our success at Trinity) we poised to break them. This had as much to do with sending the Soviets a message as it did with ending the war.
I remember hearing somewhere that the initial target wasn't either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but another city.
Kyoto, which had been spared from conventional incendiary bombing along with several other "pristine" targets. Secretary of War Stimson vetoed Kyoto late in the game when he found out it was targeted. Nagasaki wasn't a primary target either -- the original objective for Fat Man was Kokura Arsenal, but the weather did not permit bombing and Sweeney moved on to Nagasaki.
I suppose in a simplistic way you could compare it to boxing. Each fighter would much rather get a knockout and end the punishment of both sides if they can. No boxer wants to go 12 rounds every time they step into the ring if they can help it.
Every atrocity in war is justified in this way. Nobody ever enters a war they think will be long, costly, drawn-out, and vicious. The fact that people are wrong about this so often is a lesson our species seems unable to learn.
Also, accelerated nuclear research and has given us good things despite the bombs.
The truly useful accomplishments nuclear, such as filling out the Periodic Table, working out how stars glow, and MRI imaging would have been discovered without the Manhattan Project. Isotope separation and bulk transmutation have given us little more than a huge pile of insanely dangerous radioactive waste and a lot of dead bodies.
Obviously so. Despite the fact that there have been many, many interviews with Kubrick and Clarke about how they made the movie, and that Clarke wrote a very informative book The Lost Worlds of 2001 which was specifically about the process of how the movie and book emerged, you used none of that information.
The core criticism is not that some of your interpolations are fanciful or over-the-top, but that they are demonstrably wrong. Clarke and Kubrick have documented much of the process by which 2001 achieved its final form.
To take the only metaphor which Cliff accepted: Dave Bowman's name most definitely is not a reference to Odysseus. How do I know this? Because I read the damn source material and know that Clarke and Kubrick chose Bowman's name at a stage of the project when they expected the crew to survive and return to Earth.
Indeed, Cliff can't bring himself to recognize even some fairly literal symbols, including the ones representing hexagonal bothroom tiles.
And no duh, becuase the engine arrangement in Discovery most certainly isn't meant to harken to bathroom tiles; it is a sensible engineering solution which was probably approved by Kubrick after it originated with a model-maker or engineer (or combination thereof). Kubrick had a large staff of people making props for 2001 and they were largely out of the loop with Kubrick and Clarke, except for vague instructions that "we need a ship that could get to Jupiter" and "we need lunar excavation equipment." As the final form of the book and script continued to morph, there was a race to produce script fast enough to pace production, and also not to over-produce and trip over the evolving script.
Kubrick and Clarke did not sit around thinking up names that were anagrams of Meaningful Phrases or adding up Meaningful Numbers to get patterns. They were too busy to play games like that. That leaves us with the assertion deconstructionists always reach, which is that authors and artists don't do this stuff deliberately -- that these coincidences work themselves into artworks through some subconscious mechanism.
I might even buy that in some cases. But not 2001. The process of creating 2001 has been documented by its creators. To speculate on their hidden motives without taking that documentation into account (even if to refute it) is the height of irresponsibility. Imagine, we are supposed to accept that these poor authors were smart enough to make one of the most influential movies of all time but were too dumb to see these Very Important Symbols which are only visible to someone who has your advanced training in picking them apart! What chutzpah!
This screed reminds me a lot of the people who pore over Roulette and Baccarat scorecards looking for the hidden pattern that will reveal how to bet next. They find patterns, these people do. They find patterns all the time. Humans seem to excel at perceiving patterns in random noise. And I think you've just posted another excellent example of the phenomenon.
So yes, an American movie that accurately depicts the sneakiness of the sneak attack might have problems there.
We have our own similar buttons. Pearl Harbor did not justify what we did to Dresden, what Curtis LeMay did to the population centres of Japanese cities, or what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The idea of mass-attacking civilians to terrorize the enemy gradually developed through the war, and we were every bit as guilty as our enemies in deliberately extending the logic of strategic bombing. Yet you still meet people -- lots of them -- who are very defensive about the Manhattan Project and simply refuse to see what an evil thing it was in the end. After more than 55 years we are still pushing unnecessary weapon systems and misguided energy policies because we are unwilling to admit that the whole thing was just a bad idea inseparable from its legacy of misery and death.
This is why you should read Patent It Yourself if you're interested. Many of these fees are not really necessary, though you may have to do some legwork and it may take a bit longer.
The poster said SR, not AI.
SR means I could dictate this article. You are proposing a system by which I could say "Computer, draft a reply to this idiot and show me the next post," and this post would be posted automatically.
Quite a different technology, that.
Most likely you simply don't know anything about the process. That's why it's worth the ~$50 for the book. It's complicated, but very do-able at low cost if you're motivated. The particular idea fronted by our parent post is especially suited to the PIY method I think.
Yes, it can make you nearsighted, especially if you are young. As with all muscles it is not healthy to keep those which focus the eye in one position all the time, nor is it particularly good for the lens. My girlfriend was told by several opthalmologists that her childhood habit of reading books up close without looking away (she was hiding behind them) resulted in her 6-diopter nearsightedness which she eventually had corrected via Lasik. My own parents both wore BC glasses but my vision at 37 is 20/20.
All the alternative methods proposed -- speech, touchscreens, handwriting recognition, blah blah blah, have the same problem; they are slow and inexact. Handwriting schemes actually cause worse CP problems than keyboards. (Today I get writer's cramp if I have to handwrite more than 1/2 page or so; I can type for hours, with regular brief interruptions, with no problem.) I do not have to use some alternate scheme to inform the computer that I mean "here" instead of "hear" or correct the fact that it heard "beer" or "deer" or "fear." If I type the same thing a lot I can get very very fast at it.
I have watched the operators of machines who have to do a few simple functions over and over move from the touchscreen to the keyboard, and eventually become so proficient that their fingers are not visible they are moving so fast -- with no training at all! This is why, in my job, I never code a function in a GUI or touch environment without a keyboard equivalent. The keyboard is not the most intuitive, but it is the most efficient, man/machine interface designed so far.
The scheme of 100 or so keys arranged in ready proximity to the fingers seems to allow a great deal of information to be transferred from a properly trained brain to a machine with minimal error. None of the alternative methods I have seen proposed come close to this, despite the ease with which some might be picked up by novices.
A fine and noble sentiment, which is completely at variance with the next sentence...
And if they wanna give me some cash for it, I'll gladly take it.
If there is no patent, there is no reason for anyone to give you any cash. It's an idea which can be readily stolen; this is why we have patents.
If you want someone to give you some cash for your idea (which might very well deserve some), go to nolo.com and order a copy of Patent It Yourself. Patent it. Sell your patent to a company that actually makes laptop computers. Congratulate yourself for your productive participation in our fine capitalist society.
I don't personally believe in special keyboards to prevent CP; I've had one brush with wrist pain that I quickly banished by changing my habits, and I only use regular keyboards. (I find the "natural" very annoying because I'm not used to the angle, and it reduces my speed.)
When at work, at least once an hour (and usually a bit more often) I make a point of getting up and walking around a bit. I deliberately stretch and flex my wrists and back. I also make a point of looking for a few moments at some object in the distance, even if it is the far wall of the office.
There seem to be two keys to this. First, I wasn't copying, so there was no read/translate/transfer step involved. Second, I was on a computer with a backspace key and not being scored on perfection. Both of these are realistic conditions for typing in the modern workplace, BTW.
And I do regularly attain that kind of performance, especially in bursts when I'm pounding out a section of code which contains a lot of keywords I'm used to typing. Yes, fingers are flying; I've noticed (you get where you can actually observe yourself, since you're not thinking of the finger movements) that one finger will be headed toward the wrong key and, before it arrives, the right pinky is already headed toward the back arrow. The true max key rate is probably closer to 150 wpm equiv, because I do a lot of short pauses and backspacing. But this kind of speed is possible on a computer.
The totally unfacelike dropoff was in deep shadow, the unfacelike sharp small features were blurred by the low resolution of the image, and the basic outline of the side that wasn't in shadow in 1976 is easily recognized in the 1998 and 2001 images. It's the same feature, and it's obvious why it looked that way in the 1976 lighting. You can even tell the lighting direction in all the images pretty well by checking the shadow directions.
- I pay $49.95, which is the same rate as cable through @home but I don't have to have cable TV (which I don't have) to get DSL.
- I get 1.5 MBPS down and 200 KBPS up, and have actually seen these rates many times.
- I have had one outage. I logged onto my dialup backup account, went to bellsouth.net, and saw on the system info page that a DSLAM in my area had gone down. Several hours later service was back up. I didn't have to try to contact bellsouth since their website told me what the problem was.
- I live in a suburb 40 miles from New Orleans. It was equipped for DSL a year ago, but the cable modems still haven't arrived.
- Although bellsouth explicitly does *not* support home networking, I have a home network which I set up myself and have had no problem with it.
- I *like* PPPoE and the new IP address whenever I restart. Some of my cable modem owning friends have been owned by script kiddies. It's not perfect security but it keeps people from pounding my box 24/7.
While the theoretical max speed of DSL is noticeably lower than cable my speed never decreases. Most of my friends are on lightly loaded cable loops (so far) but some of the gamers have already noticed bandwidth clogs on upload during peak times. As someone else mentioned it's a lot easier to add DSLAMs and bandwidth than it is to split cable loops. I'll stick with the excellent DSL service I've gotten, thanks.You know, if you replace "Democrat" with "Republican" in your post it becomes an on-target criticism of yourself. You replied to a list of specific charges with an ad hominem attack.
I gave a link to a clearinghouse site that in turn links to many more sites, some of which have very good documentation of the things I mentioned. If you don't believe the charges, why don't you supply some counter-evidence?
P.S. I am not a Democrat. Clinton was even worse, because he supported the same corporate agenda in faux liberal drag. One good thing about Bush Jr. having stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hwon the election is that labor and environmental groups, who generally played lapdog for Clinton, are waking up and getting ready to do battle again.
Actually their marksmanship was pretty good, but their bomb-making skills were definitely in the C- / D+ range. They were apparently depending on the gadgets to dispense the coup de grace after their Viking-funeral-style exit from the scene, but many of them failed.
That must be a great comfort to the residents of such places as Love Canal and Bhopal.
Do you think that if I committed an "oopsie" that killed several thousand people that I would be let off with a fine equivalent to a few percent of my net worth and a stern "Don't do it again!" from the government?
The problem is not that the government can send jackbooted thugs to arrest you and the corporation can't. The problem is that the government faces the consequences of its actions at the ballot box (or via revolution) while the corporation weasels out, either by fading away with assets safely transferred elsewhere or by simply buying the government and getting privileges passed for itself which ordinary people can only dream of.
Look at our laws regarding drunk driving and drug dealing, and compare that with what we do to corporations that regularly kill and injure people, and tell me there isn't a problem there.
Damn straight. Some things I know I'll never be able to do that Bush Jr. has pulled off:
There's plenty more, of course, but you can just follow the link and browse.
And finally, contrary to the AC who submitted the story, the antenna has evolved quite a bit in the last few decades -- that's why cellular phones are possible at all. You might want to go check out a Radio Amateur's Handbook from the early 1980's and read the section on 2 meter autopatch to see what was required to get this functionality in the not too distant past.