Another Opinion
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Oryx and Crake
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Personally I didn't like this book as much as the several others I've read by Atwood. I found the speculative premises simplistic and contrived, ignoring the complexities of ecology in favor of an essentially alarmist, naive presentation of The Horrible Dangers of Tampering with Nature!! This is increased by the use of this character of the catastrophe-inducing mad-genius scientist, when the real story of global ecology is our actions as a collective 6-billion strong (and still rising, falling sperm counts notwithstanding)
I didn't hate the book and found it a quick and reasonably compelling read, but it didn't really leave any lasting impression or make me feel like I had learned anything. I've generally liked Atwaters writing and in particular the Handmaid's Tale, so this particular opinion may be best judged by that taste. The book just seemed pretty slight to me, despite the end-of-the-world type premise. I'd say if you're an Atwater fan it's worth a read but if you dig on hard-science speculative fiction you'll probably be dissapointed.
Hell yes. And one more thing - let the record companies, and more particularly your favorite artists, know what you've decided and why. No, I'm under no illusions about how much difference my letters to UMG, Sony, BMI etc. make in and of themselves. Efforts like this only make sense in the aggregate. So I send my letter and take every opportunity to remind you to send yours.
Many have noted the music industry giants will rush to blame their economic failures on ANYTHING besides their own incompetance. A clear-cut way to ameliorate this reality is to not just take your dollars away from them but to go on to SPEND them on independent artists. The numbers will eventually show the reality.
You make a good point, and one the author of the article seems to not fully grasp. We see in dynamically focused color mediated by a particular biochemical system with binocular vision from a shifting point of view, continuous in time and heavily filtered by our own neurological system because our vision evolved not for image capture but for survival. This in not what you see in an Ansel Adams photograph. A chemical photograph captures the effects of reflected light on a particular chemical substrate. Everything after that is in some sense manipulation - you fix the image, chemically manipulating the original chemical trace. You magnify and print the image, changing it from its original negative composition into one that more closely approximates our visual experience. And yes, you can selectively modify the exposures to radically adjust the values in various parts of the picture. If, as the author asserts, digital images are eroding our confidence in the photographic image as a reliable visual representation of reality, then they are simply catching us up with what has been true from the invention of photography.
There is a strange and subtle distinction, in my mind... There is a sense in which the conventional photographic negative holds a physical trace of the actual "light event," if you will, that created it. The digital does not. As soon as those photons are converted to information all trace of the original physical event is lost. The light data becomes completely ephemeral, completely fungible. But in pragmatic reality this is pretty much a philosophical point. In the end the reliability of an image can only depend on documentation of method and faith in the source. The transition from film to digital doesn't change that.
Thanks, this seems to give both sides... and it seems to me that the extremes presentations we armchair quarterbacks are making of both sides are stretching the truth. This guy is neither a complete jerk or a wonderful hero - he IS an adventurer and it is that spirit that got him in the pickle he's in. It's easy to blast him for poor planning but hindsight is 20/20... I'm sure when he was planning it all out he believed he'd made sufficient contingency... and having flown this thing around the world several times it doesn't seem so crazy that he believed he could make it. But he didn't and now he's stuck and reliant on the kindness of strangers, to coin a phrase.
The station people, on the other hand are not exactly going out of their ways to get him back in the air but they are being far from heartless or evil. I mean, this isn't about a guy showing up at the door with a gas can, can I get a half gallon to get me to the next gas station? These are not rescue or service stations and we're talking about a LOT of fuel.
Bottom line? Nobody got killed, nobody is in danger, he hasn't taken a hostage and demanded fuel and they haven't pushed him onto an iceberg and set him adrift. It's a little culture clash, but nobody is behaving reprehensibly. My only thought is that it seems pretty damn inefficient to ship that plane out as opposed to shipping some aviation fuel in.
I wish someone would explain the logic of that to me.
It's real simple. I can say what I want about my mother. If you say something about her we're going to have a problem. Blacks appropriated the term nigger and made it a neutral, "in" slang. In general what is objectional is the way it is being used. A white person is less likely to use nigger in a friendly, convivial way. If they try to do so, it is likely to seem like condecension or an clumsy attempt to emulate another culture.
In fact, white people who are sufficiently "in" to a black scene can and do get away with the "friendly" use of nigger, if they want, depending on context. There are also plenty of black people (more common among older blacks) who do not like to hear it said at all no matter the context or who says it. To them it seems to reflect ignorance of the history of the word - as a perjorative term arising from slavery. Social norms don't necessarily make a lot of sense.
Being the pasty honky cracker I am, and given that it has been traditionally used as a perjorative term of contempt, I don't use the term nigger casually although I might get away with it in certain contexts. Am I "politically correct?" No, I just try to be a polite and decent person.
It's funny but it is ASTONISHING how often variations on this classic logical error are used.
Consider "gateway drugs." Lifted from a very recent report: "The CASA study establishes a clear progression that begins with gateway drugs and leads to cocaine use: nearly 90 percent of people who have ever tried cocaine used all three gateway substances [tobacco, alcohol, marijuana] first."
Only one problem with this line of reasoning: It's completely bogus. You start with a population of 100 percent cocaine users. Obviously this population can say NOTHING about the propensity of the average smoker, drinker or toker to use cocaine.
They describe how their "research" showed a clear trend - first cigarettes, then alcohol, then marijuana. Sure it's a trend. Does the trend describe a hierarchy of causation? A more likely explanation is simply - smokes are more accessible than booze, booze is more accessible than weed.
Or consider any noted medical trend linked to some social change. Cell phone use is up, fertility is down - cell phones make you sterile! Oh my god!
If I could force one political issue it would be five years of mandatory logic and rhetoric in high school.
The author's primary argument is that Manhunt should have received an AO (Adults Only) rating: his secondary argument is that the rating system is inconsistent and consequently does not do the job of serving as an information source for parents.
I agree with the author in one sense: the infrequent application of an AO rating mirrors the reality of movie ratings, which is that the only thing we, as a culture, seem to think really justifies restriction for adults only is sexual content. And this is a sick, twisted reflection of modern society: that it is perceived as somehow healthier to see depictions of humans brutally killing one another than to see nudity or even the graphic depiction of sex.
Meanwhile mainstream pop culture is so saturated with sex in every kind of portrayal except an honest, direct and complex one that the sexual sophistication of modern humanity seems to be in the ballpark of a socially retarded fourteen-year-old.
Having said this, I don't really agree with the author. Personally I think rating levels are mostly pointless - they can serve a function as an arbitrary cut-off point for the restriction of sales based on age, but you can't expect a handfull of broad classifications to give you the information you need if you want to make an informed choice as a parent, which is the only rational function of ratings. A voluntary rating should, like a movie, accurately list the relevant components of a game. It should specify whether there is language, crime, drug use, violence (and whether the violence is prevalent, gory, and/or sadistic), sexuality and/or nudity. Maybe I'm missing some categories of vice. But this is basically the best that can be done. It's up to a parent to decide how involved they're going to be with the media their children consume.
I do question some of the ratings I see. Enter the Matrix is rated Teen. This is a game that could be called Let's Kill Some Cops. The violence isn't particularly bloody or gory but I question whether that should be the fundamental issue. You just blow away an awful lot of cops. This reflects the movies, of course, but then the movies are rated R. You can also blow away innocent bystanders if you feel like it. You can give random maintenance workers a rap on the head to get them to lie down and surrender... and then, if you feel like it, you can switch to sniper mode and put a cap in the back of their heads, execution style. Versatile. There is no punishment or disincentive for this behavior. Contrast, say, Eternal Darkness, where I recently got stuck for a while in a level and, in the spirit of trying everything, cut down an innocent monk. And boy did my character lose some serious sanity for that decision... I'm not saying video games should be obligated to impose some sort of moral code of behavior, just pointing out that the distinctions can get pretty subtle.
On the other hand, by the time I was seventeen my parents had pretty much stopped exercising control over the media I consumed and that seems appropriate to me. My folks actually paid attention to what I was consuming and gave their input, whether I wanted it or not, of what they thought of questionable components. I find it significant that the main, pretty much the only objection my dad ever voiced to the video games I played was the way my brother and I would get into loud, foul-mouthed arguments when we played against each other. Apparently he had this crazy idea that actual behavior towards actual human beings required the most active parenting.
I have very broad tastes and consume a lot of media I don't imagine my parents would enjoy or "approve" of. What I received as a child that made a difference was not some checklist of permitted and forbidden content, but rather parental engagement in how I spent my time, input on the kinds of things I was seeing or listening to, and a strong influence on my real behavior in the real world. I haven't had an uncontrollable urge to kill people so far.
I'm baffled as to how an out-front troll get's modded up to +5 insightful.
So, okay, first what's wrong with this "solution." In a nutshell, it does not involve "trusting" consumers. Trusting consumers involves giving them an unencumbered CD and letting them do what they want with it, and fighting copyright violation, which is not stealing (yeah, I will continue to point out the misuse of a meaningful legal term as long as people keep misusing it) where it occurs rather than trying to prevent it by making it impossible which is, of course, impossible.
Rather, what it involves is forcing people to take a certain flavor of compressed files that are encumbered with DRM and proprietary format issues that control where and how you can play and reproduce them. With a little bonus content as a carrot to get you to sign on.
Personally, what I want is very simple: I straight-up CD files so that I can rip them how I want, to where I want, to use them the way I want. If I want to use OGG I want to use OGG. If I want a copy conveniently located on every computer and portable I own, I don't want to be hassled for that. These possibilities are what make CDs desirable: they make my music collection more versatile.
Now secondly, to your comment. "You proponents of file-sharing and digital music?" Last time throught this one, kids: file sharing is a method of transferring information. File Sharing is to Digital Files as the US Post Office is to Paper Letters. Get it? And "Digital Music?" Because I write on Slashdot am I one of the dangerous proponents of "Digital Text?" Digital is just a language for recording. It is fundamentally different from the language of analog true - and a main feature of that difference is you can duplicate endlessly without losing your signal to noise. That is the price of digital.
I don't download or share unauthorized duplicates of copyrighted materials other people own because I think it's disrespectful, at the very least, to do so. To me the fact that much of this material is owned by corporations I have no respect or regard for is irrelevant. When friends offer to "burn me a copy" of some CD I don't accept. I will borrow the CD and purchase it if I want it in my collection.
What I "want" from the recording industry is for them to stop being fucking stupid. Spending money on technology like this is fucking stupid, because it impedes the majority of consumers who do not make files available for sharing from experiencing the full utility of their CDs. The people who are actually the problem, those who do make unauthorized files available for sharing, will only be slightly impeded by this - they're the ones with the motivation and most likely the knowledge to circumvent the DRM. And once the files are out there the protected discs are completely useless. The people who buy the CD are not out there seeking for bootleg files.
Personally, I don't want a constitutional amendment against DRM, I think that copyright owners should be allowed to trade their information in whatever nutty encumbered format they want. I just don't buy the stuff. There is plenty of unencumbered music out there. That is "trusting the consumer."
Although the overuse of the term "addicition" irritates me, it says something in the end about the hazy, if not outright illusory, line between the physical and the mental realm. The issue of substance dependency used to be relatively straightforward. If use caused tolerance, craving and physical withdrawal, it was addictive. Oddballs like marijuana muddy the water - for a relatively powerful intoxicant, it's addictive profile is low. Of course, the consideration of how low, and what that means, is completely obscured by the politics surrounding the war on drugs.
But what are we to make of all these so-called "addictive" behaviors? Obviously, as there is no mind without the body, there are physiological basis of these behaviors. But the mechanisms and such are much less obvious than with classically addictive drugs.
Personally I reserve addiction, in any but metaphorical terms, for drugs that cause physical dependence characterized by physical withdrawal on cessation. In terms of purely behavioral issues (where the brain itself alone is generating any chemical imbalances and resulting dependencies) I prefer to think in terms of obsession - the inability to cease or control thoughts about something - and compulsion - a dependency on carrying out certain behaviors. The extreme end of this, of course, is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I think OCD puts the issue into a nice perspective. Obviously nobody is out there saying, ooh, all this hand washing is dangerous, oh dear, better watch when you start saving all those receipts - even though there are people who obsess over filth and wash their hands to a degree that disrupts their lives, or people who cannot throw anything away and live in chaos, filth and clutter as a result. We understand that the behavior per se is not the issue: that this individual has a disorder that makes a normal behavior pathological. Playing games is normal behavior. Is a chess master "addicted" to the game? By some of the vague standards you read every single golfer I've ever met is addicted to golf (what is it about that game?)
What it comes down to is whether a particular behavior is harmful. That definition is impossible to pin down because it changes for every individual. It does not have the new addicition/scary new menace preying on our children pop-psycho cachet but it actually has some use. It's a pretty easy question to answer in the extreme cases. Can obsessive, compulsive game-playing be harmful? Of course it can. Is this different in some core, meaningful way from washing your hands or saving every little piece of trash that comes into your home or staying up half the night rechecking locks and windows and whether the stove is off? I don't see how. Is it different from drugs? Hell yes - drugs actually introduce a new substances into the brain that trigger and mediate chemical responses in the brain. As such, different standards, problems and treatment are indicated. Calling every compulsive behavior an "addiction" just makes the word vague to the point of uselessness.
As a teen you could argue I was addicted to hack science fiction and fantasy fiction. I thought about this stuff all the time, I devoured books, with little discernment for quality, several hours a day. So what? In the end, no harm done - in fact it probably helped me to earn a scholarship to college (they like the fifty cent words in those potboilers). I was in high school. If I read junk fiction the way I used to, it would certainly interfere with my life - though not as much as if I started hitting the beers every night at 6 the way my grandad did. Some people need help and other people just like to do certain things a whole lot. Is this so hard to understand? Or do we need to write another freaking "scholarly" article on the topic?
Hmm... I think your full of shit. Or more to the point, I think you've got just as much of a knee-jerk reaction against anime as you accuse fans of having in favor of it. Sure, as with any form or genre there are those who will forgive any shortcoming out of pure dedication to the form. But there are plenty of legitimate critics of cinema who recognize the highest acheivements in anime as taking a valid place alongside live action films.
I'm particularly bemused by your criticisms of "iconic visual style." Apparently you judge a visual presentation based on your assessment of the technical complexities of acheiving it? I judge it based on the visual impact the composition has on me. Who the fuck cares if it was easy or difficult to make (like you know shit about the relative complexity of creating an effect in one medium versus another anyway... offhand I'd say drawing fog beautifully is a fuck of a lot more effort than paying some tech to plug in a fog machine)? Either it works visually or it doesn't. Maybe you're missing some of the subtle nuances because you're peripheral vision is being blocked by that enormous chip on your shoulder.
The stories in anime are usually a bit thin - although, as with Akira, I found that in subtitles things hung together better than in the dub. A short form like a feature length is never going to be able to exactly follow a long form like a Manga series. It seems to work best just to go with the flow and take it for what it is.
" What should DARPA do to sort out these problems?"
Oh for heaven's sake, they're the Defense department, fercryinoutloud. Just run more races. They should make it a yearlong tournament. You know they could sell it to cable.
You pegged this one directly. The issue of "license" is not codified in copyright law per se. However, there is extensive precedent in the practical world of using this kind of explicit license to allow people to reproduce things under specific, defined circumstances - stating that copying is okay for non-commercial purposes, for that matter the little blurb in the front of a novel that says it's okay to reproduce for the sake of a review.
But what the hell. Let's just pretend that SCO is right, that layering a license over your copyright is not legal. The next big flaw in their argument is that Linux should therefor revert to the public domain. Bzzzt! I'm sorry, that is incorrect. In fact, it's just plain crazy, and stupid.
A thousand random hackers can hassle them, Linus can sue them, but they'll be pining for the irritation of that swarm of gnats when the main attraction comes - IBM handing them their asses on a platter.
Someone is giving SCO such insanely terrible legal advice that I'm starting to credit the idea that it's actually sabotage. I think this is the beginning of the end.
All about the frames, all about the assumptions
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Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The principle of academy comes through european civilisations. Doing basic science is a luxury of people who don't have to go and scrape some kind of survival out of the dirt - if you look at the resumes of natural philosophers of yore you can't help but notice a preponderance of gentlemen of leisure - they had the means and the opportunity. And of course, any system (be it political, academic, ideological) ends up defining what is "significant" to some degree, how much being debatable to a well-nigh infinite degree. That these definitions tend to group within the boundaries of the system is hardly surprising.
It sounds like an interesting read, perhaps, but I tend to need to take these kinds of things with a whole shakerfull of salt. Human civilization is something that is occurring over a timescale of millions of years, not a couple thousand, and it is the seemingly inescapable tendency of every age to think it can see past the cultural and temporal blinders and set down the "objective" view of the way things are. If you believe anyone really has it, I've got a bottle of phlogiston to sell you.
Allright, and a quick update to say - so I read TFA and sure enough, the "con" guy is saying upfront he doesn't want such things banned - he specifically sites the Sim Concentration Camp idea, I guess it's a pretty obvious example, how embarassing). Just that he personally thinks it's not a good thing.
Generally I'm down with the total freedom of information principle. But it's interesting to think about the true extremes. Sim Holocaust, perhaps, where you try your hand at running a concentration camp. Serial Killer, where your object is to kidnap, defile, kill and eat innocent victims - don't accidentally kill them during the torture phase, you lose points!
Consider the Matrix, both the movies and the game, which are pretty much straight up about anti-state terrorists. But the context tells you you're the good guy, so killin' cops, blowing up buildings and shutting down power grids is okay. In the game you can give an innocent bystander a whack to get them to put their hands behind their heads and lie down on the ground. Switch to target mode, get their innocent, harmless heads in your sights, and pow, execution style.
Although it gets dodgy on the fringes of "dangerous" information (issues of national security, for example, where practicing "freedom" with information can get you a trip to the gas chamber, or Nuremburg Files kind of things), it seems to me that we should err on the side of freedom of speech.
On the other hand, if someone wants to call someone for being sick, perverse, disgusting and unforgivable, more power to them, providing they're not calling for a government ban. Protest and boycotting are freedom of speech issues too.
I concur. I think Microsoft understands open source just fine, which is why they take it very, very seriously as a business competitor - and yet in public act so dismissively towards it.
MS operating systems have exactly two interrelated advantages: a high percentage of computers run them, and people are used to the interface. In applications where these issues aren't particularly significant, like servers and embedded systems, MS continues to lose ground to open source.
My favorite part of Ballmer's comments is that if your MS software screws up you can call MS for support, like that's a good thing.
Well, you ignored the Wired article which is about as solid as evidence is going to get. People get spammed with email for penis enlarger pills. People buy them.
The Nigerian scam is not an email scam - it existed well before the fax machine.
But it has persisted into the email age and there are documented cases of people falling for it - my point being that people continue to be foolish enought to believe in offers to good to be true offered by the friendly stranger and get ripped off in the process.
Again, I disagree - the only "economic incentive" that exists are for the Nigerian 419'ers.
Well, present some evidence beyond your opinion. It isn't like I like spam or want it to continue, I simply question whether it would continue at increasing volume, against significant opposition, if it was only enriching the middlemen and not actually selling anything. I admit I could be wrong but you've presented nothing to make me think I am.
I don't think the old tiger-stone chestnut is exactly applicable, however. One generally finds a multitude of reasonable explanations for the absence of tigers than the magic properties of rocks. Things like hey, I live in Minnesota.
Here's someone who agrees with you, just to show I'm not wholly biased in my research
http://www.tinotopia.com/log/archive/000316.html
In short, there is some solid evidence and quite a bit of circumstancial evidence that at least some spam generates revenue. The fact that commission-based spam services exist is evidence in and of itself.
Note that I'm not arguing that spam is worth it, or that there are not a whole lot of people who spam pointlessly, in hopes of making a big return off a one or three hundred dollar investment in a multi-hundred million spam campaign. But it's clear that a real econimic incentive is at least part of the whole spam picture. There's probably no way to know how big a part, since so much of the business done is grey area (or black area for that matter) anyway. I think we both have some degree of truth on our sides.
I think the assumption that spamming doesn't work is erroneous. A teeny tiny response rate is irrelevant if your output is very, very high, which is what spam is all about and why it is so annoying. If everybody were like me, there would be no spam, telemarketers, or junk mail - because I won't respond to direct advertising on principle. I decide when I want something and then I go looking for the best product at the best value.
But. More people "discover" the world of email and online every day. Many of these people are naive. How many insanely stupid urban legends or ridiculous chain mails (forward this to a dozen friends and Bill Gates will send you a personal check for a hundred dollars!) have you received from friends who ought to know better? Many of the products on spam prey on desperation - if I was impotent and had an exceptionally small, ahem, floppy, well, I might be desperate enough to try enlargement pills and generic viagra. Basically spam is a brute force technique to cull the foolish, desperate and naive from a huge, undifferentiated population. Given its persitence I have to believe that for some, at least, it is working.
I'm not a fan of most of the dominant recording industry. I don't buy their product and for what little it's worth, I've informed them of the reason why. But this article is full of it, and illustrates why so many of the so-called "advocates" of changing the recording industry are at best neutral and at worst slowing the advent of change.
First off: the RIAA is an association. They are an organization formed to serve the interests of the corporations that pay for their existence. How is the RIAA funded? By consumers of major label music. So if you still buy their product, quit complaining about their tactics. You sign off on what they do every time you sign the receipt at Sam Goody.
Secondly: the meat of this story is complete garbage. If these stores are selling mix tapes composed of unauthorized copies of copyrighted music then they are breaking the law and when you break the law in public the police show up. "How can it be illegal if the artist is making them for the street? They came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing. They're making up their own laws, if you ask me," says one store owner. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. If you're buying unlicensed DJ mixes then you're buying bootlegs, if your in the music business and keeping bootlegs on your premises then you're an idiot. The police do not need to give notice or posess a warrant to enter a store, any more than anyone else does. If they, in the process, commit an illegal act of search and seizure, then the store owner should be grateful, as he has a significant legal defense of his otherwise legally indefensible behavior. Finally, who is this "they" purportedly inventing new laws? The RIAA has the same capacity as anyone else to report what they think is a crime to the police. They are not defining how the police respond to that report. If the cops are doing wrong then it is the cops who are responsible, and as I said before, the people getting busted should feel lucky if that's the case, because as I read the facts, otherwise they legally don't have a leg to stand on. The idea that the only music available to sell is major label bunk you can't make a decent profit on or bootlegs of major label bunk is so ridiculous it doesn't bear consideration.
"The only real issue is how long we have to wait." Well, as long as we fixate on how the big bad RIAA is interfering with us getting access to copyrighted music without the approval of the copyright holders, who knows? As long as we hold an attitude that the music industry is some problem that we need to wait around to be solved by someone else, who knows? You want things to change? Support the artists and labels that are different, reject product that subsidizes behavior that you don't approve of and let its producers know you're doing this. Quit whining about how other people choose to do business and stop doing business with them.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't hate the book and found it a quick and reasonably compelling read, but it didn't really leave any lasting impression or make me feel like I had learned anything. I've generally liked Atwaters writing and in particular the Handmaid's Tale, so this particular opinion may be best judged by that taste. The book just seemed pretty slight to me, despite the end-of-the-world type premise. I'd say if you're an Atwater fan it's worth a read but if you dig on hard-science speculative fiction you'll probably be dissapointed.
How long do you figure before someone starts telling us it's all being faked ala the moon walk hoax conspiracists?
I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know you just increased the competition for any scholarship that might get mentioned by about 10X.
Many have noted the music industry giants will rush to blame their economic failures on ANYTHING besides their own incompetance. A clear-cut way to ameliorate this reality is to not just take your dollars away from them but to go on to SPEND them on independent artists. The numbers will eventually show the reality.
There is a strange and subtle distinction, in my mind... There is a sense in which the conventional photographic negative holds a physical trace of the actual "light event," if you will, that created it. The digital does not. As soon as those photons are converted to information all trace of the original physical event is lost. The light data becomes completely ephemeral, completely fungible. But in pragmatic reality this is pretty much a philosophical point. In the end the reliability of an image can only depend on documentation of method and faith in the source. The transition from film to digital doesn't change that.
The station people, on the other hand are not exactly going out of their ways to get him back in the air but they are being far from heartless or evil. I mean, this isn't about a guy showing up at the door with a gas can, can I get a half gallon to get me to the next gas station? These are not rescue or service stations and we're talking about a LOT of fuel.
Bottom line? Nobody got killed, nobody is in danger, he hasn't taken a hostage and demanded fuel and they haven't pushed him onto an iceberg and set him adrift. It's a little culture clash, but nobody is behaving reprehensibly. My only thought is that it seems pretty damn inefficient to ship that plane out as opposed to shipping some aviation fuel in.
It's real simple. I can say what I want about my mother. If you say something about her we're going to have a problem. Blacks appropriated the term nigger and made it a neutral, "in" slang. In general what is objectional is the way it is being used. A white person is less likely to use nigger in a friendly, convivial way. If they try to do so, it is likely to seem like condecension or an clumsy attempt to emulate another culture.
In fact, white people who are sufficiently "in" to a black scene can and do get away with the "friendly" use of nigger, if they want, depending on context. There are also plenty of black people (more common among older blacks) who do not like to hear it said at all no matter the context or who says it. To them it seems to reflect ignorance of the history of the word - as a perjorative term arising from slavery. Social norms don't necessarily make a lot of sense.
Being the pasty honky cracker I am, and given that it has been traditionally used as a perjorative term of contempt, I don't use the term nigger casually although I might get away with it in certain contexts. Am I "politically correct?" No, I just try to be a polite and decent person.
Consider "gateway drugs." Lifted from a very recent report: "The CASA study establishes a clear progression that begins with gateway drugs and leads to cocaine use: nearly 90 percent of people who have ever tried cocaine used all three gateway substances [tobacco, alcohol, marijuana] first."
Only one problem with this line of reasoning: It's completely bogus. You start with a population of 100 percent cocaine users. Obviously this population can say NOTHING about the propensity of the average smoker, drinker or toker to use cocaine.
They describe how their "research" showed a clear trend - first cigarettes, then alcohol, then marijuana. Sure it's a trend. Does the trend describe a hierarchy of causation? A more likely explanation is simply - smokes are more accessible than booze, booze is more accessible than weed.
Or consider any noted medical trend linked to some social change. Cell phone use is up, fertility is down - cell phones make you sterile! Oh my god!
If I could force one political issue it would be five years of mandatory logic and rhetoric in high school.
I agree with the author in one sense: the infrequent application of an AO rating mirrors the reality of movie ratings, which is that the only thing we, as a culture, seem to think really justifies restriction for adults only is sexual content. And this is a sick, twisted reflection of modern society: that it is perceived as somehow healthier to see depictions of humans brutally killing one another than to see nudity or even the graphic depiction of sex.
Meanwhile mainstream pop culture is so saturated with sex in every kind of portrayal except an honest, direct and complex one that the sexual sophistication of modern humanity seems to be in the ballpark of a socially retarded fourteen-year-old.
Having said this, I don't really agree with the author. Personally I think rating levels are mostly pointless - they can serve a function as an arbitrary cut-off point for the restriction of sales based on age, but you can't expect a handfull of broad classifications to give you the information you need if you want to make an informed choice as a parent, which is the only rational function of ratings. A voluntary rating should, like a movie, accurately list the relevant components of a game. It should specify whether there is language, crime, drug use, violence (and whether the violence is prevalent, gory, and/or sadistic), sexuality and/or nudity. Maybe I'm missing some categories of vice. But this is basically the best that can be done. It's up to a parent to decide how involved they're going to be with the media their children consume.
I do question some of the ratings I see. Enter the Matrix is rated Teen. This is a game that could be called Let's Kill Some Cops. The violence isn't particularly bloody or gory but I question whether that should be the fundamental issue. You just blow away an awful lot of cops. This reflects the movies, of course, but then the movies are rated R. You can also blow away innocent bystanders if you feel like it. You can give random maintenance workers a rap on the head to get them to lie down and surrender... and then, if you feel like it, you can switch to sniper mode and put a cap in the back of their heads, execution style. Versatile. There is no punishment or disincentive for this behavior. Contrast, say, Eternal Darkness, where I recently got stuck for a while in a level and, in the spirit of trying everything, cut down an innocent monk. And boy did my character lose some serious sanity for that decision... I'm not saying video games should be obligated to impose some sort of moral code of behavior, just pointing out that the distinctions can get pretty subtle.
On the other hand, by the time I was seventeen my parents had pretty much stopped exercising control over the media I consumed and that seems appropriate to me. My folks actually paid attention to what I was consuming and gave their input, whether I wanted it or not, of what they thought of questionable components. I find it significant that the main, pretty much the only objection my dad ever voiced to the video games I played was the way my brother and I would get into loud, foul-mouthed arguments when we played against each other. Apparently he had this crazy idea that actual behavior towards actual human beings required the most active parenting.
I have very broad tastes and consume a lot of media I don't imagine my parents would enjoy or "approve" of. What I received as a child that made a difference was not some checklist of permitted and forbidden content, but rather parental engagement in how I spent my time, input on the kinds of things I was seeing or listening to, and a strong influence on my real behavior in the real world. I haven't had an uncontrollable urge to kill people so far.
I'm baffled as to how an out-front troll get's modded up to +5 insightful.
So, okay, first what's wrong with this "solution." In a nutshell, it does not involve "trusting" consumers. Trusting consumers involves giving them an unencumbered CD and letting them do what they want with it, and fighting copyright violation, which is not stealing (yeah, I will continue to point out the misuse of a meaningful legal term as long as people keep misusing it) where it occurs rather than trying to prevent it by making it impossible which is, of course, impossible.
Rather, what it involves is forcing people to take a certain flavor of compressed files that are encumbered with DRM and proprietary format issues that control where and how you can play and reproduce them. With a little bonus content as a carrot to get you to sign on.
Personally, what I want is very simple: I straight-up CD files so that I can rip them how I want, to where I want, to use them the way I want. If I want to use OGG I want to use OGG. If I want a copy conveniently located on every computer and portable I own, I don't want to be hassled for that. These possibilities are what make CDs desirable: they make my music collection more versatile.
Now secondly, to your comment. "You proponents of file-sharing and digital music?" Last time throught this one, kids: file sharing is a method of transferring information. File Sharing is to Digital Files as the US Post Office is to Paper Letters. Get it? And "Digital Music?" Because I write on Slashdot am I one of the dangerous proponents of "Digital Text?" Digital is just a language for recording. It is fundamentally different from the language of analog true - and a main feature of that difference is you can duplicate endlessly without losing your signal to noise. That is the price of digital.
I don't download or share unauthorized duplicates of copyrighted materials other people own because I think it's disrespectful, at the very least, to do so. To me the fact that much of this material is owned by corporations I have no respect or regard for is irrelevant. When friends offer to "burn me a copy" of some CD I don't accept. I will borrow the CD and purchase it if I want it in my collection.
What I "want" from the recording industry is for them to stop being fucking stupid. Spending money on technology like this is fucking stupid, because it impedes the majority of consumers who do not make files available for sharing from experiencing the full utility of their CDs. The people who are actually the problem, those who do make unauthorized files available for sharing, will only be slightly impeded by this - they're the ones with the motivation and most likely the knowledge to circumvent the DRM. And once the files are out there the protected discs are completely useless. The people who buy the CD are not out there seeking for bootleg files.
Personally, I don't want a constitutional amendment against DRM, I think that copyright owners should be allowed to trade their information in whatever nutty encumbered format they want. I just don't buy the stuff. There is plenty of unencumbered music out there. That is "trusting the consumer."
But what are we to make of all these so-called "addictive" behaviors? Obviously, as there is no mind without the body, there are physiological basis of these behaviors. But the mechanisms and such are much less obvious than with classically addictive drugs.
Personally I reserve addiction, in any but metaphorical terms, for drugs that cause physical dependence characterized by physical withdrawal on cessation. In terms of purely behavioral issues (where the brain itself alone is generating any chemical imbalances and resulting dependencies) I prefer to think in terms of obsession - the inability to cease or control thoughts about something - and compulsion - a dependency on carrying out certain behaviors. The extreme end of this, of course, is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I think OCD puts the issue into a nice perspective. Obviously nobody is out there saying, ooh, all this hand washing is dangerous, oh dear, better watch when you start saving all those receipts - even though there are people who obsess over filth and wash their hands to a degree that disrupts their lives, or people who cannot throw anything away and live in chaos, filth and clutter as a result. We understand that the behavior per se is not the issue: that this individual has a disorder that makes a normal behavior pathological. Playing games is normal behavior. Is a chess master "addicted" to the game? By some of the vague standards you read every single golfer I've ever met is addicted to golf (what is it about that game?)
What it comes down to is whether a particular behavior is harmful. That definition is impossible to pin down because it changes for every individual. It does not have the new addicition/scary new menace preying on our children pop-psycho cachet but it actually has some use. It's a pretty easy question to answer in the extreme cases. Can obsessive, compulsive game-playing be harmful? Of course it can. Is this different in some core, meaningful way from washing your hands or saving every little piece of trash that comes into your home or staying up half the night rechecking locks and windows and whether the stove is off? I don't see how. Is it different from drugs? Hell yes - drugs actually introduce a new substances into the brain that trigger and mediate chemical responses in the brain. As such, different standards, problems and treatment are indicated. Calling every compulsive behavior an "addiction" just makes the word vague to the point of uselessness.
As a teen you could argue I was addicted to hack science fiction and fantasy fiction. I thought about this stuff all the time, I devoured books, with little discernment for quality, several hours a day. So what? In the end, no harm done - in fact it probably helped me to earn a scholarship to college (they like the fifty cent words in those potboilers). I was in high school. If I read junk fiction the way I used to, it would certainly interfere with my life - though not as much as if I started hitting the beers every night at 6 the way my grandad did. Some people need help and other people just like to do certain things a whole lot. Is this so hard to understand? Or do we need to write another freaking "scholarly" article on the topic?
I'm particularly bemused by your criticisms of "iconic visual style." Apparently you judge a visual presentation based on your assessment of the technical complexities of acheiving it? I judge it based on the visual impact the composition has on me. Who the fuck cares if it was easy or difficult to make (like you know shit about the relative complexity of creating an effect in one medium versus another anyway... offhand I'd say drawing fog beautifully is a fuck of a lot more effort than paying some tech to plug in a fog machine)? Either it works visually or it doesn't. Maybe you're missing some of the subtle nuances because you're peripheral vision is being blocked by that enormous chip on your shoulder.
The stories in anime are usually a bit thin - although, as with Akira, I found that in subtitles things hung together better than in the dub. A short form like a feature length is never going to be able to exactly follow a long form like a Manga series. It seems to work best just to go with the flow and take it for what it is.
Damn realists.
Oh for heaven's sake, they're the Defense department, fercryinoutloud. Just run more races. They should make it a yearlong tournament. You know they could sell it to cable.
But what the hell. Let's just pretend that SCO is right, that layering a license over your copyright is not legal. The next big flaw in their argument is that Linux should therefor revert to the public domain. Bzzzt! I'm sorry, that is incorrect. In fact, it's just plain crazy, and stupid.
A thousand random hackers can hassle them, Linus can sue them, but they'll be pining for the irritation of that swarm of gnats when the main attraction comes - IBM handing them their asses on a platter.
Someone is giving SCO such insanely terrible legal advice that I'm starting to credit the idea that it's actually sabotage. I think this is the beginning of the end.
It sounds like an interesting read, perhaps, but I tend to need to take these kinds of things with a whole shakerfull of salt. Human civilization is something that is occurring over a timescale of millions of years, not a couple thousand, and it is the seemingly inescapable tendency of every age to think it can see past the cultural and temporal blinders and set down the "objective" view of the way things are. If you believe anyone really has it, I've got a bottle of phlogiston to sell you.
Allright, and a quick update to say - so I read TFA and sure enough, the "con" guy is saying upfront he doesn't want such things banned - he specifically sites the Sim Concentration Camp idea, I guess it's a pretty obvious example, how embarassing). Just that he personally thinks it's not a good thing.
Consider the Matrix, both the movies and the game, which are pretty much straight up about anti-state terrorists. But the context tells you you're the good guy, so killin' cops, blowing up buildings and shutting down power grids is okay. In the game you can give an innocent bystander a whack to get them to put their hands behind their heads and lie down on the ground. Switch to target mode, get their innocent, harmless heads in your sights, and pow, execution style.
Although it gets dodgy on the fringes of "dangerous" information (issues of national security, for example, where practicing "freedom" with information can get you a trip to the gas chamber, or Nuremburg Files kind of things), it seems to me that we should err on the side of freedom of speech.
On the other hand, if someone wants to call someone for being sick, perverse, disgusting and unforgivable, more power to them, providing they're not calling for a government ban. Protest and boycotting are freedom of speech issues too.
MS operating systems have exactly two interrelated advantages: a high percentage of computers run them, and people are used to the interface. In applications where these issues aren't particularly significant, like servers and embedded systems, MS continues to lose ground to open source.
My favorite part of Ballmer's comments is that if your MS software screws up you can call MS for support, like that's a good thing.
Well, you ignored the Wired article which is about as solid as evidence is going to get. People get spammed with email for penis enlarger pills. People buy them.
The Nigerian scam is not an email scam - it existed well before the fax machine.
But it has persisted into the email age and there are documented cases of people falling for it - my point being that people continue to be foolish enought to believe in offers to good to be true offered by the friendly stranger and get ripped off in the process.
Again, I disagree - the only "economic incentive" that exists are for the Nigerian 419'ers.
Well, present some evidence beyond your opinion. It isn't like I like spam or want it to continue, I simply question whether it would continue at increasing volume, against significant opposition, if it was only enriching the middlemen and not actually selling anything. I admit I could be wrong but you've presented nothing to make me think I am.
As you say, the key here is evidence.
Like this
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59907
This gives a little with both sides of the argument, but it does demonstrate that email mass-marketing generates revenue.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/ecommerce/0,39
This article suggests that New Zealanders alone have ponied up over 100 million in response to the old Nigerian email scam
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2686411a10,
A spammers site. Check the sponsors link to note scans of checks with payments made on a COMMISSION basis.
http://platinumspam.com/spam.htm
The source in this article is suspect, nonetheless as reported by PCWorld.com
http://pcworld.shopping.yahoo.com/yahoo/article
Here's someone who agrees with you, just to show I'm not wholly biased in my research
http://www.tinotopia.com/log/archive/000316.htm
In short, there is some solid evidence and quite a bit of circumstancial evidence that at least some spam generates revenue. The fact that commission-based spam services exist is evidence in and of itself.
Note that I'm not arguing that spam is worth it, or that there are not a whole lot of people who spam pointlessly, in hopes of making a big return off a one or three hundred dollar investment in a multi-hundred million spam campaign. But it's clear that a real econimic incentive is at least part of the whole spam picture. There's probably no way to know how big a part, since so much of the business done is grey area (or black area for that matter) anyway. I think we both have some degree of truth on our sides.
But. More people "discover" the world of email and online every day. Many of these people are naive. How many insanely stupid urban legends or ridiculous chain mails (forward this to a dozen friends and Bill Gates will send you a personal check for a hundred dollars!) have you received from friends who ought to know better? Many of the products on spam prey on desperation - if I was impotent and had an exceptionally small, ahem, floppy, well, I might be desperate enough to try enlargement pills and generic viagra. Basically spam is a brute force technique to cull the foolish, desperate and naive from a huge, undifferentiated population. Given its persitence I have to believe that for some, at least, it is working.
First off: the RIAA is an association. They are an organization formed to serve the interests of the corporations that pay for their existence. How is the RIAA funded? By consumers of major label music. So if you still buy their product, quit complaining about their tactics. You sign off on what they do every time you sign the receipt at Sam Goody.
Secondly: the meat of this story is complete garbage. If these stores are selling mix tapes composed of unauthorized copies of copyrighted music then they are breaking the law and when you break the law in public the police show up. "How can it be illegal if the artist is making them for the street? They came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing. They're making up their own laws, if you ask me," says one store owner. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. If you're buying unlicensed DJ mixes then you're buying bootlegs, if your in the music business and keeping bootlegs on your premises then you're an idiot. The police do not need to give notice or posess a warrant to enter a store, any more than anyone else does. If they, in the process, commit an illegal act of search and seizure, then the store owner should be grateful, as he has a significant legal defense of his otherwise legally indefensible behavior. Finally, who is this "they" purportedly inventing new laws? The RIAA has the same capacity as anyone else to report what they think is a crime to the police. They are not defining how the police respond to that report. If the cops are doing wrong then it is the cops who are responsible, and as I said before, the people getting busted should feel lucky if that's the case, because as I read the facts, otherwise they legally don't have a leg to stand on. The idea that the only music available to sell is major label bunk you can't make a decent profit on or bootlegs of major label bunk is so ridiculous it doesn't bear consideration.
"The only real issue is how long we have to wait." Well, as long as we fixate on how the big bad RIAA is interfering with us getting access to copyrighted music without the approval of the copyright holders, who knows? As long as we hold an attitude that the music industry is some problem that we need to wait around to be solved by someone else, who knows? You want things to change? Support the artists and labels that are different, reject product that subsidizes behavior that you don't approve of and let its producers know you're doing this. Quit whining about how other people choose to do business and stop doing business with them.
Wait a minute, are you saying this Mr. A. Coward that keeps responding to my posts isn't all the same guy?