He did answer the questions. They weren't particularly verbose answers, but that's okay. We're not all particularly verbose.
Not everybody has the mad keyboarding skilz of the typical slashdotter. (I think of my dad, same age as Mr. Shatner, and the two-finger method of a guy who didn't spend his formative years in front of a computer.) Maybe it's not fun to type in all those answers.
He did fine. Maybe not an A, but a solid C+ or maybe an B-. But he said, himself, he's not a great student...
I enjoyed CleverNickname's question and answer. Hey, Wil! What gave you the impression he didn't like you?
There are three fundamental requirements for this to work:
Capture
Storage
Retrieval
Assuming we store all the things mentioned in the article, the storage requirement really becomes indexing.
MIT's media lab have been working on a retrieval system called The Remembrance Agent. At version 2.11, it's pretty mature. I guess you'd have to call it a prototype since it works by watching what you do in emacs or xemacs and suggesting related documents. The Remembrance Agent is GPL'd, BTW.
If you don't buy the game, the theory goes, game companies won't make more games like that. If someone wants your money, and is doing something you don't like, tell 'em you won't give 'em your money until they stop.
If you don't like EA's actions wrt McDonald's, tell them. Tell them you won't buy their games until they stop. Tell your friends. Tell your mom. Encourage them to do the same thing. Then don't buy any games until EA has complied. I don't care how cool this or that title looks. I don't care how much you like the Sims.
That's they way the market is supposed to work. The point is not to hide from the problem, but to exercise the power of the consumer in the marketplace.
I get spam at addresses I have in the WHOIS database. (They're proper addresses because I'm a good netizen, unlike many spammers.) I get spam at defunct addresses I used only to post to usenet 10 years ago.
I get a fair amount of spam from lots of places, though I've developed and borrowed methods for dealing with it. It really doesn't seem to correlate with failing to check-off the "Please don't send me crap" buttons on web-based order forms.
It was once the case that you could spread your email address around the internet without phear of deluge of canned meat product. If you wanted to talk to other people about Captain Picard's flytying techniques, you made a post to rec.arts.startrek.troutfishing (with your email address in your.sig), and, along with follow-ups, etc., somebody would email you back. The kicker is they wouldn't be selling you something.
Spam hasn't killed usenet, email, or the internet in general, but it sure has changed the way we do things.
Whitelists are nothing new. I've had a whitelist as part of my.procmailrc for years. "Sophisiticated internet users" are not going to block everything unrecognized by the white list. They are going to prioritize whitelisted items, and save the non-whitelisted items for a secondary check. (It's only prudent.)
Something like this happened to me a number of years ago. I was working at a student job, managing a small network, destop publishing and other stuff. I was the computer guru for a large bookstore near campus. I had helped a friend of mine get a similar job, and we worked together.
My friend was, in his youth, fairly arrogant. Our boss had failed to earn his respect: she took work that was beyond our capability, largely based on the knowledge that my friend and I could achieve results despite the shortcomings of the hardware and software. We never received recognition for our work. The more we did, the more was expected of us. I was a short-timer, but there was friction between my friend and our boss.
When I graduated and moved on, they lost the buffer that they had between them, and the friction flared up until my friend found himself unemployed.
Shortly thereafter ex-boss lady called me and asked for some help with some project she couldn't handle. I didn't get anything like the attitude suggested by the poster of the story: she was polite, but definitely looking for a freebie.
She wasn't a bad person -- maybe too zealous and a little naive. And underfunded. You know how it goes. I found myself in a dilemma. I was disappointed at how my friend had been treated, but I didn't really want to see my ex-boss go down in flames, either.
My solution was to politely express the strategic error I thought had occurred when my friend had been "let go". I gave her my consulting rates, and an estimate of how much I thought the project was worth.
She thanked me and hung up. I never heard back from her or the company. Shortly thereafter, I found out she had moved on, or maybe forced to move on.
Anyway, my advice in this situation is to remember you don't owe your previous employer anything. (Well, maybe you do, but I'm assuming you don't.) You're entitled to compensation for your services. If my ex-boss had been impolite or disrespectful, I would have had no compunction telling her where to go, or maybe jacking up my rates.
to avoid confronting the crux of an argument. So PhysicsGenius made a mistake on a publication date, does that in anyway invalidate his thesis about this book?
The error is an important one.
Why? Because it allows the reader to ignore that Dune is an influential work in the genre. Certainly George Lucas borrowed from it liberally. By misunderstanding the relationship of Dune and Star Wars, the main argument (paraphrased: Dune sucks.) is undermined.
I agree with other posters that Dune (Frank Herbert's Dune I'm talking about here, not movies or miniseries or works by other authors) is heavy reading. It is devoid of any sense of humor. Characters tend not so much to speak as to make pronouncements. However, when I first read it, Dune affected me similarly to how LotR seems to affect other people. I was fascinated by the scope of it, the cultures, the technology, the society, and all the themes.
It's interesting to me how similar the criticisms leveled at Dune and LotR are. It's dull. It's slow. It's ponderous. It's overrated. The derivative works of the son don't live up to the original by the father.
But one should not judge the quality of the original work by the derivatives. Dune and LotR are both indicators of this.
I'm happily pay for music (or movies or tv shows or books) I might download, but the details have to be acceptable.
The cost has to be sensible. I'm not going to pay more for music than it would cost me to get it on CD, unless there is comensurate value added. I'll pay a dollar a song as long as I can listen to a sample version first and decide if it's something I want to have. (Wouldn't it be nice to avoid paying for the "filler" often found on an album?)
I would much prefer to buy by the song than pay a monthly flat rate.
"Space shifting" is my prerogative. There should be no limitations on my fair use of the content just because I'm downloading it instead of purchasing traditional media. I don't want to steal it and give it away to others, but I may want to burn it to a CD for my car.
I don't want any special clients or software. I'm not a windows user, and I won't become one just to get some tunes. Just give me a web catalog with a sample link and an "Add to cart" link.
These aren't difficult requirements to meet it seems to me, except by panicy and sluggish business entities that can't read the writing on the wall.
The internet (not just the web) allows minds separated by meatspace commune as if they were right next door. It is within this mindspace that communities emerge and evolve.
[I'm intrigued by the common root of commune, communicate, and community. It seems to me that an online community is, in many ways, a truer community than that which we generally think of as a community in meatspace.]
Although usenet (really an accretion of communities) is mentioned in the article, there are other entities, many predating the web, that are more communal than the typical web-based "online community". MUDs, MOOs and their ilk are particularly interesting not only because their members interact in something like real time, but also because the "reality" of the community is a consensual construct of the members themselves. Of course, I'm thinking more of the "building" aspects of M**s, than the "game" aspects.
I recommend this article for another examination of online communities.
Is it just me, or does this guy sound like yet another internet kook? Get "untied.com" ranked first when searching for "united airlines"? That makes no sense.
Google is a system -- a system that works a certain way. His complaints about PageRank are like complaining about an automobile for the way its wheels go 'round and 'round.
I'm surprised salon dedicated any article space to this.
a) a Boycott on buying music, buying movies (or renting them), for a period of time (The NoBuy Winter?) or
Also, to be an effective boycott, downloads should be avoided. It must be shown that people just don't want the stuff that badly. Otherwise, the IP mongers will simply shout, "Theives! They're stealing our movies/music/whatever, instead of buying them!"
Ask my wife, the librarian -- I have no sentimentalized romance about books. Books are tools for storing and delivering information.
However, I find entertainment value in visiting my favorite bookstore, a hole in the wall downtown stacked floor to ceiling with volumes. I frequently find something unexpected. I bump elbows and converse with other people. I can sit in a comfortable chair and examine the product thoroughly before I buy.
On-line is nice for a surgical strike, but it's not the same as spending Sunday afternoon browsing the bookstore.
Why don't you just say what you really want? A GameBoy Advance combined with a Palm, combined with a cell phone with unlimited wireless service for $5/month.
Take away the unrealistic connection cost -- make it, oh, $30-50/month. Add a good UI, GPS, the capability to capture digital stills, and a display on which I can read books and journals.
I worked around this by power cycling, selecting the scene following the messed-up 8th chapter, and scanning back. It was a pain, but it let me watch the whole movie.
Counter Strike, e.g., is not "massive" in the sense that thousands of players are not sharing the world. People cheat(ed) similarly at Quake, using bots and "hidden" information on the client-side.
People cheated at MUDs, too, using macros (assuming they were disallowed), or finding vulnerabilities in underlying code, but not AFAIK by buying ready-made wiz/gods. I wonder why....
What is it about MMORPGs that brings about this sort of thing? Has anyone ever heard of buying and selling, say, a MUD character or item? It seems to me that back in the day, a god or even a wiz on this or that MUD should have gone for a pretty penny. (Remember, those puzzles and quests weren't designed by professionals, and frequently required the most radical leaps of illogic to solve.)
If "drone weapons" are the military future of technologically advanced countries, is it not the case that these technologically advanced countries become more sensitive to casualties in combat? Fewer and fewer human combatants are placed in harm's way, but when one of them succumbs to the dangers of the battlefield, a media machine swings into action, informing non-combatant citizens of the names, ages, genders, parents, children, high schools and soccer coaches of the newly deceased. When it's over, it's like we (the non-combatants) have lost a neighbor, rather than hearing a statistic from a distant conflict. The effect of the death of a single soldier on the public psyche is magnified significantly.
(It is not the intent of these comments to diminish the sacrifice made by an individual for his or her country, allegience or ideology, but rather to reflect upon how the rarity of such events in a modern military conflict makes them all the more poignant.)
And the sword has yet a third edge: "developing nations" cannot hope to match the power and precision of a highly advanced military. It is strategically sensible to take the battle off the battlefield, and strike in unorthodox ways, against unorthodox targets.
These unorthodox strikes are all the more shocking and outrageous, both for their unorthodoxy, and probably because of the increased value placed on individual lives by the technologically advanced power.
Slashdot Mirror
He did fine. Maybe not an A, but a solid C+ or maybe an B-. But he said, himself, he's not a great student...
I enjoyed CleverNickname's question and answer. Hey, Wil! What gave you the impression he didn't like you?
It seems a little odd to me to worry about spoilers in a movie adaptation of a book that was published something like six decades ago.
def nostalgize(node):
if is_old(node):
foreach assoc in node.associations():
if is_negative(assoc):
node.del_association(assoc)
There are three fundamental requirements for this to work:
- Capture
- Storage
- Retrieval
Assuming we store all the things mentioned in the article, the storage requirement really becomes indexing.MIT's media lab have been working on a retrieval system called The Remembrance Agent. At version 2.11, it's pretty mature. I guess you'd have to call it a prototype since it works by watching what you do in emacs or xemacs and suggesting related documents. The Remembrance Agent is GPL'd, BTW.
If you don't buy the game, the theory goes, game companies won't make more games like that. If someone wants your money, and is doing something you don't like, tell 'em you won't give 'em your money until they stop.
If you don't like EA's actions wrt McDonald's, tell them. Tell them you won't buy their games until they stop. Tell your friends. Tell your mom. Encourage them to do the same thing. Then don't buy any games until EA has complied. I don't care how cool this or that title looks. I don't care how much you like the Sims.
That's they way the market is supposed to work. The point is not to hide from the problem, but to exercise the power of the consumer in the marketplace.
Consider yourself lucky.
I get spam at addresses I have in the WHOIS database. (They're proper addresses because I'm a good netizen, unlike many spammers.) I get spam at defunct addresses I used only to post to usenet 10 years ago.
I get a fair amount of spam from lots of places, though I've developed and borrowed methods for dealing with it. It really doesn't seem to correlate with failing to check-off the "Please don't send me crap" buttons on web-based order forms.
That's the point of the article, isn't it?
It was once the case that you could spread your email address around the internet without phear of deluge of canned meat product. If you wanted to talk to other people about Captain Picard's flytying techniques, you made a post to rec.arts.startrek.troutfishing (with your email address in your .sig), and, along with follow-ups, etc., somebody would email you back. The kicker is they wouldn't be selling you something.
Spam hasn't killed usenet, email, or the internet in general, but it sure has changed the way we do things.
Whitelists are nothing new. I've had a whitelist as part of my .procmailrc for years. "Sophisiticated internet users" are not going to block everything unrecognized by the white list. They are going to prioritize whitelisted items, and save the non-whitelisted items for a secondary check. (It's only prudent.)
Something like this happened to me a number of years ago. I was working at a student job, managing a small network, destop publishing and other stuff. I was the computer guru for a large bookstore near campus. I had helped a friend of mine get a similar job, and we worked together. My friend was, in his youth, fairly arrogant. Our boss had failed to earn his respect: she took work that was beyond our capability, largely based on the knowledge that my friend and I could achieve results despite the shortcomings of the hardware and software. We never received recognition for our work. The more we did, the more was expected of us. I was a short-timer, but there was friction between my friend and our boss.
When I graduated and moved on, they lost the buffer that they had between them, and the friction flared up until my friend found himself unemployed.
Shortly thereafter ex-boss lady called me and asked for some help with some project she couldn't handle. I didn't get anything like the attitude suggested by the poster of the story: she was polite, but definitely looking for a freebie.
She wasn't a bad person -- maybe too zealous and a little naive. And underfunded. You know how it goes. I found myself in a dilemma. I was disappointed at how my friend had been treated, but I didn't really want to see my ex-boss go down in flames, either.
My solution was to politely express the strategic error I thought had occurred when my friend had been "let go". I gave her my consulting rates, and an estimate of how much I thought the project was worth.
She thanked me and hung up. I never heard back from her or the company. Shortly thereafter, I found out she had moved on, or maybe forced to move on.
Anyway, my advice in this situation is to remember you don't owe your previous employer anything. (Well, maybe you do, but I'm assuming you don't.) You're entitled to compensation for your services. If my ex-boss had been impolite or disrespectful, I would have had no compunction telling her where to go, or maybe jacking up my rates.
The error is an important one.
Why? Because it allows the reader to ignore that Dune is an influential work in the genre. Certainly George Lucas borrowed from it liberally. By misunderstanding the relationship of Dune and Star Wars, the main argument (paraphrased: Dune sucks.) is undermined.
I agree with other posters that Dune (Frank Herbert's Dune I'm talking about here, not movies or miniseries or works by other authors) is heavy reading. It is devoid of any sense of humor. Characters tend not so much to speak as to make pronouncements. However, when I first read it, Dune affected me similarly to how LotR seems to affect other people. I was fascinated by the scope of it, the cultures, the technology, the society, and all the themes.
It's interesting to me how similar the criticisms leveled at Dune and LotR are. It's dull. It's slow. It's ponderous. It's overrated. The derivative works of the son don't live up to the original by the father.
But one should not judge the quality of the original work by the derivatives. Dune and LotR are both indicators of this.
s/from/by/
HTH
Please send your out-of-court settlement to: [suppressed]
I'm happily pay for music (or movies or tv shows or books) I might download, but the details have to be acceptable.
These aren't difficult requirements to meet it seems to me, except by panicy and sluggish business entities that can't read the writing on the wall.
The internet (not just the web) allows minds separated by meatspace commune as if they were right next door. It is within this mindspace that communities emerge and evolve.
[I'm intrigued by the common root of commune, communicate, and community. It seems to me that an online community is, in many ways, a truer community than that which we generally think of as a community in meatspace.]
Although usenet (really an accretion of communities) is mentioned in the article, there are other entities, many predating the web, that are more communal than the typical web-based "online community". MUDs, MOOs and their ilk are particularly interesting not only because their members interact in something like real time, but also because the "reality" of the community is a consensual construct of the members themselves. Of course, I'm thinking more of the "building" aspects of M**s, than the "game" aspects.
I recommend this article for another examination of online communities.
Is it just me, or does this guy sound like yet another internet kook? Get "untied.com" ranked first when searching for "united airlines"? That makes no sense.
Google is a system -- a system that works a certain way. His complaints about PageRank are like complaining about an automobile for the way its wheels go 'round and 'round.
I'm surprised salon dedicated any article space to this.
Also, to be an effective boycott, downloads should be avoided. It must be shown that people just don't want the stuff that badly. Otherwise, the IP mongers will simply shout, "Theives! They're stealing our movies/music/whatever, instead of buying them!"
Ask my wife, the librarian -- I have no sentimentalized romance about books. Books are tools for storing and delivering information.
However, I find entertainment value in visiting my favorite bookstore, a hole in the wall downtown stacked floor to ceiling with volumes. I frequently find something unexpected. I bump elbows and converse with other people. I can sit in a comfortable chair and examine the product thoroughly before I buy.
On-line is nice for a surgical strike, but it's not the same as spending Sunday afternoon browsing the bookstore.
Take away the unrealistic connection cost -- make it, oh, $30-50/month. Add a good UI, GPS, the capability to capture digital stills, and a display on which I can read books and journals.
That's what I really want.
Start with a modern cell phone, with calendar and contact list. To that add:
Voila!
I worked around this by power cycling, selecting the scene following the messed-up 8th chapter, and scanning back. It was a pain, but it let me watch the whole movie.
Fortunately, it was a rental.
Counter Strike, e.g., is not "massive" in the sense that thousands of players are not sharing the world. People cheat(ed) similarly at Quake, using bots and "hidden" information on the client-side.
People cheated at MUDs, too, using macros (assuming they were disallowed), or finding vulnerabilities in underlying code, but not AFAIK by buying ready-made wiz/gods. I wonder why....
All suspects are guilty. Period.
If they weren't guilty, they wouldn't be suspect, would they?
What is it about MMORPGs that brings about this sort of thing? Has anyone ever heard of buying and selling, say, a MUD character or item? It seems to me that back in the day, a god or even a wiz on this or that MUD should have gone for a pretty penny. (Remember, those puzzles and quests weren't designed by professionals, and frequently required the most radical leaps of illogic to solve.)
So what's different?
If "drone weapons" are the military future of technologically advanced countries, is it not the case that these technologically advanced countries become more sensitive to casualties in combat? Fewer and fewer human combatants are placed in harm's way, but when one of them succumbs to the dangers of the battlefield, a media machine swings into action, informing non-combatant citizens of the names, ages, genders, parents, children, high schools and soccer coaches of the newly deceased. When it's over, it's like we (the non-combatants) have lost a neighbor, rather than hearing a statistic from a distant conflict. The effect of the death of a single soldier on the public psyche is magnified significantly.
(It is not the intent of these comments to diminish the sacrifice made by an individual for his or her country, allegience or ideology, but rather to reflect upon how the rarity of such events in a modern military conflict makes them all the more poignant.)
And the sword has yet a third edge: "developing nations" cannot hope to match the power and precision of a highly advanced military. It is strategically sensible to take the battle off the battlefield, and strike in unorthodox ways, against unorthodox targets.
These unorthodox strikes are all the more shocking and outrageous, both for their unorthodoxy, and probably because of the increased value placed on individual lives by the technologically advanced power.
--
SPOOOON!
Shine Is Note Essessaitch
Of course, for the sake of grammar, the daemon will need to be called "shone".