Branagh's a ham -- if the role is hammy then he suits it. His direction of films is generally really overdone and laboured as well, not so much making a point as bashing you over the head with it.
I wouldn't know about the Harry Potter films: I tried reading the first book and it seemed too much like Enid Blyton to interest me:/ I've steered clear of Pottermania ever since...
Keanu as a Hawaiian Jonathan Harker in Coppola's Dracula film was bad enough -- however at least that film had the redeeming value of Gary Oldman playing the villain.:)
And yes, I remember seeing 'Much Ado...' -- women in the audience were moaning at Keanu being oiled down, I just made a resolution to avoid Branagh's films if I could possibly do so.:(
A lot of the time I think Banks is deliberately trying to make Culture folk as offensive as possible in an attempt to get people off their arses in embarrassment when they recognise smug self-satisfied traits in themselves, from the Culture characters.
Given the attitudes in some of his other fiction, that sort of behaviour is generally direct satire by Banks of some of the norms of our current Western culture.:)
It's all relative anyway -- whether or not you or I like it, some people will decide to interfere with others for reasons of their own, and a subset of those people will claim a moral imperative for doing so. Some of this smaller set of people may even believe themselves when they say this. Going back to the specifics of the fiction, SC is just a mechanism for making sure that when they do decide to meddle they don't get burned somewhere they can't afford it... and at that, it doesn't work too well.
Anyway, there would be enough places around inside or outside the Culture that you could find somewhere decent to live, and the tech available is pretty great (if fuzzily reasoned) space-fantasy stuff.
See? This is why we need DRM. If there were proper DRM going on then of course it would have been recoverable! We would just need the exact system(nope, can't change the processor, or the video card, or the hard driver) in order to recover it!
Means you have to emulate those as well. Eventually it becomes something like Descartes' "malevolent demon" -- "How do I know whether or not I'm running under emulation? Are all my inputs lying to me?":/
The Amiga had a fantastic multitasking OS with all the usual features at the time (though again everyone else was exploring memory protection at the time... well okay, not Apple either)
Were there any desktop operating systems with MP in the mid-to-late 1980s?
Yup, I liked the Dune cycle for many of the same reasons that I do the Culture books... although it did get a little odd towards the end. Some of Frank Herbert's other books are also very good: The Dosadi Experiment and The Dragon In the Sea (aka Under Pressure), for example, are two good psychological novels.
Yeah, Open Source is more of a meta-license and is agnostic on that most divisve of property issues, re-use of the code.
I guess in that case the breakdown might be GPL => Left, BSD => Right, as a wild generalisation of course. It's still a choice that has to be made when choosing an Open Source license, and of course it's a political one. I guess that "dragging in completely unrelated political issues only f**ks things up" is probably a true enough blanket statement, then. Or maybe "Open source is political enough without throwing in something even more inflammatory".:)
I think 'Culture' is a good name because it implies that humanity is like a yeast or a mould -- diverse in nature, difficult to kill off, and both useful and a nuisance at different times.:)
Possibly the most interesting part of the Culture though is Special Circumstances because it's culture seems so different to that of the Culture as a whole. Extremely manipulative of the rest of the Culture. If there's any chance of the Culture turning on itself then that's where it lies.
The most interesting area in any fiction is usually in the delineated border zones, "the tension between the self and the Other" as someone like Barthes would probably have put it -- and SC is that area in the Culture books. I liked that Consider Phlebas featured a character who was, again, outside yet involved, and wasn't on the side of the Culture. It was a good introduction to the entire concept to see it from that perspective.
I'd love to see the Culture have a few more internal difficulties. The only conflict in the books seems to be for the individuals in the story. The Culture as a whole seems to breeze through anything.
Because it's so damn big:) The main danger to the Culture would seem to be, well, cultural: different sections growing apart and making a strong enough point of that apartness to turn on the rest of the Culture while becoming something different, a little like the Mechanist/Shaper split in Bruce Sterling's early works. It seems to be a pretty broad church otherwise.
I thought it suffered from Clarkeism -- great ideas, very poor characterisation of the people involved. They were like cardboard cutouts against an otherwise great political/historical/scientific backdrop.
The last thing open source needs is divisive political themes attached to products. "Use this only if you support homosexual marriages"..."Only members of the NRA are allowed to contribute to this product"..."This product can only be used to promote the views expressed by Amnesty International."
I'm going to give you the same answer I give to people who complain that the GPL is viral: "If you don't like the license, write your own damn code."
If I, as a software author, want to release software that can only be used by one-legged people, that's my right. Cuts down my potential audience quite a bit, but hey.:) Remember, it's a gift, not something you have a right to possess -- and I, with my wacky amputee fetish, choose that all those two-legged types don't receive that gift.
Some things should be political, open source is not one of them.
Would you try to argue that Free Software is non-political?
* Joh Bjelke-Peterson (pretty much every time he opened his mouth)
The man who perfectly summed up benevloent dictatorship: "Don't you worry about that.":/
NSW police corruption up until the mid-1990s* (e.g. Blue Murder, etc.) is probably the most serious endemic corruption I can think of, along with JB-P's reign in Queensland. I am, however, worried by the politicisation of the Public Service, as we saw prior to the last election, with public servants not passing on information that their bosses would have found it politically unfortunate to hear.
(*I actually think that NSW police corruption hasn't been fully wiped out, but that the reforms have made it harder for those involved to work the way they were.)
Re: corruption, a number of them were caught rorting their travel expenses, including one who got off because he had a note from his doctor saying that he only had three months to live. (This was a few years ago now.) The only reason they stopped flinging those accusations back and forth was because Nick Sherry's suicide attempt gave them an excuse... too many people being damaged on both sides, and neither side wanted any more blood drawn, figuratively or literally.
I don't imagine pork-barrelling your party's electorates really counts as corruption, but it's pretty odious at the best of times, and both parties have been guilty of it (the 'sports rorts' affair for Labour, the Federation Fund for the Liberals).
Also, Howard's "Code of Ministerial Conduct", introduced after he took office, was a bit of a laugh, as it kept on being violated and he wouldn't do anything to the guilty parties. His Resources Minister owned a load of coal shares and his Small Business Minister ran a few shopping centres on the side.
There's always Crikey if you want more, mostly true, dirt on Aussie politics.
<FONT> is deprecated, and not part of any of the Strict HTML datatypes. Now I'd quite enjoy it if the Web looked like it did back in the Mosaic days, but I imagine very few people share that enthusiasm.
Slashdot Mirror
Branagh's a ham -- if the role is hammy then he suits it. His direction of films is generally really overdone and laboured as well, not so much making a point as bashing you over the head with it.
:/ I've steered clear of Pottermania ever since...
I wouldn't know about the Harry Potter films: I tried reading the first book and it seemed too much like Enid Blyton to interest me
Keanu Reeves absolutely butchered their parts?
:)
:(
Keanu as a Hawaiian Jonathan Harker in Coppola's Dracula film was bad enough -- however at least that film had the redeeming value of Gary Oldman playing the villain.
And yes, I remember seeing 'Much Ado...' -- women in the audience were moaning at Keanu being oiled down, I just made a resolution to avoid Branagh's films if I could possibly do so.
Is this going to be a comedy or is Will Smith making another attempt at being taken as a serious actor?
:/
You mean the two are mutually exclusive?
(I know what you mean, it's just that the idea of the "Fresh Prince" doing Shakespeare would make me laugh out loud... and not in a good way.)
If Spielberg's Taken, can I have Kubrick?
Sorry, the aliens got me too...
A lot of the time I think Banks is deliberately trying to make Culture folk as offensive as possible in an attempt to get people off their arses in embarrassment when they recognise smug self-satisfied traits in themselves, from the Culture characters.
:)
Given the attitudes in some of his other fiction, that sort of behaviour is generally direct satire by Banks of some of the norms of our current Western culture.
It's all relative anyway -- whether or not you or I like it, some people will decide to interfere with others for reasons of their own, and a subset of those people will claim a moral imperative for doing so. Some of this smaller set of people may even believe themselves when they say this. Going back to the specifics of the fiction, SC is just a mechanism for making sure that when they do decide to meddle they don't get burned somewhere they can't afford it... and at that, it doesn't work too well.
Anyway, there would be enough places around inside or outside the Culture that you could find somewhere decent to live, and the tech available is pretty great (if fuzzily reasoned) space-fantasy stuff.
See? This is why we need DRM. If there were proper DRM going on then of course it would have been recoverable! We would just need the exact system(nope, can't change the processor, or the video card, or the hard driver) in order to recover it!
:/
Means you have to emulate those as well. Eventually it becomes something like Descartes' "malevolent demon" -- "How do I know whether or not I'm running under emulation? Are all my inputs lying to me?"
I remember one juxtaposition of marketing slogans soon after the Amiga's release, which was .sig fodder for a while longer among the zealots:
"Amiga. The Computer for the Creative Mind."
"Macintosh. The Computer for the Rest of Us."
The Amiga had a fantastic multitasking OS with all the usual features at the time (though again everyone else was exploring memory protection at the time... well okay, not Apple either)
Were there any desktop operating systems with MP in the mid-to-late 1980s?
Admittedly, the page/story title makes the same mistake. :)
Yup, I liked the Dune cycle for many of the same reasons that I do the Culture books... although it did get a little odd towards the end. Some of Frank Herbert's other books are also very good: The Dosadi Experiment and The Dragon In the Sea (aka Under Pressure), for example, are two good psychological novels.
Yeah, Open Source is more of a meta-license and is agnostic on that most divisve of property issues, re-use of the code.
:)
I guess in that case the breakdown might be GPL => Left, BSD => Right, as a wild generalisation of course. It's still a choice that has to be made when choosing an Open Source license, and of course it's a political one. I guess that "dragging in completely unrelated political issues only f**ks things up" is probably a true enough blanket statement, then. Or maybe "Open source is political enough without throwing in something even more inflammatory".
I think 'Culture' is a good name because it implies that humanity is like a yeast or a mould -- diverse in nature, difficult to kill off, and both useful and a nuisance at different times. :)
:) The main danger to the Culture would seem to be, well, cultural: different sections growing apart and making a strong enough point of that apartness to turn on the rest of the Culture while becoming something different, a little like the Mechanist/Shaper split in Bruce Sterling's early works. It seems to be a pretty broad church otherwise.
Possibly the most interesting part of the Culture though is Special Circumstances because it's culture seems so different to that of the Culture as a whole. Extremely manipulative of the rest of the Culture. If there's any chance of the Culture turning on itself then that's where it lies.
The most interesting area in any fiction is usually in the delineated border zones, "the tension between the self and the Other" as someone like Barthes would probably have put it -- and SC is that area in the Culture books. I liked that Consider Phlebas featured a character who was, again, outside yet involved, and wasn't on the side of the Culture. It was a good introduction to the entire concept to see it from that perspective.
I'd love to see the Culture have a few more internal difficulties. The only conflict in the books seems to be for the individuals in the story. The Culture as a whole seems to breeze through anything.
Because it's so damn big
I thought it suffered from Clarkeism -- great ideas, very poor characterisation of the people involved. They were like cardboard cutouts against an otherwise great political/historical/scientific backdrop.
evryone
:)
Tune in tomorrow for our next exciting episode, where I learn to use the 'Preview' button.
Iain M. Banks' Culture.
I'd love to live in the middle of trippy post-humanist apace opera universe... wouldn't evryone?
Some of use need English skills.
:)
Obviously.
The last thing open source needs is divisive political themes attached to products. "Use this only if you support homosexual marriages" ..."Only members of the NRA are allowed to contribute to this product"..."This product can only be used to promote the views expressed by Amnesty International."
:) Remember, it's a gift, not something you have a right to possess -- and I, with my wacky amputee fetish, choose that all those two-legged types don't receive that gift.
I'm going to give you the same answer I give to people who complain that the GPL is viral: "If you don't like the license, write your own damn code."
If I, as a software author, want to release software that can only be used by one-legged people, that's my right. Cuts down my potential audience quite a bit, but hey.
Some things should be political, open source is not one of them.
Would you try to argue that Free Software is non-political?
* Joh Bjelke-Peterson (pretty much every time he opened his mouth)
:/
The man who perfectly summed up benevloent dictatorship: "Don't you worry about that."
NSW police corruption up until the mid-1990s* (e.g. Blue Murder, etc.) is probably the most serious endemic corruption I can think of, along with JB-P's reign in Queensland. I am, however, worried by the politicisation of the Public Service, as we saw prior to the last election, with public servants not passing on information that their bosses would have found it politically unfortunate to hear.
(*I actually think that NSW police corruption hasn't been fully wiped out, but that the reforms have made it harder for those involved to work the way they were.)
Re: corruption, a number of them were caught rorting their travel expenses, including one who got off because he had a note from his doctor saying that he only had three months to live. (This was a few years ago now.) The only reason they stopped flinging those accusations back and forth was because Nick Sherry's suicide attempt gave them an excuse... too many people being damaged on both sides, and neither side wanted any more blood drawn, figuratively or literally.
I don't imagine pork-barrelling your party's electorates really counts as corruption, but it's pretty odious at the best of times, and both parties have been guilty of it (the 'sports rorts' affair for Labour, the Federation Fund for the Liberals).
Also, Howard's "Code of Ministerial Conduct", introduced after he took office, was a bit of a laugh, as it kept on being violated and he wouldn't do anything to the guilty parties. His Resources Minister owned a load of coal shares and his Small Business Minister ran a few shopping centres on the side.
There's always Crikey if you want more, mostly true, dirt on Aussie politics.
censorhip regime
:)
Hey, if you're going to post a dupe, at least do the editing that the Slashdot editors can't be bothered doing.
Hey! Don't be dissin' Hover Bovver!
Taking a break from simulation games, Sid Meier wrote CPU Bach, which was released in 1993.
(This claimer; Amanda may be a man's name in New York, but it ain't in these here parts of the world)
Isn't that one of Bart's prank calls in The Simpsons? "I'm looking for Amanda Hugandkiss"?
That quote is from the Tom Lehrer song, not from WvB. Funny, though.
:)
Tom Lehrer was usually more honest about the topics he sang about than the people concerned were ever likely to be.
solution: Don't use CSS.
<FONT> is deprecated, and not part of any of the Strict HTML datatypes. Now I'd quite enjoy it if the Web looked like it did back in the Mosaic days, but I imagine very few people share that enthusiasm.