See, that's where I think we differ. I believe Tolkien's attention to detail aided the continuity of his storytelling even as detail after mind-numbing detail aided The Iliad in its telling. It is this combined ability of linguistics, world-creation, and storytelling all-together that solidifies Tolkien as a genius of his craft in my mind. What makes LOTR better than The Iliad is that LOTR was not design-by-committee.
The whole LOTR saga is woven with elegance in design, not unlike a carefully designed program. No, it's not perfect, even as design 1.0 is rarely perfect, but it's damn fine art which I would say is indicative of his genius.
<RANT>Some critics complain of his so-called "lack of characterization," but that's a complaint about a qualitative difference in the type of character Tolkien uses, not a substantial inconsistency. All of his characters have a place in the world, a purpose. None are out of joint with the world, like in a modern tale of alienation (e.g., Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead). They each have their relatively predictable role, but the predictability of a role in no way implies that it is base.
Genius is indicative of vast proficiency in a particular skillset. If a geek possessed the excellence in programming that Tolkien exhibits in wordsmithy, world construction, and storytelling, that geek would be a genius.
Look for excellence in a particular art. Don't go around expecting Animal Farm, for example, as the indication of literary genius when an author in question is operating under vastly different motives toward a wholly other purpose.
I would definitely refrain from calling LOTR "postmodern." At best, you could try hard to sandwich it into a Rorty-esque philosophy of literature, but that's only marginally less doomed to failure than to read Tolkien as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, or some other pretentious fop.
My preferred view of the corpus is to enjoy the story for its own sake. If you don't like the way it's told... move on to something else. It's apolitical, which eliminates any european post[modern/structuralist] interpretation; it's an engrossing world meant to be for and about that world in a very human way... this is why it unfortunately lends itself to be [falsely] interpreted as allegory via authorial fiat, but also explains why it means so much to people; the reader can supply her own personal allegory.
By That is its not actually about anything. which is pretty true., I gather that you think that venerated books should be about something "real." While I am partly sympathetic to that position, I have a certain affinity for the premodern blending of the real and the imaginary without the need for any cheesy allegorical baggage. This is why I like Tolkien better than Animal Farm, and so far, better than Joyce, though I admit I am in the middle of the second part of Ulysses, which appears to me more an embodiment of the everyday psychological babble into a coherent literary form.
well... I wouldn't want to call Lewis a full-fledged sheeple though. I have lecture notes from a research project on Lewis' theology when I went to a Christian college. The researcher's conclusion was basically:
Out of the three main branches of Anglicanism, a) the wishy-washy liberal Prince Charles types, b) the moderates, and c) the Anglo-catholics (Catholicism minus the Pope, minus a few other details), Lewis was best taxonomized as an Anglo-catholic.
heh, "beware". as if you could study anything written in the West without getting into some theological implications (yeah yeah, "for all X..." is beyond what I mean here). look at the theology as an intriguing use of mythology. You don't have to be a believer to enjoy a mythology...
Hrm... I guess if Apple wouldn't threaten people duplicating its look and feel, a Very Aqua Theme[tm] would be a reality. But I mean, hell, they should create their own.:-)
All I can think of is Tom Hanks escaping that awful flourescent lighting in Joe versus the Volcano. If only Meg Ryan could somehow be attached to the application of this technology...
<peering about> "Wow! Why do all the chicks suddenly look like Meg Ryan?!"
Man, I love the Goodwill Computer store here. It is so bad ass. Did you see the Apple Lisa they had running? or that NeXT cube? I called one of those computer museum things about them.
the only thing I can imagine bad about using such old computers is power consumption. but I haven't done any research on it so I'll just leave it at the level of potential concern.
Indeed, you are correct that it would not destroy the continent outright, but I suspect that the environmental and other collateral damage would be somewhat on par with an asteroid hit.
In 3001, Clarke writes about an eerie explosion destroying an entire civilization due to mishandling of an extremely powerful energy source 500 lightyears from earth. Contextually, I think that was one of the few bits of the book that moved me much.
That reminds me of that project to transmit IP over SMTP. It actually worked. Here's an RFC draft to create a standardized MIME for IP: http://www.imc.org/draft-eastlake-ip-mime
I've actually read this article before. It was pretty intriguing. As in all things, the evolution of the notion of a corporation as a legal person is inextricably tied to the historical processes at work at the time. It was also en vogue in Europe, then, to declare corporations as legal persons.
Mainly, a corporation is the result of the separation of ownership from management for the purpose of efficiency. Shareholders do not necessarily have a clue about running a particular business but they can see a deal based on what they do understand: financials. The Schizm allowed them to invest and have rights in a corporation without having to participate in its everyday functions.
Legally, it was a new idea. There was no precedent for this idea. However, the Courts said, by judicial fiat, that they ought to be treated as persons. The main intuitions seem to be A) the concept of limited liability which means the individuals making up a corporation cannot be held responsibile for the actions or debts of the corporation and B) that a corporation "lives on," so to speak, regardless of the individuals making up the company. It "owns" property, etc. all to its inked paper "self."
My conclusion: The corporation was a good, but ultimately flawed experiment. While the level of efficiency available with not having a particular person attached to a piece of property is intriguing, it leaves too much to question in terms of personal responsibility for action. I.e., your name isn't on the life support software so you aren't responsible for it. ACME LifeSupport, Inc. is responsible. That seems like crap to me. (Yeah, there's a whole discussion on UCITA, Open Source, and warrantification attched to this).
Furthermore, if property is attached to real people only, then you won't ever have a problem with, say, Mickey Mouse and copyright extension. All the artists will die, unlike Disney, which keeps going and going and going...
Netscape - Consider the competition. Now consider that AOL is gonna go all Zilla. Now consider that TWTC employees are AOL. AOL isn't stupid, even if I think their monopoly potentiality is just as bad as Microsoft's RIGHT NOW.
Eazel - yeah, the file manager wasn't a great way to get services... maybe a groupware app would've worked, maybe something else... hard to say. Personally, I don't think start-ups are a good place to *create* free software. It seems to work better in the context of established business.
Well, the funny thing is that web advertising is probably about as effective as any other form of advertising except the advertisers finally get to see how few people are interested in something directly (i.e., enough to Click-thru[tm]) and use that knowledge to force the sites dependent on ads to get less than they would in print (ignoring the fact that print costs more...).
On that line of thought, web media should charge a helluva lot more for web ads because the advertisers should pay for the privilege of such direct feedback!
As far as the effectiveness of advertising, eh, just depends on how you mean "effective." The main concern is branding and helping you remember their product when you need that sort of item. Just like learning a foreign language, saturation in the terminology is what helps the woeful memory the most.
5. Complete the At Large study and implement those recommendations from the study that are adopted by the Board. see note F below.
(f) At Large Membership Project and Study. At its recent Melbourne meeting, the ICANN Board allocated $450,000 in reserve funds to cover the costs of the study of At Large membership which is currently in progress. Of the total amount, $200,000 will be expended in the current fiscal year (in addition to $250,000 in one time funds already expended on the At Large election earlier in the fiscal year), and $250,000 will be expended in the next fiscal year during the months July through November.
The following is my interpretation (and I will probably query Auerbach and the At Large Committee about it, too):
No money will be spent specifically for elections until the Study is completed.
One of the items under consideration by the Study is holding another election, but this probably depends on what recurring electoral procedure is decided upon.
The budgeteers are probably assuming that a lot of the initial expenses for an election have already been covered (servers, lists, infrastructure stuff).
However, I am no ICANN expert. I suggest contacting your representative. Here is what Auerbach, who is less optimistic than I am, posted in the forum:
Indeed Lord Ender, I've been running this same argument for years. As a philosophy major, I have honed my acceptable definition of the word 'nature' to the following:
Precise: 1. Whatever exists. 2. the set of all extant of which a tiny subset is dubbed artificial.
Colloquial: 1. Some warm fuzzy feeling about the good old days before we people screwed everything up. 2. generally meant as an antonym of artificial.
Probable reasons for continued use of the poor colloquial definition: Locke's state of nature hypothesis. biblical notion of a pre-Fall more natural, i.e., better, state. the historical etymology from the Latin for born suggesting that what is there at the conception [of a thing, e.g., the earth] is what is natural, i.e., better, than what is unnatural [or artificial], i.e., worse.
Street Creds - Yeah yeah, this sure looks like a poststructuralist account. Sorry about that, but a deconstruction, a genealogy, is occasionally useful, especially when dealing with such an obvious case of origin (see Derrida). That said, I am all about the precise usage of this word and generally prefer a different warm and fuzzy term for our simpler terran coinhabitants and the sorts of environment and ecology they each require for survival.
-l
n.b.- I have intentionally avoided any argument for or against protection of environments relatively devoid of artificial structures.
AND, you can still roll your own. They haven't made a nice lil/etc/roll_your_own_compiler_defaults yet, which would be cool cause then you could just dump in -O6 and other goodies.
But Hemos, this is just light mode we're talking about... Not necessarily all modes. The point of Light, AFAICT, is to go as fast as possible with as little clutter. I'm in favor of any solution that will aid streaming and not require downloading the whole shebang before viewability.
Slashdot Mirror
no, it's coincidence only unless you believe in Providence.
-l
See, that's where I think we differ. I believe Tolkien's attention to detail aided the continuity of his storytelling even as detail after mind-numbing detail aided The Iliad in its telling. It is this combined ability of linguistics, world-creation, and storytelling all-together that solidifies Tolkien as a genius of his craft in my mind. What makes LOTR better than The Iliad is that LOTR was not design-by-committee.
The whole LOTR saga is woven with elegance in design, not unlike a carefully designed program. No, it's not perfect, even as design 1.0 is rarely perfect, but it's damn fine art which I would say is indicative of his genius.
<RANT>Some critics complain of his so-called "lack of characterization," but that's a complaint about a qualitative difference in the type of character Tolkien uses, not a substantial inconsistency. All of his characters have a place in the world, a purpose. None are out of joint with the world, like in a modern tale of alienation (e.g., Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead). They each have their relatively predictable role, but the predictability of a role in no way implies that it is base.
cheers,
-l
Genius is indicative of vast proficiency in a particular skillset. If a geek possessed the excellence in programming that Tolkien exhibits in wordsmithy, world construction, and storytelling, that geek would be a genius.
Look for excellence in a particular art. Don't go around expecting Animal Farm, for example, as the indication of literary genius when an author in question is operating under vastly different motives toward a wholly other purpose.
$0.02,
-l
I would definitely refrain from calling LOTR "postmodern." At best, you could try hard to sandwich it into a Rorty-esque philosophy of literature, but that's only marginally less doomed to failure than to read Tolkien as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, or some other pretentious fop.
My preferred view of the corpus is to enjoy the story for its own sake. If you don't like the way it's told... move on to something else. It's apolitical, which eliminates any european post[modern/structuralist] interpretation; it's an engrossing world meant to be for and about that world in a very human way... this is why it unfortunately lends itself to be [falsely] interpreted as allegory via authorial fiat, but also explains why it means so much to people; the reader can supply her own personal allegory.
By That is its not actually about anything. which is pretty true., I gather that you think that venerated books should be about something "real." While I am partly sympathetic to that position, I have a certain affinity for the premodern blending of the real and the imaginary without the need for any cheesy allegorical baggage. This is why I like Tolkien better than Animal Farm, and so far, better than Joyce, though I admit I am in the middle of the second part of Ulysses, which appears to me more an embodiment of the everyday psychological babble into a coherent literary form.
$0.02,
-l
Out of the three main branches of Anglicanism, a) the wishy-washy liberal Prince Charles types, b) the moderates, and c) the Anglo-catholics (Catholicism minus the Pope, minus a few other details), Lewis was best taxonomized as an Anglo-catholic.
shrugs,
-l
heh, "beware". as if you could study anything written in the West without getting into some theological implications (yeah yeah, "for all X..." is beyond what I mean here). look at the theology as an intriguing use of mythology. You don't have to be a believer to enjoy a mythology...
-l
Hrm... I guess if Apple wouldn't threaten people duplicating its look and feel, a Very Aqua Theme[tm] would be a reality. But I mean, hell, they should create their own. :-)
-l
All I can think of is Tom Hanks escaping that awful flourescent lighting in Joe versus the Volcano. If only Meg Ryan could somehow be attached to the application of this technology...
<peering about> "Wow! Why do all the chicks suddenly look like Meg Ryan?!"
-l
use a different theme. the default "Classic" is ugly. I prefer "Modern" of the two, though I'd like to research some other themes.
-l
you weren't lazy enough to not fix the problem, why not do it right the first time? :-)
-l
WATCH OUT FOR THAT ARM!
-l
Man, I love the Goodwill Computer store here. It is so bad ass. Did you see the Apple Lisa they had running? or that NeXT cube? I called one of those computer museum things about them.
the only thing I can imagine bad about using such old computers is power consumption. but I haven't done any research on it so I'll just leave it at the level of potential concern.
-l
Yeah, I should've been more clear. I'd trailed off from the measly 1kg, thinking of larger bits, and didn't type all that out. Oh well.
-l
In 3001, Clarke writes about an eerie explosion destroying an entire civilization due to mishandling of an extremely powerful energy source 500 lightyears from earth. Contextually, I think that was one of the few bits of the book that moved me much.
-l
-l
Greets, jwz.
I've actually read this article before. It was pretty intriguing. As in all things, the evolution of the notion of a corporation as a legal person is inextricably tied to the historical processes at work at the time. It was also en vogue in Europe, then, to declare corporations as legal persons.
Mainly, a corporation is the result of the separation of ownership from management for the purpose of efficiency. Shareholders do not necessarily have a clue about running a particular business but they can see a deal based on what they do understand: financials. The Schizm allowed them to invest and have rights in a corporation without having to participate in its everyday functions.
Legally, it was a new idea. There was no precedent for this idea. However, the Courts said, by judicial fiat, that they ought to be treated as persons. The main intuitions seem to be A) the concept of limited liability which means the individuals making up a corporation cannot be held responsibile for the actions or debts of the corporation and B) that a corporation "lives on," so to speak, regardless of the individuals making up the company. It "owns" property, etc. all to its inked paper "self."
My conclusion: The corporation was a good, but ultimately flawed experiment. While the level of efficiency available with not having a particular person attached to a piece of property is intriguing, it leaves too much to question in terms of personal responsibility for action. I.e., your name isn't on the life support software so you aren't responsible for it. ACME LifeSupport, Inc. is responsible. That seems like crap to me. (Yeah, there's a whole discussion on UCITA, Open Source, and warrantification attched to this).
Furthermore, if property is attached to real people only, then you won't ever have a problem with, say, Mickey Mouse and copyright extension. All the artists will die, unlike Disney, which keeps going and going and going...
Nice little Encyclopedic entry: http://www.comptons.com/encyclopedia/ARTICLES/0025 /00471296_A.html
Op-Ed piece in our very own Daily Texan: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/01-30-01/PF2001013 004_s06_Criminals.html
Cuteness versus intelligence? Seems like a non-issue to me, here.
-l
From Origin to Destination. I like it.
Easily amused,
-l
$0.02
-l
Well, the funny thing is that web advertising is probably about as effective as any other form of advertising except the advertisers finally get to see how few people are interested in something directly (i.e., enough to Click-thru[tm]) and use that knowledge to force the sites dependent on ads to get less than they would in print (ignoring the fact that print costs more...).
On that line of thought, web media should charge a helluva lot more for web ads because the advertisers should pay for the privilege of such direct feedback!
As far as the effectiveness of advertising, eh, just depends on how you mean "effective." The main concern is branding and helping you remember their product when you need that sort of item. Just like learning a foreign language, saturation in the terminology is what helps the woeful memory the most.
$0.02USD,
-l
Under Budget Priorities and Issues...
5. Complete the At Large study and implement those recommendations from the study that are adopted by the Board. see note F below.
(f) At Large Membership Project and Study. At its recent Melbourne meeting, the ICANN Board allocated $450,000 in reserve funds to cover the costs of the study of At Large membership which is currently in progress. Of the total amount, $200,000 will be expended in the current fiscal year (in addition to $250,000 in one time funds already expended on the At Large election earlier in the fiscal year), and $250,000 will be expended in the next fiscal year during the months July through November.
The following is my interpretation (and I will probably query Auerbach and the At Large Committee about it, too):
However, I am no ICANN expert. I suggest contacting your representative. Here is what Auerbach, who is less optimistic than I am, posted in the forum:
http://www.atlargestudy.org/forum_archive/msg00063 .shtml
Keep watching the skies...
-l
Indeed Lord Ender, I've been running this same argument for years. As a philosophy major, I have honed my acceptable definition of the word 'nature' to the following:
Probable reasons for continued use of the poor colloquial definition: Locke's state of nature hypothesis. biblical notion of a pre-Fall more natural, i.e., better, state. the historical etymology from the Latin for born suggesting that what is there at the conception [of a thing, e.g., the earth] is what is natural, i.e., better, than what is unnatural [or artificial], i.e., worse.
Street Creds - Yeah yeah, this sure looks like a poststructuralist account. Sorry about that, but a deconstruction, a genealogy, is occasionally useful, especially when dealing with such an obvious case of origin (see Derrida). That said, I am all about the precise usage of this word and generally prefer a different warm and fuzzy term for our simpler terran coinhabitants and the sorts of environment and ecology they each require for survival.
-l
n.b.- I have intentionally avoided any argument for or against protection of environments relatively devoid of artificial structures.
AND, you can still roll your own. They haven't made a nice lil /etc/roll_your_own_compiler_defaults yet, which would be cool cause then you could just dump in -O6 and other goodies.
-l
But Hemos, this is just light mode we're talking about... Not necessarily all modes. The point of Light, AFAICT, is to go as fast as possible with as little clutter. I'm in favor of any solution that will aid streaming and not require downloading the whole shebang before viewability.
Thanks for all the work, man,
-l
DeToqueville must've read Rousseau.