Well, I boycotted "Pulp Fiction" - for an entire week.
By now it's grown clear that Quentin Tarantino has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how talkative the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.
Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?
Gangsters have an inherent right to arbitrary rule.
God will move bullets out of your way if you quote scripture, no matter how many people you kill.
Cynical and manipulative drug addicts are more worthy of our concern than decent, law-abiding citizens.
Some people should never have stepped into a boxing ring; it's just genetic.
This is just the beginning of a long list of lessons pushed by Pulp Fiction.
Possibly the most pernicious idea Pulp Fiction tries to sell us is the idea that Jules Winnfield could be redeemed by an act of divine intervention, diverting the gun blasts from hitting him and his cohort Vincent Vega. Divine intervention is an idea that has always been an instrument of oppressors, as if saying that the suspension of the laws of physics was a sign from God that He wanted one side to win.
Finally, the fact that Jules is spared the consequences of his actions by turning his back on his old ways plays into a disgusting morality that goes back at least two thousand years in the West, one that we should have hopefully grown out of by now: the idea that people can change their ways. No. As any moral person can tell you, once a bad person, always a bad person. Would you forgive Churchill his surliness and alcoholism simply because he led England out of its darkest hour? Is George Wallace to be trusted simply because he tells us he has changed his mind about racial integration? Of course not! Yet this same kind of moral about-face is something that Tarantino expects us to believe from his gangster epic.
People expecting a more realistic treatment of organized crime and its toll on law-abiding society should check out my new book, Mob People, about gangsters in the 30th century. Chapter one is available for preview on my website.
Remember, "innocent until proven guilty" does not automatically prevent law-enforcement from taking any action. If it did, then they'd be forced to sit around during a bank robbery on the grounds that "they haven't proven in a court of law that the suspects did anything illegal."
The standard flow of events goes: if police or other law enforcement have probable cause to suspect a crime is being/has been committed, they have the right to investigate; if they find evidence that someone has committed a crime, they can arrest him; and if a court of law determines that that evidence constitutes proof, they don't let him go.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but it seems to me that if they've got a warrant, they already have probable cause.
I was wondering about this myself, but the impression I got was that most courts have actually sided against the government and for the privacy and confidentiality of citizens and public libraries. Even Kenneth Starr got into trouble for trying to force a bookstore to hand over records of sale that might have shown that Monica Lewinsky bought a book that she later gave as a gift to Clinton. Lewinsky later gave the records over anyway, though.
But the Colorado Supreme court just unanimously overturned a lower court's decision forcing Tattered Cover to turn over records for an investigation by a Denver-area drug task force. And the protections for public libraries are even stronger than the ones enjoyed by bookstores.
It's bad to track user activity online, but it's ok to track book sales for the very same purpose?
Don't know what you mean by "the very same purpose," but tracking sales of books does not lead to surveillance as easily as tracking of online activity, at least when you're only looking at raw numbers of books sold. If I buy a book with cash, there is no way to trace it. If this is like other tracking systems I've seen as a clerk, then even if you use a credit card, a transaction number and an ISBN get sent back to Book track, but no more information than that. The store can match the transaction number to a receipt and figure out what the credit card number is, but they've always been able to do that anyhow.
Monitoring online activity, though, necessarily involves knowing where the endpoints of the transmission are. So it's a matter of surveillance almost by definition. And I can find out a lot about you by tracking where you go even if I don't know the specifics of what data you've downloaded. But I can tell a lot less about where a book goes after a sale no matter how much I know about its contents.
The documentary Trekkies has an interview with him where he talks about a fan letter/suicide note he got form a depressed fan. He found out where she lived, called her up, and asked her to meet him at the next convention he was going to attend. She did.
He kept doing this for a while, meeting her at conventions and asking her to be at the next one...that's a pretty common suicide-prevention tactic, to get a promise from someone that you'll see them sometime in the future. That way they can't kill themselves.
He lost touch with her for a few years, and thought the worst, until he got a letter from her stating that she'd gone to grad school (Engineering, I think), and that his intervention saved her life. When he was telling the story, he was fighting back tears.
So yeah, he had a chance to do the Right Thing, and he did it. Celebrity may be a fickle thing, but he used his influence well.
I agree, there's something a little peculiar about the amount of escapist movies on the top 50 there. Movies can and should be about serious topics, too--myself, I like both, but it comes and goes in phases. Probably with what's available on the big screen; I'll rent a DVD or tape for a quiet talky drama.
But that's the answer to why Hollywood makes so many escapist films--because they sell enough to place a movie on the all-time best-seller list.
(On another note, I think one of the strengths of "The Exorcist" is how well it works as a drama even when you edit out all the head-spinning icky-goo parts. And the acting! Lee J. Cobb acting against type, and Jason Miller--a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright and Tony-winning director himself--round out an unusually solid cast.)
You hype a movie like this enough and you're bound to make astonishing results, money-wise.
Yep. This movie was hyped up almost as much as "Howard the Duck" was.
Most people that went and saw the movie weren't even interested in it as Spider-man fans, they mainly went because their friends declared it was "ohhh sooo coool!".
I guess this begs the question, why did their friends think it was "ohhh sooo cooool" in the first place? Face it, something doesn't get hyped unless the studios think they'll get a big fan base. Do you really think a giant marketing campaign would help "Iris," or "In the Bedroom", or "My Dinner with Andre?" They're all good movies, but not blockbuster material, no matter how much ad space they get.
I'm always skeptical about numbers like that. Do they adjust for inflation? The fact that a movie makes, say $80 million with an average ticket price of eight dollars means that exactly the same number of people saw something that made $50 million back in the days of $5 tickets. But I've never seen the numbers adjusted to account for that.
For that matter, I've never seen them adjusted for population growth or the general economic climate. Star Wars came out when there were 200 million people in the U.S.; now there's something like 270 million plus. That's gotta make a difference, as does a movie's showing during boom times versus a recession.
Veering OT here, but has anyone seen For the Love of the Game? I've been wanting to rent that because it's Raimi (and based on a book by Michael Shaara--or is it Jeff?), but the fact that it's a Kevin Costner baseball movie's turned me off so far. Anyone know what it's like?
Re:No. Do not trust a priest. Or any authority.
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 2
IANAL (or much of a moralist, for that matter), but your legal and moral rationalizations are amazing, and I don't mean that in a good way.
Like I said before, this (the cover-up) is the church following through on its "forgiveness" dogma.
"Forgiveness" does not make you legally exempt from the consequences of your actions. Although I'm no proponent of capital punishment, they do have chaplains at executions so the condemned can unburden their souls of sin. That doesn't stop the executions from going forth, though.
There's merit to the church overreacting to protect those accused of child molestation, considering the overreaction that's made to people merely accused of the crime...(Yes, it's a horrible crime equal to or greater than murder. But, well, "Innocent until proven guilty.")
Nope, wrong. The fact that some people overreact to an accusation of guilt in no way justifies wilfully interfering with an investigation. If I shoot someone, hand you the gun, and run north down main street, you can't clean my fingerprints off of it and tell the police I headed south. That makes you an accomplice, and you can be charged with tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice, even though I haven't been convicted yet.
No. Do not trust a priest. Or any authority.
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 2
No, no, no need for justice for them.
I didn't realize being made fun of on Slashdot was a legal action.
That does it. I can no longer trust police officers, firemen, doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, stock market folk, bankers, store managers, or anyone else. They've all got members who've committed felonies!
Actually, I don't trust police officers, firemen, doctors, lawyers, programmers, stock brokers, bankers, or store managers. Anyone whose interests might conflict with mine, especially if they are charged with aiding or protecting me, should be subject to intense scrutiny, and be able to stand up under it. Lately, we've seen that the Church's actions cannot hold up under the light.
The outrage at the scandals (note the use of the plural) is partly that sexual abuses happened, but mostly that the church has gone to such lengths to cover them up and keep those same priests active, in some cases returning them to positions with unsupervised contact with children. If there weren't a pattern of covering up, the innocent priests wouldn't be tainted by the guilt of their colleagues. But, by suppressing the truth, the Church has allowed uncertainty to spread, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
My subject line is a sentence fragment. No verb. "And I think I saw a run-on sentence in there" has a subject and a verb--the "and" in the beginning makes it stylistically suspect, but not a fragment.
As a matter of fact, it's kind of hard for me to think of any recent major wars which were caused by religion.
Ummm...remember that gaping hole where the World Trade Center used to be? It was caused by men who thought they were on a mission from God. We're at war because of them.
And you don't remember any religious persecution going on during World War II? None? I dare say, without his anti-Semitic rhetoric, Hitler might never have come to power. And the Japanese believed in the divinity of their emperor, too--the word "kamikaze" means "divine wind."
At least part of the Arab-Israeli conflict is religious in nature. You just don't see a lot of atheist suicide bombers. A lot of "ethnic cleansing" is done along religious lines as well.
The expansion of European nations into the Americas was often justified under the aegis of "divine right."
That's not to mention the religious rhetoric that's used to get men to go to war. Ever hear the song "Onward Christian Soldiers?"
So the original poster might be a little bold about his statistics...but don't fool yourself into thinking religions have their hands clean, even today.
The difference between mocking priests and making racial stereotypes is huge. Nobody chooses the color of skin they're born with. People choose to be priests. Moreover, they choose to join an institution that, for at least twenty years, has used hush money and strongarm tactics to cover up what should have been an obvious problem. This is not the first time large numbers of priests have been caught molesting children, nor is it the first time the church heirarchy has been caught trying to cover it up. And even with all the negative publicity it has been getting, the vatican has only pledged itself to chastising "notorious" and "repeat" offenders. (Read: people who got caught, and whom we couldn't shuffle off to another parish.)
The problem with bad priests is the same as the problem with bad cops: it's very unlikely that one can be abusive without others being aware of it. So perhaps it's only a small percentage of priests who molest children. But the fact that many more knew about it, and kept silent, even when these molesters were put back in the charge of children, is equally damning.
Also, tell me, where are your statistics for "hundreds" of priests being "wrongfully prosecuted?" I read of people flocking to churches to support those priests who have not been accused. And being the butt of jokes is a small price to pay, and the cost of doing business, when you sign up for an organization as powerful, arrogant, and insular as the Church.
I don't want to make any insinuations, but just because the Sci-Fi channel is growing in popularity, doesn't mean it's not still for nerds. Look at how popular soap operas are, and (true or not, I'm not qualified to say) there is an impression that their audience is mostly lonely old ladies and disaffected housewives. Sad to say, this *might* just mean there's a growing number of people who aren't able to connect socially with each other.
That said, I enjoy science fiction, and I'm reasonably happy with my social life.
I've always found that combinatoric argument in favor of Go a bit spurious. It ignores the possibility that certain patterns in Go may be (may be--I'm no expert in either game) more easily generalizable than patterns in Chess, therefore cutting down massively on the search space. All of Go's pieces are exactly the same; you simply don't have considerations like trading of a bishop vs. knight (the bishop has longer range, but can only attack pieces on one color square; the knight doesn't have as long a reach, but can jump over its own side's pieces).
And, as far as depth goes, some of Chess's master combinations have gone as far as twenty-six moves deep, during the first half of which it appears as though one side is winning, but which turn the situation around by the end. (I'm thinking of one of Alekhine's games in particular, but I'm not at home where I can check my books.) So there's no generalized way of telling how many moves deep you'll have to search until you can evaluate a move.
Also, Chess's maximum branching factor isn't 32. Each piece, of which there are a maximum of 32 on the board, has a minimum of 0, and up to 27 (for a queen with clear lines to the edges). The maximum branching factor has to be recalculated for every move (although I suppose there's a theoretical "most free position," but I don't know it).
All in all, IIRC, the number of possible Chess games is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, so even if that number is fewer than Go's, it's not like it'll ever be a "trivial" exercise computing them--it won't ever happen.
I'd equate it to the various movies depicting baby carriages tumbling down stairs a la Battleship Potemkin -- a wretched example being "The Untouchables."
But that's my point. You wouldn't say that The Untouchables was a remake of Potemkin, or even a rip-off. It's a completely different story, even though it contains a shot that's obviously lifted from the original. And the similarity between Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress isn't much stronger.
Seeing as neither the setting, nor the plot, nor character names (as opposed to character types, and by no means all of them), were taken from Hidden Fortress, the connection between the two movies has been drastically overblown, IMHO. Lucas acknowledges it, and Kurosawa's other works, as inspiration, as well as the rest of the list: classical mythology, pulp sci-fi, westerns--you know the drill. There is no way, however, that anyone who's actually seen the two movies would be able to say "oh, he just substituted this character for that, and spaceships for horses"--it just isn't that close a match.
If somebody finds it offensive *at work*, you're right. If I'm videogaming *at work*, my boss can also fire me, and I have no constitutional recourse. This isn't a workplace harrassment issue, it's about the freedoms enjoyed in your own home.
Also, your "reasonable woman" standard is not so unprecedented. Many laws have to be interpreted in light of a subset of the population...for instance, judges or juries deciding whether or not a practice discriminates against the handicapped have to consider it from the point of a reasonable handicapped person. And remember, it's still a jury of men (and women) who decide what a "reasonable woman" should think.
Slashdot Mirror
If I've just gone to the movies, the conversation is usually about the movie.
If I'm at work, conversation is about work.
When I'm on Slashdot, conversation is about Linux.
What makes you think this behavior indicates "myopia"?
Well, I boycotted "Pulp Fiction" - for an entire week.
By now it's grown clear that Quentin Tarantino has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how talkative the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look. Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?
This is just the beginning of a long list of lessons pushed by Pulp Fiction.
Possibly the most pernicious idea Pulp Fiction tries to sell us is the idea that Jules Winnfield could be redeemed by an act of divine intervention, diverting the gun blasts from hitting him and his cohort Vincent Vega. Divine intervention is an idea that has always been an instrument of oppressors, as if saying that the suspension of the laws of physics was a sign from God that He wanted one side to win.
Finally, the fact that Jules is spared the consequences of his actions by turning his back on his old ways plays into a disgusting morality that goes back at least two thousand years in the West, one that we should have hopefully grown out of by now: the idea that people can change their ways. No. As any moral person can tell you, once a bad person, always a bad person. Would you forgive Churchill his surliness and alcoholism simply because he led England out of its darkest hour? Is George Wallace to be trusted simply because he tells us he has changed his mind about racial integration? Of course not! Yet this same kind of moral about-face is something that Tarantino expects us to believe from his gangster epic.
People expecting a more realistic treatment of organized crime and its toll on law-abiding society should check out my new book, Mob People, about gangsters in the 30th century. Chapter one is available for preview on my website.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but it seems to me that if they've got a warrant, they already have probable cause.
Huh? What movie are you talking about?
But the Colorado Supreme court just unanimously overturned a lower court's decision forcing Tattered Cover to turn over records for an investigation by a Denver-area drug task force. And the protections for public libraries are even stronger than the ones enjoyed by bookstores.
Monitoring online activity, though, necessarily involves knowing where the endpoints of the transmission are. So it's a matter of surveillance almost by definition. And I can find out a lot about you by tracking where you go even if I don't know the specifics of what data you've downloaded. But I can tell a lot less about where a book goes after a sale no matter how much I know about its contents.
"I swear by Apollo the Physician and by Asclepius and by Health and Panacea and by all the gods as well as goddesses, making them judges..."
How would the Geek Oath start?
"I swear by Boole, and Babbage, and Turing, and Knuth..."
He kept doing this for a while, meeting her at conventions and asking her to be at the next one...that's a pretty common suicide-prevention tactic, to get a promise from someone that you'll see them sometime in the future. That way they can't kill themselves.
He lost touch with her for a few years, and thought the worst, until he got a letter from her stating that she'd gone to grad school (Engineering, I think), and that his intervention saved her life. When he was telling the story, he was fighting back tears.
So yeah, he had a chance to do the Right Thing, and he did it. Celebrity may be a fickle thing, but he used his influence well.
That's why I admire him.
But that's the answer to why Hollywood makes so many escapist films--because they sell enough to place a movie on the all-time best-seller list.
(On another note, I think one of the strengths of "The Exorcist" is how well it works as a drama even when you edit out all the head-spinning icky-goo parts. And the acting! Lee J. Cobb acting against type, and Jason Miller--a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright and Tony-winning director himself--round out an unusually solid cast.)
For that matter, I've never seen them adjusted for population growth or the general economic climate. Star Wars came out when there were 200 million people in the U.S.; now there's something like 270 million plus. That's gotta make a difference, as does a movie's showing during boom times versus a recession.
Veering OT here, but has anyone seen For the Love of the Game? I've been wanting to rent that because it's Raimi (and based on a book by Michael Shaara--or is it Jeff?), but the fact that it's a Kevin Costner baseball movie's turned me off so far. Anyone know what it's like?
The outrage at the scandals (note the use of the plural) is partly that sexual abuses happened, but mostly that the church has gone to such lengths to cover them up and keep those same priests active, in some cases returning them to positions with unsupervised contact with children. If there weren't a pattern of covering up, the innocent priests wouldn't be tainted by the guilt of their colleagues. But, by suppressing the truth, the Church has allowed uncertainty to spread, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
My subject line is a sentence fragment. No verb. "And I think I saw a run-on sentence in there" has a subject and a verb--the "and" in the beginning makes it stylistically suspect, but not a fragment.
And you don't remember any religious persecution going on during World War II? None? I dare say, without his anti-Semitic rhetoric, Hitler might never have come to power. And the Japanese believed in the divinity of their emperor, too--the word "kamikaze" means "divine wind."
At least part of the Arab-Israeli conflict is religious in nature. You just don't see a lot of atheist suicide bombers. A lot of "ethnic cleansing" is done along religious lines as well.
The expansion of European nations into the Americas was often justified under the aegis of "divine right."
That's not to mention the religious rhetoric that's used to get men to go to war. Ever hear the song "Onward Christian Soldiers?"
So the original poster might be a little bold about his statistics...but don't fool yourself into thinking religions have their hands clean, even today.
The problem with bad priests is the same as the problem with bad cops: it's very unlikely that one can be abusive without others being aware of it. So perhaps it's only a small percentage of priests who molest children. But the fact that many more knew about it, and kept silent, even when these molesters were put back in the charge of children, is equally damning.
Also, tell me, where are your statistics for "hundreds" of priests being "wrongfully prosecuted?" I read of people flocking to churches to support those priests who have not been accused. And being the butt of jokes is a small price to pay, and the cost of doing business, when you sign up for an organization as powerful, arrogant, and insular as the Church.
What were they of, altar boys?
True, Seven Samurai was not a remake of The Magnificent Seven, but Kurosawa did acknowledge the general influence of Hollywood westerns.
That said, I enjoy science fiction, and I'm reasonably happy with my social life.
And, as far as depth goes, some of Chess's master combinations have gone as far as twenty-six moves deep, during the first half of which it appears as though one side is winning, but which turn the situation around by the end. (I'm thinking of one of Alekhine's games in particular, but I'm not at home where I can check my books.) So there's no generalized way of telling how many moves deep you'll have to search until you can evaluate a move.
Also, Chess's maximum branching factor isn't 32. Each piece, of which there are a maximum of 32 on the board, has a minimum of 0, and up to 27 (for a queen with clear lines to the edges). The maximum branching factor has to be recalculated for every move (although I suppose there's a theoretical "most free position," but I don't know it).
All in all, IIRC, the number of possible Chess games is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, so even if that number is fewer than Go's, it's not like it'll ever be a "trivial" exercise computing them--it won't ever happen.
Seeing as neither the setting, nor the plot, nor character names (as opposed to character types, and by no means all of them), were taken from Hidden Fortress, the connection between the two movies has been drastically overblown, IMHO. Lucas acknowledges it, and Kurosawa's other works, as inspiration, as well as the rest of the list: classical mythology, pulp sci-fi, westerns--you know the drill. There is no way, however, that anyone who's actually seen the two movies would be able to say "oh, he just substituted this character for that, and spaceships for horses"--it just isn't that close a match.
Also, your "reasonable woman" standard is not so unprecedented. Many laws have to be interpreted in light of a subset of the population...for instance, judges or juries deciding whether or not a practice discriminates against the handicapped have to consider it from the point of a reasonable handicapped person. And remember, it's still a jury of men (and women) who decide what a "reasonable woman" should think.
So, by that logic, if I tell a joke, it's entertainment and not speech?