...by content providers, perhaps more easily than things they published on the internet or on paper.
I worked for a company that provided large quantities of content to Lexis-Nexis for six years. They provide a method by which content can be removed by anyone who is providing it.
And my experience dealing with Lexis-Nexis as a company did not leave me with a good feeling about their concern for an accurate record.
...of the need for comic relief. And he put it in the books.
The primary delivery vehicle: hobbits, in particular Peregrin Took (Pippin). That all of the hobbits ultimately play a key role makes the choice of vehicle all the more delicious.
...on this one: Jackson completely changed the fundamental nature of Faramir, for no particularly good reason.
Faramir started out as the little brother who could never live up to the expectations of his father or the example of his brother. He sought solace by hiding in the library from activities where he could never hope to best his brother. Then, one day, a strange wizard showed up, almost demanding to see the archives there. (Jackson even showed this research, which wasn't actually depicted in the book, only described.)
Denethor was annoyed by Gandalf's "arrogance," but let him have access. Faramir spied on the wizard and when Gandalf was not there he tried to figure out what was being studied. He learned much about Isildur's Bane (although he never guessed it was a ring). He even saw that Isildur was much like his brother. This gave him the understanding of why Isildur fell, the ability to predict that his brother would be similarly weak when he encountered the ring, and *no* inclination whatever to try to take the ring from Frodo.
He even laughs when Samwise imprudently gives away the secret. He tells them he's already guessed what they've been hiding from him.
The virtue of the scholarly was at least as important to Tolkein as the virtue of the valorous. But he understood that some did not understand it and he made Denethor as tragic exemplar of that lack of understanding. When Denethor saw his son sneaking off to be with the wizard he mistrusted, jealousy added to the reasons Faramir prefered his older son. When he looked into the palantir, Sauron saw all these weaknesses and used them to bend his will. While Denethor thought he was beating Sauron (in the battle of wills enabled by the palantir) by choosing to try to use the ring against the Dark Lord, this was actually what Sauron wanted.
When Denethor finds out that Faramir had the ringbearers in his grasp and let them take it to Mordor, it is the lack of any inclination on the part of his son to have done otherwise that sends him into madness. The steward-regent's madness is crucial to the sense that mighty Gondor could fall quickly and easily before help can arrive.
Before the king can return.
Such a story may be that would have been boring to the audience. I don't think so. I thought the Yet Another Good Guy Tempted story was a cop-out. And ultimately boring. Evil has many ways of winning, and that's the real scary thing. Some people can resist from their childhood...and still evil finds a way to use their resistance to corrupt others. Evil that has depth and layers is hardly boring.
Maybe this makes me some kind Middle-Earth nerd to "hyperventilate" over this, but I think changing the fundamental nature of a key character when that nature itself was a key plot point is a mistake. This is what makes the difference between a great movie and a typical, compromised adaptation. "The Fellowship of the Ring" was (for me) a great movie. I had no problem with the changes because they didn't compromise the real meaning of the story. "The Two Towers" was a decent adaptation which I only saw once because it made unnecessary compromises with the nature of key characters (Faramir and the Ents being the most egregious).
...in a variety of ways, many them biased to greater or lesser degrees. It is true that catastrophic consequences increase the likelihood of funding. It is also true that catastrophic consequences increase the chances you'll get funding for a counter-study. This is a good thing. The reasons: catastrophic consequences are more important (both for society at large and for those who might be causing them).
While it is true that ego is a big motivator in science (anyone who has read anthing about Newton would know this), it is also true that search for truth and knowledge is the best way to achieve this (as Newton also demonstrates).
My rule of thumb is: If you see bias only on one side, you are perceiving your own bias, not the bias of the system. That's related to my sig as well.
The difference has gotten worse in the last five years because China has reduced its use of coal in that time frame. (Note that India has not achieved similar reductions.)
Although it concentrates more on the free-speech issues of Diebold's cease-and-desist campaign, it is far more informative than the deeply flawed CNN piece.
...is the fact that he has managed to accomplish all Valdrax has suggested while still planning to cut the size of the military.
Bush got elected in large part by promising members of the military he was going to "do something about" the fact that he didn't think the U.S. fighting forces were still able to fight two wars at the same time (which has been American strategic doctrine for a long time). When Donald Rumsfeld finally got around to announcing what they were going to do about it (in early September 2001), I was flabbergasted: They decided to change the doctrine so that we would no longer try to be ready to fight two wars.
When 9/11 came and went, I was convinced their plan to shrink the military would go out the window. They certainly had the public support for national security and homeland defense. Their political base is all for it. But they recently announced they were going ahead with their plans despite the fact that their current operations in Iraq are facing manpower shortfalls as early as next March or April.
I just don't get it. All the shortcoming mentioned in the parent post could have been predicted from Bush's campaign. But I don't think anyone expected them to do all that AND shortchange the military as well.
...share Clinton's concern with the deficit is to ignore enormous amounts of evidence. In particular, it ignores the undeniable fact that Clinton put Gore in charge of the hard part of reducing the deficit: finding large amounts of government waste.
The "current crop" of Democratic presidential candidates includes a general well known for improving military performance while cutting costs and a governor who balanced budgets under difficult circumstances. The rest of that crop (including one that has recently dropped out) ALL voted for a number of extremely effective deficit-reduction measures (including some which got NO Republican votes whatsoever).
As far as I can see, your use of the phrase "as far as I can see" translates as "while I am desperately trying to ignore all available evidence."
The poster isn't complaining about the price of Maya Complete. He's not even complaining that they offer a Personal Learning Edition. He's saying that a "free for non-commercial use" version would not be a bad thing. Maybe he's right. Maybe the Alias lawyer who nixed it is right.
Your point about buying a single copy of the commercial license for a whole studio full of "personal learners" is a good one, but you obfuscate it by claiming the parent poster said things he (or she) did not say. But a carefully worded license for each version would take care of any personal-learner shops that cropped up. And I don't think it would be hard to spot a shop with 1 license, 40 artists, and an explosion of art. It would be roughly on a par with looking for a shop that does multiple installs from a single license.
It would be an interesting question whether allowing a shop with 20-40 artists to work with Maya PLE until the company was ready to render for publishing would produce more sales or less. Some companies would probably say, "We've got millions invested in this art, why worry about the measly cost of 40 licenses?" while others might say, "We're behind budget here, can't one license do everything we want?" Whichever side predominated, it wouldn't be hard for Alias to tell which was which.
...to recommend Parrot for purposes other than what its designers say it will be good for.
I asked Dan Sugalski about precisely this prospect (using Parrot to run.NET bytecode) at OSCON 2003. He said, "Yes, Parrot will run.NET bytecode," but emphasized that it would not run it at a speed which would make it competitive with the CLR. If it was competitive, it might be a big threat to Microsoft (since MS has had trouble getting the CLR to handle dynamic languages). But Dan was very specific about being convinced Parrot's.NET capabilities would not be any kind of threat to the CLR.
It will be interesting to see how fast it runs compared to Mono.
...of a Microsoft Apologist Apologizing for Microsoft on the monoculture reports, check out this 3-part series:
Part I: Wherein the author proves he doesn't know the difference between an API and the OS which implements it He also manages to confuse integration with breaking encapsulation and argues that integration is acheived by eliminating modular programming. He also resorts to the traditional monopolists' excuse that the economics of scale trumps competition, imagining that Adam Smith would actually support this excuse.
The author of these diatribes (John Carroll) managed to convince me he was so clueless about the fundamentals of programming (compare Microsoft Press's own "Code Complete" with the "facts" in these stories to see how far off base he is) that I am sure I would never hire his consulting firm, Turtleneck Software, for anything.
The issues raised by the CCIA report deserve hard scrutiny. But that scrutiny must be based on facts. And on what the monoculture report actually said. Diversity of API is bad, and the report acknowledges this by arguing for strong international standards. Diversity of implementation is good, and the report makes a strong case for this.
Carroll lies to his readers by claiming the report favors diversity of API. He then compounds this inaccuracy by claiming Microsoft has achieved its monocultural monopoly by promoting a single API that has become a public standard. In fact, they achieved it by constantly changing the API, hiding it from their competitors, and forcing those who wrote competing products for their platform to write to a different API, which itself changed when it was convenient for MS (i.e., inconvenient for their competitors).
This level of dishonesty should get Carroll fired at ZDNet, but it probably won't.
And we still don't have a good, rigorous criticism of the CCIA's report. A criticism we desperately need.
..."We are going to ban movie studios from sending out copies of their own copyrighted material to our members because we believe that some of our own members are breaking the law and selling that copyrighted material."
If the movie studios who send out these copyrighted (copyrights that *they* own, not the MPAA) thought they were losing money because of this practice, they would stop sending them out. Remember these screeners are sent out after the movie has been out for a while (sometimes a *long* while). By the time these screeners are going out, most of the money to be made selling unauthorized copies has already been made (and almost all of the money that cuts into ticket sales). Some of these movies will already have been in distribution through Blockbuster. If an unauthorized duplicator wants a copy, he may be able to rent a DVD.
If ever there was evidence the MPAA is not doing any of this to protect the rights of copyright holders, this is it. Valenti is actually trying to quash one of the fundamental rights which has *always* applied to copyright owner: the right to copy and distribute their own work. Usually the MPAA attacks the long-established rights of the purchaser of copyrighted material, but now they have switched to attacking the most basic rights of the producers themselves.
Once again, Jack Valenti is exposed as a fraud of the highest order.
...The Colorado Center 9 is *not* listed in any of my resources (yellow pages, moviefone, etc) as the "Regal Cinema Colorado Colorado Center 9" but as the "United Artists Colorado Center 9."
Not that this should be a stumbling block for the true LOTR fan
Quite possibly the best multiplayer game ever designed. It did an outstanding job of reproducing the political intrigue that made the book interesting.
...they were internal dialogue and translations of sign-language codes. In other words the books had even more voice-overs than the movie. You just didn't notice them.
Any Dune movie that didn't have some way to represent the internal dialogue wouldn't be a Dune movie.
You're confusing the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department.
Actually, the CIA has sent a request to the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a part) that they look into a case where a journalist (Robert Novak) published a story in which he identified a woman as a CIA agent. The FBI has been asked to look into the matter. The journalist has said the source of his information was "two senior administration officials." If this is true, an important federal law against revealing the names of CIA agents has been broken. Since the person in question is reportedly a specialist in use of WMD by terrorist organizations, this would probably be the kind of thing the USA-PATRIOT act was intended to ferret out. And the kind of tactic being used against reporters who covered Adrian Lamo may well be appropriate against Novak (who may well turn out to be the only possible source, along with other journalists who were reported told the same thing, for the information).
Interestingly enough, in contrast to the FBI's enthusiasm in the Lamo case, the White House has been amazingly lackadaisical in the Novak case. Scott McClellan, the president's spokesperson, has said the president has not and doesn't intend to ask his aides if they were responsible for this leak. A more thorough examination of this matter is found at Josh Marshall's web site.
...actually happened at a company I worked at once.
We sold transcripts of TV shows, including the old "Phil Donahue" shows in the early '90s. There was a lady on the show who called herself "The Recipe Detective." She had a column in a small-town newspaper which was pretty popular there. She took famous foods and tried to figure out how they were made: Twinkies, Oreos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, things like that. Then she published her recipes so you could make them yourself. Donahue thought this would be popular on his show.
Oh, boy, and howdy.
The Recipe Detective made the same offer on the show that she did in her newspaper column: "Send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and I'll send you whichever recipe you want." This turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life. She got over a million replies. Just sending the envelopes back with an apology would have bankrupted her. So, the next time she was on the show she apologized to all the nice people who had written her and told them they could get the recipes and transcript by calling our company. And she gave our 800 number and address.
Thirty seconds later our phones began to ring.
We had two T-1s for our phone lines because the calls tended to come in spikes right after our number appeared on national television. (And you thought Voice Over Internet Protocol was a new thing.) The T-1s were maxed out within five seconds and stayed that way for a week. It turned out that not only had our own lines been overloaded, but our long-distance provider's cross-country fiber-optic lines had not had the capacity to carry that many calls. (Not that it mattered to our customers. A busy signal is a busy signal.)
Even the post office was slashdotted: The trays of mail (boy, did our delivery guy hate us!) filled up all the halls on one floor of our building.
We switched to MCI because they had special ways of dealing with these kinds of problems: They could put our overflow into a voice-mail service on which customers could leave a call-back number. If their cross-country capacity was exceeded they could take the calls in the every local region and store them in voice-mail there.
When Donahue reran the second Recipe Detective show, he gave us a heads-up it was coming. So we told MCI it was on its way. And we had extra people ready for the onslaught. It happened again, but we had all the special procedures in place. After 24 hours MCI called (we had set up a special line so they could get through). It seems their hard drives were almost full and could we please start listening to and removing our voice-mail messages? Well, not very easily since all our lines were still jammed with incoming calls (and MCI's voice-mail system was accessed by phone). So we hired people to work out of their own homes to listen to the voice-mail messages and compile gigantic lists of call-back numbers.
The impact has been getting better over time. The last time it happened only 90% of all life on the planet was wiped out. It used to be much worse. "Throw another log on the fire, Maude. Global warming's natural."
The term "natural" is as meaningless when used by global-warming deniers as it is when it's used by wacko left-wing vegans.
I respond to a possible troll who has been modded way up even though everything he posted is demonstrably wrong. I demolish each and every one of his arguments thoroughly and completely. I show how dependent his techniques are on French postmodernism. And I get modded down with three Overrated (-1)s and two Troll (-1)s.
...are so funny. They hate postmodernism (as I do, as well) yet they embrace its tactics. Look at these quotes:
That's your belief.
Ah, yes. The O'Reilly tactic: Spew unsupported statements like mad; when your opponent cites facts, respond by saying, "That's your opinion!"
What makes this particularly amusing is the fact that the post this poster was responding to actually agreed with his premise. Which makes the following unintentionally funny.
Scientific evidence to support that belief is not in evidence, however.
Since Arker is actually responding to a post which agrees with his position, this statement is actually one of the few truths in his diatribe. If one assumes he intended to attack some other view (as he does in the rest of his post), nothing could be further from the truth. There is plenty of evidence. That evidence has been well published (to such a degree that other post-modernist conservatives have argued the scientific journals are biased). One can legitimately argue as to whether the evidence is strong, overwhelming or definitive. If one wants to advocate a really weak case, one can argue it is balanced by evidence to the contrary. But to say it is "not in evidence" is a lie of absurdist proportions.
Despite politically motivated statements to the contrary by some politically funded researchers with obvious interest in spinning things that way, the evidence suggests instead that human action has little, if any, net affect on the global temperature average. Humans produce greenhouse gasses, yes. Humans also do things with the opposite effect.
Other humans have measured both and found it appears the greenhouse gas production is likely to overwhelm those "things with opposite effect." Those other humans then made predictions that the climate would be affected. Then they went out in the real world and tried to determine whether their predictions were being born out. They were, to the limited degree they were able to ascertain. They were challenged for not measuring as well as they could. Better measurements were funded. They continued to support the predictions. A president was elected who was strongly biased towards the challengers. He appointed a group of distinguished scientists to look into the question. He loaded the group with people biased towards the challengers. They reviewed the evidence and found it supported the predictions. The people who were misinterpreting the work of those scientists doing the challenging continued to misrepresent the conclusions.
One good volcanic eruption has a lot more effect than years of human activity.
Not really true, and completely irrelevant.
We're in an interglacial period. Icepacks are receding. Natural, normal, and on the whole a good thing for humans and most other species as well. Why people want to spin this as some kind of disaster is beyond me, excepting those with an obvious political motivation of course.
We are only in an interglacial period if it followed by an ice age. We don't know if the present period will be followed by an ice age or not. This is the kind of statement for which not only is there no "evidence in evidence" but no evidence is really possible. But, if we assume that this is an interglacial period, the rest of the paragraph is still riddled with fallacies:
Icepacks recede at the beginning of interglacial periods. Followed by a long period of relative homeostasis, during which glaciers stay about the same. Such periods are very good times to live. Times of rapid climatic change are not. Homeostasis is good, not rapid climatic change. This is not "spin." It is clear, well understood science. As well as common sense. The fact that this poster tries to equate interglacial periods (which are known to be "good" for life) with the rapid clim
...and then they state obvious truths which have no relevance to the subject under discussion.
No, global warming is simply something that happens... The earth gets warmer for a few millenia, then it gets colder for a few millenia.
And, of course, these changes have causes, which may or may not be related to the actions of various species on the planet at the time. Those species are more likely to survive the changes if they understand them and try to do something about them.
Rain happens. Snow happens. Earthquakes happen. Floods happen. The fact that they happen has no bearing on what we do about them. In fact, the fact that they happen is why we do something about them. We usually try to mitigate their impact on our lives at first ("Put on a hat, it's raining outside"). Then we try to figure out what's causing it. Then we try to find out if we can (or should) do something about it. Sometimes we find out there's little we can do about it (earthquakes are an example). Sometimes we figure out that doing something about them is a mistake (if we could stop the rain, it would probably be a bad idea). Sometimes we decide that, on balance, it's better to do something (we build storm sewers in our cities and flood-control projects on our rivers). Sometimes it is not easy to see whether or not we should do something (preventing the earthquakes we now experience might just make us more vulnerable to a really bad one). Some people think causing something makes one responsible for it ("Grog put rocks in river, make easy to cross; river get angry, wash away Grog's camp; Grog tell river he sorry, take away rocks"). But the imperative to do something comes not from the moral responsibility, but from the potential to do damage to our interests.
One thing is certain: Saying "shit happens" as an excuse for not doing anything is a good way to get killed in the next flood.
The only good thing about that is it decreases the number of morons in the gene pool.
...except, of course, it is intended as allegory for a much broader statement about human nature in the absence of government or authority. It is a eloquent restatement of Hobbes's "nasty, brutish and short" epigram. And very much a propaganda piece.
Whether it's right or not (and even the examples cited here given a less-than-definitive answer), I always assumed Heinlein's "Hole in the Sky" was intended as a reply to Golding. Heinlein has his band of lost children develop a successful society which fends off a truly dangerous indigenous life form. The funny part is when the media shows up and tries to portray them as having sunk back to the depths of primitivism. No more definitive than "Lord of the Flies," but what a riposte!
And Heinlein did a great job of extrapolating the journalism of his day to predict the media whores with which we are now beset.
Slashdot Mirror
...by content providers, perhaps more easily than things they published on the internet or on paper.
I worked for a company that provided large quantities of content to Lexis-Nexis for six years. They provide a method by which content can be removed by anyone who is providing it.
And my experience dealing with Lexis-Nexis as a company did not leave me with a good feeling about their concern for an accurate record.
...of the need for comic relief. And he put it in the books.
The primary delivery vehicle: hobbits, in particular Peregrin Took (Pippin). That all of the hobbits ultimately play a key role makes the choice of vehicle all the more delicious.
Sorry, on this one: Tolkien 1; Jackson/Rallion: 0
...on this one: Jackson completely changed the fundamental nature of Faramir, for no particularly good reason.
Faramir started out as the little brother who could never live up to the expectations of his father or the example of his brother. He sought solace by hiding in the library from activities where he could never hope to best his brother. Then, one day, a strange wizard showed up, almost demanding to see the archives there. (Jackson even showed this research, which wasn't actually depicted in the book, only described.)
Denethor was annoyed by Gandalf's "arrogance," but let him have access. Faramir spied on the wizard and when Gandalf was not there he tried to figure out what was being studied. He learned much about Isildur's Bane (although he never guessed it was a ring). He even saw that Isildur was much like his brother. This gave him the understanding of why Isildur fell, the ability to predict that his brother would be similarly weak when he encountered the ring, and *no* inclination whatever to try to take the ring from Frodo.
He even laughs when Samwise imprudently gives away the secret. He tells them he's already guessed what they've been hiding from him.
The virtue of the scholarly was at least as important to Tolkein as the virtue of the valorous. But he understood that some did not understand it and he made Denethor as tragic exemplar of that lack of understanding. When Denethor saw his son sneaking off to be with the wizard he mistrusted, jealousy added to the reasons Faramir prefered his older son. When he looked into the palantir, Sauron saw all these weaknesses and used them to bend his will. While Denethor thought he was beating Sauron (in the battle of wills enabled by the palantir) by choosing to try to use the ring against the Dark Lord, this was actually what Sauron wanted.
When Denethor finds out that Faramir had the ringbearers in his grasp and let them take it to Mordor, it is the lack of any inclination on the part of his son to have done otherwise that sends him into madness. The steward-regent's madness is crucial to the sense that mighty Gondor could fall quickly and easily before help can arrive.
Before the king can return.
Such a story may be that would have been boring to the audience. I don't think so. I thought the Yet Another Good Guy Tempted story was a cop-out. And ultimately boring. Evil has many ways of winning, and that's the real scary thing. Some people can resist from their childhood...and still evil finds a way to use their resistance to corrupt others. Evil that has depth and layers is hardly boring.
Maybe this makes me some kind Middle-Earth nerd to "hyperventilate" over this, but I think changing the fundamental nature of a key character when that nature itself was a key plot point is a mistake. This is what makes the difference between a great movie and a typical, compromised adaptation. "The Fellowship of the Ring" was (for me) a great movie. I had no problem with the changes because they didn't compromise the real meaning of the story. "The Two Towers" was a decent adaptation which I only saw once because it made unnecessary compromises with the nature of key characters (Faramir and the Ents being the most egregious).
...in a variety of ways, many them biased to greater or lesser degrees. It is true that catastrophic consequences increase the likelihood of funding. It is also true that catastrophic consequences increase the chances you'll get funding for a counter-study. This is a good thing. The reasons: catastrophic consequences are more important (both for society at large and for those who might be causing them).
While it is true that ego is a big motivator in science (anyone who has read anthing about Newton would know this), it is also true that search for truth and knowledge is the best way to achieve this (as Newton also demonstrates).
My rule of thumb is: If you see bias only on one side, you are perceiving your own bias, not the bias of the system. That's related to my sig as well.
...but if this paper turns out to be wrong Bjorn will be quoting this research long after it's been discredited.
That's his methodology.
...as a "no, I don't care."
The difference has gotten worse in the last five years because China has reduced its use of coal in that time frame. (Note that India has not achieved similar reductions.)
...is in Monday's New York Times.
Although it concentrates more on the free-speech issues of Diebold's cease-and-desist campaign, it is far more informative than the deeply flawed CNN piece.
...is the fact that he has managed to accomplish all Valdrax has suggested while still planning to cut the size of the military.
Bush got elected in large part by promising members of the military he was going to "do something about" the fact that he didn't think the U.S. fighting forces were still able to fight two wars at the same time (which has been American strategic doctrine for a long time). When Donald Rumsfeld finally got around to announcing what they were going to do about it (in early September 2001), I was flabbergasted: They decided to change the doctrine so that we would no longer try to be ready to fight two wars.
When 9/11 came and went, I was convinced their plan to shrink the military would go out the window. They certainly had the public support for national security and homeland defense. Their political base is all for it. But they recently announced they were going ahead with their plans despite the fact that their current operations in Iraq are facing manpower shortfalls as early as next March or April.
I just don't get it. All the shortcoming mentioned in the parent post could have been predicted from Bush's campaign. But I don't think anyone expected them to do all that AND shortchange the military as well.
...share Clinton's concern with the deficit is to ignore enormous amounts of evidence. In particular, it ignores the undeniable fact that Clinton put Gore in charge of the hard part of reducing the deficit: finding large amounts of government waste.
The "current crop" of Democratic presidential candidates includes a general well known for improving military performance while cutting costs and a governor who balanced budgets under difficult circumstances. The rest of that crop (including one that has recently dropped out) ALL voted for a number of extremely effective deficit-reduction measures (including some which got NO Republican votes whatsoever).
As far as I can see, your use of the phrase "as far as I can see" translates as "while I am desperately trying to ignore all available evidence."
...is the one you're riding.
The poster isn't complaining about the price of Maya Complete. He's not even complaining that they offer a Personal Learning Edition. He's saying that a "free for non-commercial use" version would not be a bad thing. Maybe he's right. Maybe the Alias lawyer who nixed it is right.
Your point about buying a single copy of the commercial license for a whole studio full of "personal learners" is a good one, but you obfuscate it by claiming the parent poster said things he (or she) did not say. But a carefully worded license for each version would take care of any personal-learner shops that cropped up. And I don't think it would be hard to spot a shop with 1 license, 40 artists, and an explosion of art. It would be roughly on a par with looking for a shop that does multiple installs from a single license.
It would be an interesting question whether allowing a shop with 20-40 artists to work with Maya PLE until the company was ready to render for publishing would produce more sales or less. Some companies would probably say, "We've got millions invested in this art, why worry about the measly cost of 40 licenses?" while others might say, "We're behind budget here, can't one license do everything we want?" Whichever side predominated, it wouldn't be hard for Alias to tell which was which.
...to recommend Parrot for purposes other than what its designers say it will be good for.
.NET bytecode) at OSCON 2003. He said, "Yes, Parrot will run .NET bytecode," but emphasized that it would not run it at a speed which would make it competitive with the CLR. If it was competitive, it might be a big threat to Microsoft (since MS has had trouble getting the CLR to handle dynamic languages). But Dan was very specific about being convinced Parrot's .NET capabilities would not be any kind of threat to the CLR.
I asked Dan Sugalski about precisely this prospect (using Parrot to run
It will be interesting to see how fast it runs compared to Mono.
...of a Microsoft Apologist Apologizing for Microsoft on the monoculture reports, check out this 3-part series:
Part I: Wherein the author proves he doesn't know the difference between an API and the OS which implements it He also manages to confuse integration with breaking encapsulation and argues that integration is acheived by eliminating modular programming. He also resorts to the traditional monopolists' excuse that the economics of scale trumps competition, imagining that Adam Smith would actually support this excuse.
Part II: Wherein the author proves that he has failed to notice the CCIA convinced a judge he was wrong about Microsoft's status as a monopoly. Then he goes on to lie about the accessibility of MS's APIs.
Part III: Wherein the author argues that 15-years-out-of-date MS technology is "cutting edge" while ignoring the fact that IE is still not standards compliant with a standard which he says evolves too slowly to to up with that "cutting edge."
The author of these diatribes (John Carroll) managed to convince me he was so clueless about the fundamentals of programming (compare Microsoft Press's own "Code Complete" with the "facts" in these stories to see how far off base he is) that I am sure I would never hire his consulting firm, Turtleneck Software, for anything.
The issues raised by the CCIA report deserve hard scrutiny. But that scrutiny must be based on facts. And on what the monoculture report actually said. Diversity of API is bad, and the report acknowledges this by arguing for strong international standards. Diversity of implementation is good, and the report makes a strong case for this.
Carroll lies to his readers by claiming the report favors diversity of API. He then compounds this inaccuracy by claiming Microsoft has achieved its monocultural monopoly by promoting a single API that has become a public standard. In fact, they achieved it by constantly changing the API, hiding it from their competitors, and forcing those who wrote competing products for their platform to write to a different API, which itself changed when it was convenient for MS (i.e., inconvenient for their competitors).
This level of dishonesty should get Carroll fired at ZDNet, but it probably won't.
And we still don't have a good, rigorous criticism of the CCIA's report. A criticism we desperately need.
..."We are going to ban movie studios from sending out copies of their own copyrighted material to our members because we believe that some of our own members are breaking the law and selling that copyrighted material."
If the movie studios who send out these copyrighted (copyrights that *they* own, not the MPAA) thought they were losing money because of this practice, they would stop sending them out. Remember these screeners are sent out after the movie has been out for a while (sometimes a *long* while). By the time these screeners are going out, most of the money to be made selling unauthorized copies has already been made (and almost all of the money that cuts into ticket sales). Some of these movies will already have been in distribution through Blockbuster. If an unauthorized duplicator wants a copy, he may be able to rent a DVD.
If ever there was evidence the MPAA is not doing any of this to protect the rights of copyright holders, this is it. Valenti is actually trying to quash one of the fundamental rights which has *always* applied to copyright owner: the right to copy and distribute their own work. Usually the MPAA attacks the long-established rights of the purchaser of copyrighted material, but now they have switched to attacking the most basic rights of the producers themselves.
Once again, Jack Valenti is exposed as a fraud of the highest order.
"...brings a lawsuit that points out to all our customers that that my company hasn't got a clue about security."
...The Colorado Center 9 is *not* listed in any of my resources (yellow pages, moviefone, etc) as the "Regal Cinema Colorado Colorado Center 9" but as the "United Artists Colorado Center 9."
Not that this should be a stumbling block for the true LOTR fan
...will ever matter: Eon's multiplayer board game.
Quite possibly the best multiplayer game ever designed. It did an outstanding job of reproducing the political intrigue that made the book interesting.
...they were internal dialogue and translations of sign-language codes. In other words the books had even more voice-overs than the movie. You just didn't notice them.
Any Dune movie that didn't have some way to represent the internal dialogue wouldn't be a Dune movie.
...find out which accounts on filesharing systems are really RIAA spies, we could frame them for sharing illegal files.
...I don't think so.
Actually, the CIA has sent a request to the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a part) that they look into a case where a journalist (Robert Novak) published a story in which he identified a woman as a CIA agent. The FBI has been asked to look into the matter. The journalist has said the source of his information was "two senior administration officials." If this is true, an important federal law against revealing the names of CIA agents has been broken. Since the person in question is reportedly a specialist in use of WMD by terrorist organizations, this would probably be the kind of thing the USA-PATRIOT act was intended to ferret out. And the kind of tactic being used against reporters who covered Adrian Lamo may well be appropriate against Novak (who may well turn out to be the only possible source, along with other journalists who were reported told the same thing, for the information).
Interestingly enough, in contrast to the FBI's enthusiasm in the Lamo case, the White House has been amazingly lackadaisical in the Novak case. Scott McClellan, the president's spokesperson, has said the president has not and doesn't intend to ask his aides if they were responsible for this leak. A more thorough examination of this matter is found at Josh Marshall's web site.
...actually happened at a company I worked at once.
We sold transcripts of TV shows, including the old "Phil Donahue" shows in the early '90s. There was a lady on the show who called herself "The Recipe Detective." She had a column in a small-town newspaper which was pretty popular there. She took famous foods and tried to figure out how they were made: Twinkies, Oreos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, things like that. Then she published her recipes so you could make them yourself. Donahue thought this would be popular on his show.
Oh, boy, and howdy.
The Recipe Detective made the same offer on the show that she did in her newspaper column: "Send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and I'll send you whichever recipe you want." This turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life. She got over a million replies. Just sending the envelopes back with an apology would have bankrupted her. So, the next time she was on the show she apologized to all the nice people who had written her and told them they could get the recipes and transcript by calling our company. And she gave our 800 number and address.
Thirty seconds later our phones began to ring.
We had two T-1s for our phone lines because the calls tended to come in spikes right after our number appeared on national television. (And you thought Voice Over Internet Protocol was a new thing.) The T-1s were maxed out within five seconds and stayed that way for a week. It turned out that not only had our own lines been overloaded, but our long-distance provider's cross-country fiber-optic lines had not had the capacity to carry that many calls. (Not that it mattered to our customers. A busy signal is a busy signal.)
Even the post office was slashdotted: The trays of mail (boy, did our delivery guy hate us!) filled up all the halls on one floor of our building.
We switched to MCI because they had special ways of dealing with these kinds of problems: They could put our overflow into a voice-mail service on which customers could leave a call-back number. If their cross-country capacity was exceeded they could take the calls in the every local region and store them in voice-mail there.
When Donahue reran the second Recipe Detective show, he gave us a heads-up it was coming. So we told MCI it was on its way. And we had extra people ready for the onslaught. It happened again, but we had all the special procedures in place. After 24 hours MCI called (we had set up a special line so they could get through). It seems their hard drives were almost full and could we please start listening to and removing our voice-mail messages? Well, not very easily since all our lines were still jammed with incoming calls (and MCI's voice-mail system was accessed by phone). So we hired people to work out of their own homes to listen to the voice-mail messages and compile gigantic lists of call-back numbers.
...on life on earth has been devastating.
Point, set, match.
The impact has been getting better over time. The last time it happened only 90% of all life on the planet was wiped out. It used to be much worse. "Throw another log on the fire, Maude. Global warming's natural."
The term "natural" is as meaningless when used by global-warming deniers as it is when it's used by wacko left-wing vegans.
...this is getting hysterical!
I respond to a possible troll who has been modded way up even though everything he posted is demonstrably wrong. I demolish each and every one of his arguments thoroughly and completely. I show how dependent his techniques are on French postmodernism. And I get modded down with three Overrated (-1)s and two Troll (-1)s.
These guys are too funny for words.
I'm going to compare Rush and Derrida more often.
...are so funny. They hate postmodernism (as I do, as well) yet they embrace its tactics. Look at these quotes:
Ah, yes. The O'Reilly tactic: Spew unsupported statements like mad; when your opponent cites facts, respond by saying, "That's your opinion!"
What makes this particularly amusing is the fact that the post this poster was responding to actually agreed with his premise. Which makes the following unintentionally funny.
Since Arker is actually responding to a post which agrees with his position, this statement is actually one of the few truths in his diatribe. If one assumes he intended to attack some other view (as he does in the rest of his post), nothing could be further from the truth. There is plenty of evidence. That evidence has been well published (to such a degree that other post-modernist conservatives have argued the scientific journals are biased). One can legitimately argue as to whether the evidence is strong, overwhelming or definitive. If one wants to advocate a really weak case, one can argue it is balanced by evidence to the contrary. But to say it is "not in evidence" is a lie of absurdist proportions.
Other humans have measured both and found it appears the greenhouse gas production is likely to overwhelm those "things with opposite effect." Those other humans then made predictions that the climate would be affected. Then they went out in the real world and tried to determine whether their predictions were being born out. They were, to the limited degree they were able to ascertain. They were challenged for not measuring as well as they could. Better measurements were funded. They continued to support the predictions. A president was elected who was strongly biased towards the challengers. He appointed a group of distinguished scientists to look into the question. He loaded the group with people biased towards the challengers. They reviewed the evidence and found it supported the predictions. The people who were misinterpreting the work of those scientists doing the challenging continued to misrepresent the conclusions.
Not really true, and completely irrelevant.
We are only in an interglacial period if it followed by an ice age. We don't know if the present period will be followed by an ice age or not. This is the kind of statement for which not only is there no "evidence in evidence" but no evidence is really possible. But, if we assume that this is an interglacial period, the rest of the paragraph is still riddled with fallacies:
Icepacks recede at the beginning of interglacial periods. Followed by a long period of relative homeostasis, during which glaciers stay about the same. Such periods are very good times to live. Times of rapid climatic change are not. Homeostasis is good, not rapid climatic change. This is not "spin." It is clear, well understood science. As well as common sense. The fact that this poster tries to equate interglacial periods (which are known to be "good" for life) with the rapid clim
...and then they state obvious truths which have no relevance to the subject under discussion.
And, of course, these changes have causes, which may or may not be related to the actions of various species on the planet at the time. Those species are more likely to survive the changes if they understand them and try to do something about them.
Rain happens. Snow happens. Earthquakes happen. Floods happen. The fact that they happen has no bearing on what we do about them. In fact, the fact that they happen is why we do something about them. We usually try to mitigate their impact on our lives at first ("Put on a hat, it's raining outside"). Then we try to figure out what's causing it. Then we try to find out if we can (or should) do something about it. Sometimes we find out there's little we can do about it (earthquakes are an example). Sometimes we figure out that doing something about them is a mistake (if we could stop the rain, it would probably be a bad idea). Sometimes we decide that, on balance, it's better to do something (we build storm sewers in our cities and flood-control projects on our rivers). Sometimes it is not easy to see whether or not we should do something (preventing the earthquakes we now experience might just make us more vulnerable to a really bad one). Some people think causing something makes one responsible for it ("Grog put rocks in river, make easy to cross; river get angry, wash away Grog's camp; Grog tell river he sorry, take away rocks"). But the imperative to do something comes not from the moral responsibility, but from the potential to do damage to our interests.
One thing is certain: Saying "shit happens" as an excuse for not doing anything is a good way to get killed in the next flood.
The only good thing about that is it decreases the number of morons in the gene pool.
...except, of course, it is intended as allegory for a much broader statement about human nature in the absence of government or authority. It is a eloquent restatement of Hobbes's "nasty, brutish and short" epigram. And very much a propaganda piece.
Whether it's right or not (and even the examples cited here given a less-than-definitive answer), I always assumed Heinlein's "Hole in the Sky" was intended as a reply to Golding. Heinlein has his band of lost children develop a successful society which fends off a truly dangerous indigenous life form. The funny part is when the media shows up and tries to portray them as having sunk back to the depths of primitivism. No more definitive than "Lord of the Flies," but what a riposte!
And Heinlein did a great job of extrapolating the journalism of his day to predict the media whores with which we are now beset.