Willow was shown kissing Tara in 5x16, "The Body". It was a big episode for other reasons; Joss had said that he didn't want it to be a big "OMFG LESBO KISS EPISODE", and so he made it incidental. So that was probably a good idea on his part.
Now, Willow was shown in bed and implicitly naked with Tara, with the implication that exciting action had been going on, in 6x19, "Seeing Red". When Tara finally did get dressed, she got shot by Warren, because lesbians are only okay if they're implicit (floating magical orbs and whatnot, not naked girls under the sheets). Joss thus honked off the lesbian Buffy fan club, who have gone off and formed their own alternate universe in protest. His attempts to break ground by showing the first lesbian sex on network TV. Of course, this was done two episodes before the series finale, in 7x20, "Touched", when he didn't have to worry about getting renewed. Season seven was a mess, anyway.
by a guy who make a witch turn lesbian in another show with declining ratings.
No, no. When the ratings started to decline, he had one lesbian die, so she was the dead lesbian, and then the other lesbian turned evil, so she was the evil lesbian. This is called the dead and evil lesbian cliche, and I assure you that Joss wasn't the first one to do it. Hell, they even had it on Babylon 5.
Hmm. Good point. Know where I can find some statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy? Any ideas for other ways of measuring whether or not things have gotten worse for the very, very poor?
No, seriously. There's a lot of people looking down their noses at SF readers, claiming it's not literary, and I just don't have a good idea of what literary means. Is Shakespeare literary? It was popular in its day. Is Watchmen or Cerebus literary? They both have extraordinary depth, complex self-reference and cultural reference.
Is it that "eternal human verities" crap that literary people seem to love so much, where people are doomed to make the same sort of stupid mistakes over and over again? 'Cause that's pretty much anti-SF, but in that case, who wants to be literary?
(the only things sci-fi in it are the formacs/buggers, FTL travel and the ansible. Everything else is pretty much ~50 years into the future technology.)
Huh? What is it if it's not more than fifty years in the future? So Vernor Vinge's upcoming Rainbows End isn't SF? Explain this fascinating new system of classification, please.
Oh, but you haven't seen any old-school Westerns, have you? All that talk about the girl kidnapped by the Injuns "going native"? Yeah, that's code for having sex with one of them, and thus, I dunno, being tainted or something.
Firefly is indeed a Western. It's got the confederacy, the frontier and the savages. But just like the Independents weren't fighting to preserve a way of life that intimately depended on slavery, the Reavers aren't the hapless natives decimated by those wacky "trick" smallpox blankets.
So, no, the Reavers don't resemble actual Apaches. But then again, neither did those dreadful Hollywood Injuns.
The first time I read it, I was in middle school or early high school, and thought it was the best damn thing I ever read. I reread it late in college, and couldn't shake the feeling that something about it was very, very wrong---but I didn't really know what it was until I read that article, along with "Sympathy for the Superman". It's an astonishingly well-constructed fanwank, playing to the infantile fantasies that people like us eventually grow out of. (Taking over the world by talking smack on Slashdot? Saving the world through gaming prowess? Killing endless waves of slavering bullies jealous of his ubermenschen nature because he's just that superior?)
Err, to clarify a bit, TEI is a source format which can automatically generate PDF, TXT (in various encodings), HTML and so forth. If a text has been released as TEI, then it will almost certainly be available in all of those formats.
Did anyone else notice that they have a street map of Japan now? It's all in Japanese only, though, which is less useful. Does anyone know what the triangle thingies mean? Mountains, I'd kinda guess.
like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
Y'know, that's a really damn good idea. I'll make a note of that.
Thanks to a strong possibility that Australia will adopt Life+50, PG Australia's works may have to be moved to New Zealand or Canada. Hence PG Canada. (Though the site design is currently horrible. What's wrong with adapting gutenberg.org or pge.rastko.net? gutenberg.org.au made this same mistake and I'll never understand it.)
Of course, you know that whoever inherited A.A. Milne's estate will be fighting tooth and nail to get Canada to up their terms prior to January 1, 2007, when Winnie the Pooh will enter the public domain. (Same for C.S. Lewis and January 1, 2013, and J.R.R. Tolkien and January 1, 2023.)
I remember seeing some of Dudeney's puzzles referred to before, but I couldn't remember where. Then the book popped up on my RSS feed (it was released within the last month, I think), and indeed, it was full of fun math puzzles. Man, that was nice.
But they don't just have HTML; see various examples of files released with filetype "TEI", including PDF (through LaTeX), TXT (in a variety of encodings, i.e. Latin-1, US-ASCII and UTF-8) and HTML.
Assuming the work was written only by American citizens:
Actually, if no one renewed the copyright (renewal became automatic for works published in 1964 or later), it may be public domain. Read the new and improved Rule 6 HOWTO that the fine folks at Project Gutenberg have put together. You can put together a reasonable case that copyright was not renewed, and heck, maybe you could get PG to pick up the book.
Or you could move to Canada and wait until January 1, 2013, when the author's work will enter the public domain there. (Life+50, and all.)
Out of curiosity, what was the book and the author?
Project Gutenberg does proofreading and postproduction, which requires a lot more human eyeballs than scanning a lot of pages. While this archive may be tremendously useful to PG by providing raw material, it's not a duplication of effort.
Project Gutenberg does a lot more than scan books. (Actually, they frequently don't actually scan the books themselves; projects like the Million Book Project do that.) The value that PG provides is in the proofreading and formatting of their eBooks. That said, any massive scanning project which provides page images for PG to pick up is quite a good thing.
Indeed. It's bothered me for some time now that it takes a good deal of doing to make a nice LaTeX edition of the book, so that it's nontrivial to go from the eBook to a really high-quality printed page.
Luckily, someone's decided to do something about it. See PGTEI, a very verbose and flexible method for marking up literary works. The full TEI spec is gargantuan, so PGTEI is actually a dialect of a subset called TEI Lite. It's an XML markup scheme which has output filters (it uses XSLT, it seems) for plain vanilla TXT (for longetivity, and on general principle), HTML and PDF. (Probably some others as well.)
Post-processors are very set in their ways, but as I've recently joined their ranks, I hope to use PGTEI for my first post-production job. It certainly seems more elegant than generating and tweaking multiple formats by hand.
Project Gutenberg doesn't just scan books. Actually, they take a lot of their scans from outside sources, like the Internet Archive's Million Book Project. The work that PG does is largely in proofreading and essentially re-typesetting the book. The output of Yahoo!'s work here will be scads of page images, maybe with dicey OCR. The output of PG's work are plaintext (and sometimes HTML) ebooks.
As a fan of Project Gutenberg, I look forward to more page images being made available, since it means more high-quality eBook scans to choose from when picking a project.
I wonder if they'll be hosting anything in Canada, where the copyrights are only Life+50, instead of Life+70 (Europe) or worse (USA). Last I knew, someone was trying to start up PG Canada...
Huh? Where are you from? I worked at a research library at a large state university, and I have no idea what you're talking about. True, libraries pay extortionate rates for journal subscriptions, but when they purchase monographs, they frequently get them off the used book market, just like you or I would. It costs them extra to get it bound in a durable fashion, and to enter it into their Byzantine catalog system, but I've never, ever heard of libraries having to pay extra for books simply because they were libraries.
Also, ongoing royalties? What country does that happen in? I've never heard of such a thing.
Historically low interest rates coupled with bankruptcy "reform". Also, the popularity of new and exciting financial instruments like balloon mortgages and interest-only mortgages, which allow people to live way beyond their means. They get loans to do this because their creditors know that, thanks to changes in bankruptcy law, they'll get the money, even if they have to garnish it for the rest of the sucker's natural life.
(Did You Know that "mortgage" literally means "death pledge"? Fun!)
The biggest problem I see here in Atlanta is people afraid of "looking like their poor."
Damn skippy. Breaking down my expenses into durable and ephemeral was like switching on a lightbulb. (And just as soon as I get a new HD to replace the fried one in my Linux box, I'll have GnuCash graphs to motivate me as well. I hope.) I wanted to grow my bookshelf, so I budgeted for it, and cut the entertainment budget by that amount. A few months later, I have a well-stocked bookshelf and catch the local matinee ($5) instead of the Shiny! New! evening showing ($9.75 plus a considerable drive). Folks at work wonder why I bring leftovers from last night's dinner instead of buying from the cafe at work.
People spend a hell of a lot more than they think they do, really.
Shit, neither do mine, and my "electronics" set is a computer which you could buy now for under $200 (add another $250 for a refurb'd 19" LCD) with either MPlayer or Media Player Classic.
Some things do have a high barrier to entry. But at least the complexity for moving or dealing with information is in software instead of hardware. All users are (vaguely) equal.
Psst. The very, very rich are not like you or me. Their mythology states that they're just regular folks who worked hard and made good, but it ain't so. The oligarchy that is the very, very rich is different. Do some reading. And note that while pretty much everyone's real income doubled between 1947 and 1979, the bottom-income quintile's went up by only three percent between 1979 and 2001.
It's true, we've constructed a previously unknown sort of society, with such grand experiments as the GI Bill, enabling upward mobility, a rising tide lifting all boats, etc. But it's not stable. Don't assume it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I concur with everyone else here. We should be so lucky as to get realfacts along with our goodfacts...
Willow was shown kissing Tara in 5x16, "The Body". It was a big episode for other reasons; Joss had said that he didn't want it to be a big "OMFG LESBO KISS EPISODE", and so he made it incidental. So that was probably a good idea on his part.
Now, Willow was shown in bed and implicitly naked with Tara, with the implication that exciting action had been going on, in 6x19, "Seeing Red". When Tara finally did get dressed, she got shot by Warren, because lesbians are only okay if they're implicit (floating magical orbs and whatnot, not naked girls under the sheets). Joss thus honked off the lesbian Buffy fan club, who have gone off and formed their own alternate universe in protest. His attempts to break ground by showing the first lesbian sex on network TV. Of course, this was done two episodes before the series finale, in 7x20, "Touched", when he didn't have to worry about getting renewed. Season seven was a mess, anyway.
by a guy who make a witch turn lesbian in another show with declining ratings.
No, no. When the ratings started to decline, he had one lesbian die, so she was the dead lesbian, and then the other lesbian turned evil, so she was the evil lesbian. This is called the dead and evil lesbian cliche, and I assure you that Joss wasn't the first one to do it. Hell, they even had it on Babylon 5.
But dicks also fuck assholes.
Hmm. Good point. Know where I can find some statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy? Any ideas for other ways of measuring whether or not things have gotten worse for the very, very poor?
What does literary mean?
No, seriously. There's a lot of people looking down their noses at SF readers, claiming it's not literary, and I just don't have a good idea of what literary means. Is Shakespeare literary? It was popular in its day. Is Watchmen or Cerebus literary? They both have extraordinary depth, complex self-reference and cultural reference.
Is it that "eternal human verities" crap that literary people seem to love so much, where people are doomed to make the same sort of stupid mistakes over and over again? 'Cause that's pretty much anti-SF, but in that case, who wants to be literary?
(the only things sci-fi in it are the formacs/buggers, FTL travel and the ansible. Everything else is pretty much ~50 years into the future technology.)
Huh? What is it if it's not more than fifty years in the future? So Vernor Vinge's upcoming Rainbows End isn't SF? Explain this fascinating new system of classification, please.
Oh, but you haven't seen any old-school Westerns, have you? All that talk about the girl kidnapped by the Injuns "going native"? Yeah, that's code for having sex with one of them, and thus, I dunno, being tainted or something.
Firefly is indeed a Western. It's got the confederacy, the frontier and the savages. But just like the Independents weren't fighting to preserve a way of life that intimately depended on slavery, the Reavers aren't the hapless natives decimated by those wacky "trick" smallpox blankets.
So, no, the Reavers don't resemble actual Apaches. But then again, neither did those dreadful Hollywood Injuns.
The first time I read it, I was in middle school or early high school, and thought it was the best damn thing I ever read. I reread it late in college, and couldn't shake the feeling that something about it was very, very wrong---but I didn't really know what it was until I read that article, along with "Sympathy for the Superman". It's an astonishingly well-constructed fanwank, playing to the infantile fantasies that people like us eventually grow out of. (Taking over the world by talking smack on Slashdot? Saving the world through gaming prowess? Killing endless waves of slavering bullies jealous of his ubermenschen nature because he's just that superior?)
Err, to clarify a bit, TEI is a source format which can automatically generate PDF, TXT (in various encodings), HTML and so forth. If a text has been released as TEI, then it will almost certainly be available in all of those formats.
Did anyone else notice that they have a street map of Japan now? It's all in Japanese only, though, which is less useful. Does anyone know what the triangle thingies mean? Mountains, I'd kinda guess.
They have building outlines, too, which is pretty darn nifty.
like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
Y'know, that's a really damn good idea. I'll make a note of that.
Thanks to a strong possibility that Australia will adopt Life+50, PG Australia's works may have to be moved to New Zealand or Canada. Hence PG Canada. (Though the site design is currently horrible. What's wrong with adapting gutenberg.org or pge.rastko.net? gutenberg.org.au made this same mistake and I'll never understand it.)
Of course, you know that whoever inherited A.A. Milne's estate will be fighting tooth and nail to get Canada to up their terms prior to January 1, 2007, when Winnie the Pooh will enter the public domain. (Same for C.S. Lewis and January 1, 2013, and J.R.R. Tolkien and January 1, 2023.)
It's more like the Million Books project. Project Gutenberg does a lot more than just scan the books; they proofread and post-produce them.
I remember seeing some of Dudeney's puzzles referred to before, but I couldn't remember where. Then the book popped up on my RSS feed (it was released within the last month, I think), and indeed, it was full of fun math puzzles. Man, that was nice.
But they don't just have HTML; see various examples of files released with filetype "TEI", including PDF (through LaTeX), TXT (in a variety of encodings, i.e. Latin-1, US-ASCII and UTF-8) and HTML.
Assuming the work was written only by American citizens:
Actually, if no one renewed the copyright (renewal became automatic for works published in 1964 or later), it may be public domain. Read the new and improved Rule 6 HOWTO that the fine folks at Project Gutenberg have put together. You can put together a reasonable case that copyright was not renewed, and heck, maybe you could get PG to pick up the book.
Or you could move to Canada and wait until January 1, 2013, when the author's work will enter the public domain there. (Life+50, and all.)
Out of curiosity, what was the book and the author?
Project Gutenberg does proofreading and postproduction, which requires a lot more human eyeballs than scanning a lot of pages. While this archive may be tremendously useful to PG by providing raw material, it's not a duplication of effort.
Project Gutenberg does a lot more than scan books. (Actually, they frequently don't actually scan the books themselves; projects like the Million Book Project do that.) The value that PG provides is in the proofreading and formatting of their eBooks. That said, any massive scanning project which provides page images for PG to pick up is quite a good thing.
Indeed. It's bothered me for some time now that it takes a good deal of doing to make a nice LaTeX edition of the book, so that it's nontrivial to go from the eBook to a really high-quality printed page.
Luckily, someone's decided to do something about it. See PGTEI, a very verbose and flexible method for marking up literary works. The full TEI spec is gargantuan, so PGTEI is actually a dialect of a subset called TEI Lite. It's an XML markup scheme which has output filters (it uses XSLT, it seems) for plain vanilla TXT (for longetivity, and on general principle), HTML and PDF. (Probably some others as well.)
You can try it out yourself. Grab some examples, and run them through the online tools.
Post-processors are very set in their ways, but as I've recently joined their ranks, I hope to use PGTEI for my first post-production job. It certainly seems more elegant than generating and tweaking multiple formats by hand.
Project Gutenberg doesn't just scan books. Actually, they take a lot of their scans from outside sources, like the Internet Archive's Million Book Project. The work that PG does is largely in proofreading and essentially re-typesetting the book. The output of Yahoo!'s work here will be scads of page images, maybe with dicey OCR. The output of PG's work are plaintext (and sometimes HTML) ebooks.
As a fan of Project Gutenberg, I look forward to more page images being made available, since it means more high-quality eBook scans to choose from when picking a project.
I wonder if they'll be hosting anything in Canada, where the copyrights are only Life+50, instead of Life+70 (Europe) or worse (USA). Last I knew, someone was trying to start up PG Canada...
Huh? Where are you from? I worked at a research library at a large state university, and I have no idea what you're talking about. True, libraries pay extortionate rates for journal subscriptions, but when they purchase monographs, they frequently get them off the used book market, just like you or I would. It costs them extra to get it bound in a durable fashion, and to enter it into their Byzantine catalog system, but I've never, ever heard of libraries having to pay extra for books simply because they were libraries.
Also, ongoing royalties? What country does that happen in? I've never heard of such a thing.
Historically low interest rates coupled with bankruptcy "reform". Also, the popularity of new and exciting financial instruments like balloon mortgages and interest-only mortgages, which allow people to live way beyond their means. They get loans to do this because their creditors know that, thanks to changes in bankruptcy law, they'll get the money, even if they have to garnish it for the rest of the sucker's natural life.
(Did You Know that "mortgage" literally means "death pledge"? Fun!)
The biggest problem I see here in Atlanta is people afraid of "looking like their poor."
Damn skippy. Breaking down my expenses into durable and ephemeral was like switching on a lightbulb. (And just as soon as I get a new HD to replace the fried one in my Linux box, I'll have GnuCash graphs to motivate me as well. I hope.) I wanted to grow my bookshelf, so I budgeted for it, and cut the entertainment budget by that amount. A few months later, I have a well-stocked bookshelf and catch the local matinee ($5) instead of the Shiny! New! evening showing ($9.75 plus a considerable drive). Folks at work wonder why I bring leftovers from last night's dinner instead of buying from the cafe at work.
People spend a hell of a lot more than they think they do, really.
His electronics don't listen to macrovision
Shit, neither do mine, and my "electronics" set is a computer which you could buy now for under $200 (add another $250 for a refurb'd 19" LCD) with either MPlayer or Media Player Classic.
Some things do have a high barrier to entry. But at least the complexity for moving or dealing with information is in software instead of hardware. All users are (vaguely) equal.
Psst. The very, very rich are not like you or me. Their mythology states that they're just regular folks who worked hard and made good, but it ain't so. The oligarchy that is the very, very rich is different. Do some reading. And note that while pretty much everyone's real income doubled between 1947 and 1979, the bottom-income quintile's went up by only three percent between 1979 and 2001.
It's true, we've constructed a previously unknown sort of society, with such grand experiments as the GI Bill, enabling upward mobility, a rising tide lifting all boats, etc. But it's not stable. Don't assume it is.