The BBC already made all of these books into VERY HORRIBLE AWFUL made for TV movies. If you thought they butched HHGTTG, wait til you see this! PLEASE, JUST LEAVE BOOKS ALONE! *cries*
Ah, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum the moribund Marshwiggle was alone worth the price of admission!
You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?
In our time, the shoebox of old letters has been replaced with email archives. I keep significant emails indefinitely, as they are the closest thing I have to a chronicle of my life (at least for recent years). The personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and T.S. Eliot are of great significance to historians and literary critics. Furthermore, I would love for my great-grandchildren to be able to read through their great-grandparents' online courtship. Same with people's personal blogs, livejournals and the like, which have replaced our forebears' bound diaries that many of us read with great interest when we find them. It would be a shame for such detailed records of our lives to be kept, then lost.
Milgram's study became the center of the first real discussions about the ethical responsibilities of psychological researchers with regard to their subjects (some of the subjects suffered from long term traumatic episodes due to thir participation). It led to the ethical codes of conduct followed today.
Ironically, this experiment would not be allowed to be performed today for the same reasons we would forbid the Nazi hypothermia experiments (an example of the behavior Milgram's study was investigating).
All this is true. However, in Milgram's defense, he was quite thorough in providing follow-up meetings with his subjects to debrief, and I think even offered psychotherapy if people needed it. Subjects often reported being shaken but wiser after the experiments, and were glad they had participated.
It is probably a good thing that today's ethical standards don't allow scientists to manipulate people like Milgram did. However, I can't help being glad he performed the experiments. He taught us stuff we need to know. Situational ethics? I don't know. I think it's more like, although it would be dangerous to let any psych*ist use Milgram's tactics, he himself had a legitimately urgent message and seems to have conducted the research in an ethical way. And have I mentioned that we really need educating in the dangers of too much obedience?
The test was called Milgrim's 37. Peter Gabriel wrote a really creepy song about it called "We do what we're told". There were 37 buttons of "increasing pain" (higher voltage) applied to a test subject. Actually the subjects were actors, simulating greater pain as higher numbers were pushed. The actual subjects were the button-pushers who actually thought they were shocking people. They did as they were told, and applied what they thought were horifically painful shocks to random people they didn't know because they could get away with it.
It's worse than that. The actor in the next room gave a scripted set of grunts giving way to bloodcurdling screams, as the test subjects (instructed by the white-coated scientist) pressed buttons to apply increasing levels of "voltage" to the victim/actor. After a certain high level of pretend voltage, the screams stopped and the actor fell silent. Often the test subjects were in hysterical tears as they obediently applied the shocks -- understandably, for as far as they knew they could have just killed a person. Stanley Milgram repeated this obedience experiment many times with many variables altered (like for example, changing the setting from Yale to a no-name office in New Haven) and found that, with a remarkable consistency, 65% of subjects did *everything* the professor told them to, giving the full "shock" and possibly "killing" the "victim."
This study was publicized in the wake of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which US soldiers, under (erroneously interpreted) orders, slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. However, Milgram's study had been planned years earlier in response to the Holocaust, to answer the question of how so many respectable people could participate in such a massive systematic crime. Milgram's disturbing conclusion was that, more likely than not, *you could have been a gas chamber operator*. In other words, most people will follow a credible authority figure straight to hell.
One cannot write a story about what people in the big city think while living in Eye Socket, Montana. Yes, land is cheap there, but only because nobody else wants it.
I'd pay money to read good articles, to the standards of Salon, about life in Eye Socket, MT. Salon has done a great job chronicling life among the hip in SF and NY, but this insularity is a liability. Regardless of whether they keep their office space, decentralizing operations just might do them some good and help attract new readers.
Score one for us Latter-day Saints. Now if only the comments would last five minutes without obligatory mentions of polygamy, jello, large families, missionaries or cults, we'd have it made.
A limerick by Edward Abbey:
An LDS bishop named Bundy
Used to wed a new bride every Sunday. His multiple matehood Was ended by statehood. Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)
Hey, now *that* would be some public park system. But how would we high-speed-train-riding megolopolitans *get* to the 2500 miles of parks? With that kind of density, personal vehicle ownership would be prohibitively expensive. The only hope would be if something like Zipcar became universal and reasonably priced.
Used to refer to the Unix operating system... in writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly (TM) typography.... Ironically, lawyers now say that the requirement for the trademark postfix has no legal force, but the asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism) in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., `YHWH' or `G-d' is used.
Those people who say that they/need/ white noise to get to sleep, and always have, are fooling themselves. How did you get to sleep before you had a computer?
White noise can help muffle the ambient noises that disturb the sleep of many urban dwellers (like sirens, cars, fighting neighbors, amorous neighbors, etc.) Without white noise, theres' silence broken by sudden sounds; with white noise, there's a more steady low level of noise and the sudden sounds are less disturbing.
That said, I still much prefer sleeping with my tower off than on. But that's just me.
However, I have *NOT* heard of any recent discussion of similar religion-meets-technology from the Jewish world (at least not since "Is it OK to use a telephone on the Sabbath?")
Microsoft has moved into the console market. Well, I think Linux should do the same. Start stealing away Microsofts marketshare with an opensource gaming console - the LBox.
I'm trying to look at the original CARP report, linked to from the LOC page, but the PDF seems to be either broken or password-protected. (Ghostview doesn't like it, in any case.)
Has anyone put up a mirror of the contents in HTML or plain text?
Villanueva was once invited to an event in Columbia where he was to meet with the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman, and to his great disappointment this event had to be cancelled.
Columbia South Carolina or Columbia Maryland? I hope Villanueva meets with Senator Hollings!
And what's Villanueva doing in North America? Don't they have Free Software events in places like Colombia?
First of all, i-95 doesn't go to texas. It probably wouldn't have hurt the producers, writers, and anybody else involved, to pick up a map and take a quick look.
Dude, you take 95 south to 40 west. Either 95 or 81 (avoid the cities), but who would think of that?
(Actually, Mapquest says something about going west out of DC on 70. Who knew?)
Going even further, we could fake Osama's capture, have him broadcast to the country that america is a nice place and to quit being player haters.
Actually, when the infamous video of Osama taking credit for the 9/11 attacks was publicized, many in the Islamic world insisted that the US had faked the video to frame their man Osama, as a retroactive excuse to attack Afghanistan. (Kind of like many Americans, especially Afro-Americans, who still think OJ is innocent. If there's a history of your people being scapegoated by The Man, you'll be really reluctant to trust The Man even when he's right.) I can only see this mistrust getting worse if it becomes possible to really effectively fake a video like this.
That repeated so quickly my head is spinning! We were just discussing this on/. on Saturday.
Q: What's the difference between an M-16 and/.?
A: An M-16 only repeats 100x/min.
But while we're back (still?)on the topic, has anyone translated the original FUD letter from the M$ Peru guy (might be mirrored, which the honorable Sr. Nunez so elquently rebutted, into English?
Christine Lavin wrote the definitive song on the subject. Whenever I hear about the possibility of exploration to Pluto, I hear Christine singing its praises, and intoning the URL "http colon slash slash dosxx dot colorado dot edu slash plutohome dot html".
I didn't like the fact that the thing has no indication of time. What about the fact that the US has been around for little over 200 years while other countries (especially the European ones with lots of lines) have been around for much more than that. Maybe they should limit this thing by time or something.
This covers the period from 1820 to 1950, as explained in the article. And the caption states, "The diagram ignores many changes in national status (such as the assembly and disassembly of Yugoslavia)." Since they used TLD country codes presumably they are ascribing conflicts to the current nation on the soil of the nation that engaged in it, for convenience. "They" *did* "limit this thing by time or something."
Huh? You argue against the DMCA, but it is arguments like the one above that are used to support the DMCA and similar efforts at censorship. There have to be better ways to protect privacy than "intellectual property" arguments.
You misunderstand, good Coward. I think it may be possible and indeed possibly even desirable to define all personal identifying information about a person as properly belonging under that person's control, in a similar fashion that we consider a person's property to be under their control. Hollywood wants us to see creative works as "intellectual property", and they are wrong. But perhaps a property metaphor may prove useful as we attempt to navigate a way of allowing individuals control over who knows what about them.
Lawrence Lessig, in his book "Code", points out that the trend in the commodification of the web is for our personal information to be traded and sold by companies without our consent, and meanwhile for corporate "intellectual property" to be protected from unauthorized use with the full force of code and law.
Lessig argues that these situations should be exactly reversed. Personal info should be treated as property owned by us; anyone who takes it without our consent should be subject to lawsuit or criminal charges, and if we choose to allow it to get bought & sold, we should get a cut of the proceeds. It's our data, after all. But for other types of data that doesn't identify any individual, including copywrighted works, there should be mechanisms that allow us fair use to use them and share them as we will, without actually overstepping our rights under copyright law. As it is, as we all know, our rights under copyright are being eroded by encryption and the DMCA. We should have that kind of infrastructure (*and* law) protecting our personal data that the RIAA wants to have protecting their work.
I understand that on Tuesday 23 April, representatives from the Recording Industry Association of America asked the Appropriations Committee for additional funding to prosecute copyright-related crimes. I feel that copyright disputes ought to be the realm of civil law, not criminal law, and that is not appropriate for my tax dollars to support the recording studios' disputes. Therefore, I urge you to resist this industry request to subsidize their work.
The paper edition of the article in the Sunday Globe had a sidebar about the Hollings bill. It has a big pic of Fritz himself. Here's the text:
The many-sided digital divide
When Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act on March 21, he declared that his aim was to spur the growth of high-definition television and broadband Internet use, the fastest route for downloading music for free.
His reasoning was that content providers so far have been unwilling to make available enough high-quality digital programming for those channels because such programming can be pirated too easily.
His method for achieving this digital safe zone would be to give the consumer electronics industry and others one year to agree on a protection standard, which would then, by law, have ot be put into "any hardware or software" capable of presenting copyrightable material in digital form, including CDEs.
The bill drew a range of negative comments that fell into four general categories:
Opposed to government mandates
"We appreciate that [they] sent a wake-up. [But] we have been, and continue to be, eager to work out a voluntary solution, for that is in the best interests of everyone involved." --Hilary Rosen, Recording Industry Association of America
"Government mandates on technology products, as proposed in the Hollings bill, will decrease consumer choice, degrade product performance, stifle innovation, and reduce global competitiveness for US information-technology products." --Ken Kay, Computer Systems Policy Project
Too favorable to content providers
"Senator Hollings' bill is simply wrongheaded... It seems that the bill would be more accurately titled the 'Content Owners Market Promotion Act.'" --Jonathan Zluck, President, Association for Competitive Technology, an education and advocacy group representing mostly small and mid-size companies
"It would basically give Hollywood veto power over the design of new technologies." --Robin Gross, Lawyer, Electronic Frontier Foundation
It won't work
"Unfortunately, no one solution will solve all piracy threats in all circumstances." --Robert Holleyman, CEO, Business Software Alliance
"As we know, copy protection isn't breakable by the average citizen, but it is very breakable by software experts." --DigitalConsumer.org Web site
Anti-consumer
The bill "appears to recognize only a right to make a single 'personal' copy, and then only of certain defined television programs (not music). Such a restriction would make it impossible for Americans to record a program on a device such as a personal video recordder, and then play it somewhere else in the house." -- Gary Shapiro, Chairman, Home Recording Rights Coalition, founded in 1981 to advocate for consumers' rights to use home electronics products for private, noncommercial purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, at first I thought it said "Tired Piercing." I want the guy who pierces my nipple to be wide awake! But then that's just me, dunno 'bout you.
The BBC already made all of these books into VERY HORRIBLE AWFUL made for TV movies. If you thought they butched HHGTTG, wait til you see this! PLEASE, JUST LEAVE BOOKS ALONE! *cries*
Ah, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum the moribund Marshwiggle was alone worth the price of admission!
You honestly don't think that the contents of your hard drive have any sort of historical importance, do you?
In our time, the shoebox of old letters has been replaced with email archives. I keep significant emails indefinitely, as they are the closest thing I have to a chronicle of my life (at least for recent years). The personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and T.S. Eliot are of great significance to historians and literary critics. Furthermore, I would love for my great-grandchildren to be able to read through their great-grandparents' online courtship. Same with people's personal blogs, livejournals and the like, which have replaced our forebears' bound diaries that many of us read with great interest when we find them. It would be a shame for such detailed records of our lives to be kept, then lost.
Milgram's study became the center of the first real discussions about the ethical responsibilities of psychological researchers with regard to their subjects (some of the subjects suffered from long term traumatic episodes due to thir participation). It led to the ethical codes of conduct followed today.
Ironically, this experiment would not be allowed to be performed today for the same reasons we would forbid the Nazi hypothermia experiments (an example of the behavior Milgram's study was investigating).
All this is true. However, in Milgram's defense, he was quite thorough in providing follow-up meetings with his subjects to debrief, and I think even offered psychotherapy if people needed it. Subjects often reported being shaken but wiser after the experiments, and were glad they had participated.
It is probably a good thing that today's ethical standards don't allow scientists to manipulate people like Milgram did. However, I can't help being glad he performed the experiments. He taught us stuff we need to know. Situational ethics? I don't know. I think it's more like, although it would be dangerous to let any psych*ist use Milgram's tactics, he himself had a legitimately urgent message and seems to have conducted the research in an ethical way. And have I mentioned that we really need educating in the dangers of too much obedience?
Incidentally, I just found an article explaining the infamous Milgram experiments, for those looking for the background on this.
By the way, it's nice to see another psych major on /.!
The test was called Milgrim's 37. Peter Gabriel wrote a really creepy song about it called "We do what we're told". There were 37 buttons of "increasing pain" (higher voltage) applied to a test subject. Actually the subjects were actors, simulating greater pain as higher numbers were pushed. The actual subjects were the button-pushers who actually thought they were shocking people. They did as they were told, and applied what they thought were horifically painful shocks to random people they didn't know because they could get away with it.
It's worse than that. The actor in the next room gave a scripted set of grunts giving way to bloodcurdling screams, as the test subjects (instructed by the white-coated scientist) pressed buttons to apply increasing levels of "voltage" to the victim/actor. After a certain high level of pretend voltage, the screams stopped and the actor fell silent. Often the test subjects were in hysterical tears as they obediently applied the shocks -- understandably, for as far as they knew they could have just killed a person. Stanley Milgram repeated this obedience experiment many times with many variables altered (like for example, changing the setting from Yale to a no-name office in New Haven) and found that, with a remarkable consistency, 65% of subjects did *everything* the professor told them to, giving the full "shock" and possibly "killing" the "victim."
This study was publicized in the wake of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which US soldiers, under (erroneously interpreted) orders, slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. However, Milgram's study had been planned years earlier in response to the Holocaust, to answer the question of how so many respectable people could participate in such a massive systematic crime. Milgram's disturbing conclusion was that, more likely than not, *you could have been a gas chamber operator*. In other words, most people will follow a credible authority figure straight to hell.
One cannot write a story about what people in the big city think while living in Eye Socket, Montana. Yes, land is cheap there, but only because nobody else wants it.
I'd pay money to read good articles, to the standards of Salon, about life in Eye Socket, MT. Salon has done a great job chronicling life among the hip in SF and NY, but this insularity is a liability. Regardless of whether they keep their office space, decentralizing operations just might do them some good and help attract new readers.
Score one for us Latter-day Saints. Now if only the comments would last five minutes without obligatory mentions of polygamy, jello, large families, missionaries or cults, we'd have it made.
A limerick by Edward Abbey:
(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)
Hey, now *that* would be some public park system. But how would we high-speed-train-riding megolopolitans *get* to the 2500 miles of parks? With that kind of density, personal vehicle ownership would be prohibitively expensive. The only hope would be if something like Zipcar became universal and reasonably priced.
From the Jargon File:
Source: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/UNX.h tml
Those people who say that they /need/ white noise to get to sleep, and always have, are fooling themselves. How did you get to sleep before you had a computer?
White noise can help muffle the ambient noises that disturb the sleep of many urban dwellers (like sirens, cars, fighting neighbors, amorous neighbors, etc.) Without white noise, theres' silence broken by sudden sounds; with white noise, there's a more steady low level of noise and the sudden sounds are less disturbing.
That said, I still much prefer sleeping with my tower off than on. But that's just me.
However, I have *NOT* heard of any recent discussion of similar religion-meets-technology from the Jewish world (at least not since "Is it OK to use a telephone on the Sabbath?")
How about Jewwwwws Innnnnn Spaaaaaaace?
Hey, buddy, that's the G/Box to you!
Has anyone put up a mirror of the contents in HTML or plain text?
Columbia South Carolina or Columbia Maryland? I hope Villanueva meets with Senator Hollings!
And what's Villanueva doing in North America? Don't they have Free Software events in places like Colombia?
First of all, i-95 doesn't go to texas. It probably wouldn't have hurt the producers, writers, and anybody else involved, to pick up a map and take a quick look.
Dude, you take 95 south to 40 west. Either 95 or 81 (avoid the cities), but who would think of that?
(Actually, Mapquest says something about going west out of DC on 70. Who knew?)
Actually, when the infamous video of Osama taking credit for the 9/11 attacks was publicized, many in the Islamic world insisted that the US had faked the video to frame their man Osama, as a retroactive excuse to attack Afghanistan. (Kind of like many Americans, especially Afro-Americans, who still think OJ is innocent. If there's a history of your people being scapegoated by The Man, you'll be really reluctant to trust The Man even when he's right.) I can only see this mistrust getting worse if it becomes possible to really effectively fake a video like this.
My bad.
;{)>
Q: What's the difference between an M-16 and /.?
A: An M-16 only repeats 100x/min.
But while we're back (still?)on the topic, has anyone translated the original FUD letter from the M$ Peru guy (might be mirrored, which the honorable Sr. Nunez so elquently rebutted, into English?
Christine Lavin wrote the definitive song on the subject. Whenever I hear about the possibility of exploration to Pluto, I hear Christine singing its praises, and intoning the URL "http colon slash slash dosxx dot colorado dot edu slash plutohome dot html".
I didn't like the fact that the thing has no indication of time. What about the fact that the US has been around for little over 200 years while other countries (especially the European ones with lots of lines) have been around for much more than that. Maybe they should limit this thing by time or something.
This covers the period from 1820 to 1950, as explained in the article. And the caption states, "The diagram ignores many changes in national status (such as the assembly and disassembly of Yugoslavia)." Since they used TLD country codes presumably they are ascribing conflicts to the current nation on the soil of the nation that engaged in it, for convenience. "They" *did* "limit this thing by time or something."
RTFA.
What WOULD be tragic: Groening not having a shot at another show. Surprise us, Matt!
How about a TV series version of Life In Hell? That would tota11y r0ck!
Huh? You argue against the DMCA, but it is arguments like the one above that are used to support the DMCA and similar efforts at censorship. There have to be better ways to protect privacy than "intellectual property" arguments.
You misunderstand, good Coward. I think it may be possible and indeed possibly even desirable to define all personal identifying information about a person as properly belonging under that person's control, in a similar fashion that we consider a person's property to be under their control. Hollywood wants us to see creative works as "intellectual property", and they are wrong. But perhaps a property metaphor may prove useful as we attempt to navigate a way of allowing individuals control over who knows what about them.
J
Lessig argues that these situations should be exactly reversed. Personal info should be treated as property owned by us; anyone who takes it without our consent should be subject to lawsuit or criminal charges, and if we choose to allow it to get bought & sold, we should get a cut of the proceeds. It's our data, after all. But for other types of data that doesn't identify any individual, including copywrighted works, there should be mechanisms that allow us fair use to use them and share them as we will, without actually overstepping our rights under copyright law. As it is, as we all know, our rights under copyright are being eroded by encryption and the DMCA. We should have that kind of infrastructure (*and* law) protecting our personal data that the RIAA wants to have protecting their work.
J
The many-sided digital divide
When Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act on March 21, he declared that his aim was to spur the growth of high-definition television and broadband Internet use, the fastest route for downloading music for free.
His reasoning was that content providers so far have been unwilling to make available enough high-quality digital programming for those channels because such programming can be pirated too easily.
His method for achieving this digital safe zone would be to give the consumer electronics industry and others one year to agree on a protection standard, which would then, by law, have ot be put into "any hardware or software" capable of presenting copyrightable material in digital form, including CDEs.
The bill drew a range of negative comments that fell into four general categories:
Opposed to government mandates
"We appreciate that [they] sent a wake-up. [But] we have been, and continue to be, eager to work out a voluntary solution, for that is in the best interests of everyone involved." --Hilary Rosen, Recording Industry Association of America
"Government mandates on technology products, as proposed in the Hollings bill, will decrease consumer choice, degrade product performance, stifle innovation, and reduce global competitiveness for US information-technology products." --Ken Kay, Computer Systems Policy Project
Too favorable to content providers
"Senator Hollings' bill is simply wrongheaded... It seems that the bill would be more accurately titled the 'Content Owners Market Promotion Act.'" --Jonathan Zluck, President, Association for Competitive Technology, an education and advocacy group representing mostly small and mid-size companies
"It would basically give Hollywood veto power over the design of new technologies." --Robin Gross, Lawyer, Electronic Frontier Foundation
It won't work
"Unfortunately, no one solution will solve all piracy threats in all circumstances." --Robert Holleyman, CEO, Business Software Alliance
"As we know, copy protection isn't breakable by the average citizen, but it is very breakable by software experts." --DigitalConsumer.org Web site
Anti-consumer
The bill "appears to recognize only a right to make a single 'personal' copy, and then only of certain defined television programs (not music). Such a restriction would make it impossible for Americans to record a program on a device such as a personal video recordder, and then play it somewhere else in the house." -- Gary Shapiro, Chairman, Home Recording Rights Coalition, founded in 1981 to advocate for consumers' rights to use home electronics products for private, noncommercial purposes.
SOURCES: cnet.com; washingtonpost.com; wired.com; www.politechbot.com; Globe archives
[end of transcript]