I didn't see a name for the new moon in the announcement. I understand that we're resorting to names from Shakespearean literature because we're running out of names from Greek mythology.
Unless, of course, anyone here has a better idea for a name... (evil grin)
Mice were doing admin work? Geez, I hope not; there's already enough competition in this field. Of course, that might explain a few things (wonder when we'll start getting troll posts that just repeat "GIVE US CHEESE OR PERISH"...)
Did anyone else who watched the launch notice that NASA Administrator Dan Goldin looked like some sort of plantation owner or Harry Truman or something? Light colored suit, white hat with a broad brim, boots...
I could practically hear him; "Now that, son, is how my pappy used to launch rockets."
How about "The ESR Charity Telethon"? Maybe we could raise enough money to make him rich enough to write another insulting "Get Off My Lawn, You Poor People" essay. Which could be posted here.
Seriously, though. I'd agree that it's just another kick in the teeth every time Slashdot slips a little more in the commercial realm. I guess if they're not even going to pretend to be unbiased, I can deal with it. Still, it feels like we're watching a sell-out in progress, and it's sad.
There is a valuable lesson to be taken from Ion Storm: Hot-shit programmers may think they're always right, but they're not.
As amusing as it has been to sit around and watch Ion Storm disintigrate while the coders played dueling egos, it does make the point that maybe, just maybe, management isn't quite as useless as Dilbert would have us believe.
As for Daikatana: Why bother? A game based on an ancient engine featuring "quests" like "find the key" just doesn't push my buttons anymore.
Personally, I don't see how it being difficult to contact some of the authors in any way absolves them of the responsibility to do so.
The only thing that gives me any pause here is that Rob still has a lot of credibility with me -- I can't believe that he'd want to, say, use other people's words to set himself up as some sort of "geek authority" with traditional media (which is what I'm half-convinced Jon Katz has been trying to do since day one of this tragedy).
No matter what the motivations, however, it still seems to me that, when possible, someone compiling a book like this still has a responsibility to make every effort to contact the original authors.
This is a case where the right thing to do ethically is backed up by the force of law. Rob, at least get someone from the publisher to try and contact the original authors, no matter what Katz says about it.
As much as I'd hate to say it, the AC is right. Because Slashdot seeks to avoid possible liability from comments by stating that "Comments are owned by the Poster", the content contributed to Slashdot can fairly be considered to be simply reprinted on/. with the permission of the original author. I don't want to get too technical, but essentially it shakes out that the individual comment posters are still the owners of their comments, and as such they retain the protection of US copyright laws. A suitable parrallel would be site featuring stories from a bunch of Sci Fi authors. Each author has agreed to allow their work to be reprinted, probably all for different levels of compensation. Orson Scott Card, for example, would likely want to get paid well for his work while Scott Card Orson (a complete newcomer) might have let his work be reprinted just for the exposure. In no case, however, could I take a sizable portion of any of those stories (beyond fair use) and reprint it (say, in book form) without the author's permission. They retain copyright even though the stories were publically published. The exception that Katz and Taco are looking at seems to be the idea that the records of public record (public as in government, not public as in visible to everyone) are free of copyright. Finally, I should point out that the AC is also right in saying that/. is a private (as in privately run) site, as opposed to a government or nonprofit run (public) site.
Personally, I'd much rather see the original (you know, the "good") Star Wars episodes on DVD before anything else, including an episode 1 DVD or even before the theatrical release of episode 2.
I think Lucas ought to hand Ep. 2 over to a director who knows how to make movies not suck ass and work on doing his required lot of smarmy, self-congradulatory psudo-interviews which he seems to think we all want to see on the DVD version and just get them out.
I mean, do we really want to see more of Jar Jar? Wouldn't you rather have the original movies with digital sound and picture?
Lucas has said he's not releasing any Star Wars episodes on DVD anytime soon.
Lucas can make disgusting amounts of cash by making us wait and hopefully relent and buy the VHS copy first, then the DVD.
There was a rumor just like this a few weeks ago.
An internet-only "rumor" site says there might be a DVD soon.
Slashdot posts it.
You'd think that we geeks would be used to that whole "don't trust everything you read online" thing by now, eh?
Even in the good 'ol US of A, you can get in trouble for making defanatory statements -- it's known as the slander and libel laws.
Personally, I don't see how this is any different than a TV station which refuses to pull defamatory advertising. Just because it's the internet does not mean that you somehow have a license to broadcast defamatory materials. I mean, come on! It's not like there are no limits on free speach offline, either -- ask you local kiddie porn purveyor.
On the other hand... a) I have one of those "we were nuts in college" stories (we apparently cross the building power main when we ran the cable, thus risking the coroner needing a dustbuster to pick us up) b) I learned a lot about networking and routing with Linux.
I'm not trying to say it was wrong to do it, but IMHO this sort of thing doesn't warrant getting tossed into jail. The dorms routinely handle minor infractions (underage drinking, etc) "in-house", applying their own penalties instead of bothering the police. This seems like a more appropriate way to handle this one.
Jesus, we did exactly the same thing at my school a couple of years ago.
We networked the upstairs rooms and ran a cable down the trash chute to the first floor, then above the drop ceiling into the cage and into a hub (breaking into the cage was the hardest part). We had fast internet for about a semester before the dorm electrician noticed and yanked the cables.
Of course, we just unhooked it and pulled down the wires in our rooms when we noticed them snooping around. They knew *someone* on our floor did it, but couldn't prove a thing...
Anyhow, what kind of insanity is it to look at this as "criminal activity" versus "harmless college mischief". Christ, maybe we should just go back to getting drunk and wizzing on the Dean's front porch.
I saw the movie a few hours ago, and I gotta say it was rather disappointing.
I was hoping for a movie that would show a realistic Mars mission or play with some of the actual likely problems with a long-term mission to another planet (one scene came close, where the characters tried to locate and plug small hull breaches, but even that scene featured some really boneheaded moves by the supposedly highly-trained astronauts).
Instead, the movie ambled along, going from boring inane chatter to sci-fi blatently lifted from 2001/2010 to half-hearted action sequences. I normally try not to blame films for taking artistic license with science (I can live with instant visual genome identification, for example), but in this film the characters were routinely threatened and sometimes killed by events which any high school student could see as impossible. At that point, the scientific slips are irritating; they're not just eye candy or oversimplifications, but actual driving forces in the plot.
The film did enjoy a high point or two -- a scene where a character and his wife "dance" in zero G was especially engaging. Still, I never really cared about the characters and was distracted by the constant scientific slips -- would it be so hard to just get things right on occassion? This is sci fi, after all.
IMHO, out of all the commercial Linux-product (as opposed to distro maker) companies out there, Loki is probably doing the most to promote the standards of OSS.
Think about it: How many companies jump onto the Linux bandwagon and just toss out a couple of closed-source programs? How much easier would it be for Loki not to release their stuff?
This is actually more important for its interplanetary implications.
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission. The fact that the boosters exist will probably give an extra push to the manned Mars project (if NASA can ever stop throwing money away on the Space Station).
I hope to see colonists on Mars before I die, but at this rate they need to get moving -- the space program hasn't done anything really visionary since Neil Armstrong walked out onto the moon.
In any event, it's good to see that a less expensive heavy lift booster is making it to the market. I wonder what NASA has planned next -- maybe toss a few dozen comm satelites into orbit with one big booster to facilitate talking to earth....
The real problem with government goon squads is that they never have anything on the table. This is as good an example as any -- SJ Games lost four months of time and tons of potential revenue because some moron in the government couldn't tell the difference between fiction and reality.
Even when the courts come out and say the Goons are wrong, all they end up doing is shoveling some taxpayer money back at the wronged party. I'll be willing to bet that no heads rolled at the Secret Service because of this particular incident -- what's the big deal about paying a fine when it's not your money in the first place? It's like when I found out that my company would pay my on-job parking tickets.
There ought to be some system of accountability to discourage government agents from degenerating into Goons -- maybe some way of allowing the courts to directly discipline government employees. In any case, I find it a bit disturbing that my hard-earned (well, earned) tax dollars are going to pay such stupid people.
Fear not, citizen. The all-stars of the OSS movement are already planning how to save Tux from the clutches of Microsoft.
Here's Plan 0.8:
Jon Katz will disable the guards at the perimeter of the Microsoft compound, putting them to sleep with a lengthy rant about how the internet will end tooth decay.
Bob Young and Michael Coupland will steal past the security cameras in the main lobby, which will be looking for long-haired, hippie-looking OSS hacker types rather than guys in suits.
Once Young and Coupland have breached building security, they will ssh out and irc with Eric Raymond, who will be providing fire support from a hill overlooking the MS campus. ESR will use his first-hand knowledge of the buildings (gained in his visit last year) to guide Young and Coupland to the central security office.
Once at the security office, Young and Coupland will release Jamie Zawinski, who will entice the guards to leave by offering them free passes to his nightclub (years of working at MS will ensure that they look angstful enough to get in). The three will then attempt to do something useful on the W2k-based security system, causing it to come to a screaming halt.
When the building is secured, Linus Torvolds will be brought in to locate Tux (after all, Linus has the uncanny ability to always move in the right direction). While Linus and his henchman search for Tux, Richard Stallman will move into position to cover the escape with an rant which will cause money-grubbing shrink-wrap licensing capitalists to burst into flames.
When Tux is located, he will be hustled into the parking lot where John Carmack will be waiting to speed away to safety at speeds well in excess of 140 mph.
When the last OSS Team member has evacuated the building, the Slashdot contributors will be brought in to flame the building to cinders, finishing it off with a corosive layer of hot grits. The confusion this will cause, combined with Carmack's rather insane mode of driving, will hopefully buy enough time to secure Tux at an undisclosed (but happily fridged an herring-filled) base of operations.
Possible bugs with this plan include both the possibility that Coupland isn't actually serious about the OSS movement and will bail at the first sign of trouble and the chance that JWZ will bail before the operation is concluded. Patches to these problems are welcome.
----
Re:Had to love the chick in the leather outfit...
on
X-Files FPS Episode
·
· Score: 2
[Turns around, bites hand]
Actually, the execution of the episode was more bothersome than the various glaring technical problems. Personally, I can enjoy a story with tech errors so long as its a good story, but this particular episode didn't really qualify.
Moreover, I thought that the obvious object lesson concerning virutal violence spilling over into the real world was just a pale excuse to have some grizzly murder scenes. However, I think the episode did make a certain valid point about women working in the tech industry (although it baffled me why such a woman would hold up a rather sexist image as her best-of-possible self).
Now, the Long Gunman episode that followed the new episode was definately more worthwhile (the one with the DOD convention in Vegas where Scully gets "drunk").
I think it might be worth our while to admit that, as Linux is extended to a mass audience and an increasing number of commercial apps begin to appear, a standard is more less inevitable. The real question which faces us is this: Do we want to design that standard, or do we want it to be a hack? Worse yet, do we want a corporate mandate?
Stay with me here: Commercial app makers know that you can't please everyone all the time, and that people like to be able to fall back on things they've already learned -- Ctrl-S is save, right?
It is therefore in the interest of these commercial app makers to go with a the same system everyone else is. If a particular GUI has a larger marketshare and more consumer-ready apps already existing, that's where your company should go, right? Folks, we've learned this lesson before -- or have we already forgotten the one big lesson MS had to teach us last decade?
There will be a standard. Hell, MS could probably set those standards tomorrow by introducing parts of Office for Linux and saying "this is how it is". It's all about the apps. The question really facing we in the OSS community is whether we want to remain involved in guiding Linux, or if we want to give it over to the same type of people who've stalled the current level of innovation for the sake of a few (billion) dollars?
I think it's a mistake to think of a GUI as being only useful for "prettying up the OS".
Really, there are a lot of steps in certain routine configurations and obscure syntaxes that I, as a sys admin, would prefer not to have to edit by hand if I didn't have to. For example, I probably add/remove ten DNS records in a given week -- I'd rather have a GUI to do it. I doubt, however, that my boss would want to pay me to develop one and I'll be damned if I'm working on my off hours.
The mistake that most of the command line crowd (myself included) make is viewing the GUI v. command line debate as being an either/or situation. Well, just because that's how MS does it, it doesn't mean that we have to make the same blinding errors.
In any event, any Linux GUI will always beat the hell out on the NT version for one simple reason: setenv DISPLAY tux:0 -- while the rest of my officemates are driving upwards an hour to get to their clients to reset some little thing or the other, I can do anything remotely that I can do in person.
Actually, my friend, I think you've probably crossed over that fine line to "unhealthy" net use. I'm not going to try to tell you how to live your life, but I will suggest that maybe it's time to take stock of things.
Sure, the original study which began this debate was seriously flawed. There is still, however, a lesson we can learn from the disussion which followed. There is a point where you get too much of a good thing, and spending 17 hours a day sitting in front of the computer would qualify.
Like I said in the last forum, the internet is a great medium for gathering information and connecting people, but there is a point where it simply becomes an excuse for naturally introverted people to become shut-ins. You might think that you're living the good life because you're hanging off the greatest collection of raw data ever concieved, but you're really not if that's all you do.
Moderation, as always, is the key -- you can always overdo things. Too much food, too much exercise, too much sex, too much of anything isn't good. It's not healthy to never get outside or get any physical activity. It's not healthy to never interact face to face with other people. You're behaving like one of those people whose life is completely dominated by their significant other -- you're making sacrifices you can't imagine in trade for fairly minimal benefits, but you've become so encompassed by the lifestyle that you can't imagine any other way to live.
There's nothing wrong with net use -- it beats sitting around watching TV any day. But, people, please remember the value of variety. Overspecialize and you'll always encounter problems.
On a personal level, I would again urge you to stop and look up from the screen for a change. Going out and having a few beers with friends isn't the best thing for your body, but it's not going to kill you and could prove extremely valuable in other respects. Going out on the occassional date might not seem like a productive use of time, but there is a reason it's so popular (and I don't just mean sex, but that is a part).
The problem with the net is that it implements another level of abstraction -- the people you talk to are just another step away from seeming "real".
Consider: If you were going to blindside your s/o and dump them, what do you think would be the easiest way?
Over the Phone
Send them an Email
Send a "Dear John" letter
Do it in person
Remember, I didn't ask which you would do, just which would be easiest to do. I suspect that tied for the easiest would be the email and letter, followed by a phone call, with the "in person" method being the most difficult.
Why? Well, from your perspective, each provides a barrier between you and the other person. In person, you have to see exactly how the dumping effect the other -- any pain, betrayal, tears or hurt are there for you to see, knowing that you've caused it. Over the phone, you can at least hear these things, even if you can't see their face or look them in the eye. Email and letters, however, provide the ultimate in abstraction. You don't have to see their immediate reaction or emotions; you might get a "You Bastard/Bitch" response, but that's far easier to deal with than immediate pain.
I'm not trying to dwell on breaking up -- this abstraction concept will apply for whatever emotion you consider -- happiness, love, etc. Would you talk to you s/o over the phone or over the dinner table?
I suspect that people use this advanced level of abstration to avoid socializing. Over email or IM, the other person is reduced to an object or an idea, often with no face to go along with it. That's why people can flame so terribly and say things they never would in real life -- it's not just because you're not afraid of getting a broken nose, but because that person is not fully a person to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm thinking something along the lines of "Rupert".
----
Unless, of course, anyone here has a better idea for a name... (evil grin)
----
----
I could practically hear him; "Now that, son, is how my pappy used to launch rockets."
----
Seriously, though. I'd agree that it's just another kick in the teeth every time Slashdot slips a little more in the commercial realm. I guess if they're not even going to pretend to be unbiased, I can deal with it. Still, it feels like we're watching a sell-out in progress, and it's sad.
----
----
As amusing as it has been to sit around and watch Ion Storm disintigrate while the coders played dueling egos, it does make the point that maybe, just maybe, management isn't quite as useless as Dilbert would have us believe.
As for Daikatana: Why bother? A game based on an ancient engine featuring "quests" like "find the key" just doesn't push my buttons anymore.
----
Personally, I don't see how it being difficult to contact some of the authors in any way absolves them of the responsibility to do so.
The only thing that gives me any pause here is that Rob still has a lot of credibility with me -- I can't believe that he'd want to, say, use other people's words to set himself up as some sort of "geek authority" with traditional media (which is what I'm half-convinced Jon Katz has been trying to do since day one of this tragedy).
No matter what the motivations, however, it still seems to me that, when possible, someone compiling a book like this still has a responsibility to make every effort to contact the original authors.
This is a case where the right thing to do ethically is backed up by the force of law. Rob, at least get someone from the publisher to try and contact the original authors, no matter what Katz says about it.
----
----
Personally, I'd much rather see the original (you know, the "good") Star Wars episodes on DVD before anything else, including an episode 1 DVD or even before the theatrical release of episode 2.
I think Lucas ought to hand Ep. 2 over to a director who knows how to make movies not suck ass and work on doing his required lot of smarmy, self-congradulatory psudo-interviews which he seems to think we all want to see on the DVD version and just get them out.
I mean, do we really want to see more of Jar Jar? Wouldn't you rather have the original movies with digital sound and picture?
----
Let's examine the facts of the case:
You'd think that we geeks would be used to that whole "don't trust everything you read online" thing by now, eh?----
Even in the good 'ol US of A, you can get in trouble for making defanatory statements -- it's known as the slander and libel laws.
Personally, I don't see how this is any different than a TV station which refuses to pull defamatory advertising. Just because it's the internet does not mean that you somehow have a license to broadcast defamatory materials. I mean, come on! It's not like there are no limits on free speach offline, either -- ask you local kiddie porn purveyor.
----
I got a semester of fast internet and some good admin experience. Fuck the meek.
----
On the other hand...
a) I have one of those "we were nuts in college" stories (we apparently cross the building power main when we ran the cable, thus risking the coroner needing a dustbuster to pick us up)
b) I learned a lot about networking and routing with Linux.
I'm not trying to say it was wrong to do it, but IMHO this sort of thing doesn't warrant getting tossed into jail. The dorms routinely handle minor infractions (underage drinking, etc) "in-house", applying their own penalties instead of bothering the police. This seems like a more appropriate way to handle this one.
----
We networked the upstairs rooms and ran a cable down the trash chute to the first floor, then above the drop ceiling into the cage and into a hub (breaking into the cage was the hardest part). We had fast internet for about a semester before the dorm electrician noticed and yanked the cables.
Of course, we just unhooked it and pulled down the wires in our rooms when we noticed them snooping around. They knew *someone* on our floor did it, but couldn't prove a thing...
Anyhow, what kind of insanity is it to look at this as "criminal activity" versus "harmless college mischief". Christ, maybe we should just go back to getting drunk and wizzing on the Dean's front porch.
----
I was hoping for a movie that would show a realistic Mars mission or play with some of the actual likely problems with a long-term mission to another planet (one scene came close, where the characters tried to locate and plug small hull breaches, but even that scene featured some really boneheaded moves by the supposedly highly-trained astronauts).
Instead, the movie ambled along, going from boring inane chatter to sci-fi blatently lifted from 2001/2010 to half-hearted action sequences. I normally try not to blame films for taking artistic license with science (I can live with instant visual genome identification, for example), but in this film the characters were routinely threatened and sometimes killed by events which any high school student could see as impossible. At that point, the scientific slips are irritating; they're not just eye candy or oversimplifications, but actual driving forces in the plot.
The film did enjoy a high point or two -- a scene where a character and his wife "dance" in zero G was especially engaging. Still, I never really cared about the characters and was distracted by the constant scientific slips -- would it be so hard to just get things right on occassion? This is sci fi, after all.
----
Think about it: How many companies jump onto the Linux bandwagon and just toss out a couple of closed-source programs? How much easier would it be for Loki not to release their stuff?
In short, thanks, Loki.
----
A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission. The fact that the boosters exist will probably give an extra push to the manned Mars project (if NASA can ever stop throwing money away on the Space Station).
I hope to see colonists on Mars before I die, but at this rate they need to get moving -- the space program hasn't done anything really visionary since Neil Armstrong walked out onto the moon.
In any event, it's good to see that a less expensive heavy lift booster is making it to the market. I wonder what NASA has planned next -- maybe toss a few dozen comm satelites into orbit with one big booster to facilitate talking to earth....
----
Even when the courts come out and say the Goons are wrong, all they end up doing is shoveling some taxpayer money back at the wronged party. I'll be willing to bet that no heads rolled at the Secret Service because of this particular incident -- what's the big deal about paying a fine when it's not your money in the first place? It's like when I found out that my company would pay my on-job parking tickets.
There ought to be some system of accountability to discourage government agents from degenerating into Goons -- maybe some way of allowing the courts to directly discipline government employees. In any case, I find it a bit disturbing that my hard-earned (well, earned) tax dollars are going to pay such stupid people.
----
Here's Plan 0.8:
Possible bugs with this plan include both the possibility that Coupland isn't actually serious about the OSS movement and will bail at the first sign of trouble and the chance that JWZ will bail before the operation is concluded. Patches to these problems are welcome.----
Actually, the execution of the episode was more bothersome than the various glaring technical problems. Personally, I can enjoy a story with tech errors so long as its a good story, but this particular episode didn't really qualify.
Moreover, I thought that the obvious object lesson concerning virutal violence spilling over into the real world was just a pale excuse to have some grizzly murder scenes. However, I think the episode did make a certain valid point about women working in the tech industry (although it baffled me why such a woman would hold up a rather sexist image as her best-of-possible self).
Now, the Long Gunman episode that followed the new episode was definately more worthwhile (the one with the DOD convention in Vegas where Scully gets "drunk").
----
Stay with me here: Commercial app makers know that you can't please everyone all the time, and that people like to be able to fall back on things they've already learned -- Ctrl-S is save, right?
It is therefore in the interest of these commercial app makers to go with a the same system everyone else is. If a particular GUI has a larger marketshare and more consumer-ready apps already existing, that's where your company should go, right? Folks, we've learned this lesson before -- or have we already forgotten the one big lesson MS had to teach us last decade?
There will be a standard. Hell, MS could probably set those standards tomorrow by introducing parts of Office for Linux and saying "this is how it is". It's all about the apps. The question really facing we in the OSS community is whether we want to remain involved in guiding Linux, or if we want to give it over to the same type of people who've stalled the current level of innovation for the sake of a few (billion) dollars?
----
Really, there are a lot of steps in certain routine configurations and obscure syntaxes that I, as a sys admin, would prefer not to have to edit by hand if I didn't have to. For example, I probably add/remove ten DNS records in a given week -- I'd rather have a GUI to do it. I doubt, however, that my boss would want to pay me to develop one and I'll be damned if I'm working on my off hours.
The mistake that most of the command line crowd (myself included) make is viewing the GUI v. command line debate as being an either/or situation. Well, just because that's how MS does it, it doesn't mean that we have to make the same blinding errors.
In any event, any Linux GUI will always beat the hell out on the NT version for one simple reason: setenv DISPLAY tux:0 -- while the rest of my officemates are driving upwards an hour to get to their clients to reset some little thing or the other, I can do anything remotely that I can do in person.
----
Sure, the original study which began this debate was seriously flawed. There is still, however, a lesson we can learn from the disussion which followed. There is a point where you get too much of a good thing, and spending 17 hours a day sitting in front of the computer would qualify.
Like I said in the last forum, the internet is a great medium for gathering information and connecting people, but there is a point where it simply becomes an excuse for naturally introverted people to become shut-ins. You might think that you're living the good life because you're hanging off the greatest collection of raw data ever concieved, but you're really not if that's all you do.
Moderation, as always, is the key -- you can always overdo things. Too much food, too much exercise, too much sex, too much of anything isn't good. It's not healthy to never get outside or get any physical activity. It's not healthy to never interact face to face with other people. You're behaving like one of those people whose life is completely dominated by their significant other -- you're making sacrifices you can't imagine in trade for fairly minimal benefits, but you've become so encompassed by the lifestyle that you can't imagine any other way to live.
There's nothing wrong with net use -- it beats sitting around watching TV any day. But, people, please remember the value of variety. Overspecialize and you'll always encounter problems.
On a personal level, I would again urge you to stop and look up from the screen for a change. Going out and having a few beers with friends isn't the best thing for your body, but it's not going to kill you and could prove extremely valuable in other respects. Going out on the occassional date might not seem like a productive use of time, but there is a reason it's so popular (and I don't just mean sex, but that is a part).
----
Consider: If you were going to blindside your s/o and dump them, what do you think would be the easiest way?
Remember, I didn't ask which you would do, just which would be easiest to do. I suspect that tied for the easiest would be the email and letter, followed by a phone call, with the "in person" method being the most difficult.Why? Well, from your perspective, each provides a barrier between you and the other person. In person, you have to see exactly how the dumping effect the other -- any pain, betrayal, tears or hurt are there for you to see, knowing that you've caused it. Over the phone, you can at least hear these things, even if you can't see their face or look them in the eye. Email and letters, however, provide the ultimate in abstraction. You don't have to see their immediate reaction or emotions; you might get a "You Bastard/Bitch" response, but that's far easier to deal with than immediate pain.
I'm not trying to dwell on breaking up -- this abstraction concept will apply for whatever emotion you consider -- happiness, love, etc. Would you talk to you s/o over the phone or over the dinner table?
I suspect that people use this advanced level of abstration to avoid socializing. Over email or IM, the other person is reduced to an object or an idea, often with no face to go along with it. That's why people can flame so terribly and say things they never would in real life -- it's not just because you're not afraid of getting a broken nose, but because that person is not fully a person to you.
----