It's true that there is an entrenched culture of sampling in music, typically without explicit attribution. Even if the artist in question pays for the right to use a particular sample, credit is rarely given in an obvious fashion, if at all. When I was a younger lad, I remember the disappointment I felt when I learned that the sick-ass grooves I was listening to on the radio were mostly lifted wholesale from soul records, Ice Cube, Puffy (well, I guess I never really liked his music, but he was one of the worst offenders), etc. It wasn't that I was mad they had sampled it, I just felt like a tool having assumed they had come up with the groove themselves, and found myself far less impressed by the music, which was usually my favorite part of a lot of the classic '90s hip hop.
Sure, sampling in music has been going on a long time, and yeah yeah kids these days and their mashups, yadda yadda. I even do a fair amount of it myself, as an electronic musician, and I try to get creative with the ways that I use my sample material. But I think that this sort of corner of sampling, where you just take a loop from an Al Green track and play it over a breakbeat and you're done, is as close to plagiarism as it gets, ignoring the fact that most of these producers probably got legal permission one way or another. If this author wants to pull the whole "we live in a digital culture now" thing, that's fine, but there's no reason why she couldn't have listed the sources she plundered in an appendix, and made public the fact that she was trying something innovative by applying the wisdom of the new generation, or whatever. I'd even hail her initiative. As it stands, it seems pretty clear that she just wanted to pass other people's words off as her own, got caught, and made up a bullshit excuse.
It's exhilarating to see such visceral confirmation of the superior efficiencies of free market capitalism. If the scientists working for this cancer research corporation didn't have the profit motive behind them, who knows how long it would have taken for them to reach this point in their research, that is, if the project had even gotten off the ground at all!
The phrase "better than nothing" is appropriate, I guess.
You can even use VST plugins if you really want to (though I wouldn't, too many are rubbish).
If you feel like trying to run your VSTs under WINE (audio plugins are tempermental enough in plenty of native hosts). And really, you think you'll be getting better results with LADSPA? Show me a non-trivial LADSPA effect (like, say, a guitar amp simulator) that doesn't sound like trash.
So your assumption is that audio production is becoming an increasingly *smaller* niche of computer use? With the number of DAWs, synths and sequencers continuing to rise on other platforms, what makes you think this is the case? If it's a "vanishingly small" market, it wouldn't have made much sense for Apple to release Garageband, now would it?
Really, there is just no form of criticism of Linux that you people can take. If the program in question is for a niche market, then it's irrelevant. If it doesn't exist at all on Linux, we can do just fine without it, and have been, thank you very much. If it's difficult to use, that's not because the software is badly designed, it's that the users are too stupid or accustomed to their existing tools to figure it out. If the documentation is undecipherable (see recent Slashdot article), the user probably shouldn't be reading documentation anyway, as they're probably the kind of user that should just stick to browsers and email. The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
The reason why people aren't using Linux en masse is that for your average user, Linux is simply a waste of time. All the stuff that your crowd dismisses as irrelevant is stuff that, in the aggregate, matters a quite a lot to people. What is a computing platform if not a collection of (sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes overlapping) niches? Who wants to recompile his kernel just to be able to get passable audio latency? On OS X I haven't had to think about that for...roughly the number of years since I migrated to it. Who wants to deal with woefully inadequate documentation or turn to community message boards where half of the advice is wrong or misleading? Who actually wants to spend more time fiddling with his OS than using it to produce content, or in the case of the non-musically-inclined such as yourself, "do something productive"? Who wants to learn a poorly designed user interface (or better yet, deal with no interface whatsoever) for substandard clone of an existing commercial product when the original product works just fine?
The answer is people like you, and the miniscule market share of like-minded ultra-left-brained mega-dweebs that your insipid post reflects.
Typical engineer's thinking. If manual dexterity is the ultimate benchmark of musicianship, then you must think that Joe Satriani is the pinnacle of guitar playing (who knows, maybe you do). There are countless musicians out there who may not be the most technically gifted performers in the world, but make incomparable music as a result of their musical sensitivity. And that sensitivity, beyond a sensitivity to the music itself, also manifests itself as a sensitivity to the capabilities, limitations, and the expressive range of the instrument (emotionally as well as physically).
Your fear of electronic musical instruments replacing traditional ones is unjustified. Not only will an electronic rendition of a traditional instrument (which is usually an insipid simulation) never fully capture the original, but the real interest in electronic instruments is in exploring the different possibilities afforded by them, both in terms of performativity and in terms of expressive depth.
Any sound can be decomposed into a series of overlapping sine waves
The timbre produced by this ensemble is more harmonically complex than "we're all playing the same sine waves", since the drone varies spectrally (as well as in pitch) over time (coordinated, as well, it's not just a random collection of tones)
What makes you think that playing tuning forks would require more skill, other than the fact that the activity itself is more obvious to the audience?
Totally! While we're at it, let's beef that up with a few other ethnic and racial stereotypes!
"As long as none of your references are named Dmitri, you should be fine" (eh? eh? RUSSIANS)
"As long as none of your references are named Deshawn, you should be fine" (black people are scary)
"As long as none of your references have Hussein for a middle name, you should be fine" (goes without saying)
"You can have this free beer as long as you don't drink it."
That doesn't count as "free as in beer" in my book.
Maybe this analogy is failing. All I was trying to point out is that you're perfectly welcome to use their SDK and write iPhone apps, test them in the free simulator, etc, without paying a dime. The $99 fee lets you test on a real device and/or deploy to the store. I can see being annoyed at not being able to deploy to your own phone (that's one of the things I'd most like for them to change) without paying, but access to the store? That's fair game, as far as I'm concerned. They've gone to the trouble of creating this ecosystem, setting up all the infrastructure necessary for you to deploy your app to potentially hundreds of thousands of users, and handle all the financial transactions. All you have to do is write it, and of course, pay them $100.
Perhaps brick and mortar comparisons are just as useless, but if I make some gadget, I don't see why any store on the block would be obligated to accept it as merchandise and put it on their shelves. Apple charging me for access to their system simply means that all I have to do is invent and build the gadget. They even take care of the packaging. Seems like a pretty fair deal to me.
They charge a fee if you want to send builds to a device, or publish in their store, but the SDK itself, and its associated dev tools, are free as in beer.
Which is exactly why Apple gives away all their development tools for free, and why the built their current flagship software product on top of BSD, drawing significant interest and new users from the Linux crowd.
Apple doesn't hate geeks, it hates the way many geeks think that because they're so smart, they're automatically good at everything. The Unix that is OS X and the iPhone platform provide plenty of room for tinkering -- perhaps less so on the iPhone -- but it's not like everything Mac is a lifeless void. What Apple doesn't like you doing is trying to one-up them at their own game. For instance, if Apple made it easy for you install themes the way you might in any number of Linux window managers, chances are pretty good that you'll just make your computer hideously ugly and then have the audacity to show it to all your friends. This isn't a chance they'd like to take, being that their niche is in good design (how depressing is it that good design is a niche market?).
These beautifully designed packages you passingly deride are what make computers usable. In the case of the iPhone, seriously, the vast majority of apps in the store are awful, even adhering to Apple's design guidelines and making use of their standard UI toolkits. Imagine what we would end up with if programmers had total control over the system. In my eyes, it would result in a sharp decrease of users as the typical iPhone would be less stable, potentially less secure, and certainly more confusing as apps would depart more significantly from the accepted set of standards. Practically every rule in their SDK license has some similar reason behind it, even if a few of them are overkill. Background processes can drain battery life. Interpreted code environments (especially user-generated code, which is the biggest concern IMHO) can make it difficult for Apple to evaluate the spectrum of how an app might perform in real use (or fail to perform), which is a real concern for those who care about all the little details of packaging and interface design.
It used to bother me how much Apple locks things down, but I have to admit that they've been really successful in creating a pleasing, easy to use, and reasonably flexible system that also brings with it a thriving market ecosystem. Essentially none of the other smartphone manufacturers and platforms have come even close to this. It certainly makes you wonder if an open platform is really the solution to the "iPhone Killer" problem.
Exactly right. It's similar to the situation we have with recent automobile designs, where all kinds of sensors are in place to detect potential engine problems. I have nothing against these sensors being there if it helps consumers realize something is wrong before serious damage occurs, but sometimes the sensors fail, and all you have to go by is the "Check Engine" light. A previous car of mine had a faulty sensor that would constantly trigger the engine light, and even though there was nothing else wrong with the car, it wouldn't pass smog as long as the light was on, which was most of the time. After spending way more money than I had ever intended to, both in attempts to get the car smogged and taking it to mechanics who simply plugged in a computer and "diagnosed" the problem the sensor was erroneously reporting, I actually ended up taking it to a mechanic who was nice enough to reset it for free, giving me enough time to take it across the street to get it smogged before the light came back on. It wasn't until later that I learned the sensor itself was the culprit.
Has it occurred to anyone that this paper isn't the "PC Brigades"? I'd be willing to be most of you haven't even bothered to read it.
Nobody is asking anyone to fill a quota. Minorities and women are underrepresented in games for the same reason that they were underrepresented in film and television for so long (and still are in many ways)...because they are socially marginalized. It's more a reflection of the state of our culture than anything else. You're probably not old enough to remember it, but if you look back just 30-40 years, it's hard to even find movies that are shown from a woman's point of view -- one of the biggest critiques of film by early feminists was the way in which female characters were often passive objects, plot devices or romantic interests of the male leads at best. Social researchers are interested in the way our culture reflects the biases we have.
You probably don't care, and that's fine. Nobody in the game industry is going to read this study any more than the slashcrowd, and if they did it's not going to cause them to rethink their plans. They make the games that sell, just like the moviemakers of yesteryear made the hero worshiping, male-centric films that audiences loved. Games, film and other cultural artefacts will continue to mirror the social gestalt, social change will be gradual, and most people won't notice. Social theorists and scientists (you can put scare quotes around it if you like) will continue to pay attention to these things, because they think, quite rightly, that having a pulse on our culture is a good thing.
The rejections weren't nonsensical, you just didn't agree with them. Apple's guidelines are freely available and fairly clear (even if they appear to give a a fair amount wiggle room). The fact that you attempted to re-submit a reworked version of your app, all while knowing that it still failed to comply with Apple's rules, is particularly telling. Don't like the fact that you're not supposed to link to 3rd party libraries? Do you think it's silly that they don't want the app's charity focus announced in the store? Well, too bad. There are plenty of other mobile platforms with far less traction that would love to have your half-assed product. This isn't Open Source, and you don't get to just take other people's hard work, make some little throwaway project, refuse to play by the rules, and then throw a hissy fit when things don't go your way.
For the record, I do iPhone development, and though there are some lovely interface concepts on the device, the overall state of UI design in many iPhone apps is typically lacking. But that said, if a fresh look at UI design is what you're after, you probably won't find it on Linux. There are just far too many ego-inflated power nerds who think they're good at everything, and engineers who couldn't give less of a damn about usability. Or worse, the occasional hotshot engineer with an artistic streak that assumes, obnoxiously, that UI design is the same thing as "skinning".
I mean, if UI quality were judged in the number and variety of themes available, we'd all be running Englightenment! Right guys? The really annoying thing about it is that this information is out there, and despite the fact that UI improvements have taken a back seat in recent years, any software developer could head on down to a decent library and learn at least a little of what makes an interface work (or better yet, learn that UI design is not a computer-specific domain, that sure would be a mindfuck). That is, if he wanted to.
White Phosphorus burns to the bone when it comes in contact with skin, and water makes it worse. The use of White Phosphorus as an incendiary weapon in Fallujah (and for that matter Gaza) constitutes deliberate killing of civilians. Any weapon that is used as a blanket over a wide area is, by definition, incapable of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant.
While this is a good point, your analysis (and in fact, every single Slashdot headline about HCI) assumes that interaction design is limited to designing interfaces that are intended as replacements for generic, everyday data manipulation, such as mice/keyboards/etc. The real assumption we should be confronting is the notion that interface design is like a diagram of human evolution, or that innovations should necessarily replace everything that have come before them.
Siftables, for instance, make little sense as an interface for graphic designers working in Photoshop, but might make a fabulous specialized interface for young children, who primarily learn through direct physical interaction with their environment. Todd Oppenheimer's book "The Flickering Mind" points out some of the issues that can arise from young children spending too much time with traditional computer interfaces â" by bypassing a child's need for direct, physical interaction you can actually end up stunting her intellectual development. In other words, sometimes a "practical" (i.e. efficient, sufficiently abstract) interface isn't what you want.
This is partly symptomatic of Slashdot's demographic, and also a byproduct of the sort of hype associated with digital media departments, and the kind of language they have to construct in order to attract funding. Mega-nerds don't usually think of technology except in the abstract and functional, and tend to regard inefficient or unusual interaction systems as a waste of time and resources (why would I want to stand there flailing my arms in the air when I could just write a shell script?). Academics tend to use overblown language to justify their work â" blanket statements about the way new digital technologies are "forever changing our world" are commonplace. Somewhere in between is the realization that we ought not only to rethink our one-size-fits-all perspective on technology, but that we should also keep in mind the way new technologies affect the meaning of interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you so fucking special?
It's true that there is an entrenched culture of sampling in music, typically without explicit attribution. Even if the artist in question pays for the right to use a particular sample, credit is rarely given in an obvious fashion, if at all. When I was a younger lad, I remember the disappointment I felt when I learned that the sick-ass grooves I was listening to on the radio were mostly lifted wholesale from soul records, Ice Cube, Puffy (well, I guess I never really liked his music, but he was one of the worst offenders), etc. It wasn't that I was mad they had sampled it, I just felt like a tool having assumed they had come up with the groove themselves, and found myself far less impressed by the music, which was usually my favorite part of a lot of the classic '90s hip hop.
Sure, sampling in music has been going on a long time, and yeah yeah kids these days and their mashups, yadda yadda. I even do a fair amount of it myself, as an electronic musician, and I try to get creative with the ways that I use my sample material. But I think that this sort of corner of sampling, where you just take a loop from an Al Green track and play it over a breakbeat and you're done, is as close to plagiarism as it gets, ignoring the fact that most of these producers probably got legal permission one way or another. If this author wants to pull the whole "we live in a digital culture now" thing, that's fine, but there's no reason why she couldn't have listed the sources she plundered in an appendix, and made public the fact that she was trying something innovative by applying the wisdom of the new generation, or whatever. I'd even hail her initiative. As it stands, it seems pretty clear that she just wanted to pass other people's words off as her own, got caught, and made up a bullshit excuse.
C#? .Net?
It was totally sarcastic all the way, I'm kind of dismayed that this line of thinking is so ingrained here that it wasn't more obvious.
It's exhilarating to see such visceral confirmation of the superior efficiencies of free market capitalism. If the scientists working for this cancer research corporation didn't have the profit motive behind them, who knows how long it would have taken for them to reach this point in their research, that is, if the project had even gotten off the ground at all!
You can even use VST plugins if you really want to (though I wouldn't, too many are rubbish).
If you feel like trying to run your VSTs under WINE (audio plugins are tempermental enough in plenty of native hosts). And really, you think you'll be getting better results with LADSPA? Show me a non-trivial LADSPA effect (like, say, a guitar amp simulator) that doesn't sound like trash.
So your assumption is that audio production is becoming an increasingly *smaller* niche of computer use? With the number of DAWs, synths and sequencers continuing to rise on other platforms, what makes you think this is the case? If it's a "vanishingly small" market, it wouldn't have made much sense for Apple to release Garageband, now would it?
Really, there is just no form of criticism of Linux that you people can take. If the program in question is for a niche market, then it's irrelevant. If it doesn't exist at all on Linux, we can do just fine without it, and have been, thank you very much. If it's difficult to use, that's not because the software is badly designed, it's that the users are too stupid or accustomed to their existing tools to figure it out. If the documentation is undecipherable (see recent Slashdot article), the user probably shouldn't be reading documentation anyway, as they're probably the kind of user that should just stick to browsers and email. The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
The reason why people aren't using Linux en masse is that for your average user, Linux is simply a waste of time. All the stuff that your crowd dismisses as irrelevant is stuff that, in the aggregate, matters a quite a lot to people. What is a computing platform if not a collection of (sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes overlapping) niches? Who wants to recompile his kernel just to be able to get passable audio latency? On OS X I haven't had to think about that for...roughly the number of years since I migrated to it. Who wants to deal with woefully inadequate documentation or turn to community message boards where half of the advice is wrong or misleading? Who actually wants to spend more time fiddling with his OS than using it to produce content, or in the case of the non-musically-inclined such as yourself, "do something productive"? Who wants to learn a poorly designed user interface (or better yet, deal with no interface whatsoever) for substandard clone of an existing commercial product when the original product works just fine?
The answer is people like you, and the miniscule market share of like-minded ultra-left-brained mega-dweebs that your insipid post reflects.
Typical engineer's thinking. If manual dexterity is the ultimate benchmark of musicianship, then you must think that Joe Satriani is the pinnacle of guitar playing (who knows, maybe you do). There are countless musicians out there who may not be the most technically gifted performers in the world, but make incomparable music as a result of their musical sensitivity. And that sensitivity, beyond a sensitivity to the music itself, also manifests itself as a sensitivity to the capabilities, limitations, and the expressive range of the instrument (emotionally as well as physically).
Your fear of electronic musical instruments replacing traditional ones is unjustified. Not only will an electronic rendition of a traditional instrument (which is usually an insipid simulation) never fully capture the original, but the real interest in electronic instruments is in exploring the different possibilities afforded by them, both in terms of performativity and in terms of expressive depth.
I guess chant doesn't count as music to you, since that usually consists of people singing the same notes.
Stupid cat! You never bark! All you ever do is meow!
You are you, and unimaginative is unimaginative.
Totally! While we're at it, let's beef that up with a few other ethnic and racial stereotypes!
"As long as none of your references are named Dmitri, you should be fine" (eh? eh? RUSSIANS)
"As long as none of your references are named Deshawn, you should be fine" (black people are scary)
"As long as none of your references have Hussein for a middle name, you should be fine" (goes without saying)
I'm sure you can probably think of some others.
I don't know, TLDR, maybe you should RTFA and find out.
"Efficiency and practical utility are all that skills or technologies are for! Screw art!"
love,
Engineers
"You can have this free beer as long as you don't drink it."
That doesn't count as "free as in beer" in my book.
Maybe this analogy is failing. All I was trying to point out is that you're perfectly welcome to use their SDK and write iPhone apps, test them in the free simulator, etc, without paying a dime. The $99 fee lets you test on a real device and/or deploy to the store. I can see being annoyed at not being able to deploy to your own phone (that's one of the things I'd most like for them to change) without paying, but access to the store? That's fair game, as far as I'm concerned. They've gone to the trouble of creating this ecosystem, setting up all the infrastructure necessary for you to deploy your app to potentially hundreds of thousands of users, and handle all the financial transactions. All you have to do is write it, and of course, pay them $100.
Perhaps brick and mortar comparisons are just as useless, but if I make some gadget, I don't see why any store on the block would be obligated to accept it as merchandise and put it on their shelves. Apple charging me for access to their system simply means that all I have to do is invent and build the gadget. They even take care of the packaging. Seems like a pretty fair deal to me.
They charge a fee if you want to send builds to a device, or publish in their store, but the SDK itself, and its associated dev tools, are free as in beer.
Which is exactly why Apple gives away all their development tools for free, and why the built their current flagship software product on top of BSD, drawing significant interest and new users from the Linux crowd.
Apple doesn't hate geeks, it hates the way many geeks think that because they're so smart, they're automatically good at everything. The Unix that is OS X and the iPhone platform provide plenty of room for tinkering -- perhaps less so on the iPhone -- but it's not like everything Mac is a lifeless void. What Apple doesn't like you doing is trying to one-up them at their own game. For instance, if Apple made it easy for you install themes the way you might in any number of Linux window managers, chances are pretty good that you'll just make your computer hideously ugly and then have the audacity to show it to all your friends. This isn't a chance they'd like to take, being that their niche is in good design (how depressing is it that good design is a niche market?).
These beautifully designed packages you passingly deride are what make computers usable. In the case of the iPhone, seriously, the vast majority of apps in the store are awful, even adhering to Apple's design guidelines and making use of their standard UI toolkits. Imagine what we would end up with if programmers had total control over the system. In my eyes, it would result in a sharp decrease of users as the typical iPhone would be less stable, potentially less secure, and certainly more confusing as apps would depart more significantly from the accepted set of standards. Practically every rule in their SDK license has some similar reason behind it, even if a few of them are overkill. Background processes can drain battery life. Interpreted code environments (especially user-generated code, which is the biggest concern IMHO) can make it difficult for Apple to evaluate the spectrum of how an app might perform in real use (or fail to perform), which is a real concern for those who care about all the little details of packaging and interface design.
It used to bother me how much Apple locks things down, but I have to admit that they've been really successful in creating a pleasing, easy to use, and reasonably flexible system that also brings with it a thriving market ecosystem. Essentially none of the other smartphone manufacturers and platforms have come even close to this. It certainly makes you wonder if an open platform is really the solution to the "iPhone Killer" problem.
Exactly right. It's similar to the situation we have with recent automobile designs, where all kinds of sensors are in place to detect potential engine problems. I have nothing against these sensors being there if it helps consumers realize something is wrong before serious damage occurs, but sometimes the sensors fail, and all you have to go by is the "Check Engine" light. A previous car of mine had a faulty sensor that would constantly trigger the engine light, and even though there was nothing else wrong with the car, it wouldn't pass smog as long as the light was on, which was most of the time. After spending way more money than I had ever intended to, both in attempts to get the car smogged and taking it to mechanics who simply plugged in a computer and "diagnosed" the problem the sensor was erroneously reporting, I actually ended up taking it to a mechanic who was nice enough to reset it for free, giving me enough time to take it across the street to get it smogged before the light came back on. It wasn't until later that I learned the sensor itself was the culprit.
Has it occurred to anyone that this paper isn't the "PC Brigades"? I'd be willing to be most of you haven't even bothered to read it.
Nobody is asking anyone to fill a quota. Minorities and women are underrepresented in games for the same reason that they were underrepresented in film and television for so long (and still are in many ways)...because they are socially marginalized. It's more a reflection of the state of our culture than anything else. You're probably not old enough to remember it, but if you look back just 30-40 years, it's hard to even find movies that are shown from a woman's point of view -- one of the biggest critiques of film by early feminists was the way in which female characters were often passive objects, plot devices or romantic interests of the male leads at best. Social researchers are interested in the way our culture reflects the biases we have.
You probably don't care, and that's fine. Nobody in the game industry is going to read this study any more than the slashcrowd, and if they did it's not going to cause them to rethink their plans. They make the games that sell, just like the moviemakers of yesteryear made the hero worshiping, male-centric films that audiences loved. Games, film and other cultural artefacts will continue to mirror the social gestalt, social change will be gradual, and most people won't notice. Social theorists and scientists (you can put scare quotes around it if you like) will continue to pay attention to these things, because they think, quite rightly, that having a pulse on our culture is a good thing.
The rejections weren't nonsensical, you just didn't agree with them. Apple's guidelines are freely available and fairly clear (even if they appear to give a a fair amount wiggle room). The fact that you attempted to re-submit a reworked version of your app, all while knowing that it still failed to comply with Apple's rules, is particularly telling. Don't like the fact that you're not supposed to link to 3rd party libraries? Do you think it's silly that they don't want the app's charity focus announced in the store? Well, too bad. There are plenty of other mobile platforms with far less traction that would love to have your half-assed product. This isn't Open Source, and you don't get to just take other people's hard work, make some little throwaway project, refuse to play by the rules, and then throw a hissy fit when things don't go your way.
For the record, I do iPhone development, and though there are some lovely interface concepts on the device, the overall state of UI design in many iPhone apps is typically lacking. But that said, if a fresh look at UI design is what you're after, you probably won't find it on Linux. There are just far too many ego-inflated power nerds who think they're good at everything, and engineers who couldn't give less of a damn about usability. Or worse, the occasional hotshot engineer with an artistic streak that assumes, obnoxiously, that UI design is the same thing as "skinning".
I mean, if UI quality were judged in the number and variety of themes available, we'd all be running Englightenment! Right guys? The really annoying thing about it is that this information is out there, and despite the fact that UI improvements have taken a back seat in recent years, any software developer could head on down to a decent library and learn at least a little of what makes an interface work (or better yet, learn that UI design is not a computer-specific domain, that sure would be a mindfuck). That is, if he wanted to.
That doesn't mean the rest of us need to give a $@*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_use_in_Iraq
White Phosphorus burns to the bone when it comes in contact with skin, and water makes it worse. The use of White Phosphorus as an incendiary weapon in Fallujah (and for that matter Gaza) constitutes deliberate killing of civilians. Any weapon that is used as a blanket over a wide area is, by definition, incapable of distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant.
While this is a good point, your analysis (and in fact, every single Slashdot headline about HCI) assumes that interaction design is limited to designing interfaces that are intended as replacements for generic, everyday data manipulation, such as mice/keyboards/etc. The real assumption we should be confronting is the notion that interface design is like a diagram of human evolution, or that innovations should necessarily replace everything that have come before them.
Siftables, for instance, make little sense as an interface for graphic designers working in Photoshop, but might make a fabulous specialized interface for young children, who primarily learn through direct physical interaction with their environment. Todd Oppenheimer's book "The Flickering Mind" points out some of the issues that can arise from young children spending too much time with traditional computer interfaces â" by bypassing a child's need for direct, physical interaction you can actually end up stunting her intellectual development. In other words, sometimes a "practical" (i.e. efficient, sufficiently abstract) interface isn't what you want.
This is partly symptomatic of Slashdot's demographic, and also a byproduct of the sort of hype associated with digital media departments, and the kind of language they have to construct in order to attract funding. Mega-nerds don't usually think of technology except in the abstract and functional, and tend to regard inefficient or unusual interaction systems as a waste of time and resources (why would I want to stand there flailing my arms in the air when I could just write a shell script?). Academics tend to use overblown language to justify their work â" blanket statements about the way new digital technologies are "forever changing our world" are commonplace. Somewhere in between is the realization that we ought not only to rethink our one-size-fits-all perspective on technology, but that we should also keep in mind the way new technologies affect the meaning of interaction.