It's unfortunate that Berman can count on diehard fans to defend even the worst Star Trek imaginable. Instead of correcting the problems or hiring new writers, he'll just get the fans to start another letter writing campaign or Internet petition.
I wonder if his latest comments aren't a hint to get that ball rolling.
Instructional...inspiring...I guess it all depends on how you read the book and apply it. "Inspiring" denotes to me something less practically applicable than "instructional," but I think that Frankl's practical suggestions make his book instructional.
Of course, if you're limiting "instructional" to mean structured with specific lessons and whatnot, then this certainly isn't an instructional book.
I always suggest Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to people wondering about their purpose in the world. Frankl's discussion about concentration camp survivors and the inner drives that helped them endure when others could not is both inspiring and instructional.
That hasn't worked for snail mail. Junk mailers don't stop sending their mail just because they have to use postage; they just up the price for their masters.
It's obviously a matter of opinion, but I think that several episodes (from both TOS and TNG) show an idealism beyond simple money-making--an idealism I don't see often in the franchise anymore.
As for the difference between success and passion, I guess it all depends on the definition of success. I want to be entertained by something that has some meaning, and I consider any work that does that to be successful. Whether or not the slavering morons of the common television audience enjoy it really doesn't matter to me.
I can almost guarantee that this production, however amateur, is infinitely superior to any recent Paramount effort for one simple reason:
The people who made it are passionate about the subject matter.
The best years of Star Trek were when people with a love for the material were in charge of the shows/movies. I'll let the Slashdot crowd argue about when those were, but I think the current failure of Star Trek isn't one of story or budget or marketing: it is one of passion.
Commercial Star Trek is a cheap hustle, fleecing idealistic and naive fans. It's always been that to some extent, but there was once some feeling behind it. Too bad Star Trek fans are now just a demographic to be exploited.
That's a very interesting idea I never thought of. It leads me to another:
If you decided you wanted to transition to a more animal-friendly society, you'd have to have some horrendous "readjustment" period where we killed off all the old animals (or reduced them to their minimum useful numbers) and we'd then just maintain that smaller population.
In other words, killing many animals upfront to save hypothetical animals down the road.
You're certainly right; it shouldn't be about how much money you raise. If you're a lawyer, by all means volunteer. If you're not, pony up so other people can pay for them.
It shouldn't JUST be about money, but money always helps.
I've already done this. I have a CD (which friends refer to as "the football") on which I have backed up scanned images of my birth certificate, medical records, school records, every photo I have (2000+), every development project I've worked on, every short story/paper I've ever written, and a database in which I store daily entries of my activities.
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
Anyone with this quote has to have been kicked in the head by a mule at some point in his life:
"People see any additional expenditure as fun and that means you don't have to go for that additional comfort for your employees because you don't need to do it anymore because you don't need to compete to hold on to your employees," Rush adds.
Huh?
This guy is just some nobody recruiter churning out his hr-speak. Pay it no mind.
Stomach contents tell us all kinds of things
on
Dinosaur Mummy Found
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What they eat says volumes about how a dinosaur is built. A dinosaur that can stoop to get ferns and reach the leaves of conifers obviously has a certain length of neck and articulation of the spine. One that eats plants may not be as muscled or quick as one that eats other dinosaurs or carrion, mostly because it doesn't need to be.
Just from stomach contents we can tell what it was fast enough to catch, what it was tall enough to reach, what it could bend down to reach, and how much energy it had to work with. The condition of the contents tells us if it had blunted teeth or sharp ones. We have some clues from a skeleton, but we have a lot more information with some extra context: "Oh. That's why that neck was built like that."
Most important solar system discovery in the last 72 years? More important than:
Liquid oceans on Europa
Ice on the moon
Possible signs of water erosion on Mars
This seems only important to people counting rocks and not to people with any hope of visiting them or furthering our understanding of the one we're on.
I was working in Washington at a U.S. Mint IT office near the Capitol when the towers were attacked. I didn't find out until the story on Slashdot appeared, and yours was the only site I could get to reliably. The phones were down, and this site was my only connection to what was going on. My superiors were totally clueless--many left without telling us we could go too, even.
So thanks for posting the story. You really served me well that day (and many since).
BASIC was the most accessible hands-on programming tool then and I learned a lot from tinkering with it and reading those magazines. The most important thing they did was break through the fear of computing, the apprehension that you could do something catastrophically wrong. Make a mistake in BASIC and you just reboot the Apple II. Make a mistake in Windows, and God knows what you've hosed.
Today's overly complicated technologies have returned us to the computer priesthood all of those home computers were trying to combat twenty and thirty years ago.
The hegemony of the historical record
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And I find it arrogant that you assume my information won't be valuable. The inane babblings of the dominant cultural leaders of a time are not nearly as useful to archaeologists as the information left behind by common individuals. The people who write the record don't accurately represent the lives and spirits of average people.
I think we have an opportunity with technology to preserve more than the party line, the "fiction agreed upon" by history's victors.
I converted more than 2000 photos to digital format on a CD, where I also have all of my softcopy writings, scanned legal papers, and other important documents. I still keep alternate versions of these things; I just wanted a single small item to grab in case of fire or hurricane or something, and one to keep offsite. I guess that makes me obsessive compulsive.
I actually had a great time doing it. I used Paint Shop Pro with good results, placing four pictures at a time on the scanner bed and then cropping them into separate images. Sometimes I did some image enhancement, especially with the older photos. A photo of my mother and my grandmother taken fifty years ago looks like it was taken last week with my wife's Canon T50. I had fun sorting and identifying them, too: "Let's see...when did I have that shirt? 1982?" Nohing adds perspective to your life like looking at all your bad haircuts over the years.
I did about 100 a night. I thought of doing something automated but there's no way to intelligently sort and name them that way (without going back and redoing it).
Now I just keep up with the photos I take. I'm hoping--perhaps vainly--that any updates to electronic photo formats will allow batch processes. I'm not sure what the lifespan of the JPEG format will be, but I'm pretty sure some enterprising person will develop a conversion tool from that to the next format.
You know, I've gone through three IBM clone PCs in the last few years after system crashes and faulty hardware and buggy software.
A month ago, I bought a 25-year-old Atari 2600 in an eBay auction and it runs great. For you trolls who snarl that the Atari is lame or the graphics are dated or the systems of today are so much cooler, I just have to ask: what system do you have that will still be working in a quarter century?
Then you get imagination, problem-solving, and interaction all in one.
Yeah, yeah, Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic, so say the Fundies. What about science fiction/real world role-playing games like Traveller or GURPS Time Travel? The latter could even be educational. "Your team's mission: prevent the First World War. Where do you go? What do you do?"
Get kids focused on using imagination instead of letting the computer do it for them.
It'll be interesting to see what the developers decide to use as a means to encourage people to join the military:
Realism, in which I'm shot in the leg and die of infection in a swamp a thousand miles from home.
Power Fantasy, in which I single-handedly defeat legions of nasties.
I'm not sure the realistic approach would be an effective recruitment tool. I don't remember people lining up to enlist after watching Saving Private Ryan: "Come! Join us! You too can wobble in shock holding your own severed leg."
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite line ever from young master Wiggum.
It's unfortunate that Berman can count on diehard fans to defend even the worst Star Trek imaginable. Instead of correcting the problems or hiring new writers, he'll just get the fans to start another letter writing campaign or Internet petition.
I wonder if his latest comments aren't a hint to get that ball rolling.
Instructional...inspiring...I guess it all depends on how you read the book and apply it. "Inspiring" denotes to me something less practically applicable than "instructional," but I think that Frankl's practical suggestions make his book instructional.
Of course, if you're limiting "instructional" to mean structured with specific lessons and whatnot, then this certainly isn't an instructional book.
I always suggest Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to people wondering about their purpose in the world. Frankl's discussion about concentration camp survivors and the inner drives that helped them endure when others could not is both inspiring and instructional.
That hasn't worked for snail mail. Junk mailers don't stop sending their mail just because they have to use postage; they just up the price for their masters.
It's obviously a matter of opinion, but I think that several episodes (from both TOS and TNG) show an idealism beyond simple money-making--an idealism I don't see often in the franchise anymore.
As for the difference between success and passion, I guess it all depends on the definition of success. I want to be entertained by something that has some meaning, and I consider any work that does that to be successful. Whether or not the slavering morons of the common television audience enjoy it really doesn't matter to me.
I can almost guarantee that this production, however amateur, is infinitely superior to any recent Paramount effort for one simple reason:
The people who made it are passionate about the subject matter.
The best years of Star Trek were when people with a love for the material were in charge of the shows/movies. I'll let the Slashdot crowd argue about when those were, but I think the current failure of Star Trek isn't one of story or budget or marketing: it is one of passion.
Commercial Star Trek is a cheap hustle, fleecing idealistic and naive fans. It's always been that to some extent, but there was once some feeling behind it. Too bad Star Trek fans are now just a demographic to be exploited.
That's a very interesting idea I never thought of. It leads me to another:
If you decided you wanted to transition to a more animal-friendly society, you'd have to have some horrendous "readjustment" period where we killed off all the old animals (or reduced them to their minimum useful numbers) and we'd then just maintain that smaller population.
In other words, killing many animals upfront to save hypothetical animals down the road.
That's an interesting choice to make!
You're certainly right; it shouldn't be about how much money you raise. If you're a lawyer, by all means volunteer. If you're not, pony up so other people can pay for them.
It shouldn't JUST be about money, but money always helps.
I've already done this. I have a CD (which friends refer to as "the football") on which I have backed up scanned images of my birth certificate, medical records, school records, every photo I have (2000+), every development project I've worked on, every short story/paper I've ever written, and a database in which I store daily entries of my activities.
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
Would it be less durable than the LCD in a digital watch?
Anyone with this quote has to have been kicked in the head by a mule at some point in his life:
"People see any additional expenditure as fun and that means you don't have to go for that additional comfort for your employees because you don't need to do it anymore because you don't need to compete to hold on to your employees," Rush adds.
Huh?
This guy is just some nobody recruiter churning out his hr-speak. Pay it no mind.
What they eat says volumes about how a dinosaur is built. A dinosaur that can stoop to get ferns and reach the leaves of conifers obviously has a certain length of neck and articulation of the spine. One that eats plants may not be as muscled or quick as one that eats other dinosaurs or carrion, mostly because it doesn't need to be.
Just from stomach contents we can tell what it was fast enough to catch, what it was tall enough to reach, what it could bend down to reach, and how much energy it had to work with. The condition of the contents tells us if it had blunted teeth or sharp ones. We have some clues from a skeleton, but we have a lot more information with some extra context: "Oh. That's why that neck was built like that."
Counting rocks isn't creativity.
- Liquid oceans on Europa
- Ice on the moon
- Possible signs of water erosion on Mars
This seems only important to people counting rocks and not to people with any hope of visiting them or furthering our understanding of the one we're on.I was working in Washington at a U.S. Mint IT office near the Capitol when the towers were attacked. I didn't find out until the story on Slashdot appeared, and yours was the only site I could get to reliably. The phones were down, and this site was my only connection to what was going on. My superiors were totally clueless--many left without telling us we could go too, even.
So thanks for posting the story. You really served me well that day (and many since).
Indeed!
BASIC was the most accessible hands-on programming tool then and I learned a lot from tinkering with it and reading those magazines. The most important thing they did was break through the fear of computing, the apprehension that you could do something catastrophically wrong. Make a mistake in BASIC and you just reboot the Apple II. Make a mistake in Windows, and God knows what you've hosed.
Today's overly complicated technologies have returned us to the computer priesthood all of those home computers were trying to combat twenty and thirty years ago.
And I find it arrogant that you assume my information won't be valuable. The inane babblings of the dominant cultural leaders of a time are not nearly as useful to archaeologists as the information left behind by common individuals. The people who write the record don't accurately represent the lives and spirits of average people.
I think we have an opportunity with technology to preserve more than the party line, the "fiction agreed upon" by history's victors.
My scanner is pretty fast; they took me about an hour to an hour and a half, depending upon how much tweaking I did to the images.
I converted more than 2000 photos to digital format on a CD, where I also have all of my softcopy writings, scanned legal papers, and other important documents. I still keep alternate versions of these things; I just wanted a single small item to grab in case of fire or hurricane or something, and one to keep offsite. I guess that makes me obsessive compulsive.
I actually had a great time doing it. I used Paint Shop Pro with good results, placing four pictures at a time on the scanner bed and then cropping them into separate images. Sometimes I did some image enhancement, especially with the older photos. A photo of my mother and my grandmother taken fifty years ago looks like it was taken last week with my wife's Canon T50. I had fun sorting and identifying them, too: "Let's see...when did I have that shirt? 1982?" Nohing adds perspective to your life like looking at all your bad haircuts over the years.
I did about 100 a night. I thought of doing something automated but there's no way to intelligently sort and name them that way (without going back and redoing it).
Now I just keep up with the photos I take. I'm hoping--perhaps vainly--that any updates to electronic photo formats will allow batch processes. I'm not sure what the lifespan of the JPEG format will be, but I'm pretty sure some enterprising person will develop a conversion tool from that to the next format.
You know, I've gone through three IBM clone PCs in the last few years after system crashes and faulty hardware and buggy software.
A month ago, I bought a 25-year-old Atari 2600 in an eBay auction and it runs great. For you trolls who snarl that the Atari is lame or the graphics are dated or the systems of today are so much cooler, I just have to ask: what system do you have that will still be working in a quarter century?
Let me help you out: none.
Hmmm...the seller must be getting married.
Then you get imagination, problem-solving, and interaction all in one. Yeah, yeah, Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic, so say the Fundies. What about science fiction/real world role-playing games like Traveller or GURPS Time Travel? The latter could even be educational. "Your team's mission: prevent the First World War. Where do you go? What do you do?" Get kids focused on using imagination instead of letting the computer do it for them.
It'll be interesting to see what the developers decide to use as a means to encourage people to join the military:
I'm not sure the realistic approach would be an effective recruitment tool. I don't remember people lining up to enlist after watching Saving Private Ryan: "Come! Join us! You too can wobble in shock holding your own severed leg."
...some sort of archiving feature. Anyone know of such an animal?