I've read many sci-fi novels in my day, and quite a few of them follow the cited sexually radical tendencies. I don't believe, however, that these outbursts were an expression of rebellion against magazine editors or the predominant culture, or even a means to explore an idea that one has (we'll get to that later). Rather, much of the sex one runs across in sci-fi, which is inevitably of the perverse nature, has to do with the authors or perhaps their target audience being unable to mature beyond adolescence.
I'm sure that geeks of the 50s and 60s, not unlike all of us today, didn't get around much. It certainly seems that way for Heinlein. That The Moon is a Harsh Mistress takes place in a male-dominated (speaking in terms of population) society speaks volumes as a metaphor for the social isolation felt in fields such as Computer Science and Physics. The misogynistic tone he takes (where women are ogled as pieces of meat as they move through hallways) is, then, hardly surprising.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the themes went beyond male-dominance and clear into homosexuality and other deviant, related practices that would occur in the male-authored societies that were inevitably devoid of Christianity. Take Larry Niven's Ringworld series, for instance, in which the main character is transported to a future Earth that consists of two immortal factions of humanity - boys and girls. In this, the two factions live in isolation from each other and are at war (I need not point out the misogynistic themes exhibited here). Furthermore, the homosexual practices that the main character encounters can only be describing the gay paedo's paradise, a rather disturbing prospect, especially for parents who unwittingly allow their children to buy this filth in bookstores. Heinlein's exploration of transsexuality, I Will Fear No Evil, hardly needs elaboration.
The prevalent anti-women themes that today's programmers and engineers were raised on now exemplify themselves in the workplace. Why is it that there are so few women in this field today, while it seems to have no shortage of creepy shut-ins and other social malcontents? The root of the problem is that generations of men raised reading this trashy "literature", whose sexuality is inevitably geared toward men, specifically those of the scientific persuasion, have been taught to hate women.
Furthermore, being a literature buff myself (I've read many of the classics and discussed them during my English courses), I can only say that sci-fi is the most lowbrow of anything that I've read, with the exception of romance-novel tripe like Heart's Aflame, Love Only Once, Prisoner of My Desire, The Pursuit, Fires of Winter, Man of My Dreams and Wuthering Heights. Science fiction is not, as some would claim, a liberating format in which one can more freely express ideas without the constraints of reality to hold them back, but, rather, an excuse to churn out some pretty unsubtle writing and themes. It's painfully, eye-poppingly obvious from books such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that Heinlien is a utopian, head-in-the-clouds libertarian. No one even needs to read an analysis of the book, his political agenda is staring you right in the face. More traditional fiction authors have gotten along just fine in getting their points across without having to resort to ludicrous, unrealistic devices like space or time travel or things taking place in an imagined "future". People like Aldous Huxley, Charles Dickens, John Irving and William Shakespeare, in fact.
So, as much fun as it is to read a good adventure every once in a while, you must also realize where these people are coming from when they write these things. And for God's sake, keep your kids away from them.
Are you kidding? How much could bullets possibly cost? And forget court costs - we're trying to save money here, we'd cut those right outa the process. None of this faggoty liberal "due process" bullshit; they've already had their day in court! And they lost!
Every XBox you buy is helping Microsoft partially recover their losses incurred by manufacturing and development. Did it not occur to you that you are paying Microsoft money for the privilege of using an XBox? Or do you just shoplift them from Best Buy?
Doesn't the XBox only come with something like a 10GB hard drive? How in the world would that work out for PVRs? Last I checked, you needed a serious amount of storage space in order to make a decent PVR (along the lines of 60 to 80GB). Also, apparently, you are required to purchase seperate hardware and add it in somehow in order to get video input.
Wouldn't a TiVO or Replay TV be much cheaper than this? Not just adding in hardware costs, but all the time required to get all this working. It seems to me that the XBox just wasn't designed for this kind of usage.
I'm glad to see those in the Open Source community finally accepting the superiority of not reinventing the wheel and have decided to build their creation on top of existing hardware. Finally, instead of fighting them, we can help out our brothers at Microsoft by boosting Xbox sales and adding value to them.
We are all geeks. It's about time we started sticking together.
I was hoping that a respected institution such as PBS would be able to come up with a more competent technology columnist than Robert X. Cringley, but unfortunately, this has not been the case. There's no need to even read the article - the main proposal is so ludicrous and demonstrative of a fundamental ignorance of software as to be completely lacking credibility.
I'm surprised that even Slashdot deigned to post this; it is such utter drivel as to rival and perhaps even surpass the ineptitude of the editors here who, for all their spelling errors and unabashed sensationalism, at least tend to get their technical facts right the first time.
In all seriousness, though, perhaps if enough people can scrape the funds together, the "community" can buy out Mandrake and open the source, like they did with Blender. A pity that it would become "hostageware" (for a while, anyway), but such is business. *sigh*
Although I also have problems with taxation, and it is, in fact, it's own form of state extortion
That's ludicrous. Services such as road maintainence and national defense are necessary to the functioning of any society. I'd like to see you pacifists and peaceniks survive for even one month without someone like North Korea coming in and walking all over you. To claim that funding things like the military is theft is not only irrational but also dangerously unpatriotic.
If they can't support (and police) themselves, they deserve to fail and go under.
Police themselves? That is the last thing anybody needs. You are advocating senseless anarchy and bandwidth waste through the RIAA DDoSing countless netizens. If the RIAA were to police itself, you'd have jackbooted thugs literally breaking down your door and taking your computer because someone at the RIAA got the notion that you had some pirated music. I think you oughta take your crazy RIAA advocacy somewhere else, bub, because it doesn't belong here.
Actually, it's a rather reasonable proposal with significant precedent. Consider the U.S. penal system (I am sorry that I am not informed of the systems of other, less free countries, but I am speaking from a position of expertise on my own country here), which incarcerates millions of people every year for everything from murder to jaywalking.
This whole system is funded by the money given to the government by the taxpayers. What, exactly, are you doing by having prisons? You are, in fact, paying to support people who have committed crimes. Is this fair? Of course. If you didn't pay for prisons, you would have dangerous murderers, rapists and potheads walking the streets and terrorizing the populace.
Similarly, in this system, you are paying the RIAA for the continued service of providing music. Like it or not, everything musical you purchase has an association with the RIAA; if the RIAA goes bankrupt from the rampant internet piracy of their intellectual property, the whole world will suffer, because all sources of music will dry up.
This is certainly something I wouldn't want to see, and I can imagine only the most ardent philistine hoping for such an outcome. So do your part to support music. Entertainers have families to feed, too.
So, you're saying "since some people don't steal music over the Internet, then the RIAA has no right to take their money from them"
That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Perhaps you are familiar with another system that works like this; we usually refer to it here as taxation. You, the user, turn over a certain portion of your earnings to the government and, in return, recieve services from them proportional to your need. There is nothing morally wrong with this - you are helping out the poor and disadvantaged by doing so.
Similarly, through paying this fee to the RIAA, you will be able to continue to enjoy the music that you listen to. What would happen if the major record labels ended up going bankrupt? You certainly wouldn't be able to get music anymore. Odds are, you would be a lot more pissed off than you were when you found out you just had to pay a fee to compensate for the crimes committed by others.
Hell, I can draw another parallel to taxation here: if you think this is so goddamned unfair, then what are you doing by electing officials who continue to support the concept of imprisonment by the state? You are, after all, paying the upkeep for other people who have committed wrongs. Surely, they should all be executed at minimal cost to you, the taxpayer, because you shouldn't be paying for their mistakes. Or should you? I certainly hope nobody here is heartless enough to support such a position - we have enough people imprisoned already for frivolous drug offenses, the last thing we should do is start executing them.
So really, when reflected upon, this isn't such a bad thing. What you are really doing is paying for a service rendered by the RIAA. Sure, there may be some who don't listen to music, but by and large, such a luddite probably doesn't have an internet connection, either.
This makes a lot of sense. Sure, I'm a libertarian who believes in a very limited government, but I also believe that taxes should be used to pay for infrastructure and civil defense. So, with the Internet becoming an increasingly important part of our national infrastructure, it only makes sense for the states to be able to tax us for the upkeep and maintainence of this valuable service.
Also Dartmouth. And Princeton is 2 or 3 in many rankings that I have read.
More fragmentation
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is another "easy to use" Linux distro what we really need? I think the last thing I want to do is be able to take a program off of my Mandrake box, take it over to my Ark box and not be able to run it because they are two different distros.
And also, who has not seen this "make linux easier for the desktop" thing before? There are about a million and one distros who purport to do this. Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
Slashdot Mirror
I've read many sci-fi novels in my day, and quite a few of them follow the cited sexually radical tendencies. I don't believe, however, that these outbursts were an expression of rebellion against magazine editors or the predominant culture, or even a means to explore an idea that one has (we'll get to that later). Rather, much of the sex one runs across in sci-fi, which is inevitably of the perverse nature, has to do with the authors or perhaps their target audience being unable to mature beyond adolescence.
I'm sure that geeks of the 50s and 60s, not unlike all of us today, didn't get around much. It certainly seems that way for Heinlein. That The Moon is a Harsh Mistress takes place in a male-dominated (speaking in terms of population) society speaks volumes as a metaphor for the social isolation felt in fields such as Computer Science and Physics. The misogynistic tone he takes (where women are ogled as pieces of meat as they move through hallways) is, then, hardly surprising.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the themes went beyond male-dominance and clear into homosexuality and other deviant, related practices that would occur in the male-authored societies that were inevitably devoid of Christianity. Take Larry Niven's Ringworld series, for instance, in which the main character is transported to a future Earth that consists of two immortal factions of humanity - boys and girls. In this, the two factions live in isolation from each other and are at war (I need not point out the misogynistic themes exhibited here). Furthermore, the homosexual practices that the main character encounters can only be describing the gay paedo's paradise, a rather disturbing prospect, especially for parents who unwittingly allow their children to buy this filth in bookstores. Heinlein's exploration of transsexuality, I Will Fear No Evil, hardly needs elaboration.
The prevalent anti-women themes that today's programmers and engineers were raised on now exemplify themselves in the workplace. Why is it that there are so few women in this field today, while it seems to have no shortage of creepy shut-ins and other social malcontents? The root of the problem is that generations of men raised reading this trashy "literature", whose sexuality is inevitably geared toward men, specifically those of the scientific persuasion, have been taught to hate women.
Furthermore, being a literature buff myself (I've read many of the classics and discussed them during my English courses), I can only say that sci-fi is the most lowbrow of anything that I've read, with the exception of romance-novel tripe like Heart's Aflame, Love Only Once, Prisoner of My Desire, The Pursuit, Fires of Winter, Man of My Dreams and Wuthering Heights. Science fiction is not, as some would claim, a liberating format in which one can more freely express ideas without the constraints of reality to hold them back, but, rather, an excuse to churn out some pretty unsubtle writing and themes. It's painfully, eye-poppingly obvious from books such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that Heinlien is a utopian, head-in-the-clouds libertarian. No one even needs to read an analysis of the book, his political agenda is staring you right in the face. More traditional fiction authors have gotten along just fine in getting their points across without having to resort to ludicrous, unrealistic devices like space or time travel or things taking place in an imagined "future". People like Aldous Huxley, Charles Dickens, John Irving and William Shakespeare, in fact.
So, as much fun as it is to read a good adventure every once in a while, you must also realize where these people are coming from when they write these things. And for God's sake, keep your kids away from them.
Are you kidding? How much could bullets possibly cost? And forget court costs - we're trying to save money here, we'd cut those right outa the process. None of this faggoty liberal "due process" bullshit; they've already had their day in court! And they lost!
Every XBox you buy is helping Microsoft partially recover their losses incurred by manufacturing and development. Did it not occur to you that you are paying Microsoft money for the privilege of using an XBox? Or do you just shoplift them from Best Buy?
Wouldn't a TiVO or Replay TV be much cheaper than this? Not just adding in hardware costs, but all the time required to get all this working. It seems to me that the XBox just wasn't designed for this kind of usage.
We are all geeks. It's about time we started sticking together.
I was hoping that a respected institution such as PBS would be able to come up with a more competent technology columnist than Robert X. Cringley, but unfortunately, this has not been the case. There's no need to even read the article - the main proposal is so ludicrous and demonstrative of a fundamental ignorance of software as to be completely lacking credibility.
I'm surprised that even Slashdot deigned to post this; it is such utter drivel as to rival and perhaps even surpass the ineptitude of the editors here who, for all their spelling errors and unabashed sensationalism, at least tend to get their technical facts right the first time.
Software Freedom is nothing to laugh about. I fully believe that the community should open the source to Mandrake Linux.
In all seriousness, though, perhaps if enough people can scrape the funds together, the "community" can buy out Mandrake and open the source, like they did with Blender. A pity that it would become "hostageware" (for a while, anyway), but such is business. *sigh*
That's ludicrous. Services such as road maintainence and national defense are necessary to the functioning of any society. I'd like to see you pacifists and peaceniks survive for even one month without someone like North Korea coming in and walking all over you. To claim that funding things like the military is theft is not only irrational but also dangerously unpatriotic.
If they can't support (and police) themselves, they deserve to fail and go under.
Police themselves? That is the last thing anybody needs. You are advocating senseless anarchy and bandwidth waste through the RIAA DDoSing countless netizens. If the RIAA were to police itself, you'd have jackbooted thugs literally breaking down your door and taking your computer because someone at the RIAA got the notion that you had some pirated music. I think you oughta take your crazy RIAA advocacy somewhere else, bub, because it doesn't belong here.
This whole system is funded by the money given to the government by the taxpayers. What, exactly, are you doing by having prisons? You are, in fact, paying to support people who have committed crimes. Is this fair? Of course. If you didn't pay for prisons, you would have dangerous murderers, rapists and potheads walking the streets and terrorizing the populace.
Similarly, in this system, you are paying the RIAA for the continued service of providing music. Like it or not, everything musical you purchase has an association with the RIAA; if the RIAA goes bankrupt from the rampant internet piracy of their intellectual property, the whole world will suffer, because all sources of music will dry up.
This is certainly something I wouldn't want to see, and I can imagine only the most ardent philistine hoping for such an outcome. So do your part to support music. Entertainers have families to feed, too.
So, you're saying "since some people don't steal music over the Internet, then the RIAA has no right to take their money from them"
That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Perhaps you are familiar with another system that works like this; we usually refer to it here as taxation. You, the user, turn over a certain portion of your earnings to the government and, in return, recieve services from them proportional to your need. There is nothing morally wrong with this - you are helping out the poor and disadvantaged by doing so.
Similarly, through paying this fee to the RIAA, you will be able to continue to enjoy the music that you listen to. What would happen if the major record labels ended up going bankrupt? You certainly wouldn't be able to get music anymore. Odds are, you would be a lot more pissed off than you were when you found out you just had to pay a fee to compensate for the crimes committed by others.
Hell, I can draw another parallel to taxation here: if you think this is so goddamned unfair, then what are you doing by electing officials who continue to support the concept of imprisonment by the state? You are, after all, paying the upkeep for other people who have committed wrongs. Surely, they should all be executed at minimal cost to you, the taxpayer, because you shouldn't be paying for their mistakes. Or should you? I certainly hope nobody here is heartless enough to support such a position - we have enough people imprisoned already for frivolous drug offenses, the last thing we should do is start executing them.
So really, when reflected upon, this isn't such a bad thing. What you are really doing is paying for a service rendered by the RIAA. Sure, there may be some who don't listen to music, but by and large, such a luddite probably doesn't have an internet connection, either.
What if Iraq also purchases anti-antijammers? We'll be screwed!
Amen. +5, Insightful.
Blade Runner, but less philosophical and with more action. Phillip K. Dick goes to Hollywood!
Stop beating around the bush and just say "Linux". Sheesh.
Did you have Dr. Krupp as a calculus teacher too?
I want the truth!
This makes a lot of sense. Sure, I'm a libertarian who believes in a very limited government, but I also believe that taxes should be used to pay for infrastructure and civil defense. So, with the Internet becoming an increasingly important part of our national infrastructure, it only makes sense for the states to be able to tax us for the upkeep and maintainence of this valuable service.
Um, which do you suppose?
Porn wants to be free. Get a girlfriend.
Um, really? Which wrong idea did you think we were getting, then?
Also Dartmouth. And Princeton is 2 or 3 in many rankings that I have read.
And also, who has not seen this "make linux easier for the desktop" thing before? There are about a million and one distros who purport to do this. Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
I wouldn't date a girl that fucking stupid anyways. You know, there are multisyllabic girls out there, and they are wonderful.
Whose laws are being enforced, and upon whom?