You should read the article. He would agree with you entirely. He's not planning on going in the den. As he says, that would be insane and suicidal. About all he's willing to do is get beat up by the bear outside it's den for the 2-5 minutes it takes for the tranquilizer shot to take effect.
I keep hearing so much about how Americans are doing so well, how strong our economy is, how much everybody has. Why then, is greed becoming the defining trait of our culture? Are not Bill Gates' tens of billions enough? I kid you not, we as a culture and as a country are headed down a very ugly road; should we persist, we most certainly will get what we deserve.
Good point, but your looking at it logically - "We have so much already, why is greed for more our dominant trait?". Unfortunately, humans don't operate logically. Money and material and power are becoming the measure of our value, and as such, no one could ever have enough.
I keep hearing the argument, if it's not protected, why would anyone do it? If patents didn't protect those who innovate, why would anyone innovate? Of course, the assumption always comes down to money. People do what they do for economic/political benefit. Maybe moving into the information age will require a changed basis for defining value. Money works for physical materials that follow the law of conservation of matter, but perhaps not for something that can be copied at the cost of a few electrons.
Not that I know what the solution is, just seems we need to find other motivators for innovation/work. After all, where will be when someone does finally figure out how to interface a computer with a brain? Then those intellectual property laws are going to be a BITCH!
Needless to say, the best boardgames come from Germany...
I know why you say this because a lot of these games from Germany show some remarkable ingenuity.
However....
I can't stand any of them. They all have one major, very unfortunate similarity - the playing of the game is separate from the scoring. Let me explain. Almost every German game is structured so that each player takes a turn, and then scores points based on achieving certain goals and/or conditions. So the games often come down to who can squeeze the most points out of their last few turns, and you can get very heavy into the calculations....
It also makes for a bizarre division between what happens on the board, and what's happening with the "victory points" off the board, and sometimes the two are at odds intuitively. I prefer games where the winning and losing is completely represented in the game itself - like Starfleet, where you win if you blow up your opponents ships, or wargames, where you win if you win on the board. Chess is another good example. Settlers of Cataan is awful, IMO. Robo Rally and Ricochet Robot are great, though.:-)
Why do you insist it be instant? Voting on bills doesn't have to be implemented like a fist-person-shooter. You could easily institute minimum time periods between a bill's presentation to the public and the final vote for it. Like on the order of several months, at the least.
Yuck. I've heard this opinion of true (as opposed to representative) democracy so many times. The American people are too stupid to be allowed to vote directly, on-line rule of the stupid masses, blah, blah, blah....
We are the American people. What you are saying is that we are too stupid, and we need the politicians too protect us from ourselves. Horseshit! They've already proven that they react knee-jerky. We're protected from a lot of crap because a) the process of passing a law, and b) the battle between the two parties. If we were a true democracy, we'd still have the process to protect us from too-quick decision making, and we'd have battles between a huge multitude of groups.
Representation allows a few to make decisions for all. This allows money to be the primary influencer (money can buy those few, money couldn't hope to buy the masses). It also means those few get together and "deal". Oh, goody.
Even with a true democracy, there's still a smaller number that would write laws, and also an even smaller few who would administer the process. I'm tired of these arguments. Until it's tried, you're fears seem contrived. Maybe you need to have a healthier fear of the current system.
Or even to make politicians redundant. Does the net possibly have the potential to change political systems from representitive democracy to partipipatory democracy where all citizens can participate in the discussion and vote on all issues rather than having politicians do so on their behalf.
Let me ask - do you REALLY want this?
Yes, I do. I'm more scared of a small group representing a larger group than I am of the larger group representing itself. I'm scared of that small group being bought and owned by the rich. The current system would be better except it doesn't work. It's become rule of the wealthy.
I wonder where this fear of majority rule comes from? Microsoft? Monopolies? I can see that, but really, is it worse than the rule of the have's over the have-nots? I think we're confusing majority rule with mob rule. I think there's a difference.
The military run-up was planned in advance as a way to break the cold war stalemate.....
So give Reagan credit for speeding up the issue. Most likely Soviet Russia couldn't have lasted anyway. However, what's so great about the cold war being over?????? What's improved????? Is _anything_ better as a result? I can't think of anything.
But..... we do have enormous debt now.... we've managed to make enemies of a whole bunch of folks in this world..... we have managed to place many Americans in harm's way, mostly because we've positioned ourselves as the world's policeman. Also, if we'd had balanced budgets in the 80's and surplusses, instead of more and more debt and deficits, I wonder where we'd be now? I wonder where the Russians would be? I'm not sure what we won in the cold war, but we sure as hell lost a bunch.
The internet is less media-abled than TV, at present, mostly because of bandwidth, so for now, I think the internet is an improvement over the emptiness of television content. I'm sure it will change for the worse though.
Semi-offtopic, I was thinking while reading Jon's article about how our population as a nation has grown since 1800, but has the population of our congressional representatives grown? I know the senate has always been 2 per state, but what about house representatives? What I'm getting at, is that the congress has become much less representative simply because of the numbers involved, and the power of each individual congress person has grown way beyond what was originally set up.
Of course, sending 10 senators per state might get a bit burdensome and needlessly expensive. I was thinking that maybe there could be a system in place where a congress person's constituents would have a chance to "override" that representatives vote on any particular matter. Just a thought, but then I've always thought the internet should be used to make voting easier and more convenient, just as a way of enabling democracy.
Moderation stuff (duh, what else?)
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Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
1. I don't see why AC's are started at 0 and named users are started at 1. What's the point? It seems like unnecessary pressure to get people to register.
2. Moderation is a chore the way it's set up currently. The first three times I was moderator, I did my best, but nowadays, I ignore it. It's a pain. If I want to moderate a comment, I have to scroll to the end of the page and reload the whole thing? It needs to be quick and easy. Press a button and be done - no scrolling, no reload of the page. Otherwise, I have no idea will keep people from getting tired of moderating. The current moderation scheme works excellently (though I would suggest letting everyone moderate all the time), but the implementation of the technical details needs work.
3. Automatic moderation of posts based on karma is probably not a good idea. People don't post worthwhile stuff all the time, or junk all the time. I've said before, negative karma makes no sense. Punishing is inefficient. Ignore the bad, promote the good.
Autism seems to be a label for a bunch of symptoms that are often found together - lengthy attention span, physical unbalance, emotional distance, hypersensitivity......
But, there are people that have 1 or two of these, and not the others. It appears to me that autism is what we call it when a bunch of these psychological traits happen to occur together in one person. I know I have some autistic tendencies that are described in the article, but I definitely don't have others. So, it seems to me we still have a ways to go to real understanding of what's going on. As long as we're applying arbitrary labels to unrelated traits, we're still pretty much in the dark, IMO.
Seems like the real goal is cordon off the wierdos so that more business gets done on the Net. More e-commerce sales.
But we have a different paradigm that we could use instead of censorship - zoning. Instead of filters and what not, use zones. And instead of cordoning off porn and other controversial content, cordon off the stuff you want to protect: Use www.XXX.bus for business purposes www.xxx.chd for children's net. www.xxx.lib for libraries, etc. But leave.com and.net open for anything. That way, we are only censoring those who want to be censored, and there's still plenty of room for freedom.
Yeah, it's not so unlike when you slave for days and weeks on some really tough code, and your clueless boss gets really excited about that great image you stuck in there as an afterthought....
"Wow, great image!"
"Oh, thanks, I just threw it in there."
"You're a great programmer!"
"Really, you like my natural language processor?"
"Uh, sure....that splash-screen is killer!"
*sound of molars grinding and head striking keyboard repeatedly*
...Star Wars was never supposed to be a deep, filosofical, artistic film...
Yeah, but I remember when PM came out and there was a big discussion on slashdot about the comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars and how Star Wars was more philosophical and thought-provoking, whereas star trek was more entertainment based. I did several double-takes during that discussion. I couldn't believe people actually thought that.
The original Star Wars movie wasn't meant to be taken seriously (I hope - I pray!), but 10 jillion $$$$ later, I think that's been forgotten.
At first I thought this plan of Sun's was a dumb idea. They keep having this same dumb idea, and it keeps flopping, and then they have the idea again. Corporations that try to do this run into too many problems and complaints. I remember when they tried to centralize our applications where I used to work. We tried it, but when our requests for having certain applications installed on the central server went ignored and delayed for weeks-months-indefinitely, the users rebelled, and we actually re-installed our own computers with new operating systems.
But, then I thought some more about it, and I decided it still won't work, but Sun could be trying harder, it seems to me. Why are they charging for the boxes? For the terminal? Seems they ought to be giving that part away. Get more people to buy their servers, and they should be golden. If companies can give away free PC's for a commitment of internet access, why can't sun give away this worthless garbage for a payoff of more $100,000 servers being bought? Why is it Sun always seems so damn smart and yet so damn dumb all at the same time?
I have to agree. Why introduce meta-moderation when all it seems to be is a way to cancel out previous bad moderation? That can already be accomplished by regular moderation, so I don't see the point.
I think it'd be best to let everyone moderate all the time, maybe using karma as a way to determine how many points you have to spend. That way, people would probably end up moderating only when they felt strongly (after an initial flurry of power-greedy moderation, people would get bored of it and moderate only when it struck them to, rather than the current system where I gots 'em for just 3 days, so I better get moderating....)
As far as Karma goes, I'm pretty sure that negative karma doesn't make much sense. I would think an earn-and-spend model would be more fair and effective. you earn karma for doing good, and you get to spend it. You don't get penalized for doing bad. One way to spend karma might be to moderate a post. Or to upgrade you're own post if you think it's important. I don't think this opens up to too much abuse, because if you didn't make quality posts, you wouldn't get karma to begin with.
....of this concept of ethics. It's untenable. There is no God, and there is no transcendent code of ethics out there for us to find. Whatever it is we call ethics, we've invented it. So give up this notion that there "is" ethics "out there" that people should adhere to.
Instead, ask the following: "How do I want the world to work?" And go from there.
There's two main reasons to go about it this way. 1. We give up the idea that there is one right ethic (usually with some god as the source), and thus enable a rational conversation about the pro's and con's of various systems.
2. It leads more naturally to the idea that we control how our world works and leads to practical, down-to-earth thinking about real solutions.
Quick example: abortion - most agree it's bad. Some say unethical. Those who say unethical often want to make it illegal. Just make it illegal and you've solved the problem. Consciences are allayed. However, the problem continues and nothing real has been done. But, if you approach it from the point of view that abortion is undesireable and we should work toward ending it, then we are naturally led to more practical solutions, such as education, empowerment, etc. Which have more actual effect on actual abortion rates.
Also, you can see that different groups of people naturally have different ideas about how the world should work. Hackers often want information to be free, because they see the harm that comes from keeping secrets. Others often don't want it to be free because it's their current source of income or power, or they can't imagine how the world could function that way. So it becomes a battle.
The battle is not a bad thing. It's healthy. By buying into the notion of ethics, Katz cannot see the battle for what it is - a battle for how our world will operate in the future. Katz has only a simplistic code of ethics, handed down from Judaeo-Christianity that says stealing is bad, etc. I think the reason his essay is so confused and empty of any solid message or even reasoning about the issues is that there is nowhere to go from the dead end of ethical reasoning.
This scheme plus public moderation/rating might have some value. Otherwise, it's worthless. Or, to be precise, not worth my $1.
If Hollywood had done this...
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Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
....it would have been a zillion times better.
Think about it. They sent three actors into the woods and didn't tell them what was going to happen. They're given base instructions as they go, and the filmmakers do wacky shit at night around their tent. Cool boy-scout prank, you might say.
Now imagine Hollywood does this, and add three 0's onto the budget (30 million for the math impaired). Those three actors they sent out aren't coming back sane. Not after what Hollywood could put them through. Now that would be entertaining!
Moderate this up PLEASE! People need to get a grip about this movie.
Re:Why BWP makes you think *SPOILERS!!!!!!!*
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Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
Did you actually read the post you're responding to, or did you just skim the numbered questions? I wasn't *asking* these questions, I was summarizing what questions were being discussed most commonly.
So thanks for your answers, but let me spell out the "nearly-obvious" point of my post: The movie isn't really a "thinking" movie just cause you have to make up for yourself what happened. And enjoyment of the movie is mostly based on how much you enjoyed making it up for yourself. My opinion of that: Makes for a decent and somewhat entertaining movie, but spare me the "it was soooo scary" and "what a fabulous movie cause there was no blood" comments. It was Ok. Nothing more.
And, btw, none of your answers to the questions are obvious, or even correct, IMO. The hermit? What hermit? He's been dead. Saying Heather died at the end doesn't exactly answer the question, "what happened"? It's about as insightful as saying the camera fell to the ground. Ditto saying Mike stood in the corner to foreshadow Heather's death.
It appears my post left too much for the imagination.
The BWP makes people think. That's what we're all saying. But I ask, what does it make us think about? Some common questions people are "thinking" about:
1. Was it fiction or non-fiction? 2. What happened in the end? 3. What was in the bundle of sticks? 4. What were the noises at night? 5. What were the piles of rocks? 6. Why didn't the students do (insert intelligent action here). 7. Who or what killed them?
It seems to me, the movie, and people's enjoyment of it, are more a product of puzzle-piecing than anything else. Watching the movie, there was no way to know what was going on at any given time. They screamed a lot. I never saw anything to hint at what they were screaming at. There was a background story, and there was a creepy woods. But nothing really there. People who enjoyed the movie and who enjoyed thinking about it later, are probably people who like to piece puzzles together. This is fine. Makes for a pretty good movie, and entertainment.
But it doesn't make for a scary movie (not even a little - if you were scared by BWP, then you are they type to be scared by sitting in the dark and "imagining" stuff. I love the whole argument that if you weren't scared it means you have no imagination. I don't think people even understand what they are saying - it's just a line they're passing on. If you can scare yourself silly sitting in the dark, and you _like_ doing that, then BWP was probably a scary movie for.)
And, it doesn't make it a great movie. Just decent.
Beware, if you haven't seen it, I will completely ruin it for you if you read this. So don't - you should definitely see it for yourself. I'll summarize: I hated it. Now, stop and go away. See it yourself.
The first thing I should say about this movie is I hated it cause it made me nauesous (sp?). It was a great idea to send three actors into the woods and tell them to invent the whole movie, but for those of us who get motion sick - wait till it comes out on video and see it on a small screen - you won't get so sick. People did vomit at some showings, my friends have told me. Ick.
If you're strong of stomach, though, I think the movie still sucks. I was more confused than scared. They kept running around, screaming and yelling - at what? Darkness and trees and stones on the ground just aren't that scary.
Three or four nights of build-up would have been good, but eight? Every night the same basically? Something needed to happen. And then they all drop dead in the end. Still no clue as to why? Mike standing in the corner for no reason except to remind us of a legend told at the beginning. I didn't get it. I hope very much that I missed something because of my queasiness, but I don't think so. I like to think Josh killed 'em all. That makes me feel better about it!
Anyway, more to the point, given the incredibly innovative tachnique to make it, and the fantastic actors, I could think of some great ways to make it a lot more scary. Most depend on creating some eerie imaging to go along with the high emotional content. Just a shadow would have done wonders to solidify the basic fear emotion. My favorite idea is having a humanoid shadow from behind a tree, but when they investigate, no one's there. Things like that would've helped. Really, I don't think lack of gore is the problem at all - for anyone. I think that you have to have _some_ idea of what _might_ be going on to be scared.
- Well, south didn't work. Let's try East! - The Blair Witch Project
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the article. He would agree with you entirely. He's not planning on going in the den. As he says, that would be insane and suicidal. About all he's willing to do is get beat up by the bear outside it's den for the 2-5 minutes it takes for the tranquilizer shot to take effect.
I keep hearing so much about how Americans are doing so well, how strong our economy is, how much everybody has. Why then, is greed becoming the defining trait of our culture? Are not Bill Gates' tens of billions enough? I kid you not, we as a culture and as a country are headed down a very ugly road; should we persist, we most certainly will get what we deserve.
Good point, but your looking at it logically - "We have so much already, why is greed for more our dominant trait?". Unfortunately, humans don't operate logically. Money and material and power are becoming the measure of our value, and as such, no one could ever have enough.
I keep hearing the argument, if it's not protected, why would anyone do it? If patents didn't protect those who innovate, why would anyone innovate? Of course, the assumption always comes down to money. People do what they do for economic/political benefit. Maybe moving into the information age will require a changed basis for defining value. Money works for physical materials that follow the law of conservation of matter, but perhaps not for something that can be copied at the cost of a few electrons.
Not that I know what the solution is, just seems we need to find other motivators for innovation/work. After all, where will be when someone does finally figure out how to interface a computer with a brain? Then those intellectual property laws are going to be a BITCH!
Needless to say, the best boardgames come from Germany...
:-)
I know why you say this because a lot of these games from Germany show some remarkable ingenuity.
However....
I can't stand any of them. They all have one major, very unfortunate similarity - the playing of the game is separate from the scoring. Let me explain. Almost every German game is structured so that each player takes a turn, and then scores points based on achieving certain goals and/or conditions. So the games often come down to who can squeeze the most points out of their last few turns, and you can get very heavy into the calculations....
It also makes for a bizarre division between what happens on the board, and what's happening with the "victory points" off the board, and sometimes the two are at odds intuitively. I prefer games where the winning and losing is completely represented in the game itself - like Starfleet, where you win if you blow up your opponents ships, or wargames, where you win if you win on the board. Chess is another good example. Settlers of Cataan is awful, IMO. Robo Rally and Ricochet Robot are great, though.
Why do you insist it be instant? Voting on bills doesn't have to be implemented like a fist-person-shooter. You could easily institute minimum time periods between a bill's presentation to the public and the final vote for it. Like on the order of several months, at the least.
Libraries?
Workplace?
Schools?
DMV?
Friend's house?
Who cares? Wherever, whenever. It still beats voting locations and booths by a long shot.
Yuck. I've heard this opinion of true (as opposed to representative) democracy so many times. The American people are too stupid to be allowed to vote directly, on-line rule of the stupid masses, blah, blah, blah....
We are the American people. What you are saying is that we are too stupid, and we need the politicians too protect us from ourselves. Horseshit! They've already proven that they react knee-jerky. We're protected from a lot of crap because a) the process of passing a law, and b) the battle between the two parties. If we were a true democracy, we'd still have the process to protect us from too-quick decision making, and we'd have battles between a huge multitude of groups.
Representation allows a few to make decisions for all. This allows money to be the primary influencer (money can buy those few, money couldn't hope to buy the masses). It also means those few get together and "deal". Oh, goody.
Even with a true democracy, there's still a smaller number that would write laws, and also an even smaller few who would administer the process. I'm tired of these arguments. Until it's tried, you're fears seem contrived. Maybe you need to have a healthier fear of the current system.
Let me ask - do you REALLY want this?
Yes, I do. I'm more scared of a small group representing a larger group than I am of the larger group representing itself. I'm scared of that small group being bought and owned by the rich. The current system would be better except it doesn't work. It's become rule of the wealthy.
I wonder where this fear of majority rule comes from? Microsoft? Monopolies? I can see that, but really, is it worse than the rule of the have's over the have-nots? I think we're confusing majority rule with mob rule. I think there's a difference.
The military run-up was planned in advance as a way to break the cold war stalemate.....
So give Reagan credit for speeding up the issue. Most likely Soviet Russia couldn't have lasted anyway. However, what's so great about the cold war being over?????? What's improved????? Is _anything_ better as a result? I can't think of anything.
But..... we do have enormous debt now.... we've managed to make enemies of a whole bunch of folks in this world..... we have managed to place many Americans in harm's way, mostly because we've positioned ourselves as the world's policeman. Also, if we'd had balanced budgets in the 80's and surplusses, instead of more and more debt and deficits, I wonder where we'd be now? I wonder where the Russians would be? I'm not sure what we won in the cold war, but we sure as hell lost a bunch.
The internet is less media-abled than TV, at present, mostly because of bandwidth, so for now, I think the internet is an improvement over the emptiness of television content. I'm sure it will change for the worse though.
Semi-offtopic,
I was thinking while reading Jon's article about how our population as a nation has grown since 1800, but has the population of our congressional representatives grown? I know the senate has always been 2 per state, but what about house representatives? What I'm getting at, is that the congress has become much less representative simply because of the numbers involved, and the power of each individual congress person has grown way beyond what was originally set up.
Of course, sending 10 senators per state might get a bit burdensome and needlessly expensive. I was thinking that maybe there could be a system in place where a congress person's constituents would have a chance to "override" that representatives vote on any particular matter. Just a thought, but then I've always thought the internet should be used to make voting easier and more convenient, just as a way of enabling democracy.
1. I don't see why AC's are started at 0 and named users are started at 1. What's the point? It seems like unnecessary pressure to get people to register.
2. Moderation is a chore the way it's set up currently. The first three times I was moderator, I did my best, but nowadays, I ignore it. It's a pain. If I want to moderate a comment, I have to scroll to the end of the page and reload the whole thing? It needs to be quick and easy. Press a button and be done - no scrolling, no reload of the page. Otherwise, I have no idea will keep people from getting tired of moderating. The current moderation scheme works excellently (though I would suggest letting everyone moderate all the time), but the implementation of the technical details needs work.
3. Automatic moderation of posts based on karma is probably not a good idea. People don't post worthwhile stuff all the time, or junk all the time. I've said before, negative karma makes no sense. Punishing is inefficient. Ignore the bad, promote the good.
Just some thoughts....
Autism seems to be a label for a bunch of symptoms that are often found together - lengthy attention span, physical unbalance, emotional distance, hypersensitivity......
But, there are people that have 1 or two of these, and not the others. It appears to me that autism is what we call it when a bunch of these psychological traits happen to occur together in one person. I know I have some autistic tendencies that are described in the article, but I definitely don't have others. So, it seems to me we still have a ways to go to real understanding of what's going on. As long as we're applying arbitrary labels to unrelated traits, we're still pretty much in the dark, IMO.
Except why make the porn sites move? They haven't done anything wrong. They haven't asked to censor out the commercial sites...
.bus. .kid domain.
Make businesses move their ecommerce to
I agree with the
And yes, leave the rest alone.
Seems like the real goal is cordon off the wierdos so that more business gets done on the Net. More e-commerce sales.
.com and .net open for anything. That way, we are only censoring those who want to be censored, and there's still plenty of room for freedom.
But we have a different paradigm that we could use instead of censorship - zoning. Instead of filters and what not, use zones. And instead of cordoning off porn and other controversial content, cordon off the stuff you want to protect:
Use www.XXX.bus for business purposes
www.xxx.chd for children's net.
www.xxx.lib for libraries,
etc.
But leave
Yeah, it's not so unlike when you slave for days and weeks on some really tough code, and your clueless boss gets really excited about that great image you stuck in there as an afterthought....
"Wow, great image!"
"Oh, thanks, I just threw it in there."
"You're a great programmer!"
"Really, you like my natural language processor?"
"Uh, sure....that splash-screen is killer!"
*sound of molars grinding and head striking keyboard repeatedly*
...Star Wars was never supposed to be a deep, filosofical, artistic film...
Yeah, but I remember when PM came out and there was a big discussion on slashdot about the comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars and how Star Wars was more philosophical and thought-provoking, whereas star trek was more entertainment based. I did several double-takes during that discussion. I couldn't believe people actually thought that.
The original Star Wars movie wasn't meant to be taken seriously (I hope - I pray!), but 10 jillion $$$$ later, I think that's been forgotten.
At first I thought this plan of Sun's was a dumb idea. They keep having this same dumb idea, and it keeps flopping, and then they have the idea again. Corporations that try to do this run into too many problems and complaints. I remember when they tried to centralize our applications where I used to work. We tried it, but when our requests for having certain applications installed on the central server went ignored and delayed for weeks-months-indefinitely, the users rebelled, and we actually re-installed our own computers with new operating systems.
But, then I thought some more about it, and I decided it still won't work, but Sun could be trying harder, it seems to me. Why are they charging for the boxes? For the terminal? Seems they ought to be giving that part away. Get more people to buy their servers, and they should be golden. If companies can give away free PC's for a commitment of internet access, why can't sun give away this worthless garbage for a payoff of more $100,000 servers being bought? Why is it Sun always seems so damn smart and yet so damn dumb all at the same time?
I have to agree. Why introduce meta-moderation when all it seems to be is a way to cancel out previous bad moderation? That can already be accomplished by regular moderation, so I don't see the point.
I think it'd be best to let everyone moderate all the time, maybe using karma as a way to determine how many points you have to spend. That way, people would probably end up moderating only when they felt strongly (after an initial flurry of power-greedy moderation, people would get bored of it and moderate only when it struck them to, rather than the current system where I gots 'em for just 3 days, so I better get moderating....)
As far as Karma goes, I'm pretty sure that negative karma doesn't make much sense. I would think an earn-and-spend model would be more fair and effective. you earn karma for doing good, and you get to spend it. You don't get penalized for doing bad. One way to spend karma might be to moderate a post. Or to upgrade you're own post if you think it's important. I don't think this opens up to too much abuse, because if you didn't make quality posts, you wouldn't get karma to begin with.
....of this concept of ethics. It's untenable. There is no God, and there is no transcendent code of ethics out there for us to find. Whatever it is we call ethics, we've invented it. So give up this notion that there "is" ethics "out there" that people should adhere to.
Instead, ask the following: "How do I want the world to work?" And go from there.
There's two main reasons to go about it this way.
1. We give up the idea that there is one right ethic (usually with some god as the source), and thus enable a rational conversation about the pro's and con's of various systems.
2. It leads more naturally to the idea that we control how our world works and leads to practical, down-to-earth thinking about real solutions.
Quick example: abortion - most agree it's bad. Some say unethical. Those who say unethical often want to make it illegal. Just make it illegal and you've solved the problem. Consciences are allayed. However, the problem continues and nothing real has been done. But, if you approach it from the point of view that abortion is undesireable and we should work toward ending it, then we are naturally led to more practical solutions, such as education, empowerment, etc. Which have more actual effect on actual abortion rates.
Also, you can see that different groups of people naturally have different ideas about how the world should work. Hackers often want information to be free, because they see the harm that comes from keeping secrets. Others often don't want it to be free because it's their current source of income or power, or they can't imagine how the world could function that way. So it becomes a battle.
The battle is not a bad thing. It's healthy. By buying into the notion of ethics, Katz cannot see the battle for what it is - a battle for how our world will operate in the future. Katz has only a simplistic code of ethics, handed down from Judaeo-Christianity that says stealing is bad, etc. I think the reason his essay is so confused and empty of any solid message or even reasoning about the issues is that there is nowhere to go from the dead end of ethical reasoning.
This scheme plus public moderation/rating might have some value. Otherwise, it's worthless. Or, to be precise, not worth my $1.
....it would have been a zillion times better.
Think about it. They sent three actors into the woods and didn't tell them what was going to happen. They're given base instructions as they go, and the filmmakers do wacky shit at night around their tent. Cool boy-scout prank, you might say.
Now imagine Hollywood does this, and add three 0's onto the budget (30 million for the math impaired). Those three actors they sent out aren't coming back sane. Not after what Hollywood could put them through. Now that would be entertaining!
>> Though really you don't lose much from keeping your eyes closed through the entire movie
The fact that this is true seems to indicate a problem. Perhaps radio would have been a better medium for BWP.
Moderate this up PLEASE! People need to get a grip about this movie.
Did you actually read the post you're responding to, or did you just skim the numbered questions? I wasn't *asking* these questions, I was summarizing what questions were being discussed most commonly.
So thanks for your answers, but let me spell out the "nearly-obvious" point of my post: The movie isn't really a "thinking" movie just cause you have to make up for yourself what happened. And enjoyment of the movie is mostly based on how much you enjoyed making it up for yourself. My opinion of that: Makes for a decent and somewhat entertaining movie, but spare me the "it was soooo scary" and "what a fabulous movie cause there was no blood" comments. It was Ok. Nothing more.
And, btw, none of your answers to the questions are obvious, or even correct, IMO. The hermit? What hermit? He's been dead. Saying Heather died at the end doesn't exactly answer the question, "what happened"? It's about as insightful as saying the camera fell to the ground. Ditto saying Mike stood in the corner to foreshadow Heather's death.
It appears my post left too much for the imagination.
The BWP makes people think. That's what we're all saying. But I ask, what does it make us think about? Some common questions people are "thinking" about:
1. Was it fiction or non-fiction?
2. What happened in the end?
3. What was in the bundle of sticks?
4. What were the noises at night?
5. What were the piles of rocks?
6. Why didn't the students do (insert intelligent action here).
7. Who or what killed them?
It seems to me, the movie, and people's enjoyment of it, are more a product of puzzle-piecing than anything else. Watching the movie, there was no way to know what was going on at any given time. They screamed a lot. I never saw anything to hint at what they were screaming at. There was a background story, and there was a creepy woods. But nothing really there. People who enjoyed the movie and who enjoyed thinking about it later, are probably people who like to piece puzzles together. This is fine. Makes for a pretty good movie, and entertainment.
But it doesn't make for a scary movie (not even a little - if you were scared by BWP, then you are they type to be scared by sitting in the dark and "imagining" stuff. I love the whole argument that if you weren't scared it means you have no imagination. I don't think people even understand what they are saying - it's just a line they're passing on. If you can scare yourself silly sitting in the dark, and you _like_ doing that, then BWP was probably a scary movie for.)
And, it doesn't make it a great movie. Just decent.
Beware, if you haven't seen it, I will completely ruin it for you if you read this. So don't - you should definitely see it for yourself. I'll summarize: I hated it. Now, stop and go away. See it yourself.
The first thing I should say about this movie is I hated it cause it made me nauesous (sp?). It was a great idea to send three actors into the woods and tell them to invent the whole movie, but for those of us who get motion sick - wait till it comes out on video and see it on a small screen - you won't get so sick. People did vomit at some showings, my friends have told me. Ick.
If you're strong of stomach, though, I think the movie still sucks. I was more confused than scared. They kept running around, screaming and yelling - at what? Darkness and trees and stones on the ground just aren't that scary.
Three or four nights of build-up would have been good, but eight? Every night the same basically? Something needed to happen. And then they all drop dead in the end. Still no clue as to why? Mike standing in the corner for no reason except to remind us of a legend told at the beginning. I didn't get it. I hope very much that I missed something because of my queasiness, but I don't think so. I like to think Josh killed 'em all. That makes me feel better about it!
Anyway, more to the point, given the incredibly innovative tachnique to make it, and the fantastic actors, I could think of some great ways to make it a lot more scary. Most depend on creating some eerie imaging to go along with the high emotional content. Just a shadow would have done wonders to solidify the basic fear emotion. My favorite idea is having a humanoid shadow from behind a tree, but when they investigate, no one's there. Things like that would've helped. Really, I don't think lack of gore is the problem at all - for anyone. I think that you have to have _some_ idea of what _might_ be going on to be scared.
- Well, south didn't work. Let's try East! - The Blair Witch Project