"We're awfully computer-centric around here. What about the scientists who discovered a 100% cure for a particularly lethal form of Leukemia?" In our culture, it would depend entirely on whether or not the scientists were telegenic, media-friendly, and willing to guest host on VH-1. Time is to Man of the Year what MTV is to music... without a music video, you don't have a hit single. Without being telegenic / media friendly, you don't have a shot at Man of the Year. Scientific / humanist accomplishment is pretty much secondary to what will look good on a magazine cover.
At the risk of pulling a Katz, Star Wars is pretty closely tied to geek culture, like it or not. A lot of us grew up loving Star Wars, and a lot of people liked Phantom Menace. As for "does Slashdot really need to be posting this story" -- I think the ubiquity of "first posts," the infinite pretty widgets of the user customization, a moderation system -and- a meta-moderation system is pretty much testament to the fact that the typical Slashdotter's time is not all that valuable.
Lucas also said, many times (as far back as 1990-1991), that he would never make the prequels, either. Lucas is a bit mercurial that way, so I wouldn't put that much stock in the six-episode statement.
Since there seems to be so much complaining about the supposed brainpower of the people involved in MTV's latest publicity stunt, maybe someone ought to put together Geek Bunker 2000. Forget putting Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds in an underground fortress.... let's just put a bunch of jaded, acrimonious Slashdot readers, who could argue about "Winbl0w$", what Linux distro to use after the apocalypse, and the relative merits of Palm colors.
I don't know... a bunch of MTV people trapped in an underground bunker.... really, the thought holds a certain appeal for me, if only because it reminds me of that old Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith gets trapped in that library during the Apocalypse and then breaks his glasses. Imagine the looks on their faces when the power goes out and they realize No One Is Watching Them. At that point, it's just a short countdown to Lord of the Flies.
Yeah, that Stephen King... a real pauper... Ditto George Lucas, "doing language" never made him a red cent.
(That's sarcasm, for those of you who don't "do language.")
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
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· Score: 1
"Contrast this to Star Wars which basically says everything is hopeless and the only chance for salvation is through nobility and dictatorship of one form or another. Outcomes are determined by chance, luck, or fate, but not due to any qualities of humanity."
You could say the exact same thing about the Indiana Jones series, another franchise of Lucas' (and Spielberg's). Indiana Jones, when you get right down to it, is a pretty seedy character. In the course of the movies, he punches out a cigarette girl, sticks a club singer with a pair of tongs, shoots a sword-wielding Sherpa from a couple yards away, etc. Not exactly the most noble hero on the planet. And, yes, fate, luck, and chance play a huge part in Indiana Jones' sucess... much as they do in any "pulp adventure" story, which Star Wars certainly is.
To grouse about whether such admittely preposterous pulp-adventure constructs as The Swashbuckling Archaeologist or the Jedi Knight "make sense" or "send the wrong message" suffers from too close an analysis of a very simple, adolescent genre that neither deserves nor merits such an intellectual dissection. I found Brin's article to be pointless and vaguely insulting for just this reason.
It's just space opera. It's just pulp adventure. Analyzing kid's movies for grim and sublimated notions of tyranny on the part of the filmmaker not only wastes time, but (to me at least) represents a certain intellectual cowardice for not analyzing movies that might truly stand up to such a critique (though such films get harder to come by these days). Star Wars, as far as I'm concerned, does not. It's just not that complicated a movie.
As soon as Jar Jar steps out for his first scene and starts uttering "Meesa Jar Jar...", a meteorite comes crashing down on his bloated, snot-green head.
Boy, for a moment there, I thought you'd gotten a sneak peek at the Episode II screenplay. Given the Tex Avery antics of Episode I, a scene like this would not entirely surprise me (unfortunately).
Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get 'im!
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
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· Score: 4
Oh, look, more cheap shots at KFC and Pepsi, ho-ho-ho, it is it to laugh.
Why does every would-be satirist from Salon think he's got a fresh spin on ridiculing George Lucas' marketing? Ever since the Phantom Menace hype, critics and fans alike seem to have flushed their collective IQs down the toilet in the mad rush to rediscover their own friggin' childhoods. This just in! Star Wars still just a kid's movie! Kids like Burger King meals! Kids like action figures! Kids probably even like those freaky-assed Jar Jar lollipops with the tongue that shoots out, but I'd wager they like it for entirely different reasons than adults do, if you get my drift.
I sometimes wonder if half the Phantom Menace backlash wasn't just from disillusioned twenty-somethings hoping to get fellated by the Messiah during Phantom Menace, but instead from weary, sleep-deprived parents who just couldn't take any more "Mom mom mom Darth Maul mom!"
What I'll never understand is the utter resentment people have for George Lucas marketing his own movie. He doesn't work through a studio! That's his own cash he's putting up for the flick! (Well, okay, technically it's probably yours, but he made the movie, you bought the ticket. You've only got yourself to blame.) Maybe you'd rather he went to Paramount and used their dough? Then they could have focus groups! That'd make a better movie! Look what it did for Armageddon!
But, really, how dare George Lucas make a profit. He should make Star Wars for charity! After all, the warm, forgiving, loving praise he receives from the fans should be reward enough for any filmmaker... yeah, right. When you have a few million to throw around, you can make the movie the way you want, too. Not the way the comic-shop employee down the street thinks you should make it.
And yeah, no one likes Jar Jar Binks, either, it hardly takes William Safire to point that out. Jar Jar Binks jokes are kind of like "Talk to the Hand" -- of note only for their outdated-ness. Speaking of which -- what's with the Andy Dick joke slapped on the end? Someone late for a deadline?
Blah. Phantom Menace didn't knock my socks off, either, but this article was god-awful stupid.
From the commercials alone, I learned a valuable fact: computers (and, in fact, all other electronic devices of any kind) have two basic modes: "explode" and "not explode." When Y2K hits, many devices will get confused, causing the bits to flip from "not explode" to "explode" and thus, explosions everywhere. It's good information to have; now I'll know to unplug my blender.
This is a rumor I heard, and I don't have any confirmation, but didn't SETI@home have big problems with people uploading fake data packets, just so they could have more data packets processed by Joe Schmuck down the street?
If that's so, that just undermines everything that SETI has worked for. Patching the client, that's one thing -- but fake data packets? SETI has not come this far to be undone by a bunch of code-happy jokers with nothing better to do than gratify their own fragile egos. I find that rather pathetic.
As far as the "client optimization" issue is concerned, it should be obvious that if SETI can't keep up with the data packet demand, "releasing the code" isn't going to do anyone a damn bit of good. What are they going to do? "Okay, we'll send you data packets -before- we have them?" (Again, SETI there's a chance that SETI has some reason to lie about this, but I'm going to take them at their word.)
And, really, whether or not someone thinks they "know better" than SETI or "know what they're doing," and are clamoring for the source so they can tweak it -- it's not yours to tweak. If you want to alter SETI's project, go work for SETI. Take some responsibility in the project and stop treating SETI@home like it's your personal toy. Certainly many people's intentions are good -- they just want to make the client "better" -- but that decision's not theirs to make. It's not their project.
If you truly want to help SETI, then use the @Home client the way the project's creators intended it, and don't sabotage it for the sake of your own ego.
"Playing at" war and waging war are two different things. So are fantasy and reality. That should be perfectly clear to any well-adjusted human being. I don't know anyone who appreciates a good action movie / video game / television program who thinks war and violence are good things. Appreciating a fiction doesn't make a person a hypocrite to the facts.
What I want to know is, will they keep those magically healing chicken dinners in Wolfenstein 2000! Because I learned a valuable lesson from that game: If you see chicken and mashed potatoes lying on the floor of a Nazi prison, eat it! It has healing powers!
In all seriousness, though, with all the innovations in gameplay that have taken place since the dawn of the FPS, they could really do something spectacular with Wolfenstein 2000. Imagine a combination of Half-Life and Thief, where ammo is low and you have to sneak around corridors, avoiding Nazi scum or dispatching them quietly with a shiv in the back, or what have you. Hell, with technology being what it is now, they could add some serious plot -- perhaps the time-tested tie-in with Hitler's occult obsessions, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on.
Not that I think they will do any of this, but I'm just saying it would be great if they did. The cynic in me thinks it'll be just another quick knock-off to make a few fast bucks off nostalgaic suckers (me included, likely as not).
There is one potential advantage to the "Web film," as I see it. Since there will probably be advertisements in banner form, or interspersed elsewhere around the site, we might finally see a decrease in invasive and distracting product placements in the films themselves. Personally, I'm getting tired of seeing the advertisements upstage the actors in most modern Hollywood productions. As it stands, I've already got a terminal case of "banner blindness," so the web ads wouldn't be nearly as distracting as the ubiquitous product placement shots.
This, of course, assumes that the new medium will ever attract the kind of budget that would require product placement in the first place, which is an iffy prospect at best, at least for the next few years.
Until AI develops advances to the point that a computer could track an individual cheaply and efficiently, such surveillance is still going to require significant manpower, which means that in practical application, the "common joe" certainly has nothing to worry about. This technology is going to be prohibitively cumbersome and expensive for a few years still to come.
Personally, I'd be more worried about the tiny surveillance devices (cameras the size of match-heads, and so forth) that will no doubt be hitting the consumer market all too soon. Amateur surveillance worries me a lot more than surveillance from the Faceless Government Conspiracy.
Who wants to take a wager that Jon Katz posts a big old story on this very subject sometime next week? "The Justice Department is committing pseudo-digital-cyber-genocide against this latest new wave of young, hip, cyber-generation-cyber geeks! Geeks like me! Jon Katz!"
Mark my words. He'll be there.
Zodiac / Diamond Age / Snow Crash
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
I agree that Stephenson does have weak endings, in stark contrast to his strong and aggressive beginnings. Both Zodiac and Snow Crash have very strong beginnings (The Diamond Age, not so much, in my opinion), and endings that resemble nothing so much as turning a record player's power off and watching it slowly wind down. Both Zodiac and Snow Crash start off with a flurry of adjectives and snappy catch-phrases; I must admit that on my first reading of Diamond Age I was almost disappointed in the reserved way he used language. No one can accuse him of writing the same book twice (although I hope he leaves Turing out of his next book; I've heard about enough about it.)
The "fantasy" sequences, as someone's mentioned already, are highly integral to the story, and not just there for atmosphere. The Turing machines are the key to the female protagonist's entire role in the story, as ineptly handled as some may think it to be.
Incidentally, besides Snow Crash, his earlier work, Zodiac, is a great read, and well worth tracking down. Stephenson self-deprecates himself about it in the liner notes of his other books (Zodiac being very popular among "waste-water management engineers" and the like), but it's on par with, if not superior to, anything else he's done since.
Slashdot certainly is part of the modern world, but:
1) Slashdot is not a business. Certainly it requires capital to operate, but as far as I know, profit is not Slashdot's definitive and ultimate goal. Once cloning hits becomes part of the mainstream medical industry, profit will become the central issue of cloning. Research scientists have to eat, too, and if your typical Slashdot visitor is willing to toss all caution to the wind and adopt a "if we can, we should" attitude (as I've seen in many postings), imagine what your typical researcher is willing to ethically shrug off to put food on the table or pay off his mortgage.
2) If you doubt that cloning will be the province of the wealthy and influential, ask yourself this question. Who's more likely to clone himself first? Bill Gates or Rob Malda? I rest my case.
Well, as far as "ethical concerns" go, there is only one "ethical concern" in the modern world, and that is "money talks." Once big money hits the cloning industry (and it will become an industry), all government regulation will effectively cease as the lobby money rolls in. Cloning will then become a plaything for the rich. Forget medical revolutions for Joe Blow. I doubt you will see much of a "revolution of thought and mind" and a new evolution of mankind. Cloning will simply be another tool to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Slashdot Mirror
"We're awfully computer-centric around here. What about the scientists who discovered a 100% cure for a particularly lethal form of Leukemia?" In our culture, it would depend entirely on whether or not the scientists were telegenic, media-friendly, and willing to guest host on VH-1. Time is to Man of the Year what MTV is to music... without a music video, you don't have a hit single. Without being telegenic / media friendly, you don't have a shot at Man of the Year. Scientific / humanist accomplishment is pretty much secondary to what will look good on a magazine cover.
At the risk of pulling a Katz, Star Wars is pretty closely tied to geek culture, like it or not. A lot of us grew up loving Star Wars, and a lot of people liked Phantom Menace. As for "does Slashdot really need to be posting this story" -- I think the ubiquity of "first posts," the infinite pretty widgets of the user customization, a moderation system -and- a meta-moderation system is pretty much testament to the fact that the typical Slashdotter's time is not all that valuable.
Lucas also said, many times (as far back as 1990-1991), that he would never make the prequels, either. Lucas is a bit mercurial that way, so I wouldn't put that much stock in the six-episode statement.
I don't know... a bunch of MTV people trapped in an underground bunker.... really, the thought holds a certain appeal for me, if only because it reminds me of that old Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith gets trapped in that library during the Apocalypse and then breaks his glasses. Imagine the looks on their faces when the power goes out and they realize No One Is Watching Them. At that point, it's just a short countdown to Lord of the Flies.
Yeah, that Stephen King... a real pauper... Ditto George Lucas, "doing language" never made him a red cent.
(That's sarcasm, for those of you who don't "do language.")
You could say the exact same thing about the Indiana Jones series, another franchise of Lucas' (and Spielberg's). Indiana Jones, when you get right down to it, is a pretty seedy character. In the course of the movies, he punches out a cigarette girl, sticks a club singer with a pair of tongs, shoots a sword-wielding Sherpa from a couple yards away, etc. Not exactly the most noble hero on the planet. And, yes, fate, luck, and chance play a huge part in Indiana Jones' sucess... much as they do in any "pulp adventure" story, which Star Wars certainly is.
To grouse about whether such admittely preposterous pulp-adventure constructs as The Swashbuckling Archaeologist or the Jedi Knight "make sense" or "send the wrong message" suffers from too close an analysis of a very simple, adolescent genre that neither deserves nor merits such an intellectual dissection. I found Brin's article to be pointless and vaguely insulting for just this reason.
It's just space opera. It's just pulp adventure. Analyzing kid's movies for grim and sublimated notions of tyranny on the part of the filmmaker not only wastes time, but (to me at least) represents a certain intellectual cowardice for not analyzing movies that might truly stand up to such a critique (though such films get harder to come by these days). Star Wars, as far as I'm concerned, does not. It's just not that complicated a movie.
Boy, for a moment there, I thought you'd gotten a sneak peek at the Episode II screenplay. Given the Tex Avery antics of Episode I, a scene like this would not entirely surprise me (unfortunately).
Why does every would-be satirist from Salon think he's got a fresh spin on ridiculing George Lucas' marketing? Ever since the Phantom Menace hype, critics and fans alike seem to have flushed their collective IQs down the toilet in the mad rush to rediscover their own friggin' childhoods. This just in! Star Wars still just a kid's movie! Kids like Burger King meals! Kids like action figures! Kids probably even like those freaky-assed Jar Jar lollipops with the tongue that shoots out, but I'd wager they like it for entirely different reasons than adults do, if you get my drift.
I sometimes wonder if half the Phantom Menace backlash wasn't just from disillusioned twenty-somethings hoping to get fellated by the Messiah during Phantom Menace, but instead from weary, sleep-deprived parents who just couldn't take any more "Mom mom mom Darth Maul mom!"
What I'll never understand is the utter resentment people have for George Lucas marketing his own movie. He doesn't work through a studio! That's his own cash he's putting up for the flick! (Well, okay, technically it's probably yours, but he made the movie, you bought the ticket. You've only got yourself to blame.) Maybe you'd rather he went to Paramount and used their dough? Then they could have focus groups! That'd make a better movie! Look what it did for Armageddon!
But, really, how dare George Lucas make a profit. He should make Star Wars for charity! After all, the warm, forgiving, loving praise he receives from the fans should be reward enough for any filmmaker... yeah, right. When you have a few million to throw around, you can make the movie the way you want, too. Not the way the comic-shop employee down the street thinks you should make it.
And yeah, no one likes Jar Jar Binks, either, it hardly takes William Safire to point that out. Jar Jar Binks jokes are kind of like "Talk to the Hand" -- of note only for their outdated-ness. Speaking of which -- what's with the Andy Dick joke slapped on the end? Someone late for a deadline?
Blah. Phantom Menace didn't knock my socks off, either, but this article was god-awful stupid.
From the commercials alone, I learned a valuable fact: computers (and, in fact, all other electronic devices of any kind) have two basic modes: "explode" and "not explode." When Y2K hits, many devices will get confused, causing the bits to flip from "not explode" to "explode" and thus, explosions everywhere. It's good information to have; now I'll know to unplug my blender.
This is a rumor I heard, and I don't have any confirmation, but didn't SETI@home have big problems with people uploading fake data packets, just so they could have more data packets processed by Joe Schmuck down the street?
If that's so, that just undermines everything that SETI has worked for. Patching the client, that's one thing -- but fake data packets? SETI has not come this far to be undone by a bunch of code-happy jokers with nothing better to do than gratify their own fragile egos. I find that rather pathetic.
As far as the "client optimization" issue is concerned, it should be obvious that if SETI can't keep up with the data packet demand, "releasing the code" isn't going to do anyone a damn bit of good. What are they going to do? "Okay, we'll send you data packets -before- we have them?" (Again, SETI there's a chance that SETI has some reason to lie about this, but I'm going to take them at their word.)
And, really, whether or not someone thinks they "know better" than SETI or "know what they're doing," and are clamoring for the source so they can tweak it -- it's not yours to tweak. If you want to alter SETI's project, go work for SETI. Take some responsibility in the project and stop treating SETI@home like it's your personal toy. Certainly many people's intentions are good -- they just want to make the client "better" -- but that decision's not theirs to make. It's not their project.
If you truly want to help SETI, then use the @Home client the way the project's creators intended it, and don't sabotage it for the sake of your own ego.
"Playing at" war and waging war are two different things. So are fantasy and reality. That should be perfectly clear to any well-adjusted human being. I don't know anyone who appreciates a good action movie / video game / television program who thinks war and violence are good things. Appreciating a fiction doesn't make a person a hypocrite to the facts.
What I want to know is, will they keep those magically healing chicken dinners in Wolfenstein 2000! Because I learned a valuable lesson from that game: If you see chicken and mashed potatoes lying on the floor of a Nazi prison, eat it! It has healing powers!
In all seriousness, though, with all the innovations in gameplay that have taken place since the dawn of the FPS, they could really do something spectacular with Wolfenstein 2000. Imagine a combination of Half-Life and Thief, where ammo is low and you have to sneak around corridors, avoiding Nazi scum or dispatching them quietly with a shiv in the back, or what have you. Hell, with technology being what it is now, they could add some serious plot -- perhaps the time-tested tie-in with Hitler's occult obsessions, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on.
Not that I think they will do any of this, but I'm just saying it would be great if they did. The cynic in me thinks it'll be just another quick knock-off to make a few fast bucks off nostalgaic suckers (me included, likely as not).
---
There is one potential advantage to the "Web film," as I see it. Since there will probably be advertisements in banner form, or interspersed elsewhere around the site, we might finally see a decrease in invasive and distracting product placements in the films themselves. Personally, I'm getting tired of seeing the advertisements upstage the actors in most modern Hollywood productions. As it stands, I've already got a terminal case of "banner blindness," so the web ads wouldn't be nearly as distracting as the ubiquitous product placement shots.
This, of course, assumes that the new medium will ever attract the kind of budget that would require product placement in the first place, which is an iffy prospect at best, at least for the next few years.
What I don't understand is how this throwaway, flamebait post got moderated up to "Insightful."
Until AI develops advances to the point that a computer could track an individual cheaply and efficiently, such surveillance is still going to require significant manpower, which means that in practical application, the "common joe" certainly has nothing to worry about. This technology is going to be prohibitively cumbersome and expensive for a few years still to come.
Personally, I'd be more worried about the tiny surveillance devices (cameras the size of match-heads, and so forth) that will no doubt be hitting the consumer market all too soon. Amateur surveillance worries me a lot more than surveillance from the Faceless Government Conspiracy.
Who wants to take a wager that Jon Katz posts a big old story on this very subject sometime next week? "The Justice Department is committing pseudo-digital-cyber-genocide against this latest new wave of young, hip, cyber-generation-cyber geeks! Geeks like me! Jon Katz!"
Mark my words. He'll be there.
I agree that Stephenson does have weak endings, in stark contrast to his strong and aggressive beginnings. Both Zodiac and Snow Crash have very strong beginnings (The Diamond Age, not so much, in my opinion), and endings that resemble nothing so much as turning a record player's power off and watching it slowly wind down. Both Zodiac and Snow Crash start off with a flurry of adjectives and snappy catch-phrases; I must admit that on my first reading of Diamond Age I was almost disappointed in the reserved way he used language. No one can accuse him of writing the same book twice (although I hope he leaves Turing out of his next book; I've heard about enough about it.)
The "fantasy" sequences, as someone's mentioned already, are highly integral to the story, and not just there for atmosphere. The Turing machines are the key to the female protagonist's entire role in the story, as ineptly handled as some may think it to be.
Incidentally, besides Snow Crash, his earlier work, Zodiac, is a great read, and well worth tracking down. Stephenson self-deprecates himself about it in the liner notes of his other books (Zodiac being very popular among "waste-water management engineers" and the like), but it's on par with, if not superior to, anything else he's done since.
Ugh. How purple can you get? You should work for Matt Drudge.
Slashdot certainly is part of the modern world, but:
1) Slashdot is not a business. Certainly it requires capital to operate, but as far as I know, profit is not Slashdot's definitive and ultimate goal. Once cloning hits becomes part of the mainstream medical industry, profit will become the central issue of cloning. Research scientists have to eat, too, and if your typical Slashdot visitor is willing to toss all caution to the wind and adopt a "if we can, we should" attitude (as I've seen in many postings), imagine what your typical researcher is willing to ethically shrug off to put food on the table or pay off his mortgage.
2) If you doubt that cloning will be the province of the wealthy and influential, ask yourself this question. Who's more likely to clone himself first? Bill Gates or Rob Malda? I rest my case.
Well, as far as "ethical concerns" go, there is only one "ethical concern" in the modern world, and that is "money talks." Once big money hits the cloning industry (and it will become an industry), all government regulation will effectively cease as the lobby money rolls in. Cloning will then become a plaything for the rich. Forget medical revolutions for Joe Blow. I doubt you will see much of a "revolution of thought and mind" and a new evolution of mankind. Cloning will simply be another tool to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.