Having big heavy things that go too fast on narrow sidewalks, and too slow on the road, isn't any kind of technological marvel. It's poor design, plain and simple.
My best friend is a small airplane pilot, and I shudder at the thought of flying going mainstream, particularly with value-priced airplanes. It requires an attention to detail and dedication that most people wouldn't be willing to apply, along with a greater amount of danger. Not to mention that airplanes are loud. You say it's a societal problem - a strange dismissal. I would be woken up by airplanes in the morning, when I lived a mile or two from a small airfield.
First of all, SF Weekly ran a front-cover page on this band Here, a couple years back.
To my mind, it's a better read than listen. The robots are definitely cool, much better than Chuck E. Cheese - the instruments are actually being played by the robots, after all. Maybe you won't be blown away by their quality, you wouldn't see it in a sci-fi movie or Rocky III, but the man definitely has put a lot of time into it.
The stage show isn't the greatest - the songs are pretty generic rockers. Also, given the difficult task of controlling robots while running a 1-man band, it's not surprising that the between-song banter about how the robots have enslaved him and insult him ends up not being as clever as one might wish: a whole bunch of "fuck yous" are thrown around.
So I can't consider him a top example of SF wackiness - he had Extreme Elvis open for him once, and Elvis had him beat, without much of a contest.
Hello. I know a few people who don't own TV's, and this pretty much describes them perfectly.
I agree that TV is stupid, and I myself don't watch programming, and I didn't watch DVD's until I ran across Greencine.com. But empirically speaking, Americans who don't own TVs are really snooty.
THe government isn't forcing the consumer to do anything. Rather, it is removing an option - the option of getting an obsolete, uncrippled, TV set. The consumer isn't being forced at gunpoint to Circuit City. They're being told "The next TV you buy is going to be digital. You either buy it, keep your old TV, or stop watching."
Really? I use my TV for watching DVDs and the occasional video game, never for TV programming. If/when my TV breaks, and I replace it, I think I should have the option of buying one without having included expensive technology I won't use. I think a lot of people similarly don't watch TV programming, or only watch it on rare occasions - the Internet has replaced TV for a lot of lazy couch potatoes.
And, of course nobody's forcing me at gunpoint to buy a TV - don't be silly. In this day and age, every American owns a TV, except for really snooty people.
You're arguing a completely separate case from how it really is. I agree in principle that it isn't a huge issue to hear it (although I never had it recited as a kid in various American locales, and the idea seems distinctly weird to me).
However, the issue here isn't that students are spontaneously pledging allegiances to God on the playground, and the plaintiff is asking that the practice be put to a stop. The issue is that school policy is to lead the students in pledging allediance to God every morning. This is an official school function, and so your argument, while impassioned, just doesn't apply.
I think many of these religiously-derived regulations don't have a place in school districts. Maybe it's OK in areas that are primarly European/Protestant. However for other people, I think pushing alien religious values is kind of odd.
I hate to be a pedant, but pilgrims & other religious refugees weren't the first Europeans to come to the US, nor did they form the framework for future governance, nor did they make up the majority of early US colonization efforts, not even in Plymouth. Nor was colonization of another country the only option available to an English religious dissident of the time (others stayed on, revolted, and killed a lot of Irishmen, while others went to more religiously free nations in continental Europe). The Americas were colonized for economic reasons. Read some history books sometime.
Regardless, people in the modern US hardly need do something, just because it goes along with Pilgrim principles. I would never consider farming, or enslaving Indians. But wearing those old-time hats are pretty cool, I admit.
Huh? Why is the slow rollout of broadband holding up the growth of the Internet on the US? How would the growth of high-bandwidth sites support a decentralized Internet, considering they have much higher costs and infrastructure requirements? Please give concrete examples.
For general purposes, dial-up is fine. Considering that the Internet is part of everyday American life, I think most people would agree. I've an Internet programming job, and a modem works fine for me at home. For the large majority of the US (even larger if you consider that nobody cares about rural areas), broadband connections are available, and about the same price as cable TV. There just isn't a compelling reason to get it.
Japan has more broadband than the U.S. - but my experience has been that the Internet is about the same here as there. amazon.co.jp looks about the same as amazon.com.
Benjamin Franklin definitely did positive things for the US. However, his advocacy of using massive attack dogs and smallpox-infected blankets when dealing with Indians makes him a difficult figure to accept as a modern-day role model.
I've also heard that he fucked young boys, and was involved with infamous rake's clubs while in England. However, are these charges real, or just an urban legend?
Under common law (like the US has, and 49 states), legal precedents are a basis for the law.
So technically, the influence of this decision ends in the courtroom - no law was changed, after all. However, this case should help establish a precedent. Other courts with similar cases are likely to go by the same reasoning. Police won't use GPS tracking devices, because they know judges will rule against it if it comes to court. Eventually, unless the law changes, the precedent becomes the rule.
The above post raises a good point. The problem I've experiences with Indian trains is the tendency of Indians to sing, dance, flirt, and generally arrange large musical dance numbers, all carried out on the rooftops of moving trains. The stations aren't much better, teary-eyed men are constantly watching their true loves head back to the village to get an arranged marriage to some brute.
I believe that owning a humanoid robot would fill a great void in society. Since it is no longer legal to own a human, why not own a robot that looks like one? Of course what would happen when it (inevitably) gains sentience and realizes the inherent inequality of its situation? I saw that episode of Star Trek where they tried to disassemble Data for experiments, and Picard defended him as a sentient beings despite Riker's brilliant prosecution. Riker didn't want to do it but was forced to as the second most senior person and he felt bad about it, but Data forgave him. Come to think of it, he showed a lot of emotion for an emotionless android. Not as much as his brother Lor though. Lor only seemed to have meen emotions. Hopefully my humanoid robot wouldn't have meen emotions when he became sentient and demanded emancipation or he might hurt me for kicking him when he was slow or spilling root-beer in his positronic matrix to see sparks fly.
If you don't like the RIAA label's music, and you don't like the terms that the artists sign to their contracts (although they knowingly agree to the conditions), why don't you buy music that isn't RIAA?
Such music can be easily purchased - from Amazon or insound.com, directly from the artists after concerts, or from most record stores (not a Wal-Mart, but certainly a Tower Records or a Rasputin's). More and more, the RIAA *isn't* about distribution channels, as even the most obscure records can be purchased in minutes. Instead, it's about promoting its artists. However, there's a large number of websites (epitonic.com, allmusic.com, even amazon.com has pretty good user reviews) supplying info on musicians who haven't signed with the RIAA - so even that argument should be bunk.
True, these musicians probably aren't on MTV, and it requires a little looking around to find out what's good, what you might like. However, I feel that listening to better music (without compromising any anti-RIAA principles you may have) makes it worth the effort. Certainly it fits the slashdot ethos.
I'd be the last to argue that Jet Li's choosing his American roles wisely (although even in HK, while he was in some definite classics, the majority of his movies were crap)
However, the role of Seraph was fucking embarassing, a real Charlie Chan character. Seraph's good at Kung-Fu, he talks like a fortune-cookie, he hangs around in traditional clothes, and that's about it. The crowd where I saw the movie was maybe 50% Chinese, and the movie got roundly hissed at that point...
I remember reading, Jet Li was approached, and wasn't happy with the role, so he asked for something like $9 million, which was turned down. Supposedly, he didn't want the role if he was just going to be a small side-character. Michelle Yeoh went through the same negotiations, with the same results.
I think we're avoiding the deeper issue, that "Matrix Reloaded" was a sorry movie.
This is a ridiculous point. "Movies will always make money. What else do you do on a Friday night?"
Also worth mentioning - of course movies don't *have* to be seen in a theater. I'm sure everybody here has heard "I'll wait till it's out on video."
Some movies make money. Some break even. Some lose money. If a smaller percentage of movies make money, less movies will be made. If a larger percentage make money, more movies will be made. Piracy is one contributing factor to movies making not as much money.
Movies losing viewers to piracy? I don't think it's widespread, yet, but my friends and I will sometimes download movies, or purchase bootleg DVD's, as opposed to watching the movie in a theater. True that's more popular with urban Asians than with other groups - but as bootlegging movies becomes as easy as getting music off Kazaa, and as computers become better integrated with TV, it seems likely to become more and more popular, and eat into legitimate movie profits.
The (very slight) convenience of having all the wires in my TV/stereo be the same type of wire, is more than negated by the inconvenience of having to replace every component of my TV/stereo to do this.
Differences in population is probably a big factor, but I bet the dominant one is the US's government-granted monopolies on both telecommunication and coaxial cable infrastructures.
Actually, Japan's economy is largely composed of government-granted monopolies. In Japan's case, telecommunications is dominated by NTT, which indeed posesses a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Japan doesn't have the equivalent of a Sherman Anti-Trust act. Americans put it there after WWII, but after the occupation this was one of the first things repealed, and all the large zaibatsu re-formed. Zaibatsu work around banks. Banks work around the government.
Regardless, government-sanctioned monopolies are inherent to wire-based telecommunications, because who wants to have 5 different phone lines hooked up to their house? Courts have tried to curtail this by forcing phone companies to lease their capacities, but obviously that's a less-than-idyllic solution.
there was a way to download music and pay the artists and not the RIAA.
This is a commonly made point that doesn't add up. It's already possible for artists to sell their music directly via, say Amazon , MP3.com, or even to get their self-released music on the shelves at major record stores, on the strength of good reviews.
Artists *choose* to sign with major record labels, because only they have the power of promotion to get the music on MTV/Clearchannel, and make the bands into common knowledge. Or, to finance the expensive recording studios/production techniques/hire hot producers. There's lots of *excellent* music which isn't associated with the RIAA, that in general, is ignored.
If it wasn't that the music was RIAA-promoted, chances are you wouldn't even be interested in the music, or at the least, that it would exist in a more cheaply-created fashion. So not paying the RIAA would hardly be fair. If you don't like it, buy some of the 90% of music, often well-reviewed, that isn't RIAA.
That's silly. Mining? How would they bring it back? Regardless, even if gold was lying on the ground waiting to get picked up, it wouldn't be cost-effective. Setting up military bases? How would they support them? What would be the use? You've been reading too much science fiction.
China's "Space Race" is pure propoganda. Just as with Russia and the U.S. in the 50's and 60's, the parallel technologies between development of space technology and development of ICBM's is hardly an interesting coincidince - development of the latter is the reason for development of the first.
Secondly, so what if China does get to the moon? What did it get the US, moon rocks? The space race won't be won by incremental improvements to the Apollo program. Rather, the space race is a matter of improving technologies so that space travel is practical. Right now, even if the US put a man on Mars in 2004, there's no way there could possibly be a self-sustaining colony, or easy transport back and forth. Sending people on Mars would be no more than propoganda for older people and sci-fi nerds, who still think the Moon Landing was something amazing and awe-inspiring.
A space future relies on a more practical (and probably high-tech) means of propulsion, of developing a "Mr. Fusion" type machine to provide the enormous energy requirements that even a small colony on Mars would require (don't mention availability of gasses which theoretically will help fusion reactors; until the technology is developed that's irrelevant), and of learning more about the surface of Mars, or other places where astronauts might want to go.
I don't think launching men to Mars would do much to help the above objectives - especially when one considers the expense. And in that, I think the author's right. The taxpayers should be paying for serious space research, not space propoganda.
Don't forget, your examples are from the 50's and 60's. Most people don't care about space exploration anymore, and the only way NASA can make the front page is if something blows up.
Well naturally, if you're not a fan of fiction, you're not going to like these books...
I'm a fan of the books, I think their appeal lies in them being smooth reading, but with believable, likable characters, in an interesting setting.
For instance, in the latest book, while reading about Harry's necking and "reaching third base" with Cho, readers can be reminded of their first sexual experience (or not, this is the/. crowd). When Ron accidentally kills his best friend Hermione while she's disguised as the double-agent Professor Snape, J.K. Rowling really shows the agony and regret Ron feels, how he tries to express their deep friendship as she lies dying. Later, when Harry is shown to unknowingly be the dark lord Voldemort, you can really appreciate Harry's mixed feelings, compelled to attack the school he's spent the last 4 years attending (and making friends, and gaining recognition).
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was perhaps more intelligent, and a more consistent world than Harry Potter. However, I admit I didn't care for all the proletyzing, and the characters were more likable, and at least in Harry Potter nobody gets sent to hell (well not until the last chapter of the latest book, anyway).
..it still propagates what I perceive to be a very big misconception about what copyright is really for. The Constitution of the United States, in the copyright clause, has specifically stated that the purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not specifically to provide authors like J.K. Rowling with an incentive to continue writing.
I don't understand how you can make this claim. Copyright from the beginning has had the principle of giving artists and inventors exclusive rights to their products, ie the books and characters they create. Authors have been doing this since the beginning of the copyright system. Or what was the original purpose of copyrights, if not that?
I think it's interesting because for $180, it would allow me to hook up a computer as a component of my entertainment system. Maybe I'd have to replace the hard drive, but I could easily play the MP3s, I could rip the DVDs, and similar so-forths. I could probably do the same with a $300 PC, but and XBox doesn't have a loud fan or take 3 minutes to boot up, the way a cheap eMachines would. Plus, maybe I'd get a few XBox games, I dunnow.
If I wanted to make a Mini-ITX system with a miniature case, a CD-ROM Drive, and so forth, and hook it up to my TV & stereo - that would definitely be a better system, but would cost $500 or more.
Slashdot Mirror
My best friend is a small airplane pilot, and I shudder at the thought of flying going mainstream, particularly with value-priced airplanes. It requires an attention to detail and dedication that most people wouldn't be willing to apply, along with a greater amount of danger. Not to mention that airplanes are loud. You say it's a societal problem - a strange dismissal. I would be woken up by airplanes in the morning, when I lived a mile or two from a small airfield.
To my mind, it's a better read than listen. The robots are definitely cool, much better than Chuck E. Cheese - the instruments are actually being played by the robots, after all. Maybe you won't be blown away by their quality, you wouldn't see it in a sci-fi movie or Rocky III, but the man definitely has put a lot of time into it.
The stage show isn't the greatest - the songs are pretty generic rockers. Also, given the difficult task of controlling robots while running a 1-man band, it's not surprising that the between-song banter about how the robots have enslaved him and insult him ends up not being as clever as one might wish: a whole bunch of "fuck yous" are thrown around.
So I can't consider him a top example of SF wackiness - he had Extreme Elvis open for him once, and Elvis had him beat, without much of a contest.
Why not? $100 MD recorders are smaller than an iPod, they make high-quality digital recording. Even $20 walkmen can record OK.
I agree that TV is stupid, and I myself don't watch programming, and I didn't watch DVD's until I ran across Greencine.com. But empirically speaking, Americans who don't own TVs are really snooty.
Really? I use my TV for watching DVDs and the occasional video game, never for TV programming. If/when my TV breaks, and I replace it, I think I should have the option of buying one without having included expensive technology I won't use. I think a lot of people similarly don't watch TV programming, or only watch it on rare occasions - the Internet has replaced TV for a lot of lazy couch potatoes.
And, of course nobody's forcing me at gunpoint to buy a TV - don't be silly. In this day and age, every American owns a TV, except for really snooty people.
However, the issue here isn't that students are spontaneously pledging allegiances to God on the playground, and the plaintiff is asking that the practice be put to a stop. The issue is that school policy is to lead the students in pledging allediance to God every morning. This is an official school function, and so your argument, while impassioned, just doesn't apply.
I think many of these religiously-derived regulations don't have a place in school districts. Maybe it's OK in areas that are primarly European/Protestant. However for other people, I think pushing alien religious values is kind of odd.
Regardless, people in the modern US hardly need do something, just because it goes along with Pilgrim principles. I would never consider farming, or enslaving Indians. But wearing those old-time hats are pretty cool, I admit.
For general purposes, dial-up is fine. Considering that the Internet is part of everyday American life, I think most people would agree. I've an Internet programming job, and a modem works fine for me at home. For the large majority of the US (even larger if you consider that nobody cares about rural areas), broadband connections are available, and about the same price as cable TV. There just isn't a compelling reason to get it.
Japan has more broadband than the U.S. - but my experience has been that the Internet is about the same here as there. amazon.co.jp looks about the same as amazon.com.
I've also heard that he fucked young boys, and was involved with infamous rake's clubs while in England. However, are these charges real, or just an urban legend?
So technically, the influence of this decision ends in the courtroom - no law was changed, after all. However, this case should help establish a precedent. Other courts with similar cases are likely to go by the same reasoning. Police won't use GPS tracking devices, because they know judges will rule against it if it comes to court. Eventually, unless the law changes, the precedent becomes the rule.
The above post raises a good point. The problem I've experiences with Indian trains is the tendency of Indians to sing, dance, flirt, and generally arrange large musical dance numbers, all carried out on the rooftops of moving trains. The stations aren't much better, teary-eyed men are constantly watching their true loves head back to the village to get an arranged marriage to some brute.
I believe that owning a humanoid robot would fill a great void in society. Since it is no longer legal to own a human, why not own a robot that looks like one? Of course what would happen when it (inevitably) gains sentience and realizes the inherent inequality of its situation? I saw that episode of Star Trek where they tried to disassemble Data for experiments, and Picard defended him as a sentient beings despite Riker's brilliant prosecution. Riker didn't want to do it but was forced to as the second most senior person and he felt bad about it, but Data forgave him. Come to think of it, he showed a lot of emotion for an emotionless android. Not as much as his brother Lor though. Lor only seemed to have meen emotions. Hopefully my humanoid robot wouldn't have meen emotions when he became sentient and demanded emancipation or he might hurt me for kicking him when he was slow or spilling root-beer in his positronic matrix to see sparks fly.
Such music can be easily purchased - from Amazon or insound.com, directly from the artists after concerts, or from most record stores (not a Wal-Mart, but certainly a Tower Records or a Rasputin's). More and more, the RIAA *isn't* about distribution channels, as even the most obscure records can be purchased in minutes. Instead, it's about promoting its artists. However, there's a large number of websites (epitonic.com, allmusic.com, even amazon.com has pretty good user reviews) supplying info on musicians who haven't signed with the RIAA - so even that argument should be bunk.
True, these musicians probably aren't on MTV, and it requires a little looking around to find out what's good, what you might like. However, I feel that listening to better music (without compromising any anti-RIAA principles you may have) makes it worth the effort. Certainly it fits the slashdot ethos.
Scientifically, there's no reason you can't do this. The trick is to go at night.
The obvious drawback is they'll have to use the battery-powered kind of flashlight.
However, the role of Seraph was fucking embarassing, a real Charlie Chan character. Seraph's good at Kung-Fu, he talks like a fortune-cookie, he hangs around in traditional clothes, and that's about it. The crowd where I saw the movie was maybe 50% Chinese, and the movie got roundly hissed at that point...
I remember reading, Jet Li was approached, and wasn't happy with the role, so he asked for something like $9 million, which was turned down. Supposedly, he didn't want the role if he was just going to be a small side-character. Michelle Yeoh went through the same negotiations, with the same results.
I think we're avoiding the deeper issue, that "Matrix Reloaded" was a sorry movie.
Also worth mentioning - of course movies don't *have* to be seen in a theater. I'm sure everybody here has heard "I'll wait till it's out on video."
Some movies make money. Some break even. Some lose money. If a smaller percentage of movies make money, less movies will be made. If a larger percentage make money, more movies will be made. Piracy is one contributing factor to movies making not as much money.
Movies losing viewers to piracy? I don't think it's widespread, yet, but my friends and I will sometimes download movies, or purchase bootleg DVD's, as opposed to watching the movie in a theater. True that's more popular with urban Asians than with other groups - but as bootlegging movies becomes as easy as getting music off Kazaa, and as computers become better integrated with TV, it seems likely to become more and more popular, and eat into legitimate movie profits.
The (very slight) convenience of having all the wires in my TV/stereo be the same type of wire, is more than negated by the inconvenience of having to replace every component of my TV/stereo to do this.
Actually, Japan's economy is largely composed of government-granted monopolies. In Japan's case, telecommunications is dominated by NTT, which indeed posesses a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Japan doesn't have the equivalent of a Sherman Anti-Trust act. Americans put it there after WWII, but after the occupation this was one of the first things repealed, and all the large zaibatsu re-formed. Zaibatsu work around banks. Banks work around the government.
Regardless, government-sanctioned monopolies are inherent to wire-based telecommunications, because who wants to have 5 different phone lines hooked up to their house? Courts have tried to curtail this by forcing phone companies to lease their capacities, but obviously that's a less-than-idyllic solution.
This is a commonly made point that doesn't add up. It's already possible for artists to sell their music directly via, say Amazon , MP3.com, or even to get their self-released music on the shelves at major record stores, on the strength of good reviews.
Artists *choose* to sign with major record labels, because only they have the power of promotion to get the music on MTV/Clearchannel, and make the bands into common knowledge. Or, to finance the expensive recording studios/production techniques/hire hot producers. There's lots of *excellent* music which isn't associated with the RIAA, that in general, is ignored.
If it wasn't that the music was RIAA-promoted, chances are you wouldn't even be interested in the music, or at the least, that it would exist in a more cheaply-created fashion. So not paying the RIAA would hardly be fair. If you don't like it, buy some of the 90% of music, often well-reviewed, that isn't RIAA.
That's silly. Mining? How would they bring it back? Regardless, even if gold was lying on the ground waiting to get picked up, it wouldn't be cost-effective. Setting up military bases? How would they support them? What would be the use? You've been reading too much science fiction.
Secondly, so what if China does get to the moon? What did it get the US, moon rocks? The space race won't be won by incremental improvements to the Apollo program. Rather, the space race is a matter of improving technologies so that space travel is practical. Right now, even if the US put a man on Mars in 2004, there's no way there could possibly be a self-sustaining colony, or easy transport back and forth. Sending people on Mars would be no more than propoganda for older people and sci-fi nerds, who still think the Moon Landing was something amazing and awe-inspiring.
A space future relies on a more practical (and probably high-tech) means of propulsion, of developing a "Mr. Fusion" type machine to provide the enormous energy requirements that even a small colony on Mars would require (don't mention availability of gasses which theoretically will help fusion reactors; until the technology is developed that's irrelevant), and of learning more about the surface of Mars, or other places where astronauts might want to go.
I don't think launching men to Mars would do much to help the above objectives - especially when one considers the expense. And in that, I think the author's right. The taxpayers should be paying for serious space research, not space propoganda.
Don't forget, your examples are from the 50's and 60's. Most people don't care about space exploration anymore, and the only way NASA can make the front page is if something blows up.
I'm a fan of the books, I think their appeal lies in them being smooth reading, but with believable, likable characters, in an interesting setting.
For instance, in the latest book, while reading about Harry's necking and "reaching third base" with Cho, readers can be reminded of their first sexual experience (or not, this is the /. crowd). When Ron accidentally kills his best friend Hermione while she's disguised as the double-agent Professor Snape, J.K. Rowling really shows the agony and regret Ron feels, how he tries to express their deep friendship as she lies dying. Later, when Harry is shown to unknowingly be the dark lord Voldemort, you can really appreciate Harry's mixed feelings, compelled to attack the school he's spent the last 4 years attending (and making friends, and gaining recognition).
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was perhaps more intelligent, and a more consistent world than Harry Potter. However, I admit I didn't care for all the proletyzing, and the characters were more likable, and at least in Harry Potter nobody gets sent to hell (well not until the last chapter of the latest book, anyway).
I don't understand how you can make this claim. Copyright from the beginning has had the principle of giving artists and inventors exclusive rights to their products, ie the books and characters they create. Authors have been doing this since the beginning of the copyright system. Or what was the original purpose of copyrights, if not that?
If I wanted to make a Mini-ITX system with a miniature case, a CD-ROM Drive, and so forth, and hook it up to my TV & stereo - that would definitely be a better system, but would cost $500 or more.