I foresee terrorists projecting copyrighted material onto billboards, causing massive traffic fatalities as thousands of drivers simultaneously go blind...
It's a sad day for literacy that people need the fact that the great-grandparent is being humourous pointed out to them.
Perhaps they don't. Sometimes I find jokes less funny because the premise has a gaping logical flaw in it. I find it particularly irritating when I can see a way the joke could have been told without the logical flaw.
That doesn't mean I don't get the joke, it simply means that the joker's delivery was flawed. It would be a sad day for humour if I had to explain that, but fortunately I don't.
Too true. Much of my job presently consists of a) teaching people how to use computerized measuring equipment, and b) rescuing people who have been trained to use the equipment by other people.
The difference is that most users are trained in pure buttonology; they have been taught to press f1, then f3, then f8, write down the displayed result, then press f5 and start over. This works fine until the first, slightest little thing goes wrong, e.g. they 'fat-finger' f2 instead of f1. Suddenly they're in a confusing world they don't understand and can't deal with at all.
I don't have time to teach them every possible screen they can reach, but I do make the effort to ensure they understand what 'f1' actually does, and why they're following the sequence they do. The result goes way beyond what I actually teach them; it gives them confidence in their ability to master the sytem, and when they do have to call me it's usually with a real problem, not I-pressed-f3-and-I'm-scared and usually they've already collected at least some of the information I need to fix it over the phone.
In my experience most users aren't dumb, they're ignorant and frightened. Taking a little time to erase the ignorance eases the fear, and saves me a lot of headaches. Of course, I don't get to tell as many PEBKAC stories as some of my cow orkers, but the ones I do collect tend to be duesies.
To me the most ineresting 'weakness' of Kal-El is his emotional need to maintain the Clark Kent personality.
He could quite easily abandon that and simply be Superman; hey presto, no more need to continually scan the area for phone booths, no more worries about being blackmailed by threats to Ma and Pa Kent, and no does-she-respect-me-for-me girlfriend issues.
Maybe the complementary question to "Does the world need a Superman?" is "Does he need to be human?"
Superman could be GENERAL KAL-EL (as in "KNEEL BEFORE..."), he's got the super powers and all -- but he uses them for good. Why? Because it was the way he was raised. Lex Luthor, all-natural, Earth-grown, smartest guy in the room, driven to be The Best, like some Ayn Randian proto-protaganist dropped on his head at an early age, and he's Capital-E Evil. Why?
I have to agree: Superman is damn near invulnerable, fast unto invisibility, incredibly strong, and has heat-vision, cold-breath and the ability to fly tacked on as grace notes, while his two major physical weaknesses are extraterrestrial; you either have to locate a chunk of his homeworld or get him into the vicinity of a red sun to really have a reasonable shot at him.
And yet, despite these unbelievable advantages, Lex continually fights him to a draw using only his brain, and the products of that brain. I may have a geek bias, but I must admit that I often find myself rooting for the ostensible villain! 'Smallville' gains a lot of credit for me because it portrays Lex realistically and yet quite sympathetically.
My archives are voluminous but unorganized, and thus I was tempted into relying on memory rather than doing my research. A dig revealed the story in the '92 _Year's Best Science Fiction_ (ed. Dozois) and, well... you're absolutely right. My apologies to Kim Newman.
(Following which I noticed that you'd included a link which would have saved me the dig, but hey, I just rediscovered a somewhat tattered (1968) copy of Fritz Lieber's _A Spectre Is Haunting Texas_ and my morning is off to a good start!:)
I personally like all of the variations of the Superman story from the original comic up to and including Smallville.
My absolute favorite variation is Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "Ubermensch!", in which a slight variation in timing causes Kal-El's lifeboat to land on a farm near Kleinberg in Germany, instead of Smallville in America. (keep in mind when 'Superman' first appeared.)
If you haven't read it, look it up - it's not just a gimmick, the story has depth.
s / quickly escorted off either by trained guards or another piece of machinery for re-classification / conveyed further along in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean fishing scenes, toward the rotating knives. The last hundred feet are heavily soundproofed, The blood drains into these gutters, and the mangled flesh slurps into..."
"Excuse me."
"Yes?"
"Did you say knives?"
"Ah, rotating knives, yes."
"Are you proposing to simply slaughter the suspects? Without trial?"
"Yes, does that not fit in with your plans? You see, I mainly design slaughterhouses."
"Actually, that's perfect. Do you own an apron and trowel, by any chance?"
(IIRC, in one of his later books, he has one of his characters comment on it saying something like "it's sad how far some authors stoop when they're desparate for money" (anybody remember that, or is my memory playing tricks on me?)
Your memory's fine. The scene takes place in _The Number Of The Beast-_, when the four protagonists are comparing their favorite books. Two of the four voted for _Stranger In A Strange Land_, and one of the other two makes the comment about Heinlein only writing it for the money.
The man is quite simply incapable of functioning in standard human society
Funny, he seems to me to be functioning quite adequately. He has way more money than I and probably you, he has the respect of a huge peer group, he has genuine influence in the major sociopolitical issues that concern him, and he isn't required to subsidize the time he spends on his avocation with drudgery.
He may not have small-scale social skills, and maybe if he did he (or at least you) would be happier, but "incapable of functioning"? Give me a break, he's *way* up there in most metrics of social functioning. Most of us, including me, don't even 'function in standard human societies' well enough to quit our day jobs and follow our passions full time, much less get as far as RMS has in actually achieving them.
Your calling him an incapable fool, appparently because he didn't respect your viewpoint in a personal encounter, smacks very much of sour-grape syndrome to me. I could be wrong, of course; perhaps you're another famous, independently wealthy person with the ear of major government and tech industry bodies, someone else whose innnovative thinking have had a profound influence on the society you live in, whose words are treated seriously by lawmakers and by the movers and shakers of a major industry, someone who can call a press conference and confidently expect representation by major media outlets.
Then again, maybe you're just another peevish Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. At least you're functional, though, right?
Maybe the answers are obvious to a lawyer, but not to me. They say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but how can anyone understand such complicated laws?
That really chaps my ass. People go to expensive colleges for years just to learn how to look up and interpret the laws, and yet I'm accountable for knowing and understanding every bit of it?
It flies in the face of common sense. Who the hell came up with this asinine legal principle?
Distributing (even for free) tools (whether physical devices or software) that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms will be illegal. (this includes DVD rippers, tools that allow copying copy-protected CDs, etc)
I would be *very* surprised if any given man from the 1500s knew enough of smithing, masonry, viticulture, horse breaking, glassblowing, dyemaking, soapmaking, clothmaking, leather curing, and so on to actually teach them directly; most of those technologies require a lot more knowledge than you might think.
The best such a person could do would be to provide the general principles and set up a research system. That's pretty much what you'd have to do for today's technological base, the only difference being that it would take longer to build the tools to build the tools.
In terms of actuallly finding someone who knows the general principles behind technologies, I suspect that it would be easier to find such a person nowadays (hint: look for avid fans of hard science fiction) than in the 1500s, when the people who had the time to learn much about them tended to spend that time on other pursuits, e.g. theological speculation.
Frankly this citizens-not-consumers meme is what burns my butt. It is boring, trite and inaccurate. 'Consumer' is not an answer to a multiple-choice question, it's just a descriptor. Having that particular box checked does not prevent me from also being a citizen, a person, a geek, a parent, a bibliophile or any of a huge number of other labels; I can check off as many as apply, or make up my own descriptors.
In short, I have no problem accepting being called a consumer, because I AM ONE! So are you, Quicksilver, your vehement denials notwithstanding; at a minimum you are a consumer of IP bandwidth, or you couldn't have posted. It doesn't mean that a consumer is *all* you are, but it is an accurate albeit limited label, just as 'citizen' or 'registered voter' might be, and your strident denials of it are just as silly and self defeating as saying "I'm not a citizen, I'm a person!" (That's assuming you are in fact a citizen, otherwise it's even sillier.)
If you want to amend your rants to "I'm not *just* a consumer", then you will at least no longer be inaccurate, just boring and trite, as this is (believe it or not) as blindingly obvious to everyone else as it is to you.
I'm sure there aren't; my comment was really addressed to the same people as yours was. I just thought it would be funny to pull an example of a very common grammar mistake out of your post, as an example.
I worked as an installation engineer for a major brand of measurement equipment all over the United States and Canada.
This makes for amusing stories in all kinds of ways, as many ways as there are to do things wrong, but the one that always makes people's jaws drop is how Caterpillar (in some of its facilities, anyway) uses green colored tags to indicate questionable materiel, and red colored tags to mark stuff that's ready to ship.
Sorry, but there *are* social implications to colors. They vary by society - white is the color of mourning in China - but they really exist. I know for a fact, from talking to Caterpillar employees, that the idiot tag colors in their plants cause confusion amongst new employees. Red might well mean good in another context, but default assumptions do exist and should be taken into account.
Slashdot Mirror
"How did we go from a couple of thousand to three brazillion?!?"
I foresee terrorists projecting copyrighted material onto billboards, causing massive traffic fatalities as thousands of drivers simultaneously go blind...
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
Perhaps they don't. Sometimes I find jokes less funny because the premise has a gaping logical flaw in it. I find it particularly irritating when I can see a way the joke could have been told without the logical flaw.
That doesn't mean I don't get the joke, it simply means that the joker's delivery was flawed. It would be a sad day for humour if I had to explain that, but fortunately I don't.
The difference is that most users are trained in pure buttonology; they have been taught to press f1, then f3, then f8, write down the displayed result, then press f5 and start over. This works fine until the first, slightest little thing goes wrong, e.g. they 'fat-finger' f2 instead of f1. Suddenly they're in a confusing world they don't understand and can't deal with at all.
I don't have time to teach them every possible screen they can reach, but I do make the effort to ensure they understand what 'f1' actually does, and why they're following the sequence they do. The result goes way beyond what I actually teach them; it gives them confidence in their ability to master the sytem, and when they do have to call me it's usually with a real problem, not I-pressed-f3-and-I'm-scared and usually they've already collected at least some of the information I need to fix it over the phone.
In my experience most users aren't dumb, they're ignorant and frightened. Taking a little time to erase the ignorance eases the fear, and saves me a lot of headaches. Of course, I don't get to tell as many PEBKAC stories as some of my cow orkers, but the ones I do collect tend to be duesies.
Not sure if you already know this - hard to detect through raw text - but that wasn't a dig at Bush.
Maybe it wasn't before, but it is now - and thanks for the belly laugh! IOW, ROFLMAO! :D
He could quite easily abandon that and simply be Superman; hey presto, no more need to continually scan the area for phone booths, no more worries about being blackmailed by threats to Ma and Pa Kent, and no does-she-respect-me-for-me girlfriend issues.
Maybe the complementary question to "Does the world need a Superman?" is "Does he need to be human?"
I have to agree: Superman is damn near invulnerable, fast unto invisibility, incredibly strong, and has heat-vision, cold-breath and the ability to fly tacked on as grace notes, while his two major physical weaknesses are extraterrestrial; you either have to locate a chunk of his homeworld or get him into the vicinity of a red sun to really have a reasonable shot at him.
And yet, despite these unbelievable advantages, Lex continually fights him to a draw using only his brain, and the products of that brain. I may have a geek bias, but I must admit that I often find myself rooting for the ostensible villain! 'Smallville' gains a lot of credit for me because it portrays Lex realistically and yet quite sympathetically.
I knew nothing of this, but I've now ordered me a copy which should be here by Xmas - thanks! :)
(Following which I noticed that you'd included a link which would have saved me the dig, but hey, I just rediscovered a somewhat tattered (1968) copy of Fritz Lieber's _A Spectre Is Haunting Texas_ and my morning is off to a good start! :)
My absolute favorite variation is Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "Ubermensch!", in which a slight variation in timing causes Kal-El's lifeboat to land on a farm near Kleinberg in Germany, instead of Smallville in America. (keep in mind when 'Superman' first appeared.)
If you haven't read it, look it up - it's not just a gimmick, the story has depth.
Your faith in the Acadamy is touching. Misguided, but touching.
"Excuse me."
"Yes?"
"Did you say knives?"
"Ah, rotating knives, yes."
"Are you proposing to simply slaughter the suspects? Without trial?"
"Yes, does that not fit in with your plans? You see, I mainly design slaughterhouses."
"Actually, that's perfect. Do you own an apron and trowel, by any chance?"
(With apologies to Monty Python
Your memory's fine. The scene takes place in _The Number Of The Beast-_, when the four protagonists are comparing their favorite books. Two of the four voted for _Stranger In A Strange Land_, and one of the other two makes the comment about Heinlein only writing it for the money.
Funny, he seems to me to be functioning quite adequately. He has way more money than I and probably you, he has the respect of a huge peer group, he has genuine influence in the major sociopolitical issues that concern him, and he isn't required to subsidize the time he spends on his avocation with drudgery.
He may not have small-scale social skills, and maybe if he did he (or at least you) would be happier, but "incapable of functioning"? Give me a break, he's *way* up there in most metrics of social functioning. Most of us, including me, don't even 'function in standard human societies' well enough to quit our day jobs and follow our passions full time, much less get as far as RMS has in actually achieving them.
Your calling him an incapable fool, appparently because he didn't respect your viewpoint in a personal encounter, smacks very much of sour-grape syndrome to me. I could be wrong, of course; perhaps you're another famous, independently wealthy person with the ear of major government and tech industry bodies, someone else whose innnovative thinking have had a profound influence on the society you live in, whose words are treated seriously by lawmakers and by the movers and shakers of a major industry, someone who can call a press conference and confidently expect representation by major media outlets.
Then again, maybe you're just another peevish Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. At least you're functional, though, right?
That really chaps my ass. People go to expensive colleges for years just to learn how to look up and interpret the laws, and yet I'm accountable for knowing and understanding every bit of it?
It flies in the face of common sense. Who the hell came up with this asinine legal principle?
Oh yeah... lawyers.
Does that also include markers?
The best such a person could do would be to provide the general principles and set up a research system. That's pretty much what you'd have to do for today's technological base, the only difference being that it would take longer to build the tools to build the tools.
In terms of actuallly finding someone who knows the general principles behind technologies, I suspect that it would be easier to find such a person nowadays (hint: look for avid fans of hard science fiction) than in the 1500s, when the people who had the time to learn much about them tended to spend that time on other pursuits, e.g. theological speculation.
Last time I looked, there wasn't a PS/2 port on the back of the Mini, so perhaps you're giving Apple a little more credit than they are due... ;)
In short, I have no problem accepting being called a consumer, because I AM ONE! So are you, Quicksilver, your vehement denials notwithstanding; at a minimum you are a consumer of IP bandwidth, or you couldn't have posted. It doesn't mean that a consumer is *all* you are, but it is an accurate albeit limited label, just as 'citizen' or 'registered voter' might be, and your strident denials of it are just as silly and self defeating as saying "I'm not a citizen, I'm a person!" (That's assuming you are in fact a citizen, otherwise it's even sillier.)
If you want to amend your rants to "I'm not *just* a consumer", then you will at least no longer be inaccurate, just boring and trite, as this is (believe it or not) as blindingly obvious to everyone else as it is to you.
Actually, I've picked up several cheapo ($1-2) silent B&W horror DVD, TFA notwithstanding.
I'm sure there aren't; my comment was really addressed to the same people as yours was. I just thought it would be funny to pull an example of a very common grammar mistake out of your post, as an example.
Also, have you checked for grammar mistakes such as verb/object number inconsistencies? Grammar is as important as spelling! :)
This makes for amusing stories in all kinds of ways, as many ways as there are to do things wrong, but the one that always makes people's jaws drop is how Caterpillar (in some of its facilities, anyway) uses green colored tags to indicate questionable materiel, and red colored tags to mark stuff that's ready to ship.
Sorry, but there *are* social implications to colors. They vary by society - white is the color of mourning in China - but they really exist. I know for a fact, from talking to Caterpillar employees, that the idiot tag colors in their plants cause confusion amongst new employees. Red might well mean good in another context, but default assumptions do exist and should be taken into account.