No, really. Why are people tired? Can we see the answers, or do we just have to click on the mailto link and bare our souls? What's going on here?
It's a government conspiracy! They want to hear our deepest fears so they can make them real and make us into zombies!
My almost wholly ignorant impression was always that those fuzzy slippers they wear are to kill the sound of their footsteps on the floors of the sets. There was something about that on one of the DS9 DVD special features, in which they had the guy who plays Dr. Bashir pointing out that you can clearly see the fuzzy slippers on his feet in one scene of an episode that they did together with the TNG cast. And I thought that's what he said about it, that it was for sound.
In that case, how about, "I'm going to be using it at the same time as you, but I won't use it while I'm sleeping next week, so that's 40 hours."
Or, even, "That program was already out for a couple of months before I bought it, so we can both use it concurrently for one month."
I'm not sure that many publishers would smile upon this "time shifting" idea.
You would be a real, licened, ready to probe the vagina gynecologist.
Um. Somehow that doesn't sound better than playing FPS games for ten years. I mean, do you have any idea how many incredibly old, incredibly fat, incredibly ill people show up at doctor's (including gynecologists) offices? I leave the rest to the imagination...
(I mean no offense to old, fat, sick people. I will probably be one myself some day, and I pity my doctor.)
This is an interesting list, but its objective use (if any was intended) is completely spoiled by the constant, nattering commentary, things like "Jackson changed X, which in my opinion was wrong because..."
The author's disdain for Peter Jackson's adaptation comes through too clearly for me to read the text in its entirety. It's just an enumerated list of more than 250 holier-than-Peter-Jackson complaints. And I understand that the function of a nitpicker's guide is to point out the tiniest deviance or flaw. But I would also contend that the purpose is not necessarily to be unceasingly nasty about doing so.
PEOPLE bug people! But, seriously, who do cell phones bother? Other people, or the phone's owner?
The normal state of my cell phone's ringer is off. I turn it on when I'm not doing anything, in a place where it won't be a nuisance. So I don't think my cell phone bugs other people all that much.
Most people view the telephone as an inherently invasive device. Here's this thing that sits there doing nothing most of the time, and then it makes this grating noise, and you have to drop whatever you're doing and talk to it. When you're eating dinner, telemarketers call. Which a lot of people view as a TREMENDOUS inconvenience. I think that's because most people are conditioned to answer the phone every time it rings. That's why it's invasive. It's immediate.
But why? If I'm at home, reading a book, and the phone rings, and I don't want to talk on the phone, I just don't answer it. The conclusion of all that diatribe is that my cell phone isn't annoying to me because I don't allow it to be.
The cellular phone is a relatively new device. We haven't fully integrated it into our system of etiquette, yet. But I think with a combination of technology and common sense, we'll eventually be happy with it.
historical events were changed in Star Trek: First Contact in such way that the events in Enterprise are not events that took place in TNG's past
Note that I'm not attacking you here, just the wisdom of whoever made this decision.
I think most people would agree that this is a valid explanation of why things are different. It also seems, however, that most people don't really care whether the explanation is valid or not. We liked our Star Trek the way it was. And it's just not working like this.
They could have made a new Trek series any way they wanted, but they chose to make it fly in the face of everything that the fans knew about the Trek universe, and they chose to make it unappealing to a more general audience, too. Perhaps this is hindsight. But my hindsight tells me that if someone had pitched this idea to me back before Enterprise began, I would have seen it as a bad idea.
Or perhaps there's a less coincidental reason why no two random people are defending the new Star Trek series. Maybe it's just not as good as anything we've seen before.
I liked everything that came before, to varying degrees. I watched TOS reruns for a long time before TNG came on, and then I saw every episode of that more times than I'd care to admit. I didn't watch DS9 very much when it was on, but I recently rented the series on DVD and found that I like it even more than TNG, in some respects. I even liked Voyager, though I didn't see all of that when it was on, either (but I have to agree that they really messed up the Borg [though I think that really started toward the end of TNG, when Lor got involved with them]). And I liked the movies. Okay, I mainly liked the even numbered movies. And I actually kinda liked Nemesis!
But I just can't stand Enterprise. The crew is like a band of clueless children, bickering about who gets to go camping on the new planet they found, completely ignoring any chain of command (as others have pointed out in discussion of this article, these people are the closest we've seen to today's military. Shouldn't they act like something other than a kindergarten class on a trip to the zoo?).
And I can suspend some disbelief in the Trek timeline and admit that people probably won't be exploring space in a starship with computers that are just flashing lights and food that's day-glo foam rubber cubes. Updating the look of Enterprise to fit in at least with modern technology is fine. But the disturbance to the timeline other than that is just too severe for me to buy it, even given whatever effect First Contact may have had.
The random flesh doesn't bother me. If you think Star Trek is too good to show a lot of skin, go back and look at the original. Boobs and miniskirts, everywhere. And Orion Slave Girls.
Anyhow. Sorry to go off. To return and address your comment, you're right. They do need to entertain the general public. But, given their ratings, it doesn't seem like they're doing that. There are just better shows out there to watch. And in making this show, they seem to have succeeded in both impressing nobody and alienating a good portion of their core fanbase. Or, at least, they succeeded in alienating me, which they've been unable to do in all of what they've done for the 20 years prior to Enterprise.
I've seen some great ideas for a new Star Trek series in this discussion. Get some good people in charge of making a new series, spend a few years putting it together, develop a continuous storyline using actual writers, and make it so.
Let me begin by saying that in college, I have nearly completed a double major in computer science and English literature (with my school being pretty heavy on the criticism). I also went into the field of literature imagining that I had some grand, unique perspective on it, having come from a background in mathematics and sciences. And, indeed, there are times when my more practical background helps in understanding or explaining or extending more "academic" thoughts. At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that math and literature are different things, and they cannot be treated the same way. They have similarities, of course, and some literary concepts are easily explainable in the language of science. At this point, I realize that both of my majors are equally valuable to me in that they have taught me a variety of ways of thinking about things that happen in real life.
I think there a a few important things that the article left out. First, that there are a lot of people in the field of literary criticism who got where they are by parroting famous and respected ideas to students, and by combining famous and respected ideas with gibberish in the papers they write. The presence of vocal, incompetent people is not occupation specific.
I think the second point is a bit more subtle. Deconstruction does not allow us to claim that a text means anything we want it to. Rather, it asserts that the meaning of a text is not determinate. I have a simple example that was given to me in an introductory course long ago:
Take the first sentence of Melville's Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael." Now, we use the trick that the author of the article explained fairly well. We look at what the sentence implies.
Typically, in normal English, we would not use the imperative form to introduce ourselves to someone. We would say "My name is Robert." Not a command, but a statement of fact. Where do we typically hear the phrase "call me x"? When we've been introduced to someone by a name that they don't want us to use. "My name is Robert, but you can call me Bob."
The simplest reading of the first words of the text imply that the narrator's name is Ishmael. But there's also a little doubt planted in our minds (even if we're not literary critics, I think that this odd construction may cause some curiousity, even subconsciously). The sentence seems to imply two opposite meanings. And this, I think, is an entirely defensible position to take. Melville was an educated man and an experienced author. He had some purpose in phrasing this line of the novel so much differently than common usage would have it said. Whether or not the narrator's name is actually Ishmael is not relevant--what is relevant is that Melville has used a trick of language to introduce some tension to the text.
This does not mean, for example, that we can make use of deconstruction to claim that the text actually means "my dog has no nose" or anything that extravagent. And it doesn't mean that scholars should go out and examine each line of the text looking for contradictions, because they will always be able to conjure something up.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course. And there are a lot of people who study it for years and come out speaking nonsense. Opponents of the theory don't have to invent straw men because there are plenty of absurd people already immersed in the field. But almost all of the opposition that I've heard has taken the same form as this article does, that you can use deconstruction to show that a text means anything, when it just doesn't work that way. All it does is allow you to show that the meaning of a text cannot be fixed to a certain interpretation, that others are also valid.
Deconstruction is a useful tool in literary criticism like a monkey wrench is a useful tool around the house. You don't apply it to every problem you have. But you may find that it comes in handy in specialized instances.
Re:Two things you can't say
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not sure that I would agree with your first point, that we "have to pretend that men and women are equal," particularly given the example toward the end of your comment, in which you point out that it's valid to segregate the participants of the 100m sprint by sex. I, personally, don't feel a lot of pressure to pretend that men and women are equal. But maybe I'm one of the heretics that the article talks about.;)
It seems like I hear a lot of people complaining about sex equality--but most everything I hear is characterized by a group that's opposed to the viewpoint. For example, I hear a lot of people decrying the "liberal" opinion that men and women are equal in every way, but I also hear very few liberals actually making that statement. At the same time, I hear people damning the "conservatives" who insist that a woman's place is in the home, taking care of the children. Likewise, I don't hear a lot of conservatives (outside of the odd AM talk radio show) who seem that vehement about this idea.
I think it's pretty well established that, in general, women and men have some different skills in addition to a fairly large, common pool of skills. I also think it's true, however, that very few individual people compare very well to stereotypes. To me, the most visible conflict between the sexes is whether or not women and men get paid equally for doing the same kind of work at the same level of skill. I don't think a person's sex should matter in determining his or her rate of pay (indeed, in the U.S., this type of discrimination was made illegal in 1975), but it still does matter, sometimes. I think most of us would agree with the idea of equal pay? I'm not sure most of us would agree that it's still a problem.
I guess the other big controversy I see is in women's roles in the military. We don't let women do things like crew submarines or fly combat jets in battle. Knowing next to nothing about the military, I can't argue with any degree of authority. But I know what my instincts say.
As a self-confessed avid gamer herself, Ms Fryer sees real value in video games, arguing they have a key role to play in people's lives.
"People need drama in their lives. Games fulfil emotional and mental needs that cannot be fulfilled any other way," she explained.
Hmm. Maybe she should try... I dunno, going outside and interacting with other human beings? Turning to a computer to fulfil emotional needs doesn't seem like the healthiest strategy, to me.
I mean, I would agree that games have an important role in our lives, but I don't think I'd extend that to games that involve just sitting in your parent's basement collecting frags. There's an important qualification to be made between games (even computer games) that involve actual social interaction and games (especially computer games) that substitute a chat interface for human social contact.
The entire article is just a big whine. Yeah, so nobody paid you to write the code for your little pet project. So what? Who cares?
At some point, programmers need to face the real world, and realize that a little bit of economics comes into life some time. Most people can't just sit on their asses writing code that other people percieve as being free for their entire lives. You can certainly try, but it's not likely to work.
As much as I'd like to make a living writing sci-fi novels, it's not like you can just sit in a corner and do your thing and get away with it. Unless you're a complete genius. And, apparently, this guy isn't.
It seems like what Gator is doing isn't all that different from the basic function of the web browser. We code a page in HTML, and rely on the browser to translate that page into something pretty for us.
If I remember right, it seems like HTML was originally envisioned to be used to define the *kind* of text that it was embedded in, and not the *appearance* of that content. In other words, if you wanted something to be a heading, you put <H> tags around it, and it was the browser's job to decide what a heading should look like.
The web publisher can't really claim a copyright infringement because the computer doesn't display their web page the way they want it to; depending on how you code your web page, it may look drastically different in all of the major browsers.
I don't think they can claim a copyright violation because the computer changes the content of the page either. Look what happens when you don't close a <table> tag in your web page, and then view it with IE. IE apparently adds the closing tag at the end, itself, because the page display as if the table was correctly assembled.
How much do you have to change to infringe on a copyright? Does it matter whether the user knows that the alterations are happening? Granted, what Gator is doing is pretty slimy, but is it really illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
No, really. Why are people tired? Can we see the answers, or do we just have to click on the mailto link and bare our souls? What's going on here? It's a government conspiracy! They want to hear our deepest fears so they can make them real and make us into zombies!
My almost wholly ignorant impression was always that those fuzzy slippers they wear are to kill the sound of their footsteps on the floors of the sets. There was something about that on one of the DS9 DVD special features, in which they had the guy who plays Dr. Bashir pointing out that you can clearly see the fuzzy slippers on his feet in one scene of an episode that they did together with the TNG cast. And I thought that's what he said about it, that it was for sound.
In that case, how about, "I'm going to be using it at the same time as you, but I won't use it while I'm sleeping next week, so that's 40 hours." Or, even, "That program was already out for a couple of months before I bought it, so we can both use it concurrently for one month." I'm not sure that many publishers would smile upon this "time shifting" idea.
Um. Somehow that doesn't sound better than playing FPS games for ten years. I mean, do you have any idea how many incredibly old, incredibly fat, incredibly ill people show up at doctor's (including gynecologists) offices? I leave the rest to the imagination...
(I mean no offense to old, fat, sick people. I will probably be one myself some day, and I pity my doctor.)
The author's disdain for Peter Jackson's adaptation comes through too clearly for me to read the text in its entirety. It's just an enumerated list of more than 250 holier-than-Peter-Jackson complaints. And I understand that the function of a nitpicker's guide is to point out the tiniest deviance or flaw. But I would also contend that the purpose is not necessarily to be unceasingly nasty about doing so.
The normal state of my cell phone's ringer is off. I turn it on when I'm not doing anything, in a place where it won't be a nuisance. So I don't think my cell phone bugs other people all that much.
Most people view the telephone as an inherently invasive device. Here's this thing that sits there doing nothing most of the time, and then it makes this grating noise, and you have to drop whatever you're doing and talk to it. When you're eating dinner, telemarketers call. Which a lot of people view as a TREMENDOUS inconvenience. I think that's because most people are conditioned to answer the phone every time it rings. That's why it's invasive. It's immediate.
But why? If I'm at home, reading a book, and the phone rings, and I don't want to talk on the phone, I just don't answer it. The conclusion of all that diatribe is that my cell phone isn't annoying to me because I don't allow it to be.
The cellular phone is a relatively new device. We haven't fully integrated it into our system of etiquette, yet. But I think with a combination of technology and common sense, we'll eventually be happy with it.
I think most people would agree that this is a valid explanation of why things are different. It also seems, however, that most people don't really care whether the explanation is valid or not. We liked our Star Trek the way it was. And it's just not working like this.
They could have made a new Trek series any way they wanted, but they chose to make it fly in the face of everything that the fans knew about the Trek universe, and they chose to make it unappealing to a more general audience, too. Perhaps this is hindsight. But my hindsight tells me that if someone had pitched this idea to me back before Enterprise began, I would have seen it as a bad idea.
I liked everything that came before, to varying degrees. I watched TOS reruns for a long time before TNG came on, and then I saw every episode of that more times than I'd care to admit. I didn't watch DS9 very much when it was on, but I recently rented the series on DVD and found that I like it even more than TNG, in some respects. I even liked Voyager, though I didn't see all of that when it was on, either (but I have to agree that they really messed up the Borg [though I think that really started toward the end of TNG, when Lor got involved with them]). And I liked the movies. Okay, I mainly liked the even numbered movies. And I actually kinda liked Nemesis!
But I just can't stand Enterprise. The crew is like a band of clueless children, bickering about who gets to go camping on the new planet they found, completely ignoring any chain of command (as others have pointed out in discussion of this article, these people are the closest we've seen to today's military. Shouldn't they act like something other than a kindergarten class on a trip to the zoo?).
And I can suspend some disbelief in the Trek timeline and admit that people probably won't be exploring space in a starship with computers that are just flashing lights and food that's day-glo foam rubber cubes. Updating the look of Enterprise to fit in at least with modern technology is fine. But the disturbance to the timeline other than that is just too severe for me to buy it, even given whatever effect First Contact may have had.
The random flesh doesn't bother me. If you think Star Trek is too good to show a lot of skin, go back and look at the original. Boobs and miniskirts, everywhere. And Orion Slave Girls.
Anyhow. Sorry to go off. To return and address your comment, you're right. They do need to entertain the general public. But, given their ratings, it doesn't seem like they're doing that. There are just better shows out there to watch. And in making this show, they seem to have succeeded in both impressing nobody and alienating a good portion of their core fanbase. Or, at least, they succeeded in alienating me, which they've been unable to do in all of what they've done for the 20 years prior to Enterprise.
I've seen some great ideas for a new Star Trek series in this discussion. Get some good people in charge of making a new series, spend a few years putting it together, develop a continuous storyline using actual writers, and make it so.
I think there a a few important things that the article left out. First, that there are a lot of people in the field of literary criticism who got where they are by parroting famous and respected ideas to students, and by combining famous and respected ideas with gibberish in the papers they write. The presence of vocal, incompetent people is not occupation specific.
I think the second point is a bit more subtle. Deconstruction does not allow us to claim that a text means anything we want it to. Rather, it asserts that the meaning of a text is not determinate. I have a simple example that was given to me in an introductory course long ago:
Take the first sentence of Melville's Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael." Now, we use the trick that the author of the article explained fairly well. We look at what the sentence implies.
Typically, in normal English, we would not use the imperative form to introduce ourselves to someone. We would say "My name is Robert." Not a command, but a statement of fact. Where do we typically hear the phrase "call me x"? When we've been introduced to someone by a name that they don't want us to use. "My name is Robert, but you can call me Bob."
The simplest reading of the first words of the text imply that the narrator's name is Ishmael. But there's also a little doubt planted in our minds (even if we're not literary critics, I think that this odd construction may cause some curiousity, even subconsciously). The sentence seems to imply two opposite meanings. And this, I think, is an entirely defensible position to take. Melville was an educated man and an experienced author. He had some purpose in phrasing this line of the novel so much differently than common usage would have it said. Whether or not the narrator's name is actually Ishmael is not relevant--what is relevant is that Melville has used a trick of language to introduce some tension to the text.
This does not mean, for example, that we can make use of deconstruction to claim that the text actually means "my dog has no nose" or anything that extravagent. And it doesn't mean that scholars should go out and examine each line of the text looking for contradictions, because they will always be able to conjure something up.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course. And there are a lot of people who study it for years and come out speaking nonsense. Opponents of the theory don't have to invent straw men because there are plenty of absurd people already immersed in the field. But almost all of the opposition that I've heard has taken the same form as this article does, that you can use deconstruction to show that a text means anything, when it just doesn't work that way. All it does is allow you to show that the meaning of a text cannot be fixed to a certain interpretation, that others are also valid.
Deconstruction is a useful tool in literary criticism like a monkey wrench is a useful tool around the house. You don't apply it to every problem you have. But you may find that it comes in handy in specialized instances.
It seems like I hear a lot of people complaining about sex equality--but most everything I hear is characterized by a group that's opposed to the viewpoint. For example, I hear a lot of people decrying the "liberal" opinion that men and women are equal in every way, but I also hear very few liberals actually making that statement. At the same time, I hear people damning the "conservatives" who insist that a woman's place is in the home, taking care of the children. Likewise, I don't hear a lot of conservatives (outside of the odd AM talk radio show) who seem that vehement about this idea.
I think it's pretty well established that, in general, women and men have some different skills in addition to a fairly large, common pool of skills. I also think it's true, however, that very few individual people compare very well to stereotypes. To me, the most visible conflict between the sexes is whether or not women and men get paid equally for doing the same kind of work at the same level of skill. I don't think a person's sex should matter in determining his or her rate of pay (indeed, in the U.S., this type of discrimination was made illegal in 1975), but it still does matter, sometimes. I think most of us would agree with the idea of equal pay? I'm not sure most of us would agree that it's still a problem.
I guess the other big controversy I see is in women's roles in the military. We don't let women do things like crew submarines or fly combat jets in battle. Knowing next to nothing about the military, I can't argue with any degree of authority. But I know what my instincts say.
And this is insightful? Wow. Thanks. Fuck fuck fuck. I'm insightful, too!
Hmm. Maybe she should try... I dunno, going outside and interacting with other human beings? Turning to a computer to fulfil emotional needs doesn't seem like the healthiest strategy, to me.
I mean, I would agree that games have an important role in our lives, but I don't think I'd extend that to games that involve just sitting in your parent's basement collecting frags. There's an important qualification to be made between games (even computer games) that involve actual social interaction and games (especially computer games) that substitute a chat interface for human social contact.
The entire article is just a big whine. Yeah, so nobody paid you to write the code for your little pet project. So what? Who cares? At some point, programmers need to face the real world, and realize that a little bit of economics comes into life some time. Most people can't just sit on their asses writing code that other people percieve as being free for their entire lives. You can certainly try, but it's not likely to work. As much as I'd like to make a living writing sci-fi novels, it's not like you can just sit in a corner and do your thing and get away with it. Unless you're a complete genius. And, apparently, this guy isn't.
If I remember right, it seems like HTML was originally envisioned to be used to define the *kind* of text that it was embedded in, and not the *appearance* of that content. In other words, if you wanted something to be a heading, you put <H> tags around it, and it was the browser's job to decide what a heading should look like.
The web publisher can't really claim a copyright infringement because the computer doesn't display their web page the way they want it to; depending on how you code your web page, it may look drastically different in all of the major browsers.
I don't think they can claim a copyright violation because the computer changes the content of the page either. Look what happens when you don't close a <table> tag in your web page, and then view it with IE. IE apparently adds the closing tag at the end, itself, because the page display as if the table was correctly assembled.
How much do you have to change to infringe on a copyright? Does it matter whether the user knows that the alterations are happening? Granted, what Gator is doing is pretty slimy, but is it really illegal?