Re:Banks is not a good author
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
Terry Pratchett is not even in the same league - he should have stopped after about 3 of those Ringworld novels
You misspelled 'Larry Niven', and he should have stopped after two. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, on the other hand, didn't get worth reading till somewhere around Mort, which was the fourth book.
I just moved from UK to USA and the amount of alcohol people drink in UK is completely unheard of in USA. Basically, we used to have three British pints 4 times a week. Properly drunk.
On three pints? What were you drinking? Special Brew, or maybe the kind of scrumpy that comes with a biohazard symbol on the label?
Three pints... you wouldn't drive on it, but 'properly drunk'?
The article states he died on wednesday, but it's still tuesday! (I know, I know... it's due to the time zones...)
So the news reached you that quickly? From Sri Lanka to you in a matter of minutes... What a wonderful invention allows instanteneous intercontinental communication! Who is it that we have to thank?
THe MPAA and RIAA would be drooling if Verizon would be dumb enough to do this. Billions in capital just sitting in the bank and knowingly violate copyright laws.
DMCA safe harbour provisions: the ISP can't be held liable, as long as it removes infringing material once notified of its presence by the copyright holder. Of course once the material is removed, some user uploads it straight back, but that's not the ISP's fault; the copyright holder just has to issue another takedown notice;-)
Blendo, from what I've heard, was very similar in concept to a UK robot called Hypnodisc. Big flywheel, all about the angular momentum. Hugely destructive - tears most robots to shreds.
Trouble was, the robots that rivalled Hypnodisc for the title were always well built and well armoured. So Hypnodisc would utterly destroy the no-hopers, and then when it met the likes of Cassius or Chaos or Razer or Panic Attack it found itself rather worse off. A flywheel weapon relies upon the one-hit kill; it's expensive in energy, so we often saw Hypnodisc running low on power after a few jolts, and left vulnerable. Worse yet, hit something that doesn't yield and you hurt yourself maybe more than the target...
To a great extent it was simply not the done thing to completely demolish an opponent's robot. Even if it was shit, it represented a huge investment of effort, and most teams had at least one little kid involved - you don't want to make the geek-in-training cry, now, do you? This may have been encouraged further by the fact that BBC special effects had put together a squad of house robots that were enormously over any legitimate weight limits. If you think you've built a super-tough robot, try your hand against those, eh? Tearing apart a flimsy no-hoper impresses nobody. Slicing Matilda to shreds as part of your victory celebration lets you go down as roboteering legends.
I always laugh when I hear this. As a child I was taught that Jesus was born (1st coming) and then was crucified. He was then resurrected (2nd coming) before ascending into heaven.
If I remember rightly how it goes (it's been a while since I've seen the inside of a church): He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We're still waiting. The best place to meet him is at this great restaurant Zaphod Beeblebrox told me about...
Yet though on Earth Christ established a church and appointed apostles to lead it, Aslan never did anything of the sort.
A correction to my previous argument. Aslan did not appoint apostles or priests - but he did appoint kings. Aslan personally inaugurated King Frank at the creation of Narnia; it was he who set up the Pevensie monarchy after the fall of the White Witch; and he endorsed the Telmarine dynasty of King Caspian after the defeat of Miraz.
This is actually quite in keeping with Lewis's religion, which was the Anglicanism of empire. The King is in his person both sovereign ruler of the kingdom, and head of the Church. The Narnian monarchy, then, is a step further in this direction. The Church and State are not just closely related as in England, but actually the same entity. If the King is true to Aslan and the people are true to the King, then all is well in Narnia; no priests are needed to tell a Narnian how to live, because it is simply a matter of following Aslan's appointed King and living one's life as as good a Narnian as one is able.
Something similar might be argued for the constitution of the Numenorean empire and its successor states in Middle-earth, which were for most of their history dominated by an aristocracy of the Elf-friends, who followed the traditions of the Eldar, respected the Ban of the Valar and revered Eru. The trouble began when the 'church' as represented by the Elendili separated from the State as represented by the King's faction. I wonder if we can see a trace of Tolkien's Catholicism here? - the Elendili by their alliance with the Eldar always held allegiance to Gil-galad's Noldorin kingdom in Eriador, which might sometimes have conflicted with the short-term interests of the Numenorean state; exactly the conflict of interests that once left Catholics in England in such dire straits, seen as potential traitors loyal to the Pope over the King. Ar-Pharazon as Henry VIII and the entire Akallabeth as Tolkien's literary vengeance for the English Reformation, perhaps?
Personally I was never a fan of Dickens, something I attribute to the fact he was paid by the word and so tended to go on interminably.
He wrote serials published in magazines. Sitting down to read Oliver Twist at once is like sitting down to go through all of The Sandman. Only more so because there are fewer pictures and a lot more text. Try reading a chapter a week, the way the original audience would have done it.
The reason for the lack of churches in Tolkien's Middle Earth works in particular is that there is no active deity to worship. The Creator God of the Tolkien mythos, Eru, has not intervened into the world's affairs, save for a single case (the flooding of Numenor).
Much the same could be said for billions on Earth who worship gods who do very little of substance outside of ancient legend. Two notable English authors included.
The Valar, who did some active meddling in the First Age, are not gods, and indeed emphatically refute any attempts to address or treat them as such - since that would be sacrilege against Eru.
Actually, one Vala at least is invoked frequently in the manner of a god - or at least a guardian angel or patron saint. Consider the efficacy of the name of Elbereth as a ward against evil - it repels a Nazgul, breaks the power of the Watchers on the road to Mordor, activates the phial of Galadriel, strengthens the will against the call of the Ring. This is the kind of thing I meant when I referred to the heroes' religion. Now, I can understand that the High Elves would not establish a priesthood and build temples to Elbereth, because they had known her personally in Aman. But I'm surprised that the mortal civilisations they influenced never did so. The nearest they get is dedicating a single, open-air site to be sacred to Eru - but no monument and no priesthood is mentioned.
Meanwhile the Hobbits, who are presented as Tolkien's idealised English culture, appear to have no concept of religion whatever. Even Faramir's practice of looking to the West before eating - a grace - is alien to Frodo, whose people know only humanistic customs of courtesy and hospitality. Frodo himself is the only hobbit we meet who shows any spiritual leanings at all, all of which he seems to have learned from the Elves.
Moving on to Lewis's world, Aslan undoubtedly is a god - in fact he's plainly Christ. Yet though on Earth Christ established a church and appointed apostles to lead it, Aslan never did anything of the sort. Things are done and promises made and kings crowned in the name of Aslan, but the only church ever established in his name was a fraud founded by Shift the Ape, and it led directly to the destruction of Narnia. The heroes have faith in Aslan and the country is dotted with sacred sites - Aslan's How, for instance - but the profession of priest is unknown in the land, unless Father Christmas counts, or Silenus.
Tolkien and Lewis were both good Christians. But I wonder if at some level, they didn't wish they could have been good pagans instead...
Now, a right-winger will respond that the palestinians didn't agree to oslo in good faith. A left-winger will respond that israel didn't agree to oslo in good faith either.
Yes, he was Christian, and more specifically Catholic, and while there is a deep level of Catholicism in his works, he never intended to write an allegorical variant of Christianity (unlike his good friend CS Lewis).
An interesting thing to notice here is that despite both men being faithful Christians, and Lewis in particular consciously writing a Christian allegory, there is no Church in their works, no organised religion. I find only one temple mentioned in the whole history of Arda, and that was built in Numenor in the days of its darkness, to sacrifice victims to Morgoth, with Sauron as its high priest. I find also only one temple mentioned in the chronicles of Narnia, and that is the great temple to Tash in the Calormene capital. Both of these are portrayed as thoroughly evil institutions. The religion of the heroes, where it exists at all, is simple and personal and carried on entirely without the involvement of any kind of priest.
When I read a book and encounter a name that I can't "pronounce", I substitute. Supposed the main character has a name Tmaegedornrea or something.... I substitute "T-guy", "the main character", "the main character's sidekick", "bob's friend", "the evil wizard", "the bad guy", "the king of dragons", or some other made up pronunciation "Tee-meg-dorna", or something else when I see that name written and move on, understanding that character's role in the story. There are *lots* of names in JRRT's work, but hanging yourself up on pronunciation is not a reason to get emo about the book.
Do that with Tolkien and you're missing the point, and half of the creative richness of the work. Remember - Tolkien was a linguist. He'd sketched out a synthetic language, and needed to create a people who would speak that language and a world in which they would live. The whole history of Middle-earth is the result of this.
Thus unlike the lesser authors who came after, and who named their characters by grabbing a Scrabble bag and taking pot luck, Tolkien's strange names mean something. Take the chief villain of the Silmarillion, Morgoth, the Black Foe - one of the first names we meet. Keep that name in mind as you read the rest of the books. Mormegil. Morwen. Morannon. Moria. Morgul. Mordor. Suddenly these aren't just random syllables dreamed up on the spot by a hack author; they're meaningful names drawing on an ancient language and history, drawing on the background of Tolkien's Elf-latin to make the world feel rich, and deep, and old.
Timex/Sinclair eventually came out with a minimalist Z80/ROM BASIC box with a membrane keyboard for ultra cheap - then came the crash of 1983.
In America, maybe, but Sinclair made an absolute killing with those machines in the UK. The ZX80 and ZX81 pretty much established the home computer market, and then the Spectrum turned up with colour graphics and became the standard machine for a generation of gamers and hackers. It was a long time before Nintendo managed to break that market; even as late as the 16-bit era, the Amiga was serious competition for the SNES and Mega Drive.
The interesting thing about that era was that these machines were largely incompatible with each other, but that didn't matter so much - they were cheap. Vastly cheaper than the contemporary IBM and Apple machines. Will the mass market accept compatibility troubles from a non-Microsoft machine, if it means they can have it for peanuts? Quite possibly.
DRM? Who cares. I'm not planning on copying 20gb+ disks.
I would have said that about DVDs not so long ago. Disk space and bandwidth become cheaper with time.
And besides copying, a DRM crack allows me to play discs on the operating system of my choice, to extract small parts of the feature for purposes of review, criticism or parody, and to bypass any annoying previews, trailers, propaganda, threats, or other junk that the studio may have seen fit to prepend to the show.
If you mix PATA and SATA drives in the same box, weird problems can arise when the OS on first boot numbers the drives differently to the BIOS or to GRUB. To get Ubuntu up and running on my newly built PC which inherited the CD drive and one of the hard disks from the old box, I had to tinker a little with the GRUB config file.
Rather worrying, a similar anti Anonymous "ad hominem" attack force is trying to re-define the cake meme from the game Portal into one about underage pornography.
IIRC, on some chans,/cake/ is for lolicon. Don't know why; delicious and moist, maybe? At any rate it's not really much of a stretch for the cult to portray Anonymous as perverted. Take ten minutes to browse/d/, and then tell me if you reckon Anonymous cares what the cult thinks...
Well you do know that March 15th is St. Patty's day this year right?
Debatable. St Patrick's is not normally a movable feast; it's March 17th every year. However, since this year that happens to be during Holy Week, I gather some dioceses are celebrating the feast of St Patrick early. As far as I know this isn't the case in Ireland, where St Patrick's Day is being celebrated on the 17th as usual.
The more important consideration of course is that a Monday is not convenient for getting properly drunk; I mean you can't leave it till after work to start drinking if it's to be a proper St Patrick's pissup now can you? Consequently the best day for Guinness sales will likely be the Saturday before.
At $1/track they'd have to sell more than one track to every man, woman, and child in the US to recoup it.
Who buys only one Beatles track? Let's say one person in ten buys music legally, and only half of those like the Beatles - one in twenty overall. If you like the Beatles, you'll download at the very least Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. That's 57 tracks; you're looking at not far short of three tracks sold per capita.
The problem really is that the planet is saturated with Beatles music. Who in the world doesn't already have those albums on CD?
Slashdot Mirror
You misspelled 'Larry Niven', and he should have stopped after two. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, on the other hand, didn't get worth reading till somewhere around Mort, which was the fourth book.
On three pints? What were you drinking? Special Brew, or maybe the kind of scrumpy that comes with a biohazard symbol on the label?
Three pints... you wouldn't drive on it, but 'properly drunk'?
So the news reached you that quickly? From Sri Lanka to you in a matter of minutes... What a wonderful invention allows instanteneous intercontinental communication! Who is it that we have to thank?
You misspelled 'Toclafane'.
You misspelled 'BitTorrent'.
DMCA safe harbour provisions: the ISP can't be held liable, as long as it removes infringing material once notified of its presence by the copyright holder. Of course once the material is removed, some user uploads it straight back, but that's not the ISP's fault; the copyright holder just has to issue another takedown notice ;-)
Trouble was, the robots that rivalled Hypnodisc for the title were always well built and well armoured. So Hypnodisc would utterly destroy the no-hopers, and then when it met the likes of Cassius or Chaos or Razer or Panic Attack it found itself rather worse off. A flywheel weapon relies upon the one-hit kill; it's expensive in energy, so we often saw Hypnodisc running low on power after a few jolts, and left vulnerable. Worse yet, hit something that doesn't yield and you hurt yourself maybe more than the target...
To a great extent it was simply not the done thing to completely demolish an opponent's robot. Even if it was shit, it represented a huge investment of effort, and most teams had at least one little kid involved - you don't want to make the geek-in-training cry, now, do you? This may have been encouraged further by the fact that BBC special effects had put together a squad of house robots that were enormously over any legitimate weight limits. If you think you've built a super-tough robot, try your hand against those, eh? Tearing apart a flimsy no-hoper impresses nobody. Slicing Matilda to shreds as part of your victory celebration lets you go down as roboteering legends.
Stand in the wrong place and the waveforms would reinforce. No thanks.
If I remember rightly how it goes (it's been a while since I've seen the inside of a church): He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We're still waiting. The best place to meet him is at this great restaurant Zaphod Beeblebrox told me about...
A correction to my previous argument. Aslan did not appoint apostles or priests - but he did appoint kings. Aslan personally inaugurated King Frank at the creation of Narnia; it was he who set up the Pevensie monarchy after the fall of the White Witch; and he endorsed the Telmarine dynasty of King Caspian after the defeat of Miraz.
This is actually quite in keeping with Lewis's religion, which was the Anglicanism of empire. The King is in his person both sovereign ruler of the kingdom, and head of the Church. The Narnian monarchy, then, is a step further in this direction. The Church and State are not just closely related as in England, but actually the same entity. If the King is true to Aslan and the people are true to the King, then all is well in Narnia; no priests are needed to tell a Narnian how to live, because it is simply a matter of following Aslan's appointed King and living one's life as as good a Narnian as one is able.
Something similar might be argued for the constitution of the Numenorean empire and its successor states in Middle-earth, which were for most of their history dominated by an aristocracy of the Elf-friends, who followed the traditions of the Eldar, respected the Ban of the Valar and revered Eru. The trouble began when the 'church' as represented by the Elendili separated from the State as represented by the King's faction. I wonder if we can see a trace of Tolkien's Catholicism here? - the Elendili by their alliance with the Eldar always held allegiance to Gil-galad's Noldorin kingdom in Eriador, which might sometimes have conflicted with the short-term interests of the Numenorean state; exactly the conflict of interests that once left Catholics in England in such dire straits, seen as potential traitors loyal to the Pope over the King. Ar-Pharazon as Henry VIII and the entire Akallabeth as Tolkien's literary vengeance for the English Reformation, perhaps?
There's a mod somewhere doesn't know his history. This is a reference to a classic /. review, in which the editor summed up a new mp3 player thus:
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
It was the first iPod :-)
He wrote serials published in magazines. Sitting down to read Oliver Twist at once is like sitting down to go through all of The Sandman. Only more so because there are fewer pictures and a lot more text. Try reading a chapter a week, the way the original audience would have done it.
Much the same could be said for billions on Earth who worship gods who do very little of substance outside of ancient legend. Two notable English authors included.
The Valar, who did some active meddling in the First Age, are not gods, and indeed emphatically refute any attempts to address or treat them as such - since that would be sacrilege against Eru.
Actually, one Vala at least is invoked frequently in the manner of a god - or at least a guardian angel or patron saint. Consider the efficacy of the name of Elbereth as a ward against evil - it repels a Nazgul, breaks the power of the Watchers on the road to Mordor, activates the phial of Galadriel, strengthens the will against the call of the Ring. This is the kind of thing I meant when I referred to the heroes' religion. Now, I can understand that the High Elves would not establish a priesthood and build temples to Elbereth, because they had known her personally in Aman. But I'm surprised that the mortal civilisations they influenced never did so. The nearest they get is dedicating a single, open-air site to be sacred to Eru - but no monument and no priesthood is mentioned.
Meanwhile the Hobbits, who are presented as Tolkien's idealised English culture, appear to have no concept of religion whatever. Even Faramir's practice of looking to the West before eating - a grace - is alien to Frodo, whose people know only humanistic customs of courtesy and hospitality. Frodo himself is the only hobbit we meet who shows any spiritual leanings at all, all of which he seems to have learned from the Elves.
Moving on to Lewis's world, Aslan undoubtedly is a god - in fact he's plainly Christ. Yet though on Earth Christ established a church and appointed apostles to lead it, Aslan never did anything of the sort. Things are done and promises made and kings crowned in the name of Aslan, but the only church ever established in his name was a fraud founded by Shift the Ape, and it led directly to the destruction of Narnia. The heroes have faith in Aslan and the country is dotted with sacred sites - Aslan's How, for instance - but the profession of priest is unknown in the land, unless Father Christmas counts, or Silenus.
Tolkien and Lewis were both good Christians. But I wonder if at some level, they didn't wish they could have been good pagans instead...
Wouldn't you have to use some kind of tool to bypass the DRM in order to do this?
Inconvenience isn't a sufficient justification for breaking the law.
Isn't such a tool itself illegal?
Pirating a movie is a lot worse than violating the DMCA to copy a movie you own in my opinion.
But both are illegal. Might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.
Definitely not. I hear that in the Blu-Ray release, Jar Jar Binks shoots first.
What happens if you're an Israeli Communist?
An interesting thing to notice here is that despite both men being faithful Christians, and Lewis in particular consciously writing a Christian allegory, there is no Church in their works, no organised religion. I find only one temple mentioned in the whole history of Arda, and that was built in Numenor in the days of its darkness, to sacrifice victims to Morgoth, with Sauron as its high priest. I find also only one temple mentioned in the chronicles of Narnia, and that is the great temple to Tash in the Calormene capital. Both of these are portrayed as thoroughly evil institutions. The religion of the heroes, where it exists at all, is simple and personal and carried on entirely without the involvement of any kind of priest.
Do that with Tolkien and you're missing the point, and half of the creative richness of the work. Remember - Tolkien was a linguist. He'd sketched out a synthetic language, and needed to create a people who would speak that language and a world in which they would live. The whole history of Middle-earth is the result of this.
Thus unlike the lesser authors who came after, and who named their characters by grabbing a Scrabble bag and taking pot luck, Tolkien's strange names mean something. Take the chief villain of the Silmarillion, Morgoth, the Black Foe - one of the first names we meet. Keep that name in mind as you read the rest of the books. Mormegil. Morwen. Morannon. Moria. Morgul. Mordor. Suddenly these aren't just random syllables dreamed up on the spot by a hack author; they're meaningful names drawing on an ancient language and history, drawing on the background of Tolkien's Elf-latin to make the world feel rich, and deep, and old.
In America, maybe, but Sinclair made an absolute killing with those machines in the UK. The ZX80 and ZX81 pretty much established the home computer market, and then the Spectrum turned up with colour graphics and became the standard machine for a generation of gamers and hackers. It was a long time before Nintendo managed to break that market; even as late as the 16-bit era, the Amiga was serious competition for the SNES and Mega Drive.
The interesting thing about that era was that these machines were largely incompatible with each other, but that didn't matter so much - they were cheap. Vastly cheaper than the contemporary IBM and Apple machines. Will the mass market accept compatibility troubles from a non-Microsoft machine, if it means they can have it for peanuts? Quite possibly.
I would have said that about DVDs not so long ago. Disk space and bandwidth become cheaper with time.
And besides copying, a DRM crack allows me to play discs on the operating system of my choice, to extract small parts of the feature for purposes of review, criticism or parody, and to bypass any annoying previews, trailers, propaganda, threats, or other junk that the studio may have seen fit to prepend to the show.
If you mix PATA and SATA drives in the same box, weird problems can arise when the OS on first boot numbers the drives differently to the BIOS or to GRUB. To get Ubuntu up and running on my newly built PC which inherited the CD drive and one of the hard disks from the old box, I had to tinker a little with the GRUB config file.
IIRC, on some chans, /cake/ is for lolicon. Don't know why; delicious and moist, maybe? At any rate it's not really much of a stretch for the cult to portray Anonymous as perverted. Take ten minutes to browse /d/, and then tell me if you reckon Anonymous cares what the cult thinks...
Debatable. St Patrick's is not normally a movable feast; it's March 17th every year. However, since this year that happens to be during Holy Week, I gather some dioceses are celebrating the feast of St Patrick early. As far as I know this isn't the case in Ireland, where St Patrick's Day is being celebrated on the 17th as usual.
The more important consideration of course is that a Monday is not convenient for getting properly drunk; I mean you can't leave it till after work to start drinking if it's to be a proper St Patrick's pissup now can you? Consequently the best day for Guinness sales will likely be the Saturday before.
Who buys only one Beatles track? Let's say one person in ten buys music legally, and only half of those like the Beatles - one in twenty overall. If you like the Beatles, you'll download at the very least Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. That's 57 tracks; you're looking at not far short of three tracks sold per capita.
The problem really is that the planet is saturated with Beatles music. Who in the world doesn't already have those albums on CD?