Dick was a one of a kind crazy literary genius who is totally underrated. I wish he had lived longer.
I highly recommend any PKD book to anyone who wants to get an open mind and science fiction like no other. Don't make a judgement on him based on the movies you have seen that are based on his writings, namely Blade Runner, Total Recall, & Minority Report. The only one that came close to doing him justice was Blade Runner, but it fell far short in my opinion but is a good movie in its own right.
The artists fall in love with the medium, but ignore the story, hence they create a crappy product.
To debunk this absolute statement, take a look at any of Akira Kurosawa's films, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood & Dreams in particular. Kurosawa began as a painter, and went into cinema falling in love with the camera. He used the camera like no other before him and in a lot of his films he used the camera as a large part of telling the story. It was his canvas. He was a master is considered one of the best directors of all time by me among more notable others.
Sure, a new medium can make it easy for people to go off on tangents and not pay attention to the whole package and making an excellent film, but there are notable exceptions in any genre. A talented artist will take advantage of new technology and find new methods to produce absolutely amazing art. Hacks will simply pile on eye candy. Oh boy, more bullet time & explosions!!;)
Has gotten extreme technological gains over the years. The top GP bikes have engine management systems to rival F1 cars, carbon fibre rotors, fuel mapping that can be changed by the rider on the track to alter HP delivery. Even motorcycle tires that race at daytona have two seperate compounds on each side of the tire. One is for the large bank, and one is for the rest of the infield course. Even the ducati I bought this year has a computer with lap timer and data recorder built into the bike. it can even interface with a trackside IR lap timer. The tech that was available 5 years ago to the pro team is now available for the amaetur racer.
good points. I apparently mistook the original message to mean: "my access point is completely open for anyone who wishes to use it when they find it, but since my neighbor is a poor sap who doesn't know any better, I charge him thus taking advantage of his cluelessness"
You have clarified that this does not seem like the case.
IMO, if he's offering to pay, there is nothing wrong with that. I'm getting ready to run a free 'open' access point of my own. I'm close to a starbucks, so with a signal booster, i think i can 'steal' some of their business. I have decided for myself that I won't take money (cause I don't need it and want to provide free access), but haven't decided if I want to just let it be completely open, or block everything but basic web access. The anarchist in me says to let it all be open, the network admin in me says NO WAY!.
Everyone always mentions orwell when talking about future societies and the impact of technology. Orwell was wrong, I agree with Gates. He painted quite a scary picture of a future controlled by big brother, but guess what... People don't like to be controlled if they know that they are, people would rebel in a orwellian state and there would be a state of bloody utter chaos and government ruling by a iron fist.
Huxley, however, painted a much scarier picture of a future society that is already coming partially true today. The best kind of servitude is that where the servant loves to serve the will of the master and knows no better, but a drone is a drone is a drone. In Huxley's world, all that the government and the powers that be have to do to retain control and shape things in the way they want is to use basic psychological principles such as someone responds better towards reward than punishment, placate them with their soma, touchie-feelies, etc, and they will want no more, or not think outside the system.
I highly suggest you check out Brave New World Revisited It is a collection of essays Huxley wrote on the topics of Brave New World, later in his life. I think you will be frightened and suprised.
Description from website:
In 1958, Aldous Huxley wrote what might be called a sequel to his novel Brave New World, published in 1932, but it was a sequel that did not revisit the story or the characters, or re-enter the world of the novel. Instead, he revisited that world in a set of 12 essays. Taking a second look at specific aspects of the future Huxley imagined in Brave New World, Huxley meditated on how his fantasy seemed to be turning into reality, frighteningly and much more quickly than he had ever dreamed.
That he had been so prophetic in 1931 about the dystopian future gave Huxley no comfort. He was a far more serious man in 1958 -- at the age of 64 -- and the world was a very different place, transformed by the catastrophe of World War II, the advent of nuclear weapons and the grip of the Cold War. Looking behind the Iron Curtain, where people were not free but dominated by totalitarian power, Huxley could only bow to the grim prophecy of his friend (and, briefly, his student at Eton) George Orwell in the novel 1984. In the free world, however, the situation seemed even more to be one for despair. For it seemed to Huxley that people were well on their way to giving up their freedom and the sanctity of their individualism, in exchange for the illusions of comfort and sensory pleasure -- just as they had in Brave New World.
Huxley heard, in 1958, a world full of the noise of what he called singing commercials, flooding the mass media, much like the hypnopaedia that shaped conscious thought in the world of the novel. He saw people everywhere in greater numbers taking tranquilizer drugs, to surrender to the unacceptable aspects of modern life -- not unlike the drug called soma that everyone takes in the novel. The power of propaganda, he believed, had been validated by the rise of Hitler, and the postwar world was using it effectively to manipulate the masses. Overpopulation was already a critical issue in 1958, and Huxley saw the emergence of an overpopulated world in which the chaos was, more and more, being countered by centralized control -- closer, it seemed, to the future of Brave New World, where the ultimate controlling capitalist of Huxley's early years, Henry Ford, had become the equivalent of God.
In the end, Brave New World Revisited despairs of what has come to pass, primarily modern humankinds willingness to surrender freedom for pleasure. Huxley quotes from the episode of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov -- "For nothing," the Inquisitor insists, "has ever been more insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom." Huxley worried that the cry of "Give me liberty or give me death" could easily be replaced by "Give me television and hamburgers, but
But Deep Thought wasn't the fastest computer ever. It was the fastest computer at the time and it designed the fastest computer ever to find the question to the answer (42) to life the universe and everything.
That computer was Earth. So the fastest fictional computer ever was Earth, and the fastest real super computers are used as earth simulators. Now isn't that cool?
Screw the technological "destroy your computer over the internet" crap. Just have Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program triangulate the location of a pirate's IP realtime, and send in the black helicoptors. After a few prominent file traders have their systems (and themselves) 'cleaned', the problem will go away, right?
After all, aren't the people on Kazaa supporting the terrorists in some way?
I have only one sun box to administer also, but even it is in the process of being replaced by linux on some cheap intel hardware. It is kind of a shame, there isn't much hardware that impresses me more than Sparc. Everything about the sun seems finely engineered while the Intel box replacement seems mass market quality, but hey, it works.
Please stop supporting these closed source companies that use Linux and don't contribute anything back other than the bare minimum to be compliant with the GPL (if that). Build a PVR with
MythTV. If more people start using it and helping with developing it then it'll quickly leave Tivo and ReplayTV in the dust.
A buddy of mine just wrote up some great instructions for getting MythTV going on Redhat 9. This should make it real easy.
I doubt Verizon really gives a crap about the rights of the people to remain anonymous. Do you think they are really a nice warm fuzzy corporation that cares about their users so much that they would put much effort into protecting them? These are only my personal feelings, but I think the case for them is all about principle, not protecting the rights of the users. Think about how their costs, and costs for other ISPs, are going to go up now with all the requests for information and logs at the drop of a hat whenever the *AA orgs have a hunch that someone has some contraband content and is publically sharing it.
It appears the precedent has been set and now the ISP's have to turn into more content police than they already are and they are probably expecting to be hit with a ton of requests for people's idendities now.
So what's the solution? I hardly think that calling people "lusers" is part of it. Mozilla needs to establish a better foothold with web designers/developers. It needs to be a browser that is so good that developers will sit there and think, "man, I wish that everyone was using Mozilla, because then we can take advantage of (whatever great dev feature that IE doesn't have)". I hear comments like this about IE all the time, albeit about extensions (not w3c endorsed) that are only supported in IE. But the fact of the matter is, most designers (granded, they may be uninformed) associate Mozilla with Netscape, which in the 4.x releases was a horrendous beast.
I think you have provided a a very reasonable responseto what was perhaps a knee jerk reaction on my part. You are right, negativity will get one nowhere fast. The best defense that I can come up with is a George Carlin quote that goes something like 'behind the most jaded cynic is a dissapointed idealist.' The users and their lack o' clue has gotten me down over the years after repeatedly encountering it. You have reminded me that they DON'T care and DON'T share my ideals and that is not necessairly a bad thing.
I think that your idea on how to get make mozilla more popular is quite valid as well. I'd also add to it that it must be EASY for the web developers to implement and take advantage of the killer features in Mozilla. One has to admit thatthe open source way of doing things is not so accessible to the masses as is the way of Redmond.
I can't believe you think IE is a better browsing experience than Mozilla. If you do, it's likely that you just haven't used Mozilla. Mozilla's features and standards compatibility are so much more advanced than IE that you've debunked your own post in this one statement alone.
I agree with your point, and I am a loyal Mozilla user and love it for a myriad of reasons. However there are a TON of lame web designers out there or those that believe as long as something renders OK in IE it IS the standard. The danger here is that most lusers will look at a site in Mozilla and if it doesn't look the same as IE, or if things are misaligned or not displaying correctly, they incorrectly assume that the browser is crap, not the person who designed the site. This generates negative sentiment about Mozilla that is undeserved, and I can't help but think if Mozilla had an IE emulation mode it would be more popular.
I also, for the life of me, can't figure out why IE hasn't figured out tabbed browsing yet.
I disagree. I am a huge Giger fan, and I think the case looks like a cheap amateur rip off. If you want to see something really cool, check out Giger's bar: http://www.hrgiger.com/barmuseum.htm
Every time there is a room 101, I'm reminded of Orwell:
When, after weeks of grinding physical torture, during which Winston confessed even to things he would never think of doing, he began to realize that O'Brien wanted something from him he could not acknowledge, even to himself, and so his conversion was impossible. Until O'Brien took the final step.
Room 101.
"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you know the answer already. Everybody knows. The thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. It varies from individual to individual.
"In your case," O'Brien said, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."
Winston was locked into chair at a table. At the edge of the table was a cage. In the cage was huge gray monster of a rat. Winston went berserk.
Interesting topic. I'm a avid Q3 player and pretty decent. I also have invested a good amount of money into a fast video card, fast computer, and a thrustmaster tactical board with lots of keybinds and voice commands. I did this mainly because I was getting too much carpal from keyboard/mouse, but the setup I have now allows me to access commands faster than most people who don't have specialized equipment. I've never 'cheated', but I do admit that I get the upper hand sometimes with the 'weaponry'.
A particular Hunter S Thompson quote comes to mind:
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
Does anyone else already do this with their Wi-Fi connection? I've been caught dropping friends off at the pool while reading Slashdot more than once:).
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to know about dick in his own words read The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick and/or the essayHow To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.
Dick was a one of a kind crazy literary genius who is totally underrated. I wish he had lived longer.
I highly recommend any PKD book to anyone who wants to get an open mind and science fiction like no other. Don't make a judgement on him based on the movies you have seen that are based on his writings, namely Blade Runner, Total Recall, & Minority Report. The only one that came close to doing him justice was Blade Runner, but it fell far short in my opinion but is a good movie in its own right.
Rarely does a moderated Funny comment on slashdot actually make me laugh. This one made me laugh out loud. Thanks Scoria.
To debunk this absolute statement, take a look at any of Akira Kurosawa's films, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood & Dreams in particular. Kurosawa began as a painter, and went into cinema falling in love with the camera. He used the camera like no other before him and in a lot of his films he used the camera as a large part of telling the story. It was his canvas. He was a master is considered one of the best directors of all time by me among more notable others.
Sure, a new medium can make it easy for people to go off on tangents and not pay attention to the whole package and making an excellent film, but there are notable exceptions in any genre. A talented artist will take advantage of new technology and find new methods to produce absolutely amazing art. Hacks will simply pile on eye candy. Oh boy, more bullet time & explosions!! ;)
There's a hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in outer space. - Arthur C. Clarke
Has gotten extreme technological gains over the years. The top GP bikes have engine management systems to rival F1 cars, carbon fibre rotors, fuel mapping that can be changed by the rider on the track to alter HP delivery. Even motorcycle tires that race at daytona have two seperate compounds on each side of the tire. One is for the large bank, and one is for the rest of the infield course. Even the ducati I bought this year has a computer with lap timer and data recorder built into the bike. it can even interface with a trackside IR lap timer. The tech that was available 5 years ago to the pro team is now available for the amaetur racer.
That's a shame to hear he has a drug problem. I didn't know that. He was absolutely brilliant in John Watters' Pecker though.
You have clarified that this does not seem like the case.
IMO, if he's offering to pay, there is nothing wrong with that. I'm getting ready to run a free 'open' access point of my own. I'm close to a starbucks, so with a signal booster, i think i can 'steal' some of their business. I have decided for myself that I won't take money (cause I don't need it and want to provide free access), but haven't decided if I want to just let it be completely open, or block everything but basic web access. The anarchist in me says to let it all be open, the network admin in me says NO WAY!.
come on.... you aren't open. admit it.
Huxley, however, painted a much scarier picture of a future society that is already coming partially true today. The best kind of servitude is that where the servant loves to serve the will of the master and knows no better, but a drone is a drone is a drone. In Huxley's world, all that the government and the powers that be have to do to retain control and shape things in the way they want is to use basic psychological principles such as someone responds better towards reward than punishment, placate them with their soma, touchie-feelies, etc, and they will want no more, or not think outside the system.
I highly suggest you check out Brave New World Revisited It is a collection of essays Huxley wrote on the topics of Brave New World, later in his life. I think you will be frightened and suprised.
Description from website:
That computer was Earth. So the fastest fictional computer ever was Earth, and the fastest real super computers are used as earth simulators. Now isn't that cool?
I miss Mr Adams.
I think around the release of WMP8. Haven't you noticed how much p0rn is in .WMV format?
After all, aren't the people on Kazaa supporting the terrorists in some way?
I have only one sun box to administer also, but even it is in the process of being replaced by linux on some cheap intel hardware. It is kind of a shame, there isn't much hardware that impresses me more than Sparc. Everything about the sun seems finely engineered while the Intel box replacement seems mass market quality, but hey, it works.
It appears the precedent has been set and now the ISP's have to turn into more content police than they already are and they are probably expecting to be hit with a ton of requests for people's idendities now.
I think you have provided a a very reasonable responseto what was perhaps a knee jerk reaction on my part. You are right, negativity will get one nowhere fast. The best defense that I can come up with is a George Carlin quote that goes something like 'behind the most jaded cynic is a dissapointed idealist.' The users and their lack o' clue has gotten me down over the years after repeatedly encountering it. You have reminded me that they DON'T care and DON'T share my ideals and that is not necessairly a bad thing.
I think that your idea on how to get make mozilla more popular is quite valid as well. I'd also add to it that it must be EASY for the web developers to implement and take advantage of the killer features in Mozilla. One has to admit thatthe open source way of doing things is not so accessible to the masses as is the way of Redmond.
I agree with your point, and I am a loyal Mozilla user and love it for a myriad of reasons. However there are a TON of lame web designers out there or those that believe as long as something renders OK in IE it IS the standard. The danger here is that most lusers will look at a site in Mozilla and if it doesn't look the same as IE, or if things are misaligned or not displaying correctly, they incorrectly assume that the browser is crap, not the person who designed the site. This generates negative sentiment about Mozilla that is undeserved, and I can't help but think if Mozilla had an IE emulation mode it would be more popular.
I also, for the life of me, can't figure out why IE hasn't figured out tabbed browsing yet.
I disagree. I am a huge Giger fan, and I think the case looks like a cheap amateur rip off. If you want to see something really cool, check out Giger's bar: http://www.hrgiger.com/barmuseum.htm
I first read Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it by Dan Farmer (author of Satan). It is an old article, but a classic and got my interest going.
I can't wait to see the darn Matrix again!
Interesting topic. I'm a avid Q3 player and pretty decent. I also have invested a good amount of money into a fast video card, fast computer, and a thrustmaster tactical board with lots of keybinds and voice commands. I did this mainly because I was getting too much carpal from keyboard/mouse, but the setup I have now allows me to access commands faster than most people who don't have specialized equipment. I've never 'cheated', but I do admit that I get the upper hand sometimes with the 'weaponry'.
Thanks
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
Does anyone else already do this with their Wi-Fi connection? I've been caught dropping friends off at the pool while reading Slashdot more than once :).