Not as funny as all that
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Speaking as somebody who was actively watching (and in a tiny way involved in) the space program in the early eighties, that, in fact, is just about what happened.
It was actually partially a manifestation of a tendency that we, as fellow geeks, must watch out for. A belief spread and has never dispersed since within NASA that congresscritters are brainless scum and the public is a bunch of childish twits.
Thereby all programs are designed to appeal to an audience for which they have contempt.
Kinda as if sysadmins simply decided to give up once and for all on educating CEOs/COOs, etc. and went ahead and bought and built BOTH a stack of M$ boxen and a stack of open source boxen, putting big M$ stickers on all the open source gear and giving up on any project that couldn't be so concealed.
When techies have contempt for the people who sign off on their projects but they don't have the balls to leave or stand up for themselves or route around, their results will be, well, contemptable.
Think about the memory bus design of the original Mac. As the story goes, Steve J. was being a pain in the ass (again), they knew he wouldn't pay attention to every little detail, so they routed around and built a better design then specc'ed. When it came time for expanded memory to come on stage, well skippy! Cut one lead and there ya go.
Can't do that on a moon lander.
So we got a bunch of "will this keep you idiots happy?" designs from a bunch of round-shouldered organization men.
Just more proof that it's time to privatize space.
Rustin
Re:Some of the early plans are a bit out there
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 1
It's worth it. I hear they've got the best food of any Mickey D.'s.
Kinda. I'm certainly using/. as a venting place these days. Haven't had the time to do the more fun stuff. Anyway, you know how I spend my days. One chemo patient to comfort here, one client losing her memory there. Cuts my tolerance for "easy answers" right down to the bone.
Allow me to quote one of the great curmudgeons of all time.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
The truth is that my life is (overall) pretty damned cool these days but I've got no room for those who won't admit the neccessity of facing hard choices.
There's a big fucking difference between sending a bully to the emergency room and killing half a million civilians in nuclear and firebombing attacks. Can't you see this? 480 thousand people slain. Not military, but civilians.
Now this is the kind of dimwitted sloppiness that really gets under my skin.
Okay, once more for the riders of the short bus among us.
If we had stayed at war with Japan, CIVILIANS would have died by the hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions, as disease, famine, and the other horrors of living in an entire region under collapse would have taken their toll.
Don't forget, we were also not going to be able to heal the wounds of war that covered much of the inhabited world until we finished our business with the rulers of Japan. Even the areas they had already retreated from were filled with the dead, dying, and just plain desperate and every dollar and every day spent fighting the "emperor's" troops was stolen from the recovery efforts.
In addition, the bombings were intended as, and succeeded as deterents against the Soviet expansionists. Anybody care to dispute the readiness of Stalin and later Mao to let CIVILIANS die by the millions to support their causes? Go for it, kiddies, try living as they did in Tibet during the Chinese invasions. Or perhaps as one of the thirty million (at least) killed by Stalin's purges. We're not even getting into the millions of deaths in populations that large when medicine, education, and so on are less then they could be.
Personally, I think that the communists were pretty damned good at bringing much of their own countries into the industrial age. But once they left their home turf they tended to back people even scarier then the ones we backed and I do not say that lightly. The Khmer Rouge come to mind, as does Envar Hoxha. You disagree? Move to fucking Albania and see if you like it. And yet again, let me remind you that the Japanese junta (I chose that word for a reason, kiddies - the wartime rulers of Japan were no less crazed and no more legitimate then the Nazis) were not trustworthy at all. I don't care much what they may have been hinting at, thinking of, discussing being willing to consider. They needed to be crushed like plague-infested cockroaches and that is just what we set out to do.
Civilians? You think I'm not concerned with civilians? Here's a nickel, buy a clue. But first, read the damned post so you can see where I tried to make that point the last time. Next time I'll try to use smaller words.
I'll say it again. In the future, please read the fucking post before you comment on it.
God help us if you're ever in a position of political or military power, cause goodness knows nothing else will. Aw, sorry, too late. Been there already. You know, emergency relief efforts, homelessness amelioration, and, oh by the way, designing components desired by the cruise missile program. And I ain't talking working a soupline or being a junior tech. And yeah, you bet your sorry self-indulgent ass, I have had no problem saying "stop packing food, we have higher priorities". Real decisionmaking always involves sacrifice. Can't hack it? Then get out of the way and let those of us who can get the job done.
Sometimes the effective demonstration of power is the most important component to being humane.
"War kills people"? Well shucky-darn, I just didn't know that until you pointed it out just now.
I'm curious, are you under the impression that fascist regimes don't "kill people"? How about famine? How about intentionally created famine of the sort that totalitarian regimes and rulers like to create, as in Somalia?
Everything large "kills people". Even making X-Boxes or printing up more boxes of GTA3. Care to go over the toxicity data for low-wage workers in Silicon Valley, let alone electronics factories in Malaysia or Indonesia?
The key question is, how to minimze the damage in a given situation and ensure that the maximum amount of that damage happens in ways that ease future risks.
Japan was under the control of a very well-organized junta of racist, expansionist sociopaths and extreme nationalists who had spent the previous decades rebuilding the entire country's structure to justify the "Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" abomination. "Co-prosperity"? Tell a Korean woman that as she was raped daily as a casual amusement for Japanese troops.
As others have pointed out, the battle of Okinawa was dirty and lethal as hell. And, let's be honest here, the Soviets made no secret that they were planning to, sorry to be un-P.C., TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD.
Both of them were serious. Both were well on the way.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, as the AC pointed out, our line in the sand. We do not bluff; we do not joke, and we can and will, to quote the AC, reduce your nation to glass.
And that is what real humane behavior is. Making the smaller sacrifice (and, yes, compared to an invasion of Japan, let alone a hot war with the Soviets) this was the smaller sacrifice. To put on a very public display of what happens to expansionist dictators.
Now don't get me wrong, having won the war, we then proceed to fumble the peace (Indochina war anybody?). But nonetheless, dropping those nukes was the brave and tough thing to do.
You want to dispute this, then start by explaining the intervening fifty years of no military expansionism by Japan or Germany -each of which made the seizing and rape of "inferior" countries their daily bread until we kicked them into the dirt over and over until they learned to stay the fuck down.
Japan's military culture, for all their bullshit talk of bushido, did not believe in honor. Not in the way that we would mean it. Remember, they started firing on U.S. soldiers back in the thirties for daring to even be nearby while Japanese troops ravaged every square foot of Chinese land they could take and despoil. "oops, so sorry, just a mistake" they would say. Kinda like their cute little game of giving their ambassabor in the States documents about a declaration of war and then, "oops, so sorry again" ensuring that they were not in appropriate American hands until the Pearl Harbor attack was under way.
When I was a wee lad, I used to get in fights with bullies. I was the geek who fought back. And initially I would get them in pain, and make them promise, then and there, to stop fighting. Oh, how earnest they sounded. "Yes, I'll stop, yes, I'm sorry, no, I won't attack again". But somehow, the moment I let them go, they would attack again. They didn't slow down until I started to actually give them the kind of hurt that didn't end when I let go. Ain't nothin' like a trip to the emergency room to teach some little snot to be more circumspect in the future.
Bullies are not just lacking in compassion. They are also lacking in the ability to understand that others are not like them. If you want them to stop bullying, not just now but from now on, then you'ld better make sure that they are throbbing with pain for a good long while even after you let go. It sucks, but there it is.
And, oh, by the way, back to the "humane" bullshit, have you ever looked into conditions in postwar Japan?
Personally, even if I hadn't already loathed IOmega (even though, as it happens, most of my Zip drives have worked just fine, thank you very much), the millions of little metal clickers that they gave out at computer shows to promote the Clik drive would have prevented any purchases by me.
Anybody else remember what it was like walking around industry trade shows that year with a constant backdrop of "clik" "clik" everywhere? Trying to carry on a productive conversation at PC Expo that year was about as viable as sleeping in a field of katydids at the height of their season.
Doggone Utah nutjobs with their clueless, murble, gurble, frazzin' . ..
ultimately all data is collected for political or commercial reasons
My, kneejerk much? Or perhaps just jerk.
Well, first of all, I don't consider something being "political" as thereby self-evidently evil, and secondly, please, kiddie boy, would you say that the only reasons to want to save, say, a music collection, are "political or commercial"?
Now, from the top, let's see you give me some examples of things that are important to you that *can't* be defined as containing an aspect that is "commercial or political".
From there, let me give you a counterexample of benevolent data storage.
Next week I will be helping a seventy-something woman archive the records of her swiftly dispersing family, both the already ancient and stuff like pictures of the house in which she and her husband have lived since the sixties. There they have been raising children, creating formidible art and music, and generally taking an already beautiful home (turn of the century arts and crafts) and enriching it with their lives and their work.
I've made it a condition of my taking on the job (part of a much larger one) that they document every room of this house, video and still, and that we turn the resulting record into a stack of DVDs to be spread to everybody who wants one. After all, not only will we be emptying out the whole house, all three floors, attic, and basement, but the house will almost certainly be torn down this year to make room for a characterless highrise.
So, is this information storage project a malevolent thing?
But quick, before you answer, howsabout you let a bunch of us/.ers head over to your crib and burn every family photo, high school yearbook, and bit of recorded data you've got. That includes movies, music, and work records, cobber. After all, they're all a part of the big bad conspiracy.
And be sure that you collect all of your medical records in any hands whatsoever and contribute them to the bonfire. Same goes for social security data. After all, if you're in "the system" then you're a party to "fascism".
Then, when we're done, and everything from your phone book to your hard drive to your driver's licence have been reduced to char, you will have an ethically credible place to stand, atop your pile of smoking wreckage, to issue blanket condenmations.
Oh, and by the way, as somebody who has actually studied fascism (trust me, reading three books on the workings of the Nazi party in two weeks was _not_ my idea of fun), you have no clue at all of what the word means. Quite contrary to your foolishness, real fascism is characterized by the replacement of rule of law (you know, transparent and documented "permanent institutional political structures") with rule by personal power and rule by localized force.
The Hague is not fascism.
Putting hundreds of people into custody without court hearings or filed documents is.
Geeks have (by definition) little to no social skills.
How can you say that? After all, Howard Hughes was said to be amazingly smooth and charming. I mean, yeah, he got a *little* awkward at the end, but, well...
Ya know what I love about that image? That with the way CGI is advancing, give it another three years or so and some bored/.er will now probably create that scene.
Oh, sure, remakes can be terrible, though I loved Aliens, T2, and any number of other remakes and sequels.
As mentioned elsewhere, we all know that Evil Dead II was amazing.
What I want to see is a BG based on the comic, which got to be one of the best dark and weird comics from the majors in those pre-indy days.
Fraud, incompetent leaders, black markets, prostitution, homeless people stranded in the halls while Caligula-like banquets take place behind the guard of the growing private militaries. Adama flaking out and being stranded in the interrogation tank for something like six months in real time, the whole Solaris/robotic society subplot, the young Adama flashbacks to the colonies at their height. It's all good.
Add in the freaky proto-byrne baroque artwork (dig those branches on the "food planet") and it was a decade ahead of its time.
Give me a series well-based on that and a trilogy of movies based on the first three years of Micronauts, and I'ld be a happy man.
Damn, I haven't thought about BG in *years*. I LOVED that damned comic. I can see the images in front of me as I sit here. They're engraved in my brain.
Road Warrior meets Blade Runner meets the Terminator in claustrophobic, disease-ridden ships, all with space battles, oasis planets, and a search for the heavenly world of the gods made flesh.
Good point on this movie matching the demands of the times. But I would counter with the amazing run of antihero films of the Seventies.
As for "popcorn flick", yeah, as I said, I actually enjoyed it.
As for me and good stuff, I've concluded that, with all the filmmakers out there these days, there are probably tons of good complex movies being made. It's just that we simply can't keep track of it all.
------SPOILERS---------
I'm intrigued by his basic point.
I saw the movie with friends yesterday (both with MFAs and wide and deep knowledge of film) and we agreed that 28 Days later is, in it's own weird way, a wish fulfillment.
As the review says, you always know who is infected so there is no uncertainty.
There is no latency to speak of, so it's containable.
Everything is black and white. Nobody has any real obligation to anybody else. Food is either unavailable or unlimited. People are either wonderful and sweet or crazed maniacs waiting for their chance to (kill/steal/rape).
Now, I've gotta say, as far as it goes, it's a great flick. It has quite literally entered my dreams.
But like Star Wars, there is an underlying philosophy there and it isn't a good one.
Compare this to any of the first three Aliens movies, where ambiguity and uncertainty define every moment and this is thin gruel indeed. An MTV movie for a hot summer day.
Go, have fun, but if anybody starts quoting lines from this movie as some sort of compressed wisdom, offer to stick a long butcher knife through their chest, leaving them to die "in a heartbeat".
Well, from the little that we're told, the chimps are under a drug regimen designed to *repress* the rage. So,
A.) The virus quiets down momentarily when the victim has satisfied the desire to attack (which matches the behavior of the "zombies" in the flick, who slow down and wander off after any confrontation)
or
B.) The chimp seeing the videos was being monitored for threshold levels or some such.
Remember, the researcher said (pretty much) that "we need to see the phenomenon to understand it"
Frankly, what little hope I had of reasonable consistency died when the lights were on in the supermarket. Science this ain't. After all "all of Manchester" is burning down but London, with more old buildings and the same lack of controls has not a single fire, even WITH their blowing up a gas (sorry, "petrol") station. I was wondering about the lack of fires *way* before they showed the burning skyline.
It's a thrill flick, dude. You're not going to find the logical reason for everything. You'ld be better off trying to find logic in the sequence of stardates in early Star Trek episodes.
You're kidding, right? So it's more productive for me to track down that one last news story on an obscure subject then it would be to leave early and get more billable hours?
"The more information the better?"
Really? Opportunity cost, my anonymous friend, opportunity cost.
Speaking as somebody with the email tag of "data omnivore", (used to be "Mycroft") I can assure you that while more information can be good, making money, dating, exercising, and a dozen other things, can be better.
"Hello everybody. My name is Rustin and I'm a dataholic." Yeah, when you have an idle moment in the airport and you start reading the ingredient list on the granola bar because suddenly you care, then you know that the pursuit of data has passed beyond the rational and entered the, yes, that's right, addictive.
Ahh, I'm just waiting for the VR universes to provide easier ways to make real money. When I can design a new piece of gear for, say, EverQuest XX, the 2011 edition, upload it, sell the rights through in-game links to ebay, and then distribute the money I make between "pieces of gold" and RL folding money. Well, at that point I'm puttin' on my goggles, pluggin' in the feeding tube, and never ever coming back out.
Sure I'll be spherical and I'll smell bad, but online nobody will know or care.
After the Hindenburg, nobody dared to use it anymore.
Uh, actually, it's been something like twenty years since they figured out that the hindenburg explosion was not caused by hydrogen. The dopants (stuff used to coat the skin) were made of a combination related to thermite which, in fact, caused several helium airships to catch fire and crash.
Hydrogen is flammable, sure enough, but it is nowhere near as dangerous as public perception holds it to be. How we continue to be terrified of hydrogen in a world that uses magnesium for auto parts is beyond me.
In which case may I suggest that you get Amazon to put in some of those pages in their samples? Because otherwise it looks like it will just leave more of us feeling like this.
I don't know about you guys, but I read all the sample pages and all I saw was vague bizspeak, anecdotes about X Corp saved Y dollars that could have been on QVC for all the useful detail they gave, and more rambling mush. I saw two good sentences about IT departments being left out of decisionmaking. That's it. Not a single concrete "if you see X problem then you need to examine Y points of failure for Z reason" or any other useful advice.
This looks to me like one more high-priced, prettily-wrapped hunk o' junk to make non-techies feel like they "know all they need to" without their having to dirty their hands or strain their minds by actually learning how any of this stuff works.
I assume that the three thousand dollar executive training session in an expensive resort is coming right behind.
Oh, and don't forget, the cost of those "seminars" and books and training manuals and time away from their operational responsibilties will be coming out of your pocket and mine when they further raise their prices to cover yet more executive bullshit.
I am *so* fucking glad that I don't run a corporate IT department anymore!
I've abused my plants terribly (no water for weeks, lots of sun, then almost none, etc.) and the hardiest survivors are onions, cilantro, and carrots (gotten by sticking the ends of carrots I've eaten into the soil instead of throwing them out). This, btw, on a windy west-facing terrace in New York City.
The onions have become a staple in my cooking as I have long-since gotten in the habit of going out to the terrace while, say noodles are draining, ripping off some green shoots, and mixing them in. Yum!
Rustin
One way to prevent that is to put a ring of chopsticks pointing out around the edges of the pot. Annoying enough to make going there uncomfortable but not sharp enough to hurt them.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as somebody who was actively watching (and in a tiny way involved in) the space program in the early eighties, that, in fact, is just about what happened.
It was actually partially a manifestation of a tendency that we, as fellow geeks, must watch out for. A belief spread and has never dispersed since within NASA that congresscritters are brainless scum and the public is a bunch of childish twits.
Thereby all programs are designed to appeal to an audience for which they have contempt.
Kinda as if sysadmins simply decided to give up once and for all on educating CEOs/COOs, etc. and went ahead and bought and built BOTH a stack of M$ boxen and a stack of open source boxen, putting big M$ stickers on all the open source gear and giving up on any project that couldn't be so concealed.
When techies have contempt for the people who sign off on their projects but they don't have the balls to leave or stand up for themselves or route around, their results will be, well, contemptable.
Think about the memory bus design of the original Mac. As the story goes, Steve J. was being a pain in the ass (again), they knew he wouldn't pay attention to every little detail, so they routed around and built a better design then specc'ed. When it came time for expanded memory to come on stage, well skippy! Cut one lead and there ya go.
Can't do that on a moon lander.
So we got a bunch of "will this keep you idiots happy?" designs from a bunch of round-shouldered organization men.
Just more proof that it's time to privatize space.
Rustin
It's worth it. I hear they've got the best food of any Mickey D.'s.
The food has all been vacuum-packed.
hehe
Kinda. I'm certainly using /. as a venting place these days. Haven't had the time to do the more fun stuff.
Anyway, you know how I spend my days. One chemo patient to comfort here, one client losing her memory there.
Cuts my tolerance for "easy answers" right down to the bone.
Allow me to quote one of the great curmudgeons of all time.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
The truth is that my life is (overall) pretty damned cool these days but I've got no room for those who won't admit the neccessity of facing hard choices.
Happy New Year all
-Rustin
There's a big fucking difference between sending a bully to the emergency room and killing half a million civilians in nuclear and firebombing attacks. Can't you see this? 480 thousand people slain. Not military, but civilians.
Now this is the kind of dimwitted sloppiness that really gets under my skin.
Okay, once more for the riders of the short bus among us.
If we had stayed at war with Japan, CIVILIANS would have died by the hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions, as disease, famine, and the other horrors of living in an entire region under collapse would have taken their toll.
Don't forget, we were also not going to be able to heal the wounds of war that covered much of the inhabited world until we finished our business with the rulers of Japan. Even the areas they had already retreated from were filled with the dead, dying, and just plain desperate and every dollar and every day spent fighting the "emperor's" troops was stolen from the recovery efforts.
In addition, the bombings were intended as, and succeeded as deterents against the Soviet expansionists.
Anybody care to dispute the readiness of Stalin and later Mao to let CIVILIANS die by the millions to support their causes?
Go for it, kiddies, try living as they did in Tibet during the Chinese invasions. Or perhaps as one of the thirty million (at least) killed by Stalin's purges. We're not even getting into the millions of deaths in populations that large when medicine, education, and so on are less then they could be.
Personally, I think that the communists were pretty damned good at bringing much of their own countries into the industrial age. But once they left their home turf they tended to back people even scarier then the ones we backed and I do not say that lightly. The Khmer Rouge come to mind, as does Envar Hoxha.
You disagree? Move to fucking Albania and see if you like it.
And yet again, let me remind you that the Japanese junta (I chose that word for a reason, kiddies - the wartime rulers of Japan were no less crazed and no more legitimate then the Nazis) were not trustworthy at all. I don't care much what they may have been hinting at, thinking of, discussing being willing to consider. They needed to be crushed like plague-infested cockroaches and that is just what we set out to do.
Civilians? You think I'm not concerned with civilians? Here's a nickel, buy a clue. But first, read the damned post so you can see where I tried to make that point the last time. Next time I'll try to use smaller words.
I'll say it again. In the future, please read the fucking post before you comment on it.
God help us if you're ever in a position of political or military power, cause goodness knows nothing else will.
Aw, sorry, too late. Been there already. You know, emergency relief efforts, homelessness amelioration, and, oh by the way, designing components desired by the cruise missile program. And I ain't talking working a soupline or being a junior tech.
And yeah, you bet your sorry self-indulgent ass, I have had no problem saying "stop packing food, we have higher priorities". Real decisionmaking always involves sacrifice.
Can't hack it? Then get out of the way and let those of us who can get the job done.
Rustin
Sometimes the effective demonstration of power is the most important component to being humane.
"War kills people"? Well shucky-darn, I just didn't know that until you pointed it out just now.
I'm curious, are you under the impression that fascist regimes don't "kill people"? How about famine? How about intentionally created famine of the sort that totalitarian regimes and rulers like to create, as in Somalia?
Everything large "kills people". Even making X-Boxes or printing up more boxes of GTA3.
Care to go over the toxicity data for low-wage workers in Silicon Valley, let alone electronics factories in Malaysia or Indonesia?
The key question is, how to minimze the damage in a given situation and ensure that the maximum amount of that damage happens in ways that ease future risks.
Japan was under the control of a very well-organized junta of racist, expansionist sociopaths and extreme nationalists who had spent the previous decades rebuilding the entire country's structure to justify the "Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" abomination.
"Co-prosperity"? Tell a Korean woman that as she was raped daily as a casual amusement for Japanese troops.
As others have pointed out, the battle of Okinawa was dirty and lethal as hell. And, let's be honest here, the Soviets made no secret that they were planning to, sorry to be un-P.C., TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD.
Both of them were serious. Both were well on the way.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, as the AC pointed out, our line in the sand.
We do not bluff; we do not joke, and we can and will, to quote the AC, reduce your nation to glass.
And that is what real humane behavior is. Making the smaller sacrifice (and, yes, compared to an invasion of Japan, let alone a hot war with the Soviets) this was the smaller sacrifice. To put on a very public display of what happens to expansionist dictators.
Now don't get me wrong, having won the war, we then proceed to fumble the peace (Indochina war anybody?). But nonetheless, dropping those nukes was the brave and tough thing to do.
You want to dispute this, then start by explaining the intervening fifty years of no military expansionism by Japan or Germany -each of which made the seizing and rape of "inferior" countries their daily bread until we kicked them into the dirt over and over until they learned to stay the fuck down.
Japan's military culture, for all their bullshit talk of bushido, did not believe in honor. Not in the way that we would mean it.
Remember, they started firing on U.S. soldiers back in the thirties for daring to even be nearby while Japanese troops ravaged every square foot of Chinese land they could take and despoil. "oops, so sorry, just a mistake" they would say. Kinda like their cute little game of giving their ambassabor in the States documents about a declaration of war and then, "oops, so sorry again" ensuring that they were not in appropriate American hands until the Pearl Harbor attack was under way.
When I was a wee lad, I used to get in fights with bullies. I was the geek who fought back. And initially I would get them in pain, and make them promise, then and there, to stop fighting. Oh, how earnest they sounded. "Yes, I'll stop, yes, I'm sorry, no, I won't attack again". But somehow, the moment I let them go, they would attack again. They didn't slow down until I started to actually give them the kind of hurt that didn't end when I let go. Ain't nothin' like a trip to the emergency room to teach some little snot to be more circumspect in the future.
Bullies are not just lacking in compassion. They are also lacking in the ability to understand that others are not like them. If you want them to stop bullying, not just now but from now on, then you'ld better make sure that they are throbbing with pain for a good long while even after you let go. It sucks, but there it is.
And, oh, by the way, back to the "humane" bullshit, have you ever looked into conditions in postwar Japan?
Personally, even if I hadn't already loathed IOmega (even though, as it happens, most of my Zip drives have worked just fine, thank you very much), the millions of little metal clickers that they gave out at computer shows to promote the Clik drive would have prevented any purchases by me.
.
Anybody else remember what it was like walking around industry trade shows that year with a constant backdrop of "clik" "clik" everywhere? Trying to carry on a productive conversation at PC Expo that year was about as viable as sleeping in a field of katydids at the height of their season.
Doggone Utah nutjobs with their clueless, murble, gurble, frazzin' . .
Rustin
ultimately all data is collected for political or commercial reasons
/.ers head over to your crib and burn every family photo, high school yearbook, and bit of recorded data you've got. That includes movies, music, and work records, cobber. After all, they're all a part of the big bad conspiracy.
My, kneejerk much? Or perhaps just jerk.
Well, first of all, I don't consider something being "political" as thereby self-evidently evil, and secondly, please, kiddie boy, would you say that the only reasons to want to save, say, a music collection, are "political or commercial"?
Now, from the top, let's see you give me some examples of things that are important to you that *can't* be defined as containing an aspect that is "commercial or political".
From there, let me give you a counterexample of benevolent data storage.
Next week I will be helping a seventy-something woman archive the records of her swiftly dispersing family, both the already ancient and stuff like pictures of the house in which she and her husband have lived since the sixties. There they have been raising children, creating formidible art and music, and generally taking an already beautiful home (turn of the century arts and crafts) and enriching it with their lives and their work.
I've made it a condition of my taking on the job (part of a much larger one) that they document every room of this house, video and still, and that we turn the resulting record into a stack of DVDs to be spread to everybody who wants one. After all, not only will we be emptying out the whole house, all three floors, attic, and basement, but the house will almost certainly be torn down this year to make room for a characterless highrise.
So, is this information storage project a malevolent thing?
But quick, before you answer, howsabout you let a bunch of us
And be sure that you collect all of your medical records in any hands whatsoever and contribute them to the bonfire. Same goes for social security data. After all, if you're in "the system" then you're a party to "fascism".
Then, when we're done, and everything from your phone book to your hard drive to your driver's licence have been reduced to char, you will have an ethically credible place to stand, atop your pile of smoking wreckage, to issue blanket condenmations.
Oh, and by the way, as somebody who has actually studied fascism (trust me, reading three books on the workings of the Nazi party in two weeks was _not_ my idea of fun), you have no clue at all of what the word means. Quite contrary to your foolishness, real fascism is characterized by the replacement of rule of law (you know, transparent and documented "permanent institutional political structures") with rule by personal power and rule by localized force.
The Hague is not fascism.
Putting hundreds of people into custody without court hearings or filed documents is.
Come back when you've shaved.
Rustin
So, if I strap a few million bottle rockets to my VW bug, I could get into orbit??
Wasn't that the first scene in Heavy Metal?
Okay, it was a muscle car, but...
Rustin
Geeks have (by definition) little to no social skills.
How can you say that? After all, Howard Hughes was said to be amazingly smooth and charming.
I mean, yeah, he got a *little* awkward at the end, but, well...
Rustin
Ya know what I love about that image? /.er will now probably create that scene.
That with the way CGI is advancing, give it another three years or so and some bored
I LOVE LIVING IN THE FUTURE!
Rustin
Oh, sure, remakes can be terrible, though I loved Aliens, T2, and any number of other remakes and sequels.
As mentioned elsewhere, we all know that Evil Dead II was amazing.
What I want to see is a BG based on the comic, which got to be one of the best dark and weird comics from the majors in those pre-indy days.
Fraud, incompetent leaders, black markets, prostitution, homeless people stranded in the halls while Caligula-like banquets take place behind the guard of the growing private militaries. Adama flaking out and being stranded in the interrogation tank for something like six months in real time, the whole Solaris/robotic society subplot, the young Adama flashbacks to the colonies at their height. It's all good.
Add in the freaky proto-byrne baroque artwork (dig those branches on the "food planet") and it was a decade ahead of its time.
Give me a series well-based on that and a trilogy of movies based on the first three years of Micronauts, and I'ld be a happy man.
Damn, I haven't thought about BG in *years*. I LOVED that damned comic. I can see the images in front of me as I sit here. They're engraved in my brain.
Road Warrior meets Blade Runner meets the Terminator in claustrophobic, disease-ridden ships, all with space battles, oasis planets, and a search for the heavenly world of the gods made flesh.
Aw, sh*t. Now I gotta go out and buy some.
Rustin
by posting that.
From Blade Runner to Miami Vice to cheesy guest shots to a remake of BG. It's all been downhill.
Actually, I thought that his character kicked major ass in Miami Vice, but I just had to get the swipe in.
Rustin
Ah, but Crazy called it "Cattlecar, the Laxative" which I, at eleven, thought was inspired.
Rustin
Good point on this movie matching the demands of the times. But I would counter with the amazing run of antihero films of the Seventies.
As for "popcorn flick", yeah, as I said, I actually enjoyed it.
As for me and good stuff, I've concluded that, with all the filmmakers out there these days, there are probably tons of good complex movies being made. It's just that we simply can't keep track of it all.
memfree, where are you in our time of need?
Rustin
------SPOILERS---------
I'm intrigued by his basic point.
I saw the movie with friends yesterday (both with MFAs and wide and deep knowledge of film) and we agreed that 28 Days later is, in it's own weird way, a wish fulfillment.
As the review says, you always know who is infected so there is no uncertainty.
There is no latency to speak of, so it's containable.
Everything is black and white. Nobody has any real obligation to anybody else. Food is either unavailable or unlimited.
People are either wonderful and sweet or crazed maniacs waiting for their chance to (kill/steal/rape).
Now, I've gotta say, as far as it goes, it's a great flick. It has quite literally entered my dreams.
But like Star Wars, there is an underlying philosophy there and it isn't a good one.
Compare this to any of the first three Aliens movies, where ambiguity and uncertainty define every moment and this is thin gruel indeed. An MTV movie for a hot summer day.
Go, have fun, but if anybody starts quoting lines from this movie as some sort of compressed wisdom, offer to stick a long butcher knife through their chest, leaving them to die "in a heartbeat".
Rustin
-----SPOILERS-----
Well, from the little that we're told, the chimps are under a drug regimen designed to *repress* the rage. So,
A.) The virus quiets down momentarily when the victim has satisfied the desire to attack (which matches the behavior of the "zombies" in the flick, who slow down and wander off after any confrontation)
or
B.) The chimp seeing the videos was being monitored for threshold levels or some such.
Remember, the researcher said (pretty much) that "we need to see the phenomenon to understand it"
Frankly, what little hope I had of reasonable consistency died when the lights were on in the supermarket.
Science this ain't. After all "all of Manchester" is burning down but London, with more old buildings and the same lack of controls has not a single fire, even WITH their blowing up a gas (sorry, "petrol") station. I was wondering about the lack of fires *way* before they showed the burning skyline.
It's a thrill flick, dude. You're not going to find the logical reason for everything. You'ld be better off trying to find logic in the sequence of stardates in early Star Trek episodes.
Rustin
You're kidding, right? So it's more productive for me to track down that one last news story on an obscure subject then it would be to leave early and get more billable hours?
"The more information the better?"
Really?
Opportunity cost, my anonymous friend, opportunity cost.
Speaking as somebody with the email tag of "data omnivore", (used to be "Mycroft") I can assure you that while more information can be good, making money, dating, exercising, and a dozen other things, can be better.
"Hello everybody. My name is Rustin and I'm a dataholic."
Yeah, when you have an idle moment in the airport and you start reading the ingredient list on the granola bar because suddenly you care, then you know that the pursuit of data has passed beyond the rational and entered the, yes, that's right, addictive.
Rustin
Ahh, I'm just waiting for the VR universes to provide easier ways to make real money.
When I can design a new piece of gear for, say, EverQuest XX, the 2011 edition, upload it, sell the rights through in-game links to ebay, and then distribute the money I make between "pieces of gold" and RL folding money.
Well, at that point I'm puttin' on my goggles, pluggin' in the feeding tube, and never ever coming back out.
Sure I'll be spherical and I'll smell bad, but online nobody will know or care.
Rustin
Life has not been dull. Rewarding though still cashless, but not dull. Starting a company without capital SUXXs.
After the Hindenburg, nobody dared to use it anymore.
Uh, actually, it's been something like twenty years since they figured out that the hindenburg explosion was not caused by hydrogen. The dopants (stuff used to coat the skin) were made of a combination related to thermite which, in fact, caused several helium airships to catch fire and crash.
Hydrogen is flammable, sure enough, but it is nowhere near as dangerous as public perception holds it to be. How we continue to be terrified of hydrogen in a world that uses magnesium for auto parts is beyond me.
Rustin
In which case may I suggest that you get Amazon to put in some of those pages in their samples?
Because otherwise it looks like it will just leave more of us feeling like this.
Rustin
Buzzwords? Not much but.
I don't know about you guys, but I read all the sample pages and all I saw was vague bizspeak, anecdotes about X Corp saved Y dollars that could have been on QVC for all the useful detail they gave, and more rambling mush.
I saw two good sentences about IT departments being left out of decisionmaking. That's it. Not a single concrete "if you see X problem then you need to examine Y points of failure for Z reason" or any other useful advice.
This looks to me like one more high-priced, prettily-wrapped hunk o' junk to make non-techies feel like they "know all they need to" without their having to dirty their hands or strain their minds by actually learning how any of this stuff works.
I assume that the three thousand dollar executive training session in an expensive resort is coming right behind.
Oh, and don't forget, the cost of those "seminars" and books and training manuals and time away from their operational responsibilties will be coming out of your pocket and mine when they further raise their prices to cover yet more executive bullshit.
I am *so* fucking glad that I don't run a corporate IT department anymore!
Rustin
I've abused my plants terribly (no water for weeks, lots of sun, then almost none, etc.) and the hardiest survivors are onions, cilantro, and carrots (gotten by sticking the ends of carrots I've eaten into the soil instead of throwing them out).
This, btw, on a windy west-facing terrace in New York City.
The onions have become a staple in my cooking as I have long-since gotten in the habit of going out to the terrace while, say noodles are draining, ripping off some green shoots, and mixing them in. Yum!
Rustin
One way to prevent that is to put a ring of chopsticks pointing out around the edges of the pot. Annoying enough to make going there uncomfortable but not sharp enough to hurt them.
Rustin
Well, you too should feel free to email me for a copy of the vast green links DB, but I think that you're probably looking for the Green Cone.
Rustin