Perhaps not the same, but quite cool. I can imagine that when another edition comes out, he'll put the corrections in, and perhaps (if he's honest) he'll put in a special page of acknoweldgements to anonymous coward, byte me, etc!
McCloud is also really good for students who are trying to understand comics as a visual literary genre. He is essentially doing a "prosody-like" analysis where he divides the genre into its component parts and explains them. While most people reading comics probably don't give a hoot if academics write about comics or not, the idea that comics is being taken as an increasingly "serious" cultural form is exciting, in that more people will read comics without feeling the need to explain away the habit.
I can see your point in theory, but like in real life, there are various ways around our identity-checking procedures. given that spamers are just the sort to use such devices, I wonder whether enforcing a lack of anonymity on the net would actually limit spammers? It would certainly limit some flaming, but the crooks will find ways around the system. So I wonder whether harsher penalties won't produce better results. We do, after all, know who the New Zealander butthead is. That wasn't the problem.
My work actually makes it almost impossible to buy lap tops for its employees (despite the fact that most of us work at home 1/2 time) becuase they don't want to loose immediately control of their equipment. I wish my work would get with the hardware!
I fully agree with you. But the question is what info does E-Bay have, and when do they provide it? There is a great case, Jessop-Morgan v. AOL, in which AOL provided J-M's info because she'd posted harassing material about her husband's ex, and so she sued AOL for privacy violation (unsuccessfully) when the cops came looking for the harasser. Thank goodness AOL caughed up the info (though they only did it with a subpoena).
But without needing a court order, there is no independent verification that the info requested is necessary. I'm willing to conceed that sellers (people in a primary position to defraud) should perhaps have less privacy rights within the context of selling. But I do wonder about whether too much info can be given, with zero justification. Court Orders are not that hard to get, though I do acknowledge you need a lawyer to do it, and that does cost something, though not so so much.
This article seems to confirm my suspicion that this lawsuit is a business strategy rather than a principled legal action. If it is also true they they themselves distributed the code under the GPL for which they now seek copyright protection, then maybe the GPL is really the target. Perhaps their lawyers believe that if they can make an argument that invalidates the GPL then they can indeed make a claim against IBM
Law suits imho (I teach media law) are far more often strategies than principled legal action. Sometimes the strategy is principled, and sometimes not. Many famous law decisions by the US Supreme Court were "set up" by one or even both parties to render a decision. So, in U.S. v. Haggerty (the federal flag burning case) someone deliberately burned a flag during a protest in order to bring the law suit. In another example, corporations are required by law to "defend" their trademarks, or risk them entering the public domain, so not that long ago Intel began to demand that a non-profit group that teaches yoga to young people in juvanile detention called "Yoga Inside" change their name because it violated the trademark "Intel Inside." Sometimes principles come out of law decisions, but lawsuits are strategies. My exmaples are two of the less henious strategies out there, but the law is a self-replicating virus even when its biproducts are principled.
As far as I can tell, from personal experience,/. gives mod points to anyone who's on a significant number of days in a row. But regardless of whether we agree that/. is fair or not, there are some seriously interesting pedagogical possibilities with mod and meta mod points. Students can practice critical thinking by evaluating posts, and through meta mods, can get some pretty serious feedback if they are being trolls, etc.
You can always assign mod points to everyone on a rotating basis, and use meta mods from all students on a rotating basis. By sharing the results, you can assign some participation points for doing the work, and a few for doing it well in the estimation of the class. Persumably you can add a few via estimation of the teacher if you really think it is necessary.
I like the rotisserie discussion that Harvard's open source software, H2O has developed. It assigns people posts to respond to automatically./. posted the story . It is definitely worth checking out. You could certainly do blog-like things there.
I have used computers in the classroom, both successfully and unsuccessfully. The guideline I've developed (the contrapositive of what was said in the post I am responding to) is that you should only do on the computer what cannot be done well elsewhere: use the computer for what it's good for.
Becuase I taught writing when I was in grad school, I actually found that some peer-editing was done better over the computer if the posts are annonymous. At first, people are shy and overly-sensitive when their writing is criticized (even constructively), and people are often unwilling to criticize someone else's writing (even constructively) in person because they don't have great interpersonal skills in that direction. As you are devloping their ability to criticize one another (constructively), have them do peer editing anonymously on the computer. At some point, it may be more constructive to actually do it in person, as they develop, but you will get a heck of a lot more out of them as editors at first if you do peer edits via computer and annonymously.
There is some truth to what you say--it is hard to fire a tenured professor. BUT places that have post-tenure review can be forced to buck up and put sanctions into place for professors that have chosen not to stay active.
The most effective way of maintaining standards is to require those who are not professionally active to teach more, and to keep pressure on them to teach well. This should happen at the level of the Deans, precisely to avoid the department-level politics.
Fewer people might in fact go to the movies, but there is nothing in the world like seeing something in a crowd of people who have strong emotional responses to the movie (or the play for that matter to go back in time to that ancient twentieth century medium).
Ask any musician: playing live inspires entirely new levels of emotion--positive and negative.
Seeing movies in a crowd isn't always good, but it definitely is more emotionally intense because of the shared experience around the fire that Gibson thinks is the root of it all.
I would add that Ellis's work in general is kinda like a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Snow Crash. but I also think Ellis spends a lot of time in the comic talking to Allan Moore. Not such a big deal, since he apparently talks to him a lot in real life too. But Ellis'sPlanetary is a lot like Moore'sThe League of Extraodinary Gentlemen. Not that this is in any way a bad thing. But I think of Moore as an incredibly awesome artist. Ellis's stuff that is similar in theme to Moore's does not do well by the comparison.
I generally agree, but Frontpage? Eeeew. And a lot of small businesses actually have Macs.
Re:Only in New York..and the UK!
on
Cheap Video Sniffing
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, the UK, and London especially, has tons of video surveillance. (See The New York Times, October 7, 2001, "BEING WATCHED: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance" By JEFFREY ROSEN--my appologies for not knowing how to mirror this.) I'd want to know if I were on camera.... I don't really imagine doing anything that anyone couldn't see in public. But depending on what happens to the tapes, I can certainly imagine as camera become increasingly present, wanting to patronize certain businesses over others on the basis of how little they spy on me.
Most open source folks, and most back in the day before micro$oft, made money by offering to supply paid support. Check the web for stuff Beagle Brother's Software for one of the most awesome models in history: they sold the software, but made the source open, and sold support. All software used to be like this.
Re:OSS belongs to the community--that IS enough
on
Credit and Free Software
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· Score: 2, Insightful
vosbert has a really good point. I like the idea of things belonging to the community more than to any individual person. Yet there is a way that an analogy should be made to art here. If you like a sculpture, or a piece of code, you should be able to find the artist/designer. So, perhaps v would say that having credit in the source code is enough, that anyone who really wants to find the designer, could. But the name of the artist adds to the work (yet perhaps only for marketing reasons?)
I spend a minute being torn.
I thought that I was going to post that while Reiser's suggestion that linux have a mandatory screen saver that flashes credit is totally micro$oftesque in its totalitarianism, but his point is well-taken, and oss designers deserve credit. Instead, your comment really convinced me. Anyone who wants to find the designers can by looking in the source code. What user would be searching for a designer who couldn't get it togeher to look in the source code? And what *other* sort of person would care who wrote linux or anything else? The glory of OSS comes from being a shared project in every senes. Let's keep the focus on that. Kudos to vosbert for convincing me.
Most "bold, new directions" are about marketing: which hairstyle do you like better, ma'am? or which charcter would increase your demographics in this or that ratings area? Real changes have to be more fundamental: what kind of stories do we want to tell?
I'm with the "GET NEW WRITERS" crowd. I love star trek, having grown up on the original, and enjoyed young adulthood on TNG. I never bothered watching the latest after catching an piece of an episode while channel surfing. What a waste of 10 minutes. If you can't make me care about a character in 10 minutes, something is very wrong.
Ask the fans what they'd like to see. The new show is just trying to pander to the FOX crowd, not real SF fans.
I tend to be sceptical of modeling subjective things like emotions. But there are lots of behaviors that are actually modelable, like voting, for example. I wonder if what it is really modeling is gender programming?
What I mean by that is at our least thoughtful, we all have fairly typical reactions that are culturally received. I can't think of a single time that the "toilet seat" conversation ("Why did you/ do men leave the toilet seat up/ why do men always.../why do women always complain about...") doesn't degenerate into a whole list of wrongs that each sex has done to the other, even when people of the same sex are having the conversation. I suspect that conversations like that, that tend to follow fairly typical patterns are easily modeled. And since psychology can alrady model aspects of emotional display fairly acurately, it isn't that far to modeling culturally patterned converstations.
There's been a bunch of cases in which companies have collected and maintained databases of children's personal information (lego, mrs. field's, and hershey's most recently). Aside from the "marketing to children concerns" (children are supposedly more impressionable and less able to distinguish between reality and fantasy), these sites are potentially dangerous because they lable kids as such and depending on what personal info is on the site, it makes it possible to find kids in the real world using their on-line info. I'd be surprised whether anyone cared if they were posting reviews. If they were writing reviews, at least they'd be practicing how to write!:)
I am aware that both the coasts and the middle of the US are often under the impression that they are being dictated to by the other parts. and I was trying to make a different point.
To clarify, the thing that bugs me about the electorial college system is that half the country (in a two-party system) is always being disenfranchised. I used a regional example in my first e-mail (Texas and Florida, I think), but the Republicans in California and the Democrats in Texas are being equally disenfranchised by the electoral college. I'd rather see people's votes being counted precisely because region isn't an especially useful way to protect ourselves from a tyrany of the majority. (Which, for the record, I think is a much less serious problem than the way our campaign system takes advantage of the college system.)
And for the record, I'm from Nashville, and calling me a coastal, that's fightin' words! ; )
Well, in the case of the 2000 election, what the "majority opinion" meant was literally more than half of the voters. It isn't whim, but objective, countable (ahem--not counted) votes. Voting makes our system legitimate.
We can bicker about the how legitimate our voting numbers are (my memory is that it was actually about 40% of the registered voters, which was half? (perhaps less) of the eligible voters). But if you are going to call voting a "whim," then you are dumping the premise of democratic government. I don't want to do that.
Your point is valid if we are talking about "political cultures" or "affiliations" within the US, but unless we are going to say that we no longer wish to support the idea that we have a majority system based on representative democracy in which majority vote wins, then the electoral college has become a campaign manipulation tool, not a check on majority passion. Check out this article on find law for a discussion of the college.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not the same, but quite cool. I can imagine that when another edition comes out, he'll put the corrections in, and perhaps (if he's honest) he'll put in a special page of acknoweldgements to anonymous coward, byte me, etc!
McCloud is also really good for students who are trying to understand comics as a visual literary genre. He is essentially doing a "prosody-like" analysis where he divides the genre into its component parts and explains them. While most people reading comics probably don't give a hoot if academics write about comics or not, the idea that comics is being taken as an increasingly "serious" cultural form is exciting, in that more people will read comics without feeling the need to explain away the habit.
Thank you! Couldn't have said it better.
the US govt. is making the internet more available for pron (and US propaganda).
When will US citizens under the USA PATRIOT Act qualify for this program?
I can see your point in theory, but like in real life, there are various ways around our identity-checking procedures. given that spamers are just the sort to use such devices, I wonder whether enforcing a lack of anonymity on the net would actually limit spammers? It would certainly limit some flaming, but the crooks will find ways around the system. So I wonder whether harsher penalties won't produce better results. We do, after all, know who the New Zealander butthead is. That wasn't the problem.
My work actually makes it almost impossible to buy lap tops for its employees (despite the fact that most of us work at home 1/2 time) becuase they don't want to loose immediately control of their equipment. I wish my work would get with the hardware!
I fully agree with you. But the question is what info does E-Bay have, and when do they provide it? There is a great case, Jessop-Morgan v. AOL, in which AOL provided J-M's info because she'd posted harassing material about her husband's ex, and so she sued AOL for privacy violation (unsuccessfully) when the cops came looking for the harasser. Thank goodness AOL caughed up the info (though they only did it with a subpoena).
But without needing a court order, there is no independent verification that the info requested is necessary. I'm willing to conceed that sellers (people in a primary position to defraud) should perhaps have less privacy rights within the context of selling. But I do wonder about whether too much info can be given, with zero justification. Court Orders are not that hard to get, though I do acknowledge you need a lawyer to do it, and that does cost something, though not so so much.
This article seems to confirm my suspicion that this lawsuit is a business strategy rather than a principled legal action. If it is also true they they themselves distributed the code under the GPL for which they now seek copyright protection, then maybe the GPL is really the target. Perhaps their lawyers believe that if they can make an argument that invalidates the GPL then they can indeed make a claim against IBM
Law suits imho (I teach media law) are far more often strategies than principled legal action. Sometimes the strategy is principled, and sometimes not. Many famous law decisions by the US Supreme Court were "set up" by one or even both parties to render a decision. So, in U.S. v. Haggerty (the federal flag burning case) someone deliberately burned a flag during a protest in order to bring the law suit. In another example, corporations are required by law to "defend" their trademarks, or risk them entering the public domain, so not that long ago Intel began to demand that a non-profit group that teaches yoga to young people in juvanile detention called "Yoga Inside" change their name because it violated the trademark "Intel Inside." Sometimes principles come out of law decisions, but lawsuits are strategies. My exmaples are two of the less henious strategies out there, but the law is a self-replicating virus even when its biproducts are principled.
As far as I can tell, from personal experience, /. gives mod points to anyone who's on a significant number of days in a row. But regardless of whether we agree that /. is fair or not, there are some seriously interesting pedagogical possibilities with mod and meta mod points. Students can practice critical thinking by evaluating posts, and through meta mods, can get some pretty serious feedback if they are being trolls, etc.
You can always assign mod points to everyone on a rotating basis, and use meta mods from all students on a rotating basis. By sharing the results, you can assign some participation points for doing the work, and a few for doing it well in the estimation of the class. Persumably you can add a few via estimation of the teacher if you really think it is necessary.
I like the rotisserie discussion that Harvard's open source software, H2O has developed. It assigns people posts to respond to automatically. /. posted the story . It is definitely worth checking out. You could certainly do blog-like things there.
I have used computers in the classroom, both successfully and unsuccessfully. The guideline I've developed (the contrapositive of what was said in the post I am responding to) is that you should only do on the computer what cannot be done well elsewhere: use the computer for what it's good for.
Becuase I taught writing when I was in grad school, I actually found that some peer-editing was done better over the computer if the posts are annonymous. At first, people are shy and overly-sensitive when their writing is criticized (even constructively), and people are often unwilling to criticize someone else's writing (even constructively) in person because they don't have great interpersonal skills in that direction. As you are devloping their ability to criticize one another (constructively), have them do peer editing anonymously on the computer. At some point, it may be more constructive to actually do it in person, as they develop, but you will get a heck of a lot more out of them as editors at first if you do peer edits via computer and annonymously.
There is some truth to what you say--it is hard to fire a tenured professor. BUT places that have post-tenure review can be forced to buck up and put sanctions into place for professors that have chosen not to stay active.
The most effective way of maintaining standards is to require those who are not professionally active to teach more, and to keep pressure on them to teach well. This should happen at the level of the Deans, precisely to avoid the department-level politics.
Fewer people might in fact go to the movies, but there is nothing in the world like seeing something in a crowd of people who have strong emotional responses to the movie (or the play for that matter to go back in time to that ancient twentieth century medium).
Ask any musician: playing live inspires entirely new levels of emotion--positive and negative.
Seeing movies in a crowd isn't always good, but it definitely is more emotionally intense because of the shared experience around the fire that Gibson thinks is the root of it all.
It is the voice of Keith David. You can read more about the production stats of the movie on IMDB
I would add that Ellis's work in general is kinda like a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Snow Crash. but I also think Ellis spends a lot of time in the comic talking to Allan Moore. Not such a big deal, since he apparently talks to him a lot in real life too. But Ellis'sPlanetary is a lot like Moore'sThe League of Extraodinary Gentlemen. Not that this is in any way a bad thing. But I think of Moore as an incredibly awesome artist. Ellis's stuff that is similar in theme to Moore's does not do well by the comparison.
I generally agree, but Frontpage? Eeeew. And a lot of small businesses actually have Macs.
Actually, the UK, and London especially, has tons of video surveillance. (See The New York Times, October 7, 2001, "BEING WATCHED: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance" By JEFFREY ROSEN--my appologies for not knowing how to mirror this.) I'd want to know if I were on camera.... I don't really imagine doing anything that anyone couldn't see in public. But depending on what happens to the tapes, I can certainly imagine as camera become increasingly present, wanting to patronize certain businesses over others on the basis of how little they spy on me.
Most open source folks, and most back in the day before micro$oft, made money by offering to supply paid support. Check the web for stuff Beagle Brother's Software for one of the most awesome models in history: they sold the software, but made the source open, and sold support. All software used to be like this.
vosbert has a really good point. I like the idea of things belonging to the community more than to any individual person. Yet there is a way that an analogy should be made to art here. If you like a sculpture, or a piece of code, you should be able to find the artist/designer. So, perhaps v would say that having credit in the source code is enough, that anyone who really wants to find the designer, could. But the name of the artist adds to the work (yet perhaps only for marketing reasons?)
I spend a minute being torn.
I thought that I was going to post that while Reiser's suggestion that linux have a mandatory screen saver that flashes credit is totally micro$oftesque in its totalitarianism, but his point is well-taken, and oss designers deserve credit. Instead, your comment really convinced me. Anyone who wants to find the designers can by looking in the source code. What user would be searching for a designer who couldn't get it togeher to look in the source code? And what *other* sort of person would care who wrote linux or anything else? The glory of OSS comes from being a shared project in every senes. Let's keep the focus on that. Kudos to vosbert for convincing me.
Most "bold, new directions" are about marketing: which hairstyle do you like better, ma'am? or which charcter would increase your demographics in this or that ratings area? Real changes have to be more fundamental: what kind of stories do we want to tell?
I'm with the "GET NEW WRITERS" crowd. I love star trek, having grown up on the original, and enjoyed young adulthood on TNG. I never bothered watching the latest after catching an piece of an episode while channel surfing. What a waste of 10 minutes. If you can't make me care about a character in 10 minutes, something is very wrong.
Ask the fans what they'd like to see. The new show is just trying to pander to the FOX crowd, not real SF fans.
I tend to be sceptical of modeling subjective things like emotions. But there are lots of behaviors that are actually modelable, like voting, for example. I wonder if what it is really modeling is gender programming?
What I mean by that is at our least thoughtful, we all have fairly typical reactions that are culturally received. I can't think of a single time that the "toilet seat" conversation ("Why did you/ do men leave the toilet seat up/ why do men always.../why do women always complain about...") doesn't degenerate into a whole list of wrongs that each sex has done to the other, even when people of the same sex are having the conversation. I suspect that conversations like that, that tend to follow fairly typical patterns are easily modeled. And since psychology can alrady model aspects of emotional display fairly acurately, it isn't that far to modeling culturally patterned converstations.
wow,
I've only seen that much bullshit in the movies. I guess life does imitate art.
There's been a bunch of cases in which companies have collected and maintained databases of children's personal information (lego, mrs. field's, and hershey's most recently). Aside from the "marketing to children concerns" (children are supposedly more impressionable and less able to distinguish between reality and fantasy), these sites are potentially dangerous because they lable kids as such and depending on what personal info is on the site, it makes it possible to find kids in the real world using their on-line info. I'd be surprised whether anyone cared if they were posting reviews. If they were writing reviews, at least they'd be practicing how to write! :)
I am aware that both the coasts and the middle of the US are often under the impression that they are being dictated to by the other parts. and I was trying to make a different point.
To clarify, the thing that bugs me about the electorial college system is that half the country (in a two-party system) is always being disenfranchised. I used a regional example in my first e-mail (Texas and Florida, I think), but the Republicans in California and the Democrats in Texas are being equally disenfranchised by the electoral college. I'd rather see people's votes being counted precisely because region isn't an especially useful way to protect ourselves from a tyrany of the majority. (Which, for the record, I think is a much less serious problem than the way our campaign system takes advantage of the college system.)
And for the record, I'm from Nashville, and calling me a coastal, that's fightin' words! ; )
Well, in the case of the 2000 election, what the "majority opinion" meant was literally more than half of the voters. It isn't whim, but objective, countable (ahem--not counted) votes. Voting makes our system legitimate.
We can bicker about the how legitimate our voting numbers are (my memory is that it was actually about 40% of the registered voters, which was half? (perhaps less) of the eligible voters). But if you are going to call voting a "whim," then you are dumping the premise of democratic government. I don't want to do that.
Your point is valid if we are talking about "political cultures" or "affiliations" within the US, but unless we are going to say that we no longer wish to support the idea that we have a majority system based on representative democracy in which majority vote wins, then the electoral college has become a campaign manipulation tool, not a check on majority passion. Check out this article on find law for a discussion of the college.