The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."
If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan, all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag
into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.
Before you mod this as flame-bait, hear me out because that's not my intent.
I have no knowledge of this incident other than the essay I just read. An essay that is clearly written from the point of view of a (financially) struggling MIT student who has been fined by the RIAA to the tune of $3750.
Now had the essayist taken the tack that the RIAA is incorrect in fining her that amount because she didn't really illegally download music, then fine. But in her last paragraph she writes, "Sure, if you commit a crime against someone, you should be held accountable." Which can reasonably be translated to saying: "Sure what I did was illegal and I should be held accountable."
So her main complaint is that they are trying to get her to pay money that she either A. doesn't have or B. doesn't want to pay them. Now I get mad when I have to pay a parking ticket which only costs $25, and I work full time. So I can understand and even empathize with her point of view that being faced with a $3750 encumbrance while going to college is, at the least, frustrating.
But again, the thrust of her argument isn't that she shouldn't have to pay that amount, just over the terms in which she is being asked to pay it. Is it right of the RIAA to suggest (and pay attention to that word, because that's all they did...suggest) that the essayist get stop spending money on education and instead earn money to pay off her debt? It's certainly not popular; it plays into the hands of those who believe the RIAA is on shaky ground to begin with; and it suggests, appropriately, that the RIAA's bottom line is money--but none of this is news to anyone who has been following this story.
In a nutshell, what I see here is a college student who, having been identified as breaking the law and being asked to pay reparations is outraged that those whom she owes are asking for the money at an inconvenient time.
Are you maybe thinking of the Library Hotel which got into trouble with OCLC, who owns the trademark / copyright to the Dewey Decimal System?
As far as I can tell the only cost you might run into in trying to categorize with the Dewey Decimal system is if you want to purchase one of OCLC's classification indexes.
But maybe you're thinking of a different instance in which OCLC required payment for use of the classification system for a small private collection. If that's the case, I'd be genuinely interested to hear more about it.
I recently saw an Ebay auction for a WoW character who had a disclaimer that read something to the affect: "What is being sold here is not the property of Blizzard, but the time I [the seller] invested in the character".
It's unclear to me whether or not such a loophole works, but such a statement seems in line with the YouTube snippet on the gold farmers. One could argue that what they're really selling is their time.
In my experience in DAoC, guild halls and player housing didn't add much to the game at all. Yeah it was neat to run around and see what guilds had done to their housing...but in the end the the "real game" was going on outside the hall or house.
If a game can exist and grow in popularity, like WoW has, without any sort of guild housing, I question whether or not it really adds anything to the game (other than it's a demand from the user base--which I grant you is an ends unto itself).
Isn't that game (America's Army) free? I know it used to be. Does making a game free sidestep this bill?
Uh, hello...it's EA...
on
Black Review
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I can't say I'm shocked to learn that EA produced crap. When was the last time they cared about anything but the money they can make with a quickly produced game?
(It could be that I'm just jaded that there are still so many bugs in Battlefield 2)
"Attack: Cartoon
Defense: Death threats, burn down buildings, deface websites, protests, and the list goes on.
Conclusion: Overkill?"
If these events had played out in a vacuum, I would overwhelmingly support the conclusion of the parent. Nothing, of course, occurs in a vacuum. I am a firm and staunch believer in freedom of speech, but there are several elements to these events that lead me to believe that someone (or someones) is leading me along:
The cartoons were published in September and are only now gathering a reaction. While it's entirely possible that it took this long for those cartoons to hit the world--it seems rather unlikely given the speed at which news travels today.
The American news media is doing a great job at covering the groups burning and rioting, but it's much more rare to see an interview with a muslim who, though understandably insulted by the cartoons, is not acting out violently.
Condoleezza Rice has indicated that Iran and Syria are to blame for inciting the violent protests.
Those three factoids (obviously mixed with my own speculation) seem suggest that the majority of Muslims
do not value free speach
do not have a sense of humor
will riot and kill over cartoons
and, as an added bonus, Iran and Syria (both of whome are America's naughty list) are really to blame
And, again, had this all occured in a vacuum, those conclusions might be valid--but given the fact that America and its European allies are currently occupying Iraq, pressuring Iran to toe the line, and have in the past been heavliy involved in influecing the middle east's regional politics, we're hardly dealing with a vacuum.
So to us who sip our coffee and nosh on our bagel while watching the morning news--the minority (and it is the minority considering the vast size of the religion) who is violently protesting seem to be behaving completely irraiontally, over the top, and seemingly inhuman. Syria and Iran are to blame? This seems to make sense too, after all, they're dead center in the axis of evil.
But before we go too far down that road, it's vital that we stop and consider the events as objectively as possible--because once we are succusfully led to believe that the oppposing side in any conflict are less than human, war becomes that much easier to wage.
Perhaps the links between violence in the real world and violence in gaming weren't meant to compare those who dedicate their lives to the military but to those who pick up a gun on the weekend and decide to shoot up their family or friends.
Or try the Oxford English Dictionary which cites cold-cock's first usage in 1927.
"cold-cock v. trans., to knock (a person) unconscious (U.S. slang); 1927 Amer. Speech II. 351/1 Cold cocked, to be knocked senseless. 'Tom was *cold cocked when that rock hit him.' 1934 J. T. FARRELL Young Manhood (1936) iv. 205 They cold-cocked him, and left him unconscious."
And while your assertion that fortnight is an older word (the OED indicates its first recorded usage was around 1000) that doesn't do much against the argument that English is a living language. Fortnight is an old word, fine, but it too had to make its debut at some point.
If you don't like a modern word that's worked its way into the vernacular, then don't use it--but to imply it's not a valid word simply because it is new(er) is faulty.
Count yourself lucky. Well, I guess it wasn't that bad, but I remember that the way they delivered the stories was almost insulting (lending credence to your theory?)
Agreed, if a student passes an examine only by knowing "to be or not to be" or that "everyone gets married," that's bad.
In terms of text-message style writing being used to save time, I think this sub-thread is beginning to merge with the one above it. I'm willing to bet they just think it will be a fun way to do it.
What might be neat is if there is some sort of contest associated with this that forces the students to go back to the text (or their memory) and text back the full text of the passage. At least then a bridge is made between the gimmick and the actual language of the work.
I think it's unclear as to whether or not the messages are being written in text-message style because it's a perceived fun way to do it, or because they think that's the only way 'kids today' will understand anything. I'm willing to bet it's the former--but maybe you're right and I'm not being synical enough.
I think it would shed a lot of light on this subject if more was known about its beginnings. The company providing the cell phones to the students (unless this is goverment funded) stands to gain a foothold in an up and coming market of young adults--but what do educational institutions get out of it? This could be the brainchild not of an educator, but of a marketing guy who sees this as a way of selling his product to the schools: "Hey look, they're learning Shakespeare!"
The high school I went to made a deal with a company that installed closed circuit TVs in every classroom on the campus. The only catch was that classes were required for one year to watch a "news broadcast" spiced with ads for Coke and Dorritos. The school figured the tradeoff was worth it--I wonder if that's the same case here.
So if, in terms of the literary-text-messages, your position is that the nuanced meaning of the original text is lost, I would agree. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record I think that the point of the project isn't to serve as a surrogate for the text, but as reminder of it.
It's a cutesy way of using an available communication medium to keep students (who, being students, are presumably already studying some form of literature) thinking about these great texts.
As far as I can tell, this project is not claiming to either A. Supplant the original text or B. Present itself as a formal (i.e. academic) paper. It's designed to "help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes" (from TFA).
I agree with you that there are subsets of a language that one uses in different contexts, but I don't see how this project, in addition to classroom study of the texts does any harm at all.
Anyone who has taken a literature test worth its salt will confirm that simply reading Cliffs Notes, or in this case reading your daily text message, will not give enough indepth knowledge of the language of the text and its meaning. But can those study aids help? For some students, yes.
Why disembowl a project designed to help students access literature because it uses an unorthodox method of communication?
While I have a negative knee-jerk reaction (is there a positive one?) to this sort of thing, if it helps a student remember an essential moment in a story it's hard to argue against it.
I don't think it's plausible to suggest that this sort of 'translation' will supplant the original text, but works like Shakespeare often have to be worked through with a good teacher in order for students to understand them.
Language (specifically English for this context) is not a static language: it's always growing. I'm hesitant to come out and say that text messages are constituting a new branch of language, but it's undeniable that "LOL" and "IANAL" are now part of the vernacular.
Slashdot Mirror
The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."
If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan, all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag
into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.What, you can't picture hundreds of rabbits hopping about a lab with cell phones duct-taped to their heads?
Before you mod this as flame-bait, hear me out because that's not my intent.
I have no knowledge of this incident other than the essay I just read. An essay that is clearly written from the point of view of a (financially) struggling MIT student who has been fined by the RIAA to the tune of $3750.
Now had the essayist taken the tack that the RIAA is incorrect in fining her that amount because she didn't really illegally download music, then fine. But in her last paragraph she writes, "Sure, if you commit a crime against someone, you should be held accountable." Which can reasonably be translated to saying: "Sure what I did was illegal and I should be held accountable."
So her main complaint is that they are trying to get her to pay money that she either A. doesn't have or B. doesn't want to pay them. Now I get mad when I have to pay a parking ticket which only costs $25, and I work full time. So I can understand and even empathize with her point of view that being faced with a $3750 encumbrance while going to college is, at the least, frustrating.
But again, the thrust of her argument isn't that she shouldn't have to pay that amount, just over the terms in which she is being asked to pay it. Is it right of the RIAA to suggest (and pay attention to that word, because that's all they did...suggest) that the essayist get stop spending money on education and instead earn money to pay off her debt? It's certainly not popular; it plays into the hands of those who believe the RIAA is on shaky ground to begin with; and it suggests, appropriately, that the RIAA's bottom line is money--but none of this is news to anyone who has been following this story.
In a nutshell, what I see here is a college student who, having been identified as breaking the law and being asked to pay reparations is outraged that those whom she owes are asking for the money at an inconvenient time.
Exactly, that is what I could never figure out. It just takes me twice as long to log into their service now...I just don't get it.
"...and your ipod will be fucked out the window."
That's some mental image...
...so now what I am supposed to do for the month of May?
Are you maybe thinking of the Library Hotel which got into trouble with OCLC, who owns the trademark / copyright to the Dewey Decimal System?
As far as I can tell the only cost you might run into in trying to categorize with the Dewey Decimal system is if you want to purchase one of OCLC's classification indexes.
But maybe you're thinking of a different instance in which OCLC required payment for use of the classification system for a small private collection. If that's the case, I'd be genuinely interested to hear more about it.
It is if you want to hack into a company's network using social engineering.
I recently saw an Ebay auction for a WoW character who had a disclaimer that read something to the affect: "What is being sold here is not the property of Blizzard, but the time I [the seller] invested in the character".
It's unclear to me whether or not such a loophole works, but such a statement seems in line with the YouTube snippet on the gold farmers. One could argue that what they're really selling is their time.
Says the Anonymous Coward...
In my experience in DAoC, guild halls and player housing didn't add much to the game at all. Yeah it was neat to run around and see what guilds had done to their housing...but in the end the the "real game" was going on outside the hall or house.
If a game can exist and grow in popularity, like WoW has, without any sort of guild housing, I question whether or not it really adds anything to the game (other than it's a demand from the user base--which I grant you is an ends unto itself).
Isn't that game (America's Army) free? I know it used to be. Does making a game free sidestep this bill?
I can't say I'm shocked to learn that EA produced crap. When was the last time they cared about anything but the money they can make with a quickly produced game?
(It could be that I'm just jaded that there are still so many bugs in Battlefield 2)
"Attack: Cartoon Defense: Death threats, burn down buildings, deface websites, protests, and the list goes on.
Conclusion: Overkill?"
If these events had played out in a vacuum, I would overwhelmingly support the conclusion of the parent. Nothing, of course, occurs in a vacuum. I am a firm and staunch believer in freedom of speech, but there are several elements to these events that lead me to believe that someone (or someones) is leading me along:
Those three factoids (obviously mixed with my own speculation) seem suggest that the majority of Muslims
And, again, had this all occured in a vacuum, those conclusions might be valid--but given the fact that America and its European allies are currently occupying Iraq, pressuring Iran to toe the line, and have in the past been heavliy involved in influecing the middle east's regional politics, we're hardly dealing with a vacuum.
So to us who sip our coffee and nosh on our bagel while watching the morning news--the minority (and it is the minority considering the vast size of the religion) who is violently protesting seem to be behaving completely irraiontally, over the top, and seemingly inhuman. Syria and Iran are to blame? This seems to make sense too, after all, they're dead center in the axis of evil.
But before we go too far down that road, it's vital that we stop and consider the events as objectively as possible--because once we are succusfully led to believe that the oppposing side in any conflict are less than human, war becomes that much easier to wage.
Perhaps the links between violence in the real world and violence in gaming weren't meant to compare those who dedicate their lives to the military but to those who pick up a gun on the weekend and decide to shoot up their family or friends.
;-)
But, thanks for flaming anyawy
If you don't like a modern word that's worked its way into the vernacular, then don't use it--but to imply it's not a valid word simply because it is new(er) is faulty.
Count yourself lucky. Well, I guess it wasn't that bad, but I remember that the way they delivered the stories was almost insulting (lending credence to your theory?)
Looks like they're still going strong http://www.channelone.com/common/about/
Agreed, if a student passes an examine only by knowing "to be or not to be" or that "everyone gets married," that's bad.
In terms of text-message style writing being used to save time, I think this sub-thread is beginning to merge with the one above it. I'm willing to bet they just think it will be a fun way to do it.
What might be neat is if there is some sort of contest associated with this that forces the students to go back to the text (or their memory) and text back the full text of the passage. At least then a bridge is made between the gimmick and the actual language of the work.
I think it's unclear as to whether or not the messages are being written in text-message style because it's a perceived fun way to do it, or because they think that's the only way 'kids today' will understand anything. I'm willing to bet it's the former--but maybe you're right and I'm not being synical enough.
I think it would shed a lot of light on this subject if more was known about its beginnings. The company providing the cell phones to the students (unless this is goverment funded) stands to gain a foothold in an up and coming market of young adults--but what do educational institutions get out of it? This could be the brainchild not of an educator, but of a marketing guy who sees this as a way of selling his product to the schools: "Hey look, they're learning Shakespeare!"
The high school I went to made a deal with a company that installed closed circuit TVs in every classroom on the campus. The only catch was that classes were required for one year to watch a "news broadcast" spiced with ads for Coke and Dorritos. The school figured the tradeoff was worth it--I wonder if that's the same case here.
So if, in terms of the literary-text-messages, your position is that the nuanced meaning of the original text is lost, I would agree. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record I think that the point of the project isn't to serve as a surrogate for the text, but as reminder of it.
It's a cutesy way of using an available communication medium to keep students (who, being students, are presumably already studying some form of literature) thinking about these great texts.
As far as I can tell, this project is not claiming to either A. Supplant the original text or B. Present itself as a formal (i.e. academic) paper. It's designed to "help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes" (from TFA).
I agree with you that there are subsets of a language that one uses in different contexts, but I don't see how this project, in addition to classroom study of the texts does any harm at all.
Anyone who has taken a literature test worth its salt will confirm that simply reading Cliffs Notes, or in this case reading your daily text message, will not give enough indepth knowledge of the language of the text and its meaning. But can those study aids help? For some students, yes.
Why disembowl a project designed to help students access literature because it uses an unorthodox method of communication?
While I have a negative knee-jerk reaction (is there a positive one?) to this sort of thing, if it helps a student remember an essential moment in a story it's hard to argue against it. I don't think it's plausible to suggest that this sort of 'translation' will supplant the original text, but works like Shakespeare often have to be worked through with a good teacher in order for students to understand them. Language (specifically English for this context) is not a static language: it's always growing. I'm hesitant to come out and say that text messages are constituting a new branch of language, but it's undeniable that "LOL" and "IANAL" are now part of the vernacular.
If I could mod this to +6 I would. Beyond the normal /. venting on Microsoft, I don't see what the big deal is.
Since when did 10% marketshare become anything close to a monopoly?
Space Woperbeing