I won't bother with many of the claims made in this review, and I'm not interested in this book, either.
The only evidence I need is that the author makes sweeping claims about philosophy of science by citing exactly one philosopher, the generally reviled Feyerabend. If the author, either of the review or the book, were serious, they would engage with the field as a whole. They would also know that philosophy of science, as practiced in analytic departments, has taken a strong stand against post-modern relativism and has able, articulate and competent writers with scientific backgrounds: Bas van Fraasen, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, Philip Kitcher, Harvey Brown, Eliot Sober, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Suppes... I could go on.
There are real issues as well: about deductive and inductive logic, Bayesian confirmation, biomedical ethics, clinical trial structure, physical interpretation, but of course our authors prefer to dwell the disputed (and here, unsurprisingly, mischaracterized) claims of a single figure. A contrarian figure that, if anything, stands opposed to the mainstream consensus in philosophy of science, positivistic (e.g., the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and so on) and post-positivistic: that science works, works best, and likely describes real, knowable entities.
It's plenty clear both authors don't have a clue what they are talking about. That Ayn Rand is brought up only underscores this. I suggest no one wastes their time on this obvious trash. If you want good, relevant, interesting philosophy of science, any of the above-mentioned authors would do fine.
Wikipedia tells me that some of the people pushing this "rogue software" that masquerades as legitimate security product clear hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. These aren't the hackers of yore, hunting for vulnerabilities as a kind of intellectual exercise, or just looking to crow about their exploits on IRC. There's money to be made, not like twenty years ago, when you'd get the Stoned virus from a dial-up BBS download of an ANSI art editor and kind of think it was neat.
I'm a philosophy PhD candidate in a top-50 North American department and from my experience--whatever that may be worth--we have been indeed paying close attention to developments in other fields, particularly those you mentioned. Several professors in the department have two or more degrees and publish outside of philosophy journals, on topics related to e.g. Bayes theorem and quantum mechanics.
The common stereotype of the disconnected, metaphysical philosophy professor muttering from the armchair is a century gone, if it ever was true (they used to call science 'natural philosophy', after all). So to answer the parent's question: yes, it seems to me that the mainstream of analytic, North American philosophy departments is keenly interested in current scientific and mathematical research.
This of course makes it less 'sexy' than post-modern Continental-style philosophy, which tends to dominate public perception despite its relative marginality in academia (Foucault sells more books than, say, Fodor).
Moreover, philosophy departments want students with a strong basis in mathematics. It is probably the only humanities degree that requires an intensive formal logic course, and the study of logical systems remains an essential part of contemporary philosophical research.
Remember that it was philosphers--Russell and Whitehead--who attempted to reconstruct mathematics on the basis of logic and set theory. Philosophers played a key role in the mathematical and logical developments of the early part of the 20th century. GÃdel was known to have attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientifically-oriented philosophers in the interwar period.
Arguably philosophy is the most mathematically-aware of the humanities. Graduate students specializing in logic and set theory must pass daunting competency examinations in these fields. The rigorous nature of philosophy prepares one surprisingly well for the job market, in just about any endeavour.
So perhaps our friend should consider applying to a top philosophy department. Where else can one discuss the many-worlds interpretation and the brain in a vat argument in the same day?
Well, okay, I indulged in a fairly typical Slashdottian bit of gratuitous MS-bashing and got a 0, Redundant only 8 posts in for my troubles. Still, I'd be quite honestly curious to see if there are any platform-based statistical correlations in the data.
The frustrations that my family exhibit (and bring to me to fix) are almost always spyware, worm, or other malware-related, followed in close second with registry issues caused by legitimate software. Both these things are almost solely found on Windows. Thing is 'computer' means 'windows box' the way 'kleenex' means 'tissue' these days, so it's hard to get a sense of what the study is really showing here.
(Well, anyway, that's my attempt at being reasonable and salvaging karma from my admittedly knee-jerk attempt at getting a first post.)
If you're like me and are wondering what the heck a gimbal is, wikipedia has an article. Not being an engineer, I still only have but the fuzziest idea of what's going on here; blame a liberal arts background.
Do what I did for my technophobe parents: install FF, rename it to IE, use the icon and tell 'em it's an upgrade. After a few weeks, I explain the truth to them.
That'd be interesting to see. I read through some more of the patent and it gets a bit more specific:
The method according to claim 34, wherein one of the communications is search results, and the interdicting of unauthorized copying comprises: generating modified search results by replacing a pointer to a reference in the search results that matches a protected file with another pointer to a spoof file along with a hash value matching that of the reference, and forwarding the modified search results through the decentralized network.
And later on:
FIG. 3 illustrates a flow diagram of a method for performing a file or document search in a Type A, non-hierarchical decentralized network such as the network 100. In 301, when a user of a node (such as node N10 in FIG. 1) initiates a search by generating a search (or keyword) string, the node operated by the user (hereinafter referred to as the "client node") receives and records that search string. In some systems, the name of a file that is being requested is hashed to get a key or hash value, and the key or hash value is sent out in the search string for matching.
That's pretty clever, but fairly restrictive in scope. It certainly couldn't work against bittorrent or anything similar which is what I use most of the time now anyway.
Abstract
An interdiction system includes software agents masquerading as nodes in a decentralized network, a query matcher that receives search results captured by the software agents and reports matches with protected files back to the software agents, and a central coordinating authority that coordinates activities of the software agents by sending instructions to the software agents specifying actions to be taken. Possible activities and related interdicting methods include manipulating search results before forwarding them on in the network, quarantining selected nodes in the network, performing file impersonations such as transferring synthesized decoys, performing file transfer attenuation, and hash spoofing.
Hash spoofing? We've had this discussion before. I call shenanigans on this.
On how much money it ends up making. It'd take whatever an executive producer says with a grain of salt. Hitchhiker did claim #1 spot on opening weekend and grossed about 20 million, but it remains to be seen whether it has any legs, that is, if it will keep making money after the first couple of weeks. Now that all the fans have seen it, will it still rake it in?
Also, anyone have any idea how much the movie cost to make?
Sorry to correct you, but I've used both Google Maps and Google Local to find businesses in Montreal, Canada. It was a terribly useful feature and I am quite pleased with it. I don't know where you are from, but I can confirm that up here, it works just fine:)
What always irks me whenever efficiency gains are made is that they almost never benefit the workers themselves. Instead of keeping the same amount of workers but reduce their load, give them more time off, etc., we fire half of them and the rest keep the old workload.
Efficiency gains almost never translate into quality of life gains, except perhaps for the CEOs, when they exercise their stock options after they are finished making things 'efficient'.
Seriously, folks, doesn't anyone remember the promises of the four-day work week because of the 'efficiency' of computers and automation? It never works that way. There is no reason for all of these job to 'vanish' except that it profits shareholders to lower the payroll costs rather than benefit their own staff. And sorry, but that's inherently unfair.
Took me forever to find the damn thing. Dr. Faro works for Drexel, not Temple, and this was presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Society for Neuroradiology, so it's actually old news Wired is picking up. The official press release is here. The abstract is as follows:
Functional MR Imaging of Truth and Deception
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to investigate the regions of brain activation during truth-telling or deception by functional MR imaging using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast while simultaneously recording the physiologic signals using a standard polygraph machine and control question technique (CQT) inside the MR scanner.
Materials & Methods
The experiments were performed on 4 normal healthy volunteers using a standard 1.5 T Siemens Vision scanner. The physiologic responses from the normal subjects were measured by using a four-channel polygraph machine. Three different types of physiologic responses were measured: The rate and the depth of respiration; blood pressure; and galvanic skin response. An event-related functional MR design was used for collecting the functional MR images. A standard quadrature head coil was used. The stimulus presentation was controlled from outside the scanner using a neuropsychologicsoftware (NeuroBehavioral Systems) and displayed through the MR compatible goggle. The subjects' responses were measured using a response box. Contiguous oblique axial images were positioned and aligned parallel to the AC-PC line covering the entire brain. Functional images then were acquired with echo planar (EPI FID) pulse sequence. The imaging parameters were: matrix size = 128*128; FoV = 22 cm; slice thickness = 5 mm; TR = 4000 ms; TE = 54 ms, and NEX = 1. The functional imaging was performed using an even-related functional MR imaging (e-functional MR imaging) design and the questions presented were set by the rules of the classically used CQT polygraph technique. The subjects were presented with 13 relevant and control questions. A relevant situation was created prior to the functional MR scanning and the subjects were asked to either lie or tell the truth pertaining to the relevant questions. Of the two subjects analyzed in this study, one of the subjects was asked to tell the truth and the second subject was asked to deliberately lie to the relevant questions. Event-related functional MR imaging was performed with a rest period of 30 seconds during which a blank screen is presented, followed by 20 seconds period for presentation and collection of the responses. Continuous scanning was performed until all the 13 questions are completed. The volunteers were cued with a brief fixation period before presentation of each question. These questions were randomized and repeated four times and separate e-functional MR data was collected. The data then was analyzed using SPM software and statistical parametric maps [SPM(t)] were generated to show visual representation of the areas in the brain wherein statistically significant differences between BOLD contrast during truth-telling and deception conditions are present.
Results
The results show areas of frontal lobe (BA 9), (BA 47), temporal lobe, sublobar, extra nuclear, and inferior frontal gyrus to be active during the deception process. However during truth telling, activation regions were predominantly seen in the temporal lobe (BA 41) as well as in superior temporal gyrus.
Conclusion
These results suggest that there may be unique area(s) in the brain involved in truth-telling or deception process that can be measured using functional MR imaging. The results also show that we can measure simultaneously the physiologic signals using the polygraph machine inside the MR scanner while acquiring echo-planar images without noticeable artifacts on the MR images. The polygraph results correlated well in the truth telling subject, however, was inconclusive in the deception subject due to insufficient GSR data. These results are preliminary and warrant further investigation.
"It is perhaps worth mentioning that the word 'profits' has largely disapeared from respectable discourse. In contemporary Newspeak, the proper word is to be pronounced 'jobs'."
-Noam Chomsky: Perspectives on Power
Don't know if quoting Chomsky means I'll get modded down or what, but I think President Bush's decision makes sense after we do the translation suggested by Chomsky. Otherwise we are tangled in a morass of contradiction, as other posters have pointed out. Everything falls into place if we think about profits instead.
There are torrents of the original movies available, ripped from the laserdisc editions-- DVD quality. A friend of mine was doing brisk business selling DVDs of the original movies after he had acquired rips. Suprnova.org should have them, if you want to look.
So add this to the list of useful things P2P does: preserves our cultural memory in the face of revisionism, which in these days is more and more of a threat....
Economics has to be the one highly mathematized discipline where, for some reason, isomorphism with reality just is not an issue.
The free market is only able to create economic equilibria in very idealized cases (perfect information, rationality, etc-- see the work of J. Steiglitz on this issue). It will *not* sort out wage and supply to 'optimal' conditions left to its own devices. If you read any history, you will see that it took sustained political pressure to get such luxuries as a 40-hour work week and a decent living wage. Capitalism was perfectly content with steep levels of social stratification for decades until political movements forced significant redistributive measures. Moreover, the 'free market' has always required government intervention-- once again, a glance at history will show that, depending on context, protectionism, nationalization, subsidies, and/or free trade, privatization and laissez-faire were required. Your Chicago School view of economics is pretty much obsolete in serious academia. It lives on in corporate-funded think tanks which have, ironically enough, political motivations.
We've now got lots more products that cater to the female market. There's the Goth section, with the Living Dead Dolls...
Something I've noticed is that about 80-90% of the goth-type people I meet can be described as geeky-- most are into sci-fi, graphic novels, have web pages, are proficient with computers, etc. My theory is that they were nerds first and then migrated to a subculture baroque enough to accomodate the intensity of their interests (which was channeled into the whole 'black' aesthetic). Alot of geek girls have goth tendencies, which is another attraction for the social outcast male.
I get beat up a lot less now that I wear 16 hole doc martins, anyway. Though I'm still a 130 pound weakling.
Well, if I may risk my Karma in defending what seems to be an unpopular position, let me say that when you are playing 150 or more live shows a year it is very difficult to keep your vocal chords in top shape. A particularly finicky high note run could be just beyond your grasp, and using an autotune, if you do screw up, it won't reverbrate across the arena and ruin the whole bloody concert. The ones I've seen are very good at small pitch corrections but *cannot* make a tone-deaf monkey sound 'good' out of the blue.
For hard rock bands, this can be really useful if your one ballad song is on the encore and your entire set before that was heavy on the screaming. Your voice is gone by that point and that has nothing to do with talent. No human being can shriek for two hours and then be expected to hit high notes with any precision.
Lovett also was the target of teasing. The classmates said he had been mocked for his bow-legged and stooped gait and his clothes.
My guess would be that over 75% of teenagers play or have played 'violent' video games at some point or another. I'm guessing but it feels more or less right. That's probably millions-- tens of millions-- of video game players in the US and across the developed world. Are they all potential killers? Of course not. To argue so would involve twisting statistics around in a 'war on drugs' fashion-- maintaining that marijuana is a 'gateway' drug, which simply isn't true. Very few users of marijuana go on to do harder drugs. But many that do harder drugs have smoked pot (and continue to do so), which is what alarmist conservative organizations, in a thorough betrayal of libertarian roots, emphasize in order to restrain civil liberties.
But there is simply not enough of a correlation to warrant limits on video games (a form of free speech IMHO anyway) even *if* in specific cases a causal argument *might* be made. The point is that you can't do sociology by anecdote only. By all rights, statistically, toasters are probably deadlier than video games anyway.
Given the utter lack of *any* systematic correlation between playing video games and engaging in violent, anti-social behaviour, perhaps we should look at other possible causes, Like the bullying and teasing which goes on in every schoolyard, every day, hmmm? I am convinced that the solace this kid found in video games was a result of being called a 'fag' constantly, of being beaten up for lacking social grace, for failure to heed the intricate, consumerist protocol of North American teenhood. Any 'obsession' with video games was a symptom and NOT the problem.
Bah, sheer sensationalism and a refusal to look at root causes-- of course this seems to be a recurrent theme these days.
Reminds me of that Onion article--Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying. It's a sad indicator of the state of our civlization when we learn nothing from tragedy, but that's another topic entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't bother with many of the claims made in this review, and I'm not interested in this book, either.
The only evidence I need is that the author makes sweeping claims about philosophy of science by citing exactly one philosopher, the generally reviled Feyerabend. If the author, either of the review or the book, were serious, they would engage with the field as a whole. They would also know that philosophy of science, as practiced in analytic departments, has taken a strong stand against post-modern relativism and has able, articulate and competent writers with scientific backgrounds: Bas van Fraasen, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, Philip Kitcher, Harvey Brown, Eliot Sober, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Suppes... I could go on.
There are real issues as well: about deductive and inductive logic, Bayesian confirmation, biomedical ethics, clinical trial structure, physical interpretation, but of course our authors prefer to dwell the disputed (and here, unsurprisingly, mischaracterized) claims of a single figure. A contrarian figure that, if anything, stands opposed to the mainstream consensus in philosophy of science, positivistic (e.g., the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and so on) and post-positivistic: that science works, works best, and likely describes real, knowable entities.
It's plenty clear both authors don't have a clue what they are talking about. That Ayn Rand is brought up only underscores this. I suggest no one wastes their time on this obvious trash. If you want good, relevant, interesting philosophy of science, any of the above-mentioned authors would do fine.
Wikipedia tells me that some of the people pushing this "rogue software" that masquerades as legitimate security product clear hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. These aren't the hackers of yore, hunting for vulnerabilities as a kind of intellectual exercise, or just looking to crow about their exploits on IRC. There's money to be made, not like twenty years ago, when you'd get the Stoned virus from a dial-up BBS download of an ANSI art editor and kind of think it was neat.
I'm a philosophy PhD candidate in a top-50 North American department and from my experience--whatever that may be worth--we have been indeed paying close attention to developments in other fields, particularly those you mentioned. Several professors in the department have two or more degrees and publish outside of philosophy journals, on topics related to e.g. Bayes theorem and quantum mechanics.
The common stereotype of the disconnected, metaphysical philosophy professor muttering from the armchair is a century gone, if it ever was true (they used to call science 'natural philosophy', after all). So to answer the parent's question: yes, it seems to me that the mainstream of analytic, North American philosophy departments is keenly interested in current scientific and mathematical research.
This of course makes it less 'sexy' than post-modern Continental-style philosophy, which tends to dominate public perception despite its relative marginality in academia (Foucault sells more books than, say, Fodor).
Moreover, philosophy departments want students with a strong basis in mathematics. It is probably the only humanities degree that requires an intensive formal logic course, and the study of logical systems remains an essential part of contemporary philosophical research.
Remember that it was philosphers--Russell and Whitehead--who attempted to reconstruct mathematics on the basis of logic and set theory. Philosophers played a key role in the mathematical and logical developments of the early part of the 20th century. GÃdel was known to have attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientifically-oriented philosophers in the interwar period.
Arguably philosophy is the most mathematically-aware of the humanities. Graduate students specializing in logic and set theory must pass daunting competency examinations in these fields. The rigorous nature of philosophy prepares one surprisingly well for the job market, in just about any endeavour. So perhaps our friend should consider applying to a top philosophy department. Where else can one discuss the many-worlds interpretation and the brain in a vat argument in the same day?
Well, okay, I indulged in a fairly typical Slashdottian bit of gratuitous MS-bashing and got a 0, Redundant only 8 posts in for my troubles. Still, I'd be quite honestly curious to see if there are any platform-based statistical correlations in the data.
The frustrations that my family exhibit (and bring to me to fix) are almost always spyware, worm, or other malware-related, followed in close second with registry issues caused by legitimate software. Both these things are almost solely found on Windows. Thing is 'computer' means 'windows box' the way 'kleenex' means 'tissue' these days, so it's hard to get a sense of what the study is really showing here.
(Well, anyway, that's my attempt at being reasonable and salvaging karma from my admittedly knee-jerk attempt at getting a first post.)
Windows the top stress producer? Could a comparative study be done with, say, MacOSX users?
If you're like me and are wondering what the heck a gimbal is, wikipedia has an article. Not being an engineer, I still only have but the fuzziest idea of what's going on here; blame a liberal arts background.
Do what I did for my technophobe parents: install FF, rename it to IE, use the icon and tell 'em it's an upgrade. After a few weeks, I explain the truth to them.
That'd be interesting to see. I read through some more of the patent and it gets a bit more specific:
The method according to claim 34, wherein one of the communications is search results, and the interdicting of unauthorized copying comprises: generating modified search results by replacing a pointer to a reference in the search results that matches a protected file with another pointer to a spoof file along with a hash value matching that of the reference, and forwarding the modified search results through the decentralized network.
And later on:
FIG. 3 illustrates a flow diagram of a method for performing a file or document search in a Type A, non-hierarchical decentralized network such as the network 100. In 301, when a user of a node (such as node N10 in FIG. 1) initiates a search by generating a search (or keyword) string, the node operated by the user (hereinafter referred to as the "client node") receives and records that search string. In some systems, the name of a file that is being requested is hashed to get a key or hash value, and the key or hash value is sent out in the search string for matching.
That's pretty clever, but fairly restrictive in scope. It certainly couldn't work against bittorrent or anything similar which is what I use most of the time now anyway.
iopha
Abstract An interdiction system includes software agents masquerading as nodes in a decentralized network, a query matcher that receives search results captured by the software agents and reports matches with protected files back to the software agents, and a central coordinating authority that coordinates activities of the software agents by sending instructions to the software agents specifying actions to be taken. Possible activities and related interdicting methods include manipulating search results before forwarding them on in the network, quarantining selected nodes in the network, performing file impersonations such as transferring synthesized decoys, performing file transfer attenuation, and hash spoofing.
Hash spoofing? We've had this discussion before. I call shenanigans on this.
On how much money it ends up making. It'd take whatever an executive producer says with a grain of salt. Hitchhiker did claim #1 spot on opening weekend and grossed about 20 million, but it remains to be seen whether it has any legs, that is, if it will keep making money after the first couple of weeks. Now that all the fans have seen it, will it still rake it in?
Also, anyone have any idea how much the movie cost to make?
Sorry to correct you, but I've used both Google Maps and Google Local to find businesses in Montreal, Canada. It was a terribly useful feature and I am quite pleased with it. I don't know where you are from, but I can confirm that up here, it works just fine :)
iopha
Actually, the top four queries were all women: Spears, Hilton, Aguilera, Anderson. I think they image search results might be skewing the data. :D
What always irks me whenever efficiency gains are made is that they almost never benefit the workers themselves. Instead of keeping the same amount of workers but reduce their load, give them more time off, etc., we fire half of them and the rest keep the old workload.
Efficiency gains almost never translate into quality of life gains, except perhaps for the CEOs, when they exercise their stock options after they are finished making things 'efficient'.
Seriously, folks, doesn't anyone remember the promises of the four-day work week because of the 'efficiency' of computers and automation? It never works that way. There is no reason for all of these job to 'vanish' except that it profits shareholders to lower the payroll costs rather than benefit their own staff. And sorry, but that's inherently unfair.
iopha
Took me forever to find the damn thing. Dr. Faro works for Drexel, not Temple, and this was presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Society for Neuroradiology, so it's actually old news Wired is picking up. The official press release is here. The abstract is as follows:
Functional MR Imaging of Truth and Deception
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to investigate the regions of brain activation during truth-telling or deception by functional MR imaging using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast while simultaneously recording the physiologic signals using a standard polygraph machine and control question technique (CQT) inside the MR scanner.
Materials & Methods
The experiments were performed on 4 normal healthy volunteers using a standard 1.5 T Siemens Vision scanner. The physiologic responses from the normal subjects were measured by using a four-channel polygraph machine. Three different types of physiologic responses were measured: The rate and the depth of respiration; blood pressure; and galvanic skin response. An event-related functional MR design was used for collecting the functional MR images. A standard quadrature head coil was used. The stimulus presentation was controlled from outside the scanner using a neuropsychologicsoftware (NeuroBehavioral Systems) and displayed through the MR compatible goggle. The subjects' responses were measured using a response box. Contiguous oblique axial images were positioned and aligned parallel to the AC-PC line covering the entire brain. Functional images then were acquired with echo planar (EPI FID) pulse sequence. The imaging parameters were: matrix size = 128*128; FoV = 22 cm; slice thickness = 5 mm; TR = 4000 ms; TE = 54 ms, and NEX = 1. The functional imaging was performed using an even-related functional MR imaging (e-functional MR imaging) design and the questions presented were set by the rules of the classically used CQT polygraph technique. The subjects were presented with 13 relevant and control questions. A relevant situation was created prior to the functional MR scanning and the subjects were asked to either lie or tell the truth pertaining to the relevant questions. Of the two subjects analyzed in this study, one of the subjects was asked to tell the truth and the second subject was asked to deliberately lie to the relevant questions. Event-related functional MR imaging was performed with a rest period of 30 seconds during which a blank screen is presented, followed by 20 seconds period for presentation and collection of the responses. Continuous scanning was performed until all the 13 questions are completed. The volunteers were cued with a brief fixation period before presentation of each question. These questions were randomized and repeated four times and separate e-functional MR data was collected. The data then was analyzed using SPM software and statistical parametric maps [SPM(t)] were generated to show visual representation of the areas in the brain wherein statistically significant differences between BOLD contrast during truth-telling and deception conditions are present.
Results
The results show areas of frontal lobe (BA 9), (BA 47), temporal lobe, sublobar, extra nuclear, and inferior frontal gyrus to be active during the deception process. However during truth telling, activation regions were predominantly seen in the temporal lobe (BA 41) as well as in superior temporal gyrus.
Conclusion
These results suggest that there may be unique area(s) in the brain involved in truth-telling or deception process that can be measured using functional MR imaging. The results also show that we can measure simultaneously the physiologic signals using the polygraph machine inside the MR scanner while acquiring echo-planar images without noticeable artifacts on the MR images. The polygraph results correlated well in the truth telling subject, however, was inconclusive in the deception subject due to insufficient GSR data. These results are preliminary and warrant further investigation.
OASIS - Online Abstract Submission and Invitation System(TM) ©1996-2004, Coe-Truman Technologies, Inc.
Wait, wrong game. Mod down!
Finally, I have found an outlet for my urges to smash bottles on people's heads... Technology is grand.
"It is perhaps worth mentioning that the word 'profits' has largely disapeared from respectable discourse. In contemporary Newspeak, the proper word is to be pronounced 'jobs'."
-Noam Chomsky: Perspectives on Power
Don't know if quoting Chomsky means I'll get modded down or what, but I think President Bush's decision makes sense after we do the translation suggested by Chomsky. Otherwise we are tangled in a morass of contradiction, as other posters have pointed out. Everything falls into place if we think about profits instead.
There are torrents of the original movies available, ripped from the laserdisc editions-- DVD quality. A friend of mine was doing brisk business selling DVDs of the original movies after he had acquired rips. Suprnova.org should have them, if you want to look.
So add this to the list of useful things P2P does: preserves our cultural memory in the face of revisionism, which in these days is more and more of a threat....
That's Darque Dungeons for those in the know. :D
iopha
Yeah, google needs more cowbell!
More cowbell!
Economics has to be the one highly mathematized discipline where, for some reason, isomorphism with reality just is not an issue.
The free market is only able to create economic equilibria in very idealized cases (perfect information, rationality, etc-- see the work of J. Steiglitz on this issue). It will *not* sort out wage and supply to 'optimal' conditions left to its own devices. If you read any history, you will see that it took sustained political pressure to get such luxuries as a 40-hour work week and a decent living wage. Capitalism was perfectly content with steep levels of social stratification for decades until political movements forced significant redistributive measures.
Moreover, the 'free market' has always required government intervention-- once again, a glance at history will show that, depending on context, protectionism, nationalization, subsidies, and/or free trade, privatization and laissez-faire were required. Your Chicago School view of economics is pretty much obsolete in serious academia. It lives on in corporate-funded think tanks which have, ironically enough, political motivations.
iopha
We've now got lots more products that cater to the female market. There's the Goth section, with the Living Dead Dolls...
Something I've noticed is that about 80-90% of the goth-type people I meet can be described as geeky-- most are into sci-fi, graphic novels, have web pages, are proficient with computers, etc. My theory is that they were nerds first and then migrated to a subculture baroque enough to accomodate the intensity of their interests (which was channeled into the whole 'black' aesthetic). Alot of geek girls have goth tendencies, which is another attraction for the social outcast male.
I get beat up a lot less now that I wear 16 hole doc martins, anyway. Though I'm still a 130 pound weakling.
iopha
Well, if I may risk my Karma in defending what seems to be an unpopular position, let me say that when you are playing 150 or more live shows a year it is very difficult to keep your vocal chords in top shape. A particularly finicky high note run could be just beyond your grasp, and using an autotune, if you do screw up, it won't reverbrate across the arena and ruin the whole bloody concert. The ones I've seen are very good at small pitch corrections but *cannot* make a tone-deaf monkey sound 'good' out of the blue.
For hard rock bands, this can be really useful if your one ballad song is on the encore and your entire set before that was heavy on the screaming. Your voice is gone by that point and that has nothing to do with talent. No human being can shriek for two hours and then be expected to hit high notes with any precision.
iopha
From the article:
Lovett also was the target of teasing. The classmates said he had been mocked for his bow-legged and stooped gait and his clothes.
My guess would be that over 75% of teenagers play or have played 'violent' video games at some point or another. I'm guessing but it feels more or less right. That's probably millions-- tens of millions-- of video game players in the US and across the developed world. Are they all potential killers? Of course not. To argue so would involve twisting statistics around in a 'war on drugs' fashion-- maintaining that marijuana is a 'gateway' drug, which simply isn't true. Very few users of marijuana go on to do harder drugs. But many that do harder drugs have smoked pot (and continue to do so), which is what alarmist conservative organizations, in a thorough betrayal of libertarian roots, emphasize in order to restrain civil liberties.
But there is simply not enough of a correlation to warrant limits on video games (a form of free speech IMHO anyway) even *if* in specific cases a causal argument *might* be made. The point is that you can't do sociology by anecdote only. By all rights, statistically, toasters are probably deadlier than video games anyway.
Given the utter lack of *any* systematic correlation between playing video games and engaging in violent, anti-social behaviour, perhaps we should look at other possible causes, Like the bullying and teasing which goes on in every schoolyard, every day, hmmm? I am convinced that the solace this kid found in video games was a result of being called a 'fag' constantly, of being beaten up for lacking social grace, for failure to heed the intricate, consumerist protocol of North American teenhood. Any 'obsession' with video games was a symptom and NOT the problem.
Bah, sheer sensationalism and a refusal to look at root causes-- of course this seems to be a recurrent theme these days.
Reminds me of that Onion article--Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying. It's a sad indicator of the state of our civlization when we learn nothing from tragedy, but that's another topic entirely.
iopha
Also known as the 'trainspotting' child policy.
iopha