Soviet style communism apart, is there any history of this bastardisation of truth and language in previous Western style democracies, or is it a relatively recent phenomena?
Also, does technology enable or disable this style of corruption?
There's this ring. It's evil. It has to be destroyed. That's where we left off after the first one. "Two Towers" and 3 hours later, that's STILL where we are. Still got that ring. Still has to be destroyed.
Yeah, and then there's the Bible. There's this guy, and he's, like, the son of God, and he performs some miracles and then he get's nailed up, but 1000 pages later, we're still telling this story, what gives?
Facile example maybe, but all narratives can be boiled down to about three sentences if you really try. To criticse a novel on this basis is to criticise just about any story ever written. While I'm dubious about this fetish for promoting LOTR as high art, I know for a fact return of the King will be about a million times better than Revolutions, which was more high arse than high art in any case...
Oh, and anyone that portrays the Matrix as some kind of deep philosophical work really needs to get out more. Yep, it has a nice line in pop philosophy, but Nietzsche it ain't... And yes, I did understand it...
Yeah, well put, I agree. The problem is that the Wachowski's don't have the intellectual prowess to resolve the dilemmas they set up in the first film.
One of the biggest disappointments for me is the lack of any real core philosophy. At least Reloaded had the architect scene to give it some depth. I didn't see anything thought provoking in Revolutions at all.
Where I don't agree is that this is a good movie. It isn't. It's lame.
Trying to fake a major event using mocked up tape is the wrong way to do this. You'd need to fake so much corroborated and consistent material that the whole charade would fall apart in hours.
If you really wanted to perform a convincing hoax, for example a UFO crash, all you'd need to do is fake the incident itself and have a bunch of people playing the parts of those involved. Then simply sit back and watch the media eat itself. You don't have to take on the media head on by playing it at it's own game, it's far more powerful to subvert the power and influence of the media against itself.
A small group of actors could easily stick to a improvised script for long enough and remain relatively consistent if all the major details were agreed beforehand. (After all, you don't want it to be too neat) If you can then stage the incident convincingly enough, the power of the media will guarantee that it becomes truth before you can say Orson Welles. After all, how hard can it be to fake a convincing UFO crash? It's all smoke and mirrors.
The stupidity of mainstream media and its target audience is almost limitless. It can't be that difficult to fool them. I don't want to score political points, but as some people have mentioned, the media coverage of the recent war in Iraq was hardly a bastion of truth and that was a real conflict in which real people died real deaths. If they can be fooled on something that important, then I don't expect them to pay much attention to anything.
Or for those of us with an eye on real scientific measurements that's about... What? 0.004% of a Volkswagen Beetle, 0.0017% of an elephant (African, obviously, no coconuts) or about a 0.1% of the average postal guy...
Definitely, think in terms of distribution. The ability to track packages through a system or warehouse without needing any manual intervention improves efficiency exponentially. Using RFID in this context means no more barcodes, removing concerns around the ripped or unreadable labels that increase delays in getting the package to its destination.
I've also heard it used to track railway carriages at high speed as they pass through freight yards, so that freight companies can track which containers are on what train in what order.
These uses don't infringe any civil liberties, and are very useful for companies in either of these fields. RFID tech can be misused, but like most things it can be used in a socially responsible and beneficial way too.
I've just finished researching an essay about this. Anyone interested in quantum consciousness might find the papers available by Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers interesting.
Also check out anything recent by Francis Crick (Yep, DNA Crick) and Roger Penrose. Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist by trade and has done a lot of work with Penrose to propose some interesting models of consciousness, though whether they deal with the so-called hard problem, I'm not so sure.
Oh, and for a sceptics viewpoint, read anything by Daniel Dennett.
I'm afraid I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to know if this is shash or not, but I'm impressed by the attachment of Penrose's and Crick's name to these theories. Perhaps someone more enlightened than myself could comment?!
Yeah, I know in any period there's always going to be a proportion of crap films but I was referring to the "blockbuster" films that clog the multiplexes on a Saturday night.
Ask yourself, would the Matrix get made today? Obviously this is now a multi zillion dollar franchise, but originally, think about it, no licence, fecking expensive to make, no guaranteed return, relatively philosophical/thought provoking storyline. I don't think a studio exec would look at it twice today.
Even a couple of years ago, "mainstream" films seemed more challenging and more willing to take risks than today, where the overwhelming majority are just dumb. Take the X-Men as an example, entertaining, but utterly, utterly forgettable, and that's one of the better films around at the moment.
Hurrah! At last someone recgonises that if there's one thing we all need in these times of artistic bankruptcy its more films of the quality of XXX, Die Another Day and Titanic. Wow, I can't wait to see the latest blockbuster with its contractually obliged 30% action and 12% sex. I'm literally tearing my eyeballs out in anticipation of the orgasmic visual feast that awaits... What does the world need more than XXX 2 with added snowboarding Vin Diesel?!
Seriously. Jesus... What more can I say? This is just going to provide more evidence to the production houses responsible for the cinematic toxins that clog up our screens every weekend that their formula is not only economically but artistically valid, providing even less incentive to produce movies requiring anything other than open eyes to watch. Great.
Incidentally, I'm not a great nostalgia freak, but one or two examples aside, haven't films got much, much worse over the last year or two or what?
Well, maybe it's true that there are more pressing issues to be sorted than internet access, but any mechanism for the diffusion of information has to be good.
Ok, maybe it's not directly giving aid but given information on how to do something yourself, or how to contact someone else who has knowledge of a particular area has got to be a useful tool. Just because many of us have become blase about the potential of the internet, doesn't mean it is in actuality any less useful than it ever was.
It's pretty fashionable to bash the whole IT as aid effort as you've done, but I'd argue that a decent IT infrastructure is just as valid an undertaking for a developing nation as almost anything else you could do.
It comes with no strings attached, can't be appropriated, creates trade links and benefits everyone, both in the receipient country and in the donating country. There isn't a great deal else you can say all that about...
While I love the idea of a semantic web with all the inherent collation of disparate ideas that it entails, I really can't see it being built on top of the internet as it stands today.
If it was built on some kind of streamlined academic research network then I could envisage this working, but the internet contains far too much noise to ever get the kind of signal that Tim Berners-Lee is talking about. If anything it becomes more like the SETI program requiring any potential agent to filter through millions of useless or diversionary signals in order to obtain whatever WOW! signal it is generated the search in the first place.
Mind you the idea of a distributed computing project in the vein of SETI using spare cycles to scour the web for question relevant information is kinda cool, dontcha think?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except now I know what's going to happen this time. I'm gonna buy me some boo.com stock and get rich quick... Eat my dust suckers...!
And yet despite all this rampant piracy, UK album sales are actually up 7.6% to a record 121 million sales in 2003.
So which side is winning again? Is it the pirates or the record companies? God I'm confused...
Soviet style communism apart, is there any history of this bastardisation of truth and language in previous Western style democracies, or is it a relatively recent phenomena?
Also, does technology enable or disable this style of corruption?
There's this ring. It's evil. It has to be destroyed. That's where we left off after the first one. "Two Towers" and 3 hours later, that's STILL where we are. Still got that ring. Still has to be destroyed.
Yeah, and then there's the Bible. There's this guy, and he's, like, the son of God, and he performs some miracles and then he get's nailed up, but 1000 pages later, we're still telling this story, what gives?
Facile example maybe, but all narratives can be boiled down to about three sentences if you really try. To criticse a novel on this basis is to criticise just about any story ever written. While I'm dubious about this fetish for promoting LOTR as high art, I know for a fact return of the King will be about a million times better than Revolutions, which was more high arse than high art in any case...
Oh, and anyone that portrays the Matrix as some kind of deep philosophical work really needs to get out more. Yep, it has a nice line in pop philosophy, but Nietzsche it ain't... And yes, I did understand it...
Yeah, well put, I agree. The problem is that the Wachowski's don't have the intellectual prowess to resolve the dilemmas they set up in the first film.
One of the biggest disappointments for me is the lack of any real core philosophy. At least Reloaded had the architect scene to give it some depth. I didn't see anything thought provoking in Revolutions at all.
Where I don't agree is that this is a good movie. It isn't. It's lame.
Trying to fake a major event using mocked up tape is the wrong way to do this. You'd need to fake so much corroborated and consistent material that the whole charade would fall apart in hours.
If you really wanted to perform a convincing hoax, for example a UFO crash, all you'd need to do is fake the incident itself and have a bunch of people playing the parts of those involved. Then simply sit back and watch the media eat itself. You don't have to take on the media head on by playing it at it's own game, it's far more powerful to subvert the power and influence of the media against itself.
A small group of actors could easily stick to a improvised script for long enough and remain relatively consistent if all the major details were agreed beforehand. (After all, you don't want it to be too neat) If you can then stage the incident convincingly enough, the power of the media will guarantee that it becomes truth before you can say Orson Welles. After all, how hard can it be to fake a convincing UFO crash? It's all smoke and mirrors.
The stupidity of mainstream media and its target audience is almost limitless. It can't be that difficult to fool them. I don't want to score political points, but as some people have mentioned, the media coverage of the recent war in Iraq was hardly a bastion of truth and that was a real conflict in which real people died real deaths. If they can be fooled on something that important, then I don't expect them to pay much attention to anything.
So any master hoaxers out there want to comment?
Or for those of us with an eye on real scientific measurements that's about... What? 0.004% of a Volkswagen Beetle, 0.0017% of an elephant (African, obviously, no coconuts) or about a 0.1% of the average postal guy...
Definitely, think in terms of distribution. The ability to track packages through a system or warehouse without needing any manual intervention improves efficiency exponentially. Using RFID in this context means no more barcodes, removing concerns around the ripped or unreadable labels that increase delays in getting the package to its destination.
I've also heard it used to track railway carriages at high speed as they pass through freight yards, so that freight companies can track which containers are on what train in what order. These uses don't infringe any civil liberties, and are very useful for companies in either of these fields. RFID tech can be misused, but like most things it can be used in a socially responsible and beneficial way too.
I've just finished researching an essay about this. Anyone interested in quantum consciousness might find the papers available by Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers interesting.
Also check out anything recent by Francis Crick (Yep, DNA Crick) and Roger Penrose. Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist by trade and has done a lot of work with Penrose to propose some interesting models of consciousness, though whether they deal with the so-called hard problem, I'm not so sure.
Oh, and for a sceptics viewpoint, read anything by Daniel Dennett.
I'm afraid I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to know if this is shash or not, but I'm impressed by the attachment of Penrose's and Crick's name to these theories. Perhaps someone more enlightened than myself could comment?!
Sorry to be a pedant, but I think you mean Alex Cox rather than Alan Cox...
Ask yourself, would the Matrix get made today? Obviously this is now a multi zillion dollar franchise, but originally, think about it, no licence, fecking expensive to make, no guaranteed return, relatively philosophical/thought provoking storyline. I don't think a studio exec would look at it twice today.
Even a couple of years ago, "mainstream" films seemed more challenging and more willing to take risks than today, where the overwhelming majority are just dumb. Take the X-Men as an example, entertaining, but utterly, utterly forgettable, and that's one of the better films around at the moment.
Seriously. Jesus... What more can I say? This is just going to provide more evidence to the production houses responsible for the cinematic toxins that clog up our screens every weekend that their formula is not only economically but artistically valid, providing even less incentive to produce movies requiring anything other than open eyes to watch. Great.
Incidentally, I'm not a great nostalgia freak, but one or two examples aside, haven't films got much, much worse over the last year or two or what?
Well, maybe it's true that there are more pressing issues to be sorted than internet access, but any mechanism for the diffusion of information has to be good.
Ok, maybe it's not directly giving aid but given information on how to do something yourself, or how to contact someone else who has knowledge of a particular area has got to be a useful tool. Just because many of us have become blase about the potential of the internet, doesn't mean it is in actuality any less useful than it ever was.
It's pretty fashionable to bash the whole IT as aid effort as you've done, but I'd argue that a decent IT infrastructure is just as valid an undertaking for a developing nation as almost anything else you could do.
It comes with no strings attached, can't be appropriated, creates trade links and benefits everyone, both in the receipient country and in the donating country. There isn't a great deal else you can say all that about...
Or alternatively, we all get wiped out by extraterrestrials with really, really good hair...
While I love the idea of a semantic web with all the inherent collation of disparate ideas that it entails, I really can't see it being built on top of the internet as it stands today.
If it was built on some kind of streamlined academic research network then I could envisage this working, but the internet contains far too much noise to ever get the kind of signal that Tim Berners-Lee is talking about. If anything it becomes more like the SETI program requiring any potential agent to filter through millions of useless or diversionary signals in order to obtain whatever WOW! signal it is generated the search in the first place.
Mind you the idea of a distributed computing project in the vein of SETI using spare cycles to scour the web for question relevant information is kinda cool, dontcha think?
Doesn't anyone else think patenting genes is a little bit too much like this for comfort?
Who said satire was dead? Woo-hoo!