I don't write for an audience. I write to get it out of my system.
I can undrestand a bit of writing for an audience. For instance, what level of swearing is appropriate? But other than that, I don't censor myself too much. The greatest constraint on my writing is attempting to put together a coherent story.
Experience has taught me that only rarely does writing skill actually matter.
Only rarely will there be something said so compellingly that it actually compells us to try to remember it, to spread it around. Things like the random quotes at the beginning of Dune series chapters, or the four boxes to use in defense of liberty, or many things that are simply expressed in a hilarious way (Linus quotes), these are memorable for their writing and style alone.
But what makes a good book, what keeps me reading, is when the story is good, the characters lifelike, the world detailed, all of it believable and yet utterly unfamiliar. The writing only has to be good enough to be invisible, much like technology. Short of glaring annoyances, like people who misuse apostrophies or Internet slang, I would rather have decent writing and a good story than amazing writing about nothing at all.
Like technology, amazingly good writing is appreciated. Frank Herbert haunts me with his proverbs and parables. But it's ultimately secondary to a good story, and story is what's keeping me from having anything worth publishing. Yet.
Yes, practice is a good thing. However, I have what seems to be a rare talent for writing the way I would speak, with the exception that writing has many more opportunities for subtle revision. Even the limitation of typing speed helps here.
I have been told that I'm a good writer. I should be humble, but it does seem like a rare case where I can sit down and write a stream-of-consciousness essay and have it come out reasonably well.
Maybe this is why I'm bad at poetry. Most people seem to write the way you'd write poetry: What rhymes with...? How can I keep the rhythm here? So, in writing: Do I really want to use passive voice here? How can I rephrase this to make a more powerful statement?
There is a disadvantage: My organization sucks. It would probably suck less if I had more practice.
But, I can still say what I mean to say, and I can reorganize later when it's incomprehensible. The only Gordon rule I believe in is: Gordon Freeman for President!
I'm very good at stream of consciousness writing, and incredibly bad at organizing my thoughts. Most people do overviews, then their essay. I do my essay, then an overview, then maybe rearrange large chunks.
When writing on my own -- things like fiction -- I typically don't do second drafts. I'll write a chapter through once, revising as I go (a few words or a sentence at a time), and it's usually good enough. From here on, if it's important and I feel like spending the time, I'll run back over it and revise a sentence here, rearrange a paragraph there, but after that, I pretty much leave it alone. It's not that I think my writing's set in stone, but simply that I'm not going to improve it at all from that initial sprint -- in fact, the more I mess with it, the more likely I am to screw it up.
The only time it will take me longer is if there is also a space constraint. While I can write concisely, I also have a tendancy to ramble. Probably the most difficult thing for me to do is elaborate on the very simple, almost proverb-like idea I have, without running on forever. The trick here is to figure out which things are important to talk about, which things to cut, which things to squeeze a few more words out of to get me under that 500 word limit (or whatever).
Still, give me an essay question and an unlimited amount of paper, and I will write literally nonstop (I'm used to typing), until I hear time is almost up, and then I will continue to write nonstop, but I'll be writing a conclusion.
Given the right conclusion, even the most random stream-of-consciousness crap can seem like a proper essay, especially if it reinforces something I was trying to say in the first place, such as: My stream-of-consciousness skills kick ass, and I fear no SAT essay questions. Too bad I don't care about the SAT anymore.
The problem is, we haven't figured out how to do this yet. It still requires an insane amount of knowledge and skill regarding all the hardware in the system.
Until recently, the biggest barrier to emulation/virtualization was the CPU power required to emulate every CPU instruction. To run Windows as a guest OS on an x86 PC running Linux, you would be losing 4-5x CPU speed, meaning a 2 ghz monster felt like 450 mhz.
Now, we've finally solved that -- but that's one piece of hardware, and a fairly standard one. And it's still damned hard to even share that much, allowing direct access to the hardware, without it being a security threat, and still being able to switch back to the host OS. As it is, we still handle everything else the old-fashioned way, including video cards.
This is because, if we gave the guest OS access to the video card, how would we get it back? How could we possibly run a guest OS in a window, that way? I'm not saying it can't ever be done, but as fast as video cards are changing, this would require a lot of cooperation and a lot of engineering on the part of video card manufacturers. And we have to do this, if we want to allow the host OS to display messages and such securely. The only other way to share a video card is to emulate one for the guest OS, and let the host OS run the real one, but then the guest OS will slow down insanely.
And that's just where you'd notice it the most in games. Disk access also sucks with virtualization.
This would be an utterly brute-force solution, and it would make many people stay on XP for years to come.
Your repeated use of straw men says something about your reaction to my position.
It says I find it hard to take you seriously, but I am trying. Your nitpicking doesn't help:
That's your reason? Hey, witchcraft also predates the US government! And so does any religion.
The Mormons do not.
How is this relevant? I'm sorry, I should have said "so do most religions." You also neatly avoided my point.
"Separation of Church and State" does not appear in the constitution.
The 3/5ths compromise does, although it has been stricken. I would have no problem putting "separation of Church and State" into the Constitution, if it could be expressed clearly and unambiguously enough.
More to the point, you cannot have effective freedom of religion without that separation, and I believe freedom of religion does exist in the Constitution. We can look it up if you like.
I do not agree with "civil unions" being given equivalency with marriage, because marriage has a specific definition.
But would you agree with completely replacing the word "marriage" in the law with "civil unions"? If you can give me a specific, meaningful, inspirational definition of marriage, I am sure that the legal definition of marriage is far closer to a civil union than it is to any real definition of marriage.
If, according to the law, there are no marriages, only civil unions, than we have complete equality, without causing any harm to the definition or institution of marriage.
Would you feel the same way if it was, say, the institution of slavery? As a country, we've been over this before.
This is a nonsensical example.
Why? It was, after all, the biggest example of states rights vs a strong federal government. People decided that slavery was so abhorrent that it was no solution simply to let the north remain free and let the confederate south keep it. We decided that there could be no slavery anywhere in the States, and fought a brutally bloody war about it. More than one person fighting for the South didn't particularly like slavery, but cared deeply about states' rights.
If I could, I'd establish marriage as a heterosexual monogamous institution in the state that I live.
But not in every state in the Union. So why do you care deeply enough about it to vote on it?
Not if they are locked up.
Murders and rapes don't happen in prison?
Murders you shouldn't care about anyway -- you were in favor of killing these people, remember? And assuming we throw all these people in together on a perpetual Death Row, I'll bet most of them would rather be alive and raped than dead.
In cases where there are any doubts about the actual guilt of the person, the death penalty shouldn't be imposed.
There are always doubts. I'm sorry, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but there have been innocents executed, or at least people who might have been innocent, but we don't find the evidence until after they're dead.
Does that mean that you would be in favor of euthanizing people with traumatic brain injuries or severe dementia? These people are usually only alive in the biological sense.
Depends on the situation. There have been people waking up after a long coma, and also people who have lost large chunks of their brain -- not brain fuction, actual brain -- and are still able to function.
However, consider Terry Schiavo. By the time they finally pulled the plug, she didn't have a brain worth mentioning. And yes, in situations like these, I'd have them euthanized, because of the financial and emotional burden on the living, and the absolute, co
Ah, but that was done in a subtler way, not something that makes a good ending for a four and a half hour miniseries. But you bring up an interesting point -- will DVD Jon become a prisoner, like Scytale, in an effort to learn his secrets? Of course, by then, there was no new spice, anywhere -- will the iTMS fall?
But then, I still haven't finished Chapterhouse Dune, which is probably the main reason I didn't focus on the end of the series -- if I get something wrong, correcting me could spoil it.
I bet I can match that by finding a few Jews to laugh at "how did the Grand Canyon...?" jokes, some blacks who laugh at "a black and a mexican are riding in a car, who's the driver?" joke, etc.
So what was the point of bringing it up in the first place?
So now we've established that we're making fun of myspace women on slashdot. Good thing. Somehow I suspect you'll manage to find a way to explain how Myspace women became a relevant topic here...
Why does it have to be relevant? In any case, MySpace is relevant, and OMG Ponies, women or not, is inherent to the culture of MySpace. Also, there used to be a whole section of Slashdot dedicated to humor -- and even if there wasn't, it seems fair game on April 1st.
But it seems you don't have a sense of humor. Sorry about that.
Happens with entirely too many things. Google is about the only one that I like. iPod, MySpace, PowerPoint, Tivo...
So yes, people sell "Skype headsets" or "gTalk headsets", and we don't notice when there start being "Xbox Live headsets" which actually use a different plug. "PowerPoint" remotes. "iPod" cables. MySpace as a noun -- not "My MySpace page", but "MySpace: <url>".
Language these days is really getting abused. I don't know how recent it is, but it certainly feels Orwellian. Keep oldspeak alive!
Until you actually need the OS to access something low-level that VMWare doesn't or can't provide. For instance, no virtualization that I know of will allow the guest OS to use 3D acceleration, which is especially bad for Vista.
I use Linux because it actually is fairly secure, when I know what I'm doing. Windows can be insecure even if I know what I'm doing.
As for eliminating the need for AV, I don't see why a prompt that says "this is a virus" means so much more coming from Norton than "this might be a virus" does coming from Windows/IE/Firefox/whatever. And I agree, clueless users will happen anyway. People will probably always buy AV, whether or not it does anything at all, unless we start educating them. But given the choice, I'd rather make things really secure for people who know what they're doing than sort-of secure for people who don't.
Not because I agree with either side -- DVD Jon is a bastard for not simply releasing this to the public -- but it looks like it's shaping up to be hilarious and fun to watch in the same way the ending of Dune was. You think you have me surrounded? Beaten? Then, out of nowhere: "If I am not obeyed, the spice will not flow."
What would be the point of creating a new political party which will just have the election stolen from them? I agree with you, mostly, but let's keep first thing's first. Voting machines, then political parties.
And supporting Israel is one thing, actually going over there and bombing the shit out of their homeland ourselves is quite another.
If you don't want the law to recognize gay marriage, the only rational, fair response is to make the law ignore marriage altogether. Would you be against that? Why?
I suspect that you already know that I'd be against such lunacy. Marriage predates the US government.
That's your reason? Hey, witchcraft also predates the US government! And so does any religion. Slavery predates the US government! You know what? Tax breaks to all good Christians! I thought this was back to 1972, not back to 1775!
But does it make marriage any less valid if the government refuses to have anything to do with it? Separation of church and state and all that? Why are you against the law only recognizing a "civil union" between any two individuals, which may or may not be marriage?
Can you make up any kind of law that in some way recognizes the Easter Bunny?
Neither exists, it's possible to craft a law that recognizes anything. Hell, our current drug laws recognize cocaine as a narcotic when pharmacologically, it isn't.
This may be true, however, our current drug laws actually use that definition for something generally considered useful -- to outlaw cocaine. Gay marriage would be similar -- the act of recognizing it actually does something measurable and potentially good. I don't think you can craft anything similar for the easter bunny.
Or maybe your new analogy is drug laws? In that case, what are you trying to change -- get cocaine redefined as something other than a narcotic? In which case, why would you be opposed to doing the same thing for a gay marriage law?
If you don't care about gay marriage in Vermont or California, why do you care about it anywhere else?
Because I don't live in Vermont or California. The people of those states have the right to define for themselves what institutions they'll recognize.
Would you feel the same way if it was, say, the institution of slavery? As a country, we've been over this before.
I'll bet, if you could, you'd establish marriage, heterosexual only, across the country.
An adult human being can be a threat to the rest of society.
Not if they are locked up. Also: What if they are innocent? Why are you in favor of protecting the life of a bundle of cells, or a doll without a brain (literally!), but not an innocent adult who's been wrongfully convicted of a crime?
We each define our own priorities.
Most of us agree on some priorities. For instance, you probably feel that abortion is a much bigger issue than, say, whether we call them "french fries" or "freedom fries". I would certainly call this a sane way to prioritize things. I guess I'd assumed that it's self-evident that sentient life is more important to preserve than a bunch of unintelligent cells.
I am all for going out of the way to protect life before the age of majority. After you're 18, you're responsible for yourself.
It just seems perverse and backward to me that you'd value life before the magical age of 18, but lump all children together with a fetus whose humanity is debated at best. Frankly, it's an insult to the children -- they have more in common with adult chimps than with first or second trimester fetuses. And that you'd value the life of the fetus more than the life of the mother, whether she's under 18 or not. But as soon as that baby grows up and hits 18, all your "pro-life" stuff goes out the window -- you don't really care.
About marriage: Exactly, well said, not much more I could have said about the subject.
Still, I can't resist stirring up the hive again, so to speak. Does a civil union have to be between two people? Would there be any kind of way of covering polygamy or polyandry, or large hippie/swinger compounds? At what point do you draw the line between a corporation and a civil union?
I won't have to answer those questions, and neither will you, because even in states handling marriage sanely (as civil unions), it will be between two consenting adults. And really, I don't have a problem with that, it was just a thought experiment.
Conservatives: No, less revenue is a stepping stone to smaller government.
Smart conservatives won't be fooled so easily. Less revenue doesn't automatically mean less spending -- in fact, with the current administration, it means more spending.
Less spending is a stepping stone to smaller government.
Modern conservatism can roughly be summed up as a "Back to 1972" mentality on many (but not all)subjects.
Sounds like a step backward to me.
I'll stick to the term "neo-conservatism". Especially because:
Not any more. Over time, "conservative" has come to mean "socially conservative" some people can not distinguish between fiscal and social conservatism.
Not so long ago, "conservative" did mean fiscal conservatism, and much less rabid social conservatism.
One might as well try to get the law to recognize the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, just like same-sex marriage their is no such thing.
I must have touched a nerve.
Let's try to be rational about fairness -- it is, after all, based on equality, which can certainly be rational. Is it fair that married couples get benefits? Tax breaks, better credit rating, etc?
If you don't want the law to recognize gay marriage, the only rational, fair response is to make the law ignore marriage altogether. Would you be against that? Why?
Regarding the Easter Bunny, you're really reaching here. We know exactly what laws regarding gay marriage would look like. Can you make up any kind of law that in some way recognizes the Easter Bunny?
Once again, I believe in a state's rights approach. If the people of Vermont and California want to declare same-sex marriage to be available, that's their business.
Once again, your motivation is because you think it's your best shot. If you don't care about gay marriage in Vermont or California, why do you care about it anywhere else? Why do you care if your gay neighbors up the street get hitched?
The GOP isn't a shining example of modern conservatism but we have nowhere else to turn.
Funny, have you even tried? At least the far left has, with Libretarianism. Hell, even the TM Movement has, with the Natural Law Party.
And I wonder about your priorities. How do neocons feel about the death penalty? Do "conservatives" even have a position about it? This seems much more important to me than Abortion. You're all for protecting something which may or may not have the consciousness of a flea yet, but you'll kill a fully developed, thinking human?
Or the war, you haven't said a thing about that. It's been said that Republicans are pro-life until the child is born.
I am not saying that you should not have a position about abortion. I understand that it must be an important issue to you. But is it so much more important to you than life after birth?
I would have us not be afraid to have a sense of humor, and yes, I'd have them bash male steriotypes. I'd have to be an utter moron to identify with one closely enough and say "Hey, that's me you're insulting!" It's like the Taco Bell Chihuahua...
Let's just say you need to watch a little more Carlos Mencia, and laugh, and understand.
Perhaps you could give me an example of this retaliation of which you speak? And maybe explain how any of it is directly a result of OMG Ponies?
Also, the headline in your journal calls it "utter mysogynism." This is obviously not true, as I said, to any intelligent woman.
I commented on this already. In order to get people to vote properly, or to convince congressmen to kill Diebold, or to get out in the street, you're going to need a meme, and a more powerful one than "You bring the pitchforks, I'll bring the torches."
I actually agree with this -- reality has a liberal bias. However, unlike Colbert's satirical response -- let me guess, avoid reality? -- I'd say it logically follows that since reality has a liberal bias, liberals are right, and neo-cons are biased.
If you say no to less than four of those things, you ARE a Liberal.
Let me see:
Reverse Bush's tax cuts? Me: Yes, they only seem to benefit the rich and wealthy. Conservatives: Yes, we're all about fiscal responsibility.
Legalize same-sex marriage? Me: That implies that it's illegal. But yes, what gays do is none of my damn business. Conservatives: Irrelevant. Possibly no by default, as it involves change.
Pass more gun control? Me: Don't care, there are infinite other ways to kill people. Focus on the killers, not the guns. Conservatives: Actually, I'm not sure. Again, probably no by default.
Undo welfare reform? Me: No. I don't know a lot about it, but I think we need education more than we need welfare, and education sucks right now. Conservatives: I'm going to guess no, based on Wikipedia.
Should Roe v Wade be protected from any future judicial review? Me: Yes, but only as a Constitutional amendment. It's hard to say when a fetus becomes human, but there are plenty of embryos that I wouldn't call human. We are allowed to put down animals if we can't afford to feed them, why not fetuses? Conservatives: No/schizophrenic. Conservatives are not necessarily pro-life, but do not necessarily believe that such a decision should be made by the Supreme Court, and not by legislations.
So, let's add them up:
Me: Three yesses, a don't care, and a no. My strawman conservative: A yes, two 'no's by default, and a schizophrenic no.
So, if you add up the raw count, my strawman conservative said no to four, and is not liberal, and I said no to one, making me very liberal. But, two of the conservative's "no" answers were by default, not because they necessarily agree/disagree with the policy, but because it's hard to remember what a conservative looked like before the neo-cons -- and "conservative" generally means leaving it the hell alone. One of them was schizophrenic -- you can be conservative and believe abortion should be legal, but you don't like Roe v Wade because of the Supreme Court abusing power.
In fact, if we run carefully through the answers and the reasons, I have two definite yesses and one definite no, and two fuzzy answers. My strawman conservative has a definite yes, a definite no, and three fuzzy answers.
So, your test doesn't seem very statistically valid to me, and it certainly doesn't cover the differences that matter to me. Conservatives used to be about small government and fiscal responsibility, and only 2/5 of your questions are about that. It's also not something I care about much -- I do care about responsibility, I don't care about small government, I care much more about whether the government we have is well run. I disagree with neo-conservatives on many other things that I see as much more important:
No Child Left Behind. It's doublespeak/newspeak, and it does more harm than good. Talk to me when you have a plan for how you're going to spend money on education, rather than how you're going to avoid spending money on education.
Bush's flip-flops. This really pissed me off that people hated Kerry for being smart enough to change his mind, but there was a pattern -- documented somewhere -- where Bush delivers a speech about how great some Government project is (say, Nasa), then not a month later, his administration cuts funding for it. Bush praising your project is like a kiss of death.
Corporatism. America is about freedom for individual human beings, not corporations. More specifically:
DRM. The DMCA is complete and total bullshit.
The Patriot Act, wiretapping, etc.
Democrats are not much better, but many of the issues you've stated are not necessarily Conservative values, and are certainly not things I care as much about. Consider gay marriage. Consider that there are likely gay fiscal conserva
It does have a strong smell of either astroturf or idiocy, possibly both.
But can't we do a bit of that ourselves? Can't we, who actually understand what the word "Meme" means, create a meme of our own, one so successful that it actually changes the world for the better?
Hell, some of us have done this already, for better or for worse, with concepts like AJAX, Extreme/Agile Programming, Google, and Slashdot itself. There's a movie coming out about a political comedian, played by Robin Williams, who runs for President and wins, so basically, John Stewart for President -- but he's too smart to run anyway.
So let's decide on a political, moral, philosophical, and sociological set of ideas, and construct a meme so powerful that by 2008, we will turn this country upside down. Who's with me?
That if only Bush weren't in office, that: 9/11 wouldn't have happened, the budget would be balanced, the response to Katrina would have been top-notch, the muslim world would love us, the economy would be going well, and so on. It's bullshit.
Certainly. Life sucks and then you die. You went on to say:
Now, don't get me wrong, things probably would be better (it'd be harder to screw it up more than this crew has), but to assume that republicans are the reason for all our woes is both simplistic and unproductive.
So what would be more productive? Certainly not a new political party, if the Republicans can simply steal the next election and continue to screw things up in the worst possible way. Fixing or removing the voting machines is a necessary first step towards having a Democracy in the first place, much less a functional one.
And certainly, I'd even prefer Hillary Clinton to GW Bush. I'd much prefer to have violent videogames of any kind (pac-man) banned to anyone under 21 than have real violence going on for no apparent reason (why the fuck did we go into Iraq?), and real people dying for no apparent reason (who's the head of FIMA, again?)
Democrats would be worlds better than Republicans. The muslim world would not love us, but they would have considerably less reason to hate us -- hell, I live here, and I hate America (there, I said it), as much as I love the American dream. 9/11 may have happened, but maybe not -- the Bush admin ignored information we had about Al Qaeda -- and if it did happen, we wouldn't necessarily go into not one, but two pointless wars because of it. The Katrina response may not have been great, but it wouldn't have been so stupendously mishandled.
So, for me, the logical progression goes: Fix the voting system, vote Republicans out, then worry about other ways to fix the system, maybe a new political party, maybe repairing the Democratic party.
I disagree. In my opinion the Democrats (and their global equivalents, ideologically extended) are rather destroying societies globally.
Um...how?
Since you are not interested in my idea being propagated, does that mean you would prefer it to be hindered from being spread?
No, but it means that I believe your meme will be selected out, while my meme will reproduce and spread, for the simple reason that I am right, and you are wrong.
Because while you say that I destroy the Earth, I say that you do, and I'm not going down quietly when fighting for what I believe in.
It seems like you really do believe that dissenters should be silenced or killed.
Remember the boxes: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Use in that order.
If deprived of the possibility of 1) telling others what I think, and 2) organising and possibly influencing the way things are done especially as they pertain to myself, the only option that remains is 3) take up arms and let the war begin.
Who is denying you the right of #1 and #2? Certainly not the Democrats. Or will you please provide some examples?
I'll go for the one that hasn't been attacked yet.
When did I ever mention ANYTHING about sexual preference? Oh, I forgot.. it's leftdot where all these assumptions are prebuilt into people who don't conform to teh groupthink.
First, it seems a bit insane to take one statement and condemn an entire community for it. Or should I have said "Oh, I forgot, this is rightdot..." when you made your "drop in the bucket" comment?
Second, you were claiming to speak for Republicans, so we were responding to Republicans in general, not just you. If you really don't believe in banning Gay Marriage, or in killing gays according to Leviticus 20:13, then tell us what you are doing to support it. If you're really an atheist, as you say, tell us what you're doing to prevent us from becoming a church state.
So, if you want to give us a newsflash about how Democrats are destroying the moral foundation of our democracy, don't claim to be a Republican, much less speak for them, because Republicans do seem to believe what we accused you of believing.
Since your journal entry about this appears to be closed for comments, I'll reply here.
Any woman insulted by the OMG Ponies gag is either not very intelligent, or has not seen MySpace. We are not laughing at women in general, we are laughing at stupid teenage girls. Just to make sure you don't miss this, I am referring to those teenage girls who are stupid, not implying that all teenage girls are stupid.
Note also that I do not speak for all Slashdotters, but I suspect many will back me up that the majority of the posts on April 1st were not anti-female in general, but as I said above, anti-stupid-MySpace-teen-girl.
Really, when we make fun of l33tsp33k and Counter-Strike players, when we make fun of Duke Nukem and Bruce Campbell steriotypes, or when we make fun of jocks, we are not making fun of men in general, but a particular breed of stupid men.
If the OMG Ponies really offends you that deeply, I suspect that it's got less to do with it making fun of women, and more to do with it making fun of something you like. Maybe it's the hearts, or the pink, maybe you like ponies but hate OMG, something like that. But IANAT (I Am Not A Therapist), so I don't really know. I do know it doesn't offend all intelligent women -- my mother thought it was absolutely hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't write for an audience. I write to get it out of my system.
I can undrestand a bit of writing for an audience. For instance, what level of swearing is appropriate? But other than that, I don't censor myself too much. The greatest constraint on my writing is attempting to put together a coherent story.
Experience has taught me that only rarely does writing skill actually matter.
Only rarely will there be something said so compellingly that it actually compells us to try to remember it, to spread it around. Things like the random quotes at the beginning of Dune series chapters, or the four boxes to use in defense of liberty, or many things that are simply expressed in a hilarious way (Linus quotes), these are memorable for their writing and style alone.
But what makes a good book, what keeps me reading, is when the story is good, the characters lifelike, the world detailed, all of it believable and yet utterly unfamiliar. The writing only has to be good enough to be invisible, much like technology. Short of glaring annoyances, like people who misuse apostrophies or Internet slang, I would rather have decent writing and a good story than amazing writing about nothing at all.
Like technology, amazingly good writing is appreciated. Frank Herbert haunts me with his proverbs and parables. But it's ultimately secondary to a good story, and story is what's keeping me from having anything worth publishing. Yet.
Yes, practice is a good thing. However, I have what seems to be a rare talent for writing the way I would speak, with the exception that writing has many more opportunities for subtle revision. Even the limitation of typing speed helps here.
I have been told that I'm a good writer. I should be humble, but it does seem like a rare case where I can sit down and write a stream-of-consciousness essay and have it come out reasonably well.
Maybe this is why I'm bad at poetry. Most people seem to write the way you'd write poetry: What rhymes with...? How can I keep the rhythm here? So, in writing: Do I really want to use passive voice here? How can I rephrase this to make a more powerful statement?
There is a disadvantage: My organization sucks. It would probably suck less if I had more practice.
But, I can still say what I mean to say, and I can reorganize later when it's incomprehensible. The only Gordon rule I believe in is: Gordon Freeman for President!
I'm very good at stream of consciousness writing, and incredibly bad at organizing my thoughts. Most people do overviews, then their essay. I do my essay, then an overview, then maybe rearrange large chunks.
When writing on my own -- things like fiction -- I typically don't do second drafts. I'll write a chapter through once, revising as I go (a few words or a sentence at a time), and it's usually good enough. From here on, if it's important and I feel like spending the time, I'll run back over it and revise a sentence here, rearrange a paragraph there, but after that, I pretty much leave it alone. It's not that I think my writing's set in stone, but simply that I'm not going to improve it at all from that initial sprint -- in fact, the more I mess with it, the more likely I am to screw it up.
The only time it will take me longer is if there is also a space constraint. While I can write concisely, I also have a tendancy to ramble. Probably the most difficult thing for me to do is elaborate on the very simple, almost proverb-like idea I have, without running on forever. The trick here is to figure out which things are important to talk about, which things to cut, which things to squeeze a few more words out of to get me under that 500 word limit (or whatever).
Still, give me an essay question and an unlimited amount of paper, and I will write literally nonstop (I'm used to typing), until I hear time is almost up, and then I will continue to write nonstop, but I'll be writing a conclusion.
Given the right conclusion, even the most random stream-of-consciousness crap can seem like a proper essay, especially if it reinforces something I was trying to say in the first place, such as: My stream-of-consciousness skills kick ass, and I fear no SAT essay questions. Too bad I don't care about the SAT anymore.
The problem is, we haven't figured out how to do this yet. It still requires an insane amount of knowledge and skill regarding all the hardware in the system.
Until recently, the biggest barrier to emulation/virtualization was the CPU power required to emulate every CPU instruction. To run Windows as a guest OS on an x86 PC running Linux, you would be losing 4-5x CPU speed, meaning a 2 ghz monster felt like 450 mhz.
Now, we've finally solved that -- but that's one piece of hardware, and a fairly standard one. And it's still damned hard to even share that much, allowing direct access to the hardware, without it being a security threat, and still being able to switch back to the host OS. As it is, we still handle everything else the old-fashioned way, including video cards.
This is because, if we gave the guest OS access to the video card, how would we get it back? How could we possibly run a guest OS in a window, that way? I'm not saying it can't ever be done, but as fast as video cards are changing, this would require a lot of cooperation and a lot of engineering on the part of video card manufacturers. And we have to do this, if we want to allow the host OS to display messages and such securely. The only other way to share a video card is to emulate one for the guest OS, and let the host OS run the real one, but then the guest OS will slow down insanely.
And that's just where you'd notice it the most in games. Disk access also sucks with virtualization.
This would be an utterly brute-force solution, and it would make many people stay on XP for years to come.
It says I find it hard to take you seriously, but I am trying. Your nitpicking doesn't help:
How is this relevant? I'm sorry, I should have said "so do most religions." You also neatly avoided my point.
The 3/5ths compromise does, although it has been stricken. I would have no problem putting "separation of Church and State" into the Constitution, if it could be expressed clearly and unambiguously enough.
More to the point, you cannot have effective freedom of religion without that separation, and I believe freedom of religion does exist in the Constitution. We can look it up if you like.
But would you agree with completely replacing the word "marriage" in the law with "civil unions"? If you can give me a specific, meaningful, inspirational definition of marriage, I am sure that the legal definition of marriage is far closer to a civil union than it is to any real definition of marriage.
If, according to the law, there are no marriages, only civil unions, than we have complete equality, without causing any harm to the definition or institution of marriage.
Why? It was, after all, the biggest example of states rights vs a strong federal government. People decided that slavery was so abhorrent that it was no solution simply to let the north remain free and let the confederate south keep it. We decided that there could be no slavery anywhere in the States, and fought a brutally bloody war about it. More than one person fighting for the South didn't particularly like slavery, but cared deeply about states' rights.
But not in every state in the Union. So why do you care deeply enough about it to vote on it?
Murders you shouldn't care about anyway -- you were in favor of killing these people, remember? And assuming we throw all these people in together on a perpetual Death Row, I'll bet most of them would rather be alive and raped than dead.
There are always doubts. I'm sorry, I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but there have been innocents executed, or at least people who might have been innocent, but we don't find the evidence until after they're dead.
Depends on the situation. There have been people waking up after a long coma, and also people who have lost large chunks of their brain -- not brain fuction, actual brain -- and are still able to function.
However, consider Terry Schiavo. By the time they finally pulled the plug, she didn't have a brain worth mentioning. And yes, in situations like these, I'd have them euthanized, because of the financial and emotional burden on the living, and the absolute, co
Ah, but that was done in a subtler way, not something that makes a good ending for a four and a half hour miniseries. But you bring up an interesting point -- will DVD Jon become a prisoner, like Scytale, in an effort to learn his secrets? Of course, by then, there was no new spice, anywhere -- will the iTMS fall?
But then, I still haven't finished Chapterhouse Dune, which is probably the main reason I didn't focus on the end of the series -- if I get something wrong, correcting me could spoil it.
So what was the point of bringing it up in the first place?
Why does it have to be relevant? In any case, MySpace is relevant, and OMG Ponies, women or not, is inherent to the culture of MySpace. Also, there used to be a whole section of Slashdot dedicated to humor -- and even if there wasn't, it seems fair game on April 1st.
But it seems you don't have a sense of humor. Sorry about that.
Happens with entirely too many things. Google is about the only one that I like. iPod, MySpace, PowerPoint, Tivo...
So yes, people sell "Skype headsets" or "gTalk headsets", and we don't notice when there start being "Xbox Live headsets" which actually use a different plug. "PowerPoint" remotes. "iPod" cables. MySpace as a noun -- not "My MySpace page", but "MySpace: <url>".
Language these days is really getting abused. I don't know how recent it is, but it certainly feels Orwellian. Keep oldspeak alive!
Until you actually need the OS to access something low-level that VMWare doesn't or can't provide. For instance, no virtualization that I know of will allow the guest OS to use 3D acceleration, which is especially bad for Vista.
I use Linux because it actually is fairly secure, when I know what I'm doing. Windows can be insecure even if I know what I'm doing.
As for eliminating the need for AV, I don't see why a prompt that says "this is a virus" means so much more coming from Norton than "this might be a virus" does coming from Windows/IE/Firefox/whatever. And I agree, clueless users will happen anyway. People will probably always buy AV, whether or not it does anything at all, unless we start educating them. But given the choice, I'd rather make things really secure for people who know what they're doing than sort-of secure for people who don't.
Not because I agree with either side -- DVD Jon is a bastard for not simply releasing this to the public -- but it looks like it's shaping up to be hilarious and fun to watch in the same way the ending of Dune was. You think you have me surrounded? Beaten? Then, out of nowhere: "If I am not obeyed, the spice will not flow."
What would be the point of creating a new political party which will just have the election stolen from them? I agree with you, mostly, but let's keep first thing's first. Voting machines, then political parties.
And supporting Israel is one thing, actually going over there and bombing the shit out of their homeland ourselves is quite another.
My mother, as I said earlier in the thread. Shouldn't be too hard to find, just look at the last sentence of the post.
You can breathe now.
Also, thanks, Mrs. jdavidb, nice to hear a voice of sanity! Funny, my name is David...
Oh, I'm quite calm, just a little confused.
That's your reason? Hey, witchcraft also predates the US government! And so does any religion. Slavery predates the US government! You know what? Tax breaks to all good Christians! I thought this was back to 1972, not back to 1775!
But does it make marriage any less valid if the government refuses to have anything to do with it? Separation of church and state and all that? Why are you against the law only recognizing a "civil union" between any two individuals, which may or may not be marriage?
This may be true, however, our current drug laws actually use that definition for something generally considered useful -- to outlaw cocaine. Gay marriage would be similar -- the act of recognizing it actually does something measurable and potentially good. I don't think you can craft anything similar for the easter bunny.
Or maybe your new analogy is drug laws? In that case, what are you trying to change -- get cocaine redefined as something other than a narcotic? In which case, why would you be opposed to doing the same thing for a gay marriage law?
Would you feel the same way if it was, say, the institution of slavery? As a country, we've been over this before.
I'll bet, if you could, you'd establish marriage, heterosexual only, across the country.
Not if they are locked up. Also: What if they are innocent? Why are you in favor of protecting the life of a bundle of cells, or a doll without a brain (literally!), but not an innocent adult who's been wrongfully convicted of a crime?
Most of us agree on some priorities. For instance, you probably feel that abortion is a much bigger issue than, say, whether we call them "french fries" or "freedom fries". I would certainly call this a sane way to prioritize things. I guess I'd assumed that it's self-evident that sentient life is more important to preserve than a bunch of unintelligent cells.
It just seems perverse and backward to me that you'd value life before the magical age of 18, but lump all children together with a fetus whose humanity is debated at best. Frankly, it's an insult to the children -- they have more in common with adult chimps than with first or second trimester fetuses. And that you'd value the life of the fetus more than the life of the mother, whether she's under 18 or not. But as soon as that baby grows up and hits 18, all your "pro-life" stuff goes out the window -- you don't really care.
About marriage: Exactly, well said, not much more I could have said about the subject.
Still, I can't resist stirring up the hive again, so to speak. Does a civil union have to be between two people? Would there be any kind of way of covering polygamy or polyandry, or large hippie/swinger compounds? At what point do you draw the line between a corporation and a civil union?
I won't have to answer those questions, and neither will you, because even in states handling marriage sanely (as civil unions), it will be between two consenting adults. And really, I don't have a problem with that, it was just a thought experiment.
Smart conservatives won't be fooled so easily. Less revenue doesn't automatically mean less spending -- in fact, with the current administration, it means more spending.
Less spending is a stepping stone to smaller government.
Sounds like a step backward to me.
I'll stick to the term "neo-conservatism". Especially because:
Not so long ago, "conservative" did mean fiscal conservatism, and much less rabid social conservatism.
I must have touched a nerve.
Let's try to be rational about fairness -- it is, after all, based on equality, which can certainly be rational. Is it fair that married couples get benefits? Tax breaks, better credit rating, etc?
If you don't want the law to recognize gay marriage, the only rational, fair response is to make the law ignore marriage altogether. Would you be against that? Why?
Regarding the Easter Bunny, you're really reaching here. We know exactly what laws regarding gay marriage would look like. Can you make up any kind of law that in some way recognizes the Easter Bunny?
Once again, your motivation is because you think it's your best shot. If you don't care about gay marriage in Vermont or California, why do you care about it anywhere else? Why do you care if your gay neighbors up the street get hitched?
Funny, have you even tried? At least the far left has, with Libretarianism. Hell, even the TM Movement has, with the Natural Law Party.
And I wonder about your priorities. How do neocons feel about the death penalty? Do "conservatives" even have a position about it? This seems much more important to me than Abortion. You're all for protecting something which may or may not have the consciousness of a flea yet, but you'll kill a fully developed, thinking human?
Or the war, you haven't said a thing about that. It's been said that Republicans are pro-life until the child is born.
I am not saying that you should not have a position about abortion. I understand that it must be an important issue to you. But is it so much more important to you than life after birth?
I would have us not be afraid to have a sense of humor, and yes, I'd have them bash male steriotypes. I'd have to be an utter moron to identify with one closely enough and say "Hey, that's me you're insulting!" It's like the Taco Bell Chihuahua...
Let's just say you need to watch a little more Carlos Mencia, and laugh, and understand.
Perhaps you could give me an example of this retaliation of which you speak? And maybe explain how any of it is directly a result of OMG Ponies?
Also, the headline in your journal calls it "utter mysogynism." This is obviously not true, as I said, to any intelligent woman.
I commented on this already. In order to get people to vote properly, or to convince congressmen to kill Diebold, or to get out in the street, you're going to need a meme, and a more powerful one than "You bring the pitchforks, I'll bring the torches."
I actually agree with this -- reality has a liberal bias. However, unlike Colbert's satirical response -- let me guess, avoid reality? -- I'd say it logically follows that since reality has a liberal bias, liberals are right, and neo-cons are biased.
Let me see:
So, let's add them up:
Me: Three yesses, a don't care, and a no. My strawman conservative: A yes, two 'no's by default, and a schizophrenic no.
So, if you add up the raw count, my strawman conservative said no to four, and is not liberal, and I said no to one, making me very liberal. But, two of the conservative's "no" answers were by default, not because they necessarily agree/disagree with the policy, but because it's hard to remember what a conservative looked like before the neo-cons -- and "conservative" generally means leaving it the hell alone. One of them was schizophrenic -- you can be conservative and believe abortion should be legal, but you don't like Roe v Wade because of the Supreme Court abusing power.
In fact, if we run carefully through the answers and the reasons, I have two definite yesses and one definite no, and two fuzzy answers. My strawman conservative has a definite yes, a definite no, and three fuzzy answers.
So, your test doesn't seem very statistically valid to me, and it certainly doesn't cover the differences that matter to me. Conservatives used to be about small government and fiscal responsibility, and only 2/5 of your questions are about that. It's also not something I care about much -- I do care about responsibility, I don't care about small government, I care much more about whether the government we have is well run. I disagree with neo-conservatives on many other things that I see as much more important:
Democrats are not much better, but many of the issues you've stated are not necessarily Conservative values, and are certainly not things I care as much about. Consider gay marriage. Consider that there are likely gay fiscal conserva
It does have a strong smell of either astroturf or idiocy, possibly both.
But can't we do a bit of that ourselves? Can't we, who actually understand what the word "Meme" means, create a meme of our own, one so successful that it actually changes the world for the better?
Hell, some of us have done this already, for better or for worse, with concepts like AJAX, Extreme/Agile Programming, Google, and Slashdot itself. There's a movie coming out about a political comedian, played by Robin Williams, who runs for President and wins, so basically, John Stewart for President -- but he's too smart to run anyway.
So let's decide on a political, moral, philosophical, and sociological set of ideas, and construct a meme so powerful that by 2008, we will turn this country upside down. Who's with me?
Certainly. Life sucks and then you die. You went on to say:
So what would be more productive? Certainly not a new political party, if the Republicans can simply steal the next election and continue to screw things up in the worst possible way. Fixing or removing the voting machines is a necessary first step towards having a Democracy in the first place, much less a functional one.
And certainly, I'd even prefer Hillary Clinton to GW Bush. I'd much prefer to have violent videogames of any kind (pac-man) banned to anyone under 21 than have real violence going on for no apparent reason (why the fuck did we go into Iraq?), and real people dying for no apparent reason (who's the head of FIMA, again?)
Democrats would be worlds better than Republicans. The muslim world would not love us, but they would have considerably less reason to hate us -- hell, I live here, and I hate America (there, I said it), as much as I love the American dream. 9/11 may have happened, but maybe not -- the Bush admin ignored information we had about Al Qaeda -- and if it did happen, we wouldn't necessarily go into not one, but two pointless wars because of it. The Katrina response may not have been great, but it wouldn't have been so stupendously mishandled.
So, for me, the logical progression goes: Fix the voting system, vote Republicans out, then worry about other ways to fix the system, maybe a new political party, maybe repairing the Democratic party.
Um...how?
No, but it means that I believe your meme will be selected out, while my meme will reproduce and spread, for the simple reason that I am right, and you are wrong.
It seems like you really do believe that dissenters should be silenced or killed.
Remember the boxes: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Use in that order.
Who is denying you the right of #1 and #2? Certainly not the Democrats. Or will you please provide some examples?
I'll go for the one that hasn't been attacked yet.
First, it seems a bit insane to take one statement and condemn an entire community for it. Or should I have said "Oh, I forgot, this is rightdot..." when you made your "drop in the bucket" comment?
Second, you were claiming to speak for Republicans, so we were responding to Republicans in general, not just you. If you really don't believe in banning Gay Marriage, or in killing gays according to Leviticus 20:13, then tell us what you are doing to support it. If you're really an atheist, as you say, tell us what you're doing to prevent us from becoming a church state.
So, if you want to give us a newsflash about how Democrats are destroying the moral foundation of our democracy, don't claim to be a Republican, much less speak for them, because Republicans do seem to believe what we accused you of believing.
Since your journal entry about this appears to be closed for comments, I'll reply here.
Any woman insulted by the OMG Ponies gag is either not very intelligent, or has not seen MySpace. We are not laughing at women in general, we are laughing at stupid teenage girls. Just to make sure you don't miss this, I am referring to those teenage girls who are stupid, not implying that all teenage girls are stupid.
Note also that I do not speak for all Slashdotters, but I suspect many will back me up that the majority of the posts on April 1st were not anti-female in general, but as I said above, anti-stupid-MySpace-teen-girl.
Really, when we make fun of l33tsp33k and Counter-Strike players, when we make fun of Duke Nukem and Bruce Campbell steriotypes, or when we make fun of jocks, we are not making fun of men in general, but a particular breed of stupid men.
If the OMG Ponies really offends you that deeply, I suspect that it's got less to do with it making fun of women, and more to do with it making fun of something you like. Maybe it's the hearts, or the pink, maybe you like ponies but hate OMG, something like that. But IANAT (I Am Not A Therapist), so I don't really know. I do know it doesn't offend all intelligent women -- my mother thought it was absolutely hilarious.