3. Between the good and the 'bad' mutants; though the 'bad' get a bad rap for nearsighted reasons. This is really a conflict between lawful and chaotic, in AD&D terms. Xavier wants to play by the rules, while to Magneto, the old rules are no longer applicable and new ones should be enforced.
This is very insightful. It really strikes to the heart of the difference, not only between Magneto and Xavier (and their respective followers), but, say, Batman vs. Superman as well.
Jon Katz may have been looking at Magneto (Magento -- ha ha) as though this was supposed to be a typical summer action flick. I mean, in "Mystery Men," the bad guy was just bad, as bad guys are, and we should always root against them and hate them strongly, that was that, and that's the way it is and was and will be, forever and ever, amen. I'm surprised that Katz didn't APPLAUD the 3-dimensionality of Magneto.
The multiplicity of conflict here was terrific. Magneto is a 'bad guy,' kinda, but so is Senator Kelly, and Xavier is fighting both of them, kinda. A triangle. And Kelly is arguing with other politicians, and so on, so it gets to be a very multidimensionsal thing. Cool and geeky.
Malcolm X allegory (also Communists & Jews)
on
Slashdot Meets X-Men
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· Score: 1
I saw at least 3 almost-explicit allusions to oppressed groups. 1) Magneto survived the Holocaust. 2) Senator Kelly might as well have a flashing neon sign on his head reading "I AM A McCARTHY FIGURE." 3) Magneto's "by any means necessary" remark, referring to Malcolm X. (Lovegoat makes this same point a bit further down in this thread.)
The intent of the moderation system is laudable. Many Slashdot users, however, have quite loudly complained that moderation isn't working. (I've written a paper about/., partly about the moderation system; e-mail me for it.)
But what would you suggest? Most communities online have faced declining signal-to-noise ratios ever since they got popular. I see a wide range of opinions on/., truly informative and insightful and interesting and funny comments, often thought-provoking discussion, sometimes heated anti-Taco-et-al. comments...and I surf at +1, sometimes 0.
Check out Advogato, or Kuro5hin, or one of the other "Like Slashdot Only [X]" sites that/. inspired, in whole or in part. How would you solve the problem that/. has tried to solve, without some way to note which comments were more interesting than others, and more worth a user's time?
I'm not trying to directly refute you, just to make a point about what some people believe about teaching nontraditional literature -- that is, teaching literature that wouldn't have been taught in literature classes in 1950s US high schools.
I took an Advanced Placement World Literature class at my high school two or three years ago. And I found that some nonWestern writers -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that one Japanese writer who wrote "Spring Storm" whose name I can't recall, Chinua Achebe -- bring a fundamentally different sensibility to literature. Sense of narrative, tone, colloquialism...
...by studying the great works of other cultures, we learn about those cultures more than we do by doing 'Diversity Weeks' of food, dance, and ethnic dress. Literature teaches us about the values that underly all the other cultural stuff. And I think it would defeat this purpose if the only nonWestern works you read were indistinguishable from western works. Faulker is distinctly Southern, Frost conveys the sensibilities of his adopted home of New England, Burns is Irish, and you can tell that from their writing. Why shouldn't we read really good works that convey Africannness, or Indianness, or Japaneseness?
I think it helps to have background material on a culture before you read something that was produced by a member of that culture. Would you want to read "Absalom! Absalom!" without knowing about the Civil War? In the same way, "Cry, the Beloved Country" doesn't make much sense unless you know about apartheid; "A Suitable Boy" requires a little foreknowledge of Partition (India), etc. So some context lets a book say more. So "This is Fubar from Mexico who's saying this" might be NECESSARY to understand the work.
Just a little rant, go back to X-Men nostalgia now.
I find it really interesting that you refer to the attempt at tyranny by the movie studios as an 'inescapable evil,' or at least imply that it's such. If the people that they count on as customers bitch a little but never DO anything about it, e.g., vote with their pocketbooks, then and only then will it be inescapable. That's the beauty of the market.
And you refer to a boycott of plaintiff movie studios as a 'martyr campaign.' I hardly think it's martyrdom on a level akin to Gandhi to refuse to support movie studios that are doing things you don't like. Conscious consumption helps eradicate evil. "Inescapable evil" is person-to-person human nature stuff. I seriously doubt that we could never escape the major-studio apparatus and its evils.
As I see it, either you're fine with what the studios are doing wrt DeCSS, or you're ignorant of the situation (which seems implausible, since you read Slashdot), or you don't think it's right but you're not willing to lose a luxury or two to stand up for what's right. Hell, I never asked you to stand in a picket line, only to stop actively funding the oppression.
BTW, some of those internet-distributed films are pretty good. Have you seen "George Lucas in Love"?
This site helps you see which movie studios are supporting the DeCSS case launched against 2600 Magazine et al.
X-Men: 20th Century Fox, plaintiff in DeCSS lawsuit
I wish I could see this movie, but I don't think I will, not paying money, anyway. If I do, it will be with a sad heart. It hurts to be a conscious consumer sometimes.
Maybe I can make up for it with my DeCSS page. Or maybe not.
This was SUCH a spoiler. CmdrTaco should have put the secret in the "Read More" portion of the post. Now I can't see Blade Runner fresh. BE more considerate next time, please.
It's sad to think that the inevitable result of/. growth is a decline in quality. I don't know. E-mail me for my essay on why/. got popular. However, lack of user feedback incorporation isn't very open source. K5 is a/. refugee camp, and might replace/. -- already has, to many former Slashdotter. Might want to visit it. Not quite 'forking' in the classic CatB sense, but kinda.
Andrew Leonard's FSP is something better than 'lame-ass.' It shows promise and might be one of the definitive histories of hackerdom. Read the chapter about the bamboo and you'll see what I mean.
As for hoping for Salon's death, you're being such an ass. Sure, there are some writers whose work I could do without, but Salon is not just one entity. Some writers are good, some are bad, some I like, some I don't. Just because "Mr. Blue" is lame doesn't make you like Paglia any less, right? And it doesn't make Leonard less of a cool writer to work there. Generalizations, self-righteousness, and overall misanthropy. Not so good, Al.
Andrew Leonard, the FSP writer, will probably go on with the FSP with or without Salon, but I hope Salon lives a while. There's some incredible writing in their archives, and I'd hate to see it all die.
I read Salon regularly and yes, there are horrible sections, and much of the first-person stuff sounds like wannabe riotgrrrl prose or English grad-student writing with the worst academic habits, but note that Andrew Leonard and such are getting free software evangelism closer to the mainstream. Salon is also something quite different than anything I get anywhere else, and to me the good articles outnumber the bad. At least the movie reviews aren't desperately bad.
In the case of the computer boom, one can argue much more plausibly that the commoditization of cheap PC hardware was the primary cause of the boom of computers, and the software which runs on them, than Bill Gates' petty greed or precident setting copyright were.
Neal Stephenson writes in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" that MS's insistence that Windows would run on any PC (as opposed to Apple's hardware monopoly) helped create the sea of cheap "commoditized" PCs (which, incidentally, helped spawn Linux).
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, noeld@pair.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
I was on the street (2nd Street, to be specific) in San Francisco on Sunday, and saw a sticker on the back of a STOP sign. "MP3 IS NOT A CRIME," it had once said, à la "Skateboarding is not a crime." Funny thing is, the "NOT" had been ripped away. My partner in book hunting postulated that the RIAA employs at least one person to jam such culturejamming.
The gold rush and its discontents
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 3
The Gold Rush of the last century -- er, the nineteenth century -- had prostitution and almost-slavery of Chinese workers and horrible environmental abuse and farmers getting dispossessed and other bad things.
Let's see what social problems we have found in the New Gold Rush:
Domestic violence (as per article in SF Weekly) among immigrants, hard to stop because a woman's right to stay in the US often depends on staying married to a man who works in the US
Age discrimination, which happens -- the anecdotes form a pattern, even if it's hard to study statistically (for the reasons stated in the Merc article). Employers are looking for just-out-of-college youngsters who will work hard and long hours for less pay, cheap perks, and a social atmosphere. They don't want to pay older people more for fewer hours; they foolishly look for specific skills instead of aptitudes (the "required: fifteen years of Linux experience" joke). They're also hungry for more cheap H-1B workers (see previous/. discussions).
Environmental disaster from chip making (see previous/. discussion), plastic wrap using, the paving over of viable farmland, the foreseeable mess that is/will be Silicon Valley urban patterns, etc.
It really is a new gold rush, a hundred and fifty years later. Yes, it has changed the world. Yes, it will have lasting effects, good, and bad. Yes, when people are chasing after money, the unsavory parts of human nature come out in full force. Lee Iacocca said in _Talking_Straight_ (the sequel to his autobiography) that his parents told him not to go to casinos; all that loose cash lying around attracted the worst kinds of characters. He compared Wall Street in the 1980s to such a casino; one could easily move the analogy to Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, if we don't change (due to external or internal forces), the Naughties.
Prodigies in math, music -- programming?
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 3
I remember reading once that "experts" (that nebulous phrase) only allow for the existence of prodigies in two fields: music and math. That is, young people (espec. children) can only be as good as adults in those two fields. Perhaps we should add programming to that list. Of course, that depends on how much you think programming is independent of other skills that we can only learn through growth and time and maturity.
The villain -- the very first time we see him at his estate, he has this look on his face that reminds me of Dr. Evil.
If I could hear his thoughts, they'd be saying: "I'm eeeeeeevil. And I like it."
There were SO many lines in the movie that I (and others in the theater) just couldn't keep ourselves from laughing at! And, of course, the burning doorway-smoke-dove-Hawke-slo-mo John-Woo-wants-you-to-know-this-is-HIS-film-dammit shot.
Gladiator was better, if implausible in its own way. At least it had thought and political import. Replace "Rome" with "The U.S." and you had something to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
What is WITH this? Is there some secret subliminal message in the Slashcode that makes people misspell the names of X-Men characters as colors?
What next?
Kelly as Aqua-Man?
This is very insightful. It really strikes to the heart of the difference, not only between Magneto and Xavier (and their respective followers), but, say, Batman vs. Superman as well.
Jon Katz may have been looking at Magneto (Magento -- ha ha) as though this was supposed to be a typical summer action flick. I mean, in "Mystery Men," the bad guy was just bad, as bad guys are, and we should always root against them and hate them strongly, that was that, and that's the way it is and was and will be, forever and ever, amen. I'm surprised that Katz didn't APPLAUD the 3-dimensionality of Magneto.
The multiplicity of conflict here was terrific. Magneto is a 'bad guy,' kinda, but so is Senator Kelly, and Xavier is fighting both of them, kinda. A triangle. And Kelly is arguing with other politicians, and so on, so it gets to be a very multidimensionsal thing. Cool and geeky.
I saw at least 3 almost-explicit allusions to oppressed groups.
1) Magneto survived the Holocaust.
2) Senator Kelly might as well have a flashing neon sign on his head reading "I AM A McCARTHY FIGURE."
3) Magneto's "by any means necessary" remark, referring to Malcolm X. (Lovegoat makes this same point a bit further down in this thread.)
But what would you suggest? Most communities online have faced declining signal-to-noise ratios ever since they got popular. I see a wide range of opinions on /., truly informative and insightful and interesting and funny comments, often thought-provoking discussion, sometimes heated anti-Taco-et-al. comments...and I surf at +1, sometimes 0.
Check out Advogato, or Kuro5hin, or one of the other "Like Slashdot Only [X]" sites that /. inspired, in whole or in part. How would you solve the problem that /. has tried to solve, without some way to note which comments were more interesting than others, and more worth a user's time?
I took an Advanced Placement World Literature class at my high school two or three years ago. And I found that some nonWestern writers -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that one Japanese writer who wrote "Spring Storm" whose name I can't recall, Chinua Achebe -- bring a fundamentally different sensibility to literature. Sense of narrative, tone, colloquialism...
...by studying the great works of other cultures, we learn about those cultures more than we do by doing 'Diversity Weeks' of food, dance, and ethnic dress. Literature teaches us about the values that underly all the other cultural stuff. And I think it would defeat this purpose if the only nonWestern works you read were indistinguishable from western works. Faulker is distinctly Southern, Frost conveys the sensibilities of his adopted home of New England, Burns is Irish, and you can tell that from their writing. Why shouldn't we read really good works that convey Africannness, or Indianness, or Japaneseness?
I think it helps to have background material on a culture before you read something that was produced by a member of that culture. Would you want to read "Absalom! Absalom!" without knowing about the Civil War? In the same way, "Cry, the Beloved Country" doesn't make much sense unless you know about apartheid; "A Suitable Boy" requires a little foreknowledge of Partition (India), etc. So some context lets a book say more. So "This is Fubar from Mexico who's saying this" might be NECESSARY to understand the work.
Just a little rant, go back to X-Men nostalgia now.
My question was, what would we ask her that we wouldn't ask her husband, and vice versa? And why would we ask those things differently?
And you refer to a boycott of plaintiff movie studios as a 'martyr campaign.' I hardly think it's martyrdom on a level akin to Gandhi to refuse to support movie studios that are doing things you don't like. Conscious consumption helps eradicate evil. "Inescapable evil" is person-to-person human nature stuff. I seriously doubt that we could never escape the major-studio apparatus and its evils.
As I see it, either you're fine with what the studios are doing wrt DeCSS, or you're ignorant of the situation (which seems implausible, since you read Slashdot), or you don't think it's right but you're not willing to lose a luxury or two to stand up for what's right. Hell, I never asked you to stand in a picket line, only to stop actively funding the oppression.
BTW, some of those internet-distributed films are pretty good. Have you seen "George Lucas in Love"?
X-Men: 20th Century Fox, plaintiff in DeCSS lawsuit
I wish I could see this movie, but I don't think I will, not paying money, anyway. If I do, it will be with a sad heart. It hurts to be a conscious consumer sometimes.
Maybe I can make up for it with my DeCSS page. Or maybe not.
Interesting, though -- what would we ask Deb differently than we ask Ian?
Thank you. I am VERY glad you chose to give a spoiler alert, unlike CmdrTaco. Argh.
This was SUCH a spoiler. CmdrTaco should have put the secret in the "Read More" portion of the post. Now I can't see Blade Runner fresh. BE more considerate next time, please.
It's sad to think that the inevitable result of /. growth is a decline in quality. I don't know. /. got popular. However, lack of user feedback incorporation isn't very open source. K5 is a /. refugee camp, and might replace /. -- already has, to many former Slashdotter. Might want to visit it. Not quite 'forking' in the classic CatB sense, but kinda.
E-mail me for my essay on why
In Bangalore (the software capital) there are more computer users, and therefore more Linux users. Still a minority, but a growing one.
Wait, it's blowing away! F***king tiny servers...
As for hoping for Salon's death, you're being such an ass. Sure, there are some writers whose work I could do without, but Salon is not just one entity. Some writers are good, some are bad, some I like, some I don't. Just because "Mr. Blue" is lame doesn't make you like Paglia any less, right? And it doesn't make Leonard less of a cool writer to work there. Generalizations, self-righteousness, and overall misanthropy. Not so good, Al.
Andrew Leonard, the FSP writer, will probably go on with the FSP with or without Salon, but I hope Salon lives a while. There's some incredible writing in their archives, and I'd hate to see it all die.
I read Salon regularly and yes, there are horrible sections, and much of the first-person stuff sounds like wannabe riotgrrrl prose or English grad-student writing with the worst academic habits, but note that Andrew Leonard and such are getting free software evangelism closer to the mainstream. Salon is also something quite different than anything I get anywhere else, and to me the good articles outnumber the bad. At least the movie reviews aren't desperately bad.
Neal Stephenson writes in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" that MS's insistence that Windows would run on any PC (as opposed to Apple's hardware monopoly) helped create the sea of cheap "commoditized" PCs (which, incidentally, helped spawn Linux).
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, noeld@pair.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
couldn't spawn child process:
/usr/www/cgi-bin/php-cgiwrap
Noel, please fix! I was about to read the last installment! The suspense is unbearable.
Do you suppose the reviewer uses the word "grab-ass" often to refer to screenwriting?
The book is available for free, via Project Gutenberg. Flatland, by Edwin Abbott
Gosh, you're prolific. I enjoy your work immensely. Could you contact me so I can praise you further?
I was on the street (2nd Street, to be specific) in San Francisco on Sunday, and saw a sticker on the back of a STOP sign. "MP3 IS NOT A CRIME," it had once said, à la "Skateboarding is not a crime." Funny thing is, the "NOT" had been ripped away. My partner in book hunting postulated that the RIAA employs at least one person to jam such culturejamming.
Let's see what social problems we have found in the New Gold Rush:
Domestic violence (as per article in SF Weekly) among immigrants, hard to stop because a woman's right to stay in the US often depends on staying married to a man who works in the US
Age discrimination, which happens -- the anecdotes form a pattern, even if it's hard to study statistically (for the reasons stated in the Merc article). Employers are looking for just-out-of-college youngsters who will work hard and long hours for less pay, cheap perks, and a social atmosphere. They don't want to pay older people more for fewer hours; they foolishly look for specific skills instead of aptitudes (the "required: fifteen years of Linux experience" joke). They're also hungry for more cheap H-1B workers (see previous /. discussions).
Environmental disaster from chip making (see previous /. discussion), plastic wrap using, the paving over of viable farmland, the foreseeable mess that is/will be Silicon Valley urban patterns, etc.
It really is a new gold rush, a hundred and fifty years later. Yes, it has changed the world. Yes, it will have lasting effects, good, and bad. Yes, when people are chasing after money, the unsavory parts of human nature come out in full force. Lee Iacocca said in _Talking_Straight_ (the sequel to his autobiography) that his parents told him not to go to casinos; all that loose cash lying around attracted the worst kinds of characters. He compared Wall Street in the 1980s to such a casino; one could easily move the analogy to Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, if we don't change (due to external or internal forces), the Naughties.
I remember reading once that "experts" (that nebulous phrase) only allow for the existence of prodigies in two fields: music and math. That is, young people (espec. children) can only be as good as adults in those two fields. Perhaps we should add programming to that list. Of course, that depends on how much you think programming is independent of other skills that we can only learn through growth and time and maturity.
If I could hear his thoughts, they'd be saying: "I'm eeeeeeevil. And I like it."
There were SO many lines in the movie that I (and others in the theater) just couldn't keep ourselves from laughing at! And, of course, the burning doorway-smoke-dove-Hawke-slo-mo John-Woo-wants-you-to-know-this-is-HIS-film-dammit shot.
Gladiator was better, if implausible in its own way. At least it had thought and political import. Replace "Rome" with "The U.S." and you had something to think about.