It took me a while to find Tolkien's out of print early works "Legolas' Guide to Shield Surfing" and "Some Notes on the Saxon Phrase - Dwerrow'tossin". Now I can happily say that the films are canonical.
If there weren't deep philosophical aspects that most people miss, then all those cheap Tolkien imitations would have a big, powerful something that the good guys dare not use. Instead, almost everyone for 50 years has done the film or book that goes for the stock plot, where the good guys get the big powerful magic thingee and use it to put the world to rights, and it works. If LOTR is laying the whole story out without subtleties, why do all those imitations act like they still haven't heard that power corrupts?
There's also generally a bad reason that scenes end up on the cutting room floor. That reason is, most novels don't translate well in an under two hour film, and the public at large has an MTV'ed attention span. Editors are under much more pressure to cut, cut, cut than in the era of Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments.
This is the same situation as with computer Pron. Even though qualifying as obscenity requires a lot more than T&A shots, cyber-porn laws have scared a lot of users into deleting soft core files that are normally legal in all 50 states as prints but become possibly illegal if digital. Why? They're concerned that an apparent 18 year old is a 17 year old lieing about her age, or an obvious 27 year old will claim that she was drunk when the picture was taken and didn't give informed consent, and the way the law is phrased, they could be held accountable as though they had hard core pedophile materials on their hard drives. Given that there have been cases where just such distortions happened, I'm not sure those people are paranoid, and I'm not sure the people who deleted all their MP3s are either. Persuit of happiness? That's for people rich enough to have good lawyers on retainer, right?
Is the sun moveing into some more active part of the galaxy? There really aren't any such regions, at least unless you're talking about exotic physics that just might be found near the immense core black holes. It's easy to imagine the sun could change as it moves into areas where there is a higher concentration of gas or dust or something, but it doesn't apply here. Why? 1. the sun is currently in a region comparatively empty of gas and dust. We have an exceptionally low density for at least 100 LY in all directions, with arms or lanes or whatever of exceptionally empty space that extend much further. This situation is something that changes over tens of thousands of years, not just a few. 2. The sun's outflow pushes stuff away. More gas or dust around us won't fall into the sun as fuel, although it might adjust where the heliopause is, perhaps shifting it inwards towards pluto's orbit a bit.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the legal sense, the moment that a consumer is financially compelled to stop considering other software strictly for its normal functions and start including the question of comptability. To put it in the form of the analogy above, as soon as there are major economic consequences to picking a non-ford compatable, and these begin to have an impact similar to the physical reality based choices and conditions that limit the consumer, such as the ground clearance needed for the local roads, that is the very measure of monopoly.
As one example, I attended a state university that required the purchase of Microsoft products for some courses. Did I have alternatives? Of course. I could have changed my major. I could have attended a private university. Both these choices would have cost me several tens of thousands of dollars, but technically no one was holding a gun to my head. What was not allowed was to use another C++ compiler, regardless of its technical merits. By your definition, that's not a monopoly. In fact I can't think of a single monopoly that has ever existed, by your definition. Obviously, there are no monopolies, and anti-trust law is a fraud that creates a null class and pretends to find members of the resulting set. Still, this non-monopoly elevates Microsoft's desire to make that particular sale to the same level as physical law.
I would have been happy with more explanation of specific relationships in the machine society. I wanted to know if agents, the merovingian, the archetect, and others had hardware bodies and projected into the matrix rather than being in there full time, to know which of these entities were truely self aware, which were smarter than humans or on the same general level, and how they ranked hierarchially in their society. For example, I could concieve of the architect being either a low paid flunky of an AI society that had most of its attention focused elsewhere, or a major industrial-political figure among the machines, and would still love to know which. If I'd gotten more of what I wished for, 99% of the other posters would doubtless be complaining about how the film dragged with more needless exposition. M3 only has 2 Hrs. and 10 Min. to give you, me, and everybody else what they want. Even if there's a 4 hour director's cut waiting on DVD, it still won't answer nearly all the questions, and your butt will fall asleep first anyway.
People expect simultaneously too much and too little (SPOILER warning)
Star Wars 6 ended with blowing up a big round thing with a built in satelite dish, just like Star Wars 4. The Matrix 3 ended up with Neo giving in to death and defeating Smith by NOT doing the same thing as the first time but its opposite. Ergo, by some of these posters, the first Star Wars trilogy is brilliant and original, and the Matrix trilogy isn't. Run that last part by me again?
The film's use of Christian symbols seemed to be overbalancing the eastern religius symbols, even while the film's take on Christianity seemed more eastern and possibly gnostic (but more in the gospel according to Thomas way than the hairsplitting way). The theme is more syncretic than the symbolism. This makes the crucifixion symbolism feel a bit heavy handed, as the biggest other symbol set to contrast it seems to be the oracle's tao earrings. Other than that, it was decent. The philosophy part is a bit more mature than Matrix 2, where I kept expecting someone to crtique both the Merovingian's and the Architect's straw man arguements, and M3 actually offered some rebuttals but still missed some of the simplest. In the end, I found myself respecting the intent of the Brothers in sticking almost continuously with the fight scene in Zion and then staying, again near continueously, on Neo and Trinity, rather than intercutting a lot more as many directors would have. Good film, won't be appreciated for a few years, but half the people who didn't like it are going to end up watching it again, and half those will suddenly realize they missed something important the first time around and it does make (some) sense.
One of the big flaws with classical Communism was the whole arguement that the state would eventually wither away amd return control to the people. The State seemed to always manufacture new enemies, either external or internal, instead. Maybe a similar flaw is developing here. The state always seems to erect barriers to everyone operating capitalistically, most often at the behest of those claiming to already be inside the system. There are a lot more people advocating a free market, except when it has adverse consequences for them, than advocating a free market, period.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the meaning of the word Capitalism seems to be going through a shift. Increasingly, it seems to mean compulsory competition across a deliberately unleveled playing field. Everyone has to play a game they know is rigged, or they are Un-American. They HAVE to be going for profit. They HAVE to limit their methods to ones that don't actually have a snowball's chance in hell of out competing the established firms. Both charity and real innovation are equated with communism or worse yet some sort of generic un-being-like-real-mericuns-ism. Your last comment is especially meaningful. This isn't just about Microsoft vrs Linux, it's moving towards an idea that any not-for-profit act endangers the 'right' of slected entities to have a guarenteed profit.
My locale uses electronic machines with a ribbon print out, not of individual votes, but of the totals from each machine. It even is set to assume the need for extra copies, and state regulations make these available to be reviewed by the press or party spot checkers at the time the polls are closed rather than later. The ribbon paper print outs are signed by machine operators and judges, and again, my state requires all signatures be originals and include representitives of both major parties. While it is doubtless not a prefect machine design, the biggest ways to make it more secure at the individual polling place level appear to be human factor issues - More training for operators, the press bothering to get reporters on site to ask for their paper copies, volunteer spot checkers from the political parties being sent out. If enough of this was going on, problems such as more people voteing in a precinct than are registered there would stand out to a lot of observers capable of doing basic math. The first time three machines show 250 votes or so each, and the 4th claims that 16,084 people used it, the press would have to be as crooked as the election riggers, or the public would hear. Right now, the press merely needs to be apathetic, and the parties understaffed, and that's enough.
... Is if this story is accurate, and gets the same sort of coverage in the mainstream US press as all the SCO coverage has so far. It'll never happen, but just imagine a bunch of slashdotters taking advantage of an IPO that catches most of the investment community by surprise.
The right being abridged is the first amendment, not the second. If the ACLU has decided that the first only applies to federally authorized state militias, that would be something. Instead of assumeing they will not support this, maybe we should give them a few days or so and see what their actual policy is.
In my state at least, you can demand a paper ballot. Of course, they are much more time consuming, and generate additional paper in the form of other records (i.e. the election official doesn't have to fill out some forms at all unless at least one person insists on a paper ballot). In the last precinct I worked, we had about 5 paper copies on hand most elections, so if more than 5 people had wanted one, the demand would have resulted in multi-hour delays in voting as new ones were brought out from the county seat and possibly kept some people from voting at all.
The shift towards a dryer western USA seems to be closely related to global warming. (I tend to that explanation because my part of the east has had rain like typical for Washington state rain forests this past year - at one point we were more than 20" over average - we're getting all the water you missed). That situation has been building over the last five years, with shorter and shorter August dry spells and such, but it's really taking off now. So if that explanation is correct, we are talking about treating only one symptom of a bigger problem, and possibly even making the opposite symptom bigger if this method isn't closely controlled. Hey, I really sympathise with you, and hope your part of the west isn't close to the forest fires that are the biggest crisis for right now, or even one of those regions that is shifting from "pretty" desert (with creosote bush and cactus anchoring the sands and some living animals) to bone dry desert. But I suspect this method is going to end up with your politicians fighting my politicians instead of really helping.
The real cut off is higher than that 5,000 US$ limit. It costs the FBI about 15,000, on average, to persue a typical fraud case, and their internal auditing process pushes agents towards investigating cases that have a potential return, in fines and penalties, greater than that limit. This also applies to other departments, such as treasury, for the crimes they investigate, although the exact limit varies a bit. To tie this to another Slashdot favorite topic, now you know why the DCMA is so scary - the 150,000$ per violation limit on possible penalties means federal law enforcement will selectively investigate copyright violation ahead of wire fraud, mail fraud and even some extortion, evidence tampering or securities cases.
This is the first time I have ever seriously wanted to send a post that in effect just says "Me Too". How many exploits have you seen the phrase "Buffer Overflow"?
Do a search for the phrase on websites such as Norton's. Given this, why write code in C at all? C++, like any other code, doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be an order of magnetude or soless vulnerable than C to such a common problem, and it becomes obviously better. Learning C++ for a person who already knows C takes about 10% of the effort of learning it from scratch. Deliberately switching the whole shop to it, or to Java may be harder, but isn't it still simply necessary in today's world?
One 98 IE specific patch I installed reinstalled stock files for solitare (I was running a hacked copy that had custom card backs or I wouldn't have spotted it quickly enough to be sure it was the patch). Why in the lower plane of your choice would solitare contain any code that could be a vulnerability? No wonder patches are bulky, they are apparently either a shotgun approach to the problem, or they are fixing lots of things besides what they claim to fix.
If a script kiddy can hose million of systems, then a real pro has already quietly abstracted all useful data from the thousand that looked most interesting. "He" is all done stealing everything he wanted, and didn't leave fingerprints. He's not hacking that exploit anymore, he's committing identity theft or insider trading with the information he got six months before the script kiddy learned about the same vulnerability. The guys who are a quarter as good as he is are the ones who tell the script kiddys and write the scripts. If you can't catch them, you don't even know how to look for him. Military perspective is right, you stop this guy by making it a war, if that.
It's been five years now since Harry Potter first brought a bunch of new mostly 10-14 year olds into reading. Those kids now mostly fall in the 15 to 19 demographic, and hey, just maybe some of them are still reading regularly. Books have a lot of the features of games. They're interactive, have few if any commercials, and they allow time shifting for us busy moderns on the go. If reading has caught on enough to affect TV, I hate to say it, but just maybe J K Rowling has saved western civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a while to find Tolkien's out of print early works "Legolas' Guide to Shield Surfing" and "Some Notes on the Saxon Phrase - Dwerrow'tossin". Now I can happily say that the films are canonical.
If there weren't deep philosophical aspects that most people miss, then all those cheap Tolkien imitations would have a big, powerful something that the good guys dare not use. Instead, almost everyone for 50 years has done the film or book that goes for the stock plot, where the good guys get the big powerful magic thingee and use it to put the world to rights, and it works. If LOTR is laying the whole story out without subtleties, why do all those imitations act like they still haven't heard that power corrupts?
There's also generally a bad reason that scenes end up on the cutting room floor. That reason is, most novels don't translate well in an under two hour film, and the public at large has an MTV'ed attention span. Editors are under much more pressure to cut, cut, cut than in the era of Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments.
This is the same situation as with computer Pron. Even though qualifying as obscenity requires a lot more than T&A shots, cyber-porn laws have scared a lot of users into deleting soft core files that are normally legal in all 50 states as prints but become possibly illegal if digital. Why? They're concerned that an apparent 18 year old is a 17 year old lieing about her age, or an obvious 27 year old will claim that she was drunk when the picture was taken and didn't give informed consent, and the way the law is phrased, they could be held accountable as though they had hard core pedophile materials on their hard drives. Given that there have been cases where just such distortions happened, I'm not sure those people are paranoid, and I'm not sure the people who deleted all their MP3s are either. Persuit of happiness? That's for people rich enough to have good lawyers on retainer, right?
1. The book is Revelation, singular. 2. Christian witnessing as an AC is unlikely to count for much.
Is the sun moveing into some more active part of the galaxy? There really aren't any such regions, at least unless you're talking about exotic physics that just might be found near the immense core black holes. It's easy to imagine the sun could change as it moves into areas where there is a higher concentration of gas or dust or something, but it doesn't apply here. Why? 1. the sun is currently in a region comparatively empty of gas and dust. We have an exceptionally low density for at least 100 LY in all directions, with arms or lanes or whatever of exceptionally empty space that extend much further. This situation is something that changes over tens of thousands of years, not just a few. 2. The sun's outflow pushes stuff away. More gas or dust around us won't fall into the sun as fuel, although it might adjust where the heliopause is, perhaps shifting it inwards towards pluto's orbit a bit.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the legal sense, the moment that a consumer is financially compelled to stop considering other software strictly for its normal functions and start including the question of comptability. To put it in the form of the analogy above, as soon as there are major economic consequences to picking a non-ford compatable, and these begin to have an impact similar to the physical reality based choices and conditions that limit the consumer, such as the ground clearance needed for the local roads, that is the very measure of monopoly. As one example, I attended a state university that required the purchase of Microsoft products for some courses. Did I have alternatives? Of course. I could have changed my major. I could have attended a private university. Both these choices would have cost me several tens of thousands of dollars, but technically no one was holding a gun to my head. What was not allowed was to use another C++ compiler, regardless of its technical merits. By your definition, that's not a monopoly. In fact I can't think of a single monopoly that has ever existed, by your definition. Obviously, there are no monopolies, and anti-trust law is a fraud that creates a null class and pretends to find members of the resulting set. Still, this non-monopoly elevates Microsoft's desire to make that particular sale to the same level as physical law.
Unless either all fines are indexed to inflation or none are, doesn't that situation represent a violation of the doctrine of equal justice under law?
I would have been happy with more explanation of specific relationships in the machine society. I wanted to know if agents, the merovingian, the archetect, and others had hardware bodies and projected into the matrix rather than being in there full time, to know which of these entities were truely self aware, which were smarter than humans or on the same general level, and how they ranked hierarchially in their society. For example, I could concieve of the architect being either a low paid flunky of an AI society that had most of its attention focused elsewhere, or a major industrial-political figure among the machines, and would still love to know which. If I'd gotten more of what I wished for, 99% of the other posters would doubtless be complaining about how the film dragged with more needless exposition. M3 only has 2 Hrs. and 10 Min. to give you, me, and everybody else what they want. Even if there's a 4 hour director's cut waiting on DVD, it still won't answer nearly all the questions, and your butt will fall asleep first anyway.
People expect simultaneously too much and too little (SPOILER warning) Star Wars 6 ended with blowing up a big round thing with a built in satelite dish, just like Star Wars 4. The Matrix 3 ended up with Neo giving in to death and defeating Smith by NOT doing the same thing as the first time but its opposite. Ergo, by some of these posters, the first Star Wars trilogy is brilliant and original, and the Matrix trilogy isn't. Run that last part by me again?
The film's use of Christian symbols seemed to be overbalancing the eastern religius symbols, even while the film's take on Christianity seemed more eastern and possibly gnostic (but more in the gospel according to Thomas way than the hairsplitting way). The theme is more syncretic than the symbolism. This makes the crucifixion symbolism feel a bit heavy handed, as the biggest other symbol set to contrast it seems to be the oracle's tao earrings. Other than that, it was decent. The philosophy part is a bit more mature than Matrix 2, where I kept expecting someone to crtique both the Merovingian's and the Architect's straw man arguements, and M3 actually offered some rebuttals but still missed some of the simplest. In the end, I found myself respecting the intent of the Brothers in sticking almost continuously with the fight scene in Zion and then staying, again near continueously, on Neo and Trinity, rather than intercutting a lot more as many directors would have. Good film, won't be appreciated for a few years, but half the people who didn't like it are going to end up watching it again, and half those will suddenly realize they missed something important the first time around and it does make (some) sense.
One of the big flaws with classical Communism was the whole arguement that the state would eventually wither away amd return control to the people. The State seemed to always manufacture new enemies, either external or internal, instead. Maybe a similar flaw is developing here. The state always seems to erect barriers to everyone operating capitalistically, most often at the behest of those claiming to already be inside the system. There are a lot more people advocating a free market, except when it has adverse consequences for them, than advocating a free market, period.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the meaning of the word Capitalism seems to be going through a shift. Increasingly, it seems to mean compulsory competition across a deliberately unleveled playing field. Everyone has to play a game they know is rigged, or they are Un-American. They HAVE to be going for profit. They HAVE to limit their methods to ones that don't actually have a snowball's chance in hell of out competing the established firms. Both charity and real innovation are equated with communism or worse yet some sort of generic un-being-like-real-mericuns-ism. Your last comment is especially meaningful. This isn't just about Microsoft vrs Linux, it's moving towards an idea that any not-for-profit act endangers the 'right' of slected entities to have a guarenteed profit.
Dibs on Raquel (v 1963)
My locale uses electronic machines with a ribbon print out, not of individual votes, but of the totals from each machine. It even is set to assume the need for extra copies, and state regulations make these available to be reviewed by the press or party spot checkers at the time the polls are closed rather than later. The ribbon paper print outs are signed by machine operators and judges, and again, my state requires all signatures be originals and include representitives of both major parties. While it is doubtless not a prefect machine design, the biggest ways to make it more secure at the individual polling place level appear to be human factor issues - More training for operators, the press bothering to get reporters on site to ask for their paper copies, volunteer spot checkers from the political parties being sent out. If enough of this was going on, problems such as more people voteing in a precinct than are registered there would stand out to a lot of observers capable of doing basic math. The first time three machines show 250 votes or so each, and the 4th claims that 16,084 people used it, the press would have to be as crooked as the election riggers, or the public would hear. Right now, the press merely needs to be apathetic, and the parties understaffed, and that's enough.
Or GE?
... Is if this story is accurate, and gets the same sort of coverage in the mainstream US press as all the SCO coverage has so far. It'll never happen, but just imagine a bunch of slashdotters taking advantage of an IPO that catches most of the investment community by surprise.
The right being abridged is the first amendment, not the second. If the ACLU has decided that the first only applies to federally authorized state militias, that would be something. Instead of assumeing they will not support this, maybe we should give them a few days or so and see what their actual policy is.
In my state at least, you can demand a paper ballot. Of course, they are much more time consuming, and generate additional paper in the form of other records (i.e. the election official doesn't have to fill out some forms at all unless at least one person insists on a paper ballot). In the last precinct I worked, we had about 5 paper copies on hand most elections, so if more than 5 people had wanted one, the demand would have resulted in multi-hour delays in voting as new ones were brought out from the county seat and possibly kept some people from voting at all.
The shift towards a dryer western USA seems to be closely related to global warming. (I tend to that explanation because my part of the east has had rain like typical for Washington state rain forests this past year - at one point we were more than 20" over average - we're getting all the water you missed). That situation has been building over the last five years, with shorter and shorter August dry spells and such, but it's really taking off now. So if that explanation is correct, we are talking about treating only one symptom of a bigger problem, and possibly even making the opposite symptom bigger if this method isn't closely controlled. Hey, I really sympathise with you, and hope your part of the west isn't close to the forest fires that are the biggest crisis for right now, or even one of those regions that is shifting from "pretty" desert (with creosote bush and cactus anchoring the sands and some living animals) to bone dry desert. But I suspect this method is going to end up with your politicians fighting my politicians instead of really helping.
The real cut off is higher than that 5,000 US$ limit. It costs the FBI about 15,000, on average, to persue a typical fraud case, and their internal auditing process pushes agents towards investigating cases that have a potential return, in fines and penalties, greater than that limit. This also applies to other departments, such as treasury, for the crimes they investigate, although the exact limit varies a bit. To tie this to another Slashdot favorite topic, now you know why the DCMA is so scary - the 150,000$ per violation limit on possible penalties means federal law enforcement will selectively investigate copyright violation ahead of wire fraud, mail fraud and even some extortion, evidence tampering or securities cases.
This is the first time I have ever seriously wanted to send a post that in effect just says "Me Too". How many exploits have you seen the phrase "Buffer Overflow"? Do a search for the phrase on websites such as Norton's. Given this, why write code in C at all? C++, like any other code, doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be an order of magnetude or soless vulnerable than C to such a common problem, and it becomes obviously better. Learning C++ for a person who already knows C takes about 10% of the effort of learning it from scratch. Deliberately switching the whole shop to it, or to Java may be harder, but isn't it still simply necessary in today's world?
One 98 IE specific patch I installed reinstalled stock files for solitare (I was running a hacked copy that had custom card backs or I wouldn't have spotted it quickly enough to be sure it was the patch). Why in the lower plane of your choice would solitare contain any code that could be a vulnerability? No wonder patches are bulky, they are apparently either a shotgun approach to the problem, or they are fixing lots of things besides what they claim to fix.
If a script kiddy can hose million of systems, then a real pro has already quietly abstracted all useful data from the thousand that looked most interesting. "He" is all done stealing everything he wanted, and didn't leave fingerprints. He's not hacking that exploit anymore, he's committing identity theft or insider trading with the information he got six months before the script kiddy learned about the same vulnerability. The guys who are a quarter as good as he is are the ones who tell the script kiddys and write the scripts. If you can't catch them, you don't even know how to look for him. Military perspective is right, you stop this guy by making it a war, if that.
It's been five years now since Harry Potter first brought a bunch of new mostly 10-14 year olds into reading. Those kids now mostly fall in the 15 to 19 demographic, and hey, just maybe some of them are still reading regularly. Books have a lot of the features of games. They're interactive, have few if any commercials, and they allow time shifting for us busy moderns on the go. If reading has caught on enough to affect TV, I hate to say it, but just maybe J K Rowling has saved western civilization.