There is a gap between writing for academics and writing for the public.
And I don't get where you see this dichotomy. Tolkien's work was ignored by academia for decades. While The Lord of the Rings sold in modest amounts for the first few years, its sales jumped in the 1960s through ordinary people (often young, idealistic, and of an anti-academic bent) simply falling in love with the world it depicted. I take it you don't listen to much rock music of the 60s and 70s, where Tolkien was allued to by a number of acts. In part because of this popular following, the book was not widely discussed in academia until nearly half a century had passed since its publication.
And the point I was trying to make in my post above is that both Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon classics that inspired him have more appeal for ordinary readers than you are willing to credit them with, in spite of their lack of women and the strict societies they depict. Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation didn't become a bestseller -- and it continues to stay in print as a ordinary paperback -- based just on a couple of hundred academics.
You know what's funny, you blast systemd as insecure yet it is every init based system with Bash installed (most of them, though certainly not all)
Debian (you know, the topic of this discussion) and its many derived distros like Ubuntu had for many years used dash as their/bin/sh. Init wasn't passing anything to bash. Indeed, the switch was made because dash offered faster boot times for a script-based init system than bash.
Get off your high horse. Slackware's init system intentionally follows a BSD model, not the model of nearly all other Linux systems. One can have vast experience with an array of Linux distros and still have to do some retraining when confronted with Slackware.
Debian is a lost cause. From Gnome 3 to Systemd they've lost their independence.
Debian's offering of Gnome 3 and Systemd are not comparable. Gnome 3 is only the default desktop for people who just want to click through the installer. But you can completely avoid Gnome 3, and indeed many people do because they do e.g. headless server installations or choose another GUI. Systemd, however, is spreading through so much of the system that it may not be possible to avoiding installing it. Even if one hangs on to sysvinit as one's init system, programs like Gimp on Debian now end up pulling in systemd libs.
I was really unhappy with Debian's move to systemd, and the fact that once systemd is running as one's init system through a general upgrade, one cannot even go back to sysvinit..
Having heard that Slackware was resistant to systemd, I installed the latest version of Slackware on a netbook I have lying around, and while it's a fine project that clearly has its fans, it seems to require a lot of retraining for someone coming from Debian. I'd love to be able to stay on the venerable old Linux distro I have so many years of experience in.
OK, I understand. "Your perspective" is that if revolutionaries commit violent acts against a peaceful opposition and betray the very cause they claim to fight for (namely "individual liberty"), then the guilt for this is not to be found in the revolutionaries who killed people peaceably advocating a different system, but in the prior political regime or the impersonal historical forces that gave them "no choice but to revolt" violently. Just claiming oppression and presenting yourself as an enlightened circle freeing the masses from bondage excuses you for killing, beating or burning down the houses of a portion of those masses. Thanks for clarifying your views.
For what it's worth, I took a degree in Classics and, in the course of my Greek studies, I read the Republic along with several other Socratic dialogues. Yes, it's an interesting text (I still take my trusty Oxford Classical Texts copy down from the shelf every year or so to re-read the vision of Er), but among the rich variety of political viewpoints in the world and counter-arguments, it really counts for little, and for you to point to it as authoritive for your personal political views (and to post so obsessively about your political views in this news website on a variety of topics) just makes you look like a crank.
After the US has spent years and billions of dollars on e.g. biosphere research with the technology available to them at the time, the Chinese for example might just wait and see, and then outpace the US with more advanced technology available to them after the US has exhausted itself. The problem with taking the first step into a technology-heavy field, where the political will to continue investment might collapse after one or two presidential administrations, is that later entrants can coast on your achievements. So, why bother?
I reread the books and honestly, it was better than Tolkien. Tolkien's stories show their age with their writing and lack of modern attitudes, no women, classist social structures sometimes bordering on racism.
While you may feel the movies were more reflective of a contemporary spirit than Tolkien, it's curious that you feel that this automatically makes them better. After all, Tolkien spent his entire career teaching young people that there was much to enjoy in ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, which also had few women and were rooted in classist social structures. Considering that Beowulf isn't only read as a boring school assignment, it sells decently to a readership that actually wants to read it, then why not consider Tolkien in the same way?
There were plenty of loyalists who were not really loyal, but saw the opportunity for personal gain at the expense of others.
OK, some loyalists were turning in revolutionaries. What about the many thousands of others who did nothing but publicly voice a desire to remain under Britain? Where was the revolutionaries' love of "individual liberty" in openly persecuting them?
Before the Lord of the Rings movies, I used to think that Tolkien could not be brought to the big screen.
Tolkien was brought to the big screen only through massive compromises with the original material. I'm not even talking about cuts made to the novels that only anoraks would take issue with, like the Tom Bombadill episode being left out.
I'm talking about things like adding a female character for the sake of a love triangle, neither of which was in Tolkien's world. (Even more disturbing, they did it with an actress who has already been used in an earlier role to provide a tiresome love triangle that helps cash in on a typical soap opera audience). Some of the visual choices also jar with Tolkien's brand of storytelling, like in a battle scene when one character is struck down and then his comrades turn around, suddenly in slow motion and mouths agape in shock, to a saccharine soundtrack by Howard Shore.
Of course, the result was a huge hit, but one wonders how much that was really due to Tolkien, and not the series of Hollywood tropes that the story was fit within.
British rule over the US is a prime example that every US student should learn in public schools. People took a lot of crap from the Brits for a long time, and there was a point where momentum changed and we had a revolt.
British rule over the US is a prime example that every American should learn from serious scholarship, not the national myths presented in school textbooks (the US is no exception to the trend for school textbooks in any country to be an idealized depiction of history for the sake of patriotism). The "momentum changing" which you refer to wasn't just public opinion swaying through peaceful debate, it was revolutionaries e.g. burning down the houses of that significant portion of the population that remained loyal to Britain. Decent people had to live in fear and keep their mouths shut, or were driven into exile in Canada or the British Caribbean, just because they liked things the way they were.
When you speak with great anticipation of another revolution, one wonders if you respect rule of law and respect for your community at all, as long as a violent struggle is for a political outcome you like.
The Neo900 has found a cell modem manufacturer that, while still closed source, at least doesn't required a shared-memory driver with all the security problems that brings.
How about genetic engineering to give future humans photosynthesis abilities.
Gene Wolfe had played with such an idea in his The Book of the New Sun with the character of the Green Man, a time traveller from one of several possible future Earths where photosynthesis does sustain human beings. It's neat to see that another writer has come up with something similar.
Already over half of Americans have begun higher education studies, even if they haven't finished them. The amount of people who have at least an associates degree or higher seems to be around a third of Americans. That's not "very few" to me. That said, I agree with your point that even those who make it into higher education are generally unable to follow a rigorous science course.
The skill of a good lecturer is to convey useful and interesting information to competent people who are already at least interested enough in the subject to have learned the precursor knowledge and pay to build upon it. That's a very small subset of the human population, and it's a very different skillset than capturing the interest and imagination of people who have trouble calculating an appropriate tip and consider reality television to be entertaining.
If someone is at a point in their lives where they are tipping and really attached to reality TV, they are probably too old already to be directed towards science anyway, so a science populizer like Sagan does no good for attracting new blood to the field. One has to go for a much younger audience, and in this case the best science populizer would be a good science teacher at the K-12 level, not someone with show on PBS that's 98% fluff.
I understand outreach in schools in universities, but science popularizers in mass media talking to ordinary adult Americans are not necessarily helpful. Working in a science myself, I and not a small number of my colleagues would be content if it persisted as a sort of arcane priesthood outside popular culture. Time and time again we have seen that the general public simply does not understand the work we do, but if given a little knowledge, they think they get the field and then proceed to perpetuate all kinds of rubbish and misunderstandings all on the basis of having seen a science popularizer at work. For the ordinary person, feeling of having learned something is just a heartwarming substitute for having actually learned something.
Disputed because wikiquote editors thought that "hispanic" wasn't in usage in the 1930s.
You act as if that is a trifle that can be waved away. Use of historical lexicology to determine spurious quotations is a standard tool, and has been for centuries, at least as far back as the Donatio Constantini.
Hm. Okay. Still sourced.
The sources are other people's claims, written decades later, that he said that. Are you really unaware that for determining the reliability of attributed quotations, finding an attestation closer to that point in time and closer to the man's own hand is vital?
It's a four part series, covering all of the major drug groups. And the resounding theme is how many drug bans began as a result of local bigotry and racism.
I asked for convincing citations for the eight specific quotations attributed to Anslinger by the OP, and you refer me to a television series that claims other people were racist too. That's not helpful. Please try to focus.
Harry Anslinger, who you could consider the godfather of the war on drugs, put his racism about it in no uncertain terms.
His racism about is in very uncertain terms, as you link to an amateurish-looking website where not one of those eight quotations is cited. Wikiquote, which takes verifying quotations seriously, notes that at least one attribution of such unabashed racist speech is disputed.
Am I defending Anslinger? Not at all, I don't have enough information at hand to judge the situation. But let's be intellectually honest and source statements instead of lazily repeating the unverified assertions of myriad stoner websites.
Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now. As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.
Sure, cheap and plentiful energy is great for a consumer society that likes its electronics and cars. In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat. When electricity is generated, much of it is immediately dissipated as heat, and later when the resulting electricity or whatever is used, this too ultimately produces heat. That planet-bound civilizations risk destruction from their waste heat has long been a theme of science-fiction -- it's a plot point in Larry Niven's Ringworld for instance, and it has only seemed fantastical so far because our ability to generate energy has been so limited. What happens when we can pursue our hunger for energy with no excessive costs or short-term environmental damage?
Apparently you are unaware that even in those sparsely populated parts of Sweden, people enjoy broadband superior to what most of the United States can get. Good broadband is not just something that coastal/southern Sweden enjoys, it reaches well out into the boonies even if customers there are few.
While you can always reach for a pithy quote to support an attitude of mistrust of government by misportraying Adam Smith as calling for the state to stay completely hands off, actually reading the man's work reveals that he too saw a need for some degree of state regulation to avoid problems like monopolies. The man saw the benefits in a more laissez faire system, but he also foresaw pitfalls that have come to plague us today.
Distance might explain why some isolated cities pay through the nose for slow speeds. But when one considers that slower and more expensive internet than many Eastern Europe small towns plagues a lot of US metropolitan areas near the coast, where all subscribers are packed into a small space and sitting right on top of longstanding longhaul fiber links, then only legislation problems could explain this sad situation.
Population density arguments don't hold water because Sweden has lower population density than the United States. Furthermore, even in densely populated areas of the United States, broadband is likely to be of lower quality (slower, more expensive) than sparsely populated areas of Europe.
It's already been a decade that I've had fiber to my door here in Romania for about $15/month. Recently the ISP started offering gigabit for only two or three dollars more. And it's really reliable high-speed too: no throttling, even when I torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month of films. Show Americans how it works in Northern Europe and they might chalk it all down to the unusual social harmony there. That even villages in a corrupt Eastern Europe country have better and cheaper internet does more to underscore a deep problem with US broadband.
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And I don't get where you see this dichotomy. Tolkien's work was ignored by academia for decades. While The Lord of the Rings sold in modest amounts for the first few years, its sales jumped in the 1960s through ordinary people (often young, idealistic, and of an anti-academic bent) simply falling in love with the world it depicted. I take it you don't listen to much rock music of the 60s and 70s, where Tolkien was allued to by a number of acts. In part because of this popular following, the book was not widely discussed in academia until nearly half a century had passed since its publication.
And the point I was trying to make in my post above is that both Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon classics that inspired him have more appeal for ordinary readers than you are willing to credit them with, in spite of their lack of women and the strict societies they depict. Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation didn't become a bestseller -- and it continues to stay in print as a ordinary paperback -- based just on a couple of hundred academics.
Debian (you know, the topic of this discussion) and its many derived distros like Ubuntu had for many years used dash as their /bin/sh. Init wasn't passing anything to bash. Indeed, the switch was made because dash offered faster boot times for a script-based init system than bash.
Get off your high horse. Slackware's init system intentionally follows a BSD model, not the model of nearly all other Linux systems. One can have vast experience with an array of Linux distros and still have to do some retraining when confronted with Slackware.
Gimp has a dbus dependency, and dbus in turn has the systemd libs as dependencies.
Debian's offering of Gnome 3 and Systemd are not comparable. Gnome 3 is only the default desktop for people who just want to click through the installer. But you can completely avoid Gnome 3, and indeed many people do because they do e.g. headless server installations or choose another GUI. Systemd, however, is spreading through so much of the system that it may not be possible to avoiding installing it. Even if one hangs on to sysvinit as one's init system, programs like Gimp on Debian now end up pulling in systemd libs.
I was really unhappy with Debian's move to systemd, and the fact that once systemd is running as one's init system through a general upgrade, one cannot even go back to sysvinit..
Having heard that Slackware was resistant to systemd, I installed the latest version of Slackware on a netbook I have lying around, and while it's a fine project that clearly has its fans, it seems to require a lot of retraining for someone coming from Debian. I'd love to be able to stay on the venerable old Linux distro I have so many years of experience in.
OK, I understand. "Your perspective" is that if revolutionaries commit violent acts against a peaceful opposition and betray the very cause they claim to fight for (namely "individual liberty"), then the guilt for this is not to be found in the revolutionaries who killed people peaceably advocating a different system, but in the prior political regime or the impersonal historical forces that gave them "no choice but to revolt" violently. Just claiming oppression and presenting yourself as an enlightened circle freeing the masses from bondage excuses you for killing, beating or burning down the houses of a portion of those masses. Thanks for clarifying your views.
For what it's worth, I took a degree in Classics and, in the course of my Greek studies, I read the Republic along with several other Socratic dialogues. Yes, it's an interesting text (I still take my trusty Oxford Classical Texts copy down from the shelf every year or so to re-read the vision of Er), but among the rich variety of political viewpoints in the world and counter-arguments, it really counts for little, and for you to point to it as authoritive for your personal political views (and to post so obsessively about your political views in this news website on a variety of topics) just makes you look like a crank.
After the US has spent years and billions of dollars on e.g. biosphere research with the technology available to them at the time, the Chinese for example might just wait and see, and then outpace the US with more advanced technology available to them after the US has exhausted itself. The problem with taking the first step into a technology-heavy field, where the political will to continue investment might collapse after one or two presidential administrations, is that later entrants can coast on your achievements. So, why bother?
While you may feel the movies were more reflective of a contemporary spirit than Tolkien, it's curious that you feel that this automatically makes them better. After all, Tolkien spent his entire career teaching young people that there was much to enjoy in ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, which also had few women and were rooted in classist social structures. Considering that Beowulf isn't only read as a boring school assignment, it sells decently to a readership that actually wants to read it, then why not consider Tolkien in the same way?
OK, some loyalists were turning in revolutionaries. What about the many thousands of others who did nothing but publicly voice a desire to remain under Britain? Where was the revolutionaries' love of "individual liberty" in openly persecuting them?
Tolkien was brought to the big screen only through massive compromises with the original material. I'm not even talking about cuts made to the novels that only anoraks would take issue with, like the Tom Bombadill episode being left out.
I'm talking about things like adding a female character for the sake of a love triangle, neither of which was in Tolkien's world. (Even more disturbing, they did it with an actress who has already been used in an earlier role to provide a tiresome love triangle that helps cash in on a typical soap opera audience). Some of the visual choices also jar with Tolkien's brand of storytelling, like in a battle scene when one character is struck down and then his comrades turn around, suddenly in slow motion and mouths agape in shock, to a saccharine soundtrack by Howard Shore.
Of course, the result was a huge hit, but one wonders how much that was really due to Tolkien, and not the series of Hollywood tropes that the story was fit within.
British rule over the US is a prime example that every American should learn from serious scholarship, not the national myths presented in school textbooks (the US is no exception to the trend for school textbooks in any country to be an idealized depiction of history for the sake of patriotism). The "momentum changing" which you refer to wasn't just public opinion swaying through peaceful debate, it was revolutionaries e.g. burning down the houses of that significant portion of the population that remained loyal to Britain. Decent people had to live in fear and keep their mouths shut, or were driven into exile in Canada or the British Caribbean, just because they liked things the way they were.
When you speak with great anticipation of another revolution, one wonders if you respect rule of law and respect for your community at all, as long as a violent struggle is for a political outcome you like.
The Neo900 has found a cell modem manufacturer that, while still closed source, at least doesn't required a shared-memory driver with all the security problems that brings.
Gene Wolfe had played with such an idea in his The Book of the New Sun with the character of the Green Man, a time traveller from one of several possible future Earths where photosynthesis does sustain human beings. It's neat to see that another writer has come up with something similar.
Already over half of Americans have begun higher education studies, even if they haven't finished them. The amount of people who have at least an associates degree or higher seems to be around a third of Americans. That's not "very few" to me. That said, I agree with your point that even those who make it into higher education are generally unable to follow a rigorous science course.
If someone is at a point in their lives where they are tipping and really attached to reality TV, they are probably too old already to be directed towards science anyway, so a science populizer like Sagan does no good for attracting new blood to the field. One has to go for a much younger audience, and in this case the best science populizer would be a good science teacher at the K-12 level, not someone with show on PBS that's 98% fluff.
I understand outreach in schools in universities, but science popularizers in mass media talking to ordinary adult Americans are not necessarily helpful. Working in a science myself, I and not a small number of my colleagues would be content if it persisted as a sort of arcane priesthood outside popular culture. Time and time again we have seen that the general public simply does not understand the work we do, but if given a little knowledge, they think they get the field and then proceed to perpetuate all kinds of rubbish and misunderstandings all on the basis of having seen a science popularizer at work. For the ordinary person, feeling of having learned something is just a heartwarming substitute for having actually learned something.
You act as if that is a trifle that can be waved away. Use of historical lexicology to determine spurious quotations is a standard tool, and has been for centuries, at least as far back as the Donatio Constantini.
The sources are other people's claims, written decades later, that he said that. Are you really unaware that for determining the reliability of attributed quotations, finding an attestation closer to that point in time and closer to the man's own hand is vital?
I asked for convincing citations for the eight specific quotations attributed to Anslinger by the OP, and you refer me to a television series that claims other people were racist too. That's not helpful. Please try to focus.
His racism about is in very uncertain terms, as you link to an amateurish-looking website where not one of those eight quotations is cited. Wikiquote, which takes verifying quotations seriously, notes that at least one attribution of such unabashed racist speech is disputed.
Am I defending Anslinger? Not at all, I don't have enough information at hand to judge the situation. But let's be intellectually honest and source statements instead of lazily repeating the unverified assertions of myriad stoner websites.
Sure, cheap and plentiful energy is great for a consumer society that likes its electronics and cars. In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat. When electricity is generated, much of it is immediately dissipated as heat, and later when the resulting electricity or whatever is used, this too ultimately produces heat. That planet-bound civilizations risk destruction from their waste heat has long been a theme of science-fiction -- it's a plot point in Larry Niven's Ringworld for instance, and it has only seemed fantastical so far because our ability to generate energy has been so limited. What happens when we can pursue our hunger for energy with no excessive costs or short-term environmental damage?
Nope. Verizon does not offer gigabit in many markets, even if people are ready to pay a little more than that $69.
Apparently you are unaware that even in those sparsely populated parts of Sweden, people enjoy broadband superior to what most of the United States can get. Good broadband is not just something that coastal/southern Sweden enjoys, it reaches well out into the boonies even if customers there are few.
While you can always reach for a pithy quote to support an attitude of mistrust of government by misportraying Adam Smith as calling for the state to stay completely hands off, actually reading the man's work reveals that he too saw a need for some degree of state regulation to avoid problems like monopolies. The man saw the benefits in a more laissez faire system, but he also foresaw pitfalls that have come to plague us today.
Distance might explain why some isolated cities pay through the nose for slow speeds. But when one considers that slower and more expensive internet than many Eastern Europe small towns plagues a lot of US metropolitan areas near the coast, where all subscribers are packed into a small space and sitting right on top of longstanding longhaul fiber links, then only legislation problems could explain this sad situation.
Population density arguments don't hold water because Sweden has lower population density than the United States. Furthermore, even in densely populated areas of the United States, broadband is likely to be of lower quality (slower, more expensive) than sparsely populated areas of Europe.
It's already been a decade that I've had fiber to my door here in Romania for about $15/month. Recently the ISP started offering gigabit for only two or three dollars more. And it's really reliable high-speed too: no throttling, even when I torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month of films. Show Americans how it works in Northern Europe and they might chalk it all down to the unusual social harmony there. That even villages in a corrupt Eastern Europe country have better and cheaper internet does more to underscore a deep problem with US broadband.