Don't forget that we ALSO have the precedent of Boston seriously overreacting with the Mooninites, which is why I mentioned it. I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt given what we know about the apparent intelligence of the security types there.
To me, the problem is less of a matter that the police reacted (I suppose an idiot could be excused for mistaking it for a bomb) than that they now know it's not a bomb, apparently she never claimed that it was a bomb, and they continued to press charges of "hoax device" and so on. Granted, this is Boston, which went batshit crazy over Mooninites, but I was just as annoyed by the "fake bomb"/"bomb hoax" news reports then. I suppose they want some sort of satisfaction for the time/expense of reacting, in a vengeful way now.
Look, people. Something CANNOT BE A HOAX device if it was not INTENDED to be perceived as a device. The entire point of the word "hoax" is that it is "An act intended to deceive or trick." If there is no INTENT, then there is no hoax. Evidence of intent is a concept built into criminal law itself as a necessary condition to make things stick (IANAL, but I'm pretty confident on this point). There is no hoax here.
There are, however, a bunch of misunderstandings and some poor judgment on the part of the student*. That said, cut your losses, shake hands, tell her not to do it again, and move on. Personally I'm sick of the rampant stupidity that seems to have infected the world "post 9-11" and this is a prime example of it.
*While I think it's poor judgment, I also think it's a shame that tech art can't be worn in public without eliciting a full-blown law enforcement response. I've seen this sorta stuff on the runway in some fashion shows and always thought it was pretty cool.
Re:I'll bookmark this review
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Well, my old-ass laptop can't handle it. So in the meantime I will do the thousand-and-one things I do anyway (and that my laptop can handle if I'm patient), like making music/working on programming projects/doing artwork/writing stories & novels, etc.
It's not that I can't stay busy, but it is an annoyance in the back of my mind that I'm trying to dismiss - and yet here I am, reading another review...so sad!
There is often a REASON that darren@yahoo.com will not tell everyone he knows that he is also darren@gmail.com. Personally, I manage my email in such a way that accounts I have at various locations serve different purposes - commercial/junk, family and friends, work, university, etc. I don't necessarily want all of these identities crossing over and I would like to have precise control over who has this information to begin with - and that includes some commercial giant search company who thinks they can offer me "privacy" settings to maintain my control over my identity as long as I give up all of this information to them.
To an extent, this relates to the criticisms leveled at MySpace and Facebook recently as well. Too much centralization of identity opens brave new worlds for people you may have only the most tenuous of relationships with to find out more than you may be intending to share with them.
That said, I'm off to RTFA because I don't think that giving everything a unique identifier is a bad thing; I just don't think that Yahoo or Google or anyone else necessarily has a RIGHT to know how all of my personal identifiers are connected.
You can read the full text of the resolution if you like.
What I find interesting is that a bunch of the "Whereas" statements are mostly about how teh evil children are doing things behind their parents' backs and thus we need a government resolution to combat this. Heh. Raise your hand if you were a kid and never did anything behind your parents' backs.
So how does an author "perform" a book? How does a director "perform" a movie? How does Bungie "perform" Halo? Your party platform sucks badly. It's so shortsighted and ill-considered as to be beyond belief. Even with regards to music, how does a song writer (not performer) get paid in accordance to the popularity of his song? I think there are a couple of misconceptions here. First, authors regularly "perform" their books by doing readings and signings and so on. And there is incentive to purchase their works because some people simply prefer to have a physical artifact than some sort of digital virtual reproduction. Secondly, directors regularly "perform" movies by playing them in theatres that exist on scales that the individual can't really reproduce at home, hence providing a better experience for the movie. And my local IMAX theatre is now renting out time for gaming parties. Who woulda thought.
I spend most of my spare time creating artworks of various sorts; novels, visual artwork (drawings and so on), and lately quite a lot of music. My primary concern as an artist isn't that some person like you will "steal" my work and that I won't be able to continue producing art. Hell, I don't make money doing it right now as it is, although I've had some small publishing successes and others on the horizon (hopefully). Rather it's that some commercial entity will make use of my stuff and not share their profits with me as they rightfully should.
And frankly, the "popularity" of music is bullshit. Read that article recently released (search any news source - Google News for instance - right now for Joshua Bell) about the world-class violinist who dressed in street clothes, took a Stradivarius into the Metro, and played for an hour. It's all about promotion, marketing, and the "frame," so to speak. There is a hell of a lot of art that doesn't get a chance thanks to being buried under mountains of overpromoted bullshit and I don't think that anybody deserves to make a billion dollars from a piece of art (Rowlings, anyone?) - that's just obscene.
The morality of that aside, the notion that private sharing will somehow stop artists from creating is silly. It might stop people who create mediocre crap hoping to get on the mass popularity gravy train, but it will not stop a single person who creates out of sheer desire to do something besides sitting there eating cheese puffs and staring at the television all day long. People who do art for art's sake will always make time on evenings and weekends or else find patrons to support their vision on a more regular basis.
And for those of us who create for the love of it, getting people to see it is a bonus. Getting paid is even more of a bonus. All we ask is that some corporation not insult us by stealing our work to line their pockets and then suing the people who enjoy our creations in our name, while throwing us pennies on the $10 or nothing at all.
It's like people fucking think 1984 is some sort of manual these days on how TO do things. So where's the manual that says how to subvert a 1984-style world back into something that free people would care to live in?:-P Oh, except that given a hundred years, we might not want to live on this planet anyway, so a terraforming manual would be nice, and/or something that says how to build practical interstellar travel in a hurry...hah!
Same for me - only people I know (myself included) who really breezed through school never lifted a finger (or a textbook) for it. I studied a handful of hours here and there, and by "study" I really mean re-read the entire course textbook for the semester or year in 1.5 hours or so the night before an exam just to be sure. Some classes I never even bothered to sit through once I got to university level and I graduated magna cum laude and went on to get a MA, again without really studying. Same for the one or two other really bright people I know.
...as an amateur artist struggling to learn the ropes of production and so on - there is actually quite a lot of skill going in to those shiny top-40s tracks from almost every level EXCEPT the "face" person usually. I would kill to have some of my stuff remastered by the guys doing the work on those tracks, or to be able to work with studio musicians half as good as the ones that back up the latest boy- or girl-band sensations.
That's not to say that I like top 40s shit, and in fact I haven't listened to the radio in almost five years unless it was a retro station and someone else forcing me to listen, but to be fair a lot of people buy this stuff because it DOES sound better than anything an amateur or semi-professional can even afford to produce. It doesn't matter how good your singing is, it still sounds like crap sung through laptop mics or using unamped stuff because you can't afford proper equipment.
Note that I am deliberately excluding live amateurs/semi-pros from that comparison - a lot of small-town or lesser-known bands are really fucking amazing if you hear them live and we can only hope that a few more of them manage to crack the vinyl ceiling or whatever you want to call it. I have high hopes that the internet really will slowly replace the recording industry as the primary means of both marketing AND distribution, and of course am personally making use of it to slowly build a little fan-base of my own.
Harvard, for instance, is estimating $48,850 per year. $100K will get you halfway through a BA, and no more.
Obviously if she's winning scholarships, she'll probably get enough from other scholarships and/or Federal assistance to cover her education through a PhD if she wants to take it that far, but anybody who thinks $100K is "wealthy" these days is simply naive.
$100,000 is hardly "wealthy," and moreover if you RTFA, you'll see that it's a $100,000 scholarship. So she can maybe take a couple of free years at a good university, but it's hardly like she won the latest super lottery or something. It would have been nice to see more details on what she actually built, too.
A parent can't "force" their kid into the military, no, but parents can (and do) give their kids options which essentially amount to "stay here and I'll make your life a living hell and your only other option is to join the military" - happened to my sister.
I know it's too late, but if you have any heart at all, please do not spread this extremely annoying use of the word any further. I do not want Apache on my dinner plate, nor in any way do I want it smashed, pulverized, or otherwise rendered into unrecognizable goop like the word "mash" itself has apparently been. I've suffered through blogs and vlogs and podcasts and bennifers and brangelinas - and even Lewis Carroll would be turning in his grave at these dreadful portmanteaus which are less about expanding the language and more about general journalistic laziness.
othrwse we mit as wll all uz IMspk and wrdsmsh all r communc8s 4 lezins sak k thx
...who has had to sit through a creative writing class could tell you, that sorta criticism 1) fails to bother me in the least if you're attempting to troll me, and 2) as a helpful tip is completely useless. If you could be more specific as to what part blows, perhaps I can correct it in my future writings.
If I try to go to gmail.com, I get the old URL (the one with <mpl=m_wsad and no way to sign up) but the link in the summary (with <mpl=m_blanco ) has a sign up form. Interesting. This with clearing my cache first to be sure that it isn't a browser caching issue.
...that it is riddled with stupid grammatical errors on top of the verbosity. Sentence fragments like "Order by any means necessary." and omissions like that in "Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status:" (apostrophe-s, anyone?) make this painful to wade through, as if the blathering exercise in gratuitous vocabulary doesn't cause enough headaches.
Now all the people who don't believe in evolution can make sure they wear the Russian anti-evolution suit and buy some extra ones for their descendents. That way, they can be sure that they're still human a few millenia from now when the rest of us are all sporting extra noses and are mostly giant brains floating in strange liquid-filled glass cases...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that we ALSO have the precedent of Boston seriously overreacting with the Mooninites, which is why I mentioned it. I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt given what we know about the apparent intelligence of the security types there.
I've seen the pictures.
To me, the problem is less of a matter that the police reacted (I suppose an idiot could be excused for mistaking it for a bomb) than that they now know it's not a bomb, apparently she never claimed that it was a bomb, and they continued to press charges of "hoax device" and so on. Granted, this is Boston, which went batshit crazy over Mooninites, but I was just as annoyed by the "fake bomb"/"bomb hoax" news reports then. I suppose they want some sort of satisfaction for the time/expense of reacting, in a vengeful way now.
Look, people. Something CANNOT BE A HOAX device if it was not INTENDED to be perceived as a device. The entire point of the word "hoax" is that it is "An act intended to deceive or trick." If there is no INTENT, then there is no hoax. Evidence of intent is a concept built into criminal law itself as a necessary condition to make things stick (IANAL, but I'm pretty confident on this point). There is no hoax here.
There are, however, a bunch of misunderstandings and some poor judgment on the part of the student*. That said, cut your losses, shake hands, tell her not to do it again, and move on. Personally I'm sick of the rampant stupidity that seems to have infected the world "post 9-11" and this is a prime example of it.
*While I think it's poor judgment, I also think it's a shame that tech art can't be worn in public without eliciting a full-blown law enforcement response. I've seen this sorta stuff on the runway in some fashion shows and always thought it was pretty cool.
Well, my old-ass laptop can't handle it. So in the meantime I will do the thousand-and-one things I do anyway (and that my laptop can handle if I'm patient), like making music/working on programming projects/doing artwork/writing stories & novels, etc.
It's not that I can't stay busy, but it is an annoyance in the back of my mind that I'm trying to dismiss - and yet here I am, reading another review...so sad!
...just a comment on the quote in the summary.
There is often a REASON that darren@yahoo.com will not tell everyone he knows that he is also darren@gmail.com. Personally, I manage my email in such a way that accounts I have at various locations serve different purposes - commercial/junk, family and friends, work, university, etc. I don't necessarily want all of these identities crossing over and I would like to have precise control over who has this information to begin with - and that includes some commercial giant search company who thinks they can offer me "privacy" settings to maintain my control over my identity as long as I give up all of this information to them.
To an extent, this relates to the criticisms leveled at MySpace and Facebook recently as well. Too much centralization of identity opens brave new worlds for people you may have only the most tenuous of relationships with to find out more than you may be intending to share with them.
That said, I'm off to RTFA because I don't think that giving everything a unique identifier is a bad thing; I just don't think that Yahoo or Google or anyone else necessarily has a RIGHT to know how all of my personal identifiers are connected.
...who thinks it looks like a researcher stubbed out a cigarette on a photo of the Martian surface?;-)
You can read the full text of the resolution if you like.
What I find interesting is that a bunch of the "Whereas" statements are mostly about how teh evil children are doing things behind their parents' backs and thus we need a government resolution to combat this. Heh. Raise your hand if you were a kid and never did anything behind your parents' backs.
That sounds like a lot of situps just to send a message. ;-)
o - the parent post
.
.
.
.
.
.
[ ] - your head.
|
/ \
___ - the ground.
Obviously that's 12 GOOGLE-Bytes*. Which are far huger than ordinary bytes, or even gigabytes, and therefore much more interesting.
* Note that GoogleBytes are still in beta and therefore the exact amount of storage in a single GB is yet to be determined.
I spend most of my spare time creating artworks of various sorts; novels, visual artwork (drawings and so on), and lately quite a lot of music. My primary concern as an artist isn't that some person like you will "steal" my work and that I won't be able to continue producing art. Hell, I don't make money doing it right now as it is, although I've had some small publishing successes and others on the horizon (hopefully). Rather it's that some commercial entity will make use of my stuff and not share their profits with me as they rightfully should.
And frankly, the "popularity" of music is bullshit. Read that article recently released (search any news source - Google News for instance - right now for Joshua Bell) about the world-class violinist who dressed in street clothes, took a Stradivarius into the Metro, and played for an hour. It's all about promotion, marketing, and the "frame," so to speak. There is a hell of a lot of art that doesn't get a chance thanks to being buried under mountains of overpromoted bullshit and I don't think that anybody deserves to make a billion dollars from a piece of art (Rowlings, anyone?) - that's just obscene.
The morality of that aside, the notion that private sharing will somehow stop artists from creating is silly. It might stop people who create mediocre crap hoping to get on the mass popularity gravy train, but it will not stop a single person who creates out of sheer desire to do something besides sitting there eating cheese puffs and staring at the television all day long. People who do art for art's sake will always make time on evenings and weekends or else find patrons to support their vision on a more regular basis.
And for those of us who create for the love of it, getting people to see it is a bonus. Getting paid is even more of a bonus. All we ask is that some corporation not insult us by stealing our work to line their pockets and then suing the people who enjoy our creations in our name, while throwing us pennies on the $10 or nothing at all.
Geez.
It's like people fucking think 1984 is some sort of manual these days on how TO do things. So where's the manual that says how to subvert a 1984-style world back into something that free people would care to live in?:-P Oh, except that given a hundred years, we might not want to live on this planet anyway, so a terraforming manual would be nice, and/or something that says how to build practical interstellar travel in a hurry...hah!
We do indeed live in interesting times...
Same for me - only people I know (myself included) who really breezed through school never lifted a finger (or a textbook) for it. I studied a handful of hours here and there, and by "study" I really mean re-read the entire course textbook for the semester or year in 1.5 hours or so the night before an exam just to be sure. Some classes I never even bothered to sit through once I got to university level and I graduated magna cum laude and went on to get a MA, again without really studying. Same for the one or two other really bright people I know.
...as an amateur artist struggling to learn the ropes of production and so on - there is actually quite a lot of skill going in to those shiny top-40s tracks from almost every level EXCEPT the "face" person usually. I would kill to have some of my stuff remastered by the guys doing the work on those tracks, or to be able to work with studio musicians half as good as the ones that back up the latest boy- or girl-band sensations.
That's not to say that I like top 40s shit, and in fact I haven't listened to the radio in almost five years unless it was a retro station and someone else forcing me to listen, but to be fair a lot of people buy this stuff because it DOES sound better than anything an amateur or semi-professional can even afford to produce. It doesn't matter how good your singing is, it still sounds like crap sung through laptop mics or using unamped stuff because you can't afford proper equipment.
Note that I am deliberately excluding live amateurs/semi-pros from that comparison - a lot of small-town or lesser-known bands are really fucking amazing if you hear them live and we can only hope that a few more of them manage to crack the vinyl ceiling or whatever you want to call it. I have high hopes that the internet really will slowly replace the recording industry as the primary means of both marketing AND distribution, and of course am personally making use of it to slowly build a little fan-base of my own.
Harvard, for instance, is estimating $48,850 per year. $100K will get you halfway through a BA, and no more.
Obviously if she's winning scholarships, she'll probably get enough from other scholarships and/or Federal assistance to cover her education through a PhD if she wants to take it that far, but anybody who thinks $100K is "wealthy" these days is simply naive.
$100,000 is hardly "wealthy," and moreover if you RTFA, you'll see that it's a $100,000 scholarship. So she can maybe take a couple of free years at a good university, but it's hardly like she won the latest super lottery or something. It would have been nice to see more details on what she actually built, too.
...you've been thinking of taking up naturism. ;-)
A parent can't "force" their kid into the military, no, but parents can (and do) give their kids options which essentially amount to "stay here and I'll make your life a living hell and your only other option is to join the military" - happened to my sister.
I know it's too late, but if you have any heart at all, please do not spread this extremely annoying use of the word any further. I do not want Apache on my dinner plate, nor in any way do I want it smashed, pulverized, or otherwise rendered into unrecognizable goop like the word "mash" itself has apparently been. I've suffered through blogs and vlogs and podcasts and bennifers and brangelinas - and even Lewis Carroll would be turning in his grave at these dreadful portmanteaus which are less about expanding the language and more about general journalistic laziness. othrwse we mit as wll all uz IMspk and wrdsmsh all r communc8s 4 lezins sak k thx
...who has had to sit through a creative writing class could tell you, that sorta criticism 1) fails to bother me in the least if you're attempting to troll me, and 2) as a helpful tip is completely useless. If you could be more specific as to what part blows, perhaps I can correct it in my future writings.
If I try to go to gmail.com, I get the old URL (the one with <mpl=m_wsad and no way to sign up) but the link in the summary (with <mpl=m_blanco ) has a sign up form. Interesting. This with clearing my cache first to be sure that it isn't a browser caching issue.
...and I don't see any way to sign up other than the "use your mobile" promotion that they've had going for a while. There's no link from TFA either.
...that it is riddled with stupid grammatical errors on top of the verbosity. Sentence fragments like "Order by any means necessary." and omissions like that in "Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status:" (apostrophe-s, anyone?) make this painful to wade through, as if the blathering exercise in gratuitous vocabulary doesn't cause enough headaches.
And you call yourself the Fun Guy!;-)
If they called it an "anti-evolution suit" it might make more inroads among that population.;-)
Now all the people who don't believe in evolution can make sure they wear the Russian anti-evolution suit and buy some extra ones for their descendents. That way, they can be sure that they're still human a few millenia from now when the rest of us are all sporting extra noses and are mostly giant brains floating in strange liquid-filled glass cases...