The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all. And it works too - as I write, they're probably high-fiving themselves as they see the hit counters spin from the slashdotting.
China is full of amazing scientists that have been making huge advancements. Why are they pushing so hard for the space race and not for eliminating AIDS and opening their *real* numbers of infection to the world
Um, because the research knowledge, skills and interest do not transfer well between things like celestial mechanics and materials engineering on one hand, and biomedicine and disease control on the other?
This kind of thing always seem to crop up, and implicitly assumes that "science" is one monolithic activity within which people are essentially interchangeable. They aren't. Specific skills and talents - and personal interest, which is hugely important in develop the other two - are very different across disciplines. A really, really good physicist could perhaps become a middling plod of a physician, though their heart wouldn't be in it. More likely, they'd become a really good engineer, designing new DVD player models or Hello Kitty merchandice instead.
Besides, there is no nation on earth without poverty, AIDS or [insert favourite physical ailment here]. What are you doing posting on slashdot when you should be working on your medical degree?
Would you want a group of people hanging out in front of your house hurling abuse at you everytime you came home? Or tried to go out?
Of course not. I'm not defending the loitering, just pointing out that I feel the approach to dealing with is not one I am comfortable with (not to disregard the fact that it just tries to deal with a consequence, not its cause).
There's a couple of aspects to this (including what constututes public space), but the most important, I think, is the one of social dynamics. People want to be where other people are. This goes for adolescents as much as for full adults and children; indeed if anything, it goes for adolescents more than any other. This is not a learned thing; it seems to be pretty much hardwired into us. Gathering is how we learn about each other and about our status in the community - way too important to ignore.
"Everybody" adult is at work, and within the work environment you have the same dynamic; but children and adolescents - or anybody not an employee - is typically not welcome to "hang around" there. "Everybody" other adolescent is typically at school during weekdays which is a major reason even the most anti-everything screwups usually still choose to sniff their glue at or near the school, not somewhere else. The lure of social dynamics attracts them all. And "everybody" is at the mall/shopping center/downtown (depending on your community structure).
Of course, the point of malls is to buy things, usually. And adolescents don't as a rule have all that much spending power; certainly not enough to actually go around shopping for hours every day. At the same time, that's the place the social community is centered, where adults do go to shop for groceries, quick after-work meal or whatever.
So what you get are a lot of teens that want and need to be there (in a quite deep, non-volitional kind of way), but do not have the money (or, really, the inclination) to spend the entire time shopping. This is a fact, and as long as the community structure makes the shopping mall the place where "people" are, this is not going to change. You can try, and you will fail.
What the mall/high street/whatever store owners should do is make sure there are places in the thick of things, where people - adolescents and pensioners, in different places obviously - can hang without being too much in the way of everybody else. They _are_ going to hang around somewhere in the immediate area no matter what you do, after all. "Natural" streets tend to be better at this; there's usually more in the way of park benches, cheap cafés where you can watch people for hours and so on, but renovated shopping areas, and malls especially, tend to lose it in order to streamline shopping to the exclusion of the other functions of public spaces.
What this guy is doing (apart from the more personal moral aspects of how to treat people) is just shuffle these teens over to the next store with any kind of potential for doing nothing in particular at. Bruce Schneier has been taling about this approach in terms of security, where you're not making anything more secure, you're just shuffling the problem around.
Yes, first they have the freedom to associate with whomever they wish. Second, they have the right to defend their property as they see fit,
Legal or not, it does show quite a bit of contempt towards people to install it. I'd rather not associate with a shopkeeper or his store if they so obviously divide people only into those that give them money and those that do not. It may be their right to do so, but it's mine not to give such a sad excuse for a human being any of my money.
As other posters have pondered, where's the metal grating to keep walkers and walking stick out? Old people don't spend much money, after all, and they take a lot of time and space in the store. Some nicely arranged tripwires should take care of the blind and a few well-trained dogs should be able to scare away the mexicans and the black people, all less likely to spend heavily than the middle-aged middle-class white people that are the sweet spot this merchant obviosuly should be optimizing his store for.
Seriously, this shopkeeper exhibits a view of people that would make me very hesitant to be a customer at his store. He is saying, effectively, that "My interest in you is in your money and nothing else. If you spend money, I love you. If not, you're a creep and should not be in my sight." And, really, that is not the kind of person I'd like to be in any kind of relationship with, be it business of personal.
Defence development people aren't as a rule the most grown-up thinkers in the world; deep within the sober engineering facade there is a small boy who likes things that go "bang!". That's the reason all defence systems have names that seem dreamed up by bored thirten-year olds in asgebra class. And so, if faced with bland, beige "Windows", the nerdy-sounding "Debian" or kewl, all violent-like "Redhawk" - it's red! it's a hawk! it screeeaaamms! - the choice is easy. You can really hear the go-faster stripes in the name, and just think of the logo possibilities.
I no longer have relationships becaues I don't need creeps.
Or, well, you could be in a relationship with someone who isn't a creep. There's plenty of them out there, after all.
As someone pointed out (no ref.), "It's amazing how often peoples' one and only soulmate just happens to live or work no more than five blocks away." Even if you're ridiculously choosy and will only accept a one-in-a-million partner, in a major city you'll still have upwards of a dozen candidates out there.
Being introverted does not necessarily mean that you're a quiet, reflective kind of person in social situations. Being introverted really means that you don't like too much people, for too long a time at once. You need a good deal of "alone-time" to be comfortable.
That can mean that you're also quiet or a wallflower at parties, but does not at all have to be. It may just as well be that you're happily partying and jabbering away - just mostly with people you already know, preferably smaller groups, and not that often.
In fact, I prefer to see introversion as the positive difference of the clingy extrovert who can't stand being alone, who values themselves only through the eyes of others, and who has to fill their time with sounds and voices at any cost, whether if it means constantly blaring TV, spending hours on the phone saying nothing at all, or always having a boy/girlfriend just to have _someone_, since anyone, no matter what kind of creep, is better than being alone.
AFAIK, unless you're higher up the chain, like heading a wholesale distributor or "importer" or similar, drugs are supposedly not all that profitable. I read (but don't have the link to) an analysis that showed a street dealer or small-scale distributor didn't actually make any more money per hour worked than usual low-level white-collar jobs. And there is no risk premium for the very real chance of getting killed, or maimed, or for going to prison for a number of years (which really puts a dent in your earnings).
You end up with a 'spiderweb' of Cat5 cables, but with wireless, you still end up with all the power cables.
I get between four and seven hours of use on my battery, depending on what I'm doing. That is a way (wayyy!) too long an afternoon meeting, or two long presentations back to back (with discussion time and a coffee break), or an entire evening at home, from when I get back from work to when I go to sleep. Away from my desk I usually don't need any cables at all, in other words, and it would make dragging a cat5 cable after me a pain.
Cabling is more than just inconvenient - it's dangerous. Having a network cable snaking across the floor means a cable that someone _will_ trip over at some point, hurting themselves, or dragging a pretty expensive piece of electronics crashing onto the floor. It's fine for fixed places, like desks, where you can make a more permanent, out-of-the-way installation, but it really sucks otherwise.
I can't help but feel that the story posters whole beef really only is that his use of wireless everywhere and all the time is hampered by other people using it in the same way.
Yep, strictly speaking, we're all Nordic, but that sounds so... skiing-related. And since most peoiple have no idea why it's called Scandinavia and happily include Finland and Iceland, I took the easy way out.
However, I'd say Finland in no way has a monopoly on the long silence. Most Swedes would think of northern Sweden and Ingmar Bergman, not Finland and Kaurismäki, respectively, if asked about it.
It didn't hurt its popularity that the movie was mostly in English.
Well, the movie was mostly in angsty, awkward silences, as befits any good Scandinavian movie production.:)
I agree with the poster, though; it's hard not to put Leningrad Cowboys somewhere in the top three of Finnish movies. Of course, the Kaurismäki brothers would probably fill the other two slots as well...
A pair of Old Navy khakis, a pair of rockport walking shoes, and a decent button down shirt is not a difficult ensemble to throw together and it looks more stylish than jeans and a t-shirt.
I fully agree on khakis/dress pants. It is a lot more comfortable than jeans; the fabric is lighter, airier and has a little give. Sixteen hours at a time in a dry, warm office environment in jeans is no fun at all.
Shoes, well, whatever in black leather with no visibly heavy sole or chrome crap on it will do. Japanese workplaces have the right idea; in many offices people are wearing slippers indoors if they aren't meeting with clients or so. Light, airy and comfortable.
However, shirts are only fine if you happen to have a shirt that fits you - or, more accurately, if you have a body shape that fits off-the-rack shirts. Many people do not. It's not only being fat I'm talking about - there's dress shirts for the portly businessman, after all - but about being round-shouldered, or having a hunched up posture (not exactly uncommon during long stretches of work), or being unusually broad-shouldered, or having a wide neck, or...
Since the shirt fabric does not stretch, it becomes very uncomfortable as it tightens up and gets in the way. And where it tightens up, it soaks up sweat, which makes it clammy and yet more uncomfortable. And that makes you tense up and cringe, which translates into even worse body posture, back pain and a growing sullen resentment to any form of dress clothing.
Yes, you can get linen shirts sown up to specifications. They will breathe, will fit like a glove and be very stylish. They are also difficult and time-consuming to obtain if you don't happen to live in a major metropolis, and will drain the entire yearly clothing budget for low-to-mid income people.
I'm actually all for the introduction of lab coats as formal wear for people with science degrees:)
One problem with C++ is that it's difficult to know that an operation always will take the same amount of time. There can be quite a lot going on in the background whenever you create a new instance of a class, for example, and figuring that out can be almost impossible (especially if things like overloading have been used). For embedded applications (where you frequently must have an upper bound on reaction time) this can be a deal-breaker.
Of course, if that is the case, he shouldn't be looking at dynamic memory allocation either, tfor the same reason.
Again, much other literature - even poetry - is routinely translated and enjoyed. The cadence, the flow of words, the flavour of 16-century England is retained.
That is the challenge for a translator; to keep the flavour, the "thing" which makes the text what it is while changing the actual language. And a good translator will be able to.
I don't think you read Homer in it's original Greek, do you? I certainly don't think you expect your daughter to do so. That is poetry, straight off. So according to you, we should rather never read the story of Odyssevs than read a translation, no matter how good?
Shakespeare in original is hard to read (for me with English as a third language, or for a child not yet with the breadth of linguistic experience an adult has acquired, _very_ hard), not because he wrote in a difficult manner, but because language has changed so very much. I'd like to make the argument that he wrote to be easily and effortlessly understood by a wide audience; removing the current language barrier is exactly in line with his intentions, not counter to it.
Since when is thoughtless memorization of plots and quotes educational? Isn't the point of studying literature to learn how to think analytically, read between the lines, address social issues, and use language effectively?
Well, when knowing the plot and some pithy quotes is what is appreciated then tha't what people will gravitate to. You know that in most other fields of society this would be hailed as a marvellous productivity increase. I'd say this makes you fit right in society today (and liberal-arts slogans aside, that is exactly what the vast majority of people really want (Those who don't normally have plenty of other psychological problems as well and are easy to spot)).
I don't think we'll lose the classics, but I think we're heading toward a tiered society (if we're not there already) composed of the literate and well educated and the underclass who stay in non-thinking jobs, a lot like Metropolis.
There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.
If an artform, or a particular piece of art, has genuine, lasting mass appeal, it is normally exorcized from the "canon" and not longer a part of that which you "should" aspire to know. The whole point of Great Literature (as opposed to great literature) is to separate Those Who Have Read It from the unwashed masses who cheerfully haven't.
A CMS is not a blog tool - it's way overkill; not suited at all for what I need. It'd take me more time and effort to learn to use it than it was for me to write the perl program I use. Also, I don't have Windows, so I couldn't use that particular one anyhow.
I'm quite happy with my script; the lack of something similar was idle musings rather than a plea for help.
What little spat Felisha is having at school with her boyfriend and her ex boyfriend and her ex boyfriend'ss new girlfriend or her suicidal poetry and half-assed slutty pics posted to try and garner attention to her blog are not interesting and not worthy of being put on the internet.
I'd say it's all plenty interesting to Felisha's boyfriend, her ex, their common friends and acquintances. And their writings are interesting - even absorbing - to Felisha in turn.
Turn it around: most stuff out on the net is not interesting for more than a small group of people. Your "person with some notariety in their chosen medical profession" is utter snoozorama for the vast majority out there, and is thus no more (and no mess) worthy of being available on the net than Felisha's anxieties.
It's out there for those who want to read it. And if you don't want to (which most people do not) then don't.
As far as I know, html/css is the only option if you don't have the ability to install and run anything on the server you have access to. I have a cobbled together perl app that allows me to write posts as text with some minimal markup, and translates it to proper html with links, image scaling and thumbnail creation, rss feed generation and so on, and moves it all up to the server using scp. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to have it indexed by blox indexers, but then, I'm not really writing for a larger audience anyhow so I don't much mind.
To me this is a good compromise - it's lean, easy to manage if there's a problem, and a static page loads real fast - and I've been surprised that there doesn't seem to exist any "real" tools for managing a static webpage-type blog like this.
Slashdot Mirror
The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all. And it works too - as I write, they're probably high-fiving themselves as they see the hit counters spin from the slashdotting.
China is full of amazing scientists that have been making huge advancements. Why are they pushing so hard for the space race and not for eliminating AIDS and opening their *real* numbers of infection to the world
Um, because the research knowledge, skills and interest do not transfer well between things like celestial mechanics and materials engineering on one hand, and biomedicine and disease control on the other?
This kind of thing always seem to crop up, and implicitly assumes that "science" is one monolithic activity within which people are essentially interchangeable. They aren't. Specific skills and talents - and personal interest, which is hugely important in develop the other two - are very different across disciplines. A really, really good physicist could perhaps become a middling plod of a physician, though their heart wouldn't be in it. More likely, they'd become a really good engineer, designing new DVD player models or Hello Kitty merchandice instead.
Besides, there is no nation on earth without poverty, AIDS or [insert favourite physical ailment here]. What are you doing posting on slashdot when you should be working on your medical degree?
Would you want a group of people hanging out in front of your house hurling abuse at you everytime you came home? Or tried to go out?
Of course not. I'm not defending the loitering, just pointing out that I feel the approach to dealing with is not one I am comfortable with (not to disregard the fact that it just tries to deal with a consequence, not its cause).
There's a couple of aspects to this (including what constututes public space), but the most important, I think, is the one of social dynamics. People want to be where other people are. This goes for adolescents as much as for full adults and children; indeed if anything, it goes for adolescents more than any other. This is not a learned thing; it seems to be pretty much hardwired into us. Gathering is how we learn about each other and about our status in the community - way too important to ignore.
"Everybody" adult is at work, and within the work environment you have the same dynamic; but children and adolescents - or anybody not an employee - is typically not welcome to "hang around" there. "Everybody" other adolescent is typically at school during weekdays which is a major reason even the most anti-everything screwups usually still choose to sniff their glue at or near the school, not somewhere else. The lure of social dynamics attracts them all. And "everybody" is at the mall/shopping center/downtown (depending on your community structure).
Of course, the point of malls is to buy things, usually. And adolescents don't as a rule have all that much spending power; certainly not enough to actually go around shopping for hours every day. At the same time, that's the place the social community is centered, where adults do go to shop for groceries, quick after-work meal or whatever.
So what you get are a lot of teens that want and need to be there (in a quite deep, non-volitional kind of way), but do not have the money (or, really, the inclination) to spend the entire time shopping. This is a fact, and as long as the community structure makes the shopping mall the place where "people" are, this is not going to change. You can try, and you will fail.
What the mall/high street/whatever store owners should do is make sure there are places in the thick of things, where people - adolescents and pensioners, in different places obviously - can hang without being too much in the way of everybody else. They _are_ going to hang around somewhere in the immediate area no matter what you do, after all. "Natural" streets tend to be better at this; there's usually more in the way of park benches, cheap cafés where you can watch people for hours and so on, but renovated shopping areas, and malls especially, tend to lose it in order to streamline shopping to the exclusion of the other functions of public spaces.
What this guy is doing (apart from the more personal moral aspects of how to treat people) is just shuffle these teens over to the next store with any kind of potential for doing nothing in particular at. Bruce Schneier has been taling about this approach in terms of security, where you're not making anything more secure, you're just shuffling the problem around.
Yes, first they have the freedom to associate with whomever they wish. Second, they have the right to defend their property as they see fit,
Legal or not, it does show quite a bit of contempt towards people to install it. I'd rather not associate with a shopkeeper or his store if they so obviously divide people only into those that give them money and those that do not. It may be their right to do so, but it's mine not to give such a sad excuse for a human being any of my money.
As other posters have pondered, where's the metal grating to keep walkers and walking stick out? Old people don't spend much money, after all, and they take a lot of time and space in the store. Some nicely arranged tripwires should take care of the blind and a few well-trained dogs should be able to scare away the mexicans and the black people, all less likely to spend heavily than the middle-aged middle-class white people that are the sweet spot this merchant obviosuly should be optimizing his store for.
Just shoplift some earplugs.
Seriously, this shopkeeper exhibits a view of people that would make me very hesitant to be a customer at his store. He is saying, effectively, that "My interest in you is in your money and nothing else. If you spend money, I love you. If not, you're a creep and should not be in my sight." And, really, that is not the kind of person I'd like to be in any kind of relationship with, be it business of personal.
Defence development people aren't as a rule the most grown-up thinkers in the world; deep within the sober engineering facade there is a small boy who likes things that go "bang!". That's the reason all defence systems have names that seem dreamed up by bored thirten-year olds in asgebra class. And so, if faced with bland, beige "Windows", the nerdy-sounding "Debian" or kewl, all violent-like "Redhawk" - it's red! it's a hawk! it screeeaaamms! - the choice is easy. You can really hear the go-faster stripes in the name, and just think of the logo possibilities.
I no longer have relationships becaues I don't need creeps.
Or, well, you could be in a relationship with someone who isn't a creep. There's plenty of them out there, after all.
As someone pointed out (no ref.), "It's amazing how often peoples' one and only soulmate just happens to live or work no more than five blocks away." Even if you're ridiculously choosy and will only accept a one-in-a-million partner, in a major city you'll still have upwards of a dozen candidates out there.
Being introverted does not necessarily mean that you're a quiet, reflective kind of person in social situations. Being introverted really means that you don't like too much people, for too long a time at once. You need a good deal of "alone-time" to be comfortable.
That can mean that you're also quiet or a wallflower at parties, but does not at all have to be. It may just as well be that you're happily partying and jabbering away - just mostly with people you already know, preferably smaller groups, and not that often.
In fact, I prefer to see introversion as the positive difference of the clingy extrovert who can't stand being alone, who values themselves only through the eyes of others, and who has to fill their time with sounds and voices at any cost, whether if it means constantly blaring TV, spending hours on the phone saying nothing at all, or always having a boy/girlfriend just to have _someone_, since anyone, no matter what kind of creep, is better than being alone.
AFAIK, unless you're higher up the chain, like heading a wholesale distributor or "importer" or similar, drugs are supposedly not all that profitable. I read (but don't have the link to) an analysis that showed a street dealer or small-scale distributor didn't actually make any more money per hour worked than usual low-level white-collar jobs. And there is no risk premium for the very real chance of getting killed, or maimed, or for going to prison for a number of years (which really puts a dent in your earnings).
...which got me wondering how the heck they got combustion to work...
Oh, combustion will work just fine. Once.
You end up with a 'spiderweb' of Cat5 cables, but with wireless, you still end up with all the power cables.
I get between four and seven hours of use on my battery, depending on what I'm doing. That is a way (wayyy!) too long an afternoon meeting, or two long presentations back to back (with discussion time and a coffee break), or an entire evening at home, from when I get back from work to when I go to sleep. Away from my desk I usually don't need any cables at all, in other words, and it would make dragging a cat5 cable after me a pain.
Cabling is more than just inconvenient - it's dangerous. Having a network cable snaking across the floor means a cable that someone _will_ trip over at some point, hurting themselves, or dragging a pretty expensive piece of electronics crashing onto the floor. It's fine for fixed places, like desks, where you can make a more permanent, out-of-the-way installation, but it really sucks otherwise.
I can't help but feel that the story posters whole beef really only is that his use of wireless everywhere and all the time is hampered by other people using it in the same way.
Yep, strictly speaking, we're all Nordic, but that sounds so... skiing-related. And since most peoiple have no idea why it's called Scandinavia and happily include Finland and Iceland, I took the easy way out.
However, I'd say Finland in no way has a monopoly on the long silence. Most Swedes would think of northern Sweden and Ingmar Bergman, not Finland and Kaurismäki, respectively, if asked about it.
Well, when the manager comes out with a bag of onions for the bandmembers to eat, the silence isn't exactly companionable :)
I really, really love this movie, jsut so you know.
It didn't hurt its popularity that the movie was mostly in English.
:)
Well, the movie was mostly in angsty, awkward silences, as befits any good Scandinavian movie production.
I agree with the poster, though; it's hard not to put Leningrad Cowboys somewhere in the top three of Finnish movies. Of course, the Kaurismäki brothers would probably fill the other two slots as well...
How could this movie not at least make the top three?! Shocking lack of taste, I say. Shocking.
A pair of Old Navy khakis, a pair of rockport walking shoes, and a decent button down shirt is not a difficult ensemble to throw together and it looks more stylish than jeans and a t-shirt.
:)
I fully agree on khakis/dress pants. It is a lot more comfortable than jeans; the fabric is lighter, airier and has a little give. Sixteen hours at a time in a dry, warm office environment in jeans is no fun at all.
Shoes, well, whatever in black leather with no visibly heavy sole or chrome crap on it will do. Japanese workplaces have the right idea; in many offices people are wearing slippers indoors if they aren't meeting with clients or so. Light, airy and comfortable.
However, shirts are only fine if you happen to have a shirt that fits you - or, more accurately, if you have a body shape that fits off-the-rack shirts. Many people do not. It's not only being fat I'm talking about - there's dress shirts for the portly businessman, after all - but about being round-shouldered, or having a hunched up posture (not exactly uncommon during long stretches of work), or being unusually broad-shouldered, or having a wide neck, or...
Since the shirt fabric does not stretch, it becomes very uncomfortable as it tightens up and gets in the way. And where it tightens up, it soaks up sweat, which makes it clammy and yet more uncomfortable. And that makes you tense up and cringe, which translates into even worse body posture, back pain and a growing sullen resentment to any form of dress clothing.
Yes, you can get linen shirts sown up to specifications. They will breathe, will fit like a glove and be very stylish. They are also difficult and time-consuming to obtain if you don't happen to live in a major metropolis, and will drain the entire yearly clothing budget for low-to-mid income people.
I'm actually all for the introduction of lab coats as formal wear for people with science degrees
One problem with C++ is that it's difficult to know that an operation always will take the same amount of time. There can be quite a lot going on in the background whenever you create a new instance of a class, for example, and figuring that out can be almost impossible (especially if things like overloading have been used). For embedded applications (where you frequently must have an upper bound on reaction time) this can be a deal-breaker.
Of course, if that is the case, he shouldn't be looking at dynamic memory allocation either, tfor the same reason.
Again, much other literature - even poetry - is routinely translated and enjoyed. The cadence, the flow of words, the flavour of 16-century England is retained.
That is the challenge for a translator; to keep the flavour, the "thing" which makes the text what it is while changing the actual language. And a good translator will be able to.
I don't think you read Homer in it's original Greek, do you? I certainly don't think you expect your daughter to do so. That is poetry, straight off. So according to you, we should rather never read the story of Odyssevs than read a translation, no matter how good?
Shakespeare in original is hard to read (for me with English as a third language, or for a child not yet with the breadth of linguistic experience an adult has acquired, _very_ hard), not because he wrote in a difficult manner, but because language has changed so very much. I'd like to make the argument that he wrote to be easily and effortlessly understood by a wide audience; removing the current language barrier is exactly in line with his intentions, not counter to it.
Unfortunately, there actually are "translations" of Shakespeare into "contemporary English" that are taught in some schools.
That scares the hell out of me.
Yep. And if Gilgamesh is ever read outside of it's original Sumerian, civilization will crumble like a week-old sand castle.
Sixteenth-century english is very different from the contemporary language. What's wrong with translating it?
I don't plan on reading Ann Rice my whole life, I'd much rather read something that makes me a better person, and doing this requires work.
So you don't actually ever read just for fun? How sad.
Since when is thoughtless memorization of plots and quotes educational? Isn't the point of studying literature to learn how to think analytically, read between the lines, address social issues, and use language effectively?
Well, when knowing the plot and some pithy quotes is what is appreciated then tha't what people will gravitate to. You know that in most other fields of society this would be hailed as a marvellous productivity increase. I'd say this makes you fit right in society today (and liberal-arts slogans aside, that is exactly what the vast majority of people really want (Those who don't normally have plenty of other psychological problems as well and are easy to spot)).
I don't think we'll lose the classics, but I think we're heading toward a tiered society (if we're not there already) composed of the literate and well educated and the underclass who stay in non-thinking jobs, a lot like Metropolis.
There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.
If an artform, or a particular piece of art, has genuine, lasting mass appeal, it is normally exorcized from the "canon" and not longer a part of that which you "should" aspire to know. The whole point of Great Literature (as opposed to great literature) is to separate Those Who Have Read It from the unwashed masses who cheerfully haven't.
A CMS is not a blog tool - it's way overkill; not suited at all for what I need. It'd take me more time and effort to learn to use it than it was for me to write the perl program I use. Also, I don't have Windows, so I couldn't use that particular one anyhow.
I'm quite happy with my script; the lack of something similar was idle musings rather than a plea for help.
What little spat Felisha is having at school with her boyfriend and her ex boyfriend and her ex boyfriend'ss new girlfriend or her suicidal poetry and half-assed slutty pics posted to try and garner attention to her blog are not interesting and not worthy of being put on the internet.
I'd say it's all plenty interesting to Felisha's boyfriend, her ex, their common friends and acquintances. And their writings are interesting - even absorbing - to Felisha in turn.
Turn it around: most stuff out on the net is not interesting for more than a small group of people. Your "person with some notariety in their chosen medical profession" is utter snoozorama for the vast majority out there, and is thus no more (and no mess) worthy of being available on the net than Felisha's anxieties.
It's out there for those who want to read it. And if you don't want to (which most people do not) then don't.
As far as I know, html/css is the only option if you don't have the ability to install and run anything on the server you have access to. I have a cobbled together perl app that allows me to write posts as text with some minimal markup, and translates it to proper html with links, image scaling and thumbnail creation, rss feed generation and so on, and moves it all up to the server using scp. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to have it indexed by blox indexers, but then, I'm not really writing for a larger audience anyhow so I don't much mind.
m l
To me this is a good compromise - it's lean, easy to manage if there's a problem, and a static page loads real fast - and I've been surprised that there doesn't seem to exist any "real" tools for managing a static webpage-type blog like this.
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren/log/current.ht