It's an addictive, dirty, poisonous drug that has no redeeming purpose whatsoever, and I have nothing but contempt for anyone who tries to trivialize or justify its use, let alone its being inflicted on everybody else.
Really? You've tried it? You can honestly compare your experiences with, say, 40 years of satisfaction and relaxation provided by a pack a day, and state unequivocally that it has no purpose whatsoever?
You're quite naive if you believe the self-deception of most nerds who think that playing D&D, watching anime, or using Linux implies, requires, or is correlated with general intelligence. You shouldn't find ignorance on slashdot surprising - it's common almost everywhere, no matter how knowledgeable people believe themselves to be.
No, no, I wasn't claiming good quality bootlegs are representative of the majority, I was only trying to say that bootleg doesn't imply any level of quality at all. I've also seen plenty of terrible bootlegs (Tool 2006/10/06 and The Who at the Isle of Wight 1969 come to mind, not to mention a significant majority of early Who audio recordings).
And yeah, snatching pre-release footage in this case was probably about equivalent to recording a Clapton gig in difficulty. While a Clapton concert is probably larger and easier for a taper to lose himself in, it's also 2 hours long, whereas this was 2 minutes. I'm surprised nobody snuck in a camcorder to record things like this with; they really should be the sort.
This film looks killer, though the quality of the clip is very bootleg.
You don't watch many bootlegs, do you? Try the NYC Bitch Committee's release of Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood on February 26, 2008, or the audience video of Acoustic Syndicate on December 22, 2007. There are quite a few high quality bootleg audience videos out there.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that geeks couldn't do any better. Hell, Eric Clapton's fans have top-quality audience videos of half the shows he's played in the last decade, and they're all old farts and have to sneak their electronics into every show.
You know which people see the Codex Sinaiticus as one of the most valuable manuscripts for textual criticism of the New Testament? NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICS. Your sentence says the SAME DAMN THING, it's just stupider.
Again, you seem to know nothing about anything, and you don't realize it. You sound like you spend all your time reading Wikipedia policy pages and talk pages, and some blogs, instead of learning real things. It's unhealthy. Go read a book about chemistry, or Medieval Europe, or something else intellectual or academic, right now. It'll do you a world of good.
As to your dumbass claim that professional encyclopedias present things in neutral tones:
I went and grabbed a random volume of my set of the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition. You know, the Scholar's Edition. THE edition of THE encyclopedia. I took volume XV (ITA-KYS) and opened it to a random page (553) and read the first article I saw (Jumna):
"The traffic on the Jumna is not very considerable; in its upper portion timber, and in the loer stone, grain and cotton are the chief articles of commerce, carried in the clumsy barges which navigate its stream."
Another, page 337, article Jesuits:
"The formation of the Society was a masterpiece of genius on the part of a man (see LOYOLA) who was quick to realize the necessity of the moment."
Another, page 723, article Kemble:
"In his own version of Coriolanus, which was revived during his first season, the character of the "noble Roman" was so exactly suited to his powers that he not only plated it with a perfection that has never been approached, but, it is said, allowed it to colour his private manner and modes of speech. His tall and imposing person, noble countenance, and solemn and grave demeanour were uniquely adapted for the Roman characters in Shakespeare's plays; and, when in addition he had to depict the gradual growth and development of one absorbing passion, his representation gathered in a momentum and majestic force that were irresistible."
All three pages and articles picked at random, and all contained opinions. Perhaps you should lay to rest the claims about professional encyclopedias until you've READ ONE.
Well, you certainly seem to know quite a bit about, er, nothing. Have you ever read an encyclopedia? You think that mentioning a text's importance in textual criticism is a biased, non-neutral opinion? You're a fucking idiot.
Well, you certainly seem to know quite a bit about, er, nothing. Can you tell me which bits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus are maliciously false, added by the "secrete (sic) editing squads" to inflict their opinions on everyone outside Mom's basement?
No, I read mostly academic texts and articles which have objective focus, and no ulterior motive. Besides, the information is not difficult to find - I just wonder why Christians never so much as read the Wikipedia page on the Gospels.
Jesus Christ. Why is it that Christians (and former Christians) will insist on knowing much less than me (atheist) about their holy texts? I've had conversations with every one of my real-life friends in the past, several of them hardcore Christians and several others casual Christians, which have revealed that I'm the only person I know who's ever heard of, among other things, the Codices Sinaitcus and Vaticanus. Why is that?
I'm reminded of John Safran's rant about atheists in John Safran vs. God (end of episode 1, I think).
The key to those was to find the head and the tail - the cats had their tails right next to their heads, even in the distorted versions, while the dogs had them far away.
Hey, listen, shut the fuck up. You're exactly the sort of person uncreepyneighbor is attacking, and you're making the intelligent people who disagree with him look bad.
I see why it inspires people, and it's a stupid reason to be inspired. I'm an atheist, and we've never had an atheist president, but if we did it wouldn't make me say "golly gee, maybe that means _I_ could be president too!"
Bottom line is, black people as a whole have spent 150 years campaigning to be recognized as equals; why is it that skin color matters _at_all_ for the president? A black president and a white president will be equal in all respects other than skin color. There shouldn't be anything inspiring about another identical president.
By the way, is it easier to disagree with someone's assessment of your emotional response to something if you just assume they don't have emotions and can't empathize with you? It's not a healthy way to think of people who disagree with you.
Nope. Most people, in my experience, genuinely like the 10 generic songs they hear on their favorite pop radio station. They might also like other stuff, but they won't like it any more no matter how good it is, so what's the point?
A radio transmitter would only track the position of the center, or a point on the outside of the ball. The deformation of the ball would affect the distance between said point and the part touching the line.
It's not harmless to others, though. You can't know that the brakes of the car 1500 feet ahead won't lock up, or that a hobo won't appear on the shoulder, or that your car won't veer hard enough on a crack in the road to jump the median, or any of a thousand other things. The key to safe driving is preparedness for unexpected emergency situations, almost all of which can appear within 10 seconds unforeseeably.
What the fuck does it matter? Some women can work as managers and there are black accountants now, great. Do you think that's a victory on the same scale as stopping your generation from annihilating the human population of Earth?
It's possible, but it can't be the default position.
It's not the default position, though. Schliemann was laughed at, and people didn't give the idea of a historical Trojan War serious credence until the independent evidence from the Hittite tablets. Only then did scholars start looking for serious correlating evidence from other Mycenaean sites.
Disclaimer: A majority of my knowledge of this subject is from a single source: Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War (which I don't remember perfectly anymore).
Present-day oral traditions observed (and recorded) "in the wild" show that retellings of stories change drastically from generation to generation, not just from century to century.
I don't doubt that you know much more about this than me, but isn't it different with poetry? Poems can't be easily changed in the retelling except by a poet, without damaging the meter.
Not really. The Atlantis story is one told by a late-Classical-Period author (Plato), with explicit claims that it is derived from a millennia-old tradition preserved by Egyptian texts. If anything, the Atlantis story has more extrinsic plausibility than this one!
Yes, well... that's what I meant to type. It just came out wrong.
But for a story to have its roots in an event from which it is separated by several centuries in which there was no such thing as writing... well, why not just announce that you've found Atlantis? That kind of announcement would have pretty much the same relationship between myth and historicity.
Oh, come on, that's not fair. The Mycenaean and Hellenic peoples were two ends of the same culture, and the Greek Dark Age was only, what, four or five centuries long? It's really not that implausible that the story could have been preserved that long (at the most, remember - no telling when in the dark age Homer composed), especially given that it was regularly memorized in its entirety by students in the Hellenic period. Atlantis is a random children's story that got lost, then blown out of proportion. Not the same thing.
Right, but he was angry before that. Ever seen/heard You Are All Diseased? That's one of his angriest, and it was released in 1999. He was angry at the whole of Western society, not just part of it or at the way it was being run.
I can't tell if you're joking, so I'm going to call you a fucking idiot just in case (better safe than sorry, y'know). Carlin was as strong an atheist as it's possible to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You've tried it? You can honestly compare your experiences with, say, 40 years of satisfaction and relaxation provided by a pack a day, and state unequivocally that it has no purpose whatsoever?
You're quite naive if you believe the self-deception of most nerds who think that playing D&D, watching anime, or using Linux implies, requires, or is correlated with general intelligence. You shouldn't find ignorance on slashdot surprising - it's common almost everywhere, no matter how knowledgeable people believe themselves to be.
No, no, I wasn't claiming good quality bootlegs are representative of the majority, I was only trying to say that bootleg doesn't imply any level of quality at all. I've also seen plenty of terrible bootlegs (Tool 2006/10/06 and The Who at the Isle of Wight 1969 come to mind, not to mention a significant majority of early Who audio recordings).
And yeah, snatching pre-release footage in this case was probably about equivalent to recording a Clapton gig in difficulty. While a Clapton concert is probably larger and easier for a taper to lose himself in, it's also 2 hours long, whereas this was 2 minutes. I'm surprised nobody snuck in a camcorder to record things like this with; they really should be the sort.
You don't watch many bootlegs, do you? Try the NYC Bitch Committee's release of Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood on February 26, 2008, or the audience video of Acoustic Syndicate on December 22, 2007. There are quite a few high quality bootleg audience videos out there.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that geeks couldn't do any better. Hell, Eric Clapton's fans have top-quality audience videos of half the shows he's played in the last decade, and they're all old farts and have to sneak their electronics into every show.
You know which people see the Codex Sinaiticus as one of the most valuable manuscripts for textual criticism of the New Testament? NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICS. Your sentence says the SAME DAMN THING, it's just stupider.
Again, you seem to know nothing about anything, and you don't realize it. You sound like you spend all your time reading Wikipedia policy pages and talk pages, and some blogs, instead of learning real things. It's unhealthy. Go read a book about chemistry, or Medieval Europe, or something else intellectual or academic, right now. It'll do you a world of good.
As to your dumbass claim that professional encyclopedias present things in neutral tones:
I went and grabbed a random volume of my set of the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition. You know, the Scholar's Edition. THE edition of THE encyclopedia. I took volume XV (ITA-KYS) and opened it to a random page (553) and read the first article I saw (Jumna):
"The traffic on the Jumna is not very considerable; in its upper portion timber, and in the loer stone, grain and cotton are the chief articles of commerce, carried in the clumsy barges which navigate its stream."
Another, page 337, article Jesuits:
"The formation of the Society was a masterpiece of genius on the part of a man (see LOYOLA) who was quick to realize the necessity of the moment."
Another, page 723, article Kemble:
"In his own version of Coriolanus, which was revived during his first season, the character of the "noble Roman" was so exactly suited to his powers that he not only plated it with a perfection that has never been approached, but, it is said, allowed it to colour his private manner and modes of speech. His tall and imposing person, noble countenance, and solemn and grave demeanour were uniquely adapted for the Roman characters in Shakespeare's plays; and, when in addition he had to depict the gradual growth and development of one absorbing passion, his representation gathered in a momentum and majestic force that were irresistible."
All three pages and articles picked at random, and all contained opinions. Perhaps you should lay to rest the claims about professional encyclopedias until you've READ ONE.
Well, you certainly seem to know quite a bit about, er, nothing. Have you ever read an encyclopedia? You think that mentioning a text's importance in textual criticism is a biased, non-neutral opinion? You're a fucking idiot.
Well, you certainly seem to know quite a bit about, er, nothing. Can you tell me which bits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus are maliciously false, added by the "secrete (sic) editing squads" to inflict their opinions on everyone outside Mom's basement?
No, I read mostly academic texts and articles which have objective focus, and no ulterior motive. Besides, the information is not difficult to find - I just wonder why Christians never so much as read the Wikipedia page on the Gospels.
Jesus Christ. Why is it that Christians (and former Christians) will insist on knowing much less than me (atheist) about their holy texts? I've had conversations with every one of my real-life friends in the past, several of them hardcore Christians and several others casual Christians, which have revealed that I'm the only person I know who's ever heard of, among other things, the Codices Sinaitcus and Vaticanus. Why is that?
I'm reminded of John Safran's rant about atheists in John Safran vs. God (end of episode 1, I think).
That's why we have judges and juries to convict and sentence, instead of letting the victims do it.
The double entendre was in "length", which could be taken to mean "penis length", with amusing results.
The key to those was to find the head and the tail - the cats had their tails right next to their heads, even in the distorted versions, while the dogs had them far away.
Hey, listen, shut the fuck up. You're exactly the sort of person uncreepyneighbor is attacking, and you're making the intelligent people who disagree with him look bad.
Petitio principii, the Latin term, works fine.
I see why it inspires people, and it's a stupid reason to be inspired. I'm an atheist, and we've never had an atheist president, but if we did it wouldn't make me say "golly gee, maybe that means _I_ could be president too!"
Bottom line is, black people as a whole have spent 150 years campaigning to be recognized as equals; why is it that skin color matters _at_all_ for the president? A black president and a white president will be equal in all respects other than skin color. There shouldn't be anything inspiring about another identical president.
By the way, is it easier to disagree with someone's assessment of your emotional response to something if you just assume they don't have emotions and can't empathize with you? It's not a healthy way to think of people who disagree with you.
Did you just identify a country by its TLD instead of its name?
Nope. Most people, in my experience, genuinely like the 10 generic songs they hear on their favorite pop radio station. They might also like other stuff, but they won't like it any more no matter how good it is, so what's the point?
A radio transmitter would only track the position of the center, or a point on the outside of the ball. The deformation of the ball would affect the distance between said point and the part touching the line.
It's not harmless to others, though. You can't know that the brakes of the car 1500 feet ahead won't lock up, or that a hobo won't appear on the shoulder, or that your car won't veer hard enough on a crack in the road to jump the median, or any of a thousand other things. The key to safe driving is preparedness for unexpected emergency situations, almost all of which can appear within 10 seconds unforeseeably.
What the fuck does it matter? Some women can work as managers and there are black accountants now, great. Do you think that's a victory on the same scale as stopping your generation from annihilating the human population of Earth?
Why not just say you work for Citigroup? It's not like it reveals any extra information.
Disclaimer: A majority of my knowledge of this subject is from a single source: Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War (which I don't remember perfectly anymore). I don't doubt that you know much more about this than me, but isn't it different with poetry? Poems can't be easily changed in the retelling except by a poet, without damaging the meter. Yes, well... that's what I meant to type. It just came out wrong.
Right, but he was angry before that. Ever seen/heard You Are All Diseased? That's one of his angriest, and it was released in 1999. He was angry at the whole of Western society, not just part of it or at the way it was being run.
I can't tell if you're joking, so I'm going to call you a fucking idiot just in case (better safe than sorry, y'know). Carlin was as strong an atheist as it's possible to be.