Art has always built on ideas and elements from the work of previous artists. Mozart's first four piano concertos are arrangements of piano solo movements written by other composers. Liszt arranged Beethoven's symphonies for piano solo and two pianos. Most of Shakespeare's plots and characters are not original.
Indeed. The phrase 'stole my thunder' derives from an incident in the Elizabethan period wherein Shakespeare's theatre company appropriated another's method of wobbling a large tin sheet to make thunder noises. The phrase endures, but its author is long forgotten.
And for all intents and purposes, so are the authors of the phrases 'Green eyed monster", 'hoist by their own petard', 'misery loves company' and countless other pithy aphorisms.
Everything comes from somewhere and though giving credit where credit is due is honourable and worthy, as time goes by we remember only the work itself. Sure, critics with a keen eye for such things will recognise the source, but most of us just won't care.
Has anyone even stopped to ask whether this young woman's book is any good as literature? If it is, then people should read it. If it's nothing more than a hack-job that pastes together passages from better authors, then it should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.
(Bonus points to anyone who recognises just how few expressions in this post are actually original.)
This is wrong because actually printing a book is the smallest cost involved in making one. When you look at the price of, say, a $35 hardcover book perhaps $4 is physical costs. Almost all of the cost of a book is the cost of paying the author/editor/proofreader plus the retail markup. These costs remain the same regardless of format.
Er, no. Well, not entirely.
Editorial costs are huge, certainly, and layout is a costly endeavour. Assuming, however, that these costs were going to be incurred anyway, the marginal cost of selling e-books in conjunction with print is extremely low.
Retail mark-up is almost certainly reduced because of the lower overheads and higher (potential) customer base involved in online selling.
The real problem is that the two formats compete with one another. Many readers will opt for a cheaper e-book if the price difference between electronic and print format is significant enough. Ignoring for a moment the potentially increased readership, it's quite possible that the result could be significantly reduced profits.
Publishing is notorious for having no profit margin. Always has been. It was famous for not making money a century ago, famous for it fifty years ago and still a great way to get well known while losing money today.
It may have been famous for it 50 years ago, but it bears noting that some of the giants of US publishing established themselves in the 19th Century by brazenly ignoring UK copyright law and publishing best-sellers without compensation to the authors or the original publishers.
One might almost say there's an interesting lesson to be learned there...
Anyway, in spite of all this, I think your fundamental point is valid: Most people grossly underestimate the cost of publishing a book.
an attacker may be able to access files with an already known filename and location
One more reason not to keep your files in "My Documents". That part is easily guessed; "2009 Income Tax Returns" would be easy to guess as well.
I'd be more concerned about the accessibility of files like Normal.dot - the default MS Word template. Stick an autoexec macro in there, and you'll learn quite a bit about the system.
The High Court really only deals with interpretation of the constitution
While this is true of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, it is completely false in regard to the High Court of Australia.
You deserve to be modded up just for spelling Bundesverfassungsgericht correctly.
... And yes, IAAAL.
Now, some of you might conclude that the 3rd 'A' above stands for 'Australian'. Actually, because of issues too complex to explain (something to do with the International Date Line, the Doppler Effect and Special Relativity), Australian vowels simply last longer than North American or European vowels. If you were to pronounce that acronym out loud it would sound more like 'OIEAAAAAAAAOOOHHHHLLLL'.
A clause in the US/Australian Free Trade Agreement requires that Australian actors have their vowels surgically removed when they're being prepared for export.
I think the perpetrators will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when a bunch of IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
I suspect that exactly the opposite is more likely: The IT powerhouses will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when the perpetrators decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
... Not that I think either outcome is a certainty, by the way. Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting part about this whole episode (and I'm including the mass-attack against US military assets earlier in 2009 here) is that the effort was so brazen. And when someone (Google) finally did pipe up, China's effective response was, 'Sit down and shut up if you know what's good for you.'
It's not at all surprising that most of our so-called business leaders acquiesce. If MBA school teaches you anything, it's that you have to go along to get along.
American news is the best you can get in the world. Woodward and Bernstein were able to publish news so scandalous it forced Nixon to resign. Does any other government allow that?
Uh, yeah:
Keith Murdoch (ironically, Rupert Murdoch's father) broke the story of the Gallipoli debacle. It was the first public sign that WWI was anything other than a noble fight without terrible consequences.
E. D. Morel, who broke the story of atrocities in the Belgian Congo, as well as breaking the story that Great Britain and other allied nations had signed secret treaties that led to World War One.
William Russell, whose descriptions of conditions during the Crimean War not only brought down a government, but led to fundamental changes in patient care in modern warfare.
Journalism has been a dirty business from the get-go, but for as long as there have been newspapers, there have been intrepid reporters who actually care about the truth and made a difference when they told it.
This demagogue is appealing to a cult of automated Microsoft haters as a Google employee.
How do you moderate a story Flamebait?
I was at the talk and I can assure you that he was anything but demagogic in his delivery. He drew a strong distinction between Microsoft employees and the corporation as a whole. He was nuanced in his views and he stated emphatically (not less than twice) at the outset that the talk was not santioned in any way, shape or form by Google.
If any Microsoft-hater was looking for ammunition, they could derive a little comfort from some of the things he said, but one of his key points was that Microsoft is not monolithic, nor was it deliberately evil. He even refused to lay the blame for the TomTom patent suit at Ballmer's feet. That said, some camps within Microsoft still see desktop domination as their only chance of survival, and he predicted that patent suits would be used in a scorched earth campaign to scare people away from FOSS. Given the Tivo suit that was announced here on Slashdot less than an hour after he'd finished speaking, I'd say the facts bear him out.
If his story deserves anything, it's a +1 Insightful/Informative.
The ATT/Microsoft/Motorola DVR sucks giant donkey dicks.
Wouldn't this make a fantastic courtroom defense? I can just see it:
"Your Honour, We submit that Tivo lacks the defining characteristics of the allegedly infringed software. Our does not suck. We tried to make it suck as much as Microsoft's, but without access to their proprietary process for suckage, were unable to make our software suck in the same way as theirs. If the court will allow, I'll spend the next 6 days demonstrating just how much their software sucks, and ours doesn't."
Isn't tivo just serving as a surrogate for Linux here? After all, I believe Linux is at Tivo's core.
Does this not continue the chain started when Microsoft sued TomTom? Is it not a pattern of harassment of companies making money with a Linux core?
In a word, yes. Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) just gave a talk about this not two hours ago at linux.conf.au in Wellington, NZ. He stated that this would likely be Microsoft's modus operandi against Linux and FOSS in the near future.
[T]he FOSS world has developed a dominant monoculture that very definitely marginalizes alternative approaches that, both in the short term and in the long term, retards progress in other areas.
How do you support this assertion? You seem to be implying that there's only one kernel, but the fact of the matter is that this is only nominally true. There is one kernel stack, yes, but its permutations are almost beyond count. It runs on literally thousands of different hardware devices. Even the major distros all roll their own. So the kernel, while nominally monolithic, varies considerably in practice.
One of the defining characteristics of a monoculture is that it's susceptible to system-wide compromise. In short, if you can hack one instance of the monoculture, you can hack them all. That is arguably untrue of the Linux kernel. There are so many different implementations that systemic compromise becomes almost impossible. Conversely (and almost ironically), the kernel does possess one often overlooked strength of monoculture: As long as the core commonality remains strong, the system at large remains healthy. Small, targeted patches can propagate quickly.
It's peculiar and counter-intuitive, I realise, but experience teaches us that the Linux kernel seems to have few of the weaknesses of a classic monoculture while retaining many of its strengths.
The great thing about those works is that they were DIFFICULT TO DUPLICATE.
You might think so, but you'd be wrong.
The editor of the Oxford University Press' complete works of Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of Shakespeare's and author of Doctor Faustus, among other works) once told me that people in Elizabethan times had vastly better verbal recall than we have today. It was not at all unusual, she said, for someone to go and see MacBeth, for example, then to go home and repeat entire speeches verbatim to others.
The Folios, by the way, were all copies, partly from memory, unauthorised by Shakespeare's estate.
This is almost as absurd as telling drinkers that they could not use a device to lift a drink to their lips because it makes getting drunk easier.
No, this is like telling drinkers that they cannot use a device that duplicates the beverage to give to their friends.
So you would be against replicators, then? Kindly hand in your geek card to security as you leave.
Okay. seriously: I know that example is a little absurd, but it's useful inasmuch as it casts the whole debate in a new light. If nourishment were universally replicable, would we not consider this a good thing? Why should intellectual nourishment be any different?
I say this as a writer, photographer and software developer, by the way. So yes, I do have some skin in this game.
We would do it if we werent undermanned, underfunded, and had competent users.
Dude, my Director doesn't even know her laptop's home folder is encrypted. She just logs in and everything is there.
She's a die-hard XP user who is anything but technologically adept. But when I told her that she'd have to choose between Ubuntu and Windows 7 on her new laptop, she chose Ubuntu. During the install, it asked if I wanted home folder encryption, I said yes, and that was that.
I've had exactly one support session with that laptop since: Her default file association was opening documents in OO.o instead of MS Office (running under WINE). I changed the association and haven't heard a peep since.
Digicel has also donated $5,000,000 in cash to Haiti. To put that in perspective, Chase Manhattan donated $1,000,000, less than a single one of their executives made in bonuses this year.
I organised a bit of emergency aid delivery with some folks from Digicel Pacific in the days following the Samoan tsunami that left thousands of people homeless. Not only are they very good at logistics, they also actually care about the people they serve. With their assistance, we were able to deliver solar/wind-up radios to affected families quickly and efficiently. Digicel shipped them for free and even paid for a bunch of them themselves.
This is due in no small part to the fact that Digicel is privately owned by Denis O'Brien. For all his faults (and he has a few), he genuinely cares about things like this and he insists that his people do too. I suspect that publicly owned corps just don't have the freedom to actually express humanitarian interest the way a private corp would.
Digicel are more or less the McDonald's of cell phone carriers in numerous developing nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific: They offer cheap, reliable service with few frills. Their Internet service (where I live, at least) is expensive but available, which is more than can be said about the situation before they arrived on the scene. It's no accident, therefore, that during rioting some years ago in Haiti, people actively defended the towers and buildings owned by Digicel. They were too valuable to burn.
For my part, I take significant comfort from the knowledge that they recovered from utter disaster so quickly. My country receives on average 1.5 hurricanes every year, and sits squarely on the Pacific ring of fire. We've had two 7+ earthquakes already in the last year and we've got a warning level two volcano boiling away in the north. Happily, we're not so crowded and impoverished as Haiti, so our buildings have (so far) staid intact.
Google disclosed that upon investigating users suspected of being attacked, they found "dozens" of Chinese human rights activists who had been compromised through phishing, malware or other systems that allowed security forces (presumably) to read their mail via a valid authentication....
I know you say so later in the message, but I think you should underline something: The people whose accounts were compromised were not all Chinese, they were citizens of several different countries. Their common tie is that they all advocated strongly for human rights in China:
[W]e have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.
Why is this important? Because some nations[*] don't like others spying on their nationals.
So, while Google itself may be mostly reliable on the backend, the security ecosystem as a whole is deeply flawed.
The fact that your spin-detector can't sense anything from the summary is indicative of greater problems.
I don't want to take away for a second from your extremely detailed parsing of the summary, but...
Let's take it is a given that the summary is spin-laden. Let's further assume (safely, I think) that the author has a real problem with nuclear technology in general, or at least with the way it's currently implemented.
In fact, let's assume that slashdot readers, being the clever types that they are, have spotted this spin coming from about 5 blocks away. I still have one question:
Are the assertions of the summary true or not?:
The answer, for what it's worth, is no. FTFA:
"The public shouldn't be concerned about any kind of health consequences," Irwin said, "because the amounts that have been measured are very, very low." Williams said the 17,000 parts per liter level was about half the reportable level established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is 30,000 parts per liter.%
Wow, I guess someone forgot to change someone's litterbox today.
I'll have you know that this is a musico-historical recreation of the moment of discovery of the fourth of the Galilean moons, encapsulated in a parody of a song depicting the senseless persecution of an innocent man.
My creation is also a bitter, post-modernist exploration of themes of alone-ness and alienation expressed as bodies adrift in the outer reaches of space, a veritable cri de coeur about the importance of attention to one's self-esteem and ultimate sense of being. It's a semiotical exploration of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition!
Offtopic, my keister! It's practically dripping with topicity!
(I knew that Arts degree would come in handy some day.)
Slashdot Mirror
Art has always built on ideas and elements from the work of previous artists. Mozart's first four piano concertos are arrangements of piano solo movements written by other composers. Liszt arranged Beethoven's symphonies for piano solo and two pianos. Most of Shakespeare's plots and characters are not original.
Indeed. The phrase 'stole my thunder' derives from an incident in the Elizabethan period wherein Shakespeare's theatre company appropriated another's method of wobbling a large tin sheet to make thunder noises. The phrase endures, but its author is long forgotten.
And for all intents and purposes, so are the authors of the phrases 'Green eyed monster", 'hoist by their own petard', 'misery loves company' and countless other pithy aphorisms.
Everything comes from somewhere and though giving credit where credit is due is honourable and worthy, as time goes by we remember only the work itself. Sure, critics with a keen eye for such things will recognise the source, but most of us just won't care.
Has anyone even stopped to ask whether this young woman's book is any good as literature? If it is, then people should read it. If it's nothing more than a hack-job that pastes together passages from better authors, then it should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.
(Bonus points to anyone who recognises just how few expressions in this post are actually original.)
I got excited for a minute because I thought the header read "Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Babies".
That would have been interesting.
So, Windows 7 is still killing babies?
No, they're using them as batteries, like in the Matrix. RTFS, you ignorant sheeple!
I agwee, because Micwosoft Wuhd totawwy wocks!
Er, no. Well, not entirely.
Editorial costs are huge, certainly, and layout is a costly endeavour. Assuming, however, that these costs were going to be incurred anyway, the marginal cost of selling e-books in conjunction with print is extremely low.
Retail mark-up is almost certainly reduced because of the lower overheads and higher (potential) customer base involved in online selling.
The real problem is that the two formats compete with one another. Many readers will opt for a cheaper e-book if the price difference between electronic and print format is significant enough. Ignoring for a moment the potentially increased readership, it's quite possible that the result could be significantly reduced profits.
It may have been famous for it 50 years ago, but it bears noting that some of the giants of US publishing established themselves in the 19th Century by brazenly ignoring UK copyright law and publishing best-sellers without compensation to the authors or the original publishers.
One might almost say there's an interesting lesson to be learned there...
Anyway, in spite of all this, I think your fundamental point is valid: Most people grossly underestimate the cost of publishing a book.
an attacker may be able to access files with an already known filename and location
One more reason not to keep your files in "My Documents". That part is easily guessed; "2009 Income Tax Returns" would be easy to guess as well.
I'd be more concerned about the accessibility of files like Normal.dot - the default MS Word template. Stick an autoexec macro in there, and you'll learn quite a bit about the system.
The High Court really only deals with interpretation of the constitution
While this is true of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, it is completely false in regard to the High Court of Australia.
You deserve to be modded up just for spelling Bundesverfassungsgericht correctly.
Now, some of you might conclude that the 3rd 'A' above stands for 'Australian'. Actually, because of issues too complex to explain (something to do with the International Date Line, the Doppler Effect and Special Relativity), Australian vowels simply last longer than North American or European vowels. If you were to pronounce that acronym out loud it would sound more like 'OIEAAAAAAAAOOOHHHHLLLL'.
A clause in the US/Australian Free Trade Agreement requires that Australian actors have their vowels surgically removed when they're being prepared for export.
I think the perpetrators will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when a bunch of IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
I suspect that exactly the opposite is more likely: The IT powerhouses will end up with more on their hands than they at first suspected when the perpetrators decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
... Not that I think either outcome is a certainty, by the way. Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting part about this whole episode (and I'm including the mass-attack against US military assets earlier in 2009 here) is that the effort was so brazen. And when someone (Google) finally did pipe up, China's effective response was, 'Sit down and shut up if you know what's good for you.'
It's not at all surprising that most of our so-called business leaders acquiesce. If MBA school teaches you anything, it's that you have to go along to get along.
More analysis here, for anyone not frightened by TL;DR.
I wonder if that is the problem Tiger Woods has. He obviously was thinking with the wrong head.
Exactly. He used his wood when he really needed a driver.
American news is the best you can get in the world. Woodward and Bernstein were able to publish news so scandalous it forced Nixon to resign. Does any other government allow that?
Uh, yeah:
Journalism has been a dirty business from the get-go, but for as long as there have been newspapers, there have been intrepid reporters who actually care about the truth and made a difference when they told it.
Can we please call it "celliquette"? ohplz ohplz ohplz!
Aikon-
In your case, 'cell-ibacy' would be preferable.
This demagogue is appealing to a cult of automated Microsoft haters as a Google employee. How do you moderate a story Flamebait?
I was at the talk and I can assure you that he was anything but demagogic in his delivery. He drew a strong distinction between Microsoft employees and the corporation as a whole. He was nuanced in his views and he stated emphatically (not less than twice) at the outset that the talk was not santioned in any way, shape or form by Google.
If any Microsoft-hater was looking for ammunition, they could derive a little comfort from some of the things he said, but one of his key points was that Microsoft is not monolithic, nor was it deliberately evil. He even refused to lay the blame for the TomTom patent suit at Ballmer's feet. That said, some camps within Microsoft still see desktop domination as their only chance of survival, and he predicted that patent suits would be used in a scorched earth campaign to scare people away from FOSS. Given the Tivo suit that was announced here on Slashdot less than an hour after he'd finished speaking, I'd say the facts bear him out.
If his story deserves anything, it's a +1 Insightful/Informative.
CASE FUCKING DISMISSED. Microsoft is held in contempt of the world, and must perform oral sex on everyone. twice.
So the punishment for sucking is... more sucking?
Wouldn't this make a fantastic courtroom defense? I can just see it:
"Your Honour, We submit that Tivo lacks the defining characteristics of the allegedly infringed software. Our does not suck. We tried to make it suck as much as Microsoft's, but without access to their proprietary process for suckage, were unable to make our software suck in the same way as theirs. If the court will allow, I'll spend the next 6 days demonstrating just how much their software sucks, and ours doesn't."
I'm not so sure its that funny.
Isn't tivo just serving as a surrogate for Linux here? After all, I believe Linux is at Tivo's core.
Does this not continue the chain started when Microsoft sued TomTom? Is it not a pattern of harassment of companies making money with a Linux core?
In a word, yes. Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) just gave a talk about this not two hours ago at linux.conf.au in Wellington, NZ. He stated that this would likely be Microsoft's modus operandi against Linux and FOSS in the near future.
How do you support this assertion? You seem to be implying that there's only one kernel, but the fact of the matter is that this is only nominally true. There is one kernel stack, yes, but its permutations are almost beyond count. It runs on literally thousands of different hardware devices. Even the major distros all roll their own. So the kernel, while nominally monolithic, varies considerably in practice.
One of the defining characteristics of a monoculture is that it's susceptible to system-wide compromise. In short, if you can hack one instance of the monoculture, you can hack them all. That is arguably untrue of the Linux kernel. There are so many different implementations that systemic compromise becomes almost impossible. Conversely (and almost ironically), the kernel does possess one often overlooked strength of monoculture: As long as the core commonality remains strong, the system at large remains healthy. Small, targeted patches can propagate quickly.
It's peculiar and counter-intuitive, I realise, but experience teaches us that the Linux kernel seems to have few of the weaknesses of a classic monoculture while retaining many of its strengths.
I want to order pizza and ice cream on earth, delivered by cannon.
That's what ICBMs are for - Ice Cream Ballistic Missiles.
Well, I know I'd scream if I saw one coming.
I-CBM
U-CBM
We all CBM
for ICBM!
The great thing about those works is that they were DIFFICULT TO DUPLICATE.
You might think so, but you'd be wrong.
The editor of the Oxford University Press' complete works of Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of Shakespeare's and author of Doctor Faustus, among other works) once told me that people in Elizabethan times had vastly better verbal recall than we have today. It was not at all unusual, she said, for someone to go and see MacBeth, for example, then to go home and repeat entire speeches verbatim to others.
The Folios, by the way, were all copies, partly from memory, unauthorised by Shakespeare's estate.
This is almost as absurd as telling drinkers that they could not use a device to lift a drink to their lips because it makes getting drunk easier.
No, this is like telling drinkers that they cannot use a device that duplicates the beverage to give to their friends.
So you would be against replicators, then? Kindly hand in your geek card to security as you leave.
Okay. seriously: I know that example is a little absurd, but it's useful inasmuch as it casts the whole debate in a new light. If nourishment were universally replicable, would we not consider this a good thing? Why should intellectual nourishment be any different?
I say this as a writer, photographer and software developer, by the way. So yes, I do have some skin in this game.
We would do it if we werent undermanned, underfunded, and had competent users.
Dude, my Director doesn't even know her laptop's home folder is encrypted. She just logs in and everything is there.
She's a die-hard XP user who is anything but technologically adept. But when I told her that she'd have to choose between Ubuntu and Windows 7 on her new laptop, she chose Ubuntu. During the install, it asked if I wanted home folder encryption, I said yes, and that was that.
I've had exactly one support session with that laptop since: Her default file association was opening documents in OO.o instead of MS Office (running under WINE). I changed the association and haven't heard a peep since.
Digicel has also donated $5,000,000 in cash to Haiti. To put that in perspective, Chase Manhattan donated $1,000,000, less than a single one of their executives made in bonuses this year.
I organised a bit of emergency aid delivery with some folks from Digicel Pacific in the days following the Samoan tsunami that left thousands of people homeless. Not only are they very good at logistics, they also actually care about the people they serve. With their assistance, we were able to deliver solar/wind-up radios to affected families quickly and efficiently. Digicel shipped them for free and even paid for a bunch of them themselves.
This is due in no small part to the fact that Digicel is privately owned by Denis O'Brien. For all his faults (and he has a few), he genuinely cares about things like this and he insists that his people do too. I suspect that publicly owned corps just don't have the freedom to actually express humanitarian interest the way a private corp would.
Digicel are more or less the McDonald's of cell phone carriers in numerous developing nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific: They offer cheap, reliable service with few frills. Their Internet service (where I live, at least) is expensive but available, which is more than can be said about the situation before they arrived on the scene. It's no accident, therefore, that during rioting some years ago in Haiti, people actively defended the towers and buildings owned by Digicel. They were too valuable to burn.
For my part, I take significant comfort from the knowledge that they recovered from utter disaster so quickly. My country receives on average 1.5 hurricanes every year, and sits squarely on the Pacific ring of fire. We've had two 7+ earthquakes already in the last year and we've got a warning level two volcano boiling away in the north. Happily, we're not so crowded and impoverished as Haiti, so our buildings have (so far) staid intact.
I know you say so later in the message, but I think you should underline something: The people whose accounts were compromised were not all Chinese, they were citizens of several different countries. Their common tie is that they all advocated strongly for human rights in China:
Why is this important? Because some nations[*] don't like others spying on their nationals.
I couldn't agree more.
--
I don't want to take away for a second from your extremely detailed parsing of the summary, but...
Let's take it is a given that the summary is spin-laden. Let's further assume (safely, I think) that the author has a real problem with nuclear technology in general, or at least with the way it's currently implemented.
In fact, let's assume that slashdot readers, being the clever types that they are, have spotted this spin coming from about 5 blocks away. I still have one question:
Are the assertions of the summary true or not?:
The answer, for what it's worth, is no. FTFA:
No one knows if you're a dog unless you tell them.
On Facebook, everybody assumes you're a dog if even one of your 'friends' says you are.
"He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscropic reality."
If that doesn't make you the life of the party in one fell swoop, NOTHING ever will.
No kidding. Chicks really dig my emergent phenomenon.
Score:1 Offtopic
Wow, I guess someone forgot to change someone's litterbox today.
I'll have you know that this is a musico-historical recreation of the moment of discovery of the fourth of the Galilean moons, encapsulated in a parody of a song depicting the senseless persecution of an innocent man.
My creation is also a bitter, post-modernist exploration of themes of alone-ness and alienation expressed as bodies adrift in the outer reaches of space, a veritable cri de coeur about the importance of attention to one's self-esteem and ultimate sense of being. It's a semiotical exploration of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition!
Offtopic, my keister! It's practically dripping with topicity!
(I knew that Arts degree would come in handy some day.)