You'll note that I don't object to movies that pander to men when that's their niche - I'm specifically objecting to films with nominally universal appeal that universalize (or simply presume) male sexual desire just by assumption. There are "chick flicks," too.
There's also a difference between targetting a demographic, and pandering.
A good analogy is that I have nothing against Maxim. I have a smidgen more of a problem with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but not much. If there were a T&A shot on the cover of The Economist or Scientific American, I'd be irked.
I'm distinguishing between the nudity and the pandering; you obviously can have either without the other. It's the promise of nudity, rather than the delivery of it, that secures the eyeballs of the teen male demographic (obviously, they need to stay within ratings limits to get that demographic.) My issue is with the selective representation of desire, and the way it creates a "canonical" audience when there isn't any call for it. Some films do have a reason for a canonical audience (Porky's, for example, or even American Pie); for others, it's unnecessary. This translates to games, as well.
Oddly enough, I'm more patient with Tomb Raider per se because I think the cheesecake factor is part of its raison d'etre, rather than being a gratuitous add-on.
I haven't seen T3, so I'm making a bit of a prediction: that the nudity of the Terminatrix was filmed in a far, far different way than the nudity of male terminators was. If you take a lot of these movies and invert the genders - not just for the story line, but for the way they're filmed, the way that the figure of the woman as an object of desire is portrayed in a way that most males would never accept a man being portrayed - you'd see what I mean.
The odd thing about a lot of Japanese anime and game culture is that they sometimes play with this sort of asymmetry of desire with gender-flipping plots and ambiguous characters, as if the artists are chafing at the market constraints and subtly undermining them. Think of "Bridget" from Guilty Gear XX, or Ranma...
I don't think the nudity per se is the issue for a lot of people, it's the pandering aspect. What T&A says to the audience is "this is meant for horny straight males - anyone else is just tolerated here." AKA, the E3 effect.
The straight male desire assumption (when it shouldn't be necessary in works with more universal appeal - erotica/porn is another question) is more offensive to me than depictions of sex or incidental nudity.
The difference between the stock market and your monitor, is that there aren't hundreds of thousands of people who would like nothing better than to crack into your monitor.
Which is why, of course, that thermonuclear devices have been launched by malicious hackers.
Oh, wait.
I mean, it's why the Stock Market has been compromised by evil criminal masterminds manipulating the prices via electronic subterfuge.
Oh, wait.
Oh, I mean that's why terrorists have been able to bring the air traffic control network down by hacking into it.
Oh, wait...
I guess you're extrapolating from the fact that web sites are often hacked and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to worms to the grandiose implication that this sort of system is inherently vulnerable. I think that's a big stretch of an extrapolation.
Debian STABLE offers the finest technology that the hard-working, cautious developers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate can muster. There's nothing that says "stability" like graven marble and cuneiform tablets! Who needs newfangled bells and whistles like "wheel" and "fire," anyway?
It's a bad thing because much of the Slashdot readership was once employed in the sector generated by the Coolness Factor. Yes, companies will save money that will get invested in other industries, but that means, at best, that a lot of people will have to start retraining for positions in those other industries.
In other words, welcome to the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Guild.
Re:Why are we so surprized?
on
Incas Used Binary?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The article, unfortunately, is a little hyperbolic - Gary Urton has done some fine work, but they've taken what's essenntially a metaphor about any point of choice being a binary element and suggested something that's a bit misleading. I don't think there's any indication that color-function was standardized across quipu-makers: just like some elements of coding style are unique from programmer to programmer, I see nothing surprising about the fact that the choice of materials for different cord-groups would be a matter of personal taste and mnemonics for the quipu-maker (and materials are dyes used also seemed to rely heavily on the region that the quipu was produced.)
The quipu were base-10. They did, in fact, use a "place holder" comparable to a zero, and the relationship between that place holder and the Quechua word for "zero" suggests that you could say there was a zero concept.
The discovery of the base-10 nature of the quipus was done by noting how sets of hanging strings, interepreted as base-10 (lowest set of knots as 1-place, second set of knots as 10's-place, etc) would add up to the same number the number on a cord which hung at the top of those groups.
Urton's Social Life of Numbers is a very good book about the quipu, but there are some concerns: he makes some historical claims based on ethnographic research (that's a bit a-historical).
A more rigorous look at the mathematics of the quipu is Mathematics of the Incas. It's also a fun book, teaching one how to make one's own quipus.
What the have in common, also, is something that really pisses me off - they always invoke "the artist" and the artists rights when they pull this crap. The Sonny Bono act was touted as a victory for, exampled, Harold Lloyd, the silent film star whose films were going to go into public domain. He's been dead for years, but it was being treated as his victory because his grand-daughter would be able to restrict distribution of his old films, and make a profit on them.
The idea that "the artist" - which is really a misnomer, since the term should be "whoever happens to own the rights to a work" - has some God-given right to perpetual profit from and control of their work - is untenenble. I certainly don't: I do my work for hire, and if I want more money, I have to do more work. But the Bonos and the RIAA and MPAA seem to think that an "artist's" granddaughter not having to work for a living is more important than an open society and a free discourse about the cultural works in it.
The irony - oh, sweet, sweet irony - is that Hatch's proposal would have been unfair exactly because it would have hoisted him on this petard. A machine is violating copyrights? It doesn't matter whose it is, it goes. It's the same logic as drug-law enforcement forfeiture (your kid gets pulled over and they find a joint in his pocket, they can take the car he was driving - your car - sell it, and use the money for the police department's Krispy Kreme fund. They don't even need an indictment!)
Um, have you heard of these little markets called Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America? Have you noticed the move to the Euro on the part of the currency market? Are you unaware of the benefits that accrued to the US when other countries "dollarized" their economies?
Besides, a strong domestic market is also a good thing, because that creates good domestic circulation of capital.
True, a strong Euro hurts European exports to the US in the immediate term. Considering the high cost of production in the US, though, and the fact that so much US manufacturing is actually overseas anyway, I can't see how either the US or Europe can remain net exporters of manufactured goods: the future for both seems to be in the service sector, although Europe may end up having more economic diversity that way. Again, the return of intellectual capital to Europe can only strengthen its position as a service exporter, and the only way to keep intellectual capital in-country is a strong currency.
Viz: my short-term, long-term thing. Those hurtings are now. The future trade balances and opportunities are the future. It means, also, that Europe gets some of its intellectual capital (read: smart people who moved to the US to make more money) back.
Not necessarily. Europeans could find themselves at an advantage, with lowered production costs (after all, they will still be able to use Linux) which results in lower costs of goods.
The short-term situation is as you describe, but the result in the longer term could be the relative strengthening of the European tech economy.
I have long said that it is in intellectual property law that the US economy carried the seeds of its own destruction.
Then I take it that you wouldn't object to graft and bribery among government officials, since the profit motive in the public sector is obviously such a great motivator.
Um, it has a lot more to do with me 1. not knowing people there and generally lacking a social network (most jobs are found through personal contacts, especially mid-career), 2. immigration issues, and 3. the hassles of moving, period. If I were already there, and knew people there. It has nothing to do with government regulation (except, perhaps, the immigration one.)
I imagine you think this is another government-regulation nail for your old "the government is bad" hammer, but it isn't.
If it weren't such a hassle to move and find work there, I'd be in Europe so fast, I'd be sipping coffee while my last fart was still drifting over the Atlantic.
(And yes, I've been there, as well as Asia and Latin America and much of the US. Europe wins the liveability award.)
That bonus should automatically be taken from the sales manager and delivered to the implementation team. All of it. And the sale shouldn't count towards the manager's quota.
Threaten to quit if you don't get overtime bonuses.
And tell senior management that the bonuses should come directly from the commissions that the sales team who negotiated the deal earned. Sales and account management should be pillaged to pay for their fuck-up.
This may actually work, too. They can do the math with you, if need be.
There is virtually nothing a Bhutanese person is going to be able to do to get a standard of living that resembles those in the West. It has nothing to do with how hard they work: god knows that most of the people in the middle class in the US work less hard than day labourers in India or Latin America. It has to do with the context in which they live: the value of the currency they have, the distribution channels, the infrastructure, everything.
So images of an idealized world that they can never access is not going to spur them on. It's going to breed some of the highest potency, uncut, unadulterated resentment you can imagine, at least among a lot of them.
Because what makes us feel poor isn't what we have, it's what we lack compared to someone else. Just listening to the whining of abused entitlement in the US when the jobs start moving to India, and you can see it: people complaining about making "only" $40,000 a year even as they engage the services of people around them for less, often far, far less.
I don't think intelligence has anything to do with it. Cultural resistance is what's at stake here, and we are dealing with a case of complete cultural overwhelming.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll note that I don't object to movies that pander to men when that's their niche - I'm specifically objecting to films with nominally universal appeal that universalize (or simply presume) male sexual desire just by assumption. There are "chick flicks," too.
There's also a difference between targetting a demographic, and pandering.
A good analogy is that I have nothing against Maxim. I have a smidgen more of a problem with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but not much. If there were a T&A shot on the cover of The Economist or Scientific American, I'd be irked.
I'm distinguishing between the nudity and the pandering; you obviously can have either without the other. It's the promise of nudity, rather than the delivery of it, that secures the eyeballs of the teen male demographic (obviously, they need to stay within ratings limits to get that demographic.) My issue is with the selective representation of desire, and the way it creates a "canonical" audience when there isn't any call for it. Some films do have a reason for a canonical audience (Porky's, for example, or even American Pie); for others, it's unnecessary. This translates to games, as well.
Oddly enough, I'm more patient with Tomb Raider per se because I think the cheesecake factor is part of its raison d'etre, rather than being a gratuitous add-on.
I haven't seen T3, so I'm making a bit of a prediction: that the nudity of the Terminatrix was filmed in a far, far different way than the nudity of male terminators was. If you take a lot of these movies and invert the genders - not just for the story line, but for the way they're filmed, the way that the figure of the woman as an object of desire is portrayed in a way that most males would never accept a man being portrayed - you'd see what I mean.
The odd thing about a lot of Japanese anime and game culture is that they sometimes play with this sort of asymmetry of desire with gender-flipping plots and ambiguous characters, as if the artists are chafing at the market constraints and subtly undermining them. Think of "Bridget" from Guilty Gear XX, or Ranma...
I don't think the nudity per se is the issue for a lot of people, it's the pandering aspect. What T&A says to the audience is "this is meant for horny straight males - anyone else is just tolerated here." AKA, the E3 effect.
The straight male desire assumption (when it shouldn't be necessary in works with more universal appeal - erotica/porn is another question) is more offensive to me than depictions of sex or incidental nudity.
Sure, as soon as all of NASA and the Euro Space crowd learns Mandarin, I'm sure that they can all work together as one big happy space family.
Oh, you meant in English, didn't you? With job creation in your home town? Hmmn, that could be a problem.
The difference between the stock market and your monitor, is that there aren't hundreds of thousands of people who would like nothing better than to crack into your monitor.
Which is why, of course, that thermonuclear devices have been launched by malicious hackers.
...
Oh, wait.
I mean, it's why the Stock Market has been compromised by evil criminal masterminds manipulating the prices via electronic subterfuge.
Oh, wait.
Oh, I mean that's why terrorists have been able to bring the air traffic control network down by hacking into it.
Oh, wait
I guess you're extrapolating from the fact that web sites are often hacked and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to worms to the grandiose implication that this sort of system is inherently vulnerable. I think that's a big stretch of an extrapolation.
Debian STABLE offers the finest technology that the hard-working, cautious developers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate can muster. There's nothing that says "stability" like graven marble and cuneiform tablets! Who needs newfangled bells and whistles like "wheel" and "fire," anyway?
It's a bad thing because much of the Slashdot readership was once employed in the sector generated by the Coolness Factor. Yes, companies will save money that will get invested in other industries, but that means, at best, that a lot of people will have to start retraining for positions in those other industries.
In other words, welcome to the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Guild.
The article, unfortunately, is a little hyperbolic - Gary Urton has done some fine work, but they've taken what's essenntially a metaphor about any point of choice being a binary element and suggested something that's a bit misleading. I don't think there's any indication that color-function was standardized across quipu-makers: just like some elements of coding style are unique from programmer to programmer, I see nothing surprising about the fact that the choice of materials for different cord-groups would be a matter of personal taste and mnemonics for the quipu-maker (and materials are dyes used also seemed to rely heavily on the region that the quipu was produced.)
The quipu were base-10. They did, in fact, use a "place holder" comparable to a zero, and the relationship between that place holder and the Quechua word for "zero" suggests that you could say there was a zero concept.
The discovery of the base-10 nature of the quipus was done by noting how sets of hanging strings, interepreted as base-10 (lowest set of knots as 1-place, second set of knots as 10's-place, etc) would add up to the same number the number on a cord which hung at the top of those groups.
Urton's Social Life of Numbers is a very good book about the quipu, but there are some concerns: he makes some historical claims based on ethnographic research (that's a bit a-historical).
A more rigorous look at the mathematics of the quipu is Mathematics of the Incas. It's also a fun book, teaching one how to make one's own quipus.
What the have in common, also, is something that really pisses me off - they always invoke "the artist" and the artists rights when they pull this crap. The Sonny Bono act was touted as a victory for, exampled, Harold Lloyd, the silent film star whose films were going to go into public domain. He's been dead for years, but it was being treated as his victory because his grand-daughter would be able to restrict distribution of his old films, and make a profit on them.
The idea that "the artist" - which is really a misnomer, since the term should be "whoever happens to own the rights to a work" - has some God-given right to perpetual profit from and control of their work - is untenenble. I certainly don't: I do my work for hire, and if I want more money, I have to do more work. But the Bonos and the RIAA and MPAA seem to think that an "artist's" granddaughter not having to work for a living is more important than an open society and a free discourse about the cultural works in it.
The irony - oh, sweet, sweet irony - is that Hatch's proposal would have been unfair exactly because it would have hoisted him on this petard. A machine is violating copyrights? It doesn't matter whose it is, it goes. It's the same logic as drug-law enforcement forfeiture (your kid gets pulled over and they find a joint in his pocket, they can take the car he was driving - your car - sell it, and use the money for the police department's Krispy Kreme fund. They don't even need an indictment!)
They're scared.
We're winning.
Um, have you heard of these little markets called Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America? Have you noticed the move to the Euro on the part of the currency market? Are you unaware of the benefits that accrued to the US when other countries "dollarized" their economies?
Besides, a strong domestic market is also a good thing, because that creates good domestic circulation of capital.
True, a strong Euro hurts European exports to the US in the immediate term. Considering the high cost of production in the US, though, and the fact that so much US manufacturing is actually overseas anyway, I can't see how either the US or Europe can remain net exporters of manufactured goods: the future for both seems to be in the service sector, although Europe may end up having more economic diversity that way. Again, the return of intellectual capital to Europe can only strengthen its position as a service exporter, and the only way to keep intellectual capital in-country is a strong currency.
Oh, sweet irony. Perfect Catch-22. The only basis they'd have for suing would be - not suing!
Viz: my short-term, long-term thing. Those hurtings are now. The future trade balances and opportunities are the future. It means, also, that Europe gets some of its intellectual capital (read: smart people who moved to the US to make more money) back.
Not necessarily. Europeans could find themselves at an advantage, with lowered production costs (after all, they will still be able to use Linux) which results in lower costs of goods.
The short-term situation is as you describe, but the result in the longer term could be the relative strengthening of the European tech economy.
I have long said that it is in intellectual property law that the US economy carried the seeds of its own destruction.
Oh, so that was you in the cubicle next door. And all this time, I thought it was a faulty hard drive.
An excellent tag-line. If I used tag-lines, I'd steal that one.
Then I take it that you wouldn't object to graft and bribery among government officials, since the profit motive in the public sector is obviously such a great motivator.
Um, it has a lot more to do with me 1. not knowing people there and generally lacking a social network (most jobs are found through personal contacts, especially mid-career), 2. immigration issues, and 3. the hassles of moving, period. If I were already there, and knew people there. It has nothing to do with government regulation (except, perhaps, the immigration one.)
I imagine you think this is another government-regulation nail for your old "the government is bad" hammer, but it isn't.
If it weren't such a hassle to move and find work there, I'd be in Europe so fast, I'd be sipping coffee while my last fart was still drifting over the Atlantic.
(And yes, I've been there, as well as Asia and Latin America and much of the US. Europe wins the liveability award.)
That bonus should automatically be taken from the sales manager and delivered to the implementation team. All of it. And the sale shouldn't count towards the manager's quota.
I've seen this policy work at other places.
Threaten to quit if you don't get overtime bonuses.
And tell senior management that the bonuses should come directly from the commissions that the sales team who negotiated the deal earned. Sales and account management should be pillaged to pay for their fuck-up.
This may actually work, too. They can do the math with you, if need be.
There is virtually nothing a Bhutanese person is going to be able to do to get a standard of living that resembles those in the West. It has nothing to do with how hard they work: god knows that most of the people in the middle class in the US work less hard than day labourers in India or Latin America. It has to do with the context in which they live: the value of the currency they have, the distribution channels, the infrastructure, everything.
So images of an idealized world that they can never access is not going to spur them on. It's going to breed some of the highest potency, uncut, unadulterated resentment you can imagine, at least among a lot of them.
Because what makes us feel poor isn't what we have, it's what we lack compared to someone else. Just listening to the whining of abused entitlement in the US when the jobs start moving to India, and you can see it: people complaining about making "only" $40,000 a year even as they engage the services of people around them for less, often far, far less.
I don't think intelligence has anything to do with it. Cultural resistance is what's at stake here, and we are dealing with a case of complete cultural overwhelming.