It seems a little me-too-ish to chime in "I wish I had mod points now," but - I wish I had mod points. Your insight into the fluidity and shared nature of creative inspiration - and the resultant constipation of culture that springs from denying it - is absolutely right on and completely overlooked by the Intellectual Property Uber Alles crowd. There are, in fact, very few original ideas. Most creativity comes from reframing and recombining that which came before.
Open artistic cultures are better then closed ones. You've stated it well. Bravo.
In general terms, "have more willpower and be less lazy" is less actionable than "eat this, do that." The former is poor advice, and essentially moral in tone, because it's a critique of character in a way that doesn't provide an effective path. Consider that the evidence is coming out against the effectiveness of traditional low-fat diets, and you are berating people for the design failures of a regimen. Different diets and regimens will have different amounts of pain, exertion, discomfort, and hunger associated with them, and those regimens which are over the threshold that the majority of people can endure are poor ones.
I listen to classical and 'serious' contemporary music as well, and there are some pieces that haven't been recorded or recorded well in some time. Also, new compositions are being written all the time - if you care about anything written after the 19th century, you should take heed. The established record companies do hold onto a lot of smaller, more outre recordings too. Most jazz artists are likewise on labels that would go the same route.
Thinking that only the Brittney Spears of the world are going to go this way is naive and, ultimately, unhelpful.
You and I look at things differently. You see life as an advice column. I see it as cause and effect. I see situation x in which 90 percent of a group demonstrate A, and situation y where 10 percent of a group demonstrate B, and I look for explanations for them. It's not a matter of blame or of exculpation from blame. It's an understanding of what causes a situation, and how that understanding might lead to better responses.
You look for moral language to berate people who do not meet your standards. Fine for talking to your cousin or the like, completely useless for dealing with problems on any level beyond that.
The fact is that most people in most of the world haven't needed to have the sort of self-discipline that you claim suddenly fell out from the bottom of the public spirit, because until lately most people haven't had an excess of food available to them so often and so constantly.
The real reason why a lot of poor (by US standards) and recently-but-no-longer poor Americans eat poorly has a lot to do with class mobility. People learn eating habits early, and as part of family cultures. When families are still in "survivor mode," when the experience of scarcity is still persistant in the values of that family, they are taught, first, that food is an intrinsic pleasure and, secondly, that the waste of food is unethical and risky. Add to that factors like a. stress, b. schedules that encourage fewer, bigger meals instead of more, smaller ones, and c. the lack of information about healthier foods (or of a traditional food-culture, like those in Spain, France, and Japan, that has over centuries learned how to make healthier meals) and you have the formula for obesity.
Ultimately, people have the willpower that they have, and I find it far more logical, and a better use of Ockham's Razor, to assume that their contexts and environments have changed more quickly than some questionable intangible of "willpower" has.
Incidentally, if you think I'm an obese person trying to explain away my condition, you're wrong. I'm completely fit, a little less than my ideal weight, and lead an active lifestyle.
The only reason that `low fat' diets fail is because of a lack of personal willpower
Since diets are for humans, and not for iron-willed Nietzschean super-heros who heed not the plaints of crude appetite, nor the pangs of hunger, a diet that doesn't work for the averagely-will-powered person is a pretty bad diet. (This logic is also useful for other domains.)
The fact that the dieting population has been getting poor advice for the past several years could also have something to do with the obesity problem, ya think? Naaawww, it's far better for you to be a judgemental jerk.
You know, your attitude betrays a fascinating, yet increasingly common, combination of ignorance and arrogance, that I'm struggling to come up with a new term for it. It's a combination of asshole and moron. Are you an assron or a mohole?
Because if 80 percent of the market is willing to buy them, the recording industry will go ahead and sell them. And when most all the music that is released comes on the copy protected format, then you are either giving in, or going without most music.
Remember, all intellectual property-based transactions are already entirely the product of legislated fictions - if it involves royalties, copyrights, patents, or the like, it is a "product" that was essentially created by legislative fiat.
Likewise, you'd like to have 4 or 5 different phones in your house, since if you could call everyone with one phone, that would reduce competition in the phone market, yes? And perhaps 3 or 4 different internetworking accounts, so that TCP/IP on the internet gets some competition?
Sorry, it's just silly. I communicate with a lot of people, and the fragmentation is annoying. Or it would be annoying, if it weren't for Trillian. I just wish they'd a. open their source and b. develop a Linux client (yes, it works on Wine.)
You pointed out something that needs to be pointed out - that able-bodiedness is largely temporary, that most likely all of us will suffer some sort of loss of ability at some point in our lives, and that making it easier to cope is ultimately in everyone's best interest.
It's a parody of critical theory that amuses only those who know so little about critical theory, that they might actually think that the satirical gun was loaded. It wasn't.
I don't see it that way. For one thing, it's not piracy - she didn't write this book (I don't read Chinese, so I couldn't tell whether they attributed the book to her or not, but in any case, it's an original work.) In Mexico, you can find a lot of street-artisans who make paper-mache versions of Tweety-Bird, Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man, and the like, and create an informal visual culture based on images that were otherwise completely imported. This is a way of adapting to the fact of being completely overwhelmed by culture industries from overseas.
I think of this as a combination of a fan-fic and street-level gray-market good. It's the adaptation of a local culture to a global one, and I think it's vital. After all, just who did Disney pay and ask permission from to use the characters in Mu-Lan, or the Lion King, or any of the other non-Western cultural figures that they freely profit from?
My DSL ISP would happily answer all these questions. They work in a market that is competitive, and it is Federal regulation which keeps them competitive, by forcing ILECS and CLECS to allow competing ISP's to use their facilities (for a fee.)
The cable providers have no regulation. And no competition. And are more than happy to answer "no and goodbye" to the 3 percent of the market that might ask these questions and then turn around and make money hand-over-fist to the 97 percent that doesn't ask these questions.
The DSL providers give a lot more latitude and flexibility, and offer more servers, because they are regulated in a way that ensures more, rather than less competition. Wherever there's a natural bottleneck - and the last mile is definitely a natural bottleneck, for any given technology - only regulation ensures that a competitive market develops.
Insofar as the problems with the economy have virtually nothing to do with productivity, I'd say very little. One of the reasons why so many of us have so much slack time is that productivity remains ridiculously high, but people (or at least the middle-class and higher people for whom goods and services are being produced) just aren't buying goods and services.
Like many others, I've grown into a real fan (in the lighter "I like what he's done with his public persona and I hope for his continued success," not the "I collect merchandise and have a signed photo" sense, which I reserve mostly for neuroscientists and Brazilian swimsuit models) of Wil Wheaton. I don't see any reference to his appearance in the movie preview, though - any news on that front?
On Earth Prime, it would be unthinkable, what I am thinking now: I have no interest in any of the Star Wars movies, and I'm looking forward to seeing Wesley Crusher in the new Star Trek movie.
Now you'll have to excuse me, the perpetual motion machine is a little loud, and needs to be oiled.
This is naive. The very last and most entrenched part of the federal government that would remain after the parts that support research and the arts, provide health and housing services, provide environmental protection, and support education have all been eviscerated, would be those powers of policing, defense, and the protection of interstate commerce - just those aspects of governance by which groups like the RIAA and the MPAA justify their influence. Thinking as "The Gummint" as one, big, undifferentiated bloc of power only benefits those who are already purchasing the influence they want, at the cost of the public good.
I'm considering switching carriers, waiting for my carrier to come up with a new product, going with a Kyocera or a HandSpring or a Nokia or a Sony Eriksson - in fact, the proliferation of options, and the fear of service abandonment/obsolesence - has motivated me to do nothing. I've frozen my decision to upgrade my phone service until there's been a market shakedown. (The opportunity cost of waiting is not great - I have a cell phone and a palm pilot already.)
I know that a number of other people are in the same boat, and with funds and budgets being tighter, people don't feel like they have money to burn on just getting the fastest-newest-fanciest. What does that mean for the ability of manufacturers to develop new products? I'm not really sure, but I do think that a lot of manufacturers are going to feel some pain for a while still.
Holy moley - I never knew. I had been using the return key or the space key instead. My friend, you have just improved the quality of my life. Thank you.
I know that this is a GTK1.2 limitation, not an xmms limitation, but xmms fails the polish test when it comes to file browsing by extension, and the entire file-browse function in general. (I guess all gtk apps - except the gimp, which has its own file browser - suffer from this, but I don't feel the pain in the other apps as much because masking my file browsing isn't as important to me in anything other than mp3 browsing.) It's what keeps it behind winamp.
Slashdot Mirror
Open artistic cultures are better then closed ones. You've stated it well. Bravo.
In general terms, "have more willpower and be less lazy" is less actionable than "eat this, do that." The former is poor advice, and essentially moral in tone, because it's a critique of character in a way that doesn't provide an effective path. Consider that the evidence is coming out against the effectiveness of traditional low-fat diets, and you are berating people for the design failures of a regimen. Different diets and regimens will have different amounts of pain, exertion, discomfort, and hunger associated with them, and those regimens which are over the threshold that the majority of people can endure are poor ones.
Thinking that only the Brittney Spears of the world are going to go this way is naive and, ultimately, unhelpful.
You look for moral language to berate people who do not meet your standards. Fine for talking to your cousin or the like, completely useless for dealing with problems on any level beyond that.
The real reason why a lot of poor (by US standards) and recently-but-no-longer poor Americans eat poorly has a lot to do with class mobility. People learn eating habits early, and as part of family cultures. When families are still in "survivor mode," when the experience of scarcity is still persistant in the values of that family, they are taught, first, that food is an intrinsic pleasure and, secondly, that the waste of food is unethical and risky. Add to that factors like a. stress, b. schedules that encourage fewer, bigger meals instead of more, smaller ones, and c. the lack of information about healthier foods (or of a traditional food-culture, like those in Spain, France, and Japan, that has over centuries learned how to make healthier meals) and you have the formula for obesity.
Ultimately, people have the willpower that they have, and I find it far more logical, and a better use of Ockham's Razor, to assume that their contexts and environments have changed more quickly than some questionable intangible of "willpower" has.
Incidentally, if you think I'm an obese person trying to explain away my condition, you're wrong. I'm completely fit, a little less than my ideal weight, and lead an active lifestyle.
Since diets are for humans, and not for iron-willed Nietzschean super-heros who heed not the plaints of crude appetite, nor the pangs of hunger, a diet that doesn't work for the averagely-will-powered person is a pretty bad diet. (This logic is also useful for other domains.)
The fact that the dieting population has been getting poor advice for the past several years could also have something to do with the obesity problem, ya think? Naaawww, it's far better for you to be a judgemental jerk.
You know, your attitude betrays a fascinating, yet increasingly common, combination of ignorance and arrogance, that I'm struggling to come up with a new term for it. It's a combination of asshole and moron. Are you an assron or a mohole?
If you're smart enough to file a lawsuit, you'll lose it.
Fair use isn't a "right." It's a doctrine which restricts a restriction on rights: that provided by copyright. IANAL, but who cares.
Because if 80 percent of the market is willing to buy them, the recording industry will go ahead and sell them. And when most all the music that is released comes on the copy protected format, then you are either giving in, or going without most music.
Remember, all intellectual property-based transactions are already entirely the product of legislated fictions - if it involves royalties, copyrights, patents, or the like, it is a "product" that was essentially created by legislative fiat.
Sorry, it's just silly. I communicate with a lot of people, and the fragmentation is annoying. Or it would be annoying, if it weren't for Trillian. I just wish they'd a. open their source and b. develop a Linux client (yes, it works on Wine.)
You pointed out something that needs to be pointed out - that able-bodiedness is largely temporary, that most likely all of us will suffer some sort of loss of ability at some point in our lives, and that making it easier to cope is ultimately in everyone's best interest.
It's a parody of critical theory that amuses only those who know so little about critical theory, that they might actually think that the satirical gun was loaded. It wasn't.
I think of this as a combination of a fan-fic and street-level gray-market good. It's the adaptation of a local culture to a global one, and I think it's vital. After all, just who did Disney pay and ask permission from to use the characters in Mu-Lan, or the Lion King, or any of the other non-Western cultural figures that they freely profit from?
Sigh. Maybe someday Peru will be in the cup again.
The cable providers have no regulation. And no competition. And are more than happy to answer "no and goodbye" to the 3 percent of the market that might ask these questions and then turn around and make money hand-over-fist to the 97 percent that doesn't ask these questions.
The DSL providers give a lot more latitude and flexibility, and offer more servers, because they are regulated in a way that ensures more, rather than less competition. Wherever there's a natural bottleneck - and the last mile is definitely a natural bottleneck, for any given technology - only regulation ensures that a competitive market develops.
Insofar as the problems with the economy have virtually nothing to do with productivity, I'd say very little. One of the reasons why so many of us have so much slack time is that productivity remains ridiculously high, but people (or at least the middle-class and higher people for whom goods and services are being produced) just aren't buying goods and services.
Best line from movie: "Nice sweater."
Like many others, I've grown into a real fan (in the lighter "I like what he's done with his public persona and I hope for his continued success," not the "I collect merchandise and have a signed photo" sense, which I reserve mostly for neuroscientists and Brazilian swimsuit models) of Wil Wheaton. I don't see any reference to his appearance in the movie preview, though - any news on that front?
Now you'll have to excuse me, the perpetual motion machine is a little loud, and needs to be oiled.
This is naive. The very last and most entrenched part of the federal government that would remain after the parts that support research and the arts, provide health and housing services, provide environmental protection, and support education have all been eviscerated, would be those powers of policing, defense, and the protection of interstate commerce - just those aspects of governance by which groups like the RIAA and the MPAA justify their influence. Thinking as "The Gummint" as one, big, undifferentiated bloc of power only benefits those who are already purchasing the influence they want, at the cost of the public good.
Then they don't need or want you telling them that it isn't ethical for them to tell you what is or isn't ethical.
I know that a number of other people are in the same boat, and with funds and budgets being tighter, people don't feel like they have money to burn on just getting the fastest-newest-fanciest. What does that mean for the ability of manufacturers to develop new products? I'm not really sure, but I do think that a lot of manufacturers are going to feel some pain for a while still.
Holy moley - I never knew. I had been using the return key or the space key instead. My friend, you have just improved the quality of my life. Thank you.
I know that this is a GTK1.2 limitation, not an xmms limitation, but xmms fails the polish test when it comes to file browsing by extension, and the entire file-browse function in general. (I guess all gtk apps - except the gimp, which has its own file browser - suffer from this, but I don't feel the pain in the other apps as much because masking my file browsing isn't as important to me in anything other than mp3 browsing.) It's what keeps it behind winamp.