Sword and sorcery fantasy films are consistently horrible, and with a handful of exceptions (LeGuin, Delany) the s&s fantasy genre itself is excrutiatingly bad. Tolkein himself I consider a "guilty pleasure"; sophisticated escapism and colonialist nostalgia for a very European arcadian past, lacking a lot of self-consciousness but compelling in its own way. And despite all that, the film worked marvelously. It didn't try to apologize for Tolkein without let itself get bogged down in the source material's murkier parts, the sense of warmth and friendship between the characters felt authentic, the pacing was expertly done, and the overwrought sense of historicial detail that was Tolkein's primary mechanism for creating a sense of persistant reality in the original was partially replaced by a visual richness that completely brought the viewer in.
When one compares the artistry at work here to anything Lucas has done, it's almost embarassing that Lucas is working as a filmmaker at all.
While an element of prophesy is part-and-parcel of science fiction, ultimately any work of literature is more about the times that it was written in rather than the times they are writing about.
A great book about the role of science fiction is Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of." The science fiction of the past often shapes our present by informing the imaginations of the people who created it. How many AI researchers cite HAL as an inspiration, goal, or benchmark?
Re:Forever War==Good, sequels==Suck.
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 2
don't expect to enjoy it's sequels. They sort of drag on and on and on.
With a name like Forever War, you were expecting an O'Henry story?
You make it sound like its ok to ignore a minority of people. You also ignore another fact. I buy a movie, i am allowed to watch it. How i choose to do so is (and should be) irrelevent. So what if i want to play in on my linux computer? Or a device of my own design? I bought the fucking thing, i will watch it any damn way i please.
That's just the point the original poster was making - that the whole "you should just not buy their products" line is not an adequate or useful strategy because it doesn't protect the rights of the minority. The only real remedy is political guaranty of the rights of all the consumers, not just small individual acts of boycotting. Yet there is such an aversion to participating in the political sphere in techie circles that there is almost always a knee-jerk "let the market take care of it" "just don't buy their products" chorus whenever these developments appear.
While the law may treat artists like slave labourers, they're still the Designers, and should have control over where every one of their designs goes.
Only until they sign a contract that says otherwise - and enough of them do, that the recording industry can call itself the content faction. Musicians aren't signing those contracts so that they can Share Their Music With The World, it's so that they can bring in the benjamins, just like everyone else. If they wanted to just share the music, they'd do just that.
There is a habit to attribute some sort of inherent nobility to certain types of artistic production, but that habit isn't particularly justified.
My point is that in economic and legal terms, to all useful extent and purposes, the recording industry owns that content. The recording artists are just factory workers, independent contractors whose labor has been paid for, and the goods handed over to their bosses. Granted, they get royalties and so forth, but the dispensation of their content is seldom under their control.
Both Xerox and Palm are troubled companies right now. How delightful, to watch the desparate tear in to each other like starving animals. I'm beginning to believe that intellectual property law and subsequent litigation are going to be the pallbearers of innovation. Elsewhere, someone noted that China has one of the few untroubled economies in the world - one wonders if their relative disinterest in enforcing intellectual property is going to benefit them in the future.
That would make Nike a distribution and branding company, since the shoes are actually made by small independent contractors being paid poverty wages in Indonesia.
As far as phonetic simplicity, consistency, and sensible orthography, Hawaiian and Japanese (kana) would be far better candidates than English, followed by Spanish.
I've also installed Mandrake, SuSE and RedHat, and still almost never had an install without having to edit config files by hand, if I wanted to do anything with, say, a 3D card. XFree does support changing depth at runtime (--bpp (n)) but not afterwards, unlike Windows and Mac. And you do want to go down to 16 for a lot of 3D games and applications.
Oh, come on. You can "install" X that way, but it almost certainly won't be configured, it will probably not have 3D support yet, Debian has pretty much stopped supporting the unreliable XF86Setup method and is back to xf86config, and dollars to donuts that you *will* be editing/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 with vi before you're really up and running. In no way does this compare with the ease of either a Mac or Windows desktop.
And in the two cases you describe, you already *have to know* that you type apt-get +args +target or rpm +args +target, which is by no means intuitive or obvious, *and* you obviously have to have your NIC set up and working. And if you want to change color depth on the fly? Forget it.
I've been battling a bug with the NVidia driver and xscreensaver-gl that has led to total system lockups, so I've been spending a lot of "quality" time with XF86Config-4.
Every linux installer I've worked with does up to 95% of the install flawlessly - and the last 5% can take hours of research, trial and error, and futzing about to work.
I have had applications crash my Debian system. To wit, most recently: xscreensaver locking the system after eating all the memory, not even able to log in remotely. I've found a fix for it, but not until after a lot of fscking around.
Some of it is even coherent. And a subset of it is even accurate. And a subset of that is even timely and up-to-date. Wading through the morass is the problem.
Because most linux knowledge is just that - knowledge on a practical "I know where they keep this and where to put that and what to edit" kind of knowledge, not any kind of conceptual understanding at all. It involves knowing through the grapevine that the NVidia driver gets downloaded by the NVidia installer that came with your distribution, that certain components are SUID are some require their own accounts and a thousand other bits of trivia that you just don't get by application of first principles. While computer science and programming is mostly about the application of principles and theories to closed domains, not about accumulating technical anecdotes.
They get a ticket number. They get a phone number that they can call back, and a person's name, and an escalation path. If they are large corporate customers, that path can get to the development and QA departments.
Most commercial software has a two-way communication between QA and support. Last I checked, the people on #linux didn't have direct and constant access to the bug-tracking databases for each and every linux application that popped up.
There are some development efforts in linux that have good 2-way communication like that - abiword, for example. But for the most part, there's nothing comparable to the relatively few players you have to deal with in the commercial world.
I can't agree less. There is a lot of documentation that tells you the basics. There is little documentation - and it is damnably hard to find - to help you troubleshoot nontrivial and nonobvious problems, or to integrate components cleanly. It's the intermediate and higher user that is really getting left out in the cold - doing things like configuring useable printing systems (via cups or such), setting up fax servers, configuring vpn and tcp/ip wrappers and the like are documented poorly and inconsistently, with outdated information everywhere (frankly, I'm convinced that most of that information is spread by word of mouth, if not by simple apostolic descent.) Writing for the newbies is easy - what is difficult is teaming up someone who knows the hard stuff with someone who can document it well, since expertise usually requires abandoning the very metaphors that make assimilating difficult material possible.
Create something. Work hard for years to create something truly original and unique. Then answer this question: is being the only one allowed to decide the use and dispensation of your creation a right, or a privilege?
Does this mean that I'm entitled to sell off my children and do whatever I want with them?
As far as I'm concerned (and I have, not a prodigious, but a real creative output) the main right a creator has is to be recognized as the creator. I don't abide plaigarism, but I don't abide grasping at the mind's children after they've left home.
What is also in suspense is the applicability of classical economic theory to dubious "goods" such as the right to reproduce a musical work and other inventions of intellectual property law. Unlike the case with real goods, which are alienable and subject to immediate defense, intellectual "property" requires draconian intervention into the everyday lives and the normal community patterns of people far afield from either producer or "owner."
Analogously, if it was learned that eating Hostess Twinkies that had been marinated in thai green curry sauce while bathing gave one super-strength and x-ray vision, we would have to become gravely concerned about the possible rise of Thai-Twinkie-powered super-criminals who know what we look like in our Underoos. This is clearly something that man was not meant to know. Won't someone think of the children?
What is the EFF going to do about it? Do you mean the FSF? What are *they* going to do about it? Don't you mean the DOJ? What are **they** going to do about it?
Anyway, if you think the goblets are bad, wait till the product placements start popping up. When Frodo and Sam start sucking down Happy Meals and guzzling Pepsi's while tracking through Mordor, I'm history.
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When one compares the artistry at work here to anything Lucas has done, it's almost embarassing that Lucas is working as a filmmaker at all.
A great book about the role of science fiction is Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of." The science fiction of the past often shapes our present by informing the imaginations of the people who created it. How many AI researchers cite HAL as an inspiration, goal, or benchmark?
With a name like Forever War, you were expecting an O'Henry story?
That's just the point the original poster was making - that the whole "you should just not buy their products" line is not an adequate or useful strategy because it doesn't protect the rights of the minority. The only real remedy is political guaranty of the rights of all the consumers, not just small individual acts of boycotting. Yet there is such an aversion to participating in the political sphere in techie circles that there is almost always a knee-jerk "let the market take care of it" "just don't buy their products" chorus whenever these developments appear.
Only until they sign a contract that says otherwise - and enough of them do, that the recording industry can call itself the content faction. Musicians aren't signing those contracts so that they can Share Their Music With The World, it's so that they can bring in the benjamins, just like everyone else. If they wanted to just share the music, they'd do just that.
There is a habit to attribute some sort of inherent nobility to certain types of artistic production, but that habit isn't particularly justified.
My point is that in economic and legal terms, to all useful extent and purposes, the recording industry owns that content. The recording artists are just factory workers, independent contractors whose labor has been paid for, and the goods handed over to their bosses. Granted, they get royalties and so forth, but the dispensation of their content is seldom under their control.
Both Xerox and Palm are troubled companies right now. How delightful, to watch the desparate tear in to each other like starving animals. I'm beginning to believe that intellectual property law and subsequent litigation are going to be the pallbearers of innovation. Elsewhere, someone noted that China has one of the few untroubled economies in the world - one wonders if their relative disinterest in enforcing intellectual property is going to benefit them in the future.
In the name of sweet Jebus, please don't ever become a novelist.
That would make Nike a distribution and branding company, since the shoes are actually made by small independent contractors being paid poverty wages in Indonesia.
As far as phonetic simplicity, consistency, and sensible orthography, Hawaiian and Japanese (kana) would be far better candidates than English, followed by Spanish.
I've also installed Mandrake, SuSE and RedHat, and still almost never had an install without having to edit config files by hand, if I wanted to do anything with, say, a 3D card. XFree does support changing depth at runtime (--bpp (n)) but not afterwards, unlike Windows and Mac. And you do want to go down to 16 for a lot of 3D games and applications.
And in the two cases you describe, you already *have to know* that you type apt-get +args +target or rpm +args +target, which is by no means intuitive or obvious, *and* you obviously have to have your NIC set up and working. And if you want to change color depth on the fly? Forget it.
I've been battling a bug with the NVidia driver and xscreensaver-gl that has led to total system lockups, so I've been spending a lot of "quality" time with XF86Config-4.
Every linux installer I've worked with does up to 95% of the install flawlessly - and the last 5% can take hours of research, trial and error, and futzing about to work.
I have had applications crash my Debian system. To wit, most recently: xscreensaver locking the system after eating all the memory, not even able to log in remotely. I've found a fix for it, but not until after a lot of fscking around.
Some of it is even coherent. And a subset of it is even accurate. And a subset of that is even timely and up-to-date. Wading through the morass is the problem.
Because most linux knowledge is just that - knowledge on a practical "I know where they keep this and where to put that and what to edit" kind of knowledge, not any kind of conceptual understanding at all. It involves knowing through the grapevine that the NVidia driver gets downloaded by the NVidia installer that came with your distribution, that certain components are SUID are some require their own accounts and a thousand other bits of trivia that you just don't get by application of first principles. While computer science and programming is mostly about the application of principles and theories to closed domains, not about accumulating technical anecdotes.
Most commercial software has a two-way communication between QA and support. Last I checked, the people on #linux didn't have direct and constant access to the bug-tracking databases for each and every linux application that popped up.
There are some development efforts in linux that have good 2-way communication like that - abiword, for example. But for the most part, there's nothing comparable to the relatively few players you have to deal with in the commercial world.
I can't agree less. There is a lot of documentation that tells you the basics. There is little documentation - and it is damnably hard to find - to help you troubleshoot nontrivial and nonobvious problems, or to integrate components cleanly. It's the intermediate and higher user that is really getting left out in the cold - doing things like configuring useable printing systems (via cups or such), setting up fax servers, configuring vpn and tcp/ip wrappers and the like are documented poorly and inconsistently, with outdated information everywhere (frankly, I'm convinced that most of that information is spread by word of mouth, if not by simple apostolic descent.) Writing for the newbies is easy - what is difficult is teaming up someone who knows the hard stuff with someone who can document it well, since expertise usually requires abandoning the very metaphors that make assimilating difficult material possible.
Does this mean that I'm entitled to sell off my children and do whatever I want with them?
As far as I'm concerned (and I have, not a prodigious, but a real creative output) the main right a creator has is to be recognized as the creator. I don't abide plaigarism, but I don't abide grasping at the mind's children after they've left home.
Someone failed logic. (P -> Q) does not imply (!P -> !Q). It implies (!Q -> !P).
What is also in suspense is the applicability of classical economic theory to dubious "goods" such as the right to reproduce a musical work and other inventions of intellectual property law. Unlike the case with real goods, which are alienable and subject to immediate defense, intellectual "property" requires draconian intervention into the everyday lives and the normal community patterns of people far afield from either producer or "owner."
That was pretty much the point of my magical Twinkie post above. Still was modded as "off-topic" somehow.
Analogously, if it was learned that eating Hostess Twinkies that had been marinated in thai green curry sauce while bathing gave one super-strength and x-ray vision, we would have to become gravely concerned about the possible rise of Thai-Twinkie-powered super-criminals who know what we look like in our Underoos. This is clearly something that man was not meant to know. Won't someone think of the children?
What is the EFF going to do about it? Do you mean the FSF? What are *they* going to do about it? Don't you mean the DOJ? What are **they** going to do about it?
Anyway, if you think the goblets are bad, wait till the product placements start popping up. When Frodo and Sam start sucking down Happy Meals and guzzling Pepsi's while tracking through Mordor, I'm history.
I bet your car gets twenty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way you like it, right?