Insofar as American professionals have more disposable income to travel than professionals from other parts of the world, it's always struck me as a bit unfair that so many international professional conferences wind up in the US as it is. Internationalizing the venues is fairer from that perspective alone.
Besides, I think more conferences should be in Rio de Janiero, don't you?
I have spent a lot more time making my computer do what I want it to do than making my car do what I want it to do. (And money, for that matter.) There's an anecdote - probably false - about a conversation between a Microsoft executive and a GM executive, in which the Microsoft executive was bragging about how fast computer technology was growing, while automotive technology remained mired in the sand.
The GM exec said, "if cars were built like computers, they would go 200 miles per hour, get 100 miles to the gallon, float on water, fly through space, and explode every 10 hours killing everyone inside."
The fact is that whether or not it strokes your muyopic ego to think of end users (such as, say, my friend the neuroscientist, who hates desktop computers and has trouble with her email - yet programs MRI scanners fluently) as dumb, it is *far far far* easier to redesign computers than to redesign end users.
The real test of soveriegnty remains the ultimate one: force. If someone else can control your piece of land, you're not a sovereign nation. In that regard Sealand may be sovereign in name but it really isn't in fact.
By that standard, there are very few sovereign nations, because there are very few nations that could even conceivably withstand a conventional military campaign against the United States.
I'll say that the bias mostly runs against Microsoft. I'm an open-source advocate who thinks that Microsoft is definitely no worse than Apple or Sun or, god help us, Oracle, in terms of their business practices and even their products - I'm opposed to all of them fairly equally from the perspective that they rely on the control - ultimately arbitrary and draconian - of intellectual property to make their profits, but that being said I don't share any special opprobrium for MS. A lot of the Linux fanboys (who as often as not care more about Team Linux winning than about the principles of openness and freedom) are far more unfair, unobjective and knee-jerk in their attacks on Microsoft than most any MS aficionado I've seen.
Discreet's Combustion combines the functionality of Photoshop with that of Final Cut Pro. Video and still image editing and compositing, including the ability to use Photoshop filters jut by dropping them into a folder. Pricey, but very kick-ass.
Service Level Agreements are all well and good, but if the cell phones are dead or whatever, all it does is give you a better excuse to yell when it's all over. SLA's don't change the laws of physics, or violate Murphy's law. Itshay appenhays.
FOr one thing, the majority of lawsuits represent plaintiffs who became addicted to cigarettes during that window of history between when the tobacco industry knew about the dangers of smoking and when that information became available. Most of the rest are about those who were part of marketing campaigns targetted at youth. Even the most ardent opponents of the war on drugs would balk at the idea of the Medellin drug cartel advertising to children.
And these lawsuits are themselves part and parcel of a culture that is compulsively reluctant to provide public health care services, which means that there's always an urgent motivation for locating blame elsewhere when possible. That's why you don't see these sorts of lawsuits in Europe - because people here battling emphysema and lung cancer - and the people insuring them - have every motivation to do so.
The tobacco companies systematically lied and repressed evidence about the dangers and harms of smoking. Even from a libertarianish contract-law-is-everything, when you lie and misrepresent in the process of selling a good, you've violated the implicit contract. And there's a huge difference between opposing the criminalization of drugs and supporting profiteering from promalgating addiction. And even then, nothing in the story that was cited had jack-diddly to do with The Gubmint oppressing poor helpless defenseless tobacco companies - it was about an individual's act of protest against his own department for taking the money.
You know, there's something pathetic about the tone of your rhetoric, a really common tone among the rightish-wing of American yahoos. It's like the stockholm syndrome - the impulsive, knee-jerk need to defend the powerful against moral censure. I don't get it.
The publicity of the gesture, and the shame it directs at the department, is worth more than the pittance sum the anti-tobacco forces would have recieved. It's a very effective gesture - which is why we have heard about it, rather than hearing about someone just donating prize money.
Um, that's like saying that someone has nothing against black people if they are willing to profit from their labor. The friends of Open Source aren't the people who use it, they are the people who contribute to it. After all, even Microsoft uses it.
Ask a linguist, and they will tell you that they *do* have an accent; it's just that accent has become acceptable as a generic broadcast accent.
All speech is accented; accent is simply one of the phonic characteristics of speech.
Re:Andromeda disappoints me.
on
Andromeda
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· Score: 2
Not-entirely-rhetorical question: would you rather watch bad sci-fi than good lawyer/doctor/sex/whatever shows? If so, what incentive does a studio have to produce quality?
I ask as someone who likes good science fiction - and also quality works from other genres - and is consistently disappointed by 95% of the sci-fi I see. (Last good sci-fi film? Gattaca. And I got bored of the Star Wars franchise when I stopped being a teenager.)
Here's a market reality for you: Yahoo auctions probably gets more benefit from cancelling Nazi-memorabilia auctions and holding onto the French market than from cutting off the French and holding onto the Nazi memorabilia market. If those were the two choices, I'm confident that Yahoo would be unwilling to sacrifice profitability just to make a gesture about free speech, because as it is Yahoo isn't about free speech anyway.
And expect the companies, guided by the hidden hand, to simply come up with nice environmental, safety, fair conduct and labor regulation all by their little selves? That has worked where?
You should get paid to write software. You are providing a service that requires education and effort. You just have to stop thinking in terms of the unit-sales model that is less and less enforceable. There are thousands of careers that don't rely on IP laws to charge for services rendered.
Not that I blame you; after all, if the person who invented cheesecake could get a royalty check any time anyone else made one, I'm sure that chefs would also be big advocates of intellectual property law.
Programmers and other high-tech professionals are among the most highly compensated people in the world, especially in the US. Vis-a-vis teachers, academics, many scientists, social workers, those of us in this industry can make more money on our own terms by an order of magnitude.
Yet we are turning to what is virtually a charity model to support the companies who are producing the things we like, even as organizations who provide services to the have-nots and disadvantaged go begging in silicon valley. Is this sector myopia, fanboyism, or something else? Maybe the dog-eat-dog ethic of the 90's has created a contempt for non-profit professional efforts. Is there a problem with focusing Free Software development in a.org context if acting like a business isn't working? Why give money to Mandrake (or VA Linux, for that matter) instead of to the FSF or one of the BSDs or other projects, or an educational institution, directly?
Have we already forgotten that SourceForge and apache.org were just compromised? Were their systems set up like a 13 year old might? Why is it that whenever there's a security compromise, a bunch of yahoos come out and insist that it is the fault of incompetent administration or clueless users, when even some of the most technically sophisticated groups can't protect themselves against intrustion? This is like blaming a rape on the victim's failure to dress properly. Do you have some sort of commitment to a philosophy of social Darwinism that makes it impossible for you to accept that the victims did nothing wrong and that the perps are, in fact, entirely blameworthy?
Then is implementing a flawed standard always a good thing? Or is it better to implement against standard without the flaw? That's the real question. I think you are just reciting pieties.
No, I wouldn't call a Joycean scholar ignorant for analyzing the allusions and references of Joyce's work. I would say he is engaging in an older style of criticism, but I have nothing against that. If he claimed to be revealing the true, fixed meaning of the entire work I would take issue with both the arrogance and the presumption involved, but if he brought figures from the text and correlated them with themes in the author's other work and experience and such, I'd have no complaint.
That's not exactly what A Triple Allegory is doing. He is going to great lengths to map the narrative onto other narratives (esp. those implicit in Nietzsche), pretty much claiming to have uncovered authorial intent, and doing, as has been said, frankly wacky contortions on the text (veeerrrry stretch anagrams) to make it work. The ties with the OdysseusI have fewer problems with - I can even believe that the authors, consciously or otherwise, included the asteroid scene as a sort of reference to the Odysseus, and perhaps dropped a few other elements that were inspired by the epic. I can even imagine them noticing, before the film was released, "Hey, that Bowman thing is a happy coincidence, let's keep it in there!" Those sort of incidental readings and analogies between different stories is fine.
If you were going to sum up my complaint with the book, it's not that one narrative can refer to another or find reflections therein, it's the claim that the one true meaning of a text is a specific other text. I think books like the concordances to Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, or Pound's Cantos, are excellent tools for unravelling them. That is most certainly not what the Triple Allegory is.
Sadly, your ignorance is showing. This symbolic reading of the text for its "true meaning" is very anti- and pre- "deconstructionist." It's a throwback to 19th century critical style. A so-called "deconstructionist" (probably better called a poststructuralist, or even just a contemporary critic - calling a critic who uses deconstructive strategies in their work a "deconstructionist" is like calling anyone who uses java a "object-oriented programming advocate" - it mistakes a tool for an ideology) would take the obvious meaning and show hidden agendas that go outside the narrative, historicize it, call into question implicit assumptions, and otherwise 'reverse engineering' the story. The book we are talking about simply looks for the True Hidden Meaning by doing scrambled hermeneutics in a more-or-less quasi-paranoid Jungian vein.
Your biggest mistake is to think that the theoretical critic's function is to enhance your experience of the book like a wine-steward recommending wines. Most literary critics of this sort actually see books, films, and other cultural works as a way of understanding and talking about the culture that produces them, what they say about that culture in its historical moment, and what they reveal about us as people who tell each other stories and use language.
Your complaining that the exhaustive analysis of literature by academics somehow compromises your ability to enjoy reading is like someone saying that discussions about programming styles or analysis of algorithms compromise your ability to enoy a game of Quake.
For pete's sake, did you expect to go to a literature class and just have a bunch of people say "Oh, I liked that, did you?", "No, I didn't. What about you?"
Your observation about the name Bowman frankly lends more credibility to the Ulysses link: Ulysses, in the Odysseus, makes it home as well. It's very sad that you don't even know this very basic element of the plot of the Odysseus - in fact, until you mentioned it, I thought that was the biggest hole in the association.
The Odysseus link is the only plank of the original essay that holds any water, as far as I'm concerned. (Duh. It's called A Space Odyssey. Duh.)
It is really unnerving, how easy people like you are to manipulate.
Well, I guess that's why so much of the money you spend on things goes to marketing and advertising. People wouldn't be spending so much money to manipulate you if they weren't, on the average, getting more back from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, I think more conferences should be in Rio de Janiero, don't you?
The GM exec said, "if cars were built like computers, they would go 200 miles per hour, get 100 miles to the gallon, float on water, fly through space, and explode every 10 hours killing everyone inside."
The fact is that whether or not it strokes your muyopic ego to think of end users (such as, say, my friend the neuroscientist, who hates desktop computers and has trouble with her email - yet programs MRI scanners fluently) as dumb, it is *far far far* easier to redesign computers than to redesign end users.
This assumes full-duplex all the way. Not always a safe assumption.
By that standard, there are very few sovereign nations, because there are very few nations that could even conceivably withstand a conventional military campaign against the United States.
I'll say that the bias mostly runs against Microsoft. I'm an open-source advocate who thinks that Microsoft is definitely no worse than Apple or Sun or, god help us, Oracle, in terms of their business practices and even their products - I'm opposed to all of them fairly equally from the perspective that they rely on the control - ultimately arbitrary and draconian - of intellectual property to make their profits, but that being said I don't share any special opprobrium for MS. A lot of the Linux fanboys (who as often as not care more about Team Linux winning than about the principles of openness and freedom) are far more unfair, unobjective and knee-jerk in their attacks on Microsoft than most any MS aficionado I've seen.
Discreet's Combustion combines the functionality of Photoshop with that of Final Cut Pro. Video and still image editing and compositing, including the ability to use Photoshop filters jut by dropping them into a folder. Pricey, but very kick-ass.
Service Level Agreements are all well and good, but if the cell phones are dead or whatever, all it does is give you a better excuse to yell when it's all over. SLA's don't change the laws of physics, or violate Murphy's law. Itshay appenhays.
And these lawsuits are themselves part and parcel of a culture that is compulsively reluctant to provide public health care services, which means that there's always an urgent motivation for locating blame elsewhere when possible. That's why you don't see these sorts of lawsuits in Europe - because people here battling emphysema and lung cancer - and the people insuring them - have every motivation to do so.
You know, there's something pathetic about the tone of your rhetoric, a really common tone among the rightish-wing of American yahoos. It's like the stockholm syndrome - the impulsive, knee-jerk need to defend the powerful against moral censure. I don't get it.
The publicity of the gesture, and the shame it directs at the department, is worth more than the pittance sum the anti-tobacco forces would have recieved. It's a very effective gesture - which is why we have heard about it, rather than hearing about someone just donating prize money.
Um, that's like saying that someone has nothing against black people if they are willing to profit from their labor. The friends of Open Source aren't the people who use it, they are the people who contribute to it. After all, even Microsoft uses it.
All speech is accented; accent is simply one of the phonic characteristics of speech.
I ask as someone who likes good science fiction - and also quality works from other genres - and is consistently disappointed by 95% of the sci-fi I see. (Last good sci-fi film? Gattaca. And I got bored of the Star Wars franchise when I stopped being a teenager.)
Here's a market reality for you: Yahoo auctions probably gets more benefit from cancelling Nazi-memorabilia auctions and holding onto the French market than from cutting off the French and holding onto the Nazi memorabilia market. If those were the two choices, I'm confident that Yahoo would be unwilling to sacrifice profitability just to make a gesture about free speech, because as it is Yahoo isn't about free speech anyway.
And expect the companies, guided by the hidden hand, to simply come up with nice environmental, safety, fair conduct and labor regulation all by their little selves? That has worked where?
Not that I blame you; after all, if the person who invented cheesecake could get a royalty check any time anyone else made one, I'm sure that chefs would also be big advocates of intellectual property law.
Yet we are turning to what is virtually a charity model to support the companies who are producing the things we like, even as organizations who provide services to the have-nots and disadvantaged go begging in silicon valley. Is this sector myopia, fanboyism, or something else? Maybe the dog-eat-dog ethic of the 90's has created a contempt for non-profit professional efforts. Is there a problem with focusing Free Software development in a .org context if acting like a business isn't working? Why give money to Mandrake (or VA Linux, for that matter) instead of to the FSF or one of the BSDs or other projects, or an educational institution, directly?
Have we already forgotten that SourceForge and apache.org were just compromised? Were their systems set up like a 13 year old might? Why is it that whenever there's a security compromise, a bunch of yahoos come out and insist that it is the fault of incompetent administration or clueless users, when even some of the most technically sophisticated groups can't protect themselves against intrustion? This is like blaming a rape on the victim's failure to dress properly. Do you have some sort of commitment to a philosophy of social Darwinism that makes it impossible for you to accept that the victims did nothing wrong and that the perps are, in fact, entirely blameworthy?
Then is implementing a flawed standard always a good thing? Or is it better to implement against standard without the flaw? That's the real question. I think you are just reciting pieties.
That's not exactly what A Triple Allegory is doing. He is going to great lengths to map the narrative onto other narratives (esp. those implicit in Nietzsche), pretty much claiming to have uncovered authorial intent, and doing, as has been said, frankly wacky contortions on the text (veeerrrry stretch anagrams) to make it work. The ties with the OdysseusI have fewer problems with - I can even believe that the authors, consciously or otherwise, included the asteroid scene as a sort of reference to the Odysseus, and perhaps dropped a few other elements that were inspired by the epic. I can even imagine them noticing, before the film was released, "Hey, that Bowman thing is a happy coincidence, let's keep it in there!" Those sort of incidental readings and analogies between different stories is fine.
If you were going to sum up my complaint with the book, it's not that one narrative can refer to another or find reflections therein, it's the claim that the one true meaning of a text is a specific other text. I think books like the concordances to Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, or Pound's Cantos, are excellent tools for unravelling them. That is most certainly not what the Triple Allegory is.
Your biggest mistake is to think that the theoretical critic's function is to enhance your experience of the book like a wine-steward recommending wines. Most literary critics of this sort actually see books, films, and other cultural works as a way of understanding and talking about the culture that produces them, what they say about that culture in its historical moment, and what they reveal about us as people who tell each other stories and use language.
For pete's sake, did you expect to go to a literature class and just have a bunch of people say "Oh, I liked that, did you?", "No, I didn't. What about you?"
The Odysseus link is the only plank of the original essay that holds any water, as far as I'm concerned. (Duh. It's called A Space Odyssey. Duh.)
Um, that you paid for the DVD?
Well, I guess that's why so much of the money you spend on things goes to marketing and advertising. People wouldn't be spending so much money to manipulate you if they weren't, on the average, getting more back from it.