At this point, the number of people who are already here in the US - and their integration into American society - is a huge fucking fact-on-the-ground. You may as well start trying to enforce immigration law (retroactively) on the people who came on the Mayflower.
The law was a bad, unrealistic law (or rather, the very broken immigration system that works for middle-class immigrants, but not for working-class ones). It didn't recognize the economic and political reality of its time. You may find the idea that someone gets amnesty rankling - but the only real alternative is the status quo.
The trouble with that compass is that it doesn't really represent well-round worldviews, and certainly not the ones that animate the American populace. It charts, well, how you feel about the presence of government in a couple of axes.
If you look at the polls and gauge national opinion on the subject, the extension of the PATRIOT act is very much in accord with the wishes of the common man.
The Democrats and the Republicans, when they govern, all generally govern as neoliberal globalists. Some Democrats campaign as social democratic liberals; somewhat more Republicans, lately, campaign as nationalist populists. Nonetheless, the consensus of power itself is pretty stable, and has been since the mid-90s.
Neoliberal globalism is essentially "center-right" ideology. It's very close to core neoconservatism, with the difference being that neo-conservatives give a bit more authority to the idea of the nation-state in carrying out its policing function.
No one in a position to do anything about it cares about burnout. They are interested in quarterly results and the effects on the valuation on their stocks. A brilliant-flame and crash looks better on resumes than a slow-walk-to-profitability.
The programmers involved could be motivated to play along with these shenanigans if they were given shares. Otherwise, they are essentially being exploited by the fact that there aren't a lot of options in a week economy, and the protections that workers used to have against overlong work conditions have been circumvented.
The great thing about rooting is that you can get a device that is subsidized by its vendor, and then free it from its restrictions, to own it at a fraction of the price you would have had to pay otherwise.
Yet most of the artists I know are very cautious about when they expose themselves to critique, which is why it is something of a formal process in places like MFA programs. If you take criticism too seriously, you risk paralyzing yourself with second-guessing. I think it's why a lot of the best work from people comes from the earlier part of their careers nowadays: the atmosphere of criticism corrupts their later work.
The Journal of Applied Nutrition does not have it archives available for free distribution, apparently - but you can order a copy from your local library, or you can purchase it at http://www.iaacn.org/Journal%20of%20Applied%20Nutrition.cfm. Of course, good research can be cited for all sorts of ends - but that doesn't stop it from being good research, and no one has contradicted it yet.
"The Hero's Journey" is responsible for some of the most stilted and cliched writing in Hollywood. It is also dated: when Campbell wrote it, he thought he was writing about universal aspects of narrative. In fact, there are many models of narrative that have nothing to do with the hero's journey - and the Hollywood version of it is really flash-freezing an idea about the self and time that has a lot more to do with the mid-to-late 20th century and its notions of what individuals were than what is going on today.
What TRON should be about is the *world* it is in, not just another setting for the monomyth. We see heros all the time - we don't see well-wrought visions of digitally created worlds, nor ambiguously sentient programs. That's where the script - and the film - should have done most of its work.
See David Brin's criticism of the monomyth - and why science fiction should be its antithesis.
I'd describe a lot of adult vegans as "passive-aggressive" in their stance. I respect vegetarianism and veganism in theory: in practice, a lot of Western vegans strike me almost as caricatures of Nietzsche's "politics of ressentiment," in their elevation of empathy and compassion over all other possible values. Perhaps that is the value of veganism: it is the mechanism by which that value devalues itself, when it becomes an impossibility.
You should check the research done on those Indian vegetarians who moved to the UK - and started becoming ill on those diets.
It turned out that they were getting lots of animal protein in their "vegetarian" diets - in the forms of bugs and larvae in their food, at a significant enough of a level to forfend the health problems that some encountered when they relocated to a place where the food supply was regulated enough to keep the little critters out of the veggies. (Research done by HL Abrams, published in the Journal of Applied Nutrition, 1980)
Besides, most Indian vegetarians are not vegans - they, too, are ovo-lacto.
Nonetheless, to enter the Schengen area itself, one still needs a passport. This makes the region comparable to a "United States of Europe" - after all, one needs no passport to travel between US states.
I believe the international passport system was instituted around the first world war, and standardized by the mid-1920s.
But to enter Europe itself, you still need a passport. And there are still certain intra-European passages (e.g., Eurostar) where you still need to provide one.
Few people research most of their purchasing decisions, and most people research few of them. It is my impression that high-tech consumers who keep themselves generally informed on standards in storage and connectors and such do not pay anything like the same amount of attention to the quality of the food they buy.
I don't buy your first claim, that they're not sentient. They make decisions, they seem to have relationships, they seem to have desires. They learn, they modify values, they change sides. They have, perhaps, temperaments programmed in them, analogous to the way that humans do. (And as shown by the case of Henry M., humans can be reprogrammed by changing brain structure.)
I'm not sure what definition of sentient is, but we're compelled to care about the programs too much to think that this issue is resolved.
It may be that Flynn didn't believe he was committing genocide, either. But programs were of the same sort of thing that isos were - isos were simply self-organizing forms of them - and he referred to their destruction as genocide.
And Flynn apologized to CLU, as well - appealing to his reason. The inconsistency and ambiguity remains.
Tron 1.0 programs (which were anthropomorphized programs) are not like Tron 2.0 programs (designed to inhabit an actual virtual world made for humans), either. The grid is not the world of the first Tron.
CLU and his staff seem to be able to visit Flynn's house, so the "programs can't go off the grid" explanation doesn't work.
This is sheer sophistry. Until you have some kind of basic indication that EV1 and EV2 are more than trivial, what you are doing is crude stalling and pure reaction.
I agree - it is fantasy-mysticism in a high-tech skin, and that's fine. But even as fantasy it fails basic internal consistency. Are programs sentient beings or not? Was Flynn's destruction of them genocide or not? Why was Flynn being left alone in exile? What the hell is up with Rinzler/Tron?
I actually come to the opposite conclusion from the same observation. The script is insipid: see the move in 3D on an Imax screen. It's eye candy and brain garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point, the number of people who are already here in the US - and their integration into American society - is a huge fucking fact-on-the-ground. You may as well start trying to enforce immigration law (retroactively) on the people who came on the Mayflower.
The law was a bad, unrealistic law (or rather, the very broken immigration system that works for middle-class immigrants, but not for working-class ones). It didn't recognize the economic and political reality of its time. You may find the idea that someone gets amnesty rankling - but the only real alternative is the status quo.
The trouble with that compass is that it doesn't really represent well-round worldviews, and certainly not the ones that animate the American populace. It charts, well, how you feel about the presence of government in a couple of axes.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/11/lind_five_worldviews is a much better description - past the crude "right/left" axis which has meant different things at different times.
If you look at the polls and gauge national opinion on the subject, the extension of the PATRIOT act is very much in accord with the wishes of the common man.
Because the common man is a coward.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/11/lind_five_worldviews
The Democrats and the Republicans, when they govern, all generally govern as neoliberal globalists. Some Democrats campaign as social democratic liberals; somewhat more Republicans, lately, campaign as nationalist populists. Nonetheless, the consensus of power itself is pretty stable, and has been since the mid-90s.
Neoliberal globalism is essentially "center-right" ideology. It's very close to core neoconservatism, with the difference being that neo-conservatives give a bit more authority to the idea of the nation-state in carrying out its policing function.
No one in a position to do anything about it cares about burnout. They are interested in quarterly results and the effects on the valuation on their stocks. A brilliant-flame and crash looks better on resumes than a slow-walk-to-profitability.
The programmers involved could be motivated to play along with these shenanigans if they were given shares. Otherwise, they are essentially being exploited by the fact that there aren't a lot of options in a week economy, and the protections that workers used to have against overlong work conditions have been circumvented.
The thing about geek-gadgets is that "needs" is a moving target. It's a perception fueled by an ever-growing set of features, benefits and uses.
The great thing about rooting is that you can get a device that is subsidized by its vendor, and then free it from its restrictions, to own it at a fraction of the price you would have had to pay otherwise.
American presidents have been acting like this since the beginning of the 20th century.
Um, no. It's not really treason. And it is definitely not treason for all non-Americans involved.
Gaia also designed you to be dominated by jocks, infested by lice, and dead by 40.
Yet most of the artists I know are very cautious about when they expose themselves to critique, which is why it is something of a formal process in places like MFA programs. If you take criticism too seriously, you risk paralyzing yourself with second-guessing. I think it's why a lot of the best work from people comes from the earlier part of their careers nowadays: the atmosphere of criticism corrupts their later work.
Creative people are often sensitive. I wouldn't want to limit my world to things created only by people with thick skins: they are often unperceptive.
The Journal of Applied Nutrition does not have it archives available for free distribution, apparently - but you can order a copy from your local library, or you can purchase it at http://www.iaacn.org/Journal%20of%20Applied%20Nutrition.cfm. Of course, good research can be cited for all sorts of ends - but that doesn't stop it from being good research, and no one has contradicted it yet.
"The Hero's Journey" is responsible for some of the most stilted and cliched writing in Hollywood. It is also dated: when Campbell wrote it, he thought he was writing about universal aspects of narrative. In fact, there are many models of narrative that have nothing to do with the hero's journey - and the Hollywood version of it is really flash-freezing an idea about the self and time that has a lot more to do with the mid-to-late 20th century and its notions of what individuals were than what is going on today.
What TRON should be about is the *world* it is in, not just another setting for the monomyth. We see heros all the time - we don't see well-wrought visions of digitally created worlds, nor ambiguously sentient programs. That's where the script - and the film - should have done most of its work.
See David Brin's criticism of the monomyth - and why science fiction should be its antithesis.
I'd describe a lot of adult vegans as "passive-aggressive" in their stance. I respect vegetarianism and veganism in theory: in practice, a lot of Western vegans strike me almost as caricatures of Nietzsche's "politics of ressentiment," in their elevation of empathy and compassion over all other possible values. Perhaps that is the value of veganism: it is the mechanism by which that value devalues itself, when it becomes an impossibility.
You should check the research done on those Indian vegetarians who moved to the UK - and started becoming ill on those diets.
It turned out that they were getting lots of animal protein in their "vegetarian" diets - in the forms of bugs and larvae in their food, at a significant enough of a level to forfend the health problems that some encountered when they relocated to a place where the food supply was regulated enough to keep the little critters out of the veggies. (Research done by HL Abrams, published in the Journal of Applied Nutrition, 1980)
Besides, most Indian vegetarians are not vegans - they, too, are ovo-lacto.
Nonetheless, to enter the Schengen area itself, one still needs a passport. This makes the region comparable to a "United States of Europe" - after all, one needs no passport to travel between US states.
I believe the international passport system was instituted around the first world war, and standardized by the mid-1920s.
But to enter Europe itself, you still need a passport. And there are still certain intra-European passages (e.g., Eurostar) where you still need to provide one.
Few people research most of their purchasing decisions, and most people research few of them. It is my impression that high-tech consumers who keep themselves generally informed on standards in storage and connectors and such do not pay anything like the same amount of attention to the quality of the food they buy.
I don't buy your first claim, that they're not sentient. They make decisions, they seem to have relationships, they seem to have desires. They learn, they modify values, they change sides. They have, perhaps, temperaments programmed in them, analogous to the way that humans do. (And as shown by the case of Henry M., humans can be reprogrammed by changing brain structure.)
I'm not sure what definition of sentient is, but we're compelled to care about the programs too much to think that this issue is resolved.
It may be that Flynn didn't believe he was committing genocide, either. But programs were of the same sort of thing that isos were - isos were simply self-organizing forms of them - and he referred to their destruction as genocide.
And Flynn apologized to CLU, as well - appealing to his reason. The inconsistency and ambiguity remains.
Tron 1.0 programs (which were anthropomorphized programs) are not like Tron 2.0 programs (designed to inhabit an actual virtual world made for humans), either. The grid is not the world of the first Tron.
CLU and his staff seem to be able to visit Flynn's house, so the "programs can't go off the grid" explanation doesn't work.
But http://tronlegacyreview.wordpress.com/ fleshes out the problems of the film better than I will in a comment.
This is sheer sophistry. Until you have some kind of basic indication that EV1 and EV2 are more than trivial, what you are doing is crude stalling and pure reaction.
Boxleitner is wasted in this film, reduced more or less to a long cameo.
I agree - it is fantasy-mysticism in a high-tech skin, and that's fine. But even as fantasy it fails basic internal consistency. Are programs sentient beings or not? Was Flynn's destruction of them genocide or not? Why was Flynn being left alone in exile? What the hell is up with Rinzler/Tron?
I actually come to the opposite conclusion from the same observation. The script is insipid: see the move in 3D on an Imax screen. It's eye candy and brain garbage.
I saw Bridges do the best he could with a really bad script.