The DMCA was bullshit. But it wasn't pushed on the pretext of a war on terror, it was pushed on the pretext of possible economic harm to certain industries. And it didn't result in widespread surveillance, imprisonment without habeas corpus, torture, no-fly lists, fingerprinting at the border (I'm married to a non-US citizen: coming into this country has become a ridiculous hassle). I actually protested - on the streets, with banners and all - Clinton's Kosovo escapades, so don't accuse me of partisanship.
And which of the parties' presidential candidates is beating the drum of war and playing the security-panic card? I think that would, again, be the Republicans.
The Republicans are the ones who tarnish critics of the expansion of executive power as anti-American and traitorous. The Democrats have generally failed to oppose this tendency adequately, but let us be under no illusions about where the real engine for this growth of policing state power is coming from.
NPR only has a left slant to it if you have an American notion of the left/right spectrum, and if you ignore the show "Marketplace", which often displays a market-fundamentalism that would make Ludwing von Mises blush.
Also, most public radio stations buy shows from a variety of sources, not all of which are NPR. American Public Media is another producer of public radio content, and is often chosen by public stations with more conservative demographics.
Oh, I think you misread me. I actually agree that, for many functions, convergence has not happened at an acceptable level of quality. And I do have separate devices at this point for those functions. I don't have GPS, though it would be helpful to me often (I do get lost a lot!) I have a separate music device and phone and camera. The phone has a crappy camera in it that I don't use.
Where I disagree with you is that I do expect convergence to happen fairly soon.
As far as obsolesence goes, I take it for granted, and before buying anything, I try to determine how long its useful life will be. Frankly, I could probably lease them rather than own them, because I think most of us do upgrade a lot of our techno-goods every few years anyway. But I would be willing to endure a little "oldness" in one function if the bulk of functions in a device were reasonably current. Upgrading one device every 3 years strikes me as less wasteful than, say, upgrading 4 devices every 4 to 5 years, even if the latter is on a staggered schedule.
I do want them all. I don't like have a whole bunch of little devices all over the place. I don't put stuff on my belt which makes me look like a repairman, I don't want my pockets filled with so much stuff it looks like I'm wearing jodhpurs.
But, I will wait until convergence doesn't suck before I buy into it. So far, you're right: most every attempt to combine functions into a device has led to compromise. But I am confident that eventually, it will get sorted out. Perhaps by Apple (I'm a holdout, for a couple reasons), perhaps by Nokia or Treo.
I think music, voice call, PDA and GPS are all good candidates for near-term convergence at high-quality. Camera phones will be gimmicky little toys indefinitely, however - I can't imagine not needing a "good" camera. But the rest? It's really almost there.
There's a difference between a considered refusal to bring closure to a narrative, and the sort of distracted inability to be bothered to finish a novel that characterizes NS' books. He's no Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Well, he might not be Shakespeare, but try reading, say, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, and then tell me he's mediocre. When you're better than 90% of the tripe out there, sci-fi included, you've wandered away a little bit from "mediocre".
Fair enough. And to be honest, at times I've liked Stephenson - usually for short bursts at a time. His writing is often a pastiche of clever ideas and descriptions held together by - well, not really held together by anything at all. I think he's be more effective if he didn't even try to write novels, but wrote books of connected, somewhat related vignettes.
Still, life is short. I'm going to read, what, maybe one one-hundred-thousandths of all the literature that's ever been written? . ..and I'm a pretty active reader. The "top 10%" is still way too indiscriminate. Surely, there's a higher bar than being better than Tom Clancy.
When I see that other people have outgrown tastes that I have, my attitude is a cautious curiosity. My wife has an incredible education in two fields: food, and painting. When I see a vaguely contemptuous look flash across her face for one of my preferences in those domains, I try not to get defensive, but to learn to appreciate the elements that she can identify as lacking in them, and to learn to understand what's better. At the same time, I don't readily abandon my pleasures, either, nor does she. (Her taste in books is weak, and her idea of a philosophy text is Alain de Botton. I've introduced her to stronger philosophers, without expecting her to drop de Botton too quickly.)
Growing up involved giving up certain pleasures in the discovery of other ones - more nuanced, complicated and difficult ones, at times. For most things, most of us are on the "low scale." We can accept it without resenting it or defending it. I think a lot of the problem with culture is the insistence that there is no such thing as "high" and "low," that all tastes are just as good - it's usually an insistence that people only make for their "low" tastes. In other words, you won't be able to convince a geek that Windows is just as good as Unix, but they'll insist that Stephenson is just as good as, say, Samuel Beckett. Conversely, a literati will express the same kind of convenient mix of egalitarianism / anti-egalitarianism.
I'm particularly fond of the fact that his male protagonists are generally depicted in close, lifelong friendships with other men, that women tend to play little roles in their lives, but by Jeebus they're not gay. I haven't seen such repression since Batman and Robin sank so far into the closet, they could see Narnia.
None. I would be grateful for the improved quality of SF readership.
But your lame defensive posture against "elitism" works for other domains, too. "What OS name if Linux or BSD got too popular to like?" You may not believe it, but I like those authors because they write much more interesting and compelling books, not to impress people.
Many elites are other peoples' masses. Slashdot-types (or at least a caricatured stereotype of them that might have some kernel of truth to it) might think of themselves as a kind of cerebral elite for certain types of technical-scientific abilities. For people with a strong background in the arts and literature, Slashdot tastes are very much of the masses, often naive and vulgar. Athletic types see the distinction between the elite and the masses in different terms, as well.
Stephenson, among others, clearly plays to the the geek version of what makes elitism. I find him one of those authors whose generally mediocre work is peppered with intriguing ideas and even flashes of clever writing. He is a geek writing for geeks, satisfying their desire to have their own view of the world confirmed. I put Orson Scott Card in that category, too.
There are alternatives to that: writers who unsettle and shake up frameworks of thought. Among my favorite of them, in SF at least, are Thomas Disch and Samuel Delaney.
You know what I want a moratorium on? "Typical of..." (non-)responses. Not only is it crudely ad-hominem, it adds nothing to the discussion. Saying that a statement is typical of one group or another, instead of actually responding the statement, is a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy. And it self-Godwinizes quickly: "that's the sort of thing Hitler would have said."
Securing our future hydrocarbon supply, by giving Iran a new best friend and setting off a civil war?
If this really was about oil, then the US has botched it more badly than I feared. Just what are the Iraq oil industry's production figures since the war began?
I was a critic of the sanctions against Iraq (which were put in place by the UN largely at the behest of Bush 1, not by Clinton - though I'm no fan of Clinton's foreign policy in Kosovo or Iraq, either.)
The war was unjustified, both in principle and in its results.
There's nothing about owning property in and of itself that depends on force, assuming the purchase or acquisition of that property was not coerced.
I am coerced to recognize the right of the seller to sell, their claim to the land, and the right of the buyer to buy. I am coerced to recognize the possibility of even owning land at all. It is violence and the possibility of violence that creates the cadastral institutions which facilitate the entire process of land ownership and transfer. If there is food on land you own, even if you didn't grow the food, I am forfended from pursuing it. If I do not own land, I must pay for the right to sleep anywhere.
All land ownership required an original taking, a coercive one. There is not one shred of property on this planet which was not fought over. By men with guns (or swords, or sticks...)
I understand you're trying to come up with a balanced nature/nurture formulation, and I think you're close. But to think of humans as "animals with a think layer of culture layered on top" misses the mark a bit.
First, other species have cultures, in that behaviors within the same species can vary significantly from social group to social group in a variety of birds and mammals. The smart ones as a rule, yes (crows, parrots, primates, cetaceans, carnivora, etc) but still a decent number.
The second objection is the "core/layer" metaphor that you're employing. Genes are just genes: they only do things in environments, whether physical or social. The organism isn't a genetic-thing that eventually hits an environment: the organism is what happens when a bunch of physical processes occur within an environment. More to the point: culture will inform genetic expression to an extent that seems "chemical." Different emotions are associated with different endocrinological and neurological underpinnings, but in different cultures the same underpinnings can have very different expressions as behavior, and then - the underpinnings can change. There are developmental changes that even small differences in childraising practices produce, that will affect brain structure, presence of hormones, etc. Why do some cultures develop serious problems with alcoholism and some do not? Why is addiction more rampant in some cultures than other? Violence (which has roots in things like adrenaline and dopamine levels, etc.)?
I don't think I am resolving the nature/nurture discussion here, either, but I think it is ready to evolve some more from its recent form, by starting to rethink the unit of analysis: the organism as a dynamic system, instead of a simple machine.
Or because we're ambivalent, especially if we've slept our way into a relationship with a lunatic.
It was hard for me to completely dissuade people from giving me positive attention, so I never didn't respond in a way that encouraged more interest. This has caused trouble. It's probably easy for women to find out that a guy is or is not willing to sleep with them, too. It's the follow-up that's a huge gray area.
(Now married, with child. Game over, man. Game over.)
Yes, without sufficient grounds to investigate, rummaging through dossiers is a violation of privacy. But you allowed for no such gray area, did you?
Currently, Swiss law does not provide for obtaining information pursuant to a warrant for those suspected of tax evasion, graft etc. from elsewhere. Soon, they might.
Organizations that live by a completely lack of accountability die by a complete lack of accountability. I hate Scientology like anyway, but if you didn't see this coming a light-year away, you're naive.
Simply owning property relies on the use of force to achieve political and social goals (even if those goals are the preservation of the status quo.) The "men with guns" argument is a fatuous one. If I try to simply walk from where I live to the beach, a lot of people with guns will shoot at me for traversing their property. That's also opposed to the meaning and spirit of liberty, even more than taxation: because taxation can be understood as being based on an implicit agreement you made with the state the produces and backs money in a monetary economy, and the by using dollars as legal tender, you have agreed to play with dollars' rules.
Are you a lawyer? Because I believe that, in terms of liability etc., a family (as a guardianship) actually is a legal entity. Not that I'm a lawyer, but...
This makes the hypocrisy/Schadenfreude even sweeter. Sony/BMG is a music publishing company, an active member in the RIAA and its global equivalents. I'm usually one for nuanced views on these things, but in this case I want see them hoisted so hard by their own petard that they'll never be able to even look at a petard again without wincing.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA was bullshit. But it wasn't pushed on the pretext of a war on terror, it was pushed on the pretext of possible economic harm to certain industries. And it didn't result in widespread surveillance, imprisonment without habeas corpus, torture, no-fly lists, fingerprinting at the border (I'm married to a non-US citizen: coming into this country has become a ridiculous hassle). I actually protested - on the streets, with banners and all - Clinton's Kosovo escapades, so don't accuse me of partisanship.
And which of the parties' presidential candidates is beating the drum of war and playing the security-panic card? I think that would, again, be the Republicans.
The Republicans are the ones who tarnish critics of the expansion of executive power as anti-American and traitorous. The Democrats have generally failed to oppose this tendency adequately, but let us be under no illusions about where the real engine for this growth of policing state power is coming from.
Oh, tying together my two observations: Marketplace is actually an APM product.
NPR only has a left slant to it if you have an American notion of the left/right spectrum, and if you ignore the show "Marketplace", which often displays a market-fundamentalism that would make Ludwing von Mises blush.
Also, most public radio stations buy shows from a variety of sources, not all of which are NPR. American Public Media is another producer of public radio content, and is often chosen by public stations with more conservative demographics.
Oh, I think you misread me. I actually agree that, for many functions, convergence has not happened at an acceptable level of quality. And I do have separate devices at this point for those functions. I don't have GPS, though it would be helpful to me often (I do get lost a lot!) I have a separate music device and phone and camera. The phone has a crappy camera in it that I don't use.
Where I disagree with you is that I do expect convergence to happen fairly soon.
As far as obsolesence goes, I take it for granted, and before buying anything, I try to determine how long its useful life will be. Frankly, I could probably lease them rather than own them, because I think most of us do upgrade a lot of our techno-goods every few years anyway. But I would be willing to endure a little "oldness" in one function if the bulk of functions in a device were reasonably current. Upgrading one device every 3 years strikes me as less wasteful than, say, upgrading 4 devices every 4 to 5 years, even if the latter is on a staggered schedule.
I do want them all. I don't like have a whole bunch of little devices all over the place. I don't put stuff on my belt which makes me look like a repairman, I don't want my pockets filled with so much stuff it looks like I'm wearing jodhpurs.
But, I will wait until convergence doesn't suck before I buy into it. So far, you're right: most every attempt to combine functions into a device has led to compromise. But I am confident that eventually, it will get sorted out. Perhaps by Apple (I'm a holdout, for a couple reasons), perhaps by Nokia or Treo.
I think music, voice call, PDA and GPS are all good candidates for near-term convergence at high-quality. Camera phones will be gimmicky little toys indefinitely, however - I can't imagine not needing a "good" camera. But the rest? It's really almost there.
Shouldn't it be "jailbroken" rather than "jailbreaked?"
Not after I mentioned Robbe-Grillet, he wasn't.
There's a difference between a considered refusal to bring closure to a narrative, and the sort of distracted inability to be bothered to finish a novel that characterizes NS' books. He's no Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Well, he might not be Shakespeare, but try reading, say, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, and then tell me he's mediocre. When you're better than 90% of the tripe out there, sci-fi included, you've wandered away a little bit from "mediocre".
.and I'm a pretty active reader. The "top 10%" is still way too indiscriminate. Surely, there's a higher bar than being better than Tom Clancy.
Fair enough. And to be honest, at times I've liked Stephenson - usually for short bursts at a time. His writing is often a pastiche of clever ideas and descriptions held together by - well, not really held together by anything at all. I think he's be more effective if he didn't even try to write novels, but wrote books of connected, somewhat related vignettes.
Still, life is short. I'm going to read, what, maybe one one-hundred-thousandths of all the literature that's ever been written? . .
When I see that other people have outgrown tastes that I have, my attitude is a cautious curiosity. My wife has an incredible education in two fields: food, and painting. When I see a vaguely contemptuous look flash across her face for one of my preferences in those domains, I try not to get defensive, but to learn to appreciate the elements that she can identify as lacking in them, and to learn to understand what's better. At the same time, I don't readily abandon my pleasures, either, nor does she. (Her taste in books is weak, and her idea of a philosophy text is Alain de Botton. I've introduced her to stronger philosophers, without expecting her to drop de Botton too quickly.)
Growing up involved giving up certain pleasures in the discovery of other ones - more nuanced, complicated and difficult ones, at times. For most things, most of us are on the "low scale." We can accept it without resenting it or defending it. I think a lot of the problem with culture is the insistence that there is no such thing as "high" and "low," that all tastes are just as good - it's usually an insistence that people only make for their "low" tastes. In other words, you won't be able to convince a geek that Windows is just as good as Unix, but they'll insist that Stephenson is just as good as, say, Samuel Beckett. Conversely, a literati will express the same kind of convenient mix of egalitarianism / anti-egalitarianism.
I'm particularly fond of the fact that his male protagonists are generally depicted in close, lifelong friendships with other men, that women tend to play little roles in their lives, but by Jeebus they're not gay. I haven't seen such repression since Batman and Robin sank so far into the closet, they could see Narnia.
None. I would be grateful for the improved quality of SF readership.
But your lame defensive posture against "elitism" works for other domains, too. "What OS name if Linux or BSD got too popular to like?" You may not believe it, but I like those authors because they write much more interesting and compelling books, not to impress people.
Many elites are other peoples' masses. Slashdot-types (or at least a caricatured stereotype of them that might have some kernel of truth to it) might think of themselves as a kind of cerebral elite for certain types of technical-scientific abilities. For people with a strong background in the arts and literature, Slashdot tastes are very much of the masses, often naive and vulgar. Athletic types see the distinction between the elite and the masses in different terms, as well.
Stephenson, among others, clearly plays to the the geek version of what makes elitism. I find him one of those authors whose generally mediocre work is peppered with intriguing ideas and even flashes of clever writing. He is a geek writing for geeks, satisfying their desire to have their own view of the world confirmed. I put Orson Scott Card in that category, too.
There are alternatives to that: writers who unsettle and shake up frameworks of thought. Among my favorite of them, in SF at least, are Thomas Disch and Samuel Delaney.
You know what I want a moratorium on? "Typical of..." (non-)responses. Not only is it crudely ad-hominem, it adds nothing to the discussion. Saying that a statement is typical of one group or another, instead of actually responding the statement, is a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy. And it self-Godwinizes quickly: "that's the sort of thing Hitler would have said."
Securing our future hydrocarbon supply, by giving Iran a new best friend and setting off a civil war?
If this really was about oil, then the US has botched it more badly than I feared. Just what are the Iraq oil industry's production figures since the war began?
I was a critic of the sanctions against Iraq (which were put in place by the UN largely at the behest of Bush 1, not by Clinton - though I'm no fan of Clinton's foreign policy in Kosovo or Iraq, either.)
The war was unjustified, both in principle and in its results.
There's nothing about owning property in and of itself that depends on force, assuming the purchase or acquisition of that property was not coerced.
I am coerced to recognize the right of the seller to sell, their claim to the land, and the right of the buyer to buy. I am coerced to recognize the possibility of even owning land at all. It is violence and the possibility of violence that creates the cadastral institutions which facilitate the entire process of land ownership and transfer. If there is food on land you own, even if you didn't grow the food, I am forfended from pursuing it. If I do not own land, I must pay for the right to sleep anywhere.
All land ownership required an original taking, a coercive one. There is not one shred of property on this planet which was not fought over. By men with guns (or swords, or sticks...)
I understand you're trying to come up with a balanced nature/nurture formulation, and I think you're close. But to think of humans as "animals with a think layer of culture layered on top" misses the mark a bit.
First, other species have cultures, in that behaviors within the same species can vary significantly from social group to social group in a variety of birds and mammals. The smart ones as a rule, yes (crows, parrots, primates, cetaceans, carnivora, etc) but still a decent number.
The second objection is the "core/layer" metaphor that you're employing. Genes are just genes: they only do things in environments, whether physical or social. The organism isn't a genetic-thing that eventually hits an environment: the organism is what happens when a bunch of physical processes occur within an environment. More to the point: culture will inform genetic expression to an extent that seems "chemical." Different emotions are associated with different endocrinological and neurological underpinnings, but in different cultures the same underpinnings can have very different expressions as behavior, and then - the underpinnings can change. There are developmental changes that even small differences in childraising practices produce, that will affect brain structure, presence of hormones, etc. Why do some cultures develop serious problems with alcoholism and some do not? Why is addiction more rampant in some cultures than other? Violence (which has roots in things like adrenaline and dopamine levels, etc.)?
I don't think I am resolving the nature/nurture discussion here, either, but I think it is ready to evolve some more from its recent form, by starting to rethink the unit of analysis: the organism as a dynamic system, instead of a simple machine.
Or because we're ambivalent, especially if we've slept our way into a relationship with a lunatic.
It was hard for me to completely dissuade people from giving me positive attention, so I never didn't respond in a way that encouraged more interest. This has caused trouble. It's probably easy for women to find out that a guy is or is not willing to sleep with them, too. It's the follow-up that's a huge gray area.
(Now married, with child. Game over, man. Game over.)
Yes, without sufficient grounds to investigate, rummaging through dossiers is a violation of privacy. But you allowed for no such gray area, did you?
Currently, Swiss law does not provide for obtaining information pursuant to a warrant for those suspected of tax evasion, graft etc. from elsewhere. Soon, they might.
Organizations that live by a completely lack of accountability die by a complete lack of accountability. I hate Scientology like anyway, but if you didn't see this coming a light-year away, you're naive.
Simply owning property relies on the use of force to achieve political and social goals (even if those goals are the preservation of the status quo.) The "men with guns" argument is a fatuous one. If I try to simply walk from where I live to the beach, a lot of people with guns will shoot at me for traversing their property. That's also opposed to the meaning and spirit of liberty, even more than taxation: because taxation can be understood as being based on an implicit agreement you made with the state the produces and backs money in a monetary economy, and the by using dollars as legal tender, you have agreed to play with dollars' rules.
Are you a lawyer? Because I believe that, in terms of liability etc., a family (as a guardianship) actually is a legal entity. Not that I'm a lawyer, but...
This makes the hypocrisy/Schadenfreude even sweeter. Sony/BMG is a music publishing company, an active member in the RIAA and its global equivalents. I'm usually one for nuanced views on these things, but in this case I want see them hoisted so hard by their own petard that they'll never be able to even look at a petard again without wincing.