Stand-alone TiVos have been doing this for a while, although you need to add a USB adaptor. Unfortunately, DirecTV is far behind with their satellite TiVo units; their new HD TiVo has USB ports, but the software doesn't support them.
I recently set up a Time Warner PVR. It has two good features--like the DirecTV TiVo PVRs, it has dual tuners, so you can record two shows at once (or record one and watch another in real time), and it gets the channel guide up much faster than TiVo. In every other respect it pretty much sucks. No real prioritizing of scheduled shows, the guide only shows 1 week of shows, no way to search by name (you can create an alphabetized list of all shows on a particular day, but you can't filter it), director, keyword, or actor. And a really poorly designed remote that uses a whole bunch of buttons to accomplish less than what TiVo does with just a few.
I have yet to read of any Evolutionist making a non-trivial prediction about some future event in the same way that Einstein precticed the bending of light grazing the eclipsed Sun and making a specific star appear to move a specific distance from its normal position relative to nearby stars.
You mean, aside from the commonality of the genetic code, the high degree of genetic sequence similarity of closely related species (only recently being entirely confirmed by large-scale sequencing projects) or the fact that all genetic differences among species are of the sort created by mutation?
Re:Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 1
These astronomers, believing that planetary orbits were circular, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as an elliptical orbit.
The difference is that they did not develop successful technologies based on epicycle theory. In contrast, technologies such as quantum cryptography are now being developed that exploit some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.
If life is truly widespread in our universe, as one would expect to find if creationism were not the case, we ought to be finding other beings similar to us.
The unstated assumption is that everybody is using communication methods generating radiation that we will be able to detect. But we have used such communication methods for only a few decades; it may well be that civilizations use such communication methods only for a historical eyeblink before progressing to other methods that we are not currently able to detect.
I wouldn't say results leave us very little choice. Imagination plays a huge role in science; physics is just mathematical models to explain what we observe. People can imagine different models based on the same data.
However, the data set certain general constraints upon viable mathematical models. For example, all interpretations involve superpositions of states at the quantum level, as well as instantaneous correlations over distance.
to some degree it comes down to faith, in which theory you "believe" at any point in time (though not blind faith as religion dictates).
Faith is belief without, or in the face of, evidence. A physicist may favor one theory or interpretation over another, but it tends to be a matter of esthetics rather than faith.
In fact, getting back to dark energy, Einstein discarded the theory because it didn't fit what he "believed" the universe was like. There is some degree of faith in science, the important part is that by it's nature science continually tests to strengthen the belief in a theory or forces us to reform our ideas and opinions.
Einstein didn't really consider "dark energy." His derivation of general relativity yielded a constant of integration whose value could not be derived from the theory. He adjusted the constant to yield a static universe, because there was at the time no evidence that the universe was not static. He later felt that this was a mistake, and that he should have assigned a value of zero (basically by Occam's Razor), in which case he could have predicted the expansion of the universe. Even this would not have yielded the accelerating expansion that "dark energy" is being proposed to explain.
Ok, I have heard of Schroedinger's cat and that whole spiel before. I suppose it didn't sit well with me though. Seems like this is all based on the "God" science issue. You can't prove or disprove. All on faith. In this case, as with most, I don't have faith in the unprovable.
Quite the opposite. Nobody wants to believe anything as apparently counterintuitive as this. Rather, it is all based upon experimental results that leave very little choice. There have been some very clever experiments done in recent years using various indirect ways of gaining information about a system, and the predictions of quantum mechanics, superposition of states and all, have held up quite well.
I'm not a physicist so you can shut me up at any time. But I thought the "observation changes the object" was only true because to observe you you have to toss energy at it and see what happens. Then the act of tossing the energy changed it.
This was an early rationalization of the experimental results, but the truth turns out to be more general than that. Physicists have gotten much cleverer in working out ways of gaining information about a system without perturbing it, and the results still hold. (Think of Sherlock Holmes's dog that doesn't bark in the night). But it is not clear whether observation changes the system being observed or the rest of the universe, or even whether that is a meaningful distinction. Another way of looking at things is that observation couples the quantum states of the system being observed with the quantum states of the observing system. So once the Schrodinger's Cat box is opened, all "dead cat" states becomed coupled with "bereaved experimenter" states, which do not appreciably interfere with the "live cat" states that are coupled with "relieved experimenter" states.
If you're playing a particular card game and you want to win, many of the cards don't serve any purpose. But if the game changes some of those cards might come in handy especially if you reshuffle and get lucky.
Absolutely. One speculation is that the existence of junk DNA facilitates evolution, because it offers genetic raw material that can mutate to acquire a new function without the loss of an existing function.
More importantly, there is a huge disparity between the tiny number of pubmed references and the repeated claims by science writers that the belief that most DNA is "junk DNA" is some sort of predominant paradigm in modern molecular biology. The majority of biologists I've talked to about this topic argue that certain aspects of transcriptional control are complicated and poorly understood, and it's known that noncoding regions are important, so they would be uncomfortable calling something "junk DNA" simply because they did not know its function.
The strongest argument for there being lots of junk DNA in most species is not mere ignorance of function, but the fact that some species get along with much less noncoding DNA. It is simply hard to imagine that the transcriptional control is all that massively different in the lungifsh (124 pg DNA/cell), the salmon (3 pg, about the same as man), and the pufferfish (0.5 pg).
55 pubmed hits is an incredibly small number for something of that generality, and I think the fact that there are so few supports my point that it is not a widely used concept or term in molecular biology.
Not really. A term is likely to appear in the abstract or keywords of a research paper only if the results of a paper bear directly on it. It is hard to come up with good experiments that bear on a concept as broad as "junk DNA." A simple descriptive term like "intron" will occur an enormous number of times, because it is something that will appear in every gene sequencing paper, whether or not it is about introns specifically. The point is that "junk DNA" is a legitimate term that is being used currently in the technical literature.
When you read the Science article, you get the impression that it's some big insight that noncoding regions are important in transcriptional regulation, when we both know that's obviously not a recent development.
When I read the article, I get the impression that an entirely new class of functionally important noncoding sequences has been identified, and that this raises questions about the validity of the theory that most noncoding DNA has no function. Of course, the "junk DNA" idea cannot really be overturned--it pretty much has to exist at some level. The debate turns around the quantitative issue of what proportion of the genome it is, as well as questions about the selective pressures for preservation/elimination of junk DNA and its potential role in evolution.
I disagree with your definition of "wasteland," but I've never heard either "junk" or "wasteland" in serious scientific conversation, so I'm not sure that matters.
"Wasteland" seems like a pretty reasonable metaphor for use in a nontechnical article. And I've personally discussed junk DNA seriously with a number of eminent molecular biologists. A PubMed search for "junk DNA" yields 55 articles, including many refereed papers from highly regarded journals.
As you say, the existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the days of the lac operon, which I think is the mid-1960s. So who considered non-coding regions a "genetic wasteland?" Science writers, not scientists.
A "wasteland" is a region where things of value are not necessarily entirely absent, but typically few and far between. This reflects a view of noncoding DNA that was and still is held by many biologists--namely, that noncoding regulatory elements are (with the exception of a few species such as fugu) a small fraction of the total noncoding DNA.
Science magazine's reporting is generally pretty good. The only quibble I have with the article are a couple of statements along the lines of "Junk DNA also encodes RNA, already shown to affect gene expression through RNAi (RNA interference)." Strictly speaking, this is incorrect, because the term "junk" as originally formulated explicitly means sequences with no physiological or developmental function. So if I were writing the article, I probably would say something like "Sequences once thought to be Junk DNA also encode RNA..."
You're misunderstanding my point. What I'm calling absurd is the idea that DNA is unimportant BECAUSE it's non-coding. Not the idea that unimportant non-coding DNA exists (which I explicitly stated at the end of my post). All of the supposed excitement about any discovery involving so-called "junk" DNA is traceable back to the first interpretation, which as far as I know, no biologist anywhere has ever believed. The only reason this interpretation continues to exist, as far as I can tell, is because it is perpetuated by ignorant science writers who claim that there are biologists somewhere who believe this.
No, I don't think anybody has ever suggested that all noncoding DNA is "junk.". The existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the dawn of molecular biology. But I can't recall getting this misimpression from media accounts, either.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression.
You haven't spoken to many molecular biologists, then. The idea that a substantial fraction of the noncoding DNA has no function is widely accepted, although not proved. And I don't know anybody in the field who would dismiss the idea as "absurd." It is supported both by the observed fact that species similar in form and function can have dramatically different amounts of noncoding DNA (for example, the "fugu" puffer fish has a tiny fraction of the noncoding DNA found in some other fish), as well as by theoretical arguments (DNA sequences can duplicate and translocate, and sequences that tend to do this efficiency will tend to proliferate whether or not they have or acquire a function).
But in these particular cases, the strategy is to narrate from a perspective that race is not considered important. Only gradually and incidentally do we learn from the narrator that Ged has dark skin, or that Juan Rico is Filipino-American (rather than Latino as many assume.
You are confusing reality and fiction. Writing a story about a world in which race is not important, or in which people who are minorities in our culture are in the majority, can be a way of highlighting the unconscious assumptions that we make about race. So the fact that the race of the protagonist is not important in the fictional world of the story cannot be taken as an indication that the races of the characters are not an important part of the story or critical to the intent of the author.
Allow me to politely interject here: bull. I am white and live in a predominately (70+ percent) Hispanic-populated area (in Washington, U.S.). The number of dirty looks, comments (in Spanish, but I can understand a few, and they aren't polite), and downright uncooperativeness (is that a word?) I receive are at least equal to those of, say, a black man in a predominately white neighborhood. Things work both ways; don't make so many assumptions.
"Rarely" != "never"
There are obviously circumstances in which caucasians are in the minority. They are nevertheless the exception rather than the rule.
White, or any other color-kids won't relate to or "get into the skin" of a character if the character development isn't very good. The author's responsibility to the reader is not to pre-determine if they are able to 'deal' with a character's skin color, but to make them interested in the character regardless and the story as a whole. or...
Obviously, if the reader is initially distracted by the character's skin tone, that is likely to interfere with the reader's ability to identify with the character. The strategy of letting the reader discoverer a character's differences (which may be as subtle as race or as extreme as species) later on in the story has long been used successfully in SF. Heinlein also used this device for a nonwhite character.
how exactly do whites have the privilege of being colorblind ?
Whites have the privilege of being colorblind because they only rarely have to take into account the possibility that the people whom they have to deal with in their day-to-day existence may be prejudiced against them because of their race.
Isn't is also extreme arrogance to call ethnic imperialism the act of a white author speaking for a non-white people.? The word "ethnic" is a generic term, yet she uses it specifically to target white writers in her statement.
Uh, if you didn't know, Ms. LeGuin is white--the "white author" (singular, not plural) that she is referring to is herself
Danny Glover had a central part not just a supporting role.
In terms of screen time, he had a more minor role than the characters whose race was changed.
I don't think it was at all "racist". I think it had more to do with popular actors and "looks".
If anything, it seems like it went the other way. The most prominent actors that they managed to recruit were Danny Glover and Kristin Kreuk. Is it coincidence that they are also the only characters permitted to deviate from the otherwise lily-white color scheme?
Race was obviously important to the author. But I don't think the suits even read her novels, they just went with what they thought they could package and sell to a predominately white audience (US & Canadian SciFi channel viewers). People use the racist label too easily.
It seems to me that eliminating mixed race characters in hopes of appealing to a "predominately white audience" is inherently a racist decision, even if the racism is driven by economics rather than bigotry. There is also a disturbing circularity in justifying such a decision based on the fact that the viewership is predominately white, when the systematic elimination of people of color from major roles helps to drive off nonwhite viewers.
True... but we wouldn't be in that situation if universities were still buying hardcopies of things.
Most university libraries are years old and are of fixed sized. The literature is expanding exponentially. So universities are faced with the choice of diverting funds and land from other projects to construct additional libraries, or going to off-site storage, with electronic access making up for the loss in convenience.
Hmm - couldn't help but notice that 90% of her complaints were about the fact that they changed the story into all white people. I didn't get the impression that race was a huge issue in the novels - it was just part of the *colour* of the setting, if you'll pardon the pun. While it certainly isn't nice to lose that part of the story, it seems kinda odd to obsess over it. On the other hand, the scuttlebutt is that Ender's Game is being made with a less international cast, which really hurts the story.
It clearly was regarded as an important part of the "color" of the story by the author. The elimination of characters of color from all but minor supporting roles, over the author's objections, seems pretty racist.
Slashdot Mirror
That the universe is understandable by man, and furthermore that its fundamental principles, when properly formulated, are conceptually simple.
Stand-alone TiVos have been doing this for a while, although you need to add a USB adaptor. Unfortunately, DirecTV is far behind with their satellite TiVo units; their new HD TiVo has USB ports, but the software doesn't support them.
I recently set up a Time Warner PVR. It has two good features--like the DirecTV TiVo PVRs, it has dual tuners, so you can record two shows at once (or record one and watch another in real time), and it gets the channel guide up much faster than TiVo. In every other respect it pretty much sucks. No real prioritizing of scheduled shows, the guide only shows 1 week of shows, no way to search by name (you can create an alphabetized list of all shows on a particular day, but you can't filter it), director, keyword, or actor. And a really poorly designed remote that uses a whole bunch of buttons to accomplish less than what TiVo does with just a few.
I have yet to read of any Evolutionist making a non-trivial prediction about some future event in the same way that Einstein precticed the bending of light grazing the eclipsed Sun and making a specific star appear to move a specific distance from its normal position relative to nearby stars.
You mean, aside from the commonality of the genetic code, the high degree of genetic sequence similarity of closely related species (only recently being entirely confirmed by large-scale sequencing projects) or the fact that all genetic differences among species are of the sort created by mutation?
These astronomers, believing that planetary orbits were circular, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as an elliptical orbit.
The difference is that they did not develop successful technologies based on epicycle theory. In contrast, technologies such as quantum cryptography are now being developed that exploit some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.
faith [yahoo.com]: 1.Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.\
Yes, a scientist may favor one theory or another for esthetic reasons or because of the weight of evidence, but he will never have confident belief.
If life is truly widespread in our universe, as one would expect to find if creationism were not the case, we ought to be finding other beings similar to us.
The unstated assumption is that everybody is using communication methods generating radiation that we will be able to detect. But we have used such communication methods for only a few decades; it may well be that civilizations use such communication methods only for a historical eyeblink before progressing to other methods that we are not currently able to detect.
I wouldn't say results leave us very little choice. Imagination plays a huge role in science; physics is just mathematical models to explain what we observe. People can imagine different models based on the same data.
However, the data set certain general constraints upon viable mathematical models. For example, all interpretations involve superpositions of states at the quantum level, as well as instantaneous correlations over distance.
to some degree it comes down to faith, in which theory you "believe" at any point in time (though not blind faith as religion dictates).
Faith is belief without, or in the face of, evidence. A physicist may favor one theory or interpretation over another, but it tends to be a matter of esthetics rather than faith.
In fact, getting back to dark energy, Einstein discarded the theory because it didn't fit what he "believed" the universe was like. There is some degree of faith in science, the important part is that by it's nature science continually tests to strengthen the belief in a theory or forces us to reform our ideas and opinions.
Einstein didn't really consider "dark energy." His derivation of general relativity yielded a constant of integration whose value could not be derived from the theory. He adjusted the constant to yield a static universe, because there was at the time no evidence that the universe was not static. He later felt that this was a mistake, and that he should have assigned a value of zero (basically by Occam's Razor), in which case he could have predicted the expansion of the universe. Even this would not have yielded the accelerating expansion that "dark energy" is being proposed to explain.
Ok, I have heard of Schroedinger's cat and that whole spiel before. I suppose it didn't sit well with me though. Seems like this is all based on the "God" science issue. You can't prove or disprove. All on faith. In this case, as with most, I don't have faith in the unprovable.
Quite the opposite. Nobody wants to believe anything as apparently counterintuitive as this. Rather, it is all based upon experimental results that leave very little choice. There have been some very clever experiments done in recent years using various indirect ways of gaining information about a system, and the predictions of quantum mechanics, superposition of states and all, have held up quite well.
I'm not a physicist so you can shut me up at any time. But I thought the "observation changes the object" was only true because to observe you you have to toss energy at it and see what happens. Then the act of tossing the energy changed it.
This was an early rationalization of the experimental results, but the truth turns out to be more general than that. Physicists have gotten much cleverer in working out ways of gaining information about a system without perturbing it, and the results still hold. (Think of Sherlock Holmes's dog that doesn't bark in the night). But it is not clear whether observation changes the system being observed or the rest of the universe, or even whether that is a meaningful distinction. Another way of looking at things is that observation couples the quantum states of the system being observed with the quantum states of the observing system. So once the Schrodinger's Cat box is opened, all "dead cat" states becomed coupled with "bereaved experimenter" states, which do not appreciably interfere with the "live cat" states that are coupled with "relieved experimenter" states.
If you're playing a particular card game and you want to win, many of the cards don't serve any purpose. But if the game changes some of those cards might come in handy especially if you reshuffle and get lucky.
Absolutely. One speculation is that the existence of junk DNA facilitates evolution, because it offers genetic raw material that can mutate to acquire a new function without the loss of an existing function.
More importantly, there is a huge disparity between the tiny number of pubmed references and the repeated claims by science writers that the belief that most DNA is "junk DNA" is some sort of predominant paradigm in modern molecular biology. The majority of biologists I've talked to about this topic argue that certain aspects of transcriptional control are complicated and poorly understood, and it's known that noncoding regions are important, so they would be uncomfortable calling something "junk DNA" simply because they did not know its function.
The strongest argument for there being lots of junk DNA in most species is not mere ignorance of function, but the fact that some species get along with much less noncoding DNA. It is simply hard to imagine that the transcriptional control is all that massively different in the lungifsh (124 pg DNA/cell), the salmon (3 pg, about the same as man), and the pufferfish (0.5 pg).
55 pubmed hits is an incredibly small number for something of that generality, and I think the fact that there are so few supports my point that it is not a widely used concept or term in molecular biology.
Not really. A term is likely to appear in the abstract or keywords of a research paper only if the results of a paper bear directly on it. It is hard to come up with good experiments that bear on a concept as broad as "junk DNA." A simple descriptive term like "intron" will occur an enormous number of times, because it is something that will appear in every gene sequencing paper, whether or not it is about introns specifically. The point is that "junk DNA" is a legitimate term that is being used currently in the technical literature.
When you read the Science article, you get the impression that it's some big insight that noncoding regions are important in transcriptional regulation, when we both know that's obviously not a recent development.
When I read the article, I get the impression that an entirely new class of functionally important noncoding sequences has been identified, and that this raises questions about the validity of the theory that most noncoding DNA has no function. Of course, the "junk DNA" idea cannot really be overturned--it pretty much has to exist at some level. The debate turns around the quantitative issue of what proportion of the genome it is, as well as questions about the selective pressures for preservation/elimination of junk DNA and its potential role in evolution.
In a written story, the part which is actually written is the only essential part.
And indeed, LeGuin's complaint is that the film changed an essential part of what was actually written.
I disagree with your definition of "wasteland," but I've never heard either "junk" or "wasteland" in serious scientific conversation, so I'm not sure that matters.
"Wasteland" seems like a pretty reasonable metaphor for use in a nontechnical article. And I've personally discussed junk DNA seriously with a number of eminent molecular biologists. A PubMed search for "junk DNA" yields 55 articles, including many refereed papers from highly regarded journals.
As you say, the existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the days of the lac operon, which I think is the mid-1960s. So who considered non-coding regions a "genetic wasteland?" Science writers, not scientists.
A "wasteland" is a region where things of value are not necessarily entirely absent, but typically few and far between. This reflects a view of noncoding DNA that was and still is held by many biologists--namely, that noncoding regulatory elements are (with the exception of a few species such as fugu) a small fraction of the total noncoding DNA.
Science magazine's reporting is generally pretty good. The only quibble I have with the article are a couple of statements along the lines of "Junk DNA also encodes RNA, already shown to affect gene expression through RNAi (RNA interference)." Strictly speaking, this is incorrect, because the term "junk" as originally formulated explicitly means sequences with no physiological or developmental function. So if I were writing the article, I probably would say something like "Sequences once thought to be Junk DNA also encode RNA..."
You're misunderstanding my point. What I'm calling absurd is the idea that DNA is unimportant BECAUSE it's non-coding. Not the idea that unimportant non-coding DNA exists (which I explicitly stated at the end of my post). All of the supposed excitement about any discovery involving so-called "junk" DNA is traceable back to the first interpretation, which as far as I know, no biologist anywhere has ever believed. The only reason this interpretation continues to exist, as far as I can tell, is because it is perpetuated by ignorant science writers who claim that there are biologists somewhere who believe this.
No, I don't think anybody has ever suggested that all noncoding DNA is "junk.". The existence of noncoding regulatory elements has been known since the dawn of molecular biology. But I can't recall getting this misimpression from media accounts, either.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression.
You haven't spoken to many molecular biologists, then. The idea that a substantial fraction of the noncoding DNA has no function is widely accepted, although not proved. And I don't know anybody in the field who would dismiss the idea as "absurd." It is supported both by the observed fact that species similar in form and function can have dramatically different amounts of noncoding DNA (for example, the "fugu" puffer fish has a tiny fraction of the noncoding DNA found in some other fish), as well as by theoretical arguments (DNA sequences can duplicate and translocate, and sequences that tend to do this efficiency will tend to proliferate whether or not they have or acquire a function).
But in these particular cases, the strategy is to narrate from a perspective that race is not considered important. Only gradually and incidentally do we learn from the narrator that Ged has dark skin, or that Juan Rico is Filipino-American (rather than Latino as many assume.
You are confusing reality and fiction. Writing a story about a world in which race is not important, or in which people who are minorities in our culture are in the majority, can be a way of highlighting the unconscious assumptions that we make about race. So the fact that the race of the protagonist is not important in the fictional world of the story cannot be taken as an indication that the races of the characters are not an important part of the story or critical to the intent of the author.
Allow me to politely interject here: bull. I am white and live in a predominately (70+ percent) Hispanic-populated area (in Washington, U.S.). The number of dirty looks, comments (in Spanish, but I can understand a few, and they aren't polite), and downright uncooperativeness (is that a word?) I receive are at least equal to those of, say, a black man in a predominately white neighborhood. Things work both ways; don't make so many assumptions.
"Rarely" != "never"
There are obviously circumstances in which caucasians are in the minority. They are nevertheless the exception rather than the rule.
White, or any other color-kids won't relate to or "get into the skin" of a character if the character development isn't very good. The author's responsibility to the reader is not to pre-determine if they are able to 'deal' with a character's skin color, but to make them interested in the character regardless and the story as a whole. or...
Obviously, if the reader is initially distracted by the character's skin tone, that is likely to interfere with the reader's ability to identify with the character. The strategy of letting the reader discoverer a character's differences (which may be as subtle as race or as extreme as species) later on in the story has long been used successfully in SF. Heinlein also used this device for a nonwhite character.
how exactly do whites have the privilege of being colorblind ?
Whites have the privilege of being colorblind because they only rarely have to take into account the possibility that the people whom they have to deal with in their day-to-day existence may be prejudiced against them because of their race.
Isn't is also extreme arrogance to call ethnic imperialism the act of a white author speaking for a non-white people.? The word "ethnic" is a generic term, yet she uses it specifically to target white writers in her statement.
Uh, if you didn't know, Ms. LeGuin is white--the "white author" (singular, not plural) that she is referring to is herself
Danny Glover had a central part not just a supporting role.
In terms of screen time, he had a more minor role than the characters whose race was changed.
I don't think it was at all "racist". I think it had more to do with popular actors and "looks".
If anything, it seems like it went the other way. The most prominent actors that they managed to recruit were Danny Glover and Kristin Kreuk. Is it coincidence that they are also the only characters permitted to deviate from the otherwise lily-white color scheme?
Race was obviously important to the author. But I don't think the suits even read her novels, they just went with what they thought they could package and sell to a predominately white audience (US & Canadian SciFi channel viewers). People use the racist label too easily.
It seems to me that eliminating mixed race characters in hopes of appealing to a "predominately white audience" is inherently a racist decision, even if the racism is driven by economics rather than bigotry. There is also a disturbing circularity in justifying such a decision based on the fact that the viewership is predominately white, when the systematic elimination of people of color from major roles helps to drive off nonwhite viewers.
True ... but we wouldn't be in that situation if universities were still buying hardcopies of things.
Most university libraries are years old and are of fixed sized. The literature is expanding exponentially. So universities are faced with the choice of diverting funds and land from other projects to construct additional libraries, or going to off-site storage, with electronic access making up for the loss in convenience.
Hmm - couldn't help but notice that 90% of her complaints were about the fact that they changed the story into all white people. I didn't get the impression that race was a huge issue in the novels - it was just part of the *colour* of the setting, if you'll pardon the pun. While it certainly isn't nice to lose that part of the story, it seems kinda odd to obsess over it. On the other hand, the scuttlebutt is that Ender's Game is being made with a less international cast, which really hurts the story.
It clearly was regarded as an important part of the "color" of the story by the author. The elimination of characters of color from all but minor supporting roles, over the author's objections, seems pretty racist.