So type "cd" if you want; that's what I do. If you didn't understand how to define symbols in your LOGIN.COM to make commonly used commands a bit easier to type in, you didn't understand VMS well enough to take full advantage of it.
Really it's no more complicated than Unix, but there have been a lot more people spending a lot more time learning Unix than VMS, especially since DEC went down the toilet. Of course *nix is going to seem easier. It's more familiar. To someone like myself who uses VMS almost exclusively at work, Unix seems complicated and arcane. It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to.
DECWindows is the VMS port of X, so replacing it with XFree86 would be pointless, and probably make it even less robust than it is. Perhaps you meant to talk about the old Session Manager, and if you are you're right; it's archaic. It's so archaic that no one I know of uses it any more; newer DECWindows installations use the CDE. I'd prefer KDE or Gnome anyway, mind you...
Re:It's not a question of likelihood
on
Bigfoot A Hoax?
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· Score: 2
"Odd flux vortices"??!! What the hell is a flux vortex? How do you measure it? What does it look like? Geez, what a crap pseudo-scientific buzzword. What are you, a writer for Star Trek or something?
No one ever claimed it was "some drunks on a lark." They're very intelligent people who plan their projects carefully and deliberately. They also by now have many years' experience under their belts, and this is the main reason the circles have become more elaborate as time has gone by. Those who make them have gotten lots of practise; it would be surprising if the circles didn't get more elaborate. It's why American circles tend to be cruder than British ones; the Americans aren't as practised.
Actually, most people DO believe that crop circles are hoaxes.
Well I don't. I honestly believe that there are people who sneak out in the middle of the night and create geometric figures in fields of cereal crops. Those circles are real. Very real.
Sorry, I refuse to evaluate anything that's not aimed at children in terms of "what it's teaching kids". LoTR was written by an adult for adults. The ultimate redeemability of orcs isn't really addressed in LoTR, but it should also be clear from the climactic scene that they're not even free-willed creatures. An reader who takes that into account would, I think, not put them on the same moral plane as humans but rather as animals; they're explicitly compared to ants on more than one occasion. The Hobbit is aimed at kids, but the "goblins" in that story exist on about the same level as the bogeyman: they're big, violent, scary monsters that are utterly irrelevant to racial issues. You might still insist on seeing them as analagous to some non-white race or other, but you're a long way from demonstrating that was in the mind of the author. It may well have been in Peter Jackson's mind, but I don't propose to defend either him or his movies.
As to comparisons with the Middle East: surely you must see you're projecting backwards. Nowhere in either LoTR or in Tolkien's ancillary writings can anything be found to show he had that region in mind in relation to Mordor. As the movies show, Mordor also bears a passing resemblence to parts of New Zealand, and some attention to the book reveals it wasn't particularly hot outside the environs of the volcano either. The part of Middle-earth that maybe corresponds to the Middle-east by intent is south of Mordor, although we find it inhabited by Moorish rather than Arabic analogues. (Since we find corsairs there as well, which brings to mind the pirates of the Barbary Coast, it's perhaps better to think of it as analagous to North Africa.) In any event, your proposed metaphor breaks down in that Sauron was the aggressor, and that the white men (who lived just as far or farther south and not very far at all west) were fighting a defensive war, not to "liberate" Mordor but to prevent Sauron from gaining dominion over the known world.
Whether or not it's right to "tar entire races with the same brush", it's a sad fact that pretty much everybody does exactly that except in those rare cases where there is some moral imperative not to. Worldwide, that is a rare thing, you know. If we must regard this as a lesson for the "kids", I don't think the fact that many people do think this way (although we ought not) is a bad one to learn.
As I said at some length before (with numerous illustrations), I don't think Tolkien's portrayal of the world was as black-and-white as you seem to think. But sometimes -- not always and not often, but sometimes -- the world does work that way. Even leaving Iraq aside, I'm sure you can come up with a relatively recent example or two.
There are very few Christian metaphors in LoTR; you've mainly read into it things that simply aren't there. Frodo might be made to stand for a Christian on his spiritual path, but he certainly does not stand for Christ. Note that he was overcome by temptation at the end. That's not something a devout Roman Catholic like Tolkien would have made a Christ-analogue do. I'm not going to bother with the rest of it. I don't have the time. And although you seem certain of your conclusion, you seem less certain about the specifics. I can't argue with such a phantom.
I don't find the morality of LoTR particularly dubious. It is, of course, a fundamentally Christian one. I can't see what your problem with it is unless you simply object to the source. As a Christian myself, you can hardly expect me to agree.
Well, that's a very simplistic view of things, but I'll admit it's the easiest to adopt if you're already of a certain mindset. I have no idea where you're coming from with the "crusades metaphor" thing, though; there aren't really enough points of comparison to qualify.
It's really a very poorly written article. At times it was difficult to tell if he was talking about the movie or the books, and in either case hadn't paid very close attention. In the book, the people called "wild men" were good guys, without whose aid the Rohirrim never could have relieved the seige of Minas Tirith. They did this despite the fact they had been unjustly persecuted (the word used is "hunted") for many years by the Rohirrim, largely on account of their race. This is as explicit a condemnation of racism as you'll find in any epic work.
The peoples the article seems to be incorrectly denoting "wild men" were "Southrons" and "Easterlings". Now, the thing is that Tolkien made absolutely no bones about his work being an English story written primarily for the English and drawing on legends and motifs of northwestern Europe. The Rohirrim the article objects to so much simply reflect the "heroic" mould of English legend; their culture (with a few exceptions) is modelled closely on that of the Anglo-Saxons and their language is exactly the Mercian dialect of Old English. In Tolkien's history the Southrons and Easterlings were primarily responsible over the long course of the Third Age for the decline of Gondorian power in repeated invasions that often took advantage of internal political turmoil or moral decay. (Gondor, incidentally, isn't all that far south. It's capital is conceived of as being roughly at the latitude of Venice. It's still well north of the tropics.) The best real-life analogues here are the Huns and Mongols (for the Easterlings) and the Moors (for the Southrons). Their invasions of Europe have the curious character of being both historical and legendary. Consider, for example, all the personal legends about Atilla, or the Chanson de Roland. It's for the legendary associations that, as "bad guys" in Lord of the Rings, they have a certain resonace with Western European readers, and it's this resonance that makes them so effective.
And this brings up another part of the problem. By drawing on the sources I mentioned above, Tolkien successfully inculcated the "feel" of a traditional epic in his work. In such tales, the line between good and evil is very clearly drawn. The good have no flaws, and the evil have no redeeming characteristics. This draws some to automatically assign this quality to Lord of the Rings, but it in fact is not there. No group of people in it is morally unambiguous. Aragorn's technologically advanced ancestors, the Numenoreans, were from an isolated western island. When they arrived in Middle-earth it was to exploit its resources, which they did to disastrous effect -- just ask Treebeard -- and as they fell into a moral decline they became brutal oppressors of the indigenes. This is one of the main causes in Tolkien's history for the traditional antipathy of the Southrons, at least, to Aragorn's race, and why they were so willing to listen to the Numenoreans opponent Sauron, who concealed his own ulterior motives. After the Atlantis-like sinking of Numenor and the establishment of Numenorean kingdoms in Middle-earth they became stagnant, a curious combination of Byzantine and Egyptian, as much concerned with the embalming of the dead as with the well-being of the living and more interested in antiquarian knowledge than new discoveries. The Elves weren't exempt either; they didn't even belong in Middle-earth anymore. Those who remained were the ones who refused the summons to the home of the gods after the end of the First Age. It was their seeking after power to preserve Middle-earth in an image of the places they remembered -- in fact, to retard its development -- that they became seduced by Sauron into the forging of the Rings of Power, which is what sets up the problem situation in Lord of the Rings in the first place. The Rohirrim had a past spotted with racial intolerance. Besides the Druadan ("wild men") they also despised on racial grounds the Dunlendings, whom they had largely displaced from their ancestral homes. Of this oppression they reaped bitter fruit more than once. Not even wizards, who are actually of the race of the gods, are free from moral difficulties. Five were originally sent to Middle-earth, but only one, Gandalf, fulfilled his mission. The others became mostly irrelevant to the struggle, and one, Saruman, went completely to the bad. (If Tolkien's color-coding were as reliable as all that, it would have been Saruman the White who persevered, while Gandalf the Grey -- a color that should indicate moral ambiguity -- would have fallen.)
And Sauron (of the same kind as the wizards, incidentally) wasn't necessarily evil, not in the beginning, or at least he may have been motivated by impulses that were essentially good. It's his method of achieving that good that led him into the evil of dominating others by force. To the extent that any other character in the book does the same thing, they are morally tainted as well.
I don't know what "wearing black" has to do with anything. The writer of the article should have noted that in the book, the livery of the White Tower in Minas Tirith was a mostly black uniform, and that Aragorn's banner was mostly black as well. Obviously, color is not always the moral indicator it's made out to be.
Nor is the South to be exclusively associated with evil. It should be remembered that Lord of the Rings was an afterthought to the main body of the mythology Tolkien had developed, and in the mythology the far North (and West of any surviving lands in Middle-earth) was the home of the great primeval evil, of whom Sauron was just a servant.
Orcs aren't human and aren't intended to resemble any humans all that closely except in a very degraded way. The article's complaints about them are artifacts of the movie; the book mentions neither dreadlocks nor very dark skin. And the movie presents a version of their origin that Tolkien considered among several others, but never actaully settled on. The origins of the Orcs were (ironically, considering their importance to the narrative) very difficult to work into his story, and Tolkien never found a satisfactory solution.
The whole racial and moral situation Tolkien presents is far more complex than it's sometimes made out to be, and it actually models the real world with some fidelity. As a white man of Northern Europe, though, he can scarcely be blamed for writing his stories from the point of view of a white man of Northern Europe. Although there was every indication that he was well aware of the multitudinous failings of his own race, he was too well-versed in history to believe that it was as uniquely fallible as it's often made out to be these days, and so failed to be embarrassed by it. And I think it's this presently unfashionable lack of embarrassment that so offends many of his detractors more than anything else.
It's "six books" as far as thematic divisions, but I don't think it was ever intended to be published as six volumes. It is in fact one continuous narrative divided into three volumes for reasons of length.
It's almost never noted that this is a revival of the format in which all the great (and not-so-great) English novelists of the 19th Century were usually published. They were called "triple deckers" in the jargon of the time. Most novels from authors like Jane Austen, Edward G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, or Charles Dickens were originally published in this form.
Does anyone know where they are located? Their "english" seems a bit... off.
+1 Insightful! Here's the whois lookup for anti-leech.com:
Registrant:
WakeNet AB
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
Domain Name: ANTI-LEECH.COM
Administrative Contact:
Wennberg, Johan johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
888 888 888 888
Technical Contact:
Wennberg, Johan johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
888 888 888 888
Looks to be a one-man operation. Too bad ol' Johan here isn't a better programmer. He might have some up with some approach that wasn't so a) easy to rip off and b) easy to work around.
It's not a Disney movie. It's from Studio Ghibli in Japan and was written and directed by Hiyao Miyazaki, who also made My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Princess Mononoke among others. Disney just has the distribution rights for it in the US, and they're doing a miserably poor job of it.
Can you imagine any other studio taking this approach with a movie? "We'll schlep it around to the art houses, and if it wins an Oscar we'll actually put some effort into marketing it." What bullshit. Yeah, that happens from time to time with movies from small production companies -- I think My Big Fat Greek Wedding is an example -- but those are sleepers; no one ever plans to market them that way. Spirited Away was the top grossing movie in Japan ever, and was almost universally praised by US critics. It deserved much more intensive marketing and much wider distribution from the start, and had it gotten those things it would almost certainly have done very, very well.
I wonder if Disney is snapping up Ghibli titles for the same reason GM bought out the trolley lines in LA back in the '30s?
My thoughts exactly, but you beat me to it. I don't think we need boggle at the idea of terrestrial bacteria in the upper atmosphere. Once they get there by any means (volcano, airplane, an extraordinarily high-powered sneeze) they might remain aloft for years.
I get about 80 spam emails a day. It's no longer a problem for me since I installed POPFile. It works great. There are typically a handful of false negatives, and no false positives so far, and I'm pretty sure that even this was an artifact of the data set I had on hand to set the filter up: I had many good emails saves, but the only spam I had to hand was the contents of the trash. It's success rate has been gradually climbing, and I anticipate that in a few months I'll have virtually no false negatives. I recommend it highly.
Well, it could get that way if he's allowed, but I doubt many people are seeing his posts at this point. He's onlt made 10 comments and they're all at -1, so that's his default score now. But the format allows him the freedom to get creative with it. The Beowulf cluster troll is always exactly the same, and the "Profit!" joke is usually pretty lame regardless of teh context. But this one allows a certain amount of genuine parody and social commentary to be snuck in. Actual howlers are possible.
I don't watch The Simpsons so I have no clue about current characters in it. And I'm not posting anonymously because I've got karma to burn so I might as well strike a match.
Ya know, I don't understand why this guy always gets modded down. He's actually pretty funny. Or is everyone else around here too young to get the joke?
Why should it necessarily be a bad thing? Nature does what it does, neither good nor bad in the larger sense although it does sometimes adversely affect us. Sometimes we affect it, and sometimes we don't, and in the case of global warming the immediate cause it not at all clear. We are, in any event, still well within historical norms. There was a time in the Middle Ages when England was a great wine producing region, and Greenland was, well, green. On a geological time scale, there were many, many more years where the Earth had no polar ice caps than when it did; recent climactic history seems to have been rather anomalous.
So what's good? What's bad? What's normal? We tend to evaluate these things by how they will affect us, and our entire civilization has come about under a certain set of climactic conditions. Those conditions may (or may not) be about to change. When evaluating the ultimate effect this will have on our culture, it's perfectly appropriate to look at things like shortened shipping routes, because every disadvantage of the new conditions will ahve to be weighed against every concomitant advantage.
"Story"? What the fuck is he talking about? If I'm trying to look up a friend's mailing address, I don't want to leaf through the story of my life, I want the goddamn address! Good thing I have all my contact information separated from my email so I don't have to search through "Make Money Now" and "Enlarge Your Penis" to find it.
And just what the hell is a "3D document" anyway? Even RL documents are 2D, more or less. What does a business letter gain from a fancy-assed display paradigm?
To make the point less crudely: Gelertner must never have worked in an office. The "Steelcase" model for filing he denigrates was invented for a reason: it's a very efficient way of organizing information. Likewise the "Rolodex" model for organizing contacts. As another poster pointed out, these are fundamentally different kinds of information that cannot be efficiently organized in the same way, and therefore it doesn't do us much good to try. I assure you that every office in the world that has a Rolodex also stored documents in filing cabinets, and could just have easily put their contact information into a cabinet as well. Why didn't they? Because it's less useful and less accessible there!
Information on comupters was organized following these models because they're what people are used to and because they work. This is not to say that some new schemes might someday come along to replace them; they certainly will. But I'd be willing to bet they'll not call for mashing everything together into a "stream" comprising a "story"! I already know my story. But I still want that address.
And never mind is pro-Microsoft drumbeating. Did he just get a humongous grant from them or something?
PanIP's nothing but a bully, and they won't stop until someone stands up to them.
I know of a roughly analogous situation from a few years ago involving Starbuck's. This isn't precisely analogous because unlike PanIP, Starbuck's is an actual company doing actual business selling actual products that acutally has to worry about its reputation. But the point is that they continued what they were doing until one of the little guys they were beating up on stood up to them.
I am acquainted with the monks of the All-merciful Saviour Russian Orthodox Monastery on Vashon Island, Washington. Like many monasteries, they have to have some source of income to support themselves. Generally this is a handcraft of some kind, but in this case it's coffee. Really good coffee, too. Among other roasts, they offer a seasonal blend called "Christmas Blend." So do many other small roasters. Trouble is, Starbuck's had trademarked "Christmas Blend" even though it sounds like a perfectly generic conbination of words, and a few years ago they decided to go after all the small roasters in the country who were using the phrase. Typically they would not only demand they cease and desist, but would demand all income (not just net profit) from the sale of anything called a Christmas blend. One of their victims on the East Coast overheard one of the Starbuck's lawyers remark, "We're going after the monks next," and gave the abbot a call.
The financial effects of this on the monastery would have been disastrous. Fortunately for the monastery (but unfortunately for Starbuck's) the abbot is a reformed Berkeley hippie who knows perfectly well how to put together a grass-roots campaign, and so forewarned he prepared to do just that. His PR skill, their status as a nonprofit, public disgust with a huge corporation going after a bunch small businesses, the draconian nature of their demands, and the absurdity of a group of Christian monks being forbidden to use the name of one of their own holy days for one of their products, all combined to good effect. Editorials were written, cartoons were drawn, letters of support for the monks poured in, threats of boycott were made and carried out. In the end, Starbuck's wound up abandonning their campaign entirely and threw "Christmas Blend" into the public domain, which is where many thought it should have been in the first place.
This, incidentally, is the sole reason I occasionally walk into a Starbuck's. Having once threatened to boycott them even though I had never been a regular customer of theirs, I feel I owe them some of my business since they capitulated.
The point of all this (besides trying to put in a plug for the monk's coffee) is that it took only a single "little guy" standing up to Starbuck's to stop them in their tracks. It worked in this case, and it may very well work for DeBrand's against PanIP too.
I challenge you to name a single judge who fits your definition of "liberal activist judge" who "always rule[s] politically".
I thought something looked odd there, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Of course, activist judges don't always make politically motivated decisions, and that's not really what I meant to say. They are prone to, however. The most recent notorious example that springs to mind is the New Jersey Supreme Court opinion in The New Jersey Democratic Party, Inc., et al. v. Hon. David Samson, et al. where they decided to out-and-out ignore the plain language of the election code (19:13-20) which only allows political parties to nominate substitute candidates before the 51st day prior to an election. This was so that the Democrats could run the popular, but heretofore retired, Frank Lautenberg in place of Robert Toricelli, who had dropped out of the race amidst a cloud of scandal. This could not have been anything other than a political decision.
As for Bork "working for" Netscape at the time he evaluated the case against MS, I think you'll find it's pretty much always customary to pay a lawyer when you're asking for his legal opinion. It's his job, you know. Significantly, perhaps, he did not advocate breaking MS up as you might have expected him to if we was merely acting as Netscape's mouthpiece. And long after he dropped off the payroll, he continued to write against MS in publications like National Review even though his opinion on this subject is unpopular to the political right.
Whatever led you to think Judge Jackson was biased? His "injudicial" remarks to the press happened near the end of the trial. By then he'd been lied to, railroaded, condescended to, and evaded often enough to strain the patience of a saint. No wonder he needed to blow off some steam.
Which makes me wonder. If Microsoft had really been trying to win the case on the merits, then their legal team was so incompetent they should all have been fired. I haven't heard they had, though, which makes me wonder if this all went more or less according to plan. Maybe they wanted to infuriate Judge Jackson so much that he would make just the kind of mistake he wound up making. Doesn't it seem to anyone else that from that point on, the MS lawyers suddenly started performing like the legal Dream Team they were supposed to be instead of the fuckups they'd been up to that point? If that's true, they must have been deeply disappointed that only Jackson's penalty was vacated and his finding of fact was left to stand.
This may surprise those of you who believe that conservative judges always rule politically, like liberal activist judges, but many conservative judges prefer to rule based on fairly strict constructions of the actual law rather than legislate from the bench. No less a towering conservative figure than Robert Bork, Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, believes that MS should be broken up, and he literally wrote the book on the conservative approach to antitrust law. Based on the stories I've read about the trial so far, I expect Judge Kollar-Kotelly to come down rather harsher on MS than some of you seem to fear.
I don't see where Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has the right to make statements like...
He has the right to say it because of the First Amendment, just like the rest of us do. That doesn't mean he's right, or that it's not a stupid thing to say.
A person like this can make a great amount of political hay by making grand, sweeping statements about eliminating waste in government. But he has to pick his targets carefully, because he could alienate a segment of his constituency if any of them happen to benefit from a particular example of waste. NASA, however, is a safe target which is why Congress can get away with giving it such a miniscule budget to begin with.
Lots of peoples' traditional measures were derived to one degree or another from the Romans, but they usually got a bit mangled along the way so the measures weren't always identical. They tended to get adapted to local conditions, and various sovereigns would also modify the standard measures for their own reasons (such as sneaking in a tax increase or debasing the currency in such a way that not everyone would notice.)
A bit of Googling came up with the reason for the differing gallon. It seems that the British standardized (or standardised;) on the ale gallon, while the Americans standardized on the wine gallon. Yes, the two used to be different. I think it was for tax purposes; wine was usually imported but not ale, and the standard used opted by the Excise authorities was not the same as that used by the Exchequer for internal taxation. 10 lbs. of water used for the Imperial standard approximated the existing ale gallon very closely, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Really it's no more complicated than Unix, but there have been a lot more people spending a lot more time learning Unix than VMS, especially since DEC went down the toilet. Of course *nix is going to seem easier. It's more familiar. To someone like myself who uses VMS almost exclusively at work, Unix seems complicated and arcane. It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to.
DECWindows is the VMS port of X, so replacing it with XFree86 would be pointless, and probably make it even less robust than it is. Perhaps you meant to talk about the old Session Manager, and if you are you're right; it's archaic. It's so archaic that no one I know of uses it any more; newer DECWindows installations use the CDE. I'd prefer KDE or Gnome anyway, mind you...
Or VMS, perhaps?
No one ever claimed it was "some drunks on a lark." They're very intelligent people who plan their projects carefully and deliberately. They also by now have many years' experience under their belts, and this is the main reason the circles have become more elaborate as time has gone by. Those who make them have gotten lots of practise; it would be surprising if the circles didn't get more elaborate. It's why American circles tend to be cruder than British ones; the Americans aren't as practised.
Well I don't. I honestly believe that there are people who sneak out in the middle of the night and create geometric figures in fields of cereal crops. Those circles are real. Very real.
As to comparisons with the Middle East: surely you must see you're projecting backwards. Nowhere in either LoTR or in Tolkien's ancillary writings can anything be found to show he had that region in mind in relation to Mordor. As the movies show, Mordor also bears a passing resemblence to parts of New Zealand, and some attention to the book reveals it wasn't particularly hot outside the environs of the volcano either. The part of Middle-earth that maybe corresponds to the Middle-east by intent is south of Mordor, although we find it inhabited by Moorish rather than Arabic analogues. (Since we find corsairs there as well, which brings to mind the pirates of the Barbary Coast, it's perhaps better to think of it as analagous to North Africa.) In any event, your proposed metaphor breaks down in that Sauron was the aggressor, and that the white men (who lived just as far or farther south and not very far at all west) were fighting a defensive war, not to "liberate" Mordor but to prevent Sauron from gaining dominion over the known world.
Whether or not it's right to "tar entire races with the same brush", it's a sad fact that pretty much everybody does exactly that except in those rare cases where there is some moral imperative not to. Worldwide, that is a rare thing, you know. If we must regard this as a lesson for the "kids", I don't think the fact that many people do think this way (although we ought not) is a bad one to learn.
As I said at some length before (with numerous illustrations), I don't think Tolkien's portrayal of the world was as black-and-white as you seem to think. But sometimes -- not always and not often, but sometimes -- the world does work that way. Even leaving Iraq aside, I'm sure you can come up with a relatively recent example or two.
There are very few Christian metaphors in LoTR; you've mainly read into it things that simply aren't there. Frodo might be made to stand for a Christian on his spiritual path, but he certainly does not stand for Christ. Note that he was overcome by temptation at the end. That's not something a devout Roman Catholic like Tolkien would have made a Christ-analogue do. I'm not going to bother with the rest of it. I don't have the time. And although you seem certain of your conclusion, you seem less certain about the specifics. I can't argue with such a phantom.
I don't find the morality of LoTR particularly dubious. It is, of course, a fundamentally Christian one. I can't see what your problem with it is unless you simply object to the source. As a Christian myself, you can hardly expect me to agree.
It's really a very poorly written article. At times it was difficult to tell if he was talking about the movie or the books, and in either case hadn't paid very close attention. In the book, the people called "wild men" were good guys, without whose aid the Rohirrim never could have relieved the seige of Minas Tirith. They did this despite the fact they had been unjustly persecuted (the word used is "hunted") for many years by the Rohirrim, largely on account of their race. This is as explicit a condemnation of racism as you'll find in any epic work.
The peoples the article seems to be incorrectly denoting "wild men" were "Southrons" and "Easterlings". Now, the thing is that Tolkien made absolutely no bones about his work being an English story written primarily for the English and drawing on legends and motifs of northwestern Europe. The Rohirrim the article objects to so much simply reflect the "heroic" mould of English legend; their culture (with a few exceptions) is modelled closely on that of the Anglo-Saxons and their language is exactly the Mercian dialect of Old English. In Tolkien's history the Southrons and Easterlings were primarily responsible over the long course of the Third Age for the decline of Gondorian power in repeated invasions that often took advantage of internal political turmoil or moral decay. (Gondor, incidentally, isn't all that far south. It's capital is conceived of as being roughly at the latitude of Venice. It's still well north of the tropics.) The best real-life analogues here are the Huns and Mongols (for the Easterlings) and the Moors (for the Southrons). Their invasions of Europe have the curious character of being both historical and legendary. Consider, for example, all the personal legends about Atilla, or the Chanson de Roland. It's for the legendary associations that, as "bad guys" in Lord of the Rings, they have a certain resonace with Western European readers, and it's this resonance that makes them so effective.
And this brings up another part of the problem. By drawing on the sources I mentioned above, Tolkien successfully inculcated the "feel" of a traditional epic in his work. In such tales, the line between good and evil is very clearly drawn. The good have no flaws, and the evil have no redeeming characteristics. This draws some to automatically assign this quality to Lord of the Rings, but it in fact is not there. No group of people in it is morally unambiguous. Aragorn's technologically advanced ancestors, the Numenoreans, were from an isolated western island. When they arrived in Middle-earth it was to exploit its resources, which they did to disastrous effect -- just ask Treebeard -- and as they fell into a moral decline they became brutal oppressors of the indigenes. This is one of the main causes in Tolkien's history for the traditional antipathy of the Southrons, at least, to Aragorn's race, and why they were so willing to listen to the Numenoreans opponent Sauron, who concealed his own ulterior motives. After the Atlantis-like sinking of Numenor and the establishment of Numenorean kingdoms in Middle-earth they became stagnant, a curious combination of Byzantine and Egyptian, as much concerned with the embalming of the dead as with the well-being of the living and more interested in antiquarian knowledge than new discoveries. The Elves weren't exempt either; they didn't even belong in Middle-earth anymore. Those who remained were the ones who refused the summons to the home of the gods after the end of the First Age. It was their seeking after power to preserve Middle-earth in an image of the places they remembered -- in fact, to retard its development -- that they became seduced by Sauron into the forging of the Rings of Power, which is what sets up the problem situation in Lord of the Rings in the first place. The Rohirrim had a past spotted with racial intolerance. Besides the Druadan ("wild men") they also despised on racial grounds the Dunlendings, whom they had largely displaced from their ancestral homes. Of this oppression they reaped bitter fruit more than once. Not even wizards, who are actually of the race of the gods, are free from moral difficulties. Five were originally sent to Middle-earth, but only one, Gandalf, fulfilled his mission. The others became mostly irrelevant to the struggle, and one, Saruman, went completely to the bad. (If Tolkien's color-coding were as reliable as all that, it would have been Saruman the White who persevered, while Gandalf the Grey -- a color that should indicate moral ambiguity -- would have fallen.)
And Sauron (of the same kind as the wizards, incidentally) wasn't necessarily evil, not in the beginning, or at least he may have been motivated by impulses that were essentially good. It's his method of achieving that good that led him into the evil of dominating others by force. To the extent that any other character in the book does the same thing, they are morally tainted as well.
I don't know what "wearing black" has to do with anything. The writer of the article should have noted that in the book, the livery of the White Tower in Minas Tirith was a mostly black uniform, and that Aragorn's banner was mostly black as well. Obviously, color is not always the moral indicator it's made out to be.
Nor is the South to be exclusively associated with evil. It should be remembered that Lord of the Rings was an afterthought to the main body of the mythology Tolkien had developed, and in the mythology the far North (and West of any surviving lands in Middle-earth) was the home of the great primeval evil, of whom Sauron was just a servant.
Orcs aren't human and aren't intended to resemble any humans all that closely except in a very degraded way. The article's complaints about them are artifacts of the movie; the book mentions neither dreadlocks nor very dark skin. And the movie presents a version of their origin that Tolkien considered among several others, but never actaully settled on. The origins of the Orcs were (ironically, considering their importance to the narrative) very difficult to work into his story, and Tolkien never found a satisfactory solution.
The whole racial and moral situation Tolkien presents is far more complex than it's sometimes made out to be, and it actually models the real world with some fidelity. As a white man of Northern Europe, though, he can scarcely be blamed for writing his stories from the point of view of a white man of Northern Europe. Although there was every indication that he was well aware of the multitudinous failings of his own race, he was too well-versed in history to believe that it was as uniquely fallible as it's often made out to be these days, and so failed to be embarrassed by it. And I think it's this presently unfashionable lack of embarrassment that so offends many of his detractors more than anything else.
It's almost never noted that this is a revival of the format in which all the great (and not-so-great) English novelists of the 19th Century were usually published. They were called "triple deckers" in the jargon of the time. Most novels from authors like Jane Austen, Edward G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, or Charles Dickens were originally published in this form.
+1 Insightful! Here's the whois lookup for anti-leech.com:
Registrant:
WakeNet AB
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
Domain Name: ANTI-LEECH.COM
Administrative Contact:
Wennberg, Johan johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
888 888 888 888
Technical Contact:
Wennberg, Johan johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
888 888 888 888
Looks to be a one-man operation. Too bad ol' Johan here isn't a better programmer. He might have some up with some approach that wasn't so a) easy to rip off and b) easy to work around.
Can you imagine any other studio taking this approach with a movie? "We'll schlep it around to the art houses, and if it wins an Oscar we'll actually put some effort into marketing it." What bullshit. Yeah, that happens from time to time with movies from small production companies -- I think My Big Fat Greek Wedding is an example -- but those are sleepers; no one ever plans to market them that way. Spirited Away was the top grossing movie in Japan ever, and was almost universally praised by US critics. It deserved much more intensive marketing and much wider distribution from the start, and had it gotten those things it would almost certainly have done very, very well.
I wonder if Disney is snapping up Ghibli titles for the same reason GM bought out the trolley lines in LA back in the '30s?
My thoughts exactly, but you beat me to it. I don't think we need boggle at the idea of terrestrial bacteria in the upper atmosphere. Once they get there by any means (volcano, airplane, an extraordinarily high-powered sneeze) they might remain aloft for years.
I get about 80 spam emails a day. It's no longer a problem for me since I installed POPFile. It works great. There are typically a handful of false negatives, and no false positives so far, and I'm pretty sure that even this was an artifact of the data set I had on hand to set the filter up: I had many good emails saves, but the only spam I had to hand was the contents of the trash. It's success rate has been gradually climbing, and I anticipate that in a few months I'll have virtually no false negatives. I recommend it highly.
I don't watch The Simpsons so I have no clue about current characters in it. And I'm not posting anonymously because I've got karma to burn so I might as well strike a match.
Ya know, I don't understand why this guy always gets modded down. He's actually pretty funny. Or is everyone else around here too young to get the joke?
Ballmer's going to have to modify his act. What's Hindi for "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!!!!"
Yeah, that's a lot more succinct. But he'd probably had more sleep than I did when I posted.
Why should it necessarily be a bad thing? Nature does what it does, neither good nor bad in the larger sense although it does sometimes adversely affect us. Sometimes we affect it, and sometimes we don't, and in the case of global warming the immediate cause it not at all clear. We are, in any event, still well within historical norms. There was a time in the Middle Ages when England was a great wine producing region, and Greenland was, well, green. On a geological time scale, there were many, many more years where the Earth had no polar ice caps than when it did; recent climactic history seems to have been rather anomalous.
So what's good? What's bad? What's normal? We tend to evaluate these things by how they will affect us, and our entire civilization has come about under a certain set of climactic conditions. Those conditions may (or may not) be about to change. When evaluating the ultimate effect this will have on our culture, it's perfectly appropriate to look at things like shortened shipping routes, because every disadvantage of the new conditions will ahve to be weighed against every concomitant advantage.
And just what the hell is a "3D document" anyway? Even RL documents are 2D, more or less. What does a business letter gain from a fancy-assed display paradigm?
To make the point less crudely: Gelertner must never have worked in an office. The "Steelcase" model for filing he denigrates was invented for a reason: it's a very efficient way of organizing information. Likewise the "Rolodex" model for organizing contacts. As another poster pointed out, these are fundamentally different kinds of information that cannot be efficiently organized in the same way, and therefore it doesn't do us much good to try. I assure you that every office in the world that has a Rolodex also stored documents in filing cabinets, and could just have easily put their contact information into a cabinet as well. Why didn't they? Because it's less useful and less accessible there!
Information on comupters was organized following these models because they're what people are used to and because they work. This is not to say that some new schemes might someday come along to replace them; they certainly will. But I'd be willing to bet they'll not call for mashing everything together into a "stream" comprising a "story"! I already know my story. But I still want that address.
And never mind is pro-Microsoft drumbeating. Did he just get a humongous grant from them or something?
I know of a roughly analogous situation from a few years ago involving Starbuck's. This isn't precisely analogous because unlike PanIP, Starbuck's is an actual company doing actual business selling actual products that acutally has to worry about its reputation. But the point is that they continued what they were doing until one of the little guys they were beating up on stood up to them.
I am acquainted with the monks of the All-merciful Saviour Russian Orthodox Monastery on Vashon Island, Washington. Like many monasteries, they have to have some source of income to support themselves. Generally this is a handcraft of some kind, but in this case it's coffee. Really good coffee, too. Among other roasts, they offer a seasonal blend called "Christmas Blend." So do many other small roasters. Trouble is, Starbuck's had trademarked "Christmas Blend" even though it sounds like a perfectly generic conbination of words, and a few years ago they decided to go after all the small roasters in the country who were using the phrase. Typically they would not only demand they cease and desist, but would demand all income (not just net profit) from the sale of anything called a Christmas blend. One of their victims on the East Coast overheard one of the Starbuck's lawyers remark, "We're going after the monks next," and gave the abbot a call.
The financial effects of this on the monastery would have been disastrous. Fortunately for the monastery (but unfortunately for Starbuck's) the abbot is a reformed Berkeley hippie who knows perfectly well how to put together a grass-roots campaign, and so forewarned he prepared to do just that. His PR skill, their status as a nonprofit, public disgust with a huge corporation going after a bunch small businesses, the draconian nature of their demands, and the absurdity of a group of Christian monks being forbidden to use the name of one of their own holy days for one of their products, all combined to good effect. Editorials were written, cartoons were drawn, letters of support for the monks poured in, threats of boycott were made and carried out. In the end, Starbuck's wound up abandonning their campaign entirely and threw "Christmas Blend" into the public domain, which is where many thought it should have been in the first place.
This, incidentally, is the sole reason I occasionally walk into a Starbuck's. Having once threatened to boycott them even though I had never been a regular customer of theirs, I feel I owe them some of my business since they capitulated.
The point of all this (besides trying to put in a plug for the monk's coffee) is that it took only a single "little guy" standing up to Starbuck's to stop them in their tracks. It worked in this case, and it may very well work for DeBrand's against PanIP too.
I thought something looked odd there, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Of course, activist judges don't always make politically motivated decisions, and that's not really what I meant to say. They are prone to, however. The most recent notorious example that springs to mind is the New Jersey Supreme Court opinion in The New Jersey Democratic Party, Inc., et al. v. Hon. David Samson, et al. where they decided to out-and-out ignore the plain language of the election code (19:13-20) which only allows political parties to nominate substitute candidates before the 51st day prior to an election. This was so that the Democrats could run the popular, but heretofore retired, Frank Lautenberg in place of Robert Toricelli, who had dropped out of the race amidst a cloud of scandal. This could not have been anything other than a political decision.
As for Bork "working for" Netscape at the time he evaluated the case against MS, I think you'll find it's pretty much always customary to pay a lawyer when you're asking for his legal opinion. It's his job, you know. Significantly, perhaps, he did not advocate breaking MS up as you might have expected him to if we was merely acting as Netscape's mouthpiece. And long after he dropped off the payroll, he continued to write against MS in publications like National Review even though his opinion on this subject is unpopular to the political right.
Which makes me wonder. If Microsoft had really been trying to win the case on the merits, then their legal team was so incompetent they should all have been fired. I haven't heard they had, though, which makes me wonder if this all went more or less according to plan. Maybe they wanted to infuriate Judge Jackson so much that he would make just the kind of mistake he wound up making. Doesn't it seem to anyone else that from that point on, the MS lawyers suddenly started performing like the legal Dream Team they were supposed to be instead of the fuckups they'd been up to that point? If that's true, they must have been deeply disappointed that only Jackson's penalty was vacated and his finding of fact was left to stand.
This may surprise those of you who believe that conservative judges always rule politically, like liberal activist judges, but many conservative judges prefer to rule based on fairly strict constructions of the actual law rather than legislate from the bench. No less a towering conservative figure than Robert Bork, Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, believes that MS should be broken up, and he literally wrote the book on the conservative approach to antitrust law. Based on the stories I've read about the trial so far, I expect Judge Kollar-Kotelly to come down rather harsher on MS than some of you seem to fear.
He has the right to say it because of the First Amendment, just like the rest of us do. That doesn't mean he's right, or that it's not a stupid thing to say.
A person like this can make a great amount of political hay by making grand, sweeping statements about eliminating waste in government. But he has to pick his targets carefully, because he could alienate a segment of his constituency if any of them happen to benefit from a particular example of waste. NASA, however, is a safe target which is why Congress can get away with giving it such a miniscule budget to begin with.
And though "fans have been drooling" about an Aliens vs. Predator flick for years, Kenny isn't expecting much.
"You devolve into making it a videogame," he said.
Uh, dude? Don't you even know where your IP's licensed?
Lots of peoples' traditional measures were derived to one degree or another from the Romans, but they usually got a bit mangled along the way so the measures weren't always identical. They tended to get adapted to local conditions, and various sovereigns would also modify the standard measures for their own reasons (such as sneaking in a tax increase or debasing the currency in such a way that not everyone would notice.)
A bit of Googling came up with the reason for the differing gallon. It seems that the British standardized (or standardised ;) on the ale gallon, while the Americans standardized on the wine gallon. Yes, the two used to be different. I think it was for tax purposes; wine was usually imported but not ale, and the standard used opted by the Excise authorities was not the same as that used by the Exchequer for internal taxation. 10 lbs. of water used for the Imperial standard approximated the existing ale gallon very closely, I guess.