Of all the Americans I've ever had cause to discuss the question with--from radio astronomers to radio-toothed dominionists--I'm the only one who doesn't "believe" in life on other planets. So, to dissolve at least one of the images of troglodytic Republicans dancing through your head, I'll give you my atheistic, scientific additional sample of one, since it's the only one I know:
Because I "believe"--or, more accurately, guess, based on known evidence--that the odds of intelligent life as we define it presently existing in the universe are approximately 1/[the number of planets estimated to exist in the universe] (mainly because the cosmic "weather" is not (yet) working in lasting complexity's favor), I'd have answered "no" on the poll.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if humanity was the universe's first "intelligent" species. Or second. Or only, ever, forever. We know space is a fucked up, dangerous, inhospitable hellhole. The PBS image of a galactic Manhattan swarming silently and invisibly all around us seems like the religious irrationality to me.
I know one guy in Israel who thinks the same thing for the same reasons (except he's a cosmologist, so he can explain it better). Also--huge fundie. Just goes to show ya.
...the millions of corpses that only a government could provide.
Our glorious, progressive 20th century institutions gave us about a hundred and fifty million real, rotting bodies to enjoy, while this vile anarchic 21st century internet has given us a only few hundred pictures of corpses--and most of them are the same old dead people from the 1900s!
It's just uncivilized.
Projecting from today's numbers, the internet will have produced not even a dozen violent deaths by century's end. Something must be done to end this lawless barbarity before it corrupts us all!
What got snatched (according to the story) wouldn't be a promo copy of the future release, but a rough, some-degree-of-unfinished CD-R version that was made just for the band members and/or studio guys to listen to, for them to find not-immediately-obvious mistakes that need to be fixed, or to test a running order for the tracks before it gets mastered, or it's for the record company to pick a single from so they know what song to spend all their post-production time tinkering with, or it's a goofy mix with all the vocals too loud so Bono could see if his takes are all keepers, or...it could be a million things.
Anyone who likes U2 enough to buy their album at its release date would download this version, think it was neat, add it to their collection, then go out and buy the real album anyway. This is not a problem for sales, and the press coverage will only help. Before this story, I had no idea U2 still existed (last one I bought was Unforgettable Fire).
Photoshop (or at least the versions I've used) has its own little swap implementation built in.
On the box I'm using right now (old G4, OS 9), that's great. System-wide VM ruins the performance of the audio-recording and -processing stuff I run, so it's off. Photoshop is the only thing I use that needs swap--and can use it without puking and dying--and it takes care of it itself. Nice.
Re:Why would Microsoft care about any of this?
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 1
The Microsoft attitude seems to be:
"Any exchange of money of which we do not get a cut is immoral."
Getting into the iTunes-alike business probably can't bring Microsoft any profit, but anyone else making any money, anywhere on Earth, selling anything whatsoever, without Microsoft's hand being in the till, is, to them, a sin (though they say it's against "freedom," not against Microsoft, because that'd be bad PR).
If corporations could be diagnosed with mental disorders, Microsoft would qualify as every variety of delusional psychotic.
There are popular bands around that sound something like Television (et al), but no one who's influenced by Talking Heads is similar-sounding enough--or similarly enough marketed--to immediately remind you of them.
The most Talking Heads-like pop single of this past year was a Justin Timberlake song, but it's not like his image encourages "Once In A Lifetime" to pop right into your head when you hear him; whereas about half the Strokes' songs make you think "Television!" within the first few seconds, and their "brand image" encourages the comparison.
So Television sounds "relevant" and Talking Heads sound "aged."
But the records are still the same. And the best ones--Fear of Music and Remain in Light, probably--are still just as good as they were then.
(Though the first couple and the last couple still sound dorky and artless, respectively.)
"Porn fuels my rape fantasies. Since I am the most morally and intellectually perfect being the planet has ever known, the refusal of most people to acknowledge that porn fuels their own rape fantasies is merely evidence of my moral and intellectual superiority to them."
"Africa's state-run utility giant" is badly written, not "ignorant" or "confused."
Eskom is indeed "Africa's," in that "Africa" is one way of naming the place where Eskom operates. The description is inexact--as would be, say, "North America's software monopoly Microsoft"--but still correct.
But I'm to understand that you're "confused" due to "ignorance" about such toddler-level grammatical arcana, right?
2) People don't play by accurately calculating probabilities and choosing the most mathematically-likely-to-be-propitious move; they do something else. Whatever that "something else" is--and no one yet understands it in a pure-mathematical, mechanically reproducible way; and maybe that's not even possible--the computer's strategy isn't better.
This effect is the purpose of these regulations, not a failure or side-effect or unintended consequence.
Buck Douche's Telemarket-Mart can't afford the "cost of doing business" created by these fines, but AT&T and its behemoth brethren can.
The interests of the state are best served by a business world made up of large, "public," tightly regulated, near-immortal corporate institutions, and the Do Not Call list and fines are just one more means of disempowering their comparatively anarchic petit bourgeois/entrepreneurial competition.
Most government regulations of business serve the same purpose.
I hate telemarketing at least as much as everyone else here does, but these regulations are far worse than anything any smarmy dillhole on the 'phone can do to us.
Re:Where are the Classic users clinging on?
on
Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Among the Mac users I know, only about a third have switched to X permanently.
Aside from the superior security, and the familiarity that makes 9 reliable for us (if you know how it works, and you don't run crappy software, it doesn't crash; and if you've got work to do, "Relearn ancient Unix and NeXt arcana" isn't high on your to-do list), what stops us from switching is the immaturity--still--of X in certain areas, like interface consistency, speed (at certain tasks), (certain kinds of) latency, and general "finishedness."
In my and a couple other cases I know of, the stumbling block is incompatability with some bizarre specialized audio software and old devices that won't ever get updated. "Classic" in X is bad with external hardware, and lacks some of the quirks and errors that some old software depends on. Also, X's virtual memory is very good, but it isn't optional; 9 and below let you turn it off if you have to (and sometimes, to do some things, you have to, or the box'll choke--physical RAM always wins).
Basically, we don't need it, so we don't buy it, though we've all tried it, and been half-thrilled, and half-disappointed. In a couple years, our boxes will die, and we'll have no choice. By then X should be as mature as 9 is. See you there.
"This thing fucking sucks!" is the feature's greatest problem; this Author's Guild bitching is flyswatter work in comparison.
Example: I just searched for "Al-Jazari," because I'm looking for a book about little robot-toys. When I searched a couple days ago, the first of two results was a book by Al-Jazari about his little robot-toys. Now, it's result #48 out of 48. Almost everything ranked above it is useless crap, but to find what I wanted, I had to page through all of it, since the results are now so unpredictable (and shitty).
"Childhood" as we think of it is an idea--and a recently invented one--not a fact. Children are childish because they are made to be. Even only a hundred years ago, the average child of ten was far more intelligent, moral, and responsible than the average adult of today. Just a glance at the schoolwork of children of the 19th century, or the letters of teenage Civil War soldiers will prove it to you.
Plato's Republic can tell you why we've been made the way we have--in brief, to make us more easily ruled--and a look at the writings of the founders of education--e.g., Horace Mann, and the Prussian and Italian fascists of the 1800s who inspired him--can tell you how it's been done.
This kind of surveillance is just a minor notching tighter of the belt.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech.
An oft-repeated piece of propaganda that remains a lie however often it's repeated.
The purpose of tenure is to perpetuate the "election" of one segment of the therapeutic/educational/prison system by reinforcing its restricted membership.
Applied to average working people, this is called "indenture." The underclass are, in every meaningful sense, immobile, bound to institutions and masters. Without their continual subsistence pay, they can't afford to live, let alone to invest in the invention of their own occupations. They cannot afford the leisure required to seek better employment. They risk their very lives by not perpetuating their bondage. So, rename the bondage "job security," and put a smile on the slaves. I'm not surprised you so enjoy the idea. Because...
Applied to the modern "master class," of which educators are a (low-ranking) part, this type of contract serves to mark those tenured as the living temporal embodiment of the Holy Immortal Institution--with a small, metonymic career-immortality that shields them from minor revolutions within the system, and prevents the system as a whole from meaningfully changing.
You should "fear popular opinion." The "progress of knowledge" doesn't need you. Your egotism and class hatred is nauseating. The whip-handle in your waistband is showing, and slave revolts are not unknown to history.
"'"'"'""'Ironically,'"'"'""'" the production design of Minority Report--the entire look of the movie, its props, and its filmic effects--is, itself, a "meta" product placement (for the Nokia Communicator--the 9210 model, specifically). The movie pretends to criticize p.p. by exaggerating it, when, in fact, its purpose--sole purpose--is exaggerated product placement that goes on re-advertizing for so long as our culture-bearers continue to valorize the work of that hack bitch. Sweet deal all around.
Spielberg is Satan (though not as intelligent or honest or fun to drink with) (and just not because of this particular vile stunt, about which PK Dick must be laughin' in his grave (or maybe Heidegger's)) (and let's not even talk about what Schindler's List was really about (Kubrick spoke the truth, and look what it got him)).
The Talmud contains a lot of strange, "dirty," and bloody stories. There are some which now would be called "horror" stories, with G-d as the "bad guy" (some of which are actually scary, in a startling, slasher-movie way). But since almost no one outside of rabbinical schools reads it, no one gets too worked up about it. You could make a pretty faithful religious-educational survival-horror/"Grand Theft Torah" game starring Akiba (though if you did, the ADL would undoubtedly spend millions to ruin your life).
The Koran of course has a lot of typical Biblical violence, because it, like the Book of Mormon, is a supplementary text to "the" Bible (Torah + New Testament), and its tone was influenced by the fiery stories of Zoroaster et al. Rape and such get mentioned about as often as you'd expect in a religious book--which is to say, many, many times more often than in most other books.
The Old Testament contains, for example, the Song of Solomon, which is, by old-timey standards, a pornographic story. The King James translation is the most "erotic" and evocative.
And, of course, all of these stories are "graphic," their being, like all writing, composed of graphemes.
A simple-minded program will always fail in a "special case."
A couple years ago, I pasted random paragraphs from about a dozen works widely acknowledged to be "great"--or at least "important"--into a Perl-scripted "Fog Readability Index" calculator, and every single one, from the Talmud to Goethe to Derrida, was deemed "unreadable" by the program. (This post, too, would "fail it," as we say on Slashdot.) However, it graded random AP stories and small-town newspaper editorials very highly.
Right now, I can't think of a single great essay--not one--that could meet even the barest criteria for a properly written essay, as taught in schools today, but, again, the average AP story meets most of them.
This story makes a nice little metonym for what's wrong with modern education: that its greatest reward is congratulation for mediocrity, and that it considers the "special case" always disruptive, and never actually special.
What are schools instituted to make of us? Certainly not a nation of Mark Twains--he's been retroactively diagnosed with ADD.
"Capitalism," such as it was, disappeared forever circa World War II. All the world's major economies are hybrid mercantilist/state-socialist/fascist. Medieval Iceland was probably the only capitalist country that ever existed; that Marx et al misnamed the previous economic revolution they hoped to supercede doesn't mean we have to keep doing it. Being "anti-capitalist" today is like being anti-Confederacy--it's too late, and the real enemies of the people can proceed unmolested while you waste your time shadowboxing.
And yeah, reading the book helps you understand the movie quite a lot better.
The movie bears as little relation to the book, or to "The Sentinel," as Shakespeare's "Hamlet" does to its book-jacket synopsis, or Michelangelo's David does to some teenage-boy webcam porn. Kubrick's film is not--at all--translatable back into mere storytelling, anymore than it can be restaged as a puppet show or a Slashdot post. As far as SF goes, Clarke's one of the Old Masters, but when it comes to general artistic greatness--"vision" and all that crap--Kubrick is way, way out of his league; and all Clarke has written about "2001" only shows that he didn't "get it."
"2001" is one of the ten or so best films ever made--or ever likely to be made--and Clarke's book is about the 67,233rd best SF pulp that came out that year. If you take Clarke's book as an explanation/substitute for Kubrick's movie--or come out of it trying to reduce it to that boring story, rather than letting it be what it is on its own--you've lost everything that makes it worthwhile.
The idea that there are such things as "Social Issues" and "Human Rights Issues"--meaning 1) issues which are neither "personal" nor "economic" and 2) whose oversight falls within the purview of the State--is, by the thinking of most libertarians, a piece authoritarian ideology, so of course they don't ask about it. Syndicalists and Marxists and miscellaneous left-anarchists wouldn't ask about those things, either. Only fascists and state-socialists or -capitalists would, because only they would consider these "issues" political, or consider "consequences," rather than freedom, any of their business.
I'd rather live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated entirely by sex criminals in cardboard boxes, than in a world where the idea that any--any--undesirables be tracked in any way, let alone outfitted with LoJacks, even crosses anyone's mind, but, evidently, that, too, is "just me."
"Free," as the word is used by the FSF means, in practice, "ours." As it currently functions, the FSF is a state-sponsored (because "non-profit") copyright-hoarding operation justified by infallible oracular dogma/stigma. Though its philosophy is medieval, its best analogic counterpart is modern Scientology; just substitute "proprietary software" for the Scieno-demon-of-the-moment in some on-high Hubbardite decree, and what appears is FSFian rhetoric.
And before the RMSturfers hit:
Yes, I know that's not what they say they are. I am familiar in detail with their press releases, their mission statements, their little pseudo-papal decrees, and with what, besides IP-hoarding, they (mostly claim to, but sometimes actually) do. RMS made GCC, and said it was good; and it was good. I just don't think it matters.
I might be one of only about ten of us left. Despite having owned and used many, many computers since about 1983, I've never once used Windows. I've read the horror stories, watched other people live them and laughed at their folly, but I've never done it.
At jobs, I've had to use just about everything Apple ever made--plus Irix, Solaris, and, once, back in the day, some kind of DOS--but I got out of "business" before the Borg takeover (and I was never in the "business" business anyway). At home, I have a pile of Apples, an old, pre-NT Silicon Graphics doorstop, and a Sun I'm happy never to have to yell at again. I used to have an Amiga, a NeXT (the shittier grayscale one), and a BeBox, but I sold them to other, more nostalgic dorks.
(I did try LinuxPPC a few years ago, just to see how it was, and thought "This [poor aesthetics, low instant-usability, dependency insanity, and messy file organization/management] is also why I don't use Windows," while I deleted it. It definitely reminded me more of Windows than of Irix or Solaris (as a desktop OS). May have changed, but I doubt it, since almost no one knows better than to ape Windows these days.)
Here's the problem--or at least what the problem sounds like to me, having heard only two songs off that album, and hated it:
In order to get a sound more like the Deftones, or like more modern, more experimental metal bands like, say, Minus (the one from Iceland), Dillinger Escape Plan, or Today Is The Day, Metallica's vile shit-for-brains producer Bob Rock compressed every sound on that album three or four times: 1) analog compression while recording the tracks (Distressor brand, I'd bet), 2) digitally while mixing the tracks (with the lame, built-in ProTools plugins), and 3) again digitally compressed the resultant stereo mixes (with some off-the-shelf near-pro program like T-Racks, it sounds like)--and, sometimes, once more digitally during track editing, back between steps one and two (you can sometimes hear little "lurches" near edit points in some of the drum and guitar parts, as if each little piece was separately compressed after it was "sampled" for looping).
That can be done to good effect--most of the work of the above-mentioned bands comes to mind--and it can be done horribly--like Metallica's new junk, or like the most recent Today Is The Day album (which is maybe even slightly worse, in the same way--but at least they did it knowingly and for "artistic effect").
Dumb production, plain and simple, trying to make sounds they don't really know how to make, to keep up with the better young bands.
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the Americans I've ever had cause to discuss the question with--from radio astronomers to radio-toothed dominionists--I'm the only one who doesn't "believe" in life on other planets. So, to dissolve at least one of the images of troglodytic Republicans dancing through your head, I'll give you my atheistic, scientific additional sample of one, since it's the only one I know:
Because I "believe"--or, more accurately, guess, based on known evidence--that the odds of intelligent life as we define it presently existing in the universe are approximately 1/[the number of planets estimated to exist in the universe] (mainly because the cosmic "weather" is not (yet) working in lasting complexity's favor), I'd have answered "no" on the poll.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if humanity was the universe's first "intelligent" species. Or second. Or only, ever, forever. We know space is a fucked up, dangerous, inhospitable hellhole. The PBS image of a galactic Manhattan swarming silently and invisibly all around us seems like the religious irrationality to me.
I know one guy in Israel who thinks the same thing for the same reasons (except he's a cosmologist, so he can explain it better). Also--huge fundie. Just goes to show ya.
Step with the times, blackguard.
Our glorious, progressive 20th century institutions gave us about a hundred and fifty million real, rotting bodies to enjoy, while this vile anarchic 21st century internet has given us a only few hundred pictures of corpses--and most of them are the same old dead people from the 1900s!
It's just uncivilized.
Projecting from today's numbers, the internet will have produced not even a dozen violent deaths by century's end. Something must be done to end this lawless barbarity before it corrupts us all!
Anyone who likes U2 enough to buy their album at its release date would download this version, think it was neat, add it to their collection, then go out and buy the real album anyway. This is not a problem for sales, and the press coverage will only help. Before this story, I had no idea U2 still existed (last one I bought was Unforgettable Fire).
Photoshop (or at least the versions I've used) has its own little swap implementation built in.
On the box I'm using right now (old G4, OS 9), that's great. System-wide VM ruins the performance of the audio-recording and -processing stuff I run, so it's off. Photoshop is the only thing I use that needs swap--and can use it without puking and dying--and it takes care of it itself. Nice.
The Microsoft attitude seems to be:
"Any exchange of money of which we do not get a cut is immoral."
Getting into the iTunes-alike business probably can't bring Microsoft any profit, but anyone else making any money, anywhere on Earth, selling anything whatsoever, without Microsoft's hand being in the till, is, to them, a sin (though they say it's against "freedom," not against Microsoft, because that'd be bad PR).
If corporations could be diagnosed with mental disorders, Microsoft would qualify as every variety of delusional psychotic.
Another effect of marketing--sort of.
There are popular bands around that sound something like Television (et al), but no one who's influenced by Talking Heads is similar-sounding enough--or similarly enough marketed--to immediately remind you of them.
The most Talking Heads-like pop single of this past year was a Justin Timberlake song, but it's not like his image encourages "Once In A Lifetime" to pop right into your head when you hear him; whereas about half the Strokes' songs make you think "Television!" within the first few seconds, and their "brand image" encourages the comparison.
So Television sounds "relevant" and Talking Heads sound "aged."
But the records are still the same. And the best ones--Fear of Music and Remain in Light, probably--are still just as good as they were then.
(Though the first couple and the last couple still sound dorky and artless, respectively.)
"Porn fuels my rape fantasies. Since I am the most morally and intellectually perfect being the planet has ever known, the refusal of most people to acknowledge that porn fuels their own rape fantasies is merely evidence of my moral and intellectual superiority to them."
"Africa's state-run utility giant" is badly written, not "ignorant" or "confused."
Eskom is indeed "Africa's," in that "Africa" is one way of naming the place where Eskom operates. The description is inexact--as would be, say, "North America's software monopoly Microsoft"--but still correct.
But I'm to understand that you're "confused" due to "ignorance" about such toddler-level grammatical arcana, right?
1) Kasparov is really good at chess.
2) People don't play by accurately calculating probabilities and choosing the most mathematically-likely-to-be-propitious move; they do something else. Whatever that "something else" is--and no one yet understands it in a pure-mathematical, mechanically reproducible way; and maybe that's not even possible--the computer's strategy isn't better.
This effect is the purpose of these regulations, not a failure or side-effect or unintended consequence.
Buck Douche's Telemarket-Mart can't afford the "cost of doing business" created by these fines, but AT&T and its behemoth brethren can.
The interests of the state are best served by a business world made up of large, "public," tightly regulated, near-immortal corporate institutions, and the Do Not Call list and fines are just one more means of disempowering their comparatively anarchic petit bourgeois/entrepreneurial competition.
Most government regulations of business serve the same purpose.
I hate telemarketing at least as much as everyone else here does, but these regulations are far worse than anything any smarmy dillhole on the 'phone can do to us.
Among the Mac users I know, only about a third have switched to X permanently.
Aside from the superior security, and the familiarity that makes 9 reliable for us (if you know how it works, and you don't run crappy software, it doesn't crash; and if you've got work to do, "Relearn ancient Unix and NeXt arcana" isn't high on your to-do list), what stops us from switching is the immaturity--still--of X in certain areas, like interface consistency, speed (at certain tasks), (certain kinds of) latency, and general "finishedness."
In my and a couple other cases I know of, the stumbling block is incompatability with some bizarre specialized audio software and old devices that won't ever get updated. "Classic" in X is bad with external hardware, and lacks some of the quirks and errors that some old software depends on. Also, X's virtual memory is very good, but it isn't optional; 9 and below let you turn it off if you have to (and sometimes, to do some things, you have to, or the box'll choke--physical RAM always wins).
Basically, we don't need it, so we don't buy it, though we've all tried it, and been half-thrilled, and half-disappointed. In a couple years, our boxes will die, and we'll have no choice. By then X should be as mature as 9 is. See you there.
"This thing fucking sucks!" is the feature's greatest problem; this Author's Guild bitching is flyswatter work in comparison.
Example: I just searched for "Al-Jazari," because I'm looking for a book about little robot-toys. When I searched a couple days ago, the first of two results was a book by Al-Jazari about his little robot-toys. Now, it's result #48 out of 48. Almost everything ranked above it is useless crap, but to find what I wanted, I had to page through all of it, since the results are now so unpredictable (and shitty).
Thanks, Amazon.
"Childhood" as we think of it is an idea--and a recently invented one--not a fact. Children are childish because they are made to be. Even only a hundred years ago, the average child of ten was far more intelligent, moral, and responsible than the average adult of today. Just a glance at the schoolwork of children of the 19th century, or the letters of teenage Civil War soldiers will prove it to you.
Plato's Republic can tell you why we've been made the way we have--in brief, to make us more easily ruled--and a look at the writings of the founders of education--e.g., Horace Mann, and the Prussian and Italian fascists of the 1800s who inspired him--can tell you how it's been done.
This kind of surveillance is just a minor notching tighter of the belt.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech.
An oft-repeated piece of propaganda that remains a lie however often it's repeated.
The purpose of tenure is to perpetuate the "election" of one segment of the therapeutic/educational/prison system by reinforcing its restricted membership.
Applied to average working people, this is called "indenture." The underclass are, in every meaningful sense, immobile, bound to institutions and masters. Without their continual subsistence pay, they can't afford to live, let alone to invest in the invention of their own occupations. They cannot afford the leisure required to seek better employment. They risk their very lives by not perpetuating their bondage. So, rename the bondage "job security," and put a smile on the slaves. I'm not surprised you so enjoy the idea. Because...
Applied to the modern "master class," of which educators are a (low-ranking) part, this type of contract serves to mark those tenured as the living temporal embodiment of the Holy Immortal Institution--with a small, metonymic career-immortality that shields them from minor revolutions within the system, and prevents the system as a whole from meaningfully changing.
You should "fear popular opinion." The "progress of knowledge" doesn't need you. Your egotism and class hatred is nauseating. The whip-handle in your waistband is showing, and slave revolts are not unknown to history.
{/"Troll"}
Minority Report, I mean.
"'"'"'""'Ironically,'"'"'""'" the production design of Minority Report--the entire look of the movie, its props, and its filmic effects--is, itself, a "meta" product placement (for the Nokia Communicator--the 9210 model, specifically). The movie pretends to criticize p.p. by exaggerating it, when, in fact, its purpose--sole purpose--is exaggerated product placement that goes on re-advertizing for so long as our culture-bearers continue to valorize the work of that hack bitch. Sweet deal all around.
Spielberg is Satan (though not as intelligent or honest or fun to drink with) (and just not because of this particular vile stunt, about which PK Dick must be laughin' in his grave (or maybe Heidegger's)) (and let's not even talk about what Schindler's List was really about (Kubrick spoke the truth, and look what it got him)).
[/"'"'"'""'Troll'"'"'""'"]
The Talmud contains a lot of strange, "dirty," and bloody stories. There are some which now would be called "horror" stories, with G-d as the "bad guy" (some of which are actually scary, in a startling, slasher-movie way). But since almost no one outside of rabbinical schools reads it, no one gets too worked up about it. You could make a pretty faithful religious-educational survival-horror/"Grand Theft Torah" game starring Akiba (though if you did, the ADL would undoubtedly spend millions to ruin your life).
The Koran of course has a lot of typical Biblical violence, because it, like the Book of Mormon, is a supplementary text to "the" Bible (Torah + New Testament), and its tone was influenced by the fiery stories of Zoroaster et al. Rape and such get mentioned about as often as you'd expect in a religious book--which is to say, many, many times more often than in most other books.
The Old Testament contains, for example, the Song of Solomon, which is, by old-timey standards, a pornographic story. The King James translation is the most "erotic" and evocative.
And, of course, all of these stories are "graphic," their being, like all writing, composed of graphemes.
A simple-minded program will always fail in a "special case."
A couple years ago, I pasted random paragraphs from about a dozen works widely acknowledged to be "great"--or at least "important"--into a Perl-scripted "Fog Readability Index" calculator, and every single one, from the Talmud to Goethe to Derrida, was deemed "unreadable" by the program. (This post, too, would "fail it," as we say on Slashdot.) However, it graded random AP stories and small-town newspaper editorials very highly.
Right now, I can't think of a single great essay--not one--that could meet even the barest criteria for a properly written essay, as taught in schools today, but, again, the average AP story meets most of them.
This story makes a nice little metonym for what's wrong with modern education: that its greatest reward is congratulation for mediocrity, and that it considers the "special case" always disruptive, and never actually special.
What are schools instituted to make of us? Certainly not a nation of Mark Twains--he's been retroactively diagnosed with ADD.
"Capitalism," such as it was, disappeared forever circa World War II. All the world's major economies are hybrid mercantilist/state-socialist/fascist. Medieval Iceland was probably the only capitalist country that ever existed; that Marx et al misnamed the previous economic revolution they hoped to supercede doesn't mean we have to keep doing it. Being "anti-capitalist" today is like being anti-Confederacy--it's too late, and the real enemies of the people can proceed unmolested while you waste your time shadowboxing.
The movie bears as little relation to the book, or to "The Sentinel," as Shakespeare's "Hamlet" does to its book-jacket synopsis, or Michelangelo's David does to some teenage-boy webcam porn. Kubrick's film is not--at all--translatable back into mere storytelling, anymore than it can be restaged as a puppet show or a Slashdot post. As far as SF goes, Clarke's one of the Old Masters, but when it comes to general artistic greatness--"vision" and all that crap--Kubrick is way, way out of his league; and all Clarke has written about "2001" only shows that he didn't "get it."
"2001" is one of the ten or so best films ever made--or ever likely to be made--and Clarke's book is about the 67,233rd best SF pulp that came out that year. If you take Clarke's book as an explanation/substitute for Kubrick's movie--or come out of it trying to reduce it to that boring story, rather than letting it be what it is on its own--you've lost everything that makes it worthwhile.
Check yourself.
I'd rather live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated entirely by sex criminals in cardboard boxes, than in a world where the idea that any--any--undesirables be tracked in any way, let alone outfitted with LoJacks, even crosses anyone's mind, but, evidently, that, too, is "just me."
"Free," as the word is used by the FSF means, in practice, "ours." As it currently functions, the FSF is a state-sponsored (because "non-profit") copyright-hoarding operation justified by infallible oracular dogma/stigma. Though its philosophy is medieval, its best analogic counterpart is modern Scientology; just substitute "proprietary software" for the Scieno-demon-of-the-moment in some on-high Hubbardite decree, and what appears is FSFian rhetoric.
And before the RMSturfers hit:
Yes, I know that's not what they say they are. I am familiar in detail with their press releases, their mission statements, their little pseudo-papal decrees, and with what, besides IP-hoarding, they (mostly claim to, but sometimes actually) do. RMS made GCC, and said it was good; and it was good. I just don't think it matters.
[/Troll]
We do exist.
I might be one of only about ten of us left. Despite having owned and used many, many computers since about 1983, I've never once used Windows. I've read the horror stories, watched other people live them and laughed at their folly, but I've never done it.
At jobs, I've had to use just about everything Apple ever made--plus Irix, Solaris, and, once, back in the day, some kind of DOS--but I got out of "business" before the Borg takeover (and I was never in the "business" business anyway). At home, I have a pile of Apples, an old, pre-NT Silicon Graphics doorstop, and a Sun I'm happy never to have to yell at again. I used to have an Amiga, a NeXT (the shittier grayscale one), and a BeBox, but I sold them to other, more nostalgic dorks.
(I did try LinuxPPC a few years ago, just to see how it was, and thought "This [poor aesthetics, low instant-usability, dependency insanity, and messy file organization/management] is also why I don't use Windows," while I deleted it. It definitely reminded me more of Windows than of Irix or Solaris (as a desktop OS). May have changed, but I doubt it, since almost no one knows better than to ape Windows these days.)
Yes, it's supposed to sound "cool."
Here's the problem--or at least what the problem sounds like to me, having heard only two songs off that album, and hated it:
In order to get a sound more like the Deftones, or like more modern, more experimental metal bands like, say, Minus (the one from Iceland), Dillinger Escape Plan, or Today Is The Day, Metallica's vile shit-for-brains producer Bob Rock compressed every sound on that album three or four times: 1) analog compression while recording the tracks (Distressor brand, I'd bet), 2) digitally while mixing the tracks (with the lame, built-in ProTools plugins), and 3) again digitally compressed the resultant stereo mixes (with some off-the-shelf near-pro program like T-Racks, it sounds like)--and, sometimes, once more digitally during track editing, back between steps one and two (you can sometimes hear little "lurches" near edit points in some of the drum and guitar parts, as if each little piece was separately compressed after it was "sampled" for looping).
That can be done to good effect--most of the work of the above-mentioned bands comes to mind--and it can be done horribly--like Metallica's new junk, or like the most recent Today Is The Day album (which is maybe even slightly worse, in the same way--but at least they did it knowingly and for "artistic effect").
Dumb production, plain and simple, trying to make sounds they don't really know how to make, to keep up with the better young bands.