In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
That's because terrorists like to keep cheerful photo albums on their computers about their various exploits.
"Here's me and Al Mohammad Abied mixing plastic explosives! Look! There's mom in the background with pie! Hi mom!"
If it didn't appear to be a waste, we'd have already found intelligent life and therefore this entire article would be about as ridiculous as denying that evolution is a fact. A lot of research appears to be a waste until such a time as the research bears fruit. With SETI this is even more exagerated simply because a lot of people don't believe that there is alien life, etcetera, etcetera, but if we don't look for it we'll never know for a fact.
So yes, SETI is always going to be an all-or-nothing project. Either we have found intelligent life or we haven't, period. Pointing out that the program hasn't had any success since its initiation, and suggesting that's a good reason to stop, is not terribly unlike having gone back and told the Right Brothers to stop trying to build an airplane because people had been trying for ages and clearly it wasn't going to work.
So why keep doing SETI? Why not? If it succeeds it'll be one of the most important events in mankind's history, literally. If it doesn't succeed, at least we tried. Which I think is an important part of what makes humans interesting; be it sailing across endless oceans, flying out into space, or sitting hunkered down under a massive radio dish waiting for intelligent signals, we pretty much do it anyway, no matter what the cost or what the risk. All that said, the SETI program is a lot less risky than anything NASA is trying to do.
Maybe it would be good to explore other kinds of interception, SETI is SETI, regardless of what methods or technologies they're using in their search. If they had the funds to add optical SETI to their repertoire, I'm sure they'd be happy to.
I don't know if it's even possible to completely eradicate spam... even if you went with full whitelisting(and frankly, that's just never going to happen if you want my opinion), the spammers will just come up with trojans that will use your address to spam everyone on your list. Or something to that effect.
Regardless, it'd be nice to have the option of whitelisted e-mail for personal accounts. People want to contact you randomly? Use the non-whitelisted e-mail. Otherwise give your whitelisted e-mail to friends and family and business associates, etcetera. Does it eliminate having to sift through spam? No, but it does at least offer a safe haven from it. If nothing else, at least you can be sure that your main address isn't going to get infected with pages upon pages of advertisements.
I was under the impression that the current goverment was sort of based around restricting the rights of people.
Re:Is It Art
on
But Is It Art?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Literature is also for entertainment. Is literature not art?
Theater, film, music, and dance are also primarily for entertainment. And yet we consider all of them artforms.
There was a time when paintings actually were considered a form of entertainment(going back to the rennaissance and its prior days), believe it or not, basically before movies came along. Paintings and sculpture came to be considered dull by comparison, but that doesn't mean that art has to be unentertaining. And of course, then games came along, adding another level of interactivity to entertainment media.
Essentially, art has become more and more interactive, but art has always been 'entertaining' in one form or another. Games are no different. There's no reason that art can't be interactive or entertaining. Now, not all games are art, just the same as not all literature, theater, film, music, or dance is purely art.
Sometimes these things are purely marketing. Which games are just full of presently, but there have been plenty of games that I would consider works of art. Deus Ex. The Longest Journey. Thief. The majority of the Final Fantasy games. Grim Fandango. Farenheit. The Master of Orion series. Civilization. Dozens of others I can't remember off the top of my head.
Every 'genre' of art is defined a little differently. But ultimately, what makes for truly great art among all genres is one element... creativity. Some games, music, films, books, paintings, are truly inspired works of creativity, while others are highly derivitive or unimaginative.
So yes, games can be art. Some people have difficulty seperating classical artforms from modern ones. Film wasn't considered art for a long time, if I remember correctly, and yet now they are. Games are a modern storytelling artform, with elements of literature, painting, and music.
To the first part, I'm not entirely sure that's true. Businesses and whatnot often profit millions of dollars on copyright infringement, and just end up paying damages to the copyright owner.
Then again, businesses as entities tend to follow a different set of laws.
To the second part, I just flatly disagree. I don't think that ignorance of the nature of the laws is justification in itself to perpetuate further ignorance. The more people understand the actual truth of this subject, the better. We have enough problems with people making misinformed judgements on all kinds of topics. I don't think we need more of that.
Piracy and copyright infringement simply isn't theft, and it shouldn't be referred to as theft by anyone. To do so would be to misinform on the subject. The truth is always preferable. Even if it's more moderately difficult to understand.
Now, this is semantics to most people, I'm sure, but... unless I'm mistaken, copyright infringement and theft aren't the same thing at all as far as the judical system is concerned.
Technically, copyright infringement and piracy isn't theft. They're defined very seperately under the law. I don't think I've ever seen a court ruling regarding piracy end up charging anyone for any manner of theft.
Copyright infringement and piracy means you get sued for damages.
You can go to jail for theft.
Theft involves taking something of value from someone. You take a musician's guitar, you've stolen property that they no longer have. You steal a CD from a store and you've taken property bought and paid for by the store, so that they can no longer sell it.
Piracy is the copying of merchandise for distribution(for profit or non-profit), and doesn't actually involve stealing anything physical from anyone. It may result in lost sales(debatable), it may be wrong(debatable), but it's not theft because you aren't physically taking property from anyone or anything. To try to say that it's theft because the music industry loses money over it, just doesn't stand up to the definition.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer. So someone may feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any particular point here.
Again, for a lot of people it's easier to just define piracy as theft because it can resemble it, but the fact is... it's just not.
Of course, one could argue that even having to get up in the middle of a movie, without even being able to pause it, to hunt down the manager of the theater so he can hopefully catch some twerp in action while he acts like a retard, and in the process miss a chunk of the movie you were watching, is still much less appealing than simply watching the movie at home.
The giant screen just isn't that much of a draw anymore to be worth all the rest. With the invention of DVDs, high definition television, and affordable surround sound, the term 'home theater' is becoming awfully literal. You can pretty much get the same experience at home if you've invested, minus a few dozen feet on screen size.
People seem to go to the theater more out of habit than for any practical reason. It costs so much less, is so much more comfortable, and has so many fewer 'risks' just to rent a movie and watch it at home. The one thing that theaters have over movie rentals is that they're still delaying rentals to weeks and weeks after initial release.
That was disappointingly hypocritical and useless.
I believe it's traditional to provide some sort of reasoning behind insulting someone's intelligence after they've made a point in an argument, as opposed to merely failing to use your brain to manage anything more than a painfully unoriginal insult. Nevermind the error you made. So hopefully you won't take it too personally that I'm finding it pretty hard to take your insult seriously.
I'm also sorry that concern for the degrading state of our environment is 'uncool' to you. I strongly suggest taking a look at the grander picture. Believe it or not, this planet's the only one we have. There isn't a spare in the trunk in case this one goes flat.
I'm hardly some pot smoking hippy, but then, it doesn't take a fifty-two week marijuana binge to see that something is wrong, and something ought to be done before it gets out of hand. You won't see me marching the streets on Earth Day with a sign, but you're damn right I support political motions to protect the environment from excessive consumption of natural resources, reduction of emissions, etcetera.
I think the point was that it was implied that having to wear gas-masked due to pollution was something that has never happened, while it has(to some degree). That comment wasn't about neo-cons being at fault - I'm not sure how you read it that way - it was pointing out that pollution extremes can and do exist.
What irks me, really, is that while 'neo-cons,' for lack of a better stereotype, have been sneering at eco-sensitive groups and warnings regarding pollution, for apparently being wrong, they fail to realize that it was only these whistle blowers that caused the environmental laws and restrictions to come into place that have manages to slow(if not entirely stem) the major effects of pollution.
And for the record, oil is a limited resource that can and will be depleted if we continue to guzzle the stuff at the rate we do, and anyone who believes otherwise, well. Oil is naturally produced very, very slowly, and not in massive quantities. It took billions of years to build up the reserves that exist, and we've managed to deplete them in less than a century. If anyone actually believes that the earth is pumping out as much oil as the world is consuming on a daily basis, they need to go back to school, because that crap just isn't any kind of rational thought.
And yes, for the record, I do believe that man is a significant factor in global warming. The only scientists that believe otherwise happen to be sponsored by the industries who really want to hear good things for their businesses.
I also like to believe(hope) that there are some neo-cons who are at least willing to admit that introducing unnaturally large amounts of chemicals into the o-zone is obviously going to affect it in some way. Which is preferable, at least, to putting on the blinders and completely neglecting the planet's future based on presumptions that they cannot prove to be correct.
Reasonably, if there's even a small chance that we are causing global warming, then we should do everything we can to do slow or stem that cycle. Playing the denial game is only going to ensure that it happens.
Take a look at the first season of ST:TNG. It was hardly a mastery of storytelling, I guarantee you that. And yet Firefly did more with its setting and characters in those fourteen episodes than most shows do in their entire lifetime. So you're comparing the detail of fourteen episodes of a show to the detail of a series of shows that have been going on for decades.
I'll also point out that all but one of the Star Trek's were about, you guessed it, living on a ship. The other one was about a space station. Ironically it was the best one, but that's even more telling; it had a lot in common with Firefly. It was a character driven show instead of being event based, which I find tired and dull as a medium for storytelling.
As for new ideas, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you weren't exactly looking for any. It sounds like you heard 'science fiction' and 'western' together and pretty much had formed your opinion when the horses appeared in the intro.
Also, I'm assuming you believe that horses will be extinct in the future? Another poster pretty much summed this one up when he said that horses are far more viable in an offworld colony setting than robotics or machinery. Y'know, in reality. Where things are shiny and perfect all the time.
Stop fixating on the ship angle. For one, your comparison to sailboats is kind of ridiculous. That's like saying that a story about pirates isn't a 'historical fiction' because we have boats today, too. Thus, the story about pirates is clearly a modern fiction. Because of the boat. Nevermind the rest of the setting.
Nothing new to see, he says. Not science fiction, he says. Well, fine. Believe what you like. I say you're missing out on one of the best
Let's see if we can't use good ol' English to decypher the meaning of 'Science Fiction.'
Science, being that subject we all know and love, about how the universe works and how we manipulate it.
Fiction, being a story that is untrue in its entirety or in part.
So... science fiction really ought to be, well, a made up story that involves made up applications of science. Which, I have to say, Firefly had a lot of. I won't bother listing them again; they've pretty much been covered(although they forgot the part about the earth being an uninhabitable wasteland).
You've basically said that 'Anything that involves some technology that doesn't exist today is considered science fiction' and how this is a bad thing... but Firefly isn't just modern day New York and the guy who invented a time machine to visit his dad in the fifties. This is a show about people living in a spaceship.
So what your post has suggested, is that to you, science fiction cannot be character driven, or involve drama. I can think of more than a few authors who would probably like to kill you with papercuts for a comment like that.
Not all science fiction has to follow the format of Star Trek. In fact, I dare say that most doesn't. Just because you don't appreciate it doesn't mean it's not science fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
That's because terrorists like to keep cheerful photo albums on their computers about their various exploits.
"Here's me and Al Mohammad Abied mixing plastic explosives! Look! There's mom in the background with pie! Hi mom!"
If it didn't appear to be a waste, we'd have already found intelligent life and therefore this entire article would be about as ridiculous as denying that evolution is a fact. A lot of research appears to be a waste until such a time as the research bears fruit. With SETI this is even more exagerated simply because a lot of people don't believe that there is alien life, etcetera, etcetera, but if we don't look for it we'll never know for a fact.
So yes, SETI is always going to be an all-or-nothing project. Either we have found intelligent life or we haven't, period. Pointing out that the program hasn't had any success since its initiation, and suggesting that's a good reason to stop, is not terribly unlike having gone back and told the Right Brothers to stop trying to build an airplane because people had been trying for ages and clearly it wasn't going to work.
So why keep doing SETI? Why not? If it succeeds it'll be one of the most important events in mankind's history, literally. If it doesn't succeed, at least we tried. Which I think is an important part of what makes humans interesting; be it sailing across endless oceans, flying out into space, or sitting hunkered down under a massive radio dish waiting for intelligent signals, we pretty much do it anyway, no matter what the cost or what the risk. All that said, the SETI program is a lot less risky than anything NASA is trying to do.
Maybe it would be good to explore other kinds of interception, SETI is SETI, regardless of what methods or technologies they're using in their search. If they had the funds to add optical SETI to their repertoire, I'm sure they'd be happy to.
Regardless, it'd be nice to have the option of whitelisted e-mail for personal accounts. People want to contact you randomly? Use the non-whitelisted e-mail. Otherwise give your whitelisted e-mail to friends and family and business associates, etcetera. Does it eliminate having to sift through spam? No, but it does at least offer a safe haven from it. If nothing else, at least you can be sure that your main address isn't going to get infected with pages upon pages of advertisements.
Is there even a provider for whitelisted e-mail?
I was under the impression that the current goverment was sort of based around restricting the rights of people.
Theater, film, music, and dance are also primarily for entertainment. And yet we consider all of them artforms.
There was a time when paintings actually were considered a form of entertainment(going back to the rennaissance and its prior days), believe it or not, basically before movies came along. Paintings and sculpture came to be considered dull by comparison, but that doesn't mean that art has to be unentertaining. And of course, then games came along, adding another level of interactivity to entertainment media.
Essentially, art has become more and more interactive, but art has always been 'entertaining' in one form or another. Games are no different. There's no reason that art can't be interactive or entertaining. Now, not all games are art, just the same as not all literature, theater, film, music, or dance is purely art.
Sometimes these things are purely marketing. Which games are just full of presently, but there have been plenty of games that I would consider works of art. Deus Ex. The Longest Journey. Thief. The majority of the Final Fantasy games. Grim Fandango. Farenheit. The Master of Orion series. Civilization. Dozens of others I can't remember off the top of my head.
Every 'genre' of art is defined a little differently. But ultimately, what makes for truly great art among all genres is one element... creativity. Some games, music, films, books, paintings, are truly inspired works of creativity, while others are highly derivitive or unimaginative.
So yes, games can be art. Some people have difficulty seperating classical artforms from modern ones. Film wasn't considered art for a long time, if I remember correctly, and yet now they are. Games are a modern storytelling artform, with elements of literature, painting, and music.
Then again, businesses as entities tend to follow a different set of laws.
To the second part, I just flatly disagree. I don't think that ignorance of the nature of the laws is justification in itself to perpetuate further ignorance. The more people understand the actual truth of this subject, the better. We have enough problems with people making misinformed judgements on all kinds of topics. I don't think we need more of that.
Piracy and copyright infringement simply isn't theft, and it shouldn't be referred to as theft by anyone. To do so would be to misinform on the subject. The truth is always preferable. Even if it's more moderately difficult to understand.Technically, copyright infringement and piracy isn't theft. They're defined very seperately under the law. I don't think I've ever seen a court ruling regarding piracy end up charging anyone for any manner of theft.
Copyright infringement and piracy means you get sued for damages.
You can go to jail for theft.
Theft involves taking something of value from someone. You take a musician's guitar, you've stolen property that they no longer have. You steal a CD from a store and you've taken property bought and paid for by the store, so that they can no longer sell it.
Piracy is the copying of merchandise for distribution(for profit or non-profit), and doesn't actually involve stealing anything physical from anyone. It may result in lost sales(debatable), it may be wrong(debatable), but it's not theft because you aren't physically taking property from anyone or anything. To try to say that it's theft because the music industry loses money over it, just doesn't stand up to the definition.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer. So someone may feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any particular point here.
Again, for a lot of people it's easier to just define piracy as theft because it can resemble it, but the fact is... it's just not.
The giant screen just isn't that much of a draw anymore to be worth all the rest. With the invention of DVDs, high definition television, and affordable surround sound, the term 'home theater' is becoming awfully literal. You can pretty much get the same experience at home if you've invested, minus a few dozen feet on screen size.
People seem to go to the theater more out of habit than for any practical reason. It costs so much less, is so much more comfortable, and has so many fewer 'risks' just to rent a movie and watch it at home. The one thing that theaters have over movie rentals is that they're still delaying rentals to weeks and weeks after initial release.
I believe it's traditional to provide some sort of reasoning behind insulting someone's intelligence after they've made a point in an argument, as opposed to merely failing to use your brain to manage anything more than a painfully unoriginal insult. Nevermind the error you made. So hopefully you won't take it too personally that I'm finding it pretty hard to take your insult seriously.
I'm also sorry that concern for the degrading state of our environment is 'uncool' to you. I strongly suggest taking a look at the grander picture. Believe it or not, this planet's the only one we have. There isn't a spare in the trunk in case this one goes flat.
I'm hardly some pot smoking hippy, but then, it doesn't take a fifty-two week marijuana binge to see that something is wrong, and something ought to be done before it gets out of hand. You won't see me marching the streets on Earth Day with a sign, but you're damn right I support political motions to protect the environment from excessive consumption of natural resources, reduction of emissions, etcetera.
Also, 'Miss' would be more appropriate.
What irks me, really, is that while 'neo-cons,' for lack of a better stereotype, have been sneering at eco-sensitive groups and warnings regarding pollution, for apparently being wrong, they fail to realize that it was only these whistle blowers that caused the environmental laws and restrictions to come into place that have manages to slow(if not entirely stem) the major effects of pollution.
And for the record, oil is a limited resource that can and will be depleted if we continue to guzzle the stuff at the rate we do, and anyone who believes otherwise, well. Oil is naturally produced very, very slowly, and not in massive quantities. It took billions of years to build up the reserves that exist, and we've managed to deplete them in less than a century. If anyone actually believes that the earth is pumping out as much oil as the world is consuming on a daily basis, they need to go back to school, because that crap just isn't any kind of rational thought.
And yes, for the record, I do believe that man is a significant factor in global warming. The only scientists that believe otherwise happen to be sponsored by the industries who really want to hear good things for their businesses.
I also like to believe(hope) that there are some neo-cons who are at least willing to admit that introducing unnaturally large amounts of chemicals into the o-zone is obviously going to affect it in some way. Which is preferable, at least, to putting on the blinders and completely neglecting the planet's future based on presumptions that they cannot prove to be correct.
Reasonably, if there's even a small chance that we are causing global warming, then we should do everything we can to do slow or stem that cycle. Playing the denial game is only going to ensure that it happens.
I'll also point out that all but one of the Star Trek's were about, you guessed it, living on a ship. The other one was about a space station. Ironically it was the best one, but that's even more telling; it had a lot in common with Firefly. It was a character driven show instead of being event based, which I find tired and dull as a medium for storytelling.
As for new ideas, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you weren't exactly looking for any. It sounds like you heard 'science fiction' and 'western' together and pretty much had formed your opinion when the horses appeared in the intro.
Also, I'm assuming you believe that horses will be extinct in the future? Another poster pretty much summed this one up when he said that horses are far more viable in an offworld colony setting than robotics or machinery. Y'know, in reality. Where things are shiny and perfect all the time.
Stop fixating on the ship angle. For one, your comparison to sailboats is kind of ridiculous. That's like saying that a story about pirates isn't a 'historical fiction' because we have boats today, too. Thus, the story about pirates is clearly a modern fiction. Because of the boat. Nevermind the rest of the setting.
Nothing new to see, he says. Not science fiction, he says. Well, fine. Believe what you like. I say you're missing out on one of the best
Science, being that subject we all know and love, about how the universe works and how we manipulate it.
Fiction, being a story that is untrue in its entirety or in part.
So... science fiction really ought to be, well, a made up story that involves made up applications of science. Which, I have to say, Firefly had a lot of. I won't bother listing them again; they've pretty much been covered(although they forgot the part about the earth being an uninhabitable wasteland).
You've basically said that 'Anything that involves some technology that doesn't exist today is considered science fiction' and how this is a bad thing... but Firefly isn't just modern day New York and the guy who invented a time machine to visit his dad in the fifties. This is a show about people living in a spaceship.
So what your post has suggested, is that to you, science fiction cannot be character driven, or involve drama. I can think of more than a few authors who would probably like to kill you with papercuts for a comment like that.
Not all science fiction has to follow the format of Star Trek. In fact, I dare say that most doesn't. Just because you don't appreciate it doesn't mean it's not science fiction.