I imagine it's a matter of pride, just like for most humans, but why is it that no matter *what* the issue that someone's suing them over, the government always insists that it is absolutely right, and could not be wrong? Even the Executive Branch does this, when it's their job to enforce laws, not make them (Congress) or determine their rightness (SCOTUS). I remember seeing a quote from a DEA executive, saying that the DEA was opposed to any weakening of drug laws. Not that he was opposed, the DEA was opposed. Why is the DEA concerned about whether the laws change? Their job is to enforce existing laws, whatever they may be; there is no good reason for them to oppose changes in the law. (Naturally, they oppose any changes in the law that will make them have less power.)
I know this is a troll, but I just can't resist. It's like having someone drop a jar of Jelly Bellies in your lap.
Take a look around, friend. Everything you see is evidence that there is a God.
Please explain exactly why "everything" is evidence of God. I see stuff here, but there are natural processes which explain it all rather well, so why postulate a sentient, all-knowing, all-powerful, undetectable deity?
Also, if you are correct, then God is responsible for *everything* -- including the Ebola Zaire virus, Stalin's murder of twenty million of his own citizens, babies who die of genetic diseases, and "Survivor: Thailand."
he's God, which means there are things He is capable of that we are not, and that He understands things that we do not.
You keep saying that. Can you prove that God even exists?
As for alternative theories, it basically ammounts to this. There is a God, or we got really, really lucky. The strength of the atomic forces, or gravity, the distance of the earth to the sun, and a whole host of other values are tuned for the existance of life. Some of these values, if altered by a thousandth of a percent, would have gaurenteed that the universe would have imploded into a fireball, or drifted away into nothingness. But here we are.
For all you know, there are infinite alternate universes, each of which has a random set of fundamental values. The universes which happen to be able to support life, due to their combinations of values, are the universes in which life arose, and in which we are here to think about it. That explanation is at least as plausible as God (read: equally unprovable).
When people lost religion, they lost morality, pure and simlple.
Since you define "morality" as "having religion," your statement is basically tautological. You may as well have said, "When people lost religion, they lost religion." However, since I consider what I have to be morality, and since I also have no religion, your statement is false. Isn't language a wonderful thing?
Self interest gives us Enron. State-sponsored religion gives us the Inquisition. God, on the other hand, gives us such hard-to-swallow concepts as "don't go around killing each other" and "feed the poor."
Actually, men gave us those concepts. They just claimed it was a God, so that people would listen to them.
Do you have a master's degree in bad analogies or something?
That's as ludicrous as saying every author writing a book needs to have it translated and published into every foreign language in common use, so those not speaking English are ensured "equal access" to it!
Someone who doesn't speak English can learn to speak English. Someone with no legs cannot grow new legs; someone who is blind cannot learn to see. (At least, not yet; future technology may make the ADA irrelevant.)
If this becomes law, many people will take down sites completely rather than pay to do major revamping to meet ADA requirements, and then *nobody* benefits.
The ADA already IS law. Has been since 1990. The issue at hand is whether websites must accommodate disabled users the same way that buildings must accommodate disabled users.
They called it "Quaoar"? You can't even pronounce it! Here I was hoping they'd have the decencey to name the planet out past Pluto as it should be named.
Goofy.
What, you don't think the name "Quaoar" is goofy enough already?:)
I would say that "boxen" is a nouveau technical term, specifically referring to multiple computer boxes, rather than box-like things in general. The main reason is that "boxen" is used by people who know that the plural of "box" is "boxes," but as a matter of linguistic playfulness pluralize it the same was that "ox" becomes "oxen." Anyway, I don't think it's wise to use the term "blasphemy" when it comes to language... language is not divinely inspired, it's merely a product of common social agreement;)
While I can't say whether your Latin is any better than his, the point can (and should) be made that even if the Latin plural of "virus" is "viri" (or "virii" or "sphygmomanometer"), the English plural of "virus" is, and has been for quite a long time, "viruses". Only in a particular online subculture (which is unfortunately spreading) is "viri[i]" considered anything but a sign of undereducation.
It's odd, too; overgeneralizing word construction is a common geek thing to do with language (cf. ox/oxen and box/boxen, or matrix/matrices and Unix/Unices... or my favorite, mongoose/polygoose), so you'd think that "viri" (if not "virii") would be something literate geeks would use in the same was that "boxen" is so often used... yet we decry it. I think the reason is that "virii" is so often seen in company with actual grammatical and spelling errors, not to mention fevered (and poorly-written) arguments that it really is the plural of "virus". As a result, most of us see it as the result of ignorance, rather than linguistic playfulness.
I think I'll write about language in my journal today.
Airport codes:
WIN: Winton Australia
LNX: Smolensk Russia
BSD: Baoshan China
OSX: Kosciusko MS USA
Not sure if you have room in your sig, but OGG is the airport code for Lahaina airport, on Maui. If you don't have room, you might be able to abbreviate the country names (Australia = AU, Russia = RU, China = CN). Of course it's not an OS abbreviation like the rest, but imagine my surprise when I booked the flight for my honeymoon and saw OGG.:)
Re:NOT even CLOSE to a Ripoff! (was:The Idiot box!
on
Napster: The Movie
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The Liquid TV segment that was always my favorite was The Specialists.... Mastermind, Miss Kitka, and, uh... the bit fat guy whose name eludes me. Sumo or something.
I say the proverbial "you" rather than "I" because I happen to know I speak for more people than just myself.
I was being half-facetious about that. Only half, because your tone indicates that not only are these anti-fantasy opinions yours, but they should be everyone else's, too.
Just because you, in particular, don't care whether an author puts in the extra effort to add a measure of believability to his/her story doesn't mean I'm automatically in a small minority of those who do.
You're right, my beliefs do not automatically do anything to you. Regardless of what I believe, you are in that small minority.
In fact, I had a number of fantasy novels up for sale on eBay last year (all in brand new condition), as well as a collection of science ficiton novels. (My girlfriend ordered a whole bunch of random things from a sci-fi book club one time, and I wanted to get the stuff out of here.) The sci-fi sold without any problems, yet several of the "fantasy" novels never sold at all, and the others sold for only the minimum bid price of about $1.00.
Well, I can't really comment on this unless I know which fantasy novels they were. There's some crap you can't even give away, let alone sell for $1.00. Maybe you've just been reading all the badly-written fantasy?
That's just one more shred of evidence that helps back up my claim that there aren't an awful lot of people out there into the fantasy genre.
This is the first time you've made that claim, but I guess that's really just nitpicking. SF is undoubtedly more popular than fantasy, but unless you can provide some statistics, your point is moot. Even if you do manage to provide hard data showing that fantasy is an inconsequential segment of what's read, then why are you spending so much time harping on the fact that it's fictional?
I daresay it's largely because people feel it's a "waste of time" to read hundreds of pages about a mythical fantasy world that not only doesn't exist/never existed, but doesn't even try to leave the reader with any new wisdom/insight or ability to relate to the characters presented.
Yes, poorly written fantasy is not worth reading. Well-written fantasy is as worth reading as any other kind of fiction. I've also read scads of science fiction that wouldn't meet your criteria for believability, mostly because the events depicted took place "in the future" (relative to when the novel was written), but by now, in October 2002, that "future" has passed, and none of those events happened. Does this bother me? No. Fiction isn't about trying to make the work fit into our real world: it's just a way of telling stories. Apparently, fictional things like dragons and elves bother you for some bizarre reason that fictional things like lightsabers and spaceships that fly like aircraft don't.
Note: I'm not claiming *all* fantasy is void of "value" to the reader. That's absurd. As I said in my first post, LOTR teaches several good lessons. Still, I think those same lessons can be better communicated in another fiction genre that roots itself a little deeper in science and/or reality.
That's your own shortcoming. Most of us don't have any trouble learning lessons just because they're couched in things that never could have happened. I'm an atheist, but even I've learned from some of the things Jesus is supposed to have done, even though I don't believe they happened.
If you just want mindless entertainment, you can get plenty of it from TV sitcoms.... No need to read fantasy novels too.
Any genre or medium can be mindless entertainment. Theodore Sturgeon was dead-on when he said that 90% of everything is crap. Just because you have this bizarre quirk doesn't mean that the rest of us aren't going to continue getting value from fantasy, even though you're incapable of it.
Essentially, the problem is that you cannot accept the nature of fantasy, but instead of understanding that this is a problem with you, you insist that it's a problem with fantasy. Manifestly, the majority of people do not have this problem, which is why I conclude that the problem lies with you. Now I don't insist that you start finding the same value in fantasy literature that I do -- if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it, but don't go around pooh-poohing what other people like to read simply because you don't get it. If you're going to keep this up, you're going to have to come up with some kind of actual logic, rather than just, "I don't like it, therefore it sucks and nobody else should like it."
The problem with "loser pays" is that it favors the rich. A rich entity can sue a poor entity, and under "loser pays," at worst, the rich entity will have to pay the poor entity's legal bills, which are going to be tiny compared to the large entity's bills. But if a poor entity brings a valid suit against a rich entity, but gets out-lawyered, then the poor entity now has to pay a gigantic amount of money, which it does not have, since it is poor.
A better solution is that the loser only pays if they are the plaintiff (not the defendant), and that the loser is only liable for paying the winner's costs up to the amount spent by the loser. So if I sue Microsoft and lose, and I spend $10k and they spend $2m, I'd only be liable for $10k of their legal costs. But if I win, they don't have to pay my legal costs.
Flipside: If MS sues me, and I win, they'd have to pay up to $2m of my legal cost, but since my legal costs are only $10k, they only pay me $10k. If they sue me, and they win, I don't pay any of their legal costs.
This allows fewer abuses than our current system, but it's still not very good. I'll expound more on this in my journal today, but the point of this post is that we need to look more carefully at all the possibilities for abuse of the legal system (which includes the fact that a large company is more likely to win a lawsuit, just because it is large, and not because it is right).
Even most fairy tales and myths make sure not to give enough detail as to the "where" and "when" so you feel as though you're struggling with a contradiction with reality.
There you go with saying "you" when you mean "I" again. The rest of us do not have this problem. It's only you. (And the "many other people" you claim to know who feel the same way.) I've read numerous fantasy stories that purport to show things happening on our actual Earth, but it doesn't bother me, or most other people. Why does it bother you? Nobody knows. Suffice to say that fantasy authors really should not alter their writing style for the sake of a tiny minority who are incapable of enjoying a story unless it's made very explicit on Page 1, preferably in large print, that it is entirely fictional.
All I'm saying is I don't care for fantasy novels that make claims that "lock them into a particular place and time in history". LOTR would have been improved, IMHO, if it was made clear that it took place on another world.
It would be fine if that were indeed all that you were saying -- but you keep writing as if everyone else should feel the same way as you. There is nothing in LOTR that ties it to our actual Earth any more than your average fantasy novel. And almost every fantasy novel ever written features humans as the protagonists. (LOTR has several protagonists, only some of whom are human.) You only get one guess as to why.
Tying it in to the human race starts the reader/viewer asking lots of questions that the author would have been better off not getting involved with.
No... it starts you asking lots of questions. The rest of it enjoy it for what it is (fiction) and then move on with our lives.
...and wants its readers to disregard reality completely. Some people are bothered less by this than others.
Indeed. The overwhelming majority is not bothered by this at all. Only you and "many other people [you] know" seem to be bothered by it. (For the record, I have come across those with your opinion a few times in my life... but only a very few.)
(Perhaps parallels could be drawn between those who blindly accept religious beliefs "on faith" and those who choose not to believe in a "god" without better evidence?)
There's a capital-O-Obvious distinction between fiction intended for entertainment, and religious beliefs that are claimed to represent the real state of the world. Sane people do not confuse the two.
In any case, I see no reason why a fantasy novel couldn't be written that still preserves some "credibility". It might take a little more forethought and knowledge of science and history, but what's wrong with asking for that?
Because the entire point of fantasy is to present something which is not real; to present something which is outside of our ordinary, mundane existence. Magic, dragons, orcs, hobbits, wizards... these things are not real. They are fantastic, in the original sense of the word. The majority of people enjoy stories about such things; it doesn't need to integrate with their view of the real world, because they know it's fiction, they know it's made-up, and they know it's just for entertainment.
Normal people have no trouble holding two conflicting ideas in their mind at the same time. On its own terms, as long as a work of fiction is internally consistent, how outrageous it is doesn't really matter. If it begins to contradict itself, that's another story, because you (the audience) can't get into a consistent mindset with which to enjoy the story. But the story doesn't have to relate to reality for it to be enjoyable.
You're right, there is no reason why a fantasy novel couldn't be written that preserved "credibility," but on the other hand, there is no reason to write a fantasy novel that must mesh with reality. The entire point is that it's not real, but you seem to miss this.
All of the things you described Apple as being criticized for are the same thing: Keeping the GUI closed. Just thought I'd point this out, since it doesn't strengthen your point any.
Social structures are common among organisms because they, however indirectly, help organisms survive and spread their genes better. Social animals procreate more often, and have healthier offspring, than non-social animals, generally speaking. Obviously there are still plenty of non-social animals, but they are dwarfed in number by social animals.
His point, poorly made, was not that the concept of society is fictional, bur rather that any given social structure is a fiction, existing only in the minds of those involved. A society is not a thing the way a house is a thing. If you have people, and they build a house, and then the people all die, the house still exists. If you have a society of people, and the people all die, the society no longer exists.
Actually, no, it's usually the Christian Bible that tells us this is unnatural, or other such works of man. There are animals in nature that engage in homosexual play, mostly chimps and other apes who are closely related to us (which is probably not a coincidence). An organism that does not reproduce because it is homosexual is unlikely to propagate its genes, but this does not automatically translate to "morally wrong," as your usage of terms like "unnatural" connotes. Sentient, able-minded humans who are homosexual have every right to live their lives as they see fit. Only if you believe that every human has a moral imperative to reproduce as much as possible, can a homosexual be logically considered "ill."
However, those who pride themselves on disease instead of attempting to free themselves of it are fairly obviously unstable in some way.
You have yet to establish that homosexuals are suffering from anything that can reasonably be called "disease." Your definition of disease, from the beginning of the paragraph, appears to be, "Anything which hinders an organism's reproduction," but you have not specified why this is a good definition. Dictionary.com's entry for "disease" does not mention reproductive fitness.
I do not deny that there may be a fair number of people who are openly homosexual but otherwise largely moral.
You did deny this, or at the very least imply it strongly, when you said:
Modern society is learning the hard way that you can't encourage perversion and expect people to act morally.
While this doesn't explicitly say that perversion = immorality, the obvious consequent is that people who are perverted will be immoral.
The fact that plenty of people in mental hospitals across the world are nonviolent doesn't mean it's time to give each of them a machete and release them; the same principle applies to the class of mentally ill under discussion.
No, it does not. The nonviolent mentally ill you reference (presumably people who cannot cope on their own in society) are distinctly different from homosexuals, who can (and do) cope on their own, and are for the most part indistinguishable from heterosexuals. I could as easily label as "mentally ill" those who claim the existence of a benevolent (but undetectable) superbeing who divinely intervenes with human affairs, leaving no concrete evidence of his passing. There is no reason that consenting adults should not be allowed to do as they will, so long as their actions do not harm a nonconsenting other.
If you've ever played Dungeon Siege, you'll be familiar with the occasional sluggish framerate drop when you get near a new area, and the game starts dynamically loading the artwork and terrain resources for that area, giving the game its contiguous feel. Now I understand that SCSI hard drives have the ability to do non-blocking reads and writes, meaning that the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive. If what I think is true, then if I had a SCSI drive and played Dungeon Siege, the sluggishness when it loads new data would not occur, since the game would keep playing while it took a few seconds to load the data in the background.
If this isn't true... then wouldn't it be cool if hard drives could do this? Having games get sluggish every time they have to load new artwork resources from disk is annoying as hell.
Pardon me, but isn't it that the US Patent and Trademark Office has done incredible damage to the IP system by allowing ridiculous things to be patented? One might go so far as to blame a particular Presidency for forcing the USPTO to become self-sufficient, more or less demolishing its ability to serve the public interest properly.
I believe there's a level 4 spell that he can use: "Detect Humor, 50' radius". Of course, it has an INT requirement of 15, so he might not be eligible.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine it's a matter of pride, just like for most humans, but why is it that no matter *what* the issue that someone's suing them over, the government always insists that it is absolutely right, and could not be wrong? Even the Executive Branch does this, when it's their job to enforce laws, not make them (Congress) or determine their rightness (SCOTUS). I remember seeing a quote from a DEA executive, saying that the DEA was opposed to any weakening of drug laws. Not that he was opposed, the DEA was opposed. Why is the DEA concerned about whether the laws change? Their job is to enforce existing laws, whatever they may be; there is no good reason for them to oppose changes in the law. (Naturally, they oppose any changes in the law that will make them have less power.)
Also, if you are correct, then God is responsible for *everything* -- including the Ebola Zaire virus, Stalin's murder of twenty million of his own citizens, babies who die of genetic diseases, and "Survivor: Thailand."
You keep saying that. Can you prove that God even exists? For all you know, there are infinite alternate universes, each of which has a random set of fundamental values. The universes which happen to be able to support life, due to their combinations of values, are the universes in which life arose, and in which we are here to think about it. That explanation is at least as plausible as God (read: equally unprovable). Since you define "morality" as "having religion," your statement is basically tautological. You may as well have said, "When people lost religion, they lost religion." However, since I consider what I have to be morality, and since I also have no religion, your statement is false. Isn't language a wonderful thing? Actually, men gave us those concepts. They just claimed it was a God, so that people would listen to them.Woo! Linux wins! Yeah! We won! We won!
Ok, we're done here, you guys can turn off Slashdot now. We won! Woo! Yeah! I'm going to have a beer.
(-1, Funny)
We should start using Star Wars names for newly discovered planets. Tatooine! Alderaan! Dagobah! Naboo!
Alternately, we can take a cue from Earth and Beyond, and start naming them after dead astronauts. Planet Grissom! Planet McAuliffe! And so on.
He said 228 gigaBYTES in 5 seconds. 228 gigaBYTES = 1824 gigaBITS. 1824 / 5 = 364.8 gigaBITS/sec (~365).
I would say that "boxen" is a nouveau technical term, specifically referring to multiple computer boxes, rather than box-like things in general. The main reason is that "boxen" is used by people who know that the plural of "box" is "boxes," but as a matter of linguistic playfulness pluralize it the same was that "ox" becomes "oxen." Anyway, I don't think it's wise to use the term "blasphemy" when it comes to language... language is not divinely inspired, it's merely a product of common social agreement ;)
While I can't say whether your Latin is any better than his, the point can (and should) be made that even if the Latin plural of "virus" is "viri" (or "virii" or "sphygmomanometer"), the English plural of "virus" is, and has been for quite a long time, "viruses". Only in a particular online subculture (which is unfortunately spreading) is "viri[i]" considered anything but a sign of undereducation.
It's odd, too; overgeneralizing word construction is a common geek thing to do with language (cf. ox/oxen and box/boxen, or matrix/matrices and Unix/Unices... or my favorite, mongoose/polygoose), so you'd think that "viri" (if not "virii") would be something literate geeks would use in the same was that "boxen" is so often used... yet we decry it. I think the reason is that "virii" is so often seen in company with actual grammatical and spelling errors, not to mention fevered (and poorly-written) arguments that it really is the plural of "virus". As a result, most of us see it as the result of ignorance, rather than linguistic playfulness.
I think I'll write about language in my journal today.
The Liquid TV segment that was always my favorite was The Specialists.... Mastermind, Miss Kitka, and, uh... the bit fat guy whose name eludes me. Sumo or something.
Essentially, the problem is that you cannot accept the nature of fantasy, but instead of understanding that this is a problem with you, you insist that it's a problem with fantasy. Manifestly, the majority of people do not have this problem, which is why I conclude that the problem lies with you. Now I don't insist that you start finding the same value in fantasy literature that I do -- if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it, but don't go around pooh-poohing what other people like to read simply because you don't get it. If you're going to keep this up, you're going to have to come up with some kind of actual logic, rather than just, "I don't like it, therefore it sucks and nobody else should like it."
My question is, how do you know that the intended recipient is getting the key, and not someone else?
The problem with "loser pays" is that it favors the rich. A rich entity can sue a poor entity, and under "loser pays," at worst, the rich entity will have to pay the poor entity's legal bills, which are going to be tiny compared to the large entity's bills. But if a poor entity brings a valid suit against a rich entity, but gets out-lawyered, then the poor entity now has to pay a gigantic amount of money, which it does not have, since it is poor.
A better solution is that the loser only pays if they are the plaintiff (not the defendant), and that the loser is only liable for paying the winner's costs up to the amount spent by the loser. So if I sue Microsoft and lose, and I spend $10k and they spend $2m, I'd only be liable for $10k of their legal costs. But if I win, they don't have to pay my legal costs.
Flipside: If MS sues me, and I win, they'd have to pay up to $2m of my legal cost, but since my legal costs are only $10k, they only pay me $10k. If they sue me, and they win, I don't pay any of their legal costs.
This allows fewer abuses than our current system, but it's still not very good. I'll expound more on this in my journal today, but the point of this post is that we need to look more carefully at all the possibilities for abuse of the legal system (which includes the fact that a large company is more likely to win a lawsuit, just because it is large, and not because it is right).
All of the things you described Apple as being criticized for are the same thing: Keeping the GUI closed. Just thought I'd point this out, since it doesn't strengthen your point any.
Social structures are common among organisms because they, however indirectly, help organisms survive and spread their genes better. Social animals procreate more often, and have healthier offspring, than non-social animals, generally speaking. Obviously there are still plenty of non-social animals, but they are dwarfed in number by social animals.
His point, poorly made, was not that the concept of society is fictional, bur rather that any given social structure is a fiction, existing only in the minds of those involved. A society is not a thing the way a house is a thing. If you have people, and they build a house, and then the people all die, the house still exists. If you have a society of people, and the people all die, the society no longer exists.
If you've ever played Dungeon Siege, you'll be familiar with the occasional sluggish framerate drop when you get near a new area, and the game starts dynamically loading the artwork and terrain resources for that area, giving the game its contiguous feel. Now I understand that SCSI hard drives have the ability to do non-blocking reads and writes, meaning that the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive. If what I think is true, then if I had a SCSI drive and played Dungeon Siege, the sluggishness when it loads new data would not occur, since the game would keep playing while it took a few seconds to load the data in the background.
If this isn't true... then wouldn't it be cool if hard drives could do this? Having games get sluggish every time they have to load new artwork resources from disk is annoying as hell.
Pardon me, but isn't it that the US Patent and Trademark Office has done incredible damage to the IP system by allowing ridiculous things to be patented? One might go so far as to blame a particular Presidency for forcing the USPTO to become self-sufficient, more or less demolishing its ability to serve the public interest properly.
I believe there's a level 4 spell that he can use: "Detect Humor, 50' radius". Of course, it has an INT requirement of 15, so he might not be eligible. :)
Well, Macs do call themselves "addicts," so it's no surprise that amphetamines have become more popular...
Wait, that's tweeking, not tweaking. Nevermind.