Indeed. I had an extensive book collection at age 20, but I was the only one I knew that did (I turned 20 in 1972).
However, books were no more expensive then than now, even accounting for inflation. From Gutenberg to the digital age, publishing didn't change much at all.
I have 40 year old paperbacks with 95c printed on the cover. Fifty years before that there were "dime novels".
Also, I'd like to point out that most of what the average person would read probably wouldn't be considered quality literature anyway
I'm reminded of a line from Star Trek IV. It's hard to define "quality literature" until it's a few generations old. Yes, some hackwork can be dismissed readily, and some writers stand out as great writers (e.g., Stephen King, he writes so well I can't read his stuff any more, it's just way too creepy) but art is way too subjective to determine withoput the benefit of time and history.
In an art history course I took, the instructor took a week showing slides of the stuff that was hanging in the galleries when the impressionists and post-impressionists were painting. It was all dreck, hackwork. Meanwhile, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother, to repay a tiny debt he owed the brother.
Movies are far inferior to books if you're a hyperlex. When I read a book by a good author I don't see the words at all, I see the characters, hear them speak, see the scenery, smell the smells, etc. I'm there.
Your remark about "One book can tell as many stories as many readers it has" is quite true. When I wrote the Paxil Diaries a few years back, most of the people in the stories didn't realize I was mcgrew and they were the people in the stories, even though they were avid fans and the stories were about them and their actions, and even used their names. Even Levi (and how many Levis have you known?), who turned out to be a rabid fan and whose band was featured in the stories, didn't realise that it was him in the stories!
It's jnot just your generation; from what I've seen, literates (as opposed to aliterates, not illiterates) have always beeen rare. Most people , if they read anything at all it's a newspaper, the National Enquirer, or People magazine.
Books won't go extinct as long as ebooks are tied to a single sales outlet (e.g., kindle and Amazon, BN and Nook), have DRM, and are subject to deletion or change by the seller. People like to buy things, not rent them.
And without paper books, how would the public library survive? It would be a terrible tragedy if public libraries died.
Yes, I've read that the accounts of the suicides were vastly overblown, but there were, of course, a few. Can't hit your link as it's firewalled off here, but I'll have a look tonight.
Springfield. IL's electric company is owned and operated by the city. We have the lowest rates, the best customer service, and the most reliable power in the state, while CWLP turns a profit that keeps taxes down. The reason? Utilities are natural monopolies. Amerin customers can't just go to a different electric store to buy their electricity, so its customers have to grin an bear their rates, power outages, and terrible customer service. If service gets bad in Springfield, the Mayor loses his job.
All natural monopolies ahould be run by local governments. I wish CWLP supplied natural gas (I have to endure Amerin for my gas), cable, and internet services.
There's nothing wrong and quite a bit good about capitalism. but there's nothing whatever good about unbridled capitalism. Capitalism requires regulation -- if there is law, nobody should be above it. Everything about monopolies is bad. Having a monopoly, especially an unregulated monopoly, and even more so an unregulated monopoly on essential goods is downright evil.
Now to ask you the exact same question -- why is socialism such a dirty word around here? It seems to me that a socially responsible libertarianism would be the best social policy of all. Stealing should not be legal, but some corporations seem to have a license to not only steal, but to kill. Remember the mine "accident" last year when not following regulations caused an explosion that killed (I'd day "murdered") two dozen men? Why wasn't anyone imprisoned for negligent homicide? My guess is because "money talks".
My grandfather went down a four story elevator shaft carrying two hundred pound sacks of animal feed because Purina was too cheap to put doors on the elevator, so don't tell ME regulations are bad.
I've been reading The Mobs and the Mafia: the Illustrated History of Organized Crime by Hank Messic and Burt Goldblatt (1972, ISBN 0-88365-211-0) and was struck by a passage:
... in the three years after the [stock market] crash... those businessmen who didn't kill themselves turned by the thousands to the only men with money and credit -- the gangsters.
It goes on to describe how legitimate business was in debt to the mob, and how politicians were beholden to businessmen for their campaigns. I think that pretty much explains why government goes after file sharers while ignoring spammers, fraudsters, and identity thieves. Our governments, federal, state, and local, are corrupt to the core. The "MAFIAA" really is the Mafia.
I assumed it was a tech company, but it isn't about the tech itself, it's about business and politics and would be the same if it was a diaper manufacturing company. Interesting to political junkies and MBAs. Just my opinion and not really germane to the topic so I modded myself down with the "no bonus" boxes (as with this comment). If I'd seen it before it was posted I'd have voted against it. But thank you for your reply.
Just in case someone else with mod points mods the parent up without clicking the link (No one has yet, it;s at -1 already), it looks like spam to me -- a music video that has nothing to do with the topic.
I'm checking the "no bonus" boxes, so if my comment is rated over 0, please mod it down so nobody's time will be wasted on it or the parent.
How is this in any way "news for nerds"? It isn't about science or technology, the internet, cell phones, computers, or anything else a nerd could relate to. How did this story make the front page????
I ran across this comment while metamoderating. I don't know about Firefox, but at work I'm forced to use IE6 (I'm on FF on kubuntu right now). With a dozen slashdot windows open it uses a few hundred megs of swap apace, if Windows' task manager can be trusted, but a dozen Yahoo news windows and the graph shoots up way past two gigs.
BYW, is there a similar Linux program? I'd like to see how the computer I'm using now looks, but there aren't any MS products here at home.
Considering that we are exposed to far more mutagens than our ancestors, from chemical mutagens to radiation (x-ray machines, atom bomb tests, airline travel) I'd say there are a lot more mutations than 19thy century and previous people. That said, there's no way of knowing whether my daughter being born with only one kidney is the result of my riding my motorcycle through what were later deemed "superfund sites" in my youth, or a stray neutron passing through one of my or my ex-wife's ancestors' balls.
Well, we are talking about statistics here. You may have no mutations at all, unlikely as that may seem, while my daughters probably have far more than 60 each since I was exposed to a lot of mutagens in my youth.
I was bored in school because everything they tried to teach I'd already read. I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter like that. College was different, though, I actually learned in college.
Sure it is, but it's a crap shoot with huge dice with billions of faces, some of which can spontaneously change the number of spots (mutation).
I actually was as surprised as the researchers that there weren't more mutations, considering all the mutagens in the environment, from chemicals to solar radiation.
Not always. Recessive genes are passed on but don't express themselves. If you have one gene for blue eyes and one for brown eyes your eyes will be brown. Two brown eyed people can produce a blue eyed child, since each parent could carry one blue and one brown. If both your parents have blue eyes and you have brown eyes, your father is not your biological father.
Gene selection doesn't cause evolution, except when a genome dies out. Evolution is caused by a beneficial mutation. Humans didn't get their big brains from a random shuffling of genes, there was a mutation in one or probably more pre-humans that made staying alive and reproducing more likely.
Look at it this way -- if your mother has two genes for normal sized genitalia and your biological father has genes for small genitalia, the only way you;ll have a twelve inch dick is a genetic mutation. You can't mix salt and water and get chlorine.
You guys referring to a "selfish gene" are thinking in binary when chemistry is analog. Rather than "selfish or empathy" and the lack of it vary as widely as intelligence or hair color. It isn't on/off. Even the "rules" we so often hear about aren't cut and dried. My ex-wife's mother had brown eyes, her dad blue eyes, hers was brown. Your eyes are blue if you get one blue gene from each parent, brown if one parent passes the brown gene. My ex-wife had a blue eyed father and a brown eyed mother. My eyes are hazel, and my daughters tell me that they could always tell what mood I was in by the color of my eyes. My oldest daughter has the deep blue eyes of my grandmother, while my youngest daughter has her mother's brown eyes -- with a twist. Her eyes change color with her mood, turning a scary looking almost red when she's angry. So apparently the recessive gene from me didn't receed completely.
Biochemistry is far more complex than computer programming.
I think where your analogy falls down is that all genetic mutations are coding errors, whether beneficial or not. It would be more like a computer bug caused by a typo in the programmer's code that made the program calculate faster. I don't, however, remember ever personally running across a bug like this in my own code...
The answer is simple. A recent study (did I see it here?) showed that bible literalists and athiests have smaller hippocampuses than agnostics, protestants, and Catholics. There's no point in arguing with someone who has a shrunken hippocampus.
Unless God has evidenced himself to you, the only logical choice is agnosticism, since there can be no proof one way or the other. Keep in mind that once you've seen an elephant you can't disbelieve elephants existance. "You're crazy, you just hallucinated that elephant! Was it pink?"
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I see no evidence of that whatever. WalMart has shelves and shelves of CDs, and there are a lot of video rental stores.
Indeed. I had an extensive book collection at age 20, but I was the only one I knew that did (I turned 20 in 1972).
However, books were no more expensive then than now, even accounting for inflation. From Gutenberg to the digital age, publishing didn't change much at all.
I have 40 year old paperbacks with 95c printed on the cover. Fifty years before that there were "dime novels".
Also, I'd like to point out that most of what the average person would read probably wouldn't be considered quality literature anyway
I'm reminded of a line from Star Trek IV. It's hard to define "quality literature" until it's a few generations old. Yes, some hackwork can be dismissed readily, and some writers stand out as great writers (e.g., Stephen King, he writes so well I can't read his stuff any more, it's just way too creepy) but art is way too subjective to determine withoput the benefit of time and history.
In an art history course I took, the instructor took a week showing slides of the stuff that was hanging in the galleries when the impressionists and post-impressionists were painting. It was all dreck, hackwork. Meanwhile, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother, to repay a tiny debt he owed the brother.
Movies are far inferior to books if you're a hyperlex. When I read a book by a good author I don't see the words at all, I see the characters, hear them speak, see the scenery, smell the smells, etc. I'm there.
Your remark about "One book can tell as many stories as many readers it has" is quite true. When I wrote the Paxil Diaries a few years back, most of the people in the stories didn't realize I was mcgrew and they were the people in the stories, even though they were avid fans and the stories were about them and their actions, and even used their names. Even Levi (and how many Levis have you known?), who turned out to be a rabid fan and whose band was featured in the stories, didn't realise that it was him in the stories!
It's jnot just your generation; from what I've seen, literates (as opposed to aliterates, not illiterates) have always beeen rare. Most people , if they read anything at all it's a newspaper, the National Enquirer, or People magazine.
Books won't go extinct as long as ebooks are tied to a single sales outlet (e.g., kindle and Amazon, BN and Nook), have DRM, and are subject to deletion or change by the seller. People like to buy things, not rent them.
And without paper books, how would the public library survive? It would be a terrible tragedy if public libraries died.
Yes, I've read that the accounts of the suicides were vastly overblown, but there were, of course, a few. Can't hit your link as it's firewalled off here, but I'll have a look tonight.
Springfield. IL's electric company is owned and operated by the city. We have the lowest rates, the best customer service, and the most reliable power in the state, while CWLP turns a profit that keeps taxes down. The reason? Utilities are natural monopolies. Amerin customers can't just go to a different electric store to buy their electricity, so its customers have to grin an bear their rates, power outages, and terrible customer service. If service gets bad in Springfield, the Mayor loses his job.
All natural monopolies ahould be run by local governments. I wish CWLP supplied natural gas (I have to endure Amerin for my gas), cable, and internet services.
There's nothing wrong and quite a bit good about capitalism. but there's nothing whatever good about unbridled capitalism. Capitalism requires regulation -- if there is law, nobody should be above it. Everything about monopolies is bad. Having a monopoly, especially an unregulated monopoly, and even more so an unregulated monopoly on essential goods is downright evil.
Now to ask you the exact same question -- why is socialism such a dirty word around here? It seems to me that a socially responsible libertarianism would be the best social policy of all. Stealing should not be legal, but some corporations seem to have a license to not only steal, but to kill. Remember the mine "accident" last year when not following regulations caused an explosion that killed (I'd day "murdered") two dozen men? Why wasn't anyone imprisoned for negligent homicide? My guess is because "money talks".
My grandfather went down a four story elevator shaft carrying two hundred pound sacks of animal feed because Purina was too cheap to put doors on the elevator, so don't tell ME regulations are bad.
I've been reading The Mobs and the Mafia: the Illustrated History of Organized Crime by Hank Messic and Burt Goldblatt (1972, ISBN 0-88365-211-0) and was struck by a passage:
It goes on to describe how legitimate business was in debt to the mob, and how politicians were beholden to businessmen for their campaigns. I think that pretty much explains why government goes after file sharers while ignoring spammers, fraudsters, and identity thieves. Our governments, federal, state, and local, are corrupt to the core. The "MAFIAA" really is the Mafia.
I assumed it was a tech company, but it isn't about the tech itself, it's about business and politics and would be the same if it was a diaper manufacturing company. Interesting to political junkies and MBAs. Just my opinion and not really germane to the topic so I modded myself down with the "no bonus" boxes (as with this comment). If I'd seen it before it was posted I'd have voted against it. But thank you for your reply.
Just in case someone else with mod points mods the parent up without clicking the link (No one has yet, it;s at -1 already), it looks like spam to me -- a music video that has nothing to do with the topic.
I'm checking the "no bonus" boxes, so if my comment is rated over 0, please mod it down so nobody's time will be wasted on it or the parent.
How is this in any way "news for nerds"? It isn't about science or technology, the internet, cell phones, computers, or anything else a nerd could relate to. How did this story make the front page????
Part of the problem is science majors teaching math and math majors teaching literature.
I ran across this comment while metamoderating. I don't know about Firefox, but at work I'm forced to use IE6 (I'm on FF on kubuntu right now). With a dozen slashdot windows open it uses a few hundred megs of swap apace, if Windows' task manager can be trusted, but a dozen Yahoo news windows and the graph shoots up way past two gigs.
BYW, is there a similar Linux program? I'd like to see how the computer I'm using now looks, but there aren't any MS products here at home.
Contributed or attributed? ')
Considering that we are exposed to far more mutagens than our ancestors, from chemical mutagens to radiation (x-ray machines, atom bomb tests, airline travel) I'd say there are a lot more mutations than 19thy century and previous people. That said, there's no way of knowing whether my daughter being born with only one kidney is the result of my riding my motorcycle through what were later deemed "superfund sites" in my youth, or a stray neutron passing through one of my or my ex-wife's ancestors' balls.
Well, we are talking about statistics here. You may have no mutations at all, unlikely as that may seem, while my daughters probably have far more than 60 each since I was exposed to a lot of mutagens in my youth.
Note that my submission was completely changed; the only thing that stayed the same was the link.
I was bored in school because everything they tried to teach I'd already read. I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter like that. College was different, though, I actually learned in college.
That's what I come to /. for. Well, that and the nerdy jokes.
Sure it is, but it's a crap shoot with huge dice with billions of faces, some of which can spontaneously change the number of spots (mutation).
I actually was as surprised as the researchers that there weren't more mutations, considering all the mutagens in the environment, from chemicals to solar radiation.
Not always. Recessive genes are passed on but don't express themselves. If you have one gene for blue eyes and one for brown eyes your eyes will be brown. Two brown eyed people can produce a blue eyed child, since each parent could carry one blue and one brown. If both your parents have blue eyes and you have brown eyes, your father is not your biological father.
Gene selection doesn't cause evolution, except when a genome dies out. Evolution is caused by a beneficial mutation. Humans didn't get their big brains from a random shuffling of genes, there was a mutation in one or probably more pre-humans that made staying alive and reproducing more likely.
Look at it this way -- if your mother has two genes for normal sized genitalia and your biological father has genes for small genitalia, the only way you;ll have a twelve inch dick is a genetic mutation. You can't mix salt and water and get chlorine.
You guys referring to a "selfish gene" are thinking in binary when chemistry is analog. Rather than "selfish or empathy" and the lack of it vary as widely as intelligence or hair color. It isn't on/off. Even the "rules" we so often hear about aren't cut and dried. My ex-wife's mother had brown eyes, her dad blue eyes, hers was brown. Your eyes are blue if you get one blue gene from each parent, brown if one parent passes the brown gene. My ex-wife had a blue eyed father and a brown eyed mother. My eyes are hazel, and my daughters tell me that they could always tell what mood I was in by the color of my eyes. My oldest daughter has the deep blue eyes of my grandmother, while my youngest daughter has her mother's brown eyes -- with a twist. Her eyes change color with her mood, turning a scary looking almost red when she's angry. So apparently the recessive gene from me didn't receed completely.
Biochemistry is far more complex than computer programming.
I think where your analogy falls down is that all genetic mutations are coding errors, whether beneficial or not. It would be more like a computer bug caused by a typo in the programmer's code that made the program calculate faster. I don't, however, remember ever personally running across a bug like this in my own code...
The answer is simple. A recent study (did I see it here?) showed that bible literalists and athiests have smaller hippocampuses than agnostics, protestants, and Catholics. There's no point in arguing with someone who has a shrunken hippocampus.
Unless God has evidenced himself to you, the only logical choice is agnosticism, since there can be no proof one way or the other. Keep in mind that once you've seen an elephant you can't disbelieve elephants existance. "You're crazy, you just hallucinated that elephant! Was it pink?"