First off, it's their store, and it should be their decision to sell or not sell any particular book.
Well, by this logic I could say that Pre WW2 Nazi-affiliated Libraries in Germany were entirely in their right to burn every book they didn't like. Their nation (their leaders were legally elected by their country),their rules. The same happened in Spain during Franco's regime, or with Mussolini in Italy.
You could say that there's a distinction between a Library and a bookstore, but from a social and cultural standpoint Amazon is the modern equivalent of Library of Alexandria. It could be fine from a an economic and commercial perspective (but even in this case it's doubtful, considering that the negative backslash is more perceived directly from their main customer targets), but from an ethical, cultural and social perspective it's way more obscene than anything that could be written in those books.
Excuse my "commie" point of view, but I have little to no regard to the free market "sanctity" when it directly damages culture,even if controversial. It should be a tool to improve society*, not the way around.
*Somebody could argue if such books should be considered "culture" or just morbid rape fantasies that creates more serial rapists, and amazon is doing us a favor by removing them. I'm not a psychoanalyst, and I can't comment on such arguments. But if the same could be said for consumption of videogames, Hip Hop, or "esoteric" literature, then I wonder how I've not yet raped and burned down an entire city.
Actually, you've already done something extremely similar with the 700 billion bailout of 2008 if I'm not mistaken. Even if it wasn't called "bolshevic communism" it wasn't all that different from that, both in ideology and the flawed way it was put in pratice, considering that both the government and the related beneficiaries could have been considered an unofficial oligopoly.
But I'm not US american, so maybe my previous intepretation could be flawed, who knows.
Probably is not the answer you are looking for, but photography puts the same skills (composition, color theory) around most of the same aesthetic concepts, without requiring the same physical requirements on the hand of your friend, especially in case of studio photography, where the camera could be even physically mounted over a tripod.
Nope, it's just faster, if you have the necessary knowledge background. If you miss that and need to learn everything from scratch, it becomes infinitely slower. Especially if it's something that you need to do just once and not that often.
And yes that kind of GUI tool exists, albeit running only on mac os x. it's called Automator, and I would gladly pay to get something like that under Ubuntu.
By the way, if you are doing that kind of operation on more than thousands jpeg files, you would be more confortable by using something like picasa or Adobe Lightroom
Nope. The CDJ series has changed the musical scene for most of the house, trance, dance progressive and minimal genre. But outside of these specific styles, the DJs (Hip-Hop, Techno, Breakbeat, Nu-dance, etc..) mostly prefer to use vinyl based solutions, plus some AKAI sampler. Such setup is still more pratical and gives more freedom for on-the-fly mixing. Or they jump directly to Ableton Live or, in some cases, even Apple Logic.
Frankly I cannot understand the latent schizophrenia in American people between "the government" (like if it were a mythical creature) and themselves.
You are the government.Or, at least, you should be part of it. If the government is, or became oppressive, it's because nobody cared when and oppressive part of the population was free to control the political and executive power. Until every person in the U.S.A. won't understand such concept, the abuse of such power is going to be inevitable.
And in any case, the Second Amendment would be mangled in its meaning to justify the use of a well armed militia ( The Army, of course), against the general rebelling population.
Lots of us think your utter submission to your governments, preference for the safety of lawbreakers over personal self-defense, and general sheeple tendencies aren't admirable either. You've traded freedom for (the perception of) security as is your right, but that only works in certain situations and assumes benign government.
While those of you who are totally comfortable with your government controlling your lives and who live in areas without violent demographic/sectarian/criminal conflict may not care for firearms, they do go a long way to ensure sovereignty over ones own space.
No offence, but the way you talk about your government, like an extraneous and dangerous element of your society, shows a clear lack of participation from the public life (or the inability for the common citizen to actually being relevant in the political dialogue, which is, frankly, a very disturbing possibility) to the extent that your own government seems not much different from the original English monarchs you fought off two hundred years ago. In most of Europe, especially Northern and Germanic Countries people are used to think that they are the government, where the extraneous element would be represented by a monarch, an aristocracy or a social elite. Actually, the fact that most of those countries are constitutional monarchy is seen as a continuous reminder that they could fall back to a monarchy if they stopped being participative to the public life.
I strongly agree that the different geography and political organization of U.S.A. makes owning a weapon a reasonable (and sometimes the only ) defence against both criminal and environmental dangers but, call me naive if you want, the idea that they should be used against "yourselves", that is, your government, makes me think that a different participation to political life would be a better solution than "Get Freedom, forget about politics and social participation for a while, then weed out the new formed tyrants with another revolution."
Well, neither "A Glass of Coke" is actually a recipient made of a sugar-flavoured drink. It's a common grammatical rule called Metonymy, and it's commonly used to exemplify the language to avoid excessive verbosity.
The same could be said about the idea of prepending GNU to Linux, giving to the name the dubious function of being considered somewhat an homage or representation of the intentions of the author. Personally I'm not offended if my friends just call me "Sal" without citing everytime my father's and my grandfather's name like some aristocrat used to think. It would just make every conversation tiring, ad would give an idea of self-importance more annoying than anything else to my speaker.
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.
Nope, despite the actual lawmaker that enacted it openly admitted in pirating movies and songs. Other than that, they made illegal to redistribute or selling music at all (yep, even Creative Commons stuff ) or any multimedia product without applying their own seal first, which you can only obtain by joining them.
Exspecially in case of music, you have to join their (and only legally available in Italy) market, where the earnings follow a very interesting process: basically they get all the revenue, and share the earnings to the various musicians based on a "artist relevance scale", which basically means that the artist that get the most advertising get even the biggest (but still miserable) part of the entire musical sales in Italy.
And it could be just a movie, just a book, just a song. Strangely enough, in such cases nobody argues like they're offended if they aren't treated like assholes who cannot enjoy something only in the most primitive and uninvolved way.
"I mean, what's all the fuss with Apocalypse Now? It's just movie, just enjoy the helicopters blowing up all the place with "The Valkyrie" in background and stay quiet. I mean, it's not even realistic! it's based on a book on a guy lost in the middle of Africa!"
Sarcasm aside, if it's "just a game", why are they even basing it on a real, contemporary conflict? If they aren't trying to use such element in meaningful ways, aren't they just exploiting it?
The fact that you feel a sense of repulsion towards the typical minimalistic style tells that you are able to distinguish it from a different, more analytical representation of the informations, and, given your tastes, you tend to prefer the latter.
As I said before, the approach used in design is somewhat heuristic given that it's impossible to objectively map the brain of your target to give them their perfect product, so the designer's "artistic" sensibility or insight (which is just a more poetic term to express good observing skills for human behaviour) towards different people, cultures and tastes is used to give a rough approximation. (A more objective and inquisitive approach, ala "focus group", rarely gives good result, considering that rarely we clearly admit what we really like.)
Of course, such approach works only for a part of the population that agrees ( consciously or subconsciously ) with the themes that the creator decided to use.
Semiologically speaking, they aren't saying gibberish, they're just talking a different language than you.
PS: Ugh. as you may imagine, these topics are the most boring part of every design course I've attended in my life.
Nope, they cannot clearly distinguish such elements for the same reasons they cannot clearly understand why an application written in Visual Basic 6 ActiveX Cut-And-Paste coding horror runs slower than a properly built application using the right coding methodologies and tools.
Most of the choices used in design, despite being , let's say, more "heuristic", than those applied in programming, require a very formal approach to get the desired results. And it requires the same amount of work, study and commitment to a designer to create a good design that it would require to a developer in order to create a good application.
Frankly, the end user should not feel the need to understand the technical details that make your application "snappier" or a visual work "well formed" (excluding his own curiosity, of course), so it's possible that he ignores the reasons that point him to such conclusions - but he can clearly the difference between a good application and a bug-ridden monstrosity. The same can be said about visual and graphic design, despite the time required to distinguish between a good work and a mediocre work is usually longer than the one required to see that MyApplication.EXE crashes every 20 seconds.
I would note however that the previous government "blew up" due to a possible case of corruption, were a member of the left-wing party was paid to undermine the stability of the government of the time. the very same politician, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemente_Mastella >Clemente Mastella was then appointed by the Berlusconi's Party to the Euro Parliament, basically a tax-paid vacation. (they wouldn't have lasted much more, anyway)
He was then found guilty of corruption due to other cases, but then the terms of the sentence weere made void thanks to a well timed "pardon" law that basically worked out as a "walk out of jail freely" card.
Yeah, I know, it seems some evil plan out from DC comics, but it's the actual political situation of Italy. The only reason because we're not yet in the same condition of Argentina or Greece is due to a really strong presence all over the territory of extremely-specialized, small to medium size enterprises, of which the luxury products (like clothes, exotic cars, etc) are the most known examples.
Unfortunately, the current situation is actively damaging all of them, considering that the government is basically uninterested to their condition, supporting instead much of the big industry, now almost irrelevant on an economic point of view but constantly bailed out due to their, guess again, "connections" to the political parties.
I wrote a brief comment regarding this some time ago. Sorry if I just repost it:
"Lately the italian government has been subject of a much more intense scrutiny from journalists not lined up to the "official truth" and private individuals, due to the reluctance from the main opposition to act (or, more probably, acquiescence to the situation) and the complete subservience of television news services.
This has ended up in some scandals for Berlusconi even more embarrassing than the usual,even for a guy that has been found guilty of Mafia connection with a group that used to liquify the children of their enemies inside vats of acid: Prostitution rings related to the rebuilding of the city of Aquila, Intentional disservices inside Hospitals which refused to give bribes to the Department of Health,the discovery ot the full approval in the past of mafia crimes by some members of the government, you name it.
So lately the main (and basically,the only) italian party has tried to silence such "annoyances that tarnish the image of Italy abroad", as Berlusconi once said, by closing or imposing a strict control to all news services not directly controlled, depriving both the parliament and the magistrature (which, of lately, had taken a more aggressive approach to the situation) of a lot of powers, and lately, a new law that in theory would make illegal any kind of journalistic investigation, any whistleblower revelation, and the publication and achievement of any legally-mandated wirettapping until any investigation is over, basically making a good part of the aforementioned processes a farce.
As you may imagine, I am clearly not impartial to the whole situation, but even the remaining part of the remaining right-wing politicians and industrial groups are more than ashamed with the whole situation. Despite a clear minority of support, the P.D.L.(party of freedom, love the irony) party has used the tactic of saturating the regional election pools with their own representatives, which in turn basically elect the actual government.
Unfortunately, most the population is completely apathetic to situation, as they seems to care only to soccer (most of such laws are being proposed during the world cup, accidentally) and the various local reality shows."
Wait, Are we shocked because third party application do not support DEP and ASLR? Hell, most of them completely ignore even the basics of User Permission Management.
"Do you want to use our software? run it as Administrator!".
And when microsoft starts implementing some resonable security in windows 7, guess what's the common answer to such Problem? "Disable UAC", of course!
My mouse from Thrust wouldn't even detect the multiple buttons on it if UAC isn't turned off....and, of course, if an always-running service written in VB6 that eats 25 mb of ram is active, too (together with the always running punkbuster deamon from some forgotten and long unistalled game, the Adobe Licesing Manager Server, the Ipod management service, and some other shitty "I don't know how to properly hook with the operating system" utility, like using a single application to make the cdrom "eject" button working.
I'm a graphic, and I've no time nor the inclination to deal with such problems, yet I need a machine as much responsive as possible.Personally, I'm fleeing to Mac Os as fast as possible (that is, when Adobe will accept my platform license switching).
Frankly, until the windows software enviroment changes radically, I don't see how somebody would voluntary put himself in such mess.
Yep, a little background is probably needed. Lately the italian government has been subject of a much more intense scrutiny from journalists not lined up to the "official truth" and private individuals, due to the reluctance from the main opposition to act (or, more probably, acquiescence to the situation) and the complete subservience of television news services.
This has ended up in some scandals for Berlusconi even more embarrassing than the usual,even for a guy that has been found guilty of Mafia connection with a group that used to liquify the children of their enemies inside vats of acid: Prostitution rings related to the rebuilding of the city of Aquila, Intentional disservices inside Hospitals which refused to give bribes to the Department of Health,the discovery ot the full approval in the past of mafia crimes by some members of the government, you name it.
So lately the main (and basically,the only) italian party has tried to silence such "annoyances that tarnish the image of Italy abroad", as Berlusconi once said, by closing or imposing a strict control to all news services not directly controlled, depriving both the parliament and the magistrature (which, of lately, had taken a more aggressive approach to the situation) of a lot of powers, and lately, a new law that in theory would make illegal any kind of journalistic investigation, any whistleblower revelation, and the publication and achievement of any legally-mandated wirettapping until any investigation is over, basically making a good part of the aforementioned processes a farce.
As you may imagine, I am clearly not impartial to the whole situation, but even the remaining part of the remaining right-wing politicians and industrial groups are more than ashamed with the whole situation. Despite a clear minority of support, the P.D.L.(party of freedom, love the irony) party has used the tactic of saturating the regional election pools with their own representatives, which in turn basically elect the actual government.
Unfortunately, most the population is completely apathetic to situation, as they seems to care only to soccer (most of such laws are being proposed during the world cup, accidentally) and the various local reality shows.
In entirely subjective terms, a game creator could be politically and philosophically against the use and misuse of his game by the army or some political party or ideology. Creating a game about real world or imaginary conflicts could be both a critique or a propaganda of a specific ideology ( and no, I don't believe them when they say that their game "has no political point of view, really!", nothing is unbiased).
It's nothing not unheard on other mediums, but the lack of strong authorship on videogames makes the problem somewhat worse.A writer could usually dissociate from intepretation given to his own texts by some others, without depriving the opportunity of reinterpret the original work. A videogame writer / game designer usually has to censor himself, or is forced to follow the positions expressed by their producers and publishers.
So if by any chance you are near a gun and these people are unilaterally "authorized" to consider you a threat, then is fine for you to be killed like a cockroach?
This is just a legally ( "legal" of course, for some people living 3.000km far from that ) allowed drive-by shooting, the fact that it happened in Iraq instead of some NY suburbia doesn't make it any different.
Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
It's already happening. See the whole "retro" movement both in music and audiovisual installation arts. More C64 , Apple ][ and Atari 2600 than contemporary units.
Not likely. Studios that publish their video on Hulu will want to have copy deterrence no less effective than what its Flash Player already implements. If anything, Hulu would follow Netflix and switch to Silverlight with DRM. This would work on a hypothetical Zune Pad even if not iPad.
Or just, you know, publish them through the factory-installed iTunes, using the fairplay DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, it's their store, and it should be their decision to sell or not sell any particular book.
Well, by this logic I could say that Pre WW2 Nazi-affiliated Libraries in Germany were entirely in their right to burn every book they didn't like. Their nation (their leaders were legally elected by their country) ,their rules. The same happened in Spain during Franco's regime, or with Mussolini in Italy.
You could say that there's a distinction between a Library and a bookstore, but from a social and cultural standpoint Amazon is the modern equivalent of Library of Alexandria. It could be fine from a an economic and commercial perspective (but even in this case it's doubtful, considering that the negative backslash is more perceived directly from their main customer targets), but from an ethical, cultural and social perspective it's way more obscene than anything that could be written in those books.
Excuse my "commie" point of view, but I have little to no regard to the free market "sanctity" when it directly damages culture,even if controversial. It should be a tool to improve society*, not the way around.
*Somebody could argue if such books should be considered "culture" or just morbid rape fantasies that creates more serial rapists, and amazon is doing us a favor by removing them. I'm not a psychoanalyst, and I can't comment on such arguments. But if the same could be said for consumption of videogames, Hip Hop, or "esoteric" literature, then I wonder how I've not yet raped and burned down an entire city.
I doubt you're going to do too much CAD related work on an ARM netbook running an extremely specialized OS :)
And by the way, I'm sure they' will implement a "toggle" option for the left Shift key.
Actually, you've already done something extremely similar with the 700 billion bailout of 2008 if I'm not mistaken. Even if it wasn't called "bolshevic communism" it wasn't all that different from that, both in ideology and the flawed way it was put in pratice, considering that both the government and the related beneficiaries could have been considered an unofficial oligopoly.
But I'm not US american, so maybe my previous intepretation could be flawed, who knows.
I say, try photography for creative expression?
Probably is not the answer you are looking for, but photography puts the same skills (composition, color theory) around most of the same aesthetic concepts, without requiring the same physical requirements on the hand of your friend, especially in case of studio photography, where the camera could be even physically mounted over a tripod.
The CLI is much easier for some tasks.
Nope, it's just faster, if you have the necessary knowledge background. If you miss that and need to learn everything from scratch, it becomes infinitely slower. Especially if it's something that you need to do just once and not that often.
And yes that kind of GUI tool exists, albeit running only on mac os x. it's called Automator, and I would gladly pay to get something like that under Ubuntu.
By the way, if you are doing that kind of operation on more than thousands jpeg files, you would be more confortable by using something like picasa or Adobe Lightroom
It's commonly done with multimedia programming languages for audiovisual generation. See tools like puredata, Max/Msp, or vvvv
Nope. The CDJ series has changed the musical scene for most of the house, trance, dance progressive and minimal genre. But outside of these specific styles, the DJs (Hip-Hop, Techno, Breakbeat, Nu-dance, etc..) mostly prefer to use vinyl based solutions, plus some AKAI sampler. Such setup is still more pratical and gives more freedom for on-the-fly mixing. Or they jump directly to Ableton Live or, in some cases, even Apple Logic.
Frankly I cannot understand the latent schizophrenia in American people between "the government" (like if it were a mythical creature) and themselves.
You are the government.Or, at least, you should be part of it. If the government is, or became oppressive, it's because nobody cared when and oppressive part of the population was free to control the political and executive power. Until every person in the U.S.A. won't understand such concept, the abuse of such power is going to be inevitable.
And in any case, the Second Amendment would be mangled in its meaning to justify the use of a well armed militia ( The Army, of course), against the general rebelling population.
Lots of us think your utter submission to your governments, preference for the safety of lawbreakers over personal self-defense, and general sheeple tendencies aren't admirable either. You've traded freedom for (the perception of) security as is your right, but that only works in certain situations and assumes benign government.
While those of you who are totally comfortable with your government controlling your lives and who live in areas without violent demographic/sectarian/criminal conflict may not care for firearms, they do go a long way to ensure sovereignty over ones own space.
No offence, but the way you talk about your government, like an extraneous and dangerous element of your society, shows a clear lack of participation from the public life (or the inability for the common citizen to actually being relevant in the political dialogue, which is, frankly, a very disturbing possibility) to the extent that your own government seems not much different from the original English monarchs you fought off two hundred years ago. In most of Europe, especially Northern and Germanic Countries people are used to think that they are the government, where the extraneous element would be represented by a monarch, an aristocracy or a social elite. Actually, the fact that most of those countries are constitutional monarchy is seen as a continuous reminder that they could fall back to a monarchy if they stopped being participative to the public life.
I strongly agree that the different geography and political organization of U.S.A. makes owning a weapon a reasonable (and sometimes the only ) defence against both criminal and environmental dangers but, call me naive if you want, the idea that they should be used against "yourselves", that is, your government, makes me think that a different participation to political life would be a better solution than "Get Freedom, forget about politics and social participation for a while, then weed out the new formed tyrants with another revolution."
Well, neither "A Glass of Coke" is actually a recipient made of a sugar-flavoured drink. It's a common grammatical rule called Metonymy, and it's commonly used to exemplify the language to avoid excessive verbosity.
The same could be said about the idea of prepending GNU to Linux, giving to the name the dubious function of being considered somewhat an homage or representation of the intentions of the author. Personally I'm not offended if my friends just call me "Sal" without citing everytime my father's and my grandfather's name like some aristocrat used to think. It would just make every conversation tiring, ad would give an idea of self-importance more annoying than anything else to my speaker.
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.
Nope, despite the actual lawmaker that enacted it openly admitted in pirating movies and songs. Other than that, they made illegal to redistribute or selling music at all (yep, even Creative Commons stuff ) or any multimedia product without applying their own seal first, which you can only obtain by joining them.
Exspecially in case of music, you have to join their (and only legally available in Italy) market, where the earnings follow a very interesting process: basically they get all the revenue, and share the earnings to the various musicians based on a "artist relevance scale", which basically means that the artist that get the most advertising get even the biggest (but still miserable) part of the entire musical sales in Italy.
That's one of the best outcomes.
If they are into djing, you could become a Lady Gaga Remix.
And it could be just a movie, just a book, just a song. Strangely enough, in such cases nobody argues like they're offended if they aren't treated like assholes who cannot enjoy something only in the most primitive and uninvolved way.
"I mean, what's all the fuss with Apocalypse Now? It's just movie, just enjoy the helicopters blowing up all the place with "The Valkyrie" in background and stay quiet. I mean, it's not even realistic! it's based on a book on a guy lost in the middle of Africa!"
Sarcasm aside, if it's "just a game", why are they even basing it on a real, contemporary conflict? If they aren't trying to use such element in meaningful ways, aren't they just exploiting it?
The fact that you feel a sense of repulsion towards the typical minimalistic style tells that you are able to distinguish it from a different, more analytical representation of the informations, and, given your tastes, you tend to prefer the latter.
As I said before, the approach used in design is somewhat heuristic given that it's impossible to objectively map the brain of your target to give them their perfect product, so the designer's "artistic" sensibility or insight (which is just a more poetic term to express good observing skills for human behaviour) towards different people, cultures and tastes is used to give a rough approximation. (A more objective and inquisitive approach, ala "focus group", rarely gives good result, considering that rarely we clearly admit what we really like.)
Of course, such approach works only for a part of the population that agrees ( consciously or subconsciously ) with the themes that the creator decided to use.
Semiologically speaking, they aren't saying gibberish, they're just talking a different language than you.
PS: Ugh. as you may imagine, these topics are the most boring part of every design course I've attended in my life.
Nope, they cannot clearly distinguish such elements for the same reasons they cannot clearly understand why an application written in Visual Basic 6 ActiveX Cut-And-Paste coding horror runs slower than a properly built application using the right coding methodologies and tools.
Most of the choices used in design, despite being , let's say, more "heuristic", than those applied in programming, require a very formal approach to get the desired results. And it requires the same amount of work, study and commitment to a designer to create a good design that it would require to a developer in order to create a good application.
Frankly, the end user should not feel the need to understand the technical details that make your application "snappier" or a visual work "well formed" (excluding his own curiosity, of course), so it's possible that he ignores the reasons that point him to such conclusions - but he can clearly the difference between a good application and a bug-ridden monstrosity. The same can be said about visual and graphic design, despite the time required to distinguish between a good work and a mediocre work is usually longer than the one required to see that MyApplication.EXE crashes every 20 seconds.
I would note however that the previous government "blew up" due to a possible case of corruption, were a member of the left-wing party was paid to undermine the stability of the government of the time. the very same politician, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemente_Mastella >Clemente Mastella was then appointed by the Berlusconi's Party to the Euro Parliament, basically a tax-paid vacation. (they wouldn't have lasted much more, anyway)
He was then found guilty of corruption due to other cases, but then the terms of the sentence weere made void thanks to a well timed "pardon" law that basically worked out as a "walk out of jail freely" card.
Yeah, I know, it seems some evil plan out from DC comics, but it's the actual political situation of Italy. The only reason because we're not yet in the same condition of Argentina or Greece is due to a really strong presence all over the territory of extremely-specialized, small to medium size enterprises, of which the luxury products (like clothes, exotic cars, etc) are the most known examples.
Unfortunately, the current situation is actively damaging all of them, considering that the government is basically uninterested to their condition, supporting instead much of the big industry, now almost irrelevant on an economic point of view but constantly bailed out due to their, guess again, "connections" to the political parties.
I wrote a brief comment regarding this some time ago. Sorry if I just repost it:
"Lately the italian government has been subject of a much more intense scrutiny from journalists not lined up to the "official truth" and private individuals, due to the reluctance from the main opposition to act (or, more probably, acquiescence to the situation) and the complete subservience of television news services.
This has ended up in some scandals for Berlusconi even more embarrassing than the usual,even for a guy that has been found guilty of Mafia connection with a group that used to liquify the children of their enemies inside vats of acid: Prostitution rings related to the rebuilding of the city of Aquila, Intentional disservices inside Hospitals which refused to give bribes to the Department of Health,the discovery ot the full approval in the past of mafia crimes by some members of the government, you name it.
So lately the main (and basically,the only) italian party has tried to silence such "annoyances that tarnish the image of Italy abroad", as Berlusconi once said, by closing or imposing a strict control to all news services not directly controlled, depriving both the parliament and the magistrature (which, of lately, had taken a more aggressive approach to the situation) of a lot of powers, and lately, a new law that in theory would make illegal any kind of journalistic investigation, any whistleblower revelation, and the publication and achievement of any legally-mandated wirettapping until any investigation is over, basically making a good part of the aforementioned processes a farce.
As you may imagine, I am clearly not impartial to the whole situation, but even the remaining part of the remaining right-wing politicians and industrial groups are more than ashamed with the whole situation. Despite a clear minority of support, the P.D.L.(party of freedom, love the irony) party has used the tactic of saturating the regional election pools with their own representatives, which in turn basically elect the actual government.
Unfortunately, most the population is completely apathetic to situation, as they seems to care only to soccer (most of such laws are being proposed during the world cup, accidentally) and the various local reality shows."
Wait, Are we shocked because third party application do not support DEP and ASLR? Hell, most of them completely ignore even the basics of User Permission Management.
"Do you want to use our software? run it as Administrator!".
And when microsoft starts implementing some resonable security in windows 7, guess what's the common answer to such Problem? "Disable UAC", of course!
My mouse from Thrust wouldn't even detect the multiple buttons on it if UAC isn't turned off....and, of course, if an always-running service written in VB6 that eats 25 mb of ram is active, too (together with the always running punkbuster deamon from some forgotten and long unistalled game, the Adobe Licesing Manager Server, the Ipod management service, and some other shitty "I don't know how to properly hook with the operating system" utility, like using a single application to make the cdrom "eject" button working.
I'm a graphic, and I've no time nor the inclination to deal with such problems, yet I need a machine as much responsive as possible.Personally, I'm fleeing to Mac Os as fast as possible (that is, when Adobe will accept my platform license switching).
Frankly, until the windows software enviroment changes radically, I don't see how somebody would voluntary put himself in such mess.
Yep, a little background is probably needed. Lately the italian government has been subject of a much more intense scrutiny from journalists not lined up to the "official truth" and private individuals, due to the reluctance from the main opposition to act (or, more probably, acquiescence to the situation) and the complete subservience of television news services.
This has ended up in some scandals for Berlusconi even more embarrassing than the usual,even for a guy that has been found guilty of Mafia connection with a group that used to liquify the children of their enemies inside vats of acid: Prostitution rings related to the rebuilding of the city of Aquila, Intentional disservices inside Hospitals which refused to give bribes to the Department of Health,the discovery ot the full approval in the past of mafia crimes by some members of the government, you name it.
So lately the main (and basically,the only) italian party has tried to silence such "annoyances that tarnish the image of Italy abroad", as Berlusconi once said, by closing or imposing a strict control to all news services not directly controlled, depriving both the parliament and the magistrature (which, of lately, had taken a more aggressive approach to the situation) of a lot of powers, and lately, a new law that in theory would make illegal any kind of journalistic investigation, any whistleblower revelation, and the publication and achievement of any legally-mandated wirettapping until any investigation is over, basically making a good part of the aforementioned processes a farce.
As you may imagine, I am clearly not impartial to the whole situation, but even the remaining part of the remaining right-wing politicians and industrial groups are more than ashamed with the whole situation. Despite a clear minority of support, the P.D.L.(party of freedom, love the irony) party has used the tactic of saturating the regional election pools with their own representatives, which in turn basically elect the actual government.
Unfortunately, most the population is completely apathetic to situation, as they seems to care only to soccer (most of such laws are being proposed during the world cup, accidentally) and the various local reality shows.
In entirely subjective terms, a game creator could be politically and philosophically against the use and misuse of his game by the army or some political party or ideology. Creating a game about real world or imaginary conflicts could be both a critique or a propaganda of a specific ideology ( and no, I don't believe them when they say that their game "has no political point of view, really!", nothing is unbiased).
See for example the case of Ed Rotberg and the "battlezone bradley training".
It's nothing not unheard on other mediums, but the lack of strong authorship on videogames makes the problem somewhat worse.A writer could usually dissociate from intepretation given to his own texts by some others, without depriving the opportunity of reinterpret the original work. A videogame writer / game designer usually has to censor himself, or is forced to follow the positions expressed by their producers and publishers.
So if by any chance you are near a gun and these people are unilaterally "authorized" to consider you a threat, then is fine for you to be killed like a cockroach?
This is just a legally ( "legal" of course, for some people living 3.000km far from that ) allowed drive-by shooting, the fact that it happened in Iraq instead of some NY suburbia doesn't make it any different.
Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
It's already happening. See the whole "retro" movement both in music and audiovisual installation arts. More C64 , Apple ][ and Atari 2600 than contemporary units.
Not likely. Studios that publish their video on Hulu will want to have copy deterrence no less effective than what its Flash Player already implements. If anything, Hulu would follow Netflix and switch to Silverlight with DRM. This would work on a hypothetical Zune Pad even if not iPad.
Or just, you know, publish them through the factory-installed iTunes, using the fairplay DRM.