btw, if you want to check it out, trillian still has the "invisible list" functionality from icq. and it also lets you keep the icon flashing in your systray instead of popping up (in all protocols, so you can treat AIM users like ICQ users). and has floating users. doesn't have user-by-user status, though. *sigh* nothing's perfect.
the same thing happened in philadelphia. our mayor took his whole entourage and went and had dinner in chinatown too, and after that, things more or less seemed to calm down, at least in the media.
although a few weeks ago, my husband (who is vietnamese) was approached by a black woman and told that she "didn't want to seem prejudiced, but it was [his] people who brought SARS over here." so i'm not entirely convinced things have backed off in public opinion.
>Your government doesn't have a free e-filing service?
we do. this year i got blanketed by junkmail from the IRS telling me to "use e-file!" i assume turbotax is just preying on the ignorant or fearful ("i can't trust myself or my own computer, so i should trust a corporation's since they're sure to be secure").
*grins* it's a pity neither of us have email addresses public.
i think that postmodernism, if taken to its logical extreme, would become a form of nihilism. a 'practical postmodernist,' if you will, must at least admit to the existence of a physical world. we can't forget postmodernism itself started as a reaction to the absolutes set out in modernism. so the whole philosophy was birthed on a reference point.
i'm going to agree with your parenthesis there, that postmodernism did not originally eschew the concept of connections. it may even depend who you talk to; some maintain that postmodernism finds meaning only in the connections and transgressions and not in their surrounding causes. if i remember correctly, it doesn't say that there are no connections, it rather maintains that there are connections, even between those things that we consider to be fundamentally opposed (male and female, for instance).
to extend that to computer science, it's not the 1s and 0s that matter, it's how they interact, the catalyst that they become. if a po-mo programmer can accept a binary basis of reality for the computer, then he can, as you pointed out earlier, work from within the structure.
it's been a long time since i've thought about this. my brain hurts:)
reading your comment, i almost feel as though we're talking at cross purposes here (and getting further and further off-topic as we do:) as far as i understood it, and admittedly i've been out of the academic loop for a while, but po-mo and especially deconstructionism, rather than criticising/within/ context were trying to/destroy/ context. i believe part of derrida's point was essentially that when you deconstruct something, you destroy it.
and you're right; you can't deconstruct a computer's binary nature any more than you can deconstruct female circumcision. it's something that/happens/. you could, however, deconstruct the/reasons/ for female circumcision. and you could deconstruct the/concept/ of the one and the zero. i'm not sure it would do you any good, really, but you could if you wanted to.
and even though the computer must rely on its 1-0 binary nature, the computer scientist need not leave his thinking shackled to that construct, especially as programming languages get higher and higher level. going way offtopic, one could almost speculate that a programmer's choice of language reveals how he looks at the world in general. almost:)
I've tried my hand at reading Foucault/Derrida/Barthes/etc., and their secondary sources. It's exceptionally difficult, but not in the way that, say, a complex algorithm is difficult. It's difficult in the way religious texts, or David Lynch movies are difficult; i.e., the difficulty is a smokescreen to keep the reader from catching on that this is all a bunch of bullshit.
postmodernism is not the butchering of the language that you attribute to undergraduate papers. postmodernism is rather a way of looking at the world that says, "there is no one way of looking at things. shades of grey exist. there are in-between stages to life." early theorists, especially foucault and saussure were in fact attempting to use language to describe a new use for language. coupled with the fact that we all read them in translation, and yes, they're very difficult. derrida, for instance, is opaque in english, but actually makes sense in french.
a previous poster pointed out that postmodernism does indeed have its roots in art and cultural criticism. what it really is is a framework for thinking about those things. arguing that gender is a masculinist plot is/not/ postmodern, unless the writer uses a postmodern methodology to support his/her arguments. a good academic, and someone who really understands po-mo would not wink and promise to take another author seriously. a true po-mo critic would feel no problem with calling someone else on their bullshit. postmodern criticism opened up the academic world to the possibility of/not having to take each other seriously/.
i dunno, maybe it's just the fact that i slogged through an undergraduate arts degree, but as far as i can see, there is absolutely no reason postmodernist thinking cannot be applied to computer science. it exists in and affects our culture, therefore it can be interpreted in po-mo ways.
We have not had an "official decralaration of war" since 1941. Yet thousands of military people have died in some things that look and smell curiously like wars.
nar. the gulf war ("operation desert storm") was decreed by a formal congressional Act of War. i remember the headlines:)
actually, the concept of a postal service is very old. even the sumerians had runners to messages to people. the messages were baked on clay tablets and put in an "envelope" addressed to the recipient. trying to get information from one person to another has always been a priority in civilization.
did our lifestyle become more mobile, and the phones followed, or was it the other way around? who cares, really. what exists right now is a society where the best and most convenient way of getting information to one person from another is the mobile phone. we've simply replaced the message runners and scribes.
In the entire life of the Playstation, Enix only managed one new Dragon Quest release. It's taking them 3-4 years between them while other rpg companies are cranking out almost one per year and still maintaining high quality. Sure they don't individually sell as much as a DQ game, but I'm sure Square is very happy with their total sales of FF7-9.
hang on there, honey. i don't know a single RPGamer that would categorize FF7 or 8 as "high quality." and don't even get us started about the travesties that were the PC ports. DQ games take a while to develop and sell more individually because they are a different (and, many argue, better) style from, to continue your example, Square's more recent FF games.
N.B. for the purposes of this post, a RPGamer is assumed to be someone who mostly plays and has played RPGs and plays them for enjoyment of the true role-playing aspect. the ones who whine about how fighting for stats in a fantasy world does not a RPG make.
Yeah, I remember that too, and I am trying to remember the details. It was 1999 I think (maybe 1998?). I do remember that Slashdot, Freshmeat and Segfault all got together and posted something that coroborated each other, but I am trying to remember what the punchline was:)
the punchline was that on april 1 (pretty sure it was '99), you went to segfault and it was a blank white page with flames announcing they could no longer fight the lawyers and had taken themselves offline. iirc, userfriendly was in on it too. then everything was back up april 2 with a "haha, we fooled you!" post *grins*
they got flamed for that too; people said they'd destroyed their credibility.
the difference between cable tv and the internet as i see it is that when you buy cable, you buy the access to the various channels. once you've paid for that, there's just your monthly cable bill to said cable company. on the 'net, not only are we paying for access, we're also independently paying for content. it would be like paying CNN and MTV cheques each month on top of the basic cable service. no one's ever sat down and figured out what's "basic service" for the net (not to mention there's a hell of a lot more content on there than there are premium cable channels).
megatokyo supports itself on ad revenue and merchandise. penny arcade adds donations and gives people who subscribe a little gift (or they used to...i think they've changed recently). but there's never been one day where you just suddenly connected and surprise! the site's pay, as what happened to piro to spark his rant in the first place. how many people do you know who kept their premium cable channels after the first 3 months free were over? i don't think i know anyone who did. and at least with that, you knew when the free period would run out.
i think piro's right. respect is the currency of the net, and when you start charging for something that before you just traded for fun or whatever, people lose their respect for you. it's the little extras that you provide once people fork over however much cash they can that keeps the respect (for instance, penny arcade never demanded a minimum donation). piro's point was that people will put stuff on the net in return for having gotten stuff themselves. we'll either add cash, or we'll increase the content out there. but presumptuously demanding payments for content won't work.
I've made the experience that IT people generally lack social skills. Some more, some less, but I don't know a IT professional who's a 'party animal'. But maybe I just know the wrong people:-)
i know a lot of "IT geeks" that are complete party animals. most of my friends, actually:) their after-work activities consist mostly of either getting completely stoned and playing PS2 or going to raves/clubs/parties, etc.
one thing we don't do, however, is have BBQs where the guys sit around a throw back a few while the wives prepare salad and yell at the kids. largely this is because we're mostly too young to have kids, but it's also because all the girls in our group are equally IT geeks. we're a bunch of programmers, admins, and graphics people, and that's not delimited by sex at all. the attitudes are different in IT, i think, than in the professions listed in the original question. *shrug* YMMV. but that's been my experience.
i use Trillian ( www.trillian.cc ). unfortunately there's no non-windows version yet, but it very happily runs on the AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, and MSN networks. plus it has an IRC client built in. it's still in beta, so it perhaps doesn't have all the nice little conveniences of a finished IM client, but it's certainly not bloated either.
>1) No message to be delivered to an ENUM unless it's from another ENUM
this won't work because ENUMs are only being assigned to people in the U.S. what happens if you have to receive email or a phonecall from someone in europe or something? yes, you could use a different email address or phone number, but doesn't that sort of invalidate the point of having an all-purpose contact number in the first place?
There is a reasonable argument that racism did play a significant part in these events, but not in the way the poster suggested. The neighborhood where MOVE built its bunker, and which was destroyed by fire, was a black neighborhood.
except for the fact that Mayor Wilson Goode, who ordered the police attack, was himself black...
i did have a dream once i was stuck in Doom2. kept blowing away the demons, etc... the funny thing was, my dream was in the low rez graphics i had been playing the game in. even when a plot (?!;) surfaced, and i had to talk to people. really wierd dream. *shrugs*
whoop! sorry. no troll intended. it's just that "baron munchausen" happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. and i heartily agree with your analysis of "this middle part."
that said, i recently saw "brazil" for the first time at my local repetory cinema and really enjoyed it. and even then, i was struck with the common themes it held with "the hacker ethos." whether that was intentional or not i don't think matters. this review definitely stretched tuttle's part and milked it for everything they could get, but i definitely agree with the basic premise. although i would also agree with everyone here who said it was much more about an orwellian dystopia than any kind of hacker ethic.
You forget that Mafiaboy was being charged before 2600 did anything.
that's what i was asking. i went through their article a couple of times and didn't think i saw which came first. i thought they were implying that it was their prank that was being used as evidence against the kid.
otoh, if he was already charged, shouldn't he have not been on IRC "bragging about it"?
that 2600 might actually be responsible for the arrest of that teenager in montreal? am i the only person this was suggested to by their writing? i mean, ok, they go on IRC and pose as someone from quebec. then someone from quebec gets arrested. maybe i missed something in 2600's write-up, but it seems to me they ought to be paying the kid's lawyer fees.
The purpose: targeted marketing. Thats what all these information schemes are all about. No longer are companies content with knowing just your age, marital and financial status. They want to know everywhere you visit
so, what happens if (like probably many people here) the url data they get from you is full of sites like/. or the EFF or the PRIVACY forum, etc. how do you target marketing to someone who is clearly interested sites that argue against targeted marketing?
that's an excellent thread, btw. after reading it, i happened to need a new laptop bag for a trip and bought the eastpak variety. i find it an excellent backpack to carry all my stuff (although if you really have a lot, you might want to look for something with more pockets), and the best part about it is it looks like any other ordinary backpack. no screaming "look at me! i'm full of expensive electronics!" here
Slashdot Mirror
btw, if you want to check it out, trillian still has the "invisible list" functionality from icq. and it also lets you keep the icon flashing in your systray instead of popping up (in all protocols, so you can treat AIM users like ICQ users). and has floating users. doesn't have user-by-user status, though. *sigh* nothing's perfect.
the same thing happened in philadelphia. our mayor took his whole entourage and went and had dinner in chinatown too, and after that, things more or less seemed to calm down, at least in the media.
although a few weeks ago, my husband (who is vietnamese) was approached by a black woman and told that she "didn't want to seem prejudiced, but it was [his] people who brought SARS over here." so i'm not entirely convinced things have backed off in public opinion.
>Your government doesn't have a free e-filing service?
we do. this year i got blanketed by junkmail from the IRS telling me to "use e-file!" i assume turbotax is just preying on the ignorant or fearful ("i can't trust myself or my own computer, so i should trust a corporation's since they're sure to be secure").
yes, you're right, thank you. i'm out of practise on this.
*grins* it's a pity neither of us have email addresses public.
:)
i think that postmodernism, if taken to its logical extreme, would become a form of nihilism. a 'practical postmodernist,' if you will, must at least admit to the existence of a physical world. we can't forget postmodernism itself started as a reaction to the absolutes set out in modernism. so the whole philosophy was birthed on a reference point.
i'm going to agree with your parenthesis there, that postmodernism did not originally eschew the concept of connections. it may even depend who you talk to; some maintain that postmodernism finds meaning only in the connections and transgressions and not in their surrounding causes. if i remember correctly, it doesn't say that there are no connections, it rather maintains that there are connections, even between those things that we consider to be fundamentally opposed (male and female, for instance).
to extend that to computer science, it's not the 1s and 0s that matter, it's how they interact, the catalyst that they become. if a po-mo programmer can accept a binary basis of reality for the computer, then he can, as you pointed out earlier, work from within the structure.
it's been a long time since i've thought about this. my brain hurts
reading your comment, i almost feel as though we're talking at cross purposes here (and getting further and further off-topic as we do :) as far as i understood it, and admittedly i've been out of the academic loop for a while, but po-mo and especially deconstructionism, rather than criticising /within/ context were trying to /destroy/ context. i believe part of derrida's point was essentially that when you deconstruct something, you destroy it.
/happens/. you could, however, deconstruct the /reasons/ for female circumcision. and you could deconstruct the /concept/ of the one and the zero. i'm not sure it would do you any good, really, but you could if you wanted to.
:)
and you're right; you can't deconstruct a computer's binary nature any more than you can deconstruct female circumcision. it's something that
and even though the computer must rely on its 1-0 binary nature, the computer scientist need not leave his thinking shackled to that construct, especially as programming languages get higher and higher level. going way offtopic, one could almost speculate that a programmer's choice of language reveals how he looks at the world in general. almost
postmodernism is not the butchering of the language that you attribute to undergraduate papers. postmodernism is rather a way of looking at the world that says, "there is no one way of looking at things. shades of grey exist. there are in-between stages to life." early theorists, especially foucault and saussure were in fact attempting to use language to describe a new use for language. coupled with the fact that we all read them in translation, and yes, they're very difficult. derrida, for instance, is opaque in english, but actually makes sense in french.
a previous poster pointed out that postmodernism does indeed have its roots in art and cultural criticism. what it really is is a framework for thinking about those things. arguing that gender is a masculinist plot is /not/ postmodern, unless the writer uses a postmodern methodology to support his/her arguments. a good academic, and someone who really understands po-mo would not wink and promise to take another author seriously. a true po-mo critic would feel no problem with calling someone else on their bullshit. postmodern criticism opened up the academic world to the possibility of /not having to take each other seriously/.
i dunno, maybe it's just the fact that i slogged through an undergraduate arts degree, but as far as i can see, there is absolutely no reason postmodernist thinking cannot be applied to computer science. it exists in and affects our culture, therefore it can be interpreted in po-mo ways.
<objoke>
that's no moon...
</objoke>
last time i checked, they were waiting on a showstopping mozilla bug to be fixed. although now that 1.1 is out, k-meleon may get some love.
actually, that's exactly what the article says. the frontpage blurb is the usual /. overreaction.
nar. the gulf war ("operation desert storm") was decreed by a formal congressional Act of War. i remember the headlines
actually, the concept of a postal service is very old. even the sumerians had runners to messages to people. the messages were baked on clay tablets and put in an "envelope" addressed to the recipient. trying to get information from one person to another has always been a priority in civilization.
did our lifestyle become more mobile, and the phones followed, or was it the other way around? who cares, really. what exists right now is a society where the best and most convenient way of getting information to one person from another is the mobile phone. we've simply replaced the message runners and scribes.
hang on there, honey. i don't know a single RPGamer that would categorize FF7 or 8 as "high quality." and don't even get us started about the travesties that were the PC ports. DQ games take a while to develop and sell more individually because they are a different (and, many argue, better) style from, to continue your example, Square's more recent FF games.
N.B. for the purposes of this post, a RPGamer is assumed to be someone who mostly plays and has played RPGs and plays them for enjoyment of the true role-playing aspect. the ones who whine about how fighting for stats in a fantasy world does not a RPG make.
the punchline was that on april 1 (pretty sure it was '99), you went to segfault and it was a blank white page with flames announcing they could no longer fight the lawyers and had taken themselves offline. iirc, userfriendly was in on it too. then everything was back up april 2 with a "haha, we fooled you!" post *grins*
they got flamed for that too; people said they'd destroyed their credibility.
megatokyo supports itself on ad revenue and merchandise. penny arcade adds donations and gives people who subscribe a little gift (or they used to...i think they've changed recently). but there's never been one day where you just suddenly connected and surprise! the site's pay, as what happened to piro to spark his rant in the first place. how many people do you know who kept their premium cable channels after the first 3 months free were over? i don't think i know anyone who did. and at least with that, you knew when the free period would run out.
i think piro's right. respect is the currency of the net, and when you start charging for something that before you just traded for fun or whatever, people lose their respect for you. it's the little extras that you provide once people fork over however much cash they can that keeps the respect (for instance, penny arcade never demanded a minimum donation). piro's point was that people will put stuff on the net in return for having gotten stuff themselves. we'll either add cash, or we'll increase the content out there. but presumptuously demanding payments for content won't work.
i know a lot of "IT geeks" that are complete party animals. most of my friends, actually :) their after-work activities consist mostly of either getting completely stoned and playing PS2 or going to raves/clubs/parties, etc.
one thing we don't do, however, is have BBQs where the guys sit around a throw back a few while the wives prepare salad and yell at the kids. largely this is because we're mostly too young to have kids, but it's also because all the girls in our group are equally IT geeks. we're a bunch of programmers, admins, and graphics people, and that's not delimited by sex at all. the attitudes are different in IT, i think, than in the professions listed in the original question. *shrug* YMMV. but that's been my experience.
i use Trillian ( www.trillian.cc ). unfortunately there's no non-windows version yet, but it very happily runs on the AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, and MSN networks. plus it has an IRC client built in. it's still in beta, so it perhaps doesn't have all the nice little conveniences of a finished IM client, but it's certainly not bloated either.
>1) No message to be delivered to an ENUM unless it's from another ENUM
this won't work because ENUMs are only being assigned to people in the U.S. what happens if you have to receive email or a phonecall from someone in europe or something? yes, you could use a different email address or phone number, but doesn't that sort of invalidate the point of having an all-purpose contact number in the first place?
except for the fact that Mayor Wilson Goode, who ordered the police attack, was himself black...
end of my rambling for the day.
whoop! sorry. no troll intended. it's just that "baron munchausen" happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. and i heartily agree with your analysis of "this middle part."
that said, i recently saw "brazil" for the first time at my local repetory cinema and really enjoyed it. and even then, i was struck with the common themes it held with "the hacker ethos." whether that was intentional or not i don't think matters. this review definitely stretched tuttle's part and milked it for everything they could get, but i definitely agree with the basic premise. although i would also agree with everyone here who said it was much more about an orwellian dystopia than any kind of hacker ethic.
You forget that Mafiaboy was being charged before 2600 did anything.
that's what i was asking. i went through their article a couple of times and didn't think i saw which came first. i thought they were implying that it was their prank that was being used as evidence against the kid.
otoh, if he was already charged, shouldn't he have not been on IRC "bragging about it"?
that 2600 might actually be responsible for the arrest of that teenager in montreal? am i the only person this was suggested to by their writing? i mean, ok, they go on IRC and pose as someone from quebec. then someone from quebec gets arrested. maybe i missed something in 2600's write-up, but it seems to me they ought to be paying the kid's lawyer fees.
i'm hoping someone proves me wrong on this...
The purpose: targeted marketing. Thats what all these information schemes are all about. No longer are companies content with knowing just your age, marital and financial status. They want to know everywhere you visit
so, what happens if (like probably many people here) the url data they get from you is full of sites like /. or the EFF or the PRIVACY forum, etc. how do you target marketing to someone who is clearly interested sites that argue against targeted marketing?
that's an excellent thread, btw. after reading it, i happened to need a new laptop bag for a trip and bought the eastpak variety. i find it an excellent backpack to carry all my stuff (although if you really have a lot, you might want to look for something with more pockets), and the best part about it is it looks like any other ordinary backpack. no screaming "look at me! i'm full of expensive electronics!" here