I can speak to the whole "idiots passing on the right" thing.
When I was racing, I drove a fairly large and long tow rig. Not quite as big as a full semi-trailer rig, but still pretty big and heavy.
When you drive something this size, you don't have the ability to suddenly jog left or right, because you are 2.5 cars long. A simple shoulder check won't cut it, because your "side impact zone" is 1.5 times longer than on a full size car. I could have 3 compact cars running nose-to-tail fit alongside my rig.
Furthermore, when you weigh 10,000 lbs, you cannot speed up or slow down very well. You have to be looking quite a bit farther down the road than one does driving a passenger car.
And finally, you have an absolutely MASSIVE blind spot running down the right hand side of the rig. Tow mirrors with fisheyes help a lot, but it is possible to stick a car along the right hand side of the rig and I *absolutely* cannot see you there.
On open two-lane Interstate, I keep right. I'm quite a bit slower (120 km/h) than most passenger car traffic, and on-ramps are infrequent enough that it's not a big deal to move left to avoid the merge lanes as they arrive.
On three-lane Interstate, I stay in the center lane. This gets me away from merge lanes on the right (especially in large urban environments where merges can happen with no warning) and yet still leaves the leftmost lane open for faster traffic.
On crowded 2-lane Interstate, I'm probably in the left lane. The threat to me from merging traffic is just too high for me to keep right, because 4-wheelers won't create space for me to move left as we approach a merge lane - they see the left lane as their divine right and will zip right in even as I am moving left. Rather than get caught between an idiot moving into me from the right and idiots not giving me space to temporarily move left to dodge the right-side idiot, I'll plug the left lane and stay safe. I will attempt to move right again as soon as I can, but my safety trumps your convienience.
But most Insterstate where the on-ramp frequency is high enough to pose this problem is three-lane, so I can take the middle lane and both stay safe from merges and yet not block the fast lane.
But here's what drives me nuts: an open left lane, and somebody passes me on the RIGHT. I absolutely cannot see you coming, and I don't expect to be passed on the right hand side. If I am trying to move right to unplug the left lanes (which I try to do as often as I can) I will hit you - and I cannot manouvre very well to avoid you if I *do* suddenly see you.
When you pass on the right, you seriously endanger both yourself and the vehicle you are passing - whereas if you take the open left lane, there's no danger AT ALL - and yet morons continue to pass on the right.
If I am plugging the left lane and you absolutely need by, give me a flash of the high beams, and I will move right for you as soon as I am safely able to. "Flash to pass" is a polite way of requesting the lane, and I will respect politeness.
But if I see you coming on the right, I'll probably box you, because I don't want a moron in a position where he can pose a threat.
Passing on the right is NEVER EVER EVER justified. It is just stupid dangerous.
And as rigs go, I was fairly small. The problem is way, way worse with semis. You should hear them talk on the CB when some 4-wheeler passes on the right....
You'll see some semis marked with "" on the back, and that is no exaggeration.
1996, and I'm being interviewed by Chrysler (over the phone, no less, as I was 2000 km away) for a position as a web application designer.
The interview is going well, and then the interviewer starts asking a rapid fire sequence of obscure programming trivia questions - things like the arguments to certain system functions, that sort of thing.
After about the third or fourth punt (these questions were really obscure), I started to get a little angry, and I told the interviewer that if that particular question ever came up in my code, that it wasn't necessary for me to have the answer memorized. Man pages and paper manuals exist for a reason (this was before the all-knowing Google) and if I really needed to know the answer, I would look it up. In fact, even if I was reasonably confident of the answer, I'd STILL look it up because the time spent looking up the answer and ensuring it was right was very much less than the time spent guessing, getting it wrong, and debugging the error.
"Real work" I said "is an open-book test".
The next thing she said was "When can you start?"
I don't need to have an answer immediately at hand to every question. What I need is to know how to FIND the answer to a question as quickly as possible given the resources at hand.
If you want to test me during an interview, I'll look at the test. If it is related to problem solving or general concepts (ie, explain the differences between a "foreach", "while", and "do until" loop) - OK, I'm game. But if it is trivia, I won't play, and I'll explain why. If you insist... I will seek employment elsewhere, because I'm not interested in working for someone who insists on procedure for procedure's sake.
Seriously dude... I'm an Amiga guy from way back in the day; I owned a 2000, a 3000, and a 4000, all bought new from C=. I was a CATS member. I still have a copy of the ROM kernal manual lying around here somewhere. My Amiga credentials are pretty solid, OK.
Apple didn't copy Commodore; if anything, it was the other way around... and even then, "copy" is way too harsh a word. "Inspire" is probably better.
The Mac's hardware design was always odd, and inferior to the Amiga (not for nothing could an Amiga 4000/040 emulate a Mac in software faster than the Mac itself ran natively) but when it came to look and feel and genral UI-ness, Apple was always far superior. Even the add-on packages for Workbench (MUI and that other one) couldn't make up the difference.
I did web development in 1995/1996 using an Amiga 4000. All the programming was done on the native Amiga, but the web browser was Netscape for Mac emulated using Shapeshifter.
Amiga hardware with Mac UI would have made for a killer machine.
Oscoda CENDIV 1999, I'm coming out of the "big corner" onto the "long straight" hard on the cas when the car suddenly starts shaking and stops pulling. Puzzled, I drop my eyes to the dash and see the tach sitting at 7700.
The shaking was the rev limiter.
On the next run, I shifted. The following week, I installed a sequential shift light http://farnorthracing.com/seat.html and never had the problem again.
I found that when I was really rocking and rolling that I got auditory exclusion. A gun could go off next to me and I wouldn't notice. Most of my data while driving came through my eyes, my inner ear, and my hands and ass.
I used GT3/GT4 and a force-feedback wheel as a training aid, and found it made a real difference in my driving. Not as good as the real thing, but close enough to practice skills more than could be done with just seat time.
Call me a heretic, but I'm coming around to the idea that armed UAVs are a better way to do business.
A traditional piloted ground-attack aircraft is an expensive, valuable thing with an expensive, amphetamine-fueled, scared-shitless pilot stuffed in it.
That pilot has a handful of seconds to ID his target, execute the attack, and then evade ground fire. Even in an environment where the USAF had total air superiority, there have been case upon case of pilots attacking the wrong target at the wrong time.
And modern air-ground weapons are so powerful that the smallest mistake can have catastrophically bad results.
But with the UAV, that element of personal risk is gone. Furthermore, instead of just one hopped-up, terrified, sleep-deprived individual making the go/no go call (and aiming the weapon to boot) you can have a series of targeting experts watching the video feed and making a soberly analyzed decision on fire/no fire.
And yet, as mentioned, while the people shooting the weapons may be isolated from personal risk, the incredible clarity of the visual feed does not isolate them from personal *cost* - and that's not a bad thing. Taking a human life should never be a painless endevour.
If we have to drop explosives on people, I'd rather that the people pulling the trigger have the opportunity to do a proper job of IDing the target, of assessing the likely collateral damage, and then making a calm and unrushed shot.
The issue is the expectation that content production should be outrageously lucrative, to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
That probably won't happen... and that's not a bad thing. There is no need for an artist to make any more money than any other profession.
Up until the invention of copyright and mass distribution, artists managed to - with the aid of their patrons - make a decent living and produce content. Mozart and Bach did just fine, and they didn't have the ability to reach mass audiences that modern day artists do.
Yes, during the switch between "legally enforced artificial scarcity" and "patronage" there would be some lean times, as customers need to realize that if they don't contribute back to the artist, the well dries up. But is fining people, sending people to jail, and the other MPAA/RIAA madness worth it?
As far as "lots of cost for no return"; it's the same thing in every other business. Even a normal retail business has to be able to carry its costs (with no expectation of sales, never mind profit) for at least a year - why should content creation be any different?
You pay your dues, do your time, and if people like what you do, they contribute to your efforts to do more. If they don't like your work - no contributions.
Hell, that's how most webcomics fund their livelihoods. Read up on how t-shirt sales drive most web comics sites - that's a form of patronage. I buy a shirt because it keeps my favourite comic in production (and as a bonus, I get a cool shirt)
Real artists are driven to create. They'll fit it into their lives however they can. Patronage allows an artist to take their passion full-time.
You are quite correct to apply supply and demand economics to this problem. The "intellectual property" industries (movies, music, and computer software) rely on the artificial legal construct of copyright in order to extract profit from an activity that produces a "product" that, once produced, has an infinite supply and near-zero cost of distribution.
The natural state of affairs is to eliminate the artificial legal construct of "copyright" and just accept that anything that can be rendered digitally is free to copy.
The usual objection is "well then how do artists/writers/producers make money without copyright backing them up"?
The first response to that question is to point out that it is not the responsibility of the state or society at large to see that any industry remains profitable. Once upon a time there was a thriving buggy whip industry, but there was no legal construct erected to protect buggy whip manufacturers from being obsoleted by the forward march of technological development.
Notwithstanding, the question of "how can an artist make a living without copyright?" is a valid one. Happily, there is a historical answer - patronage.
Not so very long ago, it was practically impossible to distribute artistic product at all. Without any form of recording device, the only way to hear Mozart was to go see Mozart. Want to see Shakespeare? Go to the Globe Theatre. Want to read Ovid? Pay the enormous costs of finding a copy and then having a monk copy it by hand.
The flip side to this is that as an artist, given that the costs of producing your art were so very high, the only way to make a living doing art was to find a rich man who would hire you to produce the art - a patron.
The nice thing about zero-cost duplication and distribution of artistic content in the modern age is that it allows the cost of patronage to be spread across a very much wider audience, meaning that the cost of being a patron is very much smaller.
In effect, erect a means where your customers/fans can get money to you, and then let it be known that if they wish to see future product, then they need to contribute to the pool, or development will cease.
Yes, many people will just download the game/song/whatever and never pay. So it goes. But if the product is good enough, enough people will contribute to allow you to continue developing more product - and that's a win. How many of us get to make a living at their passion?
This is fascinating. I don't think I've ever had a chance to talk to somebody who has manifested this sort of behavior.
Let me ask you this: you were engaging in activities that are so classically paranoid (tin foil to block mind rays, poisoned water) that they have become cliched.
I would think that anyone sitting in a basement wrapped in tin foil would recognize this as paranoid behavior and either call it into question, or seek help - much the same way I'd expect to recognize shooting pain in my left arm and shortness of breath as a heart attack (even though I've never had one)
When you were having one of these episodes, could you tell? What's it like?
As the owner of a brand spankin' new EEE 901 (that comes OEM with XP on a 4GB SSD and has another 8 GB SSD mounted as D:) I have been driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to avoid running out of space on the too-small C: drive.
In Linux, it's easy - "ln -s" but in XP? Totally non-obvious.
Imagine my chagrin when a USB->serial adaptor didn't work on my AEM EMS (the fuel injection computer in my race car)
Imagine my fury when I bought a SocketSerial PCMCIA serial card instead - and discovered that the port in my brand-spanking-new laptop wasn't actually PCMCIA, but "ExpressCard"
Leno's jokes are original, written by writers paid to come up with original material, not something scraped off the Internet and passed off as new content.
My take on this is that Chuck isn't so much looking for a cut of the proceeds, but objects to the idea of somebody taking an Internet meme and attempting to sell it.
I remember being seriously pissed that/. wanted me to register a userID for the site. I don't remember what it was that made me do it, but it took me a while to just bite the bullet and register. I coulda been a 2-digit!
There are books out there that are absolute, unquestioned masterpieces that do almost everything well, and which can not only serve as a good read, but offer some sort of insight on life. The best of these are life-changers, where the reader comes away a different person from when they started.
Sometimes, these can be difficult to get into, or they are so challenging that the reader needs to be at a certain level to really get them - "spinach books".
Those books are rare. Most books - being written by normal, flawed humans, after all - have flaws in them. Some authors are masters of plot, but can't write dialogue to save their life. Others write characters who are so well-realized that they seem likely to step right out of the page, but the plots they find themselves in take sudden, inexplicable turns in the last 50 pages or so that are so sudden as to be physically jarring (I'm looking at YOU, Stevie King!)
And readers being human as well, one man's flaw is another man's treasure. I *love* Stephan R Donaldson's command of vocabulary and how he uses it to set tone - any man who can use "roynish" in a sentence and make it feel like it belongs there is a man who can craft prose. But others find his exotic word-choices utterly irritating and simply cannot get past it to the deeper story.
One man's ice cream is another's spinach.
Rowling's prose is servicable; "sturdy", not beautiful. So what? The story is solid, the jigsaw puzzle intriguing, and the way the themes and tone of each successive book get increasingly adult as her protagonist grows up is borderline genius. These are *good books*, independent of the hype.
Sometimes popularity can be an accurate measure of quality - at least in some aspects. Not everything popular is de facto bad.
This, my high-horsed, elitist friend, is an article about the cumulation of a 10+ year long pop culture phenomenon, in which a series of BOOKS - BOOKS, that one must READ - have reached the heights of popularity normally reserved for much more pedestrian faire.
In this age of ever-deteriorating educational standards, dropping literacy rates, and a overall lack of mental challenges taken up by our youth, a story about jaded teenagers lining up in droves to buy a BOOK would flash right through science fiction and wind up as fantasy - if it wasn't actually TRUE.
Kids are reading, and it is cool to do so. This is a triumph beyond whatever "lack of challenge" you perceive in the writing.
And guess what? The stories are FUN. You're not getting Tolstoy, but you are getting a pretty good yarn with some deeper themes in it. Not every meal must be spinach and cod liver oil. It is OK to have the occasional ice cream.
Slashdot Mirror
I can speak to the whole "idiots passing on the right" thing.
When I was racing, I drove a fairly large and long tow rig. Not quite as big as a full semi-trailer rig, but still pretty big and heavy.
When you drive something this size, you don't have the ability to suddenly jog left or right, because you are 2.5 cars long. A simple shoulder check won't cut it, because your "side impact zone" is 1.5 times longer than on a full size car. I could have 3 compact cars running nose-to-tail fit alongside my rig.
Furthermore, when you weigh 10,000 lbs, you cannot speed up or slow down very well. You have to be looking quite a bit farther down the road than one does driving a passenger car.
And finally, you have an absolutely MASSIVE blind spot running down the right hand side of the rig. Tow mirrors with fisheyes help a lot, but it is possible to stick a car along the right hand side of the rig and I *absolutely* cannot see you there.
On open two-lane Interstate, I keep right. I'm quite a bit slower (120 km/h) than most passenger car traffic, and on-ramps are infrequent enough that it's not a big deal to move left to avoid the merge lanes as they arrive.
On three-lane Interstate, I stay in the center lane. This gets me away from merge lanes on the right (especially in large urban environments where merges can happen with no warning) and yet still leaves the leftmost lane open for faster traffic.
On crowded 2-lane Interstate, I'm probably in the left lane. The threat to me from merging traffic is just too high for me to keep right, because 4-wheelers won't create space for me to move left as we approach a merge lane - they see the left lane as their divine right and will zip right in even as I am moving left. Rather than get caught between an idiot moving into me from the right and idiots not giving me space to temporarily move left to dodge the right-side idiot, I'll plug the left lane and stay safe. I will attempt to move right again as soon as I can, but my safety trumps your convienience.
But most Insterstate where the on-ramp frequency is high enough to pose this problem is three-lane, so I can take the middle lane and both stay safe from merges and yet not block the fast lane.
But here's what drives me nuts: an open left lane, and somebody passes me on the RIGHT. I absolutely cannot see you coming, and I don't expect to be passed on the right hand side. If I am trying to move right to unplug the left lanes (which I try to do as often as I can) I will hit you - and I cannot manouvre very well to avoid you if I *do* suddenly see you.
When you pass on the right, you seriously endanger both yourself and the vehicle you are passing - whereas if you take the open left lane, there's no danger AT ALL - and yet morons continue to pass on the right.
If I am plugging the left lane and you absolutely need by, give me a flash of the high beams, and I will move right for you as soon as I am safely able to. "Flash to pass" is a polite way of requesting the lane, and I will respect politeness.
But if I see you coming on the right, I'll probably box you, because I don't want a moron in a position where he can pose a threat.
Passing on the right is NEVER EVER EVER justified. It is just stupid dangerous.
And as rigs go, I was fairly small. The problem is way, way worse with semis. You should hear them talk on the CB when some 4-wheeler passes on the right....
You'll see some semis marked with "" on the back, and that is no exaggeration.
DG
1996, and I'm being interviewed by Chrysler (over the phone, no less, as I was 2000 km away) for a position as a web application designer.
The interview is going well, and then the interviewer starts asking a rapid fire sequence of obscure programming trivia questions - things like the arguments to certain system functions, that sort of thing.
After about the third or fourth punt (these questions were really obscure), I started to get a little angry, and I told the interviewer that if that particular question ever came up in my code, that it wasn't necessary for me to have the answer memorized. Man pages and paper manuals exist for a reason (this was before the all-knowing Google) and if I really needed to know the answer, I would look it up. In fact, even if I was reasonably confident of the answer, I'd STILL look it up because the time spent looking up the answer and ensuring it was right was very much less than the time spent guessing, getting it wrong, and debugging the error.
"Real work" I said "is an open-book test".
The next thing she said was "When can you start?"
I don't need to have an answer immediately at hand to every question. What I need is to know how to FIND the answer to a question as quickly as possible given the resources at hand.
If you want to test me during an interview, I'll look at the test. If it is related to problem solving or general concepts (ie, explain the differences between a "foreach", "while", and "do until" loop) - OK, I'm game. But if it is trivia, I won't play, and I'll explain why. If you insist... I will seek employment elsewhere, because I'm not interested in working for someone who insists on procedure for procedure's sake.
DG
Seriously dude... I'm an Amiga guy from way back in the day; I owned a 2000, a 3000, and a 4000, all bought new from C=. I was a CATS member. I still have a copy of the ROM kernal manual lying around here somewhere. My Amiga credentials are pretty solid, OK.
Apple didn't copy Commodore; if anything, it was the other way around... and even then, "copy" is way too harsh a word. "Inspire" is probably better.
The Mac's hardware design was always odd, and inferior to the Amiga (not for nothing could an Amiga 4000/040 emulate a Mac in software faster than the Mac itself ran natively) but when it came to look and feel and genral UI-ness, Apple was always far superior. Even the add-on packages for Workbench (MUI and that other one) couldn't make up the difference.
I did web development in 1995/1996 using an Amiga 4000. All the programming was done on the native Amiga, but the web browser was Netscape for Mac emulated using Shapeshifter.
Amiga hardware with Mac UI would have made for a killer machine.
DG
Oscoda CENDIV 1999, I'm coming out of the "big corner" onto the "long straight" hard on the cas when the car suddenly starts shaking and stops pulling. Puzzled, I drop my eyes to the dash and see the tach sitting at 7700.
The shaking was the rev limiter.
On the next run, I shifted. The following week, I installed a sequential shift light http://farnorthracing.com/seat.html and never had the problem again.
I found that when I was really rocking and rolling that I got auditory exclusion. A gun could go off next to me and I wouldn't notice. Most of my data while driving came through my eyes, my inner ear, and my hands and ass.
I used GT3/GT4 and a force-feedback wheel as a training aid, and found it made a real difference in my driving. Not as good as the real thing, but close enough to practice skills more than could be done with just seat time.
More details at http://farnorthracing.com/ and http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets.html
DG
...because people know about it.
They don't call it the "Secret Car Club of America" for nothing....
DG
Call me a heretic, but I'm coming around to the idea that armed UAVs are a better way to do business.
A traditional piloted ground-attack aircraft is an expensive, valuable thing with an expensive, amphetamine-fueled, scared-shitless pilot stuffed in it.
That pilot has a handful of seconds to ID his target, execute the attack, and then evade ground fire. Even in an environment where the USAF had total air superiority, there have been case upon case of pilots attacking the wrong target at the wrong time.
And modern air-ground weapons are so powerful that the smallest mistake can have catastrophically bad results.
But with the UAV, that element of personal risk is gone. Furthermore, instead of just one hopped-up, terrified, sleep-deprived individual making the go/no go call (and aiming the weapon to boot) you can have a series of targeting experts watching the video feed and making a soberly analyzed decision on fire/no fire.
And yet, as mentioned, while the people shooting the weapons may be isolated from personal risk, the incredible clarity of the visual feed does not isolate them from personal *cost* - and that's not a bad thing. Taking a human life should never be a painless endevour.
If we have to drop explosives on people, I'd rather that the people pulling the trigger have the opportunity to do a proper job of IDing the target, of assessing the likely collateral damage, and then making a calm and unrushed shot.
DG
The issue is the expectation that content production should be outrageously lucrative, to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
That probably won't happen... and that's not a bad thing. There is no need for an artist to make any more money than any other profession.
Up until the invention of copyright and mass distribution, artists managed to - with the aid of their patrons - make a decent living and produce content. Mozart and Bach did just fine, and they didn't have the ability to reach mass audiences that modern day artists do.
Yes, during the switch between "legally enforced artificial scarcity" and "patronage" there would be some lean times, as customers need to realize that if they don't contribute back to the artist, the well dries up. But is fining people, sending people to jail, and the other MPAA/RIAA madness worth it?
As far as "lots of cost for no return"; it's the same thing in every other business. Even a normal retail business has to be able to carry its costs (with no expectation of sales, never mind profit) for at least a year - why should content creation be any different?
You pay your dues, do your time, and if people like what you do, they contribute to your efforts to do more. If they don't like your work - no contributions.
Hell, that's how most webcomics fund their livelihoods. Read up on how t-shirt sales drive most web comics sites - that's a form of patronage. I buy a shirt because it keeps my favourite comic in production (and as a bonus, I get a cool shirt)
Real artists are driven to create. They'll fit it into their lives however they can. Patronage allows an artist to take their passion full-time.
DG
You are quite correct to apply supply and demand economics to this problem. The "intellectual property" industries (movies, music, and computer software) rely on the artificial legal construct of copyright in order to extract profit from an activity that produces a "product" that, once produced, has an infinite supply and near-zero cost of distribution.
The natural state of affairs is to eliminate the artificial legal construct of "copyright" and just accept that anything that can be rendered digitally is free to copy.
The usual objection is "well then how do artists/writers/producers make money without copyright backing them up"?
The first response to that question is to point out that it is not the responsibility of the state or society at large to see that any industry remains profitable. Once upon a time there was a thriving buggy whip industry, but there was no legal construct erected to protect buggy whip manufacturers from being obsoleted by the forward march of technological development.
Notwithstanding, the question of "how can an artist make a living without copyright?" is a valid one. Happily, there is a historical answer - patronage.
Not so very long ago, it was practically impossible to distribute artistic product at all. Without any form of recording device, the only way to hear Mozart was to go see Mozart. Want to see Shakespeare? Go to the Globe Theatre. Want to read Ovid? Pay the enormous costs of finding a copy and then having a monk copy it by hand.
The flip side to this is that as an artist, given that the costs of producing your art were so very high, the only way to make a living doing art was to find a rich man who would hire you to produce the art - a patron.
The nice thing about zero-cost duplication and distribution of artistic content in the modern age is that it allows the cost of patronage to be spread across a very much wider audience, meaning that the cost of being a patron is very much smaller.
In effect, erect a means where your customers/fans can get money to you, and then let it be known that if they wish to see future product, then they need to contribute to the pool, or development will cease.
Yes, many people will just download the game/song/whatever and never pay. So it goes. But if the product is good enough, enough people will contribute to allow you to continue developing more product - and that's a win. How many of us get to make a living at their passion?
DG
I have used Skip Doctor to restore discs to playablility that were otherwise completely hosed.
I'm talking discs that spent 2 years bouncing around the glove box and who were completely hazed over.
The trick is following the instructions and being patient with the polishing step.
I've never had a disc Skip Doctor couldn't eventually - with a little work and patience - restore.
DG
...but I discovered that, as I stared into it, it stared back into me.
Which was a Nietzsche trick and all, but a little unsettling.
DG
This is fascinating. I don't think I've ever had a chance to talk to somebody who has manifested this sort of behavior.
Let me ask you this: you were engaging in activities that are so classically paranoid (tin foil to block mind rays, poisoned water) that they have become cliched.
I would think that anyone sitting in a basement wrapped in tin foil would recognize this as paranoid behavior and either call it into question, or seek help - much the same way I'd expect to recognize shooting pain in my left arm and shortness of breath as a heart attack (even though I've never had one)
When you were having one of these episodes, could you tell? What's it like?
DG
As the owner of a brand spankin' new EEE 901 (that comes OEM with XP on a 4GB SSD and has another 8 GB SSD mounted as D:) I have been driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to avoid running out of space on the too-small C: drive.
In Linux, it's easy - "ln -s" but in XP? Totally non-obvious.
Looks like you've solved my problem for me.
DG
Irony is like goldy or bronzy, just not as pretty.
DG
We doing a 3-digit roll call? I'm in.
DG
Imagine my chagrin when a USB->serial adaptor didn't work on my AEM EMS (the fuel injection computer in my race car)
Imagine my fury when I bought a SocketSerial PCMCIA serial card instead - and discovered that the port in my brand-spanking-new laptop wasn't actually PCMCIA, but "ExpressCard"
DG
Not the same thing at all.
Leno's jokes are original, written by writers paid to come up with original material, not something scraped off the Internet and passed off as new content.
DG
My take on this is that Chuck isn't so much looking for a cut of the proceeds, but objects to the idea of somebody taking an Internet meme and attempting to sell it.
If that is the case, I'm behind him 100%.
Not that Chuck needs my support...
DG
...then you're doing it wrong.
The solution is technical, not chemical.
DG
I remember being seriously pissed that /. wanted me to register a userID for the site. I don't remember what it was that made me do it, but it took me a while to just bite the bullet and register. I coulda been a 2-digit!
DG
There are books out there that are absolute, unquestioned masterpieces that do almost everything well, and which can not only serve as a good read, but offer some sort of insight on life. The best of these are life-changers, where the reader comes away a different person from when they started.
Sometimes, these can be difficult to get into, or they are so challenging that the reader needs to be at a certain level to really get them - "spinach books".
Those books are rare. Most books - being written by normal, flawed humans, after all - have flaws in them. Some authors are masters of plot, but can't write dialogue to save their life. Others write characters who are so well-realized that they seem likely to step right out of the page, but the plots they find themselves in take sudden, inexplicable turns in the last 50 pages or so that are so sudden as to be physically jarring (I'm looking at YOU, Stevie King!)
And readers being human as well, one man's flaw is another man's treasure. I *love* Stephan R Donaldson's command of vocabulary and how he uses it to set tone - any man who can use "roynish" in a sentence and make it feel like it belongs there is a man who can craft prose. But others find his exotic word-choices utterly irritating and simply cannot get past it to the deeper story.
One man's ice cream is another's spinach.
Rowling's prose is servicable; "sturdy", not beautiful. So what? The story is solid, the jigsaw puzzle intriguing, and the way the themes and tone of each successive book get increasingly adult as her protagonist grows up is borderline genius. These are *good books*, independent of the hype.
Sometimes popularity can be an accurate measure of quality - at least in some aspects. Not everything popular is de facto bad.
DG
Ah, well, touche.
DG
This, my high-horsed, elitist friend, is an article about the cumulation of a 10+ year long pop culture phenomenon, in which a series of BOOKS - BOOKS, that one must READ - have reached the heights of popularity normally reserved for much more pedestrian faire.
In this age of ever-deteriorating educational standards, dropping literacy rates, and a overall lack of mental challenges taken up by our youth, a story about jaded teenagers lining up in droves to buy a BOOK would flash right through science fiction and wind up as fantasy - if it wasn't actually TRUE.
Kids are reading, and it is cool to do so. This is a triumph beyond whatever "lack of challenge" you perceive in the writing.
And guess what? The stories are FUN. You're not getting Tolstoy, but you are getting a pretty good yarn with some deeper themes in it. Not every meal must be spinach and cod liver oil. It is OK to have the occasional ice cream.
Get over yourself and your pretentious attitudes.
DG
Read "Ender's Game" (Orson Scott Card) for a different take on this subject...
DH
8-digit UID?
Aren't you right in the target demographic of 10-16 yar olds?
DG
...not just with apps, but with *devices*.
My LifeDrive rocks, but the little instabilities grate. The idea of an upgraded, backwards-compatible OS upgrade has me tickled pink.
DG