Re: ridiculous claims that France "doesn't respect" culture and the like.
Those Frenchmen never have respected culture. Everything they have ever done has made a mockery of culture.
Look at Toulouse la Trec. He was a midget!
Then there was van Gogh who painted his hallucinations and became famous. We put people like that in asylums fer cryin' out loud!
Matisse and a bunch of others couldn't paint, so they just put dots on the canvas, or smeared some oils on. I can't tell it from the grade school paintings!
Paul Gaugin doesn't count. He left the country before he got on a roll.
And they all painted nekked people. Couldn't afford clothes, I guess. They starved them all in garrets, whatever those are.
Even back in the Stone Age, somebody daubed up a bunch of unlikely looking critters in a cave at Lausanne that just don't measure up to Real Cave Paintings!
Up until now, the process was that some industry needed regulation because it was causing potential and present harm to the public. The government would tell the industry that they needed to get their act together. Then they would tell them again. Then they would step in and regulate that industry because obviously they are incapable of doing it themselves. An excellent example is the pharmaceutical industry, whose misbehavior (past and present) caused the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Don't let that get in the way of their patents, though. We would all die of bubonic plague if it weren't for them.
Using this process, we have things like the ASME Boiler Code, the standard Building Code, the National Electrical Code, the National Fire Protection Association, the American Water Society, Instrument Society of America and many others. There is also the NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology - to help guide the process along, and to provide parallel documentation of some standards. NIST is a government agency.
In this case, we have the government regulating the public because the industry can't get its act together. Someone needs to go back to Civics 101 and figure out how government (of, by and for the people) is supposed to work. I think they have their wires crossed somewhere where the sun don't shine!
That doesn't seem to apply to this bunch. There are some real names here, although I had to look some up to figure out how they placed.
The Who
Legendary. Redesigned sound equipment because existing equipment wouldn't handle their load. Defined being a young adult (or almost adult) for an entire generation.
Led Zeppelin
Legendary. Started a few memes - we all hear about the kid who just wants to play "Stairway to Heaven on his guitar, right? Brought about a new style of music from all the roots floating around back in the 60s.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Legendary.
From Wikipedia:
Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
Elton John
Makes me want to barf, but you can't deny his success, his abilities or his impact on music.
Queen
Popular. I wasn't that thrilled with them, but you can't deny their success at the time.
Simon Cowell and a couple of rappers
You might be right.
In general, you are either misinformed, too angry to have written anything, or eminently ignorable.
At least I won't have to START boycotting Elton John or Queen, but it is going to hurt to not buy any Who or Led Zeppelin albums. I was just starting to gather some old music again. Led Zeppelin was one of the very first albums that I bought back in high school. At least Neil Young mostly gets it.
It reminds me that in the 60s/70s, there was a lot of new music to check out. New styles were popping up, creativity was flowing...
But there is a whole lot of new music out there that I haven't checked out yet. Guess I'll check out the music in the Humble Music Bundle that I just bought today.
My family still has stories from World War I. And plenty more from WWII. Plus the class distinction barrier didn't help either. And the disrespect that they showed toward wounded servicemen was not tolerated at all.
The Red Cross used to do some good things, but as the article mentioned, they changed models. They could have stood up for principles, but they didn't.
Every article worth reading on charitable giving that I've seen has recommended taking a look at the percentage of donations that actually make it to the intended recipients. The Red Cross has always been somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%. That's a lot of overhead.
If you really want your donations to be effective, then you have to look at the religious sponsored organizations. Last I checked, the Big Three are Catholic Relief Services http://crs.org/ (Catholic Charities in the USA), Lutheran World Relief http://lwr.org/ and Mennonite Relief http://www.mcc.org/. Again, last I checked, they all averaged about 97% of donations going directly to its intended purpose - overhead is very low. If those don't fit your world-view, then ask at your own church, or start your own that can hit a 2.5% overhead rate. Feel free. Then you can complain about what a terrible job these three are doing.
Now Red Cross fills a very important function - they are usually the first to arrive after a disaster, but after a week or two, the other three groups are in there providing longer term support. And Red Cross leaves. But being ready to be there first carries some overhead cost, and that does justify SOME of the extra overhead. I'm not ready to absolve them of greed quite yet, though. Let's give it another hundred years and see how they are doing, shall we?
Oh, and two cents wasn't a discounted price for a doughnut during WWII. During the Depression, farmhand wages were a dollar a week, if cash was involved at all. Let's see, today, that would be a $10 doughnut for a trucker making that mythical $50,000 a year that I see on certain semis. How much do you pay for doughnuts?
So the companies get around it by "making" one batch of product per year. They never sell any of it, though.
So what we need to do is require them to "sell" it to anyone who wants to buy it, within a reasonable range of the cost of production.
Going even further, apply the same thing to copyright. If they aren't willing to sell copies, then it obviously isn't worth anything, and there is no damage done by taking away the copyright monopoly. Use it or lose it!
I'd love to buy DVDs of the TV series Maverick. But the studios are upset at James Garner for taking them to court to make them pay him the royalties that they owed him (sound familiar), so the series hasn't been available for years. I heard that Season 1 is on Amazon now, but they have flirted with making bits and pieces available before and never finished the job.
And that's before you include compound interest, penalties, aggravated damages, late fees, triple damages for racketeering, shipping charges, finders' fees, undercoating and dealer profit!
Re: Re: Re: Re: There's another agenda lurking behind this one....
Apparently there are different conditions in Silicon Valley than there are in the rest of the country (at least as much as I know of it). That happens. Not everybody wants to live there, you know. I remember when there were corporate headquarters all over the country.
One thing that would help the situation is if IT people were hired like engineers. Engineers are hired for their skills, and their ability to learn new things and develop new technologies. IT people are hired because they have 4 years experience in a field that is 2 years old. ;-)
Even though the life-cycle of IT is about 2 years and dropping. (Maybe even 18 months.)
I was deemed sufficiently skilled to go save a nuclear power plant installation that was six months behind schedule and couldn't start up their main feedwater loop. But I wasn't deemed skillful enough to be an IT manager for a food distribution warehouse, even though I had been an IT manager twice before and had food plant and drug plant experience.
There's another agenda lurking behind this one....
I had a visceral reaction against professional immigration, and I had to step back and figure out why that was....
In every case where I have seen corporations champion using foreign nationals for skilled work, those people have been paid less, sometimes far less, than the corresponding citizen was. That makes it attractive for the corporations to promote high unemployment for citizens, while profiting enormously from non-citizens.
I'd rather compete on skills rather than wages. Bring them on in, but pay them the same, or it's just another form of slavery.
I'm sure that they don't want you peeking at the reports on chillingeffects that tell you exactly what they are trying to do.
Not only is it illegal to look at stuff that they broadcast over the public airwaves, and illegal to point to where you can find it, it is now illegal to know anything about the previous two [CENSORED].
Are you sure? Men at Work aren't ethnic, nor is the composer of the music that was allegedly plagiarized.
Wikipedia says: "The flute part of the recording of the song is allegedly based on the children's rhyme "Kookaburra", written by Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition in 1935."
I've heard that it is based on aboriginal music, but you see that the lawsuit wasn't from aborigines. This is the kind of abuse that I was referring to. Once the music gets outside of the group that wrote it, it becomes just another financial asset.
Doesn't sound like evolution, it sounds like going back to the roots.
Music is a celebration of community when it is done well. It fits in with the group of people who are making it.
Despite your comments about Lawrence Welk recently, the fact is that there was a huge community of polka fans across the country. Polka bands toured all over, in small towns and large, delivering the music that people wanted to hear.
I hate to think what would happen to ethnic music if somebody decided to start enforcing copyright on it. Tradition plays a huge part in ethnic music of all kinds. There are traditional songs, harmonies, riffs, stories, all of which are traded around and enlarged upon. If copyright broke this chain, then the music would die.
So keep on dissing Welk. I' d like to keep my cultural heritage free of entanglement with the **AAs. And here is some food for thought: Why isn't there more of a problem with copyright in ethnic music than there is?
Maybe I should have used Linux/GNU instead. I suppose that some deeply buried brain cell wanted to troll. I don't call it GNU/Linux, either, but I am amazed at those who get worked up over someone else calling it that. Credit where credit is due and all that.
I, too, remember Stallman's announcement, but from a magazine article, not from a newsgroup. I was working in a Prime 750 powered Center for Computer Aided Design at the University of Iowa as a graduate research assistant after Reagan's veto of the Synfuels bill changed my career path.
I expect that eventually, some third party will arise and write a new kernel based on GPL V3 that will be accepted because the litigation climate in the US will have passed Doomsday proportions. Linux will never become V3, and FSF is focused on Hurd, so it will have to be someone else.
Linus' efforts were really needed at that time, but he had no desire to be a real part of Free Software, as far as I can see. He is focused on implementation, as his comments reveal. No problem with that. The GPL supports it. But Linux doesn't fully support the GPL, so things must eventually change.
The idea of writing a kernel for Richard Stallman's GNU operating system was obvious to everyone -- it was the key piece still missing.
It wasn't obvious to write the kernel until the supporting cast was written. Or to put it another way -- the kernel wasn't a key piece until the supporting utilities were written. The kernel couldn't be written first. Most people seem to miss that small detail. Linux grew in the field of GNU.
As Linus said, it wasn't the idea, it was the implementation. I am glad Linux has succeeded. I use it every day. I would probably be using some ancient copy of Concurrent DOS/86 otherwise, with somebodies cobbled-up drivers inserted to make it work with modern hardware. Thank God nobody is the gatekeeper on trying things out.
I didn't realize that this would be such a hot topic for so many people. It isn't an either/or situation, it is both/and. There is a time and a place for everything.
I am not endowed with manual dexterity, so I find it hard to carry on a conversation via texting. But for me it is wonderfully handy for those short exchanges that can make things happen.
I read the article. It helps to understand what the topic of discussion is. Her points are well made, but may be incomprehensible to someone who isn't familiar with them, just like discussing the finer points of the interactions of the whang bar and string-bending is lost on me because of my lack of manual dexterity.
Face to face conversation is irreplaceable. There are nuances of nonverbal communication that just don't go over the wire. I have a hard time with the telephone (pre-cell) just because of this. I miss out on half the conversation because I can't see the person. Perhaps you get along just fine without this. It may be an unused talent for you. It is still out there if you ever want to try it.
The article mentions a new skill: maintaining eye contact while texting. What we give up when we learn this skill is the ability to give someone 100% of our attention, to make that person the focus of our mind, and to listen with our whole being. That isn't something that we need to do all the time, but if we have given it up entirely, then we are poorer as a culture because of it.
The other thing that we lose with texting is timing. When speaking to someone, I have to listen while they speak. I can't read their words after I am done speaking. There is a give and take that, to me, is the core of the skill of communication. Some people never learn it, even before texting came along.
Finally, she is absolutely right about the need for solitude so that I can be in community. Until I can stand my own company, why should you put up with me? Do you know anybody like that? Where she is wrong is that this has been going on long before technology made it easy - technology just upped the ante by several orders of magnitude.
Spiritual writers have a lot to say on this topic. It is difficult to stay in solitude, and most of us automatically put up a wall of busy-ness to prevent solitude. This wall is difficult to break down, and it has been reinforced through our life. Unless I am in contact with that small source of silence within me, I will never reach my potential. Your experience may say otherwise, but the potential may still be there.
If you are interested in some writers who have more to say about silence, check out Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Richard Rohr, Henry Nouwen and Ron Rohlheiser. I get a lot out of Thich Nhat Hanh on the Buddhist view, and the entire Zen tradition, too.
Silence is an important missing piece of today's culture. Try it sometime and see what you think. It can be uncomfortable at first, but persistence pays dividends.
Or you can continue on as you are. I have no need to change you.
First they came for the rappers, and I said good riddance.
Then they came for the pop singers, and I didn't care.
Then they came for the rock singers, and it bothered me, but I didn't say anything.
Then they came for the blues singers, and there was nobody left to care.
The only result of voting for a major party candidate is to buy in to the idea that there should only be two parties in the US. As long as they keep fighting each other, they aren't working for the voter.
I have toyed with the idea of trying to get people to agree not to vote for someone who takes money above a certain level. Why does a state candidate need more than a million dollars? [Amount up for debate] Why do national interests get to dump enormous amounts of money into states that have the first caucuses and primaries? [I am a resident of the state of Iowa.]
If a candidate is really appealing to voters, then he can get out and meet people where they live. And believe me, the rental rates for most community centers is in the hundred dollar range, not the thousand or million dollar range.
How about it, are you ready to implement some campaign finance reforms of your own, without waiting for Congress to do it?
I recently became aware of just who was on the sex offender registry, and have been telling friends about it ever since.
The first post mentioned urinating in public. I hardly think that we need to be protected from drunks who don't know where the can is.
The largest segment of people entering the sex offender registry is young boys, children, actually, between the ages of 14-16. There is no way to get off the sex offender registry. I checked with an attorney friend here in Iowa, and the law has no provision for removing someone from the registry. Two children involved in sex exploration who are more than 24 months apart in age will get the male put on the sex offender registry. Any sex exploration will get him on the list. Whether you think that child sex play is OK or not, the results are too draconian to tolerate. Children (under 18) almost never match up with the female older than the male. Males don't mature as fast as females, and it is easy for the gap to be two years. Think back to your high school days and look at the couples you remember. How many of them would have been on the sex offender registry?
When I told one woman about this, she was upset that she could no longer trust the registry to protect her children by checking who the REAL problem people were that she needed to worry about. They are now hidden in a thicket of miscellaneous offenders, most of whom are not dangerous to children, as Zachary pointed out in his article.
This whole mess is indicative of the lack of oversight on legislatures, who make meaningless laws that are not integrated into the existing body of law. No wonder judges' decisions make no sense when the corpus of law is such a Gordian knot. Discussions over the years have suggested sunset laws, or requiring legislators to fund enforcement of the laws they pass, or other schemes to bring this mess into some sort of order. But nothing ever gets done.
Anyway, it is time to stop criminalizing our children, besides all the criminalizing that the **AA's would have the government do to the rest of the population.
The core asset of the creative work is that the RIAA/MPAA/others get paid for it. How much better can you get than that?
The real pirates are the companies who have somehow (Oh, my!) ended up owning content created by others.
Meanwhile, I quit watching TV about 20 years ago and never looked back. People keep telling me I have to watch The Big Bang Theory. I don't HAVE to watch anything! But someday, I plan on catching up on Star Trek.
On the post: New French Government Not Impressed By Hadopi; Wants To Cut Its Funding
Re: ridiculous claims that France "doesn't respect" culture and the like.
Look at Toulouse la Trec. He was a midget!
Then there was van Gogh who painted his hallucinations and became famous. We put people like that in asylums fer cryin' out loud!
Matisse and a bunch of others couldn't paint, so they just put dots on the canvas, or smeared some oils on. I can't tell it from the grade school paintings!
Paul Gaugin doesn't count. He left the country before he got on a roll.
And they all painted nekked people. Couldn't afford clothes, I guess. They starved them all in garrets, whatever those are.
Even back in the Stone Age, somebody daubed up a bunch of unlikely looking critters in a cave at Lausanne that just don't measure up to Real Cave Paintings!
Those Frenchman ain't got no class!
[Satire for the humor impaired.]
On the post: Would US Education Be Better If We Replaced Algebra Requirements With Stats & Logic?
Re: Re: Re: my intuition tells me...
You might be able to solve problems just fine, but creating a good math problem is a different skill - with one exception.
If you can't write a good math problem, you will never be excellent at math.
Thanks for trying, though, and don't forget to enter again!
On the post: Let Your Senator Know Right Now That You Are Watching If They'll Vote To Protect Privacy
They have the process backwards
Using this process, we have things like the ASME Boiler Code, the standard Building Code, the National Electrical Code, the National Fire Protection Association, the American Water Society, Instrument Society of America and many others. There is also the NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology - to help guide the process along, and to provide parallel documentation of some standards. NIST is a government agency.
In this case, we have the government regulating the public because the industry can't get its act together. Someone needs to go back to Civics 101 and figure out how government (of, by and for the people) is supposed to work. I think they have their wires crossed somewhere where the sun don't shine!
On the post: Legacy Artists Sign Letter Demanding ISPs & Search Engines Pitch In To Return Them To Their Former Glory
Get out much?
The Who
Legendary. Redesigned sound equipment because existing equipment wouldn't handle their load. Defined being a young adult (or almost adult) for an entire generation.
Led Zeppelin
Legendary. Started a few memes - we all hear about the kid who just wants to play "Stairway to Heaven on his guitar, right? Brought about a new style of music from all the roots floating around back in the 60s.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Legendary.
From Wikipedia:
Elton John
Makes me want to barf, but you can't deny his success, his abilities or his impact on music.
Queen
Popular. I wasn't that thrilled with them, but you can't deny their success at the time.
Simon Cowell and a couple of rappers
You might be right.
In general, you are either misinformed, too angry to have written anything, or eminently ignorable.
At least I won't have to START boycotting Elton John or Queen, but it is going to hurt to not buy any Who or Led Zeppelin albums. I was just starting to gather some old music again. Led Zeppelin was one of the very first albums that I bought back in high school. At least Neil Young mostly gets it.
It reminds me that in the 60s/70s, there was a lot of new music to check out. New styles were popping up, creativity was flowing...
But there is a whole lot of new music out there that I haven't checked out yet. Guess I'll check out the music in the Humble Music Bundle that I just bought today.
On the post: Two-Cent Doughnuts Breed Decades Of Bad Blood: It's Not So Easy Going From Free To Paid
The Red Cross hating started long before WWII
The Red Cross used to do some good things, but as the article mentioned, they changed models. They could have stood up for principles, but they didn't.
Every article worth reading on charitable giving that I've seen has recommended taking a look at the percentage of donations that actually make it to the intended recipients. The Red Cross has always been somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%. That's a lot of overhead.
If you really want your donations to be effective, then you have to look at the religious sponsored organizations. Last I checked, the Big Three are Catholic Relief Services http://crs.org/ (Catholic Charities in the USA), Lutheran World Relief http://lwr.org/ and Mennonite Relief http://www.mcc.org/. Again, last I checked, they all averaged about 97% of donations going directly to its intended purpose - overhead is very low. If those don't fit your world-view, then ask at your own church, or start your own that can hit a 2.5% overhead rate. Feel free. Then you can complain about what a terrible job these three are doing.
Now Red Cross fills a very important function - they are usually the first to arrive after a disaster, but after a week or two, the other three groups are in there providing longer term support. And Red Cross leaves. But being ready to be there first carries some overhead cost, and that does justify SOME of the extra overhead. I'm not ready to absolve them of greed quite yet, though. Let's give it another hundred years and see how they are doing, shall we?
Oh, and two cents wasn't a discounted price for a doughnut during WWII. During the Depression, farmhand wages were a dollar a week, if cash was involved at all. Let's see, today, that would be a $10 doughnut for a trucker making that mythical $50,000 a year that I see on certain semis. How much do you pay for doughnuts?
On the post: Judge Posner On A Mission To Fix Patents; We Have Some Suggestions
Same requirement as in Trademark Law
So what we need to do is require them to "sell" it to anyone who wants to buy it, within a reasonable range of the cost of production.
Going even further, apply the same thing to copyright. If they aren't willing to sell copies, then it obviously isn't worth anything, and there is no damage done by taking away the copyright monopoly. Use it or lose it!
I'd love to buy DVDs of the TV series Maverick. But the studios are upset at James Garner for taking them to court to make them pay him the royalties that they owed him (sound familiar), so the series hasn't been available for years. I heard that Season 1 is on Amazon now, but they have flirted with making bits and pieces available before and never finished the job.
On the post: Excerpt From Rob Reid's Year Zero; Plus A Chance To Win The Book
Earth owns the universe.
And that's before you include compound interest, penalties, aggravated damages, late fees, triple damages for racketeering, shipping charges, finders' fees, undercoating and dealer profit!
On the post: A Floating Island Of Nerds... Or Just Evidence Of A Broken Immigration System?
Re: Colorful metaphors
Perhaps you shouldn't use those colorful metaphors. I don't think you have the hang of it.
On the post: A Floating Island Of Nerds... Or Just Evidence Of A Broken Immigration System?
Re: Re: Re: Re: There's another agenda lurking behind this one....
One thing that would help the situation is if IT people were hired like engineers. Engineers are hired for their skills, and their ability to learn new things and develop new technologies. IT people are hired because they have 4 years experience in a field that is 2 years old. ;-)
Even though the life-cycle of IT is about 2 years and dropping. (Maybe even 18 months.)
I was deemed sufficiently skilled to go save a nuclear power plant installation that was six months behind schedule and couldn't start up their main feedwater loop. But I wasn't deemed skillful enough to be an IT manager for a food distribution warehouse, even though I had been an IT manager twice before and had food plant and drug plant experience.
Not complaining, just reporting.
On the post: A Floating Island Of Nerds... Or Just Evidence Of A Broken Immigration System?
There's another agenda lurking behind this one....
In every case where I have seen corporations champion using foreign nationals for skilled work, those people have been paid less, sometimes far less, than the corresponding citizen was. That makes it attractive for the corporations to promote high unemployment for citizens, while profiting enormously from non-citizens.
I'd rather compete on skills rather than wages. Bring them on in, but pay them the same, or it's just another form of slavery.
On the post: Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing
Don't look at the man behind the curtain!
Not only is it illegal to look at stuff that they broadcast over the public airwaves, and illegal to point to where you can find it, it is now illegal to know anything about the previous two [CENSORED].
I know it's true. I read it in the DMCA.
On the post: Musician Wonders What It Would Take To Become An Open Source Musician
Re: Re: Doesn't sound like evolution...
Wikipedia says: "The flute part of the recording of the song is allegedly based on the children's rhyme "Kookaburra", written by Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition in 1935."
I've heard that it is based on aboriginal music, but you see that the lawsuit wasn't from aborigines. This is the kind of abuse that I was referring to. Once the music gets outside of the group that wrote it, it becomes just another financial asset.
On the post: Musician Wonders What It Would Take To Become An Open Source Musician
Doesn't sound like evolution...
Music is a celebration of community when it is done well. It fits in with the group of people who are making it.
Despite your comments about Lawrence Welk recently, the fact is that there was a huge community of polka fans across the country. Polka bands toured all over, in small towns and large, delivering the music that people wanted to hear.
I hate to think what would happen to ethnic music if somebody decided to start enforcing copyright on it. Tradition plays a huge part in ethnic music of all kinds. There are traditional songs, harmonies, riffs, stories, all of which are traded around and enlarged upon. If copyright broke this chain, then the music would die.
So keep on dissing Welk. I' d like to keep my cultural heritage free of entanglement with the **AAs. And here is some food for thought: Why isn't there more of a problem with copyright in ethnic music than there is?
On the post: 'Almost Anybody Can Have An Idea' -- Linus Torvalds
Re: Re: Obligatory GNU/Linux comment
I, too, remember Stallman's announcement, but from a magazine article, not from a newsgroup. I was working in a Prime 750 powered Center for Computer Aided Design at the University of Iowa as a graduate research assistant after Reagan's veto of the Synfuels bill changed my career path.
I expect that eventually, some third party will arise and write a new kernel based on GPL V3 that will be accepted because the litigation climate in the US will have passed Doomsday proportions. Linux will never become V3, and FSF is focused on Hurd, so it will have to be someone else.
Linus' efforts were really needed at that time, but he had no desire to be a real part of Free Software, as far as I can see. He is focused on implementation, as his comments reveal. No problem with that. The GPL supports it. But Linux doesn't fully support the GPL, so things must eventually change.
On the post: 'Almost Anybody Can Have An Idea' -- Linus Torvalds
Obligatory GNU/Linux comment
It wasn't obvious to write the kernel until the supporting cast was written. Or to put it another way -- the kernel wasn't a key piece until the supporting utilities were written. The kernel couldn't be written first. Most people seem to miss that small detail. Linux grew in the field of GNU.
As Linus said, it wasn't the idea, it was the implementation. I am glad Linux has succeeded. I use it every day. I would probably be using some ancient copy of Concurrent DOS/86 otherwise, with somebodies cobbled-up drivers inserted to make it work with modern hardware. Thank God nobody is the gatekeeper on trying things out.
On the post: Sherry Turkle Says Technology Is Making Us Lonelier Because We Spend Less Time Alone, Or Something
Some things that we lose in digital communication
I am not endowed with manual dexterity, so I find it hard to carry on a conversation via texting. But for me it is wonderfully handy for those short exchanges that can make things happen.
I read the article. It helps to understand what the topic of discussion is. Her points are well made, but may be incomprehensible to someone who isn't familiar with them, just like discussing the finer points of the interactions of the whang bar and string-bending is lost on me because of my lack of manual dexterity.
Face to face conversation is irreplaceable. There are nuances of nonverbal communication that just don't go over the wire. I have a hard time with the telephone (pre-cell) just because of this. I miss out on half the conversation because I can't see the person. Perhaps you get along just fine without this. It may be an unused talent for you. It is still out there if you ever want to try it.
The article mentions a new skill: maintaining eye contact while texting. What we give up when we learn this skill is the ability to give someone 100% of our attention, to make that person the focus of our mind, and to listen with our whole being. That isn't something that we need to do all the time, but if we have given it up entirely, then we are poorer as a culture because of it.
The other thing that we lose with texting is timing. When speaking to someone, I have to listen while they speak. I can't read their words after I am done speaking. There is a give and take that, to me, is the core of the skill of communication. Some people never learn it, even before texting came along.
Finally, she is absolutely right about the need for solitude so that I can be in community. Until I can stand my own company, why should you put up with me? Do you know anybody like that? Where she is wrong is that this has been going on long before technology made it easy - technology just upped the ante by several orders of magnitude.
Spiritual writers have a lot to say on this topic. It is difficult to stay in solitude, and most of us automatically put up a wall of busy-ness to prevent solitude. This wall is difficult to break down, and it has been reinforced through our life. Unless I am in contact with that small source of silence within me, I will never reach my potential. Your experience may say otherwise, but the potential may still be there.
If you are interested in some writers who have more to say about silence, check out Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Richard Rohr, Henry Nouwen and Ron Rohlheiser. I get a lot out of Thich Nhat Hanh on the Buddhist view, and the entire Zen tradition, too.
Silence is an important missing piece of today's culture. Try it sometime and see what you think. It can be uncomfortable at first, but persistence pays dividends.
Or you can continue on as you are. I have no need to change you.
On the post: 50 Cent Sued Over Infringing Sample; When Will Hip-Hop's Stars Speak Up About Copyright?
Progression
First they came for the rappers, and I said good riddance.
Then they came for the pop singers, and I didn't care.
Then they came for the rock singers, and it bothered me, but I didn't say anything.
Then they came for the blues singers, and there was nobody left to care.
On the post: Josh In CharlotteNC’s Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Wasted Votes
The only result of voting for a major party candidate is to buy in to the idea that there should only be two parties in the US. As long as they keep fighting each other, they aren't working for the voter.
I have toyed with the idea of trying to get people to agree not to vote for someone who takes money above a certain level. Why does a state candidate need more than a million dollars? [Amount up for debate] Why do national interests get to dump enormous amounts of money into states that have the first caucuses and primaries? [I am a resident of the state of Iowa.]
If a candidate is really appealing to voters, then he can get out and meet people where they live. And believe me, the rental rates for most community centers is in the hundred dollar range, not the thousand or million dollar range.
How about it, are you ready to implement some campaign finance reforms of your own, without waiting for Congress to do it?
On the post: New York Convinces Game Companies To Kick Registered Sex Offenders Off Gaming Services
Thanks for speaking out on this
The first post mentioned urinating in public. I hardly think that we need to be protected from drunks who don't know where the can is.
The largest segment of people entering the sex offender registry is young boys, children, actually, between the ages of 14-16. There is no way to get off the sex offender registry. I checked with an attorney friend here in Iowa, and the law has no provision for removing someone from the registry. Two children involved in sex exploration who are more than 24 months apart in age will get the male put on the sex offender registry. Any sex exploration will get him on the list. Whether you think that child sex play is OK or not, the results are too draconian to tolerate. Children (under 18) almost never match up with the female older than the male. Males don't mature as fast as females, and it is easy for the gap to be two years. Think back to your high school days and look at the couples you remember. How many of them would have been on the sex offender registry?
When I told one woman about this, she was upset that she could no longer trust the registry to protect her children by checking who the REAL problem people were that she needed to worry about. They are now hidden in a thicket of miscellaneous offenders, most of whom are not dangerous to children, as Zachary pointed out in his article.
This whole mess is indicative of the lack of oversight on legislatures, who make meaningless laws that are not integrated into the existing body of law. No wonder judges' decisions make no sense when the corpus of law is such a Gordian knot. Discussions over the years have suggested sunset laws, or requiring legislators to fund enforcement of the laws they pass, or other schemes to bring this mess into some sort of order. But nothing ever gets done.
Anyway, it is time to stop criminalizing our children, besides all the criminalizing that the **AA's would have the government do to the rest of the population.
[/vent]
On the post: UK Entertainment Industry: Fair Use Hurts Economic Growth
Those poor, misunderstood content owners!
The real pirates are the companies who have somehow (Oh, my!) ended up owning content created by others.
Meanwhile, I quit watching TV about 20 years ago and never looked back. People keep telling me I have to watch The Big Bang Theory. I don't HAVE to watch anything! But someday, I plan on catching up on Star Trek.
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