Comment Re:Why two videos? For the love of dog, why?! (Score 2) 48
"Due to management-imposed restraints on video lengths, we broke the ~10 minute interview into two parts,"
"Due to management-imposed restraints on video lengths, we broke the ~10 minute interview into two parts,"
I don't have a problem with linking to a video as long as you have a transcript, but the fact that "thousands" of people watched them without complaining doesn't prove anything about whether they liked them.
I think we need could have a great discussion, but that first we'd need to go back to Marshall McLuhan's first major book, Understanding Media - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - and come forward from there. This is where the saying, "The medium is the message" came from, in a time when "multimedia" was a beat poet doing a recital accompanied by a flute and bongos while psychedelic (a new word back then) images played on a sheet behind the stage.
I think that might make a fun little video piece. If you want to do it, email robin@roblimo.com.
I've written more than a few op-eds over the years that said we should tax "campaign contributions." I agree. A win-win. I also think all politicians should be like NASCAR, and wear all their sponsors' logos.
Less videos on Slashdot. As someone explained a few days ago, Slashdot readers are not business suits, we prefer to read our information. It's just plain faster.
This is the old "Slashdot ran a story that didn't interest me personally" complaint that's been going around since 1999. If you don't want to watch videos, don't watch them. If you want some or all of the information contained in a video, but don't want to watch the video, we give you transcripts.
Slashdot typically runs 20+ stories every day, and around 3 videos per week which may (gasp) go up to 4 or even 5 at some point. Thousands of people watch those videos and seem to like them, while 5 or 10 complain.
On the gripping hand, you seem interested in Bitcoins and that sort of thing. I've had people tell me that stories about digital currency don't interest them, so they don't belong on Slashdot. Ummm..... okay....
The sad secret is that there are many Slashdot readers with different tastes and desires. I figure that if anyone -- including me -- finds 80% of the stories on the site interesting, that's pretty good.
Thanks for caring,
- Rob
Ehrlich is simply wrong when he says "[the study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event"; that would require 75% or more of all species to disappear; the paper only looks at a small subset of species, those most affected by humans.
I wondered if the extinction record could be used as evidence of past intelligent species on Earth. If there were any kind of prior top-shelf minds spreading across the globe one unmistakable evidence would be in how they shaped the foreign ecology they spread into.
Tools and buildings may not survive deep geological time. We may not even recognize something created by a very different kind of intelligence as a tool. Ancient hearth and midden piles on the Amazon are mined today for rich soil and charcoal but really hide the enormous human presence on the river that disappeared overnight to mostly likely European diseases. It took a surprising amount of time for someone to figure out that stuff came from us just a few centuries ago. But a sudden biodiversity decrease without a volcanic or meteoric crater and a change in seafloor sediments might be a smoking gun.
I would think humanity is almost a best case for leaving behind a detectable legacy. Outside of a pathogen we are the ultimate bad neighbors for a tasty species. Humans are aggressive territorial omnivores with very poor hygiene as a group. We may leave behind just enough trash to tell someone we were here long after our radio and radar signals are lost to the background noise. But what about our paleontology record?
If we cannot even kill most of the vertebrate species then that argues against using the extinction record to track prior intelligence that may have arose here. A technological species that develops green ethics before hitting the shoot-it-if-it-moves level may leave little change at the level we can detect.
You're kidding, right? The show/hide transcript links have been in the same place all along. Is that one click really that hard on you? What about the click it takes to watch the video you don't want to watch?
If you don't want to watch videos on Slashdot, don't. We run three of them in the average week, and 20+ text pieces per day.
Tell you what: If you're real nice, we *may* consider not forcing you to watch videos on Slashdot. And it's entirely possible that (if you're nice) we'll supply transcripts of most videos so that you can read instead of watching. Deal?
Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.