I cleared that in a following post...and by the way, that politician was even on the administration board for the seismology center, even if only in a representative role. But he was a partner for the local building companies, too. Guess who would lose money if such zone would had been judged as "highly unstable"?

Sorry, maybe I was a bit unclear on my previous post. Such previous incident happened no less than few days before the bigger earthquakes. And the reaction was something very different than a carelessness act. Some of the people in charge of the local seismic centers were wiretapped some day after talking with local homebuilders and politicians, and was pretty clear that they were aware that what happened was a direct consequence of their decision to ignore most of the advices coming from the center.

They are already standing trial on a different case. What's going on here is being sure that the scientists did everything was in their position to make very clear what was eventually going to happen to the general population, or if they just passively accepted to do as they were ordered.

Nope. the crime is that they deliberately ignored all the information available at the moment, and they even suggested the people to get back at their own homes after some earthquakes had previously happened in such zones, even destroying some buildings. It's extremely probable that most of such research institutions were pressed to mislead the population due to the local government, which supported the speculative construction industry backed by some companies controlled by the local mafia.

If you can understand, a well-known italian writer and journalist and journalist explained the whole affair here

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Doubt they really care about "Marketing". It was created by a well known sociology researcher, Paolo Pedercini (at least inside sociology and communication academic circles) , whose academic focus is mainly on the effects of propaganda trough mass-media, and the effects of market induced censorship. The app itself was created with a very propagandistic, almost surreal slant towards criticizing the mobile phone industry. Most of his previous applications were created with the objective to verify the limits of freedom of speech, and to analyze the eventual outcomes from the interested parties. If he's following the same approach, probably he is more interested in objectively observing the reaction from Apple than its actual deployment inside the App Store. Yep, It looks like he's trolling but if you read his CV, you'll see he's quite serious about this kind of research. This is not that different from a medical trial, as inserting a foreign organism to see the reaction from a body.

I presume you have never seen software like vvvv, max/msp, puredata, Quarts under Mac Os X or kismet for the unreal development kit.

It seems an approach limited in its usefulness to application with very little (or none at all ) branching, like audiovisual applications, but within these limits, it's neither simplistic, nor underpowered.

Being a bachelor of Literature and Communication ( or whatever academic award you should consider my Italian degree comparable to), I don't know if I should consider such idea offensive, ridiculous, or both.

It would make an already objectively more difficult degree such as Engineering even more distressing, and would dilute the already small relevance given to Liberal Arts degrees by giving them the reputation of being "cheap majors" (guess what, they become as much expensive and difficult as any other major studies if you actually care about what you are studying, instead of using it as an easy way out of getting a degree.)

Just Cause 2 is way more subtle than his intentionally horrible dubbing and over the top action suggest. Despite the whole "Let's save the civilians from the dictatorship" themes it becomes pretty clear after a while that the main character is not very different in his motivations from the other terrorists. The scripts jumps from being the archetypal "Marines shooter" generic stuff to some dark humor and quite disturbing situations, never shown but too clearly implied to be some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the player.

It's got quite a satirical narrative, well hidden behind a stereotypical paper-thin, "videogame" story.

-"Oh! So, you're the one who writes lyrics for Radiohead, then."

Well,my explanation was to point the direct use of the Term in Tuscan dialect during the Renaissance, of course the phylological analysis is quite more complex than that ;)

[...]

No at all,actually it was quite interesting. My knowledge of the argument comes from visual design, thus much of the interpretation of Aesthetics comes from a "Bauhaus" school of thought and the works of Wladislaw Tatarkiewicz where, as you probably already know, your stance on Art was considered historically relevant only after Goethe. But I'm being biased of course. :)

In any case, as you said, most of this should be considered something very remote from contemporary "Art" Production and closer to History of Philosophy. The fact that lately I'm working more on Max/Msp and Actionscript than paper and that this conversation is being done on a place like Slashdot is quite indicative on how little weight the statements of Ebert carry on them.

They already were, during the Renaissance. the italian word Arte (that is, art), was a tuscan contraption of Artigianato, which means craftmanship. In other words, their works were considered not much more important those those made by a carpenter, a well respected but not culturally relevant position.The Sistine Chapel was High Art because it was a representation of God Magnificence, and consequently, a superior work in any case.

The equivalents of Ebert during that historical period were already dismissing many of those works basing on the same reasons: it wasn't Art because it wasn't comparable to the Fine Art of Latin Poetry. Michelangelo was even more valued as an accomplished writer, but I doubt that many remember him today for his sonnets.

Point is, nothing is usually considered "Art" until it permeates completely the society where it is created. I bet that in less than 50 years nobody is going to argue if videogames are art or not, it will be considered obvious.

By the half of 19th century, the word "Art" was already completely devalued by his original meaning and considered almost irrelevant by the Impressionism, and by the time Modernism and Post-Modernism came to exist, it was nothing more than a label. Any serious course on Art or Design would point this very clearly.

Trying to use such terminology now would be laughable.

Hold on. Of course this system is by no means perfect, I thought it was quite clear when I associated it to "humanistic" branches of knowledge.

And of course your reasoning is correct, but it would be the equivalent of saying "we should not be bothered by the Second Law of Thermodynamics while building our engine, we can always implement a Maxwell's Demon trough nanorobotics after all". It's not physically impossible, but it's an irrealistically hard objective to achieve.

I've been lucky enough to see in action the result of neurolinguistic experiments applied to design and communication, and despite the amazing results, they're still in a very initial phase; I think that the "old school approach" it's still good enough and cost effective to be used in a project like GNOME 3, and it would require no less than 50 years before a change in attitude.

And by the way, pragmatically speaking I doubt that the common user would be glad to have a CAT in order to reconfigure their interface to better suit their current mental patterns.

I wonder what kind of studies they've done before writing such cases then. UI Design is something you develop from test cases, real world experience and is a research branch much more closer to psychology, anthropology, Comparative Linguistics than Computer Science. It's extremely subjective, as there isn't something like the perfect "UI", like there isn't any perfect human language or the perfect blueprint for an house. The idea that an UI be done using some kind of theoretical , mathematical-like approach just because it's done "on a computer", would be not much different from trying to develop a C++ GUI framework using a manual of anthropology just because it's "Graphical" . Hope it's not the kind of reasoning behind such decisions with GNOME 3.

Basically, yes.

Both from conservative to socialists point of view is near impossible to find someone who isn't A) a crook / mafioso / neo-aryan fanatic or B) completely irrelevant.

right now there are just two possible viable alternative on both sides of the political spectrum (Gianfranco Fini and Nichi Vendola) ,but nobody is actually supporting them because they are extremely realist on what is needed in Italy to fix things and no one (politician, high class citizen, entrepreneur) really wants to start paying taxes / follow the law / act in a sensate way, actually.

Meanwhile with Berlusconi is in control they are pretty much safe because their behaviour falls perfectly in line with Berlusconi's one.

Just because it has no lolcats in it doesn't means it's not satire...it is actually shows a very similar tone and style of another pretty much famous italian female satirist, even if this text is quite mediocre and comes out as a very ugly copy of her.

Actually it's pretty much clear for a native speaker that she is speaking in very surreal , "Falling Down" kind of way.

The more probable reason is that right now much of the real political opposition to Berlusconi in italy comes from Intellectuals, journalists and comedians (especially female comedians ) considering that much of the left wing party gave up or just became subordinated to right wing parties trying to get some breadcrumbs from what they're grabbing before leaving the economic wasteland that Italy is going to become in the next few years. If you live in the southern part of italy right now, You wouldn't notice any difference with Colombia or Bolivia.

The concept is useful enough, if you realize what the user needs. They don't care about autorun per se, they care just about displaying the content from their media in less time as possible. That's their problem.

The feature, "Autorun" in such case, is a solution. And if you try to re-implement a solution without understanding the original problem, you're doomed to make the same errors of the first implementation. By looking at the GNOME interface, despite its really good production values, it's apparently a common error.