For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars.
conflate (v) : mix together different elements [syn: blend, flux, mix, commingle, immix, fuse, coalesce, meld, combine, merge] – source: The Hacker Crackdown, Part Two
There are hackers today who fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching of the noble title of hacker.
besmirch (v) 1: charge falsely or with malicious intent; attack the good name and reputation of someone [syn: defame, slander, smirch, asperse, denigrate, calumniate, smear, sully] 2: smear so as to make dirty or stained [syn: smirch] – source: The Hacker Crackdown, Part Two
Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the violence of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line, they are scofflaws.
scofflaw (n) : one who habitually ignores the law and does not answer court summonses – source: The Hacker Crackdown, Part Two
It came from the underground, from the outside, from the young and energetic and disenfranchised.
disenfranchised adj : deprived of the rights of citizenship especially the right to vote [syn: disfranchised, voteless] – source: Cyberpunk in the Nineties
In a cyberpunk analysis, Frankenstein is ”Humanist” SF. Frankenstein promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. – – In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we already know Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Our grandparents knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.
Rucker, Shiner, Sterling, Shirley and Gibson – the Movement’s most fearsome ”gurus,” ear-tagged yet again in Shiner’s worthy article, in front of the N. Y. Times’ bemused millions – are ”cyberpunks” for good and all. – – But the dreaded C-Word will surely be chiselled into our five tombstones. Public disavowals are useless, very likely worse than useless. Even the most sweeping changes in our philosophy of writing, perhaps weird mid-life-crisis conversions to Islam or Santeria, could not erase the tattoo. – – Seen from this perspective, ”cyberpunk” simply means ”anything cyberpunks write.” – – ”Cyberpunk” will not be conclusively ”dead” until the last of us is shovelled under. Demographics suggest that this is likely to take some time.
Ich habe ein Haustierkrokodil in meinem Muskelboot. ’Nuff said.
The terms used will be as medical as possible, which is a waste of both our times since if you’re reading an article about people boning each other on your Nintendo, you’re probably not going to break down crying if I curse while I’m describing someone’s crotch.
Warning: Possibly NSFW. Depending on whether it’s considered appropriate to spend time looking at pixelated titties.
The other big question is can you put your money where your mouth is? I’m not suggesting that proper film critics would do it, because they won’t*. However, now that video editing software is ubiquitous and DVDs are everywhere, even the most technologically inept person could easily recut almost any movie. The most famous example of this is the Phantom edit, one dissatisfied fan’s vision of what Star Wars Episode 1 should’ve been like.
My core argument is that one could easily tell if this temporal mangling was necessary by rearranging movies into proper chronological order and comparing the results with the originals. You’ve got Windows Movie Maker, iMovie or Cinelerra installed and you’ve got 21 Grams, Irréversible, Pulp Fiction and Memento on DVD, haven’t you? So why don’t you go do it already?
*: Well, I’d really like to see Mikael Fränti improve upon a sloppily edited movie. And after that could we get peace on Earth? (ramblings courtesy of Jussi)