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Better than Back Door Sluts 9?

So I'm a reasonably smart nerd and as a teenager had hair down to my ass and was a freakin metal-maniac. In my twenties I "grew up" and sold most of my metal and didn't miss it. On a recent plane ride though I saw Metal: A Headbanger's Journey by happy accident. Excellent movie (party on Wayne!). I got all amped up about metal again and went out and bought up all kinds of metal - like 30 cds in two weeks. How I've survived the last 10 years without Master of Puppets I have no idea - fucking fantastic! 3pm rolls around and the ipod almost always creeps to the metal end of the dial and half the time I end up giggling about how good this stuff is.

If you, as consumers of News for Nerds, used to have the black t-shirt and jeans standard issue uniform but have since "grown up", I strongly encourage a revisit to the used bin at your local record store, you won't regret it, and your code will improve! (Ok maybe not, but in the spirit of TFA, my code improved therefore the whole population's will as well Q.E.D.)

The sad thing about this is that it actually does make sense that Google should buy Youtube for the reason stated in the OP.

It is really sad how the interpretation has become a matter of who can afford the most lawyers and things like that. I think this is a trend that is seen at it's strongest in the USA but we sure also see this here in Europe and Denmark where I live.
In my simple mind the law should be equal for everyone no matter how much money they have, but that really is being naive these days as far as I can figure.

I don't know if my thinking here is to much influenced by movies like Civil Action, but then again it claims to be based on a true story (and the movie is almost 10 years old, so I guess this isn't a new trend, at least in the US).

Yes. He's a remarkably smart and articulate guy. Further proof can be found on Bowling for Columbine; i thought the movie was ok, but what struck me was that, of all the people interviewed, Marylin Manson made the most centered and intelligent points in the movie. The bit with Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park) was very intersting aswell.

I like heavy metal too, I also liked Metallica until the black album which in my opinion was when they became pop-metal.. from there they became RIAA-bitches metal. And I always liked Megadeth more than Metallica...

Currently I listen to Children of Bodom, Kamelot, Axxis, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Megadeth, Judast Priest, Yngwie Malmsteen, Rata Blanca, Avalanch, Lacrimosa, Theatre Of Tragedy (before they became a techno dance band), Epica, In Flames, Iced Earth, Ayreon, Rhapsody, Haggaard, Iron Maiden, etc.

Interestingly, I also like to listen to guitar players like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Frank Zappa, Eric Johnson, etc.

And about punk... I hate it, I once read that Punk was born from the frustration of the fans that could not play the songs their idols played (i.e. try to play something by Malmsteen or Maiden) and thus a new wave started with music easy to replicate (just chords) and no technique.

By the way, I would *really* recommend a DVD called Metal:A Headbangers journey, which is a really nice documentary about heavy metal (I LOL when they asked Alice Cooper when was "Heavy Metal" born and he answered that it was born when someone referred at his music as heavy metal... suuuuure duuude). If you are into metal you will like it (it has part of an interview with Bruce Dickinson) and if you are not you might find interesting what the heck is this metal thing :).

Paramount announced Tuesday that it will join Disney in providing movies for downloading from Apple's iTunes Store. However, it indicated, it will not provide its latest releases, only its older films

And you can even communicate with your dead father in the past about the world series, save some nurses and watch a guy's arm dissolve through time! See: Frequency [IMDB]

What about Wierd Science? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090305/

What's that, the choo choo ride at the nerds' amusement park?

I think this is a worthwhile question to consider, not so much in the expectation that critics would make great pieces of work, but in evaluating how much such criticism is actually worth. It's not that unusual for critics to "cross the fence" (Ebert himself wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ) and enjoy no particular acclaim for it.

I think the response "Can you do better?" is a valid one, since so much of (useful) criticism is explaining how it can be done better. Saying "the pacing is bad" and "a third of the movie should be cut" is useless blather without some understanding of how differently to pace it or which third should be cut. To be honest, most criticism is probably not that useful, and we read it more because the writers put things in an entertaining way. It's worth examining and realizing that, and also realizing that because Gabe and Tycho say a game sucks does not actually mean it sucks, or that you won't enjoy it.

While it's not fair, probably, to expect "the greatest ... game of all time" from Gabe and Tycho, it's probably fair to expect not to number among its shortcomings things they've criticized before about other games.

Hey. From the article, consultants from Microsoft and Dell were called in. As they said in Raiders of the Lost Ark, top...men.

This!

Anyone else think of this guy momentarily? :)

http://imdb.com/name/nm0000822/

Actually, they reminded me of of this. Why just have boots when you can have trousers?

Chris Mattern

I wouldn't be so sure about that...

"It's all in the name of science. Weird Science."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090305/

>but it's almost impossible to imagine what 24 would have looked like even 10 or 20 years ago.

Not too hard to imagine 10 years ago.

Nothing like a visit to The White Room.

>Compare the violence in 24 to that of, say, 1990s episodes of NYPD Blue

NYPD Blue, Law & Order, CSI, and other shows have plenty of other (more awful) things to be ashamed of. And they started before 24.

Also, I have yet to see Jack Bauer dance a jig after torturing a terrorist.

Go see The King of Kong when you get the opportunity. Seriously it is a fantastic story, even as a documentary. I got a chance to see it this past week, and it was great. The director confirmed he's now working on a dramatic version of it.

Steve Wiebe has a diploma in Donkey Kong.

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Guildenstern: Is that what people want?
The Player: It's what we do.

...when it comes to TV showing a carpenter-turned-preacher getting whipped, scourged, and crucified, the PTC will mute their objections and look the other way.

Your guess is right. The actor playing Long John Silver in this movie started this "pirate dialect" tradition that included "arr" and "matey".

Oops, here's the correct url.
(I must be lame cuz I can't figure out how to edit my own ^#%$* post)

IIRC, something similar was done in 1985.

Do you have to think in Russian?

Nonsense. "What's the death rate here?" "Same as everywhere - one each."

Please, try to keep up with modern Egyptology.

Or possibly they start to accept that torture is probably being done in our current anti-terrorism efforts, which many people still don't believe. Or maybe it shows them how easy it is to do, and the sort of safeguards we would need against it.

The glorification aspects is troubling, but people can be so fundamentally blind to what is going on out there, any sort of exposure seems somehow helpful. Now we just need The Seige to be required watching on NBC primetime.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ INVALID

...in the health insurance industry? Do I see GATTACA around the corner?

"In the not-too distant future"

(As posted to my blog)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought Psychonauts for the PS2, conviced by NoobToob, and the fact that it's written by Tim Schäfer (man, did I love Day of the Tentacle) that it's going to be a great game with clever humour. So I started it up with great anticipation, and was soon disappointed. While it delivered on the humour front, as a game, it was a pain in the ass to play, due to unbearable loading times and frequent framedrops and slowdowns.

Now, what does this have to do with our subject? Well, it got me thinking about how I nearly always finish movies or books I start. No matter how boring and pompous, sitting through a movie is never really tedious. There are lots of movies where shitty execution covers an otherwise solid concept, and I'm sure everyone's read books that are poorly written yet have messages that are definitely worth absorbing.

But if it's a game, and even one that shows so much promise for its writing as does the first couple of levels in Psychonauts, if I have to waste 20-30 seconds each time I go from one place to another looking at a boring "loading..." screen, sooner rather than later I'm going to say "fuck that shit" and just not care what witty humour awaits in the next room.

And this is not the same as whining about superficial stuff like graphics. Take Shadow of the Colossus, for instance. After I've finished this truly marvelous game, I've read on a lot of sites how horrible its graphics and textures are by today's standards. But when I was playing it, I was so overwhelmed by the experience, as opposed to the sensation, that even at this point I still can't look at screenshots and not be awed.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the system in question is very complex and rather chaotic. The doomsday predictions are well within the range of outcomes of credible models. For instance, the film The Day After Tomorrow, stripped of the over-dramatization, actually presents a real possibility which is a better explanation for the frozen mammoth (with buttercups in teeth and stomach) than the original papers on the subject (hypothesizing volcanic eruption and rapidly expanding CO2). That does not mean the outcome is probable. But, the sum total of nasty, improbable outcomes, though still not overly likely, is worrisome.

Many models, though not being able to predict real outcomes with certainty, do show a high likelihood that the climate will become highly unstable for a least a period of time. Weather models have not gotten good at predicting long range weather, but studies of the mathematics of chaos have at least made it possible to say when the weather can be predicted accurately and when it cannot, essentially picking out singularities in the models and degrees of instability in the actual weather systems. As global warming is put into the climate models, they become increasingly chaotic and increasingly unpredictable.

I think saying "the sky is falling" is going a bit far, but saying that we are likely in for a bumpy ride and maybe some major turbulence (please remain seated and fasten your seat belts) is quite warranted.

Then the question becomes: OK, what do we do about it? We cannot evacuate the coastlines due to a non-zero probability of catastrophic sea-level rises and increasing hurricane threats, especially while evacuating other areas for other non-zero threats. What we can do is a little risk management. In our small farming operations, we are laying groundwork for water storage and collection in case of extended drought, for (at least short term) utility independence in case the massive ice storm we got hit by this year is not isolated, and looking at storing seeds for hardier varieties of plants in case of climate drift. We are also looking at working through the Agricultural Extension and other means to encourage farmers to be more versatile in the face of change. It was not long ago here that the Ag Extension would not talk to farmers unless you had at least 40 acres and were raising beef cattle. Extended droughts have hurt beef here immensely and caused them to shift their policy toward greater versatility.

Shoring up coastal areas, better storm preparation, some real thought on what to do if climate change causes an upsurge in disease carrying mosquitoes in currently quiet areas, and so forth, are also probably quite warranted. Recent events show we are not prepared for what is happening now, let alone for possible increases, so these actions are prudent in any case.

"In 1998, Congress gave NASA's Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of 'discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing' 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008. [...]

Interestingly, the movie Armageddon also came out in 1998...

Pardon me, but I'm skeptical. Earth had no civilization-killing encounters for thousands of years — no, the Tunguska-meteorite does not qualify, not even if it landed in Paris (the center of civilization at the time). The only suspected such encounter is blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs — a while ago...

Yes, it would be nice to not have this threat (especially now, that we almost can), but we must realize, that we perceive it as a much larger one, than it really is. All of the readers of this message (in 2007) have a much higher risk of dying from a new strain of flu, or a spectacular terrorist attack, for example. Or even from getting hit by a truck or choking on a pretzel...

Yeah, and here is where it died.

Didn't anybody see this movie. It predicted caves on Mars a long time ago. See here -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058530/

Didn't get the reference, eh? Well don't worry, we've all been there. You're probably better off not having seen it anyway.

I really wish I could remember even a SINGLE quote from Universal Soldier... I guess the movie was just that bad.

The Internet Movie Data Base knows all.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0105698/quotes

Klendathu, source of the bug meteor attacks orbits a twin star system whose brutal gravitational forces produce an unlimited supply of bug meteorites in the form of this asteroid belt. To ensure the safety of our solar system Klendathu must be eliminated. Do you want to learn more?

Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world! Service guarantees citizenship!

Now if we could just find the large underground mutant generators, we will be able to instantaneously terraform Mars. Of course we'd need Arnold Schwarzenegger to spearhead this for us, but I think he's up to the task.

fellacious (GNAP) Intercourse, PA - Windows Vista appears to finally be taking off, at least within one Fortune 100 company. The GNAA had for the past 13 years been using Red Hat Linux and it's successor, Fedora Core, but growing discontent with the free software operating system forced CTO Jmax to declare on Wednesday that the company was to be switching its entire infrastructure to the new version of Windows, effective immediately. "I'm not going to theatrically claim that I wasn't expecting to have to do this," Jmax said. "This has been coming for quite some time." The GNAA's troubles with Red Hat's Linux system included chronic governance problems, a persistent failure to maintain key repositories, a complex and undocumented submission process which has kept the GNAA's free trolling utilities off the Red Hat-based desktops of thousands of would-be trolls, inability to keep RPM up to date, and a failure to address the problem of Firefox not crashing a entire computer when the user loads Last Measure. "The deal-breaker, though, was when a key Last Measure server remained down for four hours while our entire Intercourse development team tried desperately to bring it up despite not having statically-linked package manager binaries." What had happened was Dikky, visiting from Norway, wanted to play the child pornography mod of Doom 3 on that server- which had to drag several libraries with it. "In addition," said Jmax, "several key software applications used in the GNAA's corporate workflow are proprietary software- which means that they had to be run in an Ubuntu compatibility environment anyway." However, being as those unnamed applications were written in C#.NET, "We expect that our transition to Windows Vista will come off without a hitch."

About Jmax:

The CTO of the GNAA, Jmax also has a seat on Microsoft's board of directors. His resume can be accessed at http://goatse.fr/.

About Windows Vista:

The fastest-growing desktop operating system on the market, Windows Vista combines the legendary security of Windows 98 with the legendary ease of use of those computer interfaces you see in the movies into one ultra-fast, ultra-stable computing platform.

About Red Hat:

A failure of a computer company, Red Hat burns through investor money while giving its products away for free. It is currently under investigation from the SEC for misuse of invested funds, and being sued by the GNAA for breach of contract for sucking more than specified in the GNAA's contract with Red Hat.

About the Linux community:

Trolled.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.

I have a better idea. Let's just send Tom Hanks.

For a great history of scratch, check out the documentary Scratch.

I'm been a fan of scratch technology ever since DJ Qbert made the album Wavetwisters completely from scratch, and later made the animated film Wavetwisters from scratch. Now they're making the internet from scratch technology. Which makes sense -- in my mind, scratching is basically analog computation.

Here.

No data is given.

sounds like it would make a great movie!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0103772/
John Correli: Did you kill Mr Boz, Miss Tramell?
Catherine: I'd have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill him the way I described in my book. I'd be announcing myself as the killer. I'm not stupid.

Nick: Writing a book about it gives you an alibi for not killing him.
Catherine: Yes it does, doesn't it?

I don't think he was actually acting in Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control

What do you have against Bronson Pinchot, who has been acting since his role as Balki?

Also, Brainstorm does a wonderful job with things like lab politics, funding issues, etc. Amazing movie, and one that I've heard cited by a number of scientists. Sneakers, while some of the tech is absurd, is otherwise a superb intro into some of the ins and outs of crypto, hacking, and the computer business; iow, wonderful, as long as a knowledgable tech geek is there to provide commentary.

Let me guess...the Blu-Ray disc is not the one with Woody Allen in it, right?

Ok, I read the article and the problem is that someone at Microsoft will say one thing such as..

Microsoft is a far cry from the days when president and CEO Steve Ballmer publicly declared Linux a "cancer"

and then does the opposite spreading patent FUD.

Or how about this line..

Microsoft is crafting a multifaceted plan to approach open source from a number of different levels: Linux as an operating system competitor; interoperability with Linux in mixed environments;

while still trying to kill interoperability..

Microsoft is like the Aliens in the movie Mars Attacks. "We come in peace... We come in peace..." while they are running around killing people.

and then theres people like you. "Come on they're trying!" quoting all these articles...

Look at what Microsoft DO not what they SAY

Gail: Harris, are you sure it's a good idea to pre-tape the weather? Harris: Sure, this is LA. What could happen? http://imdb.com/title/tt0102250/