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I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies.

I'm familiar with that trend.

Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor.

An ink suit actor, in other words.

Why not just make it live action in the first place, then?

There are plenty of reasons to animate: child characters, non-human characters, zany violence, extensive violence, magic, etc. might be cheaper to do with animation than with traditional live-action special effects. And by the time you've animated 10% of the movie, you may already have the resources to do the other 90%, even if only so that the art styles don't obviously clash.

I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies.

I'm familiar with that trend.

Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor.

An ink suit actor, in other words.

Why not just make it live action in the first place, then?

There are plenty of reasons to animate: child characters, non-human characters, zany violence, extensive violence, magic, etc. might be cheaper to do with animation than with traditional live-action special effects. And by the time you've animated 10% of the movie, you may already have the resources to do the other 90%, even if only so that the art styles don't obviously clash.

I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies.

I'm familiar with that trend.

Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor.

An ink suit actor, in other words.

Why not just make it live action in the first place, then?

There are plenty of reasons to animate: child characters, non-human characters, zany violence, extensive violence, magic, etc. might be cheaper to do with animation than with traditional live-action special effects. And by the time you've animated 10% of the movie, you may already have the resources to do the other 90%, even if only so that the art styles don't obviously clash.

On the contrary. Hollywood plots are so cohesive they've all congealed into the exact same story....

Well, more like seven stories, actually:

Overcoming the Monster

Hero learns of a great evil threatening the land, and sets out to destroy it.

Rags to Riches

Surrounded by dark forces who suppress and ridicule him, the Hero slowly blossoms into a mature figure who ultimately gets riches, a kingdom, and the perfect mate.

The Quest

Hero learns of a great Mac Guffin that he desperately wants to find, and sets out to find it, often with companions.

Voyage and Return

Hero heads off into a magic land with crazy rules, ultimately triumphs over the madness and returns home far more mature than when he set out.

Comedy

Hero and Heroine are destined to get together, but a dark force is preventing them from doing so; the story conspires to make the dark force repent, and suddenly the Hero and Heroine are free to get together. This is part of a cascade of effects that shows everyone for who they really are, and allows two or more other relationships to correctly form.

Tragedy

The flip side of the Overcoming the Monster plot. Our protagonist character is the Villain, but we get to watch him slowly spiral down into darkness before he's finally defeated, freeing the land from his evil influence.

Rebirth

As with the Tragedy plot, but our protagonist manages to realize his error before it's too late, and does a Heel Face Turn to avoid inevitable defeat.

Not sure if Watchmen actually fits any of those, but that was kinda the point.

Don't forget their courage! Their rich, tasty courage...

Pretty much every Western culture requires women to cover their breasts while men can leave theirs bare. I'm not sure of the anthropological history of this particular example, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had Judeo-Christian roots. All cultures have screwy social norms. Most members of that culture can't recognize them.

Yeah seriously, check out what the Chinese used to do to girls.

If you want REALLY weird, check out the Mormons and their Magic Underwear. These freaks also practice "baptism by proxy", wherein they "baptize" dead people using a "stand-in" so that every "family member of a Mormon" gets a "Mormon Baptism"... turns out every few years, some German Mormon nutter gets it into their head to baptize Hitler, then they excommunicate him, then the cycle repeats.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that "consumption, storage, and transfusion" of blood is 100% verboten. They won't even pre-donate their own blood if they have to go in for a surgery where there may be extra blood needed.

As for the whole deal about cultures and what they will sexualize... I hereby direct you to Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Rule 34. In other words, Rule 34.

Clear?

I assume you are referring to games.

A lot of times I am, given my reputation for whining about the lack of deployed home theater PCs in comments to articles about PC vs. console, but this time I'm talking about music. Accidental plagiarism is copyright infringement. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music: George Harrison got sued and lost for having copied half of a Chiffons song into a song on his solo debut album. Is there a set of best practices to prevent accidental plagiarism when writing and recording a song, or a way to avoid being bankrupted by damages once accidental plagiarism is discovered?

If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles

This already happens. Microsoft looked at Nintendo's Pokemon and Animal Crossing, took some from column A and some from column B, and released Viva Pinata. Even Animal Crossing itself appears to draw heavily from the works of A. A. Milne and Lego's Fabuland. See Follow The Leader and Dueling Games. But then it's legal to copy general concepts (Capcom v. Data East) as long as you don't copy the appearance of identifiable characters more than necessary for the genre (Atari v. Philips).

I assume you are referring to games.

A lot of times I am, given my reputation for whining about the lack of deployed home theater PCs in comments to articles about PC vs. console, but this time I'm talking about music. Accidental plagiarism is copyright infringement. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music: George Harrison got sued and lost for having copied half of a Chiffons song into a song on his solo debut album. Is there a set of best practices to prevent accidental plagiarism when writing and recording a song, or a way to avoid being bankrupted by damages once accidental plagiarism is discovered?

If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles

This already happens. Microsoft looked at Nintendo's Pokemon and Animal Crossing, took some from column A and some from column B, and released Viva Pinata. Even Animal Crossing itself appears to draw heavily from the works of A. A. Milne and Lego's Fabuland. See Follow The Leader and Dueling Games. But then it's legal to copy general concepts (Capcom v. Data East) as long as you don't copy the appearance of identifiable characters more than necessary for the genre (Atari v. Philips).

What's next? Mario farm?

That's been done. As for a video game, it hasn't, unless you count all the Mario shout-outs in the orchard/fishing sim series Animal Crossing.

Whenever I watch one of these xtranormal videos, the voices just don't match. The characters look like the NPCs from Nintendo's Animal Crossing video games. So I come in expecting to hear higher-pitched Looney Tunes style voices, which match how I imagine the Animal Crossing NPCs speaking based on what the in-game "animalese" sounds like, and these voices sounding like grown men just strike me as jarring.

New games generally work on older computers with reduced graphic settings.

But there's still a limit. Even if I take Crysis down to 640x480, can I run it on an eight-year-old desktop PC? Can I run it on a one-year-old netbook?

I can use my PC for more than just playing games

But how many people can use your PC at once? Console games are more likely to allow four players on one large monitor.

Minecraft is about the lowest quality graphics that I can tolerate

Let me guess: you can't tolerate La Mulana, Eversion, I Wanna Be the Guy, or other games with retraux art style that calls back to the 8-bit days. Do I understand you correctly?

> I want to live as long as possible. Preferable forever...

We can cover this by continuing to grow tissue samples of you for experimental purposes. Would you care to contribute your genome to science?

Recently, we took our kids to see Yogi Bear. It was exactly what you'd expect a movie based upon the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon to be -- inoffensive and insipid. Yet, "Rated PG for some mild rude humor."

From comparing notes with other parents, I gather we're on the restrictive end of the scale -- we actually examine 'M' rated games before deciding whether to allow our 14-year-old to play them, whereas other parents in our circle seem to allow younger kids to play 'M' rated games with no supervision at all. I generally give the go-ahead for our 14-year-old, but I do want to check first. In practice, we're more worried about avoiding high octane nightmare fuel, then about sex or violence, per se.

It's striking to me, though, that I rarely see games that rated below 'T' or 'M', even games that are clearly aimed at young children, just as I rarely see a movie that is rated below 'PG-13'. The overall pattern seems to be a sort of rating inflation, in which the more restrictively rated material is seen as more attractive by most consumers, and there are only disadvantages to having less restrictive ratings.

Overall, rating systems seem to have become almost completely useless, and this is a problem, because I do think parents could use tools to help them screen the content their children will be exposed to, especially younger children.

I don't think you really understand what "women in refrigerators" means. It's more the concept of a disposable woman to drive the male protagonist rather than any specific situation. The name of the concept might have changed if the comics code had not censored it but it had the same implications. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge

I stopped playing right there because when I control a character I make the choices.

I guess there are a lot of games where you don't get far, given the prevalence of the But Thou Must pattern in video game design.

However evil this latest stunt may be, its also an own goal

Was it also an own goal for Nintendo to put the lockout chip into the NES? At the time, it appeared to have been required because the U.S. video game market was in a recession, ostensibly due to a flood of unenjoyable game releases for second generation consoles.

terrible Google Wave pun

sorry, all that came up when I googled that was this

actually, I'm joking. the actual GIS results for that phrase were even more off the wall

We should totally have quicktime events in this game cause they're awsome!

And then you have other people say they'd never play quicktime events because the updater always nags to add iTunes and Safari to the installation, and your press-X-to-not-die cut scenes should use Windows Media instead. Cue another reply that VLC is more capable than either and available on more platforms.

Here is a link for those of you unfamiliar.

Palin/Wilders of the 1920's laid the foundation on which Hitler rose up. BUT ALSO the Obama's/Cohen's (dutch political figure who is blamed for the coddling of immigrants) they too helped, or failed to stop, the sentiment that lead to the growth of the extreme parties.

This is true. It's also something those in power have sadly missed. For example, here in Finland we have a growing anti-muslim sentiment due to the high rate of violent crime they perform, and Stockholm's attempted terrorist attack didn't exactly help. There's also a (probably true) perception that immigrants are favoured over native finns in getting financial aid. At the same time, our politicians are crying "racism!" every time these issues are brought up. The result is that, since reasoned discussion is apparently impossible, the population is turning towards nationalist parties and extreme reactions. And even more sadly, I can't really fault my countrymen - what are they supposed to do, roll over and die?

Hitler rose to power amongst misery, and was voted into office by a desperate population. And, no matter how evil he might have been, at first he did improve things. People know this, and are more and more willing to turn towards a desperate gambit: vote for Hitler and hope you can get rid of him after he's fixed the economic and social problems with socialism and nationalism but before the shit hits the fan.

In short, as far as the people are concerned, we are very close to crossing the Godzilla Treshold.

rumors reach the roving tribes of the over-nerd that a pure copy of the fabled 'Second War of the Stars' exists.

You mean Attack of the Clowns?

Ocean's started at 11, Apollo started at 13, and Zombi started at 2. Star Wars started at 4, just like The Fantastic. Get it right :p

It wasn't that somebody just decided "You know, we should just not have fun!", but there are reasons why these things are considered bad.

Are considered bad by some. Please do not use the passive in trying to imply this is an universal or even widely-held attitude.

The first hint is your conscience, but the reason behind it is that they are simply, as the Bible explains, inconvenient.

My conscience condemns neither sex, drugs or any other source of pleasure. It only condemns hurting or harming people. The Bible condemns adultery, but neither sex, alcohol nor pleasure in general.

Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage. However, when we use it as a source of pleasure, we find ourselves in all sorts of painful and distracting situations.

Interesting contrast. Are you implying that sex is not pleasurable with a lifelong partner, or did you simply not think your post through? And even if you are promiscuous, that doesn't mean that you will not use your brains in sexual matters, and thus succesfully avoid "painful and distracting" situations.

Also, no partner is lifelong, unless you happen to die in the same airplane crash or something.

As for intoxication, there are several problems. Other than the fact that you are out of control (depending on the intoxicant),

Like Hell you are. You simply get an excuse for bad behaviour.

you also have the tendency to get wrapped up in it and become less productive.

You mean my overlords get less profit from me if I enjoy life occasionally? Oh noes!

One may argue that there are drugs that are not adictive and cause no lasting damage. That may be the case, so they may not be so bad. The real problem is trying to define your life by pleasure, which is fleeting. It is one of the things, such as money, fame, etc. that people set their sites on that have no lasting benefit. In that sense, it is inconvenient at best.

Define "benefit". No matter how hard you try, it eventually reduces down to getting pleasure and/or avoiding pain.

Also, I can't help but remember a book on "christian sexual ethics" I once read. It had a chapter on masturbation, which first used rather tortured logic to condemn it as sin, then spent the next 20 pages describing how to center your life around not masturbating: do not take hot showers, never be alone in a room, etc.

Even the most obsessive pervert occasionally thinks of something besides the pleasures of the flesh, but a puritan never will. The book made me realize that, no matter how worthless it otherwise was. It's better to simply satisfy your desires and then go do something else than to spend every waking hour fighting against them. And, as it happens, the Bible - specifically, Paul's letters - say the same :).

I'm just saying that they are a potential snare, and I thank God that He loves and forgives even the worst and will remove them from the things they can't leave on their own.

Yeah, he even forgives people who say "they" when talking of those caught by tempting snares. Here, have a link; may you reflect on it and this and gain insight.

The concept of the uncanny valley is a well known one: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley

In three words, the reason why no console manufacturer has embraced an AO game.

if you want this to happen, develop and market a PC game that introduces mature violent content in a way that is not adolescently sophomoric or pornographic.

When you've shown that you have moved beyond Custer's Revenge, Duke Nukem and GTA: Hot Coffee, maybe then someone will listen.

But not before.

That explains why God of War, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Gears of War etcetera never had sequels right? Right?

Oh wait sorry, it's only wrong when it's sophomoric or pornographic sex, not when it's sophomoric or pornographic violence. Porn = bad, gorn = good, right. I forgot we're so fucked that a perfectly normal part of life is supposed to be shunned, while a gruesome, unhealthy, and frequently mentally scarring part of life is warmly embraced and welcomed into our homes. Whoops.

I think even the scenario of your kids getting your game is one scare that's blown out of proportion. It's letting them sneak the canard right back in that consoles are for kids, only this time in the form of necessarily having a kid around in some form or another. I wouldn't give them even that as a given.

The fact is, the average age for marriage in the USA has risen lately to 27 years old. Very likely more than that if you exclude the Amish. While they do breed more often and earlier, you don't really have to worry about those having XBoxes and Kinect. And averages are averages. There are people not touching marriage with a ten foot pole until the thirties or fourties or indeed never.

The child bearing age has risen too, year after year. To the extent that we can seriously start worrying more about genetic diseases for that factor alone. There are a lot of people who only have children in the thirties or fourties or indeed fifties. Again the Amish are screwing up the statistics a bit for the USA, but they don't have XBoxes. I suspect that if you looked at the rest of the people, you'd get something more similar to England and Wales (a somewhat similarly urbanized and industrialized country) where the average childbearing age is 29.4 years old. And it was already 28.4 a decade ago and climbed slowly but steadily ever since, so we're not looking at an isolated 2010 spike. And again, averages are averages. The gauss curve goes waay to the right of 29.4.

The fact is, there are plenty of legitimate buyers who _don't_ have children anywhere near their home. There are plenty of XBoxes around where really there is no child with access to it at all.

(Except maybe if some child commits breaking and entering to start playing with a stranger's console, in which case he has bigger problems than accidentally finding someone's porn game. I mean, it's pretty much the Arson, Murder and Jaywalking trope at that point.)

So, yeah, it's nice of MS to make their console mandatorily friendly to a lot of people's non-existing children. I eagerly await their also adjusting their ratings to protect the feelings of imaginary friends, imaginary pets and the Tooth Fairy.

I could deal with the Ori. They were mostly a fairly natural extension of the whole Oma Desala thread, which, short of freezing, was about the most plausible way to have Daniel Jackson leave the show for a while in such a way that he could either come back or not. If they'd killed him off, there would be no going back. If they had sent him to do something somewhere else, there would have to be a timeline for his return. And it would be pretty out-of-character for him to quit, much less return after doing so.

The notion of worshippers giving them power was pushing the realm of believability, but at least it was central to driving the plot, and central to the show's overall theme (that mere power does not necessarily make something a god).

The wormhole aliens were just plain bizarre. The angelic guides were just a bad deus ex machina. I never saw LOST.

Not if you're a MacGuffin fan.

May as well ask why they don't just wire a ZPM or three into the gate and gate back home.

No, that's actually a much better question. When they gated to Atlantis, they brought along Naquadah generators. They rushed to plan the Atlantis trip in a couple of days. They had been planning this mission to wherever the eighth chevron led for years, apparently---long enough to develop a computer game send it out to the population, have someone solve it, then bring that person out there and have him figure out how to solve the real thing. You mean to tell me that the Atlantis mission, planned in two days, was planned better than this mission, which had been planned for years? Sure the decision to go through the gate at the end was rushed, but they hauled tons of equipment through. Why no Mark II naquadah generators or ZPMs? They might not be able to gate home with them, but it certainly could have solved a fair number of their more serious problems. They're either all Too Dumb to Live or it's a really bad case of Plot Induced Stupidity. Either way, it's painful.

May as well ask why they don't just wire a ZPM or three into the gate and gate back home.

No, that's actually a much better question. When they gated to Atlantis, they brought along Naquadah generators. They rushed to plan the Atlantis trip in a couple of days. They had been planning this mission to wherever the eighth chevron led for years, apparently---long enough to develop a computer game send it out to the population, have someone solve it, then bring that person out there and have him figure out how to solve the real thing. You mean to tell me that the Atlantis mission, planned in two days, was planned better than this mission, which had been planned for years? Sure the decision to go through the gate at the end was rushed, but they hauled tons of equipment through. Why no Mark II naquadah generators or ZPMs? They might not be able to gate home with them, but it certainly could have solved a fair number of their more serious problems. They're either all Too Dumb to Live or it's a really bad case of Plot Induced Stupidity. Either way, it's painful.

The music in it is something completely separate and it is interesting to ask why it is that the composer doesn't get paid once on delivery of the new song, the artists once for the recording session, and so on.

The real question is who would pay for that? I mean goods (and their development costs) are paid for by people who want them and thus purchase them.

Well we've just come back to the standard justification for copyright. The point of the exercise is because we don't know if something is good until it's finished, copyright lets us buy things after they are completed so the creator gets to reclaim their initial investment (e.g. a loan) with a tidy sum on top that they can live on while they make something else.

This is ultimately a "necessary evil" defence which is why the time limits should be short, long enough to make it viable as a career path but short enough that you don't get to mooch off your one big hit until you die.

Before copyright, we had the patron system where the rich would sponsor an artist to produce their work because they liked it enough. This worked but it doesn't always give the artist the freedom to experiment with different things that may be better but the patron doesn't like. Copyright creates a sort of meritocracy instead which, IMHO, is a better solution.

Not really. It's more like explaining the joke for those who aren't aware that /. was hacked in the past.

The hardware on which the Matrix was running was the humans' brains networked together. (Imagine a Beowulf cluster...). The harvested energy part was a terrible case of executive meddling.

I justify the "thermodynamics" argument as we only hear about the battery thing from Morpheus, who may have gotten bad information, and we never hear from the machines as to what the Matrix is actually for.

At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.

Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.

Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, without any consideration of the context or how well it was done, is just freaking stupid.

Not the least because it's a textbook example of the association fallacy.

Bill Gates has recently done a HeelFaceTurn and is no longer a super villian. He is using his money for very good purposes. Stop with the bashing.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

please dont write off Animal Rights because of PETA's actions.

This troper thinks that you might be confusing animal welfare groups with animal rights groups. Animal Welfare groups are sane associations that care about animals and their well being. Animal Rights and Animal Liberation groups are wingnuts.

please dont write off Animal Rights because of PETA's actions.

This troper thinks that you might be confusing animal welfare groups with animal rights groups. Animal Welfare groups are sane associations that care about animals and their well being. Animal Rights and Animal Liberation groups are wingnuts.

Found it on TV Tropes; "A Martian Odyssey", by Stanley G. Weinbaum.

It's called an "Author Fillibuster".

About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need

This is in the case with the Wii. Its 640x480 isn't as good for showing faraway small objects as the 1280x720 of the other three platforms, which is why Wii games use a stylistic fudge: draw units not to scale, and draw their heads even more not to scale.

About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need

This is in the case with the Wii. Its 640x480 isn't as good for showing faraway small objects as the 1280x720 of the other three platforms, which is why Wii games use a stylistic fudge: draw units not to scale, and draw their heads even more not to scale.

I highly doubt that either could be proved. However, judging from the history of philosophy and Aristotle's works (since you invoked his unmoved mover =P) it seems to be much more likely that it is an infinite sequence of small innovations. Consider, if you will, that Aristotle's philosophy groundwork came about due to observing the natural world and making observations and then coming up with ideas that would explain those observations. He then built upon these ideas with more ideas to clarify them. Granted this is an incredibly simplified way of explaining it, but I assume you know this due to your choice of wikipedia link.

Looking at the chain of events, you can see a small 'innovation' in philosophy followed by a sequence of more small innovations that built upon the original. In this example one could conceivably consider Aristotle's observations were the 'Prime Inventor' or they could consider his observations to instead be based upon the 'innovation' of whatever ideas had sparked him to think in the manner he did to decide to make those observations, infinitely small right?

Philosophy is a funny thing because in many situations you can equally reason in multiple directions and all are just as correct as each other.

My personal opinion on the matter is as follows: An accident occurs which results in an observation. The observation thus results in an invention as the observer discovers how to recreate the accident. Each string of invention and innovation could be traced back eventually to a situation as such. However, I would not call the accident->observation->discovery->invention cycle a 'prime innovator' nor the person who did the observing (who is frequently not the same as the one who has the discovery or invention). I also, however, wouldn't consider it to be a sequence of infinitely small innovations because it seems to be more like a series of disconnected but relatively related actions that, perhaps like an exponential series, continuously build upon one another becoming larger and larger very quickly. Because these series' exist for every innovation ever and constantly interconnect and overlap, there is no way for there to be a 'Prime Innovator' as, in the model I have created, many people and many different times observe many different things and have very different ideas on what they just observed. Innovation just happens, I'm sure a mathematical model could be derived to explain it but I'm also just as sure that everything can eventually trace to some infinitely small random observation that was made by several people and told to another person who reasoned enough to put them together.

In short, a real life example of "A Wizard Did It" =P

They reveal the authors insistence on going into excruciating detail on everything. Maybe his attention to detail makes him a better audio engineer/evaluator, but honestly we would have been fine with "The subjects preferred X card for Y music by a substantial margin"...

In my opinion, showing one's work is a way to deflect claims that advertisers inappropriately influenced the review's conclusion.

A thought on rhetorical questions that seems relevent here.

How is that relevant? It's about wikis and other editable documents, whereas slashdot posts are completely uneditable after they've been posted. I really expected that link to say something like, "rhetorical questions are stupid ways of making a point unless everyone already agrees with you", which would have been way more apropos, if debatably premised.

A thought on rhetorical questions that seems relevent here.

Ahh, the mathematician's answer. The next question is as follows: Which make and model and which seller do you recommend?

There's somebody with too much free time.

Can you even buy a netbook without windows?

Yes. Next question?

Ahh, the mathematician's answer. The next question is as follows: Which make and model and which seller do you recommend?

Any make, any model. And the best seller is... me. I'll just wipe it and put Linux on one that came with windows pre-installed.

But more seriously, I know for a fact Dell was selling them for a while but i think they quit earlier this year. Dunno for sure, but if you look around you should be able to find a retailer, just skip the big-box shops and try the smaller custom computer places.

Can you even buy a netbook without windows?

Yes. Next question?

Ahh, the mathematician's answer. The next question is as follows: Which make and model and which seller do you recommend?

Ever heard of the MST3K Mantra?

"It's just a show, I should really just relax".

nice Critical research failure