Slashdot Mirror

I read multi part novels. Only when I have all the books available to read.

Some book series on this list are still growing; I guess they're off limits to you. For example, to follow your rule strictly, you'd have to have not started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been first published.

Will this development help with British smiles?

(ref: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishTeeth)

Cool! How many years does that "initial binge" take?

It took me a few months. Nowadays, occasionally I visit and end up with a dozen tabs open, but my point is that the same thing happens on Wikipedia.

you can waste *days* reading that website

As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TvTropesWillRuinYourLife

end up destroying your vocabulary

As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary.

you can waste *days* reading that website

As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TvTropesWillRuinYourLife

end up destroying your vocabulary

As explained here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary.

He/she is talking about an ArchiveBinge. For the record.

It's also a form of Natter we'd prefer was avoided.

It's also a form of Natter we'd prefer was avoided.

Since the Justice Department has been asleep at the wheel for the past several decades, Google will not be broken up as it should be. It will become both "too big to fail" and "big enough to fuck everything up".

I thought that was the SEC. Or was it the FTC? It certainly isn't the Justice Dpt.

ObTopic: If they can "see" it from the street, how is it "private" in any sane sense of the word?

I was in the TVTropes IRC channel when all this was going on, and what came out was: the contract for the ads that the tvtropes people signed with Google explicitly stated that no family-unsafe content was allowed. The wiki flew under the radar for a good while, probably because it has nothing explicit and so nobody thought of checking too hard, but ultimately someone did. Now, while the wiki has no porn or anything like it, it's undeniable that some of the arguments might be seen as not suitable for young children. Whether talk about lesbian erotica or massive amounts of profanity harm children or not can be discussed at length, but the matter remains that the contract conditions were clear. I hate censorship as much as the next slashdotter and I hate self-righteous moralization even more, but in this particular case I find all this anti-googlism to be way out of proportion. Especially considering that TVTropes didn't really self-censore anything, they just put the relevant articles behind an "are you really sure" clickthrough barrier; all the content is still there.

As far as a free-time black hole, it's orders of magnitude worse than Facebook.

But once you've completed your initial binge on TV Tropes, it isn't any more of a time waster than Wikipedia. You can wiki walk on any large wiki, but they become shorter as you become familiar with the subject matter.

While I certainly don't agree with Google using its advertising to promote "family friendliness" in a site, to claim that this site is completely blameless is a little disingenuous (hint: notice the drawing on the right).

Now, that kind of picture doesn't bother me one bit, but it will bother some. Either they have complained to Google at some point or Google is preempting their complaints.

I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.

US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.

At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.

Thats British Brevity (Warning tv tropes link!) for you and there is a lot to be said for it :-)

Had Flashforward had 12 episodes to get to the money shot the would have had to really think about the how may subplots needed to tell the story.

Oh, you mean Conservation of Ninjutsu?

I've heard a few people say this, but I'm not sure I agree. Yeah, a lot of bad stuff happens to pretty much all the major characters, but they persevere for the most part. Their successes seem more genuine for the struggles. I found the triumph in spite of the tragedies more uplifting than depressing.

I think TVTropes says it best with Earn Your Happy Ending.

So if I lose I have to start the game again?

If you run out of lives in Super Mario Bros., you have to start over.

I think you're confusing "save game" with "save state" or more like "save state exploit".

Being able to "save game" everywhere transforms "save game" into exploitable "save state". Some GBA games got this right, providing different kinds of save slots. All but one are traditional save slots, which work only at the end of the round; the last one is a save state slot, which works at any time during a round, but loading from this slot erases it so that you can't save-scum.

Last time was when replaying Super Mario World. In the final battle vs. Koopa, I saved every time I hit him cause I wanted to finish it already.

The clown car battle is by no means the hardest boss battle in Mario games.

Does "MMA simulator" count as a new genre

I don't lump MMA in with Street Fighter II or table tennis, but I do lump it with wrestling.

What genre do Sims and Flower belong to?

You're right: The Sims is from 2000, after Parappa, so I'll grant you that. But it's the codifier of the genre whose Ur Example was Little Computer People from 1985. As for the PLAYSTATION 3-exclusive Flower, I don't own nor regularly visit anybody who owns a PS3 console, so I can't comment, but the Wikipedia description makes it sound like Glider PRO at first glance.

Does "MMA simulator" count as a new genre

I don't lump MMA in with Street Fighter II or table tennis, but I do lump it with wrestling.

What genre do Sims and Flower belong to?

You're right: The Sims is from 2000, after Parappa, so I'll grant you that. But it's the codifier of the genre whose Ur Example was Little Computer People from 1985. As for the PLAYSTATION 3-exclusive Flower, I don't own nor regularly visit anybody who owns a PS3 console, so I can't comment, but the Wikipedia description makes it sound like Glider PRO at first glance.

That said, I grew up playing games on PC (and before that Commodores; first PET then 64), and there were very few that I'd say were all that hard. It is mostly the impenetrable platformers from the NES and other consoles that people remember as being really difficult, and I never had much interest in those anyway.

Two words: Sierra Entertainment

Two words for Megaman. Nintendo Hard.

You do know 4chan has a big comics board right? People on it are pretty heavily into comics.

Unless, of course, the characters are uplifted animals. Then you get the anti-furry memes going.

I think that the ability to restrict other people's freedom should not be regarded as a freedom in itself, regardless of whether it is considered positive or not. Other people may disagree, of course.

Or even better to just let me make up new account names and start with a 0-0 record, so that I can learn other races in the game without lowering my rating with my main race (as I would lose lots of games and get stomped playing zerg for the first time when I am say at the gold or platinum level with protoss.)

Does the win-loss record include skirmishes against AI? Because if not, you can train until you can curb-stomp the maximum number of AIs set up on a team against you, and only then try online.

Or even better to just let me make up new account names and start with a 0-0 record, so that I can learn other races in the game without lowering my rating with my main race (as I would lose lots of games and get stomped playing zerg for the first time when I am say at the gold or platinum level with protoss.)

Does the win-loss record include skirmishes against AI? Because if not, you can train until you can curb-stomp the maximum number of AIs set up on a team against you, and only then try online.

Perhaps he should have done his homework so that he might have more realistic expectations.

He might also be able to use simple civil service phrases like "Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear" in every day conversation.

Actually I'd argue (although not the AC, as I hate ACs and think one should stand by your words) that your "legit content" IS the broken windows economics, not the other. The whole point of the copyright system as it was envisioned here in the USA was to encourage the creation of more works for a larger public domain by giving artists an incentive to actually work not to give media companies a way to lock our culture and history behind a paywall.

Everything has a cost, and I'd argue that thanks to the Internet making it easier than ever before to sell your product the time a work should be copyrighted should be even less than the original 25 years. If we had sane copyrights of say 15 years on media and 7 years on software the amount of content we'd have in our public domain would give artists tons of media to come up with new ideas and innovations, as well as giving the public a rich back catalog that current artists would have to bring their A game to compete against. Instead more and more of our history is being locked behind paywalls where many simply can't afford to enjoy but a tiny fraction of it. How much would it cost to legally fill an iPod, something like $40,000? If it wasn't for places like TPB the biggest flash drives and PMPs would probably be 2Gb, probably 200Gb with HDDs as most wouldn't need anywhere near a Tb of storage if all there was was "legit" content.

As for TFA, those of us on bandwidth caps (which BTW are being "tested" before being rolled out nationally from what I was told) I'd like to say "Yes please"! Like RAM and HDD space and Dakka you need Moar, no exceptions. The only question in MY mind is whether we the end users will actually get to enjoy any of it, or if we will all end up capped like I am currently (36Gb for cable sucks!) and this will be used instead by corps like Google to feed Youtube videos from the main branch to the servers at the local ISP level. Personally I'd be happy as a clam if we could get 100Mb pipes like they have in Asia cheap, but the way we have been "corporation yay!" for so long in this country I wouldn't be surprised if they STILL screw us with caps and crazy overuse fees and just use the bandwidth to increase profits and lock in.

Oh and slightly OT but Linux guys are gonna fucking HATE IT if they get capped, because with every distro hosting their own repos Linux updates COUNT against your cap, whereas since MSFT Updates all come from the same address range they DON'T. Hell the ISPs can cut down bandwidth even further by simply setting up a local WSUS server and feeding updates from there. It might be time to look into a central repo for ALL distros that simply does some sort of OSID check, along with an easy way to run a Linux repo server alongside or even better on the same server where WSUS resides. Just FYI in case caps end up being rolled out nationwide, which looks like it will be more and more likely.

And (and this is one of my pet peeves) US movies tend to have colour and contrast wildly exaggerated

Or is it that UK movies have a shade too much Real Is Brown?

What a magnificent example of both critical research failure and Godwin law, all rolled together in a single flamebait. Brilliant !

...we can look forward to bloated [...] flash.

Linux had that NN years ago! You see? Microsoft^H^H^H Microbe always copies off of Linux!

No person would stand around and watch a crime in progress.

Kitty Genovese would have to disagree with you on that one. But your point is taken. It is more likely that if the police department is pay for service, they'd just not investigate the murders of people who don't pay the fee. It's really a common trope in science fiction writing.

What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet.

Vinyl is less likely to have its levels compressed to the clipping point than digital.

everyone knows you need a 5 man band

The Five Man Band is a group of characters whose members fall into archetypes which all complement one another. They are a very specific team with skills that contribute to the group in a unique way.

The group traditionally includes:

* The Hero — (lead singer) The leader of the group. Can be clean-cut and upstanding, bold and charismatic, serious and driven, or some combination of the three.

* The Lancer — (lead guitar) The second-in-command, usually a contrast to The Hero. If the Hero is clean-cut and/or uptight, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti Hero or Deadpan Snarker; if the Hero is driven and somewhat amoral, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed.

* The Smart Guy — (keyboardist, bass guitar) The physically weak, but intelligent or clever member. Often nerdy and awkward played for comic relief. Sometimes unconventionally young (early- to mid-teens). Sometimes a trickster and a buddy of the Big Guy. May be the one with all the "street" connections.

* The Big Guy — (drummer) The strongman of the team. May be dumb. Or mute.

* The Chick — (vocal effects, tambourine) A peacekeeping role to balance out the other members aggression, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. The Chick is often considered the heart of the group. Not always female, but the role is usually taken by the Token Girl (hence the name). Sometimes referred to as "the useless girl".

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

I think a majority of the people here are missing something. Either the criminals in question have graduated from the ISSM, or something else is going on.

Insulators are big. REAL big. Like, bigger than a Foster's Lager can, and they only get bigger from there. And yet, they seem to be missing the insulators and hitting the cable???

Last time I checked, FO for a major backbone cable is between 1-3" thick, and something like this Google line would probably only be 3/4". That's an awfully small target, when compared to an insulator. Also, when an insulator gets hit, it's going to make a spectacular splash of ceramic shards and probably a decent puff of dust. If it's an electric cable, there's also going to be an equally spectacular explosion as the arc eats through the tower strut.

Shooting the insulators would provide far more entertainment value than shooting a fiber-optic cable, and be much more satisfying.

No, this isn't the work of a bored hunter. This sounds like the work of someone who knows what they're doing and has a grudge.

Kinda like that big outage they had in Silicon Valley, back in June of this year? A bunch of CEVs were infiltrated, in a line, one after the other, in less than 30 minutes. Specific lines had ALL of the slack pulled out of the trunks and spooled on the floor. Then those lines were cut with a hacksaw. Not at the trunk entrance, mind you, but at the regenerator, where it'd be easy to fix. Whoever did it was sending a message, that they could have been really vicious, but they were playing nice-nice.

This isn't a hunter, this is someone sending a message.

And I think I'm going to post this A/C.

If you look through all the open source projects, say on sourceforge (all 250,000 of them), a few are great, many are average and by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

If you replace "Free projects on Sourceforge" with "works on Fanfiction.net", "films from Hollywood" or "games on the market", your sentence still stands true. It isn't just Free software that is afflicted with Sturgeon's Law, you know.

Maybe you need a proper education in darksucker theory.

Also, the existence of magic smoke.

And don't forget applied phlebotinum.

Apple sells to the latte sipping metrosexual poseur who pays for a brand.

Yet the iPod touch 4, which has access to Apple's App Store, starts at 229 USD. As far as I know, this is cheaper than any Android device sold in the United States that has access to Android Market. So I guess the brand doesn't add much to the MSRP, even if you aren't camp straight.

It's not like anything could go wrong with this.

Sounds impressive, until you think of how many of these fragments were flying around in all directions.

Think of it as a More Dakka situation of stellar proportions.

Yes, it could be very dangerous to their health - pushing an Almighty Janitor may be one of the stupidest suicide ideas ever.

This press statement makes me really worried. Considering the recent news about Congress wanting a kill switch for the Internet, an NSA announcement that it will "secure" the internet sounds like spin.

Have you ever heard the joke about how different branches of the U.S. military "secure" a building? The NSA puchline would be "rig the building for demolition, then put the Big Red Button right next to the light switch.

Between my experience with STU-IIIs and being a Dune fan ("He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing") I'm really worried that the NSA has been tasked to create an internet kill switch, and that the "security" efforts they will soon recommend will be a pretext for the kill switch's creation. The NSA is the logical government agency to implement a kill switch, and designing the new security system would give them the access they'd need. Normally I hate conspiracy theories, but this is just creepy to me.

Footnotes:
For all you coders out there, I meant "=", not "=="; in my opinion the NSA getting involved assigns the value "kill switch" to "secure".

Joke punchline origin: every piece of NSA designed hardware I've handled has a kill switch built in, and one of my biggest headaches was people asking "what does (PRESS) this do?". Quote from the STU-III handbook:

The STU-III battery backup allows power to be removed, as in a power failure or unplugging the unit to move it, without losing the encryption data. The zeroization button bypasses this backup and erases the encryption data. After zeroization, the STU-III must be rekeyed and the CIKs must be remade. The STU-III is zeroized:

In an Emergency. - If the STU-III is ever in danger of falling into hostile hands, zeroize it to prevent the adversary from obtaining a functional unit. . .

By Accident. - The accident usually follows an employee's curiosity. The employee starts playing with the buttons and zeroizes the unit. Be sure to brief your employees on the importance of not pressing or playing with the zeroization button. Refill the STU-III using a new seed key [or operational key].

Actually, they frequently use their power for good. It's just that their power is mainly based on the practical application of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (warning, TVTropes link, may suck you in for hours), combined with semi-directed flash-mob behavior. So normally their version of good is being fuckwads to people who deserve it. This is a rare case of them not being fuckwads at all, while still being a flash-mob.

It is cool that they managed to pull this one off.

The "civilized man goes native" motif isn't anything new

For an interesting diversion (as usual with that site) there's a large list of examples at tvtropes.

I wonder if you know the difference between publisher and developer?

The amount of difference depends on to what extent the publisher's creative control interferes with the developer's vision.

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

At some point you have to admit, a cigar can just be a cigar.

Or in the style of TV Tropes, Our Vampires Are Different.

precious bodily fluids in any of this?

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

The iPod was game changing at the time. Apple got an exclusive agreement to use the 1.8" drives for about a year - no other players at the time could store a sizeable fraction of your music collection (5GB!) in something small enough to fit into a pocket. You had Flash players that had space for one or two albums, or players that used the bigger 2.5" drives and didn't fit into a pocket.

"Holds more stuff" isn't game-changing. Unless you think that every subsequent iPod was also "game changing" because it held more stuff ?

Heck, even the very first mp3 player (whatever it might have been) wasn't "game changing" in any meaningful sense of the word - it was just doing the same thing Sony (and others) had been doing beforehand with their Walkman products, ONLY WITH MP3s.

Don't know, but I love this one:

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thats_how_i_roll_9863.gif

Quake4 failed because apparently the competitive players that moved onto it had FX5200s and bitched and bitched about the engine being too slow.

If they're so gaming savvy, one would expect them to own something competent for a video card... that's obviously not the case. It's all an excuse to un-cheat the ambientLight cvar to turn off all the lighting causing the levels to be fullbright. Since the final 1.4.1 patch, it became a ghost town where no one plays Quake4 online anymore because it is no longer fair and fun for anyone.

StopHavingFunGuys says it all. If you please these guys, you fuck it up for everyone else, and make the learning curve shoot up into the sky.

My irony-detector sometimes goes haywire when I encounter discussion of issues that have to do with politics. I've read so many comments that I thought have to be a joke but turned out to be serious that I hesitate to trust my ability to discern the difference between authentic idiocy and the clever opera buffo.

This is known as Poe's Law, and it basically states that it's impossible to tell actual stupidity from a parody of stupidity.