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

Everyone who publicly threatens to quit playing a MMORPG, especially City Of Heroes, will always be met with at least one reply of "Can I have your stuff?" among other mocking. They almost never actually quit.
This Troper recalls the popularity of this phrase for the World Of Warcraft forums came after a Community Manager, who's account name was Eyonix, posted that phrase to one of these threads, presumedly annoyed by the many of them being made. (World Of Warcraft is one helluva Cash Cow Franchise, with its many fans making the Fan Dumb even more noticeable.)

Have you seen Italian computers? They actually do require a key for the ignition.

A better example might be people seeing the French Connection and complaining that the car chase is too much of a cliche in a cop movie. (When they aren't aware that the French Connection is the *reason* every cop movie made since has a car chase.)

Sounds like a classic case of Seinfeld is Unfunny.

What, didn't you read the warning? TV Tropes will ruin your life. I thought everyone knew about that.

The day I sent you 6 million spam mails was the most important day in your life. But for me... it was Tuesday.

So will he get a mug shot now?

Why would he? He's a CEO, he's supposed to act like a cartoon villain.

The world makes a lot more sense when you stop assuming that various businessmen, politicians etc. are trying to further their self-interest in a rational, if ruthless, manner, and instead treat them as villains in a farcical drama movie. That way you don't have to wonder why someone who already has three billions would risk everything to get a fourth, or something to that effect. The implications of that are somewhat... disturbing.

So will he get a mug shot now?

Why would he? He's a CEO, he's supposed to act like a cartoon villain.

The world makes a lot more sense when you stop assuming that various businessmen, politicians etc. are trying to further their self-interest in a rational, if ruthless, manner, and instead treat them as villains in a farcical drama movie. That way you don't have to wonder why someone who already has three billions would risk everything to get a fourth, or something to that effect. The implications of that are somewhat... disturbing.

Somehow Internet has made people to forget that creating quality content costs money. Often a lot of money. Often with these kind of things I'm really surprised at how dumb nerdy people can be too.

Dumb? Or just indifferent? This is a society which glorifies greed and selfishness, of watching out for number one and putting one's personal gain above all. Time and again do hear that the purpose of business is to generate profits for the owner, not care for the common good. Again and again do "libertarians" argue against public services because they require taxation. Should it really come as a surprise when the rest of us say "fine" and jump in on the bandwagon? And does that really make us dumb?

This is simply normal people emulating the aristocracy, doing what they're told is proper and good over and over again. "Not my problem", says a businessman who fires his employees; "not my problem", says a netizen who deprives a site of any source of revenue. Welcome to the next round of "Consequences of Capitalism"; the sound you heard is the society slowly crumbling around you since no one can be bothered to maintain it and often actively cursing any attempt to force them to.

You know, us who should know better and not be those stupid sheeps who are happy have a "mindless" job and then watch tv for rest of the evening and still enjoy it, even if theres no mentally requiring tasks involved.

I enjoy Jackass. It doesn't mean I'm dumb, it just means I enjoy Jackass.

You fail logic forever. But then again, most people who call others "sheep" do.

All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.

Except it also has the most overused and silly computer-related tropes ever in it : the logicbomb.

Now getting a program that will write music that is as good as the greats is a huge accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but their is little reason to believe it is impossible.

That's kind of what drove Cope. Early on he found his synthetic process could create musical sentences and phrases that were grammatically and syntactically correct, like your first year computer student. But stringing them together didn't produce a musical work any more than a collection of sentences makes a story. Even putting similar concepts together gave tiresome blobs that didn't have "soul".

What he did was drill deeper and deeper into the works of the composers, and figured out what made their music stand out. He discovered it was not just following the rules, but was related to breaking the rules, and how they broke them. Randomly breaking them didn't accomplish the task. He instead identified their pattern of "rule breaking" and codified it, and copied it, and that's when Emmy's music became moving.

No, it's not impossible, but it was a huge feat of analyzing huge piles of music by the masters, categorizing and labeling measures, phrases, and concepts in ways that had never been explored before.

Y'know, when described that way it sounds like the TV Tropes Story Generator on steroids, with MIDI output. Hmm...

There's a "laser dentistry" place down the road from me. I considered it because it sounds awesome.

I've seen Space Mutiny, so it sounds hilarious.

I can't stop laughing at your post. Next to Lampshade Hanging, my favorite trope has to be Explaining the Joke. Joss, is that you?

I can't stop laughing at your post. Next to Lampshade Hanging, my favorite trope has to be Explaining the Joke. Joss, is that you?

I know there's a lot of very idealistic and naive libertarians on Slashdot who chafe against anything that would even hint suppressing free flow of information, no matter how objectionable or subversive.

I protest you using "libertarian" to describe someone believing in freedom of speech. "Libertarian" nowadays means completely unregulated capitalism. It has nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes.

But you all need to realise that when the rubber hits the road, idealism doesn't get you very far in the real world.

Why do I picture a 90's anti-hero with an eyepatch and a cigar in his mouth when I read that ?-)

Truth be told, the UK has a large problem with radical, violent, political Islam, and merely pussyfooting around, striving not to offend, and obsessing about theoretical and abstract notions of "rights" and "freedoms" -- and conveniently ignoring the obligations of EVERYONE to obey the law and behave like citizens -- will get us nowhere.

Nice. It seems that in your worldview, rights and freedoms are optional but obligations are not. Sorry, kiddo, that's not how it works. Law has obligations to me - in the form of guaranteeing me certain rights and freedoms - and in exchange, I have obligation to obey it. Law exists to serve people, not the other way around.

I heartily endorse any action taken to crack Islamist heads in the UK.

If you believe that heads need to be cracked, perhaps you should vote for politicians willing to crack them, rather than ones who'll pussyfoot and try to make the problem invisible, which is the only thing banning websites will do.

Sometimes, tough choices have to be made, and idealism dispensed with.

And usually those who say that end up taking the path of least resistance out of laziness and cowardice, and then congratulate themselves on their "toughness", by which they mean the willingness to do harm to innocents rather than strength, endurance or courage.

Nothing's more pathetic than a spineless wimp pretending that slithering over and smothering the weak makes him a tough guy. Except, perhaps, his wannabe fanclub on the Internet.

There's a trope for that.

It's called Nintendo Hard.

Jim Davis has explicitly stated that Garfield is a job, not a work of art.

I use a hammer for that.

The Hammer is my Penis.

Plus, a ZPM technically doesn't have much juice. Remember that episode where they phased the entire planet in a parallel reality? No ZPM available, so they had to use the US power grid.

I've never seen a ZPM do anything close to that. :P I think their perk is they store a *lot* of power in a very condensed form - not that they output ridiculous amounts. (though clearly they do output a lot)

P.S. I hate that TV trope.

Small breasts beat big breasts any day.

This is demonstrably untrue. No matter how we may feel about it, the big girls win every time.

The Viewer Friendly Interface trope was (surprisingly) largely averted in the Matrix where only a little Hollywood was wrapped around an almost unmodified nmap and sshnuke.

Case in point: the Stupid Statement Dance Mix

Please, don't explain the jokes (even those that are a bit lame)

A few years from now all movies will be cartoons.

Show me a high-grossing animated drama film about one of the major wars of the twentieth century, and I'll agree with you that cartoons aren't just for kids anymore.

With comics it's different. Reboots happen after a franchise has run its course and there isn't anywhere sensible left to go.

Or when someone decides to resolve his mommy issues by writing himself a happy ending in comics, for values of happy that people who don't share your problems might consider less than so.

I always thought the Antares trilogy would make a great miniseries or tv series. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Antares Alas, Babylon and Farnham's Freehold would be great too. Last but not least... ARMOR. ARMOR. *sniff* Armor. *sob* Damn you, NPH.

Um...does this post make me a sex toy nazi?

Carefull with those words. Or half of the /. readership (the kinkiest half) will explode in a fountain of nosebleed.

Yes, I am a man, and Im not gay..

Sounds like a case of suspiciously specific denial to me...

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

Unique, except for that Twilight Zone Episode, and all those other things on that page that came before it.

there's no way any software can satisfy those two criteria, being a game, and being realistic, ever.

Games aren't realistic; they're a way to escape reality. Being able to start a new game is an acceptable break from reality. I was making fun of people who crusade against these breaks from reality.

There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese. Even bilingual people have trouble, www.engrish.com

Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.

The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:

1. English text used in Asian products for purely aesthetic reasons. In this case, the target audience doesn't know English beyond some elementary vocabulary, and the people putting the English text on the products neither. Hanzi Smatter is a site dedicated to the Western counterpart to this phenomenon. The technical terms for these are either "As Long As It Sounds Foreign," or "Gratuituous English," depending on the details.
2. Translations meant to communicate with English speakers, but done by people who don't really master the language; i.e., translators who are not fully bilingual. (Hint: if you want a translation to be right, you probably want to hire a translator who's a first-language speaker of the target language.) We could call this one "Eloquent In My Native Tongue."
3. Computer translations, typically of Chinese restaurant menus. These tend to involve the word "fuck" very often. (No, no clever names for this one.)

There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese. Even bilingual people have trouble, www.engrish.com

Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.

The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:

1. English text used in Asian products for purely aesthetic reasons. In this case, the target audience doesn't know English beyond some elementary vocabulary, and the people putting the English text on the products neither. Hanzi Smatter is a site dedicated to the Western counterpart to this phenomenon. The technical terms for these are either "As Long As It Sounds Foreign," or "Gratuituous English," depending on the details.
2. Translations meant to communicate with English speakers, but done by people who don't really master the language; i.e., translators who are not fully bilingual. (Hint: if you want a translation to be right, you probably want to hire a translator who's a first-language speaker of the target language.) We could call this one "Eloquent In My Native Tongue."
3. Computer translations, typically of Chinese restaurant menus. These tend to involve the word "fuck" very often. (No, no clever names for this one.)

is that some kind of MMO where you spend most of your time grinding for cash and rep rewards?

Only if you're a single mom working to pay your way through college.

Man comes from another world to harvest a rare mineral unique to only this extremely hostile planet. Ends up being forced to live among the natives and learn their ways from a local girl who he ends up falling in love with. Has to ride a fearsome creature as a right of passage into manhood, and then unites the local clans and leads them to battle against culture from which he originally came. Can you say Dune? More.

This is very convenient. Now, not only do I have a girlfriend in Canada, but my civil rights are located there as well. Shame about actually living in the US...

The villain has won ...and that's terrible

Obligatory tvtropes link: Two-D Space

We all know there are whales in space

An SNES is far more complex than a minimal CD player

Which is why I compared the game to the "Ogg Vorbis version" rather than the linear-PCM version on a CD.

It should also be noted that the information in the Eminem album was far easier to come by than the information in SMB3. If the singer mispronounces a word, or a microphone pics up some static, or a mixer doesn't adjust the levels just right, it's no big deal.

Likewise, minor errors in map data or texture data or music data might not get noticed as defects, as long as they're not in "sensitive" parts (the program itself or large-scale map objects). TV Tropes has a page about "good bad bugs". World -1 anybody? How about Missingno.?

Given that all major gaming consoles have their own Net stores that mostly sell just such games

Nintendo publishes a notice on its developer support web site to the effect: "You must be this tall to make WiiWare." Individual developers do not qualify ("home offices"), nor apparently do teams on their first or second title ("relevant game industry experience"). Microsoft is significantly more open with the XNA model that Apple copied wholesale for the iPhone's App Store. But Sony Computer Entertainment's web site is silent on developer qualifications.

PC has Steam and a number of independent publishers

As far as I know, Steam and other PC game stores have a distinct lack of "party games", or PC games designed for a TV-sized monitor and four players holding USB gamepads connected through a hub. On whose part is this oversight?

There is competition in the form of skill, and there is competition in terms of strategy and concentration. With many games a peak of 'skill' is achievable; but the best competitive players will spend time developing new strategies to defeat their opponents' strategies. This is what happens in games like Street Fighter, Starcraft and Chess:
The meta-game BECOMES the game.

800 GW

This amounts to 1/4 of total U.S. electricity consumption. Utterly impractical.

For us, maybe. For for your typical Type II Civilization or better, that's barely a sneeze.

Just you wait! As soon as I get my Dyson Sphere built, I'll destroy you all using nothing but radiation pressure! Mwuah-ha-ha-ha-HA!

To say they can't means the market isn't growing, which shows your lack of udnerstanding

Um, no, I think the lack is on your part. Even a 100% monopoly can gain sales, but they can't increase market share -- that is, the fraction of the market they reach. If the number of searches doubled, and Bing doubles and Google doubled (pretending they're the only two engines), then their market share remains the same, 10% and 90% respectively.

OMG, somebody fire this jerk.

Don't leap to conclusions like that. If he is an old-school C programmer, "macros" may just mean "constants".

If you have C++, you can do

unsigned int CUSTOMER_CODE = 486;

but in boring old C that would be

#define CUSTOMER_CODE 486

Now, if you are talking about something like these then I'm with you. Up against the wall!

Or of course he could be a LISP programmer. Because we all know that macros are what gives LISP its awesome bone-crushing power.

Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)

I had to look that one up. "Never mind!" So now we know.

steveha

stupid people breed stupid people.

Highly over-simplistic to the point to point of being pretty much just plain wrong. Stupid people frequently raise stupid people, but the brain is a complex organ and one that can be improved with exercise. Especially in the young. You might as well say that weak people breed weak people--there's a tiny amount of truth there, but it's drowned out by the fact that being weak and flabby is mainly caused by bad diet and lack of exercise. Take your typical slashdotter, for example... :)

And that's just the first and most obvious flaw in your proposition.

I don't want to get too far off topic, but lets just say that Idiocracy, while an entertaining movie, is evidence that Mike Judge fails biology forever.

Feel free to die then. Just don't imply some kind of immorality associated with not wanting to die.

(Note: this comment doesn't necessarily assume that cryogenics represents a viable approach to life extension, but anything beats eternal nothing.)

True, he has an Awesome Name

Coconuts are good for so many things.

For example, making the sound of horses, or even making soap!

I never understood why they never decided to just eat Gilligan and enjoy their island...

Sorry, forgot the standard disclaimer

Dude, not funny...

It's a bloody video game. They have no obligation to you to be historically accurate,

Of course not. It's just that most players can't tell the difference between the realistic parts and the fiction.