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Other than YouTube WebM, which major legitimate video provider uses MKV? I thought it was used for format shifting, copyright infringement, and infringing format shifting. If video providers have embraced Matroska since I last checked, please clue me in.

Smells like delicious lotuses to me.

This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. Below it is a 'tech' story that's nearly six hours old that has under 40.

I don't think that's relevant. There is nothing, NOTHING wrong with a more focused site rather than a generalist.

What we're looking at is the website equivalent of Network Decay

, where a site which used to serve a specific purpose tries to get a larger audience by posting topics that have little or nothing to do with the original site's mission. Eventually, the websites all become the same, the original audience becomes disgruntled, and you get complaints like the sort you're responding to.

What, you think they dont have Enhance button in LRO control room ?

Anyone who must admit that they have more experience with VBA than anything else should not claim to be a programmer.

Even companies that make commercial off-the-shelf ERP software in Access+VBA, such as Stone Edge? Besides, "no true programmer" is considered a fallacy.

.and the liberals want to push their own narratives and have done so, largely because the schools are government funded to begin with.

I think such censorship is probably because of parents that think their special snowflakes shouldn't be exposed to such hateful material.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - banned because of the n-word, and changing it to slave made the book fine for reading. I find it very hard to believe a liberal agenda would be to deny well-known past history, especially when they replace it with something worse (i.e. "nigger" means the person could legally leave, while "slave" does not.)

The Catcher in the Rye - single use of the f-word.

Bridge to Terabithia - banned because of disrespect to adults. I've seen greater disrespect from shows where kids are highly effective at knocking out international criminal organizations as those imply that adults are useless (and practically waving a big flag in front of the radar).

Thank you for the suggestions. I was able to abstract two genres from them: steering games and RTS.

Plants vs. Zombies is a TD game (an offshoot of RTS), and I admit that games in point-and-click genres like RTS and TD translate fairly well from PC mouse or DS stylus control.

Jetpack Joyride is essentially "Balloon Trip" from Balloon Fight. Temple Run uses tilt for steering and swipes for sharp turns and jumping, and from what I could see on YouTube, Despicable Me: Minion Rush is a Temple Run clone. These are essentially steering games, not unlike car racing games. The last time I tried Rayman, it was a fairly normal platformer on the PlayStation. I looked up the mobile version on YouTube, and apparently it became a Canabalt-style thing called Rayman Jungle Run. So I can see how a jumping game that doesn't rely on attacking might be ported by designing the levels so that the player never has to press backward, letting the player use taps, swipes, and tilts to steer around a sequence of obstacles.

But I don't see how a control method for a steering game would generalize to play styles that include exploration. It's like the difference between the mine cart level and every single other level, or like the difference between a Duck Hunt or Time Crisis style rail shooter and a standard first-person shooter. The question of how something like Super Mario (with its focus on exploration of levels in everything after SMB1) or Mega Man or Contra (with their focus on attacking) might be retooled to "rely on 'touch in the correct moment', with some combination of the accelerometer (motion control)" is still open.

Thank you for the suggestions. I was able to abstract two genres from them: steering games and RTS.

Plants vs. Zombies is a TD game (an offshoot of RTS), and I admit that games in point-and-click genres like RTS and TD translate fairly well from PC mouse or DS stylus control.

Jetpack Joyride is essentially "Balloon Trip" from Balloon Fight. Temple Run uses tilt for steering and swipes for sharp turns and jumping, and from what I could see on YouTube, Despicable Me: Minion Rush is a Temple Run clone. These are essentially steering games, not unlike car racing games. The last time I tried Rayman, it was a fairly normal platformer on the PlayStation. I looked up the mobile version on YouTube, and apparently it became a Canabalt-style thing called Rayman Jungle Run. So I can see how a jumping game that doesn't rely on attacking might be ported by designing the levels so that the player never has to press backward, letting the player use taps, swipes, and tilts to steer around a sequence of obstacles.

But I don't see how a control method for a steering game would generalize to play styles that include exploration. It's like the difference between the mine cart level and every single other level, or like the difference between a Duck Hunt or Time Crisis style rail shooter and a standard first-person shooter. The question of how something like Super Mario (with its focus on exploration of levels in everything after SMB1) or Mega Man or Contra (with their focus on attacking) might be retooled to "rely on 'touch in the correct moment', with some combination of the accelerometer (motion control)" is still open.

I believe the industry term is "purist snob," not "scum of the earth." Importing is a mixed bag; the Bowdlerization of English games is counterbalanced by the amazingly cliché-ridden writing style customary of popular Japanese. For every clever name that got ruined, there are ten Metal Wolf Chaos-like plot elements that have been bleached away from their childish roots.

I believe the industry term is "purist snob," not "scum of the earth." Importing is a mixed bag; the Bowdlerization of English games is counterbalanced by the amazingly cliché-ridden writing style customary of popular Japanese. For every clever name that got ruined, there are ten Metal Wolf Chaos-like plot elements that have been bleached away from their childish roots.

I haven't read all the featured articles because the kinds of institutions that have access to JSTOR are closed for weeks around Christmas. But what the article in The New Yorker calls the "red sneakers effect" is the same as what a popular literary analysis wiki calls the bunny-ears lawyer effect. I guess the idea is that if someone can keep her job despite not conforming, she must be really good at it.

There's no logical reason why I should not be able to marry my son, brother, or father, except for people thinking it's weird.

The relationship between children and their parents is unlikely to be equal even when they're grown up. And since its the parent who's the biggest influence during said upbringing, there's additional baggage in the form of potential for wife husbandry.

Sibling incest, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have anything except the ick factor going against it.

There will be no second act here if the protagonist solves the dilemma in the opening minutes sir.

Of course there will. Various ways for this to happen include the man behind the man, minor crime reveals major plot, etc.

There will be no second act here if the protagonist solves the dilemma in the opening minutes sir.

Of course there will. Various ways for this to happen include the man behind the man, minor crime reveals major plot, etc.

There will be no second act here if the protagonist solves the dilemma in the opening minutes sir.

Of course there will. Various ways for this to happen include the man behind the man, minor crime reveals major plot, etc.

Or Linux Mint Debian Edition, if you want modern ease of use and lack of selling out. There's bread, there's eggs, and there's breaded eggs.

That's why we recently appointed Abu Quatada as our Jihad Tsar, whose job (amongst other things) is to implement sharia law in the UK.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/war/abu-qatada-appointed-uks-jihad-tsar-201202074865

On a more realistic note, the poll you mention was carried out by a notoriously right-wing paper (the Sunday Torygraph) and tubthumped by the notoriously xenophobic ones (the Daily Heil). Back in 2006. Nothing has so far apparently happened about this supposed groundswell of angry muslims eager to start stoning unbelievers and I still haven't been stoned to death my a single one of my friends or cow-orkers.

Please compare this article from the spectator (also right-wing) on a similar thrust that was made in 2008:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/825601/our-survey-shows-british-muslims-dont-want-sharia/

There seems to be an awful lot of (presumably american?) people on slashdot that seem convinced that the UK is somehow populated by trillions of militant muslims hell-bent on dragging the country, and later the world, back to the dark ages. Perhaps it's just the rarefied circles I've moved in but I don't think even 1% of the muslims I know or have met are even remotely interested in anything approaching muslim or any other theocracy, in fact most would find the very idea of such abhorrent as they were quite happy to escape from one. And much like most christians or people of any other religion, they're eternally irritated by people thinking that the fundamentalist blowhards represent them.

A quick guide to how much NaCl you should include with anything you get from the UK newspapers:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishNewspapers

Islamophobia is also a fun read:
http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/

Even if you live in the backwaters of India (redundant) you are expected to read and memorize TV Tropes before posting to Slashdot.

This is known as Genre Blindness. I would say that Zombieland did a good job of inverting this trope; the characters (especially Columbus) seem painfully aware of the fact that they are living in The Zombie Apocalypse.

"The passwords ... are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said."

How does that work?

The archer casts his arrow at dawn (or something on this line)

(grin)

actually much easier than you think. $100k is only ten of these stacks (three pictured):
http://www.officialpsds.com/10000-Stacks-PSD63355.html

Assuming all US$100 bills, an average sized briefcase (25" x 18" x 4") could theoretically fit about US$2,400,000. An average attache case (18" x 12" x 4.5") is good for about US$1,000,000.

Calls in mind the scene from Dodgeball where they show a suitcase of $100k, namely:
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dodgeballmoney2.jpg
(although that's comically undersized for $100k)

ROT-13: Tnyyvserl Oheaf.

Quit REWRITING "History" .... damnit!

Last EP of Newhart: ... ended with a scene in which Newhart wakes up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, who had played Emily, his wife from The Bob Newhart Show. He realizes (in a satire of a famous plot element in the television series Dallas a few years earlier) that the entire eight-year Newhart series had been a single nightmare of Dr. Bob Hartley's, provoked by "eating too much Japanese food before going to bed."

One of the things I read is that it took centuries.

The British Empire fell apart in decades, not centuries.
My point being that the pace of these types of changes has significantly accelerated.
Anyone that thinks America's hegemony can or will linger for centuries is delirious.

Perhaps in a few hundred years my descendants in North America will live like characters from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

Anyone that's watched enough sci-fi knows that in the future, everyone is speaks English with a British accent

Don't tell them, they might start to keep track!

There is a system in the USA which allows debtors who are unable to pay their debts to meet with their financiers and discuss a modified repayment program. That's called Bankruptcy Chapter 13. What you are asking for already exists.

No, it doesn't. Bankruptcy sides with the debtor by default while I'm talking about siding with the debtee by default. Basically, I'm suggesting that in order for the debtor to get a single penny they'd need to prove that the debtee's circumstances have changed and this was the debtee's own fault to the point of negligence - for example, you get fired and the debtor gets neither payments nor interest until you find another job and can resume payments, you were fired because you stole from the boss, that's your fault. Dealing with such risks is very much a financial professional's job, and made much easier by the assets he possesses, not something the average person should need to worry about.

The thing about bankruptcy and debtor-debtee relations is that they were built in a society that was a lot less leveraged than current one. Leveraging accelerates economic growth but it also causes instability - for example, job uncertainty - which people who aren't financial professionals can't be expected to deal with. So, either deleverage and accept less growth, or accept that most people are going to need a buffer against resulting uncertainty, both to make their personal lives more bearable but also to keep the economy from getting constant shocks from cascading bankruptcies which turn every downturn into a crisis.

But the current system, where you have a significant risk for personal bankruptcy simply for getting a house, is utterly broken. An economy where everything becomes a luck-based mission does not really serve anyone's interests.

However, unlike movies, in the real civilized world that the rest of us live in, not everyone suspected of a crime is guilty, "they are bad guys" is not an excuse to violate someone's rights, , and the Good Guys Rule does not actually work in real life.
We have things like Habeas Corpus and the Eight Amendment that are supposed to keep the government from locking people up "just because they can." (note, these seem to be mostly ignored these days)
We have these "soft on crime" or "protecting criminals" laws because we can see that the government will absolutely abuse everyone without them.

Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia.

Oh, I do that as well, nice to know I'm not the only one. But....TVTropes will ruin your life.

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

Or at least increase the number of open tabs you have.

Obligatory XKCD

http://xkcd.com/609/

If you are talking about the one they bought from the Russians and refurb'd? I wouldn't exactly call that building, more like what Brazil did and patching the hell out of an older hull so it can get a couple more decades.

This is why I've been saying for years we need to quit cranking out the carriers, we have 10, next biggest country? TWO. Sorry but that isn't a threat, that's a joke. Not to mention those new sea skimmer missiles could be used as a Macross Missile Massacre and they wouldn't even need a carrier to take out a carrier task force anymore.

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

Will this allow them to predict what compounds will make the best super-high-temperature superconductors, like Leland Hobart's periodic table of superconducting compounds?

You go onto the internet to look for .... Oooh shiny thing

I just logged on to check the weather. That was twelve years ago...

This is not the right place to check the weather.

Science Fiction is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction. The idea is to twist a few things from reality and then make a story about it. With SciFi, those twists are usually related to technology or science (speculating on what might happen in the future at technology develops, for example). Fantasy is another sub-genre, where the twists are more supernatural. Of course, I'm making broad generalizations here, but the concept should be about right. All fiction is speculative to some extent, of course, but Speculative Fiction tends to alter something rather fundamental about reality.

So, ask yourself ... what exactly did Gravity speculate about with science or technology? "What if we hadn't shut down the Shuttle program" might work, but hardly seems to be enough to separate it into Science Fiction rather than just Fiction.

As an author establishes a new reality, the audience must suspend their disbelief to accept it. I have a theory that the closer the new reality matches real life experience, the less willing the audience needs to be (and the less willing they will be). Thus, Gravity needs to be much more faithful to science than, say Star Wars.

What if every spacecraft (and jetpack) always had just enough delta-V to change into any orbit you wanted?

But to be honest, I agree with you.

I think the issue is that people think "Science Fiction" means "a fictional work that contains science". No wonder people are so confused about science after watching Star Trek.

Science Fiction is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction. The idea is to twist a few things from reality and then make a story about it. With SciFi, those twists are usually related to technology or science (speculating on what might happen in the future at technology develops, for example). Fantasy is another sub-genre, where the twists are more supernatural. Of course, I'm making broad generalizations here, but the concept should be about right. All fiction is speculative to some extent, of course, but Speculative Fiction tends to alter something rather fundamental about reality.

So, ask yourself ... what exactly did Gravity speculate about with science or technology? "What if we hadn't shut down the Shuttle program" might work, but hardly seems to be enough to separate it into Science Fiction rather than just Fiction.

As an author establishes a new reality, the audience must suspend their disbelief to accept it. I have a theory that the closer the new reality matches real life experience, the less willing the audience needs to be (and the less willing they will be). Thus, Gravity needs to be much more faithful to science than, say Star Wars.

Way to ruin the thread of thread ruination.

Me too!

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

"The" one? I posit that there are likely dozens. It's a pretty common trope. There are a couple on here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JobStealingRobot

I don't even know why /. bothers to post any MS articles, the comments are the exact same every time -- pointless with no value.

It brings in ad clicks.

It's a good thing that Society At Large is wealthy, powerful, and politically connected.

No, wait. It's the corps, the plutocrats, the pigopolists that are. A damn shame about how the Golden Rule works.

Get used to not having an Internet as we have always recognized it.

For the last twenty years, I have predicted that Eternal September would result in an Internet not meaningfully distinguishable from Cable TV. Nothing's changed my mind so far.

No

The allusion-heavy Tamarian language has real-world analogs, such as Tropese and the tendency for users of sites closely linked to 4chan to talk in memes.

The allusion-heavy Tamarian language has real-world analogs, such as Tropese and the tendency for users of sites closely linked to 4chan to talk in memes.

The problem with searching the web for existence (or lack thereof) of a subject is that if the community has changed to a different synonym for the topic, you might end up misled by the dearth of recent results from searching on the term that is no longer in fashion. What used to be "Doom clones" are now first-person shooters, "DOTA clones" are now MOBAs, and "text adventures" are now interactive fiction. The synonym problem is the web's version of guess the verb.

Every other company has a "product range", only Apple insist on selling its old products as a product range

You'd be surprised. At various times in the video game console market, a lot of console makers have simultaneously supported an older console and a newer console. Sega did this with the Game Gear (a size-reduced Master System) while the Genesis was out, Nintendo did it with each Game Boy or DS and its predecessor, and Sony did it with the PlayStation 1 and 2 and then with the PlayStation 2 and 3. (Source: "Daddy System" on TV Tropes) And even in the cellular market, I've seen prepaid carriers sell older models in Samsung's Galaxy S line to price-sensitive customers who understand the $1,000 per year price of a contract phone.

fictional zombie problem

Well of course. I'm sorry, movies and games having people shooting and using a crowbar on threatening live people just wouldn't go over. That'd be like "anarchy of the strongest" or something.

It's not a person you're shooting, just a zombie who happens to just _LOOK_ like a person. And besides, he's the one attacking me, I'm just an innocent bystander who would just happily just ignore them -- they're the ones that started it.

And besides, zombies with all of their bleeding and moaning and shuffling and all look Nothing Like Us, forget about skin color or religion or anything else. They're dumb, offensive, illogical, not human, and they deserve to die. Again if necessary.


Gee, if you have severely limited food stocks with some controlled depot concentrations, you can replace "zombie infection" with "hunger" (you can be infected if you share too much food), the "survivors" with the "ones in control of the local food depots" (?the rich?), and the panic, fear, angst and suffering that the infected deal with along with the power, control, and angst feelings that the survivors deal with, and you've got a uncivilized, more violent Soylent Green

Oh, look: it's the news:
Zero
One
Two
Three

Don't worry though -- remember, the ones in control over government are here to help YOU -- once they finish helping themselves.

And that's just human nature, that's pretty much what you can expect from everyone -- they take care of themselves and their friends, because -- they're friends. And the sad part is, I'm NOT against government at all -- especially ours -- I'm just again people in government with unlimited power and zero responsibility.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have." ...and I'm only anonymous here because I'm too lazy to figure out my password -- I'll claim this accidental article shortly.

The layout makes no sense. The person in the "Captain's chair" is in front, and can't see what everybody else is doing. The "captains chair" has no controls or screens of its own, so whomever sits there cannot do anything except shout orders.

Makes perfect sense if the person in the "captain's chair" was kicked upstairs, and the whole point is to have them not know what their organization is doing, and just shout orders to which nobody really pays attention, so that the damage they can do to the organization's goals is limited. :-)

And fully-realized means that it's immersive enough that the AI reflects the differences when dealing with each race, rather than the same exact dialogue regardless of which alien picture is on the screen.

Ah, so it's more like designed and developed in detail.

I agree with everything denzacar said except: "We want to see humanoid aliens"... I want to show aliens that are cool, and at least interesting even if they're not completely believable

All I'm saying is, look at statistics. We tend not to popularize those few non-anthropomorphic aliens shown on ANY screen or drawing.
For every Horta there are literally thousands of centrally symmetric bipedal aliens with very distinct facial features.

And how do we instantly recognize the bad guys? No faces.

Holy shit, he's got a gun.

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

Heaven help us if he makes a rectangle with his forefingers and thumbs... that one falls under wiretapping laws!

Yeah, that is one of my favorite examples of playing with the Wire Dilemma trope, too. Though the Castle episode was fun, too. "Well, one of them had to be the right one."

(sweating over a trope)

Just to chime in with a "me, too!" but The Day After is very much a Hollywood version of nuclear war. Threads (and to a lesser extent 1965's The War Game which inspired the structure of the film but was banned from being broadcast) is essentially some of the most harrowing TV you can put yourself through. If you like your post-apocalyptic stuff then despite its pitifully small budget Threads is hard to beat; just don't expect to feel too chipper afterwards.

It's might not be well known outside of the UK, but part of what made Threads so chilling was the fact that the documentary-style delivery was done partly with excerpts from Protect and Survive, a real PI film, just to show how ineffective and futile the advice being given out by the government would really be. I think the nearest US equivalent is Duck and Cover.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_survive