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Who's Tom Bombadil?

Gene Hargrove has one answer, but it will only make sense if you've at least read the Lord of the Rings.

To go back to my first post to make my point a little bit more clear. I think that Tolkien most likely would roll in his grave if any of his main work would be performed as a musical. I refrance the quote from one of your links "He had heard it differently in his mind, he said, and hummed a Gregorian chant."[Music in Middle Earth] I can see a collection of the songs but nothing that could be thrown together with enough of a plot to be called a musical. Just a collection of songs that would not be concidered mainstream. I would like to hear them perfomed though.

Alright I admit that I posted it without a preview and I stated "awe crap".

Heh, my reaction was much the same, then I started thinking about the large amount of music in the books already. A bit of googling and I got a couple of pretty good links which give a good idea of what's already in the books for them to work with:

About the Songs and Poems in the Lord of the Rings
Music in Middle Earth

Which I'd say is a fairly good starting point.

Alright I admit that I posted it without a preview and I stated "awe crap".

Heh, my reaction was much the same, then I started thinking about the large amount of music in the books already. A bit of googling and I got a couple of pretty good links which give a good idea of what's already in the books for them to work with:

About the Songs and Poems in the Lord of the Rings
Music in Middle Earth

Which I'd say is a fairly good starting point.

More info here:

For many years, some courts also ruled that a patent could not be granted on a "method of doing business," such as a sales technique or an accounting method. A recent court decision, however, has opened the door to patents in those areas by ruling that so-called business methods can be patented. Companies that rely on computers for accounting, electronic commerce and communication may be prime beneficiaries of those new types of patents.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has the final word on patents aside from the Supreme Court, ruled in State Street Bank & Trust Co. vs. Signature Financial Group that a computerized accounting system was patentable, even though it concerned a method of doing business and involved mathematical algorithms.

...

The court's ruling provides new opportunities for those who seek patent protection in areas such as accounting, electronic commerce and computer software. Computer programs once considered merely abstract ideas can now be patented as long as they produce a "useful result." ... Even Einstein's famous equation, if applied in a useful manner, could form the basis for a patent.

I sympathize with your viewpoint; the incidents in the old wood and the barrow downs were an integral part of the book, as was the scene where the hobbit company meets the elves singing the hymn to Elbereth. As I recall, Tom Bombadil was actually a character in another Tolkien work "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", who was transplanted into LOTR. This is an interesting essay on the subject. The excision of this scene forced Jackson to have Aragorn to dole out the daggers of westernesse from a bag, instead of logically finding them in the barrow downs, where they were deposited by the Dunedain of the north in their war against the witch king of Angmar. However, in creating a movie, that was a self contained part of the story that was relatively easy to remove. I'm not certain what else could have been removed or shortened with equal ease. Perhaps some of the journey over caradhras, and the b-movie grade Gandalf-Saruman fight..but it's hard to say. A response to the comments about the scene with the balrog: as you say, I have not seen the extended edition. However, my objection was not to Aragorn's restraining frodo, but to his standing back when he could have helped Gandalf. Perhaps the bridge would have crumbled, but a hero would and should have taken that risk..it didn't look all that fragile to me. If you read the book, you will see that Aragorn and Boromir were close to Gandalf during the confrontation with the balrog, hence my rather vehement comments. Perhaps in the extended edition it looks different, but the movie I saw had Aragorn and Boromir, two stalwarts of the Dunedain, shrinking away from the balrog and denying Gandalf aid.

I agree with you to a point. Yes, what I'm about to say is an over generalization, but so what. As a former student(I transferred to UNT) , I think I can validate your point a bit better. Most of the University's population are rich kids that couldn't go anywhere better. The Engineering School was completely different. Most eng. students have scholarships, FinAid, etc. I believe your probably talking about the people that graduated from the business school with a BA or MBA, and now they're your clueless manager. :D

BTW, UNT has HAD a Game Presence for quite a while. Just check out the LARC.

I agree with you to a point. Yes, what I'm about to say is an over generalization, but so what. As a former student(I transferred to UNT) , I think I can validate your point a bit better. Most of the University's population are rich kids that couldn't go anywhere better. The Engineering School was completely different. Most eng. students have scholarships, FinAid, etc. I believe your probably talking about the people that graduated from the business school with a BA or MBA, and now they're your clueless manager. :D

BTW, UNT has HAD a Game Presence for quite a while. Just check out the LARC.

Actually thats what I've been looking into after I get out of the University of Connecticut's School of Engineering with a degree in Comp Sci & Engr doubled w/ Business and a minor in Math. I know of Digipen (which unfortunatly sounds like a geek playpen rather than a geek guildhouse -- more appealing imagry you see) as a potential place to study programming with specifics to game development, as well as The Laboratory for Recreational Computing which is def. more m1cr0s0ft centric.

Guess I have 1 more west coast place to check out.

Anyone else planning on doing something like this post graduation? Would it be better for me to just try and get a job in the industry asap? Comments and tips are welcome!

It's called the "LARC", for "Laboratory for Recreational Computing", and was started in 1993. Check it out here.

The lab is run by a professor (Ian Parberry) who has published a few books on game programming.

So here are some more links to document the sordid history of the US abroad.

The Long and Hidden History of the US in Somalia

Us Approves Invasion of East Timor

A brief history of CIA involvement in the drug trade

The Philippine War and Anti-Imperialism

Hawaii's annexation a story of betrayal

Keep modding me down and I will keep posting new links. My karma is capped right now so we could be here all night. How is it flamebait to talk about human rights abuses in the US in a story about a software license that forbids such abuses?

Oh, and we use DOS prompts too! Amazing!

Declan's article reminded me of an earlier study in another realm. Gerald Rosenberg, a law professor at the University of Chicago, did an exhaustive study of the ability of courts ("Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?", 1991) to produce social reform and concluded that U.S. courts "can almost never be effective producers of significant social reform". (Good synopsis and book review here.)

He went further to argue that because the cost of participating in the court system was so expensive, "Public interest law groups that have long relied on litigation to achieve policy goals ought start looking elsewhere."

I agree with Declan but it would be interesting to see more statistics/studies to confirm this trend before we give up on this avenue for social change.

"Could someone pass The BSA a cluebat?"

Okay, here you go. :)

Dr Ian Parberry at the University of North Texas (about thirty minutes away from UTD) already has a course teaching fundamentals of game programming. Three programmers team up with an artist, and you learn to make a GAME (as opposed to a graphics demo). Parberry also has a book based on the class here.

Given the history of Parberry's class (which used to be called the Laboratory for Recreational Computing (LARC)), it's not surprising at all that Mr. Romero would fail to mention it. Back in '94 some of the students met him and came away...very unimpressed. The consensus then was that Carmack must have really written Doom and Romero came along for the ride -- Romero didn't know half the 32-bit asm as the students, and in the '94 gaming environment that was pretty shocking.

For those in the Dallas area who really want to learn games, try Parberry's course. He's an excellent teacher and a real coder (even though I hate his brace style :) ), and he has already put the years into refining the syllabus. You'll get a lot from it, including a preview of the game industry's 80-hour work week.

Kevin Lamonte
LARC class of '94
CSCI 4050 class of '99

an intriguing behavioral trait involved in music perception and is defined as the ability to recognize the pitch of a musical tone without an external reference pitch

For example, a professor at my beloved alma mater was able to identify a pitch by referring to its frequency in Hz! The phrase describes someone at a different end of the musical spectrum than the idiots at which this product is aimed.

-jason

I don't have time to read the article, but wow, this is a story I've been waiting for. So many times I see other /.'ers talking about how they were individually involved with some type of research, and now it's my turn:

One up and coming way of dating fossils uses a technique called Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA). You bombard a substance (in this case flint) with ions, which penetrate the sample and react with fluoride when they're at a certain depth/energy. The theory is, fluoride has only been in water since a certain time in our past, so based on how deep the fluorine is inside the sample, you know how old it is.

Check out here

You may eventually be proved right about the Constitution protecting the rights of everyone located in the USA. Current laws (particularly those signed in 1996) made it possible for the INS to hold or deport any non-citizen (legal resident or not) without review by any court. The INS doesn't have to provide reason or evidence. There are currently over 3000 people in the "indefinite custody" of the INS. They have no right to any legal recourse.

There is more information available at www.ucla.org and a fairly good summary here.

Historically the Constitution has not protected slaves, females, japanese, or mexicans from laws designed to remove so-called basic human rights.

I'm told that The University of North Texas and UW have good gaming stuff going on. I'd investigate further and come up with better URL's, but then all hopes of getting this post moded up would fade because it'd be too late, and I am a whore!

We had a pi reciting contest at my geeky HS/college And it's RIVALED not RIVALLED!! I made a fool of myself! The top person knew 81 so far, still, before I left in disgust, but someone up next claimed to know 151.

Moderate him DOWN!!

There's no difference between this and childproof lids on medicine

Interesting example. Did you know that childproof medicine bottles may have actually increased the number of accidental child poisonings?

Check out this. I quote:

Childproof medicine bottles. The hard-to-open caps were introduced in 1972. W. Kip Viscusi, a professor at Harvard Law School, took a close look at the number of children who were poisoned before and after the change. He found that, contrary to what anyone could have imagined, there was absolutely no net savings of life. "First, a lot of people left the caps off, and we had a lot of open-bottle poisonings," he says. "Second, parents were lulled into a false sense of security; a fair number of preschool kids can still open these bottles."

Now I grant you, it's not possible to keep an eye on your kids 24/7, but it seems there's a growing trend among parents to hand off the responsibility any way they can. If parents actually used this sort of technology as a tool, in addition to responsible parenting practices, it'd be a great idea. But I fear that it'll be just one more area that parents will disown the responsibility, and hand it off to the government. Ack. Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but if this works anything like a v-chip, it won't be a guaranteed offensive content blocker anyway. Not to mention the whole "the government is deciding what constitutes offensive" argument.

The same thing exists in the US with the same name. It gets posted in popular columns like Dear Abby, Ann Landers, etc. all the time. IMO, people prefer to just bitch about it, as if it were no more changeable than the weather.
http://www.unt.edu/legal/mail_preference_service.h tm

There is another project at the University of Washington called LN2000, and after a quick glance at the website it appears to be even further along than the UNT project. Their test vehicle is a converted 1984 Grumman-Olson Kubvan mail delivery van and they also have a website.

http://www.mtsc.unt.edu/CooLN2Car.html

The official name for the lab is the "Laboratory for Recreational Computing", and you can check it out at this link.