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All of the posts along the lines of "go out and enjoy yourself while you can" miss the point that many of us *enjoy* dealing with computers, hacking code, etc. The whole "go out and kick a ball around" attitude seems fairly obnoxious, to me - it's precisely the attitude of the "jocks" and of overzealous parents for whom "childhood" can only mean "competitive outdoor activity".

It may well be that these kids will spend the rest of their lives in front of computers -- but it also may well be that they'll enjoy doing it. Or, perhaps, that their formative experiences will give them an insight into technology that will serve them admirably in later life.

I'd spin the "go out and enjoy yourself while you have time" notion on its head, and say "go out and push yourself, intellectually, while you can". Far from being intellectually stimulating, work for *many* people is stifling and dull - and leaves little energy for personal pursuits at the end of the day. The opportunities for 'fun' as an adult are, by contrast, almost endless, the only limited resource being people with whom to do it -- and, without wishing to get into "friendless geek" caricatures, it's probably easier for the adult to find people with common interests than it is for anyone of school-going age. We have cars, we have money, we have a greater understanding of ourselves and of who we'd like to spend time with.

So, push yourself while you can -- set up your club, and weather any ridicule that may come your way. On that note, though, one warning: do endeavour to be humble and kind, difficult though that may seem. I recently sent an email to an old enemy of mine from school; he replied to apologise for his antagonism of me, and to tell me that his school years had been difficult for him thanks to his parents' divorce. It's a cliche, I know -- and besides, some kids are genuinely just nasty little bastards -- but do try to avoid treating your less technically/intellectually able peers with scorn.

But don't listen to those who would tell you that they know better than you do how you should spend your time, or how you should live your life. If a computer club seems like a worthwhile pursuit for you, then by all means pursue it. If free software advocacy does it for you, then similarly - go for broke. You'll have plenty of time for buggering around with a football later in life -- and, if you're a "geek" in the traditional sense, you'll probably enjoy it more in later life when everyone else has started to develop a beer-gut or burned out.

the last thing we need would be people submitting caricatures of Bin-laden and Bush

I saw a piece (Charles Kuralt I think) on the building of the National Cathedral some time ago. One way they pay for the building is by allowing people to design gargoyles, for a fee. One woman had a bunch of gargoyles made that are caricatures of her grandchildren. Unsuprising that a Star Wars fan took advantage of this. The only strange thing is that it didn't happen years ago. Anyway, basing a gargoyle on a fantastic or imaginary creature has a long tradition.

Hello,

I just wanted to voice my opinion regarding your actions against the "Penny Arcade" comic satire using the "Strawberry Shortcake" caricature. Whether your actions are legal or not, please realize that as a consumer with a sense of humor, I now realize which greeting card company to avoid.

Thanks for listening,
Humor-enabled consumer - (my name)

Oh... Wait....

Obviously, I can't speak for slashdotters as a whole, but I can give my experience.

When I was a child (mid-70s - 80s) I found that there were some cartoons that I really enjoyed, and some that I didn't.

Somewhat later (when Robotech came around) I discovered that nearly all the shows I had enjoyed originated in Japan - Kimba the White Lion; Astro Boy; Voltron (vehicles and lions); The Mysterious Cities of Gold; Star Blazers; Battle of the Planets; Ulysses ...

OTOH, the shows I disliked were universally from the US - Scooby Doo; Flintstones; Jetsons ...

As time went on I discovered that I *still* didn't like most US animation, but I did enjoy most Japanese animation I watched. There were some US shows I enjoyed (e.g. Simpsons) and some anime I detested (e.g. Debutante Detective School).

Eventually I worked out the major things I liked and disliked. I enjoy story- and character-driven shows. I dislike episodic shows with no connection between the episodes and no character development. Of slightly lesser importance is character design and the overall look of the show - I *like* most of the anime character designs (esp. Miyazaki and CLAMP designs) and anime shows tend to look better in general - more attention to background detail, etc. OTOH, I'm currently watching "The Soultaker" and I don't overly like the look ...

There is a *much* greater percentage of anime which is character- and plot-driven than US animation. The Simpsons is a character-driven show - most of the episodes don't have much to do with each other (though they often refer to previous events), but the characters are well-developed - they have real (caricatured) personalities. There are others, but they're few and far between (and of course, there are shows such as "King of the Hill" that I'll never watch because the ads just turn me off).

I just finished watching "Burn Up Excess" today. It's a show with ridiculous storylines, huge breasts and unrealistic hair colours. It's also a lot of fun, with an on-going storyline that develops over the series, and characters whose stories draw me in *despite* the huge bouncing breasts. Of course, it's not a patch on shows such as "The Irresponsible Captain Tylor" or "Crest of the Stars" or "Kiki's Delivery Service" to name a few excellent shows. It's a (mostly) lightweight bit of fun, and much higher quality than most of the crud I occasionally catch on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.

My personal collection is about 300 or so DVDs, and about 400 VHS (used to be more VHS, but I've managed to sell quite a few ...). All up I have about 200 complete series and movies. I tend to pick and choose my shows quite a bit (for example, I never got the El-Hazard TV series because everything I read said that it wasn't nearly as good as the OAVs) but I've got quite a few in there that I'll never watch again (fortunately, most of those are VHS). There are a number of shows though that I watch time and time again.

Fortunately, Madman is releasing lots of anime here in Australia now - importing was prohibitively expensive. Oh - and I have lots of manga as well - Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind is definitely my favourite manga. However, the US comics I've enjoyed over the years have also tended to have strong storylines and characters - I don't find *that* great a disparity although no US comic I've ever read has had the depth of "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind".

Eh, Kyle WAS a soldier. Trained to fight, brought up in a world full of Terminators, death, destruction etc.

Sarah was a waitress. Trained to flip burgers and go out on a Friday night, and suddenly confronted by Arnie complete with shades, lots of guns and a pretty strong desire (absolutely WILL not stop etc) to kill her. Not to mention the whole certain-knowledge-about-the-end-of-the-world deal, and not being able to do a thing about it. I'm not sure how I'd react in her position, but I think a spell in a mental health institute might well be in order. Don't really see this as evidence of major sexism by Mr C.

I have to agree that Jessica Alba is a major babe though, as well as a much better actress than she's apparently given credit for.

Babe first and foremost though...

All that being said, his action movies DO still tend to be pretty good. I just think that Alita has more of a quiet confidence, rather than an in-your-face attitude, than Cameron is really used to dealing with in female action heros. I suppose on the bright side, he can probably reuse some of the costumes from Dark Angel to keep costs down :)

Dude, that's a pretty broad brush you're flourishing there.

Francis Fukuyama, defined first as a Zionist?

Charles Schultz, defined first as a Zionist?

William Bennett, defined first as a Zionist?

These folks, while sharing a desire to get rid of OBL, to annihilate the threat Hussein's regime presented, to crush Hezbollah, are a relatively diverse bunch as those things go. They certainly are not the two-dimensional caricatures you paint them to be.

I agree w/everything they said in their letter (notably absent from which was *any* mention of privacy, the Patriot Act, TIA, etc.).

I.e., what does *any of this* have to do w/the new RFC?

They *were* set, is the right way to put it.

For those who don't know, back 15 years ago when I started, they were all very dark. The basic concept in each scenario was that humanity and the various other races were being overwhelmed by the forces of Chaos (think demons and devils). But the state of humanity in each case made you unsure whether them winning would be a good thing - the WH Fantasy side made a big thing of the corruption of human society, and the 40K side made a big deal of the fact that the human Empire sacrificed psychic people to their god-emperor and all the various worlds were basically lapsing into barbarism.

Then GW changed their marketing, and targetted the game at 12-year-olds.

Suddenly all the new figures changed into WWF stereotypes, and all the art-work got the bright cartoony colours and heroic poses. Every race became a caricature - heroic humans, elegantly-dissipated elves, comic-turn orcs, etc. The game rules got over-simplified so that kiddies could understand them. And it all sucked, big-time.

Grab.

I shouldn't use evil. Yet, all sides of the RIAA debate are trying to create caricatures of evil that they are fighting against. The RIAA will probably try to include indies in their version of the axis of evil.

The media moguls are desparately trying to stop the progression of technical advances...forgetting that they fund their coke habbit on the technical advances that trumped entertainers of years past. It is easy to create a caricature of the Hollywood as the evil villians of mass culture.

The fact that these debates get hung up on antecdotes and caricatures pretty much means the political process will not produce a rational result.

Yup. If you ever played Serious Sam 2, they actually put a bunch of little game developer caricatures riding around in crates that are roped together as a joke.

If you haven't ever thought about the whole "crate" thing before you are missing out. With very few exceptions, crates are everywhere. Think about it. Quake 2: you start out staring at a crate. Half Life: You leave the room where things blew up and are staring at a crate in 45 seconds.

It's mostly because game designers want to provide cover, but they don't want to actually design the things that really do provide cover in real life. Desks maybe. Overturned cars. Furniture. Machine parts. Things which are a lot less "cube" and therefore harder to model.

I agree with you that they are very likely to cover something like this up, I just don't think the primary reason is pride, I think it has more to do with protecting their economy (which indirectly of course reflects on their image/pride, so the motivations are probably connected anyway.). The Chinese government is of course a whole bunch of people, and I'm sure that many of them have more than one reason why they may want to or not want to cover this up. And people are people; so likewise, I'm sure there are those WITHIN their government who are arguing to rather be as open as possible about SARS in order to save lives. Things are never quite so 'black and white' as USians tend to paint them. This is what I mean about having a 'balanced view'. Chinese people are not single-minded stereotypical homogenous caricatures like those in American TV shows. They are people.

In caricature, then, to clarify the distinction:

First definition: large crowds of booted skinheads and homeless "alternative lifestyle" (eg alcholic and heavy drug abusing) ex-punks with spiderweb tattoos, on the rampage, smashing in storefront windows, defacing public monuments and lobbing half-bricks at the riot police.

Second definition: you and me with our short attention spans, surfing on slashdot, getting extra annoyed for a few minutes about the latest outragous piece of IP legislation and maybe thinking about possibly sending an angry email to, well, whatever email address somebody was kind enough to post. Well, hell, at least we'll actively gripe about it to our friends at the water cooler in the office the next day.

The Second Superpower has no teeth. As witness the way support for the anti-war movement just melted away in the last days leading up to the war - right about the time it became really clear that Bush didn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. The vast majority of people just gave up. I don't wish to be hypocritical; I count myself among them.

It's just the way people are. Trouble is, we all know that you can only take a protest so far before it becomes outright revolution, and then things get broken and you might get in trouble with the law or get hurt. As long as people have comfortable lives to return to they will have no truck with revolution. You need to have nothing to lose before you will risk everything.

That's why every government likes to create and maintain a large and comfortable middle class even if there are some people without a job or a roof over their heads. The apathy of the former acts as an effective buffer against the anger of the latter ever gaining enough support to make a significant impact.

I love how the author describes this futuristic virtual world where everyone is a walking, talking, gesturing 3-D caricature but yet voice chat is limited due to bandwidth.

"See, when they move their hand, their avatar moves its hand! And as you turn your head, you can actually see everything that's around you! What? You want to HEAR what they're saying? Sorry, you'll have to use the 100 year old telephone."

The advent of digital reproduction and transmission technologies threatens the content industries with extinction in the long run, because they will be unable to maintain monopoly control of the particular content they sell. Once the first copy of something has been sold, it is effectively in the public domain and that's that, regardless of what the law says (because the public have basically demonstrated over and over again that they don't much care for IP protection laws and just don't obey them).

To restate this in more forward-looking terms: the public want a change in the law, and in a democracy a public that stubbornly resists re-education propaganda must eventually get its own way (even if it takes a long time).

But to repeal IP copy restriction laws would be inimical to the profitability, and therefore potentially to the bare existence, of the content industries.

In response those industries want to be partly state funded in order to support their continued existence. It's not possible to ask for this to come out of general taxation for several reasons including a worldwide political trend towards free market economics, and existing international agreements concerning fair trade.

But a tax on the computer hardware used to rip off their IP is more easily defended. It's really analogous in principle to the UK's TV and radio licencing schemes where a fee is payable by anybody in Britain who owns a radio or TV set, and which is used to fund public sector broadcasting. It's also reminiscent (in a reverse sense) of the "polluter pays" principle being used in some countries to fund environmental cleanup by charging the most tax to industries who make the most mess.

It's often said that the situation to be faced by the content industries in the near future is similar in some superficial respects to that faced by the buggy whip manufacturing industry which began to disappear early last century when people abandoned horse-drawn buggies for motor cars.

But it does differ in one very important respect which proponents of IP derestriction don't always appreciate: the world didn't really miss the buggy whip manufacturers because we all had cars. But we might miss a vanished content industry when we find that there is no more big-budget content being produced because it has become no longer possible to make big money doing so.

Whether you are prepared to buy that argument of course depends on where the best trade-off lies between freedom to copy on the one hand and a continuing supply of new hollywood blockbuster movies and/or expensively produced music recordings with which to feed this copying, on the other.

This argument says that if we can all get by on a diet of low budget college project/art house movies and raw, cheaply produced music that doesn't need much studio time production, then we can look forward to a future of free copying and no need for these industries to be supported by state-donated or -enforced subsidy. But, it concludes, there will be no more Schwarzenegger movies or Michael Jackson albums.

I personally think that argument is flawed and that there will still be big-budget content, however it will be funded differently - by embedded advertising and merchandising rather than retail sales. Unfortunately that means this type of mass-market content is doomed to become a caricature of what is now; overhyped, market saturated, blandly tailored for the average palate and merchandised to the point of nausea.

For those this doesn't suit, we will of course still have our new grassroots culture, word-of-mouth marketed and freely copyable. Quality for the discerning connoiseur! Now... where's my pirated collection of local amateur drama group DVDs? And my bootlegged CD of water-filled soda bottle music recorded live in his kitchen by Fred from next door? Oh there they

I would refer anyone with questions about this game's alleged (pre)pubescent target audience to the fine, upstanding American cities of Las Vegas, Reno, or Atlantic City for comparison.

Anyone who has been in a casino in the last 5 years has noticed the proliferation of colorful, fully-animated, cartoon slot machines. Almost nothing (except stuff from IGT) has mechanical reels anymore. The new machines _scream_ out "I'm like a video game! Note my humorous caricatures of rednecks, TV stars, and clowns!"

Sure, the lottery game probably appeals to a certain juvenile instinct in the players (which is what I'd personally have a bigger problem with), but I doubt that this rises to the level of a conspiracy to bilk money from players who are too young to collect the potential purse from playing. It's just a bit of Vegas seeping into the respectable, honest, dependable investm^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlottery industry.

And besides, *$4* for one in 260 kiloChances??? Thanks, but I'll stick to baiting reckless drivers to chase me down and assault me so I can sue them.

Justin

I am not saying that there aren't. However most come from biased sources such as pfo.org or the LDS Church. This one does a pretty good job of examining both sides of the issues.

Orson was a missionary in Brazil

Me too.

Anyhow, I have read the entire Ender series and found it to be pretty interesting, though I thought that it slowed down towards the end. None of the depictions struck me as caricatures, but it has been a while.

Did you see his debate with Lessig a few years ago? That was a real trip. I don't understand why Jack's lawyers let him actually talk to the public; they have to know that anyone not actively being paid to enjoy his company will despise him.

Oh, I concur that different is good.

But I can't say I agree. I keep looking at them, and they keep looking at a caricature of a car. Something drawn by a six year old.

I'm glad you like your car, and I'd be the last person to tell you your car sucks...

But I don't like 'em. At all.