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Clonaid, Lullabyes, Gerbils
Your recommended daily dose of insanity. FattyBoeBatty writes "Napster has been sued again, but this time it's by a company that makes meditation music -- and for once it's not about copyrights. They're afraid that without their company's warning labels, unsuspecting Napster users will be lulled to sleep by the tranquil melodies and will fall asleep at inopportune times (i.e. driving, operating heavy machinery, etc.)" A bunch of people submitted this story about Clonaid, a group of people wearing tin-foil hats who want to clone a human (and whose leader will give speeches for a measly $100,000). Finally, Hacky writes: "Security Service MI5 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies, it has been revealed."
I hear the /. crew employs quite a few gerbils in secret activities.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
As to not deriding the loonies thanks but I'd rather have them ostracized then allowing them to claim any sort of credibility & suck in more victims. If folks were to stop making nice-nice and actually get critical of wacko cults like the Scientologists, Raelians, Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, etc. they might whither away & the world be a healthier place for it.
Trading in critical thought and honest analysis for "happy news" is not a good long-term strategy (unless you'll looking to raise a generation of McSlave carnation-pushers.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Read the Register article before you make up your mind about him.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The scariest part is that cloning means even more of these type people.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Fertility Specialist
We also install lightning rods
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Squeek!
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
One gerbil was quoted as saying, "Bring on Saddam Hussein but damn man, the guy I'm really scared of is Joe Cartoon!"
-- iCEBaLM
Little do people a lot of things like this happen. For instance, when former drug kingpin Pablo Escobar couldn't evade having his data sniffed by the CIA, Delta Force (U.S. Army), and others, he turned to good old fashioned pigeons. [Killing Pablo] I don't remember which chapter it is but it's there somewhere. Let's not forgot the recent rumors of Usama bin Laden plotting using remote controlled helicopters either.
Hey if it works and gets the job done go for it.
Want Root?
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
PS: I posted the story first
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
The ultimate spy team: Bond and Boo!
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I'm pretty sure that's the first time that anyone has ever left the Bahamas for the U.S. because of legal pressure!
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--hongpong.com
Hehe, I just got back from that. I can't believe Spielberg spliced in CE3K footage for the last half hour of the movie. I know special effects are expensive, but that's pretty rediculous - plus he had a perfectly good ending a half hour before.
.... errr teddy bear was entertaining.
It's still an interesting movie though. It's not good in the traditional sense, but it sure had me entertained if only for trying to pick apart the movie and figure out which bits came from Kubrick and which from Speilberg. I have the odd feeling that Kubrick probably came up with the Pinnochio allusion, but some how I doubt he would have shoved it down the audience's throat and explained it over and over. Still, the movie would have been much worse had Spielberg tried to emulate Kubrick (he did to a point, but really only so far as going with slow pacing and using Kubrick's drawings/ideas for shot setup). At least the movie didn't say, "You know David - that's the first man eh?" - oh wait, it did. The really awkward thing is that the movie could have been good. At least the ewok
It's not a movie that entertains me, but it's still my favorite Spielberg movie next to Jaws. Oh wait, it also follows the Indy trilogy. Really he should either stick to those types of movies or stop trying to make movies that have some sort of underlying meaning and then tagging them with a John Williams score and computerized aliens.
OK, the ending could have been good. No shit theyh weren't aliens - I'm just saying go watch CE3K where the aliens are unveiled and then watch both the first time David is introduced and the first time the ultra-futeristic-robots are on-screen. I had three main problems with the ending - visual style, overuse of exposition (which really lasted the entire movie), and typical Spielberg-esque emotional manipulation. Yeah, I realize Spielberg is quite talented at getting a John Williams score in D-Minor, showing people crying/dying, and complimenting it with slow camera pans/zooms to get the audience into the movie, but it doesn't work for me. Suprisingly, it didn't even work for the audience I saw it with either. He had the opportunity to make the robot encounter into a great suprise ending (well, it was expected, but so are most suprise endings). It was horribly executed. It should have left me pondering its meaning when I left, but I don't have to, because the robot explained it all for me for 10 minutes. I really don't have to think about the Pinnochio allusion either because its meaning was hammered into me about four times in the movie (first reading, boy's request for blue fairy, dr. know, coney island, good god can a metaphore be so drawn out). Not to mention that the "we can only bring mommy back for a day due to the space-time-continuum" voodoo bullshit was pretty rediculous. That might have been Kubrick's idea, but it was still bull. How would the universe revolve around the human day when humans themselves are extinct? Doesn't the ending prove the lack of existence of some spiritual defense of humanity?
You're right that Spielberg's made great and shitty movies. Jaws is great, Indy is great, CE3K is great, Schindler's List is good. But this is just not particularly good in either the typical-spielberg-entertainment sense or the artistic-merit sense. It won't be a box office smash. It'll probably be #1 this weekend because of the shear number of competing movies, but it won't next weekend. The whole movie felt like it was the Cliff's Notes Complete version Spielberg made of Kubrick's ideas. Again, I know that Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct this, but I don't know how happy he would've been.
And no, every last bit of it was not Kubrick. He would not have used a JW score (look at his past strategic reuse of classic music to aid his movies - Beethoven's 9th in Clockwork, Flight of the Valkries in Full Metal Jacket). He would not have had slick CE3K robots. He wanted David to be a robot rather than a boy - physically. Again, Spielberg has liscense to change all that. My problem is just that he tried to keep all of Kubrick's plans/themes while imposing his own directing style - the emotionally manipulative, overly expository one. When Spielberg used his Indy/Jaws style for the Rouge City scenes among others, it mostly worked.
Basically I can't like this movie, but I'll still come back to watch it a few more times (though I may fast-forward through a bit of the ending). It's interesting to watch in the same sense that something like Survivor is - to try and figure out what went on behind the scenes to make the movie. I don't like the movie because it thought I was an idiot (though according to you, this is a proper accusation), but I still enjoyed watching it to figure out just where Spielberg went wrong. It could have been great; he could have made it great; he obviously didn't, however, and that's why I liked watching it.
[...] he will give you a dead baby, a defective baby or a deformed baby [...]
So if you've lost a child, you need not be racked with grief. Instead you can pay lots of money to have your child returned to you defective, deformed, sick and abnormally large, with a tin-foil hat. Now that's progress!
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Lets put that $100,000 speech on Napster!
"The road to the top of the bell-curve is paved with mediocrity." - collin brack
hmm.. you sure they're not talking about AI? Damn, but I can't WAIT to see a review of that here :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
According to the article Hauben coined the term Netizen in a 1992 article entitled "The Net and Netizens: The Impact the Net Has on People's Lives", and contributed to the IEEE's Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
JAMES BOND HAS A NEW ALLY
Santa Monica, CA (PP)- MGM executives have unveiled a new ally in James Bond's fight against evil, Scruffy the Wonder Gerbil.
Scruffy, a new jersey spotted gerbil, will lead an effort to stop a band of terrorists from downing airliners. In a remarkable new cross-company marketing scheme, MGM officials have announced that Scruffy will be deployed using the patented Outpost.com Gerbil Cannon.
"Scruffy the Wonder Gerbil will join other crime fighting rodents of the silver screen," announced MGM CEO Michael Bootiepants. "Mighty Mouse, Stuart Little and, of course, those rascally critters from Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers."
Scruffy was unavailable for comment, he was training for the role in a new state of the art excercise wheel made entirely out of titanium.
Dear /.:
<meditation music in background>
I am from the CEO of a major meditation company. <yawn> I believe it's in the best intrest of our intelectual property to be protected, along with our sweet melodies, that ppl don't get hurt by our pro... <snoring>.... uh? ya. Where were we? Anyway, we don't want any problems occuring form those wholesale pirates!
So, if you would excuse me, I need a nap. Bye.
Karma whorin' since 1999
What I don't get is that the redundancy filter didn't catch this.
LULL PEOPLE TO SLEEP
NAPster
So either the company wants the "NAPster" name, or they want free advertising on their site.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Actually, I heard Napster already moved to filter all John Tesh songs to preempt any similar suits.
Now it's Napster's fault that this company puts out music that puts people to sleep.
Clonaid makes the Scientologists seem almost rational in comparison. Almost.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
There needs to be a way to weed out dumb court cases. Maybe you could ask ten people, and if nine of them say "that's dumb" then you throw the case out. Or maybe use some kind of roulette wheel with flashing lights or something.
The suit by the company selling meditation music is obviously a big marketing ploy.
Little podunk company brinks suit against one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the 'net, 'cept to make their suit stand out, they throw in some extra marketing razzmatazz about how their music is so effective in putting people to sleep that it needs warning labels.
Yeah, right.
Why didn't they just contact Napster and tell them to add their songs to the filtering system? I wonder if even a single one of their songs is being traded...
Still, though... they are going to reap a lot of recognition out of this. Too bad they're doing it at the expense of our already-overburdened court system.
When we mock groups outside mainstream society, we only give them more reason to retaliate. Just look at Columbine, or at the Oklahoma City bombing in which Timothy McVeigh was motivated by the cover-up of those who died at Ruby Ridge. I'd think the supposedly free-minded people at Slashdot would know better to mock ostracized groups and deride them as "tinfoil-hat wearing" (note that nowhere in the CNN article are the Raelians actually described as wearing tin-foil hats). These people may be different from us, but their actions could present a real, serious issue.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.