Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?
Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"
You are all murderers. Fuck you. (first anti-ameriacan post)
FUCK you ALL
fuck YOU all
FUCK you ALL
fuck YOU all
FUCK you ALL
fuck YOU all
Go to hell, cocksuckers.
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Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
A Guardian report, from Baghdad, notes that civilians have been largely untouched by the shocking and awesome bombardment of the Iraqi capital: "So long as the rest of Baghdad remains almost unscathed, ordinary Iraqis appear relatively buoyant, as they reach for the possibility that maybe this war will be less punishing than they had feared."
Meanwhile, some of those "human shields" came to their senses after arriving in Iraq. United Press International has one such report:
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
The Telegraph has a first-person account from one Daniel Pepper, an American resident of London, who says he "was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam":
I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad--a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good." He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.
As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.
It scared the hell out of me. First I was thinking that maybe it was the secret police trying to trick me but later I got the impression that he wanted me to help him escape. I felt so bad. I told him: "Listen, I am just a schmuck from the United States, I am not with the UN, I'm not with the CIA--I just can't help you."
You guys rock! (First pro-america/british post).
...asshole... [i]YOU CAN'T STOP THE PATRIOTISM!! MUHAHA[/i]
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Sung to the tune of: Only The Lonely
y ah
y ah
Performed by Roy Orbison
Dum-dum-dum-dum-dee-du-wah
Ooh-yeah-yeah-yeah-
Oh-woh-woh-woh-o oh-wa-wah
Only the goatse, only the goatse
Only the goatse
The man's anus, is not that tight
Only the goatse
So loose, it's not a pretty sight
There goes his rectum
Just ripped a fart
He spreads his ass-cheeks so far apart
But only the goatse
Asshole in your eye
Only the goatse
Dum-dum-dum-dum-dee-du-wah
Ooh-yeah-yeah-yeah-
Oh-woh-woh-woh-o oh-wa-wah
Only the goatse, only the goatse
Only the goatse
I saw the butt-plugs you've been through
Only the goatse
I know how hard it is to poo
So painful to see at a first glance
I'd feel sorry but you're from France
How it must ache
What a stupid mistake
Only the goatse
Would you like to come over some time?
yayhooray
see for yourself, all the topics look pretty current with todays hot topics, and these are all coders/designers/creatives
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Internet celebrity Bob Goatse was found dead in his Kansas City home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.