I completely agree! Portal is perfection. It's short and sweet and has everything in it you could want in a game -- fantastic gameplay, an immaculately-crafted antagonist, a fantastic plot twist, humor, and a surprisingly thorough and satisfying ending. It's amazing as a stand-alone game, but also rewarding to a Half-Life fan: Aperture Science's technologies had many insidious similarities to the Combine (the turrets, the logo, the whole concept of portals), some of which unfold in Episode 2 and will likely be further developed in Episode 3.
Though Valve is demonstrating a disturbing trend of subscription-based gaming, offering 5-hour minigames for a somewhat steep price, Portal is totally worth it, even if you don't get the Orange box. It's a shame it's so short, but on the same token, the game's short play time might be exactly why it has so much concentrated fun. There's not much room for repetition with such a limited span of game time.
What I find even more interesting is the counter-evolution that some caterpillars have developed to thwart the wasps. Most of these wasps track by scent, in particular the scent of the caterpillar's feces. Some caterpillars have developed a mechanism to shoot their own feces a distance of 40 times their body length . Just pray that cockroaches don't develop a similar defense!
Zimmer's book Parasite Rex is a nasty and amazing little book about parasites. I never thought I'd find myself reading such a book, but it's a surprising page turner, and chronicles all sorts of parasites and their deviously complex behaviors. One disturbing case is a parasite which initially neuters a male crab and then later gives it a virtual sex change, making it think it's female so it'll disperse its "eggs," which happen to be the parasite's eggs.
I found the parallel between allergies and parasites pretty interesting as well.
Another poster also said that the new material shouldn't have any detrimental effect on the older stuff, and that should be true. It's just that, true fans do want to see more Star Wars material, and some of the unnecessary revisionist choices in the prequels felt rather insulting. Darth Vader made C-3P0 as a kid? Being able to wield the force is due to cooties in your bloodstream? Sacrilege!
I thought the clone wars cartoons were fairly cool despite their simplicity, for the very fact that they introduced new characters and didn't dwell on pointless cameos. Is it really necessary that Boba Fett was the father to every clone out there AND tussled with Obi-Wan -- AND has requested his own personal clone so that he can catch Han Solo? That's not imagination, it's contrivance. When does it become visionary inspiration drawn from the rich tapestry of the Star Wars universe rather than drivel shoehorned into the plot in order to cling desperately to pre-existing characters?
Why does the fate of the universe pivot around a dozen or so guys?
By all means, make new material. And when I say new, I mean no more R2-D2, man!
You obviously didn't read the article, because Lucas is thinking BIG, man!
Quoth the maker: "They [the suits] are having a hard time," Lucas said. "They're saying, 'This doesn't fit into our little square boxes,' and I say, 'Well, yeah, but it's Star Wars. And Star Wars doesn't fit into that box.'"
It's going to blow your mind. Think Jar-Jar Binks. Think midi-chlorians. Think greedy Chinese stereotype aliens! Think epic romances spanning multiple star systems! This is Star Wars we're talking about, and it's not taking any guff!
I thought this as well, but only because I clicked on the wrong button. Don't click the shiny "Get it for FREE!" button, which results in a mildly bewildering page of random offers. Click the bland "download" link and you should get it hassle-free.
The idea of sanctions was addressed the other day in NPR as well -- but the speaker mostly dismissed the idea. Burma just doesn't have much of an economy to cripple to begin with, and a great deal of its inhabitants live a subsistence lifestyle. In many areas of the enconomy, the black market trade is suspected to be larger than legitimate trade!
A decent overview of their economy can be found at the CIA World Factbook.
The author of the original article actually recommended this one as well. It was one of the few sites to actually send him a response that indicated they actually looked at his submission!
*shudder* The abbreviation does sound cool, but isn't XP just supposed to be short for "eXPerience?" "Windows Experience" is a far more revolting name.
I believe it, but it sounds like the majority of complaints come from folks using legacy programs, 3rd-party solutions, and just a few comments ago, video drivers for fancy graphics/gaming cards. I would imagine that in Redmond most of your software is Microsoft, made (and tested) to work well with other Microsoft components -- in that controlled environment, I should hope that it went as smoothly as it did over there!
I am equally puzzled about where the animosity comes from, but I have to admit I'm wary of her as well. In this discussion thread, there have been pleas to appeal to rationality when choosing a candidate, but some impressions run deep. Cheney looks shifty, and Kissinger seemed even shiftier. Perhaps you're familiar with their political maneuverings, perhaps not, but this knowledge may not go very far in changing your overall "shifty" opinion of them. Gore had to fight hard against his "boring" image, and I don't think he ever really won. If you're an uninformed or even mildly-informed voter making a choice between two candidates who really lack striking differences, your impression can be the deciding factor.
I personally think it would be a great statement for a woman to take the presidency, and I even thought Bill Clinton was pretty groovy during my budding political awareness, so I should be all for Hillary getting Bush's throne, but... there's still something... abrasive about her. She's cold. Another person described her as "ruthless." When she speaks, I often hear the words but not the heartfelt sentiment behind them. I think she'd be a competent president, but at the same time, I don't know if I'd really be able to trust what she says. And I'm not the only one; others I have spoken with have the same unease about her.
You might say this is politics as usual and that all candidates are two-faced, but there's something extra weasley about her to me.
Ah, your question concerning the utility of humans has already been anticipated in The Secret War of Lisa Simpson:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
I don't disagree, but I wonder a bit about "crappy connections" and "roaming that sucked." If you've come from Japan or some other high-density country, it seems like the ratio of users to telcom towers would be fairly cost-effective. But how does a company cover a state like Utah? Or Eastern Oregon? The U.S. is huge, and the cost to build towers for full coverage would be prohibitive to the point of bankruptcy.
At least, this is how I console myself when I get a crummy signal, specious reasoning or not.
I remember once seeing a post on Slashdot about a penny-pinching user who claimed that he was able to avoid paying for ringtones by powering his phone down immediately after download. Apparently the phone would download the tone in its entirety, and handle billing next. He would interrupt the billing routine, and on reboot, the phone had forgotten that it was supposed to pay money for the new ringtone!
I want to chime in at my disbelief at the American cell phone model. I lived in Taiwan for 4 years, and during that time bought my first cell phone. It was basic, crude, and perfect for me. The phone company (Chunghwa/Zhonghua) there allows you to buy timecards for your phone that are good for a set amount of money. Because I used my phone for basic communication and messaging, I could stretch that 500NT (about $15 US) over two months or so before buying a new one, essentially spending under $10 a month on calls.
So when I moved back to the U.S. in October, I was appalled at the inability to buy cell phones individually and the length of the contracts you had to sell your soul to. Admittedly, you *could* buy an individual cell phone, but the prices were so blatantly ridiculous as to coerce you to purchase a contract along with it. We bought the cheapest Nokia bricks along with our contracts.
However, not all companies lock you into a phone. We went with T-Mobile, and my wife was able to install their SIM chip on her Nokia from Taiwan. Unless things have changed, I believe Cingular also uses this model.
Perhaps Taiwan will eventually figure out how to exert the stranglehold American companies have on contracts bound to phones, but for now, I much prefer their system where you pick a phone, THEN pick a carrier.
People with similar lifestyles are drawn to one another. What if I had friends who played frisbee in college -- lo and behold, maybe I would have started to play frisbee! Perhaps I befriend a group of computer nerds and play games through the weekend; is it surprising that none of us have a suntan? Overweight people typically exercise less and eat more, and friends do things together, so if I were with such friends, I'd probably exercise less and eat more.
The article did have some interesting insights, such as people still receiving an obese influence from friends who live halfway across the U.S., but that still doesn't strike me as terribly fascinating. You are likely friends with that person because you independently have come to appreciate similar activities, and it's more than just possible that if you live an obese lifestlye, they do as well. Your common attitudes reinforce this behavior. If you're not comfortable with being chubby, it's not as fun to hang out with a skinny person who reminds you of this fact.
Like the parent said -- a group of gay guys hanging out together didn't catch gay cooties from one another -- they originally had the same lifestyle which then drew them together. This article runs the risk of encouraging folks assume the opposite, as stated by an obesity researcher in the article: "I think there's a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment."
*laugh* That completely reminds me of one episode (perhaps the series finale?) where Mulder pronounces Oregon "Ore-GONE" while Skinner and Sculley correctly pronounce it "Ore-gun." Having lived in Ore-gun for quite a few years, Mulder really made me wince!
I think too much time has passed to try and re-indoctrinate folks to the "tortured mythology" of the X-files, and the monster-of-the-week episode could really work, because many of those types of episodes still stick out in my mind (like, as one user mentioned, the critter/sporeling in the arctic research station which admittedly was something of a rehash of The Thing).
However, the problem I've always had with TV-to-movie transitions is that nowadays, the production values are so good in the episodes that there's little a movie can do to add to the prestige of the original series. TV serial formats have the advantage of hours and hours of lore and backstory, while movies, though typically a bit better crafted and with bigger explosions/effects, have approximately two hours to get EVERYTHING across.
Serenity was at least an opportunity for Joss to get closure on his murdered television series, but I smell a cash cow and little else with this new X-Files flick (and maybe Duchovny's realization that his vanity exceeded his aptitude when he left the series aloft the marketing of his own name).
Nice point there, Pope Ratzo. While your definition of "bully" is a bit broader than I'd use, online gaming also came to my mind when bullying was mentioned. While at least one poster above claimed that bullying does not beget bullying, I'd beg to differ in the land of PvP roleplaying -- I suppose I should be ashamed to admit I take a certain glee in ganking, which I conveniently justify as fulfilling the cycle of bullying I suffered as a low-level victim. For me, and I'd imagine for most players, this idea of "payback" sure seems powerfully transitive, and the idea of bullying begetting bullying seems alive and well in the online world, given the sheer slaughter and ridicule of newbies at any given "generation".
Online games are not real life, so perhaps drawing comparisons to bullying in real life is a bit specious... but at the same time, the topic is online bullying, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree! Portal is perfection. It's short and sweet and has everything in it you could want in a game -- fantastic gameplay, an immaculately-crafted antagonist, a fantastic plot twist, humor, and a surprisingly thorough and satisfying ending. It's amazing as a stand-alone game, but also rewarding to a Half-Life fan: Aperture Science's technologies had many insidious similarities to the Combine (the turrets, the logo, the whole concept of portals), some of which unfold in Episode 2 and will likely be further developed in Episode 3.
Though Valve is demonstrating a disturbing trend of subscription-based gaming, offering 5-hour minigames for a somewhat steep price, Portal is totally worth it, even if you don't get the Orange box. It's a shame it's so short, but on the same token, the game's short play time might be exactly why it has so much concentrated fun. There's not much room for repetition with such a limited span of game time.
What I find even more interesting is the counter-evolution that some caterpillars have developed to thwart the wasps. Most of these wasps track by scent, in particular the scent of the caterpillar's feces. Some caterpillars have developed a mechanism to shoot their own feces a distance of 40 times their body length . Just pray that cockroaches don't develop a similar defense!
Zimmer's book Parasite Rex is a nasty and amazing little book about parasites. I never thought I'd find myself reading such a book, but it's a surprising page turner, and chronicles all sorts of parasites and their deviously complex behaviors. One disturbing case is a parasite which initially neuters a male crab and then later gives it a virtual sex change, making it think it's female so it'll disperse its "eggs," which happen to be the parasite's eggs.
I found the parallel between allergies and parasites pretty interesting as well.
Another poster also said that the new material shouldn't have any detrimental effect on the older stuff, and that should be true. It's just that, true fans do want to see more Star Wars material, and some of the unnecessary revisionist choices in the prequels felt rather insulting. Darth Vader made C-3P0 as a kid? Being able to wield the force is due to cooties in your bloodstream? Sacrilege!
I thought the clone wars cartoons were fairly cool despite their simplicity, for the very fact that they introduced new characters and didn't dwell on pointless cameos. Is it really necessary that Boba Fett was the father to every clone out there AND tussled with Obi-Wan -- AND has requested his own personal clone so that he can catch Han Solo? That's not imagination, it's contrivance. When does it become visionary inspiration drawn from the rich tapestry of the Star Wars universe rather than drivel shoehorned into the plot in order to cling desperately to pre-existing characters?
Why does the fate of the universe pivot around a dozen or so guys?By all means, make new material. And when I say new, I mean no more R2-D2, man!
You obviously didn't read the article, because Lucas is thinking BIG, man!
Quoth the maker: "They [the suits] are having a hard time," Lucas said. "They're saying, 'This doesn't fit into our little square boxes,' and I say, 'Well, yeah, but it's Star Wars. And Star Wars doesn't fit into that box.'"
It's going to blow your mind. Think Jar-Jar Binks. Think midi-chlorians. Think greedy Chinese stereotype aliens! Think epic romances spanning multiple star systems! This is Star Wars we're talking about, and it's not taking any guff!
I thought this as well, but only because I clicked on the wrong button. Don't click the shiny "Get it for FREE!" button, which results in a mildly bewildering page of random offers. Click the bland "download" link and you should get it hassle-free.
Well, I've got no objection to those stupid wreckless drivers; it's the reckless ones I can't stand!
The idea of sanctions was addressed the other day in NPR as well -- but the speaker mostly dismissed the idea. Burma just doesn't have much of an economy to cripple to begin with, and a great deal of its inhabitants live a subsistence lifestyle. In many areas of the enconomy, the black market trade is suspected to be larger than legitimate trade! A decent overview of their economy can be found at the CIA World Factbook.
The author of the original article actually recommended this one as well. It was one of the few sites to actually send him a response that indicated they actually looked at his submission!
*shudder* The abbreviation does sound cool, but isn't XP just supposed to be short for "eXPerience?" "Windows Experience" is a far more revolting name.
I believe it, but it sounds like the majority of complaints come from folks using legacy programs, 3rd-party solutions, and just a few comments ago, video drivers for fancy graphics/gaming cards. I would imagine that in Redmond most of your software is Microsoft, made (and tested) to work well with other Microsoft components -- in that controlled environment, I should hope that it went as smoothly as it did over there!
I am equally puzzled about where the animosity comes from, but I have to admit I'm wary of her as well. In this discussion thread, there have been pleas to appeal to rationality when choosing a candidate, but some impressions run deep. Cheney looks shifty, and Kissinger seemed even shiftier. Perhaps you're familiar with their political maneuverings, perhaps not, but this knowledge may not go very far in changing your overall "shifty" opinion of them. Gore had to fight hard against his "boring" image, and I don't think he ever really won. If you're an uninformed or even mildly-informed voter making a choice between two candidates who really lack striking differences, your impression can be the deciding factor.
I personally think it would be a great statement for a woman to take the presidency, and I even thought Bill Clinton was pretty groovy during my budding political awareness, so I should be all for Hillary getting Bush's throne, but ... there's still something... abrasive about her. She's cold. Another person described her as "ruthless." When she speaks, I often hear the words but not the heartfelt sentiment behind them. I think she'd be a competent president, but at the same time, I don't know if I'd really be able to trust what she says. And I'm not the only one; others I have spoken with have the same unease about her.
You might say this is politics as usual and that all candidates are two-faced, but there's something extra weasley about her to me.
Ah, your question concerning the utility of humans has already been anticipated in The Secret War of Lisa Simpson:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."I don't disagree, but I wonder a bit about "crappy connections" and "roaming that sucked." If you've come from Japan or some other high-density country, it seems like the ratio of users to telcom towers would be fairly cost-effective. But how does a company cover a state like Utah? Or Eastern Oregon? The U.S. is huge, and the cost to build towers for full coverage would be prohibitive to the point of bankruptcy.
At least, this is how I console myself when I get a crummy signal, specious reasoning or not.
I remember once seeing a post on Slashdot about a penny-pinching user who claimed that he was able to avoid paying for ringtones by powering his phone down immediately after download. Apparently the phone would download the tone in its entirety, and handle billing next. He would interrupt the billing routine, and on reboot, the phone had forgotten that it was supposed to pay money for the new ringtone!
I want to chime in at my disbelief at the American cell phone model. I lived in Taiwan for 4 years, and during that time bought my first cell phone. It was basic, crude, and perfect for me. The phone company (Chunghwa/Zhonghua) there allows you to buy timecards for your phone that are good for a set amount of money. Because I used my phone for basic communication and messaging, I could stretch that 500NT (about $15 US) over two months or so before buying a new one, essentially spending under $10 a month on calls.
So when I moved back to the U.S. in October, I was appalled at the inability to buy cell phones individually and the length of the contracts you had to sell your soul to. Admittedly, you *could* buy an individual cell phone, but the prices were so blatantly ridiculous as to coerce you to purchase a contract along with it. We bought the cheapest Nokia bricks along with our contracts.
However, not all companies lock you into a phone. We went with T-Mobile, and my wife was able to install their SIM chip on her Nokia from Taiwan. Unless things have changed, I believe Cingular also uses this model.
Perhaps Taiwan will eventually figure out how to exert the stranglehold American companies have on contracts bound to phones, but for now, I much prefer their system where you pick a phone, THEN pick a carrier.
Amen!
People with similar lifestyles are drawn to one another. What if I had friends who played frisbee in college -- lo and behold, maybe I would have started to play frisbee! Perhaps I befriend a group of computer nerds and play games through the weekend; is it surprising that none of us have a suntan? Overweight people typically exercise less and eat more, and friends do things together, so if I were with such friends, I'd probably exercise less and eat more.
The article did have some interesting insights, such as people still receiving an obese influence from friends who live halfway across the U.S., but that still doesn't strike me as terribly fascinating. You are likely friends with that person because you independently have come to appreciate similar activities, and it's more than just possible that if you live an obese lifestlye, they do as well. Your common attitudes reinforce this behavior. If you're not comfortable with being chubby, it's not as fun to hang out with a skinny person who reminds you of this fact.
Like the parent said -- a group of gay guys hanging out together didn't catch gay cooties from one another -- they originally had the same lifestyle which then drew them together. This article runs the risk of encouraging folks assume the opposite, as stated by an obesity researcher in the article: "I think there's a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment."
*laugh* That completely reminds me of one episode (perhaps the series finale?) where Mulder pronounces Oregon "Ore-GONE" while Skinner and Sculley correctly pronounce it "Ore-gun." Having lived in Ore-gun for quite a few years, Mulder really made me wince!
I think too much time has passed to try and re-indoctrinate folks to the "tortured mythology" of the X-files, and the monster-of-the-week episode could really work, because many of those types of episodes still stick out in my mind (like, as one user mentioned, the critter/sporeling in the arctic research station which admittedly was something of a rehash of The Thing).
However, the problem I've always had with TV-to-movie transitions is that nowadays, the production values are so good in the episodes that there's little a movie can do to add to the prestige of the original series. TV serial formats have the advantage of hours and hours of lore and backstory, while movies, though typically a bit better crafted and with bigger explosions/effects, have approximately two hours to get EVERYTHING across.
Serenity was at least an opportunity for Joss to get closure on his murdered television series, but I smell a cash cow and little else with this new X-Files flick (and maybe Duchovny's realization that his vanity exceeded his aptitude when he left the series aloft the marketing of his own name).
Nice point there, Pope Ratzo. While your definition of "bully" is a bit broader than I'd use, online gaming also came to my mind when bullying was mentioned. While at least one poster above claimed that bullying does not beget bullying, I'd beg to differ in the land of PvP roleplaying -- I suppose I should be ashamed to admit I take a certain glee in ganking, which I conveniently justify as fulfilling the cycle of bullying I suffered as a low-level victim. For me, and I'd imagine for most players, this idea of "payback" sure seems powerfully transitive, and the idea of bullying begetting bullying seems alive and well in the online world, given the sheer slaughter and ridicule of newbies at any given "generation".
Online games are not real life, so perhaps drawing comparisons to bullying in real life is a bit specious... but at the same time, the topic is online bullying, isn't it?