Anyone care to predict what monthly national unlimited IP service is going to cost (not including access/bandwidth) in 5 years?
My bet is free. (Not just for p2p Skype style technology, but for conventional VOIP).
The revenue here is going to be on international and other network-out billables. (not to mention a very small amount of ad revenue from web interface impressions).
Vonage and others are going to get destroyed by whoever goes free first: GooglePhone, HotmailVoice, etc.
I didn't "debase the story by rephrasing what is said".
I made a valid criticism.
You on the other hand got upset and lost your temper.
My point was that this story like so many stories in so many newspapers is based upon a very common journalistic approach which is called the "arbitrary metric": a bar that has been arbitrarily set for emotional impact rather than social/political or economic impact.
This claim was made for one reason and one reason only: to get press.
And what did "The Scotsman" do? They gave it to them. Why? To sell newspapers.
There are so many other "robot" claims that could have been made, each with much deeper ramifications. (like robotic cars that drive themselves, or robots in combat, or robots performing tasks too dangerous for humans, robotic pilots, robotic servants, even robotic dogwalkers, the list goes on endlessly), but none of those predictions (as life-changing and useful as they are) makes for guaranteed press; So out comes the press release about something utterly nonsensical. "Watch out England! Robots will kick your ass at football in 45 years!"
And so we have yet another marriage of the press-desperate to the story-desperate.
Want an interesting story?
Robots will replace human workers for non-repetitive tasks requiring decision-making well before 2050. Now *That's* a story that will change the world. But don't worry about that. Its depressing. Let's talk about football instead, we can sell more papers that way.
...And back to his homeworld...where he will use her to breed an army of half-men / half-Bransons to enslave Earth. Mwah hah hah haaaah......er, sorry...
FROM THE ARTICLE: "At $40 a month when purchased with Comcast's cable and broadband service, $54 a month on its own, Digital Voice is more expensive than what competitors such as Vonage or AT&T offer. Unlimited domestic dialing plans from other VoIP providers often costs as little as $25 a month."
$40 Bucks a month? I could have a 2nd line (with a virtual London area code), and a separate fax line from Vonage for the same price.
Everyone's tearing this thing to shreds based upon this embryonic release. The point is, the vision is absolutely on target.
TiVO is very, very close to being a killer app. So you take TiVO and turn it in to an opensourced downloadable PC based app, and then add P2P streaming and theoretically you've got infinite on-demand programming. Am I the only one that thinks that would rule?
Granted there are some enormous technical problems (not the least of which are upload bandwidth, bitrate issues, and MPAA / ASCAP legal threats) but the basic idea here is not only strong but in my opinion it seems like an obvious winner in terms of answering demand.
It should also be said that this release is stable and has a seamless UI / Install experience. That's also pretty huge. After all the thing that makes TiVO so great is that my mom can use it. I give these guys an A+ for vision and preliminary execution. Do I think the technology has a long way to go? Yes. Do I think they have a chance of doing it? Yes.
Scanner Darkly isn't "animation" at all. Its a misnomer. Scanner Darkly is rotoscoped -- meaning that the scenes *are* actually filmed with a traditional camera. Then in post production, the individual frames are traced (or image-filtered) in order make the film look like hand-drawn animation.
Rotoscoping used to be very time consuming, but now most of the rotoscoping is achieved through PC based image filters (like photoshop filters). (Here's the wiki for more info on Rotoscoping.)
For you to compare "This style", ie: ("Rotoscoping") with the unbelievable amount of work that goes in to frame by frame hand drawn cel animation is like comparing a photocopy to a mosaic. One takes almost no work, and the other takes an enormous amount.
I find it interesting that all of the justifications to Machinima in this subthread have to do with the justifications of the filmmaker.
"Its a challenge", "It allows me to spend time on writing", etc.
But the justifications should be on whether or not an *audience* should sit through it, not whether or not it fulfilled its creator during the creative process, or whether or not it was financially feasable. Newsflash: audiences don't give a crap how cheap or fast the production was. It sucks or doesn't suck from the perspective of the viewer.
I'm talking about entertainment value. You're all talking about therapy.
>Feel free to start your own studio if you want to show them up. While you're at it, why don't you make your own cameras like Lucas did for Episode II?
As a former head of a large creative agency I can confidently say that some of the best work, if not the best work, that came out of our studios are the personal projects of the designers and animators that worked there. They're incredible. They worked tireless hours to make things from the ground up that were beautiful, compelling, and quite frankly for DIY projects, frequently looked like big-budget studio releases.
My major criticism with this medium is that it isn't "entertaining" as much as it is "a clever workaround". But worth the time of an audience (especially at one of the most competitive festivals in the world) it is not.
Am I missing something? Why do we (the audience) care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original artwork? Why do we care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original sets? Why do we care that the original film makers have simply *made do* with limited camera angles and characters?
Over the past decade 3D animation has not only gotten ten times easier with powerful tools and extensive mesh libraries, its also become cheaper: A high end PC loaded up with RAM can easily render scenes far more complicated than these 'Machinima' sets. The amount of talent coming out of places like Eastern Europe is just phenomenal, and animation festivals have become truly unbelievable showcases for what people are doing on PC's at home.
So why do we care about some semi-talented film geeks who hack together serials from other people's creative and ip? It would be one thing if the writing and voice-acting was watchable, but really -- its not. So as an audience member I find myself thinking only: "God that's a nice trick to make a serial without doing any work". And then I think: "So why's that good?"
This is the entertainment equivalent of TinyP2P. Its a good statement. But not worth experiencing.
Re:Israel is a minor player. Leave them alone.
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
And Palestine was also never (in recent times) an independent state either. Israel was given to then Israeli's by the English, and for hundreds of years before English rule it was occupied by the Ottomans. (Who by the way were *far* worse oppressors than the English and the Israeli's combined. The Ottomans did not kid around). I mean if you're going to go back that far you have to acknowlege that the number of years since Palestine was sovreign is many many more than since the Iroquois Nation, the Apache Nation and the Hopi Nation were sovreign.
Arabs live freely in Israel too. And vote. And are members of the parliament.
And I have to say (although this is a point that I'm somewhat loathe to make) that in our society land is fairly won and lost in war. It is the way France, Germany, Sweden, the U.S. and every other country has had territories decided. The 1967 war *against Israel* was a defensive war for Israel and was started by the Arab Nation. Israel won and quite frankly, she gets what she gets. The moral for the Arab Nation should probably be: Think you might lose some territory in a war? Don't start one then.
And your comment about "Israel being to greedy to accept the Oslo agreement" is so hilariously backwards it makes the room spin. I guess you don't know much about Oslo. Even Prince Bandar said "The blood of palestine will be on your shoulders Arafat". The whole friggin Arab League was pissed off as all hell at Arafat and cut stipends the same year. You might be the only person alive who thinks Arafat didn't throw that meeting.
I'm no pro-Israeli really, but I have to say that the Palestinians haven't done jack-shit to build a nation, make peace or unify their society. There will never ever ever ever be peace as long as there are armed militias within that society. And as long as there are leaders who refuse to disarm them, there will be bloody war and no Palestinian state.
The fact is even if Arafat had *accepted* at Oslo, there would still be Hamas. And now instead of Israel occupying Palestine, you'd have open war between Israel and the Sovreign State of Palestine, which would be much much worse. The problem is Hamas and extremism. And there can be NO parallel between military operations to prevent terrorism, and the blowing up of schoolbuses, murder of olympic athletes, and bombs in restaurants.
I'm for a Palestinian State -- next to Israel (not 'instead of Israel'). But first there has to be disarmamant and a centralisation of Palestinian military power under the PA. Then there has to be a retraction of the claimed "Right of Return". Ain't gonna happen, no way. And then Israel is going to have to part no matt
Until then, if I were Israel, I'd keep my tanks parked in Jenin.
How well can an economy survive on stolen territory?
Well Berlin seems to be doing pretty well. It was around 25% Jewish (more by most accounts). Hmm.. And Vienna's prospering too. Actually Moscow is prospering too. So's Warsaw... and Milan. And hey, this week things are looking up in Kiev.
In fact this whole stolen land thing seems to work pretty well.
And for the sake of decency we won't mention the really big stolen territories like say... the U.S. and Australia.
Re:Israel is a minor player. Leave them alone.
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
That sentence should have read:
The number of innocent civilians killed collaterally during the entire intifada: 3000
Israel is a minor player. Leave them alone.
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
I know this is O.T. but its hard to read this thread without stumbling in to people who are seriously bent out of shape about Israel. What gives? Israel who? They're totally and utterly irrelevant. We give Egypt practically the same amount of cash. We give Ukraine a shitload of cash too, and until last week that gov't was worse than Egypt and Israel's combined.
Its not that these criticisms of Israel's actions are all anti-semitic, but the ones that hold Israel accountable to a higher level of performance than the rest of the world *are* fundamentally anti-semitic.
So, lest we lose perspective here:
The number of innocent civilians killed collaterally during the entire intifada: The number of innocent civilians killed collaterally in Iraq: +120,000 and climbing.
The number of innocent civilians killed in the Ivory Coast (by French forces) this year: 18,000
And those are collateral damage numbers. Unfortunately, they're nothing:
The number of innocent civilians murdered in Darfur in the past year: 190,000 (and climbing sharply). This doesn't count rapes and dismembered (arms cut off) men.
Not to mention over 2800 hangings *a year* in Saudi Arabia for speech crimes...
and we won't even get to Syria, Libya, China, etc.
(By some measures China is worse than everyone combined but information is sketchy at best).
No matter how you slice it, on a scale of human-rights abuses, Israel is a pretty minor player. And on the scale of military collateral deaths, Israel is a minor player too. And let's be totally honest: the cash we give Israel prevents something *really bad* from happening: A major war in the middle east. If the balance of power wasn't in Israel's favor there'd be badness on a scale that's off the charts. You'd have MILLIONS dead. So why does everyone want to defund Israel? Are we that bloodthirsty here?
OK so the UN f*cked up and granted them a nation in hostile territory. Its not apprently clear to me who got screwed more in that move, the Jews or the Palestinians. I mean, if you think we should give indiginous peoples back their original lands...then get ready to give the Jews back huge chunks of Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Frankfurt, Milan, etc.
New ultra realistic 2.0 Robosapiens can get "depressed" (RealEmotion engine 2.3) in which case they just won't "want" to do anything cool. (It's pretty incredible functionality). So if your RoboSapien isn't doing anything particularly exciting -- its not broken, its just not in the mood. Oh, and apparently they also come with "RealDeath(tm)" -- so don't *ever* turn them off.
Here's a newsflash to the industry: NOBODY WANTS TO COPY THESE RIDICULOUS PIECES OF PLASTIC. WE RIP DISCS NOW.
Does the music industry suffer more from copied CD's, or do they suffer from the practice of ripping cd's and the sharing of MP3's.
Look at the obvious facts: Within the next 3 years the number of HTPC's is going to be off the charts. Everyone's going to be streaming digital video content directly from their HTPC drives. And they'll be sharing and downloading that content by P2P / Bittorrent or other networks.
What the industry is terrified of accepting are these simple facts:
It's the discs themselves that are the unnecessary part of the equation.
Anything that can be viewed can be ripped.
Anything that can be ripped can be shared.
Copy protecting next generation discs is an enormous exercise in futility. Discs are unnecessary. Players are unnecessary. The content is the valuable commodity in this equation and it is uncontrollable.
> and she is actually an amazingly intelligent person with an excellent memory
You're kidding. No really... you're kidding right? She's about as wooden and uncharismatic as anyone I've ever seen. Her speeches are awkward and she has about as much humanity as a stapler.
> and gets along personally with the majority of world leaders
Who she met how? By climbing the political ladder? Through personal (scratch that)... Through *any* achievement?
> I guess you are the sort that also want to rid the country of every other tradition that we have?
No, just the Queenie and Fox Hunting. You can keep Guy Fawkes night.
> become just another boring country and adopt ID cards
Uh... you guys don't have I.D. cards?! What the f*ck are you talking about? Do you mean drivers licenses and passports? Uh... if you don't have those...my recomendation would be to kick the sheepshit off your boots, drive 6 hours to London and fill out an application.
> Most countries are proud of their traditions.
History and tradition are two different things. Your queen isn't a tradition. She's a relic. Getting sh*tfaced immediately after work is a tradition that we're ok with.
Now that the top secret data from these spy sattelites is being released, other crucial details of the US Government black-ops orbital-projects are being revealed.
Apparently most of the governments secret high-optical resolution sattelites were curiously locked in geo-synchronous orbits above St. Tropez, Copacabana and other great beaches of the world.
It was also revealed that image data from these locations while still 'classified and unreleased' was stored in a black-ops folder mysteriously titled "My Cleave Shotz". No further information is currently available.
Do we care what the queenie says? Do we care who the queenie likes? Does it strike anyone else as completely ridiculous that certain crackers and marmalades get the queenies stamp of "me likey"? Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous that if you make a billion dollars you also get to be called sir? (She can really pick a winner that lady). Personally I'd prefer "Billionaire" as a prefix, but it strikes me as particularly ridiculous that this family has produced generations of failures, losers and scandals and still has the gumption to assign titles to success.
Can we all just agree that the entire concept of a royal family is irrelevant, archaic, out of touch and well... just plain silly? (And let's be honest, her social grace is extraordinarily questionable. Have you ever heard her speak an unscripted word? She can barely talk she's so affected and out of touch.)...Not to mention we fought a war against the entire concept of royalty in order to (as Ben Franklin said) "make their king a little man".
And I thought my heating bills were expensive.... and the winner for the most heat-inefficient structure ever built is... (drum-roll)... an enormous dome, heated to tropical temperatures, in the middle of a freezing winter!
(if they made the thing out of glass, they'd at least have a greenhouse effect.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone care to predict what monthly national unlimited IP service is going to cost (not including access/bandwidth) in 5 years?
My bet is free. (Not just for p2p Skype style technology, but for conventional VOIP).
The revenue here is going to be on international and other network-out billables. (not to mention a very small amount of ad revenue from web interface impressions).
Vonage and others are going to get destroyed by whoever goes free first: GooglePhone, HotmailVoice, etc.
I didn't "debase the story by rephrasing what is said".
I made a valid criticism.
You on the other hand got upset and lost your temper.
My point was that this story like so many stories in so many newspapers is based upon a very common journalistic approach which is called the "arbitrary metric": a bar that has been arbitrarily set for emotional impact rather than social/political or economic impact.
For some reason you got very upset.
My advice to you: stay Anonymous.
This claim was made for one reason and one reason only: to get press.
And what did "The Scotsman" do? They gave it to them. Why? To sell newspapers.
There are so many other "robot" claims that could have been made, each with much deeper ramifications. (like robotic cars that drive themselves, or robots in combat, or robots performing tasks too dangerous for humans, robotic pilots, robotic servants, even robotic dogwalkers, the list goes on endlessly), but none of those predictions (as life-changing and useful as they are) makes for guaranteed press; So out comes the press release about something utterly nonsensical. "Watch out England! Robots will kick your ass at football in 45 years!"
And so we have yet another marriage of the press-desperate to the story-desperate.
Want an interesting story?
Robots will replace human workers for non-repetitive tasks requiring decision-making well before 2050. Now *That's* a story that will change the world. But don't worry about that. Its depressing. Let's talk about football instead, we can sell more papers that way.
How exactly would your cable company even know you were using Vonage???
FROM THE ARTICLE:
"At $40 a month when purchased with Comcast's cable and broadband service, $54 a month on its own, Digital Voice is more expensive than what competitors such as Vonage or AT&T offer. Unlimited domestic dialing plans from other VoIP providers often costs as little as $25 a month."
$40 Bucks a month? I could have a 2nd line (with a virtual London area code), and a separate fax line from Vonage for the same price.
Doesn't seem like much of a CallVantage
Everyone's tearing this thing to shreds based upon this embryonic release. The point is, the vision is absolutely on target.
TiVO is very, very close to being a killer app. So you take TiVO and turn it in to an opensourced downloadable PC based app, and then add P2P streaming and theoretically you've got infinite on-demand programming. Am I the only one that thinks that would rule?
Granted there are some enormous technical problems (not the least of which are upload bandwidth, bitrate issues, and MPAA / ASCAP legal threats) but the basic idea here is not only strong but in my opinion it seems like an obvious winner in terms of answering demand.
It should also be said that this release is stable and has a seamless UI / Install experience. That's also pretty huge. After all the thing that makes TiVO so great is that my mom can use it. I give these guys an A+ for vision and preliminary execution. Do I think the technology has a long way to go? Yes. Do I think they have a chance of doing it? Yes.
My three cents.
Oh my god... LMFAO... somebody please mod that up...
Bookfinder:
1) is slow
2) has a terrible ui
3) doesn't sort results well
4) doesn't find the best prices
5) has no seller ratings
6) has no reader reviews
All in all I'm not sure who would ever use this service. On every level it seems second rate.
Half.com (owned by eBay) is a much, much better service and includes reader reviews, and seller ratings.
Scanner Darkly isn't "animation" at all. Its a misnomer. Scanner Darkly is rotoscoped -- meaning that the scenes *are* actually filmed with a traditional camera. Then in post production, the individual frames are traced (or image-filtered) in order make the film look like hand-drawn animation.
Rotoscoping used to be very time consuming, but now most of the rotoscoping is achieved through PC based image filters (like photoshop filters). (Here's the wiki for more info on Rotoscoping.)
For you to compare "This style", ie: ("Rotoscoping") with the unbelievable amount of work that goes in to frame by frame hand drawn cel animation is like comparing a photocopy to a mosaic. One takes almost no work, and the other takes an enormous amount.
I find it interesting that all of the justifications to Machinima in this subthread have to do with the justifications of the filmmaker.
"Its a challenge", "It allows me to spend time on writing", etc.
But the justifications should be on whether or not an *audience* should sit through it, not whether or not it fulfilled its creator during the creative process, or whether or not it was financially feasable. Newsflash: audiences don't give a crap how cheap or fast the production was. It sucks or doesn't suck from the perspective of the viewer.
I'm talking about entertainment value. You're all talking about therapy.
>Feel free to start your own studio if you want to show them up. While you're at it, why don't you make your own cameras like Lucas did for Episode II?
As a former head of a large creative agency I can confidently say that some of the best work, if not the best work, that came out of our studios are the personal projects of the designers and animators that worked there. They're incredible. They worked tireless hours to make things from the ground up that were beautiful, compelling, and quite frankly for DIY projects, frequently looked like big-budget studio releases.
My major criticism with this medium is that it isn't "entertaining" as much as it is "a clever workaround". But worth the time of an audience (especially at one of the most competitive festivals in the world) it is not.
Am I missing something? Why do we (the audience) care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original artwork? Why do we care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original sets? Why do we care that the original film makers have simply *made do* with limited camera angles and characters?
Over the past decade 3D animation has not only gotten ten times easier with powerful tools and extensive mesh libraries, its also become cheaper: A high end PC loaded up with RAM can easily render scenes far more complicated than these 'Machinima' sets. The amount of talent coming out of places like Eastern Europe is just phenomenal, and animation festivals have become truly unbelievable showcases for what people are doing on PC's at home.
So why do we care about some semi-talented film geeks who hack together serials from other people's creative and ip? It would be one thing if the writing and voice-acting was watchable, but really -- its not. So as an audience member I find myself thinking only: "God that's a nice trick to make a serial without doing any work". And then I think: "So why's that good?"
This is the entertainment equivalent of TinyP2P. Its a good statement. But not worth experiencing.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
There would be were it not for Israel.
And Palestine was also never (in recent times) an independent state either. Israel was given to then Israeli's by the English, and for hundreds of years before English rule it was occupied by the Ottomans. (Who by the way were *far* worse oppressors than the English and the Israeli's combined. The Ottomans did not kid around). I mean if you're going to go back that far you have to acknowlege that the number of years since Palestine was sovreign is many many more than since the Iroquois Nation, the Apache Nation and the Hopi Nation were sovreign.
Arabs live freely in Israel too. And vote. And are members of the parliament.
And I have to say (although this is a point that I'm somewhat loathe to make) that in our society land is fairly won and lost in war. It is the way France, Germany, Sweden, the U.S. and every other country has had territories decided. The 1967 war *against Israel* was a defensive war for Israel and was started by the Arab Nation. Israel won and quite frankly, she gets what she gets. The moral for the Arab Nation should probably be: Think you might lose some territory in a war? Don't start one then.
And your comment about "Israel being to greedy to accept the Oslo agreement" is so hilariously backwards it makes the room spin. I guess you don't know much about Oslo. Even Prince Bandar said "The blood of palestine will be on your shoulders Arafat". The whole friggin Arab League was pissed off as all hell at Arafat and cut stipends the same year. You might be the only person alive who thinks Arafat didn't throw that meeting.
I'm no pro-Israeli really, but I have to say that the Palestinians haven't done jack-shit to build a nation, make peace or unify their society. There will never ever ever ever be peace as long as there are armed militias within that society. And as long as there are leaders who refuse to disarm them, there will be bloody war and no Palestinian state.
The fact is even if Arafat had *accepted* at Oslo, there would still be Hamas. And now instead of Israel occupying Palestine, you'd have open war between Israel and the Sovreign State of Palestine, which would be much much worse. The problem is Hamas and extremism. And there can be NO parallel between military operations to prevent terrorism, and the blowing up of schoolbuses, murder of olympic athletes, and bombs in restaurants.
I'm for a Palestinian State -- next to Israel (not 'instead of Israel'). But first there has to be disarmamant and a centralisation of Palestinian military power under the PA. Then there has to be a retraction of the claimed "Right of Return". Ain't gonna happen, no way. And then Israel is going to have to part no matt
Until then, if I were Israel, I'd keep my tanks parked in Jenin.
How well can an economy survive on stolen territory?
Well Berlin seems to be doing pretty well. It was around 25% Jewish (more by most accounts). Hmm.. And Vienna's prospering too. Actually Moscow is prospering too. So's Warsaw... and Milan. And hey, this week things are looking up in Kiev.
In fact this whole stolen land thing seems to work pretty well.
And for the sake of decency we won't mention the really big stolen territories like say... the U.S. and Australia.
That sentence should have read:
The number of innocent civilians killed collaterally during the entire intifada: 3000
Its not that these criticisms of Israel's actions are all anti-semitic, but the ones that hold Israel accountable to a higher level of performance than the rest of the world *are* fundamentally anti-semitic.
So, lest we lose perspective here:
And those are collateral damage numbers. Unfortunately, they're nothing:
and we won't even get to Syria, Libya, China, etc.
(By some measures China is worse than everyone combined but information is sketchy at best).
No matter how you slice it, on a scale of human-rights abuses, Israel is a pretty minor player. And on the scale of military collateral deaths, Israel is a minor player too. And let's be totally honest: the cash we give Israel prevents something *really bad* from happening: A major war in the middle east. If the balance of power wasn't in Israel's favor there'd be badness on a scale that's off the charts. You'd have MILLIONS dead. So why does everyone want to defund Israel? Are we that bloodthirsty here?
OK so the UN f*cked up and granted them a nation in hostile territory. Its not apprently clear to me who got screwed more in that move, the Jews or the Palestinians. I mean, if you think we should give indiginous peoples back their original lands...then get ready to give the Jews back huge chunks of Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Frankfurt, Milan, etc.
My three cents.
-Popo
New ultra realistic 2.0 Robosapiens can get "depressed" (RealEmotion engine 2.3) in which case they just won't "want" to do anything cool. (It's pretty incredible functionality). So if your RoboSapien isn't doing anything particularly exciting -- its not broken, its just not in the mood. Oh, and apparently they also come with "RealDeath(tm)" -- so don't *ever* turn them off.
Here's a newsflash to the industry: NOBODY WANTS TO COPY THESE RIDICULOUS PIECES OF PLASTIC. WE RIP DISCS NOW.
Does the music industry suffer more from copied CD's, or do they suffer from the practice of ripping cd's and the sharing of MP3's.
Look at the obvious facts: Within the next 3 years the number of HTPC's is going to be off the charts. Everyone's going to be streaming digital video content directly from their HTPC drives. And they'll be sharing and downloading that content by P2P / Bittorrent or other networks.
What the industry is terrified of accepting are these simple facts:
Copy protecting next generation discs is an enormous exercise in futility. Discs are unnecessary. Players are unnecessary. The content is the valuable commodity in this equation and it is uncontrollable.
> and she is actually an amazingly intelligent person with an excellent memory
...my recomendation would be to kick the sheepshit off your boots, drive 6 hours to London and fill out an application.
You're kidding. No really... you're kidding right? She's about as wooden and uncharismatic as anyone I've ever seen. Her speeches are awkward and she has about as much humanity as a stapler.
> and gets along personally with the majority of world leaders
Who she met how? By climbing the political ladder? Through personal (scratch that)... Through *any* achievement?
> I guess you are the sort that also want to rid the country of every other tradition that we have?
No, just the Queenie and Fox Hunting. You can keep Guy Fawkes night.
> become just another boring country and adopt ID cards
Uh... you guys don't have I.D. cards?! What the f*ck are you talking about? Do you mean drivers licenses and passports? Uh... if you don't have those
> Most countries are proud of their traditions.
History and tradition are two different things. Your queen isn't a tradition. She's a relic. Getting sh*tfaced immediately after work is a tradition that we're ok with.
Yeah that's great! Children and computers. Lull them in to a false sense of security!
It'll make it easier for the Machines when the day comes to enslave mankind.
I'm totally with you. Great idea (nudge nudge wink wink).
-- Machine-posing-as-Human #405334
Now that the top secret data from these spy sattelites is being released, other crucial details of the US Government black-ops orbital-projects are being revealed.
Apparently most of the governments secret high-optical resolution sattelites were curiously locked in geo-synchronous orbits above St. Tropez, Copacabana and other great beaches of the world.
It was also revealed that image data from these locations while still 'classified and unreleased' was stored in a black-ops folder mysteriously titled "My Cleave Shotz". No further information is currently available.
Do we care what the queenie says? Do we care who the queenie likes? Does it strike anyone else as completely ridiculous that certain crackers and marmalades get the queenies stamp of "me likey"? Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous that if you make a billion dollars you also get to be called sir? (She can really pick a winner that lady). Personally I'd prefer "Billionaire" as a prefix, but it strikes me as particularly ridiculous that this family has produced generations of failures, losers and scandals and still has the gumption to assign titles to success.
...Not to mention we fought a war against the entire concept of royalty in order to (as Ben Franklin said) "make their king a little man".
Can we all just agree that the entire concept of a royal family is irrelevant, archaic, out of touch and well... just plain silly? (And let's be honest, her social grace is extraordinarily questionable. Have you ever heard her speak an unscripted word? She can barely talk she's so affected and out of touch.)
Anarchy in the UK...
And I thought my heating bills were expensive.
(if they made the thing out of glass, they'd at least have a greenhouse effect.)