Of course they couldn't. They had a lot of money tied up in this game, and turning off the game means losing everything they'd been working on. Because... in all the months of development, no one had hit "save".
As far as "downloading her from the game", I have taken a cue from TV and referred to *anything* as Downloading, or being Online/Offline. As in "Honey? Can you look up something on the computer?" "No, sorry. I can't. I'm offline in the lavatory, downloading."
I would also like a hard drive with lots of ram in the megabytes.
Warning: If you haven't read Snow Crash, this contains spoilers
One story that actually did introduce drama into a VR setting without going completely stupid was Snow Crash, and I must say i was fantastically impressed to discover it could actually be done. None of this "You die in playland you die in real life" crap, but rather a mechanism that would scramble someone's brain when they see it because of some fundamental doojobby of the brain. Nothing in particular about VR makes this work, it's just a weapon that will affect you in VR. Within the context of the story, it worked.
But yeah. After I saw the Matrix, i went home and did some lucid dreaming. I got the jump on the first time, then I deliberately jumped off a tall building into the pavement, jumped through some large plate-glass bullets, and got shot at by killer robot zombies. Woke up without a scratch. Bunk.
First off (I know it's been mentioned before, but), seem like Katz's articles are anything but thoughtless self-serving fluff if he could do something like review a movie and get the title right. Secondly, Jim Carey is a celebrity. He hasn't been around long enough to be a legend. Andy Kaufman is a legend. He may not have been exceptionally popular, he may have pissed off a lot of people, he may have made folks uncomfortable, but he made a lasting impression on our culture, and probably has shaped what our culture is now to a certain degree.
And okay, maybe he should've just made people happy and make them laugh, but some of us actually like being challenged.
Heck.. "planning an ending" doesn't even cover it. The ending was calculated before the first episode was shot. It was an *epic*, one long massive story, which ended when the story was told
(Well, okay, there *was* that weird quasi-lovecrafty Dark Primordial Nasties movie, but hey, i thought it was pretty keen)
This of course allowed for such things as long.. long.. LONG forshadowing, lots of seemingly discrete elements revealing their relationships, and in general forming a whole cloth.
Funny thing is, I really didn't expect B5 to take off when it first premiered. Just goes to show, i guess.
I wonder if this guy has read The Diamond Age. The stuff they are designing are small enough to make this applicable.
Well no, no it isn't. Diamond Age involved nanotechnology, involving lots of incredibly complex microscopic machines (the Mites). These are not mites. 2mm is small, but it's still very, very macroscopic.
Confusing nano with the merely small is a common mistake. Feynman (who pretty much invented the notion of nanotechnology) did a good job of illustrating this by pointing out that being able to write the lord's prayer on the head of a pin isn't really very remarkable, considering we could theoretically with existing technology (that being technology existing a few decades ago when There's Plenty Of Room at the Bottom was written) put the entire contents of the encyclopedia britannica on the head of a pin.
An IP doesn't necessarily have an email address associated to it; nor does a MAC address. It's meaningless to 'convert ips to email addresses'. The *only* way that is at all meaningful is when fighting spam, reading email headers, finding out the IP from whence the message originated, and the time it was sent. Then an ISP can check their authentication logs to determine who was using what IP when. But, a lot of IPs and MAC addresses have no email address or login associated to 'em.
They're *machine* addresses, not user addresses. A machine can have an arbitrary number of email addresses on it, including zero. An ip-to-email converter is a: meaningless and/or b: (as in the scenario you put forth of webmasters determining email addresses from IPs in httpd logs) require individual ISPs to give up their personal logs to benefit spammers. Something ISPs don't have much interest in doing, since such a practice would surely get a provider blacklisted.
COERSION is a rather interesting read. Not so much because of the subject matter, but because of the deconstructionist analysis of Rushkoff it provides. Namely a portrait of a man who got caught up in all the Wired buzz of the Great Generation of chaotic rough'n'ready cyberpunks and the world they were going to make, proceeded to tell advertising companies about it(for thousands of dollars an hour), and how this generation thinks, and now is acting all horrified because *gasp* THE ADVERTISERS USED THIS INFORMATION TO SELL PRODUCTS!
So, rather than fess up to the full realization that he was a completely niave chucklehead drunk on the promise of New Media and the notion that corporate america will never adjust to the cultural and technological changes that have occured this decade, he drones on with a translucent mask of objective distance about how bad and evil those advertisers and manipulators were for using the information he sold them.
They're advertisers. Adaptation is their job. You got your $7.5k/hour, shut yer whining.
Still, the Salon article itself is nicely tempered, in contrast to Katz's earlier article and any of these books. Yes, there's more data flying about, but you can control your own input. Sure, TV ads are getting fast'n'furious, but why do you need to watch TV anyway?
Nice to see they were working on this in the Richard Feynman laboratory (or at least chose that to be the location of their photo-op). After all, Feynman birthed the notion of nanotechnology in his paper There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom
The press is reminding us again that if you can't be first, you might as well try to look hip.
Hee hee... I don't suppose you need to be reminded of this. Nor do i suppose WIRED ever had to be reminded of this.
This film is, in fact, being hailed by its distributors as a cultural landmark, a new kind of Net phenomenon, as if the world could withstand any more.
What, any more than the article *you* wrote a week or so ago saying that it was a cultural landmark, Net phenomenon, magical wonderful technology film, etc?
And then we get the following:
BWP is, in many ways, the perfect teenage/Web movie...
But is this really an "Internet movie?"...
There's no doubt this move marked highly savvy use of the Web. The Blair Witch website logged more than 20 million hits even before the movie came out. Now Block says the number of visits is closer to 80 million...
Perhaps to cover their own behinds, chastened Hollywood producers are blaming the success of BWP on the movie's crafty Net and website campaigns...
It's a great movie...
But it's not a great movie...
Jon, has your brain completely fragmented? Do you proofread these things, or even make an outline before composing the article?
For extra fun, compare this article Katz wrote about BWP to the last one he wrote about BWP. It really looks like he's just upset that other media outlets are writing these sorts of articles. If competant writers in other media outlets cover these sort of subjects, maybe Jon's "insights" won't be able to pass themselves off as anything but re-hash anymore.
L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois, Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffrayeur Resusciter la grand Roy d'Angolmois. Aunt après Mars regner par bonheur.
The year millet nine hundred and ninety nine seven months, From the sky will come large Roy deffrayor Resusciter large Roy d' Angolmois. Aunt after Mars regner happily.
The meteors that you'll see streaking across the sky are only the size of a grain of sand. Of course they're hitting the atmosphere at 30,000 mph, but they're harmless.
Yes... but the meteors themselves are not as much of a concern as what happens if one hits Cassini. Sure, they're harmless to the earth, the Perseid shower in itself is nothing to worry about, but a grain of sand hitting Cassini at 30kmph while it's so close to earth could cause a bit more damage.
I love a good meteor shower, I just imagine my enjoyment of it will be rather tainted by the knowledge that 72 pounds of plutonium 238 are bouncing around up there with 'em.
Hopefully NASA's coverage of the Perseid meteor shower will include tracking of the Cassini space probe that'll be passing through it on the 17th/18th. Y'know, the one loaded with 72 pounds of plutonium 238?
I'd sorta like to know whether or not there'll be a massive ecological disaster next week.
I'm a bit confused now. How can it be called "cracking" when you have been given the root password by the owner? I thought the whole point of cracking was to *get* the root password (or some equivalent).
Having the root password isn't useful if you can't get to a prompt to use it.
You can't login as root from a remote machine, you'd have to be able to get into the system *first* and *then* su root for the password to be useful. So some crackery needs to be employed to get that far.
If it weren't from Wired, i'd be surprised that anyone could get away with such a sloppy article
A significant number of them are virgins, or their only sexual experience has been with a prostitute,"
Error: "Significant number" undefined. All that means is that it's a nonzero number. You'd think they'd at least give some idea of what that number is, unless the number was too small to actually support the thesis of the article.
"They have all these fantasized ideas as to why this is going on, such as 'I don't have time to do these stupid things that girls demand to date them... women want mushy stuff like candy, flowers, and candlelit dinners.'
So, despite the fact that it's an undefined number(certainly a far cry from "most" of the people surveyed), they go right ahead and start the next line with "They all have these fantasized ideas...", painting a picture of a six year old saying girls are "icky".
And.. of course: "While their better-rounded counterparts were having initial sexual experiences, these guys were developing new computer programs or getting major rewards from intellectual pursuits. By contrast, guys of average intelligence were more into sports, drinking beer, and getting laid, and therefore were better socialized in regards to dating and sexuality."
Yes, many people who pursued intellectual rewards in high school didn't spend much time and energy on beer, dating and sports. This makes drunken jocks "better rounded"? It would certainly seem to, at least compared to the image of the virgin chronic masturbator techies this article paints. It's funny though, from what I can tell those are the ones who considered high school the best years of their life, and are in a perpetual decline thereafter. What "significant number" of these "better socialized" people are involved in domestic abuse? And just because they screw doesn't mean they're particularly good at it. I realize I am also throwing around generalizations and stereotypes, but if that's all you need to do to present this "data superfluous, just reenforce stereotypes", then i'm throwing around generalizations and stereotypes with journalistic rigor!
All I know is, I, and pretty much every techie/geek/weirdo I know, is rather happily involved with someone. My fiance and I don't find conflict between our relationship and our technical pursuits. Quite the contrary, sometimes some hot monkey lovin' is just the thing to clear one's mind and fix that algorithm.
With no corporate interests selling MP3 players, you're looking at a format that won't have any players sold for it.
Eh? No portable mp3 players means mp3 will die?
First off, it seems to have done quite well without any portable players
Second, a Rio or equivalent device is not the only way to listen to mp3s on the go. If you don't like the Rio getting in bed with SDMI, get a minidisc. It's digital, it's swappable, and with a soundcard equipped with an optical output, it'll sound as good as mp3 possibly can.
What planet are these people from?
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 5
Although a hardware modem can cost up to five times more than a software modem,t hey are relatively cheap, with a current price tag at $100...... 'I think that [in the future], a hardware modem will be a high-end luxury item'"
Okay. So even though hardware modems are *already* fairly inexpensive and will continue to go down in price, they are going to be high-end luxury items? $100 is not a high-end luxury price. The only way anyone could consider a modem high end is if everything else available was complete garbage. Of course, this *is* the prediction of a winmodem software manager
Personally, I fail to see how, with DSL, cable, and ISDN becoming cheaper and more available, any modem could be considered "high end". If you want high end connectivity, why modulate and demodulate a bunch of analog signal?
Traditionally, software modems have a bad reputation in the linux community. In fact, they've earned the nickname "WinModems" because many are optimized to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system, and refuse to cooperate with any other OS.
Funny, I always thought they "earned the nickname WinModems" because they say "WINMODEM" on the frigging box. It's the fricking model name, not a nickname.
They do not just have a bad reputation in the linux community, they have a bad reputation among just about anyone with any idea how modems work. And it's not because they aren't very cross-format, it's because they are lousy modems. I work at an ISP, and I can say with some certainty that the loathing and contempt our tech support has for WinModems is *not* because they only work on windows, but because they barely work at all
Phew. Felt good to get that out. So anyway. What planet did these people say they were from?
Also remember that, being teenagers, they are easily distracted. The kids stationed outside theaters to keep children out invariably drift off, get a snack, yak with their friends. They don't really care about the dumb rules they're enforcing.
Riiight... So, in other words, it is unjust for the MPAA or movie theatres to not allow youngsters to see these movies, because contrary to the opinions of the Man, youngsters are not the shiftless, mindless irresponsible flakes they are made out to be.
But, you can still sneak into the movies because the kids working there are shiftless, mindless irresponsible flakes.
Do you think before you write this stuff?
Oh, oh, oh, but we're talking about geek kids. Who knows why these kids earn that moniker, they just do for our purposes. So it's alright. All 'non-geeks' are road apple, and all 'geeks' are enlightened juggernauts of whoop-ass. Because geeks are, despite their total lack of agreed upon qualifying terms, ubermensch. Maybe that's why Jon keeps trying to qualify among their ranks, despite any resemblence to anything geeklike other than the ability to operate a word processor.
Because as Katz's article so clearly states, ALL OTHER kids are attention-span impaired idiots.
As near as i can figure, Katz's article is saying it's unfair for people to prevent kids from seeing certain films based on labels of them being irresponsible, weak-minded impressionable witless piles of carbon, but you can get around this because the kids that work at the movie theatres are irresponsible, weak-minded impressinable witless piles of carbon.
Fascinating stance, jonboy. Do you think before you write?
Censorship Whenever anyone calls you a chowderhead, tells you they've heard more coherent statements from randomly arranged Scrabble tiles, or disagrees with you, they are practicing censorship. People who believe in free speech keep their opinions to themselves. Except you, of course.
How in the name of all things good and plenty is filtering out Jon Katz from someone's personal profile practicing censorship? Katz still has the right to say whatever he likes, it's just this one guy isn't going to see it because he chooses not to.
And as far as being "closed minded", he's filtering out Katz because he's read lots of Katz and has yet to see him say anything worthwhile. He's given Katz a chance, and didn't care for it. So he's doing what every Katz fan tells anyone who disagrees with Katz to do.
I do wish chowderheads could pick a position and stick with it.
Slashdot Mirror
They couldn't just pull the power cord?
Of course they couldn't. They had a lot of money tied up in this game, and turning off the game means losing everything they'd been working on. Because... in all the months of development, no one had hit "save".
As far as "downloading her from the game", I have taken a cue from TV and referred to *anything* as Downloading, or being Online/Offline. As in "Honey? Can you look up something on the computer?" "No, sorry. I can't. I'm offline in the lavatory, downloading."
I would also like a hard drive with lots of ram in the megabytes.
Warning: If you haven't read Snow Crash, this contains spoilers
One story that actually did introduce drama into a VR setting without going completely stupid was Snow Crash, and I must say i was fantastically impressed to discover it could actually be done. None of this "You die in playland you die in real life" crap, but rather a mechanism that would scramble someone's brain when they see it because of some fundamental doojobby of the brain. Nothing in particular about VR makes this work, it's just a weapon that will affect you in VR. Within the context of the story, it worked.
But yeah. After I saw the Matrix, i went home and did some lucid dreaming. I got the jump on the first time, then I deliberately jumped off a tall building into the pavement, jumped through some large plate-glass bullets, and got shot at by killer robot zombies. Woke up without a scratch. Bunk.
That's why i'm calling my current project BINARA - Binara Is Not A Recursive Acronym.
First off (I know it's been mentioned before, but), seem like Katz's articles are anything but thoughtless self-serving fluff if he could do something like review a movie and get the title right. Secondly, Jim Carey is a celebrity. He hasn't been around long enough to be a legend. Andy Kaufman is a legend. He may not have been exceptionally popular, he may have pissed off a lot of people, he may have made folks uncomfortable, but he made a lasting impression on our culture, and probably has shaped what our culture is now to a certain degree.
And okay, maybe he should've just made people happy and make them laugh, but some of us actually like being challenged.
Jon Katz, Voice of the Ordinary.
Is it me, or did someone at Scientific American read Greg Egan's Distress and get inspired to write this article?
Heck.. "planning an ending" doesn't even cover it. The ending was calculated before the first episode was shot. It was an *epic*, one long massive story, which ended when the story was told
(Well, okay, there *was* that weird quasi-lovecrafty Dark Primordial Nasties movie, but hey, i thought it was pretty keen)
This of course allowed for such things as long.. long.. LONG forshadowing, lots of seemingly discrete elements revealing their relationships, and in general forming a whole cloth.
Funny thing is, I really didn't expect B5 to take off when it first premiered. Just goes to show, i guess.
I wonder if this guy has read The Diamond Age. The stuff they are designing are small enough to make this applicable.
Well no, no it isn't. Diamond Age involved nanotechnology, involving lots of incredibly complex microscopic machines (the Mites). These are not mites. 2mm is small, but it's still very, very macroscopic.
Confusing nano with the merely small is a common mistake. Feynman (who pretty much invented the notion of nanotechnology) did a good job of illustrating this by pointing out that being able to write the lord's prayer on the head of a pin isn't really very remarkable, considering we could theoretically with existing technology (that being technology existing a few decades ago when There's Plenty Of Room at the Bottom was written) put the entire contents of the encyclopedia britannica on the head of a pin.
Huh?
An IP doesn't necessarily have an email address associated to it; nor does a MAC address. It's meaningless to 'convert ips to email addresses'. The *only* way that is at all meaningful is when fighting spam, reading email headers, finding out the IP from whence the message originated, and the time it was sent. Then an ISP can check their authentication logs to determine who was using what IP when. But, a lot of IPs and MAC addresses have no email address or login associated to 'em.
They're *machine* addresses, not user addresses. A machine can have an arbitrary number of email addresses on it, including zero. An ip-to-email converter is a: meaningless and/or b: (as in the scenario you put forth of webmasters determining email addresses from IPs in httpd logs) require individual ISPs to give up their personal logs to benefit spammers. Something ISPs don't have much interest in doing, since such a practice would surely get a provider blacklisted.
COERSION is a rather interesting read. Not so much because of the subject matter, but because of the deconstructionist analysis of Rushkoff it provides. Namely a portrait of a man who got caught up in all the Wired buzz of the Great Generation of chaotic rough'n'ready cyberpunks and the world they were going to make, proceeded to tell advertising companies about it(for thousands of dollars an hour), and how this generation thinks, and now is acting all horrified because *gasp* THE ADVERTISERS USED THIS INFORMATION TO SELL PRODUCTS!
So, rather than fess up to the full realization that he was a completely niave chucklehead drunk on the promise of New Media and the notion that corporate america will never adjust to the cultural and technological changes that have occured this decade, he drones on with a translucent mask of objective distance about how bad and evil those advertisers and manipulators were for using the information he sold them.
They're advertisers. Adaptation is their job. You got your $7.5k/hour, shut yer whining.
Still, the Salon article itself is nicely tempered, in contrast to Katz's earlier article and any of these books. Yes, there's more data flying about, but you can control your own input. Sure, TV ads are getting fast'n'furious, but why do you need to watch TV anyway?
Christ on toast. Katz criticizes someone else's Vision of the Web because it's not utopian in the same way as Katz's utopian Visions.
Damn thing is considered naive, evidently because it doesn't have enough meaningless hypertechnoculture buzzwords.
It's not that he's religious per se, he just likes reading about himself.
Nice to see they were working on this in the Richard Feynman laboratory (or at least chose that to be the location of their photo-op). After all, Feynman birthed the notion of nanotechnology in his paper There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom
Plus, he was one cool-ass mofo.
I can see my house from here!
The press is reminding us again that if you can't be first, you might as well try to look hip.
Hee hee... I don't suppose you need to be reminded of this. Nor do i suppose WIRED ever had to be reminded of this.
This film is, in fact, being hailed by its distributors as a cultural landmark, a new kind of Net phenomenon, as if the world could withstand any more.
What, any more than the article *you* wrote a week or so ago saying that it was a cultural landmark, Net phenomenon, magical wonderful technology film, etc?
And then we get the following:
BWP is, in many ways, the perfect teenage/Web movie...
But is this really an "Internet movie?" ...
There's no doubt this move marked highly savvy use of the Web. The Blair Witch website logged more than 20 million hits even before the movie came out. Now Block says the number of visits is closer to 80 million...
Perhaps to cover their own behinds, chastened Hollywood producers are blaming the success of BWP on the movie's crafty Net and website campaigns...
It's a great movie...
But it's not a great movie...
Jon, has your brain completely fragmented? Do you proofread these things, or even make an outline before composing the article?
For extra fun, compare this article Katz wrote about BWP to the last one he wrote about BWP. It really looks like he's just upset that other media outlets are writing these sorts of articles. If competant writers in other media outlets cover these sort of subjects, maybe Jon's "insights" won't be able to pass themselves off as anything but re-hash anymore.
L'an mil neuf cent nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffrayeur
Resusciter la grand Roy d'Angolmois.
Aunt après Mars regner par bonheur.
The year millet nine hundred and ninety nine seven months,
From the sky will come large Roy deffrayor
Resusciter large Roy d' Angolmois.
Aunt after Mars regner happily.
Hooray for babelfish!
The meteors that you'll see streaking across the sky are only the size of a grain of sand. Of course they're hitting the atmosphere at 30,000 mph, but they're harmless.
Yes... but the meteors themselves are not as much of a concern as what happens if one hits Cassini. Sure, they're harmless to the earth, the Perseid shower in itself is nothing to worry about, but a grain of sand hitting Cassini at 30kmph while it's so close to earth could cause a bit more damage.
I love a good meteor shower, I just imagine my enjoyment of it will be rather tainted by the knowledge that 72 pounds of plutonium 238 are bouncing around up there with 'em.
Hopefully NASA's coverage of the Perseid meteor shower will include tracking of the Cassini space probe that'll be passing through it on the 17th/18th. Y'know, the one loaded with 72 pounds of plutonium 238?
I'd sorta like to know whether or not there'll be a massive ecological disaster next week.
"I like kittens" - 36 matches
"I like monkeys" - 760 matches
Go figure.
I'm a bit confused now. How can it be called "cracking" when you have been given the root password by the owner? I thought the whole point of cracking was to *get* the root password (or some equivalent).
Having the root password isn't useful if you can't get to a prompt to use it.
You can't login as root from a remote machine, you'd have to be able to get into the system *first* and *then* su root for the password to be useful. So some crackery needs to be employed to get that far.
If it weren't from Wired, i'd be surprised that anyone could get away with such a sloppy article
A significant number of them are virgins, or their only sexual experience has been with a prostitute,"
Error: "Significant number" undefined. All that means is that it's a nonzero number. You'd think they'd at least give some idea of what that number is, unless the number was too small to actually support the thesis of the article.
"They have all these fantasized ideas as to why this is going on, such as 'I don't have time to do these stupid things that girls demand to date them ... women want mushy stuff like candy, flowers, and candlelit dinners.'
So, despite the fact that it's an undefined number(certainly a far cry from "most" of the people surveyed), they go right ahead and start the next line with "They all have these fantasized ideas...", painting a picture of a six year old saying girls are "icky".
And.. of course: "While their better-rounded counterparts were having initial sexual experiences, these guys were developing new computer programs or getting major rewards from intellectual pursuits. By contrast, guys of average intelligence were more into sports, drinking beer, and getting laid, and therefore were better socialized in regards to dating and sexuality."
Yes, many people who pursued intellectual rewards in high school didn't spend much time and energy on beer, dating and sports. This makes drunken jocks "better rounded"? It would certainly seem to, at least compared to the image of the virgin chronic masturbator techies this article paints. It's funny though, from what I can tell those are the ones who considered high school the best years of their life, and are in a perpetual decline thereafter. What "significant number" of these "better socialized" people are involved in domestic abuse? And just because they screw doesn't mean they're particularly good at it. I realize I am also throwing around generalizations and stereotypes, but if that's all you need to do to present this "data superfluous, just reenforce stereotypes", then i'm throwing around generalizations and stereotypes with journalistic rigor!
All I know is, I, and pretty much every techie/geek/weirdo I know, is rather happily involved with someone. My fiance and I don't find conflict between our relationship and our technical pursuits. Quite the contrary, sometimes some hot monkey lovin' is just the thing to clear one's mind and fix that algorithm.
Eh? No portable mp3 players means mp3 will die?
First off, it seems to have done quite well without any portable players
Second, a Rio or equivalent device is not the only way to listen to mp3s on the go. If you don't like the Rio getting in bed with SDMI, get a minidisc. It's digital, it's swappable, and with a soundcard equipped with an optical output, it'll sound as good as mp3 possibly can.
Although a hardware modem can cost up to five times more than a software modem,t hey are relatively cheap, with a current price tag at $100... ... 'I think that [in the future], a hardware modem will be a high-end luxury item'"
Okay. So even though hardware modems are *already* fairly inexpensive and will continue to go down in price, they are going to be high-end luxury items? $100 is not a high-end luxury price. The only way anyone could consider a modem high end is if everything else available was complete garbage. Of course, this *is* the prediction of a winmodem software manager
Personally, I fail to see how, with DSL, cable, and ISDN becoming cheaper and more available, any modem could be considered "high end". If you want high end connectivity, why modulate and demodulate a bunch of analog signal?
Traditionally, software modems have a bad reputation in the linux community. In fact, they've earned the nickname "WinModems" because many are optimized to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system, and refuse to cooperate with any other OS.
Funny, I always thought they "earned the nickname WinModems" because they say "WINMODEM" on the frigging box. It's the fricking model name, not a nickname.
They do not just have a bad reputation in the linux community, they have a bad reputation among just about anyone with any idea how modems work. And it's not because they aren't very cross-format, it's because they are lousy modems. I work at an ISP, and I can say with some certainty that the loathing and contempt our tech support has for WinModems is *not* because they only work on windows, but because they barely work at all
Phew. Felt good to get that out. So anyway. What planet did these people say they were from?
Riiight... So, in other words, it is unjust for the MPAA or movie theatres to not allow youngsters to see these movies, because contrary to the opinions of the Man, youngsters are not the shiftless, mindless irresponsible flakes they are made out to be.
But, you can still sneak into the movies because the kids working there are shiftless, mindless irresponsible flakes.
Do you think before you write this stuff?
Oh, oh, oh, but we're talking about geek kids. Who knows why these kids earn that moniker, they just do for our purposes. So it's alright. All 'non-geeks' are road apple, and all 'geeks' are enlightened juggernauts of whoop-ass. Because geeks are, despite their total lack of agreed upon qualifying terms, ubermensch. Maybe that's why Jon keeps trying to qualify among their ranks, despite any resemblence to anything geeklike other than the ability to operate a word processor.
Because as Katz's article so clearly states, ALL OTHER kids are attention-span impaired idiots.
As near as i can figure, Katz's article is saying it's unfair for people to prevent kids from seeing certain films based on labels of them being irresponsible, weak-minded impressionable witless piles of carbon, but you can get around this because the kids that work at the movie theatres are irresponsible, weak-minded impressinable witless piles of carbon.
Fascinating stance, jonboy. Do you think before you write?
Ah yes. The great usenet definition of "censorship", pulled from the How To Argue On Usenet article featured on The Brunching Shuttlecocks:
Censorship
Whenever anyone calls you a chowderhead, tells you they've heard more coherent statements from randomly arranged Scrabble tiles, or disagrees with you, they are practicing censorship. People who believe in free speech keep their opinions to themselves. Except you, of course.
How in the name of all things good and plenty is filtering out Jon Katz from someone's personal profile practicing censorship? Katz still has the right to say whatever he likes, it's just this one guy isn't going to see it because he chooses not to.
And as far as being "closed minded", he's filtering out Katz because he's read lots of Katz and has yet to see him say anything worthwhile. He's given Katz a chance, and didn't care for it. So he's doing what every Katz fan tells anyone who disagrees with Katz to do.
I do wish chowderheads could pick a position and stick with it.