Re:Today, I'm ashamed...
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I have to agree. Many shortsighted people in these boards.
No one quite understands that removing Hussein from power is the first step towards a Palestinian state. Hussein has openly funded the efforts of Hamas, the most feared terrorist group in the world (al-Qaeda is a mom & pop shop compared to Hamas), and other Palestinian terrorist groups. Removing that source of funding and forcing Israel into recognizing a Palestinian state by the end of the year is the goal of this war.
Also, removing a dictator who uses the people of his country as sheep is necessary in every country it exists. Sometimes, it can be done economically or diplomatically. In Iraq's case, military force is needed to remove him.
I'm cuban. See the damage a lone man has done to Cuba, which used to be a rich and thriving nation...the Monaco of the West. It's now barely a third world country. One man did that. He destroyed my homeland and made it impossible for me to ever know what it was like. The Cuba of my parents' and grandparents' youths is dead. Think about that...
None of you will ever understand that feeling unless you've lived it. There is no way you can attempt to understand it. The people in eastern Europe who were choked by the grip of Communism understand...it is why they support us. The Iraqis living here in the United States understand, and they support this too.
This is a moral and just war. It is the duty of the United States to defend a single person's freedom to pursue the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And any leader who openly denies their people those basic human rights is a monster who needs to leave power.
War has come, and no one wants it...it's a terrible thing.
But it does not come lightly. We tried for twelve years to get Hussein to concede to international opinion and law, and he did not. Eighteen UN resolutions were passed and ignored. We have no choice. Hussein has brought this on himself. We are not at fault...we are the ones who are right.
I think one of the problems with Star Trek is the fact that in 30-some years it really hasn't changed while the world has.
Modern sci-fi shows like Farscape and Firefly are showing the underbelly of the human condition. Farscape is about a lost astronaut on a ship with escaped convicts and one deserter. Firefly shows people who lost their big war for independance and are dealing with a universe willing to crush them beneath its heel.
But these are just characters in a situation we can relate with. We all can relate with Crichton's desire to return home...D'Argo's plight at being wronged and suffering for it...Firefly's Malcolm Reynolds for having his beliefs abandon him. We've all been lost, been wronged, and been abandoned before...and most of us have overcome them in our ways. We've never been as lost as Crichton, but we understand. That's the difference between heroic and personal writing...the hero is suffering the extreme of something and conquers through it. That was never exemplified more than in Picard during TNG.
When Picard had his humanity ripped away but his consciousness remained intact...we can understand. We've all felt moments where our feelings have been stripped away for whatever reason...but they've been physically removed as Picard's was. His confrontation about those events with his brother back on Earth was one of the poignant moments of TNG...here is our brave and unwavering captain...crying. And it made sense...I personally would be a quivering mass of Jell-O if half of what happened to Picard happened to me. But we're not telling the story of a yellow-belly, we're telling the story of a Hero...who through this one act is not so far removed from the common folk. Picard was not a hero because he was better than us...he was a hero because he was exactly what we are.
Roddenberry understood this to be the necessary ingrediant to a show about a ship travelling among the stars. If you show characters who are human, flawed, but are willing to be better than what they are...to show compassion, tolerance, understanding, and ability to recognize when none of three attitudes would solve the problem...that made us watch weekly. We would see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy overcome adversity by being human, not by being super-human.
ST forgot this. B5 reminded us of what ST had forgotten. B5 was a show about hope, transcendance, doing what was right, and above all be willing to make your own future. Watching the final episode of B5 after seeing the whole of the series, Ivanova's parting words do not feel like preaching...it feels like the wisdom of someone who endured hardship and adversity. B5 showed us a very possible future with people who felt as real to us as we do. Even characters who seemed like comedic relief (Vir) eventually came to be something completely different...and did it gradually.
I've said before that Data is the best sci-fi character on TV. We saw an android in the first episode who was befuddled at the SIMPLEST slang eventually become someone who so understoof humanity that he realized he would never achieve it...but that didn't stop him from trying. Watch the final episode of TNG and see the ocean of difference between the first year Data and seventh year Data...then ask yourself when he changed. There was no single point...he changed gradually and believably. The seventh year Data was the sum of his experiences, even learning to simply shake his head when reporting a tragic death instead of blurting it out.
DS9 tried to tell us a story about people in the 24th century, and even with its failures it managed to do its job. It was dark, depressing, featuring angst-ridden leads like Sisko and Odo, but it worked. The only real failure DS9 was its inability to let a problem linger...I call it the DS9 Syndrome: you build up a big problem for 50 minutes that seems impossible, then solve it quickly in the last 10 minutes.
B5 showed us what sci-fi on TV could be like. I think a line spoken by Ivanova in one early spisode sums it up best: This isn't some deep space franchise, this place is about something. Even the writer who wrote that couldn't believe they'd use it.
I wish Farscape had been allowed to finish its story, it's been one hell of a ride up to now. Firefly was beginning to tell us an intriguing story in a universe that seems very familiar. Sadly...I think the biggest problem is the audience.
TV is just not the best medium for thought-provoking fiction. Even movies fall flat too...personally, I think GATTACA would've been a better book than movie. As a book, a writer can explore ideas to their bitter end. The truly revolutionary sci-fi is being done in novels and some comic books: Rising Stars and Midnight Nation by JMS is some of the best sci-fi in comics in years...and stuff like Preacher would never survive the mass-market of TV. Thought-provoking science-fiction will remain in the written word. The audience in television who truly wants shows to mean something or try to enlighten us about the human condition is instead fed shows like Andromeda and the crap Sci-Fi channel churns out. Ahh...Sci-Fi channel...they had a chance to be a shining star among the black sky that is TV programming.
Corporations should not be granted the same rights as individuals. Therefore, no IP for corporations. If we allow ONLY PEOPLE, not legal entities, as the only ones able to register and enforce IP, then we'd have a nice fair system. After all, if one CEO or some low-level engineer registers a piece of IP or Copyright, then if that person leaves the company loses rights to the IP or Copyright. Ooo, imagine the power wielding there. Finally, the dog would wag the tail.
Re:Spidey is why I learned to read
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 1
Oh, WATCHMEN...Terry Gilliam tried to do it once and figured it was unfilmable. Alan Moore has said the same thing many times.
There's so many problems with it...how do you get around the fact that a lead male character is naked and blue for nearly half the story? You can't dress him suddenly, the fact that he's nude is part of the character! Common decency in movies almost outlaws male nudity, and prolonged is unheard of outside of porn films.
Another is The Comedian...he's a rapist. And yet he's the character you feel sorry for. Not to mention the woman he raped still loves him 40 years after the event, something she tells her own daughter that she [the daughter] will never understand why. The women groups will go apeshit over that.
Ozymandias [oh, I forget how to spell that from time to time] is another problem. He's clearly insane and admitted to mass murder of a million New Yorkers...and he's the good guy? For a lot of people, that will simply not jive. Murderers are always bad guys, regardless of their intentions. By extrapolation, you could say Hitler was trying to unite Europe for the common good of people even though he killed six million Jews. Count out the Jewish viewers...
There's three strikes already. I'm sure with some more discussion (Rorshach, while being completely unstable, is a solid moral compass in the Old Testament style) you could find a lot more strikes. All of this will prevent it from seeing any kind of mainstream airing. The only we hope is someone with a lot of money and a lot of pull (and here we need a Spielberg-type pull) to get this through on TV. A film would do it injustice.
On the plus side, JMS's RISIGN STARS has been all but greenlighted for pre-production. While it may be mainstream as far as comics go, the ideas and themes it presents and explores are new to people who think of comics as kiddie fare.
Someone else here said it, it's content, not form. The applies to everything, including comics and video games.
No, the movie isn't as bad as people claim it to be. However, it's not even Jedi good as far as the trilogy goes.
In STAR WARS, you had a director who was (for all intents and purposes) new and idealistic. He wanted to make a sci-fi movie in the vein of the old Buck Rogers serialized films, but wanted to have some sort of timeless quality. He achived this...STAR WARS is a grand fairy tale that reminds us of brave knights storming a castle to rescue the princess from the evil wizard. If course, it's a little deeper than that, and he did it admirably, albeit you can see it's a very rookie effort.
EMPIRE is, in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made. It's exciting, thrilling, and deep. The universe really opens up and we see the simple struggles for what they are. We see a change in relationships that shifts the entire spectrum. And most of all, it introduced the idea of a puppet that acts. Say what you want, Yoda in EMPIRE acts. It's a tiny, silly puppet that looks real, conveys emotion, and convinces you in one sentence that this is one powerful figure in the universe. I hate Ep1 Yoda...he looks fake and plastic and completely flies in the face of EMPIRE's work.
JEDI...good movie. Uses half of act 2 and all of act 3 for action. Bold decision that paid out. Great battles that ended the series (New Jedi Order fighting Empire remnants?...WTF was the death of the Emperor, a speed bump for the Empire?!). However, we had Ewoks...a marketing ploy. I think this movie might have been better than EMPIRE if Lucas got to do his Wookiee slave camp.
MENACE...ugh. A good movie, compared to other crap (Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot! vs Episode 1, anyone?), but utter crap compared to what came before.
And I have little faith in CLONES. I read the adaptation, and it's exciting and well plotted. But I've seen the trailers...Christensen looks and sounds wooden. I hope he's not. Portman is misused again into a unidimensional role. And there's a couple continuity gaffs I won't mention but will be brought up after release.
Oh, how I hope I'm wrong...cause if Episode 3 sucks, the entire series will fall flat. Episode 3 cannot suck...it has to be dark, brooding, deeply philosophical, and light on action. The turning of Anakin to Vader is not an action sequence for crying out loud!
Me and a buddy at work discussed and came up with two things:
If a heatsink/fan falls off your CPU while in operation, get out of computers. If you can't installa heatsink correctly you are a dangerous individual who should be restricted to installing AOL for people.
I think the CPU cooking would be just one part of the catastrophe. Think about...heatsink falls off. You now have a hunk of metal the size of your fist falling into your box. Along the way, what could it hit? Dislodge the wrong capacitor, fry your video card by connecting the wrong solder points, cook the motherboard through the same process. If the heatsink falls off and only the CPU cooks, consider yourself lucky that you're only out $100.
1) Voting on the internet is still 10-20 years away. It won't happen because the gov't will not accept a system that is 100% secured from the outside world. The internet as it currently exists cannot guarantee that, so it should not be pushed by this generation.
2) Many people will not have the internet. Just because numbers from '96-'00 have grown tremendously, doesn't mean the rate will continue. Internet growth charts resemble a bell curve than an exponential climb, so there is a point where everything will level off. That point is not 100%. There will always be someone that wants to vote, but does not have internet access (or possibly a computer). People in the low income bracket will not get a computer simply because nearly everyone in the middle income bracket has one, they will get one when they have enough money to buy a computer and their necessities.
What I've thought of for a couple years now is a system that works with computers in the polling places. Design a simple piece of software that displays the ballot vote by vote. You have a radio button by each choice. You pick your candidate (or the No Vote choice) and hit Next. After you're done, it'll present you with a confirmation screen with a Change option next to each choice. Or, hit the VOTE! button. If you hit VOTE!, your votes are sent to a local server in the polling place. So what you would have is 20 dumb terminals with one server on a LAN, not connected to the internet. When the polls close, a designated official comes by and signs off on the harddrive of the server. Unlock it, take the drive, go to the counting place. At the same time, you would have a second harddrive in the server secured in a lock box which is a perfect mirror of the one counted. This ensures that the harddrive they count votes from is the same one they picked up at the polling place.
Personally, I see this has the first step, and a system can be had for under $10,000 per polling place. Use something simple and stable, and you'd even see Windows not crash for an entire day (blasphemy, to be sure...but even Windows can handle a series of pages with radio choices;-).
I don't think Chris reached the right conclusion. What he's saying is that OL2K msgs sent on non-TNEF enabled servers will make email unreadable.
What the article actually says is that non-TNEF enabled servers strip out TNEF formatting to make it plain-text.
At my office, we use OL2K with MS Exchange 5.5 and have never had a problem communication with the managers to the I.T. department (who run anything but Windows...one guy's laptop runs BeOS, for instance).
While this is true, you forget that your PAID for the license usage and are therefore bound by an exchange of currency and a transference of ownership. You own the license now and that license has no written claims to being able to be changed in the future. In the case of the DOOM source, it's a pure electronic good that you did not purchase but downloaded under the agreement that you do not own this and they can revoke your use of said item if they feel you have gone against the spirit of the agreement. In this case, Carmack decided to change the agreement. While this can be an issue for projects started under the old agreement already having released materials, any new projects based on the DOOM engine (no matter which port you use, all DOOM engines are based on this release) are bound by the new license agreements. However, it is up to Carmack whether or not to force projects to release under GPL because he has retained all ownership rights under the original Doom license. Am I wrong?
Carmack didn't release a new version of the source under GPL. He relicensed the old release. To date, there has only been one version of the Doom source code released by id, and the bundle only changed to reflect the license change.
A source port called csDoom (http://csdoom.sourceforge.com) is the spark for all this. The author based his work off another port called ZDoom (http://zdoom.notgod.com) who originally used the Doom license and never made an announcement that he's going to GPL it like Carmack did the original source. ZDoom, though, does release sources with binaries, though.
The csDoom author, though, is not releasing Win32 sources because he says he's going to use the original license, not the GPL for his work.
John Carmack changed the license that Doom is under on Oct 3, 1999 from the original Doom license to the GPL. IMO, that makes Doom GPL and the old license null and void. All of this is coming out, though, due to csDoom which is using the Doom source but is not releasing their sources. http://csdoom.sourceforge.com.
I don't think you're right. The parties both advocate personal freedom, it's just that democrats believe that the way is through society, and republicans believe the way is through individuals.
And the libertarian party is generally right-wingers...they're an off-shoot of the republican party who reacted to the extremism of the Christian Right.
I find it a little amusing, but mostly disturbing, that people seem to think Conservative = Censors. I have been a staunch conservative and registered Republican since I learned about how I can influence this gov't.
My family had a lot to do with this, since they are also all registered Republicans who regularly voice their opinions. My family is Cuban, and they came from a country that has silenced its populace and eliminated all forms of freedom.
I do not believe in forced censorship, but I do believe in self-censorship. There's a huge difference for those who do not understand. Self-censorship means there are things I will not do or say by my own choice. When we begin to talk about forced censorship, I can hear our Founding Fathers spinning in their grave. The first amendment was created to give every belligerent, drunk, and general miscreant a voice, a way to speak freely without fear of punishment. The thinking was surprisingly simple. If even the most obscene and inappropiate thoughts are allowed to exist without punishment, then the articulate, moral, and correct thoughts will also make themselves heard.
Of course, with this freedom comes responsibility, but it's not the gov't's responsibility to tell us what we can and cannot say/do, it falls to each of us. I would think it hard to find someone for pornography is public schools and libraries, but that doesn't mean we should block out webpages with the word 'sex' in it, otherwise we lose a lot of educational sites that SHOULD be in public schools and libraries. We, each one of us, should make sure that people do not view inappropiate actions, but we should also make sure we're not the ones doing it, and we should further make sure to tell the gov't to keep their hands off our rights and responsibilities as U.S. Citizens.
This is one of the many lessons I've learned from conservatives over the years...that if you allow the people to choose for themselves, the overwhelming majority will be in the right. Remember the old saying which the Founding Fathers used to form this gov't: Laissez Faire. Roughly translated, it means 'hands off', which is what the gov't was meant to be like.
I hope one day we can go back to the eras were people were able to choose for themselves what was right and wrong for them. You'd be surprised how many people agreed with each other.
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I have to agree. Many shortsighted people in these boards.
No one quite understands that removing Hussein from power is the first step towards a Palestinian state. Hussein has openly funded the efforts of Hamas, the most feared terrorist group in the world (al-Qaeda is a mom & pop shop compared to Hamas), and other Palestinian terrorist groups. Removing that source of funding and forcing Israel into recognizing a Palestinian state by the end of the year is the goal of this war.
Also, removing a dictator who uses the people of his country as sheep is necessary in every country it exists. Sometimes, it can be done economically or diplomatically. In Iraq's case, military force is needed to remove him.
I'm cuban. See the damage a lone man has done to Cuba, which used to be a rich and thriving nation...the Monaco of the West. It's now barely a third world country. One man did that. He destroyed my homeland and made it impossible for me to ever know what it was like. The Cuba of my parents' and grandparents' youths is dead. Think about that...
None of you will ever understand that feeling unless you've lived it. There is no way you can attempt to understand it. The people in eastern Europe who were choked by the grip of Communism understand...it is why they support us. The Iraqis living here in the United States understand, and they support this too.
This is a moral and just war. It is the duty of the United States to defend a single person's freedom to pursue the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And any leader who openly denies their people those basic human rights is a monster who needs to leave power.
War has come, and no one wants it...it's a terrible thing.
But it does not come lightly. We tried for twelve years to get Hussein to concede to international opinion and law, and he did not. Eighteen UN resolutions were passed and ignored. We have no choice. Hussein has brought this on himself. We are not at fault...we are the ones who are right.
I think one of the problems with Star Trek is the fact that in 30-some years it really hasn't changed while the world has.
Modern sci-fi shows like Farscape and Firefly are showing the underbelly of the human condition. Farscape is about a lost astronaut on a ship with escaped convicts and one deserter. Firefly shows people who lost their big war for independance and are dealing with a universe willing to crush them beneath its heel.
But these are just characters in a situation we can relate with. We all can relate with Crichton's desire to return home...D'Argo's plight at being wronged and suffering for it...Firefly's Malcolm Reynolds for having his beliefs abandon him. We've all been lost, been wronged, and been abandoned before...and most of us have overcome them in our ways. We've never been as lost as Crichton, but we understand. That's the difference between heroic and personal writing...the hero is suffering the extreme of something and conquers through it. That was never exemplified more than in Picard during TNG.
When Picard had his humanity ripped away but his consciousness remained intact...we can understand. We've all felt moments where our feelings have been stripped away for whatever reason...but they've been physically removed as Picard's was. His confrontation about those events with his brother back on Earth was one of the poignant moments of TNG...here is our brave and unwavering captain...crying. And it made sense...I personally would be a quivering mass of Jell-O if half of what happened to Picard happened to me. But we're not telling the story of a yellow-belly, we're telling the story of a Hero...who through this one act is not so far removed from the common folk. Picard was not a hero because he was better than us...he was a hero because he was exactly what we are.
Roddenberry understood this to be the necessary ingrediant to a show about a ship travelling among the stars. If you show characters who are human, flawed, but are willing to be better than what they are...to show compassion, tolerance, understanding, and ability to recognize when none of three attitudes would solve the problem...that made us watch weekly. We would see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy overcome adversity by being human, not by being super-human.
ST forgot this. B5 reminded us of what ST had forgotten. B5 was a show about hope, transcendance, doing what was right, and above all be willing to make your own future. Watching the final episode of B5 after seeing the whole of the series, Ivanova's parting words do not feel like preaching...it feels like the wisdom of someone who endured hardship and adversity. B5 showed us a very possible future with people who felt as real to us as we do. Even characters who seemed like comedic relief (Vir) eventually came to be something completely different...and did it gradually.
I've said before that Data is the best sci-fi character on TV. We saw an android in the first episode who was befuddled at the SIMPLEST slang eventually become someone who so understoof humanity that he realized he would never achieve it...but that didn't stop him from trying. Watch the final episode of TNG and see the ocean of difference between the first year Data and seventh year Data...then ask yourself when he changed. There was no single point...he changed gradually and believably. The seventh year Data was the sum of his experiences, even learning to simply shake his head when reporting a tragic death instead of blurting it out.
DS9 tried to tell us a story about people in the 24th century, and even with its failures it managed to do its job. It was dark, depressing, featuring angst-ridden leads like Sisko and Odo, but it worked. The only real failure DS9 was its inability to let a problem linger...I call it the DS9 Syndrome: you build up a big problem for 50 minutes that seems impossible, then solve it quickly in the last 10 minutes.
B5 showed us what sci-fi on TV could be like. I think a line spoken by Ivanova in one early spisode sums it up best: This isn't some deep space franchise, this place is about something. Even the writer who wrote that couldn't believe they'd use it.
I wish Farscape had been allowed to finish its story, it's been one hell of a ride up to now. Firefly was beginning to tell us an intriguing story in a universe that seems very familiar. Sadly...I think the biggest problem is the audience.
TV is just not the best medium for thought-provoking fiction. Even movies fall flat too...personally, I think GATTACA would've been a better book than movie. As a book, a writer can explore ideas to their bitter end. The truly revolutionary sci-fi is being done in novels and some comic books: Rising Stars and Midnight Nation by JMS is some of the best sci-fi in comics in years...and stuff like Preacher would never survive the mass-market of TV. Thought-provoking science-fiction will remain in the written word. The audience in television who truly wants shows to mean something or try to enlighten us about the human condition is instead fed shows like Andromeda and the crap Sci-Fi channel churns out. Ahh...Sci-Fi channel...they had a chance to be a shining star among the black sky that is TV programming.
There's just no money in telling good stories.
Corporations should not be granted the same rights as individuals. Therefore, no IP for corporations. If we allow ONLY PEOPLE, not legal entities, as the only ones able to register and enforce IP, then we'd have a nice fair system. After all, if one CEO or some low-level engineer registers a piece of IP or Copyright, then if that person leaves the company loses rights to the IP or Copyright. Ooo, imagine the power wielding there. Finally, the dog would wag the tail.
Oh, WATCHMEN...Terry Gilliam tried to do it once and figured it was unfilmable. Alan Moore has said the same thing many times.
There's so many problems with it...how do you get around the fact that a lead male character is naked and blue for nearly half the story? You can't dress him suddenly, the fact that he's nude is part of the character! Common decency in movies almost outlaws male nudity, and prolonged is unheard of outside of porn films.
Another is The Comedian...he's a rapist. And yet he's the character you feel sorry for. Not to mention the woman he raped still loves him 40 years after the event, something she tells her own daughter that she [the daughter] will never understand why. The women groups will go apeshit over that.
Ozymandias [oh, I forget how to spell that from time to time] is another problem. He's clearly insane and admitted to mass murder of a million New Yorkers...and he's the good guy? For a lot of people, that will simply not jive. Murderers are always bad guys, regardless of their intentions. By extrapolation, you could say Hitler was trying to unite Europe for the common good of people even though he killed six million Jews. Count out the Jewish viewers...
There's three strikes already. I'm sure with some more discussion (Rorshach, while being completely unstable, is a solid moral compass in the Old Testament style) you could find a lot more strikes. All of this will prevent it from seeing any kind of mainstream airing. The only we hope is someone with a lot of money and a lot of pull (and here we need a Spielberg-type pull) to get this through on TV. A film would do it injustice.
On the plus side, JMS's RISIGN STARS has been all but greenlighted for pre-production. While it may be mainstream as far as comics go, the ideas and themes it presents and explores are new to people who think of comics as kiddie fare.
Someone else here said it, it's content, not form. The applies to everything, including comics and video games.
No, the movie isn't as bad as people claim it to be. However, it's not even Jedi good as far as the trilogy goes.
In STAR WARS, you had a director who was (for all intents and purposes) new and idealistic. He wanted to make a sci-fi movie in the vein of the old Buck Rogers serialized films, but wanted to have some sort of timeless quality. He achived this...STAR WARS is a grand fairy tale that reminds us of brave knights storming a castle to rescue the princess from the evil wizard. If course, it's a little deeper than that, and he did it admirably, albeit you can see it's a very rookie effort.
EMPIRE is, in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made. It's exciting, thrilling, and deep. The universe really opens up and we see the simple struggles for what they are. We see a change in relationships that shifts the entire spectrum. And most of all, it introduced the idea of a puppet that acts. Say what you want, Yoda in EMPIRE acts. It's a tiny, silly puppet that looks real, conveys emotion, and convinces you in one sentence that this is one powerful figure in the universe. I hate Ep1 Yoda...he looks fake and plastic and completely flies in the face of EMPIRE's work.
JEDI...good movie. Uses half of act 2 and all of act 3 for action. Bold decision that paid out. Great battles that ended the series (New Jedi Order fighting Empire remnants?...WTF was the death of the Emperor, a speed bump for the Empire?!). However, we had Ewoks...a marketing ploy. I think this movie might have been better than EMPIRE if Lucas got to do his Wookiee slave camp.
MENACE...ugh. A good movie, compared to other crap (Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot! vs Episode 1, anyone?), but utter crap compared to what came before.
And I have little faith in CLONES. I read the adaptation, and it's exciting and well plotted. But I've seen the trailers...Christensen looks and sounds wooden. I hope he's not. Portman is misused again into a unidimensional role. And there's a couple continuity gaffs I won't mention but will be brought up after release.
Oh, how I hope I'm wrong...cause if Episode 3 sucks, the entire series will fall flat. Episode 3 cannot suck...it has to be dark, brooding, deeply philosophical, and light on action. The turning of Anakin to Vader is not an action sequence for crying out loud!
If a heatsink/fan falls off your CPU while in operation, get out of computers. If you can't installa heatsink correctly you are a dangerous individual who should be restricted to installing AOL for people.
I think the CPU cooking would be just one part of the catastrophe. Think about...heatsink falls off. You now have a hunk of metal the size of your fist falling into your box. Along the way, what could it hit? Dislodge the wrong capacitor, fry your video card by connecting the wrong solder points, cook the motherboard through the same process. If the heatsink falls off and only the CPU cooks, consider yourself lucky that you're only out $100.
What I see is two problems.
;-).
:-)
1) Voting on the internet is still 10-20 years away. It won't happen because the gov't will not accept a system that is 100% secured from the outside world. The internet as it currently exists cannot guarantee that, so it should not be pushed by this generation.
2) Many people will not have the internet. Just because numbers from '96-'00 have grown tremendously, doesn't mean the rate will continue. Internet growth charts resemble a bell curve than an exponential climb, so there is a point where everything will level off. That point is not 100%. There will always be someone that wants to vote, but does not have internet access (or possibly a computer). People in the low income bracket will not get a computer simply because nearly everyone in the middle income bracket has one, they will get one when they have enough money to buy a computer and their necessities.
What I've thought of for a couple years now is a system that works with computers in the polling places. Design a simple piece of software that displays the ballot vote by vote. You have a radio button by each choice. You pick your candidate (or the No Vote choice) and hit Next. After you're done, it'll present you with a confirmation screen with a Change option next to each choice. Or, hit the VOTE! button. If you hit VOTE!, your votes are sent to a local server in the polling place. So what you would have is 20 dumb terminals with one server on a LAN, not connected to the internet. When the polls close, a designated official comes by and signs off on the harddrive of the server. Unlock it, take the drive, go to the counting place. At the same time, you would have a second harddrive in the server secured in a lock box which is a perfect mirror of the one counted. This ensures that the harddrive they count votes from is the same one they picked up at the polling place.
Personally, I see this has the first step, and a system can be had for under $10,000 per polling place. Use something simple and stable, and you'd even see Windows not crash for an entire day (blasphemy, to be sure...but even Windows can handle a series of pages with radio choices
Anyone think I'm full of it?
I don't think Chris reached the right conclusion. What he's saying is that OL2K msgs sent on non-TNEF enabled servers will make email unreadable. What the article actually says is that non-TNEF enabled servers strip out TNEF formatting to make it plain-text. At my office, we use OL2K with MS Exchange 5.5 and have never had a problem communication with the managers to the I.T. department (who run anything but Windows...one guy's laptop runs BeOS, for instance).
While this is true, you forget that your PAID for the license usage and are therefore bound by an exchange of currency and a transference of ownership. You own the license now and that license has no written claims to being able to be changed in the future. In the case of the DOOM source, it's a pure electronic good that you did not purchase but downloaded under the agreement that you do not own this and they can revoke your use of said item if they feel you have gone against the spirit of the agreement. In this case, Carmack decided to change the agreement. While this can be an issue for projects started under the old agreement already having released materials, any new projects based on the DOOM engine (no matter which port you use, all DOOM engines are based on this release) are bound by the new license agreements. However, it is up to Carmack whether or not to force projects to release under GPL because he has retained all ownership rights under the original Doom license. Am I wrong?
Carmack didn't release a new version of the source under GPL. He relicensed the old release. To date, there has only been one version of the Doom source code released by id, and the bundle only changed to reflect the license change.
The csDoom author, though, is not releasing Win32 sources because he says he's going to use the original license, not the GPL for his work.
Is this allowed?
John Carmack changed the license that Doom is under on Oct 3, 1999 from the original Doom license to the GPL. IMO, that makes Doom GPL and the old license null and void. All of this is coming out, though, due to csDoom which is using the Doom source but is not releasing their sources. http://csdoom.sourceforge.com.
And the libertarian party is generally right-wingers...they're an off-shoot of the republican party who reacted to the extremism of the Christian Right.
My family had a lot to do with this, since they are also all registered Republicans who regularly voice their opinions. My family is Cuban, and they came from a country that has silenced its populace and eliminated all forms of freedom.
I do not believe in forced censorship, but I do believe in self-censorship. There's a huge difference for those who do not understand. Self-censorship means there are things I will not do or say by my own choice. When we begin to talk about forced censorship, I can hear our Founding Fathers spinning in their grave. The first amendment was created to give every belligerent, drunk, and general miscreant a voice, a way to speak freely without fear of punishment. The thinking was surprisingly simple. If even the most obscene and inappropiate thoughts are allowed to exist without punishment, then the articulate, moral, and correct thoughts will also make themselves heard.
Of course, with this freedom comes responsibility, but it's not the gov't's responsibility to tell us what we can and cannot say/do, it falls to each of us. I would think it hard to find someone for pornography is public schools and libraries, but that doesn't mean we should block out webpages with the word 'sex' in it, otherwise we lose a lot of educational sites that SHOULD be in public schools and libraries. We, each one of us, should make sure that people do not view inappropiate actions, but we should also make sure we're not the ones doing it, and we should further make sure to tell the gov't to keep their hands off our rights and responsibilities as U.S. Citizens.
This is one of the many lessons I've learned from conservatives over the years...that if you allow the people to choose for themselves, the overwhelming majority will be in the right. Remember the old saying which the Founding Fathers used to form this gov't: Laissez Faire. Roughly translated, it means 'hands off', which is what the gov't was meant to be like.
I hope one day we can go back to the eras were people were able to choose for themselves what was right and wrong for them. You'd be surprised how many people agreed with each other.