Um, no, it's not. Slashdot (and every other web forum I've ever seen) is just Usenet reimplemented badly. The good Usenet clients had all sorts of nifty tools that no web-based forum has. Killfiles. Scoring. Filters. Decent threading.
The best part of the system was that it was highly distributed. There was no central server, just thousands of independent sites working together as a sort of peer-to-peer system. Ha! Take THAT, RIAA!
I'm really sorry that Usenet was largely superceded by web forums. I blame it on the lack of good integrated news support in early browsers. But hey, who knew?
As an exercise for the student, write a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Be sure to preserve thread order.
Seriously, I don't know what I would have done in my circuits classes (circa 1985) without my 15C and its complex matrix support. After graduation and my entry into the fine world of firmware development, I managed to buy a used 16C for $50. What a deal! Best danged programmer's calculator ever made. Later, a co-worker gave me a brand-spankin' new 42S, free-for-nothin'. (He was the lead on my project, and I think he just wanted to keep me happy.) The 42S does everything the 15C and 16C do, but it's nowhere near as convenient. Everything's buried on sub-menus. These days I use my 15C at home and the other two at work. The 16C stays mainly in hex mode, while I use the 42S for general calculations.
<warstory> An ME walked into my office one day and asked to use my calculator. I tossed him my HP. He entered a couple things, then looked blankly at it. "Where's the 'equals' key?" I stared at him for a minute. "You're not really an engineer, are you?" </warstory>
Check out The Story About the Baby. The first year of a child's life, as seen by her dysfunctional geek of a father. Not only is it a great introduction for what to expect, it's hilarious as well. Should be at the top of any geek parent's reading list.
Better technology is not the same as a better game. As a game, rather than just eye-candy, I'll pit Duke against any of the more modern full 3D shooters. Duke had humor and attitude. I loved it back then, and I've been trying to find a way to play it under Win2k. (No sound -- Which sucks, because that's a big part of the attitude referenced above.)
I can't wait until someone gets a working Win32 version up and running. Maybe with 3D objects replacing the sprites a la the Doomsday ports of Doom, Heretic, and Hexen.
I hear you scoffing. "Sure, Duke3D was good, back in the day. But that's just nostalgia, you old fart!" Well, maybe. But I do play still play Heretic pretty regularly. I'll bet Duke's still got some life in him!
Seriously, being a game tester will totally _spoil_ the games you are testing for yourself. You have to HATE the game to find the smalles bugs in it. The game is done when there's no reason for the game testers to hate it anymore. Oh, and when they can stand playing it several _more_ times.
Well, not necessarily. When I was coding pinball machines we had one hardcore tester. Loved pinball, and loved finding bugs in the games. What's more, he could reproduce those bugs when someone else was watching! That's the mark of a true tester!
I can see how video games would be different, though. You can't just kill the boss monster once and go to the next level, you have to kill it again and again with every weapon possible, while looking for bugs in the game. I know I'd get tired of playing the same buggy game over and over and over... In my brief career as a video game programmer I help on the port of an arcade game to a console. I ended up videotaping the original game beginning to end, then single-framing through each scene over and over to make sure we had everything in the right place. Yuck!
Remember that the FPS has been the only broadly used first-person 3D navigation scheme. VRML was pretty much DOA, so this is the only affordable tool for any application requiring a 3D walkthrough.
I have a friend who used the Duke3D engine for a walkthrough of his workplace. He works on large campus with lots of "hidden" bits. He says the walkthrough has been well-received by people who have used it. (Especially since you can still kick the computer monitors!)
The article's problem is that it has a very strong bias for console games. They say that the puzzle genre is dying, but in the same breath say the reason is that no one wants to pay $49.95 when the same game can be played for free online. Well, duh. But you know, people are still playing the games. Maybe not on the consoles, but that's hardly any reason to call the genre dead.
And as for "edutainment"... Far from dead! Jeez, walk through Best Buy sometime and look in the kids section! There are as many "educational" games out there as there are shooters, RPGs, and RTSs. Most are probably crap, but (speaking as the father of two boys, 10yo and 5yo) some are really good. The 10yo loves the Clue Finders nth Grade Adventures series. The 5yo is working his way through one of the Reader Rabbit titles. (In fact, when the 10yo was 5 he blew through RR and taught himself to read in less than a week! His little brother isn't making such amazing progress, but the game is definitely helping.) And don't forget the Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt games. Kind of like Myst for the preschool crowd. They're not overtly educational, but they do a fair job of reinforcing problem-solving skills.
I worked for Capcom Coin-Op when this game Super Puzzle Fighter came out. Yes, the name itself pokes fun at the whole fighting genre, of which the Street Fighter franchise was Capcom's cash cow. It features cutesy cartoons of the Street Fighter characters fighting while you play a falling-blocks game against your opponent.
This game had amazing appeal in our showroom. There was always a line to play it, including everyone from the assembly line on up to the top execs.
I never found out how the game did on location. I was in Capcom's pinball division, which was shut down shortly thereafter.
When I worked for a printer company I kept threatening to implement a back-door game of Tetris. One sheet per frame. (These were high-speed barcode printers, so you'd have been able to do 2-4 fps. More if you used smaller labels!) I figured it'd be a great gag for trade shows, and a good hook for a few extra sales for our supplies division.
I'm told that this isn't the enormous amount of money that it sounds like and that a change-over to non-Microsoft products would be costly.
I recommend that your grandfather tell the unnamed donor to get stuffed.
Why? Hey, I'm as much of a Micro$oft hater as anyone here, but this just seems like the wrong kind of restriction to put on a gift. It's okay to say, "Here's a couple million dollars, but it can only go to buy non-MS equipment." Cool. The restriction is on what that money can go towards. It's no different than saying, "Here's a donation, but you have to use it to build a sports arena."
But this restriction isn't just on the money being donated. It's a restriction on the use of all money, from any source. Is that actually going to benefit the students or the school?
It sounds like the donor's just a whacko with a political agenda. Yeah, it might be a good idea to dump Microsoft. But shouldn't that decision be made on a case-by-case basis taking into account the quality of the product and the benefits to the students? It definitely should not be made on the whim of a donor of an admittedly "not enormous" sum of money.
Tell me about it! Here is a list of stuff that people actually eat, every day, without realising it!
Don't forget about Dihydrogen Monoxide! This is one of the most dangerous chemicals in existence, yet it's used in just about every processed food there is. Stop the madness!
Obviously they should go home and write some code to show for the next interview. But to write code specifically for you....
I've done that. An interviewer wanted to see some code, but I didn't have any handy. I promised him some in email the next day. After the interview, I went home and started coding. I wrote a simulation of their product, including some of the technological constraints we'd talked about at the interview. I got the job.
Interviewing for a prior job, I was asked to bring some C code. I didn't have any, mainly because I didn't know C. But I had a bunch of Perl code, and I got a release from my then-current employer to show some of the (mostly assembly) work I'd done there. And, prior to the interview, I spent a weekend with K&R and coded up a small utility in C. So I came armed with some of my actual work, some non-trivial Perl, and some neophyte C. I told them flat out, "Look, I don't know C, but I can learn. I whipped this up over the weekend, with no prior experience in the language. And here are examples of my style when I know a language very well!" I managed to convince them that it's more important to be a Good Programmer than to have experience with any particular language. I got that job, too.
Of course, then there was one of the code samples I got when I was hiring. Someone sent in some demo code that ran under Windows. So I fired it up and tried it out. Okay, a little crude, but not a bad job. But I just happened to have a memory meter running. I noticed that it was climbing, even when the program was idle. I just watched as it went higher and higher. A few minutes later the program crashed due to "out of memory". That guy didn't get the job! People, if you send demo code, make sure it at least doesn't crash, okay?
"The finance department has analyzed your computing needs and decided to give you a 286 PC. That should be sufficient for the 3D-rendering you need to do. Besides, how many times are you going to do 3D-rendering in your carrer?"
"Once, if I hurry."
Dilbert, 6/21/95, by way of the comp.graphics.animation FAQ.
I agree; it is disturbing to get hit by a false positive, never know about it, and then later find out that you missed an email from someone that you would rather have read. So you'd like to review what gets rejected. Unfortunately, at some point that puts you right back to reading spam again!
That's why I like SpamAssassin so much. It flags spam by altering the subject line (to prepend "***SPAM***") and adding a couple header lines to let you know why it thinks it's spam.
Then I have Pine set up to automatically mark all spam as "deleted". This doesn't remove it from my INBOX immediately, so I have a chance to skim the spam for anything useful. But, without any further action from me, the spam all disappears when I exit Pine (or manually expunge the INBOX). If there is a false positive I can catch it and undelete it. (And add the sender to my whitelist!)
Most of the newsletter-like lists that I'm on get flagged as spam before I whitelist them. My mom actually sent me a message the other day that got marked as spam (one of those "internet postcard" things), so she's in the whitelist now.
For me, this technique balances my desire to avoid manually evaluating and deleting each piece of spam with my desire to avoid missing anything hit by a false positive. And I applaud Bruce for not compromising his content to satisfy the filters!
Re:So, where's the review?
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
That was my thought exactly. I could get more depth by going to the publisher's website than I can get out of this review. At least the publisher gives me a couple of sample chapters to form an opinion around.
Everything else around it is syntactic sugar and what really defines the language.
I fully agree. Different languages have different capabilities, advantages, and disadvantages, but the basics (which is all you're going to get in an early CS class anyway) are pretty much universal(1). Once you have one language under your belt, picking up others is pretty easy. And you should have exposure to all the languages you can, so you can pick the right tool for the job!
What else is involved in these classes, though? I certainly hope that they're not just "Learn COBOL" and "Learn VB.net". That'd be a serious waste of time. The courses I had in college (even the freshman year "learn to program" courses) typically had a goal and used the language as a means to achieve it. Like "Numerical Analysis" which happened to be done with FORTRAN at the time. But the language itself wasn't the focus of the class; the focus was on what you could use the language to do.
Way back when, when the giant reptilian mainframes were starting to die and be picked apart by the annoying little mammalian micros, I had two courses the same term: Sperry-Univac 1100 assembly (Whee! 36 bit words! No stack! Whee!) and an intro to microprocessors course that taught 8080 assembly. Oh, and I was playing with 6502 assembly on my own at the same time. There was no cognitive dissonance. If anything, using various different-but-similar languages at once taught me more about programming than just learning a single language would have.
After all, that's what it boils down to. Yes, companies advertise for a "Java programmer" or a "VB programmer" or a "COBOL programmer", but what they really want is a programmer. Damn the language, a real programmer can pick up a new one in a week. I got at least one job on this premise. They wanted a "C programmer", but I didn't know C. I did know Perl, though, and brought some Perl source from a large project to show them that yes, I could program. I also spent a weekend with K&R and banged out a simple "C" program. Hey, I can program and I can learn! I got the job.
Procedural languages are pretty much the same. Declarative languages like Prolog or Erlang are a different ball of fish!
He should have known better. FTL communication of any kind violates relativity.
Yeah, but it's hard to write space opera without FTL of some sort. Worm holes, warp drive, hyperspace, whatever. It's pretty much a necessity to write a rippin' yarn of a galaxy-spanning empire. (Although Vinge did manage to do without in A Deepness in the Sky.)
Weber's "Honor Harrington" series is one of the most well thought-out battlin' empires universe out there. His one fantastic element is that gravity is an FTL (though not instantaneous) phenomenon. He's set up the rules and he plays within them. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the books.
Right, I'd say an ankle bracelet is the answer here. You don't need to prevent your son from leaving the house so much as you need to know whether or not he has. Yes, it'd be nice to actually prevent him from leaving, but as pointed out there are safety concerns. There are also usability concerns with any lock-in solution: You can't keep him from exitting when someone else is entering or leaving the house, and you can't really trust that everyone will remember to lock up or activate they system every time they use the door. An alarm will at least let you know when he's outside so you can haul him back in.
In addition to being used for house-arrest, the ankle bracelets are also used in hospitals to keep tabs on patients who aren't mentally competent. Medical supply houses might be another source for the equipment.
Or, as someone else suggested, get a border collie or some similar breed of dog. It's not a completely whacked idea! Especially if you can find a place that will train companion animals to do what you have in mind, as opposed to the more common seeing-eye training.
Which probably is exactly what Bush wants... A never ending cold war on an enemy not only remote, but formless and without voice.
I've been saying ever since September 12th that we'll never catch Osama bin Laden. Even if we do catch him, we won't admit to it. He's a name and face for the enemy, and he does the government more good "presumed alive and up to no good" than he does "confirmed dead". After all, if the enemy is dead, why continue the war?
Hmmm... And there's evidence to suggest that John Bigboote survived his gunshot wound and the subsequent destruction of the transport ship, and went into hiding as eccentric inventor Doc Brown. He built the time machine to go back and destroy Buckaroo before he was even born by aiding Hanoi Xan back in the 50s. That would allow Yoyodyne to complete the ship unhampered, and he'd get to return to Planet X.
But it went wrong, as meddling with history often does. In the non-Buckaroo timeline, Lord John Whorfin didn't build the ship, but was successfully treated and released from the asylum. After that, he and a few of his Red Lectroid friends began studying the earth by masquarading as Prof. Dick Solomon and his family.
Things become weirder as Lizardo/Whorfin/Solomon falls for someone he believes is an Earthling, but who is actually another alien by the name of Prymatt Conehead!
Try Abuse. It's an old DOS game, but with minor tweaks to let it run under Windows. (You may need to go to the Free Abuse site for the tweaked version.)
It's a 2D platform game. Run, jump, grab weapons, shoot. Mindless, but lots of good, visceral fun. The controls are trivial (move with arrow keys, aim and shoot with mouse) so even non-gamers can be up and fragging in no time. When my friends and I have LAN parties (which we've been doing since the DOS version was new) this is the "network test game" we run while people are setting up their machines. When you can jump into Abuse, you're on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no, it's not. Slashdot (and every other web forum I've ever seen) is just Usenet reimplemented badly. The good Usenet clients had all sorts of nifty tools that no web-based forum has. Killfiles. Scoring. Filters. Decent threading.
The best part of the system was that it was highly distributed. There was no central server, just thousands of independent sites working together as a sort of peer-to-peer system. Ha! Take THAT, RIAA!
I'm really sorry that Usenet was largely superceded by web forums. I blame it on the lack of good integrated news support in early browsers. But hey, who knew?
As an exercise for the student, write a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Be sure to preserve thread order.
Mmmmm... Complex matrices...
Seriously, I don't know what I would have done in my circuits classes (circa 1985) without my 15C and its complex matrix support. After graduation and my entry into the fine world of firmware development, I managed to buy a used 16C for $50. What a deal! Best danged programmer's calculator ever made. Later, a co-worker gave me a brand-spankin' new 42S, free-for-nothin'. (He was the lead on my project, and I think he just wanted to keep me happy.) The 42S does everything the 15C and 16C do, but it's nowhere near as convenient. Everything's buried on sub-menus. These days I use my 15C at home and the other two at work. The 16C stays mainly in hex mode, while I use the 42S for general calculations.
<warstory>
An ME walked into my office one day and asked to use my calculator. I tossed him my HP. He entered a couple things, then looked blankly at it. "Where's the 'equals' key?" I stared at him for a minute. "You're not really an engineer, are you?"
</warstory>
Check out The Story About the Baby. The first year of a child's life, as seen by her dysfunctional geek of a father. Not only is it a great introduction for what to expect, it's hilarious as well. Should be at the top of any geek parent's reading list.
Better technology is not the same as a better game. As a game, rather than just eye-candy, I'll pit Duke against any of the more modern full 3D shooters. Duke had humor and attitude. I loved it back then, and I've been trying to find a way to play it under Win2k. (No sound -- Which sucks, because that's a big part of the attitude referenced above.)
I can't wait until someone gets a working Win32 version up and running. Maybe with 3D objects replacing the sprites a la the Doomsday ports of Doom, Heretic, and Hexen.
I hear you scoffing. "Sure, Duke3D was good, back in the day. But that's just nostalgia, you old fart!" Well, maybe. But I do play still play Heretic pretty regularly. I'll bet Duke's still got some life in him!
Let's rock!
Well, not necessarily. When I was coding pinball machines we had one hardcore tester. Loved pinball, and loved finding bugs in the games. What's more, he could reproduce those bugs when someone else was watching! That's the mark of a true tester!
I can see how video games would be different, though. You can't just kill the boss monster once and go to the next level, you have to kill it again and again with every weapon possible, while looking for bugs in the game. I know I'd get tired of playing the same buggy game over and over and over... In my brief career as a video game programmer I help on the port of an arcade game to a console. I ended up videotaping the original game beginning to end, then single-framing through each scene over and over to make sure we had everything in the right place. Yuck!
Oooh, the record broken in one! Turns out that the very next Ask Slashdot is even worse.
I have a friend who used the Duke3D engine for a walkthrough of his workplace. He works on large campus with lots of "hidden" bits. He says the walkthrough has been well-received by people who have used it. (Especially since you can still kick the computer monitors!)
The article's problem is that it has a very strong bias for console games. They say that the puzzle genre is dying, but in the same breath say the reason is that no one wants to pay $49.95 when the same game can be played for free online. Well, duh. But you know, people are still playing the games. Maybe not on the consoles, but that's hardly any reason to call the genre dead.
And as for "edutainment"... Far from dead! Jeez, walk through Best Buy sometime and look in the kids section! There are as many "educational" games out there as there are shooters, RPGs, and RTSs. Most are probably crap, but (speaking as the father of two boys, 10yo and 5yo) some are really good. The 10yo loves the Clue Finders nth Grade Adventures series. The 5yo is working his way through one of the Reader Rabbit titles. (In fact, when the 10yo was 5 he blew through RR and taught himself to read in less than a week! His little brother isn't making such amazing progress, but the game is definitely helping.) And don't forget the Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt games. Kind of like Myst for the preschool crowd. They're not overtly educational, but they do a fair job of reinforcing problem-solving skills.
I worked for Capcom Coin-Op when this game Super Puzzle Fighter came out. Yes, the name itself pokes fun at the whole fighting genre, of which the Street Fighter franchise was Capcom's cash cow. It features cutesy cartoons of the Street Fighter characters fighting while you play a falling-blocks game against your opponent.
This game had amazing appeal in our showroom. There was always a line to play it, including everyone from the assembly line on up to the top execs.
I never found out how the game did on location. I was in Capcom's pinball division, which was shut down shortly thereafter.
When I worked for a printer company I kept threatening to implement a back-door game of Tetris. One sheet per frame. (These were high-speed barcode printers, so you'd have been able to do 2-4 fps. More if you used smaller labels!) I figured it'd be a great gag for trade shows, and a good hook for a few extra sales for our supplies division.
Never did get around to it. sigh
I recommend that your grandfather tell the unnamed donor to get stuffed.
Why? Hey, I'm as much of a Micro$oft hater as anyone here, but this just seems like the wrong kind of restriction to put on a gift. It's okay to say, "Here's a couple million dollars, but it can only go to buy non-MS equipment." Cool. The restriction is on what that money can go towards. It's no different than saying, "Here's a donation, but you have to use it to build a sports arena."
But this restriction isn't just on the money being donated. It's a restriction on the use of all money, from any source. Is that actually going to benefit the students or the school?
It sounds like the donor's just a whacko with a political agenda. Yeah, it might be a good idea to dump Microsoft. But shouldn't that decision be made on a case-by-case basis taking into account the quality of the product and the benefits to the students? It definitely should not be made on the whim of a donor of an admittedly "not enormous" sum of money.
Don't forget about Dihydrogen Monoxide! This is one of the most dangerous chemicals in existence, yet it's used in just about every processed food there is. Stop the madness!
I've done that. An interviewer wanted to see some code, but I didn't have any handy. I promised him some in email the next day. After the interview, I went home and started coding. I wrote a simulation of their product, including some of the technological constraints we'd talked about at the interview. I got the job.
Interviewing for a prior job, I was asked to bring some C code. I didn't have any, mainly because I didn't know C. But I had a bunch of Perl code, and I got a release from my then-current employer to show some of the (mostly assembly) work I'd done there. And, prior to the interview, I spent a weekend with K&R and coded up a small utility in C. So I came armed with some of my actual work, some non-trivial Perl, and some neophyte C. I told them flat out, "Look, I don't know C, but I can learn. I whipped this up over the weekend, with no prior experience in the language. And here are examples of my style when I know a language very well!" I managed to convince them that it's more important to be a Good Programmer than to have experience with any particular language. I got that job, too.
Of course, then there was one of the code samples I got when I was hiring. Someone sent in some demo code that ran under Windows. So I fired it up and tried it out. Okay, a little crude, but not a bad job. But I just happened to have a memory meter running. I noticed that it was climbing, even when the program was idle. I just watched as it went higher and higher. A few minutes later the program crashed due to "out of memory". That guy didn't get the job! People, if you send demo code, make sure it at least doesn't crash, okay?
Dilbert, 6/21/95, by way of the comp.graphics.animation FAQ.
That's why I like SpamAssassin so much. It flags spam by altering the subject line (to prepend "***SPAM***") and adding a couple header lines to let you know why it thinks it's spam.
Then I have Pine set up to automatically mark all spam as "deleted". This doesn't remove it from my INBOX immediately, so I have a chance to skim the spam for anything useful. But, without any further action from me, the spam all disappears when I exit Pine (or manually expunge the INBOX). If there is a false positive I can catch it and undelete it. (And add the sender to my whitelist!)
Most of the newsletter-like lists that I'm on get flagged as spam before I whitelist them. My mom actually sent me a message the other day that got marked as spam (one of those "internet postcard" things), so she's in the whitelist now.
For me, this technique balances my desire to avoid manually evaluating and deleting each piece of spam with my desire to avoid missing anything hit by a false positive. And I applaud Bruce for not compromising his content to satisfy the filters!
That was my thought exactly. I could get more depth by going to the publisher's website than I can get out of this review. At least the publisher gives me a couple of sample chapters to form an opinion around.
I fully agree. Different languages have different capabilities, advantages, and disadvantages, but the basics (which is all you're going to get in an early CS class anyway) are pretty much universal(1). Once you have one language under your belt, picking up others is pretty easy. And you should have exposure to all the languages you can, so you can pick the right tool for the job!
What else is involved in these classes, though? I certainly hope that they're not just "Learn COBOL" and "Learn VB.net". That'd be a serious waste of time. The courses I had in college (even the freshman year "learn to program" courses) typically had a goal and used the language as a means to achieve it. Like "Numerical Analysis" which happened to be done with FORTRAN at the time. But the language itself wasn't the focus of the class; the focus was on what you could use the language to do.
Way back when, when the giant reptilian mainframes were starting to die and be picked apart by the annoying little mammalian micros, I had two courses the same term: Sperry-Univac 1100 assembly (Whee! 36 bit words! No stack! Whee!) and an intro to microprocessors course that taught 8080 assembly. Oh, and I was playing with 6502 assembly on my own at the same time. There was no cognitive dissonance. If anything, using various different-but-similar languages at once taught me more about programming than just learning a single language would have.
After all, that's what it boils down to. Yes, companies advertise for a "Java programmer" or a "VB programmer" or a "COBOL programmer", but what they really want is a programmer. Damn the language, a real programmer can pick up a new one in a week. I got at least one job on this premise. They wanted a "C programmer", but I didn't know C. I did know Perl, though, and brought some Perl source from a large project to show them that yes, I could program. I also spent a weekend with K&R and banged out a simple "C" program. Hey, I can program and I can learn! I got the job.
Yeah, but it's hard to write space opera without FTL of some sort. Worm holes, warp drive, hyperspace, whatever. It's pretty much a necessity to write a rippin' yarn of a galaxy-spanning empire. (Although Vinge did manage to do without in A Deepness in the Sky.)
Weber's "Honor Harrington" series is one of the most well thought-out battlin' empires universe out there. His one fantastic element is that gravity is an FTL (though not instantaneous) phenomenon. He's set up the rules and he plays within them. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the books.
Right, I'd say an ankle bracelet is the answer here. You don't need to prevent your son from leaving the house so much as you need to know whether or not he has. Yes, it'd be nice to actually prevent him from leaving, but as pointed out there are safety concerns. There are also usability concerns with any lock-in solution: You can't keep him from exitting when someone else is entering or leaving the house, and you can't really trust that everyone will remember to lock up or activate they system every time they use the door. An alarm will at least let you know when he's outside so you can haul him back in.
In addition to being used for house-arrest, the ankle bracelets are also used in hospitals to keep tabs on patients who aren't mentally competent. Medical supply houses might be another source for the equipment.
Or, as someone else suggested, get a border collie or some similar breed of dog. It's not a completely whacked idea! Especially if you can find a place that will train companion animals to do what you have in mind, as opposed to the more common seeing-eye training.
I've been saying ever since September 12th that we'll never catch Osama bin Laden. Even if we do catch him, we won't admit to it. He's a name and face for the enemy, and he does the government more good "presumed alive and up to no good" than he does "confirmed dead". After all, if the enemy is dead, why continue the war?
Hmmm... And there's evidence to suggest that John Bigboote survived his gunshot wound and the subsequent destruction of the transport ship, and went into hiding as eccentric inventor Doc Brown. He built the time machine to go back and destroy Buckaroo before he was even born by aiding Hanoi Xan back in the 50s. That would allow Yoyodyne to complete the ship unhampered, and he'd get to return to Planet X.
But it went wrong, as meddling with history often does. In the non-Buckaroo timeline, Lord John Whorfin didn't build the ship, but was successfully treated and released from the asylum. After that, he and a few of his Red Lectroid friends began studying the earth by masquarading as Prof. Dick Solomon and his family.
Things become weirder as Lizardo/Whorfin/Solomon falls for someone he believes is an Earthling, but who is actually another alien by the name of Prymatt Conehead!
Try Abuse. It's an old DOS game, but with minor tweaks to let it run under Windows. (You may need to go to the Free Abuse site for the tweaked version.)
It's a 2D platform game. Run, jump, grab weapons, shoot. Mindless, but lots of good, visceral fun. The controls are trivial (move with arrow keys, aim and shoot with mouse) so even non-gamers can be up and fragging in no time. When my friends and I have LAN parties (which we've been doing since the DOS version was new) this is the "network test game" we run while people are setting up their machines. When you can jump into Abuse, you're on the net.
You're being a little harsh, aren't you. Come on, TOS couldn't keep its story consistent with the events of the previous episode!
anti-lameness: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah
Oh, now that is a work of art!