The problem with Fox News is that far-right viewpoints are being passed off as moderate right, while moderate left viewpoints are passed off as moderate left.
I think Webcartoonist D.C. Simpson said it best, discussing CNN's Crossfire, how extremist lunatics on the Right are branded as mainstream and meanwhile moderate Leftists are considered extremist (being often considered an extremist himself):
People who make the "good riddance to Crossfire" argument seem mostly to point to the fact that it's spawned a whole lot of other shouting-head shows, and in doing so debased the national debate. You could call this the Jon Stewart argument, since it's the one Stewart made when he was on the program last fall, and got into a dustup in which he called Tucker Carlson a "dick," which Carlson is. (CNN has decided not to renew Carlson's contract, though they're keeping the other three hosts on in various roles; CNN President Jonathan Klein said this week "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise.")
But my problem with Crossfire is a different one. An alleged fellow "liberal" I know said something that made me angry, and I had to take a moment to digest why I had that reaction. What he said was this:
I enjoyed Crossfire when Michael Kinsley was (supposedly) on the left. (I know, I know... Kinsley has always been a centrist. So am I.)
My problem with this statement? Former Crossfire co-host Michael Kinsley most assuredly isn't on "the left," and he never has been. I admire Mr. Kinsley as a journalist very much, but the fact that Crossfire pits conciliatory, fair-minded, let's-look-at-all-sides objectivists like Kinsley against frothing partisan right-wingers like Pat Buchanan is exactly the problem with Crossfire.
In doing so, they contributed to the perception, still rampant in this country, that you can go as far to the right as you want, to the point of extreme protectionism, foaming homophobia and thinly-veiled racism, and still be part of the mainstream--but if you drift to the left of a centrist like Michael Kinsley, you're an insane left-wing radical.
I don't think I can forgive Crossfire for its role in propagating that notion. I think the damage from it is going to prove persistent.
Let's look at what insane left-wing radicals like me actually want.
Universal health-care, especially for children. Environmental protection. Labor laws that give workers a fair shake. Keeping Roe V. Wade intact. Some sort of legal recognition of committed same-sex relationships.
Every one of these positions has majority support. So I'm a left-wing radical only under a very strange, contorted definition of that term. My views are very mainstream, but it's the funhouse-mirror reality of contemporary American politics that people who disagree with me, holding the minority position on all of these issues, are seen as more "normal" and "mainstream."
Maybe America is like that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to any organization that would have someone like him as a member. Maybe Americans don't want to support candidates who are stupid enough to agree with them on important issues. I dunno.
I do know I believe Crossfire really hasn't done us any good.
Actually, that's one of the rumours I heard. Remember, at one of the later movies, Riker was talking about taking command of "The Titan".
My understanding is it would be Riker and Troi commanding a superscalar flagship, with a plotline that leads up to the Federation's decline and fall (sounds kinda like Andromeda to me).
I believe it was how the poet wrote his latter "The Dying Earth" novels after he moved away from writing Cantos and switched to writing trash for cash.
Other engines have TF games that don't suffer from that - I'm fond of Team Fortress UT, for example. Hell, even later StarCraft patches provide a Team Fortress mod. Still, its nice to see Team Fortress available for a free-as-in-beer game.
Still, I want to see a free (as in GPL) FPS with the kind of mod community that the closed-source people get, without having to look at fossils like Doom and Quake 1.
Yep. Many projects have taken an attempt at this meagre challenge, and they've all sucked. First of all, Super-Tux is an alpha game - their site screenshots still show the tiling grids. Not very impressive.
Want to make Linux Gaming cool? Get some better objectives. I've seen many of these "Linux Game Distros" projects, and they all do the same half-assed crap of grab a bunch've mediocre Linux games and throw them onto the main menu.
Here's my dream project for an Opensource team: FPS distro. Get one Opensource game that has tons of media available for it. That's pretty much the first 3 Id titles, plus Abuse and a handful of others. Quake and Doom are the only games to have complete media-replacement projects that turn them into standalone games, but I think there are a handful of Quake 2 and Quake 3 TC's that could be converted into standalones with a little trouble. Then, make a multi-CD package out of those games. Include all the major popular mods, models, etc. Second, take some of the configging out - Q3 and Doom were the only Id games that didn't require command-line hacking to get the mods working right.
Did you know that there are Doom Legacy maps reimplementing the Unreal Tournament 2003 gametypes? So you can play CTF Doom and Dom Doom? Very cool.
The key problem with these games, and Cube, is the installation and configging details. Handle that for the users with some nice Python GUI wrappers or something, similar to RedHat's config screens. Doom Legacy has this nicely nipped for Windows.
Now, set up a Gamespy-like GUI-oriented meta-server game-browsing service. That would be the "new feature" your gaming distro brings to the scene.
Then release a game-distro with a real featureset. Also, release win32 bundles of your game distros (like QPack and DPack) so that you can get win32 players playing with your players.
Yes, there are tons of games out there, but only Half-Life gives you tons of mods bundled in with their game package. If a person could order a QPack distro (which uses no Id IP but the GPL'd source data) with Weapons Factory, Slide, and whatever other mods you can get the mod devs to let you grab, then you're golden.
still, that option relies on a) getting permission to redistribute mods from the mod devs and b) what Id's exact license is for the Quake and Doom source.
Alternate plan: go for the oldschool people. Make the Linux Game Console for casual party gamers. There are an innumerate number of players out there who just want to grab a joystick and play Gauntlet again with their buds over a few beers. Just go for these basics: multiple joystick support, good graphics and sound configuration, TV out, and every multiplayer hotseat game you can cram onto the damn thing, even if you have to code them yourself (how freakin' hard would 8-player Spacewar be to make in PyGame?).
No, its not Halo, but neither is Mario Party, and people play the hell out of that.
Was not the pun. Tron was short for "electronic" - the people who first created the tron character weren't computer people... the glowing-overlay-clothes technique was the root of the project, not the 3d graphics.
Watch the 20th anniversary DVD for the story.
Personally, I watch Tron and I still find it visually impressive - the artwork doesn't date that badly because its so abstract. Still, its a shame that it didn't recieve an award for the visual effects (using computers and post-prod stuff for effects was considered "cheating").
Yes, the plot is a joke and the technical details are absolutely monstrous to geeks like us, but the movie is still visually neato, and the acting is passable.
While I do agree with you, its not like it would be that hard to track these people down. The very core nature of spamming demands some level of locatability. After all, they're selling products. Just subpoena the names of the people that the penis enlargement pill wholesaler has hired to advertise for them (force their cooperation with the threat of an accessory charge), and then prosecute the spammers into the dirt.
The fact is that spamming for anything practically demands a paper trail - any scam requires a point of sale. The only reason that, if it was illegal, it wasn't prosecuted, is that law enforcement people haven't been told to give a shit yet. There are tons of laws that are not enforced ever, even when police have a case fall in their lap. Many laws are only prosecuted if you confess to or commit in front of a cop.
The problem is that law enforcement needs to have their priorities forceably adjusted from busting pot-dealers and speeders to enforcing crimes that actually hurt people (although I think fighting street violence and large-scale financial crimes rates a damn sight higher than spam).
Hell, hire handful of devoted nerds and accountants onto a police squad and give them access to the resources needed to get search warrants and subpoena computers and you could probably get the evidence thrown together to nail dozens of spammers and scammers in a matter of weeks. Of course, the legal process would be a whole other matter, but still, I'm sure that tracking down scammers isn't that hard if you follow the money trail.
Amen. Nobody thinks that IP Multicasting is a bad idea, but to me it has obvious bad ramifications for net send spam and service worms like Sasser. I still want multicasting anyways (but I won't be surprised when it becomes an "trusted-IP-Only" thing much like SMTP).
Re:Which'll be the first to go up in flames...
on
Gingerbread Computers!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To be fair, parent is sfw and on-topic, if very, very sick and wrong. Too bad there's no mod "unfunny". That's worse than the suspicious-looking tunnel in UT2k3.
What pisses me of is that there are games that are designed for this sort of thing. Go on to Second Life or any of the other metaverse-style MMO's and there's a vibrant real-cash economy that the developers encourage. So why hack away in the black market on WoW?
Oh well, it all just stems from this accursed obsession with continuity and levelling up. You can't make a game where success is based on days of tedium and the rewards are near-permanent and very valueable and expect people not to capitalise on that.
You misunderstand - I meant that I figured that the comic at pennyarcade.com would be pointing over here at slashdot - I checked over there and its not - slashdot.org's hosting for slashdot.org, and PA.com is hosting for PA.com.
Which means that all the normal PA viewers who're going there to read their comics are still draining T&G's bandwidth as much as normal - all/. is doing is taking care of slashdotters, most of whom probably already check PA compulsively.
Actually, I don't quite get it - I checked PA out of curiosity (and cancelled before the download got underway out of consideration) and found that today's comic is still hosted off of penny-arcade.com. I thought the idea would be that PA would temporarily have their heavy comic images hosted over on Slashdot - but they're still hosting their own files themselves. This is pretty bewildering when you consider that they don't get any advertising revenue from Slashdot. I'm kinda confused - I would've thought it would be like "here, you host these files for us and you can show them on your site too" and the PA comics would be pointing to Slashdot servers in PA's html.
First, offtopic: the games section is kicking ass lately. Since you seem to talk like you're semi-in-charge, big props for it. I've started reading games.slashdot more than front page.
Now, on topic, a quick Q: What deal did you make with the PA boys for this repost? Just for fun ("Slashdot has comics!") or did cash/advertising revenue exchange hands?
I heard this was a falsehood peddled by the airline industry - they measure safety as "fatalities-per-passengenger-mile". You tend to fly a lot further than you drive. IIRC, if you calculate per voyage its closer to riding a motorcycle.
Well, while Doom, Q1, and Q2 were complete games, Q3 didn't really feel *finished*. It was pretty much a skeleton of a game. After all, it was Q2 DM, but with more maps and models, a smaller and less versatile weaponspread, and the entire SP game just *poof* gone. I think my reaction to it was the same as most: "is this all there is?". If you're gonna release a multiplayer-oriented game like that, at least give the players good bang for their buck - hell, I'm still playing UT '99.
Hmmph. NYC is the least concern - weather is pretty much irrelevant to big cities. The concern is that when you play russian-roulette with the weather, it becomes kinda tricky to grow food. Those NYC slickers gotta eat. Even if you could predict where the weather was going, could farmers move fast enough to keep up with shifting patterns, buying and selling land to be ready for the next season?
And that's before one considers the possible issues with hurricanes and snowstorms - the only things that do effect a big city like New York.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Webcartoonist D.C. Simpson said it best, discussing CNN's Crossfire, how extremist lunatics on the Right are branded as mainstream and meanwhile moderate Leftists are considered extremist (being often considered an extremist himself):
Actually, that's one of the rumours I heard. Remember, at one of the later movies, Riker was talking about taking command of "The Titan".
My understanding is it would be Riker and Troi commanding a superscalar flagship, with a plotline that leads up to the Federation's decline and fall (sounds kinda like Andromeda to me).
That's just what the rumour mill says.
I believe it was how the poet wrote his latter "The Dying Earth" novels after he moved away from writing Cantos and switched to writing trash for cash.
95% of games out there besides Id's stuff and the UT games (without using Cedega).
Other engines have TF games that don't suffer from that - I'm fond of Team Fortress UT, for example. Hell, even later StarCraft patches provide a Team Fortress mod. Still, its nice to see Team Fortress available for a free-as-in-beer game.
Still, I want to see a free (as in GPL) FPS with the kind of mod community that the closed-source people get, without having to look at fossils like Doom and Quake 1.
heheheh... whoops. Should've taken a closer look. My bad.
Yep. Many projects have taken an attempt at this meagre challenge, and they've all sucked. First of all, Super-Tux is an alpha game - their site screenshots still show the tiling grids. Not very impressive.
Want to make Linux Gaming cool? Get some better objectives. I've seen many of these "Linux Game Distros" projects, and they all do the same half-assed crap of grab a bunch've mediocre Linux games and throw them onto the main menu.
Here's my dream project for an Opensource team:
FPS distro. Get one Opensource game that has tons of media available for it. That's pretty much the first 3 Id titles, plus Abuse and a handful of others. Quake and Doom are the only games to have complete media-replacement projects that turn them into standalone games, but I think there are a handful of Quake 2 and Quake 3 TC's that could be converted into standalones with a little trouble. Then, make a multi-CD package out of those games. Include all the major popular mods, models, etc. Second, take some of the configging out - Q3 and Doom were the only Id games that didn't require command-line hacking to get the mods working right.
Did you know that there are Doom Legacy maps reimplementing the Unreal Tournament 2003 gametypes? So you can play CTF Doom and Dom Doom? Very cool.
The key problem with these games, and Cube, is the installation and configging details. Handle that for the users with some nice Python GUI wrappers or something, similar to RedHat's config screens. Doom Legacy has this nicely nipped for Windows.
Now, set up a Gamespy-like GUI-oriented meta-server game-browsing service. That would be the "new feature" your gaming distro brings to the scene.
Then release a game-distro with a real featureset. Also, release win32 bundles of your game distros (like QPack and DPack) so that you can get win32 players playing with your players.
Yes, there are tons of games out there, but only Half-Life gives you tons of mods bundled in with their game package. If a person could order a QPack distro (which uses no Id IP but the GPL'd source data) with Weapons Factory, Slide, and whatever other mods you can get the mod devs to let you grab, then you're golden.
still, that option relies on a) getting permission to redistribute mods from the mod devs and b) what Id's exact license is for the Quake and Doom source.
Alternate plan: go for the oldschool people. Make the Linux Game Console for casual party gamers. There are an innumerate number of players out there who just want to grab a joystick and play Gauntlet again with their buds over a few beers. Just go for these basics: multiple joystick support, good graphics and sound configuration, TV out, and every multiplayer hotseat game you can cram onto the damn thing, even if you have to code them yourself (how freakin' hard would 8-player Spacewar be to make in PyGame?).
No, its not Halo, but neither is Mario Party, and people play the hell out of that.
Nope.
22 minutes.
Was not the pun. Tron was short for "electronic" - the people who first created the tron character weren't computer people... the glowing-overlay-clothes technique was the root of the project, not the 3d graphics.
Watch the 20th anniversary DVD for the story.
Personally, I watch Tron and I still find it visually impressive - the artwork doesn't date that badly because its so abstract. Still, its a shame that it didn't recieve an award for the visual effects (using computers and post-prod stuff for effects was considered "cheating").
Yes, the plot is a joke and the technical details are absolutely monstrous to geeks like us, but the movie is still visually neato, and the acting is passable.
While I do agree with you, its not like it would be that hard to track these people down. The very core nature of spamming demands some level of locatability. After all, they're selling products. Just subpoena the names of the people that the penis enlargement pill wholesaler has hired to advertise for them (force their cooperation with the threat of an accessory charge), and then prosecute the spammers into the dirt.
The fact is that spamming for anything practically demands a paper trail - any scam requires a point of sale. The only reason that, if it was illegal, it wasn't prosecuted, is that law enforcement people haven't been told to give a shit yet. There are tons of laws that are not enforced ever, even when police have a case fall in their lap. Many laws are only prosecuted if you confess to or commit in front of a cop.
The problem is that law enforcement needs to have their priorities forceably adjusted from busting pot-dealers and speeders to enforcing crimes that actually hurt people (although I think fighting street violence and large-scale financial crimes rates a damn sight higher than spam).
Hell, hire handful of devoted nerds and accountants onto a police squad and give them access to the resources needed to get search warrants and subpoena computers and you could probably get the evidence thrown together to nail dozens of spammers and scammers in a matter of weeks. Of course, the legal process would be a whole other matter, but still, I'm sure that tracking down scammers isn't that hard if you follow the money trail.
Amen. Nobody thinks that IP Multicasting is a bad idea, but to me it has obvious bad ramifications for net send spam and service worms like Sasser. I still want multicasting anyways (but I won't be surprised when it becomes an "trusted-IP-Only" thing much like SMTP).
To be fair, parent is sfw and on-topic, if very, very sick and wrong. Too bad there's no mod "unfunny". That's worse than the suspicious-looking tunnel in UT2k3.
What pisses me of is that there are games that are designed for this sort of thing. Go on to Second Life or any of the other metaverse-style MMO's and there's a vibrant real-cash economy that the developers encourage. So why hack away in the black market on WoW?
Oh well, it all just stems from this accursed obsession with continuity and levelling up. You can't make a game where success is based on days of tedium and the rewards are near-permanent and very valueable and expect people not to capitalise on that.
You misunderstand - I meant that I figured that the comic at pennyarcade.com would be pointing over here at slashdot - I checked over there and its not - slashdot.org's hosting for slashdot.org, and PA.com is hosting for PA.com.
/. is doing is taking care of slashdotters, most of whom probably already check PA compulsively.
Which means that all the normal PA viewers who're going there to read their comics are still draining T&G's bandwidth as much as normal - all
IE doesn't ask - you have to select "log in" from the file menu to supply a user/pass or you'll just keep bouncing as anon.
Actually, I don't quite get it - I checked PA out of curiosity (and cancelled before the download got underway out of consideration) and found that today's comic is still hosted off of penny-arcade.com. I thought the idea would be that PA would temporarily have their heavy comic images hosted over on Slashdot - but they're still hosting their own files themselves. This is pretty bewildering when you consider that they don't get any advertising revenue from Slashdot. I'm kinda confused - I would've thought it would be like "here, you host these files for us and you can show them on your site too" and the PA comics would be pointing to Slashdot servers in PA's html.
What is the sound of one taco clapping?
Or, how many CowboyNeals can dance on the head of a pin?
First, offtopic: the games section is kicking ass lately. Since you seem to talk like you're semi-in-charge, big props for it. I've started reading games.slashdot more than front page.
Now, on topic, a quick Q: What deal did you make with the PA boys for this repost? Just for fun ("Slashdot has comics!") or did cash/advertising revenue exchange hands?
Smooth. 1 in 1^455 is 1 in 1, which means you're dead. Dead people don't post on Slashdot, so begone.
I think you meant 1 in 1x10^455, or 1 in 1E455.
I heard this was a falsehood peddled by the airline industry - they measure safety as "fatalities-per-passengenger-mile". You tend to fly a lot further than you drive. IIRC, if you calculate per voyage its closer to riding a motorcycle.
Yes, I am too lazy to go digging for a link.
Really? I thought we'd eat the surface dwellers.
Well, while Doom, Q1, and Q2 were complete games, Q3 didn't really feel *finished*. It was pretty much a skeleton of a game. After all, it was Q2 DM, but with more maps and models, a smaller and less versatile weaponspread, and the entire SP game just *poof* gone. I think my reaction to it was the same as most: "is this all there is?". If you're gonna release a multiplayer-oriented game like that, at least give the players good bang for their buck - hell, I'm still playing UT '99.
So yeah, Q3 did feel like a tech demo.
Really? How was God punished for killing every non-Hebrew first born son in Egypt?
Hmmph. NYC is the least concern - weather is pretty much irrelevant to big cities. The concern is that when you play russian-roulette with the weather, it becomes kinda tricky to grow food. Those NYC slickers gotta eat. Even if you could predict where the weather was going, could farmers move fast enough to keep up with shifting patterns, buying and selling land to be ready for the next season?
And that's before one considers the possible issues with hurricanes and snowstorms - the only things that do effect a big city like New York.