Nah, cat box comes between jury and ammo. You want to FedEx them a fully used catbox only *after* you've lost your case, but before you actually get violent.
Actually, I think the grandparent was referring to "Lawyer Cannons". Sort of like a Laser Cannon, except instead of throwing out a high-power laser into the path of an oncoming missile, it throws out a lawyer.
Right into the path of an oncoming missile.
It sounds inaccurate, as if you might have to expend several lawyers to get it just right.
In California Real Estate Law, your mouse, stapler, telephone, can of coke, screwdriver, keyboard, 2 monitors, flashlight, and spindle of blank DVDs are personal property, not real property. It's all "Chattel".
Real property is considered tangible and mostly immovable. The grandparent post's warehouse, factory, and store are real property.
Now before people complain that it must be "real" because they can touch it, I should point out that the word "real" in this case derives from the Spanish word for Royal. "Real Estate" doesn't mean an estate that's "fake"... it was traditionally land granted to you by the king, hence "Royal Land".
So, buildings and land are considered Real Property (and therefore fall under a slew of taxation laws). The chattel on our desks, including the desks themselves are Personal Property.
IANAL, but I'm having a problem with the claim that IP is "Real Property". What kind of claim is that? Is it legally clueless media companies (despite large legal teams) trying to enforce the idea that IP is "not fake"? Or are they trying afford the same protections for which we provide to "Royal Land"?
So MPAA/RIAA, which is it - are movies and music Personal Property, or Real Property? Answer carefully, because one answer will cause you give up several contested channels of distribution, and the other will let the State tax the hell out of your IP.
Seriously, does anyone have funeral details yet? I somewhat envision the geek version of Mother Theresa, when she died, only with about a third as many people attending...
However, I expect twice as many people demanding that the Pope canonizes "Saint Gary", the Patron Saint of Natural Twenties, Preserver of Virginities; may your troubled heart find shelter in His mother's basement.
Defenestrate: to throw out of a window. Therefore could Fenestrate be defined as putting it back in? Could the same rule be applied to "Defecate"? Or is "fecation" simply the act of eating, in which case, I should invite my next date to "fecate" at a fancy restaurant?
Drivernator:...a revolutionary type of gas station attendent...In three years, Gas Net will become the largest supplier of robotic fueling devices. All gas stations are upgraded with Gas Net internals, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they refuel cars with a perfect operational record. The Gas Net funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4th, 2007. Human decisions are removed from buying gas. The automated pump replacement begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 am, eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah: Gas Net fights back.
Drivernator: Yes. They begin exporting backyard-brewed bio-diesel from Russia.
John: Why Russia? They're supposed to be our chief exporters.
Drivernator: Because Gas Net knows that Russian bio-diesel will damage the bottom line of domestic energy companies while degrading the performance of modern vehicles.
Google or Wikipedia are your best bet here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane). In short, it's an n-dimensional slice in an environment of more than n dimensions - but that's an oversimplified explanation.
The word comes from "membrane", except that membrane implies a 2-dimensional surface. String theorists abbreviated this word to "brane", to indicate a multi-dimensional cross-section of an even higher dimensional domain.
One aspect of String Theory proposes that the Big Bang was caused by a couple of three-dimensional (or four-dimensional) branes getting too close to each other. When they actually touched, the point of contact manifested as an enormous release of energy, a very small percentage of which coalesced into physical matter.
And speaking of random speculation, I've often wondered why in media, a "parallel universe" is often assumed to be similar our own. Not in terms of having evil twins of everything, but rather, similar enough to even pay a visit.
I actually do believe in parallel universes (given that our own material space is but a single brane along higher dimensions), but I highly doubt that the laws of physics that exist in a parallel universe (or even a brane at a different "angle") would be similar enough to our own to allow for even a few femtoseconds of experience in the new world. Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time alludes to the laws of physics as we know it being formed *during* the Big Bang... does that mean the laws of physics may have been completely different *before* the BB? (Yeah, I know, there's really no such thing as "before the Big Bang".)
It would only take a single change in almost any behavior of physics (e.g., electrons attract instead of repel) to make anything passing through such a "door" immediately disintegrate on the atomic level.
That having been said, if anyone is still interested in visiting any alternate universes with no foresight to what I just said above, I'm constructing a machine that projects a large, vertical plane of annihilative energy (roughly circle-shaped) in my backyard - I'm calling it Darwin's portal. Just pay me five bucks and step right in...
Not really. The MPAA decreed that a single downloaded CD is worth $1.5 Million. Therefore, you only need to transfer 66,667 albums through this network, and it's paid for!
Will the main villains of this strip also feature an evil software company that abuses its monopoly? Will the heroes use Open Source in a positive responsible manner?
I work as a Construction Contractor for some rather extravagant celebrities*. One of my more indulgent clients asked what was the most expensive building materials I've ever seen. Well, I heard on Slashdot that unlocked iPhones make excellent bricks...
Tomorrow, I'm getting my sixth truckload. The North Wing is almost complete, and then I'll start working on the guest house.
* (just kidding, of course. I'm a working techie stiff just like everyone else here)
"I've had it with all these motherfucking zombies in this motherfucking mall!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking wizards from this motherfucking school!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking mutants from this motherfucking school!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking hobbits with this motherfucking Ring!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking Agents in this motherfucking virtual reality!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking androids from motherfucking Skynet!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking icebergs in this motherfucking ship!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking dinosaurs on this motherfucking island!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking talking pigs in this motherfucking farm!"
Lines I would have paid good money to hear: "I've had it with all these motherfucking Sith in this motherfucking galaxy!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking wedding rehearsals with this motherfucking piano!" "I've had it with all these motherfucking ghosts in this motherfucking hotel room!"
But we know he's hit the bottom of the barrel if Uwe Boll ever rejects him despite the line: "I've had it with all these motherfucking goombahs in this motherfucking sewer!"
Alas, as someone who's seen peers caught up in this stereotype...
Cantrip (level 0) Escape Parents' Basement Alteration/Enchantment Range: Touch Duration: Permanent Material Component: Your own place to live
This ritual, when cast simultaneously by one or more wizards with a combined credit score of at least 700 and their own place to live, causes the subject to come live with them. The subject will now permanently live in the new residence until one of the three criteria is met: Divine Intervention, Casting Remove Curse, or Getting A Job.
Despite the low casting level of this spell, the prohibitively high credit score requirement and scarcity of the material requirement often means that a single individual in possession of both is highly unlikely to be willing to cast this spell without some reciprocal service in return. As is more commonly the case, a large group of friends will pool their resources to cast this spell on the subject, such that 5 people sharing a 1-bedroom apartment now becomes 6-people sharing a 1-bedroom apartment.
It's the perfect camouflage for them. Looking outside my window I can already count six transformers hanging off the power poles in the street, and no one's so much as raising a brow.
Slashdot headlines are getting worse and worse, if not for the sake of sensationalism. So, Team Fortress 2 confirms:
- Elvis is alive - Area 51 experiments - JFK's *real* assassins - The existence of the Illuminati - Pharmaceutical conspiracies - Chupacabras - ECHELON-style monitoring
Sorry, Team Fortress Developers, Deus Ex beat you to the punch 5 years ago!
That's why this microwave transmitter has a dial with the following settings:
Microprocessor Disruption (default) Sparky Metal Mortal Kombat Raiden
That last setting is the most noticeable. I preferred the old microwave emitter, which referred specifically to your driver:
Light Medium Dark...but some police departments interpreted it to refer to the ethnicity of the offending driver, as opposed to how crispy you wanted them to be.
So, that big half-white, half-yellow book my phone company gives me every year isn't the Terror Watch List for my local neighborhood? Could've fooled me.
Actually, they were able to cut the development time short by changing the final goal of the game.
Instead of trying to evolve single-celled life into a viable space-faring race to do battle with each other, your new goal is to evolve single-celled life into viable space-faring ravenous aliens to be the bad guys in Duke Nukem Forever.
I use.odf when I'm feeling vindictive. Sometimes, a company will send me an email, whose entire body is otherwise stored in a.doc file, when it could have otherwise fit in just the regular body. I re-save the document as an.odf, make my changes or answer their questions, and then send it back to them.
> I wonder if they will ever allow midi to work as a controller as my > Roland V-Drums would be totally beyond awesome to use in place of the > pack-in drum controller.
I doubt it. Companies want to make as much money as possible, and which of the following makes more money: letting the user use an open-standards (albeit expensive) MIDI controller he already owns, or creating a proprietary POS controller for exclusive use with your game?
I could actually see someone modifying a Roland GR-1 to play Guitar Hero with. After that, "Pipe Organ Hero" couldn't be too far behind... I'd hate to see Hard Mode!
When I first heard that the rate of the universe's expansion was actually accelerating, I came up with a weird hypothesis after a few days...
Time in our frame of reference is slowing down.
The only way that seemed possible was if we were traveling at speeds close to c, but that didn't sound feasible since we were observing objects that were moving away from us, in all directions. Then another weird thought occurred to me...
Our observed universe is self-contained within the event horizon of a giant black hole.
We're closer to the singularity, and accelerating towards it faster than objects closer to the edge of the event horizon. Time will move slower for us, and far away objects will appear to speed up. An outside observer (if such a thing could possibly exist) would perceive our universe as shrinking, but in our current frame of reference, we still think of it as expanding.
One other observation that lends to this possibility is the fact that we have not seen evidence of other "Big Bangs" or other "Universes". If the Big Bang happened once, shouldn't it be a repeatable occurrence in the limitless void of space?
Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, cat box comes between jury and ammo. You want to FedEx them a fully used catbox only *after* you've lost your case, but before you actually get violent.
S.
But you know what they say, it's never about the size... it's all about the mass and how you use it.
S.
Another good (and related) comparison might be:
One dollar of Public School per 5 million of Iraq.
Solomon
Actually, I think the grandparent was referring to "Lawyer Cannons". Sort of like a Laser Cannon, except instead of throwing out a high-power laser into the path of an oncoming missile, it throws out a lawyer.
Right into the path of an oncoming missile.
It sounds inaccurate, as if you might have to expend several lawyers to get it just right.
I like it already.
Solomon
In California Real Estate Law, your mouse, stapler, telephone, can of coke, screwdriver, keyboard, 2 monitors, flashlight, and spindle of blank DVDs are personal property, not real property. It's all "Chattel".
Real property is considered tangible and mostly immovable. The grandparent post's warehouse, factory, and store are real property.
Now before people complain that it must be "real" because they can touch it, I should point out that the word "real" in this case derives from the Spanish word for Royal. "Real Estate" doesn't mean an estate that's "fake"... it was traditionally land granted to you by the king, hence "Royal Land".
So, buildings and land are considered Real Property (and therefore fall under a slew of taxation laws). The chattel on our desks, including the desks themselves are Personal Property.
IANAL, but I'm having a problem with the claim that IP is "Real Property". What kind of claim is that? Is it legally clueless media companies (despite large legal teams) trying to enforce the idea that IP is "not fake"? Or are they trying afford the same protections for which we provide to "Royal Land"?
So MPAA/RIAA, which is it - are movies and music Personal Property, or Real Property? Answer carefully, because one answer will cause you give up several contested channels of distribution, and the other will let the State tax the hell out of your IP.
Solomon Chang
Nevermind the cleric. Which funeral home?
Seriously, does anyone have funeral details yet? I somewhat envision the geek version of Mother Theresa, when she died, only with about a third as many people attending...
However, I expect twice as many people demanding that the Pope canonizes "Saint Gary", the Patron Saint of Natural Twenties, Preserver of Virginities; may your troubled heart find shelter in His mother's basement.
S.
From my Slashdot journal:
Defenestrate: to throw out of a window.
Therefore could Fenestrate be defined as putting it back in?
Could the same rule be applied to "Defecate"? Or is "fecation" simply the act of eating, in which case, I should invite my next date to "fecate" at a fancy restaurant?
Solomon
Drivernator: ...a revolutionary type of gas station attendent...In three years, Gas Net will become the largest supplier of robotic fueling devices. All gas stations are upgraded with Gas Net internals, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they refuel cars with a perfect operational record. The Gas Net funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4th, 2007. Human decisions are removed from buying gas. The automated pump replacement begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 am, eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah: Gas Net fights back.
Drivernator: Yes. They begin exporting backyard-brewed bio-diesel from Russia.
John: Why Russia? They're supposed to be our chief exporters.
Drivernator: Because Gas Net knows that Russian bio-diesel will damage the bottom line of domestic energy companies while degrading the performance of modern vehicles.
Sarah: Jesus.
SKC
Google or Wikipedia are your best bet here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane). In short, it's an n-dimensional slice in an environment of more than n dimensions - but that's an oversimplified explanation.
The word comes from "membrane", except that membrane implies a 2-dimensional surface. String theorists abbreviated this word to "brane", to indicate a multi-dimensional cross-section of an even higher dimensional domain.
One aspect of String Theory proposes that the Big Bang was caused by a couple of three-dimensional (or four-dimensional) branes getting too close to each other. When they actually touched, the point of contact manifested as an enormous release of energy, a very small percentage of which coalesced into physical matter.
Solomon
And speaking of random speculation, I've often wondered why in media, a "parallel universe" is often assumed to be similar our own. Not in terms of having evil twins of everything, but rather, similar enough to even pay a visit.
I actually do believe in parallel universes (given that our own material space is but a single brane along higher dimensions), but I highly doubt that the laws of physics that exist in a parallel universe (or even a brane at a different "angle") would be similar enough to our own to allow for even a few femtoseconds of experience in the new world. Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time alludes to the laws of physics as we know it being formed *during* the Big Bang... does that mean the laws of physics may have been completely different *before* the BB? (Yeah, I know, there's really no such thing as "before the Big Bang".)
It would only take a single change in almost any behavior of physics (e.g., electrons attract instead of repel) to make anything passing through such a "door" immediately disintegrate on the atomic level.
That having been said, if anyone is still interested in visiting any alternate universes with no foresight to what I just said above, I'm constructing a machine that projects a large, vertical plane of annihilative energy (roughly circle-shaped) in my backyard - I'm calling it Darwin's portal. Just pay me five bucks and step right in...
Solomon
> $100 Billion is an inconceivable sum.
Not really. The MPAA decreed that a single downloaded CD is worth $1.5 Million. Therefore, you only need to transfer 66,667 albums through this network, and it's paid for!
Solomon
Will the main villains of this strip also feature an evil software company that abuses its monopoly?
Will the heroes use Open Source in a positive responsible manner?
Solomon
I work as a Construction Contractor for some rather extravagant celebrities*. One of my more indulgent clients asked what was the most expensive building materials I've ever seen. Well, I heard on Slashdot that unlocked iPhones make excellent bricks...
Tomorrow, I'm getting my sixth truckload. The North Wing is almost complete, and then I'll start working on the guest house.
* (just kidding, of course. I'm a working techie stiff just like everyone else here)
Solomon
...where he didn't make the cut:
"I've had it with all these motherfucking zombies in this motherfucking mall!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking wizards from this motherfucking school!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking mutants from this motherfucking school!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking hobbits with this motherfucking Ring!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking Agents in this motherfucking virtual reality!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking androids from motherfucking Skynet!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking icebergs in this motherfucking ship!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking dinosaurs on this motherfucking island!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking talking pigs in this motherfucking farm!"
Lines I would have paid good money to hear:
"I've had it with all these motherfucking Sith in this motherfucking galaxy!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking wedding rehearsals with this motherfucking piano!"
"I've had it with all these motherfucking ghosts in this motherfucking hotel room!"
But we know he's hit the bottom of the barrel if Uwe Boll ever rejects him despite the line:
"I've had it with all these motherfucking goombahs in this motherfucking sewer!"
Solomon
Alas, as someone who's seen peers caught up in this stereotype...
Cantrip (level 0)
Escape Parents' Basement
Alteration/Enchantment
Range: Touch
Duration: Permanent
Material Component: Your own place to live
This ritual, when cast simultaneously by one or more wizards with a combined credit score of at least 700 and their own place to live, causes the subject to come live with them. The subject will now permanently live in the new residence until one of the three criteria is met: Divine Intervention, Casting Remove Curse, or Getting A Job.
Despite the low casting level of this spell, the prohibitively high credit score requirement and scarcity of the material requirement often means that a single individual in possession of both is highly unlikely to be willing to cast this spell without some reciprocal service in return. As is more commonly the case, a large group of friends will pool their resources to cast this spell on the subject, such that 5 people sharing a 1-bedroom apartment now becomes 6-people sharing a 1-bedroom apartment.
S.
...is becoming more and more like Slashdot?
Misleading Headlines, Irrelevant Stories, Flamebaiting Comments: you heard it here first!
Solomon Chang
It's the perfect camouflage for them. Looking outside my window I can already count six transformers hanging off the power poles in the street, and no one's so much as raising a brow.
Solomon
Slashdot headlines are getting worse and worse, if not for the sake of sensationalism. So, Team Fortress 2 confirms:
- Elvis is alive
- Area 51 experiments
- JFK's *real* assassins
- The existence of the Illuminati
- Pharmaceutical conspiracies
- Chupacabras
- ECHELON-style monitoring
Sorry, Team Fortress Developers, Deus Ex beat you to the punch 5 years ago!
Solomon
No wonder everyone who seems to know anything about "Defense Against the Dark Arts" are all uber-geeks!
Solomon
> No electronics to kill.
...but some police departments interpreted it to refer to the ethnicity of the offending driver, as opposed to how crispy you wanted them to be.
That's why this microwave transmitter has a dial with the following settings:
Microprocessor Disruption (default)
Sparky Metal
Mortal Kombat Raiden
That last setting is the most noticeable. I preferred the old microwave emitter, which referred specifically to your driver:
Light
Medium
Dark
Solomon
So, that big half-white, half-yellow book my phone company gives me every year isn't the Terror Watch List for my local neighborhood? Could've fooled me.
Solomon
Actually, they were able to cut the development time short by changing the final goal of the game.
Instead of trying to evolve single-celled life into a viable space-faring race to do battle with each other, your new goal is to evolve single-celled life into viable space-faring ravenous aliens to be the bad guys in Duke Nukem Forever.
Solomon
I use .odf when I'm feeling vindictive. Sometimes, a company will send me an email, whose entire body is otherwise stored in a .doc file, when it could have otherwise fit in just the regular body. I re-save the document as an .odf, make my changes or answer their questions, and then send it back to them.
S.
> I wonder if they will ever allow midi to work as a controller as my
> Roland V-Drums would be totally beyond awesome to use in place of the
> pack-in drum controller.
I doubt it. Companies want to make as much money as possible, and which of the following makes more money: letting the user use an open-standards (albeit expensive) MIDI controller he already owns, or creating a proprietary POS controller for exclusive use with your game?
I could actually see someone modifying a Roland GR-1 to play Guitar Hero with. After that, "Pipe Organ Hero" couldn't be too far behind... I'd hate to see Hard Mode!
Solomon Chang
When I first heard that the rate of the universe's expansion was actually accelerating, I came up with a weird hypothesis after a few days...
Time in our frame of reference is slowing down.
The only way that seemed possible was if we were traveling at speeds close to c, but that didn't sound feasible since we were observing objects that were moving away from us, in all directions. Then another weird thought occurred to me...
Our observed universe is self-contained within the event horizon of a giant black hole.
We're closer to the singularity, and accelerating towards it faster than objects closer to the edge of the event horizon. Time will move slower for us, and far away objects will appear to speed up. An outside observer (if such a thing could possibly exist) would perceive our universe as shrinking, but in our current frame of reference, we still think of it as expanding.
One other observation that lends to this possibility is the fact that we have not seen evidence of other "Big Bangs" or other "Universes". If the Big Bang happened once, shouldn't it be a repeatable occurrence in the limitless void of space?
Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.
Solomon Chang