The bare fact is that scientists rarely have to please any end-users, and they never have to please everyone. Programmers and computer scientists are always having to check with customers. Scientists just check with the people that hired them. Those people check with customers, but those people are very rich and can afford to not please everyone.
People are stupid. People asked for stupid stuff on their software. The software is stupid.
Poke fun all you want, but since the invention of photo-paper, science has contributed absolutely nothing to the important field of pornography distribution. Look how far we've come.
-the Pedro Picasso
The big difference between an acceptable faith and a... let's say "secret society" is the secrets. Scientology is rife with secret. One could say it's based on secret. The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) has quite a few secrets, and they aren't looked favorably upon by many Christians for this reason. The Roman Catholic Church to my knowledge doesn't have any secret doctrines. (And hey, give me specifics if they do.) Doctrines would be very hard to follow if they were secret. Catholics publish their doctrine in the Catechism which is available for believers and non-believers alike.
Also, major religions have stopped endorsing killing the non-believers. The Catholic Church has formally apologized for this behavior in the past. That's hard to do when an organization considers itself the Church of the Almighty God. (You may be able to tell that I have some affinity for the Roman Catholic Church, though I am not Catholic myself)
Scientology is dangerous, as in causing deaths. Their obsessions with their oddball practices of "auditing," learning the secrets of Scientology, and giving money to Scientology often destroy followers' lives. Does anyone else wonder why this church is the most litigious organization in the United States (and there are a lot of lawsuits in this country)?
I won't say that Scientology is an evil cult. I will merely say that Scientology is a dangerous, ligtigious, exploitative, secretive money pyramid organization that was founded by a mediocre science fiction writer in order to make money.
-the Pedro Picasso
Arrg! Darn my knee-jerk reaction! I'm so quick to assume that people are stupid and that I'm so intelligent that I didn't even bother to read your sig.
Damn my feeble brain. Oh well. You've got the idiot's voice down pat. Now let's see you do Moe from the Simpsons.
-the Pedro Picasso
That's right. In my opinion, punching someone in the face for the expressed purpose of making them angry is a form of art. Slapping our man Gates in the face with a pie is a higher form of art. Lots of art makes people angry, and lots of art deals with punching people in the face.
I can think of Marilyn Manson, WWF Villains, and the Three Stooges off the top of my head.
-the Pedro Picasso
You're absolutely right. Writing the "freshmen" first is a good idea. They don't have quite as much of a postal backlog anyway. I read that letter, too, and was pretty heartened by it.
The way Congress works, most of the people who voted for that bill never looked at it. It was a bi-partisan initiative with strong financial backing. The committee that recommended it considered that it would be another limit on fair use, but they probably never considered its effect on programmers and its conflict with the First Amendment. I tend to think they were looking at a law with powerful backers and few visible enemies and voted the way they thought would make them look good and help the country. Who would vote against a flashy name like Digital Millenium Copyright Act?
-the Pedro Picasso
I'm sure you've all noticed that Gameboy is the system that just won't die. People started getting "Tetrisized" and then the same people who chuckled at Sega calling Gameboy's screen "creamed spinach color," were buying Gameboys anyway. It's lasted twice as long as any other major system in terms of viable sales. Sure it's had some upgrades, but c'mon, it's ten years old. This is a testament to what simple fun games and company support will do for a system.
Random people are even coding their own games for the system in assembler and C. Crazy random people. Always getting into trouble.
What crazy things do you do to get your flaky Gameboys to work? Post a reply or email the cult.
-the Pedro Picasso
A good point. A fun example I like to use is the fact that nowadays (love that word) people have to study Shakespeare for a while before they get his sex jokes fart jokes and really bad puns. Look at the Sampson and Gregory conversation that kicks off Romeo and Juliet (after the prologue). It's funny as heck, but you really have to know what colliars, a cholers, and a collars are. It's art, but only to those who understand. To everybody else, it's Elizabethan gibberish... or Perl, depending.
Please, people. This sort of rampant display of the idiocy of the DMCA (pdf) is fun, but it's not going to help much. What we need is real action. 2600 has already shown that the MPAA has links posted to the code their fighting against (thought the Disney online search engine). This sort of rampant proliferation is cute, but it's not producing results.
Things that actually help:
OpenDVD - actually learn about the DMCA and the case against it.
US Congress - Hand write your representatives and inform them of your digust with this law
Don't get me wrong. Sig files are fun and using this tiny piece of code in every post might help, but this situation isn't going to get better unless we put some real work into it.
-the Pedro Picasso
When people read stories like this, I hope they remember the basic principles the internet and computers were founded on. Freedom.
I'm sorry. I'm afraid this isn't true. The US Government was founded by men who valued (among other things) freedom, but ARPANet was founded by the US Government. It had more to do with military supremacy than freedom at its inception. We have used it for freedom, and we hope to continue to use it for freedom, but we must understand that laws like the DMCA (pdf) are slowly eroding that freedom as are projects like Carnivore. The kind of freedom we enjoy wasn't granted by God. It wasn't encoded into this international jumble of computational devices. It's not guarunteed, and it's not sticking around. For more information about the erosion of freedom, ask the guys at 2600. They love to talk about it. If you actually want to help, donate to the legal support of freedom at The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Of course, when Al Gore invented the internet, it was all about freedom....and democracy....and health care.
-the Pedro Picasso
Art isn't necessarily beauty. I've gotten into too many arguements about this to just let it go. You will find as many different interpretations of what art is as you will find artists you actually appreciate.
Mine:Art is a human expression meant to evoke an emotional response.
I'm not right, really, but neither are you. I would say most code isn't art. I would also say code can be art. After all it is only a set of choppy written instructions. Are recipies art? Is command based haiku art? Is this post art?
(Answers: yes, yes, no)
It's not really the algorithm itself they're protecting. It's their exclusive right to sanction devices that decrypt it that they wish to protect.
DMCA 1201(a)(1) is absolutely all it takes to legally keep you from writing a few lines of your own code on a napkin and passing it to a friend. This is the first bit of legislation that does this. It was lobbied by the MPAA, recommended by the Congressional sub-committees, and passed unanimously by legislators who likely thought they were acting in the interests of the American people. Would you vote against a bill with such a trendy name and so few powerful antagonists? What bills will follow this one in regulating computer programs? If this sort of thing continues, we could even end up with a Federal Source Code Review Agency. Sure it sounds stupid, but there's enough money involved to do it.
Protect your rights as programmers:
Learn what you can about the case. Keep up with the news, and don't get bored with it. This isn't about DVDs, it's about whether or not we are allowed to write and copyright our own code.
Support the fight in legislation by sending a hand written letter to your congressional representatives expressing your digust with the law and your request for one that dismisses it.
Support those fighting on the front lines by reading 2600, the Hacker Quarterly. (They will ask you to donate to the EFF.)
You could also support me personally by buying one of my (sourceCode == freeSpeech) T-shirts. It won't help the actual issue. In case you thought otherwise, wearing T-shirts rarely ever helps an issue. But it will help me get through college. (/shamelessPlug>
If you are a programmer, you should care. If you're tired of these political fights "getting old," why not get your news from USA Today instead of Slashdot.
Without our fighting this, we are aquiescing that a computer program is essentially a device in and of itself and needs to be regulated by the US Government. This is simply not true, and I would rather my government didn't think it was.
Your credit card example--while better than Judge Kaplan's assassination example--is flawed in that there are no legal uses for that information as presented. That already falls under anti-fraud laws.
While I would like to retain the right to protect my copyrights, I would like much more to retain the right to write the content which I wish to copyright. By the current rules, there is code I am not aloud to write. There might as well be recipies I'm not allowed to write; or plays; or books, and so forth.
You make a strong point that this is a limited collection of people that usually keep to themselves and are rarely thought of as contributing to mainstream culture (and that's a direct quote). Still there exists a chance--however infinitesimal--that a word may make it from the jargon file into pop culture. My favorite example being "cyberspace"--a term coined by William Gibson's Neuromancer in the early 1980s.
Also, the non-word in question, "boxen," is not entirely identical in use to the word "boxes" in that its use seems restricted to the metal boxes that encase computational devices.
Plus it's a cute word. Don't get me wrong I'm not a linguasexual or anything (no offense to those who are), but I think this specific term has a little bit of charm over the term it actually does duplicate "computers." Besides, it's not half as heinous as the word "biotch," ('bEE-och) which I've lobbied against in rap music journals for as long as it's been in use.
On these points we disagree. That's fine. I hereby grand you permission to have your own (pre-approved) opinion. What I would like to know now is you've targeted this specific usage of a nonstandard English word. Surely you've seen the gross proliferation of almost non-sensical words and phrases that are thrown around here. (All your base are now mine.) While I applaud your style and eloquence, I wonder why you put up the effort. Was this just one term too many, or are you taking the every little bit helps approach?
"May I release my ankles now? My arms hurt."
--the Pedro Picasso
Oddly enough, that's exactly how language evolves. For years, writers, editors, critics, journalists, and street weirdos have been evolving language behind our backs. Heck, the word "duh" made it into Webster's dictionary? (That's an atrocious example, I know.) Even marketing people have gotten the word "lite" into common parlance. It's a really facinating field of anthropology.
If you're still not convinced, try swallowing the fact that one man (well arguably one man) evolved the language single-handedly (inventing hundreds of words still in use).
No, a bunch of self-appointed cultural superiors trying to look trendy on message boards don't make a legitimate quorum of language shifting legislators, but language never evolved that way. It evolves by people shoehorning new meanings into old words and hammering together new words for old meanings.
"Gibberish or Yiddish? You decide."
-the Pedro Picasso
This discussion has been going on for years, and it raises some interesting questions. Well interesting to me anyway.
Is it better to use a service as is, try to get the owners to improve it, or take the time to improve the code yourself?
Is it trendier to protect Slashdot from flames and intelligent criticism, or to criticize Slashdot for problems they either won't fix or don't have the resources to fix.
Do "Taco and the Andovers" not care about the site or do they work all day trying to maintain it and half the night trying to improve it?
Is "Pat" male or female? (Why does Pat always get into these lists?)
How long are you willing to continue reading Slashdot while you have a low opinion of it?
Will this community of geek subculture splinter off into hundreds of even smaller subcultures that replicate the site on to infinity?
How many users does it take to turn a community into a flaming pile of troll dung?
Won't someone think about the children?
"Legitimate questions... no answers."
-the Pedro Picasso
Not only was it a Republican congress who passed the DMCA, it was passed unamimously in congress. Who would oppose a bill with such powerful proponents and such a trendy name? You won't find a political party out there that backs source code as free speech.
I would suggest we all get off our collective ass and write our congress members. (And if you are not part of the "collective ass" then have no fear. You will be assimilated.) While e-mail and websites rarely get their attention, handwritten letters from constituents often do get read. I intend to put up a form letter on my website pretty soon.
Of course, you could actually support the legal battle by donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (your money will go straight to the appeal team), or you could support me personally by buying one of my t-shirts (your money will go straight to me). Mainly, you should read some of the primary documents (like Kaplan's decision) and write a well constructed letter to your Congressional representatives. If we can't show the courts how unconstitutional this bill is, we can at least show Congress what a bad idea it is.
Language evolves. So does dorkdom. Ours is the fastest moving culture on the planet right now. I would rather not see it stifled by philistines before it reaches its final maturation.
I feel this way mainly because most of us lack the physical attractiveness to breed, and so this generation may be the last. I want to see what we do with our short time on the planet.
So if you really want to correct some English, why don't you teach the script kiddies to properly spell the word pornography, and leave my well meaning but linguistically quirky bretheren alone. So there!...ya pansy.
--
Actually, Fox Interactive's Alien vs. Predator--while being a kick-ass game--hides the fact that its 3d engine isn't state of the art by keeping everything really dark. Sure they had other reasons (the game is really creepy), but it ended up covering for them.
I've always enjoyed the intelligent Micro$$oft bashing here at Slashdot, but this post was really more of a rant. Maybe it's just a bad day for the Commander.
Or maybe he's overtired of that vapid, vacuuous non-entity of a corporation with their non-refunding, scare tactic, buggy software, screwing with standards, charging in with lawyers, and EULA a mile long ways.
You are absolutely right. The hacking itself is not entertaining but the culture is. Now what people don't realize is that movies about subcultures are not blockbusters, like the not so recent "HACKERS" tried to be. They're small films, like "Clerks."
I'm currently starting a screenplay about hackers entitled, "CRACKERS PHREAKS AND LAMERS" (playing on the jargon file entry and the fact that the actual cp&l movie was called HACKERS). I'd want it to be a black and white no star hundred minute about the kind of people that write elegant code in their spare time. They're funny. They're eccentric. They're smart as fsck, and they've got more inside jokes than a Monty Python Reunion.
Finally, the difference between great hacker fiction and bad hacker fiction is the background jargon. It can't be bs. It MUST be written so that IF you don't understand it, it doesn't really matter, but IF you do understand it, it makes perfect sense.
The example is M*A*S*H. Few of us are really sure what they were doing on those tables, but they were interesting, you didn't mind watching them, and the jargon made sense. That's all that's needed to make something that can be boring into good writing.
I'm currently a sophomore at North Carolina State University in computer science. Living in Raleigh, it was the most obvious choice for me too. I applied at Chapel Hill and a few other places, but I'm really glad I came to State. You get a good education (ie. not just training) and there are a lot of opportunities for job placement. We're even starting our own Linux distro (cuz who isn't?).
As an example, I'm currently in an assembly class. Now, is there any reason for me to use Turbo Assember for Intel systems in the future. Not terribly likely, but it does teach me how to be careful, clever, and even elegant in my programming. The professors are very interesting, and very helpful. I'm really becoming a much better coder than I could be learning on my own or in a trade school.
I'm looking forward to going into the upper level AI and OS courses as well as programming theory.
Unfortunately I'm currently having to deal with Physics II and Calculus III, which I find barely relevant, and very tedious. Still you get the whole well rounded education bit, and if I would pass this stuff the first time around I wouldn't have to deal with it ever again.
Plus, we have a kick-ass theatre program. /Advertisement>
Did anyone notice how everyone was praying that Jar-jar would die, and then suddenly John-John bites the dust. Creepy. Geek Mojo, bad aim, horrible combination.
Okay, listen. Mr. Lucas makes movies the way he wants to and not the way anyone else wants to. He had a lot of money. He didn't spend it. He just funneled it all into Lucasfilm which spent it all making Episode I. He knew he was going to make butt-loads of money no matter how the film turned out so why the heck would he feel the need to "sell-out?"
The truth is, he made Episode I the way he wanted to and that was as a children's movie. George Lucas has children. He made this movie for them. He threw in some adult-candy (Darth Maul) and some teen candy (hey that Natalie Portman is some queen). Still overall, it was a kid's movie. So cry about it.
Finally, the light-hearted idiocy of this movie fits with the story. Nothing really big is happening right now. Naboo is a small silly place divided up between a seventeen year old girl and an obese frog-man. Barely worth the Jedi's notice. What this will build to is a good love story and finally a horrible tragedy. The third film will not be a "kid's movie." It will be serious, like Empire was serious. This series is not the trite EVERY MOVIE IS THE END OF THE WORLD that Star Trek is. It has levels, and broad strokes of color. Yes, Jar-jar sucks, but I laughed anyway. You should too.
Right on, pal. I think Harrison Ford said it best on the set. "George, you write great stuff, but you just can't read it." (That's an awful awful misquote by the way, so don't take it as his actual words.) BTW- Is this true? I heard that in Empire, when Leah says "I love you." Harrison Ford had a great deal of dialogue which he skipped over with an impromptu, "I know." which ended up being one of the great lines of Star Wars. Can anyone substantiate this?
George Lucas is a visual person. He's an epic scheme person. He's not a dialogue person. I bet he's not a great conversationalist.
His characters were not very deep. They were fairy tale pieces. Harrison Ford today wouldn't touch a role like that. I'm amazed that Sir Alec Guiness did at his age. It was a great set of films, but it wasn't an opportunity for great acting.
Oh, and it was just as much art as Beowulf and the Odyssey.
Slashdot Mirror
People are stupid. People asked for stupid stuff on their software. The software is stupid.
Poke fun all you want, but since the invention of photo-paper, science has contributed absolutely nothing to the important field of pornography distribution. Look how far we've come.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
The big difference between an acceptable faith and a ... let's say "secret society" is the secrets. Scientology is rife with secret. One could say it's based on secret. The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) has quite a few secrets, and they aren't looked favorably upon by many Christians for this reason. The Roman Catholic Church to my knowledge doesn't have any secret doctrines. (And hey, give me specifics if they do.) Doctrines would be very hard to follow if they were secret. Catholics publish their doctrine in the Catechism which is available for believers and non-believers alike.
Also, major religions have stopped endorsing killing the non-believers. The Catholic Church has formally apologized for this behavior in the past. That's hard to do when an organization considers itself the Church of the Almighty God. (You may be able to tell that I have some affinity for the Roman Catholic Church, though I am not Catholic myself)
Scientology is dangerous, as in causing deaths. Their obsessions with their oddball practices of "auditing," learning the secrets of Scientology, and giving money to Scientology often destroy followers' lives. Does anyone else wonder why this church is the most litigious organization in the United States (and there are a lot of lawsuits in this country)?
I won't say that Scientology is an evil cult. I will merely say that Scientology is a dangerous, ligtigious, exploitative, secretive money pyramid organization that was founded by a mediocre science fiction writer in order to make money.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
Damn my feeble brain. Oh well. You've got the idiot's voice down pat. Now let's see you do Moe from the Simpsons.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
That's right. In my opinion, punching someone in the face for the expressed purpose of making them angry is a form of art. Slapping our man Gates in the face with a pie is a higher form of art. Lots of art makes people angry, and lots of art deals with punching people in the face.
I can think of Marilyn Manson, WWF Villains, and the Three Stooges off the top of my head.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
The way Congress works, most of the people who voted for that bill never looked at it. It was a bi-partisan initiative with strong financial backing. The committee that recommended it considered that it would be another limit on fair use, but they probably never considered its effect on programmers and its conflict with the First Amendment. I tend to think they were looking at a law with powerful backers and few visible enemies and voted the way they thought would make them look good and help the country. Who would vote against a flashy name like Digital Millenium Copyright Act?
-the Pedro Picasso
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)
--
Random people are even coding their own games for the system in assembler and C. Crazy random people. Always getting into trouble.
What crazy things do you do to get your flaky Gameboys to work? Post a reply or email the cult.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
A good point. A fun example I like to use is the fact that nowadays (love that word) people have to study Shakespeare for a while before they get his sex jokes fart jokes and really bad puns. Look at the Sampson and Gregory conversation that kicks off Romeo and Juliet (after the prologue). It's funny as heck, but you really have to know what colliars, a cholers, and a collars are. It's art, but only to those who understand. To everybody else, it's Elizabethan gibberish... or Perl, depending.
--
Things that actually help:
- OpenDVD - actually learn about the DMCA and the case against it.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation - donate to the actual court case
- US Congress - Hand write your representatives and inform them of your digust with this law
Don't get me wrong. Sig files are fun and using this tiny piece of code in every post might help, but this situation isn't going to get better unless we put some real work into it.-the Pedro Picasso
(sourceCode==freeSpeech)
--
I'm sorry. I'm afraid this isn't true. The US Government was founded by men who valued (among other things) freedom, but ARPANet was founded by the US Government. It had more to do with military supremacy than freedom at its inception. We have used it for freedom, and we hope to continue to use it for freedom, but we must understand that laws like the DMCA (pdf) are slowly eroding that freedom as are projects like Carnivore. The kind of freedom we enjoy wasn't granted by God. It wasn't encoded into this international jumble of computational devices. It's not guarunteed, and it's not sticking around. For more information about the erosion of freedom, ask the guys at 2600. They love to talk about it. If you actually want to help, donate to the legal support of freedom at The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Of course, when Al Gore invented the internet, it was all about freedom. ...and democracy. ...and health care.
-the Pedro Picasso
(sourceCode==freeSpeech)
--
Mine:Art is a human expression meant to evoke an emotional response.
I'm not right, really, but neither are you. I would say most code isn't art. I would also say code can be art. After all it is only a set of choppy written instructions. Are recipies art? Is command based haiku art? Is this post art?
(Answers: yes, yes, no)
-the Pedro Picasso
--
DMCA 1201(a)(1) is absolutely all it takes to legally keep you from writing a few lines of your own code on a napkin and passing it to a friend. This is the first bit of legislation that does this. It was lobbied by the MPAA, recommended by the Congressional sub-committees, and passed unanimously by legislators who likely thought they were acting in the interests of the American people. Would you vote against a bill with such a trendy name and so few powerful antagonists? What bills will follow this one in regulating computer programs? If this sort of thing continues, we could even end up with a Federal Source Code Review Agency. Sure it sounds stupid, but there's enough money involved to do it.
Protect your rights as programmers:
- Learn what you can about the case. Keep up with the news, and don't get bored with it. This isn't about DVDs, it's about whether or not we are allowed to write and copyright our own code.
- Support the fight in the courts by donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Support the fight in legislation by sending a hand written letter to your congressional representatives expressing your digust with the law and your request for one that dismisses it.
- Support those fighting on the front lines by reading 2600, the Hacker Quarterly. (They will ask you to donate to the EFF.)
You could also support me personally by buying one of my (sourceCode == freeSpeech) T-shirts. It won't help the actual issue. In case you thought otherwise, wearing T-shirts rarely ever helps an issue. But it will help me get through college. (/shamelessPlug>-the Pedro Picasso
--
Without our fighting this, we are aquiescing that a computer program is essentially a device in and of itself and needs to be regulated by the US Government. This is simply not true, and I would rather my government didn't think it was.
Your credit card example--while better than Judge Kaplan's assassination example--is flawed in that there are no legal uses for that information as presented. That already falls under anti-fraud laws.
While I would like to retain the right to protect my copyrights, I would like much more to retain the right to write the content which I wish to copyright. By the current rules, there is code I am not aloud to write. There might as well be recipies I'm not allowed to write; or plays; or books, and so forth.
Shameless Plug:
-the Pedro Picasso
--
Also, the non-word in question, "boxen," is not entirely identical in use to the word "boxes" in that its use seems restricted to the metal boxes that encase computational devices.
Plus it's a cute word. Don't get me wrong I'm not a linguasexual or anything (no offense to those who are), but I think this specific term has a little bit of charm over the term it actually does duplicate "computers." Besides, it's not half as heinous as the word "biotch," ('bEE-och) which I've lobbied against in rap music journals for as long as it's been in use.
On these points we disagree. That's fine. I hereby grand you permission to have your own (pre-approved) opinion. What I would like to know now is you've targeted this specific usage of a nonstandard English word. Surely you've seen the gross proliferation of almost non-sensical words and phrases that are thrown around here. (All your base are now mine.) While I applaud your style and eloquence, I wonder why you put up the effort. Was this just one term too many, or are you taking the every little bit helps approach?
"May I release my ankles now? My arms hurt."
--the Pedro Picasso
--
If you're still not convinced, try swallowing the fact that one man (well arguably one man) evolved the language single-handedly (inventing hundreds of words still in use).
No, a bunch of self-appointed cultural superiors trying to look trendy on message boards don't make a legitimate quorum of language shifting legislators, but language never evolved that way. It evolves by people shoehorning new meanings into old words and hammering together new words for old meanings.
"Gibberish or Yiddish? You decide."
-the Pedro Picasso
--
"Legitimate questions... no answers."
-the Pedro Picasso
--
I would suggest we all get off our collective ass and write our congress members. (And if you are not part of the "collective ass" then have no fear. You will be assimilated.) While e-mail and websites rarely get their attention, handwritten letters from constituents often do get read. I intend to put up a form letter on my website pretty soon.
Of course, you could actually support the legal battle by donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (your money will go straight to the appeal team), or you could support me personally by buying one of my t-shirts (your money will go straight to me). Mainly, you should read some of the primary documents (like Kaplan's decision) and write a well constructed letter to your Congressional representatives. If we can't show the courts how unconstitutional this bill is, we can at least show Congress what a bad idea it is.
Can you spot the shameless plug in this post?
--
I feel this way mainly because most of us lack the physical attractiveness to breed, and so this generation may be the last. I want to see what we do with our short time on the planet.
So if you really want to correct some English, why don't you teach the script kiddies to properly spell the word pornography, and leave my well meaning but linguistically quirky bretheren alone. So there! ...ya pansy.
--
--
Actually, Fox Interactive's Alien vs. Predator--while being a kick-ass game--hides the fact that its 3d engine isn't state of the art by keeping everything really dark. Sure they had other reasons (the game is really creepy), but it ended up covering for them.
--
Or maybe he's overtired of that vapid, vacuuous non-entity of a corporation with their non-refunding, scare tactic, buggy software, screwing with standards, charging in with lawyers, and EULA a mile long ways.
I'm currently starting a screenplay about hackers entitled, "CRACKERS PHREAKS AND LAMERS" (playing on the jargon file entry and the fact that the actual cp&l movie was called HACKERS). I'd want it to be a black and white no star hundred minute about the kind of people that write elegant code in their spare time. They're funny. They're eccentric. They're smart as fsck, and they've got more inside jokes than a Monty Python Reunion.
Finally, the difference between great hacker fiction and bad hacker fiction is the background jargon. It can't be bs. It MUST be written so that IF you don't understand it, it doesn't really matter, but IF you do understand it, it makes perfect sense.
The example is M*A*S*H. Few of us are really sure what they were doing on those tables, but they were interesting, you didn't mind watching them, and the jargon made sense. That's all that's needed to make something that can be boring into good writing.
As an example, I'm currently in an assembly class. Now, is there any reason for me to use Turbo Assember for Intel systems in the future. Not terribly likely, but it does teach me how to be careful, clever, and even elegant in my programming. The professors are very interesting, and very helpful. I'm really becoming a much better coder than I could be learning on my own or in a trade school.
I'm looking forward to going into the upper level AI and OS courses as well as programming theory.
Unfortunately I'm currently having to deal with Physics II and Calculus III, which I find barely relevant, and very tedious. Still you get the whole well rounded education bit, and if I would pass this stuff the first time around I wouldn't have to deal with it ever again.
Plus, we have a kick-ass theatre program.
/Advertisement>
Did anyone notice how everyone was praying that Jar-jar would die, and then suddenly John-John bites the dust. Creepy. Geek Mojo, bad aim, horrible combination.
The truth is, he made Episode I the way he wanted to and that was as a children's movie. George Lucas has children. He made this movie for them. He threw in some adult-candy (Darth Maul) and some teen candy (hey that Natalie Portman is some queen). Still overall, it was a kid's movie. So cry about it.
Finally, the light-hearted idiocy of this movie fits with the story. Nothing really big is happening right now. Naboo is a small silly place divided up between a seventeen year old girl and an obese frog-man. Barely worth the Jedi's notice. What this will build to is a good love story and finally a horrible tragedy. The third film will not be a "kid's movie." It will be serious, like Empire was serious. This series is not the trite EVERY MOVIE IS THE END OF THE WORLD that Star Trek is. It has levels, and broad strokes of color. Yes, Jar-jar sucks, but I laughed anyway. You should too.
George Lucas is a visual person. He's an epic scheme person. He's not a dialogue person. I bet he's not a great conversationalist.
His characters were not very deep. They were fairy tale pieces. Harrison Ford today wouldn't touch a role like that. I'm amazed that Sir Alec Guiness did at his age. It was a great set of films, but it wasn't an opportunity for great acting.
Oh, and it was just as much art as Beowulf and the Odyssey.
This whole thing is a plot perpetrated by the "MiB" led by an attractive Will Smith look-alike. The plot is to "gib" people they think are too smart.
hmmm...noisy cricket as a Quake III weapon. Interesting.