When I was a young man, working at Software Etc., in the Golden Age of 16bit video games, I ran into this. I had a Mom come in with a real attitude problem.
Her problem was she hated video games, but her son was the only kid in his class who didn't have a console and he really wanted one. So she said, but "I want to protect him from this garbage," and pointed at Sonic Blast Man for the Super Nintendo, apparently at random.
I told her, "No reason to buy a console. Here buy this copy of Mario is Missing for your home PC." After she left I laughed and laughed.
I'd feel sorry for the kid, but he did send his horrible mother into my store.
Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Perhaps La Pierre was disappointed in the Xbox 360 version of Splatterhouse. I know I was.
Truthfully, this is part of living in a country where power is split between a gerontocracy and people who hate stereotypically masculine things. The oldsters hate young people stuff (Video Games) and the anti-male people hate masculine stuff (Guns and Video Games), so the set ends up intersecting at video games. That's really all it's about.
I was watching that TV series on Netflix "House of Cards," in which the most powerful congressman in America enjoys First Person Shooters in his free time. To me that puts the series into the realm of futuristic science fiction, but some day that may actually be true. (After the current lot die, I guess.)
This is good advice, but there's a trend in talking about Sandy Hook that bothers me.
The thing about Sandy Hook is people keep talking about kids. Well, the only kids involved were being shot at by an adult man. It's not that this isn't good advice, it's that this tendency to infantilize Adam Lanza kind of sickens me.
If he was committing carjackings on behalf of the Bloods, or was an up and comer in the New York Mafia, would he get the same treatment?
It bothered me after Columbine, but at least in that case despite the age of the terrorists (who should properly have been thought of as adult terrorists and not children) there was the excuse that they were High School students, Lanza was at least two years past High School, well past the arbitrary age we decide separates adults from children.
I wish we could talk about the Second Amendment without talking about the NRA, some of us who are in favor of the Second Amendment think that Wayne La Pierre is an addled blowhard.
Frankly, I still think the NRA's Sandy Hook press conference did more harm than good to the Right to Bear Arms.
As time passes it looks more and more like Adam Lanza was a Valerie Solanas type (not, Solanis didn't play video games) , a terrorist without a movement. I don't understand why an adult man, who if he was committing armed robbery wouldn't be treated with these kind of kid gloves, gets to avoid responsibility for being fully functional and knowing what he was doing when he turns to terrorism. Most of these guys know exactly what we are doing, I guess we are lucky Christopher Dorner left a manifesto or they'd be blaming him on Grand Theft Auto, too.
"I would like to rub it in the face of my friends who are paying big bucks for brand name companies like Verizon, AT&T and T-mobile. My cell phone provider just charges me 10$ and his coverage map does not include my home."
Um, the FCC wants you to pay for overpriced cell service from their customers, the Big Telcos.
Most political contributors, no matter how rich, haven't gone to the trouble to create a political machine. This is what makes the Koch Brothers different from many other wealthy people who contribute to politics.
To say the Koch Brothers are conservative kind of misses the point, the Koch Brothers fund things like think tanks and the American Legislative Exchange Council so that what is, and is not, considered conservative is decided by them. It's a huge political machine that operates in multiple states.
After all, why does so much of Republican ideology boil down to "Oil!" Oil, properly understood, is a substance, not an ideology. The answer is that the great Republican political machine is controlled by the oil interests. (Oh, and there is a Democratic political machine controlled by Wall Street, but it's not the well-oiled machine that the Republicans have, which is why you have more prominent dissenters in the Democratic party than in the Republican party.)
Wow! Looks like some Koch Brother's fans have mod points on Slashdot, my comment (see below) got modded -1, Troll.
Interesting:
Assault rifles are good, they supported by the Second Amendment as a bulwark against government tyranny.
Church is fine, I mean if you believe in that sort of thing. I think it's a little silly, given that clown in the Vatican, but whatever floats yer boat.
Destroying the planet? Oh, I doubt he believes deliberately destroying Tesla will have much impact either way.
However, Tea Party rallies?
Ok, now you are getting somewhere. No, he probably doesn't attend the rallies, but the Tea Party is just an astro-turf organization funded by Big Oil and specifically the Koch brothers. The Koch Brothers are probably bribing either Broder or the NYT as an organization as well.
With the kind of economic resources the Brothers grim can bring to bear, getting a test scuttled in a major newspaper is nothing. At any rate, someone decided to skew the test, and I doubt it was because Broder has a personal grudge against electric cars or Tesla motors.
As always, follow the money and ask, "who benefits?"
Assault rifles are good, they supported by the Second Amendment as a bulwark against government tyranny.
Church is fine, I mean if you believe in that sort of thing. I think it's a little silly, given that clown in the Vatican, but whatever floats yer boat.
Destroying the planet? Oh, I doubt he believes deliberately destroying Tesla will have much impact either way.
However, Tea Party rallies?
Ok, now you are getting somewhere. No, he probably doesn't attend the rallies, but the Tea Party is just an astro-turf organization funded by Big Oil and specifically the Koch brothers. The Koch Brothers are probably bribing either Broder or the NYT as an organization as well.
With the kind of economic resources the Brothers grim can bring to bear, getting a test scuttled in a major newspaper is nothing. At any rate, someone decided to skew the test, and I doubt it was because Broder has a personal grudge against electric cars or Tesla motors.
As always, follow the money and ask, "who benefits?"
That's Gail Dines who said that. Gail Dines has also stated that women get Brazilian waxes so they can look more like children.
Women actually get Brazilian waxes to prevent pubic hair from peaking out on their bikinis, but let's not interfere with Ms. Dines rich fantasy life, shall we?
It's a metaphor. Lot's of computer related stuff (files, desktops, The Web, etc) use metaphors as a quick way to explain what they mean.
Cyberspace is usually a poorly explained metaphor, though, that's the problem. I blame the fact that the term used sounds "futuristicky" while simultaneously sounding incredibly lame.
Still, the other metaphor for cyberspace, "The Information Superhighway," is actually even lamer in my opinion. (A personal favorite metaphor for me is probably "A series of tubes, and not a dump truck," because that has actual poetry to it... you can really feel the person struggling to explain what he thinks the Internet is there.
Of course, he was mocked mercilessly, and rightly so, for that because it isn't quite there, and because it was in the context of some seriously hostile action against the Net on behalf of the telecoms.)
"When the people at the top of our complex financial system, with the trust and responsibility placed on them to safeguard the well-being of the whole community, behave in such an anti-social manner they belong behind bars."
Hey now, it's not like they were downloading a bunch of academic journals or something!
People who mainly buy Steam games, also, are not mainly console gamers. I don't think Steam is currently available on any consoles as a video game purchasing service, and more importantly one reason people choose consoles over upgrading their PCs is because consoles are supposed to be simple. New consoles are not being sold as consoles, more and more they are being sold as crippled PCs.
I'm sure a certain amount of console gamers also own general purpose PCs. At a certain point, they are going to scratch their head and say, "Why not just upgrade my PC?"
"Using the same Super Disc technology as the proposed SNES drive, Sony began development on what was to eventually become the PlayStaion. Initially called the Super Disc, it was supposed to be able to play both SNES cartridges and CD-ROMs, of which Sony was to be the 'sole worldwide licenser,' as stated in the contract. Nintendo was now to be at the mercy of Sony, who could manufacture their own CDs, play SNES carts, and play Sony CDs. Needless to say, Nintendo began to get worried." ---- History of the PlayStation
"A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." -- Charles Fort
The United States is a Third World country masquerading as a First World Country. Some so-called Third World countries are actually nicer than the US (specifically the parts of the US where unrestrained resource extraction is going on).
Besides, the US doesn't have as many poor people oriented businesses as a lot of third world countries. You won't find a cheap food stand with decent, nutritious food in the US like you'll find all over Bangkok, for example. Instead you have to spend a mint at Whole Foods to get non-chemically altered food..
The advantage of the US is supposed to be access to technology. Third worlder's I meet here tend to get upset at the massive weight gain they experience over here from things like juice (or rather, juice flavored corn syrup), but they will buy a few ipods to take back home. (These of course, are relatively wealthy third world people.)
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a young man, working at Software Etc., in the Golden Age of 16bit video games, I ran into this. I had a Mom come in with a real attitude problem.
Her problem was she hated video games, but her son was the only kid in his class who didn't have a console and he really wanted one. So she said, but "I want to protect him from this garbage," and pointed at Sonic Blast Man for the Super Nintendo, apparently at random.
I told her, "No reason to buy a console. Here buy this copy of Mario is Missing for your home PC." After she left I laughed and laughed.
I'd feel sorry for the kid, but he did send his horrible mother into my store.
--Gen. Jack D. Ripper
Perhaps La Pierre was disappointed in the Xbox 360 version of Splatterhouse. I know I was.
Truthfully, this is part of living in a country where power is split between a gerontocracy and people who hate stereotypically masculine things. The oldsters hate young people stuff (Video Games) and the anti-male people hate masculine stuff (Guns and Video Games), so the set ends up intersecting at video games. That's really all it's about.
I was watching that TV series on Netflix "House of Cards," in which the most powerful congressman in America enjoys First Person Shooters in his free time. To me that puts the series into the realm of futuristic science fiction, but some day that may actually be true. (After the current lot die, I guess.)
This is good advice, but there's a trend in talking about Sandy Hook that bothers me.
The thing about Sandy Hook is people keep talking about kids. Well, the only kids involved were being shot at by an adult man. It's not that this isn't good advice, it's that this tendency to infantilize Adam Lanza kind of sickens me.
If he was committing carjackings on behalf of the Bloods, or was an up and comer in the New York Mafia, would he get the same treatment?
It bothered me after Columbine, but at least in that case despite the age of the terrorists (who should properly have been thought of as adult terrorists and not children) there was the excuse that they were High School students, Lanza was at least two years past High School, well past the arbitrary age we decide separates adults from children.
That was supposed to be "(note, Solanas didn't play video games)"
I wish we could talk about the Second Amendment without talking about the NRA, some of us who are in favor of the Second Amendment think that Wayne La Pierre is an addled blowhard.
Frankly, I still think the NRA's Sandy Hook press conference did more harm than good to the Right to Bear Arms.
As time passes it looks more and more like Adam Lanza was a Valerie Solanas type (not, Solanis didn't play video games) , a terrorist without a movement. I don't understand why an adult man, who if he was committing armed robbery wouldn't be treated with these kind of kid gloves, gets to avoid responsibility for being fully functional and knowing what he was doing when he turns to terrorism. Most of these guys know exactly what we are doing, I guess we are lucky Christopher Dorner left a manifesto or they'd be blaming him on Grand Theft Auto, too.
"I would like to rub it in the face of my friends who are paying big bucks for brand name companies like Verizon, AT&T and T-mobile. My cell phone provider just charges me 10$ and his coverage map does not include my home."
Um, the FCC wants you to pay for overpriced cell service from their customers, the Big Telcos.
Who did you think they work for?
Most political contributors, no matter how rich, haven't gone to the trouble to create a political machine. This is what makes the Koch Brothers different from many other wealthy people who contribute to politics.
To say the Koch Brothers are conservative kind of misses the point, the Koch Brothers fund things like think tanks and the American Legislative Exchange Council so that what is, and is not, considered conservative is decided by them. It's a huge political machine that operates in multiple states.
After all, why does so much of Republican ideology boil down to "Oil!" Oil, properly understood, is a substance, not an ideology. The answer is that the great Republican political machine is controlled by the oil interests. (Oh, and there is a Democratic political machine controlled by Wall Street, but it's not the well-oiled machine that the Republicans have, which is why you have more prominent dissenters in the Democratic party than in the Republican party.)
Hi main job is probably fixing computers, not building new ones.
Wow! Looks like some Koch Brother's fans have mod points on Slashdot, my comment (see below) got modded -1, Troll.
Interesting:
I mean really, Big Oil had the New York Times help start a war with Iraq, skewing the results of an electric car test are nothing compared to that.
Assault rifles are good, they supported by the Second Amendment as a bulwark against government tyranny.
Church is fine, I mean if you believe in that sort of thing. I think it's a little silly, given that clown in the Vatican, but whatever floats yer boat.
Destroying the planet? Oh, I doubt he believes deliberately destroying Tesla will have much impact either way.
However, Tea Party rallies?
Ok, now you are getting somewhere. No, he probably doesn't attend the rallies, but the Tea Party is just an astro-turf organization funded by Big Oil and specifically the Koch brothers. The Koch Brothers are probably bribing either Broder or the NYT as an organization as well.
As T. Boone Pickens has stated, "The biggest deterrent to an energy plan in America is Koch Industries, They do not want an energy plan for America because they have the cheapest natural gas price they've ever had, and they're in the fertilizer business and they're in the chemical business. So their margins are huge. And they do not want you to have an energy plan, because if you had a plan, then natural gas prices would come up."
With the kind of economic resources the Brothers grim can bring to bear, getting a test scuttled in a major newspaper is nothing. At any rate, someone decided to skew the test, and I doubt it was because Broder has a personal grudge against electric cars or Tesla motors.
As always, follow the money and ask, "who benefits?"
Gail Dines was on Q&A last night and the first thing she said was just plain wrong. She repeated the tired complaint that the fad of the Brazilian wax was due to pornography.
Why Iceland is consulting this insane woman about sexual media is beyond me.
That's Gail Dines who said that. Gail Dines has also stated that women get Brazilian waxes so they can look more like children.
Women actually get Brazilian waxes to prevent pubic hair from peaking out on their bikinis, but let's not interfere with Ms. Dines rich fantasy life, shall we?
I like to put sleeves on my Magic: The Gathering and Call of Cthulhu cards during breaks.
It's a metaphor. Lot's of computer related stuff (files, desktops, The Web, etc) use metaphors as a quick way to explain what they mean.
Cyberspace is usually a poorly explained metaphor, though, that's the problem. I blame the fact that the term used sounds "futuristicky" while simultaneously sounding incredibly lame.
Still, the other metaphor for cyberspace, "The Information Superhighway," is actually even lamer in my opinion. (A personal favorite metaphor for me is probably "A series of tubes, and not a dump truck," because that has actual poetry to it... you can really feel the person struggling to explain what he thinks the Internet is there.
Of course, he was mocked mercilessly, and rightly so, for that because it isn't quite there, and because it was in the context of some seriously hostile action against the Net on behalf of the telecoms.)
Maybe he means this? Obama relents on drone guidelines details
An envelope stuffed with money to read it, and a briefcase full of money to do anything about it...
"When the people at the top of our complex financial system, with the trust and responsibility placed on them to safeguard the well-being of the whole community, behave in such an anti-social manner they belong behind bars."
Hey now, it's not like they were downloading a bunch of academic journals or something!
We need some perspective here.
People who mainly buy Steam games, also, are not mainly console gamers. I don't think Steam is currently available on any consoles as a video game purchasing service, and more importantly one reason people choose consoles over upgrading their PCs is because consoles are supposed to be simple. New consoles are not being sold as consoles, more and more they are being sold as crippled PCs.
I'm sure a certain amount of console gamers also own general purpose PCs. At a certain point, they are going to scratch their head and say, "Why not just upgrade my PC?"
Actually, that's inaccurate:
"Using the same Super Disc technology as the proposed SNES drive, Sony began development on what was to eventually become the PlayStaion. Initially called the Super Disc, it was supposed to be able to play both SNES cartridges and CD-ROMs, of which Sony was to be the 'sole worldwide licenser,' as stated in the contract. Nintendo was now to be at the mercy of Sony, who could manufacture their own CDs, play SNES carts, and play Sony CDs. Needless to say, Nintendo began to get worried."
---- History of the PlayStation
Yeah, Bill Gates just wants a taste... just to "wet his beak," as they say...
"You want to use Netflix? Pay me," says he.
All Microsoft wanted to do was Embrace Sony.... and after that Extend them into new areas....
There's a third E in that but I don't remember what it stands for...
"A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." -- Charles Fort
People unfortunate enough to live in certain parts of the United States are being systemically poisoned:
Bad Water, Bleeding Gum and Gangrene Legs in Victorville
The Dark Lord of Coal Country
The United States is a Third World country masquerading as a First World Country. Some so-called Third World countries are actually nicer than the US (specifically the parts of the US where unrestrained resource extraction is going on).
Besides, the US doesn't have as many poor people oriented businesses as a lot of third world countries. You won't find a cheap food stand with decent, nutritious food in the US like you'll find all over Bangkok, for example. Instead you have to spend a mint at Whole Foods to get non-chemically altered food..
The advantage of the US is supposed to be access to technology. Third worlder's I meet here tend to get upset at the massive weight gain they experience over here from things like juice (or rather, juice flavored corn syrup), but they will buy a few ipods to take back home. (These of course, are relatively wealthy third world people.)
I think His name was Jehovah, but the pronunciation always confuses me.