You don't actually know what an IRA is, do you? I'll be a nice guy and fill you in.
IRA stands for "Independant Retirement Account."
Basically, it's money that you personally set asside in special accounts which avoid certain taxes, so long as you don't touch them before you retire (or, in the case of a Roth IRA, so long as you don't touch the interest/dividends until then.)
Could the tax laws change? Sure, but even if you could not make tax-free investments, saving for retirement would still be a good idea, and the sooner in your life you start, the better off you will be. Set up a retirement account, and let it ride (in other words, roll all interest and/or dividends you get from it back into the account.)
Like Albert Einstein said, there is no force in the universe more powerful than compound interest. Letting it work for you could be the difference between spending your retirement in the Bahamas or North Dakota.
The screen I'm watching these perfect HD signals on is 119", not 199". That was a typo.
The Panasonic AE700U is a pretty darn good 1280x720 projector for the money, but it probably would not look nearly as good if I projected it on a screen that was about 15 feet wide.
(Also note: I'm not claiming that the mini can decode HD resolution Quicktime files or anything like that. It works well with the terrestrail HDTV signals via the EyeTV 500 because it's only handling the raw stream. File sizes are gigantic, but CPU demands are relatively low.)
I kind of liked the premise of command in Martian Successor Nadesico.
In that series, the Earth forced realized that space battles were fought on such a massive scale and so carefully coordinated by computers that the individual tactical decisions of a single ship captain were pretty much irrelevant. The captain was really only needed for the sake of crew morale.
Therefore, they initially chose old men who reminded people of nautical captains for their figurehead bridge commanders.
Later, in the time-frame where the series takes place, they realized that morale would be even better (and recruiting would be easier) if they used good-looking young women for their captains.
As was noted in Anandtech's review of the Mac Mini, they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work, and the software DVD decoder sucks.
As somebody who is using his Mac mini as a high def PVR and media center on a 199" screen, I can say without hesitation that Anandtech's review is full of shit.
Using the El Gato EyeTV, it works like a champ for both recording and playback of either 720p or 1080i signals.
Also, the DVD player in 10.3 works very well, and the new DVD player for Tiger is even better.
The only complaint I have (and it's a nitpick) is that the deinterlace software is not that great, which is a problem when watching cheaply-made interlaced DVD's (such as some anime TV show disks.) That's easy enough to get around, thanks to VLC.
(The new Tiger DVD Player does have some deinterlace control, but so far nothing that works nearly as well as the better filter options on VLC.)
I suppose you have to have lived the life of a sysadmin (down, not across) to get the most out of UF, but it is funny.
I could not possibly disagree more.
Reading UF is like spending your coffee break listening to the rookie members of your office network support team bitch about the same fucking things the guys they replaced bitched about (and the guys before them) while thinking it's the first time anybody has ever pointed this shit out before.
Well, it's not entirely like that... It's sort of like that, only really badly drawn.
Why is it that the Penny Arcade folks are always picking on the User Friendly crowd?
In the spirit of fairness I would like to point out that neither is even a little bit funny.
Ever.
They both simply put flippant comments about easy targets in word balloons, draw some pictures under them, and call it a comic strip. The only thing that makes them different from the shitty "Kathy" strips in the newspaper is that they are targeted at geeks instead of fat middle-aged spinsters.
The only thing I hate more than obvious pandering from low-quality "entertainment" is when it's trying to pander to me.
See, this is why I'm kinda rooting for "transhumanism" to catch on within the counterculture.
It was a brilliant move, whoever came up with it: Get all the people who are prone to buying into psycho cult nonsense to cut their own nards off, thus reducing the number of nut-jobs (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) in future generations.
That's because absolute belief in aliens is only slightly irrational. You gotta be plum fucking loco to be under thirty and think you will ever see a dime of Social Security.
Hope you're dumping lots of money into an IRA, kids. You'll thank yourselves later.
As usual noone will want to play the monotonous roles of healers
I loved playing a straight-up healer in EQ. I hardly played any other class.
In fact, for a while, I was playing on a computer which didn't quite meet the specs to handle some of the new zones, but got by just fine because of my quirky enjoyment of playing clerics. When we got into big combat and the graphics started to majorly lag, I just stared at the ground, and everything ran smoothly.
All I had to do was keep people from getting killed, communicate with hybrid healers so we wouldn't overlap, call for tanks to scrape MOBs off me whenever I was attacked, and direct the action based on the flow of how things were going. I was shockingly effective for somebody who wasn't even watching the fight directly.
Later, when I got a beefier PC with a fast graphics card, the only thing that really changed was that I got to see what was going on while monitoring health bars and relaxing on the perimeter of the combat.
Best of all, being one of the three rare-yet-in-demand commodities (along with the warrior and enchanter), I never had to put up with any bullshit. "Don't like the way I'm running the party? Okay see ya later. I'll just recruit one of the six other rangers and shamen who have been begging me for the chance to join the group. Good luck finding another cleric forming a party in the zone. The only other one on the map is four levels lower, and is already working as my back-up healer."
That's pretty much the only explanation that makes sense, except when it is revealed to her that she's actually Luke's sister, she's not even a little bit surprised. She "knew it" when it comes to her relationship with Luke, but it never occurred to her that she was adopted?
A fun take, but I find it much more likely that George Lucas is the one who didn't know what a parsec is.
Apart from confusing measurements of time and distance, the Kessel Run story seems likely to be true, in the context of the story. He's a smuggler, Kessel is said to be a mining planet elsewhere in the movie, and he does have a ship which is faster than most others when it is working properly.
The very next thing he says is , "don't be afraid, I won't hurt you." That line makes zero sense in the context of the new past which has now been written for them.
I don't mind these kind of plot holes, but it's obvious that this series simply doesn't quite work if watched in 1-6 order. Hopefully, over the years, most parents will share the experience of the original Star Wars with their kids before showing them episodes 1-3.
So Kenobi lies a lot, what's new? Or as he might say "I didn't own any droids... in a sense."
Except that's not what he said, and he had no reason to lie about it. He was genuinely baffled at the claim that R2 had anything to do with him, which is a plot hole.
Also note, he had to reassure R2 to not be afraid of him, meaning R2 didn't recognize him, either.
Now granted, Obi-Wan had gone from looking like Ewan McGreggor to looking like Alec Guinness in the 18-or-so years since they last meet... but how many bearded Jedi in brown robes who talk like that could there be in the galaxy?
It's only a plot hole if you believe Jedi Masters to be perfect and without sin. That was never part of the Star Wars mythology.
Obi-Wan walked away in agony because he couldn't stand to watch anymore. His best friend turned into a foul villain, and the prophesy he dedicated his entire adult life to suddenly appeared to not be true.
Yoda insisted on taking Luke's flashlight out of pure greed, and he was the greatest Jedi master there was. The Jedi are idealistic and monastic, but they are still human beings (or whatever Yoda is) and still have all the same flaws as anybody else.
...His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking....
One possible explanation: NiCad battery in the head, charger in the torso (where there is some kind of generator.) The battery got fried when he was shot in Empire, so he needed the juice from the charger to power up.
Another: The torso has nothing to do with head power. Chewie just happened to close a broken circuit (or open a short) when he put the head on.
Of all the possible nitpicks I've heard, this isn't really a very big one.
Watch any version of Star Wars prior to the DVD (including a bootleg of the theatrical "Special Edition.")
After killing Ben, Darth walks toward the Falcon and the iris doors close in front of him... They forgot to animate his lightsaber! He's carrying a metal stick.
Not good enough for you? Try this one: In III, Obi-Wan says goodbye to R2 after all they had been through together. In IV, he doesn't recognize him at all. "I don't remember owning a droid."
Still want more? Leia tells Luke about her childhood memories of their mother... but now it turns out that mom died on the delivery room table. Either Leia was never told (and never suspected) that she was adopted, or she sees dead people.
There. That should be enough to fuel your nitpicks for a while.
Sure, there was Saving Private Ryan, but otherwise? Yikes!
Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar that year, in spite of being one of the shittiest movies Miramax ever made. Other movies that year included:
Bullworth Patch Adams Godzilla (US Version) Armageddon Deep Impact
Need I go on?
Dark City was a very good movie in a year which only saw two or three very good movies.
And yes, he does focus on cinematography. He's said many times that film is not a mere storytelling medium. It's also a work of art crafted with light and sound.
Otherwise, there would be no "film buffs", and everybody would be perfectly happy watching all movies on 13" TV sets.
Which is exactly why one could make the case that Ringu should perhaps be considered for the list. It's still the top-grossing horror film in Japanese history (and as the only country to ever be nuked, they know their shit when it comes to horror.)
The joke is supposed to be making fun of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo but it stopped being funny sometime around 2002.
First of all, it really was only all that funny the first time it was done, when the creators of Mystery Science Theater used it as part of the name for their second (and last, as it turned out) annual fan convention.
Secondly, pretty much nobody actually remembers the movie Breakin' anyway, let alone the sequel which pretty much nobody went to. Adding "2: Electric Boogaloo" to anything the second time around is really just sponging off the laughs the MST3K guys got from it the first time. It shows about as much wit and inventiveness as repeating a Monty Python joke around a bunch of other nerds. You might get a laugh, but you really should feel like a complete tool afterwards.
Well, it is system-wide, but optional. Apps can choose to not use it (or, as in the case of Safari, have it default at off.)
Also, as another person pointed out, this particular OS toy can only be played with by "Cocoa" apps. So-called "Carbon" apps are out in the cold, as far as the OS X spellcheck is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
and when they raid your IRA, what then???
Raid my IRA?
You don't actually know what an IRA is, do you? I'll be a nice guy and fill you in.
IRA stands for "Independant Retirement Account."
Basically, it's money that you personally set asside in special accounts which avoid certain taxes, so long as you don't touch them before you retire (or, in the case of a Roth IRA, so long as you don't touch the interest/dividends until then.)
Could the tax laws change? Sure, but even if you could not make tax-free investments, saving for retirement would still be a good idea, and the sooner in your life you start, the better off you will be. Set up a retirement account, and let it ride (in other words, roll all interest and/or dividends you get from it back into the account.)
Like Albert Einstein said, there is no force in the universe more powerful than compound interest. Letting it work for you could be the difference between spending your retirement in the Bahamas or North Dakota.
There was one error in my post, however.
The screen I'm watching these perfect HD signals on is 119", not 199". That was a typo.
The Panasonic AE700U is a pretty darn good 1280x720 projector for the money, but it probably would not look nearly as good if I projected it on a screen that was about 15 feet wide.
(Also note: I'm not claiming that the mini can decode HD resolution Quicktime files or anything like that. It works well with the terrestrail HDTV signals via the EyeTV 500 because it's only handling the raw stream. File sizes are gigantic, but CPU demands are relatively low.)
I wonder how I managed to watch House in 720p with zero frame drops every week for the last two months then.
:P
Somebody must have hidden a PC behind the mini in my media console.
I kind of liked the premise of command in Martian Successor Nadesico.
In that series, the Earth forced realized that space battles were fought on such a massive scale and so carefully coordinated by computers that the individual tactical decisions of a single ship captain were pretty much irrelevant. The captain was really only needed for the sake of crew morale.
Therefore, they initially chose old men who reminded people of nautical captains for their figurehead bridge commanders.
Later, in the time-frame where the series takes place, they realized that morale would be even better (and recruiting would be easier) if they used good-looking young women for their captains.
As was noted in Anandtech's review of the Mac Mini, they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work, and the software DVD decoder sucks.
As somebody who is using his Mac mini as a high def PVR and media center on a 199" screen, I can say without hesitation that Anandtech's review is full of shit.
Using the El Gato EyeTV, it works like a champ for both recording and playback of either 720p or 1080i signals.
Also, the DVD player in 10.3 works very well, and the new DVD player for Tiger is even better.
The only complaint I have (and it's a nitpick) is that the deinterlace software is not that great, which is a problem when watching cheaply-made interlaced DVD's (such as some anime TV show disks.) That's easy enough to get around, thanks to VLC.
(The new Tiger DVD Player does have some deinterlace control, but so far nothing that works nearly as well as the better filter options on VLC.)
Too bad there isn't a mod "-1 cynical curmudgeon."
I think you mean "+1, cynical curmudgeon."
Not everybody considers it a bad thing, snowflake. Curmudgeons make me laugh. Wet blankets like you make me bored and sad. Curmudgeons win.
I suppose you have to have lived the life of a sysadmin (down, not across) to get the most out of UF, but it is funny.
I could not possibly disagree more.
Reading UF is like spending your coffee break listening to the rookie members of your office network support team bitch about the same fucking things the guys they replaced bitched about (and the guys before them) while thinking it's the first time anybody has ever pointed this shit out before.
Well, it's not entirely like that... It's sort of like that, only really badly drawn.
Why is it that the Penny Arcade folks are always picking on the User Friendly crowd?
In the spirit of fairness I would like to point out that neither is even a little bit funny.
Ever.
They both simply put flippant comments about easy targets in word balloons, draw some pictures under them, and call it a comic strip. The only thing that makes them different from the shitty "Kathy" strips in the newspaper is that they are targeted at geeks instead of fat middle-aged spinsters.
The only thing I hate more than obvious pandering from low-quality "entertainment" is when it's trying to pander to me.
See, this is why I'm kinda rooting for "transhumanism" to catch on within the counterculture.
It was a brilliant move, whoever came up with it: Get all the people who are prone to buying into psycho cult nonsense to cut their own nards off, thus reducing the number of nut-jobs (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) in future generations.
Brilliant!
That's because absolute belief in aliens is only slightly irrational. You gotta be plum fucking loco to be under thirty and think you will ever see a dime of Social Security.
Hope you're dumping lots of money into an IRA, kids. You'll thank yourselves later.
As usual noone will want to play the monotonous roles of healers
I loved playing a straight-up healer in EQ. I hardly played any other class.
In fact, for a while, I was playing on a computer which didn't quite meet the specs to handle some of the new zones, but got by just fine because of my quirky enjoyment of playing clerics. When we got into big combat and the graphics started to majorly lag, I just stared at the ground, and everything ran smoothly.
All I had to do was keep people from getting killed, communicate with hybrid healers so we wouldn't overlap, call for tanks to scrape MOBs off me whenever I was attacked, and direct the action based on the flow of how things were going. I was shockingly effective for somebody who wasn't even watching the fight directly.
Later, when I got a beefier PC with a fast graphics card, the only thing that really changed was that I got to see what was going on while monitoring health bars and relaxing on the perimeter of the combat.
Best of all, being one of the three rare-yet-in-demand commodities (along with the warrior and enchanter), I never had to put up with any bullshit. "Don't like the way I'm running the party? Okay see ya later. I'll just recruit one of the six other rangers and shamen who have been begging me for the chance to join the group. Good luck finding another cleric forming a party in the zone. The only other one on the map is four levels lower, and is already working as my back-up healer."
That's pretty much the only explanation that makes sense, except when it is revealed to her that she's actually Luke's sister, she's not even a little bit surprised. She "knew it" when it comes to her relationship with Luke, but it never occurred to her that she was adopted?
A fun take, but I find it much more likely that George Lucas is the one who didn't know what a parsec is.
Apart from confusing measurements of time and distance, the Kessel Run story seems likely to be true, in the context of the story. He's a smuggler, Kessel is said to be a mining planet elsewhere in the movie, and he does have a ship which is faster than most others when it is working properly.
The very next thing he says is , "don't be afraid, I won't hurt you." That line makes zero sense in the context of the new past which has now been written for them.
I don't mind these kind of plot holes, but it's obvious that this series simply doesn't quite work if watched in 1-6 order. Hopefully, over the years, most parents will share the experience of the original Star Wars with their kids before showing them episodes 1-3.
So Kenobi lies a lot, what's new? Or as he might say "I didn't own any droids... in a sense."
Except that's not what he said, and he had no reason to lie about it. He was genuinely baffled at the claim that R2 had anything to do with him, which is a plot hole.
Also note, he had to reassure R2 to not be afraid of him, meaning R2 didn't recognize him, either.
Now granted, Obi-Wan had gone from looking like Ewan McGreggor to looking like Alec Guinness in the 18-or-so years since they last meet... but how many bearded Jedi in brown robes who talk like that could there be in the galaxy?
Fitting material, perhaps for "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage"
No need to study, or even see the movie more than once. Just use this new technique I mastered. I call it "paying attention."
It's only a plot hole if you believe Jedi Masters to be perfect and without sin. That was never part of the Star Wars mythology.
Obi-Wan walked away in agony because he couldn't stand to watch anymore. His best friend turned into a foul villain, and the prophesy he dedicated his entire adult life to suddenly appeared to not be true.
Yoda insisted on taking Luke's flashlight out of pure greed, and he was the greatest Jedi master there was. The Jedi are idealistic and monastic, but they are still human beings (or whatever Yoda is) and still have all the same flaws as anybody else.
He did not own R2, but he did own droids. Also, he knew R2 extremely well. He did specifically say goodbye to him at the end of III.
That's not a plot hole, that's just Obi-Wan making a bad choice.
A plot hole his him not remembering ever owning a droid when R2 shows up at his home in the next movie claiming to be his property.
...His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking....
One possible explanation: NiCad battery in the head, charger in the torso (where there is some kind of generator.) The battery got fried when he was shot in Empire, so he needed the juice from the charger to power up.
Another: The torso has nothing to do with head power. Chewie just happened to close a broken circuit (or open a short) when he put the head on.
Of all the possible nitpicks I've heard, this isn't really a very big one.
Watch any version of Star Wars prior to the DVD (including a bootleg of the theatrical "Special Edition.")
After killing Ben, Darth walks toward the Falcon and the iris doors close in front of him... They forgot to animate his lightsaber! He's carrying a metal stick.
Not good enough for you? Try this one: In III, Obi-Wan says goodbye to R2 after all they had been through together. In IV, he doesn't recognize him at all. "I don't remember owning a droid."
Still want more? Leia tells Luke about her childhood memories of their mother... but now it turns out that mom died on the delivery room table. Either Leia was never told (and never suspected) that she was adopted, or she sees dead people.
There. That should be enough to fuel your nitpicks for a while.
To be fair, 1998 was a dismal year for movies.
Sure, there was Saving Private Ryan, but otherwise? Yikes!
Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar that year, in spite of being one of the shittiest movies Miramax ever made. Other movies that year included:
Bullworth
Patch Adams
Godzilla (US Version)
Armageddon
Deep Impact
Need I go on?
Dark City was a very good movie in a year which only saw two or three very good movies.
And yes, he does focus on cinematography. He's said many times that film is not a mere storytelling medium. It's also a work of art crafted with light and sound.
Otherwise, there would be no "film buffs", and everybody would be perfectly happy watching all movies on 13" TV sets.
Which is exactly why one could make the case that Ringu should perhaps be considered for the list. It's still the top-grossing horror film in Japanese history (and as the only country to ever be nuked, they know their shit when it comes to horror.)
But The Ring!?!?!?
That would be like honoring Point of No Return over La Femme Nakita or calling the fucking color remake of Psycho a film classic.
Let's get serious here.
I gotta agree. Enough already.
The joke is supposed to be making fun of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo but it stopped being funny sometime around 2002.
First of all, it really was only all that funny the first time it was done, when the creators of Mystery Science Theater used it as part of the name for their second (and last, as it turned out) annual fan convention.
Secondly, pretty much nobody actually remembers the movie Breakin' anyway, let alone the sequel which pretty much nobody went to. Adding "2: Electric Boogaloo" to anything the second time around is really just sponging off the laughs the MST3K guys got from it the first time. It shows about as much wit and inventiveness as repeating a Monty Python joke around a bunch of other nerds. You might get a laugh, but you really should feel like a complete tool afterwards.
Well, it is system-wide, but optional. Apps can choose to not use it (or, as in the case of Safari, have it default at off.)
Also, as another person pointed out, this particular OS toy can only be played with by "Cocoa" apps. So-called "Carbon" apps are out in the cold, as far as the OS X spellcheck is concerned.