Actually, there was a study (which I saw a bit about on PBS... "Scientific American Frontiers" I think... anyway, the one with Alan Alda hosting it) which showed that when you watch somebody experience something, your brain reacts in almost exactly the same way as if you experienced it yourself.
This function of the way our brains are wired is what allows us to feel empathy.
The corollary to this phenomenon could also be the reason why voyeurs often become crossdressers.
If someone was driving a car and didn't know what "check oil" meant they would be idiots, correct?
Then why is it so different with technology? Why do we not expect them to know these things?
Because your car doesn't say something like:
"Engine Lubricant pressure levels are below reccomended levels. Do you wish to continue with operation? | Yes | No | Cancel |"
In an effort to hand-hold the newbies, OS developers (particularilly a very popular group of them from the state of Washington) have, time and time again, actually made things more difficult than they need to be.
I dunno. He's excactly the sort of nerd who other nerds look up to. A sort of "alpha nerd" if you will. The more crazy and over-the-top a guy is, the more the "nerd-hags" (yes, just as "chubby chaser" men exist, so too do women who fetishize nerds) will tend to flock to him.
I'm guessing he can get his share of wicca trim at a typical Ren Fest.
The lines at the Chinese for the original film have ascended to the status of pop culture legend.
People who wait in line outside the Chinese for the (shitty) prequels are doing so for the exact same reason kids went to "Woodstock 2" in spite of the fact that nearly all of the bands at the show sucked. They want to feel somehow connected to the phenomenon.
What kills me about the "nerds" waiting in line for Star Wars prequels is they are such posers.
When Empire came out, people waited in line days in advance because it was the only sure way to get in on opening night.
Today, you can buy your tickets on-line in advance and show up just as the previews are starting. There is no reason to camp out for seats other than pretending to be as "hard core" of a fan as those who slept out for the original movies in '77, '80 and '83.
Hey, you in the Jedi robes! Here's a clue: Real nerds will have already seen the illegal torrent file of the movie before you even get in the theater anyway. There's no geek-cred to be won simply by being the "first" to see the new movie, and all of the prequels are lame anyway. Go home and take a shower.
Goddammit, why can't slashdot pull together and condemn that piece of shit movie for the geek bashing tripe that it is?
Because it wasn't geek bashing. It was geek nostalgia. The director was clearly drawing on his own experiences.
It wasn't exactly Office Space (the funniest move of the last 10 years), but there were about a half dozen very clever moments in the film which at least made it worth watching.
Only if the local voters let it. We are talking about cities here, not a national or even state-wide.
Yeah, because everybody gets out to vote on mid-year resolutions, not just retired busibodies with nothing better to do than tell their neighbors how to live. No city government has ever made an asinine decision which went against the will of most of the residents.
i know your being funny but a stadium does do a lot for the local economy.
Actually, third-party analysis has shown, time and again, that this is BS.
The net effect of building a major league statium on a state's economy is zero (minus whatever money you throw into the rat-hole.)
A sports team doesn't bring any money into a state at all. If the team is not there, people just spend their entertainment budget on something else.
You would actually be better off by randomly selecting 200 locally-owned businesses from the phone book, and handing them all the cash you would have used to build a stadium.
If a stadium is such a massive boon to a downtown area, let the businesses in that area pitch in and build one. The truth is, it's only a help if they can get somebody else to pay for it.
Hehe! So now you not only want a state-paid (and probably eventually state-controlled) ISP, but you want the functional equivalent of a fuckin' water meter to be required on every laptop in town so they can keep track of how much you use the service?
Wow. Please never live in my town long enough to become a voter.
The other thing that everybody's forgetting is that it would be very easy for $GROUP_YOU_HATE to eventually lobby and/or bully your government into censoring that Wi-Fi conneciton which you are not forever locked in to paying for.
After all, we need to stop piracy and protect children from all those bad pictures. You're not for piracy and against children, are you Mister Councilman?
I guaran-damn-tee you that the moment the government has an ISP monopoly, somebody is going to decide that it's their place to decide what goes across those wires, just as the FCC tightly regulates what goes over the "public" airwaves.
You are now locked in to paying $16 a month for your city's commie Wi-Fi solution, whether you use it or not.
Connection speeds will undoubtably suck, but you will have few alternatives, because there will be no more mom-and-pop ISP's offering higher-speed DSL solutions. Hell, your local phone and companies might not bother with anything other than large corporate accounts now.
You can also say goodbye forever to all the free Wi-Fi hotspots you had all over town. Why would a coffee shop provide free wireless as a draw for customers when the air around them is filled with a "pre-paid" signal?
Best of all, if your city government is anything like every other city government I've ever looked at closely, part of your fee which you think is going to bandwidth will be going to fact-finding "conferences" for city council members in the Bahamas.
This is like ths speed limiter, Law makers put it in place. Even though i dislike both its the law and we either have to follow it or change it.
That's a terrible analogy.
Speed limiters are a safety feature, put in cars to help keep dumbasses like you from getting the rest of us killed on the highways. They don't prevent you from speeding, they merely prevent you from exceeding the safe mechanical limits of your car.
Control lock-outs on DVDs which force you to wait through FBI Warnings, ads, long menu animations, etc. were always an incredibly dumb idea. They serve no purpose, and there is no law against getting around them if you can (so long as you don't do anything which violates Copyright law in the process.)
So if the existance of God is proven to my satisfaction, I have no belief?
This is a stupid strawman argument which is extremely tiresome. Everything we believe exists, including God, our parents, the air, distant stars, black holes, radiation, electricity, Krispy Kreme donuts, etc., all rely on our direct or indirect observation and inferrence (which is sometimes incorrect, but it's all we have to go on.)
I believe that electricity exists because I have observed that the world behaves as if it does, and have seen nothing to tell me otherwise.
I believe that God and Satan exist for the same reason.
"I think, therefore I am." Like it or not, all else is taken on faith.
Swerving back to the game topic at hand, World of Warcraft is a lot of fun, and probably is not going anywhere unless and until something much better comes along to displace it.
I'll check it out, but if you are talking about a brief instrumental "hit" from an orchestra track, it's a safe bet that different anime houses sometimes use public-domain foley tracks for stuff like that, as a cost-saving measure.
Kind of like how you hear the "Wilhelm scream" in almost every Hollywood action movie, including all three LOTR movies, or old soap operas used the old "dun-dun-duuuuuuuun" music after one character confesses to sleeping with another character's husband or something.
Perhaps Slashdot needs an "Anime" section, so people like you could filter such stories out completely, while those of us who can name the song used as the ringtone of Hoshino Aya's cellphone can still get our fix without bothering you.
(BTW: It's "Beatiful Dreamer", which also happens to be used by Yuya's phone. Yes, I'm a huge nerd for knowing that. Yes, you are also a huge nerd if you know what show I'm talking about.)
The music in FLCL is performed by The Pillows, a Japanese garage band of little fame beyond their participation in the show. I'm sure there was no trouble securing the rights to all their materials for the US release. What musical cue are you talking about?
The soundtrack for Azumanga Daioh is mostly assembled by a J-Pop "supergroup" called Oranges and Lemons. Again, the music was produced specificlly for the show, so it's hard to imagine there were many "rights" issues in exporting it.
Any similarity between the two (and I'm very familar with both yet have no idea WTF you are talking about) is probably pure coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not being an ass, just being nitpicky
:)
Hey, don't sell yourself short. You can be both.
Ouch. Sounds like I hit a nerve there. Would you care for a little Benzocaine?
Half of our group missed Episode II because the web servers kept timing out, and by the time they got it, that show was sold out.
I wish the Fandango web site for Minnesota theaters did me the same favor. That's eight bucks and two hours of my life I'll never get back.
Actually, there was a study (which I saw a bit about on PBS... "Scientific American Frontiers" I think... anyway, the one with Alan Alda hosting it) which showed that when you watch somebody experience something, your brain reacts in almost exactly the same way as if you experienced it yourself.
This function of the way our brains are wired is what allows us to feel empathy.
The corollary to this phenomenon could also be the reason why voyeurs often become crossdressers.
If someone was driving a car and didn't know what "check oil" meant they would be idiots, correct?
Then why is it so different with technology? Why do we not expect them to know these things?
Because your car doesn't say something like:
"Engine Lubricant pressure levels are below reccomended levels. Do you wish to continue with operation?
| Yes | No | Cancel |"
In an effort to hand-hold the newbies, OS developers (particularilly a very popular group of them from the state of Washington) have, time and time again, actually made things more difficult than they need to be.
I dunno. He's excactly the sort of nerd who other nerds look up to. A sort of "alpha nerd" if you will. The more crazy and over-the-top a guy is, the more the "nerd-hags" (yes, just as "chubby chaser" men exist, so too do women who fetishize nerds) will tend to flock to him.
I'm guessing he can get his share of wicca trim at a typical Ren Fest.
Hell, quite a night when you play Luke for your gal while she playing Leia
What people do at home is their own business.
Hopefully your self-esteem can handle it when she asks you, "aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
The lines at the Chinese for the original film have ascended to the status of pop culture legend.
People who wait in line outside the Chinese for the (shitty) prequels are doing so for the exact same reason kids went to "Woodstock 2" in spite of the fact that nearly all of the bands at the show sucked. They want to feel somehow connected to the phenomenon.
Except for the LOTR kid. That was just kind of sad.
Blackwolf the Dragon Master was hilarious!
Besides, as weirdness goes, that kid's quirks were relatively harmless. It's not like his wizard robes were made out of human skin or something.
What kills me about the "nerds" waiting in line for Star Wars prequels is they are such posers.
When Empire came out, people waited in line days in advance because it was the only sure way to get in on opening night.
Today, you can buy your tickets on-line in advance and show up just as the previews are starting. There is no reason to camp out for seats other than pretending to be as "hard core" of a fan as those who slept out for the original movies in '77, '80 and '83.
Hey, you in the Jedi robes! Here's a clue: Real nerds will have already seen the illegal torrent file of the movie before you even get in the theater anyway. There's no geek-cred to be won simply by being the "first" to see the new movie, and all of the prequels are lame anyway. Go home and take a shower.
Goddammit, why can't slashdot pull together and condemn that piece of shit movie for the geek bashing tripe that it is?
Because it wasn't geek bashing. It was geek nostalgia. The director was clearly drawing on his own experiences.
It wasn't exactly Office Space (the funniest move of the last 10 years), but there were about a half dozen very clever moments in the film which at least made it worth watching.
Vote for Pedro, bee-otch.
Only if the local voters let it. We are talking about cities here, not a national or even state-wide.
Yeah, because everybody gets out to vote on mid-year resolutions, not just retired busibodies with nothing better to do than tell their neighbors how to live. No city government has ever made an asinine decision which went against the will of most of the residents.
Sheesh!
Um, no. If a Colorado city wants to build a wifi network, we can vote on it.
Proving once again that direct democracy can be defined as "two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner."
I missed the part where cities were allowed to forbid current or future ISPs from operating.
It's the part that comes later. The USPS did not always outlaw other people from delivering First Class mail, either.
Wow, you just like to be angry.
I keed, I keed! I joke-a with you!
Instead of answering my question you make a silly remark about metering, whoring for the "Funny" moderation.
Well, yeah. Your point is?
You don't actually come to Slashdot for information do you?
I always figured that most of us are here to blow of steam while our code is compiling (or whatever.)
i know your being funny but a stadium does do a lot for the local economy.
Actually, third-party analysis has shown, time and again, that this is BS.
The net effect of building a major league statium on a state's economy is zero (minus whatever money you throw into the rat-hole.)
A sports team doesn't bring any money into a state at all. If the team is not there, people just spend their entertainment budget on something else.
You would actually be better off by randomly selecting 200 locally-owned businesses from the phone book, and handing them all the cash you would have used to build a stadium.
If a stadium is such a massive boon to a downtown area, let the businesses in that area pitch in and build one. The truth is, it's only a help if they can get somebody else to pay for it.
Hehe! So now you not only want a state-paid (and probably eventually state-controlled) ISP, but you want the functional equivalent of a fuckin' water meter to be required on every laptop in town so they can keep track of how much you use the service?
Wow. Please never live in my town long enough to become a voter.
The other thing that everybody's forgetting is that it would be very easy for $GROUP_YOU_HATE to eventually lobby and/or bully your government into censoring that Wi-Fi conneciton which you are not forever locked in to paying for.
After all, we need to stop piracy and protect children from all those bad pictures. You're not for piracy and against children, are you Mister Councilman?
I guaran-damn-tee you that the moment the government has an ISP monopoly, somebody is going to decide that it's their place to decide what goes across those wires, just as the FCC tightly regulates what goes over the "public" airwaves.
Yeah, congratulations.
You are now locked in to paying $16 a month for your city's commie Wi-Fi solution, whether you use it or not.
Connection speeds will undoubtably suck, but you will have few alternatives, because there will be no more mom-and-pop ISP's offering higher-speed DSL solutions. Hell, your local phone and companies might not bother with anything other than large corporate accounts now.
You can also say goodbye forever to all the free Wi-Fi hotspots you had all over town. Why would a coffee shop provide free wireless as a draw for customers when the air around them is filled with a "pre-paid" signal?
Best of all, if your city government is anything like every other city government I've ever looked at closely, part of your fee which you think is going to bandwidth will be going to fact-finding "conferences" for city council members in the Bahamas.
Congratulations!
This is like ths speed limiter, Law makers put it in place. Even though i dislike both its the law and we either have to follow it or change it.
That's a terrible analogy.
Speed limiters are a safety feature, put in cars to help keep dumbasses like you from getting the rest of us killed on the highways. They don't prevent you from speeding, they merely prevent you from exceeding the safe mechanical limits of your car.
Control lock-outs on DVDs which force you to wait through FBI Warnings, ads, long menu animations, etc. were always an incredibly dumb idea. They serve no purpose, and there is no law against getting around them if you can (so long as you don't do anything which violates Copyright law in the process.)
I'm at a loss as to how post #88766 about "slashdot groupthink" could possibly be, in any way, shape or form, insightful.
:)
We talked it over, and we all agree that you don't think as an individual enough.
So if the existance of God is proven to my satisfaction, I have no belief?
This is a stupid strawman argument which is extremely tiresome. Everything we believe exists, including God, our parents, the air, distant stars, black holes, radiation, electricity, Krispy Kreme donuts, etc., all rely on our direct or indirect observation and inferrence (which is sometimes incorrect, but it's all we have to go on.)
I believe that electricity exists because I have observed that the world behaves as if it does, and have seen nothing to tell me otherwise.
I believe that God and Satan exist for the same reason.
"I think, therefore I am." Like it or not, all else is taken on faith.
Swerving back to the game topic at hand, World of Warcraft is a lot of fun, and probably is not going anywhere unless and until something much better comes along to displace it.
I'll check it out, but if you are talking about a brief instrumental "hit" from an orchestra track, it's a safe bet that different anime houses sometimes use public-domain foley tracks for stuff like that, as a cost-saving measure.
Kind of like how you hear the "Wilhelm scream" in almost every Hollywood action movie, including all three LOTR movies, or old soap operas used the old "dun-dun-duuuuuuuun" music after one character confesses to sleeping with another character's husband or something.
Nickelodeon is running a new show too. Who cares?
Perhaps Slashdot needs an "Anime" section, so people like you could filter such stories out completely, while those of us who can name the song used as the ringtone of Hoshino Aya's cellphone can still get our fix without bothering you.
(BTW: It's "Beatiful Dreamer", which also happens to be used by Yuya's phone. Yes, I'm a huge nerd for knowing that. Yes, you are also a huge nerd if you know what show I'm talking about.)
The music in FLCL is performed by The Pillows, a Japanese garage band of little fame beyond their participation in the show. I'm sure there was no trouble securing the rights to all their materials for the US release. What musical cue are you talking about?
The soundtrack for Azumanga Daioh is mostly assembled by a J-Pop "supergroup" called Oranges and Lemons. Again, the music was produced specificlly for the show, so it's hard to imagine there were many "rights" issues in exporting it.
Any similarity between the two (and I'm very familar with both yet have no idea WTF you are talking about) is probably pure coincidence.