you listen to Joe Soucheray, don't you?I think it's obvious he does. The real question is if he wears a helmet while listening.
Re:Too bad...
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Fortunately, down here in the US, the very first amendment to our constitution addresses this sort of thing, so most people who have been following this believe that the Supreme Court will strike down most of the current reforms as unconstitutional.
Congress actually had the balls to pass a law which says you can not buy a newspaper ad or tv spot to criticize a sitting congressman during the two months before an election, without it counting as part of the limited campaign budget of his opponent. If your representative or senator voted for this, remember that in the next election.
One work-around that occurred to me is to choose a third-party or no-party candidate who is nowhere near winning and nowhere near the spending cap, and then claim to be supporting them. That way, you could run a half-hour infomercial slamming Paul Welstone, end the commercial with "paid for by friends of Joe Blow, an independant candidate for Minnesota Senator," and none of it would count against his leading opponent's campaign, even that's who would benifit most. Hmmm....
I don't know how many times I have seen a big SUV, like an excursion, etc, and there is just one woman in the drivers seat - the whole rest of the damn thing is empty.
Maybe that woman needs a big truck some of the time, and can't afford to buy a second vehicle just for the times when she's driving alone. Ever think of that? No? Too busy congratulating yourself for being so concerned about other people's wastefulness, I suppose.
For the comment above, I should have referred to the F-350 as the truck that would emerge if CAFE standards hit the SUV market. The F-150 is already sold as and SUV, and is not that much bigger than the others. The 350 is the big honker I was thinking of. My bad.
The #1 selling car in the US remains the Toyota Camry. It has been for almost a decade.
All this hand-wringing about car makers "pushing" consumers to buy SUV's is a load of bullshit. Do you know who's buying SUV's? Soccer moms. They buy SUV's because 1) nobody makes a station wagon anymore, and 2) SUV's can carry as many passengers as a van, but are generally cheaper, have a higher stance (which is very popular with women customers), do better in crash-tests, and are more fun to drive around in.
In addition to replacing the family van (or station wagon) as the grocery-getter car for taking the kids to little-league, it has also replaced the luxury car. Lincoln has stopped making the Town Car, and Cadalac sales have been in the toilet for years now. The reason for this is the steeper CAFE standards, which make big cars impractical to make but don't apply to trucks (because trucks are considered industrial equipment). Result: light pickups become SUV's... a replacement for both big luxury cars and big family cars.
Now they are talking about extending CAFE standards to apply to SUV's. I guarantee you that the very year that happens, the Ford F-150 will become tricked out with lots of chick features (vanity mirrors, heated seats, etc) and sold as the new SUV. The way things are going, soon all commuters will be driving around in luxury fire trucks, tractor-trailor rigs, and cherry-picker cranes. Or maybe the bone-heads in Washington will someday start to think ahead about the unintended consequences that could arise from the laws they pass.
A Camry is great for driving to work, but you can't carry 8 people in it, can't haul much cargo in it, and it can't pull a decent-sized fishing boat trailor. Therefore, everybody who needs anything more than a small 4-door sedan will buy a big SUV, because Washington has made damned sure that there is nothing in between.
The reason you can learn almost everything that a commentary track has to offer on IMDB is because a lot of the IMDB "trivia" is contributed by people who got their information from the commentary tracks. Sometimes comments about the movie are word-for-word what the comentator said, but not attributed. In fact, I have lately found it very rare that IMDB has any information which did not come from various special features on the DVD or Laser Disk.
I thought the comentary on Seven Samurai was actually pretty good, although it did take a while for him to really get into it.
For a good commentary of a bad film, I would reccomend the Kevin Smith flop, Mallrats. Smith clearly really loves that movie to this day, but he's brutally honest about some of the things that went wrong with that movie, and as I recall, called it a "1.2 million dollar casting audition for Chasing Amy."
Re:We need a new moderation category! - SPECULATIV
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
That's kind of a funny coincidence.
If you do happen to listen, see if you can spot another moderation technique they use on the show, called "foghorn words".
Whenever certain commonly misused words are spoken (even by the host), the word is not censored, but a foghorn sounds in the background to call your attention to it. The most common foghorn word to come up is "inappropriate." For example, an educator might say something like "sexual assault on school property is inappropriate," which sort of implies that there is a time and a place for rape. The person should have simply said "bad" or "evil" or something along those lines, but because they are conditioned by our current culture to water down their language, they end us suggesting that there is such a thing as appropriate rape. When presented with such stupidity, a foghorn is sounded, although whoever is speaking will not be interrupted or cut off.
Yet another concept that could be fun to apply to Slashdot discussions.
Perhaps I should write myself a simple blog auto-moderator program, which downloads the stream from/. (or similar sites), parses them through a little Perl script to filter out certain comments (no more waiting for somebody else to dump the more common crapfloods to -1), highlight the foghorn words, etc., and then output the result to my browser. Hmm...
Re:We need a new moderation category! - SPECULATIV
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
In the Twin Cities, a newspaper columnist named Joe Soucheray has a local call-in radio show. Whenever any caller or guest makes a statement of fact which can not possibly be known as factual, a pre-recorded voice says "Uh... we don't KNOW that," in the background, as the caller keeps speaking.
I find myself saying that to myself a lot when reading/. comments.
Your idea for a we-don't-know-that moderation category is interesting, but I think that replying to factually incorrect comments is a much more effective form of debate than reducing the "score" of their post from behind the veil of moderation privilages.
Gotta learn to hit the ol' preview button once in a while. That should have read:
"I thought that the sparse soundtrack of the original production really underscored Lister's isolation, and the vast emptiness of space, making the show feel much darker (and the jokes that much funnier).
By the way, am I the only one out there who hates the remastered effects and music that was added to the first 2 seasons of Red Dwarf when the show was re-released?
I thought that the sparse soundtrack of the original production really underscored Lister's the vast emptiness of space, making the show feel much darker (and the jokes that much funnier). IMHO, The new soundtrack really jazzed things up, and ruined the deliberate, plodding pace which made the show so unique.
Complex morality plays don't generally go down well with Joe Sixpack.
That's because "Joe Sixpack" can usually tell when he's being preached to instead of entertained.
Let's face it, most of us who fell in love with morality-ladden Sci Fi stories did so when we were in our early teens and still growing into our own world-views. To be a 12 year-old and grok Heinlein might make you a little smarter than your peers... It's flattering to a kid's ego: you're not just another nerd, you're '1337! However, once you reach a certain age, it's time to stop kidding yourself that understanding the message behind Asimov's "Darwinian Pool Table" short story makes you any smarter that somebody who instead chose to spend his Sunday afternoon watching NFL games, and realize that the story you just read was kind of crappy, and even preachier than the feminist pablum your dingbat sister watches on the Lifetime channel.
For my own part, I prefer sci-fi that asks interesting questions (like "2001") over sci-fi that crams answers down our throats ("Cube"). To each his own, but there's no need for us to go on imagining that our tastes for movies about aliens, robots, and outer-space wars makes us any better than the average slob.
And right now, doing the story of a war based on a cultural misunderstanding might be particulary unpopular.
Doing a "story about a war" will never be as popular as a story about people. That's why "Glory" (a nice little film about an all black regement) did much better, both critically and commercially, than "The Civil War" (a four-hour movie which did a pretty good job of re-enacting some of the major battles, but never really got you to care about anybody on the screen).
People who go out to Karaoke bars a lot (the regulars) tend to be fairly good singers, and the thing that keeps them coming back (and running up big drink tabs with their friends) is the chance to show off what good singers they are.
If the performances are masked to hide pitch errors, you negate the opportunity for those poor slobs to stand out from the crowd for three and a half minutes, and they will stop going, leaving the bar with nobody but the sloppy drunks who think they know how to sing "Friends In Low Places" but can't remember any of the verses.
The purpose of running Karaoke is to make money, not to make perfect music. The people considering buying a system like this might want to keep that in mind.
I gotta side with SnicklesTheElf on this one. Almost the whole fucking web is useless today, because every tech site and blog out there decided it would be soooooo funny to write a bunch of bogus stories to celebrate April Fools Day, but none of them are clever enough to come up with one that is either plausable or funny.
Next year, I think I will not even bother to try to get any information off the web. I'll just go for a walk or something and hope that nothing really happens that I would want to know about that day.
Um... nearly all of Asimov's robot stories were about situations where following these laws got in the way of doing the Right Thing. Perhaps you should read his work a little more carefully before basing your philosophy of design on it.
Your sig is citing the wrong source. Larry Flint did not come up with the expression of wolves and sheep deciding what to eat.
This quote gets thrown around all the time without anybody being cited as the one who coined it, but it was definately not Larry Flynt, who used it in entirely the wrong context (it's a quote about taxes, not censorship) in 1999.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting to decide on what to have for dinner," is sometimes credited to Robert Heinlein, although I have had little luck finding the actual source where he said it.
In 1994, James Bovard referred to the quote, by saying: "Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Larry Flynt obviously just overheard it somewhere, or saw it on an e-mail signature, half-remembered it but failed to recall what it was about, and used it to get a laugh in one of his speeches.
Works for commentary that's on the disk, but you can't know if this type of commentary sucks until you take the time to find and download it. I'm just saying that it's probably not worth the effort, because the odds are rather high that the commentary comes from a total moron... like the AC who replied to my post, who apparantly thought that my snide comment about the lameness of the "Darwin Fish" was somehow a voice of support for creationism.
I think you may be on to something here. The thing that the pen-n-paper roleplaying games have going for them is that they are very easy to design. As a GM, I have often created very complex worlds in less time than it took the party to adventure in it.
Sometimes, it's even nice to be able to fudge the design on the fly. For example, say you are game mastering and the party decides that they should talk to an oracle or villiage wise man before, and the place you designed has none, but you suddenly decide that the story will be more compelling for you players if it does. On the spot, you can let the party discover from one of the locals that there is a hermit in the woods to the north, or something, and while the party is looking for him, you can make other decisions, such as the character's personality (for example, simply deciding to talk like Sir Alec Guinness while playing the NPC can add a lot of color to the game). Need a castle in a pinch? Pull out an old map from a game that the current party members weren't in, re-purpose a few rooms, add a hidden door the the catacombs you want the adventrures to find, and you're done.
NWN has the potential to really rock, but if designing a simple dungeon takes even longer than building an impressive FPS mod (as it did with Vampire:The Masquerade), I'll pass. I would rather spend my game design time coming up with interesting story twists, historical details, and entertaining characters than sitting in my basement with a graphics editor getting the interior walls of some throne room looking just right. A lack of flexibility for winging it would also make this game a poor substitute for old-school roleplay.
(For those who read at 1 or higher, the parent to this post said "No one will take the time to listen to this sort of thing. Except for the poster, maybe his girlfriend." Hopefully it will get bumped up soon, but AC's seldom seem to get their props under the current mod system.)
I strongly disagree with what Roger Ebert says about homebrew comentary. I like some director commentary tracks. I like it even better when a DVD comes with comentary by a very well-informed person who writes about movies for a living (such as the comentary on Criterion's edition of Seven Samurai, or the track Mr. Ebert himself did for Dark City). Listening to some of those tracks is like taking a film school seminar, with one of the nation's leading critics as your professor for the day.
That said, there is no way I'm going to spend two hours of my life listening to what the typical talk-backer from Aint-It-Cool-News has to say about his favorite flick. Why would I ever take the time to download a play-by-play breakdown of... oh, say "12 Monkeys"... when, for all I know, it was done by somebody who never saw "La Jette" (which it was based on), nor any of Gilliam's previous body of work, and spends most of the running time of the film talking about Brad Pitt's recent marriage to Jenifer Aniston and how he thought that the Bruce Willis movie "Hudson Hawk" was really underrated.
In Proverbs* it says that there is no man on Earth who you can't learn something from, but that doesn't mean that everybody's nuggets of wisdom are worth the time to mine them.
* Footnote: "Proverbs" is a popular religious text expounding on the virtues of wisdom, for those of you who drive around with those lame "Darwin fish" on the backs of your cars, in spite of having never attended a high school biology class.
The relentless pull of Earth's gravity can be resisted and avoided almost entirely, without the aid of spinning disks. The one thing that grants you the ability to be free of Earth's gravity with sublime simplicity is...
...drum roll, please...
distance.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Slashdot crowds are the greatest crowds in the world! Be sure to tip your waitresses. I'll be here all week!
The only problem is when a gov't sponsored product (university research) gets own3d by somebody who prevents us all from enjoying the fruits of our tax-payer dollars, which isn't the case with PBS.
Spoken like somebody who has never seen the prices for videos in the "Signals" catalog, or the PBS store in the Mall of America.
I think that you should consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, some of the people who posted about the Nescafe products in the UK, actually did read the Ontro web site, and were commenting on the fact that the current UK product is virtually identical to the Ontro product and has been available for some time now, but is a different product to those available in the early nineties.
/. no longer puts timestamps on posts, but when there were only 20 or so posts under this article, nearly a dozen of them were from people barking out "this is old technology". They clearly did not read the page, because 1) They would have seen that the page itself mentions the existing tech their product is based on, and 2) They posted almost immediately after the article came up, and could not have read much further before posting and still win the race to be the first to make their pedantic observation. There simply wasn't time for them to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
you listen to Joe Soucheray, don't you?I think it's obvious he does. The real question is if he wears a helmet while listening.
Congress actually had the balls to pass a law which says you can not buy a newspaper ad or tv spot to criticize a sitting congressman during the two months before an election, without it counting as part of the limited campaign budget of his opponent. If your representative or senator voted for this, remember that in the next election.
One work-around that occurred to me is to choose a third-party or no-party candidate who is nowhere near winning and nowhere near the spending cap, and then claim to be supporting them. That way, you could run a half-hour infomercial slamming Paul Welstone, end the commercial with "paid for by friends of Joe Blow, an independant candidate for Minnesota Senator," and none of it would count against his leading opponent's campaign, even that's who would benifit most. Hmmm....
Maybe that woman needs a big truck some of the time, and can't afford to buy a second vehicle just for the times when she's driving alone. Ever think of that? No? Too busy congratulating yourself for being so concerned about other people's wastefulness, I suppose.
For the comment above, I should have referred to the F-350 as the truck that would emerge if CAFE standards hit the SUV market. The F-150 is already sold as and SUV, and is not that much bigger than the others. The 350 is the big honker I was thinking of. My bad.
All this hand-wringing about car makers "pushing" consumers to buy SUV's is a load of bullshit. Do you know who's buying SUV's? Soccer moms. They buy SUV's because 1) nobody makes a station wagon anymore, and 2) SUV's can carry as many passengers as a van, but are generally cheaper, have a higher stance (which is very popular with women customers), do better in crash-tests, and are more fun to drive around in.
In addition to replacing the family van (or station wagon) as the grocery-getter car for taking the kids to little-league, it has also replaced the luxury car. Lincoln has stopped making the Town Car, and Cadalac sales have been in the toilet for years now. The reason for this is the steeper CAFE standards, which make big cars impractical to make but don't apply to trucks (because trucks are considered industrial equipment). Result: light pickups become SUV's... a replacement for both big luxury cars and big family cars.
Now they are talking about extending CAFE standards to apply to SUV's. I guarantee you that the very year that happens, the Ford F-150 will become tricked out with lots of chick features (vanity mirrors, heated seats, etc) and sold as the new SUV. The way things are going, soon all commuters will be driving around in luxury fire trucks, tractor-trailor rigs, and cherry-picker cranes. Or maybe the bone-heads in Washington will someday start to think ahead about the unintended consequences that could arise from the laws they pass.
A Camry is great for driving to work, but you can't carry 8 people in it, can't haul much cargo in it, and it can't pull a decent-sized fishing boat trailor. Therefore, everybody who needs anything more than a small 4-door sedan will buy a big SUV, because Washington has made damned sure that there is nothing in between.
I thought the comentary on Seven Samurai was actually pretty good, although it did take a while for him to really get into it.
For a good commentary of a bad film, I would reccomend the Kevin Smith flop, Mallrats. Smith clearly really loves that movie to this day, but he's brutally honest about some of the things that went wrong with that movie, and as I recall, called it a "1.2 million dollar casting audition for Chasing Amy."
If you do happen to listen, see if you can spot another moderation technique they use on the show, called "foghorn words".
Whenever certain commonly misused words are spoken (even by the host), the word is not censored, but a foghorn sounds in the background to call your attention to it. The most common foghorn word to come up is "inappropriate." For example, an educator might say something like "sexual assault on school property is inappropriate," which sort of implies that there is a time and a place for rape. The person should have simply said "bad" or "evil" or something along those lines, but because they are conditioned by our current culture to water down their language, they end us suggesting that there is such a thing as appropriate rape. When presented with such stupidity, a foghorn is sounded, although whoever is speaking will not be interrupted or cut off.
Yet another concept that could be fun to apply to Slashdot discussions.
Perhaps I should write myself a simple blog auto-moderator program, which downloads the stream from /. (or similar sites), parses them through a little Perl script to filter out certain comments (no more waiting for somebody else to dump the more common crapfloods to -1), highlight the foghorn words, etc., and then output the result to my browser. Hmm...
I find myself saying that to myself a lot when reading /. comments.
Your idea for a we-don't-know-that moderation category is interesting, but I think that replying to factually incorrect comments is a much more effective form of debate than reducing the "score" of their post from behind the veil of moderation privilages.
(In case you care, Soucheray's show is on AM1500 KSTP from 2:05 to 5:00 PM. This link no longer provides an Internet broadcast of it. Damn union!)
Or, in the home... a practical application for Lego Mindstorm at last!
"I thought that the sparse soundtrack of the original production really underscored Lister's isolation, and the vast emptiness of space, making the show feel much darker (and the jokes that much funnier).
I thought that the sparse soundtrack of the original production really underscored Lister's the vast emptiness of space, making the show feel much darker (and the jokes that much funnier). IMHO, The new soundtrack really jazzed things up, and ruined the deliberate, plodding pace which made the show so unique.
Can I get an "Amen" on that?
That's because "Joe Sixpack" can usually tell when he's being preached to instead of entertained.
Let's face it, most of us who fell in love with morality-ladden Sci Fi stories did so when we were in our early teens and still growing into our own world-views. To be a 12 year-old and grok Heinlein might make you a little smarter than your peers... It's flattering to a kid's ego: you're not just another nerd, you're '1337! However, once you reach a certain age, it's time to stop kidding yourself that understanding the message behind Asimov's "Darwinian Pool Table" short story makes you any smarter that somebody who instead chose to spend his Sunday afternoon watching NFL games, and realize that the story you just read was kind of crappy, and even preachier than the feminist pablum your dingbat sister watches on the Lifetime channel.
For my own part, I prefer sci-fi that asks interesting questions (like "2001") over sci-fi that crams answers down our throats ("Cube"). To each his own, but there's no need for us to go on imagining that our tastes for movies about aliens, robots, and outer-space wars makes us any better than the average slob.
And right now, doing the story of a war based on a cultural misunderstanding might be particulary unpopular.
Doing a "story about a war" will never be as popular as a story about people. That's why "Glory" (a nice little film about an all black regement) did much better, both critically and commercially, than "The Civil War" (a four-hour movie which did a pretty good job of re-enacting some of the major battles, but never really got you to care about anybody on the screen).
People who go out to Karaoke bars a lot (the regulars) tend to be fairly good singers, and the thing that keeps them coming back (and running up big drink tabs with their friends) is the chance to show off what good singers they are.
If the performances are masked to hide pitch errors, you negate the opportunity for those poor slobs to stand out from the crowd for three and a half minutes, and they will stop going, leaving the bar with nobody but the sloppy drunks who think they know how to sing "Friends In Low Places" but can't remember any of the verses.
The purpose of running Karaoke is to make money, not to make perfect music. The people considering buying a system like this might want to keep that in mind.
I gotta side with SnicklesTheElf on this one. Almost the whole fucking web is useless today, because every tech site and blog out there decided it would be soooooo funny to write a bunch of bogus stories to celebrate April Fools Day, but none of them are clever enough to come up with one that is either plausable or funny.
Next year, I think I will not even bother to try to get any information off the web. I'll just go for a walk or something and hope that nothing really happens that I would want to know about that day.
Um... nearly all of Asimov's robot stories were about situations where following these laws got in the way of doing the Right Thing. Perhaps you should read his work a little more carefully before basing your philosophy of design on it.
This quote gets thrown around all the time without anybody being cited as the one who coined it, but it was definately not Larry Flynt, who used it in entirely the wrong context (it's a quote about taxes, not censorship) in 1999.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting to decide on what to have for dinner," is sometimes credited to Robert Heinlein, although I have had little luck finding the actual source where he said it.
In 1994, James Bovard referred to the quote, by saying: "Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Larry Flynt obviously just overheard it somewhere, or saw it on an e-mail signature, half-remembered it but failed to recall what it was about, and used it to get a laugh in one of his speeches.
Teachers spread knowledge.
Knowledge is power.
Power corrupts.
ergo
Teachers spread corruption.
Works for commentary that's on the disk, but you can't know if this type of commentary sucks until you take the time to find and download it. I'm just saying that it's probably not worth the effort, because the odds are rather high that the commentary comes from a total moron... like the AC who replied to my post, who apparantly thought that my snide comment about the lameness of the "Darwin Fish" was somehow a voice of support for creationism.
Sometimes, it's even nice to be able to fudge the design on the fly. For example, say you are game mastering and the party decides that they should talk to an oracle or villiage wise man before, and the place you designed has none, but you suddenly decide that the story will be more compelling for you players if it does. On the spot, you can let the party discover from one of the locals that there is a hermit in the woods to the north, or something, and while the party is looking for him, you can make other decisions, such as the character's personality (for example, simply deciding to talk like Sir Alec Guinness while playing the NPC can add a lot of color to the game). Need a castle in a pinch? Pull out an old map from a game that the current party members weren't in, re-purpose a few rooms, add a hidden door the the catacombs you want the adventrures to find, and you're done.
NWN has the potential to really rock, but if designing a simple dungeon takes even longer than building an impressive FPS mod (as it did with Vampire:The Masquerade), I'll pass. I would rather spend my game design time coming up with interesting story twists, historical details, and entertaining characters than sitting in my basement with a graphics editor getting the interior walls of some throne room looking just right. A lack of flexibility for winging it would also make this game a poor substitute for old-school roleplay.
Whereas Daikatana was made by a total newcomer to the FPS market!? Uh... you might want to re-think that point.
(For those who read at 1 or higher, the parent to this post said "No one will take the time to listen to this sort of thing. Except for the poster, maybe his girlfriend." Hopefully it will get bumped up soon, but AC's seldom seem to get their props under the current mod system.)
I strongly disagree with what Roger Ebert says about homebrew comentary. I like some director commentary tracks. I like it even better when a DVD comes with comentary by a very well-informed person who writes about movies for a living (such as the comentary on Criterion's edition of Seven Samurai, or the track Mr. Ebert himself did for Dark City). Listening to some of those tracks is like taking a film school seminar, with one of the nation's leading critics as your professor for the day.
That said, there is no way I'm going to spend two hours of my life listening to what the typical talk-backer from Aint-It-Cool-News has to say about his favorite flick. Why would I ever take the time to download a play-by-play breakdown of... oh, say "12 Monkeys"... when, for all I know, it was done by somebody who never saw "La Jette" (which it was based on), nor any of Gilliam's previous body of work, and spends most of the running time of the film talking about Brad Pitt's recent marriage to Jenifer Aniston and how he thought that the Bruce Willis movie "Hudson Hawk" was really underrated.
In Proverbs* it says that there is no man on Earth who you can't learn something from, but that doesn't mean that everybody's nuggets of wisdom are worth the time to mine them.
* Footnote: "Proverbs" is a popular religious text expounding on the virtues of wisdom, for those of you who drive around with those lame "Darwin fish" on the backs of your cars, in spite of having never attended a high school biology class.
distance.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Slashdot crowds are the greatest crowds in the world! Be sure to tip your waitresses. I'll be here all week!
Spoken like somebody who has never seen the prices for videos in the "Signals" catalog, or the PBS store in the Mall of America.
Hang around a while, and you will discover it happens sometimes among trolls. Please don't be one of those people, though.