The two major Chinese languages have no phonetic alphabet, and therefore China generally does not not borrow words from other languages if they can at all avoid it.
(Unlike the French, who don't borrow words because they are being total ass-hats.)
Because of this quirk, the Chinese often assign similar-sounding kanji characters to proper names and such. For example, translating "The United States of America" into Chinese text and back would probably give you "beautiful country", which may be very flattering to us Americans, but is not always the intended sentiment.
Therefore, one could see how they end up with "Presbyterian Church" in place of "Jedi Council" when cramming the dialog into Chinese and back, especially if it was a rush-job done by bootleggers.
Oh, and there's nothing racist about finding all this to be extremely funny.
Can anyone give me a precise reason why they think Star Wars I, II or III were horrible movies?
1. It was badly written. The dialog was really awful at every turn.
2. It was poorly directed. These three films sported some of the very best acting talents in motion pictures today. Most of the major players have proven to be outstanding performers in other movies, yet you would never even think they could act at all if the Star Wars prequels were the only place you saw them.
3. It was not well made. The composition of shots, with a few exceptions, was completely dreadful, especially in the scenes in Attack of the Clones, in which the GCI backgrounds were so baroque and ugly, one could hardly notice that there were actors somewhere in the shot as well.
4. George Lucas didn't really base his original Star Wars story on anything Campbell wrote... he just said so after the fact. Star Wars was a simple homage to the Saturday Morning Matinee, and he never should have been ashamed of that fact.
5. Everything Joseph Campbell wrote was pretty much bullshit anyway.
the newest three episodes have been horrible but this author definitely casts new light on the whole masterpiece.
Can there be such a thing as a horrible masterpiece?
Also, doesn't "masterpiece" imply a great work? Lucas's greatest work (or magnum opus) is, without much room for debate, the original trilogy. His second-best would be the collaboration with Spielberg on the Indian Jones movies.
Attack of the Clones was the first movie he ever made which was actually worse than Howard the Duck. The first and third prequel films at least rose to the level of mediocrity, but little higher than that.
and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is.
First Movie: "Yipeeeeeee!" Second Movie: "I hate sand." Third Movie: "Noooooooooooo!"
yet no one gives a fuck when Apple ran all the clone-makers out of business
Correction: They bought their largest competitor on the platform (Power Computing), which was the only "clone" maker to do anything to expand the market. Then they simply ended the license agreements with everybody else, all of whom were simply cannibalizing what would otherwise be Apple sales.
If they hadn't done it, I seriously doubt there would be an Apple Computer today. The would be a small branch of Oracle or maybe IBM, and stuff like OS X, the iPod, and the mini never would have happened. It was a very smart move.
So you are right about one thing: No one gives a fuck that the clone makers are gone.
You seem to think I said a lot of things that I didn't actually say. Parents' basements??? Where did you get that from? Try not to be so remarkably sensitive in the future, 'kay? That would be greeeeeaaaat, thanks.
This "review" reminds me of the record reviews in small campus newspapers of podunk-town colleges.
"This Independent band you never heard of released a new album which you will never hear on the radio and will not be able to find in any record store within 500 miles of here. It's not as good as their earlir stuff, which you will also never hear, and frankly that older material was not as good as their fans (all three of us) remember it to be...."
Gosh. Thanks for that crucial bit of news there. I'll get busy ignoring that band as soon as the fact that I forget that you just wrote a seven-column review, complete with a side-bar detailed track listing, to show us all how cool you must be. If it were not for you, I would have been completely oblivious to the fact that this new album which does not warrent my attention actually exists.
I think all the threads going on about how great (or sucky) TSR is (or was), and all the threads about gamer personalities, and all the threads about various campaign worlds are overlooking something very, very important.
Pencil-and-paper RPG's are (and always have been) nothing more than a vehicle for nerds to gather with nerd friends to eat dorito chips and pizza while chatting about Joss Whedon shows & anime, and repeating old Monty Python jokes they've all heard a million times.
Well, I'm not a brilliant UW-Madison student, but I'm pretty sure that 57 is more than 5 (which is what the grandparent post claimed was the TOTAL number of rioters.)
And that's just the number who were actually arrested. If you think only 57 UW students rioted, you've clearly got cheese in your head.
On that note, how are they going to deal with interference from other wireless users?
That's easy. They'll flood the area with so much RF signal that no other network will be useful, and all other wireless nets will simply go away, as the grandparent AC predicted. Problem solved, and everybody gets to become a paid subscriber to get something which they once got (better) for free.
In the case of insurance companies, it's pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention that market forces are not keeping prices down; in many segments of the insurance industry insurance prices have been going up much much faster than the bottom line.
Out of curiosity, when have market forces ever applied to insurance companies?
My auto liability insurance is mandated by the state. My health insurance is collectively purchased by my company (because the state offers tax incentives to company plans they don't offer to private buyers.) Most people use the home-owner insurance offered by their mortgage lender.
I can't remember the last time I even heard of anybody I know shopping around for insurance. The tax code guides all our biggest insurance decisions. The poor in my state don't even bother with health insurance, because they qualify for government-sponsored coverage.
I can't think of an industry which is less exposed to market forces than insurance.
Knowingly releasing a defective item is not legal, when the defect in question results in irreparable damage to a core function of the product or presents an undisclosed hazard to consumers.
Well, first of all, being scuff-able is not a defect. My car gets scratches all the time too, just from everyday wear & tear. Does that mean I can sue Ford for their "defective" paint job?
Secondly, the core function is playing music, which it still does if scratched.
Are you saying that there's something "hazardous" about scratched iPods???
I have a 3rd Generation iPod, and I had a 2nd Generation one before that which I sold to a friend when I found myself wanting more storage space.
A few months ago, I received an invitation to join a class action against Apple for the "defective" battery in my iPod. Never mind that my current iPod lasted two years on two full charges a day, almost every day, and replacing it only cost me $20 and was a trivial procedure. Never mind that my previous iPod is *still running today* on the original battery.
Fucking lawyers. I wish there was a way we could all attack them for pillaging the companies we all buy from and work for.
Sure, they're trying to make a strong case for themselves but "extreme scratching"??? Gimme a break.
Indeed. "Extreme Scratching" sounds like something you might see on ESPN2.
It's a fucking plastic electronics toy. Things can scratch it. Holy fuck, get some perspective, people.
Everybody who owns glasses knows that the choice is: "Glare reducing. Scratch Resistant. Inexpensive. Choose two."
So, Apple chose not to put a scratch-resistant surface on the screens of their low-budget flash-based iPod. Big fucking surprise. Can the nano still function if it's scratched? Hell yes. Can scratches be avoided if you are careful with it? Hell yes.
Buy some brass polish, clean off any scratches you have, and spend six bucks on a slip-case for it. Whatever you do, don't sign on for this class action lawsuit, because the same thing will happen that always happens: Apple will settle out of court, you will get a pittance (like, perhaps a $10 iTunes gift card or maybe a can of scratch-removing polish if you are very lucky), and the scumbag lawyers will make millions and then move on to sue the company that signs YOUR paycheck.
Oh yeah, and everybody pays more for fucking everything because paying off asshole law firms like this has become a routine cost of doing business these days, regardless of what you do or how well you do it.
Yes. If he was Arabic, I wouldn't have bothered asking, but while (as others in this thread have pointed out) Indian shop workers are not so uncommon in the Middle East, Hindu people are very much looked down on in many regions... and he owns the Kwik-E-Mart on the Simpsons. It will be interesting to see how they handle that character.
Re:ITP I fix the typo from the parent post:
on
Homer Becomes Omar
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The problem with a watered-down Simpsons is that the subversive nature of the show is the only thing that makes it worth watching.
It's (some would say deliberately) poorly drawn, cheaply animated, and while the voice cast is now famous, they used to be relative nobodys (with maybe one exception). The story arc is your basic sitcom family living a basic life. The subversive twists are what make it funny.
I think they ought to leave the shows exactly as they are. They would give foreign audiences a pretty good idea of what life is like over here.
Plus, it would be fun to watch Mall of America tourists look around for the "Leftorium."
Re:My karma can stand it
on
Homer Becomes Omar
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The real burning question regarding an arabic simpons edit: Who's working at the Kwik-E-Mart?
I mean, I'm sure guys like Apu working at convenience stores is a much less common sight in Syria than it is in the American midwest. Would they even get the joke over there?
If you want quality audio, don't you really want a firewire audio-capture device instead?
Bingo. I'm a big believer in keeping unshielded analog signals as far away from the inside of a computer as possible. External D/A break-out boxes are the way to go. My personal choice is the Mark of the Unicorn rackmount unit, which does a fine job for the price.
MOTU was aggravatingly slow about catching up with the OS X release as far as their drivers are concerned, but I'm not the type to hold a grudge.
Now that I've finally been able to RTFA, I see that you are correct. Removable battery. (Really small too... they must have ramped up power efficiency a few ways to get the extended life of this iPod.) Good news.
Biggest bummer: They dropped FireWire support entirely. It's USB2 only. Probably to save space and power, not to mention money.
Most important (to me) good news: It's the exact same width, so if I do end up buying one for some reason, it will fit in the same car-cradle as my current 3rd Gen model, with a tiny bit of padding to make up for lack of thickness. Needing to buy new accessories after moving up an iPod generatin or two is always a real buzz-kill.
Since they knew they were slashdotting the hell out of it, the least they could have done was include in the summary whether the battery leads are soldered in place (as with the nano) or on a nice easy-to-swap pin connection. It's really just about the only thing I'm remotely curious about regarding the new iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
The two major Chinese languages have no phonetic alphabet, and therefore China generally does not not borrow words from other languages if they can at all avoid it.
(Unlike the French, who don't borrow words because they are being total ass-hats.)
Because of this quirk, the Chinese often assign similar-sounding kanji characters to proper names and such. For example, translating "The United States of America" into Chinese text and back would probably give you "beautiful country", which may be very flattering to us Americans, but is not always the intended sentiment.
Therefore, one could see how they end up with "Presbyterian Church" in place of "Jedi Council" when cramming the dialog into Chinese and back, especially if it was a rush-job done by bootleggers.
Oh, and there's nothing racist about finding all this to be extremely funny.
Can anyone give me a precise reason why they think Star Wars I, II or III were horrible movies?
1. It was badly written. The dialog was really awful at every turn.
2. It was poorly directed. These three films sported some of the very best acting talents in motion pictures today. Most of the major players have proven to be outstanding performers in other movies, yet you would never even think they could act at all if the Star Wars prequels were the only place you saw them.
3. It was not well made. The composition of shots, with a few exceptions, was completely dreadful, especially in the scenes in Attack of the Clones, in which the GCI backgrounds were so baroque and ugly, one could hardly notice that there were actors somewhere in the shot as well.
4. George Lucas didn't really base his original Star Wars story on anything Campbell wrote... he just said so after the fact. Star Wars was a simple homage to the Saturday Morning Matinee, and he never should have been ashamed of that fact.
5. Everything Joseph Campbell wrote was pretty much bullshit anyway.
the newest three episodes have been horrible but this author definitely casts new light on the whole masterpiece.
Can there be such a thing as a horrible masterpiece?
Also, doesn't "masterpiece" imply a great work? Lucas's greatest work (or magnum opus) is, without much room for debate, the original trilogy. His second-best would be the collaboration with Spielberg on the Indian Jones movies.
Attack of the Clones was the first movie he ever made which was actually worse than Howard the Duck. The first and third prequel films at least rose to the level of mediocrity, but little higher than that.
and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is.
First Movie: "Yipeeeeeee!"
Second Movie: "I hate sand."
Third Movie: "Noooooooooooo!"
yet no one gives a fuck when Apple ran all the clone-makers out of business
Correction: They bought their largest competitor on the platform (Power Computing), which was the only "clone" maker to do anything to expand the market. Then they simply ended the license agreements with everybody else, all of whom were simply cannibalizing what would otherwise be Apple sales.
If they hadn't done it, I seriously doubt there would be an Apple Computer today. The would be a small branch of Oracle or maybe IBM, and stuff like OS X, the iPod, and the mini never would have happened. It was a very smart move.
So you are right about one thing: No one gives a fuck that the clone makers are gone.
You seem to think I said a lot of things that I didn't actually say. Parents' basements??? Where did you get that from? Try not to be so remarkably sensitive in the future, 'kay? That would be greeeeeaaaat, thanks.
But seriously folks...
This "review" reminds me of the record reviews in small campus newspapers of podunk-town colleges.
Gosh. Thanks for that crucial bit of news there. I'll get busy ignoring that band as soon as the fact that I forget that you just wrote a seven-column review, complete with a side-bar detailed track listing, to show us all how cool you must be. If it were not for you, I would have been completely oblivious to the fact that this new album which does not warrent my attention actually exists.
And all those arrests were for "riots" and not for such severe crimes as underage drinking or open container, etc., right?
In Wisconsin? I thought an open container was a manditory part of the driver's test over there, especially for underage drinkers.
(I keed! I keed! I love the Wisconisin!)
I think all the threads going on about how great (or sucky) TSR is (or was), and all the threads about gamer personalities, and all the threads about various campaign worlds are overlooking something very, very important.
Pencil-and-paper RPG's are (and always have been) nothing more than a vehicle for nerds to gather with nerd friends to eat dorito chips and pizza while chatting about Joss Whedon shows & anime, and repeating old Monty Python jokes they've all heard a million times.
And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
Ni.
Well, I'm not a brilliant UW-Madison student, but I'm pretty sure that 57 is more than 5 (which is what the grandparent post claimed was the TOTAL number of rioters.)
And that's just the number who were actually arrested. If you think only 57 UW students rioted, you've clearly got cheese in your head.
On that note, how are they going to deal with interference from other wireless users?
That's easy. They'll flood the area with so much RF signal that no other network will be useful, and all other wireless nets will simply go away, as the grandparent AC predicted. Problem solved, and everybody gets to become a paid subscriber to get something which they once got (better) for free.
Congratulations, Madison.
In the case of insurance companies, it's pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention that market forces are not keeping prices down; in many segments of the insurance industry insurance prices have been going up much much faster than the bottom line.
Out of curiosity, when have market forces ever applied to insurance companies?
My auto liability insurance is mandated by the state. My health insurance is collectively purchased by my company (because the state offers tax incentives to company plans they don't offer to private buyers.) Most people use the home-owner insurance offered by their mortgage lender.
I can't remember the last time I even heard of anybody I know shopping around for insurance. The tax code guides all our biggest insurance decisions. The poor in my state don't even bother with health insurance, because they qualify for government-sponsored coverage.
I can't think of an industry which is less exposed to market forces than insurance.
Actually, that's a very good example. Some cars DO get scuffed up my automatic car washes.
Oddly their owners have not sued... yet.
Americans (and the characters in The Simpsons) look down on Hindus too.
Really? Not any Americans I know.
Hell, most Americans are barely aware of Hundus, and wouldn't know Brahman from Vishnu if their next three lives depended on it.
Knowingly releasing a defective item is not legal, when the defect in question results in irreparable damage to a core function of the product or presents an undisclosed hazard to consumers.
Well, first of all, being scuff-able is not a defect. My car gets scratches all the time too, just from everyday wear & tear. Does that mean I can sue Ford for their "defective" paint job?
Secondly, the core function is playing music, which it still does if scratched.
Are you saying that there's something "hazardous" about scratched iPods???
Every new iPod design comes with a lawsuit.
Boy, you said it!
I have a 3rd Generation iPod, and I had a 2nd Generation one before that which I sold to a friend when I found myself wanting more storage space.
A few months ago, I received an invitation to join a class action against Apple for the "defective" battery in my iPod. Never mind that my current iPod lasted two years on two full charges a day, almost every day, and replacing it only cost me $20 and was a trivial procedure. Never mind that my previous iPod is *still running today* on the original battery.
Fucking lawyers. I wish there was a way we could all attack them for pillaging the companies we all buy from and work for.
Sure, they're trying to make a strong case for themselves but "extreme scratching"??? Gimme a break.
Indeed. "Extreme Scratching" sounds like something you might see on ESPN2.
It's a fucking plastic electronics toy. Things can scratch it. Holy fuck, get some perspective, people.
Everybody who owns glasses knows that the choice is: "Glare reducing. Scratch Resistant. Inexpensive. Choose two."
So, Apple chose not to put a scratch-resistant surface on the screens of their low-budget flash-based iPod. Big fucking surprise. Can the nano still function if it's scratched? Hell yes. Can scratches be avoided if you are careful with it? Hell yes.
Buy some brass polish, clean off any scratches you have, and spend six bucks on a slip-case for it. Whatever you do, don't sign on for this class action lawsuit, because the same thing will happen that always happens: Apple will settle out of court, you will get a pittance (like, perhaps a $10 iTunes gift card or maybe a can of scratch-removing polish if you are very lucky), and the scumbag lawyers will make millions and then move on to sue the company that signs YOUR paycheck.
Oh yeah, and everybody pays more for fucking everything because paying off asshole law firms like this has become a routine cost of doing business these days, regardless of what you do or how well you do it.
Yes. If he was Arabic, I wouldn't have bothered asking, but while (as others in this thread have pointed out) Indian shop workers are not so uncommon in the Middle East, Hindu people are very much looked down on in many regions... and he owns the Kwik-E-Mart on the Simpsons. It will be interesting to see how they handle that character.
The End of the World as We Know It.
Sure, but I feel fine.
Me too. I have some time alone.
The problem with a watered-down Simpsons is that the subversive nature of the show is the only thing that makes it worth watching.
It's (some would say deliberately) poorly drawn, cheaply animated, and while the voice cast is now famous, they used to be relative nobodys (with maybe one exception). The story arc is your basic sitcom family living a basic life. The subversive twists are what make it funny.
I think they ought to leave the shows exactly as they are. They would give foreign audiences a pretty good idea of what life is like over here.
Plus, it would be fun to watch Mall of America tourists look around for the "Leftorium."
The real burning question regarding an arabic simpons edit: Who's working at the Kwik-E-Mart?
I mean, I'm sure guys like Apu working at convenience stores is a much less common sight in Syria than it is in the American midwest. Would they even get the joke over there?
If you want quality audio, don't you really want a firewire audio-capture device instead?
Bingo. I'm a big believer in keeping unshielded analog signals as far away from the inside of a computer as possible. External D/A break-out boxes are the way to go. My personal choice is the Mark of the Unicorn rackmount unit, which does a fine job for the price.
MOTU was aggravatingly slow about catching up with the OS X release as far as their drivers are concerned, but I'm not the type to hold a grudge.
Now that I've finally been able to RTFA, I see that you are correct. Removable battery. (Really small too... they must have ramped up power efficiency a few ways to get the extended life of this iPod.) Good news.
Biggest bummer: They dropped FireWire support entirely. It's USB2 only. Probably to save space and power, not to mention money.
Most important (to me) good news: It's the exact same width, so if I do end up buying one for some reason, it will fit in the same car-cradle as my current 3rd Gen model, with a tiny bit of padding to make up for lack of thickness. Needing to buy new accessories after moving up an iPod generatin or two is always a real buzz-kill.
t3h WIN!!!!
Had I not posted to start this thread, I'd mod you up for being funny. That was the best post of the day.
Since they knew they were slashdotting the hell out of it, the least they could have done was include in the summary whether the battery leads are soldered in place (as with the nano) or on a nice easy-to-swap pin connection. It's really just about the only thing I'm remotely curious about regarding the new iPod.